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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'd never heard of GUBA, but I'm real curious how they "index" multimedia that's got names like "4er0s1x03.rar" (that's "Heros, season 1 episode 3" for the unitiated). People name things like that to avoid getting caught by *AA filter bots. Seriously, how can they index all that stuff with all those cute non-machine-readable names?
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Actually, it hurts future arguments they try to make against other infringers, or at least it should (the law has a funny way of bending in the favor of these major copyright holders/campaign contributors). See, owners of intellectual propery are charged with a responsibility called due diligence. They are required to take reasonable action to protect their property, or they lose the ability to enforce their rights at all. If they want to openly give permission to GUBA to distribute copyrighted material, that's one thing. But to overlook what would otherwise be considered outright infringement, they are neglecting their responsibility of due diligence. They aren't necessarily required to take the -same- action against each violator, but flat out refusing to even respond when provided with proof that infringement is taking place effectively condones the act of infringing, and not just by GUBA. I'm certainly no authority on this topic, but that's my understanding.
There is almost nothing available through torrents which hasn't been posted to Usenet within the past 90 days. So, if you have a Usenet provider with 3 months' retention (e.g. Giganews), Usenet is huge. But more importantly, unlike a torrent, it's reliable. You may find a torrent, but if it has no seeds, you can't download the files. With Usenet, if you've found the articles, the only limit is the speed of the connection between you and your provider.
I wonder how long usenet readers will be able to hide from the MPAA and RIAA. Due to its perceived complexity, it has thus stayed under the radar of the P2P masses. Hopefully it will stay that way until the rampant suing to stop piracy stops.
Bittorrent is more or less centralized. Centralized targets are easy to shutdown and pillage.
Usenet is decentralized and distributed. It would be very hard to deal with. So this is just a matter of the MPAA/RIAA picking the low hanging fruits. Governments had trouble censoring Usenet, the MPAA/RIAA aren't going to do much better.
The easy money is going after the centralized servers and then getting the big ISPs to pull the plug on Usenet. First, steer people away from the clients. If they don't know that it exists, they don't get the service. Second, stop providing clients. That raises the bar even further. So no NNTP client from the ISPs, and I bet MS Windows doesn't even ship with a program that can handle NNTP either. Even ten years ago, back when people were constantly fiddling with their computers, something like 65% kept the default programs and configurations, the percentage must be much higher nowadays. Lastly, when their Usenet usage drops enough, they can quietly pull the plug.
Since as a side effect of being distributed and decentralized, Usenet is dreadfully difficult to track or censor or charge extra for. The largest ISPs are owned by MPAA/RIAA interests anyway and not being able to charge extra rubs them the wrong way. So, these interests steer people instead to Facebook, MySpace, and other ad revenue generators. Many western governments appear to have issues with free flow of information, and especially troubled by sources that are difficult to censor. Remember, Usenet got around blocks that even seasoned reporters couldn't when covering dramatic events like the fall of eastern block governments or even China's Tienamen Square massacre.
For those who don't know, Usenet is a distributed, decentralized, threaded messaging network which predates the Internet. There are problems with how it is designed, but keep in mind that it was set up in the mid-70's and back then if you were on the network, you were probably supposed to be there, eventally helped improve it, and for the most part were accountable.
If (when) the One Laptop Per Child project takes, of then the mesh network will need a new communications network with many of the characteristics of Usenet. HTTP just is not practical over slow, intermittent connections, so without a distributed, decentralized communications system, mesh users are cut out of web forums and such. Even e-mail is difficult if several of the nodes between you and your correspondents are frequently down or out of contact.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Actually, I have to wonder about that.
If I register with e.g GigaNews or whoever, they have at the very least my contact / credit card details, and even if they may not leave private information to just about anyone, I wouldn't be too confident in antipiracy organizations not being capable of using their user registries to proceed with their investigation.
My point is -- at least with BT, I wouldn't be registering myself on some company. With Usenet, you often have both that way for them to attack you, as well as the traditional ISP way.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Does the MPAA control TV shows, too? I have no interest in downloading full theater movies or DVD rips, but I'll grab tonight's CSI off the 'bay sometime tomorrow because my DVR is busy recording other things. Plus the shows off torrents are HD, with commercials pre-cut, so it's awesome. Where do those fit in?
Asking as someone who wasn't around when Usenet was the biggest thing, is this really as proliferate as torrent sites?
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Oh yeah! The only thing that realy shut down the popularity was the very lousy spam to content ratio. It was worse than the current e-mail situation. For the most part, it became useless except for the few with lots of time on their hands to sift through the rubble heap that remained of usenet.
Like in the early days of e-mail, It was very popular for finding information online. Now it's just a drag to find anything as the content is too diluted to be of much use.
The truth shall set you free!
Interestingly, I'm told that they stopped hosting binary newsgroups a couple of years ago, saw their international bandwidth bills shoot through the roof from BitTorrent, and brought back the binaries. The moral of this story is 'if you offer DRM-free movies at reasonable quality with an all-you-can-watch-for-a-fixed-monthly-fee plan then people will buy it.'
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Dont you think the programs out there made it too easy for users to get the illegal files and doesn't present any challenge like we used to get 'in the old days'. I liked the private days when things were kept small and it was a little more time consuming or challenging to get the file.
See we used to sneak into our local $2 cinema and the guys would not care who were standing way at the other end; the only reason they set a guy up there and later secured the doors even more was because everybody started abusing it and sneaking in.
I have no pity for torrent users who blatently use it to trade illegal files on ridiculous scale but this is the internet of course. Yah I know call me a hypocrite but I am looking at cold-hard reality here and things have just gotten too large and easy for the average user. Used to involve like 20 clicks now it takes two simple clicks to get the file; terrible example I know.
"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."
Sure, if you just use a torrent client wide open. Smart users will use something like Peer Guardian2 http://phoenixlabs.org/pg2/ to keep all the bad guys IP addresses from connecting to you...
"But this one goes to 11!"