Knock-off Nigel

[Nakor]

Absurd generalisation alert;

Downloading films is not as bad as downloading music.

In the main, a film is made because somebody (at a studio) is willing to purchase a script put a crew together, employ a director and producer and let them make the script in their image.  All are paid a wage for this, a select few and it is only a few get paid in royalties or even have the power to choose scripts and pressure studios to make certain films.  The %age of their actual earnings from bums on seats is very small - the real money is in a merchandising %, you not going to the cinema has little affect on the studios, actors, crew or anyones actual wage - it affects your local economy more then the studios.

Music is very different, its more personal and the musician, he/she/they have to find somebody willing to distribute and produce the CD.  The musician is paid on a % of units sold if these unit sales are not high enough the musician will be dropped, or get a lesser %age on his next contract.  So your downloading affects the ability of the musician to earn.  This is especially true for early careers, when sales and marketing are needed to generate interest - with interest comes live performance where you can make some real money.  But without those initial sales you will never get the chance to fill the Albert Hall, Wembly or stand on the stage at Glastonbury.

As for the advert, its about laying a foundation, educating people that their should be a stigma attached to downloading stuff, the campaign will be like the Aids adverts of the 80's or the drink drive adverts its about promoting a ethos, its starts with the kids and will help build a generation that at least think about it in the future, rather then just doing it like our good selves.  Ask around, Nigels are already stigmatised by the young - it will work because the youth will be bombarded with it for years to come, and a campaign in the middle press, TV story lines will all aid the education, it will be much more then a TV advert.

When does Lost start again?

[Bongo]

People who download more spend more on music, that was the result of research performed on behalf of one of those companies that enforce copyright for the music companies. They kept it quiet and it leaked out (along with lots of other stuff, it was a story that amused me greatly at the time),

Since I found napster at uni my CD collection has expanded exponentially and I go to lots more gigs etc.

As to downloading music v movies, in the long term they would both be as bad as each other - the less money the companies make the less they will spend on new music/movies.

Whereas the "knock off nigel" campaign may stigmatise children against purchasing fake DVDs (a practice I find abhorrent, making money from stealing other's work) will they really complain against a downloaded movie? A fake DVD is an inferior physical product... a movie is a movie - especially when loaded onto the kid's media centre PC.

The problem for the music industry is that the cat is already out of the bag. They can make it illegal but they will have a very hard time enforcing it - they can detect it at the minute but people are already working on making technology to stop that, and there are already lots of ways around that (pay a small amount for a seed box in a downloading friendly country, use that as your torrent box (24hr uptime and fast uploads will give you a great ratio!) then download over a VPN at your leisure. If you're really paranoid use something like truecrypt to encrypt the contents of your hard drive with plausable deniability (important as you can get jailtime for not handing over your encryption keys)). There will also be artists who will be using alternate business models that make the traditional record labels products seem the rip off they are - I can point to Nine Inch Nails here:

36 track album
Download $5 (choice of format, all DRM free, choice of MP3, Apple lossless, FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Compression) (potential for better than CD quality), with 40 page PDF of album art etc.
2 x CD + download - $10
Deluxe edition - $75
Super Deluxe - $300

I gladly paid the $5 and downloaded the FLAC despite not really being a fan of Nine Inch Nails. I was also happy knowing that most of that money would be going to the artist.

You might point to Radiohead and say they tried it and it was a failure. I'd say that's because they did it really, really badly - no surprise there seeing as they were doing it as a publicity stunt rather than a serious attempt at a new business model.

What did they do wrong?

They only offered the album in 1 format - 160kbps CBR MP3s. They said this was because they wanted "to be better quality than iTunes". iTunes is 128kbps AAC, which is generally accepted as around the same as 192kbps - so they were actually offering inferior quality files (NIN went to the trouble of saying which encoder they used to create the MP3s, to some sound quality is very important (the people on the (now shutdown amidst a load of lies (and also complete misunderstanding of the technologies by the police (much like TV Links))) OiNK torrent site were complete facists when it came to sound quality - some albums were unacceptable as they had been "transcoded" on the CD release - they went to the trouble of checking the files with wave analysers to check they were OK!)). I don't generally like 160kbps MP3s but thought I would buy it as it seemed like I would be supporting a novel idea. Next up - they expected me to choose how much to pay before I'd heard the album - or a sample, how was I really meant to decide what it was worth? I decided to pay 0, give the album a listen and then go back and pay afterwards. That would have been fine if the site was fast enough to let me download it in a timely manner. It wasn't though, but I found a decent link on another site and downloaded it there.

How do they expect to be successful like that when the (albeit illegal) competition are way more convenient (faster sites, easier to use, quick more reliable downloads, in the case of OiNK it had most albums you could think of in a choice of formats (FLAC, MP3 etc) and would tend to download very very quickly).

If I'm going to pay for music I want it to be the highest quality I can get - what sounds good in small headphones may not sound good on a decent hi fi for instance (would depend on the song, some are fine low bitrate). Most music stores also have the problem of DRM, which can even screw you over if you play by the rules (several online stores have shutdown, which means you can either kiss goodbye to the music you've bought or have to burn it to CD and rip it again (which is probably illegal)).

Think I've gone off on a tangent here, should probably stop typing now... i'll leave you with a song:



(seen this guy 3 times, bought his single, his EP, his album and a tshirt from him - discovered him when a mate sent me the MP3s)

[Nem]

wow Bongo your longest post eva.

If you install this http://phoenixlabs.org/pg2/ can you still get away with it?

[Bongo]

That's useless really - it won't be blocking all the IPs they use (the leak I mentioned above shows they were using employees residential DSL connections), besides which they don't need to connect to you to know your IP - they will just get a list from the tracker (that's how bit torrent works).

I'm not sure how the evidence they gather would stand up in court though, but it's enough to get an ISP to send you a letter.

Codemasters actually wrote to people they found downloading one of their games not long ago, asking for money to compensate them and threatening court (I think) and had a rather high false positive rate too.