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MIT, Boston College Refuse DMCA Subpoenas
phreakmonkey writes "Here's an interesting change of pace- According to today's Boston Globe, MIT and Boston College have both refused to turn over the identities of students to the RIAA under subpoenas. Citing failure of compliance with court rules and student privacy concerns, both colleges have refused to give out the names, addresses, or phone numbers of students based on their Kazaa screen names and IP addresses. I wonder how long the schools will be able to keep the RIAA's pack of lawyers at bay..."
Talk about burying the lede. The Boston Globe buried the most important issue in the last paragraph:
It is this issue that might make a difference. If the provision of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act for issuing subpoenas without judicial action is ruled unconstitutional, and the ruling is upheld, then the efforts of the RIAA will be stopped in their tracks until the law is rewritten.
The rest of the university objections amount to no more than a short-term fight over notice and venue:
Even if MIT is right, these are problems the RIAA can easily remedy. If the RIAA has to file the actions locally, instead of filing them all in Washington, D.C., it will. If the RIAA has to provide more time for notice, it will. Neither of these issues will halt the onslaught for long.
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
...I must say your argument is utter hogwash. It is merely the "if you have nothing to hide, why do you care about privacy" strawman dressed up in different clothes.
How is it privacy infringement? You're doing something illegal (copyright infringement), you are then caught, and you are then identified. Is their a reasonable expectation of privacy when transmitting your IP address to millions of other users when using Kaazaa? Hardly.
How is it privacy infringement? You're doing something illegal (conducting illegal business on the telephone), you are then caught, and you are then identified. Is their [sic] a reasonable expectation of privacy when you are talking on the telephone on a switchboard of millions of other citizens while talking? Hardly.
One reasonably expects one's communications to be private, whether it is by mail, telephone, or internet. Even large private meetings (private business teleconferences, etc.) have a reasonable expectation of privacy. The internet is really no different, and were lawmakers and the law at all sane ISPs would have the same common carrier status afforded the Bells.
You want to arrest someone for doing something illegal on the internet? Fine. Get your subpeana, go through the standard wiretapping process (complete with court order, etc.) and then invade someone's privacy as part of an official investigation by law enforcement who are held accountable to the public.
Do not allow private corporations and their lawyers to simply invade one's electronic home and communications at will, bypassing the entire intent and letter of the reasonable search and seizure clause of the constitution, and accountable only to their own shareholders. Or, if you do advocate such obscenely undemocratic violations of people's basic civil rights to due process and privacy, do not expect any legitimacy or sympathy from the rest of us, regardless of how despicable the actions were of those you are trampling over the constitution to get.
Next you'll be arguing the police should put cameras in our homes or listen in on every phone call, simply because somewhere out there there is a dirty old man molesting a child or someone contracting a murder for hire.
"Do it for the children! Stop Crime!"
What you suggest is the digital equivelent of a camera in every home and a wiretap on every phone, and it has no place whatsoever in a free society irrespective of what crimes a few idiots (or a billion idiots) may be committing.
Constitutional safeguards and legal procedure is there for a very important reason: to afford all of us protections regardless of our guilt or innocence. A damn good thing, too, as with the current laws on the books every single one of us is guilty of breaking some law, somewhere, nearly each and every day we get out of bed. Want private thugs in pin stripe suits enforcing all those laws against you, and breaking down your door to do so?
No?
Then stop advocating unconstitutional and draconian behavior, merely because the target of your particular ire threatens your outdated business models, or offends your notions of right and wrong. Because I guarantee you, somewhere, sometimes, you are offending someone else's notion of right and wrong, and once you open up that door you too will be on the wrong end of someone else's personal or business "enforcement action," and civil government accountable to the people will have been replaced by corporate, plutocratic fascism accountable to only a few CEOs and shareholders as they trample over the rest of us.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
So what about the rest of reality?
.torrent file out and dealt with the central tracker issue, finding people becomes that much harder... Is the person unknowingly distributing the information, or do they do it on purpose... It puts an interesting twist on the questions. It's like in the article where they traced a IP to a room, but they don't know which machine was using it, so Oooops! my hard drive had a catastrophic failure that involved my trading it with a friend and losing it somewhere... Now who do you sue?
I'm sure that most people want to know what is happening with respect to the DMCA and the RIAA being annoying to all of us... But what is the RIAA or equivalents doing in the rest of the world along the same vein? I live in Canada and use random P2P utilities often. What are they going to try up here?
And that leads to another issue, if they don't bother people in other countries, what happens when people figure out how to use locations in other countries to hide their actions? Hackers do it, I've seen that plenty, what happens when the P2P downloaders figure out how to do it and automate it. Or create zombie programs that basically turn any infected computer into a P2P forwarder, like the spam virii that are out there these days?
And then there will be the day when something like waste or freenet will be common... what do they do then? I may chose to let the software and network store a certain amount of information on my system, but I don't know what is in there, and cannot find out. Will I still be liable?
This random collection of (possibly badly placed) lawsuits will definatly lead to people just finding a way to stop the lawsuits. Lawsuits are annoying, and people find ways to avoid things that annoy them.
As I said about BT, if someone started to get a good setup that used Freenet to get the
Anyway, just my thoughts...
On Arrakis: early worm gets the bird. Magister mundi sum!
(Just for the sake ot argument, although I'm not arguing with you)
It didn't say downloading with the intent to share. It said downloading.
Define "distributing"?
You don't have to worry about DMCA-style laws up here. Check out here for why. Basically, we have bill C-6 (The Privacy Act) and the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act to protect us. To boil it down, when the last stages of these laws come in to effect in jan2004, any non-journalistic/artistic business has to have a court order signed by a judge (not just a stamp from a clerk) to release any information about an identifiable person. So if an (RI|MP)AA-type organization sends just a subpoena to your ISP, your ISP is then supposed to tell them to go screw themselves. Gotta love it!
A man who can't pronouce "nuclear arsenal" shouldn't have one -sig ends here.