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ISPs to Ban P2P With New European Telecom Package?
An anonymous reader writes "ZeroPaid is reporting that ISPs could be turned into the copyright police through European legislation that received a number of 'intellectual property' amendments. Many of these amendments can be found here. Judging by the amendments, ISPs could be mandated to block legitimate traffic in an effort to 'prevent' illegitimate traffic. To help stop this legislation, you can check out the action page. Additional coverage can be found on EDRI and Open Rights Group."
Jamendo uses it to distribute Creative Commons-licensed music, all of it with the explicit permission of its copyright holders.
BitTorrent is crucial to my musical aspirations, as distributing my music with it allows me to provide formats that would use a lot of bandwidth, such as FLAC, without incurring expensive bandwidth charges.
While musicians can host their music for free at places like MySpace, it's really best to for artists to have their own websites, and to host their own music. That way, growth in the popularity of their sites will enrich the artists, rather than the music hosting service.
But a hit song can bankrupt struggling musicians if they just supply regular HTTP downloads; p2p enables mass distribution at a very low cost.
It's very important to get the message through to lawmakers and the public that filesharing, while it can be abused, is inherently perfectly legitimate, and should be kept both legal and technically possible.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
There are already claims that its possible to distinguish the protocols inside encrypted channels based on packet size and timming with quite high accuracy
Sure, it might sound plausible when the RIAA/MPAA paints a picture of P2P = piracy and stack up all the "favorable facts" but there's no way something like that would pass. You don't hear much from other uses because they have no interest in political mudslinging, but they're there. While all the countries of the EU have their own laws, I know at least my own (which isn't part of EU but.. long story) has freedom of speech written into the constitution. Trying to block legitimate speech because it's not approved by the "authorities" would fall so flat on its face in court it'd be an embarrasment to any politician that passed it.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
One of our great lawmakers here once said in a TV interview that a good solution would be to simply ban file sharing!
The interviewer asked if she meant all kind of sharing, like if he had a document he had written him self on his computer and wanted to share it, would it be illegal? And the great lawmaker answered: "We are talking about files here, not documents and stuff like that."
The point is: They haven't got a clue! The haven't the faintest idea what they're talking about. But that doesn't stop them from passing laws...
The only feasible solution at this point to to encrypt streams between clients and servers. the obligatory reply about performance may be crossing your mind right now, but is there actually any other solution?
Globally, legislation is being forced through parliaments, to take away our rights. This legislation has come in many forms, but the result of it is that someone wants to access and read your streams of data for whatever reason.
The only way to render this closer to impossible is to stop them being able to read your private correspondence with a web information service provider. The cost for this privacy - faster servers - will be a small price to pay.
Decrypting private data is generally regarded as a serious offence in most countries, and while, only the USA security organisations have access to Verisign's root servers, they will not admit this in public, because it would take away their advantage.
Participatory Governance : The only feasible option for a real democracy, where everyone really does have a say.
All our models for running a society and an economy use scarcity as a starting point; there is more demand for something than supply, and thus there must be a strong rule of law to make sure the resource is distributed properly (although I think its fair to say plenty of people disagree on the definition of 'properly')
Data is not scare though. In a P2P network, every person who demands also by definition supplies, thus demand can never outstrip supply.
They will lose this battle for mathematical rather than political reasons (the level of control they desire is impossible, and if they understood the technology they would know that) - but it interests me as a foreshadowing of a possible future.
Our society could well die from a resources shortage, but we might be able to save ourselves. Three technologies currently being researched, controlled nuclear fusion, autonomous robots, and universal fabrication, could conceivably bring the abundance we see in data to the majority of physical products and services. I listed them in order of the maturity of each field, but I believe that in my lifetime (I am 27 for reference) we could see them all reach a point where want can be effectively eliminated.
Of course, there are some people, the same people we are complaining about now, who don't want to see that. Desperate people are controllable people.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
You can't steal data. Its a physically nonsensical concept. The only way I can see actual theft working is if you were to use quantum teleportation to extract the electrons from one persons computer and place them in your own.
Distribution of trash media is part of what helps level the playing field. It means that people used to getting their data through conventional means now get it through the new medium, and thus are looking in the right place to find user generated content.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?