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MPAA Looks to Sniff Internet2 Traffic for Sharers
Danathar writes "It looks like the MPAA is pretty scared that Internet2 users are able to trade movies at high speed without them being able to know what's being traded, since you have to be a member of the Internet2 network to have a connection. As a result, they are asking to become a member."
without them being able to know what's being traded
So, they want to know WHAT's being traded. Does this mean that they're trying to establish some new rating system based on how many people pirate their movies? I mean, shouldn't they be trying to STOP file-swappers instead of just looking at what they're swapping?
So just because they think swapping is going on they should automatically get access?
Bullshit
so if nasa playes music I wrote on the next space shuttle, can I tag along to make sure they dont abuse it?
I think if it's private, you having a copyright means nothing... can I get access to all private property in my area to make sure no one with portable cd players is listening to my music illegally?
MPAA Shut your mouth, and keep out
Sometimes the majority just means all the morons are on the same side.
.. someone were tuning a remote deep space dish, and accidently hit upon a video stream from a commercial satellite... would they end up being sued?
In any case, if someone can transfer the contents of a DVD within 5 seconds, they they would probably figure out some way of converting the files into something less noticable than an obvious archive of video and audio files. Convert everything into a tar file and convert that into something less noticable like floating-point volume data.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
from TFA:
"At least one studio, Warner Bros., is already a member of the group, as is the Napster online music service. The two groups have been discussing potential collaboration since."
Looks like they already have the key. Else somebody forgot to BOLT WB and Napster out.
All it's going to do is get a bunch of researchers pissed off to the point where they'll set up honeypots filled with all sorts of mis-named files.
In any battle of wits between the MPAA/RIAA and researchers, it doesn't take much brains to figure out who will win. We're not talking about a bunch of AOL-ing grandmas here.
I've got about 300 DVDs, and I probably buy at least 1 per week (if not more when I visit the Wal Mart $5 bin). It concerns me that they focus so much attention on the few who download movies. I would prefer that they.....say.....spend that money to develop enhancements to the DVD experience (something that isn't included in an encoded pirate version of any particular movie).
,like cockroaches, will ALWAYS exist) could be better spent to enhance their own industry....or (more likely to peak the interest of the MPAA) line their own pockets. Litigation isn't cheap, nor is computer/network forensics.
/. crowd would stop hating us"
There have been times that I've downloaded a movie from the Internet, enjoyed it, and purchased that movie from a local store so that I could watch it in higher quality and benefit from the additional DVD features (Southpark Movie). Other times, I've realized that the time spent downloading a particular movie (Blair Witch Project) could've been better spent playing solitaire.
Sometime soon, I hope, the MPAA will realize that the money they spend sniffing out pirates (who
Somewhere, there is an MPAA representitive reading this article who is thinking "Hmmm....he's right...I could get a raise and people like Trey Parker and the
"Lame" - Galaxar
The DMCA was used to threaten Ed Felton and his students into silence when they was about to present a research paper on the weaknesses of digital music security. The case sent a chilling tidal wave through the educational system.
With the spirit that Internet2 is designed for educational and research purposes and the precedent set by the Felton case, Hollywood's membership request should be denied in about three nanoseconds.
They are not welcome.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
I guess Bush was right, the "Internets" do exist! But this never came up during the elections! figures....
Internet2 is a hotbed of IPv6 as well.
:-)
Wait till they get a taste of "privacy enhanced addresses" on IPv6 and find out some of those machines can change their addresses at random and not be tracable (only tracable to the subnet and no address server required or logs kept). They'll have to track'm down by MAC address (assuming no one is spoofing and morphing MAC addresses - how long will that take?) and wire by wire, switch by switch, once they're on the subnet itself, with the "cooperation" of the local techie staff. That's not even counting the really wicked stuff you can pull with multiple addresses (thousands, if you like) and different client and server addresses). BitTorrent already has IPv6 patches and some v6 BitTorrent seeders and servers.
Hmmm...
Internet2 + High Bandwidth + IPv6 + Privacy Enhanced addresses = good time to buy in stock in antacid vendors.
The MPAA and RIAA and going to make for a run on their wares...
Oh... This is gonna be good...
How far will they take this?
Then they'll flood it with their broken files, and inevitably end up suing each other over some similar file names, most likely movie soundtracks. 2 birds with one stone.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
You know, it is funny, because I just started downloading music, and I use the I2HUB thing since I am at Carnegie Mellon, and it is great stuff. It is a shame that I did not get into this illegal stuff earlier. And now, like five days after I started doing it, there is a possibility that I might get sued. Oh, well. I am not addicted yet.
Yeah, I download "illegal" stuff. But I pay much more for stuff that I actually like.
Why? Because as the consumer, I've the right to choose what I like, before buying. And the new medium lets me exercise that right - to see if the content is worth buying.
If it's not, I simply do not buy it. That is why it hurts the **AAs - they cannot shove any jackshit down anybody's throat, without a choice.
I download 20 songs off an album, and realize that there is just ONE good song in that album. Why should I pay $25 for that one song? Instead, I'll just get it off iMusic. If it's not available, I'll just keep that one song that I like.
There are some bands, of which I own _every_ single album. Why? Because they make good music, and I would not want to cheat them.
Remember - give the consumer good quality and do not try to rip them off. And they will be happy to help out the artists.
Who said anything about a battle of wits?
Have the MPAA, RIAA, or even Nintendo every used conscious thought in these decisions? Nintendo sent a C&D to suicidegirls.com because one of their subscribers wrote that Zelda was his favorite game. They're retarded. A battle of wits does not apply.
Filling up a computer with files pretending to be movies will only cause more headaches for the researchers having to answer to a bunch of C&Ds because their grocery list was saved in a file called "the_matrix.avi". Sure, it costs them some lawyer dollars, but they can make it up by releasing an "Unrated" DVD of Elf.
Letting the MPAA loose on a research network is not a good thing. We don't need a Broadcast Flag written into the Internet2 networking protocols.
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I wonder when the last time you downloaded and watched a movie was.
sharing rotgut quality Div-X copies
VHS sufficed for rather a long time, and pretty much anything you download is better quality than that. I can't usually tell a great difference between a DVD and what I download.
each one takes several hours to download
Several hours of downloading is possible, depending on your connection - this article is about internet 2, though, where a few hours is pretty unlikely. But so what? Starting a download is less of a hassle than finding a store with the movie so you can buy it. It's probably about the same amount of hassle as ordering it from amazon, but that certainly exceeds the few-hour delay.
at minimum wage the wages for the amount of time spent downloading a stupid DivX is more than the price of a pristine DVD of the same title
I have no idea what sort of point you're trying to make here. If you know of a job that pays minimum wage for the equivalent of finding a movie and downloading it, tell me where that is. Downloading is not a particularly user-interactive or time-consuming process, after maybe two minutes initially getting it going.
Ten thousand or so people (I don't know if that figure is accurate or where you got it, but I'll go with it for now) is hardly insignifact. And I suspect that number is not shrinking.
I'm not a fan of the MPAA, but it seems like you're saying they're concerned with a non-issue, which simply isn't true. This is a problem for them, and a growing one. (How they should be dealing with it, and how that differs from what they are doing, is a matter I won't go into.)
We get complaints every once in a while from the MPAA or their lackeys, claiming that some host on our network is sharing copies of movies -- The Matrix, Harry Potter, Star Wars: Revenge of George Lucas's Crack Pipe ... you name it.
Here's the funny thing: they're all wrong.
Every one of them. Wrong. I have never received an MPAA copyright-violation complaint that even had the slightest chance of being correct.
Here's how I know: We have a ridiculously big IP allocation, several times more than we need. Most IP addresses in our space are not used, and have never been used. Like, say, X.Y.1.1, or X.Y.64.64. And yet it is for addresses just such as these that we get complaints.
As far as I can tell, the cause of it is that shitheads somewhere in the world abuse our IP addresses behind NAT, instead of using RFC1918 private addresses as God intended them to. And just like with SIP or any other protocol that uses IP addresses in the protocol level to name hosts, file-trading protocols leak NAT addresses.
The abused addresses get published onto file-trading networks as places to get files. The MPAA's drones pick up these leads, and -- without checking -- give them full credence, and fire off complaints to us. They do not even bother to ping the host and listen for our router screaming back, "You blithering fool, there's no such host. There isn't even such a network!"
Any network operator who still gives any credence to these complaints is a fool. They are all wrong. Even if I got one for an address that actually had a host on it -- or, at least, had ever had a host on it! -- I expect it would also be wrong.
Every once in a while I get a complaint from these losers on a slow day, when I have some spare time and am feeling bored in the office. So I put on my slowest, laziest "I've been working a cushy, do-nothing public-sector IT management job for years, I don't know my ass from a router" tone of voice and phone up the MPAA lackey whose number's on the complaint.
I'm oh so very concerned. There's a pirate on our network? Is he breaking the law? What's his computer? You know -- what's his computer? Yeah, I mean, his eye pee. How do I connect to his eye pee and prove he's got these files? Do I need kazz-uh to do that? Wait ... can I do that legally, or am I breaking the Constitution? What's a pee-to-pee anyway, is that some kind of sex perversion?
You get the idea. I thoroughly encourage every other research and educational site network operator to do the very same. Waste their time. Get your stupid out. Stall 'em, stymie 'em, but be very concerned that you don't want any of them Internet pirates pirating your Internet. (Or ask if they know where to find hot lesbian porn.) Most important -- keep the stooge on the line; the MPAA is probably paying him hourly.
The MPAA affiliates' products have a 150% PROFIT margin. That's insane. Not even Apple does that. Halliburton probably doesn't even get that rate of return on their Iraq "deals". Its highway robbery.
If I were making 150% profits on basically nothing (the movie's already been made, its just up to some minimum wagers to keep the DVD presses loaded), I'd be doing everything in my power to protect that business model. $6 for manufacturing, marketing, distributing, and store profits. $9 into the pocket. You can't beat that.
But yes, to anyone not reaping the ridiculous benefits, it makes no sense whatsoever. I keep hoping this stuff will eventually come back to haunt them, but with the government on their side I don't see how it can.
On the other hand, technology will only keep improving. What we have now is only the beginning. It will improve way beyond bandwidth increases. Eventually you'll be able to watch "any movie ever made in any language" (I think that's how the Qwest commercial went...) on demand. The MPAA just has to decide whether or not they want to be a part of it.
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Don't get me wrong. I think that the MPAA is doing some really terrible things. I don't want to get sued for downloading a movie that I own a license for but is damaged. And I don't think that suing a customer base is a good way to engender good-will. But the consituent corporations of the MPAA are only interested in profit. And intimidating those who use their products without paying for them may actually be a smart strategy to protect those profits.
Except it's already backfired on them with me. Personally I find most of what Hollywood puts out trash so I'd grab a copy of a movie to see if it was worthwhile, if it did I'd go catch it in the theater and buy the DVD on release. Over the last 2-3 years I've watched in the theater and bought more movies than in the 10 previous years combined.Of course now I won't bother, unless it's something I know I'll like I'll skip the theater altogether. I might rent a DVD occasionally of something I'm curious about, but frankly I doubt it. I'm not interested in supporting an industry who acts like the MPAA is now. I stopped buying US music about five years ago because of the way the RIAA member companies act (in particular how they treat their artists). I no longer even listen to the radio either, I have a CD/Mp3 player and plenty of import Jpop and Anime CDs to listen to.
From my perspective the MPAA's committing suicide, they just don't know it yet. This is especially nuts in the face of the explosion of the low-priced DVD market. They're putting out back catalog and crap stuff at $5.50 and even $1 and people are buying it like it's going out of style. Sure they don't make as much profit per disc on those but they also don't have to spend a dime promoting them. That's bonus money to them, most of this stuff wouldn't have been put out on DVD before, it was just gathering dust in vaults.
We all know that P2P networks violate copyright on Internet Classic. Internet2 currently offers better bandwidth and some element of privacy (due to membership being exclusive)...does anyone here really think that it's not contributing to copyright violation? There are apps like i2hub that are Internet2-specific P2P clients. We all know there are copyrighted works being traded on i2hub. And I'm sure all the folks doing file-sharing on Internet Classic would rather be doing so with the resources available on Internet2 if they only could.
The MPAA/RIAA (or the FBI/police/courts) should be able to investigate. If there was a university-only trucking company that we all knew was transporting stolen goods*, would we all be claiming they were unsearchable, simply because the stores being stolen from aren't a "member" of the trucking company?
Personally, I think the MPAA/RIAA should get a court order for this, not unlike a search warrant.
Lets not let our shared animosity toward the MPAA/RIAA cause us to actually endorse and defend piracy. I wouldn't be surprised if the software I develop for a living was being distributed on Internet2, and for me (or the company I work for) to be completley unable to stop that simply because we're not an "academic or research" company is absurd.
* Yes, I know, copyright violation isn't stealing, but that doesn't hurt the analogy.
If this doesn't work, the MPAA can be expected to try to force the schools to simply prevent residential networks from using Internet2. Nobody is doing research from Resnet. One of my jobs is to perform network monitoring to establish throttling guidelines on my university's network. We have found that during peak hours, 26 percent of all traffic is porn-related and practically all of the rest is P2P. There is no good reason for these people to have Internet2 access. The traffic on faculty/staff systems is monitored and we do make sure that unusual amounts of traffic created by those systems is legitimate. We throttle several ports on Resnet, but it's like the wild west in terms of content. It will be interesting to see what happens.
You know, I've (mostly) avoided getting copyrighted stuff off of i2hub because I thought there would be a chance I'd get caught. Now that I know otherwise, well, I'll have to get another HDD.... Thanks for the tip MPAA!
And here's why: even if the I2 people tell the MPAA to go fuck themselves, the MPAA will likely start bribing college kids at member universities to install their monitoring software.
$9.00 of pure profit?
No, you idiot. Movies do not MAKE money. See, that's the oddball thing about the MPAA and all their claimes about losses.
The movie industry does creative accounting to ensure that virtually every movie made loses money (yes, even the blockbusters) so they can take advantage of the loss at tax time. No matter how much a movie "makes" at the box office or on DVD, it will be a money-loser when the time comes to pay Uncle IRS.
So when the MPAA comes along and claims that file sharing is losing them money, hey, they should celebrate! It's making it that much easier for studios to claim their losses as a tax deduction.
If their bid to get a direct I2 connection fails. They could just buy a member university.
Isn't this best left to the authorities? When did the MPAA think that it was their job to be police? Maybe if they came up with better products, better pricing, different marketing ploys, piracy might go away?
-- No sig for you!
Was going to mod you, but then wasn't sure whether you should be a troll, flamebait, insightful or interesting, so thought I'd reply instead. :-)
It may (or may not) only be in those heads, but it's a good bet that they do sincerely believe it.
All the usual kindergarten statistical mistakes frequently get made by both sides in this debate, particularly confusing correlation with causation. However, the RIAA execs can see the same studies as everyone else. Contrary to popular opinion in some parts, they probably didn't get to those positions by being stupid either, so they're going to be well aware of the negative PR value of their legal campaigns, and the costs of all the lawyers' time to push them.
Now, if those execs could see that allowing on-line distribution would really make them more money, or had a negligible effect on sales, they would be promoting it or ignoring it. They are trying to maximise their organisations' profits, and you don't do that by spending who knows how much on legal battles that don't help you, or by annoying significant fractions of your potential customer base without good cause.
Hence, whatever those of you who rip music illegally may choose to believe in order to justify breaking the law, it's a good bet that the RIAA execs really do believe that the illegal song-swapping is hurting their business.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Well as it seems to be time for another Slashdot "*AA debate" I'd just like to add my tuppence worth to the debate.... as in the future there won't be just "the internet" ( or indeed "the internets") to contend with.
What about networks of bluetooth enabled phones/portable MP3 players/car stereos that each hold several gigabytes of music and which can automatically connect to each other ?
You want a particular song ? You want all songs by a particular artist ? You're interested in a particular genre ?
Put search criteria on your devices wanted list and when you come into proximity of another devices that holds what you're looking for it transfers it over while you walk past/are drinking at a bar/are in a club/are sitting in a traffic jam etc. etc.
"Walkabout" short range P2P.
And for added social interaction then if someone elses device show the same sorts of preferences as yours it give both of you a little beep so you can start up a conversation.
Also how about "slightly more powerful than today" local neighbourhood wireless LANS ? Even if you're not part of the full time local network their might be guest channels/log ins/local broadcsts so when you drive through a neighbourhood you join in the local "neighbourhood swap shop".
But the best is yet to come. How about when storage capacity is available on something approaching, or even on, a nano scale ?
Maybe someone will create a "smart sticker" which is slightly thicker than todays regular sticker but which holds several gigbytes of data plus a small, solar powered, short range, transmitter.
Pop that up in a public place and everyone passing can pick up what's on it (so long as they have a compatible device). Guerilla marketing at it's best and a killer way to advertise new bands "come see us at club x on x and here are a few full tunes to whet your appetitie"
Who knows maybe this "fantasy tech" could even be incorporated into clothing, beer cans, grocery cartons, bricks... you name it.
So these *AA imbeciles can legislate, bribe and sue until they're blue in the face but they are simply pissing in the wind.
If they think they're having a hard time with todays technology, then think what the future will bring.
Sky subscribers are morons. They pay to be advertised at !
As a matter of fact, they are perfectly legal. The reason for this is that copyright law differs in different countries. Here in Russia there is an "anti-RIAA". This anti-RIAA is ROMS - "Russian society for multimedia and digital networks". By law they hold certain rights to all works produced and sold in Russia, which rights can be licensed from them for a very modest fee (determined by law and they can't refuse, basically).
:) Unfortunately, the current trend for "harmonisation" and forcing every country to agree to WTO rules or "fuck off and die" means that in the future there will be less such freedom. :( But while it lasts, enjoy it!
Legal info on AllofMP3 and MP3Search says just that - the music is licensed according to Russian laws from copyright holders. It is perfectly legal as long as you have the right to download content from other countries. IANAL, but I think it is legal - just as legal as ordering a movie abroad, which was not released in the USA (or even after it was released in the USA). There might be some export legislation, but in general I think it is legal.
Another interesting fact is that all content produced (anywhere) before 1973 is public domain in Russia. So if you were to set up a free (or for a nominal fee to cover the bandwidth) download service in Russia with Disney movies made before 1973, you would manage to really piss off Disney, but they won't be able to do anything.
P.S. FUD spread by some people that these Russian servers would steal your credit card numbers and do other scary stuff is completely unfounded (like all good FUD should be).
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.