File sharing’s triumph
p2pnet.net News:- Eight-point-three million people were online at any one time in June “using unauthorized services like Kazaa and eDonkey – up 19% from 6.8 million in June 2003,” says a USA TODAY story here.
It doesn’t say what ‘unauthorised’ means or who’s supposed to be responsible for issuing ‘authorisations’.
Of course, although Kazaa is failing fast, eDonkey and similar commercial file sharing programs (not to speak of the scores of freelance indie apps) are not only completely legal, they’re offering legal services and gaining strength daily.
The villain in the piece is the entertainment industry with its ongoing multi-million-dollar PR campaign which casts file sharing as an illegal activity and people engaged in it as criminals.
Neither is true. Sharing music and any other kind of digital file online is unquestionably legal. The confusion – created consciously and very deliberately by the entertainment industry and then parroted by the mainstream media – arises when whatever is being shared has a record label or film studio stamp on it.
The entertainment industry both sells ‘product’ and holds enumerable copyrights on it. It says its properties can’t be reproduced or distributed without its permission, and then flatly refuses to work with would-be sellers or distributors to reach fair agreements.
Every month sees one billion, at a conservative estimate, files traded online. And yet when Apple boasts of having sold a paltry one million tracks in more than a year, it’s reported as a triumph.
Something is obviously seriously wrong and the problem rests solely on the fact that the corporate entertainment industry refuses to come to terms with the realities of the 21st century and peer-to-peer activites which could, and should, be its near cost-free sales and distribution vehicles.
USA Today quotes Digital Media’s Phil Leigh as saying the only way the industry will put a dent in p2p services is for “the legitimate alternatives to become more user-friendly”.
Once again, the commercial p2p services are in fact perfectly legitimate and perhaps the way for Big Music and the other ‘Bigs’ to deal with them is, well, to deal with them – sit down and and make a serious attempt to arrive at workable, and mutually beneficial, solutions.
But as p2pnet has emphasised repeatedly here and elsewhere, if the labels – not to speak of the movie studios – started negotiating, they’d end up competing head-on and up-front with the millions of independent artists and companies around the world.
And that’ll never happen.
