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Illegal File Trading Draws Two P2P Raids In Europe
had3l writes "Police in Finland raided the operation of a popular Bit Torrent site and arrested 34 people, 30 of which were volunteers who helped moderate the site. This comes right after the MPAA reported that it would start suing tracker servers." An anonymous reader points to a story (currently at the top of RespectP2P.org's homepage) about the raid yesterday morning of Dutch eDonkey sites Releases4u and Shareconnector.
... by having moderators. If you've got moderators, and they're making absolutely no attempt to curtail copyright infringement, you're pretty much asking to be considered an accessory. No "common carrier" defense if you're actively deleting and moderating your sites content.
Idiots.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
PeerGuardian helps in the fashion that it blocks all the _HUNDREDS_ of incoming connections the finnish police and various trade organizations have been trying. Yes, on my computer.
Also, there's a rumor going about that the finnish police have actually made backdoors into a lot of peoples computers by infecting the torrents that were available on finreactor. Quite illegal, if true. That's it for the ethics of the police I guess.
MPAA did not win a single court case in 2004. Groskter was found to be legal, and there are a number of previous rulings that show that providing technology that enables people to share files does not constitute breach of copyright! The RIAA and ARIA (Australian equiv.) are seeing this now in their Kazaa case currently underway in Australia - and if a case can not be proven against Kazaa (which still has some elements of centralisation that could provide Kazaa with a way to 'filter' or 'block' copyright material) then the chances of being able to find that a simple website with links to trackers (which themselves are not a copyright infringement either - just a 'pointer') are guilty of copyright violation are almost zero.
Time for the record labels and movie studios to wake up to themselves - they are alienating a large part of their support base. All the expenses of lobbying various governments around the world, and the associated legal fees around every case is being paid for, and funded by consumers who purchase their records!
They should listen to the overpaid Robbie Williams, who said something along the lines of "I dont care, I am rich, if yo uwant my music, just download it!" (He said this in 2002 - I can't find an online source).
Has anyone actually fought the RIAA cases, or have they all been settled out of court? If I understand it correctly, they are suing people who are sharing files, not those downloading, and they are asking for $x per file shared. Wouldn't it be valid to ask them to prove how long you spent connected to the p2p network and then multiply this by your available bandwidth. That way you may be able to argue that you could only possibly have uploaded a certain number of songs, regardless of how many you were sharing. Sure, you may still end up paying a couple of hundred bucks, but that's far better than the few thousand I've read about.
that /. kicked around last week about "how could
you prosecute BitTorrent since no one person is
holding or moving whole copies of the copied works?"
I have to ask, since the article points out that police are also striking at eDonkey servers, when the cops are going to be knocking on my door. My son and half the kids in his dorm are swapping/swiping movies like crazy with eDonkey. All of a sudden it looks like I have to get knowledgable about my liability when he brings his computer home for the Christmas break.
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
It provides the proper de-centralizing stimulus.
What if George Washington had been captured and executed by the British? Was the Revolution de-centralized enough to survive his loss? Is America's democracy de-centralized enough to survive the poor quality of Diebolds voting machines?
Stuff like this will benefit change, not only in America, but in China and Iran, as well. In those countries, the kids in the universities might be apprehended and clubbed to death by the Moral Police, at any given minute. But with sufficient security and de-centralization, they can still communicate with the outside world. Enough to possibly, one day, bring decent living conditions to the culture of power which uses and discards people as you would a tool.
This is a good thing. Good changes have never come easy, or with a consensus.
I'm still waiting for Palladium. I think that will be one of the best changes, for the good of all Humanity.
In 100 years, when people read about these events in history books rather than newspapers, it's going to seem totally insane... our police forces chasing after and persecuting people for what essentially amounts to the distribution of ideas. If only the rest of the world could see it from a historical perspective. When we look back on the witch hunts of a few hundred years ago, we wonder how the masses ever got themselves set on such a self-destructive course, and why they allowed it to continue for so long. But when you're caught up in the drama of it all, it's sometimes hard to imagine life in any other way. So how long will we allow these witch hunts over intellectual property to continue?
What are YOU doing to protect P2P?
Let's face it, there are a lot of people out there who are using P2P to illegally acquire and distribute copywrited materials.
P2P is being threatened, not only by corporate executives and ignorant congresscritters, but by people who abuse the technology. P2P will be outlawed outright unless the legitimate users of P2P networks start policing their own.
How? Well that's a good question. A willingness to admit that there is a problem would be a good place to start.
There's a Mercedes gap too. I want one and can't afford one, but it's not government's job to do anything about it.
I always thought something was worth whatever you actually paid for it.
Close, but not quite correct. It is worth as much as you would be _willing_ to pay for it. So the actual loss is much lower, but certainly not zero.
Assume 1 million songs get illegally downloaded that would usually cost $1, but the downloaders would be willing to pay at most $0.5. Then the loss is $500k, not zero or $1M.
Our law currently puts the line at 'goal of financial gain'.
Doesn't matter if one actually gained something, but if something is done with an expectation of getting financial gain out of it, then it's a much more serious crime.
Asking for donations alone might be very borderline, but in this case those donations also gave you perks (I *think* better status as a downloader even if you just leeched. not sure, wasn't an user. based on hearsay).
In which case prosecuters can easily spin it as at a thinly veiled attempt to hide 'pay us for (more / easier to get) warez' deal, which definitely means that the admins had in mind a goal of financial gain. Doesn't matter where the money was supposed to be used (hosting fees). Admins got money. 'Financial Gain'. Tough.
There is actually a test case from way back (the time of BBSes. You know - modems - 14.4K HST tech) where a BBS was selling 'bytes' (pay money, get to leech X bytes of latest warez). I don't have idea of the exact resolution of the case, but I do know the sysop of that BBS at least ended up paying sizeable reparations to the companies who sued him (Adobe, MS, Autodesk etc.. the usual BSA members). I don't think he ended up in the jail, but it sure made a huge hole in his pocket. And that case was clearly 'with goal of financial gain'.
It should also be noted that nobody as far as I know has been prosecuted in Finland for piracy unless;
- There is selling / money involved (for example, selling bootleg CDs/DVDs)
or
- Pirated software was used by a company for business use (Say, a company using pirated AutoCAD to save money)