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

Pretty common scenario

[mao che minh]

Television evangelist Pat Robertson was overheard stating that the process of natural evolution was impossible, given that it's findings lie outside the idea of Christian creation dogma. All the while scientists the world over continue to compile and test bodies of evidence for it's many intricate workings. Despite all of the evidence to the contrary, Pat Robertson's opinion remains firm.

If Pat Robertson were to tell the truth, he might loose some of his marketshare.

The file sharing companies want to display a facade that their business is as strong as ever, even in the face of the new RIAA litigations and attempts to prevent the further theft of their products. Saying otherwise might hurt their (the file sharing companies) potential advertising campaign or the planned "pay-per-play/download" strategies.

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:Pretty common scenario

[tuba_dude]

Insightful question, a whole lot better than the usual 'If evolution's true, why are monkeys still around?' sort of question. However, I'm slightly confused. You are right that evolution is apparently and inexplicably random, but you also seem to be asking for proof to backup the theory of evolution. Sorry, that was badly worded. You ask for proof to support the theory of evolution, but you accept creation without any? I don't mean to troll, but could you point to a paper or two with proof that explicitly details intellegent creation?

Re:Pretty common scenario

[aardvarkjoe]

Creationism isn't science, and thus doesn't need proof. The theory of evolution, on the other hand, is science, and so requires proof. The whole creationism/evolution thing would just go away if people realized that the two are orthogonal rather than opposing, and abandoned the notion that everyone has to believe as they do.

Re:Pretty common scenario

[Copid]

I love it when the word "statistical" comes up a half dozen times in a post that contains absolutely no statistics. My spider sense is tingling...

Re:Pretty common scenario

[technothrasher]

I love this topic when it comes up, because inevitably both sides are wrong.

You probably want to watch the dogma there. You might find yourself sitting on top of a false dichotomy.

Evolution is fairly obvious on a micro scale, but few people seem to admit it has serious problems at a macro scale.

Really? I've always found evolution to be extremely unobvious until you look at it on a macro scale

If you look at evolution of all species over time, a lot of statistical anomalies appear.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'statistical anomalies' without some kind of context. Examples, please.

Some special[sic] evolve simultaneously, rather than participate in an evolutionary arms race that "pure evolution" would imply.

I don't know what "pure evolution" is, but the "arms race" you mention is but an interesting possible side effect of evolution. There's nothing in traditional theory that would preclude 'simultaneous' adaptation.

Pick up a book by Richard Dawkins some time, you'll be glad you did.

Re:Pretty common scenario

[Copid]

That's the kind of thing the original poster was laughing at. Sure, it's possible, but why opt for that explanation rather than for the simpler one? The simple explanation for me is that I have a life history from birth until today. I graduated from high school, went to college, got a job, etc. The less reasonable one is that I was born in a laboratory in adult form yesterday, and my memories were implanted by an evil corporation bent on controlling the world. Sure, it could be true, but does it sound logical for me to say that that since I can't be totally sure of either one, both of them are equally valid theories?

It looks like there were dinosaurs a long time ago. Why prefer to believe that an omnipotent being made it look that way to trick you when you could simply believe that there were dinosaurs a long time ago?

Re:Pretty common scenario

[glitch23]

And if the scientists were to look at the evidence from a different point of view then they might loose some marketshare too and people would have to wonder who to believe. You can have all the evidence in the world to prove something right or wrong but if you don't interpret the evidence correctly it won't help. There are big steps missing in the story of evolution that scientists can't fill in.

Re:Pretty common scenario

[DrFrob]

I know this is offtopic, but you simply can't deny evolution any more than you can deny calculus. Evolution is a mathematical consequence of a system that has components which (a) compete to reproduce and (b) during reproduction, incur imperfect copying of a genotype. If you don't believe me, read up on genetic algorithms (you could start here with Lenski in Nature vol 423, 2003 pg 139).

Now, of course you can deny that evolution has happened (if you believe, for instance, that God created the universe yesterday). But you can't deny that evolution is happening. Otherwise, you're completely deluding yourselves.

On that note, perhaps in Arkansas they could teach evolution in a math, rather than in biology where the fuss is going on.

Re:Pretty common scenario

[DrFrob]

A parting shot. When I mentioned this to a die-hard creationist, he related to me the ultimate loophole: God makes the rules. Therefore, God can (did?) create a universe where evolution is considered fact rather than theory.

I'd take a theory over a fact any day. For example: "Pregnant man gives birth." Now that's a fact, but I sure as hell wouldn't bet any money on it being true. A theory, however, has evidence to support it's claims. The theory of relativity, for instance, has been verified over and over again by precise atomic clocks, the bending of light by the sun, particle physics, etc.

"Oh it's just a theory," are claims made by the ignorant who are unwilling to accept the truth.

Re:Pretty common scenario

[I(rispee_I(reme]

If God could design the world to deceive its inhabitants, surely he could've put the blindly faithful here in order to test the wits and integrity of the rest of us.

Re:Pretty common scenario

[ravenousbugblatter]

One should not assume that evolutionists believe evolution to be perfect. First of all, anyone who knows jack about science knows that evolution is not perfect, imperfect, or anywhere in-between. It is simply a response to an environmental pressure that can allow a species to adapt. No adaption and the species dies. On top of which, the adaption is not sought after -- it's usually a freak genetic mutation that happens to confer an advantage. So to say that evolution is perfect is to miss the point entirely.

As to how evolution has led to the creatures that exist today, all by tiny little steps, all one needs to do is grasp the amount of time involved (a few more millenia than 6000 years).

Re:Pretty common scenario

[RackinFrackin]

you simply can't deny evolution any more than you can deny calculus.

This statement is completely erroneous. Evolution is science, and calculus is mathematics. Science is empirical, mathematics is not. Science has theories that are based on observations. Math has theorems, each of which has a proof. Science is developed in a top-down approach (observation -> hypothesis -> theory), while math is developed in a bottom-up approach (axioms -> conjecture -> theorem). Theories may have overwhelmingly convincing evidence, but they lack proof. Denying a theory
only requires one to posit a different explanation of the observations. Mathematical theorems on the other hand have rock solid proof, and denying the validity of those proofs requires one to deny the validity of logic itself.

Re:Pretty common scenario

[CrowScape]

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.

Re:Pretty common scenario

[CrowScape]

And since chemistry is simply a subset of physics, and biology a subset of chemistry, sociology a subset of biology, etc., then all science leads back to math.

Re:Pretty common scenario

[forgotmypassword]

You show me where that squid (or whatever) grew wings. You show me significant, non-fatal mutations of anything. You show me exactly how a pool of glop from wherever turns into life at all, much less the complicated being that you are...apparently skipping intermediary forms.

No guesses. No speculation. FACT. Pure and simple.

I find it very strange that you require vast amounts of evidence and logic to support a belief in some natural process that has almost no relevance to your everyday life.

Meanwhile you support a belief in God that is comparatively unjustified. Your belief in God is far more meaningful than your belief in evolution. But you have constrained the belief of evolution to such a level that it would be impossible to believe in God under the same constraints. I find that to be unbalanced.

You are an emotional thinker. Life is easier for you if your belief system feels right, than if it is logically consistant. That is your basis. You will never be able to come to terms with a logical thinker. Neither one of you can possibly argue to the other's satisfaction.

Re:Pretty common scenario

[Zog The Undeniable]

Most photographers would argue that the eye is a pretty duff piece of hardware (compare a quality 7-element photographic lens). However, it usually does its job perfectly because it's connected to a rather powerful image manipulation computer - your brain. This compensates for the optical aberrations.

The really duff designs in humans are the neck (which is always vulnerable in a fight), the teeth (which don't last a lifetime without regular "servicing") and the close proximity of windpipe and oesophagus, which leads to many untimely deaths from underchewed food.

Re:Pretty common scenario

[darien]

Until you can, you have no better basis or argument than creationists that you ridicule do.

Read this. It's a lot more compelling than anything you've said today.

The evolutionist argument is effectively "no, of course we can't prove that this is what happened millions of years before any of us was born; but look, here's a vast corpus of evidence that supports that theory."

The creationist rebuttal is generally along the lines of "aha, so you can't prove it! So it's equally likely that the world was sneezed, fully-formed out of the nose of the Great Green Arkleseizure."

Re:Pretty common scenario

[plenTpak]

I'm a Christian. This means a lot of things, but it's also misunderstood a lot, even to many Christians themselves. Some common misconceptions are that you can earn your way into heaven; or that although miracles used to occur often, they don't anymore; or that Christianity and science, by default, don't mix.

The first two don't really have much bearing on this thread, but the last one does, since most of the comments here address creationism and evolution, and you can almost see a thick wall between what most people assume are mutually exclusive scenarios.

Here is something that both sides might want to consider: If God created the universe, and the rules that govern it, it would seem to make sense that when he does things, he would do them through the natural mechanisms that he created. Why make rules if you aren't going to follow them? So wouldn't it be possible that evolution was the natural mechanism that God used to create all the life on Earth? I'm not saying that this is what happened, but the fact is that as humans, we don't know everything. Keeping an open mind lets us find ideas to test and refine, which leads to the truth. The Bible doesn't teach us to have blind faith -- it teaches us to have faith . And knowledge of the truth strengthens faith.

By the way, regarding the drop in file sharing... people have already mentioned a lot of plausible reasons (vacation (summer), freenet, etc... oh yeah, and lawsuits). If we could see the usage statistics over the past few years, we might have better insight as to the reason for the drop (especially if they included statistics for many networks). www.redshiftresearch.com might have something useful, but you'd have to e-mail them to request data... does anyone know of anything better?

Re:Pretty common scenario

[F452]

Interesting, but I just want to consider one point: "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)."

I like that. We should also point out that our skin is not ideal, as it can't turn away bullets.

Re:Pretty common scenario

[Vindicator9000]

good point. How do you know that they can't both be equally true AND equally false. Heinlein seemed to believe in at least the possibility of 'world as myth.' Granted, I think it's bunk, but it's interesting bunk.

Re:Pretty common scenario

[F452]

But is it true that people had much better teeth before we started eating all the sweet stuff?

Re:Pretty common scenario

[RackinFrackin]

Physics in particular rarely draws hypotheses from observation. In fact, observation is often used to confirm or deny previously held conjecture.

You missed my point completely. I was merely saying that science and pure mathematics (including calculus) are different because science is empirical and math is not. Science tries to explain the world - math (pure math anyway) doesn't explain anything except itself.

You obviously agree that physics and all other sciences rely on observation to determine the validity of theories. Absolute proof is not usually (if ever) obtained. Mathematics is different - when a theorem is proved, so long as the logic is correct, it is an absolute truth.

The real difference comes in here: Physics attempts to model the external world. Pure (not applied) mathematics makes no such attempt. For a mathematical theorem to be correct, it must be consistent with the axioms of the system and the logic must be correct. For a scientific theory to be valid, it must be have correct logic AND be consistent with observations.

Just because the remedial science you did at school...

This is a paragraph of flamebait. I'll give it no further response.

Evolution has its basis in statistical mathematics. You could call it "The probability and direction of macro-change via random micro-change in highly-populated, competing systems."

This doesn't change the fact that evolution is based on observation, and is thus not a branch of pure mathematics.

Re:Pretty common scenario

[silicon not in the v]

> Creationism isn't science, and thus doesn't need proof. The theory of evolution, on the other hand, is science, and so requires proof. Hm, I never realized that difference of one method of belief requiring proof and one not. It's actually unrelated to the specific belief, but whether it is based on "faith" or "science". I know that creationism is based on a faith in God that will not be proven to most people who do not have a relationship with Him. The first step of faith to belive in Him can be hard, without evidence to support it, but once you've seen Him work in your own life and other Christians, it's not hard to believe anymore. I'm going to use the word "pure evolution", meaning specifically evolution without any action from God because that's the position I'm comparing. If people want to believe in pure evolution as a matter of faith, one can't really say much to that because they are just two opposing views with no scientific evidence, so there is no proving or disproving of them. If, however, pure evolutionists say, as they frequently do, that "there's evidence" to prove evolution, then they are putting it in the realm of fact/proof/science, and that needs to be challenged for them to demonstrate the mentioned proof.

Re:Pretty common scenario

[mfrank]

You don't know anybody who's had a detached retina? I have a friend whose retina became detached while he was driving down the friggin road. It doesn't require being pummelled by Mike Tyson.

Re:Pretty common scenario

[ShavenYak]

I think the original poster was looking for mutations so drastic that they would be regarded as new species. Which, of course, you'll never be able to show him because speciation takes a long, long time, and there is no clean point at which species A becomes species B.

Incidentally, dyslexia isn't necessarily genetic, it can be acquired through damage to the cerebellum (in utero or even in adulthood). Conjoined twins aren't a genetic mutation either, they occur when a fertilized ovum splits almost but not quite completely into two individuals.

Only on /. could an article about the RIAA and file-sharing turn into a creation/evolution debate.

Re:Pretty common scenario

[ShavenYak]

If we still lived completely naturally, with no sweets, I imagine that even without brushing, our teeth would remain in good shape for our complete ~30 year lifespan. I'd rather have candy, need a toothbrush, and not have to worry about being eaten by lions, myself.

Re:Pretty common scenario

[Copid]

so the simple explanation is that we underwent millions of years of tiny changes and genetic reinforcement of desired traits through natural selection without dying out or ending up dramatically different than we are, rather than the complex explanation that someone created us that way? Ohhhh, thanks for clearing that up.

Or, articulated in another way: The simple explanation is that things got to be the way they are through mechanisms that we have observed, following the rules that the universe appears to follow. This, rather than the explanation that for a brief time, some external force that we've never observed was applied and changed everything in miraculous ways and made it look like everything was based on rules.

I'm not sure why people consider an omnipotent being who does things that we've never observed and then attempts to make it look like everything occurred through observable natural mechanisms is a simpler explanation than the idea that things simply occurred through observable natural mechanisms. I suppose it's all in your definition of simple.

Re:Pretty common scenario

[mfrank]

Understanding God is easy. Man created God in his own image. Understanding science is hard. Humans evolved to rationalize, not to be rational.

Re:Pretty common scenario

[mfrank]

It's not God testing our faith. It's Satan trying to corrupt our souls ;)

Re:Pretty common scenario

[mfrank]

Large parts of the movie "The Final Countdown" are true too. Except the part about the Nimitz going back in time to just before Pearl Harbor. But the Pearl Harbor parts were all true.

Re:Pretty common scenario

[cnoocy]

Were squid to take up boxing, one would see far fewer prematurely terminated careers due to detached retinae.

You just made my day. Thank you.

Re:Pretty common scenario

[mixmasta]

duff? lame?

Re:Pretty common scenario

[hesiod]

> There are big steps missing in the story of evolution that scientists can't fill in

There are even bigger steps missing in the story of religion that the leaders of the respective religions can't fill in. At least not without relying completely on a book written by people a long time ago.

Scientists have looked at the evidence in many, many ways. They have come up with a reasonable explanation for the evidence they have without filling in the spaces with God. Just because there is missing information does not mean the whole theory is flawed, just that there are unknowns in it.

Re:Pretty common scenario

[hesiod]

> people have already mentioned a lot of plausible reasons (vacation (summer)

Hmm, that's an interesting idea -- we've heard of Univ. students being targetted by the RIAA, since they share large numbers of files over the network links that go into their homes (dorms) where they spend the most time, usually. They go home & go back to 56K, ergo no more file sharing. I think you just found the error in their thinking. Very good.

Re:Pretty common scenario

[ShavenYak]

Evolutionists' arguments are invalid. They claim that they can't prove something because it hasn't happened in an observable fashion yet. However, they offer evidence that it is currently happening.

Of course, I could turn this around and say Creationists' arguments are invalid. They claim that they can't 'prove' creationism to me because I'm lacking faith, but they offer 'evidence' in the form of some myths developed by early hunter-gatherer societies 4,000 years ago. That's like saying the the tooth fairy doesn't visit professional hockey players because they don't believe in her anymore, yet you offer evidence that she exists by showing me a quarter you claim you got from her when you were 6. Ridiculous.

Just because narrow-minded fundamentalist religious fanatics refuse to admit that the theory of evolution is the best scientific explanation for the current diversity of life on earth and the fossil record, that does not make "evolutionists'" arguments invalid. I'll bet you any sum of money you care to name that if we observed a speciation event tomorrow, the majority of creationists would say something like "God caused it to happen this one time to test the faithful. I still don't believe that evolution nonsense. I'm made out of dust and God's phlegm and proud of it!"

Re:Pretty common scenario

[ShavenYak]

Anyway, what I think we're all missing here is that disproving one side does not prove the other. We're all too closed-minded.

Good point, although I don't think I've ever attempted to 'prove' evolution by disproving creation. Of course, disproving Creation is basically impossible, because the theory of Creation includes an omnipotent power whose actions don't have to obey any physical laws or even logical constraints. To be fair, the same might be said of Evolution, since scientific theories are always modified when new evidence is found that shows flaws in the old theory.

For all we know, there are innumerable other possibilities for the creation of life in the universe.

You're right. For all we know, the universe and its origins might be exactly as described in Hindu scripture. There are even Hindu creationists who fiercely debate the scientifically-accepted age of the Earth, because they believe it is much OLDER.

I believe in Creation because I have faith in God. You have faith in science.

Actually, I have faith in God too, for what that's worth. What I don't have, though, is faith that the first two chapters of Genesis are historically and scientifically accurate accounts. They're incredibly old, passed down for generations by word-of-mouth, then have been translated multiple times since first being written, by people far removed from the actual events. That's not a recipe for accuracy.

Besides, if the purpose of the Bible is to lead us to Jesus and save our souls, what does it matter if it has a little bit of myth or metaphor in it (after all, parables were Jesus's favorite teaching method, and He IS God, so who's to say the whole Creation story isn't a parable)? Whether God just said "Let there be such and such" or whether He used basically the same processes scientists believe occurred, the point is that He created us, and we are the ones who cause sin.

Regarding "faith in science", yes, I have faith in science. Or I should say, the scientific method. I feel fairly confident that by making observations about the world, logically putting together hypotheses, and testing them, we can learn a great deal about how the world works.

That's not the same, however, as having faith in Biblical Creation - because the Bible is set in stone, whereas scientific theories 'evolve' over time to better fit newly discovered evidence and new experiments. Modern evolutionary theory is pretty different from Darwin's, and probably more accurate.

While I can see how this might be considered a cop-out (oh, we found the holes in their theory, so they changed it), it really isn't. That's the way science works. When Einstein found situations where Newtonian mechanics didn't properly explain the Universe, he formulated the theory of relativity to explain the discrepancies. Now we have a better theory of how certain things work. That doesn't mean Newton was wrong, he did the best he could with what he had to work with, but we have better now. In the same way, if evolutionary theory changes, it doesn't mean it's wrong, it just means we understand it a bit more thoroughly now.

Gee, it looks like this post went full circle back to the beginning - disproving a theory doesn't mean proving its competitor. I guess that means it's time to quit.

Re:Pretty common scenario

[Copid]

Yes, they are equally valid, but notice that one and only one of them is true. The same goes for the evolution vs. Creation debate. We'll all see, some day, who was right; but just in case we Creationists are right, why even take the chance that being wrong could throw you into the hands of a righteously angry God? Might as well join up with us now, so you don't face that chance.

False dichotomy. How do you know it's a choice between evolution and an angry god? Any theological decision risks the wrath of an angry god who doesn't agree with you if you happen to be wrong. What if the real truth is that there's a god out there who will punish you for all eternity for being a creationist? Or damnation for not worshipping O.J. Simpson? You might as well go with what you actually think is right rather than adopting a particular theology "just in case." Anyway, if you're only believing in God "just in case" don't you think that He, as an omniscient being, sees right through the BS?

Taking a poll

[ranolen]

How many of you have slowed or stopped your file sharing???

Re:Taking a poll

[Oliver Wendell Jones]

I'm still downloading, but I'm moving the files out of my shared directory once noone else is downloading it from me. I guess that makes me a wussy lamer leech. :-(

Re:Taking a poll

[DeathPenguin]

I don't think the Slashdot crowd has the same mentality toward legal issues involving the RIAA as normal users. Your poll is going to have an unusually high number of people voting in favor of file swapping.

Re:Taking a poll

[Pixies]

Nah. I've always been cautious enough in my activities that coming up on an industry hitlist would be a ridiculous fluke. Plus I don't live in the US.

Re:Taking a poll

[BlueTrin]

ranolen said:

How many of you have slowed your file sharing???

Yah I've slowed my download to 4kB/s, so they won't find me out of the other 1000000 AOL-kazaa 1337 d00ds ... I also share only pr0n clips and fake game ISOs and some very expensive gfx apps that I would never use apart to show my 1337ness. I even installed some spyware to get some nice offers so I am sure that I'll disappear in the crowd, but damn getting movies is so slow now and watching them too

Re:Taking a poll

[Blakis]

I've been using Rhapsody for several months now. It's fast, has a decent selection, and you don't have to worry about the RIAA. It also feels more "right", since you're paying for something that obviously has value (10 bucks a month) instead of just getting it for free.

Re:Taking a poll

[JudgeFurious]

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!

Re:Taking a poll

[jedidiah]

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.

Re:Taking a poll

[brilliant-mistake]

I've stopped sharing since I heard about the threat of lawsuits. The odds of getting caught might be long, but getting free stuff isn't important enough to me to risk getting caught. I've bought lots of CDs lately, but most are from indie labels, and I don't mind giving them my money.

Re:Taking a poll

[Fux the Pengiun]

Well, that's just excellent, then. Transfer them to ogg, because, that's an OPEN STANDARD, and we should only steal people's music with OPEN STANDARDS. See, then it's okay, because it helps "the community" and all that.

I'm surprised this story was posted in the "media" section, actually. I figured it would grace the "Your Rights Online" section for sure. We usually see this sort of thing about copyright holders trying to halt the theft of their work in that section. That, somehow, when somebody tries to enforce the law, it must be violating your rights. Forget the copyright holder...it's Your Rights Online, not theirs.

These programs, Kazaa, Nuttela, etc, were written specifically for the purpose of illegally downloading music. I know they have a few other uses, as well, but that wasn't what the authors were thinking when they wrote them. The thought was "I want to steal music." Then they release it with a *wink wink, nudge nudge* "It's for distributing my garage band's tiny garbage to our global village!" When they get called on it, when the RIAA exposes the man behind the curtain, all of a sudden it's about my "rights."

Right...I forgot about that "right" you have to get Britney Spear's latest drivel for free. Of course you have a right to works of somebody else! We talk about rights and free speech and all that, and we rationalize our thievery away. "The RIAA is evil, so it's okay to steal!" "They rip off the artists anyway!" Cognitive Dissonance. So, if RIAA doesn't give enough money to the artists for their work, that makes it morally acceptable for you to give them nothing, then, right? That's how you justify that pirate mp3, isn't it? But the artist sure isn't going to see a thing from that.

Really, why are we even discussing Kazaa on this site? I mean, isn't Slashdot the home of Free Software? Aren't these closed, proprietary formats? Isn't that bad? Oh, wait, I guess it's okay sometimes...like it's cool to like Apple because they're all so nice. I guess I'm just not enlightened enough to see the difference. Maybe a member of the Slashdot 31337ist intelligencia can inform me.

[/rant] good god...sorry for the rant, I just get so sick of seeing this gloating on /. over and over again...

Re:Taking a poll

[toddestan]

I haven't cut back, though I don't do much file sharing in the first place (it's much more productive to hang around alt.binaries, and leech). I did consider changing what I share from mp3's to music videos, as the RIAA seems to not care too much about those, but in the end I didn't. The way I figure it, the RIAA is probably going to try to nail those people who leave their machines on the network 24/7 first, but who knows.

Re:Taking a poll

[CrackedButter]

I have only just last week got broadband...so sorry if i seem far behind...plus i have very picky tastes when it comes to porn so forgive me if i don't download everything there is...oh yeah...i use a mac as well. but as long as i have futurama on disk i am content

Re:Taking a poll

[harlows_monkeys]

One cannot *steal* software,movies or music. They are an infinitely reproducable thing.

By that argument, one can't steal a credit card number, or any other information. Care to post your credit card number?

Re:Taking a poll

[vadim_t]

And it would be right. The credit card number would simply be duplicated.

Now, the money from the account would indeed be stolen since the original owner would lose it.

Re:Taking a poll

[emarkp]

True, but you can commit fraud with a credit card number and other information.

Re:Taking a poll

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:Taking a poll

[vTalon]

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.

Re:Taking a poll

[Master of Transhuman]

Which is relevant to the issue how?

P2P is not fraud - no one has ever even suggested it is. No one is offering anything on P2P networks under false pretences (except of course for bogus downloads by trolls, leeches, Madonna...and the RIAA)

Re:Taking a poll

[EzInKy]

I'm surprised this story was posted in the "media" section, actually. I figured it would grace the "Your Rights Online" section for sure. We usually see this sort of thing about copyright holders trying to halt the theft of their work in that section.

Somebody stole a copyright holders work? Well, isn't it lucky for them that so many people have been hard at work archiving these files just in case such a tragedy occurred. Perhaps if they ask nicely someone would even be nice enough to send them a copy to replace what they lost.

Re:Taking a poll

[hkmwbz]

REALLY?!

Someone alert the FBI, CIA, KGB, USSR, RIAA, MPAA and whatever they are called! If credit cards can be used to help you steal money, they must be STOPPED IMMEDIATELY!

Re:Taking a poll

[DoomHaven]

I consider buying used to be the equivalent of just downloading something. Either way, you're denying the original creators fair compensation.

Ha! And buying from the RIAA is not denying the original creators fair compensation?

How is this - I mail one check to Band A for $20-$30. In return, I get to download all their music for free for the rest of my life. I get music, they get better compsensation then they would have if I just bought their CDs.

Some armchair moralist you are! :D

Re:Taking a poll

[MyHair]

Care to post your credit card number?

I do all the time. I buy things at retail stores and online stores, and they use my cc # to get to my money.

It's not the cc# I care about, it's my money.

Re:Taking a poll

[Anonvmous Coward]

"How many of you have slowed or stopped your file sharing???"

I stopped file sharing when I heard of Rhapsody. The short version is that I pay $10 a month, and I can listen to any of their 300,000 songs in their database as many times as I want as long as I'm subscribed. The downside is that I can only hear the music when I'm connected to the net, the plus-side is that the music comes down quickly and is easy to find. For $1 I can burn a track to CD for use in the car or something.

That's not a one-size-fits-all solution, so I don't expect everybody to think that's wondeful. But, as I said, no more P2P for me, this service is better. Poor Jack Valenti, he claimed you can't compete with free. Idiot.

Re:Taking a poll

[duck_prime]

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?

It depends on why you bought it. If you are a hobbyist who just likes to draw wireframe diagrams of desks & the like, you may not have deprived anyone of a sale. The whole business still does smack of sneaking into the theater, though.

If you are someone who for whatever reason simply must draw CADdy diagrams, you have deprived someone of a sale. Here's the catch: it's probably not AutoCAD ... it's WimpyCAD, the low-powered low-priced alternative you would have ended up buying if you couldn't afford AutoCAD.

Re:Taking a poll

[Daetrin]

Now let's get with the $5 DVD's and the $29 Photoshop people! Chop Chop!

I actually had the exact same experience with audiobooks. For the last month or two i've been considering buying audiobooks so i'd have something interesting to listen to during me 30+ minute commute. However if you go to Borders or Barnes and Noble or Amazon.com they cost a bloody fortune. $30 is about as low as they get, and seeing prices up in the $70s and $80s is not uncommon.

I bought one cheap audiobook (A Wizard of Earthsea) and was impressed, but the price kept putting me off. I was seriously considering looking around on filesharing systems to see if i could grab mp3s of them from somewhere. Most of the tiles i want are books i already own anyways, so i wouldn't have felt too guilty about doing so.

Then i discovered that i could buy audio files of the same books from Audible.com. Theoretically they have the same list price as the tape version, which is insane, but just about all the files there are marked down to a reasonable price, and if you're willing to sign up for a monthly account you can get any two books a month for $20.

I signed up for the one year membership since after looking through their library i could find at least 24 books i wanted and that way i could get a free mp3 player. (Yeah, it's a piece of junk player, but if i'm going to sign up for a year anyways...)

So the book-on-CD people made $30 or $40 off of me once, and then scared me away with the horible prices and the lack of availability of the books i was interested in. Audible.com put things at a reasonable price and just made $250 off me. And i would have never taken the time to find Audible.com if the CD people were pricing things at a reasonable price of $20 or so per book. (About what i'm paying now when you consider the price of CDs.)

Re:Taking a poll

[The Dobber]

Shhh, you'll confuse the diehards.

Re:Taking a poll

[The Dobber]

Hint: Posting as an Anonymous Coward does not help your case.

Re:Taking a poll

[Izago909]

No, by his argument you can only steal tangible objects. If you can hold it in your hands, or touch it, you can steal it. Since music is sound, and sound is vibrations in air molecules; what is there to steal? That is why people use words like copyright, patent, or trademark infringement.

Welcome to Earth. Please check your logic at the door. Anyone using or attempting to use logic shall be branded a liberal and slandered in the court of public opinion. You have been warned!

Our illustrious leader, hard at work.

Re:Taking a poll

[IBitOBear]

Actually, (legally) one *CAN* *NOT* "steal" a credit card number unless one stole the card itself.

The "theft" happens when the number is used to *STEAL* the money. In that latter case, the thing being stolen is the money, because the rightful owner of the money is deprived of its use.

The fact that your local news uses common words to talk to their audience (which they presume to be filled with fifth-grade-at-most educated cretins 8-) dosn't make those words correct.

When one copies music or movies (etc) one is not depriving the "owner" of anything, so it isn't theft. Period. If they (the copyright holders et al) could *prove* that you would have bought if you didn't get for free, then the case might be made for some sort of economic undermining, but barring that, the words don't legally apply.

That is why persons are charged with "copyright *infringement*" and not "theft."

The slippery slope (probably) started with the idea of "theft of service" with respect to cable TV. This case is incredibly nit-picky and actually should have had other words applied to it. (You are reducing the signal strength of the network by your use... hmm... still seems weak for "theft" 8-)

IANAL

Re:Taking a poll

[anagama]

Might I suggest your local public library? The price is better, and you don't even have to keep them hanging around once you've heard them. ;-)

Re:Taking a poll

[ball-lightning]

I'm waiting for the windows version of iTunes myself, although I'm a bit dissapointed that the RHCP decided they would not allow their music on the service.

Re:Taking a poll

[CrowScape]

I have. Of course, I've also stopped buying CDs. Wonder if there's a connection?

Re:Taking a poll

[CrowScape]

So, then if I own Rhino 3D as well as Bryce does that mean if I pirate 3D Studio Max or Maya it's OK as A) I would never have bought the software anyways and B) I haven't cost their cheaper competitors a sale? Thanks for clearing that up. Now it's time for me to go and find a copy on Kazaa!

Re:Taking a poll

[anthony_dipierro]

Why would slashdotters stop their file sharing? They were only sharing files from independent artists who had given permission.

On a serious note, I stopped years ago. All the new stuff coming from the RIAA-affiliated artists is crap, and I have no problem buying CDs from non-RIAA affiliated artists. And I still have my huge collection from my downloading days with hits from the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s. And since the statute of limitations has run out, there's nothing the RIAA can do about it, either.

Re:Taking a poll

[ShavenYak]

Now let's get with the $5 DVD's and the $29 Photoshop people! Chop Chop!

I got Batman (the 1960's version) for $5 at Wal-Mart. Does that count?

who isnt sharing?

[claudius0425]

the truely interesting statistics would cover whether those who are not sharing are primarily uploaders or downloaders, and what there volume was before they stopped.

Re:who isnt sharing?

[Xandar01]

Or even more interesting, did CD sales increase in the same period? Maybe people were busy doing other things.

Re:who isnt sharing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone was stuck so long in the airport security lines over the Fourth of July Weekend that they're just now getting out and haven't been able to run kazaa in two weeks.

Re:who isnt sharing?

[joe_bruin]

well, let's ask, who is sharing?
a lot of those who are sharing are college students. the riaa made the "we're suing everyone" claim just as most college students go on spring break. many people that were sharing over their dorm's high speed internet connection are home now, stuck with their parents' dialup accounts. file sharing does historically decline in the (northern hemisphere) summer months, so a decline in file sharing would not be at all unexpected.

Re:who isnt sharing?

[Izago909]

My school did us an amazing favor. Since it is such a large university (+40K students during reg. seasons) it attracts almost daily threat letters from the RIAA/MPAA. So they blocked traffic outbound from the campus for various standard ports. Smart IP tools (ex. packet shapers) then try to make up for what is missed. The result is that most downloads absolutely fly since most P2P traffic stays on the campus network; making it much faster, and harder for the two bodies to snoop in on since the network can't be accessed off campus (except thru VPN). Of course, there are some who are smart enough to work our way off campus if we can't find something.

I was bitching a few years ago when they spent all this money upgrading the campus backbone from 100Mbs to multimode fiber. I have since withdrawn my complaints. I like watching shareaza when it starts to fly with a total DL speed of around 5120Kbps. Sometimes it goes even higher. Now I'd like to see them upgrade all the data ports from half-duplex 10Mb connections to 100Mb.

I remember the old napster block getting people mad until the school paper published a small article about napigator. It was an alumni article written by a man whose $100 million offer to the RIAA to ignore our schools P2P traffic was harshly refused. A suit was file against the paper until several highly respected and dedicated law professors convinced them it wasn't in their best interest. The prospect of these tenured Profs. working pro bono to defend their schools free press must have made a financial statement to the RIAA/MPAA.

Re:who isnt sharing?

[indros]

I think it's also interesting to note, that whenever other statistics are gathered, it takes a year to before you know whats going on, yet, this time, within, two to three weeks they can already tell?

Something's fishy.

Correction

[sulli]

According to CNN

According to RIAA member AOL Time Warner

Re:Correction

[qslack]

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.

Re:Correction

[sulli]

Nonetheless CNN is responsible for its prominence on the page.

(Of course AOL Time Warner is also the author of Winamp and the original author of Gnutella ... hahaha)

Re:Correction

[MMaestro]

Obviously the Fourth of July weekend caused some serious fluctuation (I, personally, was not on the computer on the 4th and 5th at all) so Nielsen Net Ratings should be taken with a grain of salt, fine.

But answer this, why did Nielsen Net Ratings release this report and/or why did CNN report this without noting the Fourth of July fluctuation? Its one thing to with hold facts (this wasn't necessarily "lying") but its another appear slanted when, quoted from the company webpage, 'NetRatings, Inc. (Nasdaq: NTRT) provides the industry's global standard for Internet and digital media measurement and analysis, offering technology-driven Internet information solutions for media, advertising, ecommerce and financial companies which enable customers to make informed decisions regarding their Internet strategies.'

I donno about you guys, but with a stanted report without giving note to the fluctation would give me some serious doubts in believing reports by Nielsen Net Ratings as an investor.

URL of quote : http://www.nielsen-netratings.com/corp.jsp

Wow who would have guessed

[missing000]

I assumed that everyone just stayed at home and downloaded mp3's on the 4th of July.

I can't belive that many people really had something better to do than surf the web on a holiday.

Re:Wow who would have guessed

[LimeColoredSloth]

On the plus side, most jobs have higher wages on holidays. Even if your job doesn't have it, there are lots of open jobs out there that do.

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:Truly anonymous is the only way to go.

[Istealmymusic]

This looks like a good idea to me. You'll always encounter the Freenet fanboys (especially here on Slashdot) that think its the answer to everything, despite its lack of speed overzealous use of encryption, and content store, which get in the way of people that just want to swap a couple MP3s.

Re:Truly anonymous is the only way to go.

[cait56]

I suppose there are legitimate applications for anonymous sharing. I don't really think that stealing music is one of them. But if you really want to do this, why not simply obscure what is being shared? That way network congestion control is left intact.

Any well administered network will interpret these packets as a Denial of Service attack and kill them anyway.

If you just encrypt the material, nobody will know what you are sharing.

Except of course for the directory you published telling people how to get this really neat download of X.

It doesn't matter how you distribute the material. If you make it possible for strangers to find your content and download it, then it will be possible for the RIAA to be one of those strangers.

Re:Truly anonymous is the only way to go.

[cantabrigian]

Encryption doesn't entirely solve the problem, since the whole point of these systems is, after all, the index. And at some level you can't encrypt that, or else people won't be able to find the files that they want.

Re:Truly anonymous is the only way to go.

[cait56]

That's the point. How you actually share the files is almost irrelevant. If a strangre can find out what you are offering, and successfully download it, then so can the RIAA. Encryption only protects you from opporunistic snooping. But it, and any other form of obfuscation, is irrelevant if you intend to tell the entire world how to get around that obfuscation.

So definitely don't go abusing UDP and messing up network performance. You won't hide from the RIAA, you'll just mess up the network.

Re:Truly anonymous is the only way to go.

[blibbleblobble]

"If you make it possible for strangers to find your content and download it, then it will be possible for the RIAA to be one of those strangers."

Someone who requests a file from you still has no knowledge of whether you hosted the file, or whether you were one part in a line of people involved in sending the file.

When a file is identified only by it's hash, you also have no way of knowing the content, therefore it becomes impossible to ascertain whether any particular node is responsible with knowledge of the file-contents.

If you make a connection for each file, it's possible for a chain of ISPs to trace back connections to an originator. But if you keep an encrypted channel always-open to other nodes, and if you regularly send dummy traffic, then you can only find out the content-host to within a group of nodes which were connected at the time. When the size of this group starts to exceed a few thousand computers, the knowledge that one of them is hosting a certain file becomes less useful.

Perhaps the work already done on MixMaster could be reused in a file-share context, using email messages to pass around content-hash indices, and attached files.

End-to-end encryption is also mighty-useful, but the speed disadvantage is that none of the people who helped to pass you the file will know what they have, they'll be unable to share it, and they won't contribute to the speed of that file in future.

But then, end-to-end encryption is more useful in an instant-messenger context, such as CryptoHeaven; although that system was controlled by one company with an access-charge, we should start to see better, more distributed, free-software implementations of CryptoHeaven in the future.

Re:Truly anonymous is the only way to go.

[cait56]

And how do they get that hash code?

If you publish in a forum available to strangers the hash code and a description of the content then you are publishing that material. The method of delivery is irrelevant. Nobody considers UPS or FEDEX to be publishers

If you only publish the hash code in private emails, then it might even be fair use. It probably won't be worth the RIAA's efforts.

If somebody gathers the descriptions but cleverly claims not to be the publisher they will be on very thin ice. If a reasonable person reading the description that matched the hashcode would know it was copyrighted material, then the index publisher should have known it.

There are clear precedents from flea markets. The organizer of the event cannot be responsible for knowing that every item sold is illegal, but they cannot duck responsibility if most of the items sold are illegal. It reaches a point where anyone should have known.

So ultimately, the controlling point remains making of easily understood public indexes. If you do that, you're violating copyrights, no matter how you distribute. If you don't do that, then you aren't that much of a threat.

Re:Truly anonymous is the only way to go.

[apankrat]

As others pointed out, the idea is neat, but not practical.

True peer-to-peer anonymity requires some sort of proxying and the simpliest and the most generic way to implement it is overlay networks. They however come at pretty steep per-packet overhead price - think Gnutella without direct downloads.

Alternately quasi-anonymity may be obtained with peer-to-group communications similar to what freenet's doing and what another poster suggested below with his multi-source downloads idea.

Unreliable stats

[l810c]

They didn't take into account 4th of July weekend here in the States. A lot of people wnet out of town. 15% decrease with a 3 day weekend is Not a trend or a result of the threat.

Re:Unreliable stats

[ScooterBill]

I saw 4.4M users on Kazaa right after reading this article. That doesn't indicate a drop to me...

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

Re:Unreliable stats

[Polo]

In related news, job attendance dropped 20% compared to the previous week.

Re:Unreliable stats

[Genjurosan]

Let me add one more thought.. "interesting"

I don't think we should assume that there is a direct correlation between my numbers of:

Traveling population during the July 4th Holiday - 13%

and

The numbers of US citizens that use a p2p service - unknown

I don't have any direct numbers that can detail just how many of these 291 million Americans are users of p2p. Let's say it's 50%, then wouldn't the drop be in usage be more like 6.5%? -/+ a few points? I'm sure there is a /.er out there that can help us out.

Granted, this is science at it's worst when speed to posting counts for a better chance of getting a 5 on your post. *grin*

Yet, no matter what, I still believe that the July 4th Holiday IS directly related to a drop. For example; My company processed about 20% less credit applications over the Holiday.

Re:Unreliable stats

[Kwil]

Let me add one more thought.. learn some stats before trying to make a statisical point. You're the one adding a correlation here where none has been shown.

Somehow you seem to think that a person using p2p is half as likely to take a vacation as the general population.

Here, let's break it down to real numbers.
To make it easy, we'll assume a population of 200 people. Of those, half are p2p users.

Now, out of those 200, say 10% decide to go on holiday. So 20 people. Of those 20, how many are p2p users. Well, if we assume a fairly even distribution (ie, that people who share files are no more or less likely to go on vacation) then about half of those who go on vacation will be p2p users.

So let's work that out.. half of the 20 people is 10. Half of the total population of 200 is 100.
10 p2p users out of the 100 total p2p users go on holiday, which just happens to be 10%, exactly the same as the general population.

See, that wasn't so hard, was it?

Re:Unreliable stats

[womby]

I don't have any direct numbers that can detail just how many of these 291 million Americans are users of p2p. Let's say it's 50%, then wouldn't the drop be in usage be more like 6.5%? -/+ a few points? I'm sure there is a /.er out there that can help us out.

if aprox 13% of the whole nation were travaling then aprox 13% of all sample groups would be travaling

if you halve the sample group you dont halve the travaling %

Re:Unreliable stats

[pla]

I don't have any direct numbers that can detail just how many of these 291 million Americans are users of p2p. Let's say it's 50%, then wouldn't the drop be in usage be more like 6.5%? -/+ a few points? I'm sure there is a /.er out there that can help us out.

Okay, the "real" statistical problems here...

IF those people using file-sharing apps form an essentially random cross-section of the population, and if none of those people had any way to engage in their normal filesharing activity while on vacation, then you would see the same percentage drop in filesharing as people going away for the long weekend - though only for the time they stayed away from home, so we have effectively a factor of 3/7ths on top of the raw number of vacationers.

(Quick summary of the above - under idealized conditions, a 13% travel rate that week would translate into a 5.6% drop in filesharing over the course of that week).

I see it as likely that the incidence of filesharers does NOT count as a random selection from the general US population. For the most obvious confounding factor, we could fairly consider both "travel" and "owns a decent computer with a broadband connection" as luxuries heavily dependant on income. This would cause the numbers as presented to increase, in that if a higher percentage of filesharers went on vacation than nonfilesharers.

For another confounding factor, looking at usage patterns over so short a period of time (for measuring social change) as a week carries very little weight. Large short-term fluctuations can occur in almost any measured variable. As an example, last week I had pizza for five meals, about three meals more than in a normal week. Can we attribute that to the RIAA's threats, or just a coincidence?


In order for the RIAA to validly claim their threats "caused" the drop in filesharing, they would need to somehow undo their threat and watch levels return to normal. And repeat that a number of times, with consistent results. And even then, they could only call it "likely" that their threats caused the changes.

Re:Unreliable stats

[Red Warrior]

Yes they did. That's why they chose to report THAT week's stats.
It's the old saying figures don't lie, but liars figutre. They wanted to show a drop in filesharing activity, so that they could FUD people into thinking that those "remaining" would be easier to trace.
It was not accidental. It was a purposeful (mis)use of statistics, based on the belief that the average (or a significant subset thereof) file sharer is stupid.

Re:Unreliable stats

[rowanxmas]

Traveling population during the July 4th Holiday - 13%

Drunk population of the United States during any holiday - 100%.

I am amazed that people were sober enough to find their computers.

Re:Unreliable stats

[jez9999]

Except, of course, when you're actually sitting at the computer.

Re:Unreliable stats

[Animixer]

Dude,

Holidays are AWESOME for downloading! I got like at least 15% more bandwitdh on July 4th!

In other news...

[AKnightCowboy]

IRC channel #mp3-d00dz attendance is up 4500%. Not to mention tons of private FTP servers re-emerging. This isn't really a big deal IMHO. There are millions of songs that have exchanged hands. Just find a friend with tons of songs, setup an FTP server, and trade amongsts yourselves from now on. We've primed the pump, so to speak. ;-)

Re:In other news...

[Fallen_Knight]

Or you can just borrow your friends CDs and rip them. P2P is only 1 way to share music, and now that everyons got a taste of free music, they will find a new way.

Stats

[BWJones]

I would not be surprised if the increase in file-sharing was due to a bunch of new folks coming on-line to see what the hub-bub was about, while the decrease is most certainly due to the folks that were sharing large collections with lots of easily trackable bandwidth that got spooked.

News at 11 ...

[Professor D]

Internet file swapping teens take a break for 4th of July. (15% = 1/7 of the week)

Re:News at 11 ...

[krouic]

That is provided these networks are solely used by american citizens, which is far from the truth.

How were the measurements made.

[expro]

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.

Re:How were the measurements made.

[Politburo]

Most services like to provide you with a "Users Online" metric, so you can feel cool (and you get that sense of security that comes with breaking the law en masse). I wouldn't be surprised if these statistics are based on some guy logging onto Kazaa and writing down the number of Users and Bytes online. At least we know someone was working over the holiday weekend.

Re:How were the measurements made.

[nelsonal]

Neilson Net Ratings is the tv ratings company trying to expand to the new media, it's software that tracks web usage. Sites visited and probably time spent, I don't know what else. They pay you to use it, the pay might be close to a budget ISP info. Why anyone would share anything with a big rating company tracking their moves is beyond me.

Re:How were the measurements made.

[expro]

I wouldn't be surprised if these statistics are based on some guy logging onto Kazaa and writing down the number of Users and Bytes online. At least we know someone was working over the holiday weekend.

And how are these stats (users/bytes online) maintained without a central server, which could also be legally mandated to prevent circulation of specific named files, as was done in the Napster case? I thought these services were P2P distributed. I guess it must be nothing like freenet, which I have used and suspect could not be monitored for number of active users (I have often wondered what, if anything, keeps freenet from arbitrarily splitting into isolated communities).

Re:How were the measurements made.

[Anonymous Coward]

They probably base it on the homepage hits for the filesharing service. Because Nielsen measures website hits i.e Each Filesharing App normally defaults to displaying the respective homepage inside the App. So measuring the number of unique hits against Kazaa.com gives a fair indication of the number of users running the Kazaa application. (This however neglects to take into account Kazaa Lite, etc.)

So while this isn't a truly accurate method, it does give an indication of usage.

Logical counter-claim.

[RyanFenton]

10% claimed up, 15% claimed down, that means we should see a 22.5% up counter-claim.

Unless aces are wild, which could throw the whole thing off.

Ryan Fenton

Wow, who woulda thought...

[Lord_Dweomer]

Filesharing companies claim their userbase increased after being threatened....

Media claims their threats were effective and the userbase decreased...

I mean...neither of these two groups would have an ulterior motive...naaaah...

So, in cases like these, aside from using your own good (or not so good) judgement, how are we supposed to be able to tell who to believe, or if we can't believe either source, where to find a source we CAN believe?

What both articles fail to mention

[Anonymous Coward]

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)

Hmm.

[Renraku]

And just how might the RIAA be able to track the 'heaviest users'? It seems like they're just putting pressure on some team of 'investigators' to point them out.

What happens in false-positivies? When someone's time and money are wasted because the RIAA took them to court over 'suspected piracy'? How much is the RIAA paying this team? My guess is 'more than they're losing to piracy'. Then they can add the two numbers up and profit in lawsuits.

Re:Hmm.

[Elfan]

Yes but everyone using Kazzaa lite has that spoofed.

hm...

[taperkat]

interesting how they fail to note that July 4 was one of the busiest travel holidays of almost the past decade.

Oops, I forgot that statistic that *could* actually mean something in the long term. How silly of me to forget it.

summer time vacations

[pbaker]

Maybe the decrease was because this was the week of July 4th. You know...people are outside setting off fireworks and having BBQ parties, instead sitting inside downloading music. It would be interesting to see if traffic also dropped on the week of July 4th, 2002.

Them File Swappers

[inertia187]

About them File Swappers,
ain't it just wrong?
Goin' all around
swappin' them songs.
Swappin' them Mp3s,
and the movies, what the hey?
Gettin' nasty threads
from the RIAA.
Look at those File Swappers
tradin' up a torrent
Waitin' 'til the fateful day
they burst in with a warrant.
How to be a File Swapper,
don't need a ticket.
Get a P2P app,
click the file and swap it.

Re:Them File Swappers

[inertia187]

Yeah, it's supposed to be threats but threads kind of works too. I'm correcting my personal archive to threats.

Thanks for your eloquent critique.

No problem!

[GuyMannDude]

According to CNN, facing the threat of lawsuits from a music industry trade group, fewer people are using online filesharing applications to swap songs.

Fine, whatever. Just as long as the number of people sharing porn videos doesn't drop!

GMD

That's because I'm using iTunes now

[JudgeFurious]

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.

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

[curious.corn]

Shure but I'm worried for what will happen when M$ if finished with that DRM of theirs. You see, RIAA members will love to charge you N times for the privilege (remember, you don't buy songs, you licence them under certain terms of use) to listen them on your PC, sitting room amplifier, car, portable player, fat cell phone... It's just a matter of time, the profiteering gluttons are waiting for the pig to get fat enough...

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

[webguru4god]

I couldn't agree more! The iTunes Music Store is awesome, I think once it hits Windows the landscape of online file sharing will be permanently changed. The other night I was looking for a CD from a smaller independent band, and a search of 6 record stores in my city turned up nothing. I used a friend's Mac the next day, and within 5 minutes, I had bought, downloaded and burned the CD I was looking for.

It's a shame the RIAA is so inflexible and that they are still trying to enforce their draconian system of rule upon us. The Internet is changing the way music is listened to, and if they don't figure that out, they're going to alienate the entire popluation of music-loving people!

Check out the EFF's Share The Music Campaign and help support them so that the RIAA doesn't win this battle!

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:That's because I'm using iTunes now

[PPGMD]

People just won't buy them. Look at what happened to DIVX, as long as CDs and CD burners are around DRM based music just won't take off.

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:That's because I'm using iTunes now

[TCM]

ed2k://|file|Aphex.Twin,.The.-.Drukqs.tar|55257088 0|BAC185B1D8B5C22B252F11A7D00A2A1E|/

Haven't gotten around to ripping the other ones yet. No disk space :(

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

[0111 1110]

Agreed. But the vast majority of the public does not know about or care about the difference. Although why these same people would even consider buying the overpriced CD when they can quickly and easily download the same songs for free is beyond me. Those ethical arguments just make me laugh--hard.

The "quality" argument would seem like a good way to differentiate CDs from the free MP3s. It seemed to work in the painful migration from analog cassette to CD, as well as the popular migration from VHS to DVD (laserdiscs never caught on in the mainstream). I remember back in the early 80s when everyone figured the more expensive CDs would never be able to compete.

I wonder why the industry is not even attempting to make this argument. It seemed to work surprisingly well in the past.

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

[debugdave]

Until iTunes music store starts to carry music that is at least -somewhat- off the beaten path, I'm not going to subscribe.
Well you don't have to subscribe to anything you just need to use a Macintosh. And i wouldnt consider aphex twin off the beaten path. You can go into Sam Goody and get a lot of his cds.

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

[Phroggy]

Until iTunes music store starts to carry music that is at least -somewhat- off the beaten path, I'm not going to subscribe.

First, there is no subscription. If they have what you're looking for, you may buy it, and if they don't, you're no worse off than you were before.

Second, they're working on adding independant labels, but they're not quite set up for that just yet. Give them a couple months and see what happens.

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

[labratuk]

I had a go on a friends mac, and thats almost exactly what I did too. Although they did have Golbal Communications, and a couple of other semi interesting things.

Besides, I don't really like the idea of buying music track by track. You're definitely missing something if you're into that.

And I'm in the UK, so I couldn't use it anyway.

Maybe autechre and boards of canada might be considered 'obscure', but aphex is on a major label and is quite well known.

All three of those are on the same label. Warp.

sheesh more twisted truths...

[Lumpy]

ell 15 percent in the week ended July 6 from the previous week. It was during that prior week,

Hmmm kinda funny how filesharing drops on the biggest holiday/vacation/camping week in the USA.

that week most areas had massive concerts, air-fairs, festivals, beer tents, you name it than any other week of the year.

over 50% of my neighborhood were gone a large portion of that week either to shows at the local music festival or travel to detroit or chicago for their festivals/events...

Re:sheesh more twisted truths...

[robogun]

This happens on pretty much every long weekend, as people are away from their machines and doing things in the actual physical world. The traffic picks back up on Sunday afternoon as people return home to check their spam.

But this last weekend, IIRC, was also the hacker contest, which caused all kinds of update/patching/routing problems that I haven't seen reported yet. I know, for instance, billing service Verotel knocked themselves completely offline for a couple days preparing for the attack.

Re:sheesh more twisted truths...

[Captal]

The great part is that the RIAA will claim a drastic increase in pirating after this week because all the people that were on vacation not downloading music are back.

Then they will be "forced" to take more drastic measures to reduce piracy. How convenient...

Distinction with a difference

[Fux the Pengiun]

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!!!

Re:Distinction with a difference

[moitz]

people are swapping fewer songs, but more other stuff.

Yeah, like britney_spears_baby_one_more_time.mpthree.exe.

I' m now going to shoot myself for knowing a Britney Spears song title.

-moitz-

I just checked yesterday

[bninja_penguin]

I just checked yesterday, and according to my monitoring, Kazaa Lite was actually running about 1 million more users than it was a month ago!
Sharing was running only slightly higher though.

Gadzooks!

[i8urtaco]

No wonder I was having trouble finding a decent mp3 of "Don't copy that floppy".

fewer sharers or smatter sharers?

[kippy]

I would be interested to know if the 15% drop in Kazaa activity was met with a 15% increase of activity on Blubster Freenet or OpenNap.

yup, happened here

[confusednoise]

Where I work they have a pretty lax internet use policy -- blah blah blah no pr0n please blah blah as long as you get your work done blah blah

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

Re:yup, happened here

[The Master Control P]

This is why someone, preferably a well-known group like the EFF or ACLU, needs to start a non-profit fund to defend people from the RIAA.

The RIAA is like a wounded sabre-toothed tiger... It's going down slowly, and it's getting weaker, but it's still more than strong enough to kill the average person.

Even though they are slowly disintegrating, they still have far more money to bribe the judge and far more lawyers than their victims (who are chosen because of this) ever will so most of their victims have to either A) get screwed by the RIAA, B) Fight the case, loose, and meet Big Gay Bubba in prison, or C) Fight, win, and suffer financial ruin for the rest of their lives.

I doubt that the RIAA would be so apt to go after p2p users if they stood a chance of defending themselves. Why do you think predators always go after the young, the sick, and the elderly?

My Question

[mutewinter]

While the RIAA and associates have been contracting third parties to scan networks for quite some time now, do ISPs keep logs long enough to have any information to turn over to them reguarding activity, say 4 months to a year ago?

easy: school's out

[hazem]

This can be easily explained. Most universities in the country were finished in mid June and sent the kids home. The kids don't normally have access to that sweet T-3 when they are at home. So of course file-sharing went down.

I doubt it has little to do with the RIAA threat.

In other news, truancy drops by 90% after mid June.

Its bullshit.

[HanzoSan]

I just logged into Kazaa and saw just as many people offering files as usual.

Where is CNN or whoever getting their statistics from? The RIAA?

MC Hammer-"Can't touch this"

[Anonymous Coward]

"How many of you have slowed or stopped your file sharing???"

We at 65.42.25.3 are still going strong.

Re:MC Hammer-"Can't touch this"

[duck_prime]

"How many of you have slowed or stopped your file sharing???"

We at 65.42.25.3 are still going strong.

And the mighty server at 127.0.0.1 is proudly and unabashedly serving files to the entire 192.168.1.1/256 network.

Re:CDRs?

[Lord_Dweomer]

"Well probably have a better idea of whats going on from CDR sales figures."

Don't know if you're trolling or not...but is it really that hard to find a way to use CDRs aside from burning pirated material? How can you possibly tell if the usage of an online service has increased or decreased based on the amount of blank media sold of which only ONE of the many uses is to backup pirated files?

Of course P2P activity is dropping!

[dcavanaugh]

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?

Re:Of course P2P activity is dropping!

[djeaux]

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?

This is brilliant! Better yet, don't let the RIAA get credit for it -- steal their stats, refurbish them as market research & sell them to record companies ;-)

Re:Of course P2P activity is dropping!

[leviramsey]

The RIAA almost certainly does that already. It's not that difficult with Gnutella or similarly architected networks (hell, most Gnutella clients I've seen allow you to see what's being searched for).

Worse still

[JSkills]

I've found an increase in decoy files out there. I was attempting to download some songs from the new Steely Dan album - hoping to preview before I buy the CD. And oh yes, I will be buying the CD no matter, I have them all . Anyway, all of the different song files were there, but each one of them was the exact same song (some old Steely Dan song from several albums/years ago). No matter what user I tried to pull from, they all had the same (single) bogus song deceptively named incorrectly. I experienced a similar phenomena when the new Chili Peppers CD came out (I bought that CD too).

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?

Re:Worse still

[angle_slam]

Same thing happened to me. The Thorns, a "supergroup" featuring Matthew Sweet, has a new album out. I downloaded a few of the tracks. They all contained about 30 seconds of what I believe is a Michael Jackson song, followed by silence for the rest of the track.

Re:Worse still

[JSkills]

Weird thing is - how is it that the real files are just not out there amidst all the fakes?

Re:Worse still

[nolife]

Keep in mind, the RIAA uses file names as the primary method of finding file swappers before sending out the scare team. These same file names have a good chance of being planted by the RIAA and thier contractors. They are trying to play on both sides of the fence here. IMHO, before an actual case goes to court against an individual file sharer, they are going to need more then a list of file names to have a case. I believe the main reason for the Verizon case was to try to keep the courts out of the loop as long as possible so they could try thier luck with the DMCA and cease and desist letters on shaky legal grounds. No court or judge would consider these tainted file plantings and a file lists from some IP address a copyright violation.

Re:Worse still

[JSkills]

I'm with you. I don't get it. NOT deleting fakes? Makes no sense. Lazy ass people ...

Re:Worse still

[mrogers]

Weird thing is - how is it that the real files are just not out there amidst all the fakes?

Are you using a FastTrack-based network? The details of the FastTrack protocol are secret, but it's known to use "supernodes" for searching: your list of shared files is sent to the nearest supernode, all searches are sent to the nearest supernode, and supernodes only forward searches to other supernodes. This avoids Gnutella's problem of low-bandwidth nodes being overwhelmed by search traffic.

My guess is that the RIAA has worked out how the supernodes rank search results, and is tailoring the descriptions of its fake files to produce good rankings. For example, your file probably gets a high rank if you advertise a high-speed connection, respond quickly to PINGs, never cancel transfers, and stay online for weeks at a time.

Perhaps real copies of the songs are still out there, but you can't find them because the RIAA has worked out how to exploit the search system.

Re:Worse still

[JSkills]

thanks man - I'm sure there's some truth to what you're saying about the decline of SD. Of course I don't want to believe it.

BTW - did you ever hear the 1973 live recording from the Record Plant (or Record Factory)? It's incredible. I only have it on cassette :-( I haven't been able to find any live Steely Dan prior to the 90's ...

good wether

[dhuv]

perhaps the weather is just getting nicer and people are actually stepping outside their homes?

No one

[HanzoSan]

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.

Re:No one

[epiphani]

Also, its not like this 15% drop happened to co-inside with a lot of north american holidays (Canada Day, Independence Day) where people are probably shutting down their computers and going camping.

Re:No one

[nomel]

Wow....good point.

how is it distributed?

[arcanumas]

What we don't know is what percentage of users made this sharing. I mean is this 15 percent drop due to a few people doing massive shareing , or to many little ones that just got scared without reason?
I suspect that this must have affected only the US based mega-sharers. I , in europe, have no reason to fear any threats from RIAA.

What we must remember about RIAA

[djeaux]

They are NOT law enforcement. They are basically a private investigation outfit masquerading as an advocacy group for the "industry."

If you know any private eyes, you know they lie, cheat, deceive, distort facts, whatever they need to do to get their work done. They are very often only two spits shy of being crooks themselves.

So, it doesn't surprise me that RIAA takes stats from a holiday week, as has been pointed out already, to show that their threats & intimidation work.

The big problem that I see is that RIAA has essentially unlimited resources -- all that money that could be paid in artists' royalties -- while Joe Blow P2Per in the dorm doesn't. It will be very interesting if RIAA ever gets an opponent in court who has some financial backing. Of course, that will have to wait until we have a Department of Justice and not a Department of "Just Us"...

So...

[rdewalt]

Wouldn't perhaps over here in the USA, the long weekend, centering on the July 4 holiday, give a -natural- decrease in file sharing traffic? Vacations, beach trips, blowing shit up with fireworks?

Don't know about you, but between pimping around on Kazaa and going to the beach and hanging out, Kazaa doesn't come close.

I'll bet you other traffic for that time period has a decrease too. I'll have to scope my server logs at home,see if I had a 15% decrease that week too.

Geez. Thats like saying that 20% of the sick days off work are taken on friday, and another 20% are taken on Mondays...

Wow who would have guessed-Swapping.

[Anonymous Coward]

"I can't belive that many people really had something better to do than surf the web on a holiday."

I did some DNA uploading with my girlfriend.

Re:Wow who would have guessed-Swapping.

[Savatte]

I uploaded my entire stomach drive to the porcelain recycle bin.

STEAL!!! or the RIAA will do it for you.

[HanzoSan]

Ok so you dont share files. hundreds of millions of people do, and hundreds of millions of people think its right.

Re:STEAL!!! or the RIAA will do it for you.

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:STEAL!!! or the RIAA will do it for you.

[SenorMooCow]

There are hardly hundreds of millions of internet users in the world, and only a small percentage of them use P2P file trading apps.

Why don't you take your own advice and "think through your numbers before you blurt them out like that." According to Nua Ltd. as of September 2002 there were 605 million internet users worldwide and I am sure there are more than that today.

Re:STEAL!!! or the RIAA will do it for you.

[ryanwright]

If 4 out of 5 people vote to steal the 5th person's money, that doesn't mean it is ok.

And yet my taxes still increase every year thanks to idiots voting yes on various bonds...

In other words, it's only OK if it's government backed.

Re:STEAL!!! or the RIAA will do it for you.

[Anonymous Coward]

If 4 out of 5 people vote to steal the 5th person's money, that doesn't mean it is ok.

Think about that for a sec. Property is an artificial idea we've all seemed to agree on. If 4/5 of all people don't respect property, there is no longer any property.

Re:STEAL!!! or the RIAA will do it for you.

[CrowScape]

But if that property is a loaded gun, they would learn to respect it in a hurry.

Maybe the drop in traffic is due to...

[mikeophile]

The RIAA calling off it's squad of goons who crapflood the P2P's with mislabeled files.

So while overall traffic is down, the real traffic could be increasing.

Eh, probably not.

Re:Maybe the drop in traffic is due to...

[BlueTrin]

I don't know how the popular P2P networks work. But wouldn't it be possible (for the RIAA or any editor) to create a file with the same signature (MD5 or whatever hash it is) than an existing one, then share it over one of these network so it would poison the whole process from the inside ?

Re:Maybe the drop in traffic is due to...

[The Master Control P]

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.

For example, without filters, I can search for "Beethoven 9th symphony" and suddenly see 50 files ending in .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.

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.

Semester period ...

[BuR4N]

I'm sure the numbers will go back to "normal" when schools starting and everybody is back at work ....

More Evidence of the Slashdot Sellout

[Cryofan]

Carrying water for The Man. Whatever The Man wants, Slashdot does.

It's part of a cycle...

[EZmagz]

Assuming that the claim it TRUE and filesharing is actually down from last week, and it's solely because of the RIAA's threats, then it's only a matter of time before they go up again. Think of Napster. When it went belly-up, people stopped sharing for a few seconds until a better alternative came along...mainly Kazaa/Grokster/Morpheus. Then sharing resumed, bigger and better than ever!

As one /.'er has already pointed out in a shameless plug for udpp2p (looks interesting, actually), the next step in p2p is straight-up anonymous filetransfers. It makes sesne, and it's inevitable...only a matter of time before someone codes up a decent client. And when that happens, you bet I'll be one of the first standing on their tiptoes, trying to see the RIAA's face and how they respond to that.

Personally I haven't used p2p, especially for music, in a while. If I need to get my fix though, there's always alternative routes to getting what you want...hotline/IRC/FTP sites still exist and flourish. It may not be as easy, but beggars can't be choosers it seems.

This news is spinned.

[HanzoSan]

Traffic on the Morpheus service also fell 15 percent, Net Ratings said, while usage on iMesh dropped 16 percent. BearShare usage dropped enough that it fell below NetRatings' cutoff point for tracking.

Check out the Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A735 9-2003Jul3.html?nav=hptoc_tn

Seems to me filesharing is increasing

And yet...

[jdehnert]

..even though On Line file sharing has dropped 15%, retail sales will probably show a similar, if not steeper decline.

Personally, I buy less since It's harder to sample.

RIAA looking for alternate money ?

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

The recording industry is finding new ways to market their products to offset losses incurred by music piracy. CNN's Jim Boulden reports.

They should get into the ISP business, and charge more than regular ISPs for the promise that they won't ever sue their users for pirating music. Threats of litigation is a real business asset for a big lobbying maffia-like organisation such as the RIAA, they really should exploit it ...

I hope they're right.

[Alethes]

Sharing RIAA music hurts independent artists. People are less inclined to look for good legitimate free music from independent artists who want you to share when they can get the RIAA peddled junk for free illegitimately.

Mimac

[CrackedButter]

This program "mimac" runs on OSX and it can access 8 p2p networks at the same time, at its current version it can access 3, kazaa, bittorrent and filedonkey...

Only works on macs and of course is questionable when issuing stats, the 0.6 version of mimac is far more stable than previous and now allows mac users to access the other big networks.

Re:Mimac

[Christian Claiborn]

You're probably referring to mlmac, which is a GUI wrapper around mlnet (formerly mldonkey). Between this, the BitTorrent client, Limewire and the Mac Direct Connect client, Mac users are well served on almost all of the major networks.

Let's see if this helps sales

[kingbill]

Now that file sharings on the decline, record sales should begin to rebound, thus proving the RIAA's claims about the cause of their woes. who wants to put down bets about what effect this will have on sales.

Did sales track?

[nolife]

Instead of posting selective FUD, they should tell the whole story. Did sales go up by an equal 15%? After all, in the eyes of the RIAA, every single file downloaded is complete cd that was not bought.

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."

Decoy Files

[shelleymonster]

Guster's album Keep It Together was released on June 24. A couple of weeks before the release, songs from the album started popping up on Kazaa. It turns out one of the guys in the band and the sound engineer re-recorded versions of all of the songs, meowing on top of them, and then put them online. I guess they figured they could preempt anyone leaking the album by doing this, but they did it in a creative in funny way that a lot of the fans enjoyed. They're actually pretty funny and well done. Also, back in May they put up half of the album on their website anyway (streaming, no d/l) to give people a taste. I'm glad that there are musicians (even on a label - WB) that are willing to try to work with the system (instead of fighting it) in a way that can make them, the label, and the fans happy.

Re:Decoy Files

[Jugalator]

Hehe, that's a pretty good and innovative way to stop people having to "pirate" their music just to hear if the album is worth your money. :-)

Excellent point

[s20451]

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.

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:Excellent point

[squiggleslash]

I posted this a while back, but I kind of got reminded of it by your "sharing" comment, so... (don't read if you're a heavy fan of Bush with a thin-skin, it's supposed to be a joke. The original was written just before he took over, apologies if I've fogotten to take out a reference)

Monday, July 14th 2003 2220 EST
Bush To Abolish Income Tax
New "Taxster" system to be used to raise revenue instead

By Ack Countant

WASHINGDON, DC (Presswire) - Citing a taxation system riddled with loopholes and get-outs, President Bush today announced changes to the United State's ailing taxation system. "There are all sorts of problems with it", a spokesman explained, "Poor people get to pay nothing at all. And, of course, not enough people have any income to begin with. We tried using executions to reduce the number of poor people, but then lawyers kept coming out of the woodwork protesting that some were innocent and stuff, and that was expensive, so we needed to find a better way."

The new system will be replaced by a system called Taxster, based largely on the Napster file-sharing technology developed on the Internet. "Essentially, everyone's bank accounts will be linked to the Taxster system, and whenever anyone needs money, they just grab some that's being 'shared' by someone else.", explained Vice President Dick Cheney, "By default, all bank accounts are shared. Whenever the government needs any money, it just looks for some on Taxster, and all the problems are solved."

The genius of the system is that the sharing system doesn't reduce the amount of money anyone has. "Basically, when we share money, we're not saying 'Here, have my money'", explained Cheney, "Instead we're encouraging people to make copies of money, for their own personal use. we still get to keep our money, but someone gets their own copy of the money in their own bank account. Everyone wins!"

Bush reputedly got the idea after watching an episode of the Geraldo Rivera Show on TV. "He saw a special on Napster", explained a government spokesman to a packed press conference, "And while at first he was a little perturbed when Trent Lott was interviewed and said it sounded like Communism to him, he got thinking, Communism is an economic ideal, and maybe this Napster thing could be applied to economics." The cash strapped Inland Revenue Service jumped at the idea, explaining that it meant they would no longer need to "Audit" Americans, a process which of late has become difficult as government stocks of truth serums have run dry and the government rack broke last week."

Ordinary American's reactions have been positive. "It sounds like a great idea", explain Rush Limbaugh, a journalist, "I don't mind sharing money if everyone else is, if I run short I can always grab some from someone else." Jeb Bush, a governor in Florida, explained "It's excellent. There's no risk involved, we just all share our bank accounts and we get as much money as we need."

Economists however are sceptical. "The money has to come from somewhere", explained Alan Greenspan, Chief US Economist, "Otherwise every bit of sharing is just going to devalue the currency." But experts have scoffed at the notion of devaluation. "These people are just living with an out of date old-economy financial model", explained new economy pundit Jon Katz, "With technologies like Napster, the notion that you'll be able to work for a living is rapidly becoming obsolete. Instead of being paid for what you do, like the dinosaurs of the old-economy keep claiming you should be able to do, you can distribute your work via technologies like Napster, and get your income from Taxster. It's much fairer."

George W Bush is 11.

Re:Excellent point

[aphr0Scorp]

I posted this a while back, but I kind of got reminded of it by your "sharing" comment, so... (don't read if you're a heavy fan of Bush with a thin-skin, it's supposed to be a joke. The original was written just before he took over, apologies if I've fogotten to take out a reference)

Monday, July 14th 2003 2220 EST
Bush To Abolish Income Tax
New "Taxster" system to be used to raise revenue instead

By Ack Countant

WASHINGDON, DC (Presswire) - Citing a taxation system riddled with loopholes and get-outs, President Bush today announced changes to the United State's ailing taxation system. "There are all sorts of problems with it", a spokesman explained, "Poor people get to pay nothing at all. And, of course, not enough people have any income to begin with. We tried using executions to reduce the number of poor people, but then lawyers kept coming out of the woodwork protesting that some were innocent and stuff, and that was expensive, so we needed to find a better way."

The new system will be replaced by a system called Taxster, based largely on the Napster file-sharing technology developed on the Internet. "Essentially, everyone's bank accounts will be linked to the Taxster system, and whenever anyone needs money, they just grab some that's being 'shared' by someone else.", explained Vice President Dick Cheney, "By default, all bank accounts are shared. Whenever the government needs any money, it just looks for some on Taxster, and all the problems are solved."

The genius of the system is that the sharing system doesn't reduce the amount of money anyone has. "Basically, when we share money, we're not saying 'Here, have my money'", explained Cheney, "Instead we're encouraging people to make copies of money, for their own personal use. we still get to keep our money, but someone gets their own copy of the money in their own bank account. Everyone wins!"

Bush reputedly got the idea after watching an episode of the Geraldo Rivera Show on TV. "He saw a special on Napster", explained a government spokesman to a packed press conference, "And while at first he was a little perturbed when Trent Lott was interviewed and said it sounded like Communism to him, he got thinking, Communism is an economic ideal, and maybe this Napster thing could be applied to economics." The cash strapped Inland Revenue Service jumped at the idea, explaining that it meant they would no longer need to "Audit" Americans, a process which of late has become difficult as government stocks of truth serums have run dry and the government rack broke last week."

Ordinary American's reactions have been positive. "It sounds like a great idea", explain Rush Limbaugh, a journalist, "I don't mind sharing money if everyone else is, if I run short I can always grab some from someone else." Jeb Bush, a governor in Florida, explained "It's excellent. There's no risk involved, we just all share our bank accounts and we get as much money as we need."

Economists however are sceptical. "The money has to come from somewhere", explained Alan Greenspan, Chief US Economist, "Otherwise every bit of sharing is just going to devalue the currency." But experts have scoffed at the notion of devaluation. "These people are just living with an out of date old-economy financial model", explained new economy pundit Jon Katz, "With technologies like Napster, the notion that you'll be able to work for a living is rapidly becoming obsolete. Instead of being paid for what you do, like the dinosaurs of the old-economy keep claiming you should be able to do, you can distribute your work via technologies like Napster, and get your income from Taxster. It's much fairer."

George W Bush is 11.

--
Bah humbug, mutter, grumble
6809

udpp2p

[Srin Tuar]

The fundamental premise of udpp2p is broken.

Spoofed source addresses do not beget security nor anonymity, especially now that ISP's are required to "cooperate". Properly configured routers will put a dead stop to the practice, and even without that its still trivial for a big organization to backtrace you.

If you want real anonymity you need something called "plausible deniability" which you can get only from projects such as freenet.

Re:udpp2p

[dasmegabyte]

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.

Re:udpp2p

[cantabrigian]

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.

Re:udpp2p

[caluml]

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.

Re:udpp2p

[ReelOddeeo]

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.

Re:udpp2p

[dissy]

> 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.

No. A properly configured router is connected to TWO networks, and will not allow traffic to pass either direction unless the source IP matches what it knows of the two networks.

If your network is 192.168.1.0/24, and your source IP is not, it should drop it.
If a packet attempts to get in to you and its source IP _is_ in that range, it should also drop it.

Forging your IP will fail the first test.
The second test is to prevent others from pretending to be hosts in your network to bypass IP based security rules.

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.

Re:udpp2p

[dasmegabyte]

The latest version of freenet I downloaded doesn't even have an option for permanent nodes; i thought it got phased out for this very reason!

Re:udpp2p

[asdfghjklqwertyuiop]

If your network is 192.168.1.0/24, and your source IP is not, it should drop it

That's exactly what he's talking about. If you're on 192.168.1.0/24, you've got up to 256 addresses to choose from for spoofing.

But I don't agree with this whole idea of IP spoofing to provide p2p annonymity. Spoofing addresses is abuse of the network, period.

Also, spoofing isn't viable long-term for technical reasons too... smart switches, PPP, some broadband equipment...

Re:udpp2p

[GlassHeart]

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?

Your scheme is a convoluted way of asking whether downloading a copyrighted work through an encrypted link (through which the work is broken up into little unreadable chunks) constitutes copyright infringement. Yes, it does.

In fact, your extra effort to disguise the act (unlike an encrypted tunnel, your scheme has no arguable technical benefit) helps the prosecutor show a potential jury that you at least suspected your actions were illegal.

No single such packet contains any copyright material, just random bits.

No, every packet contains copyrighted information. The information is just encoded, much the same way ASCII is a possible encoding for a copyrightable novel. In fact, you can reconstruct the document using certain algorithms, which proves that the bits are not random at all.

Re:udpp2p

[PetoskeyGuy]

The problem with this is that it's obviously created to avoid incrimination for trading copyrighted files. Yes it could be used to trade non-copyrighted files, but if that's the case then why go through all the extra work and waste 3 times the bandwidth.

It's like selling lock picks, ski maks and unmarked vans all in the same store. Sure there is nothing wrong by itself, but all together it draws a lot of attention and people question your motives. That's the plausable deniability the previous poster was talking about. Freenet has an existing purpose, but can be just as useful for trading files closer to 100% anonymous.

Personally I forsee private networks being formed with encrypted communications. WASTE is wonderful for such things.

Re:udpp2p

[Snaller]

In fact, your extra effort to disguise the act (unlike an encrypted tunnel, your scheme has no arguable technical benefit) helps the prosecutor show a potential jury that you at least suspected your actions were illegal.

No no, that's the programmer you are talking about. The users have no idea the program is hiding anything, its just a popular program that everybody uses!

Re:udpp2p

[GlassHeart]

Riiiiight... like my not letting others read over my shoulder (which I hate) means I MUST be reading somethingillegal...

No, it doesn't. If you read my actual post, I implied that, unlike encryption, which has an arguable purpose of privacy with no implication of evildoing, scrambling up the download into little unrecognizable bits does imply wrongdoing because it greatly increases bandwidth consumption for no apparent other purpose. If you merely wanted privacy, you'd have just encrypted the download.

Re:udpp2p

[kelnos]

oh c'mon, that's silly. you could also make the argument that because you sent a file to your friend using scp/sftp, the file wasn't recogniseable as copyrighted material while in transit and thus you aren't committing copyright infringement. saying that applying some reversible algorithm to data to "ensure that no single block has copyright content" will protect you from copyright infringement suits is ridiculous. it's merely a form of encryption - and the one you describe is fairly weak at that.

now, if your point was to show that networks could be constructed such that it's incredibly difficult to determine what is being transmitted and from where, then ok. that's possible. we have freenet for that. but it sounds like you are leaning toward proposing that if you obfuscate the contents of a file enough and split it into enough pieces, all coming from different places, it somehow ceases being a copyrighted work. that's just plain rubbish.

in any case, you still need a method to _find_ the file you want in the first place, which is of course the hard part. if there is an indexing/search service, that's an easy vulnerability. if you have some type of hashed key structure (like freenet iirc), then you have the problem of disseminating the key. granted even if authorities could get ahold of a key that points to a copyrighted work, they still can't find out where it is located or who put it there. but, lacking some form of encryption for requests, they still have the opportunity to nab those that are receiving.

regardless, a quick look at the freenet faq makes it quite clear that even freenet is not immune to all attacks that can reveal your identity.

i'm not particularly sure where i'm going with this (quite possibly nowhere), so i'll stop now.

Re:udpp2p

[ReelOddeeo]

Your scheme is a convoluted way of asking whether downloading a copyrighted work through an encrypted link (through which the work is broken up into little unreadable chunks) constitutes copyright infringement. Yes, it does.

Let's see, I received blocks A1, A2, A3, B1, B2, B3, C1, C2, C3.

A = A1 XOR A2 XOR X3
B = B1 XOR B2 XOR B3
C = C1 XOR C2 XOR C3


Now which of the nine blocks are copyright infringing? A, B and C together are a copyright infringement. But....

A1 XOR ??zz11?? is part of the declaration of independence.
A2 XOR ??ss33?? is part of the Bible.
A3 XOR ??32kk?? is part of Kernel 2.6-pre1

Well, I think I've just answered the question. Obviously block A3 was the copyright infringement, because it can be XORed together with another block to produce the commie operating system that is responsible for all this piracy.


Your scheme is a convoluted way of asking whether downloading a copyrighted work through an encrypted link (through which the work is broken up into little unreadable chunks) constitutes copyright infringement. Yes, it does.

Dear ladies and gentlemen of the jury, blocks A1, A2 and A3 are all obviously part of protected free speech. Each block A1, A2 and A3 passes all known statistical tests for randomness. Yet each block when XOR'ed together with some other block from Pr0n-2-Pr0n-Share yields something obviously protected.

Now in my example I've labeled the blocks A1, A2, A3, B1, B2, B3, etc. But suppose the real blocks were labeled...

Block298573728923985725732891912837172891398713254 1

Block298573279191827128192818289608483739486774893 6

Block968482891284757389298785178778219111111111119 9

etc. so that it is not so obvious that any block has any actual relationship to any other block. In fact, you can probably retrieve multiple blocks from the system, by key, and construct many protected works. Which individual block should be banned? Which block is the culprit that infringes copyright?

Your scheme is a convoluted way of asking whether downloading a copyrighted work through an encrypted link (through which the work is broken up into little unreadable chunks) constitutes copyright infringement. Yes, it does.

Obviously the blocks are not random if they reconstruct the Bible and the Declaration of Independence. But each individual block passes all statistical tests for randomness.

Re:udpp2p

[ReelOddeeo]

Your scheme is a convoluted way of asking whether downloading a copyrighted work through an encrypted link (through which the work is broken up into little unreadable chunks) constitutes copyright infringement. Yes, it does.

So that you don't get beaten to a bloody pulp, or have to watch your family members tortured. Is that good reason?

But obviously we should not encourage the development of technologies that allow you to freely exchange information.

My point: tools have more than one use.

Re:udpp2p

[ReelOddeeo]

See my reply about blocks a few posts up.

Re:udpp2p

[dissy]

> That's exactly what he's talking about. If you're on 192.168.1.0/24, you've got
> up to 256 addresses to choose from for spoofing. /me smaks you in the forehead :P

If you have a /24, its yours! You cant spoof any addresses in it because they are all your addresses. They all trace back throuh your ISP to you. That does no good in p2p anymore than using clients correctly right now.

Most people also dont have a subnet of IPs, they have one. There is nothing to choose from for 'spoofing'

Re:udpp2p

[mrogers]

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.

Freenet nodes publish their addresses through the DataSource field of DataReply messages. This doesn't allow the recipient of the message to work out who is sharing what, because the DataSource is reset with a low probability by each node the message passes through. But it does allow a passive "address-gathering" attack which will eventually allow you to identify all Freenet participants, or all participants in a particular jurisdiction (eg China, RoadRunner, UCLA).

1. Data should pass through the overlay network.
3. Performance should be reasonable.

It's hard to see how these requirements can be reconciled. Even if the sender and recipient are on average only 2 hops apart in the overlay network, the effective bandwidth of all nodes is halved. Even if the overlay network has "small world" characteristics and the shortest path can always be found, the best we can realistically hope for is that the number of hops will grow logarithmically with the number of nodes. For a network of 10,000 nodes (the predicted scaling limit of Gnutella), each message might make a dozen hops, so each node will only get to use 1/12 of its bandwidth for its own traffic (the rest will be used for forwarding other nodes' traffic). People are unlikely to use such a network unless they have a very good reason for needing anonymity.

For this reason I suspect that the future of anonymous networking does not lie in internet overlays, but in new networks that are potentially independent of the internet, even if some of their links are made across the internet for the time being.

Re:udpp2p

[mrogers]

What you're describing is essentially chaffing and winnowing, first proposed by Ronald Rivest.

Re:udpp2p

[asdfghjklqwertyuiop]

You totally missed the point. The definition of the word 'spoofing' is to use an IP address that is not assigned to you. If I'm using addresses on a /24 that is assigned to me, then I am not spoofing. That is obvious.

The spoofing he is talking about is using other addresses/networks that are not assigned to you at all, but are close enough to you so that egress filtering doesn't stop your spoofing.

As an example, I could emit packets through my cable modem with source addresses belonging to my next door neighbors (who are also subscribers to the same ISP) because we both have IP addresses assigned to us that are on the same subnet. But that is assuming that there is no link layer equipment stopping me, as I mentioned in my prior post.

Re:udpp2p

[cunta_cinte]

I don't like you.

I am not exactly sure why but , deep inside, I know I just don't like you ...

Watch out ...

Re:udpp2p

[dbc001]

The problem with freenet is that it has a *very* steep learning curve. Filesharers want something quick and easy (myself included). I downloaded it, fired it up, and couldn't even tell how to search the network. I couldn't tell where the network was or what I was sharing. I maybe spent 10 minutes with it, and got bored. I just don't care enough to do the research, I'll risk it with "dangerous" apps for now.

-dbc

Re:udpp2p

[Frac]

what retarded logic.

you're better off convincing the judge that a monkey in your backyard coincidentally punched in certain 1's and 0's to recreate your 30 gigabyte mp3 collection.

Re:udpp2p

[Cl1mh4224rd]

[...] to ensure that no single block has copyright content.

Maybe I missed something, but since when did they start caring about individual packets/blocks?

Dear PirateScum,
We're sending this email to notify you that packets #31253-#32675, #32743, #48667, #57365-#59326 received by your IP on the evening of June 14th have been detected as containing copyrighted materials.

It may have been fun to think about and type, but that's not how these companies are catching people sharing copyrighted works.

Re:udpp2p

[dasmegabyte]

Ha! Well then I guess it's good that, on Freenet, you'll never find me!

Re:udpp2p

[Graphyx]

Now the real trick would be to use the bill of rights as the encoding string. You see your Honor, I wasn't trying to download a stolen copyright of Yellow submarine encoded by the Bill of Rights, but rather I was downloading the Bill of Rights which just happened to be encoded with Yellow Submarine. And if the Bill of rights isn't protect by the bill of rights, I don't know what is...

Re:udpp2p

[dasmegabyte]

Well, the thing about freenet is, it isn't. Either. You have to be networked to use it, and that ain't free.

However, once you've paid to become networked, you're free to network over freenet to your heart's desire.

Re:udpp2p

[GlassHeart]

Obviously the blocks are not random if they reconstruct the Bible and the Declaration of Independence. But each individual block passes all statistical tests for randomness.

The reason I describe your scheme as simply convoluted is this: you can download all the random bits you want, but the moment you reassemble or decode them into copyrighted material, you've violated copyright laws.

To make it clearer for you, if I designed an algorithm that generates a song that sounds like a copyrighted work, use of that algorithm will violate copyright law regardless of whether I had any access to an original copy at all. Copyright is a time-limited (ha ha) monopoly to make copies of original work, so however you generate your copy, you are infringing.

Re:udpp2p

[conway]

This sort of stuff (actually much cooler, and actually working) has already been devloped.
Check out the various anonymous p2p storage projects here : www.scs.cs.nyu.edu

Re:udpp2p

[mrogers]

you are incorrectly assuming that the network scales linearly

No, I mentioned logarithmic scaling in my post.

In fact, much of the traffic is going to be for relatively few, popular blocks, a bunch of medium popular blocks, and a few unpopular blocks - it isn't going to be a bell curve either

I think the phrase you're looking for is "Zipf-like query distribution". ;-) You have a good point -- caching can reduce communication overhead in a filesharing scenario -- but it remains to be seen whether caching can have a large enough effect to make anonymous filesharing networks worthwhile for the majority of users.

Designed correctly, it is possible to implement a group-anonymous, minimal-trust distributed protocol for distributing 0day releases faster than BitTorrent.

Yes, you just need to get the nodes to arrange themselves into a spanning tree with the source of the file at the root. But distributing a file quickly to all nodes is not the problem I'm trying to solve.

Overnet/eDonkey are also a minimal speed - in a network of 1 million nodes, weighted via estimated upload speed distribution, you can expect 30KB/s for the average archive release ISO and about 25 seconds of latency between request and beginning of mesh transfer. You telling me that's not good enough?

You're comparing apples to oranges. I was talking about a network in which every request and reply is routed through a fixed overlay topology based on the web of trust. You're talking about a network in which nodes connect directly to untrusted nodes. Obviously if you're prepared to connect to untrusted nodes you can get good performance.

Re:udpp2p

[ReelOddeeo]

To make it clearer for you....

I understand copyright law very well actually. Your points are indeed correct, and I already understand this.


The reason I describe your scheme as simply convoluted is this: you can download all the random bits you want, but the moment you reassemble or decode them into copyrighted material, you've violated copyright laws.

And I understand this full well. My convoluted scheme was not about avoiding copyright law at all. With what I was suggesting, you would indeed reconstruct a copyrighted work. But you would do so in the privacy of your own home. Nobody else could see you do it, even with full monitoring of every packet that comes to your computer.

Even if the RIAA does a brute force analysis of trying to combine every possible combination of received blocks to determine that three certian blocks reconstitute a fragment of a copyright work, that doesn't proove that I went after the copyright work, nor that I actually reconstructed it. Just that I received some randomish bits from different sites that could be XOR'ed together to form a fragment of a copyright work.

Earth to RIAA: School is Out...

[Cloudgatherer]

Also, colleges are out for the summer. Unless college students have broadband at home as well (not overly likely), they will not be using file sharing networks...

So, college students who download the most are out for the summer, hence lower traffic! :-)

Good news!

[werdna]

One of the principal points against overreaching laws like the DMCA is that the RIAA never needed them in the first place. If the mere fact of responsible assertion of rights results in a reduction of measured likely infringing conduct, this indicates that the opponents of DMCA were right, and the RIAA was wrong in insisting that draconian laws are necessary to protect RIAA rights.

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.

bzzzt

[drinkypoo]

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

Internal Time Warner memo

[Anonymous Coward]

I received this from an individual who works at Time Warner. Its contents are scary.

--

As many of you have probably read or heard, the Recording Industry
Association of America is engaged in a very public battle against
individuals using peer-to-peer Internet programs to swap copyrighted music
files. Their latest tactic, which they announced recently, is to identify
people who have made large numbers of songs available for uploading via P2P,
and then to sue them for copyright infringement. Some of these people will
undoubtedly be Road Runner customers. The purpose of this memo is to
describe for you the process that the RIAA is undertaking, and how we plan
to deal with it.

The RIAA has begun to troll the major P2P networks to collect the Internet
Protocol (IP) addresses for those individuals who are offering large numbers
of songs for uploading. These IP addresses are then tracked back to the
ISPs that control them. The RIAA then must issue subpoenas to the ISPs,
demanding that they turn over identifying information on the holders of the
accounts assigned to the IP addresses (i.e., the customer name, address,
telephone number and email address).

In the first three days of the RIAA's campaign, we have received subpoenas
directed at 18 customers in 4 divisions. Once the RIAA's campaign hits full
stride, we expect to receive several hundred subpoenas per month.

When we receive a subpoena, we will send a letter to the customer in
question notifying him/her that we are required to disclose his/her
identifying information to the RIAA. We will also provide the customer with
a copy of the subpoena, which includes contact information for the RIAA's
attorney. A copy of our standard letter is attached to this memo.

Most of the flow in responding to these subpoenas will be handled, at least
initially, by the Law Department. Road Runner has developed a tool that
allows us to tie the IP addresses to the specific customers and determine
their identifying information. The process is not perfect, and requires us
to get manual confirmation from the divisions' complaint coordinators before
the notice letters are sent to the customers. It is important that
confirmation is received promptly in order for us to provide advance notice
to our customers.

The letters to the subscribers will be signed by _____, who runs our
subpoena compliance program here in Stamford. To the extent letter
recipients want to contact TWC, we expect them to contact _____. If your
divisions receive phone calls or correspondence on this issue, please direct
the customers to ___________.

Thank you for your help with this. As always, if you have any questions
about any of this, please feel free to get in touch with us at any time.

Re:ok...

[Politburo]

Kazaa mostly applies to the ignorant public.

Yup. And that's why it is targetted, just like Napster was. RIAA and others couldn't care about the 50,000 people trading on IRC, BT, and other services. They know that you are smart enough to come up with a new way to avoid them, even if it means a lot more work for you. They care about the 10 million that use Kazaa, a program that a monkey can have up and downloading within 1 minute.

Re:Earth to RIAA: School is Out...

[BlueTrin]

I think that you mean more traffic available for the students who stayed in univ for the summer =)

Re:CDRs?

[angle_slam]

Not to mention the fact that you can use P2P without using CDRs (e.g., iPod or listening via speakers connected to a computer).

Coincidentally...

[ackthpt]

All people exchanging music via MP3's over filesharing have now caught all their music collections up to the point Britney Spears, Ricky Martin and NSync began performing. As nobody actually has the stomach for this music who is intelligent enough to navigate filesharing sites, traffic suddenly fell off.

Now, if Santana or someone else were to release an album in the next week you'd see it spike again.

Also, please consider all this is statistics and probably spun to the RIAA's liking to show their Third Reich tactics actually work. Next week: RIAA to invade Poland on the pretext that 2 poles blatantly exchanged a copyrighted performance of Pop Goes the Weasel.

Or,

[missing000]

If you want real anonymity you need something called "plausible deniability" which you can get only from projects such as freenet.

Or, your neighbors un-protected wireless AP. You gotta love other peoples networks

Re:Or,

[jafac]

I'm down with OPN. (Other People's Networks).

Re:Or,

[lpret]

I haven't paid an internet bill for the past 12 months due to this. In fact, I have 2 wireless cards that connect to two different networks so I'm actually faster than most people who do pay. Suckers.

Re:Or,

[JDWTopGuy]

(entire post encapsulated in sarcasm tags)
I haven't paid an internet bill for the past 12 months due to this. In fact, I have 2 wireless cards that connect to two different networks so I'm actually faster than most people who do pay. Suckers.

On behalf of the people of Slashdot:
We hate you. And the fact that you use evil hotmail is a sure sign you are a 1337 script kiddie who is obviously way too confident in his h4x0r skillz. I bet you're like "W00t, I got TWO frickin' wireless cards! I 0wnz these homies!"

I curse you with my gym shoes! I hereby prophesy in the name of Murphy and his most high law, the neighbors whose networks you're freeloading off of will move away within one year! Do not laugh in the face of DESTINY!

Oh wtf, I might as well just admit that I'm jealous as heck of ya.

saturated.

[oyenstikker]

Could it be that everyone already has the music they want, and the RIAA isn't putting out anything new worth getting? It had to happen eventually.

The real reason...

[ohzero]

According to multiple news sources, the real reason that traffic has significantly decreased is that there is a hidden clause in the new RIAA policy which states that Hillary Rosen will personally come to your house and sit on your face if you caught infringing copyright.

I mean, really... isn't this the effective equivalent of what they're saying anyway? Suing individuals for tens of millions of dollars (well, at least that's what my bill would come out to be) seems kind of pointless seeing as how if even 1/100th of the people they go after make it to court, and then 10% of those are found guilty, the odds that these individuals are going to have anywhere near the cash to "pay their dues" are certainly low.

I give the RIAA another 4 years of dwidling around like the morons they are, and on the 5th year we can all refer to them in the same joking manner with which we currently refer to captain kangaroo, yet without the empathy.

A Friendly message from the RIAA

[mrpuffypants]

Please contact your local authorities ASAP for prosecution for your crimes. Also, you may need to bring a checkbook, because each of your downloaded files costed us $150,000 in lost revenue.

You are going to buy the CD? Not now!

(swoops up cape and runs away, cackling madly)

Re:A Friendly message from the RIAA

[JSkills]

Oh please don't send me to Federal-Pound-Me-In-The-Ass-Prison!

Summer vacation?

[mldkfa]

I wonder if anyone took into account summer vacations. I know that most people go away to a cabin or some other place around here so has anyone compared the loss of traffic to the average decrease in site traffic over thoes weeks?

And In (still other) other news...

[poptones]

Traffic in all the "relevant" USENET groups is also noticeably up. According to this report some of the groups have tripled and quadrupled in traffic.

Re:And In (still other) other news...

[Master of Transhuman]

True. I've been downloading music videos of The Corrs every day for a week off Usenet. Haven't been on a P2P network for months. Tons of stuff on Usenet that takes up all of my time. Got almost 100,000 pictures of babes on the hard drive. Got a couple old Elvis tunes. Got a ton of Tori Amos bootlegs from concert tour (amazing how people can use smugggled in mikes and DAT recorders to get really good bootlegs.)

Busy, busy.

B.S. Propaganda

[felonious]

Hmm this story smells like propaganda or disinformation because all I've been reading online states the contrary. In fact traffic is up as much as 10% since the RIAA sue threat came out. As always don't believe everything you read and all my sources could be wrong too. Statics are misleading 50% of the time:D

Here's one article stating that traffic is up...one of many...
P2P traffic up since RIAA sue threat

Re:B.S. Propaganda

[MattCohn.com]

And here's another...

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/07/06/153229 &mode=nested&tid=188

Does this count as an anti-dupe? Does it take away one of their previous dupes?

...and the rest...

[darth_silliarse]

So I guess that leaves the other 85% downloading pr0n safe then?

OK, the RIAA stopped us

[dotgod]

Congratulations, RIAA, you've succeeded. Nobody downloads MP3's anymore. Move along now.

Playing with fear

[GabrielF]

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.

Re:Playing with fear

[tempfile]

Piracy already is a criminal offence. All the RIAA has to do is to lower the incentive for people to pirate music - the outrageous prices, the mediocre artistical quality and the at times horrendous technical quality of CDs.

From the Files of Police Squad???

[niko9]

"...Nielsen Net Ratings said traffic on Kazaa.."

Is that the same cop who goes around saying things like" "Like a midget at a urinal, I'm gonna have to stay on my toes." or "Like a blind man at an orgy, I'm gonna have to feel things out."

If it is, I sure hope he doesn't show up at my crib looking for MP3's.

He's a one man crimefighting show! :p

rm -rf gtk-gnutella

are these statistics good?

[wannasleep]

ok, so what is the variance in the traffic?
dropped? with respect to when?
what was the trend before?
and big deal: the week of july 4th, when people were on vacation..... I kinow that it is not a conclusive evidence, but for instance, the number of housing posts on craigslist traditionally dips on the holidays weekends..... does RIAA threaten people who post housing ads?
the short time does tell nothing! I want to see a month to month comparison over an extended period of time to draw any meaningful conclusions

Drops, or goes more stealthy?

[Kjella]

I mean, I'd be surprised if what actually happened was that people with common interests went off on private servers, or mutual ftps and stuff like that. Just like in the "old" days. True, you don't get quite the same network effects as before, but it's not really that difficult to hook up with "enough" people anyway, it's more about bandwidth available. My server for friends is usually busy 24/7 at least... (All the latest Linux ISOs right? ;)

Kjella

i was on vacation

[jpu8086]

an open note to riaa:

sorry to disappoint. i was on vacation. shutdown my kazaa shared folder. i am back now, you can expect the traffic to go back up.

(ms. rosen: i am just kidding. pleazzz don't sue me.)

p2p lusers now moving to usenet

[sakusha]

I've seen a small increase in total goddam idiots on usenet who were former p2p lusers, you know, the kind of kiddee who thinks he can post 5Gb of mp3s to usenet like he used to share a 5Gb drive on gnutella.

Only time will tell

[UnknowingFool]

I remember that my statistics professor once said that statistical sampling is useless unless the sample size is large and randomized and the population is somewhat uniformly distributed. As others have pointed, the holiday weekend is an example of a nonrandomized, small sample set. Wait a few months to see if there has been any real changes.

As for me, I've switched swapping methods to avoid detection. This means I have to come out of my mother's basement and swap CDs behind the local convenience store. :)

Re:easy: school's out

[leviramsey]

Most US universities close for the summer in May... UMass is generally a couple of weeks later than the rest, and I was out by the 20th.

Yes, there's summer semester, but that's generally not heavily residential.

Correlation or causation?

[Gogl]

Other possible explanations for the drop in filesharing:

-- July 4th. Even geeks have lives.
-- Summer. Same as above.
-- Summer. Less college students, who tend to be heavy users.
-- No notable "new" stuff, TV series generally aren't releasing new episodes to be downloaded over the summer.
-- Simple statistical anomaly. 15% may sound like a lot, but if it's just a weeklong trend it doesn't mean much.

And there are other possibilities too. Be creative, I'm sure you can think of some.

Man, the world would benefit so much if somebody would just take out an ad during the Superbowl or something that would explain in simple terms the difference between correlation and causation. Except such an explanation is likely impossible. Oh well.

Re:CDRs?

[Lord_Dweomer]

"Is it unreasonable to assume that a great deal of CDR sales are related to piracy archives? "

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.

Random distributions.

[mfh]

I'm going to hazard an obvious guess here.

If you have a random subset within a larger set [p2p users in the USA], a randomly distributed decrease in the superset will correlate with a similar decrease in the subset.

Re:Random distributions.

[GlassHeart]

If you have a random subset within a larger set [p2p users in the USA], a randomly distributed decrease in the superset will correlate with a similar decrease in the subset.

"P2P users" would not constitute a random subset of the "USA" set. For one, they own or have access to computers. This fact will likely correlate with their income (probably average or better), education level (probably high school or better), age (perhaps from 10 to 50), area of residence (probably in or around a big city), and even race ("digital divide"). These are all factors relevant to what they do on the 4th of July.

Re:easy: school's out

[isorox]

The kids don't normally have access to that sweet T-3 when they are at home.

But occasionally they do?

Like the great blackout baby boom

[big.ears]

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.

Yes Man

[redtail1]

I doubt it, but maybe a few reports like this are all the recording industry nazis need to save face.

So let me confirm those findings with my own independent research. After spending all day logged into Kazaa I saw maybe, like... one guy downloading two files. And they were MIDI tunes. Honest.

Nothing to see here anymore, move along now.

So...

[El]

Since the RIAA always insists that every person that downloads a song would have been a paying customer if the download wasn't available, then we should also see a 15% increase in CD sales during that time period?

Another explanation....

[sokeeffe]

Maybe the drop in filesharing traffic is seasonal. New releases are not as frequent from major artists during the summer months so filesharers have less new songs available to download at present.

you're shitting me, right?

[twitter]

Does iTunes really do it for you? If so, I'm happy really I am. But it will NEVER match the collection brought forth by Napster or any other file sharing network. Dan Peng's story pokes brilliant fun at the inadequacies and he got it published by the morons as a success story for the RIAA:

Still, when I hear a timeless Beatles classic on the radio and then go home to look for it on Pressplay or ITunes and it isn't there, I tend to longingly eye the Kazaa icon that still sits on my desktop, beckoning me to return to piracy.

Can't get a Beatles song? A song from one of the most mercilessly comercialized bands in all history is not on iTunes? iTunes must blow!

No commercial company can measure up to the file sharing networks. They have lost the recordings, or just don't have money or resources to digitize them. The distributed effort of all music fans created a catalogue of all kinds of music you could never get in a store. That's what you get when you let music lovers share their stuff. Some of the newer music services are gettin good, but none match Napster yet. The comercial services don't stand a chance unless they figure out how to enlist the fans. It is this fundamental failure to make work available by the current "owners" that makes them obsolete, despite legal sucess beyond all reason. People will get around them sooner or later.

Re:you're shitting me, right?

[webguru4god]

I agree with you that the iTunes Store will never match the vast collections of music amassed by Napster/Kazza/P2P users, but I do say that it is a step in the right direction. I know that the library selection is limited right now, but Apple is adding more files all the time and continuing to improve the experience.

I know that the iTunes store won't always deliver, and sometimes I may end up going to those 6 record stores or Kazaa, but I was very pleased with the ease and convenience that Apple put into the iTunes Store.

My main point is thus, the RIAA needs to stop suing college students and threatening the general population and instead embrace the Internet and the advances it provides! I find it funny that a large portion of bands that support MP3's and file sharing are indie bands. They are the ones who realize that file sharing can help them gain the notoriety that they need, and readily provide MP3 copies and exclusive songs through the Internet and P2P networks.

It is crucial that the music industry accept the Internet instead of suing everyone they can in order to keep their monopoly on music, which is in essence common knowledge. And that is why I applaud Apple, because they have showed innovation once again and shown that there are more solutions to this problem than lawyers.

Re:you're shitting me, right?

[JudgeFurious]

twitter

I'm sure that probably a lot of music hasn't made it to iTunes yet that people are looking for. How can it not be? The sheer volume of stuff people want is incredible and hopefully it will all (or at least mostly) make it on there.

I think the thing to keep in mind is that yes, no commercial company can measure up to the file sharing networks RIGHT NOW but they're relatively new and have to take a much different approach to assembling their catalog than Napster and Kazaa did. The upside to this is that by doing it "by the book" they might be around 5 years from now and making a profit.

How can something that isn't even finished yet be obsolete? Before you judge them to be completely devoid of merit let them run for a while and take into account what they have to go through to make this music available in this manner.

iTunes probably works well for me because I'm not a big audiophile. I've got a lot of music by many peoples standards but my collection is probably tiny compared to many others. Much of the older stuff that I like (like the Beatles music) I already owned on CD's before Napster appeared so I don't feel a lot of need to go looking for it. Should I need it in the future though I'm sure it'll make it onboard.

Re:you're shitting me, right?

[Doctor7]

Unfortunately it doesn't work that way. If a song requires conversion from anything other than a CD, or a film has to be capped in realtime from video rather than just ripped from DVD, you will be very lucky to find it. Just like the commercial labels, most P2P users would rather share this year's crap than something decent from ten years ago, because it's less work.

Re:you're shitting me, right?

[Doctor7]

There are some, yes. I was actually quite impressed after I went to the trouble of digitising an old (never-released on CD) tape before it wore out, only to find the whole album available on Kazaa. But with films, particularly, it's unusual to find much that's older than about three years - people seem much more likely to go to the trouble of making a barely-watchable cam of something that's just hit the cinemas, than a high-quality cap from VHS of something that's no longer easy to get hold of.

If this is for real....

[dacarr]

If this is really the case that people are leaving P2P networks (clearly it's not), they're going to FTP and HTTP searches. There's more than one way to do this, you know.

I think this is less propaganda stating that the RIAA is serious and more propaganda stating that the RIAA is actually doing something. Both, of course, are utter shite.

Its the Kazza effect...

[sTalking_Goat]

A curios thing I dicovered while using Kazza.

People don't delete fakes. It rather amazing. I heard of a guy who hard encrypts stuff he nts to archives and the names the file after a new movie or something. People download this 600+ MB files realize its not the movie, some are probably savy enough to realize its not even a damn mpeg/avi but they don't delete them. They just let thenbogus file sit on the hardrive with out evening a namechange and let it proogate. He'd come back months later and still find the file on at least three users.

Personally I blame this phenomenon on cheap HD space. I'm running a Win XP laptop with 20 gigs. I'm constantly archiving stuff to cd and cleaning the junk of my HD because I can go from 10 G free to 0 without even realizing it. Especially since software developers have seemed to have adopted the "Bigger is Better" mantra (I mean why does an Image Veiwer need to be 25 MB ?)

Makes me long for the days when 100 MB was considered more than any sane person needed and any normal person could afford. At least people would be conservative with their space.

Re:Its the Kazza effect...

[frause]

Not deleting fakes????

I'm not even sharing the directory I'm downloading to. I listen/whatch/whatever to the files first (OK maybe just a piece at the beginning, middle and end) and then mv it to where I want it, if I want it. I just delete it if I don't like it.

And if it's really good, I go out and buy the album.

I'm sorry

[Roofus]

That drop in traffic is my fault. I just got my first Mac and I'm still looking for a good p2p client! I hope to be online soon and get those traffic levels back to normal.

Re:I'm sorry

[PetWolverine]

Give it up. There aren't any. I've been looking for years.

Re:I'm sorry

[Jhan]

Try DirectConnect. It works well enough.

What's moe entertaining?

[MoeMoe]

Now I don't know what to keep my eye on during work... The stock market, or Nielsen's Net Ratings

sales?

[carpe_noctem]

The question is, did CD sales increase in this timeframe too?

Call me cynical, but I bet not.

GNUnet is the way to go.

[HanzoSan]

See GNUnet GNUNET
Research

I will tell you why it is really down...

[0vi_king]

Just read this

Wow!

One other thing..

[Genjurosan]

The article doesn't speak directly about the numbers of users.. just the amount of traffic.

Couldn't this represent 1 MEGA user per network that went on vacation during the holiday weekend? *grin* I know that isn't the case; however, it is possible, given the manner in which the article was written.

Open for discussion...

they have learned and they know.

[twitter]

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?

They know what gets traded on the networks and it terrifies them. The catalog is so much bigger than they could ever support at a physical store that the only way for them to survive is to eliminate the networks. They are obsolete, and will never wield the power of the "big hit" again. When people are free to share what they have and pick what they want, it turns out they have much broader tastes than any music mogul ever had.

When you stand back and look at things, you might start to wonder what the purpose of the recording industry is. For decasdes it was more about promoting a small subset of all music over all others to drive sales. That's not so much a matter of promoting that one song as it about supressing all other songs. The heavy rotation play from broadcast stations never were anything more than an obnoxious advertisement. Music sharing networks cut that out and alowed music to be chosen on grounds of taste an merit, criteria the music industry abandoned decades ago.

Re:they have learned and they know.

[0111 1110]

This is a good point. I cannot even buy *any* of the music that I like at a local CD store. They just don't carry anything even slightly unusual. I can now only buy CDs on the internet. The days of the brick and mortar record store seems to be at an end. And since I am buying over the internet anyway, I may as well buy a used CD, rip it and then resell it again. Now that's what I call real filesharing with redbook quality:).

And let's not mention how quickly CDs go out of print when they are not mainstream. If it doesn't sell well enough they never even bother with a second pressing. I have a number of songs that are *only* available on P2P.

actual uses of Kazaa, et al.

[Thumpnugget]

These programs, Kazaa, Nuttela, etc, were written specifically for the purpose of illegally downloading music.

Coulda fooled me. I always thought they were for downloading porn...

oh wait, never mind, if I download porn then it's still infringing someone else's copyright, isn't it. DAMMIT, you just can't win.
----

Re:actual uses of Kazaa, et al.

[frost22]

oh wait, never mind, if I download porn then it's still infringing someone else's copyright, isn't it.

Hmmm... isn't all original, creative content on porn tapes (c)God Himself anyway ?

Wondering...

Re:actual uses of Kazaa, et al.

[kasperd]

(c)God Himself

And of course you don't care infriging his rights?

Re:actual uses of Kazaa, et al.

[hesiod]

> > (c)God Himself
> And of course you don't care infriging his rights?

But God forgives -- RIAA does not.

However...

[Calren]

...everyone downloads Ogg's now.

Disinformation & Freedom

[felonious]

Why do we let an industry over state their loses, change our laws, restrict our freedoms with the products we own, and fuck us over all to keep an old system in place , of which, consumers have completely rejected and moved past?

I can say it's our own fault for not fighting this or doing anything about it that allows it to continue. Tell me how is it possible that downloading files, copyrighted or not, and movies is frowned upon more than violent crimes? The guy who released the hulk movie on the net is going to do 3-6 years. That's more than first offenders get for violent crimes yet he's lumped in with them and he didn't hurt anyone's bottom line. Total and complete bullshit and we allow it to continue.

All it takes is a grass roots effort to put an end to this. We give them the power and we can take it away. This is about money and only when we stop buying completely will they listen and take notice. Until then keep spending and supporting the entity that is out to make a point by suing you into a financial disaster and making all of your choices for you.
As I stated in my previous post the RIAA seems to be trying out every angle available to stop filesharing. Guess what? It's not working nor will it. Disinformation seems to be a new tactic but I'm sure it'll work on the un-informed masses. In all actuality I bet a mojority of filesharers are under 18 so they aren't afraid of going to jail because they can't be charged as adults. Maybe the RIAA will sue them and their parents into poverty?

Dear CNN, repeat after me:

[sn00ker]

A statistical blip is not a trend.
Particularly when it occurs over the major holiday weekend for the world's largest population of 'net users.

Reverse

[blunte]

And who's to say the reverse isn't the case?

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.

Re:Reverse

[ReTay]

At a guess they are not covering the correct networks? I have see one or two with high amounts of traffic.
Of cource you could try
www.earthstation5,com
The RIAA can't find you and it is free.

Re:Reverse

[Daetrin]

Could it be Nielsen doesn't have the best numbers?

So we have to decide between the opinion of those with less accurate information, and the opinion of those with a vested intrest in distorting the more accurate information which they have, not a great choice.

Re:Reverse

[Sevn]

It doesn't appear to work with wine. I'll stick with
using Kazaa and only sharing public domain works. :)

Re:Reverse

[Mantorp]

never heard of earthstation5 is it any good?

Re:Reverse

[AstroDrabb]

How do you know the RIAA cannot find you? Why in the world would you trust some closed source ms windows only file sharing client, especially a newer one. Don't you think that the RIAA/MPAA could have some no name company make the "Next Genration" P2P app? It would make it much easier for them to find all the big sharers. Sorry, I will only trust Open Source.

Re:Reverse

[hesiod]

> When will these IDIOT web designers get a clue and at least supply a "HTML ONLY" or "Text Version" link

Maybe there's something wierd with my account, but why does this have a score of 0? That's a perfectly valid question. I've asked the same thing MANY times before, except I usually swear a lot more when it happens.

There are way too many people out there who call themselves web designers, but they don't know dick about HTML. They make a 20TB Flash file and stick it in Dreamweaver -- presto, a web site! Yeah right.

Re:easy: school's out

[elsilver]

Actually, from my experience, universities are done in May, so your theory doesn't quite work.

However, grade schools and high schools finish then end of June, so you may not be totally off track.

But grade/high schools aren't likely equipped with T-3s, so your theory isn't working again.

However, kids who normally would be downloading via DSL at home, are now heading out on family vacations, going to camp, getting summer jobs, and doing other things that will take them away from the computer for the next while.

On the whole, I agree with your subject line "easy: school's out", but not your reasoning.

School's Out for Summer!!

[killerfocus]

Is there any possibility that filesharing dropped signifigantly because of all of the college students in the country that either went home or were studying for finals away from their super-fat university pipe?

Anyone else wondering this?

[Anonymous Coward]

"sue them for damages of up to $150,000 per copyright violation"

How can they claim losses of $150,000 per violation? So you're saying if I download 10 songs from an album, I can be sued for 1.5 mil, but if I steal the album from a record store, I get what, a small fine and some community service?

Re:Anyone else wondering this?

[Knightmare 1]

The $150,000 per violation is for sharing songs, not downloading them I believe.

Re:Anyone else wondering this?

[anthony_dipierro]

How can they claim losses of $150,000 per violation?

These are punitive damages, and have very little to do with actual losses.

So you're saying if I download 10 songs from an album, I can be sued for 1.5 mil, but if I steal the album from a record store, I get what, a small fine and some community service?

No, no one said that.

Wild Goose Chase?

[Random BedHead Ed]

Here's an idea. If you've purchased any CDs recently and have the receipts, go ahead and Kazaa away. But only download songs from albums for which you can prove you had previously owned a copy.

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 ...

Re:easy: school's out

[hazem]

I knew Oregon was a state full of oddity...

most of the state schools here are on quarters and finished around June 15th this year.

The school I go to is on Semesters, and it's summer term ended June 20th.

My reasoning may be off, but I think it works for this whacky state, anyway.

You bring up some good points, to be sure.

as if!

[kennedy]

call me crazy, but wasnt there some worm going around the windows world that week?

;)

Re:Heres the REAL news. File sharing traffic goes

[Lord_Slepnir]

From that article: Weiss said the recording industry should lobby for special taxes on CD burners and Internet access

Makes perfect sense to me. Since everyone who has an internet connection uses it to pirate music, we should all be forced to pay for this! Its not people out there use the internet for things like....oh, I don't know...shopping, or for information.

If I'm going to be treated like a criminal (and I already am, seeing as how I buy CD-Rs for data backup and mixing my own albums from music I legally own), I'm going to at least act like a criminal. Hoist the Jolly Rogers, it's time to sail the IRCs! Yaaaarrrrrrr!

Why RIAA & crew are idiots

[azav]

First, in the late 80's or early 90's a record exec promises that CDs will be cheaper than tapes because they cost less to produce.

Prices go up.

Then MTV forgets that Music Television should play music on television.

Next, Clearchannel starts the "McDonaldization of American Radio"

Now, RIAA attacks their own customers.

Result? Those of us that see this, really do love the music, FIND SOMETHING ELSE and rip internet radio streams to our heart's content, buy turntables and pay cash for Vinyl Records of the artists we like. We find new music, enjoy new artists, NO commercials and pay money that goes to the artists we like.

And have big fat hard drives and data DVD burners.

Less big music industry. More boat parties.

And ProtonRadio.com

Re:The rightly might.

[jez9999]

More like:

1-Ogg develops the principle of compressing sound information whilst maintaining wonderful quality.
2-RIAA develop DRM technologies they can hide their data behind.
3-They also start throwing expensive lawsuits at Ogg.
4-Ogg develops anonymous filesharing networks and circumvention measures.
5-Etc, etc, etc. :-)

Filesharing and Computer usage fell by 15%

[cyman777]

after summer has started and everybody is gone to the beach. But OK - let RIAA think everybody listens to them (sic!) so they hopefully shut up soon. Cu at the beach :-)

This is a classic example of using the Media

[Evets]

This is a classic example of using the Media as a marketing network. The RIAA gets Nielsen to say that the ratings have dropped and they send a press release to CNN in response to other sources which state otherwise. Had Nielsen said the ratings rose, we would have heard nothing more about this matter. If the reporter had actually done any work aside from making two or three phone calls and reading a press release, he would have reported cd sales increases/decreases over the same time period or maybe even suggested alternative reasons for the decrease. Instead of a complete report we have nothing more than a one sided commentary that is obviously self serving to the story's originator. It's quite absurd of an idea to think that a CNN reporter could not find an antagonistic opinion to present. There are more people to talk to about this stuff than a Kazaa backed lobbyist.

Oh please...

[AyeRoxor!]

Those of you who remember the warez scenes of the BBS's of yore will remember that sometimes a board was taken down in YOUR AREA CODE. Within actual driving miles of where you lived. How long did it take for elite sections to open back up? 6 months? 3? one? They always did. They always will. Same today.

AyeRoxor [8i3]

Re:Oh please...

[burns210]

exactly!

At the end days of the Napster scene, i was completlely convinced that file-sharing was going to die.... then i discovered kazaa, which put(in many ways) napster to shame.

I have since ended my stint of trading... but don't think that taking down traders or software that they use will stop them... it is just a matter of time before the files are encrypted when sent(if the record industry tried to break the encryption, they would violate the DMCA) and ip addresses are hidden and the whole thing becomes one big shadow of a black market...

They couldn't stop them if they tried.

so being a democrat == thief

[moogla]

The 2 party system must be abolished. Great. I can no longer take this child-minded bullshit.

It's my fault the sharing dropped

[ShieldW0lf]

Next weeks article:

File sharing on p2p networks rises 15% despite RIAA threats; ShieldW0lf buys new hard drive; has more space to download; reconnects to network.

Re:It's my fault the sharing dropped

[keirre23hu]

Yet another example of a SlashDot post... find unreliable information (when did Nielsen become the authority on File Sharing Traffic.. this is a joke right? Im not even sure i trust some of their TV rating output) make sure it has the right keywords (Microsoft, Linux, GNU, DRM, RIAA, MPAA, SCO for example) Post it and wait for 500+ responses

Lets not argue...

[DrCarbonite]

Dear RIAA, You have won. All of us misadjusted p2p users are no longer sharing mp3s of legitimate artists. Instead, we now trade songs of our children banging on pots and pans. Sincerely, Your Customers.

Re:The rightly might.

[Master of Transhuman]

You forgot:

6) ???
7) PROFIT!!!

�The Slashdot effect�

[codexwriter]

"The Slashdot effect" is commonly mislabeled as a god level D-enial O-f S-ervice effect. * Where tens of thousands of computer nerds suddenly prompted to some new (read: recently rehashed) idea (and they are addicted to this constant stream of morsel sized data bites worse than any heroin victim) all try and access the data at once and bring sites to their knees, then cut off their heads and sacrifice the blood to Xanthon god of Bandwidth. In reality I propose the unsettling idea that the Slashdot effect is far more terrible... not merely a DOS attack it is in fact when tens of thousands of people suddenly lose the ability to think for themselves! They form a group consciousness (Like the Republi-Cons and the Demo-Crats, no individual thought just a mass consciousness, indeed who is to say these two variant and ever warring mind sets did not evolve from the same barren world? A concept I will explore in more depth another time) which always seems to say/write the same things ... Beowulf cluster it! "If ones cool 10 is 10 TIMES as cool oh yeah." Microsoft is Evil, Bill Gates is the incarnation of Evil. Linux is Good, Linux is the SOURCE OF ALL GOOD, the universes soul function is the evolution of Linux and hastening it is the Torvalds! a demi-deity! RIAA are scum! Even the artists hate them! They should all be subjected to the torture of 40 days, forced to walk across rock salt with the skin flayed from their naked feet and ... etc. They have no right to come after file sharers. They don't pay artists! They are hypocrites and even worse they employ STATISTICIANS! TIA (total information awareness) = END OF WORLD. It is against the constitution! Standard line referenced... "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."- Benjamin Franklin Most recently SCO are repugnant vile, scum licking litigators with no product to back their claim to existence! The US patent system is broken! And a few other things besides. Mostly (admittedly) the group think is if not always exactly on the mark, close. What disturbs me though, is the *commonality* in thought, the ever present repetition. Almost a reflection of politics, most people aren't motivated to vote (POST) but those few who do are really passionate and outspoken, and thus we develop wide ranging ideological schisms. Consequently I will address a SMALL number of thoughts that may run counter to SLASHDOT group think. I have erected PSYCHIC iron wall discipline to deal with the backlash... Number One. The RIAA. The RIAA might be scumbags, but every person who uses Kazaa to download their songs needs to stop pretending like they aren't committing a crime. They ARE. They know they are, or they should know they are. The idea that being able to listen to the song from your mp3 will inspire you to go buy the cd is a ludicrous smokescreen for most of the nerd-tech-geeks I have met. I can't even guess how many people I know with PC juke boxes filled with 20, 30, 40 gigabytes of mp3's or more, one mentioned 120 gigs. They don't BUY the cds- to do that would take the GNP of a third world nation. And if they do come across something they like, they'll burn it to a cd - with new cd players it isn't even necessary to convert from mp3 format, or they can get one of the memory laden mp3 players. Every year their capacity goes up and the price goes down... every year the incentive to get a cd fades a bit more. Does this make it right for the RIAA to go after a few unlucky bastards and make examples of them? Not really. But it's an old strategy to hang the skeletons of criminals at the gates of the city as a warning, and it can be quite effective. What I find remarkable (and I know you want to know it!) is that everyone derides the RIAA while at the same time slaking up the product they provide. At this point comp. tech in the sound field lets a hobbyist match a studio. Don't want to pay for your music? Then make your own, and download the works of independent artists. Don't insin

We need an inherently encrypted network protocol

[drinkypoo]

That way, no one can tell what you're doing with any kind of connection. Optimally you wouldn't even send port numbers in the clear. You could still implement NAT and Masquerading by having the firewall able to simply broker communication between the client and server; Connection comes in, gets stopped at the firewall, the destination is read, including the type of data, and a key exchange is brokered between client and server with the firewall acting as middleman. The user could be informed every time such a transaction took place so they could turn away from brokers they did not trust, but of course if properly implented, brokering the conversation will not result in being able to sniff the connection anyway, only to see connection type details, so the particular contents will not be encrypted.

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.

Hey, RIAA!

[fok]

track this: _|_

Dun, dun, dun...

[Obiwan Kenobi]

*** Looking up 65.42.25.3
*** Failed to resolve 65.42.25.3

Another one bites the dust...

I just imagine some RIAA lawyer sitting behind his desk and pumping his fist going "Yeah, you like that, don't you bitch?"

Re:Dun, dun, dun...

[Lazaru5]

Lack of a PTR record has nothing to do with whether the machine at the IP is up. You were better off trying a ping. (It replies today btw.)

So, why are you downloading them?

[emarkp]

If you are definitely going to buy the album, why are you downloading the songs? Just go and buy the thing for crying out loud,

Re:So, why are you downloading them?

[JSkills]

Impatience is really it ... I didn't even know they had a new album out. You're right though - I need to actually wait to get the CD in my hands first I guess.

Re:"Want To Preview" ? sometimes easy and free.

[JSkills]

thanks! I really had no oidea. I'm so used to one method of finding music, that I didn't even check the official website. Most groups I like have no official website ... BTW - I've got primo seats for Steely Dan at Jones Beach this summer ;-)

Crack money

[jhung]

Pity. It seems as though many R&B singers have just ran out of pot money. I guess their cravings for drugs are uncontrollable now. They'll have to start scaring and suing some users to add to their eight-figure salary. Have fun smoking pot, RIAA.

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.

Re:Its not stealing, it's trespassing.

[Catnapster]

The best analogy might be copying a poem out of a book. You have the poem. You make the copy. There are now two of the poem; the book is still intact (assuming you didn't mess up the book in the copier), and you have a copy.

The artist gets a small (very small IIRC) cut of a record sale... the cost of the CD is negligible (unless the RIAA's stampers are gouging them the way the RIAA gouges consumers)... chances are, the marketing cost is negligible too (how many CDs are made in a run? Millions? Billions?) The RIAA is furious at downloaders because they have worked very hard to keep their profit margin as outrageous as it seems to be, and these scurvy pirates are taking that away from them!

In my opinion, the most accurate synonyms for this kind of copyright infringement are "illegal copying" and "illegal downloading". Whether or not it's legal (and therefore, fair use) is left as an exercise to the reader. (Though the RIAA represents downloading as the only copyright infringement, there are other ways to infringe copyright - plagiarism, for instance.)

You are right: "stealing" is certainly a loaded word. "Piracy" is a loaded word too, but it just sounds ridiculous to me: music murder? Music rape? How can you rape a song (other than a bad cover)? Maybe the language is evolving. Well I say that I'm going to sit here with my... uh, "lingual dinosaur".

Re:Its not stealing, it's trespassing.

[ShieldW0lf]

The difference here is that the copyright holder doesn't lose his rights. His exclusivity is infringed upon, but nothing is taken.

Once you've violated his copyright, which other rights does he have to lose [that are related to his work]? Not speaking in favor of granting him any, mind you... there are other ways to earn a buck, just saying lets recognize that once we take that away, he's left with none.

And in related news...

[Bigby]

...individuals filed fewer tax forms to Accounting offices across the nation during the April 20th - 26th week.

Of course the numbers are going to fall. Americans do enjoy 3 day traveling weekends.

Why is this insightful?

[AzrealAO]

For it to have any correlation to the reported drop in file sharing, 100% of file sharers would have to be teens taking 1 day off for the 4th of July.

It's completely absurd.

The real truth behind the reduction in P2P traffic

[mabu]

* The airing of a very special "Buffy" episode poignantly demonstrating the evils of file sharing.

* The never-ending influx of penis enlargement spam has forced most users away from their PCs

* Kurt Kobain, Tupac and Biggy did not release a new album this week.

* Public turned off to the new breed of rockers that refuse to comb their hair. Marilyn Manson P2P file shares increase, yet many groups such as Creed, Matchbox 20 and the Goo Goo dolls suffer.

* The size of Brittney Spears brests did not seem to change this month.

* Madonna releases yet another album that makes her old fans question their taste.

* Consumers are still in a catatonic haze over the excitement of Puffy and Nelly teaming up on a song featured on the 2fast 2furious soundtrack.

* People are unimpressed that Rob Thomas from Matchbox 20 is "scared"

* Instead of sharing files online, people have discovered that Leptoprin really does work and are power shopping on QVC instead.

In related news..

[bmantz65]

Useage of BT rose 11%. Since the RIAA is so damn and blind and greedy to stopping trading on Kazaa, they don't notice this blip. Heh.

And in other news....

[L. J. Beauregard]

As filesharing traffic fell 15%, sales by the RIAA's members likewise rose 15%....

Right?

Did they?

I mean I thought these eeeeevil file traders were responsible for all the woes of the music cartel^Windustry.

Right?

Is it?

And now that all those eeeevil file traders have got their comeuppances, the music cartel^Windustry should be back in the black.

Right?

Shouldn't it?

Re:And in other news....

[anthony_dipierro]

As filesharing traffic fell 15%, sales by the RIAA's members likewise rose 15%....

No no no. As filesharing traffic fell 15%, sales also fell by 15%. After all, people are only using napster to sample music before they buy it. Right?

M$-made hookers (response to sig)

[siskbc]

The only product that Microsoft could make that wouldn't suck is a vacuum cleaner. It would blow.

What if they made a hooker? Would it do both (suck and blow)? Would it have compatibility problems with my penis (round peg, square hole)? Would it try to kill all wives and girlfriends and monopolize the nookie market? Would it come without condoms enabled, exposing me to tons of viruses? Would it be prone to "back-door" exploits from malicious users (like my shady roommate)?

I must know!

Re:Yawn....

[IdleTime]

Sure you can use your computer for anything, however, if you use YOUR computer for ILLEGAL stuff, YOU will have to face the consequences. I thought that was simple.

I know this is /. and that is the reason my previous post was rated as a troll. It's hard to face the truth, I know that, but it was not a troll, just the plain thruth.

At least I can sleep without having to fear RIAA, that's worth beeing downmodded as troll to me.

Just take it offline

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Not an issue IMHO

[Jugalator]

I guess it's really time for Kazaa to get on the train and start using links aka edonkey then. I know about sig2dat but that software isn't really part of Kazaa (comes bundled with Kazaa Lite though). What Kazaa is missing to get rid of those fakes once and for all is built-in support for "kazaa-links" with browser integration. You know something like "kazaa://894eaab15f64cc6fcd001/Terminator3.DVDRIP. XviD.avi" which, when clicked, starts a download in Kazaa for that exact version of the movie. Then all one need is to put up some ad-sponsored sites listing verified links. I know quite a few and none have been closed for any reason, yet they're rather well known and I'm sure RIAA are aware of them since they basically act as primary community sites for the entire eDonkey network. A problem might be that they don't *directly* link to anything. However, they do indirectly, but perhaps the question is how indirect links are disallowed... I mean, those links store something like a 128-bit MD4 checksum. Is 16 bytes enough to describe a version of Terminator 3 accurately and uniquely and get someone to court for?

I guess RIAA hasn't dared to do this in the case of being told "nope, are you crazy" by the judge (not thinking/caring about the extremely small mathematic probabilities an identical MD5 sum describe another file in circulation) and having these sites explode in popularity as an effect.

Anyway, fake files *is* a non-issue in most cases unless you look for an incredibly rare soundtrack/movie/software that none have even bothered to generate a checksum from. But those are also the most rarely faked. For common files, there is no special issue with fake files, at least when using most other p2p apps then Kazaa.

Something not noticed

[Apreche]

Something that a lot of these guys have not thought of, is of course, the obvious answer/truth. File sharing traffic drops in may/june and rises again in late august early september. The college students leave and go back to school with their beloved OCs. Oh dual OC3s, how I miss thee.

What do you know, scare tactics work!

[crashnbur]

But $150,000 per violation? What a joke!

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.

I feel so warm and fuzzy now...

[andreMA]

Ah Nielsen Net Ratings. Are these the same people that caused the original Star Trek to be cancelled becuase they flunked Satistics 101?

Nielsen is meaningless, just a pacifier for advertisers to suck on.

But

[Overly Critical Guy]

Sharing copyrighted files is wrong. Legally and morally.

What's the problem?

And why does someone have to be convinced piracy is a-okay ("right and good") just to be passionate about IP issues? Your justification is that the RIAA is a "far greater evil?" You're a fool.

And piracy is an IP issue, you know.

Re:Dinosaurs, dogma

[I(rispee_I(reme]

In addition to the answer given in the other reply to the parent, the fossil record, of which dinosaurs are a part, contradicts the existence of a "Garden of Eden" with every animal that ever existed, existing simultaneously in harmony, as part of the same ecosystem.

Exactly right, but wrong conclusion

[tjstork]

The music industry is using the same exact argument that religious institutions make. They argue that society should give them special perks by saying that hurting those institutions is morally wrong.

You don't need no stinking priest to find your god, and you don't need to stinking middle man recording executive to get a song.

The greatest irony of our times it that the two most diametrically oppossed institutions in terms of ideal are completely the same after all. The religious nuts want the right to control information, and so does the recording industry. The RIAA and the 700 Club (or whatever he's onto now), are both the same thing, just in it for the power, add no value to anything, hamper the rights of users in order to stay in power, collecting a tax for delivering nothing. Both institutions are obsolete.

Time to step up to the brave new world.

Intellectual property doesn't matter because your ideas have been thought of or are obsolete.

Re:Stealing

[Izago909]

Movies are made of a photons and music is made of acoustic vibrations. Until they steal the material it is printed on, they are not stealing. Instead, they are infring on someone else's rights and possibly depriving them of income. If someone points out the difference, they can not be justifying an action since either are clearly illegal. Besides, depriving someone of income is not stealing because in order to steal from someone, must have it in the first place. Instead, they are depriving them of possible income, assuming that a person would have bought what they downloaded.
Stealing, infringing and depriving are not interchangable words. Ask an intelligent lawyer (if such a beast exists). You can not go to court and say someone deprived you of your car if they, in fact, stole it. They may have deprived you of personal mobility or your wages at work that day, but not your car.

Lack of square footage not an excuse

[dcavanaugh]

"The catalog is so much bigger than they could ever support at a physical store"

I can get a 2.5TB disk array for about $12K, a kick-ass Linux file server with fiber channel for about $8K, and a bunch of touch-screen kiosks with CD burners for about $6K each. Set up the kiosks, using what might be called "LAN Napster" (LANster?) to pull files on demand from the server in the back room. You pick your files, they download pretty much instantly, scan the old credit card and hit "burn".

Add some soft couches, a "listen with headphones" mode, a coffee bar, and Voila! profitability returned to the music industry. Of course, they would have to be willing to sell one song at a time, and it would have to be reasonably priced, since P2P is the competition. The buying experience would have to be convenient and fun, no waiting, DRM, or other nonsense. In theory, P2P activity would drop to a nuisance level. After all, everyone knows it can be slow, you don't always get what you want, and the whole process takes time. Take way the thrill of rejecting $18.99 pricing, crippled CDs, crappy albums, and inadequate choices, and P2P loses much of its appeal.

All they have to do is abandon a dying sales model and their unsustainable pricing. The solution is so simple, and yet the RIAA could mess up a one-car funeral.

Not all guesses are the same

[A nonymous Coward]

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.

Scientist: My guess is valid because of these reasons, this logic, this immense mesh of other reasons which all hang together by logic.

Hmmmm .... 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.

Re:Not all guesses are the same

[mfrank]

The only people that argue that entropy prohibits evolution are people who lack any knowledge of thermodynamics.

You have a problem believing that humans are too complex to "just happen", so you postulate a god that is infinitely more complex. Where did god come from? He "just happened". Yeah. OK.

When you demonstrate the same burden of proof for your faith that you demand from evolution, I'll show the slightest bit of interest in taking you seriously.

Re:Heres the REAL news. File sharing traffic goes

[clambake]

From that article: Weiss said the recording industry should lobby for special taxes on CD burners and Internet access
Makes perfect sense to me. Since everyone who has an internet connection uses it to pirate music, we should all be forced to pay for this! Its not people out there use the internet for things like....oh, I don't know...shopping, or for information.

If I'm going to be treated like a criminal (and I already am, seeing as how I buy CD-Rs for data backup and mixing my own albums from music I legally own), I'm going to at least act like a criminal. Hoist the Jolly Rogers, it's time to sail the IRCs! Yaaaarrrrrrr!


SHHHHH! I'm waiting until this tax passes and then go and claim my share as a copyright owner (i.e. slashdot poster).

RIAA Headquarters Address

[unclebrady]

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...

Insightful? WTF?

[org.earth.Citizen]

Thank you for one of the most tortured analogies ever posted. Seriously, if I were to spend days dreaming up the most irrelevent and inappropriate analogy regarding any subject matter on earth, I would never conceive of an RIAA equals Christianity analogy, so credit to you, an idea worthy of present-day academia. No matter, I'm sure that if the topic were baseball or C++, you would still find some way to work in an anti-Christian slam in there somewhere, not that you might have an agenda...

You are still missing something.

[twitter]

I can get a 2.5TB disk array for about $12K, a kick-ass Linux file server with fiber channel for about $8K, and a bunch of touch-screen kiosks with CD burners for about $6K each.

You might have 2.5TB of music digitized in one place, but do you think music publishers have it? Part of Napster's power was the distributed digitizing effort. Simply locating all the music that was digitized and available on Napster could bankrupt a traditional publisher. It's doubtful a traditional music publisher would take digitizations from the public at large, so they are stuck, "digitally remastering" what they can when they can. It does not add up geometically like Napster did and it will cost them too much to do it.

This is why copyright is supposed to be for time limited. Music will go exticnt before big companies can get to it and the highest quality recordings will be lost. Fixing the laws so that work can be published freely within the lifetime it is produced would be a good start. This would destroy most of big music publishers and good riddance.

Re:You are still missing something.

[dcavanaugh]

You are probably right about the challenge of getting all the content (legally) under one roof. Of course, nothing prevented the industry from getting this material onto store shelves originally. Now that we have a dirt-cheap method of distribution, it somehow becomes a problem. As you say, reasonable expiration of copyrights would lead to a public domain music distribution industry that would compete with RIAA.

Could it be??

[harmanjd]

That people are starting to realize that they will never listen to the 100 GB of music they have already downloaded, so why bother searching for more?

So why

[mrmeval]

Is everybody and his brother bugging, um, friends to set up P2P networks with IPSEC and SSH and other things?

Do not feed the Trolls!!

[Pac]

Sir, the trolls here are fed with a special, moderate, ration. Giving them knowledge makes them overexcited and hard handle. The staff thanks you for your cooperation.

I found it pretty boring

[Pac]

Discovery Channel or National Geographic Channel showed it down here. I even recorded the first two episodes for my son (since they showed it too late for him), but then I found they couldn't decide if their movie was to be a good documentary or a bad soap-opera (the actors were lousy, the script terrible). So I gave up. There were good bit, though. The part about the evolution of the mammal/bird eye was very good.

Re:Heres the REAL news. File sharing traffic goes

[wkitchen]

If I'm going to be treated like a criminal (and I already am, seeing as how I buy CD-Rs for data backup and mixing my own albums from music I legally own), I'm going to at least act like a criminal. Hoist the Jolly Rogers, it's time to sail the IRCs! Yaaaarrrrrrr!

Perhaps a more appropriate act of civil disobedience would be to dump a shipment of blank media into Boston Harbor.

Re:Heres the REAL news. File sharing traffic goes

[Galahad2]

No but then the RIAA couldn't complain about stealing music, because they were getting their money. In fact, I'm sure they would just make all of their stuff available online, since people burining that music to CD would be paying them, even if its indirectly. Er... right?

My "Piracy" habits

[dtfinch]

Recently (The week of the 4th of July) I burned 217 of my MP3's onto a single CD and listened to it throughout my vacation from Oregon to Southern California.

About a dozen of the songs were things I really pirated, all of them by Danny Elfman (where would I buy that?). Another 2 CD's worth were albums where the original CD was broken or scratched beyond repair and I downloaded replacements from Kazaa. The rest I purchased, ripped directly from the CD's, and never , and never shared. During my vacation I purchased another $55 in music CDs, but they were on sale. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that I had a bunch of pirated Monty Python songs on that MP3 CD as well, but among the $55 worth of CD's I bought were 2 Python CD's containing the songs I had pirated and much more.

Although I don't support piracy in general, small scale music piracy is not always bad. Someone who has a conscience might even buy more CD's as a result. At this moment I've purchased much more music as a direct result of piracy than I've pirated without purchasing. And most of what I haven't purchased I haven't seen on music store shelves.

If they keep threatening people for such minor violations, I might just set my radio next to my PC. I could even plug it into my line-in. Problem solved.

Heisenberg principle

[CrazyWingman]

I don't know about how Neilsen checks internet traffic - I'm too lazy to go and weed thru their site. But, I know when they do TV analysis, they actually put a cable box in the home that monitors what channel is being watched, and sends that information back to their system. Now, if the same setup exists for their net traffic analysis, then people know their being watched. And, with the recent cases in which providers have turned over information about subscribers who are sharing files, I'd sure as hell stop using my Neilsen-monitor net connection to trade files for fear that they'd turn me in! So of course Neilsen thinks less people are sharing!

Of course traffic drops!

[Ringlord]

It is a holiday period for lots of people. So they can not use the computer at the office, and at home (if not gone away) they have other things to do.

And in other news..

It *is* summer

[Jarlsberg]

Gosh - people spend less time in front of their computer in june-july. Somebody call the media! Oh wait, someone already has...

And the measurement method?

[Rogerborg]

I can't find an explanation of how Neilsen/Netrating is getting these figures. If it's the same way as they get TV figures, then it'll be based on a tiny sample of households, fitted with voluntary tracking systems. Note that they specify "US households", not worldwide figures, so how else would they get them?

Pop quiz: if you're planning to do some serious leeching, are you more or less likely to sign up to Neilsen tracking?

For bonus points, if you're the sort of Suzie Homemaker that's on the Neilsen system because you're genuinely unaware that those Barry Mannilow mp3s you've been sucking down are hooky, and you're suddenly made aware that the RIAA Is Watching You, are you likely to spit up a hairball and suddenly stop sharing?

Looks to me like this is a survey selected to produce this result.

Science does not deal with proofs

[arevos]

Science does not deal with proofs. Only mathematics and alcoholism do. Science is about the disproving of ideas, not the other way around.

That said, your argument would be perfectly valid if s/proof/the ability to be disproved/g. :)

Simple maths

[Amomynos Coward]

Ok if $150,000 drops the usage 15%, they'll just have to raise the fine up to $1 000,000.

gee

[Eisenstein]

Since July there are about 30 % less cars on our streets during rush-hour. Are they all exploded? Or may it be that it is summer and people are enjoying their holidays?

Summertime -> People have holidays -> People are switching off their computer -> People do download less or nothing while on holidays -> 15 % drop in usage.

Re:Heres the REAL news. File sharing traffic goes

[blibbleblobble]

"Weiss said the recording industry should lobby for special taxes on CD burners and Internet access"

Perhaps more usefully, we can lobby for a special tax on company earnings. From the number of companies who've committed fraud recently, it's obvious that anybody who runs a company intends to steal money. The only real way for the government to combat this evil is to take additional tax from the record-companies, on the assumptions that they will commit fraud.

While we're at it, perhaps we should consider a tax on blank paper and writing implements, to recover the cost of people writing articles unfavourable to various industries. We could put it as a tax on newspapers maybe. Or even on people who stop and chat in public.

Fun and Games with Statistics

[glaqua]

The real problem is that a company doing statistical surveys tries to claim that a week containing a big national holiday on a friday is statistically equivalent to the previous week.

We all know that the RIAA is working very hard to spin statistics that support their point. The fact that file swapping only decreased by 15% during the July 4 weekend just proves that people are not married to their computers, that they know how to shut them off and enjoy a long weekend.

The tag line says it all......

"There are Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics" - Mark Twain

Re:Dinosaurs, dogma

[mfrank]

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.

ahaha you should be modded up, thats funny

[HanzoSan]

You are funny, I hope you get modded up for that post.

Re:Stealing

[Overly Critical Guy]

Why is it whenever someone says "copyright infringement" is "stealing" someone comes by to correct them by giving scientific explanations of why something like movies and music can't be stolen by downloading because they aren't tangible?

Because they're idiots used to the years of convenience of piracy and are self-justifying to render themselves "less" illegal.

Look who published the story....

[ryan303]

CNN published this story, they own WB records, who are one of the big 6 RIAA players. So of course they want to instill fear of downloading and using kazaa. The story is probably BS. On a side note, ever notice how any artist who complains about priated music ( insert Lars here ), is someone you really wouldnt want to listen to anyways? dont flatter yourself too much guys, the power of kazaa lies in the ability to get unreleased, rare, live and otherwise forgotten tracks that you could never buy in a SPECs or Virgin Mega store anyways. Rock on.

Why? Have sales gone up?

[mulp]

"What do you know, scare tactics work!"

If the goal was to stop downloading and that was it, then maybe the strategy works. But I thought the goal was to "restore industry income and profits". If someone stops downloading but doesn't buy any CDs, or some other format of RIAA member company products, then what is the benefit?

Look at it from the economists standpoint. The demand for music downloads might be almost perfectly elastic. At zero the demand is 10 billion downloads. But at a price of 1 cent, the demand might be 1 billion downloads. At 10 cents, 10 million downloads. And at $1 it might be 100,000 downloads. If that were the case, the price should be lower than what they are currently charging, but to adopt a more profitable price structure will generate pressure on the existing CD price structure, resulting in lower overall revenue. Unless selling CDs for one half the price would more than triple the sales of CDs.

In one sense, the way the RIAA member companies think of things is the ideal situation for clubs around the country is for there to be 5 cloned bands that play 5 identical play lists. The spend all their money promoting their 5 live bands. When you want to go to a club on Friday night, you pick the country band, the rock band, the heavy metal, or folk band and pay the $10 cover charge. When upstart clubs start up with independent bands, the RIAA goes out and makes sure they don't get permits, licenses, or are allowed to advertise. This is the American way - screw the customer, big salaries to those can most effectively limit choice to drive up prices.

Re:Stealing

[yourmom16]

The problem with stealing is that you deprive someone of their property. That problem doesn't apply to copying; I see no reason copyright violations are immoral.

What about radio stations?

[adam86]

For the past few decades it has been possible to hear music for free on the good ol' radio. Some people even used recording devices (aka cassette tapes) to take music from the radio and listen to it whenever they wanted! There was an article about this on http://www.theonion.com awhile back. What I don't get is why Kazaa is so much worse than companies like Clear Channel. Perhaps the music industry needs to find more ways to make money.