p2pnet - rss feed: RIAA. Greed. Lawsuits. Lies.
p2p news / p2pnet: The Recording Industry Association of America is a name often associated with words such as “evil”, “greed”, “lawsuits” and “lies”.
Why’s this? Because since the dawn of of file sharing, they’ve been on a crusade against file sharers with lawsuits ready to be sent to everyone who’s ever touched a computer. Up until now, the RIAA have sued more 15,000 people for sharing music on the internet, and shut down numerous sites and services including, but not limited to, Napster 1 and AudioGalaxy.
The lawsuits were fired at everyone from dead grannies to 14-year-old-schoolgirls. The RIAA sue people claiming that they’re losing massive amounts of profit because of file sharing. They are in fact earning more and more every year. They sue people no matter who they are, no matter if they actually did “infringe”, and no matter what kind of situation they may be in, forcing them to pay them a settlement fee that’s cleverly priced at slightly under the cost of fighting the lawsuit, making people more likely to settle just to get it over with.
They’ve also helped lobby the Digital Millenium Copyright Act in the US and are lobbying for similar laws in other countries. Their owners have added digital rights management apps to many of their of their CDs, under the impression it’ll block people from copying them.
But have any of these things actually helped fight the growing “problem” of “music piracy” on the Internet?
Let’s have a look at a few statistics.
At it’s peak, Napster 1 had over 1.6 million simultaneous users. After it was shut down, Napster’s users migrated to networks such as Gnutella, OpenNap servers, DirectConnect etc. After the largest OpenNap servers were shut down by the RIAA, users again migrated, this time mainly to the new network FastTrack, with the clients KaZaA and iMesh. This was when the first major p2p boom occured. FastTrack grew rapidly, and by mid 2003, it was at an all time peak of 4.5 million simultaneous users.
Between 2004 and 2005, problems with the network, including fake files, viruses and, ad- and spyware in the client, caused the next big p2p shift, with large numbers of ex-Kazaa users changing mainly to BitTorrent, eDonkey2000 and Gnutella.
The p2p networks usually grow a lot while they’re stable, but grow even more when shifting. Now, with BitTorrent and eDonkey2000, p2p is larger than ever. eDonkey2000 has about 3.1 million users, FastTrack has 2.9 million, Gnutella has 2.1 million, and because of it’s nature, BitTorrent’s user count can’t be gauged. Peer-to-Peer networking now stands for over 60% of all internet traffic. BitTorrent holds a large percentage of this traffic.
When we look at all of this, how successful can we really say the music industry has been in scaring off file sharers, and forcing them to buy CDs or subscribe to “legal” P2P services, such as Rhapsody?
My guess is, about as successful as an ant trying to lift an elephant.
No matter what you throw at p2p, it’s only going to grow larger and larger.
Public support for it is growing, and will continue growing, no matter how many innocent people’s lives you destroy with your subpoenas.
P2p isn’t not going to go away, no matter what you do. DRM won’t stop people from copying from CDs, “Trusted” Computing and the marginal risk of getting sued won’t stop people from sharing files, period. You decieve yourselves if you think it will.
My advice to you, RIAA: Give up, and embrace p2p. You might as well because you’re not going to succeed with your current strategy.
DaBlade - p2pnet
[DaBlade is a 16 year old Bosnian geek living in Norway. He’s the owner of LinuxP2P.com.]
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November 6th, 2005 at 6:43 pm
I like the article DB. The riaa is nothing more more than a very large group of obnoxious greedy lawyers and some guys in suits. Good riddance to them all.
November 6th, 2005 at 7:11 pm
Why dont they just give up? Why do they consistantly have to lie? Anyone with half a brain who can use google knows that they’re actually making a fortune, not losing millions of dollars.
No-one is forcing anyuone out of work due to file sharing. It’s not us saying they’re fired.
Besides, if so many are being forced out ever month, how come they’ve still got staff….
Lawsuits. Waste of time.
November 6th, 2005 at 7:43 pm
The RIAA does not give up because change is difficult.
A new business model means losing all the current anti-competitive advantages the RIAA has depended on for years. I mean people actually pay what - $10-$20 for a music CD in this day and age? RIAA to self - let’s not abandon that cash cow too quickly.
The real deal-breaker will come when the recording artists en-masse abandon their traditional music labels and go independent. En-masse is the key here.
So we can curse and swear at the RIAA and its shyster fat-cats all we want. We need recording artists to come around. But they’ll need alternative business models, marketing channels, advertising, and sales channels based on digital technology.
And the artists still need to make money, so all of you who think music should be free need to let up a little.
! Google could do this !
ITMS could do this but I don’t think Steve Jobs thinks different enough here.
November 6th, 2005 at 8:07 pm
I just couldn’t think to change the title to something more appropriate.
I saw Jon hit on this but there hasn’t been to my knowledge widescale discussion on it. One of the posters here makes mention of when the artists abandon the cartels and the contracts in favor of doing it themselves and keeping the money they would normally never see.
What do you think of these artists that were used in this little rootkit scheme? What was their names? Van hoot or something? How do you think they feel about all this. It surely isn’t improving their sales for a cd they worked hard on getting together. I don’t see Sony issuing a recall to reissue the cd without the rootkit. I do see people saying they don’t need it and won’t buy it. Actually the only folks I hear wanting this “Get Right With The Man” is the hackers wanting a free reign in an on line game.
Sony admits there are more out there on different cds with the same rootkit. So far we haven’t heard what other bands they have cursed into the pile of no sales through it.
The RIAA has shown what it is with the sue’em all. Through that you can see just how the cartel empire has been assembled. Any time a puppet organization is setup to “take the heat” you know there is a reek to the bizz.
And what of the p2p apps? Now Napster was a bit before my days. I didn’t know what p2p was then. Thankfully, the RIAA was bound and determined that I should know what it was, where it could be found, and what other equivalents were out there I was missing out on. Would never have known had they not been so vocal in their advertisements.
Correct me if I am wrong, but did Napster have any sort of hash? Since it was the early and front runner I suspect not. However Fasttrack did, abeit that it was easy for the hash to be cracked and the RIAA made hay with it through Loudeye. When they moved on to start on EDonkey, it took some doing to crack the hash of that one. Torrents have also been cracked to allow feeding of bad data but it took a long time to do that one. They had to wait till a couple of bright young minds figured that one out years later. I guess the purpose of all this writing is to show that indeed the p2p scene is responding to all this by finding ever harder ways to develop security. We are now on the edge of encrypted, anynomous filesharing being the norm and not the wished for feature. I suspect the next generation of filesharing will have all that as standard features. I am just waiting for a couple of bright young minds to spring it on the public from one of those out of the way places that don’t acknowledge WIPO and can’t be held responcible.
November 7th, 2005 at 9:17 am
Heh, yeah it’s true, they sure do a great job of advertising for p2p. Every time thier lawsuits hit the news, more and more people learn about and try out filesharing.
November 7th, 2005 at 10:48 am
Yeah, dumbasses.
They think the lawsuits scare people. Rich low-iq morons.
November 7th, 2005 at 6:45 pm
First, I support H.R. 1201 (in the United States) that will amend the DMCA. I support a person being able to copy and view any content in any way if they have legally purchased the content (e.g., anyone should be able to copy and watch Spiderman 2 on their video iPod, PDA, or mobile phone if they so desire).
Since you have ad links on your site, let me post a hypothetical situation. Imagine if another site started copying all of your posts and posted them on their site. Further, imagine your page hits decreased by 10%, 25%, or 75%. Ten percent, 25%, or 75% of your traffic now heads over to get their news from the ‘not-your-site.org’ site instead of from p2pnet.net. You start to lose Advertising revenue and have less viewers on your page.
At what point:
1.Are the actions of the not-your-site.org’s owner(s) legal?
2.Are you, the owner of p2pnet.net, damaged?
3.How do you, the owner of p2pnet.net, feel?
4.What do you, the owner of p2pnet.net, do?
Basically, if the above were to happen, how would you feel? Are you damaged by someone taking your copyrighted material and posting it elsewhere? Do you lose revenue? Do you do nothing about it?
So, please review the above hypothetical example and let me know, using some analysis, how you analize the situation.
Perhaps you are not limited by such ‘dictatorial’ Copyright Law where you and your server reside. In the United States, Copyright Law makes it illegal to post ENTIRE articles, stories, etc. on your site (e.g., we are not legally allowed, without permission, to post the entire EFF article on our web-site). Why not quote specific portions of the article and link to the EFF site? Portions of the EFF story, article, post may be used since the portions used do not prevent someone from getting advertising or other revenue and do not remove their control over their property.
November 7th, 2005 at 7:09 pm
You’re missing two major things:
The RIAA aren’t losing revenue, in fact, they’re earning much more than they used to.
The situation you described. Doesn’t it fall under fair use? Oh right, there’s no such thing any more.
November 7th, 2005 at 7:29 pm
Something Jon does here that makes me respect him very much is that he doesn’t use copyright in the traditional form. If you look at the bottom of the article page, it states that it is under Creative Commons. As such you hypothetical situtation doesn’t work.
Speaking for myself, I would not do that to Jon. It takes more than just words on a page to make a site. I have been here for a while. The longer I stay here, the more respect I have for the work and effort Jon does.
November 7th, 2005 at 11:59 pm
fair the riaa assholes have never been fair in their whole entire existance, fair isn’t in their job description, fair isn’t the riaa ,
rotten sob’s wanting to own the whole entire internet for their own greedy money grubbing dirty little bastards who cheat and steal from their own just to make money is what the riaa is, nothing more , their heartless selfserving son’s of bitches who think that their artists are to serve them and only them not the public or the artists fans but them , they don’t care about the bands or the artists who put the songs out they want the money they can make and the sooner people realize that the less power they gain , but as long as people keep cowarding under their beds and hiding from them saying oh no I can’t do that the riaa might get me boo hoo hoo, well then the more power we give them , and I say HELL NO , riaa can kiss my AMERICAN ASS.
our four fathers fought and died to get us freedom and I’m not about to let the riaa take that away .
the Name is LadyMatika and I am not about to let somebody take away my freedom just because of greed!!!!!!!!!!!
November 8th, 2005 at 5:39 am
Think about the reasons why file hashing exists.
Since Napster did not support resuming incomplete downloads (you had to start all over from the beginning if download ever disconnected) and did not support multisource downloads, file hashing would have served no purpose.
But then files you download from websites or FTP sites don’t have hashes.
The article did not mention WinMX even once. Some WinMXfan!
November 8th, 2005 at 6:54 am
I’m posting from school, so I don’t bother logging in.
For the 50000th time, I don’t use, nor have used WinMX in fucking ages! I only use Azureus nowadays.. FFS…
November 8th, 2005 at 3:00 pm
That post was by me.
November 9th, 2005 at 12:25 am
That’s too bad. Whatever happened to loyalty? WinMX could certainly use all the fanboying it can get these days.
November 9th, 2005 at 10:44 am
I couldn’t really give two shits any more…
Unless an open source client is made, WinMX is merely something in my past.