posted on February 4, 2002 08:49:36 AM new
There's a very heated war going on right now concerning copy written music, video, and software. Although there are several Person-to-Person (P2P) file sharing software programs out there, the granddaddy of them all is MusicCity's Morpheus with an estimated 2.5 MILLION users! Morpheus not only shares music like Napster used to, but also software, videos, movies, documents, images, ... virtually everything that you'd ever want to share. Although MusicCity (who distributed the software) is being sued along with Morpheus' creators in the Nederlands, if those two entities were to be permanently put out of business today, the Morpheus file sharing network would go on conceivably forever.
I pointed out in their messageboards that it was also the Internet Service Providers, or more accurately, Web Hosting Services, who stand to loose a lot as well. I mean, right now, you pay money yearly for storage space on some big web server to host your pictures (like AW) or a lot more money to web servers that offer you a few measly megabytes of hard drive space that will host your e-commerce web site. With the onslaught of P2P file sharing networks, you can share your whole hard drive over the network for FREE! And I predicted that it won't be long before someone devises a way to easily add web page-style content as the next logical step in the evolution of this quickly growing phenomena. Then where will web servers be when everyone can share what the hell they like from their own pc without having to be forced to go through them?
What it really amounts to is a full-scale revolution, for good or ill. And some companies, like Phillips, is embracing their end of it instead of fighting it. The music recording industry (RIAA) on the other hand, chooses to fight, albeit, a loosing battle. While new content providers; such as rock bands, authors, software programmers, video studios will survive in this hostile environment, eventually they will find new ways to thrive in this new era of uncopy-protectable music/video/software/books/etc.
Borillar
"Friends don't let friends vote republican"
sp.
[ edited by Borillar on Feb 4, 2002 08:52 AM ]
