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MPAA Ignores Usenet, Goes After Bittorrent
mjeppsen writes "The Motion Picture Association of America is turning a blind eye towards movie piracy on Usenet, going after torrent link sites instead. PC Magazine says it is because the studios are in bed with GUBA, who is also shilling downloadable movies for the MPAA at a premium price."
I think the due diligence requirement you're speaking of only applies to trademark. With copyright, your awareness and failure-to-sue some other guilty party could conceivably be brough up in court as a defense.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laches_(equity)
But I don't think this defense works very often. The copyright holder could basically say "we have to use our resources sparingly; there's so much infringement out there that we can't bring cases except where there's a very good chance of winning"
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
See, owners of intellectual propery are charged with a responsibility called due diligence.
No they're not.
They are required to take reasonable action to protect their property, or they lose the ability to enforce their rights at all.
That's pretty incorrect. There are some estoppel arguments, I suppose, and with trademarks, the trademark will simply cease to exist if it can't function as a source identifier. But really, no one is required to litigate.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
No.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
I'm going to go out on a limb and assume you do not know about the inner workings of the standard extensions to Bittorrent. Don't feel bad; most people don't.
.torrent container or tracker -- just give your DHT-enabled Bittorrent client (say, Azureus) a magnet link and a starter peer and it will retrieve metadata and content for you without any centralized organization. No tracker, no .torrent. Perfectly legal to distribute magnet links, and perfectly legal to distribute Azureus.
Bittorrent was designed to be as decentralized as possible. Usenet still has to be hosted on servers of one kind or another; Bittorrent shares are distributed by a system of peers. The distributed database system means that Bittorrent metadata does not even need a
PS FYI, there is at least one client installed with Windows XP capable of handling NNTP -- Outlook Express. Also, Google still has most of the worthwhile news groups.
~ C.
The main distinguishing feature of Bittorrent, and all the other mainstream P2P networks, is they all have nice shiny GUI-based clients. All your average Internet user needs is to hear from their token nerd friend "download blahblahwindowsclient.exe from this site, double-click it, and click yes to everything" and they're up and running with a dead-easy piracy scheme.
Usenet piracy, however, still requires a bit of fiddling with to get working. You need to choose and install a client. You need to set it up with your server's settings. You need to learn about binaries, how to rejoin split files, how to use RAR archives, how to recreate missing parts by using multiple servers or fiddling with PAR2s, and so on.. and that's just to leech. If you want to contribute, there's another whole list of things you need to learn how to do to make usable posts.
There's also the fact that everyone's a target with P2P. If you're leeching, you're also sharing with others, your IP is out there, and you're counted among the trackable. One file can possibly lead to hundreds or thousands of guilty trraders for the **AA to prosecute. On Usenet the only ones they can go after are the posters, and one successfully posted file can be grabbed by a virtually unlimited number of downloaders before it vanishes from the ether forever.
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Newzbin calls them 'editors' and they are actually human beings in diguise. They get perks like free accounts and fame and such. (Some of which is of questionable worth.)
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Usenet is definitely big, but the problem (or maybe the reason it's still around) is that many people find it a lot harder to use than BT.
Generally -- at least in the good 'ol days -- Usenet was a service that you got from your ISP. Along with x many email addresses and everything else, ISPs would advertise their Usenet breadth and retention. A good ISP would have its own servers that would mirror the popular newsgroups and retain articles for a set length of time, usually 90 days.
As the size of the newsgroups grew and grew (a 90-day cache must be up in the petabyte range now), and its popularity with average readers waned, fewer ISPs kept good feeds. Now, if you want a really good newsfeed, you may have to pay for it, or you're going to have to do some research on your ISP's web page to figure out how to access theirs, and what groups they have and what their retention rate is. Some ISPs don't carry the binary groups, or have short retention spans.
I know that with Comcast, they have a fairly complete newsfeed, but they limit you to 2GB per month of transfer; basically if you want to leech more than that, you have to go to a different provider like Giganews. (This is tremendously dumb on Comcast's part, because if I download gigs of stuff from somebody else's servers on the internet, Comcast has to pay for that traffic from their higher-tier ISP; if I download it directly from Comcast's servers, then it's free for them, since it only ever travels over their wires. They already have the content on the servers, so that's a sunk cost.)
The WP article on Usenet is fairly good:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Who needs a client?
-Jar.
Together, We Can Make Slashdot Better. I Do NOT Mod ACs. - Check Me Out
And to forestall the responses to my own comment... I'm an idiot. Of course they can just connect to the torrent and see every IP address connected; End-to-end encryption really only helps stop content provider traffic shaping. That'll teach me to post before thinking.
In that case, it seems traffic over an onion network is the only solution...
Newsan: This one has a web frontend and more wierd features. It's hard to install though.
I should now I wrote it..
Yes, but unless there's some darknet-capable BT protocol that I'm not aware of, when you start downloading a file, you expose your IP address to everyone that you're grabbing parts of the file from. Any one of them could be a government/MPAA/RIAA spy.
So if I want to find a bunch of would-be copyright infringers, or opposition journalists, or whatever, all I need to do is create a file with an enticing name (say, "tiananmen_square.mpg" or "TheLionKing.avi"), fill it with garbage data, and toss it out in a likely place where people will see it and start downloading. As soon as they connect, you've got their IP. Ask/subpoena/rubber-hose their ISP for the billing records, and cue the men with guns.
With a Usenet or Usenet-like system, an individual user is only ever connecting to one server. It's centralized, but there's also more trust. You're never exposing your IP address -- and thus your identity, because the two are effectively one and the same when the government or another entity can force your ISP to reveal it -- to any unknown or untrusted people.
In a really paranoid environment, Usenet can be compartmentalized; you would pull the feed from the person directly above you in your hierarchy, and they would pass traffic to someone else above them, without you knowing who the upstream provider is. If the network gets compromised at the bottom, it's a rather painstaking process to follow the traffic up in order to get the rest of the network. Rather than being able to grab a lot of users at once, you can only get one "cell" at a time, if it's being run as a darknet.
Usenet seems more centralized on the surface, but in some ways it's far less so. Perhaps its security is mostly accidental rather than by design, but it can survive in situations that are highly adverse to the free flow of information, while BitTorrent basically assumes that a high percentage (all?) of the people you're exchanging traffic with are friendly, and that your IP address is OK to give out.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
From a time before binaries and spam were rampant comes a far-reaching and informative paper entitled Obscenity and Indecency on the Usenet: The Legal And Political Future of Alt.Sex.Stories
And here is a relevant quote:
"Generally speaking, government regulation in this country seems to be most effective only when dealing with large, centralized entities (such as corporations). These entities need to pay taxes, file documents, utilize the courts, etc. These entities are also willing to put up with a number of impositions because of their overriding interest in attaining profits. However, when we are dealing with an entity that is not driven by profits and a decentralized activity that has no real controlling agent (i.e., the Usenet), the regulatory system seems to break down. The only channel of consequence to the Usenet is one of existence. Its demolition (perhaps the only real regulation available) would be a regrettable loss to society.[ 59 ]
Moreover, even though banning the structure of the Usenet could technically be instituted in the U.S., its center of gravity would most likely shift abroad and be imported through Telnet or other methods. In that case, as with any undesirable overseas activity, a customs system could be established if there was a strong enough governmental interest. However, such a system would pose a huge burden to the international flow of information. Certainly, the argument could be made that the U.S., in implementing such an Internet customs system, might be crippling itself economically for the commerce of the future.
Finally, one should note that the regulation of the Usenet by foreign nations can potentially affect Usenet services in this country. For example, a German prosector in Munich ordered CompuServe to discontinue service of over 200 "alt.sex" and related newsgroups on charges that they contained illegal pornographic material. [ 60 ] Since CompuServe lacked the technical means with which to tailor Usenet content simply for German subscribers, the company blocked access to these newsgroups for all of its subscribers worldwide. [ 61 ] Although CompuServe corrected its technical problem within a matter of weeks, the incident received tremendous criticism domestically. [ 62 ] One source even characterized the event as "the most dramatic and far-reaching attempt to restrict the free flow of information online." [ 63 ]"
All that and I still firmly believe that the only reason USENET hasn't been shut down is because its too good a source of leads for catching Child Abusers/Child Pornographers -- if USENET went away then those criminals would just be driven further underground and would be harder to catch-- plus, thanks to USENET, the FBI/et al can maintain a regular series of arrests by simply perusing USENET every now and then, finding someone who hasn't masked themselves well enough and arrest them.
...unfortunately no one can be told what The Mat^H^H^HGoatse is...they must experience it for themselves...
>usenet is little known outside of IT circles
There is no shortage of trolls and morons on USENET, not all of whom are "in IT circles."
I'm afraid the cat's been out of the bag for a long, long time.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Either way, the selective nature of just what the MPAA will go after and what they won't is rather interesting. I read through the artcle which seemed to show pretty clearly that the MPAA can ignore copyright violation when it wants to. Anyone else have a better idea than I why that may be?
It's perfectly simple. With trademarks, if you do not defend it, you risk losing it. That does not apply to copyright (or patents); they're yours whether you go after infringers or not.
More to the point though, GUBA will have signed a licensing agreement with the MPAA - they're not going after them because they have permission from the rights holders! There is no infringement taking place, and thus nothing to go after.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Plus people are more likely to use BitTorrent or other P2P 'ware because it's pretty much an on demand system- you are very likely to find what you are looking for. With Usenet you get what you find, and you have to have some idea how to find it.
Unison is what you want for software on a mac. I love it. I even paid for my copy ;) Way better than Thoth, which is what I used to use years ago. I'm not sure about websites that tell you what's online. What I have seen don't work very well.
887321 = 337*2633
What's nice about easynews is that their servers reassemble split RARs and extract the enclosure. So if you find something you want to watch, you can just click download and the .avi (or whatever) immediately starts downloading. It's really an awesome interface.
If the RIAA/MPAA/TV Networks provided a site like that (for a similar price; $10/month), I think piracy would be stamped out forever.
My other car is first.