It's interesting to see what motivates pirates. Surprisingly it isn't money. In Mexico, pirates live off of their trade, because they have no other means of support. Not so the case in the United States. One insider mentions in the article that it is true that no one gets paid for their efforts. It's piracy for piracy's sake driven by American work ethic.
Excerpted from the article:
1. THE INSIDERIdeas for the future
Industry and theater employees run their own straight-to-video operations. Hackers looking for prerelease videogames target company servers. And before that long-awaited CD hits Amazon.com, moles inside disc-stamping plants have already got a copy.
2. THE PACKAGER
The pirated goods are passed on to a release group. These groups take multi-gigabyte movie files and squeeze them down for easy online trading.
3. THE DISTRIBUTOR
Release groups are known to have exclusive relationships with certain so-called topsites. These are the highly secretive sites at the top of the distribution pyramid. When a topsite operator drops a file, the avalanche begins.
4. THE COURIERS
Alerted by release groups, worker bees spring into action, copying and transferring files from the topsites to lower-level dump sites, and then from there to P2P networks like Kazaa and Morpheus. For the couriers, the payoff is props from their peers and credits redeemable for goods on upper levels of the pyramid.
5. THE PUBLIC
After the file is copied thousands of times the P2P networks saturate, allowing casual file-traders easy access to the newest movies, music, and videogames.
1. Come up with software that seeds the P2P networks. Steps 3 and 4 can be eliminated with a little know-how. The topsites exist only as the gateway to the networks, while the couriers do their share to distribute. Reading the article, the courier's job was described as mostly cutting and pasting. That sounds like something software can do.
2. Music distributors could set up a centralized page or service (like Napster or iTunes) where the number of movie or music downloads can be counted, and that number is put into an index, which is updated every second of every day. If the stock market and the Billboard charts got together in the back of a '64 Chevy, that index would be the result. With this index, people could pay and invest in artists and labels the same way they do with stocks and bonds. Anyone can be a patron of the arts.
2a. I'm sure labels, even the small ones, have figures like projected sales where you can compare the number of downloads to the projections. This could determine the success of a particular artist. It wouldn't be fair to hold a commercial artist, like Britney Spears, to the same sales expectations as an independent artist like Cat Power, so you hold them to their relative projections.
Conclusion
The American thing to do is to see media pirates as friendly competitors rather than adversaries. The RIAA can't afford to look upon copyright violators as enemies in a war, because once they take that stance, they will find they are deep in a guerilla war with an enemy that has already won the hearts of the people. A blow against the guerillas is a blow against the people, as the copyright lawsuits seem to indicate. The first thing the RIAA should do is to calm down and use the pirate's weapons for their own benefit without harming the people they are trying to win over.
If Apple could implement a new distribution scheme, that means that new ideas are possible. Unless, of course the RIAA isn't willing to change its ways, which the past has shown. Then what we'll have is something out of a science fiction novel... the self-perpetuating pre-potent content distributors who, allied with a government, persecute cultural Prometheuses and the race of men enslaved by darkness.
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