Thank you.
This is a fascinating discussion.
Mr. Quarles, you were in a 12-year-old Econoline van. Ours was 15 years old when we went on the road. It's interesting just saying that piracy destroyed the market. When we were 18 and we were on the road, we could play six nights a week. There weren't a lot of other options. It wasn't that we were a great band, but when we hit Waterloo people weren't on the Wii or doing ten million other things.
The market changed substantially through many factors. People drank a lot more in bars then. That was a substantial factor. They didn't hire bands because they wanted music; they hired bands to sell alcohol. We have a whole number of factors—demographic shift. We're left now, as you say, with a broken model. The old model is not coming back. We are going to have to find new opportunities.
I'm interested in your example, because we've had these technological threats in the past. In the early 1920s live musicians went after the recording industry. They said if you have records, people won't hire live musicians. The recording industry got set up and the recording industry said if you let radio come in, who is going to buy records? I was at the Future of Music Coalition meetings in Washington, and T Bone Burnett had a fascinating statistic. He said that by the late 1920s, record sales had dropped by 80%; by the early 1930s, it was 91%. Now, I'm sure the Depression had a huge part in that.
Did they outlaw radio? Did they put locks on it? They monetized the stream. Once they monetized the stream, they had found a new model.
With your option, Mr. Quarles, there have been attempts to try to do this: the SOCAN versus the association of Canadian ISPs. The court case ruled against SOCAN because they said the pipes themselves were basically dumb to what was within them, and you couldn't hold them liable unless they were made aware of copyright infringements.
Given the fact that the ISPs are now selling their own content--they're content distributors--they are also using deep packet inspection, so they actually have a very good sense of what's going through their pipes. Given the fact that tracking mechanisms like BigChampagne can track the BitTorrent traffic, do you think the case could be made, outside of a business-to-business model, where they might voluntarily sign on, but that the original judgment in SOCAN v. the Canadian ISPs might be overturned at this point because they can no longer say they don't really know what's being carried through the pipes?