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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.
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
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.
My $0.02 will always be worth more than your 0.02, so :P
Um, not anymore...
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...
Yes, if the RIAA-vs-mp3.com case is precedent. In that case, mp3.com had a CD, and a challenge-response protocol virtually guaranteed that a user had the CD. But my.mp3.com transmitting a song to the user, was found to be copyright infringement.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
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.
Oh yeah, I forgot to add...
http://www.boycott-riaa.com/
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
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.
From your comment I can infer that you feel buying the cd/tape/mp3 grants you copyright ownership and, therefore, distribution rights of said contents.
It does not. Fair use and personal use are not the same thing as putting songs into file sharing systems where who knows how many people will access them. Why do you think Diamond won the lawsuit over the RIO mp3 player and Napster lost theirs?
Libraries walk a fine line on this issue. It troubles me greatly that the book publishers and other industries (assuming the rumors are true) are trying to limit libraries' ability to provide materials to the public. More and more the U.S. drifts toward a "if you do not have money you are worthless" attitude toward its own citizens. That's why the health care in this country is so fscked up.
But I'm straying from the topic. I think the difference between a library's CD collection and file sharing is that only one person can have a copy of the cd at a time. Yes, 1000 people might check the CD out over the time it survives in the collection, but 1000 people don't have it all at once. Isn't file-sharing usage somewhere in the millions of people? That's a different scope now isn't it?
More importantly, you only get the CD for a limited time. If you don't return it you are usually charged the cost of replacing it.
Neither of those are true for file-sharing and I think they are significant differences.
-r
Just because something is free does not mean you have to take it.
Mostly Playboy and Penthouse filing suits against people who regularly post half their back-catalog (and probably the other smaller pornographers just send Cousin Vinny over with a sledgehammer). But yeah, most pr0n industry types understand that this ain't gonna kill them off or really crimp their revenue stream. The value they offer isn't so much in the material itself, but in ad/spam free collections, live chats, requests, rare/uncommon archives, complete sets, constant availability, etc etc. None of those are available from "free" pr0n sites or usenet.
Then, for better or worse, there's little way for users to tell who is a legitimate poster of pr0n and who isn't, so it's basically finders-keepers on that score. But if you don't have explicit permission (no pun intended) to share pr0n, don't. You will be engaging in unauthorized duplication.