File sharing bound to go underground
Sci fi novelist and Boing-Boing founder Cory Doctorow has posted a great editorial on the Guardian's website about how file sharing will go deeper underground as a repsonse to the recent deal between ISP's and record companies in the UK.
That deal will involve reducing bandwidth on chronic file sharers.
Doctorow calls this the latest paragraph in the record industry's long, self-pitying suicide note, and it's left me wishing they'd just pull the trigger already and stop beating their chests and telling us all how unfair it all is.
I agree with him that this agreement, which has also been discussed in the US between the RIAA and big internet providers like Verizon and Comcast, will not stop file sharing.
As Doctorow points out: Kids are time-rich and cash-poor and have an infinite supply of ingenuity and impecuniousness to apply to the job of getting music for free. Last year, my freshman university students in Los Angeles regaled me with stories of "hard-drive parties" where everyone would gather with guitars, beers and whopping great hard drives that cost less than either the guitars or the beers. While the students jammed, sang and danced, they simply synchronised their drives using whatever laptops were lying around, transferring hundreds of gigabytes' worth of music while composing and recording songs of their own.
Amen.
The saddest part of all is that the record industry has made itself look so pathetic in its drive to prosecute mostly youngsters.
It's time to change your business model, RIAA, not victimize kids who are ahead of you on the technology curve.
That deal will involve reducing bandwidth on chronic file sharers.
Doctorow calls this the latest paragraph in the record industry's long, self-pitying suicide note, and it's left me wishing they'd just pull the trigger already and stop beating their chests and telling us all how unfair it all is.
I agree with him that this agreement, which has also been discussed in the US between the RIAA and big internet providers like Verizon and Comcast, will not stop file sharing.
As Doctorow points out: Kids are time-rich and cash-poor and have an infinite supply of ingenuity and impecuniousness to apply to the job of getting music for free. Last year, my freshman university students in Los Angeles regaled me with stories of "hard-drive parties" where everyone would gather with guitars, beers and whopping great hard drives that cost less than either the guitars or the beers. While the students jammed, sang and danced, they simply synchronised their drives using whatever laptops were lying around, transferring hundreds of gigabytes' worth of music while composing and recording songs of their own.
Amen.
The saddest part of all is that the record industry has made itself look so pathetic in its drive to prosecute mostly youngsters.
It's time to change your business model, RIAA, not victimize kids who are ahead of you on the technology curve.
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