For YouTube Users

[AndyD]

Of course it's about control.
if I create a piece of music and it get's used in a video that 1 million or more people see, I would want payment/credit for that. Why should my hard work and tool be used to get someone else publicity to millions of people for nothing?

You wouldn't put it on TV, so why put it on the net. It's in the same thing. Pay royalties for the music you use, or create it yourself.

Many 'pirates' will pay for the music if it's reasonably priced and it's convenient. ITunes is one of the most successful businesses of the 21st century.

Donovan, you must admit though that the music & film industry is changing very fast due to the internet.

I disagree. The music industry is made up of many different sectors from the artists, recording studios, disk pressing and manufacturing, distribution and retail. The last three links in the chain are redundant and have been for the last decade. Unfortunately the last three links are the big money spinners as well and the music industry won't let go of them without a fight.

The reality is that I, and anybody else for that matter, can download any album, movie, tv series and software that is currently available. Movies become available on the net before they hit the big screen in South Africa. People buy harddrives with 2TB of movies & music for a bit more than the cost of the drive itself.

This is a reaction brought on by customers who know they're paying through the nose for an unnecessary service.

I think that the industries will adapt in some way or another. HDTV tries to do this by embedding Macrovision Encription directly into the TV - will it work, I doubt it ......................

What you're describing is a reaction, not the industries adapting. This is a few of the many methods they've adopted to force people to use the redundant distribution model.

The industries will have to find some way to make the total disregard of copyright work for them.

Not necessarily, there are some innovative business models that have made artists good money with voluntary pay systems.

There is an upside to the internet and that is the a musician can go directly to the audience without having to go through the middlemen who take 95% of his profits. Another thing is that the musician does not have to become a teeny bopper pleaser to get his song played on the radio to get a bit of exposure.

This is true as long as they're not trussed up like a Christmas turkey for the next ten years with a recording contract for a record label.

The internet is here to stay and so is piracy. People will not politely stop pirating stuff simply because it infringes on copyright. People feel that they are exploited by companies i.e. Ster Kinekor who charge R 100 for a movie and their special brand of popcorn.

A redesign of the distribution dinosaur would reduce the prices of everything dramatically (except the pop-corn maybe)

The truth is however that soon privacy will be a thing of the past. The point of mobile registration and ISP data monitoring is to allow for investigator to view content as the user access it. Then big companies will scream copyright and place pressure on the system to reveal all users that is abusing their copyright protected data such as movies, shows and music.

The MAFFIAA et al have all but given up on prosecuting individual downloaders. It usually ended up looking like the big fish frying the small one and it's difficult to prosecute just on a harvested ipaddress.

They are concentrating their efforts on closing down FTP share sites using the Rapidshare model. They're also waging an ongoing war with P2P torrent indexing sites like Isohunt and Pirate Bay although these sites don't host anything illegal.

The latest trend is to try to make the ISP's responsible for the legal transgressions of their clientele. The aim is to be able to hold the ISP responsible for financial compensation and/or usage filtering on behalf of the copyright holders.

Now once the registration system is emplace, you can be sure to see a lot of local arrests and charges against young people because that is the main target for these big companies. The big lawyers will step in and people will go to prison or face heavy fines.
I honestly don’t know how far these companies will go, time will only tell.

I doubt you'll see a rash of individual prosecutions, the burden of proof is not easy to meet in these cases. They may go after the individuals who are making a living out of pirating but the rewards for netting these guys are few and prosecution is unlikely to be a deterrent to the syndicates who run illegal distribution networks. This country has different social priorities than Europe and the USA.

Time will tell :-)