Entertainment Cartels Rule. Everywhere.
They claim every time someone shares a file with someone else, a sale is lost, and that amounts to a crime of exactly the same nature as someone walking into a retail outlet and shoplifting a CD or DVD.
However, with sharing, no money changes hands, no one is deprived of something he or she used to own and a number of in-depth academic studies such as Felix Oberholtzer and Koleman Strumpf’s milestone Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales: An Empirical Analysis show filesharing has zero impact on corporate bottom lines.
In may also, in in fact, represent a priceless form of viral marketing. That being so, why do the labels and movie studios, primarily, insist on this ludicrous practice of suing their own customers — the very people who keep them fat and happy?
Its simple. The sue ‘em all campaign, launched by Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony BMG’s RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) in 2003 and adopted by Hollywood (with the software industry in the wings), was never about file sharing.
It’s about gaining complete and total control of how, where, and by whom ‘product’ is distributed and managed online.
And that’s all.
3 years ago