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P2P Users More Likely to Cheat, Shoplift
prostoalex writes "New research report (sponsored by the recording industry, so should definitely be objective) suggests that those who download music online are also likely to cheat at schools/universities and to shoplift. From the Globe and Mail: 'Not only does music file-swapping harm artists, but it also points to an erosion of respect for intellectual property that threatens Canada's economy and values at the core of our society,' said Graham Henderson, president of the Canadian Recording Industry Association, which commissioned the polls."
This "study" referenced in the TFA is so poisonously misleading I barely know where to begin.
From TFA:Regarding the first two statistics, perhaps that because (a) they're the ones to use the software programs the most, and (b), they're the ones in school. Regarding the last point, the actual figures were 6%, as opposed to 2% of the general population. With a poll base of only 2,043 individuals, and an error range of 3.1 percentage points plus or minus, one can seriously question the validity of this last statistic. Add this to the fact that teens have been shoplifting since the invention of the 'shop', and this statistic quickly becomes meaningless.
What's especially nauseating about this "study" is that it attempts to establish a causual connection between increased P2P file sharing and these other, 'antisocial' activities:
Again from TFA:Repeat after me: Correlation does not imply causation.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
who the hell would shoplift when you can just download anything you really need?
Maybe those types of people that are more likely to cheat, etc are drawn to P2P. Classic example of correlation vs causality.
Perhaps the report should state that people who use P2P for illegal purposes are more likely to commit other crimes. Which is completely logical: if you're willing to commit one type of crime, you're probably more likely to commit others.
I make occaisional use of P2P, but I don't do illegal things with it.
A more in depth study also indicated that P2P users are also "big doody heads" and that the recording industry's dad could kick the P2P users dad's in a fight
...and that's all there is to it.
If file swappers are so profficient at all this theft and cheating, music execs must be pretty worried about their job-security.
Users who don't download music from p2p are more likely not to have internet..
Why wouldn't they just walk into a record shop and steal the CD?
Oh yeah, this article is BS..
Canadians between 12 and 24 years of age are responsible for 78 per cent of illegal music downloading, even though they make up only 21 per cent of the population, it says.
I'm sure this is supposed to say "are responsible for 78 per cent of illegal music downloading in Canada". I can't imagine that Canadians are responsible for the majority of illegal music downloading.
Bradley Holt
This has been a test. Had this been a real emergency, we would have fled in terror and you would not have been informed.
Can we get a study done on how likely RIAA Executives are to hurt small animals, steal from donation pots, and scowl at old ladies?
Extra extra! Read all about it! Children likely to have less rigid morality than adults! Children may or may not understand concept of intellectual property! Extra, Extra!
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/index.php has some good comments on the two recent studies from the CRIA, plus some interesting comments on how various groups have been viewing them.
P2P is a gateway dru... crime. A crime of passion. One starts by downloading illegally, then on to harder stuff.
The CRIA is a poorly funded wannabe RIAA that complains about everything. They already have enough supporting laws and programs on the books. And now that there is enough focus on these issues, they are not going to get anymore.
Canadians are taxed on all blank CDR media to offset the loss of piracy, and since the Canadian content laws under our version of the FCC are the only thing that keeps a lot of crappy Canadian content on the air, and since most of it is funded with our tax dollars, the CRIA can kiss my cold Canadian A*S!
Many Canadian content providers and distributers shield themselves from real competition thru backwards isolationalist-style trade-restriction-like programs and law.
Government funding allows tax dollars to be sophened to companies that produce content that usually SUCKS - as along as it meets the "Canadian content" requirements by mentioning curling or the Toronto Maple Leafs.
At the same time, broadcasters are limited in what they can show because they have to be inline with another set of rules that dictates a percentage limit on the amount of non-Canadian content they can broadcast.
So we have cable providers that suck, a lot of content that sucks, and it is all subsidized by our own tax dollars.
All that being said, aside from not being able to get American TV legally, and having the same climate as upstate New York (in Toronto at least), it is still the best place to live in the North America - IMHO.
With all of this Canada self-bashing, I should point out a couple of examples of Canadian content at its finest. Here are two artists that are proud to be Canadian, and are world class for sure - highly worth checking out:
1) Esthero - a voice and songwriter like no other
2) K-os - hip-hop with real instruments, who's quality is unmatched
They probably kill puppies too...
How do I start my own polling firm where I get paid to tell clients what they want to hear? Seems like a sweet gig.
Entrepreneur : (noun), French for "unemployed"
"Downloading may turn you into a teenager" a scientist in lab coat commented. "We may have stumbled upon the fountain of youth".
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
Car theives around the world have a statistically higher probability of carrying a wire coat hanger on their persons. Wire coat hangers subsequently banned, chaos ensues as clothes around the world now heaped in piles on the floor. Crowbars told to watch themselves or face similar consequences.
This all just really goes to show that knowing who sponsored the study is more important often than the results. I took a journalism course once and had an assignment to check out a study about how milk sold in plastic bags went bad faster than in opaque cartons. Thing is, I found that it took a couple of days to go bad, had to be exposed to light (yeah, the fridge light does go out when you shut the door) and only two per cent of the milk sold at the time as sold in these plastic sacks. The study was, however, sponsored by ex-cello who just happen to make - opaque milk cartons.
A lot of these studies a crap and presented as fact and are not to be taken seriously. They exist to push an organization's viewpoint while deceiving the public as to their true nature.
Look no further than the tobacco company studies that show nicotine is not addictive. Yeah right, and beer causes cancer in asbestos workers.
Police Man: Billy, what made you take that pack of gum?
Billy: Kazaa made me do it! Oh yeah, and the Hot Coffee mod too!
10 days later we see Billy on a caribbean island sipping a Shirley Temple wearing a tee shirt saying "This trip paid for by the RIAA."
Parents, don't let your children grow up to be statisticians. They help to turn out spurious crap reports like this.
"It's difficult to meditate on amphetamines." - Joe Walsh
Do you realize that in addition to P2P-ing music, why, there are studies underway to P2P video, software, news, soup, sugar, milk... ice cream. Ice cream, Mandrake, children's ice cream.
The problem here is that nobody sees the RIAA as breaking the rules. They've managed to break the copyright rules (by which I mean the natural law, not the legislated law) by ensuring that copyright never expires. Copyright is inherently a bargain between the publishers of copyrighted works and the recipients of copyrighted works. The publishers promise to eventually put the work into the public domain, and the recipients promise not to copy. That's copyright *natural* law. Whenever legislated law doesn't match natural law, you see a massive disrespect for legislated law.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
those who download music online are also likely to cheat at schools/universities...
Just last week I was surfing the coder-for-hire sites, and, in addition to the ridiculous, asinine demands people were making [$100,000 projects for opening bids of $100 - the sort of thing that would starve an already emaciated Bangalorean peasant], I was just appalled at the number of spoiled, self-obsessed, ingrate college students who were advertising for coders to write their CompSci and Engineering projects for them.
What the hell ever happened to academic integrity?
In related news, users of Microsoft Windows found to use excessive foul language.
Can you really fault a kid for wanting to steal the latest copy Gangsta Rap Knee-Cap? The music glorifies the life of crime, so the would-be customers embrace that ethic by stealing that music. Makes perfect sense to me.
If the RIAA members want a more mature audience of paying customers, perhaps they should attempt to create a more mature product. Since they obviously aren't going to do that, they should just accept the shrinkage and price accordingly, like every other business in the world.
My whole life the record companies have been blaming their customers. Home taping was killing music. Bootlegging concerts was killing music, even though there's little interest in official live albums. Now P2P is killing music until the next scapegoat comes along. This is a pretty long swan song, isn't it?
This has been a test. Had this been a real emergency, we would have fled in terror and you would not have been informed.
Is this was gets written when they type for long enough?
Since "Canadians between 12 and 24 years of age are responsible for 78 per cent of illegal music downloading" (source) and "95% of those who have eating disorders are between the ages of 12 and 25" (source), P2P sharing leads to anorexia. QED.
Most people have already pointed out the correlation!=causality problem with this study, but here are a couple of more issues:
1. This was done via a survey, so what that means is that people who admit to filesharing are more likely to admit to shoplifting and cheating. The "admit to" part is significant and was left out of the findings.
2. The argument appears to work like this: people 12-25 years old are most like to fileshare, and are most likely to shoplift, so therefor people who are likely to fileshare are likely to shoplift. In other words, A->B, A->C, therefor B->C.
So my basic interpretation of this one is along the lines of the "masturbation will make you go blind" argument: An utterly false statement that if true would make an otherwise relatively harmless activity seem harmful.
I am officially gone from
On average upon leaving university, every student says they've cheated at least once. Be it copying a question, glancing at another paper, or other such small offence. Everyone cheats. Period.
"Gharbad no Hurt!" -Gharbad
I really need to get new glasses.
I guess I'm just not in this statistic. P2P abrubptly stopped in my house when I subscribed to Rhapsody. Where's the study that shows P2P represents a market demand that the RIAA could be making money off of?
"Derp de derp."
Such studies are going to be extremely hard to perform, because there are so many hard-to-measure factors involved. It's well known that there have been fewer CD sales in the last few years, but how much of that is due to P2P, legal song-at-a-time downloads, satellite radio, or just plain crappy music is nearly impossible to sort out. They were up last year, but I can't say if that's due to better music or to RIAA lawsuits scaring some people into buying rather than downloading (or even crappy accounting designed to convince RIAA shareholders that their campaigns are working).
Personally, I put the burden of proof on the music sharers. Given that the people who paid to have the music made have asked them not to do it, "prove to me that I'm costing you money" seems like the wrong way around. (And I'm tangentially involved in a band; I know how expensive it is to get an album made and promoted.)
I do not doubt that at least some CD sales have been lost to P2P. That seems pretty straightforward: at least some poeple who would have bought an album have instead chosen to download it (or part of it) for free. So there's very good reason to believe that at least some money has been lost.
Combine the two (you'd expect file sharing to lower CD sales, and CD sales have fallen), and that's as close to "actually and truthfully show[ing] that this is the case" as you're likely to get. It's not genuine proof, as I'm sure everybody is likely to remind me in their replies, but it seems strong enough to me to put the burden of proof on the shoulders of those who contend that file sharing isn't immoral.
Has it harmed artists? That's even harder to say. How many fewer bands do less-profitable recording labels sign? Even the bands that they do sign receive a negligible sum for actual CD sales, but do people go to concerts or buy merchandise from bands they've downloaded but weren't willing to pay for? I can't even begin to tell you how to measure that. There are so many bands (so, so many) and such a small chance of making any real money off of it that it's nearly impossible to measure how much they've been harmed, helped, or otherwise.
At least one band I know likes it when you download their music; it means you're listening and may even go to a club to see them or buy a tee-shirt. But the fact that many people would download their music anyway, even if they weren't fine with that, bugs the hell out of them.
Actually, the drinking age varies by province.
Drinking age in most of Canada is 19. It's ony 18 in Quebec, Alberta and Manitoba.
Why doesn't Slashdot ever get slashdotted?
and the instructor is usually quite interested in hearing about this kind of academic fraud.
Yeah, he'll make sure the culprits are automatically transferred to the MBA program.
If you are talking about natural law as in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_law/ I would tend to disagree. Natural Law stems from complex moral arguments basically being that the "law" in question has been discovered rather than invented. I don't see any overriding moral arguments that a publisher should ever have to put thier work into the public domain. I'm not saying they should or that they shouldn't it's just I don't see an overarching moral point either way. Given that so many people have *very* different opinions on exactly what the right thing to do is with regards to published works it would be very difficult to claim a Natural Law basis for copyright.
The bikini - security through obscurity since 1943
I would be more inclined to believe that cheaters and shoplifters are more likely to download copyrighted material.
However, I'm not sure where the article even talks about P2P users being more likely to cheat or shoplift. It talks about Canadians 18-29 being more likely than the general population to do these acts.
I was just appalled at the number of spoiled, self-obsessed, ingrate college students who were advertising for coders to write their CompSci and Engineering projects for them. What the hell ever happened to academic integrity?
What do you mean? Our culture teaches people that money can buy you anything, therefore all you should try to get is money. A college degree is simply a ticket to get a good paying job. If you could buy them outright, people would do so. (And in fact, with degree mills, that's exactly what happens.)
Other than that, there are also a lot of "students" who are nothing of the sort. They are very overworked laborers who are trying to squeeze themselves into a higher wage bracket. They generally work while going to college, hence simply don't have the time to properly be a student. For them, it makes a certain kind of harsh and practical sense to simply buy up blocks of academic effort. They are too busy, hence can only trade money for academic results; they already traded off excess time for money simply by being a working college attendee.
I don't condone any of this, of course, but there's nothing I can do about it except lavish my spite upon it all. Equally of course, being a college dropout myself, my criticisms are inevitably filed under "sour grapes" until my predictions come to pass.
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
I was just thinking the same thing, so I guess we should conclude that we should never trust Canadians ages 18-29. I never trusted them anyway. :)
Actually, I first read the post as PSP Users More Likely to Cheat, Shoplift. I was really starting to wonder. Actually, I read it 4x, and didn't catch the error until reading a few comments. Darn those Canadian PSP users, the hosers!
Smoke user more likely to be pyromaniacs!
:D
Burn the witch!
I would say the study is so inconclusive that it is inappropriate to make any statement. The conclusion should have been "Based on this research, no conclusion can be reached about the relation between P2P use and other criminal behaviour." To me, it looks like it didn't even meet stastical significance, meaning that all they might have found is a sampling anomly.
Would you also be inclined to believe copyright holders drink harder and do more cocaine? After all, look at musicians. Don't even get me started on Roman Polanski.
I find that piracy reference offensive. I am a Space Pirate and a member in good standing of the Pirate's Union. Calling stealing songs off the Internet as piracy, gives us pirates a bad name. Call it a five finger discount or something else.
I don't hijack, I commandeer, I don't steal, I borrow, I don't loot, I find. Sometimes I have to pursaude people with a sword or gun, but they actually give me things after I threaten their lives.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
We've trained ye well.
That's right. Walking into a shop and taking away an object is stealing. Copying a record, tape, CD, or digital file deprives no one of their property and IS NOT stealing; nor is it rape, barratry, public drunkeness or murder.
Symbols and their meanings define human reality. Keeping terms unconfused keeps definitions sane, keeps PEOPLE sane, and prevents liars and bastards of all types from confusing the issue by false symbol assignments in order to falsely win a fraudulently defined contest.
In other words, don't let liars define the terms of the argument. Swat them down or they steal the semantic ground you stand on, making it impossible for manipulated people to follow sane arguments because the terms are redefined in THEIR HEADS. False definitions are reality filters.