Recording industry blasts BitTorrent for enabling piracy
#1
BitTorrent says it wants musicians to embrace its platform and share their music with the masses.

The lobbying group that represents the music industry replies to that: Try harder.

The Recording Industry Association of America has fired the most recent shot in the long war over digital piracy, calling out BitTorrent executives for trying to whitewash its role in disseminating illegal copies of copyrighted music.

Recently, BitTorrent has sought to strike a friendlier tone recently, positioning the company's software as a tool that can be used by artists. BitTorrent is one of the few remaining popular peer-to-peer software services, having outlasted others that have succumbed to legal challenges. When you download a BitTorrent app, it gives you a file that lets you download a large file — like a movie or song — from other users, called "seeders," who are online and also have that file.

The problem: BitTorrent is a hotbed of piracy, preventing movie stars, studios, music labels and musicians from tracking where their music is going and — crucially — allowing people to avoid paying for it.

That's why the RIAA issued a letter to BitTorrent late last week, pushing the company to do more to combat piracy.

The letter from RIAA executive vice president Brad Buckles makes clear that the organization is not going to stay quiet while BitTorrent executives tout the software as beneficial to musicians.


The letter particularly calls out BitTorrent Chief Content Officer Matt Mason, who is quoted as saying that piracy happens "outside the BitTorrent ecosystem" and that users that illegally exchange files are "doing it wrong."


The RIAA says BitTorrent applications were the facilitator on 75% of the piracy infractions the organization filed in 2014. While some reports have found that illegal downloads have declined thanks to the rise of streaming, the International Federation of the Phono Graphic Industry recently estimated that BitTorrent was responsible for 4 billion music downloads in 2014, the vast majority of which it claims were illegal.



It can seem at times that the RIAA has already won, having helped shut down numerous sites like Napster and Limewire. That makes piracy appear less of an existential threat to the music industry than it did during the heady days of Grokster and Kazaa, but illegal file sharing remains a serious issue for the music industry. Cisco data has found growth in online file sharing in the U.S. in recent years.


Victoria Sheckler, deputy counsel of the RIAA, appeared to have no patience with BitTorrent's self-defense.

"Like it or not, BitTorrenting products are the premier products used for peer-to-peer infringement today," she said.

BitTorrent, however, has evaded their grasp. Numerous attempts have been made to shut down various web indexes that provide link to BitTorrent files such as The Pirate Bay, but those sites have also proved difficult to squash.


Meanwhile, BitTorrent has positioned itself as a legitimate file-sharing service, said Russ Crupnick, managing director of market research firm MusicWatch, something that has helped it keep the music industry and its lawyers at bay.

Still, they know there's an issue.


"The industry is just saying, 'Look, we respect your right offer a service that facilitates file sharing. Our issue is the illegal music downloading that goes on on that platform,'" Crupnick said.


Sheckler said that BitTorrent has been saying one thing in public and another behind closed doors.



"In private discussions that various people have had with BitTorrent over the last few years, they've refused to address the elephant in the room, which is the piracy over the BitTorrent protocol," Sheckler said.

In the past few years, the RIAA has been able to convince a variety of companies to help it limit music piracy. Sheckler said that search engines including Google and Bing had done their part by demoting results that led users to pirated material, marketers had pulled advertising off sites that hosted pirated content and payment processors stopped operating on sites that infringed on copyrights.

A spokesman for BitTorrent noted that the company has been in contact with the RIAA for more than 10 years. He also noted that the company has created new products to help artists and labels such as Bundle, which provides increased control over certain files and includes a payments tool.

The RIAA could not comment on possible future legal action but did not rule it out. Sheckler stressed that there were relatively easy fixes that they have requested.

Included with the letter was a list of codes to certain files that had been widely pirated including tracks from Britney Spears, Coldplay, Kayne West and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. The RIAA's letter proposed that this be the first in a series of verified files that could be blocked from exchange on the company's software.

Sheckler said it is a simple step toward alleviating the issue.


"If you have the means to do something about it, why don't you?" she said.


http://mashable.com/2015/08/04/riaa-bitt...-of-words/


Quote:Thank god they aren't cursing project ARPANET and DoD for inventing internet that enabled piracy! Trolls have no height of stupidity. (They forget Usenet, DDL, DC++, FTP)
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#2
"In private discussions that various people have had with BitTorrent over the last few years, they've refused to address the elephant in the room, which is the piracy over the BitTorrent protocol," Sheckler said.

The real elephant in the room is how citizens privacy is treated in the legislation regarding copyright.
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#3
Its funny how some people actually believe pirating has a impact to the sales of both music and video content, which in reality, it really doesn't.

The singers and actors who are millionaires could never be financially harmed by pirating.

Theres always going to be some one who pirates and some one who buys the content, you can't change that.

[Image: When-you-pirate-music-you-hurt-the-artist_o_128500.jpg]
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#4
I wonder what Bob Marley would say about this issue if he was alive today.
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#5
BitTorrent to RIAA: You’re ‘barking up the wrong tree’


The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) sent a letter to BitTorrent last week asking the company to help stop copyrighted infringement of its members’ content. Brad Buckles, RIAA’s executive vice president of anti-piracy, asked BitTorrent CEO Eric Klinker to “live up to” comments made by former chief content officer Matt Mason.

Two quotes by Mason stand out in particular: “We don’t endorse piracy.” and “If you’re using BitTorrent for piracy, then you’re doing it wrong.” Both of these remain accurate, but the RIAA wants to see BitTorrent do more.
We contacted BitTorrent to get their stance on the letter, and the company responded to VentureBeat with the following statement:

Quote:Our position is that they are barking up the wrong tree, as it seems they were with their approach to CBS last week.
As informed commentary in the past few days has made plain, there is a distinction between the BitTorrent protocol and piracy. Piracy is a real thing, but BitTorrent, Inc. is not the source. We do not host, promote, or facilitate copyright infringing content and the protocol, which is in the public domain, is a legal technology.

We do however have a direct-to-fan platform for artists and content owners to use. More than 30,000 publishers have signed up for it to date, including some of the most popular music artists around the world.

The protocol is also used by some of the biggest online businesses, including Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Blizzard, Wikipedia, Etsy, Internet Archive and many other businesses, governments, universities and nonprofits.

The CBS reference alludes to last week’s news, reported by Billboard, that a 16-member coalition that includes the RIAA sent a letter to CBS CEO Les Moonves alleging that CNET “has made various computer, web, and mobile applications available that induce users to infringe copyrighted content by ripping the audio or the audio and video from what might be an otherwise legitimate stream.” CBS owns CNET, which has a download section on its site that hosts hundreds of thousands of applications, and some of them aren’t very liked by the industry, according to the Billboard report.

That letter was similar to the one sent to BitTorrent, and the argument CBS counters with is also in the same vein. Namely, the legality of such software hinges on “fair use,” and the responsibility falls on the user of the software, not its creator or distributor.

You can read the RIAA’s letter to BitTorrent, which was first published earlier this week by Mashable, below.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/273840673/RIAA...BitTorrent

http://venturebeat.com/2015/08/07/bittor...rong-tree/
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#6
there's samples where some "Big" Musicians use BitTorrent protocols to promotes and distributed their works to gain more wide audience.

now now
some musicians want wider audience to get their music to be listened then hopefully they're like it then buying it,

most musicians want to get wider audience to get them paid it first...screw if they liked or not...even if you listen one note from their music you got to pay it.
and guess where the record label, distributions retails companies, artists that need new mansions..etc..etc will point at when their piles of pennies goes short a coin?
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#7
@Picklock

that's actually how people buy nowadays! And Artists know that as well. People download/pirate music if they like the album they buy Vinyl. Both are happy; artist and costumer. But blaming a technology for piracy promotion is one more senseless examples that trolls can think.
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#8
(Aug 10, 2015, 06:15 am)The_Abee Wrote: @Picklock

that's actually how people buy nowadays! And Artists know that as well. People download/pirate music if they like the album they buy Vinyl. Both are happy; artist and costumer. But blaming a technology for piracy promotion is one more senseless examples that trolls can think.

can't really say "trolls can(only)think" though.
in matter of fact, that was a smart and brilliant move by the profit maker...

why can't they pick an opponents that's so defenseless and have most of these planet opinion's about "sharing on P2P is piracy" morality shits are against us the "Sharing Is Caring" communities as a move?

Brilliant!!! a very authentic and Genius policy by the Autistic bullies of copyright era!!!
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