Sweden Sees Boom In Legal Downloading 121
Quantos writes with word that in Sweden, in addition to a drop in traffic following the introduction of the IPRED anti-file sharing law, the country also saw a doubling of legal downloads. "The sale of music via the Internet and mobile phones has increased by 100 percent since the Swedish anti-file sharing IPRED law entered into force last week, according to digital content provider InProdicon. '...I don't know if this is only because of IPRED, but it is definitely a sign of a major change,' said managing director Klas Brännström. InProdicon provides half of the downloaded tunes in Sweden via several online and mobile music services." Meanwhile The Pirate Bay's anticipated VPN service has seen over 113,000 requests for beta invitations since late last month; 80% are from Sweden. Traffic numbers may begin to rise again once the service goes live.
What's the lesson here? (Score:5, Insightful)
So what does this demonstrate other than that strong legal prohibitions and penalties can affect how people behave?
An extreme example: if a country passed a law making it a capital crime to buy cheese from anyone other than the King's brother, I imagine that 1) the level of activity in the open cheese markets would go down markedly the day after the law was passed; and 2) Regis Frater CheeseCo would be booming.
So again, how is this result surprising and/or newsworthy? Isn't this exactly what you'd expect unless Swedes are totally disrespectful of their country's legal system already? (Give 'em a few more laws like this and they might get there!)
Re:WIll it last? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's still in the process of appearing, but yes. That one or something similar.
In a technology war, the P2P users will always win. The only way to stop it is a law so draconian in scope that the whole Internet would collapse from fear of connecting to it.
according to digital content provider InProdicon (Score:5, Insightful)
DNRTFA, but given the source I'd hold my horses until someone with a less obvious bias comments on the effects of the law.
Re:So its back to the cd days (Score:4, Insightful)
So its back to the CD days. You couldn't really listen to the music and were forced to buy the cd so now instead of being able to download, listen and then reject all the crap people are now forced to download/buy crap.
It's not my intention to troll, but this is a little sensationalist.
Many bands will allow you to listen to their entire album before purchase via free streaming.
It's inconvenient, the quality ranges from poor to mediocre, but it does address the 'try before you buy' concern. Saying that we are now forced to buy our music before listening to it is false.
Consider the source. (Score:5, Insightful)
Swedish anti-file sharing IPRED law entered into force last week, according to digital content provider InProdicon.
I'm sorry, but I'd use any numbers provided by content providers with a grain, or a block, of salt. It would not surprise me in the least if numbers weren't fluffed a little or a lot to provide further leverage for future legislation.
Waiting for verdicts (Score:3, Insightful)
Many swedes are quite cautious by nature, this dip is no bigger than the dip in chips and other products which produced large doses of acryl-amid which was a scary report a few years back.
People are waiting for other people to tell them that it's actually quite all right to download, that the risks aren't all that high until they start downloading again.
The more conscious level of people are just waiting for a legal precedent, since the fact is that no-one currently knows exactly how easy it is to be caught using today's measures.
The thing is, there's the requirement of strong evidence and a proportionally big damage has to done.
No-one knows what this means yet, uploading is being referenced as one of those things, massive scale is another.
So, it might very well turn out that only original seeders are truly affected by this law.
Personally, I'm keeping my traffic down by not downloading in HD and only using private trackers.
Also, I checked the private alternatives, and they all suck, seriously.
Re:The VpN (Score:5, Insightful)
In my experience, from watching the projects of TPB, and trying to use the PRQ services, they are pretty stupid. They lucked out with their main project becoming popular and giving them name recognition, then they boosted that with how they condescendingly treat lawyers.
But from a hardcore geek level, they don't seem to know what they're doing. They're like those anarchist warez kids everyone knows, who know enough to land jobs in datacenters or big companies, but still seem to have some stunted development keeping them at a teenaged level.
I'd never trust their "anonymous" services. They've made obvious security mistakes that I had no trouble finding, making me doubt everything they do. If you're finding faults in their VPN idea, you probably have the skill to find them everywhere else if you took a look at how they do other things.
Stick with people who know what they're doing, like Tor developers. Help find better ways, because it's unlikely the TPB will ever offer anything truly worthwhile.
Re:Waiting for verdicts (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What's the lesson here? (Score:4, Insightful)
I think the lesson is that if you're a media business who wants to double your revenue, then doing it through lobbying is a cheaper and easier way than doing it through innovating new technologies or products, or through satisfying your customers better.
Human psychology and FUD (Score:3, Insightful)
So there's a big change in threat level. People download what they want before the law goes into effect, then pause so the legal system will clog up with others before they resume as they're sure to make a big push and media splash now. At the same time, people again decide to try out the legal options and see if they suck less now. This month's figures are pretty much meaningless, because both are natural and temporary reactions. Give it a little while and people will want new stuff again, done the rounds and found P2P is still superior, the threat exaggerated and the legal systems full (try prosecuting a country with over 1mio file sharers of a population less than 10mio) and want to convict robbers and rapists and murderers instead of file sharers that won't pay. Give it 3-6 months and you'll see if there's any real change here or just blowing smoke.
Re:So its back to the cd days (Score:3, Insightful)
Some people are just cheap and don't want to pay because the option to preview has been there for ages. If you need to listen to every single second of the CD then there is something wrong with you.
No surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Swedes are allowing terrorism to work... (Score:3, Insightful)
So you think it's better for artists to get ZERO money because of warez downloading, than to give them SOME money through sales?
And if the products are "subpar" WHY ARE THEY BOOMING IN SALES THEN???
And why were then being downloaded in the first place? I mean, if you can download quality films, why would you download the subpar ones?
Re:Swedes are allowing terrorism to work... (Score:2, Insightful)
Wow.
So asking people to pay for stuff that other people worked on developing is terrorism?
What laughable bullshit.
By the way some of the 'talented coders' actually make commercial software and games. The stuff that people here (and you, it seems) think they were born with a right to enjoy for fuck-all.
If you have respect for the work of 'talented coders' how about you stop taking their work for free?
Re:Swedes are allowing terrorism to work... (Score:1, Insightful)
Nice hyperbole - have you had your meds checked lately? It sounds as though someone needs to up the dosage of your antipsychotics.
Congratulations - you are the new poster boy for everything that is wrong with Slashdot in the 21st century. The phrasing of this suggests that you are not a "smart, talented coder"... and your tone implies that you're not technically inclined at all - you're just here for the free music and video.
Please, go back to Digg.
Re:WIll it last? (Score:3, Insightful)
I hope so. It seems that internet usage is quite huge even in countries with draconian laws. China, muslim countries, ... all have draconian laws, all have large internet usage.
So I hope you're right. I think, however, that you're not.
And if such a law (one that lowers traffic) were passed in the US, it would pose a problem for much of the world.
Re:The VpN (Score:4, Insightful)
Being a consistent USENET user since I discovered it, I find your idea fascinating. To this day I don't get what the big deal is with bittorrent as opposed to USENET, especially with yEnc on binaries so the encoding overhead is relatively low.
As for the message-id/nntp issues, that's reasonably easily solved. One could hash the torrent title (or tracker URL) into the subject header, with a block sequence number replacing the M/N series number. That would put the relevant data all in the overview so a client wouldn't have to pull more than that to see what was available. (Users could still track poster reputation that way. An alternative would replace a portion of the author header as well, but that would make it harder to track poster reputation.)
The biggest problems I see would be two, USENET is obscure enough it might be a hard feature to explain and to explain how to configure for one's USENET provider, and depending on how it was introduced and what sort of standard was agreed (or not), there could be conflicting implementations.
Also, given the amount of data involved, there'd certainly need to be a whole hierarchy, alt.binaries.torrent-parts.*, perhaps organized by tracker host, with a misc-tracker hierarchy for the little ones, then by genre, or maybe more generically by first letter or two of the torrent title (with or without tracker host).
But OTOH, part of the appeal of USENET is its relative obscurity, in part due to the relative technical literacy one must have to make it work at any decent level of efficiency. Think the general idea of Eternal September and etc tho if someone's open enough to learning netiquette and can RTFM and FAQ if pointed at them, glad to have 'em. Making USENET an extension of a very popular P2P protocol would NOT do anything to keep it that way.
The Server. (Score:3, Insightful)
"Being a consistent USENET user since I discovered it, I find your idea fascinating. To this day I don't get what the big deal is with bittorrent as opposed to USENET, especially with yEnc on binaries so the encoding overhead is relatively low."
Well there's ONE difference between Usenet and BT. BT is relatively free while with the dropping of Usenet from ISPs selection, most have to purchase an account from an independent. Considering the download demographic I can see why free would take precedence.
Re:I'm crushed (Score:2, Insightful)
Let us just take the better of both worlds: what about a massage from a redhead buxom sweaty pirate woman?
Re:So its back to the cd days (Score:3, Insightful)
Mind you that doesn't mean I believe the RIAA should keep pushing to sue people. They do need to focus on more options but we shouldn't pretend that downloading the music is the only way to sample it. We need to keep most people out of file sharing before they ruin it like newsgroups.
That is why I think something like Spotify is excellent as you get to listen to what you want when you want with the odd few ads thrown in after songs which I'm happy with and I can buy tracks from within Spotify if I want to.
I actually use it a lot, not so much because of the cost but because you install it anywhere and have access to all your playlists.