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May 19, 2025
The end of fileswappers
Different diseconomies
By Dan Poster, ASP
Scholars have found the reasons for the demise of the media industry in the early 21st century. It had to do with the prison terms for murder.
According to researchers from Xinghua University at Harvard Campus who have finally decrypted old files associated with the "content revolution" years, the industry started exacting enormous fines and trying to impose harsh prison terms to anyone caught sharing files or downloading them. Thanks to their political clout and a friendly government, these terms were easily enforced, thus resulting in a lockdown that paralleled the drug war.
"No to piracy" was a popular rally in the early 2000s, and one that resulted in thousands of incarcerated "fileswappers", as they were known then. With a government that depended absolutely on the media and the big content distribution companies, this was almost inevitable.
The problem with this scenario is what economists called an asymmetry: the prison term for copying files was significantly higher than that for killing a human being.
So, the mafia started offering protection schemes: if you received a cease and desist or similar, it was easy to go to the local padrino, and have him (it was almost always a man) threaten the poor paralegal that actually folded the letter that you received. That paralegal would then proceed to lose your case among the thousands of old files a large firm usually had, and everybody would be happy. If the paralegal refused, they died. Simply as that.
Of course, the firms had more mechanisms to ensure that the letters reached their destination, and the more prominent lawyers had protection, but the paralegals were the crucial interface, and easy targets at that.
The economics of filesharing were cruelly simple: Download a song, go to jail for five years. Kill the paralegal, go to jail for one year.
After a few years of this the industry transformed itself, and content became free and easily distributed, but all in all it has been estimated that there were at least two thousand deaths stemming from this "content revolution", and among its effects were the demise of the big media companies that didn’t adjust their business model as well as the party in power at the time.
That was also the origin of Killer Records, the biggest production and recording company, which proudly boasts about its dark origins.
Posted by Camilo at May 19, 2025 9:22 AM
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