Mandelson Sets Sail For FAIL!

So after a meeting with David Geffen, Voldemort has decided to go on the offensive against the filesharers of the UK. He likes his meetings with rich people doesn't he? Usually followed by, although I'm sure there it is mere coincidence, something occurring to the benefit of said rich person. This Mandy certainly doesn't leave without taking.

At first glance it is hard to argue against taking action against persistent infringers of intellectual property, although its curious that we're taking a hard line against some freetard releasing the latest Leona Lewis album, yet somewhat less so against a company like Microsoft, whose attitude to other businesses intellectual property is in much the same light as Raffles the Gentleman Thief's attitude to other peoples jewellery.

But I digress, the problem here is that they're trying to apply some rules that simply won't work. The free downloading genie isn't simply out of the bottle, it's hailing a taxi back to it's place with the girl you really fancy, a bottle of champers and a box of condoms. They went after Napster, killed it, and the response was a profliferation of Napster clones and new technology like Bittorrent. Metallica did a wonderful job of alienating their fans, going after those who'd downloaded their material, the upshot of which was I downloaded Death Magnetic long before the official release, and before my physical copy arrived in the post.

In short, all attempts, legal or otherwise, to shut down file-sharing have had successes so shortlived they made mayflies look like doyens of longevity. New technologies and existing alternatives -  darknets, FTP sites, encrypted P2P - will circumvent any and all attempts to stop file sharing.

It's not going away, and over the last decade there has been a free-at-point-of-download mentality (sort of a file NHS...) which has washed over the people - also known as the voters should any politician want to consider their opinion on this - and it's here to stay. Instead of adopting legal measures, it's time to look at methods of extracting value for content creators in a different manner, because pragmatism is required here as reality crashes into ideology, and no ideology quite manages to stand up to the unpleasant truths of the real world.

Many of us regard piracy as wrong, even though some of us indulge in it - it's a useful way to build the foundations of a business before buying legit software for example - and several businesses took advantage of it. Much of Microsofts early dominance involved the ease it's software could be duplicated (early universal software keys such as 1234-1234567 or 1111-1111111 hardly challenged those pesky pirates), and Macromedia, prior to being bought out by Adobe, got a toehold into the multimedia business in much the same way. Dreamweaver would never have spent years as the standard for developing websites in without it being the easiest program to download, install and crack, thus allowing thousands of nascent web designers to stick on their CV's, meaning design agencies bought it en masse. It's also a great way to take software and music for a test drive, although less and less people are using it for that and just regard it as another source of Free Shit.

But concepts of right and wrong are, for the most part, societal. Sure, for those who believe in the Big Invisible Guy they get a list handed down from high of do's and don'ts, for the rest of us we pretty much go off what we would and wouldn't enjoy happening to us. 'Wrong' is generally a consensus of opinion over what we really wouldn't like to occur to us. Right now internet piracy is moving away from the 'wrong' column, and heading firmly into the one marked 'right.' Before long free stuff will be seen as a right - as it with newspaper content online (good luck at changing that Murdoch) - and that'll have a detrimental effect on content creation as artists find something to do other than make stuff for nothing. I suppose there some irony in the fact the taxpayer supported some British artists whilt they were on the dole queue and learning their trade...

I'm not sure what the answer is - the whole system is quite complex as you have the content creators, and the ISP which deliver the content, all requiring money to keep going. I suspect we'll see ISP-level charges inside the decade, with the ISP determining what kind of data is going through the pipes and billing both ends appropriately. The ISP will then pay aggregator groups like the Performing Rights Society.