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The Pirates Will Always Win, Says UK ISP
TheEvilOverlord writes "The head of UK ISP TalkTalk, Charles Dunstone, has made the comment ahead of the communications minister's Digital Britain report that illegal downloading cannot be stopped. He said 'If you try speed humps or disconnections for peer-to-peer, people will simply either disguise their traffic or share the content another way. It is a game of Tom and Jerry and you will never catch the mouse. The mouse always wins in this battle and we need to be careful that politicians do not get talked into putting legislation in place that, in the end, ends up looking stupid.' Instead he advocates allowing users 'to get content easily and cheaply.'"
I believe the industry knows that you cannot stop 100% of software piracy. I don't think that's their goal.
I remember back in 2000 when I went to my dentist. He sat me down and started making the usual small-talk, asked me where I worked, what I was majoring in in college, etc. When I told him I was a comp sci major, he brought up Napster. My dentist was using Napster. He went on and on about how computer illiterate he was, but he had no problems using Napster, and how he was finding songs on there from back when he was a kid, how he could find anything he wanted, and how simple it was to get whatever song he wanted...
I believe the industry is just trying to make sure my dentist doesn't start downloading songs again.
I'm not so certain...
At some point, as with Prohibition in the States, the law may cave to reality at some point and we'll give up on the concept of owning strings of 1s and 0s.
Some other mechanism for paying creators will have to emerge - I think it'll end up being patrons for most things and live performances for others (like band tours and book readings), with a smattering of physical merchandise related to the original content.
Some things may end up being free, done as labours of love. It's not like those of us in the First World don't have enough resources and time to burn on things we enjoy without necessarily requiring pay.
Amazon has 89 cent downloads. And .99 to 3.99 albums (one per day). Pirates should check out Amazon!!!
Here is what I've gotten (albums for less than $3.99) in 6 months:
$ ls -d */* |cat
Aerosmith/Big Ones
Alanis Morissette/Flavors Of Entanglement
Amy Grant/Heart In Motion
Bob Marley/Live At The Lyceum
Bon Jovi/Cross Road
Boston/Boston
Butch Walker/Sycamore Meadows
Cary Brothers/Who You Are
Creedence Clearwater Revival/Chronicle_ 20 Greatest Hits
Creed/Greatest Hits
David Bowie/Heroes
Eagles/One Of These Nights
Elvis Costello/My Aim Is True
Forgive Durden/Forgive Durden Presents Razia's Shadow_ A Musical
Heart/Make Me
Inxs/Kick
Jack's Mannequin/The Glass Passenger (Amazon Exclusive)
Jackson Browne/The Pretender
James Morrison/Songs For You, Truths For Me
Jimi Hendrix/Electric Ladyland
Joan Jett & The Blackhearts/I Love Rock N' Roll
Joe Bonamassa/The Ballad Of John Henry
Joshua Radin/Simple Times
Kate Voegele/A Fine Mess
Katy Perry/One Of The Boys
Led Zeppelin/Led Zeppelin
Madonna/Like A Virgin
MC5/Kick Out The Jams
Metric/Fantasies
Mieka Pauley/Elijah Drop Your Gun
Neil Diamond/Sweet Caroline
No Doubt/The Singles Collection
Pink Floyd/Animals
Prince/Purple Rain [Explicit]
Queen/News Of The World
Robin Trower/Bridge Of Sighs
Rod Stewart/The Definitive Rod Stewart
Seether/Finding Beauty In Negative Spaces Spaces (Bonus Track Version) - [Explicit]
Seth Walker/Leap Of Faith
Shiny Toy Guns/Major Tom
Soundgarden/Superunknown
The Apples In Stereo/New Magnetic Wonder
The Band/Greatest Hits
The Benjy Davis Project/Dust
The Go-Go's/Beauty And The Beat
The Pussycat Dolls/Doll Domination
The Weepies/Hideaway
The White Tie Affair/Walk This Way
The Who/Who Are You
U2/No Line On The Horizon
Van Halen/Van Halen
Van Halen/Van Halen II
Various Artists/Motown Number 1's Vol. 2
Whitesnake/Whitesnake
Yes/The Yes Album
I believe the industry is just trying to make sure my dentist doesn't start downloading songs again.
That's what they like to think. But knowledge of how to use the latest piracy tools is just as unstoppable as the piracy itself. It is a variation on the same phenomenon that results in virus-construction-kits and script-kiddies.
They can only go so far to make piracy harder. What they can do without practical limit is to make alternatives to piracy easier. If typing a song name into google gets you 10 different places you can legitimately download it in various ways for various payments (outright purchase, or advertising supported, or streaming, etc all with different pricing based on the seller) then that goes a long ways to keeping the dentist from even thinking about piracy.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
He said 'If you try speed humps or disconnections for peer-to-peer, people will simply either disguise their traffic or share the content another way. It is a game of Tom and Jerry and you will never catch the mouse. The mouse always wins in this battle and we need to be careful that politicians do not get talked
You may be right. However, if you are indeed right, big productions are done for. Authors will be thrown back 500 years and be dependant on external sources of income. They will be dependant not on their skill but on their patronage.
I'm sure some will survive. But artists will become progressively more dependant on government handouts, ads, or other such indirect sources of income.
As technology kills the last real differences between "home-tv" quality and cinema quality, it will become progressively harder to sell entertainment (since you're fighting against the economic force that free represents), until it can barely be done at all.
It will be, at best, like TV is today. Music fans will go from being the customers to being the product, sold to advertisers, or ideological causes, and you will hardly see any singers, actors or ... without a pepsi or cola light in hand.
they're still calling us pirates. I like to think of myself as someone who likes to walk around the tollbooths the entertainment industry puts in front of everything, not walk through them. Haven't they got enough money? How many copies of my favorite albums do i have to buy to replace the ones i lost, or had stolen or whatever? Because the tollbooth owners don't care about that sort of fairness, how can i be expected to WILLINGLY put up with the hassle of the tollbooth experience when i can just walk around? The ISP guy got it spot on in one regard -- the only way to combat the culture that has developed to avoid this hassle (ie filesharing) is to make stuff dirt cheap and mega accessible. But there's no or very little profit in that is there, and so here lies the contradiction of trying to own something in digital form and make "good healthy profits". Normally i would sarcastically say "good luck with that" but its simply not funny that while they're trying to make these healthy profits we have to put up with all the associated nastiness of their stand-over tactics and absurd propaganda... can we have the revolution now please?
Works of art were copied long before your tape recorder existed. Hell, they were copied long before the printing press. I would guess that monks were copying lots of literary works by hand without any permission.
Napster was awesome, and I regret its passing. There is nothing like it today.
The great thing about Napster was that it let me find new music that I liked. I'd see a reference to a song in, say, a book; I'd search for it on Napster, download the track, and play it; and then, if I liked it, I could go back to the same place and see what else the guy had. I discovered They Might Be Giants that way; I downloaded Rock To Wind A String Around from a recommendation, then went back and dug out more of their tracks, then ordered the Apollo 18 CD.
Okay, Napster was pretty slow and BitTorrent has it beat technically in pretty much every way, but no other music sharing service had the same sense of exploration and community. You could explore people's music collections, find interesting new rare stuff, and then actually talk to them about it (if they were on). It was, in fact, all social networking and Web 2.0-y before the terms had even been invented. I wish something like it existed today.
You can't stop copyright infringement but you can inhibit free culture.
we need to be careful that politicians do not get talked into putting legislation in place that, in the end, ends up looking stupid.
or even worse, introduces new problems without solving the intended ones.
Trouble is, some of the new problems it introduces (namely overbearing policing of actions online, bordering on a police state) are not usually seen as problems by the politicians (at least those in power or which hope to achieve it soon), but rather goals that they date not describe publicly...
Advertising... It's already happening, how many movies have sponsors or product placements these days? Tho most of these movies have their traditional revenue streams as well, adding the advertising is pure greed to get a bit of extra cash. That's one method right there, as requested.
Modern technology makes production costs much cheaper than they used to be.
Live shows.
And many others..
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but you were copying to crap cassette tapes. You didn't have digital audio tape. Why not? Cuz the RIAA won that one.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Audio_Tape
As long as the technology was localized, where they could attack a single format, target manufacturers, etc, they could keep it under their thumb. Things are, I think, fundamentally different now that digital copying and digital redistribution is ubiquitous.
You weren't making anything like the quality of copy that is possible now, and you had no way to anonymously dump a million crappy cassettes for other people to pick up, either.
Although technically you might have called what you were doing piracy, I think the Internet has fundamentally changed the game. He might have needed to say "piracy at this scale" vs. just piracy, but functionally it's just a minor quibble.
Liberty uber alles.
This is already the situation for TV, radio, magazines, and newspapers. In all of these media, the real customer is the advertiser who pays for access to the audience who watches/listens/reads for "free."
Now I won't say that's a good thing. I think it's terrible. In my opinion, quality is clearly higher when it is made directly for the audience (as is the case for the BBC, PBS, NPR, or CBC radio, for example). To the extent that a changing media landscape is undercutting the advertising-supported model I am hopeful that direct payment for (and influence over) cultural works will become more widespread.
In the early days of radio, the manufacturers had a problem. Radio sales were extremely popular, but the people buying needed something to listen to. So the manufacturers created radio stations in order to drive demand for their products. It worked (though government licensing in favor of the networks also wiped out a wide range of independent and community services).
Today, the media industries argue that their production has a multiplier effect on the economy: each dollar invested in media produces many more dollars in related activity (transportation of books, sales of Star Wars toys, Macdonalds promotions, and so on). Some of this activity is really a cost of doing business, whose elimination would result in greater efficiency (e.g. it's more efficient to download a book than to ship it across the country), but much of it is new value. They present this as an argument for strong copyright[1]. In fact, it may be just the opposite: if the return on the dependent activity is greater than the cost of producing the original work, then there is an incentive to create the work even if it made no money directly. This is why Apple created iTunes, for example: not to make money from selling music, but to drive the (much more profitable) sale of iPods.
Or take Star Wars: the films earned $4.3 billion, but merchandise earned $13.5 billion. Widespread copying of the film would not touch the business case for making it, and at the beginning, when the venture was risky, wider distribution would only increase the likelihood of success (while possibly limiting the maximum possible scale of that success - to $13.5b in this case, rather than $17.8b).
We already live in a world where many movies are driven more by the model you describe than by ticket revenue per se. Producers care tremendously about ticket sales as a metric of popularity and because that's what keeps the films in the cinemas, not necessarily because that is their key revenue stream. As it happens, DVD sales recently became more profitable. So we have seen business model change on this scale extremely recently. It ain't the end of the world. (Though it might mean a lot more Star Wars-like films, which admittedly wouldn't make me thrilled: I'm not a fan.)
[1] In the recent copyright debate at The Economist, Dale Cendali, their May 8 guest made just this claim. She cited a study that found that the "IP industries" contributed "nearly 40% of the growth achieved by all U.S. private industry." Unfortunately for her argument, she failed to point out that under the category of "IP industry" the study included the whole automotive industry, big chunks of the transportation and retail sectors, a significant part of the petroleum industry, and so on. (You can see my detailed rebuttal if on page 5 of the May 8 comments.) Turned around, this appears to be evidence that IP is an input cost for many businesses, and there is a large incentive to create works regardless of copyright. (The actual economic claim is not that such works would not be produced, but that they would be underproduced. It's not clear to me that economic theory has a good answer for what the "best" (for whom?) level of production of Big Brother shows or Shakespeare plays is, or at what cost.)
Finding decent quality rips and downloading them takes time and effort.
Thankfully, that is not true (well, not once you learn what to look for.)
"Sceners" are a bunch of elitist faggots. They have all these anal rules about quality, which means pretty much anything scene released is downright pristine. Finding high quality mp3s (averaging 256 kbit) and lately even lossless rips is easier than ever.
Even though they look down on p2p and hate to see their releases spread that way (when I call them elitist faggots, it's because they earned that label) there are a few insiders who make sure that everything they do makes it out to p2p networks, which for the most part means bittorrent.
I would suggest everyone learn the basics, it doesn't actually take that much to do, and once you figure it out, finding high quality video and audio material on the internet turns out to be a breeze. Just type something like "what is the scene" into a search engine and follow a few links. Learn to spot the quality, and be amazed at the new realm of possibilities that open up to you.
First, if you prefer what the commercial networks produce that's fine by me. They have made lots of good TV shows. It's probably largely a matter of what you grew up with. I grew up with BBC shows rebroadcast in Canada, so prefer Doctor Who to Star Trek.
This is not actually what the main private networks (ABC, CBC, NBC in the U.S.) do. They target specific demographics desired by advertisers. The results are quite different from what would happen if they attempted to capture a) the most viewers, or b) the viewers most willing to pay for their shows. This is obvious when you compare to programming by cable channels (e.g. HBO), which are more directly responsive to their audiences. For a long time (many decades) the networks made the (patently absurd) assumption that men made all the significant spending decisions in the family, and targeted their prime time shows accordingly. Or take The Beverly Hillbillies, one of the most successful shows of its time: cancelled not because its audience went away, but because the advertisers figured its audience was too poor. They wanted to chase hip urban viewers instead. It is largely a myth that they are rational actors directed by the market. In practice, networks are basically huge command economies inside. They're not famous for making smart decisions.
The other systems I mentioned vary widely in governance and funding models. CBC TV is abysmal due to a lack of stable funding or independence from the government. Recently, CBC radio has been following in its footsteps. I believe the BBC is quite a bit more independent than CBC, largely because it has a dependable source of long-term funding (the TV license). I don't believe NPR is government run at all. It gets very little money from government. Most of its funding comes from viewers (pledge drives), member stations, and corporate donations.
What we have seen with the non-commercial networks is that they have coalesced around a different audience not well served by the private networks. So on the one hand we have a different approach to funding and governance, on the other we have contrasting tastes and cultures (the stereotype is "popular" vs "middle/high brow"). It's not clear that the one caused the other. In a world without the private networks (which, as I pointed out, would not happen because the consumer electronics industry would profit from creating them if they did not exist - probably even if there were no such thing as copyright), the character of the programming on these systems would likely be quite different.
I am aware of the limits on Fox's rights to Star Wars, but that makes no difference to its relevance. The licensing arrangements in place today are irrelevant when conjecturing whether it could or would have been made if it were unable to depend on ticket sales. My point is that it would have been profitable even if ticket sales were zero.