And what was set to happen…

…happened. Majors and studios have been fighting piracy with their lawyers instead of asking their engineers to build alternative – and legal – ways to distribute their content. Because of the consistent asymmetry between the needs and the offer (how many people illegally download American TV shows in Europe? How many would pay if they could?), the “customers” became “pirates”, and learned to download what they needed the illegal way.

Governments reacted, and you read here and there about how there will be some crackdowns on pirates, probably as soon as somebody comes up with a smart way to jail thousands of ten years old. What was the logical next step? Anonymous peer to peer! Here comes OneSwarm, “privacy preserving peer to peer”, not yet fully anonymizing users (the concept is friend to friend rather than peer to peer) but a step in the direction of totally anonymous downloads.

What will the majors do when privacy peer-to-peer happens? They will have lost the war, with no possible way to track down pirates. Fighting an agile community of hackers frontally is not a good idea. They will always beat large corporations and governments, slow to react with a hand tied in the back by the need to stay within legal boundaries of obsolete laws. The only way to adapt to this kind of change is to go the positive way. Give customers a quicker, sexier, cooler alternative. This is finally emerging – browsing music on your iPod touch at Starbucks beats piratebay – but it has to accelerate if the majors are to survive this war.