p2pnet.net News:- “The strategy of the industry is not to fight the pirates so much as beat them at their own game - by making television programming available, for a fee, on legitimate Internet-based video libraries.”

That’s a quote from the June 27 Newsweek online, the subject being the prevalence of TV shows on the p2p networks.

It doesn’t explain how selling files you can already get for free will beat the ‘pirates’, the entertainment industry’s catch-all phrase for people who make video and audio files available online without having first been ripped off by the industry by one means or another.

The article mentions Suranga Chandratillake’s Blinkx, a “search engine for audio and video files” which is, “taking the shows of his clients - including Fox News, MTV and other networks - and making them accessible by a simple word search.”

err, wow?

“The most popular TV shows have been downloaded tens of thousands of times from sites like eDonkey and Bit-Torrent - each episode of the Fox show ‘24,’ for instance, was downloaded about 95,000 times after it first aired, according to Envisional, an England-based peer-to-peer traffic monitor,” says the story, going on:

“There’s this general assumption that people will always steal content if they can, but I don’t think that’s true,” says Chandratillake. “The success of the new Napster and iTunes demonstrates that people are very interested in downloading broadband content online and paying for it - if it’s priced right and available easily.”

The only people making that “general assumption” are the entertainment cartels as they try to sue their former customers into buying poor quality, over-priced CDs and mp3s, at the same time claiming anyone who doesn’t do so is an actual or potential criminal.

People are indeed interested in downloading broadband content online and paying for it - if it’s priced right and available easily.

But that automatically lets the corporate music industry out. It’s already demanding around 70 cents wholesale for mp3s which are lossy, compressed copies of existing CD/DVD tracks. And it wants to hike that.

As to availability, the labels are releasing only a tiny poriton of the music that’s available on their many catalogs, which date back decades.

The networks would clearly (dearly?) love to shut down the video peer-to-peer networks, says Newsweek. “But they can’t” because, “New file-sharing applications like BitTorrent and eDonkey are difficult to regulate. Video pirates have eschewed the use of centralized servers in their file-swapping networks, relying instead on decentralized networks that are virtually impossible to bust.”

And ‘legal’ measures haven’t worked so far, says the post:

“In May a U.S. federal appeals court struck down antipiracy regulations put in place by the Federal Communications Commission and supported by networks. TV executives from Europe, Asia and elsewhere are closely watching other file-sharing litigation as well; these executives believe that American courts will set the tone for how emerging markets like China and India choose to treat intellectual property.

“Thus far, the Motion Picture Association of America has spearheaded the anti-pirating charge, filing lawsuits in dozens of countries, including China, France and the Netherlands,” says Newsweek, adding:

“At the moment, the video pirates still have the advantage. But if Google and Yahoo and the other search companies succeed in doing for video what iTunes has done for music, Chandratillake should be able to watch ‘The Apprentice’ - or just about any other show - any time he wants. For a fee.”

In the meanwhile back in the real world …….

Something you think we should know? tips[at]p2pnet.net

See:-
Newsweek - All TV Shows, All the Time, June 27, 2005

This entry was posted on Monday, June 20th, 2005 at 5:59 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

HOME

Viewed 3659 times