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WiFi Hotspots Elude RIAA Dragnet
mblase writes "A CNET News article discusses a problem the RIAA is having with its copyright enforcement strategy: public wireless hot spots. Normally, the RIAA notifies the ISP when a user is found to be violating their copyrights, but in this case, the ISP is powerless to do anything. Key quote: '...unless the administrator keeps detailed logs of everybody's account use - which is not required by law - she may well not know who was swapping files.' I wonder how long it will be before those detailed logs ARE required by law?"
The free WiFi hotspots I've used don't require accounts at all. They just serve bandwidth and you connect thru DHCP.
Are they going to log MAC addresses? Good luck. I can use ifconfig on my Orinoco card and set the MAC. 00:00:00:00:00:00 and a prepaid debit card in a pseudonym works nicely on the AT&T Wireless hotspot in the Denver airport.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
' I wonder how long it will be before those detailed logs ARE required by law?"
I foresee something much worse, in fact I have been worrying about it for years. As it has been reported there are those ISPs that seem to want to have their nose up your butt and watch everything you do.
Well I foresee soon that *all* suspected criminal activity will have to be reported, oh and all those pesky logs you have around because you wanna be a hyper nosy jerk? Well you, my friend, have just just blown you plausible deniability plea. Because you are keeping all those logs, and you didn't notify the 'authorities' right away you have blown your safe harbor status cause the RIAA came to you. So guess what? You have just become an accessory after the fact. *oops*
When I tell people this they think im overly paranoid. well you decide.
"I wonder how long it will be before those detailed logs ARE required by law?"
:-)
An interesting point occurs to me. One of the great things about the many 'anti-hacking' laws passed around the world is that most (if not all), have little (if any), requirement for systems operators to take reasonable steps to keep their systems secure.
So if I open up a Wi-Fi shop, and keep detailed logs, of all my paying users, but don't bother to secure the setup?????
'Yes officer, you can have the logs of my customers. Unfortunitly it dosen't cover the several thousand p2p users, who have creaked my system, and you want..... Yes thats correct, removing the howto from the MOTD would reduce this, but I'm under no requirement to do that.'
My Paintball Pics
Granted that Verizon was willing to spend quite a lot in a protracted legal battle, but I think they'd be more willing to do that then stop logging. There really is a huge incentive for ISPs to log, even if they no longer charge by the hour.
Consider anonymity in the real world. It's almost impossible to do anything really worthwhile completely anonymously. True, you may get along for a while, but sooner or later, you would need a job, a place to live, maybe a phone...the list goes on....and it's pretty much impossible to do any of these without proving your identity. You just cannot get along without remaining completely anonymous, in a fast developing world.
Maybe in lesser developed countries, you would not need an SSN or ID, but you would need alternate means of identification nevertheless, unless ofcourse you prefer to exist illegally under multiple identities.
With the Internet fast becoming part of our lives, and the ever broadening range of stuff that can be done online, it's but natural that some measures to establish identity come into force some time or the other.
People may argue that in the offline world, you are able to perform certain activities anonymously...say relax in a lounge chair in front of the fireplace...but BAM....as soon as you interact with society, anonymity is gone....Poof.
The problem with the Internet, is, that you are *always* interacting with some computer, somewhere, which does not belong to you. This is not true with the real world, if you're sitting lounging on a chair, you're interacting with the chair which belongs to you, thus ensuring anonymity. Anonymity on the Internet, on the other hand, is and will remain to be a very hard thing to achieve.
I guess that's a long enough rant for this time of the night.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
This is just plain over before it started...
The RIAA dragnet is for uploaders because their theory is if they can scare people out of sharing, the non-sharing freeloaders will saturate the remaining uploaders so that the file-sharing network will cease to be useful.
But the coffee shop isn't the idea place to even set up a transient P2P sever. The P2P share would only exist when the laptop user is at the bookstore, which won't be that often to begin with. Any transfer in progress when the laptop user leaves the store will get aborted. Smart coffee shop owners have ADSL behind these shares, because they're expecting browsers not servers, so the upload speed won't be that pretty anyway.
This isn't a technology worth banning, it's not gonna be that useful to file-swappers in the first place!
What you are missing is the level of anonymity.
On the internet, I have the equivalent of a Unique Identifier tatooed on my forehead.
In real life, if someone asks me my name, I can say "Hi, I'm Peter Smith", or perhaps say nothing at all. Online, it's incredibly easy (and regularly done) to automate the process of recording your IP address, and associating it with every action you take online... You can't refuse to give it, you can't shop somewhere else when they ask for it, you don't even get notification that they are doing it...
It's not to say you have true anonymity in public, unless you can change your physical appearance at a whim (to some extent that is possible), but the point is that you DO have some reasonable level of anonymity.
For instance, imagine that the FBI feels like fishing, and decides they want to know the identity of everyone who read about bombs, and politically dissenting material. For digital info, they simply have to ask for those records from each place, and correlate them. In the real world, they would need to track down everyone that was at each place, have them give a description, and then compare the descriptions. That doesn't make you anonymous, but it adds a large barrier to removing your anonymity, which, in reality, is all people really want.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Take this exact same story and substitute "file sharing" with "spamming". Would this story still be posted as a YRO?
(Actually, probably yes, except this time it would be about your right to sue the WiFi operator who allows untraceable spam.)
-a
I'm all for IP laws as long as they represent the interests of the people. A decade or two of exclusive trade rights ought to be plenty of time reap the harvest of nearly any creation, but 70+ years for a cartoon mouse is ludicrous. Let's just find the decendents of the guy who invented the wheel and award them ownership of GM.
I run a public WiFi hot spot and had my internet access cut off for days. The ISP support people couldn't figure out what was wrong. Finally they discovered someone had removed my business network from their routing tables because of a DMCA threat from EMI.
I explained the WiFi hot spot and they put me back online. Then I was forced to put up sophisticated filters to prevent suspect outgoing connections while allowing most good connections through. I then set up a freenet node. I don't offer a lot of bandwidth to anonymous users, so I think someone that walked by just happened to have some p2p application running on their laptop. But a large part of the reason I offer this service is because I believe in anonymous communication especially for whistle-blowers and for people with unpopular ideas. I know someone that got physical threats and had a friend of his killed for expressing his political opinions. The FBI was absolutely no help, their tech person even threatened him when he didn't want them to take his computer to their lab as evidence after it was hacked by one of the wackos. (The FBI would do more to harm his political speech 'helping' him if they took away his computer, since much of it is via the web. He had also been told by another agent they could just image the hard drive so he didn't really trust this guy.)
If somebody creates a law requiring logging, I'll be lining up to practice my duty as a citizen, civil disobedience of immoral laws. I hope it's not just because someone bought some crap from an RIAA label and put it on their computer. I really have no respect for the people that keep those intellectual "property" leeches in business, but I'll do it for that 13 year old girl sharing the latest boy band tripe too.
Ah yes, the political equivalent of a ten year old bursting into tears. If all else fails, play the "but won't somebody think of the children" card.
In fact, I can imagine a strong legal case that providing untracable access to an IP network is an attractive nuisance that the ISP knew, or should have known, would be used in the commission of felonies. Big time liabilities lurking.
And should this same principle apply to anybody providing any form of anonymity to others ?
But buying it is what entitles you to own a copy.
Let's see, right here is a digital copy of a song that costs, say, a dollar to legally download from Apple.
Over there is the same digital copy of the same song on Kazaa. Free for the taking.
Let's say I don't want to buy the one from Apple. Does the fact that "I would not have bought it" entitle me to the free one? Using your logic, wanting to buy it means I should pay for it, but NOT wanting it means I can still get it for free.
So, that means I should not express the desire to buy ANY music in any form whatsoever. That would give me the right to take all the music I want for free.
Thinking about it, I really don't want that new car I was looking at...
Beautifull. If the RIAA doesn't agree to the EULA, then they can't prosecute. Then they'd most likely go to court over it, if they lose all ISPs can do this. If they win, EULAs are invalid.
Bugs are just features that have been fixed.
It will be impossible to gather IP addresses, as there will *be* no IP address. The only way of identifying a user will be to identify the chain of nodes though which the request passed. This will require extracting data from every user in the chain. A difficult task with no user keeping logs.
However, this has caused friction with the Debian community, because they feel that the fact that the GNU Free Documentation License provides for Invariant Sections and mandatory Cover Texts makes it non-free. They're working on a policy statement to this effect, and getting ready to move all the GFDL'ed documentation from main to non-free. You can find out more about that in Why You Shouldn't Use the GNU FDL.
I observed some of the debate between the Debian developers and RMS on the debian-legal list, and while there are other significant issues, the main sticking point seemed to come down to whether or not political activism had any place in technical documentation. You can imagine Stallman's position on that. I come from way before "Open Source" was ever heard of, so I personally share Stallman's position.
It's an issue for me because I have some articles which use the GFDL, so I discussed the issue at some length in Which License for Free Documentation? The followup discussion has been very helpful.
Now why is this relevant to music?
The issue of whether it is moral (from Stallman's perspective) to forbid alteration of a work I believe comes down to whether the work is primarily functional in nature, or expressive of a personal opinion. The obvious utility of software, and the ability to combine code from different packages into new programs tips the balance heavily towards the side that says one must allow software to be altered. But that's not so clear with writing, which may be either unexpressive technical documentation, or impassioned political expression.
Music is much more like writing than software. Someone who is not a musician might not see it this way, but I feel that my music is an expression of my opinion. I can well see that there is other music that could not possibly be considered that way, and so I would support Stallman's position that not only copying but modification of such music must be permitted.
However, I don't think Stallman has completely thought this through when considering music explicitly. Have a look at his piece Regarding Gnutella.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
So, so wrong. The industry fought VCRs, they fought cassettes, they fought radio. Going further back they fought sheet music. Had people taken your recommendation a hundred years ago none would exisit today and the music industry would be much worse off.