Leaked MediaDefender Emails Show Student P2P Traffic Down 197
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.
'"
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.
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.
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Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation. [nerdkits.com]
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 blipI wonder. (Score:5, Insightful)
I know that's what I use it for (no, I'm not kidding).
Re:There's still a lot of copyright infringement (Score:1, Insightful)
I wouldn't worry about it. Its easy to be idealistic when you have nothing to protect. They'll sing a very different tune when there's money involved. LOL
Remember, the hippies eventually turned into the very Establishment they despised.
Re:There's still a lot of copyright infringement (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?
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 peers how to use torrents and most now not use it.
I don't know anyone that does not do any illegal downloading; but this is generally music/videos. I can see the majority of illegal music/video downloading being students as most do not have the funds, or care enough to pay for the music. Most adult music is generally mainstream and thus bought from mainstream MPAA and RIAA suppliers, being HMV, Walmart, etc.. A large percentage of students music will be the TOP billboard hits but general interest in non-mainstream music is generally more prevalent in comparison to adult; thus being where a majority of music downloading and sharing comes into effect.
From my understanding and evaluation of peers, is that most know the dangers of illegal downloading and know that some sort of precaution is needed. As the majority of suits against illegal downloading are against users of Limewire, Ares or other various p2p applications; most see torrents as a safer practice. So to observe this decline is normal, as most adults I know that download music illegally don't even know what torrents are and have been slower in approaching p2p; and I generally find that the adult generation like to keep what feels more comfortable to them instead of trying the "newest" thing.
The only real way to combat this generation of downloading is to partner with the ISP's because only they can really throttle the connections and stop this. Too many services allow options such as RC4 encryption making it almost virtually impossible for the RIAA and MPAA to attack; and its almost hopeless to attack a handful of millions. Fortunately for the RIAA and MPAA this is almost becoming a reality as this YouTube generation is pushing the envelope.. I use to have bandwidth of ~3.4 mbps, but a general bandwidth of 1 mbps is now more common.
zOMG - Student numbers drop in summer (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
Re:Bogus (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:There's still a lot of copyright infringement (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Actually... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:There's still a lot of copyright infringement (Score:2, Insightful)
Also, I know it's common to confuse democracy and republicanism today, but we are a republic precisely to protect the rights of the minority from a simple plurality. As prohibition shows, it doesn't always stop the political winds of the day, but it's far better than simply changing things on the fickleness of the voters at any given time. For as much as you and I dislike the tactics of the RIAA and/or MPAA, remember, they're in bed with the rest of the media and could just as easily start a movement against something you hold dear (say, open source software) if we were a true democracy.
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.
Re:Bogus (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.
Re:There's still a lot of copyright infringement (Score:1, Insightful)
Property is a fundamental natural right. Just because it is easier to steal music off the Internet and not get caught doesn't mean it is any more moral than stealing any other property.
Re:There's still a lot of copyright infringement (Score:3, Insightful)
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 sales.
Now, is copyright good or bad?
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.
Re:There's still a lot of copyright infringement (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 depend on copyright. Far from seeing copyright as the One True Way to earn a living in the arts and sciences, we actually see it and similar law as serious barriers, constantly draining resources and distracting attention towards unprofitable legal exercises.
Ahh, you bring up the old assertion that copyleft needs copyright. No it doesn't. Yes, copyleft makes it difficult for someone to make a few changes to gain a competitive advantage, then keep it all secret and compete unfairly. Copyright law is merely the handiest tool to stop that kind of cheating. If there was no copyright law, such a tactic would still be unethical, and could be specifically outlawed, in the same way that the 14th and 15th Amendments outlaw specific tricks used to disenfranchise the newly freed. The 13th Amendment ban on slavery doesn't depend on slavery to uphold the principle that there shouldn't be slavery! The GPL doesn't need copyright any more than Lincoln needed slavery or (what the heck, I've already Godwinned this, may as well make it official), Churchill needed Hitler. Liberate the information!
Re:Bogus (Score:5, Insightful)
Either that, or there is a real problem with our copyright law.
Re:There's still a lot of copyright infringement (Score:4, Insightful)
You have to wonder... (Score:1, Insightful)
Copyright is good...if you're the the publisher. (Score:2, Insightful)
Your publisher really wants you to think copyright is the only thing protecting you from starvation. The truth is that artists and authors made decent livings long before copyright laws came into being. Furthermore, the artists and authors who work outside the copyright model today can still do pretty well for themselves.
The idea that you need a publisher in order to sell a book is strong evidence of copyright's badness.
Re:Bogus (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Problem solved. (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Problem solved. (Score:2, Insightful)
I realize some of the EDU IP addresses may be from a private NAT (Network Address Translation) which enables multiple hosts on a private network to access the Internet using a single public IP address. It is safe to say the numbers are probably a bit higher than the data shows but I wouldn't imagine it would be significantly higher.
My 10000 student school has only a few dozen IPs. Yeah, a "bit higher"."
This is the point I was making. I know it is higher but how much higher? Do you have a list of all the Universities that use NAT? How many of those universities ban P2P? If all using NAT also ban P2P then they aren't even in the numbers at all. Without proper numbers it is all speculation and that is why I wrote the blog. I was hoping to spark some discussion and who knows maybe someone reading this will like to dive in and get 'real' numbers. It is still going to be hard to get a number of 'infringers', however.
Re:Bogus (Score:2, Insightful)
Most people aren't pirating as some form of protest for draconian anti-consumer policies, they pirate because it beats paying money for it.
You're trying to simplify it into something very narrow. There are more things that influence people's behavior than it simply saving money. Otherwise, these people who don't want to waste money would not be listening to nearly as much music, and certainly wouldn't be running out to buy albums they've never heard from bands they've never heard. I know people who like listening to their music through their high end stereo system, or on their computer while they work, that have wasted $15-20 on a new album only to find out that due to the "clever" copy protection on the disc, they are unable to listen to it. Then there are the windows machines that were infected with rootkits, the macs that locked up and refused to reboot or eject the malicious audio cd. Not to mention the people who have a different taste in music, preferring only a few songs from different albums. The biggest contributing factor is probably how "pirated music" tends to have far less problems, than trying to find a legal way to pay for an album and still be able to use it as easily as the mp3 you could have already downloaded by now. Not everyone is that computer literate. Most of the users I know are only capable of using a few simple programs successfully. They don't want to have to learn a variety of systems that individually are more complicated as well as costing them money, without any guarantee that they'll even be able to listen to it on the device they intend to listen to it on.
The vast majority of the world, when it comes to piracy, are cheap bastards. I know guys who pay $2K for a laptop but refuse to pay for a copy of Windows.
Something seems fishy here. A cheap bastard who pays $2,000 for a laptop from one of the limited number of companies that sells it without a Windows license, then pirates Windows because he can't afford it? Don't get me wrong, I know lots of people who pirate windows. Typically, people who are building a custom computer themselves or people who don't want the other 10-15gigs of trial software that came pre-installed with Windows on their machine. I haven't heard of many people building their own custom laptops, though. Most laptops are bought with a windows license already included. What reason would people have for pirating windows if they already own windows? Unless they don't want the other 10gigs of crap that came pre-installed and don't have a plain disc to reinstall with, why would they be pirating Windows? Are you sure it's not just because it's easier than trying to find the long and hard way of accomplishing the same task with the least chance of breaking the law?
They are vaguely aware of a musician that they're ripping off, but their feeble minds do not permit them to hold onto that train of thought long enough to feel guilt.
Every musician I've ever met has wanted people to listen to, and enjoy, their music. They like the idea of their music reaching more people. But, then again, those are just musicians. Some of them talk about how their publisher is ripping them off. I could be wrong, but I tend to believe the people I know personally over what someone I don't know says.
Have you ever been to a public place or a pub where someone had a TV with cable/satellite TV? What about a local concert or open mic where bands played music that they didn't write themselves? Do you realize how many of those are more extreme infringements of these exact same copyrights? Then there are schools, who very rarely license every copyrighted melody that they teach children to perform during public events. What do you do when you're at a restaurant and you hear someone beginning to sing The Birthday Song. I can't imagine the kind of frustration you must put up with on a daily basis, seeing all of these blatant copyright infringements everywhere. If you get so upset about people privately listening to musi