Giving in to short-term greed …
p2pnet news view | P2P | Politics:- The Canadian government is nearly at the end of a project under which it’s using the net to solicit data on how Canadians feel about copyright.
At this point, 6:18 am Pacific, Schwartz is cited in Copyright Consultations as having the ‘Highest Rated Comments’.
Among other things, he says »»»
Imagine a world where you wouldn’t let your friend borrow your screwdriver because you bought it for you and that after 3 uses of it you would have to call the company to reactivate it.
Imagine not being able to play a single note of music on your guitar because someone else played it before.
Imagine not being able to invent an electric drill because someone already had the rights to a tool made for driving screws.
Imagine locking up everyone in jail because there are criminals out there.
p2pnet reader Larry G also has a few thoughts on the subject, saying in his Reader’s Write to Canada copyright consultation: up to Aug 17, “The bottom line is that Canadians wouldn’t even be in this period of discussion if it weren’t for corporations! When the Internet was pretty much hands off from corporations a few years ago, this was the essence of a laissez faire economic model. It was only when corporations felt they were losing profits through peer two peer (P2P) sharing that the entertainment industry went into overdrive …”
He continues »»»
Only a few years ago, nobody every heard of throttling, who would have even dreamed that the Internet speeds which they connected to could be deliberately slowed down by corporations. If this would have been an issue when high-speed Internet first expanded, sales would have plummeted but once Internet content became so complex and high-speed became more or less an essential speed (not for only for file sharing but looking at websites that have media streaming content for example) then all of a sudden the suppliers of the Internet connectivity decided to interfere with users’ speeds. Why? Because it all comes down to profit! Why should I (the corporation) spend more money to lay out the expensive of expanding my network (via cable or fiber optic wire) when I can just charge the same price to consumers and just reduce their usage.
That’s the only reason corporations are trying to slow down users’ connection speeds, in order to make the Internet viable for the actual usage people need and require means an outlay of capital.
But throttling can only be a stopgap measure because the rest of the world is working at much faster speeds and connecting at non-throttled speeds 24/7.
Even at the rate the Internet keeps on growing in demand, throttling will mean the destruction of those economies in the 21st century that give into corporate demands. Tell me, who is going to do business with Canadians in 5 years from now when the world is going the equivalent speed of a race car and Canadians’ Internet speed is the equivalent of a donkey pulling a cart?
Giving into the short-term greed of corporations today means that in 5 years from now, Canada will even be farther back in the technological race; what nations would want to do business with us? Even if throttling would end in 1 year from now, it would take these companies time to finally expand their Internet capacity and in the end Canadians would still be behind those countries that are constantly upgrading their Internet networks!
The same goes for the selling of media, the newspaper industry isn’t whining to governments and lobbying politicians to outlaw Internet newspapers! Most of the print journalism is going the way of the dinosaur, it’s not only the small town newspapers that have gone under but many of the big names in journalistic print have either shutdown their print edition or are in the process of scaling down its print editions. It’s not the fault of Internet consumers that the way in which they rather read their news content is through the Internet rather than in print.
So too goes TV, music and moviesit’s not the fault of Internet consumers that they’ve made their own innovations in order to consume these entertainment products. The entertainment industry is crying foul, however the news media aren’t — they’re attempting to adapt. People want to see TV programs at their leisure and not when the big moguls decide to just show it on TV. Adapt and forget the old commercial format and program slots, sell viewership via the Internet! I don’t want to see commercials and I don’t care about waiting for you to decide what program slot is good for you, I’m willing to go on-line and pay to watch TV programs and my leisure! I’m paying too much for cable TV, how about dumping regular TV with direct Internet viewership. I bet in the end it will be a better deal for me and the companies producing TV programs can have their TV programs listed 24/7, then consumers can pay to watch their favorite TV programs when they want!
Music, the music industry has a lobby into order to pressure governments to close down the Internet sharing of music. Once again, the music industry is just like news print, you can’t undo invention. Consumers don’t want to go to music stores to buy marked upped CD’s! Get rid of physical music stores and just sell music on-line but add some innovation.
Most CD consumers just want one or two songs from an entire album. So innovate, make a price list per song, give packages that essentially make it desirable that the cost of an entire album is equivalent to just 3 or 4 songs; believe meyou’ll make money! But what you don’t do is the equivalent of being a greedy news print industry with no vision and lobby the government to shutdown all Internet newspapers so consumers are forced to just go back to purchasing their news via print editions!
And finally the movie industry, get rid of DVD rentals completely! Sell digital movie editions that can also be played on Divx players so consumers can watch movies on their TV screens. You can sell specific registration only digital movies, whereby the consumer can either purchase a permanent key (so that the movie is owned by the consumer outright) or sell time sensitive digital keys whereby the digital movie can be rented by so many hours (have different pricing structures for 24 hours, 48 hours, 72 hours, etc). Also you’ll need to invest in a new Divx technology whereby movies will play once the permanent or temporary rental code(s) are entered. Also right now you have an antiquated release date system of movies, it’s no different than consumers being reliant on TV producers on what season and time slot (including day) TV programs are going to be put on. Consumers of movies have large appetites and if you (the movie industry) feed them well, consumers will eat up your products! So once a movie has gone off the screen, you have large delays in release times of this same movie to the DVD rental market.
First by making very few DVDs (for a niche market of collectors), you’ll be saving an enormous amount of money by not burning all these DVDs for the rental market.
Also, I guarantee your sales will go through the roof if you make these movies available for Internet sale and rental via the electronic system I explained. Not everybody wants to see a movie in a theatre or even has the time to see a specific movie before it’s removed from the theatre system. But imagine if you released this same movie within a matter of weeks or even less after it came off the theatre screening system, I’d guarantee you’d make a lot more profit than you ever would under the current system of a lengthy delay followed by a DVD release throughout thousands of retail stores!
“So,” Larry say, “my bottom-line is rather than inhibit the consumer with regulation that you’ve gained through your political lobbying, you (the entertainment industry) need to adapt rather than attempt to protect your profits through regulatory laws that guarantee the strangulation of consumer rights and freedoms!” adding:
“Adapt rather than regulate your way to profitability in that way you’ll win but also consumers will ultimately gain their freedoms of choice, availability and price; all without having sword of Damocles hanging over them expecting to be arrested because they are watching or listening to entertainment via the Internet!”
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi
August, 2009
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August 22nd, 2009 at 4:55 pm
Y’know, these corporations wouldn’t ‘have’ to resort to throttling if they hadn’t:
1. used “speed” as their big selling-point
2. failed to upgrade their networks to handle the demand they KNEW they were creating via 1.
Yes, it IS a “stopgap” measure, ensuring that they can squeeze maximum profits out of their ‘customers’ instead of incurring the ‘cost’ associated with, oh, say doing that fiber thing they’ve been talking about since the mid 1980s.
Fiber would basically eliminate the infamous “last mile” issue, which is more an artifact of trying to piggyback Internet connectivity onto old-style telephone and cable TV infrastructure. (Hint: that’s part of why places like Asia are running so much faster.)
A buddy of mine ran up against the corporate thought-process when he tried to help somebody get their DSL set up.
Seems that, out in the country (where the particular company had just recently extended their service coverage) DHCP was available. Two miles away — TWO MILES — it wasn’t.
This utterly mystified him, until I pointed out that it was cheaper and easier for the company to put in the newest hardware in a ‘virgin’ area, than it was to upgrade their existing infrastructure, no matter how shitty it might be.
The fact that these older, more broken-down portions of the network impose serious bottlenecks never seems to occur to people, but then again, most of them are thinking short-term profit, as opposed to long-term functionality.
August 23rd, 2009 at 1:19 pm
Providers are using a similar principle to maximize profits from broadband oversales as the banks adopted long ago:
In the beginning, gold needed to be in the vault to cover the notes of tender printed.
Later, it was based on 10 times the value of the gold contained, and credit notes were used as “assets”.
As the years went on, the whole thing became more credit than gold.
I think the ratio now is almost 1,000 times the amount of gold asset, and only those who’ve been “running the game” are without financial worries.
If the internet provider “game” is allowed to continue on its present course, only the wealthy will have a viable service.