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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."
Guess IRC and finally Gopher will be up next :/
...
Pay no attention to those alt.binaries. subscriptions.
Now everyone will know about usenet and how to access it.
Samsung took back my unlocked bootloader because Google wants me to rent movies. They're both evil.
I guess pigeons will be next. Woe is ye, oh little beasties of high capacity and ludicrous latency!
RIAA sues HTTP.com, RIAA sues USB 2.0, RIAA sues self?
I misread the title as "RIAA Uses Usenet.com".
Wow, what a difference two letters make, huh?
The complaint, filed in the federal District Court in New York, accuses Usenet.com of providing access to millions of copyright-infringing files
Next up, the RIAA sues Nike, for their involvement in a "massive, global-scale sneaker net"
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
See what happens when you talk about Usenet?
WTF? Usenet predates the WWW and is essentially just a protocol; they might as well sue "email" as well.
Please, for the love of god, don't let this story go any further....please nobody post this to digg, or reddit, or any other place that will get it even more publicity. What the MAFRIAA wants is for all of us to be up in arms, and if we get the 14 year old ZOMFG HACK-ZORES on the case that is exactly what will happen.
/quickly now //QUICKLY!
usenet will go the way of bittorrent.
NOthing to see here folks, move along.
NewslilySocial News. No lolcats allowed.
Geez, what is this, digg? usenet.com is just a company that gives payed access to usenet. The RIAA can't sue usenet anymore then it could sue HTTP (not that it wouldn't want to) but it sure as hell can sue Usenet.com the same as it can sue a company employing a webserver that hosts copyrighted files.
I have no idea if usenet.com can be considered guilty under current laws, they do have the files in question on their servers and charge people money to download them, so they are directly profitting from these files. On the other hand, by the nature of usenet they have no control over what appears on their servers (they better not be blocking kiddie porn or they lost that defence).
Are they a phone company just passing information, or are they a filesharer profitting from doing so.
Intresting case BUT stop pretending that the RIAA is stupid enough to sue USENET, it is sueing a company that sells access to usenet. People here are quick to blame politicians for not knowing enough, but count the posts that don't even seem to know the difference between these two.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Well back to stealing porno mags from the old mans stash.
God I feel bad for ripping off my 80 year old dad's playboys from the 70's ! Oh wow never knew there could be that much hair down there !
This package Does Not Contain a Winner
Hrmm, angry you are...
I sense the AOL is strong in this one, yes?
...
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 FAQ
Posted: 00:00:00 UTC on January 1, 1970
Version 0.0.1
Authro: Kibble
Group: Alt.First.Post
The first rule of Usenet is you don't talk about Usenet
Actually, usenet.com (like any host taking part of the usenet network) is actually hosting the content.
Many usenet host (in universities or ISP) do not store binary groups (just because it take too much space on their servers). But some ISP do, and just turn a blind eye on the piracy, because they know they will attract more customers.
Thats what make it so attractive for pirated content: this are professional grade servers on the other side.
I'm surprised it took RIAA/MPAA so long to go after them.
I don't think you're emphasizing enough just how much bandwidth a newsgroup infrastructure consumes. Once you're doing binaries, and dabbling in 99% retention for any amount of days, you have yourself tremendous bandwidth and server requirements (IO/Spindles, mainly) that could quickly turn an ISPs profit into the red if they decided to keep doing it and not charge for some tiers of service.
The basic stuff like the text, completion and retention is hard enough without binaries. This is why most places (Comcast, et. al.) outsource their newsgroups to giganews - the barrier to entry is substantial.
A benefit of Usenet is that it is a push technology, not a pull. You could theoretically identify posters--or at least their servers by analyzing bang paths (and determining their forge point)--but downloading was largely anonymous... when NNTP servers were widely distributed and not just in the hands of a few businesses selling access to their massive feeds. You can't find an open NNTP server anymore that lets anyone post. It's far more vulnerable now as a result.
I remember the days of Usenet when porn was not plentiful and you could launch a DDoS on an FTP site just by posting a message that there was porn there. The attack was even more effective when the porn allegation was true.
There is a reason why Usenet was forgotten: it was the birthplace of spam. Though term spam was first coined on IRC from someone on a channel just sending the word "spam" repeatedly to disrupt a discussion and leaving, it manifested into the form of the modern scourge first on Usenet.
Except some of the binaries groups, where the porn spam is about as good or even better than the actual postings from individuals.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
http://stashbox.org/23136/P1010004.JPG
Take a look at that old man in the middle of this picture. He's my boss. He owns a karaoke bar in San Jose California called the 7 Bamboo.
This guy has been doing karaoke a loooong time. Up until 2002 and American idol, karaoke was sort of frowned on by most Americans. Then AI came out and there was a sudden surge in karaoke's popularity.
http://www.7bamboo.com/cms/?q=node/210
I did some screenshots of the Namm global music report in that article. I'll just summarize, basically the entire karaoke industry is making less money now than it was 10 years ago in 1997.
Myself, i've seen our business hurt by piracy. Before 2002, we were some quirky little Japanese karaoke bar, pretty much one of maybe 4 karaoke venues in San Jose, but between 2002 and 2004 we saw a sharp decline in attendance, and a sharp growth in karaoke venues and it's been a constant uphill battle to keep customers coming back.
I made a choice to not pirate karaoke at our club. We have about 7000 songs in our collection. This in in contrast to the 10-15 venues that have popped up in our area with anywhere between 50,000-150,000 songs.
Karaoke is expensive. About $2 a track. So somebody please tell me, with a straight face how these new guys that just popped out of nowhere suddenly have a $300,000 karaoke collection. Fact is, they don't.
It's still competition for us. Everyone that works at 7bamboo makes less money because of it. Less tips, less sales, less everything, but more work.
Look at the face of that old man and tell me that usenet.com is in the right by enabling these people to screw his business over with competition running on pirated songs. The business he and his wife built was in jeopardy until I came along and gave it a hot beef injection of technology.
Fortunately for them, and the rest of the 7b's employees, I can keep the place on the bleeding edge of karaoke technology without resorting to piracy. Still though, I think my time would have been better spent doing more worldly things.
Personally, I hope the RIAA wins this one. Don't mod me a troll for voicing this opinion either, because since when has someone voicing a legitimate, validated opinion considered trolling.
It's just not fair. Karaoke CD's have to be ripped carefully at 1x, so i've put over 400 manhours into ripping our 300 original CDG's. A pirate can suck off a newsgroup and have 7000 songs in a few hours. Given a few days, they'll have a 40-50k+ collection.
BTW RIAA if you're reading this, look into alt.binaries.sounds.karaoke. Shut that one down first, plzktnx.
--toq
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Don't think that Usenet.com is not usenet, and therefore usenet is safe. By now you should know that the RIAA tries to take one case against a weak defendant, and then leverage that win in the courts against everyone else. If they can win against Usenet.com and their servers, expect legal letters to go out to every other usenet node telling them to shut down, filter groups (yeah, like that would work), or face a lawsuit against a billion dollar corporation.
This really is a big deal on a new front, and if they don't lose big time here, they'll try to roll over everyone else.
The truth is that the RIAA truly believes that they are more important than absolutely everybody else in the world!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Yep. Not only that -- the massive storage and bandwidth -- but you need to get a newsfeed. And that's not as easy as it used to be, when you could basically ask the sysop of your local university nicely. I'm not even sure what the commercial news servers would charge for a real UUCP newsfeed, or if they'd sell you one at all (why would they want to create competition for themselves?).
I'm not sure how many high-completion, long-retention news servers are around, but I suspect it's way, way down from what it used to be. It probably wouldn't take too many targeted lawsuits to, if not actually wipe out Usenet (that's impossible), but to at least make it very different from what it's like now. You could definitely make commercial services unprofitable, push it underground, and force people to eliminate binaries or at least shorten their completion/retentions a lot.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
*horrors*
Let's hope they don't go after web.com and ftp.com next!
This seems like it there may be a precedent for this case already:
http://www.law.duke.edu/journals/dltr/articles/2006dltr0019.html
Let's hope Usenet.com has good lawyers who know about this.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
16,548,583 songs available? And I can download them at blazing fast speeds? Those bastards are going to fear our wrath!
Thats when you call in us IT "Consultants." If we can't dazzle them with brilliance, we can baffle them with bullshit. ;)
Cheers.
This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
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.
(Geez it's old homeie week. Hi Tim.)
"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
"It's too dark to put the keys in my ignition"
Need Mercedes parts ?
I can't remember who said it or the exact quote, but its something like this:
"The internet treats censorship like any other error, and routes around it."
On another note, the spam levels and trolls in usenet are so high, I find that its not really all the usable. (my killfile was huge)
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
Cochran
Ladies and gentlemen of this supposed jury, Chef's attorney would certainly want you to believe that his client wrote "Stinky Britches" ten years ago. And they make a good case. Hell, I almost felt pity myself! But, ladies and gentlemen of this supposed jury, I have one final thing I want you to consider. Ladies and gentlemen, this is Chewbacca. Chewbacca is a Wookiee from the planet Kashyyyk. But Chewbacca lives on the planet Endor. Now think about it; that does not make sense!
Gerald Broflovski
Damn it!
Chef
What?
Gerald
He's using the Chewbacca Defense!
Cochran
Why would a Wookiee, an eight-foot tall Wookiee, want to live on Endor, with a bunch of two-foot tall Ewoks? That does not make sense! But more important, you have to ask yourself: What does this have to do with this case? Nothing. Ladies and gentlemen, it has nothing to do with this case! It does not make sense! Look at me. I'm a lawyer defending a major record company, and I'm talkin' about Chewbacca! Does that make sense? Ladies and gentlemen, I am not making any sense! None of this makes sense! And so you have to remember, when you're in that jury room deliberatin' and conjugatin' the Emancipation Proclamation, [approaches and softens] does it make sense? No! Ladies and gentlemen of this supposed jury, it does not make sense! If Chewbacca lives on Endor, you must acquit! The defense rests.