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Congress to Ashcroft: Go After Song Swappers
saikou writes "Yahoo has published a news about proposal of 19 lawmakers to prosecute P2P systems' users. Allthough Texas Republican Rep. Lamar Smith, said that FBI should not go for casual users but but instead to go after operators of "network "nodes", there is not enough info in the story to see if this "should" will change to "must in addition to", if or when trying to arrest major node operators fails to curtain song swapping online. Of course, questions of what to do about foreign users and foreign music are omitted. RIAA claps its hands. I guess we should expect network congestion because of users, downloading everything in their sight to beat this initiative."
This isn't intentionally a troll, but if it ends up that way, well, so be it.
Isn't this what we've wanted all along? Make the people stealing the music the ones who are culpable rather than outlawing the methodology... it seems like the right answer to me.
Of course there's the implicit requirment (in order for this to be a good thing) that legal activities not be persecuted under this initiative. For that I suppose I'll have to wait and see. Honestly though, I'm not upset in the least about this. When folks download songs they didn't pay for which weren't given away for free by the artist/copyright holder, whatever the downloader's philosophy about it that activity is still theft. And let's face it, that's probably the majority of what goes on with P2P music "sharing" networks... that's certainly all I've ever seen anyone doing with them!
Behold the Power of Cheese!
Among those signing the letter were: Delaware Democratic Sen. Joseph Biden
Hmmm...this would be the same Joesph Biden who's 1988 Presidential bid was abruptly curtailed when it was revealed that he'd plagiarized passages in several of his speeches, and had also been involved in a serious plagiarism incident when he was at law school?
What an asshole.
Obviously centralized P2P systems like Napster, Fasttrack, and AudioGalaxy are problematic. Sure they are fast.... but their Achilles' heel is the fact that there is a single point of failure. You go after the company or the major nodes and you can effectively shut it down.
So, I was think about the next generation of P2P. Obviously if the US Gov't and lawmakers start going after P2P networks we will need to develop a more robust, anonymous method of trading files.
If I was going to make a P2P network I would think about including some of the following features.
1) Completely anonymous (maybe encrypted?). Your machine could never be singled out by IP address.
2) The ability to add security (ie: login/password). What if I want to start my own MP3 trading club and only want to have members be "invite only"? That way you can have some control over quality and selection.
3) The ability to use HTTP (preferably port 80?) to disguise traffic and prevent ISP's or schools from blocking ports and preventing trade.
4) A built-in, updatable firewall to prevent certain IP blocks from accessing your machine (ie: to prevent companies like Ranger Online Inc from searching your machine and issuing "take down" notices to your ISP.)
5) The abilty to perform a massive DoS attack on a hostile attacker. Say some company (like the RIAA or Ranger Online Inc.) starts to "hurt" the network or tries to take it down... self-defense mode would kick-in and DoS the shit out the attacker until they stopped their interference.
6) Error correction and feedback. The ablity for the system to "weed out" bad copies of files based on user feedback. You could also have it check MD5 sums to ensure quality.
Anyone else think of things that future P2P networks will need to withstand the attack?
Alot of people are using these clients to download music. Ive done it. Ill continue to do it for now. I buy the occasional CD as a result. I buy about 1 every 3 or 4 months. I probably wouldnt buy that many if I couldnt hear the music first. Im not gonna stand around in a store with headphones on to hear it either and the radio? How many times do they forget to tell you the name of the song.
I personal wont pay 17 bucks for a CD with 1 or 2 songs I like on it. Its not worth it to me. If they were to make it so I could buy just the tracks I like in a format simliar to MP3 Id probably send a buck or two a song but I have way to many cds i bought long ago with just one good song on them. Not worth the money.
One of the major problems with the "piracy" however is rather vague. I dont have a problem with the music networks or even the software networks. Where piracy becomes evil is when someone tries to profit from it. Selling cds or cdroms is wrong. That is trying to profit off others works and thats a problem.
I used to pirate software all the time in the glory days of computers (Well before the Web) and I can say when I started I didnt have the money to buy it. I was a kid, but what I did was learn it. Ok, pirating games never gave anyone but myself enjoyment but the apps I pirated tought me about the Apps. Enabled me to get my first job and enabled me to do 15 years in office enviroments making recommendations to corperations on what to buy. If I pirated a copy of Word and then had the company I worked for buy 250 copys for peoples desktop the only people hurt by this were wordperfect(showing my age).
Piracy is ok in my opinion provided its a learning experiance. Others may argue, and there will always be abusers, but look at the ages of those that never buy CDs, Look at there incomes. They probably would have never bought the cd anyway.
The real threat is those trying to profit from piracy, What they really need is a different name to describe one or the others.
Again I think this whole thing is a seriously low priority in light of all the other problems our country has but I dont have the money to buy my own polotician and probably wont in the future.
I think the real problem however is that people can pay for poloticians, We need to get some laws against people buying them. This legalized corruption needs to go.
--- Always remember. 99.36% of all statistics are inaccurate.
We've already repealed enough freedoms to make it completely possible for anybody to be picked up, labeled "enemy combatant" and quietly sequestered for an arbitrary length of time until fear and intimidation can run their course.
In the new age of DRM, that's going to be drilled into our children, there will be no fair use. Anything we don't make ourselves is going to me immutable and untransferable. To play a song on two different formats we'll have to purchase a copy in each format, and any technology that sidesteps that profit chain will be the kind of thing that will land Joe-homeowner in the same cell as the thug that's serving life for things that are really wrong, and not just wrong because a bunch of white-haired fat-cats that play the politico-game shake their corpulent fingers at the public and chastise us for having a brain.
I will probably be behind the wheel of a lorry at the ripe age of sixty peforming or helping in the on-the-fly digital hijacking/reprogramming of tuners to alter DRM lockout and re-empower the citenzry--drive-by reprogramming. Might even leave a little calling card, like a graphic or something to let joe-homeowner know that they've been unshackled. Failing that, I'll probably just kick it up a notch and start performing/organizing PETA-Style data-center raids where we'd free users from databases where they had been improperly captured and enslaved. That would be some exciting shit.
I think the worst thing that's taking place today in the technology societies is that a culture of submission to corporate interests is finally coming to fruition...all that public education is going to start paying off big for businesses that can afford to buy laws for the consumers who will happily roll over...taking it and liking it. And what's even more frustrating is that as citizens we are powerless by proxy. I don't hear anything about protests, organized or otherwise, working against the erosion of our rights...even the sham they are today would be preferable to a complete amputation.
Every new form of media has it's own Requirimento
This is new, so pay attention to what's happening. A truly new crime has been invented--that isn't something that happens often.
Copyright infringement has never before been a crime committed by individuals procuring their own entertainment. Always before it has been a crime that could only be comitted by major distributors. After all, those were the only people copyright law applied to 50 years ago.
Stealing a song is not like stealing a car. One involves the deprivation of a personal property, and the other involves breaking a social contract.
This is new, and I wonder how long this new crime will be with us.
If he were so smart he'd release some mp3s to napster with links to his site in them, and people wouldd go buy his cds if they like it, or buy his mp3s and burn them.
For the little guy who will never get a contract and be on MTV and be on the Billboard lists, that's probably not a bad idea. An artst with a small, devoted following might make a couple hundred dollars selling MP3s from a website (although, if you think about hosting costs, you'd have to have more than just a few dozen people actually buying your MP3s). But obviously the record industry has decided that they don't want to distribute their copyrighted material this way, and for good reason: it's not as profitable.
Yes, as hard as it may be to believe, record execs don't care as much about art (getting truly good music out there, profits be damned) as they do their bank accounts. That part isn't a shock to anyone. And that's the reason I am *sure* that the record industry has put in a massive amount of energy determining how to handle this whole MP3 situation. You don't make billion-dollar PR and legal moves by flipping a coin.
That's why I'm so surprised that people can't fathom how the RIAA can be so ignorant. "MP3 is the wave of the future! The record labels are stuck in the past!" When you see hundreds of 13 year-olds screaming for an artist who built his or her reputation solely by online distribution, that's when you'll know that the tides are changing.
-- "Complacency is a far more dangerous attitude than outrage." -Naomi Littlebear
>Sure, I've heard that sharing music and copyright-anarchy is supposed to increase sales in the aggregate, but it doesn't work for me any the genre I work in.
Ever considered that your real problem isn't people pirating your music?
Your problem is lack of exposure. Who are you? What genre do you play? Where can I sample your music? Are you a big time artist sticking up for the boys club, or a just a little one trying to scrape a living together?
Without answers to at least some of these questions, I don't see any reason to believe you.
>If I do the same thing with a p2p server, however, there seems to be a belief that I had a right to break the law.
I don't particularly think so. I do think that simply running a "node" that offers no actual content is as illegal as my newspaper explaining that Luigi's Garage downtown offered to hook a reporter up with a "hot" deal, or that half the cable guys that they had visit their bait house sold them a hacked cable box.
If the FBI want to shake up nodes, they should start shaking up newspapers first. They were the first people to actively report where illegal activity happens, and they report it a lot more than anything else. Take CNN along with them, too.
If the government and media companies want the problem of piracy to go away, its going to take the consumer to agree with them. And as long as the media companies consider us "theives" by default (enter DRM, copy-protected CDs, and CD-R levies) why shouldn't we act accordingly? It isn't like this is the sort of crime where someone is going to leave with physical harm done to them.
Sorry you're being caught in the crossfire.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Huh? How naive can you get?
You think the RIAA will just be nice and leave P2P software makers alone once trading of RIAA 0wn3d music on P2P networks drops through the floor? You think the RIAA will just ignore all those independent artists that they don't have any control over but who would now have more relative exposure on P2P networks?
You've gotta be kidding me. What world did you grow up in?
The RIAA will not stop until all music distribution methods are completely under their control. Total domination is what they're after and they're not going to settle for anything less. And because they 0wn Congress, they have a reasonable chance of succeeding. Oh, yeah, they might destroy the Internet in the process, but everyone knows that the only people who use the internet as anything other than a glorified TV set are 3v1l h4x0rz and terrorists, right?
Sigh...
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
Oh, dearie me, what shall we do with half our government in jail for illegal file sharing? ;)
m ai n/0,14179,2874687,00.html
;)
ZDNet posted an interesting opinion piece back in July about how we should quit using P2P now that the Senate has. Check it out here:
http://techupdate.zdnet.com/techupdate/stories/
The part that interested me most was this quote:
>> The Senate, which is now crafting legislation
>> that would further restrict the illegal sharing
>> of copyrighted works over networks, was
>> apparently a hotbed of illegal file sharing and
>> other peer-to-peer (P2P) networking activity.
>>
>> Last week, the Senate Sergeant at Arms clamped
>> down, and cut off all P2P networking within the
>> Senate. The reason? Such networking practices
>> were a security risk, and they were being used
>> to violate copyright laws.
As they say, "our tax money at work". The senators involved (it does not name names, but gives the idea that such activities were widespread) were not only breaking the law, they were using our tax money to do it. If you check the various news stories, at least two movies were illegally downloaded and watched by the senators during Senate hearings on legislation such as the Hollings bill. One of the videos was pirated by a senator, the other by the President of Disney.
If these congresspersons are correct (some of the ones asking for the FBI's "help" were senators), shouldn't the FBI take care of the most widely publicized cases first, the ones with easy proof, that involved public money?
After all, they are the ones who think this is such a henious crime that we have to pull the FBI off of child kidnapping cases and the "War on Terror" to deal with it.
Me, I think the FBI has better things to do than bother with people sampling music before a purchase and freeloading kids who wouldn't or couldn't pay for a CD anyway. But then our senators are the ones with all the file-sharing experience, not little old me. Surely they know better.
"Really, gentlemen, if that's the case, let's see the power of attorney given to you by Mothra."
Torahata "Mothra vs. Godzilla"
You're right, BUT, not mostly, almost entirely, i live/work there and there's no faster way to find yourself out of a job or unemployable than identify yourself as a non-liberal (they hate independents/Naderites/libertarians nearly as much as Republicans here - i voted for Nader in the last cycle and was savaged by a number of my friends).
Malcontent (who i modded down and some know-nothing modded back up), reflects the fashionable political ignorance of people who don't bother to look it up...
the vast majority of IP and content controls have always been sponsored by and promoted by Democratic lawmakers (and always will be).
Liberal stalwarts like Hollings, Biden, Kennedy and Lieberman tend to lead the way in Entertainment's dream legislation in Congress.
the overwhelming majority of Big Donors to the Democratic Party are from the Entertainment Industry. (What did Streisand give in the last cycle 8 or 12 million? Spielberg another 6 or 8 million? The Bloodworth/Thomasons several more million. Fred Bijan will have given the DNC about 40 million over the last few years, including buying their new HQ building for them.
Clearly a "vast right-wing plot".
There are a small handful of non-liberals (like Milius, Mann, Heston) and you will note that they aren't big campaign contributors and they are all over 50 (except Valente who's about 250).
You will also note, if you look at the voting records of such legislation, that usually far more Republicans vote AGAINST tightening content controls, and that very few-to-no Democrats vote against them.
WAIT! What am i thinking? Introducing facts into a
As a diehard political centrists and independent it's people who don't bother to fact check that cause more grief and protect the scoundrels who pass crap UCITA and the DMCA....
Just remember - When MP3s are illegal, only criminals will have MP3s
Ten quid, she's so easy to blind. And not a word is spoken...
Democracy cannot work with large populations because ultimately the policies follow the money.
That's a ridiculous theory. With an intelligent, educated populace, the politics will never follow the money - rather they will be issue based and the government will be the voice of the people.
However, when the population does not have a proper grasp of the issues involved and is easily swayed by advertising - (that's all campaign contributions are good for, btw they can't be used directly in any way) - that's when I say the populace is incapable of participating in a democracy.
Mmmm.. Donuts
I watched a news report that stated music sales have fallen 13% from last years numbers.
I work for a major clothing chain.
My manager recently commented on how our business has fallen off around 13% compared to last years numbers.
Coincidence?
Maybe we should start arresting school girls who share eachothers clothing plus those damn thrift shop owners who profit from the resale of shirts and jeans. They're cutting into the original retail seller's profits.
>how in the hell am I going to find music that I LIKE?
3 2&mode=thread&tid=149 ) almost certainly does not work for Harlan Ellison (see below).
Jesus H. God, how did people live before the Internet?!?
Kid, I'm 42 years old, and you cannot imagine how soft, pampered, and whiney you sound. I'm not saying that I agree with all the tactics of the RIAA or MPAA, but please consider toning down the cry-babying if you want to be taken seriously by anyone who was out of diapers when MTV launched.
Nobody has a God-given or constitutional right to Entertainment. The forefathers bequeathed us a right to Pursue happiness, not have it necessarily dumped in our laps.
The copyright holders hold the copyrights because the artists have signed these over to them. The artists have signed these over to them because of the value (real or perceived) which the copyright holder brings to the relationship. Arguably the most important benefit is that of Distribution. A writer wants to get his book onto the shelves at B&N, a comic book artist wants to be grouped with a writer and get his work onto a newsstand. The copyright holders -- Houton-Mifflin, Marvel -- provide those means.
Digital distribution of encoded video and audio and subsequent grass roots distribution en masse across the 'Net threatens the core contribution that the copyright holder provides the artist. The copyright holder is justifiably scared. "If the artist can achieve global distribution to his audience on his own through the 'Net," the distributor worries, "what does he need me for?" And as a creator of content, I say, yeah, that's a good question.
But you rabid anti-**AA kooks are just as frightening to the artists as you are to the distributors! I personally think that most recording artists would be happy to forego traditional truck-and-jewelcase distribution in favor of a digital model. Unfortunately, the loudest noise from the anti-tradition side is not from anyone proposing any solution that ensures that Joe Sixpack will compensate the artist if Joe acquires a copy of his song/book/movie/picture. All the creator hears is "The **AA Sucks!" (Umm, yeah, he knows that already, much more clearly than you could possibly imagine) or the nails-on-blackboard sound of "Information Must Be Free!" or the clueless musings of computer science students speculating about how many free copies of a song or a poem he is entitled to distribute online.
Guys, The World is Not Against You. Take your fists out of the air and your feet out of your mouth long enough to get on the same page, and recognize that one single distribution scheme may not work for every artist. What makes sense for Britney Spears may not make sense for Trent Reznor or Mick Jagger, and what makes sense for David Weber ( http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/08/03/23142
And for the sake of your cause, stop whining like spoiled children! Your background music and summer read is someone else's kid's college fund.
Sorry for the rant. If, however, you want more, I suggest you check out http://harlanellison.com/kick/kick_rls.htm
Nobody doles out a textual spanking like the legendary Mr. Ellison.
With an intelligent, educated populace, the politics will never follow the money
I agree completely. I think the federal government should mandate at least one year of Rhetoric classes for every high school student. If we can develop an entire generation of adults who understand how they are being swayed and have been taught the skills for critical analysis of media and information, then politicians will have to focus on issues. Money can't buy issues like it can buy the swaying of people's emotions.