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Pirate Bay Closure Sparked P2P Explosion
Barence writes to share that the closure of The Pirate Bay seems to have done nothing to stem the flow of potentially copyrighted materials. In fact, there has been an estimated 300% increase in the number of sites providing access to copyright files, according to McAfee. "In August, Swedish courts ordered that all traffic be blocked from Pirate Bay, but any hope of scotching the piracy of music, software and films over the web vanished as copycat sites sprung up and the content took on a life of its own. 'This was a true "cloud computing" effort,' the company said in its Threats Report for the third quarter. 'The masses stepped up to make this database of torrents available to others.'"
Anyone see the 60 Minutes piece last night trying to link Bit Torrent to Mexican DVD piracy to gangs to child prostitution? (think of the CHILDREN!)
It was quite ill informed, seeming to only gather information from the MPAA and other similar sources.
The link between people using camcorders to record movies and make bad quality DVD's for sale on street-corners I get, but their assumption that these are the SAME people uploading to BT, was casual at best.
Seriously, if you go through all the trouble to cam-cord the movie and burn DVD's in mass, aren't you just as threatened by BT as the studios?
Perhaps use it as a source, yes, but upload your own movies for free? I don't see it.
The idea that the media industry should be different than any other historical industry is quite beyond me. The printing press pretty much killed one of the most ancient occupations of literate civilization; the professional scribe. I'm sure lots of scribes were pretty pissed that some asshole German and his machine not only stabbed their profession in the heart, but did it with what was really a substandard result (look at illuminated manuscripts and then look at the Gutenberg Bible, it's the 128bit MP3 of its day!)
No occupation or technology is guaranteed infinite supremacy. No law can do it, not without extraordinary harm. Late feudal Japan tried banning firearms and other forms of modern warfare to stave off the collapse of the feudal system, and then by the Meiji period was bringing in every foreign expert they could to bring them up to speed before they became a two-bit colonial rape victim like China.
What I'm afraid of is that the anti-P2P movement will become like the War on Drugs, an unwinnable contest, but one with sufficient amounts of money being made by the so-called enforcers that they'll just keep trying to stop what they know they never can, under the strange idea that if you can criminalize enough people, somehow they'll eventually stop.
I think every country should adopt a new clause in their constitution; the "Stupid Ideas Tried Before Clause" that would have anyone who passes a law to try a scheme proven one or more times to be unenforceable to be removed from office permanently.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Sooner or later, freenet will become more popular, and all searches for illegal downloads will become native to the client. And with the encryption that it offers, there will be no stopping people from getting what they want. Rather, the companies might wisen up and start giving incentives to buy, rather than treat their customers like scum.
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Emphasis on "limited times" and "to authors and inventors".
The industries in question have been systematically (and successfully) attacking the first item for decades, and do not generally belong to the groups specified by the second part.
The majority of the money made in these industries goes to distributors whose historical monopoly on the means of distribution is slipping away from them. In some cases they facilitate the creative process, but in the majority of cases they do not, or do so to a limited and replaceable degree.
In fact, in many cases, these monopolists have in essence enslaved the creators of works and used them as livestock to drive their engines of profit.
Does any of this make the unlicensed sharing of copyrighted works ethical or justifiable? Probably not.
The profligate use of the guillotine during the French revolution was probably not ethical or justifiable, either, but it sure happened anyway.
The monopoly is dead, like it or not. The current noise is the death rattle of an expiring regime, the which never go quiet into that good night. Something else will rise in its place, and what that will be we simply do not yet know.
But I'll bet these same money grubbers will eventually find a way to cash in without creating anything themselves. They always do.
WALSTIB!
But who would pay for "designing stuff?"
Anyone who benefits from the existence of that stuff... mostly the same people who buy copies now. Readers benefit from having new books written. Film buffs benefit from having new movies made. (Third parties also benefit indirectly: e.g. someone who's in the business of selling Blu-Ray players benefits a little from having new movies released on Blu-Ray.)
Let's say you make a movie which costs 100 million $ to make, how can you recover those costs if not through the small contribution of 10$ from the millions of people who watch (consume?) that movie?
I agree!
However, today's copyright-based business model is not the only way to collect $10 from ten million people.
In fact, compared to the alternative (collecting the money up front and then distributing the movie for free), it has some serious drawbacks: when you spend $100 million out of your own pocket, you're taking a huge gamble. If the movie doesn't sell as many tickets as you hoped, you've just lost millions of dollars. On the other hand, if you're a film fan thinking about contributing $10 to the production of an upcoming movie, you only stand to lose the price of a sandwich and coffee, and the movie producer knows ahead of time whether or not the movie will turn a profit.
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