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Recording Industry's Unexpected Benefit from P2P

Posted by Cliff on from the having-their-cake-and-eating-it-too dept.

Matthew Schultheis writes: "Yahoo / AP is reporting that the record industry is using the files traded on Kazza et al. to track where music is popular. It turns out that they even pay for this information. 'It's the most vast and scalable sample audience that the world has ever seen'" Now if they could only use this data to somehow put out better music...

2 of 335 comments (clear)

  1. Benefitting from a crime... by SUB7IME · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I have absolutely no legal background (that statement goes way beyond IANAL), but I'm sort of thinking that benefitting from a crime must be illegal. If the RIAA considers filetrading (of their copyrighted files) to be illegal, and the legal system agrees, then nobody should be using that data to then profit.

    (Just as we do not, for ethical reasons, use information that the Nazis gleaned from their experimentation on the Jews in World War II. Clearly the magnitude is nowhere near the same, but the underlying ethical principle is similar.)

    1. Re:Benefitting from a crime... by mantera · · Score: 5, Interesting


      i don't know why you feel you have to clarify time and again that you do not condone or approve or whatever... the nazis were a product of a situation and an era... the "final solution" if such a thing existed was a result of the age of reason that saw such a course of action as rational... the catholic church and pope weren't even vocal enough about it... now some people continue to deny much of the atrocities and say they were grossly exagerated... i don't know about that, maybe, maybe not... but i know one thing... losers tend to be vilified and winners write history books...

      Just consider for example the Tuskegee Syphilis experiments; google for it... For forty years between 1932 and 1972, the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) conducted an experiment on 399 illiterate black men who were lied to and a disease such as syphilis was deliberately allowed to take its awful course on them without treatment. here

      While you're at it you might wanna also google for the CIA mind control experiments during the cold war... they experimented on soldiers and mental patients, gave them high doses of drugs, hundreds of electric shock treatments per individual within a few days... and stuff like that...

      most importantly, had you or the person you responded to been living in nazi germany, you would've probably done the same. Just see the Milgram experiments ... google for them if you don't trust the source

      don't exonerate yourself; given the situation, we're all guilty