Slashdot Mirror
The RIAA Hit List - A Pattern Emerges?
Desus writes "Slyck News seems to have found a pattern in just what files the RIAA is searching on to find offenders. It seems the RIAA is targeting a wide reach of music, including Hip Hop, R&B, Rap, Rock, Pop and Country songs. Artists such as Ludacris, Michael Jackson, NAS, Busta Rhymes, Keith Sweat and Musiq were very common throughout the subpoenas. They've even created a helpful chart showing exactly what artists and songs seem to get one flagged." Update: 07/31 13:12 GMT by H : Here's another source for the chart.
So the message I am getting is
'Listen to good music, and the RIAA will leave you alone'.
I don't have a problem with that.
Legal action is justified and actually desirable if it stops someone listening to 'Destiny's Child'.
I rest my case, M'lud
Humorous signatures are over-rated.
http://perljam.net/misc/p2p/
Most popular:
Busta Rhymes Pass the Courvoisier (12)
Avril Lavigne Losing Grip (8)
Avril Lavigne Complicated (6)
Incubus Nice to Know You (6)
Marvin Gaye Lets Get It On (6)
Musiq Halfcrazy (6)
Tracy Chapman Fast Car (6)
-ted
An even bigger surprise was that when I clicked it, Gnumeric started up and opened it without complaints...
Shove CDs down my underpants.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
What I find irritating is that the "number of times" field ought to be it's own column in the spreadsheet so you can actually sort the frigging list.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
Hint: put only one type of data in each cell. When you mix data in a single cell, it makes it very hard to sort or analyze. For instance, this spreadsheet has two colums: "Artist" and "Song title (times appearing)".
Would it have been that hard to break out time appearing into another column, so interested people could actually *use* the data for something? No. In fact, it would have been *less* work.
Sorry to bitch and moan, but spreadsheet abuse is one of my pet peeves.
Cheers
-b
Once those songs are less populated, they'll go after other ones.
What would be more interesting is the percentage of subpoenas there are for each ISP. I've heard rumors of how AOL users are more immune, simply because of their Time Warner affiliation.
While I have no sympathy for those that choose to distributed copyrighted works on P2P networks without the copyright owner's permission, I don't understand why customers not using an ISP owned by the same holding company as the record companies should get in trouble first.
On the other hand, maybe AOL can leverage this to attract more subscribers. It's no longer "823451 hours for free", it's "music and movies for free"! Heh.
Of course, if the scare tactic doesn't pan out, eventually AOL users won't be safe either.
"You've got jail!"
KSpread will open it just fine.... I don't know what you're trying to use.
Reading the RIAA hit list... your ip has been logged, don't move the police are on their way.
THe article claims that from 50 total subpoenas being checked, they can deduce overall proportions of artist representation in the subpoenas, which is, frankly, a load of crock; with a sample size that small, margin of error would be enormous. Oh, and by the way, it's not like the RIAA needs to limit itself to these artists of these songs, they just happen to be what they were searching for to trigger some results, and with the huge body of work protected by the RIAA, I imagine that if it were not for simple lack of motivation, they could easily cycle through an enormous number of searches to perform... Perhaps they'll do exactly this each time someone tries to analyze their "pattern"...
I guess it won't be long before Jesse Jackson is accusing the RIAA of racism.
-R
If you don't like Excel, you can grab the files in HTML format (25.2 KB) or in OpenOffice.org Spreadsheet format (10.4 KB).
The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.
--Aristotle
The one pattern I see is that the overwhelming number of the artists seem to be those that appeal to under 25's. Obviously the RIAA have decided to go for those who can least afford to offer legal resistance (school kids and college students).
Come on RIAA, dare you to pick on us Lou Reed fans!
hmm, out of a miniscule sample size of 50, we found that a wide variety of types of music were being shared. Many popular songs were shared by many people, while some songs where only shared by a few. This roughly fits a bell curve distribution as would nomally be found in a random sample of shared files.
Therefore we conclude that the RIAA is targetting people with specific music sharring patterns.
yeah.
I have a surprising number of those songs on my machine
Like you just woke up one day and were like, 'wow i sure got a lot of those songs the RIAA is looking for. Wonder how they got there?'
----
In Soviet Russia, the overlords welcome you!
Ah, you just want to use the labor of someone who you consider to be a whore, so you can keep your pristine innocence. That's very noble.
Cheers
-b
If you haven't noticed, Rab/R&B/Hip-Hop is really popular with the disaffected suburban youth. Who have computers.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
What a stupid chart. If you're going to go through all the trouble of making an Excel spreadsheet why not create a proper spreadsheet and put the number of times a song was mentioned in its own column? See, now it's even more useful because I can sort by the number of times a song was mentioned to see what the most popular one was instead of having to scan the whole list manually. Simple, no?
And then you don't have to figure out if the number in brackets is actually the number of times it was mentioned or maybe makes up part of the title. If I was being pedantic and took the "Title (Times song appears)" column header to be gospel, then the Jay-Z song "I Just Wanna Love U" has been mentioned "Give It 2 Me" times, and the Ludacris song "Cry Babies" has been mentioned "Oh No" times. What is this? How many is "Oh No"?
Linking directly to an Excel spreadsheet *is* kind of lame.
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
A few people complaining about the fact that the person put the numbers in the same column as the Song Title, here's an easy way to fix if you have a word processor that can do find/replace:
1. Get a plaintext version.
2. Replace all instances of " (" (thats a space and open parantheses) with a Tab.
3. Replace all instances of ")" with nothing.
4. Import into a spreadsheet program (practically every single one will do tab-delimeted fields).
Annoying to have to do it but dead simple.
There's no Metallica on it!
Welley Corporation - SLM Scammers
They've even created a helpful chart
And please tell me what is helpful about a chart written for a product I do not own? This is the internet people! What is so hard about creating a simple table using um....tables? You can view them for free!
Saying your OS is the best because more people use it is like saying MacDonalds make the best food
I realized the second they told the public they were going to sue. So what I did was I decreased the amount of shared files I have by making copies of songs that are uncommon, and whos artists probably are not good friends of the RIAA. I share these songs only now, so if you want some good ol' Final Fantasy 7 theme music, just run a quick search! ;-)
;-)
What the RIAA is accomplishing, is simply seriously decreasing the amount of shares on P2P networks, leaving only pr0n and unknown artists.
Me, I'm set with my Russian servers.... Good ol' Mother Russia, land of the oppressed hackers
Best. Webhost. Ever. Dreamhost.
There was a big mix, pop music that only teenagers would be caught dead with, some 90's better music, and then some older stuff like GFA and Fleetwood Mac.
I have to say that the most surprising song on there was My Iron Lung by Radiohead. Radiohead is hugely popular. Kid A sold tons (and granted they went after one song from it). Their next, Amnesiac was good. Their live album which followed was good as well. Their brand new album is great. The RIAA passed up these 3 albums entirely and went after a non-single on an album 8 years old.
They did the same thing with Release by Pearl Jam. I actually want to meet that person. They must own the album. Who downloads Release who doesn't own Ten?
In the last five years or so, the Internet has gone from being fairly calm and safe, to more and more of a virtual reality war zone. Viruses and worms are one front, security holes and exploits are another, intellectual property "theft" and counter-tactics... and counter-counter-tactics are another, spam and filters and anti-spam are yet another. Those early books by William Gibson aren't too far off the mark anymore!
It is interesting that the Internet was viewed as a kind of egalitarian utopia not too long ago. Some people still hold this view, but in reality, it is becoming a constant war zone.
I wonder if all this could have been avoided if the internet was not commercialized? Is all this conflict going to destroy the Internet's potential fertility?
I think that there is no policy, no law, no technology which can create peace on the Internet. I personally think that the Internet is rather a microcosm of what is happening at a slower pace in the "real" world. And that can only be fixed by a fundamental change in the way that people (everyone in the whole world) think. It's like the cold war's arms race. At some point, everyone is going to have to realize that it is getting ridiculous and everyone is losing out because of that.
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
He was a tr8der boy
RIAA hater boy
Downloaded his music off of Kazaa
He had "Complicated"
Up on his supernode
Now he gotta subpoena from Silberberg & Knupp
Only on slashdot will you see people complaining about *anything*.
Those guys rummaged through the 911 subpoenas to compile a list on a spreadsheet, they let you download it for FREE, and not only did you show a token of appreciation, but you bitched about the formatting?
Would it have been that hard to break out time appearing into another column, so interested people could actually *use* the data for something? No. In fact, it would have been *less* work.
Interested people can compile their own list if they want.
Next thing you know, they'll have a version with actually splits that column into two, and we're gonna see people say stuff like "Why the FUCK would these idiots use a Sans Serif font? Everybody knows that a Serif font looks better on the monitor! Those insensitive CLODS!"
Yes it's mashed in the same column. Yes they used Arial. Yes they used a proprietary format by Big Bad Microsoft. Yes they weren't thoughtful enough to put in plain text so I can run your Perl scripts on it. Yes it's not encoded in ogg vorbis. Yes it won't play on your iPod or microwave. Yes they deserve to burn in hell for not making 2 million different versions catered for each person that downloads it.
No they don't! Thank them for spending the time to sift through all the subpoenas!
Ludacris, Michael Jackson, Busta Rhymes, Keith Sweat
This is obviously a plot my whitey trying to put down the black man. Fuck you cracker*!!!
*cracker refering to person of white color, not someone who breaks into systems or defeats software copy protection
I'll need a moment to download Excel from Kazaa.
I'm happy they are targeting Keith Sweat listeners. He is a menace.
100% Insightful
- Why didn't he use a third column for the count?
- Does the absence of "(X)" mean "one appearance" or "zero appearances?"
- Why use Excel for something so trivial, rather than HTML, RTF, or even ASCII?
- Is you insist on delivering the data in Excel format, why not deliver it organized in a useful manner?
On a side note, opening it in OpenOffice and saving it right back out to OpenOffice format results in a file 1/3 the size of the excel file.Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Why dont we setup fake servers serving files with names that match the file.
or setup p2p clients that will respond to all requests for these files with a spoofed address.
If we flood the network with false positives, when it comes to the lawsuit it comes out that some people accused were not actualy shareing any files, they would have to prove that they verified each and every one of their victims.
we could easily create blank files with the same time and size as the "real" files
Im a gamer, not a grammer major. This post is full of spelling and grammer mistakes.
Just chatted with my investigator friend at the RIAA again. He told me they've got this whole operation outsourced to online investigators (not sure exactly what that means) and law firms. They're budgeting the effort as a simple cost of doing business. They do in fact have patterns, schedules, etc. This is just going to keep going until a group finds a common defense and can start making this more costly for them. Otherwise he said that internally it's clear they're following this road as long as they can.
He also mentioned that they're now paying for staff at ISP's. Basically with the Verizon case everyone is ready to roll and RIAA finishes them off by offering to pay for the staff increases needed to fullfil the subpeonas.
Personally I haven't bothered downloading music since shortly after the Napster demise, but this stuff is bullshit. I really hope the folks getting targeted can band together with some sort of tenable defense and start making this more expensive for them. During the Napster case I was told by this same guy that RIAA was getting short on funding and the labels weren't willing to cough up extra cash for the case. It sounds crazy, but maybe enough individuals could eventually team up, get all cases into a single jurisdiction, and try to start bleeding them again. They're big, but there funds are not limited. Certainly a long shot, though, and expensive for everyone involved.
ROFL^30
Slashdot readers are fantastic.
Most interesting stories are mirrored in the comments. Which is great, especially when it concerns a story at NYT (which there should be less of), due to the registration requirements, I don't go to the site anymore.
But the thing that really hit me with this riaa story is that someone who provided information in excel format was good enough to share the info, but not everyone uses excel, or any microsoft products, myself included. So what do some of the slashdot readers do? They adapt, and provide a service to other readers. The excel format document was changed to html, and even OpenOffice.org format, and made available on alternate sites. Both of the formats work for me. And I haven't even read all the comments yet. It may be available in additional formats.
I had to stop and write this comment because of the greatness of the slashdot readers. I tip my hat to each of you who help make slashdot better for all of us.
Thank you.
I am baffled as to why i have yet to see this mentioned (maybe I have not looked around enough).
The only way to be able to say in court that a given user actually was making a certain file available to the public is for the RIAA to have downloaded the file themselves. (unless of course they were sniffing the traffic, but that would be illegal as well)
If they used kazaa to download from users to find out that they had an "illegal" file they would violate kazaa licence terms
"2 What You Can't Do Under This Licence" sub sections:
"2.11 Monitor traffic or make search requests in order to accumulate information about individual users;",
"2.12 "Stalk" or otherwise harass another;" and
"2.14 Collect or store personal data about other users."
If they somehow reverse engineered kazaa to make their own client and avoid the above licence stipulations they would have run afoul of:
"3.2 Except as expressly permitted in this Licence, you agree not to reverse engineer, de-compile, disassemble, alter, duplicate, modify, rent, lease, loan, sublicense, make copies, create derivative works from, distribute or provide others with the Software in whole or part, transmit or communicate the application over a network."
Hi!
One of the reasons the RIAA is targeting a specific group of files (in addition to target market, etc.) is that the RIAA is acting, legally, as the agent of the copyright owner. The RIAA doesn't own the copyrights to the music--generally, neither do the record labels. The "artists" (using the term very broadly in a few cases) own the copyrights, and the RIAA is acting on their behalf. They're looking for U2 files because U2 has given them permission to haul kids into court on a trumped-up infringement action.
Which might give you pause, next time you're in the record store looking to buy a CD.
Which brings me to an interesting idea:
If you see the name of an artist you admire--and perhaps support with your hard-earned dollar--why not drop an email to the artist asking why he or she is supporting the draconian actions of the RIAA? As always, it pays to be polite--screamers just get ignored (or reinforce the "they're all crooks" attitudes). But a few hundred polite, irenic notes might just change a few attitudes.
And a few hundred thousand polite irenic notes might just drum some sense into the musicians.
Yet again with with apologies to Paul Graham, I wrote it before: implement colaborative bayesian filters in all major P2P clients. Train the filters to reject RIAA known search strings, RIAA known IP numbers, RIAA known nicknames. Iterate this across all participants. Let the filters learn while RIAA try to beat themt. Go back to step 1.
People don't listen to pop music because it's good music. It's because the singers are sexy or cool, and because it's marketed well.
Pop music, like pop movies, are primarily a marketing phenomenon. Very few pop movies induce me to say "Wow, that was really impressive acting."
Why do you think so few resources go into producing the music, and so much into marketing it?
May we never see th
Paging Dr Freud...
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
I have a surprising number of those songs on my machine.
Me too. None.
From the article:
After looking at 50 or so subpoenas, the suspicion of a pattern grew more confident. While an individual wouldn't necessarily get subpoenaed for just having a Busta Rhymes song, it was the combination of Busta and additional artists that triggered the bot. Slyck hopes to obtain the entire database to more conclusively examine and reveal this potential pattern.
This is exactly how the Joker killed people in Batman part 1!. If you used a combinatin of cosmetics THAT would kill you, e.g. lipstick with eye liner. I guess these hollywood guys use stuff from the scripts in real life!
I am happy to present my results in the form of a new spreadsheet, a CSV file and a GIF formatted graph. I am too hungover, and too rotten a statistician, to draw any conclusions. Enjoy.
I used to have a better sig than this, but I got tired of it
Look at a music CD you have. Any CD. Look for the copyright notice in fine print (usually on the bottom part of the back of the disc jewel case). I hold in my hands a copy of U2's Best of 1980-1990 CD, and it says the copyright is held by "Polygram Records". No mention of U2 or any of the band members anywhere in the copyright notice! The record label always owns the copyright! I have a lot of CD's, and none, I repeat none of them has a copyright notice that includes the name of the band or the artist as copyright holder (not even joint copyrights). The record companies always hold the rights to everything. If you want to know how these artists are actually treated by the RIAA, here's a small article that may enlighten you as to how the system really works.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
how the hell you got an insightful I have no idea.
Small bands THRIVE on p2p sharing of their music.. Hell Every one of them that I ask give me permission to use their music in movies or ad's without anything but a copy of what we used it in.
they know that the only way to make it is to get people listening to their music, the radio stations are owned by the record companies and therefore wont play them (Don't even try to tell me they are not... I watched the payola go down for 2 years when I was in radio and friends today tell me it's worse now..) and they make their real money on venues and shows. EVERY one of them tell me they sell their CD's at the shows only... because they can't get them sold anywhere else as the stores don't want them.... even the small record shops won't let them put a small amount on their shelves at cost.
P2P sharing of music is the best thing to ever happen to a small band.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Maybe they figured the rather unique words/spellings of the titles and/or artists of a lot of these songs would present the lowest possibility of tripping on another embarrassing false positive while still being popular enough to net plenty of "examples."
Just a thought.
Game... blouses.
Hey all.. I'm the news writer for Slyck.com The excel spreadsheet was just temporary and what I was working with at the time, never expected to be Slash-dotted!... Anyway, you've been heard loud and clear, and the list is available in an HTML format. Hope this make some people happy ;)
http://www.slyck.com/misc/songlist.html