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Survey Suggests P2P Users Buy More Music
elashish14 writes "A new survey commissioned by Google suggests that music listeners who utilize P2P filesharing services buy 30% more music than non-sharers. The survey also probed users' opinions on enforcement practices. Users were strongly against either throttling or disconnecting users' internet services, but the majority suggested also that search engines should block access. 52% of Americans also said that downloading infringing content should be a punishable offense."
Not all people are dumbasses, and some actually prefer to make sure that what they end up blowing their money is not complete garbage. Is that a crime?
I hated Far Cry 2, thought it was a terrible game and regretted buying it. A few weeks back I saw a stream of Far cry 3 and thought it looked fun so torrented it. This lead to be really enjoying the game and completing the pirated version, which lead me to buy it for Co Op, with another friend who bought it on my recommendation and a 3rd who grabbed it after.
I pirated 1 copy of the game (-£0)
I sold 3 copies (+75)
Ubisoft can thank me later.
This goes to show that more than half of the USian population believes in the tyranny produced by the power elite and believe in punishing people for non-crimes. That the population of the US is so badly educated and brainwashed that they believe these things. It goes to show that the US is not a civilized nation with rational, reasonable laws that make sense in any sense of the word.
Waves hand.
I believe downloading infringing material should be punishable.
I also believe that the current penalties are absurd and way out of proportion with the offense.
And, just for the hell of it, I also think current RIAA anti-piracy efforts are counter productive and they should instead focus on delivering their content in ways that make infringement less appealing, rather than ramping up DRM and suing people.
But hey that's just me supporting the tyranny of the power elite.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
Based on the article's writeup of the survey, the survey seems to suggest that everyone is "pirating", with the only difference being where they get their music from. As we'd expect, P2P users had larger libraries with a larger proportion of their library being made up of illicitly acquired music, but in raw numbers, they still purchased more than non-P2P users. Meanwhile, non-P2P users had smaller libraries and were found to be acquiring music through shady means nearly as much, with the distinction being that they were getting it from friends and family as opposed to from the Internet.
Long story short, P2P or not, people are pirating these days, but the P2P folks have a larger appetite for music, and that includes purchasing it in larger quantities. Nothing really earth-shattering for most of us, though hopefully it'll be a wakeup call to the RIAA and their kind.
Well, we can hope, at least.
You have to understand the mentality... they've been raping and robbing artists for a hundred years. So when you're dealing with cheats and criminals, all they can see is when they aren't getting paid its a crime and you must be cheating them. Its called projecting and its as common as sunrise. Problem only exists when these scum bags buy laws codifying and ultimately imposing their criminality on society.
This is STUPID... I can go over to Spotify for free this very second and listen to nearly anything my heart desires. Then when I hear something I just love, I listen to the whole album, and I find damn that's wonderful and I BUY IT because I want it in high fidelity. Or its a piece of rancid wombat feces and I flush it. I buy tremendously more music this way, try things I would never consider buying then go wow, that's not bad and a sale is made that wasn't ever gonna happen.
So the media moguls don't give a flying fsck about selling content. They care about controlling access and creating artificial scarcity so they can bleed the public. That is all, there is no sane argument to the contrary, no meaningful defense, no "But, what about..." There are only two futures, the Spotifys will inherit the earth or the current Media Moguls will legislate free (as in liberty) access into oblivion.
Converting to digital at CD standard loses nothing you can hear. The frequency range covers all of human hearing, and the quantitisation noise is too small to notice on a properly normalised track. What you hear isn't anything inherent to the CD medium: It's just that the preferred style of mixing has changed in the intervening years, something commonly referred to as the 'loudness wars,' as labels seek to make the music stand out more in a public setting by increasing the average volume at the expense of dynamic range.
With MP3s, you get as good as you allocate bits for. 64kbit music is going to sound like rubbish, but you'd need superhuman hearing to notice anything changed at 384kbit. Better, newer codecs can easily match that quality at a lower bitrate - MP3 is quite dated now, technologically. It achieved such dominance while it was the best around that when better codecs came along it was too entrenched to displace.
You don't have a choice.
The 99 percent police crackdown proved that the elite are willing and able to use force to silence their critics. Said elite also hold a collective monopoly on the mass media that wanna-be politicians need to get elected.
Finally, the elite use their money to support whichever candidate will kiss their ass, and they threaten to support the opposition if they don't. You either kiss their ass or get sold out to someone who will.
The only way you will get into a federal office is with the backing of the power elite. If they don't like you, they will:
a) Bankroll your opponent's campaign
b) Refuse you air time entirely
c) Violently suppress your wanna-be constituents
The power elite already have the country by the balls and they know it.
In your knee-jerk parroting of the "filesharing isn't theft" semantic argument, you missed the AC's point: to be meaningful the survey would need to control for the users' level of interest.
This is a classic example of the correlation-equals-causation fallacy. While it's being trumpeted by filesharers as proof that it results in people paying for more music and movies, it can just as easily be interpreted as indicating that people who are sufficiently into commercial media that they spend 30% more money on it, also fileshare it. Which would be totally unsurprising, and also a lot less of a challenge to the MAFIAA's argument, because it's possible that these people would've spent 40% more if they didn't have access to stuff without paying. Or maybe not. This survey doesn't tell us.
Don't be like a Creationist, looking for and latching onto any dubious study that seems to support the belief you already hold. Demand – as AC suggested – better studies that control for interest, to show whether or not your religious beliefs are sound or not.
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