| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"maff" |
| Date: |
24 Mar 2005 03:17:02 PM |
| Object: |
OT: Peer-to-peer |
Grokster and StreamCast face the music
http://www.economist.com/agenda/displayStory.cfm?story_id=3785847
Mar 24th 2005
From The Economist Global Agenda
The entertainment industry is taking its battle against illegal
downloading to America's Supreme Court. But attacking the technology
behind file-sharing could stifle innovation without tackling the
industry's long-term problems
THE music business should have stuck by Thomas Edison's technology if
it wanted to avoid the threat of piracy. His wax cylinders could record
a performance but could not be reproduced; that became possible only
with the invention of the flat-disc record some years later. On Tuesday
March 29th, America's Supreme Court will begin to hear testimony in a
case brought by the big entertainment companies that is intended to
stop the illegal downloading of copyright-protected music and film. The
industry's target is the peer-to-peer (P2P) technology that allows
the swapping of files directly over the internet. The defendants in the
case are two firms that make file-sharing software: StreamCast Networks
and Grokster.
peer-to-peer
http://news.google.com/news?num=100&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=+%22peer-to-peer%22&sa=N&tab=gn
http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=+%22peer-to-peer%22&sa=N&tab=nw
http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=+%22peer-to-peer%22&sa=N&tab=wd&cat=gwd%2FTop
http://groups.google.com/groups?as_epq=peer%20to%20peer&safe=images&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&as_scoring=d&lr=&num=100&hl=en
P2P
http://news.google.com/news?num=100&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=P2P&sa=N&tab=gn
http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=P2P&sa=N&tab=nw
http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=P2P&sa=N&tab=wd&cat=gwd%2FTop
http://groups.google.com/groups?as_q=P2P&safe=images&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&as_scoring=d&lr=&num=100&hl=en
A Blueprint for the Future
http://snipurl.com/dle6
http://snipurl.com/dle7
.
|
|
| User: "stoney" |
|
| Title: Re: OT: Peer-to-peer |
27 Mar 2005 10:02:12 PM |
|
|
On 24 Mar 2005 13:17:02 -0800, "maff" <maff91@yahoo.com> wrote:
Grokster and StreamCast face the music
http://www.economist.com/agenda/displayStory.cfm?story_id=3785847
Mar 24th 2005
From The Economist Global Agenda
The entertainment industry is taking its battle against illegal
downloading to America's Supreme Court. But attacking the technology
behind file-sharing could stifle innovation without tackling the
industry's long-term problems
THE music business should have stuck by Thomas Edison's technology if
it wanted to avoid the threat of piracy. His wax cylinders could record
a performance but could not be reproduced; that became possible only
with the invention of the flat-disc record some years later. On Tuesday
March 29th, America's Supreme Court will begin to hear testimony in a
case brought by the big entertainment companies that is intended to
stop the illegal downloading of copyright-protected music and film. The
industry's target is the peer-to-peer (P2P) technology that allows
the swapping of files directly over the internet. The defendants in the
case are two firms that make file-sharing software: StreamCast Networks
and Grokster.
The entertainment business has long been susceptible to copyright
infringement—and it has usually blamed the electronics industry. The
music industry first cried foul at the introduction of the
cassette-tape recorder in the late 1960s. More recently, the
digitisation of music has allowed “burning” of music tracks on to CDs
with the help of a computer. The latest threat to the record companies
is a copying technique of even greater speed, ease and scope. Every
day some 4m Americans swap music files over the internet, according to
figures from Pew, an independent research organisation. And now the
swapping of new films online is gaining ground too, to the chagrin of
the movie industry.
This comes at a particularly bad time for the music industry, which is
struggling to reverse a long-term decline. According to the IFPI, a
recording-industry umbrella group, worldwide music sales plunged in
value by 22% in the five years to 2003—a drop of over $6 billion. In
2004, sales fell by 1.3%, though that decline looks less bad when
revenue from legal digital downloads is added in. The music industry
largely blames illegal file-sharers for its ills, noting that CD sales
are dipping steeply in countries where broadband internet access is
growing fast.
Some suggest that the latest attempt to curb illicit
file-swapping—legal action against the technology that drives P2P
networks—threatens the future of innovation. P2P software allows
computers to talk to others running the same software without having
to use intermediaries. Grokster and StreamCast argue that they are not
able to control the use to which their software is put, whether it be
searching, downloading or sharing.
In court, the two software firms will no doubt cite the case of Sony’s
Betamax technology as a precedent. The home video-recording system,
which was eventually superseded by VHS, faced a suit in 1984 in which
Disney and Universal called for its ban. The entertainment firms
feared that the ability to record on to video would allow considerable
infringement of their copyright. America’s Supreme Court ruled that
Sony was not liable because the equipment had “substantial” uses other
than infringement, such as the recording of TV programmes for later
viewing.
Similarly, the software produced by StreamCast and Grokster has
significant non-infringing uses, such as sharing music that is not
copyright-protected and internet-routed phone calls. In fact, some
make the case that P2P technology could make the internet more robust
and secure by avoiding the use of centralised servers, and that the
entertainment companies’ lawsuit is thus harmful to the web as a
whole.
Napster, the first and best-known of the file-sharing businesses, was
killed off by the music industry in 2001. Because it used central
servers and so had the ability to block users who broke copyright
laws, a judge issued an injunction ordering Napster to shut its
servers down. At the time, it boasted some 14m users. Since then, the
industry has ramped up action against file-sharing and widened its
attack by going after individual downloaders as well.
At present, some 8,000 individuals around the world face lawsuits for
illegal file-sharing. The industry has backed up its legal moves with
a publicity offensive aimed at convincing the public that unauthorised
downloading is theft. As well as cinema- and TV-advertising campaigns,
45m instant messages have gone out to users of P2P services, warning
them to stop putting copyrighted material on the internet. America’s
Department of Justice has weighed in too, even suggesting that P2P
services could be used to support terrorism. Others have muttered
darkly that the technology is a conduit for illegal pornography.
There are some signs that these measures are working: surveys suggest
that internet users are becoming more wary of illegal file-sharing,
for instance. However, according to the IFPI’s own figures, the number
of unauthorised music files on the web has grown in recent months
after falling sharply in the first half of 2004 (see chart). The
number of users is also up, with 8.6m offering illegal files compared
with 6.2m a year ago.
The music business has employed other defensive measures. Apart from a
round of mergers and cost-cutting over recent years, the industry has
tried to embrace legal downloading. Napster itself was reborn as a
legal downloading service. And in 2004, according to the IFPI, the
number of legal download sites increased four-fold to 230 and the
number of legal downloads to over 200m (a figure that could double in
2005, according to forecasts). Apple’s iTunes, the largest legal
download catalogue, has over 1m songs available and handles over 1m
downloads a day.
But even if the entertainment business manages to coax more users into
paying for legal downloads and succeeds in court against Grokster and
StreamCast, its problems are unlikely to go away. True, a Supreme
Court ruling in the industry’s favour would put paid to other P2P
services. But it is not clear that curbing illegal downloading will
translate into extra sales for the music business. A rush into legal
downloading would hardly be good for sales of CDs: some
cannibalisation is inevitable. And perhaps the decline in global sales
is indicative of a far greater problem for the music
industry—consumers simply think that many of its products are just not
worth paying for.
Copyright © The Economist Newspaper Limited 2005
--
Contempt of Congress meter reading-offscale.
Hello, theocracy with a fundamentalist US Supreme
Court who will ensure church and state are joined
at the hip like clergy and altar boys.
America 1776-Jan 2001 RIP
Religion is the original war crime.
-Michelle Malkin (Feb 26, 2005)
.
|
|
|
|
|
Related Articles |
|
|
