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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)."
Don't mean to sound like a pot-smoking hippie here but it is simply the truth.
What do the BitTorrent file-sharing hubs do in response? Buy a little time shuffling across different portnums until the fix is in to support tunneling protocols, that's what. There may be a limited number of port numbers, but there are literally an infinite number of ways of translating one sequence of bytes into another sequence of bytes.
BitTorrent over a gaming port. Why not? You gonna block gaming ports? Have fun at the support desk.
Swiftel, et al, responds by investing massive amounts of resources in detecting the protocol in real-time, so as to differentiate gaming use from BitTorrent goodness, and wins.
For a day.
The response that encrypts the stream, stegonographically, arrives a day later.
By putting up obstacles you only feed innovation. The tunneling protocol is going to consume more bandwidth of course, so now everybody is going to be thinking about how to compress the stream even further than it already has been.
By putting up barriers, the censors only provide the incentive to create new technologies to overcome them. Create distributed systems that allow trusted peers to authenticate with one another. Verify the quality of content being requested. Allow for protocols that defeat sniffing and snooping, possibly by making it so that existing protocols must be scrapped.
Swiftel, China and the MPAA are doomed to fight this war forever, losing all the way, because essentially they are playing the role of adversity while the peers are playing the role of biological organisms.
Adversity fuels life.
Swiftel, China and the MPAA are fueling piracy.
It's a beautiful day. Why? Because this shit is FUN.
Bring it on, and thank you.
sadly i doubt they differentiate between trackers and actually hosting copyrighted content. i can understand if the copyrighted content was being hosted with bittorrent being the means of distribution, but i highly doubt that is the case.
http://www.sledgehammercomputers.com
Well, what the hell...
Their actions are just like if the KKK sued a bus company because they "let niggers aboard". Who cares that you hate Blacks? It's not up to the bus driver to decide who can enter and who can not -- in many jurisdiction, the driver is even not allowed to deny service to a customer if that customer isn't disruptive. And in this case, the web sites who used these ISPs didn't even commit any crime themselves -- they merely provided an index for illegal activities.
Following this logic, they may start persecuting bus operators because they don't strip search every passenger. You know, that old lady may be a hidden courier for a dope ring...
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Sharing free music is good okay. But sharing pirated music is good too.
...
Let me explain how I buy music:
1/ Look on forums/online music stores,
2/ Randomly choose artists whose music seems interresting 3/ Download the artist(s)' full discography
4/ Listen
5/ Then, if I like 1 song. I just keep it and delete te rest; if I like an Album, I go buy it.
Well, if I can't donwload music freely on the internet will I continue listening to music? Hmm... probably yes. The music I already have on CDs (lots of it) and will buy new CDs maybe one a year instead of one a week.
I *hope* I'm not the onl one to D/L music in order to choose whant I want tu buy... but hell... I *doubt* it. But anyway, too much protection can also have a vicious impact.
This is one of the occasions when i hate living in the country i live in atm. In Hungary, there is no free music, by the law.
How is this possible? Well, the law wants to "protect us" from big labels bullying people into non-paying contracts or giving music away free. Thing is, this is almost a century old law and is fundamentally broken in today's world. It works like this: the musician cannot excercise his own right to declare music public domain, because there is a for-profit organization called Artisjus which steps up, and "demands" money after every musical work. In today's reality this killed the amateur music in Hungary, because of the following:
An amateur musician makes some nice music, and puts it on his homepage for free download. The thing gets noticed, people are downloading it and Artisjus notices it aswell. Artisjus has a legal(!) right to collect around 100HUF ($0.5) after every downloads. That's right, from the artist. Then, Artisjus takes its fees, spins things around, and in the best case, the artist gets back 35-40 HUF as his "profit" from that original 100 he payed to distribute his OWN song he wanted to put into public domain. This is a good example how laws can be f*cked in some countries.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
That's more or less what I do. I refuse to spend any more than $4 on an EP/LP if I haven't heard it at least 3-4 times. Nearly every record or CD I've bought I downloaded first. The few where that's not the case I only payed a couple bucks for and most of those are demos that I bought from the band themselves. If I'm gonna spend $10-$12 on an album I better know for a fact I like it. Last month alone I spent $450 on music, not including shows and merch like t-shirts.
My record collection is better than yours.
Bungo!
Actually, the RIAA has quite a bit of political influence here. It works like this:
Q.E.D.
About bittorrent there is no doubt that it will be growing more and more with time, but there is another proyects like:
WASTE and MUTE
About freedom, here are some interesting articles by Richard Stallman
Right to Read
Misinterpreting Copyright
Reevaluating Copyright
Freedom or Copyright
Good bye
PS: RMS lost some records maybe somebody can help him Can you find any of these records?
Rock and Roll
Were they actually hosting music or were they providing pointers to music. I think the distinction is very important because it feel like the music industry is playing on the lack of technical knowledge in the general (downloading) population.
I, personally, think that hosting music for download is wrong (I think that we should have far more rights regarding what we do with music we have bought though) but wrong with a little w. I can't see any way that providing a pointer to music is wrong though. I admit that the music industry is going to be annoyed that people are providing pointers but information shouldn't be illegal.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
You know what your piece means? Ass. It's cash in someone's warm, moist hand. Charging for a performance is one thing, but charging for music is just rediculous. Why would someone want to listen to music made without pure passion, diluted with the prospect of fortune? Where's the substance? And that's all beside the point. If artists want a carreer in music, they should either learn to live on a budget, get over themselves, reconsider music as a hobby, or all three (performing arts as the sole exception, and I'm talking about people who have a masters in music composition.) This is all beside the point anyway. It's not the artists who are to blame for crappy, overpriced music, it's the producers and record labels. They are the real money-grubbing scumbags, and deserve to have their sexuals moistened with the sharp end of my shoe.
You have to pay for Artisjus for things like:
- Giving a concert in a park
- Putting a TV in a pub
- Handing out cassette tapes
- Setting up a music archive from long forgotten music from 50ies (this is why its not happening here)
Also, there is a fee on every cd/dvd and flash memory card, which doubles their price. Talk about law-supported robbery.It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
That sounds even worse then the GEMA in Germany. IIRC from my days as a guitar player in a hardcore band (read: not many sales, not doing it professionaly) I rememeber that you could choose not to become a member of the GEMA if you saw no gain from it. But then, you either had to make your recordings public domain (since else no club had the right to play them) or negotiate with every club/DJ yourself.
This insecure position led to weird situations where we had to fill out forms with the names of all songs we were going to perform on a night for sending them in to the GEMA, because the club wanted to be on the safe side, but we had some checkbox there on the paper that said that all songs were non-GEMA-controlled...
What happens when someone fakes an email header so it looks like an infrigment notice from a movie studio etc. For example Saying there is copyrighted material on the pharmacydirect.com.au website. So because of this case, emails are given the word of law by the courts and the Pharmcacy Direcy website is taken offline. Pharmacy Direct then sues the ISP for losing it millions of dollars. What will the courts do then.... Emails cannot be given legal status as they are too easily faked. It they were not there would be an easy way to filter spam emails. Another Lively discussion on this happening on www.whirlpool.com.au Direct link is to the discussion is here Bluemars
The latest good news were that someone took the time to go and ask them how to press music CDs without paying a canon (note: Spanish-written link). Now, if I didn't have to resort to abroad providers to get my data CDs/DVDs.
By the way, does anybody else think it's strange that editors and authors belong to the same association? Vertical union, anyone?
With anonymizing proxies such as The Onion Router (tor) and I2P that utilizes encryption and Bittorrent clients that are supporting decentralized trackers which make P2P unstoppable, good luck pinning the blame on ISPs. The ISPs already have a tough enough job trying to provide reliable connections and allocating bandwidth without customers complaining. Now clueless music labels think they're going to scare piracy out of existance by suing ISPs, the provider of the infrastructure. That's about as illogical as trying to sue the state for building roads everytime there's a drunk driving accident.
This is just a taste of what is heading over the horizon. The Internet with anonymizing protocols and encryption has opened up a Pandora's Box, and what's inside is a reflection of human nature itself.
Perhaps it is the evolution of our species to be interconnected and sharing ideas freely, instead of functioning at the same level of design as the laws that try to enforce an imaginary system of credit. This extends beyond the music and movie industry, and raises questions as to how governments are going to control the minds of its citizens in the age of a globally interconnected community.
Bittorrent is only a foreshadow of what is coming around the corner for our species' evolution, with humans interconnected via cybernetic implants, who decides what meme have the most value?
Now they are saying, at least in Australia, that these are legally binding documents? Ya think?! IANAL but I have a real problem with this. The last time I looked legal notices were supposed to be on paper, not in the form of bits down the cable. This doesn't even begin to address the issue of legal liability for the ISP/hosting provider that does take action on one of these e-mails and it turns out that the e-mail was either fraudulent or in error. Sheesh, what a can of worms.
I do know one thing. For simple self-protection I am so not going to host anything other than something I myself create, and even then I'm probably going to end up in software patent hell, knowing my luck. So much for the Internet age. It was sweet while it lasted.
"[I]t is a wise man who admits the limits of his knowledge or skill, and that pretending either causes harm." --Terry Go
"That's the beauty of Bittorrent you see.."
Yet tracker sites which specialize in pirated material are constantly taken down. It looks like that excuse just isn't working. The fact that your post is presently "4, Informative" shows that this may take a while to sink in on /.
What will it be tomorrow? Pirates bit-shifting files so they claim that they're not trading the real data, then continuing to watch as sites are taken down? It seems like a better use of effort to trade files provided by artists who want their music to be freely traded -- and then supporting those artists by going to their concerts or whatever. Create a real revolution by showing the world that the traditional "pay me in advance for music" concept isn't the only way. Pretending that the concept of a .torrent file will give you legal protection, while the pirate torrent sites continue to go down, is not the answer.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
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.
You got it right and used two important words/phrases.
1. "ISP" != sysadmins at the ISP.. ISP = legally authorized representatives of ISP, ISP management, whatever.
2. "legal order". Not emails, not phone calls. In most of the world this takes the form of a subpoena, a court order, visit by a duly authorized officer of the law, notarized & witnessed document, whatever.
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
The situation in Hungary is almost the same as in Poland - our organisation is called ZAIKS, and it's known to send their tax-collectors (they don't call it tax, but that's what it is) even to weddings to charge live bands for popular songs they play.
Now Creative Commons Poland talks with ZAIKS to solve that problem, but we are making very slow progress.
What is worse - we have a law called "dead hand" which makes all public domain works a subject to another tax. Money collected from "dead hand" in theory goes to artist to stimulate creativity. Practically it get lost somwehere in the ministry of culture.
This Is Not a Sig
You seem to completely miss what common carrier status is. Common carrier status lets you not be responsible for the things on your service, because there si too much and it would be too difficult and intrusive to monitor it all. But you MUST react when you are told of illegal things on your service. Just because you are a common carrier doesn't mean you can ignore illegal activity, it just means you don't have to active seek it out. And this is the way it should work. If you know of something illegal going on (because you happened to see it or because someone told you) you are then liable for it unless you take the proper action.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
Well, here in Czech republic is similar organizaton (Called OSA),
sometimes things are really fucked up:
imagine radio playing in pub.
OSA collests money like this:
1, from pub owner who has to play legal rights to "broadcast copyrighted material" to his guests
2, shop which sold him radio has to give them part of profit from that piece of equpiment.
3, radio station has of course pay fees again.
4, recording company to pay OSA that it defends it
5, musician himself paying part of profit to osa as membership fees.
note that musician cannot be non-member, its compulsory....
-- Technology for the sake of technology is as pathetic as eschewing technology because it's technology.
Because OpenBSD isn't available in a user friendly (read idiot proof) .iso download?
Personally, I want to try OpenBSD 3.7, I have the files, but no mkisofs means the instructions I've found to make the damn image are not straightforward.
I know you've got your reasons, but if you're going to ask publicly 'why don't people use this lovely secure system?' then you have to ask yourself, 'why don't we make it more accessible to n00bs?'
It's the same here in the Netherlands. There should be European directives against this
the pun is mightier than the sword
And since the
IANAL, but - would any of the lawyers on here care to give a more informed (but still not binding as no attorney/client privilege exists) opinion?
www.eFax.com are spammers
Is the line "But until musician's stop caring about the bottom line" synonymous with "But until musicians stop feeling the need to eat or sleep somewhere"?
Sure, you can do this as a hobby, but what if it's something that consumes you, takes over your life in a quest to produce something truly great? Who feeds you? Who pays for your living arrangements?
It's not the greed of musicians that's the problem. It's the attitude that everything based in the digital world must be free when things just don't work like that in real life.
People need money to live. If you disagree with that, what's the better alternative that can be a reality today, in this world, with the current cost of living?
Damn right. How many stores let you listen to the whole album in the store to try it out? Blockbuster Music used to do that 10 years ago. None of the chains do that now. If the RIAA wants to take away that excuse from downloaders then encourage more stores to do it. Nothing to be afraid of unless the rest of the album sucks.