First and foremost, I think it’s important to state that I would appreciate not allowing this to degenerate into how terrible/wonderful downloading stuff illegally is. Thank you.
Why do people feel the need to purposely rename their files incorrectly? If one is trying to download a movie, for instance, and the movie turns out to be something else entirely… well, what good does that do? If I’m looking for Shrek and you give me The Fast and the Furious, what purpose could that possibly serve? Anybody?
I think it’s at least 50% asshattedness, but the only real purpose I can think of is to increase their participation ratiing by making people download unpopular files renamed with titles people want.
Also, its my impression that a vast majority of the users really have no idea whats going on. That is to say, all it takes is one copy to get renamed and then it can turn into tons and tons of copies because people download but don’t delete or (correctly)rename.
Pardon my hi-jack and/or snarkyness but what exactly about this thread makes you think it “should be closed down soon”, World Eater? The mere mention of “file-sharing” or "P2P’ (ooooooh) seems to cause quite a kneejerk reaction with some.
Granted, IANAMod but what’s the difference between this GQ and say one asking:
“Why do people cut/contaminate cocaine when they sell it?”
Many have speculated that it’s actually people working on behalf of media producers in an attempt to sour the P2P experience. It’s just a theory, but it starts to sound rather plausible when you consider that the RIAA wants hack P2P users’ computers.
I don’t know about the participation level theory. Not only are there programs to make anyone’s participation level perfect, but I recall seeing plenty of fakes on P2P services long before such participation measurements were even implemented.
The RIAA did say they were going to sabotage P2P systems by uploading defective/incorrectly-named mp3s, but heck, that sort of thing has been going on since the heady days of Napster.
For instance, I’ve seen “Video Killed the Radio Star” and “Come on Eileen” labeled as songs by THE CURE more often than not – and if you didn’t know better, you’d think every parody song ever recorded was by Weird Al Yankovic.
Some of these mislabelings might be deliberate (though I fail to imagine why, since Napster had no “participation” rating), but a lot of it can be simply attributed to stupid people.
(And I agree that this thread will likely be locked soon. I love posting to locked threads. LOL.)
This was reported on Slashdot, so I’m pretty sure some music companies were found to have a setup with multiple DSL connections housing lots of fake songs. The multiple connections were there to make it appear like the songs were genuine. I’ve been suspecting for a while that Hollywood has been doing this, too. What better way to get a teen to stop downloading stuff than to have his mom find porn on it. Doesn’t matter if he didn’t mean to download it. I also seem to remember Madonna (sp? I’m not a big fan =P) had this done. A bunch of “different” hosts had her latest single so people could download it. It turned out to just be her saying “F*** you.”
And the program that makes you have 1000 participation level (perfect) is Kazaa Lite 2.0. Much better than regular Kazaa with all of its extra features. Plus, it doesn’t have spyware.
What would cause this to be locked? Me saying a P2P application? Me expressing my preference for a non-virus laden P2P application? QED mentioned the participation level, so I thought I might as well clarify which software app does that.
Well, not only did you mention a particular P2P client, you also made a recommendation for it, over another one. That’s a no-no, and will get this thread closed for sure.
It’s the same situation if I had said “You can buy illegal guns in the US” and you told everyone what address to go to and how much it costs.
To summarize: General information about illegal activities, good. Specific information about illegal activities, bad.
As far as this board is concerned, it is. And that’s what counts. Yeah, it sucks sometimes, but since this board was birthed by a newspaper, the folks running it take copyright protection seriously, and who can blame them? It’s just one of very few limits we have on this board, and we’ve learned to live with it.
Indeed, if someone only plays his video/music files using his P2P client’s built-in media player, he might never know the file is misnamed. Kazaa’s media player, for example, shows the file’s “title” instead of the actual file name, which may be completely different.
The genius is how clicking the little ‘x’ in the upper right hand corner, which is how most of general computer users (my mother included) know to close a window/program, merely minimizes the program to the taskbar, still fully sharing all files.
I think the worst case of this I came across was downloading the Ice Age movie (to see if it was worth buying of course) and having it turn out to be a pretty bad porn lol. In that case I think the person who renamed it merely wanted to give himself a chuckle at the thought of some ‘innocent’ person downloading what they thought was a children’s movie and getting porn. I think it boils down to, some people have nothing better to do with their lives.