RIAA Seeks Summary Judgement Against P2P Services

kanad writes: "RIAA seeks summary judgement against Musiccity , Kazaa and Grokster. In other words they want the above to be banned even before the trial. RIAA accuses them as Napster clones. Read the official statement here BTW does anybody knows of 'Leonard Kleinrock' described as "one of the original founders of the Internet" in the article and an expert witness ?" I wonder whether the mimeograph machine would survive if it was invented today.

Comments

Kleinrock

[Amazing Quantum Man]

Leonard Kleinrock.

Unfortunately the RIAA page is /.'ed. Great way to use that Berman-Coble DOS self-help!

Re:Kleinrock

[theukrainian]

there is an ongoing debate on who "invented" packet switching; who invented internet; etc. however, discounting Dr. Kleinrock would be foolish. ever heard of queueing theory? I think the argument against his contribution goes something like "well, he did all his work for a single node, so its irrelevant". However, as I understand it, there are plenty of evidence that this is not entirely true. Furthermore, his contributions to internet through the great body of work in the queueing theory are hard to ignore.

The "first node of the Internet?" You can't have an Internet with only one node.

Now, this statement of yours makes so little sense, its not even funny. Go read up on some history of what really happened (just the facts)
and you'll see exactly where this comes from.
(would you trust vint cerf saying the same thing.. which he did...?)

This is a problem with posts like this: people try to make smart-ass remarks, and give others wrong perceptions.

Re:Kleinrock

[AyeRoxor!]

"The "first node of the Internet?" You can't have an Internet with only one node."

And I suppose Wal-Mart can't have a chain of stores planned if they've only so far built one of them?

twit.

If his computer was the first on a network/protocol that grew from there, then yes, he was the first node.

Leonard Kleinrock

[DonJefe68]

I believe he was one of the engineers at BBN that helped on the development of the Net through a grant from DARPA. If you want more data, try Nerds 2.0.1 or Where Wizards Stay Up Late, both available from your favorite bookseller.

Summary judgement ....

[taniwha]

For the non-US readers - very simply (nothing really is in law) the idea is that the court has two things to decide - "findings of fact" and "findings of law" - if there is disagreement on the facts you go to trial, witnesses etc, to figure what's "true". If you agree on the facts then the judge can just rule on the law "is what's happening, based on the facts, illegal".

It's a great way to short-circuit an expensive long trial .... if you win ...

IANAL etc

Summary Judgement

[victim]

For the 10,000th time...

This is just a summary judgement request. I've never been involved in a case (thankfully few) where both sides didn't file requests for summary judgement. Its just lawyer chest thumping. The lawyers says "My case is so strong there is no possible defense." Then the judge whips out his denied stamp, whacks both summary judegment requests and the case proceeds.

Now, if the judge grants this, then that would be newsworthy.

If a lawyer filing a summary judgement request is news, then you probably ought to cover every time they take a leak too.

Re:Summary Judgement

[Anonymous Coward]

I am a former law clerk for Judge Wilson, the judge that will be hearing this summary judgment motion. In my (biased) opinion, he is a great judge.

Nonetheless, he does often grant summary judgment motions. In fact, he was once reprimanded by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals for having a "rocket docket". The reason for this is that he goes to great lengths to get cases to settle before trial. He believes that most litigation is simply wasted money, where the lawyers benefit but the parties do not. So he will usually try to get rid of his cases as fast as is possible.

This means that he is willing to grant summary judgment motions, whereas sometimes other judges send things to trial if there are any possible questions.

I have no idea how Judge Wilson will respond to this particular case. He tends to be conservative, but from more of a Libertarian perspective than a Republican perspective. He is certainly not beholden to big business. I've seen him take risks to protect the little guy. Nonetheless, I'm not sure how up on technology he is, or, perhaps more importantly, how up on technology his current clerks are.

Which raises an interesting issue, actually. The law clerk job lasts one year, and typically ends around the end of August. Thus, the law clerk that will be helping him review this case will be a relative newbie. That tends to favor the side with the better lawyers.

I'd love to give the judge a call and tell him not to grant the motion, but that would be unethical.

They're Already Doing It

[Foresto]

"With this logic, PC's should be banned as they can copy music"

They're already trying to do something like that, but instead of banning PCs and services, they want to turn them into devices that they can control. For example, check out Palladium. Last time I checked, both AMD and Intel had bought in to this.

Re:How does that have any effect?

[billstr78]

If P2P networks is the method that 90% of the music traded (illegaly) uses, than shutting them down would effectivly wipe out sharing for non-motivated individuals. BTW, shutting down KaZaA and grokster would not be difficult, they would just sue the $hit out of them, like they did with napster.

Of course, where there is a will there is a way, and many motivated individuals could find alternate means to distribute music and such. As they say on /., information wants to be free.

Re:Leonard

[thelexx]

I'm not a big fan of Gore by any stretch, but these kind comments are beyond stale.

From http://internet-history.org/memories/0055.html:

Al Gore has been one of my heroes for the last decade. I became aware of him around 1990 when he started being quoted a lot by the engineering types working on internetworking issues: He was the first legislator who actually appreciated what the internet was all about, and he helped guide the 'net through a very tricky transition.

When the 'net got started in the 1970's, every computer scientist who heard about it was jazzed, but only a very select clique could get to touch it: The hardware for the internet was these special computers called IMPs (I think that was short for Intelligent Message Processors) built by Honeywell, and outfitted with software and some minor hardware modifications by Bolt Beranek and Newman, and engineering company in Cambridge, Massachussetts. In order to get one of those, you had to be a research institution with contract funded research for the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the US Department of Defense. I think the rental for an IMP was something like $100,000 per year, which had to be paid out of the overhead on the research contracts, so small colleges need not apply!

Around 1980-82, the ARPAnet had grown to include major military posts, defense contracting companies and most universities that had any defense research contracts at all. It was now carrying several different classes of traffic:
- administrative traffic for the military
- administrative traffic between the military and its contractors
- and acting as a testbed for research experiments in protocol
development.
During this period, TCP was developed, and the network switched from the original NCP protocol to TCP/IP. Shortly after that, the network had grown so large that it had run out of numbers for the IMPs (the hardware allowed 8 bits for the IMP number) and it was split into two separate networks connected by some routers called "mail bridges":
- network number 10 - ARPAnet
- network number 26 - MILnet

This split also helped calm the fears of some military people who were worried about sharing a network with potentially subversive students. This fear is why the connection between the networks was called "mail bridges" implying that only the relatively safe e-mail could get across. Despite the name, however, those were really full-fledged routers, providing a completely seamless connection.

With IP installed, and the newly invented ethernet allowing for affordable campus networks, the major universities started attaching campus networks to the ARPAnet backbone, using VAX-11/780 mini-computers with the network-aware version of UNIX that ARPA had paid University of California at Berkeley to develop.

Many of the smaller universities wanted to participate, but did not have any military reaserch contracts to qualify them, so they banded together to build a compatible network running TCP/IP over X.25 (Telenet, Tymnet). This was known as CS-NET (for Computer Science network).

By 1989, the university-to-university traffic had dwarfed the military traffic, and the DoD wanted to divest itself of the overheads of running the network, so they asked the National Science Foundation to take over. Around this time, the NSF had started a program to build - I think it was 9 - national supercomputer centers, and needed to link them with the potential users at universities. They rented a bunch of 56 kbps lines - of the same kind that ARPAnet ran on - and installed a bunch of routers built out of inexpensive PDP-11/23 minicomputers, using a software package called FUZZBALL, developed by professor Dave Mills of University of Delaware. This created a second backbone, parallel to the DoD-sponsored ARPA backbone. Since NSFnet had no military funding, there was no longer a requirement for military contracts to be connected, but since it was paid for by tax dolllars earmarked for reasearch in the national interest, it was not available to businesses, except in support of government paid research.

It was at this point that Senator Gore stepped in, and basically brokered a deal where NSF stopped paying for the network, and instead gave the universities money to buy network services. This made it possible to start network companies to compete with NSFnet and its regional affiliates. Several of the NSF-funded affiliates re-invented tehmselves overnight into for-profit ventures. NYSERnet became PSI, for example.

Without this visionary plan, there would not have been a commercial Internet.

-------------------

He has NEVER CLAIMED to have single-handedly created the internet. And it sounds to me like we could do much worse than to have him take the stand on the RIAA issue.

LEXX

Re:Before the brainwashed Gore defenders start in.

[thelexx]

What he said was factually correct. Read my comment above. And I'm not apologizing for anyone, merely pointing out that you are wrong.

LEXX

Re:Leonard Kleinrock

[Leonard Kleinrock]

I can say that it's mine, all mine. I am the king of the Internet, and you are my beautiful peasants! Or something like that.

So far as I know ...

[burgburgburg]

Morpheus also asked for summary judgement, but they wanted all of the charges dismissed. Their argument is that there are too many uses for the service for it to be shut down because of the illegal users. This was reported on Monday on news.com.

Re:Proud of himself, isn't he?

[Leonard Kleinrock]

Out of curiosity, what was the point of having the first host, as opposed to the first pair of hosts? "Hey, look at me! I'm networking with myself!"

Actually, there really was only one host on the Internet, my Internet, at the time. It was a little like masturbation. A simulation, but a pretty good one.

Your irony skillz are amazing, in that you said I created the Internet single-handedly. Twas true, twas true. Curled my hair, it did.

Leonard Kleinrock

[chunkwhite86]

Dr. Leonard Kleinrock is known as the Inventor of the Internet Technology, having created the basic principles of packet switching, the technology underpinning the Internet, while a graduate student at MIT. This was a decade before the birth of the Internet which occurred when his Host computer at UCLA became the first node of the Internet in September 1969. He wrote the first paper and published the first book on the subject; he also directed the transmission of the first message ever to pass over the Internet.
http://www.lk.cs.ucla.edu/

Mimeograph

[buzzdecafe]

The mimeograph and later xerograph did eventually prompt changes in copyright law (1976 Copyright Act)--the additional restrictions were balanced by the codifying of Fair Use. The critical differences today are that people have the ability to distribute (virtually) unlimited copies. And there is essentially no thought given to consumers' rights in new copyright legislation.

This copyright timeline highlights some of the big events. Unfortunately, it stops in 1996, pre-DMCA.

MusicCity (Morpheus) is on GNUTELLA

[Anenga]

RIAA seeks summary judgement against Musiccity , Kazaa and Grokster.

When you say "MusicCity", I'm guessing your talking about Morpheus?

Well, sorry to burst your bubble, but Morpheus is on the Gnutella Network. The Gntuella Network is decentralized (no central server, *NOT* a Napster clone) (well, if you count GWebCache/Bootstraps as being decentralized). I doubt they could stop users on Morpheus. They could stop the vendor from distributing it's client, but not the network. Since Shareaza, Bearshare, Limewire, Gnucleus, Ares, and many many others use the Gnutella network as their network of choice for their P2P Clients.

Actually, it may be good for Morpheus to be dropped from the Gnutella circle. Morpheus is hurting the network by soaking up all the leaf nodes, and not supplying the network with any Ultrapeers (in v1.0). Before, Morpheus would allow ANY of it's nodes to become Ultrapeers, now it doesn't allow ANY of them to become Ultrapeers. Errr. There is now a major Ultrapeer shortage on Gnutella (takes a long time to connect, hard to retain a stable connection).

Before, they [Morpheus] wouldn't allow any of teir nodes to become ultrapeers, flooding the network with bad Ultrapeers (you have to be "elected" as an Ultrapeer with good details: Good OS (not Win 98/95), Good Connection (T1 and higher probably), and have a good uptime history. Morpheus ignored that, and just let anyone of their nodes become an Ultrapeer. Hurting the network.

Morpheus has proven unable to keep up with the times. They have yet to implament major Gnutella fundamentals into their system. Ultrapeers, Partial File Sharing, Upload Queue, Download Mesh... I've seen none of that.

So long Morpheus. Lets hope MusicCity doesn't bring down the rest of the network circle along with it...

FastTrack is Centralized

[Anenga]

Is it really as decentralized as it's touted to be?

Just last week ago an article popped up on the File Sharing Portal ZeroPaid which described new evidence that FastTrack (Kazaa, iMesh etc.) has more of a centralized nature than we once believed.

Not only does it have a Centralized server used as a Bootstrap (To find Supernodes), but it also has NETWORK SUPERNODES. Meaning, they are dedicated Supernodes on a server. They are always up, always fast, always avaliable. In addition, the Network has a central server for bootstrap porposes and so that they can regulate which clients connect to the network (they have a gateway system, that's how they turned off Morpheus). Network Peers and regular Supernodes (computer users) are involved as well.

The developers of FastTrack (names) have opened a new website called Joltid which has a model similar to what the RIAA said it was like. I'm guessing the website is for companies to purchase the technology, but the developers will no longer release clients for free to the public. This is obviously saying "Kazaa is gone, time to start up a new company."

Oh well. If FastTrack goes down (which it will), there are many, many, many alternatives.

Kleinrock in his own words

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's a post from my site in which Kleinrock explains his role in packet switching. It ran on Slashdot about a year ago.