Even The File Sharing Networks Can't Agree

from the disorder-and-chaos- dept

One thing that's been clear about the battle between the recording industry and file sharing is that the process has, in some ways, mirrored their general view of the network and content delivery. The recording industry, via the RIAA, has created a coordinated, top down campaign against file sharing, while the file sharing networks have mostly had a distributed campaign, where each file sharing network (and lots and lots of users) fight back individually. So far, that strategy hasn't worked so well from a political standpoint (though, from a user standpoint, it's been doing fine). So, the various file sharing networks have been trying to band together and form their own lobbying group, and so far that process has been a mess. The various companies couldn't agree, and two separate lobbying groups were formed - each of which have different policy objectives. In the end, this might be better, since a single top-down definition of how file sharing needs to work seems to go against the whole purpose of file sharing.