I read a bit of news today including this report on the fact that
the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) is going to be
following in the footsteps of the RIAA and suing ordinary folks who
are sharing movies online.
The recording industry's business has demonstrably taken a hit in the
last decade or so. You can argue that it's not P2P's fault but it
seems clear to me that P2P has had an impact. The film industry,
however, is not in the same position to make these arguments which
strikes me as very interesting.
I see two possibilities for their actions; I'm sure that the truth is
a combination of the two.
First, the film industry suspect that at some point in the near
future, their business model will become both (a) increasingly -- and
perhaps totally -- dependent on digital film distribution and (b)
increasingly aversely affected by film sharing online.
The second possibility is that the entertainment companies know that
there is a lot more at stake that the +/- sign and the number before
the percentage symbol on their annual reports. The music and film
industries are the ones producing the vast majority of the content on
peer-to-peer networks; that will not and can not persist if things continue
the way they are going. Something will break and I'm quite sure that
it will not be P2P. If nothing else (and I don't believe this is
unlikely) the modern industry will have its own ability to produce in
the way it does today (i.e., its business model and financial viability) ripped out from
underneath it. While the industry would have you believe otherwise,
this will not spell the end of either music or film. History books
teach us that both existed before Michael Eisner, Ted Turner, or even
Rupert Murdoch.
P2P's real power lies in its ability to distribute what can be
produced (and funded) in new creative ways that are sustainable
through P2P's less coercive model of distribution. The players
currently dominant in the culture industries feel (rightfully) that
they have little to gain from exploring this road or even finding out
what it might look like.
Big music and big film has everything to lose and they must know
it. They are not about to let a radically different type of
distribution technology and a couple thousand years of human attitudes
towards the way communities should and should not control ideas and
information undermine their position of power. They will fight to
install legal and technological artifice to keep the power and money
they gained through the economic realities of physical distribution in the digital realm.
They will spend every last billion fighting.
That brings us to back today and the MPAA's new response to what even
they admit is an infantile threat of digital piracy on their business
model.
I think P2P is a threat to the MPAA but not in the way that they would
have you believe. Making film for theaters would be a sustainable
industry; the industry did, after all, try to eliminate Betamax and
VCRs altogether. But this isn't about creating sustainable industries
-- with or without P2P. It's about preserving power and creating
growth.