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Networking Technology

File-Sharing Winners and Losers of 2005 140

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the sucker-born-every-minute dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A lot happened in the P2P world in 2005 according to Slyck news. From the article: 'BitTorrent soared to new heights while Steve Jobs enjoyed record breaking iPod sales. Yet not everyone shared this success. The RIAA continued its fight against P2P networking with little effect, as Sony-BMG disgraced itself and the DRM concept.'"
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File-Sharing Winners and Losers of 2005 More

File-Sharing Winners and Losers of 2005

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  • Quick Summary (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ndansmith ( 582590 ) on Sunday December 25, 2005 @04:46AM (#14335319)
    Winners: People who enjoy shared music and movies for free.
    Losers: **AAs, whose obsolete business model is faltering
    Biggest Losers: The poor pre-teens and grandparents dragged into court by the **AAs.

    • Re:Quick Summary (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Doppler00 ( 534739 )
      Let's correct this shall we:

      Winners: People who don't want to pay for music or movies and would rather steal them.
      Losers: Businesses who have a right to sell their products under the protection of copyright laws.
      Biggest Losers: The average consumer who has to deal with excessive DRM because of the "winners" above.

      Thank you. Now let's see how many replies I get about how the U.S. copyright system is flawed, and big businesses take artists money.

      • Re:Quick Summary (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 25, 2005 @05:17AM (#14335360)

        Let's correct this once again shall we:

        Winners: People who don't want to pay for music or movies and would rather steal them.
        Losers: Businesses who have a right to sell their products under the protection of copyright laws.
        Biggest Losers: The average consumer who has to deal with excessive DRM because of the losers above.

        It is not the fault of the "winners" that certain businesses refuse to sell their product without draconian restrictions and inflated prices.

        • Re:Quick Summary (Score:5, Funny)

          by zurab ( 188064 ) on Sunday December 25, 2005 @07:27AM (#14335539)
          Why don't we revise it one more time then:

          Winners: terrorists and murderers
          Losers: patriotic all-American honest corporate cartels
          Biggest losers: Mr. and Mrs. [patriotic] Smith

          Does this labelling do any better for you? Just goes to show that you can label things any way you want to make your "point."

        • One doesn't follow from the other (Score:5, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 25, 2005 @10:47AM (#14335887)
          "The average consumer who has to deal with excessive DRM because of the losers above"

          Actually no.

          The record company's business model had traditionally been a pay-per-listen model. Unlike today, people just 100 years ago had no disposable income. Most people's thoughts were of having enough provisions to survive; the idea of a middle class with income to spend on luxuries is a 20th century ideal. Even then, the real middle class was largely a result of the consumerism buoyed by the end of WW2.

          So prior to the 50's people couldn't afford record players or player pianos or other ways of listening to music. Live music, radio, and juke boxes were how the record companies grew up and the model there is you pay to listen. Every time (and yes, listening to a commercial is paying to listen).

          Even as record players grew in popularity and dropped in price, people didn't have large music collections. They started to hear music on radio's and then would put a nickel in the jukebox to listen to it again.

          The 50's and 60's brought an explosion of relatively cheap music, which from the RIAA's standpoint was a good thing. Those LP's couldn't be copied (except for a handful of geeks...er.... HiFi buffs who had a reel-to-reel recorder but with prices at several hundrew dollars, was hardly worth the effort.

          But as the compact cassette (and 8-track) grew in popularity the apple-cart was upset. People could borrow albums from each other and they could make copies! Forbidden fruit. The idea that an LP was special and uncopyable was gone. The physical DRM scheme in place at the time was rendered useless for people who could afford a cassette deck. And they could. And they copied a lot. Sometimes, they'd do it so much the record companies would raid "trading parties" on college campuses. Still,it was not a big deal and anybody with a cassette deck would do "Greatest Hits" tapes or make copies of friends albums. For the first time, copying had a measurable impact on sales. Still, the record companies figured out they could sell pre-recorded cassette and so all-in-all things weren't bad.

          Then the Audio CD came out and it was back to the old deal for the record companies. DRM. You couldn't copy a CD! Unless you were one of those geeks with a lot of time, a lot of brains and a few thousand bucks to buy recordable CD's, but that wouldn't come for almost a decade.

          But when MP3's came out nobody would have heard of them except for one sly move by fraunhaufer... they started to give away command line versions of their MP3 player, and they turned the other was as people reverse engineered MP3. The cat was and is out of the bag, and this time, a change in format won't help primarily because once its on your hard drive, format is now irrelevant. The old days of a new format every 10-15 years is obsolete. So once you own music, you never buy it again.

          Understand two things that are important. You must understand this or nothing good will every come of this:

          1) The record companies still believe they are entitled to "nickel" every time you listen. Its in their blood.

          2) The record companies have relied on format changes to encourage sales of a back catalog.

          So from their point of view, they want DRM not only to limit what you can do with music, but they also want it so you have to buy the same music again in a few years as they obsolete the current format. Remember this: The DRM would exist on the music even if nobody was stealing it. It allows control and control is the important thini

          I say this... let people copy as much as possible. Let congress pass the most draconian laws protecting music and film possible, because then people will finally get tired being screwed by the record companies and real change will happen.

          But whining about people copying RIAA music for free? Its like worrying that its not fair that you steal from the corner drug dealer.
          • You couldn't copy a CD!

            You still had your cassette deck: 3 heads now, high bias and metal tape, dolby B & C. For many of us, that was plenty good enough even for CD quality music.

          • Don't forget that music has existed for MUCH longer than music corporations. Music goes right back to the dawn of civilisation, when people would sit around a campfire with a bone flute. I can't tell you how society worked back then, but they almost certainly were sharing music, playing off each other and improvising new music through social influence, and generally thinking of music as a social and cooperative thing, rather than an economic thing.

            There really is no reason that I can see for music to be

        • Sorry. IMHO, They gave up their copyrights when they lobbied for 90+ year copyright terms. Copyright is a good thing. Infinite term copyright is a bad thing. Until copyright terms get fixed I have no moral objection to sharing music and movies. Of course it is illegal, but so is shooting the guy raping your neighbor (in most states).
        • Copyrighted works are not property. Copyright in fringement is not theft. Copyright infringement is not stealing.

      • One more try... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by commodoresloat ( 172735 ) on Sunday December 25, 2005 @05:28AM (#14335369)
        Winners: Musicians who now have the opportunity to tap into niche markets globally without paying a blood tax to soulless corporations who are destroying music
        Losers: Ego-driven and greedy but untalented millionaire executives at said corporations who will see slightly less profit this year from sucking the blood of people with actual talent by locking down their distribution channels, yet will nonetheless whine like babies that they're being ripped off by the very fans who made them millionaires in the first place
        Biggest Losers: Slashdotters who aren't getting a penny of this money but still feel driven to defend these bloodsucking corporate drones every chance they get.
        • Agreed 100%. I, much like many of the users around here, love the new means of finding music online, such as great sites like Overclocks Remix [ocremix.org] and by bands such as Machinae Supremacy [machinaesupremacy.com] who publically give music out for free on their own.
          • to be honest, I am still amazed that OCremix is still around.

            mainly since game companys like square-enix went on a C&D spree over the summer closing just about anything that hand anything related to their works that wasn't just information.

      • Re:Quick Summary (Score:3, Interesting)

        by EzInKy ( 115248 )

        Biggest Losers: The average consumer who has to deal with excessive DRM because of the "winners" above.

        No the biggest loser so far is democracy but I still hold out hope for a big win in the end. You see, the Constitution says many things about the rights guaranteed to the citizens of the US. Things such as freedom of speech, baring arms, fair trails, and protection against unreasonable searches, are written in stone. Copyrights and patents are not, they are just an option that Congress may excercise.
        • My right to bare arms (wear t-shirts) is doing just fine here in good ol' Texas.

          Are you perhaps thinking of fundamentalist Muslim theocracies?

      • Re:Quick Summary (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Gadzinka ( 256729 ) <rrw@hell.pl> on Sunday December 25, 2005 @06:17AM (#14335444) Journal
        US Copyright implementation is getting more and more stupid, but that's besides the point. You forgot to mention that other thing.

        Movies on DVD priced $10-$20 sell like there was not tomorrow. Music on CDs, usually cheaper than movies to produce, doesn't sell for $20+. It doesn't even suprise anyone anymore to find that soundtrack from latest and greatest movie costs more than the movie itself...

        Number of DVD-s bought by me in last couple of years : >200
        Number of CD-s [...] : 3

        Robert

        PS In my country (Poland) you can buy perfectly legal DVDs with movies added to magazines as marketing gimmick. The price of such magazine: $3-$6. And some of them are actually better than the crap that runs in the cinema, with price of such DVD being lower than single movie ticket.

        My last two purchases:

        "Ghost in the Shell": DD5.1 and DTS, JP, EN and PL audio, 20pln (~$6)
        "Battle Royale": DD5.1 and DTS, JP and PL audio, 20pln (~$6)

        The overall effect on the market is that now you can buy even movies from big houses (like Underworld from Sony) for ~$8 in big bookstores, without any tricks, rebates etc.

        There's actually no incentive to burn movies rented or downloaded from the 'net: good quality DVD-R is ~$1.5, rental of hot item is ~$4 and I've actually seen DVDs with lower price in retail than in rental (e.g. Shawn of the Dead lately).

        • Re:Quick Summary (Score:5, Funny)

          by cpt kangarooski ( 3773 ) on Sunday December 25, 2005 @09:56AM (#14335785) Homepage
          Typical. The one place where the copyright industry seems to be acting the way people would like, and it's Poland. ;)
          • Not really the way ppl want :(

            Blockbusters on DVD still cost >$30 for first couple of months and (not only) hit music CDs tend to cost $25+. But while music doesn't get much cheaper over time, movies tend to slide down quite fast. Above mentioned "Underworld"[1] started at $30+, and sells for $8 only for last couple of weeks. Disney on the other hand keeps its prices well over $25, regardless of how little they sell.

            On the other hand, good European productions (like "Z class" "Shawn of the Dead" or (abso
          • Typical. The one place where the copyright industry seems to be acting the way people would like, and it's Poland.

            Quick! Let's partition them!
        • Well, *some* people understand the economy of scale principle, that it's better (and in fact, easier) to sell 10K units at $10 that 1K units at $50.

          Some others are still fighting to retain low sales of overpriced DVDs. I wish them merry next xmas at the homeless shelter.

          I'm not going to buy entertainment at inflated prices. If they don't keep prices in the sensible range, there are many other options for time wasting - TV (if you can stomach it), books, games... Those that will not understand their goods ar

      • Re:Quick Summary (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Winners: People who don't want to pay for music or movies and would rather steal them.
        Losers: Businesses who have a right to sell their products under the protection of copyright laws.
        Biggest Losers: The average consumer who has to deal with excessive DRM because of the "winners" above.

        The idea that music or movies can be stolen is an invented notion like "intellectual property" itself, or for that matter, land ownership. (Remember, prior to our arrival, land ownership didn't exist in the US.) People are tr

        • Re:Quick Summary (Score:2, Insightful)

          by Essef ( 12025 )
          At the end of the day you're still playing loose-and-fast with Other People's Property. By law you're NOT allowed to freely copy and redistribute copyrighted materials. If you have such a moral outrage against the system, then don't buy the music, and don't download it either.

          Just because we can all agree that music industry is evil and stacked against the artist, does not mean you're helping the artist by denying them even the measely few cents they would have earned on a CD sale.

          If you really want to supp

          • At the end of the day you're still playing loose-and-fast with Other People's Property

            This is a moot point, but I am not going to debate this since I quite frankly find it redundant for both sides.

            By law you're NOT allowed to freely copy and redistribute copyrighted materials.

            To be technical though, it's downloading music that is copyrighted without permission from the copyright holdert - yes there is a difference, the difference that allows me to share independent music that is copyrighted because t

        • Re: science and useful arts, the framers' meaning is clear, it's just that English has changed since they wrote that, over 200 years ago. You can check in your convenient, pocket-sized unabridged OED for the historical definitions, but I'll provide them here just in case.

          'Science' means something like knowledge, generally. Copyright is intended to promote this by encouraging people to write about any sort of knowledge, whether it's a story they made up or is a book about facts they've discovered.

          'Useful Art
      • Winners: People who don't want to pay for music or movies and would rather steal them.

        Downloading isn't stealing.

        Losers: Businesses who have a right to sell their products under the protection of copyright laws.

        They have products nobody wants to buy, that's what makes them loosers.

        Biggest Losers: The average consumer who has to deal with excessive DRM because of the "winners" above.

        Naa, the industry is run by imoral people, they would do this anyyway. Especially since we see they just pick a number and r

      • Re:Quick Summary (Score:3, Insightful)

        by ultranova ( 717540 )

        Let's correct this shall we:

        You correction needs correction. Don't worry, it happens to Microsoft too all the time ;).

        Winners: People who don't want to pay for music or movies and would rather steal them.

        Winners: People who want their games, movies and music free of rootkits, cd checks, the need to connect to Steam servers, and associated instability (try playing uncracked Morrowind on Win98), and who want them now instead of when the copyright holders can be bothered to sell them in their geograp

      • Oh, come on. Let's hear some more about the poor, poor **AA client corporations, that want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to sell licenses to music, but would make it illegal for me to download an mp3 of a song that's on an album that I own. The vast majority (in fact, I can't think of an exception offhand) of my 'illegal downloads' have been in service of my album collection from my youth. But when we talk about this kind of stuff, the **AA client corps want to change their tune and act as if

    • Re:Quick Summary (Score:4, Interesting)

      by TubeSteak ( 669689 ) on Sunday December 25, 2005 @04:59AM (#14335339) Journal
      And what about the people who were legitimately targeted for their file sharing activities?

      And the various Release Groups + Suppliers (who do what they do for free) that got arrested.

      Where do they fit?

      Does society win because those (international) law-breakers were arrested? Do the releasers lose because they got caught? Does the **AA win because they 'got their man.'

      I know this is touchy ground on /. because our desire for moviez and warez makes us a touch hypocritical at times. Hopefully someone can put this into perspective.

      It's pretty short-sighted of Slyck's article to ignore the hardcore Releasers who generate most of the decent content P2P progs have access to.

    • The French solution (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      The French parliament was to accept a DMCA-like law during nighlty discussions Dec 20-22. The law proposed by the government was specially geared towards legal protection of DRM and against uncontrolled P2P. Very surprisingly, even if the government political side has the absolute majority in the parliament, the law was amended and totally reversed during the discussion: the current text makes legal any kind of file-sharing provided a fixed-price licence (so called
      "global" or "legal" licence) is paid by the
      • The Minister of Culture is strongly against the idea of the licence and will probably succeed to remove it from the law.

        He feels the urge to protect the culture. It shall not pass into the hands of the lower classes. Only proper people shall have access to the culture.

    • Re:Quick Summary (Score:3, Insightful)

      by rikkards ( 98006 )
      I think the winners in 2006 will be traffic-shaping product manufacturers. My ISP has started limiting the bandwidth allocated for P2P due to BitTorrent. I think you will find this becoming more and more common.

      Hmmm. Maybe it is time to invest in one of these companies.

  • Biggest Winner of 2005? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Chaffar ( 670874 ) on Sunday December 25, 2005 @04:47AM (#14335320)
    Definitely consumers. No DRM for at least a year, online business models proving that they can work, the R*AA losing a case...

    A good year indeed...

    • No DRM for at least a year, online business models proving that they can work, the R*AA losing a case... No DRM maybe.. except widespread use of "copy prevention" bloatware like Starforce [glop.org]... and the occasional Sony rootkit.

      Which brings up a good point: the lack of public outrage about the whole Sony debacle. That's the way to track the real "winners" and "losers". The fact Sony can get away with that kind of stuff with no retribution or brand damage really shows who's on top in all of this.

  • The RIAA is listed as 1 of the losers.... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rolfwind ( 528248 ) on Sunday December 25, 2005 @04:50AM (#14335326)
    But is it really?

    P2P is only increasing the popularity of their wares. Much in the manner that pirated MS Windows in China only increases the popularity of Windows in China until comes such a time that Microsoft can demand payment (and crackdowns from the Governement). It might be years away, but at least they aren't using/learning to use/programming for that Linux thing.

    Either way, the RIAA doesn't lose. It only loses if artists start seeing the RIAA as not the only way to distribute their stuff and earn a living (I gotta get signed man!)

    But what is being done in this area? Free P2P downloads are certainly not going to entice artists. MP3.com used to be the avenue that I thought could open the way until some major label bought it and killed it.

    Has this vacuum been filled?
    • But what is being done in this area? Free P2P downloads are certainly not going to entice artists. MP3.com used to be the avenue that I thought could open the way until some major label bought it and killed it.

      Pandora.com [pandora.com] is pretty cool.

    • Re:The RIAA is listed as 1 of the losers.... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by darkain ( 749283 ) on Sunday December 25, 2005 @06:10AM (#14335440) Homepage
      Piracey is good? [mindjack.com] - its a great read, describing what happened to the SciFi channel because of torrent downloads.
      • I agree with the part about Dr. Who and Battlestar Galactica, but his article goes downhill from there.

        He spends a lot of time talking about those little network icons in the corner of your screen and how brilliant it would be if someone thought to use that spot for advertising.

        What his brain fart doesn't seem to know about, is that TV Releasers are already hip to that game and many of them already fuzz out the graphic.

        Go ahead and read it if you have free time, but keep in mind that unless advertising beco
        • Interesting point. A good point. And I point I _did_ make in "Piracy is Good?"

          If the bugs become annoying, they'll be removed. The goal, then, is to provide what people want in an easy-to-digest manner. And that means advertising becomes more subtle - if it continues to exist.

          If advertising fails, then there are going to need to be new economic models to fund entertainment production. You could argue (and I have) that amateur content is going to drive out professional content. Google Video is probably
    • P2P is only increasing the popularity of their wares.

      But the issue is that popularity doesn't necessarily mean an increase in sales, although sometimes it does.

      I know people that can clearly afford to pay money for entertainment but do not, simply because they can download it even when it is clear it is against the wishes of the creators. One person simply claims that they are "borrowing", but does nothing to help compensate the creator even when they like it and keep it practically forever.
    • P2P is only increasing the popularity of their wares. Much in the manner that pirated MS Windows in China only increases the popularity of Windows in China until comes such a time that Microsoft can demand payment (and crackdowns from the Governement).

      Bullshit.

      Is MS felt that was the case, then it could give windows away in order to seed future customers.

      However, ignoring even that, your argument is still bullshit. Note the "until comes such a time that Microsoft can demand payment" nonsense. Here's


    • Either way, the RIAA doesn't lose. It only loses if artists start seeing the RIAA as not the only way to distribute their stuff and earn a living (I gotta get signed man!)

      It's getting to the point that less and less new artists are at that point where they "gotta get signed to a major label". Look at what's out there now - with the exception of rap, there's not a lot of bands who were big before they were signed. Most of the rock bands that have been popular in the last, oh, 5 years or so released their "

  • Thank you, Internet (Score:4, Funny)

    by itsmekirby ( 858745 ) on Sunday December 25, 2005 @04:50AM (#14335327)
    Thank you, Internet.

    Without you, I wouldn't know what happened this year. You are truly the cure for my long-term memory loss.
    • The funny thing is, you remembered /. and the more ironic part; the article will duplicate in just a few days due to a time parallax in the alternate universe, making you wonder if your how life if just like this [imdb.com].

      Atleast, that is how I feel when I frequent /. .
  • And yet its only a recap, written for people who do not keep updated on tech or actual real life data on what file sharing is and is not, people who do not have a clue on what is really going on.

    So this article is perfect for the **AA.

  • What happened to napster creator? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by vivek7006 ( 585218 ) on Sunday December 25, 2005 @04:59AM (#14335338) Homepage
    And what has Shawn Fanning been doing all these years. After napster debacle he did made lot of noise about some grand ideas, but I havent seen any. The website http://www.snocap.com/ [snocap.com] has a cheesy demo which only shouts about COPYRIGHT and digital rights management/inventory. I had expected more brilliant things from Shawn Fanning after Napster, but it looks like that he was a flash of the pan.

  • Apple iPod qualifies as "sharing"? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by redelm ( 54142 ) on Sunday December 25, 2005 @05:14AM (#14335357) Homepage
    I'm sorry, but I don't see that Apple is into P2P unless someone has statistics showing that sharing is substantial compared to sales. They've just got an effective sales scheme I call C2P.

    That shouldn't take away from Apple's achievement. They've shown the popularity of back-catalog music, and how sales can be made in a digital age, something the RIAA cannot see (likely from greed).

    • The iPod was introduced in 2001; the iTunes Music Store was introduced in 2003. Clearly the latter was not the impetus for the former: The iPod started out as an mp3 player, and Apple later realized that they could make even more money by selling you the mp3s to put on it.

      I would be interesting, though, to see some sort of study on the proportion of iPod users who primarily use it for musical purchased on iTunes Music Store or a competitor, versus music downloaded from P2P or ripped from a CD.

    • iTunes used to have sharing built in. This was crippled in later versions (limited to 5 connections a day) as it was exploited to illegally copy music. Which was a shame, as it was easily the best all in one music buying/pirating/burning/managing/playing/memory-ea ting app for the Mac.

    • Well, I know that on my university campus network, iTunes + myTunes is probably the most popular way to share music...

      That may be because "real" P2P protocals are all limited to 5kbps by packet shaping, which is a nuisance when I want to download the new version of Ubuntu or the like.

  • I see 2006 being much of the same as 2005 (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Kierthos ( 225954 ) on Sunday December 25, 2005 @05:34AM (#14335383) Homepage
    The RIAA and MPAA will still continue to lack a clue as how to effectively deal with P2P (this assumes that there is a way to do so, which, you know, there might not be). The lawsuits filed against Sony might be resolved in 2006, but depending on how many states follow Texas' lead, it could be years...

    And if it's anything like 2005, someone will develop and release the newest and greatest P2P application which will be the 'best thing evar!!!1' until the RIAA and MPAA pollute it six months after release. Lawsuits against the creators of P2P apps will continue. And by mid-March, the RIAA will shoot itself in the foot again by filing a lawsuit against someone else's grandma, 12-year old child, or, just for a change of pace, a handicapped person. They will continue to garner more ill will then the MPAA, simply because of their continued stupidity.

    Happy New Year.

    Kierthos

  • This isn't about File-Sharing, it's about piracy (Score:3, Insightful)

    by original_nickname ( 930551 ) on Sunday December 25, 2005 @05:58AM (#14335427) Journal

    This is the "music piracy" winners and losers of 2005, not File-Sharing/P2P.

    File Sharing is the big loser until people realise it has more applications than copying music (which I have nothing against btw).

    Apple Computer haven't got much to do with File-Sharing and P2P - their one real link to it is that they recently crippled the File-Sharing in iTunes - surely this makes them a loser for P2P? They've virtually withdrawn from it due to people copying music illegally using their app! Their only victory is people can use their stylish, desirable players to play their warezed music, and that is nothing new. They are also a winner as all the zealot fans like me still buy all their shinies despite the DRM.

    Microsoft also aren't mentioned - I'm sure they were experimenting using P2P to send software updates? Don't know what happened to that, anyway

    Merry Christmas to you all, too

    • It's also about the average customer being forced into buying a cd for just one song he/she likes. File sharing has existed for quite some time, not the way we do it know through computers but exchaning cassette tapes, recoding songs off the radio, copying from cd's to cassette tapes etc. Apple computer being a corporate is trying to protect it's investment, we being the consumers have to find out ways to circumvent went those measures. P2P is for me is about consumer rights being ignored by **AA and the
      • I remember when the point of a whole album actually meant something. Each song was carefully placed throughout the lineup to achieve the full effect of the album. That was also in the day that you didn't chop up parts of 75 takes of a song to get a good take and you didn't clean up. There were no pitch adjusters. Cats sold albums because they were good. Blue Train is a perfect example of this. It's only 5 songs, but I'd sure as hell pay 20 bucks for it. If you saw them at a concert you weren't left wonderin

      • Yeah, I agree entirely - except that isn't the point I'm making at all. This is a Music Piracy winners and losers.

        Apple are a Peer-to-Peer and File sharing Loser this year as they severely crippled the Peer to Peer file sharing ability in their iTunes application, removing a good way of getting music on campus networks. They saw a possible loss of revenue and plugged the hole in their app.

        However, they are Piracy Winners. Most people I know do not buy iPods to use them with Peer to Peer networks - they

  • RIAA (Score:5, Insightful)

    by james.v.farr ( 910394 ) on Sunday December 25, 2005 @06:08AM (#14335437)
    I don't know why I am so passionate about the issue. Sharing music is no more stealing than going to a friends house to watch a movie. If I like the movie, I will buy it, if I like the music I will buy an album. I would really like to say, "Sharing music is not a crime, stealing a CD from a retail outfit is!" There is not much more that can be said about the issue, if anyone likes a song they heard, they will go out and support the artist if they wish to continue the deliverence of good quality music!

    • Re:RIAA (Score:5, Insightful)

      by mangu ( 126918 ) on Sunday December 25, 2005 @07:11AM (#14335518)
      I would really like to say, "Sharing music is not a crime, stealing a CD from a retail outfit is!" There is not much more that can be said about the issue


      Your post is one of the best on this subject that I have seen on Slashdot. That's exactly it.


      The media industry has been giving away their music for free for nearly a century, through broadcasts. It has always been understood by the general public that one gets the music for free in the radio, and must pay only for the physical medium where music is recorded. Yes, I know, broadcasting is paid by advertising (or taxes), yadda, yadda, but the general idea is that no one pays to listen to the radio in the way that one pays to buy a CD.


      The media industry wants us to believe that the opposite of "copying" is "buying". The opposite of copying is not copying, the opposite of buying is not buying. If someone refrains from copying a music the artist still starves to death, if his CDs are priced too high for the market. That's the true problem that the ??AA keeps denying: pricing. How is it possible for anyone working at home to produce CD and DVD copies that compete on price with mass-produced items?


      I have some hobby machines for metal working at home. I could make nails, nuts, and bolts that are identical to the stuff you buy in a hardware store. But I could never make anything at a price that competes with the mass-produced hardware you get at the stores. That's why I don't see any complaints from the Precision Machined Products Association [pmpa.org] about people doing illegal copies of their products at home.


      I could program a hobbyist lathe and milling machine to make a copy of anything the PMPA members sell, but mass production depends on specialized machines that no one has at home. It's the same for CDs and DVDs. The ??AA members make their products in specialized machines, optimized for making and packing millions of copies of each item. No one working at home with his LG-4163 CD/DVD recorder and printing the labels on his HP-890 printer would be able to compete with anything the ??AA members sell, if the prices were right.

  • saying (Score:5, Interesting)

    by circletimessquare ( 444983 ) <(circletimessquare) (at) (gmail.com)> on Sunday December 25, 2005 @06:14AM (#14335442) Homepage Journal
    "The RIAA continued its fight against P2P networking with little effect"

    is like saying

    "The Aztec Empire continued its fight against the Spanish Conquistadors with little effect"

    duh

    both were quickly extinguished by the arrival of new tech, and i would say the RIAA knows what its like to be Montezuma right now

    • I shudder to think what the RIAA equivalent of Montezuma's Revenge will be.
      • I thought they were defeted by small pox that the spanish unknowingly brought with them from Europe.

        So, maybe the RIAA will be using Virui (Virus) to destabilize the P2P networks, maybe it's already happening thus one upping the spanish by knowingly infecting the populus.
        • P2P has already brought the virus that will be the RIAA's doom. It's the same virus that every new tech attracts. We brought the mainstream audience.

  • Not quite (Score:3, Interesting)

    by trifish ( 826353 ) on Sunday December 25, 2005 @06:39AM (#14335470)
    The RIAA continued its fight against P2P networking with little effect

    Doesn't really seem so. They managed to make the owners of the biggest P2P network (eDonkey2000) say they "throw the towel in".

    • Re:Not quite (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Zedrick ( 764028 )
      But what difference did that make? I haven't been following the legal aspect of Edonkey, but I'm still downloading hard-to-find stuff from the Edonkey network, like I've been doing for the past 5 years or so. From my perspective, nothing has changed. Or am I missing something?
      • Their bug tracker has been closed for months. No beta version has been released for months. Need I continue?
        • Only official edonkey2000 client is not updated anymore - but does anyone really care? I've never used it, for instance. eMule, eMule+, Shareaza, MLdonkey and other clients still exist and being actively developed. The ed2k network is fully operational and has all the stuff it had before. So again - why should anyone care about the "official client"?
          • FYI, the official edonkey2000 client is the only tool that can access the Overnet network. With emule you can access only the edonkey2000 network, which sucks compared to the Overnet network (I know both networks first hand).
        • Please do. What difference does that make? I'm not using the edonkey2000 client, I'm using eMule. The network is still there.
          • > I'm not using the edonkey2000 client, I'm using eMule.

            Then you can't access the Overnet network, which is vastly superior to the edonkey2000 network. Overnet network is not edonkey2000 network.

  • Why *AAs are loosers (Score:2, Interesting)

    by paja ( 610441 )
    IMHO the *AAs are loosers due to their incompetence in the world using digital media and online services. Instead of pushing all these Sonys and BMGs into trying to understand new technologies and be able to introduce a product that will be attractive (as Apple did with iPod), they are holding ground with something not attractive for anyone who is under 35 - like rootkits on audio CDs, DVD regions and stuff like this, all of them *saying* that all customers are criminals.

    The problems with new products based
  • The winner of the global file-sharing competition and the man who "grabbed the most" is:

    Joe Fatbandwidth aka "100MBitTorpedo"

    He scored bigtime this year and achieved to download staggering 5.1 TB of "online goods".
    Joe is 35 year old Chicago based power-downloader that esports BitTornado and eDonkey. He attended the ceremony at the Los Angeles convention center where he received his prize from the hands of P2P godfather Shawn "Napster" Fanning.

    He told the news that he is going to upgrade his state-of

  • Read ThePirateBay.org Legal Page (Score:5, Funny)

    by spack ( 43763 ) on Sunday December 25, 2005 @07:54AM (#14335587)
    ThePirateBay.org has become the most popular BitTorrent indexing site
    I have discovered this website thanks to the article. I have been getting some splendid laughs and guffaws out of their legal page. I suggest reading it for fun. http://thepiratebay.org/legal.php [thepiratebay.org]
  • Losers: Small, independent musicians. While the web and its promise of cheap distribution should have in the real world allowed them to sell their creative output directly to the public and overtime rely less and less on middlemen, in practice the rise pirate networks has both led to a rise of a social, occasionally even militant, culture that basically gives a number of weak justifications as to why it is ok to download somebody's creative work and not pay for it. Thus, the small musician is unable to e

    • Define:Piracy (Score:5, Interesting)

      by WhatAmIDoingHere ( 742870 ) * <sexwithanimals@gmail.com> on Sunday December 25, 2005 @10:28AM (#14335848) Homepage
      A pirate is one who robs or plunders at sea without a commission from a recognised sovereign nation. Pirates usually target other ships, but have also attacked targets on shore. These acts are known as piracy. Unlike the stereotypical pirate with cutlass and masted sailing ship, today most pirates get about in speedboats wearing balaclavas instead of bandanas, using AK-47s rather than cutlasses.

      I use bittorrent to infringe on copyright, yes. But I've never commited piracy.

      And really, you've got most of that bass ackwards. It's the little guys who can go to places like iTunes or Amazon and get their CDs and songs sold for actual money, instead of signing a $10m contract with the RIAA and spending the next 20 years trying to pay off the $10m loan. Yeah. That's how the RIAA contracts work. You didn't know that, you say? You made that whole post with your ass you say? Hmm... Go back to kuro5hin.
      • Excellent example of bullshit! Your response can basically be summed up as:
        1. Irrelevancy / misdirection / technicality: "piracy" vs "copyright infringement."
        2. Scarecrow: the notion that a band must forward 10m to sign with a label is a gross distortion of reality.
        3. Irrelevancy / misdirection: so, if iTunes allows a band to sign up for less, how exactly does this justify piracy?
        4. Ad hominem, though I will admit, I will play a bit of tit-for-tat here and call you either a moron or just basically dishonest,
        • as opposed to your bullshit. Pointing out someone's arguments is no better than someone telling you that it isn't piracy.
          • Dear Dumbass:

            www.websters.com

            Main Entry: piracy
            Pronunciation: 'pI-r&-sE
            Function: noun
            Inflected Form(s): plural -cies
            Etymology: Medieval Latin piratia, from Late Greek peirateia, from Greek peiratEs pirate
            1 : an act of robbery on the high seas; also : an act resembling such robbery
            2 : robbery on the high seas
            3 : the unauthorized use of another's production, invention, or conception especially in infringement of a copyright

    • "and in aggregate cause less content to be produced and at higher prices"

      Is this really true?

      Is there less software/music/movies/tv shows produced than ever?

      As far as the price... isn't the price set by the market? I know everybody says that piracy makes prices higher, but is that the case? Have CD prices zoomed up in the last 5 years?

      It seems to me the only content that has gone up in price is that content which is protected beyond any reasonable measure to copy. Video Games are a good example to me.
  • Lawyers win $$$
  • Instead of getting nowhere by going through the same discussion (that is, whether filesharing is legal, illegal or something between) again and again, I think we should bring up the question if information should be public property; this seems pretty much the debate in the Internet age. RMS has had some arguments for free software in his essay [gnu.org]. The text may (!!) make some sense when you replace the word 'software' with 'music' (though a piece of music isn't something that evolves continuously). Of course t
  • The RIAA is missing out on the convenience part of their offerings, which is why I actually never buy any music.
    I do, however, download music on the internet, below is why:

    I have a busy life and a mp3 player in my car-radio. I am not a fan of any particular artist, neither do I know much about the current music offerings.
    Sometimes, I hear a song on the radio/tv/whatever I *really* like. This may be some quite unfamous song remix by a random artist and I want to have that song in mp3 format on my Linux works
  • Pretty clearly, the French. The moral of the story is: Wait until 2006 to discuss the "best of" 2005.

  • DRM is for what now? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by pojo ( 526049 )
    Sony-BMG disgraced itself and the DRM concept.

    Isn't what Sony did exactly what DRM was meant for?? Screw the users, control their lives, and do it legally?

    I think Linus is the only person I've ever heard talk [slashdot.org] about DRM as just a pure technology. Everyone else (e.g. media companies) talks as though it's a means to an end for user control [riaa.com]. So how is what Sony did not right in line with that?

  • Before you ever had a CD burner to copy a music CD there were cassette decks.

    Anyone remember the Teac 450? The first cassette deck that was virtually impossible to tell from a 15ips Gold Standard reel-to-reel recording?

    Or the Kenwood KX-1030 (later KX-1060 for metal tape)? Three heads, adjustable bias to match any tape, and affordable.

    Those were the days.

    • Anyone remember the Teac 450?

      Yes. Mine is on it's third set of belts. Instead of recording, it's playing for capture to CD. Great machine.

      I keep the old media as a license for the content, but archive it on new media since the industry has no exchange program for obsolete media.

  • Funny Article - Wither WinMX (Score:3, Funny)

    by Nom du Keyboard ( 633989 ) on Sunday December 25, 2005 @10:44PM (#14337887)
    Limewire, BearShare, MetaMachine (eDonkey), WinMX, and Ares Galaxy are believed to be among those contacted by the RIAA. The reaction varied among each developer. BearShare closed its forums and hasn't released another version since September. WinMX completely shut down its operation. MetaMachine "threw in the towel."

    Funny how they list the demise of WinMX, at the same time they have a link at the top of their page to download the current, operating version!

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