The war against internet piracy could force ISPs to spy on their customers
Filed under: Technology
A foreign court decision and a bit of legislation floating around Washington could soon reshape the music and video entertainment industry. Time will tell how this will affect your pocketbooks.
The issue in both instances is the digital rights to music, movies, and television shows. For years, the industry has fought an ongoing battle against file sharers, those people who swap tunes and movies without paying a fee to the copyright holders. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), which claims that file sharing costs the music world $12.5 billion yearly, has become well known for demanding damages from thousands of people, mostly young, whom it believes have illegally downloaded music.
The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has done likewise for the movie industry, claiming damages ranging from $30,000 to $150,000 for copyright infringement.
These groups successfully shut down early file-sharing sites such as Napster, which operated much like a library, with a central depository of content. However, BitTorrent technology and peer-to-peer sharing, in which the content to download resides on many user computers rather than a central server, has been harder to rein in. Particularly successful or troublesome, depending on your point of view, has been the Sweden-based peer-to-peer website, Pirate Bay. The Bay has for several years operated with relative impunity, depending on the laxity of Swedish law to insulate it from lawsuits.
After years of lobbying by the entertainment industry, however, the Swedish government finally charged the Pirate Bay creators with a criminal offense. The case began in mid-February and finished a couple of weeks later. The decision is now in the hands of the court, with a ruling expected soon. A civil suit brought by the industry against Pirate Bay is also in the offing.
What are the ramifications of this suit? Pirate Bay is not the only such file-sharing site; in fact, there are even larger ones, such as Mininova, and the industry may find itself in a huge game of whack-a-mole trying to keep up with new sites that step up to replace Pirate Bay.
The entertainment industry would have you believe that by ending file sharing the consumer will enjoy less expensive and higher-quality content. Devotees of content piracy contend that independent bands and movie producers, who benefit from the exposure gained by free distribution, will suffer.
This debate could be moot, however, if the RIAA and MPAA are successful in their attempt to turn internet service providers into the gendarmes of the internet. The associations are backing legislation that would require companies that provide an internet connection, such as Time Warner Cable (TWC), to monitor the traffic in and out of its customers computers for pirated content, then discipline the transgressors, and report the violation to the feds. Sen. Diane Feinstein of California reportedly tried to include in the recently passed stimulus bill measures to control pornography at the ISP level that could also serve the purpose of the RIAA/MPAA.
As you might imagine, many ISPs are balking at the notion, from both the negative press they can expect and the cost of carrying out such a task. Industry experts question whether current software will even work to this end, but I imagine that problem can be solved. A greater worry, in my opinion, is the intrusion of the service provider into the computer user's privacy.
What I want is more good music and video entertainment at a reasonable price. So which side in this battle would best serve those ends? For my money, neither. The industry's insistence on format-bondage of downloaded music (iTunes) frustrates me every time I change the program or device I wish to enjoy my legally purchased tune on. Price competition is almost nonexistent, and the companies continue to serve as kingmakers, anointing a few (pliable?) artists with production, marketing, and distribution, while leaving thousands of capable musicians, directors, and writers out in the cold.
On the other hand, I know some outstanding musicians who have thousands of devotees, yet they live hand-to-mouth because their music is freely shared. There must be a way that these artists can be rewarded by those who enjoy their product. They can't eat free.
A compromise model I've found works very well for me is Rhapsody, a website for which I pay a monthly subscription fee to listen online to music from its extensive catalog. Artists receive a spiff from the company for each time I listen to their songs. In essence, this changes the concept of entertainment as something to be purchased and owned to one of an experience to be paid for. An analogy might be a baseball game. You don't buy a game; you pay to watch.
The digital frontier has changed the concept of ownership of entertainment forever. The Pirate Bay decision and the success of the RIAA/MPAA in pushing ISP monitoring are two battles that will help shape the future, if any, of peer-to-peer file sharing and the industry.
Also read: Another proposed model for music sharing
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
3-04-2009 @ 9:04PM
plonk420 said...
an "unauthorized copying" of a song/album != a lost sale. academia has written papers on this. a majority of the music i've bought wasn't music i would have "just heard" any place and tried to seek out. it was stuff sent to me by friends.
meet the lazy, almost too perfect 21st century version of the mixtape.
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3-05-2009 @ 7:36PM
Chris said...
Here's a thought: We can just email MP3's to each other!!! They are typically only a few megs each at 128kps. This prospect alone makes it tough to control music sharing. The problem is that in this age of digital data, CD's are still too expensive, and downloading tracks at $1.00 each in a format you can only use on a certain player is ridiculous.
I download lots of music on peer to peer but I probably own more CD's than anyone I know because, duh, I buy them also. And sometimes it is just easier to download the MP3's than to find the CD and make them myself. If I have a CD, have I not already paid for the usage rights?
No one said anything in the 80's and 90's when we used to make cassette tape copies of our albums for friends. Yes that is apples and oranges, and maybe I don't see the scope of the issue, but when anyone can take a store bought CD, make a perfect copy (or 100), then convert the entire CD to MP3's, and then do whatever with them after that, how in the hell does the music industry hope to stop sharing by going after high school and college kids? They will inevitably alienate the very audience they are trying to sell to. Hey and what about music videos? You can't just buy those I don't think.....can you?
Let me download full albums with album art work and inserts in a flexible platform for $3-5 per album. Since I won't get the actual CD I shouldn't have to pay the same price as going to the store and buying the whole thing. Not to mention few albums are really worth buying the whole thing. Better yet, drop retail prices on CD's to $3-5!!! Ok, now I'm dreaming!
With the economy in shambles, if the music industry wants to sell more, give us a price we can't pass up! Now let's quit worrying about this and fix the economy. Peace!
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3-04-2009 @ 11:25PM
Jamison said...
"Industry experts question whether current software will even work to this end, but I imagine that problem can be solved."
Methinks you haven't been paying attention to technology the past 10 years. From cracking DVD encryption to the continual war with anonymous peer to peer networks (keyphrase: anonymous), ISP's don't want to ne forced to crack down on this because THEY CAN'T KEEP UP. Even Apple's vaunted itunes format as well as the iphone itself has been 'jailbroken' multiple times, people don't care anymore.
The real gem in this article is the focus on service, however. Focusing on selling a performance rather than a song is a key concept for making money on the Net. Even the game industry has caught on to that (MMO's anyone?). If the music industry was smart, they'd be focusing their efforts on augmenting their CD and mp3 sales with live streaming performances to the point they could replace the studio recordings.
Now that would be win-win.
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3-05-2009 @ 10:44AM
Bob Gorges said...
"The personal truth of the matter is: Copyright and Patent law, in the USA at least, has always been and still is a specific commercial code. As such, it was not designed nor should it ever be redesigned to impose any restrictions upon legally personally owned commercial products, objects of any kind, intellectual material, or any other thing considered by any reasonable person(s) to have a monetary exchange value when strictly used or shared other than for commercial purposes. To impose sweeping impositions against other than commercial establishments and international trade would be no less than a direct challenge against an individuals privacy and the reasonable expected social security of those individuals challenged. No commercial enterprise anywhere in the World can expect to have the authority to monopolize their products to the literal extent that they may enter a persons home and dictate how their product may be used or loaned or even destroyed if that 'home' is to be protected by any sense of anyone's rights to privacy unless that commercial enterprise can show a clear and convincing violation of the peace and dignity of the immediate surrounding community.
Individual and communal privacy is important enough to protect even in times of legitimately declared war let alone a perceived commercial loss loosely based upon how a customer of that product uses or disuses their legitimate ownership of that product. It would seem that commercial enterprises that produce intellectual products, under the very liberal protection generally World wide known as "Freedom of Speech": should be more concerned and held more Internationally liable for the many adverse affects upon the psychological, emotional and in some cases individual financial devastation brought about by less than intelligent consumers of those falsely touted so called valuable intellectual products. The content of their products, in most cases, is clearly designed to inflame, support, and create a pseudo reality in the minds of their consumers that is nothing more than profit driven and clearly a direct abuse of their customers resulting in even more World wide damage to our World community than cigarettes. To try to turn the decades of the entertainment industry's abuse to it's consumer's around and lay it upon the consumer as the fault in the matter is an industry bald face lie. The Bob. Circa: March 2009."
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