The War on Share™

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.