Slashdot Mirror
File Trading Law Would Include 'Willing' Traders
mgessner writes "From InfoWorld comes a story on the U.S. House's approval of a new, tough law against trading files online. 'The bill expands the definition of file traders eligible for criminal penalties from individuals who 'willingly' distribute copyright files to those who 'knowingly' do so, an escalation that could result in jail time for file swappers.'" (The bill has yet to go through the Senate.)
Index
Summary
Text of legislation
Screw what the lawyers thing, we have technology to fight them. Try Freenet. It's mathematically impossible to determine what you're sharing! Try going to jail for sharing random bytes :-)
My other car is first.
When people start abusing this law and the public gets fed up with it congress will be left with all the blame.
Regardless of who becomes president for the next four years, we are still going to see more stupid laws like these in the future.
For anyone interested in the Incude Act and what it is, here's a reasonably good Wired article on it.
*yawn*
If you have an infected machine that has an open exploit, you may be prosecuted since you willingly run a machine that is on the internet. That you didn't make sure that there was no open shares, ftp servers, or virus that might allow others to use your machine for sharing files.
Fight Spammers!
GPL is not a copyright. It's a license. GPL software can still be copyrighted, but so can any other closed source freeware program, so bringing up the GPL really has no bearing here.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
is known to make party line stance on virtually all of the issues ever to encounter, that its hard to envisage this guy has ever in his life, thought for himself, used his god given intelligence to seperate himself (or others) from the party line rhetoric, or to atleast understand the laws he is responsible for passing in the house.
A few of his noted yes/no votes can shed a lot of light on where he stands on the issues:
(1)Voted YES on allowing school prayer during the War on Terror - Yes praying as a collective does help in cleansing terrorism.
(2)Voted YES on giving federal aid only to schools allowing voluntary prayer
(3)Voted NO on raising CAFE standards; incentives for alternative fuels - Wants to rely on Oil and dont want the Automobile industry to answer to better environmental standards.
(4)Voted NO on prohibiting oil drilling & development in ANWR. - Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, enough said!
(5)Voted YES on speeding up approval of forest thinning projects - Apparently want the rest of the US start looking like Texas (no offense).
(6)Voted YES on Permanent Normal Trade Relations with China - Yes, Cuba - BAD, China - GOOD!!
(7)Voted NO on $156M to IMF for 3rd-world debt reduction - Handouts are good when its to your automobile industry cronies and to big corporations, bad idea when its to third world countries.
(8)Voted NO on campaign finance reform banning soft-money contributions - No Finance Reform!! Period!
(9)Voted YES on decreasing gun waiting period from 3 days to 1 - By God! Yes, we all know how excruciatingly painful it is to wait 3 days for appropriate checks to be made..
(10)Voted NO on allowing reimportation of prescription drugs - We really believe you should pay 20$ for that tylenol pill instead of 30 cents if you were importing it from Canada.
What pisses me off is that even if Kerry wins this November, the senate and the house under Republican control will end up making him an acting president and not a real one. Not that I think a Democrat controlled house and senate is any better. I just want politicians to really understand the bills they sign and talk to people who these laws ultimately affect.
Rapid Nirvana
All GPL software is copyrighted. If it weren't, the GPL couldn't apply to it.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Different laws (criminal and civil) punish actors differently based on not just the act itself, but also the actor's state of mind.
Generally, commiting the same act intentionally as opposed to recklessly or negligently will bring on a harsher penalty. Intentionally aiming a rifle at someone and shooting is punished more harshly than if the gun goes off accidentally and kills them. The victim is just as dead in both cases, but the first actor will probably be punished more severely than the second.
In this case, the House seems to have lowered the bar to include both intentional and willful conduct (there is probably a subtle difference between the two) but not negligent or reckless conduct. All of these terms are (or will be) defined elsewhere in the Act or in the U.S. Code. Without knowing what the devil Congress means by these qualifiers, it's hard to say what exactly has been passed. Odds are though, it's not good.
My guess is that if one is found to be sharing more than X number of files (or transferring X amount of copyrighted data) the law will provide that the requisite level of intent has been met.
Bush Lies On the Record.
Any copyright enforcement bill needs the exception for Senators that use unlicensed software:
, 00 .html
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,59305
Note that there are other crimes where no mens rea is required: Statutory Rape is one of them, serving alcohol to minors is another. Personally I disagree with having no requirement for a mens rea component in those crimes. But, in the eyes of the law mens rea is not absolutely required.
:)
I am not a lawyer, I'm a computer engineering student taking a law class
isomerica.net | Foonetic IRC
Littl plastic pellets propelled by air
They're not necessarily propeled by air, the requirement is that each pellet, at the point where it comes out of the barrel (so, point-blank) has an energy (kinetic) of 1j or less (IIRC - it might not be 1j, but the restriction is based on the kinetic energy of the pellet).
There are several other methods used, a spring and some fancy thingamijig with an electromagnet are two systems that spring to mind.
FGD 135
Full bill details with summary and status info: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d108:H.R.4 077:
In Change the Law I point out that while the Constitution allows for Congress to enact copyright laws, it doesn't actually require it to do so. Copyright could be repealed tomorrow if we could get enough votes in Congress to do so.
If you don't think this could happen, consider that there are more Americans sharing files via peer-to-peer networks than voted for George Bush in 2000.
In my article I detail a number of steps you can take to bring about much needed copyright reform. My suggestions are that you:
-
Speak Out
-
Vote
-
Write to Your Elected Representatives
-
Donate Money to Political Campaigns
-
Support Campaign Finance Reform
-
Join the Electronic Frontier Foundation
-
Practice Civil Disobedience
If you feel as I do that more people need to read my article, you can help by linking to it from your website, weblog, or from other message boards.If you're a US citizen and 18 years of age or over, you can vote in November. But to do that, you must be registered to vote in your state. The voter registration deadline for most states is just a few days away, October 2nd for most states. So register today! Rock the Vote can help you with registration.
If you're a US citizen residing in a foreign country like me (I live in Canada), you can register to vote with the form you can obtain from the Federal Voting Assistance Program. You can register to vote in the last state you resided in in the US. But again, your registration must be received by your state by the deadline, so either express your application, or fax it, if a fax number is available.
(If you've never lived in the US, but one of your parents was a US citizen, then you're a US citizen too and you can register in the last state your parent resided in.)
If you want to make a campaign donation, a good choice would be Representative Rick Boucher. Rick Boucher has worked tirelessly for copyright reform, as you can see from his article Time to rewrite the DMCA.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
The bill changes the law from "willingly" to "knowingly". That's the opposite of what this writeup says. In law, that's a huge difference. Having a box checked by default is no longer an excuse under this law as knowingly doesn't require the person to take an assertive action or to intend to share files. They just have to know, or should know, that they are.
Sounds like we need a REAL ANONYMOUS p2p network now! They will never take us down! perhaps it is time to take another look at MUTE http://mute-net.sourceforge.net/!
Hmm, I must be your opposite. Lamar Smith has voted how I would, given what you have listed and the limited details included.
Just like Guns don't commit crimes, criminals do - no form of filesharing commits a crime, those who violate copyright law do.
This is ALREADY illegal. Why do we need more laws?
It is just congress doing nothing but wasting our tax dollars again.
Illegally "sharing" files wasn't a crime. It used to be a civil matter that could be dealt with by lawsuit in civil court. That is what the big recording companies are trying to change. They want to put the burden of prosecuting file sharing on the government so they can reduce their lawyer fees.
I think often that Americans' view of UK is as skewed as Brits' view of the US because our starting points are so different (I'm a Brit in LA, so I have *some* insight).
;-)
I don't think I ever saw a gun in England as a kid. In the 90's I saw my first Policeman with gun in Central London and that kinda freaked me a bit. Very few people in England feel their "rights" are being trodden on by not owning a gun. It just makes sense.
Whilst over here, being brought up in a culture where guns are everywhere, it's just too radical to try to envisage ever changing the relationship with guns to anywhere near what the British mentality is.
When I moved over here, my wife had a broken, unloaded gun in her apartment. I freaked and got her to get rid of it. I'm a bit more relaxed these days, but I still wouldn't ever let anyone bring a gun into our apartment.
The general paradigms* of the two societies are so different, I can't expect either to truly 'get' where the other is coming from.
Oo, what a rant, and no conclusion.
cLive
* a valid use of the word paradigm - for once.
-- Trinity in high heels carrying a whip: The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism
There needs to be a Slashdot story done on the following application that is breaking new ground on almost a daily basis .Soon there will be Jabber support for this application via Jeti Java Messenger http://jeti.jabberstudio.org/ .
Ants P2P Website
http://www.myjavaserver.com.nyud.net:8090/~gwren/h ome.jsp?page=custom&xmlName=ants
Ants P2P Sourceforge Page
http://sourceforge.net/projects/antsp2p/
Ants P2P Features
* Open Source Java implementation (GNU-GPL license).
* Multiple sources download.
* Torrent download from partial files.
* Automatic resume and sources research over the net.
* Search by hash, string and structured query.
* Embedded support for etherogeneus data types (not only arrays of bytes...).
* Completely Object-Oriented routing protocol.
* Point to Point secured comunication: DH(512)-AES(128)
* EndPoint to EndPoint secured comunication: DH(512)-AES(128)
* Automatic serverless peer dicovery procedure.
* IRC based peer discovery system.
* IRC embeded chat system.
* Full text search of indexed documents (pdf, html, txt, doc etc) -> QUERY REFERENCE.
* Distributed/Decentralized Search engine
* HTTP tunneling.
The programers answers to all those damn FAQ's
1) ANts supports point to point encription (AES 128 - DH 512)
2) ANts supports endpoint encryption ( " " )
3) ANts supports multipath routing for packets
4) ANts supports preferential connections (to create a fast backbone and
to let everyone going faster)
5) ANts supports PARTIAL DOWNLOADS and it has a unique and very
innovative system to do this (in theory it could be better than
bittorrent inspite of routing overhead and speedes reached on LAN showed
this!)
6) ANts supports AUTOSEARCH SOURCES function for active and interrupted
donwloads, if your donwload pass in the interrupted box this DOES NOT
MEAN that you have lost it... it is just paused and it will restart as
soon as possible!
7) ANts can find partial files through normal queries or queries by hash
since version 0.4.1 beta!
8) ANts supports FULL TEXT indexing and do searches over full file
content and FULL FILE PATH LOCATION.
9) ANts will (perhaps) support instant messaging integration
10) ANts IS NOT a simple IRC client
11) ANts relies on ad-hoc network theory as well as MUTE
12) ANts is strongly beta... this means it is not intended to be dummies
probed!
13) ANts releases ARE NOT backward compatible, so if you can't find
peers you probably has an old version! Use Java Web Start to be sure to
have te newest one.
14) ANts exploits IRC CTCP commands for initial ip exchange!
15) ANts supports internal ip exchage during and after your first
connection.
16) ANts queries are cripted in an asymmetric way. This means YOU are
the ONLY who can read you queries results. Everyone can read the query
string but this approach reduces drastically the potential power of a
node in trasit queries analisys.
17) ANts uses TWO consecutive ports (Like HTTP does) default are 4567 &
4568 but you can change the lower getting automatically changed the
highest. If you are NATTED you don't need two non consecutive ports,
cause these ports are used ONLY for incoming requests. Your own requests
are made on any free port, so you don't have to care, it can take a
little bit more to obtain your first connection if you are natted, but
ANts can work with natted peers as well as with unnatted ones without
ANY difference
17) Internal protocol is not harmed by nats and firewall... so once you
get a connection it doesn't make sense saying "I'm natted my queries are
not working!".
1