A study based on BitTorrent traffic by Robert G. Hammond – assistant professor at North Carolina State University – shows that shared before release albums increase popularity of the bands and helps with sales.

In a previous report we’ve mentioned how file-sharing actually increases album sales, a point proven by Hammond’s study which shows the same thing.

“This increase is sales is small relative to other factors that have been found to affect album sales,” Hammond writes.

However, not all of them benefit from this; as a matter of fact, only established artists felt the advantage of being shared via the popular BitTorrent network. As an example, artists who released one album managed to sell more than 100.000 units and the figure doubles for those who released more than three albums.

“File-sharing proponents commonly argue that file sharing democratizes music consumption by ‘leveling the playing field’ for new/small artists relative to established/popular artists, by allowing artists to have their work heard by a wider audience, lessening the advantage held by established/popular artists in terms of promotional and other support,” Hammond notes.

“My results suggest that the opposite is happening, which is consistent with evidence on file-sharing behavior.”

An important fact is that the study focused on pre-released albums, and took as source the largest BitTorrent network, along with the largest private tracker specialized in sound recordings, having over 560.000 albums from 441.000 artists. Hammond’s analysis covers a period of roughly nine months – from May 2010 to January 2011, and includes 1.095 albums from 1.075 artists, 37% of which were released by the four major label groups, and 22.4% belonging to independent albums and distributed by the same labels.

In addition, the study compares Nielsen SoundScan data with file-sharing activity of 148.465 people from different countries, including 80.000 US citizens and 11.000 Canadians. Nielsen’s data sales incorporates only purchases made within US borders and Canada.

Regardless of what these findings say, the music industry is still not happy, and their efforts to curb illegal sharing continue. However, there is a very thin line between legal and illegal if we dare say that piracy indeed helps sales. It is without doubt that a legal marketplace is important, and such services are provided by iTunes, Amazon, and Best Buy. Without them, file-sharing would just be file-sharing, and not lead to purchasing.

On the other hand, music labels can and should use their legal options to try and duplicate the positive effect of pre-release file-sharing, especially when popular artists are already doing that. One example is Coldplay choosing to put their songs on YouTube before the album’s launch date.

Subscription services can also aid, and may soon become a popular marketplace if labels choose to let them. And they should if fans are to be closer to their music before albums are released.

For no apparent reason MPAA’s chief executive Chris Dodd said that the days piracy is associated with theft are coming to an end.

“Piracy is theft” – this was the lead song of the entertainment industries, including the Motion Picture Association Of America, for quite a long time. However, recent statements from Chris Dodd indicate that this tune will soon change.

“We’re in a transformative period with an explosion of technology that’s going to need content,” Dodd told Variety during an industry event this past weekend.

“We’re going to have to be more subtle and consumer-oriented. We’re on the wrong track if we describe this as thievery,” he added.

Copying a copyrighted content is not theft, and never was. While copyright lobbyists tried to convince the public otherwise for such a long time, others are still aware of the truth.

Such a person is Stanford University Law School copyright expert Mark Lemley who explained in 2008 to the Los Angeles Times:

“Copyright infringement is not ‘theft’ in the same way that taking a CD from a store is theft. If I take your physical property, I have it and you no longer do. If I copy your song, I have it, but so do you.”

Unfortunately, not many people are hyped about this old debate on file-sharing and copyright laws. In 2003 Pew Research found that 67% of American citizens who download music online “do not care about whether the music they have downloaded is copyrighted.” But ignorance is not always blissed, and ever since both the MPAA and RIAA have sued thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of people for copyright infringement, and in many cases obtained settlements of five to six figures.

Despite all those efforts and apathy, piracy continued to thrive, and still does. The reason is quite simple – we live in a digital era where everything is at the tips of our fingers – at no costs. Therefore, despite the fact that people are aware of what copyrighted content is and what are the penalties for downloading such content, few consider that it’s wrong to download songs, movies, games, or TV shows free of charge. Mike Masnick of TechDirt said once:

“We are collectively living in a state of cognitive dissonance, uncomfortably embracing two conflicting beliefs at the same time,” he wrote.

“Copying is illegal. Copying is not wrong.”

Even Chris Dodd said that Internet offers “an explosion of technology that’s going to need content.” It’s probably the time we’ve all been waiting for, the time when Hollywood finally understood and accepted that it can’t change history. But don’t get too excited, because the studios are already planning a “more subtle” and “consumer oriented” approach, as Dodd said. And we all know how circumstantial words can be, especially with this delicate subject.

We will most certainly see major changes in the near future, and let’s hope that they will be for the best.

Our recent article about Pirate Pay and their plan to protect the industry’s interests revolved around an anti-piracy method which apparently works very well – attacking torrent swarms

The massive amounts of traffic generated by this kind of attack have been so effective that even Poland’s Cyber Emergency Response Team (CERT) noticed them. In order to disrupt or temper with a torrent swarm one has to send massive data packets that flood the group, reaching every member of the swarm.

The targeted groups are without exception Russian torrent swarms comprised of movies, a main reason to believe this is the hand of Pirate Pay. However, the origins of the packets have been identified as coming from Rodina (Russia), China, Canada, Australia, and the U.S.

But a really interesting fact is that at least one of these companies took money from a major copyright holder – Microsoft Russia, not to mention Pirate Pay, which was also financed to stop piracy by applying this flooding technique.

So the natural question that pops in everyone’s mind is: how many companies have been bought off to do this, and most of all, how legal are these measures?

For more information on distributed denial of service attacks you can visit this link.

The California-based file-sharing website has decided to sue a German company for stealing its name.

According to the filed complaint the German company that registered as BitTorrent Marketing GmbH has put into motion several file-sharing websites with domain names such as bitorrent.com, bittorrnet.net, and bitorrent.net, without getting the consent from the original BitTorrent company.

BitTorrent Marketing “adopted the BitTorrent trademark with the intent of capitalizing on the renown and success of ‘BitTorrent,’” the suit reads.

Filed on Wednesday in San Francisco, the lawsuit says nothing about the success of BitTorrent or how it gained popularity; instead it mentions that the site “provides an alternative to earlier, slower techniques for distributing data” and is used “by hundreds of people in the United States and internationally to find, share, and move digital media.”

In 2003, just two years after Bram Cohen founded BitTorrent, someone from this German company contacted him “to inquire about developing a relationship with the BitTorrent product and to seek Mr. Cohen’s permission to register the bittorrent.de domain name in Germany,” the suit states. Cohen refused, but this mysterious person went along with his plan and registered BitTorrent’s trademark anyway.

The bogus BitTorrent has also tried stopping the original BitTorrent from obtaining a trademark with the Office for Harmonization of the Internal Market, Europe’s trademark authority. However, the complaint states that they didn’t exactly steal the product:

“For example, after paying over $50 to sign up for ultimate-downloadscenter.com U.S. users are redirected to third party websites of other digital media providers, like Netflix.com and Hulu.com.”

In the suit it’s stated that the German company’s plan is to trick US consumers into singing up with them. Furthermore, it points out that this is not their first time, as they’ve tried similar schemes against other file-sharing companies such as Kazaa and Morpheus.

It’s not long until millions of BitTorrent users in the US will be monitored by Big Brother as part of an agreement between the MPAA, RIAA, and all of the country’s major ISPs.

According to this agreement those who are caught sharing copyrighted works will receive several warnings, and eventually be punished if they continue to infringe. These measures were supposed to kick-start in July 2011, but they have to wait until later this year as the involved parties may not meet the deadline.

In the following months the Center for Copyright Information (CCI) will begin hunting and tracking down pirates, due to an agreement between America’s movie and music industries and its ISPs. The parties agreed on a system designed to warn and eventually stop copyright infringers. After six warnings, ISPs could take a series of repressive measures, such as “chocking the offender’s internet pipe” and even temporary disconnections.

The plan was made public under the name of “Copyright Alters” in July 2011. The deadline passed, and the measures are still not to be implemented until later this year.

When TorrentFreak asked the CCI about the upcoming target date, they said:

“The dates mentioned in the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) are not hard deadlines but were intended to keep us on track to have the Copyright Alert System up and running as quickly as possible and in the most consumer friendly manner possible.”

“We do not intend to launch until we are confident that the program is consumer friendly and able to be implemented in a manner consistent with all of the goals of the MOU. We expect our implementation to begin later this year.”

The CCI also informed that they’ve selected a third-party company to be responsible with monitoring BitTorrent swarms, but the name remains undisclosed.

“The technology partner we have identified and begun working with is an independent and impartial expert and we expect to have an announcement about the independent expert shortly.”

The agreement describes that this “technology partner” will be tested by another independent expert to check and confirm if the methods of collecting data are viable.

As for internet providers, they have to come up with a system that keeps track of all the sent warnings; this database will not be stored centrally, so that subscribers’ privacy is ensured.
TF tried to contact several ISPs to find out their plans and views on the agreement.

“Verizon has always said that copyright infringement is wrong and through this voluntary consumer friendly system, we believe we can educate our consumers and offer them access to legal alternatives,” they told TF.

“We believe this program offers the best approach to the problem of illegal file sharing and, importantly, is one that respects the privacy and rights of our subscribers. It also provides a mechanism for helping people to find many great sources of legal content.”

Others (Comcast and AT&T) refused to respond.

Week ended May 20

(http://download.cnet.com)

New leader this week – the adventure/fantasy flick ‘John Carter’ scores the largest number of downloads on p2p networks; it’s seconded by ‘Journey 2: The Mysterious Island’. ‘The Avengers’ is still #3 in the chart.

This week’s list features three new entries.

The chart also includes download links for the movies listed here (where available) via Kat.ph

Ranking	(last week)	Movie	Rating / Trailer	Download Movie
1	(…)	John Carter	7.0/trailer
2	(…)	Journey 2: The Mysterious Island	6.0/trailer
3	(3)	The Avengers (CAM)	8.9/trailer
4	(1)	21 Jump Street (R5)	7.6/trailer
5	(…)	Act of Valor	6.4/trailer
6	(4)	This Means War	6.5/trailer
7	(9)	Chronicle	7.3/trailer
8	(2)	Get the Gringo	7.8/trailer
9	(7)	Hate Story (DVDscr)	-/trailer
10	(5)	Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows	7.6/trailer

(via TorrentFreak)

Russia’s biggest social networking website, vKontakte (compared to Facebook mostly due to its design) – has more than 135 unique million users that cover Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus.

Latest reports show that the website just lost a court appeal in which they’ve tried to overturn an earlier ruling saying they’re eligible for copyright infringement, as the portal enabled file-sharing services.

The case was brought by EMI’s subsidiaries – namely SMA Music Publishing and Gala Records, complaining that vKontakte’s users were sharing their content (music) without any legal authorization. Thus, St. Petersburg’s Commercial Court ruled in favor of the labels in January, a decision that was agreed upon once more on May the 17th.

vKontakte is probably going to shut down or restrict its file-sharing service, and that’s not going to make them happy; its integrated file-sharing service was one (if not the only) key features that drew millions to sign up with them.

An interesting fact is that vKontakte is more popular in Russia than Facebook (probably the size of the country has something to do with it), and the company is valued somewhere around $1.5 billion to $3 billion, according to a release by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry which, by the way, took sides with SBA and Gala in this case.
According to PaidContent, VK’s trump over similar platforms in Eastern Europe has been exactly this music-sharing function.

“Russia is a potentially exciting growth market for music, although it is currently being held back by a culture of copyright infringement,” the IFPI claimed in a statement.

“If Russia’s burgeoning legitimate business can effectively protect itself against such infringement, the country could become a top 10 music market.”

We are well aware of the fact that Big Content had always blamed piracy for job loses, the economic crisis, etc. while trying to force down anti-piracy laws within and beyond US borders, laws that come into conflict with every existing human right. Things are about to change.

Not only Big Content never brought into the court of law any evidence of the supposed damage dealt by file-sharing, but they’ve always relied on statutory damages, saying that it’s impossible to quantify this damage.

By taking a look at their revenues you will notice that they’re not at all in a tight financial situation, it’s actually the opposite. Furthermore, a big part of the file-sharing studies showed that sharing files has little effect on sales (including music, movies, and video games – look at Call of Duty’s series sales broking all the records recently).

The latest independent study by Robert Hammond (Assistant Professor of Economics at North Carolina State University) is called “Profit Leak? Pre-Release File Sharing and the Music Industry”, and states that piracy actually helps with increasing the sales of music albums.

In addition to that, Hammond claims that the study’s accuracy is higher than the ones previously made, since the sample size is larger: 1095 albums from 1075 artists on the largest private BitTorrent tracker dedicated to music.

The research was concentrated on albums that were leaked before they were released, and demonstrated that on average this had brought roughly 59.6 additional sales.

You can download the full study here.

The American rock band Counting Crows is preparing to share a music bundle from the band’s newest album with the 150 million BitTorrent’s users.

The pack includes four tracks from the album entitled Underwater Sunshine – Untitled (Love Song), Like Teenage Gravity, Hospital, and Meet On The Ledge. In addition, the bundle includes Adam Duritz’s (lead singer) liner notes, along with high-resolution album artwork.

The band chose their release date to coincide with the upcoming North American tour – The Outlaw Roadshow.

“These are our new radio stations,” says Duritz.

“Nobody’s carrying a boombox on their shoulder waiting for you to tell them what they can listen to anymore. But everyone has an iPod in their pocket and a choice. Everyone. So we’re going to give 150 million people some songs they can fit in their pocket and then let them choose for themselves. Listen once, twice, a thousand times, or not at all. It’s up to you.”

“Counting Crows is an enduring musical phenomenon, and a perfect example of a band embracing cutting-edge technology and networks for promotion and distribution,” said Matt Mason – executive director of marketing at BitTorrent.
“Our unique BitTorrent bundle option offers creators of all stripes the flexibility to distribute multimedia experiences directly to their fans at scale. Our commitment is to create powerful technology to connect cutting edge artists with new fans, enhance concert attendance and drive revenue.”

You can download the Underwater Sunshine BitTorrent bundle by accessing the following link.