The entertainment industry has been looking for a few silver bullets to help it blow away what it considers to be a downloading behemoth cutting into its corporate earnings. According to a recent post on Torrent Freak, it might have found one in deep packet inspection.
Of course, the entertainment industry isn't alone: Everyone from the government to advertisers have been thirsting for ways to monitor and influence internet traffic for their own particular uses. And being able to peer deep into trafficked data to see whether or not users are trading copyrighted songs or bomb-making blueprints is a security resource they simply can't refuse. Of course, being able to play both sides of the downloading divide is also too tempting for the monitors to pass up: After all, why just staunch torrent sharing when you can also divine push advertising opportunities? Torrent Freak zeroes in on that disturbing detail further:
Of course, one imagines that the monitors had learned their lesson from the Napster debacle: Shut down one technology and you only spawn further workarounds. Whatever their concerns, it's impossible to argue against the fact that torrents have eradicated the need for wasteful physical materials like CDs, DVDs, jewel boxes and the like, while creating one of the most seamless P2P environments in existence. Trying to kill that genie makes about as much sense as smashing the bottle. And with recent news that major labels are making more money than ever from licensing and other non-music sales, it's hard to feel sorry for their declining CD sales, especially since they're on track to make those up with downloads.
No, deep packet inspection is probably not the copyfight silver bullet for the biz. Waking up from its material and profit obsessions? That's a whole different conversation.
Photo: The Conversation
