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Studios, RIAA Warn CEOs On File Trading
pcosta writes "Record companies and movie studios are turning an anti-piracy spotlight on corporate America, sending a letter to top CEOs this week warning of illegal file trading going on at 'a surprising number of companies.' Full story on C|Net." Earlier this month, they also warned schools as well.
And what about these studios? Didn't Lucasfilm say something about studios eventually becoming unprofitable? You'd think...
I wonder if certain organizations will have web site access problems this week...
-- Note: If you don't agree with me, don't bother replying. I won't read it.
I haven't gone to the movie theatre in more than six months and it's been over a year since I bought a corporate CD (only local artists now). Who needs 'em?
The trouble with freedom and liberty is - you never know what people are going to do with it
like
---- "Logoff! That cookie shit makes me nervous!" - A. Soprano
Is it corporate spying to monitor another company's network traffic? Not to mention that the only way they could identify the material as infringing would be to intercept that traffic.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
All this will accomplish is even more restricted access from work for the poor souls destined to work for big corps. The actual pirates who take advantage of the Big Bandwidth availible "from work" will simply shift to a different medium to accomplish their crimes.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Is the company to blame if its employees are using P2P applications to share files? Whilst I can understand the $1m settlement won by the RIAA for the company allowing its employees to use their intranet to share copyrighted material, this letter is clearly aimed towards employees using their internet connection to trade peer to peer across the net.
My limited understanding of the law is that with P2P apps such as gnuttella, it is the end user who is at risk of prosecution, and not the organisation in charge of the network.
If companies are going to be sued for not firewalling P2P apps, then where is it going to end? Will the RIAA set its sights upon the ISP's? The backbone carriers?.... where will it end? *sigh*
-- 7 string electric violin + live loop samplers
What's next? Finding ISP's legally resoponsible for the actions of their customers? Telecom companies for allowing people to transmit illegal packets across their lines? IT companies for building networks that people can pirate on? PC makers for manufacturing the equipment that facilitates piracy?
What the hell happened to the individual being responbile for their own actions. This is dirty, dirty business.
I'm sure CEO's will try and get their employees to stop pirating music and movies. We all know how ethical and moral American CEO's are...
Now they threaten your teachers and your boss; hoping they'll get better results if they make it look like said lawyers would be happy to sink their teeth into larger fish. How many people are going to lose legitimate business use of their computers and the internet because of this? I already know too many places that make you sign 20 disclaimers before you can actually log on to the local network to get your email.
I think with the interesting people, their lives can't possibly be wrapped up into a nice little package.
How is the RIAA able to tell what is on MY corporate intranet? This reeks of an intrusion into my Business Confidential data in and of itself.
Please, please tell me some of you guys that maintain and monitor large corporate networks will bring this to your boss' attention when they get back from another RIAA sandpaper condo-media relations conference.
I think with the interesting people, their lives can't possibly be wrapped up into a nice little package.
Dear Hilary Rosen,
This is a warning from the Recording Industry Asscociation of america.
Some of your employees may be illegally sharing copyrighted material via P2P networks in your company. If caught, the leagl liabillities will affect your corporation. Please take the nessessary steps to prevent this from happenin
I don't know, does this sound like extortion to anyone else? They seem to be saying "police your corporate networks for our benefit, or we will sue you."
Now, most companies with intelligently run IT departments are policing their networks anyway. But this kind of thing seems to be saying that if an employee should happen to figure out a way to circumvent a company's firewall or proxy and swap files illegally on corporate bandwidth, that the company is somehow responsible and could be held liable. I think this goes beyond the level of reasonable control that companies should be required to exercise.
It seems to me that the RIAA is going after the people with deep pockets, looking to make an example of a few companies. Why go after Joe User, when you can go after Joe's employer? It's a higher profile target, and there's more to gain.
i can understand teenagers et al sharing stuff online upsetting the RIAA, but these are *supposed* to be respectfull adults, who have plenty of money to buy CDs. if the RIAA only realized that most of the people who share content are not going to buy CDs anyway, and if they DO buy CDs, it has little to do with their sharing. perhaps if the CDs were of reasonable price, ppl would consider buying them.
for example, the company i work for does not have a fancy license manager, and really anyone can steal the software if they want to, no one is stopping them, and we don't hunt them...but very few do. why? it is their ass on the line, and on top of that, they need support and consulting. if we spent a lot of money trying to stop them, for example by writing a license manager or working on protection/registration/activation schemes beyond a serial key, it would hurt the profit. if the RIAA feels that their profit is hurt, then perhaps they should revise their product or its pricing instead of going after people who use the most natural alternative.
BSD is for people who love UNIX. Linux is for those who hate Microsoft.
good point. however if it becomes possible initate a multimillion dollar lawsuit against a company which has just one employee hosting a p2p file sharing service, it would be possible to cripple or sink virtually any company with internet access.
All are sinful and fallen short of the glory of the RIAA's ideal happy little consumers.
do you think the courts would let the RIAA have that kind of power to hold the entire economy ransom?
I sit behind a computer for about 50 hours a week.
Why should I force myself to drive downtown on what little time I have off to go hunting for a cd or two that I like when I can sit at my desk and grab whatever I want whenever I want, on my computer.
It's not because I'm cheap.
It's because the recording industry is NOT offering me anything near this level of convenience.
Why I believe this is true. There is much ranting in press and /., ranting that I believe is fair, about executives treating company resources as their personal possessions. So I pose this question. Why is it wrong for an executive to borrow a plane to take his family on a trip and right for an employee to use the broadband connection to share music. Before you answer that questions think of the opportunities cost s in both situations and the relative compensations of the people in question.
In this post dot-com, post Enron world, accountability rules. If half a companies broadband is used for non-business related activity, it is valid to ask why. Music and porn sharing is also raises liability issue of a safe workplace. And, though downloading music on your personal account may not be stealing, downloading music on an account primarily used for profit is much more likely to be stealing.
So, lets not send letter to the RIAA about this. Lets concentrate on the characterizing the RIAA as overgrown script kiddies and general all around mal-contents. Again, if you want to share music, buy the connection. It seems we have much more power when we pit the financial interests of the telcos, who want to sell us broadband, against the financial interests of the music pushers, who want us sell up plastic disks. Both know on which side their bread is buttered.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Bzzzzzt! You lose ;-)
Freedom: "I won't!"
Milhouse (as Fallout Boy): Movie stardom is just so hollow.
Mickey Rooney: Hollow?! The only thing in show business that's hollow is the music industry.
Satanists get good grades too...suspiciously good grades
Napster was popular. So popular even my non techy friends were aware of it as well as Kazaa, Morpheous and others. But now because Napster is dead and many of the others have had rumors of, or had spyware in them, most of those non techy folks don't use P2P anymore. Even my techy friends don't mess with it because it's more hassle then it's worth and they are tired of going halfway thru a download and it blows up on them or there's nothing out there. Why is thr RIAA still on the warpath with this stuff when hardly anyone uses it anymore (they have all just gone back to using hidden ftp sites! :)).
Gorkman
This has nothing to do with responsible use.
If THAT were the case, such things as VCR's and CD-RW's would have coin deposit slots built into them or they would be outlawed as defined by the RIAA.
What this fight is over is who will control your computer because ALL other forms of information in the future will be computer generated. No more TV's VCR, DVD players, or Radio's...all existing media outlets and distribution channels will become exitinct.
Media giants know this, and they want to control your computer. They want to control:
What you see.
What your opinions are of what you see.
How much you can bear to pay for what you see.
What you do with the information, and if you use it pay additional royalties for the use of that information.
Without this control, thier business models as they exist today won't work.
However, what they don't understand, is that if we as a society permit this sort of control, the internet will cease to exist, for one, and there can be no such thing as free speech, free software.
It will only be speech, and those who have the cash are the only ones that will be heard in this new vision.
Technology enables the individual to make decisions and to be much more indepedant from being tied to distributor resources, like Muscians for example. So all the money you normally pay the RIAA for distribution, is not valuable on the internet since one person can do exactly the same thing the RIAA does, at basically far less cost.
The RIAA wants to repserve the value of thier distribution channels as they exist today, so the muscian won't have a choice and won't get any ideas they can do it themselves, cutting out the RIAA.
THIS is what this whole thing is about, really.
The RIAA could care less about you guys copying music. You have been doing it for decades with tape decks. What has changed is that the internet makes them irrelevant.
The Billions that they make could be going to muscians pockets, and not into price fixing, which they do with thier distributors right now.
They MUST be stopped, or my very busines, and the software I use will become ILLEGAL in this country.
And STOPPED they will, if not by us, 3 Billion raging Chinese Linux users who will.
Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
Maybe employees who are working for these corporations should be doing their jobs. If they have enough time on their hands to use P2P networks--and waste someone else's money in the process--maybe that's one position the company can do without the next time some cuts have to be made.
My office has a fairly liberal policy on non-business-related web use; but the shit would hit the fan fast if folks started getting busted for using Kazaa, etc., or even for using file-shares to trade music over the office intranet. A certain level of freedom to use the internet at work is good for morale; but that freedom doesn't need to include the "freedom" to violate copyright.
'Course, most corporations with an IT department worth its salt will have the most popular filesharing programs' ports blocked, anyway. But from the sound of this latest RIAA temper tantrum, a lot of corporations' IT departments are asleep at the wheel.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
I speak from experience here.
:
I work as a technician / 'network engineer' at a college... We have spent a LOT of time trying to prevent our fantastic (mutter) students from getting on p2p networks but it is very difficult.
We have tried many different things, including
* Recent installation of a firewall - it has helped a little, but some p2p apps go out on 'safe' ports like 80.. we haven't quite got to the packet filtering stage though.. this might help.
* Using some of the tools on the quite amazing Trinux security tool kit.. on our switched network, we set up a port span between the router, and a port in our office - we could then run utilites like ntop to identify who was hogging bandwith, or tcpkill all data on, for example, port 1214 (Kazaa). Very cool, very powerful, and of course it is free - I think if they have a donations page though, we should be paying a visit.
* Installing policies and software on client machines to attempt to block students from installing things like Kazaa.. has helped a great deal, but those determined enough seem to be able to circumvent it.
Maybe the RIAA need to be a little more sympathetic.. yes, in some situations companies can be using file sharing apps quite happily breaking the law. But in situations like ours, where we have spent bloody weeks of time trying to find solutions to stop it, they need to be a little more easy going! Our network has 1,500+ client workstations and only 15 or so technicicans to police it.. can be pretty tough to identify those abusing it.
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
But maybe that's another one of those pesky laws that only apply to citizens. Because when we have examples like:
...it sure seems difficult to convince most rational people that these aren't instances of blackmail.
Dear CEO:
That's a pretty nice corporate LAN you've got there. Be a shame if we had to come in and audit your Microsoft licenses because you didn't send us a few more wheelbarrows full of money to make sure you're 100% compliant-- at least, until the next time we need to bolster our balance sheet.
Sincerely,
Microsoft
and now, the latest:
Dear CEO:
Those are some pretty nice profits you've got there. Be a shame if we had to send in the copyright attorneys to take some of it because you didn't do enough to stop copyrighted filesharing on your network to satisfy us.
Sincerely,
Hilary and Jack
~Philly
Maven? He's a kid at a university! (But then again, when I was 22 years old, I seem to recall that I was the smartest guy in the world. I also must have believed I was immortal, but let's not go there...)
What I don't understand is why there is any kind of discussion at all on this particular thread. OF COURSE companies are going to come down on employees using their resources for file-sharing. Companies are cracking down on their employees for all manner of time-and-resource wasting endeavors, why should music file-sharing, which has the additional stigma of its dubious legality, be condoned, when the foosball table has already been sent to auction?
Legality aside for a minute, an employee's file-sharing on company time is a waste of resources, and just plain un-productive. You want to share files, update your Blog (blogs... ye gods!), tinker with the wallpaper on your iPAQ, whatever, Do It On Your Own Time, on your own computer, across your own wires. Period, Full Stop, End of Story.
An employee who would never dream of sitting at his desk reading a newspaper doesn't think twice about reading an (easily and quickly minimizable) online version of that same newspaper. Someone who would never in a million years think about spreading his record collection out on his desk at work and organizing it by artist and genre has no problem taking the same amount of time out to do so with his MP3s. Why? Because it LOOKS LIKE HE'S WORKING, and the bosses are fooled.
Those damn bosses...
Hey, Corporate Manager, want to increase employee productivity by at least 35% across the board? Ensure that everyone's computer monitor is viewable from the hallway outside his/her office or cube. Sure, you'll get a few, most likely just out of University, who'll exit loudly, babbling something about "employee rights," "corporate Nazis," and "going home to Mommy," but I'll wager that, from a productivity perspective, you won't miss 'em.
Later, on an individual basis, you can start allowing employees to move their monitors back to their customary positions of concealment, once trust has been re-earned.
I've already gotten my cease and desist letter...
The complaining party, the Interactive Digital Software Association ("IDSA"), specifically requests that you immediately cease and desist in the distribution of copyrighted software. In addition, please inform the Abuse Department of (my ISP) in writing, that the alleged activity has ceased.I think that everyone needs to realize that when you fire up a gnutella client, you are broadcasting what you have on your computer and the files that you are sharing for all to see. It doesn't take much coding to start logging who is sharing content that you own. It also doesn't take long to cross reference the IP address and find out who owns those addresses.
If you are sharing files on a gnutella client you can expect to get a cease and desist email from your ISP eventually. Many ISP's are receiving notifications from contents owners on a weekly basis. Sharing files on gnutella violates virtually every usage agreement that I have ever seen. Although the ISP's don't want to loose customers, they don't want to take the heat for being unresponsive.
I don't think that the Copyright holders are going to change their minds anytime soon. Right now it is probably much cheaper for them to hire a few coders and a few lawyers and start scaring people than it is to try to develop new business models.
I think that things will slowly change. There are already people out there trying out new business models. Some artists are also into it. Eventually someone will figure out a reliable way to make money and artists will eventually follow. I think that it is going to take years though. The establishment has things locked down pretty tight.
At my company, we're running a server were workers can upload their MP3s so all the other (1200+) workers can listen to them as streams via their standard MP3 player.
We asked our local version of the RIAA whether this is legal, and after some debate with our legal department, they concluded that yes, it is. Even though you might argue that those streams could be saved to hard drive and taken home, it still is perfectly fine.
I hope the US also has this much freedom, so you could just stream your MP3s or Oggs instead of putting them on a fileserver somewhere.
RIAA's intent is not to kill on-line music distribution, but to control it (and use it as a cash cow).
The Raven
The Raven