The Internet
Victor Keegan writing in The Guardian:
Stand by for the death of illegal music downloads. It is already gathering pace, being one of the fastest growing – or contracting – activities on the web. It is not happening because of the music industry’s rough justice (such as suing customers); nor because of Lord Mandelson’s variant of “three strikes and you’re out” for people caught downloading illegally – though doubtless they will claim credit.
…
This year is the most successful in the UK’s history for singles sales. More than 117m have been sold – comfortably beating the previous record of 115.1m, set in 2008. And this is with Christmas to come. Yet the industry is still belly-aching about illegal downloads. I rest their case.
This is the Internet.
While, over the years, plenty of people have waxed lyrical about the Internet and its nebulous “power”, rocking back and forth with a misty-eyed look to them, they’ve generally missed the point.
The point is this: what the Internet does is make it very very easy to talk to people who you have never met and share similar interests to you. Often, they will be people who have a different perspective to you, because their background differs from yours. This is a good thing.
The Internet isn’t about democratisation or “routing around problems”. That’s a function of the people who use it. What the Internet does is give those people a way to get together and talk about it.
Put an entrepreneur, a systems guy, a talented developer and a graphic designer in a room together, and you’ve just described half the start-ups typical of Silicon Valley. There’s just one snag: they need to be in the same room together.
The sole power of the Internet is that those four people don’t ever have to have met. All they need to do is be thinking along the same lines about how to solve a particular problem based upon their own past experience.
Illicit filesharing of music was the result of what happens when you throw a problem out to the world and let the Internet deal with getting the right people together to find a solution. The problem, back in the 90s, was “how do we share stuff between vast numbers of people all over the world who individually have very little bandwidth?”. Peer-to-peer filesharing was born.
Rather than look at this and say to the collected masses “hey, why don’t you come and solve our problem?”, the music business attempted to sue them out of existence. This presented various Internet users with another problem. And they solved it. And so on, and so forth.
Eventually—and it took a very very long time—the music industry gave just enough wiggle room that something which wasn’t going to fall afoul of any laws became feasible. They didn’t particularly encourage it, and they didn’t do any real innovation: indeed, they gave an inch with one hand (streaming costs) and took back a mile with the other (lobbying governments to do something about the terrible threat posed by the battle they’d been fighting since day one).
Now that they have, illicit downloads of music are declining. There’s still a long way to go (the streaming costs are still horrendous, for a start), but things are looking promising.
The curious thing is that the knowledgeable types, back at the turn of the century, suggested that if the music industry gave their blessing to services along the lines of Spotify and We7, their problems would diminish rapidly. It took half a decade or so for the industry to realise that there might be a grain of truth to this and implement it.
When people talk about how peer-to-peer can’t be stopped (aside from the now-implied caveat regarding sane, cost-effective, legal alternatives), it’s not some ideological battle-lines being drawn: it’s simply recognition of reality.
When you put millions of experts within shouting distance of one another and task them with solving a problem, they will find one. If you don’t engage that process, you may well discover—as the music industry did—that it’s not the solution you actually want.
That’s almost a given, because the solution you want is for the genie to be put back into the bottle and for people not to have thought up those solutions in the first place. What you may find, however, is that reaching some sort of compromise may be infinitely preferable (and more effective) than attempting to fight a collection of ideas thought up by some of the cleverest people on the planet.
Movie and TV industries take note.
