These men had last
night’s Heroes on Sunday
China’s Blin.cn bittorrent service lets you download and preview something like season six of 24 in just a few minutes while our Bittorrent and network systems enable you to sit on your hands for 4 days until you download an ISO of Palm Desktop for Windows 95. Is this fair?
This little lumpkin of info comes from an interview with Kaiser Kuo of Ogilvy China who also discusses the ramifications of this technology, not all of it bad.
His general argument is that without the artificial market restrictions imposed on P2P networks in the United States by the RIAA and the MPAA, Chinese companies have been free to innovate and are now producing superior web technology in P2P sharing, and a whole range of related industries.
I know China has an intellectual property problem and I know they have a knock-off problem. However, some of this mess lets programmers push technology to its limits, creating more powerful products. It’s a double-edged sword and nothing we can do now short of research and innovation on our shores can prevent it from cutting us off at the knees.