| All pirate sites will be shut down? Heh, I highly doubt that. That's like saying all criminals will eventually be caught and then there will be no more crime, ever! People have said that before, and the closest anyone ever came to that ideal was Genghis Khan, by killing people (and their entire families) for relatively trivial crimes. Yeah, if they start doing THAT, it'd cut down on pirate sites. But anything short of that? No way.
I suspect that eventually the biggest artists will simply start pre-selling their music. Release an album in 96k mp3, but no higher-quality copies until X copies have been pre-sold at Y dollars apiece. If that doesn't work, they could retry with different values plugged in for X and Y, or sell it to a wealthy patron (as artists used to do in ancient times) as a one-off unique piece of art (highest bidder of course), or just destroy it. He who can destroy a thing has the ultimate power over that thing. (A paraphrase of Paul Atreides from 'Dune'.) Until X and Y are satisfied, there could be no piracy, because the only high quality copy of that particular work exists only in the hands of the artist, and he ain't gonna throw it away for free, sooo...
Ultimately, the world of art may turn back into what it was once before: the wealthy elite of society paying artists, then trading works among themselves, while the common man makes do with whatever the wealthy elite feels like letting them access. How ironic that would be, for the consequences of technological advancement to spin time backwards in this way.
On the plus side, for unknown or lesser-known artists, or for those who simply have little talent, the net is a boon, and does them good. It could be that those are the only artists that the common man will be able to access in the future. But then again, we can all aspire to become the wealthy elite too, and then if you spend $10 million or whatever on the only existing copy of the newest Stephen King novel, you could always then give it away to the masses rather than trade it to another wealthy person. |
