Picture the scene:

A group of young pupils on a school trip to an old war cemetery. Pupils, encouraged by their teachers, use paper and crayons to create ‘rubbings’ or as the government and corporate industry see’s it ‘copies’ of the content of the gravestone.

A policeman enters.

The children are arrested for copyright infringement, the Teacher arrested for letting it happen.

How is this the same as the Digital Economy Bill?

Although it’s true that a digital copy of something is indistinguishable from the original, it is not necessarily true that everyone who file-shares does so illegally, nor that anyone whose connection is used for this purpose knows about it.

Consider the house with multiple renters. The music industry comes along and accuses them of downloading music. There’s six people in the house. They’re banned from using the internet again. They are internet professionals. Their life is over. Their next-door neighbour was the real thief, hacking the WEP encryption of their router, so set long ago because their Wii only supported WEP at the time.

I agree; something needs to be done about ‘illegal’ file sharing. But the laws and business models in use today are all too old. I may download a song on bittorrent. The music industry will be on the door of the people who supplied it to me. But I may own the song and just want a copy for my iPod, maybe I’m too lazy to rip the disc myself. But wait? We’re not supposed to rip CDs anymore? But they wouldn’t stop us doing that… no-one would buy CDs anymore. And EVERYONE would download them illegally.

I own A LOT of DVD and Blu-ray.

I’ve seen several downloaded / pirated films. What’s the difference between a DVD and a pirated DVD? I can have the film on my computer with a pirated copy, ready to watch whenever I like. I’m not forced to sit through three minutes of copyright warnings ON A FILM I JUST PAID FOR with a pirate disc. Essentially; Films, Music and Games I ACTUALLY BOUGHT have a nasty little problem. They ALL try to prevent me from copying them, with unskippable warnings and crude anti-copying devices.

And they wonder why people don’t want to buy the bloody things?

How do we solve it then?

The problem is, the entire business model set and our industrial infrastructure is not setup how it needs to be to irradiate this problem.

Have you heard of steam? Steam is an online games platform that allows me to install steam powered games on my computer without the need for me to insert the game disc every time I feel like playing. THIS is the future. A massive digital distribution network needs to be created and refined to allow purchasing online. It’s sad, but modern video and game shops will eventually go bust. Of course, people can still copy media in this model. Which is why we also need something else: distributed computing. When I buy a computer in future it should just be a terminal. A display. All rendering and processing should happen online in the cloud. This removes ownership and copy problems. But this solution is way, way off in the future.

What can we do now? Well, I can tell you one thing. Pissing off the hands that feed you is never a good idea.

In this age where anyone can distribute anything, we need to cut out the middle men. No more record labels, no more book or film publishers. Just you and me, sharing our creations with each other.