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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.
'"
Of course I don't want to download anything that would be considered illegal You're apparently a college student who doesn't pirate stuff? Are we supposed to take you seriously? You might as well tell us you're the son of God come back to earth to end world hunger and put an end to war, as that would be just as believable. What do you take slashdot for?
I only kid. I do however think this is less than noteworthy. I'm pretty sure it's been widely known that the RIAA types have inflated their statistics for some time now, what with their formula of x number of pirated copies = x number of sales lost and then x sales lost * y unreasonable charge == z unrealistic losses.
I got a catholic block.
There's a number of P2P sites, and P2P programs which don't allow connections to MediaDefender or other such P2P sites. Personally I've seen their IPs end up in the blocked list of Peer Guardian more than a few times.
I think perhaps they are experiencing a little bit of Heisenberg's at the macrolevel: By observing it, they are changing it. Send enough annoying letters saying X had Y media on X's computer on a P2P site as discovered by this IP address: Z, well, you're going to get programs cropping up to prevent any connections to Z.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
Lawmakers often write lofty goals such as "to promote the progress of science and useful arts", but merely writing this doesn't make it so.
For example, if somebody wrote that we must subsidise deep underground gold mining operations "to promote the progress of technology to fly to mars", it would be obvious that they are full of shit.
The fact is that "promoting the progress of science and useful arts" is not verifiably helped by copyright law, there's no evidence: nada. zip. zilch.
Instead, copyright is simply one of the arbitrary economic rules we live under and that we inherited from our ancestors. Some people like it, because they have lucrative property contracts based upon it. Other people don't like it, as they don't have lucrative contracts.
What's changed in the 21st century is that those who don't like it are finding it easier to simply ignore copyright, and those who like it are whining about it.
The bit in the article that made me laugh: "Well, I couldn't feel comfortable downloading anything from Gnutella that's more than 4mb, so I'm just searching and searching. Then I start to think, if I'm on there researching, maybe that's what other people are on there doing." and uses that as one extrapolation as to how the numbers are inaccurate, when in reality, I think the numbers of connections that are on Gnutella "just to research what's there to download, and who's downloading, but not actually downloading themselves" is probably as high (or, rather, low) as "the number of connections that are on Gnutella exclusively to share Linux ISOs".
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.
:] I suggest you think it through a little more. The notion was not formed without the use of rational thought, so an intelligent person like you should be able to understand it... right?
:]
Oh, some of us understand just fine. It's the part where people don't agree with how the law is written or enforced that get you into problem territory.
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.
No, they usually say that IP isn't really property because it's not truly rivalrous. Sure, the law creates rights that are in rivalrous in an artificial way, but you can have two people listen to the same tune whereas two people can't eat the same grape. You may have heard people refer to IP as "imaginary property" recently. It's not because they don't know what IP is supposed to stand for, but because they don't agree with it.
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.
Mind-boggling? That sounds more like a statement of ignorance to me. I don't have any trouble understanding why they'd think that, nor do I have trouble understanding those with views like yours. When I hear that something is "mind-boggling" I usually find out that people are trying to ascribe intelligence to something (or someone) that lacks it, or that they haven't thought something through. In this case, it would appear to be the latter.
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.
The GPL IS a subversion of copyright law after a fashion. RMS wrote against that notion that we need copyright because it's used to enforce the GPL quite specifically in one of his essays (yes, you can't enforce the GPL without copyright law, but you don't really need it, either). You might want to talk to the man who wrote it before you make claims like that. I did. [1]
Anyhow, to get back on topic, I don't see how you can say that not supporting copyright law makes them an infringer. I also don't think that that essay you linked to was written out of ignorance. It's written because people are fed up with this crap.
Perhaps you haven't yet realized this, but the more laws we make, the more criminals there are. Obviously, the more we criminalize the things people are already doing, the more people who are going to break them. And you can't have fewer than zero people breaking a law, so adding to the laws will certainly never create fewer criminals. The point isn't the ridiculous notion that we could just abolish all laws and have "zero" criminals. Some things, after all, are worth the cost of criminalizing them. But it's a mistake to think that laws are without cost. And here, a reasonable person can make the case that we're simply better off if we don't criminalize something, whether or not we like or agree with it.
Of course, you seem to find that "mind-boggling"
[1] To prove it, I'll point out that I also read the confusing words manifesto. Whereas RMS would like us all to stop using the word, I have chosen to subvert it with the term "Imaginary Property" not unlike how RMS chose to subvert copyright with the GPL rather than hoping to abolish it. RMS disagrees with me about that term, BTW, in that it still lumps together at least three disparate areas of law, but you'd have a hard time finding someone with whom he agrees about everything
What if piracy AND sales go down?
Can we just assume that no one wants their shitty products and move on? There are literally only three bands I have bought the CD's for in the past 7 years and one of them is from Europe. As for DVD's except for the LOTR extended box and Disney (I'm an addict I need help) I haven't bought a single new dvd in the same time.
Seriously the only thing I've even thought about pirating recently is porn and a couple computer games cause in Iraq if it isn't digital delivery it's a pain in my ass.
Most of those games I'm just waiting til I get home to see if I'll even have time to play them to get, new parent and all.
I'll meet you at the intersection of "Should be" and "Reality"
02/01/07 342854 8398 2.40% 2.45
;)
04/12/07 291001 7175 2.50% 2.47
06/14/07 265504 2475 0.93% 0.93
07/14/07 199333 1303 0.65% 0.65
Most colleges, on semesters, empty out in early May (1st or 2nd week). I want to see the data for 5/07 and then every month up through 12/07 when it lets out again.
This blogger might have found the cycle of enrollment flow and nothing more -- as much as I don't like to admit it
Except these people have tens, if not hundreds of movies stored on their hard drives. I know of some outliers who even have thousands. Clearly they consume the media, and the vast majority have paid nothing for it. This isn't the case of the MAFIAA going after people who have no supposed interest in their products, trying to extract money out of them.
I frequently hang around generally don't purchase DVDs or CDs unless it's really something they likeAh, the old "new stuff is crap, I don't pay for crap" excuse, which is valid so long as I can't catch you with the new Britney Spears album on your disk. If you're serious about only buying stuff you like, then only CONSUME stuff you like. Don't justify your piracy of a movie or album because "it's not worth the $X". For movies especially, there are plenty of avenues to avoid paying full-price, including renting the DVD.
but I do want to make it very clear that the artists/labels and movie companies aren't getting money from a portion of these users whether they pirate the media or notExcept the vast majority of college students aren't on a moral crusade against labels and studios that rip of the actual creative artists. Most students I've discussed this with don't even bother using it as an excuse, much less actually believing it. Like I said, piracy on campus is treated as a victimless crime, not "sticking it to the Man" of any sort.
Silly MAFIAA - trix are for kids!
And the kidz will always be three steps ahead of you. Face it. Your business model is done. Go figure out some other way to make a living.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
What percentage of the "10,000" potential p2p users actually have the opportunity to engage in some p2p downloading on university PC's. Perhaps things have changed but it certainly was my experience that there was a limited number of pc's available to use in a number of labs and these were all network boots with no local hard drive. Ok you could maybe get round that using a live Cd and a usb stick, for a limited time at least. For most university students a fairly small allocation of hard drive space was given on one of the servers.
Ok i am ignoring halls of residence where people get to plug in their own pc's into the network but a fair proportion of students will live outside the university and use their own internet connections as they wish.
for most of the "10,000" its not going to be practical to use university pc's for p2p downloading assuming that there are no measures in place to block p2p access for most network users.