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File-Sharing Winners and Losers of 2005
An anonymous reader writes "A lot happened in the P2P world in 2005 according to Slyck news. From the article: 'BitTorrent soared to new heights while Steve Jobs enjoyed record breaking iPod sales. Yet not everyone shared this success. The RIAA continued its fight against P2P networking with little effect, as Sony-BMG disgraced itself and the DRM concept.'"
A good year indeed...
But is it really?
P2P is only increasing the popularity of their wares. Much in the manner that pirated MS Windows in China only increases the popularity of Windows in China until comes such a time that Microsoft can demand payment (and crackdowns from the Governement). It might be years away, but at least they aren't using/learning to use/programming for that Linux thing.
Either way, the RIAA doesn't lose. It only loses if artists start seeing the RIAA as not the only way to distribute their stuff and earn a living (I gotta get signed man!)
But what is being done in this area? Free P2P downloads are certainly not going to entice artists. MP3.com used to be the avenue that I thought could open the way until some major label bought it and killed it.
Has this vacuum been filled?
Let's correct this shall we:
Winners: People who don't want to pay for music or movies and would rather steal them.
Losers: Businesses who have a right to sell their products under the protection of copyright laws.
Biggest Losers: The average consumer who has to deal with excessive DRM because of the "winners" above.
Thank you. Now let's see how many replies I get about how the U.S. copyright system is flawed, and big businesses take artists money.
That shouldn't take away from Apple's achievement. They've shown the popularity of back-catalog music, and how sales can be made in a digital age, something the RIAA cannot see (likely from greed).
Let's correct this once again shall we:
Winners: People who don't want to pay for music or movies and would rather steal them.
Losers: Businesses who have a right to sell their products under the protection of copyright laws.
Biggest Losers: The average consumer who has to deal with excessive DRM because of the losers above.
It is not the fault of the "winners" that certain businesses refuse to sell their product without draconian restrictions and inflated prices.
Winners: Musicians who now have the opportunity to tap into niche markets globally without paying a blood tax to soulless corporations who are destroying music
Losers: Ego-driven and greedy but untalented millionaire executives at said corporations who will see slightly less profit this year from sucking the blood of people with actual talent by locking down their distribution channels, yet will nonetheless whine like babies that they're being ripped off by the very fans who made them millionaires in the first place
Biggest Losers: Slashdotters who aren't getting a penny of this money but still feel driven to defend these bloodsucking corporate drones every chance they get.
The RIAA and MPAA will still continue to lack a clue as how to effectively deal with P2P (this assumes that there is a way to do so, which, you know, there might not be). The lawsuits filed against Sony might be resolved in 2006, but depending on how many states follow Texas' lead, it could be years...
And if it's anything like 2005, someone will develop and release the newest and greatest P2P application which will be the 'best thing evar!!!1' until the RIAA and MPAA pollute it six months after release. Lawsuits against the creators of P2P apps will continue. And by mid-March, the RIAA will shoot itself in the foot again by filing a lawsuit against someone else's grandma, 12-year old child, or, just for a change of pace, a handicapped person. They will continue to garner more ill will then the MPAA, simply because of their continued stupidity.
Happy New Year.
Kierthos
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
This is the "music piracy" winners and losers of 2005, not File-Sharing/P2P.
File Sharing is the big loser until people realise it has more applications than copying music (which I have nothing against btw).
Apple Computer haven't got much to do with File-Sharing and P2P - their one real link to it is that they recently crippled the File-Sharing in iTunes - surely this makes them a loser for P2P? They've virtually withdrawn from it due to people copying music illegally using their app! Their only victory is people can use their stylish, desirable players to play their warezed music, and that is nothing new. They are also a winner as all the zealot fans like me still buy all their shinies despite the DRM.
Microsoft also aren't mentioned - I'm sure they were experimenting using P2P to send software updates? Don't know what happened to that, anyway
Merry Christmas to you all, too
I don't know why I am so passionate about the issue. Sharing music is no more stealing than going to a friends house to watch a movie. If I like the movie, I will buy it, if I like the music I will buy an album. I would really like to say, "Sharing music is not a crime, stealing a CD from a retail outfit is!" There is not much more that can be said about the issue, if anyone likes a song they heard, they will go out and support the artist if they wish to continue the deliverence of good quality music!
US Copyright implementation is getting more and more stupid, but that's besides the point. You forgot to mention that other thing.
Movies on DVD priced $10-$20 sell like there was not tomorrow. Music on CDs, usually cheaper than movies to produce, doesn't sell for $20+. It doesn't even suprise anyone anymore to find that soundtrack from latest and greatest movie costs more than the movie itself...
Number of DVD-s bought by me in last couple of years : >200
Number of CD-s [...] : 3
Robert
PS In my country (Poland) you can buy perfectly legal DVDs with movies added to magazines as marketing gimmick. The price of such magazine: $3-$6. And some of them are actually better than the crap that runs in the cinema, with price of such DVD being lower than single movie ticket.
My last two purchases:
"Ghost in the Shell": DD5.1 and DTS, JP, EN and PL audio, 20pln (~$6)
"Battle Royale": DD5.1 and DTS, JP and PL audio, 20pln (~$6)
The overall effect on the market is that now you can buy even movies from big houses (like Underworld from Sony) for ~$8 in big bookstores, without any tricks, rebates etc.
There's actually no incentive to burn movies rented or downloaded from the 'net: good quality DVD-R is ~$1.5, rental of hot item is ~$4 and I've actually seen DVDs with lower price in retail than in rental (e.g. Shawn of the Dead lately).
Bastard Operator From 193.219.28.162
The idea that music or movies can be stolen is an invented notion like "intellectual property" itself, or for that matter, land ownership. (Remember, prior to our arrival, land ownership didn't exist in the US.) People are trying to push the idea on us that copying from computer to computer is the same thing as taking a physical copy from the store. The fact is that these are purely economical and not moral issues. By copying a DVD from BitTorrent you're "potentially not letting the publisher profit from your sale", not "stealing". To me, saying it's wrong to copy media over the Internet is not too far from saying it was wrong to use light bulbs because it reduced the profitability of candlemakers. Just because you are an industry doesn't mean you DESERVE to profit. The people who are really worried now are the publishers, since their industry is content distribution. Their method of said distribution HAS been made obsolete, but they think they are big enough to take on consumers. (Some industries are that big. You think they haven't come out with more electric cars because the technology/demand/infrastructure isn't good enough? Please.)
Like property ownership, copyrights and patents do serve a purpose, but they weren't created to protect Ashlee Simpson or J.K. Rowling. Article One of the Constitution gives Congress the power to "promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries." The courts may have to decide what "useful arts" are, but I doubt the framers intended that people should have to pay a fee to perform the Happy Birthday song in public. I think code is closer to what they wanted to encompass here. Programming is not science, exactly, but it certainly is useful.
If you're only using P2P to "steal" music, or for w4r3z, I say fuck off: you're tainting a legitimate utility. If you're dumb enough to want to listen to the shit they call music or movies nowadays, you're dumb enough to go out and pay for it. Get off the Internet and stop wasting our bandwidth, you parasitic roaches.
...and not even a single new artist has interested me in some years.
Personal taste not withstanding (and judging from your comments, you seem quite intolerant of any personal preference that disagrees with your own), I guess it would surpise the hell out of you to learn that I've actually purchased DVDs of movies I'd previously downloaded, simply because I liked them... "Spiderman", "Underworld", etc. I also know quite a few others who've done the same, both personally (IRL, ie. siblings, personal friends) and online.
So much for the notion that every download is money "stolen" from the *AA. While I do agree that those who only download copyrighted material are contributing to the problem, berating those people only ignores the underlying problem of an utterly broken copyright system.
Sounds like you've decided to take the stale old "nothing new can possibly be good, only the old stuff is worth anything" approach that is so typical of those who are resistant to pretty much all change. I'm not much younger than you (just hit 34 in October). Almost 40? Big Frickin' Deal, that's not so old. Yeah, I too still love some older music and movies (classic rock, for ex.), but that doesn't automatically mean "new = crap". Yes, there is some new stuff that I would describe as crap, but there's also some great new music -- just bought Corrosion of Conformity's latest, and I dare say the forefathers of metal (Zep, Sabbath) would be proud. And movies: You're old enough to recall the classic Spiderman comics, and can probably attest to how faithful the movie was to the original story... unless, of course, comics are too "low-brow" for you. Seems to me you've let yourself become a stereotypical Grumpy Old Bastard long before your time.
PS: Roaches are not parasites, they are scavengers.
But what difference did that make? I haven't been following the legal aspect of Edonkey, but I'm still downloading hard-to-find stuff from the Edonkey network, like I've been doing for the past 5 years or so. From my perspective, nothing has changed. Or am I missing something?
Winners: the RIAA, to whom the small musician must aspire to run to, as this continues to be the only outlet via which the musician can earn a living. It's a real shame, given the possibilities of the web.
Losers: the mass bulk of honest people: who are forced to deal with what economists call "dead weight loss" associated with piracy. This includes:
Winners: a select group of self-righteous technologically aware idiots who spin bullshit pseudophilosophical justifications for their piracy of music, software, movie, and other content. Thes people benefit at the expense of those who actually pay for the content, and in aggregate cause less content to be produced and at higher prices. Ironically, these dishonest people often are seen to blame the "poor quality" of the music as the reason as to why they have to steal it. They have convenient boogiemen in "bmw driving middlemen RIAA executives" and other easy-to-hate types that they point to in order to draw attention from the root cause of the problem, which is their greed (and intelletual dishonesty). Of course, these people are "winners" in the sense that they get lots of free music, movies, and software and are the successful leeches.. however, in every other sense of the word, they are complete losers.
"yeah he'll be laughing all the way to jail when the cops come and bust his door down..."
If you read their legal page, and most of their replies to the various lawyers, they keep repeating that what they are doing is completely legal in their country.
Their law has no problem with storing and providing metadata, which is all they are doing. OTOH if they were holding the actual content, that would be illegal.
Borg:"Lawsuits are irrelevant. GPL3 is irrelevant. DRM is good. We understand security... Alert! MS are assimilating us!
You correction needs correction. Don't worry, it happens to Microsoft too all the time ;).
Winners: People who want their games, movies and music free of rootkits, cd checks, the need to connect to Steam servers, and associated instability (try playing uncracked Morrowind on Win98), and who want them now instead of when the copyright holders can be bothered to sell them in their geographic location, and who are filling to infringe on copyrights to get them. Getting them free of charge is a nice additional bonus.
Copyright infringement is not stealing.
Winners also includes any business that concentrates on providing goods and services, instead of trying their best to fuck up their customers.
Losers: businesses who have abused the copyright system by extending it to the point where everyone simply ignores it. They should have cried "foul!" when Disney bought extension after extension; now it's too late to complain and ask for sympathy.
Biggest Losers: Those few who still feel they have to follow copyright laws, no matter how unjust those laws have become. Fortunately, this group gets smaller every year, as its members realize that they can use Internet to get everything they want free of baggage, and can only deal with reputable sellers (such as iTunes) instead of disreputable ones (such as Sony).
As for you, I hope you got your bonus for astroturfing on Christmas Day.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
At the end of the day you're still playing loose-and-fast with Other People's Property. By law you're NOT allowed to freely copy and redistribute copyrighted materials. If you have such a moral outrage against the system, then don't buy the music, and don't download it either.
Just because we can all agree that music industry is evil and stacked against the artist, does not mean you're helping the artist by denying them even the measely few cents they would have earned on a CD sale.
If you really want to support artists, throw your financial support behind internet-based MP3 and CD initiatives that have direct fair compensation for artists.
One thing that totally made me loose my mind yesterday, was when watching Reservoir Dogs (I got the Quentin Tarantino-box for christmas! yay!) and having to sit through a minute long commercial/lecture/accusation about how "downloadin movies is the same as stealing them from the store" (apparently along with chips and candy, though they failed to mention how it is possible to download snacks...). WTF?! The movie I was going to watch was bought legally from a store, and yet they feel it necessary to tell me how I'm breaking the law when downloading movies. Ironically, had I downloaded the DVD-R instead, that part would probably have been stripped.
What's the lesson I've learned, thanks to the MPAA?
That downloading movies instead of buying them actually pays off.
They seriously have to get a reality-check and change their strategies. What they're doing now is NOT helping in any way imaginable.
Blog -
I think the winners in 2006 will be traffic-shaping product manufacturers. My ISP has started limiting the bandwidth allocated for P2P due to BitTorrent. I think you will find this becoming more and more common.
Hmmm. Maybe it is time to invest in one of these companies.
Isn't what Sony did exactly what DRM was meant for?? Screw the users, control their lives, and do it legally?
I think Linus is the only person I've ever heard talk about DRM as just a pure technology. Everyone else (e.g. media companies) talks as though it's a means to an end for user control. So how is what Sony did not right in line with that?