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How Litigation Only Spurred On P2P File Sharing
littlekorea writes "The growth in peer-to-peer file sharing surged in response to efforts by the content industry to litigate over the past decade, according to a new study by a researcher at Melbourne's Monash University. Dr Rebecca Giblin explains why 'physical world' assumptions don't apply to the online world."
and first!
Since when does someone take it upon theirselves to demand royalties from people that trade movies by lending their discs over Sneakernet?
Shut these bums down. They don't make a living or contribute to the quality of life to others around them other than to exact fines and fees with the same precision as the Zetas and IRS.
I learned that this existed and that you could pirate stuff from all the controversy the RIAA and MPAA have done. If they never got sue happy and had absolute no morals, I probably wouldn't even know you could do this.
Typical of lawyers: why say in one paragraph what one can say in a whole page.
The threat of litigation is not stopping everyone from downloading movies and games, the torrent sites are still running. And there are FTP sites popping up that have movies on them as well, piracy is everywhere.
liberare massarum ex ignorantia, clausa descendit molestie.
The article reads like an undergraduate who wants to write a shit-kicking thesis and is really oooh excited about things but has entirely failed to do anything more than throw a few disjointed ideas in a bucket. It is peppered with lines that sound good but don't stand up to a couple of seconds examination: " So once the Napster litigation made P2P programmers aware of the rules about knowledge and control, they simply coded Napster's successors to eliminate them." I mean WHAT? Programmers coded out rules of "knowledge and control"???? No, the rules of law on knowledge and control exist independently in jurisprudence. How do you "code out" something that's entirely outwith software? Nonsense.
The author states "I would argue pre-P2P era law was based on a number of "physical world" assumptions." She goes to state that that makes sense because, well, it was pre-P2P. When you start any sentence with "I would argue that" (which is bad enough as it goes) and then point out in the next sentence that it's bleeding obvious, then it rather tends to underline you haven't made a point at all. Which is more than a small problem when you then go to make four non-points on the back of that about "the physical world" where, again, one sees no connection to the principal "argument" that litigation apparently "spurred on" file sharing. Ideas in a bucket.
And at the heart of it, the article offers no causative argument that litigation spurred on file sharing. At best it observes that file sharing increased in the era after litigation but it falls down entirely in showing any causation rather than correlation. There are other daft arguments about the Supreme Court making laws: it doesn't, de Tocqueville et al were rather insistent it couldn't; rather its interpretation of law clarifies the law already in place, which show the author is floundering on the subject matter.
So a number of ideas that sound like they were excitedly discussed in an undergraduate bar (and not at a terribly good college) and aren't worked through or even put into a single coherent narrative and which argues causation but offers no evidence of it.
Weak.
Just finishing reading this long page on how the file sharing litigation process is flawed, I feel little enlightened. Most of the observation presented have been discussed here over a decade ago. What's interesting though, is where these observations are coming from. Maybe someone on the legal size has finally opened his eyes.
If that's good or bad for file shares and file sharing app creators is another story though.
Doesn't anyone take economics anymore?
Every product has a price that is based on supply and demand.
Digital media once created has a verry high supply ability. Thus it's cost is lowered. Digital content providers are charging more then what supply and demand curve intercection states. And legal controls that are trying to maintain this off balance. So... Blackmarkets are naturally formed to provide goods at their actual costs.
This is the same thing with drugs, unpasturized milk, under the counter workers...
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Anyone who actually looked at the things for himself, instead of parroting what he heard (mostly from the media Mafia), always knew that you can't treat information like a physical object.
But it should be obvious to everyone who ever copied a file. Or who knows about how "moving" a file is actually implemented with making a copy plus "deleting" the original. Where "deleting" actually means "forgetting", as in "we overwrite the pointer to its location in the storage" and sometimes as in "we overwrite the data with new data".
And it should also be obvious to everyone who ever gave information to somebody non-trustworthy, who then passed it on to everyone else, without any way to control it and often without one even knowing it (other than with a 1984-like state with DRM/TCPA chips in everyone's head).
That "license" you get when you get some information (like a song), and that dumb people call "buying", is that contract of trust. Which is just silly, since without total surveillance, they couldn't even find out if you gave a shit or a copy to everyone but them.
Basically what they want is total control over a piece of information, while giving it to everyone for money WITHOUT doing ANY work at all. (Remember: They distribute. [Something that nowadays takes as much work as putting a link on a website.] They do not make anything. They take the work of others and give them 3.5% of the money, tops, with with the artists still have to pay e.g. studio bills.)
Sorry, that's
1. a crime, and
2. a pipe dream.
If it ever "works", society will be dead. (Which includes them too.)
If you go to Amazon, its listed at $115US for preorder.
It sounds like an excellent read, and I'd pay about 1/10 the price (more or less).
Dr. Giblin is there a place to buy this book at a regular price?
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
It makes me think about recent events with the Arab Spring's use of technology, Anonymous, and Wikileaks. Are the little people (us) in essence weaponizing the internet against the powers-that-be? Ad-hoc mesh networks might be a fall-back when the powers-that-be realize that and try to switch it off.
But especially with regard to Wikileaks. They say they've been stymied by the financial blockade of the big banks. So I wonder if there is any work being done on how to route around the financial blockade, since it seems to be the only thing that has remotely stopped the efforts of the little people against the powers-that-be.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
The real pirates and usurpers are the labels and -IAAs, just ask some of the real creators about their royalty checks from the labels. Copyright has become sheer extra-constitutional thuggery with ex post facto changes, favoritism, public subsidy, harassment, subversion and essentially unlimited terms. F-'em.
It hepls to think about who wants what:
- music makers ultimately want to do music; they derive pleasure from doing that; it's their very nature to do so and to want to do it;
- listeners just dig music; it is somewhat surprising people can appreciate music without being able to compose it, but somehow it happens; they'll get angry at what interposes itself between them and what they want -- just like any child...
- music distributors couldn't care less about music -- they want profits, by any means they can get it (alas, there's a problem with vicious capitalism, but let's save it for another occasion); for them, creating scarcity is a way to boost profits; they also have this naïve idea that masses can be contained; it's a clear joining of evil intent with ignorance about how society works plus overestimation of their own power to control things.
Misunderstanding one's own power, btw, is behind several disasters we met along the way in mankind's history, but let's save this, too.
In the end, composers will resort to free music and donations, precisely as a way to get rid of distributors -- because these latter have been so obnoxious. As everyone can see in commerce, getting rid of middlemen is a nobrainer, which means distributors might consider what to do after they lose their jobs -- or, alternatively, desperately try to survive... the first measure being, of course, changing their attitude 180 degrees by:
1. being really helpful to both composers and listeners;
2. it follows, but let's say it: don't steal from both parties!
3. stopping the bullying tactics -- that's suicide;
4. having a nice agenda, being clear about it and sticking to it;
5. disappear from the news: achieve the status of being accepted and keep a low profile.
Actually, now that I think about it, this could work also for proprietary software companies and for Linux distros.
First, what happens when you tell someone you can't do something? They go off to do it. Forbidden fruit and all that.
Second, content producers just don't want to let us buy stuff like any other normal product. Music and video come with DRM, so we can't make a backup copy (*cough*). It's not like they will provide me (outside of Disney) a replacement at a reduced price. Just give me an unencumbered disc/file. (And preferable at some type of reasonable price.)
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
comment.
Read radical news here
The author is not saying anything about correlation. What the article says is that because the law shut down the conventional methods of file-sharing, it caused people to turn to producing many varieties of free file sharing software to get around the potential litigation. The ultimate result was a great increase in the ease and availability of file-sharing software. The exact opposite of what the people writing the law intended. This happened because of a variety of physical world assumptions legislators made that don't apply in the world of software.
> [goat.cx]
For more than 100 years, every time the government tries to stop people from doing what they want to do, there is instantly either a black-market created, or people find a way around the law. You would think the idiots in power would understand that by now - and I'm sure they do, but it is just too lucrative to do it this inept way. Sure people loose money on the deal, but those in power obviously are making money - which is the goal. Look at how much Obama and the other politicians are making off wall-street at the moment - why would they want anything to change?
So, if a court says - you are guilty because you did x, y, and z - then as a coder I will find away around it, so I'll do x, somsone else will do y, and someone else will do z. Now I can still do all three, it's just that I have to create a different businesses so that on paper I'm not actually the one doing it - thank you supreme court. So if I write a tracker - which just yield hashes, I have no idea of what is in those hashes so I have no knowledge of what people are doing, and that is fine. Then I have another company that allows people to post information which maps information to those hashes. So I'm just a search engine. And as long as there are other writing P2P applications - which uses standard file transport technology. I'm in the clear on all counts. Politicians and business majors are idiots when it comes to what is feasible technologically - and since I control who sees my system, I just put a peerblocker on so no one associated with the government or RIAA, or MPAA can connect to my system and let normal people do so. And thank you for allowing me to create a bullet proof system.
Then you try to control DNS - okay, so we'll go to a dissociative DNS system so you can't do that, and thank you for exposing a flaw. And they waste these silver bullets - they did it with GPS during the first Gulf War, and now built into every phone and GPS system are several ways to figure out where you are, so if the government screws it up again, it won't matter. Technology CANNOT be controlled - THANK HEAVENS!!!!
If I encrypt everything on all of my hard-drives - it doesn't matter what you KNOW, it's a question of what you can prove... And that is nothing...
Bravo!
The world is a changing place. I believe through computers society has evolved ,en mass, to a path more beneficial to the species. Fighting nature is more futile than resisting "The Borg". The founding fathers were right in the beginning to protect NEW invention to the inventor for a limited 4 year span. Further ahead were the unforeseen inevitable crash of immovable object (individual ability to compute, copy, network and communicate to the world on a level playing field with other individuals, thus creating a virtual "world mind" which in turn evolved at the speed of technology enabling the individual.From which there is no turning back short of world wide cataclysm) by irresistible force (The momentum of the old Cro-magnon, dark age , wrong headed notion that work created as intangible could be protected for the purpose of individual profit. Best stick to tangible retail and mfg. for $ boys. Seems the world has a mind of it's own and it shares thoughts and connections around our brain via the network-a-ma-jig.) This has the implication of a new human right to it. The right to existent knowledge to the individual for the purpose of survival in an increasingly populated competitive world. ,as individuals have decided that
Bravo! We have wrought a Bio/Binary super computer via the interthingy. Stick that in your tube and pipe it for a bit!
I expect it has implications for everyone from filmmakers to codemonkeys to your grandma's recipe for baklava. In return, we
it is a NATURAL law that "information longs to be free" as those who made this vast world mind possible by hardware software
Incidentally this is recursive of a parallel natural philosophy evident that the Music Industry is now an unnecessary step for music to flow through musicians and be distributed as communication, enabling the musician as individual to provide himself a living reasonable to his talent. Yes, it's been seen that a musician can distribute his music for free and gig for $$ with wondrous potential for growth in direct ratio to his ability to utilize a playing field superior to old distribution/profit/business models. Outdated thinking is always superseded by bigger, better faster...well ,duh!
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
That the RIAA made a big stink about Napster in the early days is what caused it all.
Until that happened hardly anyone in the general public knew it existed. The concept of getting 'free music' wasn't even in their minds, until then.
Way to go RIAA for creating your own nightmare. Unless that was the goal, get it on the radar, then demonize it via the media and pay for legislation in a preemptive strike. ( that backfired... )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Just make everything over 6 months old available for a reasonable fixed subscription price and you will have no piracy, have simpler accounting (like when long distance calls became less expensive to give away unlimited than to track the calls).
$20 a month for all songs that have been out 6 months.
$20 a month for all books that have been out 6 months.
$20 a month for all movies that have been out 6 months.
You could probably push one of those categories up to $30 or $40.
You might miss some on the high end (cable people paying $120 a month) but you pick up a lot on the low end (who now pirate or do without). The current model is crazy.
There is a high benefit to being able to reliably use this model. I don't have enough room in my house to keep all the dvd's books and cd's. I've been getting rid of them for the last five years.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Every few years, THIS TIME they are REALLY going to stop all file sharing once and for all THEY MEAN IT THIS TIME. Every time, file sharing explodes as people get all they can before it ends. The explosion ends with more file sharing than ever as people explore new ways of sharing files. These crackdowns, which are announced with a LOT of media fanfare but never seem to actually happen, have done as much as anything to spur on the explosive growth of file sharing. If you knew file sharing was going to end tomorrow, wouldn't you grab everything you could today?
False. File-sharing started because there was no legal alternative. If something like iTunes had existed in the early days, people (including me), would have used it. When iTunes finally did come along, it had a nasty DRM. If it had been open, more people (including me), would have used it.
Recently, I have been seeing more and more artists offering their music on their website without DRM and without a label. This makes me so happy, I usually buy their entire discography (if I like the music of course). It is trivial to offer music on a website, and I imagine artists have realized that people are much more willing to pay for something when they know their money isn't going to a record company.
As for the litigation, that is just the noisy death throes of a once powerful industry, angry about becoming obsolete. It has had zero effect on my behavior (and I read Slashdot), and certainly hasn't affected most people's reasons for file-sharing.
... There is demand for unpasturized milk?
Are people actively trying to get themselves sick or something? Where I live there's zero supply because it's banned from sale. (you have me doubting about our demand side of the scale though)
Are you aware at least, that there's porn on the internet, too?
Damn! I'm gonna have to get me one of them Intertube connections.
It was demand coupled with lack of supply that spurred things on. That's all.
Because raw milk is supposed to taste slightly different (so for some people, better), I think. Since it's banned from sale, most people never tasted raw milk, and naturally don't care to pursue it -- well excepting hipsters who think obscure=good -- but some people who grew up on a dairy farm have developed a taste for it and don't like the pasteurized stuff.
I spent a good chunk of money every month on music at the height of napster. And was just learning about downloading.
And then metallica listened to some lawyers or whatever and turned into dicks over the whole thing.
That week i pawned all my purchased cd's. and have NEVER bought another one since.
You can argue the semantics of it forever... But i still felt like i was being called a thief.. And you know what thieves do? They steal from you. And don't buy your products. So i'm just living up to the image they expect of me.
Fuck you music industry. You spent too much time calling me a thief when i was a customer. So this won't be over just because you wise up and get a clue either. I want a personal apology and a kiss on my ass before i'll start buying music again.
What? No? Fine.. Still won't be getting any of my money ever again.
The Streisand effect? A lot of the P2P sites have gained a lot of publicity from the lawsuits.
OTOH, we were considering going to the unpasteurized stuff but we know someone who grew up on a dairy farm and he said that he would never drink the unpasteurized stuff. He's the kind of person whose opinion you tend to respect.
However, the government has no business banning it and, indeed, in certain segments of the population, the banning of it is likely to increase demand.
The price of a product is defined mostly by its perceived value, not by its production costs.
That is why diamonds are so expensive.
That is why paintings cost so much.
That is why luxury cars can only be afforded by so few people.
That is why certain areas like Beverly Hills is so expensive.
And that is why digitial products have a price far above zero.
Therefore, piracy is theft.
What's the value of the water you need to drink to survive? It's pretty ridiculous to ignore available supply in considering the price of something.
Your basic point about perceived value is not entirely wrong, but you've chosen some examples that are either terrible or irrelevant:
The price of a product is defined mostly by its perceived value, not by its production costs.
That is why diamonds are so expensive.
The supply of diamonds is artificially controlled. So while a certain amount of their value is doubtless due to perceived value (everybody knows mined diamonds are worth so much more than perfect industrial diamonds), that gap would narrow considerably if everything that could be mined was dropped straight onto the open market.
That is why paintings cost so much.
Paintings, as I suspect you mean them, are unique - theirs is not an artificial scarcity. Simple supply-and-demand is enough to explain the value of a given van Gogh when there's only one of it. So that's a good example of perceived value, but it has very little to do with a discussion of digital media, which is about as un-unique as you can get. In digital media the product is not the entire work of art, like it would be if you bought Starry Night. You're not paying for the work in every form in which it can exist everywhere...you're paying for a copy of it, and in a fair legal system that would mean you got to use that copy in your car and in your house and, hell, maybe even listen to it at the same time your wife is doing so.
That is why certain areas like Beverly Hills is so expensive.
Not really. I mean yeah, partially, there's cachet and all, but you're buying a lot of things when you buy expensive property: proximity to desirable resources, probably a really nice house, presumed safety and security, the not-entirely-intangible benefits of living in a prime ZIP code, and a virtual guarantee that you will one day be able to sell the place at a profit unless you buy at the top of a bubble. And as with paintings, as the old saw goes, they're not making any more land (except in Chiba).
And that is why digitial products have a price far above zero.
No, their price is far above zero because the content owners still haven't figured out that selling at a price the market will bear will actually increase sales. iTunes and Amazon proved the "perceived value" of songs pretty damn well. As soon as there was competition in that marketplace, songs were 99 cents (and DRM-free). Why? Because that's what people would pay for them in large numbers. Make them more expensive and fewer people buy them and the content owner loses money. I'm not a big laissez-faire guy, but the free market handled that one pretty well. As evil as the RIAA is, at least they learned that lesson. The MPAA still hasn't, which is why you still can't buy a reasonably-priced digital copy of a movie.
I want to buy them, guys...sell them to me for less than it costs to buy the 4-disc megaset with the "free" digital copy included and I will do so. I don't pirate...I just don't buy movies. Make them $5 and I will, and I doubt I'm alone in that rational economic assessment.
Your basic point about perceived value is not entirely wrong, but you've chosen some examples that are either terrible or irrelevant:
The price of a product is defined mostly by its perceived value, not by its production costs. That is why diamonds are so expensive.
The supply of diamonds is artificially controlled. So while a certain amount of their value is doubtless due to perceived value (everybody knows mined diamonds are worth so much more than perfect industrial diamonds), that gap would narrow considerably if everything that could be mined was dropped straight onto the open market.
That is why paintings cost so much.
Paintings, as I suspect you mean them, are unique - theirs is not an artificial scarcity. Simple supply-and-demand is enough to explain the value of a given van Gogh when there's only one of it. So that's a good example of perceived value, but it has very little to do with a discussion of digital media, which is about as un-unique as you can get. In digital media the product is not the entire work of art, like it would be if you bought Starry Night. You're not paying for the work in every form in which it can exist everywhere...you're paying for a copy of it, and in a fair legal system that would mean you got to use that copy in your car and in your house and, hell, maybe even listen to it at the same time your wife is doing so.
That is why certain areas like Beverly Hills is so expensive.
Not really. I mean yeah, partially, there's cachet and all, but you're buying a lot of things when you buy expensive property: proximity to desirable resources, probably a really nice house, presumed safety and security, the not-entirely-intangible benefits of living in a prime ZIP code, and a virtual guarantee that you will one day be able to sell the place at a profit unless you buy at the top of a bubble. And as with paintings, as the old saw goes, they're not making any more land (except in Chiba).
And that is why digitial products have a price far above zero.
No, their price is far above zero because the content owners still haven't figured out that selling at a price the market will bear will actually increase sales. iTunes and Amazon proved the "perceived value" of songs pretty damn well. As soon as there was competition in that marketplace, songs were 99 cents (and DRM-free). Why? Because that's what people would pay for them in large numbers. Make them more expensive and fewer people buy them and the content owner loses money. I'm not a big laissez-faire guy, but the free market handled that one pretty well. As evil as the RIAA is, at least they learned that lesson. The MPAA still hasn't, which is why you still can't buy a reasonably-priced digital copy of a movie.
I want to buy them, guys...sell them to me for less than it costs to buy the 4-disc megaset with the "free" digital copy included and I will do so. I don't pirate...I just don't buy movies. Make them $5 and I will, and I doubt I'm alone in that rational economic assessment.
You're forgetting that perceived value is related to scarcity - if something is very common, like air to breathe (just try living without THAT for more than a few minutes), people don't tend to pay much for it. Furthermore, theft implies the creator/owner loses the potential value of the item in question when it is taken. This is not the case with digital information. A person who produces an mp3 of music will always have it available to "sell" no matter how the file is pirated. And on the subject, if the owner is not deprived of having an item to "sell" by "selling" it, is it really even a sale?