Read this and understand the P2P wars

via Cory Doctorow / BoingBoing:

"The first music pirates (the recording industry, who ripped off sheet music) got this proper dressing-down from John Phillip Sousa, who told Congress:


'These talking machines are going to ruin the artistic development of music in this country. When I was a boy...in front of every house in the summer evenings, you would find young people together singing the songs of the day or old songs. Today you hear these infernal machines going night and day. We will not have a vocal chord left. The vocal chord will be eliminated by a process of evolution, as was the tail of man when he came from the ape.'


"Tim Wu runs down the history of cable versus broadcasters, and other copyfights down through the ages. He does so clearly and engagingly, in ways that non-lawyers and non-historians can readily grasp. And when it's done, the most amazing thing is the certainty that copryight-disrupting technologies every bit as wooly as file-sharing have been invented over and over again, and that the P2P fight is not a new one -- that piracy is the norm, not the exception."

"If you want to understand the P2P fight, read this -- it is the most concise, thorough and engaging text on the subject to date."

560k PDF Link Thanks Cory!


...and here's a related story from Wired magazine
Link to "New Spin on the Music Business"