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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.
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?