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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.
Because for most people, Windows XP is what they're use to. They've used it at work and/or school, so to migrate to OpenBSD would present a fairly big learning curve.
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!
Because, like Windows, people tend to think of big label music as better than free (indie) music, whether it's better or not. So Windows and "professional" music are more attractive to them plus they're better known and more advertised. Sure the better known stuff costs more, but then again, that's the reason for piracy (their term, not mine).
"Plans are for fools! Oglethorpe, the plutonian (Aqua Teen Hunger Force)
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.
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.
I find the concept of 'free' music quite interesting; I mean most music available at record shops is popular mainly due to marketing. Very few people will buy a cd for $20+ of a band they've never heard; even if it's for one song they've only sorta heard. But it get's a bit of press or marketing hype and there sold.
There are 100's to 1000's of great bands out there but the majority that i've worked with (Which is quite a few) really only care about 2 thing's getting laid and making money.
Until these act's start relizing that money's not everything then we could see a huge industry change.
Why does every single 'small/unknown' band with anyform of a recording want to charge for it? Covering costs? I hardly think so. $10 (AUD) for some local bands EP's is kind of rediculous. If they really wanted to be heard they would either sell it at cost or make it freely available.
But until musician's stop caring about the bottom line free music will probably never become a reality. I hope it does. But we've all got to eat. And unlike the open source world of computers most musicians' would be quite angered if you hacked up one there songs and re-released it on the net.
(Sorry that doesn't make but you get my point even if it is kina offtopic)
------------
As we become simpler; so do our tastes.
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
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.
And alot of it is really good. It's just that these artists don't get MTV coverage..
/. before but everytime I see this RIAA crap I am reminded by the magnatune motto...
This being said, www.magnatune.com has a great collection. So pop on over and check it out.
John Buckman has been working pretty ahrd at getting artists onboard and he's done a great job. I am sure he's been covered on
we are not evil
-if at first you don't succeed, stay the heck away from paragliding.
The law does not support the right to share, nup, no it doesn't (at least it restricts the right to share in certain very specific instances, but I'm sure that's what you meant.)
But wait a moment, these guys weren't sharing, they were just "running" a bittorrent hub, weren't they? Those dastardly pirates, trying to hide between the mask of a third party! Oh wait, hold on a moment, they weren't actually "running" the hub, they are sysadmins for the ISP where the hub is present.
Ah, but surely they must be responsible for content on their servers? Well, barring that pesky common carrier concept for a moment, sure they are, which is why they were informed by legally binding documents. Hang on, what's that you say? Emails? Phone calls? You mean to imply that these two do-no-goods ignored emails from a rightfully authorized agent of the RECORDING INDUSTRY? Why, the blackguards, swing they must.
Whoa, thousands of mails a day to sysadmins, you say? Damn their eyes, they can't shield their guilt behind a spam filter. Sue them! In fact, sue their boss! Sue the accountants who work there! Sue the janitor! Who does he think he is, claiming that he's not party to technical operatoins. I'm _sure_ he overheard one of aforementioned phone calls. For that matter, sue the landlords, they must have known that illegal activity was going on!
Good lord, man...
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
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.
Use iRATE.
It's a program that has a collection of links to legal music to download; it starts off with a standard list of tracks, you can rate then, and then it tries to find tracks you might like by comparing your ratings to those of other users. So it's legal, based on what you like, and not recycled radio crap.
It's GPL and works on Linux, MacOS and Windows. Heck, it might even run on OpenBSD.
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
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.
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
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".
You want the benefit of something that isn't yours without paying for it, until you decide that it's worth paying for... by which point you've already derived the benefit of it, regardless of whether you think it's worth anything or not.
What's the difference between this and borrowing a friend's CD and listening to it a bunch of times before buying it? I used to do that all the time before the advent of p2p. Furthermore, should I feel guilty for listening to a song on the radio without buying the single? Or does that also count as having "derived the benefit of it" without paying? (Of course we do pay by listening to advertising).
You even acknowledged that your analogy isn't accurate - stealing a shirt, a physical object, is not the same as downloading music - especially if it's later deleted. Neither the artist nor the label has actually lost anything. That's not stealing.
Most new music sucks; why should I buy a whole CD for one or two good songs? CDs are overpriced. People can get the music cheaper by downloading it. It may be illegal, but when a large portion of the population is breaking the law, maybe the law needs to be examined.
For the record, I, like the grandparent poster, also spend a good deal on music. I don't bother downloading anymore because I got sick of dealing with spyware and the possibility of RIAA action. Unfortunately for the RIAA and its artists, this also means I haven't listened to as much new music lately as I used to, and I haven't bought as many CDs either. If I'm going to spend $15 on an album, it better have more than one good song on it. The only CDs I've bought lately are ones I already heard because friends had them (I'm now back again to the days before MP3s). I don't see how limiting my selection to what my friends own is helping the RIAA any.
"Well kids, you tried your best, and you failed. The lesson is, never try."