The Price of Everything - Eduardo Porter [66]
Yet the music industry’s victories so far have been pyrrhic. Napster lost. But file sharing exploded. In May of 2010, a New York judge ordered Mark Gorton, the founder of the LimeWire, a file-sharing service that allowed people to share their songs and movies online, to pay up to $450 million to record labels for copyright infringement. Still, that same month the LimeWire software was among the top ten computer programs downloaded from download.com.
In 2008, a survey by the Pew Project on the Internet and American Life found that 15 percent of adults who regularly went online admitted to downloading or sharing files. The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry estimated 40 billion illicit downloads in that year alone, accounting for 95 percent of total music downloads worldwide. And the decision against The Pirate Bay so angered young Swedes that they elected a member of the Pirate Party to the European Parliament in Strasbourg, giving it 7.1 percent of the votes in the election of June 2009.
The record labels seem ready to change strategy. After some thirty-five thousand lawsuits in the United States over five years, in 2009 the Recording Industry Association of America abandoned its campaign of taking alleged file sharers to court. In early 2009, Apple chairman Steve Jobs made a deal with the labels to strip away the DRM locks on songs sold through its iTunes online music store, which would allow users to copy the songs and listen to them on as many devices as they wanted.
FREE IS SPREADING to other industries of the information era. Within days of its publication, more than 100,000 copies of Dan Brown’s bestseller The Lost Symbol had been downloaded from file-sharing sites in e-book or audiobook format, according to file-sharing tracker TorrentFreak.com. Movie studios seem to be going the way of record labels as well. In 2005, a report commissioned by the Motion Picture Association of America found that piracy cost the movie industry worldwide $18.2 billion a year and online theft accounted for 39 percent of the total. These days, more people copy movies than go see them in theaters. In May of 2008 the French bought 12.2 million tickets to see films but downloaded 13.7 million free copies of movies online through peer-to-peer networks.
In the summer of 2008 Warner Bros. made an impressive display of security to launch the hit Batman movie The Dark Knight, using technology that allowed it to track each and every copy of the film. A few months later I sat in Bryant Park, behind the New York Public Library with a lanky, twenty-four-year-old philosophy major from the State University of New York. He opened his Mac iBook and took me to a Web site where at the click of the mouse, he could download a high-definition copy of The Dark Knight for free. According to the tracking service BigChampagne, by the end of the year 7 million copies of the movie had been downloaded illegally around the world.
The news media, the industry that employs me, has been eviscerated. Rather than raise the drawbridge as movie studios and record labels tried to do, the news embraced the Internet as the most promising new proposition in a generation. After all, most of the news media’s money came from advertising. Consumers only paid a small fraction of the cost it took to produce the news. Newspapers thought the Internet represented a godsend—a cheap and effective platform to distribute the news more widely and reap vast new sources of advertising online.
Imagine their surprise when instead the Web became the most cutthroat competitor they had ever encountered. As the cost of serving information to the public approached zero, the