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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.
If they're counting all torrents, then yes the content/patches of WoW would certainly count for a fair bit.
But you'd have to be rather naive to think Linux distros and other legal content (not including WoW) are in any way a measurable part of the total torrent traffic. I have no stats of course (this is Slashdot), except to say that whenever you look at the top listings of torrents being hosted on say TPB, I can see TV shows, Movies, Games and Music. No Linux.
I don't trust any statistic that I didn't make up myself.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
That could simply be because Linux distros don't need to use TPB since they have their own trackers.
Money for nothing, pix for free
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.
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
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
Well, obviously lots of people must be downloading the latest Mandriva Linux...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
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
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.
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.