Isp's to Target illegal downloading

Stephenbw

del1001 wrote: »

no, not really, as Benjamin Disraeli once said "Lies, damned lies, and statistics"

I appreciate you going to such much trouble compiling your reply, but it would have to be a lot more in depth in order to resemble anything meaningful, everything would have to be totally like for like, and just for example, we all know that an American fridge is far larger than a UK fridge.

The size of the fridge, like the fish I mentioned, is a red herring.;)

The simple facts are that there is no reason why CD prices in the US should have any bearing on those in the UK, and recorded music is now cheaper to buy than it's ever been.

Sylvester

weegie.geek wrote: »

Nah, rapidshare is server based. You upload to a server, it hosts the file. Again, rapidshare and these things have pretty much taken over from newsgroups. Easier interface I guess. I didn't even think of rapidshare earlier, but they host almost exclusively warez stuff, so how they can get away with it is beyond me.



Apart from a few big players in the Applications market like MS, Adobe and suchlike, nobody really has the legal clout and finances to go after people. Short of serving a takedown notice on a torrent site, they're not able to do much. The movie studios are loaded though, of course, and would and do cause a fuss. !!!!!!, although it's a massive industry, doesn't seem to attract the legal attention movies and music do. Or at least I've never heard of a !!!!!! production company suing anyone.



That's the problem. I think the ISPs are just making a big fuss about it because of the paperwork and communication that needs doing when BMG request customer details from them. I doubt any ISPs will make any real effort to check up on what you're doing. They're just saying they will be to put people off.




Yeah, but the labels have to take money from the popular artists' sales to subsidise the ones who don't sell. It's a broken business model, and the artists have a way around it now, with itunes etc.

There are a few artists who've released things exclusively on itunes, and
there are a few who've given stuff away completely for free via their websites or/and P2P. Nine Inch Nails, Saul Williams and Radiohead to name but three. They should all be applauded for making the effort to do something new.

I'm not sure where he stands legally on it, so I won't mention names, but one person who had a tv show in the mid 90s got hold of the masters and released it all on P2P. It was a minority interest show at the time, and would be even less relevant now so it's got no hope of a DVD release, but it had/has a cult following so he put it up for people to grab.

P2P has its place (fastest way to grab Consolevania for one!) so I hope ISPs don't start throttling it. I guess any ISP who does will find themselves a lot worse off financially when people move to better ISPs, but the number of people who still sign up to Tiscali purely on price baffles me, so maybe the ISPs have nothing to fear by treating customers badly.

Thanks for the detailed reply.

As you can tell, i'm not overly familiar with these newsgroups/servers/warez things, but i'd have thought a Torrent/Warez/Rapidshare file was pretty much the same thing in regards to illegal downloads? So anyone who downloads from these 'servers' isn't going to come under fire? I'd have thought an illegal download was an illegal download regardless of how or what industry.

I can quite imagine getting one of these letters and then having to show iTunes receipts etc etc

When is all this due to come into force, or has it already?

I'm sure like many things, all the wrong people will get letters and be accused.

piggeh

Stephenbw wrote: »

I never understand this rip off argument.

Recorded music is cheaper to buy now than it's ever been.

I have vinyl albums from the 70s that cost more then than CDs do now; and that is ignoring inflation over the last 30 years!

In the mid 80s CDs cost £12, which is £30 in today's money, but what do they actually cost now? £8.98 on Amazon.

Comparing costs of CDs in the UK with those in the USA, as many do, is spurious, unless you also compare incomes and other living costs.

It's not spurious - show me a costing exercise that shows the the cost of distributing into the UK should be so much higher than the US? Incomes only come into it because the percentage of disposable income spent on music may be similar in each country. However that does not mean that the cost of actually putting it onto the shelf is closely correlated to this - the cost of the CD production-wise is pretty much the same whether you're selling in the US or UK. The only difference is a)distribution costs b)taxes c)Margin. With digital downloads this is even more pronounced - I haven't bothered looking at itunes recently, but do they still charge 79p per track here and 79 cents in the US? If so I'd like to see the costing exercise that suddenly generates an extra 30p-odd per track!

As for Vinyl, CDs are much more cost effective to produce, which is generally the way these new media types come to market, so of course they'd be cheaper.

Then you have DVDs - often DVDs reduced to £3-odd are seen as good/great value, whereas the product probably cost 50p to produce (I don't see how a 500% mark up on production costs is reasonable). I realise you have artistic license/creativity to factor in, but like is said elsewhere, the artists get very little at the end of the day.