Tim O’Reilly has a very well thought-out and informed article on piracy over at OpenP2P.com. He says many good things about the benefits of the P2P world and what has been labeled as “piracy”, the desire for users to have immediate access to entertainment, books, and the like, and the willingness of users to pay for a high-quality version of this service.
I for one would be happy to pay for the right to download music, if I was guaranteed a wide selection and high quality. The online offerings you find on P2P today are excessively mislabeled and incomplete. Plus, you’re about as likely to download a poorly encoded, popping, cracking MP3 as you are to blink on any given day.
I’m glad such a visible person in the industry is chiming in. I could say the same thing until the cows came home and nobody would give a damn, but Tim O’Reilly is visible, and depends on people paying for his stuff to boot. ‘Bout time.
Ewww… just a heads up, the formatting on this page looks horrible on IE 5 for Windows 2k.
As for the piracy stuff, I agree. I would pay to have a central place to go to get high quality mp3s, maybe music video, and high quality images. Maybe biography of the band and info on their tour.
This would also help the music companies. Whenever CDs aren’t bought, the label have to buy the CDs back. They lose a lot of money on musicians who aren’t popular (though, who may be good).
With online distribution, most of the loss is taken away. But most of the gain is taken away too (the actual manufacturing 2 cent CDs and reselling them for $15). And labels are such money hogs, that they wouldn’t want to give up this huge gain…. *sigh*
-Matt
IE5 for Windows is not a web browser. It is an abomination, a Godless pagan of a user agent. If Microsoft won’t bother writing a browser that conforms to standards, I won’t bother writing a page that conforms to IE. Fair’s fair.
At least for my personal sites.. =( I dread having to work for a company where I would be forced to write for all browsers. Technology has moved on. Don’t be left behind by the W3C, you’ll regret it.
“At least for my personal sites.. =( I dread having to work for a company where I would be forced to write for all browsers.”
Or worse yet, having to work for a company where you’d be forced to write stuff that only works with IE.
-Matt
hey man, just want to say hi