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Verizon Loses Suit Over Subpoena of Subscriber Info
Brian Golden writes "As a result of a suit filed by the RIAA, the identity of a Verizon customer with a penchant for mp3's was ordered to be released. Man, how many people are now sweating bullets trying to remember what they downloaded?" News.com.com also has a story. If you've forgotten about this case, see our earlier story. Verizon wasn't making any sort of principled stand to protect its users' privacy, it just wanted to avoid the costs of complying with the (many) subpoenas it will now receive.
The power's concentrated in the hands of the copyright holders, who have the money and the control. The DMCA was passed because they wanted it; the Verizon motion was decided this way because they wanted it...a w/
http://www.geocities.com/digitalmilleniuml
geek. lawyer.
What if someone launches a large scale DDoS attach from their netblock? You'd think they'd like to be aware of it...
The recording industry asked Verizon last summer to reveal the name of a customer believed to have downloaded more than 600 songs in one day, but Verizon refused
(Emph mine.) So just based on the fact that the customer might have downloaded [any number] of songs, they have convinced the federal government to step in and force Verizon to release information to a group of record companies? This is revolting.
But who is to say it was you using that computer? It is exactly like those automated speeding ticket cameras, just tell them someone else was driving (unless they were smart enough to take a picture of the driver, which very few of the systems do).
Oh, yeah... FP!
Ok.
What happens if, say, I have my MP3 collection on my computer at home. I get permission to temporarily use the storage at work while doing a reformat of my computer. When I download all the files back to my computer at home, is the RIAA going to come knocking?
Two choices: encrypt the entire collection or re-rip from CD. I don't know which would take longer.
...
tell it to the judge, you're going to court and will have to foot the bill for the expenses.
Sure you may get off, but it will be 25,000 dollars later.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Jeez.. come on, you think they are going to go after your little brother for downloading Weird Al recordings?
hrm.. maybe they will...
But I doubt it. However, they are using tactics like these to scare people, and it is working (the comment about sweating in the main post) and that is ridiculous.
We need a good encrypted filesharing app, with each box running it using a PGP key which is publically available *offshore* somewhere.. This could all be automated of course.
grumble
anime+manga together at last.. in real time.
A federal judge ordered Verizon Communications Tuesday to turn over the name of a customer suspected of downloading songs over the Internet, handing a victory to recording companies in their fight against online piracy.
But what if I start my own ISP and the database of customer records is indexed without any information that would be able to identify the person or phone line that's dialing in to use our Web access services?
Any payment information would be done with cash only and written on pencil and paper kept in a lockbox or safe of some sort so that no matter what a court rules, my customers remain anonymous.
Is this feasible?
Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate. Ex-O'Reilly/MIT employee, now a full-time Google employee.
What if John Doe didn't know he was sharing them?
example:
Left a port open,
someone else had compromised his machine,
a software product didn't install correctly, etc...
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I propose a cash only, recordless DSL ISP. In our customer agreement we specifically state that people may pay by cash, or money order, and even if they do pay with credit cards, no records will be kept, beyond, payment received for modem #12345. No customer names are ever to be kept. Why do I care what your name is, all that matters to me is that you pay your bill, all that matters to you is that your DSL modem works. For obvious reasons, no outgoing port 25 traffic allowed, otherwise this could be spammer heaven. Customers would have to submit payment along with the uniq number identifying thier DSL modem. That keeps the modem on for another month. Once the transaction is verified, no records are retained, and we never link IP address to DSL modem. Maybe we implement a daily rotating DHCPd IP scheme for good measure. Supeona my business records? sure, here's 100000 cash receipt stubs with no names, have a ball.
Anything you write down, record on tape, commit to a file on your computer, or store in any way other than in the meat between your ears can come back to haunt you.
Verizon should make sure they log as little as possible - keep IP to User ID logs for not more than a day, don't log ANY actions of your proxy servers, and so on.
Then, when the *AA comes and says "We need all your logs for the past week so we can find this pirate", Verizon can say "Here's all the logs we have - the last 23 hours. Cheers!"
If you absolutely feel you must have the possiblity of accessing logs older than that, then encrypt them with a public key. Let the private key be held by an individual in another country. If you need to access the logs, you mail the encrypted log to him, he decrypts it and sends it back.
Then if you are served, you give the logs to the nice officers, and then tell your friend that you have been served. Then, even if you want the logs decrypted, your friend won't.
Let them go to East Elbonia if they want the logs decrypted.
www.eFax.com are spammers
An RIAA "artist" takes a chord progression and melody that's been "written" and recorded over and over again, and then RIAA sues someone for copying it? Ridiculous.
Remember when George Harrison was convicted of "copyright infringment" for the song, "My Sweet Lord" - it had the chord progression and melody of an older song, "He's So Fine". The judge ruled that if every 7th note was the same, it could be copyright infringment.
Remember when John Fogerty (the former lead singer of Creedence Clearwater Revival) was sued for sounding like himself? The record company claimed that they owned the "sound" of CCR, and John Fogerty's solo album sounded like, well, himself. How can anyone take this crap seriously?
If I never buy CDs, and I copy music from my friend who does buy CDs, what has the RIAA lost? Nothing. So how is it stealing?
The fact that people are seriously saying that a "corporation" can "own" a song just shows how far newspeak has progressed.
Is he going to be charged with unauthorized possession of electrons in a particual sequence? Will he be charged with attacking ships on the high seas?
The fact that Michael Jackson's company "owns" Beatles songs is theft IMO.
I wonder which people on slashdot are being paid to spread this "sharing is stealing" meme, and more importantly, how can I sign up?
There are two types of people; those who divide people into two types of people, and those who don't.
But now, with this one-two punch aimed at ISPs (see http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/01/18/21 16255&mode=thread&tid=141)they've started annoying the big boys - corporations with real money. No ISP in their right mind wants to have to give up their user's personal info without a fight - it makes them look bad and generates a lot of bad will with their customers.
So might it be that Verizon, AT&T, BellSouth, Earthlink, etc. will start some counter-lobbying on the Hill to get the DMCA limited? Sure, they're not really doing it for the best reasons... but you know what they say about "the enemy of my enemy."
The alleged user was not sharing 600 files, he downloaded 600 distinct files. As to how RIAA came up with that number, I presume they must have 'shared' a good amount of stuff and that particular person just so happen to have downloaded A LOT of stuff from them in order to see what was uploaded from their treasure chest.
The end result is that they were fighting for something many of us value. The US legal system is still heavily based on common law which means that a precedent set here would help us. Once again the ignorance of many "geeks" and "nerds" is astounding. It never ceases to amaze me how many take a "principled stand" yet don't have the balls to do anything themselves. I bet most of Verizon's critics on this issue can't even get off their dead asses and write their Congress(man || woman) on issues they rant and rave about on /.
Go ahead, call me a troll and label my post flamebait. I at least write my congresscritter on a regular basis and am one of the few in my area that has the balls to call out my representative in public on issues I believe in. I have confronted him before in front of a large body of people on the DMCA, a bill he is very proud of having been involved with.
It's pathetic how loud and shrill the bitching of slashdot's resident armchair revolutionaries can get.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
Say for arguments sake that my music library was recently destroyed due to a harddrive issue. I download maybe 1 song a week (if that) but ive got over 600 songs, i could get busted if i restored my collection in one day? (hypothetically, assuming i had such a collection. At any rate, I would LOVE to see the RIAA go after EVERYONE who has downloaded an MP3 from the internet. A word to the wise, if you do get busted for this, demand a jury trial and dont take any plea bargains. For that matter, dont hire an attourney, let the court provide one. If everyone who gets busted does this, pretty soon the court system breaks down. Currenttly only 5% of cases are tried by a jury, the other 95% are pleabargained down.
I've often thought about this. This is my solution.
.
:)
Assuming you run Linux, make a loopback crypto partition. However, don't just use a password for the encryption key.
Make a smallish file (128 bytes) of random uuencoded data into a file (random128bytes)
Write a shell script that prompts for your password, and uses the contents of that file with the password appended.
That way, the password is still required, but if in doubt, you can shred -u random128bytes, and you'll never be able to get it back. Knowing the password won't help you at all.
Any suggestions for improvements from the Slashdot paranoids?
Get your own free personal location tracker
This is:
1.An attempt, and order BY the government to uphold the will of a corporation, above and beyond that of the citizens. Therefore:
2.A hostile act by the government against the citizens of this nation.
--otterpop378
If the RIAA doesn't know who the person is, how do they know the person unlawfully downloaded the music? That person may be legally entitled to possess copies of those 600 tracks as they may already own the CDs. For all they know, this person may be a record company employee!
I certainly feel I am doing nothing wrong if I download tracks I already own on CD, and I certainly own right to play more than 600 tracks. More like 6000!
According to what I read in the complaint, the DMCA authorizes a publisher to subpoena the identity of an alleged copyright infringer. "...RIAA believed a computer on Verizon's internet service was distributing to the public for download unauthorized copies of hundreds of copyrighted sound recordings..."
Was the verizon subscriber targeted because he was downloading RIAA music files, or because he was publishing (offering for download) RIAA music files?
Enquiring minds want to know? I expect a retraction (or a re-write) of the Reuters quote any time now. I suspect the RIAA FUD campaign is working too well, inadvertently causing some journalist with average integrity to because a part of their FUD engine. Can a publisher assert copyright infringment charges against a posessor (rather than a publisher) of an unauthorized copy of a copyrighted work?
The thing about things we don't know is we often don't know we don't know them.
600 files? I could easily share more than 600 files worth of public domain software, music, and books.
600 files is jack shit. This is a small server. They're after the Joe Nobodies now.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Wouldn't it be funny if all the file were fake? Ie they either used that Kazaa cheating program which makes it seem like you have more files then you do, or they just renamed some text files Brittney_Spear_mp3.
:-). Actually she said they were both very nice, and she mentioned to the RIAA guy about downloading music. The one thing he said besides explaining about some madeup revenue losses is that in the coming year aka now, the RIAA was going to go full tilt against private citizens who share their files on peer2peer programs. Now I know this is a big "no shit", but this was from someone in the thick of it and he said suits against individuals was going to become VERY common as opposed to suits against just the networks. So take it FWIW, but if your still sharing mp3's on Kazaa etc you may be in for more than you bargined for.
Also true story. My girlfriend was at a wedding recently in Washington(I couldn't make it). On both sides of her were two lawyers. One worked for MS the other for the RIAA. She said they were lucky I wasn't there
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
In recent weeks I have had KaZaa open 24/7 for sharing. Not 600 files, I share over 3000 files, simply to thumb my nose at these zealots.
With this said, let us take into consideration a suit by the RIAA against me, given that they get my name and information. A cease and desist letter? Sure, I'd probably cease, but what if I continued to share?
I'm a senior in college. I own a crappy car, rent an apartment, and have quite low income. So what then? What will they get if they sue me? Nearly nothing. They can have my student loan, my car, and my apt. Kick me off my ISP, I'll find another.
The RIAA seems to not understand that civil lawsuits mean nothing to those who have nothing. This means most college students. This means most of the file sharers.
Do you think I'd be downloading all the free music I want if I could afford it? (Yes, probably, but I'm just making a point)
One should really be asking, why in hell would Verizon even have captured that information in the first place? If they didn't have the information, they couldn't be forced to turn it over.
As to the subpoena, how can they get a subpoena to gain information about a customer who may have done nothing wrong? I hold in my hand a box of CDR marked "CD-R DA", "Digital Audio", "for Music Use". I've paid an extra tax that goes right to the music industry because they expect me to use these CDRs to record copyrighted audio onto them. How can I be doing anything that merits a subpoena and invades my privacy if they have already accepted my money based on the expectation I will record music on these CDRs?
I hope his isn't the only wave of Subpoenas that Verizon is dreading. I sure want to see the subpoenas flooding in when people want to know why the hell Verizon snooped on their Internet use and logged this.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Stop breaking the net for millions of legitimate home users.
My mail server is much better run, much more reliable, and much more secure than most ISPS.
Instead of using DHCP at all, move to IPV6 and give everyone static addresses.
Give everyone a static IP and stop logging what users do. There is no need, apart from marketing private information, for an ISP to log their own users. Filter spoofed IP packets from emerging from their networks, and then let complaints about malicious user activities (DDOS, SPAM) come with a logged IP address and then the ISP under the right circumstances can track the attacker down, securely, correctly, and without violating everyone's privacy.
And if the complaint is without merit, issue a new IP at the user's request.
the question is not about anonymity to avoid prosecution. the question is about who should be forced to cooperate at what cost for what crime. verizon or any other isp now needs to comply with potentially millions of subpeona automatically generated through viruses and worms by RIAA. they must not make mistake, lest they get sued by users for violating their privacy. this is a huge burden on any isp. in the past, it was presumed that isps just carry information and they should not need to comply with such subpeonas, but now that has changed.
No kidding. Although, in a way, it would also be a mixed blessing. Think of it this way: there's no better way for John Q. Public to wake up to all the crap and unfairness going on with the MPAA/RIAA than for his best friend to get sued to oblivion for downloading music/movies that he very well might legally own. Once that happens, just wait and watch for the headlines on your local favorite news channel. "Boy Sued For $1 Millon For Downloading Music To Replace Scratched CDs He Dropped In Shitter."
Of course, for every legitimate download there's probably 10-100 fold "illegal" downloads going on, and that's all the MPAA/RIAA really cares about. As Jay in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back so sussenctly put it, "we're going to get our MUTHAfuckin' movie check."
"Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned for SEGA. ..."
What in your opinion should be done to people who are obviously using the Internet to break copywrite laws?
It's NOT OBVIOUS that a copyright law is being broken.
That's my whole point.
Assumptions are being made and being treated as fact. For just being suspected of violating copyright law the RIAA now has the power to start collecting personal information about who you are.
That's equivalent to me going to your bank and telling them I suspect you of fraud and to give me your bank account number and contact information.
That's the kind of precedent that's being set here.
Do you want anyone with a suspicion to be able to gather sensitive, personal information about you like that?
Verizon wasn't making any sort of principled stand to protect its users' privacy, it just wanted to avoid the costs of complying with the (many) subpoenas it will now receive.
Maybe not. When companies recieve subpoenas, they often recieve some reimbursement for copying charges and the like.
My thought for the reason that Verizon was against this is because, as much as they don't want to admit it, P2P music sharing is broadband's killer app. Sure, they can brag that you can load pages faster, not have a second phone line, and that you can watch streaming video, but the main reason many people get broadband is p2p music piracy. If the RIAA makes it hard for people to use p2p, or makes broadband providers block p2p, Verizon will have fewer customers, and hence smaller PROFITS! It's one of those cases where what's good for the company is also good for the customer
I have blog like everyone else
Like, "Vote for me, and I'll get rid of that damn photo-radar." Democracy works sometime.
Copyright violations can be either criminal or civil. It is much easy to prove a civil case.
Sharing of MP3s from CDs that you own is a copyright violation. This was made clear in the my.mp3.com case. It does not matter if either or both parties own the CD. The possible penalty for sharing a registered copyrighted work is $30K per work (per song offered, not per song downloaded).
The $30K figure is for statutory damages. Statutory damages can be awarded even if it is not shown that any one actually made any money or that the owner lost any money or even that the violation was willful. If the copyright owner can prove any of these, the amount can be higher. Statutory damages for willful copyright violations are up to $150K per work.
Sharing because of a misconfigured P2P setup may not be willful, but is still probably a violation. The final determination is, of course, up to the judge or jury. Adding warnings like, RIAA keep out! could help the RIAA show that the violation was willful. The disclaimer that you propose is basically what my.mp3.com tried and they had to pay huge amount in damages.
The law (in the US, anyway) does not currently allow "licensing" of the type you reference. That software producers manage to make it seem like a "license" is necessary through some shrink-wrap, a sticker, and some fancy authentication code does not alter the legal fact that copyright protects the expression itself, not the individual instantiations. Licensing requires valid contracts and if you look at what is required for a valid contract, ripping a sticker is insufficient.
Your sentence must have been cut short, as you undoubtedly meant "... but lost at the District Court level, and will almost certainly take it to appeal." Verizon has a lot more to lose than the "John Doe" alleged infringer. Verizon wants to immunize itself from any activity of the users on its network, not just file sharing.
Even better excuse number 42-
I run a Wi-Fi hot spot and I don't log anything
Any sufficiently advanced man is indistinguishable from God
There are no "ranks" of the wealthy. At least not by your definition.
Fact is most americans are fucking rich as hell. People who complain about income tax keeping them down are such fucking whiners. "ohhh that big bad millionare only pays $80,000 a year, and here I am having to pay $20,000!"
Fact is, you don't have to pay that $20,000. You can tie up your funds too, it's just a question of knowing the tax law and a willingness to "invest" your money.
People are so ready to bitch about somone else having more. Seriously though, look at what you do have... we're all in the top 10% bracket in wealthiness in the world.
Face it, we're the rich bastards that make the laws. We're the ones that opress others with our so called "FreeMarket".
Sometimes we opress ourselves, but face it, we're the bad guys.