Music Piracy a Blip, says Lessig

From Associated Press: Washington politicians would make a grave mistake in crafting new copy-protection laws based on Internet patterns today, an influential Stanford law professor warned. The professor, Lawrence Lessig, pointed out Wednesday that millions of consumers are downloading music and other materials onto their computers because slow dial-up connections make it tough to stream content quickly to a variety of devices. That’s bound to change within a few years as connections get faster, he said, making today’s debate irrelevant. “In the future, it will be easier to pay for subscription services than to be an amateur database administrator who …

Subsidising Legality

While consumers continue to pay per-byte for access to the weightless web, there’s an unexplored opportunity for content owners to incentivise consumers’ selection of their sources of media rather than bootlegged copies.