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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."
I would go to jail for what I believe in.
But I do believe that theft is theft.
Everyone gets pissed off when someone threatens to take away their pirated music and videos.
If you want to make a backup of your music and videos fine, but don't share them out to other people to freely copy.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
I'm moving to Russia where it's more free.
Of course, there's still the "pre-dawn-raid-and-seize-hard-drive" tactic which I've heard makes that moot...
(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 problem with giving people freedom and liberty is - you never know what they're actually going to do with it.
You know, like invent a decentralized p2p system and then trade files with it.
How dare they!
---- "Logoff! That cookie shit makes me nervous!" - A. Soprano
At least in our great state north of the 49th parallel we don't really have to listen to our music with the fear of the FBI coming in and arresting us for listening to music we downloaded to evaluate. Our wonderful government just takes our money from buying blank media instead.
but it would be nice if we could get some kind of representation in the senate or congress so we could voice out conserns.
What ever did happen to representation in government?
" It doesn't matter if you've forsworn Napster, uninstalled Kazaa and now are eagerly padding the record industry's bottom line by snapping up $15.99 CDs by the cartload. Be warned--you're what prosecutors like to think of as an unindicted federal felon."
So in essence, theres no reason for me to stop, now that I've already started.
"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"
Good thing I'm a leecher!
that Hollywood needs Digital Rights Management legislation because copyright laws lack teeth, and there are no effective means to deal with copyright violations online.
Catching copyright violators will be a good thing for copyright reform: suddenly the same people who currently just ignore the laws will press to see them changed. Still better, the legitimate calls for copyright reform won't be drowned out or confused by the wails of spoiled teenagers who just want to grab free music.
Copyright needs reforming, nationally and internationally. Grabbing all the music you can in violation of copyright doesn't help the cause of those who actually want to do something about the problem. Enforcing the existing laws, and getting rid of the violators can only help the cause of copyright in the long run.
--
Ytrew
It specifically says if you upload a copyrighted file in order to be allowed to download other copyrighted files, the downloads count as financial gain even though you don't get any cash. Welcome to the doublespeak future.
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?!
In Switzerland, they actually let people VOTE on whether they want these acts or not.
Nice to hear it. Wish we had that here.
Got to love America?s "Democratic" government, passing laws without even letting the people know.
Actually, the US isn't a democracy. It's a republic. The general population doesn't vote on the laws (as in a democracy). The enfranchised portion of the general population votes on the legislators, then the legislators vote on the laws.
Originally the general population voted on the representatives and the states chose the senators (with the states' population in turn chosing the state reps and governor who were the ones chosing the senators). But that got changed so the population votes directly on both.
Of course sometimes they pass laws without the CONGRESSMEN knowing.
- The congresscritters rarely read the text, but depend on the recommendations of their staff, their party, (or sometimes their major contributors B-( ).
- Even if they want to read what they're voting, often it's impossible. The staffers put together the final text of enormous bills, which appear on the legislators desks within hours, or even minutes, of the final vote. (I recall one that was a stack of paper several feet thick that showed up in just such a fashion.) I've yet to hear of a congresscritter voting against a bill because "I haven't had time to read it."
- A conference committee might completely re-write a bill (possibly with similar staff "assistance"). Both houses normally rubber-stamp a conference committee's results.
And even when the congresscritters know what they're voting on, maybe nobody else does, or has a chance to comment. For instance:
The "Firearm Owners Protection Act" was a bill to protect gunowners from the web of 30,000-ish conflicting state, county, and local firearms laws when traveling. A tiny bill that said ~"If it's legal where you start your trip, legal where you finish it, and locked up in between, it's ok to transport it no matter what the state and local laws say in the places you pass through"~. Much support from pro-firearms groups.
In the minutes before the final vote it was amended to also ban the manufacture of new machine guns for sale to private citizens in the (already heavily regulated) private market. So the supply would be limited to those already papered - and thus become obsolete, expensive, and eventually disappear.
SURPRISE!
Of course it passed. (And some pro-gun organizations got a lot of undeserved flack for "selling out" the machine-gun fans, when it was really a crooked political gambit by the anti-gun politicians.)
Of course the Swiss don't have this problem. Their government REQUIRES them each to have a machine gun (or some other piece of large-scale military nastiness) handy. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Why is this causing such an "outrage"? Stealing copyrighted material IS wrong. If you don't like it, then well, tough shit. Copyrights are there for a reason (let's forego the whole argument about Disney and never-expiring copyrights -- that's a different topic). If I own a work of art that I've put a lot of effort into, I certainly do not want it copied around without any control on my part, unless I've specifically granted everyone permission to do so by releasing it under the "free unlimited distribution allowed" license (e.g. this creative commons clause). If you violate my copyright, then I want you punished. If you think this is unfair of me, then fart in my general direction and don't use my work. I will certainly understand and not be offended in the slightest.
You cannot expect every artist to put their works into the public domain or license them for free distribution. That's just not how this world works, whatever your youthful idealism is telling you. Please respect people's copyrights and don't steal their works. If you do, then don't make a scene when they press charges.
If you open yourself to the foo, You and foo become one.
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.
They can't jail everyone, but they don't have to.
All they need to do is start jailing people and then use those cases to scare people away from the P2P networks. If they can make people afraid to share files then they destroy the reason that most people frequent the P2P networks.
Go here to create your own Slashdot dis
You do know that there's no such thing called Internet Privacy Act, right?
:)
I'll take that as a joke.
File swappers are already commiting theft.
Its not theft - its a copyright violation. Big difference.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
yeah of course :p :p
if we join the army we get a automatic rifle and even some bullets to keep at home (it's part of our militia system)
but it is not legal to buy or own other such weapons
they wanted do requier tank crews to keep their tanks at home but nobody had space for it, so they just sold the old once to people for near to nothing,
it's a shame that you have to keep it inside of a building or i would have bought one
what we have is called a half direct democracy
that means we have some sort of congress too and to my happiness no president(if i look at bush). but we have also the possibility to infulence our law or constitution directly by a public vote
what you have is called a indirect democracy in our schools
stop supporting microsoft with pirating their software!!!!!
WRONG!
An Australian man, Habib, was captured in Pakistan and took no part in the conflict in Afghanistan. His crime? He has alleged links to al-Qaeda.
So an Australian citizen, captured in Pakistan is being held by the US, in Cuba without rights to a lawyer or even consulant visits.
Now please explain to me why one half of the world hates the US and the other half is getting sick and tired of being told to fall into line.
"She's a West Texas girl, just like me" - G.W Bush Iraqis
OOP! Boomtown Rats-Fine Art Of Surfacing CD - Item #2501717xxx Final price: $72.00 Your maximum bid: $19.00 End date: Jan-23-03 16:29 PST
First, in re: the NET Act, what is the "retail value" of an out-of-print title? My assumption is that it is zero, otherwise the record co., in this case CBS/Sony, would market it. By my reading, this Act applies only if the copyrighted material has retail value.
If the retail value is zero, then I don't see how this NET Act can possibly apply if I would choose to download the MP3s of the entire album and burn my own CD. Perhaps a lawyer could shed some light on this matter.
Secondly, why won't this record co. and others wake up and see that there's obviously a market for this CD, and presumably thousands of other out-of-print titles? Why are they pissing away this revenue stream? (No pun intended) Maybe they're too busy scrambling after the next Britney?
In the case of OOP titles, do I have to become a criminal to obtain my music or else pay $72 for a used disc on Ebay? Totally bizarre.
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
The wrongness is not that relevant--the punishment is completely disproportionate to the offense. Letting your parking meter expire is also wrong, but when we catch someone doing it, we write them a ticket. We don't send them to prison for years.
In the P2P situation, there's no demonstration that the copyright holder actually lost the "value" of the copied works. So it's ridiculous to treat it as if that amount was actually lost, rather than (realistically) a few percent of the amount, tops. So if uploading $1000 of CD's is "theft", it's theft comparable to shoplifting a pair of blue jeans, and should be prosecuted about the same way. Also, the stuff defining downloading more stuff as "financial gain" is positively Orwellian. What we're seeing is War On Drugs Part II.
ObLink: The Right To Read.
Not used it myself yet, but it sounds neat.
Be careful! New moon tonight.
"The system is unofficial - they cannot sue it."
That isn't the point. They are not suing you to win. They are suing you to sue you.
They will sue you, and cost you tens of thousands of dollars just to get to the point where their suit against you is thrown out. At the same time, another agent will sue you. And so forth.
And after you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to get out of the preliminary rounds, all of which you won, we'll assume, then you will be sued again. And again.
I watched it happen before -- the Scientologists use this technical extensively. The idea of a lawsuit, according to Hubbard, was not to win, but to harrass, to intimidate, to bankrupt, to exhaust, to ruin. In advanced cases, the broken victim can even be brought on board the attacker's cause, as a requirement for cessation of legal attacks. Oh, and gag clauses for the poor schmuck is standard as well.
Oh, and the attack has the most value as a object lesson for everyone else that the suer wants to harrass or control. The very idea that ruin can come to anyone else the attacker feels like swatting stifles resistance and give the victory to the attacker.
And the attacker gets to keep anything of value they can seize from the victim as well.
It's a very economical attack. One only has to ruin one or two people publicly to stop behavior one doesn't like.
The tools required are money, organization, lawyers, and an utter lack of morality.
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.)
I've been waiting for this to happen for some time. We are now on the cusp of our latest suicidal "war" on our own society. I have no problem with protecting copyrights, but this law puts the Draco in draconian. Do we really want to head in this direction again? Do we really want to start locking people up for years for an arguably victimless crime? How about solving all the murders first? How about the punishment fitting the crime: perhaps a fine and restitution?
Your accusation of thoughtcrime is based solely on doublethink...
Moreover, the US telecoms that are betting their financial futures on the eventual widespread adoption of broadband in the States would be hit hardest. A dozen high profile cases against kids trading files would scare the shit out of the parents and no doubt hundreds of thousands of cable modem/DSL contracts would be cancelled. Meanwhile, this would change nothing in countries outside the US where non commercial sharing of data is not considered infringement.
Democracy isn't orthoganal to a republic. Thats a myth.
: a government having a chief of state who is not a
monarch and who in modern times is usually a president : a political unit (as a nation) having such a form of government
:a government in which supreme power resides in a body
of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by elected officers and representatives
responsible to them and governing according to law : a political unit (as a nation) having such a form of government
c : a usually specified republican
government of a political unit <the French Fourth Republic> : a body of persons freely engaged in a specified activity
<the republic of letters> : a constituent political and territorial unit of the former
nations of Czechoslovakia, the U.S.S.R., or Yugoslavia
: government by the people; especially :
rule of the majority :a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people
and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation
usually involving periodically held free elections : a political unit that has a democratic
government : the principles and policies of the Democratic
party in the U.S. : the common people especially when constituting the source
of political authority : the absence of hereditary or arbitrary class distinctions
or privileges
republic
Pronunciation: ri-'p&-blik
Function: noun
Etymology: French rpublique, from Middle French republique, from Latin respublica, from res thing, wealth + publica, feminine of publicus public -- more at REAL, PUBLIC
Date: 1604
1 a (1)
(2)
b (1)
(2)
2
3
democracy
Pronunciation: di-'m-kr&-sE
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural -cies
Etymology: Middle French democratie, from Late Latin democratia, from Greek dEmokratia, from dEmos + -kratia -cracy
Date: 1576
1 a
b
2
3 capitalized
4
5
So we in the USA live in a Democratic Republic .
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.
The No Electronic Theft law and the supposed "Internet Privacy Act" are two separate laws. Moreover, one was referenced in an article submission quoted from a reputable (subjective, I know) news source, and the other was an off-hand comment by one of the half-million or so Slashdot subscribers.
Trolling about trolling. Yeesh.
BD Phone Home!
Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.
Nice try, Mr. Eisner. Unfortunately, this is exactly the topic. The fact is that businesses which benefit from copyrights that don't expire are co-opting the legal processes in the USA, which is what the original post is about. This law is just an expression of a more general malaise.
That's nice that you own a copyrighted work. I have the right to incorporate your work when making a parody, whether or not you are offended by it-- I think Mattel proved that today. But that's not the point. The point is that I used to have a second option- I could wait for you to die. Once you were dead, there was a proscribed period during which I could not use your original work- but if I was lucky enough to live 100 years after you, well after world+dog had forgotten your name and what you used to be famous for, I could take your idea and breathe life into it and bring it new relevance in my new time so that people could enjoy it again. And if I had a proper sense of humility, I could even give you credit for inspiring me.
As it stands now, I can do all of that- but I have to pay Disney, or BMG, or SONY for the priveledge of trying to make a house on the foundation that you built, so some random fuck that neither you nor I have ever met (you've been dead for 50 years, remember?) can keep making the payments on his goddamn X5 beemer.
nooo-ooo, but I can expect that the Constitution of the United States should mean more than the wishes of Disney, Inc. to the lawmakers in this country. After all, that's the oath they swore to when they took office. Right now, my expectations are not being met. Since I don't have the financial power to impact(read: buy the vote of) 95% of the lawmakers, especially the ones who benefit the most from 'donations' made by the content industry, I'd rather exercise my power of civil disobedience against the companies who pay for their re-election campaigns. Make 'em feel it in the pocket, dontchaknow. And I don't think that Rosa Parks intended to make a scene, I think she was just fed up by the bullshit she had to go through every day. People aren't stupid- if they learn of a better way to get to what they want, they'll take it. Right now, the record industry doesn't need more laws protecting copyright- they need someone to build a better mousetrap.
I'd be thrilled if someone would press charges- I'd go to jail (or guantanamo) first. File sharing cases would overwhelm the courts, and the laws would be changed. I don't see change happening that way, but I guess anything is possible.
Let's make a test case. Why don't you put your money where your mouth is? I'm not the Devil, testing your faith... Michael Eisner is the only man who can currently claim that distinction and I no longer think you're him. Send me some of this 'content' you claim to have, via Kazaa. Call it "Mr_Icon.MP3" or whatever you want. I'll download it, and then re-publish it, and you can sue me for copyright violation and charge me for criminal violation of the NET act. I'll be waiting for your reply...
Humpty Dumpty was pushed.