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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.
Leonard Kleinrock.
/.'ed. Great way to use that Berman-Coble DOS self-help!
Unfortunately the RIAA page is
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
sue if you're not happy with something, and everybody's guilty until proven innocent. well, nobody's innocent anymore, are they?
:|
it is rather unfortunate that the RIAA's product is less talented than it's lawyers
I don't know what it does, so I'll claim it's a napster clone...
It can be used to cut into our profits, stop it...
With this logic, PC's should be banned, as they can copy music, MSN and AOL should be shut down, since they provide access to the internet, which has illegal copies of music, and hell, XM radio should be shutdown as well, since it is hackable and can have music ripped off of it...
BLAH! Put the RIAA out of their missery, and MINE!
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
Here's his home page where he does claim to have invented the Internet.
Going further, what's to stop IRC and a number of FTP servers? I still host a ton of content on my FTP server, and it is NOT anonymous (yeah-yeah, insecure blahblah). Or, I could burn info to a CD and send it wherever to whomever, or even just email a MP3 if its small enough...
ineffective at best, i say.
----rhad
Slashdot needs to interview Natalie Portman.
The RIAA has seen what the people want, and refuse to offer them that service. Because of this, people are going to take an alternate method of getting what they want.
:)
All of this litigation is, frankly, nonsense.
If the goverment is for the people, (i know it really isnt) and the people want to be able to download mp3s. Then this should be reflected in the law of the land.
Maybe we could vote on it?
no
... and thier, um stuff, get's traded more heavily than the copywritten music on KaZaA.
It's a great way to short-circuit an expensive long trial .... if you win ...
IANAL etc
I wonder whether the mimeograph machine would survive if it was invented today.
No, but not for the reason you're thinking. It would be immediately banned as thousands upon thousands of school kids catch a buzz from sniffing the freshly printed sheets.
Karma: Professionally Doomed (mostly affected by inability to keep opinions to self)
Well, *obviously not*. I mean, major record labels didn't turn a profit while Napster, Kazaa, Gnutella, Aimster, FTP, HTTP, TCP/IP, The Internet exi - oh wait, yes they did.
Does that answer your question?
"Old man yells at systemd"
Do Kazaa, or the other people making the clients have *anything* to do with the actual network anymore? If say all of these companies were shut down, would the Kazaa/Morpheus/Kazaalite/whatever clients still talk to each other? Is it really as decentralized as it's touted to be?
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.
Putting aside the technical difficulty of shutting down a P2P network, some of this software may stand a chance in court. They are very much geared to 'file'-sharing rather than music sharing. That improves the chances that some court might see them as substantially non-infringing. Moreover, they are software programs, rather than centralized server, making the case for "the users are responsible for their own actions" stronger.
None of it matters in the end, though. There are three types of people out there: 1) There are those people who don't understand computer technology. 2) There are those people who understand it a little because they've used it. But they don't really understand it. They think that the icon is the program. They think of electronic mail as 'mail, but electronic.' And they have a fuzzy perception of information ownership. They think of people who alter the information on their computers in ways that were not intended as 'hackers' and slightly nefarious. 3) There are people who understand how computers work, and have a good idea what is happening with the 1's and 0's at any given time. Sure, they couldn't build their own OS, but they understand how it works to some degree. (Like someone who couldn't fix his car, but understands the basic concept of an internal combustion engine.)
Unfortunately, it is highly probable that the judge will belong to category 1 or 2.
History is an great thing to bring up, actually, because this pre-emptory banning of P2P services is ridiculous. When Thomas Jefferson put the idea of intellectual property into the Constitution of the United States, he did so because he realized that information leaks; once people learn something, they can reuse that knowledge. Jefferson believed that if there was no protection to intellectual property, people would not be encouraged to share knowledge with others. Writers would not write, inventors would not invent, artists would not . So in the US Constitution, it says: The reason why this is important is spelled out in Jefferson's own writings: His assumptions are based on the fact that you can not control what people do with information that you give to them. If you hand someone a book, they can transcribe it. If you give someone a physical invention, they can disassemble it. But if you give them a new form of media, say, a song on a copy-protected CD, and they can no longer listen to it except on approved devices that they cannot copy from, why should the government provide the same protection to you? The record companies and movie studios want to have their cake and eat it too. They want traditional copyright protection, technological copyright protection, and a government guarantee of technological copyright protection. They want to deprive all those bearded Linux hippies their DeCSS, so they can't watch bootleg Buffy the Vanpire Slayer DVDs in their parents' basement. But if they have technological protection, then why should the government give them traditional protection? It was only there because information was hard to protect as property.
How far are we going to let the copyrighters go? We need to remind people that copyright, like most laws in the US, is a balance between two forces, and the scale should not be tipped too far to one side.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
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
"Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world." - Alan Greenspan, 1999
the birth of the Internet which occurred when his Host computer at UCLA became the first node of the Internet
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!"
In about thirty years I'll tell you how I was the first host on Internet 3. :)
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
You create an arbitrarily sized table of randomly placed 1's and 0's... Then what you trade is files that reference where in the table the bytes for your file located in sequence... Would this still be considered piracy or intellectual property?
The reason that Napster was extremely successful and these P2P apps have been somewhat successful is because they lowered the transaction costs for successfully downloading, i.e., for every CHOSEN file they made it quicker (searching), easier (less work to download), faster (downloading...more servers...higher probability of finding a fast server), and require far less technical ability (the users skill). If you force the users back to IRC, FTP, and such you're going to:
A) Cut out 95% of the users because they won't have the necessary skills to complete most of the downloads they desire.
B) Cut out most of the people that have (or acquire) the skills because finding the files, the sites, and acquiring the trust or the ratios (maybe not necessary in this system, but that is the status quo and human nature). The few that are willing to put up the effort likely are not RIAA's better customers anyways.
C) Reduce the # of downloads of said users, by virtue of the fact that each one simply takes them longer.
Very effective.
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
"Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world." - Alan Greenspan, 1999
I _could_ download the Sopranos off the internet. I could have my friends tape it for me, or Replay it over to a VCD, but I don't, because HBO is easily available to me at a reasonable price.
Charge me $40-$60/month (which is more than i'm paying for CD every month these days), give me access to every song I want, and you'll make a killing.
Its a new era, you need a new billing scheme. Look at cable companies. Does anyone think that stealing cable is justified? They don't charge by the show, and conversely, nobody says "I'm not really stealing cable, because there's no way i'd watch 200 channels anyway." or "Yeah, i'll watch Showtime because I can, but if I couldn't get it for free, I wouldn't watch it."
It'll never happen though. They'll charge $18.99 for a highly restrictive format download of a shitty CD, then moan that nobody is buying it because of piracy.
Interesting point. The historical answer is quite revealing. The invention in question is not the memeograph, but the printing press. The printing press so threatened those in control of information at the time (the Catholic church), that the entire reformation resulted. Let's just hope this go-round is not as bloody.
> Would the record companies be able to sell into a meat-space distribution network?
.. there would not be a need for their business model.
... maybe the artists would have fought the Napsters such that they could pay proper royalties and such, but the whole point is there is no intrinsic need for the RIAA/Big label style business model for artists to earn a profit. Thats all. There isn't. Its no use wondering if the RIAA wouldn't have existed had they come in at the same time as Napster, because in that case, we'd give RIAA none of our business (I have to go to the store to buy the CD? But these other guys, I can do it from home! And make my own mix CDs! And they take less of a cut off the profits! And I dont have to buy 15 songs all at once!) and Napster all of our business. And then youd simply have the artists ensure that they were getting paid for making music. They wouldn't kill off the most innovative, competative, exciting and practically unlimited shelf-space model of p2p networks, they'd just make sure that they were in the loop.
No, but correct me if I'm wrong in stating thats the whole point of the market. There would not have been a need for them. Mind you, there may have been a need to regulate or mandate these distribution networks such that artists had to get paid, but the way the RIAA conducts business (shelfspace, adspace, and no space left over for anybody else)
But thats okay, see? I can't link the intrinsic need for the Big Label business model to the existance and development of music
We're so used to the RIAA approach that we think its required for artists to earn a living. So who cares if the RIAA's members could have survived with their approach had Napster been around at their birth? Its not like the RIAA are royalty-giving saints and p2p networks are all socialist devils. P2P networks can't pay the artists for copyrights mostly because the labels own the copyrights and dont want the p2p networks to be able to pay so that they can own all the parts of the music industry. (IE, they want to own the entire vertical market, and use the limited shelf and ad space available to artificially control who gets to profit off the music industry.)
Sorry for all the italics and bold. The only way to progress is to rip down what already exists, if you get my drift. Humans find a system that works, in the end. Any one group that becomes very powerful, such as the RIAA, simply injects unnatural market forces and distorts the perception of 'need' in a market. Its not that p2p networks dont want to be able to support royalty payments, its that the RIAA doesn't want anybody else to participate in the very market it was created to own.
The worst part is, the RIAA represents a group of labels that supposedly reps the entire music industry and yet represents itself like one company that needs to maximize all potential sources of profit. If that isn't cartel, I'm not sure what is.
"Old man yells at systemd"
Here is what I want:
The ability to download a low quality version of a song to see if I like it. If i like it, i am given the option to buy that track at a reasonable cost (I'd pay ~$1 USD, but demand a bulk discount for a whole CD): I want this track that I buy to be available NOW, in many popular formats including a lossless format suitable for burning. I want the right to copy this track to kingdom come, from my car to my home and portable.
The record companies will say that then users will take this files and exchange them all over with their friends but think about this: I have money and my time is worth money -- it it technically "cheaper" for me to pay $1 for a high-quality song and have it NOW than to spend 5 hours finding a low-quality and corrupted copy off some P2P service. As an extension of this, those who can't afford to pay for digital music cannot afford to buy the CD anyway, so no one is loosing a sale anyway.
Hilary Rosen's speech was about her love of money and her desire to roll around naked in a pile of money.
Great post. Clearly you are in tune with the mechanics of this situation.
I always found it funny that, armed with the DMCA, you can pretty much 'invent' your own copyright terms, since circumventing protections that violate the law of copyright (notably that the work must return into the public domain after some-odd yeats) is itself against the law.
Basically, we've arrived in a situation where the copyright holders can write their own blank cheques of ownership, which was one of the reasons copyright law was enacted in the first place (yes, to mandate ownership and royalties to the author, but also to break the monopoly that the Royal Family-approved publishing houses had on the social culture at the time.)
"Old man yells at systemd"
I gave $1000 to the EFF last month.
What have you done?
My word processor was written by Stanford Professor Donald Knuth. Who wrote yours?
Can someone help me locate the testimony in which Kleinrock describes how they could easily control and prevent massive copyright infringement?
I mean, I'm dying of curiosity. Every solution I can think of is either trivial to circumvent, or non-trivial to implement. Nothing falls in the classification of "easy".
Then again, I'm not Dr. Internet with a PhD from MIT.