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."

Comments

I bet it's closer to 100%

[melted]

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.

Re:I bet it's closer to 100%

[servognome]

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".

Infringements:
1. Hello World is a registered trademark of Servognome Corp. Any use or redistribution without the implied oral consent of Servognome is strictly prohibited
2. Patent #45239223 - Display of the words "Hello World" on a digital device

thankfully

[SoupGuru]

Thankfully all of us that have eMule installed are downloading purely legal files.

Constitutional Rights?

[fataugie]

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!

Re:Constitutional Rights?

[blueg3]

Certainly you understand that statistics and expressed opinions have nothing to do with constitutional rights. They're free to make estimates and inferences all they want.

Re:Constitutional Rights?

[Entropius]

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?

36.4% of the world's computers have LimeWire insta

[sm62704]

"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!

Nice title slashdot

[moogied]

Jesus christ, do we have 10 year olds running the headlines now?

Your Rights Online: Report Says 36.4% of World's Computers Infringe on IP

...uh no it doesn't. It says 36.4 use limewire. It does not then say "100% of limewire usage infringes on IP."

Re:It always amuses me

[Hognoxious]

Have you heard of SHHHHHHH?

Re:It always amuses me

[c_g_hills]

usenet.com is commonly confused with Usenet. One is a for-profit company; the other is a global, decentralized, distributed Internet discussion system.

Re:It always amuses me

[rob1980]

The first rule of NNTP is that we do not talk about NNTP.

The Report Continues...

[flaming error]

31.2% of computers infringe TCP.
22.9% infringe UDP.

The report doesn't mention other protocols, but as IPv6 gains ground, we're all sure to see lots more infringement.

Voluntary systems scans

[TheLostSamurai]

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.

Re:Voluntary systems scans

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Almost all computers use IP

[corsec67]

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.

Re:36.4% of the world's computers have LimeWire in

[Locklin]

Indie artists can use HTTP (and Torrent if necessary), theres plenty of willing hosts.

The Live Music Archive The live music archive provides high quality live concerts in a download-able format. The Internet Archive aims preserve and archive as many live concerts as possible for current and future generations to enjoy. All music in this Collection is from trade-friendly artists and is strictly noncommercial, both for access here and for any further distribution. Jamendo Jamendo offers free access and free download of music tracks, published with Creative Commons licences. On Jamendo, the Artists choose to give access to their music for free to the users. Users are encouraged to donate to artists, and artists earn money from add revenue. Magnature Listen to complete albums for free. If you like what you hear, download an album for as little as $5 (you pick the price), or buy a real CD, or license our music for commercial use. MP3s & WAVs, and no copy protection (DRM). FreeIndie.com A smaller selection of independent artists in various genres. Free to download. IndieFeed A free podcast of independent artists from around the world. CBC Radio 3 A popular weekly podcast featuring new Canadian rock, pop, hip-hop, singer-songwriters, alt-country and electronica.

Re:40000 songs = $40,000 sounds right to me

[LMacG]

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.

Re:It always amuses me

[Kjella]

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.

Re:It always amuses me

[squiggleslash]

Both are different? As opposed to one being different, and the other one not being different? ;-)

Re:That's It?

[PPH]

The other 2/3 are still waiting for Vista to boot. Or copy one CD.

(Ducking and running from the inevitable Troll mod points.)

Re:It always amuses me

[Cajun Hell]

One is more different than the other.

Re:It always amuses me

[Frnknstn]

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.