Pirate Ads

Variety has a story this morning about Wal-Mart placing banner ads on The Pirate Bay, one of the most popular P2P sites for bit-torrent downloading of copyrighted material. On the face of it, this seems to not make sense, since the patrons of bit-torrent sites are obviously choosing the run 'round media retails and not through them. Does Wal-Mart think that a tech-savvy 16 year old looking for the latest episode of "Prison Break" is going to stop what he's doing to purchase old episodes (one's he's already got) on DVD?

But the real issue here, as pointed up by blogherald, is that of a conflict of interest. How does the Motion Picture Association of America feel about a retailer of its product getting in bed with an outfit that's illegally distributing is?