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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
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.
It took federal courts to determine that they "ignored phone calls..." I'm glad to see tax dollars being put to such good use.
Scott Swezey
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.
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
... 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
A: Hello sir B: What? A: Hello! We're calling regarding... B: What? A: HELLOO! We're calling for the peer to peer... B: What? A: About the bittorrent... B: What? A: About the wares... B: What? A: About MP3 bittorrent links... B: What? A: WILL YOU TURN DOWN THE DAMN MUSIC? B: What?
who ignore email infringement notices are hardly uncommon. As a sysadmin for several small clients, I sure don't want file-sharing going on on MY network no matter how beneficial it may be to me personally. The article is pretty vague unfortunately - they 'treated the infringement notices like spam.' So why didn't the music industry send them ACTUAL notarized letters in the first place? If I took every piece of semi-legit-looking crap that arrived in my inbox seriously, I'd be handing out credit card numbers left and right, and I'd have about a 10-foot-long penis and twenty free iPods by this point!
They were never delivered legal documents. Only sent emails and (apparently) there was a phonecall. Why would you comply with emails? Remember that site a while back that made phony cease&desist emails and sent them from hotmail/fake accounts to see how many ISP's complied? Everyone booed the ISP's who went along with it. This ISP ignores the emails and now they're getting sued. I wouldn't blame them. Why would they act on a legal matter if they weren't sent any legal instruction/documents? The whole thing is stupid. More info here: http://whirlpool.net.au/
"(which contained pirated music etc)"
.. No they didn't.
.torrent files are saved at the server. No illegal material needs to be sent out from, or hosted at a bittorrent server.
Only
That's the beauty of Bittorrent you see..
You cant fight in here, its a war room!
Anyone else tired of the media's love of terrible puns? If I see another bad pun... I'll do absolutely nothing, partly because I'm lazy.
Also, partly because I live in a country with gun control laws. Editors should be thankful.
"Live as if you'll die tomorrow." Ridiculous. You could die later today.
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.
I work for an ISP that does some hosting.
We recieve copyright complaints all the time, and every single time we contact our user and let them know we received a notice and to cease file sharing. Most of the time it is their kids anyways.
One guy wanted to try to do the whole "I'm entitled to download this movie" speech. We just told him that we were warning him that we received it. In other words we CYA'd. In the case of multiple complaints we would lock the account (multiple being several over a few weeks).
Mainly, reading TFA, these admins not only knew about, but helped set up and maintain the bittorrent hub (considering they had access logs from it). Plus documentation had been requested and not provided, and they had deliberately ignored several notices (for deliberately ignored phone calls have to go unanswered).
I'm not saying they are so guilty as to go to prison, however they kept the site going, and ingnored request by the copyright holder AND court. That does count for something.
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.
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.
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
There used to be a time when companies didn't send Cease & Desist letters. They just subpoenaed the offending party and took them to court. This was looked down on because sometimes the poor little copyright violator didn't realize what he was doing wrong and was suddenly staring down the legal departments of the big guys. So they came up with the idea of C&Ds which give fair warning to any party who might be offending the party in question.
It was a method of 1) encouraging the offending party to see the error of his ways and stop doing the bad thing, and 2) to establish in no uncertain terms that the offending party was aware that their actions were causing offence.
With that, everyone and their brother started sending C&Ds instead of actually suing. It's cheaper and doesn't require any court action, so both sides come out way ahead if the C&D works.
Unfortunately they have become so much like "Final Notice" bills that just seem to keep coming without actually reaching a conclusion. Offenders just toss the C&D in the trash and the Offended just send another C&D. Neither side really wants to take it to court because that would entail actual lawyering.
There ought to be a law that mandates that only one C&D per offence may be sent to any customer. Once that has been ignored for a certain amount of time, the offended party would either have to stop sending it or actually take the offender to court.
I'd love to see some P2P violators squirm in the courtroom. Currently they hide behind their anonymity and the knowledge that despite any C&D they receive, that many others are also receiving them and the odds of actually getting tapped by the RIAA is slim to none.
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
The Pirate Bay's complaint schtick doesn't work very well when it's an Australian ISP being sued under Australian copyright law by the local sock puppet for the music cartel. If Australian copyright law is anything like U.S law, it'd be the internet equivalent of covering yourself in honey and smacking a bear in the face with your belt.
For sale: one sig space, gently used. Inquire for details.
"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.
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
I play in a "small/unknown" band, our most recent cd was pressed by a relatively small label, and the tracking/mixing/mastering was paid for out of pocket. We're not doing it to get laid or make money, we're all either in relationships or can very well meet girls on our own, and have 'real' jobs. Even so, that part is irrelevant, you're right in saying that a lot bands have an ulterior motive for playing music.
That being said, we do charge more than cost for our cds and eps, and don't feel badly about it.
Why? Because music is a hobby for us. We already pay out of pocket for decent guitars, amps, drums, personal recording equipment, etc. We're not trying to make a business out of this, and we've never made enough off of merch sales to even begin to subsidize equipment, we view those as personal investments. We do sell a decent amount of merch, but that really only pays for gas to out-of-the-area shows, trailer rentals, and saving towards buying a trailer (which will be at least 80% out of pocket).
I can't speak for bands that play the same town every week and try to get you to buy their $10 4-song EP, but for the rest of us, being a band can be expensive, we're literally just trying to cover some expenses.
--- What
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.