Anyway, as a commenter pointed out, TV shows are the most interesting thing for many, while the record labels are the ones, spearheaded with RIAA, that make the most noise about their rights being violated.

I think everyone should have access to all music ever made. It’s our culture. It belongs to us. Must not be controlled by evil corporations! This should be a basic human right…

“crap not good enough”

You need better crap?

“how do I smell 128kbps cbr mp3 only”

I can smell that too. I won’t be on board with anything like this unless it is CD quality.

I’m always LiT either by bud or hash..And my costs are more like $150/Month after thinking about it. All the money I pay are for LEGALL services and it’s up to me what I do with that service. I didn;t say that P2P is legit but taxing it would give it a ‘sense’ of legallity(sp?) that would be hard to challenge in a court of law. They would make their profit..I would get my media…it’s a win-win situation.

The appeal of P2P tends to outweigh a lot of the negative risks that are attached to such a protocol as bit torrent and the use of it. People know this, understand this and consequently exploit this. People love P2P because of how readily the majority of content is available to them and how quickly it can be obtained. An example, its 18:00 and you want the new, Killers album for argument sake. Depending on the connection you have, it is a safe bet that by 18:10 you have that album on your hard drive, in a format that isn’t restricted in any way. That’s the appeal. Yes it is a form of online theft in as much as if you went into a shop, you would pay for a physical copy of the same item, but i just wanted to generally emphasise the appeal of P2P.

This is what the entertainment sector needs to realise and ultimately utilise in such a way so that they can obtain revenue from this kind of service that an ISP could provide their costumers.

Virgin Media come up with the right idea, going in the right direction and essentially doing their bit as a responsible ISP to try and find an ‘appealing’ alternative to P2P and the doubts from the big cheeses come steadily flowing in. Not like i am that surprised as this always seems to happen when someone comes up with a positive idea to help resolve an ongoing and complicated issue, in this case, unauthorised file sharing.

It does all come down to money for the entertainment sector and not the ‘much publicised’ issue of new artists struggling to make it in the music industry. It obviously comes down to the money because for the longest time the sector have been throwing figures at us pertaining to ‘supposed’ lost revenue due to the prevelance of P2P filesharing and have been banging down the doors of governments to introduce new legislations which would deter people from using P2P and yet when an idea is placed before them to help curb the number of people who engage in this activity, they suddenly decide after all that the issue of filesharing isn’t that important to them when it goes head to head with the issue of lost commercial and financial gain.

Yes, people would consume all they could for their monthly subscription fee but, lets admit it, who wouldn’t? It was even initially announced by Virgin Media to be an ‘All You Can Eat’ service.

I would happily pay £15 per month to obtain music via an unlimited service such as this from VM. I am a customer of VM and applaud the forethought they have shown their actions to help deter people from using P2P applications as a way of obtaining digital music.

The bigger issue to me is the point i made at the top of this post. The entertainment sector need to start realising that people want digital content when they want it and make money from music and film this way by supporting services which encourage people to turn away from P2P whilst not limiting their options of what content they want to obtain online. Shifting gears to movies for a minute; people don’t like to be told anymore when they can see a film and where they have to go to see it if it is available on the internet already. Yes, a pre release of a movie on the internet will only arrive there via dubious circumstances but this is essentially the message that the P2P faithful are trying to get across. To the entertainment sector it just appears like those people are a bunch of ‘freeloaders who think nothing has a value anymore if it is available online and therefore they can just take it’. It runs deeper than this. To me, people who use P2P also are saying “This is the modern age, this is 2009, we can do almost everything online these days and so why can’t we see the films we want and listen to the music we want when we want to?”
Its a case of the big companies still wanting to control what you see and hear when they give you permission to and the fact that the entertainment sector are rapidly losing grip on maintaining these age old ways of distributing content in this digital era, they are starting to be more aggressive in their attempts to ‘stomp out’
unauthorised file sharing.

I read something afew months ago which has stuck in my mind ever since. “When you have millions of people ‘breaking the law’ it is the law that obviously needs changing, not the people” I agree with this as i find it hard to believe there are millions of thieves roaming the internet. Instead you have millions of disgruntled people who actually live in the modern age and feel that companies really need to use the internet more wisely to sell their product in this age.

I strongly agree that the creators of the products we enjoy so much should be paid for their work and i for one would welcome a service like the one that is being proposed as it will give revenue to those creators but in reality, until all the bodies and companies agree to such a service and the same in the future with film companies, i can’t see a way that illegal filesharing is going to be stopped, without turning all the fans of music and film against those very people who are creating them. If that happened, the suffered financial loss i believe would be a great deal larger than it is now due to online filesharing.

What makes me laugh is that even some musicians are hitting out at the government and record companies regarding their attempts to stem online filesharing. These are the very people who would be victims of illicit filesharing and yet they are on the side of the file sharer themselves? That speaks volumes to me.

Virgin Media = double thumbs up for the initiative

Entertainment sector companies who are against this proposed service from Virgin Media = make up your minds and either embrace this kind of change or face losing more revenue as a result of filesharing.

Thanks for reading

Dave
UK

But paying $1200 a year to download copyright material via Newsgroups/Usenet etc is stupid. Your still in breach of copyright -and you can still get caught.

It is NOT legit