"Someone, someday?"

Really?

This problem has been solved for years.

We invented the legal fiction of copyright for exactly one reason. To find a way to pay artists to create their work. We wanted successful artists and a society made rich and beautiful by their work.

There are a total of 12 business models that are known to have ever made money at all. One of them is to make a product and sell it above cost. Others include things like loaning money and charging interest, leasing a property, buying wholesale and selling retail, providing insurance against risk. What all of these have in common is that none of them make any sense at all for turning art into money on the Internet.

There are a few models that obviously work just fine.

1. Become famous and sell tickets to live concerts. Been done too often to think about. 2. Become good enough to aggregate an audience, use your influence to advertise things that people actually want to buy. Every Youtube star does this. Every TV show does this. Everyone who puts on a "free" show at a coffee shop or a bar does this. 3. Build a catalog and charge for access - make sure it is sufficiently convenient an inexpensive that the "happy to pay crowd" outweighs the "I'll just copy it" crowd. Musically I know about the weird case of Magnatune. Also done by every single Porn site in existence, and you don't exactly hear the Porn industry complaining that the Internet ruined their movie business, do you? 4. Lastly, and most directly, is to recognize the obvious: Distribution online is effectively free. Creating the work in the first place is expensive. So quit trying to prop up the DISTRIBUTION industries and start paying the artists for CREATION. If you need crowd funding, take a look at Kickstarter. You want a crowd funding subscription to the service of artistic creation, head over to Patreon.

Again. This problem has been solved for years.

It may be hard to become a great artist, but there is absolutely nothing complicated about paying artists to create work that we can download and copy for free. The only reason we have this problem is because we keep listening to corporate mouth-pieces of the completely redundant distribution companies who were NEVER INTERESTED IN PAYING ARTISTS TO BEGIN WITH.

Stop listening to the corporate mouth-pieces. Please. You are far to intelligent to fall for their BS.

While I haven't studied the bittorrent protocol in detail there has to be some likely cryptographic checksums at the heart of it. I'm guessing one per chunk. The infrastructure their talking about would also make it trivialy easy match those chunks against a list of data chunks that others do not want downloaded. Now you could trivially change a files checksum by introducing a bit error, reincoding, etc, etc, but this would still give them some impressive filtering abilities, particularly if you could say apply it to individual files in a torrent, which is likely possible.

Sure they have developed a bit of caching technology which could save them money, but I'd bet it is really about control. Charge extra to anyone who well wants to use feature X, be it the end user, a corporation, or anyone they possibly can.

They do the same idea with satellite and cable. They force you to buy dozens of channels to get one that you really want, and then make sure to break them up so you are stuck, one way or the other. They certainly are no closer to al la carte pricing than they were what twenty years ago? Heck you used to be able to get some al la carte pricing on C-band. With the internet we have, so far, managed to be able to pick and choose what we want, but for how much longer?

Oh look, you want to look at a non conservative news web site, well, we have a sponsor for those, so how about you poney up another $15 a month for our special news package? Look, you want to use that new fangled file sharing technology, well that will be $39.95 for the all you can eat buffet, but for the casual users we can give it to you for only $5 dollars a gigabyte. What? You had better before we introduced all that. Well, if you don't like it I'm sure you can choose another ISP. Of course if one moves in, we will just discount are service long enough to drive them out of business, so that won't last long...

If there was one thing important these days in America it is making sure the supreme court doesn't tilt further right... It may be that the American people will really fight to keep net neutrality, but these days, I doubt it....

If you divide the claimed 10 billion dollars by the claimed 600,000 jobs, you get 16,000 dollars per job. That's much lower than the average developer's salary.

If every dollar of those 10 billion went to paying salaries and every salary was about the US median which is about 50,000 dollars, it would be 200,000 jobs.

So they may have inflated their jobs figure by around half an order of magnitude.

It's strange to me that there aren't many options to buy phones pre-rooted. Considering how much I value my free time and how little I want to risk bricking my new device, I would easily pay an extra $50-100 for a phone that was both rooted and under warranty. I imagine even less tech-savvy people could be sold on the idea by just demonstrating the new "features" that you gain.