Slashdot Mirror
IFPI Turning To Lawsuits
Sherman's doppleganger writes "The IFPI (the "European RIAA") has made a lot of noise about filtering this year, but it looks as though 2008 is instead becoming the year of the lawsuit. The IFPI has now sued an Irish ISP in an attempt to keep copyrighted content off of its network. 'The lawsuit accuses Eircom of abetting illegal downloading by allowing copyrighted material to traverse its network unimpeded. The IFPI... wants the ISP to start filtering traffic to scrub all illicitly uploaded and downloaded copyrighted material on its network.' The lawsuit comes less than a week after an Israeli court forced the nation's three biggest ISPs to block access to HttpShare.com."
I recall them dishing out 2100 lawsuits at once in 2005 and 8000 lawsuits at once in 2006! And evidence that it's been going on since 2004.
You might be able to convince me that the IFPI is getting smarter (or stupider, depending on your views) at stopping file sharing by targeting ISPs with lawsuits but to say they're only now with litigating to stop these losses is ignorant.
My work here is dung.
I can think of a thing or 102.
...wants the ISP to start filtering traffic to scrub all illicitly uploaded and downloaded copyrighted material on its network.
So, basically, nearly all traffic traversing the ISP must be blocked because most is covered by copyright. Also most webcontent falls in the same category. What a prospect.
I never heard of httpshare.com. After reading the summary, I went to the website, to see what it was. I still don't know what it is, because it is in Hebrew. However, in plain English, they mention that they upgraded their servers, and they thank IFPI for the free advertising.
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
does ireland have a legal concept similar to common carrier in the u.s.? i'm not a lawyer, much less an expert on the irish legal system, but it would seem to me that this case could only work in a country where common carrier laws are either non-existent or very weak. if ireland does have something like common carrier that would cover eircom then a win appears to essentially invalidate common carriers and make any isp that sends traffic through ireland potentially liable, even if both ends of the infringing connection are outside of irish jurisdiction.
I'd comply immediately once they provide me with working code that has no false positives and pay for it to be implemented too! Not all P2P is copywronged and not all HTTP is legitimate - telling the difference to a high degree of accuracy requires artificial intelligence we have not developed yet. So if it is impossible to implement then while they're at it they may as well ask for a Pony and a Ferrari too.
Shh.
But direct HTTP downloads can bankrupt a struggling musician if their music suddenly becomes a hit. To allow mass distribution at modest expense, I offer Bit Torrent downloads of my music.
I can't really see how an ISP could filter out copyright infringement without also filtering out files that are non-infringing.
Bit Torrent distribution is also crucial to Free and Open Source software projects, whose installers are sometimes hundreds of megabytes or even gigabytes in size.
In the debate about file sharing, please speak up for the legal uses of it.
And yes, I know I can host my work on free sites like MySpace, but then it would be MySpace's website and not my own that would benefit from links placed by fans. For business reasons, it's much better for a musician to have their own website if they possibly can.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
That's not what this is about. It's not about ISPs hosting copyrighted works that the person hosting doesn't own. It's about the ISP's customers downloading copyrighted works that they may or might not be authorized to.
These people are ripping apart the infrastructure of one of Human kind's greatest achivements over their petty squabble. I'm really sick of it, and it would be easier if these people just got the hell off our planet. Fuck thesse people. Fuck the DMCA, Fuck the IFPI, fuck the EUCD, fuck it. I'm sick of these monsters that want to drag us down into the dark ages with their greed. Its just sick.
I have never heard about it (not much of a downloader myself) and just went to check. Apparently my provider decided to implement the court order by modifying their DNS thingy. Well, /me (an OpenDNS user) not notices.
So if this succeeds, can we expect people to start suing the Ministry of Transport because the proceeds of (real!) crime are traversing their road network unimpeded?
Do as you would be done to.
But you can't do a bit-for-bit comparing, or a hash, because there are a lot of ways to change the precise data in a file without changing what it sounds like in a way that is noticable to the human ear.
For example, you could re-compress it to a different bit rate, or transcode it say from MP3 to Ogg Vorbis, or what have you.
I'm sure there are known algorithms that can tell if two audio tracks sound alike, despite lossy compression.
The problem is that there are a lot of tracks to compare against, and a lot of sharing files. So it would be so computationally expensive that no ISP could afford to actually implement it.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
I wonder if we're going to see a change in the role of P2P. It used to be about evading responsibility due to the mistaken idea that P2P was anonymous.
Somewhere along the way, people wised up to that nonsense, and it started to be about performance (though at the cost of efficiency, which really pisses off the ISPs).
Lately, it seems we're seeing a lot of censorship of websites, either by forcing ISPs to block, or forcing DNS registrars to remove the name. I guess the websites were a jumping-off point to "illicit" P2P, by providing metadata. But metadata can be shared via P2P as well. P2P could make a comeback (not in the popularity sense, but in the making-sense sense) as a way around censorship. Don't want me to be able to look up the address of a website that exposes money launderers? Don't want me to get metadata about a copyright-infringing torrent? Tough shit, there's no centralized entity for you to point your gun at.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
"IFPI sues ISP to force use of magical, non-existent software to "filter their network".
Perhaps it's time to bring back the evil bit.
expandfairuse.org
I really don't understand how the RIAA can do what they've been doing, what with the legal actions, blocking, etc, "for the artists". The "artists", which are the songwriters, song publishers and song performers, are represented by ASCAP, BMI, SESAC, and the sort, for the payments and receipts of royalties, in addition to the Library of Congress and copyrights (including International agreements). IMHO, the RIAA, and their sort, are nothing but mobsters, trying to rough-up people via the legal system instead of street "hits".
This is the same misguided ideology that once tried to ban the steam engine and video recorder.
I just got done reading the Times Atlas of World History and this seems like the modern equivalent of heresy -- threatening the established economic order of copyrights.
Hopefully in the annals of history this will merit just a sentence or two in the wider scope of things.
I'll get a PHP order form up on that page Real Soon Now.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
...works fine from here. They're apparently thanking IFPI for the free advertising. :-)
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
So, they didn't call it the RIAa, in Europe ... It was too close to IRA?
Seriously, the technology to filter gigabytes per second traffic looking for specific music signatures does not exist at a reasonable price point. And, as others have pointed out, simply Zipping the file would be enough to bypass any packet inspection anyway. (In fact, it would need to inspect the entire stream, because packet inspection would be insufficient!) (Let alone the variety of compression formats that currently exist.)
I would not be at all surprised that if you encode analog audio files to MP3 that each version would produce different digital streams. For digital files, the addition of several random bytes just before the stream to be encoded would produce the same result. (That is, totally different looking digital data streams.) At the very worst, the added few bytes might produce a click. (even that could be kept inaudible!)
Alternatively, multiply the data by some small factor during encoding. (EG:Data * 0.995 would be inaudible, but the resultant MP3 stream would definitely not match any SIMPLE filtering stream.
IF the RIAA were to provide the filtering hardware to each and every ISP, that might get them to install it, given that filtering does not slow down the ISPs traffic.
If the filter isn't 100% effective, and falsely terminates legitimate streams, then the RIAA [IFPI] would be liable, not the ISP. Lets see how long the RIAA would last after that!
I would say that the RIAA needs to demonstrate to the courts that 100.00000000% accurate AUTOMATED detection (especially at the data rates an ISP might have!)is possible before they can even begin to suggest the ISP is involved. I will lay money down that they cannot even demonstrate 10% reliable detection rates. (Indeed, I personally think the ISP does not have the authority or the responsibility to inspect/filter any traffic.)
Mrs Kattie Mac Craith is suing the Irish dept of transport for allowing cars on the same roads as children.
People here are unclear on what the RIAA and their European cousins are trying to do. They are not dummies, and they know perfectly well that personal sharing ("piracy") actually helps their sales. They also know perfectly well that these lawsuits will not stop real piracy ("Psssst. Honorable Sir! Look here! 5 CDs for one dollar!"). They are willing to forgo those lost sales in pursuit of their real purpose. The purpose of the lawsuits is to create a climate of fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) surrounding *legal* downloads. That is because what they *really* hate is not "piracy", but independent musicians. By stifling music sharing, they stifle independents, and keep the music distribution monopoly to themselves. They don't especially hate FOSS, but they don't feel especially guilty about innocent bystanders getting nailed either.
> The lawsuit accuses Eircom of abetting illegal downloading by allowing copyrighted
> material to traverse its network unimpeded.
Wow. How about suing tollway operators for allowing illegal drugs/weapons/stolen goods/etc to traverse their tollways unimpeded? Or the state for that matter, that operates public roads? Or the public transport operators?
The "intellectual rights" industry is just getting more and more insane with each passing day. Next they will sue the electricity board to provide support for illicit activity by providing the electricity that runs the illegal servers and the illegal distribution network (aka the Internet).
I remeber reading an article in the IEEE magazine, written by an MPAA lawyer, in which he explains why without the DMCA there would be no art or entertainment and that the only thing standing between humanity and universal happiness is the analog hole.
I wonder how long will it go on and escalate before the whole thing will just crush and burn? Alternatively, we the people, also known as "the sheep" will just slowly succumb to the thought police and will learn to love Big Brother...
http://irma.ie/index2.htm - I suggest you write to them and tell them what you think of their idiotic attempt to destroy the internet in ireland (even if you're not in ireland). Filing a few piracy reports against names of irish politicians and celibrities should keep them busy too.
The "intellectual rights" industry is just getting more and more insane with each passing day
:-)
Did yyu mean to say "The "intellectual rights" industry is just getting less and less intellectual with each passing day"?
Insert
As stated in an article here, Irish music sales has seen a steep decline of just over €40m in 7 years. They attribute this to filesharing, but I think that's bollocks. First, that is a drop of roughly 33%. Broadband penetration in Ireland is still one of the lowest in the EU. AFAIK, something like 40% of households now have broadband. It is now 2008, the decline has been happening since 2001, and trust me, in 2001 if you were one of the extremely privledged few who could even get broadband in Ireland you would be paying about €100 per month (roughly 80 punts) for a 512k connection, so much so that if you needed faster than dial-up, ISDN was a cheaper option. This decline in sales has been happening since before people in Ireland had even knew what an mp3 was.
I can give you some reasons why I think there has been a drop in sales in Ireland. In the last few years there has been a huge jump in interest in home-grown bands. Many of these bands play gigs around the country and sell their own music themselves. They skip the corporate labels and use word of mouth and reputation to gain popularity. Then they sell their cd's at gigs and keep the money themselves rather than give it to some suit. Also, do they take into account online sales through amazon, cdwow, play.com, etc? My father buys a lot of movies and music, and buys exclusively online. Is he the only one? I think not... Or downloads from iTunes, etc, are they accounted for? I'd be sure that filesharing has caused some of the dip, but the point I'm trying to make is that the big fall in sales is not directly attributed to it.
Also, eircom have a monopoly over DSL in Ireland. There are other providers but eircom own all the exchanges and telephone lines. Even most of the other DSL providers such as BT, Digiweb, Perlico, Magnet's ADSL (not their ADSL2+), etc, all rent bandwidth from eircom and resell it to customers. This means that the filtering, if imposed, would not just affect eircom's customers, but all ADSL customers in the country. Many people in rural areas cannot get cable from Chorus/NTL or wireless from Digiweb, etc. Most people in Ireland are stuck with eircom or one of their bandwidth resellers. If this filtering did come in to play, it would effectively destroy filesharing in Ireland, but would it actually stop the decline in sales? I think that it would end up causing a monetary loss for the labels (assuming that they have to pay for the system).
You have demonstrated ignorance of the distinction between an Internet Service Provider and a web hosting service. You are advised to look these up on Wikipedia.
This is a bunch of lawyers with a mandate - "Try to sue!"
Doesn't matter if they win or not, they're being paid to send out letters and harass people, hopefully generating some press coverage along the way.
No sig today...
Bob Dylan does drugs??!?!??
Soon the music industry will die just as the buggy-whip industry died at the invention of the mass produced automobile. ,just like you can't charge for air.
Artists will promote themselves on a level playing field and the necessity of a corrupt middleman will be antiquated.
Music will be distributed freely and artists will live off performance revenues. You can't bottle music like beer to sell
Music is information and longs to be free and will break all bonds to be so. filesharing will still flourish in Europe as everywhere only disguised with a tunneling protocol,encryption or whatever will work.There are more ways to get files from one computer to another than they can ever possibly monitor or discourage.
The toothpaste is out of the tube and can't be put back easily enough to put forth the effort.The industry was unwilling to adapt at the crucial breaking point and is an angry dinosaur dying in a glacier as we speak.
The only problem of the Euro mafiaa is setting precident in court for other invasions of privacy.This makes them public enemy #1 and should be dealt with as such.
If there is no revolutionary action against the industry,it naturally follows that the people are willing to give up a yet undisclosed part and percentage of their lives for the short term benefit of this cancerous animal.I believe this sentiment to be more naturally felt in the states,than discussed.
All this is really good news.Even for those employed by the mafiaa as it will free them to find newer more positive careers to benefit mankind.As we know within the more you generate that is positive,the more you receive that is positive.
To sum it up in the words of Meher Baba "Don't worry,be happy!"
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
You think education comes from a school?