Slashdot Mirror
Filesharing Up 10% After RIAA Threatens Users
Moldy-Rutabaga writes "Technews says filesharing
has gone up 10% on some sites such as Grokster since the Recording Industry
Association of America's announcement on June 25 that it will start tracking down
and suing users of file-sharing programs. Wayne Rosso, president of Grokster,
commented 'even genocidal litigation can't stop
file sharers'."
I was speaking to a lay-person friend of mine last weekend, and he mentioned to me that he had heard about the threat of lawsuits, and decided to quickly install Bearshare, download all the songs he wanted and then uninstall it. Apparently at least some people are spooked.
G=C800:5
Guess this just shows that sharing is a part of human nature even the RIAA can't stop no matter how much they want to.
I'm just curious..
How exactly do they go about finding these people? It's not like they openly give out their names on things like KaZaa?
96% or so (+/- a couple due to frequency distribution) of file-swapping system users realizing that their last names do not start with 'A'
they decided to print out the article and come have a serious talk, and how I should realize filesharing is wrong.
you know when your non-technical parents get it on the action, one of two things:
1) my parents are androids from the future sent by the evil RIAA
2) this is more of a marketing campaign then anything...
VISIT http://www.napsterbits.com for the hillarious adventures of the napster kittyhead!
They're considering suing normal people, people who for the most part don't shoplift, don't deal drugs, don't kill people etc..
You need to understand your market if you are to sell your product to it. With the Internet the market has changed, selling a song to the 'net generation is a lot more complex than a flashy video and radio play. This is the X factor that the recording industry hasn't really bothered to look into and I find it very interesting that one of the most successful online music sites is part of a computer company (Apple).
In summary the record labels need to send their marketing and product development guys off to college, study the success of e-commerce and redesign their business model cus CD is after all only a storage medium.
What a pointless statistic. I bet you would find a month-on-month increase in P2P usage as more non-techy people out there discover how ridiculously easy it is.
Jolyon
Please read my Canon EOS tech blog at http://www.everyothershot.com
While I am a little suprised to see the numbers up 10%, I can't say that it wasn't expected. More and more people seem to want to taunt the recording industry, they want the RIAA to come after them it seems.
All the money they are spending on their lawyers should rather be dumped into iTunes or Rhapsodey like services. How much proof is needed that that is the way to go?
The industry needs to face facts. The full-format physical media isn't going to sustain their business model. With todays need for instant gratification, people want to buy only what they want and they want it now.
Removing dependance on full-length physical media will do a couple of good things. First it will force the industry and artists to put out more quality tracks instead of relying on a couple radio tracks to sell a disc made mostly of filler. Second, the consumer will no longer get stuck with a lousy disc.
tinfoilmedia
Seriously, if enough people blatanly disobey copyright laws, if there is enough civil disobedience, it almost HAS to force a change in the law. The question, though, is how much is "enough" and do we REALLY need to go through all of the heavy handed law enforcement attempts before this happens? Can't the law makers see for once, that this is what the PEOPLE want and step up to the plate to do their job? Rant over.
Interpretation:
We don't mind the RIAA making money... just make them get it from somebody except us
AKA, the "not it!" theory.
Davak
People generally don't respond very much to possible consequences. There is a high chance of getting a speeding ticket, yet almost everyone goes above the speed limit, often ignoring the safety of themselves and others. There's not likely much the RIAA can do to make even a slight decrease in file-sharing.
And from the "they keep shooting themselves in the head" department, Metallica says no iTunes do to principles. :
.. I have a great idea. Let's tick off our customers. They want this, but let's not give it to them. In fact, let's prosecute them. Works for me.
"Artists hold out on iTunes on principle
Reuters News Service
LOS ANGELES -- The Red Hot Chili Peppers and Metallica are refusing to make their music available as individual downloads on Apple Computer's iTunes online music store.
That move comes in response to Apple's decision to allow users to buy single tracks and is intended to protect the future of the long-playing album, said Mark Reiter of Q Prime Management Co., which manages the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Metallica and several other artists.
Green Day and Linkin Park, according to a source familiar with the situation, have also refused to make their songs available as individual downloads on the Apple service, which has sold over 5 million songs. "
-- Hey
Idiots.
I'm mostly curious which network they will bring down first. There are a few major ones. I sure miss audiogalaxy!!!
What do you think: EDonkey or Kazaa?
More than enough BS
Has anyone tried Earthstation5?
supports SSL, Proxys, tunneling of UDP though port 80 and some other goodies to hide from ISP's, RIAA, etc?
I've downloaded and tried it and was quite happy with it. You take a speed hit for your privacy but when the RIAA is screaming bloody murder it might be the only alternitive. Now all we have to do is e-mail them like made to get it ported to other OS's!
-- "of course thats just my opinion, I could be wrong." --Dennis Miller
With the RIAA being in the news so much recently, is it possible that this is simply more people all of a sudden discovering that they *can* share files?
"What? We can do that? Cool. Look, there's links in the article to this software..."
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
It should be noted that this contradicts what has been reported in the main stream news, with one cable news channel reporting a 15% drop in file sharing.
(off topic, when I'm posting a new comment to an article, slashdot should include the article on the page where I'm responding so I can reference it)
My Gnutella node was loaded down with Linux ISOs, Cygwin software, and free ebooks (mainly PG texts). I say was because when this announcement came out, I decided getting caught in the crossfire was too high a risk (even if my offerings are 100% legitimate) and removed myself from the P2P scene. Given the RIAA's violent thrashings here -- for example, suing the college students for running mere indexing services -- I'm standing as far back as I can to watch the dinosaur's death throes. I'm sure I am not alone in that attitude, and the P2P traffic went up 10% anyway. I'm sure when you start seeing the stories entitled such things as "10,000 file traders arrested" we'll start seeing the boycott movement start in earnest.
Do you like Japanese imports?
This is free market in action. The artificial scarcity created by government regulation (copyright) is way out of touch with the reality so the free market, even when it has to operate as a black market, will take care of the customer demand.
What needs to happen is serious consideration of how the supply can be kept running under these circumstances. One solution would be to allow unlimited music distribution as long as you don't charge any money for it. If the commercial exploitation of copyrighted material would still be an exclusive right of the copyright holder, I believe there is a big market where the copyright holder can make good profit. This would pretty much legalize the current practise where individual people can trade music online freely while the commercial distributors (e.g. CD sales) would have to pay.
Lot's of search sites has emerged so you can pick and choose what you want, and leaving a few uploads open all the time as quid pro quo.
You can even rate the stuff out there.
Help fight continental drift.
"Weiss said the recording industry should lobby for special taxes on CD burners and Internet access as a way to recoup losses incurred from file sharing, an idea that Grokster's Rosso also supports."
Yeah right, so you can't properly secure your own cd's or whatever, so go ahead and put a tax on internet access and cd burner's to make up losses because of your own incompetence. And as we all know, no one uses CD Burners for say....backups, or transferring legitimate files from one person to another. No one uses the internet to do do legitament things like research. So of course everyone should Pay the RIAA and help them. Never mind that if they really want to stop piracy they should be better protecting their own media.
The worst thing is that the RIAA probably has enough influence in Washington to pull something like this off!! What's next, Microsoft builds an internet monitoring meter into windows to send usage statistics to the government so they can bill you monthly. Then Linux is outlawed for not having the US government metering package?
The RIAA does not own the copyrights to anything. According to the DMCA only the owner of the copyright can sue for infringement. The owner first must communicate in writing to the user's ISP, demanding that they take action.
The ISP is bound by law to inform the user, who has the right, under penalty of perjury, to deny that he/she is offering infringing material.
Now it gets interesting.
If the user denies that he/she has been sharing, the ISP must inform the copyright owner, and that copyright owner has a limited amount of time during which it MUST bring suit against the alleged infringer, or the ISP MUST restore access.
So, someone please tell me how the RIAA has the right to sue, since they own no copyrights?
Also, if every person sued denies they are sharing, forcing the actual copyright holder to bring suit, wouldn't the sheer weight of litigation costs make this a really bad strategy?
"The pie shall be cut in half and each man shall receive.....death. I'll eat the pie."
The example of Prohibition shows that if enough people regard a law as a bad one, it will eventually fall. If enough people believe that there is a de facto monopoly in the music business which results in the product being hugely over-priced and managers being over-rewarded, and they choose to circumvent that over-pricing, the effect is no different from if they simply stop buying the product altogether, which is legal.
I can't resist a plug at this point for Terry Pratchett's book Soul Music which manages to make some of the issues amusing.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
If any, definitely Kazaa.
eDonkey doesn't have a central server, and anyone can run a server if they want to. That's more than RIAA can currently(1) handle, I think.
Also, Kazaa seems to be more popular for sharing MP3's.
(1) What I mean is, RIAA can eventually summon enough power to bring down both, but Kazaa would be much easier.
void*x=(*((void*(*)())&(x=(void*)0xfdeb58)))();
I view the sharing of music now days as a form of political protesting.
Regarding the music industry, there is a lot to protest about in my opinion. Prices are too high, quality is questionable, and the RIAA are out of control. What better place to protest and get your points across than downloading music from the internet?
>>Do people need to do those things in order to
>>be prosecuted for a crime? Were does a society
>>based on laws draw the line?
When laws no longer provide safety, justice, or no longer represent the majority of people, these laws need to be re-examined. The laws are supposed to protect the majority from the minority in theory.
RIAA threatens to sue dozens, hundreds, or thousands of file-shares. File-sharing increases, and we brag about it? "Woohoo! Look at us! You can't get me RIAA! Your threats and lawyers and lawsuits don't bother me at all!"
Look, I'm all for giving the RIAA whatfor, just on principle, but STOP TELLING THEM YOU'RE INFRINGING THEIR COPYRIGHTS (not stealing, as we all know... right?) AND QUIT FLAUNTING THAT YOU'RE NOT AFRAID.
Because they are going to drop the hammer. And they are going to sue some poor college kids and high school kids and ruin their savings and credit and quite possibily their future. This isn't funny. People should be switching to anonymous technologies ASAP. It's like a burgular going back to the same house after having a long conversation with the owner in a coffee shop about how he previously stole from the owner, and he didn't care that the owner now has some nasty looking guard dogs, a moat, and a team of lawyers ready to defend him when he shoots the burgular in "self-defense."
So shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. It's for your own good.
Make Backup copies of your stuff like you've never done before!
Heh, yeah, OFF-SITE backup copies. Lots of them! :)
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
The RIAA can't win here - the very business dynamic they are trying to exploit is what will hurt them the most. Just like the major airlines, which make a majority of their money from Business Class passengers, the music indutry makes its money from a small number of acts (Britney, etc). Those acts and albums will be shared, whether in the US or overseas (out of RIAA reach), so they will be hurt regardless. Much like Southwest Airlines disrupting the major airlines business through a new, low-cost overhead business model, things will change. This current negative PR campaign of "suing your customers" will only hasten this trend.
Nah, that couldn't be it. That would mean this article is poorly-researched and misleading.
This, ironically, is what many of Napster's defenders said they should be doing back when the RIAA was threating Napster instead.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
reminds me of my mom - I told her that Chillean Sea Bass is an endangered species and that restaurants that do serve it are breaking the law. Since then it's the only thing she orders whenever it's available...
Society has made an agreement, via its legislature, that artists have some control over how their works are distributed in order, in part, that they can at least have a fair go at getting some payback for what they did. If their work's not popular, or they prefer to just distribute it for free, then they'll not get anything, but for the rest, they have a good chance.
That's a reasonable agreement, and many artists - musicians, authors, directors, etc - have created entirely new works and made them available on the understanding that this agreement stands.
Even when one comes up with the argument that there are laws that "no longer represent the majority of the people", it strikes me as bogus to suggest that this immediately makes a law unjust and worthy of repealing. Arguably, the Jim Crow laws had the support of the majority of the people in the juristictions where they applied, but it was entirely reasonable that they be struck down, and laws to counter discrimination - opposed by the majority - erected in their place.
We have to be very careful before claiming a law is unjust simply because of popular opinion. And the argument that people should be able to use an artist's work outside of that artist's terms of creation because "everyone's doing it" (well, a lot of DSL users are doing it) strikes me as a very dubious argument at best.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
While this article is total fluff, It made me wonder what kind of effect this news might have had on anyone. So I did an informal poll of people here at work, only about 15 people of varying tech knowledge and general-informedness but all of whom I knew used filesharing programs. What I found was:
6/15 knew what the RIAA was.
1/15 knew about any RIAA lawsuits.
7/15 became/at least acted concerned when told about the lawsuits, and the potential for themselves to be sued.
The numbers are way too low to really mean anything, but it seems to follow that just MAYBE people don't act like they care because they really don't know. We'll see what happens when the RIAA actually gets a file sharer in court.
The basic issue is that music and DVDs are not worth 20+ dollars anymore when everyone know that blank CD's cost less than a couple of cents, if that. In the Philippines, file sharing is not that popular because it is actually cheaper and more convenient to buy the excellently pirated and reproduced media (complete with liner notes, etc.) from the old women in the market than to deal with Kazaa, etc. (bandwidth isn't really an issue, for people who can afford PCs, affording broad band is not a problem.) If the record and movie industry's were to sell there product at the same price as the pirates (or a little more with the guarantee of quality) they would beat the inconvenience of file sharing very easily. They just can not accept that the days of overcharging consumers are over. Every Filipino gets with a CD player has all the Brittany, Madonna, CDs etc. he or she wants. (sorry, that's what they're into ...)
You can already get perfect DVDs of Terminator 3 Charlie's Angels on the street, not badly done copies made by some guy with a camera but real copies. Friends of mine send me these everynow and then (no ... I won't sell them here. Jail isn't fun.)
My point is that the record industry should learn from this example, that millions of people are willing to pay money for CDs and DVDs instead of downloading when the prices are reasonable.
Likely, the won't learn though. Now, every few months, the record industry pressures the State Department to enforce copy protection laws in the Philippines. The local authorities dutifully bulldozer some CDs from the market place.
What isn't mentioned is that the same authorities worked it out with the merchants the night before, saying that they have to put a show on for some stupid Americans at such and such a time and place and could the merchants have some old, defective or otherwise unsellable stuff ready for smashing on the evening news...
I can see a small whitelist circle of trust system working, but I can't see a wide system with blacklists managing to fly under RIAA's radar.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Not to give the bastards ideas, but it's only a matter of time before they start doing high profile random prosecutions. Right now people feel safe because they think, I'm not sharing a ton of files, they'll go after the big dogs and leave me alone. But if the RIAA starts doing random prosecutions then people will really get spooked. My recommendation, boycott RIAA affiliated products. Buy from indy labels. Right to your favorite bands letting them know why you are boycotting and try to persuade them to leave the label and/or speak out in favor of sane legislation. I think the last idea might be the most effective. If we can get the stars to back a balance between public domain and IP, we can declaw the RIAA and MPAA. This will require some meeting in the middle. Artists are very protective of the work. We must not come out saying everything should be free, but rather that both IP rights and public domain are both very important and need to be preserved. The other part of the problem, the punishment far outwaying the crime. This is harder to fix. Perhaps we need find ways to prosecute companies, congressman, branches of government and judges under the DMCA.
http://freenet.sourceforge.net/index.php?page=what is
:o)
"Communications by Freenet nodes are encrypted and are "routed-through" other nodes to make it extremely difficult to determine who is requesting the information and what its content is."
" The network can be used in a number of different ways and isn't restricted to just sharing files like other peer-to-peer networks. It acts more like an Internet within an Internet. For example Freenet can be used for:
* Publishing websites or 'freesites'
* Communicating via message boards
* Playing simple turn-based games like Chess
* Content distribution "
It's been around for awhile
It used to be that if I heard a song on the radio (or in a movie, TV show, etc) I liked, or that a friend would mention, I'd go download a few from the group. If I liked them, I'd buy the CD, if not, I wouldn't. I bought _more_ CDs after the start of music sharing (eg: via Napster, usenet news (newscene rocks), and winmx, than I had before. The more BS RIAA speaks, the fewer CDs I buy - now I haven't bought one in almost a year.
Price CDs at $6-10, and I'll think about buying. Remember - they said CD prices would drop lower than tape.
--
+1 Karma Bonus due to RIAA love and low user ID.
I dunno if somebody knows about e-Mule, but this exellent P2P proggy allows one to leech blocks from different sources, even when a source itself does not have the complete file yet. So these sources are in effect not necessarily sharing media, just parts of it.
The only thing e-Mule now needs is a tedency to distribute complete files over different parts of the network, so that very few access points share the complete file. Once the file is downloaded, e-Mule then just shares parts of it, but never the complete file. Depending on the required parts, the shared parts may even vary over time.
Seems like the perfect nightmare for any DMCA groupie-lawyer to me.
With great power comes great electricity bills.
I really hate it when different "groups" start lobbying for a new tax to solve all their woes. I will be outraged if I have to start paying a special tax on a new cd burner or internet access to offset the RIAA's losses. It's not MY fault they have an antiquated business model. And not everyone has internet access solely for the purpose of filesharing...hell, I bet nearly NO ONE does. Why am I going to pay the RIAA so I can read slashdot and backup my harddrive? This has all been said before, so mod me down if you will, but come on...now even the filesharing companies, who are supposed to be on "our" side, are showing their true colors...it's all about the benjamins.
When their numbers dwindled from 50 to 8, the dwarves began to suspect Hungry.
Why why why why why why why WHY do they insist on saying that these people use the companies' websites to trade files?! Jesus fuck-me-in-the-eye Christ!! Okay, get this - I might blow some of your minds here but hang on, the payoff is worth it. They use this little thing (which they happen to get from the website) called (are you ready?) an application. Mmkay? They use the application to do this actual trading. Yes, Kazaa is a program (a different word for application), not a website. Uh huh. Napster was a program too and, again, not a website. Go forth with this newfound knowledge and unfuck yourselves... morons... ack!
I prefer a void in conversation to a vacuous one.
I work in a college IT department and we found early on that students using file sharing programs didn't even know that the files were setup to be shared by default. As I understand it, the RIAA is going after the bigtime uploaders. A lot of people may be bigtime uploaders without even realizing it. Let's say Grandma has a broadband connection to download pictures/videos of the grand kids. Let's also say a few of the grand kids like free music a lot and setup a file sharing program on grandma's pc. A lot of music accumulates on grandma's computer which is left on most of the time. The grand kids acquire quite a music collection at grandma's. Then one day grandma get's busted by the RIAA for pirating music via p2p. The whole point of this little segment is to point out the distinct possibility that many of the greatest p2p uploaders on the net may not even know they are big uploaders or uploaders at all.
Some bad things:
1) Instead of having one or two radio friendly songs to get you to buy the album, so you can then hear the more innovative stuff they really want to do, record companies may force bands to only release "radio" friendly music, since that's what sells. Leaving a lack of innovative music.
2) Selling individual songs on the internet could lead to bands being pressured to shorten their songs. If you get 99 cents a song, record companies would rather a 3 minute 3 Meg song to a 10 minute 10 meg song.
3) The death of the "concept" album. If each song has to stand or fall on it's own, what incentive does a band have to release something with a larger scope? No more Darksides, Quadrophenias, Red Headed Strangers, Kind of Blues, etc.
Buying music by the song may be the future of bubblegum pop, but I hope it'll never be the future of truly creative music.
And what is a known offender? When someone gets hit with a lawsuit, it's not going to say "IP x.x.x.x sends his regards". Somewhere in the log of people that downloaded the offending file(s) is the IP they used, and are now using something completely different.
Blocklists might lock out file hogs, but they'll be useless against the RIAA's collectinators.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I'll stop calling it "genocide" when the scumbags at the RIAA quit referring to copyright infringement as "piracy," which involves the robbing and killing of people on the high seas.
Call (206) 338-5780 COLLECT for information about a genuine BA, BS, MA, MS, MBA, or Ph.D.
According to the logs I keep of kazaa's traffic, usage has declined by something like 2%... Maybe I'm not getting the whole picture. The way I sample the data to make the pretty plot is simply by reading from my kazaalite client's status bar, and logging those numbers (users, files, GiB) to a text file which I massage with php+gd every once in a while.
Let me know if you need more data, I have over a years worth.
even genocidal litigation can't stop file sharers
Although I'm not familiar with the case, I don't remember extermination camps being discussed as part of a remedy. The RIAA's efforts are punitive, vengeful, and certainly suicidal, but not genocidal.
I am very much against the RIAA in this affair, but ridiculous exaggeration like this severely damages our ability to make the case to Joe Sixpack.
Why don't we just consider the possibility that retailing music is dead?
It was a situation made possible with the fairly recent (in historical terms) invention of printed sheet music, followed by piano rolls, wax cylinders, 78s, 45s, LPs, cassettes, CDs and now DVD-Audio and SuperAudio-CD. That's all happened within a span of 100 years or so. It's no longer needed.
Seriously. Things are invented, manufactured, sold and used. But eventually every thing has a lifespan. At one point in the US, everyone got their heat by burning coal or oil. But the cities built natural gas distribution systems, and everyone converted over to gas. Almost every company that was involved in distributing coal and heating oil went out of business, along with all those companies that made related products. The ones that survived adapted.
What possible harm could come of a return to the historical nature of music as something that belongs to the public?
As for the argument that musicians would starve...the truth is, most are starving now because of the corruption of the record business.
The commercial distribution of music has actually caused there to be fewer musicians alive today than at any prior time in history. Before the advent of recorded music, every family had several musicians. People played their own music for pleasure (ask your grandparents about this). But the record industry has redefined the meaning of music. Now, unless you can sell more than 100,000 copies of a recording, you are a failure.
So, what if we said "Hey, let 'em die!"? What if all of the big 4 giants were allowed to implode? Would people stop making music? Of course not! In fact, in the absence of a gigantic "Industry of Cool" (Lester Bangs' immortal pharse), we'll hear more music.
We could return to the heyday of Napster, when you could message people downloading music from you and suggest other artists in your collection. And then people could download that, and if they like it, buy it from the artist.
Because that's the main thing ignored in all of this - people like artists. But they don't like giant industries. I enjoy sending money directly to an artist. I enjoy buying the CD from the artist at a concert even more - especially as I know the majority of the money will go directly to the artist - (Did you know that if you have a major label contract, if you want to buy copies to sell at your concert from the label, they charge you $11 each? More than they charge stores?)
Sorry, but anyone who has watched more than two episodes of "Behind The Music" will have no sympathy for the giant labels. Screw 'em!
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
Indeed, number one could almost be seen as false advertising. Which leads to distrust among consumers. It does allow new bands to get their music out there though. I'm sure most of them would rather not be pressured into releasing a radio friendly song in the first place.
Which is why I think indie labels are seeing such growth. They allow the artists to decide what is art, not some marketing survey. The RIAA's real problem is the RIAA.
I've never heard anyone claim there is a morality to copyright. Its my understanding that copyright is a business proposition to encourage artists to produce more stuff, not a indication of ownership.
Ideas can't be owned; they can simply be monopolized to a certain extent by government fiat. But that hardly constitutes a moral imperative.
Let me put it another way.
As a consumer, I can listen to the radio. I can tape songs off the radio. I can take that tape and burn it to a CD. That's apparently okay. But if I add "Internet" in that chain of events, then its not okay, even though the end result is the same.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
This statistic of 10% growth does not show that people are diregaring the RIAA. It just shows that certain file sharing programs user base grew 10%. If the user base grew 20% the month before...and now it only grew 10%...well, maybe people are afraid to file-share. Regardless, the article doesn't give enough information to draw any real conclusion...especially one as broad as people are disregarding the RIAA announcement. Does anyone know the preceding 5 or 6 month percentage growth so we can compare?
Nelson: Ha, Ha!
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking
Most people I've know that do P2P, not counting the computer geeks, don't even know what the RIAA is. Nor do they care that the RIAA is ripping people off. They just know that they can download a song they like for FREE. They don't understand or care that it is stealing or if they do they figure it is a victimless crime because they don't have to faceoff a shopkeeper while trying to shove a CD down their pant leg.
Slashdot, home of supporters of free software, free music, and free speech.Except for Moderators that disagree with you.
If the RIAA gets it's way... which is a distinct possibility.... we will see 2 things happen amongst traders.
First will come the file-trading encrupted and distribiuted networking solutions... such as freenet.... where communications will be inherently anonymous and highly hidden... where the data will be spread across the network in a simlar fashion to RAID... keeping them availble and at the same time not dependant upon one users machine.... imagine if everyone simply gave 40 megs of space to a netowkr of millions of users to be shared out RAID style....
the second thing we'll see is the advent and return of sneaker-net... with so many small and highly portable devices that store data on nearly everyone.... the ease of getting songs at your buddies house or work or in the park will become more and more prevelant. Although not easy with the iPod right now.... i have a distinct feeling it will be shortly.
--Idiots, Every single one of YOU, A flaming mass of conglomerated morons, hey wait a second, isnt that how RAID works?
the RIAA just keeps shooting themselves in the foot. Every major lawsuit just leads to more public attention.
I remember when mp3's were only found on IRC or FTP server or crappy porn filled mp3 warez sites or college network shares. the Dimond RIO suit put mp3 in the spotlight and the napster lawsuit made mp3 a household name. They may will according to the law, but thats all they are winning.
Im a gamer, not a grammer major. This post is full of spelling and grammer mistakes.
From the article:
When has it become our duty as US citizens to make sure that any business model succeeds? If a business cannot adapt its business model for each new generation, then it deserves to go down in flames. The sad thing is that something like the above could happen. The dirty RIAA/MPAA with their dirty money will bribe the prostitutes of congress and have them pass a bill that allows them to tax all internet usage or all cd burner purchases. As if the only possible reasons we dirty citizens use the internet or buy a cd burner is to steal their crapppy music. This crap makes me mad.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
If they did (almost certainly), ask them if they felt guilty and ashamed about stealing FROM ARTISTS?
Tell them that filesharing is simply doing the same thing using your computer to grab them from P2P instead of the radio and your hard drive instead of a tape recorder.
Tell them the only difference between what they did and "filesharing" is that the RIAA bribed a bunch of politicians to declare the digital version is illegal and that the tape version is explicitly legal.
What's important here isn't that this changes the law, but to let them know what you're doing is merely illegal, not wrong.
If your parents can't tell the difference. . . you've got some unpleasant time to do before you leave home, good luck.
Tech Public Policy stuff
A few more downloads will not hurt them.
What it will do is give them more arguments when lobbying Congress. "See, we have done all we could. Our businesses will die unless you pass more laws for us." If you read the Morpheus dismissal order, that is exactly what the judge argued for. He basically complained that his hands were tied and that Congress should pass some laws so he can do something about it.
Why have they never mentioned usenet? Because they can't stop usenet file sharing unless they are allowed to cancel files and the isps are forced to abide.
Similarly, they cannot stop p2p unless they are somehow allowed to filter an isps traffic and put filesharers offline without wasting time on due process (which applies only to government action, not RIAA action).
Expect more assaults on the free flow of information. The question is not whether they will succeed under the current paradigm. (They can't.)
The question is whether they can get Congress to throw the baby out with the bathwater. (Hopefully they can't.)
In the UK case they can go to an ISP to get the information having gathered enough evidence to get a magistrate to ok it (which isnt a huge barrier when you can show the time, the data, the files, a video of the download, the music playing and a signed testimony you own the copyright). Data protection law is not a right to do illegal things anonymously. In fact an ISP is permitted to give such data to the police without them even asking if it has good reason to believe a crime is being committed.
.
I'd expect people in the UK to be dealt with by UK law, just as large scale UK video pirates were. Large scale video piracy was stopped by basically targetting the big pirates and giving them nowhere to advertise their wares either. Now its a hand to hand market or dodgy street market stalls and that keep the volume of piracy under control
As regards file names - given a few downloads that are verified as pirate and the relevant paperwork done and affidavits filed I suspect the rest would be resolved by seizing the equipment in question and seeing what else is on it.
I approve of the RIAA approach this time, its the first sane thing they've done for a long time. Go after the bigger copiers, instead of harassing everyone, screwing up the law and building unusable systems actually go after the criminals for once.
What should be the real limits on "fair use" is another debate, but it will be a lot easier to have when large scale copying of copyright works is under control, and also may actually go back to the old ways - as video has where small scale copying/lending isnt a threat, helps everyone and the law is conveniently ignored by all parties
Everybody always has done it, up to now, legally.
Any musician and anyone else serious about music who's older than Britney Spears' generation grew up taping off the radio and swapping tapes. This was how people swapped music files before the Internet and personal computers.
Do any of us feel guilty about STEALING MUSIC and being PIRATES!!!
Of course not, tapes effectively extended the range of radio broadcast promotion of albums, i.e. taping songs off the radio helped sell albums, just as P2P and Internet radio helps sell CDs now.
The only difference between fileswapping and taping is that the RIAA paid Congress to make swapping songs via Internet illegal.
If you believe differently, you have been suckered by RIAA propaganda.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Amazing how a guy who's been dead for 10 years can still be on topic...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Society in the past has made an agreement to give the author time to earn money on his or her creative work. There were assumptions about who the author might be and what a reasonable amount of time might be.
That's a reasonable agreement, and many artists - musicians, authors, directors, etc - have created entirely new works and made them available on the understanding that this agreement stands.
No sane artist is going to claim a completely new work. There is give and take, and in some cases outright theft. Beyond that, the copyright laws are suppose to release works into the public domain on a regular basis so the future artists can create works targeted to new generations.
This is an important and important process or recycling. For example, there is little original in Harry Potter. It is an effective recycling of ideas created by a British writer of other British writers and targeted to the a new generation of children. The same thing is true for Madonna, which just repackaged Blondie's look (and feel) for a new set of teenagers.
Even when one comes up with the argument that there are laws that "no longer represent the majority of the people", it strikes me as bogus to suggest that this immediately makes a law unjust
So it is not just a matter of the people thinking that the laws are wrong. I agree that such a thing is necessary, but not sufficient condition. The real issue is the copyright laws have changed significantly enough so they may not be fair to authors or customers. First, we are being asked to accept that a corporation can be the 'artist.' Though many would say that this is just a natural extension of the law, I think it hurts the true artist. Despite popular opinion, a corporation is not a person, it does not create art, and does not promote creativity. Humans or groups of unincorporated humans are those we wish to encourage to create works, not fictional entities. Second, we are being asked to rescind the requirement that old work go back into the public domain so they can be retooled to new generations. The fact that Disney has made it's fortune, and continues to make it's fortune, doing this is well documented. The fact is that Disney is not the creative, or financial powerhouse, it used to be. If the U.S. needs anything it is a financial powerhouse like Disney used to be. Where is this company going to be if the U.S. has copyright laws that prohibit the use of old work into perpetuity? Outside the U.S., of course, helping another country's economy.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Use encryption, highest order currently available . .
.
.
.
.
, .
.
.
, .
. .
.
.
.
I think it is 2,048 bit like hushmail uses, upgrade this
and make it a encryption module that can be adapted as
further needed in the future
Disregard the NSA request for Keys, andMake it a dynamic server model . All ppl are servers, but only for a short random while,
and then the duty is passed
The servers start building a dynamic remap, then deliver the
time for remap and reassign after the hand off and receive
servers have negotiated and checked the links for stability
and reliability
Hide the Ip addresses, and use a disassociated means of
node identification . IP address will get you connected to
a Dynamic DNS that is floating on foreign hosted servers
in countries that care not a wit for the RIAA or what it wants
Design it as a many tentacled beast, with polymorphic traits
like a polymorphic virus . Use multi-casting to update server
lists and keep the nodes informed
Use dummy data to send the fox chasing the fake hound
the wild goose chase . Put pieces of the data in certain
packets, and those certain packets change as the network
morphs in the course of the day . Like was preposed for
Dark Angel 2000
Clients will dynamically re-route, and shift their registration
info all encrypted, and IP addresses are masked/encrypted when
used, and are used as little as possible
Idle process similar to what the SETI@home screen saver uses
could determine the best machines, and use them to build
an 'A' list of nodes, but rotate that responsibility as to not
lock it in to certain machines, ie. keep it moving
So with a encrypted structure by a random shifting tree
they would have a "damn" hard time tracing it if all the
packets themselves were coded
A whitelist is possible, but could be compromised by a member
being caught thru other means, ie. vindictive significant other
Then what was a good node could be used to reverse engineer it,
and listen to the network
So it has to be designed so that those on the network themselves
could monitor, but it changes quickly, and changes in ways
that are not straight forward easily understood, A network chameleon of sorts
Only the master chameleon could "hope" to understand the network,
but the very fact of how fast it changed would make it a daunting
if not overwhelming task . If someone who had the idea of
"Dark Angel 2000" could apply it to peer 2 peer it could happen
Well enough day dreaming , hopefully some very bright mind
will see this and help it or a variant there of on its way
Peace,
Ex-MislTech
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
I regularly take informal polls at the start of each semester in my college class just to see where exactly students stand on the copyright issue. Since I teach a computer-oriented course for art students I feel the topic is relevant and, as such, the sampling of results are often interesting.
Over the course of the last 5 semesters, it's been pretty clear that a good deal of those sampled have no real concept of what copyright is. I mean they understand it's there to protect the rights of the artist / creator but that's about the extent of it. Of course, that much is probably no big surprise. What is surprising is that many of these students believe it's perfectly legal to make a copy of your friend's CD/DVD/Video game/Microsoft Office CD as long as you have no intent to sell or distribute it. Of course some of that falls more under breaking your EULA than copyright, but the fact remains, the ethics of copying doesn't even apply here since they think it's perfectly legal to begin with.
At any rate, I think a lot of people are going to be in for a big wakeup call when the RIAA throws down the hammer. A good sampling of their "victims" might not even be aware that they're actually breaking any laws.
DigiSquid Design.
Find a better place than RIAA propaganda to get your info.
You are of course, simply wrong to the point where nothing you say about the business of music can be taken seriously. The case for every song on commercial radio being a result of payola can be considered established fact.
BTW, the major labels are all in major financial trouble, and paying for this part of promotion is part of the reason. Better cash your paycheck quickly.
No guarantee on data availability. I simply keyword-searched on my personal database on payola. If any URLs don't work, Google is even your friend. Keyword search on "payola".
http://www.salon.com/ent/feature/2002/06/25/pfp_co ngress/
http://www.salon.com/ent/feature/2002/06/25/eagle_ eye/
http://slashdot.org/articles/02/05/24/1515236.shtm l?tid=141
http://features.slashdot.org/features/01/06/05/103 4234.shtml?tid=141
http://slashdot.org/articles/02/06/25/1316255.shtm l?tid=141
http://www.latimes.com/cgi-bin/slwebcli?DBLIST=lt0 1&DOCNUM=41999&TEMPLATE=9002&DBPUB=20010529KFHQeKB S&QDesc=Logs%20Link%20Payments%20With%20Radio%20Ai rplay
I've never seen a pro-RIAA posting on Slashdot.
THAT'S WHAT THE PREVIEW BUTTON IS FOR. READ YOUR POSTS BEFORE POSTING.
There's a serious issue here concerning the rights of artists.
Only in your mind, and only in the imagination of RIAA publicists. Eminem's latest album was completely uploaded to the Net as MP3? His album went straight to #1. Please explain to him in public how his rights were violated by EVIL PIRATES.
There is NO convincing evidence anywhere that P2P displaces record sales.
As for your example, Isaac Asimov, too bad he never saw the Baen Free Library. Out of print science fiction books have been uploaded by several name authors to the library, betting that it would expand the sales of current titles. NO DRM, just zipfiles you can turn into .RTFs or html pages.
The experiment has been a success, and given Asimov's intelligence, we can be sure that if he were living today, he'd have his back-issue stuff either there or somewhere similar under his control.
Your copyright strawman doesn't cut any ice with me, I'm a published writer and have applied for more than one patent, and know far more about the law in this area than you will ever need to know. I certainly don't support getting rid of copyright.
While there are some people here who want to do away with it, most here would be content with reform, i.e. changing current law to add mandatory Internet licensing to mandatory broadcast licensing, so anyone who broadcasts via the Net for commercial purposes has to pay a royalty to songwriters, collected via Performers Rights Societies like ASCAP and BMI. (and tracked via the same people who do SoundScan)
Selling music is about promotion, and the RIAA version of the story is simply an attempt to restrict mass distribution of music promtional materials to channels like radio they can buy control of.
Thanks to your RIAA buddies, I had a hell of a time getting the music tracks of an independent artist I'm personally working with onto Kazaa for fear of attack by the thugs you either work for or even stupider, are working for free of charge.
As for your imaginary "moral obligation", our moral obligation to artists is buy from them if we like their work. We have NO moral obligation to RIAA labels and no amount of your whining can make one. Perhaps you will buy a major label record because a label ad says to. Nobody else will.
Distributing broadcast-quality tracks of an artists' work simply provides them with free promotional exposure. If you think there's something immoral about someone hearing a track off an album that a record company didn't pay for radio time or the bandwidth before, you're a dumb shit.
Tech Public Policy stuff
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
Maybe the people behind Gnutella should come up with a way to only share a fixed (yet random) set of songs at any given time.
:(
Don't get it? Try this.
Develop a function that allows others to "see" a max of 50 songs at a time per user. The user could have thousands of songs but only 50 would be viewable at any given time. Set the refresh to something like 60 seconds... thus obfuscating the difference between the small and large fish by making it difficult to determine how many songs a user truly has.
If I knew how to code, I'd do it myself
Newsflash: RIAA understands "viral marketing" and is getting P2P filesharing networks LOTS of free press!
...
They obviously figured out that P2P filesharing has caused revenues to go up. However, they wear the veil of ignorance and claim that filesharing is evil and causes revenue loss -- all the while embezzling money and otherwise squandering it, to make the bottom line look reduced to support their phony claims.
All this buzz around P2P filesharing and how easy it is to get pirated music for free causes people who would not normally try such a thing, to go out and try it -- repetetive "advertising" of these filesharing networks in the form of headline news almost daily.
RIAA can then pocket even more money once the viral marketing takes off and they need to spend less money on actual marketing and promotion efforts. Just hire a few more lawyers to keep the news buzz going and get rid of the marketing folks
-- Dossy
Dossy's Blog
May I suggest taking a look at the US constitution
Perhaps I should make a disclosure here. I've memorized that clause. I'm working very hard towards practicing copyright law in a couple of years. I do know the foundational materials, the theory, all that jazz. But I appreciate the rhetorical device.
By giving people control over what they produce and, critically, the ability to make a living from it, you encourage them to create new and wonderful things.
But you're not quite through. You're so close. You ought to be able to smell it. But there's one step left. What do you do when those new and wonderful things are there? What's the purpose of getting them? How does their mere existence promote the progress of science? (N.B. if you read the clause carefully, and recall the 18th century meaning of words, you will note that copyright is intended to promote science, or as we would now say, knowledge. The 'useful arts' refers to the patent half of the clause, and refers to what we now might call practical technology)
We say to artists that if they produce new and wonderful things, we will give them control of that content. It is therefore wrong for us to remove that control, or expect them not to protest and not to take legal action when individuals remove that control, and do so in the most extreme way - redistributing their content, non-consensually, to millions of strangers.
Naw, not really. Congress can decide to raise the price of postage to $20 for a postcard if they like. It's done at their discretion. There's nothing whatsoever wrong with changing the rules on artists.
Because no matter WHAT copyright laws exist, those laws will usually be better for artists, and the public, in sum, than not having them at all would be. And that's a viable alternative too. Congress can always decide there shouldn't be any copyrights. And in the right circumstances, it would be the right decision to make as well.
The few cases where artists and the public in aggregate will be worse off with copyright than without it are, ironically, when copyright is at its strongest. A few artists will thrive; they'll basically have a license to print money. But most will suffer since the ogliarchy won't much care for the competition. And the public will be even worse off.
As for protest, I don't have a problem with that. I just don't care for their arguments, unless that argument is merely that the optimal point -- optimal for everyone -- of the copyright system lies elsewhere. Anything else would be arguing irrelevancies.
Remember: we didn't say that we'd give artists control in exchange for them creating new things. We said we would when it was a good thing for us. That I'll stand by. But we're the judges.
So far few are proposing fixes to copyrights beyond seriously disembowling it and removing the rights of artists completely.
Ok.
Without delving too deeply into the details -- I'm still thinking about some of the nitty gritty music and video licensing issues -- I'd say this:
5 year term; renewable five times. Except software, designs, and masks, which aren't renewable at all. Fees for renewals would likely be pegged to gross profits to raise revenue for the Library of Congress and the Copyright Office (see below for some uses of that money)
Existing terms would be retroactively shortened to fit into the new scheme.
Strict formality requirements in order to get a copyright at all; a "common law" copyright (really statutory, but based on the old ones) might exist for some works, but wouldn't be safe to rely upon, since I'd want to promote publishing. This would include strict deposit and disclosure requirements to eliminate protection on copyrighted works other than copyrights, e.g. trade secrets. So, for example, software would all be disclosed source, though still copyrighted.
Acts contrary to the ultimate public domaining, and fair uses would be grounds for voiding copyright; no copy
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
this is not scientific research, but I have found that just about everything is around 20% more expensive in the uk when compared to the us. When I was in the market for a laptop I did a lot of shopping around, and for some models I could have bought a ticket to the us, bought my laptop, and flown back with change rather than buying in the uk.
From a strictly technical perspective, you would be buying a set of data which, when accessed by the correct program, would play back Eminem's Without Me with a certain degree of accuracy.
When you download it for free, the data may contain Without Me, but it could also contain anything else, and at any quality. If you were to buy it, you would (I would think) be buying the assurance that the file you download will have the song you wanted, at a high quality level.
Y2K Compliant since the late 1890s