RIAA Blames Journalists For Its Piracy Troubles
pcmag.com
pcmag.com
Their stance should be: we report what our readers want to read and what sells ads, that you, the RIAA are inconvenienced by this is tough but so be it. Reporting this is not illegal.
And while we're at it screwing artists out of the royalties legally due to them is illegal and the RIAA does it every chance they get and good luck fighting them in court to get a win before your estate takes over.
Bits can - and will - be copied, as the price of transporting and storing bits approaches zero the ease with which this will happen will rapidly approach a point at which any kind of value directly associated with copying bits is going to be seen as ridiculous. The business-models will change, and I'm thinking convenience is going to be a much bigger driver than scarcity ever was. The music industry may end up on top of this after all, if they start making up for lost time.
The upper end of estimates about the number of albums released per year by "the recording industry" seems to be around 35,000:
http://www.mahalo.com/answers/how-many-albums-are-released-p... (and god I feel dirty linking to mahalo!)
That seems high at ~100 albums per day, but its perhaps plausible worldwide. (note too that this means it'd take you 3 or 4 years to listen to a years worth of new music)
A quick poke at my iTunes library reveals "an album" to require on average between 50 and 100 meg - call it 75 meg.
That means the entire music industries output is somewhere around 2.5TB/year - that's, what, ~$150 worth of disk space? Call it $300 if you want to back it all up.
I guess when you business model is based on a product which people can steal every single thing you sell, and store it for under a buck a day, random speculative lawsuits might be a sensible "pivot"...
(another interesting random observation - 2.5TB/year probably means the entire worlds published recorded music output is less that 100TB compressed, perhaps only 500TB @ raw CD bitrates. Even uncompressed that _barely_ gets you out of the second lowest Amazon S3 pricing tier.)
Let me be clear: I support "PCMag's" right to write an article about alternatives to Limewire. It should not be a crime to link to software just because that software can be used to break laws.
That said, my guess is that the vast majority of content available through Limewire is copyrighted and being distributed without permission. Alternatives to Limewire are "of interest to your readers" because they're looking for new places to download this copyrighted content. In my experience the average person running Limewire almost certainly needs the help of more experienced people--like technical journalists--to find good alternatives to Limewire. So it seems to me that PCMag is providing a valuable service to many people who would like to download copyrighted content.
Sure, if PCMag didn't write an article about "alternatives to Limewire," someone else would (albeit maybe someone with different interests in mind, or someone with worse SEO skills). Sure, when presented with a letter like this I can see why they choose to try and get out in front of this issue. Sure, there may be legal implications to reacting in any other way than the way they did. Nonetheless I think their statement offends my sense of frankness and honesty.
Limewire and alternatives are of interest to me yet I have no interest in downloading any content via those services. Why am I interested in Limewire and friends? Partly because I like to know what's going on in the tech world and partly because I'm interested in what other people are up to. But mostly because I find the ongoing fight between the RIAA and co and the pirates massively interesting. In what other industry does a leading industry body actively harass potential customers in what appears from the outside to be a losing battle?
I'm pretty sure that the people looking for alternatives don't need to read PC Mag to find them.
I had tried to download some music with Walmart's new MP3 site, which was a mess. I could never get the 10 songs or so I downloaded and paid for to play on my Windows 98 PC, despite downloading what they recommended (I don't think the version of Windows Media Player they suggested worked on my PC). I still wanted music to play on my Sony CLIE (which couldn't play it either)... and my friend showed me a computer magazine talking about Limewire. It said something about it being safe and legal, as long as you didn't use it illegally. I didn't consider the implications so I downloaded it and tried it.. and quickly found a bunch of music. I actually owned a lot of it, but not all of it. The point is, I was underinformed and since there wasn't much of a warning in the magazine I considered reputable, I didn't think I was doing anything illegal.
When you look at the target audience of a simple magazine like PC Magazine, I see why the RIAA would be alarmed. I'm not saying this should be illegal to publish or that PC Magazine is necessarily at fault, but I don't think the RIAA is too far off-base either.
The problem is though in a connected world if your not watching the TV show the same day it is aired in America you won't be able to follow online conversation and the chances are before it's finally aired someone would have let slip the premise or twist so your no longer surprised.
This just means they lose the chance to make anything off big overseas fans when a show is first aired because they will all be downloading it.
Linking to copyrighted content is "bad" according to the RIAA, discussing and linking to tools like Limewire is now a problem for them. When will linking to articles about software piracy and the tools become an issue?
Right before talking about linking to articles about software and tools that enable piracy becomes an issue.
Don't see this happening any time soon. As long as piracy is easier than purchasing (and viewing) content it will happen at a massive scale.
I'm still not paying for tv shows simply because there's no good way to do that (or I haven't heard about it yet). I don't watch them on tv, because I don't want ads and I don't own/need a tv in general. I'd happily pay a pound or two per episode I watch (you can get older series for £10 on 6 dvds, so that's not a bad price I think) if someone gave me the opportunity.
I think the whole "As long as piracy is easier than purchasing" concept is getting old. It is one step longer. For me it's virtually the same. If someone organised a good content distribution network, it would be even better since I could get planned downloading and wouldn't have to wait for the video to buffer, just because it's on some dodgy hosting in Thailand. I don't see either RIAA or the producers wanting to resolve the situation really - maybe it's still too profitable to do the silly war on piracy... Meanwhile, I'll keep giving my money (page views / ads impressions) to some random guy who wasn't involved in making the show at all. It's rather sad really.
I'm not arguing for that position, but that's the way it's going. So any time soon could be sooner than you think.
As for the article, what a load of nonsense, 'hey use these instead' article is quite obviously advocating piracy, whichever way they try and spin it, disclaimer or not. The disclaimer:
All of these services should be used for legal downloads, of course
There is no sane person in the world that believes that a torrent site's primary purpose is for legal downloads.
You cannot say that. That's absurd. There are tons of torrent sites with legal content, and whose primary purpose is the sharing of legal content. For example http://www.clearbits.net.
> Tis only a matter of time before laws start getting passed, ISPs are forced to monitor and people start getting cut-off/fined.
Bypassing whatever ISPs put in place will likely still be easier than purchasing, especially given that pirated content typically has a higher quality than paid content. It's a double-whammy: paying for DVDs or CDs forces you to see ads (occasionally telling you not to pirate!), in some cases download DRMed, locked content, and usually at a lower bitrate than the pirated options.
Not only is it easier to pirate, but you usually end up with a higher-quality and less annoying product.
Edit: The solution to all of this is for the content distributors to realize and understand the situation. If they put all the high-quality content online and provide direct, fast downloads (without treating me like a criminal!) then the world will change and most people will buy content...I think.
I have no idea why you think otherwise, who do you think torrents?
It's a totally strange position to take. I do not understand it.
On the other hand I totally agree with you and the poster above me about the ease, quality (in terms of advert and stupid menu-less content) and speed on getting new content, it's absurd we're in a situation where getting illegal content is quicker and easier than getting legal content. But that's another matter.
Stating that a piece of software exists is hardly "advocating" using it for illegal purposes. Most of the usage of torrents probably is copyright-infringing downloads, but that's not its only purpose and that doesn't mean a journalist can't talk about it.
Will that actually accomplish anything? I think it will just push things deeper underground, and force downloaders to encrypt everything, which is at best a minor inconvenience.
As someone whose colleagues work on BitTorrent for distributed systems research, that's patently false. At the moment I'm in the planning stages of a service which will use BitTorrent for distributed computing a la MapReduce.
But PC Mag wrote (like many others) a very thorough guide to LimeWire alternatives. Everyone, and most certainly PC Mag, knows what people use these tools for. Writing the comparison post is not illegal, they are in their full right to it. But to write this very indignant piece, claiming complete neutrality and "we cover it because we must" / free speech kind of argument, is over the top. The comparison post was not any kind of insightful coverage, or debating post. It was a cheap grab for eyeballs.
Their time is passing. But for how long? Times X billion dollars per year.
Instead of doing this and making pirate methods obscure, they insist on wasting everyone's time and money by implementing DRM schemes that cause incompatibilities, only to be broken a short while later, and suing people, which ultimately just gives the pirate sources more time to grow and more media exposure, especially when they sue and/or force prosecution of these pirate sources directly instead of just pursuing average filesharers, a la The Pirate Bay.