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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.
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
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!
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.
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.
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
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".