Stephen Fry Launches Scathing Attack On The Anti-Piracy Industry

[admin]

Offline and online celebrity Stephen Fry has launched an attack on the anti-piracy industry, calling anti-piracy ads on DVDs "preposterous" and calling the entire industry "blind" when it comes to relate torrenting to stealing handbags.

He goes on to suggest that download prices are unfair and that the music industry was acting like "Big Tobacco".

One interesting note I found elsewhere and reading the comments of the link below was that in order to fill an 80GB iPod with paid music, you would be spending tens of thousands of dollars for a device that costs 100 times less. The only sensible use for such devices would then be for storing pirated content. It seems to me that the hardware industry is profiting off the expectation that people are using their devices for piracy. So the solution to me is to have more reasonably priced, all you can eat, type services and let the consumer fill up their iPods with purchased music. I think $20 per month for all you can download music is something a lot of people are willing to pay for, ditto with movies (perhaps at a higher premium). It would be the scale of the thing that the industry profits from, because I can see millions upon millions of subscribers in the US alone - that's at least $20 million in revenue per month that the music industry is missing out on right now, while they spend millions in lawsuits and DRM that doesn't work.

More here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/technolog...copyright.html

[drfsupercenter]

DRM indeed doesn't work.

But OMG, an all-you-can-eat mp3 downloading service would rock. I'd pay $20 a month for one... what I can't stand is the ones that use DRM'ed files where the licenses expire when you stop paying.

But I've always agreed about the filling an iPod thing... nobody actually buys all that music legally. Although, I know some people with an extensive collection of CDs (I have a couple hundred myself, too), and a large part of the music can come from there. But buying them at $1 a song (Or even $1.29 with some of the new iTunes songs...) is impractical.

I'm still all for the idea that piracy doesn't hurt the movie/music industry at all. If you look at these big Hollywood movies that were leaked weeks before their release... they still make an enormous amount of money. I've also used this example before: Eminem's Relapse album was leaked over a month before its proper release by the hip-hop release groups. But yet, the album sold a record-breaking amount of copies... There's clearly no relation.

[burrell84601]

But OMG, an all-you-can-eat mp3 downloading service would rock. I'd pay $20 a month for one

Yeah!! Count me in. As long as it's original quality.

These day's it is like the songs you are able to get for free is almost like using a cassette to record from the radio.

They are not usually the same if you were going to buy.

If you want the good stuff, buy it. But I can not see the difference from a download from radio play. It still promotes the original work.