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Filesharing Traffic Drops After RIAA Threats
bryan writes "According to CNN, facing the threat of lawsuits from a music industry trade group, fewer people are using online filesharing applications to swap songs. Internet audience measurement service Nielsen Net Ratings said traffic on Kazaa, the leading filesharing platform, fell 15 percent in the week ended July 6 from the previous week. It was during that prior week, on June 25, that the Recording Industry Association of America said it would track down the heaviest users of "peer-to-peer" services like Kazaa and sue them for damages of up to $150,000 per copyright violation." This follows earlier reports, from the filesharing companies themselves, that traffic was actually increasing.
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.
How many of you have slowed or stopped your file sharing???
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.
Phus. Sysiphus.
According to RIAA member AOL Time Warner
sulli
RTFJ.
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.
Please mod me up - we need help with this project. Please get in touch if you can code, or have ideas, or comments.
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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.
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. ;-)
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.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Internet file swapping teens take a break for 4th of July. (15% = 1/7 of the week)
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.
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
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?
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
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.
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
watch this
Legal alternative which gives me music the way I want to buy it. See RIAA guys, now that wasn't so hard was it?
We aren't all theives just looking for free music. Some of us were just looking for what we consider to be an equitable business model for buying songs. I've found iTunes and it's close enough that I'd rather buy music there than download it on Kazaa.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
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...
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Doh! Read the links...the RIAA is talking about song-swapping going down, while the p2p perveyors are talking about traffic going up. That's a distinction...people are swapping fewer songs, but more other stuff.
My guess: Since they're all Pirates, they're downloading that new Johnny Depp movie. ARRRR!!!
Consensual sex is boring.
No wonder I was having trouble finding a decent mp3 of "Don't copy that floppy".
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
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.
"How many of you have slowed or stopped your file sharing???"
We at 65.42.25.3 are still going strong.
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?
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
Maybe the swappers have as much material as they want. The current offerings at the store are so pitiful that they aren't worth downloading, much less buying.
If I worked for RIAA, I would use P2P activity as a leading indicator of future sales. Reduced P2P activity means the current products are not very popular. When will they learn?
Sure I've pulled down songs, listened to them, and not bought the CD (and since I didn't dig the song, I deleted it). Is this wrong? I've actually found myself finding more and more groups this way to get into. I spent my college days working in Record World and seeing just how much it cost to produce a CD compared to how much the store charged. Nothing worse than buying the CD for one song and getting slayed by the rest of the songs (that are useless).
Perhaps we are nearing the end of an era?
No one stopped sharing, they just switched to networks which are harder to monitor.
People arent stupid, they know the RIAA is looking at Kazaa.
Just as many people are on Kazaa, but if you think Kazaa is the best place to find music files you are wrong.
Face it, no one is going to stop.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
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"...
"Obviously, I'm not an IBM computer any more than I'm an ashtray" (Bob Dylan)
Ok so you dont share files. hundreds of millions of people do, and hundreds of millions of people think its right.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
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.
"Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned for SEGA. ..."
Silly File THIEVES and PIRATES use of P2P to commit robbery increases
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Interesting quote from the head of Freenet:
A speech...
I don't think the Slashdot crowd has the same mentality toward legal issues involving the RIAA as normal users.
The reason why slashdot users are passionate about things like the RIAA, the DMCA, etc. etc., than the average person is that the average person accepts the argument that sharing copyrighted files is wrong.
Thus, while the average person will share files in an anonymous environment, he or she either feels guilty about sharing or otherwise doesn't feel strongly enough about it to cause trouble, and sees it as inevitable, and possibly right, that the sites will eventually be shut down.
My advice to you is: if you want people to become passionate about IP issues, either convince them that sharing files is right and good, or that the commodified music of the RIAA is a far greater evil. Otherwise it's a hopeless task.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
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.
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.
Practice Kind Randomness and Beautiful Acts of Nonsense.
They just went to gnutella, edonkey, or what have you. Hell, with mldonkey you can do like six protocols at once. "Kazaa is being raided," they said, "so we're going to fuck off to some other network." Comcast just gave me a 1GB/mo giganews account so I'll have a nice place to get fills, I can pretty much just use USENET now even :P
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
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
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like you're referring to those loads of garbage files that tend to come up, and usually A) are around 60 K long, B) contain your search term . every known file extension, and C) all come from the same host.
.mpeg, .avi, .exe, .ram, and with things like (must see!) on the end of the filename. I put 6 addresses in my blacklist and >99.9% of them are gone. It's literally just 5 or 6 people doing this.
For example, without filters, I can search for "Beethoven 9th symphony" and suddenly see 50 files ending in
Of course, you might be talking about something else. If it's simply genuine mp3s with garbage in them, I simply preview my downloads while they're in progress.
Anyway, that's my 2 bits and a byte.
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.
So I guess that leaves the other 85% downloading pr0n safe then?
I've noticed that everyone who is for abortion has already been born - Ronald Reagan
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.
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.)
now supporting:
cmdrTaco for president '04
michael for oval office intern summer '05
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. :)
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
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.
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.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
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.
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.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
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.
The question is, did CD sales increase in this timeframe too?
Call me cynical, but I bet not.
"Quoting famous computer scientists out of context is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming." - K
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.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
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?
You aren't free to do anything, until you've lost everything.
Particularly when it occurs over the major holiday weekend for the world's largest population of 'net users.
"God, root, what is difference?" - Pitr, userfriendly
Could it be Nielsen doesn't have the best numbers?
From their press release, I can't tell how they arrived at their numbers.
I also wonder about their "unique visitor" term.
It seems to me that file sharing admins would have a pretty good idea of the traffic on their networks.
Hard to really know what's going on with so little information.
.sigs are for post^Hers.
I wonder if the RIAA would continue with this activity if the first few people they targeted with $150,000 fines were downloading songs they already owned ...
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!
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
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
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.
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]
The 2 party system must be abolished. Great. I can no longer take this child-minded bullshit.
Black holes are where the Matrix raised SIGFPE
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.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
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.
"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
I know you can use VPNs to get much of this functionality now, but it would be better for all concerned if all the traffic were encrypted and obfuscated, not just that of people with something to hide, or those who like to thumb their nose at authority.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
...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.
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?
Ooh, moderator points! Five more idjits go to Minus One Hell!
Delendae sunt RIAA, MPAA et Windoze
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.
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.
This is my sig.
Creationist: My guess is valid because I say so and because My Book says so and because My Book was written thousands of years ago and nothing since is as good.
.... that's a difficult choice ... now if you want to argue faith, go ahead, but don't argue logic based on a book full of contradictions written thousands of years ago.
Scientist: My guess is valid because of these reasons, this logic, this immense mesh of other reasons which all hang together by logic.
Hmmmm
Infuriate left and right
Recording Industry Association of America
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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.
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.