Peter Biddle, Paul England, Marcus Peinado and Bryan Willman of Microsoft have written a paper arguing that the file swappers who swap music, movies, and other digitally encoded entertainment can not be stopped. Well, since they are from Microsoft perhaps now people will recognize the obvious. But why is this even a debate? As storage capacity continues to rise and as bandwidth becomes cheaper swapping will become easier and the amount exchanged in each swap will rise.

The truth of this matter can be arrived at with use of pretty simple intuition. Imagine you can hold in your hand a device that can story thousands of movies and tens of thousands of musical albums. Imagine that two such devices can be set next to each other and that they can quickly swap their full contents to each other. Even without the internet people could use such devices to gradually swap just about every movie and album ever made. Such devices will eventually exist. Storage device densities will increase by orders of magnitude. This will so increase the ease having and swapping large quantities of entertainment content that swapping will become unstoppable.

In the future entertainers will still be able to make money off of live performances. Also, any entertainment content that embeds advertisements into it will be able to make some advertisement revenue in exchange for embedding the content. My guess is that both of these sources of revenue will not be enough to replace what is lost through copying.

One way that the movie industry will be able to continue to make revenue from new movies might be to use heavy encryption on content sent to theaters. The theaters could have projectors that have the decryption built right into them. The movie studios could own and even have staff that controls the projectors. The weak link in such a system would be the single movie company employee who gets access to the unencrypted content and then pirates a copy and distributes it. Even if this scheme can be made to work the movie companies are still going to lose revenue from later single copy sales of movies. because of illegal copying.

Those of us who are not at all inclined to do illegal copying will pay a price for the illegal copying done by others because there will be less revenue to fund the generation of new content and hence less new content will be generated.

Update: The Register has a good article on this story including a link to the original paper.