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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."
Ethay irstfay uleray ofway ethay usenetway isway ouyay oday otnay alktay aboutway ethay usenetway.
liqbase
The article misses a major point.
The MPAA is perfectly free to choose who to go after. If they choose to allow GUBA to continue (at least for now), that is their right. It doesn't take away from their valid position to protect their copyrights.
As an aside, I had never heard of GUBA before this. I may have to look into it...
You do not talk about Usenet.
It's just easier to find and sue torrent abusers.
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
Because if they *had* sued this "Guba" thing, you idiots would be congratulating them for their meticulous fairness and consistency and expressing relief that they hadn't "lost the moral high ground" by failing to take legal action against someone...
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
So right there, Guba has some sort of DRM system in place that keeps people from just watching any movie at any time - and since they use the Usenet archives at times to snag their movies, the MPAA doesn't have to worry about "clean" copies - they'll still get paid for crappy Usenet archive copies that Joe Geek ripped from the DVD.
But there's something else that Guba offers as well: tracking of content. Does Hollywood want to know what movie might be a good pick? What if there's been a lot of traffic in "Santa Claus versus the Martians", and it's pretty constant - maybe rereleasing the DVD will make some cash.
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?
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
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 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
You do not talk about Usenet.
Slashdot is an anagram for Has Dolts, and I am Dolt number 468543
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.
So the MPAA Are behaving in a way that possibly harms the MPAA and nobody else. Why should we bully them into behaving differently?
Because, as the saying goes, when you critize somebody's personal hygiene, you'd better make sure you smell nice yourself.
In other words, the MPAA can't go about suing people right and left for piracy and copyright infringement and behave differently when said people are their buddies. They're just not credible.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
PC Magazine says it is because the studios are in bed with GUBA
GUBA!!! You said I was the only one...
I think the MPAA doesn't care about Usenet is because the Usenet that is provied "free" by ISP's sux in a major way. Anyone with Earthlink or TimeWarner can confirm that even with PAR2 files, there is simply not enough left of just about any rar to reassemble the archive. Too many pieces just disappear.
I guess GigaNews still isn't big enough to attract the attention of the MPAA. I hope GigaNews wouldn't give up the user's data without a fight anyway.
Also, one person posts on usenet and there are many free "anonymous" posting servers out there. Several people download. Getting the uploaders is more important to the RI/MP-AA than the leachers/lurkers. With bittorrent, nearly eveyone who downloads also uploads so all users are just as guilty.
Finally, the IP addresses of the users are easier to find via torrent than they are via usenet.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
WTF man? Didn't you see the first two rules of Usenet above.
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 Usenet as an MPAA profit center? I don't buy it.
So, there's no way that if the MPAA knows the full scope of the Usenet, that they would be making enough money off of GUBA to offset the perceived losses of keeping the Usenet in operation.
Here's a better explanation: to crack down on the Usenet, the MPAA would have to put pressure on the ISPs who provide Usenet connectivity as part of their plans. ISPs don't like reducing the value of their services by limiting features (it makes it harder to justify their monthly rate hikes). And the MPAA needs to be friendly with the ISPs to keep getting those juicy log files.
So it's not that they like the Usenet, it's just that they don't have a way to shut it off, yet.
perl -e 'foreach(values %SIG){$_="IGNORE";}while(){}'
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.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Using MPAA and credible in the same sentence? You've been spending too much time in alt.idealism...
How to enable garbage collection on a system without protected memory: #define malloc() ((void *) rand())
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."
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?
...if this is your first time on Usenet, YOU will upload pr0n
Lets be honest, the real reason they aren't going after it is that usenet is little known outside of IT circles and is pretty user unfriendly (at least to a layman).
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
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...
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.
When a movie/music files/whatever posted to Usenet, there is only one distributor/publisher of the questionable content. When someone downloads questionable content via BitTorrent, they are simultaneously taking on the role of downloader and distributor/publisher. If the *AA wants to go after those distributing/illegitimiately publishing their content, they'll find a lot more potential targets for litigation. Even if they went after individual Usenet servers who carry the groups and posts containing copyrighted material, the pool of BitTorrent users is simply larger.
Also, these days, I'd wager that there are more simply people downloading via BitTorrent than binaries newsgroups, given the lower learning curve and generally faster download speeds.
The first rule of Slashdot is that we don't talk about Usenet.
And it's quite possible someone here may give you a Chinese burn for mentioning NNTP.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Asking as someone who wasn't around when Usenet was the biggest thing, is this really as proliferate as torrent sites?
--
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!
4. If you must talk about Usenet, call it Google Groups.