Post Your Count - What effect is the RIAA having on sharing?

[faggotry]

KC on the today show this morning stated that filesharing use is down 15% since the riaa terrorist threats.

o, and in the segment they touted the "sales are down 25%" line. classic.

[JackSpratts]

who didn't see that coming...

well you know, they can say what they want but it won't make it true. that's what this thread is for; to counter riaa sponsored media propaganda.

todays stats are essentially identical to the ones in the above post by theknife from june 27th, two and a half weeks ago.

- js.

[Ðiego]

File-Sharing Dips After Threat to Sue

Use of several Internet file-sharing services declined the week after the music industry threatened to sue online music swappers, an Internet tracking firm said Monday.
Kazaa and Morpheus - two popular file-swapping services - had 15 percent fewer users during the week ending July 6, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. The decline translates to about 1 million fewer users on Kazaa. About 41,000 fewer users signed on to Morpheus and the iMesh file-sharing service that week.

The firm tracks a specific number of people who sign on to the services from home and extrapolates the data to estimate how many people use the services at least once in a week.

"With the negative publicity and threat of steep fines, some surfers appear to be backing off," said Greg Bloom, a senior Internet analyst with the firm. "However, with millions of loyal users, these applications aren't likely to go off-line in the near future."

Bloom said the data so far merely suggests a possible link between the threat of lawsuits and the apparent dip in file-sharing traffic. And seasonal factors, such as the holiday weekend, could also skew any trend. A better determination will be possible when all the data is in for July, he said.

The Recording Industry Association of America, which represents the major recording companies, said last month the industry would soon begin suing individuals engaging in online music file-swapping.

Record companies blame music downloading and CD burning for lagging sales in recent years and hope that by going after users directly, they curb traffic to the sites.

StreamCast Networks, the company behind the Morpheus software, said it had not detected any decline in user traffic.

"What we're seeing is that users are actually staying on the Morpheus client longer per session," StreamCast CEO Michael Weiss said. "We can pretty much tell usage by our bandwidth, and our bandwidth has been pretty constant."

Sharman Networks, which owns Kazaa, said fluctuations in user numbers is common.

"Aside from normal seasonal drops experienced on the Internet, we regularly see fluctuations in the number of users online, and there are numerous factors that play a part in these cyclical changes, but they are rarely permanent," the company said.

[JackSpratts]

StreamCast Networks, the company behind the Morpheus software, said it had not detected any decline in user traffic.

me neither. since fasttrack is by far the largest network in the file sharing universe it begs the question just why the reporters are using nielsen estimations for thier sources. statistical extrapolation is arguably ok - when that's all you have - but when your network comes wth a working gas guage you're a fool, or worse, not to use it.

- js.

[Gutrguy]

Clean iMesh(Dr Damn version 1.32)

1,286,170 users online

it doesnt say how many gigs or how many files, but that is a good number and i always get tons of hits when searching.

[JackSpratts]

status: unchanged from april

grokster - july 21st

users: 421092

files: 888541

gigs: 6413312

- js.

[JackSpratts]

later that very same day...



4:45pm, July 21st, 2002.

Grokster Use Hits All-Time High!


Users: 4967849

Files: 1040401

Gigs: 7539328



The is the all time high since we've been keeping track, at least as far as can be accurately counted.

Very interesting.

- js.

[JackSpratts]

user/file counts still high, still four million plus. if the riaa is having an effect it's not apparent on fasttrack.

- js.

[JackSpratts]

user counts still high, especially for summer, with 3,700,000 individuals using the network this afternoon.

- js.

[theknife]

still holding pretty strong, no?

[JackSpratts]

fasttrack user's are very comfortable at the four million mark, regardless of any legal actions taken against uploaders - including actual lawsuits. conceivably people could be leeching the system and not sharing but the numbers don't support that theory. although the gig count has been higher at times, at 5.5 it's the same as it was almost two months ago, on july 3rd, before the multi thousand dollar settlements and those stories of poor 12 year old girls bullied and shamed by a reprehensible riaa.

if the suits are having any effect at all on the millions of people who file share it’s not what the riaa had in mind.

- js.

[theknife]

so where are they getting these numbers from?

Traffic to the Kazaa file-sharing network has fallen 41 percent since the Recording Industry Association of America started suing college students for illegal music trading, according to Web monitoring firm Nielsen//NetRatings.

"Kazaa, the most popular file-swapping service, had 17.4 million U.S. unique visitors in March, according to Nielsen//NetRatings, a consulting company that monitors Web traffic. In August, Kazaa users had dropped to 10.4 million, and the numbers are still falling," San Jose Mercury News reported.

we know the number of overall FastTrack users is largely unchanged - the above claims are based on US p2p traffic. but i am curious as to how accurate this claim is....specifically, how can an outside firm distinguished what percentage of Fast Track traffic is US based? Anbody know the technical methodology at work here...some kind of statistical sampling, perhaps, extrapolating the conclusion by taking a sample of Fast Track ip addresses?

[JackSpratts]

nielsen, whose paying clients include every one of the old line media companies, has been inextricably linked to the media conglomerates for generations, and should be regarded with skepticism during this time, as should anyone using trend extrapolations and statistical samplings to estimate any p2p user bases. for instance bigchampange has come under fire for making file popularity claims in the past and refusing to allow their methodologies to be peer reviewed. there are incompetents and worse making grandiose statements and many have absolutely nothing in the way of empirical data to back them up.

it’s not like we didn’t see this coming, that’s why this thread exists; to counter what is certainly a major misinformation campaign designed to obscure the failures of the industry’s attempts to marginalize and criminalize users of file sharing programs.

the fact is that people are trading and sharing files as never before. the networks are filled with millions of users sharing billions of files. fyi, here are this afternoons 2 pm fasttrack user numbers, as healthy as ever.

no one ever has to take anyone’s word for this, just log on and download a file or two – and see for yourself.

- js.

[multi]

from page 2...
"The RIAA said an additional 861 people had signed affidavits in which they voluntarily admitted they were illegal file sharers and promised to stop. The signings are part of a RIAA amnesty program called 'Clean Slate.' However, such critics as San Francisco's digital civil rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation contend that the program is what it calls a 'trick' that offers no protection against suits by individual record labels,"

i think they might be counting each time a dialup user logs in with a different IP as a unique visitor ..
and for some that will be every few hours

P2P United, a group representing Morpheus, Grokster, StreamCast Networks and others, has published a code of conduct "as part of an ongoing effort to legitimize file sharing, saying it has been unfairly demonized by the recording industry," washingtonpost.com reported. With the code, which will be part of the companies' next software updates, "file-sharing companies will warn their customers against illegally downloading and trading copyrighted music. They also will make it easy for users to uninstall their software and offer parents ways to prevent their kids from sharing files.

its my guess that many will stop using the mainstream p2p sharing apps...
in favor of safer new emerging p2p models..and falls in numbers will mostly be a movement of the more experienced file sharers back to irc and newsgroups or maybe to undergound VPN's ,snail mail and sneakernet...

a lot of these lost sales are contributed to the internet when i think they are over looking at how people share one store bought CD amongst bunches of friends....with a simple CD burning technology...
oh well... to do anything about that, would mean taking on too many huge rich companies ,when taking a bat to the small guy on the internet is so much easier....

these numbers as put by these record companies are totaly suspect as are their profit losses..and have been from the start..and should be independently reviewed before ever being used to back up a case in a court of law..

[JackSpratts]

fastrack may stumble but it's very much alive. regardless of pew surveys, user counts remain healthy. add in assorted non-ft traffic (the fastest growing part of p2p) and filesharing is moving forward smartly.

- js.

[JackSpratts]

"BigChampagne LLC, which also tracks file-sharing, reports that usage of such swapping networks as FastTrack and Gnutella continues to rise."

- js.

[JackSpratts]

Massive content shared, close to the all-time high.

- js.

[Heathcliff]

Saw this Wednesday:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/06..._piracy_cases/

They're not even counting BT users in the numbers posted. BT2 is just around the corner too.

[JackSpratts]

Originally Posted by Heathcliff

Saw this Wednesday:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/06..._piracy_cases/

They're not even counting BT users in the numbers posted. BT2 is just around the corner too.

never underestimate the laziness of the established media. it's bad enough they take the riaa's self-serving, inaccurate word for nearly everything but when they do venture beyond the propaganda to report on the “status of file-sharers” they invariably mean file-sharers using one of the many fasttrack clients. hence when you see articles purporting to show file sharing is "down" the subtext is clear: they mean "kazaa use is down." for some reason the media can only hold one file sharing system in it's collective head at the same time. first napster, then morpheus - now kazaa/fasttrack. what is absolutely amazing about this is the fact that even that limited world view is corrupt. life in the fasttrack system is as vibrant as ever. if usage statistics are today as close to the all-time high as ever before, and they are, then any reports purporting to claim file-sharing (ft) is down are worse than inaccurate. they are untruths, the end result of a long chain of inaccuracies born of sloppiness moving right up thru and including deliberate falsifications. the more the media coalesces into one giant corporate voice the more it will fear and subdue the limited options left, and the more the people will seek alternative outlets like fasttrack and the many other excellent p2p systems either already in use like waste and bittorent or in development. rest assured the more of these clients they say we’re deserting, the more we’ll actually be using.

- js.

[TankGirl]

What Mr. Spratts said.

The 'established media' hasn't had much of a clue of the true p2p scene so far, and we're already four years into the p2p revolution. Instead of digging up the real phenomena and development trends (as you would expect from professionals) they are happy to draw their reports from some simplistic and often dubious statistics.

For example, most reporters and researchers still almost totally miss the concept of communities as the living and evolving powerhouse of p2p. And yet communities are the primary force and continuation in p2p - any particular software or network is just secondary and replacable infrastructure to serve the communities. The complex network of personal and community relations extends over the entire p2p ecosystem, and whatever happens on any particular network - even if the statistics were correct - can only give a very superficial idea of what is truly going on. Especially now when a lot of sharing has moved over to WASTE and other private networks the only way to get even a rough idea of the volumes of shares and the amount of traffic is to get involved and become an active and well-connected filesharer yourself. This is of course what millions of common people have done, and so we are in a paradoxical situation where the media is reporting phantom trends from a statistical phantom world to people who know much better and who are happily doing the real thing in the real world - just as they have done ever since Napster happened.

- tg