Miller Bosser
June 26th, 2003, 07:45 PM
The RIAA and the Farmer
If you compare the P2P file sharing networks to a corn farmer, or any other cash crop, we see that the RIAA is working against nature. A farmer buys seeds that he feels will yield a hearty crop. After a few months, with good weather, the crop is ready to go to market. But part of the crop is held-back to become next years seeds. And those seed beget the following years' crop. Nature makes near-perfect copies of every species - part of each crop goes for food and some for sharing with the future. The music industry seeded the land with plenty of songs, and now little seedlings are popping up all over the globe, and they don't like it.
The RIAA wants to sue the public for downloading music - the making near-perfect copies. This RIAA decision is kind of a stupid move, considering the public is the only body who can buy their music. It's fertile ground for the public to just say, "keep your darn music".
The music industry chose to be in that business, they chose to under-pay many artists, soon after 1982 they chose to convert from vinyl to CDs, they chose to publish a lot of garbage songs on an album with only one or two hit tunes. They knew, for the last 30 years, that millions of people were making their own audio cassettes with their favorite music on them. Surely the music industry realized that the same basic process would continue as they moved into CD production. They have made a lot of bad decisions and want to shrug-off the responsibility for it. No wonder there are web sites like Boycott-RIAA, and clothing products that depict public disdain for the RIAA.
The movie industry is ticked-off too, with the downloading of their movies. As an unscientific example, we went into one of the popular P2P file sharing networks and entered Matrix・in the search function. The search was conducted on a weekday, at 2PM ET, in the USA and it returned over 1400 results. The two dominant movies that include the word, matrix are huge files, between 700 megabytes and 2 gigabytes in size. About 40% of all the returned results had multiple users, ready to download the files. Often there will be 2 to 20 users per file, but one listing had 131 users available to facilitate downloads. Included in the 1400 listings were versions of the two movies in English, Germen, French, Spanish, Italian, and even a version for the Nederlands Also among the search results were movie trailers, some with subtitles. Many listings, maybe 20%, appeared to be of Asian origin. Still other files were mislabeled movies ・one was Ace Ventura・and not The Matrix・ as it was labeled. Smaller files that got caught-up in the search were titled ・Aggressive Downloading Guide・and How to stop getting fake movie files・ Yes, the movie industry is poisoning the field with fake files ・masquerading as real movies, in hopes that the public will be discouraged and turn to buying the movies. But users are fighting back by including phrases like NOT A FAKE・or Tested & Genuine・in the file names.
An identical search at 5PM, yielded over 2000 results. And that one listing that had 131 users, had grown to 175 users. By early evening, another fresh search yielded well over 2600 listings. And that one particular file grew to 195 users. But later the total number of results dropped to under 2000, as Asian and European users got off-line and went to bed.
This one exercise in unscientific research shows two basic things: One the entire world is sharing files, and Two: replication is just nature at work.
If you compare the P2P file sharing networks to a corn farmer, or any other cash crop, we see that the RIAA is working against nature. A farmer buys seeds that he feels will yield a hearty crop. After a few months, with good weather, the crop is ready to go to market. But part of the crop is held-back to become next years seeds. And those seed beget the following years' crop. Nature makes near-perfect copies of every species - part of each crop goes for food and some for sharing with the future. The music industry seeded the land with plenty of songs, and now little seedlings are popping up all over the globe, and they don't like it.
The RIAA wants to sue the public for downloading music - the making near-perfect copies. This RIAA decision is kind of a stupid move, considering the public is the only body who can buy their music. It's fertile ground for the public to just say, "keep your darn music".
The music industry chose to be in that business, they chose to under-pay many artists, soon after 1982 they chose to convert from vinyl to CDs, they chose to publish a lot of garbage songs on an album with only one or two hit tunes. They knew, for the last 30 years, that millions of people were making their own audio cassettes with their favorite music on them. Surely the music industry realized that the same basic process would continue as they moved into CD production. They have made a lot of bad decisions and want to shrug-off the responsibility for it. No wonder there are web sites like Boycott-RIAA, and clothing products that depict public disdain for the RIAA.
The movie industry is ticked-off too, with the downloading of their movies. As an unscientific example, we went into one of the popular P2P file sharing networks and entered Matrix・in the search function. The search was conducted on a weekday, at 2PM ET, in the USA and it returned over 1400 results. The two dominant movies that include the word, matrix are huge files, between 700 megabytes and 2 gigabytes in size. About 40% of all the returned results had multiple users, ready to download the files. Often there will be 2 to 20 users per file, but one listing had 131 users available to facilitate downloads. Included in the 1400 listings were versions of the two movies in English, Germen, French, Spanish, Italian, and even a version for the Nederlands Also among the search results were movie trailers, some with subtitles. Many listings, maybe 20%, appeared to be of Asian origin. Still other files were mislabeled movies ・one was Ace Ventura・and not The Matrix・ as it was labeled. Smaller files that got caught-up in the search were titled ・Aggressive Downloading Guide・and How to stop getting fake movie files・ Yes, the movie industry is poisoning the field with fake files ・masquerading as real movies, in hopes that the public will be discouraged and turn to buying the movies. But users are fighting back by including phrases like NOT A FAKE・or Tested & Genuine・in the file names.
An identical search at 5PM, yielded over 2000 results. And that one listing that had 131 users, had grown to 175 users. By early evening, another fresh search yielded well over 2600 listings. And that one particular file grew to 195 users. But later the total number of results dropped to under 2000, as Asian and European users got off-line and went to bed.
This one exercise in unscientific research shows two basic things: One the entire world is sharing files, and Two: replication is just nature at work.