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This study actually correlates purchases and piracy:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/apr/21/study-finds-pirates-buy-more-music

The rest of these articles link back to the studies they quote. They are basically information that states how piracy has actually helped industries to make money.
Piracy is good:
http://www.mindjack.com/feature/piracy051305.html
http://moreintelligentlife.com/story/internet-piracy-is-good-for-films-1
http://torrentfreak.com/why-most-artists-profit-from-piracy/
http://www.thebookseller.com/news/99958-toc-piracy-may-boost-sales-research-suggests.html

I guess this means French file sharers will be moving to anonymous p2p programs like FreeNet, GnuNet, etc and darknets. This is silly, bring it all out in the open, money can be made if the price is low and service good, for example allofmp3.com. No rubbish about the artists will be cheated, they are badly cheated in the existing system:

Trent Reznor : "One of the biggest wake-up calls of my career was when I saw a record contract. I said, 'Wait - you sell it for $18.98 and I make 80 cents? And I have to pay you back the money you lent me to make it and then you own it? Who the f**k made that rule? Oh! The record labels made it because artists are dumb and they'll sign anything'

Lets make a new system and pay the artists the lion share and let them own their music. Where an artists work can be got from multiple competing vendors. The artists and their fans is the more important thing. These fat middle men need to go on a slimfast diet and get the hell out the way. As for TV, Mark Pesce told the world that in 2005 http://www.mindjack.com/feature/piracy051305.html. Movies the same, plus we are still going to go to the cinema.

There are many ways this could work, but the world has changed and law makers legal world offers a tiny fraction of what this new world has to offer. Are they just too old fashioned? Still struggling with email let alone file sharing and hooking up the TV with the computer...

Sci-fi channel... what's that? I thought it was aired on bittorrent?!

Now that is where BSG made an impact on society and culture broadcasting as a whole.

http://www.mindjack.com/feature/piracy051305.html

I think you are either ignorant or misinformed. Your argument is the same that *AA uses all the time and it has been proven over and over again that it is not so.

Myth #1: piracy robs the artists. Pfft, puleeaze... The only ones who are "hurt" are publishers with enormous margins. Artists get only scrapes from that. Is *that* fair?

Myth #2: "civil disobedience is a self-excuse. Audio/Video "piracy" is there because media companies want to stick to old business models and keep old margins on sales. Read http://www.mindjack.com/feature/piracy051305.html or download BitTorent of the talk if you don't feel like reading. It's just one of the voices raised recently that confirm that piracy phenomenon is in fact "civil disobedience". What people in fact saying is "business models you have are broken. I want my content on-demand and I want it now. I don't want to pay markup you force me to pay on those."

Some examples from real life confirm that if person is presented with the choice to pay for the download and they know money goes directly to artists - they will be quite willing to support the artist. Fans don't just "download" stuff - they accessorize themselves with all that stuff that relates to artist and want to give back to their "idol" in most cases.

Times of "middleman" that is publisher are pretty much gone. People demand (in indirect ways) fair deals for themselves and the artists. Publishers need to readjust and not self-justify their losses by "piracy". Piracy wouldn't exist if publishing practices kept up with times.

P.S. Personally I have stopped purchasing/pirating most of "labeled" production long time ago opting out for "direct" purchases or no purchases at all. At worst I rent "labeled" products.

The Pirate Bay is under attack: http://uk.news.yahoo.com/rtrs/20080131/tot-uk-piratebay-charge-b86c26b_1.html AT&T is talking of filtering file sharing: http://www.out-law.com/page-8804 There is some hope of sanity from the Swedish: http://sigfrid.wordpress.com/2008/01/07/decriminalize-file-sharing/ Mark Pesce (co-inventor of VRML) is talking sense too: http://www.mindjack.com/feature/piracy051305.html The momentum seams to be slowly building on both sides. Personally, I loved the AllOfMp3.com model. Cheap enough and good enough service I was prepared to pay, it wasn't worth copying. It had me spending money on music in what I thought was a legal way, for the first time in a long time. The existing model is to expensive and how can it be justified to charged what you would for a cd for something where the manufacture and distribution costs are pretty much zero? As long as we can record video and sound, we can copy and copy and copy and copy. Best work with the technology not against it. Make it cheap enough and good enough we can't be bothered to copy most of the time. What you would lose on individual sales, you gain on bulk, plus you can make money from advertising. If there is a big clamp down, what really worries me is the politics of it. International big business wins out over the people. Surely this is what governments are for? We vote a government in that fosters a society we want to live in. But, in the UK at least, I can't see any party picking up this issue. Which is crazy, because as more and more of the internet generation comes to voting age it's an issue close to their hearts! 10 years time could it be an election winner?

I wouldn't put the blame squarely on Apple. Distribution agreements have kept good content out of the hands of people in other countries for decades. It's only since the advent of broadband Internet access that people have been able to get first-run content from other places without waiting.

There's a pretty good article about this over on Mind Jack

Aha! Found the article: http://www.mindjack.com/feature/piracy051305.html

I was referring to this article. AFAICT, that's the original copy, it's also hosted by the Swedish Pirate Party. Although, yes, you are correct in that a lot of TV channels have done what I suggested in my previous post, and offered free access to some episodes in an attempt to get more viewers.

• Are you going to find a movie that the creators are happy to give away for this experiment. Including those whose income is a percentage of the takings?
• The buzz created by the experiment is going to taint the results anyways.

*sigh* Yes, there is. If I have a hammer and you also want a hammer so you copy my hammer by manufacturing one yourself, just like mine, have you just stolen my hammer then? Even though I still have my hammer, right here? Because that's actually what you're saying.

You cannot make a big budget action movie by 'touring', 'selling merchandise' or any of the self-satisfied rationalizations people have suggested that musicians turn to.

No, but you can't realistically build a real movie theater at home either. Any way value is added, it can be exploited to drive sales of a good or a service. In Singapore, movie theaters have luxury seats and serve meals as an added value to the movie. Economically, there is no longer any added value in making a copy so it should not be used as the basis for value. Economics 101.

References:
Mindjack - Piracy is good?
International Herald Tribune - Imagine a world without copyright
A History And Possible Future Of Cinema
First Monday - Piercing the myths of p2p
TV Week - NBC: iPod Boosts Prime Time
Stealing Music
Roderick T. Long - The Libertarian Case Against Intellectual Property Rights

Mark Pesce argues that the broadcast TV industry is about to fundamentally change, and this Google deal seems to be part of what he is suggesting. Pesce also suggests that it might be more economical to distribute an advertising-supported TV show for free on DVD (e.g. given away with your daily newspaper) than on broadcast television, and that on-screen advertising during the programme (e.g. flashing in the corner of your screen) may replace ads placed between acts. A video of his presentation is available via BitTorrent (see link above) and in a lower-quality version via Google video.

Piracey is good? - its a great read, describing what happened to the SciFi channel because of torrent downloads.

More whining back and forth from both camps - it should be obvious by now that both sides know its against current law and one side don't care. And never will. Now if its just a minority it will pass - but if its the majority who feel this why the producers should wake the hell up, realise the world has changed and find new ways to make money.

This perhaps

In the wake of this morning's tragedy in London, someone on Flickr already set up a photo pool. So far, it appears that the photos are generally just screen grabs of the TV news, perhaps those who were there, and those who operate security cameras in the stations could post their photos from before the attacks, and try to identify the perpetrators. A warning - the pictures don't appear graphic as yet, but as the day progresses, I expect that they will get to be so.

(Cross posted at Mindjack and Swerdloff (dot com).

Although it's not p2p, the Family Guy DVD popularity was another example of how a network misgauged the audience interest in a show, but open market forces showed a strong audience prompting them to bring the show back.

Another example but P2P related was how P2P piracy (*ahem* online independent distribution) helped BattleStar Galactica become a hit

"they" really don't see the opportunities that exist and gonna keep squeezing their existing business model till it's dry.

e.

The article suggested that if they spent less on their advertising campaigns (sometimes they spend as much as 50 mil!) just trying to have huge opening weekend, they'd easily be able to offset the "lost" revenue by not being able to artificially delay/staggar release dates. It's really all the wasted advertising money that puts movies at risk of being in the red. If movies are released in every medium possible on the same day, the market penetration will be so wide, they wouldn't need to spend a fraction of what they spend now on marketing.

Cut the "pirates" off at the knees (for the most part) by taking over their distribution channel.

Create a new revenue stream.

Possibly attract market segments otherwise disinterested in the usual delivery methods (I know *I* wouldn't miss finding Junior's lolly stuck to the underside of my shoe).

Foster better overall content and possibly increase the variety of content reaching the audience (though this would mean that Hollywood would actually have to rely on story telling, rather than retreads and special effects)

But noooooooooooo...we'd rather support our lawyers and subpoena our customers.

There's an interesting piece over at Mindjack addressing this very issue and how the MP/RI/AA and the rest of the dinosaurs are missing the boat...again.

Remindme of this quote:

"..The consequence is that mainstream media still dominates public opinion - and reputation molding - because it is brief, consistent, and seemingly coherent. It's the difference between a floodlight and a laser. The floodlight may illuminate more broadly, but the coherent, parallel light of a laser punches through steel.."

Nicholas Carrol - Spining the Web, the realities of online reputation management
Whole thing here

Can't remember the story, but this article was great

Prefered quote
"The only thing holding broadcasting together today is inertia, marketing, and copy protection"

"In the same vein, the robot exclusion file that some sites use to declare parts of the site out-of-bounds to normal spiders can be ignored by the Archive if they are doing a crawl on behalf of an authority such as the Library of Congress. In that case, the webmaster will receive a notification, suitable for framing, explaining that they should be suitably honored that the exclusion files are going to be ignored so that this site can be added to the Library of Congress Web Archive."

So if you exclude all crawlers and the robots file is copy protection under the DMCA does the Library of Congress have a right to circumvent your protection?

IANAL but that would be a cool fight to see.

The broadcast television networks should be worried, too. I am not just talking about the mass customization of media consumption.

With WiMax, any freelancer with a video camera can broadcast live television in competition with the big nets. Check out Mark Pesce's article from today's Slashdot post.

My article A Closer Look at the Summer of '76 written in July of 2001 Begins:

I remember the summer of 1976 well.

Not because our big cartoon-broadcasting neighbor to the south had just turned 200 years old. Not because the Olympics were in Canada, nor because Nadia Comaneci scored the first perfect 10 in Olympic history - causing one of the most famous computer crashes in history. Not even because Disco Duck was Top 40.

I remember the summer of 1976 vividly because Viking 1 touched down on the flat plains of Chryse Planitia on Mars, and shortly thereafter discovered the first scientific evidence of extraterrestrial life - a very big event for a nine year old spacegeek like me. Curiously though, not long after NASA announced discovering life on Mars, they retracted their statement and said what they detected was not life, but rather an unusual chemical reaction.

Sigh.

Didn't you mean this?

Mindjack had an in-depth report on the Internet Archive a few weeks ago, with pictures from the inside.

Mindjack had an in-depth report on the Internet Archive a few weeks ago, with pictures from the inside.

I just thought I'd point out that we also covered Google in the Last Page column of the Oct 1 issue of Mindjack Magazine. http://www.mindjack.com/lastpage/ lastpage.html