The debate surrounding filesharing and how to stop it always boils down to one thing: the ISPs that provide us with our broadband connections always claim, as a general rule, that they're unable to somehow filter illegal filesharing while allowing other net activity to proceed normally. Courts and governments, not always having much of a grasp of the technology deployed by either ISPs or the end users, shake their heads, smile, and say "no no no, of course you can." The ISPs say "No, seriously, we can't." Filesharers, ever the anti-capitalist crusaders, say "They're right, they can't – we can do whatever the hell we like." So the courts say to the ISPs "well, you'd better find a way of doing it, and we'll fine you if you don't." One particular example of this, currently playing out in Belgium, seems to have reached an unpleasant stalemate.
Just over a year ago, a Belgian court ruled that ISPs can be ordered to block certain types of traffic flowing through their networks. One such ISP, Scarlet, not only had objections on a purely implementational level; they also claimed that the close inspection of their customers' activities constituted spying on Belgian citizens, and thus was also against Belgian law. So they appealed.
But to no avail, and for every day Scarlet fail to stop filesharing traffic, they're fined €2,500. They indignantly claim that they have tried all means at their disposal: firstly they've slowed all the peer-to-peer (P2P) networks down (the main carrier of filesharing data) but that's just had the effect of annoying customers, slowing perfectly legal services that use P2P, and, crucially, done nothing to stop the availability of copyrighted material. A total block on P2P would mean waving goodbye to those irritated customers – a suicidal business move. So they took the only available option left: at the behest of Belgian copyright enforcers SABAM, they implemented a system called Audible Magic which claims to do what many consider to be impossible: filter the illegal stuff, and keep the legal stuff flowing.
Thing is, Scarlet have tried it, and they say it doesn't work. SABAM, while maintaining that Scarlet aren't doing enough to comply with the law, seem to have admitted that Audible Magic might not be doing the job quite as well as they had hoped. So, where from here?
The biggest filesharing culprits are, in the main, a savvy bunch. They know that they shift far more data than a normal ISP customer, and know that they're probably on the radars of their ISP as a potential filesharer. But darknets and encryption of filesharing traffic mean that the monitoring of exactly what they're up to is impossible – let alone filtering and stopping it. Scarlet are absolutely right in this regard. But, equally, the vast, vast majority of traffic on P2P networks is in copyrighted material. A total block on P2P would substantially reduce the swapping of copyrighted data. But, seriously, which ISP would be brave enough to portray itself as the safeguarder of the rights of musicians and film-makers, and do such a thing? Because this stage in the life of the internet, a business model of not offering P2P just isn't viable. Because it's what people want.
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This post contains one error which makes the entire post essentiallky meaningless.
There is nothing illegal about Filesharing.
It is illegal to break copyright laws but there is a great deal of material that can and should be shared quite freely. P2P is used for many legitimate purposes. A number of companies use it to release games, there are services that use P2P to LEGALLY distribute video and other free content to large numbers of people.
In fact it is easy to stop filesharing, the difficult bit is stopping illegal filesharing without effecting legal mechanisms.
Saying you can protect copyright violations by simply blocking P2P is like saying you can prevent speeding my putting bollards across the M1. Sure it will work, but that hardly makes it desirable.
A second point is that you state that blocking filesharing is all about protecting the rights of musicians. Given that the evidence shows that file sharers tend to BUY more legal content than average, as well as any illegal sharing they may be involved in tends to throw doubt on what effect illegal file sharing is having on revenue income. Also there are plenty of musicians that have chosen to make some of their music available for free, frequently by means of P2P.
Given that all the statistics show that the ammount of moeny people are spending overall on entertainment has gone up in the age of the internet, not down as would be expected if everyone was busy stealing ther entertainment rather than buying it, I think it is reasonable to argue that competition from DVDs, Computer Games and other new media forms have had a lot more to do with the reduction in CD sales than P2P.
Oh yes and for the record I do not share copyrighted material. I have in the past downloaded the occasional track via P2P, but in all cases I have either listened to them once or twice before deciding I didnt like them and then deleted them, or gone out and brought an Album or three by the band. All P2P has done for me is allowed me to buy CDs I may not have done otherwise due to lack of familiarity with the band.
Posted by: Andrew Wimble | Wednesday, 24 September 2008 at 05:02 PM
@Andrew: Did you even read the article before copy-pasting that rant in? "The vast, vast majority of traffic on P2P networks is in copyrighted material" is what Rhodri said, and hence based the idea of stopping p2p being a way of stopping the sharing of copyrighted materials, but having the unfair effect of "slowing perfectly legal services that use P2P".
Posted by: Jam | Wednesday, 24 September 2008 at 10:01 PM
You are also sadly informed as you seme to have mistaken my typed reply for a 'copy/pasted' rant, although you fail to share where you think I copied it from. I do however take the point that I was somewhat more negative about the article than it deserved as it does in fact distinguish between legal and illegal file sharing, for which I appologise.
I Still stand by my main points however which are that the negative effects of illegal file sharing are exagerated and in any event a desire to stop an illegal activity cannot be allowed to interfear with a perfectly legal one.
Ultimately it is unlikely to ever be possible to block only copyrighted material without monitoring every piece of data being sent across the network, which is both impractical and a violation of privacy.
Posted by: Andrew Wimble | Thursday, 25 September 2008 at 09:56 AM
I have downloaded a significant amount of music over the last few years. Most of it I have owned and paid for in the past, on vinyl.
When CDs came out, I waited for the offer to exchange my LPs for CDs for a nominal charge. After all, I'd already paid for the artistic performance. No offer came, and it cost me thousands of pounds and several years to replace my substantial music collection.
So when the music companies bleat about the effect of downloading on artists and music, I'm unconvinced. They care only about profit. And they've had many thousands of pounds of my money, over my lifetime. It's enough, I think.
Off to the Pirate Bay I go, me hearties! ;-)
Posted by: Load-downer | Thursday, 25 September 2008 at 12:44 PM
Load-downer said:
"They care only about profit. And they've had many thousands of pounds of my money, over my lifetime. It's enough, I think."
Yes, profit. That's all the damn food markets think about, too, and the shoe stores and the beer sellers and the autodealers.
Time to steal it all, by this logic.
Posted by: Sam I Am | Thursday, 25 September 2008 at 04:17 PM
"Yes, profit. That's all the damn food markets think about, too, and the shoe stores and the beer sellers and the autodealers.
Time to steal it all, by this logic."
Except those stores (Excepting second hand car dealers) don't try to sell you the same stale loaf of bread over and over when you already purchased it and consumed it.
Posted by: Dick Emery | Thursday, 25 September 2008 at 06:41 PM
"Given that the evidence shows that file sharers tend to BUY more legal content than average, as well as any illegal sharing they may be involved in tends to throw doubt on what effect illegal file sharing is having on revenue income."
CD sales are down, and massively so. MP3 players across the globe are crammed with music that's been downloaded for free. Regardless of supposed stats about filesharers buying loads of music, it doesn't take a genius to realise the main reason for the music business slump. And it's certainly not because kids are buying Grand Theft Auto instead of buying My Chemical Romance albums. They're playing Grand Theft Auto while listening to a My Chemical Romance album they downloaded from Limewire.
Every time I touch on this topic, the same stuff is regurgitated to supposedly justify filesharing of copyrighted material. Or, in other words, getting hold of something for free that you would normally pay for. I'm not making a moral judgement on the activities of filesharers. But for crying out loud, why do they insist on wheeling out the same, hands-behind-back, "not me, sir" non-arguments?
"Oh yes and for the record I do not share copyrighted material. I have in the past downloaded the occasional track via P2P, but in all cases I have either listened to them once or twice before deciding I didnt like them and then deleted them, or gone out and brought an Album or three by the band. All P2P has done for me is allowed me to buy CDs I may not have done otherwise due to lack of familiarity with the band."
I'm sure you and about 12 other people can give yourselves a pat on the back for being so wonderfully law-abiding, Andrew.
The vast majority of P2P, or certainly BitTorrent, is in full albums, archived ZIP files of MP3s. Now, I suppose, in some glorious parallel universe, that people might download that ZIP file, unpack it, enjoy the album, delete the album from their hard disk and go out to buy the CD - but I wouldn't blame them if they didn't bother, because they've got absolutely no incentive to do so, save for an utterly imperceptible increase in sound quality, and the relief of a minuscule burden of guilt. But there isn't any guilt any more. That's the problem musicians and labels have. Making people feel guilty for downloading for free. But they can't. It's way, way past the tipping point.
Load-downer: Why on earth do you consider the music business to be this one big, amorphous mass that has greedily sucked up your money? What about the new artists whose stuff you're downloading for free today, who have nothing to do with the trauma you've suffered from having to buy two copies of a particular Pink Floyd album?
Now, you could say, of course, that you don't think these artists really deserve the money, they're probably having a good time after all, they should get a proper job, and why should you pay for music anyway? Fair enough, I suppose. But no-one says this, because no-one is honest; it's tarted up with preposterous "sticking it to the man", crusading, righteous, anti-capitalist rhetoric. It's nonsense. You might wish to punish record companies for being greedy, but no-one is punished more by those actions than the musicians who made the music in the first place. Because they, as ever, have the smallest slice of the pie. And 5% of zero is, um, zero.
Posted by: Rhodri Marsden | Friday, 26 September 2008 at 01:08 AM
There is a psychological condition that begins to take hold with people who learn how to download from p2p or torrents. It's a kind of "compulsive acquisition" that knows no rhyme nor reason. Having suffered from this myself I can describe the symptoms.
If you're not downloading something there's a sneaking feeling of wasted time. "All that bandwidth doing nothing" you think to yourself. So you go and queue some more downloads and the feeling goes away. Every morning you open the download program to see what if anything has finished. It doesn't matter if you don't use any of the software you download or even listen to the music/watch the films because you're downloading it "so you've got it if you ever need it". It's the getting not the having that provides the kick.
What opened my eyes was when I had a 200Gig hard drive fail with over 100Gig of mp3's, 60Gig of films and the rest in applications and I didn't bat so much as an eyelid. That made me realise I didn't need/want the contents, it was the acquisition that "got me off". It's a bit like shop lifting. I've stopped doing it since seeing through it.
Some things are legal to download. Some games, particularly old ones, are available this way. The Linux operating system is completely free and is often available via torrents. This is where the problem lies. The technology is innocent and capable of being used in a completely legitimate way. But as with all things, people corrupt things with their own corruption.
The RIAA and the UK equivalent are shameless opportunists, using ignorance in legislative circles to tell lies in order to try to control what isn't theirs to control and to demonise an activity only some of which is questionable. They have dug this hole for themselves via their own endless greed and their own pigheaded refusal to find ways to make use of these technologies.
Posted by: boy wonder | Friday, 26 September 2008 at 07:18 AM
There was a time when books were expensive, and copyright was a small tax added on to the price to reward an author. In that time, it added only a little inefficiency to the system if people had to pay an author a fee for the contents of the book.
But today, the cost of materials is cheap, the inefficiency of the copyright system is immense, and some radical change seems inevitable. A common person can go to www.youtube.com and type in the name of a favourite band, and watch many dozens of rare and sometimes beautiful videos, most of which the marketplace never made available at the music store at any price. The market does not deserve to compete under those conditions of sale. Some online subscription services offer access to millions of songs for a monthly fee, a better option - but backroom deals and arbitrary restrictions would surely choke the life out of these services if there were less pressure from illegal alternatives.
One option, still pursued by many litigators, is to redefine our notion of freedom of speech. To host a service that allows two people to talk to one another unobserved would be forbidden. To write a program that allows two people to host such a service would be forbidden. Free speech would begin with a censor, by the grace of whose paid services two parties might be recruited to the conversation, after their content has been approved.
The other option is that we redefine our mechanism of compensation for authors. Any nation could allow the creation of a "duty free zone", in which companies could allow the posting of any and all copyrighted material viewable to those who have paid a fee for the right to access it without restriction. The number of downloads and the ratings given to them by the downloaders would be used to determine how those fees are divided among the creators. The yearly fee would be such to guarantee a fixed percentage of the GDP or consumer spending was allocated to content creation as other copyright proceeds were lost to this mechanism, and could be graded to income like the income tax or according to prior data on entertainment spending as a function of income. Eventually, the mechanism could become universal; people would treat these proceeds as a portion of income tax which they are entitled to allocate the spending of based on their individual preferences.
The second option is worrisome, but surely better than the first, and possibly better than a broken system that eventually may not guarantee artists enough compensation to support any grand effort. The advantages would be universal access to content and compensation for artists. The sticking point is that the middlemen would lose dramatically - the people who pay radio stations to play songs, who demand humiliating concessions to decide who to promote as a superstar, who spend their time plotting lawsuits to ban freedom of speech, the sort of people to whom Freddie Mercury once dedicated a song (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvoPzvQPBWo&feature=related ) - these people would lose. And isn't it about time for that?
Posted by: Mike Serfas | Friday, 26 September 2008 at 06:21 PM
@Mike Serfas.
I kind of agree with your initial paragraph.
I've often thought that a good way for artists to maximise their sales would be to offer better product. I'm not meaning the actual music, but the offering in general.
When in the early nineties added value meant releasing singles in two versions the poor consumer felt ripped off.
Added value would be including some video, booklets, whatever. And there appears to be just that sort of thing developing now.
The industry needs to react to it's audience change rather than begin suing them.
Posted by: WiredScience | Monday, 13 October 2008 at 10:32 PM
UHH remember when everyone had CDs and you would share it with your friend or burn a copy for him or her? Whats different here? People are sharing what they've bought. Its like saying i bought this cake but no one can have any of it because i bought it. No, you bought it, you can share it. Im not an anti capitalist, stick it to the man person but whats wrong with sharing?
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