Is the RIAA screwed?While the RIAA is trying to stop people in this country from filesharing, the practice was legalized in Canada five years ago, according to Jay Currie writing in Tech Central Station. So it might be legal for an American to download copyrighted music as long as the file comes from a computer in Canada, and the RIAA is powerless to stop it. The article sounds convincing, though I have a math question about this claim: If the RIAA were to somehow succeed in shutting down every "supernode" in America all this would do is transfer the traffic to the millions of file sharers in Canada. And, as 50% of Canadians on the net have broadband (as compared to 20% of Americans) Canadian file sharers are likely to be able to meet the demand.Can they? Keep in mind that there are ten times as many people in the United States as in Canada. Assuming that Americans and Canadians are online at the same rate, that means right now there are four times as many Americans with broadband as Canadians. How much of the traffic goes to supernodes, as opposed to ordinary filesharers? Assuming that supernodes get 50% of the traffic, if the RIAA shuts down 75% of the supernodes" in the U.S., and discourages 25% of U.S. ordinary filesharers, that means 40% of the traffic source is gone. Can the supernodes in Canada (and the still active ones in the U.S.) handle a 67% increase in traffic? Or will this problem be solved by either the number of supernodes in Canada increasing significantly as a market reaction, or the number of downloaders further decreasing as a result of longer load times? (Via Tyler Cowen at Volokh Conspiracy). |
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