Slashdot Mirror
Sweden Sees Boom In Legal Downloading
Quantos writes with word that in Sweden, in addition to a drop in traffic following the introduction of the IPRED anti-file sharing law, the country also saw a doubling of legal downloads. "The sale of music via the Internet and mobile phones has increased by 100 percent since the Swedish anti-file sharing IPRED law entered into force last week, according to digital content provider InProdicon. '...I don't know if this is only because of IPRED, but it is definitely a sign of a major change,' said managing director Klas Brännström. InProdicon provides half of the downloaded tunes in Sweden via several online and mobile music services." Meanwhile The Pirate Bay's anticipated VPN service has seen over 113,000 requests for beta invitations since late last month; 80% are from Sweden. Traffic numbers may begin to rise again once the service goes live.
I give it six months. All it needs is some "anonymizing" P2P network to appear and it will go all the way back down the big snake to square 1.
No sig today...
The VPN mentioned is kinda bizarre if you think about it.
First, the whole strength of bit-torrent is scalability through it's use of edge connections avoiding a central hub.
VPN would necessarily be through a central hub and thus not direct peer to peer.
I suppose perhaps they are thinking that the p2p would continue outside the VPN but the low bandwidth tracker and maybe some of he handshaking would be contacted via VPN?
It's not dead obvious what is meant since it is often the case that when a user invokes a VPN, the the OS's entire network adapter switches over to the Vitrual one and the physical one is not used except to transact the VPN connection. (hence making the VPN transparent to the client browsers and such)
On the flip side, this would be a very special VPN nexus not just a general purpose one: namely if you ran all the p2p traffic through it then nearly all the requests would be for packets that had already passed through the nexus earlier. So hanging a cache off the nexus would make things simpler. It would no longer be p2p at all but rather a clearing house for packets of common interest.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
and so SOME started buying legally
SOME is the operative word.
Since they didn't give numbers, they didn't compare in any way to the change in illegal downloads and it's a highly biased source I have to assume the number of legal downloaders has gone up from some small number to two times some small number. Probably only a fraction of the illegal downloads.
They're trying to create the standard "everybody's doing it and you should too" dishonest marketing BS. Similar to the recent windows netbook "stories".
---
The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
Given that they don't want to give actual numbers, for all we know sales went from 1 to 2 (100% increase). This whole article is a propaganda piece.
it may not be ralted to Ipred laws at all, maybe they just ran a huge advertising campaign, or maybe there could be other causes, does anyone know how much online music sales have fluctuated globaly in that time period?, it wouldn`t surprise me if more people where buying music track by track online rather than by CD in the shops with the global economy in the state its in.
Um, no. What you claim is wrong.
Many bands do, but most don't. You could have said that many bands release free as in speech and as in beer music, too. Most of those that I like, however, don't.
As, unfortunately, musical tastes don't work like software, nobody chooses the music they like based on the respect they get from the artist and/or distributor. So most people can't "try before buy" unless they change or limit their musical tastes. And this doesn't sound reasonable to me.
Because "piracy" went down 1/3 from the IPRED fluffers and went up 100% from IPRED fluffers.
Therefore, if there were more than 3x the number of people "pirating" there is a net loss in numbers of music downloads. For each of those no longer being made, this wasn't about getting stuff for free.
Now, since we've been told the losses to piracy is several quadrillion dollars, Sweden has a few million users, this must mean that, if your proposition is correct, that the legal download business was previously a multi-trillion-dollar business and is now worth twice that.
Something doesn't add up...