Bits BitTorrent Seeders: Driven By Profit?

Yes, they may indeed still earn lots of money, but let's be brutally honest here, each and every one of us. If we were earning 500,000 a year we would be happy. But if we learnt that our work was actually generating 1,000,000 a year, and someone else was reaping the reward of that missing 500,000, we'd be pretty peeved and want that 500,000 for ourselves. Anyone who says they wouldn't is not being entirely honest with themself.

 

Doesn't make sense to me - 100 users making 66% of the posts and 75% of the downloads?

Maybe the 100 users or IP Address are proably just proxy server IPs used to pass the posters IP so they are not traceable. Most release groups I know of use bots to make their 1000's of posts per minute to many sites and not just to Pirate Gay.

Seems to me that the guys doing the research should have joined the posting community first to get better picture of how they work.

 

A similar study from another University found that 97% of all statistics are made up. As someone said, I'm so glad we have all these University boffins going around carrying out this vital research instead of other worthless pursuits...

"Shall we have another crack at curing cancer?"
"No, I'm going to see how many fruit pastilles it takes to choke an eagle!"

 

Who's still earning millions? 80% (caveat - see above) of musicians earn less than £16,000 per year. Have you tried raising a family on that?

Stop being blinded by the 0.5% who earn enough to be comfortable even while piracy claims most of their revenue.

 

Personally, I haven't seen an infected torrent in ages. And in general, torrents never reached the level of infection of Kazaa & the likes.

I love how you just ignore studies that actually show the relation between # of downloads to position in the sales charts.

Razor1911, FAiRLiGHT, DEViANCE,... dead? Come on!
Which proper software release group runs their own BitTorrent tracker? They all have affiliate sites and private FTPs. Movie releases are different, on that I'd (partially) agree, but even there it's not about generating money. I still have to see aXXo, KLAXXON, REVEiLLE, nhanc3!, CBGB, or KiNGDOM to run a pay-per-download or subscription-based site.

Seeding is the standard way of giving back to the community. If you don't want to seed turn to the UseNet.
Paying money to enter a site just shows that it's not legit. Even the big private trackers like Demonoid don't charge you. They just switch to an invitation-only model once they reach a certain size.

 

Well not exactly... it's basically a handfull of guys with access to dump ftp servers where scene groups put their stuff (these groups are the actual crackers/providers) whilst some of the guys with access to them are the ones providing the stuff into the P2P networks and/or download providers (rapidshare and the sorts)

It's been well known that many scene groups are against P2P sharing of their content specially torrent sites...

 

The problem is that music is easier than ever to make yes. There is a lot of **** out there. To the point where I, as a gigging musician, don't enjoy some of my own gig because of the music people are making now at such low levels of competency. They can't play in time, tune in or sing and they just want to rip off their favourite bands. Great.

If you read my next post you'd know why it's wrong. There are plenty of ways to listen to music now for free, that generate money for the artist via PRS. You should know, if you spend all your time writing, recording, mixing and mastering, you damn well want some of your dues. I recently spent just short of a grand recording 3 songs. Why should I, as a band with low income, be subjected to losing what little revenue I generate via legal means, because of torrents. I want people to hear it and they can for free already. It's not hard to share a link you know.

You personally don't feel the effects because you don't happen to be in a stituation where you do. There are effects. I'm not saying it's as severe as they are made out to be, but they screw over the little guy too, who normally needs money more funnily enough. That's what I'm worried about.

Personally again, I'm happy that the music industry - the media indusrty as a whole even - is getting the shake up it needed. Nowadays, it is more reasonable to assume a career from music rather than Fame and Fortune, which I'm pleased about; it's all I ever wanted anyway.

 

Interesting article and an interesting piece of research (although unfortunately the PDF abstract linked isn't legible).

It's also always good to see the comments thread on a piracy issue like this one. However, I do notice that the focus of the debate always seems to be on whether or not the producers are suffering serious economic harm ("one less Ferrari, ha ha").

Am I the only person who thinks that it is fundamentally wrong and disrespectful to take advantage of someone else's effort and hard work without their consent irrespective of whether they are rich or poor?

 

You are not.

 

They are not destroying it, but they are certainly hurting it a lot, certainly here in the UK.

An example based on hard fact? It used to be profitable for small independent music producers, now the demand has all but dried up. Why? Because there is no middle ground any more, it's either bedroom producers working on their own stuff or the big guys (with or without their auto-tunes).

Let's face it, a lot of people spend less on music than they used to, and that means less money for the artists which means less money for the affiliates.

And even if people are buying music from iTunes, or subbing to Spotify it doesn't mean the same money goes to the artists as it would if they bought a CD.

The shift to (Piracy = Big problem) + (Legitimate sales = Small profit per track) has hurt a lot of people and hasn't really benefited anyone other than those who've stollen the work.

And it's simply not true that everyone who can pay does pay. Anyone who still thinks that has their heard way and truly up their own arse.

But at the same time one act of piracy does not equal one lost sale at full retail price, anyone who thinks that also has their head up their... you get the picture.

 

I recently saw Sabaton play in Brighton and I remember the lead singer saying "I know some of you will have downloaded our album, but if you come to our gig then we don't really give a ****". I think that's a good attitude really, if I like the music of a band then I'll go to their gig (providing they're playing somewhere which isn't too far away), bands get a bigger cut of gig ticket sales than CD/legal download sales anyhow.

 

But it's still stealing...Just because it's a big company does not mean it's a charity.
It's their appraoch to all this which is the problem.

 

lol, welcome to the 21st century, when people are just plain silly and not willing to share. Picture this - I buy a book, you come over and I ask me to lend it to you. What should I say - nooo waaay duuude, you're trying to pirate it, so... buy it yourself?!

yeah, right, bands like Queen, Rolling stones and much more would never go on a tour if that was the case... I do wonder, why do they bother?!

Please tell me that you are 12 years old and I'm wasting my time... Do you have the slightest idea how much the artist gets from one song sold, and how much the record company earns?

There are so many things that are wrong in this world and defending Hollywood's greed is just one of them.

Nope, my friend, stealing is far from this in legal terms. Downloading content is not making you poorer in any way.

 

1. If Netflix was available in the UK with the same catalog of movies, documentaries, TV shows as in the US with a similar pricing model my pirating would drop by 90%+.
2. If the above Netflix situation came about and also had TV shows available several days after release on TV and movies avialable same time as DVD release in the US my pirating would drop by 100%.

I refuse to allow the media conglomerates to control the way I want to consume media.

 

So you pirate?

 

What's been pirated the most as of late.

Avatar, Windows 7, Justin Bieber, Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2, Call of Duty Black Ops, The Dark Knight and none of these people or corporations are broke. Actually they are all very very very wealthy and have generated billions of dollars each except Bieber but I'm sure he is close to generating a Billion dollars for his industry.

The point is the Bittorents are a way of getting media out there and getting media in the hands of people who may not buy it in the stores the first go round but will invest later on. Got my hands on a Guy Ritchie film, liked it so much I went out and BOUGHT his entire collection except the one with Madonna in it.

 

Sorry bit-tech, but this "article" is just a stinking heap of dung.

1) Asking retorical questions is not journalism.
2) dont base your story on just one source, or if you do, at least introduce something to balance that source, like maybe ummm... (and i'm just rambling here) some FKING COMMON SENSE?

This so called study has so much things going wrong (judging from the article, i refuse to go down the rabbithole of the original, or i will probably depress myself to death) that it's just a complete fking joke.
- they proclaim to study motives, yet fail to interview ANYONE at all, let alone any of the people they are supposed to be studying.
- they only investigate ONE site, incidentally the most untrustworthy site catering to the last distribution channel to get the content. i.e. the worst possible site to start investigating.
- they completely forget to investigate any motives, instead focus on statistical analysis of traffic, after which their conclusion of the investigation is:

JEZUSCHRISTONARAFT can you at least PRETEND to be objective?

 

I work in the tv cable internet industry and the firm I'm working for is looking (finally) to improve the user experience to compete rather than locking down product.

users pay us money because the experience is better is the plan

we pay the artists because we're legal and have to be to charge the consumer.

torrent sites are good for the consumer - the artists have lost out recently because we've failed to package the products.

piracy is good for the industry, open markets and consumers.

the problem with games is that (aside from xbox) the experience is the same.

 

That study is a load of S**te, they have only looked at some of the main site's like pirate bay etc, which are honey traps of the new torrent users, and dont have anyway the heavy traffic of the private torrent sites, there are twice that amount of Private trackers that they can't trace even if they wanted, most of them invite sites, were you have to be invited by another user before you can login, and then there are even more deep internet sites only visable to the hardcore downloader also by invite and Reputation, where you have to show a clear commitment to the Tracker community, as most of the private tracker based, not like the malware infested advertisment ridden sites like the pirate bay.

Any hardcore torrent'er like a friend of mine will use many measures to evade any sort of detection like using a seedbox, which is a PC in a data centre which is shared between many users who also share a Highbanwith connection usually on a 100MBt or 1000MBt connection and can download vast amounts of torrent files in very little time them and then use FTP (File Sharing Protocol) and some cheap encryption to download to the home PC and stay under the radar and never be caught of detected, as FTP is used be well 99% of all websites on the internet to load content and many business to Transfer files between computers all over the internet.


Basically Its never going to go away NEVER there are people who are years ahead of any efforts to twart the Torrent community, its time to embrace the technology, and bands should focus on gig's for a way of making money instead of CD's I think that the fatcat music companys will be the only ones out of pocket in the future of the music industry, a band can only be more popular if there music is free and they do more Gig's and find other new ways to generate money.

 

This reminds me of something that happened a few years ago.
At the time, I didn't have broadband, so bit torrents, legal or otherwise, were totally unknown territory for me.
My girlfriend at the time, who had a cable modem, spent weeks downloading "Casino Royale" via a link on Pirate Bay. When she first started, I joked that I hoped it wasn't the 1966 comedy with David Niven and Woody Allen.

When it finally downloaded, she started playing it and... it was the 1966 version! She was so angry. Whilst I was silently laughing my head off...