By Ryan Broderick

Perhaps you’ve heard of the story. It was on the front page of the Huffington Post over the break. It started with the leak of the work print of “X-Men Origins: Wolverine.” Things became more heated when a movie critic with foxnews.com gave the movie a positive review and was then immediately fired. The reviewer, Roger Friedman, was with the company for 10 years before the article was posted.

In a press release after Friedman’s termination Fox described it as a matter of “parting ways.”

What makes this a problem though, is the statement it makes about the culture of piracy still in America. Here is a prime example of how corporate America is still so vehemently blind to the swaying power of the Internet. Fox’s leaked movie was reviewed by one of their reporters, who, in turn, gave it a favorable review. How long is it going to take before companies realize that leaked movies aren’t the end of the world?

Most movie pirates who actually get first run movies while they’re in theaters are such a small majority of people who watch movies in America. What Fox threw away by firing Friedman and putting the kibosh on his review was a chance for free, genuine, publicity for their movie done by a journalist on their pay role. The whole thing is such a conundrum it could make your head hurt.

Here’s what should happen, and most likely what will happen is something similar to Lil’ Wayne, who is probably going to be looked back on as the artist who’s come the closest to perfecting a sales model based off free content. It’s a strange concept, but Fox had a perfect chance to give it a shot. What could have happened was Fox says “alright, yeah, our movie leaked, it’s not finished, you should really wait to see the real thing” and then let their critic review it, adding to the buzz around the movie.

What that type of model does is trick consumers into a genuine type of publicity, sure there’s less control on it by the companies, but with a savvy PR department armed with “anonymous bloggers” companies will be able to give away their cake for free and still make loads of money, the metaphor is strained but the point is a good one.

So if tonight after reading this you hit up isohunt.com and download a copy of “I Love You, Man” don’t think of it as piracy, think of it as blazing a trail for a new more modern economic model of media distribution.