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.
WIll it last? (Score:3, Interesting)
I give it six months. All it needs is some "anonymizing" P2P network to appear and it will go all the way back down the big snake to square 1.
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All it needs is some "anonymizing" P2P network to appear
Like the one mentioned in the summary, you mean?
The VpN (Score:5, Interesting)
The VPN mentioned is kinda bizarre if you think about it.
First, the whole strength of bit-torrent is scalability through it's use of edge connections avoiding a central hub.
VPN would necessarily be through a central hub and thus not direct peer to peer.
I suppose perhaps they are thinking that the p2p would continue outside the VPN but the low bandwidth tracker and maybe some of he handshaking would be contacted via VPN?
It's not dead obvious what is meant since it is often the case that when a user invokes a VPN, the the OS's entire network adapter switches over to the Vitrual one and the physical one is not used except to transact the VPN connection. (hence making the VPN transparent to the client browsers and such)
On the flip side, this would be a very special VPN nexus not just a general purpose one: namely if you ran all the p2p traffic through it then nearly all the requests would be for packets that had already passed through the nexus earlier. So hanging a cache off the nexus would make things simpler. It would no longer be p2p at all but rather a clearing house for packets of common interest.
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.
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As somebody who used to be an anarchist warez kid, how do I land jobs in datacenters or big companies?
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The NSA is unlikely to volunteer evidence, even for the **AA's, which would expose something about the extent of its monitoring.
My understanding is that they were totally livid when President Carter, in the name of justifying American action in Iran, exposed the fact that they could decipher "secret" Iranian messages. I find it hard to imagine they're going to give out any info just so the content industry can sue copyright infringers.
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On the flip side, this would be a very special VPN nexus not just a general purpose one: namely if you ran all the p2p traffic through it then nearly all the requests would be for packets that had already passed through the nexus earlier. So hanging a cache off the nexus would make things simpler. It would no longer be p2p at all but rather a clearing house for packets of common interest.
Yes, we could call the duration these packets that are kept for retention, and to not have so much interational traffic we could have several servers. To ensure competition we could even have feeds between these servers so you could pick your provider. Rather than torrent you could post files to this nexus, except for some reason the extension nzb comes to mind rather than torrent. What you're looking for has been done and much, much better as long as you're willing to pay for a server. All that's needed is
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.
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I don't think the message ids and NNTP protocol makes that possible though, you'd need some kind of content-based hash/query system.
Message-ID's are controlled by the poster, you could embed content hashes in them quite easily; you'd just need to know any other parts of the field, which can either be fixed (content hashes should provide enough uniqueness), or detected by parsing a NZB with appropriately tagged segments. e.g:
In a NZB, this is just another segment, and it could be posted exactly as existing posts are; a torrent client, wanting d
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Why does it have to be about bittorrent? Couldn't their VPN service simply be about providing anonymity and making money?
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A couple of years ago i sketched out something like this for a project at work.
It was with a known cloud of clients though, so security could easily be beefed out with no concerns to "compatiblity" on the client side.
Basically, a big ol tracker running in position X.
A number of headless clients connected to storage systems, spread across the world, potentially divided into a hierarchy based on connectivity.
Each client uses a unique key-pair to communicate with the tracker (phase 1 of security, for a 3rd par
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The VPN mentioned is kinda bizarre if you think about it.
It's bizzare that you have no idea what the purpose of VPN is (in this case).
RIAA/MPAA will be sending notices to owners of IP ranges like 192.168.0.0/16, 10.0.0.0/8, 172.18.16.0/12.
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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.
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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.
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were passed in the US, it would pose a problem for much of the world.
Too late: ISP DL caps. It's a question of time before the MAFIAAs bribe law makers to make it mandatory.
Doesn't matter (Score:5, Funny)
They just gave the ??AA a budget for their lobbyists of "more is better". They've killed the Internet.
There's no way that group wouldn't neuter the Bill of Rights for that kind of money, and there's no way our elected representatives won't sell out. It's over. It's been nice knowing y'all.
In five years let's get together on I2:The guerrilla mesh WWAN.
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What about the ISP rebellion?
What will happen when nobody needs bandwidth any more and people can pay small ISPs $10 a month instead of paying the big ISP's $50?
You are on the way to destruction. (Score:1)
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What you say?
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What will happen when nobody needs bandwidth any more and people can pay small ISPs $10 a month
At the <= 1 Mbps tier, it's not the bandwidth as much as the not tying up the phone line. The cable and DSL ISPs still have a duopoly on that in many areas of the United Statees. Besides, until someone discovers miracle compression for operating system updates, people will still need bandwidth.
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All it needs is some "anonymizing" P2P network to appear and it will go all the way back down the big snake to square 1.
I2P [i2p2.de] with I2PSnark (built in.) Fully anonymous, encrypted Bittorrent with acceptable performance.
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It might not last, but it shows that the scare tactics are working to a certain extent, and gives the recording industry more incentive to use them, not to mention that it enables them to get more support for similar legislation.
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http://stats.i2p/cgi-bin/total_routers_month.cgi [stats.i2p]
Doubling... I guess (Score:5, Funny)
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(did I do my math correctly? I did fall asleep in Alg classes because the teacher was too boring to listen to.)
And also, Sweden has some very different laws than we have here in USA. We cannot truly compare them and get perfect statistics every time. That being said, I believe Sweden is going in the right direction.
So its back to the cd days (Score:1)
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.
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.
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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.
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Though most of the bands i picked out never had a preview anyway, so it was virtually useless.
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Well, the problem of a listening booth from the perspective of someone trying to sell the music, besides the "if you travel to the store, you're probably already going to buy something" bit mentioned by an AC, which in the context of trying to sell means you still have to get them to the store, is that the listening once or twice is just that, listening once or twice -- it doesn't let you get /addicted/ to it.
Now what I do most of the time is listen to shoutcast streams, but this would go for the radio (too
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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
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Um, no. What you claim is wrong.
Many bands do, but most don't. You could have said that many bands release free as in speech and as in beer music, too. Most of those that I like, however, don't.
As, unfortunately, musical tastes don't work like software, nobody chooses the music they like based on the respect they get from the artist and/or distributor. So most people can't "try before buy" unless they change or limit their musical tastes. And this doesn't sound reasonable to me.
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"I doubt it if even so much as one percent of all people here ever buy anything after they decide they like it."
I actually know a few people who do (including myself), when they have cash to spare - at least when it comes to music. People with low income like us students aren't going to be buying a DVD of every movie we want to see, but 99ct for a song or 7-10 Euros for an album that we can stream online is quite acceptable.
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This may be true for some albums, but most are cheaper in a DRM-free downloadable format.
For instance:
Muse - Black Holes & Hurricanes. Almost 15 Euros on Amazon.de, 10 Euros at 7Digital.de.
The older Muse albums are 7,50 on 7Digital.de and 8 Euros on Amazon.de. Sure, they're not that much cheaper, but not more expensive either. The tagging on 7Digital.de is good, and the album art (embedded in tags) is 800x800. Okay, lossless would be nice, but hey, I guess you can't have everything ;)...
Also, you're for
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My stimulus check went to volumes 1-25 of Berserk, as I had ready them online for free. I recently bought an Eric Whitacre album after hearing pieces of it on Youtube. So some of us do actually purchase based on "try before you buy".
While I don't agree with your guesstimation, I do agree that there are some people who are hypocritical about these matters. But there's little point in calling them on it as they can continue to hide behind anonymity, write false accounts of purchases, or exaggerate the importa
I'm crushed (Score:5, Funny)
I always thought they were all giant blond buxom women who gave excellent massages.
I am so disappointed.
Troll! (Score:4, Funny)
Wait a minute... aren't Trolls from Sweden? D'oh!
+1, Troll (Score:4, Funny)
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Does it really matters if you get the massage from a blond buxom woman or a red bearded sweaty pirate?
Re:I'm crushed (Score:5, Funny)
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Let us just take the better of both worlds: what about a massage from a redhead buxom sweaty pirate woman?
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Swedes are allowing terrorism to work... (Score:5, Informative)
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Pretty much what I'm expecting too, only I'm pretty sure that the swedes are basically seeing what they want to see to make the numbers add up in their favor.
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People in countries where not everyone is treated as criminals use P2P - For everyone else there is VISA*.
* Or is that Mastercard? Or whatever credit card? Anyway, point made.
Re:Swedes are allowing terrorism to work... (Score:5, Interesting)
and so SOME started buying legally
SOME is the operative word.
Since they didn't give numbers, they didn't compare in any way to the change in illegal downloads and it's a highly biased source I have to assume the number of legal downloaders has gone up from some small number to two times some small number. Probably only a fraction of the illegal downloads.
They're trying to create the standard "everybody's doing it and you should too" dishonest marketing BS. Similar to the recent windows netbook "stories".
---
The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
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All it means is that the RIAA sent another exec to supervise so the number of RIAA approved consumers doubled immediately.
Seriously I don't buy for a second that the litigation caused any significant number of people to subscribe to a RIAA approved service in Sweden. This is just a hoax to make their argument seem relevant in the courts.
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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?
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Because if you aren't buying enough media, you must be a pirate.
Why don't you step outside for a minute here...
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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?
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Encryption allows secrecy or anonymity (but usually not both at once) and thus enables terrorists. However it is also an important component in freedom. It might also be worth noting that most terrorists come from really shitty living conditions. Stop cracking down on people so hard and you'll have less of them. I'm not trying to justify the actions of any terrorists, but at the same time I can't really justify many of the actions of my government either.
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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,
In other news... (Score:5, Funny)
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Sweden doesn't use the Euro, much like the UK and Denmark.
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: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.
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It demonstrates that it was never about sharing culture or overcoming draconian copyright. Just getting stuff for free.
At least, that's how they'll be able to sell it.
Only if piracy was 3x the legit download number (Score:1, Interesting)
Because "piracy" went down 1/3 from the IPRED fluffers and went up 100% from IPRED fluffers.
Therefore, if there were more than 3x the number of people "pirating" there is a net loss in numbers of music downloads. For each of those no longer being made, this wasn't about getting stuff for free.
Now, since we've been told the losses to piracy is several quadrillion dollars, Sweden has a few million users, this must mean that, if your proposition is correct, that the legal download business was previously a mul
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Oh, I wasn't trying to make a definitive statement or proposition one way or the other. Just saying that that's how it's going to be presented to my government by the industry lobbyists. "Look, we got stricter and they went legal! I guess it was just about getting something for nothing after all." It saddens me.
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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.
No surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
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someone like kdawson?
HAHAHAHAHA
I read... (Score:5, Informative)
I don't see anything on his site that has any verifiable information on it. He's put a lot of work into trying to connect the dots, but to me it just sounds like a conspiracy theory nut.
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.
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numbers provided by torrentfreak and thepiratebay are absolutely fucking trustworthy.
*snigger*
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comments provided by anonymous cowards are a waste of time.
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numbers provided by torrentfreak and thepiratebay are absolutely fucking trustworthy.
They're a lot more trustworthy than typical marketer's numbers. Most marketers are paid zealots who act as if honesty is optional.
*snigger*
?
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You communist! Breathing shared air!
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.
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THIS.
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Mod parent into the stratosphere.
How to Lie with Statistics (Score:5, Interesting)
Obligatory Dilbert (Score:2)
You expect us to be impressed by a percentage increase over a trivial base?
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.
UMMM! (Score:4, Interesting)
it may not be ralted to Ipred laws at all, maybe they just ran a huge advertising campaign, or maybe there could be other causes, does anyone know how much online music sales have fluctuated globaly in that time period?, it wouldn`t surprise me if more people where buying music track by track online rather than by CD in the shops with the global economy in the state its in.
Can you say "Propaganda?" (Score:1)
A joke (Score:2)
There was this church somewhere which developed a bad reputation with the Church officials for low attendance, so one day the bishop reluctantly decides to replace its priest with a new, younger one, who has been given instructions to do his best to bring more people in.
So it happens, and for the next few weeks there are no news from the new priest. Finally, after a month, a report comes in: "church attendance has increased 100%!" The bishop is ecstatic and wishes to award the new prie
Library (Score:2)
yay for them... (Score:1)
What pirating is really for the media companies is a justification for DRM, which impinges more on consumer rights than on piraters. But when the government upholds the fines for piracy, it takes a different role. But its up to us consumers to to determine which products we purchase to keep the closed source software industry from misusing it's power against fair use. Should they ever forget who their master really is, we have open source to leverage our position. It is also in the best interest of piraters