The Register has an interesting survey concerning the use of p2p file sharing (the sample, though, is quite small, 773 people, no word on how they were selected.)

A fascinating survey of music consumption conducted for British Music Rights has good and bad news for the beleaguered music business.

Jordan Crandall posted a very interesting essay to nettime, focussing on the subjectivity of a culture of "assemblage", or as I would call it, a culture of remixing. The most interesting parts are bolded by me.

CNET June 29, 2008

Harvard Business Review : Should You Invest in the Long Tail?

This is already a year old, but it's always good to have this reference at hand. Therefore it's noted here.

NBC/Universal general counsel Rick Cotton suggests that society wastes entirely too much money policing crimes like burglary, fraud, and bank-robbing when it should be doing something about piracy instead.

Ars Technica has an article titled "Sandvine: close to half of all bandwidth sucked up by P2P" where they write:

Source: NYT: What’s Obscene? Google Could Have an Answer

Malcolm Gladwell wrote an interesting article in the New Yorker on Nathan Myhrvold's company "Intellectual Ventures" which tries to come up with a method of the process of scientific discovery. The trick is that you can do it. That scientific discovery is a lot about looking at available information in a new way, relating fields to one another that are usually not considered together.

This phenomenon of simultaneous discovery—what science historians call “multiples”—turns out to be extremely common. One of the first comprehensive lists of multiples was put together by William Ogburn and Dorothy Thomas, in 1922, and they found a hundred and forty-eight major scientific discoveries that fit the multiple pattern. Newton and Leibniz both discovered calculus. Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace both discovered evolution. Three mathematicians “invented” decimal fractions. Oxygen was discovered by Joseph Priestley, in Wiltshire, in 1774, and by Carl Wilhelm Scheele, in Uppsala, a year earlier. Color photography was invented at the same time by Charles Cros and by Louis Ducos du Hauron, in France. Logarithms were invented by John Napier and Henry Briggs in Britain, and by Joost Bürgi in Switzerland.

And he continues:

For Ogburn and Thomas, the sheer number of multiples could mean only one thing: scientific discoveries must, in some sense, be inevitable. They must be in the air, products of the intellectual climate of a specific time and place.

Good ideas are out there for anyone with the wit and the will to find them.

Solove, Daniel J., "'I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy" . San Diego Law Review, Vol. 44, p. 745, 2007 Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=998565

I. INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................. 745
II. THE “NOTHING TO HIDE” ARGUMENT ................................................................ 748
III. CONCEPTUALIZING PRIVACY .............................................................................. 754
A. A Pluralistic Conception of Privacy ........................................................ 754
B. The Social Value of Privacy..................................................................... 760
IV. THE PROBLEM WITH THE “NOTHING TO HIDE” ARGUMENT ................................. 764
A. Understanding the Many Dimensions of Privacy..................................... 764
B. Understanding Structural Problems ........................................................ 768
V. CONCLUSION ..................................................................................................... 772

And here is the conclusion

It really seems that it now becomes politically acceptable, at least in Europe, to see p2p file sharing not only as socially acceptable (in order to protect privacy and freedom of speech) but even as beneficial.

This Sunday, the Swedish Left Party voted in favor of a motion calling for the legalization of sharing copyrighted files for personal use. The party, which currently holds 22 seats in the Swedish parliament, sees piracy as something positive, much like public libraries.