P2P archive at Puck’s Blog

Archive for the 'P2P' Category

Aug

Warner Music dinosaur’s death throes

By Puck 2 Comments

Categories: P2P and Rant

Warner Music says music video games must pay more. Apparently they signed deals that were acceptable but now think they should get even more.

Rock Band tracks cost around $2 each, which doesn’t include the ability to actually just listen to the song on my iPod or stereo. They do have the value — added from Harmonix and NOT the music industry – of the individual tracks prepared for playing, as well as animations and audience members.

The music industry can go to hell. They’re a cartel and not needed any more. Their practices are ruining what should be a creative free market, one ruled by the content creators not by the conglomerates who pay for studio time.

Edgar Bronfman, CEO of Warner can go fuck himself. Here’s hoping Harmonix basically tells him that and let his artists NOT get any promotion for their tracks because they weren’t included in the game.

Bands: stop signing record deals! You don’t need them any more and you’ll make more money publishing your own music online because it goes to you, not all to your record company who then decided that they spent another million on promotion which comes out of YOUR share.

Making money off of music when signing a deal with one of these asshole-filled companies is like playing the lottery. Only the very, very lucky end up making enough money to have a career. But if you publish and promote yourself — easy to do online these days — you can make a decent amount of money with little cost and little risk.

Jun

Canadian DMCA is worse than the American one

By Puck 0 Comments

Categories: P2P and Rant

From BoingBoing.net:

Canadian Industry Minister Jim Prentice introduced his answer to the American Digital Millennium Copyright Act today as planned, and it’s even worse than the US DMCA. The Canadian DMCA allows every single exception to copyright to be eliminated by adding DRM: whatever the law allows you to do, a corporation can take away, just by using DRM to prevent you from doing it. Breaking DRM is illegal, unless you fit into a tiny, narrow, useless exception for security research.

Yes, that’s right — the new copyright law being introduced does have provisions for making backups of your media, and fair use UNLESS the creator of that media puts a digital lock (DRM) on it. Which they all will. Which makes the exceptions worthless.

Canadians, write your MP!

More information from BoingBoing:

This is even worse than the approach the US DMCA took ten years ago, and look where that’s got them. Tens of thousands of Americans have been sued, key innovative technology companies have been destroyed, computer scientists have been jailed, and what did it get them? Certainly not an end to infringement — file-sharing is up in every country in the world. And for all the money the record industry has harvested from tech startups and music fans, not one dime has been paid to an artist.

As I’ve said before on this blog, industry-led actions like this are the thrashing about of dying dinosaurs. The Internet and digital commerce means an end to the companies that have taken control away from creators, and they know it and they’re trying everything they can to maintain their bottom line — including lobbying for disgusting new laws like this.

Dec

RIAA Goes Batshit Insane or Unabashedly Evil, You Decide

By Puck 2 Comments

Categories: P2P and Rant

Now they’re claiming copying your legitimately bought CDs to MP3 format for your own personal use on your computer is illegal.

Now, in an unusual case in which an Arizona recipient of an RIAA letter has fought back in court rather than write a check to avoid hefty legal fees, the industry is taking its argument against music sharing one step further: In legal documents in its federal case against Jeffrey Howell, a Scottsdale, Ariz., man who kept a collection of about 2,000 music recordings on his personal computer, the industry maintains that it is illegal for someone who has legally purchased a CD to transfer that music into his computer.

Yes, that’s right. Not content to sue grandmothers and children who happen to run Kazaa, the RIAA is now suing a guy for ripping his legal CDs to his computer.

Fuck the RIAA. It’s time to just stop buying music altogether and let them die out as fast as possible so we can get some fair copyright going on. Check your planned music purchases on RIAA Radar and don’t buy if they’re published by an RIAA member.

Dec

Fight the Canadian DMCA

By Puck 1 Comment

Categories: P2P and Rant

I stole this from a forum posting because it’s got all the relevant information well presented. I’d already joined the Facebook group Fair Copyright For Canada, but thanks for the links/writeup J0no!

Well, it’s that time of year again, and the government is trying to introduce a bill to reform Canadian copyright law and ratify the terms of those questionable WIPO treaties the Liberals signed on our behalf in the late-90’s.

The good news is, the new bill appears to have been derailed right out of the gate.

The bad news is, they will almost certainly be introducing this bill into Parliament just as soon as they have their strategy worked out, and it’s sounding like it will be even worse than the squashed Liberal bill C-60.

If you don’t know what this is, will be an amendment to the Canadian Copyright Act, in a very similar vein to the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act. I don’t want to provide a full break down of what this might mean at the moment, but basically what this will do is give large copyright holders the ability to control what devices you can use to enjoy electronic media, and thereby control how and when you can use it. The idea is that this will somehow curtail media piracy.

The implications of that are already fairly extreme. As just one of numerous examples, imagine you own an iPod and you decide you would like to purchase another music player from another company. Well, I hope you didn’t buy too much music from the iTunes music store, because this new law will provide Apple with legal protection from you ever playing your music on a player that is not Apple-approved.

For more information, here are some links I stole from the Fair Copyright for Canada facebook group:

Web-Based Resources on Canadian Copyright
Michael Geist: http://www.michaelgeist.ca
Digital-Copyright.ca: http://www.digital-copyright.ca
Fair Copyright: http://www.faircopyright.ca
CIPPIC: http://www.cippic.ca
Online Rights Canada: http://www.onlinerights.ca
Excess Copyright: http://excesscopyright.blogspot.com/

Michael Geist’s The Canadian DMCA: What You Can Do
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/2431/125/

Michael Geist’s Copyright Choices and Voices
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/2419/125/

BoingBoing’s Cory Doctorow on Canadian copyright reform
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/11/27/canadas-coming-dmca.html

CBC’s Search Engine Asks Questions of Industry Minister Jim Prentice
http://www.cbc.ca/searchengine/blog/2007/11/last_chance_to_ask_the_industr.html

Mar

Anti-Piracy Poster

By Puck 1 Comment

Categories: P2P and Rant

Saw this over on Warren’s Livejournal, but tracked down the original From Broken-TV.

Anti-Piracy ad

It’s so true, and you’ve heard me talk about it here: Content publishers are so freaked out over piracy (whether it be DVD or video game) that they’re punishing legitimate purchasers with over-the-top DRM, DVD-in-the-tray requirements for PC Games, and annoying unskippable ads at the beginning of legitimate purchases.

They forget that they’re not just selling a product but an experience, and every step they take to taint that experience is simply pushing people towards buying untainted pirate copies instead.

Apr

Canadian Musicians Get It

By Puck 1 Comment

Categories: Cool and P2P

Canadian musicians create consumer-friendly coalition is very encouraging. Seems a group of Canadian musicians understands that suing music fans who share music for non-commercial purposes is a bad thing.

The problem is that the RIAA understands that it’s bad, but it’s bad for both them and the musicians, while P2P(Peer To Peer) is only bad for the RIAA. P2P allows musicians to spread their music globally without requiring a global conglomerate to take over a large percentage of the rights to it. P2P won’t kill music, it will just kill the leeches who are making money off of other peoples’ music.

Oct

A Band Finally “Gets It”

By Puck 2 Comments

Categories: P2P

Harvey Danger has made their entire new album available online via BitTorrent for FREE.

This is what I’ve been talking about for years now — online distribution lets the band have full control over their music, gives people who download music the ability to repay the band for their work by making a contribution and also helps promote sales of the physical copy of the album. And thanks to BitTorrent’s “downloaders also upload” method of bandwidth distribution they’re not going to have massive bandwidth bills to pay off. I just downloaded the torrent, let it load up with Azureus and it has taken less than five minutes for me to grab the entire album.

Kudos, Harvey Danger! Thickets, take note!

Additional: This is exactly what the RIAA(Recording Industry Association of America) is worried about. But it appears they’ve got enough to worry about what with them being sued for fraud and deceptive business practices.

Apr

CRIA A Bunch Of Lying Gasbags

By Puck 0 Comments

Categories: P2P

So the CRIA(Canadian Recording Industry Association) claimed that music piracy (aka: peer-to-peer file sharing) has cost the industry $2 billion in the last five years. Too bad it’s a number pulled totally from their asses.

Apparently they lied about it being $2 billion and also decided to say that the only reason they could possibly be selling less is due to piracy. This has been brilliantly debunked by a law Professor at the University of Ottawa.

The CRIA has routinely upped their loss estimates in order to gain headlines. Currently they argue that piracy is costing the industry Canadian $450 million a year, to the tune of nearly $2 billion for the years 1999 to 2004. However, if one looks at 1999 as a paradigm year, what you see is that since 1999, sales figures have decreased, but only $432 million cumulatively. If every year since 1999 had been as good as 1999, then $432 million would be the amount “lost” in decline up through 2004. The other $1.5 billion in “loses” is simply made up: you can’t document it because it is based on assumptions and politicking.

Where is this $432 million oss coming from? As far as the music industry is concerned, only “piracy” causes loses. But once again, an actual look at the numbers tells us otherwise. The decrease in CD prices alone accounts for $50 million of this reduction in a single year, as large retail outlets exert pricing pressure on the music industry. Those same retail giants, which sell more than half of all CDs, also don’t carry a large stock, focusing instead on new releases. And wouldn’t you know, there are fewer new releases today than in the past. The last nail in the coffin (were that it true) relates to the starving artist claims. The private copying levy, a kind of tax on blank media, generates millions in revenue each year, which is distributed to Canadian artists.

Of course, the CRIA knows this is all made-up or extremely exaggerated bullshit. Nobody is going to make them stop doing this simply by pointing out they’re wrong because the reason they hate peer-to-peer file sharing isn’t because it costs the industry money, but because it threatens to remove THEM from the equation. The Internet allows artists to directly market and distribute to consumers without needing to sign away their music and their lives to the recording industry itself.

Again, for more information check out DownhillBattle.org

May

RIAA Full Of Crap (Again)

By Puck 0 Comments

Categories: P2P

According to this article on Ars Technica, Neilsen Ratings have shown that music sales have INCREASED in the last year, by 10%! How is this possible when the RIAA is claiming sales are down?

Well, in true “full-of-crap-evil-corporate-group” fashion, the RIAA reports sales as items shipped, while Neilsen’s Soundscan tracking system tracks actual barcode sales (how many are going from stores into listener’s hands. All the RIAA has to do with their system to show that sales are down is decide to ship less product!

If you haven’t perused DownhillBattle.org yet, do it. They’ve got plenty of information on how music should be kept alive with artists being the key. And strangely enough, it involves Peer-to-Peer and not the RIAA.

Apr

And now a message from the recording industry to consumers:

By Puck 0 Comments

Categories: P2P

Fuck you, bitches.

$13.49 (US) CDs on Amazon are being sold in downloadable form for $16.99? How does anybody continue to wonder why the recording industry hates filesharing? Because filesharing points out just how much you’re being gouged for the distribution of a record, and that plus promotion is ALL THE RECORDING INDUSTRY DOES.

If you want musicians to get money from music you download, buy a t-shirt. They’ll get more from that sale than they will from you buying a CD. I so *loathe* the recording industry. They’re everything that’s wrong with big corporations.

And other than this kind of garbage, I’m usually pro-business! Honest!