Warez Moving From BitTorrent to Conventional Hosting Services

ericatcw writes "Driven by increased crackdowns on BitTorrent sites such as The Pirate Bay, software pirates are fast moving their warez to file-hosting Web sites like RapidShare, reports Computerworld. According to anti-piracy vendor V.I. Labs, 100% of the warez in its survey were available on RapidShare, which, according to Alexa, is already one of the 20 largest sites in the world. V.I. Labs' CEO predicts file-hosting sites such as RapidShare will supplant BitTorrent, as the former appear better protected legally."

Comments

captain obvious

[MoFoQ]

this one needs a "no sh*t sherlock" tag...

obviously, when u stamp out one source....and not the demand, a new source will come to existence to fill in that demand.

Rapidshare, Megaupload, netload, etc. have been around for a while and do have legitimate uses (some times, trying to send to a 20MB PDF or Illustrator (.ai) advertising file can wreak havoc on email, especially with some of the free email ones or if your client is a small business).

Some opensource apps also use the services to host mirrors to their downloads to lighten the load on their own servers.

Re:captain obvious

[IgnoramusMaximus]

Actually, moving to paid services is one of those short-sighted, brain-dead lemming moves the general public gets involved in periodically. This is simply so because most such sites need actual payment to download (unless you want to download 1 file per 24 hours at something like 10k/s in the "free", "oh how much faster it would go if you only gave us your Credit Card number", "trial" mode - and never you mind horrid java-script hells of a "web page" all of these "services" feature).

The end result is that there is a complete trail of uploaders, their IP Addresses, their emails, but what's even better, there is a complete trail of all downloaders, including their IP Addresses, emails, user ids and, the Holy Grail of RIAA, MPAA and BSA snooping campaigns: actual financial transactions of these donwloaders which immediately yield their identities and bonus preculde any possible defense of "sharing between friends" as there is actual money changing hands.

In short: stupidity squared on the part of any people who use RapidShare, MegaUpload and a bunch of similar scams, people who have no clue about the implications of their actions and were, due to their ignorance of technology driven into arms of these scams by the PR campaigns against P2P, people who got brainwashed into believing that the direct-download sites are "safer". All it will take is one of them getting sued and happily forking over all the logs and financial records. Than again, odds are that some of them are already controlled by MPAA etc as a result of some behind-the-scenes settlements.

No such thing was possible with BitTorrent as a vast majority of tracker sites are anonymous. The snobs participating in "private trackers" had more elevated levels of exposure because of their "registration" process offered additional levels of forensic evidence. In fact most P2P systems offer as the only point of identification the IP Address, which does not immediately translate into a personal identification (unlike your MasterCard with which you paid RapidShare) due to dynapmic IP assignments, possible WiFi holes, access by other people to your computer and what not.

In short, it will take only a series of mega-busts of MegaUpload users, followed by rapid (due to excellent and undeniable forensic evidence) convictions, until the lemmings will run back to more anonymous and thus more sane methods of file-sharing.

Re:captain obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

In short, it will take only a series of mega-busts of MegaUpload users, followed by rapid (due to excellent and undeniable forensic evidence) convictions, until the lemmings will run back to more anonymous and thus more sane methods of file-sharing.

In various parts you're quite right. Although in countries where downloading is legal, there's less that can be done to the downloaders - especially those that don't mind waiting or slower-than-instant downloads. The uploader would likely get crucified all the same if uploading was illegal.

Re:captain obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

You talk about Bit torrent use like it's in the past, however it's very much a live and kicking.

Re:captain obvious

[MoFoQ]

never heard of jdownloader?

it doesn't have to use a "paid/premium" account to access those files and it automates a lot of the tedious aspects of the free versions of the services.
plus there are services out there meant for uploading to those file hosting services, anonymously and automatically, as well as payment services from various countries that don't share the bed with the lobbyists like the US/UK/France that handle the payment services as well as proxy services...

yes...I can go on and on.
It's a cat-and-mouse game, where the mouse usually is more savy and has a head-start.

Re:captain obvious

[ScrewMaster]

In fact most P2P systems offer as the only point of identification the IP Address, which does not immediately translate into a personal identification

Apparently you've not been following the RIAA lawsuit mill. According to them (and the majority of courts which have bought into it) an IP address is unquestionable proof of identity. The fact that it's not doesn't matter if you've been screwed into the ground by a frivolous lawsuit.

Re:captain obvious

[FallinWithStyle]

Agreed... But really though, rs is going to overtake torrents the day that users decide manually downloading 800 pieces of a file from a server is easier than letting an app do it for you (from a network of peers, none the less).

Re:captain obvious

[Shadow of Eternity]

No, nobody will ever be convicted of anything. They may be found LIABLE after the RIAA proves a preponderance of the evidence is in their favor but nobody is getting convicted of anything. There's a reason the MAFIAA keeps using civil suits rather than trying to pursue things in criminal courts.

Re:captain obvious

[IgnoramusMaximus]

never heard of jdownloader?

No, its first time I hear of the thing, although the concept is rather old and has been done in response to previous scam sites trying to obfuscate or lock contents and get people to pay for releasing it. Naturally the operators if the scam sites will do everything in their power to prevent this "jdownloader" from working (as they are "losing" their ad revenue and "premium account" money to it as it makes "free" downloading less of an getting-a-root-canal-dentistry-experience they want you to have) and this will quickly devolve into an arms race, where your "jdownloader" will work today, by screwed up tomorrow as some site takes counter-measures, work on the next Tuesday again when devs respond, then quit on Thursday etc and so on.

It's a cat-and-mouse game, where the mouse usually is more savy and has a head-start.

Not if the mouse was stupid enough to forward its Credit Card number to the cat, who then finds its billing-address-mouse-hole and sits there waiting for it...

Re:captain obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

You also act like you've never heard of prepaid credit cards.

Re:captain obvious

[logjon]

Again, you're disregarding prepaid credit cards that leave no such trail. You are aware it's nearly 2010 correct?

Re:captain obvious

[IgnoramusMaximus]

You also act like you've never heard of prepaid credit cards.

"Gift" (i.e. anonymous and prepaid) credit cards do not exist in many countries, and in many of those that allow them the cards do not work online .... precisely because they are anonymous. In fact the whole idea of "gift" cards is being considered a loophole that goes against the recommendations of FATF (Financial Action Task Force on Money Laundering). Anonymity is a precious commodity and is considered a weapon in the "Wars" on Terrorism, Drugs, Alcohol, Privacy and Whatever Else Can Be Made Into A Cash-cow For Security And Defence Corporations And An Excuse For Authoritarian Crusades.

Subsequently, I would not get too used to these cards being around.

Re:captain obvious

[Dudeman_Jones]

fun fact. anyone downloading junk from these sites is probably downloading an encrypted container file like rar or 7zip, under a completely false filename.
another fun fact. the most popular, and therefore hardest to police sites are all free to use, with improved premium access being a pay-to-play option, not a mandate.

Next time get off your high horse and do a little research before flipping out on this crap.

Re:captain obvious

[IgnoramusMaximus]

Again, you're disregarding prepaid credit cards that leave no such trail. You are aware it's nearly 2010 correct?

I addressed the gift cards in another reply to a poster below.

In short: they are not available in most countries, in many where they allow them they do not work online and in the last remaining few places the FATF is doing their best to make them unusable online. I do not expect that fight to last very long, by 2011 or so none of them will work online anymore.

Re:captain obvious

[logjon]

So if they're about to take away our 'gift' cards and start tracking down everybody who uses rapidshare, what makes you think BT is any safer?

Re:captain obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

This is simply so because most such sites need actual payment to download (unless you want to download 1 file per 24 hours at something like 10k/s in the "free", "oh how much faster it would go if you only gave us your Credit Card number", "trial" mode - and never you mind horrid java-script hells of a "web page" all of these "services" feature).

Rapidshare may be strict about the number of files you download, speed, etc (like "only one file every 10 minutes"), but most others aren't that way from what I can see. I've gotten 1200 KBps speeds on MegaUpload downloading files before and usually average between 500 and 800 KBps, and have downloaded a gig before the limits on a day have hit me. They adjust them back and forth depending on traffic, so sometimes it's 350MB max in 15 minutes. Yeah, they have a "premium" level of service of course, but the "free" version really is fine for regular file transferring -- just not for downloading feature films and other heavy pirate usage.

Re:captain obvious

[logjon]

They've worked for everything I've needed them for online or offline. Also, your 'projection' is meaningless, and I could give a shit about what can be purchased in other countries.

Re:captain obvious

[Kjella]

the Holy Grail of RIAA, MPAA and BSA snooping campaigns: actual financial transactions of these donwloaders which immediately yield their identities and bonus preculde any possible defense of "sharing between friends" as there is actual money changing hands.

Uh? I pay money for my ISP, so there's actual money changing hands no matter what I do online. They'll need a stronger connection than that to get anywhere.

Re:captain obvious

[IgnoramusMaximus]

BT (and any other pure P2P system) is safer simply because there are additional hoops for the MPAAs of the world to jump through (like ISPs and privacy laws) to get your identity and even so such identity is unreliable (unless your lawyer is a dolt or you have been completely unprepared and are keeping all your downloaded stuff in the open, have no WiFi routers etc).

This is of course not an impregnable defence but its orders of magnitude harder to crack then simply asking MegaUpload for all your downloads in your account, cross-correlated with your identity coming from your financial record (note that the prickly ISP problem has been circumnavigated neatly).

P2P can be made far more secure, and it has been, like for example the Japanese Winny system (which was a cross between something like FreeNet and a typical P2P system like Gnutella) and its more modern successor the Perfect Dark. If coupled with steganographic storage, good user practices and other tricks, such systems can be made near-impractical to crack, to the point that mere knowledge of the IP address is (practically) useless from the perspective of copyright witch-hunters.

Re:captain obvious

[logjon]

Ah, so that's how your 'projection' of prepaid credit cards not working after [insert arbitrary date here] comes into play. Well I project that on December 31, 2009, BitTorrent clients will be entirely illegal across the world, and anyone caught with one will face the death penalty. Rapidshare is looking good now, isn't it?

Re:captain obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't pay for my connection. I don't even use a neighbors WiFi. I also live in an apartment building where the cable lines are split at entry-point. So finding my specific location is quite difficult, unless they want to get a warrant to search all 20 or so tenant's computers of my one building.

Re:captain obvious

[IgnoramusMaximus]

fun fact. anyone downloading junk from these sites is probably downloading an encrypted container file like rar or 7zip, under a completely false file

Really? How then do you find this file? Unless you and your buddies are into psychic connections, there is somewhere, where a lot of you turkeys congregate, a "translation" to the real contents and the password to extract it. Unless you expect MPAAs of the world to be illiterate, they can read it as well as you do. Considering yourself oh-soooo-much-smarter-then-your-dumb-by-definition-adversary is the hallmark of elementary school "cryptography". In keeping with this, I fully expect you to lecture me next on the use of ROT-13 as an "advanced" method of "hiding" stuff.

another fun fact. the most popular, and therefore hardest to police sites are all free to use, with improved premium access being a pay-to-play option, not a mandate.

The article specifically mentions the likes of RapidShare, which is decidedly not in that category. But fear not, I am sure the other sites expect to make oodles on continuing to offer terabytes of bandwidth just out of their love of sharing.... or perhaps they are just hoping that enough suckers pays before they go bust. Note that places like YouTube are millions of dollars in the red.

Re:captain obvious

[IgnoramusMaximus]

Dude, you do not seem to understand. Prepaid cards are a money laundering loophole, far more serious to the powers-that-be than some nerds downloading pilfered porn off of RapidShare. You are thinking: "merry mouse-and-cat chases with the RIAA", they are thinking: "Osama Bin Laden agents paying for communications and bomb components". It doesn't take a genius to figure out what is going to happen in this case.

Re:captain obvious

[logjon]

I never even implied that your projected outlawing of prepaid cards had anything to do with the RIAA. I have not been thinking "merry mouse-and-cat chases with the RIAA." You will find no text to indicate such. If you do, I suggest you re-read.

Re:captain obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, y'see, the thing is that your original argument was "these d00ds are dumb for not using jdownloader and prepaid credit cards". And when it's pointed out that neither of these is a viable option for most of the people most of the time, you say "don't care, worksforme". Which is essentially a tacit admission that you were wrong in the first place.

Re:captain obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

an encrypted container file like rar or 7zip, under a completely false filename.

The AAs wouldn't be the least bit disappointed if file sharing went back to trading info on obscure bulletin boards located in the underbelly of the internet.

Re:captain obvious

[logjon]

No. my original point was that your point was flawed as it failed to take prepaid cards into consideration. So they aren't necessarily dumb for using it if they do it right. And then you go into a spiel about other countries and the year 2011, neither of which is relevant at this point in time.

Re:captain obvious

[vxvxvxvx]

According to them (and the majority of courts which have bought into it) an IP address is unquestionable proof of identity.

I'm glad you clarified that it's the courts that bought into it that bought into it... It's fitting that this was posted under "captain obvious."

Re:captain obvious

[vxvxvxvx]

Ohg ebg13 vf na nqinaprq zrgubq bs uvqvat fghss.

Re:captain obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

very few people are going to pay for pirated content anyway, its a silly argument to begin with

Re:captain obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

I am 12 years old and what is this?

Re:captain obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

You are aware that it's not actually illegal to download warez, right?

Re:captain obvious

[MoFoQ]

one word.... jdownloader

makes downloading RS easy
(still time consuming)
It can even do RS folders automatically.

Re:captain obvious

[Firehed]

Prepaid cards definitely leave a trail, even if it's a little harder to follow. Most stores won't allow you to pay for them in cash (partly for this exact reason, partly due to anti-money laundering laws), and in any case they're more often given out as rebate cards for whatever reason and are definitely traceable unless the issuer is in complete violation of their contract with Visa/Mastercard. It may be a two-step process, but thinking using prepaid debit cards as if they're anonymous is _not_ a good idea if you need an anonymous transaction.

Re:captain obvious

[chx1975]

What do you pay for? You do not pay to download warez. You pay for the capability to download. As long as there is any legal stuff to download, it's fine and there always be. If these services do not happen to hold a record of what particular usernames download, then there is no evidence what so ever.

Re:captain obvious

[B4light]

this.

Re:captain obvious

[jeffstar]

stores always have to accept cash. it is legal tender, you can't not take it.

Maybe they can ask for some ID if you are using cash, but they definitely have to take cash by law for anything you can buy.

Re:captain obvious

[bencoder]

Try rot26. It's twice as secure!

Re:captain obvious

[sexconker]

WRONG.
There is no law in the United States stating that cash MUST be accepted.

Legal tender for all debts public and private simply means it is an approved form of payment in the eyes of the government. If the government were overseeing the payment of a debt, legal tender is something the government is able to evaluate properly. Paying your buddy in beaver pelts?
The government doesn't have to hear your case when he says you only gave him 17 good pelts, since 3 were damaged. If you do get the case taken to court, there's no guarantee of the government being right, giving a crap, etc. in terms of the value of those pelts.

Whoever you're dealing with certainly has the option to require a different form of payment.
Yes, that includes the government.

Re:captain obvious

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

you're giving your average pirate *way* too much credit on their intelligence.

BitTorrent is really popular because it's obscenely easy. You install the torrent client, and you just grab the torrent itself. it has nothing to do with a cat and mouse game, it's just an evolution on usefulness.

Re:captain obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop calling these sites a scam. Bandwidth is not free (nor cheap) and the amount of gigabytes transferred on these sites daily is huge. They don't limit download speed for free users to be mean, or force you to pay for the service; there are physical limits to these things, and that translates into free users getting the blunt end of the stick. These sites provide a legitimate service, whether you think it is worth it or not is up to you, obviously a lot of people seem to think the service is worth it. There is no way they could afford the amount of bandwidth they use with ads alone.

I am happy to pay 10 dollars every once in a while (I tend not to keep up my subscription, but there are some months with a lot of stuff coming out that I pay) for really good speeds downloading mirrors of demos or installers etc. A lot of people have files that they simply cannot afford to host anywhere, and the amount of not annoying download services that are free are pretty slim.

Re:captain obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

Not every country is anonymous though. In Australia you must provide ID for prepaid credit cards and SIM cards. You can pay in cash, but it is deliberately set up to be traceable.

Re:captain obvious

[mister_playboy]

"stores always have to accept cash. it is legal tender, you can't not take it."

Do you live in the US? I live right in the middle of it, and an extremely large number of business now refuse to accept $50 or $100 bills. I assume they would cite counterfeiting as the concern, but I think it's pure bullshit.

If you do business in the US, you ought to have to accept US currency.

Re:captain obvious

[trickyD1ck]

I used P2P only couple of times in my life. Neither i did use torrents. Part of the reason is that the speed is too slow, searching is often awkward, it just didin't seem to cut it technologically. Another reason is that P2P downloading implies uploading and as far as i understand to upload stuff is far more dangerous than to download.

Instead i have been using Rapidshare premium for the past two years. For 1€ in a week i get tons of stuff and i get it fast. It isn't like leaving a P2P connection overnight to download a movie. I get 720p content, say 7 GB rips in 20-30 minutes, since my own internet connection is the only bottleneck, rapidshare serves content as fast as i can receive it, so i constantly get around 7-10MB per second. Can P2P compete with this?

Re:captain obvious

[sopssa]

It is actually illegal to download warez, but they usually go after the uploaders. You probably dont have to pay as much for just downloading, but its still illegal.

Re:captain obvious

[xaxa]

"stores always have to accept cash. it is legal tender, you can't not take it."

Do you live in the US? I live right in the middle of it, and an extremely large number of business now refuse to accept $50 or $100 bills. I assume they would cite counterfeiting as the concern, but I think it's pure bullshit.

If you do business in the US, you ought to have to accept US currency.

If you are owed money in the UK, you must accept legal tender: Bank of England notes of value £50, £20, £10 and £5, coins of value £5, £2, £1 in any amount, up to £10 worth of 50p and 20p; up to £5 of 10p and 5p, and up to 20p of 2p and 1p. You can (of course) accept anything else.

When you ask to buy something from a shop, you don't owe anyone any money, so the shopkeeper can decided what to accept. Many won't accept £50 notes.

So, the bus driver is allowed to refuse to take your £50 note, or your handful of 1p coins. But if you get a fine for not having a ticket they have to accept legal tender for payment of the fine.

Re:captain obvious

[hairyfeet]

That was started by these little gas station/convenience stores, who found that keeping enough change to deal with fifties and hundreds made them an inviting target for crackheads, which in case you ain't heard tend to have the annoying habit lately of just shooting the employees and then robbing the corpses.

So you really can't blame them for trying to protect their employees a little. I personally think all those little gas station/convenience stores should have set up what the sheriff the next county over did when they had a bunch of those damned "crackhead shoots up the whole damned store" robberies. He had them set up mirrored booths with a nice little sign in front that read "three days a week an off duty police officer is sitting in this booth with a 12 gauge. You guess which three".

Of course the first thing that happened was a crackhead decided to "try it" to see if it was BS or not and got his dumbass cut in half, but after that they worked beautifully. Last I checked many of the liquor stores and other stores in high crime areas still have them. I guess the amount they save on insurance and losses makes it worth paying for off duty cops, and even if they are only paying for one or two days a week even crackheads are wary of meeting the business end of a 12 gauge.

Re:captain obvious

[Mjec]

Whoever you're dealing with certainly has the option to require a different form of payment.
Yes, that includes the government.

Well, kinda. When it comes down to it your failure to pay is a breach of contract and that can be rectified generally only by financial compensation. There are some, very limited, circumstances when specific performance can be awarded but when it comes down to questions like credit cards, money is money is money.

Now, the seller can refuse to sell except on certain conditions... but if they've agreed to accept payment and no precondition is stipulated then they must accept cash.

IANAL, IAALStudent

Re:captain obvious

[kdemetter]

Not if they can't prove that it's warez.

Re:captain obvious

[PopeRatzo]

Yeah. I know TPB has had a few outages, but then they have always had a few outages, going back to their beginnings.

I stay away from Rapidshare like a bad case of the crabs.

Re:captain obvious

[PopeRatzo]

Can you buy an iPhone from the Apple Store with cash?

Can you buy an airline ticket with cash?

I don't the answer to these for sure, but I'm guessing no. I guess it's "national security" in both cases, right?

Re:captain obvious

[PopeRatzo]

My mother was a crackhead, you insensitive clod.

(I've always wanted to do one of these. I'll stop now... ..probably.)

Re:captain obvious

[krovisser]

No, he's right. Except, they only have to accept exact amounts.

That is, if you a have a $12 pizza; you want to pay with a $50 note, they don't have to.

If you show up with 1,200 pennies, they have to. Period.

Re:captain obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

If people are moving to *paid* download services, why not simply pay for the content to begin with and have it delivered legitimately?

Re:captain obvious

[Neoprofin]

The best part about money in the UK is that Scotland and Northern Ireland are allowed to print their own notes which are completely useless for all practical purposes in England and in the other territory despite being the same currency and the English pounds being universally accepted.

Re:captain obvious

[NightWhistler]

Under US law you're probably right, but it's not the same everywhere.

For example, here in the Netherlands it's legal to download content like music and movies, but illegal to upload or distribute it. BREIN has been trying to come up with things like "purchase-replacing downloads", which are illegal according to them, but AFAIK it hasn't been proven in court.

Using bittorent means that you're also uploading while you download, making it illegal. Downloading from things like RapidShare is legal though, regardless of whether you pay money to do so.

Re:captain obvious

[tnnn]

Just keep in mind that while downloading from such a site you are not making any content "available" (which, to my understanding, is the main issue with all those copyright trials). Whether this is enough to protect yourself from any legal problems depends on laws in your country. For example, here (Poland) it is not illegal to download (and posses) copyrighted music/movies/etc. (software excluded!) so it's most likely safer to download from such a site than from p2p.

Re:captain obvious

[Spy der Mann]

Download sites offer the advantage that downloaders cannot be charged with uploading or sharing - this is very convenient versus bittorrent, where you need to share to download.

Also, the download is available 100% of the time. To download via bittorrent you need a seeder online.

Re:captain obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF! No they don't. Try looking on the US Treasury's website! It even spells it out for you. T - W - A - T

Re:captain obvious

[Darkness404]

Australia is so messed up with technology and censorship it isn't even funny.

Re:captain obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

So you're saying that the RIAA has been nice to us by not suing most of us for downloading music? Bzzzt, wrong answer. They aren't suing people who strictly download because there's nothing to sue them for. There's absolutely nothing illegal about downloading warez, music or almost anything else. The only exception that I can think of that is illegal to even download is child porn and it falls outside the scope of this discussion.

Re:captain obvious

[Yvan256]

Not it's not, it's DYING!

<whisper>(shut up!)</whisper>

Re:captain obvious

[HungryHobo]

since when has downloading been illegal?
If I listen to pirate radio am I breaking the law?
If my local newspaper isn't paying the fees for using the strips in it's comic section am I liable?
If I click on a youtube video and the uploader doesn't own the rights to distribute it in what way have I violated copyright law?
If sky movies hasn't paid it's bills can the rights holders come after me?

I pay a subscription, it's the uploaders/hosting companies responsibility to make sure they have the right to distribute the material. I have no control of how they spend the money I pay any more than I can control how sky movies does spends the money I give them.

Please. Explain it to me.

Re:captain obvious

[cOldhandle]

and never you mind horrid java-script hells of a "web page" all of these "services" feature

Yeah, it's better to stick to properly designed web pages like *cough* Slashdot?!?!?

Re:captain obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, umm, duh? Because $20 a month for unlimited is less than $20 (or whatever the price is, I wouldn't know) for one CD?

Re:captain obvious

[jonbryce]

If you pay to download from somewhere, you can legitimately say that you thought you were buying from a legal source and blame the company you bought the download from.

Re:captain obvious

[JorgeFierro]

100% of the time? Maybe you've never come across a 'This file has been deleted for breach of our TOS'...

Re:captain obvious

[jonbryce]

They are only required to take legal tender when it is in settlement of a debt. If you owe them money, and you offer to pay it in legal tender, then if they refuse, you have discharged your obligations and no longer have to repay the debt.

When you go into a shop and ask to buy something, you do not at that point owe them any money, as you have not taken the goods. Therefore, they do not have to accept legal tender.

Re:captain obvious

[ScrewMaster]

AC, you missed the point, which was that an IP address simply is not sufficient information to uniquely identify an individual infringer. Consequently, because it does NOT MEET EVIDENTIARY standards, any lawsuit which is based solely upon that information is, by definition, frivolous. The fact that the majority of courts in this country have been hoodwinked by the RIAA's criminal attorneys and their illegal Mediasentry "investigative" arm does not change the fact that the technology does not work the way they say it does.

Furthermore, if the RIAA actually spent the money to perform solid investigations of alleged infringement and only sued the people that were actually infringing nobody would be complaining about their activities. But that's not what they want: this is not about redress.

The reality is that the RIAA has engaged in a campaign of fear-mongering, deliberately terrorizing and harassing families in spite of a complete lack of credible evidence, attempting to make file-sharing seem incredibly dangerous because you might have your life destroyed even if you are innocent. That's a hideous misuse of the legal system, and one that absolutely should not be sanctioned by the courts ... period!

So don't try feeding us a line about how the poor artists are being soooo abused by file sharing. It's the studios themselves that have been shafting artists for a century or more, long before the Internet came into being. They've also been overcharging consumers for about as long: even the Feds have been investigating them for that. All file sharing has done is take them down a notch: they still record profit levels that virtually any other business would envy, because plenty of people still pay them for their products.

So get the hell off your high horse.

Re:captain obvious

[Ginger Unicorn]

Scottish notes are legal tender in england too - never seen an irish note though.

Re:captain obvious

[Ltap]

You're right about that one. I know from experience that direct download sites are NOT as safe as torrents because anyone who got a virus from a torrent would not likely seed it, whereas direct download just keeps on going. Add in the fact that torrents are more reliable, in that all you need is the tracker and seeder - Rapidshare tends to delete stuff fairly quickly. The only thing you're forgetting, though, is that people don't necessarily need to PAY to get paid accounts. Phishing and heavy Rapidshare use tend to go hand-in-hand, and there are massive lists of hundreds of thousands of logins floating around online for Rapidshare, and probably thousands more for Hotfile, Megaupload, and all the others. Add in proxies and anyone using a Rapidshare account for warez would be virtually untraceable.

Re:captain obvious

[UnknownSoldier]

Yeah, no kidding.

When I was in college I remember warez beging traded via FSP, then FTP (with high-ASCII characters for folder names nested a few levels deep), then UseNet alt.binaries.*, then IRC, then P2P, then BitTorrent....

Re:captain obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the same way it works in the US.

http://www.ustreas.gov/education/faq/currency/legal-tender.shtml

Re:captain obvious

[Ifni]

Yes and yes

However, what I think you were getting at is that you cannot do so anonymously - you will have to provide ID to complete the transaction.

Re:captain obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

stores always have to accept cash. it is legal tender, you can't not take it.

This is simply false. Legal tender must be accepted in payment of debt. Obviously, before a purchase is made, no debt exists. Nor is a store required to sell you something just because you have the cash to pay for it. They can therefore accept or not accept whatever form of payment they wish.

Once a debt exists, one is required to accept legal tender in payment. However, depending on the amount owed, one is not necessarily required to accept all denominations. For example, if you owed me a billion dollars, I would not be required to accept your payment in pennies.

Re:captain obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

The following are also not legal tender in the UK:

Amounts in 1p and 2p coins over the value of 20p
Amounts in 5p and 10p coins over the value of £5
Amounts in 20p and 50p coins over the value of £10

So anyone attempting to pay their £1000 fine or bill in pennies to try and be clever is going to be shit out of luck because no one has to accept it.

Re:captain obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

most such sites need actual payment to download (unless you want to download 1 file per 24 hours at something like 10k/s in the "free", "oh how much faster it would go if you only gave us your Credit Card number", "trial" mode - and never you mind horrid java-script hells of a "web page" all of these "services" feature).

Bull shit.

Re:captain obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

[P2P is] orders of magnitude harder to crack then simply asking MegaUpload for all your downloads in your account

Why register to download?

, cross-correlated with your identity coming from your financial record

Why give them money?

An aspect of DDL (direct downloading) that makes it indeed less safe than P2P is its centralized, server-client nature. Imaginary property trolls don't have to pose as a peer to collect evidence. They can just get clients' IP numbers from file hosts, and combine those with the connection logs ISPs are required to keep in many countries. But then again, DDL users are harder to sue because uploading and downloading are decoupled, and downloading is safer, legally speaking. File hosts cover their asses with the DCMA procedure, and everyone's happy. A downside is that files on DDL tend to be short lived, but as long as people keep reuploading them it doesn't matter much.

Re:captain obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

Did Netcraft confirm it?

Re:captain obvious

[bkaul01]

an extremely large number of business now refuse to accept $50 or $100 bills. I assume they would cite counterfeiting as the concern,

The $20 is actually the most commonly counterfeited bill, and everyone accepts those. I think it's more that they don't want to have to keep enough cash in the register to make change for every idiot who wants to use a $100 bill to pay for a $0.75 candy bar. The logic of the quite informative post below regarding UK rules probably applies here, too.

Re:captain obvious

[mOdQuArK!]

stores always have to accept cash. it is legal tender, you can't not take it.

I don't believe this is true (at least not in the U.S.). You have to take cash if someone offers it to you to pay off a debt, but a store doesn't have to take cash to sell you a product or service on the spot.

Re:captain obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

Because of such configurations, the cable company usually ties each subscriber's information to the MAC address of their cable modem. This is why many/most people can't just replace their cable modem without calling their cable company. If you're talking about a civil case, and your cable company doesn't record MAC addresses in this way, you're pretty lucky...

However, if you're talking a criminal investigation, you're gonna be out of luck. Assuming that your cable company doesn't record your MAC address, they could almost certainly narrow the search to 1-5 subscribers based on signal strength/quality. With simple detective work, they could rule out most/many of the other suspects in short order. They would weigh in consideration for computer experience, employment, and education. Teenagers and young adults would top the list of considerations. Based on interviews of neighbors, they could determine which suspects are likely to be home during the time(s) that the file transfers are initiated.

The truth is that if someone wants to track you down, and if they have the resources to do so (i.e. if they're the government), they *will* do so. Unless, of course, you actually know how to successfully evade them (and you clearly don't).

Re:captain obvious

[mindstrm]

To put it another way - the only situation cash *MUST* be accepted in is when settling a debt.

No court will hear your whining if you refuse to accept cash from someone who owes you money. You can, however, refuse to make change and insist the precise amount be paid.

This only applies to debts.

Buying groceries at the supermarket is not a debt. Neither is clicking on some stuff on amazon.
Sitting in a restaurant and eating first, then paying later - that's a debt.
So is, for practical purposes, filling up your car with gas and then going inside to pay.

Re:captain obvious

[mindstrm]

You are not obligated to accept anything when engaging in an exchange of goods or services. Both parties can agree to settle the deal however they want.

"Legal Tender" only applies for the settling of debts.. and the creditor can insist on exact change.

So other than restaurants (where you eat first, and pay later) and possibly gas pumps (where you fill up first, then pay) - any business or transaction are free to agree to not accept whatever they want.

Re:captain obvious

[mindstrm]

"If you owe them money, and you offer to pay it in legal tender, then if they refuse, you have discharged your obligations and no longer have to repay the debt."

Can you cite any precedent for that? That sounds interesting.

I don't believe that's true - though they would have no standing to take you to court or ask for any type of damages - the debt could possibly still stand.

Re:captain obvious

[TheDormouse]

If you do business in the US, you ought to have to accept US currency.

If I understand things correctly, US businesses must accept US currency for debts. So if you provide a service where payment isn't due until after services are rendered, you must accept US currency for that debt. If you sell goods retail (including counter-service food) you can choose to accept or refuse any method of payment, since there is no debt involved.

So if you must pay for your $5 cheeseburger with a $50, looks like you'll have to find someplace that will serve your order before you pay.

Re:captain obvious

[sumdumass]

I do not know if I would trust TPB much more. IT seems that after one of their outages, I was looking for an old movie and got a sharing copyrighted material complain against my IP. Fortunately for me, it listed the wrong IP, had 3 of them reported within 3 seconds of each other and Verizon was robo-phoning me to explain why they where shutting my internet off.

All I did was search for the movie, I didn't download it. Now it could be a freaky coincidence where they mixed a legitimate complaint against someone else up with my account or it could have just been a malicious campaign by Sony Entertainment to knock me off line. But it was a freaky situation as it happened less then 24 hours from when I searched TPB for the movie.

I suspect TPB might not be what it once was.

Re:captain obvious

[eleuthero]

Apparently providing ID is not necessary (unless, of course, they made a fake DL that met the Apple store criteria) as someone skimmed my credit card number (Hurrah for RFID!) and then bought two iphones, a new set of wheels (actual wheels, not a whole car), two hotel rooms on the same night in different locations, several meals at cheap restaurants, $200 worth of makeup, and had their vehicle repaired. I caught them a week into their shopping spree that went way over my normal purchasing habits. For anyone intrigued by "fraud protection" services from credit card companies, they are worthless. Still, I appreciate the "no liability" clause thrown into pretty much every credit card agreement now.

Re:captain obvious

[CheShACat]

Not true at all. While these notes are technically not legal tender in England (technically they are promissory notes from external banks), they are treated as such by banks and retailers, and any note that is a denomination of pounds sterling is universally accepted. So "for all practical purposes", they are indeed useful.

Re:captain obvious

[zuperduperman]

It might be true that you legally have to accept cash, but you don't have to do it on any terms.

In Australia large companies have now started charging a *surcharge* to accept cash as payment. It started when they introduced surcharges on credit cards a while back, presumably expecting to rake in a nice little profit from people too lazy write a check. Instead I assume they saw a horrendous rise in costs as everyone abandoned credit card and started sending them paper checks or even worse, walking into a store front and trying to give them cash. So they figured out a new idea: charge people extra to pay cash! So you now have the rather ridiculous situation where you pay an amount for their service but virtually any way you try to give them the money they surcharge and thus in effect the service costs about 3% more. There is just one way to avoid the surcharge - authorize them to direct debit from your bank account - the corporate wet dream of being able to go in and plunder anything they want any time and it's near impossible to stop without taking drastic action (closing account, writing affidavit / letter to bank declaring you withdraw consent, etc.).

Re:captain obvious

[jeffstar]

Looks like I was wrong on that one. It is funny reading my post now, I state that they definitely have to take cash by law but I really have/had no idea and was talking out my ass.

Re:captain obvious

[Goodl]

An 'Irish' note is a Euro denomination

Re:captain obvious

[Neoprofin]

By banks yes, they'll be nice enough to give you the Queen's pounds in exchange as I've had the nice folks at NatWest do a number of times. Retailers? Perhaps the major ones are better about it. I've never been told off per say, but I don't know a single person who hasn't been less than politely refused the use of their BoS notes at some point.

I guess useless for some practical purposes, sadly just not when I'm arguing with a chipper, would be more correct.

Re:captain obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah im pretty happy with RS.

Never ever was I happy with speeds/availability of BitTorrent. With RS I get full use of my 20mb line, download speeds average 2.2MB/s and I dont mind paying £40 a year for it.

I follow piracy cases quite closely and the focus is always on P2P like limewire or bittorrent. As has been mentioned, noone seems to care about IRC or usenet piracy. That is why I am happy using RS.

Re:captain obvious

[SleazyRidr]

I believe that's because they don't want to have too much cash sitting around making them a nice target.
 
In Australia the rule is that you don't have to give change for more than twice the value of the product. (I think it's twice, but I might be wrong.) So you can give the hot-dog salesman a hundred for your hot-dog, but he'll only give you five bucks change.

Re:captain obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

100% of the time? Maybe you've never come across a 'This file has been deleted for breach of our TOS'...

No, I haven't. But, then again, I don't try to download kiddie porn.

Re:captain obvious

[AndersOSU]

The RIAA goes after uploaders because it's easier, not because downloading is legal.

It's a bit of an open question as to who is making the copy in a upload/download arrangement, and it's pretty easy to argue either side. In order to prosecute downloaders the RIAA would essentially have to host copyright material, which they don't want to do because, first, it involves putting something they don't want copied on the web, and second, if they're hosting it, you can make a reasonable argument that what you downloaded was implicitly authorized.

Re:captain obvious

[Carnildo]

I prefer the US solution: if you want to pay your taxes in pennies, you can -- but you are the one who needs to count it and prove it's the right amount.

Re:captain obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

Netcraft confirms this.

Re:captain obvious

[Hurricane78]

No, it's NOT. Stop spreading bullshit lies that you got fed day in and day out by the media reproduction and artist extortion industries.

UPloading something you have no license to upload, is something someone can sue you for.
But downloading... what if someone claims to be a original distributor, and that he has the right to sell this to you without a license,so that you can do whatever you want with it?
That's what every uploader implicitly does.
It's not up to you to check their validity. And it's NOT EVER illegal to download something.
You must understand shit about the internet to even be able to imagine something like that being possible.
I mean, when you download something, you send a request to the other host. And THEY send you the packet. You don't "take" anything. They have to allow your request and then give it to you. It's not even your action when you get it. You just accept what's handed to you after your request.

Good luck you're an AC, because else you would get into trouble. I'd reveal your viral marketing and FUD work, and how you get payed for it. Because no free and healthy human would ever talk such an utter bullshit.

Re:captain obvious

[Hurricane78]

But: Do I care?

If some loony person comes up to you in strange 60s clothes, tells you that gravity is a lie, and the cake too, that the government has put canned laughter devices in all our brains, and that real free humans never laugh, do you believe them?

No. Of course not!! Because you know better! Your reality is stronger. Sure, you can't change theirs, because they're loonies. But you also don't care if you can. You walk past them and laugh at them.

This is the exact same thing. Don't actually buy into the talk of the crazy people!

Re:captain obvious

[JorgeFierro]

Or books, it seems.

Re:captain obvious

[countertrolling]

I did not inhale.

I did not have sex with that woman.

The snail describing being raped by the turtle: "I don't remember, it happened so fast."

xIAA loses

[lucas teh geek]

with things moving away from p2p and back to the client-server model, the number of people open to lawsuits drops dramatically. downloaders are no longer forced to upload, so they're no longer "making available", the the most they can be realistically charged with is making one copy.

Re:xIAA loses

[Anonymous Coward]

Not necessarily. In these cases, people have paid accounts to download so *all* their downloads can be tracked and aggregated for the MPAA/RIAA. Obviously they won't be in some sort of an easy RSS feed, but once you 'come to their attention,' they can then look at all of your activity.

Re:xIAA loses

[Dan541]

What makes you think the media companies are less likely to accuse you?

Re:xIAA loses

[jez9999]

Erm, but the whole weakness of the client-server model is that there's a single point of failure - the server. Napster got taken down easily. I don't care if these sites are hosting other fiels amongst illegal torrents, you better believe the MAFIAA will sue the fuck out of Rapidshare and/or they'll just remove these torrents as much as they can.

Re:xIAA loses

[Anonymous Coward]

They do, all the time, as you say, "remove these torrents" (read: they are not torrents, but normal http downloads). Many times you can follow a link and RS will say it has been removed due to copyright violation.

Should xIAA sue rapidshare, that would be a shame, but it wont legally affect me, as I have not done anything explicitly illegal.

Right

[petronije]

It was about time

Use JDownloader for file-hosting sites

[Anonymous Coward]

If you download a lot of files from one-click hosting sites like RapidShare, MegaUpload, etc., you should definitely check out JDownloader ( http://jdownloader.org/download/index ). It automates the downloading of files from several dozen sites and even has features like CAPTCHA breaking. Linux, Mac, and Windows are all supported.

Free games?

[nycguy]

You mean RapidShare has something else besides porn on it? I'm going to have to grab my other joystick!

Re:Free games?

[Anonymous Coward]

RapidShare has porn?!?

That's not new

[jeffasselin]

A lot of warez stuff has been hosted on such services for a while now, it's only more noticeable because other services are being used less.

Re:That's not new

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought that was the point of this article, that more people are going to direct download services. Not that they're doing it period, but that there's more of them.

Re:That's not new

[TheRaven64]

Definitely not news. Before peer-to-peer became a buzzword, a common way of distributing this kind of thing was to slit it into lots of rar files and upload each to a free hosting service. Things like i-drive and geocities, for example, would host things for free with something like a 10MB limit. A 100MB file would be split across ten of these sites and there'd be a web page somewhere with links to them all. The individual components had innocuous names, and the hosting companies couldn't tell that they were illegal because they couldn't decompress them without the other parts. Back then, hardly anyone had broadband, so you'd often download things by getting all of your friends to get one piece then passing a ZIP disk around to collect all of the pieces.

Re:That's not new

[moonbender]

Hosting companies could tell very easily, both because those accounts contained nothing but a bunch of 2.88 MB files with similar names and by the fact that traffic on those accounts immediately rose far beyond a normal Geocities account. The lifetime of most accounts could be measured in hours rather than days.

Re:That's not new

[Anonymous Coward]

Besides, neither bittorent, not these sites are part of the scene.

The release groups upload to topsites, which AIUI may be ftp sites, or IRC DCC shares. It is other people who create and initially seed the torrents, and upload to usenet. Similarly, I suspect that quite often, the rapidshare/megaupload versions are actually made by end users who got the file from torrent or usenet, and want to make another version available that can be used by those who without usenet access, and without the ability to use the torrent (such as really limited upload bandwidth, or an ISP that actively attempts to stop bittorrent connections, etc).

For my above post Warez is video, computer programs, largish console games (not like SNES roms), etc.

The ROMs scene, and keygen/crack scene operate somewhat differently, and the public interfaces tend to be very different. (Who would want to use torrent for a 100kB keygen?) To the best of my knowlede there is no music scene anymore, since that need is taken care of by end users with P2P apps.

The future of piracy...

[girlintraining]

They'll continue to make more and more draconian laws. In twenty years, they'll be threatening people with fifty years in the electric chair with a gerbil up their arse, and it will have done nothing to solve the problem. And between websites, new protocols, new control methods, demands to the ISPs, and all of that, the community will survive on shifting sands, always staying one step ahead of their pursuers because it takes time to legislate and administrate a response to what is inherently a social movement without any defined leaders or organizational structure. They cannot beat the economics of the situation, no matter how much technology or social control, or legal action they take: Which is that the cost of reproduction is effectively zero.

They will do everything they can to make distribution as expensive as possible, enforcing ludicrous bandwidth caps and trying to control the internet as much as they can. Eventually, it'll reach a critical point where the cost of forming a new decentralized network will become cheaper than continuing to use the old methods of communication, and the community will give birth to the successor to the internet. It's something of an irony that the internet was created on the ideas of free information exchange and ensuring that an open line of communication would always be possible between its participants turning into a profit-orientated tool by greedy corporations. But while they may someday succeed in control of the network, they will have done nothing to attack the ideals upon which it was originally built, and so long as those ideals live, it will continue to rematerialize like the goddamned phoenix, generation after generation, even as society claims to have no use for it.

Re:The future of piracy...

[Anonymous Coward]

of course, although the cost of reproduction is zero, the cost of *production* is still pretty huge for most media types, by most metrics.

if that's the way things are going, then i can only really see one possible endpoint: advertising/product-placement driven production. which is gonna suck. thanks for playing.

Re:The future of piracy...

[cdrguru]

Everything adapts. Software will be something you rent on the Internet and never resides on your computer.

Music? The situation in China has "evolved" to the point where there is no more recorded music sold (or produced). In the West check your local radio stations... what is selling there is oldies. What will continue to "sell" will be music from the previous century and the Internet will be dominated by garage bands offering stuff for free in hopes of landing a gig.

Movies? Eliminate digital distribution (DVDs) and you eliminate the problem. If it is going to be on DVD, lots of people will just download it for free. You want a theatrical release? It is going to have to be in theaters only, for years. Maybe sell DVDs years later, maybe never because once released on DVD the revenue stream ends.

User generated content? Check out YouTube for that, especially ShayTards and Magibon. This is the height of user-generated content and people are starting to discover (realize?) that it is crap. All crap, all the time. No, that isn't going to be the future of entertainment.

What most people don't understand is we've grown an entire generation that believes it all should be free and will never, ever pay. This is going to require a major adaptation that most "media" and "entertainment" isn't going to survive, but the adaptation will eventually succeed.

No, only in your fantasy will it really all be free. Someone has to pay, and patronage doesn't work. So we all have to pay for what we consume.

Re:The future of piracy...

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm, the music and movie industry are raking in cash, even in the age of mass downloads. That isn't going to change.

Re:The future of piracy...

[DentInYourHead]

You know, I'm fine with this future. A return to live experiences may be best.

Re:The future of piracy...

[amRadioHed]

What do you mean recorded music isn't sold or produced in China? I've got a handful of recent CDs from China sitting in front of me right now.

Re:The future of piracy...

[Anonymous Coward]

In twenty years, they'll be threatening people with fifty years in the electric chair with a gerbil up their arse

That's a wicked way of cooking up a gerbil (though I wonder about its taste afterwards...)

Re:The future of piracy...

[Zontar The Mindless]

Everything adapts. Software will be something you rent on the Internet and never resides on your computer.

In your dreams, and Microsoft's perhaps. On *my* computer? I think not.

Music? The situation in China has "evolved" to the point where there is no more recorded music sold (or produced).

Been to China lately? When I was there last April, I saw plenty of Chinese music for sale.

(And my gf, who is from Canton, has boatloads of the stuff.)

In the West check your local radio stations... what is selling there is oldies. What will continue to "sell" will be music from the previous century and the Internet will be dominated by garage bands offering stuff for free in hopes of landing a gig.

I'm sure these guys (whom we listen to in the office nearly every day) will be interested in learning that Miss Li sounds like she recorded her stuff in the 1920s because she actually did...?

Movies? Eliminate digital distribution (DVDs) and you eliminate the problem.

Wrong

and

Wrong.

User generated content? Check out YouTube for that, especially ShayTards and Magibon. This is the height of user-generated content and people are starting to discover (realize?) that it is crap. All crap, all the time. No, that isn't going to be the future of entertainment.

(I am going to burn in Hell for this, but...)

[citation needed]

What most people don't understand is we've grown an entire generation that believes it all should be free and will never, ever pay. This is going to require a major adaptation that most "media" and "entertainment" isn't going to survive, but the adaptation will eventually succeed.

No, only in your fantasy will it really all be free. Someone has to pay, and patronage doesn't work.

No, what we've got is a generation that views the 'Every conceivable juxtaposition of eyes/ears with content entails a licence fee' model with derision. And rightly so.

So we all have to pay for what we consume.

Please tell that to the rich folk who got that way by finding some way not to pay for something (a lot of something). Which would be most of them.

But wait -- that's what *they're* telling *you*, isn't it?

Re:The future of piracy...

[dangitman]

In twenty years, they'll be threatening people with fifty years in the electric chair with a gerbil up their arse,

I'd be surprised if they gave us the luxury of the gerbil. After all, if you're being fried on the electric chair, a rectally inserted rodent might offer some comfort and relief.

Re:The future of piracy...

[rohan972]

User generated content? All crap, all the time. No, that isn't going to be the future of entertainment.

It won't be the whole future but it's here to stay whether you like it or not. User generated content is being used as the entire basis for mainstream media content sometimes now, such as in this news story about the "wedding dance video". You are way off base if you think this type of content isn't going to have a place in mainstream entertainment.

What most people don't understand is we've grown an entire generation that believes it all should be free and will never, ever pay.

Like with free to air TV and radio? Free content is hardly a new thing, for many people a significant portion of their entertainment has been free (ad supported) content for decades.

The idea that people aren't willing to pay is a lie anyway and everyone who promotes the idea knows it. iTunes proved that. If you provide the product or service people want they will pay for it. Make paid for DRM free downloads available at the right price and most people won't bother with "pirate" sites with even minimal risk of getting caught. Just having predictable quality movie and music files will win people over on convenience over illegal downloads.

Re:The future of piracy...

[Anonymous Coward]

Your last part is probably not going to happen. A new decentralized network takes physical outlay to do. I'm sure Joe Sixpack won't be stringing a gigabit Ethernet cable from house to house. Wireless? The FCC will just methodically hunt down and squash rogue connections just like pirate radio.

The days of someone making a new app to win the cat and mouse game are slowly winding down. Virtually anything going from router to router gets logged, and any traffic that isn't obvious can just be dropped or throttled to nonexistance.

This reminds me about the early part of the century, unless you used USENET or IRC (and were able to get invites as opposed to mode +b *@*.yoursitename.com), the only way to find anything was "warez search engines". All they did was demand you vote for them, shunt you to another search and all the while try every browser hole known to get malware onto your system. Then we had file sharing networks with decent clients (which soon turned into malware infected clients). Then when those turned to crap, a standardized protocol. Now, with all the P2P throttling, we are back to download sites and lame "warez search engines" again to find not just where the program is stored, but what the RAR password for the archive is.

I hate to say it, but the big guys are winning this round, just like they took back satellite TV from the average joe with the universal card. Now HD programs from satellites and blu-ray players end up accessible to only a very few in a tight, closed circle. Similar with consoles, where PS2s still have yet to be cracked, after a number of years later.

Regular CD protection is not being cracked as easily. Splinter Cell, even years later still requires someone to physically unplug their IDE CD/DVD drives in order to get a "crack" to work. Newer StarForce games still have yet to be cracked in any meaningful fashion.

I'm sure in 3-5 years that piracy will get all but pushed to the fringes by a combination of techniques like RIAA style litigation, product activation, constant patching, CD/DVD ROM hardware with DRM hooks that work on concert with SecuROM's successor, and finally DLC, where the CD is just a stub, and the relevant content is downloaded. When technology fails, the laws will pick up. Right now, there is a lot of lobbying in US and other country governments for not just universalizing the DMCA, but the mysterious ACTA (where it will end up the law of the lands of many countries at once) which will not just require ISPs to act as policemen on their dime, but order peers to drop any packets that are not tracable to some group or person which can be held responsible for the contents.

Re:The future of piracy...

[Anonymous Coward]

Correction: Radio stations only play oldies because they only need to license 150 songs and nothing more for the life of the station. There are a lot of bands out there. Piracy in no way affects this because oldie songs are just as easily downloaded as new released.

Movies: If a movie sits in theatres without ever going to DVD, people will just not see it, and eventually someone, somewhere will cam the sucker and put it on the Internet in full 1080p HD. A lot of flicks have earned far more money on DVD release than ever in the theatres.

User generated content: Youtube is definitely in the red, and it is almost certain that most movie sites will move to a closed, subscription, pay by the minute viewed model in the future. However, people will still be putting on good content that is actually worth watching. For MMO addicts, the Guild comes to mind.

Re:The future of piracy...

[Anonymous Coward]

what part of 'the ideals' of the military-designed internet included you downloading a torrent of spiderman 3?

People here have their head so far up their ass they forget they are just cheapass arrogant thieves some days

Re:The future of piracy...

[koma77]

One word: Freenet. Freenet might just be that decentralized anonymous network you predict. The only thing is; it's been around a while.

Re:The future of piracy...

[Wildclaw]

and the Internet will be dominated by garage bands offering stuff for free in hopes of landing a gig.

And fortunately for them, people who love music will have more money to spend on going to concerts as they don't have to spend it on buying easily reproducible data.

You want a theatrical release? It is going to have to be in theaters only, for years

For years? Have you seen the numbers that the big movies take in, in the first few weeks. It is more than enough to pay for any movie. Well, at least when the people producing it are working at normal salaries. Especially when people don't have to spend as much money on DVDs, so they can afford to go to the theater.

What most people don't understand is we've grown an entire generation that believes it all should be free and will never, ever pay

Your whole post is based on lies. Entertainment spending hasn't been going down as piracy has gone up. At most it has shifted a bit between the different entertainment industries. So tell me, why should I take you, or the entertainment company executives who claim much the same, seriously.

Re:The future of piracy...

[maxume]

I see two possible explanations: You ruined the assertion by actually checking, or he is using hyperbole to describe a situation where very little music is produced and recorded per capita.

Re:The future of piracy...

[Totenglocke]

What most people don't understand is we've grown an entire generation that believes it all should be free and will never, ever pay.

No, what we have is a generation that believe it should all be reasonably priced .

So much media today has ridiculously inflated costs just because the MPAA / RIAA / Microsoft / Apple CAN increase the cost. That's why I pretty much never buy music anymore (I virtually never pirate music) and I simply listen to the stuff I have - occasionally I hear something worth buying and pick it up, but at most that's 2-3 cd's a year. I do collect movies, so I still buy dvd's, but I always find them for the lowest price possible and or use rewards certificates / coupons to buy them. Software is pretty much like music, I rarely buy any new stuff. However, with Microsoft, I don't feel bad in the slightest when I pirate their stuff (the only company I pirate from). Why? Because they charge about 2-3 times what the product should actually cost. $100 for Windows or for Office is perfectly fine. $350 for Windows 7 Ultimate is bullshit, plain and simple.

Re:The future of piracy...

[BenoitRen]

No, what we've got is a generation that views the 'Every conceivable juxtaposition of eyes/ears with content entails a licence fee' model with derision. And rightly so.

That may be what you and a sizable group of people think, but the reality is that most people just want media for free, especially this generation's teenagers. It's gotten to the point that they don't understand why they should pay for something if they can just download it for free. There is no ideal involved at all.

Re:The future of piracy...

[BenoitRen]

The idea that people aren't willing to pay is a lie anyway and everyone who promotes the idea knows it.

Most teenagers I talk to don't understand why they should pay for anything if they can download it for free. All iTunes proved is that people may be willing to pay if the price is very, very low, and the content gets delivered to their virtual door.

If it's about a video game sold in their retail stores, they won't think twice about downloading it.

Re:The future of piracy...

[rohan972]

Most teenagers I talk to don't understand why they should pay for anything if they can download it for free.

Most of the boys I knew in primary school wanted to be policemen or firemen. Taking informal surveys of the views of teenagers doesn't tell you much about how society is going to be in the future.

All iTunes proved is that people may be willing to pay if the price is very, very low, and the content gets delivered to their virtual door.

The price on iTunes is not very low, it only seems that way because you pay by the song instead of the album. Even if the price goes down that's quite normal with the advance of technology, otherwise why bother with progress? We pay for internet connections to get content right to our homes, of course consumer demand is affected by that. You think we should saddle up our horses and ride to town for our music? What are you thinking?

If it's about a video game sold in their retail stores, they won't think twice about downloading it.

If enough people think that way either the business model will change or those games won't be produced any more. One way or another it won't last, don't lose any sleep over it (unless you are a games developer staying up late working on your new business model).

Re:The future of piracy...

[Anonymous Coward]

"So we all have to pay for what we consume."
Including major content providers, like Disney? For all their major catalog items? Including the remake of existing popular tales, without paying a dime to the original writer, then copyrighting the story to prevent others to do the same?

Re:The future of piracy...

[BenoitRen]

Taking informal surveys of the views of teenagers doesn't tell you much about how society is going to be in the future.

It certainly says something about now.

The price on iTunes is not very low, it only seems that way because you pay by the song instead of the album.

Be that as it may, the illusion of it being cheaper worked.

You think we should saddle up our horses and ride to town for our music?

There's still the postal service to deliver the content home. What's wrong with leaving the house, anyway? A breath of fresh air is nice.

If enough people think that way either the business model will change or those games won't be produced any more. One way or another it won't last, don't lose any sleep over it (unless you are a games developer staying up late working on your new business model).

The problem with that is that some of us like our games on physical media that we can just insert into our game console or PC. When it's transferred over the wire, you have to manage that data yourself and eventually buy more storage media.

Re:The future of piracy...

[h4rm0ny]

either the business model will change or those games won't be produced any more. One way or another it won't last, don't lose any sleep over it (unless you are a games developer staying up late working on your new business model).

Or if, you know, you want games to be produced because you like them (or big budget movies, or mainstream music, or novels, or whatever).

Re:The future of piracy...

[rohan972]

Or if, you know, you want games to be produced because you like them (or big budget movies, or mainstream music, or novels, or whatever).

No need to lose sleep, just pay. Like most people do, those are still multi-billion dollar industries you know, even though OMG the evil PIRATES are coming!!!

Re:The future of piracy...

[rohan972]

Taking informal surveys of the views of teenagers doesn't tell you much about how society is going to be in the future.

It certainly says something about now.

Not much. The purchasing power of teens isn't exactly the biggest sector of the economy.

Be that as it may, the illusion of it being cheaper worked.

It's not an illusion, it's sold in smaller amounts. Go to a bottle shop and check the price on one beer compared to a carton. People haven't been fooled by this, it's just preferable to purchase in smaller amounts sometimes, even at a higher price/unit.

If you seriously think people should forgo online distribution because it's nice to get outside then there's no point discussing this with you further. I mean, it's nice to go outside, so why not make a spear and hunt your own meat?

Re:The future of piracy...

[h4rm0ny]

No need to lose sleep, just pay.

So I pay US$40 for something whilst for everyone of us that does another three people who would have bought it if they had to rip it off for free? In theory, that game should have cost each of us US$10.

Re:The future of piracy...

[BenoitRen]

If you seriously think people should forgo online distribution because it's nice to get outside then there's no point discussing this with you further. I mean, it's nice to go outside, so why not make a spear and hunt your own meat?

Nice hyperbole. Well played, sir.

Re:The future of piracy...

[RogerWilco]

Very well put.

I think that most under the age of 35-40 will have grown up in a world where copying was cheap, if not free, and the lines around copyright got blurred. If the industry really plugs all the loopholes at some point, in a few years time the people who have come to expect not to always pay for copyrighted material will be a very large electoral force, and will end up forcing legislative change.
It will take a few more years, but then the dinosaurs will find that it's the politicians themselves who "get it" and no longer support their outdated business model.

We will need to move from a system where the rules revolve around the rights to copy, to a system where authoring a new creative piece gives rights in a whole new manner. From copyright to authorright if you will. I don't think we should completely get rid of the notion of rewarding authors of original works, but we need something entirely new.

Re:The future of piracy...

[Anonymous Coward]

You have a girlfriend? Oh wait, if she's asian I can buy that. I like how you say "boatloads" too.

Re:The future of piracy...

[rohan972]

If more people buy it will not reduce the price you've paid. Other people downloading should not determine your behaviour, just what you think is right or wrong, or in absence of a moral issue, what you think is the best action to take.

Re:The future of piracy...

[Reverend Jeckel]

I can't remember a single instance of any media provider lowering their price because alot of people bought a product. The only time I've seen a price go down is when no one is buying it. I know plenty of people that download all their media, I know alot of people the buy all their media, and I even know some people the download -> try -> buy if good, but I can't say I know anyone that downloads content instead of buying it. Basicly, most people are going to buy a product if they can, and if they are going to pirate it then they wern't ever going to buy. Obviously not true for all people, but true for the most part and either way, no one is losing any money because of it.

Re:The future of piracy...

[h4rm0ny]

but I can't say I know anyone that downloads content instead of buying it

I find that very hard to believe. I can name at least five of my friends who do without even having to think about it. You surely aren't arguing that people don't download music, movies, books instead of buying them? If you are arguing that, then I think you are really only seeing what you want to see.

Re:The future of piracy...

[h4rm0ny]

Posted before finishing. I meant to say that if you are arguing that this is a rare exception that doesn't impact sales, then you are really seeing only what will support your view, not what is there.

Re:The future of piracy...

[rohan972]

Glad you liked it. My mum always said I had nice hyperbole.

This makes perfect sense

[Ralph Spoilsport]

RapidShare will supplant BitTorrent, as the former appear better protected legally.

RS et al is more than happy to take down anything determined to be a violation of copyright. PirateBay et al stood up and said "fuck off". This doesn't jive with the workflow IP capital demands under the DMCA. Yes, the DMCA is a parochial piece of shit that is only enforceable in the states, but given the size and power of the USA system and its networks, it only makes sense to appease the DMCA as it is the more restrictive of the nationalist bullshit rules re: IP copyright.

RS, mediafire, and others will take down stuff when someone complains. Hence, by "killing its own" it becomes much more resilient, as one gets the whack-a-mole effect, but with this major structural difference: with pirate Bay / napster etc. when the system is brought down, resurrecting or building a new network is very time consuming and difficult. with the RS/megaupload/mediafire/etc. model, they own they field on which whack-a-mole is played. So by letting the rights holders chase the pirates, RS et al get to profit on the churn.

The next thing will be blogs dedicated to software with links to DLs of the stuff in RS et al, similar to music blogs now, and then a master system to search it all, similar to chewbone.

RS

Re:This makes perfect sense

[buchner.johannes]

RS, mediafire, and others will take down stuff when someone complains.

Maybe, but it is still a "Bat a rat" game with an apathic player. You will never get all copies across multiple hosters.

Re:This makes perfect sense

[JoelRodz]

Personally I've already seen Forums used to post links of RS or MU. I've even seen Twitter linking to a blogger's site which contains the URLs in text files!

This is already being done... its just not as mainstream as one would think.

Re:This makes perfect sense

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't matter. Producers will put advertisements in their products no matter what; either they can make X from selling their product traditionally, or they can make X+Y selling their product with embedded advertising. Even if X decreases slightly because of the blatant advertising, Y usually makes up for it.

Re:This makes perfect sense

[Anonymous Coward]

There are dozens of RapidShare search sites out there, so the "next thing" has been going on for months or even years. Most of those sites come with a giant helping of suck, though. When a decent one surfaces, it will be attacked by the copyright mafia for "linking to evil things and being a nasty thief", and the whole thing begins again.

Except for the technology powering the network, The Pirate Bay did exactly the same thing, link to some files in some network. These RapidShare search sites link to files inside RapidShare. The only difference is the whack-a-mole game as you say, which is possible with RS but not BitTorrent.

Re:This makes perfect sense

[Anonymous Coward]

The next thing will be blogs dedicated to software with links to DLs of the stuff in RS et al, similar to music blogs now, and then a master system to search it all, similar to chewbone.

They already exist... www.filestube.com

Re:This makes perfect sense

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems to me it's pretty darn mainstream. "Rapidshare" as a google search returns 175,000,000 hits. That's LARGE. And the third link is a rapidshare search engine.

Re:This makes perfect sense

[Anonymous Coward]

"Yes, the DMCA is a parochial piece of shit that is only enforceable in the states"

Well, the former is right. As for the latter though - the free trade agreement between Australia and the US in 2003 (or 2004) had a DMCA clause shoved somewhere in the middle of it, so now we effectively have the same law shoehorned into our legal system, albeit without consultation of the Australia people (hell, few people would have noticed it before the legislation went through and not many more would be aware of it and its implications now).

It probably wouldn't be too presumptuous to assume that Australia isn't the only country to have DMCA-style legislation sneak into its legal system via treaties ostensibly designed to allow of other things like this - so it's enforceable in the states, in Australia, probably Canada and Mexico via NAFTA, and quite possibly the UK and other European nations. And anywhere else where the politicians are to stupid to read the fine print/grasp the implications or too apathic to care.

Re:This makes perfect sense

[Anonymous Coward]

The next thing will be blogs dedicated to software with links to DLs of the stuff in RS et al, similar to music blogs now, and then a master system to search it all, similar to chewbone.

this is already in full swing. Not only are there forums dedicated to all manner of RS data (music, video, games) but as you mention there are also blogs. Just google "[name of HD movie or PC game] rapidshare -torrent" and you will see how abundant it is.

Another thing that is interesting is that because RS limits uploads to 200mb per file, almost all files are archived in such a manner (using WinRAR mainly) with each archive carrying a cryptic name containing the title and the name of the group that released it (for example, the new Need for Speed: shift game, cracked by Reloaded, will look something like nfss-RLD.part1.rar) thereby not making it clear exactly what is cointained within the link, unless you see the context the link is posted in (such as, on a forum, closed to the public, in a post containing the game's cover and description).

Ideas

[robvangelder]

I wish that TV Shows were available on Rapidshare legit. The download speeds are great, and I would definitely pay $1 per episode.

Re:Ideas

[Tacvek]

Rapidshare would not the right right site for this. Legitimate content would be downloadbale only through things like the iTunes store.

The other alternative is streaming sites. Threre are three models for streaming sites.

Streaming with ads. Most of the legal online streaming is of this sort. Simply goto Hulu.com and search for the show you want. If hulu has it will show up. If hulu does not have it, but the network's own website has it, it will give a link. Some of the sites have amazing image quality.[1]

Pay per video. I've not actually seen many serious proposals for a site using this model.

Monthy fee for unlimited: Netflix's steaming service uses this model, although mostly in the movies catagory, which for some reason, people seem to treat very differently.

The problem with all models of streaming is that they don't work unless they have a sufficently wide selection. One of the biggest complaints about Netflix's streaming video service is that compared to Netflix's main business, the selection is pretty limited. If you feel like watching some specific movie right now (that has reached DVD), you can't really depend on it being available. On the other hand, with the main service, just about every movie out there is availble. People like to be able to know that virtually whatever you want is available. That is one of the great benefits of the iTunes store. Although there are a few exceptions, just about every song commerically released in the past 10 years or more is present. You hear a song on the radio, and you can be almost certain it is availble on iTunes. That is what the video sites are missing.

But back to the video sites. The ad supported ones not only don't have as much selection as they should, but the videos are often available only for a limited amount of time. So you can't just go back and watch the back episodes of a show you stumbled upon while flipping channels, and decided you liked. Most of this seems to be due to executive decisions based on not wanting to hurt DVD sales, or alienate TV stations that might want to pick the show up for syndication. (This would be syndication of back episodes while the series is still going, as opposed to rerun syndication of concluded shows, or syndication of gameshows, soap operas, talkshows, and other shows with potentialy unlimited number of seasons).

The best chance for a good legal streaming Television show site would probably be a monthly subscription site, that has deals in place for all the major networks, and on the day of launch has all primetime[2] shows currently airing on all networks with full back catalogs, and deals in the works for many concluded programs. That would be an enormous undertaking, as hundreds of contracts might need to be renegotiated to make room for such a site. So this is not likely to hapen for a while, but I'm still hopeful.

[1] Notable is abc.com, which uses a dynamic quality system, that adjusts the quality based on how far ahead you are with downloading, so you get the highest quality you can without having the video stop to buffer. The highest quality streams of those videos rival the quality of the 5 episodes 42 minutes long on 1 DVD format.

[2] Here I am excluding game shows, talk shows, game operas, news programs, and soaps, even if they air during primtime, and am including other first-run programming similar to most primetime shows, even if they are being aired outside of primetime. The excluded shows may or may not be present at all. (It is very unlikely anybody wants to watch yesterday's Good Morning America.) Those that are present may have only limited and potentially rolling back episodes. It might be nice to have a few back episodes of Price is Right, but there is little interest in going back much firther than 5 or so. I'd imagine there is more interest in old episodes of "Spiderman: The Animated Series" then there is in old Survivor Season 1 episodes, or old Season 30 episodes of "As the World Turns".

List of warez ftp sites... regularly updated

[DNS-and-BIND]

List of warez ftp sites... regularly updated.

General information on accessing these sites:

• Some sites are slow, down, whatever. Try again later.
• These sites use advanced authentication methods, such as reverse authentication look-up to local FTP daemon. Anonymous might not allways work if the address that you're coming from doesn't look 3l33+ enough, you might have to use your own userid and password. Also, disabling or enabling a proxy might help.
• Also, simple PC's with Wind0wz are also totally off the limits. Go to your shell account and use a real operating systems. L4m3rs without multitasking can't get in.

Re:List of warez ftp sites... regularly updated

[gzipped_tar]

I particularly like the jokes such as "ftp://0x7f000001/" there ;)

For those who don't get it, they're the localhost address in hex, dec and oct representations.

Re:List of warez ftp sites... regularly updated

[ultimad]

Also, simple PC's with Wind0wz are also totally off the limits. Go to your shell account and use a real operating systems. L4m3rs without multitasking can't get in.

That gave me today's dose of laugh! Considering 90% of warez are applications and games designed for Windows, it's amusing that users with that OS are not allowed!

Re:List of warez ftp sites... regularly updated

[DNS-and-BIND]

It was a joke...that web page is from 1995 or so. You couldn't do anything from a Windows 3.1 box on SLIP dialup. I didn't expect it to get +5 Informative...I was planning on +5 Funny, but go figure.

Re:List of warez ftp sites... regularly updated

[Kjella]

Sometimes the moderators have a sense of humor too, they're modding it so others will be fooled. Plus you get free karma, so no reason to complain.

Re:List of warez ftp sites... regularly updated

[Ifni]

They forgot one of the best:

ftp://warez.waldo.net

Re:List of warez ftp sites... regularly updated

[ring-eldest]

Yes, now just tell us your password so that we can add that karma to your account... We have an automatic system for it but it's on the fritz. You know. Sunspots.

Re:List of warez ftp sites... regularly updated

[Anonymous Coward]

Not all of those point to loopback. Some haven't since 95. The first random one I tried wasn't a loopback address and I vaguely remember sending him nasty email back then that I thought he was a lowlife trying to scam passwords. To me the "you need a multitasking OS" comment meant he was attempting to steal shell accounts, hence the nasty email. Never got a reply. There used to be many people dumb enough and trusting enough to fall for something like this. The me too comments on usenet are proof enough of that.

Re:List of warez ftp sites... regularly updated

[Kjella]

It's hunter2

All things old...

[blue l0g1c]

What? You can get warez somewhere other than newsgroups? My lawn...get off it!

Re:All things old...

[voodoowizard]

For me, the death of dial up with a free newsgroup service killed it. Now I have to pay...? Bah, screw that, why pay when... ah never mind.

Re:All things old...

[RedK]

Newsgroups ? Son, dedicated line BBS with courrier service for some 7-day Warez is the way it is.

Re:All things old...

[Mashiki]

Pft. Who uses a BBS? I'm still trading floppy disks on a non-viable format. Speaking of which I need to get going, and take these 38,000 5.25" disks to the next person.

Newsgroups

[Frogbert]

To preempt any discussion about newsgroups please read the following before posting:

Do not talk about fucking newsgroups, we have a good thing going here, don't fuck it up.

Re:Newsgroups

[blue l0g1c]

Gotcha by a minute!

Re:Newsgroups

[Anonymous Coward]

And I got you by six.

Re:Newsgroups

[mako1138]

I've felt for a while that download sites are the new [redacted], except they're accessible over a different protocol. A "premium account" is a subscription, more or less.

Re:Newsgroups

[Anonymous Coward]

You're kidding right? The FBI, BSA, RIAA, and anyone else who cares about copyright infringement has known about binaries on Usenet for at least a decade.

It's the low volume of users that prevents lawsuits.

Re:Newsgroups

[0100010001010011]

Given they haven't paid attention for the last 20 years, somehow I don't think they're going to start.

Yes BT was 100% free. And I was against paying for anything. But with that of which we do not speak, TV and Movies are closer to VOD. My cable company just upgraded me to 1.4MB/s... I can get a 30 minute TV show in 3 minutes. I can get a whole movie in 10-15, enough time to pop popcorn and get settled in. It's well worth the $11 I spend on it.

Re:Newsgroups

[ewolfr]

$11/mo? You must be using Astraweb as well. Good choice.

Re:Newsgroups

[kristopher]

Started with 11/mo, now 96/yr.

Re:Newsgroups

[Anonymous Coward]

Astraweb is a terrible choice.
Those fuckers are polluting usenet.
Most large scale postings to astraweb gets article-id's mixed up with other unrelated posts on transfer to other usenet providers.

The effect being that everything looks great on astraweb, but any posts made to astraweb are really fucked up if downloaded from any other usenet provider.
It has become so bad that the author of newsbin has added extra code in the beta releases specifically to detect such "spoofed" article-ids and not download them (which is better than silently downloading them and assuming they are good until par2repair says otherwise).

I'm surprised that the other big usenet providers have not banned together and 'shunned' astraweb for feeding them bad data because otherwise there is nearly zero incentive for astraweb to fix their problem (so far they've blamed it on hackers and left it unfixed for about a year).

That $11/month pricing won't last if astraweb's negligence causes their competitors to lose customers and fold. It would be one thing if they were competing on quality, but they aren't, they are sabotaging the competition instead.

Re:Newsgroups

[RoboRay]

"It's the low volume of users that prevents lawsuits."

Actually, I'm pretty sure it's the inability to monitor downloads and the ease of forging headers for the uploaders.

Re:Newsgroups

[trytoguess]

Please every bittorrent site I've been to mentions Usenet. You're just way WAY too late my friend.

Re:Newsgroups

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do people always say this? Most people who seriously pirate know about usenet, and most of us choose not to use it.

I showed a few bittorrent sites to my friend who uses usenet, and he was extremely impressed. I get the same download speeds as him (maxes out my connection), but the selection and quality is far better if you know where to look.

The tradeoff is on usenet you pay, on bittorrent you seed what you download.

Re:Newsgroups

[Draek]

I believe the GP was trying to keep the w4r3z kiddies away, rather than the RIAA goons. You know, to avoid a second Eternal September.

Re:Newsgroups

[Anonymous Coward]

Try saturating a 50mbps download link 24x7 on anything but the most popular torrents - meanwhile this usenet thing can do that just fine without exposing my ip address to anyone else besides the usenet provider.

Re:Newsgroups

[Anonymous Coward]

So shut the fuck up

Re:Newsgroups

[Anonymous Coward]

To preempt any discussion about newsgroups

Who cares about newsgroups? They've been irrelevant for the past decade or so when it comes to file-sharing, unless you're a pedo.

Re:Newsgroups

[Anonymous Coward]

You obviously know nothing about usenet at all.

The lifecycle of pirated software is nearly always:

Original (often physical) source -> Private Warez FTPs/Darknets -> Public Usenet -> BitTorrent

If it's on bittorrent, it's on usenet, because most torrents are posted from copies leeched from usenet as their source anyway. This is why say, when new TV releases come out, they're never on even private torrent trackers until a few hours after they've been on usenet.

It sounds more that you don't actually know how to find stuff on usenet, because you can be rest assured, it's there. Regarding it maxing out your connection, you're probably right if you're using private trackers with mandated upload speeds, but you're also ignoring the added overheads in the bittorrent protocol which means you have to transfer noticable more overall than someone downloading from usenet, this is particularly the case if a chunk gets corrupted. It's also likely you're not on a terribly fast connection if you're maxing it out either. It's rare even on private trackers to see anything over 10mbps get maxed out consistently throughout a whole transfer.

Oh... and you better hope no one on the tracker is making a note of your IP address either, as that's all it takes to get hit by a court summons in some countries, whilst usenet is much better protected legally.

Or to put this post another way, there's absolutely zero benefit to bittorrent over usenet.

Re:Newsgroups

[Anonymous Coward]

Incorrect, the best bit torrent sites are mostly full of original material. These are sites with communities - something you will almost never find on usenet.

March Hare:

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it the time already? Hatter will be mad, I'm so late...

Re:March Hare:

[pecila]

Then you might know why is a raven like a writing desk?

Re:March Hare:

[Anonymous Coward]

Because they both use Rapids-hare?

And he's wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

"V.I. Labs' CEO predicts file-hosting sites such as RapidShare will supplant BitTorrent, as the former appear better protected legally."

As a former courier from the mid to late 90's, most of the "good" shit will be found underground, on unlisted boards. All the releases you see on IRC or where ever are 1/10th of what you see on the private servers.

Agreed

[mister_playboy]

JDownloader has really come into its own over the last few months. Older versions were prone to errors, dropped links and excessive CPU usage, but the current version does very well. As the program has grown, it also keeps up much better with changes in hoster page layout (which can break downloads).

Re:xxxxgroups

[networkzombie]

The first rule of xxxxxx is DON'T TALK ABOUT XXXXXX

Re:Usenet anyone?

[mister_playboy]

Usenet is not particularly useful unless you spend money. File hosting services are generally quite usable for free (granted, I don't have a big download pipe, so I can still max it out with the free options.) Bittorrent is 100% usable without spending money.

I understand the arguments in favor of Usenet, but the truth is the competing services are way better when your main goal is to spend no money at all.

Re:xxxxgroups

[Anonymous Coward]

The first rule of xxxxxx is DON'T TALK ABOUT XXXXXX

Of course not. You just post the porn and you don't discuss it. Else it gets kinda creepy.

And six-X porn? Seriously, that just seems unnecessary.

The first rule of usenet

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that YOU DO NOT TALK ABOUT USENET.

The second rule of Usenet is that YOU DO NOT TALK ABOUT USENET.

Re:The first rule of usenet

[Anonymous Coward]

The third rule of Usenet is that is costs lots of money and is a major pain to download anything from if you could ever find anything that you wanted. So everyone should just forget about waiting time with Usenet.

Oh and rule four, you don't talk about Usenet.

Re:The first rule of usenet

[shutdown -p now]

The third rule of Usenet is that you can actually talk about Usenet. But only on Usenet.

Re:The first rule of usenet

[Anonymous Coward]

You are doing it wrong

Re:The first rule of usenet

[MartinSchou]

1st RULE: You do not talk about USENET.

2nd RULE: You DO NOT talk about USENET.

3rd RULE: If someone says "stop" or throws up, passes out the post is over.

4th RULE: Only two girls to a cup.

5th RULE: One tubgirl at a time.

6th RULE: No shirts, no shoes.

7th RULE: Flame wars will go on as long as they have to.

8th RULE: If this is your first night at USENET, you HAVE to goatse.

Re:The first rule of usenet

[stumblingblock]

Rule 5: Don't talk about .nzb files.

Re:The first rule of usenet

[Inda]

Awww, you could have hit comedy gold with a bit a thought.

Surely 8th is "If this is your first login, you have to upload" or "if this is your first supscription, you must download all headers"

6th RULE: No Outlook Express, No Grabit.

how are they better protected?

[Punto]

Rapidshare is a central source, that stores the actual illegal data, and even charges money for it. How are they better protected than "bittorrent", which is not even a real target? Apart from the "activism" side of it, nobody gives two shits about The Pirate Bay being shot down. Anyone can setup a webserver in their basement that serves a bunch of links, but who can recreate rapidshare if it goes down?

Re:how are they better protected?

[petronije]

Rapidshare will not go down because they remove the copyrighted files promptly - as soon as they are notified.

Re:how are they better protected?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm guessing it's the downloaders who are better protected.

You can download without broadcasting it back to anyone who requests it (including the **AA).

Re:how are they better protected?

[shentino]

I wonder how long the pirate bay would survive if they were in the USA...

Which would happen first? Being drained of content by DMCA takedowns or being shut down by the feds?

Re:how are they better protected?

[Dan541]

If they were in the USA the MPAA would probably sentence them to life in prison.

Re:how are they better protected?

[Punto]

thus making it completely useless for piracy

Warez Scene

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually the true scene of "pirates" is still going strong oldskool on FTP servers.
Nothing much has changed in years there.

Re:Warez Scene

[Bazman]

Didn't the real 'leet guys switch to FSP in about ooh, 1876, to get round all the problems with FTP - no resumptions, security holes, up/down quotas etc?

Re:Warez Scene

[petrus4]

Actually, the true scene of "pirates" is still going strong oldskool on FTP servers. Nothing much has changed in years there.

Darknets, you mean? Bedroom 0day FTPs stopped being advertised on IRC at least, years ago.

Re:Usenet anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

Right that's why I download about a terabyte a month from usenet.

Hacker's Manifesto

[JoelRodz]

This reminds me of the famous Hacker's Manifesto!

People will just keep finding other means to manifest themselves.

"This is our world now... the world of the electron and the switch, we explore... We seekafter knowledge... We exist without skin color,without nationality, without religious bias... You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to usand try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals. You may stop this individual,but you can't stop us all... "

Warez Scene

[Ziekheid]

Actually, the true scene of "pirates" is still going strong oldskool on FTP servers. Nothing much has changed in years there.

Can we stop calling it "piracy" already?

[linuxhansl]

"Piracy" is a clever term coined by the music and file industry to associate file copying directly with stealing.

Existing information is replicated or copied nothing more and nothing less.
That may not be legal by current law, and there might be an "opportunity loss" for the content owner, but that is not "piracy" nor is it "stealing".

"Illegal content replication" just doesn't sound as snazzy and dirty as "piracy".

Re:Can we stop calling it "piracy" already?

[MagusSlurpy]

Frankly, I prefer hearing myself called a "pirate," versus a "copyright-infringing content replicator."

Not as cool as being called a ninja, but I'll take what I can get.

Re:Can we stop calling it "piracy" already?

[petronije]

How about "Forger"? Although the definition is a bit different: "Forgery: The creation of a false written document or alteration of a genuine one, with the intent to defraud."

Re:Can we stop calling it "piracy" already?

[Zerth]

Piracy was coined by book publishers in the 17th century in response to what happened when they failed to produce cheap books instead of expensive ones.

It isn't new.

Re:Can we stop calling it "piracy" already?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can we be patriots?

Re:Can we stop calling it "piracy" already?

[DAldredge]

Wrong. For electronic and audio-visual media, unauthorized reproduction and distribution is also commonly referred to as piracy (an early reference was made by Daniel Defoe in 1703 when he said of his novel True-born Englishman : "Its being Printed again and again, by Pyrates"[2]). The practice of labeling the act of infringement as "piracy" actually predates copyright itself. Even prior to the 1709 enactment of the Statute of Anne, generally recognized as the first copyright law, the Stationers' Company of London in 1557 received a Royal Charter giving the company a monopoly on publication and tasking it with enforcing the charter. Those who violated the charter were labeled pirates as early as 1603 From wikipedia

Re:Can we stop calling it "piracy" already?

[Anonymous Coward]

So how do you classify Robin Hood???

Think about third world countries where they earn couple bucks per month and windows still costs a couple hundred.
If only MS adjusted their prices so it was reasonable for these guys there would be no 'illegal' software and their user base would be around 4 billions.

On the same note don't see reasons for this happening in US.

Re:Can we stop calling it "piracy" already?

[Spewns]

How about "Forger"? Although the definition is a bit different: "Forgery: The creation of a false written document or alteration of a genuine one, with the intent to defraud."

How about a term that's neutral and doesn't play into corporate propaganda and agenda?

Re:Can we stop calling it "piracy" already?

[brit74]

"Piracy" is a clever term coined by the music and file industry to associate file copying directly with stealing.

You may be interested to know that "piracy" is also a term used by the cable and satellite-TV companies to refer to using their signal without paying them. Do you really think companies are going to spend $50 million or $100 million dollars putting satellites up into the sky if the whole world says, "I don't have to pay you; but I get all the channels for free"?

Existing information is replicated or copied nothing more and nothing less.

And if everyone treats cable piracy (or music piracy, or software piracy) as a non-crime, then why shouldn't everyone do it? The ultimate end-point of "companies provide a service + you won't pay them for it" is "you don't get the service anymore".

That may not be legal by current law, and there might be an "opportunity loss" for the content owner, but that is not "piracy" nor is it "stealing".

It's as much stealing as not paying your doctor or your plumber for work performed. Sure, you can claim "I didn't take anything physical from you, therefore, you aren't actually losing anything when I don't pay you", but work needs to be done, you want the benefits of that work, but you balk at paying for it. Piracy creates an unsustainable situation which results in people not getting paid for their work, even though you want the benefits of that work. How long do you think people are going to "volunteer" their time and effort just so you can benefit without giving anything back?

Re:Can we stop calling it "piracy" already?

[Anonymous Coward]

How do you forge a bit? Isn't that like forging an electron, the number 3 or a number with 100,000 digits? Will the real bit stand up!? I claim that the RIAA's/News Limited's bits are the forgery and that mine are the genuine article.

Re:Can we stop calling it "piracy" already?

[rohan972]

It's as much stealing as not paying your doctor or your plumber for work performed. Sure, you can claim "I didn't take anything physical from you, therefore, you aren't actually losing anything when I don't pay you", but work needs to be done, you want the benefits of that work, but you balk at paying for it.

The doctor and plumber's time is limited, number of copies of digital media isn't, so it's a bad analogy. Not to justify copyright infringement as I agree that copyrights are a good thing, but it isn't at all the same as stealing. Consider the situation with MS Windows. While they would prefer that people buy it instead of copy it, they prefer people to pirate windows than use a competing product. Can you think of any seller of a tangible product that would prefer you to steal their product than use a competitor's product? Stealing doesn't work like that.

While I agree with the concept of copyright, the constant extension of copyright terms, lobbying for draconian legislation, deliberate public misinformation programs and abuse of the court system by copyright holders is far worse than what the "pirates" are doing and was happening long before copyright infringement became commonplace. I oppose any measures in support of that industry until they demonstrate their willingness to clean up their own act first. Until then, if the pirates destroy their businesses I will be cheering from the sidelines. Vote for the pirate party.

Re:Can we stop calling it "piracy" already?

[Anonymous Coward]

The use of the term piracy for this purpose was coined 400 years ago (of course it was copying books back then)

How many 400 year old terms do you wish to abandon?

Re:Can we stop calling it "piracy" already?

[dkf]

How do you forge a bit? Isn't that like forging an electron, the number 3 or a number with 100,000 digits?

Don't be silly. Forging bits is a bit like forging ink drops: nonsense. But money and documents can be forged nonetheless, and so can forging of digital entities (e.g., forging a digital signature).

OTOH, the issue isn't creating a new recording and claiming it is a real one (which is what forging is about) but rather unauthorized creation of perfect copies of a real entity. There's no attempt to pretend that it is authentic (or otherwise).

Re:Can we stop calling it "piracy" already?

[qwertyatwork]

I pirate would totally kick a ninjas ass. Even if the ninja did kill the pirate, the global warming that would come would kill all the ninjas. So no matter how it ends, the ninjas wouldn't survive.

Re:Can we stop calling it "piracy" already?

[rohan972]

Pirates have the rum. As an Aussie, I feel it is my patriotic duty to side with the pirates.

Re:Can we stop calling it "piracy" already?

[Anonymous Coward]

If anything that's the worst thing we can do- support the media industry's campaign to paint piracy as some negative thing.

If you allow negative connotations of words to persist and be used against you then you're not going to get anywhere, the real solution is to turn the accepted norm for a word into a positive thing. If you put aside artificial emotions and look objectively at terms like "Paki" which are seen as offensive, then look at terms like "Brit" to which most people would respond they're proud and you can see what a farce continuing a taboo on such terms is. If someone of Pakistani origin really wants to stop someone using the word paki as an insult, the correct response is not "OMG you're so racist", it's "Yep, and I'm damn proud of my origin"- just as the Brits would when called "Brits" in the same manner.

Realistically, I'm not even sure piracy or being a pirate is seen by joe average as a bad thing. Between the fact most people almost certainly actually are "pirates" in the music industry's sense of the word, and the fact that even the movie industry's own creations like pirates of the carribean have actually popularised the image of pirates, coupled with the fact most people are amazed at how a bunch of somalians in crapped out wooden boats are managing to keep screwing the rest of the world in the fact of patrols from the combined might of the world's largest navies including China's, Russia's, America's, Britain's, France's and so on and pirates actually have a pretty good rep. as the small guy being able to stand up against the man.

Sorry, but I'm a pirate and I'm proud of it. I'll keep calling myself such and allowing the word to spread and flourish thank you very much. I've yet to meet anyone in real life who if you told them you were a pirate would think of it as "dirty", on the contrary, many see it as a medal of honour.

If you really want to do everyone a favour, then please, stop continuing the music industries farcical campaign of tying piracy to a negative connotation and join everyone else in supporting the positive connotations of pirates being people who can stand up to large organisations.

Re:Can we stop calling it "piracy" already?

[brit74]

The doctor and plumber's time is limited, number of copies of digital media isn't, so it's a bad analogy.

It takes time to create digitial media, and the people who make it have limited time. Copyright enables a group of people to collectively pay for the work of the creator. It's not such a bad analogy.

Consider the situation with MS Windows. While they would prefer that people buy it instead of copy it, they prefer people to pirate windows [itwire.com] than use a competing product.

Two problems with that argument.

First: Operating Systems serve as foundations for software developers. People buy operating systems based on the amount of software available for the OS, and software developers write software for platforms where the users are. This creates a self-reinforcing cycle. So operating systems naturally tend towards monopolistic patterns. Microsoft doesn't want people to break out of that cycle because they're on top. Most digital media is not in that situation.

Second: people claim that companies benefit from piracy, but there's something very bizarre in the whole calculation when piracy goes to 100%. If piracy of MS Windows went to 100%, then Microsoft wouldn't be much of a beneficiary. At best, they could charge for consulting and could maybe steer users towards certain products, but most digital media creators aren't in that situation, either.

Even Lawrence Lessig (a piracy advocate, and who I disagree with on a lot of things) says the Microsoft Windows case is a bad example to use when thinking about piracy and whether it has benefits. Here's what Lessig - a piracy advocate - says in his book:

"Finally, we could try to excuse this piracy with the argument that the piracy actually helps the copyright owner. When the Chinese “steal” Windows, that makes the Chinese dependent on Microsoft. Microsoft loses the value of the software that was taken. But it gains users who are used to life in the Microsoft world. Over time, as the nation grows more wealthy, more and more people will buy software rather than steal it. And hence over time, because that buying will benefit Microsoft, Microsoft benefits from the piracy. If instead of pirating Microsoft Windows, the Chinese used the free GNU/Linux operating system, then these Chinese users would not eventually be buying Microsoft. Without piracy, then, Microsoft would lose. This argument, too, is somewhat true. The addiction strategy is a good one... Still, the argument is not terribly persuasive. We don’t give the alcoholic a defense when he steals his first beer, merely because that will make it more likely that he will buy the next three. Instead, we ordinarily allow businesses to decide for themselves when it is best to give their product away. Thus, while I understand the pull of these justifications for piracy, and I certainly see the motivation, in my view, in the end, these efforts at justifying commercial piracy simply don’t cut it. This kind of piracy is rampant and just plain wrong. It doesn’t transform the content it steals; it doesn’t transform the market it competes in. It merely gives someone access to something that the law says he should not have. Nothing has changed to draw that law into doubt. This form of piracy is flat out wrong."

Can you think of any seller of a tangible product that would prefer you to steal their product than use a competitor's product?

Didn't Standard Oil lower their prices below wholesale cost (i.e. selling their product at a loss) so that they could drive other oil companies out of business? Not exactly the same thing, but if you were a gas-station, you could reason from that case that it's okay to pay oil companies $90 for $100 worth of gas. You'd be underpaying them - maybe they'd even describe it as stealing $10 - but it might harm their competition, and therefore be "a benefit" to them. I can imagine other scenarios where a company is in bitter compet

Re:Can we stop calling it "piracy" already?

[linuxhansl]

Flamebait?! I was merely clarifying terms, and pointing out the clever naming scheme chosen by the industry. Oh well...

Re:Can we stop calling it "piracy" already?

[Lord Flipper]

Didn't Standard Oil lower their prices below wholesale cost (i.e. selling their product at a loss) so that they could drive other oil companies out of business?

Actually, they might have done that, but their main , most effective tactic was to sign agreements with the transporters of oil in those days-the trains-to triple the cost of shipment by train, and to have the railroads radically increase prices between certain points-that were used mainly by Standard's competitors-with destination points that were also served by Standard, thereby driving their competitors into near-extinction.

They had other tactics that were concerned with raising the costs of their competitors.

The Sherman Act is rather complex, and has been messed with over the years, but the original Section One of the Act seems tailor-made to criminalize Standard's primary business model. It boiled down to an agreement that restrained competition and had a negative impact on interstate commerce.

As far removed from what appears to be happening with the uploading and "sharing" of copyrighted entertainment material as the Standard Oil "business model" might seem to be, there are some unusual similarities. In a "free" market Price is supposedly set by a combination of supply and demand and a (de facto) mutually agreed-upon price point where the spread between the bid and asking price of an item or service reach a given point. As well, the existence of competitors is theoretically an additional advantage on the "buy" side for numerous reasons. But all of this idealized market theory falls apart in the entertainment business. Why?

The short answer, from me, is: "I don't know, exactly." But when I look at the market for a new CD by (for the sake of argument) Bruce Springsteen, here's what I see: A cheaply-produced replica (the actual CD) of a work, done by an artist under an exclusive contract with a single company (record label), available, remarkably, at a price point that varies only marginally from the price for the exact same item, everywhere in the country, AND, is also priced at the same point(s) as other works by numerous artists all over the country, not only from the same record Label, but all "competing" labels.

Bruce's work is exclusively available from one "label" so I can't go to Warners or MCA (etc) to see if they can deliver the "same" product at a lower cost. There's no tiered pricing mechanism in the so-called "legitimate" marketplace, so, for all intents and purposes the price of the item is "posted" (in the same way that Standard "posted" their arbitrarily-set pricing of oil back in the pre-anti trust days).

Wow, okay, let's ignore the obvious price-fixing (for brevity, ha ha) and look at the alternatives to the "posted" price. There's only one. And it isn't iTunes. It's free. What has gone so wrong here? Lots of things: Markets aren't free, prices are fixed, there's no de facto "competition" in terms of a specific work's availability, the supply/demand ratio is horribly skewed by the labels's insistence on enforcing the myth of "scarcity" despite the de facto existence of truly unlimited copies of the same item, etc.

So many people download "copies" of equal or lesser quality/value. That is a classic "free market" response,under the current, enforced business model. When the band, Radiohead, made a new work available on an honor system they were incredibly successful. The argument against that method being viable for any and all other groups was that Radiohead had "clout" in the market-place, and other less-known/talented/savvy/etc bands wouldn't be as successful. But isn't that the nature of free-market price-point agreement?

My view is that the labels are doomed to anachronistic existence if they fail to grasp the realities of the modern age/market. C'est la vie. As a parting shot, I chose Bruce Springsteen on purpose, of course, as an example. Back in the mid-Seventies, when Bruce decided to unilaterally renegotiate his then recently-signe

Re:Can we stop calling it "piracy" already?

[brit74]

Actually, they might have done that, but their main...

Well, I wasn't really planning on discussing Standard Oil. It was a peripheral point meant to show that sometimes companies can benefit when you steal their product if it means not paying a competitor. (Also, Lessig's writing also provides another example: alcohol and drugs. I'm sure my local drug dealer would be okay with me stealing a little of his meth, heroin, crack, etc if it meant that I'd come back for more. That's why they give away samples.)

Bruce's work is exclusively available from one "label" so I can't go to Warners or MCA (etc) to see if they can deliver the "same" product at a lower cost.... There's no tiered pricing mechanism in the so-called "legitimate" marketplace, so, for all intents and purposes the price of the item is "posted" (in the same way that Standard "posted" their arbitrarily-set pricing of oil back in the pre-anti trust days).

That may be, but you have alternative artists and alternative media (TV, movies, games, etc). Anyway, you can make the exact same argument about concert tickets -- tickets are only available at the price that Bruce Springsteen sets. Should we allow people to print-up their own tickets, which are entirely valid? Should we allow companies to print-up and sell tickets to Bruce Springsteen's shows even though they have no affiliation whatsoever with Bruce Springsteen? Essentially, that's what piracy is.

horribly skewed by the labels's insistence on enforcing the myth of "scarcity" despite the de facto existence of truly unlimited copies of the same item, etc.

The problem with the "you can make unlimited copies" argument is this: the consumer cost of a product can NEVER reach the marginal cost of a product. I've heard arguments that costs should always fall to the marginal cost. The problem is this: there's development costs. If you have a digital product that only 10,000 people in the world want, you'd better figure out how to pack your development costs into 10,000 sales. If it costs you 50 cents to print a CD, and $50,000 to record an album, then you HAVE to charge $5.50 per copy in order to break-even on 10,000 sales. One problem is that piracy ignores the whole "development cost" part of the equation and pirates think they should only have to pay the marginal cost (50 cents). Now, I'm not claiming that top-selling musicians aren't meeting their production costs, but there's a severe flaw in the pirate's calculation about how much they should pay. If everyone acted like them, then musicians would not be able to pay their production costs, and you'd find that more and more musicians are just recording music live (because that has the lowest production costs). Even worse, I think many of us in the software industry are operating much closer to the red-line of "paying our production costs" than musicians are.

When the band, Radiohead, made a new work available on an honor system they were incredibly successful.

I'm not so sure they were. Further, I can think of plenty of reasons that system doesn't work long term. For one thing, their system of "pay what you want" was no novel that it garnered lots of free press. If bands routinely gave away their music on a "pay what you want" basis, then none of them (not even Radiohead) would get the kind of press that you saw the first time around. So, maybe the free-press drew in 10x as many listeners, and only 10% of them actually paid. In the end, that evens out, but if "pay what you want" becomes routine, then instead of 10x listeners, you'll see smaller and smaller numbers of people hearing about it. Eventually, it could become so commonplace, that bands get zero additional press and no additional listeners from a Radiohead-like stunt. Additionally, it's possible that people were so grateful to Radiohead that they wanted to pay them for their generosity. If "pay what you want" becomes routine, the charity of the public could fade with time. I've heard art

Re:xxxxgroups

[FallinWithStyle]

Wait... We're talking about Usenet here, right? It's cool, I can say that, it only shows up as X's for everyone else-- try it.

Sucks to be American sometimes

[Langfat]

sorry to be rude, but not all countries adhere to the crazy copyright laws that the USA does. according to my interpretation of current Canadian law (which could very well be incorrect) the levies i pay on blank media go to the riaa/mpaa/canadian equivalents and i am allowed to download as much as i want. this doesn't mean i'm allowed to distribute as much as i want, but with a centralized server which is download only, that's not the problem that it would be with bittorrent, in which you're required to both send and receive.

not too mention that rapidshare et. al have an air of legitimacy, as they take down any files which are reported to contain content they aren't legally allowed to distribute. of course, "they don't have the resources to check every single file that is uploaded to their servers," only the ones that are reported. And the only reason rapidshare does that is because they are a German-owned company (if i recall correctly). some countries, like Colombia and Egypt don't adhere to any copyright law. presumably a company owned and operated in a place like that would be virtually immune to any information requests from the MAFIAA and their ilk.

it surprises me, given the invention and popularity of the internet, how many americans still struggle to think globally, and still assume that the rest of the world on their terms. this is not intended to be a troll or flamebait or personal insult, it's merely my own stated opinion.

Re:Sucks to be American sometimes

[ImYourVirus]

Sure but that doesn't stop 'american' companies from forcing their will in other countries. I don't recall any foreign governments/isp's/corporations that haven't bowed (eventually) to the demands u.s. corporations like the mafiaa, correct me if I'm wrong, and even if I am it hasn't been many.

Re:Sucks to be American sometimes

[jim_v2000]

God this is hilarious. "Crazy copyright law" is law that says only the copyright holder has the legal right to produce and distribute copies of his/her work? Do you realize how ridiculous you're being? This is all about people who don't have enough money to buy something, but still think that they should have it anyway.

What's even funnier about watching all this is that I don't have to worry about it because I get my media from the myriad of legal, decently priced sources like Steam, Hulu, Amazon, iTunes, Zune, Napster, Pandora, etc.

Re:Sucks to be American sometimes

[Artemis3]

Actually the law is not like that in US, thats why its crazy. If ONLY the author were the copyright holder and the only one with those rights, it would made some sense. However, the US system allows "transfer of ownership", thats the death trap. The original US copyrights lasted 14 years, and were meant to put a stop to perpetual rights of printer guilds in UK. Today, these "printer guilds" (corporations) have restored their hereditary powers. For this reason, if you are not going to fix it, we are going to ignore it, or even better, legalize non-profit sharing and put an end to the abuse.

You keep your US only Hulu and your DRMed iTunes, i keep my worldwide p2p file sharing sites and my anonymous p2p networks. If artists want money, they better start touring or taking direct donations, i don't believe in third parties "owning" content and exploiting said artists beyond their lives. Or the corporate state imposing their rule to the world.

Re:Sucks to be American sometimes

[BikeHelmet]

God this is hilarious. "Crazy copyright law" is law that says only the copyright holder has the legal right to produce and distribute copies of his/her work?

Crazy copyright law is the US's copyright law - a place where any company can come around and hand someone a DMCA takedown notice, and your legit stuff(music, art, photos, whatever) that you own copyrights to are removed because of the allegation.

Your laws blow. Wasn't there an article saying the DMCA was used properly less than 10% of the time? Get over it and fix your laws - until then, I'm praying to god no other countries adopt them.

Re:Sucks to be American sometimes

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed. And more, countries who follow the french copyright tradition recognize the right of their citizens to access and distribute copyrighted content without any authorization by the copyright's owner. For example, from where I'm from the author's rights code states that it is very legal to access and distribute copyrighted work without the copyright owner's authorization if it is exclusively for personal use, if I don't make any money from it and if it's distribution doesn't affect the commercial distribution in a meaningful, measurable way. So in practice, thanks to the copyright law in my jurisdiction, I can freely download/photocopy/print anything that I wish as long as I'm not earning money from it or basing a business on it.

Re:Sucks to be American sometimes

[jim_v2000]

Are you kidding me? Most of the stuff being "shared" on p2p networks IS NOT 14 years old...it's movies, music, and software that just came out. If it was about some ideal of what copyright law *should* be, you and people like you would still be respecting copyright within the timeframe that you think it should be. But you don't, and it's hilarious to see you try to justify it as something noble when it's really slightly less than theft.

Re:Sucks to be American sometimes

[smoker2]

They steal from us, we steal from them. Let's see who breaks first.
Maybe we'll reach a stage where some kind of peace agreement is the only way forward. Reasonable copyright terms being one of the clauses.

Re:Sucks to be American sometimes

[misexistentialist]

As has been said many times here, copyright is really only ethical as a means of preventing others from profiting off creators' work. Corporate controlled copyright has perverted copyright by exploiting artists more often than not, while increasing scarcity and decreasing quality of material. People have always shared information, and while p2p reduces revenue, it's more a reduction from "obscenely fucking profitable" to just "fucking profitable".

Re:Sucks to be American sometimes

[thejynxed]

Unfortunately, you're screwed. Why do you think other nations are 'harmonizing' their copyright laws with the US?

WIPO treaties, and the treaties and mandatory conditions signed/applied when nations join other international trade groups and things like the IMF/World Bank have already buried your notion of thinking no other countries should adopt them.

Even China is starting to come around on this, and that nation hasn't taken copyright seriously, ever. My main worry for the Chinese people is that their government will start to employ their normal tactics of executing people or sending them to gulag reeducation camps instead of levying fines.

Re:Sucks to be American sometimes

[Anonymous Coward]

No, its a public negotiation: ask for reasonable terms (14 years) -> get reasonable terms, ask for unreasonable terms -> get nothing.
If the corporates push beyond a reasonable middle ground - we push back to zero.

Re:Sucks to be American sometimes

[Znork]

the legal right to produce

Preventing everyone from producing something just because someone else has produced that same thing before. Yes, from the economic, legal and ethical perspectives, it falls very close to the realm of 'crazy'. And it certainly isn't compatible with a free market economy. Even the use of the phrase 'legal right to produce' indicates how far from a free market it is.

This is all about people who don't have enough money to buy something,

They do obviously have enough money to 'buy' it, as it costs nothing to reproduce. It's actually about people who want to keep prices up, and non-scarce goods scarce, to prevent some people from getting it. Keeping non-scarce goods scarce means you're damaging the economy and costing it wealth as a whole, which is one of the most damaging aspects of monopoly economics, possibly costing the economy several times the entire revenue of the IP industries (every transaction that doesn't happen because consumer value is less than sales price means a loss to the economy of consumer value minus marginal cost (which is zero)).

decently priced sources

If they ever manage to reduce uncontrolled copying (which I don't think they will), you'll find that without piracy as the only actual competition, those decently priced sources will quickly become much more expensive.

Re:Sucks to be American sometimes

[selven]

Many people who pirate are respecting the time period that they believe copyright law should have, ie. zero.

Re:Sucks to be American sometimes

[PopeRatzo]

Sure but that doesn't stop 'american' companies from forcing their will in other countries.

Sony, for example.

Re:Sucks to be American sometimes

[PopeRatzo]

Maybe we'll reach a stage where some kind of peace agreement is the only way forward.

Spoil-sport.

"smoker2", huh? Is that you, Mr President?

Re:Sucks to be American sometimes

[Anonymous Coward]

bittorrent, in which you're required to both send and receive

Nobody forces you to send one bit, you can configure your client not to. And if you can't configure your client, get a proper client!

I'm from Finland and we also have a similar crazy levy scheme which everybody has to pay. And even with such a system very firmly in place with probably highest rates worldwide, politicians and the general public remain utterly clueless about the law and keep spouting MAFIAA type of rhetoric...

Re:Sucks to be American sometimes

[mdwh2]

But where do you get your straw men from?

Re:Sucks to be American sometimes

[mdwh2]

Your original post:

This is all about people who don't have enough money to buy something, but still think that they should have it anyway.

Your back-pedalling:

Most of the stuff being "shared" on p2p networks IS NOT 14 years old...it's movies, music, and software that just came out.

So which is it? Are you making a blanket claims against anyone who might criticise copyright law? Or are you instead criticising what you claim to be most usage of downloading - which may not at all be representative of readers here?

you and people like you would still be respecting copyright within the timeframe that you think it should be.

Ah, back to the accusations. Provide evidence that he's downloading material less than 14 years old, please?

But hey, what do I know. I live in the UK where it's illegal to copy a CD I own onto my mp3 player. And we have to pay a mandatory TV licence, yet if I happen to download a TV programme instead of watching it or videotaping it because I want to timeshift, I'm a pirate.

But you don't, and it's hilarious to see you try to justify it as something noble when it's really slightly less than theft.

Slightly less than theft? Is that like me saying you have "slightly less than a valid argument"?

Re:Sucks to be American sometimes

[Darkness404]

The point of copyright was to prevent other people from profiting off of your work. You see back in the 1700s, there were only a few printing presses in existence and nearly all were owned by businesses. Copyright wasn't to deny the public free access to information but rather deny corporations the right to screw the artists. No one would have gotten mad about a hand-written version of a book or song. However today it is as if every single person has a printing press. Information and authorship can go out much, much faster than before. For example, most everyone knows who wrote Harry Potter and even a brief summary of the plot. If a movie came out with 3 student wizards going to Pig-Blister's Academy for the study of wizardry, most everyone would either say it was a parody or a clone of Harry Potter by J. K. Rowling.

really slightly less than theft.

Oh yes, slightly less then theft. Even though you do realize that one download does not equal one lost sale or even come close to that, that most artists make their living based on tours and album sales really only serve to promote tours, and there are some artists who give away every piece of music (Johnathan Coulton and others) and still are -very- successful.

Re:Sucks to be American sometimes

[Alpha830RulZ]

it surprises me, given the invention and popularity of the internet, how many americans still struggle to think globally, and still assume that the rest of the world on their terms. this is not intended to be a troll or flamebait or personal insult, it's merely my own stated opinion.

I think you can be forgiven for your observation/opinion, given how well it conforms to the visible data. Says the 50+ year American citizen.

Re:Sucks to be American sometimes

[zach_the_lizard]

Aren't they trying to pass (or have passed) some sort of three-strikes law in France over file-sharing copyrighted materials? That doesn't sound like a recognition of any sort of rights to distribute and use copyrighted material without profit.

Re:Sucks to be American sometimes

[kz45]

"You keep your US only Hulu and your DRMed iTunes, i keep my worldwide p2p file sharing sites and my anonymous p2p networks. If artists want money, they better start touring or taking direct donations, i don't believe in third parties "owning" content and exploiting said artists beyond their lives. Or the corporate state imposing their rule to the world."

You have your open source and GNU license, but I don't believe that my freedoms should be restricted. I believe that I have the right to sell and do whatever I want with the code (without giving back to the community).

Re:Sucks to be American sometimes

[kz45]

"They steal from us, we steal from them. Let's see who breaks first.
Maybe we'll reach a stage where some kind of peace agreement is the only way forward. Reasonable copyright terms being one of the clauses."

How exactly did "they" "steal" from you?

Companies release music and movies that they produced. If you don't agree to their terms, don't listen or watch them. It's that easy.

The same rules apply to GNU software.

Re:Sucks to be American sometimes

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you kidding me? Most of the stuff being "shared" on p2p networks IS NOT 14 years old...it's movies, music, and software that just came out. If it was about some ideal of what copyright law *should* be, you and people like you would still be respecting copyright within the timeframe that you think it should be. But you don't, and it's hilarious to see you try to justify it as something noble when it's really slightly less than theft.

Let's agree to disagree. You can keep your moral high ground, and I will keep the hundreds of gigabytes of music, games and films on my hard drive that I downloaded for free.

Re:Sucks to be American sometimes

[kz45]

"Corporate controlled copyright has perverted copyright by exploiting artists more often than not, while increasing scarcity and decreasing quality of material."

With digital works, the scarcity is the talent needed to create said work, not the bits used to distribute it. Artists aren't forced into a contract at gun-point. They understand the terms of the contract when signing.

"People have always shared information, and while p2p reduces revenue, it's more a reduction from "obscenely fucking profitable" to just "fucking profitable"."

Not really. P2p and the Internet is putting any industry that can be digitally copied out of business. What's your excuse for movies? Are the Actors getting screwed? How about books? Do you not like the publishing contracts?

P2p is and always has been an easy way for freeloaders to get easy access to movies, music, and software. There is no noble cause behind it, and all of the excuses that are given are laughable.

Re:Sucks to be American sometimes

[kz45]

"Oh yes, slightly less then theft. Even though you do realize that one download does not equal one lost sale or even come close to that, that most artists make their living based on tours and album sales really only serve to promote tours, and there are some artists who give away every piece of music (Johnathan Coulton and others) and still are -very- successful."

You are only hurting the small artists. I have known many musicians that don't make shit touring bars and clubs..but can make a living from albums and sometimes t-shirt sales.

Is using GNU software in a commercial app (without giving out the source) theft? Richard Stallman and the thug lawyers at the FSF would thinks so.

Re:Sucks to be American sometimes

[Soilworker]

So, what you're saying is that they don't lose more money from me downloading a cd instead of not buying it ? It's not like it's a product where the word "Stealing" really mean something: To deprive the possession of somethings or the revenue from the selling of the said product. IMO, it would be stealing only if you'll make money over the selling of a product that is not your, depriving the companies from some revenue.

Re:Sucks to be American sometimes

[Anonymous Coward]

Also: ha ha ha ha ha.

Re:Sucks to be American sometimes

[I(rispee_I(reme]

How exactly did "they" "steal" from you?

They (being corporations) stole the public domain.

The prime example is disney. Here's what happens...

1. Disney pilfers the public domain to create a "new work", for example, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, or Aladdin.
2. Disney changes just enough to allow the work to be copyrighted.
3. Disney enjoys the privileges of copyright until they would expire, then purchases a renewal by way of lobbyists and campaign contributions.

Note that copyright is extended every time Steamboat Willy would pass into the public domain. Note also that many of Disney's works derive their value from previously existing public domain works. Other media corps are no different than Disney, it is just that Disney is the most blatant example.

To summarize, media cartels are parasites that steal from the public domain (or "myth pool" for the advanced readers out there) while contributing as little as possible. I hope this answers your question of how "they" have stolen from us.

Re:Sucks to be American sometimes

[Darkness404]

You are only hurting the small artists. I have known many musicians that don't make shit touring bars and clubs..but can make a living from albums and sometimes t-shirt sales.

Either way though, they have to be heard somehow. The internet and especially P2P offer that opportunity to the independent artist. No one is going to pay money on songs they haven't heard, if someone playing in a bar is good enough they might buy their CD and tip them extra. But in that case their problem isn't piracy it is obscurity.

Is using GNU software in a commercial app (without giving out the source) theft? Richard Stallman and the thug lawyers at the FSF would thinks so.

Someone has no clue about GNU, RMS or the FSF. From (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#Theft)

Copyright apologists often use words like "stolen" and "theft" to describe copyright infringement. At the same time, they ask us to treat the legal system as an authority on ethics: if copying is forbidden, it must be wrong. So it is pertinent to mention that the legal system--at least in the US--rejects the idea that copyright infringement is "theft." Copyright apologists are making an appeal to authority...and misrepresenting what authority says. The idea that laws decide what is right or wrong is mistaken in general. Laws are, at their best, an attempt to achieve justice; to say that laws define justice or ethical conduct is turning things upside down.

So no, at most they would consider it copyright infringement (remember, the GPL uses copyright law as its basis) and not theft as you stated.

Re:Sucks to be American sometimes

[jamstar7]

the legal right to produce

Preventing everyone from producing something just because someone else has produced that same thing before. Yes, from the economic, legal and ethical perspectives, it falls very close to the realm of 'crazy'. And it certainly isn't compatible with a free market economy. Even the use of the phrase 'legal right to produce' indicates how far from a free market it is.

What about derivative works? For instance, being the bigtime Star Trek fan that I am, I create, produce, film, and distribute my own 'Star Trek' series with different non-canon characters and new storylines. Per the studios, I'm not allowed to do this. IIRC, Desilu Studios holds the copyrights on the original Star Trek series, and they can sue me for making my own 'Starship X' series even if I put 'Based Upon 'Star Trek' Created By Gene Roddenbery' in it someplace.

So far, though, nobody who does this strictly as nonprofit has been sued, such as Hidden Frontier and James Cawley's 'Phase 2'.

Re:Sucks to be American sometimes

[bertoelcon]

Sure but that doesn't stop 'american' companies from forcing their will in other countries.

Sony, for example.

Is a Japanese company.

Re:Sucks to be American sometimes

[jim_v2000]

I didn't back-pedal at all. I said that it's all about getting stuff without paying. Then the next guy said that it's because of what people think copyright law should be. Then I said if that was the case, people who pirate stuff would respect copyright for the time period he mentioned. But they don't, which goes back to my initial statement that it's all about getting stuff without paying.

"Ah, back to the accusations. Provide evidence that he's downloading material less than 14 years old, please?"

Go to a torrent site like the Pirate Bay or Mininova. 99% of the stuff on that site that has anyone seeding was published within the last couple years. I bet you'd be hard pressed to find much content that's older than just a few years.

Re:Sucks to be American sometimes

[jim_v2000]

It is entirely irrelevant how much the actual artists make. The law is the law, and if you want it changed, lobby for it. If you're not doing that, then you're really just after getting content for free, and couldn't give a rats ass about the artists.

Re:Sucks to be American sometimes

[jim_v2000]

Who's stealing from you?

Re:Sucks to be American sometimes

[jim_v2000]

What kind of fucked up thinking is this? Someone should be forced to give away their creation because it can be easily copied? Bullshit. The price is what creates the scarcity in the case of non-physical "goods", and there's nothing wrong with that.

Re:Sucks to be American sometimes

[AstrumPreliator]

And people in the USA can also download as much as they want without paying the blank media levies. So it appears as though in this instance the USA is better. Don't get me wrong, the copyright laws in the US have a lot of problems, but a lot of the first world countries tends to follow along with them to a similar degree.

Re:Sucks to be American sometimes

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, as long as you're honest with yourself about what you're doing... meh. What I can't stand are the self-righteous douchebags who think torrenting movies and games makes them a modern Rosa Parks.

Re:Sucks to be American sometimes

[mrbcs]

Unfortunately, you're screwed. Why do you think other nations are 'harmonizing' their copyright laws with the US?

Good luck with that. Every time our Canadian government tries that shit, we either kick their asses out or we storm their headquarters and threaten to kick their asses out.
They've tried the Canadian DMCA 3 times now only to be defeated every time. Canadians will not put up with that crap. Once you tell Grandma that she can't copy a song to her ipod, there's no hope for the gov't.
This faulty American DMCA legislation is probably the reason we now have minority governments. That's not a bad thing. They have to work together or get booted out.
America is on life support anyway. Not as important as she thinks, and soon to die from her own overindulgence and greed.

Bring on the trolls mutherfucker. Mod me into oblivion... I could care less.

Re:Sucks to be American sometimes

[Darkness404]

And how do you expect the average person to lobby for it who doesn't have a few million to spare? Lets see here you can A) Write to your senators/representatives and the best you usually reply is a written message from a secretary assuring you that they will "represent you", most of the time you receive no reply and occasionally you get assurances that your congressman is going to vote -for- the bill you specifically told them you would like them to oppose! B) Try to vote for someone who is pro-reform however that is near impossible. Between the ignorance of the masses to copyright law, the pro-copyright bias of most non-internet media, the lack of proportional representation in the US and the fact that both parties are anti-reform means even if you vote for the right candidate chances are slim they will be elected.

Yeah, you can lobby for it all you want but chances are you aren't going to see any change. Myself I've called, wrote, and even personally asked copyright questions to my congressmen and every time I was either generically "assured" my opinion would be taken into consideration, openly defied, or waved aside.

Re:Sucks to be American sometimes

[kz45]

"So, what you're saying is that they don't lose more money from me downloading a cd instead of not buying it ? It's not like it's a product where the word "Stealing" really mean something: To deprive the possession of somethings or the revenue from the selling of the said product. IMO, it would be stealing only if you'll make money over the selling of a product that is not your, depriving the companies from some revenue."

Many people on slashdot consider it stealing when companies use GNU software without giving back to the community. Think of it like this.

Re:Sucks to be American sometimes

[kz45]

"To summarize, media cartels are parasites that steal from the public domain (or "myth pool" for the advanced readers out there) while contributing as little as possible. I hope this answers your question of how "they" have stolen from us."

The free software foundation has also stolen from us. They take away the freedoms of corporations and other people that decide to utilize source code in any way they see fit (which is true freedom).

"To summarize, media cartels are parasites that steal from the public domain (or "myth pool" for the advanced readers out there) while contributing as little as possible. I hope this answers your question of how "they" have stolen from us."

Why don't you just say that Disney has "stolen" from you? Disney is one example. Generalizing all businesses as a large entity out to get you is just wrong. It doesn't justify the sharing of copyrighted material owned by companies that have nothing to do with the extension of copyright laws.

"1. Disney pilfers the public domain to create a "new work", for example, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, or Aladdin.
2. Disney changes just enough to allow the work to be copyrighted.
3. Disney enjoys the privileges of copyright until they would expire, then purchases a renewal by way of lobbyists and campaign contributions."

If it's different enough to be copyrighted, they deserve it. I find it funny that you are complaining that you can't get free access to something that wasn't yours in the first place. It's not like someone is going to randomly create Mickey Mouse.

Campaign contributions are a way of life. Even our dear president Obama had help from the labor unions (during the elections, I got at least 10 or 15 calls from various unions around my area telling me to vote for Obama). In return, he has given them ownership in the car companies and preferential treatment in the new health care bill (which hasn't been passed yet).

Re:Sucks to be American sometimes

[I(rispee_I(reme]

Why don't you just say that Disney has "stolen" from you?

Because Disney is not the only company that lines its pockets by parasitizing from the public domain, it's just the worst offender. I anticipated your question, and answered it in my original post.

I find it funny that you are complaining that you can't get free access to something that wasn't yours in the first place.

If no one was allowed free access to anything they didn't create, Disney would have been unable to create most of its works in the first place.

It's not like someone is going to randomly create Mickey Mouse.

This comment displays a lack of understanding of copyright's reason for existence. Copyright exists to encourage creators to share their ideas by giving them a limited monopoly on those ideas. To extend copyright's duration indefinitely defeats the purpose of having copyrights at all.

Indeed, this may explain the rationale of those who choose to ignore the existence of copyright law.

Re:Sucks to be American sometimes

[kz45]

"This comment displays a lack of understanding of copyright's reason for existence. Copyright exists to encourage creators to share their ideas by giving them a limited monopoly on those ideas. To extend copyright's duration indefinitely defeats the purpose of having copyrights at all."

The only person here who has a lack of understanding when it comes to copyright law is you. Copyright is also there to protect your work from getting taken from you.

If there were no copyright laws, the only people that would be able to make a profit from otherwise copyrightable works would be large corporations.

If you were a smaller company and wanted to release a new product (music, movies, etc), a much larger company could easily take your ideas from you as soon as you attempted to sell it (since they would have more resources).

Copyright is there to protect. However, some companies have chosen to abuse it.

Re:Sucks to be American sometimes

[I(rispee_I(reme]

Copyright is there to protect.

No, it's not. The reason for copyright's existence is to encourage creators to share their ideas. The means it uses to reach this end is a monopoly on those ideas. This is why I suggested that you failed to understand the purpose of copyright.

If the reason for copyright were protection, then it would have no need to expire, since that would only lessen the protection it provides. Since it does expire (continuous extensions notwithstanding), it stands to reason that its intended purpose is to promote the sharing of ideas. That copyright's intended purpose has been thwarted by corporate lobbyists is the reason I originally posted.

What year is this?

[michaelhood]

Is it 1997 again? s/rapidshare/geocities

Re:What year is this?

[Anonymous Coward]

but this time the downloads aren't split up into 2.88 MB zip files ;-)

Re:What year is this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Geoshitties is for n00bs.

All the k-rad kids have access to FTP serverz on T1s with good ratioz!!!!11111

(Irony: Captcha is 'puberty'. I swear Slashdot is becoming self-aware.)

This is about ACTA for sure.

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, think of the children. Just read between the lines. It's about MAFIAA and Micro$oft closing down the free software ecosystem. Those guys just don't like competition, like wiseguys generally don't.

http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/acta/

Micro$oft tried the treacherous compting trap and it's still slowly going onwards. Then they tried the patent FUD "we own the Linux kernel". And now they're playing this ACTA shit. What a bunch of crooks!

http://icefilms.info/

[HNS-I]

http://icefilms.info/ Uses some javascript hack to start a divx player in your browser and stream the content directly on the megaupload site. No download limit.

history

[Anonymous Coward]

warez normally used http/ftp hosting in the past. but many providers caught on and started deleting stuff to fast to keep up. then bittorrent and other p2p changed the game and warez got easy hosting again. now free hosting made a comeback in a mutch better form then in the past so now warez is shifting back. hosting site like rapid share acully encurage this like free premun acount if you rack up tons of download points so does many others. they do use the worst of the worst sharing sites being thers alot better free ones out there but they do it for those points and paid links.

Re:history

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but no.

Warez used to be the scene. Mostly private FTP servers, sometimes on legitimately owned machines, sometimes on somebody else's machines, but also a good deal of commercial HTTP/FTP services and usenet. There weren't many people involved, but they were all technically inclined enough and dedicated enough to make it work.

These days, warez has expanded to include not just the original software and occasional e-books, but also music, audiobooks, TV, and movies. While this is principally a result of across the board bandwidth increase (faster net links for distribution, bigger hard drives for local storage, faster CPUs/graphics for decoding and rendering quality video), it's had an initially unexpected effect of broadening the audience substantially. But most of the newcomers have no interest or capability of ripping new works, and little or no interest in collecting and distributing existing releases, so they generally have no direct contact with the scene.

These consumers can't really make it worthwhile for the scene to directly support their leechage, so they have two routes available: One is to pay for download bandwidth from a site like RS (or, if they have enough tech know-how, or patience, to work with the free service). The other is to use P2P sharing software (bt, ed2k, etc.) which removes the brunt of the bandwidth to them and others like them. The relationship of scene groups and consumer distribution networks vary -- sometimes a release group will directly seed a torrent, as well as posting their release in "the usual places" (if you know the scene, you know; if not, I'll name no names); some dedicated distribution groups exist (such as eztv and vtv) for the express purpose of initially seeding releases almost immediately, and sometimes some random person connected with the scene seeds it.

But the scene at the core is still there, still using the same network of private, pwned, and commercial servers, and the flux of non-scene downloaders between the latest P2P net and whatever hosting services are popular today has not altered the way the scene runs one bit. (This explains, for example, why the actual scene releases that get directly seeded have 20Mb rars, even though so many non-sceners complain vigorously...)

How about we hire editors that speak English?

[Frenchman113]

According to anti-piracy vendor V.I. Labs, 100% of the warez in its survey were available on RapidShare

It's was available no RapidShare, and no, writing "were" where it is not needed and not correct does not make your sentence "sophisticated" or "advanced."

Now for a statement related to the article: How is this new? Illegal content was always more prevalent on standard web sites. P2P was always more of a niche thing, even after BitTorrent and ThePirateBay caught on.

Re:How about we hire editors that speak English?

[BenoitRen]

It's was available no RapidShare, and no, writing "were" where it is not needed and not correct does not make your sentence "sophisticated" or "advanced."

Now who fails at English? ;)

Re:How about we get commenters that speak English?

[Homburg]

"Were" is the past plural form of "to be." As "100% of the warez" names more than one ware, "were" is the right form of the verb to use here.

Re:Usenet anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

Right. And, for me at least, I like the fact that with torrents, I'm helping the next guy by using my abundant upstream bandwidth. This makes the free model eminently sustainable. Since the bandwidth for trackers is tiny compared to the overall volume of data being copied, the costs for that can be covered by ads (i.e. The Pirate Bay's old operating model),

With RS, MU, etc., they bear the entire bandwidth cost for every bit I download, so their business is unsustainable for free (even with ads), so they're forced to provide artificial obstacles (some circumventable by the savvy 5% of users, some more-or-less solid) to force people to buy subscriptions. Yes, I'm in the savvy 5%, so I can still get quite usable free service in general, but at any specific time, they may have just thrown up a new hurdle I haven't circumvented yet -- I'd much rather use a service that I can pretty much count on, because they have no real incentive to interfere with it.

Before I'd go with a premium filesharing account, I think I'd go with a good usenet account, but as long as I'm content to stick with free stuff, I use torrents heavily, and RS etc. only as a backup for those things I can't find on torrent sites. (Especially since demonoid is down. :( TPB has like _no_ dvdrips of TV shows; people just keep seeding the tvrips even after the DVD releases.)

War on Piracy = War on Drugs

[Anonymous Coward]

Sad how the war on piracy is now and will continue to have the same effects and results as the war on drugs with regards to personal freedoms. Which is to say those who follow the rules have more and more hassles, while those who don't will continue on their merry way with not a care in the world.

Reminds me of an article I read just last week where a grandmother was hassled for buying two boxes of Sudafed (with Pseudoephedrine (sic?)) while the people who use it to make meth just have multiple people buying it for them to skirt the system.

The most frustrating part is that the politicians who enact these retarded regulations usually know better, but have other motives ($$ or power) that drive them to put them into law.

Re:How about we get commenters that speak English?

[Myopic]

If you think hard about this, you will be forced to side with the original poster. Consider changing 100% to 50% and it's mostly clear that "was" is the correct word. It's not important that more than one piece of software comprises the 100%, the important thing is that the verb must agree with the percentage (not the warez), and a percentage is singular. Or, consider removing the phrase "of the warez", so only the percentage is left in the sentence, and obviously "was" is correct. Still, it's fairly subtle, it's not a huge glaring error like "there/their" or "you're/your", or even "its/it's".

The only good thing is that they remove content...

[fraktus]

For me as a developer fighting software piracy I can at least ask to Rapidshare to remove copyrighted content, and thanks to the web search services I can receive warnings when new version are poping out... Of course it's a lot of work but it's worth doing it.

Re:How about we get commenters that speak English?

[Homburg]

I don't know, that doesn't make it obvious to me. "Was" would be OK if we were talking about a bulk noun - "50% of the water was left in the glass" is right, but *"50% of the apples was left in the basket" sounds obviously wrong to me. I'm now trying to figure out if "warez" is a bulk noun or not, and actually it may well be. *"I downloaded 10 warez yesterday" does sound wrong, which it shouldn't if "warez" is a plural; but the "z" in "warez" suggests that it derives from a plural form.

Artificial Poverty

[Anonymous Coward]

> All crap, all the time. No, that isn't going to be the future of entertainment.

I hope not! It sounds a lot more like the present than the future...

Re:How about we get commenters that speak English?

[Swanktastic]

You're right. Percents are plural when the object of "of" is plural. They're singular when the object of "of" is singular. The examples you used are correct, e.g.

50% of humans are male. 50% of the human race is male.

I guess it just depends on whether the writer would say "Warez are found on the internet." or "Warez is found on the internet."

Tough noogie

[poptones]

We can only accept so much "protection" before we delve into "revolution" once the people realize they are being "protected" right out of their ability to participate in society. Gift cards might be a "loophole" for them mean and evil "terrists" but the fact is those folks are gonna get money no matter what - but without the ability for POOR PEOPLE who have zero credit and no bank accounts to participate in society the folks on Pennsylvania Ave would end up with way more to worry about than a handful of radical nutcases.

We have become a culture of plastic money. Financially deprived people need access to that plastic as well.

Re:xxxxgroups

[tkw954]

Wait... We're talking about Usenet here, right? It's cool, I can say that, it only shows up as X's for everyone else-- try it.

You can go Usenet my Usenet-ing Usenet.

Correction required!

[udippel]

In the post, the major information is sorely missing: the new link for pr0n and gamez; the link to RapidShare.

Welcome to the real world

[silentace]

Welcome to 1995, they have been doing this shit for years... it never went away (geocities used to be the biggest pirate site on the planet). If it is just now being noticed as a trend then I would say they are about 5 years behind the curve.

Re:Welcome to the real world

[Carra]

Indeed. I remember the days when sites like yahoo and geocities offered online file storage, limited to 20mb a file.

Programs popped up which automatically made accounts on those services and uploaded your files. And http sites offering all new titles as geocities uploads. Those sites fought back with captchas.

Then came napster file sharing. Then came bittorent file sharing...

And now it's back to http warez.

Anonymous P2P (OneSwarm) will be the next step

[PoontangSunrise]

Once this short and partial relapse to centralized commercial services will unevitably be sued to pieces (I mean, duh...), the next evolutionary step _will_ be anonymized P2P. The excellent OneSwarm protocol (implemented and working today!) has a very good change of becoming "the sh*t" when it comes to this I think, and I'm very surprised by the low buzz concerning it: http://oneswarm.cs.washington.edu/ And for more general use, something like the (not equally yet implemented) Phantom protocol will probably have a place in the market too: http://code.google.com/p/phantom/wiki/MainPage

Re:Anonymous P2P (OneSwarm) will be the next step

[grumbel]

the next evolutionary step _will_ be anonymized P2P

The trouble with anonymous P2P is that its either a darknet where you only share with friends, which is safe in theory but impractical to build on a large scale or an opennet, which means you share with everybody. And when you have an opennet there is no guarantee that the cops won't come knocking on your door for sharing child porn, even if it happened in the background without your knowledge.

And while no such lawsuits have been brought forward for anonymous P2P so far, there is precedence, open WiFi spots give a similar amount of anonymity and there the person who provided the open WiFi is held at least partly responsible for what an anonymous user does with the open WiFi spot. Don't know how the situation looks in other countries, but thats at least what you have in Germany.

Re:Anonymous P2P (OneSwarm) will be the next step

[PoontangSunrise]

Actually, OneSwarm solves _both_ these problems in a _very_ elegant way, where the "darknet" just happens to be all the OneSwarm users in the whole world, while still only being directly connected to (and thus traceable by) people that you personally know and trust! I can really recommend taking a closer look at this project, and read the paper (http://oneswarm.cs.washington.edu/f2f_tr.pdf), since the other info on their website is rather shortcoming and even misleading at times.

Re:Anonymous P2P (OneSwarm) will be the next step

[Hatta]

So if I understand correctly, you're only ever connected directly to people you actually know. Doesn't that mean that your download speed is limited by their upload speed? If I am a light downloader, and I invite a heavy downloader I am essentially donating a large amount of bandwidth to that person by serving as their proxy. Is there any sort of credit system involved so people acting as proxies don't get short changed? Isn't this system vulnerable to the same problem every other darknet p2p (e.g. freenet) has, that it will be dog ass slow?

Re:Anonymous P2P (OneSwarm) will be the next step

[PoontangSunrise]

Yes, with OneSwarm you are always only directly connected to people that you personally know and trust, that is correct. And yes, a securely anonymized system will sadly _always_ be slower than an otherwise equal non-anonymized system, that is the sad truth. :-/ There are a bunch of mitigating factors in the case of OneSwarm though: 1. As soon as a file becomes popular on the network, there will be very few hops to it on average (in many cases only one single hop, just like with BitTorrent or whatever), while still without any possibility to prove that you're downloading it directly from your connected peer! And it actually also uses BitTorrent under the anonymization (F2F) layer, meaning that it will distribute and parallelize the load over all routing paths as optimal as possible too. 2. You can throttle the proxying speed so that it never takes up any more of your upload/download capacity than you want to provide. There is also prioritization of your own downloads compared to proxied data. 3. As people's internet connections get better globally, their speed in relation to the size of e.g. an HD movie won't be much of a problem. Me for one, for example, am sitting on a 100 Mb/s connection in my home, which is common in my country, and it can handle _many_ HD movies at once...

Re:Anonymous P2P (OneSwarm) will be the next step

[Anonymous Coward]

And while no such lawsuits have been brought forward for anonymous P2P so far, there is precedence, open WiFi spots give a similar amount of anonymity and there the person who provided the open WiFi is held at least partly responsible for what an anonymous user does with the open WiFi spot. Don't know how the situation looks in other countries, but thats at least what you have in Germany.

The US has different laws. In particular anonymous speech is protected by the constitution. If the cops come to your house and say that you're hosting $SOMETHING_ILLEGAL, and you only knew that you were hosting $SOMETHING, they can arrest you if you refuse to stop hosting it. But probably not otherwise.

BZZT!! WRONG

[RobertLTux]

http://www.treas.gov/education/faq/currency/legal-tender.shtml

not going to dump the whole thing but
"There is, however, no Federal statute mandating that a private business, a person or an organization must accept currency or coins as for payment for goods and/or services. Private businesses are free to develop their own policies on whether or not to accept cash unless there is a State law which says otherwise. For example, a bus line may prohibit payment of fares in pennies or dollar bills. In addition, movie theaters, convenience stores and gas stations may refuse to accept large denomination currency (usually notes above $20) as a matter of policy."

The policy does have to be visibly posted but otherwise all bets are off.

Isn't all content user generated?

[SmallFurryCreature]

Just some users are better at it then other, but George Lucas WAS just fan of action movies who grew up with Flash Gordon and made his own version of it. He just did it really really well. But all real artist start by singing, dancing, painting for their mommy.

Re:Isn't all content user generated?

[Anonymous Coward]

it's funny because George Lucas made two good movies (star wars ep4 and ep5. ep5 was written by someone else) and then proceeded to suck for the entire rest of his career.

meanwhile, the fans made episode 1 watchable. go find 'the phantom edit' on bittorrent.

while we're on the topic of people who shouldn't control the canon of their universes, j.k.rowling made exactly one good harry potter book and then proceeded to take herself entirely too seriously while not knowing how to write.

Re:How about we get commenters that speak English?

[smoker2]

"If I were you I would ..." I is singular. Basically avoid using "was" unless it really makes sense when read back. "The government was contemplating a new law" is grammatically correct as there is only one government mentioned, but "the government were contemplating a new law" is better as a government is composed of many individuals. Also look up "past subjunctive".

tl; dr;
100% is plural, regardless of the subject matter. It represents 100 percentage points, ie. plural.

BEGINNING FILE TRANSFER OVER HTML

[selven]

(Please mod this post down so that the RIAA/MPAA/CoS doesn't see it and get it taken down)
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Re:BEGINNING FILE TRANSFER OVER HTML

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Wow, that movie really was devoid of redeeming content.

Re:BEGINNING FILE TRANSFER OVER HTML

[Nicopa]

That must be why his message is very short: Bad movies should be much more compressible... =)

Re:How about we get commenters that speak English?

[smoker2]

50% of humans are male. 50% of the human race is male.

No. The human race is a collective noun, so "are" is perfectly correct.

Re:How about we get commenters that speak English?

[PhilHibbs]

I think it depends on whether "warez" is a mass noun or is countable.

I THINK ITS QUITE OVIOUS CAPTAIN

[mdwh2]

And I think it's quite ovious that the next step after Rapidshare etc, is filesharing mp3s on your MySpace, in the form of a "mix tape". Apparently if you do that, in the UK at least, even if everyone knows who you are, it's perfectly fine.

Re:I THINK ITS QUITE OVIOUS CAPTAIN

[Incadenza]

It is not in the Netherlands, to play music on your website (even in the form of linked radio stations) you have to pay a license fee. The BUMA/Stemra claims *everyone* has to pay, but that they won't ‘go after non-commercial sites’. Article in Dutch in a sub-standard newspaper, is the only source I can find about this now, but I am sure BUMA/Stemra won't forget their plans.

Re:I THINK ITS QUITE OVIOUS CAPTAIN

[mdwh2]

Indeed, and note it's not legal in the UK either :) But there was a recent story where artist Lily Allen was publically lobbying for the three strikes law, then it was discovered she'd been illegally sharing these "mix tapes" herself in order to promote her career. But most the mainstream media seem to be ignoring that aspect, and I don't see her getting sued...

Most Copyright Infringement Is Not Filesharing

[mdwh2]

Oh, and if you want to talk about what "most of the stuff" is, the bigger picture is that, even according to the UK Government's own documents (which if anything is going to be biased on the anti-filesharing side, as it is supporting a new law to disconnect suspected filesharers), the alleged damages from commercial software piracy by businesses is 144 times greater than the alleged damages from filesharing.

Source: http://www.berr.gov.uk/consultations/page51696.html

So if you want to talk about most of the stuff, why aren't we bringing in draconian laws to target where the vast majority of the problem is, instead of worrying about less than 1% caused by people downloading something using bittorrent?

Is Warez Really That Relevant Now?

[damn_registrars]

I don't know what people pirate these days, but back when I used Warez I primarily downloaded applications that I could not afford to purchase. Now there are open source equivalents of those same applications available that meet my needs. I never bothered to pirate movies, since I can get movies on demand through my cable box for just a few dollars, or buy the DVD used at the local rental store for not much more.

BtDNA was the death of BitTorrent

[Anonymous Coward]

When the official client goes malware and installs a firefox plugin and windows service without asking permission or any notification whatsoever, users will flee from your product in droves. BitTorrent killed itself. I used to use it for stuff, but once they did that to me that was the end. Never again. I bet I am not the only one.

RIAA, MPAA, take note

[russotto]

RIAA, MPAA: Look, no one is using ThePirateBay or any of those BitTorrent or peer-to-peer services any more. Nobody. There's no point in continuing to go after them, or those store and forward systems either. Just pay attention to Rapidshare and similar hosting services and you'll have stopped piracy in its tracks!

Its Computerworld... (nuf said)

[warncke]

Now, who should be surprised that they don't exactly have their finger on the pulse of the "warez" scene?

More likely than not, VI Labs slipped them a little cash to run this story so that they can pimp some new b.s. product designed to "fight piracy" on direct download sites.

As others have pointed out, this is just about data being copied. Data is going to be copied using whatever means are available, depending on the tastes and technical abilities of the users doing the copying. Since installing a single standalone helper app still exceeds the technical capabilities of a large segment of the user population, there is always going to be some market for direct downloads, but that is a long way from saying that direct downloads will replace BT.

What is more important than where users happen to be copying data, is where data is initially being distributed. BT has now become a major network for initial distribution, at least for movies, tv, and music, which has nothing to do with the technology but with the people who are using the network.

As long as new content is being distributed on BT, it will be the preeminent P2P network. FTP networks are still major sources of original content, and as long as they are, they will continue to be a major factor in file sharing.

Direct download sites are still very much downstream, because they are only copying data from FTP or BT. They are also unlikely to attract people who distribute original content for a variety of reasons, including their commercial nature, lack of security, availability of superior technological alternatives, etc.

If RS captures a large segment of the "sucker" market by reselling what other people give away for free, good for them, but that doesn't mean they are going to replace the people who actually distribute the content in the first place.

Rapid share is wonderful !!

[Weezul]

I'm spending the year teaching in a poor country. gigapedia.com has rapidshare links for like every undergraduate text book. so all my students get the text book without spending hours at the xerox machine! :)

You could not be more wrong.

[bigtallmofo]

BitTorrent, IRC and Usenet have been shut down for years. I dare you to try to get anything from them! It's impossible. They have been literally shut down by the MPAA and RIAA.

We are left with one alternative: Rapidshare. Sure, it's not perfect but that's all we have after the effective campaigns of the RIAA and MPAA. Now it looks like they'll have to focus all their attention on Rapidshare. Darn. Then we will be left with nothing.

But to reiterate, no need to focus on BitTorrent, IRC or Usenet - those are already dead. Yup. Dead and buried. Nothing to see there.

Re:You could not be more wrong.

[Anonymous Coward]

The first rule of Usenet is... Don't talk about Usenet.

Re:You could not be more wrong.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why are you breaking the first rule of Usenet if you know the rules of Usenet?

Re:You could not be more wrong.

[ultranova]

But to reiterate, no need to focus on BitTorrent, IRC or Usenet - those are already dead. Yup. Dead and buried. Nothing to see there.

You know, Freenet is actually pretty useful these days. No fast, not by long shot, and the Fred (Freenet Daemon) is of unbelievably shitty programming quality to the point of needing a separate wrapper to reboot it when it gets stuck; but still useful.

The future belongs to untracable networks. CIA and its ilk will yet curse RIAA and MPAA for moving everything to encrypted connections.

Re:You could not be more wrong.

[destiny71]

I recently moved, and had a few weeks of missed TV watching. I missed 3 weeks of all my shows, starting with all the season premieres.

Within 24 hours, I got every missed episode, of every show downloaded. Plus several high quality DVD rips of movies not yet available on retail DVD.

I don't use hosting services such as RapidShare. I use bittorrent.

Dare accepted, and completed. Your move.

Re:You could not be more wrong.

[destiny71]

ohhhhhhhhhhh sarcasm. oops

Re:Usenet anyone?

[Nedry57]

I don't understand why people balk at paying for usenet. It's cheap as hell, and if you weigh the costs vs. the benefits, it basically approaches free because the numerator becomes so large and the denominator stays small. Being able to actually saturate my bandwidth is a huge plus, vs. waiting on slow torrents and overloaded file sharing sites. But you didn't read any of this. The first rule of usenet is not to talk about usenet.

Re:Usenet anyone?

[Nedry57]

I have to assume that you are being modded down by people who use usenet and want to keep it quiet. There's no other rational reason. =]

Re:Usenet anyone?

[Nedry57]

Complete and utter bullshit. I can't even list the number of movies, shows, etc. that I've downloaded from usenet. I haven't needed a torrent or any of those other gimped/slow services in years. What you mean by "elitist" is "I'm too lazy to learn how to use/search it properly." Well, your loss.

Re:Usenet anyone?

[Nedry57]

I, of course, meant that the numerator stays small and the denominator grows large. Math bad, MATH BAD!!!

Re:xxxxgroups

[Anonymous Coward]

alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.d

Yes, it is kinda creepy.

Five-X porn just seems so ... bland, now.

RapidShare *is* more safe for a simple reason.

[Doctor O]

I'm with you concerning paid accounts - that's plain stupid. But you are wrong on several other points:

1) IP addresses aren't safe at all

An IP address, combined with the timestamp of the access actually makes for pretty good identification. At least here in Germany you can easily get the name and address of the person who had that IP address at the specified timestamp because all around the EU there's mandatory logging of this information. I figure in the US with its Orwellian laws it's the same.

2) RapidShare is *much* safer than BitTorrent

This is speaking for Germany, but I believe the legal situation is the same in the US.

Here in Germany, *downloading* music isn't illegal, and they can't do jack about it. Making it available is, however. I know several people who got dragged to court because of BitTorrent, and they had to pay quite hefty fees because they "made available" copyrighted music. BTW, those smart-asses who just had an open WLAN and tried the "I didn't do it, it was the bad wardriving hacker bastard!!1!" defense got sued for that *seperately*, and had to pay for that, too, because of negligence.

So, when I download from RapidShare, I don't make anything available. I just download it. This is covered under fair use here in Germany, and I believe that the RIAA didn't successfully sue for downloading alone, but always for making available. (But I don't know for sure and am too lazy to google it. I believe they tried but never succeeded.)

That said, where does one search for music on RapidShare? *8-D

Has Usenet ever been targetted?

[witherstaff]

Has any usenet provider ever been hit by the MPAA, RIAA or others? The one click download sites are easier then an automated index site but not by much. Since the days of free usenet is over and requiring payment to get the binary groups that would seem better than the megaupload/rapidshare/etc sites.

Re:How about we get commenters that speak English?

[Swanktastic]

That's potentially a point. I was going off of this dictionary entry that says "Percent can take a singular or plural verb, depending on how the quantity being described is viewed. Very often what determines the form of the verb is the noun nearest to it. Thus one might say Eighty percent of the legislators are going to vote against the bill or Eighty percent of the legislature is set to vote the bill down. In the second sentence the group of legislators is considered as a body, not as individuals. When percent is used without a following prepositional phrase, either a singular or plural verb is acceptable." (answers.com)

I started looking at this thread and gave up based on boredom... :-)

http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=30630

Does downloading alone carry civil liability?

[dirkdodgers]

I am not a lawyer, but I like to try to read and understand our laws. To my understanding it breaks down as follows.

1. 17 USC 501 defines copyright infringement as violation of the exclusive rights of the copyright owner
2. 17 USC 106 defines reproducing in copies to be an exclusive right of the copyright owner
3. 17 USC 101 defines copies in a way that seems to include copying onto computer disk
4. 17 USC 501 provides for large statutory damages to be awarded for copyright infringement so defined

Now, I can not find any cases in which an individual has been found liable under 17 USC 501 for his or her act of downloading alone, but all of the pieces are there to make that case. It's probably just a matter of the logistics and the cost/benefit of making the case. A credit card billing, an IP address, and a long list of copyrighted works downloaded would probably be enough to bring a profitable multi-million dollar case.

For uploads Rapidshare claims to log IPs. For downloads Rapidshare claims not to log the IP or the specific file downloaded, only the account, the date, and the amount of data downloaded. However, ISPs for individual Rapidshare servers may, and could be subpoenaed for downloader information, just as YouTube was, and would have to comply.

Re:Does downloading alone carry civil liability?

[Reverend Jeckel]

Your looking for 17 USC 506 --- To quote the US Copyright Law (a) Criminal Infringement. — (1) In general. — Any person who willfully infringes a copyright shall be punished as provided under section 2319 of title 18, if the infringement was committed — (A) for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain; (B) by the reproduction or distribution, including by electronic means, during any 180-day period, of 1 or more copies or phonorecords of 1 or more copyrighted works, which have a total retail value of more than $1,000; It would seem to me the key parts of that are "Any person who willfully infringes a copyright", "for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain", and "reproduction or distribution ... during any 180-day period, of 1 or more copies ... copyrighted works, which have a total retail value of more than $1,000" --- So, to actually infringe a copyright you have to (a) "wilfull" act of infringing (b) make money from it, or (c) the number of copies times the product price is greater then $1,000 Note that for (c), it would be up to the court to decide how much an individual song from an album, or a number of megabytes uploaded verse size of entire file, is worth. Again, this is why hosts and such are targeted and not actual downloaders. Its hard to prove that a single person infringed upon a copy right by downloading something for personal, non commercial uses, but a host that provided copyrighted material to hundreds, if not thousands, of people shows a willfull intent to violate the copyright. The reason no indiviual has been prosecuted is the fact that its kind of hard, and pointless, for a single person to download $1,000+ worth of a single digital product. If a person did manage to break clause (c) then whether or not they got convicted would depend on the judge's attitude and how good your lawyer is at argueing you had no "wilfull" intent.

Re:Does downloading alone carry civil liability?

[dirkdodgers]

Hmm. Again I am not a lawyer, but it's my reading that 506 pertains to criminal liability. 501 provides for civil liability and I believe stands independently of 506. I think 506 is for cases where the FBI goes after big time pirate clearing houses.

I'd be interested to hear what an IP lawyer thinks of the viability of civil cases for downloading alone (but not interested enough to pay to hear that opinion!). I can't figure out whether the RIAA aren't pursuing it because the case wouldn't hold up, or because of the logistics of it, or just because they don't want to alienate their customer (hah!).

Am I Missing Someting???

[IonOtter]

Rapidshare, Megaupload and the others are not searchable. You need to know the URL for the content.

Torrent trackers are, and that's been the whole point of torrent trackers from the get-go.

Switching over to services like Rapidshare and the others is like going back to 1990 when FSP became the "in thing" The problem with that, is that you had to log into IRC and haggle back and forth with God-only-knows-who-they-are-and-what-they're-pushing creepazoids until you found something they wanted.

Assuming you had something to trade in the first place, that is. Charity was very rare, and in order to get the "good stuff", you either had to pony up something really awesome, or be Creepazoid's bitch and let them have access to your system.

Sure, you can post the link for RS/MU on some random board, but now you're just switching from IRC to a static medium, and you have just as much if not MORE elitism, and even tighter access controls.

Going back 18 years is not going to impress anyone.

Re:Am I Missing Someting???

[UnknownSoldier]

WHOA! Someone else actually remembers FSP!

Totally agree. See my other post... http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1400201&cid=29711857

Does not compute.

[bigtallmofo]

How can there be a rule about something that was destroyed years ago by the legitimate and merciful actions of the RIAA and MPAA?

Rapidshare and brethren actually quite useful...

[schmiddy]

Rapidshare has been around in its present form for at least 3 years, and AFAICT hasn't been sued yet by the xAA. Yes, it's a single point of failure, but take a look at any recent movie release which has been spread out to rapidshare: you'll notice the movie will be uploaded in chunks, mirrored to several different hosting providers.

Here's a good example of a recent movie. Notice the spreading of identical chunks to multiple hosts, and the availability of two direct links to .avi halves from megashares.com -- you could start watching right away with a halfway decent connection.

I actually like Rapidshare and cousins for movies much more than bittorrent: you're not forced to share, so you're not uploading to god-knows-whom, potentially including xAA bots. And some providers (megashares.com, megaftp.com) even let you download files up to 1GB for free, at full speed. Not a whole lot unlike Usenet, actually, if you think about it -- just replace your Usenet provider(s) with these free hosting providers.

Yes, Rapidshare could be subpoenaed and forced to reveal IPs of downloaders, but that would probably take weeks or months (assuming these hosting providers even keep logs -- some of them explicitly claim not to), and then your ISP would still have to be subpoenaed as well for the xAA to get your info, by which time the ISP may very well have purged its logs. Plus, the xAA is usually interested in uploaders only anyways. (You don't have to register for accounts to use rapidshare or its brethren. It could happen, but I've never heard of such a thing, and it's far more hassle for the xAA than simply going after IPs on bittorrent.

THIS is why I read /. - THANKS!

[vaporland]

thanks!

Re:How about we get commenters that speak English?

[Anonymous Coward]

No. The human race is a collective noun, so "are" is perfectly correct.

ITYM "The human race ARE a collective noun".
HTH. HAND.

who cares about bottom feeder sites

[Anonymous Coward]

a skilled coder can earn a leech slot on a rated top site by creating tools for the kiddies. anything else is a waste of time.

This is news?

[cavebison]

Rapidshare's been hosting this stuff for years and years.

I've felt almost as quietly self-satisfied as the newsgroupies all this time. True, they have noticed and RS links get canned pretty quickly these days, but at least it wasn't *news* until now. I don't feel special anymore.

Original Report from V.i. Labs

[mgoff-vilabs]

The report that Eric discusses in the Computerworld article may be found here: http://www.vilabs.com/offers/Software_Piracy_Report_2009_pt2.aspx

Because BitTorrent was reverse evolution!

[Hurricane78]

BitTorrent was a huge step back from Gnutella, which had no servers/trackers for that very reason.
Also every protocol previous to BitTorrent had the peer finding and most importantly the search functions integrated.
The only reason I ever used it, was because some dumb people started to prefer it for its speed (which was a direct result of it not being that safe against attacks) because they were unable to think one step ahead. And now they get what they deserve for it.

Maybe if you went a step backwards, and for obvious reasons failed... going back another step is perhaps not the best thing to do, isn't it? ^^

Wait for RapidShare to be the next one being shot like a huge elephant in a tiny corridor.
Following their logic, I bet then they will go back to FTP. Which means that not some other company will get sued big time, but they themselves with their own servers will pop like flies in a fryer.

All the while, Gnutella, and modern, much more advanced networks, will still be there, laughing at them for the idiots they are.