Leaked MediaDefender Emails Show Student P2P Traffic Down

An anonymous reader writes "The MPAA and the RIAA have been targeting universities in a fury claiming that college students are causing them huge losses. However, some leaked MediaDefender emails show that may be a huge exaggeration. 'I also want to state that I am not for the illegal sharing of files. I am absolutely against it. I just want to make sure that the numbers presented in the media are fair numbers. I have a feeling they aren't fair at all. '"

Comments

Bogus

[neokushan]

The MPAA and the RIAA have been targeting universities in a fury claiming that college students are causing them huge losses.

This is a bogus claim anyway, everyone knows college kids (aka Students) are piss poor and couldn't afford to buy the music even if they didn't download it.
Now they're just piss poor and bored.

Re:Bogus

[p0tat03]

I call bullshit wishful thinking.

I am in college, and I've been to the campuses of MANY others, for one reason or another, and while it's true that you've got some college students eking by on savings and loans, being very judicious in their spending, the vast majority are supported by middle-class parents, and have plenty of disposable income.

No, indeed, while I am no fan of the MAFIAA, there IS a very real problem with our young people and their perceptions on copyright. The general consensus is that if they didn't have to filch if off a store shelf, it's morally a-ok, and this mentality pervades every college campus I've ever been to. I'll leave the psychological analysis of the why to people better qualified than I, but it is undeniable that the average college student thinks nothing wrong with piracy. It's perceived as a victimless crime.

Seriously, if you can spend thousands boozing yourself up each year, you can't make the excuse that you're too poor to buy DVDs.

Re:Bogus

[LordLucless]

No, indeed, while I am no fan of the MAFIAA, there IS a very real problem with our young people and their perceptions on copyright.

Either that, or there is a real problem with our copyright law.

There's still a lot of copyright infringement

[compumike]

Just take a look at this recent opinion piece to MIT's newspaper. Here's a student who believes that "the free flow of information" (as he says twice) is the ultimate good. Lots of students still don't understand why copyright exists. In fact, some will even try to explain that physical property is the only kind that should have value. It's totally mind-boggling, even when these students are the ones who will be going out and making the next generation of intellectual works.

Even the GPL and all copyleft mechanisms rely on copyright laws. If people want their wishes as content creators to be respected (whether that is to allow some forms of redistribution, like CC-NC, or not, like "All rights reserved"), they need to respect copyright law and not subvert it.

--
Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.

Re:There's still a lot of copyright infringement

[ricebowl]

If people want their wishes as content creators to be respected (whether that is to allow some forms of redistribution, like CC-NC, or not, like "All rights reserved"), they need to respect copyright law and not subvert it.

You say 'subvert,' I suggest 'revise.' If a large portion of a community disregards the copyright laws as currently written, does that imply that a large portion of a community needs to be punished/made to pay, or that the copyright laws need to be re-written?

Re:There's still a lot of copyright infringement

[QuoteMstr]

Actually, the popularity of a law is its /very basis/ for legitimacy, at least in a democratic society. Who gets to decide what policy can "better service society" except the very members of that society? The law should reflect common morality, not some notion three guys in a room decided was best.

Every time the law has been used as a club to force the public to accept a minority moral position, it's failed to have the desired effect. Remember learning about the prohibition?

Re:There's still a lot of copyright infringement

[QuoteMstr]

Some people also care about being credited for their work.

Re:There's still a lot of copyright infringement

[QuoteMstr]

You have a point. I'm not advocating mob rule. A representative government should act like a shock absorber for democracy and prevent sudden fits of passion from leading to bad decisions. Arguably, Prohibition was a failure of that damping mechanism.

But what you're missing here is that society itself defines right and wrong. We think slavery is wrong today, but when it was popular, it wasn't considered wrong. When public opinion changed hard enough, for long enough, slavery ended. (Granted, a little less elegantly than we would have liked.)

You can't judge a past society by our own morals. What are we supposed to do, live our lives based on what people 200 years from now will think? What if we guess wrong?

I don't know why you brought the holocaust into this discussion. That program was a secret project concocted by an insane, totalitarian government. It was not a popular movement.

Also, copyright is not property. At best, it's a pragmatic bargain between artists and the public, and it terms are no more fixed, and no more sacred, than the income tax rate.

If the terms of this contract really did constitute a "fundamental" right, what would give Disney, err, Congress the authority to extend copyright by 20 years, every 20 years?

Point is, like you like it or not, we live a representative democracy. And public opinion is rapidly shifting in favor of weakening copyright. If those in power continue to ignore that shift, they will not long remain in power.

Re:There's still a lot of copyright infringement

[CodeBuster]

Yes, most of us do not disagree completely with notion of copyright as a concept, but rather the particularly onerous and unbalanced implementation which has emerged in the first world in general and the United States in particular from about 1975 onward. Copyright is supposed to strike a balance between producers and consumers but how is it balanced to say that all of the works copyrighted in a single human lifetime will not be enjoyed by that same person in the public domain in his lifetime? In fact the balance has tilted so far in favor of the copyright holders that people in general, and college students in particular, are in open rebellion against a system which they perceive is no longer fair. They choose to act outside they system because the laws are so broken and the deck so stacked against them with regard to having those laws changed.

maybe there are other explanations

[petes_PoV]

• students have found ways to not be discovered
• the students have got all the stuff they want
• there's nothing much worth downloading at present
• (my favourite) The RIAA are getting tired of the "war" so they're engineering a victory. Look! our stats say we've won - we can stop now.
• possibly the stats are over the summer, when the colleges were empty

Just like house prices, you can't draw any real conclusions from a single data point. Give it a year and see if there's still a downward trend or if this was just a blip

I wonder.

[palegray.net]

I wonder how many students at technical colleges and universities are using BitTorrent to download Linux ISOs, free software packages, etc...

I know that's what I use it for (no, I'm not kidding).

Business plan

[PPH]

1. Find a bunch of corporate PHBs who fear new technology will disrupt their market share.
2. Put together statistics showing them how much money is slipping away.
3. Collect fees from them for a service that will reduce these losses.
4. Put together new statistics showing the reduction in losses, thanks to their generous contributions.
5. ????
6. Profit!

zOMG - Student numbers drop in summer

[Anonymous Coward]

Shocking! The numbers quoted in the articles show a steep drop in June and July, having reached a peak in midwinter.