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RIAA Moves Against College-Network Fileswapping
pazu13 writes "The RIAA is taking action against college "Napster networks". It's suing four network operators, two at Renssalaer Polytechnic Institute, one at Princeton University, and one at Michigan Technological University. Don't know where this is going, but I'm afraid it might get significantly harder for humble college students such as myself to sample an artist's music before going out and buying a disc... my speed across the network is ridiculously faster than when I try to access outside sources."
Can you use the DMCA against them? Create a system that only lets local IP's access the servers. Then use some simple crypto to transfer the files. Top it off with in access policy that forbids non-student use. If they access your network, it would then be illegal.
By reading this you have broken the DMCA as this message is encrypted with the English Language Cypher. I'm not a lawyer and I don't play one on TV.
i think i speak for most college students here when i say 'FUCK RIAA'. that's it no more cd's for me
"I'm afraid it might get significantly harder for humble college students such as myself to sample an artist's music before going out and buying a disc"
hahahaha, April Fools was two days ago.
John Kerry is a Joke!
Quit College.
If you want to sample an artist's music before buying a disc, why not listen to the radio, MTV, or the short samples available on Amazon.com (or wherever) to get an idea of what the artist is like?
shutting down warez sites so i can't sample software?
STARVE the RIAA.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
The recording industry has stepped up its campaign against campus music swapping, filing suit against four university students who operated file-search services on their school's internal networks.
The lawsuits, filed against two students at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), and one each at Princeton University and Michigan Technological University, ratchet up the pressure that the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) recently has been putting on universities to block campus file-trading. The trade group still has not filed suit against average file-swappers who use more common services such as Kazaa, however.
"The people who run these (campus) networks know full well what they are doing--operating a sophisticated network designed to enable widespread music thievery," RIAA President Cary Sherman said in a statement. "The lawsuits we've filed represent an appropriate step given the seriousness of the offense."
University students have been widely viewed as the core of the various file-swapping networks ever since the appearance of Napster on the digital scene in late 1999. Universities have seen half or more of their network bandwidth used by people uploading and downloading songs, software and movies over the past few years.
Schools have attempted to crack down on the practice of file swapping in various ways, ranging from blocking network traffic associated with Napster or Kazaa to confiscating computers used to trade files. In a recent congressional hearing, some lawmakers called for criminal prosecutions for campus file-swappers.
In its lawsuits, the RIAA compares the use of the campus search software--variously called "Phynd," "Flatlan" or "Direct Connect"--to the defunct Napster service, dubbing the services "local area Napster networks." The particular technology in these lawsuits in fact represents something different than the file-swapping techniques used by Napster or Kazaa, however.
"Phynd" and the other pieces of software set up servers--often on ordinary dorm room PCs--that search all the computers connected to a campus network that have Windows file-sharing turned on. Unlike Napster or Kazaa, which helped create a network of computers that would not have existed otherwise, "Phynd" and the others search a network that already exists.
"Dan," a university student who runs a similar server but has not been sued, said the RIAA is missing critical differences in the file-sharing technologies. He asked that his full name and university not be used.
"With or without these services, people would be able to share these files," the student said. "It's Microsoft that's allowing people to share these files; we're just accessing public information."
That difference in technology may or may not have any effect in court, attorneys said.
"It does seem like all it's doing is indexing resources that are available on a network that people are already a part of," said Fred Von Lohmann, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital civil liberties group that has defended file-swapping companies in court against the RIAA. "It doesn't seem like there's anything wrong with building a tool to do that. And it doesn't seem like there's anything wrong with running that tool."
Where the students could run into shadier legal territory is when those indexes and search results come back loaded with MP3 files, Lohmann said. According to the RIAA lawsuits, several of the students also maintained archives of hundreds of songs on their own machines.
All four civil suits were filed in federal court near the universities.
So NFS and windows file sharing are illegal now? It is almost impossible for network admins to know what is on every single network share on the LAN. Especially if people are running shares from their desktop machines.
Of course, people should expect to be prosecuted for outright theft. That's how things work in a lawful society.
It seems like nailing the network admins for the (mis)behaviour of the students is a bit of a broad move to make.
They have an AUP I'm sure, but at the bigger schools, it becomes tough to enforce. The inability to control what the students do (at some level) somehow makes the admins responsible? I don't agree with that, but that's just me.
If you can't beat them, arrange to have them beaten. -George Carlin
Maybe true for older stuff, but somehow I don't think that's what the RIAA is pursuing people over.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I support the recording industry locating and suing and/or prosecuting people who illegally violate copyright on publications of all kinds. But that is the people engaged in the illegal activity. Peer to peer networks have legitimate functions and can be used in a non-infringing manner. They should have similar common carrier status to the phone companies.
If they were locating and prosecuting some students engaged in illegally copying copyrighted content, that would be different.
This action may be legal, but it isn't right.
Why should censorship be allowed at college? How is a person supposed to learn when censored? Most college students do not buy CDs, so its not really going to help their sales by doing this, because most college students except for the few who are rich are too busy buying books, going to parties, and paying tuition to have any money left for music CDs. So this isnt about money, its about control, the RIAA wants to be able to control everything we do on our computers, it also removes our privacy. Once the campus police start to monitor all internet trafic kiss your privacy goodbye. Whats the point of going to college if you are being watched 24/7 by men in black with RIAA logos?
We need to fight this somehow, and I dont mean just a stupid petition, we need to protest this instead of protesting the Iraq war.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
I'd suggest right now you go over to Anti-DMCA and read up, link up, and sign up for the mailing list. We need to get many people on the same page, then attack the law causing us trouble, not the people using the law. The law is the root cause of these problems and it must be reformed or corporations will continue to abuse it.
The people who wrote these sites aren't doing anything illegal. They are simply taking a network search utility and making it more efficient. If the RIAA wants to sue someone, they should pick on someone their own size. Sue Microsoft for including "Network Neighborhood" in their "search for files and folders" tool. That's all these kids are doing, searching a LAN for files, more efficiently by storing lists of filenames in a centralized location.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
How is this an example of throwing the baby out with the bathwater? These kids broke the law and the record companies are taking legal action against them for it. And as far as I'm concerned, they deserve to pay the price for their actions. Organized illegal file swapping is organized crime, nothing more and nothing less. If you're big enough to make a name for yourself on campus, you need to deal with the consequences.
On a slightly odd recent discovery, it seems the RIAA may not have been so evil at a point.... jpg
http://members.cox.net/datafox166/irony
I pulled this off an album circa 1965 or something like that. It _was_ that now its doing this? What happened?
Scan each machine. If there are files with the extension .mp3, BALEETED!
It seems the whole article is based on the assumption that "Because the LAN operators are smart enough to install the P2P software, they have to know that it will be used to share copyrighted music." (paraphrased)
Bad, bad assumption.
Encode your files using OGG-S. I am sure your college's IT community would be a great testing and developing environment.
If they crack the encryption, unleash the DMCA on them. Settle only if they let CowboyNeal screw lightbulbs into Hilary Rosen's ears.
Trollem mirabilem hanc subnotationis exigiutas non caperet
The RIAA is horribly misguided. Those networks are used to share movies, not music. Yeesh.
In all seriousness, I'm wondering one thing: why didn't the students block outside IP addresses (the way the article reads, it sounds like they didn't)?
Live and learn I guess.
I'm am just in awe of the RIAA. Sue the people who work in education to stop intra-campus filesharing over private networks. I think it's official that the music industry hates education. That way the youth of tomorrow will be dumb enough to buy the same recyled crap the music industry will put out for us. But seriously, What are they really hoping to achieve by temporarily impeeding a college students ability to aquire music that they probably wouldn't buy anyway because they can't afford to buy cd after cd. I really wish they would just come out and say what their master plan is, because right now it just seems like they are bullies which is going to make them lose business, not increase it. I can't remember the last time I bought a cd from a major label. I bought a vinyl copy of the new AFI album which was released on Adeline records over buy the CD put out by Dreamworks, simply to avoid giving any money to a major label. But I haven't downloaded an RIAA song in the past year either. I don't buy their product because their product is crap, not because I have the ability to steal it. I can get almost any top 40 release for free, but I don't because I don't want it.
Nothing from nowhere I'm no one at all
Please, dear God! Stop! My sides hurt from laughing so hard!
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Shutting off all the TVs to prevent minors from viewing violence.
I mean really, its not the RIAA's job to be our parents. Its should be left up to the college. Capitalism is important yes, but its not everything, money is not more important than education, if you cannot have freedom of speech even in the educational enviornment well then I'm going to move to China, I mean if we have to be monitored by the RIAA, whats the point of staying in the RIAA's country, Its not ours anymore, if we had a vote right now most people would be for piracy, and for filesharing, this reminds me of prohibition, or people who try to outlaw porn.
Look, it will never work, give it up, the people want to share music, the RIAA can adapt to the industry, or they can hiijack our government and change the laws. If they are allowed to change our laws, we arent a democracy.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
...how we are going to be able to find older, less popular music titles? Case in point: for some time (years), I was looking for Red Seven's self-titled album or CD. My local record stores told me it was out of press, so I couldn't order it. I couldn't find it any of the used record stores around town. Finally, after a lot of searching online, I found one song from that album through a gnutella client (Note to RIAA: I'd be glad to send $1 or whatever to the rights holder in exchange for a full-quality *.wav). Until the music industry gets off its hands and makes it easier for the public to find and *pay for* the music it wants, without all the nutty paranoia, the KaZaA's of this world are not going to disappear.
"Anyone that has ever gotten an idea based on any of my work and done something better with it-good for you."--J.Carmack
How is the RIAA (Recording Industry Assholes Association) finding out what is being traded on these networks? From my understanding (based on the file sharing network at my school) is that the system is only accessible to people on the school's local network (which requires a direct connection to a on-campus drop or use of VPN software AND the use of a school-issued userid/password). Is the RIAA illegally breaking into people's LANs, hiring campus spies or what?
I wonder why they're choosing lawsuits over legal prosecution. As I understand it, lawsuits require less proof, and give them much greater investigatory allowances, but in my book these people should be prosecuted rather than hassled with lawsuits.
What the hell is the point of forcing us to sit through 15 second FBI warnings before movies if they're not going to use the FBI?
NAPSTER-LIKE ONLINE PIRACY ON CAMPUS
It's Illegal!
Local Area Napster Networks
This is a particularly flagrant way to illegally distribute millions of copyrighted works over the Internet. The people who run these Napster networks know full well what they are doing ñ operating a sophisticated network designed to enable widespread music thievery. The lawsuits we've filed represent an appropriate step given the seriousness of the offense. --Cary Sherman, President, RIAA
What do these systems do?
The systems, which we call ìlocal area Napster networks,î operate similarly to the illegal, and now shut-down, peer-to-peer network Napster -- the online service found by a U.S. federal court in 2001 to have engaged in wholesale copyright infringement. But instead of being open to anyone with access to the Internet, they reside on a specific collegeís internal computer network, known also as a ìlocal area network.
The perpetrators of these internal Napster networks make use of software known variously as Flatlan, Phynd or Direct Connect. All of them work much like Napster did, centrally indexing and processing search requests for copyrighted works.
Why did the RIAA file these lawsuits?
The court ruled that Napster was illegal and shut it down. These systems operate in just the same manner.
Because of the sophistication of the technology and the expertise needed to install and manage such systems, these Napster network operators canít help but be aware of the copyright infringement they facilitate. Each of the accused operators has also seeded his services with tens of thousands -- of copyrighted works without the permission of the artist, songwriter or copyright holder. And in fact, they often monitor the infringement and, in several instances, have publicly bragged about their knowledge of it.
These local area Napster networks have popped up at an alarming speed. The seriousness of the problem requires us to act quickly to send a loud and clear message that this kind of activity is illegal and has consequences.
In contrast to Napster and pirate P2P networks like it, which have been clearly and repeatedly judged illegal, there are several legitimate online services where music fans of all ages can access hundreds of thousands of music tracks the right way. (Click here to find a listing of some legitimate services: http://www.musicunited.org/6_legalsites.html)
W hy are these lawsuits against students?
This action has been taken against the network operators of these illegal systems. The activity in which they are knowingly taking part is illegal and has consequences. Hundreds of thousands of copyrighted works are being pirated over these networks without the permission of the artist, songwriter or copyright holder. It just so happens that these network operators are students and they are using their schoolsí bandwidth and resources to participate in illegal activity.
How severe was the copyright infringement on these Napster-like networks?
One Napster network operating was offering approximately 650,000 music files; another offering 27,000 music files; a third 500,000 music files; and the worst offender was offering more than a million music files! (Actually, one file was found, but we used our 'special math' to inflate the numbers.)
This kind of activity hurts artists, musicians, songwriters, those who invest in their work and the thousands of others who work to bring music to the public.
How long has this problem been around?
This appears to be prevalent on college campuses around the country. These suits are intended to send a very strong message that this type of illegal distribution of copyrighted material is not acceptable.
How many operators of these local area Napster networks are being sued?
Four.
At which schools?
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) [two individuals], Princeton University, and Michigan Technological University.
W
Once they've won their million dollar lawsuit, the judge might not throw out the "trespassing" charge against them, but it would be a slap on the wrist penalty for it.
And it sure as hell won't protect you from the million dollar settlement.
Besides, they might not even use the evidence they've illegally obtained. Rather, they would find some student/traitor that would be witness to the "awful theft of IP".
The law isn't a tool you can use, it's for them to use. Think of it as a smart gun that knows their fingerprints... you might punch them and take it, but it won't ever shoot them.
The RIAA is horribly misguided. Those networks are used to share movies, not music. Yeesh.
Actually, to be more specific, those networks are used to share porn movies, not music. :)
GMD
watch this
I read it as Ryerson Polytechnic Institute, and I thought my uni (www.ryerson.ca) was going to face this. I'm saved for now...
Glad to see good 'ol RPI is leading the charge, in 20 years RPI will still be around, will the RIAA?, hope not. Let's all so what we can to starve the parasitic beasts.
MM
The filesharing services that they are trying to shut down are internal to the college's network and as such does not have such a negative impact. In many cases, traffic passes between two dorm rooms on the same switch. It NEVER leaves the network, and in my experiences, NOTHING slows down. The network admins at (some school I know of) are aware of this, and actually ENCOURAGE this type of filesharing as it cuts down on the outbound/inbound traffic to/from the University's internet connection. This is great stuff...
but I'm afraid it might get significantly harder for humble college students such as myself to sample an artist's music before going out and buying a disc
I had a solution for that back in my university days that preceded napster and mp3s, for that matter.
It was called: FRIENDS
I'd say "Whatcha got there Stu?"
He'd say "Mr Bungle CD"
I'd say "it any good?"
He'd say "yeah, have a listen.. you can borrow it"
I'd say "Thanks"
It can work for you too.
Oh, wait, you want music without any social interaction or having to pay for it. Tough shit.
It is almost impossible for network admins to know what is on every single network share on the LAN.
And doubly so if anyone operating an engine that catalogs what is on the LAN is sued.
Correct me if I'm wrong. But isn't that what they're doing in these cases? Claiming that anything that catalogs the accessable shared files is a "piracy tool" that must be suppressed?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Don't kid yourself, the RIAA is as eager to throw you in jail for pirating the Velvet Undergound as for pirating the new Britney CD. It's all money, after all.
Freedom: "I won't!"
The final solution for the RIAA will be to make all copying Illegal.
Remember, anyone who copies anything is a Pirate, just like anyone who uses Kazaa is a Pirate.
They want to turn the internet into something more controlled like the TV industry. Freedom isnt allowed in this country, some people have to control everything.
What ever happened to individual freedom? If the masses decide they want to share files, why should you be able to stop them? What happened to democracy? If the masses vote to have file sharing, that should end this, and from what I see (100 million people sharing files) well, the masses have spoken, so the laws should be changed.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Don't know where this is going, but I'm afraid it might get significantly harder for humble college students such as myself to sample an artist's music before going out and buying a disc...
I think he meant to say "it might get significantly harder for humble college students such as myself to sample an artist's music until he's sick of it and no longer has the need to go out and buy a disc".
I only buy CD's from used CD resellers. The RIAA will never get a dime from me again as long as I live.
Unless we find some rich benefactor, there's not a chance in hell that will work. And I'm depressed you even think it has a chance. I mean, unless someone out there knows some hypnotism or voodoo that would let us brainstem-wash (*grin* it's not like they have the complete organ) politicians, you might as well give up.
I don't have money. But I do have a brain. Let's fight this with technology.
So, after endless stories on slashdot, I'm convinced the RIAA is evil. Now what? How do I stop supporting them?
It just so happens I live in Canada and my musical tastes lie mostly in stuff from Europe. Therefore, RIAA, as in America, shouldn't really apply. Does this mean I'm already set?
"[A] high IQ is like a Jeep; you will still get stuck, just farther from help!" --Just d' FAQs, c.g.a
but I'm afraid it might get significantly harder for humble college students such as myself to sample an artist's music before going out and buying a disc
I had a solution for that back in my university days that preceded napster and mp3s, for that matter.
It was called: FRIENDS
I'd say "Whatcha got there Stu?"
He'd say "Mr Bungle CD"
I'd say "it any good?"
He'd say "yeah, have a listen.. you can borrow it"
I'd say "Thanks"
It can work for you too.
Oh, wait, you want music without any social interaction or having to pay for it. Cant help ya there.
Their networks, their rules. We werent allowed to copy video games using school equipment either.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
I used to run a Phynd server for a little over a year while in the Berkeley dorms... it was actually pretty cool, but it's not like Napster.
Basically, the Phynd concept is actually very basic: scan all SAMBA shares (i.e. windows shares), store the results, put in a file/DB and then make a searchable webfront or application. FlatLAN is actually a separate, user-friendlyish application to the webfront. Scanning only takes place every couple of hours, so it might miss a couple computers. Also, if people turn their computer off, the shares are still listed in the database, but aren't accessible. It isn't updated in real-time like Napster/KaZaA/
The reason this is popular, in case you don't know, is that you're just searching all available shares and downloading them at the speed of the internal network... mmm... 100Mbit switched network... it was quite useful, especially if you're looking for bigger files.
While I think that the RIAA does have a point, I mean, honestly, why would you put a compressed (.zip/.rar/.arc) category or a mp3 category to narrow searches down?
However, they do miss a really great aspect of Phynd: it can be used as a security scanner. Since a lot of new computers do come with their computers sharing the entire harddrive (in the same way some trojans do), it's easy to figure out who needs to secure their computer.
Another legit use is actually sharing ISOs... no, I'm not talking about your latest w4r3z fix, but the latest Linux ISOs. I was able to pull Slackware 7.1 (I think it was 7.1) off the network at a cool 2-4MB/s which is much faster than trying to grab it from a mirror at 50-100K/s.
Damn you RIAA...
Once again, the RIAA demonstrates that it doesn't know who or what it's up against.
I can only imagine how many war-dialers will go into infinite-loop mode calling that number.
I'm beginning to think that RIAA really stands for Really Ignorant Arrogant Assholes.
--K.
Sig: Bad people happen. Try to avoid being one of them.
From the Article:
"We hope that these suits serve as a stiff deterrent to anyone who is operating or considering setting up a similar system."
The RIAA's president also praised the higher education community for the steps that many colleges and universities are taking proactively to address the problem of peer-to-peer infringement on campus.
They don't really care how these lawsuits turn out. They just want to scare individuals and get more universities to do this. I think illegal copying is a rather unfortunate way to use university bandwidth, especially publicly-funded institutions.
I think all this creates is an antagonism between the RIAA (and in turn the major players in the music industry) and what could be arguably be considered their best customers. Admittedly, I remember reading an article a long time ago saying how it's middle aged customers who buy the most CDs but it's teenagers/college students that drive the pop culture industry.
The more the RIAA cracks down on teenagers/college students, there will be a point where the underground independent music industry becomes the "cool thing", being lifted aboveground, but free from the RIAA. I can see how the RIAA will gain in the short run from stopping "piracy" (though they don't seem to know that most of my fellow college students own a plethora of CDs) but I have faith that in the future their draconian means will come back to bite them in the ass.
In addition (this paragraph isn't very coherently organized), the RIAA is now messing with the generation that has grown up with Nintendos and computers. We will always find a way to circumvent whatever stupid DRM are imposed whether legally or illegally. Perhaps it would be in the RIAA's interest to actually acknowledge that times are changing, and that this period can make or break the music industry. People still buy CDs of their favorite artists (hell I do, even though I could easily just copy my friend's original CDs) and the RIAA should keep that in mind in whatever new business model they hopefully soon will develop.
...I've actually gone out and done just that. I was given the responsibility of picking 3D CAD and FEA software by my employer. Not having used a lot such software before (don't ask why they picked me - I'm under 30?), I found the local dealers, let them give me their spiel, then (for those apps that didn't offer trial licences) went and downloaded the warez and played with them for a few weeks. It made the choices a LOT simpler. And we didn't get stuck paying for software that didn't work as advertised (nice try Inventor).
I am one of the apparently few dastardly people who downloads MP3s...and doesn't buy the CDs! I also steal -er I mean borrow- a lot of software too. Does anyone buy this lame argument?
On my campus, sometimes the link to an outside server is faster than the connection to a server in a neighboring building. Once we transfered a 2 gig file to a server in Florida (I'm in Kansas) and then from that server to computer in another dorm faster than we could directly from my computer to theirs.
The article said that they were suing the operators of the file sharing network. aka, the "kids".
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." P.J. O'Rourke
I know exactly where it's going, and I don't like it one bit. But the solution is not to buy CDs at all; only 4% of the profits go to the artists anyway. You'd actually be giving them more by just mailing them a dollar. (If only there were an easy way to do this) The only way to get rid of the RIAA disease is to quit feeding it. Music existed long before there was a "music industry" and it will certainly exist long after it has gone.
They don't want to be our parents. They want to be slaveowners, to be our masters.
After all, that's the most efficient way to extract value from a person, isn't it?
Give me a fucking break. File sharing on college campuses is about nothing more than getting free music. Ask the average kid with a new Dell on a wired campus what he or she does with that computer - well, they "download music and burn cds, duh". Most of these kids aren't even aware that this type of stuff is a violation of copyright (whether or not you agree with that is a different story altogether).
The "sampling music" argument is such bullshit it makes me cry inside. Admit it. You're getting something you used to have to pay a pretty penny for for free, have been for a few years now, and now it's being taken away, campus by campus, server by server. Don't expect this to change anytime soon - the recording industry probably has more resources to proctect their copyrights than some college kids crying about not getting their free music any more. Note that the same can be said for the movie "trading" that has increased in recent years.
The next person at my campus who talks about their "rights" being taken away when the RIAA comes in to shut down some kid's MP3 server gets a punch in the face.
"and by 'sample', I mean download as many songs as humanly possible"
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
While we're at it, let's sue ISPs for spreading virii through email, Cisco for building routers that forward packets used by P2P apps, and ATT for providing the backbones that transport these packets. I just don't see where the NetOps are responsible for this.
No.
Why don't they use freenet? ... and with freenet, the activity would be untraceable.
Not that I propose copyright infringement, but I would not like other people watching me as I'm copying data, maybe just to the neighbour via the LAN - and using a p2p tool for it...
So as I understand it, these services simply provided a web index of any files that students on campus had in thier Windows shared directories. So doesn't this suit imply that it's illegal for Windows to allow said shared directories? I think we need to sue Microsoft for this one.
Just a thought
I wanted to try karma whoring... here ya go:
DirectConnect
Phynd
FlatLAN
Well no, because people dont want CDs. People want mp3s. Perhaps if you gave them a discount on Mp3s I'd buy them, sell each mp3 for 10 cents each and I'd buy them, but I wont ever pay more than 25 cent per song.
Setup mp3 vending machines with new released songs on them that I cant get anywhere else and I might plug in my mp3 player and load a song or two, otherwise I'm not going to do it, I dont use CDs anymore, CDs arent as portible as mp3s, and we dont go backwards in technology on the college campuses.
If its cheap and if its all over the place, I'd buy it, otherwise no.
Here are my options, listen to music online, or dont listen to music at all, if the RIAA wants to make it so I cannot listen to their music, well then I wont listen to any of their music but I'll still listen to music online and guess what, They'll lose customers because I'll end up buying somethinng from an Indy Label.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
"I'm afraid it might get significantly harder for humble college students such as myself to sample an artist's music before going out and buying a disc... my speed across the network is ridiculously faster than when I try to access outside sources."
... I'm sure you can sample just fine from the outside world. If you want to support this, all right. This shouldn't be the reason to support it.
And now... what are you smoking? Frankly, if you're just "sampling" music, then why do you need incredibly fast transfers?
Especially on a college account, that's always on, with no cost for additional bandwith (AFAIK)
Ah bork it. :(
oh wait, this is about music... it isn't important
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
The RIAA is taking legal action against the Department of Defense. It believes the DoD has caused serious harm to RIAA members, in its harbouring of and creation of the Internet.
"The people who built this huge network know full well what they are doing--operating a sophisticated network designed to enable widespread music piracy," RIAA President Cary Sherman said. "They built a protocol called TCP/IP that has been shown to provide ample opportunity for stealing music online."
Also, it seems out of character for the RIAA to sue a couple of rich colleges. Did they have to make sure the kids' parents would have the dough to put up a decent fight? I would have expected to see them sue some poor-ass state colleges or something, not Princeton. You know, like all those patent-peddling bullshit companies that sue the little fishes to build up the war chest to take on the bigguns? People at these colleges have connections.
Why are these kids running a napster like client with a centralized database when they could use one of the anonymous p2p protocols? I figured thats what kids were doing these days.
Yeah right, like you thieving college l00zer ever bought CDs anyway once you could steal the songs. Lying sack of shit.
University Resources shouldn't be used for your personal entertainment. They are supposed to be for learning stuff.
It really depends whether your school is behaving like a full ISP or are providing net access for database access etc.
If they are a full ISP then they should just tell RIAA to go to hell. If not, then they really should block all peer to peer sharing (between students at least).
Why not just have encrypted file sharing? This would shield you from the RIAA as well as the LAN admins (hence getting them off the hook). Something like 128bit SSH should do the trick.
-Valiss
To all the people that are foaming at the mouth, over the network admins getting sued over this. READ THE DAMN STORY!!!
It's pretty clear from reading the article, that the RIAA is suing the operators of the file sharing networks. Not the LAN admins. In other words, they are pursuing lawsuits against people that are actively engaged in copyright violations. Nothing more.
They are doing exactly what they should be.
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." P.J. O'Rourke
i work at a huge college, and we've had a variety of meetings about this. although they'd love to just shut down filesharing for a variety of network traffic reasons, the legal reasons aren't as cut and dried as it may seem.
unlike a workplace, a college dorm is NOT just a room in a building with a network jack.
it also happens to be someone's residence. there are severe restrictions on what you can and can't do/listen to at someone's "home" per se.
this lawsuit may not be as cut and dried as the RIAA is hoping for. my guess is scare tactic and this will just settle out of court with the schools paying a pile of monet to the RIAA.
stupid ass RIAA is going to end up having to live off their lawsuits though, seeing as this will just drive cd sales down even further.
retards.
Although it doesn't mention if these people were just operating hubs, or were perhaps actual employees of the University as well?
Princeton eh? Could it be that snarky Ed Felten getting busted there for doing "filesharing research"?
No! He points the finger elsewhere in his Freedom to Tinker blog back in November 2002: the campus paper, the Daily Princetonian then had a nice article with some details on how filesharing works (and is policed, not tightly enough for the RIAA apparently) at Princeton these days.
At least until today.
(I had to laugh at the frankness of the music professor quoted in that article.)
--LP
It's over. The genie is out of the bottle. The RIAA wonders how it will control and profit from music distribution. It won't.
How will artists make money? Just like they do now, from live appearances, endorsements, and the other trappings of fame. They already make on avearage less than zero from record sales royalties. As more artists realize this and release music royalty-free (except the ones under dealth-penalty lifetime contracts) the need for record labels will finally be over.
How will artists get the money to record? Please. The requirement for expensive studio time isn't just over, it never existed. Some of the best music you'll hear on the radio came from live sessions on what are by today's standards junk equipment. And for those that want to use multi-track mixing, 24-bit mixers are about as expensive as a new Statocaster. The popularity of ~128Kbps MP3s shows that music isn't about perfect fidelity for most folks. You wan't better fidelity? Go to a show.
-Ryan C.
-Ryan C.
> Don't know where this is going, but I'm afraid it might get significantly harder for humble college students such as myself to sample an artist's music before going out and buying a disc... my speed across the network is ridiculously faster than when I try to access outside sources.
I'm sorry, I don't believe you.
Look, the rhetoric of "I want to have file sharing programs so I can legitimately and legally under fair use laws make backup reproductions" is getting old. Not only do I not believe you, but the media does not believe you, the law does not believe you, and the industry sure-as-hell does not believe you.
People want to steal and pirate music and movies. They are doing it, and no amount of legislation and regulation is going to change that.
What does this imply? Well, quite rightly, a fundemental transformation of the actual value of art and entertainment media itself.
This has been going on since the invention of the printing press -- since the age of the bard. Over time, the cost of reproduction goes down, and thus so does the value of the individual unit of media.
The industry can fight it, but it will lose over time. That is inevitable.
However, profit can still be made. The winners will be those who offer media that can not be reproduced digitally (vinyl, packaging, etc), and those who adapt the earliest and fastest to the future economies of entertainment. Those that predict the changing value will have a head start on capturing the emerging market.
In other words, an hour of music is no longer worth $15 - $20. The earlier the industry realizes that, they better they will do.
And the sooner consumers stop trying to deceive themselves, the lawmakers,and the industry, the better this will be for all of us. Legislature is being crippled by a lying consumer (fair use, my ass), a lying producer (free market, my ass), and people trying to take advantage of the deception (Microsoft DRM, my ass).
"As the present now will later be past, the order is rapidly fading. And the first one now will later be last, for the times they are a changing."
PS: Don't believe there is a trend? Think about music in the middle ages. You had to pay someone to play. And when they were done, they were done. You'd have to pay them again to hear the music again. By the beginning of the 20th century, you could spend a fortune on a record player and another fortune on some vinyl, but you could listen as often as you liked. By the end of the 20th century, cassettes and CDs were ubiqituous and cheap, but had a cost associated with physical reproduction. Today the physical costs are nil. See the trend?
Its a ongoing problem, many groups DONT get air play, so their sales suffer and remain virtually unknown.
Sampling via 'illegal' means is the only way you decide if you want to buy the rest of their stuff...
And a 10 second sample doesnt count, that is not representative of a artists work.
And yes ive bought many albums i never would have risked money on, unless i could hear the WHOLE thing.. I have to work for my music budget...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
"The targeted systems operate similarly to the pirate peer-to-peer network Napster -- the online service found by a U.S. court in 2001 to have engaged in wholesale copyright infringement -- but instead of being open to anyone with access to the Internet, they reside on a specific college's internal computer network, known also as a "local area network." ...
"This is a particularly flagrant way to illegally distribute millions of copyrighted works over the Internet," added Sherman.
Hello? LAN = local network. Internet = connection of network*s*. Not exactly the same thing.
I would like to make the comment that having a completely anonymous filesharing network like freenet is a great thing. Now it just needs a freesite with some sort of central music repository, and I'd be willing to bet that it'd really take off.
Beautiful stuff, anonymity.
My campus has a peer to peer network running to avoid the possiblity of a server operator being targeted for prosecution. (we did have an OpenNap/WinMX network last year but the server admin was asked to shut it down by the university)
From what network administrators at the university have told me, they have see cases at our school where the RIAA actually hires students on campus to spy for them.
Never underestimate the bandwith of a college student walking across the dorm loaded with CD-Rs.
These students are operating commonly available software packages that basically crawl open NetBIOS shares ("Windows Filesharing") on the university's LAN and produce a searchable index. This includes absolutely anything that anyone on the network is publically sharing. Some of this is data (dumps of physics data, for example), some of it is copyrighted music and movies, some of it is student-produced music and movies (e.g. a project for a film class), etc. The people operating the search engine have no control over what people choose to put on open shares.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
So far so good, no misinformation yet. But then the spin gets started:
"These systems are best described as 'local area Napster networks,' said Cary Sherman, President, RIAA. 'The court ruled that Napster was illegal and shut it down. These systems are just as illegal and operate in just the same manner."
Ok, so now we're defining a LAN as a LANL? And Sherman is saying that a LAN is the same thing as Napster? But wait, it gets better:
"This is a particularly flagrant way to illegally distribute millions of copyrighted works over the Internet,' added Sherman. 'The people who run these Napster networks know full well what they are doing ?'"
The first quote already differentiated between LANs and the internet, but now they're being lumped together. Also, that question mark at the end is in the original article, and I think that it deserves to be there, since now we are referring to LANs specifically as "Napster networks." But wait, now things get really confusing:
"The perpetrators of these internal Napster networks named in the suits filed by the RIAA make use of software known variously as Flatlan, Phynd or Direct Connect."
Ok, so LANs are "Napster networks" which use software? I thought that Napster was software too, but now I see that it was a network, though I'm still not clear on whether it used software or not. Anyway, I learned a lot from this article, like the RIAA's music piracy hotline, 1-800-BAD-BEAT. Call in and report a rival company or school that is hosting a "Napster network," and keep America running!
survive. Drop CD prices to $4.99!! Personally i would rather have my music on CD if I could buy 3 or 4 CD's for the same price as one Brittany Spears album. I would be plenty happy to buy TONS of music. I just can't justify spending $15 on a damn CD that I don't even know for sure I like. So what do I do? Download a couple of songs and give it a spin, find out I don't like the CD and never buy it. CD's only cost $0.01's to manufacture anyway. Pellets go in, CD's come out. Come on tell me, if you could buy a CD for the same price as a gut bomb at Macindon's would you buy a handful on a whim?
(reposted from "Would Free Music Sell Cars?" makes more sense in this discussion)
In any case, the ones that are sharing the copyrighted material are the ones that are sharing part of their hard disk to the lan. Why not sue all of them? Better yet, why not sue all the windows users that in internet shares they hard disks? In that way, RIAA will get enough money to make them happy for some centuries and don't bother anymore, and we will be free of those dumb users that shares their C: disk with internet, and becames a possible zombie for orchested attacks and things like that.
Give me a break. It's stealing...that simple! I'm sick of people trying to justify it.
Pretty soon anyone who holds a LAN party will be busted down. Anyone who advertises for them will be held in the same light as anyone who asks you to buy some crack on the street. The RIAA might just make computers illegal alltogether. I mean, why not? It would just cut out the problem... of course they'd be out of business, but that doesn't seem to bother them...
-Valiss
The bands you want to sample still don't have websites?
As if a practical search for "new music that I like" existed. Not even the mighty Google can make that one work. I might as well use rand() to find samples of new bands. Nah, I'll just drive to New Orleans that's quicker.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Now internet radio stations must pay fees to the RIAA whenever songs they own (I guess...) are played. This may not be a big deal for some people, but out here in the middle of Kansas we don't get a whole lot of air radio.
P2P has completely legal uses, and should not be silenced like internet radio just because it has illegal uses as well.
If they successfully prosecute the people who are illegally copying music they're going to have a much harder time convincing a court that they need draconian technological countermeasures.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Go engineers!
"With or without these services, people would be able to share these files," the student said. "It's Microsoft that's allowing people to share these files; we're just accessing public information." So, if some technotard shares out their "My Music" with windows file sharing, they are sueable?
You and I both know that if we had a vote on this issue, the people would decide to make filesharing on the internet legal.
I dont think people would want true piracy to be illegal, meaning copying and then selling it, but most people in this country do not believe sharing is morally wrong and its going to take years to reprogram everyone in this country to somehow go against all they were taught. You see I dont think you can train or program a person to be selfish, and just because greedy guys in suits at the RIAA are selfish does not mean you can convince me or anyone else here to be selfish like you.
So here is what should be done, we can handle this in a democratic way, and have some kinda vote/discussion which involves the people, or they can sue us and put us in jail and cause us to riot and sue them and boycott.
But I think we can avoid conflict and solve this problem without it even going to such a level. I dont want to see people on college campuses all around the country rioting and protesting over something like this, but thats whats going to happen and while people may be divided on the war with Iraq, most college students SUPPORT filesharing and you can expect millions of people to have alot more power than the RIAA, whats the number now? 100 million people? Why the hell should some small hidden group of guys in suits and ties in some fucking office somewhere be allowed to decide what we can and cannot do, is this a democracy or are we in the new soviet union/China/Iraq?
We have troops fighting for our "Freedom" when in reality we dont have any? What the hell are we fighting for then? Fighting so some stupid goofballs in suits and other corperate types can rule the world behind closed doors?
I usually dont believe in shadow government BS, or illuminati garbage, but you know I'm starting to wonder if a group of businessmen actually do rule the world and want to make it seem like its a democracy when its really not.
Sure, have an election but keep it rigged so the vote doesnt even matter? And no matter who gets elected, money can be used to control them and if they get out of line well then you might have another john F kennedy kinda situation?
I dont like it.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
It will be interesting to see how the RIAA gets the evidence it needs for these cases. Its fair to say that access to University networks is only granted to authorised persons. So I read it as a case of RIAA got its evidence illegally, by somehow tapping in to the "local area Napster network" as they call it or that someone on site snitched in which case they must be hoping they aren't identified.
The RIAA may be able to prove someone on campus is sharing files illegally on to the internet. However, proving that a private internal network is being used for something dodgy requires a bit more evidence gathering than just making the accusation and hoping it sticks.
Go MTU! My connection off campus slowed down because of all you freaks.
:) I traced it back to this LAN Search program in September.
And maybe this will cut down on the odd connections to my webserver
X(7): A program for managing terminal windows. See also screen(1).
The RIAA and their related knuckleheads are only cutting their own throats and alienating it's customer base. They will be right behind the lawyers as the second ones up against the wall. Because of these idiots trying to squeeze every last drop and dictating to me pretty much what, when and where and on what I can play music I BOUGHT they can go to hell.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
The DMCA represents a significant amount of time and money expended by the RIAA. Are you saying that anyone should be able to just invoke a law, when they never paid for it? That's un-American!
Forget about all this commercial music garbage. I quit downloading warez when I moved to an open-source platform(Linux), let's get some Open-Music goin...
-------
"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
-- George Orwell
They're suing these students for creating an indexing service that *links to content*. Content which is *not hosted by the students being sued*.
The students being sued aren't any more guilty than Google is. This is absurd.
You gotta love the (in)consistency of logic employed by the RIAA.
Is it "These systems are best described as'local area Napster networks,' said Cary Sherman, President, RIAA"
or "This is a particularly flagrant way to illegally distribute millions of copyrighted works over the Internet." ???
Inquiring minds want to know. (hint: "Internet != local area network")
The emphasis on "napster=bad" is so similar to that "Metallica good! Napster Bad!" cartoon I have to chuckle.
--LP
Universities are protected by their students actions along with ISPs. Now, if a company like Microsoft could get sued all day long, but a university has some very powerful protection that this kind of lawsuit seems to want to contest.
If the RIAA won their suit, a university would be responsible for all student network activity. To say the least, that's a very BIG deal. Basically you would no longer have computer labs and only research labs would be connected to any kind of network. Dorms rooms would have to buy a connection from a private ISP. Now then the RIAA might sue some big ISPs? If they the courts set such a legal precedence, it would destroy the internet.
Everyone knows this, that's why this lawsuit is ludicrist and is merely an effort by the RIAA to gain publicity and grind on these college's legal bills. There is no way the courts could rule in the RIAA's favor unless there is something particular going on at these specific universities that is actively endorsing unlawful behavior. Like an ISP having a special "child porn search bar" or somesuch. If that's the case that Princeton is actively supporting piracy, then they're in trouble. If the RIAA wants to make them responsible for each student's network activity, that is absurd and impossible.
If you're unhappy with them, let them know. Call them at 1-800-BAD-BEAT at tell them all this junk you are writing down. As an extra special benifit, every call you make will cost them on their next phone bill. Have fun, be polite and express your views.
The guy almost sounds apologetic, "I'm just sampling..", "a humble student like me" etc. People need to realize that they *deserve* to have the freedom to share published information, and the RIAA are the real crooks here for threatening good people with jail and lawsuits in a desparate effort to maintain their control. These same tactics were employed by the former Soviet Union, except in that country the motive was political; in the US the motive is profit. But the actions affect us the same way regardless of the motive. I laugh when the RIAA uses smear words like "piracy" and "theft," as if they're suggesting that sharing music is the moral equivalent of attacking a ship on the high seas, murdering and kidnapping the people on them. It's sad that most people in this country buy into the idea that the RIAA and others should have the right to boss people around and tell them what they can and can't make a copy of. Although I don't listen to much music, admittedly, I never buy CDs anymore, and I'm proud of it. The day the "music industry" dies (at least in its current form) will be cause for celebration.
Metallica Good! Napster Bad! cartoon link.
The exact method was not forclosed, for fear of embarasment, but it involved a random search of the web and cataloging Captian Hook's own bounty of MP3's, OGGs, Wave files, porn and all forms of information under all types of copyright terms including public domain. "It's not as fast as the Napster Music Sharing Comunity ^H^H^H^H^H? Pirate Network used to be, but it gets there" a computer expert said.
"The Court outlawed Napster and we are going to jail this bastard, Twitter" claimed an RIAA press release.
"To add insult to injury, he just gave the idea away.", fumed Rosen when asked for a comment, "We know where you live, how much you weigh and what food you don't like and we are going to get you for figuring out a way to share. This rand() function is costing us billions!"
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Yeesh. That doesn't really roll off your tongue quite as well as, "Holy shit I'm going to have to start paying for CDs again!"
The point is that this type of BS in posts gets annoying after awhile. Adding a disclaimer at the end of the post to make it sound like there really is a legit reason for having access to high-speed downloads is counterproductive.
Downloading copyrighted material for a looksee is still illegal. That doesn't mean that you shouldn't be able to control what you download. But this sort of comment really takes away from the issue at hand. Its like a little nudge, or a wink, that says, "Hey buddy, I like to download illegally. 'Bout you?"
Don't buy music unless the CD has the seal "Unprotected open CD - Not affiliated to RIAA".
I used to say don't buy American music (and I recommend this boycott to everyone, including American consumers)... but that's unfair, there's a lot of good artists who just want to sing and make a living.
Why don't these guys go after the pirates instead of bullying consumers? So I say, buy only CDs with that seal.
(This seal doesn't exist yet, AFAIK, but I'll buy CDs when I'm sure they're not "protected").
The moderators so far have fallen victim to one of the classic blunders! The most famous of which is, "Never moderate up a slashdot catch phrase which is no longer popular." But only slightly less well known is this, "Never moderate up a troll when RIAA is on topic!"
Don't forget to moderate this post as "-1 unfunny". Thanks.
// harborpirate
// Slashbots off the starboard bow!
. "It's Microsoft that's allowing people to share these files; we're just accessing public information."
So because somebody didn't lock their door, its okay to steal the things in their house?
This is not a flame bait, this is the line of reasoning that a judge would see. The kids argument is valid for non-ip protected stuff: sure, look around the network and snag some freeware files off somebody else's drive. But just because you CAN do something, doesn't make it right in the eyes of the law.
IANAL, IANAL, and, BTW, IANAL.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
If you're in such a college environment, set up a wireless network separate from the institution's wired network. Forbid any sort of crossover. Start gluing nodes together and then go nuts "sharing" whatever you want.
For bonus points, construct a system with sufficient redundancy to still work if several nodes are missing. This way you can "go stealth" by only turning on your equipment when you want to get onto the net and start shooting files around.
This all assumes that there would be several "content sources" - someone has to buy the CD at least once, or at least import the files from some other venue.
Old news. How many times have I heard threats from the RIAA. Sony sued my school back in 2000. P2P ports were throttled down to like .00000001 kbps, which adversely affected legitamate software. I wish the RIAA would take care of the source, such as big P2P promoters, instead of attacking the average joe. Piracy was around before the internet and will surely be around for the span of our lifetimes. Everytime someone is knocked offline, 5 more join the community. Looks like the recording industry should sell theirselves on service and not product. Open source software is the first intelligent step to tomorrow. It free to most of us anyway, cant remember the last time I bought a CD or paid for software. Doubt there are many of us here who haven't pirated something. Doubt it felt like you were stealing either.
I'm afraid it might get significantly harder for humble college students such as myself to sample an artist's music before going out and buying a disc...
It's already hard for me to justify buying CDs. I'm down to one mainstream band that I really like, and have to wait about 2 years for new CDs. Add the headaches of fair-use prevention, errr, copy protection, and it just doesn't make sense to buy CDs. Maybe Apple will get the subscription music service right and we'll have a legitimate, fair, and fun service with tons of good music.
damn RIAA
ZOO ROCKS!!!
because I have been enjoined by this Holy Office to abandon the false opinion which maintains that the Sun is the centre
Michigan Tech is a small 6,000 person engineering school stuck up in the middle of NOWHERE. Check out this map to get some idea of what I mean. It's an absolutely beautiful area- it's on the shore of Lake Superior, and the hiking/biking/camping/skiing is fantastic. Tech turns out a lot of good engineers in part because there's not much to do throughout most of the school year except play in the snow and drink. Oh, and the poor (for the men) male:female ratio means not much of a distraction for the guys in that regard, either.
Aside from the great college radio station (all 100 watts of it), at least in 1996 there was basically nowhere to hear new music. Bands wouldn't ever stop in the area and the three local radio stations were top 40, country, and NPR.
So, while I can't really defend this guy, I have to imagine his network was *extremely* popular. It was probably the only place to get music locally unless Musicland was still open at the Copper Country Mall ("Over Forty Stores!")
Anybody from Tech care to comment on whether or not things are any different today than they were when I was there?
Every single time one of these articles comes out, there are a bunch of complaints that this will affect those who use the system legitimately. What a bunch of baloney. Does anyone really think the RIAA would be going to all this trouble if the majority of P2P users were using the systems to share legitimately obtained material?
Okay, so granted it is not cool to put down hard-earned money on a crappy CD. But, how many of those yelling about that would be happy with 15-second samples?
Granted, MTV, radio, and other mediums tend to promote whatever the industry wants to sell - rather than new unknown styles. But how do you search a P2P network for an "unknown"? That is something easier done through word-of-mouth, local jigs, and unaffiliated local radio stations. (BTW - how many of these complainers are willing to support their local college station in any way to ensure it isn't taken over by a big corp?)
I was taking one day at a time, but then several days got together and ambushed me. (from a Rhymes with Orange comic)
Two hours later, the RIAA came out with a list of search warrents for more LANN admins. The list of names included:
Phuck Yu, Chris Mayazz, and Dick Hedd. The RIAA asked if you have any information about those students please inform them immediately.
How about gathering by the student union and trading CDRs or just connecting via an 8 port switch?
What will they get if they sniff the network? (insert odor/pot/fart joke here.)
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
Princeton University discourages filesharing but students will always find ways to share files. There is a LOT of misinformation about Phind though. While I do not believe in sharing copyrighted works as someone who has is trying to make a living producing commercial software, Phind is NOT a peer-to-peer file sharing service as the RIAA has described. All it is is a search service that searches all SMB (Windows/Samba) file shares campus-wide and indexes the files it finds. It is up to you as a user to locate that machine on the network, make the connection, and grab the files. In fact, there are a lot of files on there that have nothing to do with copyrights. People share their papers, research, vacation photos, etc. on their workstations and Phind will index them if they are public shares.
Just like anything else, there are legit uses as well as legitimate uses. Shutting down a service and depriving people from it's legitimate use is not the answer. --Jon
The Gestapo were the Nazi secret police who particpated in the death of nearly 6 million people. To trivialize this by equating it to rounding up of thiefs shows a real warped sense of perspective on your part.
...f*ck the RIAA.
They've been pissing everyone off entirely too much.
# fuser -v
#
Think about music in the middle ages. You had to pay someone to play. :-)
...
Or just make them your slave
ive said it before and ill say it again we need a "true" (as in budweiser) modifyer
Slashdot - The one stop shop for procrastination
This is the most absurd thing I have read in recent days. The notion of stealing music inorder to preview it for later purchase is insane. Would you steal a CD from the music shop only to turn around and go make a purchase of the exact same thing. NO, you would not!
People think up the weirdest shit to justify that their actions are legitimate, and many times they belive their own lies. I can speculate that some folks steal music, and then go out and purchase some of the tunes they stole. But how many tunes are sampled, yet never purchased. Also, a sample of music is typically a segment of the audio, not the entire tune. People do not trade samples, they trade entire tracks/albums.
Simply put, napster is not designed to be a preview service. It is designed to move mp3 files from one computer to another, and search the data of remote computers for whatever your criteria is(genre, artists, albums, etc). I'm not sure what is worse, people who download music from napster, or peope who make their albums available on napster. The people who share their tunes are facilitating a criminal activity by the people who steal (aka download) the music.
My opinion on the entire mess is that if Napster could hurt the music industry, it probably does. Dowloading a binary file is inocent in of itself. A downloader has no notion if the binary they download (mp3's) are copyright, or not. The notion of a filename is meaningless as files can be renamed, so respect of copyrights based on recognition of the bands name in the filename is a flawed argument. Clearly the criminal liability points to the people who make music available for download, but since in napster downloaders, and publishers are one in the same. Thus, the method of correcting the criminal situation is to remove the napster servers.
</rant>
It isn't a lie if you belive it.
Make the box the property of a small company. Base the company in Botswanaland. Even if the RIAA sued, the company could declare bankrupcy and then the RIAA would't get it's settlement.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
Okay, I thought previous generations had already proven that Rock and Roll leads to sexual promiscuity. I attended RPI. The last thing that's going on at RPI is sexual promiscuity ... well, with anything human.
Leave the poor Engineers alone. They're stuck in Troy, NY with a dearth of anything resembling an attractive woman, and nothing but their curriculum-mandated laptop to keep them warm at night.
The truth is, chances are 90% of them could create an online music solution that would run circles around whatever the RIAA eventually blesses as version 1.0. Then again, maybe that's the RIAA's new preventative strategy.
Doesn't the RIAA realize that attacking SCHOOLS is the wrong way to do this? Most state universities are hurting for money so bad that having to play "traffic cop" for the RIAA would put an undue stress on the university. This would be a private organization effectively attacking a government run educational institution -- but I digress. I mean, what's more low down and heinous than a rich group of fat cats deciding to selectively enforce their god-given right to stop file trading, with its sights pointed to a school. Why not go after another corporation! They have much more money than any university...
Alas, isn't Patriot-II proposing that using crypto in commiting a federal crime gets you an automatic 5 year jail term?
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
I got them "Can't post on Slashdot 'cause the mods are sons of bitches" blues.
Interesting how the RIAA press release continues demonizing the term 'Napster' -- early in the release Napster is labeled as a pirate service, then the term is stretched to cover any P2P network and finally the Napster court loss is recalled. Ergo 'Ray Charles is God.'
I remember those days, back before Napster. We had Network Neighborhood and Ethernet connections to the dorm. Edit your lmhosts file and you could see any computer on the campus if you wanted to. No need for Napster. In some ways I miss it, you'd just see a new computer and open it and wade through all the crap someone would share. It was a simple time, a fun time. We didn't need to actually copy the song, just click it and you'd listen to it. It was nice then too cause before Napster, finding a song was a task. Mp3's were aplenty but in hiding. Eventually there was mp3.com and scour.net, but the joy was finding that song you had stuck in your head but couldn't find on the internet on some random lan computer.
*sob*
Yep, that's exactly what happened. A couple of students acted as "admins" over a file swapping server and they are the ones that got nailed.
When I read the headline though, I was very afraid that the university admins might be the people targeted. Sadly, I'm not wondering *if* the focus will switch from users to carriers, but *when*. ISP's are going to take a beating in the forseeable future...
The headphones most CDplayers come with are cheap peices of junk, so on a portible device people prefer mp3. You are right however for the home stereo people do prefer CD, but those same people who prefer CD over MP3 would also prefer a record player over a CD player because Vinyl sounds so much better.
See the problem I have and alot of others have is, we dont want to buy the whole CD which might only have one good song on it, but I will pay a fee to download an mp3 in public. I think 25 cent is reasonnable, its a price anyone will pay rich or poor.
I wont pay $3.99 for a single, I will pay $1 for a high quality vinyl single. I will pay 50 cent for a CD, and I will pay 25 cent for an mp3. Thats it.
I'm not going to pay $5 for one song.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Parent is the truth. Just because you don't like what he/she has to say does not mean they should be modded down as a troll.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Perhaps this will get more people interested in politics...
StarTux
Surely Amazon is also lining up to sue these kids. They stole their valuable intellectual property!
I see a lot of people here talking about how they sample music online, before purchasing the disc. What I want to know is how many of you are just about ready to say "Fuck the RIAA. I'm not buying another disc, ever." I'm frustrated whenever I read about actions like this. Suing system admins at colleges makes me sick. I used to sample music and buy and album if it had at least a few songs I liked on it, but I'm honestly sick of the RIAA.
Just my two cents of what makes sense.
It's been said a million times before..these IDIOTS will never 'get it'! They truly believe that they can sue themselves into total control. It's only a matter of time before the Govt. gets tired of this crap and deals with it. What are they gong to do? Sue EVRYONE? What we need to do s all write a letter to the RIIA wich says: "I'm a file sharer. I dare you to sue me". If they got say a million letters what are they going to do, put everyone in jail? In a way, this is a lot like prohibition. The Govt. passed a special interest law outlawing alcohol. Then they realized that they couldn't arrest everyone who was breaking the law. hey did try for a while though, wasting a lot of lives and money. Finally they 'got a clue' that what they were doing was accomplishing nothing, so they eliminated it. Also, isn't this the very same RIAA that publically said they would NEVER sue an individual? Well this action, suing private individuals on a private network proves what a lying sack of sh*t they turned out to be! They'e already lost -they're just too dumb to realize it!- Public opinion is turning against them. Their own artists are turning against them. It's only a matter of time before the lawmakers turn tail and run themselves. But then again, maybe I'm overestimating the intelligence of the average member of congress.
Under current federal (and many state) laws, it's just as illegal for the RIAA, BayTSP, or any other copyright cop to spoof source IP addresses. If you really want to toe the line and swap files online, use your brain. The following are good measures to take:
b s.htm]. The program comes with a list compiled by the author, as well as borrowed from the Shareaza security updates.
(1) Use a firewall. I'd recommend using a stateful packet filter, and, if you're in Windows, an application level firewall, but if you want to save CPU cycles, meth has done an excellent job with PeerGuardian [http://homepage.ntlworld.com/tim.leonard1/methla
(2) Harden your OS. If the Berman bill would pass for some reason, keeping your system up-to-date may make the copyright cops' job harder.
(3) Use an IDS. If you aren't logging when those verboten IPs are hitting your box, you aren't helping yourself. If you see a lot of probes, perhaps you've peaked some interest.
(4) Start using encrypted P2P clients. If you start using it, you add one more user to the network, thus increasing its exposure. As another plug for meth, the last time I chatted with him he mentioned development of an encryption protocol for his XS Client. Simply chatting with developers like meth can make encryption a more popular tool (and viable as well, if you can offer assistence). However, don't pester the developers.
Finally, diversify your interests. The RIAA isn't going to sue you for having Magnetic Fields MP3s on your drive, and if they didn't, they wouldn't have standing in court, since they don't own the rights to the songs. Support independant bands. Share their music, and encourage your friends to buy it. Indie labels have a hell of a time breaking even, because distribution is hard to get. You help them out when you tip a friend off to them. However, BUY THE MUSIC! I'm all about free information flow, but when you talk about independant labels, they're not licensing their songs under the Creative Commons license - they're trying to make money off the sales of the records and merchandise. Buy a T-shirt and an album, and make it a habit to substitute bands on the big labels with independant ones.
-Bill
Exactly! CD's just aren't worth it. For $15-$20 I could get a 45 minute long cd or a DVD-music video with 2-3 hours of footage/music on it. And for another $2 I could rip the auido and burn to a CD (the $2 comes from the cost of the CD-r and the time it takes you to do it. Come on I should be able to use RIAA math as well).
Of course if the industry went to selling Multiformat DVD's for 15 dollars (a dvd layer for music videos and a CD layer for audio cd players) they would see an explosion in sales I bet. But as long as my 20$ are better spent on a DVD (or broadband) I will buy somthing else.
There is nothing wrong with being gay. It's getting caught where the trouble lies.
They have an 800 number. ( 1-800-BAD-BEAT ) Lets All call it everyday. And waste their time. They have to pay for the call, and someone on the other end to take a report possibly. I know they claim that file sharing is illegal but I do not see any difference from that to copying songs to a mix tape, to simply having freinds over and all listening to my stereo. If it is truely art, then why not let everyone enjoy it. Listening to an mp3 you dowloaded does not STOP you from also buying the CD. They are NOT mutually exclusive. Or supporting artists in other ways, (think Fugazi... Merchadise)
We won the war for USED CDs, we can win this one too. Don't lose the faith!
Tim
-- Steal Me --
"Our team of lawyers and researchers have your names and we're going to hunt you down like the table-scrap pilfering grab-asses you are."
;-)
Gee, I guess they were serious about this, eh?
"Sampling" MP3s, yeah right.
There is, however, a decent excuse for such behavior. As an example, I will use the recently released CD, "Meteora" by Linkin Park.
The first single released off of Meteora caught my ear, so to speak, so I hunted it down on KaZaA and burned a CD. This is illegal, and I recognize that.
This was about a month before the CD came out. The day it came out I bought the special edition of the CD.
All I did was get one song earlier than I was "supposed to." Never mind that the release date is completely arbitrary after the band finishes the album.
The world can be wrong today for once.
When I'm at work, my employer basically claims that they own everything I do on the computer. They hold claim to all text, emails, phone calls, etc. So if I setup a P2P network at work, essentially the RIAA would have to sue my company seeing as I have no real claim to anything that goes on on those systems.
... but they pay for access to the high-speed network which facilitated the P2P network and it's owned by the universities. Can the RIAA sue the students without implicating the universities as well?
Could the same could be said for the network at universities? Sure, the students own their PCs
It is now. If you read the article posted on the RIAA website, there is a statement made (towards the end, if I remember correctly) that the RIAA AND Universities (probably Colleges as well) have formed an alliance to combat theft of music on campus.
This means that, as long as the University/College (U/C for short) is a member of this alliance, the RIAA is allowed to spy on the LAN of the U/C (just inform the U/C head network admin of what they are going to do and the results).
.. is that ibiblio.org can't keep up with all the Gentoo users. When we getting p2p for portage?
Because of the sophistication of the technology and the expertise needed to install and manage such systems, Napster network operators can't help but be aware of the copyright infringement they facilitate. Indeed, each of the accused operators has seeded his services with hundreds -- and in some cases, thousands -- of copyrighted works.
.MP3 or .EXE and delete them all. I average around 1000 to 2000 MP3 every time I do this. I once had a teacher who took up 2GB of MP3s. Again, this is just nuts, and an extreme bully tactic at the wrong people and I hope the school stands behind their employees and students. (if they actually caught a student with a 1000 mp3 on their personal hard drive, I would have less of an issue)
This is just nuts. You don't need any "expertise" to install napster type programs and it is certainly not "sophisticated" by any stretch of the imagination. Doesn't the RIAA have any clue as to why they are so popular? Any 5yr old to 90yr old can do it. These programs manage themselves - haven't they got that yet? And why the network operators? Maybe I missed something here, they didn't get too technical. But I work in a school system, and our little kiddies are always doing this. They download some type of file sharing app, they all have home directories and they are unable to save to any local drives, so naturally all the music shows up on the server. I do not have time to watch the server to see this music show up. Periodically, around once or twice a year, I will sit at a server (I run 12 buildings) and search for things that end in
That sucks, man. I'm sorry to hear it. I like the college/community radio here: independent, eclectic and we get the BBC world service on it too.
:-)
CFRU 93.3 FM Guelph
Still broadcasting streaming audio over the net
Freedom: "I won't!"
"they reside on a specific college's internal computer network, known also as a "local area network." I can see tomorrow's press relase now. "The RIAA today fired its first salvo of lawsuits at businesses using LANs. The people who run these Local Area Networks know full well what they are doing, operating a sophisticated network designed to enable widespread music thievery. The lawsuits we've filed represent an appropriate step given the seriousness of the offense. We will continue to shutdown LAN's and protect our artists' rights."
"I may disagree with what you have to say, but I shall defend, to the death, your right to say it." -Voltaire
Yeah, my roommate is one of the people getting sued, the phone calls are great. I didn't have any idea what they were calling about until he got back from a meeting with the dean. Apparently they considering using LanScan the equivilant of a "Napster network" Yeah, I think that the music companies just want to scare people. I must say that what they are doing seems to be working pretty well...
In many cases, traffic passes between two dorm rooms on the same switch.
In our university network, in enough cases, p2p did slow down the various research facilities. We are not a campus university, and we are large, distributed over the city. Another problem is gaming with its many small (UDP, I think) packets.
Solution was to change the network structure. We can be grateful that they chose to do that instead of introducing internal traffic limits.
It appears napster is alive from the dead! Why don't the students just use freenet? The school system has some nerve, if they plan on supporting riaa efforts by limiting bandwidth or whatever policies that they adopt that are "anti-sharing".
The best thing you can do if you are a student, is to drop out of college, save you and your parents some cash, since you will have a huge debt and the competitive advantage of having a piece of paper will not be worth the expense you bare for that piece of paper in the current economy.
--Education is a sham, to shape your mind fit for dunghills! The people who have a chance in this world, are those not taught by their fellow man.
Another article here: on quicken.com
:( One of the guys goes to my school...
Even lists names.
Unlike Napster or Kazaa, which helped create a network of computers that would not have existed otherwise, "Phynd" and the others search a network that already exists.
Okay. Phynd is a straightforward SMB indexing server. As per comments here from one of the RPI students, one of the persons charged wrote some of the Phynd software, and the other person admined a Phynd server for RPI. The RIAA is *not* going after the people who are serving infringing data, but after the CS students who wrote indexing software...because it's more convenient for the RIAA.
When file indexing services become illegal because one of the servers that they index contains potentially infringing information (as just happened), the world has turned completely upside down. Google indexes copyright-infringing images and text every day, and in *far* larger quantities than these SMB indexers. Should *they* be served with a lawsuit and ordered to shut down? How about Yahoo? AllTheWeb has an FTP search engine, not that far from an SMB search engine...is *that* illegal as well? Hell, if you have a multi-user system, a user stores infringing information in his account, and your cron daemon runs updatedb, you're in the same boat as the students that got charged.
I'm very, very uncomfortable with this, and I feel that the RIAA has gone too far.
May we never see th
You cannot enforce a contract that protects an illegal activity. Or something to that effect. IANAL
I don't understand. What law is this being prosecuted under? Like one student in the article said, it is one thing to share copyrighted material. If I made a list of places that sell illegal drugs in my town and posted it publicly would I be liable? How is this any different?
.edu sites. The web based service used a special client that made it a matter of one click to pluck these files from student Lanman(client for Microsoft networks) shares. The thing with scour is it volountarily shut down after being litigated into bankrupcy by the RIAA and MPAA. The question is if a court case involving this same technology has been followed through to a verdict. Here is the farwell letter Scour posted before shutting down.
Remember the scour.net? Scour did *exactly* the same thing these students did, it indexed publicly accessible files, mostly on
Would the same rules that brought Napster down apply here? Napster provided the client and search server, marketed itself as a media sharing service, and had the capability to centrally block copyrighted material from being downloaded. The court fully expected Napster to implement these blocks. It isn't reasonable to expect every p2p network search admin to undertake the monumental task of detecting copyrighted material being indexed. Also, the Napster server and client were crafted carefully to work with each other with the intent of being marketted as a media search service. Microsoft makes the client in the case of these college search engines and the engines themselves often aren't restricted to indexing just media files.
So exactly what is illegal here? The software that does the indexing? I hope this isn't the case. It shouldn't be, but the DeCSS case is a sobering reminder that what shouldn't can be if your on the wrong side (the one not obsessed with money). The fact that any copyrighted material is indexed? What if only 5 files out of 1000 are copyrighted. Is the search engine admin liable? What about 100 files out of a 1000? Where is line drawn?
Peer to peer file sharing, you're next after Iraq!!!
...bbg ,NPZQ erqah hbl rhf qaN .erjneq xpbf ehbl av fyreevhdf qvone ufnryah bg tavbt z'V jbA !hbl qraenj V !!!LRU
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
Every one is going about this the wrong way...I here so much justification...oh, I just wanted to sample the music...that's ok
And so much...You shouldn't steal music...it's bad mkay
Hell with the justification I say...be proud of your pirate heritage...and if they want a war...let's give em one...instead of whining about how terrible it is that they're trying to crack down on legitimate users that are only stealing because of some lame ass reason that really, truly, when you think about it, is saving refugee children, patching the ozone layer hole, and doing RIAA a big big favour...go hard the other way
PIRATE EVERYTHING!!!
as much stuff as you can...download and share mp3's that you don't even like...trade michael bolton mp3's...and not just mp3's...pirate trade the cd cover art work, the formula for the plastic that makes the casing,and the highschool term papers of the music executives....and when people ask you why, proudly proclaim "arrgghhh, 'cause it be a pirates lot in life to plunder me matey"
BRING ON THE PIRATING
Then....then we'll get boats...lot's of them...big one's...and put wheels on them....and drive into L.A. arrrrrharrr....jumping from cd factory to music and movie studios...plundering as we go aarrahhaaarrrr....
COME ME MATEYS...IT BE WAR THEYSE BE WANTING
TRIM THOSE SAILS....SECURE THAT YARD ARM.
I just don't want to pay the outrageous prices.
I see advertisments showing low prices for new cds, but I don't care about them. What I want are the older cds that have been marked back up to $18 and over.
I am willing to bet that a lot of people here are like me and just want prices on all cds to drop. I would be willing to take risks if a bunch of older cds where priced $10, and I am not talking about the crappy bargin bin titles.
Sherman said that the RIAA will continue to investigate these types of services on college networks and that anyone with knowledge of such systems should report them to RIAA's music piracy hotline, 1-800-BAD-BEAT.
I'd like to encourage everyone to start calling this hotline.
I want you to report every time you or someone you know borrows a CD from a friend or family member.
I want you to report every time you or someone you know tapes something off the radio or television.
I want you to clog their hotline with millions upon millions of reports of what clearly is also piracy. If they're so afraid of losing money because of it, they should know how many millions of times it happens every day with pristine, CD-QUALITY AUDIO. None of this MP3 shit! These are ACTUAL CDS exchanging hands!
Flood their hotline with this information! It's just as important as online piracy, but it's being overlooked by the RIAA! We need to make them aware of this egregious violation of THEIR rights!
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
I've been digging around this story a bit and it turns out that at least one of them, Aaron Sherman, was researching file-sharing and had published a paper on it. Here's the detailed information.
Actually, look at the software. They are suing the people that index the networks. That's like suing Google because you can find copyrighted material by using it.
For an Organization, such as the RIAA, who has been whining about lost and diminishing profits, they sure do have a lot of money to spend on these witch hunts.
Dolemite
_________________
Save the World! Use a Quote!
It says in the posted CNet article that the four individuals being sued are actually students at their respective universities. RTFA.
as an aside, sharing files using windows file sharing? blech. Better to use HTTP on a local apache server of some sort) If they are CS students, the RIAA should put an injunction against them for bad application design.
You can either have a lot of people sharing data using crappy Windows file sharing (they know how to use it, they don't have to install anything) or a few computer-savvy people sharing data using better protocols. If I have to choose, I take the system that offers a lot more data.
When I'm a mod I mod down anyone who has some self-righteous annoying .sig about modding.
Look if you're going to make stupid generalizations, then your argument is as invalid as the ones you are attacking.
"People want to steal and pirate music and movies."
Bullshit. *Some* people want to do this. Many others just want a convenient, reasonably priced service for previewing and purchasing music, in standard formats. Most people will pay an honest price for an honest product.
"...lying consumer (fair use, my ass)..."
Pretty dumb to dismiss fair use outright. I won't bother with the counter arguments they are well known and valid.
You made some good points, but your zealotry takes alot of wind out your sails.
Because Budwieser isn't going to sue the university because the students are swapping beer.
paintball
Its ok, I have a disclaimer on the end of my Fserve that says if you're a member of the FBI or if you work for the RIAA then you do not have permission to enter my Fserve ;)
It's still about the same as you said, except that the ratio is getting a little better (up to 3:1!), but the college radio station BLOWS. Absolutely no one listens to it. The school is so poor they just had to cut the 80 year old football team....
This is a terrible case of a bureaucracy perpetuating itself.
I would just like to speak out, as a student at RPI, that Celery and Phynd, the samba search engines in quesiton have been an invaluable tool. Yes, they are frequently used for mp3's, divx, warez, and even pornograhpy, but at the same time they are invaluable when it comes to locating a paper that your class group is sharing when you've forgotten where its shared. There are lots of times these engines have saved my butt.
-dave
http://millionnumbers.com/ - own the number of your dreams
The biggest trouble with p2p networks that I see these days is that they don't seem to take into consideration Internet geography. Wouldn't it make sense to trace route potential sources for files and prefer ones that are fewer hops away? This way you would automatically download from people on your campus, or for home users, other people on your ISP. Seems like this would really cut down on the backbone traffic and speed up many of the downloads. I mean sure the traces would take time, but the saving in bandwith and the faster downloads would probably more than make up for it. Of course the few LANs that block outside ICMP packets would suffer but they would still prefer users on their own LANs.
Slashdot is an anagram for Has Dolts, and I am Dolt number 468543
That's a shame about the radio station... I was there when it went from "cable FM" to "over-the-air" broadcasting. It was a big deal.
I guess that's also too bad about the football team, although I have to admit that I never went to one of their games; why watch football when you have division I hockey? (Although it looks like the hockey team is still sucking wind, but the coach quitting can only help)
How's the internet connection at MTU? I heard it sucked, which is why this file sharing thing was so popular.
"Upon attaching the waterblock to my penis, I began to notice that I know nothing about computers." -- JRockway
some of us have trouble affording musical equipment and a computer, let alone a server to host high volume traffic. YES have mp3s on your site but once ten or eleven people have downloaded it, allow for that to be put on the Gnutella/etc networks - this means that people can search gnutella FIRST, so that if the songs are on gnutella, you don't have to waste your bandwidth uploading it to them. not to mention not all places in the world have highspeed access[or the rights to host servers, especially high volume ones!] I myself just got off of dialup, about a month ago. imagine trying to upload 10 10 MB Mp3 files on a 14.4...bottleneck anyone?
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
follow the money. Most alcohol consumed by minors is paid for legitimately. If businesses had to pay $2000 for drunk-in-public, dwi, or under-age-consumption arrest, you'd find beer companys a little more concerned. And cops, too.
I can't stand the "drink responsibly" ads that reinforce the stupid stereotype that says having requires drinking. Screw that. And colleges go along with this junk, co-sponsering ads during the NCAA - that's what gets me. It's like a gun company with a "kids, it's fun to shoot at people, but do it safely" campaign. But that argument of mine is lazily mixing too volatile subjects to no good effect, sorry.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
I have to wonder - how smart is it to alienate the next generations of business and industry leaders?
So because somebody didn't lock their door, its okay to steal the things in their house?
No its more like, in a world where people decide to share each others houses, should we all get arrested if we refuse to lock our doors?
If the people choose to leave their doors open, and choose to let everyone in, who are you to tell us that we should lock our doors? Maybe the people actually WANT to share?
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
I downloaded 2 or 3 avril lavigne songs, and found out that I liked her music. Then went down to the store and bought her CD. If I didn't sample a couple of her songs, I probably wouldn't have bought it...
I want my rights back. I was actually using them when our government stole them after 9/11.
I have a friend at Michigan Tech who got in trouble for sharing files from his computer. The network guys there bought a search program that searched the school network for people using p2p clients like Kazaa then searched their shared folders for copyrighted material. He had many (>10)GB of copyrighted stuff, so he got a letter from the net admin saying they were coming to check out his computer. They came, but didn't find anything, so nothing happened to him (he 'deleted' his files), but consider this a warning for those of you who are in college and do share things, they are looking for you and will find you if you're not careful.
Lets say I hack into your computer, and aha! MP3 files! I report you to the RIAA and you go to jail for Piracy. Why? Because currently the RIAA does not even check to see if you purchased the CDs or not, they assume every Mp3 is piracy, every file on Kazaa is stolen, fair use doesnt exist, if you have mp3s on your computer that you copied off a CD yourself, well you broke the law.
This is why you need to buy RIAA special MP3s, so they can know you arent a pirate.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
These (or at least phynd, that I all I have used) are web-based. That means the person who installs them are the administrators (the author in most cases) and so they obviously know what they are being used for. However, I know that these search tools are used for more than just copyrighted material. It is usually the first place I go to to download iso's of various opensource operating systems as well as various class content shared by frats etc.
This is good stuff!
Look, guys -- file-swapping of RIAA content is, in fact, copyright infringement except in certain VERY NARROW circumstances. Napster lost big, and didn't contest the 9th Circuit decision, so here we are: it is contributing to such infringement to run a Napster-like network.
Why would we revile RIAA for asserting these rights now. This isn't some technology regulation, like DMCA -- it is enforcement of entirely legitimate intellectual property rights against actual infringers.
I would rather they went after the students actually doing the swapping, but we lost the server battle, at least for now.
Sampling? Right. Like my old roommate who used to suck down MP3s ten at a time on Napster and had well over 3000 MP3s (which I'm sure he backed up from the roughly 15 CDs he owned) on his Winamp playlist. He's going to get around to buying all those CDs he's been sampling, sure.
But seriously, I think retail stores are going to make the "sampling" argument irrelevant. Just tonight I was at a music store called Coconuts and they have little devices set up where you scan a CD and -POOF- you can listen to snippets of every track on the CD. Seriously, it's not like you can only listen to top 40 albums, I mean every damn CD I picked up had its tracks available. What more do you want?* You can sample music and purchase right on the spot. As more and more stores latch on to this technology you're going to have less and less ways to rationalize your behavior.
* Inevitably, someone will point out that thirty second snippets of songs just aren't enough and therefore these kind of efforts by music stores are worthless.
...but there's one other point in error here, as well.
---Settle only if they let CowboyNeal screw lightbulbs into Hilary Rosen's ears.---
I don't think you can use the term "screw" and Hilary in the same sentence. Especially since she wouldn't know what you meant. -The Dog
Since most community colleges do not have any sort of Law School, the RIAA suit aginst the colleges is like total bully action. The community colleges are a weak gonna be a weak spot in the case.
As i'm reading this story I'm getting adds for Kazaa and another add tempts with "Download Music Faster Download mp3/music faster with 3D-FTP. Get free trial Now."
;)
Kewl Slashdot
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Much easier, more flexible, and it protects all files and subdirectories, not just individual php scripts. You might have to enable
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
Don't purchase CDs.
Seriously, now, think about it this way: The cost of a CD is sky-high. What college student, who cannot possibly earn enough during college to pay for tuition, can afford to spend $14.99, $18.99, or $21.99 on a CD? It will be fun to listen to a music recording; I know. But avoid buying them and save the money instead. You can use it on your education, which will serve you well for many years after you are no longer interested in the CD. One day, its price will come down to 8 bucks or so... Nothing bad will happen to you as you wait patiently in the meantime. Besides...
You'll be voting with your dollars! If enough people do this, the retarded music industry will actually start listening to the consumer and realize that they need to step into the 21st century. This isn't the 1800's anymore. This is already happening to some extent. There is a backlash against them for the sky-high prices. They are selling a product that does not create the value needed to justify the price. This is what happens to them and they'll either get smart or lose a lot more than they ever will through piracy.
Fix the spelling dammit, it's my alma mater. :-)
Soon Microsoft will beat out Google and all searches for the term "Second Superpower" will point to a giant JPEG of Bill Gates' head!
Music duplication will never be preventable; the very usefullness of a piece of digitally encoded music depends on the media's ability to produce a pretty darn good analog of the original performance. Since a pretty darn good analog will therefore exist, the analog may always be reencoded with very little loss of quality.
Now, the Internet is the medium upon which the crime of music duplication takes place. Highways are the media upon which speeding takes place. Should we eliminate highways because they are media for crime? No, becuase they serve mostly legal and useful purposes, regardless of the fact that they by their very natuere lend the law of speeding to uneforceability. Think hard about this.
Quit school so you can afford to pay for the RIAA's high priced CDs and avoid jailtime.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Speech is any form of communication, be it over the phonewire, the internet, the face to face, speech is speech.
So, if we want the freedom to communicate "restricted" speech, why is this any different than Iraqis wanting to talk about the government?
The people should decide, if the people as a whole want to talk about the Iraqi government, its ok to liberate them? But its not ok for us, if our people as a whole want to get rid of the copyright system? We dont benefit from copyright, very few industries actually NEED copyright, if the people dont want copyright, democracy says the government is supposed to do what the people want, not to control the people.
Look, if we want free speech online, meaning freedom to communicate any 1s and 0s we choose, this should be our choice, if the RIAA doesnt like our speech they should make it impossible for us to do it, meaning create music in a format that we cannot copy.
But to say we cannot copy it, and then after we copy it that we cannot speak it, well thats censorship.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
actually, the server in question (at RPI) is currently run by a student, but the phynd source is maintained by a recent grad. i believe these (or just the 2 developers) that are being sued, not the RPI sysadmins, and not the users.
i was working with the maintainer earlier this year on a PHP port of phynd but i dropped it due to work load... looks like i got out i the knick of time. i feel really bad for these guys - the project started a long time back and is now on its second maintainer. it is an innocent program that searches SMB shares that are not passworded (or have a blank password) and keeps a db of them. phynd is a network search engine, not a napster clone. napster developed its own network of file sharing peers, and allowed transfer between them. on a campus, the computers are already connected, and phynd does not open anyconnections, it just links people together. it is not a client that supports file sharing, it is an indexing program for built in windows functionality.
it makes me mad because all of these files would still be there without phynd, but users would have to manually look, or search in real time ("find files on network")...
the RIAA is on a witch hunt, and they barked up the wrong tree on this one
I'm PROUD to be an RPI grad.
Go Phynd!
Theft or not, I'm concerned about my own privacy. It find it disturbing that people watch what I download. Hence the *secure* *encrypted* P2P that I look forward to. A managed P2P network where there are no direct downloads, (every encrypted packet follows a routing pattern, but is still fast). Ought to provide for secure filesharing/messaging. and cracking it to track users is a violation of the DMCA. Piracy will always exist, but my point is that the RIAA/MPAA want others to be legally obligated to fix their problems/sales. But tell me this: Who was ever all that interested in VCR??? Who did you know that had a library of 100s of tapes? Not many. Now compare that number with the number of people you know with just as many DVD/CDs? (likely) Went up didn't it! The point is that as technology progress, so does it's usage. That includes both sales and piracy. From banning CD burners to making mp3 players build DRM into their lastest player, am I not the only one who sees this as ridiculus?!?!? If the RIAA/MPAA doesn't like what's going on, then they need to take of their little white gloves, fire the lawyers, and compete. They can easily stop leaked albums months before release by investing in security. Maybe they should abandon cds altogether and move towards developing something new? I think they can learn alot from console companies, who are at the absolute forefront of DRM/Copyright protection. From the PS/2's bluebacks, Nindtendo's cartriges, and Microsofts 2048-bit key ---it works! Fighting the pirates is a losing battle in the long run, if you win you will have sued all of your customers instead of sold to them.
See, the RIAA's member companies - read, mob members - usually have subsidaries over in these foriegn countries. Think of it like the fact that Nintendo is a Japanese based company, but their stateside company, NOA, answers to the folks in Kyoto.
The only way to stop supporting the RIAA in the current climate of big campaign lobbying is to just stop buying music, DMCA be damned.
bad in the dorms....maybe slightly better than 56k speeds. All of campus has 1 T3, and i think only 1/3 of that is earmarked for the dorms.
...effort? I'm a student at a PSU campus and the other day the bursar sent an email out to all students warning of the dangers (ie. severe physical punishment, etc.) that come along with file sharing.
Now I'm wondering if the RIAA somehow prompted that email.
I'm sorry, I don't care whether or not you believe him (or me.) Let me be the 8,000th person to say this on /., but I do buy more music thanks to file-sharing. Before Napster, I bought, on average, 5-10 CDs a year. I'm very, very picky. I like quite a bit, but I don't buy most of it. Only after extended listening, usually due to a friend owning the album (we're talking 5+ listens to the full album here) would I buy a CD.
Post-Napster, I'm buying 20-25 CDs a year. I burn entire albums, yes. Some are acts I already know, but want to check out an album that I don't own. I've been burned enough by the "I like one CD, so I'll probably like all of theirs" mentality enough to avoid it. Some are of acts I've only heard about. Burn it, enjoy it (or not), and expand.
In the middle of last year, I got onto an extended hip-hop kick. I've always been a big fan, but I started listening almost exclusively, and started snapping up CDs both new and used at the rate of 2 or 3 a week. Why? Because after listening to A Tribe Called Quest's Midnight Marauders for about the thousandth time, I happened to be in front of a PC when I heard the line "favorite rap group back in the day was EPMD." Went to Amazon, read some reviews. Downloaded and burned Strictly Business, and listened to it on the way home. Went nuts. Went out and bought two other EPMD albums. Moved on to Nas (1 burn, 1 buy), Biz Markie (2 buys), De La Soul (2 buys), etcetera, etcetera. The result? My hip-hop collection has gone from about 30 CDs to about 80 (15 of which are burns), and I have an extensive collection of early hip-hop which I'm still adding to at a very accelerated rate for me. The moral, as always with posts like this, is that for the price of me "stealing" 10 albums, I've bought 40 others. Yeah, I'm "stealing and pirating." Yeah, the RIAA can feel free to condemn me. But if they would just take their heads out of their butts, they would realize and capitalize on this. So yes, I'm saying the same thing everyone else says, and you probably don't believe me or don't care. But they should.
To bastardize a quote: "Fuck the RIAA. Fuck them up their stupid asses."
As another poster mentioned, the program these students are being sued over is a server that scans a Windows network and allows users to search. My 700-student college, Mudd, used to have a similar web server ("Muddster"), but it was taken down. The version of the story I heard is that school administration had it taken down because students from neighboring colleges (but not complete outsiders) could search and download through it. A friend just put up a replacement, called M2M, which does not allow downloading through the server. So far M2M is a bit slow for me.
In the meantime, I'm happy with Sharescan, a Windows program that scans Windows networks without the help of a server. It's a little annoying that Sharescan has to scan the entire network each time I run it and that searches don't include computers that are offline, but the speed is great and I love being able to click "Open Location" to open the folder containing a search result in Windows Explorer. I fear graduation, because I'll have to return to using unreliable P2P networks for my music pirating needs.
The shareholder is always right.
The real problem underlying this whole music copyright fight is basically pretty simple.
.. Maybe more.
... actually these few don't matter, really .. But it's nice to dream. Maybe I could stay with the record company and continue to make lots of money? Sounds ok to me.
...
There is a huge and rich industry that has made a great deal of money from distributing music. It is not really needed any more but it doesn't want to go away. (Disintermedierisation, someone called it. I think it means cutting out the middleman).
Does this wealth include the artist? No, it doesn't. A tiny few have made - and will continue to make - a fortune. Most are penniless, many bankrupt.
If I were a struggling garage band today, I would make an album and put it on my web site (yes of course I have a web site - a mate of mine made it - or something). Let the fans download it for free - or maybe for US$5. If they spread it amongst themselves, so what? I make my real money from performances anyway. But I'd surely get more than doing a deal with the record company - most bands lose money for their first few albums
If I were a more famous band I would do the same - and make more money that I do now because the record company takes most of it.
If I were truly successful then
And the record companies would gradually die out. (It's called obsolescence). But they will fight - and they are! Using all the resources they have available. Wealth, influence, rich friends, lawyers.
Let battle be joined
"Cats like plain crisps"
just go freenet, after that, you don't even know if you're sharing something.
suing network providers in this case though is like suing aol-time warner because it's users use the lines to transfer something riaa doesn't like.
fuckin ridiculous.
besides than that, IT WOULD BE ILLEAGAL for the network admins to actually sniff the traffic to get a clue what's going on in the network (at least here, you get a bitchslap for massive transfer amounts though, but transfer amounts are the only thing they can sniff at, they _can't_ by law eavesdrop on the telecommunications).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
In the final analysis, who is this really hurting?
Everybody!. Because the universities must spend more money in defending themselves, which raises their budgets, in the long run they have to raise their tuition.
This means that we have fewer students who can afford college; fewer graduates who have the skills and knowledge to improve our society; fewer educated people to make decisions.
I have watched the deterioration of our educational system for too long. I am getting very damned angry. What can be done to stop this? Do we have to declare open season on lawyers who take cases on simply out of greed? We should at least start slapping down companies/organizations who pull this kind of shit; it's obviously not contributing to the common good. Perhaps fines aren't enough; dismember the companies involved and execute the greedy fucks.
Good lord. I am sick of where this country is headed. The greedmongers have taken over, and we are all fucked in the long run. Maybe it *is* time for a revolution. I honestly don't know what else can be done at this point. The sheeple don't know enough to fix things - not that our political election system seems to work right, either.
Fuck.
SB *does not give a shit about karma tonite*
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
Actually according to an Associated Press story about this case says at least one university wasn't notified about the lawsuit.
MTU president Curt Tompkins wrote a letter to RIAA Thursday expressing the desire to be notified by RIAA before they go suing one of Tech's students.
Adam, a classmate of mine in a course on Information Technology and the Law noted on the course newsgroup that FindLaw has the complaints online.
The irony is that this happened the same week we discussed the Napster case in the class.
Do you work for RIAA?? ORGANIZED CRIME?? Organized crime is groups like Triads, Yakudza or South American cartels. Even if this student had an underground music printing shop he would not even come close to being defined as organized crime. Organized crime doesn't deal in free distribution of copyrighted material... not enough money in it.
I'd agree that kid(s) broke the law. Though it seems that they provided indexing, much like gnutella rather than napster.
I currently run a version of phynd, but my school was not named in the suit. I am curious as to the options that I have at the current time and what future implications may occur. What legal proceedings can they take to me? I have taken the site down, I have also not been contacted by my network administrators. I know they know that the site exists. Any advice?
Sure, we all believe you, your a college student and you go out and buy music. good one.
I hate when people lie.
Funny thing, too - Japanese video rental stores sell tons of mini-discs, and on the CDs it even says - it's ok to copy to mini-disc. (and I assume keep it (the minidisc) after you return the CD)
Gotta love the clout the RIAA has...
My life in the land of the rising sun.
Well, that settles it for me. As long as the RIAA and their ilk keep up the shenanigans I will never buy another shrink-wrapped commercial CD again. I can get all of the music I want from alternative sources, and I am not talking about allegedly illegal sources, though there are more of them than they will ever stop, or probably even find. I will buy independently produced and recorded music, from non-RIAA members. I will attend live local, non-RIAA members' concerts (also, no music, concerts, etc from shit-peddling control freaks such as Clear Channel, don't even get me started). I will buy commercial CD's I must have from used CD stores, flea markets, yard sales, etc. I will loudly advocate to anyone who will listen to do the same. Maybe independent musicians, artists, fans, etc need to start their own over-arching organization, kind of an FSF for music, to counter the RIAAs of the word... kindly point me to one if it already exists.
[what?]
I envision a future. I envision a future in which the Universities, so plagued by the massive fileswapping in which its students partake, decide to institute internal p2p networks (or at least turn a blind eye). I envision a future in which the Universities, so sick and tired of receiving 'ceast and desist' letters from the RIAA, firewall off all IP addresses known to be RIAA-owned. Eat a dick, RIAA.
Everyone knew slavery was wrong, even slave owners. The reason slavery was ended is because in the 1850s the slaves were running away, learning to read, and starting to fight back. The US was becoming unstable and slavery had to end for both economic reasons and because slaves were going to fight back.
Voting rights were not given to blacks, blacks had to fight for them, same with women and now gays who fight for their rights, nothing was given.
Please tell me how these issues relate? Its clear that slavery is wrong, its also clear that sharing is right, no one is harmed when you share and someone gains something when you share, sharing therefore is right, correct?
If we think its right and we are a democracy, and the only people who say its wrong are the middlemen RIAA monopoly, well then.
This isnt about democracy being always right, fact is in a democracy WE THE PEOPLE DECIDE. The people do make mistakes in democracy, but you have no arguement which can prove that sharing music is a mistake, in fact most evidence proves Musicians would make more money because they'd have more fans to go to their concerts. Its proven that most musicians dont make a penny unless they sell platnium, and they may not make a penny until their second album. So your point?
Learn how the music industry works, the only ones who get hurt if we share music are the RIAA, the ones who benefit when we share music? We do, as well as the musicians who sell double the amount of tickets at their next concert. Musicians dont give a damn about CD sales because thats not how the game works, you dont make money off your CDs unless you are really selling millions of them and theres only a few hundred musicians who do this.
If you want to make money, you make money on tour, you make more money selling hats and tshirts than you would selling CDs.
So here we have both the fans and musicians supporting file sharing, and then you have a bunch of business men saying its bad, whos right and whos wrong? Considering if we allow sharing, Musicians make more money and we get more music, vs if we dont allow sharing and then we get less music and musicians make less money while the RIAA guys make more money?
I say the Musicians deserve more money, and I'd say we deserve more music and freedom. I say the RIAA are the slave owners here in this situation.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
http://slashdot.org/~riaa/freaks
i wonder how that will change...
Slashdot - The one stop shop for procrastination
"The RIAA represents the world's major music companies, including Vivendi Universal, Sony Corp., AOL Time Warner, EMI Group Plc and Bertelsmann AG" -from reuters http://reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=technolo gyNews&storyID=2505231
AOL Time Warner is listed as one of the companies represented by RIAA, but what about their Instant Messenger, which offers file sharing capabilities? You can get files from any user sharing anything they want (even more accessable than these college networks). How can they be so picky and hypocritical? Microsoft should be sued too for allowing someone to share files on a local network... we could go on and on. RIAA is getting desperate
Hard to speak without seeing actual numbers, but I'd guess the lawer fees are less than what companies would lose by offering the student or other discounts.
It always pays to beat the shit out of somebody for example and scare colleges into adapting guidelines disallowing any similar services. Plus, this moves forward the anti-piracy marketing/lobying campaign. And it's always good to look like a victim of unjust business environment. ;/
And, of course, there's the obvious argument that student discounts are a can of worms which nobody would want to open anyway ( 1) ID problems 2) no matter how many of them are prefering downloaded MP3s, students still make up sizeable music market segment (again, no figures, but very reasonable guess) - so discounting their CDs would eat into profits too deep)
Andrius
I only have to look at the local network, some people actually download episodes of Dawson's creek.
I wouldn't care if it didn't hurt me, but it does, when the bandwidth is all used by movies and music and the ping is lower than on a modem. I can't use the web properly and I can't use emacs and it's likes remotely, since it's to slow. I think it's time for charging people per megabyte. Not much, only so that they don't download all that crap.
And about the music industry. I can't help but thinking about all the people working for minimum wage when I hear rockstars complain about how people are stealing from them. Come on, you're rich as it is, no need for being greedy. Maybe the piracy is a way of telling the music industry that people actually don't think that the work a band put's into a record is worth millions and billions.
Besides, the record industry takes most of the money anyway and turns it into shit.
Next time when I download some music, I'll send 10 cents to the artist and buy 10$ worth of manure.
Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even if you take into account Hofstadter's Law
Well posting anonymously great but this could ruin everything i have going for me.
I was nabbed by SUNY Fredonia a state school in NY ( hence the SUNY ) for sharing movies and music, by the RIAA. They have a high bandwith network and sharing these things was quite prevelent throughout campus. Why did i get caught i was downloading and alowing sharing of files including "American Pie 2" along with tons of other files but the movie industry is going after more people then the music industry, they just used all the music against me.
To help every one out if the full file wasn't compleatly downloaded from your computer they have nothing. If there is a bite missing or a megabite it doesn't matter. You may have helped that person in downloading copyrited material but you didn't sell or give it to them in compleat form.
They are now going after SYS admins because they say you can stop all file sharing by blocking ports, but you me and every one else knows this isn't true.
So for every system admin out there that is getting nailed for a server, a'n' user on your system you are in the clear. You let your users have access to a compleaty clean and leageal form of file sharing, if they are breaking the law chances they are not.
AND THIS BITES THE RIAA in the ass every time
As others have said, that doesn't allow you to escape the problem of only being able to listen to things that people want you to listen to. However, I know for a fact in the UK that Virgin Megastore/V.Shop (or whatever it is called now), and HMV (as well as a Scottish chain called "Fopp") will allow me to return CDs if I decide that I don't like them. I have bought about a dozen CDs that I haven't liked and have promptly returned them for a full refund (usually within a reasonable time period though). It simply doesn't make sense to say that P2P is the only way to sample music before you commit yourself to a purchase, since you can always return purchases that you regret.
just make the server return the results with sucks appended to the file name, then it will be protected as a parody. And have the client remove sucks, making the client illegal.
Microsoft just added a thumbs.db file to a folder that contained 100 illegal divx movies. NTFS also indexed the files. Windows is now illegal right?
I want to go out and buy the Napster trademark. That way, whenever the RIAA starts blurting out Napster-this and Napster-that in a disparaging manner, I can sue them for libel for defaming and devaluing my trademark.
-jaghttp://starboard.flowtheory.net/
Downloaded a truckload of drum 'n bass mixes from the net. Like alot of the Moving Shadow ones.
Then I find out the Moving Shadow label sells these mix CD's for £1-2 each. I've bought the lot, and have bought several full priced albums from that labels artists. They provide a low-cost way of getting into the bands on their label in a high quality format (dem be damn phat mixes inna area, yo), and if the listener likes them they have the opportunity to go find out more.
I'm surprised I've seen so few other labels doing this. Seems to be resrticted to the smaller niche-market indies by the looks of things.
WHAT??!??! A record label being innovative and trying to do something different?! Divide by zero error!
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
all you people bitching about how much of a bastard RIAA is and such.
If you put alot of work into something, got a copywrite on it, and planned to make money off it and I stole a copy from you and released it free to the world.....
Are you seriously telling me you wouldn't be angry and want something done? You'd just say "Oh well" and skip happily down the road?
Not bloody likely.
Its all fine and dandy when you are the one profiting from theft. But if someone did this to you, you'd bitch and cry.
Copying copywrited material is theft. So don't bitch if you get nailed. Your like the morons who yell at cops giving speeding tickets. Don't speed in the first place. You know the consquences and if you don't, you have no reason to be behind the wheel(mouse).
All the lame reasons and justification on here boil down to this: You found a cheap illegal way to get what you WANT. (I stressed want because I've seen people talking about rights and things they deserve. Thats BS) Its now being threatened and your angry. Just like a child whose mother took away that candy you found on the road.
I download MP3's. Because its cheap and easy and I don't want to pay money. I know its illegal but I don't care. Just like everyone else who downloads ripped songs.
Bottom line: As long as what we do doesn't affect ourselves in a negative way, its "OK". Soon as it does, its DIFFERENT and BAD.
Least be honest people
The RIAA moved today to sue college students for lending CDs to their friends. "It's not fair that these freeloaders should get to try our music before they buy it!", the cartel's spokesman said. "If they want to try it, they need to buy it. Oh, yeah, I almost forgot-all sales final, no returns!"
"Do I dare disturb the universe?"
Read the complains filed in federate court here.
It seems to me that unless the defendants promoted their tools as a means to find and download illegal software that Hillary and Co.© have just followed their favoured trend here of complete ignorance and arrogance. Let them sue and lose it will make a nice precedent.
There is nothing wrong with making a network file indexer. Not amount of political posturing by the RIAA is going to be able to change that. Not as long as we are here.
What if I were to copy some music off mtv and listen to it, or record what I hear on the radio... Is that illegal? Oh btw, I will never buy a cd ever again. Well unless it's a blank one :)
"sample an artist's music before going out and buying a disc..."
Shut up asshole! You don't buy shit!
"I'm afraid it might get significantly harder for humble college students such as myself to sample an artist's music before going out and buying a disc"
Didn't you mean to use the word "steal" instead of sample?
The RIAA tried to go after Verizon, but being a mega-corp, their pockets are just as deep, if not deeper than, the RIAA's. Verizon had much to lose. They invested tons of money in rolling out broadband, and the number one reason for selling that to kids is file sharing. The broadband providers are having a hard time selling their services, and there is no way they would allow the RIAA to make those sales even harder.
So what is the RIAA to do? Go after the next largest file-trading networks....colleges! After all colleges don't make their money from broadband connectivity, they make it from tuition. The RIAA figures that colleges will put up less of a fight.
Next they'll go after churches and non-profits...these people are the lowest-life scum of the earth.
-ted
Hmm, what have I bought recently that I could have downloaded for FREE? How about redhat linux 9.0. I bought the PRO version for $130.00....why?
Support. The product is free, but if you want the manuals and support you must pay.
Consumers have decided that music is no-longer worth paying $20.00/CD for. Consumers dictate markets...not the other way around. OK, if you want album art and true CD quality, then you go and buy the CD, but the majority of the music consuming public has decided that getting their pants pulled down over the price of a CD is not worth it.
The music industry needs to change its business model, not have congress legislate it. What business model is so entitled to survive that laws must be created to protect it? That's CRAP. In a true capitalist society, consumers dictate markets....not congress.
CD's are overpriced. People will pay for music when it's live, or when it comes with other goodies (t-shirts, desirable album art...etc.).
-ted
Please note that according to this article at The Chronicle of Higher Education that a lot of the colleges are surprised and upset that the RIAA did not contact them or try to work with them on this. My guess is that it's because the institutions have lawyers who can defend in court the fact that a search engine is not illegal. So skip the lawyers by skipping the college. Oh, and don't tell the students until after the lawsuits are filed.
"Is this not a rare fellow, my lord? He's as good at any thing, and yet a fool." -from "As You Like It", Act 5,
The point is that they filed suit against people that don't do anything more than index the content, just like the poster above said about google, yahoo, etc....
You must work for the RIAA to even spread such propagana.
emule
i was an RPI student back when Phynd was written.
these guys aren't operating a file swapping network, that would be RPI's network itself. They wrote an application which searches peoples window's shares. So, like any other tool, it can be used for piracy or non-infringing uses.
Bring back the old version of slashdot.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
As more artists realize this and release music royalty-free (except the ones under dealth-penalty lifetime contracts) the need for record labels will finally be over.
Yeah, it's working great in China. Look at all the great music being produced there now that there's prolific bootlegging and no labels.
The popularity of ~128Kbps MP3s shows that music isn't about perfect fidelity for most folks. You wan't better fidelity? Go to a show.
Great, guess I'll just toss my $12K stereo. Thanks a lot.
My teenager downloads music and it is fine with me. Why? It is not because I'm amoral, but because the reality is quite different than how the RIAA sees it. She owns MANY more purchased CDs than downloaded CDs (without counting I'd say the ration is greater than 9:1). Most of her downloads are test drives; most of the rest are collections of old, outdated, and/or obscure music.
Most important is that without downloaded music, she likely would not own more CDs.
(I'm solidly in the camp that the RIAA needs to figure out how to utilize this technology rather than criminalize it.)
When did the idea of copyright get so misconstrued? The whole idea of copyright is to prevent someone remarketing my idea or product under there name and there label. If I buy a lawnmower I don't have to mow the lawn according to the manual (yet I have to listen to music only one way?). I also can loan that lawn mower to a friend (sounds a lot like trading to me). Also if I want to turn that lawnmower in to lawn art or battle bot I can. The only thing I cannot do is reproduce that product under my name and/or make a profit of that idea. So how and why are these really unimaginative and none capable business owners trying to change law? Because they are too incapable to come up with a working business model? ::sigh:: makes me feel like I have to suffer under the rule's of morons and idiots. If you don't like the way people handle or use your product. Don't sell it. I don't buy borrow or steal any thing from any of the part of the entertainment industry and I don't do business with people who call their customers thief?s.
The fact that I am swapping files does NOT mean I am infringing on your bloody copyright. I have the right to share MY own data with whodahellever I want, with or without your approval.
We really need to stand up for our rights as consumers and tell the RIAA to take a hike with their cavemanish license agreements. The cost of sharing data is rapidly approaching zero, yet these anuses still want to charge $17 a CD AND rid you of any rights to share it. Imagine the nerve! The world is so full of people willing to rid you of any rights or liberty you have if you are in any way naive, trusting, or complacent. Nothing really changes. Human greed is everlasting. The powerful will always seek to oppress and capitalize upon the weak and meek.
It's high time we rejected these ridiculously ridiculous license agreements.
People died for your freedom.
Don't just give it away.
What if one were to spam their attempt to enforce this, by reporting all of one's friends (only the ones who weren't actually pirates, yeaargh) over their 1800badbeat number?
According to some statistics that someone put together recently, a little under 10% of all the students in the dorms at MTU use an SMB indexer (like the one that went down) on a weekly basis.
My school has already had problems with the RIAA. At the end of the Fall '02 semester the RIAA called up our school and reported a couple users sharing copyrighted materials. Those users were immediately banished from the school network for the remainder of the year.
Our school has since implemented a traffic shaping tool, which allocates approximately 3 k/s to kazaa and its clones per user on the network. This isn't hardly enough to stay connected, much less download anything from anyone. Frequently we can't download a single thing because kazaa will always require more sources. When you do download it goes near 1 k/s, frequently lower. I have since come up with a better way of getting my movies and music. I use a shell on my friends t1, and download stuff to his computer, then use ftp to transfer it to mine. Ftp is limited to 100 k/s so its decent. I would use irc, but that is limited to 10 k/s or so.
This school blows.
You're nothing; like me.
This lawsuit is petty to say the least. The multi-billion dollar music industry is suing a few college(aka poor) students who are most likely already in debt so they can buy another mansion. Personally i think that there are many talented artists out there, but i don't believe in them being millionaires because of it. Record companies are even worse because they only exploit the talent of others without having any of their own making themselves gobs of (unearned)money. Granted that we(the public) don't HAVE to have the music that these "artists" produce, but where is the line going to be drawn. I think that everyone should boycott all products made by the RIAA. Make sales drop another 50%. Show them that they are not a necesary institution in this country, and that the general public will not be told what to do with what they purchase. I see no difference between listening to a friend's cd in person and listening to the mp3 s/he sent me over the internet of his cd. I still get to hear the music. They(RIAA) will say that the song was copied and distributed to a person who doesn't own it allowing me to play the song at will. But there are ways to do that anyway without explicitly copying the song. Remote access to a machine can be configured in such a way that all of the output(audio and video) from the machine get redirected to your machine, still allowing you to play the song at will but denying you a copy. Is there a difference? Isn't the user still listening to the song at will, or is it going to be illegal to listen to music that you do not explicitly own? How far are we gonna let them take this? Land of the "free"
Hey this is the generation that spends its time playing GTA, watching needlessly violent cartoons, and prime time news that prides itslef one being the first ones to bring you the carnage. It might once and for all prove that video games warp the mind, but isn't a bloody war what all of us really want to bring to these corupt basterds. Frag 'em all.
One negative example does not cancel out a positive one.
According to my head, dc, my ti-85, etc, $150,000 * 652,000 = $97.8 billion, NOT trillion. I mean dont bet me wrong, I hate the RIAA as much as anyone else, but lets stick with real numbers, not RIAA-type math.
-M
Why does Slshdot have so many "I'm persecuted by the man", when you grow up you might just be the man (directed at the article poster).
....and....
I still don't understand why people insist it's their right to steal. Please, take a moment to understand information is not free, it takes time to create and as they say time is money.
If a company doesn't sell something according to your terms and conditions, don't buy, or even steal it.
It really is that simple, look at the catastrophy of divx dvds, movies didn't vanish when divx died.
To play devil's advocate here. The record companies need to slog out a whole bunch of pop trash to publish the good stuff, so they do get pissed when you take their revenue away. They make that on the pop that no one ordinarly would buy if it wasn't on MTV and ClearChannel in heavy rotation.
To the pissed college kids with a 100Mb LAN connections in their dorm, you're spolied, you don't work, you aren't starving, you have a roof over your head.
You will understand the meaning of strife when you enter the real world, even if it is just looking out the car window on the way to your ivory tower.
This is not in deference to those who worked through school, balancing fulltime work with school is arduous.
My university has had filesharing in the lawbook for a couple of years now, after the RIAA started suing our Computing Services director (my boss). He's not sharing files, but he's being personally sued for allowing this to happen.
:-D
Just how much is the RIAA able to stretch the law? It doesn't matter that my boss can't actually be personally considered guilty in any way for the actions of the students. But the RIAA sues him anyway. It's like they're mimicking the actions of the trash who run around suing McDonald's for coffee that's too hot, and the like. Just play legal hardball, and most people will cave in.
My boss did. Filesharing is punished pretty severely - most people don't know that downloading is acceptable (strange RIAA thing, they don't bother with people who download, only people who upload), so now when someone sees KaZaA open on my computer, they give me a weird look and mutter about me losing my connection.
It's actually pretty nice. Now I get decent speed.
The gevernment is looking into limiting how much a person can sue for if doctor really screws up your life. But the RIAA can sue a person for what ever they want. I don't agree with swapping artist audio files, but I disagree with this even more.
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it.
When web search engines are outlawed by the government because of the possibility of accessing sensitive or copyrighted material. Your browser will be provided with the approved corporate sites for your education and consuming purposes. Any code used to indiscriminately search the internet for data will be punishable by FBI prosecution. Your personal web page will allow you to post any pictures or material in the public domain (which effectively no longer exists) or that you have copyrighted to yourself. You may e-mail the location url to your friends so that they may view your web page. Any dissemination of non-government or corporate approved url's will be prosecuted. This message is brought to you by the RIAA. Advertisement: Britney Spears, the reunion tour! Everyone's favorite diva is back with new songs of hope and redemption. Her latest CD is available for only $25.99 at approved web sites. [-)
What would Richard Feynman do, if he were here right now? He'd do some math and he'd follow through!
http://www.admin.mtu.edu/urel/news/media_relations /95/
Phynd can be used to find anything on the network, and is often used for searching for things like "Lisa Mark's term paper" or even "My discussion about the project.mpe". The students who made Phynd are not responsible for the fact its used to share MP3s.
Volunteer Mozilla developer, RPI Student.
Phynd is a way to search network shares. I'm an RPI student and Phynd has been around since when I started going there in 1999. It can search for many kinds of files including zip files, mpgs, documents, text files, and anything else you can imagine within network shares. The fact it also can search for mp3 and has that as a preset option doesn't mean it is designed to allow for the distribution of copyrighted material. MP3s are not inherently copyrighted. I usually convert my own recordings of various things to MP3 to save space on my hard drive. Therefore, the RIAA has no argument and will be made to look like fools by trying to get into a technical battle with the students from one of the best engineering schools in the country.
Volunteer Mozilla developer, RPI Student.