ZP Users living in a dream world

[Empire]

If you want to know what the future has in store for P2P, just look at what general consensus is by all the Zeropaid members (not the exceptional voices that stand out in opposition to the general trend) and predict the opposite. Zeropaid members are INCREDIBLY naive and ignorant about real life and how the legal system works.

For some reason the cold wind of reality fails to reach most of the members here. I suspect it's because they are mostly kids. Their defiant attitude about the law is probably because it will be Mommy and Daddy who will be paying the lawsuit damages.

There is no way that governments are going to wipe out trillions of dollars of intellectual property value by making music and movie file sharing legal. Those that continue to use wide open p2p programs will be caught and penalized.

The only things that I foresee in the p2p future are:

1) Stop sharing music, and other copyrighted files.
2) Use p2p apps that hide your ip address and protect your identity or use networks that hide your identify (free, anonymous wireless networks).
3) Get sued and be too broke so that you end up as number one anyway.
4) Go to jail (in countries where p2p carries criminal penalties)
5) Online file shopping makes enough money for the RIAA artists that there comes to exist a stalemate where file sharing is still illegal, but RIAA artists are making enough money to be happy.

Five, while possible, is highly unlikely. Why? Because to those people, there is NEVER enough money. They are going to want their last drop of blood no matter what. The only reason they permitted copying via tape from the radio all these years was because that probably did more to spread new artists that it did to damage sales.

Anyone who believes this is going to end with everything happily continuing the way it is, is living in a dream world where fairies and trolls write songs and music, Gandalf the Grey makes movies magically come into existence and hobbits and elves toil tirelessley to make free software available to people who won't pay for any of it.

It was ok while nerds and geeks (a very small percentage of the population) were doing it but when copyright violation became a mass marketed commodity, the copyright holders could not ignore it any more and survive.

The people who will pay the worst penalties are the ones who will be sued after the RIAA ramps up into full power juggernaut mode. After they work the kinks out, and take off the kid gloves. They are just waiting to see what public opinion is. Public opinion won't give a shit. People have a lot more to worry about than "record pirates" getting sued and/or going to jail. If you get busted, no one is going to care and the public is notoriously unsympathetic to each other. If you are getting something for free that someone else has to pay for, in their eyes you are a thief, plain and simple.

I'm not saying its fair, but people are terribly ignorant sometimes. Just look at how wrong a lot of reporters are when the cover computer related stories.

No one is going to come to your rescue. There isn't going to be any grassroots movement to boycott the RIAA. The people who buy CDs are too stupid to know about file sharing, and the file sharers are already not buying CDs. and a boycott by them isn't going to hurt the RIAA any more than it is already.

I'm sure everyone will be screaming that I am a troll, and to go back home. I don't mind. They will probably delete this post because it shatters their frail reality. However, I am doing them a favor with a warning. Handcuffs don't come off hitting the delete key.

But mark my words, if you don't take effective measures to protect yourself and your p2p activity, you will end up a casualty on the p2p superhighway.

[Wolfie]

I'm sure everyone will be screaming that I am a troll, and to go back home.

Can't totally disagree with that, especially with that opening line, lol. ;-)

I do not quite agree with you, dude, but you do argue your point in intelligent manner.

[MoonMan]

You make good points, but even then it is hard to take what you say seriously as you line every paragraph with "Zeropaid users are ignorant".

[aqlo]

Extremely good thorough post. i like this one for the negative view best. Thanks

[baghdad_steve15]

Good point,. Most people who are mature know that filesharing is stealing. We all know that one way or another the RIIA will win.

[Empire]

Originally posted by notbob
i'll buy that

of course you'll never convince the naieve and ignorant The naive, ignorant and idealistic have always formed the shock troops in any movement, like the civil rights movement. They are the ones that get thrown in jail, bitten by dogs, hosed off with fire hoses and have their lives ruined.

That's ok with me. We need them around to absorb the blow for the rest of us who are smart enough to take cover.

[shawners]

If you look at the numbers "Empire". You would see a growing number of p2p users. More and more get tired of the games the music industry makes with our money. While artist at one time get into the music scene to actually make music and spread their music to far off distant places, now they seem to fight for their music to stay on a Cd with some half drawn cover art that a ten year old probably have made. You see, if we did not have pirated, you would not have seen Universal drop their prices or Uk lower their prices, you would not seen albums released earlier due to the fact they was on the internet. Cause of piracy it has created more jobs and more money flooded to the software industry as well as other such Media scavengers. They search for copy protected things that were hired by the software companies to find ip's and send letters out. Im tired of the middle man and blue collard worker paving the streets, while these people write 20 minutes of bable, turn it into a 40 minute recording and get paid millions. And yet i get satisfaction out of every album I download. I See hundreds of dollars beiing saved as i can listen to all the music i want, burn it in any other way, and then months later when i have the means to get the album, i can say "YEH or NaY!". Until then I will continue to do wrong til im scourned by the hands of the RIAA, then i will continue to do wrong. Remember there was a time when Alcohol was outlawed and people ran runs across states, and made moonshine.. THis is by all means history once repeating itself in a different way. If you dont stand up for anything, your sitting on your ass for nothing. And if you recall those college students being sued and having to pay 12000, you can see that their was a paypal set up and they got their money back.
We arent going to be forced to pay high prices or haveing to wait twelve years for the artist to make a Greatest hits cd so you can have the one or two songs off their 5 albums, that somehow with file sharing going on, still went 4 times platnium.
My internet connection brings me true happiness, all the power and knowledge in the world can come into my room and i can grasp it. No library card, no return dates, no limit. OF course my wife brings me happiness in the world, but not as much knowledge. Any way you look at it, were a community of people from different rays.

[aqlo]

This mother-daughter team sold out cold. Everyone who settles is going to implicate everyone on their network. Everyone who hits that amnesty form is going to do the same.

How many millions of people have switched over to leeching? Where is stuff going to come from if everyone is just leeching?

How long have we got before we start seeing major network outages?

[Winphuk]

Okay, you can critisize people for taking a stand for p2p, but where do you stand on the issue?
Are you for it or against it? Do you share files?
Wev'e had so many people coming into our forums to discourage file sharing.
Whether your arguement is valid or not, there is no place for it here.

[MoonMan]

Originally posted by aqlo
This mother-daughter team sold out cold. Everyone who settles is going to implicate everyone on their network. Everyone who hits that amnesty form is going to do the same.

How many millions of people have switched over to leeching? Where is stuff going to come from if everyone is just leeching?

How long have we got before we start seeing major network outages?

Will Bill and Mandy EVER be together ??

[Kyle06]

Some good points but we will see....

[Induna]

I'm under no illusions about what I do, and I never have done.

And just like the tech stock boom in late 99, early 2000. I've never thought for one minute that this could last forever.

I'm here to enjoy the ride for as long as I can.

[tMoD]

Empire, I share your pessimism. I think P2P probably will be driven underground (and when it's underground it will suck) but what I don't share is what seems to be your acquiescence. What would you have us do? Go back to buying the RIAA's products? For ethical reasons, I could never do that unless they radically changed their ways.

[yfoogsittam]

Nice, Intelligent Argument, but...
The boycott is on, and is growing. CD sales decreases accelerated in july, because of legal action taken against its customers. Boycotts will and do make a difference... Universal dropping CD prices is a good example. They are pleading people to buy music, but I'm not going too until there is a major overhaul in the Industry.

What I hate is the greed of the RIAA.. Artists get on Average 80 cents per CD (After they recoup all recording and promotional fees) That is crap. I can buy 50 CD-Rs cheaper than one RIAA CD. That shows how cheap it is to make CDs. (And you know those CD-Rs are marked up for the average consumer, therefore cheaper en mass to maj. corps) Theres a lot of unnacounted-for money floating into Exec.s' pockets. Give the Artists more money, and I might "support" them.

Shawners -
I like to say..
"If you don't stand up for what you beleive in, then you're bending over"

[matstao]

Empire, that is quite an impressive post for your 1st (or 2nd). Welcome to Zeropaid.

I agree with much of what you say. Singled out P2P users have no legal ground to stand on. I fear the glory days, the wide open "wild west" of mp3's flying from everywhere to everywhere, are over. However I can't agree that filesharing has a terminal diagnosis. There are too many intelligent people that want to do it, even if it means on a reduced scale.

I'm very interested to see where the dust settles after a few months. Until then I have enough to keep my eyes & ears busy.

edit: I also think RIAA boycotts could be affective. Does anyone have a good RIAA label database?

[Lord_of_the_Dense]

So much for my dreams of Middle Earth...

But seriously, gotta agree 100% with Empire. It seems that the dyke just breaks more and more when words of wisdom are thrown into the foray. It seems like an order for a Whaaaa-mburger and some French Cries are in order.

And here's a direct one shawners.....you're gonna find a new happiness in jail. Possibly with Bubba. How can you risk your wife...someone you obviously care dearly about? Does she support your raised fist and is willing to face the wrath of the RIAA? Are your children, if any? It's easy to say now. But what happens when the last thing to pawn is that oh-so-important computer? Not any broadband in the slammer.

Some rays shine; some are just plain weak.

[Rickio]

I was a music collector and trader before computers and online p2p, it really wouldn't bother me if online trading dissappeared tomorrow.

I and may others have seen the internet and computers go through so many changes and its just another change and something else is always around the corner. I also never expected it to survive forever. It will change one way or another.

At least efficient means of copying is developed and sharing CD's with friends is still totally possible. I got friends with huge collections and we can easily just share amongst each other.

Music collecting is seperate but sometimes part of the computer revolution.

P2P isn't just about music, but its the part I am interested in.

peace

[Kooperman]

I absolutely agree. I used to love the album swap meets my friends and I used to have. We'd loan albums out freely just to be able to hear as many sounds as we could without having to spend a fortune. Later on this moved through 8 track tapes, then cassettes.....later came the CD. All the while we managed to keep a flow of music alive....we'll continue to do so should the RIAA leave a scorched earth music scene. We'll still be out there, spreading music.

[tMoD]

Originally posted by matstao
edit: I also think RIAA boycotts could be affective. Does anyone have a good RIAA label database?

Here one, matstao:

www.boycott-riaa.com/membership.php

[CaptainMorgan]

Ground Work

[Kooperman]

Originally posted by Rickio
I was a music collector and trader before computers and online p2p, it really wouldn't bother me if online trading dissappeared tomorrow.

Well, it would bother me, but I've got tons of legal Cd's...stuff I used to buy until the recent RIAA blitzkrieg, and I've got other friends that have a lot too...we'll all survive.

[FrozenShadow23]

Not a bad essay, but a rule of thumb, unless you are looking for a flame of a retort, don't insult the reader. If you let them believe you are on their side, you can manipulate them and make them open to your ideas better.

Now that that is over: I disagree with you. Plain and simple. P2P as we know it may die. Widespread sharing may falter. I have no doubt of these things, however, something else will come to the rescue. The super proxy tunnler 20000 or something that will keep us safe. Now that the population has gotten a taste of not only free music, but free software, movies, games, etc. that they will give it up so easily? Not likely. Some form of trading will ALWAYS exist until they make free thinking illegal and can somehow back up that law. That is the day I want to die.

/me knows that the pirate's heart will live on

[Empire]

Originally posted by Winphuk
Okay, you can critisize people for taking a stand for p2p, but where do you stand on the issue?
Are you for it or against it? Do you share files?
Wev'e had so many people coming into our forums to discourage file sharing.
Whether your arguement is valid or not, there is no place for it here. Of course I share files. I am sharing 3000 files. I use a network that hides my ip address.

[Empire]

Originally posted by FrozenShadow23
Not a bad essay, but a rule of thumb, unless you are looking for a flame of a retort, don't insult the reader. If you let them believe you are on their side, you can manipulate them and make them open to your ideas better.

Now that that is over: I disagree with you. Plain and simple. P2P as we know it may die. Widespread sharing may falter. I have no doubt of these things, however, something else will come to the rescue. The super proxy tunnler 20000 or something that will keep us safe. Now that the population has gotten a taste of not only free music, but free software, movies, games, etc. that they will give it up so easily? Not likely. Some form of trading will ALWAYS exist until they make free thinking illegal and can somehow back up that law. That is the day I want to die.

/me knows that the pirate's heart will live on My essay is a prediction of the future. I wanted to post it so I can go back and say "I told you so". I don't care if the reader is insulted or not. The reader's life is his own responsibility, not mine.

I am testing my own knowledge of p2p by predicting and seeing if my prediction is right.

Oh yeah, I left out another rescuing technology, private sharing groups.

[The Crypt Keeper]

You make some good points empire, however technology will always outpace everything else, always has always will.

[Jorge]

http://www.nonesuch.org/p2prevolution.pdf

[CaptainMorgan]

I was going to bother replying to the original poster's prediction of the status quo.

But that just seems so pointless now.

Originally posted by Jorge
http://www.nonesuch.org/p2prevolution.pdf

This article is actually a prediction of the future.

I was at a technology conference onces where a speaker asked the following question. "Processor speed is now doubling every 18 months, Hard disc capacity is now doubling every 12 months. Network speed is poised to start making these type of gains. Assume that in the future you have infinite network speed and capacity. What would you do with it? What ever that is, is the future."

This was pre-napster. There were many blank stares. Including mine. Yogi Bera once said, "Prediction is difficult, expecially of the future."

*enviously* I wish I could write like this guy.

[metale]

Originally posted by Empire
If you want to know what the future has in store for P2P, just look at what general consensus is by all the Zeropaid members (not the exceptional voices that stand out in opposition to the general trend) and predict the opposite. Zeropaid members are INCREDIBLY naive and ignorant about real life and how the legal system works.

For some reason the cold wind of reality fails to reach most of the members here. I suspect it's because they are mostly kids. Their defiant attitude about the law is probably because it will be Mommy and Daddy who will be paying the lawsuit damages.

There is no way that governments are going to wipe out trillions of dollars of intellectual property value by making music and movie file sharing legal. Those that continue to use wide open p2p programs will be caught and penalized.

The only things that I foresee in the p2p future are:

1) Stop sharing music, and other copyrighted files.
2) Use p2p apps that hide your ip address and protect your identity or use networks that hide your identify (free, anonymous wireless networks).
3) Get sued and be too broke so that you end up as number one anyway.
4) Go to jail (in countries where p2p carries criminal penalties)
5) Online file shopping makes enough money for the RIAA artists that there comes to exist a stalemate where file sharing is still illegal, but RIAA artists are making enough money to be happy.

Five, while possible, is highly unlikely. Why? Because to those people, there is NEVER enough money. They are going to want their last drop of blood no matter what. The only reason they permitted copying via tape from the radio all these years was because that probably did more to spread new artists that it did to damage sales.

Anyone who believes this is going to end with everything happily continuing the way it is, is living in a dream world where fairies and trolls write songs and music, Gandalf the Grey makes movies magically come into existence and hobbits and elves toil tirelessley to make free software available to people who won't pay for any of it.

It was ok while nerds and geeks (a very small percentage of the population) were doing it but when copyright violation became a mass marketed commodity, the copyright holders could not ignore it any more and survive.

The people who will pay the worst penalties are the ones who will be sued after the RIAA ramps up into full power juggernaut mode. After they work the kinks out, and take off the kid gloves. They are just waiting to see what public opinion is. Public opinion won't give a shit. People have a lot more to worry about than "record pirates" getting sued and/or going to jail. If you get busted, no one is going to care and the public is notoriously unsympathetic to each other. If you are getting something for free that someone else has to pay for, in their eyes you are a thief, plain and simple.

I'm not saying its fair, but people are terribly ignorant sometimes. Just look at how wrong a lot of reporters are when the cover computer related stories.

No one is going to come to your rescue. There isn't going to be any grassroots movement to boycott the RIAA. The people who buy CDs are too stupid to know about file sharing, and the file sharers are already not buying CDs. and a boycott by them isn't going to hurt the RIAA any more than it is already.

I'm sure everyone will be screaming that I am a troll, and to go back home. I don't mind. They will probably delete this post because it shatters their frail reality. However, I am doing them a favor with a warning. Handcuffs don't come off hitting the delete key.

But mark my words, if you don't take effective measures to protect yourself and your p2p activity, you will end up a casualty on the p2p superhighway.

huh?

You didn't say anything new....

[Theinfamousone]

I like your post, and I'm glad someone said it. There are a few people that can't see the storm clouds coming.

However, I'm pretty sure that because people in foreign countries have no laws governing them, such as Canada, there will always be sources, even if everyone in America stopped sharing tomorrow. Would it slow things down? Immensely, but as CaptainMorgan said, networking speed is advancing incrementally, and so if everyone's uplaod bandwidth in Canada doubles in the next 5 years, that will be double the P2P bandwidth, in 10 years, everyone will probably have the equivalent of a T3 or faster. What then? On top of that, hard drive will hold thousands of gigabytes, therefore there will be no need to download and delete, or download and burn, so there will be much more files being spread. People's file sharing appatite is becoming more wetted up all the time, I think you would agree with that.

Also, even if the RIAA wins, there are many other means of file sharing at this point, over Palm pilots for instance.

In 5 years from now, PDA's will hold, say, 150GB, 500GB, a TB? iPods hold a cool 35GBs now and that weighs less than 2 ounces. Say they have headphone and RCA adaptors to plug into stereo line in, and video line in. Video codecs will probably be able to hold a full DVD quality movie in 500MB. You can transfer these videos over wireless connections of course, or "beaming" just like you can now. Say each one transfers at 20Mbits, or maybe 80Mbits, 200Mbits? Just look at an average wireless network router and tell me in 5 years those speeds aren't easily accessible.

http://www.directron.com/usr1120.html

You could transfer thousands of songs and dozens of movies in a few seconds with your friends. That can be plugged into your reciever just like you have now, and you have a complete audio/visual center right there. Say my friend has all the Planet of the Apes movies, I'll trade him all of those for all of the Rocky movies. Maybe I'll download the entire DVD rip of The Twilight Zone or Star Trek and when I get home or to a computer, I can just watch them in full living color, or on the miniature screen in class, or use it as an mp3 player.

If I want, I can load them on my computer, and P2P networks will still be around, and people in foreign countries can share all they want. By that time the RIAA will be only a memory, so Americans might be able to share too. But with PDA's being a phone/mp3 player/personal computer/video player, and being able to completely confidentially transfer files extremely quickly, they probably wouldn't be used as much except for new releases and rare content that people release. like TV series from the 60's all zipped together or whatever you can imagine.

Sure it sounds like a darknet kind of thing, where people can only share on a minimal basis, but I think that the larger hard drives and faster connection speeds will easily offset the setbacks. You could probably transfer with friends over AIM, private FTP, or private DC hubs and incredible speeds.

EDIT:

My point here is that while we are all "facing facts", we might want to look at the technological aspect as well, even with absoluetely no internet protocol innovations (ie anonymous networks), or laws being changed in favor of the public, or boycotting or anything like that, there is no way to fight the inevitable. Their best bet is to learn to use it, and live with it so that people are a little bit more willing to cooperate with them in the future, rather than forcing 60 million people to find other means of file sharing which most certainly will be completely out of the reach of one entity or the snailing court systems.

[aqlo]

people in foreign countries have no laws governing them, such as Canada Yeah they just do whatever they want up there in Canada, those damn foreigners with their draft-dodging hippy music-paying-for ways. They need some damn laws like we got down here. That's where foreigners come from you know, other countries.

I still like that wireless network of people walking around downloading everything they get in range of. That could be the deal, especially as ranging improves. But in the meantime why not something like "smart plugs" like some of the home security systems use? Let's share everything right across the power lines.

[Mel_Smiley]

Keyword- world
the RIAA can't run the whole world. The good old USA is screwed though

[Theinfamousone]

Originally posted by aqlo
Yeah they just do whatever they want up there in Canada, those damn foreigners with their draft-dodging hippy music-paying-for ways. They need some damn laws like we got down here. That's where foreigners come from you know, other countries.

I still like that wireless network of people walking around downloading everything they get in range of. That could be the deal, especially as ranging improves. But in the meantime why not something like "smart plugs" like some of the home security systems use? Let's share everything right across the power lines.

My dad was just telling me about how they are going to start using power lines as a means of providing high speed internet using frequency and stuff to send information. It's actually relatively simple. And yes, Canada, like in the news article said, pays a CD-R tax/levy, therefore their recording industry gets reimbursed for money they lose to copyright infringments.

[Empire]

Originally posted by metale
huh?

You didn't say anything new....
Then you didn't read anything new.

http://www.nonesuch.org/p2prevolution.pdf

That article doesn't contradict anything I wrote.

He is basically saying that number 5, an uneasy peace will exist between p2p and copyright holders if the copyright holders find a way to make money without prosecuting people.

I do have a few disagreements, for the purpose of discussion.

He mentions that product placements in movies are a great idea for advertisers. I agree, but I don't see that as a feasible method for songs. How do you put a product placement in a song without ruining the song? "Stairway to Macys"?

I have always considered television shows, "advertisements for the advertisements". In other words, television shows aren't art, they are just there to attract you to watch the advertisements and then the advertisments attract you to buy the product. If the creator of a television show must cater to the sponsor's whims, it limits what can be expressed and its value as art is greatly diminshed.

The law will be hard to change. First all all, copyrights are embedded in many countries' constitutions. Those cannot be changed without extreme measures like 2/3 vote in the United States as an example. If they wouldn't vote to give women equality, why do you think they'll change copyrights?

Second, loosening up copyrights would potentially wipe out trillions of dollars of intellectual property. This would be called communism. It would be like tell you that you must share your car or house or apartment with anyone who asks, like, if you aren't using it, you have to let someone else use it. After all, if you aren't using it, it isn't stealing from you to let someone else use it.

Now, I understand that circumstances may make copyright law inneffective and unenforceable, but someone making copies would still be breaking the civil copyright law.

All his ideas are good, except the major flaw is, the copyright holders can implement his ideas and STILL make money by holding hard to their copyrights and sueing people. He considers that if studio A offers a movie for free, studio B who charges will not be able to compete.

This logic works for software. If there are several software products that will get a job done, people will stay away from the hassle that a copy protected piece of software has.

But I'm not sure it will work with movies and songs. There is NO substitute for an artist that someone likes. If you have to pay to listen to Eminem, hearing Snoop for free isn't going to satisfy you.

If you have a popular artist, there IS no competition and free songs that are not that artist, won't satisfy the fans.

There is also a flaw in his logic about the FAST TCP/IP algorithm. This algorithm can speed up data transfer, but it still cannot go faster than the media you have coming into your house. We have the technology to go to them moon, but very few people can afford it.

He also has a flaw in his logic that p2p network is necessary for people to distrubute their creations and not suffer bandwidth problems, i.e. bittorrent style solutions. Anyone can get a cheap website with lots of bandwidth at a co-hosting center. You don't need a high speed connection into your house to have high bandwidth distribution capabilities.

The P2P revolution wasn't about P2P. Peer to Peer has been around since Windows machines hit the Internet and before. Windows file sharing has always been available to share anything on your hard drive with anyone else. The big revolution was the global library that made locating what you wanted easy. It was the ability to locate things that made the revolution, not the ability to download from and share to each other. The very heart of the Internet is P2P and from its very beginning, TCP/IP broke the mold with older client/server systems and made EVERY machine on the TCP/IP network an equal peer. This is technology that goes back to the early 70s.

P2P isn't new. What is new is that is was made useable by non-experts.

A lot of people harken back to the good old Napster days when you could find what you wanted and Napster was reliable. That's because Napster was Client/Server. The database was centralized and thus reliable. Bittorrent style distribution is inherently unreliable and will not beat out a centralized method. It depends on flaky users who have no commitment to distribute, but only to download. Sharing is secondary to them. They just want their stuff no w. If you allow ANY user to be part of the distribution chain, I can guarantee you someone will find a way to insert a virus into what is being distrubuted and a meta virus that infects ALL bittorrent style downloads. No, the distributor must exercise absolute control over his commodity

The reason the Web took off is because it was simple. Programmers love to complicate things. They'll spend weeks to save seconds just because it's a "neat" idea. But the users that want the services often don't give a shit. There are many superior p2p services to Kazaa, but the vast majority of people use Kazaa, why?

P2P as we know it has specific purposes. It allows people to share files and other people to locate and download those files. We are talking about "common" people now, not corporations or people who can afford websites. Trying to make P2P scale to be the equivalent of an online Yahoo is silly. The web as it is works fine. There is no reason to replace that. Lots of fads come and go. Where is AI? Where is "push technology"? Where is biometrics? Where are 3D virtual reality helmets and gloves?

A lot of techologies sound excited but the crash for various reasons.

[MainManMoe]

Yes good post Empire. Still, I think youre a tad too square about this. There are many things to consider, international law et.cet., but Im sure your predictions fit well on the American market. I dont think youre saying anything new, but I see your post as a good recapitualization of status quo for the many naive.

There is one or two small things tho..

But mark my words, if you don't take effective measures to protect yourself and your p2p activity, you will end up a casualty on the p2p superhighway.


..okay thats what were all working towards. What did you think we were doing?

and:

The naive, ignorant and idealistic have always formed the shock troops in any movement, like the civil rights movement. They are the ones that get thrown in jail, bitten by dogs, hosed off with fire hoses and have their lives ruined.

That's ok with me. We need them around to absorb the blow for the rest of us who are smart enough to take cover.

Here you are just telling us you think being clever automatically means youre a coward. Because thats what you are. There would be no changes in society without the "naive, ignorant and idealistic" . While I agree with your dark perspective on filesharings future, I do not agree with your tactics. You sir, are a mouse among men.

[Empire]

Sure, I'm a coward. I won't deny it.

But I'm not square. I just like to know what I'm really up against and not pretend.

[MainManMoe]

yes sorry Empire, I didnt mean square as in boring/reactionary, wrong wording, I meant that your perspective is a little black and white, for instance it seems to only deal with Americans, and although you elaborate in a later post, your original post did not leave much for technological advance. However, Im really not trying to patronize you, obviously you are capable of thought and it is very hard to fit all the aspects of p2p into a post and still maintain somekind of coherency. Again, my bad, when someone whos English is his 5th language tries to talk "jive" it sometimes ends up pure babelfish. In the end I think you and I are eye to eye on this issue a looong way.

Just one more thing..As you undoubtedly know, the focus of the p2p community is anonymity. You yourself claim to use a network that hides your ip adress. How do you propose the industry (riaa et.cet) will cope with new technology like earthstation and private filesharing groups? I do not consider encryption of material an answer, it is too easy to get around "coded" copyblocks. People will always be able to copy a coded cd through a mixer, or make screeners of movies and cracks of software.

[eclectica]

Originally posted by Rickio
I was a music collector and trader before computers and online p2p, it really wouldn't bother me if online trading dissappeared tomorrow.

I and may others have seen the internet and computers go through so many changes and its just another change and something else is always around the corner. I also never expected it to survive forever. It will change one way or another.

At least efficient means of copying is developed and sharing CD's with friends is still totally possible. I got friends with huge collections and we can easily just share amongst each other.

peace
When I engage in peer-to-peer I feel that I am sharing with my friends, who are located all around the World. Without p2p Rickio, you would be limited to a small group of people you know. The bigness of the internet and the ability for people to develop digital communities regardless of geographical location is what makes p2p so great.

It sounds like you've grown weary and you're ready to retire from the p2p community.

[Empire]

Originally posted by MainManMoe
yes sorry Empire, I didnt mean square as in boring/reactionary, wrong wording, I meant that your perspective is a little black and white, for instance it seems to only deal with Americans, and although you elaborate in a later post, your original post did not leave much for technological advance. However, Im really not trying to patronize you, obviously you are capable of thought and it is very hard to fit all the aspects of p2p into a post and still maintain somekind of coherency. Again, my bad, when someone whos English is his 5th language tries to talk "jive" it sometimes ends up pure babelfish. In the end I think you and I are eye to eye on this issue a looong way.

Just one more thing..As you undoubtedly know, the focus of the p2p community is anonymity. You yourself claim to use a network that hides your ip adress. How do you propose the industry (riaa et.cet) will cope with new technology like earthstation and private filesharing groups? I do not consider encryption of material an answer, it is too easy to get around "coded" copyblocks. People will always be able to copy a coded cd through a mixer, or make screeners of movies and cracks of software.
I think that a p2p app can be developed that will shield your identity, as long as encryption is not made illegal. I think we are already pretty close to that.

At that point, copyrights will be unenforceable.

I cannot predict the ramifications of that. It seems that it might mean fewer artists will produce recorded art and movies in hopes of making money. I think books and much written material will probably be safe because few people like reading novels on a computer screen so the "book" user interface is still superior and necessary.

Since pop music and movies are so intertwined in our culture, I cannot fathom a world without them. It is beyond my ability to imagine and I see few other people postulating possible scenarios so it must be hard for everyone.

This is truly a paradigm shift of monumental proportions about to occur.

[shawners]

what i do now is no different of what i did back in the eighties.. When me and my friends got a new cd we taped it and had each a copy. It doesnt matter if i do the same on a p2p network, everyone in america has done what i have done, we tape shows, we tape vcr movies. We record and record over and over again. As soon as the GOVERNMENT find a way to make money on the p2p system, they will legalize it. We have tobacco products killing people everyday yet its legal to buy and they make so much money from the tax on it. So when they find away to tax your internet connection, or tax pc users more when you buy a pc. Zeropaid only has so many registered users on here and to just say we are in a dream world when theirs 60 million us file sharers out there. This is their last attempt before the technology comes to stop p2p users. 261 sued, out of 1000 or more subpoena. I doubt that when you settle for 3000 or whatever, it really covers the court cost the riaa has to go through, Retaining a Lawyer, fileing the paperwork, man hours to do what is necessary to git the evidence built up.

[MainManMoe]

@empire

Then we do agree completely.
There has been many good posts and quotes here, and I think more of the users of this forum are aware of the reality of filesharing than many of the posts may lead us newcomers to believe. Im glad to see so many users with low post counts, making good posts. hmmmmmmm.

Anyway, obviously we should use our main asset, this congregation of devoted minds and knowledge of the field, to try and take the lead in the discussion of filesharing. We are an interest group. If we want to influence society we must have a vision. Not some halfbaked scheme, but a solid idea policies can be based upon (oops, ended a sentence with a preposition, sorry). We have so far established that we are aware of staus quo. Theres no reason to dwell on these facts. I have talked about the paradigm shift in other threads, and I have proposed a "right to all knowledge" as a guiding principle for the establishment of our global web. What are your ideas towards a solution to the problems deriving from the inevitable global web (fast, free, unlimited) and our economic system based on personal property? Or if you prefer to remain specific to the topic, what do you propose is a realistic solution to the problem of filesharing and copyrights? (I do not see your 5 points as satisfactory points, they are all interpretations of status quo bordering synthesis rather than real visions of long term stability).

[camoor]

I have a feeling that if Empire was around in the days of the VHS, he would have predicted that it would eventually be banned too. Republicans (who control gov't these days) are asking why they should defend the unpopular entertainment trade unions, when these unions will only help flaming liberal democrats.

As a matter of public policy, reversing prohibition had many negative effects (liver disease goes up, driving fatalities go up, domestic abuse goes up...). The gov't still did it because a vast majority of the ppl wanted it, the gov't couldn't stop the majority of the ppl from drinking alcohol, and alcohol can be regulated and enjoyed responsibly. In contrast filesharing has broadened the music horizons of a generation, a vast majority of ppl continue to do it despite crackdowns, and it can be regulated so that artists are compensated properly. Who knows?

BTW guys, can you think of any big industry where people get used to getting a product for free, and then were willing to pay for it? I can only think of water (ppl bottle it and sell it), but that only works because bottled water adds value (making tap water pure and portable). And it doesn't hurt that Avian hasn't sued drinkers of tap water.

[reg]

If you can imagine it ... you can achieve it.
If you can dream it ... you can become it.
William Arthur Ward

Don't be afraid of the space between your dreams and reality. If you can dream it, you can make it so.
Belva Davis
: )

[Pebbles100]

I've read a few articles on possible solutions to all of this. One of them mentioned paying for p2p services. Not in the traditional way, [such as Apple's Itunes], but the fee would be covered in monthly internet bills. This was briefly mentioned.

[ShepMode]

P2P will never die, but it will degrade in quality as the RIAA floods the networks with rubbish.

In the future the following will happen:

P2P sharers will continue to be sued, and P2P applications will eventually become totally anonymous. Those applications that cannot become anonymous will die out as their userbase decreases and moves to other networks that guarantee anonymity.

Copyright agencies will then use P2P applications to drive sales with digital downloads, or offer their own services like the music download services we now have available to us. We coming to an age where most music will be downloaded as opposed to being bought in a store.

[method]

The blind defiance might not be good, but I think a lot of the defiance from people is down to the fact that networks like ES5, freenet, etc. exist.

How long do you think anti-piracy has being going on?

And after 15+ years of anti-piracy efforts, where are we now? In a situation with more piracy or less?

Also, p2p will continue to exist... there's ALWAYS someone wanting to be the next thorn in the RIAAs side. I agree though, people should stop sharing at least the RIAA artists. In fact, I'd welcome that change!.. at least then we'd know they're whinging because of the competition.

[BlueLieu]

P2P has been around alot longer than Napster, Kazaa and Gnutella. The present downfall of P2P is because it was made to stinkin' easy to use. There are plenty of smart, persistant people who learned how to IRC and Newsgroup their P2P desires. But once it became an automated point and click process, every teenie bopper jumped in with wild abandon.

I don't know the future of P2P but I believe that the IRC and Newsgroup channels will stay open. I hope that media becomes a trade dominated by single track, E-Delivery purchases.

I'll keep sharing but it won't be amongst the flock of sheeple now being sued.

[Kooperman]

I'd like to congratulate Empire for ditching the taunting, combative tone of his initial posts, and making this thread into a nice exchange of ideas and theories. Maybe it won't change the world, but it never hurts to open up another spot for the cool and level headed flow of opinion and thought. Consequently, I'm deleting my initial negative retort to him. Welcome to ZP....I think you'll find it's a place that isn't as you thought, but one where you reap what you sew.

[aqlo]

How do you put a product placement in a song without ruining the song? Doesn't have to ruin the song

I'd like to teach the world to sing
In perfect harmony
I'd like to buy the world a coke
And keep it company

No offense with Canada and Infamous it just struck me as giggle-funny that what was a rate-increase for those guys (democratic) now looks to us like lawlessness (republican), your facts are exactly correct.

[jonnymnemonic]

I agree with you for the most part. However, I hate agreeing with people, so I'll be the Devil's Advocate.

There are 100 million+ p2p users now across the world exchanging software. They are using decentralized p2p for the most part, because these aren't nearly as vulnerable as centralized networks. They were primarily created because Napster was sued into non-existence, but the will of 100 million people created an immediate need for a de-centralized service. Now that individual users are being sued, the 100 million people want proxied anonymous networks, and what 100 million people want, someone will provide. That's always been the way the world works.

Once that occurs, and it's probably inevitable, then what? A randomly self-proxying decentralized network would then mean that the RIAA would have to subpoena information from machines in other countries (which likely will not store the information they seek anyway) to get a person in the U.S. In fact, they won't know a particular person IS in the U.S. which will compound the problem even further. The progression here is obvious: with Napster they had to sue one user (the database) to shut down everyone. Now they have to sue one person to stop one person (the uploader). With anonymous networks they may have to subpoena/sue MANY users just to get one user, and even that is quite likely to fail because they may end up finding out that the user they are targetting isn't in the U.S., or the proxies he used are not in the U.S., or the proxies used do not have the information they need to progress further in the suit.

The escalation in difficulty for the RIAA is, thus, geometric. What was easy to stop with Napster became much harder with de-centralized networks, which will become even MORE difficult if not downright impossible with anonymous networks. The lawsuits filed this week can only serve to spur on the development of the next level of difficulty, which may be unsurpassably difficult. And even if it isn;t, the next level after THAT would certainly be.

So, the lawsuit versus technology method of attacking the problem cannot ultimately be the solution, as it just gets progressively harder to eliminate piracy until it simply becomes impossibly difficult to combat.

The solution then, if there is to be one, must lie elsewhere. Laws, enacted worldwide, could possibly help, but there is no chance of that happening. There will always be countries that have few legal restrictions on ANYTHING, because there will always be a demand for such. Laws, then, can perhaps slow the progression, but cannot halt it, because the necessary laws will not be universal.

Offering more to the consumer than piracy will help. It won't stop the problem by any means, but it will help. However, whatever "features" are added to books, music and movies will simply be pirated too, so even that isn't really a solution, just a mitigating factor.

A tax could actually solve the problem, almost completely, except that the tax would never be fair. The U.S. taxpayer would be likely to pay most of the burden for the entire world. Still, we're spending $87 billion this year in Iraq. If we spent that much each year on the book, movie and music industries as a tax, that would at the very least pay a very large number of artists to keep producing. If the U.S. ends up paying for the entire planet's cultural access, well, I can think of worse things that could happen. (Like the artists not getting paid at all, and the human race's cultural health declining severely.)

Or perhaps the tax could be levied on countries on a proportional basism based on GDP, so that poor countries pay very little, and wealthier countries assume most of the burden. And then the p2p developers, working with this idea, only allow access to their networks from users in countries that are contributing. The benefits to countries to "join the club" so to speak would be impressive - the entire cultural production of the human race.

At worst, we will devolve to the most simple of solutions, where artists simply ask on their websites for a PayPal donation of whatever the user thinks appropriate. Certainly some artists could survive this way. Some would certainly even thrive this way. So I don't see art as ever dying out completely, regardless of how prevalent piracy becomes once sharing becomes completely anonymous. Of course, the actual organized INDUSTRIES might not be able to survive in this scenario, at least not on the same scale as they exist today.

Strong DRM has some promise, but will never be perfect, because analog recording in some form or another will always be possible, even if it's no more sophisticated than pointing a camera at your monitor and recording the movie that way.

Technology is progressing stunningly fast, so fast that it's essentially impossible to make long-range predictions about anything that involves technology. Your doom-and-gloom prediction is probably true, but it's also only accurate until the next wave of technology hits, which is likely in the very near future. In fact, the next wave of technology, anonymous networking, has probably moved much much closer to the present because of the lawsuits filed this week.

In summary, the future is in no way predictable. What we see as probable today may be impossible tomorrow. What hasn't even been envisioned today may be ubiquitous next year. The only thing that I see as certain is that artistry, as a profession, will survive in some form; but it may very well be in a completely different form than in the past or the present. And whether the actual copyright-reliant industries will survive at all on anything like their current scale is absolutely NOT certain.

[Jon49]

"Handcuffs don't come off hitting the delete key."

what rhetorical magnificence! why, even henry james would be proud of such a line.

you frigging moron...

[Truncheon]

You may be able to extinguish a candle, but it is not so easy to put out a forest fire.:devil :devil

[Rickio]

Originally posted by eclectica
When I engage in peer-to-peer I feel that I am sharing with my friends, who are located all around the World. Without p2p Rickio, you would be limited to a small group of people you know. The bigness of the internet and the ability for people to develop digital communities regardless of geographical location is what makes p2p so great.

It sounds like you've grown weary and you're ready to retire from the p2p community.

Not weary of p2p, I still download quite a bit. Just eager for the next phase. It's just the talking and predicting about the future is quite old now. But I understand we each come to points where the whole thing still seems fresh and worth discussing.

I'm just saying I'll roll with the flow and I won't stop sharing. I just am not predicting how it will be, but it will still continue.

I am sure some form of international as well as national file sharing will be possible. It's been discussed here in threads before. Wireless, BBS, etc.


I must add, this is a very good thread in that people are being thoughtful, and hope we are get more polite discsussions going. ;-)

peace

[N[E]rD]

I want to say bravo, and thank you. I do not pretend to be anything more than a psuedo N[e]RD. And the reason I want to say thank you is for educating an ignorant git. I know that p2p is up against the wall right now. But as long as there are people willing to fight, there will always be a reason to. Empire I must say while realism and idealism cannot go hand-in-hand. In order for p2p to move forward and survive today, and last until tommarrow, requires us to stop squabbling umungst ourselfs. Rather than pointing out how we will fail, try and point out how. And solutions to those shortcomings. I don't need someone to point out where I have messed up, because I usually know right away. With this same idea, p2p needs people with your attitute like it needs and asshole on its elbow. :shy We need problem solvers and innovators. We need idealism, and "ignorance" to take the heavy blows as you say.

[CaptainMorgan]

I am quoting jonnymnemonic here, but I am really responding to the basic sentiments of this entire thread. Not to any one person.

originally jonnymnemonic
Technology is progressing stunningly fast, so fast that it's essentially impossible to make long-range predictions about anything that involves technology. Your doom-and-gloom prediction is probably true, but it's also only accurate until the next wave of technology hits, which is likely in the very near future. In fact, the next wave of technology, anonymous networking, has probably moved much much closer to the present because of the lawsuits filed this week.

I'm not sure these count as a "long-range" predictions. But, I am going to make several predictions here. Normally I wouldn't do this, as it is simply mental masturbation. Stroking myself now for a climax of "I told you so"s. However, I will in this case for three reasons:

[1] I have come to like this group of people. Friends should help each other.
[2] I have a kind of "inside information" that most people don't have access to.
[3] I am manipulating you.


Prediction 1: Digital Copyright is dead within 6 months.
Prediction 2: "Dark Nets" will become increasingly interesting to the people on this site, but only for 6 months. Then no one will care.
Prediction 3: For the next 2 months, the media will become increasingly interested in "Dark Nets". Then they will cease to care.
Prediction 4: In approximately 2 months, media coverage will begin to shift from, "it's illegal arguments", to "it's inevitable arguments", to "it's a good thing arguments. This will all happen within 6 months.
Prediction 5: The "next wave of technology" will appear within 5 months.
Prediction 6: The "next wave of technology" will be public and not the least bit "Dark"
Prediction 7: In one year, no one will even be discussing the issues we have been thrashing in this forum. It will be as if you learned, "there is no Santa Clause". Most people wil think, "why did I ever think that? It was so obvious".

Prediction 8: Musicians will still exist, and people will still like them. (Stroke...)
Prediction 9: Business will still exist, and people will still hate them. (Stroke...)

It is not particularly long range but, I think it is valuable none the less.

Now, I have a question for you. Hypothetically, Assuming, I am a respected authority figure and I say, "Absolutely, unequivocally" and with conviction that this is true. Let's say that in six months all of these things WILL turn out to be true. Let's even say that you believe me.

The question is: "What would you do now, and for the next six months?"

I say, "Yet it does move."

[aqlo]

N[E]rD you are right about many of your arguments. But I would like to point out to you that there are several threads where we really are working together and pooling our talents and resources to solve this problem.

This is one of them.

I know it doesn't seem like it, but it is, this is the place where we are examining the negative arguments. If we don't do that we will be like the guy who didn't believe in cars. (He got run over.)

So if you have any bad ideas we want to hear them. If you can rebut any of these ideas in a constructive, logical way, (not this cheerleader stuff) that's also great. If you have good ideas about potential legal defenses or alternate ways of remuneration or violent responses to tyranny we want those too, if you can't figure out where the right place is to put them don't worry we will crosspost it for you. What do you think?

Anyway Auron had some excellent material in the p2p-is-legal thread about protocols and so on, some of it I like to think I've discounted or at least deferred, but this one's still pretty bad.

P2p may be not only as bad as having pirated stuff on your webpage, but worse. Your webpage might be your private tard webpage that only 6 people ever visit, and then once someone at school catches on a whole 200 or so. Your private webpage with pirated material on it might conceivably be no big deal so long as you aren't making money. You aren't going to submit it to the search-engines, why take the risk? Only commercial pirates with some hope of money are going to tell yahoo where they are, and then only for a little while until they get shut down and move on to the next freespace provider for more spamming.

But by using a p2p program you are skipping past all those steps and moving right out into the big leagues in one download. In the course of downloading your song on kazaa gold you have moved from interested private party to public commercial web criminal in one fell swoop. (Maybe.)

[N[E]rD]

I am not trying to say that pointing out a weakness is wrong. Quite the contrary, it is a necessary step in finding a solution. The only thing that I am trying to point out is that we need more than a nay-sayer. We have plenty of those guys, I think the term we use for them is the RIAA?

What I was trying to get at is that just like when you write a good essay in school, if you present arguements you must present solutions. Not just this is wrong with the situation. Everyone jumped in saying, "Nice essay, well written." I agree that Empire has an impecable writing style, and a firm grasp of sentence structure, and even a certain amount of elloquince. But her overall point lacks, how should I put it importance. I just like you do not need to be told yet again that the RIAA is comming. We know, if you look on ZP for anyshort amount of time you realize that a lot of the forums focus on this point, and even more new program freatures do as well.

The ignorance Empire speaks of is when people comeback with "Screw the RIAA," and "I DON'T GIVE A DAMN." That isn't ignorance I would call it anger, and defiance, things I think a movement like ours needs.

Some of you now have read this and thought, well he is doing the same thing Empire has. Spewed painfully obvious info without a solution. Yes, I did do the same, however, I didn't start a thread, to try and rile up the ZP community. I was merely replying to one. And I will be the first of us here to admit, I know nothing about the technical side of p2p. I am trying to learn all I can. But as of now I don't. But that doesn't mean I won't do what I can to save it in any form.

[drei]

Personally I think the p2p software will get better at keeping users anonymous. Sort of like how the Big Software makers put anti copy, anti theft measures in their code. Everytime they think they have it someone still manages create a backdoor or crack that beats the protections. Where there's demand for a product or service someone will provide it. Just like cocaine or marijuana which are also illegal but we all know that you can go within 10 miles of your front door to get drugs.

Quite honestly it is easier for me to go downtown here in DC and by illegal $5.00 copies of CD's than to download online.
And most of the time that's what I do. What's even more funny is that as I am making my purchase the police drive right by. I have even had officers in uniform make illegal purchases at the same time I was. Even the law thinks CD prices are to high. Go figure!?

A change in business model would seem to be a better solution than lawsuits $9.99 cd's would totally curb my downloading and illegal copy appetite. Or a way to download what I wanted like what Apple iTUNES has done. Ten million legal downloads folks someone is doing something right over there at Apple.

I always thought that the businesses that prosper most are the ones that give the consumer what he/she wants. If I sell more oranges in my produce store than apples wouldn't it make since for me to find more varieties of oranges sell?

Just my .02 cents ya'll,

DREi

[jonnymnemonic]

The obvious weakness with doing anything illegal over p2p is lack of anonymity. That is the flaw that I expect will be addressed before long. There will probably be two prices to pay for it though: 1) it will be slower (but if implemented properly it should still be half as fast, which is tolerable); and 2) with anonymity will come the real dark side of the human race in all its *cough* glory: kiddie porn, serial murderer planning diaries, terrorist communication, you name it. The more securely anonymous it is, the more of this will crawl out from beneath the rocks.

For good or for ill, anonymous p2p will ring the starting bell for an interesting time in human history.

[aqlo]

Drei I agree with you 100% that there's no wall they can build that we can't breach. Lot of projects at sourceforge for new p2ps to do just what you are describing. Perfectly logical to expect this from hackware like k-lite and "tom" also. But there's a problem you aren't thinking of.

All our content came from Kazaa and Napster! Millions of people shared content and we got it and were glad to have it and spread it on. Simple programs they were, commercially backed and you didn't have to be 1337² just to find them and use them.

If p2p is limited to people who know steganography isn't the science of drawing spiky dinosaurs then how many files are we going to be able to find?

Who will share every album they play and every mp3 they download in a geometric curve like we need if Kazaa dies?

[Kooperman]

Originally posted by aqlo

Who will share every album they play and every mp3 they download in a geometric curve like we need if Kazaa dies?
That's where moderation and the concept of smelling the coffee comes into play. Rather than DL 12 albums a day, finding the favored few will make for a more satisfying experience in the long run, probably.

[jonnymnemonic]

Don't confuse 'need' with 'want'. No one's ever died of music withdrawal or literary withdrawal. We WANT entertainment, but we don't NEED it. Things we WANT should always be commercially exploitable (someone works to satisfy the desire for a fee), but things we NEED shouldn't ever be too hard to get. (But even there, some things we need have to be commercially exploitable, because farmers won't farm for free -- farming is hard, hard work -- when they could fill their land with obnoxious antenna towers and provide for their families that way.)

[tMoD]

I disagree with N[E]rD that if we criticize we need to present solutions. I'm not a tech guy so all I have are questions which I think are legitimate. As far as foreign-based anonymous proxies go, can't a law be passed demanding that ISPs prevent access to them? The government could easily give plausible non-copyright related reasons for it. I know I'm not the only one to see these reasons since jonnymnemonic mentioned some of them. I'm sure there would be ways around this; but only for dedicated and very knowledgeable people.

If the police get involved, and I suspect they will eventually, how would you be safe on DC, Waste, etc.? A cop could infiltrate your hub and bust your whole ring of filesharers. Cops could also pose as foreign filesharers and nail you when you download from them, although they would have to be careful to avoid entrapment. I don't see a way to keep filesharing from being driven underground if the cops get involved. Maybe I'm assuming much but when has the law not been on the side of the powerful?

I resist the RIAA not because I believe we will win, but because I think it's the ethical thing to do. Things will never be the same as they were before for me- the RIAA will never get another penny from me unless they radically change their ways but this will never happen, it's the nature of the beast.

[Iacchus]

this is not a time to be scared or pessimistic. this is not a time to prepare for the worst. this is a time to pour it on. WE are thge people putting money in those bastard's pockets. WE have showed our dissatisfaction, and it has been noticed, ..widely.
The head of sony music is calling for a restructuring of the company to meet this new untapped consumer market's needs. He has stated that the way business is being handled by record companies is outdated.
How much money a year pours into the appliances neccessary for this so called "piracy"? more than ever before, i assure you. the money still flows, just to different places. The advances is mp3 software for burning and ripping are advertised on every box of software.
This is a time to hold your ground. we all thought it was over after napster bit it, but now there is a p2p community that i never dared dream of. let the riaa advertise our position. Our numbers will only grow. believe in people. not everybody is scared to fight for freedom. i spend more money on media than ever before... i havent bought a cd that wasnt blank in over a year.
get active, people will provide our weapons, there will always be a new format. stand strong. bask in the glorious music that is the death rattle of the riaa.

[Kooperman]

Originally posted by Iacchus
this is not a time to be scared or pessimistic. this is not a time to prepare for the worst. this is a time to pour it on. WE are thge people putting money in those bastard's pockets. WE have showed our dissatisfaction, and it has been noticed, ..widely.
The head of sony music is calling for a restructuring of the company to meet this new untapped consumer market's needs. He has stated that the way business is being handled by record companies is outdated.

To just be recognizing this now sums up the thinking of these dinosaurs. Only when pushed to extinction will they respond.

[jonnymnemonic]

I don't like that phrase "fight for freedom", because one man's freedom ends at another man's door. Do the artists have freedom to set the price for their product as they see fit? Shouldn't they have that freedom? Or should we take that freedom from them so we can have OUR freedom from paying any price at all? Those two freedoms may not be able to coexist, in which case, which freedom is more important to maintain? And who decides that? And how is it enforced?

I personally believe that any creator of artistic works should be able to price their product as they see fit. This creates competition. If Joe Schmoe the musician prices his music at $100 a song, more power to him. Probably no one will buy it and will instead buy music from other musicians that don't charge as much. But I see nothing wrong with Joe Schmoe having the freedom to price what he makes any way he sees fit. It's his work, his creation, and ultimately, whatever money he makes (or doesn't in this example) is what he's going to be relying on to provide for himself and his family.

So when you say "fighting for freedom" you should be explicit about WHOSE freedom you are fighting for. Obviously you are not fighting for Joe Schmoe the musician's freedom, but are instead fighting to REMOVE his freedom.

[jonnymnemonic]

I agree that the money still flows, just to other places. In my case, the money I used to spend on CDs now flows (to a larger extent than you might believe) to the beef industry. I freaking love a good steak. If I can get a free CD and a steak, or pay for a CD and eat Ramen noodles, well, that musician is a lot more distant than my stomach's craving for a kickass steak. But that's not right, and I know it. I wish I were better at resisting temptation, but I am not. I admit my flaw. I'd rather it wasn't so EASY to give in to temptation, then it would be easier to resist. But that happens....go beef industry! Ironic that the music industry and muscians are, indirectly, in my case, subsidizing the beef industry. ;)

[Lord_of_the_Dense]

Looking for a cure within the human race
Eliminate the poor, how much longer will it take
Burning up the tents of the rank and file
Exterminate their lives, crack a demon smile

Crushing down, caving in our will to live
Getting rid of man's mistakes
To take a lost life, lock it up, break it down
How much more can we take

Fight for freedom, fight authority
Fight for anything, my country tis' of me

Cry for absolution, it's not the end for me
A last minute pardon, one final reprieve
Resist the war machine, don't get in it's path
Fight to die a free man and reap the aftermath

Crushing down, caving in our will to live
Getting rid of man's mistakes
To take a lost life, lock it up, break it down
I don't know how much more I can take

Fight! … It's my country


Megadeth
"FFF"
Cryptic Writings

[N[E]rD]

Originally posted by jonnymnemonic
So when you say "fighting for freedom" you should be explicit about WHOSE freedom you are fighting for. Obviously you are not fighting for Joe Schmoe the musician's freedom, but are instead fighting to REMOVE his freedom.

Wow, just when you think you have heard it from all the angles, you hear a damn good one. Which begs the question who is the victim the RIAA, the artist, or us?

[CaptainMorgan]

Originally posted by jonnymnemonic
I personally believe that any creator of artistic works should be able to price their product as they see fit. This creates competition. If Joe Schmoe the musician prices his music at $100 a song, more power to him. Probably no one will buy it and will instead buy music from other musicians that don't charge as much. But I see nothing wrong with Joe Schmoe having the freedom to price what he makes any way he sees fit. It's his work, his creation, and ultimately, whatever money he makes (or doesn't in this example) is what he's going to be relying on to provide for himself and his family.

Hear Hear!! Jonny. Hear Hear!! I whole heartedly agree.

Here, is an interesting brain twister based on this logic though. made up story, (I am not an author)
Suppose I'm a musician. I'm already known and well liked. What if I decide that I am going to make a new CD. All new songs. All great.

Now suppose I decide, "I'm only going to make ONE CD. Ever. Period." I just want a clear idea of what my work is worth."
What should he price it at?
If I buy it at that price, can I put it on ebay for open bidding?
What prices would if fetch then?
If someone borrows it, rips it, and posts the rips on a p2p site, what impact does that have to the value of the original.
What if I give it to a poor person. How does this affect your above view on price.

I'm not f***king with you. This is the kind of shit that goes through my mind all day long. No, actually, I'm just f***king with you.

[PatientSaint]

Ok while alot of what you wrote is by no means new....

How long do you think the RIAA will stay around as it keeps ATTACKING it's customers. The biggest point is this if they want to stick around. Stop suing potential customers, drive down CD prices, give artists more creative freedom and bigger cuts of profit that they DESERVE, change your business model and offer online dsitribution that is FAIR to artists and consumers, and let the talent that you go out and discover sell itself.

If the RIAA had gotten on with the internet boom and offered online music distribution early at good prices there wouldn't have been a problem... or at least not the the extent they feel it is.

To the person (i didn't really read honestly) who was discussing needs. There was an article on here a while back that was called confessions of a MP3 junkie. Go back and read it.

Maybe I can't speak for all the people here... but music is a part of me.. it's part of who I am and what I believe in. That it is soley the most universal language we will ever know other than a smile :).We can come from different countries and speak different languages, worship different deities and so forth... but when we are all in the club or where ever... we feel the same energy we all thrive in the moment we revel in each other's presence. For that moment we forget everything else and let it carry us. That is the power. Music drives me to great heights it sinks with me to great lows...it defines a moment and time in my life.

Are any of us theives to want that? Does anyone deserve to be sued for that? Am I a horrible person to feel that way? Can you really put a price on the purity of a joyous moment? Should we be deined that?

[jonnymnemonic]

They release all their music, free, on p2p networks, at 64kbps mp3s. That lets the listening public get an idea of how the music sounds when they hear it in higher quality form. The try-before-you-buy concept. They do not release recorded music AT ALL, EVER, and instead jack ticket prices for live shows up around 300 percent or 500 percent, and make sure that no one enters the venue with an electronic device of any kind.

I wonder how that business model would work. True, people wouldn't have much access to new music EXCEPT at live shows, but they'd still have access to all OLDER music like they do today.

It would be an interesting experiment, at the very least. It wouldn't work for studio musicians, of course, but it might kick some ass for touring musicians.

[IshareManyFilez]

Empire impressive first post. I have to give you that. You used the word ignorance many times. Yet the definition of ignorance is the condition of being ignorant; the want of knowledge in
general, or in relation to a particular subject; the state of being uneducated or uninformed. Yes many zeropaid users are ignorant yet so are you. There is no way of having an exact clear view of the future. Technology, and computer laws are still very primitive, and general. Many judges, congressmen, and senators are older and don't understand computers and filesharing. I doubt p2p will ever die. It has allready been proven that KazaA, Grokster, and Streamcast are perfectly legal. Yes the RIAA will loose a whole generation of consumers, and costumers. But when our generation, the younger people, the computer geeks, the hackers, and everyone else gets into office the laws will change. I mean a 80 yr old senator won't know anything about computers, or filesharing. They will just go to the side of money, the RIAA. But when a new generation steps up to the plate to be future senators, and congressman, and political officials things will change. Things will change. Oh and i live in the US, and still share

[a n n e x i a]

Originally posted by Mel_Smiley
Keyword- world
the RIAA can't run the whole world. The good old USA is screwed though

this is sooo right

The terms "legal" and "illegal" are soo subjective; laws are very different in each country, i dont see a world wide internet law in the near future, its almost imposible, so the RIAA can only expand its wings over the USA, which means the downloading of music wont stop, therefore p2p wont be extinct.

I would like to know: are there any world wide copyright laws? are there any digital world wide laws?

[CaptainMorgan]

Originally posted by a n n e x i a
I would like to know: are there any world wide copyright laws? are there any digital world wide laws?

Where is no world wide govenment, hense, no world wide laws. IMHO this is a good thing.

Their are treaties however. Most of the countries we post from here are parties to the WIPO treaty (http://www.wipo.org/). In the U.S. the DMCA was passed to impliment the WIPO treaty. I don't know the name of any other countries implementations.

[shawners]

Our freedom ends when we hurt others. But we could hurt them as far as they hurt us. We are the consumers, if you cheat them your cheating your fans as well as millions of people who sale, distribute your work.
AS i see it, the musicians have freedom to snork coke, not go to jail, have sex with a minor being taped, shootout in new york city, west coast, east coast crap. The right to record vulgar, hateing statments.. THEY get to have freedom of speech, but suddenly our freedom to have music that one can afford ends all of suddenly. I wont feel bad if recording companies SPEND millions on the works of an album by paying millions just to the producer, band, recording studio, limo, assitence, IF They cant budget themselfs, all i see is ENRON.
My blank media i buy goes directly to the people who made the disc, and the recording studio gets a deal out of it.
Not saying all artist are bad, just alot of artist know how to stay out of the media so who knows what alot of bands do. Do recording companies give these people DRUG test? Help them with accepting fame, and dealing with stress? They employ the artist, but they can not show up to a gig cause their strung out, they can be late producing an album, they can take the stage late. But suddenly if i want to listen to an album in the entirety before buying it, or having the power to delete it.. ALL of sudden my right as a consumer is gone. If they develope a better pay service i would honestly buy music, but when artist put intros on to cd's.. If you want that 40 second clip, it may be a dollar.

[jonnymnemonic]

You still have and always WILL have freedom to help yourself to free music. You just have to create it yourself. No one can take that away for us. You just don't have freedom to take OTHER peoples' music. So, become a musician, make your own, give it away to others! Nobody will stop you from doing that, nobody CAN stop you from doing that, and nobody even wants to stop you from doing that.

Ah, but you don't wish to make music? Why not? No talent? No time? Well, there ya go, that's what you pay the people who do make music for - their talent and their time. You have the freedom to charge for your talent and time or give it away. Shouldn't everyone have that same freedom?

Freedom of speech is in no way related to any mythical freedom to take the fruits of other peoples' labor (thereby denying them the freedom to charge for it if they wish to do so). Freedom is a two-edged blade. It's hypocritical to whine that your freedoms are being removed while advocating the removal of the freedoms of others.

[Lord_of_the_Dense]

No talent? No time? Well, there ya go

Hear, hear!

[Empire]

Originally posted by notbob
"Ah, but you don't wish to make music? Why not? No talent? No time? Well, there ya go, that's what you pay the people who do make music for - their talent and their time. You have the freedom to charge for your talent and time or give it away. Shouldn't everyone have that same freedom?"

i can listen to a song on the radio for free, learn how to play it, and play it live and charge people for it

is it illegal? no. is it dishonest? no. do i have to say where it came from as long as i don't say it's mine? no.

so then why can't i upload it for free to a few friends? the original artist made 0 on the radio airplay, and 80 cents a disc on cd sales

the odds of anyone becoming a million dollar musician are about the same as becoming a professional baseball player, only with less strenuous work

most people have enough sense to realize that a career in music is a dead end (unless you sell out and become a record exec like sonny bono or cary sherman) Actually, if you play someone else's song for money, you owe them performance royalties. That's the god honest truth.

In my opinion, making people pay performance royalties if they share a song seems reasonable to me, not 150,000 per.

In merry old England people stopped convicting people for stealing because the penalty was death. When the punishments are too harsh, juries won't go a long with it.

[mr-g]

Empire said - The people who will pay the worst penalties are the ones who will be sued after the RIAA ramps up into full power juggernaut mode. After they work the kinks out, and take off the kid gloves. They are just waiting to see what public opinion is. Public opinion won't give a shit. People have a lot more to worry about than "record pirates" getting sued and/or going to jail. If you get busted, no one is going to care and the public is notoriously unsympathetic to each other.
___________________________________________

Exactly. Ask the countless people that sat in prison for 5 to 10 years back in the 60's or 70's for having one lousy joint, or arrested for protesting a war they didn't believe in? Or people like Reuben "Hurricane" Carter accused of a murder they didn't commit? The general public had no interest, let alone sympathy for them. Do you really think the average person these days will take time out from polishing the chrome on their Hummer or BMW to worry about someone in jail for sharing music on p2p?

[aqlo]

Empire's right, if i go down to the corner bar and pretend that drums are an instrument and we play desperado* there's a couple of miniscule payments that have to go out.

*and there's a cover-charge and/or checks and/or name advertising and/or a dozen other loopholes, this doesn't really happen as often as the law would like

[Empire]

Originally posted by notbob
"Ah, but you don't wish to make music? Why not? No talent? No time? Well, there ya go, that's what you pay the people who do make music for - their talent and their time. You have the freedom to charge for your talent and time or give it away. Shouldn't everyone have that same freedom?"

i can listen to a song on the radio for free, learn how to play it, and play it live and charge people for it

is it illegal? no. is it dishonest? no. do i have to say where it came from as long as i don't say it's mine? no.

so then why can't i upload it for free to a few friends? the original artist made 0 on the radio airplay, and 80 cents a disc on cd sales

the odds of anyone becoming a million dollar musician are about the same as becoming a professional baseball player, only with less strenuous work

most people have enough sense to realize that a career in music is a dead end (unless you sell out and become a record exec like sonny bono or cary sherman)
I am a songwriter and have written some very good stuff. Stuff that brought people to tears. However, once I encountered the real facts about the music industry (In Los Angeles), the fact that is was mostly people wanting to party, get high and fuck everthing that moves: an orgy of hedonism I quit. I wasn't interested in all that. I was in it for the music. I was pretty timid back then and probably would not have survived the actual business side of the music world anyway. If I pursued it, I probably could have gotten one or two songs published and done by other artists but I found another talent, software and pursued that.

My entire financial existence depends on copyrights and intellectual property, but, I recognize the writing on the wall.

The main problem with copy protection, for software, is that customers don't like it. If they were no competition, people would be forced to accept copy protection but as it is, if you copy protect your software, a competitor who doesn't gets more market penetration via bootlegs and ends up selling more legitimate product than you ANYWAY. So its actually a competitive advantage to not charge everyone; to allow a little bit of bootlegging.

When I first started programming in the early 80's no one I knew could afford the compilers available then and we all used bootlegs we'd copied from where we worked as programmers.

Only when Borland came out with 99.00 Turbo C, or was it 49.95? Were we able to afford out own legitimate copy.

All this is to say that even though my livelihood depends on copyrights, I am moving away from that dependency. System maintainence, free software, shareware and software that depends on a non bootleggable components seems to be the only way to make a living on intellectual property now. I'm not moaning about it but getting busy trying to solve the situation.

An example is Everquest, an online multiplayer game that you MUST pay for. There is no way to bootleg it and still play. It depends on connection to servers where other players participate. That is a component that you cannot bootleg so they effectively have copy protection. Sure, you can make copies of the software but they are useless without the community of other players.

[Empire]

Originally posted by jonnymnemonic
They release all their music, free, on p2p networks, at 64kbps mp3s. That lets the listening public get an idea of how the music sounds when they hear it in higher quality form. The try-before-you-buy concept. They do not release recorded music AT ALL, EVER, and instead jack ticket prices for live shows up around 300 percent or 500 percent, and make sure that no one enters the venue with an electronic device of any kind.

I wonder how that business model would work. True, people wouldn't have much access to new music EXCEPT at live shows, but they'd still have access to all OLDER music like they do today.

It would be an interesting experiment, at the very least. It wouldn't work for studio musicians, of course, but it might kick some ass for touring musicians. If recorded music became unprofitable it would open up a whole new area of opportunity for live music. Many more musicians could make a living playing real, live music instead of just the few superstars taking all the money by their recorded music.

If there were no NEW recorded music coming out, people would have to go out to clubs to hear new music.

The problem here is, people would make recordings of the live music anyway, and recording technology, getting better and smaller all the time, would be unstoppable.

There might be a way for musicians to broadcast some sort of jamming signal that the ear doesn't hear, but recorders pick up and make audible that would ruin any recordings made.

Some people think RAP music is that already.

[Theinfamousone]

Originally posted by aqlo
Drei I agree with you 100% that there's no wall they can build that we can't breach. Lot of projects at sourceforge for new p2ps to do just what you are describing. Perfectly logical to expect this from hackware like k-lite and "tom" also. But there's a problem you aren't thinking of.

All our content came from Kazaa and Napster! Millions of people shared content and we got it and were glad to have it and spread it on. Simple programs they were, commercially backed and you didn't have to be 1337² just to find them and use them.

If p2p is limited to people who know steganography isn't the science of drawing spiky dinosaurs then how many files are we going to be able to find?

Who will share every album they play and every mp3 they download in a geometric curve like we need if Kazaa dies?

It all depends on networking speed. If high speed ISPs are increasing upload bandwidth, with less users, we can transfer more files with less sources. If everyone has a 1Mbit upload, a private DC hub would satisfy our needs easily.

[shawners]

Put it this way, you either download or you dont. You share or you dont, your WITH Us or against us. No ways about it, the industry says, as long as you share ONE Mp3 your going to be fined and sentenced to jail and your still a PIRATE!. I never wanted to be a musician, or had the desire and yes talent to make music. But if i did make music, the industry still has a problem with promoting new bands and signing new bands. Until they realise theirs plenty of people that are willing to make music to be heard and have a lifestyle to not care about how much music we download. Their still making millions.

[Brycen257]

You can argue for or against the concept of file sharing being illegal, immoral, fattening or mind bending all day and it really won't change a thing. I could really care less whether it is strictly legal or not because I know that all too often what is legal simply depnds on the view of those in power. Many things that were once illegal are now legal (ie alcohol) and some things like pot which are illegal in one country are legal in another. So what does "legality" really mean anyway.Its an empty and worthless concept.

Likewise the whole idea of what is moral or ethical or just depends on your point of view which is shaped by your beliefs, your religion, your background, your peers, family etc. I have my ideas of what is moral and what is not but i recognize others may disagree with them and they are free to do so.

The bottom line is that i believe like most people here do that the RIAA and other music organizations are completely crooked and corrupt organizations that have shafted the public and given us inflated prices, mindless, copycat, cheap trash music and have consistently opposed all efforts by music lovers to obtain a worthwhile product at an affordable price. I don't believe that this is an unobtainable goal and will keep fighting for it.

In addition, most people, including myself will keep downloading files off the internet for as long as they continue to be available . I enjoy the diversity of movies, music and games that I am able to enjoy by downloading from the internet and have no intention of stopping this voluntarily. No one knows if we will be able to do this indefinitely , but I for one will enjoy it and share my files for as long as I can . Long live file sharing and death to the RIAA and their lackeys !!!!!!!!

[Lamourlady]

whatever........:mellow

[NDGAARONDI]

Originally posted by aqlo
They need some damn laws like we got down here. That's where foreigners come from you know, other countries.


Wow, I learnt something there.

[crackerjacker]

i am living in a dream world
where schemes come and go
do they grow on me?
that i tell you i dont know
------------------------------------------
but really piracy is piracy, file sharing is filesharing. people have many names for it. but what it comes down to honestly is u are responsible for your own actions.

[aqlo]

Wow, I learnt something there. Glad to be of assistance

For the rest, anyone who sees a quote out of context and thinks I disrespect say Canadians, should ask Hunter and Cheap Prick and Crazy Horse who I respect. The fact is that, if required for a "snap judgement", I respect Canadians more than my fellow Americans. In my experience they place a greater value on money, can do math in their heads, and are better looking on the average.

Is my experience limited? Yes.

And at the point where I parroted that attitude to show how ridiculous it was it had been limited for several days in a "Ten Commandments" thread which I think turned out quite well.

[Redneck4sure]

Empire said, "I am a songwriter and have written some very good stuff. Stuff that brought people to tears."
I know how you feel. I am a singer. My singing will bring you to tears also. My family cries at my every attempt.:shy

[jonnymnemonic]

Personally, I share only that which I have created myself (no one can ever argue with that), and I download my ass off. I figure it the producers of what I download are losing the freedom to price their stuff as they see fit, well, it isn't ME taking that freedom from them. I personally believe in freedom, freedom for producers to set prices, freedom for consumers to accept or reject the products based on price. I wouldn't want EITHER freedom removed from either segment of the population. Freedom is good.

Assuredly, lots of people have lost money because I was able to download stuff for free, but it wasn't because I downloaded it, it was because someone else LET me download it. Ergo, I am not taking anyone's freedom from them - someone else is. This allows me to feel fairly moral when I lay down to sleep each night.

Damn, I just morally rationalized my downloading AND my leeching; I'm good! ;)

[Lucian]

There is no way that governments are going to wipe out trillions of dollars of intellectual property value by making music and movie file sharing legal. Those that continue to use wide open p2p programs will be caught and penalized.


Yes just like when Alcohol was illegal.


The only things that I foresee in the p2p future are:

1) Stop sharing music, and other copyrighted files.
2) Use p2p apps that hide your ip address and protect your identity or use networks that hide your identify (free, anonymous wireless networks).
3) Get sued and be too broke so that you end up as number one anyway.
4) Go to jail (in countries where p2p carries criminal penalties)
5) Online file shopping makes enough money for the RIAA artists that there comes to exist a stalemate where file sharing is still illegal, but RIAA artists are making enough money to be happy.


Yes and when Alcohol was illegal, there were plenty of criminals selling Alcohol illegally. Nothing new here.


Five, while possible, is highly unlikely. Why? Because to those people, there is NEVER enough money. They are going to want their last drop of blood no matter what. The only reason they permitted copying via tape from the radio all these years was because that probably did more to spread new artists that it did to damage sales.


You are right, but those people are also limited in power by the very money they wish to protect. We stop buying their products, their money goes down and so does their power, when we no longer buy the government wont get tax dollars from our purchases and will have to make P2P legal so they can tax things like CDRWs and other things to make up for the losses.

[Lucian]

but RIAA artists are making enough money to be happy.

By the way, RIAA artists will not make a dime and will not be happy under the RIAA.

RIAA artists done make a dime from CD sales, what makes you think they will make a dime literally from Mp3 sales? Are you crazy?

[eivioolla]

Originally posted by jonnymnemonic
Personally, I share only that which I have created myself (no one can ever argue with that), and I download my ass off. I figure it the producers of what I download are losing the freedom to price their stuff as they see fit, well, it isn't ME taking that freedom from them. I personally believe in freedom, freedom for producers to set prices, freedom for consumers to accept or reject the products based on price. I wouldn't want EITHER freedom removed from either segment of the population. Freedom is good.

Assuredly, lots of people have lost money because I was able to download stuff for free, but it wasn't because I downloaded it, it was because someone else LET me download it. Ergo, I am not taking anyone's freedom from them - someone else is. This allows me to feel fairly moral when I lay down to sleep each night.

Damn, I just morally rationalized my downloading AND my leeching; I'm good! ;)

Yes you are a leecher, but I wouldn't call that poor excuse rational. And what is this freedom bullshit, file sharing doesn't remove anyone's freedom to price their product, it simply adds a choice of a cheap copy instead of expensive original. Anyone is still free to price their products as they see fit.

Oh btw, that reasoning you used to push DRM somewhere (didn't bother to comment on it there) was simply hilarious. Something about digital libraries and how "DRM" would make all stuff available for free and what not. Puh-lease. If content owners would have total control over their works you would not see another free bit in the rest of your life. Piratism is the only thing that keeps product prices even remotely reasonable, content owners can say what they want.

[BigFatLazyAss]

Gosh, so many postings .... and not enough time. It is wonderful we are talking here on this subject. That is one reason why I am a Zeropaid member. Have not had time to read all the info and digest all your thoughts. Yet!

I did have a thought that may not have been mentioned yet; A BrainFart, if you will.

You know the record industry does have another option to take ...... adding ads imbedded into the song. You buy the song, hear the music ..... then you put it on KaZzA to share .... Your friends online download the song & they get : "This song is brought to you by Coke-a Cola !!!"

Think about it; Advertizing had gotten most of us free stuff because people get paid. Yea, I know most won't like it. You most likely would (if you are a hacker type) try to separate the ad from the song .... but takes work. So in order to keep from having to listen to ads .... you buy the album. But only if it is a keeper.

The only reason they are coming down so hard on filesharers is because they are frustrated on how to control something that has gotten out of control. 30 to 40 years ago, we shared albums and singles with our friends..... cassettes made it easier to copy & share ...... filesharing has made it where it is easier and almost as good as buying the CD. In someways, filesharing is better than the turntable and LP's. So good quality, easier ... and not a legal alternative, CD's high price ... filesharing became a monster. People in countries that have no record store can get anything they want by filesharing. There is still no alternative yet to match filesharing.

At best, the record companies can do with the strategy they are trying now will be like the Government is on drugs .... make it known that what you are doing is illegal, and busting 1% of those who do it. Scare tactics work to some degree. The record companies are trying different ways to stop the proliferation of filesharing. One day they will find a common ground with the filesharing community and things will get better.

I would rather have ads than be sued. I would rather have ads than have my rights trampled on. And as Bob Dylan sung: "The Times They are A-Changing" ..... So, if the record companies stay with this practice of suing fileshares, you will get used to it, you will become more careful and go underground a bit more. Did people stop smoking pot because some got busted??
:fire Big & Fat

[jonnymnemonic]

Once someone else can arbitrarily take a person's product and set THEIR price on it, then the producer has lost the freedom to price his product. At best, that freedom has become ephemeral, an illusion.

For example, let's say you have the right to free speech. But I can arbitrarily limit your speech at any time, without you being able to invoke your right or have any say in the matter. You can still talk, but *I* control whether anyone hears you. Do you still have that freedom then? Sure, but only on paper - e.g. only until *I* (or someone else) decides to limit it. Nice freedom.

So yes, we ARE removing the freedom of the artists to price their works as they see fit. If you can ignore that price at your whim, the freedom has become meaningless. Perhaps technically it still exists, but realistically it is gone.

However, I don't consider it very "generous" to "share" what other people have created. If I take my grandma's car and "share" it without her consent with my friends, am I generous? No. Grandma is, involuntarily, but *I* am not. In effect, I am FORCING grandma to be generous. She has lost all choice in the matter.

On the other hand, when I share something *I* have created, and do so for free, that really DOES seem generous. Any untalented bozo can "share" what other people make, obviously. (Not that I say I'm all that talented, mind you.) But sharing what cost YOU time and effort (and sometimes skill) to create - that is the true epitome of generosity. It just so happens that I would like to reserve for myself the freedom to decide whether I am generous or not and, if so, by how much, and I don't really need or want anyone making such decisions for me.

Those who would take freedoms from me, by making decisions FOR me that I am entirely capable of making myself, well, I call them dictators. When I was younger I called them "parents". I'm too old to need parents now. I can make my own decisions. If I chose to give away what I create for free, well, I want THAT freedom too, to be sure. That is, of course, a subset of the overall freedom to price as I see fit, and I avail myself of it now.

(Side note: And of course I am for DRM. I don't see legal network loans ever happening without some way to at least sorta-kinda ensure it IS a loan, not a copy. I have 10,000 legal songs. At any one time I can listen to one song. Thus, the ability to listen to the other 9,999, which I would glady gift to anyone if I could, lies dormant. So, I use what I have paid for with 0.01 percent efficiency. That business model (the 10,000 licenses for one user model) is really the major impediment. Multiply license-efficiency worldwide (with a super-library) by 10,000 and you have something astounding, and legal, with no fakes, blips or bleeps. You'd be an idiot NOT to want that, unless you have nothing you'd share in that scenario. Even then, you could just leech off the library without ever contributing anything to it. Personally, I wouldn't care who was accessing my songs/books/movies or whether they were contributing anything themselves. That's probably true of most people.)

[charmed31]

But let me ask you this, theoretically. The songwriter dude on the filesharing special on techtv friday night made a point."If you take something that does not belong to you without permission, it is stealing." I think i paraphrased a little. OK, so I pay for the album. I put it on my hard drive for personal use. which is legal. then since i own it, i choose to give others permission to copy a few songs. is this illegal? i own it. it is now my personal copy. see how the lines blur? but it all gets down to the riaa. They lost control. they don't like it. they can;t fight the retort of "the artist esn't receiving diddly squat from the sales of albums." they can't say yes they are. in the end, it comes down to, they didn't think of a paid version of napster, etc, until it was already out there for free. and after watching the music wars special, and listening to what they had to say about the consumer, i realized they have no respect at all for us. and i have tried all along to see both sides. it comes on again at 9 pm eastern on tech tv, unless they change the schedule. it was worth the time.

[jonnymnemonic]

It is illegal. It is, however, legal to LOAN them the songs (e.g., while they have the ability to listen to them, you do not). This is the basis for libraries across the world. My super-library concept would simply extend the loaning process across networks. The big impediment to loaning NOW is that it must be done face-to-face, which really sucks in this day and age.

Take every CD and book and movie ever sold and (via) DRM put them in one giant data center with massive bandwidth, and let people check them in and out. How many CDs would be in that library? Billions, probably dozens of billions, just of music. Plus books, plus movies, plus software applications. (It is perfectly legal for me to loan someone my copy of Office if I am not using it.)

Any book or CD (or book, or application, or movie)which has sold 50,000 copies would never be sold again, because that many copies would satisfy the entire planetary population. (Yes, I realizing that that would piss off the music industry, but how could they argue with it? Loaning of what you have purchased has been a part of property rights for ages, and because it is an entirely reasonable right, it cannot really be argued against. Although I'm sure they would try.)

[Afn]

Originally posted by Empire
Then you didn't read anything new.

http://www.nonesuch.org/p2prevolution.pdf

That article doesn't contradict anything I wrote.

He is basically saying that number 5, an uneasy peace will exist between p2p and copyright holders if the copyright holders find a way to make money without prosecuting people.

I do have a few disagreements, for the purpose of discussion.

1) He mentions that product placements in movies are a great idea for advertisers. I agree, but I don't see that as a feasible method for songs. How do you put a product placement in a song without ruining the song? "Stairway to Macys"?

I have always considered television shows, "advertisements for the advertisements". 2) In other words, television shows aren't art, they are just there to attract you to watch the advertisements and then the advertisments attract you to buy the product. If the creator of a television show must cater to the sponsor's whims, it limits what can be expressed and its value as art is greatly diminshed.

3) The law will be hard to change. First all all, copyrights are embedded in many countries' constitutions. Those cannot be changed without extreme measures like 2/3 vote in the United States as an example. If they wouldn't vote to give women equality, why do you think they'll change copyrights?

4) Second, loosening up copyrights would potentially wipe out trillions of dollars of intellectual property. This would be called communism. It would be like tell you that you must share your car or house or apartment with anyone who asks, like, if you aren't using it, you have to let someone else use it. After all, if you aren't using it, it isn't stealing from you to let someone else use it.

5) Now, I understand that circumstances may make copyright law inneffective and unenforceable, but someone making copies would still be breaking the civil copyright law.

6) All his ideas are good, except the major flaw is, the copyright holders can implement his ideas and STILL make money by holding hard to their copyrights and sueing people. He considers that if studio A offers a movie for free, studio B who charges will not be able to compete.

This logic works for software. If there are several software products that will get a job done, people will stay away from the hassle that a copy protected piece of software has.

But I'm not sure it will work with movies and songs. There is NO substitute for an artist that someone likes. If you have to pay to listen to Eminem, hearing Snoop for free isn't going to satisfy you.

If you have a popular artist, there IS no competition and free songs that are not that artist, won't satisfy the fans.

There is also a flaw in his logic about the FAST TCP/IP algorithm. This algorithm can speed up data transfer, but it still cannot go faster than the media you have coming into your house. We have the technology to go to them moon, 5) but very few people can afford it.

He also has a flaw in his logic that p2p network is necessary for people to distrubute their creations and not suffer bandwidth problems, i.e. bittorrent style solutions. Anyone can get a cheap website with lots of bandwidth at a co-hosting center. You don't need a high speed connection into your house to have high bandwidth distribution capabilities.

7) The P2P revolution wasn't about P2P. Peer to Peer has been around since Windows machines hit the Internet and before. Windows file sharing has always been available to share anything on your hard drive with anyone else. The big revolution was the global library that made locating what you wanted easy. It was the ability to locate things that made the revolution, not the ability to download from and share to each other. The very heart of the Internet is P2P and from its very beginning, TCP/IP broke the mold with older client/server systems and made EVERY machine on the TCP/IP network an equal peer. This is technology that goes back to the early 70s.

P2P isn't new. What is new is that is was made useable by non-experts.

A lot of people harken back to the good old Napster days when you could find what you wanted and Napster was reliable. That's because Napster was Client/Server. The database was centralized and thus reliable. Bittorrent style distribution is inherently unreliable and will not beat out a centralized method. It depends on flaky users who have no commitment to distribute, but only to download. Sharing is secondary to them. They just want their stuff no w. If you allow ANY user to be part of the distribution chain, I can guarantee you someone will find a way to insert a virus into what is being distrubuted and a meta virus that infects ALL bittorrent style downloads. No, the distributor must exercise absolute control over his commodity

8) The reason the Web took off is because it was simple. Programmers love to complicate things. They'll spend weeks to save seconds just because it's a "neat" idea. But the users that want the services often don't give a shit. There are many superior p2p services to Kazaa, but the vast majority of people use Kazaa, why?

9) P2P as we know it has specific purposes. It allows people to share files and other people to locate and download those files. We are talking about "common" people now, not corporations or people who can afford websites. Trying to make P2P scale to be the equivalent of an online Yahoo is silly. The web as it is works fine. 10) There is no reason to replace that. Lots of fads come and go. Where is AI? Where is "push technology"? Where is biometrics? Where are 3D virtual reality helmets and gloves?

A lot of techologies sound excited but the crash for various reasons.

Great thread, and and now I will make some incontext points. As a general response to Empire, I too have thought much of the future of IP. I will leave you with this statement, and then rip through some of the arguments made. With all great threads that are long, there is a limit to how many posts you can read.

"The excesses of one generation are corrected in the next generation, the excesses in one century are corrected in the next century."- Afn


1 and 2) Television is a one to many medium, ever since comerical radio in the 1940's, there has always been a connection between program content, and advertiser dollars. The difference between the 1940's and today is the FCC was very clear as to what was community service and what was paid advertising. Today, the rules are all controlled by business interests with token respect for community.

3) The isssue is this, can I control distribution of what I create for 'tribute' ?

We now have technology that if you leave it on 24/7, you can download more video, audio and text than you could view in one or two years.

Before p2p, broadcasters had the audience, movies on vhs had the audiance. Now it is ANYONE, ANYWHERE can create an audience for ANY PURPOSE.

So now that the world is on a single media channel or 'feed' I do not see how the content industries will be able to compete with the meta-feed of p2p.

4) Content industries may go bankrupt, and millions with out the income to support a family or create wealth, Well welcome to the world, Hollywood!

5-10) Intelectual property is dead in the age of always on net connections. We are going from a few providers of information to Millions and soon Billions of providers. There will be a few businesses that make money selling pre-purchased information.

Most information will be free, and systems will allow you to get information without commerical intrusion for the most part. There will still be fads, and new technology, but as far as the traditional communications businesses are concerned, will be wiped out.

P2P and the WEB are about decentralized control of information, meaning, you can not control who has the message and who does not. So all systems based around information control will fail.

I often think, what would happen IF the soviet union, linked computers together and had created the first "ussr-net"?

So even if you can control distribution of information, and even if you can find an audience, now that the web makes information so cheap to produce and in such volume that only few well organized corporations can make a profit from it, you still have the central problem of all of the content that is available that no one owns and still has value and hold's people's time and attention.

The day I find a girlfriend, I think I will NOT be spending my time on p2p and the WEB, and somday (soon!!) when I get married and have kids, I will spend more time with my KIDS than pre-recorded media.

Unless you can create a full employment society, you can say goodby to pre-paid and controlled forms of information distribution.

Long term, what do you do when money has no value?

:)

[jonnymnemonic]

You make me think more than many people do.

I can't really argue too vehemently against what you say. You could be right, you could be wrong. The future is too amorphous in these changing times for me to say one way or the other with any degree of reliability.

Still, there will always be SOME measure of control, unless and until society can FORCE creators to create and give away their work. What Paul Atreides said in Dune still rings true to me: "The people who can destroy a thing, they control it". Any work that is either not created at all, or is not given to *anyone* is effectively destroyed.

What may happen is that that VERY FIRST copy of anything important will become extraordinarily expensive. And if no one will pay that price, then it will be destroyed. For example, a great writer writes a book. In that writer's presence, people read that book and say, "Oh my God, that is quite simply one of the best books ever written". The author says, :"You may take it with you, for $150,000. It took me three years to write, that provides me a middle class salary and I can send my children to college."

Would someone buy it? Perhaps. There is value in being the ONLY owner of something, after all, even if the buyer can't figure out how to market it to consumers in general. Hell, for a big collector, such a work by a prominent author could easily be worth much more than that. Some collector's item caliber books sell for many hundreds of thousands of dollars today. What makes them valluable is more that no one else has them than the words on the pages, really.

Perhaps that's where it will all end, with the very rich having access to anything that is culturally a "great work", thereby allowing the creators to exist and make a living doing what they do best. True, the consumer wouldn't have easy (or any) access in that scenario, but when you get down to the nitty gritty, your average creator cares more that he gets to create and gets paid for it than he cares about the numerical count of who gets access.

And of course, the buyer could perhaps find some way to market what he purchased to the public, if he so chooses to do so. It would at least be an option. If enough people tried and failed, then obviously these rich folks would simply stop trying, but perhaps they could find a way. If not, then so be it, they go thru life as the ONLY owner of "product X" and can trade it for other similar items from other wealthy people.

[Afn]

Originally posted by jonnymnemonic
You make me think more than many people do.

I can't really argue too vehemently against what you say. You could be right, you could be wrong. The future is too amorphous in these changing times for me to say one way or the other with any degree of reliability.

Still, there will always be SOME measure of control, unless and until society can FORCE creators to create and give away their work. What Paul Atreides said in Dune still rings true to me: "The people who can destroy a thing, they control it". Any work that is either not created at all, or is not given to *anyone* is effectively destroyed.

1) What may happen is that that VERY FIRST copy of anything important will become extraordinarily expensive. And if no one will pay that price, then it will be destroyed. For example, a great writer writes a book. In that writer's presence, people read that book and say, "Oh my God, that is quite simply one of the best books ever written". The author says, :"You may take it with you, for $150,000. It took me three years to write, that provides me a middle class salary and I can send my children to college."

Would someone buy it? Perhaps. There is value in being the ONLY owner of something, after all, even if the buyer can't figure out how to market it to consumers in general. Hell, for a big collector, such a work by a prominent author could easily be worth much more than that. Some collector's item caliber books sell for many hundreds of thousands of dollars today.2) What makes them valluable is more that no one else has them than the words on the pages, really.

Perhaps that's where it will all end, with the 3) very rich having access to anything that is culturally a "great work", thereby allowing the creators to exist and make a living doing what they do best. True, the consumer wouldn't have easy (or any) access in that scenario, but when you get down to the nitty gritty, your average creator cares more that he gets to create and gets paid for it than he cares about the numerical count of who gets access.

And of course, the buyer could perhaps find some way to market what he purchased to the public, if he so chooses to do so. It would at least be an option. If enough people tried and failed, then obviously these rich folks would simply stop trying, but perhaps they could find a way. If not, then so be it, they go thru life as the ONLY owner of "product X" and can trade it for other similar items from other wealthy people.

Thanks, Yes I am smarter than the average bear. Nice to know my spatterings of thought are liked.

1) Since all info will be digital, and 'windows to exibition will be closed', meaning you can sell it as film tickets, then dvd, then broadcast, then cable brodcast... ect... Since all products produced in the future will be digital, and the public will not buy into dongle technology, nor shoud they, the quality of any release will be the same.

What will have value, will be the first draft, the personal diaries, ect. Then again, once you sell your diary on your pda to one person, that person could then put it on p2p.

But the first draft of a work, or work in progress, will have value.

The work iself, because of it being digtal, may not have value becase of the 1:1 copying possible with no data loss.


2) if they are of value, academically, then they will be purchased by museums and other 'institutional' buyers. Most people will never have a chance of owning a copy of one of the orgininal gutenburg bibles. In theory, everyone can see the work in it's original form thanks to digital. The question is, would you want to?

3) " very rich having access to anything " ... you said enough. Let me finish... AND the very poor access to nothing.

Wow, that is our society, in one sentence.

So the question is, if we have technology that lets a wealthy man or woman acess to any information they want or have a desire to view, yet the average citizen or member of the underclass is prevented from access is systemically wrong, and historically, is the precursor to radical change.

The British are coming!
The British are coming!
The copyright holders are coming!
The copyright holders are coming!

[jonnymnemonic]

The more I think about that idea, the more interesting it becomes. I can almost envision a plot-line for a story for the concept.

Let's say that the very first copy for artistic works DOES become really expensive, and there are bidding wars among the wealthy. Then these people get together and form something like "The Only Consortium". To join you must have 100 onlies. And as a group, they hire an independent reviewer to look over new applicants' "only" collection - works that exist as the sole copy. If they're 100 CRAPPY "onlies", well, sorry bud, keep trying, get more, get BETTER, then apply again.

Once you DO join, then you can swap "onlies" with other members. Both members must be in the same room, to verify no copying occurs, of either one of their works. They all sign some ironclad contract whereby they essentially lose everything they own if they are found to have copied anything.

Then artists give away their stuff as they develop their skills. Like J.K. Rowling gives away her five first books, the audience becomes huge, but the 6th, and 7th, and anything else, they go up for auction as "onlies". Some rich guy spends a million or ten and buys the 6th book, then lets the guy with the newest Stephen King book read it while he reads the Stephen King book. You get the idea. They Only Consortium has a large library of works that exist nowhere else, that they all share among themselves (and with no one else).

The consumers get access to TONS of stuff for free though - the stuff done in the youth of peoples' careers, while they prove they ARE great (or fail to do so), but only (pun intended) the Only Consortium has access to the works created AFTER the artists has mastered his skill, and they of course pay a steep price for their priveledged access.

Gotta admit, that makes for an interesting plotline for a story! (And, for what it's worth, I hereby reserve the rights to exploit that plotline as best I can. Lol)

[Afn]

Originally posted by jonnymnemonic
The more I think about that idea, the more interesting it becomes. I can almost envision a plot-line for a story for the concept.

Let's say that the very first copy for artistic works DOES become really expensive, and there are bidding wars among the wealthy. Then these people get together and form something like "The Only Consortium". To join you must have 100 onlies. And as a group, they hire an independent reviewer to look over new applicants' "only" collection - works that exist as the sole copy. If they're 100 CRAPPY "onlies", well, sorry bud, keep trying, get more, get BETTER, then apply again.

Once you DO join, then you can swap "onlies" with other members. Both members must be in the same room, to verify no copying occurs, of either one of their works. They all sign some ironclad contract whereby they essentially lose everything they own if they are found to have copied anything.

Then artists give away their stuff as they develop their skills. Like J.K. Rowling gives away her five first books, the audience becomes huge, but the 6th, and 7th, and anything else, they go up for auction as "onlies". Some rich guy spends a million or ten and buys the 6th book, then lets the guy with the newest Stephen King book read it while he reads the Stephen King book. You get the idea. They Only Consortium has a large library of works that exist nowhere else, that they all share among themselves (and with no one else).

The consumers get access to TONS of stuff for free though - the stuff done in the youth of peoples' careers, while they prove they ARE great (or fail to do so), but only (pun intended) the Only Consortium has access to the works created AFTER the artists has mastered his skill, and they of course pay a steep price for their priveledged access.

Gotta admit, that makes for an interesting plotline for a story! (And, for what it's worth, I hereby reserve the rights to exploit that plotline as best I can. Lol)

Stephen King may be on to something with his, book by chapter give-away. My take is, yes it would work, but he did not want to piss away his relationship to his book publishers<a href="http://slashdot.org/features/00/11/30/1238204.shtml"> story here.</a>.

My line of thought is that the J.K. Rowling's of the future may be few and far between. Like today, we never know when an artist goes hot, or supernova. We all know of people who wrote one hot book, then faded in public memory.

There will be the need to educate, move, physical stuff from place to place, and perhaps a few people will still work for the post office, since most retail will be automated and virtual.

Other than that, I think it will be a very unequal world.

[eivioolla]

Originally posted by jonnymnemonic
Once someone else can arbitrarily take a person's product and set THEIR price on it, then the producer has lost the freedom to price his product. At best, that freedom has become ephemeral, an illusion.

For example, let's say you have the right to free speech. But I can arbitrarily limit your speech at any time, without you being able to invoke your right or have any say in the matter. You can still talk, but *I* control whether anyone hears you. Do you still have that freedom then? Sure, but only on paper - e.g. only until *I* (or someone else) decides to limit it. Nice freedom.

So yes, we ARE removing the freedom of the artists to price their works as they see fit. If you can ignore that price at your whim, the freedom has become meaningless. Perhaps technically it still exists, but realistically it is gone.

The problem with your analogies is that they are not analogous. No one controls artists and what price they tag on their products. Sure, putting unrealistic price (as they are doing) may not sell all too well, but they are still free to do so. Let's not forget that a lot of people still buy originals, and more would, if the prices were reasonable and the money would support the artist instead of the corporations. And even if it was about freedoms, then surely the freedoms of the majority should override the freedoms of the minority if such choice had to be made.



However, I don't consider it very "generous" to "share" what other people have created. If I take my grandma's car and "share" it without her consent with my friends, am I generous? No. Grandma is, involuntarily, but *I* am not. In effect, I am FORCING grandma to be generous. She has lost all choice in the matter.

That would, of course, be an awful thing to do. However, it has nothing to do with the subject. So let's say instead that you go to your grandma's, take a copy of her car and drive away with the copy. Your grandma still has complete control over her property, the car is in her disposal at any time. Unlike you try to present it, she has not lost anything and is not forced to do anything.

Any untalented bozo can "share" what other people make, obviously. (Not that I say I'm all that talented, mind you.)

Obviously not, you weren't sharing, remember?

(Side note: And of course I am for DRM. I don't see legal network loans ever happening without some way to at least sorta-kinda ensure it IS a loan, not a copy. I have 10,000 legal songs. At any one time I can listen to one song. Thus, the ability to listen to the other 9,999, which I would glady gift to anyone if I could, lies dormant. So, I use what I have paid for with 0.01 percent efficiency. That business model (the 10,000 licenses for one user model) is really the major impediment. Multiply license-efficiency worldwide (with a super-library) by 10,000 and you have something astounding, and legal, with no fakes, blips or bleeps. You'd be an idiot NOT to want that, unless you have nothing you'd share in that scenario. Even then, you could just leech off the library without ever contributing anything to it. Personally, I wouldn't care who was accessing my songs/books/movies or whether they were contributing anything themselves. That's probably true of most people.)

Your DRM propaganda is exactly how one would expect such technology being pushed to the public. I have to disagree with you though, you would be an idiot to accept a technology that gives someone else control what happens on your computer. The library example would never work. Given that the budget for libraries remains the same, there is no way they could provide enough copies for the public. You may already have to wait for months to get the publication you are looking for. Putting the material online would explode the usage of library services sky high. I don't use library that often, it's just too much effort to physically transport myself over there, but if it went online, then sure, I'd immediatly book everything I'd be interested in. The problem is, so would everyone else.

I have 10,000 legal songs. At any one time I can listen to one song. Thus, the ability to listen to the other 9,999, which I would glady gift to anyone if I could, lies dormant.


Are we not forgetting something here? Like the fact that if you borrow your CDs to a friend, then obviously you can't listen to them in the meanwhile. I don't know about you, but I'd be somewhat pissed if all my music would always be in someone else's use when I'd want to listen to it.

[jonnymnemonic]

Originally posted by eivioolla
The problem with your analogies is that they are not analogous. No one controls artists and what price they tag on their products. Sure, putting unrealistic price (as they are doing) may not sell all too well, but they are still free to do so.


No, they aren't free to price as they wish. If one can arbitrarily say "That is too high, I'm gonna take it, screw you" then that isn't a real freedom. Or at least, it has no teeth, and is therefore meaningless. Capitalism is founded on the principle that producers set prices, and consumers reject or accept them (with the caveat that if they reject, they also do not get the producer's product). These two freedoms are balanced against each other and in a free market, things that are priced too high don't get bought, reducing profits. Producers then juke around with prices until the price/number_sold maximizes their profits. Of course, the producers are free to give it away too, should they wish to do so - their choice. Notice I have not, and would not, ever advocate taking away the consumers freedom to accept or reject products (based on their price, or anything else for that matter). At the same time I do not advocate taking away the producers' freedom either. I'm an equal freedom kind of guy. You think CDs are too high? Don't buy em! Tada, capitalism in action. If no one buys em at $19, the price WILL drop. If no one will buy em for even $1 the price WILL drop from that level too.

Originally posted by eivioolla
[B]That would, of course, be an awful thing to do. However, it has nothing to do with the subject. So let's say instead that you go to your grandma's, take a copy of her car and drive away with the copy. Your grandma still has complete control over her property, the car is in her disposal at any time. Unlike you try to present it, she has not lost anything and is not forced to do anything.


Okay, let me rephrase - grandma spends five years and builds a really kickass self-replicating car. She tries to make a buck on it, because she was poor for those years, by selling people copies of her car (that's the cool thing about Grandma, she's good at making really innovative stuff like replicating cars). You then take one of the copies of her car and let your friends use it. So are you now generous? Grandma, the one who made it possible, didn't get any reward for her work, yet without her your friends would have nothing TO enjoy. Mighty generous of you to give away Grandma's work like that. Yeah, right. I bet you don't get any milk and cookies for a while if you screw Grandma like that!

Originally posted by eivioolla
Obviously not, you weren't sharing, remember?


Oh? Who said that? I said I was sharing what *I* spent time and effort to create. You seemed almost intelligent up to this point - but not being able to read gives you away, I am afraid.

Originally posted by eivioolla

Your DRM propaganda is exactly how one would expect such technology being pushed to the public. I have to disagree with you though, you would be an idiot to accept a technology that gives someone else control what happens on your computer. The library example would never work. Given that the budget for libraries remains the same, there is no way they could provide enough copies for the public. You may already have to wait for months to get the publication you are looking for. Putting the material online would explode the usage of library services sky high. I don't use library that often, it's just too much effort to physically transport myself over there, but if it went online, then sure, I'd immediatly book everything I'd be interested in. The problem is, so would everyone else.


You raise some good points. But you ignore the fact that *currently* libraries serve their *local* users ONLY. When you go into the library, how much do you see sitting there gathering dust compared to how much is checked out? MOST of EVERY library isn't used. But pool the monetary tax-dollar resources of 50,000 libraries and make them loanable online and you suddenly have the potential to optimize efficiency with undreamed-of scale. That book sitting on the shelf in THIS library, may be highly desired at that OTHER location. And no need to buy a copy of everything important for every library, because economy of scale would kick in along with the extra efficiency. And don't forget that, besides the works the *libraries* allow to be loaned, you'd also be able to access everything that *individuals* purchase if they wish to allow their purchases to be loaned. Now you've got 50,000 libraries and their tax dollars AND every purchaser in the world contributing, plus vastly increased efficiency.

While library useage *would* explode, the extra efficiency and the fact that the library contributions themselves are the most trivial part of the library would easily counter the demand. How many millions of Madonna CDs out there now? 50 million? 100 million? How many people listening to Madonna this moment? 50,000? Probably not even that. In other words, always available. We've *already* oversold pretty much everything - because the licenses people purchase gather dust 99+ percent of the time rather than seeing active use.

Originally posted by eivioolla
Are we not forgetting something here? Like the fact that if you borrow your CDs to a friend, then obviously you can't listen to them in the meanwhile. I don't know about you, but I'd be somewhat pissed if all my music would always be in someone else's use when I'd want to listen to it.

First off, if you buy something, you wouldn't HAVE to share it - make it available for loan. You could, it would be an option, one you currently do not have except face-to-face. However, in my case, I loan it all out, and I see that, say, the Phish It Festival music is all checked out. I, as the owner, issue a "license reclaim" and in five minutes it's there waiting for me. Even if it takes 30 minutes, so what? The things I always want to have available to me, the things I enjoy most, I simply would not make available for loan so that I would always have something waiting for my enjoyment. No big deal. If it's a big deal to you, then you just don't let others borrow your stuff. Personally, I'd be generous with what I buy, but not required.

[jonnymnemonic]

Sorry for the over-bolding, missed a /B somewhere in there I guess. Kinda easier to read anyway. ;)

[NDGAARONDI]

This thread is kinda getting a load of essay answers and it's huge lol

[eivioolla]

Originally posted by jonnymnemonic
No, they aren't free to price as they wish. If one can arbitrarily say "That is too high, I'm gonna take it, screw you" then that isn't a real freedom.

But they aren't taking *it*, but a copy. Most of still prefer original over copy, it's just a question whether it's worth the price.

Okay, let me rephrase - grandma spends five years and builds a really kickass self-replicating car. She tries to make a buck on it, because she was poor for those years, by selling people copies of her car (that's the cool thing about Grandma, she's good at making really innovative stuff like replicating cars). You then take one of the copies of her car and let your friends use it. So are you now generous? Grandma, the one who made it possible, didn't get any reward for her work, yet without her your friends would have nothing TO enjoy. Mighty generous of you to give away Grandma's work like that. Yeah, right. I bet you don't get any milk and cookies for a while if you screw Grandma like that!


Files are not self-replicating, but they are replicated. So let's refrase, say your grandma invented a technology to replicate physical objects. Should she have exclusive right to the use of that technology? This is a perfect example where, imho, the general good would and should bypass her rights on the technology, information is not property and we should not kid ourselves that it is.


Oh? Who said that? I said I was sharing what *I* spent time and effort to create. You seemed almost intelligent up to this point - but not being able to read gives you away, I am afraid.

Puhleaze... That has nothing to do with sharing. What I mean with sharing is fair game, you share what you download, you give what you take. Sharing is about taking care that you don't hurt the network but help it.

"I share only that which I have created myself (no one can ever argue with that), and I download my ass off."

So if I start my hex-editor and "create" say 50 gigs of data and share that, am I sharing? Sorry, but that's horse shit.

The same goes about sharing freeware/shareware and other shit. I mean who are you kidding, does it make you feel better that you pretend to share. Why the hell would anyone copy freeware off of unreliable p2p service when they can grap it from a fast mirror site near by.

You raise some good points. But you ignore the fact that *currently* libraries serve their *local* users ONLY. When you go into the library, how much do you see sitting there gathering dust compared to how much is checked out? MOST of EVERY library isn't used.

That is absolutely correct. And would be no different in the digital world. It's the new releases, the ones that most of us are actually interested in, that are hard to get atm. But in the online world they would not be hard to get, they would be impossible to get, because you'd be number 610048773 in the queue.

But pool the monetary tax-dollar resources of 50,000 libraries and make them loanable online and you suddenly have the potential to optimize efficiency with undreamed-of scale. That book sitting on the shelf in THIS library, may be highly desired at that OTHER location. And no need to buy a copy of everything important for every library, because economy of scale would kick in along with the extra efficiency. And don't forget that, besides the works the *libraries* allow to be loaned, you'd also be able to access everything that *individuals* purchase if they wish to allow their purchases to be loaned. Now you've got 50,000 libraries and their tax dollars AND every purchaser in the world contributing, plus vastly increased efficiency.

While library useage *would* explode, the extra efficiency and the fact that the library contributions themselves are the most trivial part of the library would easily counter the demand. How many millions of Madonna CDs out there now? 50 million? 100 million? How many people listening to Madonna this moment? 50,000? Probably not even that. In other words, always available. We've *already* oversold pretty much everything - because the licenses people purchase gather dust 99+ percent of the time rather than seeing active use.

Ok, maybe. Most importantly, who decides whether "digital loaning" equals to loaning? If things went the way you're suggesting, the industry simply would not have that. The RIAA bought DMCA to be able to crack down "illegal" sharing, and similarily they would buy a "Digital Loaning Copyright Act" That would make it illegal to do what you suggest.

Furthermore you made some pretty wild assumptions. You say you have 10 000 "legal" songs. I take it you mean originals by that (because I have 'em legal too, but only because the copyright law in my country has an exception that allows copying for private use). Well, I have never heard of anyone having 10 000 originals. For sure most of us don't. I have like 3 original CDs maybe. So most of us do not have much to contribute to the "digital library" anyway.

[eivioolla]

I guess the bottom line for me is that the freedom of tens or hundreds of millions of people to freely exchange information with each other, while retaining their right for privacy, exceeds, by far, the freedom of handful of people to earn a ferrari or something to show off on MTV cribs by playing a guitar, or more likely by lip-syncing for a cam.

[jonnymnemonic]

All the relevant industries probably would try to fight network loaning. Ironic that they haven't really thought through what the ultimate effect of strong DRM could have on them, whereas I, just some peon from Nowhere, USA *has* thought that far ahead.

But under what basis could they fight it? That's where it would get interesting. They have already said they have no problem with loaning, as long as they are sure it IS a loan. Thus, their own words would be used against them. In addition, hundreds if not thousands of years of property rights include, as part of ownership, the right to loan what you have purchased. Maybe they'd win - who knows. But it wouldn't be easy for them to win, if there really was technology available to make it a loan.

And I even forgot some extra efficiencies enabled by network loaning. For example, I go to the library and borrow a CD. Odds are, I listen to it once, maybe twice (or rip it), then it just sits there for six more days doing nothing, because I'm too lazy to return it. If music were loaned on a per-song basis (as opposed to a per-CD basis), then I'd really only need that song during the time I listen to it - say six minutes. Instead of 7 days, it's back in circulation in six MINUTES. Movies longer, of course, books perhaps longest of all. But even so, that "laziness" waste - totally eliminated.

And that 30 minutes I said I might have to wait to get a song back - that'd be absolutely worst case. If there were other copies of the same thing waiting to be loaned, then I'd get mine back *instantly*, and the "available copies" would simply then decrement. Obviously it would depend on how many copies were "in the system" and how many people using them at any point in time.

Anoither efficiency I didn't mention before is almost the most obvious one - no need to waste money *replacing* works. The data doesn't get old and deteriorate, ever. Once it's "in the system" it is there forever.

And while the relevant industries would assuredly take a big financial hit, it wouldn't totally kill them either. Some people would still prefer to just buy a good old-fashioned book, or would prefer to buy just SO they can do that license-reclaim at their whim (or not share their purchases at all), and some people would buy because it would help others less fortunate than themselves, and the libraries themselves would still buy simply to eradicate the waiting lists - that is, after all, what we pay them to do with our tax-dollars. They'd just be really REALLY efficient, instead of the current clunky non-digital face-to-face method.

Artists would suffer too, I suppose. But mainly it would be the very richest artists who would suffer - those currently selling millions of CDs (when 1/100 that amount would be more than sufficient if utilized efficiently). You'd still be able to make a living creating, you'd just have quite a bit harder time getting fabulously wealthy doing it. (But you could still do that too - by simply producing MORE work.)

It's really not a bad model. It integrates modern technology with creativity, kinda sticks it to the greedy industries, kinda sticks it to the greediest artists, and creates an ever-growing never-degrading legal (and ethical, regardless of your stance on whether *copying* is ethical or not) repository of information for ourselves and all future generations.

Eventually, they will have to face this dilemma, I think. It's only a matter of time. It's oh so ironic that when it does hit them in the face, they may very well have never even noticed it coming.

[eivioolla]

They might for example argue that this loaning scheme does not prevent making copies. After all, what you can play back, you can also record. I f nothing else, then simply recording it back from the analog signal with reduced quality. I would never listen to such material myself, but most people would not care. They might argue that when they talked about loaning, they did not mean it in the "global" sense. Ok, maybe bad examples, but they are good making such things up and feeding them to the deciders, you have to give 'em that.

[tMoD]

Originally posted by eivioolla
They might for example argue that this loaning scheme does not prevent making copies. After all, what you can play back, you can also record. I f nothing else, then simply recording it back from the analog signal with reduced quality. I would never listen to such material myself, but most people would not care. They might argue that when they talked about loaning, they did not mean it in the "global" sense. Ok, maybe bad examples, but they are good making such things up and feeding them to the deciders, you have to give 'em that.

I can make copies, and have, from the physical CDs I check out from the library now. They would have a problem arguing the copying issue without arguing for the destruction of the library system. The main problem with his idea is not that copying is still possible but the fact that the content industries would never allow a bill that would create such a library system to ever pass. They wouldn't need to argue it legally because they would kill it politically.

[Kyle06]

Originally posted by Empire
I suspect it's because they are mostly kids. Their defiant attitude about the law is probably because it will be Mommy and Daddy who will be paying the lawsuit damages.

OMG JUST TO TELL Ya as we get older we CAN AND MORE INLIKELY WILL change the current laws but then again who am I to talk....

[aqlo]

Will Bill and Mandy EVER be together ?? The Moon also rises the dyke just breaks more Words of wisdom Ground Work who was that masked astronomer? a good read
http://www.nonesuch.org/p2prevolution.pdf the best people in foreign countries have no laws governing them covered that already That article doesn't contradict anything I wrote. sad and true painfully obvious info without a solution props I respectfully disagree wonderful, wonderful things that this loaning scheme does not prevent making copies it could as we get older we CAN AND MORE INLIKELY WILL change the current laws how obvious, it was right under our nose.

Hey, what about this idea I attribute to Jorge where we pay higher rates for service and trust the govment to give the money directly to the artists.

[coconut]

Exactly. I watched that songwriter on the TECHTV show whine about his royalties going down. His problem was, he hired himself out to the record company without them taking any risk.

In the future, songwriters will have to sell their songs outright for a single lump sum, or, be paid a salary to be on on-staff songwriter. That way, the record company will have to take the risk of making the music sell and not sluff off their failure to sell the music on the songwriter by giving him less royalties.

Originally posted by jonnymnemonic
You make me think more than many people do.

I can't really argue too vehemently against what you say. You could be right, you could be wrong. The future is too amorphous in these changing times for me to say one way or the other with any degree of reliability.

Still, there will always be SOME measure of control, unless and until society can FORCE creators to create and give away their work. What Paul Atreides said in Dune still rings true to me: "The people who can destroy a thing, they control it". Any work that is either not created at all, or is not given to *anyone* is effectively destroyed.

What may happen is that that VERY FIRST copy of anything important will become extraordinarily expensive. And if no one will pay that price, then it will be destroyed. For example, a great writer writes a book. In that writer's presence, people read that book and say, "Oh my God, that is quite simply one of the best books ever written". The author says, :"You may take it with you, for $150,000. It took me three years to write, that provides me a middle class salary and I can send my children to college."

Would someone buy it? Perhaps. There is value in being the ONLY owner of something, after all, even if the buyer can't figure out how to market it to consumers in general. Hell, for a big collector, such a work by a prominent author could easily be worth much more than that. Some collector's item caliber books sell for many hundreds of thousands of dollars today. What makes them valluable is more that no one else has them than the words on the pages, really.

Perhaps that's where it will all end, with the very rich having access to anything that is culturally a "great work", thereby allowing the creators to exist and make a living doing what they do best. True, the consumer wouldn't have easy (or any) access in that scenario, but when you get down to the nitty gritty, your average creator cares more that he gets to create and gets paid for it than he cares about the numerical count of who gets access.

And of course, the buyer could perhaps find some way to market what he purchased to the public, if he so chooses to do so. It would at least be an option. If enough people tried and failed, then obviously these rich folks would simply stop trying, but perhaps they could find a way. If not, then so be it, they go thru life as the ONLY owner of "product X" and can trade it for other similar items from other wealthy people.

[BigFatLazyAss]

From "Charmed31"
OK, so I pay for the album. I put it on my hard drive for personal use. which is legal. then since i own it, i choose to give others permission to copy a few songs. is this illegal? i own it. it is now my personal copy. see how the lines blur?

Yes, ANY form of sharing is illegal. Read the small print on the outside rim of your bought CD's.

"Unauthorized copying, hiring, lending, public performance and broadcasting of this record is prohibited" This is off of "Eat A Peach" by the Alman brothers - 1972

I find this on many CD's .... lots just say "No unauthorized use" But many do say "No Lending" and I think that means sharing.

by jonnymnemonic
(It is perfectly legal for me to loan someone my copy of Office if I am not using it.)
And by the way, sharing or lending that copy of "Office" can get you into trouble too. Any copy of software bought is regestered to a single computer & can not be used with any other computer. That is why big companies have to buy a copy for each computer. now you can share it for Demo purposes, but that is for 30 days.

As far as librarys ... I know I have found Albums there before, not sure how they get by with it .... but it is a great thought. But, there you go, "No Copying" .... So, no mater how you look at it, Record companies would like to control every copy and its use. Of course that is how they get paid. And of course there is a special employee that points things like this out to them ... he is called the "Lost Prevention Manager". He points out where they are not making money on something that would increase their profits. The matra of every Corporation.

Big & Fat:fire

[eivioolla]

I actually thought that last night and look it says right here: "unauthorized copying, hiring, LENDING, public performance and broadcasting prohibited.

So jonny, I guess you can forget about lending your copies for the library use. Perhaps libraries have an exception so they can lend copies, but either way they would probably have to gain their own copies, which would never be sufficient.

[charmed31]

Just for the record, i do know that it is illegal. But the lines are sometimes blurred. What I was simply saying, is that this is nothing new. People back in the 70's were buying albums and making copies on tapes to play in their cars. They also gave copies to friends. I know growing up in the 80's (yes i'm older than 15, which takes away the thought that all of us are 11 yr olds) whenever one of us got a new album, we made copies for friends. My parents did the same thing, My dad's buddies in the air force did the same thing. course i didn't listen to englebert humperdink (sp?) but hey, we shared. My point is, the whole making copies of movies and tv shows and recording off the radio came about years ago when beta and vhs first became a consumer item. the courts ruled in favor of the consumer. I would give dates, etc. but i'm too lazy to search for it right now. this is basically the same thing. But it could be a regulated thing where everyone gets what they want.

Yes, Bill and Mandy will get together, just in time for one of them to develop amnesia, marry someone else, and take over the world in a plot thought up by the riaa.

this is a thread that will never die!:cross

[jonnymnemonic]

I had no idea they restricted loaning. Well, I can still GIVE stuff to people legally. And on the honor system, they can give it back to me when they're done. Hard to imagine they can restrict GIVING things to others. If they did, that'd put a serious crimp in the holiday shopping season.

So how do libraries get away with loaning me CDs? (Which they pretty much all do now.) They loan me DVDs too. Maybe libraries are exempt from that disclaimer, or in my state it isn't allowed to restrict loaning, regardless of what the disclaimer says. (You know, like some things say, 'unless prohibited in your state' and such.)

[jonnymnemonic]

I still wouldn't rule out libraries. Figure an average of $100k per library, multiplied by 50,000 and you have 5 billion dollars of moolah to use each year to buy stuff. At a bulk rate of, say, $10 per CD that'd still be 500 million CDs every year. That amount of money, incidentally, is actually twice as much money as the recording industry says it's losing each year due to piracy, so it'd cover everything people currently pirate (and that's assuming their estimates are even correct, and you know they probably slant the statistics their own way for effect). That'd still then leave an extra 2.5 billion a year to work on building up the book and movie availability. And nothing says we couldn't increase library funding too. And nothing says that the library systems of other countries couldn't contribute too, which could double or triple the amount of funding I'd think. No need for the U.S. to bear the entire burden of creating a global library system. What government wouldn't want their citizens to be able to access it too? At least the developed (read: wealthy) governments could kick in a little.

[Afn]

Originally posted by charmed31
Just for the record, i do know that it is illegal. But the lines are sometimes blurred. What I was simply saying, is that this is nothing new. People back in the 70's were buying albums and making copies on tapes to play in their cars. They also gave copies to friends. I know growing up in the 80's (yes i'm older than 15, which takes away the thought that all of us are 11 yr olds) whenever one of us got a new album, we made copies for friends. My parents did the same thing, My dad's buddies in the air force did the same thing. course i didn't listen to englebert humperdink (sp?) but hey, we shared. My point is, the whole making copies of movies and tv shows and recording off the radio came about years ago when beta and vhs first became a consumer item. the courts ruled in favor of the consumer. I would give dates, etc. but i'm too lazy to search for it right now. this is basically the same thing. But it could be a regulated thing where everyone gets what they want.

this is a thread that will never die!:cross


There was never a problem of sharing, because the industry estimated sharing as piracy, but also knew that the social tape swaping did help album sales.

Before MP3, there was no near perfect way to by-pass the record store, and for that matter, radio.

So the recording industry looses control of the channel to push product, and it's very very profitable control of the distribution channel.

We can argue about pooling libraries, but will never work. My own view is that the recording industry, if it does not go bankrupt, will downsize and wither away.

Artists will still be discovered, talent will still be produced, but the show, will be your life --- not the manufactured product and image pushed by hollywood to titalate you to buy tickets to what a few studios are producing. The kings and queens of hollywood soon will no longer broadcast to peasent underclass of middle America.

As I have said, the right to access information freely is more important than the need to collude to make a profit.

[jonnymnemonic]

The artists WILL collude to make profit - they'll do what I said, give away some stuff for free, but their BEST stuff they will just sell to the wealthy, who will then horde it among themselves. Why give away what you had to pay a great deal to acquire?

What will change is that the value of art may end up lying not in quality and distribution counts, but in quality and exclusivity (e.g. LACK of distribution counts). If it becomes more profitable NOT to distribute something than it is TO distribute it, then at least some things will just be sold to the few. The public won't really have a say in the matter at all.

To prevent that you'd have to legislate it, by passing laws that say something like, "If you write a book, or create a symphony, you must immediately share it with the rest of the world". While it'd be possible to pass such a law, it'd be damn hard to enforce it. If nothing else, people'd just say "screw it" and give up on the idea of spending years perfecting a skill that gains them nothing in terms of providing for their family or enhancing their quality of life.

If the Stephen Kings (or equivalent studio musicians) of the future can make a million by selling their newest creation to ONE GUY for a million bucks, or make half that or less as it propogates freely throughout p2p networks, well....basic economics dictates that he who pays the highest price becomes the buyer.

It'll all work out in the end, I'm sure. I'm not so sure that the PUBLIC will have more access to stuff though. They may end up with LESS access.

[Afn]

Originally posted by BigFatLazyAss
From "Charmed31"


1) Read the small print on the outside rim of your bought CD's.

"Unauthorized copying, hiring, lending, public performance and broadcasting of this record is prohibited" This is off of "Eat A Peach" by the Alman brothers - 1972

2) I find this on many CD's .... lots just say "No unauthorized use" But many do say "No Lending" and I think that means sharing.

by jonnymnemonic

3) And by the way, sharing or lending that copy of "Office" can get you into trouble too. Any copy of software bought is regestered to a single computer & can not be used with any other computer. That is why big companies have to buy a copy for each computer. now you can share it for Demo purposes, but that is for 30 days.

As far as librarys ... I know I have found Albums there before, not sure how they get by with it .... but it is a great thought. But, there you go, "No Copying" .... So, no mater how you look at it, Record companies would like to control every copy and its use. Of course that is how they get paid. And of course there is a special employee that points things like this out to them ... he is called the "Lost Prevention Manager". He points out where they are not making money on something that would increase their profits. The matra of every Corporation.


1) The fine print, was put on the disc by the manufacturer of that disc. If I manufacture a disc, and put: "No unauthorized listening only to the licensed person included on the label of this compact disc" ...

That is what the software industry wants, each user paying. Some call this usery. Some call this 'a right'. I think, restricted use of media and software, long term will be as archaic as horse drawn carriages were in the 1950's.

2) Again, I can put ANYTHING on a discs i manufacture. The music industry has a problem, that movie industry does not have. Movies can be rented. Music, historically 'can not be' rented. In my opinion, this will be the downfall of the industry. Then again, you can put anything on a disc.

"only play this compact disc twice a year at midnight"

3) That is what the software industry wants, each user paying. Some call this usery. Some call this 'a right'. I think, restricted use of media and software, long term will be as archaic as horse drawn carriages were in the 1950's.

[eivioolla]

Originally posted by jonnymnemonic
I had no idea they restricted loaning. Well, I can still GIVE stuff to people legally. And on the honor system, they can give it back to me when they're done. Hard to imagine they can restrict GIVING things to others. If they did, that'd put a serious crimp in the holiday shopping season.

They would just say that you're trying to circumvent copyright and that this kind of action is killing the industry. If they could they would sue you, if not they would buy a new law and then sue you.

Seriously jonny, what's your angle here? On the other hand you present yourself as the high and mighty defender of the copyright holders' freedoms while the same time pushing DRM with some unrealistic utopia that would in effect be no different from free sharing?

I can't help thinking that either you try to confuse your reader or you're just confused yourself.

You try to justify your leeching with some backwards thinking that the one doing wrong is the sharer, not the downloader. How is leaving your files online any different from leaving your car in the park with doors open and keys in the lock? There is nothing illegal in that, the one doing the crime is the one who steals the car or downloads the files, i.e. you.

[NDGAARONDI]

If you give something to someone, you generally keep it. If you return it, that's lending.