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BSA Reacts to 'New' BitTorrent
An anonymous reader writes "It seems the Business Software Alliance isn't afraid of the new, tracker-less BitTorrent beta. While it concedes it will have to 'regroup', Tarun Sawney, BSA Asia anti-piracy director, said BitTorrent files could still be identified. 'BSA has traditionally sought the assistance of those hosting the actual pirated files. With or without the tracker sites, someone still hosts the infringing files.'"
Are but the torrent files do they actually in fringe copyright??
BitTorrent was never designed to anonymize. It was designed to distribute the load of hosting a file. A lot of hoopla about a non-issue.
They're right, this changes nothing. At the end of the day someone is still hosting the infringing material, and they're in the firing line.
Now they are just going to go straight to the lists of people who are downloading and randomly pick IP addresses to follow.
Utinam me logica falsa tuam philosophiam totam suffodiant.
These BSA dictators are paying off politicians to create corporate feudalism. Just like it was in the Middle Ages where private power, those with the most gold, OWNED the humans beings within a certain geographical area, so too has the BSA BOUGHT a part of us. For those BSA funders, and politicians who have enabled this, this is treason, IMHO.
All the CEOs who fund the BSA should be tried for treason, and if convicted, placed in the electric chair, and electrocuted to death. And do the same for their lapdog politicians who give them this power.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
What bittorrent is about is being able to send very small but verifiably authentic parts of the file - but is that enough for them to prove the person has the infringing content?
My guess is that this is going to be made into law in the US in the near future - that if they get a single BitTorrent packet from you that belongs to an infringing file, it's enough to convict you of a crime and haul your behind in jail.
-- Arik
Shiver me timbers!We can just bury the torrent files and make a map!BSA's having the Davies now! Arrrgh!
See, the problem is, BitTorrent has been originally created to distribute large files efficiently.
There's been plenty of legal use, I've downloaded slackware ISO's, funny spoofs of warez groups from Sony's www.welcometothescene.com website, and I download updates to my legally owned copy of X-Plane using BitTorrent.
On those downloads, I've never got less than 200-300k/sec, and I had no problem connecting to the official, legal, and stable tracker.
This whole trackerless bullshit (new BT beta as well as "new" distributed tracking in Azureus, was created for ONE purpose only - to distribute ILLEGAL content.
Legal trackers don't go down. How many times did you try to download Slackware 10.1 ISOs and the tracker was down? Never. But if you go look at your favorite torrent pirate site, how many torrents on there are hosted off some dweeb's DSL line at home? Probably 50% or more. What happens when BSA/MPAA/RIAA/*AA comes in and takes away his PC? Tracker goes down, oh noes, piracy cannot continue.
So this "solution" to a non-existent problem will simply promote piracy using BitTorrent, and sway it from the original goal of distributing large amounts of data.
But the real problem starts is when everyone (read: my ISP, their upstream provider, etc) will be told by BSA/MPAA/etc that "BitTorrent in any shape or form is illegal". They will shape down my downloads, and i'll be downloading slackware 11.0 ISOs at 5k/sec. THAT would bother me, and piss me off, espeecially because I couldn't give two shits about pirated american TV shows, and a few dweebs that do, would be ruining a good software/data distribution method for ALL of us.
Why not just take magnet links to the next level: Allow anyone with the torrent to send it to anyone with the magnet link. that way the only way to curb the spread is to shut down every site that posts a line of text, or hope that a search function doesn't get integrated.
When I download pirated stuff via BT I disconnect as soon as I am done as well as throttle outgoing connections. (call me a leech, whatever, I am one)
Since I never share even the quantity of information in the file, is there sort of a legal loophole there if I were to get caught. For instance could a defense such as "I only shared 100megs of a 500 meg file" be applied. It is like taking a book, ripping out 80% of it and giving the other 20% away. Or taking a movie, ripping 20 minutes of it and giving it away.
I realize the infringement is there but since the total piece of work is not distributed, it is a lesser crime, like aiding in infringement?
Thanks
"I find your ideas interesting and would like to subscribe to your newsletter." - HJS
Bittorent can prolly be run on top of i2p or tor anyway.
Why should jerks be allowed to see what I'm doing?
Today the released a statement saying : Why should it bother us? We manufacture classic motorcycles.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
why cant people use winny? as long as you dont post hashes of files on the bbs, your chances of being identified are low. i would love to hear slashdot tell me why winny sucks. the people that actually do know what it is, anyway.
I2P can do bittorrents. Unlike magnetic links, the original file is hidden behind a series of tunnels. Theres some encryption in there too for good measure. Check it out at www.i2p.net.
particular IP with that IP for disassembly at the other end. Whammo, proof of DMCA violation on the part of anyone who comes after your ass.
DMCA violation trumps copyright violation any day.
The BSA, Microsoft and the definition of Extortion
But what if you and your 500,000 friends stand in line and each hold a letter and each will show it to people for $12/500,000 per letter. Are you infringing on the copyright?
What if you and your 10,000 friends each stand a in line and each of you are holding a paper citing a line from the book. Are each of you just using your citation rights?
Sure you can blame BitTorrent for piracy problems you can probably even go and make it illegal to use in most countries. But it wont stop the piracy. They will make an other program that does it differently. Technology moves a lot faster then the legal system. If they really want to cut down on piracy they should figure out why people pirate materials.
Things like Price. $100 and up is a lot of money for the average home user. Money that can be used for car payments, paying Rent/Mortgage. And paying $100 on a product you don't even know you really want or will use for only a couple of months can be a big waist. $25-$85 is the normal sweet spot for what people are willing to pay for most software.
Things like convenience. Going to the store and finding the product that you need now. Or going online and filling out all your personal information and getting placed on the stupid mailing lists and then paying for the product. Or go and get a pirated version with no questions asked.
Finally no real good reason to buy. When you buy the programs at the store you no longer get useful documentations like the good old day you just get the media and sales stuff on other programs the company makes or install directions in 1000 languages. I wish every program came with a manual the explains all the features in it, and a real paper manual not a PDF or html documentation where it is more difficult to flip to some page and find a cool feature.
Stop blaiming people who make the tools that make our lives easier the companies to think about making our lives easer,
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
> BSA has traditionally sought the assistance of those hosting the actual pirated files. So that's what they're calling it these days. I guess "suing the ass off" has lost its appeal.
Why should they be so scared of it? Is it made to attack them? Is the stated goal of BitTorrent to attack incessently, to give no quarter to the BSA?
Or are they just self-rightious overreacters that think that everything technological that doesn't come from them is a threat to their god-ordained, constitutionally protected business model?
www.eissq.com/BandP.html Ball and Plate System. Amuse your friends. Crush your enemies.
So at the moment, certain forms of "extortion" are legal. Not *Just*, mind, only legal. Until a paradigm shift occurs in the mindset of the general population ("hey, it can't be one law for some people and another for everyone else - that's unjust!", "can a legal system that upholds contradictory practices ever be just?", etc.) this sort of argument will continue to carry little weight.
After all, if it's happening to lots of people, it's got to be legal, right?
This has nothing to do with Piracy, it just alieviates the scaling botlleneck that was the tracker.
;-)
A more interesting question might be will this lead to other problems as swarms split and fragment. You may end up joining a tiny swarm cut off from the main swarm and thus get no bandwidth.
Or stuck in a swarm with no seeds.
Bram is very Clever though and I believe he has thought of this - can someone explain it to me though?
Bittorrent is designed to scale well and to ease the load on the Seed.
The problem was that the tracker did not scale well, even though it is a small file, it gets communicated with reguarly and just doesn't scale, popular files take down trackers.
So trackerless trackers simply allow better scaling and ease publication - so I would say that this innovation is more for legitimate files running on indiviual sites rather than Advert funded Warez trackers.
The myth of Internet anonimity has allowed an awful lot of fools to be caught. Naughty Bittorent swappers only have security through numbers.
How about underground fanzines which publish Movies as UUENCODED ASCII which is then typed in or OCR'ed - these could be published as poetry and protected as Free Speech.
Found this on Planet Peer: http://board.planetpeer.de/index.php/topic,829.0.h tml
Rodi is a new developmental P2P network that is currently in testing. What makes Rodi unique? Many features, such as IP-spoofing for anonymity and packet-mimicking, so the P2P traffic can appear as one of many different internet traffic patterns - such as HTTP, FTP, etc - that are less likely to get blocked or throttled by an ISP's packet shaping. Unlike traditional proxied (very slow) anonymous networks (Freenet, Mute, Ants, Winny, etc) the use of IP spoofing can allow high-speed full-bandwidth downloads while keeping the uploader's true IP address hidden from the downloader.
So I suspect that you're wrong. By making publishing easier still, more will be able to put stuff up on their site that they couldn't before. True, most people lacking in resources will in this context be pirates, so the proportion of illegal use will go up, but that is a side-effect of enabling your average Joe to publish where they couldn't before, meaning that the quantity of legitimate use will also go up.
Wikileaks, no DNS
Your 'idea' of selling software is just that.... and Idea. As much as it is my idea to give my software, and the source away for free. YOU lobby the polititions, and make it illegal for people too oppose YOUR ideas. I don't. You speak of rights, but yet, you won't acknoledge the rights of others.
Thats my stand.
for those who don't want to be tracked and want privacy. The BSA is a bunch of whiners anyway. Piracy helps promote the software, and if people like it, they can buy a real copy.
The anti-piracy people should look to solve their problem a different way. Why are people pirating things? Maybe it's because of the price. People certainly don't get a thrill out of piracy in the same way that people do other illegal things. Stop making moves $10 to go to, stop making someone pay $1/song, stop over-charging and blaming increasing charges on piracy when that is a complete lie. It's time to attack the problem elsewhere - not in those sharing the files.
i have the largest collection of up to date linux iso's in my country. its a hobby as well as a job for me. so when The Linux Mirror Project tracker went down a few days ago, it took down the best way i had of downloading ISOs. so yeah, i would say tracker-less BT has a legitimate use, and it is an important one.
Suchethalearn from yesterday, plan for tomorrow, party tonight
or one out of three ain't bad
Notice how the MPAA had features on all the major news channels about Star Wars Torrents, these people are getting rich putting people in jail, the bigger the problem the more money and power these folks get.
Perhaps Bush should declare a war on piracy and set up an international bosy that has ultimate powers of search wiretapping and seizure...
The market is already floating with illegal copies of the Alphabet Song, but nobody has been jailed. I guess the Roman's IP-laywers died a couple of milleniums ago.
Wouldn't that be you and 25 friends? I mean, I missed the part where there are 500,000 letters in the english language
...your head around this: A text may have 500000 letters, but only 26 unique letters. What those 500000 people are implicitly selling, and that 26 could not, is the ordering of those letters into a book.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Someone should file a patent for "a method of identifying a Bittorrent user by means of their IP address".
Hey, Windows programmer! Learn how to use strcmp() correctly.
Mod: -1, Hungarian notation and ugly brace style.
- chrish
They may manufacture classic motorcycles, but they are hardly boy scouts (of america) in their treatment of schools, businesses, and open source issues.
I don't know if a court of law would buy that line of arguments, but that's the way I see it.
Clever signature text goes here.
If they really want to cut down on piracy they should figure out why people pirate materials.
No, you can't blame BT for piracy but you can blam eit for the boom in the amount of piracy.
First let me qualify myself by saying I have been involved in the Warez scene for about 10 years. I remember when Quake 2 was the zero day release and when the size of the acceptable release was raised.
Now, back in "the day" the warez scene was a community. You needed to know somebody or contribute to be involved. Leeching was shunned upon. You need to have skills (I personally hacked server to make zero day FTP's). You couldn't just download to your hearts content.
When P2P came into existence this started to change, you no longer needed to involved, you could go to what amounts to a store and pick out any song and or piece of software to pirate.
As the pipes for fatter and people caught on, even the P2P community started to go down hill. It was flooded with crap, bad files, and incorrect releases.
Along comes BT. It provides the redundancy check to make sure you are getting the correct info, it FORCES you to share with anybody else who has the torrent and it scales in such a way that big file downloads are no longer a huge drain on bandwidth for the provider.
BT has facilitated the world of warez a lot. Without it you would still need to be on IRC getting zero day FTPs and provided a service to the community. With BT any person can download a torrent and if they are on a fat pipe, have a new movie, album, or expensive piece of software in a short amount of time.
Suppose you downloaded a bunch of Blocks.
... ...
Each block is, say, 128 KB.
Each block contains bits that are indistinguishable from random noise.
Each block has a number, which is its hash. Block numbers are much longer than in the example below.
Each block may have come from a different IP address, indeed, even through a different network protocol (Gnutella, OpenNap, Mute, Http, etc.)
You obtain a list of reassembly instructions through another network and reassemble the blocks as follows. (Each block you downloaded is labeled with a B, and the content blocks of the reassembled result are labeled with a C.)
C1 = B224 xor B166
C2 = B287 xor B948
C3 = B569 xor B982
C4 =
C5 =
etc....
Blocks C1, C2, C3, etc. taken together form a copyright infringement.
Which IP address sent you the infringing work? Each block may have come from a different address? Each block is not infringing content.
Which block is infringing? The first block of the infringing reassembled file C1, was formed from B224 and B166. So was B224 infringing? Or was B166 infringing?
B224, when combined with a different block in the network results in a portion of The Declaration of Independence. B166 when combined with yet some other block from the network results in a portion of The Bible.
Maybe the infringer is who gave you the list of reassembly instructions that told you which blocks to obtain and how to reassemble them? But this information is not directly a copyright infringement. In fact, it may be a fairly short text file.
Note that I did use double the download bandwidth to obtain my copyright infringing material. But for that cost, I raised a whole bunch of questions about who to blame. And I did not suffer the horrible performance of Freenet. (I have not tried Mute.)
(This is an idea I read somewhere.)
Such a hypothetical Blocks p2p system could potentially be designed with the swarming advantages of BitTorrent. Each block could be available from multiple sources -- even multiple network protocols.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
A file is really nothing but a series of Ones and Zeros. Which is basically just a really big number.
;)
Couldn't you just distribute an equation that gives you that number? Then use distributed computing to share the load of re-computing that number?
You're no longer uploading/downloading copyrighted material, you're just computing a really big number and/or sharing a math equation... which happens to sound a lot like Britney Spears when ran thru an mp3 player.
You think they don't have the resources to figure out that they can set "--max_upload_rate 0"?
Is there an upper limit on the 'paraphrasing' allowances in current copyright law?
Lets say you download 100%, but only share 50% of the pieces back out..
Is that enough to be called infringing? 75%? 25%?
Just an idea.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Let us tone down the 500,000 number to 257 persons. Each person holds a different 8 bits byte. The 257th person has lists with the names of the other 256. Those lists vary in length and each person's name is repeated many times.
When the list-holder calls a person name, that person shouts his/her byte.
Who's showing a book that can be represented, in a particular code, by say 1,000,000 8 bits bytes? Each person has only one byte. The list holder has only a list of persons.
Matters get more complicated if you add more byte holders, repeating the bytes and alternating the names on the lists.
This is a "Boy Scouts of America machine gun".
Looks like a starting cannon to me (yacht races).
Prolly has "BSA" on it, maybe Birmingham Small Arms?
winny's creator was arrested.
After failing to crack Winny's encrypted communications used in its file sharing feature, the Kyoto Police switched to a different method, namely tracking users via Winny's integrated forum feature. Unlike its file sharing feature, the forum feature of Winny provided anonymity for users who accessed message threads, but not for creators of threads. Users accessing threads were able to determine the IP address of the originator of the thread.
The Kyoto Police first looked for a thread where its originator was posting the file names of copyrighted material he was sharing, and recorded his IP address. They then configured their firewall to only allow connections to them from the thread owner's IP address. Finally, they confirmed that they could indeed download the copyrighted file from the user who stated (on his thread) that he was sharing it.
Would it not be reasonable to interpret one who threatens U.S. politicians with execution an enemy of the U.S.?
...that the parent is actually modded up as insightful for making comments about murdering people over copyright laws.
We may disagree where the boundary between stealing and sharing is, but I think when it comes to major media, that cost many hundreds of people many years to create, you can share it on a small scale with a couple of people, but, for example, posting a torrent of Return of the Sith the day it hits movie theaters, stealing is, as Yoda would say.
If you don't like the price of a movie, don't pay it, but also.. don't steal it. There's people who make that stuff for their living. They spend lots of time and energy on it in the expectation that many people will be interested in buying a copy for personal use. It doesn't matter if you think that's a valid profession, or morally correct. it's their business. Their life. And if they wouldn't sell you the copy if they knew you were going to turn around and give it away for free to everyone you could, on a massive basis, on the world-wide internet, that means that if you do, you're lying and stealing and violating their trust.
Sharing can't happen without trust.
Now, if you give it to a friend, and that friend gives it to a friend, etc. etc. and it remains low-level, then it doesn't matter what they think. It's none of their business what you do with it as long as it's basically private to you and your friends and family.
Now maybe you disagree with the particular place I've drawn that line. You may see the line at a slightly different place in the sand. Or think it's blurry. Or gray, or not so gray. That's a whole other argument.
But I think we would all benefit us all to identify a community-determined middle area where we tread softly, and broad side areas where we firmly plant our feet. I think we should all preserve and protect the practice of small-scale sharing of everything in the world, even in the face of pressure against this by The Man. I also think we should all preserve and protect the expectation of honesty in a market transaction, even in the face of painful desire for the latest and greatest popular piece of culture.
Other people have pointed up the other holes in your theories, so I'll point up something different, namely: you mistakenly assume that only big is legal. Sure the latest Ubuntu liveCD torrent won't shut down from an overloaded tracker. But what about JoeSmithLinux or other hypothetical small distro? Suppose one such is surprisingly good and gets posted to Slashdot. A thundering herd of geeks crams down this guy's DSL and knocks him off the net. Distributed tracker to the rescue!
DT really is just an extension of the BT idea of spreading the load. BT allows downloads to scale, DT allows trackers to scale. It's better for "piracy" simply because it's better for everything. Just as BT was versus HTTP.
hahah.. was the Jedi who returned.
Extortion n. 1. The act of extorting; the act or practice of wresting anything from a person by force, by threats, or by any undue exercise of power; undue exaction; overcharge.
;-) That's what makes it fun.)
There's a lot of room in the word "undue". For instance, "I'll sue you if you don't give me back my iPod" isn't exactly extortion. Nor is the policeman who says "Put your hostage or I will shoot you" committing extortion. I'd even hazard to say that the theatre that sells popcorn for $7 isn't committing extortion, but YMMV.
The point? Dictionary definitions are seldom clear enough to be a law all by themselves. (Nor are most laws clear enough to make good dictionary definitions.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
What are these guys smoking? The concept of the trackerless torrents wasn't created because of the need for protection of tracker servers, but for the ease of distribution... this is not about making it harder to identify trackers. The whole torrent system isn't about circumventing identification or about being completelly anonymous, and the BT author has mentioned this several times.
Well, we are talking the BSA here...
They may have resouces, but "clue" aint one of them.
I realize this a little late and a little off-topic, but I'm hoping to get some help analyzing my problem.
Yesterday I attempted to set up/seed a torrent using the trackerless BT beta and it didn't work for me.
System/setup:
-Windows XP, SP2, firewall enabled.
-ports 6881 thru 6889 opened up for TCP
-real routable IP address (no NAT)
-created torrent, checked DHT box, ran the bt client (pointing to the localhost's IP in the torrent)
-at another computer on the same subnet, I installed the beta bt client, opened ports 6881-6889 and clicked on the torrent file and...
nada. waited a long time but the 2nd client stayed at 0%.
Bram's site is real slim on details on using the beta client in DHT mode, was wondering if anyone can spot something stupid that I'm doing wrong.
-TIA
---- But what if you and your 500,000 friends stand in line and each hold a letter and each will show it to people for $12/500,000 per letter. Are you infringing on the copyright? ----
Yes. You are all showing the book.
'H'
Now, I really want to see someone sue me for that. Really. Even if others start posting the remaining of the book letter by letter, I want to see me getting sued for posting the letter H. That is NOT copyright infringement, that's a letter. Every single word I used here has been used before by someone else, but I'm still not copyright infringing on anyone's work.
Now, with bittorrent it's not quite this situation. You can tell seeders from leechers, so you can tell who is sharing the whole thing, and you can tell how much the leecher's are sharing. At a certain threshold, it's a significant portion of the work and it's copyright infringement. Note that it's still kind of hard to sue people for copyright infringement with just that information. With the tracker torrents you can tell how much people have shared (I don't know whether or not you can with this), but that's sort of important information too, since it's only criminal infringement after damages are beyond a certain point and if you shared the equivalent of one movie, the damages are like...$25. Heh.
---- What if you and your 10,000 friends each stand a in line and each of you are holding a paper citing a line from the book. Are each of you just using your citation rights? ----
No. A line by itself is not a citation. If you were each holding a complete essay or article that used that line as a reference in some other context then yes. Otherwise you are just showing the book.
So you're telling me that when people place quotes in their sig from a movie they like that's copyright infringement? You're an idiot.
You need to understand something. THe United States of America kills people every day. Not just in war, although we have killed tens of thousands of innocents lately in Iraq. But also our policies kill people. Like for example, our lack of a national healthcare system kills 18000 Americans every year because they lack basic healthcare. THat is why Americans have shorter life expectancies that people in NW Europe or Canada or AUstralia, where they have universal healthcare. Our politicians would rather that the healthcare industry have high profits, than we Americans live longer. I consider this a form of murder. That is MY opinion.
And we kill people in the electric chair after convicting them in our courts. Sometimes we do this because we claim they have killed other people (although sometimes we are wrong about that).
Also we execute people for passing certain information to certain other people (See Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, for example).
So, I am suggesting that we subject some of our leaders (political and corporate) to the actions of our court systems. There is nothing illegal about saying that we should this. I have the legal right to call for CEOs and politicians to be tried for treason in a court of law, and if convicted, sentenced with the ultimate punishment, as others have been sentenced before in our courts of law.
THis is just politics. That's all. That red-state blue state crap you see on the boob tube is not really politics--that is something else....
eat shiat and bark at the moon
...never actually hosted in its entirety and instead hosts portions of files or intermittent streams of the files. Sort of de-centralizing the file itself.
I wonder how prosecution would work for someone who only had every 3rd byte of a music file which would only be assembled with other byte streams from other torrent locations. Nobody actually hosts the file itself, or even a recognizeable facsimile of the file.
Loading...
peers without complete copies can add up to 1, 2, 5, or many more complete copies on a distributed network.
It's not necessary for any one person to have 100%, so long as there are 5 people with at least 20% difference between their data and the next person.
Copyright infringement is not thieft. Dumbass.
this has nothing to do with anonymizing BT.
If this is not Boyscouts, then download all, else download nothing. After all, if it is boy scouts, you do do not wish to down it.
Remember, in windows land, that is a feature, not a bug.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I realize that this is not always the case, but with some file formats if you only get say 1/5 of the file then it is utterly unusable. Are you really infringing if what you upload is unusable?
CitrusTV (http://www.citrustv.net): the Nation's Oldest & Largest Entirely Student-Run Television Station
So they intend to blame the people hosting the .torrents? They going to stop 80,000 MIRC torrent distribution channels, especially when they start using encrypted filenames?
Well, no, none of those examples are extortion, but not for the reason you state. In the first two, the target has clearly committed a crime; in the latter, the key word is "sells" - the theatre's not forcing anyone to buy their popcorn.
(I'd also question whether suing someone for theft would ever be a reasonable course of action...)
But I fear we're drifting off-topic.
So... everyone except the boyscouts downloads pr0n?
Um, they're allowed to distribute it. They own it.
That's what they do when they sell you DVD's.
is a client which will insert random blocks of noise, which can be discareded at the other end - sure it would take longer, but you have deniability? ;)
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Oh, we're definitely straying from the topic. But why not?
The ipod example* shows extracting something by threat. The second example shows extracting something by use of force (assuming the cop eventually shoots the guy). The third example shows overcharing.
The possibilities are: (1) these fit the definition and are extortion; (2) these fit the definition, but aren't extortion because they're not "undue" under their special circumstances; (3) these fit the definition, but aren't extortion because of the various exceptions you mention; (4) ??.
Since we agree these aren't extortion, (1) is false. My (2) sort of gives the definition more credit than it maybe deserves by supposing that the poor little word "undue" can stand for all the special circumstances. Actually, I think that (3) is the most true. Which means that the definition itself would make a poor law since it leaves out a lot of important information about exceptions.
[*I was thinking of an ipod that I had loaned to the guy but that he later refused to return.]
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
Once the recipe is published, does it not acquire the same protections as the copyrighted works that the recipe is facilitating the infringement of? I wonder how that would play into the legal aspects of the 'War on (some) Pirates.' Having a book with instructions on building a nuclear weapon is legal, as is publishing said book, right?
I suppose the recipes themselves could be reproduced from other recipes, allowing for the construction of a recursive system. Although, I'm not sure how useful that would be.
If an application were developed to encode the recipes in 'plain text' I wonder if any infringement could be proved, absent posession of the re-assembled infringing material (presumably the reason for having this whole Blocks system in the first place).
I really like how USA is separated from the realm of 'civilized countries', even on a sub-conscious level.
"So, Lone Starr, now you see that evil will always triumph, because good is dumb." - Dark Helmet
But we all know what the "BS" really stands for.
"Sometimes it takes more than an axe and a busload of strangers to work through your anger." -Rikk Estoban
Well here's how I look at it. I do download music from time to time, I don't keep large repositories of music on my system. And if I download some songs of an album and enjoy more that one of them, I'll usually go out and buy the album, if only to support the artists.
Personally I wouldn't want to come in to work one day and have my boss tell me, "Sorry Scott, we can't pay you for your work today. Somebody up and stole our sales department, so we can't sell anything today, and won't make any money"
Not that this would technically be possible, but that's what musicians and the like often face.
Now having said that, I'm all for P2P networks, especially for up-and-coming musicians, it's a forum for them to try and get their music out there, in an age radio-stations that won't play anything that isn't from a major label. Many of them couldn't give a rat's ass about the money they 'could' be making, they're just happy to share their art. And sometimes down the road, someone will remember having heard a certain artist somewhere, and sign him to a big label.
Hopefully some sence will come from this inane babble of mine, I just finished a test in my training program, so my brain is broken...
"So, Lone Starr, now you see that evil will always triumph, because good is dumb." - Dark Helmet
What the hell's a bit torrent?
So if they have the right to distribute it (as, say, the copyright holder), have they not then LEGALLY made it available to BE copied? It is no longer a copyright violation if the copyright holder puts it there for you to copy.
They might not get most of you for direct copyright infringment in that situation but they could sue each and every one of you for contributory infringment.
The two examples you give aren't remotely analogous to bittorrent since none of those friends are going to get a complete copy of the copyrighted work in the end. The person seeding is essentially the one organizing a conspiracy (for when the prosecutor tries to make his rep nailing an internets criminal) to distribute a copyrighted work and every person who distributes a portion is contributing to that direct infringement.
Shit, the damn Gungans got onto this thread somehow.
Basic economics set the price for goods at "whatever the market will bear". As pointed out, piracy thrives and will continue to as long as the price of music, videos, or software is set artificially high by restricting the supply. Bittorrent and other forms of P2P break the supply strangle-hold and those that control it. The MPAA/RIAA as middle men will continue be marginalized. Artist no longer need the middle men since distribution is now cheap and easy. As proof I give you iTunes, yahoo monthly subscription, napster and many, many others.
The information warfare dished out by these organizations seems aimed at setting up the "idea" that *copying* is equivalent to *stealing*. But is that actually a valid equivalence, as far as the core definitions of these concepts goes. The common element between these two concepts is that something is "transmitted" across the time-space spectrum.
Stealing:
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A chunk of matter (a1) is *moved* from (x1,y1,z1,t1) to (x2,y2,z2,t2) where x,y,z is the space coordinate, while t is the time coordinate. In both locations, (a1) is the same chunk of matter, the same identical group of protons, electrons and neutrons.
Copying:
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The *arrangement* of a chunk of matter (a1) is *transmitted* from (x1,y1,z1,t1) to another chunk of matter (a2) that is located at (x2,y2,z2,t1). The neutrons, protons an electrons of (a1) and (a2) are different, and but their arrangment is identical.
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So, the concept of stealing is used to represent the action of moving the same piece of matter, from person to person, through imaginary boundaries that are arbitrarily defined as property lines. While the concept of copying is used to represent the action of moving information across different pieces of matter, matter that is already allocated across those property lines. When something is stolen, a piece of matter moves from Person-A to Person-B, and Person-A no longer has access to it. When something is copied, a piece of information moves from Person-A to Person-B without Person-A loosing loosing access to it.
Moving versus Copying. They are not the same actions.
But what is infromation, what is the signal, what is the arrangment or organization of matter. You can't just hold it in your hand because it's not matter but rather an attribute of matter. It's more like software and less like hardware.
Equating copying to stealing is somewhat deceptive.
When a stream of 1's and 0's is copied across the network between two computer systems, what actually happens is that the receiving computer's memory system is simply rearranged to match a pattern of 1's and 0's from the transmitting computer. The computer doesn't steal or re-move it from the other computer.
The very similar thing happens when information is transmitted between people. If someone tells you "100101010111101010101" and you listen to what that other person says, the sound pattern hitting your ears will be transformed into a THOUGHT that is identical to the THOUGHT of the other person. In otherwords, thoughts are *copied* between people when they communicate. Can a human thought be stolen from another person?
If you are watching a movie in a theater, or listening to an opera, or looking at a painting in an art gallery, you are copying infromation, you are copying someone else's thoughts. The structure of the human body neccessitates copying, just like the structure of computer systems neccessitates copying.
Information is copied, because it's information.
If someone decides that a piece of information can not be copied, what they are doing is controlling and restricting the flow of information according to their own imaginary boundaries and parameters. And since information is actually human thoughts, regulating information is the same as regulating human thoughts. You are allowed to think that, but you can't think that. And in the end, the extent of your thoughts becomes limited by the amount of electronic money you hold in your electronic bank account, and that money also happens to be just pure information.
To add to this. History also records that artists were ripped off, from all directions. I'm not certain what utopia the OP's from. But history wasn't kind to artists, regardless of what they produced. The OP is just a varient of the "Back in the Good Old Days" argument.
"The anti-piracy people should look to solve their problem a different way. Why are people pirating things? Maybe it's because of the price."
I got a much simpler solution. How about artist stop being artists? That way, no one can argue that "they're being charged too much" or "I don't like the price you're asking for. I'll just download a copy because I don't give a f**k about what YOU want! It's all about ME baby!" As two nice side-effects it also happens to get rid of the "YOU SUCK!" justification for downloading (hypocrisy at it's finest). And pirates no longer have to worry about whipping out their "American Express" of arguments. "It's all your fault I'm a terrible person".
Simple problem, simple solution. How come more pirates aren't pushing for it?
"So, then government has to assume the role of preserving these people's profession, no matter what technology has done to make their busniess model obsolete?"
Technology hasn't made their model obsolete. It may make it more or less efficient, but not obsolete. What technology has done however is make it easier for people to indulge the baser aspects of human nature, and ANY model you can concieve will fail when faced by such a force. Online? Offline? From space to the ground? ALL have no immunity against a corrupt public.
How can anyone say this doesn't change things? When DHT makes it big and is implemented all over the place, the MPAA will not be able to cause the shut down of sites like LokiTorrent, BTEFnet, TVTorrents, ShunTV, or any other tracker of movies/TV. That's a big difference and it's positive. But the negative side is they may just begin suing not only uploaders, but anyone who seeds a whole copy of the file or maybe even anyone who downloads. And if you download movies and TV through BitTorrent, and on this web site, I bet more than 70% do, that's not very nice. But even then, you have to believe the MPAA already had plans to sue American downloaders, whether trackerless BitTorrent was gonna happen or not. But now they can't shut down your favorite place for TV shows. People could just share the torrents on Limewire, Ares or whatever P2P network, and then launch their BitTorrent client.
As a result, I meta-modded neutrally; if you're trolling, you got me fair and square.
If you are sharing mp3/divX/etc, they are not an exact copy of the orginal.
They are a lesser qualty copy. with each part having 'meaning'. Ever listen to a audio clip? Or a part of a movie? They all have meaning on their own..
---- Booth was a patriot ----