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RIAA Sues Usenet.com
Several readers pointed us to Torrentfreak's coverage of the RIAA's latest move: the major record labels have launched a copyright infringement lawsuit against Usenet.com. The complaint, filed in the federal District Court in New York, accuses Usenet.com of providing access to millions of copyright-infringing files and slams it for touting its service as a "haven for those seeking pirated content." Usenet.com has been refusing the labels' requests to block access to alleged "copyright infringing groups."
What way did bittorrent go exactly? My 'torrent use' has not been effected in the least from anything the RIAA or bittorrent themselves have done. As for usenet, even if it is shut down, only the name will take a hit. The whole community will reorganize 3 days later at a new domain, the same community, and a new vigor of secrecy. I mean really, the RIAA cannot do anything to stop us(Us being geeks/nerds). No matter what they do, we change our ways, improve our position against them(RIAA), and continue to do what we want, share files. Darknets and private trackers are already commonplace because of the RIAA - it just goes to show that the only thing that can control what the community does is the community itself.
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Well, think of the latency of a donkey or mule (I had a two year long download once), a pigeon should outperform those easily.
Don't confuse 'Usenet' with usenet.com. 'Usenet' is an internet-wide discussion system, with thousands of usenet nodes and of no central control.
Usenet.com provides paid access to Usenet newsgroups, and happened to land a nice DNS name.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
Still exists? ive not seen them on an ISP for years.
Why not just have a blanket suit against all people that have internet access. Then tax us all for our 'assumed guilt'. Sort of like the 'music CDR tax'.
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If the RIAA's main complaint is that Usenet.com is offering access to alt.binaries.*, that's a little pointless. Now that NZB files are all the rage, the various pieces of each posting don't even have to be in one newsgroup, because the reference them by message-id. So, I could chop "Stairway to Heaven" into 20 pieces, post one piece to soc.singles, another piece to alt.flame, etc. etc... and then post the NZB somewhere and any NZB-aware program will be able to go get them. So... trying to shut off alt.binaries isn't going to stop anything.
Usenet is a protocol. Usenet.com is a company. (Not that I agree with this strategy. just explaining...!)
don't giganews and usenet.com do pretty much the exact same thing?
just because I don't care doesn't mean I don't understand!
Deleted
Copyright isn't a constitutional right. It's a right which may or may not be granted pursuant to a power granted to Congress in the Constitution, but that's not the same thing. If it were, we'd have a constitutional right to federal welfare programs, for example.
-- 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.
Most slashdotters that are against the RIAA/MPAA for their tactics would also be against the piracy you described. Typically, this community accepts "personal use" type file-sharing, where the song/movie is not then sold on the black market. In fact, the RIAA would be perfectly in the right to sue in this case. However, they should sue the pirating karaoke bars that are making profits because of piracy, not the medium from which they obtained them. Furthermore, they should not have to pay $220,000 per track in any case, but rather something more along the lines of actual loss (maybe a grand total of $300,000 as you cited in your example).
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Great, and we finally got the AOLers to go away.
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(Do they still bar any proposals for the creation of binaries groups under rec? Do any comp.binaries.* groups survive today?)
Most of comp.binaries.* is gone. We're not looking to make more binaries groups in the Big-8. You can see the current creation policies here, and the list of "discouraged" proposal types is here.
There is a reason why Usenet was forgotten: it was the birthplace of spam.
Naah, that didn't have much to do with it. Spam was actually effectively defeated on Usenet. The problem is that nobody tells anybody else that it exists anymore, and so the number of posters have gone down... I personally think that the difficulty of making a new group caused problems too, and I hope that the new system may help.
It might come down to advertising. Selling a knife is legal. Selling a knife as "the perfect murder weapon" is not. There's a long and difficult story trying to figure this out, you can read Shooting the Messenger: ISP Liability for Contributory Copyright Infringement [pdf] for the 16-page brief summary. On the one hand you have the Sony vs Betamax shield (you can't control the users) on the other you have Grokster etc. (you can't advertise it as a pirating service). Some of the Usenet providers have been making ads that are dangerously close to inciting illegal activity. I think newsgroups will survive, I'm not sure usenet.com does.
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No, you ARE wrong.
Usenet is one system. If i post something to one server, it propegates outward to the rest of them.
If you shut down usenet, you shut down usenet.....there is not "oh, well...lolz it will pop back up somewhere!"
What pisses me off is that Usenet is a TERRIFIC source of information on just about any topic you can imagine. It is the best discussion system I have found for AS/400. There are experts in the field that will respond to any questions that you have within hours, 24/7.
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This seems like it there may be a precedent for this case already:
http://www.law.duke.edu/journals/dltr/articles/2006dltr0019.html
Don't confuse 'Usenet' with usenet.com. 'Usenet' is an internet-wide discussion system, with thousands of usenet nodes and of no central control.
Usenet.com provides paid access to Usenet newsgroups, and happened to land a nice DNS name.
And, as a Usenet provider, hasn't the RIAA of yesteryear already fought this battle and lost? After all, aren't Usenet servers Common Carriers, like the telcos? The Telcos are not liable for what goes on over their networks, Usenet.com isn't, either.
Arguably, USENET predates the *Internet*, not just the Web. USENET feeds were originally delivered via UUCP, and it wasn't until the mid-80s that NNTP was created to allow the transport of USENET content over TCP/IP. Even then UUCP-based USENET feeds stuck around for several more years, until the early 90s or so. I started reading USENET in 1988, and my university was still getting it via UUCP then (I'm not sure if they even had an Internet connection then).
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Let's hope Usenet.com has good lawyers who know about this.
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For those who don't want to take the time to read the "iBrief" (wtf?), it says that AOL's usenet service should not have qualified AOL under the safe harbor provisions. However, the article uses a very narrow interpretation of the definition of "ISP": a party that offers transmission, routing, or provision of connections for digital online communications, between or among points specified by a user, of material of the user's choosing. The article says that the user does not control where the usenet post goes after they make it, so the user has not specified a point of transmission, so with respect to usenet, AOL does not qualify as an ISP.
However, the user specifies "rec.arts.whatever" as the end point. The user is oblivious to the IPs and server locations of various ISPs' usenet storage machines, but users don't know the actual IPs of Youtube.com, yet when they specify "youtube" as the location for an uploaded video, no one is suggesting that this technicality disqualifies Youtube from the safe harbor provisions. Youtube's video storage is probably on more than one machine with more than one IP, so, similar to Youtube, usenet is a web of servers, and the user does not choose a specific server as its target. Instead, the user chooses some nebulous "site" to send their data to. The site itself is not a real location, but an interconnected web of servers.
Email is similar.
There are numerous valid reasons to offer 20GB/mo. of downloads.
Usenet is one system. If i post something to one server, it propegates outward to the rest of them.
If you shut down usenet, you shut down usenet.....there is not "oh, well...lolz it will pop back up somewhere!"
Could you elaborate?
Usenet consists of thousands of nodes. If you shut down one usenet node, even a large one, the remaining nodes will continue to function. Affected nodes can eventually route their messages through connecting nodes. Messages can still be sent from one node, routed through the connecting nodes, and received by the remaining nodes.
Shutting down usenet would involve shutting down a majority of the nodes, which isn't practical.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
Alt didn't come till well after 1970.
It was net.* and mod.*, later, the comp/sci/rec etc hierarchies.
Alt happened around this time when some anal retentive twits pissed off Brian Reid and Jon Gilmore.
See Hardy:The History of the Net
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"How long before they take on Google Groups?
Do they carry alt.binaries.*?
Google Groups probably does more with usenet than anyone else.
But they still don't know what they're doing with it, sadly. "
Truer words were never spoken. Google doesn't really have a clue what usenet is nor do they give a shit about it. This was told to me by a google vp.
I'm the guy that tracked Henry Spencers (utzoo!henry) tapes and got them into uwo!magi's hands then into brewsters hands at archive.org then into dejanews. Google has *exaclty* the same content. The missing bits are where Henry's origial 9 track tapes could not be read by magi & co and transferred to DAT.
To give you some idea how bad it was every 12 feet of tape they had to stop, clean the heads and restart. I think it took 2 or 3 years to convert them all. Nobody in the world had the disk space to home them all till I pointed out Brewster did, and they sat as multi terabyte files on archive.org that nobody had the capacity to do anything with. We're talking about ALL of usenet here. The reason Henry kept all of usenet? A friend of his wanted all postings to rec.birds and Henry was just too lazy to pull only those out and tape was cheap.
Deja began archiving all of usenet from 1995 on. But they never split up the older posting archives which still sat as huge multi terabyte files they got from Brewster. "Marketing couldn't see the point of it" is the reason I was told by the deja techie that I directed to get them from archive.org (where they still live btw). When google aquired deja they found the big files, split them up and all or a sudden postings going back to 1988 or so suddenly appeared. A word in the right persons ear made this happen.
Most of what's written about this stuff in the NYT and Wired is just plain wrong. But as I said I guided those files to the right places for years and was there when it happened. I've had no problem finding any posting in google and don't understand how or why deja's search was "better".
Cheers,
Richard@gryphon.dead
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Whether you agree with the technical correctness of that definition is immaterial to how a judge must apply the law.
-GiH