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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?"
This gives rise to a solution to these and similar lawsuits. Whether or not the ISP's have a choice in turning over the customer information when they have the IP address subpoenaed it does generate a loss because they will have staff or outside lawyers look into it on every case. If this continues and expands then it may be cost prohibitive to the point that the ISP's just stop logging. I think larger ISP's might do this to avoid billable hours and small ISP's will do it as a feature.
Will people be happy to get rid of that static IP for a dynamic one?
I always thought that the true anonymous internet would come when unsecured Wi-Fi was rampant. How are they going to carnivore anyone when they aren't tied to the other end of a line? There is no way to really know who is doing what on Wi-Fi.
Stop copying other people's stuff.
Take the moral highground.
Then, when the RIAA doesn't have a leg to stand on, push the balance of copyright law back to normal.
Until people stop publishing and redistributing material which they have no claim to (or rights to), the people who produce that material will gang up against them. And that gang typically has bigger pocketbooks.
They didn't care about it before now, because it's only with the rise of fast connections to the Internet that people have had enough bandwidth to make it a real problem. The losses were a blip on the radar.
Self regulate, learn the rules, or the fairness police will come down on you. If you think it's fair to copy someone else's material willy-nilly, then I'm willing to bet that you've never produced anything of any worth.
Coming soon - pyrogyra
From what I know, the RIAA is planning to sue sharers, not downloaders (although often they are one and the same). The idea is, kill the supply, and the demand decreases. (Yeah, because it worked so well with illegal drugs.)
/. readers came to the consensus that I can be held accountable for content my neighbors download with my connection. Does this mean that the RIAA can sue coffee shops who setup their own independant hotspots? (Of course, it doesn't apply to the server businesses who have paired with T-Mobile)
Point is, how many people are likely to run persistant shares over a hotspot? I'd think that those who use hotspots have nothing to fear from the RIAA, yet..
There was a previous discussion about an ISP who was encouraging customers to setup an access point and share the connection with others for a reduced rate.
-Ryan
AUWYHSTOT (Acronyms are Useless When You Have to Spell Them Out Too)
Is it about wardriving for tunes or is it about using WiFi hotspots with your favorite p2p app? It is the latter. Currently P2P traders can't be identified in a WiFi hotspot as was the case with Bryant Park.
I'll agree though, wardriving looking for shared tunes is a big waste of time and gasoline for that matter.
The thought of me getting fined or jailed for sharing would be enough for me to stop doing it as I'm 35 with a wife and kids. If I were 15 I don't think I would think twice about it. It sure didn't stop me from phreaking back then.
'Same speed C but faster'
If you have the logs, they are business records and can be subject to subpeona. The key is to set up a business policy which purges the logs entirely on a rapid basis, and actually follow it.
If an RIAA lawyer asks you for information about who had what IP address at a particular time last month, and you then delete the logs, you are in a whole lot of trouble.
But, if you only store a week's worth of logs, and regularly delete the logs after they are a week old, you can honestly say "Sorry, that information has been purged in accordance with our document retention policy." There is nothing the RIAA can do about it.
This was what happened at Enron/Arthur Anderson. They had a document retention policy that would have saved their asses, but no one followed it. Only when they realized that they were about to be sued did they shred everything. If they were shredding all along as standard procedure, they would have been fine.
...are people not smart enough to secure their systems. And the more people they bust, the more people will be enticed to secure their systems, thus causing the RIAA's overhead to rise. Frankly, the RIAA is trying to shovel back the ocean with a fork. The only question is how much money they're willing to spend trying. I myself serve almost 500 gigs of stuff (most of it anime, jpop, and the like), and if the RIAA wants to track me they can sure try. I knew the risks when I got into this, and accept them as a cost of doing business. That being said, if the RIAA breaks down the door to get the HDs I keep the stuff on, I have no problems whatsoever with activating the electromagnets sitting on top of 'em and scrambling the whole mess into indecipherable gobbledygook. I got a nice stack of back-up CDs in a safe place ;)
Oh, and for those of you who use Kazaa Lite: The latest ver blocks the IP ranges that the RIAA and their minions/co-conspirators use.
Who says resistance is futile?
Berrik
Current karma: Terrible (due to mods without a sense of humor)
The IP Log Circle Jerk: .winnuke me"
1) ISP's will be required to keep logs, for legal purposes
2) the common folk, with their (insert firewall here) logs will say "hey, if ISP logs are kept for legal purposes, why not track this sonuvabitch down who tried to
3) The Department of Justice will get involved when they hear of rumors that such and such a ISP has been tampering with their logs, thus costing us more money in them doing their shit.
4) Some random group of people who like to complain will picket the government some more claiming "they are tracking how long i'm on the internet and what i'm doing, invasion of privacy" and that will cost us even more money as they send out the swat teams and the rubber bullets because we all know protesting in any form is pretty much ILLEGAL now.
5) Some Congressman will present a bill to overthrow the IP log law because it's causing conflicts in society (he doesn't want them to catch onto his warez/kiddie porn ring)
6) the law will be discontinued, we'll be right back were we started, a couple billion dollars further in the hole, with nothing more accomplished.
your sins into me, oh my beautiful one.
Probably the best known site for downloading MP3s is of course MP3.com. See especially their genre index. Click the link. You will be quite astounded at how many genres there are.
Unfortunately the website usability of MP3.com is atrocious, and their streaming audio seems to be buggy - I can't get it to work in either Explorer or Mozilla. To get an MP3 file to download to your hard drive, you have to register, which I'm sure will result in merciless spamming. May I suggest registering with a throwaway email address from spamgourmet?
The Open Directory Project has Bands and Artists and Styles indices. Not all the artists offer downloads, but the site says they list 48,000 artists and I imagine many of them offer downloads.
Better sites for hosting MP3's than MP3.com are Epitonic.com and insound.
If you prefer the higher quality, patent-free Ogg Vorbis files you can find several download sites here. Ogg Vorbis players are available for many platforms - WinAmp will play them on Windows, and I understand iTunes on Mac OS X supports Ogg now. There are open source Linux ogg players and encoders, even an open source fixed-point decoders for embedded applications where the CPU doesn't have floating point hardware.
There are also peer-to-peer applications for distributing legal music. See Furthur Network and konspire[2b].
I'm sure if more people availed themselves of the wide variety of music available for free download, we will make short work of both the RIAA and ClearChannel. Our lives would also be richer for it.
Request your free CD of my piano music.