File-sharing on the decrease says Pew survey

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File-sharing on the decrease says Pew survey

“The percentage of online Americans downloading music files on the Internet has dropped by half and the numbers who are downloading files on any given day have plunged since the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) began filing suits in September against those suspected of copyright infringement.

Furthermore, a fifth of those who say they continue to download or share files online say they are doing so less often because of the suits.

A new nationwide phone survey of 1,358 Internet users from November 18-December 14 by the Pew Internet & American Life Project showed that the percentage of music file downloaders had fallen to 14% (about 18 million users) from 29% (about 35 million) when the Project last reported on downloading from a survey conducted during March 12-19 and April 29-May 20.

“The record industry law suits have been a watershed event in American culture, so we naturally wanted to see how they might have affected people’s behavior” said Mary Madden, a Research Specialist at the Pew Internet Project who co-authored the new study. “While some people may simply be less likely to admit to downloading now, we have never seen an Internet activity drop off this dramatically. And the comScore data confirm that something significant has happened.”

The data from comScore Media Metrix, based on the company’s continuously measured consumer panel, show significant declines in the number of people with peer-to-peer file sharing applications running on their computers. The declines in the user base of each of these applications from November 2002 to November 2003 were: 15% for KaZaa, 25% for WinMX, 9% for BearShare, and 59% for Grokster.

Conversely, comScore has observed that in recent months a growing number of consumers have turned to a new generation of paid online music services. In November 2003, 3.2 million Americans visited Napster.com, which re-launched as a paid online music service in late October. Apple’s iTunes, which expanded to serve Windows-based PC users in mid-October, drew 2.7 million such visitors in November.”

[More in pdf download from here.]

So why did so many die in Bam?

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So why did so many die in Bam?

Answer: mainly because Iran is governed by an incompetent theocracy. Scarifying column by David Aaronovitch.

More: Many thanks to AA for this illuminating comment: “[Aaronovitch] doesn’t realise that one of the driving forces behind some of the building regs that keep California above ground is the active plaintiffs bar. There is a strong belief that the US tort law, despite some obvious problems with juries and punitive damages, creates a legion of “private attorney generals”. The attractions of 30% fees on success (and class actions) is that it forces companies to look at the cost-benefit analysis of projects in a way that works better than having a legion of planners taking full responsibility for matters (in a simplistic world). one of the biggest supporters of Ralph Nader’s “Common Cause” is the National Trial Attorneys’ Association. I always think the legal process in the US is another example of US Exceptionalism.”

The 100-megabit guitar

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The 100-megabit guitar

Headline on a fascinating Wired story about what Gibson’s CEO wants to do to the venerable electric guitar — plug it into Ethernet. Quote:

“The technology inside the electric guitar has been set since the 1930s: Magnetic pickups convert string vibrations into electrical impulses. Gibson’s new Les Paul, with proprietary Magic technology, does something else altogether, something no other guitar does. An audio converter inside the instrument’s body translates string vibrations into a digital signal that can travel over a standard Cat-5 Ethernet cable. The company will continue to sell traditional Les Pauls, but Juszkiewicz thinks it won’t be long before all guitarists go digital. “We’re improving the electric guitar for the first time in 70 years,” he explains.”

December pictures

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December pictures

December and January are the bleakest months of the Cambridge year. And yet…

Photograph taken on my way to the doctor’s surgery one afternoon.

And here’s a sunset from the same week…

The myth of ‘classless’ America

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The myth of ‘classless’ America

Right-wing American commentators are always deriding Britain as a class-ridden society. Well, guess what, social mobility in the US is much less than they suppose. Lovely piece by Paul Krugman. Excerpt:

“The other day I found myself reading a leftist rag that made outrageous claims about America. It said that we are becoming a society in which the poor tend to stay poor, no matter how hard they work; in which sons are much more likely to inherit the socioeconomic status of their father than they were a generation ago.

The name of the leftist rag? Business Week, which published an article titled “Waking Up From the American Dream.” The article summarizes recent research showing that social mobility in the United States (which was never as high as legend had it) has declined considerably over the past few decades. If you put that research together with other research that shows a drastic increase in income and wealth inequality, you reach an uncomfortable conclusion: America looks more and more like a class-ridden society.

And guess what? Our political leaders are doing everything they can to fortify class inequality, while denouncing anyone who complains–or even points out what is happening–as a practitioner of “class warfare.”

Let’s talk first about the facts on income distribution. Thirty years ago we were a relatively middle-class nation. It had not always been thus: Gilded Age America was a highly unequal society, and it stayed that way through the 1920s. During the 1930s and ’40s, however, America experienced what the economic historians Claudia Goldin and Robert Margo have dubbed the Great Compression: a drastic narrowing of income gaps, probably as a result of New Deal policies. And the new economic order persisted for more than a generation: Strong unions; taxes on inherited wealth, corporate profits and high incomes; close public scrutiny of corporate management–all helped to keep income gaps relatively small. The economy was hardly egalitarian, but a generation ago the gross inequalities of the 1920s seemed very distant.

Now they’re back. According to estimates by the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez–confirmed by data from the Congressional Budget Office–between 1973 and 2000 the average real income of the bottom 90 percent of American taxpayers actually fell by 7 percent. Meanwhile, the income of the top 1 percent rose by 148 percent, the income of the top 0.1 percent rose by 343 percent and the income of the top 0.01 percent rose 599 percent. (Those numbers exclude capital gains, so they’re not an artifact of the stock-market bubble.) The distribution of income in the United States has gone right back to Gilded Age levels of inequality…”