Study: No Decline in Illegal Downloading

Unless you're a U.S. resident, it's still next to impossible to legally download TV or Movies. Make content more accessible outside the US, and maybe these numbers might start to decline.

I'm not sure how easy it is in the U.S. either. Whenever our DVR somehow fails to record one of our favorite TV programs, we'll hit up CBS or NBC's website in attempt to watch the program online. It's not very easy to even find the right link to click. And 90% of what's there is 2 minute teaser clips of the show.

And trying to use Microsoft's latest Media Center built into Windows 7 isn't any better. Again, 90% of what's there is 2 minute clips, even though Microsoft dubs the program as being able to allow you to watch your favorite shows by the web.

I will say, as far as TV/Movie/Music downloads go. I'm not a fan of buying digital downloads. Without a hard copy (CD/DVD), once you lose your original file, how can you PROVE later that you "OWN" a license. Ten years from now are they really going to have some record under your username that you "purchased" a copy of this song, or that song?

This is why I don't use Steam to purchase games. If Steam ever shuts down, you no longer own those games.

If thy base their results solely on the amount of sold or rented DVD's I think their numbers may be off by lots!

With the closing of TPB tracker and the removal of illegal downloads on mininova, as well as youtube which removed copyrighted material, there's a DRASTIC decrease of downloaded material!

Only a percentage of people is searching for alternate sources!
I think this article is just bull sh#t, crapped out to get another article out!

People who pirate are going to continue to pirate. Period.

What you want is a REAL REPUBLIC. In a true democracy the people with the big guns win.

you mean a real republic like China's?

Offer a reasonably priced service that allows me to subscribe to my favorite shows and stream them in HD, without any damn DRM hassle, and I'd be done with all my illegal downloading.

Amen to that!

ITS CHEAPER FOR SANTA ....

GOD I LOVE THE USA AND HULU AND NETFLIX AND YOUTUBE AND MAKING FUN OF CANADIANS!

[citation]This is why I don't use Steam to purchase games. If Steam ever shuts down, you no longer own those games.[/citation]

I bought all my non valve games on ebay not to long ago. I switched my isp and didnt have the net for a few days, low and behold, stupid steam needed the internet to sign in offline mode.....and yes your absolutely right, if steam is gone, so is hundreds and hundreds of dollars per person that millions of people spent :S

I watch alot of stuff on hulu now. I was amazed that they had Gurren Lagan on there. I also head on over to network official sites to watch shows I may miss. Honestly, it's more convenient to stream something than waiting for it to download before you can watch it. Now if only there was a type of adaptive internet radio that would let you listen to what you want, when you want, with a few commercials thrown in. I think people would find that more convenient than going through news groups to download stuff. Personally, I listen to live365 when I want some internet radio, but sometimes you just want to hear a certain set of songs.

What you people want is not democracy or republic but rights.

The consumer has no rights and are forced to piracy in many cases. I'm not trying to justify someone going through and downloading stuff simply because they can but the people who want to give money to watch shows they miss or listen to songs once in a while or have the same movie at home on their DVD as on their iPod.

The first company that gives the consumer rights will be insanely rich because they'll convert people who don't want to pirate but do because they basically have to into paying customers.

I want to buy TV episodes but I don't want to be overcharged for an entire season and I want it in HD. I miss stuff regularly. I want to be able to watch live sports over the internet, but the NFL won't let me. I want to randomly pick a new song every day without having to turn on the awful radio. And I want to pay money to do it, but they won't take my money... It's insane. They want to cry about "piracy" when it's more "stupidity" than anything.

There I fixed it...

And that is why I pirate.

"There I fixed it...

And that is why I pirate."

I admit I don't really listen to music at all myself but even so I have to agree it's ridiculous that I get higher-quality audio embedded in my HD movies and TV-shows than is available for pure music downloads.

At one point the compressed audio formats made sense due to the storage, bandwidth and processing constraints but that's just not the case anymore.

Failed misserably with your point cause all the examples show otherwise..




As simple as his arguement sounds it does make perfect sence. When i returned form the US back here, in Greece, I couldnt find anything neither a way to be provided with all the shows etc that I had grown to be so fond of while living there and was annoying as fk. Addint the fact that even if you order something AFTER you manage to find 1% of the things that interest you you realise the troubles of regions etc and you are headed to even find out for the first time in your life in multiple cases of what torrents are.

So indeed a lot of ppl that get involved into P2P get introduced and used to it as if so harmless with this as a real excuse practically.

Other than that I dont know what to say. I think anyone that is using the web more than often for more than simple use of Facebook and emails or whatever is aware of how much torrents etc are turning more and more easy to find and use.

Even though with all the fuzz about TPB and mininova being taken down you might have expected otherwise, might as well be why people are using more and more those sites refered in the article.

When Sony and the rest stop making money from it themselves then they should care about the poor people that do it. When they pay the price 100% of what they have been screaming and pretending to be against all this time when their mouths are as big as their freaking wallets, then they should start chasing the rest. I cant consider the poor ppl and average user a thief when they screw up the artists themselves by making profit out of contracts as proved the past few months.

I looked at the BPI article (thanks for the link).

First, it was done for the British recording industry by Harris Interactive - an apparently independent firm. That may be a plus, but when your paycheque (we're talking UK here) is on the line, you may slant the direction of your research by being very selective of who you poll.

Second, of the 3442 people polled, only one third (1012 to be exact) said they pirate music. The article then states, "The survey showed a net increase in the use of web-based or “non-P2P” methods during the last six months". The increase is in the different methods of downloading and not necessarily the number of downloads.

Finally, the percents mentioned in the article are percents of a percent - 47% of the 1012 who download illegally; 31% of the 1012 who download illegally, or approximately 303 people, download illegally on a daily basis, which turns out to be about 10% of the overall people polled.

So how does that percent compare to people who steal from stores? Where does that rank compared to people who steal little things from the company they work for, like paper and such? In other words, how does it compare to the general level of theft across society.

I don't do illegal downloads, as I am a copyright holder and part of my income relies on that copyright, yet I feel the sense of frustration other people feel. Yes, I would like to take the movies I bought on DVD and put them on my Zen Vision or my wife's iPod. Living in Canada I don't have to be concerned about DMCA prosecution, so there are ways I can do this other than "piracy". The other thing I would be concerned about with illegal downloads is security. What better way to transmit trojans and viruses than through "free" downloads? Not being familiar with the P2P community, I would feel vulnerable.

The entertainment industries need to devise a new business model, but can they develop one that trusts the consumer? I don't think there is much trust within their own ranks, so I don't expect that they will be open to us anytime soon. When the book publishing industry wishes they could stop people from reselling an old book or trading it or even giving it away, what hope is there that any other group will help us, the people who provide them with their income, to resell a DVD or videocassette or CD or software. They'd send the police to your garage sale and have you hauled away in chians for that if they could.

I think Descendency (above) has it right. The first company to work with the consumer will make a killing, at least for a while. But perhaps the few greedy idiots will eventually ruin it for all once again.

TOTALLY off topic but does anyone else misread that as "The British Pornographic Industry" every time?

40% of employees in Latin America do not have retirement taxes payed by his employer, so they don't officially work, and have not right to access to a credit card.

In other words: they cannot buy anything on Internet. Price does not matter. Is not the price. There is no choice other than pirated software, music, pictures, anything. No choice.

Republic = senate

every day you can learn something

Did they say that "Newsgroups" is a NEW method to download illegal stuff? Really? NEW? LoL .. That is funny.

But if you buy games on discs these days, the copy protection makes it hard/impossible to backup (nor you are allowed to legally do so) so if the disc gets lost or damaged, you won't get a replacement or an opportunity to download it. Once the disc is gone, so is the money you spent on it.

I personally download all my music off youtube

the truth is the industires involved have reacted in teh wrong way to boilster peopel's opinions of them . as soem one stated , book publishers wish they could do away with the right to resell books ,game companies and music companies are working on this for games as well by circumventing laws , via securom , safedisk , starforce, TAGS, and other install/listen limit based drms. i woul;dnt put it past the movie industry to try teh same with blue rays and dvd's and none of these companeis care to work with consumers to come up with a pleasing compromise. personally i think drm's would be fine .. if these limited instal versions , costed considerably less that full price, i would not mind only gettign 3-5 installs , if the game only costed me 19 bucks instead of 59, or even beter make it 5 dollars an install perhaps ? so you buy teh game for 5 bucks to get one install with an easy option to buy more installs that might "work" for many consumers, the game indsutry could offer an unlimited install version for the regular 59 dollar price point then.

I pirate. I also happen to actually enjoy some of the games and movies I pirate, so I shell out the cash and buy original copies to support developers.

I don't think I'm harming the industry in any way, considering the fact that most cases are like mine and that even with most of the gamers playing hacked copies they still make an obscenely large amount of money.

I would stop pirating altogether if they didn't charger outrageously high prices, considering the state of the economy (and where I live it is really bad) they would actually sell more if they charged 10 dollars.

Just see what happens on Steam, every week they have at least two discounts to games and when it happens those games sell a lot.

Why should those ridiculous prices when they don't give if they sell it at $60 or $15? The pioneer that sells a hyped game at $15 bucks will own the PC market, not because the game is good, but because the bang for the buck can't be beaten.

The MPAA/RIAA and all of these other crooked, greedy bastards have milked the cows udders for too long. It is time they realize that the more they push the more the piracy groups will shove, and soon, the shove will become a complete knockdown. They need to learn that BUSINESS should FEAR the CUSTOMERS, not the CUSTOMERS fear the business. Right now, they seem to think WE need to fear them.
The business HAS to satisfy the customers, till that occurs, piracy will increase and they can file suits left and right, it'll only help the piracy.

It is an uphill battle they cannot win, specially considering all the false information they spew left and right. I only wish the information on how much money they're loosing from all the piracy was true, so I could watch them starve to death. Because after them suing people for HUNDREDS of times the "damages" supposedly caused from pirating a few songs (through courts that they have bought out and laws they have $lobbyed$ for), they deserve worse even. The punishment's are always absolute exaggerations and do not fit the crimes. Per the standards for punishment these industries are trying to push around, an 8 yr old entering a local convenience store and stealing a 5 cent gumball should land him in jail for 10-15 years, that cannot be.

Right now as it stands, they have absolutely no way of knowing if Jane Doe pirated an album, whether they REALLY are loosing any money at all, they just force everyone to assume that they are even though maybe Jane Doe's listening to it to see if its any good and might never listen to it again after realizing the first song is ok and the rest SUCK. They want us to shell out the dough for their CRAP whether we like it or not. After Jane Doe gets caught for her ONE album, the damages they force their way to collecting are always, as I said above, absolute exaggerations of the actual damages caused.
Any judge that rules in favor of these greedy animals is DISHONORABLE and shouldn't be a judge.

luckily for me downloading movies and music is legal in my country

Did anybody say, what should be done next?

MS OS down loaders: Use Open Source coz it's FREE

I love the fact that this article considers Newsgroups to be a new method of downloading stuff and that P2P is #1.

Newsgroups has been in use for years, way longer than P2P and before Newsgroups there was FidoNet.

Newsgroups has always been a major method of getting what ever you want. While there might be only so many people who upload stuff, there are millions more who download that same stuff via the newsgroups.

Such tools as NewsBin Pro, Forté Agent, NewsLeecher, GrabIt and others are used to find and download the files from the binary groups.

But to do this, you really need to subscribe to a premium news service such as EasyNews, GigaNews, PowerUsenet, AstraWeb, NewsHosting or SuperNews.

There are other premium news servers out there, but you need to watch out for resellers as they are not always able to give you the service they promise. SuperNews is one of those resellers.

These days there is a lot more to learn about using Newsgroups than there used to be years ago, but it can be a very rewarding experience once you learn the ropes and once you learn what groups have what ever you are most interested in.

With such a tool as NewsBin Pro and a premium news service, you can download how ever much your connection and account status allows for.

I cannot even imagine how it would be like to even considering being paranoid when downloading pirated stuff.
Megaupload, Rapidshare, Mediafire.. Torrents, sitcom streaming, etc. And nobody can do SHI T about it. There is no way that Im paying to watch something that I can get for free in less than 2 minutes.
It just doesnt make sense.
Really, it sucks to be you guys.

[citation]What you people want is not democracy or republic but rights. [/citation]

What I want is Anarchy...plain and simple...

or maybe I just want a steak from Outback? No Rules, Just Right...? mmmm... steeeaakk....