Why are rights lawyers still allowed to bully consumers?

Tuesday, May 10th, 2011

It seems the rights holder community, their parasitic lawyers,and the authorities haven’t learned their lessons when it comes to taking on illegal downloaders. Despite court rulings on both sides of the Atlantic that have declared scatter-gun lawsuits based on flimsy IP address evidence to be untenable, lawyers are being allowed to continue to pursue the money-spinning tactic.

In the US, a judge has given the US Copyright Group permission to start legal proceedings aimed at identifying an unprecedented 23,000 BitTorrent users alleged to have downloaded Sylvester Stallone’s The Expendables – a film deemed so poor that the Twittersphere believes watching it should be punishment enough for pirates.

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Low prices can break the illegal download habit

Tuesday, January 5th, 2010

Last month I came across one of the most interesting books I’ve had the pleasure of reading in a long time: Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age by Steve Knopper.

As well as a riveting account of changes in the music industry over the past several decades, it tells the story of the birth of Napster, the rise of peer-to-peer downloading, and the terrible choices the industry has made that have directly led to the situation we find ourselves in today.

The sheer scale of the head-into-sand plunging that evidently went on in industry boardrooms until very recently – and still does in some – is astounding, and it’s hard to feel sympathy for the fat cats who are now seeing their bottom lines being squeezed by punters with more technological nous than they. The plight of the artists themselves, and the music they make and we enjoy, is a different matter entirely – one which the book seeks to address.

But Knopper’s not looking at ways of preventing illegal downloads. He’s more interested in how the industry can make legally downloading a song a better experience than taking the free alternative route. It’s an obvious point, but in my opinion Apple’s recent stranglehold over the digital music market and its rigid pricing (not to mention the appalling design of iTunes) were standing firmly in the way of that ever happening. To this end, even though I use my iPhone as my primary music player, I’ve never purchased a track from Apple.

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Don’t pirate anything! (Unless you have to)

Wednesday, April 15th, 2009

I’ve just finished reviewing the QNAP TS-119 NAS drive. It’s interesting, in a geeky, all-your-stuff-on-one-device kind of way, and the review can be found here.

Among the drive’s long list of features is the ability to run BitTorrent downloads in the background. This is great news for anyone who currently leaves their PC running overnight. But before you do, the manual has the following warning:

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My mummy said it’s good to share

Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008

In David Bayon’s latest blog post he discusses a new tool which makes it almost effortless to download music for free. Really he shouldn’t refer to this as “stealing” – that entails taking someone’s property so as to permanently deprive them of it, which isn’t what’s happening here. But I think he’s absolutely right when he says it’s “hard to see what sites like Amazon can do in the long run” to compete with free unauthorised downloads.

Because the fact is that BitTorrent is only gaining momentum. A huge number of people now get their music this way (and see nothing wrong with it, as noted by Tim Danton in another recent blog post). As I write this, one popular BitTorrent tracker is reporting over 21 million users currently uploading or downloading data. A recent study by Jupiter Research estimates that a fifth of Europeans actively use file sharing sites – twice as many as use the iTunes store.

Clearly this is a problem. When such a large segment of society is at odds with the law, something needs to change. But what? Do we need to rethink the law, or do we just need to work harder to stop people sharing music and video files?

Before we can answer that, I think we need to understand what we’re actually trying to achieve. I believe the presumption should be that people are free to do what they want on the internet (and elsewhere) so long as it doesn’t harm anyone else. So the first question is: what precisely is the harm that’s done by file sharing? Why, in a nutshell, do we care about all these people sending music files back and forth between their computers?

I’ll return to this subject in my next blog post; but before I do I’d be interested to hear your views on the above questions. So please, comment below and let me know what you see as the problem with file sharing.

Hating BitTorrent (or How To Spoil Three Years of Anticipation)

Thursday, July 31st, 2008

Like Napster and every other file sharing service since, BitTorrent has altered (some would say scarred) the digital landscape immensely. I’m not going to go into the legalities here – we all know people who use it, a noble few for genuine legal file sharing, vastly more for getting the latest Coldplay album without having to shell out for it (I’ve heard it, I can sympathise).

It’s part cause and part by-product of the fact that the Internet has hugely magnified the hype and speculation around new albums, movies and games, to the extent where we often know far more than we need to about something before we experience it.

Simon over at fanboy site Den Of Geek makes the point well here, with even seemingly innocent Facebook walls proving a minefield before a much anticipated film release. I can understand this to a certain extent – I read previews and speculate about films more than is really healthy. But I stop there.

The people I simply won’t ever understand are those seemingly intent on deliberately ruining their own enjoyment of the thing they’re so desperate to get hold of. (more…)