p2pnet - rss feed: File sharing: The Big Lie
p2pnet.net News View:- The latest mainstream media organ to put the frighteners on people on behalf of the Big Four record label cartel is Britain’s The Times.
In a headline screaming, Is your child an internet pirate? That’ll be £4,000, it kicks off with:
“Has your child been downloading music illegally on the internet? Then, as our correspondent reveals for the first time, you could be facing a bill for thousands.”
Far from being ‘revealed for the first time,’ this message has been, and is still being, repeated ad nauseum by the Big four, EMI (Britain), Sony BGM (Japan, Germany), UMG (France) and WMG (US). They use the world’s print and electronic press to carry the message that p2p file sharing is causing them terrible financial losses, forcing them to cut back on artist development, and leaving support workers in dire straits.
In fact, with file sharing, nothing is stolen, no money changes hands, no profits are made or lost and it’s never, ever, been proved that file sharing has resulted in the loss of even a single sale.
Nor has it had any demonstrable effect on the multi-multi-billion-dollar music industry’s ever-increasing profits.
“According to an internal study done by one of the majors, between two-thirds and three-quarters of the drop in sales in America had nothing to do with internet piracy,” says Britain’s The Economist. “No-one knows how much weight to assign to each of the other explanations: rising physical CD piracy, shrinking retail space, competition from other media, and the quality of the music itself.”
“Rising physical CD piracy” is a key phrase.
The last century
The prevalence of counterfeit product assuredly puts a dent in sales. Exactly how much of a dent is, of course, entirely subjective, although the entertainment cartels persist in issuing numbers which purport to accurately define losses due to fakes.
If the labels and movies studios used p2p technology instead of disingenuously claiming it’s “devastating” their businesses, it would reduce the availability of physical product which the criminal duplicators use as templates. It would also mean huge savings in legal, packaging, storage, marketing, printing and other costs.
Instead, the cartels, clinging to business models which date back to the 70s in the last century, insist on equating p2p file sharing with ‘piracy’ as they’ve labelled counterfeiting. And they say it’s responsible for all of their problems.
They do this because they believe they must gain absolute control of the internet and how product is distributed on it. And this means crushing all forms of competition, real or merely perceived.
“Alain Levy, chairman and chief executive of EMI Music, told Billboard magazine this year that too many recent acts have been one-hit wonders and that the industry is not developing durable artists,” says The Economist. “The days of watching a band develop slowly over time with live performances are over, says Tom Calderone, executive vice-president of music and talent for MTV, Viacom’s music channel. Even Wall Street analysts are questioning quality.
“If CD sales have shrunk, one reason could be that people are less excited by the industry’s product.”
It could take no more
“Gina Harkell was, putting the final touches to her third CD when the full weight of the music industry came crashing through her letter box,” continues the Times story.
“ ‘It was a legal document,’ she recalls. ‘There were all these huge names - 14 of them - Universal, Polydor, EMI, Capitol, Virgin, Mercury, Sony … versus, well, me, my partner, but principally my son.’
“A hundred miles away, at about the same time, Richard French, a respectable financial adviser, was calling his wife, Louise, with the news that he and his two young children had apparently been breaking the law for years, and they hadn’t even known it. If they wanted to keep out of the courts, he told her, they would have to pay £2,500.
“In fact, all over the country on that day in mid-April, the opening of dull white envelopes elicited gasps of astonishment and despair among parents as they found out that they - usually because of their children - had become the first in Britain to be hit by a clampdown on internet music piracy. After losing sales amounting to some £300 million because of music-sharing software, the industry had decided it could take no more; there was no option but to use the courts.”
The industry could “take no more”. Really? And the article goes on and on in this vein, treating the £300 million claim as though it’s based on reality and as though it comes from credible sources.
Behind this utterly groundless victimization of children and their parents – because that’s exactly what it is – is the BPI (British Phonographic Industry), owned by the members of the Big Four record label cartel.
Nor are these attacks confined to Britain. The same thing is happening in America and in other countries where the major corporate software makers, movies studios and music companies have been able to impose their wills on lawmakers, suborn police forces, and remotely control the mainstream media, most of which they either own outright or manage indirectly, often through adverting dollars.
The irony is: their efforts are all in vain, thanks to the Net. Thousands and thousands of people are opening accounts every minute of every day.
Ordinary people now routinely and regularly by-pass the print and electronic press outlets which used to be their sole means if acquiring knowledge and information.
The media reports correctly say thousands of people (mainly children) have been sued, although they never appear in court, a fact never mentioned by The Times or other mainstream media outlets.
But against that, hundreds upon hundreds of millions of people continue to share music, movies and all kinds of other digital media online, the efforts of the likes of the BPI and The Times notwithstanding.
People have stopped being ‘consumers’. They’re customers again, and the customer is always right, even in the digital 21st century.
A single, lossy, heavily compressed mp3 track
The lawsuits and media rants are having zero effect on file sharing.
More than 11,000 people have around the world have received ‘dull white envelopes’ but against that, millions of people share with each other all day, every day. And their numbers are swelling continually. So the chances of a particular individual becoming a victim are so tiny that they can barely be measured.
People aren’t crooks. They don’t deliberately go out looking to cheat the labels and studios out of what’s rightfully theirs.
If anything, it’s the other way around.
File sharers would gladly pay any reasonable amount for their downloads. However, a dollar and more for a single, lossy, heavily compressed mp3 track converted from an already existing song is ridiculous, which is why the corporate sites are bereft of buyers.
And the labels want to increase even this amount.
In the meanwhile, p2p and file sharing are here to stay and all that remains is the question:
How long will shareholders allow the executives who run their businesses to continue alienating the very people upon whom their enterprises depend?
Jon Newton - p2pnet
Something you think we should know? tips[at]p2pnet.net
See:-
The Times - Is your child an internet pirate? That’ll be £4,000, June 7, 2005
The Economist - Music’s brighter future, October 28, 2004
never appear in court - File sharing, p2p criminals, p2pnet, March 12, 2005
June 7th, 2005 at 5:49 pm
I found the numbers in that story interesting. Gina got hit up for £2500 for having 1,300 files that her son was sharing. That’s a quite modest collection of 100 CDs. If they are like most of us then a good proportion will have been CDs that they bought and then ripped. Now I seem to remember when the BPI announced the law suits that they said they were going after “major filesharers”. So I expected to see people named who had more like 13,000 or 30,000 files available.
But no. It appears to be anybody they can easily identify.
June 7th, 2005 at 6:04 pm
I’m a customer, not a “consumer.” Weel, I was a customer until the RIAA and MPAA started their intimidation campaign. Now, I refuse to put money in the hands of people that use it to subvert copyright law and sue innocent families. I I want to hear a song or see a movie, I get it through a FreeWan Cell or via sneakernet. Once in a blue moon will I rent a movie, so that I can contribute to the exchange. Anything that will make the entertainment cartel go bankrupt is ok with me (at least until they change their tactics).
June 7th, 2005 at 7:03 pm
I too refused to be a consumer. I am a potential customer who votes with his wallet. In this case, I vote nay as I don’t believe in financing what I don’t believe in. I don’t believe in the financial terrorism that big music is hoist off on the potential customers and I refuse to support them in it. This goes for both movies and music.
First sale doctrine is no longer supported by the majors and has been effectively killed with the use of DRM. It wasn’t taken to legislature and made a new law, it was a get around by using technology instead. They now want you to pay the same for a crippled, low quality, and inferior product that you paid for a phyiscal product. That isn’t any bargain and it isn’t worth the price. I refuse to downloan. So now they got you paying for nothing but bits and bytes that aren’t real in the sense they have no tangible presence and they are charging the same prices as they were before when getting you a physical product had a complete infrastructure to get it to you. And just who was responcible for all the job losses? My poor ears misheard and thinks it heard it blamed on “pirates”. To my knowledge they went out with the 18th century though a few holdovers remained in some of the far corners of the world. Also to my knowledge pirates never figured how to sail on land.
June 7th, 2005 at 7:54 pm
“Alain Levy, chairman and chief executive of EMI Music, told Billboard magazine this year that too many recent acts have been one-hit wonders”
Maybe if our chart wasn’t full of the same shitty pop and urban / rnb music people would buy more! 20,000 sales gets you to #1 in the charts (unless Sweety the chick is about to release a single after that bloody frog!)
It’s all the same trash week in week out that enters the charts, played on the radio and seen on TV from the Emap owned stations.
Take a trip aorund HMV trying to find an album of a support band you saw at a gig, i’ve only ever found 1 album (and I have been to plenty of gigs! it’s the only way the music industry gets money from me). A bands just got themselves known to people and you can’t find their album anywhere in a store - it’s no wonder people turn to P2P networks to get what they are after. As for the Internet based downloading sites, why should I pay £10 to download a few tunes I can’t find in a store and KEEP HAVING TO PAY £10 to listen to it each month?? It’s no wonder people I know “abuse” Napster and download EVERYTHING they can find (making the most of their £10) and re-recording their downloads, stripping it of it’s DRM so when they stop paying they don’t lose their music, that they purchased.
Another newspaper over here offered a free Oasis CD over the weekend that was advertised on TV, the small print read “this CD can only be played 4 times” - thats hardly worth listening to! Then again, it is Oasis who’s stuff sounds the same with each album they release.
Thats enough ranting for the time being.
Mullin
June 7th, 2005 at 8:01 pm
“Also to my knowledge pirates never figured how to sail on land.”
Only when the bosses in the music / film industries go to sleep at night. It’s one of those buzz words making something sound worse than it really is.
June 7th, 2005 at 11:17 pm
OK, now that I’ve got your attention I can explain that i’ve got it all figured out. I know why these major corporation’s are bleating about how filesharing is harming their turnover.
Filesharing enables us to obtain a sneak preview of a movie or an album or even some piece of software. If we like what we see then it might be worth buying the product retail. Whereas if the product is not what you were expecting then you can simply delete the offending file from your computer, no harm no foul.
This is where the cartel’s are losing money. From the sub-standard album releases and the cheap, cliché driven movies.
Before I had internet access I relied on the single’s charts and recommendations from friends. I have quite a few crap albums from back then. Purchased on the strength of a cracking single. Which turned out to be the only decent song on the whole CD.
Now I have access to countless reviews and even a free sample if the reviews are favourable. This means that if the album really is a belter afterall then I can safely go out and spend some hard earned cash on the purchase. And my cash really is hard earned so I don’t want to throw it away on inferior pap.
The same can be said of movies. I wonder how many of those thousands of torrent leeches who downloaded ‘Revenge of The Sith’, six hours before it’s premiere later went out and watched it in the cinema? At least 95% of them, i’d be willing to wager some of that aforemantioned hard earned cash on it! After all, the majority of them will have been big Star Wars fans, eager to find out the missing piece of the puzzle. The remaining 5% probably thought it was porn.
It’s expensive to go to the movies these days. And retail DVD prices don’t seem to be falling very far. Sure we’ve seen all the “3 for 2″ deals and what have you, but those are mostly the poor quality movies which no one really wanted to buy when they were full price anyway. And one or two ‘niche’ titles which were never gonna sell much at any price.
Now, thanks to filesharing, people can make a much more informed choice about what products they want to spend money on. Instead of relying in pot luck or blind chance. This must be costing the Big 4 millions in lost revenue. All those purchases which people later realise was a mistake never take place.
Most of what’s available on the common peer to peer networks is guaranteed to be in some sort of ‘lossy’ format such as DivX or MP3. This allows for quicker downloads but obviously sacrifices quality. If you want superior quality, high-definition audio and/or video there’s only one place to go… Retail! Even if you were able to find 1:1, EXACT copies of your media, you’ll still be missing a quality cover, case and insert, etc. Maybe the covers have even been scanned at an ultra-high resolution to preserve the usually tiny text. I assume most people wouldn’t bother to print it out on nice glossy paper, even if their printer was capable of printing the required resolution. The amount of ink required alone would push the cost of such a notion well into the region of about 1/2 the price of the related product… More if there is a multi-page booklet included! Plus the time and effort required to crop the printout and make-up the case, etc. Hardly worth it to my mind. If your gonna spend any sort of money on a thing like that then don’t be a dick and at least direct your cashflow towards the people who released the damn thing in the first place.
Another side to this story is the fact that filesharing is a much better mechanism for discovering new or obscure music. I remember watching a little known band (at the time and in the UK anyway) called ‘Nickel Creek’ on ‘Later with Jools Holland’. Loved the 1st song they played so I thought, “hmm, I think i’ll check out their latest album… “. Before the show had finished I had the complete album at my finger tips. Checked it out and thought the entire album was great. The next time I was in a half way decent music shop I made sure to dig it out. I would never have bought the album on the strength of the 2-3 songs I’d heard. I’ve fallen for that gag before. But thanks to the power of two thousand electric donkeys, Nickel Creek CD sales were up by 1!
Also add to that the random trawls through different p2p index sites, merrily clicking on slightly interesting links with a cry of, “Meh… May as well see what this is like… It’s not costing me anything except bandwidth, and that’s costing me money even when it’s not being used.”. I’ve found plenty of great artists using this method and always look out for the best of them when I manage to get to a music store.
More often than not though, the store in question doesn’t have the album i’m looking for, or hasn’t even heard of the artist (I have obscure tastes). Where is the loss of revenue if i’ve download an album and yet find it physically impossible to purchase by conventional means? (Quantic’s ‘The 5th Exotic’ anyone?). I am unwilling to shop online for various reasons. So therefore they have not lost any revenue as a result of my downloading an album. Rather they have gained a potential customer, should I find the album for sale somewhere in the future.
The entertainment industry has always relied on the hard sell. Forcing massive publicity campaign’s upon us to encourage interest in lack-lustre products. Exciting movie trailers with loads of explosions, which turn out to be better than the movie itself. Constant tv/radio hype about the latest ‘in’ band, who disappear shortly after their 1st appearance on Top of the Pops.
Now they are unable to control the surge of public opinion and exchange of information. Now we are able to sample an entire product and judge it’s worth, rather than base that judgement on the most positive aspects alone. Now they are unable to trick us with their flashing lights and catchy slogans. Now we can seperate the wheat from the chaff with zero expenditure. Now they are unable to sell their product’s to the merely curious, for the curious are notorious. Their curiosity leads them to new ways of doing things. New ways of thinking about things. You can be your own film/music critic. You can decide what’s hot and what’s not.
Sorry big cartel guys, us little people each have our own voice, and we’ve found a way to amplify that voice across continents, in every language. We don’t need to listen to your doctrine anymore, the choice has always been ours to make. You took that from us. Now we are taking it back. Now it’s our turn to call the shots.
June 8th, 2005 at 2:07 am
wow, that pretty much sums it up. but unfortunately, the cartel(s) dont seem to be the type to just abandon their ’cause’, especially after all of this money invested and rhetoric imposed on the public
June 10th, 2005 at 12:11 am
Well said. Now if only the corporate media could remove their blinders and stop swallowing the line of bull that the music and movie cartel has been feeding them.
June 10th, 2005 at 7:50 pm
i wouldnt worry only middle aged old farts read the times anyway.
July 5th, 2005 at 8:27 am
Here is a BIG clue, one the **AA cartels have been giving away but no media outlet has yet to comment on: CD/DVD sales are obviously a profittable soruce of revenu or else counterfieting WOULD NOT EXIST!
You see its really quite simple. In order for the COUNTERFIETER to make a profit from their labors, they have to be able to undercut the prices of the legitimate version. The only way this can be done is if they can produce illegal copies at a price low enough to make selling them feasible. Since the vast majority of coutnerfieters sell directly to retailers, this means they have to undercut WHOLESALER prices.
“But wait a minute, aren’t wholesale prices low due to mass-production savings?” Why yes they are. It is a simple truism that the more of something you make, the cheaper you can make each one. Counterfiet CD/DVD sales are about 1/10th of total sales of the item in question in America (as told by the FCC and **AA). That means that even if ALL of the counterfiet material was coming from one criminal, they woud only be able to get about 10% of the mass-production discount that the OFFICIAL PRODUCER gets….
In other words, CD/DVD sales are artificially inflated. If they were not, there would be no way in that counterfieting would be profitable enough to have any presence in the market at all! This artificial price increase leads many to get the media for free via p2p, since there is no way in hell they could afford the latest top-10 CD every week on what they make at Wal-Mart.
So who should we blame for counterfiet CD/DVDs and p2p’s popularity? Try the **AA cartels that artificially inflate their prices in order to maximize their profiut margins; only to end up spending most of that profit on advertising, buying law-makers, and legal enforcement of the new laws they paid for.
What a sick joke.