Where my original search request had been dropped. I typed in 52nd Street again….
52ndsearch.gif
52ndresult.gif
Which of course was not what I was looking for.
I had lost the Rolling Stone page by this time. So I thought I would try Last.fm
Curiously, Last.fm would let me listen to Billy. Facilitated by becoming a member. In other words, there was no option to remain anonymous.
It’s a shame that the efforts of the industry at legitimizing music downloads don’t appear to extend beyond the borders of one or two countries.
i.e.: In a perfect world, where a supplier is interested in engaging with me, the consumer, rather than being fobbed off with the:
“For music and entertainment services available in your country, please click here……”
Which, by the way took me to the same place that thought “52nd street” equaled everyone BUT Billy Joel.
If American programmers can’t yet work GEO IP location databases to find out where an AU APNIC registered IP address originated from, then the music biz is in real trouble.
Hint Rhapsody and Real…. Please see the Resources section below for free GEO-IP software and if you would like Aussies as customers maybe you could link them to a service that knows that the worlds first CD was 52nd Street by Billy Joel.
Alternatively and until you do, users are probably still going to use the convenient, no hassles, works every time option…..
Emule doesn’t require me to be any particular country, nor does it require that I offer up my user details for statistical analysis.
On Emule there were 45 instances (file versions) with 54 people offering to share their copy with me.
Had I elected to download the track, I could have been listening to it within seconds, hassle free and still anonymous.
There-in lies the principal challenge for the industry.
How to replace the convenience and accumulated habits of consumers with revenue earning alternatives.
We are impressed with many of the digital available alternatives.
So I have but one question…. Why couldn’t I listen to Billy Joel via the Internet anonymously?
SneakPeak. (OK it’s the Perceptric version of a Trailer……..)
For all those wondering what I have been up to for the last ten days with nary a blog post or a how’s your doody…..
It’s been an interesting start to the year.
Two reports came out in the last couple of weeks.
The IFPI Digital Music Report 2010
Music How, When, Where
You Want It – But Not
Without Addressing Piracy
and the independent report that emanated from Tera Consultants.
For some time we have been saying that the downturn in sales [if any] has more to do with format change (Compact Disc to Digital) and the industry’s slow response to consumer demand than P2P.
Although we have found that there are positive indications of file sharing damaging catalogue sales, we are unable to come to the same conclusion on new releases.
Whilst perusing the Terra report, found some criticism of the Oberholzer-Gee & Strumpf2007 paper
– Most studies conclude that the impact is negative
and significant (even if, in some cases as
Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf (2007)133, the effect is
supposed to be negligible)
133The results of Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf (2007) were contradicted by Blackburn (2007) and
Leibowitz (2007).
A similar comment in the IFPI 2010 Digital Music Report;
“There is one study (Oberholzer and Strumpf, 2004) that claims to find a zero impact but it
has been frequently discredited. All the other studies find some degree of negative
relationship between file-sharing and sales of sound recordings.”
again in the Recording Industry In Numbers 2009 report;
A well-publicised study by Oberholzer and Strumpf (2004) found
no link between the fall in music sales and illegal downloading.
This study was reviewed by Liebowitz who concluded that “it
is probably something of an understatement to say that [their]
results did not hold up well under this re-examination” (How
Reliable is the Oberholzer and Strumpf Paper On File-Sharing?).
Being a curious chap, I read the Leibowitz commentary and let Google do the walking…..
In Table 11 your instruments are different for each album. In Table 12, your instruments only have 17 observations, one for each week. That doesn’t seem like much information on which to explain the downloading behavior toward 670 albums. I am particularly concerned about the German school holiday variable. To start, I am surprised that the coefficient was even positive. I looked at German school holidays and I see that there are usually 12 days in October plus the typical Christmas holiday. Yet according to Table 3, October is when downloads were lowest. Is there something else going on here?Would you mind providing data on the number of German kids on vacation for each of your 17 weeks?(What a ridiculous question from a learned academic – I did not know that sarcasm was an approved method of querying statistical results or analysis.)
There appears to be more going on here than meets the eye….. I always thought that academics earned their spurs by being dispassionate and independent.
How important are the files of German school children to American downloaders? We really do not know. You only provide data on the total files of Germans used by Americans.
That’s interesting, because although I am familiar with the work of Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf and don’t exactly agree with all their findings, this was one area of research that I had conducted extensive samplings over – i.e.: increases and decreases in file sharing based on school holidays, work start times and work end times and our data correlated the small sample numbers of the Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf analysis.
This was obviously a velvet gloves off (game-on) situation, where analytical economic theory fails against actual raw data collection.
Many of our readers are aware that we set-up and ran for six months (April-September 2009) an ed2k server (non-indexing) to collect search request data from Australian IP numbers.
We restricted the access numbers to 1000 users but still amassed 6 GB per day of search request data.
In part to assess the damage or lack of, that file sharing was causing to media creators and in part to confirm the Ipoque data that users were no longer as interested in downloading music files.
With the server located initially in Melbourne for the first few months and then Sydney, we discovered that it was still a target of attempted (futile, because it didn’t index users files) server use by international IP numbers (even though it had an overseas latency figure of over 1400 ms).
The Kademlia XOR next available bucket does not respect RIPE allocation of IP numbers.
We briefly discussed the Kademlia Protocol in P2P with a Condom. (A blog article and not a formal research paper).
However the relevance of the German school kids files to Americans would be in the time differences between the two continents and the habits of user in keeping their computers on all night.
If on holidays, obviously, German kids computers are not being left on at night and not making available (average 800 files each) for the download of American kids.
This unfortunately is a serious flaw in the understanding of Leibowitz.
I wondered if a learned academic can make such an obvious mistake in the analysis of other academics data studies, was it time to speak up about the results of our own empirical data set?
Australia is an island without the luxury of gigabyte speed unmetered intercontinental connections. Each megabyte costs someone somewhere (our data says that it is usually the employer that pays) about $0.10 cents. Therefore, as a semi-isolated ed2k enclave, Australia is particularly useful as a reference analysis of XOR propagation.
Not-withstanding my above comments, we have noticed a very similar effect related to a children’s television program called Hi-5.
Google discovered a new Oberholzer-Gee & Strumpf paper, from 2009, and I quote there-from;
While the majority of papers reports some sales displacement, the four studies using actual measures of file sharing (Tanaka, 2004; Bhattacharjee et al., 2007; Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf, 2007; Smith and Telang, 2008) find that file sharing is unrelated to changes in sales.
What I found most interesting is that everyone ignored the official Netherlands paper,
Economic and cultural effects of file sharing onmusic, film and games (TNO)
Which is the only paper apart from a Canadian paper, (referenced) to have brought up the positive cultural aspects of file sharing.
The research shows that the economic implications of file sharing for welfare in the
Netherlands are strongly positive in the short and long terms. File sharing provides
consumers with access to a broad range of cultural products, which typically raises
welfare. Conversely, the practice is believed to result in a decline in sales of CDs,
DVDs and games.
Therein lies the Dilemma for the European Union (and every country outside the USA).
Cultural enhancements for the community or blind allegiance to corporatism.
At Perceptric we believe there needs to be a balance, ensuring cultural diversity, the welfare of the citizenry and that new content can continue to be created.
So, for the last ten days readers, I have been refreshing the recent material on file sharing including the Leibowitz evidence in the Joel Tannenbaum case.
Based on what I have read, it is time to revisit seriously the partially completed analysis of Australian file sharing that I carried out last year and rebut some statements that I consider erroneous and misleading.
We thought we would look at actual sales data to ascertain the impacts of file sharing.
Sales figures by Numbers of Sales, Record Albums, 1991 – 2009, No 1 Albums by Week (USA).
annualalbumswk.gif
Source: BillBoard Charts, Neilsen Soundscan
Positive growth (however miniscule) over the whole period. Then again, what happens if we just look at the file sharing years?
Sales figures by Numbers of Sales , Record Albums, 1998 – 2009, No 1 Albums by year (USA).
Source: Neilsen Soundscan.
Yes, it looks grim for the file sharing community (or someone).
And that was before we allowed a factor for population growth numbers…..
We leave you with just one more little graph…. Call it thinking music……
Yet according to the NBC – it’s not available yet.
Amazon of course managed to restore my faith.
Buy Episode $1.99
Buy Season 2 $33.99
So Season two is available on DVD but NBC can’t even be
bothered to update their website.
A little Click
here to buy Series two on DVD or download from Amazon.
Is all that was needed.
So let me see NBC. You made the show. You want to sell it to
me. But you’re too lazy or lacking in sufficient clue to give me a clue as to
where I can get it from.
Hmmm.Shame because
at $33.99 US dollars, it’s cheaper to buy it on DVD, pay the postage than to
download it Australian broadband prices, even if I was to bag the low-fi
version at only 352 Mb per episode. That would still equal nearly 8 GB which is
only 2 GB short of my monthly 10GB prime time quota. (Cost? 80% of $49.95
equals $39.96 AUD.) The cost of the DVD?
$37.25 AUD.
Pardon? Did you say there is no DVD?
Oh, it’s available only for digital download.
At $1.99 per episode and the $33.99 is for 22 episodes.
Oh. Is it available for Australians to download?
Oh. Not released yet as per the comments (comment is about
Stargate SG1 but applies equally to this series.)
iv'e had a look at stargate sg1 season 9 and when it
starts playing a message comes up that i can't use video on demand. so if i
can't watch it streaming i can't download it? iv'e bought it in australia on
dvd the only problem is the the thing that holds the disks caused a break on
the last disk so i haven't seen the last three episodes and there's no repeats
shown of stargate sg1 on australian tv creates problems trying to watch
episodes of shows that you haven't seen or the delays waiting for new episodes
of current shows to come on in australia currently waiting for the star wars
the clone wars season 2 to come on in australia
As an American I'd like to say that I'm sorry to hear
this. It seems problems such as this are common with region-coding and other
prohibitive measures. It seems movie and television studios in the U.S.
can be a real pain when releasing content to the rest of the world. I don't
think this situation is common solely to Amazon. The copyright holders are
likely to blame; they want their product released on "their" time in
other regions. One would think it would not be too difficult to coordinate a
simultaneous release in all of the lands in which English is spoken! (They
could slightly delay for countries as France
and Germany
to catch up on subtitling or voice-over.)
It sucks, I know. They want to enforce their copyrights in Australia
and Europe but leave honest people little
choice but to download illicitly. I'm not suggesting one do that, but it they
did I could not blame them. They're not providing the product or getting any
money anyway.
I hear you on the DVD/CD disc-retaining things. (I don't know what they are
called properly either.) If you have an X-Box 360 or something like that this
will not happen. It is due to wear caused by the spindles on drives like the
ones that retain the disc on a portable CD player or a slim-line laptop drive.
They tend to stress this plastic each time a disc is snapped into place. That's
what causes the hair-line cracks that keep growing into the ROM areas rendering
our discs useless and the data irretrievable.
I wish you luck in finding the content you are searching for. Hopefully here
soon. Amazon is a decent service and usually the first place I go to find cool
stuff. Peace.
So there it is.
Not available in Australia
and if it was you would still have to download it at an incredible additional
cost increasing the price to roughly $4.00 per episode.
And on the subject of the No DVD – someone managed to buy a
copy. They ripped it. All 22 episodes – the TVU reference didn’t say Webrip or
Digital RIP it said:
Delegates to the ACTA discussions are now safe and sound
back in their home countries convinced that they have been successful in aiding
in stamping out copyright infringement.
History has taught us that every-time the music industry or
Government enact prosecutorial or legislative actions against file sharing, the
resulting pushback always seems to trump the original file sharing incursion.
New programs, new servers, new locations, new technologies
and new players.
We have blogged about this before and stated that unless the
industry stops attempting to stop file sharing it will disappear under a cloud
of invisibility.
It would appear that whilst some Governments are attempting
to stamp out perceived copyright infringement, others may not be so inclined.
In underground bunkers in country’s that won’t be signing up
to ACTA anytime soon, the geeks are plying their file-sharing trade with
impunity.
Earlier this year, Torrentfreak announced that the PirateBay site had been taken down by
order of the Swedish Government.
Following the earlier court defeat for Fredrik, Gottfrid
and Peter and the pending civil action taken by several Hollywood
studios, the Swedish authorities have now ordered The PirateBay to be
disconnected from the Internet. The site’s bandwidth suppliers have been
threatened with a large fine. The site is completely offline.
It didn’t take long for some Russian opportunists to get
their site up and going.
154 listings for the latest Michael Jackson documentary
movie, “This is it”.
And of course there are longtime sites like Baidu.com which
are rated number one in China and according to alexa are: The leading
Chinese language search engine, provides "simple and reliable" search
experience, strong in Chinese language and multi-media content including MP3
music and movies, the first to offer WAP and PDA-based mobile search in China.
At Perceptric we have been saying for sometime that file
sharing is and should be considered a Public Relations cost.
However we have also said that file-sharing impacts the post
initial rampup catalogue sales.
Our thesis is twofold.
File
sharing promotes the artists, actors, directors amongst a community that
would not otherwise be able to view or listen to the content.
There
is a long term loss to the catalogue value of content when the credentials
of the artist, actor, director have already been established.
For example, The Beatles. There is no valid reason for file
sharing Beatles songs as they are already a “made” brand.
Therefore except for those people that are too poor, too
remote or in areas where distribution of Beatles records are not available in a
format desired by the consumer; where obviously point 1 above would apply.
It would appear that in the main, file-sharers would agree
with me. ED2K Beatles links are less than 2,000 with minimal daily activity.
I doubt that EMI’s current woes would disappear if everyone
stopped file sharing the Beatles.
Ergo, File sharing is not really damaging the economy. So is
ACTA merely yet another “Watch this hand, don’t watch the other hand… watch
this hand.”
Goombridge [2001] states that in his opinion, it is obvious
that “that the United
States will continue to remain at the forefront of shaping
Western policy responses to
China,
both economically and politically.”
My question is, can we as a country allow another nation (America)
to interfere with our economic well being?
ACTA is not about File sharing, it is the next stage of a
currency War that began with the discovery of oil and has had several
escalations in the last twenty years.
Afghanistan
The Berlin Wall
The Euro
Iraq
And now, Chinese citizens can afford to buy motor vehicles.
ACTA is being conducted by the USA
and is merely another diplomatic tool.
However, when American Statespersons (Hilary Clinton) are
taken for a walk within metres of the latest torrent tracker on Russian hallowed
ground – I think file sharing is here to stay unless ACTA is the precursor to a
Global military escalation.
On that basis alone, I urge Global Governments to consider a user pays Internet Licence from which to satisfy all copyright infringement claims thereby clearing the decks for beneficial Trade advancement.
References:
The PirateBay Taken Offline By
Swedish Authorities (Updated)
Last Modified: 2009-11-10 19:33:44
EST, Size: 26 kb . Accessed 17th November 2009
Groombridge, M., 2001, Economic relations after China's
accession to the WTO: an American perspective on shared goals and challenges
confronting the US
and the EU. Mimeo, Cato Institute, WashingtonDC.
Time Magazine 16
November 2009 Hilary’s Moment Page 16-23
The Future of Australian Television – Taxation, Licensing, Advertising or Criminalization?
http://www.perceptric.com/blog/_archives/2009/11/14/4379856.html
Given the attention of Governments to file sharing, it would
appear that the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) was obviously caused by you
sharing a copy of Lily Allens “Fuck you very
much”.
We have Ministers flying all over the world to discuss how
to criminalize 15 year old kids who can’t yet vote.
These same kids don’t bother reading political manifestos, or
if they do, have no idea how the restrictions being discussed on their
personnel freedoms will impact them in the future.
What the world does not need is an unworkable trade
agreement facilitating third party interference with the choices of any one
country’s citizens.
What it does need is a system that recognises the validity
of claims for payment by artists, authors, publishers and distributors and
renumerate them according to their contribution to the creation of the content.
In the UK,
the BBC has had the benefit for years of Television Licensing fees. This has
enabled the UK
to become one of the eminent producers of quality content.
In fact, it could be argued successfully that UK TV licensing fees have created the only real competitor to Hollywood
and the American TV networks.
I recently viewed a BBC show called Wild Down Under. One of the
best representations and photography that I have ever seen of outback Australia. Into one hour, the BBC packed what it took me over 15 years of weekend adventuring to view firsthand.
How is it that an English company can outdo Australians at
pictorially representing our own country?
There is but one answer. Experience and talent created by content creation funding. Paid for
by the annual £142.50 household UK
Television license fee.
Twenty-six million Brits paying an annual license fee adds
up to an impressive £ 3,804,075,789 (or $6,805,659,118
AUD) Quite a nice windfall for any production company.
That works out to $ (AUD) 110.84 per man woman and child in the UK.
In comparison, the Australian ABC funding
of $ (AUD) 1,070,900,000 (Gov 800+ M, other sources 200+ M) works out to
only $ (AUD) 50.61 per citizen.
That extra sixty bucks a
year would help produce an awful lot of viewable high class content.
Meanwhile back at the ranch, the Internet highway is being redesigned
into an Internet super highway (Trademark Al Gore . See References) or in Australian parlance, the NBN.
Mind you, the proposed ACTA legislation will make most fun
things illegal, so there is some doubt about the eventual profitability of the
service. i.e.: if one is unable to use the internet for what it was designed
for – sharing content, (and reading newspapers for free) then what good will it
be?
The parallel is winning a brand new Ferrari and being told
that there is no way you can drive it on the freeway at full speed.
You might as well buy a two stroke Trabi, and paint it red.
To Create your own
Customized Trabant, click on the image.
Let’s talk about highways and motorways for the moment.
Travelling time between the southern suburbs of Sydney
(Liverpool) and the city used to take about an hour.
Then along came the M5. For $1.50 you could drive between Liverpool
and the airport at speeds of up to 110 kilometres per hour with no traffic lights.
Now with peak congestion, the trip takes only two hours and twenty minutes. (As per my experience last week when I left the house at 5:50 am to ensure that I would be in town by 8:30. I made it to College Street via the Williams Street offramp with only ten minutes to spare.)
The difference?
Three things, land prices in the outlying areas rose because
of the motorway;
a company now receives the toll for the privilege of being
allowed to queue up on the morning city bound carpark;
and public transport by comparison looks REALLY good. (It only takes an hour from Liverpool by train to Museum station and for less than the return tolls.)
The M7 was then developed as a ring road to benefit outlying
areas of Sydney.
The cost to drive on the M7 from (let’s say Blacktown)
to Sydney and back again?
M7 $ 6.67 M2 $4.95 Lane Cove Tunnel $2.73 Harbour Tunnel $4.00 = $18.35 each way
or $183.50 per week.
Even the RTA know they have a problem with Tolls.
Visiting http://sydneymotorways.com/
and selecting Plan your trip and calculate tolls
will allow you to Select for example Sunnyholt road as your entry and Beecroft
road as your exit. A nice little 10 Km drive. Nope, the official RTA route
wants you to drive 94 kilometres. (So much for Government databases.)
So it would appear the NSW Government have totally stuffed
up the economy of anyone living in the western suburbs who works in the city.
(The only good thing I can say is that those responsible have retired from politics.)
But the Toll companies are getting rich.
With the average weekly travel cost now about two hundred
per week, who the hell can afford to buy music or rent DVD’s?
Certainly not the greater population of Sydney.
So scratch 5 million from Australia’s
population for the purposes of music and movie purchases. They're too busy paying tolls to buy any music.
So here we have an example of Government, Lobbyists and Companies
allowing the economy to be damaged for the benefit of private interests.
Never a good long term economic plan.
But enough about motorways, let’s get back to the National Broadband
Network.
It is proposed that eventually we will have fibre to every
home (FTTH) in Australia
at a cost of around $4456 per home.
This fibre will allow the population to turn off their
televisions, disregard their newspaper deliveries and receive all of their
content via interactive means.
If we calculate the available bandwidth per consumer (by the
time the FTTH is delivered in about eight years time) on the basis of Moores
law, Australians will have available approximately 640 MB per second of access
to Australian content.
If we utilize Standard Definition television resolution, (with
one hour of programming being 400 MB) then the average TV viewer requires 11.2
GB per week. In a previous article I suggested that the obvious solution to the
file sharing problem was to propose a per Gigabyte viewing tax of one cent per
Gigabyte.
This of course could be ameliorated via advertising.
So for those that are well heeled, one cent per Gigabyte
would be a pittance that few would object too to be able to be masters of their
own viewing choices.
i.e.: Imagine being able to download all the Star Trek
movies and episodes in a few minutes to be able to watch whenever you wanted too,
without having to wait for “To be continued…..”
For those to whom this taxation impost was an anathema, the
choice to accept voluntary advertising would still allow them to participate in
the future download spree but assist in retaining the economy’s necessary
consumer retail programming.
Benefits to Government
Benefits to Consumers
Benefits to Content Creators.
Benefit to Australian Content Creators
No longer the meat in the sandwich between the people and
the Content Creators.
Guaranteed payment for the NBN without relying on xharging high access fees.
Choice.
Payment for all content
Enhanced Funding for local content creation.
I can hear the doubt, but lets do the numbers.
9.2 million homes in Australia. (Future number)
2.3 persons in each home.
Standard Definition TV picture @ 400 MB per hour.
11.2 GB per week per person (based on 4 hours and 11 minutes
of TV viewing time)
1 cent per gigabyte.
Total weekly Broadband license (Tax) $ 2,369,920,000 (Assuming each
person in the home has separate screens. As we do in the Koltai household.)
Annual Total? $ 123,235,840,000.00
(Boy - wouldnt that fix the budget deficit?)
To Do List:
Develop an Electronic Program Guide (EPG) that scrapes all
content from all sources.
Develop a set-top box that sits between the LCD/Plasma
screen and the media storage device.
Develop a tracking regime as to what content was viewed by
whom when.
Organise advertising companies to fund the development of
the set-top box.
Pass legislation that mandates a set-top box media device with
one cent per Gigabyte billing (with appropriate exemptions for pensioners and advertising
recipients).
And…. Develop a methodology for tracking royalty payments to
ensure they actually get paid to the creators and not just those with the most
lawyers on board.
C’mon Australia,
let’s solve the financial crisis, create a huge pile of jobs, eliminate criminalization
of our younger population and obtain better content all in one go.
What say you? Let's not make the same mistake with our content that we made with the NSW motorways.
Allowing private corporations to dictate Government policy leads to financial suicide or at the very least financial hardship, for our future citizens.
Senator Conroy, Prime Minister Rudd, I call on you and the Australian Labour Party to follow the innovative leadership initiative created by the announcement of the NBN and to implement a sensible, meaningful solution to the file sharing problem and not blindly follow the direction of the American lead, driven by corporate greed and led by individuals whom are scared of technological advancement.
ACTA will not put any money into the pockets of Australian corporations, or benefit Australian citizens.
This proposal will create jobs, ensure the content creators are reimbursed for their content on a user pays basis with a substantial amount left over for the further funding of the ABC and the NBN.
Hat tip to Jan Whittaker for the ABC Piracy Reference.
References:
Is the Trabi, East
Germany's Clunker, On the Comeback?
An anecdotal statistical examination of music industry
potential income with no file sharing.
The music industry have managed to convince global
Governments that they should have special protectionist legislation enacted.
No-one has bothered to have a look at the logic behind their
claims.
Forget file sharing for a moment.
The question should be, how much discretionary income do the
music Industry feel that they should receive and how much do they receive and
what portion is that revenue when measured against all other products necessary for living
life.
The other day I calculated the average schlepping citizens
(being me) music appreciation library as constituting 1400 tracks collected over
36 years of buying 45’s, LP’s, cassette tapes, 8-tracks and CD’s.
This brought up an interesting question. If I represented
the average citizen, what then did this mean for the music industry?
Bear with me for a few moments. Read the boring stuff and
assume (just for now) it is correct.
There are six billion people on planet earth.
The average age is thirty-four years old.
Historically the average person purchases 3.027 CD’s per
annum.
The average CD holds 12 tracks of music.
The retail value of a music track is $0.99.
If we assume that all planet earth want to listen to all the
same type of music – i.e. Hip Hop, heavy metal, classical, country and western,
with no differentiation, or preferences, then we can say that the maxim potential
for music sales in the world today is:
Population (6 Bn) by average CD’s times 12 tracks @ $0.99
which equals $ 18,162,162,162 P.A.
If we adjust that by
language bias. i.e.: Not everyone would appreciate an English lass singing “Fuck
You very much”and may well prefer the
gentle crooning voice of a sitar accompanied local language ballad.
In fact it may be a
surprise to the music industry, but 67% of the world don’t speak English as
their first language.
So if we knock out
the 67% to whom most english music is of questionable value, how are we doing.
Then the total
revenue per annum to the industry would be in the order of$5,993,513,513 or approximately $1.00 per Global citizen per year.
Unfortunately as we explained in how the
content industry won the West, not every citizen has a dollar a year to
spend on music. e,g,: Burundi,
the poorest nation on earth where the residents have only $120 per annum to
live on.
Therefore, we must consider music a discretionary expense
that comes after the basics of food, shelter and clothing and of course
considerably behind the purchase of a music player device, (like a CD-player
for $50.00); oh did I also say that playing music normally requires
electricity?
The poverty level of Americans in 2005 was calculated (by
the ACS) as being $7765 per adult.
In the table at the end of the above mentioned
article, there is an entry for the global aggregate income per annum.
Entry number 133 is for the World and reads World $8,230.
The sources for that table originated from various datasets
supplied by the IMF, World Bank, CIA Factbook and the OECD.
In other words, 6,000,000 are aggregated to having a
discretionary income of only $465 per annum.
If you had $465 to buy all or your non food, shelter or
clothing items per year, how much music would you buy?
Yes, that includes petrol for the car that you can’t afford
to buy.
Yes that includes presents for your kids
Yes that includes dinner at Level 41 for 2 which comes to
gee, about $465 (including two good bottles of wine).
In other words, the entire worlds discretionary income is
only $2,790,000,000,000 which is spent
on the produce of all industries.
So before we pass any legislation forcing people to spend
their $465 on music that is culturally irrelevant let’s just see how the
numbers work out for Australia.
One of the lucky countries in the world Australia at position 175 in the list
with an income of $42,020 or 5.4 timers higher than the American definition of
poverty.
Our population is 22 million. Therefore retail music
sales in Australia
should account for 22 million and some change.
In 2008, Aussies spent
(wholesale value only) $177,901,624 in the period January to June.
In other words, in the first six months, they exceeded the
statistical expectation of the music industry by 3.99 times or 7.97 times for
the entire year.
Remember above I said that Australians had 5.4 times more
discretionary income than the definition for poverty?
It would seem that we are doing 2.57 times better that the
world average. In other words, Australia
as a country spends way too much of it’s discretionary income on music.
Add the retail markup of 35% (total now $240,167,192) and we creamed the music
industries expectations.
This now represents 0.015%
of Australia’s imports.
To put that into perspective, our food only imports account for 10.9% of our overseas import trade.
We have already determined that the average Australian is in fact spending $ 10.91 per annum on music. That's eleven music tracks per year.
WOW!
But Koltai, there are two things wrong with your
assumptions.
1.All Australians speak English.
2.The Aria numbers include wholesale revenue from
other sources, like licensing music in games and Ringtones.
Good points.
In relation to point 1:
Australia
is no longer the WASP country it was in the fifties. We are now a
multi-cultural integrated cosmopolitan society with multiple heritage streams
in some cases overtaking and dominating the earlier prevailing English ones.
e.g.: Fish and Chips shops compared to Kebab stands.
Therefore the language spoken at home in this multi-cultural
society is an important consideration.
i.e.: Is an Australian Hindi mum going to be enamoured of
her 12 year old daughter playing Metalica at full volume throughout the house?
Possibly not.
According to the ABS, four million Australians were born
overseas. These four million have had ten million children born in Australia.
Whilst it is obvious that the children born in Australia
are likely to speak English with their peers, at home, 64% of Australians
still speak a foreign language and this also impacts to an extent on their
viewing and listening habits and consequently their music language purchases.
We could use a further analysis of my music collection to
assist us in this determination.
I was born in New Zealand of Hungarian refugee parents. I
have spent the majority of my adult life in Australia
with a few years in Hungary
and approximately eighteen months in countries like America,
Nauru, Iran,
Hong Kong, Germany and the
UK.
Of my music collection, (114 CD’s/albums/cassettes)17 CD’s/tapes are Hungarian,3 are German, 2 are French, 2 are Romanian
and 2 are European language compilations.
Here we depart momentarily from the norm. I may not
represent the epitome of average consumer having been able in my lifetime to
travel to multiple countries.
However, I do speak languages other than English and
consequently my music interests roughly approximate the social interaction I
have with the world in those languages or 22.8% of my total music library.
Now the question that one has to ask, is how many of those
foreign language CD’s/cassettes did I purchase in Australia?
The answer?
Not one.
In regards to point 2.
$4,028,088 is for Digital Ringtones
$2,673,480 is for digital other.
Therefore deduct 6.7 million if we’re being picky.
However,as Digital Ringtones and
digital other are a development of the same technology that evolved P2P, I have
left the numbers in.
In other words, it is incorrect to selectively discriminate
statistics.
Ringtones are sales of music copyright, as are digital
other; they would not exist without the same tools that the industry now blame
for their declining revenues.
So, in summary, I have to ask, why are our politicians
listening to music industry claims about file sharing damaging their business?
Why is Australia
about to sign up for ACTA?
The numbers quite clearly state categorically, that the
industry is doing far better than could be economically expected.
References:
MAIN LANGUAGE OTHER THAN ENGLISH SPOKEN AT HOME /
PROFICIENCY IN SPOKEN ENGLISH
The Music Industry continuously claims that it has been
harmed by file sharing.
Yet it has also, failed to provide empirical evidence
of the actual damage.
Whilst we disagree with their modus operandi in
criminalizing their consumers, we do find that there would appear to be a
difference in the reality of music sales and the storage capacity of the
devices that are made available by the disruptive mp3 player manufacturing companies.
From an article on the Apple Website:
The first iPod was sold five and a half years ago, in
November 2001, and since then Apple has introduced more than 10 new iPod
models, including five generations of iPod, two generations of iPod mini, two
generations of iPod nano and two generations of iPod shuffle. Along with
iTunes® and the iTunes online music store, the iPod has transformed how tens of
millions of music lovers acquire, manage and listen to their music.
iTunes have sold 6 billion music tracks.
Total revenue to the music industry? 6 Billion dollars.
Number of iPods sold to 9th September, 2009 =
220,000,000 ranging in size from 2 GB to 80 GB.
Logic tells us that no-one is going to have a spare two to
eighty thousand dollars to fill up their iPods with $0.99 per music track.
But let’s do the exercise.
For the purposes of this (non empirical) exercise, lets
argue that the average mean ipod sold is 40 GB in size.
Storage capacity of a (theoretical) 40 GB iPod? 8,750 songs.
Global
(Theoretical) iPod Storage Space
1,925,000,000,000
Songs Sold via
iTunes
6,000,000,000
Difference
1,919,000,000,000
So the logic would suggest that there are 1.9 trillion tunes
missing.
Is this the loss the industry is referring to?
In response to my article last month, “Members
of Parliament – Why Did Your Son Just Buy a One Terabyte Hard-disk?” a
friend of mine commented: “i only buy cd's BECAUSE i prefer not to be 'controlled' by someone
elses DRM that may dissapear in the future. Sorry i'll pay the $15 once and own
for good even though i rip all my content to store on my own servers.
I still think a lot of people store content on terrabyte disks BUT they paid
for the content in a different format.”
I responded to Dean’s comment:
How much is a CD? is
my first question.
And who the F*** has got 3 million different CDs available for
sale ?
There only 97 million music tracks in the entire music industry's combined
catalogues. (Luckily for you that equals 7,461,538.46
different CD's.)
And lets be realistic - even if you pay a buck per CD, it will take you (@ 12
minutes per CD) 182.75 years to rip them all.
Now let’s analyse his comment in relation to iPods.
Just how much music do people own that they can put on their
(average sized) 40 GB iPods?
Over 35 years of music appreciation, (starting with my first
album, Experience, by Jimmy Hendrix), I have collected over 100 albums, CD’s
and cassette tapes.
I have ripped all of these tracks onto my computer. The
total number of tracks equals 1475 which relates to 21 GB of digital Music.
(N.B. It did however take me over six months to rip my
music - in my spare time.)
I have also purchased a few tracks (<20) from digital
resellers but unfortunately due to DRM, ceased that practice.
I purchased a 4GB iPod in 2004. At that time I used iTunes
to rotate my music.
If we accept that I am the average music purchaser, then the
difference between purchased music and iPods sold now equals
iPod Storage Space
1,925,000,000,000
Songs Sold (iTunes)
6,000,000,000
Existing Music
LP/CD (iPod owners only)
4,620,000,000,000,000,000
Difference
- 4,619,998,081,000,000,000
In other words, there are 4 trillion (quintillion) more music tracks than
iPods sold.
So that would suggest that iPods have not been responsible
for illegal file sharing and that the music industry is crying wolf.
Critics may elect to discount the numbers based on my age (51) and the fact that I have been collecting music since I was 15.
However in doing so, you must then include the statistics of my friend, Bill Bilalis who is 15 years younger than I and has over 300 CD Albums; which of course results in much higher numbers.
Even if we chop my numbers in half, and say the average person only has 50 CD's, the worlds iPods are still overserviced by at least two trillion tracks.
Music file-sharing? Bah Humbug!
NB: A trillion in the United States equals twelve zeroes (1,000,000,000,000)
A trillion in other countries: eighteen zeroes (1,000,000,000,000,000,000)
When I was four years old, my family constructed a house. I
asked my father how the builders knew what went where. And he told me about the
plans and showed me the blueprints. I was enthralled, here was a method to
build something. Draw up a master plan, order the lumber, roofing iron, and
nails and construct the family mansion one nail at a time.
Some years later I resided in the Northern Territory of
Australia and discovered the indigenous bush “Humpy”. A “Humpy is a shack built
of bits and pieces. It may have nails holding it together or it may be string. The
elements of a Humpy are essentially a mismatch of scavenged building materials.
A humpy keeps out some of the rain, some of the wind and
some of the sun. It doesn’t do any of these very well, but it does provide the
owner/builder with the perception that one is protected from the tropical elements.
Until the cyclone arrives.
In the manner of the traditional Humpy, our copyright
legislation has been cobbled together overthe last 34 years into the quagmire of citizen vilification
it is today.
Globally, legislators have been coerced gradually through
large campaign contributions into gradually altering our copyright vista.
“Just this one little step, congressman”.
Followed by, “Well it really is only a small thing. After
all, we employ thousands of people to make movies.”
Each small step seemed reasonable at the time.
Unfortunately these little steps have turned copyright from a
beneficial regime designed to protect the original creative talent, into an
oppressive regime designed to benefit only the litigants.
Copyright and Trademark issues already take up far too much
of our legal system and now with the onset of the criminalization of users and
service providers our economy is about to be stifled seriously by this one
single factor.
Using a torrent client little Johnny downloads a song or a
movie from the internet, little Johnny should be fined $150,000. Little
Johnnies parents will need to each take on an extra job to make the payments.
However, because unemployment is running at almost 20%, they won’t be able to,
so the house will get repossessed, the parents will get a divorce and all
because some planner at the RIAA decided that it was a good idea.
Does anyone in charge see a problem with this? No?
OK, how about if little Johnny is your son.
“They weren’t good parents.” (RIAA Spokesperson)
“They should have ensured that little Johnny wasn’t downloading
illegally.”
Obviously the RIAA spokesperson, has never been a parent.
The Internet is the worlds largest playground. It is full of
fun exciting adventures and traps for the unwary. It is physically impossible
to watch every action of little Johnny.
Son, don’t use Torrents to download music mp3’s OK?
He probably seeks the council of his peers, who also happen
to be twelve year olds. Result, the peer consensus is to not use torrent but to
download via firefox from Rapidshare.
Johnny gets his movie or song and tells all his friends how
good Rapidshare is.
DTECNET develop a Rapidshare interdiction program and start
sniffing packets at Internet exchanges worldwide.
Result?
The RIAA send little Johnny an infringement notice and sue his
parents for $150,000.
N.B. In Australia
we don’t have the RIAA and our local equivalent organisation, Music Industry Piracy Investigations (MIPI), don’t sue consumers.
The Solution.
The world’s economy is loosely based on a capitalist system
of demand induced by advertising.
The more advertising, the more retail sales. The more retail
sales, the healthier the economy.
For sometime I have been railing against action stopping
advertising as the method no longer desired or accepted by viewers. Around twenty-three
percent of viewing time (in Australia)
is now advertising.
Technology innovations that remove adverts at the push of a
button (TiVo and VideoRedo) are now
threatening the entire entertainment ecosystem.
The file sharing networks, rapidshare were the enemy, now good old sneaker
net is changing that. Those USB sticks/SD Ram cards that are always in your
kids pockets? They’re the new file-sharing medium.
The marketplace? The school playground.
Rip, Copy Swap is the new mantra. Who the hell wants those
poorly videoed camera copies?
Of course, the conundrum is that with the youth of today
watching less then two hours of Television (down from four hours and eleven minutes),
advertising is loosing it’s effectiveness.
This is having a nett result on our economy through
decreasing retail sales.
Free to air broadcasters, cable companies, and radio have
all discovered that technology is impacting their ability to sell premium priced
advertising.
Yet, the content companies think the merry-go-round ride
will last forever.
They think they will always have a ready market with the broadcasters.
The content creators don’t particularly want advertisers messages
to interfere with their content (as an overlay format).
However, there may be no choice.
Thinking needs to change. The adverts need to be overlaid
and not inserted.
This will achieve two benefits.
Advertisers will once again trust broadcasters and filesharing
downloaders now become part of the advertising ecosystem and no longer need to
be criminalized.
As the advertiser do you care whether your advert is seen on
a television, computer screen or phone?
Nope. You merely want the eyeballs and the resulting sales.
The concept does need some work, for example, content being
distributed via file-sharing from small town locations are likely to have non
national advertising included.
Well, that would be a bonus. Joe’s Carwash is now famous
because the current version of Heroes that was aired in Podunk, Missouri (OK,
Podunk Alaska) just happens to have a higher trust value on the file sharing networks
than the version from Durban S.A. or the version from New York.
In fact if done correctly, the innovation could be a feature
of the entertainment.
Already practiced by some stations for advertising upcoming attractions
First aired in the USA
last Friday, the 23 of October, 2009.
Also available from Syfy.com as a direct stream – on the 24th
of October.
Downloaded via ED2K networks an estimated 182,000 times.
Downloaded via Torrents an estimated 310,000 times.
As the technology for content moves away from set-top boxes,
and into the realm of self programmed viewing from home video libraries, quite
possibly our legislators could have a look at this solution to one that is far
preferable to locking up fifty percent of the population.
As the indigenous man says in the above Youtube video, it’s
in the nature of people to share with everybody.
Like
in the shops they don’t share things.
Too much money.
Possibly he doesnt watch Stargate Universe, but how is ACTA going to help him?
MI5 and MI6, had also voiced concerns about
disconnection. “The spooks hate it,” the source said. “They think it is only
going to make monitoring more difficult.”
At last - somebody's thinking.
Each push from the content industry has advanced the
technology of file sharing that has made it consequently harder to track,
monitor and intercept.
Obfuscation (where the software emulates a normal web
browser, or similar) is now the standard.
Some P2P clients are now running 128 bit encryption via
cache servers.
The only people that are getting "caught" for file
sharing are the those that :
a. Dont care.
b. Cant be bothered.
c. Dont RTFM.
d. Cant speak english and cant RTFM
e. Are too young to know it’s illegal.
f. Are old enough but
have no-one to discuss the issues with.
g. Those that wouldn’t file share if they understood what
the real facts behind file sharing were.
The reality is that the undesirable elements of society are
also taking advantage of these advancements in encryption and alternative DNS
developments to enable them to carry out their criminal (as in real criminal
and not file sharing) activities away from the observational capabilities of ‘The
Man’.
We at Perceptric, advised the licensing bodies in Australia
11 months ago that if they didn’t implement a fair P2P user pays policy, within
six months half of the file sharers would just disappear.
We had a number of ideas, which were not acted on.
Anyone keeping track of the numbers would agree with me when
I say that, I believe that visible file sharing has dropped dramatically over
the last nine months.
Although some of it is actually due to high bandwidth nocap
delivery of streaming content (Hulu etc), and some of it due to the plethora of
new games on Facebook, there is still a growing file sharing user base (however
growth has slowed when pegged to population growth), although it would appear,
they are to all intents and purposes invisible.
The British secret service, are the first people who have
figured this out.
When the solution creates a problem that is greater than
original problem then it is time to return to the drawing board.
When Universities develop technologically easy to implement
alternatives to standard TCP-IP Internet protocols, and release the source code
in the public domain, then I say - It's time to back off file sharing before
the whole world disappears into a mobile DNS peer to peer haven that can only
be cracked if you are invited to join.
I previously described one of these technologies which while
it’s development was inevetible, now allows organisations to create their own
private networks, not depending on the normal internet infrastructure.
I won’t spell out the methodology here, because I really don’t
want the bad guys knowing how to do it. However with recruitment of bad guys
now taking place in our learning institutions, MI5/MI6 have a good point.
If you force them to go underground for file sharing, you
know that in their next online life, they will be VPN’ed, alternative DNS’ed
and encrypted at 128.
To me, logically it would seem that the next iteration of P2P will be local wireless with
P2PDNS, neighbourhood only - by invitation only and synched with your phone.
What will our security forces do when that happens?
I’m not sure, but I for one strongly agree with MI5 and
totally disagree with the criminalization attempts by industry that as just discussed
have far reaching consequences far more serious than a few home based file
sharers.
References.
MI5 comes out against cutting off internet pirates
Most people in Australia
don’t understand the iiNet trial.
They think that either iiNet failed to follow it’s obligations
under the copyright legislation or that iiNet were setup by DTECNET to take the
fall that would create precedent in law that will require all ISP’s to dob in
their customers, irregardless of actual proof.
A poll in the UK
last week revealed that most English people don’t like the concept of a
commercial company dictating the laws to their legislators.
“A YouGov poll released yesterday suggested that the
public are strongly against the proposals, with nearly 70 per cent saying that
someone suspected of illegal downloading should have a right to a trial in
court before restrictions on internet use were imposed. Only 16 per cent are in
favour of the current plans.”
So seventy percent of UK
residents still believe in the concept of innocent until proven guilty.
Which is actually what the iiNet case is all about.
Can a commercial company on the other side of the world
determine who is at the keyboard at an Australian IP number and doing the deed?
Under the Privacy ACT of Australia, it can’t.
Which is pretty much Michael Malone’s defence.
He sent the infraction notices to the police. If a crime has
been committed then obviously it should be looked into. However the Police are
too busy with important crimes like speeding besides, what’s wrong with a little
file sharing? Even policeman do it.
So what is the iiNet case all about?
It’s about the content industry in Australia
ensuring that our Government meet their obligations next week in Korea
and accept the ACTA recommendations.
The iiNet action is a PR exercise only. Win or lose, the industry have attained their objective; that is, to get our Government believeing that file sharing is an enormous crime.
Fortunately for us, we have a political team that are not
quite satisfied that everything the Americans ask for is necessarily good for Australia.
Australia
on a global trade related basis has a stronger reason to consider our major
trading partners point of view.
If our trade is mainly to countries like China
and India, then
should we necessarily side with those countries that are attempting to stifle those
countries influence on the global financial community?
That is possibly a more relevant question to ask in relation
to the iiNet case.
Would we be having the case at all if Australia
promised the US
that it would settle all imports and exports in US dollars?
Probably not.
Australia’s
future trade balance with the emerging nations depends on its primary
industries, it's future intellectual property management and it’s ability to
turn some of those primary goods into secondary goods through the application
of Australian owned intellectual property.
Australia
has opened it’s doors to immigration and consequently is attracting some of the
brightest and most capable science and technology graduates from India
and China.
These immigrants bring with them core relationships from their
heritage which will be of incalculable benefit to Australians in the future.
In this manner, Australia
the lucky country can hold it’s head up, proud that it was able to achieve peer value to
the emerging economies as well as a lifestyle for it’s citizens.
The new American business genre of sue everyone for breach
of copyright/trademark is not necessarily a good long term goal for Australia
to follow.
In 2008, the RIAA sent out 30,000 default notices to
suspected file sharing copyright infringers.
The infringement notices were couched in threatening
legalese designed to intimidate the recipients into settling for an average
nominal figure of $3,000.
Apparently 25% of those served with these infringement
notices paid up, not wishing to take the chances on a court case.
It’s a successful business model for the RIAA and they’re
reasonably happy with it.
Let’s just see how that looks on a spreadsheet.
Total Infringement
notices Sent
30000
25% estimated paid
up.
7500
Estimate total
collected
$22,500,000
estimated Bay/TSP,
DTECNet, Admin & legal costs per infringement
$395.00
Estimated total costs
$ 11,850,000.00
Balance of funds
for distribution to artists
$ 10,650,000
estimated file
sharers in the USA @ 57% of Online Population
188100000
$ Recovered per
file sharer.
$0.06
N.B: Online population actually equals all population and not just online.
OK great, so the recovery value equals six cents for every
American that downloads.
Today, I was browsing P2PNetand found a story about how Canada
is on the Obama’s watch list of unfriendly Copyright countries.
The story referred to Barrie McKenna’s article in the Globe
& Mail. I thought I would have a look as Jon Newton’s article slammed the
article as being full of inaccuracies and cast serious doubt on the legitimacy
of the author as a Journalist.
Well I read the article and became so incensed at the
virtual parrot nature (Polly works for the CRIAA) of the author that I decided
to write a response.
There are only two choices here boys and girls, either
Barrie McKenna follows his bosses instruction and writes what he is told to
write or he is seriously mis-informed and believes only what the RIAA tell him.
Possibly because no-one has told him any different.
So get a coffee, put your feet up and let’s debunk Barrie’s
total lack of understanding of 1 + 1.
First of all we should examine some data to see if the
biggest Torrent tracker in the world agrees with Barrie’s
article.
Search sequence on a well known non torrent tracker search
engine:
Lets try just .torrents.
Results 1 - 10 of about 239,000,000 for
".torrent". (0.12
seconds)
Lets pick the number one TV show in the world at the moment.
Results 1 - 10 of about 90,400,000 for "house" +".torrent". (0.10
seconds)
Let’s pick a movie which everyone knows.
Results 1 - 10 of about 1,720,000 for "wolverine" +".torrent". (0.21
seconds)
Lets have a look at this weeks number one selling song:
Celebration by Madonna
Results 1 - 10 of about 664,000 for "Celebration" +".torrent". (0.30
seconds)
And lets check out number 2.
Results 1 - 10 of about 163,000 for "Crazylove" +".torrent". (0.25
seconds)
So it would seem that TV programs are what people are
downloading the most, not music.
But on the topic of music. At Perceptric for some time, we
have been saying that P2P encourages people to buy the content. So let’s see if
that works for the Canadians.
From the Global Chart Report athttp://www.mediatraffic.de/
'Celebration' keeps just ahead of
the competition Friday,
October 16, 2009 by Fred Chuchel, Dresden
Despite a 47% sales decrease to 172.000 copies, Madonna's
best of compilation 'Celebration' holds the top spot of the global album chart
for a second week. In 3 weeks on the tally the album moved nearly700.000 units. Michael Bubl's new set 'Crazy Love' follows close behind
at no.2 with 169.000 copies. After only 3 days at retail in North America the album sold
132.000 in the USA and 37.000 in Canada.
Sales
Country
Population
Percentage of Pop
132000
USA
330,000,000
0.040%
37000
Canada
31,000,000
0.119%
Difference
Canada wins by
298.39%
So 298.3% more sales per capita of population than the USA
which we would guess isn’t on President Obama’s Black List.
Also please note the almost direct correlation between
numbers downloaded and sales.
Madonna CelebrationDownloads: 664,000 Sales: 700,000
Michael Buble : Downloads 163,000 Sales: 169,000
So I think we can discount music suffering in Canada
more than the USA.
Not convinced yet ?
His comments are in Blue,
mine in Black.
InBarrie M’kenna’s
article, he stated
Published on Tuesday, Oct. 20, 200912:00AM EDT Last
updated on Wednesday, Oct. 21, 20093:21AM EDT
Internet entrepreneur Gary Fung
fancies himself a budding Sergey Brin or Larry Page, the Google co-founders.
In Mr. Fung's view of the world,
his Vancouver-based company, isoHunt Inc., is essentially a search engine.
We agree with Gary.
The worlds number one rated internet site (which is also a search engine) search
engine supplied all of the statistics in the torrent stats graph above.
The catch is that 95 per cent of
what goes on at isoHunt.com
involves what most Western countries regard as piracy - unauthorized file
sharing. Want the latest maps for your GPS, a copy of the movie Twilight, video
games or just about any song ever digitized? At any time, you'll find links to
more than 90 million files, neatly catalogued and free for the taking.
Again, another person that doesn’t understand the
differences between:
Piracy on the high seas.
Commercial piracy of DVD’s and Music for commercial profit,
and;
File Sharing for personal consumption, because;
The
content is not available in the country, legally.
The
individual doesn’t have a credit card,
Restriction
of services like Hulu, Amazon, Pandora.com and Lala.com.
Not surprisingly, the site is
wildly popular. IsoHunt is one of the world's most visited so-called BitTorrent
websites, which use special software to index files and enable users to browse
and download whatever digital content they want. As many as 100 million unique
visitors go to the site every year, putting it among the 200 most popular
websites of any kind on the planet.
Canada has earned a dubious distinction as a world hub for
illegitimate file-sharing websites and a leader in Internet piracy. Canada now hosts five of the most popular pirate sites in the
world.
And other unauthorized sharing
sites say they have shifted operations to Canada, specifically to exploit the friendlier legal environment.
“Helping retailer,
developer, and municipal clients achieve their expansion goals.
Since 1995 Site Analytics Co. has been helping clients
boost their odds of success on every real estate transaction they make. We
provide innovative techniques to shed light on the strategic questions they
face on a daily basis.”
So we thought we would check similar sounding sites and we
found:
And we discovered that that Canada’s
leading “file sharing sites can only scrounge up a measly 2,862,691 unique users and further that the
trend appeared to be decreasing or remain flat since January 2009. In other
words, file sharing through these sites is on the decrease.
Rightly or wrongly, Canada is
seen as a country where the laws to combat digital piracy are weak, ineffective
or simply non-existent, argues Barry Sookman, a partner at McCarthy Tétrault
LLP and a leading Canadian expert on copyright.
Expert? What is a copyright expert? Someone that actually
understands the legislation?
In other words a lawyer that is touting for more legal work
on the totally non understandable copyright legislation that you would have the
Canadian Government change.
"Canada is viewed as a pirate haven," says Mr. Sookman, who
has done work for the Canadian recording industry.
Really? I actually thought that Canada
was forward thinking country that recognised the value of locally encouraged
talent and realised that file sharing couldn’t be stopped but that artists
still needed to be paid. To this end, Canadians have instituted the CPCC.
From the CPCC about page:
The Canadian Private Copying Collective is the non-profit
agency charged with collecting and distributing private copying royalties.
Established in 1999, CPCC is an umbrella organization that represents
songwriters, recording artists, music publishers and record companies. These
are the groups on whose behalf the royalties are collected. CPCC is not an arm
of government. Enforcement of the private copying tariff and advocacy,
including representing copyright holders before the Copyright Board, which
decides the tariff, are other important functions of CPCC. This site provides in-depth
background on each of CPCC's key functions.
So how are they doing?
CPCC Media
Royalties Collected
23434900
Divided by ten
years
2343490
Administration
Costs already deducted.
Balance of funds
for distribution to artists
2343490
estimated file
sharers in Canada @ 57% of the online Population
17670000
$ Recovered per
file sharer.
$1.33
Source:http://cpcc.ca/english/finHighlights.htm
N.B: Online population actually equals all population and not just online.
So how does that compare with the RIAA efforts at Legal
criminalization and legal actions to collect damages?
Well the figure above for the RIAA recovery method (Top
table) was six cents per file sharer.
The figure in Canada
is $1.33 per file sharer. That’s an increase of 2342%.
And the CPCC
royalties are ACTUALLY DISTRIBUTED to artists and publishers. We have yet to
see a single cent from the RIAA legal actions be distributed to artists. Until
the RIAA publish a full audited (they always present their numbers
unaudited)set of financials showing
their distribution to artists, we can honestly say that their legal actions are
for self funding purposes and not to benefit the talent that created the
infringed works.
Wow! So the nice way
works better than the nasty way?
It would seem so.
Let’s pop back to Barrie McKenna’s enthralling fairy tale.
Earlier this year, the Obama
administration put Canada on its blacklist of shame - a "priority watch
list" of intellectual property laggards, joining the likes of China, Russia and Venezuela.
By demonstrating that increased
levels of file sharing actually showed that in countries with a lower IPRI rating the real GDP growth of
country's was superior to those countries with a higher IPRI rating.
http://www.perceptric.com/rgdp1.gif
Indicating obviously that countries that file shared more were happier and worked harder.
It would be easy to dismiss the U.S. action - an early precursor to retaliation - as yet another
bit of American hypocrisy on the trade front. After all, more than a quarter of
the visitors to many of these sites are Americans.
Do you have any statistics for this Mr. M’kenna? Or is this
more hyperbole?
isohunt.com Rank By Country
Country
%User
Rank
UNITED
STATES
26.90%
152
INDIA
9.60%
147
UNITED
KINGDOM
6.10%
108
JAPAN
5.70%
319
CANADA
3.90%
97
AUSTRALIA
2.90%
83
PAKISTAN
2.30%
86
GERMANY
2.30%
677
CHINA
2.10%
1264
ITALY
1.90%
366
Access stats for ISIHunt.com.
And less than 4% are Canadians. That would suggest that Americans are much bigger file sharers than Canadians.
What Canadians should be aware of is the implied threat. An early precursor to retaliation. What retaliation would that be Mr. McKenna? Nuclear, or financial? Could the US Federal Reserve afford to short sell the Canadian Dollar into oblivion?
But that would be wrong. Canada,
which has repeatedly promised but so far failed to deliver on copyright reform,
isn't just out of step with the United States, but with much of the Western
world.
I don’t know Mr. McKenna, I would say that Canada
is providing a model of file sharing acceptance that is paying the artists far
more than they are receiving through any USA
initiative. If that is out of step – then viva the Canadian model.
"There are real copyright
problems," Mr. Sookman concedes. "It doesn't just affect Canadians.
It's a trade problem."
How is it a trade problem Mr. Sookman? Is that what you were
told to say so that the Canadian Government would be shamed into accepting and
adopting the US Governments anti human rights, and anti civic rights ACTA Trade
agreement at the November Korean meeting?
Music and movie royalties are not a trade problem. They are
a commercial licensing problem that your content company masters who no doubt
instructed you on what to say in this article, have elected to not fix because
after all, file sharing is profitable for them. So why would they actually want
it stopped?
IsoHunt, meanwhile, is facing
legal challenges. It has been sued in California by Columbia Pictures. And at home, it has sparred in court with the
Canadian Recording Industry Association, which has demanded (so far
unsuccessfully) that the company take down links to copyrighted material.
Authorities and copyright owners say they need a lot more tools to disrupt
piracy in Canada, including the ability to force sites such as isoHunt to
remove links to copyrighted material without lengthy legal proceedings. They
also want stiff penalties for Internet service providers who turn a blind eye
to unauthorized sharing over their networks.
As I said above, file sharing is a profitable legal exercise
for everyone. Let’s stop it using fines.
Bullshit. Did fines stop speeding? Nope. But they generated
an awful lot of revenue. Do people still speed? Yes, but they buy GPS systems
and in some countries, radar detectors that warn them of where the Speed
cameras are located.
Discover Globetechnology.com's
special series on copyright and filesharing in the 10 years since Napster View
Ottawa acknowledges it must update its laws to meet the digital
challenge. Canada has promised reform in several Throne Speeches. Those
efforts have so far produced a lot of talk and thousands of pages of reports,
but no law. Ottawa's last attempt at copyright reform died, along with the
government, at the end of 2007.
Now, the Harper government is at
it again. It recently completed a national consultation, garnering responses from
nearly 5,000 individuals and groups. Industry Minister Tony Clement wants a
bill by December.
Experts are dubious because so
many earlier efforts failed.
"Canada has made itself a
victim of this," said Eric Schwartz, speaking at a recent forum in Washington,
organized by the Woodrow Wilson International Center's Canada Institute.
"It has allowed the business to get established and opposition to
grow."
There are good reasons for Canada to embrace reform - and not only because the Americans and
Europeans are pushing Ottawa to do it.
The world has gone digital. And
there's now an explosion of legitimate download sites in the U.S. and Europe, including ground-breaking music sites Pandora.com and
Lala.com. But you can't use them in Canada.
These and other businesses are
choosing to bypass the market entirely, in part because of licensing problems.
That’s an interesting comment Mr. McKenna. So is Australia
equally bad at file sharing reform? Because in Australia
we cant access any of these legal sites either. The facts are clear from the
CRIAA’s own sales numbers, the fastest growth in digital distribution is from
legal streaming sites.
Dec-08
2008
2007
Percent Change
2008
2007
Percent Change
Digital product **
(December 2008)
Internet Downloads
5037
2297
119%
45438
27564
65%
Digital Mobile Content
1921
1716
12%
21632
20592
5%
Subscription Model
395
262
51%
4599
3144
46%
Other
***
319
50
538%
2829
552
413%
Total
$7,672
$4,325
720%
$74,498
$51,852
529%
Units and dollars expressed
in thousands
Sales information is
supplied by members of CRIA and tabulated by Grant Thornton without audit.
The categories of DCC/Mini
Disc and Cassette Single have been eliminated from the report due to
negligible sales.
* This category includes
formats such as cassettes, CD singles, VHS music videos and DVD-Audio
** Monthly digital
statistics are not available for 2007.
For the purposes of monthly
comparisons, one twelfth of total year-to-date digital statistics for 2007
will be entered each month.
*** This category
includes formats such as streams
Source: http://www.cria.ca/stats.php
Ergo, but locking out countries outside of the USA,
these “legal sites” are in fact encouraging file sharing.
I would suggest strongly that until the content companies
alter their policies on open access to the content via legal sites, illegal
file sharing will continue to grow.
And the creative industries that
produce music, software and the like - industries that contribute significantly
more to the economy than BitTorrent sites –
We would dispute that Mr. McKenna. We did some arbitrary
figures earlier this year and calculated that the file-sharing industry in Australia
alone is worth :
In other words, in Australia P2P is worth more than the
entire combined revenue base of the member companies of the various industry
bodies trying to stop P2P. (i.e.: EMI, Warner, MGM, Sony)
Now multiple those figures by the population of the rest of the world and you
have an industry globally that adds up to $10,355.319,277,091. In other words, Mr. McKenna, a lot more than the content industry.
may also shun Canada if nothing is done.
I don’t think so Mr. McKenna, the only danger to Canadians
is the US Dollar and the lengths that the US Government will go to protect that
dollar.
I don’t see why Canadians should have to support the
bankrupt US
lifestyle any more that they are already doing.
That hurts Canadians, and most
people don't even know it's happening.
You are right Mr. McKenna, an increased support by Canada of
the US Dollar may very well suit your masters but it would hurt Canadians and
they don’t even know that is what this entire file sharing argument is about.
Oh, that’s not what you meant?
So sorry. With all the misdirection, outright lies and false
innuendo in your article it was difficult to know exactly what you were saying
that had any merit.
The article as written Mr. McKenna, is either a rather
poorly compiled piece of propaganda or merely shoddy journalism.
The last man that relied on misdirection to influence the
people was tried as a war criminal at Nuremberg.
He often said: “Repeat something often enough and the people
will believe”
His name was Joseph Goebbels.
Your article unfortunately can be called nothing else except Blackmail. Blackmail of the Canadian people by one of their own. If you're a Canadian Mr. McKenna, may your face burn with shame for propogating this crap.
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