ISP Sued By Irish RIAA

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "An ISP in Ireland has been sued by the Big Four record labels because its subscribers have engaged in P2P sharing of the record companies' song files. The record companies claim the ISP should be buying Audible Magic's CopySense, the software being peddled by the RIAA's expert witness, which supposedly would filter out copyright infringement. Of course, not everyone agrees."

Comments

fight it

[DKP]

fight it all the way and if the iaa wants software installed then let them pay for it not that it would work.

Re:fight it

[mwvdlee]

Sueing somebody to force them to buy a product... isn't that kinda, I dunno, anti-competitive?

Re:fight it

[L4t3r4lu5]

IANAL, but I thought threatening legal action (and engaging in it for not conforming) into parting with funds for a particular purpose was Demanding Money with Menace.

Extorsion, maybe?

Re:fight it

[zoney_ie]

Also ironic in this instance. The ISP involved is the former state telco Eircom, which the govt. screwed up the privitisation of such that they have a monopoly on last-mile, exchanges, etc. and have ensured LLU and DSL reselling is not something other telcos can make money out of (the few "players" in that game are just spending millions to "buy" customer base, with a step 2: ... before step 3: profit).

Actually, I would probably classify Eircom as vastly more evil than the Irish version of the RIAA (IRMA - Irish Recorded Music Association).

Re:Bad Title

[Anonymous Coward]

I read "Irish" and transposed "RIAA" to "IRA(A)" - shadows of another terrorist group.

Re:Bad Title

[Jafafa Hots]

He meant the Irish version of the RIAA - One of the As in RIAA stands for "America."

Here's the only two things you need to know

[TubeSteak]

While the record companies had taken various measures to discourage record piracy, including public awareness campaigns and legal actions against individuals engaged in piracy, these had proven very costly and time consuming and were not enough to stop people using illegal services on a broad scale. AND

[Eircom] ... had no legal obligation to monitor traffic on its network. There isn't much more to say.
The ISP has no obligation and the *AA can't seem to "educate" themselves out of their problem.

Re:Here's the only two things you need to know

[Kjella]

Pointy-Haired Boss: I don't see anything that could stand in our way.
Dilbert: Sanity? Reality? The laws of physics? Never underestimate a manager that think he's missing out on the big bucks. I assume they'll go by some sort of "willful ignorance" logic, that Eircom is purposely not monitoring to learn any specifics of copyright infringement. It's a rather weak argument though...

Re:Here's the only two things you need to know

[Skrynesaver]

Actually an alternative defence for Eircom could be that their network is crap, their broadband rollout has been pathetic and if they were doing their job properly IMRO would be seeing waaay more music downloads.

Seriously though this one just isn't a runner, the various record label umbrella groups have realised they can't go after every 12 year old with computer access (or in the US case suing indigent men for their shopping trolleys) so they will try to tackle the access, however any company that put this cruft on their servers would lose their subscriber base overnight as people fled to other providers.

Re:Here's the only two things you need to know

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

The ISP has no obligation and the *AA can't seem to "educate" themselves out of their problem.

This is Ireland. We don't so much have laws here as we have sort of "tribal customs". Over here, even if a law is struck down as unconstitutional, the supreme court has ruled that you can still be imprisoned under it. It used to be illegal for Irish ISPs to hold certain types of data for more than about six months, I believe. It was at one time discovered that Eircom, the ISP mentioned in this article (effectively the Irish AT&T), was retaining this information for three years, the government passed a bill making it mandatory to store it for at least three years.

That's how things work in this country. We're kind of a one party state meets banana republic meets laissez faire capitalism. Basically, laws here are universally subject to interpretation and arbitrary revision. That's when they're not being ignored outright. If Eircom agrees to the censoring and monitoring, then it will become legal. If it doesn't, it won't. I doubt the IRMA is anywhere near as well connected or influential as Eircom representatives, so unless they're willing to pay up, in either bribes or in financing the system, this surveillance simply isn't happening. Anyway, we're all under surveillance anyway, so this entire issue is rather moot.

Re:Smells like standard record company BS

[calebt3]

Because that would make sense.

Re:Bad Title

[Anonymous Coward]

But what would the "Recording Irish-Americans of America" have against an Irish ISP? (Tongue firmly in cheek)

Honda car used to steal my parking spot!

[Kenja]

All Honda cars should be forced to use my special "No park in my spot" tires to prevent this in the future. Only $999 per set of four!

Re:Honda car used to steal my parking spot!

[Solandri]

Police sue automakers for allowing drivers to exceed the speed limit.

Parents of child porn victims sue camera manufacturers for allowing pedophiles to make child porn.

Corporate hacking victims sue computer manufacturers for providing hackers tools to break into their systems.

Violent crime victims sue weapons manufacturers for enabling criminals to harm them.

China sues Western democracies for giving its citizens subversive ideas of freedom and civil liberties.

Re:Honda car used to steal my parking spot!

[Anonymous Coward]

Corporate hacking victims sue computer manufacturers for providing hackers tools to break into their systems.

If my memory serves me correctly Germany already made "hacking tools" like nmap illegal.

It's much like banning hammers because someone decides to beat a person to death with it.
How about we eliminate hard objects altogether, then nobody can steal cars!

Lets burn our public libraries

[CrazyJim1]

People are using books that they didn't even pay for there. I think this is causing a big impact on book sales. More authors would make books if it wasn't for the Library. It is in the public's best interest to burn their libraries.

Re:Lets burn our public libraries

[wvmarle]

Not a very apt comparison.

Books from the library are read there, or borrowed to be returned later. The number of copies in existence remains the same (unless people go to a copy machine to copy the book - a non-trivial and fairly costly operation, probably more costly than going to the book shop and buy yourself a copy).

Libraries can be compared to music/video rental shops (many book libraries also do this). Those disks are rent or lent, and are returned a week or so later.

Music and video downloads (and e-books) however DO increase the number of copies. And copying is as good as free in effort and cost.

Of course the publishers also complain about libraries (not so much, they are considered a given due to their long historical existence), and video rentals. They claim it also lowers sales. Just like reselling used copies of books/CDs/DVDs. But no matter what, on-line file sharing is in a league on its own.

Re:Lets burn our public libraries

[mr_matticus]

Of course they paid for them. It's a public library, paid for through municipal taxes and whatever endowment scheme your local library uses to supplement that tax income.

The materials in the libraries are all duly licensed for lending, through a combination of statutory exceptions in the US Code, and, where applicable or gapped, through licensing with the copyright holders permitting such use.

The copyright holders have indeed been compensated, both through license payments from libraries (often on DVDs and CDs and similar materials by acquiring the more-expensive rental copies [which often include media replacement]) and through the inherent copyright law bargain.

Incidentally, many library collections include video and audio content licensed for commercial use, which is a great way for a community organization (say, a church or club) to put on such a performance without having to buy a license or negotiate one with the rightsholders. You just check out the video with the commercial license and you're good to go. Your tax dollars at work, literally.

Re:Lets burn our public libraries

[mr_matticus]

The Library has paid for one copy of the book No, usually libraries buy many copies, particularly for important or popular works. Those copies wear rapidly and will slowly be pulled from circulation. Eventually, the library's collection will stabilize at a lower number, lasting a long time. The kinds of books ordered individually are not ones that sell tremendously well to begin with. Multiplied across the thousands of libraries in the country, most specialty books are quite buoyed by library sales--sales they would not have otherwise made because the market for the book is limited, or the cost of the production run is more than most of the market would spend on it.

which does in the end withhold possible profits from authors and publishers as hundreds of people can read the book for free. No. Reading the book is always free. Possession of the copy is what costs money, and it's not free. Running even a small library system costs millions of dollars per year--it's more like social insurance, spreading cost instead of risk. And again, many of these books rely on libraries for a significant portion of their revenue in the first place--revenue that would not be replaced by customers if libraries were to vanish suddenly.

Libraries don't pay a special version of the book licensed for lending, publishers are not compensated any more for books going to libraries then to anyone else No kidding--that's because there's a statutory license for libraries. It's part of the negotiated copyright bargain. Furthermore, there was a time when libraries did pay more for the books. Not for licensing, but for library binding. Today, mass production and lower overall product quality just means that libraries just replace worn out copies more frequently instead of investing more in a longer-lasting copy to start (also because people are far more abusive with library materials than in past years).

There is rarely incentive for me to buy the book after I've read it at the library. If that's the case, then there isn't incentive to buy it, independent of the existence of a library. A library offers a large collection available to all at a lower cost, because everyone contributes a fixed amount. There's absolutely no reason to expect that net sales would increase without libraries. My city's library materials budget is approximately $7 million annually. I sincerely doubt that if that number dropped to zero, that people would offset that loss with increased spending. I think instead that people would just read less. The people who buy books might even buy less without a library, especially given the cost of investing in them--and they are an investment, except trade paperbacks.

laws have been passed that don't just allow it, but encourage and set up the system. Libraries predate the library exceptions to copyright law. We have decided as a society that libraries are a valuable resource, and we protect them in copyright law and other places because that's part of the social contract in granting copyrights. It's not accurate to say that publishers lose money to libraries, because copyright wouldn't exist without libraries to ensure that knowledge doesn't get bound up in copyright. It's explicit in the simple passage of the Copyright Act, and contrary to popular Slashdot belief, it is still a functional bargain.

Re:Lets burn our public libraries

[howlingmadhowie]

if i consider the films i've downloaded, i can't say i've watched many of them more than once. and with most of them, i'd have been pretty annoyed had i spend money on them.

Re:Lets burn our public libraries

[mariushm]

Well, they're probably not even taking those 2 dollars. If the book has no success (as in sells few copies) the author won't make any money.

I'll give you a real example here, that happened to me when I went to university.

In order to get promoted and be able to earn titles like "Doctor Honoris Causa", a teacher is required to have some works of his published, the minimum being at least three books printed and about 10-15 articles in different magazines.

So, the teacher talks to a printing house, which says they have no guarantee that the book will sell, so the author has to pay for the printing process.

If a book costs 6 dollars, the publishing house requires the author to pay 3.5-4 dollars for each book.

The teacher obviously wants the have the book published, he goes on and publishes the minimum of about 250 books and then he wants to get his money back.

So what does he do?

At the start of a semester, he tells his students that at the end of the semester there will be a yes and no test with questions from his book, and students will be allowed to use the book at the exam, but not copies of the book.

The second edition of the book, the third and so on, belongs to the publishing house, they have the rights, and if the publishing house won't get their money back for the printing process, the author won't get any money in the future.

This is probably the best scenario, where the author can move the books, has guaranteed buyers for the books.

Not all authors afford to pay in advance, which makes them reach an agreement to not receive any payment until the publishing house gets all the money back. This may never happen (Hollywood accounting).

The author would make more money if you just send him a 5$ check in the mail.

"Obvious ways"?

[Damon Tog]

The two "obvious ways" to defeat Audible Magic (as listed in the article) do not seem very promising to me. If large numbers of filesharers begin to send huge transfers amounts of data over SSL, it's going to be pretty noticeable. In this day of ISP "traffic shaping," I wouldn't be surprised to see SSL throttled down to the point where transferring large files becomes painfully slow. The second strategy is not currently possible (as the article itself states). It goes on to admit that future OS upgrades would be required. I'm sure Microsoft will be more than happy to modify their TCP/IP stack to help make filesharing as easy as possible.

This technology is not foolproof, but it does require filesharers to jump through additional hoops to distribute files. Hardcore filesharers will no doubt toil obsessively to workaround the issue, but some casual downloaders may conclude that the hassle and risks associated with filesharing is becoming greater than the costs of paying $0.89 to get the song from Amazon, etc.

Eliminating %100 of copyright infringement is not a requirement for the RIAA to regard its strategy as successful. Simply making the process risky and aggravating enough that most people will switch to paying for music is enough. Each generation of this cat and mouse game between the "pirates" and the RIAA has resulted in an increased compartmentalization of p2p networks. Sure the "hydra" will grow more heads and live on, but it's hard to ignore that something that could immediately be located and downloaded on Napster in the Year 2000 now frequently takes time to hunt down and leech via bittorent.

Re:"Obvious ways"?

[Damon Tog]

"lastly, why should it be up to the isp's to monitor this? how the hell is it their problem?"

I half agree with you, but something like %30-50 of traffic on the internet is bittorrent, and a big chunk of bittorrent traffic is regarded as illegal activity (in most jurisdictions) by a good many folks. If there was a highway where %30-50 of the vehicles were widely known to be transporting something illegal, would you be surprised if the local authorities took an increased interest in that particular road and began to watch things a bit more closely?

"I also think it's bullshit to claim it was easier to download a song in 2000, go on any of the dozens of torrent websites and you'll find anything you want in 2 seconds flat."

You'll find them listed, but they aren't necessarily current or well-seeded. I'm not saying it's necessary *difficult* now, but it's not quite as easy or as immediate as it was back in the Good ol' Days of Napster. Those small increments of difficulty and gratification delay are increasingly significant when DRM-free music is now much easier to get legally and quickly.

Re:"Obvious ways"?

[WoollyMittens]

Throttling SSL traffic is not going to make businesses happy. "I'm sorry sir, you'll have to sync your extranet databases insecurely, or it'll take about 3 weeks."

Re:"Obvious ways"?

[burgundysizzle]

... but something like %30-50 of traffic on the internet is bittorrent, and a big chunk of bittorrent traffic is regarded as illegal activity (in most jurisdictions) by a good many folks. If there was a highway where %30-50 of the vehicles were widely known to be transporting something illegal, would you be surprised if the local authorities took an increased interest in that particular road and began to watch things a bit more closely?

Using the logic at hand if the road was a toll road the government would be filing charges against the operator of the toll road for not making sure that all of the traffic on the road was in fact not transporting anything illegal.

Clearly in that particular case the onus would be on some level of government to ensure that the illegal transportation of goods was stopped not the operator of the toll road.

Since copyright is something granted to the copyright owner it should be up to the owner to enforce their copyrights.

Perhaps it would be less onerous for the ISPs if the copyright owners had to install their own appliances on specific networks. They would need to pay for the software, hardware, software and hardware support, traffic costs, and rack space (including power, aircon, etc) assocated with it. There would have to be limits on how many and where but the cost of enforcing copyrights should lay with the copyright owners as I have a feeling that they definitely want the enforcement costs to be paid for by anyone else but them.

Re:"Obvious ways"?

[syousef]

This technology is not foolproof, but it does require filesharers to jump through additional hoops to distribute files. Hardcore filesharers will no doubt toil obsessively to workaround the issue, but some casual downloaders may conclude that the hassle and risks associated with filesharing is becoming greater than the costs of paying $0.89 to get the song from Amazon, etc.

Garbage. Historically what happens is that a tool is created to automate getting past the file sharing restrictions which requires no more knowledge to use than any user oriented piece of software. Copyright extortionists then respond with more software, some of which cripples legitimate use. The process repeats and escalates.

Re:"Obvious ways"?

[aj50]

However, BitTorrent and P2P in general do have some quite specific traits. Since they all rely on connecting to other peers to download, you can easily guess that someone's using bittorrent because they have ~40 open connections, most of which aren't doing much. Encryption does nothing to help this.

Re:"Obvious ways"?

[Anonymous Coward]

lastly, why should it be up to the isp's to monitor this? how the hell is it their problem? only luddites suggest isp's are responsible to people browsing kiddie porn or other sick shit, yet somehow it's different when it's the RIAA. ISP's want to oppose this to their dieing breath, for exactly the reason you just listed.

As long as they do their 'common carrier' thing where they are simply providing a service and not trying to moderate that service they can't be held liable.

As soon as they start trying they open them selves up to potential liability, if they do this for the RIAA, soccer moms will go 'so why is there still kiddy porn on the net?' and then somebody will jump in and sue the ISP for not filtering the kiddy porn out, after all they can get the music right? Or remember the parents who sued myspace because their daughter met somebody dangerous through the site? What happens when everybody who suffers identity theft starts suing the ISP's because the ISP didn't filter out the spoofed page? Or the spam flooding their inbox. And best off all, botnets.

Of course the internet is fucking huge, and even the best software (and the RIAA's sure ain't it) will never catch everything. Any ISP cooperating with the RIAA on this will be committing suicide. By admitting they CAN, somebody will force them to DO, and once they start taking an active hand they become responsible for what they miss.

Re:"Obvious ways"?

[ZeroExistenZ]

you can easily guess that someone's using bittorrent because they have ~40 open connections

Consider this:

• Several RDP Connections open to misc servers
• FTP upload/download with several threads
• Your fancy 2.0 website constantly calling home to "create a richer experience"
• Constant updates on your versioning software (as SVN) generating quite the traffic
• Your machine searching for networked PCs
• Browsing networked machines for some archived filed
• Outlook syncing
• An open IM with serveral conversations
• VPN connection to client hosting network
• ...

Now combine a few and you'll easily max out 40. You can't possible base yourself on the amount of connections.

Re:"Obvious ways"?

[redxxx]

I'd rather people use the various encryption schemes built into bit torrent clients already, rather than letting the bad people win, and forcing me to download torrent where I can't tell what the actual content is and need to get the whole thing before I can check the quality.

Seriously man, screw that.

Sued for not buying something?

[zmjjmz]

That's messed up.

Re:Sued for not buying something?

[Faylone]

Well, they wouldn't be the first to try it... http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/07/03/26/1431258.shtml

extortion.

[Bishop Ebonhand]

Doesn't this sound suspiciously like extortion? "buy our 'partner's' software/protection or we'll sue you for infringement" I wonder what kind of kickback they're getting on it?

Re:extortion.

[NewYorkCountryLawyer]

Doesn't this sound suspiciously like extortion? "buy our 'partner's' software/protection or we'll sue you for infringement" I wonder what kind of kickback they're getting on it? Yeah, to me it sounds exactly like extortion. See what happened when Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, paid $76,000 in "protection" money to Dr. Jacobson's business partners.

Re:extortion.

[Max Littlemore]

Doesn't this sound suspiciously like extortion?

The slashdot summary does. TFA says that they are being sued for allowing file sharing on their infrastructure. The fact that they don't use filtering products such as (but not limited to) CopySense is evidence that they are complicit with file sharers.

I'm not saying they're not a pack of F**king idiots who are sure to lose in any justice system where the 'just' part of justice is meaningful, just pointing out that this is not exactly extortion.

Right

[dissy]

If they wanted them to use the software so bad, they would give them a copy for free.
Greedy bastards

Re:Right

[Tsu-na-mi]

I wouldn't call this funny. I thought the same thing -- that if giving away hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars worth of their blocking technology would prevent the "billions of dollars" per year of losses in music sharing, it would be a no-brainer for the RIAA to offer their product for free. The only logical conclusions you can draw from their stance are that their losses are not so large as they claim, or their tech will not be effective in stopping it.

Re:Right

[wvmarle]

Copyright holders should at least provide:

• The hardware to run it on,
• The software itself, including O/S and other required software,
• Money to pay for the energy bill caused by this hardware,
• Pay for the modifications to the network required by their system,
• Pay for any and all maintenance on their servers,
• Pay rent for the space used by their hardware.

I think that about sums it up. It is after all not in the network operator's interest to do this, nor is it a legal obligation for them to monitor their network. I can't think of any reason for a network operator to willingly install this software - it goes against the interests of the users, and does not give any advantage to the operator. Not even a legal immunity against subpoenas from the RIAA. It gives them nothing, it only costs money and inconveniences their users.

By the way, does anyone know what happened to "common carrier" status for ISPs? I do recall they were fighting for that. Installing this kind of sniffer systems completely goes against such a possible status.

Re:Smells like standard record company BS

[Tuoqui]

Because the ISPs don't want their shitty ass code cluttering up their networks. So they need to use the legal system to try and strongarm them (read: Force by means of court order) into installing this crappy glorified spyware onto their networks.

That's nothing, my house was robbed...

[Anonymous Coward]

So I'm suing my town and state because their roads were used to transport the stolen items away. That could have been easily avoided had they employed a security guard from my company at each of the intersections...

Re:Smells like standard record company BS

[MightyMartian]

Because they seem to think there's a business opportunity in a new line of extortion revenue based on a faulty software package that won't do what they claim it will.

RIAA wants someone else to do the dirty work:

[Fluffeh]

A funny story that sort of shines out as an example here of how this all fits together:

In Australia in recent years there has been a push to stop selling cigarettes to under 18's. There are harsh fines and so forth to both the business and to the individuals who would do the selling.

One smart (or lazy/tricky depending on what way you look at it) cookie decided that as a shop owner who sold tabacco products, he was being asked to do regulatory work on behalf of the state government here who said that he shouldn't sell to minors. He took the government to court - and amazingly won the case. (I couldn't find anything on google though).

THe basic premise is the same here though, the RIAA and governments are imposing rules about what can and can't be done by users of something else, but they want someone else to do all the dirty work imposing the law. It's a bloody great way not to do any work if you ask me - by getting someone else to do it, and pay for it.

While I support copyright, I think that they should stop trying to get ISP's to do all the dirty work.

Fighting Back

[hyades1]

It seems to me that a good way to fight the RIAA is to turn their whole numbers game on its head. Hit them with so many lawsuits that their legal strategy collapses.

Would it be possible for law schools in various countries to assemble "how to" kits that would allow average people to harass the big labels, individually or collectively, in this way? I'm not sure what grounds would be best to surpass the "nuisance" threshold and protect the litigants from charges of malicious prosecution (or whatever it might be called), but something must surely exist.

Can you imagine the drain on their financial and manpower resources if the RIAA suddenly found itself on the receiving end of 15,000 suits in 20 countries?

Re:Bad Title

[Ozrius]

What's the difference?

Re:Bad Title

[Anonymous Coward]

What's the difference? One's evil. The other is Irish.

For free?

[mr_lizard13]

Or they could just get it off bit-torrent.

Re:Bad Title

[radaos]

The organisation is IRMA, the Irish Recorded Music Association http://www.irma.ie/index2.htm Their website mentions other legal actions taken against file sharers.

Re:Smells like standard record company BS

[aproposofwhat]

we will never see deep packet inspection inside providers, as this is absolutely expensive to do an no provider would do it without coercion

I wouldn't be too sure - the infrastructure needed for Phorm's 'targeted advertising' could easily be adapted to inspect more of the data - it already intercepts HTTP requests, and it's not a great step from there to data inspection (though the lookups are going to cost a lot of latency).

Once the ISPs allow themselves to be corrupted by Phorm, expect to see packet inspection proliferate massively.

And things you need to know about Eircom...

[PinkyDead]

Eircom used to be a semi-state company.

What does that mean? Well, if a normal business needs to handle a business crisis they will create new products, modify their business model, reduce their costs etc etc.

When Eircom was a semi-state the solution was: write a cheque for the amount you need, put in the post (also a semi-state body) to the respective minister. Minister signs cheque, problem solved.

This mentality didn't necessarily wash when the company was privatized, but it certainly prevailed for a long time. And I'm quite sure that attitude is hanging around their offices like a bad smell. For example, Eircom has the highest broadband prices, even though they control the infrastructure.

IMRO, the snivelling little toerags that they are (it wouldn't surprise me if the RIAA learned their tactics from these shites), have gone after the easy target in the hope that it will draw a mark in the sand. Thing is though, in order to survive against a pseudo-monopoly like Eircom for so long, the competition are not so "roll-over tickle-my-belly".

(And if you think that sounds like hell, you should see our semi-state bus service!)

The real deal

[sysconp1]

The real deal on this story is that Eircom (Irelands national carrier) said they wouldn't install the software suggested by RIAA on its systems. RIAA have tried a number of bullying tactics against Eircom and taking Eircom to court is just the latest of these. If RIAA have its way they will have the software installed and then this is meant to only filter copyright material from Eircom's subscribers. However this could also prevent legitimate P2P use by limiting the bandwidth avaiable, as well as blocking any number of sites that they see fit. Correct me if I am wrong here but wasn't the goal of the internet to be a free and easy exchange of information on a global network? Having these self proclaimed internet police trying to stop actions on a global scale should not and must not work. The internet should be self regulating and a FREE exchange of information. Record companies and movie companies to a lesser extent have been pushing junk onto the consumer for far to long and the internet has simply allowed the consumer to identify the difference between junk and gold. If the record and movie industries are so worried about this "Piracy" (doubtful as sales have gone up whilst production costs have gone down = more profit for record companies), then they should consider working with the consumer rather than against it. Here is a suggestion that I don't seem to have read anywhere yet... but why don't the record companies put the deleted items up on a site for purchase or whatever... then your consumers wouldn't have to "Pirate" material that is not readily available. As a closing note... if you deal with the "Piracy" problem at source and regulate it properly with good attention to delivery methods etc. then everyone wins. Up to now there have been a number of Knee jerks resulting in bad press, mainly emenating from RIAA. These guys are just looking for back handers from the record companies and winning dubious cases in courts for publicity and shock factor. If you push the exchanging of media files underground by the use of RIAA and excessive pricing you can expect that dodgy organisations and "Pirates" will ultimately win. (Take a look at the drug situation across the world... if governments regulate (not ban) then it is manageable and the underworld is put out of business. If you push it underground it flourishes and the wrong people benefit. No one says it is right but we must be grown up about how we manage these things)

Re:Bad Title

[Barn-eye]

Have a read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omagh_bombing Yeah, there's a difference alright. That was the Real IRA, not the IRA.

How exactly does CopySense work ?

[Mornedhel]

How exactly does CopySense work ? I just read a PDF of their propaganda. Apparently an artist wishing to "protect his copyrighted works" registers in their database. Then CopySense makes a "media fingerprint" of the files - what do they mean by that ?

If they mean an actual audio fingerprint like MusicBrainz does, wouldn't the entire file need to be downloaded first ? So they're scanning the entire P2P traffic for relevant packets and recomposing the file on their own systems (including compressed files, since they could be an entire discography, hey, who knows ?), and *then* comparing the fingerprint ? Sounds really resource-expensive to me. Then on with bigger, more complex files (movies, HD movies...). Then they also say they can filter out porn/kiddie porn P2P traffic. Have they got fingerprints of THAT ? All existing porn movies ? Sounds like the largest porn collection on Earth. And you would only need to distribute the files with the video turned upside down and the audio playing backwards to defeat the system. Or are they relying on torrent file names for that ?!

If they mean an SHA1/MD5/whatever fingerprint, it's even less feasible, as they would need one for every possible encoding (MP3 CBR 128kbps, MP3 CBR 192 kbps, MP3 VBR... Vorbis... FLAC...) and compression (.gz, .zip, .rar, .7z, .bz2...) and combination of both.

Does anyone here know exactly how CopySense work, and IF it works at all ?

Re:How exactly does CopySense work ?

[azrider]

Then they also say they can filter out porn/kiddie porn P2P traffic. Have they got fingerprints of THAT ? All existing porn movies ? Sounds like the largest porn collection on Earth.

Not only that, they have now confessed to possessing child pornography!!

Take that, Audible Magic!

Re:"irish RIAA"

[NewYorkCountryLawyer]

an organisation that is not the RIAA It is a clone. The 4 companies who brought the suit are the exact same "Big 4" who have launched a plague of lawsuits in the US.

Packet Shaping

[Bonzodog01]

"The record companies believed greater availability of broadband will lead to a further escalation in the volume of unlawful distribution of recordings, he added." It looks like they don't like the idea of Broadband getting to Ireland. I live in Galway and use ntl/chorus cable for my Broadband. I have discovered that they are packet shaping my connection, as I cannot get a Bittorrent connection to sail above 5k/s for more than a few minutes at a time, it's hopeless, even downloading legal torrents for ISO's for Linux Distro's. Yeah, I'm Galways Linux User.

What about false positives?

[Gordonjcp]

I *want* people to redistribute my copyrighted material over P2P networks. Preventing this from happening causes me a problem. If my material is wrongly detected as something the RIAA don't want shared, it harms *my* profits.

I suppose the question is, how do you detect false positives, and when they happen who do I sue?

Re:makers of grammophones to sue too

[sm62704]

is it possible that the average person has a certain budget for entertainment and just spends the money buying what they want?

Most people don't work on a commission or have an unlimited amount of funds. Normal people have a certain FIXED INCOME* (salary, wages, retirement, etc). I don't know about Ireland but we're paying a hell of a lot more for gasoline here in the US. Every dollar I spend at the gas station is a dollar I can't spend on a CD.

-mcgrew

*If it's a fixed income how come I'm always broke?

Re:Smells like standard record company BS

[Ralph Spoilsport]

I agree with you, and, I would add this:

That the idea of file sniffing software is sheer idiocy, prima facie. Why? Because all you have to do is "compress" the mp3 into a zip file, and bingo: no more mp3, just a zip, and if they start opening up every zip that's emailed or set up in the net, the entire interweb thingie would grind to an instant halt.

All of this was dealt with at Napster (I used to work there) and we scenario-ised all different combinations of spoofing and clamping etc. We thought of going after file names, so then we started writing names in 1337, Nirvana-SmellsLikeTeenSpirit.mp3 started popping up as n1rv4n4-sm3lzL1| That was also circumventable by editing the file using a destructive editor and recompressing it. Even still the system would catch a massive number of files. We were concerned about people skipping around Napster because Napster was developing a billing client. The efforts did not mollify the RIAA and the rest was history.

Since then, I've thought of compressing the files into a zip, and if there was a client that could autozip-unzip on the client side, then it wouldn't affect the network at all.

Also, there was a program called metasynth that could turn sound into an image file (like a BMP), and then people could trade BMP files that could then be turned into audio.

So, the research is still there, and all it takes is an open source free-as-in-beer translational file system to circumvent ANY sniffer from the RIAA, especially now that drive space is practically free. Such a translator would take the contents of an audio file, translate it into a BMP and then automatically compressed into a zip. At the other end, the translator takes the zip, unzips it, and then translates the BMP into an mp3. Done. The zip file is left in a "sharing" folder, and the mp3 is autoloaded into iTunes. Today's Multiprocessor machines would make this kind of computation a trivial task.

If anyone decides to build such a thing, please be kind and let me know by naming it "Pushover", because that's what it does. Personally I have neither the time, inclination, or skillset to program such a thing. Next life time, maybe.

There is NO way the RIAA can win this. They are fighting a losing battle. The ONLY way they can win is by getting in with the major ISPs (ATT, SBC, Verizon, Sympatico, Rogers, etc.) and collude with them to enforce selective traffic shaping/blocking. Some ISPs are already doing that to optimise bandwidth - all it would take is something more organised. Which is why Net Neutrality is so crucial.

RS

Re:Internet TV will Kill ISP Tracking

[monxrtr]

If large numbers of filesharers begin to send huge transfers amounts of data over SSL, it's going to be pretty noticeable. All web pages must send data to be viewed. All content whatsoever must send data to be viewed. File sizes are going to increases *exponentially*! There will be absolutely no way for the isp to distinguish between phone traffic, "illegal" p2p traffic, and even the isp's own "movie" file offerings.

It will become nearly impossible for anyone to know the contents of any file by merely looking at size, distribution, origination, etc. ISPs will lose a helluva lot more money with their free speech violations that end up blocking news feeds, public domain library contents, etc. There's a helluva lot of *expired* copyright content to be exchanged and hosted, and the amount of that content will only continue to mammothly exponentially grow.

You might also think it's "quite noticeable" that just the sheer number of files grows every single day. For a microcosmic example, the number of posts on a site like /. grows every day. Now multiply that out over the entire internet, and legitimate "legal" information compendiums on topics will start to dwarf all the "copyrighted" content combined.

If copyright police and ISPs decide to make information flow a war they are living in la la dreamland in they think they can win. Big businesses like Comcast are already having their asses handed to them by minor "scooby-doo kids" groups. These efforts are only going to become more professional, better organized, better funded. The RIAA is doing nothing more than setting up a copyright troll business model to be copied that will screw those with the biggest pockets the hardest.

When the history books are written, this will be regarded as a mammoth world-wide Boston Tea Party-esque Victory for consumers. Copyright is doomed because it's economically inefficient. The costs of filtering and policing will only continue to soar with the sheer size of content available on the internet. The government could 24/7 audio-visual record everyone in the world. Do you have any idea the time and budget constraint costs actually listening to all that would cost? It's practically impossible, and as effective as a police officer on the African planes ordering a stampede of animals to "stop!" The private police going to be run over at best, and pay bankrupting legal settlement costs for the privilege of being run over at worst. In the end, they will choose to just move aside and abandon copyright.