Slashdot Mirror
Spain Outlaws P2P File-Sharing
Section_Ei8ht writes "Spanish Congress has made it a civil offense to download anything via p2p networks, and a criminal offense for ISP's to allow users to file-share, even if the use is fair. There is also to be a tax on all forms of blank media, including flash memory drives. I guess the move towards distributing films legally via BitTorrent is a no go in Spain." Here is our coverage of the tax portion of this law.
Isn't WoW patching done via P2P?
Also if you want to really push the boat out they've now made it illegal to play online games, since they work in a way you could argue is P2P in some cases.
I like muppets.
This just in -- Spain is being a tool.
This seems like not only a bypassable law (encrypted ssh tunnels, etc...), an uninforceable law (what're they gonna do? punish the MILLIONS of people who fileshare?), but also a VERY STUPID LAW (legal file sharing is now a "no no"? why the FUCK was that even proposed, let alone passed!). For shame, Spain, for shame.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing.
These guys got it all! Now they just need to ban internet and computers, even if your use of it is fair, this way there will be no more piracy.
In other news, arresting 100 persons is still a good thing provided that one of them is guilty.
You just got troll'd!
They have done something far worse than simply ban unauthorized p2p sharing.. they have made it a criminal offense for ISP's to merely allow it.
since every protocol on the internet can be used for unauthorized p2p sharing ISP owners must now either cease all service or go to prison.
This is a subtle but radical difference from what other nations have done, and it spells doom for all spanish ISP's
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
I believe the law only applies to copyrighted materials that you aren't entitled to copy;
Ummm, wasn't copyright infringment already a civil offence in Spain? So you're saying that they passed a law to make the civil offence of copyright infringment into a civil offence?
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
A button in P2P to be able to pay wouldn't help. The brain damaged RIAA&friends refuse to accept payment for MP3s.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
I think you missed the part where ISP's are obligated to block P2P traffic. Since an ISP cannot differentiate between authorized and unauthorized P2P traffic, they have no choice but to block the entire technology (or make a best case effort at least).
"Internet service provider" can also be extended to cover torrent sites and trackers because they provide an internet service. Then they can be liable for damages. Enjoy http://www.descargasweb.net/ while you still can!! Be carefull though to give a fake ID because the logs can be use against you..
There are two types of sources in bittorrent:
* Peers are people who are both downloading and uploading.
* Seeders are people who have already downloaded the entire file and are uploading it out of the kindness of their hearts.
Peers will continually kill the connections with the worst download/upload ratio, meaning you will get virtually nothing from peers if you don't upload.
Seeders upload to anybody, though they _may_ be clever by avoiding uploading the same parts of the file more than once during a limited amount of time in order to maximize the amount of data that can be distributed between peers.
So in other words, if trhere are a lot of seeders you will get ok download speeds without uploading.
Try out fish, the friendly interactive shell.
Someone posting as anonymous coward should be less flippant asking for references. But I love shutting assholes up.
"I think it would be a good idea!"
Gandhi, about Internet Security
It's simple: every form of government authority implies that the whole population is pursuing the same goal, which is determined by whatever law-making process there is.
So if a lobby manages to get the Law to state that P2P is going against that common universal goal, tough luck. There's no place for any "minority" (or non-lobby) opinion in a system driven by votes: winner takes all.
Maybe we deserve this world ?
Together with a random port there should be no way to detect and thus affect the traffic.
The traffic analysis necessary to detect BitTorrent traffic is trivial; nothing else opens a large number of connections and starts sending data the way that BitTorrent does. Encryption has worked with some ISPs because they've only made a half-hearted effort to traffic-shape. As it currently stands, many users have a choice of broadband providers and will switch if their carrier is too aggressive, and in most cases it's easier to simply cap all of an heavy user's bandwidth than to waste the cycles trying to find the BT traffic in particular.
But rest assured, the traffic analysis is child's play. If ISPs want to stop BT traffic, encryption won't present any impediments.
Don Negro
Perl 6 will give you the big knob. -- Larry Wall
....like say anyone who uses South Africa's sole monopoly telecom provider, Telkom.
Why has this happened? Oh well you see Telkom likes to save bandwidth because they're cheap. So they force every international connection through a cache server. Slashdot has deemed the cache server an "abusive" IP, so it's banned from posting on the site. But you can't NOT submit from that IP, because it's forced by the only internet provider in the country. So basically 45 million people can't post thanks to lazy site administrators.
Have I submitted this to the appropriate channels? Of course, countless times, and never recieve any reply. I've even submitted it as news. I've asked about it as an ask slashdot.(both rejected of course). Nobody seems to care.
After all, I'm sure it's just so easy for everyone to VNC into a machine in the US like I'm doing so they can struggle with laggy shaped international connections just to submit text to a website. It's our fault for living in a third world country with a government that artificially maintains a monopoly now that it's no longer "official" since half of the government still has stock in it, right?
Go ahead, mod me offtopic or troll or whatever. I don't give a damn. If you people bothered to read your own damn mail and fix the site I wouldn't have had to spend a year trying to find a solution only to wind up bitching about it in posts!
Introducing the new Occam Fusion! Now with sqrt(-1) fewer blades!
The blank media tax is absurd, simple because you can't tell who gets copied how many times.
So, if every GNU/Linux contributor claims refund... Well, at least they'll make a good DDoS!
Imagine that, a crowd of people, all swinging copies fo their own copyrighted materials...
WYSIWIG, but what you see might not be what you need
Pulling the trigger is actively deciding to kill someone.
Making copyrighted content available on P2P is simply letting people know what you have. If no one else wants anything, nothing is ever going to be downloaded. It's the other person's decision....not yours.
The bullet doesn't make a decision...at least...not yet....so your analogy is piss poor, to say the least.
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
"It's not like there aren't good and honest alternatives out there."
Please name some, I'd like to know.
urd
I'm not sure I buy Rand's quote 100% but its easy to refute some of those points. Government can't declare war with out soldiers, it is a crime not to sign up for selective services. Government can't build roads, fund space programs etc with out forcibly taking taxes, its a crime (you can go to jail) for not paying taxes. The Government is the only "creditor" that can forcibly take your belongings, and your freedom. Is that right or wrong? I'm not saying, but yes government's ability to operate rests largely on its ability to incarcerate people.
SSU. SSU introductions. Passive-active-passive peering. Double-ended passive-passive TCP sockets using a mutual introducer (so what if so few nodes can introduce; you only need one per hundred thousand or so). A distributed mixnet with partial restricted routes - a comparatively low number of peer connections to less restricted connections, to tunnel to a large number of peers using multiple hops. Hell, you get anonymity as a side dish to that. So does everyone else. Fuck it, make 'em full restricted routes. May as well add encrypted, protocol-masquerading steganographic transports to thwart application-layer traffic shaping.
Stuff like this is already well in development. Not everything has to use a thousand inbound and outbound TCP connections like Bittorrent, there are many different approaches to this sort of thing. Not to mention there are a lot of tricks in TCP. Some threat models see the ISP as malicious. Free speech ultimately demands anonymity, and the ability to be able to punch through any effective barriers blocking the protocol that allows that.
By the time they would successfully enforce such a thing, we would probably already have a fielded, very good way around it, and by then, it would be extraordinarily difficult - possibly computationally infeasible, given enough time and effort - to block, or perhaps even detect.
And remember, comparatively very few peers are in Spain.
You could just turn the upload of Spanish residential connections down to shit, like 32kbps or something, and allow only ACKs to bypass that limit. But there'd still be enough left over bandwidth from everywhere that *doesn't* legislate itself into the Internet Dark Ages to keep the stuff moving, and there are tricks on top of anything that has already been done, at that...