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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."'"
I thought that they refused to take down the content in the last article about this?
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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?
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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.
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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."
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.
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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.
...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.)
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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?
Of course, that assumes the party issuing the takedown notice knew to cite the offending articles by Message-ID. The canceled messages will not re-propagate to the server. The poster, anywhere else in the world, could still repost under a new Message-ID (automatically generated for every posting). The cancel messages can even contain the takedown notice in each message body, which would be readable in the newsgroup named "control" and/or in "control.cancel" if it is present.
They wouldn't necessarily even have to cryptographically sign the cancels since they are local, though it might be wise to prevent fellow users of the same server wildly canceling other articles.
These organizations could technically send out their own cancel messages with unrestricted distribution, though I'm not familiar with the current state of the art in preventing forged cancels. If spammers have truly lost interest in Usenet, it may have come to the point where cancel messages are generally ignored.
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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!
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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.
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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!