Archive for October, 2008
The Constable on October 24th, 2008
There’s a new article over at Ars Technica discussing how the legal use of P2P is growing at a faster rate than illegal use.  Of course, the fact that illegal use is already so immense does make it quite easy for legal use to grow at a faster rate (a much lower baseline).
What’s the most interesting about the article is that P2P is seeing some very legitimate uses.  As we’ve said before: if people pay attention to technology and distribution models that gain popularity as a way to steal content, they may start noticing that the technology isn’t always created solely to “steal” but instead as a better way to distribute (and may have help businesses better serve their customers, if they can figure out how to give customers what they want - and then build a business model around it).
The Constable on October 14th, 2008
According to a recent article at the Wired “Threat Level” blog, DarkMarket.ws, an online watering hole for thousands of identify thieves, hackers and credit card swindlers, has been secretly run by an FBI cybercrime agent for the last two years, until its voluntary shutdown earlier this month, according to documents unearthed by a German radio network.
At least this explains why so many sites with illegal content are never shut down by law enforcement, lawsuits, etc. They must all be FBI stings. We recommend you stay away from sites like The Pirate Bay, Ultimate-Guitar.com, Songsterr, Pianofiles.com, Soundsbox, etc.
Yes, I’m being sarcastic… but still at least there’d be a reason that illegal sites (or sites designed to enable people to break the law) are allowed to proliferate relatively undeterred.
Well, except for Textbook Torrents which did get shut down.
The Constable on October 13th, 2008
Fewer people are downloading music from the internet illegally because they are frightened about having their connections cut off, according to new research.
According to an article in today’s Telegraph (UK):
Around 39 per cent of music fans currently download tracks from illegal sites, compared to 43 per cent last year, the annual digital music survey of 1,500 people found.
However, of those, 72 per cent said they would stop if they were contacted by their internet service provider (ISP).
The Constable on October 10th, 2008
Even though it’s still over two weeks away from an actual retail release, Bethesda’s much-anticipated new entry in the Fallout series has already made its way onto several torrents and into the hands of happy pirates everywhere.
Although it just hit the torrents, the pirated version of the game has reportedly been downloaded over 2,000 times already.  Of course this is expected to increase substantially (especially now that news about its availability on the torrents has been hitting), although it is unlikely to see anything like the levels of piracy Spore saw (even in spite of its much-maligned DRM), since a(n illegally) modified Xbox360 is required to play it.
Thanks to Gamesindustry.biz for the heads-up.
The Constable on October 9th, 2008
Just a year after one of Romania’s most popular BitTorrent sites was raided by the police (and its admins arrested, then released), Torrentbits.ro is now being blocked by one of Romania’s largest ISPs, UPC.
The move mirrors other recent blocks by ISPs, including the now-famous block of The Pirate Bay by Italian ISPs - a block which was later forced to be removed at the behest of the Italian courts.
Kind of makes you rethink Net Neutrality, doesn’t it? While freedom on the net may sound like a great idea at first, perhaps a middle ground can be found where ISPs are at least allowed to block access to sites it deems to be potentially illegal.
Just a thought.
(Thanks to TorrentFreak for the heads-up)
The Constable on October 8th, 2008
According to an article at The Financial Times today , EMI is going back into the direct to consumer market with its music downloads. As some of you may remember, they tried something similar in the past with Musicnet (which was a failure).ÂÂ
At this point not much is known about the new venture, other than that is planned to be live by Christmas. Of course, the big question on everyone’s mind is “why should I bother shopping there?” - and EMI has yet to answer this. In today’s marketplace, a site or store with the broadest selection is most likely to succeed, even in the face of competition including price (see online sheet music site Musicnotes’ 80% market share vs. that of their competitor, Sheet Music Direct for proof).
Of course, the experience is another key component - but even if EMI offers a great experience it is unlikely to triumph over the experience already available from iTunes and others. Exclusive content might help, but for the most part if the rest of the content isn’t there the destination is likely to become an “I am going there specifically for this” vs. “I am going there because I like shopping there” kind of option.
That is, unless EMI is using this as an option should they decide to stop licensing retailers like iTunes, or force them to change their pricing structure (using the “if you don’t like it, we’ll just sell it ourselves” threat).
Of course, a lot of my ideas are speculation - but they’re valid speculation at least…
The Constable on October 1st, 2008
A recently discovered flaw in Amazon’s Video on Demand service allows users to rip Flash streams, but it’s not clear that Adobe deserves all the blame on this one. Amazon may have made mistakes of its own, in the name of improving user convenience, and the company’s online content distribution system could be headed for a revamp.
read more | digg story
