The Pirates Will Always Win, Says UK ISP

TheEvilOverlord writes "The head of UK ISP TalkTalk, Charles Dunstone, has made the comment ahead of the communications minister's Digital Britain report that illegal downloading cannot be stopped. He said 'If you try speed humps or disconnections for peer-to-peer, people will simply either disguise their traffic or share the content another way. It is a game of Tom and Jerry and you will never catch the mouse. The mouse always wins in this battle and we need to be careful that politicians do not get talked into putting legislation in place that, in the end, ends up looking stupid.' Instead he advocates allowing users 'to get content easily and cheaply.'"

Comments

They hit the nail on the head

[Simon (S2)]

It is really refreshing to see someone, sometimes, who understands the situation and puts it down this clear in an unbiased manner.

we need to be careful that politicians do not get talked into putting legislation in place that, in the end, ends up looking stupid.

or even worse, introduces new problems without solving the intended ones.

Re:They hit the nail on the head

[Anonymous Coward]

Politicians need to start relying on other field experts rather then a company's benjamins to get answers.
Obligatory comment: http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1258397&cid=28227665

Re:They hit the nail on the head

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

He said 'If you try speed humps or disconnections for peer-to-peer, people will simply either disguise their traffic or share the content another way. It is a game of Tom and Jerry and you will never catch the mouse. The mouse always wins in this battle and we need to be careful that politicians do not get talked

You may be right. However, if you are indeed right, big productions are done for. Authors will be thrown back 500 years and be dependant on external sources of income. They will be dependant not on their skill but on their patronage.

I'm sure some will survive. But artists will become progressively more dependant on government handouts, ads, or other such indirect sources of income.

As technology kills the last real differences between "home-tv" quality and cinema quality, it will become progressively harder to sell entertainment (since you're fighting against the economic force that free represents), until it can barely be done at all.

It will be, at best, like TV is today. Music fans will go from being the customers to being the product, sold to advertisers, or ideological causes, and you will hardly see any singers, actors or ... without a pepsi or cola light in hand.

Re:They hit the nail on the head

[psnyder]

we need to be careful that politicians do not get talked into putting legislation in place that, in the end, ends up looking stupid.

or even worse, introduces new problems without solving the intended ones.

Charles Dunstone's wording is better when talking to politicians.
Politicians know that new problems will always arise, so it's not much of a deterrent. But they do NOT want to look stupid.

Re:They hit the nail on the head

[janwedekind]

You can't stop copyright infringement but you can inhibit free culture.

Re:They hit the nail on the head

[A coward on a mouse]

Nuts to this argument. The packaging, extras, quality, and convenience that are offered as part of non-pirated media will keep the honest artists and publishers going strong.

The music industry as it exists today is horrifically ineffecient and has had to settle price-fixing litigation as a result. Even after this wake-up call, they refuse to lower their prices signficantly. Do you honestly believe that it costs more to produce a 45 minute CD than it does to produce a 90 minute DVD?

Finding decent quality rips and downloading them takes time and effort. A lot of people would rather not go through the hassle and instead just buy the product from a legitimate retailer if the prices weren't artificially twice as high as they ought to be. This is not a case of people not wanting professionally produced works or of people not being willing to buy them for a fair price. It is a case of the media industry refusing to sell things for a fair price.

When CDs came out, they were fifty to a hundred percent more expensive than vinyl, but we were all told that the prices would come down because CDs are cheaper to make than vinyl or cassettes. Guess what - that didn't happen. Instead, the music industry just decided to charge as much as they wanted to charge and dare us to find a way around them. We found a way around them, and now they're trying to lobby and sue the entire world into submission. This guy is not the first one to tell them there's no way it works and that they'd better just start making the adjustment now to a less-lavish lifestyle now that large parts of the contribution they used to make to music production and distribution are no longer needed.

Re:They hit the nail on the head

[joaobranco]

we need to be careful that politicians do not get talked into putting legislation in place that, in the end, ends up looking stupid.

or even worse, introduces new problems without solving the intended ones.

Trouble is, some of the new problems it introduces (namely overbearing policing of actions online, bordering on a police state) are not usually seen as problems by the politicians (at least those in power or which hope to achieve it soon), but rather goals that they date not describe publicly...

Re:They hit the nail on the head

[Bert64]

Things will even out, again thanks to technology...
A few years ago, high quality cameras and equipment for producing special effects cost huge sums of money, as did decent audio sequencing equipment... These days, a lot can be done very cheaply... Powerful computers with complex 3d modeling software are affordable and most special effects are computerized... Same for audio, a lot can and is done in software these days.

Big productions can be good, but they do come at a cost... Big name actors don't come cheap, and aren't necessarily any more talented... There are so many layers of management, corruption and greed that the production actually costs far more than it should.

Singers i think will do just fine, especially those who enjoy doing live shows... Technology is still no substitute for a live show. I guess other forms of live entertainment such as sports will also do very well. The effect it will have tho, is that being a singer will no longer be seen by people as an easy path to riches (as exemplified by all the talent shows on tv these days).. It will be seen as hard work, and only people who have a true passion for art will go for it.

There are also other avenues for actors, big name actors like patrick stewart do live plays, professional wrestling is also a form of acting, and the fame of being the star of popular (not necessarily profitable, most widely viewed is what matters) movies can propel people into other fields such as politics (see arnold schwarzenegger).

Incidentally, movies and music are already heavily used for advertising, not because they need the money to survive but because the producers are often greedy and only care about the money, not about the art.

Re:They hit the nail on the head

[McGiraf]

Hardly "unbiased" it's and ISP, how can they sell their high speed if you have the choice of
1) paying the same price as the store for you download

or

2)go to prison for "illegal" downloading?

for 1) you pay your ISP on top of the "content" and you will not get 10 movies or what ever a month, too expensive.

and 2) not many people want to go in prison

so without "illegal" downloading and cheaper price for download than physical goods you do not need high bandwidth. You go to a ISP that offer 256k "basic DSL" and pay less than the super high speed adn it cost them about the same to provide it.

yeah unbiased.

Re:They hit the nail on the head

[jonbryce]

Or they will have to do more live performances.

I spend about £250 per year on concert tickets. I wouldn't consider spending anything like that amount on CDs.

Re:They hit the nail on the head

[Anonymous Coward]

I had custom made hardware and software to crack games. I had filing cabinets full of copied, cracked games. This was in the C64 days. When I would spend 20 times the cost of the computer on the hardware and software to break copy protection and would do it for 'fun' they can't easily win. When I'd spend six months breaking a dongle, they can't win.

Now some kid has 100,000 dollars worth of hardware debuggers, 20k worth of software debuggers, 100k network analyzser/scope, 20k waveform generate and a 5k multimeter. You can't win. You might slow them down and their friends my have to remind them to EAT but you can't win.

Yea his dad knows and he just snickers and buys him more. I'm so proud.

Re:They hit the nail on the head

[Anonymous Coward]

If what you said was true, there would simply be less sales. Instead we see more piracy. Hence the fallacy of your argument comes crumbling upon itself. It was never about prices being "unfair" and you know it.

Re:They hit the nail on the head

[Yvanhoe]

The problem is that he will be considered biased : ISPs are known to be on the side of "pirates" by politicians. They even make profit from them !

Re:They hit the nail on the head

[commodore64_love]

The companies did get sued y the U.S. government for price-fixing and forming an illegal cartel. My family (and millions of others) got a ~$50 refund as a result of that court decision.

In other news:

Charles Dunstone has meant an untimely death in a car accident in a tunnel. Witnesses report seeing a van drive-away with the word "RIA" on the side.

Re:They hit the nail on the head

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

Unfortunately technology advancements work both ways. Technology innovations will indeed make it cheaper to produce movies, BUT they will also eventually enable "live piracy", which would devastate sports events' income.

Live shows are nice for accomplished singers. But relying on live shows will mean that no kid, no matter how promising a musician he or she may be, will get what every girl that can just barely hold her boobs in while holding a note gets today. 99,9% of musicians will need a day job, until live performances bring in enough money.

Fame is not edible, sorry for stating the obvious but do you seriously think stars will still be admired if they have to have a "you want fries with that ?" job on the side ?

Movies in a piracy world will be one of three things :
-> ideological advertisement (like the Sistine chapel, but in movie form. What you call "art")
-> commercial ads
-> political advocacy

They will not contain ads, they will BE ads, and nothing more. Every single aspect of the movie will only serve to advance the commercial(/political/ideological) interests.

Re:They hit the nail on the head

[Truus]

In the Middle Ages the life of an actor was a lot harder than what it is likely to be when no movies are sold anymore in these periods of time. Cinema's, live concerts, and theatres will do the job for these still ridiculously rich group of people. So hit that download button, and save your money for the theatre.

Re:They hit the nail on the head

[eiMichael]

All this means that if your art can be reproduced, it will. Be fucking excited that people regard your creative endeavors worth reproducing. This doesn't mean people won't pay for some of it. It just means that people won't go through hoops and gatekeepers for it.

This reproduction opens your exposure to a MUCH MUCH wider audience. You may lose some paying consumers as they never really wanted to pay the price, but buying your CD was just the easiest way to get your art. Now it isn't. However, people may be willing to 'donate' the $9.99 they would have paid in a store to those who produced such art.

This new distribution network for information is probably one of the biggest technological jumps in producing as it gives everyone who has an IP address the ability to distribute w/e it is they create. From tweeting to personal scientific research, everyone has the capacity to be a producer. This leads to tons of new competition against big-media, and as has been shown people will produce for nothing more than a few hits on their web site.

In summary, if you do art for a living, good luck. Everyone is creative, and now you have a bunch of competition lowering the value of what you produce.

Re:They hit the nail on the head

[A coward on a mouse]

If what you said was true, there would simply be less sales.

On what do you base this assertion?

Instead we see more piracy.

More than what?

Hence the fallacy of your argument comes crumbling upon itself.

It looks like your sentence is crumbling upon itself.

It was never about prices being "unfair" and you know it.

It is about prices being unfair and it will continue to be about prices being unfair no matter how many times you or anyone says it isn't about prices being unfair. Millions of dollars of equipment and a specially-designed studio are no longer necessary to produce professional-looking or -sounding media. Most creative personnel signed by major labels / studios aren't being paid well. Social networking and not expensive advertising is driving sales. Lots of people know this stuff. Older folks know that prices haven't come down since all the expenses associated with producing and distributing music and video dropped. Put all of this together and it's clear to anyone who thinks about it for a moment that the pricing is unfair. Some people (like me) have cut way back on acquiring new music rather than pay the inflated prices. Others are settling for the decidedly inferior product available through filesharing and torrent sites. "Piracy" is what happens when markets are distorted the way the market for music and video are distorted.

Re:They hit the nail on the head

[A coward on a mouse]

It's not the stars or the writers whose livelihoods are at risk. That's why it's the MPAA, the RIAA, and their ilk fighting piracy and not the screenwriters or actors or musicians (except for Lemmy, who noone ever thought was mentally stable). In fact, the actors and screenwriters have been in legal battles with the studios trying to get paid. Both the actual creators of the music and video and the actual consumers of it want to do the same thing, which is to cut the fat out of this market and thus reap the benefits of all the wonderful technology that made the major studios and labels unnecessary.

Re:They hit the nail on the head

[NSN A392-99-964-5927]

I love you! well said and well written!

Re:They hit the nail on the head

[vivaelamor]

Others are settling for the decidedly inferior product available through filesharing and torrent sites.

Weirdly, filesharing often provides better quality products as you can get pre tagged FLAC files ripped with EAC from a CD.

The only big artist I know offering a similar level of quality is Nine Inch Nails. Even the small labels have hardly realised that they can offer a better product than CD for cheaper and insist on using MP3/WMA etc.

Re:They hit the nail on the head

[kamochan]

I submit that the best movies and TV series these days comes from BBC in the UK. That's a publicly funded organization, whose mandate is more-or-less to make quality entertainment, documentaries, and news coverage. Finland has a similar organization called YLE, I'm sure other contries ditto.

Ergo, I think you are absolutely correct: commercial movies and entertainment materials will be ads - they almost are, already. The non-commercial quality stuff will be publicly funded.

The only change will be that commercial entertainment will finally be admitted to be just that, commercial.

Re:They hit the nail on the head

[RichardJenkins]

It's easy for a business to "understand the situation" when understanding involves arguing against any legislation that increases your costs or decreases your profits. They're just protecting the bottom line, nothing to see here.

Re:They hit the nail on the head

[Thinboy00]

The only big artist I know offering a similar level of quality is Nine Inch Nails. Even the small labels have hardly realised that they can offer a better product than CD for cheaper and insist on using MP3/WMA etc.

The masses have never heard of FLAC files. Hence, any label that tries to sell them will run into issues like "why won't my iPod play this?" and "why won't WMP play this?" Noone's ever heard of VLC either, so don't get hopeful.

Re:They hit the nail on the head

[Anonymous Coward]

Nuts to this argument. The packaging, extras, quality, and convenience that are offered as part of non-pirated media will keep the honest artists and publishers going strong.

Nah. Piracy will continue canablising at least some sales. The way the markets work there is a very strong incentive for companies to grow, so they'll have to charge more for the same quality, or reduce the quality of there output. Either way, this is going to make easily available pirated material more appealing and the vicious cycle continues. You'll only avoid this if there is a large enough contingent of consumers who will refuse to view pirated material on moral grounds. I doubt there will be.

The music industry as it exists today is horrifically ineffecient and has had to settle price-fixing litigation as a result. Even after this wake-up call, they refuse to lower their prices signficantly. Do you honestly believe that it costs more to produce a 45 minute CD than it does to produce a 90 minute DVD?

Are you expecting the investment made to produce 90 minutes of DVD content will be the same as for 45 minutes of audio on the future? I can see where you're coming from.

Re:They hit the nail on the head

[vivaelamor]

They don't need to sell them to people with iPods. They just need to offer them as a choice.. if people buy FLAC instead of mp3 despite a warning saying 'please check your chosen format is compatible with your media player' and a default to MP3 then they probably shouldn't be using the internet to buy things.

One nice potential side effect of the inclusion of FLAC along with a slightly increased price for the banwidth would be pressure on manufacturers to start supporting FLAC. The reason being that people will likely think they are missing out on a better product.

DRM causes way more problems than FLAC ever could and they forced that on people so I don't give much credence to any arguments that an open format is unsupportable.

Hell, any actual businessman rather than con-artist would see the benefits of shutting up the 'mp3's are destroying music' crowd of technophobes.

Re:They hit the nail on the head

[mcvos]

You may be right. However, if you are indeed right, big productions are done for. Authors will be thrown back 500 years and be dependant on external sources of income. They will be dependant not on their skill but on their patronage.

400 years. That's when the first printing monopolies were granted. But that was only so the printers/publishers could make a living. It's only since the 20th century that authors could live from their copyright. Before that, any author that could live from his writings did that because of patronage, which, by the way, can be very dependent on skill (depending on the kind of patronage).

It will be, at best, like TV is today. Music fans will go from being the customers to being the product, sold to advertisers, or ideological causes, and you will hardly see any singers, actors or ... without a pepsi or cola light in hand.

Not at all. Many music fans will remain customers, and their idols will make a handsome living from concerts. For most musicians, that's already their major source of income, and it has always been like that. That won't change as long as rock stars are idolised.

Of course allowing free downloads will change the game, but the game has been changed several times already, and art has always survived, often even flourished. The same will happen now. People just need to find a new way.

The only people who are really fucked are the record companies and other publishers of other people's work. Self-publishing is too cheap and easy, exposure is free, and artists and customers can find each other without the help of a middle man. Their business model is obsolete, but we don't lose much by losing them.

Re:They hit the nail on the head

[arkhan_jg]

The reason CD prices and DVD prices are what they has virtually nothing to do with the cost of production. It's because they lie on what the companies believe to be the optimum point on the price/demand curve - i.e. the maximum they can get away with. This is the result of monpoly distribution - if you want a legitimate copy of a particular artist on a major label, or a particular film, you go to their media representative and pay their price, or you don't buy it at all.

If you look at the price breakdown of either media, the largest slices of the pie go to the retailer, the label, and the taxman, generally in that order. The artists get a very small percentage. Where you see price drops, thats due to competition between the retailers (i.e. supermarkets) reducing their cut, rather than the label taking a hit. Of course, the record labels have used it as justification to reduce the artist's cut, even though their own profit margins have increased due to the substantial falling cost of production. Pressing plants are a lot cheaper, and while a good studio engineer and producer still costs money, the equipment is a lot cheaper and time needed to run it through autotune has fallen.

Just take radio; payola is still in business, so labels literally pay to get their music on the air, as a promotional tool to drive album sales.

With DVDs, most of the costs of production have already been paid anyway; most films at least break even in the cinema, so DVD sales are just gravy, and they'll take as much as they can get away with. It's also why prices are so wildly different between regions; they price to what local demand will allow (prices are generally 50% higher in Europe compared to the US), and use DRM and import restrictions to prevent customers price shopping around.

So, the internet. The long tail has turned out to be somewhat of a myth - online sales have emphasised the marketshare of the top marketed artists, not flattened it. Many of the more obscure back catalogues don't sell anything at all, as generally teenagers want the latest new hit, not some crusty 20 year old album from a band they've never heard of.

What it has done though is freed the indies. OK, their share of the market might not be very big, but the market itself (if you include piracy) has grown quite a lot. indie music doesn't end up on piratebay much, and they can price themselves very low and still keep almost all the profit. Self-production is pretty cheap indeed now, and there's various indie distribution channels such as cdbaby that leave the artist with almost all the money. You might not make the megabucks of being a heavily marketed hit teen sensation, but it's still enough to make a decent living. Even major artists have twigged that once they're famous, if they can break free of the label they can really make a killing using the internet. Just look at radiohead.

So the record industry is being squeezed between two places. Internet distributed indies are showing how the internet can make you money not lose it; and piracy is utterly destroying their artificial distribution monopoly, and its monopoly prices. They had their chance to become the go-to online distributer buy buying napster and keeping it running, and blew it big time - now apple have that title. The film industry is not making the same mistake; with services like netflix, and video streaming via xbox live, or even just over cable they're trying to stay ahead of the curve by offering convenience for a price. If they can keep that price low enough, and get titles out fast enough not to drive the general public to piracy, they'll survive. Plus of course, they have the cinema chains to fall back on; anyone prepared to watch a cam rip wasn't likely a customer in the first place.

My maxim is always this - in a world where you can sell bottled water, you'll be able to sell packaged entertainment media. You might not make as money as you'd like, but give the customer a cheap, easy to use experience that 'just works', and you'll stay in business. Trea

Re:They hit the nail on the head

[commodore64_love]

Then they can sell Apple Lossless instead, which plays back just fine in ipods. There's really no excuse for them to sell lossy songs without the lossless option.

Re:They hit the nail on the head

[YourExperiment]

Politicians know that new problems will always arise, so it's not much of a deterrent. But they do NOT want to look stupid.

Oh dear. I think perhaps they need to try a little harder then.

Re:They hit the nail on the head

[commodore64_love]

IMHO BBC (and PBS and CBC) produces very little worthy of watching. Also in my humble opinion, I shouldn't have to support it because I never watch it. It should be supported wholly-and-completely via donations from the people who do watch it, not government. Like the way my local Christian station operates - no government funds.

Re:They hit the nail on the head

[Anonymous Coward]

"These days, a lot can be done very cheaply... Powerful computers with complex 3d modeling software are affordable and most special effects are computerized... Same for audio, a lot can and is done in software these days."

The problem is that that is only true for some sub-genres of music. (Techno, bedroom hiphop made from recycling other people records etc)

For most genres involving actual musicians the cost of the equipment has risen dramatically.

The reason for this is that the real cost of a studio is the building and sound treatment. The equipment, even in the days of Studer 24 tracks and SSL desks, is a smaller consideration. The cost of property in a good location has not got any cheaper.

Of course, like any market, people are seeking to produce goods for cheaper. So there is a lot of the kind of music around at the moment that one guy can make on a computer. The problem is that no one wants to listen to it, and everyone complains that music is not as good any more. :( Still, at least it's cheap.

Re:They hit the nail on the head

[Anonymous Coward]

Finding decent quality rips and downloading them takes time and effort.

Thankfully, that is not true (well, not once you learn what to look for.)

"Sceners" are a bunch of elitist faggots. They have all these anal rules about quality, which means pretty much anything scene released is downright pristine. Finding high quality mp3s (averaging 256 kbit) and lately even lossless rips is easier than ever.

Even though they look down on p2p and hate to see their releases spread that way (when I call them elitist faggots, it's because they earned that label) there are a few insiders who make sure that everything they do makes it out to p2p networks, which for the most part means bittorrent.

I would suggest everyone learn the basics, it doesn't actually take that much to do, and once you figure it out, finding high quality video and audio material on the internet turns out to be a breeze. Just type something like "what is the scene" into a search engine and follow a few links. Learn to spot the quality, and be amazed at the new realm of possibilities that open up to you.

Re:They hit the nail on the head

[Anonymous Coward]

I find designer clothes are way more expensive to buy than they are to produce so i've taken to stealing them from shops until these rip-off designers get the message and reduce the prices. As for music, i made an album on my laptop which sounds ace and it didn't cost a penny. So all these bands have been taking the piss out of us for years! I'm going to sneak into their gigs for free too. I went to see Madonna and it was really expensive. I worked out the cost of her show with all the dancers and stuff wasn't that much.

Re:They hit the nail on the head

[A coward on a mouse]

I find designer clothes are way more expensive to buy than they are to produce so i've taken to stealing them from shops until these rip-off designers get the message and reduce the prices.

That would be stealing, not copyright infringement, and it certainly causes more damages to more the store, manufacturer, and designer than downloading an mp3 causes to the artists.

As for music, i made an album on my laptop which sounds ace and it didn't cost a penny.

Good for you! If you let me listen to 128k MP3s off the album for free, maybe I'd give you some money for a DRM-free 256k MP3, if I like your music.

So all these bands have been taking the piss out of us for years!

Happy to pay the artists, just not so much the studios; I know the studios don't pay the artists very well. In the video industry, the creative types (screenwriters and actors) have been suing / striking because they're tired of being screwed by the studios.

I'm going to sneak into their gigs for free too.

OK. Good luck with that. I've never considered gatecrashing and I don't know anyone who has.

I went to see Madonna and it was really expensive.

Supply and demand keep the prices high. There's limited space in an arena, and taking up space makes it impossible for others to occupy the same space. This is one of the differences between IP and other kinds of property.

I worked out the cost of her show with all the dancers and stuff wasn't that much.

You might want to sharpen your pencil. A roadshow like Madonna's is expensive to put on. Also, a live concert isn't something that can be canned or reproduced or downloaded.

Gatecrashing and shoplifting are not the same as copyright infringement. For one thing, far fewer people think either of them is socially acceptable than think that downloading MP3s is socially acceptable. There's a reason for that that has to do with people's perception of what's fair. Seems more people agree with me than with you about this, and that's dangerous to the major studios and labels, who can tell they're losing their grip on this market. Anyway, I think it may be time for you to get back to that briefing with the lawyers about how the anti-customer litigation campaign is going, Mr. Valenti.

Re:They hit the nail on the head

[Zarluk]

big productions are done for.

No problem, here. Most of then aren't worth the time I spent viewing them... still, I remember several "low cost" productions that, most likelly, will stay in the history of cinema for many long years: "Easy Ryder", in the US, and most of the european cinema between 1950 and 1980 (Arrabal, Bunuel, Fellini, Pasolini, Polanski, and so may others).

I'm sure there will be more great "low budget" movies done in the USA... I just failed to remember them :(

They will be dependant not on their skill but on their patronage.

You mean: "They will be dependant on their skill and not on their patronage", don't you?

As far as I understand, for several decades, the real artists have been totally screwed by the major labels. Here are two examples:

Frank Zappa:
I'll prove to you that I'm bad enough to go to hell
Because I have been through it!
I have seen it!
It has happened to me!
Remember, I was signed with Warner Brothers for eight fuckin' years!!!
(in "Tities an Beers")

Sex Pistols:"Fuck EMI" (in "The Great Rock and Roll Swindle")

Re:They hit the nail on the head

[Zarluk]

Please, someone mod the parent UP!

Re:They hit the nail on the head

[Nefarious Wheel]

This guy is not the first one to tell them there's no way it works and that they'd better just start making the adjustment now to a less-lavish lifestyle now that large parts of the contribution they used to make to music production and distribution are no longer needed.

The funny thing is, when people lower their prices the volume can go way up. That's why Wal-Mart is simultaneously loathed and extremely well patronized.

If they lower their prices to something more reasonable for decent work then people might be less inclined to walk past the record shops on their way to buy milk & bread.

Re:They hit the nail on the head

[mikechant]

When CDs came out, they were fifty to a hundred percent more expensive than vinyl, but we were all told that the prices would come down because CDs are cheaper to make than vinyl or cassettes. Guess what - that didn't happen.

In the UK I would say it pretty much did happen - eventually.

Allowing for inflation, CDs are probably a little cheaper now than vinyl LPs were 30 years ago.

Re:They hit the nail on the head

[LCDrago]

@eiMichael - I've been involved in exploiting copyrights for 30 years. In my opinion, your analysis is spot on.

Re:They hit the nail on the head

[Tubal-Cain]

Just take radio; payola is still in business, so labels literally pay to get their music on the air, as a promotional tool to drive album sales.

I haven't heard 'payola' very much, so I looked it up. It seems to carry some more negative connotations that 'advertising' (literally paying a bribe for promotion of one's product). Is there, perhaps, a more accurate word?

Re:They hit the nail on the head

[arkhan_jg]

I used payola intentionally, and meant it. Record companies used to illegally bribe radio stations directly, to get their music on the playlists - and then present it as an independent choice based on quality. In 2006, major labels were sued (successfully) in NYC for using third party promoters to pay the radio stations directly to play their music, and try to get round the payola laws that way.

It's a form of astroturfing, and it's still going on.

There's another form of sleeze with top-10 chart lists. They're based on sales, right? Well, the record companies buy back their own records in an attempt to get them up the chart. I'm told that in some cases, they don't even bother shipping merchandise; they just give the retailer a lump cash sum equivalent to their cut as if they had bought and sold x number of albums to the label, and to then say that they had, in fact, sold x albums.

Since people are social animals, they have a tendency to buy what other people are buying - if it's popular, it must be good, right? See amazon recommendations for another example, though I've no reason to believe amazon are artificially changing the recommendations because of bribes. But getting on the top 10 list for music sales, by whatever method, then goes on to make much more money from people buying what other people are listening to, even though the charts are based on a total lie.

Re:They hit the nail on the head

[vivaelamor]

I quite like some stuff that the BBC produces, less and less every year mind. I still am completely against their public funding regardless of how great I think their shows are though. I think you will find that there is a big mix of people in the UK when it comes to opinions on the BBC.. most can find something about the BBC they would miss and this tends to bias things in favour of keeping the license fee, in other words their opinion is based on uncertainty. Those that are against the license fee need to address this by offering an alternative community driven model that those who want to pay the license fee can subscribe to which in all logic would prove better than the BBC due to the laws of supply and demand.

To use the proms as an example (I have no hard factual data but will speculate for the purposes of making a point), the proms are likely quite high budget. They are well enjoyed by a good portion of the country. The musicians probably love the proms as it increases awareness of their work and generates revenue for shows the rest of the year. If we were to take away the BBC funding, what would happen? Well according to Wikimaybe:

With the outbreak of World War II in 1939, the BBC withdrew its support. The Proms continued though, under private sponsorship, until the Queen's Hall was gutted by an air raid in 1941 (its site is now the St George's Hotel and BBC Henry Wood House). The following year, the Proms moved to their current home, the Royal Albert Hall, and the BBC took over once more.

History tells us that private sponsorship is an option. I do not believe that is a better option than public funds but I think that it demonstrates how the demand is sufficient to be met by other means. Community driven funding gives the audience the power of choice over these events as those producing the proms in being answerable to the funders are directly obliged to the audience.

A bigger advantage is those who do not participate in the proms potentially will have the resources to maintain similar achievements in other arts. The proms may well get smaller but it is not a certainty. The same advantage goes towards getting rid of shows that don't have a significant audience where people are forced to subsidise shows that seemed like a good idea to the producers at the time but meet little actual demand.

As you point out, there are other examples of community driven funding already working. Hell, if we use community driven software as an example then the less open competitors have actually been a major reason why it hasn't been more successful and entertainment has less of those obsticles unless you are a fan of big budget productions.

Re:They hit the nail on the head

[Bert64]

Live piracy is already possible... Many live events, especially sports, are televised, so you can make a very high quality rip from an HDTV feed... On the other hand, people want the atmosphere of actually attending the event, so despite the fact that all these major sports events are available on tv and to download people still go to great lengths to attend... This is why there are ticket touts, fake tickets and all kinds of other fighting to try and get in to see these big events live. There are only a finite number of seats at a live event, it's not possible to arbitrarily duplicate the seats for free.

I think an actor or singer who has a side job serving fries will be better able to connect with their fans... They will understand how hard it is for the average person, and not be some out of touch freak living in a penthouse snorting cocaine through $100 bills.

I would be far more inclined to support an artist that's a real person trying to scrape a living, than some rich arrogant druggie that lives a life of luxury thanks to having done a few hours work several years ago.

Fame may not be edible, but fame brings with it perks... You will get paid to attend events, to give speeches etc... Even a fast food company will likely consider you more valuable an employee if your fame draws in more customers.

Yep, now explain that to the politicians please.

[__aashqr1992]

Accurate, and correct. Although it's not (or shouldn't be) an ISP's job to police what goes through a phone line.

Of course...

[XPeter]

As long as there is internet, there will be piracy. Plain n' simple.

Re:Of course...

[Lillesvin]

I'm inclined to correct that, because long before the internet there was piracy too. I remember copying the new Guns n' Roses album (Use your Illusion I) and lots of other stuff to tape. Yeah, that was 1991 - internet did technically exist, but let's be realistic, it wasn't a common thing to see in a house hold.

So how about we say, "as long as art exists, there will be piracy"?

Re:Of course...

[Youngbull]

As long as there is internet, there will be piracy. Plain n' simple.

keep it down man! we don't want them to shut down the net!

Re:Of course...

[Ginger Unicorn]

back then piracy was what people did when they made hundreds of dupes and sold them on a market stall. taping an album off your friend was just taping an album off your friend.

half of my dad's music collection was lp's and recorded tapes, half were dupes an blank tapes. the same went for everyone i knew. there was never even the inkling that there was something wrong with this.

now all of a sudden anyone who obtains dupes for free is a vicious evil greedy selfish thieving pirate and deserves to be financially ruined and/or imprisoned.

fucking absurd.

Re:Of course...

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

So how about we say, "as long as art exists, there will be piracy"?

No. Not at all.
You can't pirate something which is freely given.

As long as copyright exists, there will be piracy.

If and when society discards the crutch of copyright in favor of modern means of funding creative endeavours, piracy will end.

Getting rid of copyright is the only way to end piracy.

Re:Of course...

[SeaHunter]

If there was no Internet people would still have pirated software. I remember playing pirated video games on my Commadore 64.

Re:Of course...

[impaledsunset]

Works of art were copied long before your tape recorder existed. Hell, they were copied long before the printing press. I would guess that monks were copying lots of literary works by hand without any permission.

Re:Of course...

[Anonymous Coward]

Name one modern mean of funding those creative endeavours.

Re:Of course...

[impaledsunset]

And making killing people legal is the only way to end murder....

Current copyright law is FUBAR, which doesn't mean we should get rid of copyright completely. Even a sane version of copyright will still be infrinded just as any other law out there, which doesn't mean that one shouldn't exist. Sane copyright laws should exist, however they should be beneficial to art and culture, not to the RIAA's pockets, and shouldn't thread down on almost everybody's and their wishes.

Currently many people want and have the opportunity to remix and share art, so they will do it. On the other hand, current copyright laws make almost everything you can do with a work illegal. It's simply inconsistent with reality.

P.S. What's this piracy are you all talking about? Why would you bring sea-robbers in a discussion about copyright?

Re:Of course...

[eugene2k]

I don't think software can be called art...

As long as the creators of products use a business model that is built on the concept of selling copies of a product they created once, there will be piracy. Moreover the cheaper it is to create a copy of the original product and the closer this copy is in quality to the orignal, the more this product will be copied. Which makes digital products the most copied, and things like the design of coke bottles or tables the least copied.

Re:Of course...

[Bert64]

Anywhere that mass duplicated media is sold for far less than it costs people to duplicate their own, there will be "copyright infringement"...

CDs were not commonly copied when computers didn't have enough disk space to store them, processing power to compress (mp3) them, and writable CDs cost as much as pre pressed ones containing music. Instead, people made lower quality copies onto audio cassette.

If you want to stop copyright infringement, make the originals better value for money such that it isn't viable to obtain a copy. Make them cheaper, make them more easily available and without onerous drm schemes that reduce the value of the product to the consumer.

I bought tons of genuine games for various old machines (amiga, c64, sinclair etc) long after those machines were outdated, because the cost of blank media outweighed the bargain bin games.

Re:Of course...

[Bert64]

Advertising... It's already happening, how many movies have sponsors or product placements these days? Tho most of these movies have their traditional revenue streams as well, adding the advertising is pure greed to get a bit of extra cash. That's one method right there, as requested.

Modern technology makes production costs much cheaper than they used to be.

Live shows.

And many others..

Re:Of course...

[msouth]

but you were copying to crap cassette tapes. You didn't have digital audio tape. Why not? Cuz the RIAA won that one.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Audio_Tape

As long as the technology was localized, where they could attack a single format, target manufacturers, etc, they could keep it under their thumb. Things are, I think, fundamentally different now that digital copying and digital redistribution is ubiquitous.

You weren't making anything like the quality of copy that is possible now, and you had no way to anonymously dump a million crappy cassettes for other people to pick up, either.

Although technically you might have called what you were doing piracy, I think the Internet has fundamentally changed the game. He might have needed to say "piracy at this scale" vs. just piracy, but functionally it's just a minor quibble.

Re:Of course...

[Bert64]

More sane copyright laws would massively reduce the level of infringement that occurs... If you make media easier and cheaper to obtain, while removing nasties such as DRM then people will have far less reason to infringe.

People do it because it's easier, substantially cheaper and often yields a superior and more usable product.

Re:Of course...

[jonbryce]

Or, as long as copyright exists, there will be piracy.

Re:Of course...

[noidentity]

As long as there is internet, there will be piracy. Plain n' simple.

Because before the Internet, when we just had home computers and tape recorders, there was none.

Re:Of course...

[noidentity]

So how about we say, "as long as copyright exists, there will be piracy"?

Fixed that for you.

Re:Of course...

[harry666t]

Your new "more sane" system will eventually end up being abused as much as the current system is. Yes, really... Name a single system existing today that isn't being abused in some way.

I think the world is fucked up today not because of the law but because of the people's attitude towards the law. When there's something wrong, people demand a new law to fix it, and expect that the existence of the new rule will magically make the problem disappear.

Re:Of course...

[ubersoldat2k7]

I don't know about this. Just today, my mother-in-law downloaded a crack for a software product because she was feeling lazy about searching for her license somewhere around her home. Sometimes laziness beats morality.

Re:Of course...

[mspohr]

When I was in high school (1965... I'm really old) I bought a reel to reel tape recorder (Sony) and made copies of my friends records (old vinyl 12 LP records). This was considered 'fair use' then and it probably would be now, also. The Internet just expands my network of friends willing to share their records.

The record industry needs to get a better business model. They could have been making lots of money from Internet distribution if they hadn't adopted the 'kill the Internet' strategy. By coming up with innovative ways to sell stuff over the Internet they could be way ahead of the curve. Instead they are just pissing everyone off and digging a big hole. Meanwhile 'unauthorized' copies are proliferating, making it harder to charge anything for digital music.

They blew this whole 'Internet' thing big time.

Re:Of course...

[PRMan]

And if they hadn't, we wouldn't have ANY ancient works today. Everything we have of the ancient world are several generations away from the originals.

Re:Of course...

[laughingcoyote]

Exactly how is morality implicated here? Even if one accepts the argument that it is immoral to use software without payment (which many do not), it seems from your post that your mother-in-law did pay for it and was simply inconvenienced by a "feature" of it (being required to find a license).

How exactly is it immoral to use a workaround to use software you paid for the privilege of using?

Re:Of course...

[Animaether]

Well of course it has fundamentally changed the game. Let's not forget that recording a radio/tv show onto tape (casette/video) -is- still perfectly legal. You -can- still borrow your neighbor's DVD, play it back, and record it to tape legally.

However, I have a sneaking suspicion (or call it insight from history) that if that were the -only- available method (lossy transfer, can only transfer slightly above real-time or else the recording gets too distorted for the tape technology, etc.), casual piracy would be much more incidental rather than systemic and on the scale we're looking at today.
From time taken to make the copy, to having to purchase the storage (and keep in mind that tapes tend to have a levy to do with home copies already), to having to actually store it all somewhere.

Let's face it, the 'convenience' factor is extremely powerful. Be it related to getting upset if somebody takes away the convenience of downloading, or hating on the government because of automated speed traps (being more okay with it if it were a live copper that actually had to pay attention, give chase, etc.; only to complain "don't you have murderers to catch!?" once caught, of course).

It's that convenience that the RIAA/MPAA are worried about the most when it comes to piracy. They don't mind so much if you have to go way out of your way to make a copy, nor do they worry about convenient (iTunes not even being the most convenient) -legal- alternatives online.

Re:Of course...

[cliffski]

And that will get rid of people who make content and use the proceeds to pay the bills, such as everyone I know who works creating computer games.

And people like you will whine like children that "all teh games are teh shit now. They were so much better back then.."

Why are you so incapable of seeing what the result of your dreams of a copyright free world lead to? it is NOT rocket science.

Re:Of course...

[cliffski]

Sounds ideal.
I can't wait to see schindlers list, sponsored by pepsi. I'm sure that will be an awesome film.

On the other hand we could..you know.. actually pay people who entertain us, just like me pay people who make our food, our cars and our homes?

Re:Of course...

[misexistentialist]

And making killing people legal is the only way to end murder....

Probably, since there would be more duels, in which both parties are defending themselves. Cowards would face painful retribution that would be more of a deterrent that time-outs in prison and painless euthanasia.

Re:Of course...

[Anonymous Coward]

And that will get rid of people who make content and use the proceeds to pay the bills, such as everyone I know who works creating computer games.

And nothing of value was lost? I tease.. I haven't played any of your games although I occasionally consider pirating a few just out of spite.

And people like you will whine like children that "all teh games are teh shit now. They were so much better back then.."

Why are you so incapable of seeing what the result of your dreams of a copyright free world lead to? it is NOT rocket science.

And people like you are another reason to abolish copyright altogether. Incessant whining aside, you have consistently and ignorantly overlooked what would happen if copyright was abolished. You only see destruction [of your way to make money]. There would also be a lot of creation by people merging works together to form new works. I've written a more detailed post that you should read.

I know you're in the UK, but (from wikipedia): An example of the intent of copyright, as expressed in the United States Constitution, is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors...the exclusive Right to their...Writings".

You only see copyright as an express guarantee for you to make money. To others it's a way to promote new culture... provided that things actually return to the public domain. I don't care if you can't make a living from making games in the future. The abuses of the system by those who make the same argument as you do have demonstrated that you are not responsible enough with our culture to keep the system in place. If you want to keep your guarantee to make money, stop yelling at the angry mob with the pitchforks and torches, and instead yell at those they're angry with. The ones who keep pushing to prevent what is rightfully ours from returning to us.

Re:Of course...

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

And making killing people legal is the only way to end murder....

Current copyright law is FUBAR, which doesn't mean we should get rid of copyright completely.

Not all laws are created equal. Murder is an aberration that destroys society, the sharing of ideas is the primary reason we have a society. You should be embarrassed for having made such an inept comparison.

Copyright is an anachronism that depends on distribution adding value. With the internet, distribution is essentially free so not only can anyone do it for zero marginal cost, but doing it adds no new value. Thus no rational consumer is going to pay for something that adds no value and that anyone can do.

Sane copyright laws should exist,

Why? What makes copyright so special that you are willing to unquestioningly appoint it to an absolute requirement? When alternate business models can do the job without the downsides of copyright why do you worship at the altar of a disproven ideology?

Re:Of course...

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

And that will get rid of people who make content and use the proceeds to pay the bills, such as everyone I know who works creating computer games.

Hey, its cliffski the broken record. No surprise you would show up playing your same old song. Tell me, how do you make the leap from "funding creative endeavours" to "get rid of people who make content and use the proceeds to pay the bills?"

Why are you so incapable of seeing that copyright is not some holy divinity but just a tired old business model going the way of the buggy whip?

Re:Of course...

[glodime]

As long as there are boats, there will be piracy. Plain n' simple.

There, fixed that for you...

Re:Of course...

[remmelt]

How is that even illegal or immoral? Your mom-in-law bought the software, what more could they possibly want?

Re:Of course...

[Anonymous Coward]

but you were copying to crap cassette tapes.

Well, now I'm copying to a crap Dell running crappy Windows.

Re:Of course...

[Anonymous Coward]

In other words, copyright law is FUBAR and we should repair it.

Re:Of course...

[Anonymous Coward]

Did the RIAA really kill the Digital Audio Tape? The Wikipedia article says they tried to stop it and failed. Isn't it more likely that since it came out after CDs, comsumers were happy buying CDs since there is only a small difference between DAT and CDs and the consumers still had their analog tapes for recording. It seems to me that is more likely the CD stopped the DAT gaining mainstream acceptance rather than anything the RIAA did. Unless you have anything to support your claim?

Re:Of course...

[msouth]

My understanding was that people didn't want to commit to DAT until the legal issues were settled. That didn't happen until 1992, and at that point they had not only added a tax to it (an already expensive technology, surely that didn't help), but they were successful in keeping players from being able to record past a single generation. By this time, cd was ubiquitous, and with the format crippled it had no hope of people being willing to pay the early adopter price. The RIAA had demonstrated that, as I'm sure a lot of people expected, they were going to be able to control the manufacturers. The laws they did get passed were enough.

This isn't from the wikipedia article, just my recollection of a conversation with someone about it a long time ago.

Re:Yep, now explain that to the politicians please

[jginspace]

Exactly what he said:

TalkTalk has always maintained the defence that it is merely a broadband pipe and not an online policeman for the content industry.

I don't think that's actually the industry's goal.

[Pollux]

I believe the industry knows that you cannot stop 100% of software piracy. I don't think that's their goal.

I remember back in 2000 when I went to my dentist. He sat me down and started making the usual small-talk, asked me where I worked, what I was majoring in in college, etc. When I told him I was a comp sci major, he brought up Napster. My dentist was using Napster. He went on and on about how computer illiterate he was, but he had no problems using Napster, and how he was finding songs on there from back when he was a kid, how he could find anything he wanted, and how simple it was to get whatever song he wanted...

I believe the industry is just trying to make sure my dentist doesn't start downloading songs again.

Re: There will always be piracy

[Baron_Yam]

I'm not so certain...

At some point, as with Prohibition in the States, the law may cave to reality at some point and we'll give up on the concept of owning strings of 1s and 0s.

Some other mechanism for paying creators will have to emerge - I think it'll end up being patrons for most things and live performances for others (like band tours and book readings), with a smattering of physical merchandise related to the original content.

Some things may end up being free, done as labours of love. It's not like those of us in the First World don't have enough resources and time to burn on things we enjoy without necessarily requiring pay.

Finally

[Anonymous Coward]

Some one who has a handle on things. "to get content easily and cheaply". You mean charging 80 dollars CAD is is too much, No shit.

The ways in which TalkTalk gets it

[jonaskoelker]

Here's a few snippets from the article, selected to show how TalkTalk gets it:

TalkTalk has always maintained the defence that it is merely a broadband pipe and not an online policeman for the content industry. Dunstone said any technical measures to try and clamp down on sharers of copyrighted material would soon be bypassed by pirates.

"If people want to share content they will find another way to do it," [...] This idea that it is all peer to peer and somehow the ISPs can just stop it is very naive."

TalkTalk is testing BT's new fibre-optic super-fast broadband network in north London [...] Dunstone [of TalkTalk] reckons super-fast broadband â" offering speeds of up to 40Mb a second â" will be more expensive than current-generation broadband but less than the sort of £39.99-a-month prices being asked for basic broadband a few years ago.

Fast cheap internets, "we can't stop the pirates"...

Exchange your currency into British pounds and vote with it.

(I'm not paid to say that)

Re:The ways in which TalkTalk gets it

[Anonymous Coward]

I've just today got my broadband service through virginmedia activated. placed the order about a week ago.

If i'd known this a weeks ago, I would have gone to talktalk.

Re:The ways in which TalkTalk gets it

[Marcika]

TalkTalk is testing BT's new fibre-optic super-fast broadband network in north London [...] Dunstone [of TalkTalk] reckons super-fast broadband â" offering speeds of up to 40Mb a second â" will be more expensive than current-generation broadband but less than the sort of £39.99-a-month prices being asked for basic broadband a few years ago.

Fast cheap internets, "we can't stop the pirates"...

Exchange your currency into British pounds and vote with it.

(I'm not paid to say that)

You wouldn't be all that enthusiastic if you actually had ISP service from TalkTalk... (Like I have.)

They are 40x oversubscribed and proud of it - so my 8Mbit line only gets more than 500kbit between 2am and 4am.

Their support is notoriously bad - I had to talk to them about 12 times for half an hour each to get 110 quid back that they overbilled when I moved house.

They use the Internet Watch Foundation secret censorship list (Slashdot reported).

They suck as bad as any ISP, their only redeeming feature is that they cost half as much as BT. They only push the "dumb pipe" angle as they are confident that they can outcompete anyone on price if they can keep the market extremely low-cost and low-service. (Mind you, I am not pro-netcop, but TalkTalk are not the knight in shiny armor by a long strech.)

Re:The ways in which TalkTalk gets it

[Tony Hoyle]

FTTC is being tested by BT Wholesale, and later in the year there will be lots of ISPs providing it - many of them *much* better than TalkTalk.

What they forget to mention is that 40mb download (definately achievable if you're near enough your cabinet, as it's VDSL), but only a 2mb upload. With that level of disparity I wonder if the ACK packets will saturate the upstream before you hit 40mb anyway.

Also, they won't be increasing the monthly caps, so if you do stream that fast you're going to get burned anyway.

Re:The ways in which TalkTalk gets it

[Anonymous Coward]

I support a fairly extensive number of friends / acquaintances / colleagues home connections. I'm in a virgin, formerly-NTL cabled area, so they get the lion's share of the business. However I still see a few talktalk customers.

My $0.02 is that talktalk is fairly low quality as a provider. I don't rate them on the few occasions I've had to use their service (on someone else's connection) and I wouldn't personally recommend them.

They're not the worst, but they're fairly low down on the list of providers.

Although Virgin may throttle 'extreme' downloaders I've not been hit, and I personally find the cable network much more stable than any adsl offering. Of course, if you've signed up for Virgin ADSL I can't comment on that.

The point? Well, what this guy says is certainly worthy of note and reportage. But it shouldn't be considered the only criteria for buying a year's contract from an ISP.

Wow! Someone with a clue?!?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Price media at a REASONABLE price and make it so simple and easy for us to get it in a form we want. and you'll make all the money you deserve. And hey. not pissing off millions of people is good too.

Amazon!

[Rick Richardson]

Amazon has 89 cent downloads. And .99 to 3.99 albums (one per day). Pirates should check out Amazon!!!

Here is what I've gotten (albums for less than $3.99) in 6 months:

$ ls -d */* |cat
Aerosmith/Big Ones
Alanis Morissette/Flavors Of Entanglement
Amy Grant/Heart In Motion
Bob Marley/Live At The Lyceum
Bon Jovi/Cross Road
Boston/Boston
Butch Walker/Sycamore Meadows
Cary Brothers/Who You Are
Creedence Clearwater Revival/Chronicle_ 20 Greatest Hits
Creed/Greatest Hits
David Bowie/Heroes
Eagles/One Of These Nights
Elvis Costello/My Aim Is True
Forgive Durden/Forgive Durden Presents Razia's Shadow_ A Musical
Heart/Make Me
Inxs/Kick
Jack's Mannequin/The Glass Passenger (Amazon Exclusive)
Jackson Browne/The Pretender
James Morrison/Songs For You, Truths For Me
Jimi Hendrix/Electric Ladyland
Joan Jett & The Blackhearts/I Love Rock N' Roll
Joe Bonamassa/The Ballad Of John Henry
Joshua Radin/Simple Times
Kate Voegele/A Fine Mess
Katy Perry/One Of The Boys
Led Zeppelin/Led Zeppelin
Madonna/Like A Virgin
MC5/Kick Out The Jams
Metric/Fantasies
Mieka Pauley/Elijah Drop Your Gun
Neil Diamond/Sweet Caroline
No Doubt/The Singles Collection
Pink Floyd/Animals
Prince/Purple Rain [Explicit]
Queen/News Of The World
Robin Trower/Bridge Of Sighs
Rod Stewart/The Definitive Rod Stewart
Seether/Finding Beauty In Negative Spaces Spaces (Bonus Track Version) - [Explicit]
Seth Walker/Leap Of Faith
Shiny Toy Guns/Major Tom
Soundgarden/Superunknown
The Apples In Stereo/New Magnetic Wonder
The Band/Greatest Hits
The Benjy Davis Project/Dust
The Go-Go's/Beauty And The Beat
The Pussycat Dolls/Doll Domination
The Weepies/Hideaway
The White Tie Affair/Walk This Way
The Who/Who Are You
U2/No Line On The Horizon
Van Halen/Van Halen
Van Halen/Van Halen II
Various Artists/Motown Number 1's Vol. 2
Whitesnake/Whitesnake
Yes/The Yes Album

Re:Amazon!

[Sponge Bath]

Here is what I've gotten (albums for less than $3.99) in 6 months:

Is this lossless encoding of 16-bit stereo 44.1KHz?
If not, then I still prefer a FLAC torrent.

For old time classics like these, a price of 0.49/track 1.99/album for lossless compression is about where the price needs to be to compete.

Re:Amazon!

[Anonymous Coward]

$ ls -d */* |cat

Please tell me you're doing that on purpose to piss of the Useless Use of Cat people. Please.

Re:Amazon!

[Crookdotter]

If I got that right, that's 54 albums, so in cost that's $215 you've spent right there. I bet I could have the majority of that on a torrent in a day or two, for nothing.

What's the incentive for pirates to look at amazon?

Re:Amazon!

[akanouras]

$ ls -1d */*

There, fixed that for you.

Re:Amazon!

[Thundarr Trollgrim]

You could have downloaded those for free and saved yourself a whole load of cash!

Re:Amazon!

[adona1]

Yes, pirates should check out Amazon. I've checked it out. However, because I don't live in America, they wouldn't let me give them my money. Credit card out, mp3s selected, and bam...sorry, you're in the wrong country (nothing stopping me buying the CD from Amazon though). And the record companies wonder why they're dying...

Re:Amazon!

[Anonymous Coward]

In these enlightened times I understand that homosexuality does not carry the stigma it once did, but I am puzzled at your decision to come out on Slashdot. Aren't there more suitable websites for this kind of thing?

Re:Amazon!

[mightyteegar]

If I got that right, that's 54 albums, so in cost that's $215 you've spent right there. I bet I could have the majority of that on a torrent in a day or two, for nothing.

What's the incentive for pirates to look at amazon?

Of course you could find all those via torrents -- with no guarantees that an album in a discography won't be incomplete, there won't be any pops, skips or warps in the song files and that your download won't stop at 98% for eternity. Part of the reason I quit pirating is because, just like getting anything else on the black market, the quality often left a lot to be desired.

Furthermore, Amazon has a massive catalog of great albums that aren't freely available as torrents. Some of them you'd be lucky even to find on Soulseek. And all of it downloads quickly; almost all the albums I've purchased from Amazon MP3 were in my music library less than 2 minutes after I bought them. It's 192k MP3, which isn't lossless, but it's not bad.

What was my incentive? Amazon eliminated my desire to pirate by offering me cheap music, the lack of which led me to pirate in the first place.

Re:Amazon!

[caluml]

What, exactly, are you thinking that | cat on the end is adding?

Re:Amazon!

[PRMan]

Actually most Amazon songs are over 200kbps. I suspect that they are using something similar to the LAME alt present standard, which even people with much better hearing than I have can't hear the difference from the original.

Re:Amazon!

[Pecisk]

So bloody seconded. Wanted to start clean with buying newest Keane "Perfect Symmetry" which I love so much and after that wanted to get "Ode to Mr Smith". They don't even care to inform you before registering your credit card data that it is for US ONLY.

Amazon, it is really Stupid, stupid, STUPID.

Re:Amazon!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok. But how do you prove that those are legally bought files? Or I could say, prove that the music I downloaded from torrent is not bought on Amazon.

Re:Amazon!

[Anonymous Coward]

Enjoy your clear channel approved pop rock

Re:Amazon!

[pandrijeczko]

How about you jump down off that pedestal of yours and enjoy a piece of music just because of how it makes you feel good, rather than just carrying it around as some kind of political fashion statement?

It may come as a shock to you but many of those albums the OP has listed happen to be popular *because* a lot of people consider them to be good albums - and whilst I personally own many of those albums in that list, I also happen to listen to a lot of more obscure and, yes, even independent music. But the fact is, I only care about music quality, I couldn't give a toss if it's marketed by Sony or an indy label.

Re:Amazon!

[Anonymous Coward]

This is seriously out of whack. Your list looks as if you had a mullet, you wore faded blue jeans, a T-shirt with a jacket on top of it, no socks and maybe some Nike sneakers... But then, there's this Soundgarden album with no wrong notes on it to give you a flannel shirt and some cred. Wha?

Re:Amazon!

[Anonymous Coward]

He's just playing the typical pirate blame-game: "The music/software/movie industry would be doing great if they sold their products for [CurrentPrice / 2]. If they aren't selling at that price, then it's their fault I pirate."

Re:Amazon!

[remmelt]

You had a good argument, but I stopped reading at "Alanis Morissette."

Re:Amazon!

[ModMeFlamebait]

What, exactly, are you thinking that | cat on the end is adding?

!isatty(1) inside ls, influences formatting (like ls -1).

Re:Amazon!

[Anonymous Coward]

With quality music like this who need piracy!

Re:I don't think that's actually the industry's go

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Well, the British, for one, can always send Lemming of the BDA to check on their naughty dentists.

Re:I don't think that's actually the industry's go

[Krneki]

Unless they offer a better service then Napster, your dentist will keep using it. Besides a dentist might not be good with computers, but he ain't a stupid person.

It was clear from the start of the Internet that free sharing can't be stopped. They need to accept it and move forward.

He's right but...

[thetoadwarrior]

I agree with him but part of me thinks he's only saying that because Talk Talk is a cheap service and he'd easily change his mind if the government offered them a cheap or free solution to police their service.

In the end I guess it doesn't matter as long as he's on the sensible side but it would be nice to know he'll stay on the sensible side.

Re:Yep, now explain that to the politicians please

[Kokuyo]

Making ISPs police the users and the content is as if they wanted to make BMW and others responsible for all the illegal activities people commit in their cars.

How come it's so hard to differentiate between offering access and being responsible for what people do with it?

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:I don't think that's actually the industry's go

[ickleberry]

"Cloud computing" is the new way of stopping software piracy. Client-side security such as DRM is doomed to fail but server-side has half a chance. Web applications can be filled with ads and user-tracking but nobody complains because it doesn't have the same invasive mechanism as client based spyware. but as the browser is given more control, more access to hardware and more 'sploits surface the over all effect will be the same.

of course there should always be enough legitimate client-side FOSS around that people won't actually *need* to use web-apps

more subtle

[Weezul]

It's not true, the news media isn't vulnerable to piracy. Well, obviously their product is ad supported, but only some small minority of "pirates" blocks the ads. An easy solution is : (1) change internet radio consist of separate mixing instructions and content, so the original song is immediately available to users, but (2) include banner as in the ogg/mp3 comments and get player to attempt to induce purchases. But there are numerous other frameworks where users "usually pay".

The Pirates Will Always Win...

[pboechat]

Take that, ninjas!

Re:The Pirates Will Always Win...

[kno3]

I for one welcome our new pirate overlords.

Re:I don't think that's actually the industry's go

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

I believe the industry is just trying to make sure my dentist doesn't start downloading songs again.

That's what they like to think. But knowledge of how to use the latest piracy tools is just as unstoppable as the piracy itself. It is a variation on the same phenomenon that results in virus-construction-kits and script-kiddies.

They can only go so far to make piracy harder. What they can do without practical limit is to make alternatives to piracy easier. If typing a song name into google gets you 10 different places you can legitimately download it in various ways for various payments (outright purchase, or advertising supported, or streaming, etc all with different pricing based on the seller) then that goes a long ways to keeping the dentist from even thinking about piracy.

Re:I don't think that's actually the industry's go

[Yacoby]

he had no problems using Napster, and how he was finding songs on there from back when he was a kid, how he could find anything he wanted, and how simple it was to get whatever song he wanted...

I believe the industry is just trying to make sure my dentist doesn't start downloading songs again.

Then the solution is not to sue the dentist, but to give him options to get the music he wants cheaply and easily. By cheaply, I don't mean the current prices that they are ripping me off with. 12p a track sounds reasonable. 10p to the artist, 1p to the publisher, and 1p to the distributer.
When they try and sell me a digital album for £8 - £10, I just give up. Do they think I am made of money? Why should I pay a large amount of money for something that costs them nothing to reproduce?

One big issue the industry will hit is that when people my age (late teens) get to the point when we are the dentist, we won't have any problem pirating things. We won't have any problems with computer illiteracy. We will know where to find the programs that encrypt the traffic. If we don't, we just ask a friend who does.

Re:I don't think that's actually the industry's go

[Ginger Unicorn]

tell the dentist about spotify and whatever the one is that lets you pay a quid to download an mp3

Wow, progress being made, but ...

[soporific16]

they're still calling us pirates. I like to think of myself as someone who likes to walk around the tollbooths the entertainment industry puts in front of everything, not walk through them. Haven't they got enough money? How many copies of my favorite albums do i have to buy to replace the ones i lost, or had stolen or whatever? Because the tollbooth owners don't care about that sort of fairness, how can i be expected to WILLINGLY put up with the hassle of the tollbooth experience when i can just walk around? The ISP guy got it spot on in one regard -- the only way to combat the culture that has developed to avoid this hassle (ie filesharing) is to make stuff dirt cheap and mega accessible. But there's no or very little profit in that is there, and so here lies the contradiction of trying to own something in digital form and make "good healthy profits". Normally i would sarcastically say "good luck with that" but its simply not funny that while they're trying to make these healthy profits we have to put up with all the associated nastiness of their stand-over tactics and absurd propaganda... can we have the revolution now please?

Re:Wow, progress being made, but ...

[Anonymous Coward]

buy to replace the ones i lost, or had stolen or whatever?

Why should the "tollbooth owners" have to pay for your lack of care of your possessions or your lack of insurance cover? There are valid arguments for the current state of piracy but neither of those are remotely relevant. Lost and uninsured stolen goods have nothing to do with greedy publishers and everything to do with your own incompetence.

Re:Wow, progress being made, but ...

[Migraineman]

The entertainment industry is notorious for creating an artificial scarcity. They squeeze the distribution pipe between the content creators and the customers. There's plenty of content, and the economics dictate that the price should drop. However, that prevents the media cartels from making "good healthy profits" (as defined by *them*.) Their solution isn't to flood the market with lots of content ... that would entail more work for them for the same return. They have chosen to choke-off the supply line, separating the product from the customer such that they may dictate the market price for a given set of products. This method is only sustainable if no one is allowed to circumvent their choke hold, which is why legislative actions are so important to them. If there are no repercussions to you bypassing the toll booth, their economic model fails.

The revolution is upon them. It snuck up in the darkness of the internet, and the media companies are scrambling to kill it. If they had any vision a few decades ago, we would be begging Paramount-Verizon or Universal-Bell-South to deploy video-on-demand services through the government-restricted 2B+D ISDN services residential customers are allowed to have. (Corporate customers may petition the Federal Digital Communications Commission for higher bandwidth access ... and trust me, you don't want to run afoul of the FDCC.)

Re:Wow, progress being made, but ...

[cliffski]

"I like to think of myself as someone who wanders past the security guards the local food store employs. Have walmart got enough money?
Wal-mart don't care about fairness, how can I be expected to queue up to pay when I can just shoplift..."

Face facts. if you had to look the content creator in the eye every time you pirated, you wouldn't take jack shit. This is just the usual bullshit to paper over that part of your conscience that gets pricked when you realise you are helping yourself to other peoples work.

Re:Wow, progress being made, but ...

[Draek]

If I had to look to the content creator in the eye every time I "pirated" something, I'd download the entire Metallica discography on a weekly basis and I don't even *like* Metallica.

Let's face it, pretty much everybody who downloads and quite a few of us who don't despise the RIAA and their so-called "artists", so appealing to people's consciences ain't gonna do much.

Re:Wow, progress being made, but ...

[martin-boundary]

Nonsense. It makes sense to charge for a second copy of a physical good, since every physical good has a nonzero replication cost. However, digital goods have zero replication cost, so it makes no sense to charge for a second copy, except greed. And the point of piracy is that pirates have the technical means to bypass the greed if they so choose.

Re:Wow, progress being made, but ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Nonsense. It makes sense to charge for a second copy of a physical good, since every physical good has a nonzero replication cost. However, digital goods have zero replication cost, so it makes no sense to charge for a second copy, except greed.

Who said anything about purely digital goods? Presumably no-one "stole" his digital copy, he was referring to CDs or some other physical media that he expected replaced. Even if it was digital media there's still the matter of proving he bought it once. Even if it was digital media and he could prove he bought it and has lost it, there's still the fact that running the servers, the tech response, bandwidth, and all other support roles for a lost/stolen media service would require a certain amount of cost (probably not equal to the original cost of the song but certainly more than nothing).

And the point of piracy is that pirates have the technical means to bypass the greed if they so choose.

There is no inherent point to piracy. It's an act, not an ideology. Everyone has their own reasons. Personally I use piracy as a means of trying new albums/bands and then go on to buy the CDs if I like them. I find no moral/economic quandary in that action, but I certainly don't do it on the basis that "those evil record labels are rich so I can do what I want for free and screw them!" because that's stupid and counterproductive. If you do like music then you obviously need to understand that by not paying for it at any point then there will come a time when either the overall production quality and quantity will dip as there's no longer a viable market for it. Or otherwise the market will change to a service-based one of making a living by performing live shows and using recordings primarily as promotional material. Maybe that's the only true future in music recording, but to act like you can take what you want and it only affects the record labels who are rich enough already is plainly bullshit.

Re:Wow, progress being made, but ...

[cdrguru]

Stores used to have boxes of apples out in front of the store. If some unruly child came by and took one without paying, passersby would stop the child and make them put it back. Other shopkeepers would do the same.

Today, stores have to employ security guards to keep their own employees from stealing as much as they can. They check receipts against bag contents for people leaving the store. If someone sees a shoplifter in action they think "Good job, keep it up!"

Piracy is just part of the general trend.

Do you really think the scarcity of good work isn't real?

Re:Wow, progress being made, but ...

[Migraineman]

Here's the funny thing ... there is plenty of entertainment. That's a bad thing for a media cartel, because a free-market economy will drive the price down due to excess supply. It's not difficult to declare yourself a musician - grab an instrument and go. (note: if you're complaining about "quality" work, that's a completely subjective matter and is the topic of a completely different rant.) The modern distribution model doesn't rely on the middleman anymore, and they're crapping their pants right about now. They've moved from collusion to attempting to legislate their defunct business model in the form of onerous copyright laws and attempts to become a semi-law-enforcement entity (what the hell are RIAA enforcers doing accompanying the FBI on raids?)

When the fruit vendor jacks the price up, you shop elsewhere. If all fruit vendors jack the price up, you bitch and moan, and choose other more affordable foods. When the fruit vendors band together and sue anyone who attempts to grow their own fruit, or purchase legislation that prevents you from selling or giving your fruit to another individual, then you have civil disobedience (i.e. folks disregarding the broken laws.) When truckloads of fruit infringers are shipped off to fruit-piracy re-education camps, you'll end up with civil war.

Piracy is not the problem

[lc_overlord]

"The mouse always wins in this battle and we need to be careful that politicians do not get talked into putting legislation in place that, in the end, ends up looking stupid."

yea, the thing that politicians has yet to understand is that piracy is not a behavior created for it's own self fulfillment, but rather a function of how parts of the surrounding society firmly and grossly overestimates the value of their product.
In these cases people say "if you won't sell me the thing i desperately need that you have a gazzilion of for a fair price, and if i take one you won't actually loose one, then i guess I'll just have to take it for free without you knowing".

It wasn't long ago where a single track was worth a couple of bucks, likewise a album, and even i paid for that since it was worth it, but now they are basically worthless, the music is still great but i can get is anywhere for free whether i want to or not, so it shouldn't take a years salary to fill an ipod, but rather like $50.

It's the same with almost anything though, so if i where them i wouldn't count pirates as a problem but as a competitor, especially if i already am in a monopoly situation, which most recordlabels and move studios are.

Re:Piracy is not the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Piracy is a behavior that results from a basic principle, people will take things if you let them. Just ask Lisa Simpson and her family's theft of cable.

DRM free and I'll buy it

[Anonymous Coward]

I was going to buy song from apple the other day- I have an account I opened with a £20 iTunes voucher I was given, but instead opted for the effort of finding (it was quite an unknown song) and downloading it illegally so I had a DRM free copy.

Now if someone like me who WANTED to pay for it, HAD THE MEANS to pay for it, and found it EASIER to pay for it, but didn't- how will record companies ever compete with piracy?
Cheap, DRM and hassle free media is the only way forward in my opinion.

Re:DRM free and I'll buy it

[jonwil]

Didn't iTunes go DRM free for all their music?
Or is there still music on iTunes thats DRM protected?

Re:DRM free and I'll buy it

[Anonymous Coward]

It is, its still technically the same protected format (and tied to the account), but its not encrypted anymore, IE, I can take my files downloaded from itunes on my laptop, copy them to a network linux box and play them in anything that can understand normal m4a.

And more importantly they now allow you to convert the audio file to any other format iTunes can understand -- a process which drops all the account data entirely.

This is why i respect TalkTalk

[Anonymous Coward]

And also why i switched to them from BT.

Hopefully they can convince the idiots in power of this and maybe actually figure out a way to offer easy access to media at a "decent" price.
If iTunes and similar services can work, i don't see why they won't implement things like this.

Just make the process as seamless as possible, but not to the extent that people will end up spending without realising it.

Imagine if you will, Youtube, but with paid videos, and if you click into a paid video, it will show a frame before playing that states that this is a video you need to pay for, you click Yes or No, simple. No numbers, no addresses, nothing. (this is all done in the user account settings beforehand)
The number of people who would accept this system is surprisingly high, if it is made simple enough to register an account and cheap enough.

Re:This is why i respect TalkTalk

[Anonymous Coward]

"And also why i switched to them from BT"

TalkTalk just resell BT bandwidth they don't own any infrastructure (pipes in the ground) their business model consists of "how much discount do i get if i spend 50 million with you"

Part of me thinks

[tepples]

part of me thinks he's only saying that because Talk Talk is a cheap service and he'd easily change his mind if the government offered them a cheap or free solution to police their service.

And part of me thinks he's confident that if the government makes such an offer, he can show how it is an ineffective solution.

Re:I don't think that's actually the industry's go

[Jawn98685]

I believe the industry is just trying to make sure my dentist doesn't start downloading songs again.

And that will be their undoing. Never mind the fact that, at the price point in place before electronic distribution became reasonable the dentist would never have purchased all those songs (thus putting the lie to all the "lost revenue" bullshit), the record companies, if they had had any fucking vision at all, would have seen that this was a money making opportunity and built it (Napster) first, along with a pricing model and payment scheme that leveraged the almost zero distribution costs. Instead, they have tried to protect their buggy-whip industry to through litigation.

Yes, the mice are going to win.

A suit with a clue

[vosester]

A suit with a clue, might have to switch form current ISP Virgin Media.

Who's CEO is a tool of the highest order, by saying Net Neutrality was bollocks.

Really it should be Illegal for content providers to own an ISP.

The amount of power these content providers are getting is scary.

If I played a song down my phone line and the other person recorded it, that would be like retro file sharing.

But they would never get a judge to sign a wire tap for that, so why do they have the power to do it to my internet connection?

Re:A suit with a clue

[momfreeek]

This guy making some nice noises costs nothing... and his argument is only that they shouldn't have to spend money to police themselves. At least consider the possibility that its nothing more than good PR.

Earlier comments gave me the impression that TalkTalk gives crappy service, awful support and uses packet shaping heavily to save costs (off course they're hardly gonna put that in the press release)

Re:I don't think that's actually the industry's go

[david.given]

Napster was awesome, and I regret its passing. There is nothing like it today.

The great thing about Napster was that it let me find new music that I liked. I'd see a reference to a song in, say, a book; I'd search for it on Napster, download the track, and play it; and then, if I liked it, I could go back to the same place and see what else the guy had. I discovered They Might Be Giants that way; I downloaded Rock To Wind A String Around from a recommendation, then went back and dug out more of their tracks, then ordered the Apollo 18 CD.

Okay, Napster was pretty slow and BitTorrent has it beat technically in pretty much every way, but no other music sharing service had the same sense of exploration and community. You could explore people's music collections, find interesting new rare stuff, and then actually talk to them about it (if they were on). It was, in fact, all social networking and Web 2.0-y before the terms had even been invented. I wish something like it existed today.

Re:I don't think that's actually the industry's go

[PakProtector]

Lemming, Lemming, Lemming of the BDA!
Lemming, Lemming, Lemming of the BD- Lemming of the BD- Lemming of the BDA~!

Geographic Limitations

[S77IM]

Can anyone convince these TalkTalk guys to start a branch of their business in Austin, Texas? I know a number of current Time Warner Cable subscribers who would be eager to switch.

  -- 77IM

Re:Geographic Limitations

[jonbryce]

They may be the 2nd largest ISP in the country, mainly by buying up everyone else - OneTel, AOL, Tiscali etc, but I don't think they are particularly good as an ISP.

I didn't know TalkTalk were like this.

[lattyware]

I live in an area where TalkTalk have an LLU, It may be worth switching to them in the near future.

Re:I don't think that's actually the industry's go

[S77IM]

I believe the industry is just trying to make sure my dentist doesn't start downloading songs again.

I believe the industry wants to extract as much money from your dentist as possible. For example, he can download a song, but every time he listens to it, they get money. Or better yet, he downloads a song, and then has to pay them recurring fees for the rest of his life. (I haven't heard that one actually suggested yet, but it is only a matter of time.)

There's nothing wrong with a business wanting to make money. But they should be doing it by trying to create value for the customers. Any other means (anti-competitive measures, deceptive marketing practices, cooking the books, etc.) is immoral and unethical.

  -- 77IM

on the same side as the P2P app devs

[Cyko_01]

both have the same logic in mind:
we have a great network/protocol with large amounts of legal content! Why should we destroy a perfectly good network/protocol just to keep out the pirates?

Re:Yep, now explain that to the politicians please

[sakdoctor]

I wish my ISP would filter out all the car analogies for me.

Re:Yep, now explain that to the politicians please

[superskippy]

The problem is that TalkTalk sabotage their own arguments by being one of the biggest proponents of Phorm and traffic shaping. If it's just a pipe, and "oh we can't possibly be expected to look inside the packets and find out what they are", why are you planning on inserting adverts into my web pages at the ISP stage?. Why do you open up my packets and make some of them go slower or faster?

The truth of the matter is that ISPs secretly love pirates- they pay the broadband bills. Modern piracy has been a big loss for the content industries and a big win for telecoms companies. Please don't pretend that Dunstone is resisting this because he is a huge fan of civil liberties, he is resisting this because it is good for his business.

hes right

[Bizzeh]

the thing is, hes right. all companies are doing when they are trying to stop pirates is presenting them with a new challange. the way to stop, or at least curb piracy is do what dvd's did, be cheap. i bought about 5 dvd's from asda about 2 hours ago because they were all good, and they all cost less than £7 each, one was £3. im sure the companies involved are still making money from these dvd's, infact, im sure they are making more, because when a dvd cost so little, it makes it not worth the time of downloading it.

Torrents are just more convenient

[Anonymous Coward]

Digital music stores can't compete with the community based private torrent trackers for me. I'm heavily into electronic music and even dedicated stores like beatport do not offer me the choice i get on torrent sites, not to mention how much easier it is to select the good releases from the bad ones because on torrent sites i can recognize the appreciated uploader and know i'm downloading something good. On beatport i should go listening to crappy quality short previews and hope for the best and also pay them at least 1,29 per track.

Re:Same goes for child porn

[Bert64]

Your post is clearly flamebait, but...

What the hell makes you think that a child's right to not be abused by a pervert is of equal or lesser importance than a corporation's desire to have a profit margin higher than any traditional industry?

These companies are greedy and want to produce infinite copies of something for virtually no money so that they can sell them at 99% profit, and gouge consumers for multiple copies of the same thing. Do these companies have more "right" to this level of profit than a kid does to not be abused?

Why should companies in markets like this make such massive profit margins when anyone else selling food, physical goods or services etc must make do with a few percent?

PLEASE MOD PARENT REDUNDANT

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes it's hard to stop copying, but it's not that difficult to seriously clamp down on P2P. To me it's easy to spot P2P, the characteristics are: 1) Lots of connections to multiple other IPs 2) High upload AND download So if you see that, you can just leave the first 4 "conversations" that are downloading alone, and the first 2 "conversations" that are uploading, and squish down the rest till the first bunch are done. By conversation I mean IP to IP. Doesn't matter how many TCP/UDP connections between two IPs, it's still one "conversation". If you see small packets, both ways but at low to medium speeds, that could be voice or video chat.

From the fine summary:

He said 'If you try speed humps or disconnections for peer-to-peer, people will simply either disguise their traffic or share the content another way.

See that "disguist their traffic" bit? Yeah. It was right there in the summary and you didn't even need to read the fucking article to see that someone already addressed the point you think you're making. You'll look like much less of a douchebag in the future if you at least read the summary.

Re:PLEASE MOD PARENT REDUNDANT

[orangesquid]

It shows how many people actually read the fine summary. I don't see one comment with a sophomoric interpretation of 'speed humps'.

So, I guess I'll have to be the first.

Speed humps? Well, it is the Internet, and you can get pr0n faster than ever before in human history...

TRUE for almost all crime

[mrnick]

The best the police can do is try and stay only a few steps away from the criminals, instead of miles. With computer crime FUGET ABOUT TIT!

Copy protection doesn't work. Never has, never will.

It used to take someone with GURU computer skills to be a pirate, now all it takes is a kid with access to the Internet.

The problem is not piracy, it is the distribution and cost of media (content not storage).

I would feel confident in saying that the majority of American homes have one, likely more, instances of pirated content in their homes. That sounds like a referendum on piracy. Though, if you could buy a new DVD movie for $1 then who would wait hours for a movie to download?

They are not criminals they are just tired of working within a system that is broke. FUDGE the system!

Re:TRUE for almost all crime

[swilver]

Though, if you could buy a new DVD movie for $1 then who would wait hours for a movie to download?

Me. However, I would not be waiting on a download. It's called planning ahead. I dislike DVD's and CD's for other reasons:

1) I find them to be archaic. Music CD's hold 75 minutes of music. They get repetitive quickly and I'd have to bring a bunch of them with me everywhere I go. The whole "Album" thing is so outdated and more of a "tradition" than a necessity these days. Instead I prefer to just put my entire collection on a few memory cards, small enough to carry around in a wallet or something.

2) I see little added value in "extras", "chapters", "interviews", "fancy menu's", "stupid repetitive background music in a loop" and "FBI warnings I cannot skip". When I want to watch a movie, that's all I want. I don't want to see "Chapter 36: Neo gets his ass handed to him", I don't want to fiddle with your non-standard menu designs, I don't want hidden easter eggs, I just want to drop down on the couch, grab my remote, select a movie to my liking and watch it... immediately. In fact, if it is a particular boring episode/movie, I may even play it back at 20% increased speed (with pitch corrected audio of course) if I even bother completely watching it at all.

3) I didn't like the myriad of Vinyl albums, tapes, video cassetes and CD's I had to buy special storage closets/holders for -- infact, I've thrown them all away by now (a small fortune that did do nothing but take up space). I'm not about to start over again with DVD, Blueray or whatever the latest craze is. Discs are a thing of the past for me and I simply cannot be bothered to even walk to the player and insert the correct disc anymore.

Re:I don't think that's actually the industry's go

[hitmark]

Meh, its more like 1p to the artist 10p to the label and 1p to the distributor (to the latter if often rolled into the label).

Re:Yep you can stop P2P

[Swizec]

Yes it's hard to stop copying, but it's not that difficult to seriously clamp down on P2P. To me it's easy to spot P2P, the characteristics are: 1) Lots of connections to multiple other IPs 2) High upload AND download So if you see that, you can just leave the first 4 "conversations" that are downloading alone, and the first 2 "conversations" that are uploading, and squish down the rest till the first bunch are done. By conversation I mean IP to IP. Doesn't matter how many TCP/UDP connections between two IPs, it's still one "conversation".

1) What if I open 20 different websites in a few seconds because I happened upon a cool wikipedia article?

2)What if I'm chatting, uploading a video, opening websites and running a dev server? Many many connections.

3) How do you define "high" transfer? Firstly I can tell my torrent client to curb how fast it's going to just a few kilo per second. Secondly, I could be doing something funky, like, I dunno, running an ftp server to share photos and video between people in a design shop.

Re:Yep, now explain that to the politicians please

[Anonymous Coward]

If large portions of people who came into BMW dealerships then went out and ran people down right in front of the dealership, and this happened consistently and was almost always the same group of people doing it, I'd want BMW to do something about it too, even if at the very least that meant being willing to hand over security camera footage for the proper authorities to do the work for them. When you hand people a tool that is able to let people run amok committing crimes, no that doesn't make you responsible. When they do it blatantly, in front of your eyes, repeatedly, the same people all the time, and you don't do anything about it, yes, you have a moral and legal responsibility to do something about it. That's why gun stores are bound to follow gun licensing processes, stores with a liquor license are bound to serve drinks responsibly, and pet owners are responsible for the actions of their pets.
Why is it so hard for some people to accept a little responsibility in their lives? If you believe yourself to be so inadequate to be able to handle any moral or legal repsonsibility, why haven't you killed yourself yet?

Re:I don't think that's actually the industry's go

[Anonymous Coward]

There are tons of services that accomplish this and much more. Private bittorrent communities often have ways of finding similar artists to the ones you downloaded, and soul seek is basically built on that foundation.

Lots of other people felt the way you did, you just have to look harder. If anything, today's solutions are much more elegant.

Re:Yep, now explain that to the politicians please

[Kokuyo]

In light of the waterpipe analogy I wanted to say something along those lines, I just didn't know the English word for the ones delivering the water to the people.

Re:Yep you can stop P2P

[andy.ruddock]

But P2P isn't inherently illegal. You may well argue that the majority of P2P traffic is of copyrighted material which the recipient isn't legally entitled to download.
I may, or may not, agree that this probably the case. However, you are automatically labeling all P2P as illegal.

Downloading is the future, and the present.

[TheMightyFuzzball]

I think this person is the only person of his position that is actually seeing reality. All he has done is stated the plain obvious. But it goes further than that, he (and everyone else) needs to realise that downloading is a very convinient method of distribution, I would much rather download a film or album than go out and look for it, or even order it from Amazon. Within the next few years ISPs should be providing (from what I read) 10Gb/s speeds, this is faster than USB 2.0... With that kind of speed it will take people less than an hour to download a full Blu-Ray disk, I think you get my point...

I don't see the problem

[TheLink]

1) The websites would tend to load eight by eight. You would read the first one that loads up. There aren't that many people in the world who can read 20 websites at the same time AND do it quickly.
In fact with my suggestion at least the first few websites would load up quick rather than all 20 websites contending for bandwidth.

2) Uploading a video = 1 upload stream. Opening websites - 8 downloads. chatting = 1 voice stream. I don't see a problem there. It does not look like P2P.

What does your dev server do? If it's a webserver for the public it will get squished down if there are many people downloading from it but that's supposed to happen - go figure out why yourself.

3) How do I define it? That's up to the ISP.

If you curb your P2P to a few kilo a second it stops being such a "big problem" right? At 5KB/sec it takes 11 days to transfer a 4.7GB DVD ISO. You may not consider that as "seriously clamp down on P2P" but I'm sure lots of P2P users will think otherwise.

If you are running an ftp server to share photos and video between _many_ concurrent people in a design shop, I'm sure the ISP can offer you a commercial package.

Otherwise 2 people downloading from your server at full speed and the rest getting throttled to crap till one of the two are done isn't such a big problem.

It hurts bittorrent since each connection will be transferring different pieces.

Re:I don't see the problem

[profplump]

So what you're suggest essentially equates to "residential users can load web and email in a rate-limited fashion, so only users with 'commercial' accounts can really use the Internet".

Couldn't P2P users couldn't simply buy the "commercial" plan you suggest that does not have these restrictions? And what's to stop P2P users from wrapping their connection requests in HTTP so it looks like web traffic -- then you couldn't simply dismiss high web usages as "doesn't look like P2P" as you do above.

Also, if these restrictions were universally apply it would be fairly easy to setup a registry to make sure that P2P clients cooperatively used the allowed number of links -- with a little coordination and at least say, 100 users on a given torrent, bittorrent could be almost as fast (if somewhat less efficient an fault tolerant) as with unrestricted links, because the 2 connections allowed to each users would run at relatively high speeds.

Re:I don't see the problem

[TheLink]

1) I'm sure ISPs would be happy if P2P users paid for a more expensive commercial plan.

2) Once the P2P traffic starts looking like web traffic it stops being P2P, because it ends up with most peers leeching from a few "servers".

Normal web traffic:

Client downloads >> client uploads.
Many connections to few IPs.

P2P traffic:
Many connections to many IPs.
Downloads similar to uploads.

While 2 high speed connections to each IP works fine for HTTP, it doesn't work so well for bittorrent, since it relies on many people serving up different parts of a file. No point being able to get the same part over and over again from the same person.

If only a few end up being the "Big Servers", they become bigger targets for the **AA etc.

I have not given it much thought, but my guess is a P2P protocol that doesn't have problems with being restricted to 2 high speed connections will have many of the problems that bittorrent was created to solve. I'll be happy to be proven wrong on that.

Re:I don't see the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

At 5KB/sec it takes 11 days to transfer a 4.7GB DVD ISO.

BitTorrent does not work that way.

Re:I don't see the problem

[Ant P.]

Are you proposing that you'll pay Blizzard's server bandwidth once their current bittorrent-based update client is rendered useless? If not, fuck off.

Re:I don't see the problem

[Pentium100]

1) The websites would tend to load eight by eight. You would read the first one that loads up. There aren't that many people in the world who can read 20 websites at the same time AND do it quickly.

On the other hand, if I am reading some website and find some interesting-looking links, I may click all of them with the middle mouse button (=open in background tab).

Or I could instruct my torrent client to only open 8 connections.

2) Uploading a video = 1 upload stream. Opening websites - 8 downloads. chatting = 1 voice stream. I don't see a problem there. It does not look like P2P.

Really? Am I doing what you listed or downloading a torrent while I am connected to 8 seeds and 1 peer?

It hurts bittorrent since each connection will be transferring different pieces.

Bittorrent uses a lot of connections because it is faster, also the network can make use of people with bad connections (I can get a decent speed if I am downloading from 50 dialuppers).
Instructing the client to use a small number of connections is easy. Or you can devise a new system that, say, does this.

1. Divide the torrent into small pieces.
2. Connect to n-1 peers (n - max allowed number of connections by the ISP)
3. Connect to new peer using the nth connection.
4. Try to download a piece from this peer.
5a. If it is slower than all of the other peers, goto 3.
5b. If it is faster or same speed but more complete, dfinish downloading from the slowest peer, disconnect from it, goto 3.

This will screw the people with slow connections, but will still allow me to download fast...

If I can't use BT, I might as well drop that fastest subscription and get the basic one...

Re:I don't see the problem

[TheLink]

Why should I pay for Blizzard's server bandwidth?

Can you even read and understand what I wrote?

If you can't, fuck off.

Re:I don't see the problem

[LiquidFire_HK]

Apparently you have problems reading and understanding. I'll write it out nice and simple for you.

BitTorrent is not only used for illegal downloads. A major example of legal usage would be Blizzard's download system. While your suggestions (technically infeasible, by the way - otherwise they would have been implemented already) may be well-intentioned, they will also prevent legitimate usage of P2P. That was the GP's point.

Re:Yep you can stop P2P

[commodore64_love]

>>>Yes it's hard to stop copying, but it's not that difficult to seriously clamp down on P2P.

You're as much of an ass as RIAA. I can understand their desire to stop copying, but not to kill P2P. I download lots of illegal TV shows, yes, but also download some legitimate stuff like Linux, PS3 patches, WoW upgrades, and so on. In fact one time when I had a virus, it blocked all browser usage, so the ONLY way I could get the Virus killing software was via P2P. Without P2P I'd probably still be stuck with that virus.

Re:Yep you can stop P2P

[Zaiff Urgulbunger]

But P2P isn't illegal, and is in fact a useful distribution method.

It's a sudden break of common sense

[DragonTHC]

I have been screaming this line for years and years.

It would appear, I'm a fucking visionary.

Why do they put up so many barriers to buying their content?

Make it cheaper, make it easier to find and access. If I could buy your content online in HD format for what I think it's worth, then I would buy it instead of download it. You think it's worth more than it is. You strictly control access to it. You claim that your business is suffering. Adapt to the damn market.

And finally, make up your damn mind. Is it a product or a license? You can't have it both ways. If it's a product, I can understand that. Since downloads are not stealing and aren't a diminishment of your product, we can download anything we want.

If it's a license, then I have a right to download the mp3s for all the vinyl and CDs that I own. I also have a right to download any movies I own on vhs (which is a lot.)

If it's both, we can still download anything we want.

Copyright law was intended to prevent counterfeiting. Piracy isn't counterfeiting. Downloading isn't piracy. Downloading isn't counterfeiting.

The statutory damages were intended to prevent corporate counterfeiting. They were never intended to be applied to music fans.

Re:Yep you can stop P2P

[swilver]

You should go into politics, you have about the same level of understanding of the issues involved.

Making lots of connections is not illegal, and is in fact likely to become more and more commonplace as more and more services are developed where the combined uploading / downloading power of users is leveraged to provide decentralized and cheaper services. The only reason it is not more prevalent right now is because of retarded bandwidth restrictions on connections like ADSL. This will become a thing of the past soon enough though.

You seem to think that people use their internet connection for one thing at a time, like a microwave oven. I however run a webserver, versioning system, several SQL servers, a torrent client (yup), IMAP mail server, web mail, reverse proxy, a regular proxy, do remote backups and allow some friends to have SSH/SFTP access. Sometimes I even read slashdot.

Profiling that with some simple rules is not going to work. The webserver alone would look like a P2P program with thousands of connections a day. If there happens to be some download activity as well, I'm screwed.

Re:Yep you can stop P2P

[ubersoldat2k7]

At first, this is true, P2P is directly related with media traffic (not everywhere in the world, sharing copyrighted material is illegal) but as companies try to cut on costs, they could easily start using P2P as a way for distributing content. Take for example Youtube and how much they could save if a great P2P network with a great algorithm was used so their current traffic was shared among cities residents. Slashdot, where comments can make you a millionaire.

the issue is control

[DaveGod]

Piracy is not what is stopping the music industry embracing online distribution. How could it possibly be worse than the existing position? What they are frightened of is their lack of control and competition. Piracy is making their existing business untenable, but competing with it will cause them all kinds of problems that they are used to having control over. What's Wall Mart going to do when the label is actively competing with it? What are their mega stars going to do when the labels no longer control the channel? What happens when pricing becomes competitive?

"Allowing users 'to get content easily and cheaply" might be good for music, consumers and the industry as a whole but there is not much there that is attractive to the labels. They will do it when they really have to, I think presently they are clinging on while they can and meanwhile negotiating for the best position possible for when they do.

The labels aren't nearly as stupid, out of touch and unable to adapt as they seem. They were incredibly quick and successful in moving to exploit the surge in popularity of live music, I'm not even sure whether that was a natural change in consumer tastes or something instigated by the labels.

Re:I don't think that's actually the industry's go

[swilver]

I believe the industry knows that you cannot stop 100% of software piracy. I don't think that's their goal.

I wouldn't be so sure :) In fact, I think that's exactly their goal and the only thing stopping them from going for it is that it would likely result in copyright law being abolished or at the very least thoroughly re-examined. They'll push it as far as they can, and they'll only stop pushing when it starts to hurt their bottom line.

Re:Yep you can stop P2P

[andy.ruddock]

not everywhere in the world, sharing copyrighted material is illegal

Why is this idea that it is automatically illegal to share copyrighted material so prevalent?
It is copyright that underpins the GPL and ensures that we can safely share our source code yet have some protection that it not simply be misappropriated by others as their own.

Re:Yep you can stop P2P

[Anonymous Coward]

You can stop P2P, sure, but you can't stop pirating which is this guys point. People would just move back to Usenet or abuse of free hosting services, which is only getting easier.

Back in the day people used to split their files up across 20 xoom.net, angelfile, geociites, etc accounts and then link them all in the same place. This is back when 'free hosting account' often meant 10-20 megabytes.

Now you have places like rapidshare and megaupload, already a place for potential piracy if you know where to look. You also have places like gmail offering >5gigabytes of storage if you know how to use it, easily leveraged for file transfer (email yourself passworded zip files, have friend login to account)

then there are sites like youtube which are FULL of copyright violations already in the form of copied video and audio. I would bet that the number of people who go to youtube and watch a tv show instead of paying for it on dvd is FAR more than the number of people that download the tv show off bittorrent that would have otherwise bought it.

Stopping p2p is easy, stoping piracy is impossible. Limitting connections in the way you suggest would also do exactly what the article warns about as far as looking stupid and having unintended consequences.

I do not use P2P at ALL on this connection (far too slow, far too many better options). Current number of connections open:

2 idle connection to steam
19 HTTP onnections between firefox and chrome (welcome to web2.0, where background XMLHTTPRequests will kill any kind of conneciton cap you might try to put)
10 IM connections from pidgin to various IM servers, not counting any direct connections i may establish in the future

Even if you cut out the multiple connections to the same ip, you're still going to need a lot more slots than that.

Re:Yep you can stop P2P

[luder]

Secondly, I could be doing something funky, like, I dunno, running an ftp server to share photos and video between people in a design shop.

Some ISP forbid that in their TOS, at least mine does. They have a clause that says this:

"The client can't use the Internet access service to connect to the Internet WWW, FTP, IRC, Chat, MUD, MOO or similar servers, also not being able to use the service to run bots."

I doubt this has ever been enforced and believe it is only there to route companies to their enterprise oriented sister company, but still it would give them grounds to terminate the service. Stupid, I know...

Re:Yep, now explain that to the politicians please

[giorgiofr]

I suppose you're also in favor of selling weapons willy-nilly without any background check, then. The weapon dealer is only providing access; he's not responsible for what people do with the goods he sells.

Re:Yep you can stop P2P

[Anonymous Coward]

You seem to think that P2P is only used for copyright infringement. What gives someone the right to clamp down on me using bittorent to spread a Linux ISO? What gives them the right to interfere with apt-p2p? And if they're gong to scan and only interfere with copyright infringing materials, they'd be infringing on my privacy.

Re:Yep you can stop P2P

[Anonymous Coward]

You make the assumption that all P2P traffic is illegal. Downloading the latest version of ubuntu or openoffice.org is usually faster through bittorrent. WoW uses bittorrent to push their updates. Also, some legal download sites are also moving to bittorrent to save costs.

Re:I don't think that's actually the industry's go

[nurb432]

I believe the industry knows that you cannot stop 100% of software piracy. I don't think that's their goal.

Its also not the governments goal. Their goal is to use this as an excuse to get citizen support of reduction of our rights.

Where am I labelling all P2P as illegal?

[TheLink]

I know it's a standard Slashdot practice to not read the article or even the summary, but nowadays it looks like slashdotters aren't even bothering to read posts they reply to.

Where did I say P2P is illegal? Go read what I wrote. I don't think it's what you imagined I wrote - at least based on your reply.

Just because I show how it can be done does not mean I want it to be done, or say that it should be done. Or I'm labelling stuff as illegal.

What next you're going to say the person I was replying to wants to "inhibit free culture"?

Lastly if an ISP slows something down it doesn't mean they regard it as illegal.

Re:Where am I labelling all P2P as illegal?

[Fallen Seraph]

Lastly if an ISP slows something down it doesn't mean they regard it as illegal.

Ah, but the question that comes up is what right does the ISP have to inhibit traffic that isn't illegal? For the ISP to legally be able to throttle P2P traffic just because 'it *might* be used for illegal activity' sets a dangerous precedent, especially since often they describe their service plans as 'unlimited.' This is the entire crux of the argument over Net Neutrality; whether ISPs have the right to shape and manipulate traffic without any legal precedent, and without any legal right, for that matter. The issue is especially touchy since most ISPs have local monopolies, so the consumer can't even switch to another provider, because there is no other provider.

And on a side note, your method doesn't cover how to block one-click hosts such as megaupload and rapidshare, since that's just regular HTTP traffic. Though technically not P2P, the end result is the same.

Re:Where am I labelling all P2P as illegal?

[Threni]

> Ah, but the question that comes up is what right does the ISP have to inhibit traffic that isn't illegal?

Every right, as it's them how are conveying the data. If they want to ensure that 95% of users can surf, email, game etc, and it's 5% of the users who use the majority of their bandwidth, then the obvious thing to do is to somehow restrict that 5% from lowering the quality of service for the others. This is seperate from any legal argument about whether or not the data is subject to copyright.

It's nothing to do with 'legal right' because no-one has a 'legal right' to internet access. It's a contract, agreed by both parties. Net neutrality, when it comes into existance, will exist due to ISPs choosing or having to provide a certain quality of service. As it is (in the UK at least) ISPs can offer 'unlimited' access and actually restrict it to 250megs a month or whatever. Traffic shaping and other limitations have been in place for years and aren't currently under attack in any law suits here as far as I'm aware.

In the UK there isn't generally a problem with local monopolies as you could easily switch from ISP to ISP here.

Re:I don't think that's actually the industry's go

[Tony Hoyle]

Spotify is free.. in a way, better than napster was, except you don't keep the music. In an age of ubuquitous internet access keeping and storing music doesn't make a whole lot of sense anyway.

Re:Yep you can stop P2P

[TheLink]

So why am I an ass for saying: "Yes it's hard to stop copying, but it's not that difficult to seriously clamp down on P2P".

Are you also going to say the person I was replying to was an ass for saying: "You can't stop copyright infringement but you can inhibit free culture."

Flamebait?

[TheLink]

Hmm, so how's that flamebait?

Someone couldn't handle the truth? :)

Or maybe I should have used the term "restrict" instead of the phrase "clamp down"?

But you can clamp down on stuff that is legal.

To quote Merriam Webster quoting Time: "a clampdown on charge accounts, bank loans, and other inflationary influences"

Re:I don't think that's actually the industry's go

[4D6963]

I was going to offer a rebuttal with examples of how you're wrong, but actually you're right, back then you'd just easily search for a song, download it, it would instantly start (can't say the same for BitTorrent or eMule), using a mere 33.6 K modem with a 20 hours/month connection you still could get quite a lot, and you could go to chatrooms, actually make new friends and even see what they had. And if you downloaded porn, you'd even get the person you were downloading from telling you to get your hands out your trousers.

Amazing how I forgot how it was better back then than it is now, except of course for the fact that now you get entire albums in a zip and the rarer stuff is much easier to find.

Your argument already applies to TV, radio, papers

[Geof]

They will not contain ads, they will BE ads, and nothing more. Every single aspect of the movie will only serve to advance the commercial(/political/ideological) interests.

This is already the situation for TV, radio, magazines, and newspapers. In all of these media, the real customer is the advertiser who pays for access to the audience who watches/listens/reads for "free."

Now I won't say that's a good thing. I think it's terrible. In my opinion, quality is clearly higher when it is made directly for the audience (as is the case for the BBC, PBS, NPR, or CBC radio, for example). To the extent that a changing media landscape is undercutting the advertising-supported model I am hopeful that direct payment for (and influence over) cultural works will become more widespread.

In the early days of radio, the manufacturers had a problem. Radio sales were extremely popular, but the people buying needed something to listen to. So the manufacturers created radio stations in order to drive demand for their products. It worked (though government licensing in favor of the networks also wiped out a wide range of independent and community services).

Today, the media industries argue that their production has a multiplier effect on the economy: each dollar invested in media produces many more dollars in related activity (transportation of books, sales of Star Wars toys, Macdonalds promotions, and so on). Some of this activity is really a cost of doing business, whose elimination would result in greater efficiency (e.g. it's more efficient to download a book than to ship it across the country), but much of it is new value. They present this as an argument for strong copyright[1]. In fact, it may be just the opposite: if the return on the dependent activity is greater than the cost of producing the original work, then there is an incentive to create the work even if it made no money directly. This is why Apple created iTunes, for example: not to make money from selling music, but to drive the (much more profitable) sale of iPods.

Or take Star Wars: the films earned $4.3 billion, but merchandise earned $13.5 billion. Widespread copying of the film would not touch the business case for making it, and at the beginning, when the venture was risky, wider distribution would only increase the likelihood of success (while possibly limiting the maximum possible scale of that success - to $13.5b in this case, rather than $17.8b).

We already live in a world where many movies are driven more by the model you describe than by ticket revenue per se. Producers care tremendously about ticket sales as a metric of popularity and because that's what keeps the films in the cinemas, not necessarily because that is their key revenue stream. As it happens, DVD sales recently became more profitable. So we have seen business model change on this scale extremely recently. It ain't the end of the world. (Though it might mean a lot more Star Wars-like films, which admittedly wouldn't make me thrilled: I'm not a fan.)

[1] In the recent copyright debate at The Economist, Dale Cendali, their May 8 guest made just this claim. She cited a study that found that the "IP industries" contributed "nearly 40% of the growth achieved by all U.S. private industry." Unfortunately for her argument, she failed to point out that under the category of "IP industry" the study included the whole automotive industry, big chunks of the transportation and retail sectors, a significant part of the petroleum industry, and so on. (You can see my detailed rebuttal if on page 5 of the May 8 comments.) Turned around, this appears to be evidence that IP is an input cost for many businesses, and there is a large incentive to create works regardless of copyright. (The actual economic claim is not that such works would not be produced, but that they would be underproduced. It's not clear to me that economic theory has a good answer for what the "best" (for whom?) level of production of Big Brother shows or Shakespeare plays is, or at what cost.)

Re:Yep you can stop P2P

[Anonymous Coward]

You want to use a decent ISP. The only "restriction" mine has is they will filter port 25 incoming until you have passed a relay test to check you don't have an open relay running.

Re:I don't think that's actually the industry's go

[Anonymous Coward]

How about DC++?

Way to lower pracy

[Psychotic_Wrath]

I think the only way that piracy can be significantly lowered is by making the software less expensive, and by making the measures taken to make piracy difficult. If it is more difficult to crack the game than it is to just buy it, then it comes to a point where people would rather just go out and buy the thing rather than deal with cracking it all the time. Companies say that piracy drives their costs up. If they thought right then it should drive the prices down. People pirate because they aren't wiling to pay the price in stores. Instead they pay the price in time by cracking the software. Find the point where you can get more people to buy your product and making piracy of the product hard enough, and you will be able to lower piracy significantly.

Re:Way to lower pracy

[cdrguru]

Through piracy, just about everything digital is free. If I can afford to buy one DVD, I can afford to pirate 100 DVDs. Or 1000. There is no "cost justification" becaue free trumps everything.

All it takes is one person motivated enough to overcome whatever protection there is. Once that happens there is no longer any need to buy it - assuming the cracker shares. Zero revenue to the creator, whatever the medium is. That seems to be the pirate goal - remove all revenue from everything digital.

I'd say there is no price point. Someone with time on their hands will always crack stuff no matter how difficult it might be. Or they will buy it with a stolen credit card (which hurts only the seller) and post it for free. The result is it is always better to pirate, no matter what the cost is. Unless it is zero.

No, I am pretty sure I don't agree with the philosophy, but it is tough to beat. Everything for free, nobody ever goes without. Attractive, but doomed in the end. I suspect 10 years from now we will still find P2P filled with nothing but music from earlier times and YouTube with Magibon and TV shows from the 1990's. It won't feel like we're missing anything because everything that is there today will still be there. But anyone capable of creating something new will find something else to do, something that pays.

Re:Yep, now explain that to the politicians please

[PReDiToR]

I just don't believe that yours is the only post that mentions Phorm.

How can we take anything this man has to say seriously when he is balls deep in that dung heap?

Re:Yep you can stop P2P

[phyreskull]

What about P2P networks like Kontiki, which are used for legal services like (in the UK) iPlayer downloads and 4 on demand? Those provide redistribution of copyrighted material in a licensor-approved manner...

Re:Yep you can stop P2P

[Anonymous Coward]

Even if it were possible to correctly distinguish all illegal P2P traffic from legal traffic in real time, which it isn't (not without a huge percentage of false positives, and by extension, a lot of unhappy law-abiding customers), TFA has it spot on; "Pirates" would just change things up as they have always done. The powers that be trying to fight them have *always* been 3 steps behind their tech-savvy opponents, and that's never going to change.
 

Perhaps they just throw some AES-256 encryption into the mix, start using common ports like 80 and 443, randomize headers and packet sizes, intentionally mask the traffic patterns to look like media streams, place any centralisation away from unfriendly governments / ISPs etc... it would make it very difficult. And that's exactly the point, the pirates don't have to make this sort of thing impossible to track or prevent, they just have to make it an expensive and unwieldy fight. When ISPs start seeing their bottom line being impacted and their customers getting angry due to getting caught in the crossfire, they suddenly lose the stomach for it and start turning a blind eye.
 

All this has happened before, and will happen again... The principle at work here is the same as the war on drugs or alcohol prohibition - you can't stop an activity that such large parts of society simply don't see as a problem and have no issue with engaging in. You could argue the morality and legality of it ad nauseam, but that's just how it is.

FINALLY someone seeing clearly!

[kheldan]

I've recited the mantra a million times: You can't stop the signal, Mal!

Don't call it that

[Anonymous Coward]

Piracy is attacking ships at sea and a very bad thing. Sharing is the basis of society.

Re:Yep you can stop P2P

[bestalexguy]

If you carefully analyze the traffic there's no problem in identifying P2P traffic and what that traffic contains. The point is, it's unacceptable to use in this case investigation techniques which should be reserved to extremely serious crimes. The police don't break into every small time crook's home to recover stolen apples. There must be a careful balance between social benefit and privacy violation. Duplicating a file, as well as copying a piece of poetry by hand, shouldn't be considered a major offense.

Awarding damages amounting to thousands of times the market value of the item duplicated and sentencing to time in prison is outrageous. Like hanging a guy for stealing the king's deer. What is so special with this offense to make it the only one for which punishment must be made unreasonably harsh until it's fully eradicated?

Some theoretically less civilized countries use this draconian method for serious crimes. I wonder where is civilization, actually?

Copyright Infringement = Bank Account Infringement

[B_SharpC]

It is easy to stop copyright infringement.
Similarly, bank account infringement is currently halted.

Pirates love the protection they get from their own bank account infringement.
But when authors want the same protection for their IP property from pirates, the pirates cry.

You cannot have it both ways. Laws must be equal and reciprocal.

Re:Yep, now explain that to the politicians please

[cliffski]

Because when the end user is the one who is prosecuted (like Jammie Thomas) there is no end of shouting and whining about TEH MAFIAAAAA and so on.

You cant moan that they should tackle the website hosters, but get upset when its thepiratebay, moan they should prosecute the end users, but get upset when its jammie thomas, and moan its the isps fault, but get upset when they go after the ISP.

Who exactly *is* to blame?
Will people try and stick to one story?

Re:Yep, now explain that to the politicians please

[YourExperiment]

Yeah Dunstone, get your act together and start disconnecting me for file sharing, you lazy hypocritical ass! Oh, wait...

Re:Yep you can stop P2P

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, and services like the BBC's iPlayer, Hulu, digital radio .fm's .... increasingly they are relying on P2P technology to distribute their products. This just makes it an uphill struggle for anyone attempting to filter/manage illegal P2P traffic because everything is blurring into one and the sheer amount of data flowing through the series of tubes is exponentially increasing.

Phorm

[Ant P.]

As mentioned in the comments somewhere above, this ISP has no problem with spying on your traffic and injecting ads into it. It depends which you find more tolerable - online policemen or online telemarketers.

Re:Your argument already applies to TV, radio, pap

[commodore64_love]

>>>In my opinion, quality is clearly higher when it is made directly for the audience (as is the case for the BBC, PBS, NPR, or CBC radio, for example).

And in my opinion all of those networks are pants. BBC is the best of the bunch, but overall produces almost nothing I enjoy; PBS was okay as a kid but as an adult I'm sick of their pro-big-government propaganda. Ditto NPR. And I don't know CBC radio but CBC television sucks; the only good shows they've ever produced were Red Green and Avonlea. I prefer networks that look at their viewership numbers, and try to tailor their entertainment to what the general population wants. I've found they produce more good entertainment than any of the government-run systems.

>>>Or take Star Wars: the films earned $4.3 billion, but merchandise earned $13.5 billion. Widespread copying of the film would not touch the business case for making it

I understand your point but this is a bad example, because 20th Century Fox only own the film. They did not own the rights to the merchandise which all went to George Lucas.

Re:Yep you can stop P2P

[commodore64_love]

Anyone who says we should kill P2P, which has legitimate purposes, is an ass in my book. Or maybe just incredibly short-sighted.

Re:Your argument already applies to TV, radio, pap

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

And in my opinion all of those networks are pants. BBC is the best of the bunch, but overall produces almost nothing I enjoy; PBS was okay as a kid but as an adult I'm sick of their pro-big-government propaganda. Ditto NPR. And I don't know CBC radio but CBC television sucks; the only good shows they've ever produced were Red Green and Avonlea. I prefer networks that look at their viewership numbers, and try to tailor their entertainment to what the general population wants. I've found they produce more good entertainment than any of the government-run systems.

You mean "basically fox", right ? (I kid, I kid)

But the gist of the argument is this : if piracy/"intellectual property theft" is not stopped there will be no such stations left, because why would anyone subject themselves to their ads when the same content + free tivo features is available pirated ?

Furthermore, it will no longer be possible to produce movies targeted at an audience. If piracy is not contained there will be only "government run" movie productions.

You will only have the "european cultural" type propaganda films (you have to like those nice not-white-colored criminals, they're the victims of crime. The fact that your wife was raped by them is, obviously, the fault of white racism. you have to recycle. oh no co2 it is YET EVEN MORE SPECTACULARLY BAD AND DISASTROUS unless we submit to UN world government. You have to like those nice european politicians, even if they voted themselves above the law, ... that sort of crap) that get awards on cannes aplenty, due to self-masturbatory tendencies of the movie makers, but noone ever watches because ... well they suck badly.

But if piracy is not culled, that's all that will be left (well obviously there will be the movies that exist today ...)

How can you stop politicians ?

[DaveDerrick]

You can never stop politicians from passing stupid laws, thats even more impossible than stopping illegal downloads !

Publishing, File Sharing & Revolution

[Randomly]

If the computer is the generic machine: the Internet is the generic means of digital retail and distribution. But does anyone really want to prevent peer to peer file sharing?

Give people what they want.

[Anonymous Coward]

If we could download what we want when we want, most of us wouldn't care if we had to pay. I only ever download stuff iligally if I can't buy it. Much more slowly and in poor quality a lot of the time because that's all I can get. I'd much rather pay a few pounds to get a decent quality legal copy. Just archive EVERYTHING and charge a decent price, that doesn't take the piss.

Re:Yep, now explain that to the politicians please

[Anonymous Coward]

Seconded. I'm with talktalk, and whatever Dunstone says about his company's policy, they still throttle the living crap out of unencrypted bittorrent traffic - I get 5 Kb/s at most out of the protocol until I turn on the encryption. Even then, the speeds are well below the theoretical capacity of the line.

I'm more inclined to believe this is just a clever PR stunt. The quality of the service is not good - switching to openDNS helped somewhat, but the connection still drops out with astounding regularity.

No account, hence A/C - forgive me!

Piracy and Child Porn comparison

[brit74]

I completely agree with this article. And, on that note: I propose that we legalize child pornography. Why? Because every "can't stop it" argument that applies to legalizing piracy applies even better to child pornography. People who trade child pornography are, in fact, more careful about "sharing" their porn with other people - which makes it even harder to stop than piracy. Clearly, we need to "allowing users 'to get child porn easily and cheaply.'"

(Yes, I am be sarcastic. And, yes, I think this argument is 100% valid - so long as you accept the "we can't stop piracy" argument.)

Wow... I fell for their sweet-talk

[jonaskoelker]

As a lot of people have mentioned, TalkTalk aren't all roses. Censorship, advertisement, traffic caps, oversubscription, bad support :(

I guess I in my innocence assumed all ISPs to be as benign as mine.

They overtly censor thepiratebay.org, because the court told them to. Anything else is fair game. No ads, friendly support (good for what little I've used it), no caps, I seem to get the advertised rates.

They're at bnaa.dk (in Danish). Again, I'm not paid to say anything :)

Myth of market forces and network TV

[Geof]

First, if you prefer what the commercial networks produce that's fine by me. They have made lots of good TV shows. It's probably largely a matter of what you grew up with. I grew up with BBC shows rebroadcast in Canada, so prefer Doctor Who to Star Trek.

I prefer networks that look at their viewership numbers, and try to tailor their entertainment to what the general population wants. I've found they produce more good entertainment than any of the government-run systems.

This is not actually what the main private networks (ABC, CBC, NBC in the U.S.) do. They target specific demographics desired by advertisers. The results are quite different from what would happen if they attempted to capture a) the most viewers, or b) the viewers most willing to pay for their shows. This is obvious when you compare to programming by cable channels (e.g. HBO), which are more directly responsive to their audiences. For a long time (many decades) the networks made the (patently absurd) assumption that men made all the significant spending decisions in the family, and targeted their prime time shows accordingly. Or take The Beverly Hillbillies, one of the most successful shows of its time: cancelled not because its audience went away, but because the advertisers figured its audience was too poor. They wanted to chase hip urban viewers instead. It is largely a myth that they are rational actors directed by the market. In practice, networks are basically huge command economies inside. They're not famous for making smart decisions.

The other systems I mentioned vary widely in governance and funding models. CBC TV is abysmal due to a lack of stable funding or independence from the government. Recently, CBC radio has been following in its footsteps. I believe the BBC is quite a bit more independent than CBC, largely because it has a dependable source of long-term funding (the TV license). I don't believe NPR is government run at all. It gets very little money from government. Most of its funding comes from viewers (pledge drives), member stations, and corporate donations.

What we have seen with the non-commercial networks is that they have coalesced around a different audience not well served by the private networks. So on the one hand we have a different approach to funding and governance, on the other we have contrasting tastes and cultures (the stereotype is "popular" vs "middle/high brow"). It's not clear that the one caused the other. In a world without the private networks (which, as I pointed out, would not happen because the consumer electronics industry would profit from creating them if they did not exist - probably even if there were no such thing as copyright), the character of the programming on these systems would likely be quite different.

I am aware of the limits on Fox's rights to Star Wars, but that makes no difference to its relevance. The licensing arrangements in place today are irrelevant when conjecturing whether it could or would have been made if it were unable to depend on ticket sales. My point is that it would have been profitable even if ticket sales were zero.

Re:Nonsense! Make every road an "Autobahn" then?

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop crying because you're still on dial-up and don't have 1Gbps FTTH, JACKASS!

Re:I don't think that's actually the industry's go

[Nursie]

Whilst I appreciate the reasoning behind your comment, I don't agree.

1. I don't like the idea of relying on a third party keeping that data available in perpetuity

2. There are always things these services don't have, either because of contract/copyright issues or just because they're really obscure annd 99.9% of folks don't care about them. I care!

So I'll be keeping my collection. FYI, I'm also the old-fashioned type that buys all my music on CD and likes albums rather than just tracks, which I guess makes me out of touch with today's fashions.

Re:I don't think that's actually the industry's go

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks to me like you're making up hypothetical things that the digital-content industry would do - just so you can justify hating them. It just goes to show where your bias it. You'd be equally justified in making up hypothetical situations to vilify the consumer: those consumers would keep movie directors and musicians in their basements working as slaves, paying them nothing and feeding them table-scraps if they could get away with it.

Piracy alone accomplishes nothing

[mrpiddly]

People these days seem to blame everything and everyone except themselves. In this case, they bemoan the system, the artists, the producers, the prices, ect but they do not offer alternatives and they do not work to directly change things. Either standup and take real measures to bring about change or stop crying about everything that you think is wrong. Just sitting around and pirating digital content accomplishes nothing on its own.

P2P is not the problem!

[Anonymous Coward]

P2P is not the problem! The problem is that people are tired of being overcharged for crappy products, tired of being treated like criminals, and tired of paying for software and content providers to prop up their out of date and failing business models. They are tired of being told what they can and can't do with products that they have purchased. While the RIAA/MPAA foster the idea that P2P itself is illegal/immoral, IT IS NOT! P2P has legitimate uses. Using it to infringe upon copyrights IS illegal, but there is much content that can legally be shared.

And of course, copyright has been twisted and perverted from its original purpose, and needs to be brought back to something reasonable. Patents too. Reasonable as in 7 years. After 7 years, EVERYTHING is in the public domain. No exceptions, no extensions. Business method and software patents need to go away entirely. And patents need to expire after 2 years unless a viable prototype product can be demonstrated, and it can be proven that the patent holder (or their licensee(s)) are making a serious effort to bring the product to market.

Re:Yep you can stop P2P

[TheLink]

And where did I say we should kill P2P?

Maybe you should check your own eyesight and improve your reading skills before you call other people asses and incredibly short-sighted.

Re:Your argument already applies to TV, radio, pap

[metaforest]

mod parent up!

Re:I don't think that's actually the industry's go

[Anonymous Coward]

Napster was a nice first attempt, and it paved the way for everything that followed, but for my (lack of) money, AudioGalaxy was the best at helping me discover new music. During the time period I was using AudioGalaxy, I bought a ton of CDs from artists I never would have heard of otherwise. Since AudioGalaxy went away, I've bought exactly 1 CD (from a major label, but the artist is someone I know, so I felt like supporting them.)

In some ways I'm glad they shut it down..I've gotten to keep probably $1k-$2k/yr in money that I was spending on CDs at the time. But the music I listen to is now a lot less varied and I don't find as many new artists that I like.

Re:Yep, now explain that to the politicians please

[remmelt]

One (1) example of how online piracy has killed a person.

None? Find a new argument, please.

I read fine, I don't know about everyone else

[TheLink]

I never said P2P should be restricted, nor did I say it is illegal. If you think I did, citation please.

Just because "everyone" claims or believes I did so, doesn't mean I did.

I just showed how P2P could easily be restricted. Why? Because "everyone" seems to think that it's so hard to stop P2P traffic, and thus it will be "speed hump" proof.

For example (from the summary): "If you try speed humps or disconnections for peer-to-peer, people will simply either disguise their traffic".

I'm claiming it's not so simple to disguise P2P, because it has a particular characteristic. Once it stops having that characteristic it starts being less efficient at what it is supposed to do. It stops being like P2P and starts being more like "peer to server" with the associated problems.

But you better hope it is legally or commercially infeasible to stop P2P. Because it is indeed technically feasible to stop P2P despite what you believe.

For example, a relatively trivial way P2P can be stopped is by just not moving to IPv6, running out of IPv4 addresses and then putting most "normal users" behind NATs.

Most popular non-P2P services will NOT be affected - only certain VPN technologies will break, the others will be OK (e.g. IPSEC with NAT traversal, openvpn).

But P2P will not work. You will need the ISPs _active_ cooperation for your P2P connection to still work properly behind _their_ NAT they've placed in front of you.

The media companies will find the resulting "network topology" reassuringly familiar - few talkers, many listeners... Back to the good old days. Does Big Media own some ISPs? If you see any inklings of Big Media and the ISPs moving in that direction, you better start acting if you want your P2P.

Just because something has not been implemented already, doesn't mean it cannot be, or it will not be.

The NAT thing is already done by some countries/ISPs and it stops P2P pretty effectively. If more and more hosts end up behind NATs, P2P becomes harder and harder.

Re:Yep, now explain that to the politicians please

[cavebison]

Or, a little more analogously, making a mobile carrier responsible for phone calls and SMSs used to organise illegal activities. Shove that one into the courts.

Re:Nonsense! Make every road an "Autobahn" then?

[Golddess]

There's this road in Germany that has no speed restrictions. Perhaps you've heard of it. It is actually a lot safer than US roads, because the cops there are real strict about actual dangerous driving.

Re:Yep you can stop P2P

[jakykong]

I think it's a mere colloquialism; GPL source code is seen as somehow different from "copyrighted material", and probably rightly so -- although copyright law protects it, when we speak of copyrighted material and copyright violation, the GPL is rarely at the center of that debate. Instead, it's almost always someone who uses copyright to *stop* someone from copying (if this isn't the case, then most arguments about copyright infringement don't really make a lot of sense).

A result is that while it's technically true that being copyrighted doesn't automatically make it illegal to copy, it's easy to simply assume that it is within arguments, leaving GPL, et al to be understood by the reader.

I don't see any particular problem with this as long as it *is* understood that the GPL exists (and I would argue that at least here at /., the majority of people already understand this).

Re: There will always be piracy

[DelShalDar]

The funny thing is that most content creators already have patrons paying their way. If you work for a company as a software developer, or work for a production studio drawing or performing, then those respective companies are the patrons.

The original 7 year copyright was considered an okay compromise because it was relatively short, but was still long enough to allow the creator to potentially earn enough to live off while they held the copyright, as well as having a means to control how much and how far their work spread during that time frame. As soon as that time frame was up, the formerly copyrighted content belonged to everyone and it could be used, duplicated, or sold by anyone and everyone. It promoted a sense of community and cultural contribution to everything creative in the community and society at large.

The only thing preventing the creator from duplicating and selling that work was an agreement with their patron to not do so without the patron's consent. The patron was ultimately responsible for adhering to the creator's wishes with regards to the duplication and distribution of the work that was created so long as they didn't go against the initial arrangement with regards to the uniqueness of the work. Both parties held equal power over the distribution and reproduction of the work, with a bit more freedom given to the creator as they had the ability to create other, similar works as they saw fit. All that, thanks to the patrons who could afford to bankroll the creator while they were doing the creating.

While that model worked out decently for all involved while the common artisan didn't have ready or easy access to the means of reproduction and distribution, it no longer works out that way. The problem is that these days, the balance of power rests more with the patrons than the creators, and so we have companies holding the copyrights to works they didn't actually put any actual effort into creating beyond a vague "I'd like something like..." for the creator to deal with. Once those works are paid for, usually through a mechanism such as a wage/salary (almost always a statement that more creative effort is expected to be forthcoming) or contract (short-term or one-time effort), the modern patrons have set it up so that the artists, once paid for their work, get nothing more than a pittance for the continued use of their work.

For musicians and songwriters it's a "Thanks for the song and here's an exceedingly small percentage of the total profit we re-sell your work for. Be lucky we're giving you that, 'cuz if it wasn't in the contract you'd get nothing."

For software developers it's more like "Thanks for the non-overtime 80-hour weeks you've put in to make the software worth multiple millions of dollars in annual revenue, here's your standard bi-weekly paycheck (no raises this year, recession, you understand) and we'll see you bright and early tomorrow morning when you'll be tasked with making us even more money by building another application that's also going to be worth millions to the company."

I'd love to see a return to the original arrangement where the actual creators held the power and the patrons had to negotiate with the creators to get access to the content.

Re:Yep you can stop P2P

[Anonymous Coward]

any possibility they can be both?