Something very interesting is happening to illegal filesharers. They’re vanishing!
The powers that be love to hate them: Lord Voldemort Mandelson is trying to use them as an excuse to give himself executive powers to raise militias and legislate by decree. The music industry use them as scapegoat in their crusade to take our liberties away despite 2009 being the best sales year ever.
These efforts fail time and time again. And yet illegal filesharing is reducing at a rapid rate.
Have filesharers thrown in the towel? Have the pushers of outdated business models and abusive copyright practices won the battle. I’m afraid not. The answer is another altogether.
As discussed recently by the Guardian, a cadre of high-quality, legal streaming services have appeared in recent times, giving filesharers the opportunity to participate in the legal marketplace for the first time. These services rival P2P in quality, reliability and speed. They back, and are backed by, artists and their minders. And they deal with the underlying cause for illegal filesharing – a love for the creative arts. Filesharers are not thieves, they’re avid customers that for too long were prevented from buying the products they love to consume in the channels they use. Because let’s face it, when was the last time you actually listened to a CD on a CD player?
The BBC’s iPlayer sparked a cadre of catch-up TV sites both sides of the Atlantic that rendered torrents redundants overnight. Spotify played a similar trick in the music space, although ingrained out of date business practices and labyrinthine copyright relationships are dampening out its potential and a significant market for sharing of songs and albums remain.
The movie space is lagging sorely behind, particularly in Europe, to the detriment of both consumers and Hollywood alike.
Everyone involved should take a page out of the TV stations and find ways to make the content we want available when and where we want it, subsidised by the ever-greater purse of advertisers to a price we can afford -free. TVs all over the world are making more and more of their content available online and experimenting with novel forms of advertising in and around the content to monetise our desire for entertainment.
Governments and moguls use sharing as an excuse to try and cement their grip on our lives and our freedom of choice. In doing so, they become irrelevant, as fresh ideas enter the marketplace, providing what the public really want. And the public stops filesharing because the new options are more convenient. Now, that wasn’t too hard, was it?
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