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.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 12:08 PM | Print | Comments (0)Top telco Verizon has seemingly had enough with cable operators stealing away its local voice customers. Fresh from its VoIP patent lawsuit victory over independent VoIP provider Vonage, Verizon is now flexing its legal muscles to take on the even more threatening cable industry.
Last week the telco filed its second infringement suit against a cable operator, Charter Communications, accusing Charter of violating its VoIP patents. Verizon seeks an injunction plus monetary damages. The Charter suit follows a similar lawsuit Verizon filed against cable operator Cox Communications last month.
Charter and Cox are not, apparently, alone in feeling Verizon's jab at their VoIP businesses. Three other cable companies, Comcast, Time Warner and Brighthouse Networks, filed a complaint with the FCC yesterday claiming that Verizon is violating the Commission's rules by dangling retention incentives to landline customers that have already decided to switch to cable digital voice services.
FCC rules bar incumbent telcos from trying to win back customers while they are in the process of switching away from the phone companies. The three cable companies contend that Verizon begins to woo its almost-lost customers once it receives number portability requests from the operators themselves.
Verizon offers these customers discounts and even gift cards when they receive notice that a phone number will move to a cable rival, and thousands of potential cable voice customers are lost in the process, the companies claim.
These latest skirmishes underscore just how surprisingly high the competitive stakes have gotten in what many people consider to be a cozy duopoly marketplace. Although Verizon is clearly making headway against cable on both the video and high-speed data fronts -- the telco added nearly 250,000 FiOS TV customers during Q4 07 -- cable operators are far more successful in stealing voice customers away from Verizon.
For years now, Verizon has lost around one million access lines per quarter, due in part to mobile phone substitution and competition in the enterprise market. But cable accounts for at least a third to one half of these lost access lines, with Verizon losing around 400,000 to 500,000 residential lines each quarter.
So, it's easy to see why Verizon is suing Charter and Cox and it's not hard to believe that the telco is fighting tooth and nail to keep customers on the network. Verizon is waging war with cable over VoIP customers.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 1:46 AM | Print | Comments (0)
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