BitTorrent Use Up 24% Since November 239
dingalig writes "It looks as though the MPAA's fight against The Pirate Bay and other BitTorrent sites isn't going very well. Ars Technica reports that BitTorrent traffic is up by 24% since before the holidays. 'BitTorrent traffic spiked over the December holidays. After a peaking at almost 12.5 million downloaders on the 200 most popular files, traffic dropped at the beginning of January — about the time that school started up again. But one figure that will prove alarming to the content creation industry is that the numbers are higher now than they used to be. "The baseline has been elevated," notes [BigChampagne CEO Eric] Garland. "Not only did the spike happen, but the bar was raised."'"
WGA Strike? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm guessing this has more to do with the fact that when there's nothing on TV to watch, people are more likely to download a film.
MPAA should sue the WGA
Mainstream now... (Score:5, Insightful)
Victimless (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyone know any victims? Artists or creators whose works are widely pirated but who struggle to make a living?
Prohibitions encourage what is prohibited (Score:5, Insightful)
The only reason why P2P file sharing is a problem is because copyrights have been extended into perpetual special privileges. Copyrights were only needed in the first place due to the limitations of physical media and the brick and mortar distribution system. Both of those are now obsolete - as are the artificial market distortions justified by their limitations.
Just as the Internet offers a far more efficient distribution system, it also offers the ability to shorten the time require for a creator to recover fair value for his work before releasing (some) rights to the public domain. A modified dutch auction over the Internet provides the means for artists to be fully compensated at the moment they finish their creation. Once the artist has received fair value for a recorded performance, there isn't any need to attempt to control how consumers choose to use that recording. The P2P file sharing that today is called piracy, and used to justify ever more abusive intrusions into the rights of all people in order to enforce unnecessary copyright restrictions, becomes highly valuable viral promotion and distribution that benefits the artist.
Remember that the artist has already been cut of meaningful earnings from the reproduction and sale of recordings by the typical "all rights" contract terms imposed by the legacy record labels. Only a tiny percentage of artists earn a living from royalties on their recordings. For most artists, the primary benefit of selling records is just the publicity - they still make most of their money from live performances. File sharing and "word of mouth" on the Internet are much more effective promotion than the paid advertising of the legacy labels.
Re:Mainstream now... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Victimless (Score:5, Insightful)
Not all trafic is illegal (Score:3, Insightful)
So saying an increase in P2P traffic is equivalent to a increase of illegal streams in not at all correct. A lot of Linux vendors also use P2P to distribute their distro's. A lot of them are about 4Gb in size, so that would be a nice increase of traffic. Also you will notice an increase of traffic within a few day's when the latest Ubuntu hit the web...
And it's not only the Open Source vendors that are using this distribution method. More and more Closed Source software makers ar starting to use this distribution channel, simply because it lowers the cost...
So - saying an increase of P2P traffic is the same as an increase of illegal content is absolutely not true!
Not all torrents are piracy! (Score:5, Insightful)
BitTorrent is also critical to unsigned musicians such as myself who offer downloads of their music [geometricvisions.com] from their websites. P2P allows bandwidth to be contributed by one's fans, whereas direct HTTP downloads can bankrupt a struggling artist if one of their tracks becomes a sudden hit.
And yes I know there are many music hosting sites such as MySpace. But it's better for musicians to offer downloads from their own sites rather than to use a host.
Re:Gotta love statistics. (Score:3, Insightful)
But Linux users are so incredibly insignificant to the OVERALL amount of torrent traffic, that this fact has no relevance.
Dumbass? I think you're more of a dumbfuck here mate.
Re:Mainstream now... (Score:5, Insightful)
And yes I agree with you.... BT could only go up
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Private bittorrent networks (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Victimless (Score:5, Insightful)
Being civilized means respecting the rights of others to life and liberty - it doesn't mean giving others the right to be rich. I have no problem with people being rich but I feel no need to defend their wealth. I don't believe that being rich makes them more productive so from my point of view it's better if they have to continue struggling for their wealth by doing useful things like producing more music, movies, and other cultural resources. Sitting on their ass enjoying their wealth isn't really a boon for humanity although most of us wouldn't mind being able to do so.
Re:Victimless (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Prohibitions encourage what is prohibited (Score:5, Insightful)
An electronic copy has an incremental cost so small that it is typically in the noise.
Re:Gotta love statistics. (Score:3, Insightful)
Please, it's ridiculous to claim that the majority of torrent bandwidth is used for legal content. And it's pointless too. No one from the MPAA/RIAA is going to come one here and stop harassing pirates just because some people use the same protocol to download Linux. They don't care about that, what they do is to leach on the illegal torrents they do care about and then try to get the ISPs to tell them who was using the IP addresses they saw downloading.
Re:Victimless (Score:2, Insightful)
How would you feel if technology made it possible for people to share for free something you used to sell to them individually?
Re:Mainstream now... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Victimless (Score:5, Insightful)
It's increased? *gasp* I'm really amazed (Score:2, Insightful)
How does the entertainment industry respond? Not by removing or reducing the reason of illegal downloads. Not by gaining trust with the people. No, imagine that sales might actually go up because the price is actually affordable and/or you could easily buy the song or movie you want without any additional crap.
Instead of putting energy in sales (adapting to the market), they put energy in piracy (lobby to get various ineffective, annoying laws applied; suing their clients; Digital Restrictions Management). Result: because of the various annoyances and of the bad reputation of the entertainment industry, piracy increases.
If they'd just adapt to the market, their problem would disappear like snow for the sun (or, at least, reduce to acceptable proportions).
Re:Victimless (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm not - I sell services to people. But I'd like to be someone who sells software. And people that make songs or software or movies do it partly because they want to make money out of it. So if you start taking their stuff and not paying them and you break the law whilst doing so, you shouldn't be too surprised if they sic their lawyers on you.
Re:Most torrents ARE 'piracy' (Score:5, Insightful)
Linux Distributions
Other 'free' Software
Non-Copyright Music
Non-Copyright Movies
Creative Commons Content
You still have a very large number of downloads
The industry always complains that they have lost $x million in sales but they do not allow for the fact that the vast majority of the downloaders would never buy what they downloaded?
Re:WGA Strike? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Victimless (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Prohibitions encourage what is prohibited (Score:3, Insightful)
It was specifically the expected benefit to the public good of timely transfer to the public domain of technical knowledge and creative works that justified the distortion of even a limited duration monopoly within a free market economy. So the overt intention of patents and copyrights has always been the eventual transfer to public domain. The only question has been the duration of protected monopoly needed to extract fair value compensation before the copyrighted work becomes public domain.
In 1776 copyright protection was set at 14 years. It's only been in the last few decades that copyrights have been extended from a few years to somewhere around four generations beyond the lifetime of the creator - essentially a perpetual special privilege. The current period is an extreme aberration in copyright history - at least during the period when copyrights bothered to mention the rights of the creator at all. (The original and continuing primary purpose of copyrights has been to protect the "rights" of "reproducers".) It is also an extreme violation of the public interest since it delays transfer to the public domain beyond the useful value of many/most works.
Returning to the original purpose of copyrights, the legitimate duration of monopoly protection is a function of the time required to monetize the creative work sufficiently to return fair value to the creator. Once the creator has obtained fair value, there is no further justification for monopoly protection.
In the current business model, most artists receive their only compensation as an advance. The record labels routinely demand that creators sign over all rights to the resulting recordings. So the current extended copyrights don't protect the rights of creators in the first place - they protect the monopoly production rights of those selling copies of copyrighted works. The legacy record labels have lobbied for repeated extensions to copyright protection on the basis that ever longer monopolies were needed to compensate for the high costs of capital intensive manufacturing and distribution.
Eliminate the high costs of the legacy record labels and you eliminate the need for extracting vast wealth from the music trade. Creators can be better compensated for their contributions to the popular culture, while the costs to consumers can drop to a level reflecting the true cost of digital production and distribution.
What is really needed is for enough people to see past the efforts of the legacy record labels to artificially preserve the limitations of obsolete technologies, and allow the free market to implement the legitimate purposes of copyrights in more efficient ways.
Your labor is owned by society (Score:3, Insightful)
There, I fixed that for you. Sounds like a crappy way to structure a society... good thing nobody would ever be stupid enough to go for it. Oh wait...
I write software for a living. If I stop getting paid for it, I'll stop doing it. There won't be any more sunsets, for the ~1,000 people who are dependent on my software. You can claim "society owns the idea" all you want, but "ideas" are hard to compile. Society has not produced workable bytecode, except insofar as "society" has chosen to make a "market" and the market pays enough to make it worthwhile for one engineer to create bytecode. (And to market and whatnot, which are my more important contributions. It wouldn't help society out very much if the solution were buried in the basement water closet behind a sign that said Beware Of The Hairy OSS Programmer, right?)
http://www.bingocardcreator.com/ [bingocardcreator.com]
Here is my broken OSS competitor. Get cracking, it needs a LOT of work. I suggest starting by fixing whatever the bug is that prevents it from working on Windows. Then you might clean up the GUI a bit. Go on, get cracking -- you owe it to society, after all.
http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/bingo-cards [sourceforge.net]
Re:Mainstream now... (Score:2, Insightful)
1 click. gets you to the torrent site.
1 search gets you the torrent you wanted 90% of the time.
1 click starts your download.
wait 15 minutes for an hour long show.
1 click plays the file.
Oh yeah thats SO hard and inconvenient. Oh wait. no. its so easy an aol user could do it.
Comment removed (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Victimless (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd love to be able to make money off software too, but for the fact it just seems wrong to charge for something that is infinitely reproducible. For my service and effort, sure. But that decreases on average for every copy made. Give me the ability to transfer >$1AUD with no fees, I'll pay for every song I would then download, 8$ per movie. Few, if any, media files are worth more in the current environment. What, your going to sulk and 'not create'? I'll live.
Its like garbage, if there are plenty of bins around more people put the rubbish in the bin. My 3km street has no bin, there is mounds of rubbish lying around. Moral of the story; make it convenient and inexpensive, and most people will be reasonable.
OTH, technically it isn't moral to copy someone else's work with no benefit to them. Thus, I don't 'pirate'.
Re:Victimless (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm guessing here that you are probably my age (32) or younger. I'm at the older end of the generation that, for some reason, seems to want everything right now. A new series comes out and we have to have it right now, not when our local TV broadcaster gets around to showing it. Even though there is plenty of stuff to do in the meantime, and the show will be just as good in 6 months time as it is now, we still have to have it now.
Never, of course, is a different matter altogether... that's what DVD's are for
Re:Mainstream now... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Mainstream now... (Score:3, Insightful)
Now?
Re:Mainstream now... (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course, this requires you to not be a leech. Is that not convenient?
Re:Your labor is owned by society (Score:5, Insightful)
No, ideas and physical objects are fundamentally different. I see nothing wrong with limited term copyrights -- 20 years, maybe less. Tell me, in what way would your incentive to create software be diminished if you could only hold the copyright for 20 years? Do you have any belief that you can make money from the 20 year old version of your software? If not, why shouldn't it pass into the public domain?
Ownership of physical objects makes sense because if I take your car, then you no longer have a car. If I copy your software... you still have your software. So there's no fundamental moral argument for the ownership of software. There is, however, a strong practical (not moral or ethical) argument for ownership of limited term copyrights, intended to promote creation of such works.
Re:Victimless (Score:4, Insightful)
It has been codified. Look at the form of the copyright and patent laws -- they don't grant ownership of the idea at all. Look at the justification in the Constitution -- the premise is that copyright and patent require explicit permission from the constitution to exist at all, since they go *against* the natural way of doing things (ie ideas owned by society). Look at the writing of the founders discussing the matter, and you see the same concept -- patents and copyrights are limited term monopolies, granted because it is useful to do so, not because of any inherent right of ownership.
The views I espouse form the very core of our copyright and patent systems; they have merely been forgotten by the public, while a very well-funded campaign attempts to dismantle them entirely. Perhaps it has succeeded, and we as a society have changed our minds -- but if that is the case, it needs to be expressed in very forceful terms -- specifically, a constitutional amendment permitting unlimited term copyright.
Re:Your labor is owned by society (Score:2, Insightful)
*disclaimer: no one needs this.