Part 1

Some time ago, my
colleague Chris Gilbey and I held a discussion about how a cease fire could be
brokered between the content Industry and the File sharing community.

Chris explained to
me that the nature of the problem was that there was no central organisation
that the content industry could sit down and negotiate with.

We concluded that an
industry (file-sharing) lobby group should be formed. We registered the domain
name and even put up a draft manifesto (www.iap2p.org). Unfortunately we became
bogged down in the minutiae of legalities and logistics of an international
organisation that to the un-informed general public would appear to be only a pro-file
sharing lobby group.

With all our years
of entrepreneurial experience and long toothed wisdom, we couldn’t figure a way
around the problem of big business membership (look at the www.DCIA.org
membership list to understand) versus consumer membership.

To us the consumers
were as relevant as each of the big business interests, however, we were sure
that that the big business end of town would reject that premise out of hand.

And… if big business
wouldn’t dive in on the file sharing side, then Hollywood would doubtless dismiss just the file
sharing consumers. Apart from suing them and using their download statistics
for market research and their downloading for market PR, they appear to have a
penchant for ignoring the man in the street as being irrelevant.

So, iap2p went nowhere.

With Companies using
the P2P networks publicly to promote their “authorised content” it is obvious
that file sharing is at best a marketing PR Exercise and at worst an
intermediate development cost.

So why haven’t the
legislators addressed this issue in an open and honest manner?

Because they have
no-one telling them :

How prevalent
file-sharing is.

How prevalent
loaning DVD’s to friends is.

Except the industry
lobby groups.

In actual fact, both
Chris and I are actually against ubiquitous file sharing for all content. We
consider that artists should in fact get paid in some manner for their works.

We have come up with
a number of schemes and attempted to promote these to various industry organisations.

No-one was
interested. Could it be that our efforts at saving the industry and preventing
the de-criminalization of a whole generation of youth, were being ignored
because either the industry already had all the answers or; the industry
already had a plan that it was implementing and our rational concepts for
generating revenue would just confuse the issues the industry were promoting.

We have now spent over a year collecting file sharing
statistics and developing a unique scoring system to gauge the popularity of
artists’ newest releases.

We have analysed
both the loss and the gain to the industry.

We have proved without
a doubt that the industry and its revenues have grown as a result of
file-sharing.

In the next part we
discuss the industries real plans.

References:

50 Cent:
File-Sharing Doesn't Hurt Artists, Industry Should Adapt

http://torrentfreak.com/50cent-file-sharing-doesnt-hurt-the-artists-071208/

Jason Mraz said
half of the fans who pay to see him in concert heard about him through illegal
downloading

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A61254-2005Feb28.html

Lions Gate Puts
Kazaa Net to Use

http://articles.latimes.com/2002/oct/11/business/fi-kazaa11

Content Industry
IP numbers Seeding Content.

Perceptric Corporate
Data

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Posted in Economics Main Page by Tom Koltai No Comments Yet