Slashdot Mirror
The Law and P2P
Anonymous Coward writes "Here's some interesting legal commentary on the continuing saga of copyright enforcement and Apple's attempt at a constructive approach."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
I was under the impression that iTunes was Client/Server, not P2P... How does it possibly relate to Napster/Kazaa/Gnutella, etc.
They are more akin to Amazon.com no?
I am become Troll, destroyer of threads
This is a great idea that would be embraced by the public... until someone asked:
Why would i pay to download music on one service, that i can download for free on another?
0110100100100000011000010110110100100000011000100
It is quite likely that at some point the music industry will end up making more money out of Internet distribution of their music than they do out of selling CDs. It is also entirely likely that they will continue fighting against P2P tooth and nail until they have exhausted all possible options.
The problem is that right now the lawyers are making the decisions. If you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and if you are a laywer - you often assume that all problems can be solved with a law suit. This mentality will likely continue to persist until it is absolutely obvious, even to the lawyers, that it can't work.
What does this mean? Well, for one it means that we should fully expect legal attacks against users of P2P networks to continue. This will simply serve to encourage greater use of Freenet and other future systems which protect user anonymity (Freenet still needs work to make it well suited to this task - but if there is a demand, someone will create a suitable third-party app which uses Freenet as a back end).
After Freenet or its successors have finally demonstrated the futility of trying to use the law to halt progress in communications technology - the music industry may eventually accept that it needs to adapt, but don't hold your breath for it to happen any time soon.
Of course, resorting to such extreme measures would almost certainly inflame public opinion. And, as George Washington University Law School Professor Orin Kerr has argued, it might even land a few record company executives in jail, absent Congressional immunity for such tactics, which (believe it or not) has been proposed."
I personally would love to see this happen, if they damage my computer, I want the bastards in jail. If somebody came into a music store and stole a bunch of cd's, they can't just break into their house and smash them - along with anything else they might believe is stolen, they'd have to notify the authorities. I'm not trying to defend copyright infringement here, but two wrongs do not make a right.
The decision is obviously bad news for Hollywood studios and record companies
Doubt it. More like bad news for a lot of people sharing copyrighted material who can start expecting to hear from the legal attack dogs shortly
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
or, Ignoring that Cognitive Dissonance
You may notice a large number of posts made on Slashdot concering KaZaA, or similar programs such as Gnutella or FreeNet. Often these will be posted under "Your Rights Online" (YRO), in order to show how the use of KaZaA affects your "rights". You may wonder what the hell programs whose sole purpose is to circumvent copyright laws is doing on a conservative (yes, I mean it) site such as Slashdot.
Let me explain to you. In the back of their minds, most Slashdot readers ("Slashbots") know that they simply don't want to pay for anything which they can get illegally for free. Most people are exactly the same way. KaZaA et al allows them to get music for free, so they use it. They know that this is copyright violation, which is a bad thing to do. This brings them feelings of guilt which they want to do away with.
How do they do this? They rationalize it away. It's the copyright laws that are wrong, not them. DCMA needs to be rewritten. The MPAA needs to be destroyed. It's an expression of free speech. And those greedy record companies take all the money anyway. Never mind that with pirate mp3s the artist never sees any money anyway. This way, they are sticking it to "the Man", who exists to make life difficult for 31337 Linux users like themselves. Yes, it is flimsy, and yes, it allows them to take the moral high ground by robbing hard-working artists. Yes, many will say that modern popular music is all horrible anyway, and that their favorite music is the only worthwhile type, but then go on to slam others for being "elitist" in any discussion in which Gnome or KDE is mentioned.
And what about the SCO Linux beta? Didn't that violate the GPL by attaching a NDA agreement? And remember the cries of the Slashbots that Corel should be sued, destroyed. boycotted, etc.? All because SCO who was helping out the Linux community mistakenly added a certain clause to their beta, which violated the GPL. As you can see, the "community" is quick to cry foul when the copyrights on their software is violated, even by companies with good intentions. Our copyright good, yours bad.
It's called "hypocrisy" and if you read Slashdot enough, you'll have to get used to it.
Now ask yourself exactly why ther is coverage of KaZaA on a site obstensibly devoted to Free Software. KaZaA is proprietary as hell. Those protocol specs had to be reverse engineered. Isn't proprietary software bad? Isn't all free software superior? Isn't "open sourcing" a piece of software the best way to improve it?
These are all bleatings of the party lines. Here, we consider proprietary software Evil until Rob Malda tells us otherwise, or it gets ported to Linux. Then it becomes a special class of proprietary software which somehow becomes better than the rest. KaZaA is one example. SCO is another. Somehow, they are able to ignore this seemingly large discrepency by claiming that these companies are "helping" the "community". The only one being helped is VA Research^W Linux^W Software who gets to sell ads to these people after giving them free publicity on the most popular "Linux" site of them all.
Stop lying to yourselves.
I hope that Apple sees the chance to pull in some extra revenue, and ports this to PC. I doubt anyone would switch to a Mac just because of iTunes, but it'd give them an extra stream of cash if they let PC users share in the goodness.
From the Article:
Meanwhile, Apple has announced that it is adding additional music to its library, and will introduce a version of its service for Windows machines by year-end.
There you go...
While $10 is still higher than I'd spend for most craptacular CDs, it is a reasonable fee. I'd love to be able to just download the new Metallica CD as soon as it comes out, legitimately.
I'll just be glad to be able to download just the couple of songs that I want from a CD, and not have to pay for the filler crap. This is one of the reasons I don't buy many CD's, there is usually 1 or 2 songs I want on the CD, and the rest is mediocre at best. I often wait for a "Greatest Hits" type CD from a band before I'll buy one of their CD's, and even then I try to get it cheap/used. Call me a skinflint if you want, but I don't think of $20 as a small amount of money that I can just throw around, I want to get a good value for it. And $15-$20 for a new CD with a handful of songs that I like is just not a good value. Now $1 for a song I do like, now that's a pretty good deal.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
This whole Apple thing confuses me. I mean what they are doing is not in any way innovative. I think pretty much everybody has been asking for something like this for years. The question is why is Apple able to provide what noone else could or wanted to?
I think it is because they are operating at either a loss or tiny profit with the idea of making it up in Computer and iPod sales. When they do finally release software for the PC I am sure it is going to be awful like Quicktime is on the PC, which they will of course blame on Microsoft. This way they can say they are supporting Windows (and maybe make some money in the process) but they can also say how much better the service is on the Mac.
This smells like flamebait to me, and the post goes downhill from there. Armchair psychology and broad generalizations are not insightful.
Kazaa is covered on
I'm not sure it's fair to assert anecdotally, absent evidence, that the same persons most vocal about e.g. GPL compliance also advocating copyright infringement via Kazaa or otherwise. Furthermore, I see *no* inconsistency between saying people should respect copyright law and that copyright laws should be changed. A charge of hypocrisy really can't be levelled at a group of users where each user may (and often does) have differing views on any two given issues.
</SOAPBOX>
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
When a user boots the software, his computer is directed to sign on to a "root supernode" (a server owned by Sharman), which then directs the user to a "local supernode."
I've never used KaZaA or Grokster, but if the above is true, how is it that "when Grokster and Morpheus users search for and receive digital files, they do so without information being relayed to or by any computer owned or controlled by Grokster or Morpheus." is also true? If Sharman Networks were to shut down their servers, how could Grokster/KaZaA users find each other?
Or is the article saying that the company behind Grokster isn't responsible, Sharman Networks is -- but they are way over in some island and hard for the RIAA and MPAA to find?
If I were the RIAA, I would do what I could to shut down Sharman Networks. Have they tried that yet?
And how does Gnutella work? Can someone explain how a network can be "pure" peer-to-peer and anonymous at the same time (how would you connect to a the network)? The article explains it as: "This initial connection is usually made by linking to a computer on the network that maintains a constantly changing list of IP addresses for certain currently active nodes.". How do you find that computer with the list? Isn't that a central server, the maintainers of which should be targets for the RIAA?
"And there be unix which have made themselves unix for the kingdom of heaven's sake." - Matt. 19:12