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Leaked MediaDefender Emails Show Student P2P Traffic Down
Posted by
Zonk
on Sun Dec 09, 2007 06:48 PM
from the they-are-tending-not-to-copy-that-floppy dept.
from the they-are-tending-not-to-copy-that-floppy dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The MPAA and the RIAA have been targeting universities in a fury claiming that college students are causing them huge losses. However, some leaked MediaDefender emails show that may be a huge exaggeration. 'I also want to state that I am not for the illegal sharing of files. I am absolutely against it. I just want to make sure that the numbers presented in the media are fair numbers. I have a feeling they aren't fair at all.
'"
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Submission: MediaDefender leaked shows lower student P2P by Anonymous Coward
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Actually... (Score:5, Informative)
Problem solved. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Problem solved. (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:Actually... (Score:5, Funny)
RIAA fudges numbers, exaggerates case, claims huge losses; no plans to reimburse the artists in question. News at 11.
Parent
Peer Guardian Use Up. (Score:4, Interesting)
I think perhaps they are experiencing a little bit of Heisenberg's at the macrolevel: By observing it, they are changing it. Send enough annoying letters saying X had Y media on X's computer on a P2P site as discovered by this IP address: Z, well, you're going to get programs cropping up to prevent any connections to Z.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Actually... (Score:4, Interesting)
04/12/07 291001 7175 2.50% 2.47
06/14/07 265504 2475 0.93% 0.93
07/14/07 199333 1303 0.65% 0.65
Most colleges, on semesters, empty out in early May (1st or 2nd week). I want to see the data for 5/07 and then every month up through 12/07 when it lets out again.
This blogger might have found the cycle of enrollment flow and nothing more -- as much as I don't like to admit it
Parent
Bogus (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a bogus claim anyway, everyone knows college kids (aka Students) are piss poor and couldn't afford to buy the music even if they didn't download it.
Now they're just piss poor and bored.
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Pissed, poor, bored, depressed and worried because they are just wating to be sued for some songs they downloaded in 2000.
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Re:Bogus (Score:5, Insightful)
I call bullshit wishful thinking.
I am in college, and I've been to the campuses of MANY others, for one reason or another, and while it's true that you've got some college students eking by on savings and loans, being very judicious in their spending, the vast majority are supported by middle-class parents, and have plenty of disposable income.
No, indeed, while I am no fan of the MAFIAA, there IS a very real problem with our young people and their perceptions on copyright. The general consensus is that if they didn't have to filch if off a store shelf, it's morally a-ok, and this mentality pervades every college campus I've ever been to. I'll leave the psychological analysis of the why to people better qualified than I, but it is undeniable that the average college student thinks nothing wrong with piracy. It's perceived as a victimless crime.
Seriously, if you can spend thousands boozing yourself up each year, you can't make the excuse that you're too poor to buy DVDs.
Parent
Re:Bogus (Score:5, Insightful)
Either that, or there is a real problem with our copyright law.
Parent
Re:Bogus (Score:4, Interesting)
Except these people have tens, if not hundreds of movies stored on their hard drives. I know of some outliers who even have thousands. Clearly they consume the media, and the vast majority have paid nothing for it. This isn't the case of the MAFIAA going after people who have no supposed interest in their products, trying to extract money out of them.
Ah, the old "new stuff is crap, I don't pay for crap" excuse, which is valid so long as I can't catch you with the new Britney Spears album on your disk. If you're serious about only buying stuff you like, then only CONSUME stuff you like. Don't justify your piracy of a movie or album because "it's not worth the $X". For movies especially, there are plenty of avenues to avoid paying full-price, including renting the DVD.
Except the vast majority of college students aren't on a moral crusade against labels and studios that rip of the actual creative artists. Most students I've discussed this with don't even bother using it as an excuse, much less actually believing it. Like I said, piracy on campus is treated as a victimless crime, not "sticking it to the Man" of any sort.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
When I was in college plenty students had large CD collections - that was when Napster was just getting on the scene, though. Have you ever been to college?
Anyway, being poor doesn't give a right to pirate/steal.
Not where I live.... (Score:3, Funny)
Just yesterday someone was talking about how they have 6000 illegal downloads. Someone else said "Only 6000?!"
Not kidding.
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Tongue in Cheek? (Score:3, Interesting)
I only kid. I do however think this is less than noteworthy. I'm pretty sure it's been widely known that the RIAA types have inflated their statistics for some time now, what with their formula of x number of pirated copies = x number of sales lost and then x sales lost * y unreasonable charge == z unrealistic losses.
Gives a new meaning to extortion. (Score:2)
That's the formula they use for PR to make them look sheepish. The formula they use in court is z unrealistic losses + c counts of infringement * s statutory damage = d claimed damage. However, since z / d is very close to 0, you can consider the actua
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In Soviet Russia ... (Score:3, Funny)
What is the next headline? (Score:2)
Hopefully more data can be gathered and published showing not only what the real numbers are, but how the RIAA/MPAA get their numbers. If the EDUs of the world understand that piracy isn't as prevalent as claimed, we can hopefully see fewer DMCA letters and more advances in the fair
Damned if we do, damned if we don't. (Score:5, Informative)
If the numbers didn't go down, the MAFIAA will claim that piracy is rampant, and use that as an excuse to do even more DRM, and get even more laws passed for them.
It's called spin. Let me try some of my own:
If the numbers went down, I claim that this proves that piracy isn't as much of a threat to their profits as they thought, and therefore, DRM should end.
If the numbers didn't go down, I claim that this proves that people are so sick and tired of the MAFIAA's bullshit on their legitimate products that they're willing to turn to piracy.
Here's my trump card, though: If we really can't tell who's right, the default position should be consumer freedom.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Here's my trump card, though: If we really can't tell who's right, the default position should be consumer freedom.
Have you tried taking back a freedom you gave someone? It's a lot harder than not giving it in the first place. There's a reason pretty much all the consumer rights have come through law - if it was up to the corporations they wouldn't let you do anything except the perscribed use. Anything and everything could be a potential revenue stream, so why give away something for "free" at all? And DRM does a wonderful job of making sure people have to pay for everything they do. There's a reason it's not copyrigh
There's still a lot of copyright infringement (Score:5, Insightful)
Even the GPL and all copyleft mechanisms rely on copyright laws. If people want their wishes as content creators to be respected (whether that is to allow some forms of redistribution, like CC-NC, or not, like "All rights reserved"), they need to respect copyright law and not subvert it.
--
Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation. [nerdkits.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:There's still a lot of copyright infringement (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You say 'subvert,' I suggest 'revise.' If a large portion of a community disregards the copyright laws as currently written, does that imply that a large portion of a community needs to be punished/made to pay, or that the copyright laws need to be re-written?
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Re: (Score:2)
Re:There's still a lot of copyright infringement (Score:5, Insightful)
Every time the law has been used as a club to force the public to accept a minority moral position, it's failed to have the desired effect. Remember learning about the prohibition?
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Every time the law has been used as a club to force the public to accept a minority moral position, it's failed to have the desired effect. Remember learning about the prohibition?
Prohibition, otherwise known as the Eighteenth Amendment, required 2/3rds of both houses of Congress, and 3/4ths of the states to pass it(Rhode Island was the only state to reject it). It was hardly the minority moral position. That said, it was subverted by the minority position, but not before we got the wonderfully powerful FBI to fight them. It was ultimately repealed with the Twenty First Amendment after twenty some years as citizens grew tired of the racketeering and other problems it was causing.
Re:There's still a lot of copyright infringement (Score:4, Insightful)
But what you're missing here is that society itself defines right and wrong. We think slavery is wrong today, but when it was popular, it wasn't considered wrong. When public opinion changed hard enough, for long enough, slavery ended. (Granted, a little less elegantly than we would have liked.)
You can't judge a past society by our own morals. What are we supposed to do, live our lives based on what people 200 years from now will think? What if we guess wrong?
I don't know why you brought the holocaust into this discussion. That program was a secret project concocted by an insane, totalitarian government. It was not a popular movement.
Also, copyright is not property [gnu.org]. At best, it's a pragmatic bargain between artists and the public, and it terms are no more fixed, and no more sacred, than the income tax rate.
If the terms of this contract really did constitute a "fundamental" right, what would give Disney, err, Congress the authority to extend copyright by 20 years, every 20 years?
Point is, like you like it or not, we live a representative democracy. And public opinion is rapidly shifting in favor of weakening copyright. If those in power continue to ignore that shift, they will not long remain in power.
Parent
Re:There's still a lot of copyright infringement (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:There's still a lot of copyright infringement (Score:5, Interesting)
Lawmakers often write lofty goals such as "to promote the progress of science and useful arts", but merely writing this doesn't make it so.
For example, if somebody wrote that we must subsidise deep underground gold mining operations "to promote the progress of technology to fly to mars", it would be obvious that they are full of shit.
The fact is that "promoting the progress of science and useful arts" is not verifiably helped by copyright law, there's no evidence: nada. zip. zilch.
Instead, copyright is simply one of the arbitrary economic rules we live under and that we inherited from our ancestors. Some people like it, because they have lucrative property contracts based upon it. Other people don't like it, as they don't have lucrative contracts.
What's changed in the 21st century is that those who don't like it are finding it easier to simply ignore copyright, and those who like it are whining about it.
Parent
Err, what are you complaining about again? (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh, some of us understand just fine. It's the part where people don't agree with how the law is written or enforced that get you into problem territory.
In fact, some will even try to explain that physical property is the only kind that should have value. It's totally mind-boggling, even when these students are the ones who will be going out and making the next generation of intellectual works.
No, they usually say that IP isn't really property because it's not truly rivalrous. Sure, the law creates rights that are in rivalrous in an artificial way, but you can have two people listen to the same tune whereas two people can't eat the same grape. You may have heard people refer to IP as "imaginary property" recently. It's not because they don't know what IP is supposed to stand for, but because they don't agree with it.
It's totally mind-boggling, even when these students are the ones who will be going out and making the next generation of intellectual works.
Mind-boggling? That sounds more like a statement of ignorance to me. I don't have any trouble understanding why they'd think that, nor do I have trouble understanding those with views like yours. When I hear that something is "mind-boggling" I usually find out that people are trying to ascribe intelligence to something (or someone) that lacks it, or that they haven't thought something through. In this case, it would appear to be the latter.
Even the GPL and all copyleft mechanisms rely on copyright laws. If people want their wishes as content creators to be respected (whether that is to allow some forms of redistribution, like CC-NC, or not, like "All rights reserved"), they need to respect copyright law and not subvert it.
The GPL IS a subversion of copyright law after a fashion. RMS wrote against that notion that we need copyright because it's used to enforce the GPL quite specifically in one of his essays [gnu.org] (yes, you can't enforce the GPL without copyright law, but you don't really need it, either). You might want to talk to the man who wrote it before you make claims like that. I did. [1]
Anyhow, to get back on topic, I don't see how you can say that not supporting copyright law makes them an infringer. I also don't think that that essay you linked to was written out of ignorance. It's written because people are fed up with this crap.
Perhaps you haven't yet realized this, but the more laws we make, the more criminals there are. Obviously, the more we criminalize the things people are already doing, the more people who are going to break them. And you can't have fewer than zero people breaking a law, so adding to the laws will certainly never create fewer criminals. The point isn't the ridiculous notion that we could just abolish all laws and have "zero" criminals. Some things, after all, are worth the cost of criminalizing them. But it's a mistake to think that laws are without cost. And here, a reasonable person can make the case that we're simply better off if we don't criminalize something, whether or not we like or agree with it.
Of course, you seem to find that "mind-boggling"
[1] To prove it, I'll point out that I also read the confusing words manifesto. Whereas RMS would like us all to stop using the word, I have chosen to subvert it with the term "Imaginary Property" not unlike how RMS chose to subvert copyright with the GPL rather than hoping to abolish it. RMS disagrees with me about that term, BTW, in that it still lumps together at least three disparate areas of law, but you'd have a hard time finding someone with whom he agrees about everything
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You're thinking too narrowly. You see us as working against our own best interests, undermining the very thing, copyright, that will empower us to make a living. But copyright is only a means, and a poor one at that. We need a better means. We aren't going to get a better means as long as we keep fighting over the impossible task of how to enforce copyright rather than hash out and try other ways. Another way, much older than copyright, and with plenty of its own problems, is patronage. Mozart didn't
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Ok, try this on for size:
I spend a year (or more) writing a novel. My income depends on the advance my publisher gives me (if I am lucky), as well as royalties from additional sales. The novel is published and put in the book stores, priced at $25.
You come along and copy it, then sell it in the same book stores for $20.
I now have to pay my publisher back the advance due to lack of
maybe there are other explanations (Score:5, Insightful)
- students have found ways to not be discovered
- the students have got all the stuff they want
- there's nothing much worth downloading at present
- (my favourite) The RIAA are getting tired of the "war" so they're engineering a victory. Look! our stats say we've won - we can stop now.
- possibly the stats are over the summer, when the colleges were empty
Just like house prices, you can't draw any real conclusions from a single data point. Give it a year and see if there's still a downward trend or if this was just a blipRe:maybe there are other explanations (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
I wonder. (Score:5, Insightful)
I know that's what I use it for (no, I'm not kidding).
That happened to me... (Score:2)
Of course, I wasn't downloading Linux ISOs with that.
I am shocked (Score:3, Funny)
I gotta go shower now, for some reason I feel so dirty....
out of touch (Score:2)
someone wake me from this dream.
Business plan (Score:4, Insightful)
As a University Student... (Score:2, Insightful)
Gnutella market became huge when I was in highschool.. which was Napster... that is when most students learned and starting using this tool. It has really been the last few years that most people I know are using other means of downloading besides Gnutella network; but still a majority do that are not computer literate. I have taught several pe
zOMG - Student numbers drop in summer (Score:3, Insightful)
Huh? (Score:2)
While I suspect that his suspicions are correct, pretty much anybody could say the same thing and post it to their weblog. Why is it notable in this context? Could someone tell me how the last five minutes o
the answer is: hard drives and ipods (Score:4, Interesting)
Silly MAFIAA - trix are for kids!
And the kidz will always be three steps ahead of you. Face it. Your business model is done. Go figure out some other way to make a living.
RS