Mar 09
8
The Copyright Industry is Removing the Barriers Against Terrorism.
Since 1999, World War III has been raging, slowly escalating
in ferocity and intensity as a result of each battle. It is a war between the
content industry and the public the world over.
The battle lines were drawn when the industry decided to
stamp out P2P by squashing Napster. BMG, one of the largest media companies in
the world invested in Napster, because they “got” the vision of a centralized
server enabling soft distribution of content. Unfortunately the other companies
in the music industry were not prepared to cede control of Internet
distribution to BMG. So instead of trying to figure out a logical business
model that would reward all content owners, they fought tooth and nail to destroy
Napster.
According to the great military strategist, Clausewitz, “war
is merely the continuation of politics by other means.” This was war.
In their minds the content industry depends on distribution
control. Value can only be achieved and maintained if the distribution chain is
totally controlled.
P2P was the ultimate threat to that control.
The world of Napster was a community, with individual files
of small value being shared between members.
National governments have enforced WIPO trade agreements in
response to pressure from the very powerful lobbies of the content industries.
Their primary construct for this was to enact legislation referred to as “Safe
Harbour”, which is anything but “safe”.
Safe Harbour doesn’t stop an ISP from being sued by their
customers for loss of service.
Safe Harbour doesn’t protect the population from predatory
characters and/or activities
Safe Harbour
in no way interferes with the bulk of P2P activity. What it does do is to
ensure that all P2P users are motivated to act together in common cause, to the
threat from content owners.
What Safe Harbour
Does Do:
It gives the illusion of control back to the Industry so
that one day they will again be able to dictate price.
Unfortunately, as many of the industries initiatives, time
is against them. Whilst they are
awaiting the implementation of the Safe Harbour legislation in all good WIPO
member nations, the Safe Harbour users have already moved on by increasingly
adopting Rapidshare, encrypted P2P, caching services, PVC* tunneling and
dynamic IP number utilization – ensuring that more than 30% of the world’s P2P
activity is harder to detect, if not totally invisible.
Ironically it is the big corporations (Microsoft, Cisco) the
universities, (Harvard) that are at the forefront of development of these hard
to track methodologies for consumers to be able to communicate under the radar
of the NSA Echelon interpreters.
In plain English, the increasing adoption of new
technologies like encrypted torrents is leading to criminals and specifically,
enemies of the state having a heightened ability to conduct impenetrable
conversations over Skype, to share documents on manufacturing weapons and
generally to add to the potential for instability in the world – and its all
because of a battle over the price of an MP3.
The attacks by the content industry on their own customers
together with Internet service providers has created an increasing and more
complex (now 1024 bits encryption on some tunneling streams) security hole that
you would have to assume that every terrorist group in the world would be
making use of.
P2P users are becoming invisible. They are going totally
underground – and an invisible network is what we will be left with.
According to Sun Tzu’s Art of War, Every battle is won
before it is ever fought.
The content Industry has lost. But as it goes down, its last dying throes
are actually doing more damage to society than anyone can possibly imagine. The
content industry seeks to attack consumers. The content industry’s real enemies
are those that manufacture the hardware and software tools that are used by its
consumers.
BMG, having lost the fight to turn Napster into a business,
went into a venture with Sony and subsequently retired from the music industry,
selling its stake in the JV to Sony. They were smart. They took the money and
ran.
As P2P continues to mutate and grow, we need to look at how
the content industry is responding and acting. Remember how miners used to take
a canary down the mine to determine whether there were noxious gases…
The decision makers in the content industry should be watching the canaries –
but they apparently aren’t. (The canaries are dying – and new canary acquisition
is becoming costlier.)
The content industry wants to make money, and so it should. But if it makes
money at the expense of society as a whole, is that a good thing for society?
To get to a win-win strategy the content industry needs to stop working
against, and start working with, the smart PhD’s in academia who have a vision
for a world in which information will be able to travel instantly and
inexpensively to everyone.
There is a way to do this that can be hugely profitable for the entertainment
industry.
Just like Wall Street went through a period of denial before
having to deal with the reality that they were financially, and perhaps morally
insolvent, so too does the content industry have to turn the corner and move
beyond denial.
Meanwhile, how do you feel about being a canary?
*PVC – Private Virtual Circuit