Archive for the ‘Research’ Category
The Game of Numbers
"Just a day after the BSA came out with their misleading report on software ‘piracy‘, the MPAA needed to follow suit by releasing their own misleading study on the impact of movie downloads.
"On the numerical side, this is really a survey, so they’re not making up numbers… just conclusions. They found that 50% of people they surveyed claimed to have downloaded ‘copyrighted content’ last year.
"First off, that’s a ridiculous question. If you visit just about any website you’ve downloaded ‘copyrighted content.’"
Techdirt. MPAA’s Turn To Mislead With Statistics. July 8, 2004.
See Also. Techdirt. BSA’s Latest Made Up Software Piracy Numbers Parroted By The Press. July 7, 2004.
Elsevier to Allow Pre-Production Posts
"According to a post on the SPARC Open Access Forum, Elsevier has declared they will allow authors who publish in any of their 1,700+ journals to put their peer-reviewed post-prints on their personal webpages and their own institutional repositories, where they can be made available, for free, to anyone with internet access.
"This does sound like a big shift on Elsevier’s part, and now that Elsevier has made this concession, it is crucial that authors take the next steps to ensure that their research is made available to wider audiences.
"But I still see plenty of challenges here for librarians, who will have to continue advocating for open access, promoting institutional repositories, and developing ways for all that material to be made accessible through simple search systems.
"Does all this mean that Elsevier has seen the light? I wouldn’t bet on it."
Commons-Blog. Elsevier to Allow Open Access Archiving. May 27, 2004.
Updates:
Richard Wray. Reed Allows Academics Free Web Access. The Guardian. June 3, 2004.
Reed Elsevier. Comments on Evolutions in Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishing and Reflections on Possible Implications of Open Access Journals for the UK. (.pdf) February 2004.
Attribution: SNTReport.com first discovered news of the Guardian article and the Elsevier report through a posting in beSpacific, edited by Sabrina Pacifici.
File Sharing Battles Continue
Mere days after our luddites and legislation posting, SNTReport.com has learned that Italy’s parliament has voted in favor of imposing jail sentences of up to three years on anyone caught uploading or downloading unauthorized copyrighted material to and from the Net. The legislation makes Italy one of the first countries to enact legislation that specifically criminalizes file sharing and P2P activities.
While several credible studies have published recently have provided reliable evidence that file sharing and peer-to-peer networking are not the sole — or even primary — causes of the music industry’s lost revenue, Leigh Phillips’s brief story in Digital Media Europe suggests that today’s children are simply doing other things.
"Under-25s spend much more money per year on mobile products than on music. Manifestly, this is not simply a case of youngsters downloading music instead of purchasing CDs, it is a wholesale shift in mindset and way of life from earlier generations," said Phillips. "The mobile, to many young people, maintains a place in their life that pop music did for my generation and that of my parents. There was a survey published last year that found that UK teens are also spending far less on cigarettes and chocolate than preceding generations. What are they spending the money on? Why, mobile phones, of course.
"Thus, this shows, once more, that what is affecting music sales is so much broader than the issue of downloading and piracy."
Leigh Phillips. Mobile Phones are the New Rock and Roll. Digital Media Europe. May 24, 2004.
Tony Smith. Italy Approves ‘Jail for P2P Users’ Law. The Register. May 20, 2004.
Musicians Discuss Views on File Sharing
The Pew Internet & American Life Project presented at a conference some early findings of an online survey it did of more than 2,700 musicians to gather their views on copyright and file-sharing issues.
Among other things, these musicians are very divided about the problems and marketing potential of online file-sharing systems and they are not sure the recording industry campaign against illegal downloading will help them. Many of these artists themselves share some of their songs for free online and find that it helps them sell more CDs, draw bigger concert audiences, and get more playing time on commercial radio.
The survey of musicians and songwriters was conducted online between March 15 and April 15. While the sample for this survey is not representative or projectable to the entire population of musicians and songwriters, it brings many more voices into the debates about copyright laws, the impact of online music swapping, and the long-term prospects for the music industry.
Pew Internet & American Life Project. Pew Ineternet Project Data Memo: Preliminary Findings from a Web Survey of Musicians and Songwriters. (.pdf) May 2004.
Music Downloads Rise
The Pew Internet & American Life Project released a report Sunday that suggests that the future of music distribution is through online means.
"The number of those who say they download music online remains well below the peak levels that we tracked in the spring of 2003, but there was some growth in those who reported music downloading in our February survey. The data also shows growth since last November in usage of some of the smaller file-sharing applications, such as iMesh, BitTorrent, and eMule.
In the most recent survey, we found that 18% of Internet users said they download music files. That is a modest increase from the 14% of Internet users who reported in a survey just before last Christmas that they downloaded music files online. But it is still considerably below the 29% who said they had done this when we surveyed in the spring of 2003."
Pew Internet & American Life Project. 14% of Internet Users Say They No Longer Download Music Files. April 25, 2004.
David McGuire. Americans Head Back Online For Music. The Washington Post. April 25, 2004.
Solving the Scholarly Publishing Conundrum
“Google, the popular search-engine company, has teamed up with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and 16 other universities around the world to provide a way to search the institutions’ collections of scholarly papers, according to university officials.
“A pilot test of the project is just getting under way. If all goes as planned, the search feature could appear on Google in a few months, said MacKenzie Smith, associate director of technology for MIT’s libraries. She said the search would probably be an option on Google’s advanced-search page.”
One of the most troubling issues that universities face these days is how to manage the crushing expense of subscriptions to scholarly journals (or the databases that house past issues of those journals). This effort by Google may turn out to be one of several steps — others include MIT’s DSpace and the Public Library of Science –that make scholarly research more widely available, and at a more affordable cost.
Jeffrey R. Young. Google Teams Up With 17 Colleges to Test Searches of Scholarly Materials. The Chronicle of Higher Education. April 9, 2004.
Patrick Brown. For Cracking the Spine of the Science Cartel. Wired. April 2004. (This article was written to commemorate the Public Library of Science winning the Science category of the 2004 Rave Awards.)
File Sharing Doesn’t Hurt CD Sales
According to a News.com story, researchers at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina tracked music downloads for more than four months in 2002, matching data on file transfers with actual market performance of the songs and albums being downloaded. The conclusion? "Even high levels of file-swapping seemed to translate into an effect on album sales that was "statistically indistinguishable from zero," they wrote.
"We find that file sharing has only had a limited effect on record sales," wrote the study’s authors wrote. "While downloads occur on a vast scale, most users are likely individuals who would not have bought the album even in the absence of file sharing."
John Borland. Music Sharing Doesn’t Kill CD Sales, Study Says. News.com. March 29, 2004.
Felix Oberholzer and Koleman Strumpf. The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales: An Empirical Analysis. (.pdf).
COPYCENSE 