Pretty good profile of Bram Cohen and BitTorrent in the new Wired.
[BitTorrent inventor, Bram] Cohen knows the havoc he has wrought. In November, he spoke at a Los Angeles awards show and conference organized by Billboard, the weekly paper of the music business. After hobnobbing with "content people" from the record and movie industries, he realized that "the content people have no clue. I mean, no clue. The cost of bandwidth is going down to nothing. And the size of hard drives is getting so big, and they're so cheap, that pretty soon you'll have every song you own on one hard drive. The content distribution industry is going to evaporate."Cohen said as much at the conference's panel discussion on file-sharing. The audience sat in a stunned silence, their mouths agape at Cohen's audacity.Wired 13.01: The BitTorrent Effect
Do you think there is a solution? I don't personally define iTMS as a success. There is MORE music piracy going on than sales at iTMS. iTMS has not decreased piracy. In fact I suspect that although it might have helped iPod sales, sales of iPods end up introducing people to piracy and that actuall piracy has risen. That some small percentage of people are buying music a iTMS and that the results look like a big number is mis-leading IMO.
I think someone smart like Bram will end up writing a P2P organizing system at which point finding the particular song, movie, tvshow you want will be so easy that no one will pay for something like iTMS.
The only true solution I see is someting like Rhapsody through it's a little ahead of its time. It will take wireless everywhere so you can access a service like that through your TV, cell phone, car stereo, iPod, PSP, etc at which point paying $10 a month for access to all music ever might cover it. The same as paying $20-$60 a month for cable tv, people might pay $20-$60 a month for access to a video library. The problem which will prevent these solutions is that no one company will have all the world's content meaning that by definition people will be searching to find content not in that system which will lead to more things like BitTorrent and also a solution for finding it all. Once you can find all of it on the non-paid for solution easily no one will even pay the subscription.