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P2P Filesharing vs. The Web
The Importance of writes "The recent RIAA lawsuits have raised many questions and issues, but the focus has been on P2P filesharing. Before there was P2P, though, there was filesharing via webservers. There doesn't seem to be much complaint about the RIAA shutting down people who upload MP3s to their homepage. Why do many people seem to treat http filesharing different than P2P filesharing? LawMeme has one answer."
The media seems to be focusing on, and the RIAA seems to be only going after those who share the mass-market crap like Britney, Eminem, etc. I for one, am more interested in Asian pop, anime, classical recordings, game soundtracks, indie stuff, (indie) Christian music, etc. that are simply unavailable for sale in the US, whether you want to pay for it or not.
The Internet provides a unique medium to distribute works such as the aforementioned categories, whose owners can't/don't want to bother marketing in the US because the demand is so small in absolute numbers. In the absence of official marketing, it allows a building of a fan following for non mass-market type works, possibly paving the way in several years for more organized marketing efforts. Witness the growth of anime from underground fansubs to small marketers in the US, to recent feature theatrical releases (eg, Spirited Away). Without the initial underground sharing, you wouldn't have the word-of-mouth hype.
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
That model already exists: mp3.com allows artists to publish their works on their site and there are a number of payment models to choose from. Another model is for an artist to sign up with a smaller label and try to get sold on Apple's Music Store. When the Windows version hits the streets next month, there will be plenty of potential buyers.
The article on Lawmeme conveniently forgets the fact that the last round of lawsuits effectively stopped web based file trading.
While this is only a number of articles on a couple of incidents, there is no question that web based file trading was effectively crushed by record industry litigation just a few years ago. With P2P, people thought they were anonymous.
However, the RIAA has consistently misrepresented the "safe harbour" clause. The intent of the "safe harbour" clause was to prevent ISPs from hosting copyrighted material on the ISPs' own servers. The identity part also had to with information hosted on the ISPs' own servers, but it appears that most judges are buying the RIAA's BS.
Welcome back to the Dark Ages.
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