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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.
Since these services are peer to peer with no centralized servers, it would be interesting to know how the measurements were made.
If they are merely asking people if they used P2P, it seems like fewer people would openly admit it.
Is that usage is DROPPING in the US due to lawsuits while its getting bigger outside the US due to lack of lawsuits...hence the contradiction being pointed out.
Yey!
I'm 4 episodes off from completing the whole 5 series of futurama thanks to kazaa...
(non-us resident)
Legal alternative which gives me music the way I want to buy it. See RIAA guys, now that wasn't so hard was it?
We aren't all theives just looking for free music. Some of us were just looking for what we consider to be an equitable business model for buying songs. I've found iTunes and it's close enough that I'd rather buy music there than download it on Kazaa.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
Doh! Read the links...the RIAA is talking about song-swapping going down, while the p2p perveyors are talking about traffic going up. That's a distinction...people are swapping fewer songs, but more other stuff.
My guess: Since they're all Pirates, they're downloading that new Johnny Depp movie. ARRRR!!!
Consensual sex is boring.
All of a sudden last week, the sysadmins sent out notice that they will be blocking commonly used P2P ports out of fear of being sued by the RIAA. This is a small non-profit company that's just managing to keep its head above water. No way could we deal w/a lawsuit. It's another case of money buying the legal system - whether RIAA could ultimately win the lawsuit in court is irrelevant since this company doesn't have the $$ to even risk it. Personal/Non-business/just plain folks have it even worse
Actually, it's according to Nielsen Net Ratings via Reuters. CNN did not write the article. It's a syndicated article. Still, you have a good point that is worth noting in most cases; this, however, is not one of them.
qslack.com
Maybe the swappers have as much material as they want. The current offerings at the store are so pitiful that they aren't worth downloading, much less buying.
If I worked for RIAA, I would use P2P activity as a leading indicator of future sales. Reduced P2P activity means the current products are not very popular. When will they learn?
Sure I've pulled down songs, listened to them, and not bought the CD (and since I didn't dig the song, I deleted it). Is this wrong? I've actually found myself finding more and more groups this way to get into. I spent my college days working in Record World and seeing just how much it cost to produce a CD compared to how much the store charged. Nothing worse than buying the CD for one song and getting slayed by the rest of the songs (that are useless).
Perhaps we are nearing the end of an era?
No one stopped sharing, they just switched to networks which are harder to monitor.
People arent stupid, they know the RIAA is looking at Kazaa.
Just as many people are on Kazaa, but if you think Kazaa is the best place to find music files you are wrong.
Face it, no one is going to stop.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
(Of course AOL Time Warner is also the author of Winamp and the original author of Gnutella ... hahaha)
sulli
RTFJ.
I have but I have to admit that it only applies to movies. I last logged in to get a song before iTunes Music Store came online. Now that's got my music needs covered.
I still go to P2P for the odd South Park episode, that hard to find must have porn, or to get some software. Movies have absolutely nothing to fear from me though. Too much time and the results are crap.
I never said I wasn't stealing their shit. I only said I'd buy it if they met me halfway. iTunes did that and now I'm doing that.
Now let's get with the $5 DVD's and the $29 Photoshop people! Chop Chop!
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
I don't think the Slashdot crowd has the same mentality toward legal issues involving the RIAA as normal users.
The reason why slashdot users are passionate about things like the RIAA, the DMCA, etc. etc., than the average person is that the average person accepts the argument that sharing copyrighted files is wrong.
Thus, while the average person will share files in an anonymous environment, he or she either feels guilty about sharing or otherwise doesn't feel strongly enough about it to cause trouble, and sees it as inevitable, and possibly right, that the sites will eventually be shut down.
My advice to you is: if you want people to become passionate about IP issues, either convince them that sharing files is right and good, or that the commodified music of the RIAA is a far greater evil. Otherwise it's a hopeless task.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
One cannot *steal* software,movies or music.
They are an infinitely reproducable thing. Otherwise, something like Kazaa would not really work.
All you can do is deprive the RIAA of a "potential" sale. Now since the demand for luxury items is typically VERY elastic, you can't equate a presumed loss at $0 to an actual loss at $20.
However, you can achieve a similar end result by merely buying used media. It's rather nice being able to "stick it to the RIAA" in a manner that no airchair moralist can reasonably complain about.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
They just went to gnutella, edonkey, or what have you. Hell, with mldonkey you can do like six protocols at once. "Kazaa is being raided," they said, "so we're going to fuck off to some other network." Comcast just gave me a 1GB/mo giganews account so I'll have a nice place to get fills, I can pretty much just use USENET now even :P
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Agreed. Forget Udpp2p. Freenet's already here, it's bigger, it's faster, it's better...don't waste your time.
Of course, Freenet's not the easiest thing in the world to use. It's getting better, but the high rate of key return failure is disheartening. Still, it's better than requesting a file on KaZaa, only to find out that the user isn't really trading.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like you're referring to those loads of garbage files that tend to come up, and usually A) are around 60 K long, B) contain your search term . every known file extension, and C) all come from the same host.
.mpeg, .avi, .exe, .ram, and with things like (must see!) on the end of the filename. I put 6 addresses in my blacklist and >99.9% of them are gone. It's literally just 5 or 6 people doing this.
For example, without filters, I can search for "Beethoven 9th symphony" and suddenly see 50 files ending in
Of course, you might be talking about something else. If it's simply genuine mp3s with garbage in them, I simply preview my downloads while they're in progress.
Anyway, that's my 2 bits and a byte.
uh, Hundreds of millions around the world use P2P, 40 million in the USA alone, this is more than who voted for President Bush.
"I would bet that most of them do know that it is wrong, but they just choose to do it anyway."
If they thought it was wrong, why in the polls do they all say its not wrong? why in interviews do they claim its not wrong?
Millions of people are feeling entitled to steal music, and the music industry is terrified. They have good reason to be, CD sales are down significantly and piracy is absolutely rampant. My cousin just announced that she's stopped buying CDs, she burns her own, she's computer illiterate, not a geek at all, and their are probably millions like her. If a huge portion of the recording industry's customers stop buying CDs, how is the industry supposed to make money? People use filesharing apps like kazza because they are free and there is just about no risk of getting caught. Most people (probably including myself depending on the circumstances) will do something morally wrong for their own benefit if they have no fear of getting caught. What the RIAA is trying to do is save the music industry by making people afraid of filesharing. So far it seems to be working. A friend of mine is now terrified to use Kazaa, she's afraid of being sued. I know I'll be modded down for this, but I don't think the RIAA is doing something particularly terrible. They are simply trying to save the music industry. Personally I think they should approach the problem differently. They should seek legislation making music piracy a criminal offense, and they should promote easy to use and affordable alternatives like the iTunes music store. Instead they are inciting a massive backlash against the industry. I don't mean to be self-righteous. I pirate music too. But no matter how you justify it, if you are using a product that someone sells without paying for it, you are stealing it. The RIAA is being mean and hard-hearted, but they are simply doing their job and they aren't in the wrong.
Also, ISPs could potentially use ingress filters to block spoofed addresses. It seems to me that there are two main requirements that an "anonymous" P2P filesharing system should meet: 1. Data should pass through the overlay network. If I can see addresses other than the addresses of my neighbors in the overlay (who are presumably my friends or at least people who trust me in real life), then I can systematically gather information about who is sharing what, which is unreasonable. It seems that Freenet is suited to this. 2. Users should be able to publish their own data on their own machines. Most users aren't so interested in publishing files that they care enough to push it to someone else's machine, and furthermore, if someone abuses the network it is a hassle to figure out who to cut off for overpublishing. 3. Performance should be reasonable. Perhaps we can use an approach like bittorrent or WASTE to exploit parallel downloads, which will probably be important if we are passing the data through the overlay. We may be able to use a path-vector algorithm (similar to BGP) to advertise a randomly-generated node ID through the network, and later on publish index files that associate parts of a file with the node ID. Not sure if this sort of approach is most efficient, but it's hard to think of what else we can do. The bottom line is that we have to avoid connections from nonneighbors, as it is this that compromises anonymity. We could look to projects like mixmaster/mixminion or onion routing for anonymity, but I don't think that they will provide us with the performance we need to keep users happy. Probably the best thing to do is just route data through your neighbors, but only reveal your identity to your neighbors -- and no one else.
In a word? Yes.
"Warez/MP3 archives, VCD/SVCDs, and MP3s converted to Audio CDs for the purpose of compatibility with older players probably make up a sizeable amount of CDR sales, particularly through non-office supply sources such as Walmart or Best Buy."
And can you point to some numbers justifying this? If not, you are trying to connect two things which have some vague relation to each other, but no direct connection, and is thus a meaningless correlation.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
This reminds me of the great NY Blackout Baby Boom. Legend has it, on a Monday, 9 months after the big 1965 blackout, a nurse in a hospital noticed a larger-than average number of births. The NYT picked up on this, and reported it. By Wednesday, births had fallen off. It was later shown that there was no real statistical increase, and the numbers may have reflected normal weekly fluctuation (probably because people like to schedule planned births at the beginning of the week. see snopes for more detail.
One week fluctuations are pretty meaningless, especially when there is a huge confounding factor like the July 4 Holiday. But that doesn't mean the RIAA won't use it as evidence to coerce people.
No, a properly configured router will only block packets that don't appear to come from that network. That still gives you a lot of addresses to chose from.
Get your own free personal location tracker
What if every packet of a file you received had to "bounce" through another node on a gnutella-like network?
Okay, so you downloaded a file, but from where? Five thousand different nodes sent you parts of the file.
Better yet, what if no file is actually ever sent, but randomish blocks of bits that must be XOR'ed together to reconstitute the file. This means that a file takes double or tripple the bandwidth to download. But which other node sending you a randomish block of bits was guilty of copyright infringements? Said differently, where did you download the file from? Can someone monitoring your traffic even know that you downloaded a file? Can we even make this work in the presence of someone running a packet sniffer. If each incomming packet indicates which "fileid" or "ssa checksum" it is part of, which block, and which XOR part.
You've now eliminated the spoofed packets problem of getting blocked at firewalls. A downloaded file arrives as many UDP packets from thousands of different nodes. No single such packet contains any copyright material, just random bits.
The node sending out the file has to send out two or three copies. Each block of the mp3 file is XOR'ed with a random number. The random number and the result XOR block are two blocks that must be XOR'ed back together to reconstitute the original block. Repeat this process on one of the two halfs, and you've now got three blocks, if you care to use three times the bandwidth to upload/download a file to ensure that no single block has copyright content.
Those who would give up liberty in exchange for security and DRM should switch to Microsoft Palladium!
Could it be Nielsen doesn't have the best numbers?
From their press release, I can't tell how they arrived at their numbers.
I also wonder about their "unique visitor" term.
It seems to me that file sharing admins would have a pretty good idea of the traffic on their networks.
Hard to really know what's going on with so little information.
.sigs are for post^Hers.
I wonder if the RIAA would continue with this activity if the first few people they targeted with $150,000 fines were downloading songs they already owned ...
Agreed, if I never intended to buy the item in the first place how can you be losing any money on me if I copy it? You'd only be losing money if I stuffed my credit card back in my wallet and didn't make a planned purchase and copied instead. Counting every copy as a lost sale is bogus to say the least.
I personally admit to having installed AutoCAD without having bought it but I never could have justified buying it in the first place due to the high cost so how could they say they lost a sale?
However, you can achieve a similar end result by merely buying used media. It's rather nice being able to "stick it to the RIAA" in a manner that no airchair moralist can reasonably complain about.
Ha! You underestimate the power of your average armchair moralist!
I consider buying used to be the equivalent of just downloading something. Either way, you're denying the original creators fair compensation.
Of course, you buy used, and you're out $5-$10 on top of the damage to your Karma. I'd rather just download.
I know you can use VPNs to get much of this functionality now, but it would be better for all concerned if all the traffic were encrypted and obfuscated, not just that of people with something to hide, or those who like to thumb their nose at authority.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Meaning, offering the contents of my HD to anybody I know the old fashioned way: I go to their house with the HD and they copy it to their machines. I've already "merged" my collection with others and have about 60GB of music, which will last for quite a while ... at least until the music biz gets their act together and offers everything they put out in digital, unprotected form. I'm not buying another CD until then. And with all this music, I have no need to go on a P2P network and risk my ass. Just going through all the stuff on my drive will take years.
The biggest problem I currently have with suing individuals for copyright infringement is that the infringers are being charged a lot more than their individual infringements had been worth.
No offense to anyone who thinks one infringer's damage may equate roughly to $150,000, but I don't think so. I think it would be difficult to prove that millions of dollars worth of infringements, spread out over tens of millions of infringers, would equate to even $100 from even the worst infringers.
You can't put everyone's bill on the one guy you catch. That's like throwing in a couple of unsolved murders into a serial killer's list just to say the killer has been caught. That isn't justice.
Creationist: My guess is valid because I say so and because My Book says so and because My Book was written thousands of years ago and nothing since is as good.
.... that's a difficult choice ... now if you want to argue faith, go ahead, but don't argue logic based on a book full of contradictions written thousands of years ago.
Scientist: My guess is valid because of these reasons, this logic, this immense mesh of other reasons which all hang together by logic.
Hmmmm
Infuriate left and right
Recording Industry Association of America
1330 Connecticut Avenue, N.W., Suite 300
Washington, D.C. 20036
(202) 775-0101
You know... Incase you want to stop over and say hi...
That would by why things like carbon dating aren't used to date fossils, as they are way too old and the fact that they're comprised of various minerals, not organic compounds, pretty much means there ain't all that much carbon to be found in them. Since C-14 decays too rapidly, you aren't gonna get more than a few thousand years out of that method. C-14 dating is great for archaeology, not for palentology. Imagine trying to measure the distance from New York to LA, and your only tool is a yardstick that has been solidly bolted into the ground in Times Square and you get why it's futile to use C-14 to date something that's millions of years old. And for Creationists, I think they consider God to be a complete idiot.
common sense: noun
What those who are ignorant of the subject matter think; usually wrong.
Uh, Newton, Einstein, other big-name physicists thought that by figuring out the rules of nature, they were getting a glimpse of the face of God. Newton spent a lot more of his life arguing obscure religious arguments than he ever spent on physics and the theory of the calculus.
Science assumes that the universe is governed by a set of rules, that these rules are the same everywhere, and that the rules don't change. If you (or anyone) can demonstrate that's not true, science will accept that and continue. Can't honestly say the same for religion.