ISP Police
First of all before I start ranting, i only know what i have read on the net about all of this, so i may be spouting utter rubbish. However im going to start spouting anyway...
Im sure you have been reading the recent articles scattered around the net about the Film/Music bigwigs telling ISPs that they need to disconnect their users if they catch them doing P2P downloading, and im finding it a bit silly.
The big wigs are all scared because too many people are basically stealing their products online using Peer 2 Peer software, which is completely understandable, however as they cant find a good way to stop this happening it looks like they are turning to the ISPs and making them do the leg work for them. Now this wouldnt be too bad if there was some incentive for the ISPs to do this, so they can make their money back from disconnecting problem users or if the big wigs invested some money to help the firms update their connections etc. However they dont seem to be doing squat except for constantly telling everyone that they are losing money.
Now i understand it costs money to make this music and things, and they are people with jobs who need to get paid at the end of the day but most of the income gets distributed amongst the fat cats of the relevent industry, which means the people who are making the films/music probably dont lose out on that much money from all this downloading. Now i could be wrong, and im sure there are alot of artists who have lost out money down to people stealing their music, but did they really deserve ALL that money in the first place? Now if someone went from making £1,000,000 from a single then only made £900,000 due to masses of people downloading, is that really such a massive loss? To people like you and me £100,000 is loads of money and could afford a small house, but to people who are already making a mint from it all then its not that much really.
Most of the artists who dont make as much from music and films etc really need the income, but chances are there wont be that many people sharing or downloading their product as they are not as mainstream. So looking at it from this angle its only really the MASSIVELY overpaid artists and studios who lose out a sizable amount, and its not going to make or break them really.
So after reading the above if it is almost all correct then you can see the situation as the following...
Bigwigs are wanting ISPs to save them £1,000,000's in lost sales by making them lose £1,000,000's in customers.
So does that seem right? not really... and this problem hasn't suddenly appeared overnight, its been around for decades, since VCRs were used to copy tapes and the like, so they are always going to have losses due to people copying and stealing their stuff, its the same with people who get burgled every day, and shops that have shoplifters steal from them.
Anyway i think im going off topic and just ranting for the sake of it, but i dont see why they should automatically assume that ISPs should pick up the torch, which will no doubt cost them alot of money in lost sales and increased hardware costs to improve the way they track users online...
On a more gaming related note, im currently re-playing Mass Effect with Mez as well as Fallout 3 with Jode. After talking to Arnie for a while i thought Bioware should re-release a slightly updated version of Baldurs Gate on the DS, it would fit perfectly and they had an unreleased PSX version which shows that the hardware could handle it fine. Screen may be a bit of a squeeze with all the text but they could easily find some way round that... Also if they used the DS wifi for allowing mutliplayer on it they would be onto a winner. The R/D into it and development changes would be a small snip for the amount of income they would make from the sales, as they already have the content and storyline etc, so most of the content is done and just needs porting... get on it Bioware... and give Dragon Age multiplayer while you are there...