Scriban v. Valenti

Cory Doctorow 2:01 pm Wed Apr 24, 2002

George Scriban is one of my heroes. After reading Jack Valenti's latest filetraders-are-commies-chewing-through-the-body-politic rant, George has decided to turn his keep analytic corpus to letting the air out of Valenti's rhetorical tires (George is the freelance troublemaker who demonstrated that the RIAA's sales-figures-in-decline-because-of-file-sharing hysteria was as unfounded as we suspected, and yes, folks, he still needs a gig!).

So check this out, as George begins his one-man crusade to tear apart Black Jack Valenti's prevarication:

according to the report, the "350,000 downloads" number was ginned out of a weeklong sample of IRC file-trading activity. the IRC profile was subsequently applied against "self-reporting" P2P networks (like Napster or Gnutella) activity (ie, given x nodes and y files, z files can be assumed to have been traded). the resulting numbers were smoothed out with media reports for the less transparent networks (like Aimster). I admit that this is about as thorough as you can get. it's also probably wildly inaccurate.

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