piracy Archives - Page 2 of 2

Following on from my last post, I’ve just been reading the far more eloquent Lawrence Lessig’s ‘In Defence of Piracy‘, published on the Wall Street Journal. (Hat tip to Doc Searls).

I also heard on the radio this morning, that letters sent by Internet Service Providers about the penalties for illegal downloads have seen a 10 per cent drop in the total of illicit goods. I’ll find the exact figures etc later today, but the inevitable problem is that the 30 second report revealed that numbers of downloads amongst teenagers haven’t dropped at all.

So the older generation, which is still used to physical items to store music, and has far more to lose in a ridiculous court case (See the fine for Jammie Thomas) has stopped – and teenagers and digital natives are continuing as normal. Is that really a surprise?

It doesn’t really seem a success when you’re continuing to alienate the future of your business.

Interestingly, after postulating (and possibly posturing) my view on how streaming TV and video solutions are a bigger piracy threat than Peer-to-Peer services like Bitorrent (Which grab all the headlines and the attention of the multimedia industries), I spotted this: P2P traffic drops as streaming video grows in popularity.

While the Ars Technica article looks at legal streaming solutions, like the BBC iPlayer, Hulu and Veoh, the fact that it’s encouraging users to utilise faster broadband connections to consume content which is quicker, easier and safer to view means there’s likely to be an equally large amount of people realising ways they can share paid content for free via streaming websites.

Funnily enough, it’s not just problems with the content itself – The Spyware Guide blog reveals an example of a fake site claiming to stream the complete Batman: The Dark Knight movie – but the real motive is to get you to download a dodgy .exe file.

More fuel for the record company bonfire…

Internet pirates will sail the streams…

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