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Millions Delete ALL Music Files?
Honig the Apothecary writes "CNN is reporting that millions of people have deleted all the music files from their computers in a story here.
My question is how the hell would they know? Are they substituting "deleted" for the words "disabled sharing with other users"?"
Hi, this is jim joebob from the NPD group. We're doing a little survey to find out how many households have thrown away their pot. Do you still have a stash over 1oz, or have you disposed of all your contraband since the current crackdown went into effect?
Either way, please give me your name and address, and the pattywagon will arrive in 15 minutes.
that downloaded the new britney cd. Coincidence?
Well Duh! Of course we are deleting all the music files from my computer. How else am I going to have enough disk space for all the pirated HD broadcasts I will be downloading?
Yeah, I did too. In fact I deleted everything. Prove I didn't.
Yoda of Borg am I! Assimilated shall you be! Futile resistance is, hmm?
...yeah, um, thats the ticket....deleted 'em
How they measure 'file deletions' consumers' PCs... Spyware?!
...wait, no, all 40GB of files are still on there. Of course they're all legally ripped from the CDs I purchased since I was a kid that are all stored in a nice box in my TV room...
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
As far as the RIAA is concered, deleting and 'unsharing' are same thing.
Their goal is to stop filesharing, not convince users to pay for what they already downloaded.
Take out deleted and add in burned. With cd writers being under $50, and with blank cds being damn near free, it makes a lot more sence to just burn all your mp3s instead of archiving them on your hard drive.
They're just like me, they burn them onto CDROM instead and then delete the files...TO MAKE ROOM FOR MORE PIRATED MUSIC! [Evil laugh...]
Linux O Muerte!
mebbe not some ethnic stuff of his wife's, (foreign language stuff- hard to find) but anything the riaa would be interested in..
he's still sharing 530 files....
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Also on the page (I'm not kidding, look yourself):
CNN: The Least Trusted Name In News.
sulli
RTFJ.
Thats right horribly evil RIAA lawyers, I deleted my mp3s, so please don't sue me. Its not like I just moved them out of the shared folder or anything. Wait....oh crap.
[Just Shut Up and Do What I say]
yes, i delete all my mp3s, right after i burn em to CD-R
Its sad that modern american corporate media can be such obvious tools.
How can they publish such obvious self-serving corporate propaganda? Did CNN, or the author ever stop to think "hey, maybe they're assumptions are rigged in order for them to recieve some personal gain?" You'd think that they'd question the source of the information they'd base such a story on.
Did you expect them to understand computers at all? They're dinosaurs--just laugh at them while they are still around.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
I have deleted all music files on my computer. Therefore, I should not be sued by the RIAA. Not that my answers to you would directly effect their decision as to whether to sue me or not, because you are an independent research company, not corporate flunkies who'd narc me out the second I get off the phone.
I took a couple of marketing classes and I understand the principals involed in calculating marketing data, but where are they getting their data?
In May, 606,000 households deleted ALL mp3's. 1,400,000 in August. Let's just say that 1mil/month for 4 months. 4,000,000 HOUSEHOLDS(not people) in 4 months. At that rate mp3's will be wiped from existence sometime next year. It just doesn't add up.
>> Millions Delete ALL Music Files?
I delete my thousand music files once a month when I reinstall Windows because the damn OS is so unstable. Over the past year I've deleted 12000 music files, the same ones twelve times.
Does windows crash to the point you have no hope but to format/install: YES
Given an installed base of 100's of millions, if it happens to even 1%, we have millions of machines a year dying.
Does everyone back up: NO
Do these crashes case music to be deleted: YES
has thousands of files, this means that there are about: millions*thousands*~5Mb = 5 Million Gigabytes more space in the world ! Yippie !
Methodology Note: NPD MusicWatch Digital information is collected continuously from the PCs of 40,000 volunteer online panelists, balanced to represent the online population of PC users. NPD's MusicLab survey was fielded in September of 2003 to a representative sample of 5,000 respondents aged 13 and older.
Still, you have to believe their volunteer panelists wouldn't fess up to having any downloaded music given the current RIAA intimidation tactics.
Of course. To make room for Matrix Revolutions rips, no doubt.
Since when has been ok to post stories and articles without backing it up with proof?
Now, were this a link to The Weekly World News, that'd be different. ( I love that rag )
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
We asked 2 people if they had deleted all their files. 1 said yes, the other said no. We factored that in against the population of the US, # of computer users, # of estimated song downloaders, and then against a .5% factor of error...
Voila 1.4 million people have deleted their music drives. That'll be 5 cents please.
If you go to NPD Group's website and click on their press release, they had this to say: "Methodology Note: NPD MusicWatch Digital information is collected continuously from the PCs of 40,000 volunteer online panelists, balanced to represent the online population of PC users. NPD's MusicLab survey was fielded in September of 2003 to a representative sample of 5,000 respondents aged 13 and older." How were those volunteer panelists chosen? Perhaps they were provided by their client the RIAA from people who signed their on-line forgiveness document. It's hard to believe any of this information when their clients spend a lot of money to get the answer they want. I could probably produce a study showing that music-swapping is up 400% by monkeys in Nepal.
I just deleted Windows so I would have more space for stuff like that!
X(7): A program for managing terminal windows. See also screen(1).
Penny Arcade has something to say about this.= 2003-09 -12&res=l
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date
In other news, Hundreds of Millions of people went out today to buy the new Britney Spears CD, Watch the Matrix Revolutions, and wear Nike shoes.
0110100100100000011000010110110100100000011000100
Because even heavily compressed, they look so much better than anything I get via regular TV/cable.
It probably helped when they sued the 12-year old girl. Now I'm scared to have a mp3 on my computer.
suck it RIAA
Ya, they deleted it all...
That is probably true if you count all of the users who accidentally delete a critical file or Windows being so screwed up a re-install is the only option. Not to mention the occasional HD crash or scratched CD.
Deleted my computer, all my CD, my records, tapes, 4-track, and guitars, etc...
Hell, I'm having all copyrighted songs removed from my memory this afternoon via lobotomy.
One Can Never Own Enough Musical Instruments...
There is no way they could know that.... but the RIAA probably loves them saying it... "Look ma, we're winning!"
Some probably have deleted everything our of fear... but those are the users who simply don't know the difference between a bark and a bite from the paper tiger.
I haven't deleted a single music file, and I doubt most have...
This is just another PR story for the RIAA.
The price we pay for immortality... is death. Narnia The Great Fall
Well, I think its obvious how CNN knew this. The RIAA probably uploaded one of those viruses to Kazaa that delete all your music files. They also have a team who keeps track of every machine it affects, along with the persons name, street address, and credit card info (for automatic billing of the $90B fine). CNN simply said they wanted to do an article about how the RIAA was winning their battle against the EVIL pirates. So they supplied them with the info showing how many people the virus had actually affected.
(/conspiracy theory cap off)
Nothing to see! You may all go about your business!
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
I hope eveyrone remembers to empty their recycle bins... before the RIAA snoops around in them ;-)
So basically all this is saying that they've needlessly scared enough people to delete anything with a .mp3 extension on their computers whether they ripped them from owned cd's or not.
There's a reason I haven't bought a cd in almost 3 years.
What about moving the files out of the "shared folder" is that deleting too, maybe for the p2p software, but not for me :)
Because my hard drive only holds so much! You go through a cycle of fill the drive, burn them all off to a bunch of CD-Rs, wipe it, rinse, repeat :)
Seriously though, the genie is out of the bottle. They can quote all the surverys and statistics they want. If you tell me though that this month Kazaa usage was down 10% I'll assume eDonkey's went up by at least that.
These people aren't stopping, they're just moving on to the next safe haven the same way they all moved from napster (cough sellouts cough) to kazaa.
Always one step ahead. The RIAA needs to get over it and offer an attractive, reasonable alternative.
Now I know where my recycle bin goes to after I empty it.
By the way can I have my budget presentation back that I deleted with all my music files.
And for a not-so-small-fee, I'd be happy to tell you whatever you want to hear so you can be quoted in national media with authority!
Yes, of course people are deleting all their music files out of fear of prosecution!
That'll be $10 million, please. Thanks.
But then again, I'm a stingy SOB because I'm a DJ and keep it all to my self... No sharing... That and I'm waiting for DRM to lock me out of my WAV files (that God I don't use licenses).
Is it possible to share my "recycle bin"?
It is great that they think so! Maybe they can have another supercampaing and get _all_ the households to delete all their digital music (except, of course, that they bought from iTunes and the likes).
This could be a sword of two edges:
* The RIAA is happy and thinks that they have been succesfull and stop being annoying
* The RIAA is happy and thinks that they have been so successfull that keep doing it and doing until 100% of the market has erased all their files.
So, next time somebody calls you at home from a survey and asks you: Do you use digital music, respond, noooo, I am soo afraid of the legal consequences that I buy perfectly legal CDs and don't even lend them to my friends.
I deleted all of mine when I started Launchcast [yahoo.com] seriously it is free and legal and I controll the music enough to where I don't hear songs I hate and I hear new songs that I might like, in fact I like it better than my mp3s because it has better variety... now if they would just work with firebird... I wish I was not a corporate whore, but yahoo's free music service is better than radio or MP3s.
quote from article: "NPD also found that the number of households acquiring digital music via peer-to-peer file-sharing services declined by 11 percent from August to September, during the traditional summer holiday for college students."
Funny my college usually has summer holidy in, oh I dunno, the summer? I mean.. May June July. A little August but not September.. And what the hell would it mean anyway?
owned by Time Warner who also puts out a lot of music. Here's the RIAA members list BTW. Warner Brothers is a member.
lol, wtf?
is there some kind of site where you are able submit your name when you deleted all your digital music files?
this is just a really poor attemp of propaganda
I just renamed all my mp3's to .abc's. That would keep it from being found by any HD searches.
I encourage this kind of propaganda, it will make the RIAA think they've won. Perhaps they will leave people alone.
-Ed I don't eat meat, but I'd go hunting with a paintball gun.
AFTER I burned them to CD
Technoli
My PC went beep beep beep and suddenly all my mp3's were gone!
*ducks*
Threadkilling since 1992
Hold up, wait a minute, let me put some pimpin in it
bullshit! bullshit bullshit bullshit! Wow. Sorry, guys. Sometimes, the media just gets to me a little. Unbelievable.
Boycott everything - they're all trying to fuck you one way or another
probably the most important thing to keep in mind when reading anything off CNN is to remember that it's a Time-Warner subisidiary and as such a bit of a mouthpeice for Warner entertainment in general. I mean would you instantly agree with an article on FOX news that claims to examine the circumstances leading to the enstatement of Murdoch Jr. as the CEO of britains SKY TV networks?
NPD also found that the number of households acquiring digital music via peer-to-peer file-sharing services declined by 11 percent from August to September, during the traditional summer holiday for college students.
What exactly would attribute this to a success of the RIAA's anti-piracy tactics rather than the fact that students are leaving their T3 connected dorms and returning to their parents dial-up?
To be fair, the article didn't state any connection of these numbers to the RIAA's tactics, but given that it is in an article about millions deleting files out of fear, I'll go ahead and assume they meant to use it as a supporting statistic
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
I am sure you are thinking of Journalism in terms of "Woodwerd and Bernstien", and in fact, the idea of a truelly independent editorial staff did almost come into being in the 60's and 70's. However, what "professional journalists" are tought today is that "always use and give greatest credibility to an authorative/official source", and that "governments" (and by extension corporations) are an "authoritative source".
No, Journalists are NO LONGER tought to think critically or investigate a source. Editorial press rooms are discouraged from using a "non-authoritative" source and are neither given nor "permitted" editorial freedom from their owners. Modern journalism as tought and practiced is what I like to call "press release journalism", and it is a shame.
Well after I followed tech support's instructions and resinstalled XP, I just can't *find* them - or the rest of my data for that matter...
160 more wasted bits
I knew it! Seems like those monkeys are behind everything.
Despite the liberal attitudes to intellectual property here on slashdot, slashdot is not the mainstream public. So has anyone considered that there are in fact millions of people out there who have an actual social conscience, and get rid of files that they've illegally pirated?
The RIAA represents big record labels such as Bertelsmann's BMG Entertainment, Vivendi's Universal Music and Time Warner's Warner Music. Time-Warner is the parent company of CNN.com.
GEEZ!!!! Will you shut up!? We're counting on the fact that the RIAA doesn't know the difference. ;P
Un-news
lemme guess.
Survey
Name:
email:
address:
SS#:
question one: have you ever downloaded mp3s from the internet to your computer ? y/n
question two: are you currently sharing these songs, or did you DELETE THEM ALL?
sharing/deleted
NPD also found that the number of households acquiring digital music via peer-to-peer file-sharing services declined by 11 percent from August to September, during the traditional summer holiday for college students.
... or was this article trying to say that this was expected??? It's so badly written I just cannot tell.
Well duh... college students are not going to ge downloading mp3s over 56k at their parents house.
I don't know about millions, but I've talked to a couple of people who have deleted all their music before I explained to them sharing.
You have to understand 95% of people using Kazaa and such have Zero idea what happens. All they know is that they can get free music and now people are getting sued.
-- taking over the world, we are.
Uh, yeah - great idea.
Welcome to our Poll 12.222.21.42 - Do you have illegal, pirated music on your computer?
Anyone else reminded of the communist "Cultural Revolution" in China?
yea, right after i burnt them all onto DVDs. I removed them from my hard drive, does that mean i'm now immune to the RIAA's policy?
i'll tell you how they made that survey; it's exactly the same way they know that 32 million watched a TV show or 100 milion don't have breakfast in the morning.... they survey or poll a sample of the population and then they multiply the numbers to come out with a result that is an estimate for the entire population. it's probably a thousand individual that they've surveyed.
Kind of off topic but is the riaa going after anyone with .ogg or .wav files?
Shhh! You'll spoil the whole plan!
So, *.mp3, *.wav, *.ogg, *.whatever. Every music file, including the ones with Windows, for startup, shutdown, error, and such, gone? The music and sound effects in PC games, deleted? Please show some proof, or at least make a semi-believable story, then we might take your word for it, CNN...
Time Warner owns CNN, so CNN is baised against File sharing, open source, p2p, 12 year old girls and college students....
On the other hand Fox is Owned by the GOP so It's not like they are an 'unbiased' news source.
Now to top it all off Rush Limbaugh is Hopped up on Oxycotin, which in retrospect may explain much of the last several years. Certainly no reliable source of news there.
MSNBC well we know what the MS stands for
What the hell am I left with Slashdot as a source for all my news!!!!!!
Someone please help us.....
Wait I forget I do have BBC America on Direct TV, so maybe all is not lost.
what am I left with for
So Long and Thanks for all the Fish.
If you buy CDs you're paying the RIAA to sic lawyers on 12 year old girls.
Just thought you should know.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
...wouldn't this mean that RIAA member companies should see their CD sales soar again. Afterall, every time you download an illegal MP3, you're taking away the money you would have spent on CDs from RIAA. With all those MP3s gone, people will have no choice but to go out and buy all those songs.
"The market alone cannot provide sufficient constraints on corporation's penchant to cause harm." -- Joel Bakan
If someone deletes their music files, then they're probably not going to go out and buy music, are they? Yeah, it's awesome from the RIAA's perspective, fewer illegal music files, but wait, now people will NOT be listening to RIAA music everyday. How does the RIAA expect to get new customers if the customers throw away their RIAA purchases? The RIAA is just shooting themselves in the foot. Multiple times. The RIAA is going to find it hard to get customers to replace those that it has lost.
650 MB at a time, after burning them on CDs ;-)
Why can't we have CNN:
Clitoris
News
Network?
I'd certainly watch THAT.
Thanks to iTunes for Windows, they were finally presented with a decent alternative for buying music online. Plus, sharing songs over a large local network now becomes a viable option.
Dear NPD,
I would just like to inform you that I have not deleted any of my several thousand music files. I have simply deleted Kazaa and moved over to *CENSORED*. Please adjust your count accordingly.
Viv
Gmail invites for ip
Nothing like reading a RIAA paid INFO-tisement.
and I really love how they still paint ANY music file as illigitimate and EVIL.
I'm educating my daughter and her friends, they spend at least 2 days a week surfing on www.iuma.org for new indie bands to download and they have cince stopped listening to RIAA music on the radio. My daughter has asked if I could buy her a few of the CD of artists she likes, they ALL are unsigned bands from IUMA.
when you discover that there is an alternative source that only takes a bit of effort to get better quality music.... I can see why the RIAA is extremely afraid of music files.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
So, where did they get these figures? Would it appear that you deleted all your music files on a P2P if you disabled the shared folder? If that's the case, it sounds more like a lot of people stopped sharing their music and the spin of the report is that they deleted all their files.
...what you are SUPPOSED to know.
Actually, only 100,000 users deleted all their music files, but some of them had really fast computers.
-- I have monkeys in my pants.
If it's working, maybe they'll stop suing people now. I know my drive is clean, in fact, I destroyed all my CD's, vinyls, tapes, 8-tracks, mini-disks and gramophones too. I want to be legal!
Are they taught how to spell?
Don't watch the Matrix....it's produced by pretty much the same people.
Where are my moderator points when I need them...
Anyways, this guy actually went to two sites to prove his point! Count that people, the original article And an official reference.
If this becomes the trend, the slashdot effect will be a dominoe one (or virus-like for that matter) and the whole world will succumb to this american centralized site (troll, I know)...
Put that in Deus Ex 2 and you'll have yourself a conspiracy,hehe.
Your (or some Brit's) tax dollars at work. Sometimes they suck too but I find them to be slightly more "fair and balanced" than the corporate networks.
sulli
RTFJ.
Disclaimer: The RIAA will bomb your house if you respond "Yes" to any of the following questions. Please answer truthfully.
SURVEY CO.: "Sir, have you illegally downloaded music in the past 60 days?"
Mr. X: "Uh.. no way, thats illegal!"
SURVEY CO.: "Have you failed to delete the previously downloaded music files?"
Mr. X: "I've actually never illegally downloaded music."
SURVEY CO.: "Don't lie to us! We KNOW who you are and where you live. Our loss in CD sales prove that statistically, you MUST have downloaded at least 50 free CDs."
Mr. X: " OK!, Ok. I did delete those old music files."
SURVEY CO.: "Good job Mr. X. We'll be watching you.
There is NO incentive to tell the truth in a survey like that.
The price we pay for immortality... is death. Narnia The Great Fall
The statistics presented in newspapers are almost always flawed if not totally inaccurate (as this one seems to be). Good luck trying to find out how the NPD conducted their poll. Odds are they took the 11% decline in file sharing and multiplied it by the number of users. I wonder if NPD even knows what "deleted" means.
Big Brother promised a pair of brand new boots to each and every one of us! Hooray!
Anonymous Coward? You bet!
(via anonymous proxy)
Study: Millions of people fooled by shitty CNN Headlines:
.5% drop in sharing... Seems like filesharing is still alive and kicking, despite the highly biased media's subliminal messaging.
Millions of morons visiting CNN today find refrence to study that contains no actual facts, and further serves the goals of RIAA member and CNN Parent Company AOL-Time warner.
This study claims that "Millions of households deleted all music files from their computer". It further goes on to claim that file sharing is dying, citing a 11% (Oh, my!) drop in users since the announcement of the RIAA's plans to sue those engaged in serving music files. Aside from failing to mention that there is no way to accuratley measure how many families have deleted all music files from their computers, they forget that from the roughly 200 million filesharers using KaZaA, if 11% dropped out their method of detecting households that have MP3's (By checking how many users are sharing files), they would have a rougly 22 million drop in households sharing music files, thus looking like 22 million has deleted them from their computer. Obviously, they forgot this simple (As in "WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK WERE YOU FUCKING FUCKERS FUCKING THINKING?", excpet requiring more explaination and being more profane.) fact when they gagued this. 11% drop in users, but only
When life gives you crap, Make Crapade.
Sluggy Freelance.
Is to send out via snail mail the "questionare", where the questionare is not individually marked and gets mailed back to a po box with thousands of other questionares.
I think they probably realised that everything they had downloaded over the past years on their 56k modem was crap and now they had broadband they could get higher quality rips.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Of course, I was doing housekeeping and they were all duplicates, but hey, I deleted them, right? :)
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Deleted or simply removed from the file system directory entrywith the music still on the disk?
CNN
Cock Sucking Bush
News
Network
>"In August, 1.4 million households deleted all music files, whereas prior to August, deletions were at much lower levels, according to Port Washington, New York-based NPD on Wednesday."
A collective outbureak of full harddrives?
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
The RIAA represents big record labels such as Bertelsmann's BMG Entertainment, Vivendi's Universal Music and Time Warner's Warner Music. Time-Warner is the parent company of CNN.com.
So one of the companies underneath the RIAA is reporting something they find favorable. Its not surprising. I'm sure if some 10 person company came out with a survey that people loved the RIAA's new tactics they would publish that too.
Journalistic integrity is not always held to a high standard. This comes up when they can pass the credibility to another company. This time its the "research company NPD Group" or whoever the fuck they are.
A related NPD survey of consumer perception, however, found that consumers' overall opinion of the recording industry is suffering due to the RIAA's move to sue hundreds of people alleged to have illegally shared music online.
Well, duuuh! Wanna know how many CD's I've bought since this mess started? 0! Wanna know how many more I am likely to buy in the future? 0! Wanna know how much file sharing I did before this mess started? 0!
The RIAA and anyone associated with them are not getting one more red cent from me. I never did anything to hurt their bottom line before; I only occasionally bought a CD or DVD, but I never felt the need to steal one. Now, I will never feel the need to buy one, either.
how they know people deleted music files? Aside from the obvious phone or email poll, I wonder if in fact they have other means by which they track file deletions?
In addition, if they track deletions, do they track file creations? And is the creation of MP3 (et. all) files going down or up (especially considering the enormous popularity of iTunes and other MP3 players)?
It will be interesting to see if RIAA's profits come back up. Since they claim that the "pirates" are the cause of their profit decline (of course it must be.. it couldn't be expensive cds in recession or the crap music they're offering), by extension, if people are deleting music, ipsofacto, RIAA's profits must be going up.
And if RIAA's profits don't go up, who are they going to blame next time?
"I drank what?" - Socrates
..the correct numbers. They just pull a frightening number out of their asses and you spread them gladly.
Thats only true in some of the corporate press. There *still is* a vein of honest journalism in the world, quality journalism, investigative journalism. CNN, ABC, CBS, FOX(HAHA) *cant* be honest journalists by definition. They MUST tow the corporate line. It goes so far that nothing that upsets the corporate status-quo is allowed in American Public Discourse -- thats unsettling.
Reporters sans Frontiers publishes a ranking of nations w/r/t Freedom of The Press -- though it dosnt directly deal with corporate-self-censorship, it does speak to concerns of press freedom.
Of course there are many other reasons for deleting the mp3's besides not wanting to get caught with them on your hard drive, namely: - 'Spring Cleaning' of the files, only keeping the ones you listen to on the drive. - Archiving to CD-R/RW or DVD-R. - Moving to a different music format than mp3. And those are just ones that I can think of off the top of my head, I'm sure there are more.
Yeah, this reminds me of "surveys" we would take in high school.
Half the kids (the 'good' ones) would never admit to having done drugs, or had sex, even if they had. They were worried that the school would tell their parents somehow, that it wasn't truly anonymous.
The other half of us.. well let's just say that at 14 I was having sex at least twice a day, drinking probably 40 ounces of alcohol a night, and had done crack twice in the past week alone. Oh, and I was also a gay transvestite horse-buggerer (for the surveys that had write-on options).
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Is yummy. I never can get enough of it, thanks /. for keeping me fed!
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
I need space for my divx screener collection dammit !
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
...that credits mass deleting or mass destroying of cultural artifacts as a good thing.
I gues they deleted their .MP3 files, after they created .OGG files. That way, you can have twice as much music at about the same quality:).
I deleted all my music files.
However it was because I recently downloaded iTunes and felt like re-ripping all my MP3s at a higher bitrate. Space isn't as much of an issue for me anymore and I now have a decent pair of speakers.
"I felt a great disturbance in the kazaa, it was like millions of files cried out at once and then were silent..."
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
about how all the nasty pirates have deleted all their illegally copied software
I am Viklas from Stockholm. For there to them be, you are support RIAA. This support is very against us, and averyone. Why for suppporting RIAA? You make sense of them stopping the freedom.
You have goal to make RIAA seem like good. You make friends in bad places. You should come over to help us.
I have put many krowns onto music. I wont make enouf SeK to make them hapi.
Den amerikanska skivbranschorganisationen RIAA har slappt atalet mot en av de 261 personer som valts ut som syndabockar nar det galler nedladdning av musik pa natet.
with many love to all
Viklas
Maybe CNN and the RIAA have set up trojans in "millions of PCs" to track deletion activity...
I like how they mention the decline occurred during college summer vacation but the tone seems to say that the measured decline is an indicator of people not sharing due to RIAA junk, but they said it themselves -during the college summer vacation- meaning, no one has bandwidth anymore.
I personally deleted all of my mp3's as well as all traces of said mp3's in the registry because I didn't want to chance being harassed. However, I also have not purchased a CD since then nor will I ever purchase one in the future.
The music industry stifles musical creativity by picking up the latest britney clones and telling the masses that they are popular. Even the artists that are lucky enough to be chosen don't make anything from the CD sales. It's all about some old man somewhere making 90% profit from each CD sold, just because a group of those guys controls what gets sold to stores, what plays on the radio, and what is seen on MTV.
I can safely say that I've given up on the music industry and the only time I am exposed is when I'm in the car and the radio happens to be on. Good riddance Recording Industry Ass. of America. You can take your pop music and shove it up your ass.
....for pages out of Slashdot. -1 Unsubstantiated.
90% of everything is crap. Also, crap is relative.
Ahhh yes, my plans are unfolding nicely. This will lull the RIAA into a false sense of security, thinking that their draconian tactics are effective.
Little do they know I am now using their servers to stash MP3s!! And PORN! Muhahahahahahahahahaha!
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
I'm sorry about all the confusion. I deleted millions of songs off my computer. I work for Time Warner, so I guess some of my coworkers might have noticed. Sorry about that.
Um...millions of hot cheerleaders have had sex with ME! They obviously had a good reason, and you would hate to upset the status quo, right? In fact, many cheerleaders that have refused to have sex with me have been sued by large faceless corporate conglomerates.
(whoo-hoo!)
"You know why you do not see me styling wit my homies? Because I have no homies!!" -Mojo Jojo
Can you tell me the origins of the happy ball please?
Perhaps you meant to post your comment in the "What the Candidates are Running" instead of "Millions Delete ALL Music Files?". Perhaps you did indeed mean to post your comment in this topic as an advertisement?
To know is to have knowledge....to understand is to be enlightened.
the way i see it, digital music files arent illegal by any standard. it's covered under "fair use" i beleive. digitizing your music and putting it on your computer's hard drive is more conveniant than having that one retail CD floating from CD player to car to computer. don't ya think?
=^_^= P|-|33R |\/|3
Here in Germany NPD is a neo-Nazi party, wonder if the two NPDs are related. :)
If it is from CNN what do you expect?
CNN - Cooked-up News Network.
What really did happen in eye-raq? Makes me wonder...
"CNN: The Least Trusted Name In News."
Watch yourself! Knees jerking all over the place!
"Fifty million Americans can't be wrong," said Rep. Billy Tauzin. Gore - 50,999,897 Bush - 50,456,002
Just as soon as I burn it off onto CDs
----
---- "Excuse me. Where's the children's gun section?"
These people were probably just spooked, what we need is a way of destroying anything incriminating from your hard-drive very quickly that you can activate as the police knock on your door. Maybe a hardend enclosure for your drive that contained its own battery and upon activation (with a code or something) would wipe everything as fast as possible before the police could stop it. You could even have it only destroy selective files and leave no evidence that it had been activated (destroying evidence could be seen as criminal in some circumstances but if theres no evidence that you destroyed evidence - i.e nothing to say you activated the device, then what can they do?). Something like this could be pretty easy to make (infact homemade versions would be better than commercial ones because the police wouldnt be able to "learn" weaknesses to stop it in time) it just needs to be tough enough to survive and has to send the right commands to the drive, and once its done one pass it can continue multiple bonus passes until the battery dies or its stopped.
Does anyone see anything wrong with the legal implications of something like this? assuming there is no actual evidence that you deleted anything, is it illigal to own something that would do this? im surprised it hasnt been done before as you always see the police carrying PCs out of raids on the news and wonder if they had checkd for booby traps.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
The copyright discussion is currently happening at Educause's national meeting in Anaheim. The RIAA president and MPAA's Jack "boom boom" Valenti (who finally is retiring) represent the holders of copyright.
What this discussion really implies is that it is REALLY time to express our views to our congress critters. The lobbying power of the MPAA and RIAA will overwhelm anything we do if we don't act pretty quickly as a group.
-- Multics
thanks to StreamRipper32. Yeah, I get a lot of duplicates and stuff I don't want, but I still get a ton of music.
Counting duplicates and bad music, I guess I've deleted hundreds of music files over the last few months.
... where the possibly inaccurate responses of a small fraction (12%) of an incosequential number (40,000/(number of PC users)) is used to extrapolate numbers of the order of 1 million. Hell, 80% of those who deleted had less than 50 files on their machines ... they're not even serious music downloaders! How meaningless is that?
This is a just means for NPD to curry business from RIAA (if the company isn't already in the employ of/owned by that odious group).
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
I have now deleted all of the files with the extension .mp3 from all of my computers as well as all my freinds and neighbours computers. I would appreciate if you just dropped this whole nonsense regarding suing people. We will be good girls and boys now.
Stay tuned for new sig...
The RIAA is a political organization, looking to ban technology to save their business model.
The recording industry fatcats want their money, and are scared of new technology. No one wants to split from the group and try selling music in any other fashion than the current model. They feel threatened. The industry is behaving exactly like they did during the cassette tape scare, just like the motion picture industry was scared of the VCR and video tape. Remember movie rentals? VHS videos were frequently $100 or more until used movies became available... and movie houses started dropping their retail prices down to the current prices.
Movie rentals threatened the movie industry, until they realized that it actually developed new markets for their material.
The RIAA is not filled with innovative, bright individuals. The RIAA throws money at weak-minded, spineless senators and congresspeople like Conyer, Fritz Hollings, and any politician from California (Berman, Feinstein, etc.). The recording industry sees technology as the end of their business. They are in denial. The emperor has no clothes.
What's really funny is that they also profit from the downloaders. They research what the downloaders' are trading, and call the radio stations to increase air time, which sells more CDs. Hypocrites! They profit from the very process they're trying to stop.
I don't fault them for researching the downloaders' behavior. That's the bright people helping the record biz survive.
The political side of the biz is what I can't stand. This is why most people can't stand politicians or the courts.
Politicians choose not to understand the technology, they choose to listen to those with the biggest pocketbooks. Ostriches... with their heads in sand.
With the RIAA and Fritz Hollings' old method of thinking, the school systems should only be using chalkboards and chalk. The police will be stopping by later to pick up your VCR, computer, and cassette tape recorder.
"No new technology, it ruins our business."
-- No sig for you!
If im counted in the 'millions' statistic, they are wrong... i, and many people i know have stopped publicly sharing, and started sharing to people we download from and know :)
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
I happen to work for the RIAA and as far as we all in the office are concerned, THANK YOU AMERICA for clearing enough space for all our porn to be transplanted onto your hard drives in the near future in hidden folders so as to not clog up our hard drive space with it for our all day wanks :D
thank you all again,
Maynard Gonagoblind
Chief Wanker of RIAA Information Bureau
p.s. we still love you Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, Iraqi Minister of Information, here at the RIAA
Do you really expect an Edwards' supporter to be that bright?
are you referring to the saturday night live fake commercial for 'happy fun ball'?
The other thread is worth taking a look at though...
The number one defacto problem with sample based studies is that we know for a fact that people who take part in surveys are not necessarily representative of everyone else. The magnitude of this problem is debated (see John Brehm's book The Phantom Respondents).
Read the social science classic Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research by King, Keohane, and Verba.
Chapter 5 on "What to Avoid" explains how selection bias works, and why, for example, asking 40,000 people who agree to have their computers monitored by a commercial research marketing group is probably a heavily biased sample.
That being said, its interesting to note that the same research firm notes that while file sharing has an impact on record sales, the music industry is still to blame for declining sales.
I know of more than a few non-technical people who still were able to figure out Napster/Kazaa/etc and download songs who deleted EVERY .mp3 the second they heard about RIAA lawsuits/etc. They didn't understand that the RIAA was going after sharers--they heard 'mp3' and 'lawsuit' in the same sentence and freaked out. Granted, this is just anecdotal and not representative of the whole population, but I think it's an attitude more than just a few people had.
I have a feeling a good number of other people did the same thing, even if they did just rip the music from their purchased CDs. To the uninformed, it must look really scary.
sig--we don't need no goddamn sig
Are they substituting "deleted" for the words "disabled sharing with other users"?"
This is probably a fair assumption based on the fact that they didn't have the foresight to adopt online music services before they lost control. The music industry is still suffering from their stagnant business model and will continue to do so for a number of years to come.
Legal digital music is already well outselling physical CD music this as the newer digital stores are only just starting. This tells us that the RIAA and their owners will finally be forced to accept the inevitable. That digital distribution of music IS the only way forward for the music industry.
Let's take a moment to recall that the reason for the rise in downloaded free music was because 55mm American consumers were unwilling to pay the excessive prices for CD music. Meantime the music industry was in denial and rather than work on legal digital music offerings decided to eventually prosecute 55mm Americans.
Now after chasing maybe a 1,000 people the RIAA can claim that their efforts have been rewarded by people wiping out their illegal music and the job is done. They can now retreat, in the glory of this publicity, while their owners finally face up to the realities.
Consumers merely wanted inexpensive, but good, legal digital music and CDs are well dying....
I really did delete my files
accidentally.
To quote the original release:
...
The music industry's success in reducing file-sharing activity has been impressive, but now the real work of winning back the hearts and minds of consumers must begin," Crupnick said. "To capitalize on this success, the industry must re-double efforts to educate the file-sharing public about how illegal file sharing affects not just the industry's bottom line, but also the artists themselves and the ability of the industry to continue to offer a wide range of new music to consumers. New legal ways to purchase digital music on the Web can work hand-in-glove with these education efforts and help to improve the public's perception of the music industry."
Not a single mention about winning our hearts and minds with better content, fairer prices, or better treatment of artists. No. They want to reemphasize how BAD the public has been. Yes, the floggings will continue until morale improves!
The RIAA so profoundly does not get it
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
I have 15GB to fill on my iPod and that frees up a heck of a lotta room on my hard drive for more games!
-growing old is inevitable, growing up is optional
I quit looking at pr0n too. You have my word on it.
but only because I lost a couple of RAID disks. Damn cheap used hardware.
If 1.4 million deleted all their MP3s and we assume the average P2Pirate had 100 illegal MP3s with the well-known value of $2,500 per track, this means RIAA member companies just made a net profit of:
1.4 * 10^6 * 100 * 2500 = 350 billion USD
I think CNN's interpretation of "Deleted" is actually just wishful thing. Although I bet a lot of kids have been yelled at by Mom and Dad and probably grounded from "web use" for having kazaa installed.
On a side note (sorta related) I saw the Matrix Revo- last night and before the movie was this ad about software piracy and why it's wrong because lot's of people work hard to make good movies. This was laughed at, booed, and general flaming comments shouted by the audiance at the ad.
Ave Molech Setting
For every file/music sharing story I read, I need to download at least 5 gigs of music. It's a good reminder, "Hey, it's been a few days since your last download. Get more."
Man alive, my HD is gettin' full and I'm running out of good music to download! I think I have it all!
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
This happens every 6 months as we all reinstall windows...
;)
On a less serious note, these stories are very important for helping us to understand the credability of the agancies that report them.
While my evidence is anecdotal (and as questionable as theirs, since they studied people who allowed themsleves to be monitored), I know of quite a few people who have deleted their music. I know personally of 3 or 4 people who have deleted their entire collection of downloaded MP3s, and another 6 or 7 who no longer download MP3s. While /. laughs at the RIAA for suing people, it is having the desired effect among you average downloader.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
CNN is reporting that the 218 Slashdot readers simultaneously yelled 'BULLSHIT' upon reading that millions of users allegedly deleted all the music files from their computers in a story posted here. The force of the simultaneous blast woke up Daryl McDumbass, CEO of SCO, whereupon he finally confessed to being the model for a picture posted here, confesseed his undying love for IBM's Lou Gerstner, and his secret desire to take Jar Jar Binks inside himself while George Lucas masturbated with a Yoda doll.
I read this is the wall street journal the other day.
A company has got 10,000 people to install monitoring softward on their computers, and they use that to gague internet behavior.
How many pirates would volenteer to have monitoring software on their computer?
Heck it was probebly a spyware tool used to check for this... Most of the people only had a few
songs that stoped shareing, hardly cutting down on the masses
come comment on the madness at http://slashdot.org/~phreak03/journal/
Actually CNN is an excellent news source in its international version (on tv) which Americans can't get. Its the American CNN that has been stripped of its balance and content and is only slightly less patriotic than Fox News.
Look who hit the nail on the proverbial head....
They all had to reformat their Windows XP installations at the same time. Hence, deleting all their mp3 files. Come on, this is Slashdot.. Doesn't take the DOJ to come up with this!!
Slashdot.. Land of nerds, trolls, and FlameBait..
CNN is reporting that millions of people have deleted all the music files from their computers in a story here.
That's a good thing people are finally deleting their files. It means that all the new DMCA-like laws won't be necessary after all...
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
Kazaa Lite has a feature that allows you to block listing of your files, but not sharing. So, if someone it trying to download a file, your computer would oblighe them if it has it. However, if someone tries to get a list of what you have, it reports nothing. I guess the reasoning is you can still share, but the RIAA et al can't find a list of all the shit you have to go after you with.
...watching "Cops" causes rampant paranoia among middle-aged hippies, who have dumped over $700 billion of marijuana into toilets across the nation over the last 10 years. Moscow's Ministry of Proof Burdens chief Balsak Kruschmoff is quoted: "we cannot compete with this shit."
Why? Public memory is short. Right now they're creating a buzz, scaring some away. It's like that hunger disaster on TV. Right then everybody cares. A few months later, still same crisis, very few care.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Is this validation that the RPIAAs tactics work.. Or they've reached thier goal and will stop?
http://threetechguys.info Come, discuss Technology. Got a technology question? Come ask!
Which makes sense. But it misses some subtle and interesting points highlighted by NPD's press release:
It should not be a shock to anyone that file traders might find the RIAA's actions distastefull. After all - they're the ones either directly affected or threatned by it. But what's interesting is that it appears that the same negative reaction is being expressed by those who are either casual traders or not involved in file trading at all.
This aludes to the often-expressed opinion that it is dangerous to sue one's customer base. It will be interesting to see if the Industry is able to manage this increasingly negative opinion and, if not, if it will affect the bottom line.
I swear I haven't deleted a one. In fact I just got a new drive and migrated all my MP3 stuff over to it were it resides by it's self. I think they are all wet.
If you don't like what I write don't be a CS and mod it down. Refute it.
Yea I can't spell. So what is your point?
That must have been one interesting heck of a poll. I wonder how they worded it.
RIAA has used the argument that file sharing has reduced sales of music CDs over the past several years. If this is correct, then there should be a direct correlation between file deletions and CD sales (assuming folks who listed to their music files will continue to listen to something). It will be interesting to track CD sales and see if there is a turn-around in the record market. If there is no turn-around, it suggests that excessive price is the culprit, not file sharing - a quiet victory for our community.
They know people deleted the files because Real Player told them so.
Editors ask writers to create content on subjects that they think will be picked up by other news services. The union rules state that the writer retains the right to withold their name on a story if they feel the story is inaccurate or if they disagree with what they've been asked to write. Editors hate when writers do this because those in the industry know what a authorless article implies. This is why you will sometimes see stories from the AP or Reuters that do reference the author:
Move Over Beauty Queens, Italy Seeks Miss Digital
And others that don't:
Dog Shoots Man
So what does this mean to you, the critical consumer of news? If an article carries the author's name, it means they endorse it's content - they believe in the validity of it. If it does not, it means the writer was either forced to create content that they didn't agree with or believe was accurate or that the writer was up against a deadline and failed to provide content that they were proud of.
The cnn article, interestingly, does not provide an author. Any thoughts on why? The question of how they know content was deleted is awfully vital to getting the point of this article across. It really doesn't seem to stand up to scrutiny.
Recorded music without video is so 20th century. Why would anybody want to buy an audio-only recording when video costs less and runs longer? Hello?
Kudos to you for actually going to the NPD site and finding out the basis of their claims before bitching on /. :p
:Eighty percent of the consumers who deleted files had fewer than 50 files saved; just 10 percent had more than 200 files.
And to answer your question:
Hmm I wonder if people who know their computers are being monitored are more likely to delete their digital music files... Maybe that would affect the validity of this study, you think?
Yes; this is called voluntary response bias in statistics. People with large collections of illegal files are much less likely to volunteer to have their PC watched, as you implied. Note from the official press release
I think most people will agree that 80% having less than 50 songs is not an accurate representation of the file-sharing population.
Moderation Totals: Flamebait=2, Troll=1, Redundant=1, Insightful=6, Overrated=1, Underrated=1, Total=12. (not mine)
40,000 volunteers....yet the press release title says "Millions of households". And then, the survey itself was fielded by only 5,000 respondents.
I may be a little behind the bell curve here, but how does that add up then to "millions" of households. I can understand maybe millions of files deleted...but I checked and rechecked the release and it plainly states "More than a million households deleted all the digital music files they had saved on their PCs in August".
Or is NPD MusicWatch Digital just a puppet of the RIAA? Spreading around a little FUD and dis-information...kinda like the inflated enemy body counts of Vietnam.
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
Sure they have, and why not. After they burn them on a CDR why waste the space! :)
(Stolen sig) Remember: it's a "Microsoft virus", not an "email virus", a "Microsoft worm", not a "computer worm
"My question is how the hell would they know?"
Ahh, maybe they did a survey and asked people? Poster should RTFA.
The deletion stats are done via PC monitoring. The current consumer opinion of the RIAA is done via telephone survey. You mixed them up.
Methodology Note: NPD MusicWatch Digital information is collected continuously from the PCs of 40,000 volunteer online panelists, balanced to represent the online population of PC users. NPD's MusicLab survey was fielded in September of 2003 to a representative sample of 5,000 respondents aged 13 and older.
MusicWatch is the deletion stats and MusicLab survey is the opinion survey. It's a confusing name scheme, certainly an understandable mixup.
Moderation Totals: Flamebait=2, Troll=1, Redundant=1, Insightful=6, Overrated=1, Underrated=1, Total=12. (not mine)
What they don't tell you is that those millions who deleted all their music files are the same millions who call you into their office and tell you that their PC was full so they formatted the hard drive to clear up some space and now it doesn't work.
Though, for all I know the numbers could be true, but it is still first and foremost publicity.
Reuters reported that last month over one million marijuana users deleted their pot. One survey participant was quoted as saying, "Ya man. And then we deleted like eight million cheesburgers."
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
after I burned them... so I could have the space to install Final Fantasy XI.
(Actually I REALLY did archive 7GB of mp3s to data DVDs cause I didn't listen to them often. But then again, that's ARCHIVE)
Waste is out, I'v used it and people I know use it. Download it once off of some p2p app and throw it onto a waste network and the riaa/mpaa won't know a single thing.
Aside from that, once the riaa mentioned they're sueing everything that moves people probably started using ever so popular blacklists that keeps the riaa/mpaa/goverment/spammers from seeing what they've got or advertising files to them and probably started taking the crazy folks warnings, er, advice more seriously. So while p2p may be stronger than ever, their probing becomes ever more innacurate due to the blacklisting.
They won't succeed in stopping p2p, they'll just drive it underground. Waste is a form of that, as nobody can get onto the network without the proper key and ip swap. I just hope the members of the riaa's cartel loose profits until they go out of buisness and the chickenshit artists who support them starve. Sure, it's a harsh thing to say but I don't like the alternative.
Candy-Coated Knowledge
I have done this to comply with the RIAA.
The disk the songs were on has been removed from the server....
It's now on e-bay.. happy bidding and good luck!!
rename *.mp3 *.m3p
Use your head, can't you, use your head,
You're on earth, there's no cure for that - S. Beckett
Yeah, I deleted about 14,000 mp3's from my desktop system last month after I moved them all over to my NAS server.
Du har aldrig funderat pa att lara dig engelska? Den rappakalja du just fororenade Slashdot med gor mig tveksam till om du ens kan svenska.
Call me a bit jaded here, but how many millions of people end up wiping and reinstalling Windows every year, or tossing their old system when they get a new one? Wouldn't this cause a huge margin of error in an mp3-collecting study?
And then, factor in the spread of cheap CD burners. Mp3s burned to CD as file data or audio aren't going to show up in scans of hard drives anymore. How do you know that kid with only 10 mp3s isn't really a kid with thousands, but whose system self destructed recently, and s/he is just listening to stuff already on CD-R?
I have over 70 GIGAbytes of MP3's.
Why the hell do you think people have 300GB HDs?
Like the percent of Americans who supported the Iraq war? Yea, statistics are fuckin hilarious.
The purpose of the RIAA is to fuck you up the ass!
Really people, where do you get these outlandish ideas?
I deleted all of my music files!
They were using up the valuable diskspace I needed for my pr0n collection!
It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men. -Frederick Douglass
There just burning them onto cd and stashing them until the heats off.
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
More than a million households deleted all the digital music files they had saved on their PCs in August, according to new information released today by The NPD Group. NPD credits the ongoing RIAA anti-piracy campaign and related media attention as having had a measurable effect on the actions of many consumers in regard to the illegal sharing of digital music. In a related survey of consumer perception, however, NPD found that consumers' overall opinion of the recording industry is suffering as a result of the record industry association's well-publicized legal tactics.
In August 1.4 million households deleted all the digital music files saved on their PC hard drives. Prior to August, deletions were at much lower levels. For example in May of 2003, when NPD first began to track music file deletions, 606,000 households deleted all digital music files from their PCs. Eighty percent of the consumers who deleted files had fewer than 50 files saved; just 10 percent had more than 200 files.
"So far the RIAA's litigation has focused on users with the largest numbers of files to be shared, but it appears that the lawsuits are also having an effect on those with fewer files, indicating that the message that file sharing is illegal is getting through to mainstream consumers," said Russ Crupnick, vice president of The NPD Group. "There are many reasons why consumers would delete files -- from hardware changes to burning their music inventory to CD -- but this massive jump in deletions is clearly a reaction to the new environment for pirated music."
Another illustration of how the RIAA's lawsuits are having their desired effect on consumer music file-sharing activity is exemplified by a continued decrease in file-sharing overall. According to The NPD Group, the number of households acquiring digital music via peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing services declined by 11 percent from August to September. During that same time period, the total number of music files downloaded decreased 9 percent.
"While some in the music industry expected a large jump in digital file acquisition as the summer ended when students returned to school, the latest consumer information from NPD belies this expectation," Crupnick said. "It's apparent that the music industry's strategy continues to work in the ongoing battle against illegal music file sharing; however, those same tactics also appear to negatively affect the perceptions of the recording industry among consumers."
A MusicLab survey fielded by NPD in September noted that consumers' overall impressions of the recording industry were negatively affected by threats of litigation. Two-thirds of consumers who had recently shared files on P2P networks reported that the lawsuits caused them to have a "much more" or "somewhat more" negative opinion of record companies in general. Just over 40 percent of consumers who had not downloaded music in the previous four weeks felt similarly.
Perceptions of recent file sharers diverged from their non-sharing counterparts when the question of fairness was posed. When asked if "stopping people from freely sharing copyrighted music files through a file-sharing network is the honest and fair thing to do," just 23 percent of recent file sharers agreed, versus 42 percent of those who had not downloaded music in the previous four weeks.
"The music industry's success in reducing file-sharing activity has been impressive, but now the real work of winning back the hearts and minds of consumers must begin," Crupnick said. "To capitalize on this success, the industry must re-double efforts to educate the file-sharing public about how illegal file sharing affects not just the industry's bottom line, but also the artists themselves and the ability of the industry to continue to offer a wide range of new music to consumers. New legal ways to purchase digital music on the Web can work hand-in-glove with these education efforts and help to improve the public's perception of the music industry."
Methodology Note: NPD Mu
I sense a great disturbance in the force !
It was as if millions of mp3 files suddenly cried out and were silenced!
"Science is like sex: sometimes something useful comes out, but that is not the reason we are doing it" Richard Feynman
They bought the info from Micro$oft, of course.
When you buy a modern MS OS, you voluntarily agree to let them do anything at all on your system.
``How convenient!''
from my old computer, just minutes after copying them to my new one.
Music will continue to be shared even if it will not be .
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
in a very public manner
There are private mailing lists with PGP encryption
There are SSh2 dump sites with 1,024 bit crypto
Programs like Konspire2b are just spreading their wings
There other ways I will not even mention
I think it is good that they perceive that they are winning,
maybe it will "eventually" get them off our backs
File sharing is taking place in pretty much every country
world wide that has net access
Copyright and patents get ALOT less respect from ppl that make
like $2/hr or less in the third world
They will never be able to enforce it there
Peace,
Ex-MislTech
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
Idiots.
My question is how the hell would they know? Are they substituting "deleted" for the words "disabled sharing with other users"?"
My answer would be they found out from the trojan's they install via file sharing sites.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
How about this:
A bit of spyware. Like BonziBuddy or Weatherbug or some of that crap. It can use someone else as a proxy to download illegal songs. When they get tapped for it by the RIAA they can respond "What? People download music through that?" But the software maintains no record of who was using it as a proxy. Two or more "guilty" parties can use the software in a loop.
Now either people can download music effectivly and anonymously OR spyware will be declared illegal. It's a win/win!
Can you tell me the origins of the happy ball please?
Here you go.
"Vivendi's Universal Music"... Doesnt Vivendi own VALVe (the makers of Half-Life)? And, dident VALVe just release a feature that plays mp3 files in-game?
Or earthstation5 finally started making use of the embedded feature to delete files
Statistics 101 doesn't allow you to extrapolate from 40,000 to millions if the original 40,000 is a biased control group. They knew they were being watched, so they were far more likely to remove illegal, or what they thought were illegal, materials.
Let me think about it. A company wants to watch my PC usage habits. Do I: A. Continue downloading MP3s from Kazaa while the company monitors my every move or B. Delete (or burn to CD, then delete) my MP3s until the company is done monitoring me. I've got a pretty go idea that anyone who is participating in the Neilson ratings is careful with what late-night Cinemax movies they watch too. Anyway, the fact that a few thousand people out of 40,000 who knew they were being watched stopped doing something illegal doesn't surprise me at all. The fact that a large surveying company would fail to note this and would apply this skewed number to the population of the US is ridiculous. Yes, I have my PhD and BS...or is it a PhD IN BS
If you mod me down, I shall become less powerful than you could possibly imagine.
What you say you're doing- not buying cds- is possibly the only thing we as "consumers" can really do to hurt the riaa- so "way to go"
BUT- there is plenty of music published by indie labels, and its mostly not "pop music" which I'd like the RIAA to shove up their ass too:)
I spend about $100/month on CDs and I've only bought one RIAA label cd in the last year- and that was an accident (I didnt imagine the artist would be on a major label so didnt check)
How do I find out about all this indie music? P2P and allmusic.com:)
"Files, share you must them."
PR mavens do this all the time. They send out a press release and lazy news organizations just post it. My boyfriend used to do tech PR before he got fed up with it, and says that this sort of thing happens all the time.
90% of the "news" you read is placed there, sometimes verbatim, by a savvy PR person. This is especially true of technology reporting. A PR staffer calls a journalist, tells them what to say, and a lot of times, they say it.
A good book on the topic is "Toxic Sludge is Good for You! : Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry." It's a frightening book and highly recommended.
In the example of phoning people and asking their incomes, for instance, you can correct for the bias easily if you use a different technique that addresses that particular issue head-on: do an expensive but small survey of a random selection of the entire population, and from that, find out what percentage have no phone and low income, no phone and high income, phone and low income, phone and high income. This difficult and expensive information can then be used to extrapolate the information discovered in a larger (and cheaper per capita) study.
Here's another way to put it. Any kind of statistical extrapolation, as opposed to intensive direct counting, relies on knowing the underlying distribution of the data. If you don't know the general curve(s) the data lies on, then you can't extrapolate, period.
Fortunately (for statistics folks), there are many ways to determine the nature of the underlying distributions. Then, knowing those, you can then reliably extrapolate a finite sample into a determination of the behavior of the entire population (modulo issues of precision, accuracy, random and systematic experimental error, etc, all of which are routinely dealt with by hardcore scientists such as particle physicists, and alas, too often dealt with poorly by social scientists).
Nonetheless, the better soft scientists (and better reputable pollsters) can and do approach these things the right way -- that is, doing it the way that our huge body of math and science informs us is the best practice.
All of that is, of course, a different question than whether this study used best practice. Some here have said they are reputable, and so they must have, but the results are extraordinarily counter-intuitive, so I, for one, refuse to believe that they used best practice until I see some better proof of the fact.
Professional Wild-Eyed Visionary
My first impression was that the RIAA had paid CNN to run that story.... Although I wonder how many clueless people deleted the music they've purchased from services like iTMS or Napster.
You can fit 160 mp3s onto a single CD. Think about that...
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
ahem *clears throat*
Congrats! You have been selected to ride the short bus for all your commuting needs. Just call 1-800-I-AM-DUMB and they will ride by to pick you up.
Moron.
I have a Cig, but do you have a light?
CNN is reporting that millions of people have deleted all the music files from their computers in a story
This tends to happen when you format your HD because windows committed suicide.
Mp3's don't leave a "trace" in the registry, unless you're talking about recently opened lists that are parts of applications.
Don't worry...unless you've got spyware, nobody knows. And even if they do, its not illegal to own those MP3's.
There is no reason to delete MP3's; only the act of "uploading" (aka sharing) is illegal.
But MP3's by themselves are completely lawful. There is nothing "bad" about an MP3. Its legal. Okay to use. Honest. A great thing to have.
Hope that's clear.
....of course now I have spindles of CDRs lying everywhere. Its just easier to share when you can hand over a 100 CDs at a time to your friends.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!
This was a survey of the computer using public, not the subsection of that public who are identify as part of some file-sharing 'community.'
A Good Intro to NetBS
I can imagine the board meeting now
------
There's a fine line between cuddling and holding someone down so they can't get away.
If most of the downloaded music is RIAA music, then I say the sooner RIAA music is deleted, the better.
Music that cannot be shared is not worth listening to anyway. See my extensive essay share the music .
Robert Nagle, Idiotprogrammer, Houston
Da Blog
Bullshit.
Stock in Seagate, and other hard drive manufacturers, dropped like a rock. We interviewed Dick van Byte, CTO, and he told us "yes the rationing of music these days means there just isn't as much to store. We're hoping that bored former listeners will turn to p0rn. At least that industry isn't quite so organized in its opposition to widespread copying. (Yet.)" P0rn videos typically occupy more spice in a computer's mamary than MP3 files, so maybe we will be seeing Dick's stock rise up again sooner than Wall Street pundits seem to think.
RIAA Fast CD Burner Theory states that anyone with a CD Burner at over one-speed qualifies for magnification in reporting. Therefore, if all of the survey respondents had 40-speed CD burners then they'd qualify to be counted as 200,000 respondents and if they each had ten songs on their hard drive apiece then they'd naturally become then 'millions' that the RIAA needs to qualify their statements.
Britney's CD is called "Me Against the Music"
Punchline 1:
It's fairly clear that Music isn't winning.
Punchline 2:
Doesn't that describe her whole career?
Whats the big deal about ipods with 68 bazillon of gigabytes?!
:P)
I get bored of old songs, so there ya go, on a CD. I dont listen to 'em anymore.
I just cleaned up my hard drive two weeks ago and I noticed that there was so much stuff I dont listen to anymore. So if someone say to me "My music folder takes 40Gb.", i'd reply "And how much of that music do you really listen to? Sure, you dot the lastest Celine Dion CD, but do you really listen to it?"
When I take the bus, I bring my Sony player (using MiniDiscs), and 5 of these disks are more than enough for my listening needs.
(FYI, my music folder takes 11Gb on my hard drive, and i didn't start to burn CDs of not-listened mp3s yet. You heard me RIAA, 11Gb.
"...a generation of kids has grown up thinking Trance is the shittiest music since country and western." - Paul van Dyk
/C:
what the hell is that????
...we are from the government - we are here to help...
Don't you feel it ? The winds are changing !! People now fear the great EVIL EYE of the RIAA ! No more sarcasm permitted... They are the strongest and we, the commoners, are weak... They know all about us... They spy on us, they see all wot we do...
Hurry up folk ! They 're comming ! Dump all youre file, empty your recycle bin, flush your history, reformat your drive and, by the way, burn your computer.
The fire purify, the fire remove all traces... so by the way, eleminate all witness of your crime and burn their body !!!
"Insanity in individuals is something rare, but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule." - Nietzsche
I'm still in the process of ripping my 1000+ CD collection... which is COMPLETELY LEGAL! In fact, it appears to be necessary for backup; I've all ready found 2 CDs that are no longer playable.
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Windows just trashed 2 partitions on one of my computers. Who needs to delete anything when you have Windows to do it for you?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
40,000 volunteers....yet the press release title says "Millions of households". And then, the survey itself was fielded by only 5,000 respondents.
Theory goes like this:
1. Find entire population, which would be what, 57 million?
2. Pick a representative selection (usually by random draws). Imagine that there really was 70% A and 30% B in the population. If you picked say three people, they could easily be all A or all B. But if you drew 5000 people from the 57,000,000, there'd still be ~70% A and ~30% B. What you're doing is the same, only in reverse.
3. Find the facts for the selection, ie. discover that for the selection there's 70% A and 30% B.
4. Assume that the entire population would behave just like the selection, of course with greater error margins. That is, 70% A in selection => ~70% A in population, and 30% B in selection => ~30% A in population.
So if you have 57,000,000 people, pick a selection of 5,000 at random and find that people who have music files has dropped from 5000 * 70% = 3500 to 5000 * 60% = 3000, it's reasonable to assume that the total has dropped from 57,000,000 * 70 = 39,900,000 to 57,000,000 * 60% = 34,200,000. This would mean that "millions of people" have deleted music.
The key problem, as is always the problem, is the "representative" part. Are they selected from the entire population, work access, home access, all ISPs, universities, schools etc.? The second problem is whether they are picked at random, which they are not.
Even if they could ask people picked randomly from a list, there's enough problems with statistically biased unreachable/rejection (e.g. a phone survey will catch a) people who are at home b) households with more people = someone to pick up the phone c) less busy people "Don't have time to answer your survey, bye!")
In this case, it looks as if they volunteered, which is usually an even more biased group than those who are asked and accept. Generalizing from a favourable segment is one of the reasons why there's a saying "There's white lies, black lies and statistics."
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Well when you think about the #1 application people use to download music, and the fact that they "monitor your computer to enhance the ad's you will see" makes you think just what they might be monitoring.
Makes me think if brillant (they own kazaa right?) is giving this information out freely or against their will to RIAA..... Or someone else.
TruePunk | Games
But I also haven't shared a file or even connected to a P2P network since the lawsuits came out. The biggest reason for that is that I haven't had the time. The second biggest is I got a virus. And the third biggest is there hasn't been anything I've wanted to download too particularly badly. As an aside, I personally haven't "purchased" a cd since roughly '98, and don't plan on it. I currently "own" over 500 cd's. And when I was downloading it was mostly what would be considered "oldies but goodies" circa '92 and back. Most of these wouldn't even be found in the record store unless it was on a compilation of equally as obscure but largely ignored tracks. To date I've only received a cease and desist from the MPAA NOT the RIAA so I don't believe any efforts the RIAA has made thus far has had any measurable impact. I just don't have the time to be bothered with worrying about it. I don't listen to the radio, so generally the only new music I hear is either in a tv show, movie, commercial, or retail overhead speaker. Good riddance RIAA.
The english language is in beta. It's evolving but has not yet reached a level of usability.
Everyone, Rip all your CDs and then
SMASH THEM ALL TO BITS
er PIECES
Look it up.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
"If you have committed a crime and wish to report it click Yes. If you do not wish to report is click No.
You have selected no, meaning you have committed a crime and chosen not to report it. Please remain where you are while our unit is on the way."
"Trying is only the first step towards failure." - Homer
I would assume this story is as fake, and paid for by the music industry, as other stories on CNN (the most trusted name in news, or how the ad runs). I travelled the USA recently and frequently watched CNN. Boy do they spread factoids, false information, and other crap. But as long as the moderators like Lou wear US flag pins that's okay I guess.
open (SIG, "</dev/zero"); $sig = <SIG>; close SIG;
It's a popular misconception. :-(
Call me a conspiracy theorist, but perhaps this claim is just a new tactic by the RIAA to curb illegal p2p filesharing. People are very impressionable; sounds like RIAA just hired a psych. major and told him/her to sex up a story about how 'Bob from Accounting' got in trouble with his wife for all the pr0n on his machine; and accidentally removed his .mp3's in the process of cleaning up his collection of midget schizer movies.
Did these 1.4 million people not have backups? Did they throw out their burnt CD's? Probably not.
When they removed these rogue music files - did they uninstall their copy of Photoshop 7.0 and Norton Antivirus as well? Give me a break.
I find it hard to believe that 1.4 million users would agree to have their disk content monitored. Especially when they are knowingly storing copyrighted material. Are people generally that dumb? It's debatable, but in regard to this topic it's a safe bet that 'No... they aren't'.
As the RIAA know near-to-nothing regarding technology, it's application, or its potential - it is reasonable to assume that the systems being 'monitored' were M$ honeypots. (well, they obviously weren't running tight packet filters were they?)
"What is this thing you c4ll 'B.S.D'?"
In this instance, it was surprising that no mention was made of Micro$oft... Micro$oft are usually proactive in claiming their share of credit. We've all ready the drivel they sprouted about community responsibility when they shut down their public messageboards. Where are they on this topic?
The story stinks of horse-shit.
Hey relax fella, you need a rest, guy.
Alright, as everyone might know - The United States tries to scare the population into believing something, for more info on this watch "Bowling for Columbine." But onto the real issue here. RIAA states that 40,000 people have deleted all their music. These 40,000 are based on, and I say this term loosely, "rigged" polls. To a certain degree, one can easily see that 40,000 people who are being monitored by such companies like RIAA or the MPAA would delete their music. So right their you have a flawed poll, definitly inaccurate. their are over 87 million people in the US that downloads from P2P networks, I seriously doubt that they will scare everyone into not doing it anymore, I mean they cannot hand out 87 million lawsuits for roughly $3,000 - $9,000 each. Oh well... Be Proud and Download! =) -Ryno
But then I have a consistent source of new material from fresh new artists to keep myself entertained with on a weekly basis.
Haven't bought a record in years. I actually went to the shop yesterday to pick up Obie Trice' new album, but guess what: THEY DIDN'T HAVE IT!
Bling bling, off I go for some Poisoned Obie...
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
I bet you they just burn them to CDR, and then delete from HD because they have sooo many that their HD is running out of space and they rather have a portable version of the music too.
/mp3/*
Then once on CD and verified, rm -rf
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
... in favor of the RIAA. :-P
How come the "Related Topics" regarding file sharing in that article are:
1. Music swappers sued, amnesty unveiled
2. Why I've stopped sharing music
3. 12-year-old settles music swap lawsuit
4. Why suing college students for music downloading is right
Basically goes to tell:
1. Fear us!
2. Join us!
3. We do have a heart after all!
4. We're right!
And no related article touching the failing business model of the RIAA, their overly aggresive and inefficient pursuing of pirates that fairly often results in completely innocent targets?
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
So what if we found something better and turned off Kazaa.
I could probably produce a study showing that music-swapping is up 400% by monkeys in Nepal.
Would you mind? We've been working for months on this one. Those monkeys are costing us billions of dollars per year.
Thank you,
The RIAA
ahem *clears throat*
Congrats! You have been selected to ride the short bus for all your commuting needs. Just call 1-800-I-AM-DUMB and they will ride by to pick you up.
Moron.
Hmmm.. Couldn't argue anything I had to say? All you can do is try to personally attack me (unsucessfully of course)? That's gotta be the weakest attack I've seen in a while, you may want to work on that.
You're the moron if you have to reinstall Windows every 6 months.
If you liked licking my balls, add me to your foes list!
If you, me and Bill Gates are in a bar the average net worth of people in the bar is a few billion, so the next round is on you? Didnt think so. Including the none file shareing computer users and people that dont have any music files in their statistics is an artificial way to allow them lower the number of files their 'volunteers' need to have to be significant thus making the data inaccurate.
Thank you for a well written comment. Very insightful.
CNN is a bunch of idiots. And if their readers actually believe that there's a company out there tracking which files they delete from their own PCs, then the readers are even bigger idiots.
And kudos to *you* for not using the phrase "props to you...". A sincere thank you.
Don't know how they can support that claim (notable that no credible support is offered), but in other news, the number of live users of Kazaa as displayed by that software remains smack dab where it was four months ago, just over 4 million at a given time.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
Most people unintentionally deleted all their MP3s when they uninstalled Napster :)
But it is on CD-R, and the stuff on the hard drive is GONE
BALEETED!
But did they really delete the music? I bet it can still be recovered. Since we all deleting merely erases the entry from the FAT table. I think the music is still on these peoples computers, RIAA better sue them.
;)
And FYI my Music directory is 13GB on a drive that has only an 18.2 GB capacity, my pirated videos and movies take up the rest
sig?
The Central Limit Theorem? What about it? It just says that an infinite series of convolutions of many kinds of distributions tends in the limit towards a Gaussian.
Let's say you know that a distribution is normal, but not whether it is bimodal or not. A single small sampling cannot possibly tell you which it is. You have to make the assumption first (or preferably, actually know one way or the other), and then fit to the curve. Real world data is always noisy, remember.
Just as a BTW the central limit theorem doesn't apply to everything. An infinite series of convolutions of dirac deltas converges to just another delta, not to a normal distribution. There are also any number of assumptions about an L^2 space -- granted this is extremely common in real life, but other spaces with wildly different norms are possible, albeit generally ignored by statisticians.
In other words, typical practice only works most of the time, but it is completely unwarranted to assume that that means that it will always work. There's no mathematical, scientific, nor philosophical basis for such an assumption.
And coming back to the subject at hand, and getting very explicit, the distribution being sampled is not necessarily Gaussian. Maybe for some reason it is best fit by a nice cubic, or even a plain old straight line, due to an underlying causal factor. If you don't know that little fact, and just assume a Gaussian in going from the sampling to a statement about the entire population, then you've just plain screwed up.
Thus my original statement: you need to know something about the underlying distribution. You can't generate information from nothing; this isn't just a matter of statistics, it's even more fundamentally a matter of information theory. Garbage in, garbage out.
Professional Wild-Eyed Visionary
Of course man, as soon as i heard they sued some freakin 11 year old girl, i stopped sharing about half my music collection, keeping it at a decidedly safe 500 or so. I'm not going to stop sharing altogether, because then they would win.
I do however think that some people who said they deleted them most likely just burned them to CDs or DVDs, as my sister did to aleviate her hard drive.
btw, check out my lazily coded webpage on a slow server. I'm trying to start up a business to paint electronics (don't even think about stealing this idea, I will hunt you down)
~Chris Hammond
I keep wondering one thing. Why is it not all right to have downloaded songs of stuff you already own? I'm too lazy to drag all the CDs out that I paid for and rip the data off them so I can play them on my computer. So what gives? Why is it evil to do such a thing if I already paid for the CD?
--TT
TT
Since all my MP3s are completely legal (from independent artists' websites radio broadcasts and church services my dad recorded on tape in the 60s, and now magnatune.com), I would be tempted to say exactly that. The only drawback would be that work is keeping me real busy. (So why am I on slashdot?)
If so, I've lost my appetite.
Despite as little as 5,000 actual respondents the remaing "evidence" of deleted music was from "millions" misreading results of a recent Slashdot polls. How do you keep illegal MP3s on your PC? [ ]1. I'm deaf you insensitive clod. [ ]2. at 68 degrees Farnheit [ ]3. I had Scotty put it in and infinite transporter feedback loop. [ ]4. It's in Ogg Vorbis [ ]5. at Cowboy Neal's house http://slashdot.org/pollBooth.pl?qid=957 http://slashdot.org/pollBooth.pl?qid=922
Eighty percent of the consumers who deleted files had fewer than 50 files saved; just 10 percent had more than 200 files.
Amateurs!
Yeah, we:re all deleting our music. Whatever makes you sleep better RIAA.
Maybe you can stop suing ppl now eh?
Nobody has kicked my door down yet.
Newt-dog
My Doctor prescribed daily nasal saline irrigation, hehe
The day rap artists can only bling bling half their teeth in gold I'll join the "millions" who delete
If somebody called you asking that question, wouldn't you tell them that you deleted everying?
I'm not positive who these people are calling me, but it could only be bad news if I say I have illegal music on my computer, and there is a lot better chance of being safe by lying.
Let's see... how did Loretta Lynn make it in the first place? She drove around to radio stations and talked then into playing her record.
In today's world, she wouldn't get in Clear Channel's front door.
Probably not. On the other hand, it might be a more or less accurate representation of the population of consumers who deleted files, which is all that they seem to be claiming.
On the other hand, statistics about the population of "people who don't think they are doing something illegal and are prepared to be monitored, but then jump like a startled rabbit when they hear the RIAA get heavy with the lawsuits" (which is what this seems to be) are actually pretty uninteresting overall.
-- Ian
That sounds like it - a fake commercial. Thanks!
Thank you very much.
Why are there so many stupid people in the world.. Do people actually believe this sort of stupid news? We need to come up with some statistics saying like 15 million Nerds get laid every day. Will people believe that? Oh wait..
AcmeShells.com The cheapest Eggdrop
After I re-ripped them all to ogg. (I also deleted all my porn because my wife told me to.) Yeah. Right.
I'm wondering now, how is my post in any way a troll? I noticed that someone modded it as a troll.
Are honest questions like my own considered trolls now? It was an honest question about how they get "millions of households" from only 40,000 people.
The statement about the Vietnam body count of the enemy is also accurate...to make it look like the US was winning the war, they often inflated the count in "Stars & Stripes". I'm wondering if the RIAA is doing the same in their "war against piracy" to make it seem like they're winning.
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
All I can say is:
The last time 60 million Americans broke the law, we changed the constitution to make it all legal.
want to ruin the article writers life, or at least their email
hamilton02@aol.com
spam the hell out of her. Show that we care about our music, we will fight for it, to the bitter end...