the $5/mo user fee's been batted around since the early napster days in '99. everyone said that was the magic number. it probably is. that's the soulseek monthly fee for "privileged members" and they're doing ok members-wise even if their execution is failing.
i like five dollars and i’d pay it. i’m paying a lot more than that now for my high speed connection – and the only reason i do is to share files, but competition is driving down my bandwidth costs – they’ve dropped 10 dollars in the last year - so a five dollar file sharing fee would mean i’d still be doing better than when i first got got dsl in 2000 and i thought that deal was pretty good. the money’s not a problem for the average western user – it’s the equivalent of purchasing less than 4 cd’s a year.
but like soulseek has discovered it can be difficult sustaining a worldwide peer-to-peer network on 5 dollars a month where resources are needed defending against script attacks and god knows what else, not to mention when most of that five dollar fee goes right back out the door to copyright holders and artists. for starters advertising would have to be employed to generate the kind of sustainable income needed for full time staffing and clearance departments, and maybe other things like pop-ups and cydor type spyware. then the real problems start. users begin complaining about malware and other odious 3rd party apps. they bitch about the company. the company doesn’t like it and they respond clumsily with bans. next thing you know it’s back to the freewheeling free services and the whole thing starts all over again. we’ve seen it with napster, morpheus, audiogalaxy and now we’re seeing it with kazaa and soulseek. it’s almost axiomatic; peer-to-peer is particularly adept at resisting any type of central control. like a river these networks are excellent at flowing around obstructions and there doesn’t seem to be a thing anyone can do about it. from lawsuits to jail to black technology, it’s been tried and it’s failed. as long as there are people who can code there will be networks that are open and free of restrictions and going by the users we wouldn’t have it any other way. more than the money lost or the business empires leveled the legacy of peer-to-peer remains the absolute freedom it gives to all the people. put simply it gives voice to the mute, especially when it was the establishment who cut out their tongues. that this causes the establishment to hate it with a fury unmatched in modern political life is but an irritation to filesharers and not a fatal consequence. still, when the irritation levels get high enough the people’s networks respond with their own corrections and route around them. this makes the concept of migrating filesharers into pay-for-download schemes unrealistic if the past is any guide.
sometimes i simply think the concept of paid content is itself an anachronism. that in a place where information is endlessly replicated and distributed only the most foolhardy would insist on careers in “selling copies.” seriously in a few years time it wouldn’t surprise me to find that nobody gets a penny for the stuff and all the ones who did it for the loot moved onto something else, like selling timeshares in vanuatu. it leaves the field open to those who have to do it - because they just have to - and we’ll probably all be better off for that. at least we’d have a culture created by people who believed in what they did instead of what it would do for them, and that’s something that’s been seriously lacking for these last many years.
too harsh? maybe. on the other hand maybe a lot of our problems can be traced back to this “cultural/industrial complex” octopus with it's greedy tentacles insinuated into every corner of our dreams, and what it means to be dependent on them who worship profit alone.
in truth no one knows where we’ll be down the road. one can say that things will change but one can’t precisely say how. it is too early in what is proving to be a very long and trying process and one that will in all likelihood contain a very many twists and surprises. that we won’t be here gives confidence to those who seek to wrest control of the media from the companies who use it to control us. but where we’ll be and how we’ll get there remains a quiet and frustrating mystery.
- js.
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