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Rapidshare Divulges Uploader Information
Gorgonzolanoid notes a post on TorrentFreak reporting that the German Rapidshare is divulging uploader information to rights holders. Record labels are apparently making creative use of "paragraph 101" of German copyright law, which gives them a streamlined process to ask a court to order disclosure of information such as an IP address. "In Germany, the file-hosting service Rapidshare has handed over the personal details of alleged copyright infringers to several major record labels. The information is used to pursue legal action against the Rapidshare users and at least one alleged uploader saw his house raided."
RapidShare is now rapdidly sharing uploader information.
There are far better hosts that don't require you to purchase a "premium" account. Why even bother with RapidShare?
...when you don't take adequate measures to protect yourself and rely on third parties to do the protection for you.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
So all you "IAAL's" out there, could these logs be presented in a court outside of Germany?
Was the act of uploading to Rapid Share from country X a violation of copyright laws in Germany, X, or both? Also, if no one downloaded the content you uploaded, have you still distributed?
Just curios... I could never make out the captchas so this doesn't affect me.
why direct download sites operated with so little trouble, when torrent sites were always being targeted for infringement. Maybe that will start to change.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
I'm assuming this is for Rapidshare.de, yes? Seeing as Rapidshare.com's master company is based outside of Germany..
Rapidfail! ^^
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Yes, there are people who upload material in infringing ways. But there are also lots of people who upload material in ways that (at least in the US, Your Kilometers/litre May Vary Elsewhere) don't infringe copyright but are still complained about by record labels and other alleged copyright holders. One way to support alternatives to infringing activities is to support groups like the EFF and Lessig's folks in defending fair use.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Gotta appreciate the lazy cowardly policemen that chose to raid a music pirate instead of dealing with serious violent/criminal offenders.
I love (no I don't) how the police will spend hours, if not days, of their man-hours dealing with petty nothings while the most blatant criminal elements are perpetually neglected.... I suppose this comes from giving the police the option which crimes deal with. In that case of course they will avoid dangerous battles and cowardly resort to minor traffic infractions and (as made evident) music pirates.
NWA said it best.
My proposal? Double the pay and bennies for the police, half the number on the force, and then expect a LOT more out of them and focus them on worthwhile crime. Then implement a very small, separate force to deal with traffic infringement and all the other petty crap.
When I served in the military, if there was more work to be done, you don't go home. That is part of service. I fail to understand how the police go home after a shift of handing out speeding tickets when there is quite obviously a *lot* more to be done --- that is not what they have sworn to do when joining the force, nor is it what we should permit them to maintain.
I would rather have very little or no police than to have a force that operates under convenience and laziness.
Damn, what a day to not use my neighbor's wifi.
It wasn't all fun and games for the record labels EITHER...
http://rapidshare.com/files/12345678/PIRATE_IP_ADDRESSES.part1.rar | 209715 KB
You are not a Premium User and have to wait. Please notice that only Premium Users will get full download speed.
Still 66 seconds...
there are several things wrong with the whole system (in terms of music)...
:-)
- the fact that you're paying for a license to listen to the music, not the music itself is a bit of a fiddle. (correct me if i'm wrong). if i pay for music, i want to be able to do with that particular music, what i wish. if i want to play it from the rooftops for all to hear, i should be able to.
- the fact that, out of the money you pay for music, only a small percentage of that money actually goes to the artists. the rest goes to the record labels, and covers the costs of advertising, paying the production team and fueling corporate profits. the band make most of their money from live concerts, which, in my eyes, far exceeds the experience of listening to an album on my headphones. in accordance with this level of experience, live concerts cost a substantial amount more than a cd, but i really dont care. if i managed to get all my albums free of charge, i'd be able to pick the best ones to go and see live, and have more money with which to fund such a venture.
- the fact that, when a law suit is filed for copyright infringement, the amount demanded is so far in excess of the amount of music that has actually been downloaded. this can only lead me to think that its the record labels suing fans, not the bands, and that the record labels are looking to recoup their losses to copyright infringement on the few scapegoats hap-hazardly chosen from the masses. if it was a case of "okay, you've been caught, hand over the money"... "okay, here you go"... *hands over money for the 3 cd's he downloaded for a friend*... then i would be quite willing to co-operate. but that'd be honest, and more expensive, quite un-corporate. instead they sue for hundreds of thousands of *currency* to make up as much money as they can manage.
i suppose all the above is indicative of a flawed system. as a band, the last thing you want to be doing is hassling your fanbase for money that you're not getting anyway... i just question the higher level affiliations between the record companys, production companys, parent conglomorates and the policing services. i'd imagine the governments of the world are quite sympathetic to the industry that makes an extremely substantial amount of money, and has the ultmate influence on popular culture in society. you have large record companys paying for "britney spears 2.0" to keep us away from thinking about the real issues... like in the USA, and their laws about income tax, or lack of them... or in england, and their complete lack of understanding of how money is created (nobody knows the answer to a simple question - "where does money come from?").
i've probably missed stuff, but jus add to it when you feel free.
What matters is not whether or not copyright should be abolished or fundamentally altered because of the digital revolution: it probably should.
What matters is the streamlined procedure to obtain ip addresses, as specified in German law. What we should ask ourselves is whether or not these laws are just, constitutional and proportional. We should ask ourselves whether we want to hand out such broad authorizations, turning private entities into 'law enforcement' agencies.
Piracy, copyright and "intellectual property" were vehicles to get these laws passed, if the vehicles disappear, the law remains, as does the drive towards totalitarianism. New vehicles will emerge, new totalitarian laws will get passed.
Resistance during war-time occupation is a different ball game from civil disobedience
How is it different? In the United States, the drug czar has declared a war on some drugs, and now the copyright czar is about to declare a war on sharing.
How about actually creating new works and sharing them with the community
If I did, I could get sued for accidental plagiarism. It happened to George Harrison.
Richard Stallman decided contractual and copyright-related restrictions were threatening his community. So he said (may not be an exact quote ;)) "fuck all y'all, I'm writing my own OS".
To establish that copying has occurred, the copyright owner must demonstrate both 1. the alleged infringer's access to the copyrighted work and 2. the substantial similarity of the works in question. It's easy to shield yourself from access to proprietary software: don't read non-free source code. But music differs markedly from computer programs in this respect. Once you've heard a song on the radio or as background music in a grocery store, you are deemed for the rest of your life to have had "access" to that song.
This is interesting in a political and an historical context. Gandhi worked with non violent means as a choice, but not as the only choice except by circumstance. Although he was a pacifist, he recognized that the "gun control" laws that prohibited the Indian people from ownership (mostly) were designed to quell any insurgency against the British colonial powers. The Indian people had been disarmed by the British, on purpose and "by law", (privately and even for the most part they had no armed governmental workers either) and as such they had no means to use force against their "masters". Non violent resistance then became their only option, and they suffered a lot for it. And in Germany, one of the very first acts the fascists managed was the almost total disarming of the civilian populations, making it quite easy for them to implement their "solutions". There's a pattern...
People seem to forget, civilization doesn't necessarily equal freedom or peace. Civilizations can be quite organized and have a great amount of civil governmental infrastructure, but still be violent with state sponsored terrorism and oppression of all the people or selected subgroups of the people there. Civil does not equal free. A full oppressive police state can be quite "civilized". Or like they are wont to say, "pacified".
I'll also add this as a personal anecdotal. As a civil rights worker back in the day (belts..onions..), there was some success, but it was one step back for every two forward and it was scary and it sucked mostly. It wasn't until the scene changed as more and more vets came back from viet nam who were either black and returned to still oppressive society or poor whites, who had gotten drafted while their richer peers got off with basket weaving majors in college with the 2s deferments, and those dudes weren't all necessarily into being non violent, quite the opposite actually, they had just returned from where being very violent was the expected norm. Whoops....
These folks and a growing sense of direct action combined with some other factors led to the major riots in the mid to late 60s. The powers that be (here comes my opinion) finally got scared enough to actually DO something about the situation rather than just talk about it. They didn't want to, they were *forced* to make some concessions.
The 64 civil rights act didn't do much of anything until the fatcats realized they could wake up one day with one or several major cities no longer under their control, important big cities. They would have been seized and occupied by outright rebels with a cause and several legitimate and rather large beefs, or burnt to the ground, either way, lost to their control. They capitulated, although they won't admit it, that is exactly what happened and it went beyond non violent protest or threat and promise of same to get there.
And everyone knew it.
Then stuff changed, for real this time. They *really* starting enforcing the civil rights laws, in a lot more places. They changed the draft to a lottery system so no more fatcats kids getting out of it. That backfired on them though, because that in turn lead to the war finally ending (started to become obvious it would end, put it that way), because the protests then quintupled/more in size from all these new kids suddenly realizing it wasn't going to be just the blacks from the ghettoes and rural farmers kids going, but THEM too, so they joined in the protests. It went from thousands to hundreds of thousands at protests, and rather quickly. And the situation was clearly not going in wallstreet's/government puppets favor, they had to keep backing down or they were eventually going to face the "heads on pikes" stage of social readjustment.
Now they did have a goonish reactionary success that they weaseled through, the passage of the 68 gun control act. That was a huge disappointment for true second amendment rights, and was clearly a racist and reactionary bill (you had to really be there to ca
They may well have released data to the German authorities, but they're based here in Switzerland. I've worked a bit with some of the guys there (I used to live in the town where they're located). Besides which, the "AG" suffix is a Swiss business designation, roughly equivalent to (I think) GmbH in Germany. And of course, Wikipedia backs me up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapidshare
Of course, they did originate with German TLD (rapidshare.de).
Why is this relevant? Because rapidshare.com accounts don't work on rapidshare.de (at least, according to Wikipedia). Therefore, people with .com accounts may not be at risk (from this instance).
Just FYI. There's some great comments on this article about the so-called civil disobedience vs simple greed, so I'm not condoning the downloading behavior (though, frankly, I've done it myself), but I thought some people would probably like to consider this angle.
It's to a nasty javascript-tastic shocksite
Just RAR and password-protect the uploads then. And give the archives non-obvious names. You'll be safe. In theory, the passwords can be bruteforced, but they have better things to do. Like hunting down people who upload in "the clear" so to speak.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!