Slashdot Mirror
BitTorrent Use Up 24% Since November
dingalig writes "It looks as though the MPAA's fight against The Pirate Bay and other BitTorrent sites isn't going very well. Ars Technica reports that BitTorrent traffic is up by 24% since before the holidays. 'BitTorrent traffic spiked over the December holidays. After a peaking at almost 12.5 million downloaders on the 200 most popular files, traffic dropped at the beginning of January — about the time that school started up again. But one figure that will prove alarming to the content creation industry is that the numbers are higher now than they used to be. "The baseline has been elevated," notes [BigChampagne CEO Eric] Garland. "Not only did the spike happen, but the bar was raised."'"
Sounds like people started downloading more films when the TV shows started running out.
I'm guessing this has more to do with the fact that when there's nothing on TV to watch, people are more likely to download a film.
MPAA should sue the WGA
With all the publicity TPB et al has gotten with those ridiculous actions of MPAA, BitTorrent is now a mainstream. The same thing happened with Napster and the same thing would happen with private torrent sites when MPAA starts attacking them.
I wonder just how closely they selected the data on this study. More and more Linux distros are being torrented as are larger open source apps like OpenOffice. In fact, you can't get a LiveDVD outside of the torrent world right now...and rightly so. It's just more efficient that way. Let's also not forget all the companies out there like Blizzard that roll out software via torrenting. That leads me to wonder if they are just looking at BitTorrent traffic or ALL P2P combined.
Statistics can be manipulated to prove a point...87% of all people know that.
Anyone know any victims? Artists or creators whose works are widely pirated but who struggle to make a living?
Repton.
They say that only an experienced wizard can do the tengu shuffle.
the more torrents will slip through your fingers.
Well, the proof is clearly in the pudding. If school holidays didn't mark the end of anything decent on the tele I can assure you that the hoards of people wouldn't be racing off to download something better off the net than the horrid renditions of Dickens Christmas Carol being shown on the box.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
I used BitTorrent more during holidays to...download various linux distros, exchange vacation photos and videos with my friends, 'tested' my router, 'tested' comcast whether it complied with its own policy, downloaded movies i BOUGHT from BitTorrent.com and downloaded Farenheit 9/11 about 3 times just to be sure (after all Michael Moore allowed me to do).
So saying bittorrent usage is higher == movie/music stealing is higher is like saying iam getting poorer because the bush government's tax cuts benefit the rich only. Wait! Isn't that true? Sorry, its linking my home foreclosure with Bear Stearns bailout. Wait! Dammit Fox news, you have made me think like an idiot!
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
Seems logical, people grabbing some HD content for their HDTVs, combined with a general increase in userbase due to all the adverts the MPAA/RIAA keep running about TPB and bittorrent in general.
I don't trust any statistic that I didn't make up myself.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
The current authoritarian tactics are an obvious failure, and are causing substantial collateral damage to innocent victims of miss-targeted enforcement efforts. The solution isn't more of the same, but rather to accommodate human nature and evolving technology.
The only reason why P2P file sharing is a problem is because copyrights have been extended into perpetual special privileges. Copyrights were only needed in the first place due to the limitations of physical media and the brick and mortar distribution system. Both of those are now obsolete - as are the artificial market distortions justified by their limitations.
Just as the Internet offers a far more efficient distribution system, it also offers the ability to shorten the time require for a creator to recover fair value for his work before releasing (some) rights to the public domain. A modified dutch auction over the Internet provides the means for artists to be fully compensated at the moment they finish their creation. Once the artist has received fair value for a recorded performance, there isn't any need to attempt to control how consumers choose to use that recording. The P2P file sharing that today is called piracy, and used to justify ever more abusive intrusions into the rights of all people in order to enforce unnecessary copyright restrictions, becomes highly valuable viral promotion and distribution that benefits the artist.
Remember that the artist has already been cut of meaningful earnings from the reproduction and sale of recordings by the typical "all rights" contract terms imposed by the legacy record labels. Only a tiny percentage of artists earn a living from royalties on their recordings. For most artists, the primary benefit of selling records is just the publicity - they still make most of their money from live performances. File sharing and "word of mouth" on the Internet are much more effective promotion than the paid advertising of the legacy labels.
I guess you can expect the numbers to increase considering Demonoid is back.
My 65 year-old parents recently asked me how they could also watch all the shows & movies that I've been downloading all these years. So being the good son that I am, I set them up with uTorrent, the appropriate bookmarks, VLC, and a tutorial on how to handle everything. They were quite happy. :)
Sure - P2P has increased, but more and more software vendors are distributing their software using Bittorrent.
So saying an increase in P2P traffic is equivalent to a increase of illegal streams in not at all correct. A lot of Linux vendors also use P2P to distribute their distro's. A lot of them are about 4Gb in size, so that would be a nice increase of traffic. Also you will notice an increase of traffic within a few day's when the latest Ubuntu hit the web...
And it's not only the Open Source vendors that are using this distribution method. More and more Closed Source software makers ar starting to use this distribution channel, simply because it lowers the cost...
So - saying an increase of P2P traffic is the same as an increase of illegal content is absolutely not true!
BitTorrent is also critical to unsigned musicians such as myself who offer downloads of their music from their websites. P2P allows bandwidth to be contributed by one's fans, whereas direct HTTP downloads can bankrupt a struggling artist if one of their tracks becomes a sudden hit.
And yes I know there are many music hosting sites such as MySpace. But it's better for musicians to offer downloads from their own sites rather than to use a host.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
We're raising the bar, your world delivered, AT&T.
"Some books contain the machinery required to create and sustain universes."-Tycho
As a security and privacy feature, people shall now start to deploy full encrypted trackers on which only people they know can connect to (password or PSK). And that additionally to "public" trackers. Another thing, some transports should be able to hide randomly torrent traffic in well known protocols in order to avoid CPU efficient detection. Torrent traffic means data and control stuff from the tracker and other peers. The idea is to make tracking torrent users unreasonable and inefficient regarding net performance. Namely, torrent user tracking will cost a lot and would kill net efficiency.
I'll throttle my client back a bit.
--- We are not in the 8th dimension. We are over New Jersey.
In Australia a CD / DVD be around $40 (about US$37). Since this represents about $37 o' pure greed, it's no wonder t' people be votin' with their mouse. I say, when t' sea be rough, jump on t' starboard ship.
Arrr, ahoy landlubbers, we be PIRATES and YOU MPAA will be dancing the hempen jig.
consider coffee a lubricant that helps one penetrate the coding zone
As I was reading the article, they mentioned that you could download "whole seasons" of TV shows bundled together. While at the moment I'm downloading the whole series of Deep Space Nine. (Hey, I plan on buying the DVDs some day, I'm just broke at the moment.)
I'm thinking of also taking up the Marimba. I think it would be fairly easy as the bars are arranged just like piano keys.
What is it about my homepage that turns you off? I really appreciate your feedback.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
I'm doing my part..Are You?
Do you want to know more?--->www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMTz9nIUkGc
Available here---> http://www.mininova.org/tor/1010533
"Persistance is Fertile" - Me. I can quote myself if I want to.
I seem to recall that napster was a minority sport until it got media attention, then suddenly everyone I knew was using it .
I was at uni at the time, and probably unique in not knowing about filesharing till napster was being forced to close.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
And all p2p of copyrighted media is stealing, that must mean that DVD sales and box offices takings are down 24% in just four months.
Crikey, the industry must be really hurting!
In Portugal a regular music cd costs around 15euro ( +/- US$27 ) but you can find the latests games for 55/60euro ( about US$95 ), a movie is charged at 25euro ( about US$40 ) ... i pay for my 24/1 adsl 49euro ( about US$ 77 ) and i get 120gb + unlimited on national ISP's, i have 1.5 Tb of disk space, the choice is obvious...
Things are happening in the case against The Pirate Bay. One of the police officers involved in the investigation now works for Warner Brothers in Sweden. See here for more info.
/ The Arrow
"How lovely you are. So lovely in my straightjacket..." - Nny
Ok man, Im gunna be completely honest with you... I love this but I can send you shit I made up that sounds the same as alot of shit and singing isnt necessary but if your trying to make moeny or something I dunno but music is an awesome hobby and i can send you my own shit if you know a good way to do it (its guitar based) and maybe you can gain something from me like i did from you because thats what this internet thing is all about
ps ignore my bad grammer
Your homepage is fine, so I'd write it up as 'different tastes,' (if at all anything.)
A horse can't be sick, you know, even if he wants to.
Don't try and make a point about torrents not being 'piracy' by mentioning a few users who downloaded a Linux distro last winter. Anyone knows it's a flawed argument; they're statistically irrelevant anecdotes. Remember those words, as they apply in almost any debate where a general statement is made, and some not too bright person tries to refute it.
Well, obviously lots of people must be downloading the latest Mandriva Linux...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
PETER
So when the subroutine compounds the interest, right, it uses all these extra decimals places that just get rounded off. So we just simplify the whole thing and we just round it down and drop the remainder into an account that we own.
JOANNA
So you're stealing.
PETER
Ah, no. No. You don't understand. It's, uh, very complicated. It's, uh, it's, it's aggregate so I'm talking about fractions of a cent that, uh, over time, they add up to a lot.
JOANNA
Ok. So you're gonna make a lot of money, right?
PETER
Yeah.
JOANNA
Ok. That's not yours?
PETER
Well, it, it becomes ours.
JOANNA
How's that not stealing?
PETER
I don't think, I don't think I'm explaining this very well.
Should this not mean that there's going to be a 24% reduction in sales?
Actually, since the reason for the $220,000 fine for sharing 24 songs was "thousands of people could have downloaded it", this should really mean a 24,000% reduction!
Negative publishing is publishing. Many more people are now aware of the existence of bittorrent and, even worse, are aware how the entertainment industry deals with piracy. The consequences are simple: more and more people distrust the entertainment industry and start using p2p networks (among which bittorrent).
How does the entertainment industry respond? Not by removing or reducing the reason of illegal downloads. Not by gaining trust with the people. No, imagine that sales might actually go up because the price is actually affordable and/or you could easily buy the song or movie you want without any additional crap.
Instead of putting energy in sales (adapting to the market), they put energy in piracy (lobby to get various ineffective, annoying laws applied; suing their clients; Digital Restrictions Management). Result: because of the various annoyances and of the bad reputation of the entertainment industry, piracy increases.
If they'd just adapt to the market, their problem would disappear like snow for the sun (or, at least, reduce to acceptable proportions).
Email it to michael@geometricvisions.com
I hope to earn money from live performances someday, but I'm determined that my recordings will always be free.
For now, my aim is to build a base of fans who might buy tickets to my shows someday, and to study piano and music theory so that a few years from now, when I can pass the entrance audition, I can enroll in music school to study musical composition.
I want to compose symphonies someday!
Request your free CD of my piano music.
It is what makes up our culture. Sometimes we, as a society, have seen fit to let the laborer execercise some limited degree of control over the fruits of the labor. This does not mean any one person can own their labor, any more than they can own a sunset.
There, I fixed that for you. Sounds like a crappy way to structure a society... good thing nobody would ever be stupid enough to go for it. Oh wait...
I write software for a living. If I stop getting paid for it, I'll stop doing it. There won't be any more sunsets, for the ~1,000 people who are dependent on my software. You can claim "society owns the idea" all you want, but "ideas" are hard to compile. Society has not produced workable bytecode, except insofar as "society" has chosen to make a "market" and the market pays enough to make it worthwhile for one engineer to create bytecode. (And to market and whatnot, which are my more important contributions. It wouldn't help society out very much if the solution were buried in the basement water closet behind a sign that said Beware Of The Hairy OSS Programmer, right?)
http://www.bingocardcreator.com/
Here is my broken OSS competitor. Get cracking, it needs a LOT of work. I suggest starting by fixing whatever the bug is that prevents it from working on Windows. Then you might clean up the GUI a bit. Go on, get cracking -- you owe it to society, after all.
http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/bingo-cards
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
-
1. A page should only one screen (doesn't include the browsers menus and tool bars etc....) worth of information. (There are exceptions such as a lot of text based info which should be broken up roughly every screen anyway.)
- 2. A menu system should be universal to all pages, like what you have on the first page.
- 3. Whitespace is good, except when you have too much.
- 4. It should be obvious what link is meant for which pic.
Other wise, I'd have said it is simple therefore not too bad. I wouldn't personally have your colour combinations, but that is a preference and it still is a good look. Should I mention you have got further than I have as I don't have any content to display therefore no website?? Ah my sig lives again.Semi-automatic amateur armchair Australian philosopher; conjecture ready at any moment...
Miro is a video feed aggregator, player, search tool, downloader with torrent support; recently out of beta and has improved a lot.
The Miro folks are even trying to help people distribute their videos via bittorrent, esp. as a way to get full SD and HD shows published at low cost.
It kind of competes with Youtube, but with better video quality. It even handles feeds from Youtube.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
MPAA Are still going? I thought they were dead and buried.
PirateBay's publicity, and the fact that pirate movies make awesome, cheap, gifts then it's no wonder. And you always have people "I'll download illegally this once for Christmas" who end up continuing their downloading.
They remind me of that song "I Get knocked down..."
So the substitution doesn't fit. And confusing labor with the product of labor is disingenuous.
Both revenues and profits in the entertainment industry continue to increase in the face of rampant copying because it allows people to become exposed to far more material that they had forgotten about or never knew they liked. That's a huge contrast to having our culture rented out to us based on what multinational corps perceive to be trendy and market-able.
They blew it. Right at the moment when everybody was about to go online, media corps were writing legislation for obscene amounts of entitlements over content produced by people already long dead, and introducing medieval concepts like "intellectual property".
I do believe in copyright to an extent, as most people do here and elsewhere. But I wouldn't encourage you to enforce it to a very large degree unless you want to remain obscure.
Just wondering if anyone knows if it'd be feasible to make a "distributed website" via torrent, with a "bittorrent browser"?
No idea what the actual USE would be, but it's been churning in my skull, off and on, for a bit.
"After a peaking at almost 12.5 million downloaders on the 200 most popular files, traffic dropped at the beginning of January"
Well, probably the main reason for this is one of those 200 most popular files (well, several 'cause lots of people seeded different copies): The new Christmas episode of Doctor Who!
Lots of us Yanks would rather not wait 6-8 months to get their Who fix when the sci-fi channel finally gets around to it.
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
Now that we have started acting like children we should be treated like children. I'll expect George Clooney to come by my house, give me a cookie and prop up my self esteem.
Canadians:
$5 per month of your internet bill and 2% of blank cd/dvd price goes to the Canadian music & film industries.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Not personally, but Martin Korth from NO$GBA seems to be getting the raw deal from piracy. He does everything right, with a free version for casual gamers, a cheap version for non-commercial use (which I use, it's a fine piece of software), no DRM, no activation, no required CD-ROMs, only non-invasive watermarks. Yet, apparently, he suffers from large amounts of piracy, if you believe his site. He seems awfully bitter about the whole affair, and he's relying partially on donations to keep NO$GBA running.
But that's only the shallow, superficial definition of victim. It's still possible to be a victim if you're not impoverished.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
They released Nordkalotten 365 as a bittorent file, saved oodles of money in the process, and now we hear usage is up. Add the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's Canada's Next Great Prime Minister to the mix and of course the numbers will skyrocket. Downloading television shows illegally is so passé.
The opinions expressed in this post are not necessarily those of my brain.
That 25% increase might be higher if they didn't block bugmenot user names AND at the same time their stupid registration page doesn't work for me in any browsers either. I used them a lot until all of that happened.
"During My Service In The United States Congress, I Took The Initiative In Creating The Internet." -Al Gore
Instead of embracing P2P and offering low-resolution (say no higher than 320x240 with low bitrates) versions of your movies available for pennies or even no cost (maybe embed advertisements for discounted DVDs, or trailers for upcoming DVD and theatrical releases) you instead chose to start a public campaign slandering all P2P usage.
For me, ALL of my P2P usage is legit (linux distros, etc). I no longer try before I buy. When I was, I was buying anywhere from 5 to 15 DVDs per month. Now I buy two or three per month. I buy maybe one CD a year because the RIAA chose to bite the hand that feeds it. I have reduced my DVD purchases for the same reason - you are trying to squelch new technology and what you DO offer in downloadable formats, you INSIST on crippling it with DRM, which breaks fair use and prevents me from watching the content on my computer (I run Linux).
With your propaganda, all you have succeeded in doing is providing bittorrent free publicity. Joe Sixpack, who was previously totally unaware that bittorrent even existed, is now using it for everything from music to movies to software.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Tragic. My heart bleeds for them. I'm crying, I'm crying like a baby.
Arrr ! Hoist the Jolly Roger ! Death to the copyright lobby !
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
December was an interesting month for the torrent trackers. its was free leech for like 5 out of the 8 sites with passwords, that i visit. then January is the seeding month for all the leeching that transpired, GO BITS. GO BANANA!
I recently set up torrentflux on my always-on box at home, sharing some music from Jamendo and the latest Kubuntu beta. Nothing wrong with that. But I sometimes wonder if someone will see that I'm running a bittorrent node and attack me because of that, without bothering to notice what content I am sharing.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Its an erroneous but very common mistake to presume the amount of P2P traffic is directly relative to the amount of copyrighted music being illegally traded. It seems to me that more and more legal stuff (device drivers, service packs etc) are being made available as torrents, in some cases exclusively.
For example, many popular linux distros are made available as torrents. I wonder how much of the spike is actually down to the fact that people are fed up with vista and downloading alternatives to it?
I download the occasional TV show via torrent. I justify it because my tv is not working. So the choice the tv producers have is: I plain just don't watch their show.. or I was it and they at least get the in-program advertisement out to me. Doritos for instance. Mmm doritos.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
1. A page should only one screen (doesn't include the browsers menus and tool bars etc....) worth of information. (There are exceptions such as a lot of text based info which should be broken up roughly every screen anyway.)
Break everything up in to screen sized pages?
Do you work for a newspaper or ad agency?
No, I read books. And the aforementioned maligned companies only use the length of the screen, and a 5 word width. My 'idea' is revolutionary because it uses the width of the screen! I admittedly did misspeak as the pages can have more than one screen of info, however it should be in screen sized chunks. People would rather a book be thick, rather than tall; they too should be around 2 - 3 (avg)palm lengths tall, but can be wider than a palm is long. More than that and people tend to turn off.
Semi-automatic amateur armchair Australian philosopher; conjecture ready at any moment...
> Why the analogy with Royalty.
Because the RIAA makes (or rather, buys) the laws.
There are other ways to make money, or even a living off of art. Those should be pursued rather than trying to get our government to spend lots of money to enforce unenforceable laws.
If you were truly thinking of the artists, you would want them to have a stable income from a reasonable source. Not hope that they could somehow manage a living under a system that is no longer possible.
Laws won't kill piracy any more than prohibition killed bars. Sometimes you have to work with people, not against them.
This is *not a hypothetical* -- Sourceforge gives out downloads as public information, and so do I.
My OSS competitor has been downloaded 40 times in the last week.
http://sourceforge.net/project/stats/detail.php?group_id=47026&ugn=bingo-cards&type=prdownload
My software has been downloaded 40 times in the last thirty minutes.
(A related statistic, which typically tracks at a ratio of about 1 of these to 1.2 downloads: http://www.bingocardcreator.com/stats/bingo-card-downloads )
There are a variety of reasons for that. One is that my software actually works and the OSS version is broken. The other is that the profit incentive makes it worthwhile for me to spend a sigificant amount of time and money promoting the use of the software, rather than just uploading it to a server somewhere with a description that doesn't even address the needs of the end user and then calling it a day.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
>>
Well if you open source the code im sure that someone who needs* a "bingo card creator" would be happy to contribute
>>
I gave you a link to the OSS project in grandparent. It hasn't seen a patch since 2004. Reality sucks, doesn't it.
>>
*disclaimer: no one needs this.
>>
This is why we let customers decide what they "need" instead of letting lazy programmers on Slashdot decide it. Customers have signaled, via paying me ~$18,000, that they really do need this.
http://www.bingocardcreator.com/stats/sales-by-month
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.