FAST: ISPs, Copyright Holders Should Become Business Partners

This is just another group trying to give ISP's content to sell so ISP's will start to regulate their traffic, essentially killing the internet. Its only a matter of time before more ISP's shape their traffic to hinder competing services, its already begun with small caped billing.

“This would provide both industries with a win-win" Translation: "If you help us fuck over your customers, we'll give you some of the money".

It is pretty funny, and shows just how disconnected from the sector these old-economy lobbiests are. FAST, like the CAAST and BSA branding of the same folks, doesn't represent the software sector but only those using outdated business models (monopoly rents, selling software as a product rather than a service). Infringement is not their greatest threat: competition from competing business models are. Like their studies/etc, their policy focus will be on these competitors, not copyright infringement. The ISP market is also not unified: There are incumbent phone and cable companies who offer Internet-like services, and then there are competing ISPs who are not in the broadcast or phone business. The phone and cable companies want to expand their legacy business models onto the Internet, and their greatest threats come from -- you guessed it -- competition from those using entirely different business models. The phone companies are becoming cable companies, and you can see that in Canada where Bell is also a BDU (Broadcast Distribution Undertaking) with their Satellite service. Like other BDUs (Rogers, etc) they are purchasing other companies in the content distribution business (television networks), and getting more and more into generating content as well as distributing it. Partnering? These BDUs see content as something you buy on the cheap and distribute. Software isn't a relevant marketplace for them, and for the part of the copyright sector that is relevant to them "partnering" isn't the right term. It's like the music industry vs. the recording industry. Composers and performers historically made pennies on the dollar for physical distribution of recorded music, with the labels extracting the vast majority. The musicians were always being screwed, but new technology allows the music industry to flip around where the musicians make the lions share and the labels (if used at all) get pennies on the dollar. Most of the lobbying from the recording industry is also against their competition, with the competition being musicians trying to harness new technology and business arrangements where they can get out from under the thumb of the recording industry. Look for the movie and television industries having to do the same thing as the phone/cable companies take them over. Partnerships? Ya, right. Like the Boston Strangler wanted a "partnership" with women home alone, to paraphrase a Jack Valenti quote.