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SBC Refuses To Name File-Sharing Users
securitas writes "The New York Times reports that Internet provider SBC Communications has refused to identify computer users accused by the RIAA of file-sharing copyrighted material. SBC is the largest high-speed DSL provider with over 3 million subscribers. It continues to refuse a response to the 300 subpoenas served by the RIAA despite a ruling against Verizon earlier this year. 'We are going to challenge every single one of these that they file until we are told that our position is wrong as a matter of law,' said James D. Ellis, general counsel for SBC. He continues, '...We've got a long heritage in which we have always taken a harsh and hard rule on protecting the privacy of our customers' information.' Mirrors in Tuscaloosa and Lakeland."
Definition of irony: a company formed from the dissolution of a monopoly talking about protecting it's customer's rights.
It's not stupid. It's advanced.
Not that it's going to stop the RIAA per se, but it's at least nice to see some ISPs making the RIAA work a little harder and waste a few more resources to sue people.
I'm not against chronic lawbreakers to face the consequences of their actions, but I would think (hope?) that better challengers from ISPs would make the RIAA think twice about being more heavy-handed than they need to be, and encourage them to pick their targets for lawsuits more wisely.
Finally, someone has the balls to try to stop the RIAA. So much for their legal tactic of "let's sue and let them settle for only 10k and their first born son". It only everyone else would challenge their abuse of the legal system, they would have been foiled by now. What we need is an organization for the purpose of hiring lawyers to screw oer the RIAA. Imagine the settlements and awards you would get...
"73% of quotes on the Internet are made up" -Ben Franklin
I suspect this has more to do with retaining customers already "file sharing" and avoiding bad PR than it does to be protecting customer privacy.
so now the RIAA will sue them, just to sue the ppl downloading songs from kazaa....ugh, how much longer can the RIAA afford to keep suing people. I think they're single handedly keeping half the lawyers in business!
Defender of Microsoft and Communism!!!
The USA was the first country in the world to address Cyberstalking as a serious issue & get laws effectively punishing the same. It is really sad to see the same lawmakers give such sweeping powers to the DMCA, wherein any tom dick & harry can walk in & say "Mr.X stole my copyrighted work, I need to serve him a subpeona" & this can be handed out by a clerk in the court, without any form of checking as to who the person requsting the subpeona actually is & what his/her intentions are... how dumb can you get ?
I sincerely am hoping that this ISP wins the case/the courts wake up & see what the actual picture is.
Somehow, I'm more willing to believe that the whole protection of privacy thing is a PR hoax and that they are really worried about the extra operational overhead necessary to hand the RIAA the information it needs. I mean, figuring out who had which IP and when in an ISP as big as SBC probably isn't a trivial task.
However, I think SBC is doing the right thing for the wrong reason. Painting the RIAA as the evil organization trying to invade your privacy is definitely a good thing, since that's what they're trying to do.
And heck, who doesn't love the irony of using one underhanded business tactic to undermine another underhanded business tactic? RIAA wanted to get lawyers involved, and now they find themselves fighting 800lb gorillas rather than poor students.
There is a saying in the PR industry that goes something like this: "Every PR is good PR". The attacks that SCO has made against us has been one of the best demonstrations of this saying. Even though they showed a face of humanity that would make most criminals throw up, their stock went up substantialy and the officers made some serious cash.
Now look at what SBC is doing
IANAL, nevertheless I believe SBC doesn't stand a chance in court. They know it. Their General Counsel has huge balls but I think he knows that this is a great publicity. GREAT publicity.
At a time of software patents, monopolies held by incompetents and failing companies trying to kill Open Source, it sure feels good to see someone doing The Right Thing. Or at least it would seem.
After reading this story, I would switch to SBC if they covered my area ...
What about you?
Looking for a great online backup: Green Backup
Hm, and they just called me today to try to sell me LT and LD service.
The article said that Verizon kept its log files indefinitely where as others may have kept logs for 30 days meaning those other companies wouldn't be able to provide any information if legal battles took the courts over that amount of time. I wonder if companies like SBC start gaining customers because of these practices if other companies would jump onboard.
It's a good PR for them since they will gain nothing giving RIAA their customer list w/o a fight (even worse if people know about it). And they also have deep enough pocket to pay for legal fees which are more likly to be even when more ppl switch to SBC for their piece of mind and just to piss RIAA off.
I can't blame you for your cynicism - I share it in copious amounts, too. Any one of us could recount a dozen times a corporation has screwed someone over for the bottom line. However, in this scenario, I'm willing to give SBC the benefit of the doubt for now.
Of course SBC is banking on this helping their image with current and prospective customers. To think they are not at least glancing at the bottom line would be ludicrous. However, there is nothing tangible, at least in the short run, to be gained by going head to head with the RIAA. Yet, the risk is high. This is like pissing on the Don's shoes when the mob come calling for their protection money. There is no sure payoff here.
Perhaps, for once, a company actually does have its customers' rights in mind? Only time will tell. I'll keep an open mind until proven otherwise. Hopefully my brain won't fall out. Again. Damn cheap hats.
It goes from God, to Jerry, to me.
Bottom line: Publicity stunt aimed at gaining popularity and consumer confidence by pandering to the most prevelant public opinion - regardless of righteousness. This ISp cares about generating profit, not the privacy of their customers. Rest assured that RIAA lawyers are already in talks with the ISP over possible compensation for the release of the names. Once a satisfactory amount is agreed upon, the customer information will be given up.
It's just sad that, whenever MP3 or downloading music comes up, people instantly assume you are talking about copyright infringement, and not about the MILLIONS upon millions of freely and legally downloadable MP3s available. Or perhaps they are talking about legally purchased music files.
First "hacker", now "mp3". Pretty soon, every possible technical term will have a negative connotation to it.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Dude, companies are not evil. Just the lawyers that run them are.
So, in your rejoicing of the possibility of both companies going bankrupt, you forget that lawyers (the greatest evil) are getting rich.
Lawyers get what they want -- always. Everyone else gets screwed.
now supporting:
cmdrTaco for president '04
michael for oval office intern summer '05
Bah. Privacy and Piracy even sound the same (when I'm tired). This is about having it both ways. The /. mob opinion is like a lawyer's argument:
/. opinions are just completely nonsensical.
"File sharing is not wrong, but even if it is wrong, it's still helping bands more than it's hurting, and even when it does hurt them, the labels have no right to sue the services, just the specific offenders, but even if they do catch a file-sharer, they have no right to sue them unless the offender just happens to volunteer his name and address."
Whenever politicians ignore the suggestions that are popularized here, people always accuse them of being crooked and in the hands of industry. No one ever admits it's because the
-a
I realize this isn't the main point of your post by any means, but I'd like to point out that there are LEGAL and legitimate uses \ needs for broadband.
:)
I'm a remote contract artist working in game development. I work fulltime hours from home and have to be on call constantly and able to quickly and reliably send and receive my assignments at a moment's notice. I'm working for two companies right now, one of which is developing a full game in a very tight six-month development cycle, so having constant, fast and reliable connectivity is a must.
Even more importantly than simply sending and receiving assignments from my bosses, I have to log into the SourceSafe (a central repository for all the latest project files) several times daily and download the latest version of however much of the project I need, usually ranging from 1mb to 600mb.
Keeping current with the rest of the team remotely is VITAL in my line of work, and it would be impossible to do on dialup. By the time I downloaded half or even a fourth of the project, it would probably be updated by then and I'd have to download it all again. Without broadband, I'd be shit out of luck and out of a job.
I guess by a very broad definition that this does fall under 'file sharing' but it's almost certainly not in the same sense that you meant it.
beyond just downloading music. I'll list just a few of them, all relivant to me personally:
1) Always on access. I use the Internet as a seemless part of my computer. I just look at it whenever I feel like it or need info. I don't thik about "logging on", I'm ALWAYS on. I like it that wany and don't want it any other way.
2) General fast access. My computer these days is fast. Most programs load in under 5 seconds and everything works quickly. I want the Internet to be responsive like that too. I don't want to wait 20 seconds for a page to load, I want it loaded immediatly.
3) Games. Many online games (first person shooters mainly) function better with lower latency. Also many like to have more bandwidth than a modem can provide. I want to have these games preform as well as possible.
4) User-user file transfers. I frequently need to share data with friends, or to or from my work computer. To do this over a modem would be very slow (we are often talking hundreds of megs here for audio and such). To do so on CD is technically inconvienent (requiring getting in a car) for people locally, and very slow for people out of city/state/country. I want to be able to easily and quickly get data to and from people.
5) General purpose file transfers. I find I download lots of things like patches for applications, product demos, video (like from iFilms) , technical docs, user guides, etc. I don't want to sit and wait 20 minutes to get a little user guide for a product, I want it quickly.
6) Multiple users. I have two roomates, we all use the Internet. If the three of us tried to share a modem it would go from slow to intolerably slow. To get 3 additonal phone lines and 3 ISP accounts is finincally inefficient. However one broadband account costing less than the 3x modem service works just fine.
7) Servers. I want to run my own server. It is of use to me in many ways. Well this requires a static IP, an always-on connection, and a fair bit of bandwidth. A modem connection provides none of these.
Those are just the 7 reasons off the top of my head that are teh most important to me personally for having broadband. #1 and #2 are the biggies for most people. Like my mom, sh'es an art teacher and not very technically adept. She just uses the Internet for shopping and getting information. None the less she has a cable modem and wouldn't have it any other way. She likes having it always on in the background, able to use it on a whim, and she likes things to move quickly, at near realtime speeds.
What have they got to loose? They already have lawyers on payroll, having them do more work isn't going to cost much.
plus, they get great publicity and with it new users and incresed income.
If the court says so, then will still sell you out so all this is 'We won't sell you out... for now" It's PR.
Sometimes I wish I was a plumber, then I'd know how to deal with other people's shit.
for a DSL company that I've sometimes questioned their technicial decisions, I for one am proud of their stance. I worked as the network admin for a university student network (aka ResNet) of approximately 1500 users, and I can't tell you how many times I fought decisions destined on further monitoring and tracking individual users. It just seems like SBC is trying to prevent a gorilla from harming rats here - not totally innocent customers, but the customers have far more to lose than the RIAA has to gain.
And of course there's the non-RIAA stuff, see mp3.com.
Okay, this is something that creeps up every time there's an RIAA story. People seem to think that mp3.com is all indie artists, free from RIAA influence. That may have been the way it used to be, but take a good, long look at what's there. Take The Ataris, for example. These guys used to be on Kung Fu Records (owned by one of the guys from The Vandals), and before that, they had a stint with Big Wreck Chords. But their latest album, So Long Astoria (not their best, IMO), is on Columbia (Sony's bitch). 2 of the 3 tracks mp3.com has for these guys is from that RIAA-produced album. Sure, there's still lots of indie stuff there, but not exclusivley. I support mp3.com because it's free - yet totally on the level - music. To support them because they're 100% indie is a flawed argument.
A man who can't pronouce "nuclear arsenal" shouldn't have one -sig ends here.
Kazaa and other p2p apps are just a convenient, braindead way for mom and dad user to "share stuff" online. Yeah, some of them are too daft to even realize those "shared files" they download are visible to everyone online, but for every one of those braindead souls there's another who actually uses a p2p app to share stuff legally.
It takes a certain amount of know-how to get a "real" server running on a machine. Takes even more know-how to do that without it being owned by the kid down the street, or even the latest robotic virus. But it doesn't take a genius to install kazaa, drag a few files to the "shared" folder and then point your friends to them. You can even do it with zone alarm running and have some warm fuzzy feelings of safety (however misguided). And yes, I do know folks who use p2p apps in just such a setting.
But for most everything else, no one needs broadband. Especially when it may well cost more than twice as much as dialup access. Many folks who have never had broadband don't realize how handy it is to be able to go to a yahoo map, or google a factoid you can't recall in detail, without having to think about all the crap that goes along with "dialing the internet." They have never had the experience of talking with someone on the phone while they figure something out together. Or even just watched tv and surfed while the kid talks to her friends on the phone.
In fact that is the killer app for broadband, and it's the only way that computers and the net are truly going to become ubiquitous. But you can't sell any of that because the people who use dialup to check their email and surf msnbc have never experienced that, and they cannot relate to it. You might as well be trying to sell them tickets to mars, or lightning in a bottle. They can't get past thinking of "going on the internet" because it's still an alien place to them. They have no sense of ownership of the space in the same sense you and I might think of google as an extension of our own intellect.
So you gotta market what people can understand to get the asses in the seats. And they understand free shit, so you market that. Tell someone who chats with buddies, reads a few emails and surfs ebay an hour a night that they can get pages to load twice as fast with broadband and most every one will tell you "it's already fast enough." I've had broadband in my home, and regularly use very fast academic connections, but even I would not pay forty or fifty bucks a month in addition to a phone bill just to be able to see the pages of slashdot render faster. For most of that stuff dialup is plenty adequate, and with a dedicated phone/fax line the time constraint ("gotta get offline before someome tries to call") goes away as well.
The only reason left is file sharing. Not sharing web pages, not running a fucking web server in your living room - to get broadband sold to 99% of the people who don't have it and have never used it, the only "killer app" available to market right now is music and movie trading.
Last I checked, the vast majority of music is free and legal to download. We have just become accustomed to this idea that we have to pay for it or we've violated someone's copyright.
Many many many artists make their copyrighted materials available for free. For the RIAA to point to this newspaper advertisement just shows that they know they have a effective monopoly on the distribution of copyrighted music that you are supposed to pay for.
SBC isn't doing this for altruistic reasons, but the results could be good.
Perhaps RIAA execs and their lawyers use SBC. I wonder how the RIAA and their lawyers would feel if SBC would publish in great detail their network activities for the public to see. Perhaps SBC could offer immediate and full disclosure on that information if the RIAA wishes to agitate for disclosure of internet activities of individuals.
That is just about the wrongest thing I have ever seen in 5 years of reading slashdot, and that is SAYING SOMETHING!!!
I have a 512k cable line, and I love it. I download absolutely no music or video whatsoever (ok, maybe once a month or something). I mainly use the connection for things like downloading open source software, including linux isos; carrying out Windows Update (have you ever tried doing that over a slow connection? and how are you supposed to keep your machine secure if you can't patch it? eh?); general web browsing (eg. slashdot, news sites, checking train times, buying things), for which a fast, always on connection is like driving a brand new Golf GTi instead of an A-reg lada; email and newsgroups(download the list of newsgroups over a phone line takes forever); gnome-/net-meeting; and a whole bunch of other stuff which I just can't do without nowadays.
I used a telephone line for the internet for years, and it was utter crap. Now, if I don't have broadband access I feel like I'm blind!
Don't get me wrong, I agree with most of what you said. But file-sharing as the only reason for using broadband? Where did that come from?
"The Milliard Gargantubrain? A mere abacus - mention it not."
Ya know, it's really getting old hearing of these cases of people that are soooo poor they can't afford to buy this or that, but somehow manage to find it in their budget to pay for a broadband connection. I have little sympathy for the financial situation of a mom with 4 kids that's having a hard time making ends meet or a mom with a 12 year old living in public housing who somehow find the money to spend on something as frivalous as a broadband connection.
That is probably the most short-sighted post I've ever read. I would eat less to provide my kids with a broadband connection if I had to. Reason? Simple.
KNOWLEDGE IS POWER.
I have been poverty-struck myself, and am just now crawling out of it (arguably, in fact). I want my kids to be able to live without poverty, and in this day and age, access to the internet is an excellent way to provide my kids with resources they wouldn't have if I took your shortsighted point of view. With these resources they can find help with their homework, pursue whatever intellectual flights of fancy they have, network to other individuals, and leverage computing power into marketable skills that may well put them in a higher income bracket than I'm in. A broadband connection for a poor family is an investment into the kids' future, and a worthy one at that.
Combine said broadband connection with the educational power and readily-available Free Software, and you might have a winning combination. We'll see about it, though.
My oldest kid still isn't school age, but she's already learned enough reading and enough about KDE to find movies she wants to watch. In the next month or so, I intent to sit down with her and show her how to use KDE to do things, play games, and so forth, and make sure the edutainment package with KDE is installed. Not bad for a 4-year-old, eh? With your shortsighted point of view, this wouldn't even be available as an option for her.
Like what I said? You might like my music
At first I was lauding SBC for not bowing to RIAA's demands - I thought "Finally, Someone standing up for the Legal system, and the correct use of it.
That was until I read the part of their advertisement on Downloading songs. SBC realizes that if a case can be brought against many of their subscribers for downloading mp3's - then by extension they were facilitating theft knowingly by advertising how to do it - this is going to be one of the most interesting legal fights in a decade.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
Say what you will, but SBC is taking quite a risk.
Um, what risk is that, exactly? SBC is HUGE. They might win. Think of that? Whether they do or not, the PR benefits of fighting the RIAA are ENORMOUS. Whoever in their staff recommended fighting the RIAA has got their finger firmly on the pulse of America, and knows which way the wind is blowing. (Let's see if I can produce another cheesy metaphor) You can't buy press like this! You can't buy advertising that's this good. I'm thinking about seeig if I can get SBC internet access in my own home, after seeing this. How many others like me are there? How much growth will they experience as a result of this fight, win or lose?
Like what I said? You might like my music
Nice, except for then the ISPs become script kiddie heaven.
There needs to be some form of ability to track someone, for those few cases where "really bad things" are done.
I'm sure nobody here would like spammers given anonymous IP addresses in a net block.
However, given that we do have identifiable addresses, it's good to see that policy in the ISPs is FOR the end user, and against frivolous acquisition of their data.
Like most things in life, the solutions aren't black and white, they're shades of grey, and require common sense to come up with something that's a happy, or at least workable compromise.
Good to see that at least the ISPs seem to be following the common sense path this time against the RIAA Inquisition.
Using a P2P or playing games on KDE gives your kid nothing educationally. GUIs will change, programs will change, and by college your kid will end up having to learn something else anyway. Kids don't need computers to learn (at least on the elementary/junior high level). They need good textbooks, good involved teachers, and most importantly involved parents.
I would bet a good sum of money that the mom in the public housing situation wasn't using the computer as a TRUE educational tool for the 12 year old. I bet she was probably using it as a baby sitter, much the same way some parents throw Disney movies on the TV.
***
Radio Shack. You've got questions...we've got blank stares(TM).
Monopoly? No. Cartel? Yes.
Why "accidentally lose" the logs at all?
Simply make it company policy to destroy them after 36 hours?
Just like all the companies who get stuck handing over old emails as evidence. Simply make it company policy to destroy all emails, or email backups after 14 days.
Why does everyone so willingly buy into the idea that if they leave their systems exposed they should be able to go after the exploiter? Don't want your systems compromised? DON'T LEAVE THEM EXPOSED.
It's kind of like a warehouse full of goods. Don't want your stuff stolen? Put locks on the doors. Not enough? Hire a security guard. It's called common sense.
B
"There needs to be some form of ability to track someone, for those few cases where "really bad things" are done.
I'm sure nobody here would like spammers given anonymous IP addresses in a net block."
When "really bad things" are done, it usually falls to the real law authorities (police, FBI, NSA etc..) and they have procedures to get proper subponeas and get the information.
The thing is they are not talking about an anonumus block. SBC is basically saying that the RIAA is not following due process. Not only that but the RIAA is a LOBYING group, not a duly appoint police force. This is turning into a case of someone driving by your house, seeing a light in the window, walking up to that window and seeing you watching a video tape that you don't own, guessing you don't own it and didn't properly rent it, and then saying to a judge that the want all your information so they can sue you because they were in the item you were watching.
If the RIAA wants to do this, they should lobby to OFFICIALLY become a police force for the record industry and have to follow the proper procedures. Copyright Infringment is a CRIME, and thereby a lobbying group should not be the police in these matters. IMHO, the should give the IP addresses they have got to the proper authorites to deal with. Then again, the authorities have bette things to do than go after a 12 year old kid.
Just my $.02
Just realise the reality of the situation..... There is no reality.
about your privacy. they want to keep selling you dsl. most people have few actual uses for broadband. if most of sbc's dsl customers were suddenly too scared to download music or were forced to actually purchase music, they would most likely go back to hit'n the malls with their friends and go back to a 56k modem. it seems like basic economics here: you always want your complimentary products cheap (or in this case free). E.g. hardware people are always pushing to keep the software cheap and software people are pushing to keep hardware cheap.
They will of course loose in the end since our conutry is going to hell when it comes to rights/freedoms, but its good to see they are trying to protect their customers privacy.
I am NOT supporting illegal practices and hiding behind the 4th amendment, but using just the DMCA to demand records is wrong, you should be getting a court order to do the request...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
"...the
I know what you mean. It's like Americans' views on the Iraq invasion. They're saying it's fine, they're saying it's not fine.
Or it's like politicians' views on the death penalty. They say its a good thing and then they say its a bad thing.
Oh... no... wait a minute "Americans" and "politicians" are not a single organism, but collectives housing many differing views.
Just like "/.'s" views on filesharing.
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
Let's look at "file sharing", shall we? "File", I think we can all agree, refers in this context to a collection of 1's and 0's on a computer's hard drive, CD, or other digital storage media of some sort. "Sharing" is the sort of thing you did as a child when Mary Jane Snotnose wanted to borrow your bike and you let her. Now, we all know that in cyberspace, you're able to retain a copy of files that you want to lend to other people as well, which is what makes this internet thing so neat sometimes. The concept of "file sharing", however, does not mean specifically audio or video files, copyrighted or not, as far as I've been able to tell. Sure, the evil empires of the world want us to believe that it's all bad because one of the (apparently) primary uses of P2P applications (supposedly) hurts their business, but if you want to read a poem I wrote in the third grade that I just happen to have in electronic format and have made accessible to the world, that's file sharing. So is your working remotely on a computer game for work (it's Doom 3 or Duke Nukem, isn't it? Hurry up, dammit!), though that's probably a lot more restricted in terms of who you're supposed to share those files with than, say, my freely available list of favorite drink mixes.
By equating "file sharing" with "copyright infringement", "theft", and "communism", the bad guys are trying to subtly convince ISPs and PHBs the world over that the entire concept and anything associated with it is illegal, immoral, and fattening. How many people have thought about hearing (or have already heard) something like "oh, file sharing? You get 5 to 30 in a federal pound-you-in-the-ass prison for that, right?"
I haven't heard it much either, but just tell me with a straight face that the suits aren't trying to guide the public's perception in that direction.
Another thing I've got to get off my chest: One of the biggest complaints I've heard from the RIAA is that file-sharing programs make it "easy to search for and distribute files". I can think of some pre-P2P stuff that they should be going after, if the "ease of use" complaint is the biggest problem they have: the web, newsgroups, e-mail (well, for ease of distribution, not so much searching for new files to share).
Mod me, spank me, make me write bad checks. That's all I have to say about that.
"Linux doesn't exist. Everyone knows Linux is an unlicensed version of Unix"- Kieren O'Shaughnessy
This is turning into a case of someone driving by your house, seeing a light in the window, walking up to that window and seeing you watching a video tape that you don't own, guessing you don't own it and didn't properly rent it, and then saying to a judge that the want all your information so they can sue you because they were in the item you were watching.
Not quite, this is more analogous to you offering copies of the video (whether for profit or not is irrelevant), while the RIAA determines that you are not authorized to be a distributor for the video, followed by the identity subpeonas as you describe above. The difference is that they aren't (currently) after the usage of unauthorized copies, but they are trying to squelch the distribution of unauthorized copies in order to protect their (broken) business model.
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
Business Intelligence isn't an oxymoron.
0x09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
Aren't they the company that publishes your telephone number and address unless you pay them extra not to?
Yeah, these guys are all about privacy... as long as there's a buck to be made off it.