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Filesharing Up 10% After RIAA Threatens Users 750

Moldy-Rutabaga writes "Technews says filesharing has gone up 10% on some sites such as Grokster since the Recording Industry Association of America's announcement on June 25 that it will start tracking down and suing users of file-sharing programs. Wayne Rosso, president of Grokster, commented 'even genocidal litigation can't stop file sharers'."
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Filesharing Up 10% After RIAA Threatens Users

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  • by afreniere ( 611999 ) * on Sunday July 06, 2003 @12:04PM (#6377251) Homepage
    I was speaking to a lay-person friend of mine last weekend, and he mentioned to me that he had heard about the threat of lawsuits, and decided to quickly install Bearshare, download all the songs he wanted and then uninstall it. Apparently at least some people are spooked.
  • How? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Tuffnut ( 618438 ) on Sunday July 06, 2003 @12:06PM (#6377268)
    I'm just curious..

    How exactly do they go about finding these people? It's not like they openly give out their names on things like KaZaa?
  • Re:How? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by usotsuki ( 530037 ) on Sunday July 06, 2003 @12:08PM (#6377274) Homepage
    They sue an IP address (no, I'm not kidding).

    -uso.
  • Pointless Statistic (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jolyonr ( 560227 ) on Sunday July 06, 2003 @12:08PM (#6377278) Homepage
    What a pointless statistic. I bet you would find a month-on-month increase in P2P usage as more non-techy people out there discover how ridiculously easy it is.

    Jolyon
  • by kenthorvath ( 225950 ) on Sunday July 06, 2003 @12:09PM (#6377282)
    Seriously, if enough people blatanly disobey copyright laws, if there is enough civil disobedience, it almost HAS to force a change in the law. The question, though, is how much is "enough" and do we REALLY need to go through all of the heavy handed law enforcement attempts before this happens? Can't the law makers see for once, that this is what the PEOPLE want and step up to the plate to do their job? Rant over.
  • by pgrote ( 68235 ) on Sunday July 06, 2003 @12:12PM (#6377300) Homepage
    And from the "they keep shooting themselves in the head" department, Metallica says no iTunes do to principles. [chron.com] :
    "Artists hold out on iTunes on principle
    Reuters News Service

    LOS ANGELES -- The Red Hot Chili Peppers and Metallica are refusing to make their music available as individual downloads on Apple Computer's iTunes online music store.

    That move comes in response to Apple's decision to allow users to buy single tracks and is intended to protect the future of the long-playing album, said Mark Reiter of Q Prime Management Co., which manages the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Metallica and several other artists.

    Green Day and Linkin Park, according to a source familiar with the situation, have also refused to make their songs available as individual downloads on the Apple service, which has sold over 5 million songs. "

    -- Hey .. I have a great idea. Let's tick off our customers. They want this, but let's not give it to them. In fact, let's prosecute them. Works for me.

    Idiots.
  • Re:Not it! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by gilesjuk ( 604902 ) <<giles.jones> <at> <zen.co.uk>> on Sunday July 06, 2003 @12:13PM (#6377307)
    I believe they already collect a tax on CD burners.

    They collect quite a lot of funds in fact, they even collect money for radio play of unsigned acts and these artists receive nothing.

    Above info collected from:

    Here [boycott-riaa.com]
  • Re:Haha! (Score:2, Interesting)

    by trompete ( 651953 ) on Sunday July 06, 2003 @12:14PM (#6377311) Homepage Journal
    I'm mostly curious which network they will bring down first. There are a few major ones. I sure miss audiogalaxy!!!
    What do you think: EDonkey or Kazaa?
  • by GammaTau ( 636807 ) <jni@iki.fi> on Sunday July 06, 2003 @12:17PM (#6377325) Homepage Journal

    This is free market in action. The artificial scarcity created by government regulation (copyright) is way out of touch with the reality so the free market, even when it has to operate as a black market, will take care of the customer demand.

    What needs to happen is serious consideration of how the supply can be kept running under these circumstances. One solution would be to allow unlimited music distribution as long as you don't charge any money for it. If the commercial exploitation of copyrighted material would still be an exclusive right of the copyright holder, I believe there is a big market where the copyright holder can make good profit. This would pretty much legalize the current practise where individual people can trade music online freely while the commercial distributors (e.g. CD sales) would have to pay.

  • Re:How? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by jkeyes ( 243984 ) on Sunday July 06, 2003 @12:20PM (#6377342) Journal
    So leechers are safe?

    Yes for now except once they get done with the filetraders then I can see them starting after the leechers with download bots recording the IP addresses of leechers too.
  • Lazy RIAA (Score:5, Interesting)

    by cervo ( 626632 ) on Sunday July 06, 2003 @12:22PM (#6377353) Journal
    "Weiss said the recording industry should lobby for special taxes on CD burners and Internet access as a way to recoup losses incurred from file sharing, an idea that Grokster's Rosso also supports."

    Yeah right, so you can't properly secure your own cd's or whatever, so go ahead and put a tax on internet access and cd burner's to make up losses because of your own incompetence. And as we all know, no one uses CD Burners for say....backups, or transferring legitimate files from one person to another. No one uses the internet to do do legitament things like research. So of course everyone should Pay the RIAA and help them. Never mind that if they really want to stop piracy they should be better protecting their own media.

    The worst thing is that the RIAA probably has enough influence in Washington to pull something like this off!! What's next, Microsoft builds an internet monitoring meter into windows to send usage statistics to the government so they can bill you monthly. Then Linux is outlawed for not having the US government metering package?
  • by droopus ( 33472 ) * on Sunday July 06, 2003 @12:24PM (#6377364)
    The RIAA does not own the copyrights to anything. According to the DMCA [loc.gov] only the owner of the copyright can sue for infringement. The owner first must communicate in writing to the user's ISP, demanding that they take action.

    The ISP is bound by law to inform the user, who has the right, under penalty of perjury, to deny that he/she is offering infringing material.

    Now it gets interesting.

    If the user denies that he/she has been sharing, the ISP must inform the copyright owner, and that copyright owner has a limited amount of time during which it MUST bring suit against the alleged infringer, or the ISP MUST restore access.

    So, someone please tell me how the RIAA has the right to sue, since they own no copyrights?

    Also, if every person sued denies they are sharing, forcing the actual copyright holder to bring suit, wouldn't the sheer weight of litigation costs make this a really bad strategy?
  • Re:A good thing? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Our Man In Redmond ( 63094 ) on Sunday July 06, 2003 @12:27PM (#6377381)
    You forgot (or didn't mention) the third beneficial effect, namely, no more waiting three years for an album from your favorite band. They get the sound they want, put out the word, and 24 hours later fans are enjoying the track.

    In fact eventually "track" may become a carryover from an earlier time, sort of like "album." Has anyone younger than me ever seen a real album, with half-a-dozen sleeves, each of which contains a 10" 78 RPM record?
  • Re:How? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by C_To ( 628122 ) on Sunday July 06, 2003 @12:48PM (#6377473)
    What happens if the invididual sharing the files in question is out of jurstidiction of the United States? As far as I know ISPs in Canada, Australia, England, won't give out user information without a court order. Since the DMCA or whatever law it is that allows the RIAA to get information from ISPs does not exist in these countries, these users don't have to worry (at least in theory).

    And even worse, what about those who have filenames that are similar but not exactly the same as commerical music? They're going to have to download every song they can to verify it, otherwise it will be tossed out of court (and on 56K, that can be hours if not days).
  • by Spoticus ( 610022 ) on Sunday July 06, 2003 @12:52PM (#6377489)
    While it may be true for a majority of records, some CDs have to be taken as a whole. The Wall from Pink Floyd, for example, comes to my mind.

    Yeah...and how many _albums_ have you found that that's the case for since file sharing came about? I can think of *maybe* 3 or 4 complete albums released in the last 5-6 years that I would listen to in full.

    I bought those though.
  • by lambadomy ( 160559 ) <lambadomy&diediedie,com> on Sunday July 06, 2003 @12:52PM (#6377492)
    While this article is total fluff, It made me wonder what kind of effect this news might have had on anyone. So I did an informal poll of people here at work, only about 15 people of varying tech knowledge and general-informedness but all of whom I knew used filesharing programs. What I found was:

    6/15 knew what the RIAA was.

    1/15 knew about any RIAA lawsuits.

    7/15 became/at least acted concerned when told about the lawsuits, and the potential for themselves to be sued.

    The numbers are way too low to really mean anything, but it seems to follow that just MAYBE people don't act like they care because they really don't know. We'll see what happens when the RIAA actually gets a file sharer in court.
  • by cyber_rigger ( 527103 ) on Sunday July 06, 2003 @01:00PM (#6377540) Homepage Journal
    If I download a piece of music how am I supposed to know it is copyrighted? Video has a copyright notice at the beginning (FBI warning, etc.). Music does not....... The recording industry should be required to have a spoken copyright notice before each song. Then go after anyone who removes the notice NOT the someone who has no clue that it was copyrighted.
  • by andr0meda ( 167375 ) on Sunday July 06, 2003 @01:02PM (#6377555) Journal

    I dunno if somebody knows about e-Mule, but this exellent P2P proggy allows one to leech blocks from different sources, even when a source itself does not have the complete file yet. So these sources are in effect not necessarily sharing media, just parts of it.

    The only thing e-Mule now needs is a tedency to distribute complete files over different parts of the network, so that very few access points share the complete file. Once the file is downloaded, e-Mule then just shares parts of it, but never the complete file. Depending on the required parts, the shared parts may even vary over time.

    Seems like the perfect nightmare for any DMCA groupie-lawyer to me.

  • Re:A good thing? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by goon america ( 536413 ) on Sunday July 06, 2003 @01:16PM (#6377656) Homepage Journal
    ... a couple of good things. First it will force the industry and artists to put out more quality tracks instead of relying on a couple radio tracks to sell a disc made mostly of filler. Second, the consumer will no longer get stuck with a lousy disc.

    Whoah, cowboy! You're talking about benefits *to the consumer*. When was that ever the issue? If it was then CDs would cost $3.99 and there wouldn't be such an incentive to waste time on KaZaA.

    You've got to put in terms of benefit to the recording industry if they're ever going to change their minds.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 06, 2003 @01:22PM (#6377695)
    It was like this in my case.

    I never had heard of napster if it wasn't for the legal cases. And then those same cases told me you could also download movies with it and how.

    Now I'm a kazaa addict.
  • Re:Genocidal?! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by vegetablespork ( 575101 ) <vegetablespork@gmail.com> on Sunday July 06, 2003 @02:04PM (#6377911) Homepage
    I'll stop calling it "genocide" when the scumbags at the RIAA quit referring to copyright infringement as "piracy," which involves the robbing and killing of people on the high seas.
  • Re:eDonkey vs. Kazaa (Score:4, Interesting)

    by xYoni69x ( 652510 ) <yoni.vl@gmail.com> on Sunday July 06, 2003 @02:07PM (#6377928) Journal
    Of course. I was talking about the network, not the client. I use both of the networks above, neither with the "official" clients. The only way to use Kazaa is Kazaa Lite, and for eDonkey I use eMule [emule-project.net].
  • IPv6 (Score:1, Interesting)

    by jinglecat ( 673072 ) on Sunday July 06, 2003 @02:16PM (#6377974)
    Internet2 needs to be finalized.

    With IPv6, it would increase RIAA's work 3 fold.
  • Re:How? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by koko775 ( 617640 ) on Sunday July 06, 2003 @02:18PM (#6377985)
    Get Peerguardian (windows program). It blocks IPs from RIAA, MPAA, and other IP ranges. It might not totally solve it, but I find that without fail, my IP is checked day after day, several times, by either or both the RIAA and the MPAA. I feel violated.
  • Ask your parents... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by alizard ( 107678 ) <alizard&ecis,com> on Sunday July 06, 2003 @03:41PM (#6378503) Homepage
    if they ever taped songs off the radio and shared the tapes with friends when they were kids?

    If they did (almost certainly), ask them if they felt guilty and ashamed about stealing FROM ARTISTS?

    Tell them that filesharing is simply doing the same thing using your computer to grab them from P2P instead of the radio and your hard drive instead of a tape recorder.

    Tell them the only difference between what they did and "filesharing" is that the RIAA bribed a bunch of politicians to declare the digital version is illegal and that the tape version is explicitly legal.

    What's important here isn't that this changes the law, but to let them know what you're doing is merely illegal, not wrong.

    If your parents can't tell the difference. . . you've got some unpleasant time to do before you leave home, good luck.

  • by spiritraveller ( 641174 ) on Sunday July 06, 2003 @03:51PM (#6378569)
    A few more downloads will not hurt them.

    What it will do is give them more arguments when lobbying Congress. "See, we have done all we could. Our businesses will die unless you pass more laws for us." If you read the Morpheus dismissal order, that is exactly what the judge argued for. He basically complained that his hands were tied and that Congress should pass some laws so he can do something about it.

    Why have they never mentioned usenet? Because they can't stop usenet file sharing unless they are allowed to cancel files and the isps are forced to abide.

    Similarly, they cannot stop p2p unless they are somehow allowed to filter an isps traffic and put filesharers offline without wasting time on due process (which applies only to government action, not RIAA action).

    Expect more assaults on the free flow of information. The question is not whether they will succeed under the current paradigm. (They can't.)

    The question is whether they can get Congress to throw the baby out with the bathwater. (Hopefully they can't.)
  • In the UK (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Alan Cox ( 27532 ) on Sunday July 06, 2003 @03:52PM (#6378581) Homepage
    In the UK case they can go to an ISP to get the information having gathered enough evidence to get a magistrate to ok it (which isnt a huge barrier when you can show the time, the data, the files, a video of the download, the music playing and a signed testimony you own the copyright). Data protection law is not a right to do illegal things anonymously. In fact an ISP is permitted to give such data to the police without them even asking if it has good reason to believe a crime is being committed.

    I'd expect people in the UK to be dealt with by UK law, just as large scale UK video pirates were. Large scale video piracy was stopped by basically targetting the big pirates and giving them nowhere to advertise their wares either. Now its a hand to hand market or dodgy street market stalls and that keep the volume of piracy under control

    As regards file names - given a few downloads that are verified as pirate and the relevant paperwork done and affidavits filed I suspect the rest would be resolved by seizing the equipment in question and seeing what else is on it.

    I approve of the RIAA approach this time, its the first sane thing they've done for a long time. Go after the bigger copiers, instead of harassing everyone, screwing up the law and building unusable systems actually go after the criminals for once.

    What should be the real limits on "fair use" is another debate, but it will be a lot easier to have when large scale copying of copyright works is under control, and also may actually go back to the old ways - as video has where small scale copying/lending isnt a threat, helps everyone and the law is conveniently ignored by all parties .
  • by Chiascuro ( 179381 ) on Sunday July 06, 2003 @04:52PM (#6378905) Journal
    Actually you are wrong. There are quite a few artists around who release music that can legally be shared and more than a few individuals who use the file sharing networks to publish their works and get some form of distribution. It's much easier to cut an MP3 and stick it on Kazaa than to get a record deal.
  • by Ex-MislTech ( 557759 ) on Sunday July 06, 2003 @06:21PM (#6379351)
    Use encryption, highest order currently available .
    I think it is 2,048 bit like hushmail uses, upgrade this
    and make it a encryption module that can be adapted as
    further needed in the future .

    Disregard the NSA request for Keys, andMake it a dynamic server model . All ppl are servers, but only for a short random while,
    and then the duty is passed .

    The servers start building a dynamic remap, then deliver the
    time for remap and reassign after the hand off and receive
    servers have negotiated and checked the links for stability
    and reliability .

    Hide the Ip addresses, and use a disassociated means of
    node identification . IP address will get you connected to
    a Dynamic DNS that is floating on foreign hosted servers
    in countries that care not a wit for the RIAA or what it wants .

    Design it as a many tentacled beast, with polymorphic traits
    like a polymorphic virus . Use multi-casting to update server
    lists and keep the nodes informed .

    Use dummy data to send the fox chasing the fake hound ,
    the wild goose chase . Put pieces of the data in certain
    packets, and those certain packets change as the network
    morphs in the course of the day . Like was preposed for
    Dark Angel 2000 .

    Clients will dynamically re-route, and shift their registration
    info all encrypted, and IP addresses are masked/encrypted when
    used, and are used as little as possible .

    Idle process similar to what the SETI@home screen saver uses
    could determine the best machines, and use them to build
    an 'A' list of nodes, but rotate that responsibility as to not
    lock it in to certain machines, ie. keep it moving .

    So with a encrypted structure by a random shifting tree ,
    they would have a "damn" hard time tracing it if all the
    packets themselves were coded .

    A whitelist is possible, but could be compromised by a member
    being caught thru other means, ie. vindictive significant other .
    Then what was a good node could be used to reverse engineer it,
    and listen to the network .

    So it has to be designed so that those on the network themselves
    could monitor, but it changes quickly, and changes in ways
    that are not straight forward easily understood, A network chameleon of sorts .

    Only the master chameleon could "hope" to understand the network,
    but the very fact of how fast it changed would make it a daunting
    if not overwhelming task . If someone who had the idea of
    "Dark Angel 2000" could apply it to peer 2 peer it could happen .

    Well enough day dreaming , hopefully some very bright mind
    will see this and help it or a variant there of on its way .

    Peace,
    Ex-MislTech

  • by Angerson ( 121904 ) on Sunday July 06, 2003 @07:03PM (#6379526) Homepage
    I regularly take informal polls at the start of each semester in my college class just to see where exactly students stand on the copyright issue. Since I teach a computer-oriented course for art students I feel the topic is relevant and, as such, the sampling of results are often interesting.

    Over the course of the last 5 semesters, it's been pretty clear that a good deal of those sampled have no real concept of what copyright is. I mean they understand it's there to protect the rights of the artist / creator but that's about the extent of it. Of course, that much is probably no big surprise. What is surprising is that many of these students believe it's perfectly legal to make a copy of your friend's CD/DVD/Video game/Microsoft Office CD as long as you have no intent to sell or distribute it. Of course some of that falls more under breaking your EULA than copyright, but the fact remains, the ethics of copying doesn't even apply here since they think it's perfectly legal to begin with.

    At any rate, I think a lot of people are going to be in for a big wakeup call when the RIAA throws down the hammer. A good sampling of their "victims" might not even be aware that they're actually breaking any laws.
  • by Technician ( 215283 ) on Sunday July 06, 2003 @07:17PM (#6379579)
    Actualy his mom is right. Case in point. In the USA it is illegal to have sea turtle stuff. They are an endangered species. Beef is not protected. There is no problem finding a steak at the supermarket.

    In the Cayman Islands it is legal to have sea turtle products including meat and shells. They also farm sea turtles to both sell the products and preserve the species. By the way turtle stew is delicious. Too bad the US would not permit me to bring a shell back.

    If only they would allow the gulf coast to legaly farm and sell sea turtle products, they would be much more common. Possibly as common as a Big Mac (tm).

    Making it illegal to own makes raising and selling for a profit impossible. Poaching kills the wild population. So does taking the habitat for legal profitable other uses of the land. (lots of beef is raised for profit) Threatened species becomes more threatened. Over hunting wild populations should be limited. Farming and selling should be legal.

    Ever bought farm raised salmon? Could Chillean Sea Bass be profitably farmed with a percentage returned to the wild?

    Raising passenger pigeons for the hat industry instead of hunting them could have saved it from extinction.

    Obligatory link to the turtle farm. Watch the web cams on this farm here

    http://www.turtle.ky/video.htm

    Here is a cut and paste with some stats on the release program.

    The Farm's captive breeding colony now produces an average of 45,000 eggs per year. Approximately eight thousand hatchlings are needed each year to satisfy current production goals. Excess hatchlings are designated for tagging and release. Over 28,000 hatchlings and yearlings have been released into the waters surrounding the Cayman Islands.

  • by Angerson ( 121904 ) on Sunday July 06, 2003 @08:14PM (#6379862) Homepage
    Educate the consumer as to the law, sure... But, please give the proceeds to those who create the art, or you're supporting the system to the demise of those for which the system was originally set up. You need to teach that in your college class...


    Actually the exploitation of the artist is always a key factor in our discussion. Especially since the bulk of these students are (or plan to be) artists as well. So no, I'm not force-feeding anyone the idea of bending down (or is it over?) and obeying the almighty RIAA. I'm just making them aware of the law - both the good and bad aspects of it.
  • by mobets ( 101759 ) on Sunday July 06, 2003 @08:52PM (#6380007) Journal
    I've always heard this, even said it myself a few times, but I see a major flaw. The only practical way to find a song on the network is to have the name or the artist. Unknown artists arn't going to be found if no one knows who they are.
  • Re:How? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by User8201 ( 573530 ) on Sunday July 06, 2003 @09:04PM (#6380065)
    What about all the people that use proxies to share files like spammers use?

    Lots of cafe's have open proxies (or you can set one up there, yourself), I think.
  • by NanoGator ( 522640 ) on Sunday July 06, 2003 @09:04PM (#6380072) Homepage Journal
    "Sounds just like the "Do not click on this link!" found on my prof's course webpage. (And yes, I did click on the link.)"

    His testing of his hypothesis is flawed. He claims that clicking that link has to do with people wanting to open every door and see everything that is concealed from them. Though his hypothesis may well be right and may even be true in a lot of cases, he's still getting polluted data. I didn't click on the link because it said "do not click on this link", I clicked on it because every time I've seen "do not click on this link" it was because somebody was trying to use reverse psychology to get more attention. Frankly, I wouldn't have clicked on it if had said "members only". I wouldn't have even cared, that that would have flown right in the fac eof his hypothesis.

    I'm not sure if I'm communicating my idea too clearly or not. So here's a test that I think would help filter out the noise: password protect the next page and watch how hard people try to figure out the password.

    Now, as for the RIAA (gotta drag myself back on topic here), I do not believe the growth is due in part to people feeling like they're 'bad-boys' about it. Rather, I believe it is a mixture of reasons. Two pop into mind. 1.) Lots of people flipping off the RIAA and saying "no, if you're going to be like this, then I'll hurt you in the way that I know best." and 2.) I better get what I can while I can.

    As for Napster's growth (I realize it was the parent poster and not you that said this), I think that had more to do with people being made aware of it than anything else.

    In any case, I'm a little off-topic. Sorry about that. The RIAA has been way off in understanding the psychology of its customers, and yes that includes file swappers too. Suing individual users will only cause music trading to evolve and resist. Sooner or later, it'll be impossible to know who's downloading what.

    The funny thing is that I think this movement can outlive the RIAA's abilities to sue it. I can't remebmer the last time I've thought that about the little guy.
  • Legal file swapping? (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 06, 2003 @11:55PM (#6380821)
    How much time will the RIAA waste suing people who are trading legal files? All of what I have downloaded over the past few months have been from DJs and artists who want their songs to be swapped. I'm on KaZaA all of the time, and have pretty high rating...when the man comes knocking, he won't like what he's going to find.

  • by po8 ( 187055 ) on Monday July 07, 2003 @02:01AM (#6381247)

    You have a moral obligation to use works of art under the reasonable conditions set by the artists.

    I find this statement (admittedly taken out of context) quite fascinating. I'm trying to think of any historically relevant philosopher of morality that has ever suggested any sort of moral obligation even remotely like this, and am coming up empty. Yet this is the result of the *AA advertising binge: the people of the world have come to believe that whatever their television tells them is not just the law, but morally imperative.

    I'm a Christian, and I'm trying to think, as an example, what Biblical imperatives I am violating when I rip a CD and give it to a friend. "No stealing" is the obvious one, but it is quite difficult for me to equate stealing (depriving another of something) and duplicating (making a copy of something)---they are such different activities on the face of it! I am ripping a CD I paid for, after all: I'm surely not depriving anyone of anything more tangible than "an opportunity to sell to my friend", which is an abstract concept indeed. If I feed my friend lunch, do I not equally deprive someone of this opportunity?

    I thought of a few more possible justifications, but at the end of the day I'm afraid I cannot see the moral imperative. As far as I can tell, there is no basis for a moral obligation to use artists' works in the way they direct. I will continue to use them as I like, as folks have done for as long as there has been art.

  • by Lectrik ( 180902 ) on Monday July 07, 2003 @05:13AM (#6381681)
    Sooner or later, it'll be impossible to know who's downloading what.


    That, I think, is the problem. I would like to know who is downloading potential evidence from me (although I can say I only share my creations and gutenburged texts). Perhaps if either party had complete anonimity it'd feel safer.
    I've heard some IRCops have been trolling recently and even that one of the servers kick-banned everyone to save it's users.
  • by Drakonite ( 523948 ) on Monday July 07, 2003 @05:19AM (#6381695) Homepage
    I know it's nonesense, but I think that RIAA's actions have artificially inflated the value of music files.

    It's not just nonesense... The RIAA has monoplistic type control over pricing (although technically I think they would be classified as a cartel and not a monopoly...) so the price of CD's rising or falling is a direct consequence of the RIAA's decisions.

    However... As for the real "value" of music... IMHO the value of music (i.e. how much you would be willing to pay for the crap) is dropping substantially and we are working our way to a new business model for the music industry where acquiring music is free/near free and the money is made through other things (concerts, merchandice, etc.) and having a piece of crap song that goes top 10 won't cause a band to become instantly rich.

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