RIAA law suits are failing
p2pnet.net News:- A major new Canadian academic study should be a wake-up call to the music industry.
That’s the view of Globe & Mail tech columnist Jack Kapica.
“The music recording industry’s best efforts to stop those who use peer-to-peer networks to download music files have failed to deter people with the threat of lawsuits or criminal prosecution,” he says, referring to new evidence in Dr Markus Giesler’s Rethinking Consumer Risk: Cultural Risk, Collective Risk and the Social Construction of Risk Reduction.
Giesler, now assistant professor of marketing at the Schulich School of Business at York University in Toronto, is a former record label owner.
p2pnet featured his report, which kicks off with a quote from p2pnet editor Jon Newton, some time back.
“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,” we wrote at the time.
“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.”
Big Music’s Canadian Recording Industry Association’s effort to sue Canadian downloaders resulted in a court ruling that made the practice legal, Kapica says, adding that America’s RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America), “has continued its litigious approach to the matter.”
This is the second time in the past few days that Big Four record cartel claims that its sue ‘em all intimidation campaign is having a significant effect on file sharing have been discredited.
An important new US academic study says the p2p networks are, in fact, thriving.
“In general we observe that P2P activity has not diminished,” say the authors. “On the contrary, P2P traffic represents a significant amount of Internet traffic and is likely to continue to grow in the future, RIAA behavior notwithstanding.”
Download a copy from Giesler’s site here, or from p2pnet here.
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See:-
wake-up call – Lawsuits fail to stop music downloads: Study, Globe & Mail, November 2, 2004
featured – File-share risk overplayed, p2pnet, August 3, 2004
legal – – Keep on swapping! Cdn file sharers told, p2pnet, March 31, 2004
dismissed – P2p study flawed says RIAA, p2pnet.net, October 28, 2004
November 3rd, 2004 at 5:24 pm
The only way to get rid of p2p is to get rid of the internet.
Even then, sharing will just go to friends sharing physical media rather than digital (sounds an awful lot like the fair use rights gained through betamax when I say it that way).
The RIAA/MPAA try to ‘wag the dog’ as much as the polititions in their pockets……who do ya think they learned it from……and why do you think they get laws passed around their business…… um .. money. lol
Anyway, just my 10 cents as usual..
_-Jile-_
November 4th, 2004 at 6:24 am
Even getting rid of the internet might not be enough.
With a radio receiver and transmitter you could potentially build a little network by retransmitting to your neighbors.
If the internet failed mesh networks would probably sprung up.
http://p2pnet.net/index.php?page=reply&story=2650
It’s rather long so I’ll copy the relevant part here:
“I think most of us would prefer anarchy to plutocracy. And in this spirit, let’s examine the ways in which we can open some gaps in the functioning of these powers, gaps wide enough to transmit a signal.
The AM radio band is a little bit different in Australia than in the USA. In the US it goes from 540 Khz to 1710 Khz, while in Australia it only extends up to 1620 Khz. This means there are at least 50 khz of spectrum that are quasi-unregulated. They are regulated by the ACA but not by the ABA – and hence not subject to the normal rules of broadcast regulation. What’s interesting is that most (perhaps all) of the AM receivers sold in Australia actually provide access to the band as defined in the US, so at the top end of the dial, there’s nothing but empty space.
Now you can’t just plop a transmitter into that range and start broadcasting 50,000 Watts of power – the government shut you down immediately, or perhaps just demand hundreds of millions of dollars in license fees. But it is possible, and at least marginally legal to use so-called “micropower” AM radio transmitters in this band. A micropower transmitter generally has a transmitter power of 100 milliwatts or less – not much, you might think, unless you consider that most of WiFi communications use even less power than that. With that kind of signal strength you can get up to about a 500 meter transmission radius – if you’re antenna is located on a nice, high point. That’s not very much, although in the urban areas where most Australians live, that would still reach a fair number of homes.
But so what? You could all have your own little micropower AM stations, each saying your own little things, making your own little reports, but really who cares? A network isn’t a thousand stations saying a thousand different things; a network is a thousand stations speaking with one voice. That’s what Clear Channel is – here and in the United States. So how do you turn these little stations into a network?
Well, there are two answers to this question. The first is fairly obvious: you put the transmitters close enough together that each station is a paired receiver/transmitter, and in so doing you create a mesh network of transmitters. The receiver picks up the signal and passes it along to the transmitter, which rebroadcasts it on the same frequency. This is somewhat analogous to how mobile networks work – you move from cell to cell and the signal follows you seamlessly – and is very well suited to densely populated urban districts, college campuses, public events, and so forth.
The costs for each node in such a system are very low – probably less than fifty dollars for both the AM receiver and the transmitter. And because it’s low power, it can all be run off of batteries which are automatically recharged via solar cells. It should be possible, with only just a touch of design and engineering, to produce a tiny all in one receiver-transmitter-charger unit that could be dropped almost anywhere – say on the rooftop of every tall building in your suburb – and voila! – you’ve got yourself a network.
(For technical details google “micropower radio” and peruse some of the links.)
Now it isn’t possible to blanket an sparsely populated entire country – like Australia or the USA – with a micropower radio signal. There are places where the transmitters would be more than 500 m apart, and the signal chain would be broken. In situations like this, Internet streaming comes to the rescue. Any signal which can be delivered via AM radio can also be delivered via the internet at dial-up speeds. The streaming signal output can put plugged into the AM transmitter, and, once again, you’ve got your network. In this way you can cover both the densely populated areas and the spaces in between them with one network.
Now both of these proposals are more than just idle ideas – they’re the heart of a new network – RADIO RHIZOME – which launched in Los Angeles a week ago today. RADIO RHIZOME has hijacked frequency 1680 on the AM dial to bring a continuous loop of programming to the city which the media megacorps call home. And they can’t do anything about it. Jeff Cain, the artist/creator of RADIO RHIZOME describes it in these words – “I took a look at the telecommunications law, and squirted myself in between all of its forms, like foam, filling up all the space they’d left empty.” In the US this means micropower AM radio, with a mixture of repeaters and Internet streaming to cover what could potentially be the entire planet with a single broadcast network.
If we had some sort of networking in this building we could tune into RADIO RHIZOME right now; if we had a few micropower transmitters, we could set up a mesh network that ran all the way through this festival. And that’s the point: anywhere you go, you could be setting up your own mesh-style radio networks. Radio networks aren’t meant to be permanent – even if that’s what the media megacorps want you to believe. Put them up, get the message out, take them down again, move on. Mobility is more important and more useful than permanence; flexibility trumps sheer size every time.
Now one thing that RADIO RHIZOME has – one thing that every network has – is a “head end” – the point from which programming is distributed through the network. This is an architecture that is quite literally built into the design of the network. Thus, true power lies at the head end, at the top of the hierarchy of transmitters. This is what people are going to fight over – the right to control the distribution of content. It won’t be a big issue when the mesh is small, but as the mesh extends to cover the nation – and this isn’t very hard to imagine happening – people will begin to have very serious disagreements about what goes onto the network. In the beginning you’ll be hard pressed to find enough content to put over the airwaves, but as you reach an inflection point, you’ll find yourselves swamped with programming choices. And you, like every radio and TV programmer who has gone before you, will have to decide who gets to decide who gets to the airwaves. That’s a lousy choice, because it basically means you will recapitulate the gatekeeper strategies which are the hallmark of the media megacorps.”
November 4th, 2004 at 11:51 pm
What I just find so amazing is that everyone thinks the current IP based global network was the first! Before there was all this IP stuff, there was X.25 and it was going on there.
This was largely done with either direct telephone dialup or direct connect and this was going on in the early 80’s.
Getting rid of the internet will stop nothing.
With the advent of wifi the playing field has changed. People can now be driving down the highway with a 802.11g link transfering just about anything they want. With Wifi MAX it will be like DATA CB radio with people broadcasting to their neighbour hood.
No you can’t stop it, no matter how many people you try to make examples of.