This is part 3 of 4… to read the previous entry click here
ISPs don’t just have a moral reason to step up to the plate — they
have a commercial one too. IFPI estimates say illegal P2P distribution
of music and films accounts for over half of all ISP traffic. Others
put the figure as high as 80%. This is traffic that is not only
destroying the market place for people who are trying to make a
legitimate living out of music and films, it is hogging bandwidth that
ISPs are increasingly going to need for other commerce, especially as a
legitimate online market for movies develops.
(Note: All supporting links open in a new window, you won’t leave the page you are reading by clicking on the link)
Mm, unlike the US ISPs who throttle bandwidth and stoop to using ’hacker type’ low down techniques,
in Europe ISPs increasingly upgrade their networks to accommodate
traffic. Having an 100MBPS connection for around $50 USD a month is not
at all uncommon in Sweden but quite the norm even if all grandma does
is visit the news sites and IM with her grandchildren.
As for morals, you and your hollywood pals should be the last people in the world to speak of morals or try to forcibly install them into peoples kids.
I think the failure of ISPs to engage in the fight against piracy,
to date, has been the single biggest failure in the digital music
market.
Reaaaaallly? What about the above points about the labels failing to
agree among themselves, release back catalogs, etc etc (read the above
again…. this time it might sink in)
They are the gatekeepers with the technical means to make a far
greater impact on mass copyright violation than the tens of thousands
of lawsuits taken out against individual file-sharers by bodies like
BPI, RIAA and IFPI.
The only thing bugging you PG is that people like you and your label
pals can’t do jacksh#t to those gatekeepers and they have politely but
strongly told people like you to… fu#k off and mind your own business
instead of them asking them to.
To me, prosecuting the customer is counter-intuitive, though I
recognise that these prosecutions have an educational and propaganda
effect, however small, in showing that stealing music is wrong. ISPs
could implement a policy of disconnection in very quick time. Filtering
is also feasible. When last June the Belgian courts made a
precedent-setting ruling obliging an ISP to remove illegal music from
its network, they identified no fewer than 6 technologies which make it
possible for this to be done.
Yes, start filtering content… ”see” everything that gets piped to
the end user… screw his privacy as it does not fit in with your
business models… start grasping at ”filtering straws” when
there is no technology in this world that can differentiate between a
normal illegally downloaded MP3 and a legally downloaded one… or a
home movie to a TV serial or cinema movie… or a copyrighted image from
one in the public domain… if mistakes happen, fu#k it… can’t make a
corporate omelette without breaking and fu#king over a few eggs right?
No more excuses please. ISPs can quickly enough to block pornography when that becomes a public concern.
Yes, as seen here
When the volume of illegal movie and music P2P activity was slowing
down their network for legitimate users recently in California, Comcast
were able to isolate and close down BitTorrent temporarily without
difficulty.
Good point… read more about the lawsuits brought against comcast here , here , here and here
There are many other examples that prove the ability of ISPs to
switch off selectively activity they have a problem with: Google
excluded BMW from their search engine when BMW started to play games.
This was a clear warning to others not to interfere. Another show of
power was Google’s acceptance of the Chinese Governments censorship
conditions.
Mm, correct me if I am wrong but google is a website not an ISP, and as a website they can link to and filter the links to any site on their website…
they are not inspecting the packets of data that are flowing to peoples
computers from the website’s they link to… as its against privacy laws,
stupid and plain old impossible to differentiate legal from illegal packets.
The BBC has spent a fortune on their iPlayer project and the ISPs
are now threatening to throttle this traffic if the BBC doesn’t “share
costs of iPlayer traffic.” All this shows what the ISPs could do if
they wanted.
Again totally different scenario, the ISPs are targeting a
particular site/source along with its protocol and port… not possible
with quite a few present online P2P apps without disrupting legal
applications and uses.
We must shame them into wanting to help us. Their snouts have been at our trough feeding free for too long.
Yes, if threats don’t work and you can’t write new laws… shaming them
has to come next, like calling copyright infringement ”stealing”… or
saying downloading funds terrorism!
You are complaining about their snouts feeding off your trough for too
long… think back a little to the days that we paid and ate from your
trough… the days when we had to buy a whole CD for 2 good songs and had
to pay full retail, the old we are the masters so just take what we
give you and shut the F up, you might think of them as the good old
days… but remember one thing, those are the OLD days and the days of
people like you dictating to us is long gone, now either you work with
us.. or you lose.
I do have one question though, since “pirates” who download don’t
pay a cent other than their normal internet subscriber fee… there’s no
money being exchanged anywhere… so…wheres the “fund” in “piracy funds
terrorism”?
Let’s spare no effort to push the ISPs into taking responsibility.
But that’s only one part of the story. There’s a huge commercial
partnership opportunity there as well. For me, the business model of
the future is one where music is bundled into an ISP or other
subscription service and the revenues are shared between the
distributor and the content owners.
Sounds good, but how many more years of negotiating trying to screw over the ISPs before you think that got a good enough deal?
I believe this is realistic; the last few years have shown clear
proof of the power of ISPs and cable companies to bundle packages of
content and get more money out of their subscribers. In the UK, most
ISPs offer different tiers of services, with a higher monthly fee for
heavy downloaders. Why are there “heavy” downloaders? Isn’t that our
money?
By ‘our money’ who do you mean? The music labels? Think just for a
minute how many songs a single 1 hour television serial equals… and at
least double that if the television is in HD or uses a less lossy
codec. The days of thinking people burn they cable on music downloads
is pretty much over.. now its mostly video and if anyone should really
be complaining it should be the movie industry because however you
compare it whatever the music industry is bitching about… the movie
industry is going through it more than 10x over…
As an example: cost of making a music album to cost of making an “average budget” movie…
Looking at the events in the last year, this revenue-sharing model
seems to be taking hold in the music business. Universal — U2’s label —
recently struck a deal with Microsoft that sees it receive a cut of the
revenues generated by sales of the Zune MP3 player. It’s unfortunate
that the Zune hasn’t attracted the sort of consumer support that the
iPod did. We need more competition.
There’s no dirth of MP3 players out there, the fact of the matter
is… the zune can’t really be compared to a lot of them out there… and
jacking up prices for a MS product with access to a few of Bono’s songs
on it or not is not such a huge deal clincher for most. The zune was
crippled from the very second it was conceptualized because of the huge
amount of DRM it was dragging around, DRM that made executives in the
music industry cream in their pants and pissed of the buyers of the
device no end with their restrictions. Looking clunky and like a
prototype instead of the final end product didn’t help much either.
Under the agreement, Universal receives $1 for every Zune sold. When
you consider Radio Shack sells Zune players for $150, you’ll see that
Universal has asked for less than 1% of revenue — for a company that is
supplying about a third of the U.S. market’s chart music at the moment.
This isn’t really enough, but it’s a start, I suppose, and follows from
the U2/Apple deal, the principle that the hardware makers should share
with the content owners whose assets are exploited by the buyers of
their machines.
Yes, $1 for every player sold… no artist gets a single penny of that
$1 as its not covered in any artist contract. As that $1 was supposed
to be payment for supposed infringed content that would reside on the
device… it does raise the question of, if you own a zune player have
you paid for all the illegal stuff that you have downloaded?
The record companies should never again allow industries to arise
that make billions off their content without looking for a piece of
that business. Remember MTV?
Never ”allow”…. so now you want to control innovation too?
From what I remember of MTV, it helped sell a s##tload of music didn’t
it? I remember it even made Michael Jackson go multi Platinum with
Thriller… so what are you bitching about now?
Nokia has announced it will launch “Comes With Music,” a service
that effectively allows consumers to get unlimited free downloads of
songs for 12 months after they buy certain premium Nokia phones. At the
end of the 12 months consumers will be able to keep the songs they
download. Nokia gets to supply premium content and Universal gets to
boost competition in the digital marketplace, to make it more
competitive and open new channels to customers. A proportion of the
revenue generated by sales of the handsets will flow back to Universal.
The question must be asked; will they distribute that revenue fairly?
Do artists trust the labels? Will artists, songwriters and labels trust
the telcos and handset companies?
Thats the problem you guys face and will always face, because there
is no honor among thieves and you can’t understand how P2P works where
people upload and share not think of their ”cut” but just share because
they truly believe ”sharing is caring”. While every minute you spend is
in the goal of how much money you can milk from it and how you can keep
the biggest share for yourself… p2p’ers spend time ripping, coding and
distributing with the goal of helping the community and not themselves
by sharing knowledge and culture be it in the form of text, images or
sound… which I am sure you would define that as seeing evil, hearing
evil and speaking evil.
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