Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
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".
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.