Cell carriers about to get Napsterized? So what?
Annoyingly alarmist article in The Guardian the other day about how the music industry is facing Napsterization from a new side — cellphones — citing the latest evidence of Nokia's new 7610 cameraphone (pictured at right), which can
(gasp!) play MP3s as well as take pictures, and the fact that high-speed networks that'll make it easy and fast to swap files are on the way. To which we respond, So what? Any decent smartphone can already play MP3s, plus a whole lot of other files, and when it comes down to it, what difference does it make whether P2P happens on a PC or on a cellphone?
To the record industry an illegal copy is an illegal copy is an illegal copy, no matter what equipment you're using.
Maybe the carriers think they can lock down the phones (they already sometimes stop people from installing new applications on their phones), in order to make it impossible for people to get music on their phones without paying for it, but all that is gonna do is force people to stick to their trusty iPods, which, at least for the time being,
can still play MP3s that have been downloaded online.