After spending weeks mucking about with various P2P platforms in preparation for a report I've written, I am very sympathetic to traditional video content providers. I'm here to tell you that practically every movie and TV show ever produced anywhere in the world is available for free on the Internet using various BitTorrent (as in the technology and not the company) applications.
How can anybody expect to make money by writing, producing, directing or distributing traditional films or TV shows when this stuff is just given away on the Internet? That's why Hollywood's big agenda these days is to crack down on unauthorized distribution of video content on the Internet. The studios, simply put, face extinction if this keeps up much longer.
But, the solutions to the problem can be worse than the problem itself. To wit: the UK government is eyeing a new law that would force ISPs to take action against customers who are suspected of downloading pirated content.
A draft bill, no doubt backed by Hollywood, would legally require ISPs to issue a warning email for a customer's first offense, suspend service for the second supposed instance of infringing activity and terminate service altogether if a third instance occurs. Companies that fail to enforce this "three strikes" policy would be prosecuted and details on suspected customers would be made public in court.
As Mathew Ingram notes, there are a couple of glaring problems with this idea. First, it's easy for clever hackers to defeat any kind of filtering system that would detect the "illegal" content in the first place.
Secondly, what a mess this kind of law would create. Would ISPs have to inspect each and every bit that flows through the system hunting for illegal content? What happens when the technology produces false-positives, namely nails a customer for downloading pirated content, when, in fact the content is perfectly legal? Who would monitor the ISPs? If disconnected, would a customer be forever banned from gaining access to the Internet or would his name go on a blacklist circulated around the Internet world and among government officials?
The questions are endless and the implications of such a regime are vast. If the UK government thinks it has a right to protect one industry's business on the Internet, then what about other industries whose business models have been demolished by the Internet? Can book publishers can access to the same kind of protection? What about brick-and-mortar retailers? Don't they deserve a break too?
And what happens to those poor souls who no longer have access to the World Wide Web? Are they banned from Internet connections everywhere or can they shuffle over to their local libraries anytime they want to use the Internet? Can they share a neighbor's Internet connection via Wi-Fi?
What about the children in those households? Must they lag behind their peers in school, go without the educational benefits of the Internet, simply because someone in the home didn't take piracy seriously?
Whatever problems piracy is creating for Hollywood, the solution can't be to kick people off the Internet or to force their service providers to do the dirty work for some other industry. If the only way piracy can be controlled is to make sure no one uses the Internet, then everybody has to figure out a new game plan, one that creates new ways of making money with video content.
Cynthia Brumfield at 12:08 PM|Comments(0)
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