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Report Says 36.4% of World's Computers Infringe on IP
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "According to a new report by Digital Music News, 36.4% of the world's computers have LimeWire installed. Given their claim that filling an iPod legally would cost about $40,000, they're pretty sure that most of those computers are infringing upon at least a few imaginary property rights. BitTorrent shouldn't feel left out, though. BitTorrent actually uses more bandwidth, but the article suggests that this is because it is used to share larger files, like movies."
If you count IP infringements made by software vendors. Face it, in the world where One Click patent can even exits, you're _guaranteed_ to infringe on someone's intellectual property if your code is more complicated than "Hello world". And software vendors can't guarantee non-infringement, either, because there are tens of thousands of vaguely worded patents.
It's hard to believe that only 1/3 of computers engage in copyright infringement. Perhaps most of those 2/3 belong to business or education, but I would be hard-pressed to find someone that hasn't borrowed a copy of MS Office or copied a song from a friend.
So I guess screw innocent until proven guilty.
Becuase I have bittorrent installed to download Mandrake, I *MUST* have illegal things on my machine?
Screw that report and the assholes who wrote it!
WTF? Over?
If this wasn't piracy, it would be straightforward to distribute the entire output of the RIAA via NNTP. The bandwidth consumption would be far smaller, because no file traverses a link more than once. The "p2p" approach is a horribly inefficient way of distributing data.
somehow, there must be a tension of powers between shared public wealth, and private corporate wealth. there is no such mechanism to legally reflect this tension in the current world. and so all we have is the the ever increasing encroachment of corporate ownership into what should naturally be public spheres of public ownership. and so none of corporate ownership can be respected. naturally, some of it should, but not the overextended monstrosity that the corporations currently expect
and it is not up to the corporations to restrain themselves. it is their job to squeeze money out of every possible nook and cranny. that is what corporations do, that is their nature, it is not their nature. we should not expect them to restrain themselves. it is our job to restrain them, so they do not become cancerous growths. and we, the legal world and our legal frameworks, are not currently doing that. so we must begin doing that then, so that some of private ownership is respected, not none of it, as currently is the case, because current private ownership laws overreach in time and in venue
as if these means somebody won't still make money, and good money! it is just that the old models won't work anymore, and the corporations are nervous about the unknown
in the current world, the legions of lawyers representing the corporations, and the congressmen they buy (sonny bono, et al) push the scales firmly in the direction of irrational monetization. in a world where i cannot play "happy birthday" without paying someone, something is seriously broken
it is not that we shouldn't respect morality. it is that we shouldn't respect a legal system that is seriously broken, and doesn't reflect morality. current ip law is nothing more than an overextended farce
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Since the concept of intellectual property is almost completely meaningless, the title must be about Internet Protocol, and I bet close to 99% of the worlds computers have IP, and most use it every day.
Oh, you mean that 36.4% of the computers have tools installed that facilitate copyright infringement?
Can we please stop using the term "IP" or "Intellectual Property" and actually specify what we are talking about, which in this case is copyright infringement? Especially since the source articles never use either of those two term in them?
It would be very hard to infringe on trademarks using limewire or bittorrent in any way, and the same goes for patents unless the patents cover the implementation of the software.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
I have just scanned all of the computers on my corporate network. I have concluded that 0% of the computers in my office (out of 300) have LimeWire installed. I am therefore claiming that 0% of the WORLD'S computers have LimeWire installed based on my sample group. /sarcasm
I believe this is a valid comparison as the data in question was collected when users submitted to voluntary PC scans by visiting a specific website that 99% of the worlds computer users have never heard of.
I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.
So, 36.4% of computers of users who are dumb enough to use a site like that have Limewire installed?
Is this like one of those sites that tells me "YOUR REGISTRY MAY BE CORRUPT!!!"... on a linux box?
So in other words, 36.4% of all really dumb people have Limewire installed?
Sounds about right.
The ______ Agenda
Inefficient as in slower (because most people's uplinks are far slower than their downlinks), then yes. Inefficient as in ammount of data transferred (as you seem to be implying), then I don't see how that can possibly be the case.
In the case of P2P, all transmissions are essentially requests for a part of of a file that a client does not currently have. Now since I'm sending data back out to others then MY OWN bandwidth usage will be much lower, but the internet as a whole won't see much difference.
Now, when you combine in the fact that on Usenet a) some of the older encoding schemes must translate to 7-bit ASCII first and hence increase the size of a file by 30-40%, and b) because of missed posts you often have to download the original + a number of parity files, I don't see Usenet coming ahead on the efficiency side of things.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
You are assuming that all of those songs need to be purchased at $1 apiece. What about the CDs I already have at home? I know that Sony lawyer said that ripping even one song is OMG theft, but I don't live on her world. What about all the stuff I downloaded from eMusic when I belonged? There was a cost, but not anything close to $1/song.
Slightly disreputable, albeit gregarious
Wow... that's some MAJOR selection bias. Most people I know would never run anything like that, and thus we'll never get counted. Since most only go there because they're a) stupid and b) already infected with some crap that slows down their machine, the only meaningful statistic I get from that is that the people that click yes to "free" anything (free screensavers, free porn, free download enhancers, free performance scans) quite a lot also want other free stuff. Shocking, I tell you.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The premise of this argument is that no content worth having exists in the public domain, so any use of this tool must be directed toward infilching upon proprietary content.
Half of the motivation being the Mickey Mouse copyright extension act was not just to protect Mickey's inflated infantilism, but also to keep the public domain shelf as bare as possible, so legitimate sharing doesn't cloud the wolf cries of MAFIAA, where every untaxed gratification over every untaxed wire represents a pimple-faced insurrection against the natural order bought and paid for.
It was 36.4%. Or was that 36.43687286723%
:D
When you see B.S. like this (adding decimal places to stupid statistics), it is a signal to ignore it.
What kills me is that it totally reminds me of project management bozos who track project progress to the decimal place. I can understand tracking it in 10% increments, but I realistically can only maybe tell people I am 20, 40, 60... percent complete. Sometimes on 25, 50, etc.
But then there are others who can track the details so well. "Sir, we have millions of lines of code, a few hundred programmers, testers, analysts, and we are 42.48403% complete to date." Right.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Yeah, I said stolen. Those contracts they offer are nothing more than legalized thievery. Most artists don't have legal ownership of the music they perform. Each artist gets generally $.07 from each song from any album. The artists are essentially forced to enter a one sided contract in favor of the music mogals. These guys have parties that i'm sure many of you would be aghast at the bill. The music mogals had made billions of dollars off the backs of the artists.
Don't get me wrong. These artists are not getting much money. They are essentially being ripped off of all their creative work. This has happened for decades. Once the moguls found out how to steal from the creative artists they used their power to do just that, ripped them off.
I don't care about the music mogals. I don't care about the people that are loosing their jobs. I don't care that they can't pay their bills. I don't care that the moguls are no longer making billions. I could care less. They can go and shove it up their asses. They need to go back to the artists and give them their fair share. They need to grant each artists retroactively all their fair share of the royalties that they would have earned. It's just sad that these dimwits were allowed to get so powerful.
How can anyone feel bad about downloading music when it is so obvious that the music moguls stole the music from the artists. Screw them all, we all should.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
You are forgetting something: Almost all usenet downloads take place from the NNTP server set up by the user's ISP. Each file is only transferred only once to each ISP via the Internet at large, rather than than once per user.
Also, you mischaracterised the the other side of the argument, too: a properly running torrent was many seed, and although each seed may have less uplink bandwidth than downlink bandwidth, the network as a whole should saturate the new peer's downstream bandwidth.
If it's in you sig, it's in your post.
Land is inherently rivalrous.
We can't all live on the same acre.
We can all copy the same file.
Find a way to copy land, though, and we'll talk.
While I agree with you that the people sampled were probably not the brightest bulbs on the tree, AFAIK Limewire doesn't download anything of its own volition.
It's probably not so much that "limewire downloaded some crap that messed up their computer" but rather that "they downloaded some crap using Limewire that messed up their computer." I believe the NRA has a catchy slogan that could be modified to fit these circumstances.
My truck is like a series of tubes.
This isn't really related to the original complaint, but yes, it would be nice if statistics were not misleading. Often they're intentionally misleading, and often "lies" would be a more accurate moniker than "misleading". But, it should generally be taken as granted, unless you're reading an original study that describes in detail its methods and analysis, that any statistic posed is far from accurate, that any inference drawn is drawn by the article's author and not by the study's author, and that summaries of that article will be even more wildly inaccurate than the article.