ISPs and the DEP

Rory Cellan-Jones blogs here about who's winning the file sharing war, there are some wide-ranging and sometimes wild comments following the blog itself. Personally, I come down on the side of Charles Dunstone, the traditional ISP provides the highway along which data passes, nothing more. If a customer is doing something that infringes someone's copyright, then it's between the copyright owner and the customer, not the ISP.

I'm also struggling to work out what this current proposal and activity will achieve except another round of technology escalation. Every time the record industry attempt to block, stall or stifle file sharing, the technically minded come up with a way round it and file sharing goes on as normal after a short hiatus. Eventually the peer-to-peer networks will become so sophisticated in their obfuscation techniques that not even the ISPs with their deep-packet inspection tools will know what is file sharing traffic and what isn't making it impossible to traffic shape or know when or how someone is infringing copyright.

Does a piece of technology exist that was supposed to protect a system, service, copyright or device that hasn't been broken? Blu-ray was supposed to be secure, but it's now possible to rip a Blu-ray disc, it's somewhat complex, but completely possible. Only yesterday there was news that the PS3 had been hacked. As long as the copyright owners continue on this escalation route, so will the hackers and crackers and it'll be the hackers and crackers that win, not the copyright owners. That is unless the copyright owners change their model.

Actually, let's be specific here, it's the corporate monolithic copyright owners that need to change, there are many private copyright owners, particularly in the music industry, who are coping quite happily within the file-sharing domain, in fact making a tidy living out of it simply because their overheads are much lower, they get a greater margin from their efforts, they're able to specifically target their market and they provide bespoke products for their market. In other words they're providing value add a price point and regularity that the corporate monoliths cannot hope to achieve. These artists may not be making millions, but they're certainly able to live off their artistic achievements as long as they don't rest on their laurels and expect a CD to do their work for them.

Considering how long this file-sharing "war" has been going on for, I'm amazed that the basic lessons still don't seem to have been learnt and the large corporate copyright owners continue to point the finger elsewhere rather than understand they have only themselves to blame.