rrwood writes "The latest Cringely is out. In it, Bob give his take on P2P and Big Media and where it's all going. Nothing new there, but as usual, the interesting part is what SlashDotters will say here afterward."
Is P2P still alive? I gave up using it when Napster started collapsing under its own weight. This was before it got shutdown through the courts, of course.
As the number of nodes increased, searches took longer and longer until they just started timing out and failing altogether.
Until P2P developers solve these tricky problems, I don't see how P2P can resurrect itself.
P2P is alive and kicking. Kazaa, Morpheus if its still going, WinMX, Kazaalite, blah blah blah. Its all still out there. People are still sharing files. But there are other forms of P2P. Gaming companies are now creating P2P downloads so they can alleviate bandwidth issues by pointing you to another person who has the same file, instead of their overloaded servers.
Secondly, Buhahaha state the obvious! Go Cringely Go!
"Forgetting for the moment that some of these media people are greedy pond dwellers, let's ask the important question -- how are peer-to-peer file sharing systems going to replace $100 million movies? Peer-to-peer systems can share such movies, but since there is no real peer-to-peer business model that can generate enough zeroes, such systems are unlikely to finance any epic films.
Well, right there we have a problem. People LIKE epic films, but even with the best editing and animation software, there is no way some kid with a hopped-up Mac or PC is going to make "Terminator 4." One can only guess, then, that people will continue to go to movies and eat popcorn and watch on the big screen despite how many copies of Divx there are in the world."
Thats it right there. What are they worried about if they're still selling 47 Million $ in Box Office Ticket Sales on the first 3 days of Harry Potter, or whichever movie it was that had made some tremendous ammount of cash... Why spend so much money fighting P2P when they could embrace it for completely different Ideas like gaming companies and even some slash movie websites have done.
interesting, but ...
by
ender's_shadow
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· Score: 4, Insightful
"And text, well, text is even worse because it is easiest of all to steal. " The problem w/ this is that p2p networks aren't being used to trade text. they're being used to trade movies and music. so, while p2p may have the power to kill text publishing (given his parasite assumption, which is the most interesting and insightful part of the article), it doesn't have the interest.
pretty empty article
by
GoatPigSheep
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I didn't learn anything new from this, but I might as well write my comments on the issue, since you guys enjoy comments so much.
Personally I find movie piracy to be good for the movie industry. I can search kazaa for divx's of movies, and if I like them, I go out and buy the DVD. There are no divx's that even come close to the quality of a dvd, and I cannot play divx's on my dvd player (I would rather watch movies on my 50 inch hdtv than my 17 inch flat pannel display!).
Divx's are also good because if I see a 'bootleg' home-camara recorded version of a movie that is still in theatres, I can get an idea of wether it is good or not simply by judging audience reation. For instance for the latest star wars movie, you could see alot of people getting pissed off and leaving the theatre because the movie was crap. If you didn't know this, you might have gone to see that terrible excuse for a movie.
-- GoatPigSheep, the 3 most important food groups
Re:pretty empty article
by
timeOday
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I think this is a big issue in the whole matter. Giving up control. Companies try so hard to present everything with that shiny, deceptive sheen, and the actual product so rarely lives up to that.
I remember walking home to my dorm room with a shrinkwrapped Visual C++ 4.2 educational edition. "Only" $80. I suspected somebody would see it in my bag and be envious or impressed. What a chump I was. A nerdy chump. Somehow, apt-getting that latest gcc revision doesn't give me that buzz. But neither would shelling out for the hologram, anymore.
Just like when I was 14 and realized there wasn't really a 24x7 party going on down at radio station.
I really hope I can teach my kids to see through all the crap at an early age, but it's not easy. Last night my wife asked my 4 year old what his favorite movie his. He said it was the new Little Mermaid movie - which he has NEVER SEEN. It could only have come from seeing commercials on the Disney Channel.
shake me down, rattle, and roll...
by
simpl3x
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· Score: 4, Insightful
"But the same is not true for records. This is simply because technology has reached the point where amateurs can make as good a recording as the professionals. The next Christina Aguilera CD could be as easily recorded at her house (or mine) as at some big recording complex out on Abbey Road."
it just so happens that i really like the music that tends to be made in garages, or basements, or lofts... isn't this as much about access to choices, as paying for those choices? and, don't you think that these musicians might actually like to make money on their first recordings, as opposed to "waiting" for the labels to bequest riches? not to mention that rarely does money equate with artistic vision--second albums generally blow.
Somebody has to pay, somebody has to be paid, but where does that leave the RIAA?
Re:It can be slowed down... perhaps
by
Space+cowboy
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· Score: 5, Insightful
At which point, you adopt a "spread-spectrum" approach to the data transmission. Chop each item up algorithmically into N blocks (so the split points can be determinable and reproducible across multiple servers), append metadata to the end of each block saying how to get the next from this, and encrypt each block with a key from the previous one. Use changing ports and servers (if it's a true P2P system) for access to each block.
The ISP filtering s/w would have to be *damn* good:-)
This doesn't cope with the blocking issue, so the "obvious" thing to do is to coerce the great unwashed into an involuntary P2P network using virus technology to steal bandwidth (disk & net).
There'd be no nasty virus payload (the authors would want the machines to be operating smoothly). The virus might even patch and protect against other virii just to keep it only infected with the P2P s/w!
If the virus can infect (ooh, say, IIS) then it could use HTTP as a transport without affecting normal behaviour.
It's coming, or something like it. It's just a matter of time before the arms race really kicks in.
Or then again, perhaps I've missed something obvious - it's very late over here in the UK:-)
Simon.
-- Physicists get Hadrons!
Re:Out of the loop
by
SN74S181
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Per-byte metered bandwidth would do a lot to stop P2P.
Who's gonna want to pay for someone else uploading over their wire?
Re:It can be slowed down...
by
SwedishChef
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· Score: 4, Insightful
In order to have P2P there has to be at least one person serving the data... it doesn't matter what port it's on if all the packets outbound are capped at 56k then P2P will collapse. And as far as port 80 goes, simply denying every packet inbound to port 80 (or 25 or 22 or 23 or whatever) except those addressed to previously approved static IP addresses would make connecting to a "server" damn difficult.
The advent of P2P may prove to be even more damaging to those of us who simply run our own mail servers or ssh in from work to check on data on our home computers. It could provide the impetus for ISPs to just deny any and all connections except "established" connections. Or, worse yet, go NAT.
In fact, lots of ISPs would love to implement NAT just to avoid the hefty costs involved in having a stable of real IP addresses for their users. Implementing NAT would be an easy way to give all users a static IP (cross-checked against MAC address) and just turn down the bandwidth of those users who overuse what they pay for.
So, if that happens you can add some gamers to the victims of P2P. Of course, since most P2P players are also gamers they'd just end up cutting their own throats. I can hear the whining on/. now.
-- No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
There seems to be a bit of wishful thinking of a twisted sort in Cringely's doomful prophesying. To paraphrase Twain at his most cliched, reports of the RIAA's death are indeed greatly exaggerated. Not only is the record industry adapting with more specialty packaging and combo CD-DVD packs, but more importantly, there's the fact that a whole lot of people just prefer to actually own the official package and are willing to pay for it. I myself...um, know a friend who...has on occasion downloaded an mp3 album and then bought the damn thing a few days later simply to have the real, legal, genuine, uncompressed item in my, um his, collection.
After all, many many years after the invention of libraries, book publishers are still in business. Heck, people actually plunk down premium dollars for hardcovers even after the mass-market paperback comes out in print. Amazing.
-- There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
Re:silly quotes from article..
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LostCluster
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· Score: 4, Insightful
The problem of physical distribution of all forms of media is effectively solved. We now live in a situation where media can hit the average home in multiple ways. What we need, is institutions to tell us what media is worth our attention, and what isn't. This is why/. is considered superior to other message boards, there's an innovative moderation system here, and even a meta-moderation system to keep the moderation system tuned right.
That's what the indie artists of all kinds need right now. A service such as MP3.com that advertises them to a following of people. The problem is, of course, that any such service usually gets bought up by "big media" and we're back in the hole we started in.
Re:Cringely and P2P
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LostCluster
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· Score: 3, Insightful
The fact that the Luddites of the world are still out there. Remember, a Luddite is not somebody who doesn't understand or doesn't want to use new technologies. It is somebody who has a vested interest in seeing that others don't use the new technology, because it threatens their way of doing things.
Whenever a new technology creates a better way to do things, there's somebody who owns the old way of things who would rather that tech go back into the bottle. It rarely works, but they sure can give up quite a fight in the process of going down.
It's a broken business model
by
Do+not+eat
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· Score: 4, Insightful
The interesting thing that came up in a conversation the other day was that there is an entire generation of people who are growing up not paying for music.
I come from a generation that has been totally used to paying for things. For me there is a "guilt" syndrome about knowing that the music is made with profit in mind. So I am more willing to make purchases or delete.mp3s
How do you stay in business when no one sees a direct reason to pay you for the information they can readily get for free? It's a broken business model for sure and they are really fighting to stay alive in more ways than the average guy realizes.... It will be interesting to see what happens.
Re:It's a broken business model
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fucksl4shd0t
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Actually it's not a rationalization for theft, since I've always stolen music. When I was a kid, it was explained to me (and I did thoroughly research the issue in the late 80's and early 90's) that you are *not* stealing copyrighted material if you don't pay for it. You are stealing it when you pay someone other than the people authorized by the copyright owners to collect payment. For example, if you copy me a CD, that's ok. But if I give you $10 for it, *that* is piracy. Fair use includes the right to redistribute the works and to collect a fee up to the cost of materials. Anything higher than that is not covered by fair use anymore. The EULA's that have been printed on CD's for years are themselves illegal (or were 10 years ago) and FUD all the same.
Let's educate the up-and-coming bands by showing them ourselves what we want them to do. You don't get people to do what you want if you don't do it yourself. Lead them, and they will follow.
And as far as the bands we know and love that are now incredibly rich, let me direct your attention to Metallica. Need I say more?
In their early days, Metallica encouraged people to pirate their music, record it at shows and give it to their friends, buy the albums and copy them for all their friends. They even set aside SPACE at the show so people could get the best quality bootleg recordings possible! I joined up with them during this time, and when they got rich and successful and subsequently started sticking a knife in the collective back of their fans, I dropped 'em.
In spite of their ultimate hypocrisy, Metallica got rich and famous because they toured a LOT, and they encouraged PIRACY. Talent, as usual, had nothing to do with it.:)
Re:Cringely is becoming Crufty
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silentbozo
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I just borrowed my friend's Wallace and Grommit VHS tapes and recorded and burned VCDs of them.
It isn't like W&G has the resolution and production quality where a VCD degrades it.
Well, no, not after it's been recorded to VHS. After VHS, a well encoded VCD could be considered an improvement, especially if you started with the 24/25fps source material and didn't have to go through reverse pulldown.
Re:Not totally invalid, though
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Insightful
My point, the price of videos has come down due to pressure from the P2P networks
With all due respect, bollocks. The price of videos has come down because the movies are stale. Or did bargain bins not exist prior to the rise of P2P networking?
~~~
Fighting the inevitable
by
rolfwind
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· Score: 5, Insightful
The RIAA and all those organizations are going to have to give in some time. They are not going to come up with their own P2P effectively, because it's been shown that most people want to shop at one place so to speak, but every company will want their own network (Sony, Columbia, etc.) and people simply don't want that.
Plus, I just don't see people willing to pay for music files, they are already used to getting it free off the net or hearing it on the radio, when I pay for music I expect a CD and something tangible. I know this isn't the case with software anymore, but music is different, when people buy music they don't just want to run it on their computer, but in their stereos, cars, etc and a DRM crippled file just won't let over 95% of the people do that, hence people will not migrate to these company offered P2P solutions when the free one offers them a "better" product in those regards.
I think to a certain extent, Piracy is good (Yes, someone throw me in jail please) because in any industry that has a near monopoly it keeps them semi-honest with prices and whatnot because then they have a competitor. Whoever says piracy drives prices up don't know what they are talking about- do they know what the profit margins on music cds are? Capitalism is based on normal human behavior, it's a model that lets natural selfishness benefit the whole within reason, and these companies are fighting this. And they will lose.
Gee, it's like he can predict the future - NOT!
by
NewsWatcher
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· Score: 2, Insightful
From the article: "Of course, the recording and publishing executives, who often work for the same parent company, aren't going to go without a fight. We are approaching the end of the first stage of that fight, the stage where they try to have their enemy made illegal. But the folks at Microsoft Research now say quite definitively that legal action probably won't be enough. That's when we enter stage two, which begins with guerrilla tactics in which copyright owners use the very hacking techniques they rail against to hurt the peer-to-peer systems. This too shall pass when bad PR gets to the guerrillas. The trick to guerrilla or terrorist campaigns is to not care what people think, but in the end, Sony (just one example) cares what people think.
That's when the record companies and publishers will appear to actually embrace peer-to-peer and try to make it their own.
This will be a ruse, of course, the next step in the death of a corrupt and abusive cultural monopoly. They'll say they will do it for us. They'll say they are building the best peer-to-peer system of all, only this one will cost money and it won't even work that well. There is plenty of precedent for this behavior in other industries.
Is this supposed to be a prediction? All these things have already come to pass. Let me see if I can try to make a few similar "predictions":
There will be a decrease in the share price of technology companies that some will call the 'tech wreck' this will cause the NASDAQ to fall and investors to lose lots of money....
-- If the pattern goes 9am, 10am, 11am, why isn't noon 12am?
Why P2P will prevail...
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Why is P2P popular? Because it's cheap? No. It's popular because you've got choice.
The problem with "The Entertainment Industry" is that it's so manufactured - so programmed. Some people can see through it, and those are the people using P2P (other than the folks leeching Britney...).
Examples: Tom Cruise has a new movie coming out - Suddenly, there are a whole bunch of old Cruise movies on TV. The Chillies are coming to town - suddenly, their old vids are on TV, and their songs are getting airplay. These are without including paper and electronic media in the equation. Ad those into the picture, and it's very, very hard to see anything resembling freedom of choice - it's all designed to make people "like" a particular medium icon, at any given time. If you examine it, you'll find that very rarely are their conflicts between "products" within a given market segment. Apply some Reverse Engineering skillz to this area, and you may be surprised what you see. I wonder what Fravia would have to say about it...
Anyway, it worked for a while, but now people are seeing the patterns, and seeing through the crap. They want access to the entertainment of their choice, not just whatever Sony or Tri Star decides to sell today. The Next Big Thing isn't such a big deal anymore for most of us, especially when Media Co keeps pumping a new Next Big Thing out every couple of months.
The media companies (heh, I say it like there's more than one...) can't keep everyone blind forever, so given a little time, EVERYONE will be using some form of P2P simply to have the freedom to choose what they watch/listen to.
When I look at the media companies, I feel pity. I see a bunch of archaic industries fighting a losing battle for their lives. The battle's over. They've lost. They just haven't realised it yet.
Cringely is na�ve about pirates.
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 2, Insightful
> Cringely:
If the industry is weakened too much by piracy, the pirates begin to hurt themselves by drying-up their source of material. It is very doubtful that this will happen simply because the pirates, too, want to go to movies.
Why is this doubtful, Cringely? No pirate is ever going to think to himself: "Gee, I had better stop sharing files for awhile and pay to see some movies so that Paramount and Disney et al will have the capital to make more movies."
No pirate ever thinks that his individual actions will hurt anyone. And he's right -- much for the same reason that no rational voter can expect that his one vote will actually be the vote that affects the outcome of an election.
Pirates only think and act as individuals, not as some collective Borg consciousness.
There are several likely scenarios that will allow the entertainment industries to survive the P2P onslaught. But suddenly obtaining the good will and generosity of pirates is definitely not one of them.
Re:Out of the loop
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Empty+Threats
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· Score: 2, Insightful
My ISP *is* a monopoly. There are only two ISP's in the market. One cable, one DSL. The two rarely overlap in market area.
I imagine this is true for much of the United States.
You just don't get it....
by
SwedishChef
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· Score: 3, Insightful
You don't comprise a "large number" of their customers. You comprise a small percentage. Most ISPs would gladly see you haul your P2P ass to another provider... be it ISDN, cable, modem or whatever else.
You cost them money directly in your use of bandwidth to act as a server. You also cost them money directly in responding to legal challenges by MPAA, RIAA, and all the other "AA" groups out there. If 90% of their customer base is perfectly happy surfing and downloading email, why would they want the 10% that you make up?
And what other small ISP is going to spring up and gather you to their fold when they cannot make money on you? Do you see where this is headed? You are not a market anyone wants. You are a liability. You don't have any market clout. They actually WANT you to go somewhere else.
You guys all whine about how these "business plans" need to be changed. Well I got news for you: the business plans have changed. And you aren't in them.
-- No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
The problem is that MPAA Gets It
by
alizard
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Meaning that without real political representation via our own PAC or a high-tech industry PAC, we're all going to get it. Without Vaseline.
Cringely almost gets it, but he's made a major error in forecasting.
Apparently, Jack Valenti isn't quite the techno-illiterate we all thought him. He is no more worried about P2P piracy than Hilary Rosen is, and he's probably gotten plenty of entertainment out of her mistakes. As in the case of the record labels, this isn't about stopping people from distributing low-quality copies of product, it's about control.
MPAA is NOT worried about some kid with a loaded current generation Mac or PC making Terminator 4. Unlike their sister companies in the record industry, their business model is doing very, very well. They're selling an ok to good product at what people believe is a fair price.
They are worried about the next Steven Spielberg or George Lucas graduating from the UCLA Film School 5 years from now with a loaded PC or Mac with a story to tell deciding he wants 25% of the gross and that he doesn't have time to serve out a Hollywood-style apprenticeship.
He makes a rough draft of the movie using a workstation and a render farm in a box, i.e. a bunch of high-end current generation graphics cards. Or maybe he borrows some time on his school's equipment. How does he do crowd scenes? Were you paying attention to the article on the Monster crowd generation package? Like to bet that there won't be one downloadable or off-the-shelf by then?
What does he do with it? He shows it to investors and to a few stars who are either up-and-coming or haven't been selling too well lately and are willing to take a chance on a straight percentage of the gross.
How does he distribute it? Reduced quality copies or samples via P2P or streaming Real Video, via pay-per-download, etc., and actual DVDs to film critics. He pitches it as a TV movie. Once the film is in the can, lots of things he can do with it. He presses a bunch of DVDs and sells them off his Website at $10 a shot. He finds a way to get higher-quality versions (TVD media?) into the movie theaters.
Even if he doesn't, if he makes even a reasonable profit without Hollywood, his next picture will have serious budget behind it and he'll be able to cut a deal with an MPAA company that'll give him the whip hand. Or worse, the ability to have his own auditors check the books unannounced any time they feel like it.
Unless the MPAA locks down the technology and the bandwidth and locks it down now.
The MPAA movie companies know that one can make a high-quality record album using PC-based studio hardware and distribute via the Net if one can find buyers, and they don't plan to let this happen to them.
Though all this means is putting off the inevitable for a few years, if one can't do this in the US market, which is all but inevitable, there are other markets and with new US technology under the control of the RIAA/MPAA, the technologies to enable this will simply appear everywhere except America. The bright young people they're depending on for their next generation of movies will be doing what the ones who want to work in creating high-tech will.
Moving the hell out of the USA to anyplace with a Net connect that isn't under RIAA/MPAA control implemented by the politicians the Hollywood cartel has bought or are buying. What's the MPAA going to do when the hot new movies and video content is all coming from outside the USA?
Watching Americans buy it. Trying to get politicians to use import restrictions to keep it out of the USA either online or as physical DVD product.
If worse comes to worse...
by
The+Jonas
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I don't care if P2P succeeds or fails. There is always USENET and the abundance of.mp3/multimedia categories and postings. Will the RIAA/MPAA/DMCA attempt to effectively shutdown the smtp/nntp protocols which allow for postings on USENET. I don't think so. Data, by its nature, is designed to be copied. I have bought one retail CD in 3 years and not because of P2P networks. Their are too many other financial obligations in my life to spend money on music/media. I contribute to their profitable causes through other means - e.g., I watch MTV2/MTV and others on digitial cable, i.e., my viewing habits are recorded and matched up with advertising dollars. Also, I attend some concerts. It seems like the industry cry-babys are like most other sects of management - they have an aversion to change! Have I done anything wrong if I buy media (music/book) and let my friends/family listen/read (SHARE!) that media? Again, I don't think so.
The survivors, or more likely, the new names among both record and eventually, the movie companies will be the ones who know they are in the business of adding value to an artist's content, not trying to extract value at the artist's expense.
They will be the ones with the how-to knowledge in creation / production / distribution / marketing and to a smaller extent, the ones who can loan the artists the high-end tools and venture capital to do a better job than they can do on their own.
I expect that there will be very, very few survivors among either record or movie companies of this shakeout.
actually, "Oh,shit"
by
alizard
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· Score: 5, Insightful
What's the RIAA afraid of?
Look up the word disintermediation.
MP3s sell CDs and everybody in and out of the RIAA knows it. MP3s are not the product, they're a promo item, just as tracks played over the FM radio with comparable quality (actually, I saw FM radio compared to 200K MP3, which might be about right given optimum conditions) are promo items.
The difference? Anybody can distribute MP3s over the Internet.
The RIAA is afraid that the artists who currently are already selling in platinum-level quantities will decide that they can sell CDs via Internet without them quite nicely and keep all the profit instead of a 15% of revenues as calculated using Enron-style economics.
Or the new artists with platinum potential will take a swing at this themselves. Somebody will get all the pieces and market momentum together. It's only a matter of time. Will it be a formula which can be duplicated? Since I'm working with an indie artist myself, I sort of hope so.
If the record industry believed what you were saying, they wouldn't be buying Congress to make laws that allow them to decide what technology gets deployed.
More to the point, I suggest you do some googling for record industry sales numbers. You'll find that the trend is uniformly downward, but look for yourself anyway, the practice with search engines will do you good.
Slashdot Mirror
Is P2P still alive? I gave up using it when Napster started collapsing under its own weight. This was before it got shutdown through the courts, of course.
As the number of nodes increased, searches took longer and longer until they just started timing out and failing altogether.
Until P2P developers solve these tricky problems, I don't see how P2P can resurrect itself.
"And text, well, text is even worse because it is easiest of all to steal. " The problem w/ this is that p2p networks aren't being used to trade text. they're being used to trade movies and music. so, while p2p may have the power to kill text publishing (given his parasite assumption, which is the most interesting and insightful part of the article), it doesn't have the interest.
I didn't learn anything new from this, but I might as well write my comments on the issue, since you guys enjoy comments so much.
Personally I find movie piracy to be good for the movie industry. I can search kazaa for divx's of movies, and if I like them, I go out and buy the DVD. There are no divx's that even come close to the quality of a dvd, and I cannot play divx's on my dvd player (I would rather watch movies on my 50 inch hdtv than my 17 inch flat pannel display!).
Divx's are also good because if I see a 'bootleg' home-camara recorded version of a movie that is still in theatres, I can get an idea of wether it is good or not simply by judging audience reation. For instance for the latest star wars movie, you could see alot of people getting pissed off and leaving the theatre because the movie was crap. If you didn't know this, you might have gone to see that terrible excuse for a movie.
GoatPigSheep, the 3 most important food groups
"But the same is not true for records. This is simply because technology has reached the point where amateurs can make as good a recording as the professionals. The next Christina Aguilera CD could be as easily recorded at her house (or mine) as at some big recording complex out on Abbey Road."
it just so happens that i really like the music that tends to be made in garages, or basements, or lofts... isn't this as much about access to choices, as paying for those choices? and, don't you think that these musicians might actually like to make money on their first recordings, as opposed to "waiting" for the labels to bequest riches? not to mention that rarely does money equate with artistic vision--second albums generally blow.
Somebody has to pay, somebody has to be paid, but where does that leave the RIAA?
At which point, you adopt a "spread-spectrum" approach to the data transmission. Chop each item up algorithmically into N blocks (so the split points can be determinable and reproducible across multiple servers), append metadata to the end of each block saying how to get the next from this, and encrypt each block with a key from the previous one. Use changing ports and servers (if it's a true P2P system) for access to each block.
:-)
:-)
The ISP filtering s/w would have to be *damn* good
This doesn't cope with the blocking issue, so the "obvious" thing to do is to coerce the great unwashed into an involuntary P2P network using virus technology to steal bandwidth (disk & net).
There'd be no nasty virus payload (the authors would want the machines to be operating smoothly). The virus might even patch and protect against other virii just to keep it only infected with the P2P s/w!
If the virus can infect (ooh, say, IIS) then it could use HTTP as a transport without affecting normal behaviour.
It's coming, or something like it. It's just a matter of time before the arms race really kicks in.
Or then again, perhaps I've missed something obvious - it's very late over here in the UK
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
Per-byte metered bandwidth would do a lot to stop P2P.
Who's gonna want to pay for someone else uploading over their wire?
In order to have P2P there has to be at least one person serving the data... it doesn't matter what port it's on if all the packets outbound are capped at 56k then P2P will collapse. And as far as port 80 goes, simply denying every packet inbound to port 80 (or 25 or 22 or 23 or whatever) except those addressed to previously approved static IP addresses would make connecting to a "server" damn difficult.
/. now.
The advent of P2P may prove to be even more damaging to those of us who simply run our own mail servers or ssh in from work to check on data on our home computers. It could provide the impetus for ISPs to just deny any and all connections except "established" connections. Or, worse yet, go NAT.
In fact, lots of ISPs would love to implement NAT just to avoid the hefty costs involved in having a stable of real IP addresses for their users. Implementing NAT would be an easy way to give all users a static IP (cross-checked against MAC address) and just turn down the bandwidth of those users who overuse what they pay for.
So, if that happens you can add some gamers to the victims of P2P. Of course, since most P2P players are also gamers they'd just end up cutting their own throats. I can hear the whining on
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
There seems to be a bit of wishful thinking of a twisted sort in Cringely's doomful prophesying. To paraphrase Twain at his most cliched, reports of the RIAA's death are indeed greatly exaggerated. Not only is the record industry adapting with more specialty packaging and combo CD-DVD packs, but more importantly, there's the fact that a whole lot of people just prefer to actually own the official package and are willing to pay for it. I myself...um, know a friend who...has on occasion downloaded an mp3 album and then bought the damn thing a few days later simply to have the real, legal, genuine, uncompressed item in my, um his, collection.
After all, many many years after the invention of libraries, book publishers are still in business. Heck, people actually plunk down premium dollars for hardcovers even after the mass-market paperback comes out in print. Amazing.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
The problem of physical distribution of all forms of media is effectively solved. We now live in a situation where media can hit the average home in multiple ways. What we need, is institutions to tell us what media is worth our attention, and what isn't. This is why /. is considered superior to other message boards, there's an innovative moderation system here, and even a meta-moderation system to keep the moderation system tuned right.
That's what the indie artists of all kinds need right now. A service such as MP3.com that advertises them to a following of people. The problem is, of course, that any such service usually gets bought up by "big media" and we're back in the hole we started in.
The fact that the Luddites of the world are still out there. Remember, a Luddite is not somebody who doesn't understand or doesn't want to use new technologies. It is somebody who has a vested interest in seeing that others don't use the new technology, because it threatens their way of doing things. Whenever a new technology creates a better way to do things, there's somebody who owns the old way of things who would rather that tech go back into the bottle. It rarely works, but they sure can give up quite a fight in the process of going down.
The interesting thing that came up in a conversation the other day was that there is an entire generation of people who are growing up not paying for music.
.mp3s
I come from a generation that has been totally used to paying for things. For me there is a "guilt" syndrome about knowing that the music is made with profit in mind. So I am more willing to make purchases or delete
How do you stay in business when no one sees a direct reason to pay you for the information they can readily get for free? It's a broken business model for sure and they are really fighting to stay alive in more ways than the average guy realizes.... It will be interesting to see what happens.
I just borrowed my friend's Wallace and Grommit VHS tapes and recorded and burned VCDs of them.
It isn't like W&G has the resolution and production quality where a VCD degrades it.
Well, no, not after it's been recorded to VHS. After VHS, a well encoded VCD could be considered an improvement, especially if you started with the 24/25fps source material and didn't have to go through reverse pulldown.
With all due respect, bollocks. The price of videos has come down because the movies are stale. Or did bargain bins not exist prior to the rise of P2P networking?
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The RIAA and all those organizations are going to have to give in some time. They are not going to come up with their own P2P effectively, because it's been shown that most people want to shop at one place so to speak, but every company will want their own network (Sony, Columbia, etc.) and people simply don't want that.
Plus, I just don't see people willing to pay for music files, they are already used to getting it free off the net or hearing it on the radio, when I pay for music I expect a CD and something tangible. I know this isn't the case with software anymore, but music is different, when people buy music they don't just want to run it on their computer, but in their stereos, cars, etc and a DRM crippled file just won't let over 95% of the people do that, hence people will not migrate to these company offered P2P solutions when the free one offers them a "better" product in those regards.
I think to a certain extent, Piracy is good (Yes, someone throw me in jail please) because in any industry that has a near monopoly it keeps them semi-honest with prices and whatnot because then they have a competitor. Whoever says piracy drives prices up don't know what they are talking about- do they know what the profit margins on music cds are? Capitalism is based on normal human behavior, it's a model that lets natural selfishness benefit the whole within reason, and these companies are fighting this. And they will lose.
"Of course, the recording and publishing executives, who often work for the same parent company, aren't going to go without a fight. We are approaching the end of the first stage of that fight, the stage where they try to have their enemy made illegal. But the folks at Microsoft Research now say quite definitively that legal action probably won't be enough. That's when we enter stage two, which begins with guerrilla tactics in which copyright owners use the very hacking techniques they rail against to hurt the peer-to-peer systems. This too shall pass when bad PR gets to the guerrillas. The trick to guerrilla or terrorist campaigns is to not care what people think, but in the end, Sony (just one example) cares what people think.
That's when the record companies and publishers will appear to actually embrace peer-to-peer and try to make it their own.
This will be a ruse, of course, the next step in the death of a corrupt and abusive cultural monopoly. They'll say they will do it for us. They'll say they are building the best peer-to-peer system of all, only this one will cost money and it won't even work that well. There is plenty of precedent for this behavior in other industries.
Is this supposed to be a prediction? All these things have already come to pass. Let me see if I can try to make a few similar "predictions":
There will be a decrease in the share price of technology companies that some will call the 'tech wreck' this will cause the NASDAQ to fall and investors to lose lots of money....
If the pattern goes 9am, 10am, 11am, why isn't noon 12am?
Why is P2P popular? Because it's cheap? No. It's popular because you've got choice.
The problem with "The Entertainment Industry" is that it's so manufactured - so programmed. Some people can see through it, and those are the people using P2P (other than the folks leeching Britney...).
Examples: Tom Cruise has a new movie coming out - Suddenly, there are a whole bunch of old Cruise movies on TV. The Chillies are coming to town - suddenly, their old vids are on TV, and their songs are getting airplay. These are without including paper and electronic media in the equation. Ad those into the picture, and it's very, very hard to see anything resembling freedom of choice - it's all designed to make people "like" a particular medium icon, at any given time. If you examine it, you'll find that very rarely are their conflicts between "products" within a given market segment. Apply some Reverse Engineering skillz to this area, and you may be surprised what you see. I wonder what Fravia would have to say about it...
Anyway, it worked for a while, but now people are seeing the patterns, and seeing through the crap. They want access to the entertainment of their choice, not just whatever Sony or Tri Star decides to sell today. The Next Big Thing isn't such a big deal anymore for most of us, especially when Media Co keeps pumping a new Next Big Thing out every couple of months.
The media companies (heh, I say it like there's more than one...) can't keep everyone blind forever, so given a little time, EVERYONE will be using some form of P2P simply to have the freedom to choose what they watch/listen to.
When I look at the media companies, I feel pity. I see a bunch of archaic industries fighting a losing battle for their lives. The battle's over. They've lost. They just haven't realised it yet.
Why is this doubtful, Cringely? No pirate is ever going to think to himself: "Gee, I had better stop sharing files for awhile and pay to see some movies so that Paramount and Disney et al will have the capital to make more movies."
No pirate ever thinks that his individual actions will hurt anyone. And he's right -- much for the same reason that no rational voter can expect that his one vote will actually be the vote that affects the outcome of an election.
Pirates only think and act as individuals, not as some collective Borg consciousness.
There are several likely scenarios that will allow the entertainment industries to survive the P2P onslaught. But suddenly obtaining the good will and generosity of pirates is definitely not one of them.
My ISP *is* a monopoly. There are only two ISP's in the market. One cable, one DSL. The two rarely overlap in market area.
I imagine this is true for much of the United States.
You don't comprise a "large number" of their customers. You comprise a small percentage. Most ISPs would gladly see you haul your P2P ass to another provider... be it ISDN, cable, modem or whatever else.
You cost them money directly in your use of bandwidth to act as a server. You also cost them money directly in responding to legal challenges by MPAA, RIAA, and all the other "AA" groups out there. If 90% of their customer base is perfectly happy surfing and downloading email, why would they want the 10% that you make up?
And what other small ISP is going to spring up and gather you to their fold when they cannot make money on you? Do you see where this is headed? You are not a market anyone wants. You are a liability. You don't have any market clout. They actually WANT you to go somewhere else.
You guys all whine about how these "business plans" need to be changed. Well I got news for you: the business plans have changed. And you aren't in them.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
Cringely almost gets it, but he's made a major error in forecasting.
Apparently, Jack Valenti isn't quite the techno-illiterate we all thought him. He is no more worried about P2P piracy than Hilary Rosen is, and he's probably gotten plenty of entertainment out of her mistakes. As in the case of the record labels, this isn't about stopping people from distributing low-quality copies of product, it's about control.
MPAA is NOT worried about some kid with a loaded current generation Mac or PC making Terminator 4. Unlike their sister companies in the record industry, their business model is doing very, very well. They're selling an ok to good product at what people believe is a fair price.
They are worried about the next Steven Spielberg or George Lucas graduating from the UCLA Film School 5 years from now with a loaded PC or Mac with a story to tell deciding he wants 25% of the gross and that he doesn't have time to serve out a Hollywood-style apprenticeship.
He makes a rough draft of the movie using a workstation and a render farm in a box, i.e. a bunch of high-end current generation graphics cards. Or maybe he borrows some time on his school's equipment. How does he do crowd scenes? Were you paying attention to the article on the Monster crowd generation package? Like to bet that there won't be one downloadable or off-the-shelf by then?
What does he do with it? He shows it to investors and to a few stars who are either up-and-coming or haven't been selling too well lately and are willing to take a chance on a straight percentage of the gross.
How does he distribute it? Reduced quality copies or samples via P2P or streaming Real Video, via pay-per-download, etc., and actual DVDs to film critics. He pitches it as a TV movie. Once the film is in the can, lots of things he can do with it. He presses a bunch of DVDs and sells them off his Website at $10 a shot. He finds a way to get higher-quality versions (TVD media?) into the movie theaters.
Even if he doesn't, if he makes even a reasonable profit without Hollywood, his next picture will have serious budget behind it and he'll be able to cut a deal with an MPAA company that'll give him the whip hand. Or worse, the ability to have his own auditors check the books unannounced any time they feel like it.
Unless the MPAA locks down the technology and the bandwidth and locks it down now.
The MPAA movie companies know that one can make a high-quality record album using PC-based studio hardware and distribute via the Net if one can find buyers, and they don't plan to let this happen to them.
Though all this means is putting off the inevitable for a few years, if one can't do this in the US market, which is all but inevitable, there are other markets and with new US technology under the control of the RIAA/MPAA, the technologies to enable this will simply appear everywhere except America. The bright young people they're depending on for their next generation of movies will be doing what the ones who want to work in creating high-tech will.
Moving the hell out of the USA to anyplace with a Net connect that isn't under RIAA/MPAA control implemented by the politicians the Hollywood cartel has bought or are buying. What's the MPAA going to do when the hot new movies and video content is all coming from outside the USA?
Watching Americans buy it. Trying to get politicians to use import restrictions to keep it out of the USA either online or as physical DVD product.
Tech Public Policy stuff
I don't care if P2P succeeds or fails. There is always USENET and the abundance of .mp3/multimedia categories and postings. Will the RIAA/MPAA/DMCA attempt to effectively shutdown the smtp/nntp protocols which allow for postings on USENET. I don't think so. Data, by its nature, is designed to be copied. I have bought one retail CD in 3 years and not because of P2P networks. Their are too many other financial obligations in my life to spend money on music/media. I contribute to their profitable causes through other means - e.g., I watch MTV2/MTV and others on digitial cable, i.e., my viewing habits are recorded and matched up with advertising dollars. Also, I attend some concerts. It seems like the industry cry-babys are like most other sects of management - they have an aversion to change! Have I done anything wrong if I buy media (music/book) and let my friends/family listen/read (SHARE!) that media? Again, I don't think so.
They will be the ones with the how-to knowledge in creation / production / distribution / marketing and to a smaller extent, the ones who can loan the artists the high-end tools and venture capital to do a better job than they can do on their own.
I expect that there will be very, very few survivors among either record or movie companies of this shakeout.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Look up the word disintermediation.
MP3s sell CDs and everybody in and out of the RIAA knows it. MP3s are not the product, they're a promo item, just as tracks played over the FM radio with comparable quality (actually, I saw FM radio compared to 200K MP3, which might be about right given optimum conditions) are promo items.
The difference? Anybody can distribute MP3s over the Internet.
The RIAA is afraid that the artists who currently are already selling in platinum-level quantities will decide that they can sell CDs via Internet without them quite nicely and keep all the profit instead of a 15% of revenues as calculated using Enron-style economics.
Or the new artists with platinum potential will take a swing at this themselves. Somebody will get all the pieces and market momentum together. It's only a matter of time. Will it be a formula which can be duplicated? Since I'm working with an indie artist myself, I sort of hope so.
If the record industry believed what you were saying, they wouldn't be buying Congress to make laws that allow them to decide what technology gets deployed.
More to the point, I suggest you do some googling for record industry sales numbers. You'll find that the trend is uniformly downward, but look for yourself anyway, the practice with search engines will do you good.
Tech Public Policy stuff