Internet piracy approaching the end?

I hope you are as lucky as I am to have caught the Knock Off Neville advertisement. For those of you who are not lucky enough to have seen it, it's a silly attempt by some ad exec to make downloading uncool, but so enjoyable to watch in its ineffective unrealistic childishness. They might as well go and pull file sharers' hair. Although I find this approach sophomoric to say the least, it does not detract from the fact that illegally downloading film and music is a grave concern to the media industry. But a new approach that I must say may be much more effective has been found.

In a plan agreed between the UK's largest Internet Service Providers and the government, persistent music sharers will start to receive letters warning them to stop illegally downloading and sharing music or face lowered bandwidth. As Internet speeds have increased over the last decade and MP3s are the most popular way of listening to music, the circulation of "ripped" CDs through file sharing networks has increased exponentially.

Virgin, BT, Tiscali, Orange, Carphone Warehouse and BSkyB have all signed up in order to warn their subscribers to desist from sharing music illegally. Initially, the companies will send letters to their users with high records of downloading. If the users continue despite the warnings, their speeds will be limited, thus making it extremely time consuming to do anything on the web while downloading large files.

The reason I find this will be the most effective is because of some of the characteristics of filesharing culture. I have known people in the past that were prolific filesharers. As a teenager I was Internet illiterate, but I had friends that were on the forefront of downloading music, either through networks such as Napster or by person to person filesharing done through chatrooms. It seemed strange to me that they exchanged so much music. Hundreds of records went back and forth. The numbers were so high that it was impossible for them to hear all the music they had received. But in many cases it was not a question of listening to a record from a band they liked, it was just collecting. It was, and probably still is, a fetishistic collection of music, to a certain degree.

This is why I find the "slow down" approach so clever. It may be fun for them to download music and they may ignore the letters sent to them, however when checking their email becomes as time consuming as it did when 56kbps was the fastest you could go, and they have to leave their pc on overnight to load a page with several high quality photos on it, the fetishism will give way to practicality. The plan has also attracted the attention of the Motion Picture Association of America, which has also been losing money through the circulation of their films on line.

So perhaps the end of free circulation of copywrited information on the Internet is approaching. With many companies now seeling filesharing services it is obvious that pressure would be put on those who offer the same services for free. But we will have to wait and see what happens.