RIAA Says P2P Encourages Illegal Downloads

stlhawkeye writes "The RIAA is at it again, attacking inconvenient technology because it can be abused. They have sent another round of letters to P2P services, asking them to stop "encouraging users" to illegally distribute copyrighted material. eDonkey, LimeWire, and Kazaa are all on the RIAA's hit list, along with 2Hub, BitTorrent, WinMX and Free Peers, maker of file-swapping software BearShare. One wonders how they intend to attack BitTorrent, which can be and is used in legitimate mass distribution efforts of legal material, such as World of Warcraft patches. Are FTP and /usr/sbin/scp next?"

Comments

Limewire strictly prohibits it!

[DavidLeeRoth]

http://www.limewire.com/english/content/answerno.s html How can the RIAA make such claims? Limewire will NOT let you buy their product if you have malicious intent.

Just wait for tomorrow's press release.

[Neil Blender]

It has something to do with the sky being blue.

In other news

[dgatwood]

Apache can be used to serve illegal downloads. Film at 11!

Re:In other news

[afidel]

Hmm, maybe we can get rid of Windows for good:

Dear RIAA,

It has recently come to my attention that a certain program with hundreds of millions of users worldwide can be used to easily distribute copyrighted content. In fact the product as shipped from the manufacturer makes it so easy that no additional work is required on the part of the end user, they simply connect their computer to the internet and within minutes it will start to deceminate any copyrighted content it contains, and is often used by others to hold content which they do not hold a valid license for. It would disturb me greatly if you did not seek to stop this insidious program after all of the recent media attention brought to your efforts to thwart the trading of copyrighted material.

Yours truely,

A concerned citizen (please think of the clidren)

p.s.
The name of the program in question is Microsoft Windows.

Next...

[WesLsoN]

Counting down the days until agents come and take the . a v and i keys off my keyboard

Submitter is on crack...

[Zamboni]

The article points out:

1. "Other companies in the peer-to-peer file-swapping market include i2Hub, BitTorrent, WinMX and Free Peers, maker of file-swapping software BearShare."

2. "BearShare, WinMX and LimeWire were identified in a Wall Street Journal story as recipients of the letters."

How does this equate to threatening BitTorrent, exactly? They're threatening companies with similar models to that of Grokster. Get a grip.

Sure...

[futurekill]

RIAA Says P2P Encourages Illegal Downloads... kinda in the same way that actually producing the music encourages people to share it...

Grokster Doctrine

[Doc Ruby]

The context for this latest RIAA PR crusade is the Supreme Court "Grokster" decision this past Spring. The Court found that, of the P2P SW publishers which were sued, the ones which could be liable for illegal abuse of their SW by users were those publishers which "encouraged" the abuse. The Court found that Kazaa was liable, because its internal memos showed that they were expecting such abuse, and it designed external promotions consistent with that detected strategy. The other publishers, including Grokster, were not found liable, lacking that evidence of promotion.

Whether the Court was correct in finding such encouragement by Kazaa is now merely post-game quibbling. So also are arguments about whether a person can be held liable for another person jumping off a bridge just because the person told them to. The Court has ruled. So the RIAA is now portraying any P2P operator as encouraging or promoting abuse, because that's the basis for attacking them under what will now be known as the "Grokster doctrine". Any publisher, developer, designer, or user of P2P SW (or anyone else associated with it) must now invest in producing evidence that they do not promote illegal abuse. How to produce evidence of something not happening is extremely expensive and ultimately impossible.

So, as usual, only the lawyers have won, and the RIAA can do whatever it wants under these deeply flawed legal doctrines. People who just want to use the content we own, fairly, have to look elsewhere for some way to protect our rights.

Re:WinMX?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Too late, it's on their list now.

Let's just hope they never find out that we're spreading files encoded in Slashdot moderation scores. If anyone ever starts to wonder why the scores bear no relation to the comments then we're ruined.

The Next Step

[rlp]

RIAA: "We understand that your organization: DARPA is responsible for TCP/IP - software used for copyright infringement. We demand you respond to our staff attorney immediately."

DARPA: "Sure thing, what's your longitude, latitude, and elevation?"

Living the lie

[theonetruekeebler]

Apple also puts stickers on all iPods asking you not to pirate music.

All the sex shops here have racks and racks of exotic toys, all labeled "for novelty purposes only," because in Atlanta it's illegal to sell a dildo.

And all the head shops all sell "water pipes."

In either place, if you start asking questions about getting high or getting off, you get kicked out.

Interestingly enough, you can walk right into a gun shop and say "I need a gun to kill my husband with" and they'll still sell it to you (maybe). Okay, you have to go outside the city limits for that. I love that you have to go outside the city limits to buy a dildo or a gun, and I've seen more than one bumper sticker that says "when dildos are outlawed, only outlaws will have dildos."

Maybe if they called a gun a "hole punch" the way they call a bong a "water pipe" we could skirt this whole issue. I mean, we call it "the Internet" instead of "all the music and porno in the world for free," right?

The business model

[Infonaut]

if the business model was every actually looked at instead of just blindly protected.

I am also surprised that nobody pays more attention to this. There's an elephant in the room, and nobody wants to believe it exists. Musicians are just as much a part of the problem as the RIAA. Why? Because musicians buy into the notion that they should sign with a label, have the label pay for everything, and receive whatever the label feels fit to give them in return.

Essentially everyone (musicians, labels, consumers) has bought into the notion that the huge crapshoot that the music industry has established, wherein a small minority of music gets major backing and the rest is given limited exposure at best, is a rational marketplace. If musicians in aggregate were less interested in becoming big stars, and more interested in making music and being justly compensated for it, the labels would lose all leverage over artists. For every Madonna there are 99 acts that got signed and never made any real money, because the labels were running a company store setup. The message has been put out by Courtney Love, Janis Ian, et. al. for years now. You have to be blind and deaf not to know that this is the system.

There is no longer any need for the enormous middleman structure that sustains the music industry. Hardly anyone is satisfied with the music being generated by the big labels. There are plenty of musicians who are content to play music and have more control over how their music is distributed. When the majority of musicians accept that a business model built on bloated middlemen is not in their best interests, the rest of us will benefit as well.