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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.
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 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.
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
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.
Add up the numbers for the top 500 illegal torrents on Pirate Bay and all the other torrent sites and I bet you'll get a much bigger total bandwidth than this. Popular TV shows and movies can have tens or even hundreds of thousands of downloaders. And that is happening 24/7, not just on a release.
Please, it's ridiculous to claim that the majority of torrent bandwidth is used for legal content. And it's pointless too. No one from the MPAA/RIAA is going to come one here and stop harassing pirates just because some people use the same protocol to download Linux. They don't care about that, what they do is to leach on the illegal torrents they do care about and then try to get the ISPs to tell them who was using the IP addresses they saw downloading.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
From the list of torrents downloaded please subtract
...but then how many of these people would have bought the content they downloaded?
Linux Distributions
Other 'free' Software
Non-Copyright Music
Non-Copyright Movies
Creative Commons Content
You still have a very large number of downloads
The industry always complains that they have lost $x million in sales but they do not allow for the fact that the vast majority of the downloaders would never buy what they downloaded?
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
No, ideas and physical objects are fundamentally different. I see nothing wrong with limited term copyrights -- 20 years, maybe less. Tell me, in what way would your incentive to create software be diminished if you could only hold the copyright for 20 years? Do you have any belief that you can make money from the 20 year old version of your software? If not, why shouldn't it pass into the public domain?
Ownership of physical objects makes sense because if I take your car, then you no longer have a car. If I copy your software... you still have your software. So there's no fundamental moral argument for the ownership of software. There is, however, a strong practical (not moral or ethical) argument for ownership of limited term copyrights, intended to promote creation of such works.