Pirates, traders – or hoarders?
p2pnet.net News:- Posting on Corante, Dana Blankenhorn says given that, “both sides in the Copyright Wars know about language and framing, I’m urging use of this new term for the heavy hobbyist users on peer to peer networks.”
Thus, “Pirates (the copyright industries’ term) is false. There is no economic motive behind most file trades. There is no assurance that, if trading ended tomorrow, sales would rise appreciably.”
And, “Traders (the term favored by users) isn’t correct either. Most traders are asymmetric. Most are downloaders, not uploaders.”
Blankenhorn’s preferred terminology?
“I think the word hoarding says more about the motives of the users, and the way toward ending the practice, than anything else,” he states. “Thanks in part to the industry’s rhetoric, and in part to its actions, many lovers of music and other files are afraid they will lose access to the culture they crave. Thus they demand to have physical copies of its artifacts, and grab all they can. It’s classic hoarding behavior.”
But no matter how big your collection is, you can only listen to one song at a time or watch one movie at a time, he points out. So how can hoarding be stopped?
“1. One step is already being made, unlimited rentals. Economically this is very similar to the concept being pursued in some quarters of taxing the media. The industry gets regular income and data that can be used to parcel it out.
“2. Tone down the rhetoric. All this talk about an industry ‘lock-out’ of its users (if this keeps up we’ll go out of business) is only increasing hoarding.
“3. Engage the market. The movie industry hasn’t even begun to do this. BitTorrent has many legal uses, and could easily be used to take a service like NetFlix fully online. But as of now, while there are many non-infringing uses of BitTorrent we’re short of economic models for it.”
See:-
Corante – File Hoarders Get BitTorrent Win, May 23, 2005
