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Pew Study Says RIAA Tactics Are Working
Furd writes "The Pew Internet & American Life Project has posted a new data study that purports to show that the RIAA lawsuit strategy has successfully reduced P2P filesharing. While the presentation of the data is weak (poor graphics and weak statistics), the report does suggest that there has been a change in the usage of P2P tools."
Well, I oggify it for my laptop, and it sounds "okay" but I can hear the difference; mostly in the cymbols and, I dunno, some of the "punchiness" and "energy". Obviously for very high bitrate mp3s its harder, but the files are commensurately larger. Lossless each song is about 50 mb; I can fit about 11 CDs on each DVD-R.
All lossy music sounds like "cassette-quality" to me; I much prefer flac, since technology has allowed me to deal with 50 mb 3-minute songs like its no big deal.
I personally know that my friends are quickly moving to eMule due to the degradation of KaZaA's usability. They are having no difficulty in migrating to eMule's interface. Perhaps the RIAA should realize that attacking one source doesn't effect other sources, especially with today's computer literate college youth.
Where the Music Matters
you said everything that was needed. Well done.
But the question, now, is : why such a story is posted when this is self-evident than someone is going to refute the very content of the story ? Or is it just meant to allow us to put some more sarcasms to the RIAA ? I still wonder.
Nothing to see here, move along.
Regards,
jdif
Let's overcome our weakness.
Here's a surprise for you - your "lossless" formats are in fact really lossy. To better understand this, consider the difference between 192KHz 24-bit PCM (the best DVD-Audio can do) and 44.1KHz 16-bit PCM (the format used on all CDs). Both are "lossless" per your definition, but all other things being equal, the DVD-A format provides a more complete reproduction than the CD format does. In fact, the CD format loses about 85% of the theoretical information content that the DVD-A format contains. Now compare the DVD-A format to a hypothetical 512KHz 32-bit PCM encoding, same sort of thing applies, ad infinitum.
My point is that while you may not like psycho-acoustical compression like mp3,vorbis,aac,etc - you are still losing information with your so-called "lossless" formats, it is just that the choice about what information to through away is not directly based on human perceptual capabilities but rather simple mechanical inability.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
The only downside is that you can only download what other people have posted. But if you ask nicely someone will usually upload whatever obscure album I'm looking for after a couple of days. In a way, its like a IRC trading with REALLY REALLY bad lag.
C - A language that combines the speed of assembly with the ease of use of assembly.
... but not because of the RIAA, but simply because the process of finding the albums I liked was almost impossible. The tedious process of finding the songs, downloading them and then repeating the process if the rip was of poor quality or incomplete was not worth my time anymore.
/. but I thought it's worth mentioning again. When the RIAA will start changing its abusive tactics towards technology in general, then I _might_ consider buying another CD from them. Even then, I have everything ever played by my favourite rock bands, I have a lot of classical music, blues, jazz. And since of late I've been more interested in DJ mixes that are not even available on CD anywhere (try buying DJ Tiesto or DJ Sasha to name just some very well known people), but only on specialised sites or through other friends, I'm even less likely to buy one of the RIAA CDs.
That is not to say that I started buying CDs all of a sudden, far from it. The last CD I bought was more than three years ago (RATM, Battle of LA), and the only reason I did it was because it was my favourite band and I decided to show my support to them. I had the same album in mp3s since the day it came out.
This has been discussed numerous times on
So unless they will actually release interesting, creative music (instead of Britney et al), I couldn't care less about the RIAA's problems. The one way it did affect me was through the levy imposed on mp3 players in Canada, but you can always buy them from private individuals that bring them over straight from HK or Japan. But that's another can of worms, and it's off topic under this article.
Poor graphics? A study doesn't have to be prettied up to be a good study.
I think that mainstream P2P may have gone down. However underground P2P is going waaaay up. All the RIAA has done is to force this underground. The Pew study likely doens't look at the underground methods. I think most of us know what software I mean.
But let them think they've won. Hopefully it will blind them to reality and hasten their well deserved end.
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
Well, what a surprise. The RIAA and international counterparts piss of everyone and then they think they are going to make more money? When you want People to buy something from you, you have to be nice to them, or at least pretend so. Here in Germany we have a huge media Campain that basicly says: If you copy cds or dvds you are a criminal and go to Jail.
Not only is this hugely exagerated, it is a plain lie. The only chance of going to jail for that, is when you charge money for it.
But they think they kan scare people into buying crappy songs from crappy mainstream bands...
Well, i own about 25 cd's, all of which were bought, when you could get them for 15DM (about 7.50 EUR). I will not buy anymore untill i can get them for that price or lower again AND they stop behaving like the mafia. It's bad enough, that i pay a fee on each recordable media i buy for recording Knoppix or Debian on it.
Calculations show that anything above 20 bit is simply not worth the effort - you won't be able to hear a single bit of difference anyway, the first 4 bit will be well below the noise floor.
Be careful how you do those calculations. Frequency domain methods, such as FFT and/or the human ear, can detect periodic signals well below the "noise floor".
The eDonkey network (and it's many clients) are more sophisticated. You forgot them. :P
-If God wanted people to be better than me, he would have made them that way.
Yea, everyone is changing over to MUTE, using Bittorrent or Freenet.
That should screw up some stats!
MUTE protects your privacy, unlike other networks!
Get MUTE at:
http://mute-net.sourceforge.net/
SoulSeek.
This tax benefits mainly folks like Celine Dion and Brian Adams and whomever sings those beer commercial songs. It doesn't benefit the artists of the rest of the world.
First, it's not a tax. It's a levy, tarrif or royalty, depending on who you talk to.
Second, it is imposed by international convention just about anywhere you would like to live. http://www.socan.ca/jsp/en/resources/around_world. jsp. It is infact well-distributed around the world.
Third, they succeeded in imposing a very similar system in the U.S., it happened twelve years ago. The RIAA http://www.riaa.com/issues/licensing/default.asp is a member of the AARC, who admisters the royalties in the U.S. http://www.aarcroyalties.com/.
I don't really understand this stuff myself, but just check out the websites. They have lots of info up there about what they're doing and why.
One thing I really don't understand, is why "Happy Birthday" can demand royalties direct through AOL/Time Warner, when systems like this are in place. Urban legend?
Shareaza is a pretty good client. It supports Gnutella 1 and Gnutella 2, as well as eDonkey2000 and BitTorrent. I don't know if it counts as "more sophisticated" but if Kazaa really did not hash the entire file, then at least G2 is more sophisticated, since it makes sure the entire file is not corrupted. Plus, there's no spyware. :x
(\(\
(=_=) Bani!
(")")
I was never on KaZaA. I started out on WinMX, which was an opennap client before it grew its own P2P network, which even in 2004 still isn't polluted. The thing WinMX has that BitTorrent and eMule lack is that BT and eMule are optimized for a few files of 20 MB to 1 GB (e.g. whole albums and ISOs) rather than many files in the 4 MB to 10 MB range (e.g. singles).