[Infowarrior] - Leahy’s Protect IP Act: Why Internet content wars will never end

[Richard Forno]

Larry Downes

Leahy’s Protect IP Act: Why Internet content wars will never end

May. 16 2011 - 2:29 am | 781 views | 0 recommendations | 0 comments

http://blogs.forbes.com/larrydownes/2011/05/16/leahys-protect-ip-act-why-internet-content-wars-will-never-end/

The media industries, everyone agrees, are in the fight of their lives.  These businesses rely for profitability on the controlled distribution of information goods whose individual copies have a marginal cost that keeps getting closer to zero.

But new media killer apps keep coming, and each of them challenges anew the ability of rights holders to maintain control.  So far, Bit Torrent, cloud computing, YouTube, Limewire, Napster, and Google Books have each been vilified as the ultimate enemy…until the next one came along.

It is now clear that the true enemy of traditional media, still unbloodied, is the Internet itself.  The remarkable ability of digital technology to reduce the transaction costs of information exchanges of all kinds has destroyed the business models, if not the businesses, on which content providers have operated successfully since at least the 18th century.  That’s when the first copyright law was passed in England.

The focus on “media” in the very name of the industry belies its reliance on the limited life of physical copies as the key control mechanism.  But as physical copies are replaced by faster, better, and cheaper digital alternatives, control becomes more illusory.  The entrenched providers are growing desperate.

A full-scale war between content distributors and everyone else has been raging in earnest for over a decade. Both sides have seen theirs share of victories, defeats, and casualties—some in the market, others in the courts.  Like many messy conflicts, it has dragged in many once-neutral parties, including device manufacturers, network operators, and consumers.

Today it is a battle fought on many fronts.  There’s litigation and there’s legislation, as well as both private and public enforcement of copyright, trademark, patents and licensing.  There are threats, which are often followed by pleas.  Trade associations, including the RIAA and MPAA, as well as book, magazine and newspaper publishers, alternate between hubris and pathos.

Both sides are in a technological arms race.  The content industries, for example, have invented cryptographic and other digital rights management systems.  The Internet, at the same time, offers users increasingly advanced peer-to-peer file sharing networks, open, robust media file standards and jailbreaking technologies that undo the most sophisticated technical controls on purchased or leased digital “copies.”

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