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Grokster Launches Fear Campaign
An anonymous reader writes "Slyck is reporting on Grokster's new scare tactic. Suddenly it's become taboo to head over to Grokster.com. In a transparent attempt to scare potential P2P users, Grokster.com has reinforced its anti-P2P sentiment. The visitor's IP address is clearly displayed in large font on the Grokser's homepage while indicating the address was logged."
Obviously we have to slashdot it. Why is there no link in the story?
Here: for those too lazy to type it out
Grokster.com
http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/world.html
U.S. 297,835,838
World 6,489,060,591
297,835,838 / 6,489,060,591 = 0.04
(ps, whoa, a "no karma bonus" button...)
"Quoting yourself is stupid." -Me
If I was musically talented, and decided to write and record a song, that song automatically becomes copyrighted as soon as it's created. The way the warning on Grokster is worded, it sounds like it would be illegal for me to then distribute my own works on a P2P service like Gnutella, since those works are copyrighted. That was the point I was trying to get across in my original post about the warning being misleading.
If the owner of a copyrighted work authorizes his or her creations to be distributed via P2P, then that makes whatever P2P sevice it is distributed on authorized for those copyrighted works. Just because someone releases their work via P2P does not mean those works are no longer copyrighted.
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Folks, I'd now like to direct you to a wonderful little extension for firefox called, "Reload Every". You can set it to reload every second. You can go to the extentions section of spread firefox and do a search on 'reload every'. There are two results. It is the second. Now, some would use this power for evil, but, noone here. Right? Wow, I wonder how a bunch of slashdotters using this at www.grokster.com would go? Hmm. Not much, but I bet the logs could get messy.
Hitting refresh is so 20th century.
Don't have to much fun at www.grokster.com now.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groklaw
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grokster
Am I the only one who thinks the RIAA/MPAA "wrote" that message?
Grokster sold out all their assets to Mashboxx (including their domain).
Mashboxx itself is a sham RIAA front company that pitches itself as "the world's first P2P application with content authorized by major record labels". Which is a total load, considering they don't even have a client available to the public.
So, in short, this is all nothing but a marketing ploy driven by smoke, mirrors, and fear. What else were you expecting from the RIAA?
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Ok.
One cannot forge an IP address for an established TCP connection.
Wrong. You need to be on an L2 net between the forged sender address and recipient address, at which point it's trivial. But generally more trouble than it's worth.
There is one way one can sort of forge IP addresses, but this technique is more accurately termed as hijacking. Spammers have been known to do this, they abuse BGP which automaticly queries neighboring routers for the networks they manage, and then use this date to decide where to route packets.
No. I don't know where you get the term "hijacking" and spammers don't have any claim over this technique. Injecting more-specific routes into BGP to divert traffic away from where it should be going is a drastic maneuver that can take any site on the web down. It requires having access to a router at a major NAP or within a network that peers with other major networks without filtering. That's not simple and I don't know that it's happened very often, if at all.
One could also hijack a users connection or computer using malware, or alternatively you could perhaps intercept their DSL line between their house and the ISP.
I don't know what you mean by "intercept their DSL line". You can't tap a DSL line.
And finally, there are ways to mask, or make it diffuclt to find one's originating IP, this can be done by bouncing your TCP connection through one or more servers. Serious hackers use this technique, so for example, a hacker in Russia connects to a server in Brazil, then from Brazil to a server in Europe, and finally from that server in Europe through to the U.S. server he hacks.
"Serious hacker"? I don't know what a serious hacker is. There are so many compromised boxes out there, on cable modem / DSL networks, in universities and other institutions, that anyone who wants to cover their tracks and knows the right people can simply hop from machine to machine. I don't know if this is what you mean by "bouncing your TCP connection"; that seems to imply your packets are hopping from one place to another, when in fact you're logging into one place, then to another, then to another, etc., the final connection being made from a machine which is not your own and any trace efforts requiring the participation of every machine in the path you created to get there.
The way you forgot to mention is the use of an open proxy that doesn't log, of which there are dozens out there.
Why only just look at the cache, when you can let Google be your proxy?u =www.grokster.com
http://www.google.com/translate?langpair=en|en&
(no link because slashcode can't deal with the pipe in the URL....)
Actually, the real reason you sue the doctor, hospital, and nurse simultaneously is as follows.
Suppose I go in for an operation, and it goes wrong. I don't know who or why, but somebody screwed up. I decide to just sue the surgeon. We litigate, he wins. Then I find out it was the nurse's fault for not doing something she should've done. In federal courts (and I think most state courts), I can't then sue the nurse for the botched operation. When I sue somebody, I have to make all claims arising out of the same transaction or occurence (here, the operation) or lose them forever. This is actually an efficiency rule, since it prevents one jerk from bringing up dozens of successive lawsuits until he wins. The courts want to hear a dispute and resolve it with finality.
In fact, this rule hurts plaintiffs, since all of a sudden they have to face down a literal army of defense lawyers; they can't divide and conquer.
The "loser pays" system certainly has its merits, but consider one of its main drawbacks: legal stagnation. When a plaintiff might get stuck with the total bill, he's more likely to not sue. Since courts can only decide the cases before them, the law develops and adapts as a result of actual cases; fewer cases means it won't keep up with the times as quickly. Many people here already think the law is too slow to adapt (especially in the tech sector), so a loser pays system would only make things worse in this regard.
Judges are indeed not thrilled with frivolous lawsuits. For one, each new suit means more work for them, and they're not paid by the case. Two, frivolous cases often don't present real and interesting legal issues; presiding over the frivolous case eats into the time a judge can spend on more interesting cases. There's a federal rule against filing frivolous or harassing lawsuits, and courts have great leeway to come up with creative punishments for violating that rule (Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 11).
IANAL(yet)
That doesn't seem to be the right address anymore, try this instead: http://www.google.com/translate?u=http://www.groks ter.com&langpair=en&hl=en&ie=UTF8
Don't sweat the petty things. Don't pet the sweaty things. --Stephen J. Simmons
For the same reason that we don't spell color as colour, and labor as labour....
It looks funny the other way...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
World population is hardly relevent anyway. 95% of the world population is outside the U.S., but only 55% of the active Internet user population is outside the U.S. Not that I'm bragging or anything.
From the Copyright FAQ on the U.S. Copyright Office's web site: http://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-general.htm
Registering a work with the Copyright Office just gives you a little more legal ammunition should you need to defend your copyright.
This is for works protected in the U.S., of course. The regulations in other countries may be different.
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