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Spanish Court Rules In Favor of P2P Engineer
Sir Mal Fet writes "In line with previous rulings discussed here, a judge in Spain has ruled that P2P technologies are 'completely neutral' (original in Spanish ; Google translation ), thus dismissing a lawsuit originated in 2008 from the Spanish Association of Musical Producers (Promusicae), Warner, EMI, and Sony suing Pablo Soto, a Spanish man who created the Blubster, MP2P y Piolet programs to share files. The labels demanded 13 million euros in damages arguing that the mere existence and distribution of P2P technologies violated copyright, but the ruling stated the technology itself was neutral, so the creator could not be held responsible for how the software was used, and demanded that they pay for legal expenses. Promusicae said it was going to appeal the ruling."
because a deranged criminal killed a pedestrian with a stolen car. Wow the judge did his job no story here. Unless the story is about judges doing their jobs, in which case we have a winner.
Well, there's a thought! You mean it has the same neutrality as a car, a knife, a gun? Sorry, where have I been all this time - I've been lead to believe that technology is somehow evil because it "may" be used for illegal activities.
Spanish Court Judge In Favor of P2P Engineer
There, fixed
sysadmins and parents of newborns get the same amount of sleep.
The Spanish press ( http://www.elpais.com/articulo/tecnologia/Pablo/Soto/industria/discografica/siempre/va/paso/detras/elpeputec/20111221elpeputec_3/Tes )also says this guy might be suing them back, because in the course of the lawsuit against him, these cartels applied some really dirty tactics against him (like hiring goons to follow him every day, etc.)
This is rare good news! Just like guns in these Unites States. You see, guns were created for the sole purpose of inflicting harm and to some extent, kill (take lives), which is illegal.
So if some thug did precisely that, we cannot ban the possession of guns, can we?
I only ever use P2P to download FOSS and, windows fixes. There are plenty of music streams if I want to listen to something. I suspect that Comcast is stepping on the streams though at the behest of XXAA or some other equally praiseworthy organization. These guys rip off artists and slander titles out of principle. So I hope someone is sticking it to them for a change.
Beats me. What difference is there between being "unlimited in length of term" and merely practically so because the length is constantly being enlarged at a rate which is faster or equal to the progression of time?
SCOTUS thought there was some kind of difference. Unfortunately...
"Technology", in the sense of basic principles, is certainly neutral. However, specific assemblages of technology - from a car, to a gun, to a spoon, or a computer program, certainly aren't neutral. they have good points and bad points, which are determined by their intended or designed use, their practical or common use, and their potential or possible use. How we allow for the use of given assemblies of technologies depends entirely on how we view the social cost-benefit equation of the assembled tool.
Many people want to ban certain tools based on their potential usage, which is either irrational or irresponsible (or displays a hidden agenda unrelated to the merits of the tool).
However, it is equally dishonest to judge a tool merely on its proclaimed intended usage.
As a society, we must look at the whole picture, and hopefully, error on the side of permissiveness. That does not mean that we should be shy about outlawing things whose negative potential and common usage significantly outweigh any benefit that is intended or common usage provides. Like everything else, it's a balancing act.
In this case, the judge did just that, much to the *IAA (or Spanish equivalent's) disappointment.
-Erik
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.
I am shocked, absolutely shocked to learn that is unauthorized copying going on with this filesharing mechanism
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
P2P helps people break the law in the very same way as FTP ad HTTP do. If you want to find real-world examples of P2P usage for legal purposes, just try to download some popular operating system image or a MMORPG installer, you'll probably find that they are also offered as P2P downloads because it results in less strain for the content owner's servers and potentially faster downloads for the content consumer.
How about videos of cats doing funny things? Or dogs? or kids? Or art? Political speech? Open source software? There are plenty of examples of what people could legally publish. The big media cartels aren't the only ones who can produce content.
...then anyone who uses P2P in any of its forms is automatically violating copyright? We're talking anything from a crossover cable between two computers to a university compute cluster to the INTERNET here, folks - the labels, to put it bluntly, are fucking delusional.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
Blubster, Piolet, and Manolito P2P are all programs that operate on a network (confusingly) called MP2P.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
just be careful what you name it. I remember a case a few years back (can't find a link, sorry) where a teacher was whacked by the MPAA over an instructional video that just happened to have the same name as a (rather shitty) movie. Settled out of court, IIRC.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
Actually, it's not illegal in Spain to share copyrighted files. So whatever his intended purpose was, the main use the tools came to were not illegal in Spain.
That's kind of ironic considering how big an arrogant asshole you are yourself, Marcan.
World of Warcraft uses Bittorrent to distribute it's client and it's updates
NCSoft uses Bittorrent or a similar P2P protocol to distribute Lineage 2 files
Mandriva distribute it's Linux CD and DVD using Bittorrent, including the "powerpack" edition (which is commercial)
BitTorrent is increasingly used to transfer big LEGAL files by big companies...
Maybe we should have some big names like Blizzard and NCSoft (which are by no mean affiliated to that bunch of "OpenSource freaks") weight in in favor of the technology they are using themself...
Because, should RIAA/MPAA/... have their way, BitTorrent traffic would be banned at ISP level (using Layer7 firewalling) and it would affect them very badly.
Or just use Skype, Spotify and or legal streaming sites.
In particular, what files did he think people might legally share with the software that couldn't have been obtained elsewhere?
What does it matter?
Are you seriously arguing that just because there is another legal way to obtain something, one can not create an alternative?
So because I can buy something at Wall-Mart we don't need any other shops/malls?
Wasn't it designed specifically to be a way to share information even if one or more sources of communication have been disrupted? The "it" being the internet, of course.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
P2P helps people break the law in the very same way as FTP ad HTTP do.
Both FTP and HTTP have ton's legal uses and only a tiny fraction of illegal uses, with most P2P stuff it's exactly the reverse, they are optimized for illegal sharing and quite useless for legal sharing.
Bittorrent for example is nice for downloading isos, but that's something one does every few month or even years. For the much more regular tasks, such as regular software updates, bittorrent is rather useless, as it has no real support for frequently changing collections of small files, thus all the OS updates have to come over FTP and HTTP.
Or how about we look a little further, what do people actually need for their legal use, people such as video producers, podcast producers and software creators. Is my Git repository hosted on P2P? No. Do you see podcasts on P2P? No. Do you see videos on P2P? Very rarely. Can by Firefox play video directly from P2P? No.
All those needs are currently not full filled by P2P, but by things like GitHub, Google Code, Youtube or plain old commercial hosting. So in essence, if the goal of P2P was to make it easier for users to share legal stuff, it does an incredible shitty job at it.
Both FTP and HTTP have ton's legal uses and only a tiny fraction of illegal uses, with most P2P stuff it's exactly the reverse, they are optimized for illegal sharing and quite useless for legal sharing.
Hm...interesting...most P2P stuff is optimized for illegal sharing...thus explaining why Skype is optimized for legal VoIP calls. Somehow I get the feeling there are more Skype users out there than there are people using P2P filesharing systems to violate copyrights.
So in essence, if the goal of P2P was to make it easier for users to share legal stuff, it does an incredible shitty job at it.
The Internet itself was originally designed as a P2P system. If you are wondering what a network that is not P2P looks like, take a look at digital cable TV or some other thin client network. The whole point of the Internet is that any computer connected to the Internet can establish communication with any other computer, without having to route that communication through some single central system (note that in the case of cable TV, nodes cannot communicate with each other at all, except for communication between the head ends and the set-top box). P2P distributed computing embodies the very philosophy of the Internet, which is to share computing resources among Internet users -- whether that is storage (in the case of filesharing systems) or CPU time (in the case of Skype and grid computing efforts).
The fact that people ignore copyright laws and share copyrighted videos over P2P systems has nothing to do with P2P, and everything to do with the general public's attitudes about copyrights.
Palm trees and 8
P2P is optimized for low cost distribution of large files without a centralized point of failure.
GitHub, Google Code, Youtube or plain old commercial hosting all have significant operating expenses in terms of servers, bandwidth and people power, thus they all require a business model to derive revenue from their content, either directly or indirectly (such as advertising). If youtube where to suddenly go bankrupt, that content would suddenly disappear from the internet. With P2P the costs of hosting are equally distributed among the userbase and in practice will soak up any spare capacity in network (which ISPs don't like as it doesn't fit in with their all-you-can-eat business model).
The inherent assumption is that anything worth sharing online is capable of generating a business model capable of covering its hosting expenses, or is deemed important enough to have a philanthropic donor to pay for it. Also a single point of failure assumes that you want to exert a high level of control over your content and are not subject to attacks from entities (governments, corporations) who do not wish you to share specific content.
So what remains is mostly content that is unable to generate a business model through its online distribution (Linux ISOs) and content that others are actively seeking to remove from the internet (Copyrighted Music and Videos + Wikileaks backups).
What would be the operating, server and bandwidth costs of hosting the full contents of The Pirate Bay on a centralized server? Maybe the internet giants like Apple or Google would have the modern day resources to physically achieve this, it would require a global CDN (like Youtube has), a multi-million pound operating budget, thus requiring either subscription charges or huge quantities of advertising, and would subject its owners to a huge multitude of legal issues, and the business interests of big media would ensure that it would be almost impossible to create such a service. With P2P we bypass all these restrictions and remove our dependance on the good-will of large corporations.
Without Napster pushing the boundaries and showing what was technically possible, big media would never have been forced to agree to iTunes (which tries to play by the rules, but at a cost)
"Yes, technology itself isn't bad."
But as Langdon Winner points out, technological systems do have assumptions and implications...
From:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langdon_Winner
"In 1980 Winner proposed that technologies embody social relations i.e. power.[2] To the question he poses "Do Artifacts Have Politics?", Winner identifies two ways in which artifacts can have politics. The first, involving technical arrangements and social order, concerns how the invention, design, or arrangement of artifacts or the larger system becomes a mechanism for settling the affairs of a community. This way "transcends the simple categories of 'intended' and 'unintended' altogether, representing "instances in which the very process of technical development is so thoroughly biased in a particular direction that it regularly produces results heralded as wonderful breakthroughs by some social interests and crushing setbacks by others" (Winner, p. 25-6, 1999). It implies that the process of technological development is critical in determining the politics of an artifact; hence the importance of incorporating all stakeholders in it. (Determining who the stakeholders are and how to incorporate them are other questions entirely.)
The second way in which artifacts can have politics refers to artifacts that correlate with particular kinds of political relationships, which Winner refers to as inherently political artifacts (Winner, p. 22, 1999). He distinguishes between two types of inherently political artifacts: those that require a particular sociological system and those that are strongly compatible with a particular sociological system (Winner, p. 29, 1999). A further distinction is made between conditions internal to the workings of a given technical system and those that are external to it (Winner, p. 33, 1999). This second way in which artifacts can have politics can be visualized as a 2-by-2 matrix, consisting of four 'types' of artifacts: those requiring a particular internal sociological system, those compatible with a particular internal sociological system, those requiring a particular external sociological system, and those compatible with a particular external sociological system.
As are all typologies, this matrix is a simplification-by-boundary-work -- in this case, the two boundaries are drawn between requiring and compatible, and between internal and external. It is this boundary-work that makes the typology useful for avoiding extreme technological determinism, social constructivism, and noetic flatness in conceptualizing an artifact's political qualities, and for thinking about how these qualities change through time.
Applied to Wikipedia itself, Winner's first way in which artifacts can have politics asks about the process of a Wikipedia's development and whether it was/is somehow biased. The second way asks whether Wikipedia requires or is compatible with particular internal or external sociological systems."
That said, I applaud the judge's ruling.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Japan's Supreme court also ruled in favor of the creator of Winny.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
GitHub, Google Code, Youtube or plain old commercial hosting all have significant operating expenses in terms of servers, bandwidth and people power,
The thing is even with all those disadvantages people still vastly prefer them over the P2P alternatives, even if that means paying their own money for hosting. If P2P is so awesome, why isn't Ubuntu and Debian using it for distribution software updates? Why are all the podcast I listen to, even those from the Free Software community and those under free CC licenses, hosted on regular for-pay HTTP servers, not on P2P? Why are almost all the videos I watch hosted on vimeo, blip, youtube and Co. not on bittorrent? Why doesn't my Firefox support bittorrent?
What would be the operating, server and bandwidth costs of hosting the full contents of The Pirate Bay on a centralized server?
Hosting large amounts of illegal content would cost money, P2P makes it easier to share large amount of illegal content. I don't doubt that. That's my point: P2P tools like Bittorrent are optimized for uses which rarely appear in legal use, but which are frequent when it comes to illegal use.
The ability to share frequently changing collections of small files would be far more valuable for legal users, then sharing large blobs of static data, yet in all those years there has never been a P2P tool optimized for the former.
Ah sure, bit torrent is useless for installing updates?
Wake me when you have a tool that is actually in standard use by a major distribution, not just some random proof of concept that is used by nobody and apperently hasn't updated their webpage in the last four years.
The fact that people ignore copyright laws and share copyrighted videos over P2P systems has nothing to do with P2P, and everything to do with the general public's attitudes about copyrights.
Bingo. Remove P2P from the equation, and people will share copyright videos using other means (just like they did before P2P).
"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein
Finally, some Common Sense. It's so rare, it's a goddamn super power.
Do you trust your OS updates to come out of p2p cloud?
Cryptographic signatures exist, so getting secure updates from an untrusted sources is quite possible.
Their customers are already using p2p so it was a natural fit.
I haven't checked WoW in a while, but I can't remember ever having to touch a Bittorrent client for it, it's all handled internally by the updater. So while that is a use of a P2P protocol, it's not exactly a justification for PirateBay and friends.
You will not see video on p2p due to the nature of how videos work. You need the front part before you can watch the later parts. So streaming is what they do.
And what stops you from developing a P2P protocol that can handle that?
Also for things like github it makes little sense for p2p there.
Github has an incredible small quota for their free service, so a free P2P alternative would make perfect sense to host larger files. Also storage is cheap, so a handful of users hanging their TB drives into the P2P cloud could go a long way to host a ton of projects.
You are confusing usage with 'right or wrong' moral choices. They are 'right or wrong' design decisions. Very different.
I am not passing a judgment, heck, I wouldn't mind if copying would be legal. What I do mind is all those lies and half truth that people throw around to defend P2P.
Also the entire internet was designed up front to be p2p.
The Internet has always operated on a client/server model not P2P, the only P2P about that was that every client could also be a server in the early days, which isn't true today due to NAT. However, currently day use of the term P2P generally implies some short of resource/bandwidth sharing between peers, none of the mainstream FTP/HTTP part of the Internet was ever build for that, one could make an argument for Usenet, but even there that wasn't really P2P, but more a collection of central servers that copied data to each other.
It [Bittorrent] is one of the most, if not THE most, efficient file transfer protocols invented.
Only when it comes to large static files, for everything else it sucks.
I was talking about the design intent of this particular tool... what this particular software tool was originally used for.
Googling around a bit, it seems that MP2P is an evolution of Gnutella with some anonymity and speed ups thrown in, i.e. regular old school illegal file sharing.
World of Warcraft uses the bittorrent protocol to update their clients. That's far more than a "proof of concept". As an added bonus, bandwidth costs are pushed to their users.
That's pre 7-11 thinking....
Farnsworth : "Amy, technology isn't intrinsically good or evil. It's how it's used. Like the Death Ray."
Global warming and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking number of pirates - Gospel of the FSM
World of Warcraft uses the bittorrent protocol to update their clients. That's far more than a "proof of concept".
Not really, as that's not the use case I was talking about. WoW patches are still a large blobs of mostly static data, not a large collection of frequently changing small files. Furthermore Blizzard has bittorrent wrapped up in their own client, which also allows them to bypass limitations of the protocol (i.e. chumbersome management of managing .torrent files).
The reason that your code, podcasts, and online videos are hosted in special purpose web applications is that they understand the format and purpose of your data. This will always allow them to be more featureful, as they are full fledged applications. You are comparing them to a file transfer protocol, which is disingenuous.
Rsync is optimised for replicating frequently changing collections of small files, and is widely used for that purpose, and it peer to peer. You seem to be arguing that there is little legal need for sharing large binary files. You must not edit video collaboratively, or develop and distribute indie games, or train neural nets, or share language corpora, or any number of other possible legal uses. The fact that it is widely used to share cultural ephemera is more a testament to advertising and poor education than a problem with a protocol.
That's pre 7-11 thinking....
The reason that your code, podcasts, and online videos are hosted in special purpose web applications is that they understand the format and purpose of your data.
Yes, but those have little to do with the actual transfer protocol. There is in principle nothing that would stop you from using P2P for these services instead of HTTP, as the core protocol doesn't care much about what data you ship with it. Yet my Podcast tool doesn't even support torrent or any other kind of P2P and my browser doesn't either.
Rsync is optimised for replicating frequently changing collections of small files
Rsync is not P2P, it's classic client/server like HTTP and FTP, just with a bit of delta/incremental updates thrown in.
You must not edit video collaboratively, or develop and distribute indie games, or train neural nets, or share language corpora, or any number of other possible legal uses.
I do and bittorrent or really any kind of P2P, is a shitty tool for handling regularly updating data.
You are however brushing p2p with rather broad strokes you have to admit...
Might be, but I am just going by personal experience. I consume a ton of legal open content, be podcast, videos or free software. Yet the amount of that that comes over P2P is pretty damn close to zero. If P2P is so awesome for legal uses, I really don't see them much in the wild, I have to go search for them with a magnifying glass.
It has not. Go read the intro books from the early 90s. They all talk about how everyone can talk to each other equally.
Modern P2P isn't just about talking equally, but about sharing resources and becoming an provider for the stuff you consume. That has never been how the Internet operated. Internet was always about having servers that provide data and clients that consume it, it always was a one way street aside from manual efforts such as setting up a classic mirror server.
For the much more regular tasks, such as regular software updates, bittorrent is rather useless, as it has no real support for frequently changing collections of small files
Most major Blizzard games (including WoW) use p2p for updates. A good deal of other popular multiplayer games do as well.
All the world's a CPU, and all the men and women merely AI agents
Hmm... by its smell, I'd say grilling chicken.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Remove P2P from the equation, and people will share copyright videos using other means (just like they did before P2P).
While the removal of P2P wouldn't stop piracy, it could certainly change it scale and scope, as peoples behavior is influences a lot by the convenience and abilities of the tools they have at hand.
But the tool that enables piracy on the current scale and scope is not P2P, it's the Internet.
"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein