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Grokster Case Aftermath: Busy times Ahead for EFF
Tractorjector writes "Mad Penguin has published part two of their MGM vs Grokster interview series (the first part was featured on Slashdot on 2005-06-27). This time the focus is on EFF Director Shari Steele. A very compelling (and somewhat concerning) interview."
It sounds like a johnny mnemonic style future.
Hit me!
Concerning or Disconcerting?
The basic point of the ruling is that you need to be able to have plausible deniability when it comes to promoting illegal actions.
Bitorrent, for example, is able to get away with aiding mass piracy because the primary use for it is to disseminate large binary files. Those files can be anything, but one major use of bitorrent is to ease the spread of Linux distributions and other Open Source binaries.
Grokster (and its workalikes) is designed, advertised, and used as a way of illegally distributing copyrighted materials. The court just found that if you run a service designed to help people break the law that you will have some amount of responsibility in the acts.
I'm not saying that I think that "bullet makers" should be held responsible for the actions of a select few of their customers, but I do think that there is a certain amount of discretion that companies riding the razor's edge ought to employ.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
Sure there were strings attached but when isn' there?
I really don't understand why these companies think thier stuff is the only media to be had. They think they have us over a barrel, and currently they do..
As a community we should shun copyright infgringement, but at the same time we should encourage the copyright holders to release their material for personal use..
Thats how I do my stuff.. My songs are copyrighted, or CC, but they have "no profit" without permission clause.. You are free to have them as long as you don't sell them.. Its really really simple.
Since I started posting my little songs up on the net I have contacted by BMI.. I am going to join, but only because they can help me if an artist took something i have written and recorded it/ changed it. etc and proffited without compensation or permision from me..
I need the EFF to ensure that I have the right to make my stuff available. They fight the good fight for us honest little people.
Long the the EFF!
From TFA:
We also look at the effect of piracy and ask whether piracy can ever be beneficial to Microsoft. This extension was motivated by analyzing data on a cross-section of countries on Linux penetration and piracy rates. We found that in countries where piracy is highest, Linux has the lowest penetration rate.
I have an idea then: why don't they make Linux insanely expensive, put it on a CD with a small manual that has a shiny Tux hologram on it, require the user to read a long boring EULA and enter a very long serial number, then have the Linux box display a Teletubbies-like background and make it contact an activation server at www.kernel.org? That way, pirates will just jump on it, distribute it like there's no tomorrow on P2P, and Linux will eventually displace Windows.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
We need broad public, and congressional pressure .. not judicial rulings. Remember judicial rulings can be overruled by constitutional amendments and other means such as judge replacements etc.
A long term, permanent solution requires informing and winning the public.
This makes no sense. Linux has lower penetration in areas of high piracy because people who just want a free operating system rip off Windows instead of using Linux. How does that contribute profit to MS? If they use it as a price discrimination tool and raise the price in high priracy areas (presumably thinking that "low Linux penetration" means less competition), more people will pirate it!
In what way to "CNR" ot apt-get foster piracy for commercial gain?
I think the ruling is correct. If you deliberately set up a business that relies on copyright violation, then you deserve to get hauled through court.
I'd agree that the OSS community does need to shun piracy. OTOH I think people take things that Richard Stallman says, that software should be free, and try to equate that with "they want to steal stuff." That M$ would profit from piracy I think has long been established. Accusations like this were made years ago concerning usage in Central America. It was believed that M$ had let a dependence on Windows grow then cried fowl on piracy. It's a very effective tactic that has been used for ages by other sordid groups. Now it seems to be the modus operondi in East Asia.
http://management.silicon.com/government/0,3902467 7,39145066,00.htm e d_for_newsnight/ 0 588,00.html
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/07/04/brit_sack
http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/news/0,12597,152
It's one thing to bang your hand on the table for copyrights. It's something else to bury your head in the sand when a company like Grokster is effectively a copy infringement network.
Am I the only person on the planet who finds that the EFF's director's name Shari Steele (Share & Steal) is ironic?
You have the right idea, but you seem to be buying in to some unfortunate memes that really should be scotched: "plausible deniability", "promoting illegal actions", "get away with aiding mass piracy"... Bittorrent is promoting legal actions, it's aiding the distribution of software, it doesn't need to "deny" anything. The problem is that there's a limited amount of bandwidth, the solution is a Usenet-style store-and-forward distribution system.
If Bittorrent had come first, and these systems had started out like Usenet as a way for people to share information (discussion boards, open source software, and so on) nobody at the EFF would dream of defending Grokster on the grounds that they're only making their money from "arms length" piracy, just like nobody sane would call an ISP a censor for refusing to carry alt.binaries.warez.
There's nothing new about peer-to-peer networks. The Internet is a peer-to-peer network. Usenet, UUCP, Fidonet, peer-to-peer networking has been the nerve fibers of the community that slashdot is part of since long before the Internet has been available to carry its traffic.
So it's a damn shame that Napster and its successors were created to take advantage of the limited anonymity of peer-to-peer networking rather than its bandwidth-accelerating capabilities... to uise the technology as a cut-out so they could make money from mass copyright violations rather than sharing legal material. Because they may have ended up poisoning the well for good, given the way even defenders of systems like Bittorrent are using this kind of language.
How does that contribute profit to MS? If they use it as a price discrimination tool and raise the price in high priracy areas (presumably thinking that "low Linux penetration" means less competition), more people will pirate it!
Two words: market share. Get market share now, crack down later. Piracy is a thing which they publicly oppose and denounce, but if they are copying anyone's work for free, they would much rather have it be Windows than Linux.
The Grokster decision was Good.
The ED of the EFF wants to stir up the masses and make us skeered the gummint gonna take away our P2P by letting the RIAA sue anyone who writes a P2P program or runs a peer-based download service.
People who advertise a tool expressly for its illegal purposes were already liable for those eventual uses. The Grokster case merely, and rightly, applied that old-as-the-hills principle to file-sharing services.
EFF is fearmongering for donations.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
EFF has never won any significant legal battle it has taken on. In fact, some of the cases the EFF fought most heavily have been lost in a manner that substantially weakens the EFF positions. It is my opinion that the EFF should disband before it does more damage to our civil rights.
Linux has lower penetration in areas of high piracy because people who just want a free operating system rip off Windows instead of using Linux. How does that contribute profit to MS?
It means that the people who are now stealing Windows, in five years, or ten, whenever they are better off and have their own assets at risk and their own wealth to protect and when the price of Windows is something they can afford, they will be familiar with Windows and be more likely to buy Windows than to switch to Linux.
This has been a tremendously valuable tool for Microsoft over the years, in the US and abroad. Combined with their proprietary file formats it's helped them keep the market for competitors to Office down... someone who can't afford Office is a potential market for a $50 word processor, except that it's easier to "borrow" Office from the office... so there's no low-cost competition to Office any more and even free software has a rough ride.
I suspect that's one reason they didn't put any effective copy protection in Windows prior to XP. Once they had the market penetration, they could go wild.
I oppose piracy not because it harms big companies, but because it helps them.
The same thing is true for music. There are some tremendous musicians out there doing amazing work, and promoting themselves through free music and listings on MP3blogs like 3hive. They're hurt by Grokster, because a huge chunk of their potential market is swallowed up by the P2P networks. I suspect that if the networks did go down, the labels would just find themselves facing a whole new threat from independants who are right now taking a bigger hit from P2P than the labels are.
Grokster has such a great scam going. They build a piece of software, which they know darn is of questionable legality. They plan to profit in the millions on this software off they backs of copyright holders, see the internal memos. (have they offered anything to those who hold the copyrights both the RIAA people and the songwriters who have statutory mechanical royalties?). Then they get you schmucks to foot the bill for their legal defense. In the end the worse thing that happens is they go belly up fold the corp and the founders don't get to cash in when the company sells (I wonder what these guys are giving themselves for a salary.) Man I gots to get one of these schemes going.
No they don't have us in a stranglehold. Maybe they believe they do, or the public does, believing it is forced to buy certain items. But I think this may be just a result of history, and the role of copyrights. Basically, a game of numbers. How many people there are (world population), how many of those are creative spirits, and how well people are connected.
Imagine a primitive world with only 5000 souls, where only 1 in 1000 is exceptionally gifted/smart/genius. Then you have only 5 of those to provide that world with new creative works, scientific breakthroughs and so on. The discovery/birth of another genius would be a major event. And in a primitive world, anything new could take a long time before it reaches remote corners of the world. An inventor that takes a secret into his grave, makes a great loss for society. A copyright system that puts a lock on the works of those few, can make a huge difference in that world's development. I think that copyright as a concept is mostly based on the idea that creative spirits are a rare commodity.
Fast forward to here and now. With a world population of 6 billion+, modern mass media, and a general high-tech base to start with, the picture isn't anything like the above. That same 1 in 1000 people would mean 6 million creative spirits in this world, and anything they come up with, reaches far corners of the world in no-time. Then a single genius isn't as important as it used to be. Rather, you have some sort of 'environment', where scientific knowledge and creative works move in certain directions. At some point in time, the next step/development will become 'obvious' (read: very likely), and then... somebody (one of those many gifted folks) will do it. If that specific individual wouldn't, somebody else would. An inventor that takes a secret into his grave, doesn't make much difference to society.
Copyright has a totally different meaning and effect in that situation (IMHO, something that is only about economics, and/or politics). Not to say that brilliant individuals don't matter anymore, but there's always enough of them to go round, copyright locks or not.The supreme courts decision is a sound one. Those folks tried to freeload on the work of others and only thought of the "non-infringing use [ha!ha!]" when they where dragged to court.
Let me add that the direction copyright legislation is taking worldwide and specifically in the US is appaling, but that doesn't make it right to get rich quick on the expense of others.
Even if those others are such a depicable, rotten and corrupt organization as the RIAA.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
There was an intersting exchange on Slate about Grokster. One of the points made it that the rule announced is basically a rule of etiquette. This seems a good analogy, and points out the limited effect.
What will be intersting is when this ruling is put up against non-commerical products. Commerical speech is subject to a lower level of protection. Non-commerical speech is not as limited, and I don't know that applying this ruling to a non-commerical sitution would be more of a speech problem.
To blame napster for poisoning the well is just too much. Shawn Fanning was just some 19-year old college kid on a pet project. I don't think anyone looked that far ahead.
What's interesting about your funny, and indeed this whole discussion, is that people here are clearly saying that a primary purpose of P2P is software theft. Yet, quite often here at Slashdot, whenever that issue is pointed out, the poster will soon be modded "flamebait" or "troll".
Ey matey, I think there be some pirates about! Well, OK, maybe just free-loaders.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Because nearly everyone on the earth, except the greedy, megalomaniac, Bill Hates type at the Riaa, wants to be able to download music either affordably, and if not, then freely!!
So TOOOOO BAHHHHHHD!!
That is what WE want (the people), so go have a stroke if you can't deal with it.
Puting a few kids in jail and ruining their lives, and the expense of a handful of scum ceo's, is not going to do anything, but solidify the *Community*.
I just hope that the so-called illegal downloading becomes SOOOOOOO widespread, that it actually does put the scumbags out of business!!
This is all part of the culture war that is brewing on the earth. You have the ceo's & the Riaa's relying on the corrupt and illegal government(s) to do their bidding, with the Un-Jewdicial System.
What the Real Criminals don't realize is that when there is a war- anything goes, and the victor goes to the people who are willing to IGNORE laws written by the enemies :)
I will gladly loose all of life's battles.. in order to win the war..
>>Leave me a message on this here board with your email addy
piracy@mpaa.org
Thanks Tom Cruise. Go take your L. Ron Hubbard vocabulary somewhere else. You've got no business preaching that word "meme" around here. ;)
You're nothing; like me.
When supporting the EFF in words, how about with funding? There is theSummit 2005, on Thursday July 28, 2005 in Las Vegas...
o n/323.html ])
At the end of Black Hat and the beginning of DEFCON this year is theSummit 2005 - bringing together DEFCON & Black Hat speakers from past/present, as well as well known names in the computer security world. We all come together in a small, private venue for the evening summit to meet and discuss the important topics and socialize.
Note that there will be no more than 200 tickets sold (including featured guests), and all proceeds go to the Electronic Frontier Foundation [http://www.eff.org/ with the sponsor covering event overhead.
theSummit is our gathering of BlackHat / DefCon speakers and big thinkers in the Information Security realm. Anyone interested in supporting the EFF, are highly encouraged to attend; meet with fellow Information security professionals, and talk with big thinkers from the Information security world in a more private and informal setting. Too many times people want to ask questions, or have ideas that cannot make it to the big thinkers. This is either because of time conflicts or they are nervous to come up and talk. This event plans to pull out the stops, and allow the free form of conversation to flow.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation [http://www.eff.org/ is a nonprofit group of passionate people -- lawyers, technologists, volunteers, and visionaries -- working to protect our digital rights.
Where: Ice House Lounge, 650 S. Main Street, Las Vegas, Nevada
When: Thursday July 28, 2005, 9:00PM - 12:00AM
Tickets: $30 (pre-sale) $40 (at the door, if available) All Ages welcomed!
For more information, and to purchase tickets for the event:
http://www.dc702summit.org/home/
Event is sponsored by the Hackajar Foundation, and by the members of DEFCON 702.
We all hope to see you there!
(as posted in the Livejournal DEFCON community [http://www.livejournal.com/community/defcon_defc
Just what do you call such an ISP? IMO, any ISP that does this should be required to police all its traffic, and not be considered a common carrier.
~~~
For BitTorrent, and BitTorrent ONLY, I agree with you (although the Way Back Machine revealed some incriminating statements from young Bram Cohen, we can attribute that to youthful sarcasm...). Most or all of the rest are strictly warez tools.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Because nearly everyone on the earth
:)
Way to dismiss the billions who don't have interenet access. And the hundreds of millions who respect the law.
Oh, and it's not "so-called illegal downloading." Copyright infringement to avoid buying the album was fairly recently made a federal crime.
What the Real Criminals don't realize is that when there is a war- anything goes, and the victor goes to the people who are willing to IGNORE laws written by the enemies
Nooo. When there is a war, things get violent. And victor goes to the side that's better able to organize, gather, and execute its forces.
I don't buy your argument that the EFF hasn't won any battles. But let's assume for a moment that I do. You've convinced me that the EFF is counter-productive. Given that there are many corporate and political interests in the US that want to limit our civil liberties and control what we can do online, how will removing the EFF from the battle help us, and what would you propose in its place?
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Nothing is going to change until we shoot the bastards.
Andy Out!
Okay, what I want to know is this: what do they mean by "advocating illegal use"? Will Linux eventually be attacked as a piracy tool because it does not have effective DRM? I presume the copy protection schemes which are starting to show up on music CDs are windows-specific, and Linux/FOSS will allow infinite workarounds to this (I'm counting on it, for when holding down SHIFT as I pop in the CD stops working - I don't up/down load, but I want total control and ownership of the 35.5 GB of music I payed thousand$ for). The grokster ruling seems to say you have to advertise your product/service as a piracy tool - but that looks like a thin defense to me. What if the vendor never specifically says to use product-X for piracy, but word spreads virally that X has that use, and then it becomes the predominant use of X? What if millions of kiddies start burning Knoppix DVDs for no reason other than to break the DRM on their CDs and DVDs? It'd be great from a Linux-adoption standpoint, but will there *be* any Linux left to adopt, after the big RIAA/M$-funded lawsuit? I assume Novell and RedHat would just bolt DRM into the kernel and keep on chugging, but what happens to free / source distros like Gentoo?
;-)
Oh yeah, and how representitive is Slashdot considered to be of the FOSS community in general? Could a court look upon the pro-piracy / anti-DRM/RIAA statements and articles that show up here as evidence that the whole Linux thing is a criminal enterprise? Will moderation count, or will they just print ALL the posts?
I better go eat breakfast, low blood sugar makes me paranoid.
Organization + gathering helps the more powerful adversary.
But when you're a weak enemy fighting a strong enemy, hierarchical organization means that your leaders get targeted and killed. The key is to coordinate movements without becoming too organized.
In these kinds of wars, most people are often innocent civilians. The weaker enemy can sometimes gain an advantage by coaxing the stronger enemy to attack blindly. The effect is to radicalize the otherwise innocent and apathetic population when bystandars are killed. This is what Sinn Fein did, for instance, in Ireland.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
And this boys and girls is why "regular folks" think we techies are a bunch of free-loading twits who have a false sense of entitlement.
I fear this has something to do with Godwins Law... but I'm unsure how it applies exactly. *Hmmm* Let me think...
GRAMMAR NAZI!
Why is the parent +4 funny? we cant use the word meme anymore? im genuinely curious. has it jumped the shark, so to speak, the same way that 'paradigm' did in the late 90s?
someone modded this guy up and thought he was funny, but to me the grand parent was just a normal slashdot comment. do i have to sit through that allegedly dreadful war of the worlds to get the joke?
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
This may, overall, be good.
The Madpenguin interview TFA starts by pointing out a study that indicates Copyright infringement may be good for Microsoft.
I think that this probably can be extended to the MPAA, RIAA and friends -- in fact, there's the infamous stats that showed a CD buying spree as napster's fortunes rose, and the popping almost the week that napster got shut down.If you want to hurt the copyright cartels, obviously the best thing to do is discourage your friends from comitting copyright infringement and encourage them to by local and independently sourced music. and/or music or software that is under an open license. This also tends to result in more money staying in the local economy (good for you in the long run).
Just like Linux has forced Microsoft to produce better software, lower their pricing and even give at least lip service to 'open' (cough cough) standards, if your friends start ignoring content that is copy protected and going for stuff with permissive customer rights, then those companies are going to have to respond in kind to keep their market share.
What I liked about grokster was the peer-to-peer distribution network. What I disliked about it is that they openly encouraged copyright violation that effectively supported the mega-corps. This Supreme Court decision seems to open up the possibility of a peer to peer company that actually promotes independent music over the mass market pablum.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Always get your software from the official distributors:
http://www.cacs.louisiana.edu/linuxreloaded/
Do it from unknown third parties, and you might be very surprised to get some highly unexpected video file instead (*wink-wink, nudge-nudge*).
... responsible for WMDs?
For clearly what other possible intent could there be in the manufacturing and sale of such items?
Or at least this is the thought that comes quickly to mind in reading about this grokster case.
I stopped donating to the EFF and let my membership lapse over a year ago because of the EFF's activities on behalf of "file-sharing" networks, websites, etc., whose primary focus is to encourage piracy. By support these groups and individuals, you undermine the credibility of the EFF and associate legitimate internet pioneers with profiteering sleazebags. As long as the EFF continues to support entities that are profiting from blatantly encouraging people to use their networks for piracy, I will not support the EFF, and I will encourage other EFF memebers to discontinue their support as well.
At the end of the day, the question for most /. folks seems not to be the legality/illegality of the actions but, rather, whether or not we believe the labels should die.
The actions are then justified/condemned according to the author's position against/for the labels.
Maybe the EFF is really doing the greatest service possible in killing the labels?
Mod me up, mod me down, flame me, praise me -- whatever you do, you help prove I exist...
From the article:
Let's also be very clear about one thing: free open source advocates need to become staunch opponents of piracy. We are asking the world to respect the GPL, which is based on copyright. We need to respect copyright, if do the same if we expect respect the world to respect the GPL. Lessig also repeatedly pounds the table for respect for copyright wherever he goes.
Bollocks. Unless copyright expires after a sensible period of time; say 20 years. The current laws are designed for the benefit of Disney Corp's Mickey Mouse.
On several of my previous posts over the years, I would declare that all hell was about to break loose. Well it has now broken loose!
Basically this is like the civil war, accept information age style. The battles will not be fought with soldiers, but with endless cross litigation, civil harassment, frivolous lawsuits, property confiscation, virus and worm attacks, spyware and spybots, and plain old fasion brow beating.
There will be no north and south, this time only pro-ip and anti-ip, pro information controll and anti information controll backed by various loose alliances. In fact, even within the same corporations there will be massive division.
Better take sides now, because anyone inbetween will simply used as a pawn and exploited for the one or the other sides. Like it or not, the middle ground is dead! Like it or not, they are going to force this into an all or nothing game. Copyrights and non tangable patents will either last for all eternity or be dead for the rest of eternity. That is the bottom line.
An ISP that doesn't want to require 4 OC-12s and 20 Terabytes of disk to be connected to its newsserver when all it wants to make available is discussion newsgroups? I have to imagine that alt.binaries.warez is a particularly egregious offender when it comes to bandwidth usage. And unlike, say, alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.* it probably isn't extremely popular *cough* so why bother keeping it around at all? It seems like any reasonable ISP would want to remove this particular group.
Random and weird software I've written.
Now I'm not an expert on Hubbardisms, but I strongly suspect that the word you're thinking of is "engrams".
To blame napster for poisoning the well is just too much. Shawn Fanning was just some 19-year old college kid on a pet project.
All that means is he poisoned the well accidentally rather than deliberately.
I don't think anyone looked that far ahead.
Lots of us did. Of course when we pointed out that Napster's business model was basically the knowing promotion of illegal activity, we got slammed by the extreme anti censorship brigade... but the fact is that Napster screwed us all by establishing this connection between P2P and piracy in the general consciousness.
The only thing that your post really says is that you've been brainwashed by the "piracy" meme, whose only purpose is to ensure a future of unlimited profitability for major media copyright holders.
Since you've been assimilated, you're obviously not going to see any good in the work of the EFF. The fault isn't with them though, but in the fact that your machinery of judgement is no longer operative.
So-called "piracy" is free advertising, targeted to those most likely to buy. The only reason the **AA is yelling about it, is to get even more people to tune in, and pay attention to their products.
The latest Star Wars movie was the most pirated movie of all time... AND the biggest box office of all time.
Microsoft has always been the most pirated software, AND the biggest market share.
Rest assured, the accountants for the owners of copyright did not miss the connection between cause and effect. To eliminate "piracy" would cut profits significantly. They just want to limit the number of "pirates" to the most profitable levels, not eliminate them altogether.
And, the **AA copyright holders are clearly not content with obtaining this massive, targeted advertising, that so very effectively increases their sales, at no cost to them.
They want us to pay them for it as well.
I predict therefore, that even though "piracy" increases sales and profit, lawmakers will be influenced, and an entertainment tax will eventually be added to the cost of internet access.
The true thieves are not those who share files without profit.
No, the true thieves call sharing "piracy" and profit from effort and bandwidth they did not pay for.
The meaning of your Life is up to you. Mean well. -- Me, 9/11/2001
Oh, and it's not "so-called illegal downloading." Copyright infringement to avoid buying the album was fairly recently made a federal crime.
SOOOOOO!! That law is ILLEGAL!!
And it's only a matter of time for it to be overturned, retroactively)!
Meanwhile, WE will just keep hammering away at the jewish-mafia running todays business world by downloading whatever, whenever and wherever WE want!! :)
Nooo. When there is a war, things get violent. And victor goes to the side that's better able to organize, gather, and execute its forces.
The ONLY ones to get violent in this particular spat, is the leaders involved in the recording industry, and their arselickers in the government.
They did this when they started making it a CRIME where young kids can goto jail, face violence there (along with the whole danger of being arrested) and then having their whole lives ruined because they want to listen to music they can't afford.
SOOO don't tell us about violence buster... go tell the leaders of the KIKE- Mafia behind all this trouble!! :[
I will gladly loose all of life's battles.. in order to win the war..
Your argument that rights in the electronic realm are in no way separate from traditional civil rights is of course in its largest context true, but if civil rights should only be tackled by the ACLU, where does that leave the UFW (United Farm Workers), the Southern Poverty Law Center, NOW (the National Association for Women), and other organizations that tackle "niche" issues?
My take on it is that a diverse collection of organizations taking on civil rights abuses in a variety of venues is more effective than a single organization. I certainly give to only some of them, but I do like to have choices.
It seems to me that your real gripe about the EFF is that the organization is run ineffectively. Because it hasn't won as many court cases as you'd like, or rolled back legislation even in the face of massive corporate-financed Congressional power, you see it as ineffectual. But given that money donated to the EFF goes directly to the fight for online rights, while money donated to the ACLU goes to a wide array of causes, I'm not sure that support of the ACLU and exclusion of support for the EFF is such a good idea.
I hedge my bets by supporting both of them, even though I sometimes disagree with positions taken by both organizations. If you want to influence the EFF to become a more capable organization, why not get involved in it?
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Grokster didn't acually lose anything right?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this just means that now they will actually need to start defending themselves and try to prove that they didn't actively promote the use of their product for illegal acts.
The sad part is that without the protection of procecution they will now need to start spending big bucks to defend themselves in court. Which sadly often just means that the first one to go bust loses.
And MPAA and RIAA have prety deep pockets.
BT and its ilk also have an unfortunate characteristic in that it's designed to break files into little pieces, with one of the original "benefits" the fact that, in doing so, no one has to have all of an infringing file on their system.
One other misconception is the "bandwidth-accelerating" aspects. It may just be my perspective from looking at the code, but perhaps you can tell me how sending out thousands of requests to thousands of servers asking for bits and pieces of a file is more "efficient" bandwidth-wise?
Especially from a end-user's perspective, as having just "part" of a requested web page or half of my email does me no good whatsoever. The entire document must be gathered and transmitted, one way or another.
It's only benefit there, truly, lies in allowing smaller servers from being swamped from requests for popular files.
As earlier models (servers, mirrors) also enabled large file distribution, it will be instructive to see if that sole benefit is enough to outweigh its other more "disturbing" mis-uses...
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
That you don't see how bittorrent utilizes the network more effeciently.
"One other misconception is the "bandwidth-accelerating" aspects. It may just be my perspective from looking at the code, but perhaps you can tell me how sending out thousands of requests to thousands of servers asking for bits and pieces of a file is more "efficient" bandwidth-wise?"
It's more effecient because the bandwidth that's normally unused (end-user upstream) is used. And no single routing path will become saturated with packets because clients get data from all over.
Sure, there's bandwidth "wasted" compared to a straight FTP or http download, but it makes use of the network that exists much more effectively, and thus effeciently.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
So basically you're saying that the EFF is not effectively protecting "real" civil rights online. By defending Grokster, they're actually promoting a cause that has nothing to do with civil rights as enshrined in the Constitution. In casting too broad a net, they're making it more difficult not only for themselves, but for other civil rights organizations to defend core Constitutional rights that apply to the electronic sphere.
If I've paraphrased your argument correctly, it does make sense to me. It is interesting that I've heard the same case made against the ACLU. Because the ACLU often takes positions on behalf of some incredibly venal people (the KKK for example), they are often accused of being completely unbalanced in favor of individual rights as opposed to the well being of society at large. The ACLU philosophy is that individual rights must be defended as a matter of principle, and the law can only work properly if everyone's civil rights are defended.
I'm not sure if the EFF has the same philosophy. It could be that they feel every attempt to regulate Internet activity is a threat to individual freedom. It could also be that they simply feel that every time big business or the government acts to regulate what people can do on the Internet, such action should be opposed as a matter of principle. Not many people feel that Grokster deserves much sympathy, and my guess is that the EFF was defending Grokster not because they believed in what Grokster was doing as much as they were afraid of what a negative ruling would do to other, more legitimate P2P efforts.
Your premise is interesting. I'm not won over, but I am now more interested in which cases the EFF turns its attention to, how it makes policy decisions, and how the EFF and ACLU coordinate their efforts.
One final note: I agree that niche groups can't address larger issues, and I prefer it that way. I tend to fear organizations that are too broad in their mandate. The ACLU sometimes goes a bit too far for my tastes. The AARP is downright scary at times. The Family Research Council freaks me out 24/7. Smaller entities may have ideological zeal, but their limited range makes them less dangerous to society than organizations with broad scope and intense "us versus them" fervor. The absurd Blue vs. Red dilemma we find ourselves in today stems in large part from the extended power of broad groups that focus on the "big picture" rather than on more modest goals.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
"Again, and for the last time, it will be interesting to see how far the perceived benefits outweigh the perceived abuses."
I don't care about that. It's political. We both know there's going to be people that use it for both good and bad things, like anything else. Sure, it might be interesting, but that's not the arguement. The arguement is that you don't see any benefit in bittorrent at all - even from a technical standpoint.
"I think you're ignoring common network topology. It "may" be more efficient if someone in your ISP's local network has the entire specific file you're looking for, or most of it, otherwise you're still routing out and back anyway." "but all of those packets still need to be routed from there over the backbone to"
What do you mean by "the backbone?" You don't think the Internet has a few major links that connect everything, do you? It's a distributed network. There's a whole bunch of routes to anywhere, and the ISPs and Telcos all connect to each other across many redundant links. Some of them are absurdly fast, and some of them are just plain fast. But there's so much redundency and load balancing involved that only your regional traffic is going to go through the same locations.
That being said, it's also likely that with most torrents, people will be downloading the peices from all over the place. I don't feel as though this should even have to be explained but I guess I must.
Someone seeds a download. It's downloaded by, say, 20 clients, all random peices. More clients join in, and they start to download peices from not only the seeders, but from those 20 clients. 200 more clients join in, and download from the seeders, the 20 clients, and the last bunch of clients. Another 2,000. Now there's thousands of clients with peices of the file, all spread out over the internet. Traffic from any single torrent client is minimal, but the aggregate bandwidth is tremendous. You're not filling up any one backbone since you're downloading peices from all over the country/world.
Bittorrent isn't about giving you, as a downloader of some file, the fastest download. It's about the ability to download said file AT ALL when it's a popular download. The side-effect is that you can end up reaching much greater speeds then the server could have done on it's own - at the same time as everyone else.
Web caches are one thing, but they don't solve the problem because you'd need 100% participation with all ISP's to make it really worth a shit. And even then, there's thousands of ISPs - you'd still have to upload your file thousands of times to get it onto everyone's web proxy.
And let's not go and assume that all linux distributions are created by big companies with lots of cash. Knoppix is a good example - they're not a big company. And they struggle with mirrors all the time. But when there's a big release, you can sure get on a torrent and download it nice and fast.
Even WoW beta used Bittorrent to distribute the 3GB+ installation flat to the beta testers. They seeded it with a few fast machines on some fast connections - but they would never have been able to distribute it to 10,000 clients simultaneously without paying BIG bucks to an Akamai type service.
So, why is it that you see no value in Bittorrent? Because every 50K of data ends up being padded with 2k of control data? Who cares? There's enough aggregate bandwidth available to eat up that control data no problem, and with a distributed network like the Internet, it works great.
Even Microsoft is apparently developing it's own bittorrent type thing (avalanche.) Although we'll believe it when we see it.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
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There are a lot of ideas and concerns after the supreme court ruling against Grokster. The major question amongst most p2p users is: Does this mean the downfall of the p2p networks? Our thought is, not exactly. There are too many people that have had p2p for too long. Not to mention that many people use the networks for legitimate purposes, and the developing technologies are to valuable to abandon. Bittorrent disseminates large binary files and therefore has a legitimate function. If the remaining networks can show that their sole function is not to commit illegal actions they too may have a loophole. To further the argument, what is stopping p2p developers from expressly forbidding copyright infringement, then just not regulating or enforcing it on their networks?