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RIAA to Sue You Now
An anonymous reader writes "MSNBC reports that apparently the music industry feels so satisfied with going after file swapping software makers that they want to sue the pants off the file swappers themselves. Of course, you'll need to be a big fish with lots of illegal music to get their attention." This is what they should have done in the first place- go after the people who are actually doing it instead of making P2P seemingly
illegal.
About time the true guilty party was sued!
So what are they going to do? Do some searches on Kazaa and find some users with big stashes and then....what? Oh of *course* these nice pirates registered with their real names and addresses, right? Right?
This is just stupid. Going after big pirating syndicates is one thing, and I'm all for it. Going after Joe college kid with an 80 gig drive of mp3s and DivX is just useless. When does it end?
"Moderate drinking can help prevent amputated limbs" -- Abigail Zuger, NYTimes, 12/31/02
This is what they should have done in the first place- go after the people who are actually doing it instead of making P2P seemingly illegal.
If anyone can show me any hard evidence that suggests more than 1% of users of P2P software(s) use it for anything other than getting music/movies/software for free, I'd agree with that statement.
It hurts when I pee.
i have over 5,000 mp3s, just because i have that many doesn't mean they're illegal though, are they going to search the P2P networks, and track people down, then audit them for no reason, what's to say i don't own all of my music and have a nice digital copy to avoid cd swaping? this is bunk...i don't share my mp3 directory, because it's illegal, however, as previously mentioned, many people share their entire drive unknowingly.....i think they're overstepping the fair use boundries, i also thought putting the annoying clicks in the cd was overstepping, it's great to see we have a politician fighting for us
--fetch daddy's blue fright wig, i must be handsome when i release my rage
Or maybe plant a wooden aircraft gun on top of their headquarters?
the article says that they are going after "for profit" orginazations. What if the so-called orginazation doesn't ask for money, just a donation... wouldn't that put a crimp in their court case. After all, a big business charging for music they don't have a right to sell is just asking to be caught and have a big fine slapped on them...
Instead, the industry has focused on lawsuits against for-profit piracy outfits
I expect this from MSNBC, but this is a WSJ article.
Nope, no sig
Of course, you'll need to be a big fish with lots of illegal music to get their attention."
That's good news for all of us humans out here, but what about our aquatic File-swapping friends? Unite with our fishy friends and protect their rights to music!
I don't honestly believe it'll be easy (possible, even?) to *prove in court* that anyone has caused copyright violations using p2p software. This is just more FUD from the turd manufacturers.
One of the things people have been claiming to be a disadvantage to gnutella is now showing itself as an advantage. People cannot browse your file lists in gnutella and thus cannot see how many illegal files you are swapping. They only learn of what files you have when they do a specific search for them.
"Filing suits against individual users is complicated. Entertainment companies frequently hire services that specialize in tracking copyrighted material online. But to get the name of an individual user, they have to send a subpoena to that person's Internet-service provider. Even for the ISP, linking the Internet address to a name can be complex. Moreover, it's hard to verify which person was logged on to an Internet connection at a given time."
So in other words to find most individual users they will have to invest time+money, yeah this'll fly for an association thats primary concern is profit!!
crazy dynamite monkey
I wonder, what happens when let's say 100.000 users sue the RIAA, all at once? being inventive and original, 'course...
c'mon guys, let's do it!
maybe they'll sue themselves out of business, lawyers ain't cheap and even if they bust half of the teens they prosecute they won't recoup their losses
going after users doesn't work, ask the DEA
stupid wars on freedom waste time and money, why not go the way of BMG and at least attempt to make a profit from it insted of trying to slow your demise.. death to teh riaa
This isn't about an industry that is feeling smug and self-assured...This is a LAST DITCH EFFORT to assert their right to exist. And in the long run, I don't think its going to work.
RIP RIAA -- 2006
their profits will be -$2,000,000,000 and they will claim it's "Due to piracy".
:-)
The funny thing is, they'll be more correct than any of the other times they have made that statement.
My $0.02 will always be worth more than your â0.02, so
"The United States versus KazaaLite User "SpankyPants27", AKA 64.123.25.14"
::.. check out some Cell Phone Reviews
In the case of the RIAA vs the inhabitants of the planet earth.....
judge --> will the defendants please rise
(defendants) --> Everyone rises
judge --> HOLY SHIT RIAA ARE YOU INSANE?
Wow did someone hit RIAA with a Clue Stick? this is one of the first smart things they have done. This of course is assuming the following
If they find someone who is sharing music that could only be there if it was pirated.
That means you should only be under suspicion if you are sharing music that is not yet released (Eminem was a recent one that I heard of being out there well in advance). That's it. Otherwise who knows maybe some insane freak does buy every song on the top 100 list. There is no probable cause, no reason to sue.
Just my $16.99 (My thoughts might have become easier to produce but marketing and branding still cost money)
Better to encrypting your harddrives and put some PGP on it so if you get busted they can't ask you for the keys to self incriminate :-)
I like what the article had to say about the general public getting probably disgruntled over large corporations taking individuals to court. Making "examples" of only the large criminals is very debatable, and a waste of time in my mind.
Through which of the following services is it actually possible to track a single user down to their ISP?
1.Kazaa
2.Bearshare
3.Direct Connect
Or is tracking users down actually possible in *gasp* all three?
Say I own the "rights" to 500 songs. I bought the CD, tape, payed for an individual mp3 download, whatever.
/tunes shared out.
How is offering them over napster servers any more illegal then what a library does? If user X downloads them, and keeps them permanently, or sells them, or otherwise violates HIS local copyright statutes, I don't see how that's my fault for simplying for having
Sue all of us? Have fun with that. I can't even count the number of people... and only sueing the "big fishes" isn't really going to solve anything, I'm pretty sure many "little fishes" will just fill the gap. Isn't that the idea behind P2P anyways?
No large FTP sites, just many users with perhaps a few files.
Years from now, law students are going to have to remember the names of groundbreaking cases that formed the latest incarnation of IP law...
RIAA v. l33t d0Wn104d3r
RIAA v. i oWnz j00
RIAA v. cr4pfl00d3r
Can't wait to see how those textbooks handle it...
--------
Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
The RIAA has tried (successfully) to paint P2P networks as festering cesspools of piracy and other sorts of illegal activity. I think this is part of the reason P2P networking has not been used to come up with more innovative technologies. Also, independent artists -- who could benefit immensely from distributing their music through P2P instead of through recording companies -- have been reluctant to embrace P2P as a truly new way of doing business.
So this might be good. Granted, the RIAA won't _stop_ prosecuting P2P networks, but at least they'll be shifting some of the blame to the people who actually use these networks for illegal activity.
But it won't help them. People like free music, and they'll fight tooth and nail when you try to take it away from them. Imagine the public backlash they'll have when they trace some huge fileswapper, have the Feds bust down their doors, only to find that their suspect is a 15-year-old whose father works at a university and whose mother is a nurse. They'll have to arrest someone, and no matter who they do, they'll be setting themselves up for negative publicity. Online file-sharers will be galvanized to the "cause" of free music, and the RIAA's troubles will continue to pile up.
Companies like the RIAA and the MPAA are going to go out of business. Period. When people have the ability to make an infinite number of copies of your product, at virtually no cost, you can't make money anymore. It's as simple as that.
will they be scanning for files? I'll be sure to DENY their packets before they touch me.
--
grep "xercist"
Can they leagally go after the people with legitamate MP3s who happen to make them available on the internet or those who illegally download them?
To better explain: if I leave my doors unlocked and someone steals my CDs I may be a moron for not locking my doors, but I certainly didn't commit a crime (the thief did).
Also, if User A has a Old97s CD and legit MP3 copies of the disc on his machine and I also own the same Old97s CD and download his copies (instead of burning my own) did either of us break a law?
I am sorta hazy over both issues.
I know that this would be a quick way to get a short list.
I can also imagine them then trying to get the FBI to help them out tracking down which of these are actually music file trafficers, vs merely trafficing in other warez, although there might not be that much difference.
After all, this fits into the war on terrorism. These folks are terrorizing American Industry (tm).
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
It looks like the RIAA has decided to attack innocent file swappers! If someone doesn't stop them, the lawyers will take over!
What should we do, Batman?
As long as they aren't going after ISPs and trying to make them block or restrict access to what they consider file-sharing or file-sharing-related internet sites, i'm fine. Though i'm still going to help fight this if i can, because that's the logical next step after this-- if they go long enough with attacking users who fileshare, the file sharing will just move out of the states, and then they'll have to convince GWB to build The Great Firewall of America..
Though it will be amusing if they ever *do* get in court and someone goes all the way instead of settling. I want to see a protacted legal battle in which the RIAA tries to justify the rediculous amounts of money they claim piracy costs them. Since there's absolutely no fricking way to tell out of those who pirate music what percentage would have bought music before file-sharing but don't know, what percentage wouldn't have been listening to music anyway but do listen now that they can get it free, and what percentage go and buy the album after they've sampled it on Audiogalaxy (i am generally in the third group), it should be fun trying to see the legal circus that would result from both sides trying to argue undefendable viewpoints..
Also i'll be curious to see what happens when The Outside World realizes how much child porn there is on freenet
Copying CD tracks onto MP3 format should be and is most definitely illegal. We should pay for the album a second time if we wish to convert the CD into an MP3, and must never under any circumstances distribute it to others.
Well I understand that the movie industry is making money hand over fist. Maybe the music industry is just looking for new revenue streams. Spin it as reoccuring revenue streams.
Yah, I'm sure the expense of filing suits against thousands of college kids is really going to help their bottom line.
The RIAA will have to have a pretty careful strategy with this tactic. If they sue anyone, it is going to instantly have meteoric press coverage, especially if they sue one of the "supernodes" for an high $$ amount. Public sentiment against the RIAA will be astronomical if they don't choose someone who is: 1. Undeniably guilty 2. Unremorseful 3. A poor martyr Public opinion is fairly well split on the filesharing issue, but if a big corporate entity makes a martyr out of someone, you can bet public opinion will sway quickly. And dont think the RIAA has not considered this issue.
.....
Actually, since they'll never succeed in stopping P2P networks, i'd much rather have them trying to do that. If they actually stop the people distributing them, I won't be able to continue to steal their music.
I am SURE that there is a law regarding noise pollution... and I am positive most of you have heard the latest Booby Spears and N Stink songs at least in passing...
:)
This is my sig. Its pathetic.
No, I totally disagree with the move they're making. There are already too many people who have downloaded music; tracking down each and every one of them would be slow and inefficent. While they go after one, another will be out downloading a song. Really the dumbest move they've made yet... ...wait, dumb move regarding stopping downloading of music! Go with it!
Crap, my goldfish has been leeching MP3s since the birth of Napster. He's quite a smallfish though, will he be ok?
Everything sucks except musicandstuff
or you could move your server to Sealand
I want 2D games back.
I sense an increase in the number of doors kicked down by the RIAA sekret polize, though, which could be a bad thing.
You don't need to be a pirate to be targeted, you just have to have mp3s, and the media will automatically MAKE you into a pirate, regardless of if you made them yourself.
It's funny because the suing will only happen in the US. Here is Canada the artists supposedly get money from CDR's and other recordable media meaning they still get rich from doing very little.
RIAA really can't pull that off because what do they do with Minors, sue the parents? What about other people who have their machines hacked? You could play stupid. It's worked with so many companes in the past (@home). Uh, I'm running a server thats doing something illegal, how do I fix it.
Why would they need a big fish with lots of illegal music, according to the article they are going after people HOSTING or SHARING the music, not the ones downloading it.
World-wide music sales dropped 5% last year, while global sales of compact-disc albums declined for the first time since CDs were launched in 1983. So far this year, U.S. music sales are down steeply from a sluggish 2001.
I suppose the music industry thinks that they are recession resistant?
love is just extroverted narcissism
I guess if they make file swapping illeagal/immposible they would have no way of regaining the legal/lobbyest fees that they have already spent... but can the really expect to get much money out of a poor college student?
In America we are imprisoned by our fear of them.
The RIAA will have to have a pretty careful strategy with this tactic. If they sue anyone, it is going to instantly have meteoric press coverage, especially if they sue one of the "supernodes" for an high $$ amount. Public sentiment against the RIAA will be astronomical if they don't choose someone who is:
1. Undeniably guilty
2. Unremorseful
3. A poor martyr
Public opinion is fairly well split on the filesharing issue, but if a big corporate entity makes a martyr out of someone, you can bet public opinion will sway quickly.
And don't think the RIAA has not considered this issue.
.....
"Of course, you'll need to be a big fish with lots of illegal music to get their attention"
Can anyone who doesn't have 1gb of mp3's please put their hand up.
Ok , looks like everone here is a "big fish"..... take them all away... and take away there mice...
Cruise TT
So in other words to find most individual users they will have to invest time+money, yeah this'll fly for an association thats primary concern is profit!!
If they win, they can hypothetically get the judge to make the loser pay the RIAA's legal fees
If all goes right, eventually the only way the RIAA can lose out is if a really large number of penniless students get the pants sued off of them, elect to defend themselves, stall in court for a really long time, and then when the judgement is passed, file for bankruptcy. But that would involve the penniless students A) organizing B) being willing to go for some amount of personal sacrifice C) giving a shit about the greater good, so i wouldn't count on it.
Isn't there something in our copyright laws up here that allow us to make personal copies of CDs, irrespective of whether we own the original or not? Besides, with the hefty increases in the blank media levies that the Copyright Board want to introduce, I feel that I have the right to do this. So, how are the RIAA going to stop Americans grabbing files from places outside their jurisdiction?
The owner of my ISP (small company in Ottawa) posted something to the Usenet last year or so. He'd received an email from some lawyers in the US about somebody sharing files on his service. I think the complaint was about a file sharing programme running, not the actual files. All he did was laugh.
Crapdot
News from birds. Stuff that splatters.
I support going after the people breaking the laws rather than the P2P networks, definitely, however something just doesn't seem right to me about the way this is going. Sure, it can be just the big fishes now, but if they eventually start going after everyone with 10-20 gigs shared, well, that's a lot of people, and I'm one of them. It's not because I'm stealing music, I swear I'm not, it's just that I use mp3 to test out music I'm considering purchasing, or to discover bands I never would have dreamed of listening to otherwise. Seriously, with a 5 minute investment I can hear almost any band in the world by simply picking one I've never heard out of someone else's directory. I can't even begin to imagine how much music and music related merchandise (Tickets and such) that I've purchased over the years because of things I heard on mp3. Literally, probably at least 60-75% of my collection of nearly 400 CDs. That's a lot of money. That's a lot of money that I didn't mind spending. Though, it's also a lot of money I'm not going to be spending anymore. I'm personally boycotting first run music stores if the album I want is on a label that is involved in supporting the RIAA. I just can't reconcile my love for music with my hatred of them blaming the fans, the customers, legitimate customers such as myself, for their slagging profits. Cut the prices, guys. Just slash them heavily. THEN think about going after people who still share 500 gigs, but damnit, please don't blame the customers for your losses due to greedy price fixing, and backwards attitudes towards fair use.
or are these guys biting off more than they can chew?
For anyone with the most limited technical knowledge, it's fairly simple to make yourself more or less immune to this sort of tracing... so you have to think that the only people who would be caught would be the dumb kids who don't take any countermeasures. Ok. Here's a truism: if these kids had enough money to have it be worth taking it in a lawsuit, they would be buying the CD's in the first place.
So what's the idea? Sue 30,000 12th graders for the baby-sitting money?
Or is this more about scare tactics? "Jim, it says here in the paper that people are being sued for sharing music in the internet. Do you think our Johnny could be mixed up in this? Perhaps we had better have a talk with him."
(cue "father knows best" theme song)
Or am I missing something here?
Michael-
You catch enchiladas by picking them up behind the head and holding them underwater until they don't kick anymore -VeGas
The trick is to get people to read the article. Making it sound like they're coming after -you- is a pretty decent way to do it, right? Slashdot uses the same technique..
This is what they should have done in the first place- go after the people who are actually doing it instead of making P2P seemingly illegal.
*Doing* what? Sharing large numbers with my friends and their friends? When will they learn that a mp3 file is just a stream of bits, which in turn is just a VERY large number. Are they going to sue me for that?
Helooooo...
Are they going to sue my neighbour playing music so load that I can hear it outside his window for sharing the music with me?
Give up already!
Go ahead try it.
S
Do we have secure p2p yet? If we don't then we need to develop it. Then how would the be able to track or prove anything? We could use existing technologies like OpenSSL and create a gnutella based client/server system. Usernames, passwords, all data transmissions are totally encrypted. Is this possible and has it already be done?
Scare tactics could be very effective. Just one random, not-for-profit, casual MP3 pirate being sued is enough incentive for me to stop using P2P programs.
They can pick random users from Gnutella, and do a little detective work to find out who they are based on your IP-address.
For those of you who aren't going to read the article, the RIAA is not going to try to sue everyone. They have 2 goals in mind, I suspect:
1) Find someone who is sharing 100,000 files with a T-3 connection and use this person to demonize everyone who shares music over p2p. The RIAA is suffering from a bit of an image problem, and I think they want to try to make it good guys vs. bad guys, so they have to find a bad enough guy.
2) Scare anyone who considers sharing files into wondering if they are above the magic threshold that will bring a suit.
I suppose the theory is that if you stop the people who are sharing the music, then there will be nothing for anyone to download. Kinda like the drug war -- bust all the dealers, then the users will have nowhere to go.
I don't think this will work, as my guess is that most people who download music also share it. It isn't centralized enough that you can take out a few super-sharers and suddenly everything dries up.
If they thought sales were slumping before, just wait till they piss off their user base. Just because there are still lots of people out there who don't download music or have anything to do with the Internet doesn't mean they don't know when someone is trying to screw them.
"... I declare our city to be a free and independent state to be named Tri-Insula!" --Fernando Wood, Mayor of NYC 1861
I'm still learning more about networking, so this might sound stupid, but what if the person has a firewall/router? Can it be bypassed?
Why can't P2P companies like Kaaza use their EULA's to prevent people from tracking down users on thier network. As well as from knowingly putting mislabeled files. THen sue the companies who host them. I mean if Kaaza can't kick off people with mislabeled files, how can they stop copyright infringement.
Ah! I'm in a far away country wich they have never heard of! No way they'll get me!
You can't take the sky from me...
go after the people who are actually doing it instead of making P2P seemingly illegal.
While it could be argued that RIAA is just taking an expedient course of action, this is the one thing that they should have done.
Go after the burglars - don't penalize the manufacturers of crowbars.
I'd just as soon live in a free society where I have my choice of combining Napster with crowbars as long as I don't infringe on someone else's rights.
However, I will admit that trading an MP3 from a CD of mine that I've ripped to someone I don't know for a song which I don't have constitutes a commercial transaction (albeit cashless) and, while copyright exists, the possessors of the it should have the exclusive right to charge for distribution. Exactly and only that.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Could RIAA then be sued for downloading their own music from these swappers?
If they do not download, how do they know it is there and that it is the real music (as opposed to loops)?
If they do download the music, are they not taking a part in the "crime"?
If they claim that they have a right to download it because they already own the rights to this music, does that not legitimize the distribution as long as the downloader already owns rights (under "fair use")?
-Em
RelevantElephants: A Somatic WebComic...
We've now reached the endgame... When the whole music industry comits mass suicide like Metallica did when filing suit against 300,000 of it's own fans.
I've been waiting for this to happen, as this will push things to a final resolution.
BTW, Why can I buy a movie that has been out for 3-4 months for $15-16 on DVD, with extra features, etc, but a 20 year old album costs more than that? I can buy DVD's of older movies for around $10.
Yet, DVD sales boom. The best anti-piracy protection is reasonable prices. So long as the RIAA engages in illegal, anti-competitive practices (the FTC found them guilty of CD price fixing again), I say they deserve whatever happens to them.
It's a Mexican standoff... Pirates will pirate from P2P networks, the RIAA won't obey the law.
If it can be heard, it can be ripped. If it can be ripped, it can be traded. No amount of lawyering can change this, and indeed, the music industry will only become an even greater villian to the average Joe by the attempt.
Sell CD's for $10. Watch the sales rise. Quit wasting $millions bribing stations to play songs they will play anyway. Watch profits rise...
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
which shares all the mp3s on a system in a kazaa like manner..
:/
thatll amusingly screw up alot of the RIAA's law suits..
RIAA > We're taking you to court for being an anti-american, communistic Bin Laden supporting, bad spelling MP3 k0uri3er!
Lame NT Admin > I was hacked I tell you.. hacked! I have the MCSE! I know what Im talking about
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
focus on individuals who supply the biggest amounts of music...
The suits could set the company against many users of its own America Online Internet service.
I don't think AOL users have the bandwidth to download MP3s let alone be the major uploaders!
I stole this Sig
They intend to go after high-volume sites with lots of files. Combine this with their plan to flood P2P networks with bogus files, and they'll probably wind up suing themselves! Only the lawyers will profit. Oh wait, that's how the game is played already...
Envy my 5 digit Slashdot User ID!
Here is a formula for determining damages.
Actual Damages
Actual Damages and Profits.-The copyright owner is entitled to recover the actual damages suffered by him or her as a result of the infringement, and any profits of the infringer that are attributable to the infringement and are not taken into account in computing the actual damages. In establishing the infringer's profits, the copyright owner is required to present proof only of the infringer's gross revenue, and the infringer is required to prove his or her deductible expenses and the elements of profit attributable to factors other than the copyrighted work.
Statutory damages
In a case where the copyright owner sustains the burden of proving, and the court finds, that infringement was committed willfully, the court in its discretion may increase the award of statutory damages to a sum of not more than $150,000.
Oh yeah, they get to impound your computer, too.Copyright law on damages
Of course, they have to front the money for the lawyer to investigate and pursue you, so you better be worth some $$ to them. I somehow think that the RIAA will pursue statutory damages, as file sharers are not making any cash from the endeavor. It could end up costing the RIAA a lot more to pursue than they will recover from settlements. I guess they are betting their revenues will rise when they knock out the supernodes.
Somehow I think slashing their prices would be a better idea...
Why don't we just pass a clause in copyright law that states that we can steal whatever MP3's we want. It seems to me the people of the United States have decided that they don't wanna pay for music anymore. We make the laws... only a few people are against MP3, surely a minority. This is a democracy isn't it?
But many music executives, watching revenue sag as home compact-disc copying has soared, feel that they have little choice if they are to save their business. World-wide music sales dropped 5% last year, while global sales of compact-disc albums declined for the first time since CDs were launched in 1983. So far this year, U.S. music sales are down steeply from a sluggish 2001.
/., but I have to say it again. If they would just realize that people WANT digital music that they can download and throw onto a custom CD/MP3 player/etc, then they could give this up now! Yes, there'd still be copying of CDs, and all that, but it would drop. If they have lost revenue because of filesharing, not their own lack of quality, then setting up a system where we can buy ONE song would do wonders for their revenues. They are, bluntly, idiots.
Or could it be because people are getting fed up with the latest crap from Britnay Spears and N'sync? I have bought 5 albums in as many years. They were all albums that I knew I would enjoy, start to finish (w/ maybe 1 or 2 songs as exceptions). I didn't buy the same album over, and over, and over again.
Hell, I download a few songs that I want to hear, but there's no way I'm paying for an album for one song. I know that argument has long been shouted loudly and proudly from our ranks here on
On a side note, RE: the article, I don't see how they can get someone beyond reasonable doubt. It's a simple matter to give the HD a complete wipe (7 times over, 1s and 0s) and users can just claim that they downloaded a song from Kazaa to hear it before they bought an album. The only way they could truly "get" someone is if the user had perpetually downloaded copies of the same song.
Anyway, that's my $.02
Later.
That suing your customers is NOT good marketing...
Anyone care to speculate how hard it'd be to graft some sort of encryption into Gnutella? Stuff that deliberately obfuscates IP addresses, etc, at least enough to make it hard to identify users?
BTW, wouldn't breaking such encryption be a DMCA violation?
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
If try to sue file-swappers by linking them with their IPs, all DSL users will need is a static IP. (Though I think RIAA can go a step further to get over this hurdle).
IANAL, but wouldn't a shared warning file protect you?
Have it say something like, "By downloading files from my computer, the recipient agrees not to press charges resulting from the contents of the file."
Hell, it's about as legal as a EULA.
Can the RIAA pull a BSA sue me for mp3's of foriegn music? That's the vast majority of what I have. I find current American music to be, umm, slightly lacking. Maybe I'm starting to get old. ;P
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
This is what they should have done in the first place- go after the people who are actually doing it instead of making P2P seemingly illegal.
First you tell us to play nice with Microsoft, then you come out publically against copyright infringement. Taco, you rock (even if I don't agree with you).
Not wanting to get into a moral debate on this issue, I can say I do understand where the RIAA is coming from with this way of thinking. I recently read somewhere that it's believed that 90% of all files that flow through a p2p program come from the same 50 or so individuals. I wish I could remember the link but apparently they found some guy using kazaa that had roughly 600 gigs of divx quality bootleg movies on his computer.
Finally, math books without any of that base 6 crap in them.
Ok, so even if they start to try to sue people, how exactly are they going to go about this? maybe they come to my house, I blame it on my roommate, he blames it on me, how are they going to know which of us is the bad guy? wait, I have 15 people using my IP address NATed wirelessly through my apt complex. Are they going to sue me because its my internet connection? Am I supposed to be able to monitor/block all traffic that my friends and neighbors use? How are they going to know who is uploading the music? I don't log anything... and my ISP can't tell exactly what computer its coming from inside my network... Never gonna work
World-wide music sales dropped 5% last year, while global sales of compact-disc albums declined for the first time since CDs were launched in 1983. So far this year, U.S. music sales are down steeply from a sluggish 2001.
Name one GOOD album that was released this year (Mainstream please)! I cant think of ONE MP3 that I have downloaded that was released in the last two years...
put out a quality producat and people WILL buy it, music today is like the "K-car" or the 80s... no soul...
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
Amen to that.
Yes, RIAA sucks ass.
Yes, RIAA "exploits" its "artists".
Yes, the typical RIAA lawyer has the cold, dead eyes of a killer.
But if they have a problem with the actions of fileswappers, then go after the fileswappers. Do your best. But KEEP YOUR FILTHY FUCKING UNPRINCIPLED MITTS off my consumer electronics and P2P software.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
They sued Napster, it pushed people to true P2P networks like Gnutella. Now they go after the people on the networks, won't this just push people to something like Freenet? (Freenet masks users and files so it'd be more difficult to target specific people for trading specific things)
Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?
I don't know about all of you, but all the lawsuits that the RIAA is waging is a clear indication to me that these people are loaded with too much money and not enough competition. Record labels are the only people that stand to lose profits from fileswapping; the arguements about the poor starving artists are essentially illegitimate. That being said, I think it's time to work on more shameless p2p protocols. ;)
"Quoting famous computer scientists out of context is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming." - K
On the basis that the RIAA has been found guilty by the FTC of price fixing, AGAIN... It would at the very least make things a little less black and white...
And might sway a jury.
Remember, in the USA, jurors have the right of "jury nullification", to judge that the criminal is the LAW in question, not the accused...
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
My response to any lawyerdom: "I legally own all of the music that I have stored on my hard drive, and will be prepared to produce receipts and/or the actual CDs for the majority of them (excluding those that might be floating under the seats of my car). I will gladly prove this in a court of law."
If you get a subpoena, all you have to do is hit a few used record shops - definitely a lot cheaper than trying to fight it otherwise. A few hundred bucks and the RIAA has nothing on ya.
So then you might expect the RIAA to say, "but you were sharing them online, therefore distributing them illegally". au contraire, mon shitheads - those files were taken from my computer - i did not actively participate in their distribution.
-dbc
I have to take out loans in order to feed myself and would definately have not bought most of the tunes I download. Many of them I delete after listenning to them once. Would it make any sense for me to spend 18 bucks on something I would end up throwing away?
Their prices are too high and their product is usually too shitty
> How is offering them over napster servers any more illegal then what a library does?
Here and there in the midst of all this discussion, I've occasionally run across an estimate from the publishing industry that each book sold is read on the average four times. One of their interests is cutting this number down and making people pay for the books they read.
Now, I have very few books that I've ever loaded out to anyone, and I doubt if any of my couple hundred books have been read by three other people. So where could all these extra readers be coming from?
Right. Libraries. The publishing industry doesn't make much of a public fuss of it, but one of the goals that they are starting to consider reachable is using the growing copyright restrictions to shut down public libraries. In the eyes of publishers, libraries are nothing but open copyright violations. All the arguments being made about "piracy" apply directly to libraries.
In the 1800's, the development of the public library system was one of the really significant advances in public education. We are seeing an attempt to end this social experiment, and to restrict education to those who can afford the publishers' price.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Has someone devleoped a peer-to-peer Proxy chain yet? Build a non-logging Proxy server into the P2P apps, then let the user choose how many hops to 'chain' the Proxy. You real IP address never shows up on P2P networks (or anywhere else for that matter). The IP of the last person in the Proxy chain shows up. Since this is merely forwarding traffic somewhere else, the person hosting the Proxy didn't do anything more than host a service. Everyone's IP address on P2P points to someone else. It would be impossible to track.
Two weeks ago I had exactly one pirated mp3. But when somafm shut down, I got mad. I got an 80 gig hard drive and had some friends fill it up with pirated mp3s. I've got enough music for quite a while now.
I've purchased my last CD. I feel for the artists, but by their silence they're supporting an industry that makes professional boxing look upstanding.
LAN parties. WiFi nets. Face it, all you slime who have profited so handsomely by prostituting musicians, the party's over. You can't run a business by treating both your clients and your customers like shit anymore.
1. Notified of lawsuit against you
2. Drive to local music store
3. Buy CDs of songs downloaded
4. Show up to court
5. Laugh in face of RIAA as they accuse you of stealing what you already own
6. Yawn.
So what if everyone out there has an mp3 of random backround noise listed as a hit song? Or even better, what if we all have ten, twenty, or even 100 hit songs? If the RIAA wants to go after users, shut the RIAA down by making them find so many copies of barking dogs, farting babies, and happy birthday listed as Eminem and Moby that lawyers and staff get wasted working around the false hits and it costs too much to keep up. Someone could even create a program to create random tracks from libraries of samples.
The downside of course, is that filesharing users would get sick of downloading garbage files, but then again it also might push people to start using P2P for legit purposes...
Whats wrong with suing criminals? Aslong as I can swap non-copyrighted material I don't care, as a matter of fact I think it's good, music authors should be paied for their work.
what would YOU call Kazaa, then?
:P
A for-profit "sharing" outfit?
Somehow I don't think that the kind of "sharing" that goes on 90% of the time on p2p networks is the kind of "sharing" your mom taught you was good.
How about "for-profit copyright-violation outfit"?
The Free desktop that Just Works
The end result will be the same as trying to use a shotgun against an infection.
The host will die. And perhaps rightly so. The fact that "musical art" has become big business has taken all of the art out of it.
In the long run, this could be good for the true artists being buried in the stack of Brittany Spears packaging.
Won't the quality of the music be better if people start making music for the pure joy of it? There'd still be money in live performances too.
I hope they try to sue me. I mean, my college will get me, because I'm technically breaking their rules by file sharing. But I really hope the RIAA sues me. It'll give me a chance to say all the crazy stuff I like to say in court. Also, if they order me to say, stop sharing, I'll do it anyway. It's really hard to win a fight against someone who brings companies to court. But as an individual I've got nothing to lose. I'll fight tooth and nail to the bitter end.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
...and the network of P2P will just become more distributed.
e.g. P2P clients that only share a few files.
This is just off the top of my head, but I'm sure you can find ways to make the entire P2P community blessed with bandwidth share everything nearly evenly. What are they going to do, bring every cable/dsl/campus P2P user into court?
~Dalcius
Rome wasn't burnt in a day.
Those on the file sharing services need to make their own Mp3's.
Change the name to something like
Brtny Speers newest hits
so it's not trademark infringement and in the mp3 put how they just STOLE YOUR COPYRIGHT material and that their IP has been logged. This way you're playing the same game they are
Maybe someone should write a script that goes out, finds a bunch of music titles, and touches files on your hard drive...that is, make a bunch of "fake" music, that doesn't actually take up any hard drive space. So you run the script, it searches the billboard top 40 charts or whatever, then you get:
brittany_spears-track01.mp3 (0k)brittany_spears-track02.mp3 (0k)
So suddenly, you have thousands of "illegal" mp3's, and essentially everyone becomes a supernode without actually providing any harm to P2P systems (given that you could block out all 0-length files). I dunno...just an idea.
"Quoting famous computer scientists out of context is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming." - K
all they do is sue people. Why don't teh artists just distribute music over the internet or sell their own cd's and make money on action figures?
Everyone is born right-handed; only the greatest overcome it
Whenever you purchase (legally) a CD, DVD, VHS, etc., you have a right to make one copy for backup purposes. What happens if your original gets stolen (as one of my CDs was) or gets destroyed in fire, etc.? The backup copy that you have is yours to own legally.
Now not too many people keep receipts for small purchases for long after the purchase. At that point, armed only with a copy of a music CD, DVD, etc. and your word, you'll have to battle a mega corporation which will insist that you are a thief and stole the music. Guess who will win?
How can the little person ever win? Anyone care to extrapolate on this a little.
I'm not quite sure who said it, but when the vast majority of people disobey specific laws, those laws become unenforceable due to the sheer amount of effort needed to curtail offenders.
Look at prohibition as an example. The government tried to make alcohol illegal, but due to the overwhelming amount of people who simply ignored those laws and continued to consume it anyhow, it was eventually repealed when they discovered just how much effort would have to be put into stopping offenders. Similarly, music trading will never be stopped, simply because people will move between media as necessary, even going so far as to design an anonymous program which does not allow the tracking of IPs or other identifying sources.
Oh, and don't forget the good old days of searching through websites for mp3's.
1) they get your IP address.
2) they call your ISP.
3) if (!yourIsp.isCool()) goto 7
4) your ISP tells them to get stuffed.
5) they go to court
6) they come back with a suppoena
7) your ISP gives you up
8) they call Federal Marshals
9) they come to your house with search/arrest warrents
10) they arrest you for copyright violations/wire fraud
11) they trash your house and take your computer
12) to go to jail
13) you do not collect $200
The RIAA shouldn't be attacking P2P like Napster, which claims to have supported small artists, or KaZaA and Morpheus. When those P2P programs were in their hay-day, they had upwards of a million people on the servers, with hundreds of gigabytes of files being shared. The RIAA can't expect that these companies can filter these services! And P2P ought to adopt a policy similar to Slashdot's "Reply" policy: You are responcible for what you say, do, or share. NOT the service. The people are preforming the illegal acts, not the company. About time the RIAA got on people's cases!
Rawr
Does anyone have a list of these companies netblocks? I'd very much like them firewalled into oblivion. Maybe someone could start a ORBZ like list that could be validated against to block these assholes
09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0
I just graduated from college with a liberal arts degree. If they want massive amounts of money from me, they're just going to have to get in line and wait their turn.
Compare this to leaving a book in a public library. Someone borrows it and makes a cover to cover copy. Who commits the crime? The library or the copier.
Lets get closer to home, what happens with a record library?
See my journal, I write things there
I checked out musicnet.com which is the legal digital music pay service.
Does anyone know how it works? It says something about 10bucks amonth for the RealOne service for 100downloads and 100streams a month.
I really just want digital music sitting on my HD that I can move anywhere, burn anywhere and play any time.
this site mentions NOTHING about what 10bucks a month entitles me too, how the technology works, or if I even get mp3s or what.
Am I supposed to just sign up and spend my money blindly and just hope for the best?
Yes and the war of drugs is ending shortly.
The jails are filling, and support is dropping but they keep fighting.
The RIAA is targetting a subset, one that people won't identify with so there is less public support. They don't care what happens to the "thief", cause it won't happen to them. As long as they only target small groups rather then the public at large they'll be okay.
Rather than use P2P networks, yours truly uses his local library system to get most of his music. The selection may be a little less varied, but they have a lot of good stuff, nonetheless.
For instance, they have Creedence Clearwater Revival, Jimi Hendrix, and even stuff released in 2001, like the Vanilla Sky soundtrack.
All I have to do is reserve the CD on their website, wait until it's available to check out, and then convert it onto my computer! And since the CD's are returned, no clutter! As of now, I have about 50 CD's on reserve, and I've checked out about 80 since I started.
I don't know if other library systems have as many CD's as the one I use (Sno-Isle in Washington State), but it's worth giving a shot.
I just hope I'm not giving my local library system the kiss of death.
*crosses fingers*
I guess they are hoping people will read this and stop swapping...
© 2004 The SCO Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
...then you're going to be really surprised.
This is one branch of a multi-pronged attack that will send your "fair use" rights the way of the Dodo.
Congress will be lobbied that ISPs must be responsible for the traffic that passes across their switches. The proof that this is needed is that even though music is available in a format the public demands (MP3 on the Internet), for a price of almost half the cost of a store purchase, stealing still continues.
The fact that the world economy sucks will help bolster the above as anything that helps the big companies continue their revenue stream will be seen as "good for the country".
Your "secure" operating system is just around the corner and it's possible that by 2006 you wont have the RIAA anymore because you won't be able to do anything that they wouldn't like!
RIAA has you!
I submitted this story this morning:
...right after the MSNBC article appeared, and I had read it in its entirety.
2002-07-03 14:26:10 RIAA to sue individual file sharers (articles,news) (rejected)
Anonymous Coward submits it six hours later, and it's suddenly newsworthy?
I know I'm not supposed to bitch about these kinds of things, but seriously, how about some editorial consistency? This is the second time this has happened to me, and I can't tell if it just because I'm a smartass, the different editors see different submissions in the queue, or what... all I know is that I'm a karma whore and want bonus points for my submission!
SlashSigTheorem: Humorous, Political, Critical, Constructive- If you have a
The RIAA has tried (successfully) to paint P2P networks as festering cesspools of piracy and other sorts of illegal activity.
Whether you like the RIAA or not, this is a pretty acurate description of what most P2P networks are. Log onto Kazaa or Gnutella and see what is there. It seems like a bunch of pirated MP3, some pirated movies, some pirated software, and lots and lots of porn (some of which is priated, the rest is wholesale stolen from porn sites). There is very little "legal" content on P2P networks. Even the few independant artists who have released their work on P2P networks get very little traffic, because P2P is set up mainly to be used by searching, and it's hard to search for new material since you don't know what it is your looking for (yes, you can find some stuff based on looking at a users files, but even then, you need to find the user somehow). The P2P networks are painted as havens for piracy because that is how they are used, and mostly what they were designed for.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
The P2Ps could start using disclaimers like:
You are not allowed to use this private service if you are affiliated in any way with law enforcement.
I remember seeing these back in the day on BBSes and have noted a few on FTP sites now and then, as to if they actually work, I have no idea.
Ever heard of a monopoly? how about the fact that they deprive artists of much deserved revenue? I'll gladly pay $5 directly to the artist for a CD (which is more than they get now). I'll gladly pay $5 more to all the leeches that attach themselves to artists (RIAA and co) to get them to shut up. What I won't do is be bullied into $20 a CD or take my collection offline.
i don't see sharing files as a way of life but more of a protest against an industry that charges too much BECAUSE its overgrown and inefficient. if their sales dip maybe they should take the hint that we won't overpay anymore. we have 2 choices: overpay or download for free. give us a third option that lies in the middle and all this nonsense will stop. I don't want to steal but when the government overlooks blatant abuses of power by organizations that border on monopoly status, its up to us (the citizens) to punish the offender and show them the right way.
I don't care! They must find me first, and sue me for sharing less then 100 musics through gnutella, musics which I have downloaded through gnutella too.
I bet much more then my own pants on this: "They will NEVER reach me, or whoever has no more then 10GB of shared mp3.
Even if they find me, and sues me, how much should I have to pay? $100? $200? They don't even know what they are talking about!
I'll ask once more: Where are the f****** advisors? Don't they have lawyers to ask what is possible and what is not?
Let's see who will be the first!
-=-=-=-=
I know life isn't fair, but why can't it ever be un-fair in MY favor!?
Doesn't FileTopia use some encryption to prevent the man from snooping?
That's what they should have done in the first place.
Sue those actually breaking the law by distruting copyrighted material in violation of existing copyright laws....
"Of course, you'll need to be a big fish with lots of illegal music to get their attention."
Gee, I dunno where the RIAA would get any ideas about how much disk space that we use to store our MP3's.
Note to RIAA: "If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane."
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
When they spit out those stupid numbers ($XX billion lost to music pirates), they now have even more lawyer fees to include in that number (very little of which will they be able to re-coop from teenage defendants)
Well, not the lawsuits, but the lawsuit threats, which are just as effective. See this link to a Gnucleus Forum post regarding an incident of this taking place over a month ago. Just to clarify how it works (straight from the DMCA rules), the copyright holder hires a company like Ranger which has custom-made software that spiders all the major P2P networks. They will index the copyrighted work to a list of IPs, then generate form letters which are sent to the ISP threatening a lawsuit. The ISP then forwards the letter to the user, who has the opportunity to dispute the claim or comply with the 'request' to remove the copyrighted material from the network. Needless to say, if you want to keep your internet access, you must comply. The latest version of Gnucleus already comes with a list of known spidering site IPs blocked, but this is clearly not a solution. IMO, nothing short of the capabilities of Freenet will succeed against this.
Imposing Libertarian views on everyone online since 1992.
that I'll be thinking about this non-stop as I take my practice LSAT exam this weekend.
<SARCASM>
This isn't a problem. It's a great idea. Now they can stop piracy and get rid of those pesky bandwidth hogs at the same time.
</SARCASM>
What if the user is in a country outside US and the his ISP doesn't track user ip address. Some of the ISP's have poor customer service. It don't think RIAA will be able to get the swappers id.
If I recall, about a year ago Hilary Rosen came out and clearly said that the RIAA woud NEVER do this.
What a lying sack of shit she turned out to be, Hmmm?
First they came for the swapping services
And I did not speak out because I was not a file swapping service.
Then they came for the P2P authors
And I did not speak out because I was not a P2P author.
And then they came for the massive traders.
And I did not speak out becuase I was not a massive trader.
Then they came for me --
Happy Independence Day
This got me thinking; why should it stop with dummy files? Wouldn't the best way to put a P2P system out of commission is to attack the components of such a system directly, namely the individual computers and files therein? And one good way I can think of for doing that is virii; put enough mock executables online loaded with a destructive strain (or maybe even find a way to distribute a virus through the
Well, I'll just have to use my audio out plug capable player that rips the files.
Ooh, gee, that was _so_ hard.
Resist - when you get "protected" music, use a credit card and return it for a credit reversal. If they dispute, phone the credit card company and refuse to pay. Then file in small claims court.
Noone can take your rights if you fight for them.
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
A year or two ago, the band Wheatus was hot on the radio and they were coming to town. I'd never really heard of them, but my friends wanted to go to the show. So, I hopped onto Napster and downloaded whatever I could find. I decided, "hey these guys are pretty good - kinda funny, too." So I BOUGHT a ticket to their show. A couple of days later I BOUGHT the CD. I mean, having the tunes on my computer was cool, but I still have a "segregated" stereo system that sounds much better with a store-bought CD.
The same exact scenario occured last year when Carbon Leaf was getting big on the scene. I looked for some music to "test drive" the band, then I BOUGHT a ticket for the show, then I BOUGHT the CD. Probably lots of people BOUGHT t-shirts and stuff too.
The point is, I'm either going to buy a CD or I'm not. Having it there to download for free is in no way influencing that decision. For that matter, neither is the fact that even if/when all the P2P gets shut down, I'll STILL be able to burn copies of CDs that other people buy. RIAA just doesn't get it.
P2P networks are a *better* kind of sharing than the sharing we were taught when we were kids.
Example: I have a candy bar. Bill and Sally don't have candy bars but want one. Solution: I break my candy bar into three pieces and give everyone a piece.
Compare this to P2P: I have a file. Bill and Sally don't have the file but want it. Solution: I send them each the file.
With the candy bar, we each get only a third of the candy bar. With P2P, everyone has the whole file. And then if Joe comes along, Sally can share the file with him as well, and then Joe will have the complete file.
live(free) || die;
They should really sue Microsoft, whose Windows "operating" system accounts for the majority of p2p software being run online.
The RIAA has tried (successfully) to paint P2P networks as festering cesspools of piracy and other sorts of illegal activity.
Log on to one of them and do a search for something random. Count the number of legitimate files you see-- meaning files that can be shared without breaking any contracts, rules, or laws-- and compare to the number of illegitimate files you see-- meaning files that shouldn't be shared. That ratio makes it pretty tough to call P2P networks anything other than festering cesspools of piracy.
Have you ever stopped to consider, through all of your knee-jerk reactions and unlikely political opinions, that the RIAA and the MPAA might actually have a point?
Companies like the RIAA and the MPAA are going to go out of business. Period. When people have the ability to make an infinite number of copies of your product, at virtually no cost, you can't make money anymore. It's as simple as that.
Then you'd better hang on tight to your favorite music and movies. Because there won't be much more of 'em. Music and movies aren't cheap to produce. Somebody has to put up the cash to get 'em made. Even though the artists themselves may not care about getting rich-- I'm sure some of them don't-- they're going to have to get funded somehow. If nobody believes they can make a profit by investing in a new movie, then nobody will do it, and the movie won't get made. No more 2001s. No more Citizen Kanes. No more.
Of course, I think your line of argument is full of shit, so I'm really not all that nervous.
So let's say they go total nazi all over the US and achieve a complete cease of all file uploading from the US to Kazaa. As improbable as that would be, it would still only take out half --at most-- of the overall Kazaa traffic. Assuming that nobody in Europe, Asia, or South America uses an insanely popular P2P app is a bit ridiculous. In fact, if you look at apps like Donkey which could eventually become even more troublesome for the RIAA than Kazaa, you find the servers are predominantly in Europe, Asia and South America. What is the RIAA going to do about that?
Nah, it aint gonna fly. But what is cool is that once the Dow gets back down to 5000 for a few years we'll probably see the end of prohibition in the US because any small time business like selling weed to your neighbors will be essential to getting the economy started again. 1932, part deux.
These copyright and patent motherfucking RauGun revolution asshole sons of bitches caused these problems by restructuring the courts to create these corrupt mega-monopolies and playing their conservative image shell game while they drained the blood of America. Now we're seeing "best defence is offense" crap. Going after first amendment rights isn't going to cover their asses. The American people are not cowards. These fucks are gonna pay for their crimes and the harder they push the harder they're gonna get hit.
I think this is a temptest in a teapot; most of us would agree that the RIAA has ever right to go after anybody that is violating their copyrights to make a quick buck. What we disagree on is the grey area: at what point does "loaning my new album to my friends" become "unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material". Even the RIAA isn't stupid enough to try to put a 12-year old in jail for letting her friends listen to her new Britney Spears CD...
And yet almost every movie released this year has made incredible amounts of money for everyone involved, even many of the movies that sucked hard. I don't think there's any danger of people not being able to make money creating music and movies any time soon, but the method of distributing the content is going to have to change. I'd rather just listen to the radio or a bunch of free techno stuff than pay 20$ for a cd with no more than 15 songs on it, 10 of which are total crap and 2 of the remainder that have been played to death on radio.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
Go ahead, sue us! We'll suddenly all become friendly to your overcharging, greedy ways and allow you to completely ignore any technological innovations that have taken place in the past 6 years. Seriously, how can they even contemplate such an action and not think that the entire Internet will become their enemy. They are fighting their source of revenue. They need to embrace what everyone else already has and stop pretending like the Internet doesn't exist. There is nothing to be gained by them suing individuals.
slit their own throats.
Nothing will turn customers against you faster than attacking them. You have to wonder at sheer stupidity of suing music filesharers when in all likelihood they are some of the RIAA's best customers.
This will at least be interesting, especially since it is not entirely clear that filesharing music in a non-profit manner is illegal, despite what the RIAA would like everyone to think.
As a final note, the economy is doing abysmally, which makes me wonder why the RIAA is so shocked that their CD sales are down. The first thing to go in a bad economy is disposable income, and CDs are nothing if not frivolous crap bought with disposable income. Is the RIAA immune to economics and their sales decrease completely due to these "horrible filesharers", or are they just suffering like everyone else in this economy, only they are looking for a scapegoat to try and sue to stop their business model from eventually evaporating?
My money is on the latter.
"There are laws that enslave men, and laws that set them free. " - Sean Connery as King Arthur
This works well with a few megs of MP3s. This may get expensive with a few gigs of MP3s.
SeeUsueMe
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
They are the ones who probably adviced RIAA to do this and are also the ones who'll make big bucks suing everyone. Just imagine 10 lawyer hours â $100 on the clock per P2P user. Hmm.. RIAA, do you guys need more lawyers??!
They shouldn't be suing anybody. It's the Music Industry's fault. They do nothing to educate music buyers about what's right and wrong.
Think about it: You go to the store, you buy a radio, you turn on radio, boom you have music. You can buy a tape player and record that music, no harm done. When you want to hear a specific song over and over again, go buy the CD. You're paying for convenience.
People have no reason to believe that music is anything but free. So when music sharing becomes popular, the RIAA has the NERVE to try to block it. Of course people aren't going to like that! Hell, I'm tempted to use the word 'entrapment' here.
And everyone who has ever downloaded an mp3 you've put in to a file-sharing system has been your personal friend? Someone you have met/spoken with frequently/some other activity generally shared among friends? Or are they strangers from around the world and you have no idea who they really are?
You are stretching the definition of "friend" just a bit.
-r
Just because something is free does not mean you have to take it.
I think we should celebrate this move in a big, BIG way. Let's all have a big party and invite all are (local) area internet friends. Everyone bring ALL there CD's, MP3's, Vinyl, etc..And we'll all share/swap EVERYTHING!!!!!
Now what will they do? Send the IP Police? Or just MS staffers with search dogs?
No really! Let's PARTY!!!
P.S. Pants optional
I could be wrong here, but with Kazaa I dont think you can see the individual IP addresses, only the IP addresses from Kazaa.
I say this because my on my cheesy fire-wall software I only had to create rules for three IP addresses, and I am never prompted by my fire-wall for permission again. So all the Kazaa connections are coming from these IP addresses. Am I wrong?
How strange it is to be anything at all
I don't care who RIAA is suing now. I will not be a party to it. The RIAA can't sue me as I have no d/l-ed MP3s and do not partake in the sharing of them.
/.-ers are trading illegal MP3s.
So, Fsck you, CmdrTaco for the subject "RIAA to Sue You Now", assuming all us
And as long as the MPAA doesn't get the same idea, I'll be just fine...
The recording industry seems to be incapable of offering a legal online music service. The main issue is that every service they try to offer involves restricting where and when the user can listen to the music they purchase online. Home users want to have the same freedom they have with a CD: play it on your stereo system, on your PC, in your car, on a portable player, wherever. The problem the industry has is that any kind of download that allows you to do that also allows you to make copies for other people, instead of having them buy their own copy.
BUT - how feasible would it be for a downloading music service provider to use steganography to watermark each downloaded file individually? You wouldn't prevent copying, allowing a purchaser to use the music wherever they feel like. But if the purchaser puts the file on a file-sharing service, it would be tracable to them. If the purchaser wanted, he or she could make copies of CDs for friends, but would need to be certain THEY won't make copies for anyone, because it would all lead back to the original purchaser.
This gives the industry a way to sell online music, gives the consumer a way to play the music when and where they want to, and also gives the industry a way to identify "pirates" and, if they want, sue them (had to bring it back to the original article somehow).
But is it feasible? How easily can steganographic watermarks be removed? What would the server-processing requirements be to individually (and uniquely) watermark each downloaded file?
(Also, I could easily see this being perverted into some kind of DRM system where music simply won't play if you don't have the proper digital key... but that kind of solution is always defeatable, which is why I'd lean towards forgetting about preventing people from playing and copying music, and concentrate just on the tracability).
"Piracy" has been used to describe copyright violation since the 80's, if not sooner. And Kazaa and them were clearing encouraging copyright violation.
No one's going to confuse that type of piracy with murder and raids on the high seas.
The RIAA obviously feels it has a lot of money to spend on lawyers. I wonder if their law firms decided to take the RIAA for all they are worth. Thousands of lawsuits are tens of thousands of billable hours which equals million of dollars for law firms.
This was forwarded from my ISP.
>We have received a complaint from the Recording Industry Association
of
>America that you are hosting an unauthorized music site using your
@Home
>Network service for connecting to the Internet. It is located at:
>
>> ftp://000:000@127.0.0.1/
>> This site, which was accessed on 11/07/2000 at 12:47 p.m. (EST),
offers
>> approximately 650 sound recordings for download. Many of these
recordings
>> are owned by our member companies, including songs by such artists
as
DMX,
>> Dr. Dre, Eminem, Fatboy Slim and Nas.
>>
>We are requesting that you immediately remove any files which you are
>distributing in violation of copyright. Please reply to this email
with
>your assurances that these infringing activities will not continue.
They don't care about the money they'll collect from people. They don't care about legally chasing every user.
They just want to scare everyone away. If record companies can demonstrate that they can ruin people's lives if they catch you sharing files, it's not going to take very many examples to reduce file sharing significantly. (Or so they think. All it'll really mean is sharing programs will be developed to make it even harder to detect who's sharing what.)
"indivisible, except over this pledge," etc.
--
E_NOSIG
Most porn sites put the content on P2P for advertisement, a few are DivX'd from VHS movies & DVD's though.
;)
Umm, not that I know that first hand or anything
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
This is the last straw. My music collection contains about 300 CDs, but the buck stops here. The RIAA has gone too far. Actually, they went too far quite a while ago; this is just an arbitrary point far beyond acceptable.
I do not download MP3s. I do not participate in file swapping. I do have enough money to buy all the CDs I want. And I am opting out.
The US is a nation of the people, by the people, and for the people; and the people have spoken. The people, by clear and obvious consensus, have decided that file swapping, ripping-mixing-burning, and format- and media-shifting are acceptable uses. It is up to the music creators to learn how to live with and profit from these fair uses without crushing the rights of the consumers. It is up to our government to recognize and protect this expression of our civil rights. Innovation on the part of musicians and their collaborators is called for. Widespread litigation and repressive new legislation is not.
I will not add one more cent to the coffers of any RIAA-affiliated music company as long as this insanity persists. From now on, my money supports only those artists that respect me and my rights. And I will listen to my legally acquired music whenever, however, and in whatever format I want.
And the RIAA can rot in hell.
I guess I just have to keep getting all my music from Usenet like I always have ... heh.
Unlike prohibition, these people are easy to catch. Programs which do not allow the tracking of IPs are impossible to make, because IP does not allow it.
Sure, you won't get everyone, but it will be possible to set pirates back to the days of trading files over usenet, and even that can be stopped to a large extent by DMCA takedown notices.
freenetproject.org can help you out. It was designed from the ground up with plauable deniability in mind. It's really really hard to track down, much less prove in a court of law, who is putting what on freenet.
Copyright Violation:"theft, piracy"::Anti-Trust Violation:"thermonuclear price terrorism"<-Overly dramatic language.
The people who actually care about about art for art's sake won't stop creating. That will eliminate the flood of crap we've gotten for the past few decades or so.
btw... Game companies have really slowed down making those games since p2p appeared, haven't they?
And to tell you the truth I don't think copyright infringment is right, I just didn't think you had a very good argument.
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
I for one would like to see that lawsuit happen :-)
Never attribute to stupidity what can be construed as a monopoly preservation tactic.
You are correct but unfortunately the statute was amended by the DMCA. Now the definition of "financial gain" includes the "receipt or expectation of receipt of copyrighted works." In other words, they amended the law to forbid "trading." It's going to be difficult to assert that you setup a file-sharing client with no intent to download anything else (assuming file sharing on computers is even protected by AHRA, which it probably isn't.)
Burris
www.freenetproject.org
whom do you want to sue tomorrow?
Ok, let me fill you in on the part you're missing.
John makes music for a living. His record company rips him off with a crappy contract, but it's better than starving or having to work at a regular job full time so he couldn't focus on his music.
But Bob down the street doesn't care to pay for John's music, even though he enjoys it, so he downloads it off a p2p network. Then he "shares" it with everyone else on p2p networks, so they can do likewise.
Except that it's JOHN'S music being "shared" and John never said it was ok to just give away is music against his will, and doesn't see a fucking CENT from the exchange of that music.
Yes, p2p, and the entire digital realm for that matter, is great for avoiding the zero-sum problem of most markets. However, this doesn't mean it's alright to take other peoples work and do what you will with it. (with respects to Fair Use, of course.)
Finally, YES, a handful of artists use p2p to give out their music, but go browse a Kazaa users' shares sometime... tell me how many of those songs you REALLY think were put there by the artist/publisher for legal distribution.
The Free desktop that Just Works
...except that when you purchased the CD, you're required to also abide by the copyright, which means that you've agreed NOT to "share" (unless the copyright owner has explicitly granted such permission). It's the default arrangement, so it's part of the deal unless the copyright owner says otherwise. So, basically, you're breaking your word.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
The people who actually care about about art for art's sake won't stop creating.
You can't make The Godfather without money, and lots of it. That money has to come from somewhere. While it's possible that people might give the next Coppola enough cash to make his masterpiece out of the goodness of their hearts, common sense and history tell us that it's pretty damn unlikely.
Let's take a small-scale example. Nobody is making 3D movies any more. Why? Because it's too expensive, and you can't recoup your investment with ticket sales. This wasn't caused by piracy or anything like it, but simply by audience disinterest. The result, though, is the same. No more 3D movies.
The same thing will happen if it becomes impossible for movie studios to recoup their investments due to piracy. They'll stop making movies. If you think it won't happen, I believe you've being naive.
"...go after the people who are actually doing it"...
But instead they will go after anyone running P2P regardless of whether they are infringing any copyrights.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Freenet also anonymizes uploads. That's its true reason for existence. Freenet is not intended to facilitate mp3 trading. Its purpose is to circumvent censorship by repressive governments. Freenet would be useless for that if it led goon squads to dissidents.
I have little doubt it will be pressed into service as an mp3 repository though. It will be interesting to what what that does to the network.
Finally the RIAA is going against the criminals instead of the toolmakers (I do wish this was instead of rather than in addition to). I'd kill the attacks on file swapping services, on people who run supernodes, and go after the people actually copying the files. Works wonders to punish the guilty party.
They are going after the guys with lots of files shared?
Fine by me. I know people who have5-10 Gigs of movies and songs available.
When my directory size approaches 640 - 700 megs I burn a cd. (and take the disk home since I don't have high speed internet at home).
BAD MUSIC.
Bad release after bad release from the Big-5 has made me RUN to smaller labels for my music.
So to them (Big-5), it appears people aren't buying music anymore....fact is, people aren't buying THIER music anymore.
(now I know there are exceptions...like the top40...but lately it seems more and more people are going "indie".)
Also, if they want to audit ME I am prepared to show them all 1000+ of my actual physical retail CD's to accompany the mp3 files I have in my 70+ GB jukebox...and original store reciepts too! fuckers....
Remember the "used cd" debate before the time of MP3?? these guys just don't quit bitching...
So are they honestly expecting people to flood the stores and buy their overpriced boy-band (or eye-candy) CDs as a result of these lawsuits? I just can't see people responding favorably to this behavior. But then again, the RIAA has been suffering from denial for a LONG time.
They weren't happy digging their own graves with a shovel, so it looks like they switched to a backhoe.
Funny, you're almost hitting on the real motivation behind the RIAA/MPAA attacks on our industry. Sure, producing music and movies has historically been expensive. What's got the **AA cartels running scared is that we're making these a lot cheaper to produce.
Michael Straczynski, the guy who created Babylon 5, talked about this in an excellent book about screenplay-writing. Traditionally, TV shows would cost a couple million per episode to produce, and the networks would pay $800K per episode. Producers would have to convince a major studio to front the money and gamble that they'd make it back in syndication if the show was successful. He called this "deficit financing".
He then went on to describe how he used tools like Lightwave3D on a bunch of PCs to produce the special effects for Babylon 5, and that by using PC technology he was able to produce the show for less per episode than the networks paid, and how this made it possible to produce it independently instead of having to sell off his rights to a studio.
You're wrong. KaZaa does searches through the server, but actual transfers are done through HTTP port 80 which doesn't set off any firewall alarms.
Username taken, please choose another one.
Sharing is good. Giving a piece of your candy bar that has already been paid for to someone who doesnt have any candy is good. However, giving someone a perfect copy of what you have is bad, because you havent paid for that second copy, nor are you giving up your own use of that item. Sharing as mommy taught you was supposed to learn sacrifice through giving, not helping your friend at someone else's expense.
Get ready for the Cyber IP cops to bust up the P2P "Speakeasys" for a while. Everyone just sits back and takes a swig of the digital bottle from time to time.
Good Point. Won't they also be intruding into other people's computer. Will they appear to act as regular users? Entrapment?
Can't the P2P software just say in the EULA that this software cannot be used for monitoring or auditing purposes?
Power to the Open Source Developer Community
Somehow I don't think that the kind of "sharing" that goes on 90% of the time on p2p networks is the kind of "sharing" your mom taught you was good.
There is no way to deny that MOST of the files getting shared on KaZaA are being spread illegaly. The thing that most people seem to miss is that that fact doesn't make KaZaA itself illeagal! There is absolutly nothing illeagal, moraly wrong, or negitive about software that lets people share files with each other. That is all that KaZaA is (and all the other ones too). It is true that many many people are using it in an illeagal way, which is why I think that it is good for the companies to go for the real criminals: the people actualy distributing copyrighted material. Have you ever heard the record store annalogy? A teenager listens to a whole bunch of violent/sexual/gang-bang/etc music and goes out and commits a related crime. Who is to blame? Do you toss the teen in jail or do you sue the pants of the record company? It is not the record company's fault that the teen did somthing illeagal. Strangly enough, Sony music and the rest seem to like that anaglogy just fine until the tables are turned. You don't shut down an ISP because a user commits a crime, you don't outlaw guns because a someone gets shot, you don't outlaw beer because someone drives drunk and YOU DONT OUTLAW P2P BECAUSE SOMEONE SHARES MP3's!!!!
Sigs are out of style, so I'm not going to use one...oh wait..
Unforntunatly they do not need to "prove" anything
in a civil case. A preponderance of evidence is what civil cases are decided upon. If they have enough evidence (even if just "circumstansial")they have made their case and there is not a whole
lot you can do about. You won't be able to challenge the legality of how they obtained said evidence... they broke into your system and scanned your hard drive and found that you had X amount of MP3's. But you would have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt (a criminal justice tenet) that they were infact the people that hacked your system. Now which one is going to be easier to "prove"? I wonder why the beyond a reasonable doubt standard is not being applied to tort claims?
If it was how many "OUCH I burned myself because the stove didn't have a warning label on it that says WARNING stove will burn unprotected skin" suits would we have? I will admit that some lawsuits do help society but the vast majority only help the lawyers pay their mortgages.
If they had started by sueing the "illegal" copiers, I would have said "Go to it."
Now, however, they've spent all the credibility that I have given them. I don't believe anything they say. I doubt that they are doing what they report. And if somebody does something that injures them, I say "good".
It's really hard to support people who violate copyright, even when the copyright isn't owned by the creator. But I cannot support the MPAA. I suppose that my feelings are "a plague on both their houses", and when saying this I remember that during the plague the streets were filled with dead bodies (it's not true, but that's what I remember).
I suppose that I might favor the MPAA if they were sueing Anderson for sleazy accounting. Perhaps. Otherwise they had better just ensure that I'm not on the jury.
Clearly it is illegal to copy works without the copyright owner's permission while those works are under copyright. But the MPAA has been so blatant in attacking my rights, and an uninvolved party, that I find it next to impossible to care about theirs.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Is there a problem with RIAA suing criminals?
We aren't talking about swapping of non-copyrighted material, right? Then whats the problem?
The thing about P2P is that you can have a ton of small and medium sized distributors providing as much or more content than a big one. It's the aggregation that's key. Take down the top 5 and you're still left with the bottom thousands or millions that likely have all the same content. I'm not sure the RIAA has any idea what it's dealing with here.
We pay for a CD and rip it to our HDs. We share it online while we're surfing. User X decides to download "Puppy Cum" from my computer. I am not personally breaking copyright, because I paid for that song. (well, actually, me and my friend Joe wrote it, but whatever)
User X is using my bandwidth. Bandwidth that companies like AOL and Comcast are going to start charging me extra for. So not only am I NOT making a profit, I'm actually PAYING somewhat to let other people download my music.
I can sure see how companies would think this is just as bad as buying a high-capacity burner setup and color copying the covers @ Kinko's and selling the bogus copies on the streets of any city in America for $5.
This gets especially ludicrous for dial-up users. It can take HOURS to get ONE SONG... this entire initiative is overblown and a gross overreaction to the fact that our economy isn't doing so hot, people are tightening their belts, or buying more booze, who knows, but they're not buying the crap that the Big Five want to sell us.
Welcome to the business world. The bigger you are, the harder you fall. Those companies have been price-fixing, getting taxes put on blank media so we're paying them there as well, and basically doing everything they can to suck the public and the artists dry.
Eminem needs to bitchslap these people into submission. His latest was one of the MOST PIRATED ALBUMS EVER - yet when it came out, it was also NUMBER ONE, selling TWICE AS MANY COPIES as the #2 record that week, with LESS TIME ON THE MARKET TO SELL. Why?
Because Eminem is WORTH IT. You'll never stop us from sharing MP3s. So if you want us to buy you music, make sure its GOOD. THAT might be a start. God these rich-ass media-pushers piss me off.
Negatory. You're wrong.
KaZaA searches are sent through automatically elected supernodes which communicate with other supernodes (much like the the new "UltraPeer" in Limewire et. al.) Then the transfer is done via a borked HTTP protocol on any port (usually 1214)
The best thing that could happen would be for the RIAA to pursue this new scheme. Here's why.
1. This action could bring potentially turn the a current ally, the PC industry, against them. Look at it this way. Before, they'd targeted the P2P networks. Once word of the first lawsuits against individuals starts hitting the news, many other individuals who may be considering getting a new, faster PC so they can have access to "free" music, etc. will be discouraged from buying that PC. Simply, the idea of getting "free stuff" on the internet is a very big reason many people get a PC, these days. Many friends of my mother and even my grandparents have asked how they can get things, such as music, if they were to purchase a PC. The RIAA's action against individuals will certainly discourage a portion of new PC sales in an already slumping market.
HP-Compaq, Dell and even Microsoft will not be very forgiving or encouraging once they begin to feel this impact.
2. Washington and certainly the Bush administration will be forced into some action once word of "those West Coast fat cats suing the average American" goes mainstream. Bush's approval ratings have already taken a big dent because of the public's perception of his being is bed with big business (Enron, WorldCom, et. al.) Something like the RIAA admitting to trying to "sue the pants off" of Joe Public would be a very good way for him to get back into the public's good graces by thwarting the RIAA's meglomaniacal view of itself. Besides, his conservative supporters would fall all over themselves to send truckload's of cash his way to fight "those pink-o, liberal California record weirdos." I bet Limbaugh is drooling over the possibility even now!
3. It takes something substantial to get the American public's attention. And what the RIAA is proposing is very substantial indeed. It's the kind of action that'll cause the average American to take notice, and once more and more people begin taking notice of the RIAA, who they are, what they do, etc., the more the RIAA is going to be in trouble. Most Americans don't like institutions that which operate with the smug, authoritarian abandon of the RIAA, and will happily go out of their way to spit on them given the chance. Well, my friends, the action that the RIAA is proposing is the definitely going to be the chance for more and more Americans to hawk up a big one and spit it right in the face of the RIAA.
Wonderfulll. I'd Moderate you up, but your at 5
I thought it was more like too many software engineers, not enough people who can actually code worth shit. Maybe it's Java's fault, but even handling a couple of connections, Freenet can easily eat up 10% CPU and 40MB RAM. i.e. NOT USABLE.
wut with the enormous harm those darn file swappers are doing to the record industry...yeah right...nothing to do with the same song playing on the radio for the last 20 years. They want us to pay 99 cents a pop for inferior copies of songs that are usually only comparable to a tune recorded from an fm radio station. Furthermore they fail to see the internet as a huge radio station with the difference being that u and i are the dj and we dont need to be paid to play wuts good. Now bands are becoming popular due to the file swapping services themselves. Since bands primarily make their money from touring i guess no one seems to make the connection that one could almost eliminate the record industry alltogether as a culture of listening continues to pervade the amerikkan landskape...We can win this one if continue to be vigilant. Once bands see that they can make the money we spend themselves some savvy marketer will make the dream come true. at 99 cents a pop yr paying for a cd like it or not...an inferior cd at that...good luck riaa!!!!
If I was a fish reading
give me a
Not that Napster would ever load with more than 7,000 songs....
But I bet my 700GB of music would catch the attention of the RIAAA.
the alternative is to let the grassroots "i'm empowered by my pc" thing work. *it is working now*, and it will continue to work more and more often.
[|]
I got $20.
I can buy 1 CD
or 2 DVDs....hmmm
tough times call for tough decisions, but sometimes the decisions are pretty simple.
Lately I've been buying my CD's at concerts I go to. Not really a statement, just how I've been doing it.
This is not the way to build a lasting empire.
dude, you own scissors! those could be used to hurt someone. we need to throw you in jail.
yes, its a sad state of affairs that many p2p apps are mostly used for priacy and pr0n. but that doesn't invalidate it as a technology. its just that current legal content distributors have all decided to take the simpler much more expensive distribution route of servers rather than use p2p infrastructure to distribute their content. p2p is still being devloped and explored; reliability and scalibility are increasing.
expect to see p2p technology inside the intranet at corporations doing data archival, backup and computing. general use in appropriate legal circumstances on the net will follow.
Wouldn't MP3 trading be not so much sharing among friends (which is legal), but more like broadcasting the songs to a multitude of people? Aren't there already fines for that?
Power to the Open Source development community
Who cares.
I said here years ago, we're going to fuck the RIAA, we're going to fuck them hard, and in the ass, and they won't like it.
They're squirming right now, but Hillary and crew is going to learn to like it or go out of business.
He he he. Hard to keep it up for these ugly crows though....
It just occurred to my why the RIAA has been coming down so hard on
Internet piracy lately. Remember that the RIAA mostly represents the
management of the music industry--not the artists and not the
shareholders. It is the job of these people (or the people they
supervise) to pick out the artists they think will sell well and to
promote their albums.
Now, record sales have been way down recently. There are two possible
explanations for this:
- Internet piracy is cutting into record sales.
- The music industry is mostly managed by incompetents.
Guess which one the managers are loudly pushing for. Guess whatthey're blaming when the shareholders ask why the company isn't making
any money.
That's right--this is all due to a bunch of pointy-haired bosses
trying to save their jobs. Here's hoping that the next music industry
will have more clue.
its the new radio...the only thing that will be accomplished is more elaborate p2p apps that hide the users...or at least make it harder to hunt them down like nazis...even if microsoft succeeds with its prison pc there will be some circumvention invented...i dont think consumers are stupid enuf to update to anything like that...we just may finally see the end of microsoft and people buying less pcs....
He then went on to describe how he used tools like Lightwave3D on a bunch of PCs to produce the special effects for Babylon 5, and that by using PC technology he was able to produce the show for less per episode than the networks paid....
But this isn't new at all. You can always get it done more cheaply (down to a certain minimum cost, of course) if you're willing to cut corners in the production process. Stracican'tspellit's choice was to sacrifice quality for cost. The show may have had tons of quality in other areas-- I never saw more than about four episodes, so I have no opinion-- but the special effects looked like ass. Thus was money saved.
But not every movie or TV show is a special effects vehicle. Sometimes it's a lot harder to cut costs without really eating into the quality of your project. Can you get away with using a less expensive (and probably less experienced) actor? How about filming on a soundstage instead of on location? What if the soundstage itself is too expensive? Can you shoot the whole thing in your house?
My point is that quality work costs money, even if you're economical. Hell, The Blair Witch Project was just a couple of kids running around in the woods with video cameras, and it still cost $35,000 to make. Can't cut your budget much more closely than that.
"Have you ever stopped to consider, through all of your knee-jerk reactions and unlikely political opinions, that the RIAA and the MPAA might actually have a point?"
But in the end, what does it matter?
Its like saying "people who don't wait until they're married to have sex are SINNERS!!!".
Who cares what these pseudo-authorities think?
Why don't they try lowering the price of CD's to $8 and see what the @$# happens?
$18 for a CD? I have no remorse in downloading. None. I don't even feel its wrong or illegal. I think its a moral imperitive to make sure the RIAA doesn't get any money from anything.
They're mobsters, they loath you. They think of you as a sheep that needs to be sheared. You're nothing to them.
Every time you defend them, it makes you a collaborator.
That means CD's should cost about $4, not $18.
The recording engineer who makes $20K for making an album isn't making the CD cost all that money.
But the guy who runs Vivendi and pays himself $50,000,000 a year is having *some* effect, don't you think?
Invoicing, Time Tracking, Reporting
I got this message while on a P2P.
RIAA®>
Hello and welcome !
150+ registered !
This HUB is going to be for registered users only! If u have 10GB
including 5GB+ Full albums and few Completed movies u are able
to register. Send Following information to [MP3]Elkoos, [MP3]Overdrive
[MP3](TM) or to OUR bot RIAA®.
Username: ( username here )
Password: ( Password here )
NOTICE** U CAN ALSO REGISTER IN HUB WEBSITE WWW.MP3000.INFO
The solution to this problem could be very simple. We just need to change the way that p2p servers list the amount of content on peoples computers. They should just show a max of 100 songs per person per session then the record companies would be not be able to tell who has a huge collection. Or if you want to be very paranoid modify the client to randomly share 100 songs for each session. Considering the volume of people on p2p networks these days I think that it would not make a big difference as that much content per computer will generally mean the connection will be at max all the time anyway.
That bit about knee-jerk reactions and unlikely political opinions has little to do with this discussion. I'm talking simple economics; you can't make money selling a product when just one copy of the product can be duplicated and redistributed at virtually no cost. But first:
Then you'd better hang on tight to your favorite music and movies. Because there won't be much more of 'em.
I'm aware of this, and it does worry me. Realize I'm not an advocate of piracy. I pay for my movies. I pay for my software. I think the people who put their hearts and souls into their work deserve to get paid. But for every person who shares my adoration for spending money, there are a hundred people who would rather be freeloaders. So I do worry about where music and video will be in thirty years.
Of course, I think your line of argument is full of shit, so I'm really not all that nervous.
You should be. Like I said before, there are many freeloaders in the world. Even if the American government starts policing copyright laws the same way they hunt drug trafficking, there are still hundreds of millions of people in the rest of the world's nations who would just as soon pirate their music. Why pay to buy music from a foreign corporation when you can just download everything from the Internet?
Now, if you can actually provide an argument to the contrary, by all means, enlighten me. Otherwise, save the dirty talk for your blow-up doll.
Don't shoot the messenger. Sueing the delivery method doesn't stop the problem. What they need to do is simply scare the kiddies, then the illegal activity will go back underground where it belongs if anywhere. I don't know of 1 person who stopped sharing because 1) napster went down, or 2) audiogalaxy went down, plus others. They just downloaded another app and the piracy continued. I have bought seriously hundreds of cds that I heard first in mp3, illegal at the time. Those mp3's are all gone now, but I spent thousands I wouldn't have otherwise spent on cd's since I wasn't finding artists I was interested in listening the radio or MTV. Now that I have no mp3's (due to hard drive crash), I've found that I don't miss them. I buy everything on vinyl, and most online vinyl shops have realaudio or low quality mp3 samples. I hear before I buy, and I BUY. Better selection to check out than P2P, faster, and guaranteed to be online.
If we're lucky, it will morph into an industry that takes into account the new technology.
BRENT ROCKWOOD, EST'd 1975
Or you could look at it from another viewpoint, that of the record industry. See, the record industry has been bitching and moaning about this big problem that they created due to their own greed. It's called payola. They have to pay so that the music they sell gets exposure to listeners around the country and around the world. They have been doing this forever. First they were paying radio stations to play their songs. Then when that was outlawed, they started paying some middleman to pay radio stations to play their songs. Now they're complaining that it's just too expensive and that the government should put a stop to it, boo hoo hoo. Oh yeah, and in the meantime, they are going to shut down napster and kazaa and anyone else that gets their music out to listeners around the world. Can't have that happening, can we.
Now you might say that people who download songs will just listen to them on their computer and never pay for the CD, but I don't think there's any evidence that that happens on a wide enough scale to really have that much of an impact, and there is a decent amount of evidence that seems to say that Napster and others have had a positive impact on CD sales. I think that what the record industry should really do is work on their public relations problem. Get rid of Rosen and put an artist or several artists in her spot. They don't even have to be Britney-class superstars, and in fact, they shouldn't be. They should represent the vast majority of artists that make something around minimum wage or a little better. Kind of like the artistic middle class. They could help to persuade people that artists really need their support in order to continue to make the music that the fans love. That could probably make a huge impact on people. But if they really want to make it work, then they should knock off all the damn price-fixing crap and lower the price of CDs. They should probably stick an MSRP price on each CD too, so that stores couldn't just double the price without facing some serious questions. I think that the statement to fans would be that the record industry wants to do good by them and help them find the music they like and help artists to make a good living. Oh, and they would save all those millions that they've been flushing down the payola toilet too. Now most of us can't imagine this happening in a million years, but if anyone has the muscle to get a message out to fans, it's the record industry.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
...so, with all this stuff going on, how come Americans aren't questioning why copyright expiration takes over 100 years?
In fact, I can't help but wonder why the publishing industry has the nerve to target public libraries, even though the publishers already have the national legislature in their pockets. Already, they make scads of money on garbage paperbacks, magazines, and other landfill that never even makes it into public libraries, oftentimes, and now they want to outlaw used book and CD sales as well?
So, when do we, the people, get our part of that deal; i.e., a 25-year copyright period, non-renewable, after which the work goes into the public domain?
--------------Rev. C.C.Chips---------------- For the real truth, visit
Instead, the industry has focused on lawsuits against for-profit piracy outfits. Just who are these outfits? They certainly don't mean the booths at flea markets. Those are there week after week. Not all of them sell pirates, but you can always spot some who do. The RIAA doesn't even consider them competion. P2P is really a treat to their power over artists. The old system gave the the ability to arrrogantly tell artists, "I made you a star, and I can break you, so you better do it my way!" P2P has made it abundantly clear that fans decide who is a star, and this scares the recording racket's power brokers. To read more about that, check out an article entitled What Is Piracy?
The Uncoveror: It's the real news.
Searches, sure. But what about the actual file transfers themselves? Wouldn't each party have to know how to contact the other? I suppose those could be routed through supernodes as well, but that seems unlikely.
Dyolf Knip
So in other words to find most individual users they will have to invest time+money, yeah this'll fly for an association thats primary concern is profit!!
If they carry out this plan, they'll find it incredibly not worth their time. The people I know who are storing cash houses of MP3s are your 18-26 year old male who has a crappy job and spends most of their time at home in front of the computer. They own very little property.
I would presume that the RIAA would try to plaster some kind of $10 million lawsuit. So, let's figure out all that they need to do to do so. Subpoena the ISP, watch the data traffic on the individual's computer, get the feds involved, confiscate the computer equipment, and spend hours digging through the thousands of files on the computer. So, not only does the RIAA have to spend a ton of time and money doing things by the book, but they also will have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees. All to make some college kid go bankrupt and fork over all his assets, somewhere in the realm of $2,000 - $8,000 in property and computer equipment.
Go ahead, RIAA. Sue away. If you think you're losing enough money by lowered sales, just wait until you go on this legal binge!
Anyone that thinks this is a good thing has to have the smarts of a fucking fence post. Oh, they may bust 50 or 100 or so people, or more, but a random check of KaZaA-Lite shows there are more than 192,000,000 users (right now) sharing more than 319,000,000 files of more tham 2,000,000 GB.
How long will it take to prosecute even 1% of this group? Simple math will tell you there ain't NO way. How much money would it take? Lawyers are gonna love this shit. What will it accomplish? Not a fucking thing. Most of these people don't have a lot of money. I will wager some have $50.00 or less spending money. Do you think they are going to spend $20.00 of it on a CD? I don't think so. All these Millions of Bucks the RIAA is spending on lawyers could be going to the entertainers. Believe me Hillary, showing your big ass is not my idea of entertainment.
Maybe this is the Lawyers version of how to do an ENRON thing, legally.
Folks, don't buy into Paladallium, it will kill everything, if it works.
They are describing a worst case scenerio when they speak of the difficulties in tracking down a file sharing host. Most of the "big fish" file sharers are going to be on a broadband connections. And enough of the broadband big fish will have a static IP address to give the RIAA a variety of easy targets to choose from. They will be carefull to pick out people who have assets and who will not play sympatheically before the camera. The first case will not be a Doctor with a file sharing young teenage son, it will be a nerd who lives alone (so that it cannot be mistaken who was responsible) with a fat pipe and a giant RAIDed server of pr0n, mp3s, and DivX movies. He'll be inarticulate, combative, and swear a lot. At least that's what I would do if I were them.
It is true that filing suits against all file sharers would be foolish at this point. But after they get the first 10 people...well they will probably reduce the number of people doing the sharing, and drive the sharers to use tools will better anonymity.
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
1. Notified of lawsuit against you
2. Drive to local music store
3. Buy CDs of songs downloaded
4. Show up to court
5. Laugh in face of RIAA as they accuse you of stealing what you already own
6. Yawn.
You forgot:
7. ???
8. Profit!
I have downloaded a lot of songs. Many of them SUCK. Just give me a porthole where I can send 1-5 bucks directly to the artists of good music, No way in hell am I buying songs that I haven't heard, or an album with one good song and a bunch of crap. well isn't that RIAA's Job to filter out crap songs? NO, they FORCE THEM TO GET POPULAR on the Freakin RADIO. (I don't download those) RIAA, freakin get your act together. Your the terrorist, and we ain't pirates.
yep, that's jail for ya.
It's my culture, so naturally I use it..."
*sound of plug being pulled*
*sound of jump into future to 2069*
Culture? What's a 'culture'? Oh, you mean those things people used to have back when they had the amazing and unthinkable technology to *gasp* play one tape and record it onto another, thereby making what's called a 'copy'.
At one time, people actually did this! That was before the zero copying initiative, and of course before the move to SDs (Sayonara Discs) with their shelf life of two years or 300 plays, whichever comes first.
Which is why there are still recordings from 100 years ago, 1969, but there is no record of any visual or musical performance from ten years ago, 2059.
If it wasn't illegal to express such doubts, a person might well wonder whether we as a society really made the right decision in outlawing all forms of sound and video archiving...
*POW!*
*sound of doubt-expresser falling dead*
Another intellectual terrorist made safe for society by the copyright industry ;)
That bit about knee-jerk reactions and unlikely political opinions has little to do with this discussion.
Of course, you're right. I was annoyed at what I'd been reading, and I reacted rudely. I apologize.
Realize I'm not an advocate of piracy. I pay for my movies. I pay for my software. I think the people who put their hearts and souls into their work deserve to get paid. But for every person who shares my adoration for spending money, there are a hundred people who would rather be freeloaders.
Then is it safe to assume that you support copy protection technologies like JVC's D-Theater? In my opinion, building strong encryption into digital media storage formats is the only way we're ever going to be able to sustain a healthy entertainment economy. And, as we've discussed, a healthy entertainment economy is the only way we'll continue to enjoy the quality and quantity of loud noises and bright lights that we all love so much.
Gosh, I feel like going home and giving my TV a great big hug.
And as for my ``your argument is full of shit'' comment, I was really referring to the part where you said that the RIAA and MPAA are going to go out of business because you can't make money in entertainment any more. That's specifically what I disagree with. If the current state of affairs were to continue, then the entertainment economy probably would collapse, just as you say. But I don't think this state of affairs will continue. The recent, rampant anarchy will be replaced by secure but fair copy protection technologies like D-Theater. Your DVD player won't be obsolete exactly, because it'll still play all the DVDs you ever bought. But the studios will only release new movies in copy protected formats.
That's what I'm expecting.
"What the hell are you mad about? You say you do not swap music files, and all your music is legally obtained."
I'm mad that the RIAA is resorting to dirty tricks that will impede my (and everyone else's) use of lawfully obtained music in the name of a bogus war on "piracy". Their revenues are down 10% this year? Be still my beating heart; my whole industry's revenues are down 30%.
Could it maybe, possibly, be the case that the drop in revenues in the music industry has more to do with the fact that (a) we are in a recession, (b) their product is overpriced, and (c) they insult their customers rather than try to serve them, than it has with people illegally copying music?
I'm mad that the RIAA chooses to assume that we consumers are all criminals. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black! The real or imagined economic harm they claim to suffer from song swapping cannot be but a tiny fraction of the economic harm they themselves have inflicted on musicians (through exploitive contracts, spurious bookkeeping and even outright theft) and the public (through gouging and price fixing). That sort of hypocrisy really gets to me.
In a nutshell, I'm pissed off because, even though I'm not one of the people the RIAA is scapegoating right now, I will still suffer the loss of civil rights, higher prices, decreased utility, and societal harm that result from their campaign of greed (thinly and misleadingly disguised as a campaign against piracy).
to begin with! Finally a little logic in this insane process. Sue the people actually breaking the law. What a concept! Glad to see 1% of the sanity returning.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. A strong but fair copy protection scheme would put this whole argument to rest. Let the movie studios release their films (and the record companies their CDs) in a secure format that can be played as often as you want, but that cannot be copied under any circumstances. I'm sure the Slashdot Masses will rise up in anger at this idea, but the truth is that it'd be a pretty sweet state of affairs.
few percent out of millions?
If they are sharing their whole drive unkowingly, who's fault is that?
I doubt many people do it unkowingly. Maybe when they first get into it.. but come on. Are you trying to say that people sharing music online don't know they are doing it? Bollocks.
Overstepping? Fair use? I'm sorry. This is the one thing that makes SENSE to me. Rather than going after facilitators like napster, who aren't really doing anything, or rather than making new law, just go after those who are breaking the existing laws.
... at least they do in europe - is it different over there? :)
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Umm.. okay. how about this.
They see you on a p2p network, and have reasonable proof that your IP address is sharing 100 gigs of their material. Now, of course, that's not proof, that's just evidence.
So they contact a judge, and your ISP, and find out who you are. Still no proof. But it's enough evidence to waltz into your house and sieze whatever is hooked up to the cable modem as evidence. Oh look, your computer is running kazaa, and sharing 100 gigs of files.
THAT is evidence.
Now, you are probably going to say they can't prove how many violations you did.. that may be true, but they can certainly show intent.
Welp, you guys have finally picked sides. I hope you enjoy your bed-time with the Media moguls.
They'll buy you're ass out and sell you for peanuts just like all the other sell-out SOBs.
TACO YOU NO LONGER REPRESENT THE PEOPLE YOU USED TO. YOU HAVE FUCKING LOST IT MY FRIEND!
If you have the 2 minutes to go look for major record companies stock prices, you will understand they need to find paying customers NOW! ( 50% down in 2 days for Vivendi-Universal) They need your gigas in the books... On the other side, money will be running short to pay for any lawyers SOON. Why not sue Metallica for not making hits anymore?
{100% paranoia is not enough when you are 99.9% right}
Which is cause and which is effect? Perhaps there would be more legitimate use of p2p networks if they hadn't been painted as being entirely for piracy.
There is no "agreement" here. There is the social contract (and copyright laws stemming from that), but that's the closest you'll get to an agreement. There is no word-breaking here. These are not the droids you're looking for.
I propose we start the International "Don't Buy CD's" day, or better yet, week. Let's pick a day, start a ball rolling, and get everybody to not buy any CD's that day. If we could cut into the industry's earnings, even for a day, they'd feel it.
WinMX uses a completely proprietary (and closed, sadly) protocol, but one that they're constantly upgrading. One of these days they might get it to a stage where they're content with it, and open it up... Maybe. I hope. Until then, it's still the best damn swapping service out there. Yay WinMX.
So, according to the RIAA, they are losing sales due to music pirating.
Whats going to happen when all the music pirates are broke because the RIAA took all their money in court and can't afford to buy a CD anyways?
What will the RIAA blame it on then? Oh wait. By that time they won't care, as they have figured out a way to have income without having to go through the process of manufacturing a band.
*sigh*
The Internet is generally stupid
I'd like to point out that the fact that a law is in place may make something illegal, it doesn't make something wrong.
I disagree with IP laws, in that ideas should be protected only as much as the "owner" can with cryptology, fancy coding, merchandise, value-added services, etc. If you don't believe that people will support what they like, then you're wasting your time lobbying against human nature anyhow. I agree that plagarism is always wrong, but sharing is what IP is meant for, and if you are going to lobby against the nature of your product, then you should not be its "owner" anyhow.
~Ben
Have you ever stopped to consider, through all of your knee-jerk reactions and unlikely political opinions, that the RIAA and the MPAA might actually have a point?
Omigod. How dare you say something like this on Slashdot? All the Slashdot pirates will no doubt squeal and mod you down.
Don't these RIAA/MPAA people get worried about their own reputations when they make decisions like these? Imagine what would happen if they completely ruined a family because their 15 year old kid liked sharing MP3s online? I'm pretty sure a LOT of people would hate the RIAA/MPAA and label them as being fascist corporate pigs.
Given that people like Hilary Rosen and Jack Valenti like to talk a lot of shit in public and bad mouth large groups of people, I'd say they are putting themselves in a very bad position. They don't seem to realize that they are pissing off a huge amount of people, and if I'm not mistaken, that's something people try to avoid.
Get naked and start the revolution !!!
I received a call from my ISP 3 years ago telling me the RIAA emailed them a cease and desist letter for me. I was running a pretty big mp3 ftp at the time. I asked my ISP to forward the letter and they did.
The letter basically said they discovered the ftp and it was hosting illegal files and they named specific bands and albums I hosted.
Now granted, my username/pass was mp3/mp3, but doesn't randomly portscanning, picking up carriers, and entering a private computer break some kind of law? I would hope so. My ISP didn't seem too concerned about it (The 20-something year old guy said: yeah we got this letter, so, uh, if you could stop, that would be good. They didn't even threaten to shut off service.) so I wasn't either. I politely emailed the RIAA back with a nice big F*** YOU. I never heard from them again.
So the question I have is if I have 10Gigs of free MP3's (i.e. "garage" bands that make mp3s of their music and put it out for free download). Does this make me a target for the RIAA? And if it does what the hell can they do to me? What if I'm sharing music that doesn't go through the RIAA?, i.e. Asian or Euorpean music labels?
Correct, only searches and results are sent through the supernodes. The results contain the address of the KaZaA node that has the desired content. Just like in Gnutella or Napster or AudioGalaxy or... There's a special case for users behind firewalls where you can send a push through thier supernode and they'll contact you.
Or have some kind of click through--
;)
"This unique list of files is copywritten by its owner and may only be used for the purpose of selecting files for download."
I mean, if Gracenote (formerly the CDDB) can copyright their database of CD tracks and extra information, why can't you copyright yours?
The RIAA would have to claim "fair use" to excerpt from it
They'll have to arrest someone, and no matter who they do, they'll be setting themselves up for negative publicity.
Furthermore if they do try to prosecute all of the people who share music online, they could and possibly will LOSE their copyrights in the first place.
Think about it, we are granted a fair trial with a jury of our Peers. The people who will be on the jury will be the parents of all the teenagers that swap music (over 75% of those on P2P networks are teenagers), and if they aren't their parents, it will be people who have friends who have teenagers, or the people who feel that the RIAA is ripping people off in the first place.
If they start taking people to court, it will backfire, and backfire big. They will lose, they will appeal, then when it gets to the supreme court, they will strike down the current copyright law, or at least modify it greatly, then the RIAA will be out of business.
End of Story. Bye, Bye, See you later.
They simply refuse to accept that technology and competition should drive down prices, and make materials available to the masses. Advances in technology and competition is what drove down the prices of computers to a level affordable by the masses.
But yet, the music industry charges $15 for a CD which cost them pennies to produce. Sure, the content is important, but if they charge $5 for a CD, then millions of people WILL buy the CDs, simply because its easier that way. And piracy will no longer become a *central* issue.
Why is it that the Congressmen cannot understand this and question the RIAA about this? Simply because they can make 100s of millions on a CD, and the industry believes that it is their right to make that much.
I'm certain that the music industry is one of the few industries out there with the highest profit margin for material content.
or $5 for the noname ones.
Canada can to collect a supertax, but when the difference is so marked, there is going to be a problem. An economist would say elasticity - lower the price of your product.
Somebody forgot to mention a DVD gives one 2 hours of nominal entertainment, when most audio CD's run 45 minutes if that, and are about the SAME price, often full of fill to boot.
IMHO, the music industry must start adding A complimentary DVD to their product, as 'buyer remorse' has well and truely set in.
It is not necessary to connect to the sharer to identify what he is sharing. When you send out your Query, just broadcast it normally. Then, sift through the returned QueryHits and find the ones with the target's Servent ID number. This must be accurate and consistent is the target is truly sharing files, because it's how Gnet tells the appropriate server of the request to download it. Make sure your Queries are specific enough to not overrun the "Return X queries per search" option set in the target's software. Initiate a download. Linking the ServentID with an IP address for a firewalled user is left as an exercise for the reader. Which brings up another point: the consulting firms for the XXaa will have to successfully complete some portions of download of copyrighted material to verify that it is actually being Distributed...
That's what Chairman Mao called the act of harming someone you could get a grip on for the purpose of of discouraging someone who was (temporarily) out of your reach.
I think the applicability here is clear.
How the hell is a random question 'insightful'?
Granted it's more on topic than the usual rambling from asdf, but still... hardly any insight to be gained by wondering if the MPAA will sue next.
Perhaps it deserves a -1 for lack of content?
For those of you conjecturing on why RIAA would do this, remember that people scare easy. About a year ago a warez group was taken down and the whole scene did a disappearing act for about a week (then promptly resumed the "liberating" of "information"). I believe if they came down heavy on the odd individual, people would be reluctant to serve large collections. The demand on the would be greater than the supply and widespread music sharing would grind to a halt, probably reverting back to its old ftp / private sharing form.
I think a conservative estimate would be 1000 servers taken down for every server sued
Democracy \De*moc"ra*cy\, n.; pl. Democracies. [F.
.. guess now I know. ... Anyone care to take bets on how long it takes for pirating music to become a "terrorist act"?
d['e]mocratie, fr. Gr. dhmokrati`a; dh^mos the people +
kratei^n to be strong, to rule, kra`tos strength.]
1. Government by the people; a form of government in which
the supreme power is retained and directly exercised by
the people.
2. Government by popular representation; a form of government
in which the supreme power is retained by the people, but
is indirectly exercised through a system of representation
and delegated authority periodically renewed; a
constitutional representative government; a republic.
------
Well, here's a novel idea.. if "the people" seem to want to pirate music, doesn't it make sence that the government of "the people" should make it legal to do so.
Before you begin to flame me with a "it's illegal thus it's bad and you're a criminal so you should be punished" (like so many threads before) maybe you should ask yourself what the difference between an american 'democracy' and a dictatorship is if you, the people, don't question the laws you choose to abide by.
I had wondered what the RIAA would do with themselves when they realised their lawyers outnumbered their recording contracts and they ran out of enemies to point them at.
It's there alright. Which part of 'monopoly' didn't you get?
Buckets,
pompomtom
"There's an exception to every rule. Except for some rules"
What?! you mean that some people hit the "I Agree" button without reading, or inteding to obey section 2.6 of the license agreement, saying that you will not "Transmit or access any data that infringes any patent, trademark, trade secret, copyright or other proprietary rights of any party;" huh. weird.
on that note, RIAA email me here, for my new home address. come and get me motherfuckers!
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
This has nothing to do with murder. I have an actual, inherent right to live... they only have a limited grant of copyright as an incentive to create. This isnt just for the judicial system to handle. This relates to our lives and in a democracy or even a pseudo-democracy it is incumbent on the population itself to be active in its own defense. If there is something like this that large numbers of people like you or me have a very large problem with then the courts are only one area of battle for it. We can also challenge the labels and their mismanagement/abuse of that limited grant more directly through public debate, coordinated countersuits, political means, and financial means... They dont have a right to be exempted from competition or from having to justify their continued grant of "copyright".
The RIAA is simply doing the same thing Microsoft is. People realize that much of the music on the radio (and thus much of what comes from the RIAA) is crap, and are turning to other bands. Software for production of music gets better and cheaper (and maybe someday there'll be something gnu for it), and bands no longer _have_ to rely on selling themselves to the entertainment biz to get started. Eventually it won't benefit them to. Someone over at the RIAA has realized this, and we're seeing the result. Enough lawsuits, and there'll be (more) laws following, eventually laws that'll _require_ copyright protection on every computer (haven't they already been passed?). They won't have to come up with a new business model, or change the way they operate...they can simply have laws passed to enforce their ways. Microsoft is doing the same thing with Palladium.
...as well as so-called "supernodes," or people who provide the centralized directories...
Supernodes aren't violating copyright. That is like suing because I say the person at IP xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx has copyrighted material. Especially considering that they are automated, supernodes don't violate copyright! Talk about stupid.
It seems to me that RIAA is going after the "big fish" who share lots of mp3 files.
What if Gnutella would (and soon will) keep partial files distributed on various machines? In theory, we would all have partial files, and therefore would share only part of the original work, not the whole file. So, to construct the original file it would require a collection of partial files assembled together from a variety of hosts.
This would mean that no single person could be responsible for distributing a single copyrighted work, right? Unless they are considered part of a consipiracy. But, not knowing/caring who the other people are may insulate the individuals from the consipiracy.
It's like treating distributed files in P2P like the T1 and T3 links that form the internet. The transfer medium isn't to blame, it's the individual who uses it. Using this kind of anonymous distributed file system would ensure that my 10GB that I share doesn't form a single complete mp3, rather many parts of many files. However, the individual who downloads many partials to form a single mp3 might be considered the perpetrator.
Would this work?
Suncoast Linux - Sarasota, FL
This is what they should have done in the first place- go after the people who are actually doing it instead of making P2P seemingly illegal.
WARNING: Opinions Ahead. (-:
What a clueless statement. First off, P2P itself has never been and will never be "seemingly illegal". Second, Mr.Taco, this whole issue is not about reasonable respect for the RIAA as long as they "behave." This is about a grassroots movement to eliminate a long-standing cartel that has been found guilty on multiple occasions of price-fixing (which hurts consumers) and has been screwing over musicians for decades with bad contracts. It's about digital technology bridging a divide and eliminating obsolete middlemen. It's about the people of the free world asserting that their personal freedom is infinitely more important than the profits of mega-corporations. (And do you want DRM all through your hardware? eh? Didn't think so.) I'm a big supporter of the musical profession. But I do it in a way that only helps those who deserve compensation for their work--the artists themselves. That to me means a complete boycott of all RIAA member music. Anytime you buy an album produced by an RIAA member, you are voting with your dollars that the RIAA is the way to go. You are encouraging artists to keep selling their careers to greedy middlemen and you are discouraging folks from going independent because they're afraid of being ignored otherwise.
Then there are the people who keep saying stuff like "hey, I buy more music now because P2P lets me preview it." This is precisely what NOT to do because guess what kinda music dominates the P2P scene? RIAA member music!!! Do you want to empower people who are striving to take away your rights? It's so ironic it's sick. Don't even download the crap!
Support live music. Support smaller bands. Boycott RIAA member music. Learn to play an instrument yourself. Lets take back our culture.
So what happens if you don't share your drive out? How are they going to find you? How can they prove that your MP3 is illegal and mine is not? I believe it to be an empty threat
Boycott-riaa.com
http://www.boycott-riaa.com/links/link.php - Free banners and buttons for your website
I've grown tired of responding to incessant peer-to-peer/music industry/IP/Congress (they all seem to revolve around the same issue) stories, so I will simply state my position on the whole matter once and for all.
1. Filesharing networks are a tool, as is a car or a firearm or an aircraft. There are legal and illegal uses for all of them. The fact that a majority of users misuse filesharing networks is no more relevant than the fact that a majority of American motorists break the speed limit. Period. End of story.
2. Certain songs are copyright their respective copyright holders, in this case the Recording Industry Association of America. Those songs are their intellectual property. This is not a gray area. Now, should it be demonstrated and upheld in a court of law that they, the RIAA, have abused this copyright, this may change. Hasn't happened yet.
3. End users that have not paid for said music or otherwise acquired a LEGAL license to said music do not have the legal right to possess their own distinct digital copy of said music for any purpose other than parody. In English: If you didn't buy it you don't own it.
4. End users who download music that they do not otherwise own are committing theft, recognized as a crime in most countries. End users who back up their music are not, so long as they have purchased said music.
5. End users who make available copyrighted material that they have paid for but others may not are abetting theft. Analogy: You set up a card table outside a record store. You offer CD's burned with music. You put up a notice stating that you may only take the CD if you already have bought the music legally. You do not attempt to verify whether or not anyone has done so. Right. Sure.
6. Suing someone for engaging in the above practice is indeed legal. That person is willfully distributing something that is not theirs to distribute. This is illegal.
7. To copy-protect a CD to prevent ripping is a violation of fair-use. However, fair-use is not defined in stone. Moreover, to circumvent the copy-protection is a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (1998). Like the law or not (I don't), it is law. It conflicts with fair use, therefore the courts must decide boundaries.
I could go on, but that about sums it up. I dislike the RIAA intensly for the way they treat artists, end-users, et al., but they do have legal standing here. As for CD-ripping, I can only hope they get knocked ass-over-teakettle.
This is not a troll, but what I hope is a clear stating of the matter as I see it.
~Chazzf
No statement is true, not even this one.
RIAA currently has 806 members:
http://www.riaa.org/About-Members-1.cfm
Does anyone know any big labels that aren't on the list?
I have heard (with my own ears) two well-known authors decry libraries as "theft", because they feel that one book should mean one reader (ie. one sale per reader). So it's not just publishers who are so misguided and shortsighted.
(Point of irony: both are SF/F writers.)
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
I've got 80 gigs of music and I sold my CD's, but have never used p2p. Am I going to get sued?
In some quarters, yes, the above is true. (Harlan Ellison, ^h^h^h.) However, the publishing industry is much more divided on the question of "piracy." The audio industry (the corporations, that is) all agree that song swapping is inherently bad for their business. But in the publishing industry you find people who actually encourage book swapping -- and not just some authors. Check out the Baen Free Library, an archive of freely available books. There are some non-trivial names on the author list there (Jerry Pournelle, Lois McMaster Bujold, Mercedes Lackey) and it has official sponsorship from Baen Books, which is one of the largest publishers of science fiction and fantasy.
The introductory page by Eric Flint, "Introducing the Baen Free Library" is an eloquent argument for the share-and-share-alike crowd. Anyone who is interested in this debate, regardless of which camp you prefer, would be well advised to read that essay. (It's fairly lengthy, but worth the effort.)
This was, by the way, discussed multiple times on Slashdot.
Okay everyone, read this carefully.
According to the DMCA, a violator of copyrighted material must be notified of their infringement, and given a chance to remedy the situation before legal action may be taken.
1) If you are notified by the RIAA or MPAA that you are sharing copyrighted files, do not state of imply any intentional breaking of laws, just tell them the following:
"I'm sorry, I didn't know that THOSE files were copyrighted."
"When searching for perfectly legal content, often there are files mixed in there that are not legal. I did not intentionally download them."
"I have legally obtained those files... My software automatically shared them without my knowledge."
2) After which you've said one or more of the above, remove all the files they SPECIFICALLY NAME, and get on with your life. If they find you sharing the same content again, you will be dragged into court. If you have other copyrighted files, and are notified just as before, go to step 1.
3) I would also recomend the slowest method of communication possible. Wether they contact you by e-mail, phone, or snail mail, I recomend replies by snail mail. For one thing, it will give you plenty of time to think through your responses, as well as causing the RIAA/MPAA to spend a great deal of time in communicating with you. There's no law that says you must use the fastest mode of communication available.
4) I am not a Llama. However, I have read several legal documents thoroughly detailing the DMCA.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
You seem to be missing the most absurd point about their claims that copyright infringement is causing sluggish sales in 2001/2002: the economy has been in the toilet that entire time! Yeah, what you said may have something to do with it, but I think the economy is the biggest factor.
Not quite as absurd as the doublethink they were pulling in 2000. They said they were losing profits to "piracy", and yet I heard 2000 was one of the best years they had profitwise.
So John makes music and has a record company to distribute it in his place. In the Real World, this means there's a 99.9% chance that the record company bought the copy rights to his music (cheap). So he's not getting a single cent out of the sales of his albums because he was never supposed to.
And when Bob shares the music over P2P networks John doesn't "lose" anything. Whether the record company is actually losing money on this is also debatable.
Guess what the RIAA and record companies are doing with artists' work ? The artists should sell their music on their own, using new technologies that make it affordable.
I think this is not the case. I think most of them are using untraceable, high-bandwidth locations like PCs in university labs. This is mostly because broadband upstream is inefficient, and also because these people have been around since the days of sticking FTP servers on PCs in labs, and that's what they're used to doing. Burn a few CDs, walk into a university lab, copy the files, put Kazaa/whatever in the machine's startup, and go to. Believe me, it's not hard.
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore
I've had it with these people. I have been approached by 2 different "scouts" and let me tell you, the musician is the one that does ALL the work and gets NONE of the credit for their work. A band gets $1 per CD on average....IF that. Where's the other $20 going? I'll tell you, 20% goes to the studio expenses (ie, employees, equipment repair/replacement media to put the recordings on and some to spare but not much). So, we've counted for 25% of the cost of a CD. Another 1% goes to art...graphics for the jewel case and printing. That's about 26%. Let's be VERY generous and say we're dealing with Metallica and about 20% maybe even 30% goes to marketing. Now you've accounted for 56% of the cost of a CD. Now all you have left is to pay the scouts, CEOs, publishers, and others that decide "what you want to hear". But then let's not forget paying the RIAA.
I will NOT sign with a studio that is with the RIAA. I have already turned down a deal because of that very reason and I will continue to do so. I'm not going to let some PLICK (lethal weapon 4 language) get money simply because he THINKS others will like what I play when I can earn a living without him.
All it takes is a few hyped up public lawsuits against "Joe average MP3 trader" to get people to think of downloading MP3s as a REAL CRIME that breaks laws that are actually enforced.
Right now the public mindset seems to be "everyone is doing it and nobody gets in trouble for this stuff". A a couple public lynchings of P2P users and a lot of casual traders will think twice about sharing their collections.
Why do I have the feeling that we will all be listening to a lot more forgein music as scared americans zap those shared folders?
What post? The one you're carrying inside your rusty innards!
That's one of things I like about Tehran. There's no copyright - I get 100k per second with mutella, and the RIAA can't touch me! Eat your heart out, RIAA!
Also it's the cheapest city in the world to live in, according to a
survey released today.
...since ethics is just a code, a set of laws and rules. You are ethical if you live exactly by that arbitrary set of rules. Which says nothing about the morality, or goodness, of those rules.
That's not true at all; it depends on the law actually being enforced. It is nice when people agree not to break the law, but if they won't agree to, they are forced to; either way the law works. In theory anyway :)
"That's right, your Honor, according to the data we have researched, the biggest collection of illegal mp3's on the internet belongs to this character named "CowboyNeal." We'd like to formally request a warrant to search his hard drive."
It wouldn't bother me in the least to see on the news that Hillary Rosen had been kidnapped, tarred and feathered, and released on Sunset Strip.
Maybe we should bring back some of them "old-time" punishments.
"World-wide music sales dropped 5% last year" - maybe that's just because the music's crap at the moment and less people want to buy it! Or am I just getting old?
So, what if their searches turn up spoofing by the RIAA themselves? Will they take themselves to court?
I can imagine a rewrite of Joe's garage. Joe's just been released from prison and starts to play a guitar riff in his head because music is illegal. But then the thought police come take him back to jail because the guitar riff he was playing wasn't his, he didn't pay a royalty, and a telepath nearby could have read his mind.
. Quit playing Monopoly with Bill. Switch to one of many non-Microsoft products today.
What we need is decent broadband at an affordable price ,until that happens the record industry will be able to hang on to its crappy business model cause no dial up 56k userbase p2p network will be able to evolve to the same standard of audiogalaxy for example.
,the music industry wishes to control the manner in which new music is presented to us and thus where bands have to go if they wish to make it big, the sharing of music over the interenet undermines this position .
I dought what the riaa are trying to do now will be effective at stopping people sharing music or in incouraging people to buy there artists music. It has been said before but I will say it again
the main aim of this 'war on music sharing' is one of control
The only way I could see the music industry having any further success in this war would be for them to become more intergrated into isps and at an isp level blacklist people who trade music , aol/time warner would be one group in a perfect position to do this.If all the major labels started buying into isps and trowing people of for trading music and then placing these people on a black list which would ban them collectively from all riaa assossiated isps as well as harrassing all non riaa isps for allowing pirates on there service , mabey then they might see a decrease in music sharing, but then again would any of this really benifit them in the long run or would it just really piss off lots of people and cost them alot of money and customers
?
_________________________________________________
The FCC is very similar in function to your local Department of Motor Vehicles.
You don't need a licence to walk down the road, but you do for a car. There aren't many rules for what you do when walking around, but there are plenty of laws and rules for driving.
The difference is a matter of risk, organization, and benefit.
People generally don't collide into each other when walking around. If they do, it generally isn't fatal.
However, without motor vehicle laws, the roads would be basically useless, because there's nothing to regulate traffic at an intersection, there would be far more auto accidents, and far more auto-related fatalities. And I hate to imagine the traffic jams.
Since driving requires much more responsibility (from both a 'society' standpoint, and a personal standpoint) than walking does, we require a licence to drive.
Radio is not much different. Without the FCC's rules and regulations, the entire radio spectrum would essentially be a giant traffic jam.
What many people either do not know, or willfully ignore, is that there is a very finite radio spectrum. The entire radio spectrum can only handle transferring a relatively small amount of information. (Compared to, say, a fiber optic cable). And even the latest technologies can only compensate for so much interference. Even spread-spectrum technology fails when too many devices are using the same frequency range.
The FCC does a few things that are absolutely necessary to keep wireless technologies going smoothly. The FCC does a few things:
* They control how the spectrum is divided up, and enforces the separations. This way you don't end up listening to your next-door neighbor's cell phone call while you're trying to watch the super bowl, etc, etc. Basically, they create the "standards" for which frequencies are used for specific purposes. Somewhat similar to saying you drive on the right side of the road (in the US at least).
* They put limits onto how much power can be used to transmit a signal. These limits are to actually keep things local. Otherwise, big rich group X can just transmit with so much power that nobody else can use the frequency. Another good example is a cordless phone. Sure, it would be nice if your cordless phone worked for miles around... But it would limit the number of cordless telephones that could be used at any given time, as they would start interfering with each other. So, the FCC limits the amount of power a cordless phone can transmit with-- which limits its range, but allows for thousands of phones to be in a small area without interfering. Similar to saying a car can only be "this big" and drive on the roads.
* They certify electronic devices; that they don't emit any spurious RF signals. (Meaning, they don't make "background noise" Kinda like emissions testing.
* They have authority to enforce their rules. (Like your average traffic cop)
Radio stations (and TV stations, telecom companies, Ham Radio enthusiasts) all have to pay to recieve a licence to transmit (once a certain amount of power is used)-- and even then they must do so on specific frequencies.
You don't need a licence to use a cell phone, wireless LAN, etc. because they're actually very limited devices. They have short range, so there isn't as much of a problem with interference from other people.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
Artists can make money the same way they always have: concert revenue. Even signed bands get most of their money this way. When you buy a CD, unless they're one of a handful of groups, they will see very little of that $15. Movie stuidios can continue making a profit the same way they have before the VCR was invented. There will always be money to be made in the film industry whether or not you can download movies for free. Somehow I seriously doubt that if the RIAA and all of the music under its umbrella suddenly vanished, that it would be the end of music, or even the end of good music. New companies and new bands would no doubt spring up and maybe they'd adapt to the way things are now because face it, you're never going to not be able to download music. There's always some IRC channel or some FTP or some whatever.
face it, you're never going to not be able to download music. There's always some IRC channel or some FTP or some whatever
Which is exactly why I'm very much in favor of strong crypto. The music (and other media) piracy problem goes away if we use strong crypto. Weak crypto solutions like CSS are clearly insufficient, and cause more problems than they solve.
What we really need is an open-source collaborative project to build a strong media encryption system. It's a great technical challenge, difficult and fun, and it would solve a significant problem in the world if done right. Who's going to open the Sourceforge account for us?
John makes music for a living. His record company rips him off with a crappy contract, but it's better than starving or having to work at a regular job full time so he couldn't focus on his music.
But Bob down the street doesn't care to pay for John's music, even though he enjoys it, so he downloads it off a p2p network. Then he "shares" it with everyone else on p2p networks, so they can do likewise.
I wonder if the people who write this stuff ever use P2P?
To continue: Then Hank, Mary, Jane, and a few hundred others download the song, enjoy John's music , and then buy his CD. This is the only way, of course, that they'd ever hear John -- They'd never even see his name otherwise, they wouldn't pay $15 for a CD from someone they never heard or heard of, and John is very unlikely to get radio play
Now, if John performs music outside the mainstream -- say, free jazz -- this is pretty much his only hope to get his name out.
It's a free distribution system -- it should put music distribution companies out of business; that's how the economy works: Computers put typewriter manufacturers out of business. They have no special right to make money or maintain the industry in the state to which they're accustomed.
They do have a right to their copyrights. But they need to specifically identify who has done them what amount of harm, not just attack p2p in general. I'd guess Britney Spears has lost some sales; I very much doubt 'John' has.
the subject says it all
The problem with putting an artist out there to influence people is that the artists see so little of the money from CD sales that they're not likely to intervene on the part of the RIAA.
Here is the Zeropaid discussion on this headline: http://www.zeropaid.com/news/articles/auto/0703200 2e.php
I wonder if the people who write this stuff ever use P2P?
/. and even some quasi-major media outlets are telling them that record companies are evil (true, IMO) and that the best way to "get back at them" is to break the law via p2p networks. (false, IMO)
WEll, this person has. I don't anymore, as I began to notice that I DIDN'T always buy what I liked - if I could find a song/album encoded well (ogg or >160kbps MP3) on a p2p system, what's my incentive to buy the album? Doing the right thing? That might work for a handful of people, but not the majority of the population. If they can get songs of nearly equal sound quality to a CD, why buy the CD? It certainly doesn't help the that
Your example about free distribution is good, but it's only a paritial answer. Again, if ALL of an artist's music is p2p-available, why buy anything? Distribution of singles via p2p is a great idea, but whole albums? I'm not so sure.
Finally, and this is the most important part, it is the ARTIST that must allow or disallow their work to be distributed in a certain manner. Record companies violate this through coersion, and p2p users violate it through outright violation of the law. It is no one else's place to tell an individual how they should have their music distributed, and this is the most fundamental question in the whole equation. Yeah, record companies suck ass, but that doesn't make stripping artists of their rights via unauthorized p2p distribution acceptable, either. They're both wrong. As I said in another reply, the future of music (I hope!) lies in the 'Net, with artist-owned distribution houses, and high quality, open standards like Vorbis.
The Free desktop that Just Works
Not that anybody cares, but let history record that I predicted this exact thing in April of last year:
8
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=5184=110850
If they can get songs of nearly equal sound quality to a CD, why buy the CD?
I'm not sure I have a great answer to that question, but here's a thought: How long would it take to duplicate a CD?
* Find out the song list of the CD
* Download good quality copies via p2p of every song (many p2p files are incomplete or poorly recorded. You'd need an hour+ to verify the quality of all the songs).
* Burn the CD
* Find the lyrics
* Find some 'artwork'
* Layout the packaging
* Print the packaging
Not everyone will care enough to follow all those steps, or pay $15 for the convenience of having someone else do it, but you get the idea.
this is the most important part, it is the ARTIST that must allow or disallow their work to be distributed in a certain manner.
I'm not sure I agree. Most important is, how much harm is being done (if any), by who and to whom?. I don't see good answers to any of these questions.
* If no significant harm is done, it's a problem of principle (yes, the owners of the music probably deserve some control), but not a big deal. I've seen nothing reliably connected CD sales to p2p.
* If you can't say who is harming them, demonizing and punishing all of p2p technology and its users is not an acceptable alternative. I buy CDs; why should I suffer?
* If you can't say who is hurt by p2p, then you can't just assume it's everyone who ever cut a song. As I said, Britney Spears probably suffers; artists not on the radio (small or non-pop genres) probably benefit.
Finally, the marketplace is sending a clear signal to the CD industry: Your product is obsolete; we don't want it anymore; we want p2p. The industry is trying to legislate away this reality, but it's almost ridiculous to watch American courts and Congress forcing consumers to use inferior products, all to subsidize a dead industry. Any economist can tell you what the outcome will be. Figuring out how to make a profit isn't my problem, it's the music industry's.
You have a source on this little factoid, or are you making it up as you go. Why can't they run over to Waldenbooks and buy it at 10% off... or surf over to Amazon and buy it at 30% off.
Hell, I can donate books to my local library. Tell you guys what... gimme your book budget (at 80$/book) and your shopping list, I'll have Amazon ship 'em to you and I'll keep the change.
Let's get the offtopic part out of the way. First up, the word crisis. I never said we had a health care crisis in the US. I said our health care system is fscked up. That's not the same thing. A crisis would be not having any doctors to treat sick people. Our system is screwy because at its root is the idea that if you cannot pay for health care (either through insurance or otherwise) then you do not deserve it. My belief (or model, if you prefer) is that the simple fact of being a U.S. citizen should grant you the ability to get good health care at no cost.
I congratulate you on having good health care without health insurance. But even you admit that this is rare. Incredibly rare were your exact words. Which is sort of my point. Why should it be rare to have good health care without insurance? Even moreso, why the hell do we need health insurance anyway? It's classist and designed to punish those less fortunate. Don't believe me? Go have a look at Brownsville in Brooklyn for a few months. See how those kids live. Then come back and tell me our government takes care of all its citizens.
I know we'll never reach the utopian idea I have for what health care should be. It's not because it's impossible. We can send people into space so don't tell me we couldn't make a better health care system. It's because people in America don't care about other people in America (or the world for that matter). I'm talking about our day-to-day living and would be happy to provide many examples of just how inconsiderate we are toward each other. If we made it a priority we could make it happen. We won't because no one cares.
But enough of that. On the to question of copying and distributing music for no personal gain. Fair use does not give you unlimited rights to reproduce and distribute copyrighted works just because you are not profiting. Yes, commericial vs. non-commercial (their phrase is 'nonprofit educational purposes) is a factor. But this comparison (commercial v. nonprofit) is part of the larger issue covering the nature of the use. What's the nature of putting someone else's work on a file-sharing service?
The other Fair Use factors are:
the nature of the copyrighted work
the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole
the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work
Yes, you can copy a CD to a cassette, or mp3 or whatever for personal use. And that's fair use. Fair use might even be giving a copy to a friend. Even though I'm not a strict interpretationist when it comes to law I feel I should point out that the US Code for Fair Use does not specifically mention "giving copies to friends" as an example of acceptable reproduction.
Either way, making your copy of a song available to thousands of people (many of them you won't know) is not in the spirit of fair use.
-r
Just because something is free does not mean you have to take it.