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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.'"
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.
400 years. That's when the first printing monopolies were granted. But that was only so the printers/publishers could make a living. It's only since the 20th century that authors could live from their copyright. Before that, any author that could live from his writings did that because of patronage, which, by the way, can be very dependent on skill (depending on the kind of patronage).
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.
Not at all. Many music fans will remain customers, and their idols will make a handsome living from concerts. For most musicians, that's already their major source of income, and it has always been like that. That won't change as long as rock stars are idolised.
Of course allowing free downloads will change the game, but the game has been changed several times already, and art has always survived, often even flourished. The same will happen now. People just need to find a new way.
The only people who are really fucked are the record companies and other publishers of other people's work. Self-publishing is too cheap and easy, exposure is free, and artists and customers can find each other without the help of a middle man. Their business model is obsolete, but we don't lose much by losing them.
Why should I pay for Blizzard's server bandwidth?
Can you even read and understand what I wrote?
If you can't, fuck off.