Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
Get your own free personal location tracker
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.
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
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.
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.
Or even more interesting, did CD sales increase in the same period? Maybe people were busy doing other things.
Life moves pretty fast; if you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. -FB
"How many of you have slowed or stopped your file sharing???"
We at 65.42.25.3 are still going strong.
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
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 have but I have to admit that it only applies to movies. I last logged in to get a song before iTunes Music Store came online. Now that's got my music needs covered.
I still go to P2P for the odd South Park episode, that hard to find must have porn, or to get some software. Movies have absolutely nothing to fear from me though. Too much time and the results are crap.
I never said I wasn't stealing their shit. I only said I'd buy it if they met me halfway. iTunes did that and now I'm doing that.
Now let's get with the $5 DVD's and the $29 Photoshop people! Chop Chop!
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
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.
One cannot *steal* software,movies or music.
They are an infinitely reproducable thing. Otherwise, something like Kazaa would not really work.
All you can do is deprive the RIAA of a "potential" sale. Now since the demand for luxury items is typically VERY elastic, you can't equate a presumed loss at $0 to an actual loss at $20.
However, you can achieve a similar end result by merely buying used media. It's rather nice being able to "stick it to the RIAA" in a manner that no airchair moralist can reasonably complain about.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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
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.
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.)
This Space Intentionally Left Blank