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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."
Here is a link that actually works
I've started hosting the article on Gnutella
Banaaaana!
from the article: "What we're trying to drive for is an environment in which legitimate online music can flourish."
Read as: "We want online music to be hosted by our business partners, protected by DRM and for which we get get paid every nickel we think we're due."
Trolling is a art,
But copyright infringement remains illegal. So, if you want file-sharing (of the infringing variety) to be legalized, you need new laws -- but will they actually be better? Check out Derek Slater on the topic.
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
Y'arr, does any lad find this here news of pirates somewhat coincidental? Today be talk-like-a-pirate day, it be!
Offenders will get twenty lashes of the cat-o-nine tails or walkin da plank to Davey Jones' locker. Y'arrr!
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
I'd imagine the RIAA wouldn't think too kindly of this idea - but it is kinda fun to think about :)
we see things not as as they are, but as we are.
-- anais nin
If the RIAA wins a few decisions in a courtroom, I think it safe to say it will scare the crap out of quite a few folks. Thereby causing a decrease in the number of people sharing music.
JP
The facts expressed here belong to all, the opinions to me. The distinction between fact and opinion is yours to decide.
It's always been a fact that the worst way to tackle piracy is by nabbing the end users. Remember that humerous article a while back about the major detaining facility in Death Valley for file sharers? The problem is that they let filesharing get so widespread that everyone and their mother now download music. They're going to have to be a bit more creative if they want to stop people from using P2P.
Enough people will be prosecuted and then people will stop.
This approach has worked wonders for the "War on Drugs". How many people are "criminals" because they dared have a few grams of pot on them?
Trolling is a art,
I have a hunch that this is because programs like Kazaa are devious. Even when you think you're not sharing anything, you are. So, there are probably many many people who think they are only downloading music, not sharing it, too. For instance, only the most clever will point their shared folder to an empty directory, so as not to share anything. But only the cleverest of the clever realize that your download directory is automatically shared, so that each and every file you download is shared, unless you move it out! Ooops! Combine that with Kazaa's infamous difficulty to actually close, and you've got plenty of unwitting file sharers out there.
In other news, crack cocaine remains popular, despite War on Drugs. No healthier or more legal, of course...
Boromir, son of Faramir, King of Gondor and Minas Tirith
neither will their crippled CD's have a negative effect on filesharing..
You know what statistics would be interesting to see?
How much CD sales have dropped off in the period since all these lawsuits started targeting RIAA customers.
It's hit all the newspapers, even Senators are getting in on the act. I wonder if that's had an effect on the public.
-- james
because until the RIAA hunt down every single P2P filetrader, people are going to continue to do it. Certain drugs are illegal but people still sell and buy them because the government can't stop every single person. The RIAA has to realize that basically the only way to stop P2P is to pull the plug on the internet (which btw they might eventually try to do once they run out of other bright ideas!)
No trees were harmed in the composition of this; however, numerous electrons were inconvenienced.
all that will happen is people will start to use more secure filesharing apps like EarthStation 5.
Actually, ES5 has so many security features the setup can be overwhelming to the average joe. So I wrote up a journal spelling out the important stuff.
What did they expect?
I mean the RIAA has only the reach in the US it seems, its up to individual countries appointed authorities to persue foreign traders.
The problem will come for the RIAA when the trading goes underground to private FTP servers and the like, it wasnt that long ago when it was the only way to find music online..
Napster changed things, it was probably the most significant 'killer app' next to Yahoo when Yahoo first started as somebodys bookmark page and grew to something thats been copied over and over and over (And which Google has perfected *grin*)
-- Jim.
-- If at first you don't succeed, lie!
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.
[I can picture a world without war, without hate. I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it]
It's a simple money matter : if you d/l a lot of music, at $15, $20 or whatever a pop at the music store, even if you get sued, you settle with the RIAA and you're still winning.
...
Besides, the chance of getting caught is minimal : there are dozens of millions of file swappers around the world and maybe 1000 at most get supoenaed, and even better, in the US only (for now anyway). I would think it's more risky to die crossing the street than getting caught sharing files by the RIAA.
So, why on earth would people stop swapping ? the risk/benefit ratio is tiny indeed. Which means that the RIAA's tactic is not effective, which also means that the only thing they achieve are (1) ruining poor students, single-moms's daughters and causing anguish and misery to all of them for nothing, and (2) generate a lot of shitty press for themselves. Not that I complain about the latter of course
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Here is why this won't happen:
Scale - 261 out of 5,000,000 is 0.005%. Those are slim enough odds for most people to think it won't ever happen to them.
Small-Timers - If 5,000,000 people each share one different song that leaves still 5,000,000 songs available. The RIAA would never be able to go after these small-timers. Even if they did the fines would be far less than the legal fees.
International - P2P exists outside of the US. All you need is few guys in Kazakhstan with a fat pipeline to share every song he can get his hands on.
Downloading - The biggest change that has occured since these lawsuits is that people are just clicking off the upload option and becoming leeches. This would shut down the system if not for the few that still don't realize they are sharing and the international users (see above).
Anger - People are never going to get over the anger they feel towards the record industry. Years of overpricing and the current war against the little guy have destroyed any goodwill they had.
Alternatives - When they shut down Napster they didn't kill file-sharing. It evolved. They can fight and fight but it will continue to evolve. People will move to something more secure, more anonymous - perhaps Freenet or something like it (and hopefully better).
The truth is that until a viable alternative is created people will continue to share. And $1 per song from a limited selection is not an alternative. People want variety, they want a fair price, and the want the freedom to do what they want once they pay.
>"Law, technology and ethics are not in sync right now,"
This one sentence sums it up well. Despite the massive propoganda , people are not convinced by RIAA arguments and they dont find anything wrong in sharing things they possess. These file sharers are not "crminals" as RIAA says. They are just normal human beings who are not convinced by RIAA arguments, period.
http://www.nasirudheen.blogspot/
Reports indicate crime still occuring despite existence of Police and Judicial system...film at 11.
Really, I'm against the RIAA action as much as anyone else (and likewise the DMCA), but experience shows us that making something illegal rarely prevents it from occuring.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
"How many people are "criminals" because they dared have a few grams of pot on them?"
All of them.
Because the law currently says pot is illegal, case closed. They may not be evil for smoking pot, and maybe pot should be legal. But until it is, using it is a crime. No debate here.
It never ceases to amaze me that so many people here rage at the fact that people get sued and prosecuted for doing illegal things just because they disagree with the law. What they need to be doing is trying to get those laws changed. And if you can't get them changed, and the majority of the public does NOT support your position on getting it changed, tough luck, you lose, move on. That's how it works in a democratic republic. Just because YOU don't support the law, that doesn't mean that you have a blank check to defy it. If we defied all the laws we didn't like, it wouldn't be much of a civilization, would it?
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Delay. Delay. Delay. Demand a trial by jury, Delay. demand a hearing in your home town. Delay. pay your lawyer to nitpick. Delay. Mount the costs as high as you can... and if they ever get a settlement, fight it too, and if that ever succeeds, declare bankruptcy.
IF everyone they sue does this, the RIAA will run up horrendous bills trying to get blood from a turnip. their problems only increase, the more people they sue.
Set up a fund for people willing to do this. I'd contribute fifty bucks to it. the price of two cds in exchange for killing the RIAA... Hell yes.
If someone wealthy publicly offered to help back individuals being sued, that would stop this crap in a hurry.
The persistent lack of guilt over online copying suggests that the record industry's antipiracy campaign, billed as a last-ditch effort to reverse a protracted sales slump, is only the beginning of the difficult process of persuading large numbers of people to buy music again.
I had the feeling that sentence was explicitly intended to be dripping with sarcasm. I could see the subtext as if it were in bright blinking neon: "The record industry would be much more effective at persuading people to buy music if they didn't feel like they were constantly being taken advantage of at the register."
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.
I've seen lives ruined from the criminal charges associated with marijuana. As for the substance itself, well... I do know a few people who abuse it, but in the long run, it's doing less damage to them than the alcohol they would have used in place of it. The lack of addiction or especially bad long-term effects means that when they "go clean", they recover.
It's really no different from alcohol, except that it's not addictive and doesn't cause brain and liver damage (it does cause lung cancer, but like that ever stopped people from smoking tobacco). Some people abuse it, some use it responsibly.
Hardware, software, and blinking lights!
I really do feel bad for the RIAA members (not the RIAA itself). They are stuck having to eventually face the fact that they are 80% of the way to extinction. Can anyone realy imagine a future 50 years down the road where anyone is interested in buying a piece of plastic with music on it?
Yes, storing it in a way that does not rot too fast or get deleted for video game space is valuable, but I see the future retailers of music being the clubs that host musicians. They should strike a deal with the performers that they host to sell the music via a Web site and via a kiosk at the show.
Here's one business model for that:
Club makes USB-fobs that contain the customer's name, credit info (or a key that they look up the credit info in their database with) and email address. The customer goes to a show and likes it, so they walk over to the kiosk and plug in their fob to order the "album" on the way out. The kiosk notes the purchase in the database and sends email to the customer with a link to download the music from the Web site.
Quick, easy, and here's the best part: you don't care about file-swappers because you get the customer at the exact point where they decide they like the music. You don't care if the 5 billion people who never come to your club swap this music around. What you care about is that your club (and the artist who gets a cut) made some extra money from a customer. You win, they win and the band wins.
But, I still feel bad for the labels who are doomed because they can't make a "star" anymore out of some semi-talented performer who they can stick on MTV. Or more to the point, they can make the star, but there's soon going to be no point in terms of selling CDs.
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.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage