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.
...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.
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.
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 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".
...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.)
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.
really, how much harm can they do to your computer by using your wifi?
Your argument reminds me of a 3com sales guy who told me encryption isn't important for home connections since no one wants to break into your computer anyways. The problem is that it's not your computer they want; it's your internet connection.
They could start spamming and get your account disabled. There was also the time I got called in to find out why the office internet was so slow only to discover that one of the neighbouring offices that shared our internet connection had an open wifi and someone was using it to launch a DoS attack.
Then theres the guy they caught driving the wrong way down a one way street with his pants down in Ontario Canada. Turns out he was using someone's wifi connection to browse child porn. Imagine having that traced to your ip. Given the current guilty until proven innocent attitude when it comes to crimes against children your likely to lose your house and job before they even bother (if they bother) to find out you were innocent in the first place.
the police are people, too. if you are kind, pleasent, honest, and up front with them, they tend to not be dicks.
I completely agree with you. I just find that being human some topics make people go completely off the wall. I agree that every child porn creator should be nailed harshly but I find that the search for them tends to be in the witch hunt category.
I think I will check my wifi activity more often. but because most of my neighbours are really freaken old, i don't think i have to worry about that.
I was actually shocked when I discovered that.. there were no houses around just an industrial park. I think it was actually a war driver since every other office in range used the same shared connection. The main lesson I learned was that remote locations don't guarantee security
As for the rest.. I suppose you could put in a transparent proxy that restricts outgoing mail and an ICMP filter. Be careful to allow ICMP messages dealing with fragmentation so that things till work correctly. (Blocking all ICMP is an unfortunately common mistake)
It means kicking your NAT functions off of the wireless gateway but then I find that speeds things up anyways