A Glimpse At Piracy In the UK and Beyond 132
Zocalo writes "The BBC has a fascinating look into the music download habits of the UK population based on stats compiled by Musicmetric. The stats, gathered through the monitoring of BitTorrent swarms and geo-locating the IPs, shows the hotspots for music copyright infringement across the UK and regional preferences for certain types of music. Some of the outliers are somewhat unusual though, suggesting some problems with the methodology or sample size, unless people on the Isle of Wight really do prefer trumpet-playing crooner Louis Armstrong to the likes of Rihanna and Ed Sheeran who top the lists nationwide. Not in the UK? There are some global stats on the ' Most pirated near you? tab' of the story. Better yet, if you want to crunch the numbers for yourself all of the data has been made available at the Musicmatch website under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial ShareAlike license and a RESTful API to access the data (free for non-commercial use, but requiring an API token) is also available."
cash (Score:5, Insightful)
If you love music, download legally
I'd like to ...
Where's the store that I can go to with my 20 gbp cash and a usb stick and download/buy music/software/movies?
It doesn't exist. That's the problem.
If you can't get the message, get the man (Score:2, Insightful)
Memorable quotes for
Looker (1981)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082677/quotes [imdb.com]
"John Reston: Television can control public opinion more effectively than armies of secret police, because television is entirely voluntary. The American government forces our children to attend school, but nobody forces them to watch T.V. Americans of all ages *submit* to television. Television is the American ideal. Persuasion without coercion. Nobody makes us watch. Who could have predicted that a *free* people would voluntarily spend one fifth of their lives sitting in front of a *box* with pictures? Fifteen years sitting in prison is punishment. But 15 years sitting in front of a television set is entertainment. And the average American now spends more than one and a half years of his life just watching television commercials. Fifty minutes, every day of his life, watching commercials. Now, that's power."
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"The United States has it's own propaganda, but it's very effective because people don't realize that it's propaganda. And it's subtle, but it's actually a much stronger propaganda machine than the Nazis had but it's funded in a different way. With the Nazis it was funded by the government, but in the United States, it's funded by corporations and corporations they only want things to happen that will make people want to buy stuff. So whatever that is, then that is considered okay and good, but that doesn't necessarily mean it really serves people's thinking - it can stupify and make not very good things happen."
- Crispin Glover: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000417/bio [imdb.com]
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"It's only logical to assume that conspiracies are everywhere, because that's what people do. They conspire. If you can't get the message, get the man." - Mel Gibson (from an interview)
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"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." - William Casey, CIA Director
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"The real reason for the official secrecy, in most instances, is not to keep the opposition (the CIA's euphemistic term for the enemy) from knowing what is going on; the enemy usually does know. The basic reason for governmental secrecy is to keep you, the American public, from knowing - for you, too, are considered the opposition, or enemy - so that you cannot interfere. When the public does not know what the government or the CIA is doing, it cannot voice its approval or disapproval of their actions. In fact, they can even lie to your about what they are doing or have done, and you will not know it. As for the second advantage, despite frequent suggestion that the CIA is a rogue elephant, the truth is that the agency functions at the direction of and in response to the office of the president. All of its major clandestine operations are carried out with the direct approval of or on direct orders from the White House. The CIA is a secret tool of the president - every president. And every president since Truman has lied to the American people in order to protect the agency. When lies have failed, it has been the duty of the CIA to take the blame for the president, thus protecting him. This is known in the business as "plausible denial." The CIA, functioning as a secret instrument of the U.S. government and the presidency, has long misused and abused history and continues to do so."
- Victor Marchetti, Propaganda and Disinformation: How the CIA Manufactures History
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George Carlin:
"The real owners are the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians, they're an irrelevancy. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They've long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the statehous
perspective (Score:4, Insightful)
The overwhelming majority of musicians are unpaid amateurs and do it for fun.
Of those who make a living at music, almost all derive most of their income from instrumental teaching.
Of those who derive their income from playing, almost all are paid per performance (think session musicians, orchestral musicians etc), not on a royalty basis.
This whole issue is about a tiny proportion of musicians (mostly modern rock & pop) who perform almost entirely for recorded distribution. The recording business talk of 'killing music' is hysterical horsesh*t.
Human beings have been making music for over 30,000 years. Downloads are not going to stop them.
Re:cash (Score:5, Insightful)
You know, it nearly did. I worked for a start-up years ago who were pioneering the music kiosk business, firstly allowing albums and mix albums to be burned on the fly, and there was a working solution for downloads of MP3s straight to devices or USB. The major labels and most of the indies were interested and signed on the dotted line. Millions of pounds were invested. Best Buy were trialing the cd burning, but even 8 years ago we knew the market needed the direct to device solution.
The problem which killed it. Apple. They refused to allow any content to go onto their devices bypassing itunes and wouldn't even consider working with us. We had the product, we had about 80,000+ lossless albums converting merrily stored ready to rock, but apple killed the business model because like it or not iPods dominated the market.
Re:The British have a long proud history of piracy (Score:5, Insightful)
The difference between a terrorist, a guerrilla, and a freedom fighter is simply how much we like them