Terry Jones, the member of Monty Python not the pyromaniacally-inclined Florida pastor, is looking to reunite his former Python team mates to help contribute to his upcoming movie Anything Else.

Jones is currently prepping the film to begin shooting next spring, and Deadline is reporting that the director would like to have John Cleese, Michael Palin, Terry Gilliam and Eric Idle provide voices for aliens who will somehow bedevil the film’s star, The Daily Show correspondent John Oliver. Deadline is reporting that the movie will contain “aliens, a goofy Brit, a talking dog and buckets of silliness.” Robin Williams is supposedly being sought for the part of the talking dog.

While it certainly won’t be a full-fledged Python reunion – they state that as long as member Graham Chapman insists on staying dead there will never be a full-on Python reunion – it certainly won’t be the first time that various members of the group have appeared in each others projects. Both Jones and Gilliam have often cast various of his former team mates in his his films, though this would mark the first time that all of the group have worked together outside of the Python banner.

Jones has co-written the script with Gavin Scott. The previously collaborated on an episode of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles.

For years we’ve heard sob stories about how the entertainment industry has been losing money to various online outlets that made the material available for free. But now the good men of Monty Python have thrown a monkey wrench into that argument.

In November, the Pythons launched a YouTube channel featuring much of their classic material with the simple request-

We’re letting you see absolutely everything for free. So there! But we want something in return. None of your driveling, mindless comments. Instead, we want you to click on the links, buy our movies & TV shows and soften our pain and disgust at being ripped off all these years.

The fans responded, and now Mashable is reporting that sales of Python DVDs on Amazon has risen to no 2 on the web retailers Movies & TV Bestsellers list, an incredible increase of 23,000%! Coincidence? I think not.

While I don’t think that such an approach would work for every artist or film out there, it does show that the draconian attempts by the recording and motion picture industries to control online content may be, at least in part, wrong-headed. Claiming that online pirates, filesharing protocols such as BitTorrent and sites like YouTube have cut into their revenue streams, they lobbied Congress to pass the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a law that has been criticized on numerous levels for its potential for creating monopolies, limiting competition and being against the Fair Use doctrine of US Copyright law. (Of course, in their hubris, the entertainment industry would never admit that a contributing factor to their declining revenues may be the declining quality of their product.)

I think the obvious lesson to be learned here is that the entertainment industry needs to embrace these new technologies, not fight with them. If Viacom were to work with YouTube instead of trying to sue them, perhaps