There is some news from the music industry on MegaUpload closure. This is for the first time since MegaUpload’s owner Kim Dotcom and his associates were taken into custody that RIAA’s Vice President of Strategic Data Analysis has released a statement on the topic of MegaUpload shutdown.
Aside from MegaUpload, the statement also mentions LimeWire’s closure as another example of why seizing P2P services is so important. According to the statement, after LimeWire had been closed, a decrease of peer-to-peer file-sharing was noticed. However, the industry observers refuse to believe such a statement, because there are still hundreds of thousands of similar services that are still operating online.
RIAA claimed that digital music sales that had been decreasing jumped right after the LimeWire closure, and have remained stronger ever since. The Recording Industry Association of America pointed out that the spike in sales had been “immediate, noticeable and lasting”. Although this point of view may approve that taking down file-sharing services can be a good idea, the thing is that it does not actually matter. As RIAA itself admitted, closing down notorious services won’t encourage consumers to shift to legitimate services: instead, it could actually do the opposite and just make people angry. A great example of that could be the Pirates of Catalonia – a political party in Catalonia supporting intellectual property reform, implying open access to culture and knowledge, transparency and Direct Democracy. They have even issued a statement, saying that they had warned an organized civil action would start against the FBI, because a lot of people had lost their legitimate and personal information. They also pointed out that FBI’s actions could be treated as a violation of Articles 197 and 198 of the Spanish Penal Code.
Meanwhile, after the seizure of MegaUpload, a lot of file-sharing services, including Filesonic, UploadStation, Fileserve, 4shared, VideoBB, UploadBox, VideoZer, and Uploaded.to, have decided to close access to their gates for users from the United States. Thus far, MegaUpload’s founder Kim Dotcom still keeps trying to get bail, but his requests have been continuously denied by the High Court of New Zealand…
Aside from MegaUpload, the statement also mentions LimeWire’s closure as another example of why seizing P2P services is so important. According to the statement, after LimeWire had been closed, a decrease of peer-to-peer file-sharing was noticed. However, the industry observers refuse to believe such a statement, because there are still hundreds of thousands of similar services that are still operating online.
RIAA claimed that digital music sales that had been decreasing jumped right after the LimeWire closure, and have remained stronger ever since. The Recording Industry Association of America pointed out that the spike in sales had been “immediate, noticeable and lasting”. Although this point of view may approve that taking down file-sharing services can be a good idea, the thing is that it does not actually matter. As RIAA itself admitted, closing down notorious services won’t encourage consumers to shift to legitimate services: instead, it could actually do the opposite and just make people angry. A great example of that could be the Pirates of Catalonia – a political party in Catalonia supporting intellectual property reform, implying open access to culture and knowledge, transparency and Direct Democracy. They have even issued a statement, saying that they had warned an organized civil action would start against the FBI, because a lot of people had lost their legitimate and personal information. They also pointed out that FBI’s actions could be treated as a violation of Articles 197 and 198 of the Spanish Penal Code.
Meanwhile, after the seizure of MegaUpload, a lot of file-sharing services, including Filesonic, UploadStation, Fileserve, 4shared, VideoBB, UploadBox, VideoZer, and Uploaded.to, have decided to close access to their gates for users from the United States. Thus far, MegaUpload’s founder Kim Dotcom still keeps trying to get bail, but his requests have been continuously denied by the High Court of New Zealand…
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