If you’d like to a see what the “Establishment” considers a reasonable and balanced look at Peer-to-Peer and the legal and moral reasons why file sharing should be stopped, look no further than this months Fortune magazine.
In a deviously one sided article entitled
“From Betamax to Kazaa: The Real War Over Piracy” author Roger Parloff makes the money case for investors while overlooking the other issues, especially the cultural ones. Naturally enough he finds file sharing fundamentally different from earlier technologies like the VCR and therefore should be banned.
That his conclusion seems preordained comes as no surprise. We are talking about media giant Time/Warners’ Fortune magazine after all, the bible of capitalists. But it's an old argument with so many hidden holes it’s anxiety provoking just stumbling over them. It’s perverse reading fun though. Sort of like playing Where’s Waldo when your score determines your tax audit.
“Why did the studios ever think they might be entitled to compensation for consumers' personal use of their works within the home? Try looking at it this way. What entices people into stores to buy VCRs is, in part, the prospect of taping copyrighted shows. If so, why should equipment manufacturers hoard all the profits, rather than sharing them with the copyright holders?”
Well…In the case of Peer-to-Peer the “VCR” is free and profit is zero. Even the networks P2P users are migrating to are ad-free, have no real income streams or any hope of seeing them and the groups themselves are run by volunteers. But that dances around a fundamental point. In America we don’t tax industries (people actually) because other industries play parts in purchase decisions. When I buy Michelin tires the company doesn’t send a check to Oldsmobile because that’s where the tires wind up. I pick up furniture that works well in my 100 year old house but that doesn’t mean the carpenter's descendents get a piece of the profits. He got his money when he built it. We all do work that benefits someone but to tax all of us
for that reason alone smacks of communism and is demonstrably unworkable - while to tax us simply for the benefit of a few is unfair. He’s right that things have changed since the Betamax case but there's some snow in the video obscuring his picture. P2P changes things so thoroughly that in time the funds media companies may stand to lose - or gain - might come to be seen as one of the least important effects of file sharing.
The article is good for one thing though, letting you know where things stand with the people in charge at the moment.
- js.