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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."
Missiouri voters decided he was less fit for public office than a dead man. What more can I say?
Don't we have terrorists roaming around? Haven't half of people's retirement funds vaporized thanks to big business' gluttony? ...and Congress wants Ashcroft to bust FILE SHARERS???!!
Somethings wrong here...
REALLY WRONG HERE!!!
The vast majority of p2p traffic violates copyright. Yes, there's legal sharing of music. And yes, we can disagree about whether the illegal sharing is wrong.
/. readers
would think I got what I deserved.
But it seems the suggestion is that the FBI uphold the law. They are not outlawing p2p. They are not prohibiting legal music trades. Instead, there's a suggestion that the FBI enforce the law against users who traffic in large amounts of illegal software and pirated music.
If I put up a web page with links to tens of thousands of dollars of pirated software, I should expect either my ISP to yank my connection, or to get a visit from the FBI. And I would expect many
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.
So, before we get hysterical about "protocols being outlawed", perhaps we should look at (a) the proposal, and (b) the ethics of those 'big fish' traders who traffic in warez and mp3.
Well, this will likely get a bad mod rating because it's not all "rah rah mp3 warez". But I'm an artist who needs these protections to feed my family. 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. So I need my audience to please be a *paying* audience.
I'd hate to see all the entertainment industry waste all that money on bribing so many of our nation's lawmakers without anything to show for it.
Seriously folks, when are we as a nation going to say enough is enough with this legal corporate bribery? Can anyone please explain the practical difference between bribery and massive "donations" ? I'm reminded of a remark made by George Carlin, who said "this country was bought and sold years ago". Was he right?
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
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!
Welcome to the world of intergenerational warfare. I'll bet no science fiction novel you ever read prepared you for this.
Under Nixon an older, reactionary generation declared a War on Drugs, which was essentially a euphemism for a war on the lifestyle of the youth of that era and the values it represented (chemical experimentation, casual sex, a healthy skepticism of authority, and so on). Indeed, the prohibition of drugs and the actions that have been taken to try and stamp out its use has caused far greater harm, in both a humanitarian and economic sense, than the abuse of the substances themselves ever did or could have.
A War on Ourselves indeed, or at least a war on the younger generation, one that began under Nixon, was escalated out of control under Reagan and Bush Senior, to the point where we now have over fifty beaurocracies fighting for the collected spoils seized from non-violent drug offendors.
Now, with the new War on Copyright Infringement, we are about to target today's youth, who trade their music, their movies, their videotapes online, instead of via cassette tape the way us older folk did when we were in high school and college.
Another front on an intergenerational war, between the dinasaurs of the Jack Valenti Generation of Greed and the emerging, technically savvy information generation they seek to repress and quite possibly destroy.
This escalation will likely claim even more victims, fill our prisons even more with people even less inclined to violence than the many drug offendors who account for half our inmate population today.
Worse, we'll have to listen to even more self-righteous tripe along the lines "but these fans are stealing bread and milk from the mouths of Lars and Britney," and "we'll win the war on copyright infringement! These pirates will never see the light of day again! God Bless America!"
What's next, a broken egg on a frying pan with the words "This represents your Life on MP3?"
Make no mistake, this is intergenerational warfare, waged by the parents and grandparents upon the children who have chosen to live differently than their elders, indeed, differently than their elders can comprehend. As we draw closer to the technological singuarity I think we can expect ever more extreme examples of the same.
Hell, I haven't even finished writing a novel set in 2057 that depicts exactly these sorts of events. How close is one to the Singualarity I wonder, when real world events overtake science fiction faster than it can be written?
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
- DOJ crawls through the P2P networks, scanning your file swapping list, and arresting everyone it can find which they believe is illegally sharing copyrighted materials. They prosecute a buch of big-time file-sharers, winning some, losing others. But they get enough that it scares most people.
- The big P2P sharers leave the networks. Usage drops drastically. However, the P2P software makers are still in business, as they are now left alone. Music is still being shared, only now its stuff that explicitly has been allowed by the Artists to be shared.
- Now that the P2P network isn't clogged with NSYNC tunes, people actually can find (and listen to) stuff that isn't on ClearChannel or the other big chain Radio stations. Bands have small successes - releasing 128Bit MP3s to the P2P networks, and selling 256Bit ones on their websites for a couple of dimes. It becomes possible for a regional band to make a few tens of thousands of dollars of MP3 sales per year (100,000 sales @ 40 cents each adds up), and people start to flock to the P2P networks again.
- Big-time artists notice it. Those which are in controll of their catalogue (through foresight, ownership of their label, or lawsuits), decide that its possible now. Somebody big tries it, and makes a couple million in sales on their back-catalog in the first month. The artists drool, as they see 75% profit margins on per-MP3 sales, with nothing going to the label (or other middlemen).
- Artists flock to the P2P networks to sell their songs, and the big labels are reduced to what they really are: promotional marketing houses. Artists contract with them for fixed fees (or precentages of gross receipts) to do promotion and such, and label no longer get ownership of the music, as Artists now have the means to say "Fuck You" if the label demands it.
I'd love to see this scenario, and I think it's realistic given two BIG "ifs":- IF they really start to clamp down on the big P2P users with huge illegal catalogs, so we can get all the infringing crap off the P2P networks. Once it's all legal and above board, you can start running real marketing analysis and do the business case studies that you need to make it a real sales market and distribution channel.
- IF the artists continue on the current road of fighting to get ownership of their music. If they quit (and continue with the Faustian bargain of their soul for 15 minutes on MTV), then it's over. I'm hoping they have the backbone to stick it out.
And realistically, isn't this what we want? P2P networks with LEGAL music for us to try out and see what we want? And an economically viable way for the artists to produce music and get paid for it in a reasonable manner?Call it what you want, but sharing copyrighted MP3s right now is definitely illegal, and in the long turn, harmful to everyone. Don't do it - it's NOT the Right Thing.
-Erik
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.
Memo to Congress: Get your fucking priorities straight.
I prefer:
Memo to Congress: fuck you!
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
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.
I wonder how long a 15 year old kid would get in the slammer for downloading a britney spears mp3 vs the CEO of Worldcom who defrauded 7.1 billion dollars worth of employee's and stockholders life savings.
Manipulating and stealing Stock ok, downloading mp3's bad.
Same is true for packet sniffing and reverse engineering. Under the DMCA, packet sniffing to make a program compatable with something else is illegal and bad. However killing competetion and cutting tens of thousands of jobs who use to work for your competitors ok. If Microsoft never existed do you think Oracle, Borland and Watcom would have like 10x the staff they do now as well as enjoy healthy competition from companies that would of existed because Microsoft would never exist. My guess is that Netscape would be quite huge right now would and its software would be a whole platform and not just a web browser. Its a shame.
http://saveie6.com/
Inmate 1: What are you in for?
Inmate 2: I blew this guys face off with a shotgun because he didn't have my money. And you?
Inmate 1: I downloaded some Weird Al mp3's and uploaded that video of the monkey sniffing his finger and falling over.
Inmate 2: Sicko. You disgust me, its people like you...