Slashdot Mirror
Renewed Crackdown On File Sharing
||Plazm|| writes: "Here is an article on CNet's News.com that talks about some ISPs, such as Adelphia and @Home, teaming up with record companies to crack down on not only copyrighted music trading but also other media such as movies. It goes on to talk about the rise of bounty hunter hiring by record labels to track down media pirates. It's good to see ISPs like Verizon reject such pressure from big label companies. But can they hold out forever?"
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
For speaking kindly toward Verizon may thou be struck repeatedly and often with one million strands of unlaid fiber. When Verizon can actually get around to doing it that is.
http://windows.scares.us
This is an ironic arena of businesses fighting with each other. On one hand, we have . . . well the MPAA and RIAA whom I trust to care about my well-being as much as I'd trust Pauly Shore with nuclear weapons.
On the other, companies who make money selling access. I doubt they care much about my rights either.
However, what we do have is two different corporate intersts colliding, and as noted, if people don't like one service, they can go elsewhere. I can easily see companies using this as a sales pitch eventually - we support your rights and won't back down (please pay promptly).
Maybe we can use greed against greed.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
If ISPs were common carriers, like the telephone company, they would not be able to cancel your account except for a limited number of reasons, such as not paying your bill. They would also be obligated to provide service to everyone on a non-discriminatory basis.
ISPs are not common carriers, they can cancel your service for any or no reason. They can refuse to provide service for any or no reason.
This means that an ISP can cancel your account if someone complains that you are violating their intellectual property rights. It does not mean that they have a legal obligation to do so.
As of July 23, SWBell Internet Services & Prodigy are dumping a bunch of newsgroups "after evaluating possible copyright infringement issues". They posted an FAQ about it, and the bottom line is they're no longer offering any of the newsgroups with sounds, mp3, cd.image, movies, multimedia, warez, or vcd in the title.
What's your damage, Heather?
SSSShhhhh!!!! You fool, don't tell them!!!
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
First of all I have to congratulate Verizon for something, OUCH!
They're not standing up for a cause; they're just negotiating for a higher payoff.
I just had a friend lose his internet service. He
downloaded "Bear Share" and got one song.
Neil Young's "Cinnimion Girl"
I am having trouble with the fact that he was
"punished" (suspended for 30 days) without a
trial, hearing or anything.
No one ever downloaded any mp3's from him. Seems
a little unconstutional to me...he has the
Neil Young CD.
AdFuel
That's what we have police for. Or maybe you wouldn't mind if I followed you all day, took videos of you jaywalking and doing other minor stuff, then send you a blackmail letter demanding USD $2,000? After all, you are a criminal..
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Hi!
m l
Would it be foolish to suggest you link to the printable version of this story?
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1004-202-6674297.ht
This way we could avoid this MASSIVELY IRRITATING DAMN ADVERT in the MIDDLE OF THE &&%%/ SCREEN.
Ciao,
Klaus
---
"What, I need a *reason* for everything?" -- Calvin
Free PC version of ChipWits at http://www.breueronline.de/klaus/chipwits/
It's their own damn problems if they don't care to crack open a networking textbook and look for "Quality of Service." Where X is defined as the number of users at a given point of time, A is defined as any given member of X, B is defined as the amount of bandwith any given member of X is allocated, and Y is defined as the total available bandwith out of the private network into the public, then the relationship between X, Y, A and B can be expressed as: B(A) = Y/X
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Useless? If you have the Service Providers on your side...
Those of us using phone modems: the ISP knows what number you're dialing in at, what username you're logining in with (for the initial modem connection). This info is kept in a db of some sort (flat file or actual db) or at least should be if the ISP wants to be able to troubleshoot any problems.
Those of us using cable modems(at least Comcast, my provider): the ISP knows what MAC address you're using and has a db with that MAC address and your name in it.
Those of us using the school's connection:
Is it in your dorm? They know what port jack you're plugged in to so that DHCP IP can line up nicely to 1-4 people, depeding on how many share the room.
Are you using the computers in a computer lab? chances are you had to log in to the computer at some point. that will be kept somewhere: Fri Jul 27 08:59:39 EDT 2001 frisco logged in from 192.168.0.1 or so.
Are you using computers in an open lab? Where i work, we can match up a couple db's to tell you what DHCP address lines up with what Mac address, then what computer that NIC card is in, then what room that computer is in. but the best: some of those labs have cameras in them, Security keeps tapes of what goes on. give us a time and a DHCP IP address, we can get you a print out what the person using the comptuer looks like. Not that that's ever happened, and every time something close to that happens (police wanting email, etc) i raise a big stink about it and always always make sure the college lawyer has gone over the paperwork for it a few times, and i'd do the same if it was just to stop someone trading mp3's - i didnt get that 160gig raid for nothing!
Sure, you need to select data from a variety of different db's in order to track down the exact user, but that's really just a matter of a few case's, select's, and join's. It may take 1 second to track down 1 user, so 100,000 will be 100,000 seconds, or almost 28 hours. I don't think the big players will mind waiting a day and a half.
There are some sources for internet access that will be more difficult to track, like that access in the library, or at a webcafe. but even a lot of those places have cameras set up. The best is taking your computer somewhere with a large network, like a university or a corporation, and either finding a live drop or a live wireless network - then it will be more difficult to track you. Don't forget to change your MAC address while you're doing it and have some TIGHT firewall rules to make it harder fro Them. But how many people are willing to go through the effort just to trade mp3's and avi's?
But that only goes for tracking someone you know is trading stuff. first you have to find out they are trading, and that's where some good steganographic and cryptographic techniques will come in handy for the actual transmission of files. Distributing lists of who has what is another matter - how to separate who we want to be able to see that we are trading illegal stuff from the feds?
-f
-f
www.blackant.net
The publishing industry, be it text, music, or whatever, used to be in the business of making information available to the market.
That has changed, because the Internet is far more efficient at that.
The publishing industry is now in the business of manufacturing scarcity, controlling access to that information. This is a fundamental paradigm change. Their present business model depends on their controlling access to 'their' information, and no business likes to change business models.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
"We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company."
One of the quickest and best ways to access mp3's, movies, warez and pr0n is through the @home news-servers. So, isnt it a bit hypocritical that @home is cracking down on their customers mp3 sharing, while back on their servers you can download over 100 albums, 3 iso's and 5 movies a day. and that is without access to the alt.bin.warez and alt.bin.cd-image newsgroups
Bounty Hunters? Seems to me yet another typical American (read USofA-n) solution. But than again, I can just imagine how this would work. Me and my laptop are happily enjoying a nice vacation in France, and suddenly I find myself tied in the back of a van waiting for the next cargo flight to the USA --- just because I had forgotten to wipe my MP3's.... There must be a better way. There goes my karma...
Because really, would you prefer to watch your movie in 640x480 after spending all evening first finding then downloading or would you prefer to shell out a couple bucks to see it on the big screen?
Even if you do watch it first on your computer, if the movie is good you're still going to either go see it or buy the DVD because you can't yet replace that experience.
Of course it's only a matter of time..
Matt
Recently the Canadian Recording Industry Association sent our ISP this ceases & desist letter. Fortunately our ISP called us up and told us that they wouldn't be shutting us down unless they received a court order. We then fired back this response to CRIA pointing out the absurdities of their letter to our ISP.
A good source of info on copyright in Canada is Michael Geist's website. He actually wrote an article entitled Napster north of the 49th parallel outlining the current copyright situation faced by file shares up here.
Matt.
I don't necessarily like this approach that they are taking, but at some point, they have to be able to get some legal recourse for stopping people from sharing copyrighted materials. Either that, or forget the whole copyright system and replace it with something else, but realistically, that's never going to happen. Just like Income Tax will never be replaced with a more fair Sales Tax and we'll never get rid of guns in the hands of criminals.
I hear a lot of people bashing the RIAA/MPAA (myself included), but I don't hear very much constructive criticism. At some point, they have to be able to protect their interests.
Should they go after individual users? Personally, I think they should, but the outcry of that would probably be far greater than than anything they are doing now.
It was easy to hide behind Napster, when tens of millions of people were using the service, but at this point, if you've got 100 DVD movies on your system (assuming you've got the space!), I'd be pretty frightened of prosecution. And there wouldn't be much you could do legally, if they wanted to throw the book at you.
I'm wearing my Copyleft DeCSS T-Shirt as I type this, and if we're ever going to be able to denounce the DVD CCA and MPAA for going after 2600.com, then we're going to have to bend somewhere. It's like people say "DeCSS was not made to copy DVDs, it was made to watch your DVDs on Linux... Hey, did you copy that DVD for me yet?" That type of attitude should stop, and people should be willing to admit that what they are doing (copying and distributing DVDs, CDs, etc.) is wrong, if not in a moral sense, then at least in a legal sense.
Break the law, pay the price. So far we've been relatively lucky because they've been going after the wrong people (Dmitry Sklyarov, Napster, 2600, etc.)
First of all I have to congratulate Verizon for something, OUCH! (OK ~Grude~ nice going Versizon, on resisting pressure)
Ok, on to the rant.... Why aren't all ISP's doing this. Why is it that they don't understand their legal role here is to do nothing and should remain that way. They are granted enhanced service provider status under the law in the US. They are just like the Phone company, they provide a line, but can legally take no responsibility for whats on that line. The second they take any responsibility for whats on the line they loose that status. Perhaps because Verizon is in the phone business, they understand this and resisting pressure because they know thier legal standing in this, but more companies should be following the example. It seems to me that perhaps AOL is also understanding of this, lests consider they own Winamp which for alot of the world is the only way they know how to play that MP3 they just downloaded.
So far my provider for my Cable modem has not caved as far as I know and shows no signs of doing so, of course I never check my mail their, or hardly ever read their web site so who knows, it might have just changed.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
Remember, cable modems (the most popular form of consumer broadband) are shared bandwidth. If one user is hogging the pipe, other users experience degraded performance, and the ISP racks up complaints and loses customers. If a handful of their customers are taking up 75% of the available bandwidth by distributing MP3s all day long, it doesn't matter to the ISP if they themselves are liable or not. It's in their economic best interests to keep the pipe free for everyone's convenience.
Crackdown on file sharing? That's an understatement - look what's happened to Napster !!!
---------------------
---------------------
%46%55%43%4B !
While @home, et al don't give two shakes about IP, they do care about the bandwidth they're selling. They can't oversubscribe their networks if everyone is using 128kbps or 384kbps upstream and 1Mbps or more downstream with Gnutella, Freenet, or other connections.
I wouldn't be surprised if the broadband ISP's start taking a proactive approach, sniffing users looking for file sharing programs, claiming that these violate their TOS, and start issuing warnings/terminations.
Think about it--if you're a cable/DSL provider, what kind of customers do you want? Those who read email and go ga-ga at how much faster web pages with blinking pop-ups load than on dialup, or those who are sucking down a half-gigabyte a day from your NNTP server, and another from each of a couple of "premimum" (i.e. warez, pr0n, mp3, moviez) news servers and have seven Gnutella connections up?
There's a symbiotic relationship between "rights holders" and broadband providers here. Expect things to get worse.
CEE5210S The signal SIGHUP was received.
Yeah, so other companies are doing this too. For instance the other day, I was out of town and called my young daughter and read to her from her favorite book. After the first paragraph, on operator came on the line and asked me to please cease and desist with my balatant copyright violation. I told her to fuck off and that information wants to be free, but they cancelled my phone service and put my daughter in juvinile detention. Now I have two copies of the book, one here, and one at home, and I purchased a reading license. It feels so good to be legal, and not an evil pirate!
Then there was the time I was calling a friend from work, and my CD player was on, and the same thing happened. I got a letter from the RIAA, and they cancelled my employers phone service. Of course, I was fired and they took my CD. But I should've known better! Distributing copyrighted content is WRONG!
And the other day, I connected my stereo to my computer and played my favorite Metallica MP3s that I downloaded and didn't pay anybody for. After 4 seconds, the power went out. The next day I received a fedex telling me that "your electricity service is only licensed for legal purposes. failure to abide by these terms will result in the immediate termination of your account.".
So don't worry folks, this is nothing new. Now I just have to read the license terms on this new flashlight I bought: "Your new Mag-Lite(r) flashlight is licensed soley for the illlumination of material that you have the right view. In order to enforce these terms, we reserve the right to audit your flashlight use at any time and without prior notice."
This is just another MPAA RIAA big brother tactic to try to make themselves look useful and possibly make some more money. Blocking client services like Gnutella and iMesh is difficult on any level within an ISP, primarily because it's just data flowing on a port. You can start by blocking specific ports, but this will be a game of catch the rabbit while users switch services, protocols become more intelligent, etc. Any ISP who is at all concerned with efficiency will quickly abandon these efforts.
The only way I could see ISPs finding out who is actually distributing copyrighted data would be to spy on users and look through data manually to find copyright violations. Of course, this would be a violation of several telecommunications laws. Using a file sharing system isn't illegal, and unlike Napster, many of these networks do not have a central source to go after.
It's also interesting to note Napster's community was its breaking point, because it gave unique usernames which could be tracked. In Gnutella's case, there is no clear way to track people. Specific networks could be tracked and IP addresses are available, but with DHCP those are pretty useless. It also raises the familiar point of placing IP addresses to real names (1 is easy, but imagine 100,000).
Hopefully the futility of all this will be realized. Napster was easy to get rid of, but now do these companies think every ISP will bend to their wills and censor communications and spy on the very people who provide the money to run their network?
Perhaps one day we will need confirmation that what we send is not copyrighted nor offends or violates any law or rule by any company with enough money to buy the pressure rights.
"I'll just chip in a bit for RedHat: I actually have that installed on my university machine." - Linus, '95
If any of you had a website that earned revenue based on traffic, and someone hacked it so that those hits didn't register with the advertisers, you'd howl bloody murder. There is no f-in difference here.
Everybody has a right to practice civil disobedience. The price is the potential of punishment. Getting your service yanked is a paltry punishment indeed. Get over it.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
I always find this clause strange. ISPs' status as common carriers is now fairly well established, but they still choose to be responsible for policing what their customers are doing, beyond the endpoint of their cable.
I can see why ISP's take down content hosted on hardware that they own (http/ftp servers), but by cutting the cable to individual customers, they are acknowleding that they are not common carriers. I can see a clear distinction between serving copyrighted content from their own hardware, and maintaining a bit of dumb cable connecting my home network (which I am responsible for) with the internet. I doubt that the RIAA sends threats to the outfits maintaining the cable coming out of China.
I'm at a loss to understand why ISP's don't have contracts which say "We are a common carrier, you are responsible for your own actions" (which you are), then when they receive a complaint, either completely stonewall (i.e. spend nothing on responding to) the complainer until a court order arrives or just pass on the customer info (responsible for your actions, remember?), then step out of the way and let the (forewarned) customer and the copyright owner slug it out.
By giving themselves power to cut cables over copyright violation, and by protecting their customers from prosecution by passing on warnings, aren't ISPs actually making themselves more liable? Very strange.
So, does anyone know of any (home, retail) ISP that does have a "we're a common carrier, do what you want" clause?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Michael Healy, the company's senior Internet abuse investigator stands in the back control area of his ship's bridge with a motley group of men and creatures. Harris Schwartz, director of network policy and standards for Excite@Home and two controllers stand at the front of the bridge and watch the group with scorn.
...there will be a substantial reward for the one who finds the file-swapping networks and their subscribers. You are free to use any methods necessary, but I want them alive. No disintegrations.
SCHWARTZ: Bounty hunters. We don't need that scum.
FIRST CONTROLLER: Yes, sir.
SCHWARTZ: Those file traders won't escape us.
A second controller interrupts.
SECOND CONTROLLER: Sir, we have a priority signal from the Star Destroyer MPAA.
The group standing before Healy is a bizarre array of galactic fortune hunters: There is Bossk, a slimy, tentacled monster with two huge, bloodshot eyes in a soft baggy face; Zuckuss and Dengar, two battle-scarred, mangy human types; IG-88, a battered, tarnished chrome war droid; and Boba Fett, a man in a weapon-covered armored space suit.
HEALY:
BOBA FETT: As you wish.
If I'm not remembering it wrong the anger on /. over the Napster shutdown was that people couldn't trade music that the author wanted to be free. Atleast that was that people said.
Those companies and bounty hunters only tracks down people who DO break the law, whats wrong with that?
Sue the shit out of them so that we who do have some morality on our body don't have to buy music/software with added pricetags to compensate for piracy.
It's kind of funny that the people stealing music is often the same people who praises open source software for ethical reasons. Makes one wonders if it really has anything to do with ethics and not the fact that it doesn't cost anything.
*Groan*. Right. That's like saying "it's good to see convenience store robbers get away all the time."
What are we fighting for here, exactly? I want to be able to place copies of music and videos I own on my own devices. That's what's called "legal". Everybody else, or so it seems, wants to share the music and videos with a million other people on the internet that don't pay. That's what's called "illegal".
The hacker/techie/music pirates always seem to walk this fine line between legal and illegal, slipping over on each side from time to time. Yes, the argument that we should be allowed to keep copies of the same music in various parts of our house is a sound one (legal side). But no, we shouldn't be allowed to share it with a million people on the internet (illegal side).
Or better yet, block the port at which the user is sharing at by using firewalls. This will keep the customer's connection to the internet alive, but it will block a GNUtella client from working. At least until the user changes the active port.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.