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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)?
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.
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
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.)
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.