Oct 09
15
Part II
In Part 1, I said that we considered that Hollywood would ignore the man in the street as irrelevent on the other side of the table at a file-sharing peace conference.
That was our conclusion. That an industry body that represented the man in the street would fail in lobbying a solution.
Anyone on the inside (who really knows the P2P score) has
been watching the iiNet case with interest.
The iiNet case to the casual observer appears to be about three strikes and your
out.
It’s not. That is the first stage of the strategy of the Content
Industry.
The second stage is to say:
Well ISP’s and Telephone companies we have the legislation
in place.
But we’ll let you off, if you send out these collection
letters for us instead and collect the fees from the infringers.
Give the customer
the choice of paying up the fine or get disconnected.
For every mp3 the fine will be $180.00
For every movie the fine will be $630.00
Sounds fair and legitimate doesn’t it? In fact so fair that
most ISP’s would probably prefer to do that than to lose their customers by
turning them off, which is in fact exactly what the current iiNet case is all
about.
Michael Malone is fighting tooth and nail on behalf of the
entire world to ensure that a precedent does not occur in Australia.
Why? Because Australia
is the lucky country. Australia
is the independent country that everyone loves.
Great for Holidays, Blondes and Beer. Oh yeah – and it was
the home of the jurisprudence system that successfully wiped out Kazaa.
So what about these
fines then?
Well as per Chris’ article
yesterday,
P2P settlement letters from the RIAA to identified
downloader’s is a much more profitable business then iTunes or Amazon.
25% of all people served with the default demand letters pay
up immediately.
So if we compare the revenue of the 25% that pay up for file-sharing
music tracks versus the money received by the industry from legal sales if
everyone purchased the music track.
Based on 5,000 potential customers the revenue looks
something like this….
Music Sales of 5,000 tracks
Movie (VoD) Rentals @ $3.50 per movie of 5,000 movies.
Wow, that’s only an uplift in the content value of 4500%.
I guess a bottom line increase by a factor of 4500% warrants
a whole campaign to ensure that it happens.
The campaign would most likely be
- hiring
the best political lobbyists. - hiring
the best lawyers and barristers. - convincing
large media organisations to join with you on the grounds that they will
also benefit from the same legislation. (Fox News). - making
sizeable campaign contributions to politicians.
In fact with the result so obvious, the question is no longer “But why don’t media
companies just monetize P2P?”
The question is now, “What won’t they do, who won’t
they bribe and what will they do to people that stand in their way?”
4500 percent is a pretty good profit margin and that’s on
the basis that only 25% of notice recipients pay up. With the recent 600k and
1.9 million dollar awards in the USA,
I think the percentage will rise.
57% of the online world now file share. (A more recent
figure quoted by IPFI last month is that 30% of the Swedish population file
share at least once per week.)
So that’s 2.7 million infraction notices 52 times a year for
an average of $450.00 (halfway between a movie and an mp3) per infraction
notice.
That’s only $(US)15,795,000,000.
(Just for Sweden.)
Why would an industry facing this kind of revenue portential even be interested in negotiating agreements for digital distribution?
The content industry don't want digital distribution.
They want P2P to flourish.
They want more people to use file-sharing software.
They want infraction fines policed by ISP's.
References:
German Anti-Piracy Firm Makes Case For Extortion
http://www.themusicvoid.com/2009/10/german-anti-piracy-firm-makes-case-for-extortion/
http://torrentfreak.com/illegal-downloads-150x-more-profitable-than-legal-sales-091009/