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What The RIAA Gets Out Of File Sharing
ChrisPaget writes "Wired have a fascinating article about a company called BigChampagne which sells regional P2P download statistics to most of the major record labels. When the labels know what people are downloading, they know what to put on the radio, and sales in the area increase. The record industry's lawsuits against file- sharing companies hang on their assertion that the programs have no use other than to help infringe copyrights. If the labels acknowledge a legitimate use for P2P programs, it would undercut their case as well as their zero-tolerance stance."
And using data about which cars are stolen most often to help redesign auto security makes auto theft ok too.
paintball
The RIAA is making the single mother of a 12 year old pay thousands to settle. Does anyone really think that they are just going to allow their plot to be undercut? Clearchannel and the RIAA run a tight squeeze on music and it won't change without some serious consumer action and hopefully federal litigation.
-ad105
If the labels acknowledge a legitimate use for P2P programs, it would undercut their case as well as their zero-tolerance stance.
I'm sure the RIAA will simply put a new spin on it, in a "we're not monitoring demand, we're monitoring privacy" kind of way. A legit use, but one that doesn't support file-sharing.
having a legitimate use doesn't really have any legal effect. File sharing programs already have many possible legitimate uses. They have already quit trying to outlaw the file sharing software. Guns have legitimate uses, however if I use it to kill somebody that doesn't limit my culpability.
We kinda already knew this. Many people go out and buy music based about what they download from p2p networks. I myself have done that.
Again though, this isnt in the main stream media so it will make little impact against this constant onslaught of press the RIAA is getting. We need more stories like this to come up on 60mins and the local news to debunk the crap that the RIAA is spewing forth.
I have written to my local news stations around my area about the other sides to many of the RIAA and DMCA related stories and havent even gotten back a form letter reply. I have done this via e-mail and snail mail. Looks like they really don't care to be objective (I know, I know, Thank you Captain Obvious!).
My guess is that they'd be fine with losing this resource if it meant people would stop downloading music that didn't belong to them, but as long as the latter keeps occurring they might as well take advantage of the statistics they can generate from it. Lemons, lemonade.
A) I am getting this document and all the comments here and putting it aside as my defense if I'm ever accused of P2P downloading of copyright material.
B) Let's just face it, it's the new radio.
C) I'll countersue for obstruction of justice.
My personal belief on this is that when I was a college student (the vast bulk of my music downloading), I was too poor to buy CD's anyway. It didn't stop me from buying CD's, because I wasn't going to in the first place, it just helped me learn more about music. Now that I have money, I would gladly pay a reasonable price to support the artists I like, but the RIAA had to be jerks about it and come out to prosecute people who're in the same boat I was. Or even worse boat for that matter, freakin' 12 year old girls in the projects who need $2000 a lot more than Justin F'in Timberlake!
I don't know about you, but to me, YRO posts are the most important out of all tech stories. Privacy and speech are going to be the next huge battles fought in government, and it's going to be a big war, one that we'll all have to fight. I would hardly call any of the YRO posts "minor."
The record labels' "case" is that copying their products is against the law. The possiblity that they might extract some incidental compensation from it doesn't undercut their case in the least.
Similarly, if everyone who downloaded a song voluntarily sent 2 cents to the record company, that wouldn't make any difference either.
The record companies are a nasty lot. They illegally fix prices. They corrupt lawmakers. They try to ban useful technologies just because those technologies can be used in ways that are illegal and harmful to their business. They have gained legal powers of search which are an invasion of privacy and ought to be repealed.
But they've called their opponents' bluff and gone after illegal file-sharers, and I've noticed that on slashdot at least, I'm seeing a really poor hand. People don't care about defending freedom or privacy, they just want to copy albums.
It's not the selfishness I object to, it's the stupidity. Even if you do only care about copying albums, can't you see that you'd look better if you pretended to be like me and care about freedom?
You're missing the point. Your analogy doesn't really fit.
In your scenario, the insurance companies would be going to the car thieves themselves to get information on which cars are most likely to be stolen and then increasing the number of billboards or commercials for said vehicles, in an attempt to get car thieves to go legit.
What the RIAA is doing is scraping the lists to see whose stuff is getting "pirated" the most so they can increase marketing and airplay for that "artist" - thus making the case that there is actually a legitimate use for P2P -- something they've been campaigning against all along. So, if there's a legit use for it, this lessens the chance of P2P being outlawed completely.
Cruising the internet on my TI-99/4A @ a whopping 300 baud!
Wired:
"If the labels acknowledge a legitimate use for P2P programs, it would undercut their case as well as their zero-tolerance stance."
I'm not so sure. They aren't acknowledging the legitimacy of the programs or their use, they're observing a market that they believe to be illegitimate. Spying on the activity doesn't mean that they endorse it.
The point of that sentence in the article (and it's buried pretty deep, so I wonder why it got bumped up to the summary here) seems to be "why are they fighting KaZaA if they love it so much?" While the information they glean from KaZaA may be valuable to them in many ways, the two markets can only coexist uncomfortably. Nobody will go before a judge and claim that they were doing the labels a favor by not paying for music in exchange for consenting to being watched while stealing it.
I guess my argument hindges on whether Big Champagne is sharing copyrighted files and tracking their download (which would at least dirty the labels' hands) or simply tracking searches (observing the activity, and not participating in it).
Or maybe Big Champagne is responsible for all those mislabeled or dummy tracks.
They've got an interesting position in the debate, though.
No, sharing files is not illegal. What's illegal is sharing somebody else's files without permission. The RIAA wants people to believe that the act of filesharing itself is illegal in order to protect its outdated business model, just like how they want people to equate copyright violations with theft.
"I think so, Brain, but 'instant karma' always gets so lumpy." - Pinky
"Decepticons FOREVER!!!" - Ravage
By matching partial IP addresses to zip codes
This sucks. When is a P2P app with good speed going to come out with good anonymity?
With all the lawsuits and shit, good ideas and code should be flowing.
Not that anyone really cares if they are using p2p networks. As far as I'm concerned, maybe it will help them weed out the no-talent-ass-clowns that are making all of the crap records today.
When the labels know what people are downloading, they know what to put on the radio, and sales in the area increase.
I wasn't aware that the labels [legally] "put anything on the radio". It probably wouldn't be the best idea for them to build the idea that they do into their business model, since that would be an admission of payola.
This is simply more proof that these models for profiting from media have long outlived their usefulness. Technology has outstripped the marketing, the distribution network they cling to will soon go the way of the 8-track.
There ARE other models... other ways to make a profit from a popular artist. Take for example the sports industry - a popular franchise (and its popular players) makes 1000 times more money through endorsements and sales of authorized merchandise than they do from from actual ticket sales - (We'll have to ignore the massive profit made from broadcasting rights, there really isn't currently an equivalent in the music industry... though, if they got their heads out of their butts, that could work as well) yet the RIAA would have you believe that there is no other way to make sure an artist gets paid for their work than the Pay-For-Play model that has been around since the days of Shakespeare.
You can't download a genuine Starter Steelers Jersey, and bootleggers are a lot easier to bust.
Frelling Dinosaurs.
Mnem
What I find to be so horrifically obnoxious about this is not that the RIAA is suing end users (i.e., their customer pool.) They certainly have the right to do so if the defendant was downloading copyrighted materials. It is the apparent lack of due process allowed by the DMCA that causes me worry. What if I am a P2P user, who shares and gets only non-infringing materials, and the RIAA selects me for a subpeona? As far as I know, there are no checks on this system; the only thing the RIAA has to do is attest that I am a P2P filesharer. They don't have to prove anything, much less demonstrate a reasonable suspicion that I am trading in material that they actually own. After I have been subpeona'd (spelling Nazis bugroff, I know it's wrong) and the RIAA has gone through every file I own, they will certainly not elect to sue, but my privacy has been irrevocably and severly compromised without any redress. This I find unreasonable. If I had to pick one word to describe the DMCA, it would be "unfair". Copyrighted material has strong legal protections to guard against and provide redress to infringement, which I consider to be a good thing. I think that the notion of a strong personal copyright is necessarily the foundation of any healthy model of intellectual property. However, the DMCA takes the additional step of providing nearly airtight legal protection to technological methods used to control access to copyrighted materials. This means two things. First, I have to pay $25 for a decryption algorithm that can be printed on a T-Shirt to watch a copy of a movie I own. Second, content distributors are able to region-lock media and hence control pricing. I don't consider these to be beneficial effects, and I don't understand why this level of additional legal protection is necessary. I consider the DMCA to be bad, harmful law, and unless it is repealed, I see a future in which we are free to do less and less with media content that we have purchased.
They set up a few servers with a bunch of the top songs. They can "share" them to the system because they own the rights.
However, you, the downloader does not have permission to download them.
Any number of scenarios can then be used:
They take the logs of who downloaded from them and hits their shares to see what they have.
monitor the downloads until they have enough from the same addreses to go after that address
They have been aware of sharing for a few years.
Think that is enough time to get some solid data?
I tend to think so.
comment directly in my journal
Here's the kicker. Of course there is the classic, "What if I take a cd and make a copy for a friend?" argument. Well, that doesn't necessarily apply to file sharing. Think of it this way. What if I take and spend my own money and gave out 10,000 copies to people standing on the street? Do you know what that is called? It's called MARKETING and it didn't even happen at the expense of the artist or the recording label.
The RIAA should recognize file sharing as a medium for marketing. People who normally wouldn't listen to an album, may download it, like and then buy it. Even if that person doesn't buy it, chances are that they will tell someone about it and that person might buy it. It has a cascading effect.
I think file sharing has more positives than negatives. Rather than combating it, the RIAA should see it as a way of life and take advantage of it. The RIAA should use file sharing's own strengths for it's own advantages.
Apple cares a lot about user experience. If they made it web based, you know that someone out there will try to access it using netscape 4 and complain about javascript problems or whatever. You'd get all these applications hijacking the browser helper associations and all that. And people would never know where they downloaded their files.
Using iTunes to access the iTMS gives a very consistent way of finding, searching for, downloading and playing the music. It avoids all browser problems, user-incompetence-in-file-management problems, etc. This is one of the reasons why Apple 'got it right.'
And sadly, even though I do have a mac, I can't buy anything at the iTMS because I don't have a billing address in the USA. I hope they expand it to Canada. And soon.
Its a group (the RIAA) calling file trading immoral and criminal, and then paying somebody to use file trading in order to beef up their marketing data.
.. the point is, they are associating with the very people they identify as criminals and aquiring self-professed marketing data. Its hypocricy. That's all. Analogies are flawed but useful. They become less useful the more literally people insist on taking them. If somebody can't pick out what parts of analogies a person is relying on to prove their point, and which parts of analogies a person expects you to ignore, they they probably shouldn't be arguing in the first place.
Whether its cars/tv shows/etc
In my example above, it should be obvious that its not important *what* commodity or copywritten work we're talking about, only that a group is associating with the very community it says is illegal to associate with. Whether or not the people in that illegal community are providing you with useful data/service is completely besides the point; at the extreme end of the point, the RIAA is moronic and is wasting their money anyways.
Its not up to somebody pointing out their hypocricy to credit or discredit the likelihood of the RIAA achieving their intended goal of aquiring solid, representative market research, nor is it a particularly relevant or interesting point to think about. Who cares if the the money the RIAA gives these guys is worth the market research they get back. The point is that its hilarious that the RIAA is paying people to interact in the filesharing community they claim is 100% cancerous to their business.
"Old man yells at systemd"
If you listen to a Clear Channel station (how can you NOT listen to one) you notice they play the same 20 songs all day and all night.
I don't know about you, but if I hear the same songs every time I turn on the radio, I have NO need to by the CD. I get burned out on it for free.
If they start using this info and get more artists on the air it can only help. This could increase their ratio of "listeners due to lack of choice" to "willing listeners" and help their advertisement revenue.
It will also help RIAA and non-RIAA affiliated labels sell more records by getting more airplay for lesser known artists. Less total air time for the current top artists would help them not to give away the need to buy while also not making people think of them as annoying.
IMHO, quite a bit of the RIAA's low sales can be traced back to the Clear Channel monopoly.
How can using these P2P statisics be a bad thing?
If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. - James Madison
There is no real limit to the number of songs that can be written
Most emphatically false.
Music theory sets a combinatoric limit on the number of possible sequences of discrete notes. Copyright case law sets a limit on how much can be copied before the copying warrants a finding of infringement. Therefore, it's possible to infringe by chance. Please read my white paper about this issue.
Will I retire or break 10K?
without advocating piracy, I'd like to point out a few facts about downloading music: (these points do NOT apply to assholes that sell pirated music in bulk)
-not unlike the whole "if a tree falls in the middle of the forest, does it make a sound?" argument, it is impossible to *harm* an artist or label by downloading and listening to a song you would never consider buying in the first place. however, you are most definitely harming the artist/label by downloading the new album put out by your favorite band that you would buy if it were not for your ability to download said album.
-The labels, while carrying on about harm to artists, demostrate very little care towards the artists. if the label cared more, they would certainly be paying artists a more appropriate royalty per cd. from everything I know, *normal* artists make anywhere from $0.01 to $0.10 per cd. this obviously doesnt apply to self-published artists and superstar artists who have long since passed their first contract.
-The artists have historically been unable to fill an entire album with decent material. There isnt a single person out there that hasnt bought a cd after hearing a song or two and found the rest to be crap. this really lends itself to people wanting to hear more than the current radio single before forking out $20 for a cd.
-there are people who dont feel obligated to pay for another copy of a cd that was stolen from them, or for that cassette they purchased 10 years ago. if you paid the price for an album once, why in the world should you pay it again? we know it's not media costs!!
just things to think about...
A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
They say they use IMs to sound cool. They actually just say that someone requested a song when that song was what they were going to play anyway.
Why do they do this? Because they are owned by Clear Channel. The people you hear were recorded yesterday between 8 and 5 somewhere in New Hampshire. Or maybe Kentucky. They are voice actors who have probably never been to your broadcast area. And the people who call in? Same thing.
Get a grip people - radio is produced and managed as pre-recorded entertainment.
A legitimate use for P2P file sharing? Sure! What, you think the only files you can share are music? What about shareware?
but networks like waste are coming with possibilities of saturating your inbound and outbound lines
And getting users kicked off their ISPs for violating the "excessive use" provisions of the typical residential acceptable use policy. Remember that in many areas of the United States, there is one ISP with a monopoly guaranteed by a municipal utility franchise; thus, switching ISPs costs $200,000 to move the whole family to an area served by a different ISP.
Will I retire or break 10K?
The "Most Stolen" statistics you see in the paper are almost always in terms of total number stolen rather than percentage stolen. Which means, of course, that the most common cars will almost always top the list of most stolen cars. Unless they REALLY suck, or are REALLY secure.
I looked and looked and looked, and couldn't find anything on the web using numbers that weren't from the same yearly NICB study that deals with total numbers.
If you're bored, you could take the NICB study and dig up the sales statistics from somewhere else, and do the math yourself, but I'm far to lazy today. It would be interesting, though, to know if there are any "popular but never stolen" cars, or any "rare but frequently stolen" ones.
Heavy rotation on the radio stations is apparently directed by recording industry marketing people, armed with statistics. BigChampagne gives these marketing people credibility, so the marketing people can apply more pressure on the radio stations to play what the marketing people want. This isn't about surveying P2P to find out what the radio stations should play, this is about harvesting P2P statistics to get more leverage over radio station play lists.
Sometimes I worry that I'll develop Alzheimer's disease, but no one will notice.
I found a decent link over at howstuffworks:
y al ties6.htm
http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/music-ro
so basically, artists come out of the deal with next to nothing unless they happen to sell 100 million copies on their first album.
hey RIAA, cry me a fucking river about how downloaders are hurting artists...
I remember reading the book All the Rave on the rise and fall of Napster. Shawn Fanning's whole point of coding Napster, according to the book, is to get people sharing and promoting music freely, and the RIAA coming in to use the Napster network to promote their music and to use this new medium like they do the radio. It was basically Napster deep-sea fishing and capsizing because the RIAA didn't agree with their point of view. Now this company is starting to do something similar to Napster's original idea and hopefully the RIAA will ease up on their subpoena campaign, which is rather similar to someone punching random people in a dark room.
No TiVo and no caffeine make me something something...
If a person leaves there car unlocked, they are not breaking a law if someone steals the stuff inside. Just because you provided access for someone to commit a crime does not make you a criminal yourself.
The fact that you have mp3s or divx movies or anything of the sort on your computer in a folder that is accessible does not make you a criminal.
The NY Times just sued (Read Article) Adrian Lamo for entering a basically insecure network. He did nothing but look to see what was there. Hmm, sound like RIAA?
I don't know about anybody else, but what the RIAA is doing seems very similar. I own many cds, many of which I convert to various formats on my computer to create playlists. Apparently, I can be sued if that file is accessible to people who might want to take them from me.
The question is, if I have a broadband connection without a firewall, am I liable to the RIAA because some hacker might want a couple of songs? They are in fact accessible to some people.
Music should be free, or at least a heck of a lot cheaper than $17 for a cd.
"The RIAA wants people to believe that the act of filesharing itself is illegal in order to protect its outdated business model, just like how they want people to equate copyright violations with theft."
Interesting, I can't believe they'd try something like that. Do you have a citation for that? A link to an article where a representative of the RIAA states something that implies that file sharing is intrinsically illegal?
I think this is largely theoretical, as the P2P networks and copyright violation are fundamentally linked. If, magically, all unauthorized copyrighted files disappeared from the world's P2P networks, the content offered would probably drop to a microscopic percentage of its current size, and so would its usage. Unsigned musicians would still use it to actively get their tunes heard, and /.ers would use it to share GPL and shareware stuff, but Joe and Jane Average Teenager would quickly flee. Companies like Kazaa which have built businesses around P2P would their business model radically changed. Does anybody disagree?
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
Well let me then suggest that you have the same problem as a lot of /. readers, which is Boolean thinking.
From the content of your post, I believe you have trouble with the concept of thinking, Boolean or otherwise.
So what if they could survive if they make heavy changes to their business model. Do you think bare survival is all they care about?
To make a business run, you market where the customers are and sell products the customer wants, including packaging in whatever form the customers want. An increasing number of people are getting their new music off the Internet the record companies can't control instead of FM radio that the record companies do control. The RIAA response is to try to make it impossible to use the Internet to distribute content by attacking the companies that promote new technology and individual users using their 0wn3d politicians. If the RIAA labels insist on losing money by not adapting to the present, why should taxpayer money go into shoring up their old business model? If the buggy whip manufacturers had organized RIAA-style lobbying in the 1900s, would there be an auto industry today?
You don't have to go to the Stanford School of Business to know that if you have a business and you want it to do better than survive, you change with the times and adapt to what your markets are doing. An industry that refuses to do this doesn't deserve to survive
You say that file sharing can be made to work for the record industry. Fine. That's your opinion (and a pretty common opinion around here).
The most prominent example I know of with respect to file sharing working for the record industry is the prerelease via P2P of Eminem's latest record a month before the official release date. It went straight to #1 as soon as it hit the stores. While other artists are doing quite well with P2P promotion, they generally are not part of the record industry.
However, I can't think of any good reason to care about the record industry. I care about good music. I care about the people who make it. I don't care about a bunch of suits whose contribution to music is parasitic and who subsidize an organization that attacks new technology and its users. If you support the enemies of new technology, what the hell are you doing here?.
But keep in mind that 5 years ago there were a lot of business cases that were pretty commonly espoused on /. that all turned to shit.
Perhaps you can get IBM to listen to your case as to why Open Source is a failure. Other than that, the worst business models of the 90s by and large were NOT promoted here. Is there anyone on slashdot who did anything but laugh about the $300M put into boo.com , a high-end cosmetics retail sales site? How about the $50M put into Dr. Koop's medical portal? Slashdot =! the vulture capital community. By and large, the dot.com failures can be traced to VCs buying into their own hype. I'm a bit surprised that anyone can confuse the two, but I guess an RIAA apologist is going to have funny ideas about how high tech works.
Why should the RIAA listen to you.
What makes you think I want them to? I believe that the artists and the public are best served if every major label goes from deep shit where they are now into bankruptcy and their assets are sold at fire sale prices to investors who have new business models in mind that don't depend on platinum records to support them and can profit from artists selling 10K albums a year.
In the last couple of years, there is a quote that I see in a lot of people's sigs:
Tech Public Policy stuff