Back to the Future
I suppose it's possible for people to download more, although my acquaintances seem to be to doing it already with as much abandon as there is impunity. Meanwhile I personally know of no one affected by any legal campaigns, and let’s face it, with file sharers numbering the 100s of millions, and lawsuits in the thousands the odds will always favor the file sharers, and overwhelmingly so.
The most game changing trend however is the exuberant return of sneakerware. Not that it ever fully disappeared but now that harddrives have crossed the 1TB threshold and easily hold 10,000 albums at high bitrates, offers to share have become ubiquitous. A quick perusal of Craigslist shows "DJ" drives being openly advertised in the 300 dollar range fully loaded with karaoke, CDs, videos or any combination one chooses. Then there're movies: a 1.5 TB drive holds 1000 high-bit AVIs in an era when the typical Blockbuster outlet has I think less than 4000 titles in stock, and drive sizes are increasing. Soon an entire store’s inventory will fit in a home cartridge smaller than a VHS tape, no small irony for a company that was founded by enticing consumers to go out and rent them one at a time.
Obviously at present transfer speeds it would take months to grab such prodigious amounts – in the unlikely event one found an uploader willing to service the transfer for that duration - but a pal-to-pal hard drive dub is measured in hours, and perfect for a socially acceptable Saturday afternoon barbecue or big Sunday game.
The internet will always be the ideal medium for low level “background transfers” and the copyright mavens have in all likelihood resigned themselves to it, and the realization their lawsuit strategies are beginning to encounter serious and expensive legal resistance.
It's also beginning to dawn on them that the big issues moving forward will be full quality library swaps via hard drive, where the entire TCM archive, or all the films in Maltin's movie guide, are available to be plugged directly into a TV via consumer devices like Western Digital’s TV HD media player, and no amount of Limewire trolling is ever going to stop it.
It’s no surprise they’re retiring the distracting lawsuit campaigns.
In a few years time the RIAA will be looking back with fond remembrance on the good ol’ days of Napster/Grokster/BT because the media companies’ brain trust will be caught in a truly difficult quandary: herding consumers back to the store when they already have every album they can conceivably hear and every movie they can conceivably see, and all acquired for far less than the price of the media center they're enjoying them on.
- js.
I suppose it's possible for people to download more, although my acquaintances seem to be to doing it already with as much abandon as there is impunity. Meanwhile I personally know of no one affected by any legal campaigns, and let’s face it, with file sharers numbering the 100s of millions, and lawsuits in the thousands the odds will always favor the file sharers, and overwhelmingly so.
The most game changing trend however is the exuberant return of sneakerware. Not that it ever fully disappeared but now that harddrives have crossed the 1TB threshold and easily hold 10,000 albums at high bitrates, offers to share have become ubiquitous. A quick perusal of Craigslist shows "DJ" drives being openly advertised in the 300 dollar range fully loaded with karaoke, CDs, videos or any combination one chooses. Then there're movies: a 1.5 TB drive holds 1000 high-bit AVIs in an era when the typical Blockbuster outlet has I think less than 4000 titles in stock, and drive sizes are increasing. Soon an entire store’s inventory will fit in a home cartridge smaller than a VHS tape, no small irony for a company that was founded by enticing consumers to go out and rent them one at a time.
Obviously at present transfer speeds it would take months to grab such prodigious amounts – in the unlikely event one found an uploader willing to service the transfer for that duration - but a pal-to-pal hard drive dub is measured in hours, and perfect for a socially acceptable Saturday afternoon barbecue or big Sunday game.
The internet will always be the ideal medium for low level “background transfers” and the copyright mavens have in all likelihood resigned themselves to it, and the realization their lawsuit strategies are beginning to encounter serious and expensive legal resistance.
It's also beginning to dawn on them that the big issues moving forward will be full quality library swaps via hard drive, where the entire TCM archive, or all the films in Maltin's movie guide, are available to be plugged directly into a TV via consumer devices like Western Digital’s TV HD media player, and no amount of Limewire trolling is ever going to stop it.
It’s no surprise they’re retiring the distracting lawsuit campaigns.
In a few years time the RIAA will be looking back with fond remembrance on the good ol’ days of Napster/Grokster/BT because the media companies’ brain trust will be caught in a truly difficult quandary: herding consumers back to the store when they already have every album they can conceivably hear and every movie they can conceivably see, and all acquired for far less than the price of the media center they're enjoying them on.
- js.
posted by JackSpratts at 8:44 AM
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