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OpenNaps Targeted; Gnutella "Validated"
An Anonymous Coward writes "As early as Wednesday, the RIAA
has sent letters to the ISPs and operators of OpenNap servers in the U.S. which were
listed on Napigator. Here's the
story from ZDNET. The RIAA's letter refers to the U.S. Supreme Court decision against Napster. Given that nearly all the OpenNap servers are run by individuals who are never intending to charge for the service, this is an interesting assertion."
And HyperbolicParabaloid points out
this NYT story
(free reg. req.) in which a lawyer says the decision "validates Gnutella" (ok, whatever, but there's also some interesting discussion about how the Sony VCR time- and space-shifting precedent fails to apply to Napster).
From: Antipiracy@riaa.com
Subject: unauthorized distribution of sound recordings
Date: Tue, 20 Feb 2001
VIA EMAIL
February 20, 2001
RE: IP Address: xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
Dear XXX:
We are writing concerning the above referenced system being made available
at an IP address assigned to XXX. The Recording Industry Association of
America, Inc. (RIAA) is a trade association whose member record companies
produce, manufacture and distribute approximately ninety (90) percent of all
legitimate sound recordings sold in the United States. Under penalty of
perjury, we submit that the RIAA is authorized to act on behalf of its
member companies in matters involving the infringement of their sound
recordings, including enforcing their copyrights and common law rights on
the Internet.
Our investigation has revealed that XXX is hosting
or otherwise making available a Napster-like (OpenNap) server that is
operating a peer-to-peer file copying system. The system is located at the
above-referenced IP address. This system allows users to search the file
libraries of other users connected to this system and facilitates the
copying of files between users. In order to access this type of system, a
user must download specialized client software such as Rapigator
(www.rapigator.com) or FileNavigator (www.filenavigator.com).
This system, which we accessed on XXX, offers directories of downloadable
digitally-encoded files containing sound recordings. The vast majority of
these sound recordings are owned by our member companies, including songs by
such artists as XXX. We have a good faith belief that the above-described
activity is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.
We assert that the information in this notification is accurate, based upon
the data available to us.
The system provided at the above IP address is almost identical to the
system Napster provides. You may be aware that the United States Circuit
Court for Ninth Circuit, District of California issued a ruling in RIAA's
lawsuit against Napster, finding that Napster is actively facilitating
widespread copyright infringement and, in doing so, directly affecting the
legitimate market for copyrighted works. The Ninth Circuit ruling upheld a
United States District Court's issuance of a preliminary injunction against
Napster. You may obtain a copy of the Ninth Circuit decision at
http://www.riaa.com/pdf/napsterdecision.pdf.
We request that you immediately remove or block access to the infringing
material offered via this server. In addition, we ask that you inform the
operator of this server about the illegality of his or her conduct and
confirm with the RIAA, in writing, that this activity has ceased.
This letter does not constitute a waiver of any right to recover damages
incurred by virtue of any such unauthorized activities, and such rights as
well as claims for other relief are expressly retained.
Finally, if you or your users wish additional information concerning
copyright law as it applies to sound recordings, please feel free to visit
and/or link to our web site at http://www.riaa.com.
You may contact me at RIAA, 1330 Connecticut Avenue, N.W., Suite 300,
Washington, D.C., 20036, Tel. (202) 775-0101, or e-mail
antipiracy@riaa.com, to discuss this notice. We await your response.
Sincerely,
Jonathan Whitehead
Anti-Piracy Counsel
RIAA
The fact that people go to Napster et. al. for music is just an effect of the prime cause -- CDs are too damn expensive. Until that is "fixed", any number of solutions will be pursued by those who love music, but think they are getting gouged paying for it.
yeah i had a similar problem. it was with a new car. they wanted 35k for that suv. i said to myself "self, they are trying to screw you... it's ok to just steal it". since they were going to try to charge me too much, self and i decided to steal the car.
well when they arrested me i tried to explain to the judge, but she said something to the effect of "self if you cannot afford it, you can't just steal it". to make a point she told everyone in the court room that they could go over to my house and point to things. i had to tell them how much i thought it was worth, and if they thought the number was too high they could just take it...
i guess it's a two way street. so where exactly do you live?
use LaTeX? want an online reference manager that
-- john
How about this: the judge had a magic photocopier than could copy anything perfectly, and everyone went over to your house and photocopied everything you own, leaving the original in your house unharmed.
But you didn't like that, because you have a magic photocopier too. You wanted to photocopy all of your stuff at a cost of $~0.30 to you, and sell the copies at the full retail cost of the originals. Because you believe that don't just own the toaster, you insist that you own the idea of the toaster.
Jordan Bettis
``Wherever you go, there's another stupid sigfile quote.''"...some of the servers are located overseas ... it will be more difficult to enforce compliance with a shutdown request".
Too damn right it will. Especially if no national laws are being broken in some of those countries.
So they'll have to make do with threats instead.
The RIAA has done a good job of convincing the general public and miscellanous yahoos that copyright infringement is *theft* haven't they?
Copyright infringement differs greatly from theft. If I *steal* something from you, you can no longer have it because I have taken it from you. So, if I go over to your house and take your table without your permission I have stolen it.
But, if I go back to my house and build an exact replica of your coffee table I have not *stolen* it, I have *copied* it.
You're allowed to enjoy your table as much as I enjoy my replica.
The difference between copying music and copying tables is largely a matter of degree. Lawmakers have seen fit to make the copying of music illict and not the copying of tables. But, that still does not make the former any more "theft" than the latter.
Sheesh.
BRx.
Life after capitalism? The participatory economics project
No more of your shit. No more force feeding us the music you think we want to hear. No more of you marketing violent movies to 11 year olds. No more selling a sexual image to pre-teen girls as the model to follow. No more bullshit. I think it's time for the world to stand up and say "We're mad as hell and we're not going to take it anymore." MPAA? Fuck you. RIAA? FUCK YOU TOO. Take your cookie-cutter bubblegum rockers and your homoerotic punk metal clown possies and shove them up your ass. Take your idiotic teenie-bopper horror slasher flicks and put them where the sun don't shine. It is time for us to wake up from this crazy capitalist induced nightmare that has resulted in us only having 5 huge mega-corporations being responsible for the sales, marketing, and creation of over 90% of the music, movies, and media in the world! What kind of sick society have we become where we allow this to happen? We exist to feed the fat overbearing media gods. Our only purpose in life is to make them profit so they can turn around and force more garbage down our throats.
Gee, what happens when people get so tired of this nonsense that they just quit going to movies, watching TV, buying music, etc?
Will that ever happen? The cynical say "Never". But, at this rate, such commercial "entertainment" (a term I use loosely, usually preceded by the word 'mindless') will, in the not-too-distant future be affordable only by those who own and control it.
Maybe it's time we revert to the practice of people producing art because they are compelled to, not because they are paid to. When artists are paid only on commission, or for a live performance. That is, they earn their living like the rest of us, based solely on the merit of their work - as judged by others.
And don't anyone spout that tired old line about how no one will create without getting paid to do so. That would mean that no one, anywhere, ever created purely for the joy and satisfaction of seeing their imagination realized - not to mention such a theory invalidating the whole Free Software movement.
Art is not an endeavor in which one should expect to "Earn a living". It is a gift which the artist willingly and lovingly shares with others. His expected reward comes from self-satisfaction, and, hopefully, the appreciation of his audience.
Any artist who would give up his art because no one would pay for it, is most likely a very poor artist.
Or a fool.
~cm.
Isn't this basically the same argument that we get away with all the time at when it comes to software? We're licensing the intellectual property from the vendor, not the fsck'n media. In fact, we've lost/damaged the media to applications and called the vendor (we "registered" the software) and they sent us new media for a nominal fee (like, $10 or something on a $3k license). In fact, when we buy multiple licenses we only get 1 CD and are expected to dupe it or otherwise copy it to other distribution media ourselves.
Why doesn't this apply to music? I can accept the idea that an album originally sold on vinyl that has been put onto CD *AND* that has gone through extra special processing or contains extra material is different than the original. But when it's just a transfer to CD from the *same* masters used to make the album I don't see where it's any different than supplying an application on floppy vs. CD ROM. The intellectual content is otherwise the same, just delivered differently.
Except that the net is IP based and, if found illegal, it would be easy to have the courts demand that ISPs cooperate with turning in the gnutella users. Fine them each $500 a pop and you end up with something a lot like speeding. People do it, but only within reason and only when they have a good chance of not being caught. This is precisly what the RIAA wants. Free advertising, but nothing so pervasive as to cut into profits.
--
I don't remember there being a "U.S. Supreme Court decision against Napster" so if the RIAA's letter really did refrence it, there's some interesting legal points to be analyzed.
More likely this guy just confused that Circuit court that made the Napster ruling with the Supreme Court.
--
--
RumorsDaily
It's important to read The Appeals Court decision on Napster
This decision discusses Napster and contributory and vicarious copyright infringement. A key part:
Sig: My Latest Censorware Essay:What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
Sorry folks, this is a LONG one...
Well, this was nice. Got home from work to find this lovely message in my Inbox. Yep, you guessed it... the RIAA contacted me because of my li'l old opennap server. Actually, they contacted my ISP instead, and they were "kind" enough to forward it to me...
Well, I do have to give them some credit: at least they didn't summarily axe my connection like so many others did. Anyway, what was I to do? I can NOT afford to lose my DSL at this juncture, considering how I use it for EVERYTHING -- receiving email, hosting my website and several others (and some local nonprofits' websites), online gaming (of course :) ), etc. And I didn't really want to piss off my ISP, since decent connectivity is so hard to come by in this two-horse town. So I swallowed my pride and ran "killall -9 opennap" Sent them a nice "yes, I am ceasing and desisting" email, and got a response. End of story... or so I thought!
(Incidnetally, the phrase "unauthorized distribution of sound recordings" caught my eye... UHH, HELLO PEOPLE??! I was *NVER* actually SHARING any MP3's... my server only acts as a "gathering point" to connect everyone else who wants to trade files. This would be like the police raiding and shutting down an ENTIRE Shopping Mall just because some drug dealers happen to hang out there to ply their wares. DUHHHHHH!!!!)
Anyway, "Time passes..."
The time: Later that afternoon. The place: in my Command Center, ice cold can of Coke(tm) by my side. The activity: reading through my webserver logs. Why? Because I am a nosy bastard and like to know what people are doing on my webserver! :P (actually, I had just tweaked around my CGI's and installed some new ones the other day, and wanted to make sure everything was running happily)
Well, what do we have here? Someone at my ISP is happily reading through ALL of the websites that I host!!!
"Hmmmm... what's this? A deliberate and methodical browse through of my website? Someone trying to look for more infractions by me (not that I have any, my websites are all pretty boring and really poorly crafted...) Or maybe it's just someone who saw my URL in my .sig and was curious?" Well, I had my doubts...
(and, before you ask: yes, this is somebody in the ISP's office, not a random dialup user... A traceroute proves that.)
But later that day, my doubts were erased. There I was, happily cavorting around the new UO 3D betatest server (which ROCKS btw...), when all of a sudden my connection goes straight to hell. "Great, more OSI routing trouble, or maybe the beta server is clogged to capacity..." I think. Wrong, try again. Because then the firewall messages start flying:
Yes, boys and girls, a real honest to god portscan!!! Meanwhile, my bandwidth is going to hell in a handbasket with all the probing I'm getting. No, I am NOT happy about this. But is it the same guy? Hmm...
Yep, same guy.
There's some real nasty stuff going down out there...
--
Yomigaeru Aiyan Geek!!!
To: Piracy@RIAA.com
...
...
Mr. Whitehead,
The OpenNap efforts of many individuals are not about piracy. OpenNap only
indexes and allows easy searching of content already available online.
Instead of wasting your money going after servers and hosts, you should
target the individuals who host content.
Since the servers do not enable or promote piracy which was not already
available to other clients, they only index content, they do not have to
accept any terms given them by you. Of course there are more individuals
than there are servers, which explains your flawed strategy of attacking
OpenNap servers, because servers are not in violation of any legislation
only the clients sharing your files are.
I must question what RIAA has plans to do as more secure, anonymous,
sub-networks are developed that do not rely on single-host entities that
index content. RIAA is throwing money out the window in efforts to stop the
sharing of information.
Things are changing in today's world. Software is becoming free. Large
corporations are being turned upside down by the availability of that
software. Information is being made free, for all to use, not just the
people that have a big wallet. RIAA cannot accept these changes and RIAA's
business model is flawed in that it cannot deal with such changes. RIAA has
attempted to utilize the court systems to stop such changes in society, but
it will only hinder one aspect of it... that hinderance will lead to
stronger weapons against RIAA.... like Freenet. The massive media attention
RIAA has gotten from these series of bull-shit legal battles has lead to
RIAA's own destruction.
You have kicked the chair out from under you and now the rope has
tightened... it will be over in a few seconds.
-
It looks like 90% of the "legitimate" sound recordings in the United States
are being shared... something music was made for. Ohh my.
If I record the sound of my own fart, will it be "legitimate" ? Probably
not... Why don't you write what you mean, instead of trying to scare people
off by saying they do illegitimate things and attempting to scare them with
legal terms and shit. If you want the people to listen, speak their
language. It is okay to cry sometimes and say "We have a failed business
model, we need to find a better way to make money besides sueing everyone
up-the-butt for excessive amounts of money that will never be paid."
Sorry to say this, but
Get a new job, Mr. Whitehead.
--
Your friendly mentor,
x-empt
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