Filesharing Traffic Drops After RIAA Threats

bryan writes "According to CNN, facing the threat of lawsuits from a music industry trade group, fewer people are using online filesharing applications to swap songs. Internet audience measurement service Nielsen Net Ratings said traffic on Kazaa, the leading filesharing platform, fell 15 percent in the week ended July 6 from the previous week. It was during that prior week, on June 25, that the Recording Industry Association of America said it would track down the heaviest users of "peer-to-peer" services like Kazaa and sue them for damages of up to $150,000 per copyright violation." This follows earlier reports, from the filesharing companies themselves, that traffic was actually increasing.

Pretty common scenario

[mao che minh]

Television evangelist Pat Robertson was overheard stating that the process of natural evolution was impossible, given that it's findings lie outside the idea of Christian creation dogma. All the while scientists the world over continue to compile and test bodies of evidence for it's many intricate workings. Despite all of the evidence to the contrary, Pat Robertson's opinion remains firm.

If Pat Robertson were to tell the truth, he might loose some of his marketshare.

The file sharing companies want to display a facade that their business is as strong as ever, even in the face of the new RIAA litigations and attempts to prevent the further theft of their products. Saying otherwise might hurt their (the file sharing companies) potential advertising campaign or the planned "pay-per-play/download" strategies.

who isnt sharing?

[claudius0425]

the truely interesting statistics would cover whether those who are not sharing are primarily uploaders or downloaders, and what there volume was before they stopped.

Correction

[sulli]

According to CNN

According to RIAA member AOL Time Warner

Wow who would have guessed

[missing000]

I assumed that everyone just stayed at home and downloaded mp3's on the 4th of July.

I can't belive that many people really had something better to do than surf the web on a holiday.

Unreliable stats

[l810c]

They didn't take into account 4th of July weekend here in the States. A lot of people wnet out of town. 15% decrease with a 3 day weekend is Not a trend or a result of the threat.

In other news...

[AKnightCowboy]

IRC channel #mp3-d00dz attendance is up 4500%. Not to mention tons of private FTP servers re-emerging. This isn't really a big deal IMHO. There are millions of songs that have exchanged hands. Just find a friend with tons of songs, setup an FTP server, and trade amongsts yourselves from now on. We've primed the pump, so to speak. ;-)

Stats

[BWJones]

I would not be surprised if the increase in file-sharing was due to a bunch of new folks coming on-line to see what the hub-bub was about, while the decrease is most certainly due to the folks that were sharing large collections with lots of easily trackable bandwidth that got spooked.

News at 11 ...

[Professor D]

Internet file swapping teens take a break for 4th of July. (15% = 1/7 of the week)

Wow, who woulda thought...

[Lord_Dweomer]

Filesharing companies claim their userbase increased after being threatened....

Media claims their threats were effective and the userbase decreased...

I mean...neither of these two groups would have an ulterior motive...naaaah...

So, in cases like these, aside from using your own good (or not so good) judgement, how are we supposed to be able to tell who to believe, or if we can't believe either source, where to find a source we CAN believe?

summer time vacations

[pbaker]

Maybe the decrease was because this was the week of July 4th. You know...people are outside setting off fireworks and having BBQ parties, instead sitting inside downloading music. It would be interesting to see if traffic also dropped on the week of July 4th, 2002.

sheesh more twisted truths...

[Lumpy]

ell 15 percent in the week ended July 6 from the previous week. It was during that prior week,

Hmmm kinda funny how filesharing drops on the biggest holiday/vacation/camping week in the USA.

that week most areas had massive concerts, air-fairs, festivals, beer tents, you name it than any other week of the year.

over 50% of my neighborhood were gone a large portion of that week either to shows at the local music festival or travel to detroit or chicago for their festivals/events...

Re:Taking a poll

[DeathPenguin]

I don't think the Slashdot crowd has the same mentality toward legal issues involving the RIAA as normal users. Your poll is going to have an unusually high number of people voting in favor of file swapping.

easy: school's out

[hazem]

This can be easily explained. Most universities in the country were finished in mid June and sent the kids home. The kids don't normally have access to that sweet T-3 when they are at home. So of course file-sharing went down.

I doubt it has little to do with the RIAA threat.

In other news, truancy drops by 90% after mid June.

Re:who isnt sharing?

[Xandar01]

Or even more interesting, did CD sales increase in the same period? Maybe people were busy doing other things.

Re:Taking a poll

[deadsaijinx*]

I don't steal* software, movies, or music, so I have no need for Kazaa otherwise.

at the risk of sounding like an ass.... "Woopdy friggin doo!" No one cares if you never used kazaa. No one cares if you consider yourself to be the more moral person. The original poster asked if you had slowed down or stopped, he didn't ask, "Are there any stuck up I'm-better-than-you-because-you're-a-filthy-pirate people out there that want to speak about how pure they are?"

What we must remember about RIAA

[djeaux]

They are NOT law enforcement. They are basically a private investigation outfit masquerading as an advocacy group for the "industry."

If you know any private eyes, you know they lie, cheat, deceive, distort facts, whatever they need to do to get their work done. They are very often only two spits shy of being crooks themselves.

So, it doesn't surprise me that RIAA takes stats from a holiday week, as has been pointed out already, to show that their threats & intimidation work.

The big problem that I see is that RIAA has essentially unlimited resources -- all that money that could be paid in artists' royalties -- while Joe Blow P2Per in the dorm doesn't. It will be very interesting if RIAA ever gets an opponent in court who has some financial backing. Of course, that will have to wait until we have a Department of Justice and not a Department of "Just Us"...

STEAL!!! or the RIAA will do it for you.

[HanzoSan]

Ok so you dont share files. hundreds of millions of people do, and hundreds of millions of people think its right.

It's part of a cycle...

[EZmagz]

Assuming that the claim it TRUE and filesharing is actually down from last week, and it's solely because of the RIAA's threats, then it's only a matter of time before they go up again. Think of Napster. When it went belly-up, people stopped sharing for a few seconds until a better alternative came along...mainly Kazaa/Grokster/Morpheus. Then sharing resumed, bigger and better than ever!

As one /.'er has already pointed out in a shameless plug for udpp2p (looks interesting, actually), the next step in p2p is straight-up anonymous filetransfers. It makes sesne, and it's inevitable...only a matter of time before someone codes up a decent client. And when that happens, you bet I'll be one of the first standing on their tiptoes, trying to see the RIAA's face and how they respond to that.

Personally I haven't used p2p, especially for music, in a while. If I need to get my fix though, there's always alternative routes to getting what you want...hotline/IRC/FTP sites still exist and flourish. It may not be as easy, but beggars can't be choosers it seems.

Re:yup, happened here

[The Master Control P]

This is why someone, preferably a well-known group like the EFF or ACLU, needs to start a non-profit fund to defend people from the RIAA.

The RIAA is like a wounded sabre-toothed tiger... It's going down slowly, and it's getting weaker, but it's still more than strong enough to kill the average person.

Even though they are slowly disintegrating, they still have far more money to bribe the judge and far more lawyers than their victims (who are chosen because of this) ever will so most of their victims have to either A) get screwed by the RIAA, B) Fight the case, loose, and meet Big Gay Bubba [newgrounds.com] in prison, or C) Fight, win, and suffer financial ruin for the rest of their lives.

I doubt that the RIAA would be so apt to go after p2p users if they stood a chance of defending themselves. Why do you think predators always go after the young, the sick, and the elderly?

udpp2p

[Srin Tuar]

The fundamental premise of udpp2p is broken.

Spoofed source addresses do not beget security nor anonymity, especially now that ISP's are required to "cooperate". Properly configured routers will put a dead stop to the practice, and even without that its still trivial for a big organization to backtrace you.

If you want real anonymity you need something called "plausible deniability" which you can get only from projects such as freenet [sourceforge.net].

Re:ok...

[Politburo]

Kazaa mostly applies to the ignorant public.

Yup. And that's why it is targetted, just like Napster was. RIAA and others couldn't care about the 50,000 people trading on IRC, BT, and other services. They know that you are smart enough to come up with a new way to avoid them, even if it means a lot more work for you. They care about the 10 million that use Kazaa, a program that a monkey can have up and downloading within 1 minute.

Re:Truly anonymous is the only way to go.

[cait56]

I suppose there are legitimate applications for anonymous sharing. I don't really think that stealing music is one of them. But if you really want to do this, why not simply obscure what is being shared? That way network congestion control is left intact.

Any well administered network will interpret these packets as a Denial of Service attack and kill them anyway.

If you just encrypt the material, nobody will know what you are sharing.

Except of course for the directory you published telling people how to get this really neat download of X.

It doesn't matter how you distribute the material. If you make it possible for strangers to find your content and download it, then it will be possible for the RIAA to be one of those strangers.

Re:Taking a poll

[Fux the Pengiun]

Well, that's just excellent, then. Transfer them to ogg, because, that's an OPEN STANDARD, and we should only steal people's music with OPEN STANDARDS. See, then it's okay, because it helps "the community" and all that.

I'm surprised this story was posted in the "media" section, actually. I figured it would grace the "Your Rights Online" section for sure. We usually see this sort of thing about copyright holders trying to halt the theft of their work in that section. That, somehow, when somebody tries to enforce the law, it must be violating your rights. Forget the copyright holder...it's Your Rights Online, not theirs.

These programs, Kazaa, Nuttela, etc, were written specifically for the purpose of illegally downloading music. I know they have a few other uses, as well, but that wasn't what the authors were thinking when they wrote them. The thought was "I want to steal music." Then they release it with a *wink wink, nudge nudge* "It's for distributing my garage band's tiny garbage to our global village!" When they get called on it, when the RIAA exposes the man behind the curtain, all of a sudden it's about my "rights."

Right...I forgot about that "right" you have to get Britney Spear's latest drivel for free. Of course you have a right to works of somebody else! We talk about rights and free speech and all that, and we rationalize our thievery away. "The RIAA is evil, so it's okay to steal!" "They rip off the artists anyway!" Cognitive Dissonance. So, if RIAA doesn't give enough money to the artists for their work, that makes it morally acceptable for you to give them nothing, then, right? That's how you justify that pirate mp3, isn't it? But the artist sure isn't going to see a thing from that.

Really, why are we even discussing Kazaa on this site? I mean, isn't Slashdot the home of Free Software? Aren't these closed, proprietary formats? Isn't that bad? Oh, wait, I guess it's okay sometimes...like it's cool to like Apple because they're all so nice. I guess I'm just not enlightened enough to see the difference. Maybe a member of the Slashdot 31337ist intelligencia can inform me.

[/rant] good god...sorry for the rant, I just get so sick of seeing this gloating on /. over and over again...

Only time will tell

[UnknowingFool]

I remember that my statistics professor once said that statistical sampling is useless unless the sample size is large and randomized and the population is somewhat uniformly distributed. As others have pointed, the holiday weekend is an example of a nonrandomized, small sample set. Wait a few months to see if there has been any real changes.

As for me, I've switched swapping methods to avoid detection. This means I have to come out of my mother's basement and swap CDs behind the local convenience store. :)

Correlation or causation?

[Gogl]

Other possible explanations for the drop in filesharing:

-- July 4th. Even geeks have lives.
-- Summer. Same as above.
-- Summer. Less college students, who tend to be heavy users.
-- No notable "new" stuff, TV series generally aren't releasing new episodes to be downloaded over the summer.
-- Simple statistical anomaly. 15% may sound like a lot, but if it's just a weeklong trend it doesn't mean much.

And there are other possibilities too. Be creative, I'm sure you can think of some.

Man, the world would benefit so much if somebody would just take out an ad during the Superbowl or something that would explain in simple terms the difference between correlation and causation. Except such an explanation is likely impossible. Oh well.

Re:who isnt sharing?

[joe_bruin]

well, let's ask, who is sharing?
a lot of those who are sharing are college students. the riaa made the "we're suing everyone" claim just as most college students go on spring break. many people that were sharing over their dorm's high speed internet connection are home now, stuck with their parents' dialup accounts. file sharing does historically decline in the (northern hemisphere) summer months, so a decline in file sharing would not be at all unexpected.

Random distributions.

[mfh]

I'm going to hazard an obvious guess here.

If you have a random subset within a larger set [p2p users in the USA], a randomly distributed decrease in the superset will correlate with a similar decrease in the subset.

you're shitting me, right?

[twitter]

Does iTunes really do it for you? If so, I'm happy really I am. But it will NEVER match the collection brought forth by Napster or any other file sharing network. Dan Peng's story pokes brilliant fun at the inadequacies and he got it published by the morons as a success story for the RIAA: [cnn.com]

Still, when I hear a timeless Beatles classic on the radio and then go home to look for it on Pressplay or ITunes and it isn't there, I tend to longingly eye the Kazaa icon that still sits on my desktop, beckoning me to return to piracy.

Can't get a Beatles song? A song from one of the most mercilessly comercialized bands in all history is not on iTunes? iTunes must blow!

No commercial company can measure up to the file sharing networks. They have lost the recordings, or just don't have money or resources to digitize them. The distributed effort of all music fans created a catalogue of all kinds of music you could never get in a store. That's what you get when you let music lovers share their stuff. Some of the newer music services are gettin good, but none match Napster yet. The comercial services don't stand a chance unless they figure out how to enlist the fans. It is this fundamental failure to make work available by the current "owners" that makes them obsolete, despite legal sucess beyond all reason. People will get around them sooner or later.

Re:Taking a poll

[vadim_t]

And it would be right. The credit card number would simply be duplicated.

Now, the money from the account would indeed be stolen since the original owner would lose it.

Re:No one

[epiphani]

Also, its not like this 15% drop happened to co-inside with a lot of north american holidays (Canada Day, Independence Day) where people are probably shutting down their computers and going camping.

sales?

[carpe_noctem]

The question is, did CD sales increase in this timeframe too?

Call me cynical, but I bet not.

they have learned and they know.

[twitter]

If I worked for RIAA, I would use P2P activity as a leading indicator of future sales. Reduced P2P activity means the current products are not very popular. When will they learn?

They know what gets traded on the networks and it terrifies them. The catalog is so much bigger than they could ever support at a physical store that the only way for them to survive is to eliminate the networks. They are obsolete, and will never wield the power of the "big hit" again. When people are free to share what they have and pick what they want, it turns out they have much broader tastes than any music mogul ever had.

When you stand back and look at things, you might start to wonder what the purpose of the recording industry is. For decasdes it was more about promoting a small subset of all music over all others to drive sales. That's not so much a matter of promoting that one song as it about supressing all other songs. The heavy rotation play from broadcast stations never were anything more than an obnoxious advertisement. Music sharing networks cut that out and alowed music to be chosen on grounds of taste an merit, criteria the music industry abandoned decades ago.

Disinformation & Freedom

[felonious]

Why do we let an industry over state their loses, change our laws, restrict our freedoms with the products we own, and fuck us over all to keep an old system in place , of which, consumers have completely rejected and moved past?

I can say it's our own fault for not fighting this or doing anything about it that allows it to continue. Tell me how is it possible that downloading files, copyrighted or not, and movies is frowned upon more than violent crimes? The guy who released the hulk movie on the net is going to do 3-6 years. That's more than first offenders get for violent crimes yet he's lumped in with them and he didn't hurt anyone's bottom line. Total and complete bullshit and we allow it to continue.

All it takes is a grass roots effort to put an end to this. We give them the power and we can take it away. This is about money and only when we stop buying completely will they listen and take notice. Until then keep spending and supporting the entity that is out to make a point by suing you into a financial disaster and making all of your choices for you.
As I stated in my previous post the RIAA seems to be trying out every angle available to stop filesharing. Guess what? It's not working nor will it. Disinformation seems to be a new tactic but I'm sure it'll work on the un-informed masses. In all actuality I bet a mojority of filesharers are under 18 so they aren't afraid of going to jail because they can't be charged as adults. Maybe the RIAA will sue them and their parents into poverty?

Dear CNN, repeat after me:

[sn00ker]

A statistical blip is not a trend.
Particularly when it occurs over the major holiday weekend for the world's largest population of 'net users.

Re:udpp2p

[dissy]

> No, a properly configured router will only block packets that don't appear to
> come from that network. That still gives you a lot of addresses to chose from.

No. A properly configured router is connected to TWO networks, and will not allow traffic to pass either direction unless the source IP matches what it knows of the two networks.

If your network is 192.168.1.0/24, and your source IP is not, it should drop it.
If a packet attempts to get in to you and its source IP _is_ in that range, it should also drop it.

Forging your IP will fail the first test.
The second test is to prevent others from pretending to be hosts in your network to bypass IP based security rules.

Anyone else wondering this?

[Anonymous Coward]

"sue them for damages of up to $150,000 per copyright violation"

How can they claim losses of $150,000 per violation? So you're saying if I download 10 songs from an album, I can be sued for 1.5 mil, but if I steal the album from a record store, I get what, a small fine and some community service?

Re:Pretty common scenario

[aardvarkjoe]

Creationism isn't science, and thus doesn't need proof. The theory of evolution, on the other hand, is science, and so requires proof. The whole creationism/evolution thing would just go away if people realized that the two are orthogonal rather than opposing, and abandoned the notion that everyone has to believe as they do.

Why RIAA & crew are idiots

[azav]

First, in the late 80's or early 90's a record exec promises that CDs will be cheaper than tapes because they cost less to produce.

Prices go up.

Then MTV forgets that Music Television should play music on television.

Next, Clearchannel starts the "McDonaldization of American Radio"

Now, RIAA attacks their own customers.

Result? Those of us that see this, really do love the music, FIND SOMETHING ELSE and rip internet radio streams to our heart's content, buy turntables and pay cash for Vinyl Records of the artists we like. We find new music, enjoy new artists, NO commercials and pay money that goes to the artists we like.

And have big fat hard drives and data DVD burners.

Less big music industry. More boat parties.

And ProtonRadio.com [protonradio.com]

This is a classic example of using the Media

[Evets]

This is a classic example of using the Media as a marketing network. The RIAA gets Nielsen to say that the ratings have dropped and they send a press release to CNN in response to other sources which state otherwise. Had Nielsen said the ratings rose, we would have heard nothing more about this matter. If the reporter had actually done any work aside from making two or three phone calls and reading a press release, he would have reported cd sales increases/decreases over the same time period or maybe even suggested alternative reasons for the decrease. Instead of a complete report we have nothing more than a one sided commentary that is obviously self serving to the story's originator. It's quite absurd of an idea to think that a CNN reporter could not find an antagonistic opinion to present. There are more people to talk to about this stuff than a Kazaa backed lobbyist.

Oh please...

[AyeRoxor!]

Those of you who remember the warez scenes of the BBS's of yore will remember that sometimes a board was taken down in YOUR AREA CODE. Within actual driving miles of where you lived. How long did it take for elite sections to open back up? 6 months? 3? one? They always did. They always will. Same today.

AyeRoxor [8i3]

so being a democrat == thief

[moogla]

The 2 party system must be abolished. Great. I can no longer take this child-minded bullshit.

“The Slashdot effect”

[codexwriter]

"The Slashdot effect" is commonly mislabeled as a god level D-enial O-f S-ervice effect. * Where tens of thousands of computer nerds suddenly prompted to some new (read: recently rehashed) idea (and they are addicted to this constant stream of morsel sized data bites worse than any heroin victim) all try and access the data at once and bring sites to their knees, then cut off their heads and sacrifice the blood to Xanthon god of Bandwidth. In reality I propose the unsettling idea that the Slashdot effect is far more terrible... not merely a DOS attack it is in fact when tens of thousands of people suddenly lose the ability to think for themselves! They form a group consciousness (Like the Republi-Cons and the Demo-Crats, no individual thought just a mass consciousness, indeed who is to say these two variant and ever warring mind sets did not evolve from the same barren world? A concept I will explore in more depth another time) which always seems to say/write the same things ... Beowulf cluster it! "If ones cool 10 is 10 TIMES as cool oh yeah." Microsoft is Evil, Bill Gates is the incarnation of Evil. Linux is Good, Linux is the SOURCE OF ALL GOOD, the universes soul function is the evolution of Linux and hastening it is the Torvalds! a demi-deity! RIAA are scum! Even the artists hate them! They should all be subjected to the torture of 40 days, forced to walk across rock salt with the skin flayed from their naked feet and ... etc. They have no right to come after file sharers. They don't pay artists! They are hypocrites and even worse they employ STATISTICIANS! TIA (total information awareness) = END OF WORLD. It is against the constitution! Standard line referenced... "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."- Benjamin Franklin Most recently SCO are repugnant vile, scum licking litigators with no product to back their claim to existence! The US patent system is broken! And a few other things besides. Mostly (admittedly) the group think is if not always exactly on the mark, close. What disturbs me though, is the *commonality* in thought, the ever present repetition. Almost a reflection of politics, most people aren't motivated to vote (POST) but those few who do are really passionate and outspoken, and thus we develop wide ranging ideological schisms. Consequently I will address a SMALL number of thoughts that may run counter to SLASHDOT group think. I have erected PSYCHIC iron wall discipline to deal with the backlash... Number One. The RIAA. The RIAA might be scumbags, but every person who uses Kazaa to download their songs needs to stop pretending like they aren't committing a crime. They ARE. They know they are, or they should know they are. The idea that being able to listen to the song from your mp3 will inspire you to go buy the cd is a ludicrous smokescreen for most of the nerd-tech-geeks I have met. I can't even guess how many people I know with PC juke boxes filled with 20, 30, 40 gigabytes of mp3's or more, one mentioned 120 gigs. They don't BUY the cds- to do that would take the GNP of a third world nation. And if they do come across something they like, they'll burn it to a cd - with new cd players it isn't even necessary to convert from mp3 format, or they can get one of the memory laden mp3 players. Every year their capacity goes up and the price goes down... every year the incentive to get a cd fades a bit more. Does this make it right for the RIAA to go after a few unlucky bastards and make examples of them? Not really. But it's an old strategy to hang the skeletons of criminals at the gates of the city as a warning, and it can be quite effective. What I find remarkable (and I know you want to know it!) is that everyone derides the RIAA while at the same time slaking up the product they provide. At this point comp. tech in the sound field lets a hobbyist match a studio. Don't want to pay for your music? Then make your own, and download the works of independent artists. Don't insin

Re:STEAL!!! or the RIAA will do it for you.

[ryanwright]

If 4 out of 5 people vote to steal the 5th person's money, that doesn't mean it is ok.

And yet my taxes still increase every year thanks to idiots voting yes on various bonds...

In other words, it's only OK if it's government backed.

Re:Pretty common scenario

[Copid]

That's the kind of thing the original poster was laughing at. Sure, it's possible, but why opt for that explanation rather than for the simpler one? The simple explanation for me is that I have a life history from birth until today. I graduated from high school, went to college, got a job, etc. The less reasonable one is that I was born in a laboratory in adult form yesterday, and my memories were implanted by an evil corporation bent on controlling the world. Sure, it could be true, but does it sound logical for me to say that that since I can't be totally sure of either one, both of them are equally valid theories?

It looks like there were dinosaurs a long time ago. Why prefer to believe that an omnipotent being made it look that way to trick you when you could simply believe that there were dinosaurs a long time ago?

Re:Reverse

[Daetrin]

Could it be Nielsen doesn't have the best numbers?

So we have to decide between the opinion of those with less accurate information, and the opinion of those with a vested intrest in distorting the more accurate information which they have, not a great choice.

Re:you're shitting me, right?

[Doctor7]

Unfortunately it doesn't work that way. If a song requires conversion from anything other than a CD, or a film has to be capped in realtime from video rather than just ripped from DVD, you will be very lucky to find it. Just like the commercial labels, most P2P users would rather share this year's crap than something decent from ten years ago, because it's less work.

And in other news....

[L. J. Beauregard]

As filesharing traffic fell 15%, sales by the RIAA's members likewise rose 15%....

Right?

Did they?

I mean I thought these eeeeevil file traders were responsible for all the woes of the music cartel^Windustry.

Right?

Is it?

And now that all those eeeevil file traders have got their comeuppances, the music cartel^Windustry should be back in the black.

Right?

Shouldn't it?

Re:Taking a poll

[Daetrin]

Now let's get with the $5 DVD's and the $29 Photoshop people! Chop Chop!

I actually had the exact same experience with audiobooks. For the last month or two i've been considering buying audiobooks so i'd have something interesting to listen to during me 30+ minute commute. However if you go to Borders or Barnes and Noble or Amazon.com they cost a bloody fortune. $30 is about as low as they get, and seeing prices up in the $70s and $80s is not uncommon.

I bought one cheap audiobook (A Wizard of Earthsea) and was impressed, but the price kept putting me off. I was seriously considering looking around on filesharing systems to see if i could grab mp3s of them from somewhere. Most of the tiles i want are books i already own anyways, so i wouldn't have felt too guilty about doing so.

Then i discovered that i could buy audio files of the same books from Audible.com. [audible.com] Theoretically they have the same list price as the tape version, which is insane, but just about all the files there are marked down to a reasonable price, and if you're willing to sign up for a monthly account you can get any two books a month for $20.

I signed up for the one year membership since after looking through their library i could find at least 24 books i wanted and that way i could get a free mp3 player. (Yeah, it's a piece of junk player, but if i'm going to sign up for a year anyways...)

So the book-on-CD people made $30 or $40 off of me once, and then scared me away with the horible prices and the lack of availability of the books i was interested in. Audible.com put things at a reasonable price and just made $250 off me. And i would have never taken the time to find Audible.com if the CD people were pricing things at a reasonable price of $20 or so per book. (About what i'm paying now when you consider the price of CDs.)

Re:STEAL!!! or the RIAA will do it for you.

[Anonymous Coward]

If 4 out of 5 people vote to steal the 5th person's money, that doesn't mean it is ok.

Think about that for a sec. Property is an artificial idea we've all seemed to agree on. If 4/5 of all people don't respect property, there is no longer any property.

Exactly right, but wrong conclusion

[tjstork]

The music industry is using the same exact argument that religious institutions make. They argue that society should give them special perks by saying that hurting those institutions is morally wrong.

You don't need no stinking priest to find your god, and you don't need to stinking middle man recording executive to get a song.

The greatest irony of our times it that the two most diametrically oppossed institutions in terms of ideal are completely the same after all. The religious nuts want the right to control information, and so does the recording industry. The RIAA and the 700 Club (or whatever he's onto now), are both the same thing, just in it for the power, add no value to anything, hamper the rights of users in order to stay in power, collecting a tax for delivering nothing. Both institutions are obsolete.

Time to step up to the brave new world.

Intellectual property doesn't matter because your ideas have been thought of or are obsolete.

Re:That's because I'm using iTunes now

[debugdave]

Until iTunes music store starts to carry music that is at least -somewhat- off the beaten path, I'm not going to subscribe.
Well you don't have to subscribe to anything you just need to use a Macintosh. And i wouldnt consider aphex twin off the beaten path. You can go into Sam Goody and get a lot of his cds.

Re:Pretty common scenario

[forgotmypassword]

You show me where that squid (or whatever) grew wings. You show me significant, non-fatal mutations of anything. You show me exactly how a pool of glop from wherever turns into life at all, much less the complicated being that you are...apparently skipping intermediary forms.

No guesses. No speculation. FACT. Pure and simple.

I find it very strange that you require vast amounts of evidence and logic to support a belief in some natural process that has almost no relevance to your everyday life.

Meanwhile you support a belief in God that is comparatively unjustified. Your belief in God is far more meaningful than your belief in evolution. But you have constrained the belief of evolution to such a level that it would be impossible to believe in God under the same constraints. I find that to be unbalanced.

You are an emotional thinker. Life is easier for you if your belief system feels right, than if it is logically consistant. That is your basis. You will never be able to come to terms with a logical thinker. Neither one of you can possibly argue to the other's satisfaction.

Re:Pretty common scenario

[darien]

Until you can, you have no better basis or argument than creationists that you ridicule do.

Read this [talkorigins.org]. It's a lot more compelling than anything you've said today.

The evolutionist argument is effectively "no, of course we can't prove that this is what happened millions of years before any of us was born; but look, here's a vast corpus of evidence that supports that theory."

The creationist rebuttal is generally along the lines of "aha, so you can't prove it! So it's equally likely that the world was sneezed, fully-formed out of the nose of the Great Green Arkleseizure."