File-sharing and AOL

Andrew Leonard writes "Farhad Manjoo's cover story in Salon today, on AOL's refusal to take a stand on the RIAA's (so far) successful attempt to get subscriber information from Verizon, is a detailed look at the most important battle in the file-sharing world right now."

Comments

Not in a possition

[bace]

I dont think that AOL will cave into the demands. If they do cave in, people might think twice before signing up for AOL, and present users might think about jumping ship. The numbers might sound trivial, but see numbers drop ould hardly be a good thing for AOL in its current financial situation.

Sorry about the spelling, too much free beer.;)

Re:Not in a possition

[scott1853]

So are you assuming that people choose AOL based on rational analysis of cost, quality, support and political agenda?

Re:Not in a possition

[Simonetta]

Let me see if I understand this:
1> At the beginning of 2003, there are thousands of ISPs which offer internet service to about 100 million people in North America. Of all these people, about maybe ten to twenty million use P2P occasionally.
The RIAA monitors the P2P networks and assumes that they own everything that is flowing across any P2P network.
The RIAA selects one million or so intercepted P2P streams a month at random and orders the smaller ISPs to identify and turn over the identification of the 'criminals' to them. All legal threats to AOL are ignored by AOL as 'under review for possible questionable activity'
The smaller ISPs immediately cancel the service of their clients randomly selected by RIAA. Their names go to the RIAA and RIAA sends these names to the other small ISPs and threatens 'legal action' if anyone on this black list is allowed to sign up on a different ISP. AOL allows allows these little lost lambs the opportunity to sign on for $24 a month plus a small surcharge for being a 'criminal'.
2> The RIAA threatens AOL. AOL tells the RIAA to back off or Warners will leave the RIAA. Faced with the possible loss of 25% of its membership and its subsequent breakup, the RIAA allows AOL Warner to 'continue to study the situation for any possible wrongdoing'. It backs off. AOL gives a small percentage of 'criminal surcharge' (which is growing by millions of new customers per month) to the RIAA for 'operations research'.
3> Early 2004, all the small ISPs are gone. There are one or two medium sized ISPs that handle nothing but people who hate everything offered by the P2P networks and never have or would download anything from them, and AOL. AOL has tens of millions of new customers all paying $35 a month at least and about half of them also paying a 'criminal surcharge' (which will never be removed).
4> AOL Time Warner's stock price goes back to the mid-50s. Levin, Turner, and Case are brought back from exile at the pig farm to run the company in its new glory era.

Thats funny

[trotski]

Warner music is one of the most imortant members of the RIAA

AOL is a part of the AOL-Time-Warner corporation; so is Warner music. Is there therefore a conflict between divisions of the company? Hmmmm... me thinks it's time to sell my ATW stock.... wait, I don't have any anyway.

I don't see the big deal

[Noksagt]

The article even points out that MSN and others have refused to comment. Why then is AOL so suspicious just because of their TW relationship?

If _I_ had an ISP, I wouldn't comment either (I'd just go for another swim in my money....)

These big companies rarely have a unified front, as /.ers have pointed out many times on the media/hardware manufacturer copy protection debates.

Who writes the law?

[migurski]

"I was one of the 10 industry representatives who was there to draw up this law," said Sarah Deutsch, associate general counsel for Verizon. "There were five people from the telecom sector and five from the content sector -- and it was clearly our interpretation that the content would have to be on our network."

Why are industry people there in the first place, to draw up the law? Are they balanced by ten representatives of the public?

User vs IP address

[chill]

This will get interesting when the RIAA comes crashing into a dorm room that is NATted behind a proxy/firewall.

They have a warrant to search...

IP WW.XX.YY.ZZ, but THAT is the IP of the NAT proxy/firewall. Oops, no music THERE! No warrant for any OTHER IP, such as the PC which is 192.168.0.100...

User "Joe Schmoe", who, by the way, HAS no MP3s. THOSE are all stored on his friend's PC -- who isn't named in the warrant.

OR, "Joe Schmoe" doesn't OWN the PC, he only is paying for the service. The PCs actually belong to someone else -- who is not named in the warrant.

OR, the PC with the goods belongs to a minor, who just happened to be the purchaser of all the CDs that he ripped and shared. A minor who CAN'T ENTER INTO A LEGALLY BINDING CONTRACT such as a music licensing agreement...

OR... take your pick. The costs for the RIAA to start tracking down and legally pursuing individuals would be astronomical.

Good luck proving successful downloads of songs for copyright infringement. Not to mention proving the downloads were of the SONGS claimed, and not some other file with the same name. Even if the file "baby_one_more_time.mp3" exists on the subject's machine, and the RIAA downloaded it and tracked back to to the subject that is only ONE violation. There is no way they can legally prove other infringements -- maybe the person was sharing a copy of bible reading masquerading as Brittany Who's-Dumping-Me-Today Spears? Maybe the RIAA was the only one that got the real thing?

The sheer expense will deal with this issue.

Re:User vs IP address

[MBCook]

Well all know that this is just a fear tactic. The idea is that if they can make a few big cases and get a few big sentences on some of the major sharers, it will make the news. And your average person doesn't think P2P is that bad, but if they see people going to jain for 10-20 years for using P2P, they'll stop. Let's not forget that the major news outlets are owned by the same parrent companies that own MPAA and RIAA companies, so the stories will be

Man in Utah arrested for downloading music files, gets 20 years

not...

Man in Utah arrested for giving 50,000 copies of unreleased movies away to people on P2P and selling copies of CDs and making kiddie porn and...

That will be enough to scare most of the people away from P2P, thanks to half truths. They don't intend to actually go after everyone because that wouldn't be cost effective, as you've noticed.

encrypted networks

[smd4985]

if the subpoena of IP addresses based on pure suspicion as supported by the DMCA holds, then media and/or ISPs will be powerless when p2p networks provide authenticated, encrypted services. freenet is already making strides in this area but i think it can be even better.

as much as they fight it, AOL/RIAA/whatever are only shooting themselves in the foot. embrace digital content as a viable content delivery mechanism or die....

This gets modded up?

[ALoverOfPeace]

Salon is having major financial troubles. They make their money by having people view their ads when reading their content. There is no registration required to view their content. If you have a problem with viewing an ad as a requisite for accessing their content, why not try to find a print substitute of Salon's quality that costs money.

Two Things:

[idiotnot]

1. AOL doesn't want other agencies snooping into its network, because it'd make it easier to find out the other illegal stuff going on in there. Nice, wholesome kiddie pr0n, for example. The fewer eyes that aren't theirs, the better.

2. Yes, TW is in the music business. They don't have a good way, however, of preventing filesharing from happening. As others have poined out, the slow speeds within AOL itself are enough of a deterrant there -- where they ought to be concerned is in the TW broadband area.

So they're gonna cool their jets and see what happnes. Makes sense to me.

Delegated enforcement

[xixax]

That will be enough to scare most of the people away from P2P, thanks to half truths. They don't intend to actually go after everyone because that wouldn't be cost effective, as you've noticed.

Ideally the *AA's would also want to make p2p expensive to condone/tolerate on their networks. Pestering ISPs with subpoenas is one avenue of doing this. Hopefully p2p customers bring in more revenue than it costs to service the RIAA.

Xix.

Er, how 'bout file-sharing with non-US buddies

[bluesangria]

Does the reach of the RIAA extend to, say, Europe, Asia, Australia, South America, etc.?? Last I heard, they had people over there who file share music also. Maybe I can just make sure I download from non-American owned IP blocks. Or better yet, it can be built into the next release of LimeWire, Kazaa, etc. (Check this box if you live in the U.S. and only wish to download from people outside U.S!)

This is very silly of them. I see a couple of problems if they do start attempting mass-enforcement

Try and subpeona someone outside the US.

Try and explain to average, white upper-middle-class parents that their "little angel" is a "criminal" and NOT have a bad publicity stink about it when parents complain of "needless harrassment".

Try and keep the egg off your face as people start to use proxies outside the US to reroute the download to their computer.

Am I missing something here?? I feel like we're being scared by the big, ominous shadow on the wall and missing the little dork casting the shadow with his hand.

blue

Or another way to look at it

[ShatteredDream]

People will demand legal change because if there really are more than a handful of prosecutions little Johny or little Suzy is now potentially in the DoJ's legal crosshair. I've met more than a few people who were self-righteous about it until they found out how absurd it was and that their kids and kids they thought were really great kids could sit in a federal prison for 3 years and be literally bankrupt before the age of 18. You see, most people think you're directly ripping off the artists when they hear piracy. They're not thinking their kid with his small mp3 and divx collection.

Re:What's the article about?

[Weirsbaski]

Personally, I think the burden of proof for the subpoena is the whole bananna. Note that once the RIAA has your name, is still must make its case you broke the rules. They'll maybe get part of that by suckering you into downloading directly from decoy computers.

If they have enough info for a subpoena, then can take your name to the feds to make a little "surprise visit" to your residence, taking your computer (and cd's, and x-box, and stereo, and cordless phone, and anything else remotly related to alleged file sharing) back to their ofice for "further investigation" .

In this case, even if they don't find a single thing to nail you to the wall with, they still made an example out of you and still won.

Re:What's the article about?

[Chokma]

I'm among those who doesn't want strangers flipping through any data about me without a convincing reason

I agree with you on this point, but then I sit back and think about it: Am I really that interesting?

Almost everything you talk about will interest someone...

• The health insurance might want to know all about your occasional stomach problems you discussed with your mom yesterday
• Your employer might want to know which bars you frequent in order to know if you hang around known places of vice, gambling and drug abuse.
• Your bank and the IRS might want to know if you plan to go shopping for a new car while owing someone money etc.
• Your wife may want to check on you, so she may call your friend if you are with him or with a woman.
• Spammers want to know the size of your penis. (Granted, few people talk about that in public.)

All information can be misused. And at one point, twenty years from now, Joe Doe, a reformed christian and good father to his children, will most certainly not want someone to post his teenage pr0n habits on the net. Even if it is old stuff, you would wonder if he is still into it...