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Australian Court says Kazaa Users Breach Copyright
mferrare writes "This from Reuters UK: An Australian court ruled on Monday that users of Kazaa, a popular internet music file-swapping system, breached music copyright and ordered its owners to modify the software. The music industry told the court that Sharman Network licensed users to access a network it knew was being used for piracy and hence it was authorising people to infringe copyright"
The Freenet Project is working towards the next major release of the Freenet software, hopefully this side of Christmas. Among the major new features will be:
- Trusted links, so that only your friends will know that you are
part of the network
- Switch from TCP to UDP to support seamless firewall traversal
- Complete code rewrite and simplification
- Support for live broadcast of information, in addition to storage
and retrieval (allowing everything from IRC over Freenet to "instant
RSS")
Freenet's goal is to ensure that people have the freedom to share knowledge without fear that someone is looking over their shoulder. Unlike Kazaa, Freenet is a voluntary, non-profit free software project.The Freenet project requires $2,300 per month to pay for its full time developer, Matthew Toseland, but currently the project's reserves are very low, so if you can spare it (especially given the more immediate drains on people's generosity), your donation would be much appreciated.
The Sky is blue.
Microsoft are convicted monopolists.
Geek groupies exist.
(Ok, so I made the last one up, we can't expect a totally perfect day now can we)
liqbase
"...was being used for piracy and hence it was authorising people to infringe copyright."
Come on now, this is the same argument that's been going on for decades concerning VHS tapes, cassettes, CDs, DVDs, etc. Sure Kazaa has its share of illegal bits and bytes, but if you want to censore everything, might as well get rid of the internet altogether.
This sig contains repetition and redundancy.
so when are car companies going to be told to put limiters on all their cars set to the max speed limit in that country because, you know if they allow me break the law by speeding then obviously i have no choice but to do it.
...that decided it could change the rules of Formula 1?
who's still using kazaa anyway? it's full of adawares and spywares
My business faces ruin. CD sales have dropped through the floor. People aren't buying half as many CDs as they did just a year ago. Revenue is down and costs are up. My store has survived for years, but I now face the prospect of bankruptcy. Every day I ask myself why this is happening.
I bought the store about 12 years ago. It was one of those boutique record stores that sell obscure, independent releases that no-one listens to, not even the people that buy them. I decided that to grow the business I'd need to aim for a different demographic, the family market. My store specialised in family music - stuff that the whole family could listen to. I don't sell sick stuff like Marilyn Manson or cop-killer rap, and I'm proud to have one of the most extensive Christian rock sections that I know of.
The business strategy worked. People flocked to my store, knowing that they (and their children) could safely purchase records without profanity or violent lyrics. Over the years I expanded the business and took on more clean-cut and friendly employees. It took hard work and long hours but I had achieved my dream - owning a profitable business that I had built with my own hands, from the ground up. But now, this dream is turning into a nightmare.
Every day, fewer and fewer customers enter my store to buy fewer and fewer CDs. Why is no one buying CDs? Are people not interested in music? Do people prefer to watch TV, see films, read books? I don't know. But there is one, inescapable truth - Internet piracy is mostly to blame. The statistics speak for themselves - one in three discs world wide is a pirate. On The Internet, you can find and download hundreds of dollars worth of music in just minutes. It has the potential to destroy the music industry, from artists, to record companies to stores like my own. Before you point to the supposed "economic downturn", I'll note that the book store just across from my store is doing great business. Unlike CDs, it's harder to copy books over The Internet.
A week ago, an unpleasant experience with pirates gave me an idea. In my store, I overheard a teenage patron talking to his friend.
"Dude, I'm going to put this CD on the Internet right away."
"Yeah, dude, that's really lete [sic], you'll get lots of respect."
I was fuming. So they were out to destroy the record industry from right under my nose? Fat chance. When they came to the counter to make their purchase, I grabbed the little shit by his shirt. "So...you're going to copy this to your friends over The Internet, punk?" I asked him in my best Clint Eastwood/Dirty Harry voice.
"Uh y-yeh." He mumbled, shocked.
"That's it. What's your name? You're blacklisted. Now take yourself and your little bitch friend out of my store - and don't come back." I barked. Cravenly, they complied and scampered off.
So that's my idea - a national blacklist of pirates. If somebody cannot obey the basic rules of society, then they should be excluded from society. If pirates want to steal from the music industry, then the music industry should exclude them. It's that simple. One strike, and you're out - no reputable record store will allow you to buy another CD. If the pirates can't buy the CDS to begin with, then they won't be able to copy them over The Internet, will they? It's no different to doctors blacklisting drug dealers from buying prescription medicine.
I have just written a letter to the RIAA outlining my proposal. Suing pirates one by one isn't going far enough. Not to mention pirates use the fact that they're being sued to unfairly portray themselves as victims. A national register of pirates would make the problem far easier to deal with. People would be encouraged to give the names of suspected pirates to a hotline, similar to TIPS. Once we know the size of the problem, the police and other law enforcement agencies will be forced to take piracy seriously. They have fought the War on Drugs with skill, so why not the War on Piracy?
This evening, my daughters asked me. "Wh
I steal music and am proud of it.
http://www.kazaa.com/us/help/new_100percentlegal.h tm
:)
I was hoping to see this updated.... damn
what a crime.
how about we sue utensils manufactures because Jeffrey Dommer used them on his victims
First the US gov and corporations is screwing its population.
Then Australia decides to follow the same path.
What is this world coming to?
People in the computing field like to spur the use of spurious jargons. The less educated they are, the more they like extraneous jargons, such as in the Unix & Perl community. Unlike mathematicians, where in mathematics there are no fewer jargons but each and every one are absolutely necessary. For example, polytope, manifold, injection/bijection/surjection, group/ring/field.., homological, projective, pencil, bundle, lattice, affine, topology, isomorphism, isometry, homeomorphism, aleph-0, fractal, supremum/infimum, simplex, matrix, quaternions, derivative/integral, ... and so on. Each and every one of these captures a concept, for which practical and theoretical considerations made the terms a necessity. Often there are synonyms for them because of historical developments, but never "jargons for jargon's sake" because mathematicians hate bloats and irrelevance.
The jargon-soaked stupidity in computing field can be grouped into classes. First of all, there are jargons for marketing purposes. Thus you have Mac OS "X", Windows "XP", Sun OS to Solaris and the versioning confusion of 4.x to 7 to 8 and also the so called "Platform" instead of OS. One flagrant example is Sun Microsystem's Java stuff. Oak, Java, JDK, JSDK, J2EE, J2SE enterprise edition or no, from java 1.x to 1.2 == Java 2 now 1.3, JavaOne, JFC, Jini, JavaBeans, entity Beans, Awk, Swing... fucking stupid Java and fuck Sun Microsystems. This is just one example of Jargon hodgepodge of one single commercial entity. Marketing jargons cannot be avoided in modern society. They abound outside computing field too. The Jargons of marketing came from business practice, and they can be excusable because they are kinda a necessity or can be considered as a naturally evolved strategy for attracting attention in a laissez-faire economy system.
The other class of jargon stupidity is from computing practitioners, of which the Unix/Perl community is exemplary. For example, the name Unix & Perl themselves are good examples of buzzing jargons. Unix is supposed to be opposed of Multics and hints on the offensive and tasteless term eunuchs. PERL is cooked up to be "Practical Extraction & Reporting Language" and for the precise marketing drama of being also "Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister". These types of jargons exude juvenile humor. Cheesiness and low-taste is their hall-mark. If you are familiar with unixism and perl programing, you'll find tons and tons of such jargons embraced and verbalized by unix & perl lovers. e.g. grep, glob, shell, pipe, man, regex, more, less, tarball, shebang, Schwartzian Transform, croak, bless, interpolation, TIMTOWTDI, DWIM, RFC, RTFM, I-ANAL, YMMV and so on.
There is another class of jargon moronicity, which i find them most damaging to society, are jargons or spurious and vague terms used and brandished about by programers that we see and hear daily among design meetings, online tech group postings, or even in lots of computing textbooks or tutorials. I think the reason for these, is that these massive body of average programers usually don't have much knowledge of significant mathematics, yet they are capable of technical thinking that is not too abstract, thus you ends up with these people defining or hatching terms a-dime-a-dozen that's vague, context dependent, vacuous, and their commonality is often a result of sopho-morons trying to sound big.
Here are some examples of the terms in question:
anonymous functions or lambda or lamba function
closure
exceptions (as in Java)
list, array, vector, aggregate
hash (or hash table) ? fantastically stupid
rehash (as in csh or tcsh)
regular expression (as in regex, grep, egrep, fgrep)
name space (as in Scheme vs Common Lisp debates)
depth first/breadth first (as in tree traversing.)
operator
operator overloading
polym
From TFA:
The music industry told the court that Sharman Network licensed users to access a network it knew was being used for piracy and hence it was authorising people to infringe copyright.
Ok, so, extending this precedent, Comcast (for example) provides access to a network (the Internet) that it knows is being used for piracy. Ergo, all ISPs are authorising people to infringe copyright. I am amazed a court actually swallowed this.
Stasis is death. Embrace change.
Check out aussie journalist Garth Montgomery's full coverage "kazaagate" site here
Including the full official court ruling as well
No I dont know him, but have found the site very insightful throughout the trial.
IMHO kazaa is a liability anyway, its only real purpose is to be a honeypot for the RIAA to sue people and make an example of, and more to give the RIAA an excuse to peddle DRM. If all these big "illegal" networks were done away with the industry has no excuse for DRM, nor would they "lose" any money from it being pirated. DRM costs them money, I doubt they will continue to invest in it just to stop people making copies for their friends. There are a large number of people who use these networks instead of buying music. If all these networks were gone we could have one centralised subscription based drm-free p2p network and we would all be happy.
Some percentage, unknown to me, of files shared on file sharing networks are copyrighted. This may mean (hypothetically) that those who created these works are not rightfully rewarded for their work, which of course is a Very Bad Thing.
All books in a library, more or less, are copyrighted. They are initially bought, but then the information, the whole of their content, is shared with countless people, which pay little or none in order to aquire this information, and if any money is exchanged, then it does not go to the copyright holders (correct me if I'm wrong).
So, aren't libraries basically analogous to file-sharing networks (or vice versa)? What am I missing?
No, the kazaa thing seems to be in the Federal Court. The Formula 1 issue was a state issue in Victoria.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Well, since we (US Australians, pun intended) have had to take on the DMCA, does this mean that it is now illegal in US and USAustralia to use anything that may be used for copyright infringment. The list is quiet large, photocopers, scanners, Video Recorders, PVR's, DVD Recorders, DVD\CD Burners, Tape Recorders, MP3 players/recorders, camera's, mobile phones, file sharing software.............. Three of Nine. John Howard (Australian Prime Minister) has had crack detected in his system, George Bush's crack.
1) The NRA defence of "guns don't kill people, people kill people" is now dead
2) Microsoft are liable for writing an OS that they KNEW would enable virus writers to propogate
3) DARPA are buggered as they built the underlying technology to DELIBERATELY enable information sharing.
I'm one of the few people who don't do illegal downloads but this really isn't an attack that work in the above cases so why does it work here?
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Come on now. Kazaa "authorized" them to do it (according to the article). This is a little like prosecuting people who claim the devil made them do it. We think they're insane; not criminals.
... but even so, can one criminally download anything? Hmmmmmmm ... ? Afterall, it is all there just for the taking on Kazaa ... offered for free. Hell, Kazaa is FFFRRREEEEEEEE!!!!
Well, maybe criminally insane
Just like Robin Hood and his merry band. Were the starving of England criminals because they ate the King's food and drank the King's wine, all approppriated by Robin Hood's valiant hoarde?
We the people are starving for entertainment. The world is a shambles. We need a little fantasy. Kazaa gives people something to do. Don't prosecute them.
...manufacturers, they sell cars despite knowing the fact their customers could (and sometimes do) use them to ram raid shops, getaway from cops and drive by shootings (but they do the same to gun manufacturers on that score) etc. the point is how can you be responsible for another persons actions even if you gave them the means they still made the choice to comit the crime
Rob http://scullyshouse.tblog.com
Freenet is slow. And i am not talking about the developemnt cycle (if you are on the unstable branche you would think it goes very fast). I am talking about the download speed.
,an open source client without any spyware, that does provide search (where is the search button in freenet?)
That is because the freenet was developed for anonymisation, not for file exchange. That is, freenet is good against compagnies that sue their own customers.
If you want to leave kazaa because it future is doomed because their next client will/should contain copyright restrictions (I am sure there wil be lots of trolls here that say you can not determine this, true, but flaimbait) you might want to switch to emule
If you live in fear because ou think some compagny might sue you because of copyright violations please use freenet. But you might get afraid they capture you for aiding terrorist/childporn. Don't worrie you will never get such charges get uphold by a court, (if you get there).
At this rate, someday, computer will be considered as a tool to breach copyrights and patents and, therefore, will be declared illegal. Isn't it getting worse every day?
Sharman Network licensed users to access a network it knew was being used for piracy and hence it was authorising people to infringe copyright What? By this logic, the manufacturer of a firearm would be held liable for any murders committed with said firearm because they knew it could be used for such a purpose. Thankfully, such cases have been struck down in the USA. This is an awful decision. If we were to hold manufacturers responsible for what people did with their products, we wouldn't have guns, knives, VCRs, computers, cameras (kiddie porn!), or even pencils. There is almost always a destructive use for any type of technology, but that doesn't mean the technology should be outlawed or it's creators punished.
This game will waste your life. Don't clicky!
C|net:t +Kazaa/2100-1030_3-5849480.html
/ 2005/1242.html
http://news.com.com/Australian+court+rules+agains
Full judgement:
http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/cth/federal_ct
- reasonably plain english, and worth reading. No cause for outrage here folks.
And people on Freenet do not swap material which is under copyright?
By continuously exchanging copyrighted material via the internet, copyright law will not end. If we ant to get rid of copyright law, we should petition the goverments, protest (with your money by not spending it on the apparently for you, or in your opinion, to expensive materials), start a political party against copyrights, etc.. Freenet is just another P2P application, and since people have nothing to share except other peoples material, it will be used to do just that.
Donating to Freenet will not solve anything, it will just cause new lawsuits.
So stop complaining about these rulings, it is not your freedom they are ruling about. It is the criminal behaviour they are ruling about. If you walk into a store and steal anything, you get arrested (some call this bad luck!), and you will get some punishments. What is different here? It is not your digital right to exchange copyrighted material at all.
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
I have no idea how this relates to the story....
Freenet is currently quite slow, but these problems should be rectified in the next version. There is no inherent reason that an anonymous P2P system must be slow.
Of course, you are correct that Freenet isn't about "file sharing", its about the free exchange of knowledge and information. If all you care about is getting free music, Freenet probably won't be well suited to your needs.
My brother with designer jeans and a iriver mp3 player, modernly dressed went to Australia, Adeliade to visit a friend of him.
The guy he visits is Italian-Australian and waits for him outside.
They kept him 2 hours without any explanation. He says he felt like a jew trying to enter Germany in 1939.
FYI, he is a turkish guy. Remember Al Queda blew us 2 times, not we blew anything.
Australian courts should start discussing what can be done to avoid such racist things, not about a fucking spyware and its so called freedom of information.
From another article here:
e d-to-clamp-down-on-ripoffs/2005/09/05/112577245613 2.html
/ 2005/1242.html
http://www.smh.com.au/news/technology/kazaa-order
"Kazaa's owners would have to apply "maximum pressure" on existing users to upgrade their software to the new, filtered version."
I wonder how the court sees this as being implemented? and how they intend to measure that "maximum pressure" has been applied.
I dont know the architecture of Kazaa. Is it possible for Sharman to "force" a new version out? or could the old version continue to be used as always?
Also the full judgement can be found here:
http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/cth/federal_ct
Has anyone ever thought what eliminating recorded music copyright would do to music quality? It might actually make talent count for something as people would be really drawn to hear it live.
musicians should be paid to perform or for other real work that they do. The records that they freely distribute can be used as promos for the performances. Don't they make enough money from that?
And people with talent would actually be forced to use and perfect it and do some real work.
Overall the quality of music could really improve.
So now corporations, if they make software that can potentially be used for copyright infringment, must research all uses of that software that only infringe copyright, and block those?
Watch out bittorrent.
Did you ever notice that *nix doesn't even cover Linux?
from my reading of the FA, the desision is based on the use of Kaza is for downloading of copyrighted materials.
Since, because of the Berne convention, ALL works are automatically copyrighted, that means that the network I am using now, is transmitting this text I'm typing, which is copyrighted.
There is no other data ON the internet, apart from some public domain and some header/routing information (which is not copyrightable). 99% of the data is copyrighted.
That I am giving permission for the network to transmit this is irrelevant to the judges' reasoning for Kaza being illicit, so in Australia, the networks are causing copyright infringement.
Oh, and the telephone.
And letters.
And talking.
Etc....
Did you ever notice that *nix doesn't even cover Linux?
It is clear to me that Wilcox probably sucked a lot of cock to get where he is.
Judges have the brains of maggots, not even. Oooo Judges have the ability to send people to jail for being innocent; sue them sue them!
I say give everyone a gun, and remove laws. Will fix an awful lot!
You are so wrong.
Riaa is sueing and warning emule users. It just is not that high-profile. There are more emule users than kazaa in the world. In the USA emule is relatively less popular.
If the anonymisation is done by proxying over more hops it is inherent slower. A faster speed can be reached by direct uploading. Note that uploadcapacity is sparse. Caching does not help get a higher upload. Motivating users to give more upload might help however.
Is there a working search in freenet? or are there still only proposals?
The Brits and Australians seem to be bending over to accomodate any Yankee demands that they respect the American version of IP laws.
Canada learned a long time ago that pandering to Uncle Sam doesn't work. The Americans, especially under Bush, don't honor treaties unless it suits them. You have nothing to gain by pandering and plenty to lose.
Who is still using Kazaa nowadays ?
The judge also outlines some very basic steps that Kazaa should implement in order to be in compliance with the court order.
Yes, media companies are using piracy as an bullshit explanation of lost sales. Yes, DRM is just a way to block long established fair use rights. But people that are copying the stuff just contribute to problem. Anyone who buys DRMed content (including DVDs) or even a single item from these media companies is just financing the behavior. Don't like it? Stop giving them money. Yes, you are responsible for your own actions.
Modding:
60% Troll
20% Insightful
20% Informative
100% Whooosh!
``Well, maybe criminally insane ... but even so, can one criminally download anything? Hmmmmmmm ... ? Afterall, it is all there just for the taking on Kazaa ... offered for free. Hell, Kazaa is FFFRRREEEEEEEE!!!!
Just like Robin Hood and his merry band. Were the starving of England criminals because they ate the King's food and drank the King's wine, all approppriated by Robin Hood's valiant hoarde?''
And in some countries, the downloaders are not doing anything illegal. The files are being offered for download, and how would you know if they got there legally or illegaly? It's the people sharing the files even though they don't have a license to do so that are the real criminals. Yes, the Robin Hoods.
A separate issue is who actually has the moral high ground...the entertainment industry who charge ridiculous prices for their wares? The people who will happily grab everything they can for free, and don't pay a dime to the creators? Or the people who break the law to provide free access to the wares?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
SYDNEY (Reuters) - An Australian court ruled on Monday that users of the Internet, a popular computer network, breached music, video, image, text and software copyright and ordered its owners to modify the software [so that nothing could be downloaded].
"The Internet authorised users to infringe everyones' copyright," Federal Court Judge Murray Wilcox said in his ruling.
Australia's major companies sued the Internet's owners and developers, claiming the Internet had cost them millions of dollars in lost sales.
The music industry told the court that the Internet licensed users to access a network it knew was being used for piracy and hence it was authorising people to infringe copyright.
The Internet defended the use of the Internet to download stuff, but said it could not control the actions of estimated 450 million world-wide users.
As a result of this ruling, Australians will no longer be allowed to use the Internet until the Internet makes it impossible to download stuff.
I feel like I wasted enough of my own life reading his shitty post that I don't want anyone else to have to go through it too.
Let's see them filter all copyrighted content, and then we'll find out just how many non-infringing uses P2P applications actually have.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Newsagents sued for encouraging piracy of books by selling pens and paper.
Seriously though, it's easy enough to argue that the primary use of Kazaa et al is piracy. However, were there enough appropriately licensed content (eg creative commons etc.) then this would be less clear. It would be a shame to lose the right to use peer to peer technology for 'legitimate' tasks, especially if projects like BitTorrent come under fire for the same reasons.
In other news, an Australian court ruled that the national highway system must be dismantled. Judge Kanga stated in his ruling "It's clear that these roads were intended from the beginning to facilitate illegal activities. Every smuggling operation or fleeing criminal in the country is using these roads. The complex system of registrations, fees, taxes, and licenses does not relieve the road authorities from their culpability in enabling these criminal activities. Without the roads, there are no high speed chases, period. This cannot continue in the face of the law."
Isn't it odd how every country seems to imitate the worst behaviors of the originating country? If the US will pass such a ridiculous set of laws as the DMCA, well golly we all better get right to our own version!
I think that is a bad thing to implement, as it will create a bunch of small 'freenets', not one large community.
What use is it to just share your political feelings with your friends, which already know?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I can't recall an actual court case, but it was decided that because time-shifting broadcast content was an ethical advantage to both parties (viewer sees their show, companies get their ads to more viewers), the case set precedent for legal recording.
You are right about Freenet being slow...but emule is SLOOOOOOW as well.
Trying to download any file that's popular and large (over a 100MB) usually takes DAYS. Plus there are bots on emule/edonkey network that steal all the bandwidth and download everything.
This set of protocols could allow trusted machines to receive properly licensed and authorized content but still filter out other less useful but more dangerous content/extentions like exe's, zips, tar.gz's, bz2, py, and iso's, and additionally any encrypted content, and the major webserver venders would have to outlaw application/octet mime types to regain control of the internet-turned-piracy haven that the thieves like warez groups and gnu have perverted, not to mention all the pornography and child molesting an open internet produces.
Its time to make the net safe again for our families and businesses.
I think sharing in general is not piracy!
It is just the nature of men to share so that happiness prevails.
Anti-sharing is work of the Devil! Anathema to RIAA and all who oppose sharing!
Piracy is when you steal and sell for profit! No profit is made by sharing! But the evil money and the evil US authorities and evil music companies and the Devil think they can f**k with us! No way!
Blessed be those, who share and cursed be those who dont for GOD will not allow them to live in heaven!
sex is better than war!
Death of Usenet, film at 11...
Since Kazaa has been found in the wrong in Australia,
and kazaalite has been found in the wrong against kazaa,
does this mean that Australia prefers us to use Kazzalite
instead?
---
besides, who uses kazaa?
IIRC it's slow now because of old design decisions that have been changed for the upcoming version. In principle, since Freenet is a cacheing system, there's no reason why it can't be equally fast as a torrent download.
The first time this story was posted, I thought, "This guy needs to see a counsellor."
f aces+ruin.+CD+sales+have+dropped+through+the+floor .%22&hl=en&lr=&safe=off&rls=GGLD,GGLD:2004-22,GGLD :en&filter=0
The second time I saw this story, I thought, "Umm, you already said that."
The third time I wondered what the hell is going on. Then I tried a google search and looky what I found.
http://www.google.com.au/search?q=%22My+business+
And thats not even half the time the story has been posted. It does the rounds on slashdot quite regularly. It should be added to slashot posting spam filters or something. Great work of fiction, isn't it?
This is a metaphor, a fable, a tale that reflects the music industry as a whole. It's not real. Not at all. Jeez.
Three different users have posted this identical story since the Napster case.
Have made thier living on this type of principal for decades. They do not relenquish the copyright but promote sharing and taping of thier music so that anyone can enjoy.
I think its important to see the distinction between something like Kazaa and BitTorrent. Kazaa is somewhat centrally, they are sending advertisments down to all of the users. They know exactly who their users are, and are very capable of seeing their searches as well. BitTorrent the author is completely seperate from the process.He has no clue who is using his software
I think that because of Kazaas connection to all users, it would be rather simple for them to make some kind of attempt to block searches to known copyrighted material. Everyone needs to hop off of their free-data high horses for just a minute and realise this is a company knowingly making money off the work of others without giving them anything
I'm encouraged by this news. Next Australia will obviously be cracking down on gun makers, who know their customers are using their products to murder, rob and terrorize. Australia will order the gun makers to change their gun products to prevent people from shooting each other.
--
make install -not war
Dont think the industries wouldnt do that if they could.
But since its not practical to do that, they will do their best to attack the end points, and turn them into simple restrictive media devices, under *their* control.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
And in other news, the Australian Court also ruled that it is illegal to drive on the freeway since it should be obvious that some of the other people driving on the freeway are speeding.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
...do you look at something that should be innocent, see that it's full of bad, and decided that it can't go on?
However clear it may be that kazaa (and other P2P's) don't promote the piracy, the piracy is going on. Sooner or later someone is gonna say that, hey, this started out as a good thing but it's infested now. Gotta go.
I can use an ftp client to get illegal software.
I can use a browser to get cracks for software.
This just in:
The following software can be used to access copyrighted works:
Mozilla Browser Suite
Firefox
Internet Explorer
Opera
Lynx
Links
www
wget
curl
ftp
cuteftp
wsftp
gftp
(This is not an exaustive list)
ARIA (Australian Recording Industry Association) and the AFI (Australian Film Industry) has called for a ban on the above mentioned list, and any other softwares that allow access to the FTP or WWW networks.
it is only after a long journey that you know the strength of the horse.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
I mean, every other week we see a Slashdot story along the lines of:
"The Australian courts today made a ruling that is totally out of line with the rest of the world's understanding of copyright, human rights, personal freedom, fair use, and common sense. The ruling will definately futz over anyone who reads Slashdot, and will stand to benifit only the *AA-of-choice."
Either the fine folk of Australia aren't petitioning their politicians hard enough to get favorable copyright legistlation in, or the courts are even more corrupt and backwards than the US ones.
So, to my Thunders down Unders: either suffer under the rules, or be the first country (heck, the first CONTINENT) to overthrow the government based on copyright laws. I, for one, will welcome my new Australian filesharing overlords.
UTF-8: There and Back Again
Game modders and hackers do it all the time. They release these things called "patches", which disable restrictions or add value where there was none. In this case the "patch" would disable the filter, as if people couldn't simply misspell the name of the musician whose work they seek. Filtering technology is just like DRM technology. It is infinitely crackable because of its inherent stupidity and automation.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
As is often the case, this law hurts the law-abiding citizen and (probably) fails to slow the illegal traffic that it purports to have the capability to stop. The P2P client distributors are all likely to go completely underground anyway, which leaves the govt with the same old option (going after the individuals who trade pirated music). Same old song and dance ...
SO, you consider it balanced that this ruling basically turns the ARIA into all powerful regulators of all "potentially infringing" technology, able to punish anyone for "not doing enough".
How many technological items will they be allowed to force a "redesign" of in their quest to stop any and all copying.
How many PC's, CD burners, Isp's, DSLAMs, tv's, et al will become crippled, and how many manufacturers will go bankrupt from having to continuously redesign because every other month the precious ARIA decides they just arent "taking enough steps to prevent infringement"
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
The RIAA and MPAA are suing people because profits are down. Profits are down because the music industry and the motion-picture industry are producing crap, not because people download cds and movies.
Google is your friend.
l d=1&commentsort=0&tid=141&tid=188&mode=thread&cid= 7278955
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http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=83129&thresho
http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/28
license software that allows users to access a network with known copyright violations?? Can you say 'the internet' or 'www'?
Why don't they go after microsoft? Their web browser lets you access a network with millions of known copyright violations. You can't tell me microsoft doesn't know that this software is used to download copyrighted images and software provided by other subscribers to the network.
Nothing is going to change until we shoot the bastards!
Andy Out!
this text is not here.
sum.zero
I've found gnunet better for actual use. Freenet people spend a lot of time "advertising", talking about freedom, but the actual network is useless. Gnunet is an anonymous, encrypted network that already supports pure F2F use, multiple transport protocols (not just TCP (with NAT support, of course) and UDP but also tunneling over HTTP and even SMTP), also a graphical client (which has just been rewritten to use glade and improve usability) rather than the goofy "access it through your web browser" method of freenet. Naturally there's also a command line client for scripting. Other nice features are digitally signed namespaces, so you can get your files from a reliable source, directories allowing you to group a set of related files, content migration while still allowing sharing local files in the traditional manner, rich metadata, and a reward system for those who upload. I've found it far superior to freenet as a usable filesharing network. Give it a look.
I am trolling
If the people who copy are blatent freeloaders, then the people who sit on their ass and collect royalities are blatent bums.
When a "freeloader" copies something I create, I am not deprived use of that creation, but if a lazy bum sits on their ass and collects royalities while suing everybody over how they use information at their disposal then we are all deprived use and liberty.
Also, since when is copying things a violation of civil liberties? It would be more accurate to say that the right to copy things is a right that exists above government, like free speech, and free religion. Nobody is against the rule of law here, but laws that punish people for copying things are simply unjust, and that's all there is to it. FYI, anarchy and overbearing government tend to give the same results.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
And how have they proven that there was even a single lost sale? Do they have a line of kids outside the courthouse door ready to parade in and declare: "Yes I would have bought that CD, but I was able to pirate it off of the Internet instead."
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
If I don't have "No Tresspassing" signs up and someone walks across my yard to rob the house next to mine, does that mean I helped rob the neighbor?
I guess the USA should have gotten a patent on flawed legal systems.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
Sorry, no longer accepting anyone's copyright laws...After the global entertainment corporations stole the public domain by paying off American politicians to pass laws that enact a de facto extension of the copyright period. Then trick various courts around the world to accept this purchased American version of indefinite copyright extension as local law by international treaty.
Imagine that you have bought a car with time payments. You make a payment every month and after a predetermined number of months, you own the car. Imagine that the finance company pays off the politicians to extend the number of payments that you have to make every time that you get near the scheduled last payment. They claim that granting you title would cause undue hardship on the people who have come to depend on your monthly payments. No unbribed judge anywhere would accept this.
Copyright is the same way. By granting an exclusive right to collect payments for using a creative work, the copyright law also has a definite time period for which these payments must be made. After that period, the former copyright owner can't legally force payments from users. The copyright ownership transfers to the public. Bribing politicians to pass laws extending copyright periods on works in the current schedule is theft because it steals from the public the funds that they would not have to pay according to the agreed-upon original copyright schedule. The theft of the public domain is the greatest theft of creative works in history. Digital copying is chicken feed compared to this.
When a contract is broken as a result of bad faith, all of its provisions are broken. Therefore we no longer accept any copyright restrictions on any creative works, regardless of their age. When the global entertainment corporations are willing to restore the public domain, then we will be willing to consider DRM and the re-start of the purchase of creative works. Until then, forget it. Does this hurt the 'artists'? Maybe, maybe not. But where were they when the the public domain was stolen?
No one is going to allow some judge somewhere to shut down Kazaa. It's simply too important now. Kazaa is the world's new public library for creative works. Along with Wikipedia for general information and FreeNet for censored political coverage, it is the one of the primal forces of the new Information Age.
It's time for the world governments to begin to understand this. In the new Information Age, it's not the people who control the violence (the police, the military, the mafia,...) who set the agenda, it's the people who control the information. That's us, folks! Kazaa will be destroyed only if we allow it. And, I, for one, of the many millions of Kazaa users, suggest that we keep it.
>> 3/ It's hard to understand why it's okay to borrow a book from a neighboor and not to borrow an mp3 from a guy 1000km away.
It is okay to borrow a book, yes, because you are only borrowing it. Downloading an mp3 from someone is NOT borrowing. The file is being copied. It is being copied by people who do NOT hold the copyright to the work. Just as it is illegal for someone to photocopy a book and sell it or give it away, it is illegal for someone to copy music and sell it or give it away. You can argue if you feel copyright itself is right or wrong, but as it stands now you cannot equate copying an mp3 without permission of the copyright holder to borrowing a book whatsoever; It is illegal, plain and simple.
The same could be said of ISPs then... or computer manufacturers ... heck even people who make DVD recorders ... or why stop there, ban cameras, cos you might take a snapshot of a CD cover!
This is just...amazing. I think next, we should sue car companies who pay to have their cars featured in movies where the cars are used to commit crimes (speeding, drive bys, etc).
Not a perfect analogy but its very akin. Kazaa said "you can find millions of files on our product." That is 100% true. It is also NOT hard to find millions of perfectly legal files on the Kazaa network.
This is just like my school, which has their distro of Red Hat hard coded to NOT play MP3s. XMMS is included but it will literally NOT PLAY MP3s. Their reasoning: they're a vehicle for piracy. Anyone remember when they were saying hte same about CD burners? How about VCRs? How about tapes?
This just gets dumber and dumber the farther things go. It's almost like they're saying that the company should not say you can find any type of file on their product (then why would people want it?), but I'm sure they'd find something wrong anyway.
Bomb the RIAA and MPAA. They want to make an example of Kazaa, I want to make an example of them.
Yes.
1/ Contrary to what happens if you steal a can of soup in a supermarket, when you download an mp3, you do not prevent anybody else from having it.
Indeed. And although people like to forget this, the reason stealing is wrong is exactly what separates it from copyright infringement: stealing deprives someone else of the thing you stole. There's nothing inherently wrong with getting something for free; stealing is wrong only because it involves taking something away from someone else.
If we had the technology to let someone point a magic cloning ray at any object and instantly have a copy of their own, there'd be nothing wrong with doing so. Such a tool could eliminate hunger and material poverty, just as P2P can eliminate informational poverty by giving everyone access to the same knowledge, tools, and entertainment.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
"all data will have to pass over multiple peers to reach anonimity" is AFAIK not how Freenet does it. Freenet's anonymity comes from never knowing who fed data into the mutual cache, not from Tor style multiple-hop routing.
Doesn't anyone else think that the judge has made the right decision in this case?
Kazaa knowingly makes advertising revenue from piracy and has taken limited or no steps to correct this. The legitimate P2P industry would do well to disassociate itself from the business model created by companies like Kazaa.
Who still uses Kazaa anyway?
Decision can be found here: http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/cth/federal_ct/ 2005/1242.html
then the GNU GPL ceases to exist.
I hope you don't mind companies taking GPL code and closing the source on you.
Winamp was play "Anakin vs Obi-Wan" from my Star Wars Episode III soundtrack CD.
First claiming that Kazaa users are breaching copyright, what's next? Using Winamp to play cartel based CDs instead of the 'media browser' launched by the CD violates the DMCA?
Dark times indeed
Instead of defending systems like Kazaa by arguing whether they breach copyright law, I would like to see more direct attacks on the law itself. Modern copyright law is "right" only because it is the law, not because it inherently has any real moral footing. That's what I think should be attacked.
I personally download and share a lot of old time radio shows from the 1940s and earlier. Most of these shows were never intended for rebroadcast or resale, let alone 60 years later, and were not preserved by any conscious effort on the part of the creators or the copyright holders. Most of the material has survived through the efforts of people like radio station engineers and hobbyists, who saved the transcription discs because of personal interest. They have kept the entertainment of that era alive for decades by making, trading, and often selling copies (illegally!!).
The 1998 Bono Act, which retroactively restored copyright protection to all audio recordings made before 1972, makes "pirates" of these people. Paradoxically, it gives the current copyright holders, who often did nothing whatsoever to preserve the material, the legal grounds to swoop in and attack those who did. Even the earliest wax cylinder recordings made by Thomas Edison in the 1890s will remain under copyright until the year 2067. This isn't right, and I think it would be better in the long run to attack the legislation by refusing to obey it, rather than by concocting elaborate technical arguments. The best argument I can think of is that copyright law can't be valid in cases where it simply doesn't produce justice. I doubt whether that would fly in court, but there might be someone out there who could present it in different terms. For example, could a case be made that by arbitrarily removing material from the public domain Congress breached a contract with the citizens when it passed the Bono Act, and therefore the law itself is void?
Yes, The principle is very much the same. To feed it into the "mutual cache" you first have to store the data. During the store phase it passes several peers. During the download phase it passes also multiple peers.
So in the end the anonimy is reached by passing it over a unknown number of peers. There are smart optimisations for this, but in the end it not as efficient as an real peer to peer network.
The judge in that court must be out of his mind to think that he can globally control what words are acceptable in file names and what words are unacceptable. I guess it will based up the daily directives of RIAA executives to the courts. You will comply or all your offending files will be deleted. Expect a daily update from a media owned government near you with a list of words and word combination unsuitable for use in file names.
Shows what can be achieved with sufficient ignorance and money. This judge undoubtabley will the favourite for the dumb judgement of the year award.
I hearby claim patent rights to the non-infringing file name checker. The alternate of using my program will be the automatic deletion of files using copyright infringing words under DRM. Make sure that when you save that file it will really be saved, buy it yesterday to be safe.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen