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."
Link correction (Score:5, Informative)
Most piracy happens in person. (Score:3, Informative)
Only about 20% of copying happens over the net. The majority comes from swap parties between friends as they copy MP3s or AACs from one drive to another. (Yes there's a source for this. It was published here on /. but I can't find the article.)
Re:Silly pirates? (Score:5, Informative)
There is no such thing. In fact, most anonymizing and/or VPN services flat out state in their TOS that they will respond accordingly to all legal requests for information.
Anyway, it's kind of a waste of breath for us as a community of geeks to bother engaging people (like the journalist writing that article) in conversation when they don't even care enough to put the hyperbole aside and use rational words to discuss the topic. Starting off any discussion with the loaded word "piracy" or "pirate" in the title or opening paragraph is silly and unprofessional. It'd be like someone writing an article about a guy investigating government corruption by calling him an "anti-government terrorist" and asking him "why do you hate 'Merica?!"
As for "copyright infringement", and "file sharing", there's little point in people getting their panties in a twist. Technology evolves and so do industries. We already have services like MOG and NETFLIX, which replace what a lot of questionable activities used to provide, for a combined total of a whopping $13 USD/mo. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. In the coming years, we should find more content available to more people in massive libraries like both of these services for *very affordable* subscriptions. When that finally happens, the idea of bothering with file sharing becomes silly unless you are really and truly destitute. For everyone else, it'd be absurd to waste precious time finding and downloading crap via these other methods when they could just pay $5 for an almost limitless library of music or $10 for an endless library of movies and television. The only possible exception will remain books, where there seems to be no equivalent and you'll be stuck paying the $30-$60 per book that we do, today.
Re:Where's China and Russia? (Score:4, Informative)
given its huge population, somewhat surprising is the presence of smaller Third World countries like Brazil and Philiippines that you don't expect to have the broadband speed necessary for a decent BT download.
I am Brazilian. Most people here - at least people living in larger cities - have 1 to 5 Mbps internet at home, which is than enough for occasional torrenting (i.e. not leeching/seeding 24/7). People with slower connections use 4shared/Rapidshare/etc... to download a low-quality copy of the movie they want to watch, or a 128k MP3 rip of the CD they want to listen to.
WTF Slashdot? (Score:0, Informative)
Stop calling it piracy. Downloading something not even close to the same thing as getting on a boat and using weapons to take control of another vessel. Pirates murder, pillage, rape, etc. Slashdot sounds more and more like the lamestream media every day.
Re:would like to see a hollywood accounting study (Score:5, Informative)
Most contracts aren't even readable. The artists don't realize that the contract often stipulates they don't get paid until they make a profit (which rarely happens).
QUOTE: "The royalty rates granted in every recording contract are very low to start with and then companies charge back every conceivable cost to an artist's royalty account. Artists pay for recording costs, video production costs, tour support, radio promotion, sales and marketing costs, packaging costs and any other cost the record company can subtract from their royalties. Record companies also reduce royalties by "forgetting" to report sales figure, miscalculating royalties and by preventing artists from auditing record company books." http://www.gerryhemingway.com/piracy2.html [gerryhemingway.com]
Re:Silly pirates? (Score:4, Informative)
There is no such thing. In fact, most anonymizing and/or VPN services flat out state in their TOS that they will respond accordingly to all legal requests for information.
Some VPNs claim there IS NO information if the authorities come calling
http://torrentfreak.com/which-vpn-providers-really-take-anonymity-seriously-111007/
Re:Link correction (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Hmm (Score:5, Informative)
That's why Dublin is one of the top party destinations for the Brits is it? Its complete bollocks. Any sensible Brit has no problem with the Irish. Most of us are mongrels anyway and many have Irish blood.
Re:would like to see a hollywood accounting study (Score:4, Informative)
There's a ridiculously low number of them. For each megastar you have a hundred thousand small artists getting ripped off.
Re:Where's China and Russia? THEY ARE EVEN WORSE. (Score:4, Informative)
I spend a considerable amount of time and Russia and Ukraine on business. Let's put it this way: ALL THERE IS in Russia and Ukraine is piracy. Let me give you some examples.
- you can go down to the corner shop and buy DVDs and CDs of your favorite movies, music, and/or games. They are all pirated, and professionally so.
- companies that sell legitimate entertainment products last about a week in most places before they close for lack of sales.
- even large electronics outlets sell pirated goods
- use of torrent is extremely widespread
- you'd be hard pressed to find anybody under 20 who has ever legitimately paid for music or games, ever. and i really mean that.
- a major university in ukraine that i know of has on its campus intranet a 400+TB system exclusively for piracy. I mean, university set up, where people upload movies, music, games, software, etc. this is actually a university function that they figure saves them on outgoing bandwidth.
- the first thing people do when they buy a new computer is to take it to a local 'repair shop' where for $5-$10 you get a full suite of every application you might want, nicely installed. This practice is extremely widespread.
if you think "fine, because these are disadvantaged countries..'" well, you're only fooling yourself. while the per capita gdp of those countries is somehwat low, it is also highly unequal. the ones with the PCs, ipads, and university educations doing the pirating are highly likely to be quite well off indeed.
the authoritarian laws are there. there is simply no will to enforce them.