File Sharing is Piracy?
February 4, 2010 on 5:13 am | By admin | In NewsThe war is on. Big Film and Big Music against their customer base. Reading those words seems strange. What kind of industry actively seeks to imprison or fine its base of customers? Welcome to the 21st Digital Century. The old business models for music and movie distribution no longer fit the world we live in and those industries refuse to acknowledge the change. It’s as if they believe they can just hurl lawsuit after lawsuit and the technology will just simply change. The technology does change. It gets better and smarter and more resistant to the law. First there was Napster, now there is Ares.
The movie and music industry complain that internet users are stealing too much content and harming the artists. They never mention that both industries have continually grown year after year even as file sharing has grown. The net has changed communication in the same way that the automobile changed transportation and so the music and movie industry need to adapt to the change and utilize the new tools to their benefit rather than clamp down on content with IP laws. P2P software has moved into the world of open source code and Ares appears to be one of the leaders in the the space.
Just like Limewire and Napster and Kazaa before it, Ares offers superior download speeds and a vast library of content to share. The technology had become so widespread that it is too late to try to legislate the cap back on the bottle. It’s time for industries that relied on content sale to realize that they need to shift their business models and utilize P2P networks to market their products and capitalize on the success of content creators once they become popular, rather than trying to revive a dying business model.
So the short answer is that file sharing is piracy only because of the current copyright laws, but the web is a global community and their are no global copyright laws. Ares downloads are shared by millions of users all over the globe. The RIAA and MPAA can send all the legal notices they want to some obscure user in China. I’m not so sure that’s going to work for them.