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P2P File Sharing Could Cost You A Bundle
geekee writes "CNET posted an article claiming you could be liable for $250,000 in fines and up to 3 years in prison for p2p file sharing. This is due to an obscure law called the No Electronic Theft (NET) act passed in 1997 (signed by Bill Clinton). Although the Justice Department has not prosecuted anyone under this new law, some members of congress have asked John Ashcroft to begin prosecuting. In response to the request, John Malcolm, a deputy assistant attorney general, said to expect some NET Act prosecutions."
(a) DEFINITION OF FINANCIAL GAIN- Section 101 of title 17, United States Code, is amended by inserting after the undesignated paragraph relating to the term `display', the following new paragraph:
`The term `financial gain' includes receipt, or expectation of receipt, of anything of value, including the receipt of other copyrighted works.'.
Very nice. I just traded some recently-read books with my mom. Does this mean I'm gonna fry (she'll probably turn me in 'cuz she's like that)?
Honestly, this law will never be used against the "normal" citizen. However, what should worry you is this, the law can be used to imprison or harm people who the gov't (or a malicious DA) wants out of the way.
Let's say you have a paranoid administration like the Nixon one, or a socio-fascist one like FDR's that wants an easy way to get rid of dissidents. What's a good way? Find out that they used Kazaa a few times, and imprison them for a few years.
This law is another example of government intrusion into your everyday life through regulation and taxes.
"Bring back the Articles of Confederation!"
Do you legislators ever vote for you?
I have a hard time believing that Swiss Citizens have voted on every single line in the law books. When Switzerland joined the UN recently, did you actually vote on that, or did some representative vote in your name,.
Not a flame, but I'm curious how it works in other countries (I got some idea when I spent a week there in June, but a week is so little time).
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
Instead of hammering redhat, Freebsd, ftp.kernel.org every time the latest and greatest is released, wouldn't it be a better use of resources to make a kazaa-like program that distributes the bandwidth of multiple mirror sites? I seem to remember something similar to this being discussed before but has anything like that been done? I actually feel kinda bad that my most "local" redhat mirror is ftp.redhat.com so I purposely rotate ftp sites to even things out.
we voted actually :p
and our system works
with and without holes in our cheese
stop supporting microsoft with pirating their software!!!!!
Part of what you've said is true, theft is theft. But using p2p isn't, and nor is (was) sharing files via p2p. Some people would argue it is in the entertainment industry's best interest
Say I have a CD of "Revolver" by the Beatles, I can legally convert it to MP3. But converting CDs to MP3 is a drag, if I can't be stuffed doing the conversion, I can log into napster and download the MP3s. Similarly, if I want to save other owners of that CD the hassle of converting their CDs to MP3, there is nothing wrong with me sharing the files via p2p.
The problem comes when someone who doesn't own the CD downloads the files from me. Now personally, I don't care -- I think it is up to each person to decide what laws they're willing to break -- but I still haven't broken any laws (or at least I shouldn't have). Just because what I do makes it easy for others to break the law shouldn't make what I do illegal.
Lets ask law enforcement to prosecute the NET charges against the MPAA and RIAA agents that violate the terms of use and copyrights of websites while they search for pirated software.
Fight Spammers!
I just brought up the text of the bill. I'll give my obligatory IANAL here, but in order to be prosecuted under the bill, it looks like you must:
Traffic copies ammounting to over $1000 in retail value within a 180 day period.
Engage in electronic reproduction for financial gain
So, if you aren't selling the right to download your MP3s, or burning and selling (at a profit) CD s of material you download, or even if you do these things on a very small scale, it looks like you can't be prosecuted. This law does not affect the average P2P user, it just affects people who bootleg as a business and happen to use P2P networks to accomplish their goals.
Anonymous Luddite: "What do you think of the dehumanizing effects of the Internet?"
Andy Grove: "Not Much."
I've yet to read the law, but that would seem to indicate that you would be fscked if you used Kazaa and even traded just one mp3.
The idea of facing even $5,000 in fines for obtaining a few hundred songs illegally should be considered ludicrous. This fine should be at the top of such a penalty, and only in extreme circumstances. A $250,000 fine for such a thing sounds, to me, simply un-American. We like our lax criminal penalties. Who does the RIAA think they are?!
Regardless of how much you disagree with a license, doesn't make it any more right to turn around and do the same thing that you hate so much when you're on the other side.
At the risk of being labeled a troll right off the bat, quite a number of people here seem like a bunch of whiny people who feel that they can just take what they want from other people, but their heads virtually explode when the shoe is on the other foot.
Also I wonder if it's possible to intersect and analyze any IRC/SSL (IRC over SSH) traffic? Because, if it's not possible, than I'll encrypt my filesystem and FBI can forget about any evidence.
Well, fortunately I am not living in USA anymore and perhaps I can forget about crazy USA govt for awhile... untill slashdot will remind it again in such crazy news :)
Less is more !
Interesting, I don't think I can buy any of the MP3's I have on my computer... They're all ripped from CD's. Does that mean the RIAA gets to set the retail CD price, and set it equivalent to the price they recently were (all but) convicted of fixing at a tremendous markup?
If you assume 20 dollars per retail CD, with 8 songs per album, you're docked 2 and a half dollars per album. That's 400 songs, or 30 real albums (albums with more than 8 songs... Kind of like the equivalent of 421 CD Burners). If you have ripped a portion of your CD collection to your drive, that should be enough to push you over the theoretical limit, and somehow I doubt you will be able to convince the judge to look at your Kazaa preferences file to prove that you are only sharing legal fansub anime.
On the other hand, it does say that this distribution must occur during a 180 day period, which would imply that it is not enough to just have music on your machine, but you must actively upload 400 songs in 6 months... or about two per day, irrespective of the total on your hard drive. This sort of rate would be difficult to prove, though I tend to think that judges would accept an average rate extrapolated to a long period of time, rather than requiring the justice department to tap your line for 400 songs. I've seen an older client serve more than that at a single time, but newer ones tend to throttle that to something that won't DOS itself. Still, a newer client throttled down to 3KBps, with sharing on for only one person, can theoretically serve up a song every 16 minutes. If we assume that half of the time the computer sits idle, and 80% of song transfers are aborted / fail %50 of the way through, You get a successful song transfer ($2.50) every hour and a half. If you leave your computer running all of the time (but, as previously mentioned, Kazaa only half the time), you are stealing $6,480 dollars every 180 days from Bertlesman's pockets. Assuming the previous success rates, and the minimum bandwidth / transfer settings for non-scrubs, you would need to have Kazaa running for less than 1.8 hours per day. Not terribly hard, but it is primarily a background task. Perhaps it is time to share only indies and bands with talent?
Does Kazaa leave logs?
The ______ Agenda
IANAL and all that.
Do you think they can jail those users that work for the RIAA (or others) and try to infiltrate the P2P networks ? They intentionally share low-Q content but it's still copyrighted content right ?
That would really make my day!
Write boring code, not shiny code!
Millions of dollars in politicking and legal fees of course. I wonder if the music industry cut back on political donations and spending millions of dollars on lawyers to issue lawsuit upon lawsuit and C&D upon C&D, if this would improve their bottom line...
Strategically, it's flawed. Sure stealing is stealing is stealing, but the value is so high en mass and the method of stealing is so easy (you don't even have to intrude or even interact with the person being stolen from) that people will find ways to circumvent it.
Since (I imagine) there are literally thousands of amoral people with enough programming talent, knowledge of network protocols, and spare time, I can't see a few "test cases" putting an end to sharing.
Essentially, the investigators will have to monitor the networks to see where files come from, then seize the computers to show that the file lists are the same as they monitored.
If one builds an IP spoofing scheme (similar to Triangle Boy, for example) into a P2P protocol, the actual IP of the sharer could be hidden. Then reasonable doubt goes out the window.
Prosecutions would then have to focus on the downloaders, which is a much more difficult problem because it takes quite a bit to get to the value trip points.
(Not that I'm trying to give anyone ideas or anything or trying to suggest that there may be a degree thesis in this scheme.)
Actually I have been doing this for a while now. Kazaa is too much trouble.
Setup ssh plus a few user accounts. Swap with friends, one to one.
No different than trading tracks in the old days via analog methods. Remember ogg/mp3 is a lossy format.
Blogging because I can...
I don't think there are any extradition agreements that apply to civil lawsuits. In general, the purpose of extradition is to allow people charged and convicted in due process to be handed over to the respective authorities.
However, that never applies to crimes committed outside of the jurisdiction of the court seeking extradition. For example, if you breack American copyright law in Germany and get charged and convicted in the US for that violation in a criminal case, extradition agreements do not apply because the US court had no jurisdiction over you. Most likely, it won't even get that far as a judge in general will not accept cases that the court has no jurisdiction over.
"Light is faster than sound." - "Is that why people tend to look bright until you hear them speak?"
I use Windows (so sue me), and WinXP does support encrypted file systems. How secure is it though? Secure enough that if my PC were ever seized that they couldn't get the data off of it? Anyone know?
A quick check of Kazaa on Friday afternoon showed that there were 4.1 million users online
4.1 million * $250,000 ~= 1 trillion
Cool, now we can pay off the national debt and pay for the tax cut. Oh wait, the national debt is 6.4 trillon. Better raise the fine to a couple million!
(1) for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain
:)
Perhaps you're right. But consider the following: By downloading an MP3, you are saving yourself $17 by not buying the CD. It may not be much, but it's still a private financial gain. 17 bucks is 17 bucks. Multiply by the number of MP3's you might have (currently a little over 4,000 in my collection, though I ripped the huge majority of that myself), and it comes out to a *lot* of money you might have saved.
All I can say is thank heavens the US has no jurisdiction in my neck of the woods.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
Jabber, right? Easy to use client (actually many clients), extensible by new transports server, which has already got IRC transport, by the way.
If Kazaa will go down it will be a matter of weeks that Jabber will get P2P substitution transport extension, which will be based on current IRC transport, but will use also some dialog scripts with bots.
It could be not IRC and not Jabber - the name might be different. But you've got an idea - it will be next generation of P2P network with no one central server.
When many servers replicate each other in many countries - forget about any chances to shut such network down.
And don't worry about client - OSS will give you several of them. Perhaps some of them will be just as web pages. Like admin port of CUPS print server :)
Less is more !
It appears this is just a rehash of the same old copyright enforcement act. You remember, that annoying FBI/Interpol warning before every movie on tape, LD and DVD. The warning that somehow never makes it into your 'archival' copy. States something about several thousand dollars in fines and possible jail time for non-archival copying of the movie.
Want to hit these jokes where it hurts? Write a decentralized Kazaa that uses pseudo-random rotating ports and a healthy encryption mix. Make sure you use all the standard ports as well as ports for gaming systems (PS2 & Xbox). Encryption doesn't have to be too heavy - 128bit for searches and 40bit for transfers. When the court commands the ISPs to monitor traffic the ISPs have to tell the court to stick it since the DMCA (?!) won't allow cracking/breaking encrypted communications.
A fine should relate to the damage done, right? How to prove you did so much damage? The RIAA would like people to believe that every single CD shared is the full price of that CD stolen from the artist. Come on! We all know that the truth is far from that, and hard to calculate, or even prove that damage was actually done.
Prison? Aren't they already crowded in the US? So, next to thieves and murderers, fill them up with P2P file sharing folks? Yeah, sure.
Prosecution by the Justice Department? I thought they were there to serve the public, to keep serial killers of the street and so on. Spend tax payers money for prosecuting folks that share their favourite musician's work with other fans? Get real.
And get it to stand up, when going through the higher courts? I don't think so.
Who to begin with? More users of any P2P network than there are lawyers on total in the world...
It's really amazing that such nonsense laws actually get passed in 'the land of the free'.
And really useful too. Crackdown on KaZaA, and the next popular P2P network will be one that's harder to force out of existence.
Actually the NET act has a clause stating that it does nothing to effect prior fair use laws. Anything you could do before you can do now.
Then again, to hear some people tell it, watching a TV show without watching commercials is theft too, so I think fair use was obsoleted long before this thing happened.
I read about this awhile ago and tried it out. It's totally 100% invisible. No one knows who the hell you are, not even the people running it. There is no possible way for them to find out either. Obviously it's run on it's own software, a frontend to MIRC, and you can only connect to IIRC servers, but like I said, there is no way to find out who you are via ANY method. Here is the rundown of quick stats and then I'll post the url:
Perfect Forward Security using Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange Protocol
Constant session key rotation
128 bit Blowfish node-to-node encryption
160 bit Blowfish end-to-end encryption
Chaffed traffic to thwart traffic analysis
Secure dynamic routing using cryptographically signed namespaces for node identification
Node level flood control
Seamless use of standard IRC clients
Gui interface
Peer distributed topology for protecting the identity of users
Completely modular in design, all protocols are plug-in capable
http://www.invisiblenet.net/
http://www.invisiblenet.net/iip/index.php
While I do think the war on drugs is a fraud, and a violation of basic human freedoms (ultimately, to do what you want with your own body) I really don't think it's comparable with P2P - I think far more people will be dissuaded by enforcement in this case, since the rewards are far less and the risk of being caught is somewhat greater.
That's all well and good but the war on drugs is supposed to stop people preying on the weak and the feeble. e.g. selling drugs to kids, giving crack to the homeless.
Also, some drugs make the users dangerous to other people (e.g. alcohol!).
I have no problem with a consenting adult taking drugs for recreation, they can even kill themselves for all I car, that's their freedom but I don't want them giving drugs to my kids to turn them into addicts and I don't want them inciting people to cause dangerous crimes to get more drugs.
Do what you do to your own body, fine, but what happens when YOU are carjacked and murdered for the money in your wallet and the parts to your car, just so someone can get their fix?
Don't be so naieve
Troc
Troc's dubious podcast and blog: http://www.trocnet.net
In fact they did recount the votes because it was so close. In the UN referendum b.t.w. it was not the majority of cantons that mattered, but the overall majority of votes.
For some referendums both a canton and an overall voter majority is required, for some only a voter majority will do.
The Swiss have indeed not voted on every single line of lawtext, but if anyone disagrees with some part of a law, he can start a referendum to have it changed.
Because of the growing importance of foreign treaties in these days, the law is being changed (a referendum follows in 2 weeks) to extend referedum power: in future foreign treaties must always be ratified by the people in a referendum. This because more and more of the states sovereignty is influenced by foreign treaties.
Should you want to become a Swiss citizen, here's what you gotta do:
-move to Switzerland
-meet a Swiss citizen to marry
-wait for 5 years (or is it 10 now?)to get your citizenship. Don't divorce right away, otherwise you may lose the passport.
Very few places let foreigners vote (local stuff only), but once you got the passport you'll vote 7-12 times a year. Check this post for more info on how we vote.
Cheers,
max
-- It's always darker before it goes pitch black.
According to the Audio Home Recording Act, as long as the audio recordings are not for commercial purposes, there are no legal probs.
Here's a cool demo explaining it all - needs flash and sound... even has Robin Gross -EFF and mentions OGG is not a crime with an unauthorized cameo by Emmett Plant.
http://electroniclaw.org
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
When they start fining people $250,000 for downloading a song worth $1.20 if you bought it, it won't take long for the people to assert their rights. I'd be surprised if the courts let the law stand anyway because punishment is unusually severe.
-- $G
If someone starts a fund for supporting folks being sued, I'd pitch in. This whole litigious mindset makes me sick. Big corporations think they can win just because they throw more money at it than the common folk, they don't care about being fair or who's actually braking the law. It'd be great to turn this around...
/* TAANSTAFL */