When the world was less digital
p2pnet.net News View:- You and I knew that whichever way it went, the Supreme Court’s Grokster v MGM ruling wasn’t going to mean a whole lot in the real world.
Someone else agrees with us.
By now, “SEVERAL HUNDRED MILLION copies of this software that the entertainment industry would like to vanquish have been downloaded to individual computers around the world,” writes our fellow traveller. “They go by names like Grokser, Morpheus, Limewire, eDonkey, Bit Torrent, Kazaa, etc.) And each time, there is a successful enforcement or a new way to catch the developers with copyright liability, they reinvent themselves and generate another two or three year court proceeding. And now, a majority of them are hosted outside the United States. There is no court ruling whose enforcement can keep up with this. Sure, it might affect some venture capitalist deciding where to put money for a product. But none of these services since Napster have required venture money.
“They grow organically, because they are serving a still unserved desire. Do people like free content, sure, but they also like content. All the stuff – when they want it – to feel like free even if it might not be free.”
Wonderful stuff : )
But wait. That’s not all.
The, “entertainment industry is still far too often spending time comparing the profit margins and risk of new ideas to an earlier time when the world was less digital,” the opinion piece goes on.
“So here is the crux of the problem. These services have traffic at a rate 40 to 50 times the traffic of legitimate sites. Yet, the amount of time and money wasted on besting the game by the entertainment and techonolgy industries is huge. This volume needs to be embraced and managed becasue [sic] it cannot be vanquished. And a tone must be set that allows future innovation to stimulate negotiation and not just confrontation.”
What the consumer [read customer] is left with now are, “a few legitimate services that offer some great content” and “lots more illegal P2P choices that offer ALL the content plus a healthy dose of spyware, bad files and unwanted risk”.
So, “The entertainment industry has no choice right now but to speed up its licensing activity and risk-taking and the tech industry should start caring that they are not helping their customers [read consumers] when the easiest way to get entertainment content is to also accept spyware, viruses, and bad files in the process. Sure there are some promising things happening, but they are not being embraced nearly fast enough.
“All the wisdom of the Supreme Court will not change that bottom line.”
So who is this?
None other than Hilary Rosen who was, as she points out in her Huffington Post post, chairwoman of the Big Music cartel kop organization when, “when we developed the case almost five years ago”.
And ‘we’ is the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America)
A lot of sites (including p2pnet) hammered Rosen when she was running things at the RIAA. However, it’s reasonable to think she may have been saying much the same as the above behind closed doors when she was still over in Never-Never Land.
Welcome aboard, Hilary : )
Something you think we should know? tips[at]p2pnet.net
See:-
Huffington Post post – The Supreme Wisdom of Not Relying on the Court, June 26, 2005
