The filesharing websiteQuebecTorrent.com was shut down recently in the latest of a series of filesharing shutdowns around the world. The lockdown Quebec-based filesharing service is generally being viewed as a victory for the music and movie industries.
This news has a number of other filesharing websites worried that they could be next. Sebastien Brûlotte, the guy behind QuebecTorrent.com, said that while he will respect the ruling, he is concerned about the outdated approach to dealing with filesharing websites.
And so the ongoing debate between the music and movie industries and the filesharing communities rolls on. QuebecTorrent.com will no longer be allowed to facilitate the downloading of copyrighted music and films. It’s always sad to see another filesharing soldier go down, but there are so many more out there that from a consumer point of view, it doesn’t make all that much difference.
There’s an interesting article by Lucas Gonze this week that questions whether ad-supported music websites can survive. The basic premise is that streaming-audio music services such as iMeem can’t stay afloat given record labels current pricing demands.
The major record labels apparently demand one cent every time a song is played. To break even, the streaming-audio websites need to sell one ad for one penny per song played — something that is near impossible for any music website.
So that leaves a gaping hole where money is concerned and streaming-audio websites cannot even cover their bases and will certainly struggle to make a profit. A more feasible fee is one tenth of what major record labels are demanding, a fee that labels call unreasonable.
It seems as if streaming-audio websites have some way to go before they can be deemed as having successful business models and it doesn’t look as if record labels are going to give any slack.
Students are taking the filesharing bull by the horns, no doubt fed up with being sued by the RIAA for using filesharing networks to download free music.
Matt Earp and Andrew McDiarmid from the UC Berkeley School of Information have written their master’s thesis on filesharing, investigating how a monthly fee could work for a legal filesharing service.
The students have developed a model for how such a filesharing service would work. Amazing that it took students to really put forward some ideas that would solve the filesharing standoff with the RIAA.
The premises of the thesis are that 64% of students would be willing to use a paid filesharing service and that 75% of people who have used filesharing services would consider a paid service. Why didn’t the RIAA use these stats to come up with something?
It will be interesting to see what happens next, but legal filesharing is a hot topic at the moment.
Limewire, one of the most popular services for free music downloads, has launched the latest section of its Limewire store, Live at Lime, which will give users access to live-music recordings by various indie artists.
The sets have been recorded exclusively for the Limewire store and are being produced as EPs that users can then download. The EPs are being sold to inspire sales of full releases. Some of the bands include Sloan, Tigers and Monkeys, and The Morning Benders. No, we hadn’t heard of them either.
Limewire should be commended for bringing new music to the table. It seems as if this music is more the favourite bands of the guys at Limewire than anything else, but that’s fine by us, so long as there is more music available.
These Limewire sessions are kind of like Peel sessions for the Internet (John Peel, remember him?). Interesting stuff from the Limewire camp as always.
Virgin made headlines recently when it announced that it will send letters advising of legal ways to get music to people who are suspected of using filesharing networks to share copyrighted material.
Well, Virgin has come under fire this week for its broadband speeds. The complaint isn’t quite as serious as the ones launched against Comcast, as Virgin is only really accused of failing to tell users that its advertised speeds are only achievable at off-peak times.
Virgin will have to clarify the speed of its services for users now. Though not directly related to filesharing, part of the issue here is, ironically, how fast people can download TV shows (and music) through filesharing networks.
Meanwhile, ISPs in the US are banning access to filesharing services such as BitTorrent, while British Telecom is planning to cut off the Internet connections of people who sue filesharing networks to download copyrighted material.
While students have been consistently targeted by the RIAA for filesharing violations, it has usually been related to illegal free music downloads. The whole filesharing debacle has taken a turn as the makers of text books have started voicing concerns that students are using filesharing services to get copyrighted study books.
It’s a tough call. The students are presumably using the books to aid their education, but they are effectively stealing them. How do you approach such a situation? Sue the students for all the money they have?
Sites such as Textbook Torrents call on students to scan their text books and upload them. This is perhaps crossing the line. It’s one thing that filesharing is used to obtain material, but asking students to actively violate laws and upload data is a whole different matter.
A number of links to text books have been taken down recently and there will likely be more to follow. Where do you stand on this?
British Telecom (BT) has teamed up with the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) to tackle the supposed problem of illegal filesharing. In shocking news, BT will apparently be cutting off customers who use their service to access copyrighted material through filesharing networks. We never thought this would happen in the UK.
This comes after Virgin announced that it will be sending out letters to people suspected of filesharing, but BT is taking it a step further. Virgin never implied it would be cutting off customers from the Internet.
BT has said that it isn’t doing anything out of the ordinary as customers should adhere to the ISP’s rules. Customers who continually break the rules (by downloading music?) will have their accounts suspended or terminated.
This is all kinds of stupid and can only result in a serious backlash. Where will BT draw the line in deciding who gets cut off?
Guardia di Finanza in Italy shut down a filesharing forum this week after discovering links — and only links – to pirated material, such as music and movies.
Downrevolution.net was locked down and four people were arrested pending a criminal investigation into the activity on the filesharing forum. Three of those arrested are reportedly children. Some 17 computers were seized in the filesharing raid, along with three external hard drives and a bunch of CDs and DVDs.
The arrested could face jail terms of up to four years for their supposed illegal filesharing activities. This again raises the issue of what constitutes copyright infringement. The filesharing website in question did not host any of the copyrighted material, so really, who is in the wrong?
We’ll be following this filesharing case closely. This is all similar to the arrest in the UK of the guy behind the filesharing website OiNK.cd. He remains under investigation.
Ha! We knew it. While the record industry has been harping on at people to pay for their music, it’s been revealed that a whole bunch of these paid websites don’t even have the rights to sell the music they are offering customers.
While free music downloads may land you in hot water, no-one would have thought that paying for music could do the same. There are, apparently, dozens of websites offering music downloads when they don’t have the rights to do so.
Many of these websites tout their services as having billions of songs available for legal music downloads. Just because you pay for a music service doesn’t mean it’s legal, which leaves consumers in a kind of odd position. Who are we supposed to trust now? Is this a message to give all our money to big brands, such as Apple?
This is the kind of news that destroys faith in buying music downloads through legal means. Long live filesharing and free music downloads.
While we all know that filesharing makes up a lot of the Internet’s traffic, we had no idea that it was quite this much. Believe it or not, about 44% of all North American Internet traffic is used up by people accessing P2P filesharing networks.
This number is up from 41% just one year ago. The top-three forms of Internet traffic, according to the survey, are P2P filesharing (43.5%), Web browsing (27.3%) and streaming media (14.8%). We wonder where watching porn fits into those figures.
Apparently, P2P filesharing accounts for an even larger slice of the upstream traffic, eating up about twice as much bandwidth as all other traffic combined. In the face of such a statistic, which must surely be representative of a lot of countries, is there any way that the music industry can continue to ignore filesharing? Surely the logical step is to introduce paid filesharing services.
