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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.'"
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
exactly, although (whatever they say) they must be gutted that they won't have single points to shut down many users with.
This is my Sig, this is my Gun. One is for Slashdot and one is for Fun.
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.
Let's say you get four friends and you each photocopy a fifth of the new Harry Potter book when it comes out, then stand outside and each sell your part for a dollar, in effect letting one person collect a fifth from each of you and get the whole book for $5 instead of the $12 or whatever the retail price will be.
Is it your contention that by making only a part of a work available that you and your friends aren't infringing on a copyright? A "small but verifiably authentic" part of a file is content infringement just as much as a significant portion of a book would be.
IF an agent of a copyright holder (BSA) makes the work avaliable for public download is it illegal to download it? I mean by knowingly making it avaliable on a public network they are giving public permission to copy it.
Brad
As x approaches total apathy I couldn't care less.
So, what? They're going to sue everyone who's seeding copyrighted material, and force them to stop? The problem with that is, legal proceedings are slow enough that by the time they go through, those particular seeders would likely have already stopped anyway, and been replaced by new seeders.
It makes the system more fault-tolerant.
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.
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
> 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?
Wouldn't that be you and 25 friends? I mean, I missed the part where there are 500,000 letters in the english language
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.
THIS IS NOT FLAMEBAIT!!!
Yeah, BitTorrent anonyminity should be a non issue, except there are so many people out there who abuse it to make illegal copies of games/music/movies. When that happens, it becomes a big issue, expecially for those holding copyrights.
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
Once again, sharing is not selling, is not piracy. The various *AA's want the terminology confused, and no doubt will be successful in their BS campaign. Redefine the words, and opponents have no chance in an argument because the audience hears definitions in their own minds that were implanted by BS campaigns. It's a wonderful strategy. Oppose the war? You oppose the troops. Share a file? You steal/sell the file. Oppose Bush? You oppose America. Want reproduction and birth control education in schools at an early age? You're for little-kid promiscuity. Oppose inserting religion into the government? Anti-Christian, probably satanistic, certainly anti-American.
The analogy fails because you invoked the idea that I and my friends are selling parts of the book for a dollar. We are not selling anything; as a matter of fact, we pay for the bandwidth, tho that is irrelevant. What if we sat on the corner and let passers-by read our portions? Are we stealing then? The who **AA argument rests on the fallacy that just because it's electronic, the old traditions and laws should be junked. Frankly, they're using this to give themselves rights under law they always wanted, but never could get. They're using the newness of the technology to redefine copyright as ownership, which is NOT what copyright is about. Not to mention that the new copyrights are now eternal, which breaks the original deal the constitution's writers had in mind, which is: make cash for a bit, then the work goes into the public domain forever to enrich all. The deal was broken, so all bets are off. Change the copyright laws so that copyrights expire in twenty years after publication, and then we can talk. Right now, copyright=ownership for eternity. A free marketplace for ideas can't exist like this.
Now, with the TCP transport in place, I2P is essentially thread-limited (2 threads per connection) to about 250-300 nodes.
Quick solution: don't use threaded connections. Use NIO instead. I will look in to this.
Luring people to I2P now is not useful for development
I2P is an open source project. "Luring" people is essential for its growth. If I2P core team did not want outside input they should close the project until a future time. This is unlikely their belief since they are posting bounties and requesting peer review to reach version 1.
But for now, don't join it yet, and don't announce it here.
Sorry. Already joined. I even download the source and starting to fiddle. I just can't help myself. As for official posting, you can do a slashdot search where I2P has been mentioned several times in the past. Thats how I found out about it to begin with.
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.
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? Perhaps these content DISTRIBUTION companies should investigate seriously how the Internet can be used to distribute their goods. If "Sith" was available electronically, many of us who watched it illegally in the past 24 hours would have paid. Was downloading it and watching it wrong? Yes, probably, but I have little remorse. The fact is, content creation has not ever been a lucrative business. Content must be sold, performed, or distrbibuted to make money from it. If I pick up a guitar, and strum out a tune so good that angels would weep to hear it, I have not made any money by doing so. DaVinci, paiting the Mona Lisa did not suddenly become rich as he put down his brush, the canvas had to be sold. My point is, the business you are defending is the distribution busness, the record labels, TV netowrks and syndicators, and movie distribution houses. I think that the "rampant" piracy of thier client's creations is due to thier shortsided, hidebound, outdated business model. They might be able to make even more money by making the content available to the public in a timely, convenient manner. Perhaps you should turn in your car, because it is putting the buggywhip manufaturers out of business.
Frankly, my biggest beef with movies is people. I can't stand to go to a movie house, especially a crowded one, because people behave like animals. Why I should rearrange my day to fit the showtime, buy a $8 ticket, then get gouged at the concession so that I can have something to drink, only to have to put up with someone's single-digit-aged child being disruptive and kicking my seat all trough a PG-13 or R rated feature is beyond me. And this is the experience they want to protect by not releasing the content on any other channel.
I can watch movies at home, on my wide-screen HD set in 5.1 sound and be quite stisfied with the experience.
"My point is, the business you are defending is the distribution busness, the record labels, TV netowrks and syndicators, and movie distribution houses."
I'm not defending their business wholesale, I'm defending their expectation to come to a fair market. I don't give a h00t about their business model. If they have a broken business model, a fair market is the best hope of replacing it with a better alternative. You are basically arguing that "piracy" isn't stealing... because they didn't make what they're selling? So if I walk into a Wal-Mart and take something out without paying, it's not stealing because Wal-Mart didn't make it? hahahahahahahahahah.
You know, you're right. I don't like the visceral experience of going to a Wal-Mart to shop. Therefore, I'm going to go to the shipping docks, where all the actual goods are (that Wal-Mart bought from the actual producers), and take them directly from there, without even asking the original producers what they think about that.
And the biggest problem in this analogy is that the Wal-Mart shopping experience isn't enjoyable... not me stealing goods from the shipping docks, you know, like the mob does.
Awesome.
It's really not surprising that this kind of action puts the media distribution companies on the defensive. "We're gonna steal your stuff until you give it to us for free. And you should thank us for our words of wisdom."
Awesome, Awesome, Awesome.
All of their strategic stupidity pales in comparison to an argument like this. This kind of behaviour manages to put huge, grotesque art exploitation business in the right. All of us get to watch a war over expensive protected movies instead of giving our time and attention to making better, legit alternatives. w00t.
BTW, if you could even begin to churn through all the free movies, music and texts available on the internet, your argument would have a lot more weight. But since we live in an age of amazing free media, it sounds like a fat man complaining he hasn't had enough to eat.
It gets even more interesting when you consider that you probably "share" less than 1% to any individual peer.
Is "talking about" a "piece" of a book considered copyright infringement?
I was thinking a while ago that Azureus should be modified so that less than 5% of your outgoing traffic will go to the same peer. It would be tough to argue that you have given away "copies" of the song/program to anyone....
Friedmud