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.'"

Comments

Quick Summary

[ndansmith]

Winners: People who enjoy shared music and movies for free.
Losers: **AAs, whose obsolete business model is faltering
Biggest Losers: The poor pre-teens and grandparents dragged into court by the **AAs.

Re:Quick Summary

[TubeSteak]

And what about the people who were legitimately targeted for their file sharing activities?

And the various Release Groups + Suppliers (who do what they do for free) that got arrested.

Where do they fit?

Does society win because those (international) law-breakers were arrested? Do the releasers lose because they got caught? Does the **AA win because they 'got their man.'

I know this is touchy ground on /. because our desire for moviez and warez makes us a touch hypocritical at times. Hopefully someone can put this into perspective.

It's pretty short-sighted of Slyck's article to ignore the hardcore Releasers who generate most of the decent content P2P progs have access to.

Re:Quick Summary

[EzInKy]

Biggest Losers: The average consumer who has to deal with excessive DRM because of the "winners" above.


No the biggest loser so far is democracy but I still hold out hope for a big win in the end. You see, the Constitution says many things about the rights guaranteed to the citizens of the US. Things such as freedom of speech, baring arms, fair trails, and protection against unreasonable searches, are written in stone. Copyrights and patents are not, they are just an option that Congress may excercise.

What happened to napster creator?

[vivek7006]

And what has Shawn Fanning been doing all these years. After napster debacle he did made lot of noise about some grand ideas, but I havent seen any. The website http://www.snocap.com/ has a cheesy demo which only shouts about COPYRIGHT and digital rights management/inventory. I had expected more brilliant things from Shawn Fanning after Napster, but it looks like that he was a flash of the pan.

the iPod long predates the iTunes Music Store

[Trepidity]

The iPod was introduced in 2001; the iTunes Music Store was introduced in 2003. Clearly the latter was not the impetus for the former: The iPod started out as an mp3 player, and Apple later realized that they could make even more money by selling you the mp3s to put on it.

I would be interesting, though, to see some sort of study on the proportion of iPod users who primarily use it for musical purchased on iTunes Music Store or a competitor, versus music downloaded from P2P or ripped from a CD.

Re:Apple iPod qualifies as "sharing"?

[original_nickname]

iTunes used to have sharing built in. This was crippled in later versions (limited to 5 connections a day) as it was exploited to illegally copy music. Which was a shame, as it was easily the best all in one music buying/pirating/burning/managing/playing/memory-ea ting app for the Mac.

saying

[circletimessquare]

"The RIAA continued its fight against P2P networking with little effect"

is like saying

"The Aztec Empire continued its fight against the Spanish Conquistadors with little effect"

duh

both were quickly extinguished by the arrival of new tech, and i would say the RIAA knows what its like to be Montezuma right now

The French solution

[Anonymous Coward]

The French parliament was to accept a DMCA-like law during nighlty discussions Dec 20-22. The law proposed by the government was specially geared towards legal protection of DRM and against uncontrolled P2P. Very surprisingly, even if the government political side has the absolute majority in the parliament, the law was amended and totally reversed during the discussion: the current text makes legal any kind of file-sharing provided a fixed-price licence (so called
"global" or "legal" licence) is paid by the user.

Some artists are complaining that this law would kill their business, others defend the idea of the licence. Free software movements in France are very concerned about the implications of the law and seems to be heard by representatives. The discussion before the parliament is now stopped and due to continue Jan 17. The Minister of Culture is strongly against the idea of the licence and will probably succeed to remove it from the law.

Not quite

[trifish]

The RIAA continued its fight against P2P networking with little effect

Doesn't really seem so. They managed to make the owners of the biggest P2P network (eDonkey2000) say they "throw the towel in".

Why *AAs are loosers

[paja]

IMHO the *AAs are loosers due to their incompetence in the world using digital media and online services. Instead of pushing all these Sonys and BMGs into trying to understand new technologies and be able to introduce a product that will be attractive (as Apple did with iPod), they are holding ground with something not attractive for anyone who is under 35 - like rootkits on audio CDs, DVD regions and stuff like this, all of them *saying* that all customers are criminals.

The problems with new products based on mp3 and online xfers are severe: first of all - publishers will have lower margins, this is outweighted by no price for media, booklet, case etc. The other problem I see is that if some publishing house publishes CD full of songs sang by some fscking trumpet, You have to buy *all* the songs, even if You want only *one* hit. If anyone implements pay per song model, there will be problem what to do with tons of bubblegum sh*t nobody wants to listen to and which in that case are generating no money. It is much easier to sell all songs and let the consumer use the skip button on his CD player. Now is too late - no one sharing his favourite (and only them) songs for free is going to pay for bag of sh*t on prehistoric CDDA with rootkit on 1st track - *AAs will stay on the looser side - not due to people stealing something, but due to their 10 years ignorance of new technologies and banning them, instead of embracing them.

Define:Piracy

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

A pirate is one who robs or plunders at sea without a commission from a recognised sovereign nation. Pirates usually target other ships, but have also attacked targets on shore. These acts are known as piracy. Unlike the stereotypical pirate with cutlass and masted sailing ship, today most pirates get about in speedboats wearing balaclavas instead of bandanas, using AK-47s rather than cutlasses.

I use bittorrent to infringe on copyright, yes. But I've never commited piracy.

And really, you've got most of that bass ackwards. It's the little guys who can go to places like iTunes or Amazon and get their CDs and songs sold for actual money, instead of signing a $10m contract with the RIAA and spending the next 20 years trying to pay off the $10m loan. Yeah. That's how the RIAA contracts work. You didn't know that, you say? You made that whole post with your ass you say? Hmm... Go back to kuro5hin.

Music(/information) = public property?

[avanninen]

Instead of getting nowhere by going through the same discussion (that is, whether filesharing is legal, illegal or something between) again and again, I think we should bring up the question if information should be public property; this seems pretty much the debate in the Internet age. RMS has had some arguments for free software in his essay. The text may (!!) make some sense when you replace the word 'software' with 'music' (though a piece of music isn't something that evolves continuously). Of course the music creators want credit for their work, so what about a Creative Commons license for every piece of music? Why couldn't it work?

Re:I consider myself lucky.

[sleppy1]

I've bought more music & movies since I've been able to download stuff. Some stuff I've d/l'd I didn't like that much but knew someone who would, and I've bought a few of these as gifts. I wouldn't buy music or a movie as a gift if I hadn't seen or heard it first, and a lot of that stuff I'd never have seen or heard if I couldn't download it.

I think the *AA are mistaken in where their lost revenues are going. It's more likely decreasing just because of the increase in diversity of entertainment available. Before music, there was just books. Before videotape, there was just music and books. Then it was just music and movies and books. Now it's music, movies, videogames, books, and probably a lot of other things I don't know about. There's just more to pick from.