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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."
Now it's illegal to _LINK_ to websites that have content that _MAY_ infringe on someone's copyrights?
And what law makes that illegal? The DMCA?
"Do you now, or have you ever been a contributer to online music sharing? We'll let you go if you simply provide us with a list of music sharers."
...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.
I RTFA and it appeared to be that an ISP and specific employees are being sued because one customer put up links to some files that might breach copyright. Can't say I agree with the music industry on this one.
It's reasonably clear that it's not illegal, to quote the COPYRIGHT AMENDMENT (DIGITAL AGENDA) ACT 2000 - SCHEDULE 1--Amendment
of the Copyright Act 1968:
"A person (including a carrier or carriage service provider) who provides facilities for making, or facilitating the making of, a communication is not taken to have authorised any infringement of copyright in a work merely because another person uses the facilities so provided to do something the right to do which is included in the copyright"
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.
Well then, it's now illegal to link to websites that may contain copyrighted material. Gotcha.
/. mods, editors, hosts, OSDN, etc.:
Well, here's a link to a page about a DeCSS program (no, not the one you're thinking).
Here's another that distributes freeware.
Oh, and a link to Disney just for the hell of it.
A note to
The (RI|MP)AA will not come burn your house down if you "inform them" of me this second! But the instant that you mark me as +1 Funny and click on, they're going to get you, too!
Pass this on to 15 of your friends within the next 1000000 minutes or you'll have bad luck forever and your dog will die, too!
topreacher@signature.slashdot.org 1% rm -rf sig
Criminal 1: What are you in jail for?
Criminal 2: Murder. You?
Criminal 1: I worked for guy who ran an ISP who had a customer who set up a site that had some links to another web site that stored some files that may or may not have infringed copyright law.
Criminal 1: You BASTARD!
I should buy some cement.
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.)
There are two potentially disasterous legal precedents that coud be set by this case:
They are both found in this quote from the second article:
It's going be be impossible to prove that he made copies of the music, because he didn't. They're relying on nailing him on distribution charges. So the key element in this case is the definition that the court adopts for "distribution". In my opinion, distribution is the act of actually transmitting the file.
However, if the creation of a link is acknowledged as being considered distribution (and thus copyright infringement), the results for search engines like Google could be disasterous.
The other major point is that they're trying to hold ISP's responsible for the actions of people they host. This, also, could have far-reaching ramifications for the internet community.
"If you see someone get mugged, are you legally bound to report it to the police?"
No. There are very few crimes which a citizen is compelled to report, and the only one I know for certain is child abuse. This is true even if a police officer asks. You can't lie directly, but you aren't under any obligation to speak. 18 USC 1001.
Now, if someone knows you witnessed a crime, then you can be compelled to testify. This is where a good understanding of the 5th Amendment and witness rights and responsibilities in your jurisdiction is important.
If you find yourself in the position of a witness giving testimony, you want to understand the concept of misprision. Generally, that is only an issue if you are an accomplice or otherwise materially involved in the crime.
It's possible that actively and intentionally concealing knowledge of a felony can make you an accomplice to the felony, but 5th amendment protections are pretty strong. When it comes down to it, it's actually going to be a direct yes-or-know question where the person asking the question already has a pretty good idea of the answer:
"Did you see Joe strike John on the face with his open hand, at 12:30 am on October 17th, 2003? Please answer yes or no."
"I must have missed that, I'm sorry. I must have been looking the other way." (Assuming you haven't said anything to the contrary to anyone else on the matter, ever.)
You had also better hope there is no evidence that you did witness the crime and have accepted compensation in return for not reporting it.
If you actually do find yourself in any situation like that, (ANY time a Federal law enforcement agent is asking you questions about ANYTHING), remember these magic words:
"I would like to talk to my attorney prior to any discussions with you."
Repeat this for any and every question you are asked, until you are either arrested or the questions stop.
It doesn't matter that I Am Not A Lawyer. This is Good Advice.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Certainly, if every copied MP3 or other media is a 1:1 correlation with a lost album sale, and every "shared" MP3 is responsible for hundreds of lost sales, then one city BUS must then be responsible for the loss of the sale of 40-60 automobiles?
And further, for every car not sold, there is also a loss in license plate fees, gasoline sold. toll road fees and parking fees.
Seems like that would be a perfect test case as the names of cars are copyrighted, as are certain design details, and of course, the purchaser must hold a "license" to operate it on the road.
Oh, wait, some bus riders own cars and some car owners ride the bus!
Maybe there is some truth to the idea that the acquisition of shared downloads has an impact on media sales, but it is obviously not of the magnitude the bastards claim.
We are required by law to be able to log sufficient information to associate IPs with customers if informed to do so by authorities. We may well be required (waiting for legal counsel answer) to keep these logs for several years. Not doing so may lead to criminal charges. By the way, incompetence and lack of resources aren't a defense any more than your cheap-ass landlord can get away with "but those smoke detectors are so pricey".
Not logging customer data is ultimately more expensive to us anyway. When AOL emails us up and says "67.32.1.1 is spamming, drop them or we drop you", a hundred bucks for a RADIUS log drive suddenly looks cheap compared to two fscking weeks of losing customers while I call their incompetent support line to get out of their blacklist.
The whole usenet thing is problematic, although the issue isn't piracy, it's kiddy porn. Usenet admins have been arguing about whether a common carrier defense would work for as long as I can remember. Fortunately, thus far no Usenet providers (or ISPs for that matter) have been charged that I know of, the authorities seem much more interested in the people who post this filth than in us. They change newsgroups regularly, and tracking readers isn't as trivial as grepping RADIUS logs, we'd basically have to monitor every newsgroup.
But if advised to do so we'll drop our news server faster than you can blink, and our customers can go to giganews et al where they have deep pockets. I'm not going to prison just so you can read alt.binaries.kinko-the-clown or whatever they're using these days. But beyond that, I don't personally give a rodent's posterior whether you're sharing the entire first season of Gilligan's Island on gnutella and sucking a month's worth of alt.binaries.mp3s.circle-jerks, as long as you don't saturate the DLSAM and we don't get a subpoena.
Don't like it? Use an anonymizer, find an open wireless access point, run freenet, and/or pull a full newsfeed (oh and have you priced OC3s lately? cuz that's what you'll need for a full feed).
BTW, you're largely right about the economics of smaller ISPs, although many of them seem to forget that customer service is ultimately the most important part of the business.