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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."
Yup, new tactics are being employed. For example, I built a nice private, encrypted peer-to-peer network using WASTE. Kazaa, and all the viruses/fake files/incorrectly named files/spyware/trojans are a distant memory. ;)
Well, I guess that depends on your definition of "working"
it may be working to reduce P2P, but is it also working to reduce sales of records, or also working to alienate their customers? it has with me, i guess it remains to be seen whether thats the case with sales figures 6-12 months from now.
The study shows that usage of P2P networks known to be heavily monitored by RIAA is down. This makes perfect sense to both the RIAA and to me, but the WHY is what makes all the difference. To admit why the traffic is really down would show that RIAA is hopelessly sliding into the abyss. It is so much easier for them to lie to themselves and their shareholders and say they are crushing the P2P threat to their business model.
But the p2p hydra has many heads.
RIAA is largely blind to the activity going on in the other networks, most of which are much harder to quickly traverse than gnutella or kazaa. Also, I imagine that no one has written a spidering program for them yet.
The other networks are flourishing right now. Without naming networks, the server count for my favorite p2p network is much higher than normal, as is the user count and the download speed. No one has gotten a warning letter or sued yet for activity on this network, to the best of my knowledge, although some german and spanish ISPs have begun to block the ports it uses.
Extra credit: Can you guess a name for this new network?
It would be interesting if they could actually identify the people who stopped using the file-sharing programs they looked at. It might correspond to the more tech-savvy geeks who've moved on to better things.
I've got all the songs I want.
I truly, truly pity anyone who could say such a thing. You need friends like me who constantly bug you to listen to some new band.
Property is theft.
I don't doubt that the scare tactics have worked, and casual P2P users have been scared off. I have friends who are just now getting DSL lines and are scared to death to load up Kazaa or Limewire out of fear that the sheriffs will immediately knock down their doors. But I'll also bet there's a large number of people who've been there since the Napster days, who have hundreds of gigs of mp3 files they'll never get around to listening to. P2P activity might also be levelling off because so many users have all the music they'll ever need... And spending all day and night trading files no longer has the illicit thrill it used to.
I will, on occasion use a P2P service, though I keep it short and sweet. Never did use P2P big however, so the change is minor in that the frequency went down a bit.
Why use P2P? Got addicted to the variety of music present on Napster. You know, find a user with similar tastes, then grap a couple tracks you don't know, but might like. That's fun stuff that is just too damn expensive to do otherwise.
The new pay services make it pretty easy to get a lot of music, but fall way short in the finding new music area... Rock from the Aussies, techno / house / trance from Europe and Japan is very appealing to me. Didn't know that until Napster. In a way, I kind of wish I didn't given all the majors mistakes today.
I am not sure they are going to like the bigger changes however. When P2P started, I would exchange song titles with friends. Each person would just grab a copy because that was easiest. Now we are all back to the old way of doing things; namely, trading tracks directly.
How?
Ssh, scp directly from machine to machine. The music I do buy, and I do buy music just as I always have, gets ripped. Stuff I think friends might find interesting, or that ends up part of a discussion gets traded instead of just named. The stuff that comes from P2P gets hashed around and played a bit. If it's good, I buy it, then trade the quality encodes from that with whomever was interested during the critique stage. So in the end, most of the costs are there with time and distance being less of a factor. Nice improvement over dubbing parties, but it could be way better.
A while back, we were helping a small group master a CD. Sometimes it is hard to articulate production values when some people are missing the tracks in question, for example. We could lend physical media, but why? We have nicely networked computers that save a lot of time, it is foolish not to use them. Afterall, the production is happening over the Internet, why not foster the discussion as well? This sort of sharing is a totally necessary thing and can get expensive if done the way they think we should do it. The really creative folks need stuff to create from. This means a lot more music to listen to, discuss and build style influences from. If everybody hears the same top 100 crap, then we are going to get more top 100 crap --exactly what we don't need to sustain a healthy music market. P2P really helps with that, maybe it shouldn't, but the truth is it does.
Personally, I think P2P is great stuff for learning about music. It also works well for lots of other things like software, though torrents are better for new or popular software. The Apple model is a good one, though its a shame Apple and the artists do not get a bit more of the cut.
It has been mentioned many times here, but I will say it again. The majors are fools plain and simple. If they had taken the Napster deal, they would be rolling in dough right now with monthly subscriptions and marketing data up the wazoo that we paid to give them! But, nooo they want control. Today they pay the price. Lots of lawyers, annoyed customers, and the confines of age all doom them to lackluster sales and growing vulnerabltiy to potential newcomers who get it.
People all over the place are making interesting music with inexpensive equipment. Mp3.com was a first attempt to aggragate them and present them to potential listeners. It worked, but not well. Others will follow, just as the P2P clients evolve, so will they. As they get it right, the majors will be sooo sorry.
I have traded tracks all my life starting with cassette and a bit of reel to reel. For me, nothing has changed really. Napster was a brief flurry that likely cost them a few sales, but the real cost was my newly opened eyes to the real diversity in music I was missing out on. I buy music in about the same quantities I always have; namely, small quantities because good albums are few and far between, I would buy a lot more If I could get it at
Blogging because I can...
Im on a dedicated university connection. I can not afford for the RIAA to sniff my way. I have a few connections to a few FTPs that get current music AND when I am at lunch I have access to someone's WAP and I download when I am there. My download habbits have gone from a new album a week and then some to about a new album a month in 2003.
Ive also started using Winamp5's Internet Radio more often then not...
The ultimate network admin tool needs HELP!
My speculation is that the RIAA tactics did have a substantial effect, but only with the availability of alternative download mechanisms. In statistical terms the legal online music stores played a substantial moderating role in the causal relation between the high-publicity RIAA actions and the results reported.
With the right sort of data, it would be possible to test this speculation. Pew does things fairly well, and they may additional data which could be used to check it out.
Just because we despise the tactics of the RIAA and the structure of the music industry as a whole, doesn't mean that we have to pretend that their tactics couldn't have worked.
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
By now any serious downloader would have downloaded his/her favorite songs and collected a few GBs. And maybe the new music is just not worth downloading. It would have been interesting to see if the decrease in file-sharing resulted in any increase in CD sales but the CD sales data is missing from the study.
It may be working but these tactics must be costing RIIA some money and the increase in revenue from CD sales may be hard to come.
Sorry, but I doubt the music industry launching a double front attack with law suits and rather expensive and less usable alternatives is that much of a coincidence.
For that matter, the two pronged assault was probably orchestrated. To launch lawsuits without a replacement technology in place would be a losing strategy. Launching legitimate music channels while building a case against the anti-capitalist P2Pers would have weakened the case for built in copyright protection.
You probably should ammend your post to say that both the lawsuit and pay per song services were part of the strategy, and that the strategy is working quite well at keeping the power in the hands of the few.
Watching the free music crowd getting played for suckers was an extremely painful thing to watch...especially since their was a better option: If there was respect for the written laws, we could have had our MP3s and copied them to our MP3 player too. Hey, we may have even been in a better position to change the laws for the better.
What really matters is there is hardly any loss of revenue due to downloading: It allows me to get music or movies that I wouldn't buy or rent anyway. There is simply no loss of money. If I don't have the download service, I just don't listen to the music or watch those movies I download! How's that for an argument? Those RIAA fools just don't get it, now do they?
To be fair there probably is some causation, and it's interlinked in a web.
One might expect this to be able to be abstracted to a predator prey model, where lawsuits might be members of the predator species, and the gross files shared as the population of the prey.
Increases in the pedator population might cause the prey to crash (and evolve) then rebound fantastically. Ultimately, the prey will evolve much more swiftly than the predators who are constrained by another pressure (the legal system) which is expensive and difficult for them to influence.
The real danger for the predators is the escalation of the arms race which might get out of hand, causing a new and improved prey to explode out of their reach depleating the resources and the balance they all depend on, forcing everyone to endure drastic change.
Asserting there is no causation is akin to saying people neither understand nor percieve intimidation. Which is patently false. Lawsuits are having some effect. Mostly likely a net downward pressure. While the study doesn't to the best job of quantifying that effect, their infered causal relationship is hardly without merit.
Assuming that CD is properly recorded (which it rarely is, properly recorded CDs require properly constructed audio systems) and properly reproduced (even less chance, due to crappy stereos with cheap acoustics) there is NO information loss within audible frequency range. Shannon-Kotelnikov's theorem doesn't lie. Whatever gets in is reproduced exactly at the output. You have 96dB dynamic range (more than enough) and 2Hz to 20KHz frequency range (which is more that even babies can hear).
Now lemme explain why anything more than 20bit/96KHz is bull crap. First, let's tackle 96KHz. Raising the sampling frequency to 96KHz actually makes sense, because it becomes a lot easier to make a good sounding CD player. You don't need oversampling anymore and you don't need high-order digital filter to filter out the harmonic images in inaudible band. The same thing applies to recording. You can record with less than perfect low-pass filter, and even though there will be horrible aliasing you won't be able to hear it anyway as it will be well above 20KHz. Now let's consider 24bit part. If you calculate the potential dynamic range of a linear DAC with full 24 bit input you will see that it at this point it is PHYSICALLY impossible to construct an analog amplifier that will fully exploit more than 20 bits of its dynamic range. Why? Because the dynamic range will be limited by the noise floor, which in turn will be limited by thermal noise in resistors and semiconductors. 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.
Posted yesterday on slashdot (time for a repost;)
;)
Actually, the sales are down by 20%. Popular filesharing is down by 30%. Offcourse, this is not proof. You have to take into account iTunes and likes, and the decline of the economy.
But I can't help and smile
The study shows that usage of P2P networks known to be heavily monitored by RIAA is down. This makes perfect sense to both the RIAA and to me, but the WHY is what makes all the difference. To admit why the traffic is really down would show that RIAA is hopelessly sliding into the abyss. It is so much easier for them to lie to their shareholders and say they are crushing the P2P threat to their business model.
But the P2P coin has many sides.
RIAA is largely blind to the activity going on in the other networks, most of which are much harder to quickly traverse than GNUtella or KaZaa. Also, I imagine that no one has written a spidering program for them yet.
The other networks are flourishing right now. Without naming networks, the server count for my favorite P2P network is much higher than normal, as is the user count and the download speed. No one has gotten a warning letter or sued yet for activity on this network.
HOW'S MY POSTING? CALL 1-800-POSTING
What has the RIAA been targetting? I've only heard of them suing Kazaa users, and so I assume that's all they are polling. There are many other platforms in use.
Also what are their polling tactics? Do they call people up "We are the RIAA, do you share music?" Who the hell is going to say "Why yes, would you like the new {insert generic band} album?".
I personally have not noticed a change in number of people sharing, or any individuals who have stopped. I have to cry social norming on this one. Social norming is when you lie and say people are doing what you want them to, then people will fall in line and actually do it. As with the posters at our school that say the average freshman has "0 - 2 drinks at a party", bullshit.
"Sidenote: as a Canadian, I dont plan on buying a single CD or paying for a single song from the major labels while I'm paying a music industry tax on my blank media."
So, since Canadian artists and their management have given you the shaft without benefit of reach around, you are going to turn around and stick it to the rest of the world?
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.
I for one work have worked in the background in somewhat popular music (nothing that big as I won't work on the crappy overly slick pop shit)...and generally I get substandard wages in hopes that the guys will make it bigger and I can share in a little of the album sales. As I have a day job and engineer / music techs don't really have a purpose on the road, most of the arguments about making the money while touring don't exist for me.
Shafting it to the rest of the world just because your country has decided to make it a point to subsudize your artists is just assinine. Its not as if you are in some third world country and can't afford it, nor has our recording agencies been able to penetrate your country to the point that they've been able to syphon some of this cash. They HAVE tried to impose those taxes here in the states, but if you could ask the gov't to give you personally 1 cent of everyones who filed taxes and get away with it more power to ya (if I thought I could do this, I'd be drafting a law and sending it to my congressperson today) -- its the country men that actually approve the laws that decide if your points are valid and NOT these special interest groups. They don't have to take the money these companies give them, and you don't have to elect anyone that panders to interests.
It's working for me, I stopped sharing and downloading. However, I also haven't bought a CD from them in uhh.... uhh.... can't remember. I used to have a MASSIVE collection of cd's. I'm only 20 years old and already stopped buying from them... they lost any potential from me. A friend of mine told me of some place about an hour drive away with about the same msuic, except much cheaper and don't deal with the recording industry. The recording industry shot themselves in the foot, much like the oil industry is doing with the price of gas (by raising prices and making people think "I wish there was some other way...").
"Do or do not. There is no try." -- Master Yoda (Half man, half muppet)
Yes, it's true -- I really haven't downloaded as much music during the past year. But I also only purchased one CD during all of 2003, and that was Radiohead's "Hail To The Thief", which I got for my girlfriend after going to see them live in NJ a few month's ago. In fact, I went ahead and sold back all of my old CDs to http://www.wherehouse.com/, in exchange for store credit, which I then used to purchase a whole messload of DVDs.
I wonder who/what the RIAA will blame if this double-helix trend of decreasing file-sharing / decreasing CD sales continues for a few more years. In the meantime, I'll continue to purchase games and DVDs, which provide more bang for my buck than comparably-priced, more heavily restricted CDs.
If you work with this stuff professionally, you should check out what those sites are saying: "Once the monies are received, AARC distributes the royalties to each artist and sound recording copyright owner it represents based on the participant's sales during the royalty year. So if a given artist's sales account for 3% of the total records sold that year by all claimants in its particular royalty subfund, they will get 3% of the royalties."
Yeah, it's a blurb about what they do, as opposed to what they actually may or may not do, but if you know otherwise, you should probably feed back on their site.
Here's some more text on it from the AHRA:
Section 1004, Subsection 3b : Digital Audio Recording Media
The royalty payment due under section 1003 for each digital audio recording medium imported into and distributed in the United States, or manufactured and distributed in the United States, shall be 3 percent of the transfer price. Only the first person to manufacture and distribute or import and distribute such medium shall be required to pay the royalty with respect to such medium.
I read "3 percent of the transfer price" as 3% of wholesale... which even for "data" CDs, is probably unnoticably low. Except for fancy packaging and a jewel case for prominent display where tapes used to occupy the shelves, I don't personally know of any difference between an "audio" CDR and a "data" CDR.
From their FAQ, they agree with what you're saying about analog media and computers. An inline D/A A/D convertor would probably make for a levy-immune copying machine.
In the end, I suppose you're right, the Canadian Act appears far more powerful... I think it was to be applied retroactively at retail... which is fiendish. The proposed levies were so high too that they would have crushed the CDR industry and closed a lot of businesses if they went through (retroactive!?).
Regarding the legitimacy of the tarrifs as applied in the U.S., it's all suspicious to me, but I don't know enough to have an opinion about it.
The Happy Birthday thing is still a little weird to me, even if the words are copyrighted, so are the words to any given song.
As for Perl, I agree wholeheartedly :-)
Filesharing has changed, though I view it more as the following, as opposed to the RIAA's witchhunt:
- spyware built by corporations and individuals not associated with the RIAA
- horrible networks that can't hold a candle to the original napster incarnation.
- less techno savvy folks sitting on T3 connections (due to a |slight| decline in available IT jobs in the "new millenium") willing to share their collections.
I like BitTorrent, however I see it as a tool to share Open Source works rather than to exploit the RIAA's latest and greatest FadWare.
:-( --- argh. Despair, I owe again.
I want to know where the hell they get their data from... I'm not really going to put much faith in their stats though, as these are the same people who claim that only 13% of people who use the internet have been to an "adult website".
Be careful! Bears shouldn't consume large furry dogs.
First off, I didn't say it wasn't possible, I said that at low levels you get significantly more distortion in the sound versus recording at higher levels. Compare a 1mV and a 100mV signals run through a DAC and then a ADC, with the 1mV amplified to the same output level as the 100mV. the 1mV signal will be significantly more distorted due to the staircase nature of a digital signal - If you assume the DAC has a step of .1mV, your amplified 1mV will have a step of 10mV after amplification, meaning you've lost a lot of resolution.
As for compression; heard of it, understand your argument, pretty sure it introduces even more distortion of the music. Personally I don't care as I listen to older stuff that is far less or even not compressed.
You also chose to ignore the other factors I mentioned - jitter and harmonics - which are also both important factors.
Jw