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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."
...give me death"? And then good old TJ said something to the effect of "He who would sacrifice his freedom for safety deserves neither". /me wonders how far this all will go...
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[Big Brick Wall]
If you want to see where we will be in 5 years as a general, having a look at the solutions adopted in these situations would seem to be a damn good guide.
"To any truly impartial person, it would be obvious that I am right."
What if AOL decided that it was going to take a stand against piracy... what if, the RIAA went after AOL along the same lines that they did Verizon. Wouldn't that be like me turning around and suing my mom? (AOL is part of Time Warner which is a record company in the RIAA five fingered hand of the future)
This useless space for sale, inquire at front desk.
Hmm. If AOL had the bandwidth to support p2p they'd be for it, but since they just plain DON'T....
Content-makers and content-distributors vie for control until they collide (e.g. AOL-TW, Sony) at which time they engage in fierce legal battles which garner headlines.
Meanwhile, their customers carry on performing "criminal" actions.
You don't have to be Jeffrey Friedl to match this pattern.
--K.
Sig: Bad people happen. Try to avoid being one of them.
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. The hard part will be getting you for nickle-and-dime offenses. More likely, they'll look for the folks who host thousands of titles on P2P. And perhaps they should.
I don't really have a problem with copyright in the abstract, unlike many here, but do with the basic privacy issue in careless attempts at enforcement. Can weirdoes (e.g., Capitol Records
Perhaps the simplest fix is a method of IP obfuscation. But anonymizing makes legitimate enforcement of far more compelling laws (kiddie porn, stalking, etc.) will become more difficult -- yet another side-effect of this whole enterprise.
Nice to see some positive mention of Salon, though. They did some interesting journalism a while ago, and I wonder if those days are long gone.
A modest proposal....
/. community this could be expanded to be a major mine field for the **AA cartel....
1. Write a little script/program to scan the top 5000 swapped files (got to beat the Verizon 666 guy)for filenames/file sizes.
2. Stock a honey pot system with random files of the appropriate file size and names (there is no law requireing you to label your files correctly...look at the **AA's spoofing efforts for examples), making your honey pot a big target.
3. Wait for them to come for you.....
4. Counter sue the socks off them & retire.
I am sure with the technical knowledge base of the
Just a thought....
If the ISPs are forced to give the information, it would be a good time for somebody to write a Kazaa client that used similar technology to that developed by Zero Knowledge back in the day.
Basically, it would go through a couple of intermediate servers that hid the IP addresses in such a way that nobody knew who you were anyway...
Then it would really suck to be the RIAA.
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P2p networks have no obstacles to membership. And the traffic has to get decrypted on each end. Private detectives on RIAA payroll can join like anyone else, can provide zero-day copies of a few major albums, and can then log the destination address of everyone who requests a copy.
- The RIAA will look for (and find!) ways to argue that freenet's primary purpose is as a copyright infringement device. They will get a researcher to sign up as users and construct a statistical analysis demonstrating that freenet's content is 10% MPAA movies, 20% BSA games, 30% RIAA music, and 40% porn. Then they'll have freenet nodes declared a DCMA circumvention device (or roll out other new laws if that fails), and start sending out a whole new wave of subpeonas.
PS. I suppose those statistics don't reflect freenet today. But if it becomes the successor to p2p swapping applications like Kazaa and Bearshare, then someday they will.True, systems like freenet can obfuscate data and conceal user's addresses from each other, so
The major problem I see with this law is that small ISP's will give anyone a subscriber's personal information if they can forge legal letterhead. Witness what happened to an ex-girlfriend of mine:
About a year ago, before we met, my (now ex) girlfriend "met" a guy in an internet chat room, and had a brief online relationship. When she met me, she broke up with the guy (online of course), and then the problems began. The guy was not, shall we say, civil. He found out her IP address, and then, to find her street address, he sent a letter to her ISP accusing her of copyright infringement. The local ISP is a two person shop, and they figured it would be better just to send the info along than hire a lawyer.
To make a long story short, this enabled him to harass her further. Now that he had her address, he was able to cancel her utilities - twice. Then, she got bills in the mail for credit cards she had never signed up for. She began getting so much junk mail that the post office required her to collect her mail from the post office directly, because the volume would no longer fit in the mailbox. The saga finally ended when the local police arrested the guy breaking into her place. He was armed. Seeing as he drove in from out of state, I don't think he came over for a nice chat. Fortunately, she was with me at the time.
The major problem that I see with laws like this one is that they give anyone the ability to co-opt someone else's privacy by merely making a claim of copyright infringement.
Back in the 90s, since technically everything sent over the internet is a copy, and thus technically the ISPs were in pretty much infininte copyright violation, copyright holders could have legally bankrupted every ISP in America. Since Congress didn't want this to happen, they put the two groups in a room and told them to work out a compromise. I think it makes perfect sense to get two sides in a dispute to come together and compromise, rather than impose a solution from outside or through huge nasty lawsuits. When the two sides compromised, congress then wrote up the compromise into law.
Unfortunately, that law was attached to other laws that were poorly written and includes a bunch of other stuff that were extremely harmful to consumers. However, the part dealing with the ISPs not wanting to get sued by copyright holders didn't really involve the public and didn't really hurt them.
Don't be so quick to label something as "evil" - a lot of times you wind up throwing out the baby with the bathwater...