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Senate Takes Aim At P2P Providers
thejoelpatrol writes "The Senate Judiciary Committee, led by everybody's favorite senator, Orrin Hatch, is moving to outlaw P2P entirely by making it illegal to produce such applications. Hatch says such firms 'think that they can legally profit by inducing children to steal. Some think they can legally lure children into breaking the law with false promises of "free music."' So, when was the last time that Kazaa told kids to steal music? Shouldn't the parents be the ones looking out for their kids? The RIAA is (surprise!) in favor of this, while P2P groups are (surprise!) opposed."
So P2P applications will only be written by people outside the US. If he wants to stop P2P, he should try outlawing possession of a P2P app.
This is just ridiculous. Compensating failed business models through rigorous legislation. Did anyone ask for more proof the US is run by big business? If so, you've just been served.
So are they going to pass a law that prevents the labels from illegally enticing people to buy CD's that have built in copyright protection?
Their argument is that DL'ing copyrighted works is violating the rights of the artist and copyright holders.
I say they are violating the rights of the people by placing undue restrictions on our property!
The preceding message was based on actual events. Only the names, locations and events have been changed.
It will be interesting to hear these people come up with a definition of "P2P" or "software that encourages children and teenagers to infringe copyrights". Any definition I can think of would include most Internet software and, for that matter, Microsoft Windows.
Guns don't kill people, people kill people. P2 has many legal uses they've been posted here many times before so I won't repeat them now. Maybe we should ban the sale of car's people break the law in them all the time so they must be bad aswell. or ban razor blades and OTC pain killer's 100's if not 1000's of people attempt sucide using them. See It gets alittle out of hand doesn't it.
Gun manufacturers are not responsible for the actions of the people that use their products, but P2P vendors are?
Both products, of course, can be used without breaking the law.
Why, Sen. Hatch, I can download illegal MP3s through my web browser! GASP! Better shut down the WWW.
Oh, no! Now there's this FTP program people are using! Better shut that down, too.
Zounds! Someone just e-mailed me a song! Bye-bye, e-mail...
Can anyone post a link to the text of the Bill itself? It might be prudent to examine the letter of the law before pre-judging its merits and faults.
You may treat all information submitted above as wild speculation.
Don't worry, P2P will not die that easily. Isn't all new software development outsourced to India, anyhow? And, sure, they *can* outlaw possession. It has worked wonders for drugs, hasn't it? Look out for new India-Colombia joint ventures. Both production and distribution taken care of.
Could someone please tell those in charge that the basic premise of peer to peer (and modern networking as a whole for that matter) is not to cheat somebody out of his/her rights. Peer to Peer is the holy grail of modern networking. Everybody who has ever thought about networking has been wondering how to build a network in such a way that all nodes can connect with all others, without having the need for a central switch/server controlling all the aspects of the communication.
In the lower network levels you see these kinds of networks in wireless setups. They tend to have problems with scalability. In the higher network layers it has turned out to be possible to create networks that are not in need of a fixed central node that controls communications. However you do see the advent of supernodes to improve communications.
Illegal stuff generally ends up on the most efficient network setup. It used to be BBS, then FTP and now Peer to Peer. However in the end, Kazaa, Gnutella and Bittorrent are all modern answers to the question: How do we build an FTP-system without the need for a central server that will run out of its bandwidth the moment it is announced on Slashdot.
Use Adsense for Charity
There's no way this will happen. They'd essentially have to make the internet illegal since every application written for the internet is about transferring data in one form or another. This is just stupid. Even if congress passes a law, I have no doubt the Supreme Court would strike it down, even THIS Supreme Court. I doubt Scalia or Thomas would help, but most of the rest have some basic sense of law and the bill of rights.
And as we saw in the Slashdot post yesterday, file sharing is clearly destroying the movie industry. Not! The only thing hurting the music industry is the music industry. They're putting out crap music and they're suing their customers. If they changed these two things, they'd probably be back to record (pun not intended) profits.
Not only am I not buying today's music, I'm not downloading today's music. Because it sucks. Britney, please don't do it again! Quit. Go home. Please!
Guess what, Europe (and Australia . . . and Canada . . .)? You're next.
Don't think for a second that storebought government officials are unique to the US.
It would be odd if America put up an iron curtain so soon after the one in Europe fell.
I stole this
Repeat after me: "Illegal copying is not theft, it is illegal copying".
The equating of illegal copying with property theft is now so widespread that it doesn't attract comment: this is bad. Those who misuse the language in this way should always be corrected.
Dunstan
The last scintilla of doubt just rode out of town
Call my a cynical old prick (well don't bother, I know already), but I say it's inevitable that in 10 years you won't be able to legally run any p2p in the US or its "do as we say or we bankrupt your farmers" states such as Australia. So instead of jumping up and down and pretending two hundred thousand nerds can change shit, we need to start focusing on what we'll do to get around it.
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
At least stealing is not automatically wrong, it's just the act of obtaining something surreptitiously. My son steals music all the time, he borrows my CD's without telling me, and I steal them back. I'm fine with this, as long as he doesn't thieve them. Theft is wrong and as you say copyright infringement is not theft. Children should be encouraged to steal music so that the can learn about it, and broaden their knowledge. A child that listens only to music they have bought and payed for, or that the media conglomerates see fit to broadcast is a child that is deprived of the riches of our culture. A society that tolerates such deprivation in the pursuit of corporate profit is truly decadent.
Assuming that copyrights are first reduced to "limited times" as spelled out by the Constitution, an inducement law might be appropriate -- to prosecute (rather than reward with millions of dollars) people like Shawn Fanning of Napster who actively solicit infringement of specific copyrighted titles. But this bill is not that because it is overly broad.
...or rather Godwin's Rule perhaps. Invoking the magic words "The Children" as a justification of your own cause, should automatically result in you losing the argument, and the closing of the discussion.
Incidentally, I'd love Godwin's Rule to be adopted in politics. For a very good reason: when someone makes a comparison to Nazi's or feels a need to protect The Children, you can be sure that the rational part of the discussion is over, and that all that's left is emotions and name calling.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
it is freedom wall, but on which side are you standing?
There are no atheists when recovering from tape backup.
Or even better, we could start eliminating kids that are likely to code such appliations in the future!
That isn't a new idea. Frighteningly, it used to even be one that was explicitly stated. When a bill was proposed to introduce public libraries, there was massive opposition from the Tories (closest equivalent in the US being the Republicans). Favourite quote from one being: "the people have too much knowledge already: it was much easier to manage them twenty years ago; the more education people get the more difficult they are to manage."
Education equates to being difficult to control. Always has, but it's necessary for the health of society - the eternal dilemma of the ruling classes.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
Worse. It's sending us well on the slippery slope to anarchy. Or, at least, to general disregard of inconvenient laws by the the majority of people.
And I'm not sure they see that.
They're creating laws that corporations love, but the mojority of society in many countries do not like. Are they persuading people to stay within the letter of a law they don't believe in? Probably not in a lot of cases. instead people just dismiss the Law as an inconvenience. This is not going to end well.
yes, sometimes laws probably need tightening up to stop rampant law-breaking. But each law really should be looked at case-by-case.
Why was the law created?
What was society/technology like at the time?
What are things like now?
Does $ACTIVITY$ really need protecting/prohibiting now as it did back then?
Copyright law probably needs wholesale revision, but not automatically in favour of (large) corporations.
Currently they're wanting to restrict more things, and impose bigger sentences. What people see, though, is them being faced with out-of-proportion punishments for something that's not perceived as a serious crime.
Copyright needs reworking. Allow more stuff, decrease restrictions, don't penalise for what should these days be allowable, reduce copyright periods and allow things to hit the Public Domain within the public's lifetime, and don't make breaking the law seem more attractive than obeying it.
TiggsConversely, what's left as illegal should be serious breaches that really do look like criminal activity and make them the ones with teh heavy punishments. Mass bootlegging factories of DVDs, and making a profit for someone else's work does seem to warrant heavy punishment. People sharing MP3s doesn't seem to warrant the same level. But the **AA (and local equivalents) want to make it so, and people can't understand that thinking.
Tiggs
"120 chars should be enough for everyone..."
Let me get this straight:
... Can't you smell that smell ... Ooooh that smell ... The smell of hypocrisy
surrounds you ...
For years, the music industry has claimed, in Congressional hearing after Congressional hearing, that the creators and distributors of music that encourages its listeners to behave in an anti-social fashion bear no responsibility when those listeners follow along. (I agree with them, by the way, but that's not the point at the moment) They have gone to court over and over again to prove that they have no liability when they tell children to kill, to rape, to use drugs, etc., and those children do so.
Now they want to criminalize the act of writing computer programs which could be used for copyright infringement because that is "inducing" children to break the law.
Now, wait just one cotton-pickin' minute here. If selling music that glorifies committing crimes, and in some cases has a clear and direct call to commit such crimes, is not "inducement" to commit such crimes, then how is writing computer programs which may be used to violate copyrights, among many other legal uses, "inducement" to violate those copyrights? They want to have it both ways.
Ooooh that smell
And let's not even get into the gun industry. By Orrin Hatch's logic, since guns are used in crimes, the gun industry is "inducing" children to hold up liquor stores. Handguns in particular should be banned, since their overwhelming use is to either kill human beings or practice killing human beings. It follows the same logic. So how come Hatch is so worked up about copyright infringement but he doesn't care about murder?
Ranting on Slashdot is fun, but it doesn't change anything. We need to be active. We need to vote. We need to get our friends and relatives to vote. And we need to do it now, before "inducing" people to vote against the party in power becomes a crime, too.
It's enlightening to think that this entire mess is related to the failure of campaign finance reform to adequately accomplish its goals; reason #1 why geeks should care about politics.
Actually that's much more correct than what you meant.
The origin of the word "Firewall" isn't a wall made of fire, but rather a wall that can block fire. Like "blast door" isn't a door that blasts everyone that tries to pass it, but rather a door that can withstand blasts.
Therefore a "freedom wall" is a wall that blocks freedom.
^_^
Yes, he's wrong... it's point-to-point. But each point is equivalently considered a peer.
SIG: HUP
This bill could easily kill BitTorrent, or more specifically ruin the lives of the people who developed it. And probably will. Here's the scenario:
The RIAA/MPAA first goes after Kazaa and other software and services of that sort. Once they take out the easy targets, they will inevitably start going after the more innocent software. They more or less have to, or the users booted from Kazaa will just use the next easiest system. Eventually, they are bound to get to BitTorrent.
Now, BitTorrent has plenty of non-infringing users; certainly a higher percentage than Kazaa. But there would be sufficient grounds to bring a case, and a judge is probably not going to throw out a case that hinges on what a "reasonable person would find". That's exactly the sort of decision that it, in theory, best made by a jury. Once it makes it to a jury trial, the developers start to run into real legal costs and probably go broke even if they win. And winning is not a foregone conclusion; counting on a jury to reasonable apply a reasonable person standard is definitely a crapshoot.
Come on, we have seen this dozens of times. The big fish don't have to win the lawsuits they bring to crush the little fish. Previously, BitTorrent's protection came from case law decided when a big fish went after, say, a medium fish that fought back and won. If this bill becomes law, it will nullify that protection. I hope the BitTorrent developers aren't from the US!
Not so much a sig as a lack of one.
The proposal is not to make the software illegal. It is to make it easier for corporations to sue you for producing the software. There is a difference. The article goes so far as to spell it out
The bill doesn't set up new criminal or civil penalties for those who "induce" copyright violations, but it creates a new class of people who can be sued or prosecuted for copyright infringement -- those who a "reasonable person" would believe "intentionally aids, abets, induces or procures" copyright violations.
The headling says: "outlaw P2P entirely by making it illegal to produce such applications."
I guess that in addition to RTFA we need to have UTFA, Understand the f**** article.
While I am not all that impressed with the proposed legislation, being served papers because the RIAA is suing you for producing a P2P app is certainly much different from federal agents kicking down your door and arresting you because you just wrote a new Java app to share files on the internet for your programming class.
If you are going to get pissed off, at least understand what you are getting pissed off about.
Do your part.
Tell Orrin Hatch that A) This law will change nothing (I thought we had legislation to stop spam...), B) He's a US senator, and has no control over the spread of P2P apps oversears, regardless of where they come from, and C) He'd also be opening up a lawsuit vs. many, MANY legit companies. (ICQ to name a prominent one).
Lots of talk here about the unfairness of corporate entities like the RIAA lobbying for bad laws, but no one has really touched on the fact that they're using today's big taboo to sell it to Congress: children.
The scope of the law is nothing new, but the way it's being presented certainly is -- Hatch is arguing that p2p applications induce children to break the law, to become criminals. P2P is sullying the lives of our children. Won't somebody please think of the children?
This disgusts me. I have to agree with George Carlin that children are the new taboo in the United States. Heaven help you if you say anything against the children, and may God have mercy on your soul if you so much as depict a child in a dangerous situation in a movie (thank you, Mr. Spielberg, for ruining E.T.).
Now we have a legislator trying to use the emotional value of the children to sell a bad bill to the rest of Congress. These are similar to the tactics that were used to pass the USA PATRIOT act. Let's hope that Congress has learned its lesson and is paying more attention this time.