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Iceland and USA Feel the Copyright Industry's Wrath
spellraiser writes "Iceland's Internet traffic saw a substantial decrease this week as police raided the homes of 12 individuals suspected of sharing massive amounts of copyrighted material over a private, local DC++ hub that was infiltrated by SMAIS, the Association of film right holders in Iceland. The people who were raided were questioned by the police, and had computer equipment confiscated. It is unclear at this point what their fate is, but there is a distinct possibility might face charges." And in the U.S., an anonymous reader writes "The Recording Industry Association of America strikes again with yet another round of lawsuits. Jon Newston over at P2Pnet.net doesn't hold back anything in his great commentary on it today. Best quote 'It's almost as if having lost its bitterly fought case against the p2p application owners and failed in its many obvious (and expensive) attempts to disrupt the p2p networks, the music industry is now determined to vent its wrath on helpless men, women and children who can't hope to stand up to it with its tremendous political and financial power.'"
Osama is lucky he doesn't share videos over the Internet or he would awaken the RIAA Rebellious Viva La Resistance Militia capturing him in 24 hours.
When the RIAA went after P2P software we all screamed "don't attack software that has legitimate uses, go after the people actually breaking the law." Now that they're doing just that everyone's still pitching a fit.
No, he means that they're helpless to pay lawyers thousands of dollars to defend them whether they are guilty or not. Even if they have done nothing wrong, it is cheaper to just settle than pay to fight it.
The RIAA just doesn't get it. Continuing with these lawsuits is not going to do anything but build another revenue stream for them. At this point, one has to wonder if they realize that and if that is all they are hoping for.
You see, the market has already spoken and it has spoken loudly. An entirely new paradigm of music distribution has evolved and it isn't going to regress to the way it was in the previous generation. The RIAA had their chance to give people a product they want online and to use the new mechanism of distribution for profit. It failed to do so, thus other non-sanctioned methods entered the space to fill the void.
What will happen now is one of two things. Either the RIAA realizes that they can't have it their way and comes up with an acceptable online offer that will attract customers, or they will continue to spin their wheels in vain and alienate their customers who will in turn seek other outlets from which to obtain music.
Back when the RIAA was focused on Napster and P2P, didn't we say they shouldn't be focusing on the technology, but on those who misuse it?
Now they're doing just that - focusing on the people, not the technology. Their methods could be a lot better (they should focus on people who share a lot, not anyone with an MP3 with a suspicious name), but they *are* on the right track.
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
GeneralEmergency
A quote from a German Colonel made during operation Barbarossa:
"The German Army in fighting Russia is like an elephant attacking a host of ants. The elephant will kill thousands, perhaps even millions, of ants, but in the end their numbers will overcome him and he will be eaten to the bone."
So it is with the *AA. Eventually they will fail out of the sheer weight of numbers they are fighting.
My rights don't need management.
DC++ hubs were started in Iceland because we usually have to pay extra for foreign downloads so people started sharing stuff between them for free.
When they raided the 12 guys (and seized 11 terabytes of data) all the dc servers were shut down and immediatly MRTG graphs clearly showed about a 50-60% traffic between domestic connections.
We have long heen proud to say that we have very high percentage of net users here, about 95% (number pulled out of ass) of the country has the internet and DC isn't the only way Icelanders share copyrighted stuff.
In fact most people just get cd's from friends who download from DC or someother p2p sharing app.
So in our case most of the population is rampantly breaking copyright laws all the time and suddenly because of complaints from SMAIS 12 random guys are arrested and two of them held for 24 hours.
2 years in prison is the maximum punishment for a crime like this while murder is maximum 16 years and if anyone is convicted for a copyright violation in Iceland we are going to have to put the entire nation behind bars.
I'm personally disgusted that our government is even thinking about putting profits of american companies above the well being of the people it is supposed to serve.
Hitler's in the fridge.
However, the Register article was slightly misleading in implying that the traffic reduction was directly caused by the raid - it was more likely caused by the media coverage of the raid.
Basically, Joe Sixpacks all over the country read about the raids in their morning papers, paniced and turned off all their P2P apps. This includes the managers of the other DC++ hubs.
Traffic still hasn't returned to "normal".
Host your own websites, anywhere!
Downloads which are local to Iceland are "free" (included in the lease of the ADSL line), but international downloads are rather expensive.
This is exactly why DC++, with it's centralized hub-based architecture was so popular in Iceland. Anybody who understood both technology and copyright law knew better than to connect to them though, for exactly the same reasons.
Host your own websites, anywhere!
Iceland might consider becoming the world's library since the other aspects of their financials are changing. The fishing is not as good as it used to be and trans-Atlantic airplanes don't need refueling stops anymore.
So why not just become the center of world trading in 'copyrighted' materials and take a microcharge of each trade? They'll get kicked out of the EU? Hardly likely. Brussells can be really boring on a small Eurocrat's salary and full-price media product can be mighty expensive (and will definitely be going up in price).
Better Iceland become the world's library than Vanuatuu, because that little island could just disappear in a typhoon and take all the servers and storage with it.
Maybe, you say, no one should be the world's center of 'illegal' trade in 'copyrighted' materials. Nonsense, that is a spin fantasy of the media giants who need inexpensive unofficial downloads as much as they need full-service 'all-fees-paid' fully-legit product sales.
When five companies control most of the world's media, it doesn't really matter if people buy the product at full copyright-paid Western prices or discounted 'pirate' prices. Either way they get all the money eventually because they are the only game in town. It's more important that people consume ever-increasing amounts of corporate media product. The money will get back to them. That isn't the case when there are thousands of small and medium-sized media companies globally. However that situation no longer exists and the media executives should revise their overall concept of how this new global framework works.
In a sense the reference in the parent to secret underground terrorist religious organizations is apt because these groups are the primary competition to the global media companies, especially in the developing world where 2/3rds of the population is under the age of 25. Hollywood and religious fanaticism don't mix all that well in the long term. Both compete for the leisure time attention span (and the loyalities) of the billions of new young people. In America, corporate Hollywood won because in the current political alliance between the major corporations and the religious right the religious community has always been the weaker partner.
"This would remove all financial motivation for most worldly pursuits. Why write software? Why write a book? Why create music?"
:("
;).
Information would be a pure public good then. Like paying for national defense, you couldn't privately deliver such a good since people could enjoy national defense by allowing their neighbours to pay for the army. Everyone could similarily mooch though, thus a pure public good is necessarily provided for by government.
It is possible, if people do not want to create content although I see open source software alive and well without such incentives, government too can provide incentives, as they do with other pure public goods mentioned.
How would such a system work? Who knows, although it is rapidly looking better in comparison to the alternative DRM future, police state and tech phobic RIAA corporations' view.
"Never gonna happen, though...
Um, simple majority is easy enough. Go for it
3dinfo@maficstudios.com