WebProNews

Tag: Downloading

  • New Anti-Piracy Plan: Kindergarten Copyright Class?

    The United States’ largest copyright lobbies, the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America, have initiated a highly controversial program nudging the educational system to shoulder the burden of teaching kids about how evil piracy really is.

    The LA Times reports that a nonprofit group known as the Center for Copyright Information has commissioned a program to teach kids between kindergarten and sixth grade about intellectual property ownership.

    The program is to be called “Be a Creator,” and the proposed curriculum includes lesson plans, videos, and activities that promote “being creative and protecting creativity” with topics like: Respect the Person: Give Credit; It’s Great to Create; and Copyright Matters.

    The president of a nonprofit organization (iKeepSafe) that focuses on helping keep kids safe on the internet, Marsali Hancock, defended the program by saying “It’s important to prepare children to succeed and thrive and learn how to share and create and move files in a way that’s ethical and responsible.”

    Even though nothing of the plan has even been written yet, the idea of implementing it has come under intense scrutiny. Frank Wells, a spokesman for the California Teachers Association, said “While it’s certainly a worthy topic of discussion with students, I’m sure some teachers would have a concern that adding anything of any real length to an already packed school day would take away from the basic curriculum that they’re trying to get through now.”

    In one curriculum draft acquired by Wired a couple months ago, a property attorney described the information being disseminated as “thinly disguised propaganda” because the program omits any mention of the concept of Fair Usage, such as satire, parody, or commentary.

    Corynne McSherry, the intellectual property director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said “It sends the message that you always have to get permission before you can copy anything and that sharing is always theft and that if you violate copyright law all kinds of bad things will happen to you. It’s a scare tactic.”

    Stephen Smith, a managing partner with Greenberg Glusker and an expert on copyright law, said “The idea that time would be taken out of kids’ days to teach them copyright law, when they ought to be learning reading, writing and arithmetic, I find to be strange… I just don’t think it’s appropriate curriculum for kindergartners to sixth-graders.”

    Meanwhile, in spite of the MPAA’s constant whinging about immense profit losses caused by online piracy, recently conducted economics studies suggested that their “losses” are sensationally inflated and that the music and film industries are fiscally performing better than ever.

    [Image via ThinkStock]

  • UK Government Introduces Intellectual Property Crime Unit

    Late last week, spokespersons the City of London police force announced the creation of a special crime unit, one that will focus on intellectual property abuse, otherwise known as illegal file sharing. The new branch, called the Intellectual Property Crime Unit, will focus primarily on eliminating illegal peer-2-peer activities within the United Kingdom. The details of the new task force were discussed on the official site for UK’s Intellectual Property Office:

    “The establishment of a new online intellectual property crime unit is evidence of the government and City of London Police’s commitment to confront this threat,” [Commissioner of the City of London Police, Adrian] Leppard said.

    “Together we are creating an operationally independent police unit that will co-ordinate the national and international response from law enforcement and public and private sector partners so we can effectively target those who continue to illegally profiteer on the back of others endeavours.” Leppard said the new unit would not only safeguard jobs, but would also ensure citizens’ “computer safety” by ensuring they were not exposed to unauthorized copyrighted content.

    It should be noted that the United Kingdom does not rank incredibly high when it comes to illegal downloads. Even if you look at multiple sources, the UK does not stand out as a hotbed for illegal file sharing. So why is the UK’s law enforcement agencies making such a big deal about it? Perhaps this is a matter of perception, as indicated by the press release:

    Around seven million people a month visit sites offering illegal content in the UK. Globally, it is projected that digitally pirated music, films and software will account for losses of around $80bn – this is expected to rise to $240bn by 2015.

    I’m not exactly sure where these figures come from, because they don’t really match the information found in other resources. Another question is, how much influence does a company like EMI have when it comes to greasing the wheels of such decisions? Considering EMI’s disposition towards protecting their assets–see the “I Have A Dream” mess, for example–it stands to reason the company would fully support such a move by the UK government.

    Whatever the case, the new IP crime unit will receive 2.5 million GBP in funding; and it is being supplied by the aforementioned Intellectual Property Office.

    Lead image courtesy

  • Rutgers Named Top Torrenting University in the U.S.

    BitTorrent is popular among college students. That, of course, is as obvious as saying the sky is blue or freshman will gain at least 15 pounds of beer and pizza weight. Although many universities have made curbing torrenting a primary focus (via government mandate), it’s hard to stop such a long standing tradition like collegiate file sharing.

    If you ever wondered which U.S. Universities were the most torrent-happy, you’re in luck. TorrentFreak (with the help of ScanEye) has produced a list of the top 50 institutions for BitTorrent use.

    And New Jersey’s Rutgers University takes to top spot.

    Rounding out the top 10: NYU, University of Houston, USC, Texas A&M, George Washington, University of Minnesota, State University of New York at Buffalo, University of Maryland, and Tennessee State.

    According to the study, the most downloaded files at Rutgers were Fast Five, Cars 2 and Puss in Boots, The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings (game), and the album The Dreamer, The Believer (Common).

    Check out the top 25:

    Of course BitTorrent use doesn’t necessarily equate to unauthorized file sharing. But TorrentFreak confirms that it’s that kind of use that’s the most popular.

    If you don’t see your current college of alma mater on the list, that probably means one of two things – either your school is not very torrent-happy, or they’re just really good at hiding their tracks. Evidence of the latter? Another recent study said that Gainesville, Florida was the piracy capital of the United States. Absent from this list? The University of Florida, which is located in Gainesville.

  • Streaming Music Will Dominate Downloads in 2012 (and Beyond)

    Streaming Music Will Dominate Downloads in 2012 (and Beyond)

    According to a forecast from Strategy Analytics, this year is shaping up to be all about Spotify and less about iTunes. That’s because streaming music services (like Spotify, Pandora, and Rdio) are set to dwarf download services when it comes to revenues in the year 2012.

    According to the Global Record Music forecast, streaming revenues will increase 40% this year. Download revenues are only set to increase by 8.5%. Basically, Spotify and Pandora are currently about five-times as profitable as iTunes and Google Play (percentage-wise, of course).

    “Although downloads still account for nearly 80 per cent of online music revenues, this market is maturing and spending is flattening in all key territories. Streaming music services such as Spotify and Pandora will be the key growth drivers over the next five years as usage and spending grow rapidly,” says Strategy Analytics’ Ed Barton.

    Streaming music revenues 2012

    Streaming is going to crush downloads over the next few years, but when you team them up they still fall short of packaged sales. Overall digital sales are set to increase 17.8% to $8.6 billion, but still only hold a global share of 39%.

    But Strategy Analytics predicts that will all change in 2015, when digital finally overtakes physical.

    When streaming services were in their infancy, they just couldn’t compete with the likes of iTunes in terms of selection. It’s not that people feel they have to own their music, they just want to have access to everything they want to hear whenever they want to hear it. As services like Spotify are better able to provide that for $6-10 a month, people are naturally seeing the benefit in forgoing the $0.99 download.

    [h/t The Verge]

  • The Pirate Bay Stops Hosting Torrent Files

    The Pirate Bay has announced that they will no longer offer torrent files for download on their site. Anti-piracy advocates should not get too excited, though: they are replacing the torrent files with Magnet links. This format is considerably more difficult to block than .torrent files, and the links require significantly less storage space, meaning that the entire Pirate Bay website could theoretically be hosted from a sufficiently-sized USB drive.

    The Pirate Bay has apparently been planning this change for a couple of years now, but the Magnet link technology wasn’t quite ready for prime time. As of today, Magnet links will be come the default format for downloading from the website, though users will still have access to .torrent links for some time yet.

    Most users will not see a difference, however, since the majority of torrent software supports Magnet links already. BitTorrent and uTorrent, the two biggest torrent clients, have had Magnet link support for some time. The only difference most users will see is a longer start-up time before downloads start.

    Concerns about bandwidth aside, part of The Pirate Bay’s motivation for this move has to come from the efforts that have been taken against them in the past. Repeated efforts to shut down or block the site have occurred all over the Western world. The fact that Magnet links are harder to block and require less bandwidth and hosting space will certainly make efforts to shut The Pirate Bay down more difficult.

    [Source: The Pirate Bay]

  • Girls Don’t Pirate?

    Girls Don’t Pirate?

    A survey was conducted over at the Pirate Bay, perhaps the most well-known of the bit torrent search engines, and besides the expected finds–downloaders have moved on from Napster-like mp3 downloads and are targeting movies–there’s an interesting tidbit about the fairer sex. That is, they don’t download.

    Or, at least, they don’t stop their bit torrent search to take part in on-site surveys, which leads to one of the major problems when dealing with statistics from a survey, bias, of course. The fact that these surveys are normally voluntary-response based means that, although Pirate Bay got over 75,000 responses, PB visitors could easily overlook or ignore the survey prompt, which skews the findings.

    But then again, considering the response rate was substantial, it could also mean that girls don’t pirate, and if they do, they don’t use Pirate Bay to do so.

    The details about the Pirate Bay’s survey comes from TorrentFreak.com, and according to their article, Pirate Bay partnered with the Cybernorms research group, which bases its operations at the Lund University in Sweden. The goal survey, even with its built-in potential for bias, was to “conduct the largest survey among file-sharers.” Apparently, the results won’t be available until November, but there has been some data released, and these findings are about what you’d expect.

    Pirates (or file-sharers, depending on which side of the fence you sit) want movies and instead of ceasing these actions, they would rather find more anonymous ways of downloading. This, quite honestly, should not come as a surprise. Even the data about female downloaders, five percent, according to the responses, isn’t considered shocking, but then again, maybe females don’t want to answer questions about their file-sharing habits, either.

    And therein lies the rub with voluntary response surveys. It’s more likely that there are less female pirates than there are males, but the nature of the survey also lends itself to the idea that maybe these same women are just more private about their activities, anonymous surveys or not.

    Then again, it could be a case of the “men do it like this, women do it like this,” with males downloading and females spending their time on Twitter and Facebook.

    Another area of note is the idea that despite the incredible corporate backlash, file-sharers/pirates/downloaders/thieves/rebels–call them what you will–have no intention of slowing down. From TorrentFreak’s post:

    According to the researchers it wont be easy to stop people from sharing files. Aside from seeking more ways to download torrents anonymously, the respondents are also increasingly seeking alternative sharing options, such as swapping USB-sticks and sharing files directly with friends via mobile phones.

    Which means, at least in the United States where ISPs and entertainment content producers are close bedfellows, the legislative efforts of trying to turn the Internet into a cable TV package will continue unabated as well.