Are you sure it’s working out well? All the troubles of TPB amount to
little more than a couple slight dips — from enormous piracy to
slightly less enormous piracy. TPB is still alive and well. … nothing has been remotely effective at reducing torrent pirating.
It’s precisely wrong to see downloads as the measure of success —
what matters is activity that could be monetized. Unauthorized
downloads don’t matter unless the downloader would have made a
purchase. The point is to extract as much money as possible from each
potential customer, not to extract money from people who aren’t ever
going to be customers.
Sell Donald Trump a gold-plated tour jacket. Sell box sets to
20-somethings who passionately love a particular band. Sell single
MP3 downloads to teens with no more than a single dollar to spend.
in what possible universe can you claim pirates aren’t demolishing
their foes in every field of battle they choose to fight? … The only battles the copyright forces are winning are Pyrrhic. They’re *masters* of those.
I know that people who read tech blogs think P2P is winning and don’t
understand why anybody would be in a business that assumes copyright
will continue to exist. This is a dream world.
Licensed content businesses are a big deal, techies.
YouTube, Hulu, Netflix, Pandora, Last.fm, Spotify, and on and on. And
awesome products from startups like Mog keep coming in wave after
wave.
Or note that Limewire earned on the order of $20 million a year, while
the iTunes music store probably earns on the order of $150 million –
an order of magnitude. And it will probably cost Mark Gorton far north of a hundred million dollars to settle the lawsuit. That
investment is a huge disaster, even though he had the #1 product in an
important space!
Money reshapes the economy like icebergs reshape continents.
Slowly but inexorably, value follows investment and users follow
value. Spotify’s users are there because Spotify’s investors
subsidize them. Who is investing in the Limewire of tomorrow? And
who is investing in their competition?