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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)."
Why don't we share free music instead? Pirating music is equivalent to pirating Windows XP - why do it when OpenBSD is available instead? There's a lot available under the CC.
Only three remote holes in the default install, in more than 10 years! OpenBSD
The law specifies that this is a proper course of action.
The fact is that the law does not support the "right to share" when it becomes massive intellectual property piracy. To believe differently is to be deluded.
You can change the law, but it takes a lot of time and a lot of money. Guess who has that. That's right! YOU and all your filesharing friends. Unfortunately it is the record companies who are going out of their way to influence elected officials and getting the laws that they want passed. Meanwhile, you (the general "you") sit on your ass and bitch and moan about how the RIAA is being a bunch of bastards.
Get organized and get active. The only way you can stop this kind of action is to make it illegal.
... it's the industry. Although I haven't RTFA, I believe that these people should be reprimanded, if nothing else then to push the argument for higher open-standards when it comes to music. Why on earth would someone want to restrict the world from loving their babies!? I say, downloads by donation (for hosting) and CDs at cost. Make a living off a non-creative based job. Isn't that what working is about?
Anonymous Coward
Art is not a commodity, not if you're not Andy Warhol.
Music cannot simply be substituted for other music. A piece means something.
If we stop listening to certain music simply because of the economic situation, then we lose more than just our freedom to share music. We lose the music itself.
Promoting people who happen to make good free music is a good thing. Ignoring good label music is a bad thing.
The inevitable response to this post will mention Britney Spears. If Britney Spears is the only thing you know of that's been released on a label lately, or even if you think similar things make up the majority of what labels release, you're just not keeping an open ear.
Labels release an absolute ton of stuff of all kinds. They generally *promote* crap, but that doesn't mean they don't have their hooks in a lot of wonderful work. What you hear on Clearchannel isn't a thousandth of what the record companies have purchased lately.
Young artists have dreams of grandeur. They think signing with a label is a stroke of luck. Maybe they're wrong, but they do it. Letting that destroy what they've produced is a crime.
Nothing to do but break the law and watch the economy shift in response.
Here's how this will pan out:
They will get sued and ordered to pay 50 gadzillion dollars, AND court costs.
The court will look at their income, and the lack of prior convictions, and order them to pay 20 bucks a week for the next 100 gadzillion years.
In the meantime, at least 42 new torrent sites will open to replace each one that has been shut down, and these will be progressively harder to shut down due to being physically hosted in
(a) Russia
(b) China
(c) An Oil platform, and finally,
(d) The moon.
Meanwhile our sysdamins have paid off the 20% of the court costs of the guy that brings in the suitcases for the lawyers. They are now old, but venerated figures in the piracy underground.
Who wins? No-one.
The Records companies have lost heaps of money, our sysadmins have also lost heaps of money, the effect on global piracy was imperceptibly small, and the legal teams of both parties are sitting together on their company yacht, toasting their victory with pina coladas under the stars.
who ignore email infringement notices are hardly uncommon.
We throw them away too. Because YOU writing ME that some customer of mine violates your copyright doesn't imply that he really is, you could be lying. Only a judge can rule that something really is an infringement and order us to take action. WE ARE NOT JUDGES, we therefore ARE NOT ALLOWED to make a legal decision whether something is illegal or not. This is the law, and we citizens are not allowed to take it into our own hands and decide that our customer is "guilty".
And in fact, this false allegiations of copyright infringement already happend. Some wanted to have removed works which really were in public domain, others sent complaints according to laws that do not exist in our country, and still others sent complaints because of similar filenames (in one case, some open source package was confused with a movie, just because of the same name).
So we simply don't act on them. You have to write us a letter, on paper, and then we'll forward this to the respective customer alleged of infringing, for him to do what he sees fit. If our customer does not do what the sender wants, he may involve a judge to order us to put the material down, or to disclose the identity of the alleged infringer.
"The more prohibitions there are, The poorer the people will be" -- Lao Tse
Information isn't free, it costs whatever the person who knows it sees fit to charge others.
Reproduction of information can be essentially free, but the information itself certainly doesn't have to be.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Patient: "Doctor, it hurts when I do this"
Doctor: "Then don't do this"
If the court says folks were breaking the law, then by definition they were breaking the law. End of story. Don't like it? Try to get the laws changed, or buy the god damn CDs, or boycott the music industry by refusing to listen to the music it publishes. Stealing is not the answer.
Then they should not have gone out of their way to list their email address and telephone number first in their To report copyright infringement page. This is really just common sense -- if they only wanted to be notified by mail, and did not wish to receive emails or phone calls with piracy reports, then they should have said so.
Writing a contact page correctly is just one of those basic life skills. You and I can grasp the simple concept of omitting our email or telephone number from our contact page -- or at the very least, not listing them first -- if we only want to be contacted by post. Swiftel doesn't get a free pass here.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
"We'll be demonstrating that the company had knowledge of what was happening, and that these two individuals knew of this [piracy] activity," Tony Bannon, counsel for the labels, said.
The plaintiff has promised to demonstrate that they had full knowledge, not just that they had unverified takedown notices. And if they do - It's fair enough. But they'll have their day to prove it.This is the second case I've heard of where an organization sent legal notices through e-mail and took legal action as a result of a failure to respond.
This might have been a reasonable thing to do in 1990, but since then the flood of spam and viruses has increased to the point where it's effectively impossible to accept and read all email that arrives at a well-known address. Assuming that a message has been recieved because you don't receive a bounce message is completely unreasonable.
The labels allege Swiftel's senior systems administrators Melissa Ong and Ryan Briggs ignored calls to remove Web sites that were in breach of copyright, and instead "treated the infringement notices like spam."
Given the way facts get twisted even when all parties are trying to communicate accurately, this quote could well be a distorted version of something like "a spam filter at the ISP inadvertently lost the messages".
I know our IP laws are pretty similar to the US and are being "syncronized" because of the recent FTA, (Fuck The Australian's) agreement. However as I understand it there was no legal notice given to the ISP, so legally the sysadmin cannot act, therefore the case will be laughed out of court. BUT, it will cost a fortune to get an actual court decision and the lawyers don't mind being laughed at for the right price.
I think that the labels are looking to settle out of court, thier lowest buyoff price might be something like, forcing the ISP to make thier "report infringement" info more prominent. In other words they are trying to scare sysadmins into making sure thier message gets prominent (and free) advertising and to inject some parinoia into thier bosses for good measure.
An outragous claim backed by deep pockets will often force the victim to "do something" to get the legal monkey off thier back. The bully knows they have no chance of winning in court. However it doesn't matter since they also have no intention of going to court, they want to "negotiate an amicable settlement". I hope the ISP shows some balls and drags them through the courts to get recompense for legal costs and losses due to injuring thier reputation.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
The law is not God. It is manmade. It has not more power or legitimation than any other idea. Without the weapon of the police, it is nothing more than a contribution to a debate. This shows that a law is no differant from any tyranny. People should respect and care for each other by their own free will. On any side. We don't need any law to do that.
If they host servers with illegal content, then this is no news !
The slightly off-topic part: More and more online music stores appear on the net, which I consider a good thing. I for one would love to go there and buy a song if I hear one I like.
Problem is: If I would like to buy a random song from the top 40, changes are that with my linux machine, I can't buy it. Or maybe I can... but I can't download it, burn it or whatever. Because I don't have WMP ! I'm not downloading it illegally. If they don't let me buy and download a simple mp3 (or ogg or whatever) with GOOD quality (192kbps), they won't have me as a customer.
The terrible thing is that people that DO have WMP don't even know they are helping the big music companies in restricting everything their customers are allowed to do.
And for complete albums... , CD's are still better value. You get some media with it (CD), a case, a booklet AND the music is of better quality ! And if it is copy protected and does not adhere to the CD audio standards... they lose my business as well. I wish more people would make a statement like that. Then it might make a difference.
If you think music/video is to expensive... don't buy it, but don't copy it either. If you are not willing to pay, you probably don't need it bad enough. Buy buying restricted media, or stealing it, you just are part of the problem, making it worse for everyone.
Taken down by who? The webmasters or their ISPs who fold at receiving a letter with a lawyer's signature? That signifies nothing about the legalities, just how effective intimidation can be.
They call themselves the "SABAM" and they "represent" the music publishers. All public use of recorded music is subject to a (negotiable in the sense of "let's be reasonable about it, guvnor") fee that is calculated by square meter, number of places, etc. Normally it applies to all public events. When I asked the organiser of the open-air xmas ice-skating rink why they played such terrible 1960's jingles he just said, "sabam".
An artist who publishes his own music has to register with the SABAM or he won't find anyone to distribute or play it.
So you get insane situations like a group playing their own songs, live, who have to pay the SABAM up front for the concert, then claim the money back, minus a fee.
Or, to produce an album, you have to pay about 500 Euro up front to the SABAM, who may eventually pay this back.
And, if you make a deal with the SABAM then their cousins, the B-vergoed, come knocking, asking for due payment for "the music authors".
Little of the collected money actually goes to any artist. The big labels like PIAS get the largest chunk, the rest is lost in administration.
To be fair, the SABAM are fairly decent about it, and like all Belgian institutions, are happy to interpret the law depending on how much they think you're trying to cheat. I.e. they do not come to your wedding parties, but they will crack down on clubs that aren't paying a fee.
My blog
In Canada the offending organization is called SOCAN. They collect a tax on every blank CDR/CDRW sold. It doesn't matter if I am using the CD for storing my own photos. They distribute the wealth to record companies.