The RIAA: managing Jell-O
p2p news feature / p2pnet: The entertainment cartels just don`t get it.
They can`t kill p2p, and they can`t stop file sharing >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
RIAA Threatens, File-Trading Grows
By Jay Lyman – TechNewsWorld
Having won a U.S. Supreme Court ruling against peer-to-peer (P2P) operators running unlicensed file-sharing networks, namely the once-popular Grokster, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has sent cease-and-desist letters to seven more P2P outfits in the U.S.
However, online music industry experts indicate that despite its court victories, the RIAA is having no negative effect on illegal file-sharing, which has grown more than two and a half times since the recording industry group began filing lawsuits against individual file-traders two years ago.
Yankee Group senior analyst Mike Goodman, said the RIAA’s efforts actually tend to publicize and promote unlicensed file-trading of music online, which jumps by thousands of users every time the issue is in the news.
“You mean the P2P marketing campaign,” he called it in an interview with TechNewsWorld. “Every time they have a press release or there’s news about it, the number of P2P users grows.”
Stop Already
The RIAA has loudly fought the growth and proliferation of P2P networks, from the first suits that brought down the original, unlicensed Napster to individual lawsuits against alleged illegal file-traders. After a court loss late last year on its blanket subpoenas to Internet Web Hosting and Web Design services from the original domain name registrar, Network Solutions. service providers (ISPs) to give up supposed copyright infringers, the RIAA finally scored a win this year from the Supreme Court, which ruled in June that while P2P technology itself is not illegal, some behaviors by operators encouraging free file-trading was.
With that court ruling in hand, the RIAA most recently sent cease-and-desist letters to seven other P2P operators, warning those businesses that they were in violation of the ruling. The organization did not respond for comment. Some of the recipients reportedly included LimeWire, BearShare and WinMX.
Explosive Growth
Goodman said the RIAA court win has had “zero-effect” on the growth of P2P users, which grew from 3.8 million average users per month when the RIAA suits began in 2003, to 9.5 million in August 2005.
“It just keeps going up,” he said, adding that the RIAA’s court cases have not been the reason for the increase in legitimate online music services, either.
The analyst, who called the growth in P2P “explosive,” observed that the RIAA strategy was like chasing cockroaches that scatter from the light, stressing that for each P2P network targeted, there are ample more to step up and bring on more users.
“It doesn’t go away, it just shifts, and every time it shifts, it gets bigger,” Goodman said.
Managing Jell-O
Gartner Latest News about Gartner research director Mike McGuire told TechNewsWorld a similar story, noting that the focus on Grokster, LimeWire or any other P2P application changes regularly.
“They appear to be moving a lot of traffic off to other protocols,” he said, adding that eDonkey is the latest, most popular P2P.
McGuire, who said the companies promoting better copyright control have good reason to want content protection, indicated that some parts of the music label industry are realizing the need to leverage the technology and architecture of P2Ps, rather than resist them.
However, the majority of the industry continues its legal-PR campaign to pursue P2P operators and users, a tactic for which McGuire also had an analogy.
“It seems to be like trying to manage Jell-O,” he said.
[Reproduced with permission of TechNewsWorld and ECT News Network. (c) 2005 ECT News Network. All Rights Reserved.]
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First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win
- Mohandas Gandhi
Tired of being treated like a criminal? They depend on you, not the other way around. Don’t buy their ‘product’. Do bug your local political representatives. Use emails, snail-mail, phone calls, faxes, IM, stop them in the street, blog. And if you’re into organizing, organize petitions, organize demonstrations and then turn up on your local political rep’s doorstep, making sure you’ve contacted your local tv/radio station/newspaper in advance.
October 19th, 2005 at 9:42 pm
Couldn’t agree more with the theme of this article. By the strangest coincidence it is exactly how I learned and then became involved in p2p. My first reaction was; “What free music on line? Where do I find this phenomenon?” That was in the days of the original Napster. Up to this point, I had never heard of p2p and had never used such a service. My first use started with the now defunct AudioGalaxy; another of the RIAA’s victims.
Everytime the RIAA closes a site they do two things determental to their aims.
One is that they advertise to everyone and anyone of the existance of such programs and usually even name them. Anyone that knows of search engines will readily find what they seek. Taking them out of the search engines doesn’t help as there are forums all over the net dealing with p2p, problem solvers for the newbees, and readily recommend what they think the very best of p2p apps along with instructions in setup and use.
The second result of a successful closure to a site is that when the members leave they hunt for another application that will be harder to shut down and suffer the same fate. This hunting for a better app leads to a sort of Darwinian evolution to the p2p scene with an end result of increasingly harder to find on the net and when they do, harder to come to grips with how to shut it down. Encryption of transmissions is very close to making the turn around the corner and showing up in p2p. It will make it very much harder to hunt for infringers from outside of those p2p programs. Since the RIAA saw to it that the DMCA law came into being, they are just as subject to them as their victims. Any admission of entering a p2p app for the sole purpose of hunting victims will invetiably lead to modifications of those clients and a violation of the law as a result of those modifications. The RIAA’s window of oppurtunity is closing so they are making hay while they can.
October 21st, 2005 at 9:06 am
The third result is that it pisses the consumers off even more. This has not been emphasized enough. When you insult and harm the consumers, they tend to become more ‘hostile’ and less willing to freely give away their hard-earned-cash. And there’s bound to be several very smart people among them, who either been burned by the cartel, or know of friends who have been attacked. This only serves their resolve to develop the next generation of technology — technology that is even years ahead of the current batch. Sometimes I wonder who are the actual parasites?! The file-sharers or the cartel?!!