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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 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
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.