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130 Filesharer Homes Raided in Germany
Flo writes "Today, 130 homes have been raided in Germany under the allegation of filesharing. Law enforcement agencies had been monitoring an eDonkey-Server for two months. 3500 identified users are being investigated. Searches took place when users shared more than 500 files. Partners of the music industry helped identifying copyrighted material, but monitoring of the servers was solely done by law enforcement."
From Wikipedia:
"There is a widely recognized codicil that any such deliberate invocation of Godwin's Law will be unsuccessful."
Better luck next time. . .
http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=1196
Copying for private use neither a criminal nor a civil offense in Germany, as long as the source is not an evidently illegal one (ie a movie before its released on DVD - or filesharing).
Copying from an illegal source is a civil offense. So law enforcement still isn't involved at all.
However, distributing copyrighted material is a criminal offense (up to 3 years in prison). And since one can't really download without uploading, law enforcement must investigate any complaint by the copyright holders.
What the attorny said was that "they expect to find all kinds of material, ranging from music to child pornography".
The server also wasn't run by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), but was monitored by them with a "custom developed software".
Also, the operation of an edonkey server is legal in Germany.
Germany's copyright laws aren't that strict actually. It is still perfectly legal to copy a CD or MP3s from your neighbor or even a DVD you rented for private use. And you can make copys of these copys and share them with your family and friends and it's still legal. Of course the industry is constantly trying to change that. They managed to get an insanly stupid copyright act introduced, which makes it illegal to circumvent "effective technical copyright restriction". To this day, their is no clarifying judgment on what the heck is an effective restriction and what is not. After all, you could argue that as soon as the restriction is cracked, is isn't effective anymore.
Some highlights:
So it doesn't exactly look like times are tough in the record industry in Europe at the moment. If the european authorities are worrying about margin erosion for european industry then there are plenty of other targets way ahead in the queue.
The research i've been doing in P2P networks (due to my involvement in the okopipi project) has shocked me. In file sharing, we're living in the STONE AGE. Yes, even with bittorrent (which depends on centralized servers, and there's practically no privacy. And anonymous bittorrent like mutorrent is closed source, who knows if they got a backdoor in there).
EDonkey uses MD4 for hashing, it depends on central servers, and has no anonymity at all. And without mentioning queue # 4892 for a popular file.
Unfortunately for filesharers, file sharing networks based on modern P2P architectures is very scarse. The supernodes / ultrapeers approach is obsolete, easy to disrupt both denial of service and eavesdropping attacks.
The future of P2P is Overlay Networks.
From an architectural point of view, I would recommend the KAD p2p network, which bases its architecture on the relatively-new kadelmia network (See Technical paper on Kadlemia, 2002).
Even then, Kadelmia could be improved because it's based on a Pastry network topology - compared to other topologies like De Bruijn Graphs, proposed by a recent paper in 2003.
And more research is being done dealing with load balancing, anonymity, trust, reputation, etc.
As I said, current peer to peer networks are in the stone age. Someone needs to design a file sharing network based on the latest research, and publish it.