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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.
After they make P2P illegal they then tax one of its possible end-products? Isn't this like simultaneously outlawing heroin and taxing syringes?
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.
"unauthorized downloading" is possible via HTTP, so they ISPs might as well stop completely. I wonder how long this new law will hold up, I wonder if it's even allowed according to EU guidelines.
- Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, 1957.
I wonder what the cost will be to set up the infrastructure required to enforce and prosecute these laws.
It's really naive of the spanish government, and all other, to believe they can banish everyday people's freedom to share data over the internet. No matter the means. They're really not acting in the best interest of the public.
I have an equally intelligent proposal for spain. Ban http and ftp!
It is a well known goodfact that copyrighted material which is not transfered via p2p is mostly transfered via http and/or ftp, so why not just ban those protocols and be done with it! After all, seperating babies and their bathwaters respectively is just to ardious a task for the simple minds of government officials.
A bad analogy is like a leaky screwdriver.
Score one for maintaining the status quo.
I wish p2p would include some sort of payment system. If I could fire up Gnutella or Azureus and have a big debit button where I could pay with a click standardized as a common framework for anyone to plug into their app then the issue would mostly resolve itself. Basically a Gnu_iTunes. P2P isn't bad, missing payment systems is.
Shh.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Not only is this a dupe it's pure FUD.
From TFA "banned unauthorized peer-to-peer file-sharing in Spain" authorised sharing is still allowed.
These new laws are really no more restrictive than those from other countries.
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!
Wow, this is Socialism? If I were a Spaniard who'd voted in the current regime, I'd be feeling pretty betrayed right now.
For some reason I think you'll have no trouble downloading WoW patches via P2P. It's amazing how many people are willing to jump to stupid conclusions without even reading the legislation.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Modded Insightful? Why?
The linked article says "unauthorized peer-to-peer file-sharing". So you will be able to download your prescious WoW-Patches, you will be able to send your own videos to your friends... because its not "unauthorized". Where's the problem?
In other words: the summary was BS and you did not get it straight...
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!!
Slashdot just took a severe dive with this lie. The headline is a lie. The brief is a lie. Read the article and discover the truth for yourself. If this site continues to head down this complely disreputable path, I'll go somewhere else. It's not like there aren't good and honest alternatives out there.
For crying out loud editors, put aside your greed (for that's the most likely motivation for this) and get some integrity.
The owners of this site might do well to consider just firing the editorial staff for FUD-mongering in the worst form.
And before you mod this out of existence, consider that I've probably been a Slashdot member for a hell of a lot longer than you, and I may just know what I'm talking about when I express my disgust at this slide into mediocrity and irrelavance.
So now they are paying the copyright owners, presumably to cover all of those copies that the Spanish people make. So if the copyright holder has been compensated, why in the workd outlaw P2P? Rather than outlawing P2P becasue some uses of it may infringe on copyright, even though it has many valid good uses, why not realize that the copyright holders have been compensated anyway? Sure, I expect that some politicians lined their own pockets in order to pass these laws, but still how can the justify taxing all media, that used for copying and that used for uses that in no way infringe on copyrigh, even flash drives, and then over agressively start outlawing things that might (but certainly don't always) let users copy copyrighted materials when they have already paid the tax?
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Ayn Rand says something right for once. Given how much she'd written, it was bound to happen eventually!
Wish I could say the same for you, Chomsky. Somehow I doubt you'd know anything about Ayn Rand if not for Wikipedia.
But keep those typing monkeys in your brain tap, tap, tapping away... They have an infinite amount of time to try and come up with something worthwhile.
Simply means that you can use the technology for whatever use you like, but if you are caught downloading unauthorized copyrighted material, by any means (client-server or p2p) you dont go to jail, but you pay money for the damage you have done to the people authorized to sell that material. Seems fair to me..
just goes to show that governments should not be given power over the internet, can you imagine if they got control of the root servers too? that would be ridiculious, besides isn't sending an email a form of file sharing?
as i said it before, there is a growing need for networks such as anonet to free people from persecution in repressed countries, i'll just add spain to the list, i might not have anything to hide but then again if i want to share a file i created with a friend i will, if you build it i will find a way to get around it.
should we blame the governments or their advisors, or should we blame the people that build these type of things to restrict us?
if you are one of the following, please erase your mind: drone, sheeple, religious or government robot. if you are not one of them, please stand up and say somthing.
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?
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
well, bullfighting is common in france too
I live at Barcelona (Spain, Europe), and I can tell you that who wrote the article has misinterpreted the whole thing. I'll try to clarify it a bit:
1) A "canon" will be fined over blank media (optical and flash), but hard disks and volatile RAMs are excluded.
2) Still exist the "private copy right", when there is no meaning of making further money selling/dealing with downloaded data (in spanish "sin ánimo de lucro").
As corollarius, can be said that the "canon" has been aproved due to the fact of admiting two points:
a) The citizen is right to get and give (aka share) data from a P2P network, or share a phisical book or disc without having to pay to the author.
b) The "canon" is intended to compensate in some way the point (a).
Well, after my try of claryfing that the P2P it is *not* illegal in Spain (neither for downloading a movie nor for a disc, while not intended for making money of it), I'm against that canon, as it is indiscriminate, thus not fair.
There are many organizations here fighting for civil rights to revert the "canon" law/instruction.
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).
... and the article also mentions that it will be a criminal offense for ISPs not to block P2P. Now tell me how you're going to P2P your authorized material? Sometimes I wish people would read the entire article in stead of just the first sentence...
"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..
But flash drives are rewritable! Surely a tax on "blank" ones can be circumvented by filling them with pointless free content before sale?
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
Right, if you are, lets say, in Spain and you download Maddonna, Sony Spain Inc. can ask you for 20 euros for the album. If you upload to 10 people you own 10X20 plus your own=220 euros, etc.
Im lawyer in Spain.
I know the IP law. I have studied the reform of the law, and theres nothing in the law that substancially change the P2P legality.
The head of the article is a FUD. Obviously, illegal contents like child porngrafy is not allowed, and ISP, if had notice of that illegal transit are responsible (see European Directive 200/31), but P2P filesharing of copyrighted material, for non profit, is not ilegal, as it was with previous law.
So nothing has change, in my opinion. And nobody, with the full legal text, can say what the article sais.
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
did you just make a copyright infringement? :)
When did Slashdot become a safe haven for people like you?
"he, who has quotes in his signature, is a douche" - unknown.
Here you go. While an actual figure like "10th in the World" is hard to compute accurately, the figures given in the link should show that Spain is not exactly a struggling country.
i ate crayons when i was a kid and now i have two braincells and the blue ones taste nicer
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!
Great idea! Linux distributors should register as copyright holders so they can get their cut of the media taxes!
All this fuss...
All they did was outlaw unauthorised files, as in illigal, as in not approved by the author.
How hard is it to read the article? No, really?
Seems better than killing retarded people legally and having hundreds of people waiting in the death row.
Yes, and gay marriage is legal, and there's no death penalty, and... it's so unrelated.
Telephony is certainly P2P-connections and users do exchange audio files.
And all this craze in Europe due to corruption in EU:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janelly_Fourtou
The amount of crap that gets modded +5 insightful on /. is annoying enough in general, but when it comes to IP / P2P topics it really jumps through the roof. Here is a bit of information for those of us who have not yet been assimilated into the "information wants to be free" crowd.
1- The law explicitly bans "unauthorized P2P". Authorized P2P, despite the submitter's misleading assertions, is not concerned.
2- The blank levy is not a compensation for massive, indiscriminate filesharing on P2P networks. Rather, it is a compensation for the (perfectly legal) private, physical copying and sharing of copyrighted works, within the circle of family and close friends, and in low numbers, which I understand is definitely allowed in Spain. France and Canada have a similar scheme.
Basically you're allowed to make a few private copies, and in return you pay a bit more for your blank CDs. The money is they redistributed to registered copyright owners, proportionally to the royalties they earn from other, more easily quantifiable sources (sales, public performances, etc.). Not perfect, but that's the best way they could find. It certainly sucks for those of us who use CD for non-musical data, but I guess we're regarded as "collateral damage".
If I burn a CD of my own copyrighted works, will I get the tax refunded?
It's not a refund, it's a payment based on sales. The money levied from the tax is distributed to registered copyright owners, proportionally to their royalties. Note that anybody can register, including Joe Musician; in fact registering is a prerequisite to receiving any kind of royalties. So if you produce your own copyrighted works (and register to the appropriate body), AND some people buy your stuff or play it in public or use it for any other activity which involves payment of royalties, you'll definitely see some money from this tax.
If you burn a GNU/Linux cd, do you think the copyright holders are going to get paid by the Spanish government?
As I said, it's only for music, so basically no. However, I understand that the tax is only applicable to individuals, not corporations (a bit like VAT tax I suppose), so if $random_spanish_distro sends you a CD of their distribution, they won't have to pay the tax on the CD they burn.
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
So it's not a question of whether you're afraid of getting sued by Blizzard: The patch simply won't come down the pipe.
If you think imaginary property and real property are the same, when does your house become public domain?
Although I expect laws to be passed to ban this or that (P2P, etc), and it's easy to buy off the politicians with $$$ for re-election or in other countries just plain bribing I don't see much enforcement (except for selective large perpetrators). Why? It costs $$$ to enforce.
Governments pass laws all the time and then don't put for the effort to REALLY enforce them (immigration in the U.S. for example). I expect anything to do with file-sharing to be the same.
Take the RIAA and the MPAA. How many people are downloading movies and music vs how many people they are actually prosecuting? Percentage wise of the violators we are talking VERY little. It's all about LOOKING like you are doing something, not actually enforcing or getting rid of the problem. Software piracy is the same way.
We passed the point LONG ago in world where the government can break into your house rifle your things and find something to throw you in jail with.....copied tape? where is the master CD? Can't find it...Ooooo..that's 5 years and 20,000 dollars. That rifle in your basement, is it registered? No? Antique? Doesnt matter..off to jail you go. Speeding? What's that? It's stupid that the speed limit is 25 mph and everybody else is going 50? Tell that to the judge, I'm throwing you in jail for reckless driving.
No government official is going to enforce a law that hurts his/her voters or campaign contributors. If many of them are at home downloading MP3's they will turn a blind eye, But you can bet if it HELPS them in any way they will enforce.
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...