Slashdot Mirror
Taking a Closer Look at the P2P Subpoenas
An anonymous reader writes "Cnet is reporting a federal appeals court on Tuesday scrutinized the details of a 1998 copyright law, wondering whether it permits the wide-scale unmasking of alleged peer-to-peer pirates by the music industry." The issue, of course, is the constitutionality of the DMCA subpoena process which is among the more evil components of the often-criticized law.
Judges are political appointees. If the political parties are paid off by RIAA, MPAA, etc the rulings will be in favour of the RIAA and MPAA. There are a lot of good judges out there, but $$$$ unfortunately wins
Maybe so, but the burden of identifying the users gets much more complicated under that scenario. By going after the ISP's like they have been, they can scoop up name, address & phone number all in one place.
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
Scott McIntosh, an appellate lawyer with the U.S. Justice Department, assured the court that "we don't think the constitutional questions are substantial ones."
That sounds extremely accurate to the RIAA's view. Nobody has rights, but they have copyrights!
how many of us in the pre-internet days went to the library to photo copy a text book for a paper and then after the paper was done threw out all the copies?
is this copyright infringement???? probably.
so drawing from this it seems like the RIAA is only interested in short term profit. i mean i use kazaa and i can never find a good selection of Carol King or Arthra Franklin songs. does the RIAA itself feel that their artist have no long term value????
Still looking to find a legal loophole to avoid being penalized for knowingly breaking the law. Sad.
That someone knowingly breaks an unjust law imparts it no justice.
who are those slashdot people? they swept over like Mongol-Tartars.
So what percentage of people have to break the law for it to be deemed unjust?
I see plenty of people driving over the speed limit. It must be unjust. Violent sexual assaults are on the rise, those laws must be unjust.
What their tying to do is (a) use an aggressive interpretation of a new law to their advantage while (b) circumventing standard legal procedure for filing of civil suits.
Throw in the fact that there is a related article on cnet about how the RIAA is claiming that P2P networks are "rife with child porn" in order to make P2P seem like more of the devil's work.
So what percentage of people have to break the law for it to be deemed unjust?
How about we base such judgements on an objective assessment of the laws' fairness rather than how many people break it?
Not that I pirate or condone piracy, but I'll never understand why:
If I record a song/tv show off the radio or TV, then let a friend borrow and copy it, why this is illegal.
This friend could've recorded the song/tv show off the radio/tv themselves.
I suppose you could make an argument over different markets, but lets face it. For pretty much all the popular songs floating around p2p these days, they pretty much play in every market, as every market has a "popular" radio station. All probably owned by ClearChannel too.
I know people have been making arguments about perfect copies and such. But MP3s are lossy. And many of the songs are floating on P2P before the CDs are even released, so they were probably recorded off the radio anyways. Besides, I heard that most of the MP3s floating around P2P are only 128kbit/sec recordings anyways...
The judges are not bothering to consider whether the DMCA is constitional, nor if the way it is being abused is constitional, but whether or not it was intended to be used the way it is - this is NOT a good sign. It isn't going to help on the larger issue, but maybe it'll clean up the smaller one.
Wow, judges doing their job? Handing down rulings based on law and precedent, rather than trying to legislate from the bench based on politics and personal agendas?
I'm not shocked. These are District of Columbia judges, not Californias.
Ginsberg doesn't seem to understand the difference in usability for the average user between an FTP site and a P2P file sharing network. Not that his comments are invalid, but certainly the scope is very different. How do we educate our judicial system?
He understands it perfectly. FTP is not the super-hard 1337 h4x0r tool you think it is. It's dead simple.
P2P is just FTP with a centralized list/searching tool.
Main thing I think we need to remind our congressman about - the RIAA is NOT a law enforcement agency, and should be slapped the hell down if they think they can step into that role.
What does that have to do with anything? The RIAA like anyone else has the right to sue in civil court to resolve grievances. This has nothing to do with criminal law enforcement. There's a big difference between a subpeona and a warrant, or a civil judgement and a fine.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Hmmm... catch up please:
1. Part of a judge's job is to determine whether a law is constitutional or not. Please take a Civics course.
2. P2P is just FTP with a centralized list/searching tool. My point exactly. Please try to comprehend the issue before throwing your forehead against it. How much easier is it for people to use P2P than FTP? Well, for the reason you pointed out, the ease of use difference is significant.
3. Sorry if you aren't following the news - I was referring to the "amnesty" that the RIAA has offered. "Amnesty" is misleading, and positions the RIAA as a law enforcement agency. Obviously, before you slam your head in a wall again, the RIAA meant amnesty against their own lawsuits, but that is not what is implied.
I appreciate a good rant as well as anyone else, but hell, let's think before submitting, shall we?
I've written thousands of lines of code and I've never seen one cent in royalty payments. I've always been paid for the code I could write, not for the code I've written. I don't see any value in the notion of intellectual property at all. It's a dumb idea.
Big Brother Bush is doubleplus ungood.
The courts decide what laws are just or not. The problem is that people would like to empower themselves this right. I can't go to court and fight a speeding ticket because I didn't think the speed limit matched the speed I thought the road is capable of and expect to win.
The vast majority of these Judges are uneducated when it comes to technology.
You kidding me? I could walk up to any judge and ask him the difference between FTP and P2P and receive nothing but blank stares.
Of COURSE the uneducated are easily manipulated. If you know nothing about cars and you take your car in to get the brakes fixed and they come back and make some BS story up about how your exhause pipe is cracked, how would you know if it's valid or not? The majority of people would just nod and accept that it needs to be fixed rather than checking the validity of the problem. Much like the RIAA is trying to sway judges by saying it's now a medium to trade child porn or whatever bullshit story they come up with.
These people are making decisions on things they know NOTHING about. Why don't people question *that* instead?
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
The judges are not bothering to consider whether the DMCA is constitional, nor if the way it is being abused is constitional, but whether or not it was intended to be used the way it is - this is NOT a good sign. It isn't going to help on the larger issue, but maybe it'll clean up the smaller one.
Has a defense lawyer put forth a reasonable notion that the DMCA is unconstitutional? Heck, have any of these cases gone against a defendant with the funds to pursue an appeal all the way to the Supreme Court?
Main thing I think we need to remind our congressman about - the RIAA is NOT a law enforcement agency, and should be slapped the hell down if they think they can step into that role.
RIAA isn't trying to enforce the law--they are trying to press claims on behalf of their members. They're acting more akin to a collection agency than a police department.
So say the RIAA takes me to court.. and I have a legal copy of every song that i downloaded .. and made them available for people who also had legal copies but didn't know how, or couldn't be bothered to rip/encode them so that they could have a copy.
:)
Could you then counter-sue the RIAA? I say we make a library of legal "loaner" cd's for people that they can purchase at the courthouse before trial for $0.01 per CD, just because it's a used cd, doesn't mean you have any less rights to the content on it.
I'd imagine if you entered a stack of 600cd's as evidenece that a) the court clerk would be pissed, and b) the RIAA would start to look pretty stupid.
What am i saying.. i'm canadian.. i'm just timeshifting.. plus i pay for piracy with every blank CD that i buy.. it's a right the lobby has in-advertently given me
Forcing the RIAA to first file "John Doe lawsuits" does not make the burden of identifying users "much more complicated." It may, however, make it initially more expensive.
As stated in the linked article, the RIAA contends that the DMCA allows "copyright holders to glean the identity of alleged infringers without filing a lawsuit first." As also stated in the article, Judge John Roberts, one of the judges of the three judge appellate panel, questioned that interpretation.
If the RIAA is incorrect, and it is forced to first file "John Doe" lawsuits, it will initially be more expensive in that they may have to pay a filing fee for each lawsuit. (It may be possible for them to file a single lawsuit in each jurisdiction where each such suit names numerous "John Doe" defendants. However, in some jurisdictions they may have to pay more for a large, multi-defendant suit.) Once the "John Doe" lawsuits are filed, the RIAA can subpoena the relevant ISPs to identify the "John Doe" defendants. It is, for an entity as well-funded as the RIAA, at most a relatively minor procedure hurdle.
The reason why I say forcing the RIAA to first file "John Doe" lawsuits may only be "initially" more expensive is that in many cases the RIAA would have to file a lawsuit anyway -- i.e., in every case where pre-lawsuit subpoena to idenfity the downloader did not lead to a pre-lawsuit settlement.
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
Nevermind the fact that the Constitution itself, and the Bill of Rights in particular, is a finely crafted document part of whose explict purpose is to allow citizens not only to break a certain class of unjust laws, but to do so with little or no risk of prosecution by denying the government, and by extension anyone else ( because all law is enforced at the point of the government's guns) the power to do so.
Specificly, with regards to this case, the RIAA is invoking governmental powers ( court orders) to go on a "fishing expedition" to identify people it has only cursory a priori reason to suspect and without judicial oversight and on an assemblyline basis.
That sort of behaviour is traditionally verboten and shit.
KFG
What are you talking about? The article is about a federal court (not some slashdotter with a 400gig mp3 collection) scrutinizing a law not for loopholes but to see whether the dramatic action taken by the RIAA -- action which infringed on the privacy expectations of all ISP users, not just those downloading mp3s -- was legal. Hell, you didn't even have to read the article to figure that out.
Yeah, but the librarians sure do look at you funny when you're walking out with a stack of 8 1/2" x 11" photocopied paper.
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
I honestly think that the RIAA is out of controll and that copyrights are immoral, but either way these arguments are irrelavent. Right or wrong, good or bad - copyrights are effectively unenforcable on the internet. It is not a matter of if, but when the people backing them will simply run out of steam.
They can make rules, laws, declarations, assertions, and in IMHO people can ask for the rest of time if people should respect copyrights, but when all is said and done - people can copy whatever they want, and they can more or less do it without any fear of retribution inspite of the occasional highly publisized wich hunt. Even now with all the lawsuits, and trading from publicly viewable IP addresses, the chances are still one in millions of being nailed. You're more likely to get ran over by a bus.
Sure, if the gov randomly raids 10 million homes per year, and pops a bullet in the head of anyone who posesses unauthorized copyrighted materials on site without trial - then perhaps the copyright regime will be extended a few years longer, but lets get real - copyrights are really dead, and the RIAA, Microsoft, and even the government simply haven't faced that reality yet.
Do you get a cookie for not reading my post?
.05c .10c .20c
As I said, I have in the past bought CDs even when I had the mp3s.
Who said anything about charity, there you are strawmaning again. Great.
CDs are still sold, concerts still paid for, Merallica still makes money from their official merchandising etc...
Oh and even if Metallica showed up on my doorstep and kissed my toes I'd not give them a penny...
If CDs are $5 it's not worth my time to download them. There is NO reason that they can't cost that.
CD -
CD Case -
CD Booklet -
Delivery etc -.50c.
Profit Per CD = $4.15
In Soviet Russia, the television watches YOU!
In fact, librarians love photocopiers. Before they were commonplace in libraries, *sshole patrons would either steal books or use a razor to cut out pages they wanted, and steal them. Photocopiers mean the library gets fewer books stolen or damaged.
There is also no reason to think that the RIAA will lose most of the cases. In fact, Copyright law is unambiguously hostile to people who swap music files over the Internet. Even worse, according to Fred von Lohmann, an intellectual-property attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation: "The remedies are so terrifying that even if you have a good defense, you have to think twice."
As far as I know, all they keep track of is the DHCP logs, i.e. "John Q. Filesharer had IP 55.27.185.96 from 10:04 Wednesday through 9:47 Saturday."
There is no law requiring ISP's to keep these logs, so if the subpoenas ever became a major problem for them, they could simply delete the logs after a period of time (like 24 hours-- I doubt that the RIAA could get a subpoena sent that soon after discovering copyrighted material.) Of course, deleting the logs after they have been subpoenated is probably contempt of court, but as long as they haven't been subpoenated yet, they can delete them, and when the RIAA asks for the information, the ISP can say "go fuck yourselves, we don't have it."
As for why they do keep the logs, I don't know about you, but if someone on my ISP was spamming, cracking, or uploading kiddie porn, I would certainly want them TOSed in the first two cases, and prosecuted in the third.
Reprise the theme song and roll the credits!
Yes. It's called a public library, and it's been one of the strengths of American society ever since Ben Franklin instituted the first one.
1. Do a search on some song that is under copyright.
2. When you get a list of users that are sharing that song, browse the directory of one of those users.
3. Check the IP address while you are browsing and take a screenshot.
It is hard to claim that this is illegal even though none of us like it.