Dylan Hunter

Woo-hoo - here’s one for the good guys! I hate these kind of utterly bogus attempts at supporting failing business models through technology, and specifically this kind, where you’re hiring a company specifically to piss off your most avid consumers.

Again, here’s a bizarre idea that I’ve spoken of before - work on correcting the value imbalance, and crap stunts like what this company used to do, (again, hooray!!! ) become unnecessary, (and yes, I’m well-aware that it’s a heck of a lot cheaper to hire a couple of hackers to do this than to address the real issue, but it’s hardly the way to make friends and influence people like - oh - those folks who are your only shot at being able to survive as a business over the long term…).

It’s about time, as The RIAA, etc., keeps working harder and harder to make sure that it keeps killing any services working on what is very much a high-demand service,*1* *2*to see at least the nail driven into the coffin of one of theirs.

It’s funny, but if there were a RIAA for text content owners, there would be no search engines at all, (no Google, no Yahoo) as they all locate content that inherently has all IP rights reserved, (by its very production) and point directly to the most “useful” IP, most often taken out of the context desired by the copyright owner, facilitating _massive_ copyright infringement, while concurrently making money by selling ads around these infringements, and, of course, not sharing a dime of this revenue with the copyright holders of the content itself, (and, in fact, concurrently charges the IP-infringed should they wish to get people to examine their content in its originally-designed context, and for its original purpose). Instead, Search has become a multi-billion dollar industry, with tremendous growth potential, and has become a critical part of all our lives on what could have been entirely snuffed out in the early days of the Web, if the “PublisheRIAA” had been established. And we all would have been… better off therefore?

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*1* Normal folks outside of college campuses won’t be able to use for several years, at least, but some darned fool gives The RIAA access to Internet2, and they promptly work to shut down a file sharing service in its infancy there - i2Hub - read more here

*2* As well as the solutions that these services would drive to the increasingly-problematic bandwidth expenses for individual bloggers / podcasters, etc., (and if you don’t think this is a real issue and hindrance to richer and richer media being created by more and more individuals, go ahead - try producing your own show, and find out the entirely-counter-to-radio economics of doing so, due to both bandwidth expenses and the obscurity of royalty payment schemes, and then tell me that continued work isn’t needed to solve these issues).

And what about VoIP - Skype gets bought out for literally billions of dollars, by providing us the ability to make phone calls anywhere around the world for free, (or, really, rather by making it now included as part of our bandwidth expenses). And where did this technology come from? Yep, some of those “pirates” from Kazaa, (and yes, can still hold them out as laudable for the Kazaa product itself, as I can entirely without conflict consider them scumbags for largely being the naiscent force behind the growth of the spyware industry - tech good, business model bad).

A company that fought net piracy by adding fake files to file-sharing networks is being closed down.

Overpeer led efforts to battle the rising popularity of file-sharing networks such as Kazaa.

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