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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."
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Or people could rip songs from vinyl, tapes, or CDs that they already own. Or they could have cheap music from online sources that is cheaper than $1/track, like Amie Street.
How much would it cost to fill an iPod with songs from used CDs?
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
"36.4% of the world's computers have LimeWire installed"
That's some damned weak logic, since LimeWire's real reason for existance (and the RIAA's opposition to it) is for independant artists to get their music out.
The RIAA labels have radio and empty-v. Since the RIAA effectively killed "internet radio" P2P is all the indies have.
Now someone please tell me, I heard a song by some indie whose name I don't remember named "scatterbrain". There are literally hundreds of different songs with that name. How can I get a copy of the lagal song I want without ACCIDENTALLY downloading some crap RIAA song with the same name?*
The war against P2P is a war against their competetitors, the independant musicians.
-mcgrew
* Fuck LimeWire, Morpheus has a check box where you don't automatically share downloaded files. The RIAA can go fuck themselves. Hey guess what they are!
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
That's probably more people than have floppy drives. I personally don't even know what limewire looks like, but I do have bittorrent installed and have only used it for downloading linux distro ISO's. I don't know about you, but I'd rather put useful data on my hard drive than crappy media files that waste the space on my drive. I have some mp3's, about 3 gigs of it, ripped from my entire CD collection and stuff I burnt to a disc and then ripped from iTunes, but I can attest that I don't even think of looking at bittorrent sites or limewire, eMule, or whatever, when I want something new. Anyway I used to have the old school Napster before it was abolished, but that was the end of my IP stealing days...and I haven't even a single one of those media files, because that host died long ago. Just about when I decided to make a living by producing and selling some of my own IP, I stopped deciding that I should look for ways to steal other people's. It is possible you know not to steal shit just because you can.
Speak for yourself.
From the report linked to in the article, the data was collected when users went to a site (pcpitstop.com) and allowed their computers to be scanned so that the software could find "performance improvements" and make suggestions for their machine. Although I'm sure it was buried in the fine print of the TOS, I wonder how many people realized they were allowing this type of information to be sold to data mining and/or marketing companies.
I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.
When I was an undergrad I was downloading some Linux ISO (required for work) and meanwhile playing a game of DotA, a Warcraft 3 mod.
WC3 maintains a direct connection to all the other players in the game -- it uses a P2P network model rather than client-server -- but uses a trivial amount of bandwidth (under 10 KB/sec).
The network admins saw someone with connections open to residential ISP IP addresses and using a lot of bandwidth (ignoring the connection to ftp.mandrake.com or whatever) and call me to tell me that they're killing all my open connections due to P2P download abuse.
WTF?
That's the upside. The down side is that everything gets pushed through every link which means more than 3TB/day. A modern design would be a cached pull system. Say you request part afba76a7b687af6b87fa6b87a6fbaf67 (hash sum), it goes to the local central, which checks local store (basicly a LRU disk cache), if not requests it from regional central, who'll again request it from the national central, who'll keep requesting it up the chain. If none of the caching servers can help, ultimately you connect to the torrent and get it from one of the seeds. Your ISP can cache it on the way out too, so you seed once and the backbone doesn't need to pull it from your seed line more than once. If the cache expires, it can be reseeded again as long as there's peers like with regular torrents. Basicly, no wasteful transfer because there's no traversal without enduser, it only passes once over a link, no expirery as long as someone is seeding. Technically, this is not really difficult it's legally the problem is. With many switching to encrypted torrents this kind of acceleration just isn't possible.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Also, internet radio is not currently affected in cases where it plays an unsigned artist's material, as royalties only apply to copyrighted tracks. Correct me if I'm wrong on that, but the only way royalties hurt IR is that it's harder to get many people to listen to a purely indie station.
I'm sure there are services out there that make it easy to find, sample, and download independent music for free. If they exist, they aren't well known enough (at least not well enough for me to have heard of them and know what they are). The only one I can think of is Myspace, and there are piracy problems there as well.
I fully agree that the RIAA is rightfully threatened by increasingly easy recording, production, and distribution of quality independent music. However, as long as this walks hand in hand with rampant piracy, they will always find it a wise move to suppress it. It's a given that P2P systems that allow sharing of entire libraries, with no restrictions, will inevitably result in heavy piracy (that's human behavior - no matter how much the recording industry complains).
Here's what I think would make for a wildly successful way for artists to distribute their work, easily, cheaply, and without fuss:
An easy to access system, requiring no login, that allows you to freely sample it's entire library of music. Let the artists themselves select their sample clips.
Focus on a combination of samples (since many artists might not want to give it all away) and full tracks (for those who want to gamble on popularity, or are trying to get their name out).
Controlled uploads - ie I can't just start sharing my collection of Pink Floyd (all legal except for my beloved bootlegs). You want it to be easy for an artist to put up their work (and keep the requirements for "artist" as loose as possible), but make it harder for someone to put up material that is not theirs.
Absolute separation from the sale of these tracks - this isn't a requirement, but will help keep the system from eventually degenerating into a profit-driven system.
Checksum system, or other similar method, of identifying a track (and allowing the uploader to retain their rights later, except for the free distribution of what they have already released).
Adoption of any current DRM models, but without utilizing it's restrictive nature - just enough to be supported by DRM-driven software.
A means to keep the servers and bandwidth flowing without requiring a standard business model (ie go for advertising revenue - everyone hates it, but it works better than subscription and praying for donations).
Tie this with a venue system (ie see where the listed artists are playing, and make it easy for them to get a gig, tied heavily to their tracks)
And of course, a good user rating system, to make it easier for truly good work to rise to the forefront, but limited enough to where it's hard for heavy marketing to do anything more than draw attention to something (ie you cannot offer prioritized placement of a track in a rating system - the best you could do is pay for banner ads highlighting the artist)
The key is to make the system as trustworthy as possible (ie any complaints the RIAA has should be spurious, and DRM is used against them in that it marks the tracks as being from a trusted source), and focus on it's main goal (distribution of unsupported artists in a way that is difficult to , and steering clear of the politics of IP). Also, there has to be a means of selling the music, though it might be a good idea for the actual sales to be done from elsewhere (so there is little conflict of interest).
End result, independent artists have an easy way to get their names out, and the RIAA has a target that they can't blame for piracy. This forces the RIAA to either put on a white hat and not interfere with some
Do not confuse "Freedom of Choice" with "Free Will".
The ISPs could save massive amounts of money on content distribution if only they could cache it all closer to the enduser. They cannot do this now because the distribution is illegal. DRM was supposed to solve this problem by making it so that anybody could download anything but only those with the correct permissions could use the content. DRM however is flawed in that it just cannot work, smart people who want the content will always prevail. Attack is vastly simpler than defense (a good offense is always better than a good defense).
The solution is to have the sales of music go through a third party distributor (iTunes, Amazon, Napster, Rhapsody, whatever) and have the ISP distribute the actual content. The key here is that the ISPs would have to allow any third party to sell their content through the distribution network to maintain their status as common carriers. Record labels get paid, independent artists and small record labels have the same access to a massively scalable distribution network as the big guys and best of all the load on the network goes down substantially.
It strikes me as odd that they single out Limewire, since Gnutella (which Limewire runs) really isn't that prevalent in the first place and other User Agents are way, way more prevalent than Limewire. Depending on where in the world you happen to be situated, BitTorrent, eDonkey, Ares or Winny/Winmx/Perfect Dark would be the preferred poison, both in terms of hosts and bandwidth consumed.
Which is not to say that there isn't a lot of gnutella out there, but 1/3 of all (consumer) hosts is sheer hogwash. No way I'll be paying for that report, but it sounds like they could be making some very odd assumptions about Gnutella based on network traffic (i.e identify *all* non-port 443 SSL as Gnutella or something equally silly), or just got an extremely skewed host pool they're looking at.
You're applying the adjective "imaginary" to the wrong noun. Indeed, you're applying it to a noun that isn't even there. You may not have noticed, but not once have I referred to "imaginary property law" (which would contain the ambiguity you describe).
It is the "property" that is only imaginary, because it is a non-rivalrous good with a very low marginal cost. In other words, we can both have a copy without deleting the other person's and it's cheap to make more copies. The law tries to make it rivalrous by giving the author legal rights to prevent duplication and certain other things, but it can't do much of anything about the low marginal cost, so a black market flourishes. Yes, they've tried things like blank CD levies, but those don't seem to do much.
As for the propaganda comment, I'd say that you must be new here, but come on. Believe it or not, I do not represent any government or business, just myself. To call it "propaganda" because you think I'm sensationalizing a report that's going to get passed off to those in power as saying exactly what I said it implies is a bit much. I know the report is badly flawed. That's actually part of why it's newsworthy.
Finally, you should have realized something already, but I can't count on that if you think that adjectives like "imaginary" modify nouns like "law" that aren't there, so I'll tell you outright: I know all this because I am the submitter and I was the first I know of to coin the term "imaginary property." Don't worry, though. You can use that term freely, as much as you want.
You're welcome.
Oh I know! Why don't we throw 1/3rd of the world population into jail!!!!
Or maybe, just maybe, the IP laws as they stand now are not sufficient to meet the demand of the populace in what and how they expect content to be transfered/delivered/received.
Hmmm, how about making it so that ACs web links aren't clickable.
They ARE out to get you simply because They are in it for themselves and they don't care about you.