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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.'"
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.
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?
Thank you, Internet.
Without you, I wouldn't know what happened this year. You are truly the cure for my long-term memory loss.
And yet its only a recap, written for people who do not keep updated on tech or actual real life data on what file sharing is and is not, people who do not have a clue on what is really going on.
So this article is perfect for the **AA.
- d
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.
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).
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.
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.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
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!
"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
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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".
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.
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.
For those who fight for it, life has a flavor the sheltered will never know.
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.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
"The average consumer who has to deal with excessive DRM because of the losers above"
Actually no.
The record company's business model had traditionally been a pay-per-listen model. Unlike today, people just 100 years ago had no disposable income. Most people's thoughts were of having enough provisions to survive; the idea of a middle class with income to spend on luxuries is a 20th century ideal. Even then, the real middle class was largely a result of the consumerism buoyed by the end of WW2.
So prior to the 50's people couldn't afford record players or player pianos or other ways of listening to music. Live music, radio, and juke boxes were how the record companies grew up and the model there is you pay to listen. Every time (and yes, listening to a commercial is paying to listen).
Even as record players grew in popularity and dropped in price, people didn't have large music collections. They started to hear music on radio's and then would put a nickel in the jukebox to listen to it again.
The 50's and 60's brought an explosion of relatively cheap music, which from the RIAA's standpoint was a good thing. Those LP's couldn't be copied (except for a handful of geeks...er.... HiFi buffs who had a reel-to-reel recorder but with prices at several hundrew dollars, was hardly worth the effort.
But as the compact cassette (and 8-track) grew in popularity the apple-cart was upset. People could borrow albums from each other and they could make copies! Forbidden fruit. The idea that an LP was special and uncopyable was gone. The physical DRM scheme in place at the time was rendered useless for people who could afford a cassette deck. And they could. And they copied a lot. Sometimes, they'd do it so much the record companies would raid "trading parties" on college campuses. Still,it was not a big deal and anybody with a cassette deck would do "Greatest Hits" tapes or make copies of friends albums. For the first time, copying had a measurable impact on sales. Still, the record companies figured out they could sell pre-recorded cassette and so all-in-all things weren't bad.
Then the Audio CD came out and it was back to the old deal for the record companies. DRM. You couldn't copy a CD! Unless you were one of those geeks with a lot of time, a lot of brains and a few thousand bucks to buy recordable CD's, but that wouldn't come for almost a decade.
But when MP3's came out nobody would have heard of them except for one sly move by fraunhaufer... they started to give away command line versions of their MP3 player, and they turned the other was as people reverse engineered MP3. The cat was and is out of the bag, and this time, a change in format won't help primarily because once its on your hard drive, format is now irrelevant. The old days of a new format every 10-15 years is obsolete. So once you own music, you never buy it again.
Understand two things that are important. You must understand this or nothing good will every come of this:
1) The record companies still believe they are entitled to "nickel" every time you listen. Its in their blood.
2) The record companies have relied on format changes to encourage sales of a back catalog.
So from their point of view, they want DRM not only to limit what you can do with music, but they also want it so you have to buy the same music again in a few years as they obsolete the current format. Remember this: The DRM would exist on the music even if nobody was stealing it. It allows control and control is the important thini
I say this... let people copy as much as possible. Let congress pass the most draconian laws protecting music and film possible, because then people will finally get tired being screwed by the record companies and real change will happen.
But whining about people copying RIAA music for free? Its like worrying that its not fair that you steal from the corner drug dealer.
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?
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 *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.
"Nobody's ever going to make any money on the internet"
--VP of the company I worked for, circa 1995
Pretty clearly, the French. The moral of the story is: Wait until 2006 to discuss the "best of" 2005.
I hate the one hundred and twenty character limit for signatures with an all-enveloping, all-destroying, incredible pass
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?
Funny how they list the demise of WinMX, at the same time they have a link at the top of their page to download the current, operating version!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."