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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"?"
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?
Also on the page (I'm not kidding, look yourself):
CNN: The Least Trusted Name In News.
sulli
RTFJ.
Because even heavily compressed, they look so much better than anything I get via regular TV/cable.
Believe you me, if there was a feasible way for them to do just that, they would. Remember the legislation they were trying to get passed which would allow them to legally hack into people's computers?
Don't ever underestimate greed as a motivating factor.
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.
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.
Um. Let me think. I'm a member of a panel and I have consented to let big brother monitor my PC. Big brother starts suing people who illegally download music. Do I...
A) Don't worry, they're only after 12 year old girls
B) Delete all evidence so they cannot sue me
Given the above, are my actions representative of other people who have *not* consented to being monitored? Clearly, no - therefore this falls into the 78.34% of statistics that are statistically meaningless.
Most writers regard truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are most economical in its use - Mark Twain
You know? It doesn't surprise me in the slightest that CNN would put a bogus story like that up there. I'm a musician, and I'd KILL for the world to want a free copy of my songs. Just so I could go get paid to do concerts. I don't care about selling cd's. I just want to be heard. AND I don't have a clue what I'd do with 10 million dollars, let alone 40 million dollars. Actually I do.. I'd put all 10 million in the bank, earning 3% interest and live on the $300,000 a year. That however, is another story.
Cnn used to be free... and now you have to buy a pass for the streaming video? hell.. I'll stick with fox news instead.
Call me paranoid but I wonder if those 40,000 'volunteers' are even aware that they have agreed to install monitoring software on their computer and that someone is checking everything they do.
:P
I wouldn't even be surprised if the monitoring was handled by Gator
Did they also delete there DivX Movies? Copy righted photos they might have downloaded off the net? and what about the games? also did they remove Kazar or what every file sharing program they might have used to get the music? This story seems a bit Proper-gander-ish to me.
"The most dangerous creation of any society is that man who has nothing to lose." - James Baldwin, American author
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/
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.
'I wonder if clicking "I Agree" in any of thier software installations made them become "volunteers".'
NPD doesn't sneak software onto people's computers. People on NPD's panels know that they are panelists. They are recruited, surveyed (gender, age, etc.) and qualified into specific surveys, and are compensated for participating in the panels.
Of course, since the panelists know that they're on the panel, NPD has control mechanisms and statistical models to compensate in this surve, as they do when surveying what magazines people read, what food they like, and so on.I don't know the details of their methodology, but their research is trusted in a huge range of consumer surveys, and they've always had good answers to my questions, so my starting assumption is that they did a pretty good job on this survey as well, unless someone picks out specific flaws.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
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.
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.
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.
Since when has been ok to post stories and articles without backing it up with proof?
I'm pretty sure they teach this as a fundamental strategy in the journalist training camps.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
This is the same situation as with computer Pron. Even though qualifying as obscenity requires a lot more than T&A shots, cyber-porn laws have scared a lot of users into deleting soft core files that are normally legal in all 50 states as prints but become possibly illegal if digital. Why? They're concerned that an apparent 18 year old is a 17 year old lieing about her age, or an obvious 27 year old will claim that she was drunk when the picture was taken and didn't give informed consent, and the way the law is phrased, they could be held accountable as though they had hard core pedophile materials on their hard drives. Given that there have been cases where just such distortions happened, I'm not sure those people are paranoid, and I'm not sure the people who deleted all their MP3s are either. Persuit of happiness? That's for people rich enough to have good lawyers on retainer, right?
Who is John Cabal?