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Usenet.com May Find Safe Harbor From RIAA lawsuit
Daneal writes "Ars Technica has some interesting analysis of the RIAA's lawsuit against Usenet.com. There's reason to believe that Usenet.com — and most other Usenet providers — could qualify for protection under the DMCA's Safe Harbor provision. 'The DMCA's Safe Harbor provision provides protection for ISPs from copyright infringement lawsuits as long as they take down offending material once they are served with a notice of infringement. "Whether the Safe Harbor applies is the central legal question that is going to be raised," EFF senior staff attorney Fred von Lohmann told Ars. An RIAA spokesperson tells Ars that the group has issued "many" takedown notices to Usenet.com, but von Lohmann says that the volume of takedown notices isn't what counts. "The DMCA's Safe Harbor makes it very clear," von Lohmann said. "The number of notices doesn't matter as long as you take the infringing content down."'"
If you can. lets see your infringement argument there.
Read radical news here
I thought that they refused to take down the content in the last article about this?
) Human Kind Vs Human Creation
) It'd be interesting to see how many humans would survive to serve us.
I thought that the first rule of Usenet was that "YOU DO NOT TALK ABOUT USENET"...
They wanna take down USENET?
And they're gonna target a single NNTP provider to do it?
OMFG, USENET was P2P before P2P was invented. It's so distributed, diffuse, and attributionless that it's practically untouchable.
Who keeps picking out windmills for RIAA to tilt at? Their legal attack strategist needs to put down the crack pipe and step away from his desk.
Seriously...
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Since Usenet just publishes other people's stuff, don't they (at least somewhat) qualify for common carrier classification (similar to phone companies) in that the the content is someone else's?
Along these lines, what about Google/other search engines that show "copyrighted" content - either in the snippet or in their cache?
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
To be honest, I don't know how Usenet.com can not qualify for DMCA protection, since it's exactly the type of service that the Safe Harbor exception is supposed to protect. The only thing that seems like it could harm Usenet.com is their advertising, which does veer a little into "wink, wink, nudge, nudge" territory. However, damning a company because it says it respects users' privacy, without actually advocating any type of criminal activity, seems like pretty terrible precedent, and I can only hope (although at this point I have little faith) that a judge will see it similarly.
I think the mention in the Ars article about Safe Harbor being related to "transitory network communications" is irrelevant here. Transitory network communications is covered under 512(a) of the OCILLA (which is part of the DMCA); the portion that I would expect Usenet.com to seek protection under is 512(c), "Information Residing on Systems or Networks at Direction of Users".
You can read the relevant section here, but the significant portion, IMO, is:
The major things they're going to have to avoid are that they "had actual knowledge" that the material was infringing (which might be tough -- I mean, anybody who opens up alt.binaries.movies can probably tell pretty quickly that it's full of bootlegs) and that they didn't receive a "financial benefit directly attributable" to the infringing activity. I think that second one is actually a little easier (for Usenet.com) than the former. And, of course, they have to successfully argue/explain that they don't really have the power to remove articles from Usenet, because of the nature of the network -- it would probably help their case if they started at least deleting articles from their spool/store when they receive a complaint.
I suspect that this may lead to a shakedown in the Usenet provider world, if Usenet.com loses. At the very least, the big providers might have to do more in order to maintain a veneer of plausible deniability (deleting some of the more obviously movie and/or warez related groups, perhaps), or move their servers out of the U.S.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
1) Usenet != usenet.com, which is merely a host. The RIAA is not attacking a protocol. They are suing a company that hosts a lot of NNTP traffic, some of which may be infringing on copyright.
2) It's fscking hilarious that the DCMA may wind up being used against the RIAA. Kudos to Ars for thinking up that one.
3) If the DCMA doesn't help, maybe the supreme court ruling stating that an ISP is not responsible for user generated content will. Details here. (Note: The article isn't about copyright, it's about libel. But if an ISP is legally the same thing as a telephone carrier, then by extension they are not responsible for copyright content. Much in the same way you can't sue AT&T for copyright violation if a person transmits a copyrighted work through their system via modem.)
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
So, if I post something using another provider that a music label asks usenet.com to takedown and usenet.com does it, won't people leave them because they are taking down stuff that I post and move to another nntp provider? But won't usenet.com go out of business because they will lose customers?
If you can. lets see your infringement argument there.
What I want to know is, how long until the RIAA sues Internet.com, because of infringing stuff they found on the internet?
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
http://www.usenet.com/articles/free_download.htm Humm. Yeah, that's a lot more blatant than they were making it out to be in the Ars article. In fact, what the hell, guys? I know it has a copyright date of 2005 on it, but even if that had been written in 1995 it still would have been a little much.
To wit: (in case they take the page down, which I sure would if I were them)The hell with it: They're pretty fucked.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
But they are just a carrier, how are they going to 'take down' a file? ( beyond blocking access to the entire group )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
to force ISP's to filter the entire fscking Internet, one service at a time?
This is going to be interesting. If Usenet.com goes down, next will be NNTP service filters on every ISP in the US, and then by association, such efforts will be made in the rest of the world. Perhaps it might not work in Russia for fear of being mistaken for a spammer, but in the rest of the world, the US government and the **AA will push to have the entire Internet filtered...
The next step? To filter all your email, IM, and VoIP traffic as well, and in fact any method of sharing data. Sounds like tin foil hat stuff, but that seems to be the writing on the wall. If the **AA has those filters in place, guess who will be using them? Why the NSA of course. Any bets on whether the **AA are digging so deep into their wallets on the legal battles because the NSA is promising to refund some portion of the cost, if they are not already secretly funding them from money that went missing in Iraq?
yeah, sounds a bit crazy, but after the lies that have been discovered lately, it would NOT surprise me.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
So, how far does this go? If someone makes a torrent that has a txt file in it that says they'll stop seeding if someone files a takedown, does that mean they'm safe? Or just a file that says that in a shared folder?
Does this also protect torrent trackers? I thought isohunt had to take down US trackers because of riaa pressure. Does this protect them too (as I know they have a takedown option)?
I would have thought this was the first defense any of the trackers would have used. Why would it apply only here, and not to trackers?
The first US telephone exchange opened in 1978. AT&T and the regional Bell companies were privately financed from day one and evolved into regulated public utilities.
The common carrier rule can be traced back to the days when Western Union was in its prime and censoring telegrams it found inconvenient.
With the the exception of civil engineering projects like the Panama Canal, federal spending on infrastructure begins with the New Deal of the 1930s.
That varies widely from provider to provider. A typical ISP, if they bother to offer a Usenet server at all, may retain binary content for just a few days. On the other hand, some of the commercial news servers have much longer retention periods. GigaNews, for instance, now boasts a binary retention period of 200 days.
Usenet.com is a host, not a carrier. It advertises easy access to pirated content. It is Usenet.com that may be going down, like Grokster.
So after reading this, how many 12-18 year olds who've never heard of Usenet are going to say "Another place to pirate stuff from? SWEET DEAL!"
...someone who put their own stuff on usenet and then someone comes along and falsely claims copyright infringment to the ISP and teh ISP takes it down.
Does the genuine originator ever get notified and given an opportunity to counter?
I see a lot of people saying "They don't host the files!"
This is absolutely wrong. They may not be the initial point that the file enters the network, but they DO host the files on their own servers there -entire- time that it's available to their customers. Every usenet provider does this. It's how the entire system works.
Each provider can choose which groups they will bother to handle (it used to be common for free services not to handle the 'alt.' newsgroups) and they -can- remove anything from that server that they choose. It wouldn't be fun to find exactly what the RIAA has requested a takedown for without specific post IDs, but it can be done.
Places that don't host the files are merely indexing services (like newzbin.com) and truly do not host the files. It's just a list of the post IDs that you need to grab what you are looking for from usenet.
I've never heard of a usenet provider that has removed partial content... Only entire groups, and never (that I've heard of) because someone asked them to.
So while it is theoretically possible for this law to protect them, they've never complied with it and it won't do them a bit of good.
It won't do the RIAA any good, either, though... Hundreds or thousands of servers all over the world mirror the same information from 3 to 200 days... They would have to individually ask for the files to be removed from each of them individually.
(Before anyone objects, I know they aren't stored as 'files', but that's irrelevant to the conversation.)
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
For those who don't understand how Usenet works, files are broken up into messages (IIRC, in a 7-bit format) and then transmitted. A Usenet reader of any recent vintage takes these messages and combines them, so you can get the particular (usually) RAR file. Now, most people think that killing one message (one file could be comprised of hundreds) is enough to kill the file, but with the advent of PAR utilities, the file could be easily fixed...
So, for this to be effective against any one program/video/MP3/etc., you'd have to send takedown notices for hundreds of messages. That task, on either end of the spectrum, would have to be daunting!
This is beginning of the end of the US-based news carriers...
Windows 3.1x calc: 3.11 - 3.10 = 0.00
Despite the fact that this makes some modicum of sense, any sort of legal authority this is brought to isn't going to understand it.
What is, to us, a distributed and self-replicating system of nodes to distribute information (in the form of text "articles") worldwide is, to a judge, a website that sells access to copyrighted materials and refuses to remove them.
It's the same sort of roadblock torrent sites run into: computer illiteracy. Though, to be fair, it's not like judges should be required by law to be well versed in the ways of technology (though a little bit of knowledge would help), steps should be made to ensure that trials/hearings/negotiations/etc are presided over by someone who understands or can be made to understand all of the nuances in the discussion.
Anyone else think the comments just weren't rendering right before they turned off ABP and saw ads?
In the late 1970s I was on ARPANET when I was a student at SFU (in fact, I was the Computer Science Rep to Student Council there, running on a slogan of A Rabbit On Every Streetcorner, as a feminist candidate).
I claim prior art. I advertised that I wanted to sell one of my textbooks when I dropped a course.
RIAA owes me money.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I've been on usenet.com's site and can't see anything overtly suggesting potential customers use their service to post/retrieve copyright material without authorization.
Granted, most of their paying customers probably use the service for that, but where's the (legal) beef?
whoa buddy... they're going after a particular USENET service, not USENET the grand cosmic savior of piracy.
The attitude of the RIAA appears to be that any and all MP3 files are by their very nature illegal, and that they deserve huge woges of money for anyone who has ever touched one. This, of course, is not true at all -- except in the mind of the RIAA.
If anyone at all is going to kill the rich culture of this country, it won't be the filesharers. It will be the RIAA, and copyrights extended to infinity -- and beyond!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
is forge a cancel and at least honor it on the local servers. that way I'm pretty sure that it then sticks as far as whether it'll show up again from other feeds.
"Maybe they'll try to go for customer logs next?"
They might, but for downloaders, it might not do that much good.
Remember that the RIAA won their last case because the woman "made available" certain songs on P2P. But if you download, you aren't making something available, and thus less likely to raise the ire of a retarded jury in kansas.
Plus, if a nntp provider is smart, they won't keep logs beyond the amount a user has downloaded.
USENET.COM should be considered a common carrier (like a telco) rather than an ISP. They provide access to a service provided by others only, and do not provide additional value in the process. They charge a fee for this access.
Why doesn't the MAFIAA just sue all the telcos-- without them, nobody would be able to download unauthorized copies of their material!?
I'm sure USENET.COM will lose the battle, but it is really sick that this is the case.
Am I mistaken?
Maybe i'm missing a point or two here. But it seems to me in order for anyone including the RIAA to define the content of Usenet they would have to decode the binary "and probably have to have a special reader for text" messages. UUencode YENC and MIME seem to be the major encoding types and seeing as the servers store purely code in an unidentifiable format there is no way they could actually SEE what is posted without downloading it and re-encoding it back to a compiled file. Movies/audio etc are all converted TO ascii and then back.
You cannot watch a stream coming into a usenet server and say it's an MP3 or MPEG or AVI If memory serves me. It's possible the subject line would be clear/plain text but more than that is encoding.
Correct me if I am wrong.. I've been using Usenet since 97 but it's been since like 98 since I investigated what made it work.
Inane Comments are Generously Disregarded
The first US telephone exchange opened in 1978.
Uh... What?
What we might end up with, if we're lucky, is a Usenet devoid of anything even remotely related to the RIAA.
That, my friends, would be a good thing.
At this point -- seriously -- I'm actually quite interested in knowing whether or not an artist I am interested in purchasing an album from is with a label that is part of the RIAA.
By promoting the downloading of commercial-type stuff, filesharing apps and sites are just "working" the same marketing machine set up by these huge organizations.
Better to get rid of that music.
This could turn out well.
It's a typo. So sue me. Bell's patent was issued in 1876 and the telephone was a big hit that year at the Centennial Expo in Philadelphia.
In 1995, that advertisment makes a lot of sense, as not-for-profit copyright infringment was non-actionable.
IANAL
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Do you have any idea how much public domain content has actually been digitized? I suspect that if you took all the PD music and video that's around in digital form, combined it with all the text, you still wouldn't get close to the capacity of a big Usenet site. (Keep in mind the entire Library of Congress -- which is mostly filled with post-1923 content -- is estimated to be about 20TB; a big newsfeed might take in 3-4TB a day.)
Yes, there is a lot of old stuff around. (In fact, I'm a rather ardent supporter of digitization and preservation of public domain and other old and antiquarian material. And I think the copyright term extension was bullshit.) But you need to put in perspective that while human civilization has been around for a while, a very significant fraction of all the people who have ever lived are alive right now: some 5-10%, depending on which estimate for total population you believe. And widespread literacy is fairly new, so a lot more of those people are in a position to produce content than their forebears.
Even if the content on Usenet was a random distribution of content chosen without regard to date created -- if the people downloading content had just as much interest in copies of the Rig veda as they did in the latest pop music album -- it would still end up containing huge amounts of in-copyright material: because a massive fraction of humanity's total creative output, in absolute numbers, has been produced fairly recently and is trapped in the extremely long copyright terms we've created. (Datapoint: the U.S. alone published 106k books in 1996, and 206k in 2005 -- that's almost doubling in a decade. In the early 20th century it was around 10k new titles per year.*)
And combine that with the fact that most material created prior to the 1970s (to say nothing of material created before 1923) hasn't been digitized yet, yet we're talking about an all-digital medium here, and the public-domain argument becomes even weaker. And what stuff does exist in the public domain tends to be text, rather than video (not that there isn't some movies and video, but there's not that much), so it's pretty small in terms of space.
Look, I really believe in the importance of freedom of information, and hate the pro-copyright lobby that's twisted the laws over and over again to their own advantage, but I hate a downright stupid argument even more. And trying to assert that all the content on Usenet could plausibly be public domain stuff is laughable.
Let's not try to minimize this issue by making arguments that wouldn't last even a few seconds in front of a determined opponent or even a reasonably competent judge. I *wish* that most of the content on Usenet's binaries groups was in the public domain, but it's not and everyone knows it.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Who keeps picking out windmills for RIAA to tilt at? Their legal attack strategist needs to put down the crack pipe and step away from his desk.
Seriously...
--
The RIAA's biggest mistake is picking up the role of angry bull elephant. When an angry bull elephant starts attacking the village with intent to cause as much harm as possible, the villagers are quick to;
1 Run and hide.
2 Put up defenses.
3 Directly attack the threat.
In short.. Number 1 is trade offline with the sneaker net. USB drives, USB music players, CD and DVD burners are now the choice for moving massive amounts of data without risk. Number 2 is the online resource to pool knowledge such as the Ray Beckman site and those who are fighting instead of rolling over and paying the settlement supprt center. and 3.. Counter suits, RICO suits, Anti-Trust suits, Class Action Suits, and artists openly slamming them such as the recent tour where the artist told the crowd to steal the music. Artists are going independent. The RIAA is badly wounded, angry, dangerous, and is being dealt with in response. The PR is in the trash. They need to change or die. Even the congress is looking at changing copyright law.
The truth shall set you free!
How many times have we heard ruling that essentially said "ban the interwebs" because some judge made a decision without adequate (or any) knowledge of the technology involved?
When judges are judging technology based lawsuits, why won't they ask for "Friend of the Court" briefs explaining the technology and what are practical steps that can be done (i.e. reasonable steps that any competent system admin can do). After all, in this society, no one can know everything of every technology. If you study law for your entire life, how would you innately know about the complexities of electronic communication today?
What do you think?
Even the congress is looking at changing copyright law.
Could you please supply a reference for this statement? TIA
Apparently the RIAA has no idea about how Usenet and NNTP work at all. Suing one NNTP service provider will not get everything removed from Usenet, since it is a distributed system with thousands, if not millions, of servers carrying the data. They can try to sue usenet.com, but they won't get the material removed from every server carrying their "stolen" IP.
Anyone reminded of Don Quixote yet?
Funny thing was, the last time my lawn service guy came by to cut the grass 2-3 weeks ago, he had a visit from a friend in the neighborhood with whom he trades movies. Guy drove up, they swapped some cash for a CD, and he drove away.
How's the RIAA or MPAA going to stop that nonsense?
Eventually, it'll be a protocol war. As fast as the **AA sues over some protocol or app, everyone will switch to a newer, harder to detect/break/poison protocol or app. It'll be like copy protection - the monopolists roll out a new "unbreakable" tech, the real people roll out a break for it a few days later.
But it'll be reversed: the monopolists roll out a new litigation tech battlefront, and the real people roll out a new tech before the first lawsuit goes on the docket.
Like the copy protection wars, the monopolists simply can't fight their side of the battles as fast as the real people. And they're vastly outnumbered.
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
Could you please supply a reference for this statement? TIA
The top entry is responses to questions from Slashdot.. Nice!
Rep. Boucher:
I am in the process of drafting comprehensive legislation which will
reaffirm the fair use rights of the users of information and create a
better balance between the copyright owners, who currently dominate the
Congressional debates on intellectual property measures, and the users
of copyrighted information.
http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/bparchive?year=2001&post=2001-03-28$7
http://www.boycott-riaa.com/editorials/boucher
http://www.jambase.com/Articles/Story.aspx?StoryID=10943
http://www.house.gov/berman/newsroom/p2p_analysis.html
The truth shall set you free!
usenet.com is owned by well-known '90s porn spammer Jerry Reynolds, who busies himself suing anti-spammers in an attempt to cover up his shady past. David Ritz and Ed Falk are among his lawsuit targets. I'll be posting AC here, since I wouldn't put it past him to go after /. posters for telling the truth about him, either. While Reynolds seems to now be pursuing more or less legit Internet businesses, his suits against people who have documented his spammer past leave him at that same low level in my book and the books of many others.
I can't believe I'm actually rooting for the RIAA. Well, politics and war both create strange alliances.