Content industry’s ‘last dying throes’
p2pnet news view P2P:- Since 1999, World War III has been raging, slowly escalating in ferocity and intensity as a result of each battle. It’s a war between the content industry and the public the world over.
The battle lines were drawn when the industry decided to stamp out P2P by squashing Napster.
BMG, one of the largest media companies in the world invested in Napster, because they “got” the vision of a centralized server enabling soft distribution of content.
Unfortunately the other companies in the music industry weren’t prepared to cede control of Internet distribution to BMG. So instead of trying to figure out a logical business model that would reward all content owners, they fought tooth and nail to destroy Napster.
According to the great military strategist, Clausewitz, “war is merely the continuation of politics by other means.” This was war.
In their minds the content industry depends on distribution control. Value can only be achieved and maintained if the distribution chain is totally controlled and P2P was the ultimate threat to that control.
The world of Napster was a community, with individual files of small value being shared between members.
National governments have enforced WIPO trade agreements in response to pressure from the very powerful lobbies of the content industries. Their primary construct for this was to enact legislation referred to as “Safe Harbour”.
But it’s anything but “safe”.
Safe Harbour doesn’t stop an ISP from being sued by its customers for loss of service.
Safe Harbour doesn’t protect the population from predatory characters and/or activities.
Safe Harbour in no way interferes with the bulk of P2P activity.
But what it does do is to ensure all P2P users are motivated to act together in common cause against the threat from content owners.
What Safe Harbour Does Do
It gives the illusion of control back to the industry so one day they’ll again be able to dictate price.
Unfortunately, as with many industry initiatives, time is against them. While they wait for the implementation of Safe Harbour legislation in all good WIPO member nations, online communities have already moved on by increasingly adopting Rapidshare, encrypted P2P, caching services, Private Virtual Circuit tunneling and dynamic IP number utilization – ensuring more than 30% of the world’s P2P activity is harder to detect, if not totally invisible.
Ironically, it’s the big corporations (Microsoft, Cisco) the universities, (Harvard) that are at the forefront of development of these hard to track methodologies for consumers to be able to communicate under the radar of the NSA Echelon interpreters.
In plain English, the increasing adoption of new technologies such as encrypted torrents is leading to criminals and specifically, enemies of the state having a heightened ability to conduct impenetrable conversations over Skype, to share documents on manufacturing weapons and generally to add to the potential for instability in the world – and its all because of a battle over the price of an MP3.
The attacks by the content industry on their own customers, together with ISPs, has created an increasing and more complex (now 1024 bits encryption on some tunneling streams) security hole you’d have to assume every terrorist group in the world would be making use of.
P2P users are becoming even more invisible. They’re going totally underground.
According to Sun Tzu’s Art of War, every battle is won before it is ever fought.
The content industry has lost. But as it goes down, its last dying throes are actually doing more damage to society than anyone can possibly imagine.
The content industry seeks to attack consumers. But the content industry’s real enemies are those that manufacture the hardware and software tools that are used by its consumers.
BMG, having lost the fight to turn Napster into a business, went into a venture with Sony and subsequently retired from the music industry, selling its stake in the JV to Sony. They were smart. They took the money and ran.
As P2P continues to mutate and grow, we need to look at how the content industry is responding and acting.
Remember how miners used to take a canary down the mine to determine if there were noxious gases?
The decision makers in the content industry should be watching the canaries – but they apparently aren’t. The canaries are dying – and new canary acquisition is becoming costlier.
The content industry wants to make money, and so it should. But if it makes money at the expense of society as a whole, that’s bad for society.
To get to a win-win strategy, the content industry needs to stop working against, and start working with, the smart people in academia who have a vision for a world in which information will be able to travel instantly and inexpensively to everyone.
Just like Wall Street went through a period of denial before having to deal with the reality it was financially, and perhaps morally insolvent, so too does the content industry have to turn the corner and move beyond denial.
Meanwhile, how do you feel about being a canary?
Tom Koltai - p2pnet
[Koltai is an economist in Sydney Australia. He's says he's been online for 26 years, has run several ISPs and, "lobbied governments in four countries to prevent Internet restrictive usage legislation from being enacted". He says he's a strong believer in P2P, "as being a technological requirement to fully exploit the convergence of telephony with computers and remove the last barriers to human communication and interaction".]
March, 2009
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March 11th, 2009 at 10:13 am
you are absolutely correct Tom, 101%. very good article, this really puts the onus on the industry. darknets wouldn’t have been as prolific if, like u said, they didnt squabble over the price of an mp3… the MAFIAA has done more to promote terrorism than Al Quada… fuckin asshats.
stw
March 11th, 2009 at 1:06 pm
because of the parasites from the record industry, governements, justices and corporations have lost all their credibility. The damage to our societies is incaculable. Citizen have to render justice because the justice system is now broken. Let’s fire all the judges and lawers.
Let’s deal with these music parasites ourselves in our own terms and let’ds rebuild!
March 11th, 2009 at 1:09 pm
“The content industry wants to make money, and so it should. But if it makes money at the expense of society as a whole, that’s bad for society.
To get to a win-win strategy, the content industry needs to stop working against, and start working with, the smart people in academia who have a vision for a world in which information will be able to travel instantly and inexpensively to everyone.”
No, those Dinosaurs need to go belly up and sink into the tar pit they are wallowing in. Unlike some posters here I don’t see a future in which the RIAA continues on a new, more successful business model which is supposedly more “respectful” of consumers as a good thing, they are blood sucking Weasels and that won’t change even if they try to put on a “friendlier” face. They can’t become extinct fast enough.
March 11th, 2009 at 2:46 pm
I totally agree with Monkey above, no matter what the RIAA do (which includes lining up outside my door every morning for a month to kiss my ass) I just want to see them disbanded and no more, even more so for the labels that make the RIAA possible.
They just have to dry up, that is the price for their crimes for the past few years, for Tanya Andersen, Britney Kruger, Jammie Thomas etc etc etc 30000+ plus people.
No matter what they do, its never going to be enough, this ‘war’ will only end when those parasites are no more.
March 11th, 2009 at 6:40 pm
And I download without worry. Unlawful to sue someone on SSI!