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Convicted by the Movie Cops
Reckless Visionary writes "Salon has a great article about what it's like to get on the MPAA's bad side. It's a first hand account of what happens when you are accused of violating the DMCA and commentary on the "guilty until proven innocent" nature of today's copyright laws." Pirate movies. Lose access. You are guilty. And this guy was on vacation when it happened, so there's no need for accountability. Hope you don't depend on your net access.
If my ISP decided to shut me off because someone else accused me of something, and they didn't even bother asking my side of the story, I think I'd be more than happy to terminate my relationship with that ISP.
"We never sleep. Our IOS software is constantly searching the Internet 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Our intelligent scanning probes are customized to each client's needs and patrol the Internet searching for suspicious sites."
Isn't scanning illegal now too?
The segment called "Video Pirates" from the film "Amazon Women on the Moon"( don't mod me offtopic if you haven't seen it), I guess we should be scared afterall...
Je t'aime Stéphanie
How many times have we seen this before? They had their connection to their ISP discontinued! This is hardly a conviction, nor would I in any way consider an ISP to be a government body. Okay, so it was an inconvenience, and the matter was settled, but the ISP was just doing what they felt was right in trying to resolve a problem, and inadvertantly targeted the wrong user. It's not like they were thrown in jail for visiting the US by Adobe. Come on.
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
I think this pretty well sums it up.
Did anybody expect an ISP owned primarily by Time-Warner to act in a responsible manner? After all, the parent company owns several movie studios.
Synergy, hah. More like incest...
I believe that, in such as case, it should be possible to countersue both the ISP, the MPAA and the company doing research for both.
Something like "Unfair termination of service" or "Violation of service agreement" as well as "Slanderous attacks" seem totally possible in this case. Anybody with more legal experience cares to comment?
Chilling, nonetheless... =(
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
Lawsuits, anyone?
Harkening back to that interesting, if wierd, article by ESR: DMCA violates flerbage. Innocent parties had the time wasted, perhaps in this guy's case, his money wasted.
I've heard some noises about how stupid the word 'flerbage' is, but you know what? I sure is a good concept to single out. It sure puts the true effects of law into perspective.
I like to play children's songs in minor keys.
"We're all sons of bitches now." --J. Robert Oppenheimer
I'm a Sys Admin. When ever i complain about someone trying to hack my system, the ISP i'm calling will almost always shut down the account of the person who's ip is attached to the complaint. The only difference here is that it is required by law. I'm not saying this is right, in fact I think it is very wrong, I'm just saying its has been happening for a long time.
The ISP therefore HAS TO CUT OFF THE ACCOUNT or risk being sued by the copyright enforcement agency.
And where's the customer (the one actually paying for the service) in all of this? Left without net access even though they didn't actually break any laws since they claim they weren't even at home when the incident occurred (although I admit that's pretty weak, I can run a file server while I'm away from my computer or mess with the clock to change the upload timestamp and then claim I wasn't home when it happened). No one contacted the customer to confirm anything, it was all done because the MPAA claimed they had "evidence"!
Still, it points out HOW MUCH FREAKIN POWER these copyright agencies have. All the ISP's are so afraid of going to court that they give in every time! Yay freedom!
You can enforce your laws.
So much for checks and balances.
From reading the article, it seems like the "identification" portion of the pirate hunt process is flawed. I suspect that the reason this person was accused was either because
Cases like this are prime for exposing the inherent dangers of relying on IP addresses (or any other electronic address for that matter) as identifiers. The people affected must take the time to address the issues head-on. In this case, and IMHLO (the L is for Legal) a little detailed information of how networks operate applied in the right area would shine the great light of knowledge and understanding into some very dark legal corners.
Laws affecting technology will always be bad until enough techies become lawyers.
From the article:
If we are accused again of distributing copyrighted material, we lose our accounts for two weeks instead of one, and face banishment from our ISP.
McCarthyism is alive and well in America. A little finger pointing is all it takes, and you are discredited forever.
let's launch DoS attacks against spyware services like Ranger Online.
This is a common trend in our society, at least in the US. There is often a good reason for a party to take proactive measures to prevent further crimes from occurring, but that must be balanced against the requirements of liberty. Our entire judicial and legislative system is founded on the premise of "no prior restraint" - in other words, you can't attempt stop someone from doing something illegal, because that would presume that they WILL do so. The only time this premise is routinely broken is when significant physical harm might result.
(FLAMESUIT)
On the OTHER hand, it's worth pointing out that cutting off access to a service temporarily is not a "conviction". In this case there is no judicial involvement. The person was not convicted of any crime, will not be punished, and will not have any criminal record. I agree, it's an awful thing, but we ought to be careful not to overhype this issue. Until the MPAA gets the ability to send someone to jail or to fine them WITHOUT TRIAL, this proactive approach to copyright enforcement is simply a business issue.
(/FLAMESUIT)
That said, the US needs to pay careful attention to this trend of "guilty until proven innocent" OUTSIDE the judicial arena, so that this kind of excess does not grow further. Although I hate suggesting increasing the reach of government, I believe copyright law could stand to see some carefully written laws limiting or preventing this "prior restraint" practice.
--Brandon / Split Infinity Music
...how corporates now have so much power than the justice system is deligating them powers.
I'm sure the ISP had a terms of service agreement. The first reaction of the ISP when it becomes aware of something illegal it should be to dump the connection immediately. Try arguing that a child pornographer's site should not be shut down until a court decides that it is, in fact, illegal. You and I both know that could be days, weeks, or months.
People make honest mistakes (even people from large corporations) and when they realize they made a mistake, they fix it.
I will be interested to see how the MPAA goes about trying to force this law onto other countries. Say a user within my IP block is 'found guilty' of breaking the DMCA - so they will write me a letter saying (essentially) stop them now or else. But I'm not in the USA so what are there options if I take my chances? Does local law in the UK support US commercial organisations killing me or my users? And more so - what if I don't capitulate under pressure? The article seems to suggest that US ISP have to act on notification or they can get taken to court and sued - that surely can't apply across national boundries....can it? :/
Ps. I would like to thank all Americans for voting in people who then passed laws like this which make the rest of us worried...
Something similar happened to me when I ran botf.com
:)
The day after I left for a 3 week sail in summer 1999, my ISP received an anonymous tipoff - at least they wouldnt tell me who, although I have an idea.
The ISP shut the account down straight away, including email access. They then emailed me on webmaster@botf.com with an explanation. Naturally it was unreadable, as I couldnt log in.
About a week after I left I popped into an internet cafe to see what was going on, unfortunatly I couldnt read my botf email, hence had no contact with my ISP.
when I got back, eventually it sorted itself out. I refused to pay for the time though, and as the site had pretty much crumbled to bits (3 weeks with no site means people dont come back), I contacted my credit card company and told them to hold payment.
Why did they shut me down? I had 5 mp3's for download - these were mp3 versions of the wavs freely available on microprose's site. I had had permission to mirror the samples on my site.
The (5) samples were also in a zip file.
The ISP had heard about these files, obviously not researched them or contacted me - and just shut the site down ASAP.
I will never use them again, needless to say. I hadnt been with them long, having just moved from a wonderful ISP, that unfortunatly couldnt offer me the facilities I needed. I have 2 domains with them now, and couldnt be happier with allwebco. Unfortunatly I forget the name of the ISP that shut me down - I think they went out of buisness.
These mp3's were legal, but because of the hysteria of "mp3 == bad" arround then (and still arround today), I lost something ver dear to me.
Ahh well, the game sucked anyway
We need to get rid of these extralegal enforcement methods: if they want to punish you , they should have to go to court, not dragoon your ISP into being the executioner. This requires either (1) a court finding the DMCA unconstitutional (likely): or (2) legislative action (increasingly likely).
George Bush should wake up to the fact that everyone hates the MPAA & RIAA already (a recent NY Times profile of Hillary Rosen says that RIAA staffers don't wear RIAA t-shirts in public anymore because of the abuse they get) and that he can make a lot of political hay by beating up on them.
InstaPundit! Ahead of the Curve Since 30 Minutes Ago
Has anyone thought of filing a complaint with the MPAA's ISP, and telling them you have found evidence that there are copyrighted materials being pirated from their IP address? Create a dinky little mp3 song, then send a screenshoot of a text-based gnutella session saying it's being offered on x.x.x.x. Hell, why even stop at MPAA.. How would WB feel if they were down for a week? Or Disney? Or your congressman's web site?
_______
2B1ASK1
The biggest question that remains in my mind in situations like this is how do they determine that you are sharing copyrighted works?
For something to stand up in court, you would need (i would hope) an IP, a date & time, and the actual content in question itself, that was obtained from your machine illegally.
It looks like the majority of these copyright monitoring services simply check file names and consider this sufficient.
What happens when you are using a client that supports any file type (gnutella/freenet/etc) and they find 'Metallica - A history of the band.html' and send your ISP a nastygram? This is obviously not a video or music file, however, unless they download it, how do they know?
Finally, I am concerned about people who use DHCP to configure their net access. Your IP changes every so often on cable/DSL. How accurate are their methods of finding the exact subscriber?
Perhaps the person who had your current IP before you was sharing files. Now you have that IP, and they accidentally terminate your access. Where are the checks and balances in this process?
The only solution in my mind right now is to switch to an ISP that isnt so trigger happy. Perhaps one that requires actual *proof* of any kind that such an infraction occured (like a copy of the file perhaps? even a description?) before terminated an account.
Does anyone know how various DSL/cable modem providers stack up in this regard?
The thing is, he didn't have anything to hide in the first place, and he was still accused.
I used to think that there was nothing wrong with the "if you're really innocent, you would have no problem with this" attitude. But now I see that it's a rather clever way to get people to give up their rights.
By that logic, since I'm really innocent, I should have no problem with letting the Goverment (or Time Warner) look at all the files on my hard drive whenever they want to. I do have a problem with that, not because I pirate music, but because I just don't want them in my hard drive, and I shouldn't have to cooperate with them if I don't want to. (Remember... I haven't even been charged in a court yet, and they're cutting off my access!)
I also have a problem with the "proprietary" techniques that are used to find copyright violators. How can you determine the difference between an illegal copy of "Titanic" and a two-hour streaming file of my dog on her floating raft in my pool named "Titanic"? The answer is that one has better acting, and the other has a bigger boat, but I can't believe that an algorithm can tell the difference between the two when they're all just bits anyway.
How would you feel if the cop pulled you over and said "You broke the law back there, but we can't tell you how we caught you because that's proprietary."? This is no different.
He's probably on a DHCP link, the IP address changes every time you log on with those. Well, not all of them, but that's the default. It allows the ISP to have more subscribers on a node than it has addresses. I suspect that the log got bollixed up and linked the port he was on to someone else's IP addr.
Best Slashdot Co
If you want to shut down someone's network, simply notify their upstream provider that they are distributing your copyrighted works. If the DMCA requires them to shut down the connection immediately as is implied by this article, what is to stop someone from utilizing this in a malicious manner?
ISPs have their service agreements written in such a way that they can terminate service simply because they want to. I though /. had put out on more than one article pointing this out.
Sue them? Please you agreed to the silly terms of service when you came on.
Listen it sucks for the wrongfully screwed but what are you going to do? Go to the competition and set up your mp3/movie file server under a different provider of bandwidth.
ISPs are a dime a dozen until AOL/Time/Warner can shut all of them down.
Its harder to hit a moving target folks.
ACK
Idiots probably tracked an IP that changed when a DHCP license didn't get renewed...If it's like my cable modem, you don't get a static IP. Two weeks later...hmmm..let's hit this IP...whoops? Wrong one now.
That's the rocket science of the MPAA for you...I feel like killing someone.
RB
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ah honey, we're all resplendent - Bill Mallonee
If I remember correctly, the letter that the MPAA sends to the ISP is required by the DMCA to contain language like "Under penalty of perjury, we declare that these facts are true". This goes along with the assertions in the letter that IP A.B.C.D uploaded a file and that file contained material copyrighted by an MPAA member, so the ISP should suspend A.B.C.D.
If they're abusing the power granted to them by the MPAA by sending out such letters without performing competent investigations, then whoever signed that letter should by hauled into court and charged with perjury. The problem is that in cases like this, it's the word of insignificant nobodies against the word of a powerful entity - no prosecutor will ever bother to take such a case. If, on the other hand, anyone ever send such a letter alleging a DMCA violation on the part of the MPAA, you can bet they'd be in court so fast it would make their head spin.
The minimal safeguards that the DMCA puts on the power to accuse and convict merely by sending a letter (by requiring it to be sent "under penalty of perjury") are in practice worthless.
Time Warner is a copyright cop in their own right... it's more like "When copyright cops join forces" rather than a general indication of how ISP's operate.
broadband is a want, not a need.
The problem that this issue highlights is that the DMCA assigns liability to the ISP if it does not immediately act on *claims* of copyright infringement. Even though no wrongdoing has to be proven, no ISP is going to stand up for a user's rights the way the current law stands. Why should any ISP expose itself to possible liability when it is so easy to just pull the plug on the accused infringer?
Just imagine if other modes of communication were subject to similar provisions. Have you been *accused* (not convicted) of wrong doing involving a phone? Sorry, no more phone access for you until you prove your innocence. Sounds ridiculous, yet if the phone companies were liable for what you said over the phone in the same manner as the ISP's, they would be forced to take similar actions. The problem is the law, not the ISP.
Other than that, you make a very valid point: the DMCA does violate fundamental freedoms, liberties, and constitutional rights. See, no new word or verbal contortions required.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
i know from a secret source that the involved ip-adress was in fact:
127.0.0.1
When I asked exactly how they find an instance of piracy (for instance, what search parameters they use), Nigam told me the methods were proprietary information.
Heh, judging from the results they must be using MS Access to keep their records! Nice work. Just a few minutes ago, I was talking to a looser who likes to traffic in warez and movies. While bragging of getting "Spy Kids" two weeks before opening, he was no more worried about getting caught than my grandmother. GET A CLUE, MPAA!
GET A LIFE, PEOPLE! Run your own ftp/http site and provide original content. Get movies from a theater, if you must, or rent them. Geazer! A whole week of bandwith consumption for something dumb like "Spy Kids"? And that crap is competing with me for Slashdot? GRRRR! You don't need this garbage, and it's providers are powerless when you quit demanding it. Sigh of relief.
I wonder what kind of cyber brains are looking for child porn. Loosing email is one thing, having your house raided and all your stuff broken/confiscated is another.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Agreeing with a previous poster, just exactly how much damage was done? Sure, the ISP covered its butt and that resulted in a loss of internet for a couple of days. Big deal. The ISP certainly didn't do anything wrong.
The MPAA, however, may be considered big, mean, and nasty for... oh wait they were just protecting their propery rights. And it looks like they made a mistake. Since Road Runner (TW)is like most ISP and uses Dynamic IPs, this sometimes happens. Oops.
If the writer's boyfriend feels like he was treated terribly, then the process is simple: he can send the MPAA a complaint letter via certified mail. He can even ask them to pay for "damages" of about $5.00 since he was without internet for a couple of days. And maybe the MPAA will actually send an appology letter with a check for $2.50. If the boyfriend is really persistent, file a claim in small claims court--it costs about $35 here,and the loser pays. I'm sure he could get a settlement for $40, or win the case and earn $5.00. Big deal. Of course, then the MPAA will have lost in court...
Long, cute, or funny Sigs are just another form of over compensation, used by geeks, nerdz, etc.
What if your phone service was cut off because you sang a copyrighted song over the line?:-) Or suppose your postal service was suspended because someone accused you of sending or receiving copyrighted material?
Consider the possibility... (or dont and just forgive my ranting.)
There are laws in the US concerning drug enforcement that allow agents of the government to sieze any property belonging to an individual suspected of violating our nation's policies on illicit drugs. They can take your car, house - anything - and are not obligated to return it even if you are found innocent of the crime. It is merely enough that it was involved in the offense. Will similar legislation arise concerning infringement of the DMCA, hacking, and the like? Confiscation based on accusation might well be around the corner for suspected infringements. (It might already be in place? They are typically closed mouthed when it comes to the aftermath of 'cybercrime'.)
Remember: Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not currently searching your website for illegal content.
What we will have is a Compliance Bureau - a clearing house for people's information, much like today's credit bureaus...
ISPs will report DMCA and other transgressions to these bureaus.
When you go to an ISP to get a new account, they'll run a "Compliance Check" on you instead of a credit check. If you have a file, they'll see what's in it. Your ISP may decide to charge you a higher premium or require you to post a security deposit for insurance purposes if you have a "bad" file.
Sure, after a while, Congress will pass a "Fair Internet Compliance Reporting Act" much like the Fair Credit Reporting Act that is used by creditors and bureaus today, but how much will that REALLY protect us... How many of you out there REALLY trust your credit card company and credit bureau?
There will be a dispute policy, but ultimately it is the ISPs word against yours... so you will have to wear a scarlet "DMCA" every time you go "apply" for internet access.
Unlike a criminal record, this is completely a CIVIL matter, which means preponderance of the evidence - someone thinks the bureau has a decent case, you're screwed for x number of years.
Who's to say that if I just say "hey Time-Warner, go to HELL I'm going elsewhere" they won't put a mark on my file?
quis custodiet ipsos custodes - Juvenal
I seem to remember reading about this kind of thing during the whole Napster incident. If memory serves me correctly, the DMCA states that if someone finds an incident of copyright infringement, they must first attempt to contact the infringer directly with proof of the infringing action and a sworn (under enalty of perjury) statement that they are authorized to act on behalf of the copyright holder.
If this is not possible or the infringer does not respond, then the copyright agent can contact the ISP and submit the same proof of infringment and swore statement.
AT THAT POINT, the DMCA also states the ISP must give you, the "infringer" a chance to refute the charges with a sworn statment (also under penalty of perjury). If you refute the charges, then the ISP is no longer involved, they leave the content/connection alone and the copyright agent must then file charges against you in court to get a court to issue an order to block the material.
So, if they are cutting access without sufficient proof and without giving you a chance to refute, the ISP is violating the DMCA safe harbor provision and your usage agreement. If the proof doesn't meet the standards in the DMCA then it certainly does not meet the watered-down standards of your average terms of service.
IANAL, just what I remember reading.
- JoeShmoe
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
I'm incredibly curious as to how they came up with this fellow's IP as the offender. Posting to Usenet with a spoofed IP isn't that difficult really. When I worked for an ISP, yeah, we'd get calls about "So and So is hacking my server" and we'd shut those accounts down only if we could VERIFY that this person was actually doing it. i.e., they were in the PROCESS of doing it or we could track said activity in our logs. We didn't just look at the headers of some printout and
go "Yep! That's the Cretin, get 'em!"
Someone else posted earlier that this isn't a case of "innocent until proven guilty" because no government body was involved. IMHO, this situation is much WORSE because a PRIVATE corporation is sticking it's big nose into someone else's PRIVATE business and getting thier paid-for
services turned off without having to go through any sort of governmental check and balance procedure.
At least, you can buy laws and government. This is just another example.
I posted this two days ago, but of course 2001-08-21 22:16:52 Mainstream DMCA Coverage(articles,money) (rejected) for some unknown reason :-(
/. crowd, the Post is read regularly by members of congress and their staff. Maybe this is the kick-in-the-pants that congress needs to take another look at this terrible lobby. There is also a relevant discussion here on k5.
The Washington Post has a small editorial regarding the dangers of the DMCA. Newsweek is carrying a similar piece [registration required]. Although this news is nothing new for the
std::disclaimer<std::legalese> sig=new std::disclaimer; sig->dump(); delete sig;
The things about this is that they have you where it hurts ... your broadband internet access.
...
In the days of dialup you could literally call and open another account the same day. No issues. Who cared if your ISP cut your access.
With the advnet of ISDN you were a little more locked into your ISP, but you could still move your ISDN account to another provider.
With cable and DSL you can't do that. Your broadband provider is still your ISP. What you end up with is that wait. Oh, the wait. It is agonzing when a DSL line goes down or a cable modem won't sync for more than two minutes. You don't have the ability to tranport your account to another ISP.
To make matters worse, it's usually a one horse town. Most people don't have access to DSL, so cable is the next step. If you lose cable access you are pretty much dead in the water.
What can be done about seperating the ISP and broadband provider issue? I don't know, but I know it's going to get worse as the combo abuses it's power. Yes, I know about TOS, but look at what's happened lately:
1) Access to incoming port 80 cut off.
2) Bandiwdth limitations without notice.
3) Access to external SMTP servers cut off.
It's going to get worse until it gets better.
Of course, I am trying to get the household CFO to sign off on a cable connection as a backup, but I'm not having much luck
Couldn't someone get the IP addresses of some of the tyrants who are responsible for this and post those with an MP3 on USENET?
Turnabout is fair play.
"What? Oh that IP address must have been a typo!"
If he did it, then he is a very bad guy. Of course he would have been a VERY VERY BAD PERSON if he had posted the information by sending to a usenet email gateway via an anonymous remailer. That would be the height of evil and depravity.
More to the point of her current problems: Did she and her squeeze read their terms of service when they signed up with a media superconglomerate, exactly the type of organization that brought the DMCA into existence? Did they immediately start shopping for a alternative carrier, someone with more respect for their privacy and presumed innocence? No: they signed their letter like good little clones, yes we promise not to do it again, accepting their juryless, judgeless, trialless guilty sentence.
Guess what, Tinkerbell: this shit doesn't come out of a vaccuum. I for one am glad to see this kind of thing because people are not going to take the evisceration of their rights and the violation of their privacy seriously until it starts fucking with their lives.
When all of the power is held by the government or when all the power is held by large companies? Seriously though... wasn't America supposed to be about freedom and stuff? Oh well, I could always go back to Russia...
------
Sig
I'd be more than happy to terminate my relationship with that ISP ... even if it's the only highspeed provider
If your net connection is worth USD$200,000 to you, you can always move.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Just because the ISP or anyone believes someone probably did violate copyright laws doesn't give them the right to take action against you. That is, if you believe in being innocent until proven guilty.
Civil law, not criminal law, governs most copyright cases. The only right the accused gets in a civil case is the right to trial by jury. All that "innocent until proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt" and "right to remain silent" jazz applies only to criminal cases.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I think part of the problem in this story is that the guy has an account with 'Time-Warner Cable' who happens to be part of the same company that is an MPAA member. It looks like that there is probably a confidential information flow between the various parts of 'AOL-Time-Warner', hence the reason why it never went through the proper legal channels, ie it was all happening within the same company.
I think the best thing this couple can do is go and find another provider that doesn't have the words AOL, Time or Warner included in its name.
Sure this may not be what is happening, but in this case I am going to play by the same rules and insist the company is guilty until proven innocent.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Yeah, everybody knows that corporations don't have any influence on legislation, right?
Another thing to be on the lookout for - Mediaone's online AUP, which its suit-drones assume is authoritative (it isn't jackasses, and I'm waiting for someone to sue you over it), instead of the one you sign when you first get connected (if you have a pre-2000 contract - it is gold). Be sure to drag that one into court, or if you can't do that, demand they produce a signed copy of the AUP they're quoting as authoritative.
Trapped in Time... Surrounded by Evil... Low on Gas.
wait till this happens to some senator... and then gets picked up by some major news agency... like CNN. I just hope its copyrighted pr0n :)
-- This is a stickup. Give me all you .sig
-- bill
Ok, before anyone marks me flamebait or something for supporting AOL, this happened many years ago before broadband was widely available (before the AOL-TW merger), during the closing days of pay-by-hour access.
My parents once received an email at their AOL account for alledged violations of their Terms of Service. Turns out my younger brother used some profanity in a chat room and someone reported it. The email contained the log of the chat conversation, when it happened, what room, etc. It basically warned us that should another violation occur, the account would be temporarily disabled, a third violation is termination of the account. But only if the next violation occured within the next few months (dont remember if it was 3 or 6 or something), after that the violation is scratched from the record.
In this case, AOL looked at the evidence and took appropriate steps to issue a warning to the master screen name on the account and what would happen if it occured again. They included the evidence they used to come to the conclusions they did.
I don't know how AOL would respond to accusations of one of their users violating DMCA in today's world, especially with Time Warner being in the same bed as them. I'm no longer an AOL user (now an @Home user), and frankly dont care. I simply wanted to show what it used to be like in the good ol' days on the Internet.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
Just to make sure I have this straight, the DMCA can be straightforwardly interpreted to violate both freedom of expression (e.g. this story, previously a Slashdot headline) and due process (this story).
Other than that, it can easily be interpreted in a manner which violates fair use and other non-Bill of Rights concepts which most people tend to think are Good Things.
It allows exemptions to some people (e.g. public libraries) for some things, leaving it to the judgment of those people, while leaving nothing to the judgment of the majority of the people.
It uses such specific language that only encryption research is exempted, while researchers into other methods of "technological measures used by copyright owners to protect their works" may not publish their work for fear of prosecution by any party that could theoretically be involved (company that created the measure, company that might purchase that measure, anyone who owns a copyright of soemthing on the medium in question, and so on).
Is there anything worthwhile in this law that wasn't around before? It seems that at least the titles concerning the WIPO treaties tend to counter rights that we should have in the US, according to previously existing documents, if not to most people who live here.
--- "TANSTAAFL" --Robert Heinlein (There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch)
THIS?!?!?! Reason: that's an awful long string of letters there! Reason: that's an awful long string of letters there! Reason: that's an awful long string of letters there! Reason: that's an awful long string of letters there! Reason: that's an awful long string of letters there! Reason: that's an awful long string of letters there! Reason: that's an awful long string of letters there! Reason: that's an awful long string of letters there! Reason: that's an awful long string of letters there! Reason: that's an awful long string of letters there! Reason: that's an awful long string of letters there! Reason: that's an awful long string of letters there! Reason: that's an awful long string of letters there!
I wonder if something will happen to the DMCA then?
Constitutional protections don't exist.
Fair use, freedom of speech and expression....gone.
You are guilty. Period. An accusation is all it takes.
The government works against the people. Congress and the President are lackeys for corporate America.
You pay. And pay. And pay. If you want a CD. you pay. If you want a cassette of the same CD you pay again. An MP3 for your Rio? Take out your wallet!
The rich get MUCH richer while the rest of us....?
Privacy doesn't exist. Mail is randomly opened and read. ALL email is scanned and read. Phone calls are randomly listened to. TV viewing is monitored. Radio listening too. 'Net access is monitored down to the keystroke.
Think this can't happen? Think again. Much of it already does happen.
The rest?
Give them 10 years.....
If they don't cut you off they are liable for MONETARY DAMAGES. There is precendent for multi-million dollar damages - they have been assessed in copyright cases quite recently.
If they do cut you off they aren't civilly liable for damages done to you.
BOTH of these are due to the DMCA. The gov't can't do "guilty unless proven innocent", but they can use extortion by court to force the ISP to act that way.
Gov't taking your money and giving it to the MPAA is a very damaging and frightening thing. A small ISP can be killed easily. A big one can take a lot of damage, or be killed off by huge enough damages. Plus the big ones usually are in cahoots with (or actually are) the content providers.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
#1) The real threat is not a few days' inconvenience, but arrest, as in the case of Dimitri Skylarov. I don't know the ins and outs of the DMCA but it seems likely that they could arrest people for this as well. Of course, an arrest would require a trial. #2) The method for determining copyrighted material should be available under the Freedom of Information Act if it's being used to enforce the DMCA. If people are being prosecuted (or even punished under a law) because of information determined from a particular algorithm, that algorithm should be available. The only exception I know of is the IRS' algo for auditing.
People have always been arguing that the post-Napster world will reign supreme over leviathans like RIAA and MPAA, because with systems like Gnutella they would have to go after every single user instead of just the central server.
Well, it looks like the MPAA has turned the tables on that argument. They are doing exactly that!
Life is like a web application. Sometime you need cookies just to get by.
http://www.rodos.net/outlook/
I find it amusing that no-one ever goes after hotline while trying to abolish P2P software. This one single network has been around far longer than any other P2P software. In case you don't know already, it is an unregulated jungle where you can find just about any piece of software, movie, or mp3 you would ever want. Well, I probably just screwed the whole network by mentioning it here, but I am a karma whore after all ;-)
std::disclaimer<std::legalese> sig=new std::disclaimer; sig->dump(); delete sig;
Well, you know, instead of launching a DDOS attack against places like ranger online, you smart computer hackers out there could simply spoof the ranger online IP addresses, upload a few hundred/thousand/whatever movies, and then give the MPAA a hint about Ranger's "illegal" activities....
The thing is, any ISP has to take the same action, under the DMCA, or risk being held liable in court. Which ISP is going to take that risk? No big one will, that's for sure. And no small one should either, if it wants to actually survive.
The DMCA should be the target of your ire, not the ISP. Their hands are tied, I think...
Anybody want to send an anonymous letter to MPAA complaining that pirated materials are distributed from 204.253.162.16 ? Let them try to shut down the connection and see how EFF would react?
In Murphy We Turst
This one is a little different. Go to Ranger's website. They have a section for government... The implication that this is electronic surveillance without a warrant. Who cares what the stated "reason" is, it is money. Rights? Freedom? Pursuit of happiness? These things are antithetical to legislative based revenue generation. Speed traps on the highway are not for public safety. They are for money. Businesses are now moving more boldly towards integration with governmental processes, or our government is now behaving more like a business. Either way, the result is the same. Businesses are moving to provide fewer real services to individuals, and more for other businesses. Before Dmitry was thrown in jail, there were hundreds of silly/stupid little "inconveniences". Politics makes few direct bold moves, before making thousands of tiny ones. Call it test marketing if you will...
You know, you could look at this in a different way..
-In America, we're whores and make money off of anything.
-We should all become bounty hunters, forming startups, getting paid to find illegal content.
-We bust anything that moves
-Eventually JoeChristian23@aol.com gets busted for using an aol copyrighted smile gif.
-So many innocent people get burned by us that non-slashdot people write their congresspeople and get the DMCA changed to something realistic.
-We get big bucks in the meantime, even if it annoys everyone.
Sounds like that Princess Di song by Depech Mode..
Broadband should be regulated by the government, just like power and local telephone service, because it is the same kind of thing.
They're controlled by Time-Warner.
/. , Yahoo, Salon, etc. in the last few weeks all due to aleged DMCA violations.
/. reported in earlier articles.
Take a look at all the civil rights violations reported on
Some of this news made to cnn.com's sci-tech page, but they're not related with AOL-TW. CNN'll try to protect their mother company the same way MSNBC tries to protect M$, as
BTW, the salon story's writer said clearly that their connection was provided by TW cable. so don't expect ANY mention of this on CNN...
What ? Me, worry ?
If we you to stop this sort of thing from continuing to happen, you need to move the ISPs into a more cynical attitude about copyright infringement. It seems to me, the easiest way to do that is false reports: lots and lots of them. Preferrably using the same form letters the bad guys use (has anyone who works at an ISP got a copy of whatever they send you to post?), report random people doing random things... you can start with those IP addresses you've all logged trying to send you Code Red.
Hypothetically, of course. You wouldn't want to actually do something like that, it's probably illegal, ianal, blah covering ass blah disclamer...
... and the worst thing that happened was you lost internet access for a little while. Just look at celebrities, inlcuding athletes, these days. If some 18 year old crackhead says that a pro football player gave her drugs and raped her, it goes to CNN, New York Times, ESPN, etc and he's kicked off the team, banned from pro sports, basically shunned from society... and that's before the first search or arrest warrant has been issued, nevermind even having a trial or impartial jury. I agree with the writers of this article that penalizing someone for breaking the law, even before they have been accused of it, is severly wrong and action needs to be taken. I'm sure a civil suit would be fruitful in this case, punitive damages can go a long way. Just be glad though that the only thing taken was some internet access, and not your entire life.
~ now you know
And then you could refuse to back up your accusations, saying you didn't want to reveal your "proprietary" methods.
I can see it now:
Los Angeles, CA -- Today, an online psychic ordered 1,387,529,000 web sites shut down, in accordance with DMCA, claiming they all infringe on his private thoughts. George "Moonglow" Taylor alleges that web sites express private thoughts, and that he makes his income from private thoughts, therefore all the sites in question infringe his private rights. He refused to say how he determined which sites were in violation, citing "proprietary" methods.
Ummm...that's true; guilt is not resolved until after a trial takes place. However, bail hearings are granted prior to guilt being resolved and there are minimum levels of evidence required to hold a person in confinement until charges are brought before a judge. If the incarceration has no sound basis, you can easily sue for Wrongful Arrest. The police CANNOT just arrest someone and hold them because they THINK he committed a crime...not in the US anyway. Picture this scenario:
ANNNNNNHHH. Can you say "Kiss that badge goodbye!"
What can you do in the case related in this article? Nothing that I can see if the article is true. They could have shut down his access for months if they wanted too, and I don't see where he would have had any recourse. No laws granting him access to the evidence against him, no opportunity to refute it, etc. "Your pipe is cut off. We will consider restoring it when and if we feel like doing so."
It's not funny till someone gets hurt.
Hello, subscriber to my ISP services. You, along with tens-of-thousands (or was that hundreds-of-thousands) other people, have selected our services to access the Internet.
If you haven't guessed already, we are attempting to be a profitable company. Most of you all are law-abiding citizens who on occasion like looking at porn sites, which as long as it is not in violation of your communities indecency laws we do not care. However, there are a limited number of you who take part in the illegal trade of intellectual property.
We don't have the time or the FTE's to devote to look at each accusation of piracy that we receive, so instead of getting our balls in a vice we have deemed it best to just cut you off if we get a complaint about you. Jump through some hoops for us and we'll consider reconnecting your Internet.
For us, like any other business, it's about money. We would rather lose your $40/mo. than get nailed for hudreds of thousands of dollars in damages by the MPAA. At the very least we'd have to hire some expensive lawyers to protect us in the matter.
In France, for a couple of years now, it's "innocent until proven guilty", and it's far better for people. There's some US laws that looks "strange" for non US people you know! It seems in the US the company/profit/dollar is more important than people rights...
"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking
Find some way to post (or get posted) information on Time-Warners site(s), then send a letter to their ISP demanding they take them off-line for suspected copyright infringement. Revenge... a dish best served cold. he!
Ctimes2
My cube. My friend. My solace. My prison.
Here's the corproate SWAT scenario. Graphic, but true:
Corporate-sponsored, miltary-style copyright squads. Copyright-sponsored SWAT teams, licensed by Microsoft, Adobe, Sun, MPAA, RIAA (under whatever "license" they choose to deem official) running military-style ops to knock out egregious P2P "nodes".
Running an especially active P2P node?
Come 3AM in the morning, expect a white van to pull up outside your house/condo/apartment, filled to the brim with a covert tactical squad in full body armor and carrying fully-automatic weapons, two hundred pound door "key" to knock down those pesky screen doors.
Search warrants? Not a chance. None of this is supported by state, local or even federal law enforcement.
These renegade ops are private. Who has time for a search warrant? Or for due process? What matters here is that the RIAA and MPAA get their results.
You wanna know who these guys are that have their gun barrels pointed at your head? Your girlfriend's head?
Don't mean nothing when one guy has a steel toed boot across the back of your head and is pressing your cheek against the bathroom floor. One weapon is at the back of your head, the other's at the back of your girlfriend's head.
And your dog -- he's already knocked out cold, thanks to the little "dog sleeping darts" these guys carry. Rottweiller? German Shepard? Doesn't make a difference. First thing these guys do is look for the dogs. One dart, and the dog's out cold, lying with his tongue flopped out his mouth in the middle of your living room floor.
Meanwhile, all you see is odd flashes of light coming from all over your house. You can make out maybe five, six guys running around, screaming at the top of their lungs. But you can't tell for sure because everytime you sorta look around, the guy makes sure your forehead hits the floor with a thwap.
Two of your teeth are already on the floor, and you can feel one loose in the back of your mouth. You can't tell if all the blood is coming from your mouth or your split lip.
Your girlfriend is saying something -- yelling -- and these guys from behind their black goggles keep telling her to shut the fuck up. Shut the fuck up. She doesn't. And then you see one guy take some duct tape and put it over her mouth. She's still yelling something, but it's not as loud.
That's when you start hearing the crashes and thumps in the bedroom above you. What are they knocking down -- the shelves? Overturning the beds? Throwing the monitor down on the floor?
Couple seconds later, one guy comes down with your Dell Athlon box. Not the monitor, not the printer, just the white box with the keyboard cable hanging from it. The ethernet cable is still attached and he's dragging your Linksys hub -- bump, bump, bump -- down the stairs. He hustles out the front door. The guy above you gives you one more whack with his boot, then says, "Clear!" to someone.
Suddenly all these guys start saying "Clear" to one another. You hear everybody run out the front door, down your porch, and the sound of tires squealing off.
Meanwhile, you wait. You're not sure what to do. Your girlfriend is dragging her cheek against the kitchen floor to get the tape off her mouth.
And you -- your lips and gums hurt like a sonofabitch. They tied your hands with those plastic twisti-cuffs but you've got one hand free. You touch your mouth -- your front teeth are gone. The blood from your mouth smells metallic. And you're not even sure what happened.
Whatever it was, it took all of 2, maybe 3 minutes.
And you have no idea who it was. For days, you try and figure it out. Cops show up, they're stymied.
Was it a robbery?
Well, no.
These guys -- they were dressed in body armor?
Yeah. Like SWAT.
SWAT? The cops laugh. No, there's no SWAT here, son. Say, do you use drugs? Even smoked a little? Maybe it's some drug deal gone bad? One of your drug buddies come to get more of what you sold him?
No. No it wasn't that.
But the cops are suspicious. Say, maybe you'd like to come down with us? Answer a few questions?
You say, well, no, I'd rather not.
But they insist.
While you're waiting in the back of the cruiser you hear the cops laughing: SWAT, yeah. Sure. What's this guy smoking?
Some weird shit, that's for sure.
They laugh some more.
And that's that.
Who provides service for the MPAA? Somewhere along the line, they have to connect to the Net, just like us. What if a bunch of people just started accusing them of copyright infringement and getting their service cut?
Or, perhaps more effectively: What about senators and representatives? They often quote an awful lot of stuff; surely one might feel some of it is in violation. And of course, the beauty is, there doesn't have to be a violation, just an accusation of one.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
A journalistic experiment:
Start a broadband account. Then, a few weeks later, send an evil-looking lawyer letter to the ISP in question, stating that you are the "Mendax Interactive Entertainment Company" and that your game property "Iron Fist Kung Fu" was pirated via IRC on X date from Y ip (yours) and see if it gets cut off...
Excellent story-fodder, and no innocent bystanders harmed.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
This law is completely stupid. The DMCA says ISP's must take steps to prevent access to copyrighted material on their networks, or risk being held liable for the damages? Does this mean we can hold Freightliner truck Co. responsible for the drugs being transported in their trucks? Should Freightliner take steps in the design of their trucks to prevent the transport of illegal cargo? Of course not! ISP's should come together and lobby congress to change this stupid law. The law should be written to hold USERS responsible for the content they post and download!
Then put it in mp3 format, with the name (with a little bit of modification, so as to be considered a parody) of whatever favorite song/music/movie, etc, and
spread the files all over the place.
When MPAA/RIAA strike, counter sue them for whatever reason you can think of (freedom, rights, 1st Amendment, etc).
Do this in a big scale. And everyone who is sued by MPAA/RIAA, must counter sue. Imagine MPAA/RIAA have to fight a hundred thousand lawsuits at once. That would be funny to watch.
It's not THAT hard, you will have to find a broadband(DSL, prolly) reseller that will be the middle man between you and the local telco. and then you'll have to find a bigger ISP to be your backbone. We are partnered with IP Communications for DSL, and they do an good job (no i dont work for them, but I work at an ISP that is partnered with them)
"I keep looking in the want-ads under 'revolutionary' but there don't seem to be any listings.. "
(1) Copyright and computer systems in general.
The basic rule in copyright law is that one may not copy an original work of authorship, unless one has permission of the owner of the rights to that work or one can claim fair use. Making a copy is infringement on the copyright. The federal courts have ruled that when a computer stores data in its memory, a copy is made. As we all know, a file in a computer is never physically transferred anywhere like a piece of physical paper. When you move a computer file all you are doing is deleting a copy at one location (your hard drive for example) and making a new copy at another location (a cd-r for example). The same thing works for downloading and uploading--you have a copy on your hard drive and you make a new copy at the upload location, or make a new copy of the file from the download location. Thus, if you have, for example, an mpeg file of an entire movie, and you transmit that mpeg to a usenet board, you make the following copies (I'm trying to keep this simple, so don't flame me if it isn't exactly right): you have one copy on your hard drive, you have another copy in the RAM of your computer where the data from the hard drive is copied as it is sent over your internet connection, your ISP has a copy in the RAM of whatever computer receives the data, the ISP then has another copy in the RAM of any other computer in its system that receives the data from the first computer, the ISP eventually has a copy on at least one hard drive somewhere in its network, the Usenet board has a copy in the RAM of at least one of its computers, and the Usenet board eventually has a copy on at least one hard drive in its network. Each of those copies is an infringing copy, and whoever owns the system on which each of those copies resides is liable for copyright infringement. It doesn't matter that one guy sent the copies to the ISP and Usenet, the ISP and Usenet made subsequent copies within their own systems.
(2) DMCA and ISPs
However, the DMCA was written to avoid this pitfall for ISPs. Obviously, it's impossible for an ISP to know what every one of their users is putting into the ISP's network at every moment for every day. ISPs would be exposed to huge liabilities under the law as outlined above. The DMCA permits ISPs to avoid liability if they take immediate action to disable access to allegedly infringing material when properly notified by the holder of the copyright or the holder's agent. Basically, these provisions of the DMCA are a good thing because they keep our ISPs from strictly monitoring everything we do and censoring anything that might possibly bring on liability. Under the DMCA, an ISP only has to disable access if it has actual knowledge of infringement--actual knowledge can be gained a lot of ways, but the most prevalent is from a notice from the copyright holder. The act places the burden on copyright holders to protect their own copyrights, and that is as it should be.
(3) What subscribers can do when their ISP disables their access because of alleged copyright infringement.
The DMCA also contains protections for subscribers, which this Salon article does not mention at all. Basically, after an ISP disables access, a subscriber can counter-notify their ISP that the material does not infringe on any copyright. When an ISP receives a counter-notification, it must tell the original notifier that the ISP will restore access to the material in ten days unless the original notifier gets a court order to prevent them from restoring access. Then, obviously, it is incumbent on the original notifier to take their case to court and prove before a judge that the material infringes their copyright. The subscriber is guaranteed an opportunity to present his or her case before a judge. The counter-notification has to satisfy specific requirements as laid out in the DMCA (basically swearing under penalty of perjury that the subscriber has a good faith belief that the material does not infringe on any copyright).
(4) What this post has to do with the Salon article.
The author of the article is not entirely correct when she says that her boyfriend was accused and had no recourse. The DMCA protects the right of the subscriber to due process, i.e., to have an opportunity to be heard in his own defense before a judge. The problem was that this author and her boyfriend treated being accused of copyright infringement as a customer service problem. This kind of accusation is not a matter for a person to take up with the ISP; it's a legal problem, and they should have sought the advice of counsel. For example, if a store stops you and accuses you of shop-lifting, then the police come to arrest you, would you try to resolve the dispute with the store? No, you call a criminal defense attorney, because you've been accused of breaking the law, not store policy. If there is a moral to her story, it should be when you are accused of breaking the law, take legal action to defend yourself.
(5) One final note.
The DMCA also provides that if anyone knowingly materially misrepresents that material or activity infringes on copyright, that person is liable to the accused person for damages, including attorney's fees and costs. Basically, MPAA cannot go around falsely accusing people of violating copyright, or they risk being sued. Perhaps the author's boyfriend could have pursued this line against the MPAA.
DISCLAIMER: This post is not intended to provide legal advice.
...there are consequences for the false accuser.
Similarly, I think when one person accuses another of plotting murder, the police should immediately detain the accused person. But if the accuser lied, or even if they were honestly mistaken, they should be punished severely enough to keep people from making such accusations when they aren't certain.
So when a copyright holder sends a threatening letter to an ISP over a user's alleged copyright infringement, if there is no copyright infringement they should be subject to severe penalties. It shouldn't be a matter of civil law either, requiring the offended party to bear the cost of challenging his accusers, they should simply be able to report it to the police (subject to penalties for false accusation themselves, of course).
You could call the crime "legal thuggery" or something like that, and define it as "manipulation through the insincere threat of baseless litigation."
OTOH, you could just straighten out the civil court system so you can't be hurt by baseless litigation...
In any case, where there isn't any realistic threat of punishment to false accusers, nothing should be done to the accused without proof of guilt.
---
You'd be surprised at the broadband connection available to things crawling around in your hair.
Would allow you to send the ISP a letter saying that you are not violating the act and they are, from that point forward, no longer liable for anything that you may be doing with your connection. It would be up to the studio to come after you, personally. Does anyone know if there is anywhere on the net where you can download one of these denial letters written in nice legalese?
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
People are sharing their horror stories and anger on the subject, but for those this whole incident bothers or starts raising some questions, what can we do? Write a congressman, join a grassroots effort, any other ideas, suggests.
It's good to vent, but it's also good to point others in the right direction. Venting on /. is like preaching to the choir sometimes. We should expand our venting. =)
As media content and access providers continue to merge, what will be the effect? What will happen when someone hosting a website posts something critical of the parent company of the hosting service? Orwell seems to have been mistaken, it will not be the government that controls you, but the Heinz ketcup bottle in your refrigerator that report use of generic condiments to their masters. Heinz ketsup doesn't play well with others.
Although I pride myself in being an extremly patient and nice guy I think I would have acted a lot more violently than this guy did.
48 hours without Internet Access? and worst of all having your privacy violated by the MPAA. I would have gone crazy, probably becoming a criminal and taking my revenge against those bastars. I wonder how he was able to stay calm.
Of course not, and you are a left wing chomsky nut if you believe anything of the sort. I have half a mind to sick the MPAA on you, you dirty pinky commie bastard!
Verdict first, trial afterwards!
It seems to me that there would probably be a clause in the DMCA that would prevent someone from claiming with no evidence that there was a DMCA violation. Otherwise, it would be easy to claim that the MPAA had pirated one of my images and immediately cut off their website, without any proof on my part.
If you provided proof that was later found to be false, what are the penalties? Is there a difference between willful and negligent misuse? Is there a penalty for negligent (i.e. unintentional) misuse?
I see a lot of posts here, both for and against what happened to this lady, as well as explanations (however brief) as to how the IP could have been spoofed, yadayada...
Nowhere have I seen any mention that someone has emailed her, leting her know more about the DMCA, making her aware of her options (such as switching services - oh! Maybe she can't do that! Maybe she doesn't _know_ that!), or lack thereof. Letting her know more about what the DMCA is being used for (2600, Dmitry, Felton, etc).
Send her an email - show her links! Show her the problem!
Here we have a jounalist who has had the DMCA used against her and her family - but maybe she didn't even know such law existed, and how it could affect her further, as well as her career as a journalist and writer. This woman could be a potential "ally", who may write further stories and do some investigative journalism into the DMCA and its abuse, and threatened abuse.
Email her - let her know more...!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Ranger Online (Canada) Inc. (NETBLK-RONLINEUU1)
1188 West Georgia Street
Vancouver, BC V6E 4A2
CA
Netname: RONLINEUU1
Netblock: 204.92.244.208 - 204.92.244.223
Coordinator:
McCluskie, Michael (MM1671-ARIN) michaelm@rangerinc.com
604 638 9578
Record last updated on 26-Dec-2000.
Database last updated on 22-Aug-2001 23:12:27 EDT.
This is a problem.
IPs are used to identify people by the anti-piracy folk and by ISPs. IPs can be spoofed, sometimes far more easily than other forms of assumed identity. ISP's know this, but the threat of litigation forces them to be the DCMA's lackey.
It seems to me that the DMCA is more of a symptom than a problem, the actual problem being democracy vs fascism. The question is, what can we do about it other than type our indignant speeches into the Slashdot comment box? I think democracy in America is broken, and at the moment I don't see a way to fix it. The mechanisms that have broken it have been deliberate and calculated, and the loopholes are being closed methodically. Does anybody know of a credible effort to fix the problem? I'll sign up.
Just so everyone is aware that this is not a new technique. In many cases things that are seen as a privledge can be revoked without having to prove the party is guilty. Drivers licenses in my state for instance, can be suspended for 6 months if you are even charged with a crime. This crime does not even have to take place while you are operating a vehicle. Even if the charges are dropped by the state the MVA can still enact a punishment. Just like the case here, it seems a seperate non-government agency has the ability to accuse, judge, and convict you and need not follow any laws or more importantly the Constitution. There seems to be a new type of justice forming out there. One that does not require you to beproven guilty. One that does not offer you the right to a fair trial. One that does not allow you to face your accuser and one that Justice is NOT blind. Brave new world isn't folks?
A philosophy of "freedom and liberty", that has been completely debunked.
I'm of the opinion that authors DO have the right to control their works, but that the public has a GREATER right to benefit from the works of humanity. I'm willing to live in a society in which artists (or, as it is now, copyright holders) make less money, and the public is more intelligent, well read, and free. For this reason I pretty much oppose all copyrights.
It is illegal to wait for proof. It is even illegal to wait for a proper DMCA notice if you've been given a defective one. See the ALS Scan vs RemarQ case for details.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
Understandably the ISP does need take action against the alleged user, and in a timely manner, because of the DMCA.
....
Instead of shutting down the users service completely, maybe a gentler approach would be wise,.. how about granting only outbound port 80 requests and blockoff anything incoming under 1024. This for all intents and purposes will shut down most users from doing anything 'normal'
the Alleged infringer would still have net access but in a very restricted sense....
as far as i can tell, there are none. remember that this legislation was pushed heavily by the MPAA and the RIAA. they don't care to concern themselves that this might target innocent people, and probably would have opposed any ammendments to the DMCA that would have that effect.
Got Freedom?
Thinking?
Someone should spoof the IP of Jack Valenti and Hilary Rosen, upload some mp3s or movies to the newsgroups, and then give the ISP an anonymous tip.
Internet access is not a Right, it's a service. I'm not saying what the RIAA and the ISP did was cool, but whilst they can't do an illegal search and siezure, they can certainly shut down your internet access without a warrant. The only recourse they will have to deal with is civil (i.e. when you take them to the People's Court and sue them for various damages.)
Disclaimer:IANAL
/*drunk.. fix later*/
Internet access is not a legal right. The way the reporter in question gets access, it is a commercial service provided by a corporation. The corporation can shut off the service for any reason at all; even without providing a reason.
It isn't meaningful to talk about legal terms like "conviction" and "trial" here. Nobody was convicted of any crime. The ISP simply shut off their service.
Take the MPAA to court and put out a subpoena for the methods that were used to incriminate these people. :)
Jack Valenti and the MPAA are to technology as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone
It makes no sense to say we should punish corporations for spending money in govt when they are only trying to do the same thing we are (take this story for example) and that's keep themselves from getting screwed over by an overzelous bunch of legislatures who don't have a clue.
That said, using terms like "lunatic left" hardly helps rational discussion.
"No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."
--James Madison
I have road runner service. And without question the people running road runner are Satan.
... ordered 1,387,529,000 web sites shut down...
:-)
He refused to say how he determined which sites were in violation, citing "proprietary" methods.
Well its obvious from the number of web sites that his "proprietary" method is visiting Google. Scarier still is that I recognized that number so quickly...
I'm not a journalist, but I play one on slashdot
So what if someone posts a movie to a newgroup and uses a bogus IP address that turns out to be mine? Am I legally responsible for any Usenet post that claims to be sent from my IP address? This is scary indeed.
Aside from blocking IP's, is it possible, as the :)
owner of a website, p2p net, or what have you, to
legally exclude certain individuals/corporations
from accessing your site? Ie, say a web site on
the home page has a statement to the affect: "All
are welcome to this site excepting XYZ corp" where
XYZ might be Rangerinc. Just a thought but there
should be some way of denying them access to scan
your whole site on a fishing trip, and if they were to try to
use any information found, it would be illegal due
to the prior declaration. Of course, I'm not a lawyer
Ehh....Are we talking about Slashdot now? or Spykids?
Oh my God! I never considered the power that I'd given Slashdot. What would I ever do if Taco decided to hate Twitter? No, it's much worse than denied email, extingushed publication, raids and jail. It would be the Slashdot death penalty. I'd have to get another ISP and start again. Ahhh! Karma death, say it ain't so.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
But does their software run from their systems, or from their client's? If the MPAA has their own computers running this stuff, blocking Ranger's IP block won't help. You'd have to blacklist every "IP holder's" subnet.
:) If they can snoop with impunity, I can take steps to protect myself.
Of course, if there was a list available, I'd sure use it
They already have this service in California for landlords to check out potential renters. It's called UD Registry (UD stands for Unlawful Detainer, a fancy name for an eviction notice). They keep records on legal actions against tenants (resolved or not), as well as reports of "bad" tenants (e.g. hearsay). Their records are not open to inspection or correction by renters. Landlords using their service sign an agreement that they are not supposed to let the potential renter know their "file", not even that UD Registry is involved. UD Registry has resisted attemtps to regulate their activity. BTW, they were accused of blacklisting political activists in the 1980's - basically if you were tagged as a pro-rent control "radical" you suddenly would find no one would rent to you. This is what we have to look forward to.....
Something similiar happend to me just last christmas. I was at a party for most of christmas break and when I came home my Cable internet connection wouldnt work. After 3-4 days of it not working I called my ISP and they told me I was logged hacking into a business computer and thus suspended my service till I agreed to not do it again. (though i wasnt home at the time for nearly a week during which the crime had taken place) They wouldnt release details of what I had done nor to whom. They also dont scan past there network so if someone had hacked my computer I would be the last computer on there logs... They also asumed i was guilty without letting me defend myself. Crap like this scares me esspecially when half the time they wont tell you what it is you are being accused of.
AOL/Time Warner effectively IS a large part of the MPAA.
... he's an idiot. If he has access logs like the article says, he's got a good, solid case for libel and defamation. And the MPAA is based in California, where there are no limits on punitive damages. It would take about 30 seconds to find a lawyer who'd take that billion dollar lawsuit on a percentage.
Unfortunately, people are so terrified of being confrontational, most will simply roll over and die rather than object to the slightest offense against them. At which point, they deserve it.
This is also a cable account, not dial-up. There are few places that I know of where multiple choices for broadband exist, so, no, you aren't free to choose service elsewhere. There are very few places that have more than two, so what's the guy supposed to do next time someone misaligns their spreadsheet or the next time some numb fuck at TWC forgets that they use DHCP and, oh, before we steal this guy's money by taking his service away while charging for it, let's check to see that he actually had that IP at the time of the infraction?
The problem is that monpolistically run services are free to screw paying consumers any time they choose with no controls or consequences, at the behest of an unsupervised private interest who needs provide no proof whatsoever that the customer has done anything wrong.
That's fine if your standards of justice are on the level of, say, Mexican police, Soviet mafia, or corrupt local governors in rural China, but for a wealthy, stable country it shows that whoever is supposed to protect citizens against arbitrary harm is asleep at the wheel.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
Except when you get your liscense taken away for drunk driving they have to have EVIDENCE and REASONABLE CAUSE. They test you for drunkenness on the spot, before they do anything else. ISPs are required under the DMCA to take away your acccess at the slightest FINGER POINTING, without any EVIDENCE or REASONABLE CAUSE whatsoever. That's the difference. That analogy is bullsh*t!
Repeal the DMCA!
Cutting off someone's Internet access when they are doing illegal activities is like the gas company cutting off your gas for smoking crack on the stove. Granted, smoking crack is illegal, but its not the gas company who is responsible for stopping it.
No...probable cause relates to search and seizure, not arrest and holding people in prison without a bail hearing.
No, they made him sign a statement which was, in effect, an admission of guilt. Bail is granted prior to the defendant making any plea, guilty or not guilty.
You will note that my post said: "Nothing that I can see if the article is true." I freely acknowledge that this story may be completely false, and my post is based on the assumption that it is not. I wholeheartedly agree that there is a very good possibility that she is a) lying to protect herself or her boyfriend OR b) knows only what her boyfriend told her and that was a lie.
It's not funny till someone gets hurt.
While a bit over dramatic, this is exactly what is wrong with this type of "policing". None of the entities involved are acoountable to anyone. They do not answer to the government or to the citizenry at large as elected officials are ( well at least nominally anyway). And certainly do not ask the regulatory agencies to look at them because that would imped the ability of big business to do business. And unfortunately this trend is not just limited to DCMA ( can you say UCITA ), though it is by far the worst example yet. Take a look at the agricultural sector, where big business is being left to police themselves and run everyone else out of business.
I am extremely frightened by the erosion of personal liberties and rights that has taken place since the Reagan administration under the guise of "protecting business interests". Mostly it has been efforts to protect businesses from consumers. Not that this should be construed as a partisan claim since the Clinton adminstration helped this along as much as any other president.
I think that maybe we should take the law into our own hands. While the idea of creating an infringement problem for these companies has a certain appeal and would definitely be good for a laugh, I think we need another more permanent solution. We should as it is said route around this censorship and control as if it were damage to the system. Using a system like the one for the spam databases, start cataloging and blocking all of the ip address from which companies like Ranger operate. Before to long it will be impossible for them to operate in the open and they will eventually be put out of business. And as it is not illegal for us to block illegal access to our systems, there is not a thing they can do about it.
While I have no problem in principle with copyright, in fact I quite support it. In fact copyright helps protect some of my favorite things, such as Linux and the GNU software. The system in use today is no way, shape or form a reflection of the original intentions of these protections.
So start sniffing out those Ranger, et al. packets and lets get them on the banned list.
Yes, there is a provision in the DMCA that prevents someone from knowingly and falsely claiming copyright infringement. See my post below for more detail. One thing to add: the knowinlgy part makes this tricky--this guy would have to prove that the MPAA knew that he did not upload a movie (or that the movie wasn't uploaded from his IP) and then deliberately lied about it. I doubt that he could prove that. The provision seems to be designed more to prevent someone from viciously targeting an innocent person than to prevent mistakes like this one.
So lets say that the water utility was privatized, and I had to sign a contract with them that indicated what I could and could not use their water for, and that I was paying for the usage of their water, but that I didn't actually own the water coming into my house. Let's say that my contract didn't cover using the water for the purpose of gardening.
Now someone who make a living off of doing this sort of thing reports my neighbor for using their water to garden with, in violation of their water contract, but he accidentally puts my apartment number on the letter to the water utility. They immediately cut off my water supply until I promise never to do it again. Unfortunately, I'm on vacation, so my cats die of dehydration. *But*, because it's a private water utility, and I did sign that contract, it's all perfectly legal, if an unfortunate mistake.
Does that sound like a just and right situation to you?
Before you go off on the fact that legally, broadband providers aren't utilities, consider this: They're generally monopolies; they provide a service many people need in order to earn money to live on, and they provide a "pipe" into and out of your house or office.
If we can privatize utilities, maybe we should utilitize broadband providers, who are such in all but name and legal obligation.
Causation can cause correlation
s/RIAA/MPAA
There's so much evil that the DMCA has stirred up that you can barely keep up with which acronym is doing it.
/*drunk.. fix later*/
Could you create a web/ftp/gnutella collection of larges files creaetd with /dev/zero that have titles like "Phantom_menace_1of2.avi" and such and put them up for public access. Would they simply bust you for the filenames/filesizes alone or would they actually verify the content?
...look like this.
My DSL was shut off for about a week because of it. Yes, I was sort of breaking copyright law, and I never argued it... at least I got my DSL back.
I was a victim of the "terminate access now - ask questions later" policy. My ISP terminated my account without contacting me first. Honestly, the reasons why don't really relate to anything being discussed here, but it's still the same problem.
Eventually I convinced my ISP to reconnect my service. This involved jumping through a lot hoops because of the internal bureaucracy of the company. And my connection never was restored.
I was treated like crap by the staff. They screwed up many, many times. Nobody would take responsibility for the actions of the company. They recorded my conversations. Everyone kept passing the buck; I was an object of a departmental ping-pong game.
So I decided to take them to court. I am doing this, not because I'm greedy, but to shovel that same shit down their throats. Even if I lose I've already wasted hundreds of their dollars on lawyers. I guess I have a strong case, but it's hard to beat a lawyer at his own game.
I can't get detailed for obvious reasons. But there is a moral to the story: read the contract and the terms of service.
If the terms of service is longer than a page, screw them. Companies that have a huge contract & terms of service are not trying to "protect" themselves; they are trying to waive their "responsibilities." Avoid these kinds of companies like the plague.
Now I am with a new ISP. They have a contract & terms of service which protects them. They can terminate my account if I *violate* the terms of service. But they can't terminate my account if they *suspect* I violated the terms of service. Way better!
...but the owner was innocent?
Imagine a virus or worm whose job it is not to participate in DDOS attacks, but to post to Usenet. The virus infects a machine, and waits to be contacted by someone who wants to distribute copyrighted material, but doesn't want to get caught. At some pre-arranged signal, the virus recieves or acquires the material, then posts it ot Usenet.
From all available evidence, the material would be coming from the targeted user's account, and this user would potentially get nailed, like the guy in the story, but he would have a heck of a time explaining why all the records from his ISP showed that he was indeed responsible.
This kind of action, without due process, really needs to be eliminated.
Well, let's see.
I depend on air.
I depend on water.
I depend on food.
I am fairly dependant on warmth and shelter too.
But my net access? Nope. You can remove that and I will still live.
People should not be afraid of their governments - Governments should be afraid of their people.
Oh, I'm sorry.
The cost of a week's worth of broadband internet access, plus lost work and productivity isn't enough of a fine for you?
Conspiracy theories? Like what? That corporations have more say in legislation than the general public? Is that a conspiracy theory? I thought conspiracy theories were generally backed up by a lack of proof. Color me silly.
Chuch of Chomsky though, I like that. I need to start going to church anyhoo, so what the hell. Beats the hell out of the ritualistic cannibalism that takes place Sunday's all across the country (and beyond!)
I dont care what threats someone throws at you. without a court order you cannot be forced or sued for it. A law body, Judicial usually is the only body that can force you to do anything. so if the RIAA says "shut em down" tell them to go bite themselves until you get a warrent or court order. If you ignore the court order, then you can be sued.
Now that I think about this a little more, I have one question: why did the MPAA contact the ISP of the person who uploaded the file? Under the DMCA only the server where the file is stored and accessible is potentially liable for copyright infringement. The DMCA should have contacted whoever maintained the server for the usenet group and told them to disable access to the file. The DMCA exempts ISPs from liability for allegedly infringing files that are merely transmitted through their network. The MPAA could not have taken any action against the ISP. Further, the ISP is not authorized by the DMCA to cut off this guy's internet access, simply because the MPAA says he transmitted a copyright protected file. (However, the ISP might have a provision in their service agreement that permits them to cut off the internet access of someone accused of copyright infringement.) Unless the file was stored on the ISP's network and accessible to others on the outside, the ISP didn't have to do anything to protect themselves from liability.
Seems that the real problem here is that the ISP had a knee-jerk reaction to an accusation of copyright infringement--cut off the subscriber's access. Even if the allegedly infringing material was located on a web page, for example, hosted by the ISP, the only action the DMCA would require the ISP to take would be to disable access to that web page, not disable the subcriber's access. It seems that even under the DMCA, both the MPAA and the ISP acted wrongly here.
I've wondered since this type of incident has become more common who the ISPs consider authoritative enough to respond to a copyright infringement notice for. Apparently with the MPAA they recieve a letter and immediately terminate the connection with little/no investigation. I wonder if I, myself, send off a letter saying such and such IP address is violating my copyright for some non-existant piece of IP will they terminate a connection just as quickly? Who will they listen to?
if Jack Valenti got his internet cut because of something like this?
....
hmmmm
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
This, my friends, is the hammer I have been waiting for to start bashing the proverbial heads of all the usenet users who annoy me. From now on, you won't be getting flames from me, instead your ISP will be getting an email from me becuase you quoted my last copywritten post in your reply... Watch out America, here I come! :)
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
then, we'll call them and tell them that the MPAA is infringing on someone's copyright..
you can figure out the rest.
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
All countries should follow the USA's lead and revise all their laws to maximise the profits of large corporations. Small corporations may also make money if it doesn't impact any large corporations. The one obligation of all good citizens is to be good consumers. Each new technology must be embraced. CD's replace vinyl, DVD's replace VHS, you must upgrade.
As has been pointed out by the most important part of society, large corporations, current copyright laws which include archaic concepts like 'fair use' are preventing maximal profits. New laws like the DMCA rectify these glaring loopholes thus moving society towards a more ideal state.
As corporations move to improve the social contract we can look forward to new, enlightened, laws like:
Infinite copyright. Why go to all the trouble of extending copyright laws every twenty years when we can get it right with one change - infinite duration copyright.
Pay per view for all media. This whole idea of 'buying' stuff really cuts into profits. All media will be metered and paid for monthly directly from your pay-check. Manufactures of durable goods will add metering capabilities via wireless (and mandatory) Internet connections so these good corporate citizens who have so long suffered under the penalty of actually selling their goods can share in the new profitability of enlightened American society.
A surtax will be added to all transactions to pay for piracy. We all know that despite the best efforts of good corporate citizens a large percentage of wrong minded consumers will subvert the ideals of the profit driven society. This surtax will help defray the cost of this piracy. To keep paper work to a minimum it will be applied to all transactions.
Minimum consumer quotas will be set. Consumers who fail to meet their quotas will be sent to re-education camps where they will be gently taught the error of their ways. (Special thanks to the Chinese for pioneering this technique).
Anonymous speech will be eliminated. If you're innocent, you have nothing to hide.
Welcome to the new United States of Corporations.
Anarchists never rule
and as its been posted before.. "its only going to get worse"
after thinking about it though, the fact that they actually pay some company to look for people breaking the law with software (that i have no clue how it can tell the diffrence between a real movie or my brothers graduation) makes me kind of wonder if the MPAA is better off just not trying to go after pirates. i mean, seriously, if these people are pirating the software, would they even pay for it if they couldent pirate it? and if they could pay for it, would they? which makes me wonder if the MPAA and RIAA is doing nothing more then throwing away good money.
seriously, im almost sure the cost of stopping pirates is far more then the damage pirates cause. if the MPAA and RIAA wants to throw millions away at an attempt to stop them, then they can give me the money and i'll throw something together using perl and finger.. bah!
i cant seem to come up with a sig.
This article reinforces the necessity of the end user to research and implement security measures against such investigations. They can't hit you if they can't see you...so i say, read Hacking Unix, get a Linux box up and running, serve your own material, and get in the know.
spelling is for machines and loooooooooooooosers!
You don't need judicial review to be deemed a threat to society. And just because *your* definition of a threat may not be equal to *somebody else's* definition of a threat, or society's, doesn't mean you're free and innocent.
Not a bad idea if they supported it. When you use the phone, you may have to wait a bit for an answer, and you may use several more seconds explaining to the 911 operator that it's a fire. If they took email, you could have a hot-coded key or icon; you'd just click and run.
Well, in the future, when things are getting tighter, the way this is going to be used is that anybody who are critical of e.g. the movie industry will be harassed by the movie industry sending letters to ISPs to make sure that the person critical of the actions will be shut down on no grounds, repeatedly. That way, free speech can be prevented very easily. This is going to be very bad.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
You missed the point. The news agency is irrelevant. The fact that it is a senator (or any other prominent person) that is being accused is the point.
To quote RATM again:
Fuck you I wont do what you tell me!
Fuck you I wont do what you tell me!
Fuck you I wont do what you tell me!
Fuck you I wont do what you tell me!
guitar riff
MOTHERFUCKERS!! UNG! UNG! UNG!
"Klaatu, verada, necktie!" -Ash
I require internet access in order to perform my job duties. Are you going to argue that I don't need my job, hence I don't need internet access?
Playing by the same rules, I hereby accuse the suits at Time-Warner Cable of being ignorant about the technology and assuming that just because copyrighted material might be coming from some IP address, this does not rule out that the IP address can be hijacked easily (in fact, it is easier when you are away). While the DHCP server might not assign that address to a request via DHCP from other than the correct NIC address, the ARP query in the router will record whatever NIC answers first. The people who are in authority at Time-Warner Cable apparently are ignorant of this and ignorant of the fact that an IP address does not identify an exact machine. They are therefore guilty until they can prove they are innocent. And I doubt they can do that.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Lunatic because you fail to realize that corporations are not an alien race but that they just represent the people who control them - i.e. a set of people with money.
Feel free to argue against contributions to politicians or mechanisms that allow certain people to contribute more than the others (i.e. soft money - where they disguise their contribution under organizations). However, the fact remains that corporations are not in themselves evil and in fact serve a great purpose to the economy by allowing the shielding of personal financial liability. Blame the stupid laws that allow corporations to make political contributions that an individual cannot - don't blame the corporations for exploiting the law. The bottom line, of course, is that if citizens didn't vote for politicians who supported these laws, then we wouldn't have the problem in the same place.
Blaming "corporations" rather than the individuals that control them is dissimulation at its best.
Mmmm.. Donuts
"Don't blame the ISP, it's the DMCA that's broken."
while the DMCA is seriously one-sided (precisely as it was intended to be), you can surely share some of the blame with the ISP...
it's amusing to note that the AOL portion of TimeWarnerAOL HIDES behind one of the strictest privacy agreements in the industry, in case (no pun intended) anyone thinks thats done solely to favor the user, think again.
The AOL privacy agreement is at least as much intended to keep AOL's ass out of hot water.
By making a really strict Privacy Agreement (if you haven't read AOL's Service Agreement, you should, it's remarkable in every legal way you can think of) with its customers when of the "watchdog" groups like the MPAA, RIAA, BSA comes calling AOL can throw up its hands and say...
"Gee, we'd really like to check and see AOL User; "IRIPDVDS" has any copyrighted materials on our service. But, Shucks, our privacy agreement with them doesn't really allow us to do so without you guys having a warrant. You DO have a warrant don't you?"
The average ISP remaining after the fallout is only a fraction of AOL's size and clout, and can't afford to play "Lawyers At Dawn" with the entertainment industry, so they will do the "Bend and Spread" in about 10 seconds.
And since the remaining broadband providers are essentially all telcos, who would (like all public utilities) generally perform copulative acts with their maternal unit's left eye socket, they would just as soon hose a customer as look at them.
As the telcos remind us constantly they ***HATE*** deregulation and the fact the RBOCs are "re-merging" should tell you how well they understand (and care to understand) the retail communications marketplace.
The DMCA, as related in the article, is having precisely the intended effect on ISPs.
We in the community failed to stop the DMCA, and now we're seeing only the beginning of our failure.
Essentially, those who enforce copyright laws in the "non-digital world" are used to having "no knock, no due process" rights to puruse purported violators
We in the digital world have largely, up to this point, only been purused by statutes and agencies that have to more/less give us due process and Bill of Rights protections (the glaring exception to that is Kevin Mitnick, who literally became "The Man Without a Country", one of the most egregrous violations of due process in American history")
well, our friends in the entertainment industry don't observe (thanks to the American Congress) either due process or bill of rights restrictions when pursuing "copyright violators"
it should interesting to note that the Freakazoid who slaughtered his whole family up in Sacramento has more civil rights than he would have if he downloaded "Phantom Menace"....
you decide who our laws are really intended to protect, people or property????
Ten quid, she's so easy to blind. And not a word is spoken...
They can't make any money on the movies ... not to mention even make a good movie ... so instead they sue the consumer into oblivion.
If the MPAA only presented to Time-Warner the IP address, then it was TW that had the responsibility to correctly identify the customer involved. They would have had to verify from their ARP logs that no one but the customer was using that IP address at that time. DHCP logs would not be good enough, since hijacking IP addresses bypasses DHCP. This is assuming they are using DHCP technology. If they are using something else, and that something else has a flaw (most protocols do) with respect to hijacking, then they would have to have some kind of proof that it was his machine, as opposed to someone else who had hijacked the IP address.
In fact, it is not even necessary to hijack the IP via ARP. By using UDP and forged source addresses, someone could operate a server that takes requests on its own IP, but sends answers back on another (we're not talking RFC compliant here). Even ARP wouldn't know about that. Sure, it would take special software in the client end to recognize the wierd response, but designing such a protocol wouldn't really be any harder than any other P2P. In fact I would guess that future (if not even some present) P2P protocols in the works will further hide their origins by the following technique.
Requests to a particular server would be shuffled around P2P nodes until the right one found it, not by IP address, but by certificate included inside, or some other encrypted message. Then responses from that server could be forged with a different IP address, and/or bounced off one or more other servers (with the real destination being encrypted) for 1 or 2 hops, before finally converging on the destination in what appears to be a smurf attack.
Don't think it can't happen. In fact, I would be a bit surprised if it is not already happening. There are some very clever protocol designers out there.
ISPs could filter against these, but it would be very much a cat and mouse chase game. Encapsulation would be used to hide things in other protocols like HTTPS which are virtually impossible to selectively filter (either you block port 443 or you don't).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
All it takes to make the ISP "aware" of something is an anonymous tip. They're not going to check it out- they're just going to pull the plug.
Sounds like a great way to do a Denial of Service attack- and get the ISP to do all your dirty work.
If you agree to your little "Devil's" advocate position- would you so terribly mind anyone testing that theory? Yes, you do mind? I thought as much...
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Who controls corporations? The workers do. The investors do. The customers do. Without all of these present, the corporation fails. Therefore, the corporation exists to serve all three groups.
All such laws which allow contributions are doing nothing other than staying out of the way of people exercising their First Amendment rights. If anything needs to be done, the laws that you refer to that censor the free speech of individuals when it comes to political candidates must be abolished.
I sincerely doubt this range of ip addresses will be missed by our customers :-)
I love the way the DSL network came into place. I was able to get a faster connection, and keep my ISP that i've been using for years.
The thing with local ISPs is there's so damned many of them, that the big MPAA-type companies don't have the time to deal with them.
I've had a very established working relationship with my ISP, which has incredible uptimes (due to their commercial hosting sector) and friendly, local staff. If they had some kind of MPAA problem like this, I'd storm right into their office, which is only about 5 miles away, and give them hell.
You should take a look at the potentials of local ISPs, especially in relation to privacy, port 80 blocking, MPAA thug attacks, code red worms, and all this other stupid crap that the big boys keep coming up with. If they enforce something on their service that you don't allow, just call up one of the other 40 ISPs in the phone book. A lot of them even give you UNIX shell accounts!
DMCA, RIAA, MPAA, all 4 letter words ending in "A".
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
As a network programmer, I could set up an SMTP server using forged addresses and source routing to act an imposter to the MPAA and terminate the service of anyone I don't like.
As a pirate, would I really use my own IP address or would I "borrow" one and use source routing? After all, why not let some one else pay the consequences? How many ISPs check for source routing on outgoing packets anyway? How about valid IP addresses? Of course with Windoze XP, it will get a whole lot easier for the Windoze crowd to take advantage of these wonderful technologies! Unless proper firewalls were maintained in front of receiving internet mail servers (DMZ-style), they would never know the difference.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Who it was that bragged about 'internet freedoms' and 'new reality' and stuff? Here it goes - every step you take is watched. You have absolutely no rights. Your access can be terminated any second without explaining a reason or giving you any chance to explain. All burden to prove your innocense is on you. Nobody has any obligation to even listen to you.
Does no sound like too much of freedom, does it? Does sound as a 'new reality', though. Free people of America, get used to it. It will get worse - how many times would it take for ISP to make 'access history' and share the data? One complaint from MPAA - and you lose your broadband for life. Sounds good?
-- Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
The DMCA does not require an ISP to do anything about mere allegations of copyright vioation. However, the DMCA says that if an ISP receives proper notification of a claim of infringement, and it takes down the allegedly infringing material and notifies the user of the details of the situation and gives the user the proper opportunity to respond, then the ISP cannot be sued by either the accuser (for contributing to copyright infringement) or the user (for breach of contract.) This is spelled out in 17 USC 512, and you can read about how to respond to an accusation of copyright violation here. If you follow this form of reply, your ISP has to put your files back.
Warner Cable's actions were not justified under the DMCA. Since the infringing files were posted to Usenet, there's nothing the DMCA requires Warner Cable to do except delete the posts from their own news servers. But as they're a division of Time-Warner we shouldn't expect any kind of reasonable or moral behavior from these clowns. At least not this early in the game. They are still many clue sticks away from enlightenment.
As for Hemanshu Nigam, I've had dealings with him as well. He seems to be the perfect straight man for those who want to point out the idiocy of the MPAA.
Netblock: 204.92.244.208 - 204.92.244.223
For those of you who don't know how to use ipchains (or iptables), here is the syntax for firewalling an IP block such as this one:
ipchains -A input -s 204.92.244.208/28 -j DENY -l
Might the good ol' BBB be a good place to go with an issue like this? Just an idea that popped into my head...
I lost two ISP accounts within two months because of
alt.usenet.kooks "discussions" with certain Right
Reverend from Colorado. He raised such a stink, it
smelled all the way to Massachusetts. That was in '95,
I think, Exon's bill was in the works...
First -- Saturn.net, then -- GIS.net wet their pants
and yanked me with no warnings or "listening to my
side". GIS.net's (aka thecia.net) Bob Carp left me
a voice message -- you could hear crap dripping from
his undergarments, so scared he was...
Nothing changed, as far as I'm concerned. If you
yell loud enough, an ISP will bend: "For $10/month,
we don't want calls from police," Bob Carp (spit)
told me...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
It's crap like this that makes me sick. Wtf is wrong with these guys.
:)
(sorry for the pointless rant
This was not the law applied, the user no doubt agreed to allow the ISP to terminate their connection at any time for whatever reason the ISP wanted (these days specifically listing possible copyright infringement).
Go find another ISP with a better agreement and practices. (good luck, there aren't many).
So.... The DMCA states that the penalty for making false accusations is Perjury. They made a false claim against the writer. Nail them! Seriously. The law isn't entirely one sided. There is a penalty if they lie in their claims. Make the law work for you.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
...here is not "the Evil MPAA vs. the little guy," the real issue here is why the MPAA feels the need to stop people from distributing movies. Those in the MPAA -- and indeed, most corporations -- view the world differently than most individuals. It is a truly sad day in society when innocent people have their livelihoods violated because of a mistake reaulting from an ideological difference. .
The difference is between two schools of thought: those who believe we now live in an information age , and those who believe we live in an information economy
You see, the first group believes that in today's society, information must be free to flow, and the economy has progressed to a service-based economy, and you should pay for things like materials, labor, and service. The other group believes that the economy should be information-based, and in addition to all the other things, you should pay for the information itself. And sadly, this second group views technology as a threat to their way of life and business, and will do whatever they can to protect what they view as theirs. Unfortunately, tragically, people such as the fellow in this article get caught in the crossfire.
Technology, most notably computers and the Internet, has changed the way of life in today's society. It remains to be seen what we are headed for: information as a way of life, or information as a way of business.
--
Me: http://www.robertdhill.com/
DSLExtreme's AUP/TOS:
Right Here. And they give out static IP addresses too!
These guys rock.
From slashdot.org -
From the Salon Article -
There was no mention stating if the author was homosexual, so it's safe to assume, he's a she.
Yes, I know. I need to get laid.
k
But this is not most copyright cases. This is a DMCA copyright case, and the DMCA has felony provisions, e.g. the "felony fair use" provision against circumventing an access control.
1 26 _ny_lib_amicus.eps
Dammit, I've got to read the the damn law. I can't check now, but the EFF has as amicus brief from a New York library association describing the effects of the law on fair use in considerable detail. I think it is at
http://www.eff.org/IP/DMCA/MPAA_DVD_cases/20010
Tom Hardy
The thing is, corporations should not have lobbying power, especially because if they do, their power easily trumps that of individuals.
Remember that the benefits of a free market depend on consumers having freedom to choose. Allowing corporations to have the political power to influence legislation that can effectively protect their business models and markets pretty much eliminates this.
Would the colleges be under obligation to suspend your access? Especially if there are whole floors of people running an OpenNap server?
If by this you mean that governments do not screw you as long as you are vigilant I agree. Unfortunately, history bears out that people are complacent creatures, who tend toward an attitude of personal peace and affluence. Or, as long as it doesn't directly affect me, who cares.
The thing is, corporations should not have lobbying power, especially because if they do, their power easily trumps that of individuals.
Remember that the benefits of a free market depend on consumers having freedom to choose. Allowing corporations to have the political power to influence legislation that can effectively protect their business models and markets pretty much eliminates this.
Agreed. The point is, if the government had no power to manipulate the market then the corporations would gain no benefit from lobbying it. Corporations lobby the government because they have to. First, for self preservation, so they don't get regulated out of business. Second, because that's the way our government has setup the market. If you want to be successfull, you've got to throw money at the government. Instead of letting the market decide. If the government wielded no power over the market then the corporations would be forced to return to competing with other companies in providing valuable services and products.
The RIAA is the perfect example. Because the govt chooses to be involved in the market, once they became irrelevant in their current form they just lobbied congress to cement their current form into law rather than evolve. How wonderfull it would be if the government weren't allowed to do this! Then we wouldn't have ANY of the issues we have today surrounding the DMCA and the RIAA/MPAA/etc.
"No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."
--James Madison
Ah crap. I did it again. Sorry about the lack of a closing there. One of these days I'll remember to preview my posts. ;-)
Anyway, I think I read on Slashdot about personal wireless networks. If this is possible and FCC legal, I think all efforts should be thrown into creating private networks with equipment capable of transmission distances of less than a mile. That means that in a reasonably populated area, everyone could be a node, blah, blah, blah.
To hell with ISPs, in other words.
Is this possible?
MjM
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
However, it is possible for laws to be written that govern these private contracts - just try and evict a goat fekking, pr0n producing turd from your apartment complex and watch the 4CLU-less get involved.
They should be required to PROVE that you did something wrong - this is the problem.
Just today Google updated their counter to the above number. I wonder why it's always an even multiple of 1000...
I'm not a journalist, but I play one on slashdot