File Sharing's Future - washington post

3 October 2005

Recently, an Internet service provider in England struck a deal with Sony-BMG so that new broadband customers are allowed to use the pipeline to download movies and music from any source--iTunes, Grokster, legal, illegal--and they pay a monthly fee for the content as part of their bill to the Internet service provider.

I've often thought that is a good solution. The problem is the only businesses who will get the money will be the majors. Of course they are losing the most, and the independent artists actually do better because of P2P. Attention is the current scarcity.

The prospect of these P2P services going legit will cause inconvenience in the short run but no great disadvantage in the long run. Users who are willing to pay for their downloads will go legit along with the new services and those who are not willing to pay will simply migrate to other P2P networks that either based in other countries (bittorent) or networks that are not centralized at all (limewire/gnutella). By crushing the for-profit p2p companies, the music industry will only encourage non-profit open source projects that have no single organization to sue. As long as the law is biting technology's dust, consumers will be the winners

word http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2005/09/29/DI2005092901179.html?nav=rss_technology