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."

Comments

Re:Privilege of Prosecution.

[realityimpaired]

Because people lending (which is different to whats going on here) over "sneakernet" doesn't equate to tens of thousands of people having their own copy in only a few hours.

*shrugs* it takes about 10 minutes for me to transfer an ISO to my hard drive, stripping the region coding as I do it, and then about 30 minutes to transcode that ISO into an MKV file that includes all of the soundtracks and subtitle information. If I'm not worried about the storage space, I can skip the second step. With a reasonably fast Internet connection, it *could* equate to tens of thousands of people having their own copy in only a few hours, and the main difference between what I'm doing and downloading it off the Internet is that instead of downloading it from a host that might actually be owned by the content holder, I'm creating my own digital copy of it. That I don't then upload it to the Internet is mostly because I can't be bothered to do so, because I don't really care about that side of things. I am digitizing movies so that I don't have to devote a large amount of shelf space to their storage, not because I believe the information wants to be free.

You don't seriously think that the people doing the actual ripping/uploading (who are the people that the industry should *really* be going after) are *buying* dvd's, though, do you? All of the movies I rip, I own (physical copies and everything, just not kept in my living room), but most of the people who actually do the ripping/uploading are getting the movies from some form of sneakernet. Either they work at a video store and have physical access to the DVD before it's released, or they work in a theatre as a projectionist or something, and can rip the DVD while it's still in theatres, or they have a friend who does the above and gets the DVD for them. Most of them are not going to retail outlets and actually *buying* the DVD so that they can rip it.

Re:Privilege of Prosecution.

[drakken33]

I don't want to sound picky but my local theatre doesn't use DVDs for it's digital content. It uses heavily DRM'd files supplied on a portable HDD or beamed in via satellite. The keys are sent separately as and when needed and expire in anything from a week or more. The files can be 200GB+. I'm not saying it's impossible to get a digital copy from a theatre but it's not easy.

RTFA

[mosb1000]

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.

The end result? The mismatch between the law's physical world assumptions and the realities of the software world meant that the law created to respond to the challenges of P2P file sharing led to the opposite of the desired result: a massive increase in the availability of P2P file sharing software. The failure of the law to recognise the unique characteristics of software and software development meant the abandonment of the litigation campaign against P2P providers was only a matter of time.

Re:Privilege of Prosecution.

[Kjella]

And individually watermarked and tamper-proofed, if it did happen they'll know exactly when and where. I've never heard of anyone actually getting a raw 4k rip from these things, if they did I'm sure it'd come to halt very soon. Besides, almost nobody can watch it - I guess the people with 30" displays could get 1440p but 4k televisions and projectors practically don't exist. With the price of 4k equipment you might as well license yourself as a cinema too, won't be that much more expensive. Size would be an issue too, I think for the last of the LotR movies it was 900GB, not sure about that. They're going out practically uncompressed, no artifacting there.