File Sharing Ruling - own goal

A couple of days ago a ruling in the good ol' US of A made file sharing network developers responsible for the media that is shared on them. Own goal music companies!

This will be an impossible law to enforce, not because it implies by it's logic that gun companies can be sued (or should it be the bullet manufacturers) for someone being shot, or car companies for accidents, but because we now live in a society where most computer and entertainment systems are networked, and the ability to share information, in watever format, is inherent in this system.

On a basic level, it's easy to e-mail files to people - marketing companies even use this to create spoof videos to market their products that people think are a joke. Now, with the increasing penetration of instant messaging solutions, particularly those like Skype that offer cheap voice calls, it is even easier to share files directly.

However, on a deeper level this poses a big headache for the multinational, or indeed any company with more than one connected office, as there is a potential to share files accross these networks without anyone loggin what's going on. Who do the music companies sue under this ruling - apparently not the individuals sharing, but the company providing the infrastructure. Sure, you could get sacked, even sued, but do you really have the money to pay what the record companies will be going after the company to pay? Who's going to keep their music on their hard drive - most people will copy it onto a portable media player and delete the evidence.

How would they find out you cry! Well, for some time now companies, particularly in the adult industry, have been embedding information in their clips to manage their digital rights, but to also spy on users, particularly those that think they're getting in by a back door method. These, as with the marketing campaigns mentioned earlier, could be easily planted by the record companies to see where files are being shared.

I agree with the record and movie companies that what's happening here is theft, and I like systems like ITunes that make it easy to download music, but it really should be cheaper and offer better deals on bulk buying. The recording industry should also think about monthly subscription services where you can listen all you want to tracks (without doanloading them).

The bottom line, however, is that the music companies are dinosaurs who can't keep up with the developing world around them. Nothing illustrates this more than the fact that none of them seem to have thought of buying Napster and commercialising it years ago, but they just wanted to shut it down - did they not think that other people would develop similar technology? Do they think that this ruling will change anything. It's an unprecedented ruling that will drive these things underground, probably generating a new file format that will alert people to any embeded tracking code and be based out of a third world country at odds with the rest of the world, like the good ol' US of A.