Web pirates placed in 'slow lane'

The government has all but ruled out using a "three strikes" law to tackle persistent net pirates.
Using warnings and disconnection to tackle pirates was thought to be in the final Digital Britain report due to be published on 16 June.
bbc.co.uk/news

After years and years fighting the Music and Movie industries, still seem reluctant to change there business models. Still trying to convince government and ISP the only solution is to kick pirates off their respective networks, or divulge the users browsing habits so they can be sued.

The fact still remains that the industry in general still doesn't get it, see the pirate bay trial, and repeatedly shady operations for so-called piracy prevention. See

• Sony Rootkit (2005)
• MPAA Hire Hackers

There have been more problems caused by the industry completely and utter refusal to get with the times and stick to their, pay at every point model. Than if they had simply said lets follow the path of least resistance.

We live in a world were everything is online, the vast majority of people follow the path of least resistance to what ever they are searching for. For example if I was to search online for a movie for example something that may be quite old, you look on iTunes you find nothing, you look on LoveFilm.co.uk see they have it but you want it now, you have very few remaining options - Pirate.

On the flip side you may find the film you are looking for on iTunes, yet its priced at the same as the DVD or in some cases more than the DVD. This immeadiately makes no sense even to a technophobe, they already know that you can make a video clip and put it only for free on YouTube, BBC iPlayer also almost free (You still have to pay the license fee) but the fact still remains the user knows that it costs nothing (or very little) to distribute a film online, so therefore why doesn't the price reflect this - pirate.

Sony Corporation

"I'm a guy who doesn't see anything good having come from the Internet...(The Internet) created this notion that anyone can have whatever they want at any given time. It's as if the stores on Madison Avenue were open 24 hours a day. They feel entitled. They say, 'Give it to me now,' and if you don't give it to them for free, they'll steal it." - Howard Stringer CEO Sony Corp

Rather than embracing the technology that could see the Music & Film Industries revenues rise dramatically they are putting up road blocks at every turn, and don't seem to get that the vast majority of users will pay for content if its trivial and cheap to get to. However, by letting the piracy world fester and grow they are setting themselves up for a long term problem, the perceived value of content is dropping by the day, respect for the content producers and distributors is also dropping. So by the time that they really do acknowledge and start using the web the way it should have been in the first place, the price that they can charge for the content is not viable as a business

TalkTalk ISP

"It is more about education and allowing people to get content easily and cheaply that will make a difference. This idea that it is all peer to peer and somehow the ISPs can just stop it is very naive" - Charles Dunstone - TalkTalk

ISPs for the most part seem to get the role that they play in this system, they provide the pipe. As long as they can charge you for the data that you consume it is not their concern what you do with it. Nor, should it be.

BT, SKY, and Virgin have already started capitalising on the on-demand nature we now live, but they also make it difficult to get to, BT you need an extra subscription and a new Set-Top Box, similarly for Virgin Media and SKY you need a whole other subscription and a set top box. This is at an extra cost to the user and to the business would it not be easier, due to the growing number of people who use their PC as their TV to offer the content through a Hulu or BBC iPlayer like service and cut the cost of the set-top boxes.

When you boil it down to its very bare details the facts are this, the Media Producing Industries are damned if they do and damned if they don't. However if they don't act soon and make a good decision, long term they will never recover. They need to become smaller more agile companies that can easily cope with change and more important embrace it. If Sony and Universal had embraced the technology when it first appeared they would not be facing any problems now, in-fact I would guess they would be making obscene amounts of money, thats not to say they are now anyway.

We all know that piracy has ended up as a monumental PR mess for the record industry, and it is a undisputed fact that the industry in general were far too late and couldn't adopt the same model they do in the shops so invented DRM (lets not go any further into this)

I love music as much as the next man, but when a consumer thinks their being ripped of they will always find a new way, the internet provides such a way. So when Napster and Kazaa came along the consumers went there instead of going to the local music store, by the time the industry realised just how big this was they had only one option left to sue everything and everybody related to this P2P software. As a resulting pissing off there next generation customers and the ones they already had, and along the way giving themselves and P2P developers bad press.

As a knock on affect we see the labels only investing time and money and bands that they know will make money (yes the popular rubbish, usually based of Pachelbel's canon somewhere along the line)

I acknowledge the fact piracy is theft and I just think its too late for some people who are so used to just downloading music that its unlikely that even the Dell Marketing budget could change there minds. I also think DRM just locks you in the path of why buy it and have it locked down when I can download it for nothing.

As much as the labels may not be ripping us consumers off as much as we think, why do they need to get royalties from every iPod sold, this is greed and almost a stealth tax. There has to be better ways for the industry to still make money and let the cosumers get the media from wherever they like or at least get it for a good price, for example it is often cheaper for me to buy a CD then it is to buy from iTunes, how can this possibly work, it cost more to make a CD downloaded has no CD yet costs more (a sense a little greed here)

We then move on to how music is no distributed and listened to. Radio is taking a back seat, the associations wont license Podcasts, and only the popular blogs publish what people want to read and lets not even get into myspace. How do we discover really good new music?? Well there's a new section of my site (thats it check out the music pages when you've finished reading this) and then there is the IODA Alliance: http://www.iodalliance.com/ and the Podsafe music network http://music.podshow.com I also urge you to check out ReIgnition Records www.reignition.com

I will leave this post with a thought:

You and some of your mates are a band just starting out, you produce a CD and put your music online in the iTMS, napster etc. You find that your Album is more illegally downloaded than it is bought and you get no money for these illegal downloads. Would you be pissed off? I know i certainly would be.