P2P is media piracy’s biggest enemy

BoingBoing quotes a great story about how P2P filesharing puts media pirates out of business:

A media pirate — someone who sells pirated DVDs and CDs for a living — complains that P2P has put him out of business. People might be willing to buy legit music online even though P2P exists (…), but they won’t buy from pirates in the face of P2P. The music industry likes to lump P2P and hard-goods piracy together, but they’re not the same thing at all — in fact, they’re dire enemies. Piracy’s biggest competitor is P2P.

Here’s from the original article:

According to Tony, the first 2 hours of every Saturday and Sunday morning at the local flea market always proved the most exciting. “We’d take 60 cases of CDRs down in the van and as soon as we got there a crowd would swarm around us. We had no competition and it was obvious the punters had no other suppliers. Inside 30 minutes, 90% of the stock would be gone with some customers taking 2 or 3 cases each, presumably to sell on. After 3 hours we were cleared out and on our way home, always with huge amounts of money.”… Tony is very clear about why his rags to riches story has gone back to rags again. “File-sharing, P2P – call it what you like. When you asked a customer why he wasn’t buying anything, 9 times out of 10 it was ‘BitTorrent this, LimeWire that’.

Interesting perspective, and one that I don’t think I’ve ever seen covered by any major media outlet…

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