The concept that file sharing will be the destruction of jobs within the movie and music fields, as a legitimate argument against it has always intrigued me. We do not continue using horse and buggy, just to ensure that horseshoe makers still have job… We have not made buying cars illegal because they are made by machine now, instead of by humans.
File sharing is the future of distribution of the arts, anyone with eyes and a pulse can see that. File sharing makes it cheaper, faster, and easier to distribute media from one place to another. Why pay for shipping of bulky CDs when you can quickly download a song onto your computer? Why pay some guy behind a desk to create a business model that delivers it to me?
By having law makers change laws, and create new laws to protect the status quo, we create a system where we can no longer have development of new technologies. People who create new and exciting ways of file sharing, or even communicating will think twice because they are afraid of being sued. These people typically are not even looking to make a profit, or much more than an acceptable amount of money to feed their family.
Innovation is being killed by the media industries, and their fat wallets. We don’t need major media industries, and they understand that, however they make way too much money to simply throw their hands up in the air and give up. They have had time to find new jobs, go into new fields, and I suspect some have. The battle of People vs Media Industry has been going strong since Napster, they have had time to see the reality that their current business model just will not work in the digital revolution.
Many people who fight for the cause of file sharing typically don’t get into the lost jobs argument because it upsets people “oh no, by supporting a free culture — some people might lose their jobs”. We are simply cleaning up the food chain.
If you took high school science, you will know that for every level on the food chain, energy is lost. The suns rays are converted into energy by plants who store the most energy. Then animals that eat plants have the second highest energy, and so forth. The same applies to these media industries.
Currently the setup that they are trying to push (and have even come out against licenses like the Creative Commons, saying that they are hurting media), is that money first goes to the highest management people, then middle management, then the workers, then on down the line the artist makes shillings.
A setup that I try to push is:I pay an artist for his music, he pays royalties to his writers if applicable.
Or better yet: I download a song from an artist because I hear they are good, then I buy their teeshirt, and they make more profit.
As you can see, more money goes directly to the people who are making the music, and less gets tied up in the greedy hands of middle management. We are not killing jobs that are important, we are supporting the artists.