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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.
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!
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
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.
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."