Study: Filesharing doesn’t dramatically affect CD sales

From this article originally published in the Washington Post:

Songs that were heavily downloaded showed no measurable drop in sales, the researchers found after tracking sales of 680 albums over the course of 17 weeks in the second half of 2002. Matching that data with activity on the OpenNap file-sharing network, they concluded that file sharing actually increases CD sales for hot albums that sell more than 600,000 copies. For every 150 downloads of a song from those albums, sales increase by a copy, the researchers found.

Very interesting indeed. But I wonder what p2p filesharing’s effect on songs that aren’t on “hot albums that sell more than 600,000 copies”? For many years, I’ve believed that p2p filesharing can only help such songs. But I’d love to see some empirical research to support this.

Another passage:

Oberholzer-Gee and his colleague, University of North Carolina’s Koleman Strumpf, also said that their “most pessimistic” statistical model showed that illegal file sharing would have accounted for only 2 million fewer compact discs sales in 2002, whereas CD sales declined by 139 million units between 2000 and 2002. “From a statistical point of view, what this means is that there is no effect between downloading and sales,” said Oberholzer-Gee.

Now, I am of course suspicious of statistical analyses. But this is good stuff. Bottom line, p2p filesharing isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. The music industry will either adapt or die.

Free Culture

Lawrence Lessig‘s new book, Free Culture, is out. It’s also released under a Creative Commons license and is available as a pdf for free download.

In addition, Lessig was on NPR’s Talk Of The Nation recently. There is realaudio available.

I have the book downloaded, and I hope to read it soon. Free pdfs are nice, but they’re damned inconvenient. I still haven’t gotten around to reading my printed copy of Cory Doctorow‘s novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.

comments on this site

Well, so far the comment feature on this site has been, to say the least, underutilized. I have no idea how many people read this site, but I humbly invite more of you to make a comment. For the uninitiated, simply click on the ‘Comment (x)’ button at the bottom of each entry to add a comment. Pretty simple. I’d love to hear what’s on your mind, as it interacts with this virtual representation of my mind.

Is Truth Enough?

My friend and teacher George Caffentzis recently gave a talk entitled Is Truth Enough? The Bush Administration’s Lies and the Anti-War Movement’s Truths at a recent Maine anti-war forum. Go read it. George’s specialty is the oil industry and its impact on capitalism and world politics, especially since the first oil crisis in the 1970s. George’s comments are, as always, spot on and very insightful. I urge you to read the whole thing, but the fifth and last part is perhaps most interesting:

5. A Politics of Truth?
If we still want a politics of truth in a world of the master’s lies and the precisely-timed gullibility of many of our fellow US workers, then we must be truthful with ourselves, sober up and assess our situation and the possibilties for effective action.

First, we should recognize some of the unique elements of our situation, the most important being that we are opposing a war of occupation waged against an Iraqi resistance movement that has no discernable political program, strategy, or even tactics. This is quite different from the anti-Vietnam war movement of the 1960s and early 1970s and of the anti-Central America War movement of the 1980s (the training ground of many older militants of the present movement). In those previous movements the US government’s opponent was well known. Whatever you thought of them, the Vietcong, the FMLN, and the Sandanistas were political organizations with a public, even international presence in contact with the US anti-war movements. This is not the case with the Iraqi resistance in 2004. We are ignorant about something we should know about. We must face the political vulnerbility of our ignorance and work hard to turn this ignorance to knowledge.

Second, the situation is going to change on July 1, 2004. Using a classic “prestidigital” trick, the Bush Administration on that day will swiftly transform an occupying army into an “invited police force” asked to keep order by a “transitional” government concerned about terrorism in its borders. At that very moment, guerrilla resistance fighters will officially become terrorists, and hence open to the kind of treatment accorded to fighters in Afghanistan (including shipment to Guantanamo). Our movement will then have to face the consequences of this categorical slight-of-hand, since we will find ourselves attacked by the Bush Administration as supporters of terrorism. The key to the trick was the recent “constitution” “passed” by the US-hand picked Iraqi Governing Council and approved by the CPA. This constitution (especially with all its attractive civil liberties trappings) must be decisively deligitimated by our movement. In this fight, we should remember that “constitutions” are fetishized by many in the US working class, so we have to confront many of the prejudices that have “frozen” political change in the US for the last two hundred years.

Third, let me say this again, “respect your enemies.” The antiwar movement’s lack of interest in the Bush Administration is one reason why we fail to grasp the underlying imperatives propelling its actions. We look at the ungrammatical President, the secretive Vice-President, the Dr. Strangelovian Secretary of Defense and the Lady Macbeth-like National Security Advisor and conclude that they are “just” lackies of a right-wing conspiracy fueled by the “majors” in oil industry. Such reductionism is not completely accurate, for they are responding to a major crisis throughout the machinery of capitalism that goes beyond (but definitely includes) the profits of the oil companies and the “control of Mideast oil.” The Bush Administration has offered a “solution” to this crisis: a war on terrorism, and all that it means. Their political replacements (perhaps the Democrats) might offer a more multilateral, more union-friendly varient of “the war on terrorism” or a completely “new” solution, but either option must deal with the world-wide crisis of neoliberalism, because that is their business as residents of the White House.

Fourth, we not only must understand the “invisible hydra” of the Iraqi resistance. There is a Sphinx closer to home whose riddle needs to be answered: the US working class. It is a complex beast and bitterly divided within itself. Many of the 67% of US workers who attested in the poll to their belief in the sincerity of the Bush Administration’s commitment to the war on terrorism are terrorized all right, but not of Al-Quaida personally blowing them up. They are terrorified of being made jobless and homeless by the power of capital to move beyond US borders and use foreign workers against them. That is why the “helping hand” from capital that the Bush Administration is offering white or citizen workers through the “war on terrorism” is so attractive. It holds out the possiblity to them that they can escape the international competition for jobs in a globalized labor market through their status as “loyal” citizens which will make them “irreplacable.” Can our movement offer a better answer to the real terror of the US working class?

In the past, George’s analyses have been quite prescient in their ability to predict the next moves of neoliberal capital. It sounds to me like this will be no exception. The “war” on terrorism, like Sept. 11, is neither the beginning nor the end of the story, and the trajectory of the “plot” of this story is easy enough to spot for those who know the history of neoliberalism.

12 Reasons for Growth of Open Source

Very succinct, from Marc Andreesen, founder of Netscape:

1. “The Internet is powered by open source.”
2. “The Internet is the carrier for open source.”
3. “The Internet is also the platform through which open source is developed.”
4. “It’s simply going to be more secure than proprietary software.”
5. “Open source benefits from anti-American sentiments.”
6. “Incentives around open source include the respect of one’s peers.”
7. “Open source means standing on the shoulders of giants.”
8. “Servers have always been expensive and proprietary, but Linux runs on Intel.”
9. “Embedded devices are making greater use of open source.”
10. “There are an increasing number of companies developing software that aren’t software companies.”
11. “Companies are increasingly supporting Linux.”
12. “It’s free.”

I particularly think #5 will be a strong reason for the success of the software commons….

geergeaklust

These two things are cool. I’d almost rather have these two than a laptop. Enough functionality for my needs, and much more portable. The Zaurus runs Qtopia, which is basically a Qt environment (KDE is also fundamentally a Qt environment) designed for handheld devices. It runs on embedded linux. The built-in keyboard is way cool. And the iRiver (great name) is one of the few portable mp3 players that also handles ogg files. Most of my music is in ogg format, so this is essential to my reality. Any portable I get must play oggs, period, end of report.

UPDATE: Apparently there is a new model of the Sharp Zaurus coming out, with pretty much the same features except a much larger screen. Cool.

Oh, and an interesting article about ogg vorbis and more reasons it should be considered for audio distribution. It’s definitely better technology than mp3. But will it gain in useage? If the answer is no, why?

The p2p battle takes a new turn

The peer-to-peer(p2p) filesharing battle has taken an ominous turn. Wired magazine got a copy of a Microsoft Word document, supposedly written by California’s attorney general. But a close look at the document’s “metadata” (accessible through the File–>Properties menu of MS Word), shows the original author to be someone in the entertainment industry.
Here’s an excerpt:

However, the metadata associated with the Microsoft Word document indicates it was either drafted or reviewed by a senior vice president of the Motion Picture Association of America. According to this metadata (automatically generated by the Word application), the document’s author or editor is “stevensonv.” (The metadata of a document is viewable through the File menu under Properties.)

Sources tell Wired News that the draft letter’s authorship is attributed to Vans Stevenson, the MPAA’s senior vice president for state legislative affairs. MPAA representatives have issued similar criticisms of P2P technology in the past. Stevenson could not be reached for comment.

So it looks like there is an impending p2p battle in California; the state legislature, or at least some of it, is in bed with the entertainment industry. Go figure.

Lessig on photography

Lessig: IP protection a business, not cultural, battleground:

“Daguerre created his photo process in 1839. It was cumbersome, difficult to use, and expensive. Photography’s growth chart was very slow, to say the least. In 1888, George Eastman invented the Kodak camera, which was much easier to use, and inexpensive. The photography growth chart took off very fast. Eastman didn’t need ‘permission’ to build a better camera. Had there been restrictions on Daguerre’s idea early on, the history of photography would be very different from what we have today,” Lessig said.