torrentfreak.com — Ashwin Navin, former president and co-founder of BitTorrent Inc. has left the company after four years. Thus far, the company hasn?t been a great success, but the BitTorrent protocol is more alive than ever. Now he can talk more freely, we ask Ashwin about his view on the future of BitTorrent, piracy and online media.
Nov 9, 2008 View in Crawl 4
mjeacomaNov 9, 2008
Word up!
lonewolf01Nov 10, 2008
But then the furniture salesman loses a sale on a whole house furnishing.
vizerothNov 10, 2008
Personally, I commonly go to local concerts at small venues (relatively speaking, not a bar, but not a sports arena, either), usually with one or two nationally- or internationally- known headliners and two or three smaller bands on the bill. I'll even go to a concert with a headliner I don't necessarily like if the style of music is close enough to what I usually listen to. I almost always go expecting to spend roughly $100 between the cost of the ticket, a couple of drinks, and buying CDs. It's very rare that I go to a show and don't hear at least one band I like, and I'll pick up a CD from each band that sounds good on the stage (in some cases I've had to ask the vendors if they had "any CDs from the band that's playing right now"), and maybe whatever CD the headliner is promoting.The CDs might be more expensive at the concerts than if I looked for their distributor online, but the headliners usually have signed copies for the same price you'd pay at Best Buy or some other large chain. At the same time, the bands usually get more money from the concert sales than they do from the store sales, and they get money from the ticket purchase.Otherwise, I don't even mess with downloads any more unless they're licensed for legal download, and are free. Most of the crap people are sharing online is the same crap I don't want to hear on the radio anyway. I'd rather trust that a band I like is going to choose good touring partners than download crap at random.
vizerothNov 10, 2008
I think the biggest issue, and reason for the popularity of downloads, is that no one feels they can trust a review, or any type of less-than-full preview, to determine whether or not something is worth purchasing.Certainly you have a subset of people that will continue downloading movies and music for free just because they can, and those people are never going to buy anything (and when someone finds a way to shut them down, they'll find another way). Their threshold for the value of what they're downloading is effectively free. If it was in the $5 DVD bin at Wal-Mart, they might consider picking it up, but chances are they still wouldn't see any value in it.However, you also have a lot of people that just don't want to spend money to find out whether or not they'll like something. Those people might download a lot of movies and music, watch/listen to it, delete what they don't like and eventually buy a couple of DVDs/CDs. Those people result in Hollywood selling less garbage because people didn't buy it only to find out it was garbage, and they hurt the resale market a bit because those people don't turn in DVDs/CDs they don't like any more. On the other hand, they still buy things they actually enjoy, and possibly spend the same amount of money on entertainment as they did previously, they just aren't going to drop the cash every time someone spends a bunch of money promoting the next great thing.As some artists have begun to realize: if the work is good, put it out there. Whether you get the money back in purchases of discs, word-of-mouth promotion, or attendance at concerts and movie theaters, it will come back to you. This doesn't make it easy for the big media companies to spend their way into big returns, because good movies and music aren't made through big media hype. They're also having trouble figuring out what people actually want because the numbers have spread out significantly in the last 15-20 years (ie people are getting more eclectic in their tastes and aren't just scooping up the "next big thing" being hyped). I don't think this model will improve the output of the industry, but it will reward the good and punish the bad.Then again, there's no accounting for taste. Most of the crap being downloaded is still bad.
vizerothNov 10, 2008
The stated purpose of copyright law in the United States is to improve the public domain by giving the owner a limited time-frame in which they have a monopoly over their content to monetize that content before it becomes a part of the public domain.Over time, and through the efforts of the largest copyright holders in this country, the "limited" time has effectively come to mean "not within your life-time", and the owner becomes a corporation with no limited life of its own (or in the case where an individual owns the rights, those rights are passed on by will or to family (or through legal battles), long after the owner is gone).There's also the issue in which copyright owners permit material to be lost, so that it can only become part of the public domain if individuals maintain it long enough for the copyright to run out. When movies and music are remastered for digital mediums, they often discuss having to restore the original masters before they can even digitize them, which means that essentially those masters could have become unreadable before someone bothered to pull them out of the vault if it hadn't been for the decision to remaster them.
rdoger6424Nov 10, 2008
I'm just digging him because he has the courage to say that in a public forum.
rioracer916Nov 11, 2008
Heh, the imagery is hilarious.