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An organization in my country tried to lobby for an ISP-level block on TPB. Then they got what was coming... (and the block wasn't implemented).

Now they're delivering thousands of IPs of file sharers, when it's illegal to record that data (IP + time) without an authorization from out national data protection commission. I hope they crash and burn.

He's "crying" about them stealing a domain he legally paid for.

I did read your post.

You can choose not to work with them, but its more convenient or profitable for you to throw the rest of us under the bus and contribute to the success of thugs intent on undermining civil society, stealing and bullying.

Sorry, but you are not an "innocent bystander", you are a willing collaborator. It should be our goal to make sure the sociopaths such as yourself suffer enough that you stop working with them.

I am all for property rights, real and intellectual. The Doctrine of Reciprocal Abuse is not a defense of stealing, its about causing as much economic hard to the RIAA/MPAA/* and their allies (you) as possible in order to persuade them to change their behavior.

See the latest link on slashdot?
http://www.slyck.com/story2129_MPAA_Dismisses_COICA_Free_Speech_Concerns

Go fuck yourself. I hope you go bankrupt.

The charges and the character assasination were ALL bullshit.

No they weren't. By your own words you were a drug addict who lost control of themselves and used tannerite on at least one piece of property that you did not own. Not just "took a plea" you made actual statements about yourself. You admitted to the charges and assasinated your own character. This doesn't sound like an innocently targeted man at all, can you refute any of this? I am not intentionally being derisive; rather I hope you would respond with a statement to exonerate you of this all, be it hearsay or otherwise.

See also this. Did you not consent to be interviewed? You even posted a review of the book this excerpt is from on slashdot!

and what about this? Of course the statements that your anger and gun issues were escalating is pure hearsay; who knows what kind of person you are? But you really glossed over the use of tannerite didn't you? That's WAY more serious than you made it sound. Another article here

Sadly, I agree with everything you say about our overly intrusive gov't and the erosion of out rights, so it's unfortunate that your case doesn't back up those positions. By attempting to be an example of a problem, you are supporting their cause. Please stop.

More here and here. You'll want to read the last couple of comments on this one, bruce. The posters sound like old friends of yours that want to get back into contact with you. This guy too.

Is it just me, or are there a whole bunch of posters appearing recently who vehemently take up an anti-piracy point of view?

My point of view.

FINANCIAL ARGUMENTS

1. THERE ARE NO REAL COSTS AND NO ONE IS DEPRIVED. Software is inherently different from physical products. It costs nothing to *reproduce*, and therefore imposes no direct costs on manufacturers, nor any significant cost to the planet. This point is essential. If you steal bread in order to eat, someone else is deprived of the bread. If you steal software, no one is deprived of that software.

2. THERE ARE LIMITED VIRTUAL COSTS. The claimed costs of piracy are virtual, not real. The software industry claims it loses X amount of sales to piracy. This is virtual in that we have to assume people will buy the software they pirate. But the point of TFA is that people don't want to pay for the software they pirate. If this is the case, then not only are there no real costs, there are no predicted costs. This may or may not hold true across different categories of software (i.e. game vs. productivity software), but the assumption that every pirate is a lost sale is clearly an inadequate idea.

3. THERE ARE LIMITED COSTS TO THE CONSUMER. Some make the claim that pirates raise the cost of software. Because software is a virtual product, it contains little or no real-world costs. It is not something that reliably decreases in cost in mass production, or a drop in natural resources. There is little reason to assume that the cost of Windows 7 would decrease if everyone who ran it owned a genuine copy. It is more reasonable to assume Microsoft would absorb the additional revenue.

4. NO NORTH AMERICAN SOFTWARE COMPANY HAS BEEN BANKRUPTED BY PIRACY. 2D Boy, maker of the World of Goo video game, claimed that 90% (really 82%) of its users were pirates. Soon its parent company Brighter Minds filed Chapter 11. Was it due to piracy? Not likely.

Despite the rather high piracy rate estimate, 2D Boy was content with the situation. In a article featured in Gamasutra, 2D Boy explained a recent analysis of DRM didn't necessarily mean better sales; instead, they found that such protection only netted 1 additional sale per 1,000 thwarted piracy attempts.

"This supports our intuitive assessment that people who pirate our game aren’t people who would have purchased it had they not been able to get it without paying."

With no DRM, "World of Goo" has been easily copied and distributed throughout the PC gaming world. But did it contribute to Brighter Minds Media's decision to declare chapter 11?

It doesn't appear so. According to Brighter Minds Media's bankruptcy affidavit in PACER, there are a variety of reasons for this setback: "growing level of indebtedness" and a soggy world economy. (link)

MORAL ARGUMENTS

Many people will say that what is at issue here is not the theft of something material, or the loss of real income, but an insult to the moral right to the products of one's work.

4. THE MORAL RIGHT OF VIRTUAL PRODUCT PRODUCERS IS ITSELF POLITICAL. This moral right to products of the imagination is not written into the laws of nature. It is a law created by people, originally conceived to be of benefit to society by safeguarding the incomes of inventors of new products and ideas. Today intellectual property rights law is the product of the intervention of large corporations, and are to their benefit. The benefit to the average person or to culture generally is questionable. Therefore the basis to this moral right is itself questionable.

5. SOFTWARE IS A FORM OF POWER WITH POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS. Software introduces novel forms of power into the world, which are employed by the end user. Software is therefore not merely technical or financial in nature, but also political because those who have access to software and its effects.

*sigh*, the persistence of belief in this dated misinformation is more than annoying.

Please see http://www.slyck.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=36623

Easily...just like you'd get any other file off usenet for free...provided you have access to a good usenet server.

People have been trading all sorts of files on usenet long before there were any P2P applications...way before they were even thought of.

There is also IRC you can look at too....

Get a good news client...do a little googling...and you'll find out. Take a look at Slyck for a start...look into nzb's and the like, they make downloading off usenet a snap.

But when traffic is being routed through my home system - when I am the "upstream provider" - there are questions I need answered: 1 What is my legal exposure? I am betting I do not have protection as a common carrier.

You are betting correctly, because no ISP has common carrier status. This is a common myth that is unfortunately widely propagated on Slashdot. Due to the safe harbor provision of of the DMCA and some other laws, ISPs do enjoy some similar protections (see, for example here and here for more details).

As for the remainder of the questions, they are valid ones and I'm not certain of the answers. Personally, I'd be willing to chance any potential exposure (which I believe would be limited but I am not certain of that), but YMMV.

This is why

The CAN-SPAM Act is directed at the commercial entities that actually create the message, not the service providers who happen to be the medium.

as the actual medium as it's put is already constitutionally protected from being liable. So although ISP's are not common carriers in the US, the law is virtually identical for the considerations discussed within the article.

http://www.slyck.com/story1771_The_Pirate_Bay_Sucessfully_Appeals_Italian_Block

The whole concept of DRM is a joke, invented b/c lawmakers were unwilling or unable to draft legislation that properly dealt with online filesharing and piracy.

I vote unable - because enforcement is impossible. Even the RIAA's highly publicized campaign of sueage currently near the 40,000 suit market is just a drop in the bucket of well over 10million simultaneous users -- only 0.4% at best.

Of course I don't believe it is the politicians fault, its really the fault of the entertainment business for (a) being run by lawyers (the old every problem looks like a nail when all you have is a hammer situation) and (b) not accepting the obvious and ignoring new business models.

IIRC, ISPs have never had common carrier status.

No, but they should lose their DMCA safe harbor status if they start censoring content.

IIRC, ISPs have never had common carrier status.

To which I would point out that The Pirate Bay is also setting records.

Which, you would think, would tend to show not only that the MPAA's anti-piracy tactics are working, but that there isn't really a correlation (positive or negative) between piracy and MPAA profits.

The only time Slyck mentioned eMule was when he questioned the reasoning of Sourceforge in awarding eMule as the "Best New Project" of 2007. He didn't mention eMule at the title of the article of course.

Not that a juggernaut like eMule needs Slyck,

Also, Slyck has a Guide to eDonkey2000 and the eMule is the first client on its list of clients.

Not that anybody's going to read this comment, but I just had to reply because I don't think Slyck has an anti-eMule bias like you seem to imply. eMule just doesn't make the news because it's overshadowed.

The only time Slyck mentioned eMule was when he questioned the reasoning of Sourceforge in awarding eMule as the "Best New Project" of 2007. He didn't mention eMule at the title of the article of course.

Not that a juggernaut like eMule needs Slyck,

Also, Slyck has a Guide to eDonkey2000 and the eMule is the first client on its list of clients.

Not that anybody's going to read this comment, but I just had to reply because I don't think Slyck has an anti-eMule bias like you seem to imply. eMule just doesn't make the news because it's overshadowed.

The only time Slyck mentioned eMule was when he questioned the reasoning of Sourceforge in awarding eMule as the "Best New Project" of 2007. He didn't mention eMule at the title of the article of course.

Not that a juggernaut like eMule needs Slyck,

Also, Slyck has a Guide to eDonkey2000 and the eMule is the first client on its list of clients.

Not that anybody's going to read this comment, but I just had to reply because I don't think Slyck has an anti-eMule bias like you seem to imply. eMule just doesn't make the news because it's overshadowed.

Yes, this was discussed in an earlier Slashdot story, " RIAA Argues That MP3s From CDs Are Unauthorized", and in a bunch of other places:

* Boing Boing p2pnet reddit Heise Online (German) Truemors BlogRunner/Digital Rights Hugh Casey IDG (Polish) Geek News Central CE Pro Gizmodo TechDirt Read/Write Web Thomas Hawk's Digital Connection TDPRI WhatReallyHappened.com Slyck Root.cz (Czech) Craigslist Forums Hard OCP Wired.com Uneasy Silence Overclock.net Wake World SpaceBattles.com Hydrogen Audio BrickFilms.com Hockey Zombie iLounge Zune Scene AllmanBrothersBand.com Golem (German) PC Magazin (German) Tweakers (Dutch) Mackauf (German) Wake Space Kino-eye.com Digital Copyright Canada Northwest Progressive Institute Louisville Music News Frant

I understand the reasoning behind putting it in volatile, but why not enable volatile by default during installation?

----- Original Message -----
From: J*
To: B*****; J****
Sent: Wed Jun 06 16:22:23 2007
Subject: p2p summit

I'm speaking at a p2p summit next week. Usually we just blow smoke and brag about our companies for an hour or so...but this time we have a different format. They want me to put together a presentation with slides and all...

You think you can help me with some of these questions?

Estimated number of decoys we send out every day?
Estimated number of spoofs we sent out every day?
Estimated number of projects we have running at any one time?

Thanks!

This has been pointed out here before. Neither Comcast nor any other ISP has common carrier status.

http://www.slyck.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=36623 this describes that no or almost no ISP's have Common Carrier Status.

So basically BitTorrent bought uTorrent and is staying closed source (as uTorrent is now). Q: How will this impact the BitTorrent open source development community as a whole? A: There will be no impact to the BitTorrent open source development community. We are committed to maintaining the preeminent reference implementation of BitTorrent under an open source license. Although the latest documentations won't be published for the world to see, an aspiring BitTorrent developer or a hardened coder can still obtain the specifications on the latest protocol extensions by obtaining a SDK license.

slyck has a better article

My Zune works fine on 64 bit Vista.

Kneht is obviously using some M$ definition of "works". The rest of us don't see it that way.

The new M$ party line is that Vista is "perfect" and anyone complaining is a malicious liar. Looks like a temper tantrum to me. M$ is dying.

As we all know, the quality of blank DVD media varies by brand, manufacuring plant, etc. Note that some brands (e.g. Maxell) sell DVDs from different manufacturers (e.g. Mitsubishi Chemical, Taiyo Yuden). Therefore, some Maxell DVD models are very good (manufacured by a good factory) while other Maxells are very poor (cheaply manufactured).

The current "standard" for long-term storage seems to be DVDs manufactured by Taiyo Yuden, which is sold under various brands (including "Taiyo Yuden" brand). A hundred Taiyo Yuden DVD-R single-layer blanks cost about $33 (plus shipping) at Newegg.

Also, any archives should use parity data to recover from data that has gone bad. Hopefully, the "backup to DVD" software should include parity data creation. If not, use something like PAR2 files to ensure you can recover from minor data loss.

The CD Freaks Blank Media forum is a good place to read about how to identify and buy good quality blank DVDs. If you don't understand the concept of parity files, Slyck.com has a good explanation of PAR/PAR2.

What the hell is that snake with the raised eyebrows doing in the background? And why is Captain Copyright raising his eyebrows back at the snake?

Because BitTorrent has also partnered with CacheLogic which provides Internet Caching solutions. You pay your subscriptions to legally access the content and you can now use BitTorrent not only to download from your peers but from strategically placed caches.

This substantially reduces the cost on a content provider that would otherwise need to provision expensive hardware and bandwidth to deliver content via FTP/HTTP. Now they can use the resources of the downloaders and use CacheLogic's infrastructure to provide service even better than the one current BitTorrent networks have and perhaps even better than they could possibly afford to provide by using FTP-like central servers.

Users are motivated to pay BitTorrent and content providers, and not download for free, simply because BitTorrent combined with in-network caching gives a better service than plain BitTorrent. Users that don't pay cannot access Cachelogic's infrastructure. If their pricing is reasonable, I can see this scheme taking off rapidly. I know i would pay 5-10$ to download a movie i want to see now in a couple of hours or less, instead of waiting 2-3 days, while using all my uplink and slowing down my browsing speeds. From the article: "In a joint announcement made today by CacheLogic and BitTorrent, a global network of cache servers has been organized under the name "VelociX". VelociX is the network protocol that governs the actions of a theoretical global community of cache servers. With potentially thousands of networked cache servers at the disposal of the end user, network costs are cut and download speeds are increased significantly.

For example, let's take a look at a CDP enabled client on the prowl for a specific 4.5 gig file. The CDP looks for the closest geographical area for a VelociX swarm, in addition to conventional peers. The VelociX swarm provides the bulk of the file sought after, greatly reducing the reliance on peers. This equates to greatly accelerated download speeds, and since this takes place largely on dedicated servers and not peers, the ISPs costs are reduced. ...

Unless you plan on downloading authorized content, the network probably isn't for you. In the CacheLogic press release, VelociX will allow "legal content (infringing content is not accelerated) to be inexpensively delivered in minutes instead of hours." Content that is authorized to function on the VelociX network must be manually published via specific hash codes to a central data base."

A Danish court recently ruled against a Danish ISP and ordered it to block all access to the site Allofmp3.com. According to the ruling, the ISP is willingly infringing copyright if it's customers use AllofMP3 to download music.

The verdict could have very strong implications for the future. It clearly states that an ISP can be held liable for temporarily (milliseconds) storing infringing data on their routers. This means that ISPs can be forced to block websites, if the court decides that these sites are mainly used to spread "illegal" content.

Read more here and here...

AllOfMP3 has been censored at the DNS level by the Danish ISP, Tele2/Get2net, following a court ruling. They've appealed the ruling and expect the censorship to be canceled, but who knows...
See more at Google News.
Direct links to first few hits: 1, 2, 3.

Coincidentally, one of my colleagues worked for the Danish police making the pedo-filter working out which IP addresses to block, delivering those to all danish ISPs who have to block these by law. I asked her about pirates, and her comment was "why should the police care?".

what is needed, is more manpower available to track, prosecute and breakup such nets.

Perhaps if the police spent less time investigating fraudulent copyright infringement claims and confiscating a political party's servers they would have more time to chase real criminals. Or was it only in Sweden that the police ignore the criminals and try to hunt down political activists instead?

When bittorrent 4.2 was released, there was already mention of this, and I thought ya right the isps will help with torrents, but supposedly isp caching (even copyright material) is allowed under the dmca.

http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=1231

http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode17/u sc_sec_17_00000512----000-.html

" If a file shows up on the network frequently, the cache stores that file so that its seeded in the network rather than by peers. ISPs appreciate this because their access networks are terribly congested with P2P traffic. Caches are legal and covered explicitly in the DMCA"

5. On September 1, 2006 the changes to the Russian copyright legislation will come into force. Since January 2006 the site has been making direct agreements with rightholders and authors at the same time increasing the price of the music compositions and transferring the royalties directly to the artists and record companies. The aim of AllofMP3.com is to agree with all rightholders on the prices and royalties amounts by September 1, 2006.

If I understand this correctly, they will slowly adjust their prices/policy towards complying with the 1 september ruling. Time will tell if allofmp3 will still be as profitable a place to download music by that time. I guess it might get more expensive (will offer drm'd music?), but still a better alternative than itunes, as the price competition within russia will be pretty tough.

from digg:

RIAA Shifts Lawsuit Strategy

Tatter submitted by Tatter 23 hours 1 minute ago (via http://www.slyck.com/news.php?...)

The old strategy of suing 800 people at once is gone. Instead the RIAA is looking to be more localized, focused and personal with its new strategy. More...

Hell, your chances of getting sued in any one year are http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=769
1 in 1840. Damn this was initially supposed to be a counter argument but 200K/1840 is $108.

Nevermind :)

Oh - and of course the ability to play Halo 2 on your PC - because as we all know, thanks to Vista bringing clarity to my world i'm not able to play it on Windows XP - I have to own Vista to play it.

The original MS/Bungie press release seems a little hard to find these days - no small wonder given the complete load of marketing bullshit which padded it out, living precious little room for actual technical explanations of why this would be the case, but this article sums it up fairly well with a good example quote from the release:

http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=1089

I feel sorry for Bungie because i'm sure they want to get this game out to as many PC owners as possible.. but the Microsoft-marketroids have clearly put their foot in and made them make it a Vista exclusive.

What a load of BS. Of course I won't be buying Vista and therefore will have to forfeit playing Halo 2. Woe is me.

i'm too paranoid to use stuff like this for backups.. sure 25 gigs is nice but whats the use if i just burn everything in 35 copies on the disc incase one part becomes unreadable?

as media starts to hold more, i just start creating more copies of the same backup on the disc. bluray/hdvd scares me because if it gets scratched you lose so much more than if a cd gets scratched

For those that don't know, PAR2 files are parity files that can efficiently reconstruct missing or damaged blocks in your archive. If you have more PAR2 recovery blocks than damaged blocks, then you can completely reconstruct all of the damaged files in your archive. The best newbie explanation I've seen is the "PAR & PAR2 files" section from Slyck's Guide To The Newsgroups.

If I'm backing up to a data DVD-R (capacity 4,706,074,624 bytes), I'll leave around 4GB of space for the actual data and fill the rest (to the brim) with the PAR2 files that I created for that data. I name the PAR2 files starting with the letter 'z' so that they get burned on the outer edge of the DVD. When creating the PAR2 files, I choose a block size that is a multiple of 2048 bytes because that is the block size of a DVD sector.

Some easy-to-use tools to create PAR2 files:

• Windows: QuickPar (freeware)
• OS X: MacPar deLuxe (shareware, $15)
• Linux/OS Independent (GTK): GPar2

Some DVD data recovery software (to get every readable block off a damaged disc):

• Windows: IsoBuster (recovery functions are free)
• Linux/OS X (command line): dd_rescue

Thanks, WuphonsReach.

read: slyck.com

1.) Go to a store and watch the movie/listen to the CD."
What about movies that are currently in the theatre and I want to know if it's worth paying the 25+ bucks to see it on the big screen (I always go with my roomate and girlfriend). I see movies all the time at movie theaters, or more aptly, theatre.

"2.) Go to a friend's house and do the same thing."
Ummm no. I have the amenities want at my house. Nor do I have many friends, as I'm a recent implant of Austin.

"3.) Double-click a stream on the internet. Get a sample from iTunes, for example."
30 secs in the middle of the song, chosen out of the best 30 secs mind you, does not a good representation make. Especially for any song over 2 minutes. I have a favorite band, they have music on iTunes. I listened to the previews, they were good so I decided to buy the CD. The CD sucked, and I couldn't get my money back.

"4.) Listen to the radio (yes, SOME channel out there plays what you like)."
Broadcast Radio does not play the songs I like. Now if your talking internet radio it normally takes (even the big guns in my genre) 4-6 weeks for them to get it in the stream, and I can only listen to internet radio streams a) when I'm online, b) when I'm not doing something else online, c) when I feel like it. Kinda hard to stream an mp3 stream to my car (I know I could pay upwards of $60+/month for a highspeed cell connection, but up yours if you expect me to do that.

"5.) Rent the item before buying it."
Tell me a place where you can rent a PC video game, an obscure industrial audio CD, or even a buy either one of them and return for my money back when I don't like it, I'll love you forever.

"With all those options available, pirating seems less and less of a legitimate option."
Actually it is looking like a more viable option.

"Who's pirating? A lot of people. What are they pirating? A lot of stuff."
Say the numbers on Slyck are correct and we'll add in another 10 million on BitTorrent/Other networks. This gives us 17.5 million people pirating. 17.5 million is alot. But that is what 5% of the total population of the US. The numbers, even at 100 million pirates, are satistically nil when dealing with the populations of the planet (potential 6.5 billion). Sure that's alot of people... you're right.

"Just because a lot of people do it doesn't make it legal, moral or right.
If a majority do it and put thier will to their representatives it _CAN_ be legal, morality is based on ethics which changes over time, and there is no such thing as "right".


As for the story, I think that TPB needs to get servers going BACK IN .SE, else they (MPAA, RIAA, White House, WIPO) will consider it a win.

-jijin

http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=1196

If a company is losing lots of money to piracy, that means most of the time that they're charging too much - high school economics has told me more than enough to figure out that charging less means more sales, and there's a point where your profit per sale and number of sales are optimal. Yes, there are always going to be pirates just looking to get out of paying, and you can't do much about it, but when you've overcharged to the point of making legitimate users steal your software, your business model is shot.

Google trends has given us some insight into piracy as well, but that doesn't mean they encourage it. Rather than companies suing richer companies because they provide information that, statistically speaking, people want, they should use that information to their advantage and change their business model accordingly.

http://slyck.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=22181
I have not used Bearshare for years.
it's just another gnutella clients.
Only with spyware the edonkey/emule network is better anyway and its open source.

I agree, not including the year with slashdot stories/comments is stupid.

"Why do people keep repeating this absurd claim?"

Because it seems like a good argument to most people.

I talk to people all the time (do my own computer tech house-call operation) who have no idea that websites also pay for bandwidth.

Net neutrality is not a "big issue", and really won't be until people start having to wait for thier favorite site that's not in a multi-national corporation (my favorite is http://slyck.com/ to load. Sadly, maybe not even then.

Or it'll happen when tiny to small business owners, choose a domain+space+bandwidth solution, Powweb or GoDaddy come to mind, for thier new business that happenes to be on AOL's, TimeWarner's, and MCI's "brown list".

"5s ping times? OH You must be on RoadRunner! For $200/month more we can garantee you to have have below 250ms ping times...OK! Sign here"

I for one will never bow down to the ISP overlords.

Apple doesn't pay any money to the RIAA when a song is sold on iTMS. They pay the record company that holds the rights to the song (the one they licensed distribution rights from). The RIAA is a trade organization not a corporation....

1. Boing Boing
2. Slyck Forums
3. Another blogger with some good quotes
4. Normality Net with more info
5. Amit's Page with even more commentary

Drive by linkings!

eases....

the mpaa uses pirated pdf tools for their pressreleases

also see

http://www.slyck.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=19476& postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=75

(check the posting of the nxm dude in that thread)

check their pdf at:

http://www.mpaa.org/press_releases/2006_02_21_raze r.pdf

(wonder why its named razer.pdf when the site they took down was called razorback2. are they as dumb as shit?)

http://slyck.com/guides.php

Its one of the only sites I know about that lists and reviews clients for all the major P2P networks.

Guide to the Newsgroups
-- Guide to Grabit
-- Guide to Agent
-- Guide to Xnews
-- Guide to WinRAR

Guide to BitTorrent
Guide to eDonkey2000
Guide to WinMX
Guide to DirectConnect
Guide to Ares
Guide to Gnutella
Guide to SoulSeek
Guide to IRC
Guide to MP2P

In all of the "Guide to" sections, they have a list of clients (Win, Mac, Linux) and they order them by rating. It's the site I send people to when they ask "what client should I use?"