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New Wave Of File-Sharing Embraces Secrecy
twin-cam writes "There's an article over at The Inquirer that software developers are designing secret file sharing networks that will make it harder for the music and file industry to prove cases of piracy.
According to Reuters, three file sharing networks are being planned which its users think will make it a lot harder for
music industry to track and charge people on their networks. The first is Optisoft which runs on Blubster and Piolet, music-only file-sharing networks. Only a matter of time before the RIAA requests a data dump from the ISPs or just sues everyone using their network."
This was only a matter of time, and really the RIAA's heavy handed tactics, and the goverenments complacency with them have forced developers to take matters into their own hands. Now they're really screwed.
It's pretty easy to design a network that will at least frustrate attempts to recover identities of sharers. Now if only freenet would stop sucking.
They better start building one heck of a computer cluster if they want to break the encryption. If anything, the RIAA/MPAA will give up the fight, and turn their efforts to getting Congress to pass some sort of tax on media, media players, your computer, your stereo, your car, your dog, your dinner, and anything else which could possibly be related to music or movies.
...anyone heard of FreeNet?
Windows is only $500 if your time is worthless.
Use freenet... Oh wait it's unusable.
Error 404 - Sig Not Found
Here's something to think about, the DMCA isn't just for big mega corporations. Put together a private peer-to-peer network using some kind of encryption and use a trusted invitation method (like maybe Orkut) to invite people.
Protect your network communications under provisions of the DMCA. Obviously if the DMCA knows what you're trading then THEY are violating the DMCA because the only way they would know is if they somehow got on and broke encryption.
Someone more technically more adept should be able to figure out how to pull this off but there HAS to be a way to establish a peer to peer network (which is still legal) and protect it via the DMCA.
An Optisoft spokesman is quoted as saying it will be "four times" harder for copyright holders to trace infringers... Exactly how is that quantifiable?
I've heard of this program a couple of years ago. That, and there will always be the file-trading madness at nearly every LAN party. If the recording industry sees this as breaking news, no wonder they're losing the battle -- they're about 5 years behind the rest of the modern world.
But have you tried using it? Even for the technically oriented it can be a pain to use, and it's incredibly slow. It's fine for what it's designed, but that isn't for home users to trade copyrighted material.
this seems 100% just about making copyright infringement safer (especially the music-only one), not the kind of thing most /.ers will be in favour of.
this is a bad thing because they're playing up to the role of "the evil pirate" though since their aim to protect copyright infringers I doubt they could care less about hurting supporters of legitimate p2p.
Won't somebody PLEASE think of the children?!
There's still the "pssing in the pool" attack. Remember just as in security, you can not achieve 100 % success. but you can make things more difficult for your opponent.
The second rule of file sharing is YOU DO NOT TALK ABOUT FILE SHARING.
I don't know how long the original mp3.com was around, but it was probably less than 5 years, and it probably put up mp3's at a faster rate near the end than near the beginning. But even at a uniform rate over the whole 5 years, it sounds like one web site was distributing more songs per year all by itself, than the entire CD industry released put together (1.7 million songs / 5 years = 340,000 songs/year). Add to that the number of musicians who distribute their stuff through their own sites, and it's clear there's a heck of a lot more music being released as gratis downloads than as proprietary CD's.
Some people blame diminishing CD sales on unauthorized CD copying; others blame it on technological obsolescence (people buy DVD's instead of CD's now); still others say it's because poor artistic decisions by record labels result in releasing uninteresting music that people don't want to buy. I haven't yet seen a connection made with authorized, freely downloadable music, that people can listen to instead of buying proprietary CD's, just like they can run GNU/Linux instead of buying Windows, Apache instead of IIS, etc. Sure, a lot of mp3.com downloads are crap, but lots of commercial CD's are crap too.
Anyway, it seems to me that most of the music even on these "secret" all-music p2p networks is likely to be freely downloadable.
(Note: this post mostly rehashes an earlier comment of mine from that other thread, but the statistic is interesting enough that I felt it was worth posting again).
In light of the more secretive file-sharing networks, I think the RIAA's next strategy is just going to be to open up the phone book from every city, town, and village in the country and file suit against every single American citizen, nearly every one of which will have to settle with the RIAA for a few thousand dollars, because it will be less expensive than hiring a lawyer to prove, say, that one doesn't even own a computer.
It doesn't matter who's actually right in a legal case. It only matters who has the lawyers. And the RIAA has the lawyers.
After the music industry has made hundreds of millions of dollars from suing every single American, the MPAA will follow suit (no pun intended) with their own campaign of legal terrorism, and then the patent trolls will roll out with patent infringement suits against absolutely everyone.
Welcome to the Age of Lawyers.
Lawyers are the new American nobility. You are either a lawyer or a lawyer's subject. In the 21st Century, all Americans who are not lawyers will be forking over whatever money they have to pay for lawyers to defend themselves against other lawyers.
Lawyers will be living in mansions surrounded by the rest of us, who will toil endlessly, day and night, to earn our masters' legal protection.
Hooray!
You are in error. No-one is screaming. Thank you for your cooperation.
I've used WASTE for a long time. It has in interesting history....involving AOL and others. WASTE is a VERY secure private p2p network. It uses keys similar to pgp keys and can use over 4000+ bit encryption if needed. However, the network does seem to fall apart after about 50 or so people have joined. It is only good for small groups, imo. If you have a MAC, i wouldn't even bother was WASTE for now, it's current development stage give basically no functionality. For pc users who just want to trade files with their friends, etc, its a great alternative to other p2p.
I think the best way to keep the RIAA out would be to have filesharing networks based upon social networks (like orkut). You trade with your 'trusted' friends and their 'trusted' friends. You could set how many hops you were willing to spread.
"This was only a matter of time, and really the RIAA's heavy handed tactics, and the goverenments complacency with them have forced developers to take matters into their own hands. Now they're really screwed."
Oh yeah. You're using computing resources that could be going elsewere in order to get free music and movies. So who's really screwed here? So let's all wait for the next level were we waste more time and money (arms race US vs USSR). Am I the only one to think that there are better ways, instead of playing the acceleration game?
mp3.com was up since at least 1996, i believe.
Lawyers will be living in mansions surrounded by the rest of us, who will toil endlessly, day and night, to earn our masters' legal protection
So, let's just begin shooting lawyers before this day arrives.
Or BETTER!, Let's take all law books and stuff and lock them under the DMCA. That would be fun.
how long until
Good?? Hey let's invent technology that makes copyright infringement easier, proving that the RIAA was right all along and p2p technologies are all about theft of services!
Come on. It's one thing to try and claim that p2p is being 'abused' by the users but when you develop something to hide where the data is coming from you're doing it to hide illegal activity.
Not only will this slow RIAA and MPAA down, but it can slow FBI, CIA, local law enforcement to stop child pornography, or other things like those terrorists that use computers from caves (sarcasm on that last one, I really don't think the morons in caves use computers that much)
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
At least it was a very funny rant ;)
Don't forget about Mute-net.sourceforge.net
Mute is an encrypted filesharing system that has actually worked for me and although a little slow, it IS anonymous.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
I think that a person can ask for retribution for (former) free advertising by sharing RIAA/MPAA/whatever files over the 'net,. too. It's in the same line of thought as asking for retribution for downloaded mp3's that are counted as "lost album sales", right?
... as far as I'm concerned, is the "VPN Name Resolution" service.
... I know of a fair few VPN's that are maintained with quite steady uptimes, all using plain ol' FTP as the internal-xfer-service of choice...
...
openswan and an IP address somewhere is all thats needed to 'bury a filesharing service'. It doesn't even have to be p2p
Its interesting that its come to this. Whats next - routers which won't route unless they know the protocols being encapsulated in the tund'd packets they're peer-transferring for? Sheesh, as if that will ever happen
(If anyone knows of some good VPN's, please share! heh heh...)
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
The DMCA works for corporations because they can afford the cost of litigation. Your average person isn't going to be able to afford to win a DMCA case against the RIAA companies.
You'll notice that these DMCA cases are never seen through to the end. The little guy runs out of money, has to give up, and the big corps get their way.
I proposed this solution about 4 years ago to one of the gnome-vfs guys at a Helixcode party in San Francisco "back in the day".
Basically you have a section of your local storage that is specifically set aside for this purpose, say a 5gb slice of your partition. This storage area is strongly encrypted with hashes that only you know (Blowfish, AES, whatever), via your own passphrase or private key.
When you send a file "to the network", that file is split into blocks, and encrypted with your public key, and those blocks are dispersed to everyone else on the network, in that encrypted fashion, and the "map" to reassemble them is dispersed likewise.
Every node with block #1, has a map which tells them how to get block #2, but not block #3. System with block #2 (which knows that block as block #1 to itself), knows how to get block #3, and so on. Sort of like the "Triad" mob system in Japan.
Your system requests a file, which is dispersed as a series of encrypted blocks, across hundreds, thousands, millions of other systems, and those blocks are reassembled, using those systems to find "The Next Block", and send it to you. You could also arrange it so that each "node" could know about the next 5 or 10 or 20 blocks, etc.
It is sort of a mesh between PKI + BitTorrent (which didn't exist when I came up with the idea), and the methodologies of common peer-to-peer networks.
You could further strenghthen the network by only accepting blocks from nodes you "trust" (via your own public keyring). Facilities to "swap blocks" across systems on a regular (or irregular) schedule, to keep the network "self-healing" would also be a good idea.. or keeping duplicate blocks in different parts of the "storage slice" for redundancy, etc. Storage is cheap.
In the end, this means that nobody can be accused of having "the full file", nor can anyone figure out what is in those encrypted blocks. Even if they had 1 block, there is no way to get all of them, or to accuse someone of distributing the material, since it would be moved around at irregular intervals.
What do you think?
Hey. Great site. It is work safe too!
Go try it. Your boss won't mind.
While you're partially right in saying that it doesn't matter who's right when it comes to winning a case (really, it depents more on quality of attorney), you're wayyy off when it comes to your rant against lawyers.
Remember, lawyers work for clients; it's their professional responsibility to represent them fully and by every legal means possible. If the client (here, the RIAA) wants to stop filesharing and they want to take a course of litigation, the lawyers must serve or quit (and even that's difficult in terms of professional responsibility).
I wholeheartedly disagree with the RIAA's stance and it's tactics, but it's not the lawyers' fault that they must do their clients' bidding.
As for the "Age of Lawyers" and the "new American nobility," I don't even knot where to start. As it is, there are not enough fully-competant lawyers. The good ones get grabbed by big firms that can pay a lot, leaving the masses with sub-par representation. Courtrooms are having trouble keeping up with the caseload; there aren't enough judges to handle.
Lawyers aren't nobility; it's the corporations and the CEOs that are. Lawyers are here to serve. They're traditionally not even allowed to advertise. Sure, some make a pretty penny, but that's usually while working 60+ hours/wk.. There are also a huge number of lawyers who aren't so well off, especially those who manage their own first.
Finally, remember: lawyers don't sue; clients do. This is the RIAA's fault, the film industry's (and, truth be told, the downloaders are more than a little to blame).
Any new filesharing network needs to use a nonobvious port (443 like SSL traffic), so users of it arn't just sued into oblivion by guilt by association.
Not just hide IPs, hide the fact that it has traffic.
Who modded that "funny" for goodness sake? It should have got an Insightful or Informative IMO, it's just a shame /. doesn't have a "too bloody accurate by half" rating.
I personally think music-only networks will just be a "warez" ring for copyright music, not an alternative distribution network for indies...
BUT, you take the bad with the good, and fully anonymous P2P is a good thing for folks who need it. People in countries where freedom is a dirty word, for example.
I doubt the music/general folks will let these freaks on their own networks, but if pedos start using this kind of thing the Police (or whoever monitors this shit) will step in and shut the affected networks down. And fair enough too. Civil suits are one thing, but it's really in the networks interests to keep it criminally legal, lest they find law enforcement tapping on their doors.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
You could have an anonymous P2P app that has network performance that is nearly as good as current networks, like Gnutella/Kazaa...
All you have to do is allow the source of a file transfer it to the client without the client knowing the source's IP address. To do this, you simply have the server sending files with UDP and a spoofed source IP address. Since few networks have any egress filtering, this should not pose a problem.
Now, the client has to be able to tell the server to send packets faster/slower, and which packets didn't get through. Well, first you must have a huge window size (TCP term, but applicable) so that the server will send a massive ammount of packets before the client has to send back any responses...
When the client does eventually have to send a few packets to the server, it does so by broadcasting them to all-nodes (just as searches are handled). So, everybody gets them, and everybody but the server involved can just ignore them.
I left out some details, like all servers generating a random 32bit Unique ID every hour or so, and sending it instead of their IP address with search results.
Now, that's only the anti-RIAA anonymity. It'll make things 99% more anonymous, but any foe with the ability to monitor the network will be able to see what is happening. To combat that, you could just have search queries include the client's public key. The results can include the server's public key (encrypted with the client's public key) in addition to the search results... That would keep you completely anonymous, even from resourceful snoopers that can eavesdrop on your own network.
The best thing about this is the speed compared to other anonymous networks. No longer would it take an hour to download a small MP3, because you don't need any intermediary nodes (except for small-message-passing), direct from source to destination, at full-speed.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
The term IANAL has never been so heartbreaking...
I think the RIAA's next strategy is just going to be to open up the phone book from every city, town, and village in the country and file suit against every single American citizen, nearly every one of which will have to settle with the RIAA for a few thousand dollars, because it will be less expensive than hiring a lawyer to prove, say, that one doesn't even own a computer.
Good thing my name is unlisted. MWAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!
Join the TWIT army now!
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
all lawyers must die
Blubster comes with adware (GAIN), Piolet doesnt, as long as you remember to deselect them during installation...
You're totally wrong, or I am. But I've got this feeling most /.ers aren't against illegal file trading.
/.'ers are 20-30something individuals in the high-tech industries with lots of stuff more important to worry about than getting caught filesharing. I just think your perception of the community is off.
I mean, most of the people on slashdot are internet "elite" in one way or another. Sure, there are lots of casual readers, like you or me, but the both of us probably know more about computers than the average american. We know about these networks. We know the new ones exist. We know that getting caught is very unlikely.
You know, I haven't really traded files in a long, long, long time. But that doesn't mean there wasn't a time when I did. I don't mean to burst your bubble, but I'm willing to bet everyone on slashdot has one or two illegal files on their computer, and - to the people who respond to this post saying, 'Wrong! Liar! I'm a saint!' - the ones that don't are the exception to the rule.
Most
In Canada you pay a tax on blank media, the assumption being you are going to use it to break somebody's copyright. They didn't even have to open a phonebook, a few well priced lobbyists (lawyers probably) managed to get them their own source of tax revenue.
I don't blame lawyers per say, but I do think that if political parties take coporate cash (Liberals in this case) you can expect that they are going to return the favor to their benefactors.
Every field of empliy goes through changes...the music creation industry is going through one now. Maybe Books will be next. Besides, in the future computer will compose our cool jazz!
Blar.
Indeed. Guns don't kill; people do!
... before the RIAA just decides to sue everyone on the Internet?
Free Firefox news reader.
...it sounds like one web site was distributing more songs per year all by itself, than the entire CD industry released put together ...
Yup, I can't say I miss the days of even trying to find a particular song, off a particular CD, in some hidden obscure part of a music store...or bothering to ask the min wage working brian child behind the counter for help.
Payback continues to be a bitch for the CD industry.
Some aim to please, I aim to tease.
Is it even considered illegal for somebody to download a song which he owns the original album cause the way they are sueing people, doesn't look like they are paying attention at what the user owns legally.
Also on a different note, I would like to pointout the frustration of knowing that in an average album, you'll only enjoy 2-3 songs and that paying for the whole album seems ridiculious. I guess this is why online music stores exist I guess, right?
Maybe you could call it something like free-net?
oh wait... how about tree-net??
...to share spam.
...campaign of legal terrorism...
Post 9/11 this phrase has a double meaning.
Both fairly describe the abuse of the RIAA/MPAA.
The preceding message was based on actual events. Only the names, locations and events have been changed.
Well, you can't forget that many artists in the "CD industry" release a handful of songs on sites like mp3.com anyhow, so there's plenty of overlap.
Additionally, the number of songs is an arbitrary, weak comparison. If you want, I can whip-up a shell-script that will create more songs in a week than there are songs on CD-releases in a year. It will just sound like random noise, but never-the-less, I can beat-out the CD industry on simple numbers-of-songs alone.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
His scheme is that only people known to be non-RIAA agents will be able to download the application - which in turn means that the only way RIAA can get in is via cracking/disassembling... illegal under the DMCA.
Whether it's practical to keep RIAA agents out of the network is another question.
Sean
They certainly know about these secret networks now...
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
Sounds good. Actually quite close to an idea I had. The problem is, what happens when nodes drop of the net? What if some of your nodes are modems, and are only on for 4 hours max, before falling out of the network, until they next log on in a day or two.
You have this whole mess of trying to keep your maps current.
Any ideas how to solve this.
BTW, another idea is to try and include spoof sourced UDP, and distributed hash tables. I am not telling you how, just suggest you look into them.
I hope you develop your thoughts more.
Thanks, -Me.
I think the biggest and most important technology this brings to the forefront is that these tools help to make our online habits a little more ananomyous (I read this as a _little_ more secure). More power to them. Thanks /. for helping spread the word - this will make some Joe-6-pack-type peoples a little more aware.
--- "To ignore race and sex is racist and sexist!" -- Jesse Jackson
This is the difference that counts, between RIAA members and Indies: Marketing.
...
RIAA members market their products the American way: "buy our-song!" "BUY our-song!" "You're nobody if you don't own our-song!" "Everybody loves our-artist!" "our-artist is the GREATEST!"
Indies put their songs on mp3.com and hope word spreads about their music, somehow.
Every time I read something like this. I'm reminded of the black sheep in the family that spends most of his time dreaming up get rich quick schemes, and ways to get out of work, rather than actually going out and getting a job. All that effort, anyway....
"When you send a file "to the network", that file is split into blocks, and encrypted with your public key, and those blocks are dispersed to everyone else on the network, in that encrypted fashion, and the "map" to reassemble them is dispersed likewise."
Who's key? Why don't you just put a John Hancock on the file while you're at it?
Only a matter of time before the RIAA requests a data dump from the ISPs or just sues everyone using their network.
And if I don't download MP3s, dont have any on my boxes, just WTF am I being sued for?
What law have I allegedly broken?
And will any law enforcement agencies even be involved in such a privately organized dragnet?
And when the RIAA does come after me, only because I happen to be a customer of the same ISP that someone else is downloading stuff, and finds out that I am clean (i.e. have no MP3s et al), do they think they can just say "ok, you're clean - carry on" and walk away? Do they think a token "oops - our bad" is gonna fly?
I don't think so.
Hey, lawyers... the line starts over here... form a single-file line... thanks.
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
Hasn't someone already patented this process?
These aren't the sigs you're looking for.
This download includes additional applications bundled with the software's installer file. Third-party applications bundled with this download may record your surfing habits, deliver advertising, collect private information, or modify your system settings.
Couldn't someone create a directory page on Freenet with an organized list of the available content?
Possibly more insightful that funny.
I'd love them to sue me, because it would be so much fun watching them explain why the US courts have jurisdiction over me.
a buddy has been working on a Linux build that combines a database to organize music files based on the ID3 tags, various web-based interfaces to play back the music on a networked computer and even an ipaq PDA. He can also create a direct ipsec based connection with a freind who has the same setup at his location and can share/update each others music collection. No peer to peer, you connect with a known person, no or little risk of RIAA getting in the middle since the data is encrypted.
Instead of trying to go farther 'underground' why not add facilities to p2p networks for content verification and authenticity.
By this I mean, if your looking for a old Micky Mouse (copyright symbol) cartoon, you go into the Disney (copyright symbol) 'channel', search through their offereings and download what you want... except since you are 100% positive what your downloading is what it says it is... you are willing to pay a small fee (how about $1 dollar a download, size independent... or some sort of subscription service... I pay Disney Inc. directly to be able to download their verified and authenticated content).
This would elminate 'piracy' on the 'overground' network because why would you need to go 'underground' if you allready have access to all the content you wanted through a minimal monthly (or per download) basis (instead of cable telvision... we pay the content creators directly for their shows). This will greatly help artists... because they will be able to market and sell directly to the 'listener' (or viewer)... and bypass the recording industries web of middlemen.
Now ofcourse the underground will still exists, but there will be no point going there... unless your looking for illegal (not pirated) content like child porn (and other nasty stuff). The bandwith costs of being a content producer are augmented through some sort of bittorrent like swarm download... where you are downloading parts of your content from other people who have also downloaded it. This will open up a whole new way to access media, eg. what if instead of going to the shitty theater (and paying a shitty price for shitty sugar water and burnt corn) you can wait until the release day... download a HD stream of that movie directly to your home theater. And since you have 24/7 access to all the content you want (and the downloads are fast because everyone has broadband or better (idlealy fiber)) there is no point of 'hordeing' all the content on your 400gig drive.
Computers slim back down in terms of hardware, and start to act more like what they should act like (for a typical consumer) vcrs. You turn on your fluxbox (I would like to call the system the 'flux') and on your screen is a list of stuff to watch, read, or listen to... and all you pay is a minimal monthly fee... (less than $50, and or pay per download)
Jon Bardin
CD's released in the US - erm.. US
I just spent half an hour removing all the spyware and adware that these programs installed.
DO NOT INSTALL PIOLET OR BLUBSTER.
--
More privacy can only be a good thing and I'm not about to launch into a rant about freedom vs. safety, but let's just look at some of the more ugly tactics people can use to subvert a P2P system.
/. one? Has anyone implemented anything like this? I don't know if it could be used alongside any privacy measures the designers implemented, but with enough work and balancing couldn't this be feasible? Imagine browsing limewire at a high threshold /. style and weeding out all those porn movies in disguise, incomplete files and mp3's with artifacts in them. There could be different ratings based on the node and the individual files and while the system could be abused I'm sure enough thought going behind it could make it fairly balanced and useful.
So anyone looking into stopping sharing of illegal material can't launch lawsuits anymore because they don't know the identities of the users. Fine, but they (or anyone malicious enough) can still flood the network with garbage and create so much noise that it will drive people away.
So how about a P2P moderation system similar to the
Just a though, slightly off-topic.
Some people blame diminishing CD sales on unauthorized CD copying; others blame it on technological obsolescence (people buy DVD's instead of CD's now); still others say it's because poor artistic decisions by record labels result in releasing uninteresting music that people don't want to buy.
CD sales aren't down, they are up.
What's down is the number of CDs being shipped by the big companies, because of the closure of many small stores and the reduction of inventory by large stores that use just-in-time stocking.
I'm guessing that wasn't on their radar screen...
Use an anonymizer.
https://www.metropipe.net
The bad thing about all these "schemes" is that they're basically "If you don't give me what I want on my terms, then I'll make you give me what I want on my terms". They don't actually lead to reformation of either the legal, political, or social systems, and in fact lead to the entrenchment of the status quo. How would you like it if some "made you" give up your property? Think you can get the rest of society to agree with that (first they came for...)?
It might not seem that lawyers are at the top of the food chain, not all lawyers make a good living (I suppose) but lawyers can live without the corporations, can the corporations live withough the lawyers?
If file-sharers were instead opting to get new music from new authors who chose to share, that would be a different story.
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
Spoofing IP is probably a violation of your ToS, and can get you terminated. Egress filtering is rare but increasingly popular in order to block DDoS UDP attacks. Your network admin may think you're a DDoS zombie and cut your line too.
The second thing this network doesn't provide is any incentive whatsoever to share files or bandwidth. Networks that rely solely on the honor system doesn't get much (one of many reasons Freenet is slow).
Third, it's trivial to disrobe which server is sending you what. Instead of sending "to all nodes like searches", a hostile client would try them in order. Servers could tell eachother, but the server might be hostile too.
Fourth, the entire network sounds like a DDoS waiting to happen. I flood the network with UDP packets telling them to all hit one server. That server has no way to tell them he doesn't want those packets, since he doesn't know the network.
Hell, since you installed it voluntarily (as opposed to getting a DDoS trojan) they might even sue the network nodes for DDoS'ing them. Nothing like a little legal liability too. Not to mention the good press you'd get.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
>It is blatantly obvious that there is a big enough
>group of people who don't want to pay, won't pay,
>and will use the means available to achieve what
>they want.
Amen!!!
Bit torrent isn't anonymous, this article is about anonymous p2p. The guy across the hall from me in the dorms was just sued by the MIAA for downloading/uploading the movie Chicago with bit torrent.
Steve
For numerous years, many in the /. and CS world have said and known that closed source and encryption does not truely work. These can always be broken. Yet now, some companies come along and say that they will prevent others from knowing by encrypting the files, doing UDP transfer, etc. The truth is that it is only a matter of time before RIAA is able to break all of that and get the IDs.
Instead, now is a very good time to move away from labels and move to indi music or simply those that support downloads. Kill RIAA's power by simply not buying from them anymore.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
So you and you shell script are responsible for techno?
Bastard!
People toss the term "monopoly" around quite inaccurately, I think. I mean, of course record companies have a "virtual monopoly" on making records. But canned air makers have a "virtual monopoly" on canned air. Super glue makers have a "virtual monopoly" on super glue. So what?
Indie musicians release their music outside the traditional channels, and if you would like to make your own canned air, if you have the resources, no one is stopping you. But, if you want a piece of music (product) managed, owned, controlled by some major label, you have to give them what they want for it. It's their product; they manage it, own or manage the rights to it. They don't have to give it to you at all, if they don't want to.
If you buy a car off the lot, you don't tell the dealership what they are going to sell it to you for, they tell you. And, if you buy that car and start producing exact copies in your garage and distributing these copies, my guess is you will get a visit from a lawyer.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
"When you hear a song you want, go to the store or whatever source, and buy it."
And buy it each time the media its stored on goes out of date, and buy it each time you want to listen to it since the future of DRM is that you will only rent the information, and buy it each time anyone other then you wants to listen to it (i.e. your friends over for a party).
Why stop at music too? Every time you want to read something you'll have to 'buy it', no more Havens of Copyright Infrindgement and Free Information (A.K.A. libraries).
You may like this information consumerism future, but I don't and will fight against it.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
It's becoming harder and harder to believe the desperate cries of "why don't they understand that people are interested in P2P for legitimate uses!" in light of developments like these. Do you honestly need these convoluted secrecy schemes like 1024-bit encryption and splitting up files into thousands of pieces that are distributed to thousands of other machines on the network just to share Linux ISOs and Project Gutenberg texts? Clearly these non-copyrighted (or copyrighted, but freely distributable) files can be made available openly on web sites or FTP sites without fear of "the man" coming down hard (but please, feel free to share some isolated exception to this rule with me), and chances are you'll be able to download it faster to boot.
Honestly, it can't be about download speed. I've used Bittorrent before. It's slow. Unless the file you're trying to get is very popular, your download is going to be stalled for a long time, after which you'll be pulling a whopping 3KB/sec for hours on end. Maybe you'll top out at an underwhelming 40KB/sec. Color me unimpressed. Why anyone would want to download a Linux ISO using Bittorrent or Freenet (now THAT'S what I call agony) is beyond me. Just a few weeks ago I downloaded two FreeBSD ISOs at a consistent speed of approximately 500KB/sec from one of FreeBSD's FTP sites. No muss, no fuss, no "more sources needed" messages. Remind me again why I should have preferred using a P2P app to grab those ISOs? Remind me again why anyone would want to grab a Linux ISO from a P2P app when there are plenty of fast FTP sites where the ISO can be downloaded? This is why I roll my eyes when I hear people on Slashdot talking about how P2P apps have revolutionized their Linux ISO (for example) downloads. No one would put up with greatly reduced download speeds and file availability when nine times out of ten the file can be found on much faster non-P2P sources. On the other hand, when someone is trying to obtain files that cannot be freely distributed, they're willing to put up with awful download speeds and, of course, desire having unbelievable encryption on everything they do on the network.
What P2P advocates need to do -- and I've said this many times -- is create a self-policed P2P network where the sharing of files that users DO NOT have the right to redistribute is strictly prohibited. Users report violations they've found, and the offending user is banned from the network, perhaps reported to the authorities if the people in charge of the network -- NOT the RIAA -- determine a legitimate case of copyright infringement has occurred. Before any user creates an account on the network, make them aware of this fact. It's simple, and while nothing can be done to stop the network being used for copyright infringement entirely, I'm sure such measures would greatly reduce the amount of piracy that would occur. This would finally create the P2P utopia I've been hearing so much about on Slashdot.
What about those of us (with taste) who hear a song we want *only* when traded on the Internet by people we know to have similar (good) taste? And it's out of print? The crap the RIAA labels push on the radio and "music television", and everywhere else, lacks not only distribution convenience, but also quality. That's a problem, which people are solving handily by sharing.
It's also pretty clear that people are reverting to centuries of habit by circulating music among ourselves, regardless of its age, without depending on mercenary middlemen. As demand for music is pretty hardcoded in our humanity, we're moving to some kind of sustainable system for just that. And the music producers who are fit to survive in that environment will thrive, though their obsolete competitors will leave only fossils.
--
make install -not war
if pedos start using this kind of thing the Police (or whoever monitors this shit) will step in and shut the affected networks down. And fair enough too.
:) Get them up against the wall!
Fair? Should whatever "the sickos" start using be shut down? The sickos are using the Internet, you know. Shut it down!
The new anonymizing networks (not including the commercial ones, which I haven't looked at) cannot be shut down as such. And "whoever monitors this shit" is nobody, since all communications are heavily encrypted and even if you could decrypt it in time, you wouldn't be able to tell (or prove) who had requested or provided it. So you'd have to outlaw the networks themselves, but then, of course, only outlaws would have anonymity.
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
The solution is exceptionally simple: When you hear a song you want, go to the store or whatever source, and buy it. You will have no problems.
Those days are gone. We will actually have lots of problems.
One: we can't hear a song that we want because the channels of exposure are closed to all recordings except for a small number that the record companies have paid enormous amounts of money to have played on the Clear Channel monopoly. P2P exists to allow the music community to share their discoveries with others in the community.
Two: the price of the song is set by monopoly control by the record companies. The bands themselves have no control over the price of their songs, nor do the listeners. And the price is way too high. In a real free marketplace, buyers and sellers would bid and offer until the price was acceptable to both parties and the transaction occurs. For example, goth-metal 'artist' Delicious Goodhead records a rap album of Rolling Stones songs. I like the Stones and will pay $20 for their new recordings, hate rap and will only pay $0.25 for a #1 rap record, and thought Mr. Goodhead's last record was mediocre so will only pay $3 for his next masterpiece. I offer $5 for the new recording. A week after it leaves the top ten the record company accepts my bid and authorizes me to buy a blank CD-R at my local record store for $0.25 and have the latest Delicious Goodhead recording burned on it.
This is how the free market works. If the record industry worked this way, people would buy a lot more music.
Three: A large percentage of very dollar that you give to the RIAA for music recordings goes to put you in jail. Under their laws, their purchased legislators, and their penalties. It is not in anyone's better interest to give money to any entity that uses the money to destroy your life and freedom. Christ, you pay taxes, isn't that enough?
Four: The RIAA companies have repeatedly and systematicly shown that they will cheat and defraud the artists that make the music. If you give money to the record companies, you are hurting the music community because the fair and proper compensation that you believe that you are giving to the musicians is not, has never, and will not in the future get to the artists under the present music industry system. And every purchase that you make perpetuates that system.
If we could 'just buy the music', we would 'just buy the music'.
But those days are gone.
You know, I have to wonder about warez/copyright music and what it really affects. As for warez, the only people who are going to use warez are individuals who can't afford your product anyway. If they like it, they will probably hype it to your friends and freely promote your product OR delete it after bungling around anyway. Legitimate businesses will always be forced to buy licensed software because now we're talking about massive distribution and something that is used for business. Going after an individual just doesn't seem like a good economical practice -- lawyer fees just to retrieve a theoretical few hundred dollars of lost revenue.
On the other hand, music is a different premise all together. As pointed out many times before, signing a record contract is not the number 1 way for an artist to make money. It does provide some money, but after a while concerts, merchandising, endorsements are the bread and butter. In fact, I would venture so far as to say the only value a recording contract gives to an artist is initial marketing and distribution. If you ignored the many tentacles of the music industry with other industries/media, artists would probably make more money distributing it online themselves.
--------
Free your mind.
"People toss the term "monopoly" around quite inaccurately, I think."
Yes, people like you. I will correct your mistakes and misconceptions though.
"I mean, of course record companies have a "virtual monopoly" on making records. But canned air makers have a "virtual monopoly" on canned air. Super glue makers have a "virtual monopoly" on super glue. So what?"
Canned air makers do not have a monopoly since there is no barrier to entry, i.e. I myself can can air right now. Super glue is also not a monopoly since there are readily available alternatives.
In order for monopoly to exist you need: 1) Strong barriers to entry and no close alternatives.
The RIAA is a a monopoly in that they exert monopoly power like a cartel (e.g. OPEC). The blatent evidence is that the RIAA was recently fined for abusing their monopoly to gouge consumers and were fined under US anti-trust laws.
Everyone MUST be pirating something, right?
Or at least thats the attitude the *IAA's and other related industries belive.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I belive if they can prove you are using encryption to break the law ( or intent ), the DMCA decryption clause wont apply..
At the very least, the goverment can demand decryption and use it as evidence in court...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
"Good" is what happens when people finally begin to implement and adopt the inevitable.
Not that its important, but how many 'worlds largest P2P networks' can their be?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I agree its slow, but its designed for passing bits of information securely, not huge files.
And there are several 'search engines', guess you have not been looking lately. Check out the default page when you open your node.
But again, i agree its slow as mud and is painful at times to use. But you cant say it doesn't function. Speed will never match other 'networks' due to the fact that anonymity is the primary driving factor of freenet. It's a tradeoff.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Unfortunately, in Canada, the riding vote counts are published by the Elections Canada Bureaucracy... and we know who's running that...
Guns dont kill people; Physics kills people
boohoo boohoo boohooo.......
And only for windows?
Neither facts instill confidence in them, that there isn't anything evil hidden away ( anyone remember earthstation 5? ), or its actually anonymous and hard to break its encryption.
Not ranting about 'everything needs to be open', but with stuff like this, it is important to know what you are dealing with. Before the man comes knocking on the door ( or you start broadcasting spam like crazy )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
In order for monopoly to exist you need: 1) Strong barriers to entry and no close alternatives.
It's not true now, of course, but SubPop did fairly well without being part of the "monopoly". There are many examples.
The RIAA only controls the IP of the companies / musicians it represents. The RIAA does not control the distributers that are not members of it.
The blatent evidence is that the RIAA was recently fined for abusing their monopoly to gouge consumers and were fined under US anti-trust laws.
Reference, please.
But the fact exists: Record companies own the music that they do, and they can require whatever they want as far as distribution restrictions.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
There is a big difference between "fair use" and what most people use p2p for.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
If it's so secret, how come you know about it?
Remember, three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
You are allowed to represent yourself.
Also, the last time someone's business strategy was "sue everyone", they got their asses kicked when people started waking up and banding together. The RIAA can't have as much money as EVERY SINGLE CITIZEN!!!
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
The RIAA doesn't have to consult the phone book. All they need do is sue all the ISPs, of which only the major ones can afford to defend themselves, and even then they don't have near the pocket depth that the RIAA csrtel does.
:/
Hmm... Earthlink might have the funds, if the Co$ finally got involved (lots of money there)... egads, in that case one wouldn't know which side to boo. And with AOL/Time-Warner, they'd effectively be using themselves.
Well, scratch THAT approach...
But that leads to another thought: if the MP/RIAA cartel (which in the above sideways manner includes AOL) sued only small ISPs that don't have a lawyer fund, they could put all the competition out of business.
I don't know where I was going with this, but I don't much like where I wound up. I think you're right, in that we're now a society at the mercy of laywers, or more accurately, of whoever can afford to buy their own lawyers. I'm reminded of nobility who lacked popular support (and thus couldn't trust their own people as soldiers), paying mercenary troops to keep the populace suitably subdued.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
The speed of most major ISOs from http/ftp is good because some organization with fat pipes can back it up *and* they are sporadically popular, so most of the time not many people are needing to get it....
Now with torrents, people with less beefy hosting services can publish content. When a new release of a distro comes out, it used to be I waited 2-3 days for the sites to settle down, but that is now the peak time for torrents to work better. In fact, if the same resource used to serve up http/ftp requests is used to serve torrent, the torrent should perform at worst case no wore than the http server, and during congestion has a recourse to scale better than http/ftp servers ever could. As it stands now, most places with that sort of resource don't take bittorrent seriously enough to allocate the same resources to it, so things can degrade to a few puny clients hosting the content indexed by a torrent. Understandably, as all the torrent interfaces I have seen to date are heavily individual file oriented and hosting many torrent files at once doesn't scale as neatly in terms of manageability as web or ftp servers, but that is a matter of a mature torrent-oriented server application being developed (I would *love* to be proven wrong, it would be very cool to have an integrated torrent hosting environment to help my puny pipe for some large content I serve up that is too unwieldy to administrate many torrent sessions for).
As to the >3KB/sec, I haven't seen it that bad on almost any torrent *except* when behind a non-configured nat or firewall. I'm not sure, but it seems like you can grab from a greater resource pool if you can allow direct connects to your client. If this is your circumstance, you should try researching the firewall configuration a bit and experiment. It is truly an awesome distribution scheme.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
The receord companies were fined for MAP pricing, which was there to help record stores vs stores like Best Buy which sells a small selection of CD's for below retail so that people would come into their stores for music and buy a TV for a huge markup. This really cut into the profits, not of the record companies, but music only stores such as tower records. Lowering the price of music would not have helped this situation since the electronics retails are already taking a loss on every CD sale. SO to prop up the record stores they made MAP (minimum advertised pricing) which gave a kickback to the record stores for their advertising if they advertised the CD at a certain price or higher (that price was not the same for all companies or CD's). It was not really a big deal, while the record companies a fairly small fine and where told to stop MAP, it didn't come close to criminal price fixing like ADM, where people went to jail.
Price-Fixing Settlement Checks in the Mail
. . . switch my Ethernet cables with my roommate's at the wall jack when my University gets a take-down notice for my IP. When he tries to get his connection reactivated and they get his information, the RIAA will have fun pinning my Kazaa sharing on a Mac user!
Or maybe it should have been modded as Overly Paranoid. The day the RIAA starts trying to sue everyone is when they go bankrupt. I could see it as a last ditched effort, such as what SCO might be doing, but this will ultimately lead to their demise (unless something else gets them first).
As you said yourself, a lot of mp3.com is crap; in fact many "songs" are merely soundbytes, unitelligeble noise, or other material not normally classified as "music", and certainly something no record exec would approve for commercial release...
this is a bad thing because they're playing up to the role of "the evil pirate" though since their aim to protect copyright infringer
It is a good thing, because piracy is where you board a ship and murder people, but illegal copying has no such netative social consequence. Saying illegal copying hurts letitimate p2p is like saying that speaking out against the government hurts letitimate free speech.
>We're effectively saying "We're willing to risk breaking the law ...
You made a typo - you're not risking breaking the law, you ARE breaking the law.
Well I say you're effectively saying "I don't give a damn about property rights as long as I can steal anonymously".
>until you wake up and provide a product that is reasonable."
That's just, like, your opinion, Dude.
The problem is that there will always be thugs who will find any price but free unreasonable.
For example, you've got Apple's downloads at $0.99/song and Wall Mart's even cheaper (80c or something). And even though these have been available for a while now, you're still bitching about unreasonable prices, which I find anything but insightful and which makes me suspect nothing short of free will make you happy.
And like someone mentioned in other postings, the fact that artists don't make money (or make much less money) lowers quantity and quality of film and music publishing.
Perhaps it's different with software but I simply cannot believe Madonna would be able to create the same set of records if she had to work part-time at McDonalds and use her free time to do music. Or like having a local Linux User Group get together over the weekend to shoot Matrix.
The whole thing with music and movie "sharing" devastated music publishing in some countries. Yes, I've seen the news that claim the contrary and I don't believe them because I've checked music sales figures for some European and Asian markets and they've declined a lot.
I don't even want to say that downloading music is bad - it's currently illegal, that's true. But at least, for Christ's sake, stop justifying what you do by pulling lame pro-freedom/anti-corporate explanations for what you do - even if prices were "unreasonable", this still wouldn't mean people should engage in illegal downloading).
I think income tax is too high, but I still pay it while at the same time I act thru a political organization to bring about change to the injust tax system.
Encryption is only useful to prevent third parties from eavesdropping on a file transfer or to prevent filtering and blocking at routers and firewalls. It doesn't protect you from a user of the network itself from finding out who you are. For that you need to disguise the source of the transfer. MUTE and Freenet use the members' computers to essentially proxy file transfers so the real source is hidden. However, this means you might be proxying kiddy porn for someone else. It also means speeds suffer since the speed of any transfer is only as fast as the slowest hop. Earthstation 5 uses several methods. Anonymous HTTP proxies are used to PUT files so the source is hidden, and/or one can use PXP which is a UDP file transfer protocol that uses spoofed UDP packets. Proxies can impact speed but less than users proxying themselves because the proxies used are set up on high speed links and only one hop is involved. PXP has no speed penalty. As far as is known, no one using the above 3 networks has been sued yet. Virtually all modern p2p apps get files from multiple sources so the "breaking a file up" is nothing new and is no protection since even sharing a PIECE of a copyrighted file is still an infringement.
Currently in Canada, the Supreme Court of Canada and Federal Court of Canada have both ruled (in response to the music industry lobby) that downloading and copying music for yourself is allowed under fair use; sharing your music with friends is fair use; and ISPs do not have to reveal the identity of their customers to an angry recording industry.
Now it looks like things are going to change, and soon we will have the same situation as there is in the United States. The recording industry lobby, spearheaded by Canadian Recording Industry Association, CRIA is pushing our legislators to overhaul Canadian copyright law. The model for the changes is WIPO, which is implemented in the United States as DMCA.
Dammit, doesn't this look familiar? Are you scared yet?? The corporate lobby is rewriting laws that our courts have already decided are fair. Please speak up! Sign our petition for user's rights, if you're Canadian. Sign it, mail it to us, and we'll take them all to Parliament. We need to show parliament that we have demands as users of media, and that we will exercise our votes.
What do I think?
I think if you spent that much effort on getting a better paying job instead of stealing other people's work products you could afford to buy all the music you'd ever want or need and still have time left over to listen to it.
It might as well be the software writers selling your personal info. I have no sympathy for petty criminals who whine when they cut their finger breaking into my window.
You know the rest.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
Before I will install apps like this, I always take a look at google and see what I come up with looking for the appName + adware. I loathe (as 98% of the rest of ya'll?) adware/spyware/malware..so I really would need a very good reason to install programs with adware.
? pn=1&fb=2
below is what I found:
Piolet:
http://download.com.com/3302-2166_4-10192787.html
and
http://www.spywareinfo.com/articles/p2p/
actually I am happy to see you, however that is in fact a banana in my pocket.
I'm in a country outside USA and EU.
Your stupid RIAA and copyright acts means nothing here.
So, we don't pay for music, not before, not now, not after... tell to your gov to stick your laws in their ***
We don't pay for software either.
P2P for ever!
Viva la revolucion!
enough people start doing that they'll turn on the encryption (all those 'legal' echostar satellite boxes are already capable of it) ... you're getting away with it because you're mostly flying under the radar ..... a quick note from the RIAA lawyers to E* and your service is toast
--it's only been recently that music was purposefully made to not be recorded from. I used to record to reel to reel from vinyl and off the airwaves. As soon as the technology got there for joe home user, we could use it. What's different now is, these various industries want all the use of modern high technology to increase productivity and lower their expenses,to increase profits, but they don't want anyone else to have access to roughly the same technoilogy. And they most definetly COLLUDE to keep that in place, ie, "break the law".
Well, that just sucks. They've had years to adjust to changing times, all they have done is legislate away our rights to use technology so they can maintain a pricing schedule that reflects standards from years ago, and to keep it that way, forever.
Music and art used to be live only,and expensive, it was restricted to kings and such like that could afford to hire musicians and artists, or to people freely sharing with others, the local hoe down. Then it got to be recorded,first on paper rolls, then wax cylinders then vinyl, then tape now digital on hard magnetic media or plastic that is embedded, etc, and it's cheap beyond belief.
That's reality. But, it was expensive way back when it was first able to be copied for later use and didn't require the artists to be there to hear it (or view it), and they charged accordingly, but it was BECAUSE it was still difficult to make copies. It was more or less fair then, because it was still hard to do, it was expensive to make those copies.
Now, this isn't so, yet they still want the higher fees of yester-year, and, frankly, people revolted eventually. They revolted because the rip off prices were-revolting. Quite revolting.
The music and movie industry is going through changes, and they will NOT suceed in keeping technology away from people, so my best advice to them is to come up with a new way of doing things or get left in the dust.
Perhaps they may need to come to grips that there are so many people making music and art, that our society can't support those millions *just* doing that for a living, and if that is so, we will also no longer support an artifical class of music and art copier middle men.
It could be that the expensive media middlemen copiers and sellers are the buggy whip retailers of the 21st centyury, and their business is close to becoming completely obsolete, and they just can't stand the thought of having to go get another job after decades of some extraordinary fat city profits. Seems like everyone else around here is in the same boat, what makes them so special that it can't affect them as well? Joe rustbelt assembly line worker is told he's too expensive and tough crap, he can be replaced at a dime on the dollar, and gets replaced. Joe keyboartd banger is now being told he can be replaced by another person someplace else for a dime on the dollar, and too bad to him too. So what makes these music and art copying mechanics all that special? the answeer is NOTHING, they can be replaced, and quite easily, and for not dimes but PENNIES on the dollar, so tough crap to them, too, they are in the same boat everyone else is in now.
It looks to me more and more that what artists that are hip and honestly understand what is happeneing and are smart enough to deal with it and the various consumers of said art will get closer together, and just keep bypassing the middlemen, to the point of making independent studios and marketing concerns and professional copying mechanics massively and redundantly *unnecessary*. for most practical purposes, they are NO LONGER NEEDED IN OUR ECONOMY.
Maybe I am wrong, but that is what it looks like to me. The tools avaialable to both the productive artists and to the end users of that art are fantastic now, stuff that only the most wealthy of businesses could assemble and use just ten years ago. Well, it follows then then those specialty niche industries that used to be necessary in the middle are on the way out, they have been a
And if you're handy with tools and the the other dorm's ethernet cables pass nearby you could arbitrarily use any one of those connections, whilst directing their traffic to someone else's. Of course make certain that the person you "give" your connection isn't into file-sharing or worse things.
It is very hard to justify something when the ONLY difference between it and something else is that it has features whose only use is to make it easier to break the law.
They'd better have the police do it because otherwise someone's going to die. I'd have no problem with sticking a knife in a music industry thug or two.
my website has a waste network for those who want to give it a try.
If people weren't copying music, not just for their friends, not hundreds or thousands but millions of people, then the RIAA wouldn't be so overprotective perhaps. What else are they supposed to do exactly? Lots of people I know don't even know it's illegal and perhaps if the police did come knocking then it would make people think before they acted. What we need is less privacy - "this is me, I am sharing these files and they're mine (or free or whatever)". If the illegal sharing can be stopped then it will give the rest of us the FREEDOM to make backups, copy in any format we want for our own use etc. and the RIAA won't take any notice. If the stealing continues (and it is really no different to stealing shirts in a shop) then we will more and more stupid limitations, and the record companies will have even fewer challenging acts, and only those "which will do well" or those out of the file sharing demographic. There will be no tours by interesting bands anymore (too expensive to put on without record company backing). And just why do people spend 2 or 3 on a RINGTONE and won't spend this amount on the actual single? You couldn't make it up.
lousy. from louse (plural: lice).
The RIAA does not control the distributers that are not members of it.
Think of the many universal flops that the music industry has created over the years. The bands that came out and never even had a single hit song. These unpopular and still mostly unknown bands sell virtually no songs. The laws of supply and demand would say that this music would be dirt cheap. Yet in the eyes of the music industry, they price it the same as everything else. Example: iTunes 99 cents a song is flat rate pricing, set by the music industry. There is no supply and demand here, it's price fixing.
I think you just hit it on the head. Things like free music over the radio and TV lower the value of their product. I think that fundamentally people think of music as a right - and that it can be obtained almost everywhere for very little cost (ie: advertisements, cost of listening device - TV/Radio)
Historically, the value of purchasing music came from convenience, quality sound reproduction, and the medium the music was distributed on. And the record industry only furthered those assumptions of value. CD's cost more than tapes, tapes cost more than vinyl. Ah, but now factor in the Internet. Now people can reproduce music digitally, with relatively high quality sound reproduction, almost no cost of medium, and listen to it at home, while walking, or in the car. All of this done of course with a high degree of convenience.
I mean Christ, you can hook your computer up to your TV and tune to MTV and rip all the music till your hearts content. Hook it up to your FM radio, and record your favorite songs. And you wonder why people think it's not illegal? Because it's essentially free to the listeners anyway! Which goes directly back to the point that the Record companies have devalued their own product. Which is kinda funny since this is all about IP rights, and the RIAA is essentially saying when it comes down to there to 100 music that: "Hey, you can't make copies of our music! If you want to listen to it tune into your favorite radio station, or MTV, MTV2, VH1, BoX, or CMT and listen to it for free. But if you want your music on a $.10 plastic disc along with a napkin sized piece of album art then it will cost you $19.99"
At any rate, I realize that this is a very charged issue - feel free to let me know what you think.
Proof again that technology and self-preservation will always whip-up on draconian totalitarian intentions of the plutocrats.
Is this a form of cyber-warfare by folks internationally?
Let dumb politicians write laws for the special interest that fail, then keep them writing laws for special interest to fix the failure, until events crush the special interest and politicians into long lost history.
This may eventually teach the politicians and special interest that they are the ones singing "ring-around-the-roseies" and that laws should promote freedom, innovation, performance, and protection (citizen control is a failure for all US).
OldHawk777
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
Actually.. I have never yet downloaded a single mp3 or music file that I haven't had direct permission from the band directly (and I've helped quite a few bands promote themselves by helping them get .mp3/.ogg files online for their sites; Kerry Lauder Band, Seryn, etc.). I don't support the RIAA, and I don't purchase albums in the store that are backed by the RIAA.
"Encryption" is not always about hiding anything, it's about retaining privacy, or in some cases, verifying the identity or source (ala gpg signing an email or a gpg key for a released tarball).
I'm not sure who your response was targeted to, but it certainly was not me. I don't need to "circumvent" any mp3/illegal sharing methods, because I don't personally use them.. that being said, I think a solid network predicated upon the basis of privacy, is an important thing, and this is precisely why I came up with this solution back 4-5 years ago, well before the whole p2p/RIAA madness was even a speck on the radar.
I think, instead of saying "virtual monopoly" you meant to say oligopoly.
Instead, now is a very good time to move away from labels and move to indi music or simply those that support downloads.
Then the RIAA will use the loss of sales to fuel their claims that people are illegally downloading music instead of buying CD's. Course this is mainly from the fact that they only look at their CD sales and not the entire markets CD sales.
When was the last time they included an idependant label or say a Bach CD in their sales figures? Anybody know?
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
Errr, in the context of your analogy, that is!
:does goatsex imitation with CD:
The problem is that this story is not about "customers stop listening to RIAA music, start going to local clubs instead". It's more like this:
RIAA: Want some music? Only $15.
Customer: No thanks, cram it up your arse!
RIAA: Fine, be that way.
Customer: Hey, wait! Shiny! Cool! I want that! : lunges and grabs for RIAA orifice:
Blubster is LOADED with spyware. I had to run 2 independant spyware removal proggies, along with my virus scanner to get rid of it all. Just a heads-up.
I don't think it would happen because encryption is used widely right now. Banking, online orders, etc. It would be nearly impossible to separate encrypted banking traffic from p2p one. Of couse you could do some traffic pattern analysis, but it doesn't guarantee anything. And certainly doesn't prove anything. "Look, Judge, this user's encrypted traffic has a very suspicious profile!"
Mods, How did wirelessbuzzers get marked troll? His post has more calm reason than either of the posts he refers to!
The RIAA only controls the IP of the companies / musicians it represents.
." or "Record labels suing. . .", etc. By making it an industry or RIAA effort, your average Joe who thinks it's a bad thing can't really protest except to boycott all the RIAA members, which for most people would mean ceasing to buy music since they typically don't buy much indie label music, and therefore Joe (or Jane for that matter) is likely to do nothing about it beyond ranting.
And technically, they don't even control those, the companies still do. The RIAA merely represents the interests of its member companies and takes actions accordingly.
My theory is the reason the RIAA is initiating lawsuits for copyright violations rather than the labels themselves is to shield the labels from direct negative publicity. It's not an outlandish theory, as industries have been organizing trade associations for years with exactly that purpose in mind, to lobby for publicly unpopular policies, etc. without implicating the individual companies themselves. For example, how often do you here "Sony (or Universal, etc.) suing filesharers for copyright violations". it's always "RIAA suing. .
fuck you.
using your criteria:
a. check
b. check - MP3
c. check
d. check - Emusic Express
not it's not perfect, to be sure, and is not for the mainstream listener, but it's got some great stuff on there. stuff like Guided By Voices that iTunes has just picked up has been on emusic forever.
this, to me, is the right model. pay a reasonable fee, get a reasonable amount of downloads (it's not unlimited any longer).
if it's this simple, why would i steal?
hey, it's not my fault you are so broke you can't even afford to buy a freakin' cd. yeah, go ahead and rip music off of tv. Some of us have something called an allowance.
at least my parents are not so cheap that they can't afford a 500/mo for allowence. I have NEVER had a problem not being able to afford a cd.
sucks to be u
This has nothing to do with the "buggymaker"
It most certainly does! Read this carefully, please.
What?
Sounds like they're misrepresenting themselves in their ads, then. Most ads for CD suggest that you can "buy" a cd, not "license the contents" of one.
Welcome to the Age of Lawyers.
Lawyers are the new American nobility. You are either a lawyer or a lawyer's subject. In the 21st Century, all Americans who are not lawyers will be forking over whatever money they have to pay for lawyers to defend themselves against other lawyers.
Lawyers will be living in mansions surrounded by the rest of us, who will toil endlessly, day and night, to earn our masters' legal protection.
Hooray!
Damn, I wanna be a lawyer!
"DMCA Title 17, Chapter 12, Section 1201 (a) (1) (A) states " No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title." If your network communictions is not protected under the copyright law, then it is not protected under the DMCA."
If it is circumvented then the measure did not not
_effectively_ control * (anything)
In the English usage of the word 'effective'.
The supid addition of this superflous word is laughable. It utterly obviates the clause, dumbass lawyers.
Instead of creating "secret" networks whose sole use will be outright copyright violation, why not just use what we have that's legal? They sell CDs for 11.99 a pop at my store, they sell CD singles for even less, there's a radio and online radio that lets you "sample" things, and we've got countless music services now including the popular iTunes music store.
Sorry, kids, but just because you don't like DRM, or you don't like the price of something, or you think it's "heavy-handed tactics" (actual phrase used elsewhere in this discussion) to sue people infringing on your own copyright, doesn't mean the copyright magically transfers over to you for you to pirate endlessly across the Internet.
Why is it we all get up in arms when a company dares violate the copyright of the GPL, but when it comes to violating the rights of those who aren't on "our side," it's suddenly a "gray area?"
It's bullshit, is what that is.
in a blender?
"Why, that's exactly the kind of Philistine pig-ignorance I've come to expect from you non-creative garbage!"
Just try finding a copy of those "flops" and you will find out how small the supply is (i.e. forget trying to find it on iTunes). The price is the same because supply and demand are in balance.
I'm sure glad this is modded +5 - good job! I just wish you had given it a better title than "Sure You Do", so I could reference it more easily when I quote it.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Really, there's less of a barrier to entry for music than there is for canned air. I would be willing to bet an air compressor and a can making machine is a lot less expensive than an acoustic guitar with a cheap PC with a microphone and a CD-ROM burner.
If you don't like what capitol records does, don't buy their music. But the artists that signed with capitol records evidently do like it, or, they wouldn't have signed. Nobody forces anyone to sign a record deal, it's just, people do, so they can make millions of dollars.
This is my sig.
... until they find out that p2p networks are mainly used by al quaida terrorists to communicate. you know, the whole internet is nothing but a platform for criminals. pr0n is everywhere, and you all know, in the internet you can find a blueprint for making a nuke for 10$. and then, there is quake. all young people turned into homicidal maniacs. thanks john. and the quake engine is GPL! and so is some encryption software! imagine, it's not enough for those criminals to communicate through the net, no cherie, they have something to hide! the internet is evil! pull the plug!
no wait... someone mentioned pr0n...
beer as in "free beer"
when the MPAA and RIAA respect the public domain. They can start by lobbying congress to reduce copyright terms to, say, five years.
Test 1 2 3 4
I downloaded the blubster program. It has a trojan in it. Be forewarned.
Better hope your uni didn't bother to write down the MAC address of the offending file sharerer.
OT: My freshmen year, I had a douche for a roommate. The guy went to bed at 9pm every night, had a freaky "internet girlfriend," and took phone calls in the dark. Every once in a while, I would decide that he had had enough internet for a while, and while he was sleeping (say at ten pm on a Friday night) I would unplug his ethernet, put tape over the end of it, and plug it back in. The next night, I would usually untape it. I did this a number of time before one day I forgot to untape it the next day. The next day, I came back to my dorm room and all his ethernet cable was coiled up on the floor-- with no tape on either end.
Oops!
Oh well, it was a good prank while it lasted.
you are more than welcome to make your own title, copy it, share it, even fix the typos! Freely released under the universal internet forum ranters posting license.
I can't code, but I can rant!
%^)
Brother or sisters have I none.
yet this man's father is my father's son.
I think a lot of us would be happy if there were something out there that was worth paying for. For example, I just bought, out of my own money, legally, the Season 7 of Buffy, so I now have the complete set on DVD. I did not feel cheated, it was worth every penny, and I would buy the whole thing all over again. This is called "getting your money's worth."
Honestly, when is the last time you had that feeling with a music CD? Usually, there are two, maybe three good songs, and the rest is "filler", put on so that they can get the damn thing out on the market. I have bought about three CDs the last year (yes, I buy my music), and I'm still mad about two of them. More than 50 percent of the songs were crap.
I can see why people go online to steal their music. Yes, it is illegal, yes, it is wrong, no, I don't do it, but what the fuck does the industry expect? At those prices, people do not feel they are getting value for money, they feel they are getting robbed, and they're probably right. CDs are too expensive, too much of what is on them is terrible.
The industry is going to have to lower prices, start producing less crap, or find an alternative way of getting the songs to the user. Everything else is just wasting everybody's time.
[...] flames will be ignored and taped onto my refrigerator.
You have got to get yourself some kids to paint for you...
Yeh yeh, get off your soap box. If the security if that good that the only way to stop the kiddy fuckers is to shut it down, I'll accept that, but the internet itself is insecure enough that it's not necessary. The people that monitor this shit are the Police, in my country, and they'll be there undercover and in the scene. Quite simply, if they find kiddie porn proliferating on a particular anonymizing network, steps will be taken to shut either it or the traffic down. There's more options than just outlawing anonymity, but you're the expert so I won't need to explain it...
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
I'm sorry, I didn't realize you live in Iran or Saudi Arabia or wherever. I guess I'm pretty spoilt, living in a modern European country where police don't have quite those powers you describe.
Finally, I'd like your prescription for how to shut down FreeNet, for instance, since the sickos are using it. Also, do tell me what methods of infiltration police could use to take it down. Because I'm sure the FreeNet developers themselves don't know about them yet.
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
I slurped Blubster off Download.com. I tested the resulting exe with AVG 6.0 and found it V-free. But, when I was installing it, as it downloaded supporting files, I was warned by AVG of a virus. I cancelled installation, logged off, and ran AVG. It found 3 viruses; 2 in files which could be healed, and 1 which had to be isolated. When I logged back on, I was gifted with a new "MySearch" toolbar (which, as it turns out, Spybot S&D pronounced benevolent) that I promptly removed. Running Spybot, I found that I was host to Webhance, which I promptly removed. Not being the brightest bulb in the /. array, my question is this; was this the result of chance exposure via a public server, or did our friends at Blubster award me this cyber-facial?
Been looking for software where myself and my close pals can share our files, but only among us and without anyone knowing what we are sharing. Like to have search abilities like current P2P file sharing programs so just hosting a secure FTP site is not what we are looking for. Platform independance would be great. This would be something the RIAA and such would not spend much time on as the network would only be about several hundred people tops.
Main idea is that most of us in our group are going to have tastes in a similar ball park and are going to most likely have high quality files. We don't want to offer up what we have to everyone just our people, nor do whe care to let the world know what we are sharing.
When I search on Freshmeat and/or Sourceforge for P2P it seems, at least from the basic descriptions, that the main programs are all Kazza, etc copy cats with some sort of extra stuff to make em a bit different, but still seem all based on public access.
Thanks for any suggestions.
maybe offer to do some of the sound (intros, backgrounds, whatever)for new video games, that gets people to listen to your stuff, they'll go look for more of it.
Got a favorite distro? I think it'd be a hoot if every new distro that was given away contained some MP3s as well, people could use them to test out their sound configs after a fresh install. I always wondered why we didn't have that anyway, at least a few tunes and a few vid clips with new releases. Heck, most releases are several CDs long now anyway, so whut the heck, a few more megs won't make much of a difference.
I think the peer to peer internet streaming projects are all worthwhile efforts(not file trading, direct spawning streaming), being involved in them, to get people using those sorts of technologies, could help spread awareness as more independent broadcasters start appearing. And also make sure you are being played on the normal shoutcast/icecast whatever channels someplace, even if it's only *some* streams.
Besides that, not sure. I'll think on it more, still waking up right now.
I have a BIL been playing professionally for over 20 years, but never made it past the local bar venues on the weekends, and always just had a regular job during the week. He's happy enough doing that, it's more just fun for him than anything else.
Hmm cross -artist compilation releases? collaborate with other artists to do albums, each band/artist gets one track, use combined distribution efforts as a force multiplier. usually when you see something like a "best of beach music from the 60's" it's just that, real old stuff. I don't remeber ever seeing a "new" CD or album that had all different bands on it. People might want to sample that, knowing at least they will get variety if nothing else.
Basically you are trying to figure out how to break several overlapping near monopolies..and it's just gonna be hard. I don't think there will be any single one solution, you'll have to get pretty creative to work around it. Both in the music and in the distribution/marketing. The way it is so easy to make copies, you'll have to be very content with extraordinarily cheap copies and do volume as much as possible. On the airtime, really, that will only be broken once microbroadcasting is legitimised more, and is more accepted and used by the listening public. The net is just as viable now formost purposes, but over the air is still good, too, obviously, but as you say, clear channel, etc just overhwlems most of the stations. Only way around that is to overhwlem clear channel stations on a 10 to one basis with microbroadcasters. That, and netbroadcasting.
The market is saturated, too, it really is. How many bands and individuals are there now trying to be full time professionals, just inside the US? It has to be hundreds of thousands, easy. There's at least one per city, no matter how small, and larger cities can have hundreds or thousands just there. That's a completely saturated market. And it's obvious they sure can't all be full time professionals. Maybe that's just the reality of it.
I will keep chanting this mantra till people understand it. "I dont care if people download and share my music just as long as they dont profit from it." In this period of media control by a few companies just about the only way people can listen to you is if your being shared on the net, I welcome people downloading my music and passing it back and forth. General Mills gives out tons of cereal as samples so people will try it and then buy it. I do object when individuals and companies use my music without paying me to make a profit. There are people that are downloading and selling that music to others. There are companies that use music in retail and multimedia applications that do not pay licensing or royalties. There are people in other countries that are illegally reproducing music and selling it in mass quantities. These are the true pirates that the people at the RIAA should focus their efforts upon. Please keep in mind "Pirates" of yesteryear stole valuables and then sold them they did not share. Dennis Jennings Celestial Image http://celestial-image.com
damn that must be embarassing! "chicago"! hehehe