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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.
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.
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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.
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
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!
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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.
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
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.