How a big movie studio (unfairly) forced a student to give up his senior thesis

Don't worry, God is just.

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I presume by "One download at a time" the author is referring to the downloading of his own films? Downloading Hollywood films won't kill Hollywood, as it only spreads Hollywood's influence and makes the problem worse.

The way to kill Hollywood is to ignore it. That's got to be more terrifying to a studio than being pirated. Paul Graham had it right in his "Kill Hollywood" piece: it's not pirating that will kill Hollywood, but irrelevance. Startups, new ways to entertain people and new ways to make movies.

This would be "protecting the artist", yes?

Back in '97 I was the CTO of a VC funded startup. Within weeks of our funding closing a company we had been working with for about a year initiated litigation over an IP matter.

Even though it was the company, and not me personally, who was being sued that time was the most stressful time of my life - the sheer injustice of it all left a deep scar on me. However, we had a good law firm and money in the bank - our lawyers more or less told them there was no case to answer and both sides backed down (although we did have to pay our own legal costs).

It was bad enough being involved in litigation with supportive colleagues, money and good lawyers - being in a similar, actually worse, situation as a broke student would be infinitely worse.

[Edit: as to the timing of the litigation, I believe the first rule of litigation is "sue people who have money"].

People with money have influence. If we give them less money, they'll have less influence.