p2pnet news view RIAA | P2P:- Teenagers’ toilet habits can be valuable indicators of whether or not they’re predisposed to illegal file sharing, says a new report.

Youngsters who put toilet paper in holders so it unrolls from the back are nine times more likely to be ‘illegal’ file sharers than those who install it the other way around, says RIAA vice president Hilary Sherman (right).

“Using toilet paper in this manner is an indication of a dark and secretive nature,” she states, going on:

“Moreover, those who employ toilet paper from left to right instead of up and down are more likely to use approved applications such as iMeem, iTunes and Kazaa then illicit underground P2P programmes and banned indexing sites.”

Her statements follow a report, Toilet Behaviour, Teens and Darknets, from Britain’s University College London Centre for Information Behaviour and the Evaluation of Research  (CIBER).

The study also includes interviews with families whose breadwinners have lost their jobs due to to the depredations of online file sharers, and who are now forced to live in homeless shelters, or on the streets of major cities around the world.

It was prepared for the RIAA  as a follow-up to the UK government’s Stratic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property (SABIP)  Copycats? Digital consumers in the online age study, which reveals seven million Britons are illegal file sharers.

Toilet Behaviour, Teens and Darknets was published on the heels of widely circulated RIAA news that governments around the world are cooperating with requests from Vivendi Universal (France), Sony (Japan), EMI (Britain), Warner Music (US), and East is West (China) to implement the Big 4’s anti-P2P Three Strikes legislation.

Under it, in the US, ISP customers suspected by the RIAA of uploading and/or downloading digital music files are warned twice by ISP Network Police, recently created by executive order from US president Batrack Obama, and then jailed for a minimum of six years, with fines of no less than $US222,000.

In France, whose president Nicolas Sarkozy was the first to officially adopt the policy of behalf of the music labels, file sharers are immediately imprisoned for three years.

In Britain, infringers are placed in a special RIAA-designed anti-file sharing training device for three hours every two days until they agree to never ever share music with anyone again.

The system, with double doors, stands about 7 feet (2.1 m) tall and 3 feet (0.91 m) wide, and is big enough to hold a large teenager.

Called the Eiserne Jungfrau in Germany, which plans to use it for a similar purpose, the system is state-of-the-art, says Sherman.

The music industry is losing the equivalent of $9.5 billion to file sharers every day, she says.

Toilet Behaviour, Teens and the Darknets  was compiled with data supplied by leading Antiguan research, security and investigative company MediaSentryDefender.

Jon Newton - p2pnet

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June, 2009