Manchester is 'PIRATE CAPITAL of the UK'

Manchester is Britain's biggest cove of pirate downloaders, claims a Shoreditch-based music upstart. Mancunians have a particular craving for illegal copies of smirking indie crooner Ed Sheeran's albums and singles, we're told. The northern city is the piracy capital of the UK, according to a new study by London-headquartered …

[Efros]

I wonder how many mp3's are downloaded from youtube using the plethora of websites that will quite happily convert them for you.

[A J Stiles]

Website?

Who needs a website to convert YouTube vids? It's easy enough to do with a Perl or Python script and ffmpeg. Add a few lines of Bash scripting, and you can even burn your own CD. If anyone still uses those things anymore .....

[HMB]

Progress

I love Manchester (I really do, thinking of moving up there) and if the little rascals are downloading movies and music instead of nicking my car, I call that progress!

Lovely city.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Progress

Obligatory: You wouldn't download a car!

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: You wouldn't download a car!

I have, multiple times. It's called Digital Content. It can also be produced free (as in beer, round on me?) and distributed at almost zero cost. Many can do this legally through crowd funded or opensource (free as in beer again) services.

Basically the phrase "you wouldn't download a car!" is redundant on so many levels.

[TRT]

Re: You wouldn't download a car!

No. You download a new key for one.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: You wouldn't download a car!

I'd download a car...

I've always found those ads at the start of an official DVD odd, I mean I bought it already, why are you telling me?

To paraphrase,

"I'm about to sit down and watch a Hostel at 1pm in my pants while drinking beer, don't assume you know what I'd do given the opportunity. "

[nichobe]

Re: Progress

you could download a 3d printer blueprint of a car then reproduce it....

[TeeCee]

Most downloaded charts.

So the important information here is that the majority of illegal downloaders have appallingly bad taste.

[Law]

Re: Most downloaded charts.

"the majority of illegal downloaders have appallingly bad taste"

Nah, just the ones stupid enough to still use bitorrent to do it. :)

[Dave 126]

Re: Most downloaded charts.

If the charts were anything to go by, it would seem legitimate music buyers have pretty poor taste, too.

[FartingHippo]

Stupid Canal

Until they built the ship canal, pirates were almost unheard of in Manchester. A bad decision if ever I saw one.

[TRT]

Re: Stupid Canal

Ack. Two days early. Should have been released on 19th Spetember.

[NogginTheNog]

Re: Stupid Canal

You're having a laugh! The Manchester Ship Canal was an amazing feat of engineering, two fingers to those scallies down the road in Liverpool, and helped to make Manchester the great port and centre of global trade it became - 60km from the sea!

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Stupid Canal

.....And you wonder why Scousers hate the Mancunians. It goes way back before a football was kicked on Merseyside.

The Manchester mills made a fortune making cloth, the railway and canal owners made a fortune in the transportation, and Liverpool thrived on the export of cloth and the import of raw materials...

When they built the ship canal, it put a lot of people into financial difficulty. This was back in the days before there was social security, dock workers went down to the docks each day, and waited in the pens for a ship to dock and then selected to unload the ships. As a lot of the ships were sailing past the docks there was less and less work for the dockers. no ships, no money, no food....

You could go on about progress, but it was no quicker as ships had too que up to use the canal. it did not cost the shipping companies any less to load unload in Manchester, it was all about making Manchester richer and taking away from Liverpool.

My own family (fathers mothers side) had a very prosperous shipping company from the mid 1700's, running routes between the West Indies, East Africa & Liverpool (you can guess what) but by the end of the century, soon after the opening of the Manchester ship canal, a lot of dirty tricks were pulled on shipping companies based in Liverpool, by exposing the details of past trading and a lot of them were essentially put out of business, our family managed until early in the 1900's and through a series of bad decisions trying to save the company ended what the ship canal started. my great grandmother ended up homeless after her husband killed himself.....

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Stupid Canal - aint Karma a bitch?

"running routes between the West Indies, East Africa & Liverpool (you can guess what) " Slave traders then?

"my great grandmother ended up homeless after her husband killed himself." what goes around comes around...

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: Stupid Canal - aint Karma a bitch?

"my great grandmother ended up homeless after her husband killed himself." what goes around comes around...

Although I see where your coming from, I think you missed out on some date calculations. His great grandmother and her husband were around about 200 years after the slave trade ended, so it was hardly their fault.

[Charlie Clark]

Re: Stupid Canal

The Manchester Ship Canal was an amazing feat of engineering...

Well, yes but also almost slave labour to build it and, like most canals, it was pretty much obsolete by the time it was finished in 1894. It's major role has been as part of the city's flood defences, helping to keep the lowest lying places like "Little Ireland" (around Oxfod Road station) from flooding like they regularly did. The scousers' fate was largely sealed by the decline in the slave trade, especially after the loss of the colonies. Manchester's prosperity, which briefly in the middle of the century made it richer than London (though how you define richer is a bit difficult) was based on the services it provided to the industries in and around it. Hence, the importance of the Free Trade movement. Obviously, not having a city charter until late also favoured businesses who didn't want to worry about things like working conditions.

Still, nothing wrong in having a go at the scousers! ;-)

[Arrrggghh-otron]

Thats not where I live...

Are they associating the downloads by point of presence?

I live several hundred miles from where my ISP is located. Geolocation by IP show my ISPs city... (unless I'm VPN'd to somewhere else on the planet)

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeh half-arsed geoIP bollocks...

...when I was with Zen it always showed me as being in Rochdale.

[Dave 126]

Re: Yeh half-arsed geoIP bollocks...

And I always get internet ads promoting single ladies in Basingstoke. Whilst I'm sure the good women of Basingstoke are as charming as those in the next town, their beauty has never reached the popular imagination in the same way as their Swedish or Brazilian counterparts.

[Anonymous Coward]

43 Million?

Thats not far off one download per household in the UK.

and when thats only on BitTorrent and includes no data for newsgroups or anyother network you must assume everyone everywhere is downloading music illegally.

Including the old and frail, infants and those in prison.

or the data is trumped up rubbish and things aren't that bad.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: 43 Million?

It's all meaningless figures if used in that way. 43 million requests could come from one PC in theory. You could download the same song over 100 million times. Should you get punished per time then? It's all quite complicated.

[Crisp]

So the general gist of the article is:

If you want free music, BitTorrent is totally the way to go.

[Anonymous Coward]

GeoIP rubbish

Yeah, basing location on ISP address is way dodgy - apparently I'm currently in NOORD-HOLLAND, HAARLEM, NETHERLANDS, but I'm sure that's the Norfolk countryside I can see out of the window - but then I am using Mullvad anon VPN...

[Pat 11]

monetising

They should flood BT with genuine mp3's containing brief ads in the middle. And name them things like Ed_-_Sheeran_-_Dull_-_Ballad_-_Clean_copy_noads.MP3

[Mark McC]

I'd a feeling it would be Manchester.

Every time I use IE or some other browser without ad-blocking at home, those adverts that try to target me with "hot local MILFs" always seem to think I'm in Manchester. I'm not. I've never been to Manchester. I don't even live in England.

I'm with a rather large and much-maligned ISP and unless I'm a special case I imagine a pretty big chunk of their addresses are 'located' in Manchester. Guessing location based on the ISP's IP block is a lousy way to gather data.

[Graham Marsden]

"For the first time...

"...we have evidence that blocking Pirate Bay had little effect on BitTorrent downloading"

And we've also found that the Pope is a Catholic...!

[DaeDaLuS_015]

Optional

I think it's more amusing that it's all such terrible music!

Makes sense i guess, not worth paying for.

[David Neil]

Not sure I trust their stats

Looking at the raw data they have very small mining villages in Ayrshire, Scotland featuring, but none for some larger towns.

[Wang N Staines]

Farking Landaner

Sarf is gud norf is bard, init?

[SpaMster]

All this shows is that a lot of ISP's host their proxy's in manchester...

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly, shoreditch tools

[ACx]

Yet still these "artists" and record corps make decent money.

[Ross K]

Back in my day...

....we pirated decent music. It took too long to download an album on 56k so you went to see the man with the folder of CDRs in the Barras

Kids nowadays eh? Don't know they were born etc. Although their choice of music is pretty shit:

Ed Sheerin?

Rihanna?

Rizzle Kicks? <- Sounds like a brand of throat lozenges...

[John H Woods]

Re: Back in my day...

"Rizzle Kicks? <- Sounds like a brand of throat lozenges..."

You clearly aren't "Down with the Trumpets" as the kids like to say. Although, neither am I - my daughter thinks I'm "more in the proximity of the harpsichord"

Can I just say that I'm currently obsessed with Caro Emerald? Thanks.

[Robert Ramsay]

I'm wondering if their record companies are setting up private torrent sites and then downloading from them millions of times to get ****ing "Lego House" back in the charts...

[Anonymous Coward]

Certainly not beyond their moral range. Or even just to pump the piracy figures up. Rhianna and thingy just got a free mention on BBC news, so there's free advertising too.

[Ross K]

If I ran LEGO I'd sue the ginger twat for bringing the company into disrepute.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not solely "illegal" downloads

The musicmetric report doesn't just include illegal downloads. The second most downloaded album globally in their report is one that was available legally for free, with almost twice as many downloads as Ed Sheeran managed in fact.

I find it curious that all of the major media sites are failing to mention this, instead focusing on the usual piracy/BPI circlejerk.

http://www.musicweek.com/news/read/musicmetric-s-global-file-sharing-data-in-full/051817

[Tony Green]

Scousers only at number FOUR???

Amazing!

[Charlie Clark]

Re: Scousers only at number FOUR???

Internet requires some degree of literacy, lar!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's all good

Just fine them 25K Euro per title and all will be fine. Those who can't pay go to prison. That should be how pirates are punished.

[Furbian]

Re: It's all good

Britain's prison population is second only to Turkey's, so this is one way to take the Turkish crown from them. Not forgetting that they are fighting a Kurd insurgency, and insurgencies, like the one that used be over 'ere (Northern Ireland), tend to result in a lot of extra people in jail.

The punishment may not quite fit the 'crime'. You might want to seize dual tape decks while you're at it, a copy is a copy, no?

Oh and you'll need some extra legislation to get those pesky teenagers into jail too, they surely won't have '25k euros' lying around.

etc. etc.

[Elron]

Re: It's all good

WTF are you talking about?? Britain actually has a comparatively small prison population, and certainly nothing like the USA, which has far and away the largest comparative prison population. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarceration_rate)

Get your facts straight before you spout garbage next time!

[mickey mouse the fith]

Who the fuck uses bittorrent anymore?, its throttled to buggery on bt`s home broadband and its too easy to have your ip logged by some trolling solicitor putting up a honeypot file. Newsgroups,direct downloads or youtube ripping is the way to go these days.

And my ip puts me a full 200 miles from where i actually reside, so this little study is bollocks as well.

[David Gosnell]

Free advertising

This has all been fantastic free advertising for Ed Sheeran, as if he isn't attracting enough interest already with the forthcoming Hobbit movie.

[Harvey Trowell]

Take that, Penzance.

In yaaaaaaaaar face.

[Keep Refrigerated]

Monetise

"The challenge for copyright holders is to find ways to monetise music files torrented online. While the file sharing network is largely ignored as a proactive channel, little progress can be made on figuring out how this might be possible."

Umm... so slap some ads on the front (middle if TV/Movie) and back of the recording, and release. Can I haz consultancy fee now?

[Fuzz]

population

The population of Manchester is around 500000 but that doesn't take into account the Students or people who live in the Manchester area (Salford, Stockport, Trafford)

The total population of Greater Manchester is over 2 million. Without seeing some raw figures for the study I would guess this will somewhat skew the figures.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: population

Yep, and London's population is much much more than that - just shows how much bollocks this survey contains.

Why do surveys always seem to be done by people without logical and numerical capability i.e. no common sense.