James Delahunty
26 Nov 2004 4:41
It seems the MPAA has realized that the "new" major thing on P2P networks is to trade TV Series. This may seem a bit late to most of you as Series was always one of the most traded material on P2P. The COO of the Fox empire outlined 10 rules at a consumer forum two months ago and ended it by saying, "All the other rules are meaningless, if content is not protected from digital thievery.". High quality copies of TV Episodes are available online usually within hours of their first airing, or even before it. You can even download High Definition TV copies of episodes, which produce higher quality than most cable and satellite networks worldwide.
"People are ignoring the old notion that you watch your program at 8 o'clock when CBS or NBC decides you should be watching it," says Mike McGuire, a digital rights expert with research company Gartner Inc. "And they're using the Internet to do that." Once again, the attention has turned to BitTorrent, which is a clever invention by Bram Cohen to make it easier and faster to spread large files around a network. Despite the fact that it was created for this legitimate purpose, the MPAA would like the world to believe its an evil invention to assist in evil file-sharing, as they have already made indirect threats against Bram Cohen in statements made earlier this year.
The RIAA has sued nearly 7,000 P2P users to date for sharing music with each other and has made a claim that they are winning the battle and file-sharing is decreasing. However, if you take a close look, P2P sharing has never been so big as the numbers are just increasing every month and developers are looking for, and finding ways to build P2P networks where privacy is restored. You would think the entertainment industry would have learned from previous decades that you cannot fight a new technology, especially if it has the backing of most consumers. I still don't understand why they are selling Digital DRM protected music downloads online, but not selling protected TV episodes online. It doesn’t take an expert to tell you that this mass sharing of TV Episodes might just mean there is a huge demand for them.
So lets see, first we were told the P2P craze was music as early as Napster, then we were told the pirates were turning to movies, threatening to cripple the multi-billion dollar studios. The Software Industry has long being complaining about the mass sharing of cracked software on P2P, but lawsuits haven’t come there yet. Oh yes there was also other claims made too like the RIAA's claims about P2P users spreading child pornography to try to blacken the name of P2P. So now we are being told the craze is to use evil BitTorrent to share TV episodes with each other. Let’s see what the entertainment industry has missed out on. One major thing they forgot is the spreading of educational material like Documentaries, which are very popular on sites like Suprnova.org. Also lets not forget the millions of eBooks available. So what will we hear next? That P2P is threatening the Education "Industry" by allowing users to share Documentaries and eBooks with each other? Would we actually be surprised?
Source:
Macleans.ca