Opinion: As long as the RIAA and MPAA think that they can control digital content, file-sharing services are bound for trouble.Does this sound familiar?
A service that lets people share digital content over the Internet rockets from obscurity to dizzying levels of popularity in a short amount of time. Once it's established as the place to go for digital content, the buzz becomes deafening. Its creators are hailed as online heroes and visionaries and the model is praised as "the next generation" of online content. Breathless screeds are written declaring how the free exchange of information is ushering in a new age as more and more people come aboard.
And then the lawsuits begin.
Copyright holders (and the trade organization representing them) who previously hadn't paid attention to the service when it languished in obscurity now feel that they are losing revenue because they're cut out of the ever-growing revenue stream and audience.
Their material is being shared nearly unchecked even though the provider of the service that allows the sharing to happen has attempted to stop the sharing of copyrighted materials.
One lawsuit after another happens, the stories get picked up in the press and the service starts to become synonymous with copyright scofflaws.
Eventually the lawsuits win, the service is shut down and file sharers go somewhere else. The service, tainted with the stain of unlawful activity but shiny with promise for investors who saw the potential of traffic, eventually comes back online. But things never are the same as they were. File sharing still continues but moves substantially further underground.
You've probably guessed by now that this is the story of Napster, the first major peer-to-peer file-sharing service that rose to infamy in 2000 as a free-for-all MP3 file-swapping service, only to be shut down in a series of lawsuits and court actions after it was deemed "an out-of-control monster."
Since then the online music industry has changed dramatically and has matured from wildly free trading to a paid model led by Apple's iTunes. The MP3 wars still continue and the RIAA has yet to be appeased (it probably won't be until everyone has to pay exorbitant prices for music that can only be listened to on crippled, approved devices), but in general things have begun to settle down.
But while the music industry online has been maturing, the file-swapping wars aren't over. For the online video industry, the fight's just beginning.
Online video had been poking along nearly since the beginning of the Internet, but late in 2005, YouTube began to take off. Coming out of relative obscurity, the video-sharing site has increased its viewership nearly 300 percent since January, attracting 19.6 million visitors in June of 2006.
Why the popularity? To some extent it can be attributed to the Network Effect, wherein a service becomes more valuable the more people use it, thus attracting even more users.
YouTube's growth can also be attributed to increasing broadband adoption, YouTube's ease of use and the site's reputation as a place where anyone can post goofy home videos.
But the main reason for its growth hasn't been amateur videos ... it's been the fact that anyone can upload commercial video clips, share them with the world and gain social cred by being the first to post, much as with many of the social news and networking sites out there.
YouTube's terms of service forbid the uploading of copyrighted materials, and the site has taken measures to limit copyright violations through monitoring and limiting uploads to under 10 minutes, but copyright holders haven't been satisfied.
There have been a few skirmishes so far, and now the lawsuits are on the way.
This all begs the question: Is YouTube the next Napster?
The parallels between the two services are pretty striking. From the obscure beginnings to the meteoric rise to the copyright issues to the legal challenges and even to the media hype, YouTube today looks a lot like Napster in its heyday. YouTube built its popularity on sharing copyrighted materials (even if not by explicit design) and the RIAA and MPAA, and the copyright holders themselves, are starting to notice.
Click here to read more about YouTube's response to copyright violations.
So, what dies the future hold? Odds are that YouTube's going to end up being snatched up by one of the big broadcast networks and turned into a place to distribute legal commercial content alongside the user-submitted stuff. Considering the traffic, it might make an attractive target, but as John Battelle points out, the manpower necessary to police the content and the war chest needed to fend off lawsuits might just sour the deal once the hype's died down.
Ultimately, though, the lessons of Napster and the lessons being learned by YouTube may just call into question the viability of any open, online content-sharing service. As long as the RIAA and MPAA think that they can control digital content, file-sharing services are doomed.
And therein lies the rub...they can't. The end of Napster didn't mean the end of file sharing. The end of Grokster didn't mean the end of file sharing. New technologies such as BitTorrent and sites like ThePirateBay.org have sidestepped around any new controls, and others will move to take their place once countermeasures are found for these.
The fact that the music and film/video industries don't want to realize is that stopping file sharing is impossible. The sooner they embrace the fact that people like to share content and realize that most of the time sampling leads to buying or increased viewership (as The Daily Show has found out), the better off we'll all be.
Let's just hope that YouTube doesn't have to be another object lesson in the stupidity of the old media industries.
Online Media 
