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)."
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.
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 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...
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
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