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by On the heels of the previous report that peer-to-peer filesharing, most commonly in the form of music files, took a hit by the Supreme Court, Dell and Napster have announced a plan to provide universities with cheap and legal systems to supply music downloads to students and faculty. Simultaneously, very inexpensive music-download websites such as allofmp3 are becoming wildly popular and US-based sites (e.g., eMusic) are starting to follow suit.
With the growing availability of cheap music online and the recent crackdown by the legal system, can there be any doubt that the days of free music are limited?
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Future Compatibility
One thing that cannot be neglected is to examine just what digital format these different service provide. Consumers are stuck with what may be a proprietary media format that must now be supported by all future media players. Additionally, audiophiles will probably not like the lower bitrate copies most download services offer. Even worse is questioning what system was used to compress the files - Fraunhoffer, Xing, LAME ... the encoders are many but the good ones are few. Inevitably, P2P or sharing of some fashion to be seen in the future will always exist to support the connosieurs of super-high quality media encodings.
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Limited Days of Ease for Non-Geeks by markmcb :: NR7 :: Show
I'd say the days of logging on to a huge database of every song known to man and getting anything you want for free is going to become harder to do in the future, but by no means are the days of ripping a CD and giving a copy to your friend limited. As long as everything is digital, it will always be distributable. It may get harder or more inconvienient to do, but that doesn't mean that it's impossible.
It's funny to me to watch all of this commotion. When I first got on the Internet in 1994, there were no P2P sharing systems like there are today. But what did exist was Usenet and IRC. Though not quite as user-friendly, they got the job done quite well. What's interesting is that these same networks are still alive and well today and bubbling over with content. So, perhaps for the less tech savvy Internet users out there a big sad face is appropriate. But for anyone with a clue about the whole Internet, P2P limitations are just a small bump in the road.