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Court Action Does Not Reduce File-Sharing
gollum123 wrote to mention a BBC report that despite numerous court cases, litigation does not appear to be reducing the amount of file-sharing. From the article: "The level of file-sharing has remained the same for two years despite 20,000 legal cases in 17 countries. The International Federation of the Phonographic Industries (IFPI) said it was 'containing" the problem and more people were connecting to broadband."
True, the level has stayed the same .. but perhaps without the lawsuits and FUD campaign the amount of file sharing would have grown?
The number of users of iTunes and iPods music devices has increased, why hasnt the level of file sharing? Seems either lawsuits worked, or people prefer convenience of using the itunes store. I dont think it's healthy for the lawsuit factor should be blindly dismissed as ineffective.
The point I actually want to make is we have to be objective and have to know where the threats are. After all, no point in ignoring something that might be true. Maybe counter FUD is needed, or better file sharing methods?
Note that one of the first publicized waves of RIAA lawsuits coincided with a heavy marketing campaign by Apple and Pepsi for free downloads on iTunes. Coincidence? I think not. Heck, some of the kids being sued caught some good airtime in the commercials.
Yes, and Mr. bin Laden probably said that terrorist attacks are a "sometimes misunderstood element of the business of international politics".
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Copyright was never about the experience, it was always about the product. They want a copyright on the experience of something; afterall, the Eifel tower is an experience and it's copywritten, as is times square in new york. You can't take pictures of it; security guards will forcibly confiscate the film. Same goes for a number of other things in America.
;)
Copyright was always for the profitable production of various works; works being vynle records, tape casetts, music rolls, ect. It's come to the point where it's now on the experience of something, which it was never meant to be. But pioneering judges and profiteering politicians have sold their power for profit and in their attempt to gain an income, have sold off nearly all of their vested commodity.
Frankly, if you're sharing music, you aren't a bad guy. If you're on the streets of Chicago selling burned CD's and harddrives full of various works then yeah, your but should be busted because you're selling a product, not sharing an experience.
It may seem sad to some that we now have been spoiled by this technology. Frankly, technology has brought us closer together, and we have now nearly reached the ultimate goal copyright set out to achieve; a technology that lets everyone produce and spread experiences and media, for free. The new market, undoubtedly, will be for experience preservation. 89 cents to buy an MP3 is a bad business model; 89cents to gain access to someone's perminant music preservation service and $50 to order a hyper-long-lasting recording of it is going to be the new business model. Because of gnutella, I now have access to a breath and depth of information never before realized, and in the future, it will only exponentially increase. I can now hit a few websites and get enough books to last me for the rest of my life if I read them back to back, in mabye 2 or 3 days.
The recording industry cannot compete with technology so they've tried to destroy technology, and have thus far failed and will fail. The cost of producing media and experience has gone down and down and as it does we get closer to living in a completly virtualised and created reality with created experiences and created ideas.
Ownership and property will become obsolete. I look foward to the ultimate ego/identity dissolution experience it will be. Of course, there will be those who will refuse the change and will lead a path of destroying themselves and will try to drag everyone else under them. That's the basic idea behind revelations.
If we've got a problem with filesharing, wait until someone figures out a way to make a home-fabrication machine the size of a car that can produce anything a machinist can.
Entities like the RIAA and IFPI hire spin doctors (and the media) trying to make the public equate file-sharing with illegal activities. But this isn't necessarily the case.
P2P file-sharing technologies are inreasingly being used for legitimate distribution of many large content objects, simply because it makes more-efficient use of Internet infrastructure: the free-for-download fan series "Star Trek: New Voyages" and World of Warcraft patches are just two examples that come to mind.
I expect there's plenty of Gene Research data and other such things using P2P by now as well.
You'll notice that there is *never* any mention make of the use of portable storage devices, flash memory sticks etc., for the exchange of music files. Give the increase in the amount of storage that these devices are being upgraded to it becomes very convenient to copy MP.3s to these devices at your friends house etc. and to transfer such files to your computer, then iPod etc..
A draconian crackdown in online file sharing will only result the movement of file-sharing to an offline model.
I well recall the music industry wailing and gnashing their collective teeth in the late 70s, early 80s because of 'pirate' taping. There was much fuss, 'n feathers about electronics manufactures marketing dual well cassette decks. In the end CDs came along killing the cassette. Thus, the industry was placated for a couple of decades. Given the convenience of the CD, and the quality of the sound folks bought into the audio CD with a vengeance. They started replacing their music collection which had been on vinyl with CDs. This caused the recording corporations to reap a windfall, without having to develop new artist, paying for new albums etc.. About the time that the internet, especially broadband, got cranked up and really going the folks that were updating their music libraries to CD got caught up. Thereby causing a dip in CD sales. This was inevitable. Not that that placated the shareholders of the recording companies. Well the CEOs etc. in the industry had their backs against the wall, as they had failed to point out to shareholders that the retool to CDs was not going to last forever, and the CEOs had been operating on cruise control as per developing new sales. So recording industry fat-cats were staring doom in the face, heads were going to roll...
But Wait! We're not bad CEOs etc., it's those evil internet downloaders that are causing the drop in profit!
The fact is that the RIAA and its minion are doing *nothing* but scapegoating of a new technology, and its users so that oligarchs entrenched in an economic sector that is doomed for the scrape-heap of obsolescence can hang around long enough to be able to pop their golden parachutes.
It's not about morality, nor ethics. In the final analysis it ALL about $$$$$$ and maintain the oligarch's tasteless, but stately pleasure domes.
"Oh drat these computers, they're so naughty and so complex, I could pinch them." --Marvin the Martian
Yes and it did. That is a brief history of the 90s.
If it has, in fact, stayed flat that would indicate something is creating downward pressure.
What you see is market destruction and saturation. The big publishers wiped out their competition, so their primary market is left with bad choices and continues to make them at the same rate as always.
Don't confuse broadband adoption with internet access and don't think that you need broadband to swap music. Internet access itself has remained constant in the developed world. Everyone who wants it has had it for years. Broadband is needed for other activities that require instant feedback but music is not one of them.
Music sharing was big before broadband became common because songs are only a few megabytes in size. Back in the day, people would set their favorite client to download their music while they did other things. There's only so much free music a person wants in a given night and dial up worked just fine. A person using the old Napster was exposed to more new music than any commercial radio station can provide and often collected more songs than the average station carries in inventory. Having your requests met in minutes is not much more satisfying than your computer getting it over an hour or so. The thing that mattered was variety and price.
It's not surprising that "piracy" is still rampant because the greedheads turned everything else off. Legitimate providers like MP3.com were all shut down and replaced by greedy nonsense like ITunes and horrid clients like WMP. After years of stagnation, other legitimate services are finally coming back on line. Places like Magnatune are finally going to put money in artist's pockets and new music at your fingertips. In the mean time, anyone who really wants music will find a way. The tools only get better and the difference between what you can get on music sharing services and what's offered by the big publishers and broadcasters is still staggering.
The greedheads are losing.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Just one idea that seems, at the moment, to make sense. You're a music company, now. You sell CDs. You advertise them on the radio by passing out major bucks to corrupt DJs and so on. This works? For teenyboppers. Thus the boy bands, the Britneys, all of that. Hey, it's smokin' when you're 14. But it doesn't work with core music buyers. So what to do? Simple. Sponsor sharing networks. Pay people if they recommend things that get downloaded a lot. Give them download credits for uploading. Get into commercial deals with websites, and pay for their servers, give away prizes, all that stuff. It'll be a whole lot cheaper than KISS-FM, that's for sure. Now, if it's legal, why buy? Simple. Check out what's on pirate boards: nada. Three or four hundred albums and their songs, all current with teens and young adults. But servers cost money. A catalog costs money. Quality costs either bandwidth or straight money. Hardware, software and music companies should all take a piece of establishing the "music promo" environment, and get money back in hardware, software and music sales. The Hit Parade is dead. Top 40 radio is dead. Pirate Bay? Not dead.
What would they consider to be "winning the war", anyway? Complete elimination of the Pirates Of The Internet (won't happen)? 80% decrease in piracy rates (possibly, not likely)? Their sales going up to the point they want them?
I have a feeling that they'll declare victory no matter what happens in order to keep up morale and put up a good front. The same way both political parties in the US try to claim victory every two years. Anything else would make them look weak.
If you were truly taking a principled stand, you would stop listening to the music altogether.
Can't speak for the poster of the grandparent, but why would you need to stop listening to the music altogether? I haven't bought a major-label CD new since 2001. The last ML CD I bought new was Depeche Mode's "Exciter" (which, as it turned out, wasn't very...). Since, I've bought some indie label CDs new, but mostly I buy all CDs used. Neither the labels nor the artists who support them get any cut from those purchases, I still get to enjoy the music, can compress the audio to my own standards (rather than those imposed by some music service), and it's legal and cheaper than DRM'ed rip-offs like iTMS.
Plus, I like to shop local. I learned that lesson on 9/12/01, in New York City, when all the big box chains were closed and the only stores in my neighborhood that were open were the locally owned mom-&-pop's. Once in a while, I buy something on-line, if it's something I've been looking for and it's available at a good price. But most locations have at least one decent used record store and unless you're exceedingly picky or have fairly limited music preferences, you can usually find lots of good stuff to choose from.
Michael
"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality;..."
i'm sorry, but i will never buy digital media in my life ever again. i haven't bought a single CD since i fired up Napster in 1999. my formula for not being caught is two-fold:
1. load your shared folder up with porn
2. if you must download linkin park or flipsyde, the kind of stuff the riaa is sniffing?:
a. stop all of your downloads except that song you want with the most sources and the best connections
b. suck it down in under a minute
c. immediately get it out of your shared folder
d. if you do it fast enough, all the porn suckers you have cultivated will flood out and anyone trying to get that drop of water pop song in your sea of masking porn
e. and the riaa only goes after those who make pop songs available, not those who download it, don't forget that
additionally you are a filesharer of good ethical standing: you ARE sharing files people want, you are just segregating what you share/ don't share according legal risk
and speaking of pop songs? i have the BEST solution for beating the riaa on that subject matter: i embrace world music, i let my mind wander. currently, i'm into japanese pop music and european techno: love that armin van buuren and ayumi hamasaki (i live in new york city)
the thing to do is is to expand your musical interests to things beyond the usual pop crap of your native country (and embrace pop crap of other countries, heh), and you are also therefore using the new file sharing technology to its greatest benefit: connecting with resources that otherwise would be beyond your grasp in the pre-internet universe. file sharing is exactly what the digital utopians dreamed about in the heyday of the internet: the free exchange of world culture, bringing people together in large and small ways. file sharing is the promise of the internet. the only people who lose, are media conglomerates. every one else wins, INCLUDING THE ARTISTS. because a real artist does it for the art, not the money
so embrace world music, and you win two ways:
1. you won't be on the riaa's radar
2. you'll grow new brain cells as you develop an awareness of a world beyond your nation's borders, of music beyond your stupid local music industry
there really is a lot of good stuff out there. free your mind and give the bastards who want to keep you in a marketing straightjacket the finger in the process.
and for those of you with a holier-than-thou attitude about me ripping off musicians from other countries? get around this chicken and egg situation: if it weren't for the filesharing networks, I WOULD NEVER BE EXPOSED TO THE ARTIST I AM LISTENING TO IN THE FIRST PLACE. solve that quandry and get back to me with your holier than thou attitude
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I don't see the point in all the who-har around music piracy. Up until 1920s people in Spain would have played music via instruments in town squares joyfully, people shared music and shared the enjoyment of it. There was no complaint of reproduction of music. Later came the tape cassette, so shortly there after the bootlegger. Now we have CDs, at incredible prices and people just boot leg via mp3. There is some reduction in quality and there is also the colour injet to make the inlays.
Whats the point though, why all this fus, it's just people trying to share enjoyment. It's not like money makes people happy, if the artists are good then they sell tickets, that's where the real money is.
I'd rather move to Spain and try to catch some of the towns people reproduce music their way, that has to be more original.
But on this note, why should the consumer pay to listen to some remake of an old classic for a rediculous price, it's not original work and therefore as much IP theft as someone who boot leggs music.
And no, I do not copy music, kazza doesn't run on Linux, I listen only to shoutcast streams, and freeview channel 18.
Why UNIX?