Wired News has a five page(!) article on Bram Cohen and BitTorrent. But what at first seemed to be an homage to Bram the brainy coder turned into a speculation on the future of TV and film. In fact, if there was ever a perfect article that represented the interests of this blog: this is it. It involves the death of TV as we know it, radical changes in film distribution, radical change in copyright and piracy and even quotes Jeff Jarvis.

Cohen knows the havoc he has wrought. In November, he spoke at a Los Angeles awards show and conference organized by Billboard, the weekly paper of the music business. After hobnobbing with “content people” from the record and movie industries, he realized that “the content people have no clue. I mean, no clue. The cost of bandwidth is going down to nothing. And the size of hard drives is getting so big, and they’re so cheap, that pretty soon you’ll have every song you own on one hard drive. The content distribution industry is going to evaporate.” Cohen said as much at the conference’s panel discussion on file-sharing. The audience sat in a stunned silence, their mouths agape at Cohen’s audacity.

The above quote is one of many gems to be found in the article and its author Clive Thompson seems to usually “get it” right.

Stop whatever you are doing and read this artcile now.