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3 New Defendants Named In MP3s4free.net Case
As reported in The Australian, three new respondents have been named in the mp3s4free.net link site case, including an employee of the ISP which is said to have hosted the site. The music industry says that ISP employees will be targeted in the future, but given an amnesty if they "inform the music industry."
And what law makes that illegal?
It's the golden rule. He who has the gold, makes the rules. Historically this has only been countered by popular uprisings, public execution of tyrants and corrupt officials, and running carpetbaggers like the RIAA and their ilk out of town on a rail.
Give lawyers power over policy in YOUR community, and this is what could happen to you!
...This is just another hopelessly idiotic example of the music industry using their coercion tactics to force people into complying with their own rules, not the rules necessarily of the state, the government, nay, the music industry's rules.
I don't even see how this was illegal:
The website, www.mp3s4free.net, was alleged to contain MP3 audio files which infringe upon the copyrights of the record labels, but is in fact a collection of links to other websites on the Internet, and other MP3 files distributed by permission of the Copyright holders.
All this site was doing was referring to other websites, which may have been illegalt themselves, but a links page that refers to them is not illegal!
Hell, there are sites out there that tell you how to build bombs, sites with "art" that is really just child pornography, sites claiming to be legitimate businesses which scam people out of their money for all kinds of items, and they are going after a page of links?
Let me repeat, a links page is not illegal. This is yet another example of the music industry throwing out ridiculous propoganda to spread the word on their "illegal music crackdown". Stupid.
Well at this point I feel I need to say this again.
Back a while ago I was ranting about how some ISPs feel the need to aggressively log everything and even pay people to read them all.. sad really. I had mentioned that 'soon' the media companies would try to press into legislation making it mandatory to report the alleged 'copyright violations' of their users. I use quotes as real violations and what the **AA considers to be violations are a set of diverging functions.
Well my warning went unheeded, and look what happens. They now want to grant (presumably non-binding) 'amnesty' for probably breaking NDA, privacy, and perhaps the law, out of coerced self interest.
What does this have to do with my thing about logging? Well mark my words! If the **AA even gets a wiff that extensive traffic logging was going on and the ISP didnt report 'copyright violation' your amnesty is out the window. What? You say there are too many logs to read? Too bad you had the logs in your possession, you should have checked them. You purged the logs? Oops sorry you destroyed evidence you should have kept.
Its about to get a lot more ugly boys and girls.
Merriam webster's dictionary of extorting:
To obtain from another by coercion or intimidation
So, the industry is saying "give us information or get sued." Sounds like intimidation and coercion to me.
How many roads must a man walk down? 42.
Yep, you're absolutely on target here, and yet, most employees at ISP's still tell me I'm wrong about this one.
The secret has always been to operate in such a way so you're not snooping on anything your customers are doing. You simply provide the connection to the Internet, and ensure your servers are properly providing the services they're supposed to be providing.
As soon as you start selectively filtering out the "alt.binaries" newsgroups because you're concerned about the "pirated files" going through them, or start sniffing packets looking for customers running p2p file sharing programs, you're illustrating that you do, indeed have the ability to monitor and control the traffic.
IMHO, a smart ISP will not attempt to monitor or log any specific information about the content being sent/received by customers. Then, there's a strong legal defense of claiming "It's unrealistic to expect us to be able to keep track of exactly what our users do when they're online." (And honestly, with the shoestring budgets most smaller ISPs run on - I'd think this would be the complete and utter truth anyway. It blows my mind that some of them still waste time sifting through logs and trying to censor things out, when they can't even seem to answer their phones for tech. support, or call people back in a timely manner.)
Unfortunately, this makes my office's legal department edgy. We recieved a positive review from USNews and World Reports and wanted to link to their site... but our legal people wouldn't let us link without written permission from USNews. Since when is "Ranked #2 by USNews" and a link to their site something they'd object to?
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I'd rather be flamed than ignored.