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)."

Comments

This just in... information is free

[nokilli]

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.

Re:This just in... information is free

[RickPartin]

This is a short history of the P2P revolution that proves your point.

1. Napster lets you download any song you want. You can only download from one person at a time. Downloads frequently died. No resume download feature. Downloading full albums was frustrating.

They kill Napster

2. Kazaa emerges and lets you download any song you want, plus warez movies or anything else. Downloads are spread across many people. Very reliable. Ok speeds. Pausing and resuming is possible. Downloading full albums is still a pain.

They kill Kazaa by flooding it with bogus files.

3. Bittorrent comes out and now instead of downloading a single song you can grab the whole album in the same amount of time.

Each time they kill off a technology the next generation is always much better. I can't wait to see what is after bittorrent.

Re:Instead of sharing non-free music

[Yjam]

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.

Re:Instead of sharing non-free music

[A beautiful mind]

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.