Myopic, self-centered, gross overreaching for a startling metaphor, and very stupid: Star Wars producer Rick McCallum equates the fight against file sharing to the War Against Terrorism. Other than little things like the loss of thousands of innocent lives in an attempt to destroy a way of life for a billion or two others, it's practically the same:

STAR Wars producer Rick McCallum told a Melbourne audience that the fight against P2P swapping of films was as important as the war on terrorism.

Big budget film-making faced a total collapse in three years if studios don't quickly address the threat posed by movie downloading on the internet, McCallum said.

He said the increasing ease with which high-quality films could be downloaded with P2P software was the biggest threat to the industry.

The drive to protect movie copyright needed to be "as concentrated an international event as the war on terrorism" said McCallum, who is in Australia to oversee pre-production work on Star Wars Episode Three at Sydney's Fox Studios.

"It is a big issue and no-one seems to be wanting to deal with it," the producer said.

He had "no idea" how the threat would be tackled and neither did executives for Star Wars distributor Fox, who were "deeply concerned" about it, he said.

McCallum claimed that 50 per cent of music business revenue had been lost due to file sharing in the last few years. "And that's what's going to happen to the movie business," McCallum said before addressing the annual screen producers conference. [from Australian IT]

Other than being 100% wrong about everything he says, good job.