P2P Music Sharing Remains Popular Despite RIAA

KarmaOverDogma writes "The New York Times reports that the RIAA's attempts to cut down on (music) file sharing are slow to show any effect, as much of the public still considers the activity to be useful and/or acceptable. P2P filesharing activity has decreased very little since they began their end-user legal campaign."

Comments

Re:It'll start working eventually

[mrtroy]

Enough people WONT be caught and prosecuted.

Due to the enormous number of file sharers, you have a certain anonymous factor, even if they can try to obtain your IP. People will not stop trading music, they will just change the way they do it, if it becomes too "risky" under current conditions.

When you can download unlimited numbers of songs, from so many sources, with almost ALL of music history being found somewhere, it is impossible to go back to paying 20$ for 3 good songs on an album. People will still buy the classics, because they want the little extra quality, etc.

It is basically a natural progression...as technology advances, music is moving with it...and now instead of listening to your favorite music station, people download their favorite new songs.

Before you start complaining too much about people downloading music illegally, consider where the money from CD purchases is going, the majority of which is going to the record companies, not even the artist anyways.

The RIAA-killer application: the music worm

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the recent Sobig infestation demonstrates why the RIAA's tactics are doomed to failure. Why? Because there will ultimately be a "killer application"--the music worm.

How will the music worm work?

It will be distributed as an email worm. The user installs it by clicking on an attachment that arrives in an email spam. A large number people will do this knowingly, but many will be innocent "victims". Knowing users will thus have "plausible deniability".

Once installed, it will do the following:

1) Email itself to everybody in the user's address book, just like any other worm.

2) Install a hidden peer-to-peer server.

3) Identify every music file on the users computer.

4) Make all of them available over the web via peer-to-peer sharing.

5) Begin silently and automatically downloading music files to the user's computer and adding them to his music library, favoring additional titles by artists already represented in the user's library.

6) An internal list will be maintained of the downloaded files, and the worm will monitor their usage. Any downloaded file that is not played within a certain period of time will be marked for eventual replacement, in order to prevent the music archive from growing too large (say 20% above the size of the permanent library or 80% of available disk space, whichever is smaller). Any file that is played will be deleted from this list and permanently added to the user's music library.

7) Knowing users will be able to "order" specific music via a web interface by accessing a web site (actually located on the user's computer) via a web browser. The worm will silently edit the browser's history file to erase the record of this access.

How could such a worm be combatted?

1. Legal assaults on users would become difficult; there will be continuous trading of music over the net. Much of it will be entirely innocent; the result of the worm running on the computers of innocent "victims." This will provide a smokescreen for the activities of knowing users. It will be extremely difficult to prove that somebody is a knowing user, since the patterns of download to any individual user will be similar to knowing use. Many unknowing victims will accidentally add some of the downloaded music to their permanent libraries, because a lot of people do not keep careful track of the contents of their music libraries.

2. Virus scanning software could be employed, but many users do not keep their antivirus software up to date. Attempts to eradicate spammer worms such as Sobig have not been particularly effective. And with the music worm case, many of the "victims" will actually be secret users, intentionally abetting the worm's presence on their computers.

3. The music industry could distribute counter-worms, which would infect computers and delete music, or gather evidence of intentional trading. However, this would require the music industry to engage in an ongoing illegal activity. Moreover, it would be relatively unsuccessful in targeting the technically sophisticated knowing user, who would have a strong incentive to block such worms.

Prohibition didn't work

[HangingChad]

And neither will any attempts to stop file trading. Even if you could make the penalties draconian enough to make people stop in this country, it'll still be going on in the rest of the world where many get a kind of perverse delight in thumbing their nose at US interests. Even though the music business is hardly a US enterprise, the way Congress bends over for them it's hard not to see it that way sometimes. RIAA might as well be trying to control the tides. Besides, the music industry is so hypocritical the way they treat their artists who feels any sympathy for them?

Tn the meantime they will succeed in breeding a smarter generation of file traders. Wireless AP's, encryption, private music rings...only the naive will get caught. Pathetic. Makes you wonder how stupidity seems to get such a grip on corporate entities. Talk to them individually and they're pretty smart, but group up and the collective intelligence takes a nose dive.