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I've been online since 1971 and I like to smoothe the way for everyone else. Among other things I co-founded Sympatico, the world's first easy-to-use Internet service (and Canada's largest).

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Saturday, December 23, 2006

Music piracy: no defence

A lot of forward-thinking writers have said that music piracy has been good for the music industry because it showed that there was a desire for downloading music, and that this is why we now have things like iTunes and Rhapsody.

I don’t agree. If there hadn’t been illegal sharing, the notoriously self-serving record companies would have continued to insist that we buy their music on physical media as usual, while independent musicians would have pioneered Internet distribution and new labels would have appeared to sell electronically. Then the old record companies would have slowly given up market share to new players interested in cashing in on the new method of distribution. And there wouldn’t be any of that abominable DRM.

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I think you are right.. Btw, I wonder what else the 'forward-thinking' people have to say in defense of piracy - do you have any links that could enlighten me?

Wednesday, December 27, 2006 at 9:25:00 a.m. EST  
Blogger Rohan Jayasekera said...

Anonymous, here is one example.

Thanks for stopping by.

Wednesday, December 27, 2006 at 11:03:00 p.m. EST  

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