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.

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.