Slashdot Mirror
House To Hold Hearing On Napster
ptbrown writes: "On Wednesday the House Small Business Committee will be holding a hearing on Internet music technologies. (That is, Napster.) Chuck D, of Public Enemy and Rapstation.com, will be testifying on behalf of the good-side of MP3. For the opposition, the Progressive Policy Institute has written a report that recommends extending the DMCA to explicitly outlaw technologies like Napster." Yeah, we should definitely ban peer-to-peer file sharing over the Internet, and NFS pisses me off, too. And Web pages: Ban Port 80! Does anyone out there understand what they're saying?
Politics are far too important to be left to politicians. If we don't get involved we have no-one to blame but ourselves. Contact your congressman!
For the opposition, the Progressive Policy Institute has written a report that recommends extending the DMCA to explicitly outlaw technologies like Napster.
From the PPI site:
PPI proposes the following changes to the DMCA:
- Give judges the flexibility to grant injunctions against service providers whose services are substantially used for copyright infringement. It may be impossible to write a law that accounts for every conceivable technological innovations, however a judge will know an illegal act when she sees it.
From what's currently on the PPI site I cannot see how this is supposed to be outlawing technologies like Napster. Instead it seems to me like PPI has found the perfect median position in the Napster vs. RIAA debate. Let me explain how I came to this realization.1.) Napster wanted to claim that it is a common carrier under current law and thus should not be held responsible for the actions of it's users. What Napster has forgotten is that all common carriers (e.g. phone companies and ISPs) have personal information about their users so that if they are involved in illegal activities the users can be prosecuted. The PPI's first point is simply that if a company or service wants to claim innocence as a common carrier then it should be ready to cough up user info if the users participate in criminal endeavors through their service. After in the U.S. obscene phone callers and people who host illegal material on their ISP pages can be dealt with through their service providers, so why should Napster be different?
2.) What's wrong with a reasonable time frame for cease and desist? I see nothing wrong with a law that explicitly states how long service providers can give users to remove illegal material (especially since it would take 5 minutes in front of a computer to do this) as long as the time frame is suitable.
3.) Agreed. Make the law general enough so that it evolves with technology instead of creating a specific law to handle Napster, then another one to handle digital movies when bandwidth becomes ubiqitous and another to handle whatever else the future brings. This is very logical, after all the U.S. constitution is over 200 years old and has mainly survived due to it's general nature while countries with constitutions containing massive specificity and minutae seem to be in constant turmoil and have to deal with constantly changing laws and environments.
Basically, I can't see much wrong with PPI's recommendations and it certainly is a whole lot better for everyone than Napster's proposals (leave us alone, so our users can keep ripping artists off) or the RIAA's (explixitly ban anything that affects our bottom line) plus if implemented properly will also be able to deal with whatever other disruptive technologies that may appear in the future.
Of course, it might get you even more pissed off, since they propose:
Require service providers, as a condition to qualifying for the liability limitation under the DMCA, to collect personally identifiable and verifiable information from their users.
which as someone noted above, is far more sinister. What are they going to do - require my Social Insurace Number or credit card number to access file-sharing services?
You also have to question these people's grasp on reality when they base their arguments on statements such as:
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), a music industry trade group, estimates that piracy of physical music products, cassettes, and compact discs costs the industry nearly $5 billion in sales worldwide every year.
which we all know is crap.
This PPI group seems to have more suggestions that will just jam a few fingers in the dyke while water will continue to pour through. If they are successful, all they will do is further harm privacy on the internet along the way.
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
As a staff member working on Capitol Hill, let me remind you of the hierarchy of response to constituents (highest to lowest).
1. US Mail
2. Fax
3. Telephone calls
4. Email
NB: Most congressional offices don't put the priority on email communcation that this community does.
In your correspondance, refer to any personal contact you've had with your Member of Congress. Such notes usually get pushed to the top of the pile by staff.
You can click here to look up your Representative from a US zip code.
While we're on the subject of grass(digital?)roots involvement in politics, I'd like to remind my U.S. compatriots that this is an election year. Many of you will have the opportunity to hear candidates for various political offices speak. Find out when they will be speaking, or contact their campaign headquarters and ask them what their position on the DMCA is, what their position is on the Internet as regards defending the rights of the individual versus corporate intrusion. Ask for a written statement, or ask for an interview, if you can't ask a question at a speech or political rally. Tell them you work for the online media outlet called Slashdot, and post a report of what they said here.
Keeping the Internet free (as in speech) is very important. The death of the Internet as an open medium will start with the banning of Napster because some folks use it to do illegal things. If the law is worded poorly, then any type of peer to peer data sharing could become illegal. What's next? Requiring a special license to have a web site? Soon the large corporations will wrangle it so that linking will become illegal.
Look, individuals can vote, corporations can't. It's time we make that very clear to the politicians who have forgotten.
If you want a reaction from your elected representative, do the things above, and write a letter, with a pen on paper, longhand. Trust me, that will have more of an impact that something typed or printed off of a computer, because you took the time to sit down and write something original. If it was laser printed, how does your representative know that it isn't some form letter. (I also recommend unlined paper.)
Time for some political activism, folks!
If you want a true internet candidate, I'll be eligible to run for U.S. President in 2008. So, get up off your ass and vote!
Just be sure to wear the gold uniform when you beam down -- you know what happens when you wear the red one.
I am man enough to state that "I use Napster to pirate music. I am fully aware of the legal and moral implications of my actions, and I don't give a damn."
The level of hypocrisy here on slashdot is unbeleivable -- If I were to develop a program called "GPL'ster" that provide a way to distribute binaries without any source code or GPL mannifesto docs, I would get CRUCIFIED.
For the record, I do believe that extending the DCMA to cover *technologies* like Napster would be a bad thing, because these technologies are part of a system of checks and balances that the consumer requires in order to keep software and music publishers honest (or at least less dishonest than they'd like to be).
Slashdot: come for the pedantry, stay for the condescension.
I always find it at least peculiar, if not downright weird, that the Internet generation feels that it's somehow your RIGHT to be anonymous in this world; because it isn't, and it never has been.
The United States Supreme Court disagrees with you. The Court ruled in Talley v. California (1960), and reiterated in McIntyre v. Ohio (1995), that the First Amendment protects the right to anonymity. I think that the first ruling was well in advance of the "Internet generation".
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
Why is the House Small Business Committee holding the hearing? Which small businesses are involved?
Seems to me that this issue is only really important to some of the biggest businesses on the planet...
Jeeezus, when are Slashdot's editors going to actually fact-check before posting these crap stories?
I don't agree with the PPI's position, but i at least *read* it. They aren't saying modify the DMCA to ban Napster and peer-to-peer file sharing. What they're saying, if Slashdot's editors and the foaming-at-the-mouth crowd would bother to read for content, is that service providers whose services mean serious risk of copyright infringement (i.e. Napster) should be required to get solid identifying information for users, should have to respond to challenges in a timely manner, and that judges should have broad powers to grant injunctions against them - and that THOSE things should be written into DMCA.
The problem with this approach, which PPI fails to understand (and Slashdot doesn't dig deep enough to understand) is that peer-to-peer data sharing doesn't require a company to centralize the information. Gnutella and Freenet technologies, as well as whatever comes next, allow such sharing with no central control. That sort of thing is pretty much impossible to regulate by law without stepping on the First Amendment in the US (depends on local laws in other countries), and is practically impossible to regulate *regardless* of laws, short of unplugging the 'net.
Napster will probably die. And as far as i'm concerned, they *should* die, because they really are attempting to make money on piracy. But the technology that spawned them will not and should not die, and the PPI (and probably Congress) can't understand this.
--
Hand me that airplane glue and I'll tell you another story.
The most important point that needs to be made is that there is no way for the RIAA to control online distribution of music without taking away the freedom of independent artists to distribute music.
Think of this: Napster has been banned on many college campuses. College campuses are traditionally the place where independent music flourishes. Thus the RIAA has managed to shut down a distribution channel for the independent artists. I can't say that it was intentional, but it certainly will be a nice side-effect for the major labels. Of course, the RIAA says that "piracy" is the problem, costing them billions of dollars a year, yet at the same time they brag to their stockholders about record earnings this year.
I'll say it once more just to make sure: The RIAA can not completely control the distribution of music online without controlling the distribution of ALL music online.
Anything that allows the RIAA more control over online distribution takes away from the freedom of independent artists to distribute online.
It's time to start thinking about the original intent of copyright law and work from that. The intention of copyright law has been to foster the arts, not to guarantee revenue for entertainment cartels.
numb
Ok, we have a west coast rapper on our side, and they have....a Government Policy Institute.
I think we're okay.
Pablo Nevares, "the freshmaker".
Pablo Nevares, "the freshmaker".