Copyright.net Springs Into Action

Mynn writes "Tennesean.com is reporting that copyright.net is now operational." There's another story about copyright.net at siliconvalley.com. Supposedly they just banned 350,000 Napster users on the basis of title scans - obviously they didn't listen to one million mp3 files to make sure they were actually such-and-such a song, that would take years. Sure, this may be a little overbroad - you'll run into situations like the one described here (in German - use a translator), where a webpage offering mp3 files was attacked, except that the *.mp3 files were just text files with the cryptic letters "*aetsch*" in them - but who cares, they're just Napster users, they probably did something bad, right?

Comments

A few questions.

[Naivete]

Wow, that's a lot of bannings. I thought napster was still appealing so they weren't removing people yet? And can't you just get unbanned by deleting something in your registery, so that this is just a simple harassment thing? This had to happen just as I got my mp3 player, too...

For those who are interested:

[Roofus]

The board of directors of copyright.net appear to all have experience in the recording/publishing industry. Some of them were record label execs.

http://www.copyright.net/copyrightnet/cg_board.cfm

I just thought that was interesting. Who's side are they on?

Re:For those who are interested:

[american goon]

if (person->class == RECORD_EXEC) {
person->side = "evil";
}

// note: record company executives are always on the side of evil.

Re:For those who are interested:

[neoofthematrix3]

hey i believe these guys are on the owner of the copyrights plus by what i have read they are also trying to SAVE napster, they believe in the P2P systems, the courts have ruled against napster, napster must find a way to get users to pay for copyrighted music, these guys may have the solution for them, do you guys believe that music should be for free?

Re:For those who are interested:

[Roofus]

I guess a level of indirection is implied when dealing with RIAA scum.

For your protection, we always recommend keeping at least one level of indirection between yourself and RIAA execs.

We don't you catching any nasty viruses!

Re:For those who are interested:

[Kwantus]

Who's [sic] side are they on?

Well, duh. do you guys believe that music should be for free?

If the artists are all dead, or wanted it to be free, sure. I liked that Napster provided a mass-audience route around the RIAA leeches for the artists. I grant that there was a lot of copyright violation by Napster users! But is that bypass going to remain available for those who want it, or is the RIAA going to close it down too?

Banned based on title?

[Zarniwoop]

You better believe it. And a really poor search formula at that.

One of my friends wrote a techno song about, well, gerbiling. You know, the tube, the gerbil (named Raggot in one legend), the stuffing...

He renamed it "Metallica - One Gerbil Too Many", and put it up on Napster. He was banned. Not only does the banner bot not check the song itself or the id3 tags, it's pretty poor at figuring out song titles.


What do I do, when it seems I relate to Judas more than You?

Re:Banned based on title?

[interiot]

Does DMCA say anything about legal ramifications for a copyright holder who alleges infringement, later it's found that there is none, but the user lost their account for that time anyway?

Can copyright holders wildly allege infringement without recourse?

I fear the answers are "no" and "yes", but that doesn't seem right.
--

Re:Banned based on title?

[luge]

How exactly is that copyright infringement? In the US that I was born in, we have this concept called "parody" which is legally protected, even when it involves the use of trademarks.
~luge

Re:Banned based on title?

[Zarniwoop]

D'oh. Forgot to link to the song =D

No, it's not that Signal 11. It's referring to the enunchs error message.

What do I do, when it seems I relate to Judas more than You?

Re:Banned based on title?

[Zarniwoop]

Thank you, kind sir. That link was both informative, interesting, funny, underrated and insightful.

But next time, use a URL obfuscation. Noone falls for straight goatse anymore.

Hugs and kisses,
Erik

What do I do, when it seems I relate to Judas more than You?

Re:Banned based on title?

[Gleef]

interiot wrote:

Does DMCA say anything about legal ramifications for a copyright holder who alleges infringement, later it's found that there is none, but the user lost their account for that time anyway?

Not that I know of, no.

Can copyright holders wildly allege infringement without recourse?

Here in the US, we have defamation (i.e. libel and slander) laws that can sometimes cover that. I am not a lawyer, but here's my rundown of how this works. For brevity's sake, I'll use "Alfred" to refer to the person who is claiming "Beth" has violated copyright. As a result, Beth loses access to systems.

First off, there must be no actual copyright infringement, if Alfred speaks truth, then it's instantly not defamation anymore.

If Beth is past that one, and is interested in pursuing, then she should call a lawyer instantly. There are a lot of arbitrary deadlines with defamation cases, and I surely do not list them all here.

Next, Beth should demand a retraction by Alfred within 20 days of finding out what he said. From what I understand, this is really only a requirement if the press has defamed her, but the way I see it, it doesn't hurt and might actually help. He might just retract his statement and tell people to give her account back.

Next, assuming Alfred doesn't retract his statement, Beth should file a lawsuit within a year, or else the statute of limitations takes effect and there is no case anymore.

Keep in mind that Defamation is part of Civil Law, which means that the key recourse is money. If Beth doesn't have significant financial damages to claim, it's just plain not worth it. For example, the guy who put up text files saying "*aitch*" with the names of popular songs really can't claim significant damages. An independant artist, who was counting on the increased recognition of having her own song ("Eat Metallica") widely distributed on Napster to help her career grow, could make a case. If so, she's in for a long and expensive ride (but could get publicity out of the case too, so it might still be worth it).

Most other countries have defamation laws, but from what I understand they often differ substantially from what I described.

----

Re:Banned based on title?

[[wy1d]]

Makes you wonder if the deCSS song will get you pulled.....

Re:Banned based on title?

[sallen]

Here in the US, we have defamation (i.e. libel and slander) laws that can sometimes cover that. I am not a lawyer, but here's my rundown of how this works. For brevity's sake, I'll use "Alfred" to refer to the person who is claiming "Beth" has violated copyright. As a result, Beth loses access to systems.

IANAL either, but what you say makes sense. I wonder, however, at what point potential punitive damages could some into play vs. just actual damages. What amount of 'due diligence', for lack of a better known term (like I said, IANAL), would/should the company be required to do before that company can, under the guise of the DMCA, demand an ISP terminate a users account? At what point might that be considered negligant? This is the type of action I could see the ACLU becoming interested in, and they DO have the resources for long and lengthy litigation.

Re:Banned based on title?

[cats]

Who gives a fuck about karma on slashdot?
Only sissy sluts.

FUCK YOU MODERATORS!

Re:Banned based on title?

[ichimunki]

It's not copyright infringement, which actually means that his being banned on this count is a complete miscarriage of justice.

However, naming his song using someone else's trademark in a way which may cause others to believe his work is also the work of the trademark holder does open him to liability on that score. I'm not attempting to pretend I'm a legal official, but putting a band name followed by a "-" or other common separator makes it look like this may be a Metallica song.

Had he named the song "Sticking Gerbils up Metallica's Ass" that would be a much different story.

But parody can be a tricky business. For instance, Mad TV and SNL frequently run parodies that are nigh indistinguishable from the originals except that they are obviously skits on a comedy show. They use the trademarks of other networks and corporations all the time. What they do not do, is pretend to be those other entities in order to find a wider audience for the satires.

copyright.net?

[SpitefulBen]

they want you to sign up to learn why your account was banned, they have banners (just seems odd for an industry site, and the name copyright.net sucks too. Who is this run by anyways? It's approach to copy control seems very Draconian.

Hard to find out what they are doing by visiting

[jamiefaye]

Their page for Napster users asks you to give your email address, Napster name, and full personal details before telling you what they will do for you and if it costs anything.

None of the links from their home page lead anywhere which would clarify matters.

While I was not blocked by them, this policy of "taking names" at the front door sure scared me away from seeing what they propose to do for me.

Just admit you're breaking the law

[Skyshadow]

> they're just Napster users, they probably did something bad, right?

Well, duh. 99.99% of Napster users use Napster to locate copyrighted information and download it in a fashion illegal under current copyright law. A very small minority of these people don't; they're either really honest, trying to make some political point that nobody'll ever care about or are doing something worthwhile like trying to get their own music out there.

It's one thing to think that you ought to be able to share music, but I tire quickly of Napster users trying to pretend like they're legally in the right on this one; the self-rightousness of it makes me gag. Face it: more than likely, you're sharing music illegally. If you can't deal with that, don't do it.

Disclaimer: I get my music illegally. I do it because it's convenient and I'm cheap.

----

Re:Just admit you're breaking the law

[Maestrogenic]

Yeah. Doing it is one thing. Trying to justify it as some kind of righteous crusade against evil recording labels is quite another.

It's nice, but it's illegal.

Re:Just admit you're breaking the law

[Anonymous Coward]

It's one thing to think that you ought to be able to share music, but I tire quickly of Napster users trying to pretend like they're legally in the right on this one; the self-rightousness of it makes me gag. Face it: more than likely, you're sharing music illegally. If you can't deal with that, don't do it.

Yeah I'm sure governments were quickly tired by the women trying to get the ability to vote (and illegal protests) or people who wanted to end aparthide. Copyright holders want to extend their rights I want to protect and extend mine (fair use). This is my form of protest. Sure it may not be as exciting or dramatic as the other causes cited above, but you know in the comming years it may become just as important. That is what is truly sad. The want gustapo tactics, they'll get a war waged in the press, at public hearings, at the ballot box and most importantly, at the register.

pingmeep

If you like my post and feel it has something to contribute mod it up. I'm drunk enough not to care about points anymore.

Re:Just admit you're breaking the law

[Anonymous Coward]

So you don't pay a tax on blank recording media in your country to cover casual copying? We in the US do, and therefore have the right to share this material in whatever way we see fit.

~~~

Re:Just admit you're breaking the law

[bryan1945]

I will not admit I am breaking any law- every single song I have downloaded on Napster I already owned. It was easier to download the songs than trying to dig through all my discs to find the ones with the correct songs.

So take you %99.9 crap and shove it- unless you have talked to every Napster user out there.

Yeah, I AM in the %0.1 (supposedly), but now I am getting screwed because you "get your music illegaly because you are lazy and cheap". Thanks, I appreciate you screwing my legal rights.

Re:Just admit you're breaking the law

[dirk]

It's one thing to think that you ought to be able to share music, but I tire quickly of Napster users trying to pretend like they're legally in the right on this one; the self-rightousness of it makes me gag. Face it: more than likely, you're sharing music illegally. If you can't deal with that, don't do it.

Yeah I'm sure governments were quickly tired by the women trying to get the ability to vote (and illegal protests) or people who wanted to end aparthide. Copyright holders want to extend their rights I want to protect and extend mine (fair use). This is my form of protest. Sure it may not be as exciting or dramatic as the other causes cited above, but you know in the comming years it may become just as important. That is what is truly sad. The want gustapo tactics, they'll get a war waged in the press, at public hearings, at the ballot box and most importantly, at the register.

There's one small difference you seem to be forgetting, civil disobedience only works when people are prepared to accept the consequences. You didn't hear the civil rights protesters whining because they got arrested. They expected to be arrested, because they were breaking the law. Napster isn't a protest, it's a way around the law. If it was a protest, people would be trying to get arrested to get the world to see what's going on and that it's wrong. Instead they spend all their time being anonymous and trying not to be booted from Napster, so they can still get music for free.

Re:Just admit you're breaking the law

[L-Train8]

Because some, or even most, Napster users are breaking the law, that doesn't mean you can punish them without some sort of proof or due process. (Well, actually you can because of the DMCA, but that doesn't make it right.)

Copyright.net has not witnessed any mp3 file of copyrighted material being downloaded. They have only seen mp3 files with names similiar to copyrighted material available for sharing. The only other evidence they have is that those files are available on Napster, which everyone knows is a hotbed of piracy, just ask the RIAA. It seems to me that this is a frightening reduction in the standard used to convict and punish people of crimes.

Is it okay to do this because most people are violating copyright laws on Napster? We don't arrest people for walking through neighborhoods where drugs deals take place, even if "99.9%" of the people in the neighborhood are there for the drugs. They have to be seen exchanging money for drugs, the drugs have to be tested to determine that they are drugs and not something that looks similiar. The accused are entitled to a trial, etc. etc. Why is it different on the internet? Because this crime hurts an industry's bottom line more than drug deals do? Is that worth suspending constitutional protections?

Re:Just admit you're breaking the law

[dasunt]

Lets play devil's advocate then. Lets assume that if a vast majority of a group is doing something illegal, then all members of a group should be punished accordingly.

Using this logical, an extra tax on blank media (cassettes, cds) to compensate the record companies are justified. This is already in place. However, an extra tax on larger hard drives (say >10 gigs) would also be justified, as well as for broadband users, any cd player that can play mp3s, any mp3 player, as well as any cd burner. Moving away from computers, we should automatically fine people for speeding (after all, most people do drive over the speed limit), as well as start arresting kids for underage drinking and smoking, and all people for drug use.

Its rather absurd now, isn't it? Maybe its better to assume people are innocent unless proven guilty.

You also admit that you download mp3's illegally. Thanks for you honesty, unfortunately, I'm going to use your admission of guilt to further my own argument. The maximum penalties for copywrite infringement include a large fine and a bit of jail time. The penalties can be cumulative. By downloading mp3s, you either think that that you won't get caught and/or the judge won't take the law seriously, and your punishment will be a slap on the wrists. So, by admitting that you download mp3s, you are putting minor copywrite infringement for personal use into the same catagory as speeding, or breaking some other minor law that most people ignore.

Re:Just admit you're breaking the law

[tbo]

You're missing a fundamental difference--these people aren't being convicted of a crime simply for using Napster. They're being threatened with legal action, which is a different thing.

You can bet the RIAA or whoever wouldn't go to court with only the name of a song, as recorded by a bot. They would, at the very least, download and listen to the song.

What's happening here is more like arresting someone for wearing a ski mask while loitering outside a recently-robbed bank. 99% of the time, they're guilty, and, for that other 1%, they'll be found innocent in a trial (or charges may be dropped if they have a good excuse).

Re:Just admit you're breaking the law

[dasunt]

I must quibble. Sometimes, laws can simply become ignored. Their are laws on the books in a lot of states that outlaw certain sexual acts, but they are often broken, and nobody will be arrested for breaking them. Society can change more quickly then the laws.

Re:Just admit you're breaking the law

[MushMouth]

This isn't law, it is Napster. Bitch to them if you are banned and think you shouldn't be.

Re:Just admit you're breaking the law

[StarTux]

Its absolutley dangerous and foolhardy to tamper with civil liberties! Its a slippery slope that will lead to.... This is what History has proven over and over again...

Constitutional rights should not be interefered with, even if it means the "victim" is not getting what he wants. In which case he will need to find other legal ways of doing it.

I predict the death of the DMCA in its current form, they know that it will not last either, so will try to get as much as done as quickly as possible before the succesful challange goes in (it just needs to be declared unconstitutional).

What really upsets me is that my grandfathers fought and died for true Freedom against Tyranny (trust me, when I talk to them they feared bad laws such as these) and yet people are so willing to piss on their legacy...

Re:Just admit you're breaking the law

[Maestrogenic]

Because some, or even most, Napster users are breaking the law, that doesn't mean you can punish them without some sort of proof or due process. (Well, actually you can because of the DMCA, but that doesn't make it right.)

Remember, you don't have any such right to due process. The Napster people can refuse you service at their discretion. It's their software.

Re:Just admit you're breaking the law

[stype]

I'll tell you why its ok. Because using napster isn't a right, walking down the street is. If napster wants to block a million users from using their service, they can. You can bitch all you want, its their service, they can do what they want with it. Banning someone from napster is not a legal punishment, its just a way of stopping them from possibly doing it again. And if they ban someone who wasn't doing anything wrong, well tough. If you don't like napster, stop using it.
-Stype

Re:Just admit you're breaking the law

[nyteroot]

you make a good point; under *current* law, the vast majority of napster users (including myself, to hell with lars ulrich..) ARE probably doing something illegal. the less significant reply to this is that unlike other judicial systems, the american judicial system is based on one's being innocent until proven guilty; being at the scene of a crime does not make one a criminal. however, there is a far more important point here; the entire idea of 'intellectual property' is basically flawed. often, the concept undermines the very thing it was meant to preserve: innovation! the type of property people are most familiar with are tangible: cars, houses, computers. how do you say you own a stream of bits and bytes? or an analog series of magnetisms (ie music/data on a cassette tape) ? what if i were to change one bit, or chop off the end of the file? blurring the line a little more obviously, if i play your song on my guitar am i infringing your copyright? how about if i use a lick from one of your songs? it is no longer the same thing you claim ownership to, certainly. one can claim ownership to the *media* that it is recorded on, but when the cost of reproduction of a commodity is zero, then the entire idea of owning and charging for it is void. the line between what is and what isnt claimable as 'intellectual property' is very, very blurry, and its being pushed further back every day. athletes have started to patent specific moves! does that seem sensible? its about as sensible as 'owning' a string of bits and bytes.

Re:Just admit you're breaking the law

[Zebbers]

#1 Information is not copyrighted.
#2 Whered you get your bullshit stats.
#3 Innocent until proven guilty, in a court of law.

Re:Just admit you're breaking the law

[Zebbers]

Kudos! And what good is a law kids, if no one follows it! *WE* are the people. *WE* will decide. Not the RIAA. Bring it to the people, bring them the truth. I remember a story here recently about congess threatening the riaa to get its ass moving on digital delivery or it would open it up to anyone to trade. THIS is what needs to be done. They are being COUNTERproductive to society. We force car companies to abide by clean air laws, develop alternavehicles. We force companies to comply with tons of shit, why? FOR THE PEOPLE. Because the PEOPLE matter more than any damn company any day. And if the RIAA wants to lick its ass all day and not provide digital delivery, they DESERVE to get "pirated" the hell out of. After all, there is no alternative. "Burning" your own mp3s doesn't mean shit. Their whole argument is that MP3s COMPETE and CONFLICT with their sales. DATs didnt, so there was less of a fuss. MP3s do. We need to say, get the fuck moving or else. They have the opportunity, and they are stalling. Artificially just like every other bullshit move they make.

Re:Just admit you're breaking the law

[dachshund]

What's happening here is more like arresting someone for wearing a ski mask while loitering outside a recently-robbed bank. 99% of the time, they're guilty, and, for that other 1%, they'll be found innocent in a trial (or charges may be dropped if they have a good excuse).

Hmm. But if you are arrested, interrogated, and found to be a confused skiier who wandered off the trail (or at least, no evidence turns up to prove you actually did anything wrong)-- generally you get your full freedom back within a few hours. And if you are charged, the government will kindly provide you with legal representation should this be beyond your means.

If you're suspected of copyright violation, however, you are required to prove that you didn't break any laws. Until then, you can have your account taken away, etc. Finally, if you're innocent and crazy enough to take it to court-- you're out many thousands of dollars. If you can't afford to fight the civil suit, your out of luck.

Re:Just admit you're breaking the law

[dachshund]

The Napster people can refuse you service at their discretion. It's their software.

The DMCA and the DMCA-based Napster injunction (probably at least, pending rewrite) give copyright-holders the specific right to request certain accounts be closed. So yes, Napster is closing the accounts. But they're doing it under force of Federal law, so it's not as simple as you make it out to be.

Re:Just admit you're breaking the law

[dachshund]

If they want to ban you for no reason except that they don't like your screen name they can.

Ack. Sure, Napster can ban you for any reason they want to. But do other organizations have the right to force Napster to do so, based on flimsy evidence? That would be the presumption of the DMCA.

Re:Just admit you're breaking the law

[Ageless]

Noooo... sorry. That logic is incorrect. Just because you are taxed on something doesn't mean you can break other laws. Just because you pay sales tax on a rifle doesn't give you free reign over the clock tower.

Re:Just admit you're breaking the law

[RedWizzard]

The point is that users are banned on the basis of song titles without any verification of actual infringement. That's the same as jailing someone for grand theft auto because the car they're driving matches the description of one that was stolen. It's wrong and unjust no question about it.

Re:Just admit you're breaking the law

[micromoog]

First of all, I can't believe this drivel got +5.

With that out of the way, I'll attack specific points:

The only other evidence they have is that those files are available on Napster, which everyone knows is a hotbed of piracy, just ask the RIAA.

Just ask anybody. Don't even try to claim with a straight face that Napster is not a hotbed of piracy.

We don't arrest people for walking through neighborhoods where drugs deals take place, even if "99.9%" of the people in the neighborhood are there for the drugs.

No one's getting arrested. Just as it's perfectly legal for a restaurant to kick you out for not wearing shoes, or talking too loudly, or because the manager thinks you might eat n' run, Napster has the right to ban anyone for anything at any time.

Is that worth suspending constitutional protections?

The Napster user has no "constitutional protections" here. The user can plead a case with Napster for reinstatement, and Napster has the sole discretion to accept, reject, laugh at, or just ignore the user. Again, this is not a matter of law.

If anyone has constitutional protections here, it's Napster. Since when do we force an organization to serve those which it has deemed "undesirable"?

In closing, I can't believe this drivel got +5.

Re:Just admit you're breaking the law

[micromoog]

Maybe its better to assume people are innocent unless proven guilty.

Napster doesn't have to meet any burden of proof at all to ban you. They can ban you just 'cause they don't like you. The framers of the US Constitution wouldn't have it any other way.

Re:Just admit you're breaking the law

[pjrc]

There's no need for due process to cancel a Napster account. Napster can cancel anyone's account at their discresion. Since Napster accounts are free, there's not any sort of obligation on their part, as you might expect had you paid.

Re:Just admit you're breaking the law

[elflord]

You've raised a good example -- and I'd like to point out that people do sometimes protest against even these laws (specifically on homosexuality) by writing confessions and turning themselves in, in an attempt to get arrested and make a statement about the absurdity of the law in question.

Re:Just admit you're breaking the law

[linzeal]

good point, if they are already treating us like we are guilty why not act like it as well ?

Re:Just admit you're breaking the law

[Miragejp]

Well - let's do a little thought experiment. I've bought a song and rip it. I have it on my hard drive and say "Please, listen to this." I'm not charging anything for the person to listen to it. I could either invite 8 million people into my cramped apartment to listen to my stereo, or let them listen on their computers. I see no difference. You claim that one is legal (letting them listen at my home) but the other is illegal.

So - I claim that they are one and the same. Now, I've paid for the song, I am not charging money to let people listen to it (I see it as the same thing as the disclaimer NFL football puts on their broadcasts - you can show it, but don't make money off of it.)

Should I pay for the same song again if it is done by the same artist in a different format (vinyl vs. CD) or in a different style (electric vs. acoustic)? Should I pay for the same song if it is done by a different artist? After all, I paid for the song, and they are the same notes, right? Why should I pay twice for the same thing. Not so logically (and this is a stretch even for me) - one could argue that when you've paid for one song, you've paid for every song since they are the same notes, simply arranged in different patterns.

What it boils down to is corporate greed, plain and simple. They don't give a damn about the artists, who are merely cheap labor for them. If they could make more money employing Guatemalan or Malaysian children as rugweavers or shoe makers, they would. The RIAA has never sued on behalf of the artists, they've sued on behalf of the record companies. Just take a look at the "industry standard agreement" that basically makes artists fucking slaves to record companies. The industry isn't about art, its about profit. Sure, making money is a great thing, but not when it compromises your morals and ethics.

I have no problem with the concept of paying an artist for his work - once - not every time I want to listen to it. Would you pay someone every time you fired up your copy of Quake? No? Well, what about paying a writer every time you crack open that book you picked up at B&N?

Besides, as it exists now, you're not paying an artist, you are paying some bottom-feeder, who then doles out the equivalent of a bowl of rice gruel to the artist. The industry engages in price-fixing ($16+ for a 2-cent CD?) How much of that goes to the artist? About 7 cents.

Most of the stuff out there is crap anyway - Britny Spears? Backside^H^H^Hstreet boys? I'll take old-school punk, 50's doowop, Elvis, Ozzie, etc. anyday. There are no true artists anymore, merely plastic people packaged by a corporate entity - they don't write their own music or play their own instruments. And - the "music" sucks. I can listen to an entire Led Zeppelin album - every one of them (which I've purchased) - and it is all good. Some of today's albums have a single decent tune (or none at all) and the rest of the album sucks.

Finally - legally right and morally right are hardly ever the same thing. I, for one, advocate armed vigilante justice against bottom-feeders everywhere. What these corporate low-lifes need is to be drug out into the street, get beaten until they beg for death, and then set on fire and the remains left to rot as a warning to others of their ilk. Society as a whole is too caught up in the idea that they can sue for every perceived wrong - common sense and morality have taken a backseat to greed and corruption. If music cost $5 per CD and the artist got 4 of those 5 dollars, I'd be out there buying them left and right.

Re:Just admit you're breaking the law

[GypC]

...the drugs have to be tested to determine that they are drugs and not something that looks similiar.

If you try to sell a quarter ounce of oregano to someone and claim that it's weed IIRC, you'll go to jail for just as long... do they really even bother to test it?

I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature.

Re:Just admit you're breaking the law

[hburch]

Actually, the larger problem is that Napster is being used almost exclusively for illegal purposes.

If I give you a list of 350,000 of people who I believe are using the system illegaly, even if I have an error rate of 0.1%, that's 350 users. Napster knows that at least 340k of those users belong on that list, so they have to remove all of them, to give themselves any credance.

It's also easier and less costly for them to just remove them all and add back in the 1k people who claim innocence than try to find those people themselves.

Re:Just admit you're breaking the law

[stilwebm]

Exactly. This company expects to make its money from extracting settlements/compromises. They offer, for a fee and comission, to protect a record company's copyrights. They then do their "advanced search" (title search on napster in this case, or in some cases they have done web spider searches) for copyright infringments, offer to "settle" by cancelling the user's account, and then threaten legal action, and give them the option to purchase a legitimate copy of the music.

It is similar to a tactic the local cable company took a few years ago. After a buyout, they noticed the previous provider had not been enforcing illegal cable access. Thousands of people had stolen or purchased the filters to get premium channels (or removed filters to scramble one premium channel). Over 3,000 subscribers were mailed a bill for $500 (per illegal channel) to settle, or face potential legal action. Virtually everyone paid. Of course, the difference is that most Napster users will just create a new account and ignore it.

Re:Just admit you're breaking the law

[sjames]

If you try to sell a quarter ounce of oregano to someone and claim that it's weed IIRC, you'll go to jail for just as long... do they really even bother to test it?

True enough, but they have to show that you represented it. If the cops bust you and the buyer, and you both testify that you were selling oregano, you're not guilty. The same deal if you just hold out the bag and say 'you want to buy this?'. You didn't represent it as anything at all.

Re:Just admit you're breaking the law

[Rakarra]

I will not admit I am breaking any law- every single song I have downloaded on Napster I already owned.

Guess what? That's still illegal, look at the my.mp3.com case. Yes it's rediculous, yes it's a stupid decision, and yes, that makes downloading material for which you do not have permission illegal.

Not that that's necessarily a bad thing.. I've done it to, as a "try before you buy" measure. A FAQ for one of the bands I listen to suggested another band, so I downloaded a few mp3s of that band off of Napster. I liked them so much I soon had an order shipped off for 4 of that band's CDs. So I'd say there are cases in which this is justified.

Re:Just admit you're breaking the law

[Rakarra]

Well - let's do a little thought experiment. I've bought a song and rip it. I have it on my hard drive and say "Please, listen to this." I'm not charging anything for the person to listen to it. I could either invite 8 million people into my cramped apartment to listen to my stereo, or let them listen on their computers. I see no difference. You claim that one is legal (letting them listen at my home) but the other is illegal.

So - I claim that they are one and the same.

They aren't. Now, say if you had live365.com stream all your mp3's, that would be legal for a few reasons:

• You're not giving the music to them, you're letting them listen to it. There's a big difference. With Napster, you're giving users the music, like if you let them walk into your apartment and let them make tapes of your cds. Yes, there are ways to record the stream, but there are also ways of recording radio broadcasts, and that doesn't make broadcasting illegal.
• Shoutcast has payed lisencing fees, so you can legally broadcast your big-name labels.

I have no problem with the concept of paying an artist for his work - once - not every time I want to listen to it. Would you pay someone every time you fired up your copy of Quake? No?

Watch out! If Microsoft is successful, the idea of paying once for software is going to go out of style.

The RIAA has never sued on behalf of the artists, they've sued on behalf of the record companies. Just take a look at the "industry standard agreement" that basically makes artists fucking slaves to record companies.

By the way... what ever happened to Courtney Love's lawsuit asking for a share of the money when the RIAA won a major lawsuit a little while back? I haven't heard anything about it since it was filed.

And - the "music" sucks. I can listen to an entire Led Zeppelin album - every one of them (which I've purchased) - and it is all good. Some of today's albums have a single decent tune (or none at all) and the rest of the album sucks.

Well, basically if there's only one good song on the album, the artist sucks, no matter how good that song is. There are good and talented artists out there who can write really good music, but you'll rarely find them pushed by Tower or radio or record stores. Mediocrity sells these days -- in the US.

Re:Just admit you're breaking the law

[Dogun]

That's exactly it. Commercial software, centralized software, will always be a burden on the consumer; we will always want to think that we are entitled to use the software. Then one day, new management steps in and suddenly Windows only runs on Micro$oft's dos.
This is why people need to move to OpenNap and Gnutella, because these are safe. Free software is a right, because it's OUR software. So shut your trap and get on OpenNap and Gnutella, and watch the RIAA try to stop you.

Re:Just admit you're breaking the law

[rifter]

Well, they actually have been doing just that. Clearly you did not read this article. They are after OpenNap with a vengeance, so watch out...

Re:Just admit you're breaking the law

[Dogun]

My goodness, you're right. Thanks for pointing it out. Well, Gnutella's the way to go then, I'll switch my advocacy to STRAIGHT_GNUTELLA!

Re:Just admit you're breaking the law

[selomon_of_levi]

Its Gestapo dude, the Nazi secrect police, I'm ensitive to Nazi references, what they did shouldn't be taken in light or be made into catchphrases, I know you meant no harm and I know I'm off topic but thought that was important to say. out

Oh good grief

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anybody, especially the folks here at /., really not think that most napster users are innocent?

However much we hate the RIAA, the DMCA, and everything else, it is STILL ILLEGAL to copy music you didn't pay for.

And that's what most napster users do. Not all, but most.

-ciao

Re:Right

[Anonymous Coward]

What about people who use it to download live versions of songs that the artists explicitly permitted to be downloaded?

In case you were banned..

[Anonymous Coward]

napster leaves some registry entries in your computer when they ban you. even if you uninstall napster these entries stay. I don't know exactly where they are but when I got banned (by rage against the machine's management..) it wasn't too hard to find a site giving instructions on getting napster back up and running (I think it was www.fixnapster.com). Anyway, I have a static IP and can still connect so they don't ban based on that.. its just based on your account name and some reg. entries.

Re:In case you were banned..

[acceleriter]

I got banned (by rage against the machine's management.

How truly ironic.

Re:In case you were banned..

[jpetzold]

WOW! they realy did sell out!!

----

Re:In case you were banned..

[Anonymous Coward]

In case you can't figure out what registry entries it's reading, you can use this. http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/source/regmon.sh tml

Re:In case you were banned..

[crucini]

Apparently they felt rage against your machine. Sorry, couldn't resist.

Re:In case you were banned..

[cyber-vandal]

Do they have any way of banning a Gnapster user on Linux, apart from cancelling the account?

Re:In case you were banned..

[linzeal]

no

wierd ...

[taniwha]

apparently for $29 if I register with them they will send a lawyer's letter on my behalf to someone else .... I hope they remember to copyright those letters ..... otherwise one could just send yourself one and then resend it as much as I like for free ....

(somewhat) Seriously though .... maybe it's time to set up copyleft.net to send out lawyer's letters about GPL violations ..... :-)

Appearances are important

[Chuck Flynn]

I realize there's a certain culture in the geek demographic that says functionality is more important than form: just look at how open source software focuses on getting the job done and doesn't pay much attention at all to how ugly it is while doing so.

But it's important not just to behave legally. It's important not to give the appearance that you're behaving illegally. Much of law is based solely on appearances: the whole issue of "probable cause" is based on the police's perception of criminal wrongdoing, not the actuality of those criminal act. Usually the matter gets sorted out eventually, but only after a period of invasion and confiscation.

If you're a little more careful, you can avoid these sorts of surveillance. If you're doing wrong by illegally sharing IP, then why are you doing it out in the open? What kind of example does that set? And what can you possibly expect others to do on your behalf when you finally get caught as these did?

Maybe some education is in order, here. Geeks need to learn from marketers and lawyers that appearances do count for something in this world--maybe it should be a required course in all engineering and computer-science majors. The only alternative is learning it at the hands of the police. And nobody wants that.

we need an encryption based OS for HD's

[ruebarb]

I've decided to learn more programming and get my butt in gear. If I can't control what's on my personal computer, there's no point in having one.

What we need is something that encrypts all data with an OS that works off the front end and decrypts within software. This is more practical now that Processors have hundreds of MHZ to waste. (unless you're like me and running distributed.net on the side) -

For example, you burn your favorite CD to your computer as MP3 (as I do) - then you encrypt the files (like PGP disk) - and the Winamp player decrypts them in memory and plays them out.

No HD copy protection can target it, cause they don't recognize it encrypted. Napster can't ban it, cause you can't identify the file (except by name....but hell, you can get around that) - No one can take your DeCSS away, cause they don't know what it is, and they can't ask you to take down something they can't identify. No one can suopena your HD and look for their stuff.

Screw distributed and Freenet...Let's find ways to secure what we have instead of tucking tail and spamming newsgroups.

Re:we need an encryption based OS for HD's

[SquadBoy]

A better use of that knowledge would be to help these fine people . The problem is that they would of course be able to tell that the data is encrypted no real way to keep that knowledge from them but with Rubberhose they can never tell how much or if the have it all. A pretty sweet project.

Re:we need an encryption based OS for HD's

[um... Lucas]

Hold on... you cand do whatever yo uplease on you own computer. You can put whatever you'd like on it as well. For the 10 millionth time, they're just saying "don't let people copy files from you if you arent allowed to distribute the songs", and , unless you've a contract with a band, odds are you don't.

WHy does this keep turning into a civil liberties issue?

A problem with your OS is, if they can't find it, neither can you or the rest of the world which you'd like to share it with... And once there's a means available for "authorized" users to share files with you, there's the means for "unauthorized"/unwanted people checking what files are being shared as well...

Illegal search?

[Robber Baron]

Since I don't recall giving anyone from any of these "services" the right to search my hard drive, I wonder if there is a case for illegal search as they claim to have the "ability" to search my HD without my knowledge (or consent).

Re:Illegal search?

[Wesley Felter]

If you are sharing files using Napster, then you consented to let other people know what you are sharing.

Re:Illegal search?

[Sarcasmooo!]

As I mentioned in a previous reply, copyright.net used software it developed, not just napster.

Isn't copyright.net violating the Napster rules?

[ArticulateArne]

IIRC, Napster explicitly states that bots are not to be run on the service. Assuming that copyright.net doesn't have enough employees to do manual searches against 350,000 users, wouldn't they have had to employ a bot? Shouldn't their napster account have been removed? Why didn't the napster server pick up the bot activity?

Freenet

[evilviper]

I saw things like this comming and I see things getting far worse. That's why I've been hoping for FreeNet to get a 'search' feature for a long time now. Once that happens we'll have a Gnutella-esque system without scaleability problems, cacheing to prevent putting too much load on a single host, and no way to know who is downloading/uploading files. I just hope it happens SOON.

Re:nth Post!

[jpetzold]

yeah well I have the (n-1)th post so there!! :)

German link

[harmonica]

The German link is about the Swiss RIAA counterpart asking a site owner (1) to remove some MP3 files, (2) to pay ~ USD 500 and to (3) add a note that the site was closed by them.

However, the files are raw text and contain the string "aetsch", which means "gotcha" / "serves you right" / "see". So someone had them on...

Re:German link

[ti_dave]

Actually, with the umlaut unmapped on his keyboard, he'd be correct. That is the Anglicized version.

Thanks for playing!

ti_dave

Re:copyleft.net

[agallagh42]

you're a little late for that. Copyleft has been around for a long time, selling geekware.

Double Standard

[supabeast!]

"obviously they didn't listen to one million mp3 files to make sure they were actually such-and-such a song"

And why should they? Is there any evidence that Napster users commonly give files that are meant to be freely redistributed on the net new names?

Napster users sharing copyrighted music not meant for free online redistribution are violating the Napster terms of service. I guarantee you that if Microsoft was accused of violating the GPL, the Slashdot crew would certainly be throwing fits about that!

If the Slashdot editors do not like the way that the record companies are handling online music, they should be working to promote change. They could, for instance post about Prince's online music distribution, the NPG Music Club, or point out Amazon's new mp3 distribution site.

Instead they just bitch and groan about the big evil record companies trying to shut down Napster, and people trying to ban the Napster users who are stealing from musicians.
No wonder the record companies are the ones winning this war.

Re:Double Standard

[msodfjsalfhlskdhf]

It is also very much against the Napster TOS to run bots on their service, which is something this group almost certainly did to gather the info on these 350000 users.

====
If all comedy comes out of tragedy, let the killing begin...

Re:Double Standard

[supabeast!]

Very good point! Perhaps Napster should spell that out in their TOS with details and sue. Damned if that wouldn't be hilarious!

Re:Double Standard

[supabeast!]

"BECAUSE IT'S THE LAW"

And what law would that be? I was not aware that corporations requesting that Napster ban users for offering copyrighted music requires absolute proof. Perhaps you are, in fact, referring to laws that restrict the govenment of the united states, and not the corporations found within.

This is not harassment, it is a legitimate application of Napster's terms of service.

Re:Double Standard

[msodfjsalfhlskdhf]

It's on the welcome screen whenever you open up napster, usually in the last row of info/updates.

====
If all comedy comes out of tragedy, let the killing begin...

Well, if your name is...

[Perianwyr Stormcrow]

"CATS" and you live in "ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US", I guess I just gave away your user information.

--Perianwyr Stormcrow

Re:Well, if your name is...

[jamiefaye]

Actually, the also have a "license agreement" you have to click to accept, which is hard to read but if you do struggle through it you agree not to lie about who you are.

While I doubt they would swoop down on me for joining the chorus of bogus noise, they would have my IP number now associated with something that looks like a confession. If I come in through an anonomizer, then they can tell I did not come in from the site I was caught sharing from and could just refuse to turn my Napster back on.

I imagine the long-term strategy here is to make people with something to lose, like a business, house. or savings, become scared about getting nailed in a lawsuit. This would push file sharing into regulated areas like universitys or onto judgement-proof people likely to have lower bandwidth connections.

Re:Well, if your name is...

[HydroCarbon10]

ALL YOUR DEAD HORSE ARE BELONG TO US!

*this is here to throw of the lameness filter*

From the radio...

[SuperJ]

I heard on WTOP this morning that copyright.net was going after Napster users who downloaded the music of Roy Orbison. The one issue is that Roy Orbison (The Big Bopper) passed away a long time ago. I don't think the record company/his estate is making very much money off of CD sales.

Re:From the radio...

[FigBugDeux]

Dude, Roy Orbison isn't the Big Bopper, the Big Bopper was Jiles Perry Richardson. I'm pretty sure Roy is still alive.

Re:From the radio...

[Mononoke]

Roy was not the Big Bopper. He did pass away a few years ago, however. No spectacular headline-grabbing plane crash.

I don't think the record company/his estate is making very much money off of CD sales.

Pretty Woman still makes quite a bit of money for the estate, thanks to Van Halen's (and a few other) cover version.

--

How is possessing an .mp3 a crime?

[stretch_jc]

Since when is it a copyright violation to possess mp3's of cd's I own? I can see users getting banned for downloading copyrighted content, but if I simply checkthe box to search my hard drive, napter automatically shares every mp3 on my drive, including legitimate mp3's created from my own cd's. I don't see how this is a violation of copyright law, as having these mp3's is covered by fair use.

Saving people the trouble:

[Wakko Warner]

[wakko@wakko] 8:59:55pm ~> nmap www.copyright.net

Starting nmap V. 2.12 by Fyodor (fyodor@dhp.com, www.insecure.org/nmap/)
Interesting ports on 83-216.205.94.dellhost.com (216.205.94.83):
Port State Protocol Service
13 open tcp daytime
21 open tcp ftp
25 open tcp smtp
37 open tcp time
80 open tcp http
111 open tcp sunrpc
135 open tcp loc-srv
199 open tcp smux
443 open tcp https
465 open tcp smtps
1032 open tcp iad3
1433 open tcp ms-sql-s
5631 open tcp pcanywhere
5800 open tcp vnc
6666 filtered tcp irc-serv
6667 filtered tcp irc
6668 filtered tcp irc
65301 open tcp pcanywhere

Have a blast.

--
* CmdrTaco is an idiot.

Re:Saving people the trouble:

[acceleriter]

Seems that a boycott against Dell is in order, given that they're providing hosting services to these slime.

Re:Saving people the trouble:

[BlueGecko]

Please, don't destroy the box. That'd just give us bad rap. If, on the other hand, hidden links to DeCSS showed up on their homepage...

Re:Saving people the trouble:

[Anonymous Admin]

Who needs napster, They were kind enough to provide an IRC server for DCC trading.

Re:Saving people the trouble:

[indiigo]

Think someone took your advice... it's down... ;0

Re:Saving people the trouble:

[mosch]

and the admins over there should really read MS99-025. You'd think they wouldn't want to let people execute arbitrary code with admin privileges.

--
"Don't trolls get tired?"

OT: origin of the quote in Chuck Flynn's sig

[xdc]

Sorry for the off-topic post, but...

Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.

This quote in your signature, which you attribute to "anonymous"... I believe John F. Kennedy said that. (If the saying predates JFK, then I don't know its origin.)

Re:OT: origin of the quote in Chuck Flynn's sig

[Pinball Wizard]

even his sig is a troll. Its gotten at least 10 replies and 1 parody of it.

Re:Katy!

[Aunt Mable]

"obviously they didn't listen to one million mp3 files to make sure they were actually such-and-such a song, that would take years"

You don't have a clue what method they used and your logic is screwed. This following method would work. I could check one million mp3 files to a fairly accurate degree within only a day or two.

1. Download an mp3 with a metallica related name in the title (provided I had the bandwidth).

2. Listen to it and evaluate whether it's a genuine metallica song (and not a bootleg, which they allow). If it a genuine copy (we'll call this the master copy) then mark the user as having a copy of a metallica song and go to step 3.

3. Automise the following process: search by the filename of your master copy. Filter out those that don't have the same filesize and review these mp3 at step 2. Download a couple of KB from files that remain and if it matches with your master copy you can be pretty sure it's the same so mark that person as having a copy of a Metallica song.

I'm not saying that what Metallica did was right - but this process would be a good way of tracking copies of their songs - and it would be an exponential process. The more songs you check the more you can accurately mark off as being copies.

-- Eat your greens or I'll hit you!

once again... anonymous p2p proxies

[Travoltus]

I'll say this until I'm blue in the face.
Why hasn't anyone tried putting up anonymous p2p proxies yet? It would make it impossible for these snoop programs to find your IP address.

End of problem!
========================
63,000 bugs in the code, 63,000 bugs,
ya get 1 whacked with a service pack,

Translation to English

[SirFlakey]

Translation:

MP3-Removal mistake at the Swiss Music Association (sf: basically the Swiss form of the RIAA)

The Swiss International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI)has missed the joke on a web site when it issued a letter formed like a removal request.

According to this letter the website had offered MP3's for download. In the letter sent to the webmaster Matthias Leisi, the IFPI had demanded to have the MP3's removed and a notice ("This Site is closed by IFPI Switzerland...") to be added to each page on the website.

In addition he was asked to pay a penalty of 500 Franken (sf: approx 300 US dollars) plus an additional 200 Franken for the investigation costs.

Alas, it appears the people responsible for the "investigation" did not put in much effort. If they had, they would surely have found out that the offending music files were not in fact real MP3 files but text files containing the word "*aetsch*" (sf: Got'ya, psych).

--
This is translated to be accurate to content and "style" not necessarily sentence structure. There are likely to be a few grammatical errors and spellings mistakes in there.


--

Re:Translation to English

[MeanGene]

The real problem is that this "gross mistake" will never make it to the mainstream media. We can laugh all we want, but unless the general public appreciates the complexity of the problem - RIAA will have the last laugh.

By the way, if this ever gets to a court, copyright.net will have a hot potato on their hands - having to choose between a frivolous lawsuit and not performing the "due diligence" work.

Re:Translation to English

[Anonymous Coward]

Ahhh.. Everyone do this.. It takes 30 seconds to put up such a web page. Nothing pretty.. Just a bunch of text files with a .mp3 extension.. it's not hard. Put meta tags with things like pirate free music and the like... Nothing wrong with it, you're not breaking any law.

Raise a big piss about it if they send you a letter. Forward copies to your local newspaper, and anyone else you think will listen.

Then, Just to be a jerk, use spam as a tool, spam people with this information.. And with the DeCSS code. Force people to see the side of the story. There's nothing illegal about being a jerk... My page is up and I'm typing up my bulk e-mail now.

And I like Rage Against The Machines idea (Which probably isn't theres, but I know it isn't mine, so I ain't takin credit for it) of writing your messages on money... Spend it like a good little sheep.. baaaaa...

Re:Translation to English

[cyberdonny]

They could still sue for trademark infringements, for naming the files after songs which they were not

Re:Translation to English

[AdeBaumann]

I think that'll be difficult. After all, you could then go and sue all people who name music reviews after the album they're reviewing...

...oops... didn't want to give anybody any ideas!

Re:Translation to English

[Fizzlewhiff]

I'd send them a ziplock bag containing 500 Frankenberries if I were him.

Re:Well, so what?

[NeMon'ess]

Right, but unless something has changed, users banned by Metallica can go to Napster.com and fill out a form declaring they did not have any Metallica songs. If this person ever gets hauled into court, which won't happen, he can use this defense.

Re:Well, so what?

[sPaKr]

I hole hartly disagree. This proves that the lawenforcement can not be trusted to fire the weapon in safely. Rather it proves that law enforcement choosed to shoot first then ask questions, rather when you choose to be part of law enforcement team you must go the further to prove that your actions are justified, not implied. I was wondering when the napster arguement would finally discover that they have no way to *PROVE* those songs are what they say they are. Just becouse some band releases a song Im not allowed to name a file on my computer by a similar name? What if I wrote an essay for school about Metallica? I can not title the document file metallica.doc ? I suspect this software would hold me in violation. Name doenst prove content. Maybe people should remember you cant judge a book by its cover.

ps. no one has commented on dilution. If setup millions of fake accounts with bogus metallica songs napster will linke to them all, then we allow the users to filter them out with new patened audio -> orgranic translation devices, Hide the Trees' in a forrest

Whose side are we on?

[tbo]

Some people (*cough*Slashdot editors*cough*) seem to be waffling on this whole copyright issue.

When company X goes after Napster, they complain that Napster isn't breaking any laws--only some of the users are. "Napster shouldn't be responsible for its users' actions," is the message we get.

When company Y goes after Napster users, they complain that they shouldn't be going after individual users, and should stick to the big fish to avoid pissing off consumers. "'Sharing' by individual users isn't a threat--it's commercial pirates the industry has to worry about," is what we hear in this case. These people also seem to think it's unfair to use technology to enforce copyright, but perfectly reasonable to use it to violate copyright.

So, which is it? Who should the RIAA prosecute: users or Napster? Or is the message that we should we get rid of copyright altogether? If so, what will replace it?

Let me rebut some common responses before they happen:

Most artists don't make money anyway!
Maybe so, but the possibility of "going big" motivates a lot of them. Then there's the fact that they need to eat and pay for recording studio time, etc. If they have to work a second job to support themselves, they'll have less time to produce music (which is clearly inefficient, if you know anything about economics).

The labels just produce crap like Britney Spears and Backstreet Boys
We think Britney and Backstreet are crap because we're not pre-teen girls. I bet they think our music sucks, too. You can get all snobish if you want, but the truth is that labels, being businesses, produce what consumers want. If consumers want crap, that's what they get, and lots of it. Sure, some good indie bands get missed, but a lot of others make it, and the ones that don't probably appeal to too small an audience to go big-time... If there were really this huge, untapped market for "good" music, then some new label would come along and clean up.

Music labels already rip off artists
True, the system is broken, but it at least gives some artists some money. It's better than nothing, and, until you come up with a better system, it's the only game in town.

But I do have a better system! It's the Street Performer Protocol
The SPP is flawed for many reasons. Even having payments held in escrow upon condition of delivery of the work doesn't solve most of them. The most obvious of these flaws is the free rider problem. Essentially, it's in your best interest to let others pay, and not pay yourself, since you'll thereby save money and gain the same benefit. It's all basic economics, but I'll rehash a bit of it here: People make decisions based on marginal gain and cost. If you "pay" under the SPP, you have only a very small chance of actually influencing the outcome, whereas you do have a significant cost (the amount paid). Fundamentally, without copyright and other forms of protection, intellectual property becomes a public good--it is neither excludable nor rival. Private industry nearly always underproduces public goods, without some form of intervention.

To see SPP failing in action, look at what happened to Stephen King. After the novelty wore off, not enough people paid. Fortunately, King released the next installment anyway.

As another example of a failure of SPP, why don't we all voluntarily donate money to the government to pay off the debt? We'd all benefit from it. Strangely, it's not happening. The only way the debt gets paid off is through taxes, which are a way of ensuring that everyone pays in some semi-fair fashion.

I'm not going to try to condense an entire economics course here, but I will recommend a book on the subject that's funny and happens also to be educational: Eat the Rich by P.J. O'Rourke.

I hope this provokes an intelligent debate, not a flame-fest. If you want to rebut my argument, please do, but please stay clear of ad hominem attacks. Obviously, I do have some bias, but I also recognize that the future of intellectual property poses a huge challenge, and one that nobody has solved. Any constructive input is welcome...

Re:Whose side are we on?

[Mononoke]

I agree with everything you said, but I'd like to clarify one thing...

Music labels already rip off artists
True, the system is broken, but it at least gives some artists some money. It's better than nothing, and, until you come up with a bettersystem, it's the only game in town.

Minor detail: The labels loan the artists some money--Every dollar spent on recording, packaging, promotion, distribution, plus all touring costs, comes out of the artist's pocket. However, since most artists don't start out rich, the label loans them money against future earnings (ie: royalties), earnings that don't appear when the artist's works are freely traded.

Once it's all said and done, the only people losing out due to MP3 trading are the very people who should be supported by their audience: The artists and creators of the music.

--

Re:Whose side are we on?

[interiot]

I sometimes wish Slashdotters would come out of the closet and say what they mean.

If you secretly wish that copyrights didn't exist, then say so, don't skirt around the issue. If we express our ideas directly and discuss how we can influence society to move towards those goals, I think we would be more productive, rather than railing against somewhat perhipheral issues.

(The word "Slashdoters" can be optionally replaced with "CmdrTaco & friends")
--

Re:Whose side are we on?

[tbo]

Minor detail: The labels loan the artists some money--Every dollar spent on recording, packaging, promotion, distribution, plus all touring costs, comes out of the artist's pocket.

Good point, but your average contract is more than that. Not only do the artists have to pay back the "loan", but they lose ownership of their works, and they only get a small cut of the profit. If labels just functioned as a combination of consultant/bank/recording studio, then artists would only have to pay back these costs (plus interest), and would keep all the rest of the profits. Unfortunately, that ain't how it works.

Re:Whose side are we on?

[Ben Hutchings]

The typical recording contract for a new artist seems to be somewhere between a loan and an investment (venture capital) from the studio, yet worse than either (from the point of view of the artist). As far as I can see, the studios currently have enough control over distribution that artists are forced to agree to these inequitable terms if they are to have a chance of achieving the level of distribution needed to make a decent income. On the other hand maybe artists just aren't attractive investments.

Re:Whose side are we on?

[Popocatepetl]

"If there were really this huge, untapped market for "good" music, then some new label would come along and clean up."

You make it sound like every good business plan is already in existence. I wonder why anyone would bother starting a new business...

Re:Whose side are we on?

[Trepalium]

And to make things worse, many contracts state that the record company gets ownership of all albums produced afterwards (either a number of albums or a number of years). If you TRY to get a better deal, they can sue you for breach of contract. The system is crooked and rotten to the core. Unless you have a lawyer on your side (which the record companies will, of course, try to discourage), and your music is extremely popular, you will probably get screwed.

Re:Whose side are we on?

[robl]

Actually, I really hate people like you. Cause you obviously haven't been reading or participating the whole debate from start to finish. So instead you set your flame throwers to "frag" and point and shoot wildly aiming at various targets -- slashdot editors, napster users, mp3 enthusiasts. AND then you say, "Oh... let's not start a flame fest here."

The whole argument the *cough*Slashdot editors*cough* have been saying is that THE RIAA SHOULD NOT BE PROSECUTING ANYBODY. Jesus, where the hell have you been? In fact, you *sound* like you want people prosecuted. And apparently it's only okay to have a civil discussion with you as long as somebody *is* prosecuted.

The arguments you have paid attention to only bring to light the arguments you have blatantly ignored. Like, should we really be creating artificial scarcity, here? Do we really want the RIAA privacy-invasion scan on our hard drives? What about Fair Use? Remember "Fair Use?" You do, don't you?

Now, here's the argument you really missed. If I kick you in the teeth, I bet you wouldn't want to buy a cd from me. Boy howdy, did you miss it. Let's face it, if you really want to sell your good on an open market, prosecuting the primary users who buy your goods by the millions just ain't the way to do it.

Re:Whose side are we on?

[tbo]

Actually, I really hate people like you

Thank you for not resorting to ad hominem attacks. I appreciate it. It's nice to have such a high level of discussion.

The arguments you have paid attention to only bring to light the arguments you have blatantly ignored. Like, should we really be creating artificial scarcity, here?

You obviously missed my whole discussion of public goods, and the reason for copyright. Go back and re-read my post. It's a subtle argument, and I do presuppose some knowledge of economics and economist jargon, for which I apologize.

Do we really want the RIAA privacy-invasion scan on our hard drives? What about Fair Use? Remember "Fair Use?" You do, don't you?

Privacy-invasion scan? What the hell are you talking about? If you share your MP3s via Napster, you've obviously given permission for people to look at them. Fair use doesn't apply to Napster--at best, Napster is an infringing use for which no criminal charges can be laid (under Home Recording Act, or whatever).

THE RIAA SHOULD NOT BE PROSECUTING ANYBODY

In other words, you don't believe in copyright. You'll notice (if you re-read my original post) that I mention and discuss this viewpoint.

Let's face it, if you really want to sell your good on an open market, prosecuting the primary users who buy your goods by the millions just ain't the way to do it.

Last I checked, they're prosecuting Napster users, not those who are legitimately buying CDs in stores. If what the RIAA is doing is really a bad business decision, then they'll suffer for it.

Re:Whose side are we on?

[Eccles]

As far as I can see, the studios currently have enough control over distribution

You use the record company's recording facilities, video producers, etc. If you want shelf space at major retailers, you have to pay -- especially for shelf end positions.

Read Courtney Love's bit on the rape of musicians, it's on Salon. Whatever you may think of copyrights in general, the RIAA has set up a monopolistic system that makes anything Microsoft has done seem amateurish.

Re:Whose side are we on?

[robl]

BOY HOWDY did you miss my main argument.
You can pick and choose the ones you want to argue with, fine. But in all seriousness, you really need to tend to all the issues I mentioned. (I'll give you a hint, it includes the phrase "Boy Howdy.")

This goes to show how much you are willing to distort the truth as well as other's arguments to support your own propaganda. For future reference ,the line I wrote "THE RIAA SHOULD NOT BE PROSECUTING ANYBODY" belongs above "Do we really want the RIAA privacy-invasion scan on our hard drives."

I anxiously await your reply.

Re:Whose side are we on?

[masq]

>Who should the RIAA prosecute: users or Napster? Neither. If the RIAA were at all realistic, they'd see this kind of file swapping as an opportunity, like radio or whatever. I know, I know, radio generates revenue by ads, blah blah, I've never paid anything to listen to radio. The difference is that Napster / MP3 allows users CONTROL

Re:Whose side are we on?

[bluecalix]

You make some solid points, but your argument is clouded by some misunderstanding of how things actually work in the music biz. OLD DAYS: Band X makes demo, plays around city, gets some interest from label. Label throws large amounts of money at them to impress them, which they spend foolishly. Band finishes record that they spend way to much on. Label encourages them to spend too much money. Label pays INDIES (industry term form independant something or other - basically modern middleman in payola scheme) large sums to play songs. Pays large chains to feature album prominently. Pays for massive advertising. Pays for street team activities (posters and flyers, free tape handouts, etc). Pays for executives (and their assistants) to fly around and talk up band or see them play as well as their weekly salaries. Band rings up massive recoupable account with label (recoupable accounts have to paid off before the band sees any money from record sales). Label offers band, since this is their first record, only meager split of cd sales (lucky to get 1$ per cd). Label keeps copyright of music. Label has asay in how music is used.That 'less than $1 per cd' then has to go and pay off the massive moneis spent (and continuing to be spent). Majority of that money is being used to prop up bloated record company staff and pay off debts incurred from others band that have been written off. Band tours. Makes money to eat. Sells T Shirts. Buys nice house. When band tries to get better split, label decides it's easier (in most cases) to just try a new batch of one hit wonders, the profit margins for them are higher. NEW WAY: Band writes material and records on their home computer. Finds web scenes devoted to their type of music. Puts music out there for fans of the genre to listen to. If popular, people talk them up. if not, musicians keep day job. band has website. sells cds to hardcore fans (hardcore fans will always want to buy cd's to collect the actual artifact - just look on ebay, maybe for the booklets, maybe for the signed pictures the band includes, whatever). makes 90 per cent profit on cds vs less than 5 and can sell them for less than cahin stores, so hardcore fan wins as well. bands starts touring in regions where people like them. band sells more cds. New model forces musicians to build over time, but has added benefit of lengthening sustainable career for many artists. band eats, buys nice house, still has a job in a year (and complete control and ownership). Also, as a side note: In the 'for once having a large crappy ISP pays off department': ``We don't see it as our responsibility, or even our jurisdiction, to police what's on our members' hard drives,'' said Kurt Rahn, a spokesman for Earthlink in Atlanta. ``So sending us letters isn't going to do any good.''

Re:Whose side are we on?

[masq]

Sorry, the cat hit submit.

Here's what I was ranting.

>Who should the RIAA prosecute: users or Napster?

Neither. If the RIAA were at all realistic, they'd see this kind of file swapping as an opportunity, like radio or whatever. I know, I know, radio generates revenue by ads, blah blah.

I've never paid anything to listen to radio. The difference is that Napster / MP3 allows users CONTROL over what they listen to. Despite the untoward death of good music commercially, album sales are sky-high. Napster is opening people up to new and old music that DOESN'T suck. I am one of the many who say "I've bought a million CD's because of MP3's" - none which I've ever seen a video for, or heard on the radio.

However, Napster is theoretically for legitimate (legal) music swapping. What if the RIAA's true intent is not to stifle the swapping of pirated MP3's, as everyone can see Napster actually increases sales, but to control the spread of the independent artists, who are not giving anything back to the mainstream music industry?

Say "Purple Floyd" was a little unsigned band making MP3's on their Protools Mac studio. If they were to succeed, the record industry would not be required any longer, as Floyd proved it could be done without them, right? Is this what they're really afraid of? Not the loss of sales (there isn't any), but rather the loss of control? If Floyd was an independent, I'd ditch my Britney forever and say goodbye to big label records, just like I said goodbye to big-label software (guess who?)

Anyway, at any rate, the big companies will NEVER stop piracy; they should embrace the idea of MP3 sharing as a way of creating excitement for a product, much like a movie trailer. The trailers I get off Apples Quicktime website are a MAJOR factor in what I see every weekend.

Sorry again for Mister Binkles hitting submit prematurely.

Re:Whose side are we on?

[Nightpaw]

If you kick me in the teeth and you were the only person in the world selling CDs, boy howdy I'd buy CDs from you. And I'd complain about it on Slashdot a lot. But that's all.

Re:Whose side are we on?

[Phil Gregory]

To see SPP failing in action, look at what happened to Stephen King. After the novelty wore off, not enough people paid. Fortunately, King released the next installment anyway.

Stephen King was not using the SPP. The SPP calls for a couple things that Stephen King didn't do. First, in the SPP, there is a target dollar amount that must be reached in order for the work to be released. Stephen King set a limit that a certain percentage of the downloaded copies must be paid for. The SPP's approach seems more reasonable to me, as people could pay an amount proportional to how much they think they would value the result. Also, release is not dependent on some percentage of the consumers, but on a preset amount that (presumably) the artist thought was reasonable.

Secondly, the SPP specifies that the money contributed by consumers be held in escrow and, if the set amount of money is not received in a prespecified amount of time, the money is returned to the contributors. Stephen King was not giving refunds in the event of a non-release of a poriot of the book. The escrow is important, because it assures the contributors that their money will not be wasted if nothing is released.

So, please don't point to Stephen King as a failure of the Street Performer Protocol. Perhaps the SPP isn't viable, but I don't know of any instances of it actually being tested. In the absence of any evidence, it seems to me that the protocol would work, and I would be willing to participate if an artist whose works I liked released those works via the SPP.

--Phil (As I listen to mp3s ripped from CDs owned by me...)

Re:Whose side are we on?

[Xn]

>> Minor detail: The labels loan the artists some money--Every dollar spent on recording,
>> packaging, promotion, distribution, plus all touring costs, comes out of the artist's pocket.

Good point, but your average contract is more than that. Not only do the artists have to pay back the "loan", but they lose ownership of their works, and they only get a small cut of the profit. If labels just functioned as a combination of consultant/bank/recording studio, then artists would only have to pay back these costs (plus interest), and would keep all the rest of the profits. Unfortunately, that ain't how it works.

an artist is free to go to a bank to try to get a loan to record and promote their albums, but the risk of the artist failing is rather high so the bank is unlikely to write the loan. the potential return on investment would have to be a lot higher than the interest for them to consider writing the loan, and banks aren't in high risk investment business. they also don't have the right people on staff to evaluate the investment. so record companies exist.

Re:Whose side are we on?

[Trinition]

The labels just produce crap like Britney Spears and Backstreet Boys
We think Britney and Backstreet are crap because we're not pre-teen girls. I bet they think our music sucks, too. You can get all snobish if you want, but the truth is that labels, being businesses, produce what consumers want. If consumers want crap, that's what they get, and lots of it. Sure, some good indie bands get missed, but a lot of others make it, and the ones that don't probably appeal to too small an audience to go big-time... If there were really this huge, untapped market for "good" music, then some new label would come along and clean up.

I tend to disagree here. I don't think they soley produce what the public wants. I think its more along the line of controlling what we can have in a trust-like manner, and them bombarding us with it (radio play, marketing, media hype, etc.) until we're brainwashed into liking it. What's more, I think they've also figured out that those tactics work on younger people better than old.

Of course, all of that can be explained away as teenage rebelliousness and normal business practices. I figure that the reality of what happens is somewhere inbetween. Its certainly not just following market demand though, they're pushing it. I doubt anyone in their customer base said "gee, I wish I could have a blonde, big breasted, omigawd girl who covers up her lack of musical talent with ridiculous coreographing!".

Music labels already rip off artists
True, the system is broken, but it at least gives some artists some money. It's better than nothing, and, until you come up with a better system, it's the only game in town.

Again, someone did try to come up with another system. But in one way or another, the RIAA members have a stranglehold on the whole darn thing. Its turned into a industry where you have to be able to refine, mass produce and market your music, not just put your MP3s on a website.

So its not so much that its all we have because no one else has tried, but its all we have because of the high cost of entry. Startup labels tend to be gobbled up, or indirectly owned by, the big labels.

Re:Whose side are we on?

[elflord]

Why ? Because if the existing record companies are as inefficient as the slashbots claim, then someone who is more efficient could make a killing in the industry. That's why.

Re:Whose side are we on?

[elflord]

It's funny how the SPP is untested. I wonder why ? Perhaps it's because the SPP is a model that everyone wants others to use, but they don't want to use it themselves. I mean, would you accept a consulting job where your clients anonymously tipped you out of "good will" when they "felt like it" ? Face it, no one's tested it because no one is stupid enough to want to use it, though there are some who are malicious enough to wish it upon others.

Re:Whose side are we on?

[grahamm]

If you want shelf space at major retailers, you have to pay -- especially for shelf end positions.

Should the retailer's shelf space not be paid for by the profits from selling the goods on those shelves?

Re:Whose side are we on?

[Sarcasmooo!]

A few points: 1. Labels use focus groups to build and market not just crap, but crap that is designed specifically to latch on to impressionable young people. BSB and the like are the equivalent of an attack on kids in America -- call it extreme, but any /.'er understands the greed of this industry. They've created a fad that no parent in the country can protect their child from, short of locking them in their room without a TV or radio. Their friends do it, the 'cool kids' on MTV do it, and the music itself portrays attractive young people 'just like you' that are simply here to remind your kid to fit in, wear the latest GAP fashions, and drink lots of pepsi. 2. NO ONE should be resigned to paying record labels just to pay artists. I don't want to bankrupt a good band anymore than you do, but the RIAA's time has come. Record labels take 90% profits for providing a non-existant service; publicity and distribution in an internet age, where any talented individual can (on their own merits) gain exposure and distribute their own work.

Re:Whose side are we on?

[Miragejp]

"The labels just produce crap like Britney Spears and Backstreet Boys We think Britney and Backstreet are crap because we're not pre-teen girls. I bet they think our music sucks, too. You can get all snobish if you want, but the truth is that labels, being businesses, produce what consumers want. If consumers want crap, that's what they get, and lots of it."

Allow me to rebut - I'm not a fucking "consumer" - I'm a "citizen" with all the rights and priviledges (as well as responsibilites) protected by the full force of the U.S. Constitution. Something that the corporations always ignore - I'm not an exploitable resource who should just take their forced pablum. The reason the pre-teens "like" Britny Spears is that they have been force-fed that crap. Record Companies don't re-release old music. How many (pre)teens have every heard of groups such as Jan and Dean, The Spaniels, The Temptations, Vito & the Salutations, or even Black Sabbath or The Who?

Re:Whose side are we on?

[mvdwege]

Most artists don't make money anyway! Maybe so, but the possibility of "going big" motivates a lot of them.

&ltflamebait&gt

Excuse me?! Just because a bunch of snotty kids in a garage want to become millionaires the rest of society has to live with restricted fair use rights and crap like CPRM?

&lt/flamebait&gt

Seriously, this is exactly the point. It has already been pointed out that artists are being screwed by the RIAA as well, so I won't go into that issue. There is however something else at stake here.

The problem is an imbalance of power: the media companies have the power to dictate contract terms, and the power to influence legislation to protect their business model. However, the way they have chosen to exercise that power is harmful to society as a whole, by restricting certain rights and freedoms.

So the question remains: why should we all suffer injustice in order to protect a few?

Mart

Re:Whose side are we on?

[GypC]

--Phil (As I listen to mp3s ripped from CDs owned by me...)

A good way to make your music sound worse without as much time-wasting effort as ripping CDs is to merely punch holes in the little paper cones in your speakers... this gives you that marvelous clipping and compression on all your sounds, not just mp3s.

I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature.

Re:Whose side are we on?

[sh00z]

It's funny how the SPP is untested.

BZZZT. Thanks for playing. An easy counter-example, even keeping with the horror novelist theme of the parent, is Douglas Clegg. He has released two books for free. One was published electronically first, then in paper form. The other book reversed the order.

The fact that he hasn't starved to death yet is encouraging. The page for the ebook Purity incluses the following quote: "tips are appreciated -- in the form of going to your local bookstore and asking for Douglas Clegg novels." I would imagine that the fan base expansion created by these two freebies is generating increased sales of his other work, or he wouldn't have kept this up for over a year.

(IANA publisher shill. I subscribed to Naomi, but didn't much care for it.)

Re:Whose side are we on?

[elflord]

The fact that he hasn't starved to death yet is encouraging.

Maybe he's got a day job, where he's not payed under the SPP (-;

Re:Whose side are we on?

[mikej]

Music labels already rip off artists
True, the system is broken, but it at least gives some artists some money. It's better than nothing, and, until you come up with a better system, it's the only game in town.

Ok, how about this: A friend of mine has a CD that I like. I copy that CD, and send a $10 money order to the artist's contact address. Enclosed with the money order is a note thanking them for making music that I like, and asking that they continue to do so.

The problem, obviously, is that I'm not paying the owner of the music. That's what frustrates me, even though I don't possess a single copy of any Itellectual property (that I know of) that I havn't paid for. I think Napster is a crock: As a business, it's a late-in-the-game tack-on to the filesharing software that Fanning wrote for fun. Napster's service is a wonderful thing, and has considerably greater benefit for every entity involved with music than the current system, with the notable exception of the distribution monopolists that extort ownership from the content creators.

Excuse the ramble, by the way.

Re:Right-o

[divec]

The only viable use of Napster is to illegally obtain copyrighted music

What about live stuff, which is usually freely distributable (including Metallica's)? What about stuff you've already bought on vinyl or cassette? What about the many thousands of parody tracks available? (e.g. "Lasagne", a take-off of "La Bamba") Hell, what about "explicit__groaning__noises.mp3"?

This is only half right

[Skuld-Chan]

One thing that still gets me about the DMCA is how it circumvents the US Constitution and skips the section called "criminal rights" (thats the 4th, 5th and 6th ammendments...) - due process, right to an attorney, unwarrented search and seizures might apply here. Even if you can search a person's hard-drive wihtout the users permission or a warrent - does that mean you can use it as evidence against someone? And does that mean a legal agency can annouce you guilty as charged without a trial or legal representation? And even better - does that mean a legal agency can enforce laws (IE banning you off your ISP or disconnecting your phone or whatever). Personally I don't think so.

On the other side I'm kinda hoping that the RIAA shoots themselves in the foot (in the sense that napster probably boosts CD sales) and forces napster to filter out "illegal" mp3's - because then it will be a boon to the vastly under-rated unsigned artist community (who - if you know who you're looking for are really quite good)

Re:This is only half right

[rabidcow]

First off, internet access is a priveledge, not a right. Your ISP probably has a clause in the agreement that states they are able to terminate your service for any or no reason.

Secondly, I suspect there is no actual legal work going on here, just the threat of legal work. The ISP doesn't want to get into some big costly legal battle over a small percentage of their customers.

The data available to the world on your hard drive can probably be used against you as evidence because it is publicly visible. IANAL, but I seem to remember this from someplace. No warrent is needed if you keep your cocaine at the edge of your driveway with a big sign saying "come and get it."

Re:This is only half right

[pjrc]

... unwarrented search and seizures might apply here. Even if you can search a person's hard-drive wihtout the users permission or a warrent

But they're not searching user's hard drives, they're searching a publically visible list of file names. They can even download some or all of the files, as the user is offering them for public downloading by sharing them.

It's like claiming someone would need a search warrant to read my public web pages. How silly is that?

does that mean you can use it as evidence against someone?

Court cases can introduce evidence which was publically published material. There's no rule that says evidence need be obtained with a warrant for search, only evidence collected by searching private property requires warrant. There are rules of the way evidence must be handled, to be admissible in court. Of course, there is no court case in this example.

And even better - does that mean a legal agency can enforce laws (IE banning you off your ISP or disconnecting your phone or whatever). Personally I don't think so.

They're not enforcing a law and charging you with a crime. They're requesting that Napster remove your account. Napster's service agreement states that Napster may terminate your account if they believe you have violated the terms of the agreement, which includes not distributing copyrighted material. Most ISPs have similar terms and conditions in their terms of service, which you agree to when you sign up.

Law enforcement and due process don't enter into it. Nobody is being charged with a crime... Napster is just excersizing their rights as spelled out in the service agreement. The agreement allows Napster to make the determination at their sole discression. Due process isn't part of the agreement between Napster and its users. Most ISPs allow themselves sole discression as well. In the case of an ISP, where you pay real money, there is the question of wether you are due a refund for any unused time that you're already paid for. In the case of Napster, you paid nothing.

On the other side I'm kinda hoping that ... forces napster to filter out "illegal" mp3's - because then it will be a boon to the vastly under-rated unsigned artist community

If it helps unsigned artists remains to be seen, but I hope it will.

Re:This is only half right

[bludstone]

shouldnt you be debugging the yggdrasil? ^_-

Re:This is only half right

[crucini]

I'm not defending the MPAA/RIAA or their flunkeys, and I hope they all choke. Having said that, the rhetoric about 'searching a person's hard drive' is utter nonsense. If you run a server on a machine connected to the internet, you're giving permission for people to connect to that server. You, the sysadmin, have complete control over who is allowed to connect: what domains, what IP ranges, what authentication mechanisms. You have absolutely no right to punish someone for connecting to a server you've set up.
The problem is not that the IP flunkeys looked at your openly published list of MP3's. The problem is that a) they have the effective power to censor and b) they are lazily leaping to conclusions and c) they are not being appropriately punished for the harm or inconvenience they cause when they're wrong.

Re:This is only half right

[Skuld-Chan]

I probably shouldn't be replying to slashdot articles :)

Offtopic, but about Rage...

[Brian TNB]

The management asked Napster to ban users who downloaded RATM stuff without asking the band first. On their site, Tom Morello explains, and points to a page where they have a ton of music to download. They are for music sharing, their managment (Sony) isn't.

------------

Re:Offtopic, but about Rage...

[Dr. Prakash Kothari]

Well what the hell am I supposed to use my Sony MP3 player with?

Re:Offtopic, but about Rage...

[um... Lucas]

Try your own MP3's, ripped from your own CD's? Or perhaps one of the many tunes available on mp3.com and the like? Or songs downloaded from a bands official site?

Just because they sell an mp3 player doesn't mean they're implicitly okaying the concept of "free" music.

Re:Offtopic, but about Rage...

[Digitalia]

It is often easier to download songs from Napster users than to rip the tracks from the CD. It is much quicker to download them.

Re:Offtopic, but about Rage...

[jpetzold]

not if they have a dial-up account :)

When appearance is important, cops are guilty

[localroger]

Much of law is based solely on appearances: the whole issue of "probable cause" is based on the police's perception of criminal wrongdoing, not the actuality of those criminal act.

This is a distortion of the truth. While it is technically true, probable cause must be based on a specific fact which is not just consistent with criminal behavior, but indicates that a particular crime has occurred.

There are many court cases which have established, as one author colorfully put it, that you cannot define "grand theft auto" as "six Chicanos in a Cadillac".

Let's be clear about this: Probable cause does not consist of being in a place where criminals hang out, of driving the kind of car they do, of dressing like they do, or of talking like they do or being of their race. All these things have been very clearly established by court challenges.

By this standard, which the DMCA and RIAA both violate, using Napster does not make you a violator, and neither does having files with particular song titles on your hard drive. Really only some kind of evidence that you downloaded a particular song at a particular time would suffice. Which means that what copyright.net is doing is illegal, and the provisions supporting them in the DMCA are illegal. But good luck getting our current pack of Supreme Court justices to agree. Dred Scott would have been proud of 'em, based on some of their recent activities.

I used to drive a very old Cadillac, and once I moved to the white-bread suburbs I got pulled over at least once a year for "weaving" just past the same donut shop about a mile from my house. I finally got rid of the car after the last cop tried to pick a fight with me when he realized I wasn't the drug dealer he thought he'd tagged. I never pursued it but this was highly illegal, because driving an old Cadillac through Mandeville at 3:00 AM is not, repeat not, probable cause. Thus the lame "weaving" excuse. I could have probably got a settlement out of them but it wasn't worth the effort, and then it was just over the top.

Oh, the cop who tried to pick a fight with me eventually succeeded in picking a fight with someone else. About a week later he was fired, and word was the city shelled out 6 figures + to the guy he baited. These laws about police limits aren't exercised frequently because it's such a pain to do so, but they do exist. And it sounds like copyright.net just added several hundred thousand crimes of a more serious nature to the long list of likely copyright infringements surrounding Napster's servers.

Re:When appearance is important, cops are guilty

[localroger]

The organization simply asked Napster to ban a few hundred thousand accounts. What's illegal about that?

Well, if instead of pulling me over for "weaving" Mandeville had just acted to seize all pre-1975 Cadillac sedans, I'd have been even more pissed off than I was.

In 'net terms what copyright.net is doing is called Denial Of Service. IIRC this is illegal under the DMCA 8-O

But of course the equivalent to my metaphor is actually going on -- whenever cops seize your money or your car or your boat and charge your property with a crime, rather than you, "your property has no civil rights" and they can shift the burden of proof (to a nearly impossible standard) to you. Welcome to Forfeiture Hell.

The Constitution may not be a dead letter yet, but it's panting, sweating, turning red, and dropping to the floor and nobody seems too interested in performing CPR.

Why this isn't a solution.

[luge]

Um, because they'd sue your ISP for allowing you to host the proxy? All these folks who keep arguing that "the net routes around damage" live in a fantasy world- they presume that ISPs will always allow all packets to pass unfiltered and untouched. The ISPs don't really have much business interest in our freedom, or in routing around damage to our rights. If we just leave things up to our programming skills and the myth of the invincibility of the net, we'll lose everything we've built here, and fast.
So... what can you do about that? First and foremost, join the EFF. Run, don't walk, to that website, and make out as big a chunk of cash as you can. Second, run like hell to a book store and pick up Code and Other Laws Of Cyberspace. It isn't the best book, but it does give some very cogent arguments as to why "the net will protect itself" just doesn't cut it anymore. After that... well, after that, keep coding, I guess, and write your congressman when the issues do come up. This is going to be a long and uphill battle, but until we all move to an island nation that isn't intimated by the US and has abundant bandwidth, we can't just bury our heads in the sand.
~luge

Re:Why this isn't a solution.

[acceleriter]

ISP's do have interest in not being liable for everything, though. If they do allow all packets to go through unfettered, they get to claim common carrier status. If they don't, they're liable for what they miss. This is in large part how "premium" Usenet providers, who exist pretty much to provide a nice fat pipe of porn and warez for about US$10/month (no B.S. about reliable text news feeds, please--who we kiddin'). Since they don't filter any content at all, they (so far, with the exception of a negotiated settlement in New York and an asshole Laurence Godfrey in the UK) have escaped liability.

Too big for their britches

[interiot]

In a Wired article that feels like it was ghost written:

• Thanks to new software applications hitting the market, content providers are now able to track users that share music, movie and other media files across file-trading networks like Napster. Even Freenet -- the fiercely protective network -- appears to be vulnerable to the new programs.

• One service, Copyright Agent, allows content owners to provide ISPs with lists of files to remove and, in many cases, to have Internet access to certain users cut off completely.

  "Our software all developed around the DMCA. We've Web-enabled the DMCA."

So... they're claiming that they can find the IP of the Freenet computers that are hosting the MP3's, and ask that the files be removed?

And in one of their officially attributed press releases:

• Copyright.net goes live today with CopyrightAgent, its groundbreaking software tool that legitimizes Napster and other peer-to-peer networks while at the same time protecting the rights of copyright owners.

Poof, this lone company suddenly solves the whole P2P problem.

Yeah, that's it.
--

irony

[iceman82]

I just thought this was funny... there was an advert for "the blue collar comedy tour" on copyright.net. Ironic isn't it?

Right and wrong

[ellingtp]

he aint the big bopper, but our man Roy is dead.

They may be liable if they falsely block someone

[Sanity]

Reading the DMCA, someone is legally liable if they wrongly take advantage of the take-down provision. In theory this means that if even one of these people were incorrectly taken-down, they may be able to take legal action. In practice, this is pretty weighted in favour of copyright.net as the test is one of "good faith", which may mean that it must be demonstrated that they were acting in bad faith, which could be tough to prove.

I wonder if there could be any legal response that could be sent to copyright.net which would cause them to spend more time per-user than would be economical...? Any lawers care to comment on this?

Even though I am slightly irritated that every discussion of legality must be accompanied by an IANAL disclaimer (you don't need to lay eggs to tell a bad one), IANAL.

--

Roy wasn't the Big Bopper

[YeOldeGnurd]

The Big Bopper died in a plane crash with Richie Valens (sp?) and Elvis Costello. Umm, I mean, Buddy Holly. You know "the Day The Music Died".

Roy O. lived for many years later, and was a member of The Traveling Wilburys (awesomely silly band which included Jeff Lynne, George Harrison, Tom Petty, and Bob Dylan.

Sadly, Roy passed away shortly after the massive success of the first Wilburys album.

Bravery, Kindness, Clarity, Honesty, Compassion, Generosity

Re:Well, so what?

[Zarniwoop]

Um... dude?

The whole point was that it was an experiment to see if they did *anything* except do a cursory check of the title. They don't.

Have a nice day.


What do I do, when it seems I relate to Judas more than You?

Re: Service model

[tbo]

In other words, you think they should switch to the service model. That does seem like a good option, but they would quickly be outcompeted by other "services" that didn't have the extra overhead of actually paying production costs and royalties to the artists.

Net result: Nobody makes any new music (commercially), since there's no money in it.

The issue is...

[Dredd13]

... not "should they go after Napster or should they go after the users".

If they want to sue their fans, let them.

The issue is that the criteria they're using is flawed, and they're making mistakes at best (suing people who are innocent) and committing perjury at worst.

If I have a filename "EnterSandman.mp3", is it:

1.) Metallica's Enter Sandman from the black album (copyright owner: Elektra Records)
2.) Metallica's Enter Sandman from a live concert which I recorded legally (Copyright owner: me)
3.) Metallica's Enter Sandman from a performance on the Grammy Awards (Copyright Owner: NARAS)
4.) Apocalyptica's Enter Sandman from their "Metallica by Four Cellos" CD (Copyright owner: Apocalyptica)
5.) A spoken word essay from someone saying how much they hate how Metallica sold out when they wrote pop metal (owner: that guy)
6.) a text file disguised as a Metallica MP3 (owner: the author)
7.) Britney Spears song to intentionally poison Metallica song-searches (Owner: britney spears)

If the file is anything other than #1, then whatever Metallica representative claimed copyright ownership in their affidavit (the DMCA notice is an affidavit) committed perjury, because they claimed to own the copyright on something they had no reason to believe they actually had the rights to.

Now this group may be able to act on behalf of the owners 1,4,7 and POSSIBLY 3 above, but the rest have all got nice counterclaims against copyright.net, possible sanctions, etc.

Simply culling lists looking for filenames and even looking for title info isn't enough. The copyright holder actually has to confirm that the file REALLY DOES contain their copyrighted work, or they're in a heap of trouble, and whenever someone goes after (n>100000) people, you have to know that nobody verified the copyright on each and every item.

D

Re:The issue is...

[supine]

You need to remember that there is both mechanical copyright (for the performance) and publishing copyright (for the authoring of the music). So by my calculations a few of your examples would still be in breach of copyright where you have only considered mechanical copyright:

1.) Metallica's Enter Sandman from the black album (copyright owner: Elektra Records)

Mechanical: Elektra. Publishing: Metallica

2.) Metallica's Enter Sandman from a live concert which I recorded legally (Copyright owner: me)

Mechanical: you. Publishing: Metallica. ie you still need Metallica's permission to distribute it

3.) Metallica's Enter Sandman from a performance on the Grammy Awards (Copyright Owner: NARAS)

Mechanical: NARAS. Publishing: Metallica

4.) Apocalyptica's Enter Sandman from their "Metallica by Four Cellos" CD (Copyright owner: Apocalyptica)

Mechanical: Universal. Publishing: Metallica

my 2 cents
marty

Is this legal?

[stain ain]

What if I don't want them to browse my files?
Are they hacking in my computer if I don't give them express permission to look?
What if they make a mistake and my "this is a pretty woman speaking.mp3" is a recording of my girlfriend and they ban my access to Napster without ground?
Can I sue them?
Is this legal?

Re:Is this legal?

[elflord]

What if I don't want them to browse my files?

If you don't want them browsing your files, then don't serve them !!! (DUH!) It's NOT "hacking into your computer" if you're serving the files, just as it's not "hacking into a computer" when you download packages off rpmfind.net.

Waiters starve as voluntary payment model fails

[Sanity]

So if voluntary payment is so flawed, how come the entire American service industry is largely subsidised by voluntary payment? What is the substantive difference between tipping a waiter and paying for music - that makes tipping work so well, but voluntary payment for music fail?

I would argue that the opposite is true. People tend to form an emotional relationship with those whose music they like (just look at the amount fans spend on merchandising), that is much stronger than any relationship you might form with a waiter. If anything, voluntary payment will work better for music than it does for the service industry.

Your simplistic argument about public good, compares information to property, but the difference is that information costs effectively nothing to reproduce and distribute. Whether you force 100% of 10,000 people to pay for something, or whether 10% of 1,000,000 people pay one tenth of the amount, makes little difference to the producer of the information. Why not exploit the fact that the internet permits almost free distribution of your creative output, rather than using oppressive laws to prevent it from happening?

--

Re:Waiters starve as voluntary payment model fails

[pen]

What is the substantive difference between tipping a waiter and paying for music - that makes tipping work so well, but voluntary payment for music fail?

There is a major difference. First of all, you have to look the waiter in the eye before you leave. Since it is customary to tip, a person will generally be thought of as either an asshole, cheap-skate, or both when he doesn't tip. Most people don't like to be thought of that way -- they want to appear rich and generous.

The second difference is that, provided that you visit the restaurant/hotel/etc more than once, you will most likely get great service every time if you're a good tipper.

--

Re:Waiters starve as voluntary payment model fails

[tbo]

People have already pointed this out, but there are two essential differences between SPP and tipping waiters:

1) Tipping is not anonymous, and failure to tip incurs societal disapproval (people think you're a cheap bastard).
2) You personally benefit by tipping, assuming you return to the restaurant (you'll get good service next time)

If you actually think voluntary tipping is viable for the music industry, check out Fairtunes's stats. They've been running for something like 8 months, and have only brought in about $7000 US for artists. I believe the two university students who started Fairtunes have spent over $10,000 on equipment and development costs. Unless those numbers increase drastically in the next year or so, I'd say voluntary music tipping is a failure. You can't fault their implementation, either--it's a very well-thought-out system, and I can't think of how they could make it better. The problem is that people suck. If we were all perfectly moral, Fairtunes would work. Too bad it ain't so.

Re:Waiters starve as voluntary payment model fails

[micromoog]

Whether you force 100% of 10,000 people to pay for something, or whether 10% of 1,000,000 people pay one tenth of the amount, makes little difference to the producer of the information.

Where do you get the conclusion that lifting copyright and switching to SPP will increase interest in each artist by a factor of 100? Artists that don't sell a lot of CD's now are not going to suddenly become hugely popular just because they start accepting micropayments.

Re:Waiters starve as voluntary payment model fails

[Skyshadow]

You know, I can't go back to my favorite Dim Sum place now because I "only" tipped the waiter 7% (I asked 6 times for water and never got any), and *man* did he get mad. We went back two weeks later and were getting the evil eye the whole time -- I was afraid to eat-drink anything that I couldn't pick out from a group at random.

----

Re:Waiters starve as voluntary payment model fails

[bungalow]

What is the substantive difference between tipping a waiter and paying for music - that makes tipping work so well, but voluntary payment for music fail?

Nothing, if you will never repeat business at a restaraunt (which a substandard tip would seem to indicate to the management).

In practice, people in general have "favorite" restaraunts and frequent haunts. Whether the waitron knows your children or not, she will associate your face with your tipping style.

If you accumulate a reputation for tipping poorly, you eventually wind up with a hot, French-onion flavored lap, if they ever get to your table at all.

You miss the point.

[schon]

When company X goes after Napster, they complain that Napster isn't breaking any laws--only some of the users are.

True so far...

When company Y goes after Napster users, they complain that they shouldn't be going after individual users

Where? Certainly not in this article.

The complaint is not that someone is going after Napster Users, but that they're illegally going after Napster Users, by violating their civil rights ("Innocent until proven guilty.")

In essence, "company Y" is saying that it's OK for them to break the law, but it's not OK for the Napster users to do the same.

Please don't distort the truth.

(And it's a sad, sad, day when a troll gets modded up to +5 as "informative")

Re:You miss the point.

[tbo]

Where? Certainly not in this article.

The complaint is not that someone is going after Napster Users, but that they're illegally going after Napster Users, by violating their civil rights ("Innocent until proven guilty.")


Copyright.net isn't intentionally breaking the law--they've just screwed up. It happens. Especially when people do stuff to make it look like they're breaking the law.

Here's an example. Suppose that, shortly after a bank robery occured, you ran around town with a ski mask over your head, a plastic gun tucked in your pants, and a sack of monopoly money over your shoulder. You would quite likely be arrested. What a surprise.

"Innocent until proven guilty."

That's a principle of criminal justice. These people are being accused, not convicted, of a crime.

(And it's a sad, sad, day when a troll gets modded up to +5 as "informative")

Your post is only at +3 so far... :-)

Re:You miss the point.

[Sarcasmooo!]

You've gotta be kidding me. Poor copyright.net and their poor-poor staff of recording industry execs. I'm sure they're just new to the whole issue, and had no idea what they were doing. Ok, let's pretend that they aren't veterans, and that they aren't intentionally chipping away at peoples' rights in the name of greed; [b]where were they[/b] when their highschool teacher taught them about the bill of rights (4th amendment)? Out sick? personally I've always believed there aren't many who [b]actually[/b] set out to commit fascist-style evil, and that the root of their crimes is ignorance. Fortunately, 'whoops!' is not a viable plea, because ignorance is no excuse.

Re:You miss the point.

[Sarcasmooo!]

And for the people who are saying that no one has rights in this matter, and that napster can ban anyone they like, yes I do consider copyright.net "using software it developed" (not just napster's search) to scan my drive, constitutes a violation of the 4th amendment.

Re:You miss the point.

[twitter]

What garbage you are full of!

These people are being accused, not convicted, of a crime.

These people are being forbiden to share files that MIGHT be copyrighted by some one else. No leagal body has been involved, becuse the action is not really legal. To use your poor analogy, this is like being punished for wearing a ski mask because a robber was wearing one. We are outraged at the presumption of guilt, the punishment that followed and the reasons for such behavior.

The goal is to restrict distribution of music, and other original content to the world's big five publishers. All other distribution channels will be bought, destroyed or made hoplessly inconvenient and socially stigmatized.

I've got news for you and your friends, it is not going to work. Good content will become available from alternate sources, artists will make money, and the big five will crumple into the land of dead media as revenue plumets. Those of you who would be abitrars of taste had better start looking for alternate employment, and lean humility. People demand more than your corrupt little radio, tv, and cable racket was able to provide. Good riddance, dinosaurs.

Re: Service model

[Anonymous Coward]

Right. And I respectfully disagree that they'd be outcompeted by other services, since even Napster couldn't run without some income forever. (I'm not convinced they'd last long even without the RIAA.)

And whether they like the service model or not, that's the only model there's going to be. Now that the masses have tasted easy access to music, it's here to stay. There are already people passing around full CD-R's of popular MP3's at my workplace which filters port 6699.

I also dispute that true artists wouldn't make music because "there's no money in it." The world would be better off without the "artists" so motivated, IMHO.

~~~

Canada

[yamla]

They'd better not be going after people outside of the U.S. In many countries such as Canada, you do not need to own a copy of the music you have an MP3 of.

--

Re:Canada

[shepd]

Not that I doubt you or anything, but I just haven't heard of a Canadian law that lets us Canadians do what you suggest...

Could you provide details and/or a link?

Just Curious... Thanks!

No offense, but this is stupid.

[FallLine]

It's simply impossible to write an algorithm that would allow the general public to access the information and/or the title without allowing RIAA and others the same information. To the extent that RIAA (and/or Napster's enforcement--if they really cared enough to try) is incapable of reading or understanding what a file is, so to is the public. In other words, it's entirely self-defeating when it comes to distribution.

Distribution is really the only key point at the present moment. This "method", if you might call it that, simply CANNOT address this problem.

As for HD copy protection, it makes little sense either. First, I believe most of these HD copy protection methods do not try to magically determine copyrighted material, rather they take specifically encrypted and tagged copyrighted material and try to prevent the user from committing unallowed actions on it (such as copying the file in question). So the only trick is just getting a "raw" copy, encryption is pointless. Second, even if HD copy protection really tries to play Big Brother, just about any number of existing encryption techniques could cover it just as well as this "method", in any event.

As for your vague DeCSS and subpoena statements, these come down to the same logical issues. If you are capable of decrypting the materials manually, the courts can compel you to release the key. Even if you claim that you can't retrieve the key for some reason, what's to stop the court from simply confiscating the material until you do, since you can't read it anyways? If your software does the decoding for you, it must contain the means to decode it. I don't see how it is logically possible to hide a key or the algorithm in such a way that only the software can get to it. In fact, it seems pretty much impossible. You might be able to do some things to the slight of hand, but not be truely secure.

Is there any possible and novel proposition here? I simply don't see any.

I have a question:

[the_other_one]

There, they are told specifically why they were kicked off Napster and offered copyright-protected versions of the Orbison songs, which cost less than a dollar. These specially encrypted versions can be sent to other users, but they can be played just twice, at which point a message invites them to buy a copy.

What is to prevent someone from creating a client that will save the original file in a backup. Play it once then restore from backup. How can they protect against a bitwise copy?

Any Ideas?

Re:I have a question:

[the_other_one]

This idea just in:
Do they use encryption and a proprietary client?

Re:I have a question:

[vsync64]

What is to prevent someone from creating a client that will save the original file in a backup.

Because that would be a device "primarily designed or produced to circumvent" copy protection. Then the RIAA would get ya.

--

Re:I have a question:

[the_other_one]

Ok so those people unlucky enough to live in the USA are SOL

Fortunately I am not one of those that have to live with th inane US Govt.

I only have to put up with the inane Government of Canada.

The future....

[themanfromutopia]

Ultimately, P2P will be an unstoppable form of data transfer. Everything that has been said about Napster has been said about vhs, casette tapes, even records. We have to face facts and understand that the world changes, and musicians will have to deal with that fact as much as anyone else. A new business model for music will have to evolve, but one will evolve. The only ones hurt are current musicians in the short term, and organisations like the RIAA and MPAA... By protecting the musicians of today, we hurt our own children, who will have to make the admittedly painful but necessary step into freely available music.

Re: Service model

[tbo]

Right. And I respectfully disagree that they'd be outcompeted by other services, since even Napster couldn't run without some income forever. (I'm not convinced they'd last long even without the RIAA.)

Let's say Napster and Sonyster each decide to charge $5/mo for unlimited access. They have the same overhead, except Sony also has to pay production costs and royalties to artists. Without the ability to prevent others from stealing your creations, the most successful businesses are the "leaches" that create nothing.

And whether they like the service model or not, that's the only model there's going to be.

I think you're probably right here.

I also dispute that true artists wouldn't make music because "there's no money in it." The world would be better off without the "artists" so motivated, IMHO.

For the sake of argument, I'll accept your premise that all good artists are motivated by things other than money. Even so, we'll still get more good music by paying artists. If we don't pay them, then they have to work a second job to pay for food and expenses, and will have less time to produce music. Assuming the number of "true" artists is fixed, eliminating artist compensation will reduce the amount of music out there, which is a bad thing.

In reality, I suspect that most artists are motivated by a mix of factors that includes desire for fame, joy of creating music, and making money. Almost everyone is a little greedy, either for money, fame, or power. Thus, the effects eliminating artist compensation could be larger that your premise (non-greedy artists) would suggest.

mp3 privacy

[Anonymous Admin]

tar -cvf blah.tar *.mp3 you can then play the tar file in your mp3 player. the tar headers are simply ignored by the player. lets see them find all the tar files on the net...

No one can wrap themselves in glory on this one

[shambler snack]

The basic issue is that the Napster system allows for an artist's work to be 'used' without any control system whatsoever. This is not listening on a record station (and them recording) or buying and then ripping for your personal pleasure (used as an example of 'fair use'). This is flat out intellectual property theft.

Having said that, what copyright.net is doing is nothing less than throwing gasoline on the raging fire. I don't trade on Napster based on my beliefs, and have stated those beliefs in the past. But that does not give me the right to use the kind of crude act that copyright.net uses to force my views down everybody elses throat.

Copyright.net is a far greater threat to the resolution of this entire issue than Napster ever was. They need to be taken down, preferably by legal means, and Tim Smith, copyright.net's chief executive, needs to have a new asshole ripped. His comment that he's not trying to antagonise anybody is pure bullshit. I've never seen a troll site before, but copyright.net sure fits my definition of one.

I don't care about napster.

[Convergence]

I don't really care about napster itself.

What I do care is the newer draconian user-controlling legistlation like the DMCA. Copyright cannot be enforced without destroying the first amendment and concurrently destroying the concept of 'innocent until proven guilty'.

As they said, 300,000 users were banned from Napster, just based on song title. That's almost as stupid as blocking a website because it has the word 'breast' in it. (Like a cooking website talking about turkey's). This is WRONG.

Then you have the DMCA, whose purpose is to legistlatively and legally ensure that an obsolescent industry can preserve their former way of doing business, with the first amendment be damned. Fair use exists to resolve the conflict between the Copyright clause, banning speech, and the first amendment, allowing speech.

A 'copy-control' box cannot identify the difference between fair use, and unauthorized duplication. It cannot now and never will. Such a box is literally a censorship box. Right now, these boxes (CSS/SDMI/Minidisc) censor uses which, while legitimate and legal, are deemed undesireable by the owner of the copyright, regardless of whether or not they're legal. In the future, who knows what might be censored? With encryption adding technical obsticles and the DMCA adding in a legal obsticle, there is no way bypass the restrictions and do the things that the first amendment says that you ARE allowed to do. It also allows a tyrant to censor whatever they want from their populace, at any time after publication. Just 'withdraw the keys'.

A world with every computer, hard drive, TV, VCR, player, or recorder supporting censorship is repulsive. So is a world where people are assumed guilty and banned without proof, without evidence.

I cannot see any REASONABLE way of resolving this conflict other than the removal or signifigant weakening of copyright. As an artist myself, I would love to have some other alternative. But it looks like me, like everyone else, will have to toss the dice and see what comes up.

If you can offer a reasonable and workable alternative, I'd love to hear one.

Re:I don't care about napster.

[micromoog]

Copyright cannot be enforced without destroying the first amendment and concurrently destroying the concept of 'innocent until proven guilty'.

Whoa there, buckaroo. The first amendment has nothing at all to do with this issue. The first amendment merely states that you can {speak|write|play} original material, and distribute the product as you see fit, without hindrance. The amendment does not provide anyone the right to steal the intellectual property of someone else.

As for the second point, these people are not going on trial, they are merely being banned from a private company.

To put it in perspective, it's Slashdot's policy to ban trolls. By my reckoning, this would violate both of your points.

Don't serve copyrighted content

[Sloppy]

It's not a copyright violation to have the MP3s, but it is one to serve recording of other peoples' songs without their permission. And just because you "simply checked a box", that doesn't absolve you of responsibility.

---

Re:Don't serve copyrighted content

[stretch_jc]

So hypothetically, if I'm an ignorant user and accidenttly allow smb/nfs/ftp shares of my mp3 collection to anonymous users, I am responsible for those who download? Regardless of protocol it is the same, just because it is there and you have access to it, doesn't make it my responsibility if you download it.

Re:Don't serve copyrighted content

[Temporal]

So hypothetically, if I'm an ignorant user and accidenttly allow smb/nfs/ftp shares of my mp3 collection to anonymous users, I am responsible for those who download?

Yes. Ignorance is no excuse for breaking the law.

just because it is there and you have access to it, doesn't make it my responsibility if you download it.

Sorry, but that's just not true. I am sure that any court would agree that sharing a file on a network constitutes active distribution of that file on said network.

Why are you trying to make excuses? Sharing an mp3 on Napster without the author's permission is illegal. Get over it.

------

Re:Don't serve copyrighted content

[Cederic]

But what if I decide to let Napster advertise my collection of MP3s, but configure my router to prevent any uploads whenever someone tries to download a file from me.

That way I am not sharing my music, I am merely using Napster as a bragging tool, to boast about the immense size of my collection [tm].

~Cederic
ps: as it happens, I don't have a large collection, and my router does allow two-way traffic. But the point holds.

Re:Don't serve copyrighted content

[Sloppy]

If you did that, I don't see how anyone could make a convincing case that you've violated copyright.

(Although, realistically, I think that might get you into an area where your fate is decided by what kind of mood the judge is in, rather than whether or not you actually broke a law. So even if it's legal, it might be a dangerous thing to do.)

---

Re:Don't serve copyrighted content

[Sloppy]

(All this is just my opinion, and it's more about ethics than law.)

Yes, people should be held accountable for what they do, even if it is due to a "simple mistake" or ignorance.

If I accidently bent someone's fender, that doesn't get me off the hook for repairing it. I can't just say, "It was just an accident, I didn't know this was a one-way-street, so I shouldn't have to pay for fixing it."

---

Re:Katy!

[bigbadwlf]

Comparing file sizes isn't an accurate way to identify more of the same file.... don't forget about different bitrates or different ripping software that may have added/cut a second or two from the beginning or the end.

Sure, but...

[luge]

How long is the idea of a "common carrier" going to hold up? Not long, I don't think. Two reasons:

1) With traditional notions of "common carrier", it was always easier to attack the source of the "problems" that were being transported. For example, you don't attack the USPS for mailing out Playboys because it is easier to shut down the Playboy printing presses. When everyone is a printing press, shutting down the press is hard, so attacking the carrier (i.e., the ISPs) will prove more practical, both for corporations looking for a pressure point and for legislators looking for an easy legal target.

2) The traditional common carriers (the mail and the phone service) have limited "criminal" impact, especially on large corporations. I mean, one guy with one phone or one mail box can only leak so many company secrets or transport so many stolen goods. The infinite copy powers and multiplication of distribution of the net radically change that equation. Imagine distributing the DeCSS code by a USPS letter, or the phone. The damage there is limited. You've seen what distributing it over the web has done- there are literally millions of copies of it floating around, and already there are multiple programs that use it. And /those/ can be distributed without problems. Much, much greater impact than the traditional notion of common carrier.

By the way, DMCA already has provisions that would force ISPs to install equipment that enforces copyright as soon as techniques to do it are invented. There hasn't yet been such a case, but you can guess from the fact that that provision has already been written and passed that Congress isn't going to come down on the side of the ISPs, no matter how badly they'd like to be common carriers.
~luge

Re:Sure, but...

[acceleriter]

That's good stuff--thanks. I didn't know about the "copyright protection" equipment provision of the DMCA.

So if no one's a common carrier, and ISP's have to censor/provide copyright protection, is there an internet, or a glorified TV network? One I am willing to pay for. The other . . .

Re:Sure, but...

[luge]

My vote ends up with glorified, self-publishing TV network. It would still have some cool functionality, I guess (I mean, it isn't like I'm pushing warez at tieguy.org) but it would definitely destroy so much of the promise of the net. That's why I said in my original post that anyone who cares about the future should contribute to the EFF, and contribute now, and contribute as much as they can. If there are other groups doing similar work that anyone knows about, I'd love to hear about them- I just got my first "real" paycheck (for my book!) today, and I'm in a giving mood. And the slashdot community (of all places) should know about them too.
~luge

Heh. Fuck 'em.

[superdan2k]

Time to go configure the router to block traffic from the copyright.net domain...and any other domains owned by the same group... Let's see them work their way around *that*...

----------------------------------------
Yo soy El Fontosaurus Grande!

Copyright.net guilty???

[coupland]

I couldn't help but notice one of the banner ads running on Copyright.net looked an awful lot like the trademark of the gaming company Terminal Reality. Here's a comparison for you:

12k GIF

Perhaps we should report these guys to themselves?

---

Why Would Anyone Properly Title Anything?

[Scouras]

Oh, yeah, because they like to know what they have on their hard drive. I even maintain directory structures of artist->album and then title everything Artist - Album - Track - Track Title. This is all listed as from CDDB, like most MP3s produced with automated CD->MP3 software. Therefore, exact search strings of my Napster listings for Artist->Song matches would be perfect. Now, is everyone else this Anal?

Frequently, Anal enough. Am I going to download Metalica - Enter Sandman and then title it Metal Band - Here Comes the Sand Dude? no Now, am I going to download my friend's mp3's and retitle them Metalica - Enter Sandman???? am I?

Now, their search engine might be broken or overly general, but if I find "Metalica" and "Enter Sandman" in the title of an MP3, odds are 10000 to 1 that's what song it is.

Re: Service model

[tbo]

But if Sonyster's paying the artists and Napster isn't, they'd have the recordings first. This would enable Sony to charge more, and even delay the propagation of "their" songs to Napster for a few hours by creating a proprietary client that wouldn't facilitate automatic mirroring.

Six minutes after the Grammies, Eminem & Elton John's performance was on Napster. I rest my case :-)

I agree with this suspicion--it probably comes down to this: in the large, people aren't altruistic. There's some kind of self interest--it may be in the form of "warm fuzzies" rather than money, but the person still "gets something" for his/her efforts. I don't really know whether there'd be less real artists, but I am hopeful that they would not only continue to exist, but flourish, being supported by a willing base of patrons rather than through a small percentage of the fruits of systematic intellectual "property" extortion.

I used to think so, too, but the failure of Fairtunes to generate any real revenue for artists ($7000 over 8 months?) has left me disillusioned.

Re:Isn't copyright.net violating the Napster rules

[ShaunC]

You can pretty much bet that the "no bots" rule is just for show, it's certainly not legally binding. Think of it like your ISP's AUP. If your ISP forbids you from transferring more than 250MB/day from their news server, downloading 500MB of porn one lazy afternoon isn't going to land you in court. It's just going to get you disconnected.

Napster could add "No one affiliated with the RIAA is allowed to use this service" to their motd, that wouldn't keep RIAA and friends out. All a rule like this does is provide some recourse for them (e.g. terminating the offensive account) if they happen to discover that the account has violated their policies. Additionally it gives them a viable defense if they happen to get sued by a bot-user for unfair termination. They just point to their motd and say "look, it says right here that we'll nuke you for that."

I doubt that Napster has any bot-detection capability to begin with; if they do, I'd be embarassed to write a bot it caught. There's not much you could do to "detect" a Napster bot, so long as it wasn't performing tasks at inhuman speeds.

Shaun

Babelfish on $3 Crack

[alexburke]

The Heise article was mangled thusly:

MP3-Abmahnpanne with Swiss music federation

Swiss regional committee that Federation OF the Phonographic Industry ( IFPI) is international with a letter, which equals after German right of a warning, on a joke in the Web pleases. On the assumption, on a Website MP3-Dateien were offered to Matthias Leisi a letter, which requested it to remove the files for the Download, had been sent IFPI Switzerland to the operator. Additionally it should platzieren the note " This Site is closed by IFPI Switzerland... " on the pages. A punishment of 500 Swiss Franconias is additional to pay - plus 200 Franconias for the determination.

However the editors do not seem to have given oneself much trouble with the " determination " particularly. Otherwise it would have surely noticed to them that it concerned with the alleged music pieces not around genuine MP3-Files, but text files, which contained only the word " * aetsch * ".

--

Re:Isn't copyright.net violating the Napster rules

[wunderhorn1]

Why didn't the napster server pick up the bot activity?

Maybe for the same reason they can't seem to stop the people who keep spamming me with instant messages saying "Hey if you like Popular Mainstream Artist XXX go check out Shitty Band YYY at http://www.mp3.com/shittyband ! Thanx!"

And really, I can understand them wanting to appear to be against illegal behavior, but it's not good business to let another business scare off your clientele...

Short term solution?

[longword]

Who's up for a bit of ROT13?

Paul.

Re: Service model

[nyet]

Net result: Nobody makes any new music (commercially), since there's no money in it.

Fine. Works for me.

I'd rather listen to music that people make for the love of music itself anyway.

I can live without 99.9999999% of the rest of the garbage.

Copyright.net is Slashdotted

[Baddas]

Gotta love this. Slashdot doesn't like you, therefore you go down. Exerting our will by force of presence.

Like the sit-ins in '60's civil rights movement, only more expensive and without the guns, dogs, and firehoses.

I've done a little extra research

[luge]

About that last claim: I can't find anything to back it up. It may not have been in the DMCA, which may be why I can't find it, but I know I've read about it anyway. Regardless, DMCA stamps pretty squarely on the face of "common carrier": as an ISP, anytime you are served notice that a user has infringing content, you have to immediately (or as soon as possible) take that content off the net. This is the "big deal" at copyright.net- they've automated this process, so that for the big ISPs, instead of the occasional letter from a copyright owner, they can now be swamped by hundreds or thousands of these notifications. And there is nothing the ISP can do except notify the user and start taking the content down. Note that the burden of proof here is not on the copyright owner or the ISP; all the copyright owner has to do is "swear" (via copyright.net's automated tools) that the user has distributed copyrighted materials and the user then has the burden of proving otherwise. I'm still trying to find a good summary of the impact- most are either way, way too dense (this one) or a little too light weight. Grr.

Re:I've done a little extra research

[acceleriter]

Thanks for the link. And wow! Just from reading the paragraphs on "System Caching," it looks like Google is clearly liable under the DMCA for caching stuff subject to the act--unless there's another out buried in there somewhere.

I dunno about you...

[oldwolf13]

but I frequently download songs via napster that I already do own on cd just because I am too bloody lazy to hunt through all my cds (the RIAA has made a small fortune off me alone), take it to my workstation, rip it and encode it, and then send it to the mp3 player box. Much easier to download it... and hell, with my aging workstation, probably faster too.

aymen!!

[Travoltus]

I've already donated to the EFF. I shall get that book tomorrow. :)
========================
63,000 bugs in the code, 63,000 bugs,
ya get 1 whacked with a service pack,

Who has one?

[codepunk]

Who has one of these slick expires with two plays files. Sounds like a fun crack to make it play forever. Eat them bits...

bah...

[Error27]

Sure there were some people who got banned from napster that probably weren't doing anything wrong. But the fact is that most of the people who got banned from napster _were_ trading Metalica songs.

Maybe it's time to be honest... Trading music online is generally pirating. For what ever reason, we are pirates.

Sometimes it's because it's easier. Sometimes it's cheaper. Sometimes it's music we can't get in stores. Sometimes it just for background music while we play MUD.

Once you admit that you're a pirate you can stop making excuses. You don't have to say things like, "I'm only downloading it to see if I want to buy the CD." Or "Those were mostly just text files that someone had put a .mp3 extension on as a joke." As a pirate, you can focus on developing new technologies that allow millions of other pirates get together and discuss pirating without being banned.

Long term I'm full of hope. Given the choice between becoming a pirate and support the Recording Industry, I think most people would choose the former. Millions and millions of people have already made the choice. New techology is making it imposible for the RIAA to stop pirating without going after individual small time pirates. This will be an unpopular and expensive procedure and I don't think they will succeed.

(btw I have never used napster. The pirated Music I own is a Nirvana album on mp3. But I consider myself a pirate and you should too)

Re:bah...

[Error27]

Ok. You are not a pirate because you bought all the music you own.

But I am a pirate because I downloaded Nirvana songs without paying for them. (This is literally the full extent of my pirated music, but I still maintain that I am, indeed, a pirate) And I were a betting man I'd wager that most of the people using napster have done the same thing at least once. That makes them pirates.

>>I don't believe you build a strong position by engaging in or supporting amoral or illegal acts (where the laws are legitimate).

I don't claim that this makes a good argument against the RIAA. I'm just saying people need to be honest with themselves.

I do feel sort of sad about trampling on the rights of Nirvana. But not bad enough to stop.

What I see happenning is that the RIAA will create ever more and more intrusive procedures to stop pirates like myself. So far, they have only sued people who host music. By next year we'll start to see them sueing people for downloading music as well as serving it.

I really, have no sympathy for the people who got banned from napster. That's the sort of punishment pirates deserve.

On the other hand, I think there is a valid limit to measure the RIAA should be allowed to take in order to stop pirates. Random harddrive searches and packet filtering etc we can all agree are wrong. Contacting the isp of every one who uses gnutella is shakier ground. Banning programs like Freenet is another example of something they could do.

It will be interesting to see how this all ends.

(btw, I'm hurt that someone moderated me redundant. Troll or flamebait, I could understand. Perhaps, it was some British person who thought redundant means "unemployed". I'll have you know that I have a great job working as bag boy at the local grocery store.)

They can ban me all they want

[NineNine]

They can ban me from Napster all they want. Every time I get on, I choose a new username, and put in a fake email address. This is just another example of clueless industry execs trying to stop a deluge with a cork. Sorry, guys. You're never going to be able to effectively stop music (or any kind of media swapping) on the Net. Execuse me, I've got to go get another Dido track now...

Been said before

[Shagg]

I've actually been trying to point this out for awhile when the topic comes up about Napster.

How can you ban/blacklist anybody based solely upon the title of a file. Other than "absolutely nothing", what does the name of a file have to do with the contents of that file? If I really wanted to host Metallica files on Napster, I would name them all "Little_Bo_Peep_Sings_The_Blues.mp3" and then advertise on a webpage/usenet that the above file is actually "Master of Puppets by Metallica".

Their search engines would be absolutely useless in the previous scenario. Not to mention the case of banning people based upon a filename, when the contents of the file itself are completely benign.

This is a pretty bogus way of searching for "bad" people on Naptser, and goes to prove that the whole notion of scanning what users are trading is totally impossible. They don't have the resources available to audibly analyze every file in their system to determine if it is RIAA owned material or not, and have to make assumptions. However, those assumptions completely negate any claim they have in court.

"Yes your honor, they did catch me hosting a file called "Master_of_puppets.mp3" on Napster, but it was really a recording of my little sister burping... I swear. They just assumed it was a copyrighted song."

--

Re:Been said before

[elflord]

They do have to find you guilty beyond reasonable doubt in a courtroom to kick you off.

However, if they take you to court, they'd better at least listen to the files first.

Re:Been said before

[acceleriter]

You're confusing criminal and civil law. Civil law only requires "preponderance of the evidence," not "proof beyond a reasonable doubt." They should be required to listen to the files first, but they aren't--all a DMCA declaration requires is that they believe "in good faith" that the material is infringing. IANAL, but I've acted like one by saying so as a disclaimer :).

IANAL.IANAL.IANAL.IANAL.VOMIT

[bluehead]

Agreed. Sometimes, reading slashdot, I feel as thought seeing IANAL one more time will push me over the edge of nausea into the abyss of explosive vomiting. As if all posters are assumed to be lawyers by default. Let lawyers use IAAL (i am a lawyer) and everyone else just shut the FK up about it. Sorry, just seeing everyone write all the same shit everyone else writes because everyone else is writing it bums me out...

�If your name is Cats...

[yerricde]

Well, if your name is "CATS" and you live in "ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US",

If your name is Katz (of which Cats is a variant spelling), then you write op-ed for Slashdot and all the trolls hate you.

All your hallucinogen are belong to us.

Sonny Bono

[yerricde]

The one issue is that Roy Orbison (The Big Bopper) passed away a long time ago

Which means his music won't come out of copyright until 71 years after such "long time ago." And the courts have upheld Congress's power to extend that by 20 years every 20 years.

All your hallucinogen are belong to us.

You're thinking criminal. Copyright is civil law.

[yerricde]

The prosecution in a court of law would have to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that you had Knowledge and Intent

You're mistaken here. The "beyond reasonable doubt" standard (which became a household word during the Simpson trial) is from criminal law. The vast majority of copyright cases fall under civil law, where there has to be "a preponderance of evidence" (51%) that there was intent or just negligence. Failure to set up a strong firewall (e.g. OpenBSD patched every couple weeks) could be considered negligence.

All your hallucinogen are belong to us.

MP3 isn't a crime because...

[yerricde]

Point of terminology: Don't use the word "crime," copyright infringement cases are generally tried under civil law (standard is 51% of evidence; damages and injunctions are at stake) rather than criminal law (beyond reasonable doubt; you can go to jail).

Since when is it a copyright violation to possess mp3's of cd's I own?

It's not a copyright violation under 17 USC 107, as you mention. But it is a patent violation under United States law unless the encoder publisher has paid THOMSON multimedia $15K/year or $2.50/unit sold (whichever is greater). That means you, LAME users.

All your hallucinogen are belong to us.

W r a p s t e r

[yerricde]

renaming text files does not work

Have you ever used Wrapster?

All your hallucinogen are belong to us.

Copyrights, trademarks, and patents

[yerricde]

12k GIF ... Perhaps we should report these guys to themselves (for infringing Terminal Reality's trademark)

I'd report you to copyright.net for posting a GIF, but copyright.net handles only copyrights, not patents (on GIF's LZW compression) or trademarks (on the Terminal Reality logo).

All your hallucinogen are belong to us.

"Lasagna" by Weird Al Yankovic is copyrighted

[yerricde]

What about the many thousands of parody tracks available? (e.g. "Lasagne", a take-off of "La Bamba")

"Lasagna" by Weird Al Yankovic appeared on the album "Even Worse" which is under Bono Act perpetual copyright. Most parodies came off either some comedy album, SNL, MADtv, Howard Stern, or the like and are copyrighted by their producers.

I'd say that Al Yankovic performed less than one-third of the songs attributed to him on Napster, but that's another node.

All your hallucinogen are belong to us.

Re:"Lasagna" by Weird Al Yankovic is copyrighted

[divec]

"Lasagna" by Weird Al Yankovic appeared on the album "Even Worse" which is under Bono Act perpetual copyright.

Hmmm, OK, bad example :->

Most parodies came off either some comedy album, SNL, MADtv, Howard Stern, or the like and are copyrighted by their producers.

Dunno, there's lots of stuff out there which is too amateurish (in actual recording quality) to have been done in a studio. And there's freely distributable stuff like Chumbawamba's "Pass It Along", a parody of Metallica ("It's OK when our fans pay to buy our T-shirts. It's OK when our fans pay $40 to go to one of our concerts. But when our fans think they can listen to our music for free ... they just crossed the line.")

Oh, and are you going to do an article on DOS 2.1?

[Glowing Fish]

Yeah, I have heard about this thing called Napster...someday I might check it out for nostalgia, like the Atari 2600 emulator I have or something. Wasn't Napster, like, some kind of music program for the first 286s? Or maybe it was programmed by that one Navy Lady who coined the term bug? I think I heard about it in a computer history textbook, or something.

Gnutella for the 3rd milenium!

Better way

[The Cat]

Clearing houses have been used to facilitate many-to-many licensing for radio stations to play copyrighted music for years. Why can't the same approach be taken here? Individual licensing of each particular copyrighted work is impractical and not in the interests of anyone involved.

However, there is no reason why a clearing house could not be set up to license large amounts of intellectual "property" under broad, unrestrictive terms, then make those licenses available at predictable rates to someone wishing to use that property in a commercial venture, or clear the use in a non-commercial, non-competitive way.

This would probably make everyone happy, and would probably be an excellent business model for some company.

That's a weak point in civil rights

[Lonewolf666]

I think there should be anti-discrimination laws for ISPs and similar services. We already have such laws in most western countries for things like employment:
If an employer fires an employee or rejects someone who applies for a job solely on grounds of sex, color or religion, this is illegal and the victim can sue.
Since public discussion is increasingly happening through corporate-owned media, we need similar laws to protect legal speech online. The gist of those laws would have to be
"You shall not exclude someone from internet access/online forums/similar things just because you don't like his opinion"
Other things like not paying the service fees or distributing kiddie porn would still be reason for kicking that user (actually, german providers are legally obliged to remove illegal content from their servers if they discover it).

Re: Service model

[tbo]

First, how many people have heard of FairTunes, let alone trust it to get money to the artists?

They're actually pretty good--you can check the status of all your donations, and they post scans of cashed checks on their website. If you're really paranoid, you can email the artist to confirm. They've gotten a fair amount of media coverage, at least in Canada. It's really my ideal payment system, but, unfortunately, nobody uses it.

Second, you are making the mistake of assuming that low-quality MP3 files are what music fans want for their main copy of an album.

128 KBps MP3s are only the beginning. As people Get a Clue, they'll start ripping at 256 KBps, and the quality will become indistinguishable from CD. Napster or its successors will probably evolve to distribute cover art and liner notes, too. With CD burners becoming standard in consumer computers (see the new iMacs) and easy to use (check out iTunes), there will be no reason to buy a CD. The record companies know this, which is why they're freaking out now even thought it's not hurting them yet. They'd be stupid to wait until they were losing milliions a year and it was too late to stop.

Hmmm...

[markbthomas]

It seems to me there are three types of people on the internet:

• Those who innovate (www.slashdot.org, www.sourceforge.net, etc.
• Those who try and get as much as they can for free at the expense of others (Napster etc)
• Those who stifle the industry, and try to make money out of their proprietry creations (www.micro$oft.com)

Of course, these are generalisations, and in fact most people lie between these three extremes, but which one do you come closest to? I personally like to think of myself as being nearest to the first.

vaporware

[giberti]

This looks like another Microsoft vapor ware product (a practice which incidently Intel has taken up...)

about us Copyright.net incubates partnerships that create and internet Community. We're developing a portal that will offer web- based software solutions and business services for the copyright community. Copyright.net will offer the highest level of integrated software solutions as well as management and marketing business services for copyright owners and users.

But you can be certain that this thing that they hope to do will not exist until more money is thrown their way.

At least copyleft.net has some cool swag to buy.

I see where the record industry is comming from it does cut into margins which puts people out of work. But Napster itself is not the problem. Its users who are the problem. Unless you want to police the users activities (ie, what I use my computer for) killing a program like Napster will only give rise to less organized distribution methods.

Have you tried searching on Warez on Google recently?

I can only hope that Microsoft doesn't throw a bunch of money into this and say that a free operating system is somehow an infringment in their ULA, and therefore, you have lost rights to your computer, because you installed Linux.

Translating "aetsch"

[Mr. Obvious]

As an American living in Germany, and a father whose kids have survived German Kindergarten (where the word "aetsch" is most often to be heard), I would translate "aetsch" not so much as "gotcha" as "nyaah nyaah". In other words, it's simply a fairly all-purpose, generic taunt. Whereas "gotcha" generally implies that something I did previously "got you", and often implies "I tricked you into doing something dumb" (e.g. believing some outrageous lie), "aetsch" can be said without any previous provacation, just totally spontaneously, if you get my drift.

That said, I'll hurry to concede that, in context, "gotcha" is a pretty good translation.

Now, I'm curious whether any real Germans will want to correct me on this...

Accused not convicted

[elvum]

"These people are being accused, not convicted of a crime."

Ah yes, but the point is that they are being punished as a result of the accusation, not the conviction.

Perhaps the problem is that the legal remedy has been effectively put into the hands of a third party. (Copyright.net, in this case...)

What kind of stupid marketing ploy is this?

[the_hose]

Okay, is this just me or does it look like the napster bans were requested _soley_ to drive people to their site & force them into "registering"? Isn't there some way Napster can legally elect to flat-out ignore them, on the grounds that they are flagrantly abusing the provision?

It would help if they were a more known service...

[Svartalf]

Bluntly speaking, they don't happen to be that well known. If someone doesn't know about a given restaurant, they're not going to be a patron of it now are they? Same goes for any other business.

What trends will now start occuring?

[mr_tails]

This is just an observation, but does anyone else have any ideas on how this will go?

Possible scenario:

More companies will join on the bandwagon of detecting copyright infringments and developing software in order to 'catch' illegal distributions of mp3's (and eventually movies, books, etc.)

In an effort to circumvent these copyright detectors and to cause them all sorts of headaches including legal problems users will begin to distribute false files. This will include incorrect naming of files, substituting junk and garbage as copyrighted material and such. If it truly is illegal to accuse you of a copyright violation, as a form of protest, some people will begin to pawn junk files as a political movement. Others will simply continue to pawn them off because they either think it is funny, dont care, or feel if they get shafted why not someone else.

This will then cause tons of garbage to exist out there as chaff. Users end up getting garbage a majority of the time from filetrading services. It becomes somewhat of a game for users who attempt to avoid detection yet continue to distribute.

P2P would seem to have some interesting times ahead, or would they be worse times?

Re:Well, so what?

[Wavemaker]

Believe it or not, you can write an essay in any language, not necessarily English ;)

Obscure voluntary payment model fails

[Antaeus Feldspar]

I think there's an important difference between Napster and Fairtunes -- I've heard of Napster.

It would be a shame if the failure of an unadvertised and unpromoted venture was held to be "proof" of the failure of its core principle. The majority of real-world retail operations fail within two to three years, but is this taken as proof that the concept of a real-world retail operation is flawed and cannot work? There are too many other explanations, including just that no one knew it was there.

A fairer comparison might be MP3.com, which has had all the publicity that Fairtunes does not appear to have. There, you can stream an artist's song for free, or you can pay to have that song and others shipped to you on a DAM CD in CD audio and MP3 format.

The theory that people will never pay for what they can get for free should mean that no one buys MP3.com CDs. Instead, I've probably spent 500% to 1000% more on MP3.com CDs than on CDs from the RIAA companies in the past year, and my only criteria has been "is this a fair price for this music?", not any sort of ideological "screw the RIAA!" position.

We should be careful to take from an experience only that wisdom which is in it, and not more. - Mark Twain

Question for you all

[hypergreatthing]

Hey. I was thinking. Legally, who is breaking the law?.. the person who rips the music and makes it available, or the person who d/les it and listens to it? I mean if someone was giving out bootleg copies of the newest movie, who would get in trouble?.. some passerby who decided to pick up a copy?.. or the person who made it possible to do it? -Hypergreatthing@yahoo.com

Rights and such

[bee]

I seem to remember something written about 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness'. I dunno about you, but using Napster seems to fall into that third category there.

If you discount that argument, then I challenge you to find the right to 'walk down the street' in the Constitution in anything other than generalities like the 9th and 10th Amendments. And last I checked, using the legal system as a club to get something you want that doesn't have anything to do with the law is itself a crime. The RIAA wants Napster dead, and it will do anything, legal or illegal, to accomplish its goals, including (ab)using the legal system.


---

Why I don't use Fairtunes

[dingman]

I looked at Fairtunes a while ago. I liked the idea. However, there is one problem. If I use Fairtunes to pay the artists whose music I listen to, I am more or less admitting that I didn't obtain the music through legal channels. The bands might not care (Hole, to pick an extreme example), but their lables probably do. In fact, AFAIK, I have no music that is not legally obtained, but that's not going to save me from a costly bettle with record lables and scared ISPs if someone decides to use Fairtunes' records to track down 'pirates'.

Copy R-I-G-H-T

[elmar(a)unixcode.net]

Its copyright, as in, the rights to copy.

Flaws with that argument

[Xuther]

1) Tipping is not anonymous, and failure to tip incurs societal disapproval (people think you're a cheap bastard).

Unless you are visiting a strange town, and if the service sucks I do more than not just give a decent tip, I leave a single penny to let them know how dis-satisfied I am with the service.

2) You personally benefit by tipping, assuming you return to the restaurant (you'll get good service next time)

I should have good service the first time if they even expect me to come back. Aside from that, tips are usually distributed among others who work there. I recall one time I was at a restaurant, the person who was the waitress was an exceptional server, however she didn't get any of the tips because she was in training, they all went to some fat lazy bitch hanging out at the register chatting with other employees. Since then, we've made a habit of giving it directly to the people as a gift.

That's the same problem I have with taxing blank media, who decides who gets what? Especially when that same media can be used for other purposes, such as if I had to duplicate a corporate training cd for a new employee, or a database backup.

blithery explication for the unwashed

[Kwantus]

All these folks who keep arguing that "the net routes around damage" live in a fantasy world

Yes. They took a technical truth - the packet routing can adapt to the loss of a node if there are redundant physical links, since it started as a military project and had to survive attack - and twisted it out of meaning; if they really want to censor the net badly enough, they can do it. It won't be "easy," because of the distributed nature of the net, but it's still possible. (For that matter, the net is likely nowhere near as "distributed," especially redundant, as we might like. Commercial interests have less stake in redundancy than the military, after all; and only a couple of the big commercial networks would have to be "brought on-board" for censoring to be practically universal if not actually so. That's what's so scary about an AOL/Time/Warner/et al merger...)

This is a bit like the twisting of Einstein's spacetime relativity into moral relativity, or of Darwin's survival-of-the-fittest ideas into eugenics, that went on in the early 20th century. Or even the twisting of Lev18:22. You can't take something that far out of context and validly make a point with it, although it doesn't stop the Gëbbleses of the world trying... and sadly, too often succeeding. :(

"Search and desist"

[CaptainTylor]

...seems to be the best description of copyright.net's business operations.

This phrase is hereby released into the public domain. :)

Is copyright.net willing to pay damages?

[Fizzlewhiff]

Let's say on my web site I have some MP3 of my own band doing covers or parodies. Copyright.net gets my ISP to shut me down because there was a file called pretty_woman.mp3 on it. As a result my site is down for several days while I do who knows what to prove I am not ripping off a dead guy's old lady. I would imagine I would be able to sue copyright.net for this.

Network info for Firewall, Routers and DNS

[Stavr0]

Could someone post all the DNS, netmask, IP ranges associated to Copyright.Net and related entities. That way we can all add them to our 'deny' rules and levee around them.

This being said, I am not naive enough to pretend it's going to stop anything.... but if one should find a 'copyright.net' hit on a firewall and serve them with a cease-and-desist (for violating any number of privacy or computer abuse laws); it just may cause Them to reconsider their operations.
---

An example of a sucessful "free" book

[davecb]

I'm one of the authors of Using Samba, which is selling quite well, which has been translated into German, French and Polish, and which has a pocket guide coming out soon. It's available under an open content license, which says it can "be freely reproduced and distributed in any form, in any medium physical or electronic, in whole or in part..." I and my colleagues are receiving a decent income from this book despite its free availability: O'Reilly adds so much value by editing, publishing and distributing it on paper that people spend real money buying physical copies. The free, online copies are a non-threatening form of advertising for us.

Re:An example of a sucessful "free" book

[elflord]

You're not using the SPP though. Moreover, noone wants to read books on-screen (maybe this will change -- when we have 300 DPI screens)

BTW, how much money do you get for the book ? And how much per copy ? (you can email me if you like, I'm just curious, considering writing a book some time)

A new twist on napster: Legal until played!

[Joey7F]

See about this, IANAL but:

It seems that if you download an mp3 you are not breaking any copyright law.

What if you download it and NEVER PLAY IT! If you don't play it, isn't that the same as someone taking their cd copies to the safe deposit box and putting them in there? Or lets say you make a copy and put it in your car. Your car gets broken into and the cds are taken, are you guilty of copy right infringement? I think this is extremely narrow and clintonian in nature, but hey he survived as a president, maybe we can too.

--Joey

Easier distribution

[Sanity]

because it is much easier to distribute music over the Internet than it is to distribute CDs, your music gets much more exposure.

--

So you don't tip waiters in strange towns?

[Sanity]

By your argument, nobody would tip waiters unless there was a chance that they might see them again, or see the people around them again. This clearly isn't the case. Further, the "I want my friends to see that I am generous" can just as easily apply to voluntary tipping mechanisms, nobody said they had to be anonymous.

--

Who said anything about anonymous?

[Sanity]

1) Who said that voluntary payment online had to be anonymous?
2) People still tip even if they don't expect to return to a restaurant
3) Just because one example of a non-funded, low-profile, voluntary payment mechanism hasn't been a success yet, does not justify a dismissal of the whole idea.

--

Re: Service model

[Rakarra]

Fine. Works for me.

I'd rather listen to music that people make for the love of music itself anyway.

You'll have a hell of a lot less than that too after all the members of the good bands have to get full-time jobs in various industry because their music won't pay for the time spent recording, writing, [practicing, etc. Our society revolves around money, whether we want it to or not. Food costs money. Housing costs money. Band equipment costs a lot of money. The artists NEED to bring a fair amount of money in somehow.

For fun - a response sent to silicongod article.

[ImaLamer]

Good thing I'm the owner of this e-mail or maybe I'd be braking the law.
---Response Start---

I read your article on Copyright.net and never did I see any mention of the
forth amendment.

I would certainly believe that if this service scans my hard drive it is no
better than a Trojan or a virus. And isn't virus and Trojan trading a
illegal activity if it causes a monetary loss? What if a user at my business
gets my whole office kicked off line - I would hold copyright.net responsible.

This service is doing a search and seizure at computer speeds. The FBI would
even need a warrant to search my computer. The DEA (an unholy relic from WWII
see High Times Issue March 2001) with it's unelected and shady practices
wouldn't even try something like this without a warrant. Fidel Castro
wouldn't even do something like this.

My ISP (Road Runner/Time-Warner) has its own 'Copyright' team and if they
even accessed my hard drive without my knowledge or consent I would have a
lawyer in about 2 minutes.

This 'service' is so very unconstitutional that copyrights are not even an
issue. There is no due process - there is no proof even that in some way you
do not own the rights to one of these files.

And in no way do I intend to say copying and trading of mp3's are right (or
wrong) but simply this isn't the way to 'protect' this billion dollar
industry.

Copyrights are really just figments of people imaginations - they are made up
to protect the all mighty dollar someone *could* be making. But the funny
thing is - this service shows my rights as an American citizen are even more
imaginary.

Thank You
Joe Henzi

/postscript/ - who is the founder of this company again? Kevin Mitnick? Is
the code to this software already proprietary under a release from several
hacker groups?

---Response End---
Does making an MP3 make me the owner of 'that' work?