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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."
No.
Love,
Internet2
So they're asking to become a member of a limited group, for the sole purpose of suing other members of the group?
Can you say: "Hell No."?
Laws are designed to help us co-exist with each other, to respect one another and bring order and a set of rules to abide by so that we can pool in our interests and progress as a civilization.
People or "things" like RIAA and MPAA abuse these laws, which were written to help bring progress. They abuse them into filling their coffers with wealth that is meaningless when it does not really help anybody. More so when it happens at the expense of others, and at the expense of progress.
Internet2 is primarily designed for scientists and research organizations, to pool in their resources and create a powerful network to facilitate better research interaction. Experimental particle physics data goes over several gigabytes, cosmic ray measurements are tremendously huge, gene databanks are big -- this is the kind of information that these networks are built for. Sure, some kid may be misusing them, but the percentage of people doing this would be far too less to be of any consequence (it has come down from 30% to 7%).
People like MPAA just will abuse the system, bring in more bureacracy, more rules and more regulations that will hinder how genuine users will use the system. They will wrap it nice and dandy around money and laws, and buy out our corrupt politicians who will dance to the jingle of wealth. And in the progress, they just will affect real people doing real work.
They are dragging everyone to the level of technology that they can control. Rather than adapt to the new technologies and grow with it, they try and exert their control by legal battles and money. Why can't they admit and move on to an era where their policies and principles encourage the technology, rather than deter it?
I sincerely hope that they are not let on board the Internet2. And I sincerely hope that one day our society is rid of parasitic savages of the likes of MPAA and RIAA. They're the scum and a disgrace of our civilization. They are the true deterrents to progress.
Internet2 was designed (and funded) for use by universities and educational facilities, as well as governments so they could "[develop] and [deploy] advanced network applications and technology, accelerating the creation of tomorrow's Internet." It doesn't really seem as though the MPAA has anything to bring to the table. Their membership application should be denied on that basis alone. Plus the fact that there is simply no evidence that there is anything untoward happening on Internet2, just that it's *possible*.
Get a life, MPAA.
There are many good reasons for the MPAA to join the Internet2 research project. Huge bandwidth, multicasting architecture, realtime multimedia: all these features might have a legitimate association excited about the future, and their role in bringing better service to their members and market. Instead, the MPAA has become interested only as a cop, not in contributing to the development of the technology itself. They'll just wait for Internet2 to be developed, at great expense in time, money and inspiration, by others - then they'll eventually cash in. Their only attitude towards the future is fear, emboldened a bit by greed.
The great lesson here is that Internet2 is only a litmus test. The MPAA acts exactly the same way on Internet1, and everywhere else. We're just witnesses to the miracle of the birth of their racket on Internet2. Burn, Hollywood, Burn (our should I say "Stream").
--
make install -not war
If the MPAA is allowed on Internet2, where else will they want access to? Your college's intranet? Your corporate network? ISP's LAN networks? There are many other fast network connections where piracy could take place.
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
While it seems ridiculous to include MPAA as a member of Internet2 under the pretense that it is helping research, we still cannot let Internet2 turn into a free-for-all of file sharing and illegal movie swapping. There is a reason that sharing copyrighted material is illegal. Intellectual property forms that basis of our society, and certainly it is critical for research institutions that "trade" in information. Being a member of Internet2 should be a privilege, and one with responsibilities taken seriously. Governments and universities are spending millions to get their systems on I2, and it is not the public's job to finance piracy. It would be terrible to see I2, which is quite powerful now, turn into another (regular) internet filled with all its trash, and with all its bandwidth consumed sharing movies.
That said, I cannot support commercialization of Internet2 or an invasion of it by MPAA just to allow them to sue I2 users. But in order to keep internet2 aligned with its true goals of promoting research, we will have to give some governing council the authority (even imperative) to fight this piracy and THEN take it to the respective IP owners like MPAA. I think it is silly that the burden should fall on MPAA to regulate such things, and it is because of this lunatic system that we are forced to deal with lawsuits from companies who snoop at file sharers. Pirating movies should have a penalty similar to stealing them physically: go to the city court and explain yourself in front of a judge your crime and regret, rather than dealing with expensive lawyers and publicized cases as is happening now.
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
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...
I just got through reading the latest New York Times magazine which featured many long and detailed articles on DVD and the movie industry.
The amount of disturbance to the industry caused or even potentially caused by Div-X converting and downloading is so tiny compared to the amount of resources and ill-will generated by their heavy-handed response to this so-called threat that one must come to the conclusion that the MPAA leadership is mentally unbalanced.
They are acting like the people who wash their hands ten times after touching a public door handle. They just aren't being rational.
The NYT Magazine articles mentioned that each DVD sale of $15 brings $9.00 of pure profit to the film studios that they don't have to share with anyone. This is the source of all the profit in the film industry. This is the fuel that is making the current entertainment boom possible.
Hundreds of millions of DVDs are sold each year and billions will be sold in the coming years.
Why are they so obsessed with ten thousand or so people sharing rotgut quality Div-X copies? Especially when each one takes several hours to download?
Even 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.
Nothing about this makes any sense.
It will probably just fade as embarrassment when the MPAA actually examines the real numbers involved and comes to its senses.
The following two quotes are from the MPAA's own 11/11/04 press release:
Must be terrible...the industry is losing $3.5 BILLION a year in revenue? They must just be drowning in the losses!
Wait a moment. This industry, suffering these massive, crippling losses from piracy, is doing BETTER than most sectors of the economy?
Here's the problem, and that is that the MPAA's figure is grossly inflated. Effectively, the MPAA figures EVERY download as a lost sale. (The MPAA's figures on downloading are also inflated, but that's pretty technical and better left to someone who can explain it comprehensively.) However, even provided that they're correct, they presume that EVERYONE who downloads a movie would have, instead, gone to a theater or bought a DVD in place of every download. (They also assume that these people don't do that anyway, and look at a lower-quality download to decide if the movie is WORTH seeing or purchasing on DVD.) This is, quite simply, not true.
It's time for the **AA's to quit whining. DESPITE widespread downloading, and bad business practices that turn customers away in large numbers, their revenues and market shares grow daily. Given that, it's hard for them to claim that downloads, whether on Internet1 or 2, are threatening to put them out of business.
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
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.