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Innocent File-Sharers Could Appear Guilty?
daveo0331 writes " New Scientist has an article about what could be a promising defense strategy for people targeted by the RIAA. Basically, anyone on the Gnutella network can frame other users by making it look like someone is hosting RIAA music, even though they're not. Therefore, the RIAA's "evidence" against file sharers is theoretically unreliable and wouldn't stand as good a chance of holding up in court. No mention of whether this has anything to do with the RIAA's eagerness to settle the lawsuits out of court. The article is based on a research paper (PDF link, HTML version) posted anonymously to a web hosting service in Australia."
How about an entire computer shared to the internet?, like this crazy guy did...
A number of people say they were wrongly accused by the RIAA, or that their children swapped music without their knowledge. The RIAA dropped one suit, against retired Boston teacher Sarah Ward, 66, when it was discovered she couldn't be sharing songs on pirate service Kazaa because she uses an incompatible Apple computer.
Will this really stop them from doing anything? Like the poster said, they like to settle out of court, and they'll probably pull something like "Well, you should've been more protected against this kind of identity theft. Give us $10,000 in amnesty, and we'll go catch the _real_ theif."
- Sherman
When using a modem, or even Cable/DSL one is typically dynamically assigned an address. Many times these can change. It was stated in numerous articles that the RIAA found IP addresses for people, then subpoenaed ISPs for the users using those addresses.
Either due to ISP incomprehension, or RIAA non-specific requests, they most likely received a lot of information based on who was using that address after subpoena, not during copyright infringement.
Shawn's Tech Articles
there is no p2p service in which files pass through nodes. The bandwidth cost would be prohibitive. If user A sends file to user C what advantage is it to send through user B, apart from eating his b/w?
This would be like filesharing on irc send file data through irc servers. This would bring almost any server instantly down. So the files go through only routers etc in between but no acutal end users.
In these programs only the search information is gathered p2p. SO if kazaa runs a supernode it caches search info, passes it on etc.
Here you can possibly fake it as if some other machine has some files which it doesn't have or even a non existent user/machine etc.
There lies the hole.
Furthermore, a worm/trojan could be released that secretly installs a Gnutella client and ACTUALLY downloads some tunes. Would ignorance be an excuse, when suddenly every computer in the world is filesharing? Tell you what, if I did fileshare copyrighted material, I would put up a fight.
Someone already sort of asked this but they are modded at 0 and thus might not get heard that easily. I was wondering if anyone had a breakdown of just what P2P networking the RIAA is targetting. If you read the headlines all you would think is that this is between the RIAA and Kazaa. I remember when recently when we all joked about the actual kazaa names people were using and how many "kazaalite" users there would be.
So what's the deal? Any WinMX, EDonkey, Bittorrent users being attacked in this recent spat of 700 cases by the RIAA. Or is it just those Kazaa users?
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
That's the thing about innocence until proof of guilt. One has to show evidence that the presumed innocent logically has to be guilty. Not that they COULD be guilty. Not that they might as well be guilty. Not if they have the tools that would allow them to be guilty. Not even if the prosecution can't find anyone else that they think might be guilty.
It's things like these that can make harrassing people a real bummer for a litigious group in the long run. Still - fear and respectful loathing may still "work" in the short term. But again, that short-term respect and fear will die down if cases are ruled against them.
Ryan Fenton
i currently share 976 free songs (~3.58 GB), legally. i got all these songs off of iRATE. so i'd say you certainly can!
i think irate is great by the way, although there's certainly room for improvement (p2p support, perhaps, as well as integration with an external media player). maybe when i have time i'll sit down and (attempt to) throw something together... (hopefully someone will have done it by then, and i can just download it. =P)
On the edonkey net, information about who has what files is collected and managed by edonkey servers. Since the server protocol is open, anyone could write a server that deliberately misinforms clients about the location of RIAA files.
what we need is someone to write a virus that installs inself on windows machines and honeypots the common various p2p protocols and gives results that the riaa hate like a few titles of briney, metallica, etc.
so when your ip address changes and your still listed as a valid source they get scanned and nailed with the legal mess.
that will put an end to this crap when they start suing innocent people in massive quantities.
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