Filesharing Traffic Drops After RIAA Threats

bryan writes "According to CNN, facing the threat of lawsuits from a music industry trade group, fewer people are using online filesharing applications to swap songs. Internet audience measurement service Nielsen Net Ratings said traffic on Kazaa, the leading filesharing platform, fell 15 percent in the week ended July 6 from the previous week. It was during that prior week, on June 25, that the Recording Industry Association of America said it would track down the heaviest users of "peer-to-peer" services like Kazaa and sue them for damages of up to $150,000 per copyright violation." This follows earlier reports, from the filesharing companies themselves, that traffic was actually increasing.

Comments

Truly anonymous is the only way to go.

[caluml]

That's why truly anonymous P2P apps are the only way.

Please mod me up - we need help with this project. Please get in touch if you can code, or have ideas, or comments.

Re:Unreliable stats

[Genjurosan]

BINGO! You hit the nail on the HEAD.

AAA Predicted that 37.4 million Americans planned to travel over the holiday. --With the US population roughly at 291 million, that's about 13%..

For backup of my stats:

US Population Clock:

http://www.census.gov/main/www/popclock.html

Travel States: (search for July 4th on this google cached page)

http://216.239.37.104/search?q=cache:vb3Zo5s2UHo J: www.tia.org/Travel/tiupdate_current.asp+july+4th+t ravel+statistics&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

Heres the REAL news. File sharing traffic goes UP!

[HanzoSan]

Silly File THIEVES and PIRATES use of P2P to commit robbery increases

There was an article on CNET about this...

[km790816]

P2P's little secret

Interesting quote from the head of Freenet:

Ian Clarke, the project's inventor, said in an interview that the RIAA's recent legal actions and threats of additional lawsuits have heightened interest in Freenet. "The Freenet site has seen a threefold increase in Web traffic since the RIAA announcement," Clarke said. "We've received more donations to the project in the last week than we had in the past two months before that."

no recent change in stats

[Arslan ibn Da'ud]

Slyck keeps weekly stats on
filesharing usage...here's the usage statistics today:

FastTrack 3,525,734
iMesh 1,175,244
eDonkey 770,032
Overnet 458,752
MP2P 199,214

These stats have actually remained fairly constant for a couple of
weeks now. Back in May there was a lot of fluctuation on the EDonkey
vs Overnet, and FastTrack was around 4.5M. I suppose it dropped
because college students went home for the summer.

At any rate, Slyck's stats have noted no increase or decrease in
filesharing in the last two weeks. So the media hype (both ways)
seems to be just that...hype.

Move along; nothing to see here.

Re:That's because I'm using iTunes now

[JudgeFurious]

And you go for it man. I'm happy with the quality of the songs on iTunes. That's me and obviously different people have different standards.

I also have DSL and I'd be ok with the file sizes if they gave me an option of getting the WAV instead of the AAC but the AAC doesn't suck so I'm good. Hell since I'm mostly about downloading a track or two per album (and not always the "hit single" either) I'd even be willing to go a buck fifty to get the better quality file. Now a lot of people wouldn't but again, that's me.

I respect what you're saying but I think that based on the number of people who've been downloading MP3's and the price that iTunes is asking for individual tracks that they're going to appeal to plenty of people selling it the way they're doing. The Dial-ups are going to require the file size be small enough to at least get in a night and so many people out there are ok with the MP3/AAC kind of quality already that it will be a non-factor to most.

Re:Excellent point

[Kwil]

Here's another point.. ..everybody gets up in arms about calling it theft when it's not.

If we want to be perfectly honest, let's stop calling it sharing -- it's not that either, it's distributing.

If you want to get really picky, it's making available for distribution.

Re:Pretty common scenario

[Anonymous Coward]

How about this?

The eye has always elicited awe from anyone who has studied its structure carefully. The clear tissue of the cornea curves just the right amount, the iris expands and contracts to modulate the amount of light entering, the lens adjusts to distance, so that the optimal quantity of light focuses exactly on the surface of the retina, etc. It seems to be so carefully crafted that it is hard to imagine how its design could be improved upon. In the 19th century this conviction reached its zenith in William Paley's Natural Theology (1802), which took the eye as the basis for an argument for the existence of an all-wise, all-powerful Intelligent Designer. A closer look at the vertebrate eye, however, may lead one to a different conclusion. Blood vessels and nerves traverse the inside of the retina, and then dive through an opening in the retinal wall on their way to the optic nerve. This creates a blind spot at their point of exit, and some distortion as photons have to make their way through the tangle of blood vessels and nerves before striking the retinal wall. It may not be a large distortion, but the vertebrate eye is clearly not designed as well as it could be. This arrangement also fails to anchor the retina securely to the inside of the eye, so that retinal detachment sometimes occurs (e.g., in boxers). The "backwards" wiring of vertebrate eyes is a good example of (i) bad luck and (ii) historical constraints. Hundreds of millions of years ago the layer of cells that happened to become light sensitive in our ancestors was positioned "incorrectly," but because it provided a selective advantage, it was retained and evolved into the modern backwards-wired vertebrate eye. Even though a better design existed in an abstract "morphospace" (i.e., the space of biologically possible forms), once evolution of the eye started down a certain path, backing up (i.e., going back to a relatively less advantageous form) and starting over, became impossible. Squid eyes, on the other hand, are designed more sensibly, with nerves running on the outside, reducing distortion and securing the retina so that it cannot detach. Were squid to take up boxing, one would see far fewer prematurely terminated careers due to detached retinae.

A simple google search turned up this paper
I'll leave it as an exercise for the readers to find a reference for marsupial pouches.

Re:That's because I'm using iTunes now

[carpe_noctem]

Until iTunes music store starts to carry music that is at least -somewhat- off the beaten path, I'm not going to subscribe. Here is a brief summary of my last iTunes store experience:

1 Hrm...iTunes music store. 0.99$ sounds about right. Been meaning to pick up that new autechre album, anyways.
2. Search "autechre": returns 0 results.
3. Hey, that's a bummer. Lets see if they've got anything else.
4. Search "boards of canada": 0 results.
5. wtf
6. Search "aphex twin": 0 results.
7. wtf * 2
8. Ok fuck this. Preferences->Deactivate iTunes music store.

Maybe this has changed since last time I was on, but the selection sucks. Maybe autechre and boards of canada might be considered 'obscure', but aphex is on a major label and is quite well known. Until the iTunes store evolves from yet another place to buy eminem's music, I'm not putting any money into it.

Re:udpp2p

[Geekenstein]

As a past and present freenet user, I have to disagree. The main problem with Freenet is that it relies so heavily on people who claim they will run permanent nodes. Far from the promise of consistent, anonymous storage, you're lucky if you can still retrieve all the pieces of a large file within a week of its publication. For small files or recently introduced files, you get pretty good results. Just don't expect to get anything relatively old. "Permanent" nodes come and go way too often, even with the admittedly very cool file correction protocol that reassembles missing pieces.

Its not stealing, it's trespassing.

[User 956]

One cannot *steal* software,movies or music. They are an infinitely reproducable thing. Otherwise, something like Kazaa would not really work.

Seriously. No one calls "patent infringment" "patent, stealing", no one calls "trademark infringement" "trademark stealing".

Copyright infringement isn't stealing either, though they can both be independently illegal. The difference here is that the copyright holder doesn't lose his rights. His exclusivity is infringed upon, but nothing is taken.

If people are going to insist on analogizing it to something else, I would suggest TRESPASSING. If I put my foot in your yard, I've trespassed. But you still have your yard; you just aren't enjoying it exclusively.

Anyone who calls copyright infringement "stealing" has an agenda, and shouldn't be trusted.