Yeah, that Bono. This has nothing to do with his music which is, generally speaking, decent. No, my assertion is based on comments he made in the New York Times (which I first saw on Ars Technica).
I have some specific problems with Bono’s statements, so I’m going to tackle them one by one.
the only thing protecting the movie and TV industries from the fate that has befallen music and indeed the newspaper business is the size of the files.
This claim is so ridiculous it makes me wonder what pharmaceuticals Bono has begun mixing into his food. File sizes may have been relevant five years ago, but in these days of commonplace multi-GB game downloads, file sizes are nowhere near the top of anyone’s concerns.
- The newspaper business’ problems have nothing to do with file sizes at all. Their problems stem from declining classified ad revenue and the increased availability of free information.
- The music business’ problems have nothing to do with file sizes at all. Their problems stem from pushing crappy, DRM-laden music on their customers, and their hesitance to embrace a business model that works well with modern technology. (But despite this, Ars points out that EMI, for example, is actually doing very well with rising revenues.)
- The movie business’ problems have nothing to do with file sizes at all. Their problems stem from pushing crappy, DRM-laden movies on their customers. I’m all for superhero movies, but did we really need to make 10,000 sequels last year? (Ars points out that box office receipts have been rising over the last three years.)
A decade’s worth of music file-sharing and swiping has made clear that the people it hurts are the creators
A decade’s worth of file-sharing has made it clear that the people hurting content creators are the publishers. Independent creators of music and games are finding that they can be far more profitable by distributing DRM-free content on their own and skipping the middleman.
In fact, publishers aren’t even necessary anymore. It used to be that musicians couldn’t afford to edit and distribute their music without the support of a publisher willing to risk investing in them; nowadays, you can grab a cheap Mac that comes with the software you need to edit your music, and selling it yourself on the internet is essentially risk-free.
the people this reverse Robin Hooding benefits are rich service providers, whose swollen profits perfectly mirror the lost receipts of the music business.
… and yet again Bono exposes his ignorance. ISPs don’t profit from music downloading. If anything it costs them more, by having to support the bandwidth necessary to sustain it. They certainly can’t advertise it. At any rate, ISP profits certainly don’t “perfectly mirror” the lost receipts of the music business – especially because the music business isn’t actually losing money!
We’re the post office, they tell us; who knows what’s in the brown-paper packages? But we know from America’s noble effort to stop child pornography, not to mention China’s ignoble effort to suppress online dissent, that it’s perfectly possible to track content.
It’s technically possible for ISPs to track connections and protocols (but not necessarily content). However, there are several problems with his comparison:
- The Post Office is also technically capable of monitoring the packages it processes; is Bono in favor of opening every piece of mail sent through the postal system on the off-chance an envelope contains child pornography? I certainly hope not! There’s a reason the post office doesn’t open packages.
- It’s only technically possible to track unencrypted content. It’s not feasible. The trouble is, the solution isn’t to track it – it’s to identify what it is, and if it meets some arbitrary definition of “infringing”, to block it. There could be no recourse for accidentally blocked connections – it wouldn’t be feasible. That’s essentially arbitrary censorship.
- Attempting to implement the system would be prohibitively expensive. Customers won’t want to pay for it; media companies won’t either. That leaves either the ISPs or the government shouldering the financial burden; either way, customers are going to end up footing the bill unwillingly. This would end up being basically a mandatory “music tax” – and I can tell you right now, if they try this, they can be sure I’ll stop buying music to pay for the fees. 威而鋼
That won’t help their profit margin at all. - The trivial workaround for content filtering is encryption – it takes virtually no effort to enable SSL on peer-to-peer connections, but encryption makes content filtering irrelevant. You can’t filter something you can’t read.
The problem then becomes (again as Ars points out) that would-be filterers will then begin filtering based on protocol rather than content. That’s akin to trying to filter out swear words by banning the entire English language. It doesn’t succeed at its goal (you can still swear in other languages), and it has huge, unpleasant side effects (we still need English).
In other words, if you block one protocol, another will pop up; and inevitably ISPs will find themselves blocking protocols that have many legitimate uses. (World of Warcraft comes to mind; it uses peer-to-peer file transfers to speed up patch downloads. This undoubtedly saves Blizzard gobs and gobs of money on server bandwidth.)
Now, I’ll admit; I didn’t actually read the rest of Bono’s article. It’s a set of ten unrelated ideas, each independently digestible. It happens that this one is the only one I care about.
So perhaps you can see why I said Bono is a complete moron – he points out a goal (“save the media industry”) ignoring the evidence that it doesn’t need saving, and then lays out a plan that will do far more damage to society than peer-to-peer ever did to media – not to mention that the plan wouldn’t even increase media companies’ revenue. And to top it off, he makes a self-defeating comparison with the post office (unless he really is in favor of the post office opening our mail).
It’s almost like he doesn’t know how the internet works.
(If you didn’t read my comments on net neutrality a few months ago, it’s a closely related subject and you should read it now.)