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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...
While going from 18 to 36 legal sales is technically a doubling... I'm not sure I'd call it a boon.
Here, we are led to believe that Swedes are naturally a bunch of thieving leeches, only cowed by John Law.
I always thought they were all giant blond buxom women who gave excellent massages.
I am so disappointed.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Just because there are more people in Los Angeles county than the entire country of Sweden, don't think you'll get away with this blatant troll.
Wait a minute... aren't Trolls from Sweden? D'oh!
I know, its harsh and maybe too soon, but essentially that is what is going on here. Finally, a real credible threat of prosecution due to file sharing, and so SOME started buying legally. Sales go up and now this is going to be used by corps as evidence that we need stricter online laws etc etc, file sharing dies, corps rake in more dough for subpar products. Nothing good will come of this... that is of course until smart, talented coders come up with even a more anonymous way of sharing that keeps everyone's nose out of our business. Pirate Bay is trying something in this respect, but not quite there, still just disguising you using the old method. New guys will code around this by summer and things will go back to normal - I will hope.
Parent should be modded +1, Troll, but there seems to be some difficulty with that.
After sweeping porn and prostitution tax collection laws were passed, the legal purchase of properly documented strippers and prostitutes in Sweden increases by 75%. Officials have begun talks into other laws that can be passed to decrease syphilis, the plague, torn euros, smudged photos, and world hunger.
So what does this demonstrate other than that strong legal prohibitions and penalties can affect how people behave?
An extreme example: if a country passed a law making it a capital crime to buy cheese from anyone other than the King's brother, I imagine that 1) the level of activity in the open cheese markets would go down markedly the day after the law was passed; and 2) Regis Frater CheeseCo would be booming.
So again, how is this result surprising and/or newsworthy? Isn't this exactly what you'd expect unless Swedes are totally disrespectful of their country's legal system already? (Give 'em a few more laws like this and they might get there!)
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.
They just gave the ??AA a budget for their lobbyists of "more is better". They've killed the Internet.
There's no way that group wouldn't neuter the Bill of Rights for that kind of money, and there's no way our elected representatives won't sell out. It's over. It's been nice knowing y'all.
In five years let's get together on I2:The guerrilla mesh WWAN.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
DNRTFA, but given the source I'd hold my horses until someone with a less obvious bias comments on the effects of the law.
I read the article and his blog and came to the conclusion that somewhere some medical professionals are looking for him.
I don't see anything on his site that has any verifiable information on it. He's put a lot of work into trying to connect the dots, but to me it just sounds like a conspiracy theory nut.
Some people are only alive because it's against the law for me to hunt them down and kill them.
So its back to the CD days. You couldn't really listen to the music and were forced to buy the cd so now instead of being able to download, listen and then reject all the crap people are now forced to download/buy crap.
It's not my intention to troll, but this is a little sensationalist.
Many bands will allow you to listen to their entire album before purchase via free streaming.
It's inconvenient, the quality ranges from poor to mediocre, but it does address the 'try before you buy' concern. Saying that we are now forced to buy our music before listening to it is false.
-I only code in BASIC.-
Swedish anti-file sharing IPRED law entered into force last week, according to digital content provider InProdicon.
I'm sorry, but I'd use any numbers provided by content providers with a grain, or a block, of salt. It would not surprise me in the least if numbers weren't fluffed a little or a lot to provide further leverage for future legislation.
Many swedes are quite cautious by nature, this dip is no bigger than the dip in chips and other products which produced large doses of acryl-amid which was a scary report a few years back.
People are waiting for other people to tell them that it's actually quite all right to download, that the risks aren't all that high until they start downloading again.
The more conscious level of people are just waiting for a legal precedent, since the fact is that no-one currently knows exactly how easy it is to be caught using today's measures.
The thing is, there's the requirement of strong evidence and a proportionally big damage has to done.
No-one knows what this means yet, uploading is being referenced as one of those things, massive scale is another.
So, it might very well turn out that only original seeders are truly affected by this law.
Personally, I'm keeping my traffic down by not downloading in HD and only using private trackers.
Also, I checked the private alternatives, and they all suck, seriously.
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.
You expect us to be impressed by a percentage increase over a trivial base?
You have no chance to survive make your time.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
So there's a big change in threat level. People download what they want before the law goes into effect, then pause so the legal system will clog up with others before they resume as they're sure to make a big push and media splash now. At the same time, people again decide to try out the legal options and see if they suck less now. This month's figures are pretty much meaningless, because both are natural and temporary reactions. Give it a little while and people will want new stuff again, done the rounds and found P2P is still superior, the threat exaggerated and the legal systems full (try prosecuting a country with over 1mio file sharers of a population less than 10mio) and want to convict robbers and rapists and murderers instead of file sharers that won't pay. Give it 3-6 months and you'll see if there's any real change here or just blowing smoke.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
"I doubt it if even so much as one percent of all people here ever buy anything after they decide they like it."
I actually know a few people who do (including myself), when they have cash to spare - at least when it comes to music. People with low income like us students aren't going to be buying a DVD of every movie we want to see, but 99ct for a song or 7-10 Euros for an album that we can stream online is quite acceptable.
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.
Don't forget most places that sell CDs do let you listen to them. Even Wal-Mart has/had those preview machines that let you listen to stuff. Proper run music shops will normally let you listen to quite big chunks of the CD if you ask.
Some people are just cheap and don't want to pay because the option to preview has been there for ages. If you need to listen to every single second of the CD then there is something wrong with you.
Indeed. The record industry sanctioned alternatives, including services like Spotify, have been growing in popularity since long before the IPRED law. They continue to grow at roughly the same rate. Only relative to the non-sanctioned downloads have they grown significantly, and seriously, this is probably just a bump in the graph. This is not sensational news.
"Stop failing the Turing test!" -- Dilbert
someone like kdawson?
HAHAHAHAHA
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
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...
"Being a consistent USENET user since I discovered it, I find your idea fascinating. To this day I don't get what the big deal is with bittorrent as opposed to USENET, especially with yEnc on binaries so the encoding overhead is relatively low."
Well there's ONE difference between Usenet and BT. BT is relatively free while with the dropping of Usenet from ISPs selection, most have to purchase an account from an independent. Considering the download demographic I can see why free would take precedence.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
Of course they're going to fucking say they're successful! Where are they getting those figures from? Yeah, they made them up! Anything to make it look like they're winning.
Well, the problem of a listening booth from the perspective of someone trying to sell the music, besides the "if you travel to the store, you're probably already going to buy something" bit mentioned by an AC, which in the context of trying to sell means you still have to get them to the store, is that the listening once or twice is just that, listening once or twice -- it doesn't let you get /addicted/ to it.
Now what I do most of the time is listen to shoutcast streams, but this would go for the radio (too many programmable zombie targeted ads, content generally to broad and/or bland) or P2P/USENET/Web downloading (too troublesome when I can get exactly what I'm in the mood for off a dozen shoutcast channels) too. After I've heard a song a few times, I may decide I like even more than the usual channel content -- and want more from that (group of) artist(s).
With shoutcast metadata streams too, it's easy enough to note the artist, album, etc, and watch for more. The next (intermediate) step would be actively searching out more, P2P, web, streamripper-and-filesearch. The final step is finding it actually interesting enough to buy the whole album or often whole series of albums of. That can mean checking at the store next time you're in, or buying online.
The problem with listening stations is that it doesn't allow that interest build-up to the point I'm willing to go to the trouble to find and then pay the money to buy the album, or often, entire series of albums. I'm not going to spend hours in the listening booth, doing JUST that, but if I have the songs available to listen to at my leisure, while I'm doing my Gentoo updates, reading /., playing a game, working around the house or in the car on the way to work (or /at/ work, for the lucky ones), I AM going to find some of them "addictive" enough to buy, and from experience, when I do, it's often NOT just a single album.
Of course, that's the whole P2P/streaming users buy MORE music, not less, phenomenon so often mentioned 'round these parts.
Duncan
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master,
and if you use the program, he is your master."
R Stallman
There was this church somewhere which developed a bad reputation with the Church officials for low attendance, so one day the bishop reluctantly decides to replace its priest with a new, younger one, who has been given instructions to do his best to bring more people in.
So it happens, and for the next few weeks there are no news from the new priest. Finally, after a month, a report comes in: "church attendance has increased 100%!" The bishop is ecstatic and wishes to award the new priest at the first opportunity so he schedules a visit.
He arrives on a Sunday and stays there for the morning Mass, the midday Mass and the evening Mass but is confused. Finally he turns to the priest and asks him - "Is that all? I've been here the whole day and I only ever saw two little grannies in the pews?!" - the young priest replies "Yes, your excellency, there was only one little granny attending before my mother started coming!"
The moral of the story is - don't trust percentages without raw numbers!
-- Sig down
This may be true for some albums, but most are cheaper in a DRM-free downloadable format.
For instance:
Muse - Black Holes & Hurricanes. Almost 15 Euros on Amazon.de, 10 Euros at 7Digital.de.
The older Muse albums are 7,50 on 7Digital.de and 8 Euros on Amazon.de. Sure, they're not that much cheaper, but not more expensive either. The tagging on 7Digital.de is good, and the album art (embedded in tags) is 800x800. Okay, lossless would be nice, but hey, I guess you can't have everything ;)...
Also, you're forgetting that most online sales are of single songs. If you only want one song off of a CD, you're probably better off getting it on iTunes or something similar than shelling out 7+ Euros for the CD...
I do believe serious music fans do buy more music from downloading. The problem is that there are a lot of people that don't. A lot of chavs and barely literate people who are just getting into computing see the internet as a way to save money not expand their musical tastes.
Mind you that doesn't mean I believe the RIAA should keep pushing to sue people. They do need to focus on more options but we shouldn't pretend that downloading the music is the only way to sample it. We need to keep most people out of file sharing before they ruin it like newsgroups.
That is why I think something like Spotify is excellent as you get to listen to what you want when you want with the odd few ads thrown in after songs which I'm happy with and I can buy tracks from within Spotify if I want to.
I actually use it a lot, not so much because of the cost but because you install it anywhere and have access to all your playlists.
Saying we are not is a logical fallacy as many != all.
There is an answer to this: lots of free music in one place. I didn't change my listening preferences, but I don't listen to buyed music anymore, I only use Jamendo now. Sometimes I still pay artists on jamendo, if I find really good music.
Extreme Programming - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Developers
Dosn't the RIAA know that libraries are contribute to a large amount of piracy? I get a ton of my music from the library and share it online....
Trying to install linux on my microwave, but keep getting a kernel panic...
What pirating is really for the media companies is a justification for DRM, which impinges more on consumer rights than on piraters. But when the government upholds the fines for piracy, it takes a different role. But its up to us consumers to to determine which products we purchase to keep the closed source software industry from misusing it's power against fair use. Should they ever forget who their master really is, we have open source to leverage our position. It is also in the best interest of piraters to support open source because in the long run it will be the best choice: no guilt, no greed, and less risk (from malware). See P2P is the perfect place to inject malware, bot-nets, viruses. Use a condom, get linux.
Just say no to license servers!!
The ones we had had a bar scanner. You'd scan a barcode and your preview would be up after a commercial.
Though most of the bands i picked out never had a preview anyway, so it was virtually useless.
Stupidity only gets you so far, then you've gotta try
My stimulus check went to volumes 1-25 of Berserk, as I had ready them online for free. I recently bought an Eric Whitacre album after hearing pieces of it on Youtube. So some of us do actually purchase based on "try before you buy".
While I don't agree with your guesstimation, I do agree that there are some people who are hypocritical about these matters. But there's little point in calling them on it as they can continue to hide behind anonymity, write false accounts of purchases, or exaggerate the importance of the purchases they did make.
Thunderclone: ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE! ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE!
The NSA is unlikely to volunteer evidence, even for the **AA's, which would expose something about the extent of its monitoring.
My understanding is that they were totally livid when President Carter, in the name of justifying American action in Iran, exposed the fact that they could decipher "secret" Iranian messages. I find it hard to imagine they're going to give out any info just so the content industry can sue copyright infringers.