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BitTorrent: Sysadmins to face the music
An anonymous reader writes "Two sysadmins in Australia are set to get sued by the music industry after the federal court ruled that Melissa Ong and Ryan Briggs did ignore calls to remove Web sites that were in breach of copyright. All major music labels in the country have banded together to take action against the duo's employer Swiftel, an ISP which allegedly hosted BitTorrent file-sharing hubs (which contained pirated music etc)."
They were never delivered legal documents. Only sent emails and (apparently) there was a phonecall. Why would you comply with emails? Remember that site a while back that made phony cease&desist emails and sent them from hotmail/fake accounts to see how many ISP's complied? Everyone booed the ISP's who went along with it. This ISP ignores the emails and now they're getting sued. I wouldn't blame them. Why would they act on a legal matter if they weren't sent any legal instruction/documents? The whole thing is stupid. More info here: http://whirlpool.net.au/
"(which contained pirated music etc)"
.. No they didn't.
.torrent files are saved at the server. No illegal material needs to be sent out from, or hosted at a bittorrent server.
Only
That's the beauty of Bittorrent you see..
You cant fight in here, its a war room!
Copyright infringement is a civil offence, It requires court action before it can be acted upon.
The only thing the RIAA IRAA or whatever should be allowed to do is to ask the site owner that they remove the site , failing that then ask the Host , If all else fails then they should take action against the site. Once that action is complete they can ask the host to remove the site and the host will have to comply or face legal action, which would then be a criminal case then (IIRC disobeying a court order is a criminal offence).
The Admins deserve no reprimand or prosecution , They did all they had to do .
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
I work for an ISP that does some hosting.
We recieve copyright complaints all the time, and every single time we contact our user and let them know we received a notice and to cease file sharing. Most of the time it is their kids anyways.
One guy wanted to try to do the whole "I'm entitled to download this movie" speech. We just told him that we were warning him that we received it. In other words we CYA'd. In the case of multiple complaints we would lock the account (multiple being several over a few weeks).
Mainly, reading TFA, these admins not only knew about, but helped set up and maintain the bittorrent hub (considering they had access logs from it). Plus documentation had been requested and not provided, and they had deliberately ignored several notices (for deliberately ignored phone calls have to go unanswered).
I'm not saying they are so guilty as to go to prison, however they kept the site going, and ingnored request by the copyright holder AND court. That does count for something.
And alot of it is really good. It's just that these artists don't get MTV coverage..
/. before but everytime I see this RIAA crap I am reminded by the magnatune motto...
This being said, www.magnatune.com has a great collection. So pop on over and check it out.
John Buckman has been working pretty ahrd at getting artists onboard and he's done a great job. I am sure he's been covered on
we are not evil
-if at first you don't succeed, stay the heck away from paragliding.
Use iRATE.
It's a program that has a collection of links to legal music to download; it starts off with a standard list of tracks, you can rate then, and then it tries to find tracks you might like by comparing your ratings to those of other users. So it's legal, based on what you like, and not recycled radio crap.
It's GPL and works on Linux, MacOS and Windows. Heck, it might even run on OpenBSD.
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
There used to be a time when companies didn't send Cease & Desist letters. They just subpoenaed the offending party and took them to court. This was looked down on because sometimes the poor little copyright violator didn't realize what he was doing wrong and was suddenly staring down the legal departments of the big guys. So they came up with the idea of C&Ds which give fair warning to any party who might be offending the party in question.
It was a method of 1) encouraging the offending party to see the error of his ways and stop doing the bad thing, and 2) to establish in no uncertain terms that the offending party was aware that their actions were causing offence.
With that, everyone and their brother started sending C&Ds instead of actually suing. It's cheaper and doesn't require any court action, so both sides come out way ahead if the C&D works.
Unfortunately they have become so much like "Final Notice" bills that just seem to keep coming without actually reaching a conclusion. Offenders just toss the C&D in the trash and the Offended just send another C&D. Neither side really wants to take it to court because that would entail actual lawyering.
There ought to be a law that mandates that only one C&D per offence may be sent to any customer. Once that has been ignored for a certain amount of time, the offended party would either have to stop sending it or actually take the offender to court.
I'd love to see some P2P violators squirm in the courtroom. Currently they hide behind their anonymity and the knowledge that despite any C&D they receive, that many others are also receiving them and the odds of actually getting tapped by the RIAA is slim to none.
My point is, that the RIAA cannot boo and make this go away with legal measures, it will be always possible to copy data while a Neumann-principle based computer exist, i'd hazard the guess that such computer will exist for a while...
Ah, but you require program code that will actually read those data. What they are trying to create is a world where everything exists only within its own signed keyspace. On a TCPA-machine, the TCPA root is the only real machine. What you believe to be the machine, is just one special "virtual machine".
Essentially, each Trusted Computing-program runs on a Neumann-principle machine, but it will only run code signed by that entity. No/wrong signature = no access. And since you can't sign your code with their key, you don't get to alter it so you can read it. You may exploit flaws in their code, (by making data become code, that's Neumann for you), but in flawless code you're pretty much SOL
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
It's clear that you're smarter than the folks at Swiftel. Their To report copyright infringement page clearly lists email and telephone numbers first in the instructions for reporting piracy. Their postal address is listed as the last bullet.
You'd think it's common sense: if you're writing a contact page, and you don't want to get certain things via email (because you have a spam filter, because you don't have the time to read email, or whatever reason you chose), then don't list an email address as your first contact point -- and certainly don't try to use the "it's your fault for sending me email just like my contact page asked you to" excuse. But it looks like this fundamental bit of obviousness is lost on Swiftel.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
The Pirate Bay's complaint schtick doesn't work very well when it's an Australian ISP being sued under Australian copyright law by the local sock puppet for the music cartel. If Australian copyright law is anything like U.S law, it'd be the internet equivalent of covering yourself in honey and smacking a bear in the face with your belt.
For sale: one sig space, gently used. Inquire for details.
In the UK, any 'ISP' is responsible upon a legal order to prevent illegal activity on their systems and network. If they don't then they are in breach of the law.
This applies to hosts, isps and any other service provider on the net.
So the question, if this was the uk, is not if they are responsible for the illegal activity but rather whether the activity itself is illegal - bittorrent trackers are information sites with links. They do not host any illegal files. One could say that they are breaching trademark laws - as the use of the trademarks is in a negative way (it might harm the business) but that is all I could see.
What is Australian law like regarding 'Common Carrier' ideas?
I'm a law student - I'll be a laywer soon enough. Basic second year stuff: email is not legally binding, in terms of document serving for a tort (which this is) or in terms of a contract. You need something written and delivered. Hell, mail isn't valid unless you get a response or it's a previously agreed method. Keep chucking out your pseudo-legal stuff - it's not binding.
"But everyone should know everything." -markab
Actually, you can get free music from ocremix.org and vgmix.com. Ocremix was on slashdot a while back, it got some negative comments about copyrights; however, there isn't actually any problem with copyrights with remixing vg songs (fair-use and all). 99.9% of the songs I listen to come from these two sources; I'm quite happy with the quality.
I play in a "small/unknown" band, our most recent cd was pressed by a relatively small label, and the tracking/mixing/mastering was paid for out of pocket. We're not doing it to get laid or make money, we're all either in relationships or can very well meet girls on our own, and have 'real' jobs. Even so, that part is irrelevant, you're right in saying that a lot bands have an ulterior motive for playing music.
That being said, we do charge more than cost for our cds and eps, and don't feel badly about it.
Why? Because music is a hobby for us. We already pay out of pocket for decent guitars, amps, drums, personal recording equipment, etc. We're not trying to make a business out of this, and we've never made enough off of merch sales to even begin to subsidize equipment, we view those as personal investments. We do sell a decent amount of merch, but that really only pays for gas to out-of-the-area shows, trailer rentals, and saving towards buying a trailer (which will be at least 80% out of pocket).
I can't speak for bands that play the same town every week and try to get you to buy their $10 4-song EP, but for the rest of us, being a band can be expensive, we're literally just trying to cover some expenses.
--- What
Whoever said that you have to copy it in the original format? At some point or another, recorded music has to become audible. While audio watermarks could then be used to preven this from being recorded, this is impossible at live performances, and it's pretty easy to make your own recording device anyway. Plus there's literally thousands of tons of old equipment floating around, i.e. tape recorders.