Report Says 36.4% of World's Computers Infringe on IP 331
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "According to a new report by Digital Music News, 36.4% of the world's computers have LimeWire installed. Given their claim that filling an iPod legally would cost about $40,000, they're pretty sure that most of those computers are infringing upon at least a few imaginary property rights. BitTorrent shouldn't feel left out, though. BitTorrent actually uses more bandwidth, but the article suggests that this is because it is used to share larger files, like movies."
I bet it's closer to 100% (Score:5, Insightful)
That's It? (Score:2, Insightful)
Constitutional Rights? (Score:4, Insightful)
Becuase I have bittorrent installed to download Mandrake, I *MUST* have illegal things on my machine?
Screw that report and the assholes who wrote it!
Re:It always amuses me (Score:3, Insightful)
If this wasn't piracy, it would be straightforward to distribute the entire output of the RIAA via NNTP. The bandwidth consumption would be far smaller, because no file traverses a link more than once. The "p2p" approach is a horribly inefficient way of distributing data.
ip is a valid concept (Score:4, Insightful)
and it is not up to the corporations to restrain themselves. it is their job to squeeze money out of every possible nook and cranny. that is what corporations do, that is their nature, it is not their nature. we should not expect them to restrain themselves. it is our job to restrain them, so they do not become cancerous growths. and we, the legal world and our legal frameworks, are not currently doing that. so we must begin doing that then, so that some of private ownership is respected, not none of it, as currently is the case, because current private ownership laws overreach in time and in venue
as if these means somebody won't still make money, and good money! it is just that the old models won't work anymore, and the corporations are nervous about the unknown
in the current world, the legions of lawyers representing the corporations, and the congressmen they buy (sonny bono, et al) push the scales firmly in the direction of irrational monetization. in a world where i cannot play "happy birthday" without paying someone, something is seriously broken
it is not that we shouldn't respect morality. it is that we shouldn't respect a legal system that is seriously broken, and doesn't reflect morality. current ip law is nothing more than an overextended farce
Almost all computers use IP (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, you mean that 36.4% of the computers have tools installed that facilitate copyright infringement?
Can we please stop using the term "IP" or "Intellectual Property" and actually specify what we are talking about, which in this case is copyright infringement? Especially since the source articles never use either of those two term in them?
It would be very hard to infringe on trademarks using limewire or bittorrent in any way, and the same goes for patents unless the patents cover the implementation of the software.
Re:bovine excrement (Score:3, Insightful)
I believe this is a valid comparison as the data in question was collected when users submitted to voluntary PC scans by visiting a specific website that 99% of the worlds computer users have never heard of.
Re:Voluntary systems scans (Score:5, Insightful)
Is this like one of those sites that tells me "YOUR REGISTRY MAY BE CORRUPT!!!"... on a linux box?
Re:Voluntary systems scans (Score:4, Insightful)
Sounds about right.
Re:It always amuses me (Score:4, Insightful)
In the case of P2P, all transmissions are essentially requests for a part of of a file that a client does not currently have. Now since I'm sending data back out to others then MY OWN bandwidth usage will be much lower, but the internet as a whole won't see much difference.
Now, when you combine in the fact that on Usenet a) some of the older encoding schemes must translate to 7-bit ASCII first and hence increase the size of a file by 30-40%, and b) because of missed posts you often have to download the original + a number of parity files, I don't see Usenet coming ahead on the efficiency side of things.
Re:40000 songs = $40,000 sounds right to me (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Voluntary systems scans (Score:3, Insightful)
the other premise (Score:4, Insightful)
Half of the motivation being the Mickey Mouse copyright extension act was not just to protect Mickey's inflated infantilism, but also to keep the public domain shelf as bare as possible, so legitimate sharing doesn't cloud the wolf cries of MAFIAA, where every untaxed gratification over every untaxed wire represents a pimple-faced insurrection against the natural order bought and paid for.
Sorry... you lost your precision (Score:3, Insightful)
When you see B.S. like this (adding decimal places to stupid statistics), it is a signal to ignore it.
What kills me is that it totally reminds me of project management bozos who track project progress to the decimal place. I can understand tracking it in 10% increments, but I realistically can only maybe tell people I am 20, 40, 60... percent complete. Sometimes on 25, 50, etc.
But then there are others who can track the details so well. "Sir, we have millions of lines of code, a few hundred programmers, testers, analysts, and we are 42.48403% complete to date." Right.
All from companies that Steal from Artists (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't get me wrong. These artists are not getting much money. They are essentially being ripped off of all their creative work. This has happened for decades. Once the moguls found out how to steal from the creative artists they used their power to do just that, ripped them off.
I don't care about the music mogals. I don't care about the people that are loosing their jobs. I don't care that they can't pay their bills. I don't care that the moguls are no longer making billions. I could care less. They can go and shove it up their asses. They need to go back to the artists and give them their fair share. They need to grant each artists retroactively all their fair share of the royalties that they would have earned. It's just sad that these dimwits were allowed to get so powerful.
How can anyone feel bad about downloading music when it is so obvious that the music moguls stole the music from the artists. Screw them all, we all should.
Re:It always amuses me (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, you mischaracterised the the other side of the argument, too: a properly running torrent was many seed, and although each seed may have less uplink bandwidth than downlink bandwidth, the network as a whole should saturate the new peer's downstream bandwidth.
Land is inherently rivalrous. (Score:1, Insightful)
We can't all live on the same acre.
We can all copy the same file.
Find a way to copy land, though, and we'll talk.
Re:Voluntary systems scans (Score:3, Insightful)
It's probably not so much that "limewire downloaded some crap that messed up their computer" but rather that "they downloaded some crap using Limewire that messed up their computer." I believe the NRA has a catchy slogan that could be modified to fit these circumstances.
Re:Constitutional Rights? (Score:4, Insightful)
Today the separation between working for someone and running your own business is almost gone. I can work for someone from 9 to 5, then come home and sell antique stereos (or whatever, Wii if you wish) through Ebay. There is no law against this, and only IRS should know. If a police officer sees my garage full of boxes he is welcome to ask, and even to buy. But I owe him nothing else, and I can't see him getting a search warrant only because I have a pile of merchandise. (As long as zoning requirements are met.)
Re:Almost all computers use IP (Score:3, Insightful)
Imagine if Coca-Cola had a copyright on the words "Coca-Cola" and "Coke", and not just a trademark on them? Or if song writers got patents for writing songs, and nobody else could do anything similar for 20 years? What if Amazon's "One-Click" thing was just a copyright, and anybody could change the name to "single-click" and not be infringing?
It doesn't make much sense to lump them together just because they are laws about non-tangible things.
This article is only about copyright laws, so why not just say "copyrights" instead of "IP"?
Re:statistic wrong & retracted (Score:3, Insightful)