File-share risk overplayed
p2pnet.net News:- The risk tied to Internet file-sharing is almost zero despite entertainment industry claims to the contrary, says a new consumer study by Canadian marketing expert Dr Markus Giesler, who’s also a former label owner.
“Downloaders are generally less likely to expect a stern warning, expensive lawsuit or even criminal prosecution, the more those around them are doing the same,” says Giesler in his Theory of Collective Consumer Risk.
Members of Europe’s Hotline file-sharing community were the subjects of his four-year ethnographic investigation which examined risk-taking behavior and, “The results directly contradict entertainment industry claims that Internet file-sharers are generally at risk of landing in court,” Giesler told p2pnet.
Hotline is particularly popular in Europe, “but the study’s findings also apply to any other p2p community such as Kazaa, BearShare, or LimeWire,’ he states, going on:
“The Internet dramatically reshapes the power relations that have long organized the global marketplace and these communities help consumers undermine the dominant market structures.”
However, “A key to winning future entertainment markets is to identify how interactive consumer technologies are altering the social fabrics of peoples’ lives,” Giesler points out.
“While these transformations may lead to the mitigating of traditional consumer risks, they eventually bear the emergence of new ones. To find out where, entertainment managers must do a better job in reading the digital map of consumer risk.”
Giesler is assistant professor of marketing at the Schulich School of Business at York University in Toronto.
He was a successful label owner working for more than hundred entertainment companies until the music industry crisis, “prompted him to change camps and become a consumer anthropologist“.
Download a copy from Giesler’s site here, or from here.
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August 4th, 2004 at 4:46 am
Well I for one am glad he finnaly saw the light!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
August 4th, 2004 at 12:20 pm
In addition to providing http download links to the p2pnet server, what about also posting P2P links for the files?
In eMule for instance, you can create a file weblink that also includes your IP address, so a user who clicks the link will try to connect to and download directly from your computer or server, so this makes it as fast as a direct ftp or http download.
OK, so here is a trial (copy/paste) ed2k link -
ed2k://|file|Markus.Giesler.Rethinking.Consumer.Risk.pdf|669169|662CFE06EF29A1A92DAF137B5E8C703C|/
(This paper is worth reading - it even opens with words of wisdom by none other than Jon Newton!)
One of the main problems of P2P is that many people consider file-sharing as a way to download only illegal files, but P2P really has far more benefits than most people realize. For one thing, once a file gets spread on a major P2P network, it can live on virtually forever in a kind of semi-permanent internet archive. By comparison, in traditional ftp/http downloading, the lifespan of a file’s availability is usually quite short, as older files are normally removed on a server to save bandwidth for newer files. Sometimes companies simply close down the servers or go offline due to the high cost of bandwidth.
Another legitimate benefit of P2P is getting older versions of free software. Often a software developer will give out early versions of its software for free, and only start charging later, once the software has established a dominant market share. But unless those older, free versions live on in P2P, they will then become unobtainable.
It also goes without saying that when more legitimate files are available on P2P, the networks will gain respect and will be less likely to be targeted by hostile authorities.
So I often recommend to website operators to try to include posting P2P links for downloads whenever possible.