'necessary' or even 'educational' has always been a scam at colleges...they simply do not have the right to restrict your speech in such a way.
Universities are not legally allowed to punish you for connecting to to a site or service they disapprove of. They can shape traffic so educational needs come first, they can limit everyone to the same amount of traffic, and they can call in the MPAA or RIAA, or even cut off your access if you actually break copyright law, which, BTW, you cannot do by downloading, only by letting people download off you.
They are not legally allowed to do what UF is described as doing, any more then they're legally able to arrest people for protesting, they have to follow the first amendment. You have the right to communicate with whoever you want, yes, even over their network, because they are the government and don't get to restrict your freedom of speech and freedom of association.
It's basically the same as having a protest on their property. They can get you in trouble if your protest is causing other students not to get the education they paid for, but beyond that they cannot do anything. First amendment rights trump government property ownership rights.
Yes, but the victim's actions are completely relevant to assault charges.
There's a rather large difference between walking up to someone and threatening to punch their face in if they don't give you 200 dollars right now, and walking up to someone and threatening to punch their face in if they don't give you 200 dollars right now because they were keying your car as you walked up.
Both are illegal, both are assault, but they aren't the same thing, and won't be treated the same way by a jury.
Because of that, I hope this guy doesn't fall for what his lawyer tell him, to plead. I want him in front of a jury. I'd find him innocent. Someone constantly hasswassing someone else for months to enlarge his penis, and the guy finally snaps and starts threatening their life? That's entirely justifable in my world. Hell, I'd probably be okay if he had hunted the guys down and taken a few swings at them.
It's even more hilarious when the family Guy does have some moral at the end, because it's usually some horrible horrible thing.
I'm specifically thinking of the time that they all move to the Deep South, and don't get along, but eventually have their life saved by the Southerners, and Peter closes the episode with the dubious moral 'I think the lesson here is, it doesn't really matter where you're from, as long as we're all the same religion.'.
You don't give him bad leads, in fact, this entire idea is silly.
You do what I do, give mortgage spammers my actual telephone number. I wait for banks to call, and then I call them criminals and tell them I'm alerting the SEC for their purchase of leads from felony computer hijackers, and I'm recommending that everyone I know not do business with them, because they are criminals.
If I'm in a good mode, I just demand their mailling address, and tell them they that if they cooperate with me in tracking down the spammers, I will consider them innocent dupes, and will not personally file suit against them.
Copyright infringement involves violating any of the exclusive rights of the copyright owner, one of which is the right to distribute copies of the work.
And the other is public performance of the work, and that's all the rights that apply to movies.
You do not have to commit any act of copyright violation to end up with a movie in your shared folder. All you have to do is download it from someone else.
They are the ones who violated copyright then, not you. You didn't do anything illegal.
This is really funny. You're sort of claiming that if I download a file from your public FTP server, my experience is no way to prove to others that you have files available for public download. To argue that before a jury would be a major insult to their intelligence.
It doesn't matter if I have files available for public download. It matters if I have copied files and given them out.
Having files available to download is not, in any way, a crime, which is something you seem to be ignoring, so it doesn't matter if they prove it. I was just pointing out they'll have problems doing so.
To successfully sue someone, either they must have violated a specific civil law which allows you to sue them, or they must have damaged you in a way not specifically illegal.
"Making copies" is illegal.
A "very strong possibility" is all that's needed to win in civil court.
Put those two things together, and a "very strong possibility that you made copies" is enough to get convicted.
No, there's not a 'very strong possiblity', which you seem to be using to mean 'preponderance of the evidence'. You can't arrest a prositute for prostitution because she's standing on the street solicting. (You can obviously arrest her for solicitation, though.)
To commit a copyright infringement, you have to commit a specific infringment. They have to be able to say 'On March 14, 2003, you copied the Beatles' song 'Hey Jude', contained in an MP3 format file named 'Beatles-Hey Jude.mp3', on your computer, and then transmitted one of the copies to 10.0.0.2. You cannot commit a crime 'in general'.
And they cannot do that. The only copy they can prove you made is the copy they themselves downloaded, which is, as I said below, not a crime on your part.
So, you content that their machine would have just randomly made a copy and handed it out to some passerbyer if the RIAA hadn't asked?
The RIAA's lawyers would contend that the machine would hand out copies to any random passerby who attempted to download it, without first checking if the passerby was the copyright owner, or otherwise authorized to possess the file. The fact that the RIAA's detective was able to make a copy without presenting any identifying information will be sufficient to prove this in court.
The fact it will hand random copies out is not illegal.
The RIAA has the perfect right to let people make copies. If a copyright owner walks up to someone on the street and asks for a copy of their work, there's an implication there that they have granted you permission to make said copy.
If I approach a stranger in a bar, and hire him to climb in the back window of my house and remove my TV, is he committing a crime?
Yes, if I didn't tell him it was my house. He willingly performed an act he thought was criminal, and he can be imprisoned for it. This happens all the time in current US law.
No, sorry, that's not illegal. It's impossible for him to do it, so he can never be guilt of it. (It's impossible to trespass and break and enter on a property you have permission to do so.)
Committing something that you think is a crime, but is not actually illegal, is not in any way illegal. (Neither is attempting to commit a crime that is physically impossibly.) This is why they use actual underaged people to purchase alcohol, etc, as it is impossible to sell alcohol to an underaged person if the person is not underaged, and hence it's completely legal, even if the clerk thinks it's not. Back to law school with you.
(Note, of course, you could be guilty of 'attempted' crimes even if said crime is impossible, because the legal issue is the attempt to commit the crime, not the crime itself. But 'attempted copyright violation' isn't illegal.)
You can't sue someone for what might have happened,
Yes you can. You can sue for almost anything, and you can win by showing that it is highly probable that your claims are true.
You can obviously sue anyone for anything. However, the 'possiblity you made copies' is not a violation of copyright law.
To successfully sue someone, either they must have violated a specific civil law which allows you to sue them, or they must have damaged you in a way not specifically illegal. The possiblity that your computer copied a program is not illegal, and it has not damaged anyone. (A possiblity can't damage anyone at all.)
There are civil violations that let people sue you based on possiblity, but those have been made explicitly illegal.
and none of those programs keep logs.
The downloaders can keep logs if they want. Since the downloaders will be detectives hired by the RIAA, I think they'll keep fairly accurate logs.
Can they demonstrate that you didn't delete that copy of the file after they downloaded it?
unless the RIAA went around downloading them themselves. If so, the judge is going to look at them funny and dismiss the case. Making illegal copies for someone who's in charge of enforcing the copyright
Judges are quite used to getting testimony from undercover cops that bought heroine from a suspect. They never seem to look at it funny- instead, they see that if someone willingly performed an illegal act with a detective, it's good evidence he's been doing it with other people too.
It's not illegal to make copies of copyrighted materials at the copyright owner's request.
(And the standards of proof are lower in civil courts)
If they were cops it'd be entrapment.
Nope. Cops frequently ask people to commit crimes (mainly drug sales or prostitution). Then they arrest those people, and they usually get convictions. The standards for an entrapment defense are very high: you must prove that before interacting with the cops, you had no inclination to commit the crime. The entire idea must have been the cop's, and the burden is on the defendant to prove it.
So, you content that their machine would have just randomly made a copy and handed it out to some passerbyer if the RIAA hadn't asked?
And, entrapment is only a defense if police committed it. Get entrapped by a civilian, and you're 100% liable.
Except in this case you were asked to do something by someone who is allowed to give you permission to do it.
It's rather akin to claiming a doctor assaulted you with a knife when he performed surgery you consented to.
The RIAA has the perfect right to let people make copies. If a copyright owner walks up to someone on the street and asks for a copy of their work, there's an implication there that they have granted you permission to make said copy.
What is illegal is making copies and passing them out. Which is normally what uploading would be. (Although, of course, they have no evidence you didn't just give away your only copy, and deleted it after upload.)
People who share music have set up their computer to make copies and pass them. However, that's not the same as making copies and passing them out.
I hope some of these people getting sued have good lawyers, because the RIAA's case is crap...they can't prove any illegal copies were actually made. You can't sue someone for what might have happened, and none of those programs keep logs. (In addition to proving you didn't get rid of your only copy.)
...unless the RIAA went around downloading them themselves. If so, the judge is going to look at them funny and dismiss the case. Making illegal copies for someone who's in charge of enforcing the copyright of said object, while technically illegal, is a fairly silly crime for them to accuse you of. If they were cops it'd be entrapment. As they aren't cops, it's not illegal, but it's pretty damn insane.
You can even give them access to incoming email, and even shunt their SMTP into a custom mail server that lets them send email to tech support. (Or, hell, to anyone in the world...at one piece of mail every ten minutes.)
Of course, I'm in serious favor of outbound SMTP blocking in general. With the ability to have it disabled for people who know what they are doing. While trojans can still check what network they are on and spam though the right relay server, that requires custom code for each ISP and it's a hell of a lot more noticable by the ISP.
Before all you people start whining that you run Postfix behind a dynamic DSL, note I said 'the ability to have it disabled', and thus, not only can you turn it off, it's a hell of a lot more likely your entire dialup range isn't blocked somewhere because one third of the lusers on your ISP are running open proxies.
Slashdot Mirror
It's public property, that doesn't mean it's publically accessable.
It's a public network, because it's a public school.
Universities are not legally allowed to punish you for connecting to to a site or service they disapprove of. They can shape traffic so educational needs come first, they can limit everyone to the same amount of traffic, and they can call in the MPAA or RIAA, or even cut off your access if you actually break copyright law, which, BTW, you cannot do by downloading, only by letting people download off you.
They are not legally allowed to do what UF is described as doing, any more then they're legally able to arrest people for protesting, they have to follow the first amendment. You have the right to communicate with whoever you want, yes, even over their network, because they are the government and don't get to restrict your freedom of speech and freedom of association.
It's basically the same as having a protest on their property. They can get you in trouble if your protest is causing other students not to get the education they paid for, but beyond that they cannot do anything. First amendment rights trump government property ownership rights.
You know, your analog is a lot better than mine.
There's a rather large difference between walking up to someone and threatening to punch their face in if they don't give you 200 dollars right now, and walking up to someone and threatening to punch their face in if they don't give you 200 dollars right now because they were keying your car as you walked up.
Both are illegal, both are assault, but they aren't the same thing, and won't be treated the same way by a jury.
Because of that, I hope this guy doesn't fall for what his lawyer tell him, to plead. I want him in front of a jury. I'd find him innocent. Someone constantly hasswassing someone else for months to enlarge his penis, and the guy finally snaps and starts threatening their life? That's entirely justifable in my world. Hell, I'd probably be okay if he had hunted the guys down and taken a few swings at them.
Then we kill the marketers.
Get a clue, dumbass, you are spammers.
I'm specifically thinking of the time that they all move to the Deep South, and don't get along, but eventually have their life saved by the Southerners, and Peter closes the episode with the dubious moral 'I think the lesson here is, it doesn't really matter where you're from, as long as we're all the same religion.'.
You do what I do, give mortgage spammers my actual telephone number. I wait for banks to call, and then I call them criminals and tell them I'm alerting the SEC for their purchase of leads from felony computer hijackers, and I'm recommending that everyone I know not do business with them, because they are criminals.
If I'm in a good mode, I just demand their mailling address, and tell them they that if they cooperate with me in tracking down the spammers, I will consider them innocent dupes, and will not personally file suit against them.
Actually, I'd like to see someone accidently configure Postfix to relay spam. It's pretty damn tricky to do that on purpose, much less accidently.
Renaming root just stops some really stupid dictionary attacks.
It's called 'learning by example', there.
In what universe is 'this person has the ability to punish me' the same as 'I have respect for this person'?
And the other is public performance of the work, and that's all the rights that apply to movies.
That doesn't mean that you have committed any copyright violation.
You do not have to commit any act of copyright violation to end up with a movie in your shared folder. All you have to do is download it from someone else.
They are the ones who violated copyright then, not you. You didn't do anything illegal.
Having a copy of a movie in a shared folder is not copying it, it's indicating a willingness to copy it.
How exactly that works I don't know, but it does.
It doesn't matter if I have files available for public download. It matters if I have copied files and given them out.
Having files available to download is not, in any way, a crime, which is something you seem to be ignoring, so it doesn't matter if they prove it. I was just pointing out they'll have problems doing so.
To successfully sue someone, either they must have violated a specific civil law which allows you to sue them, or they must have damaged you in a way not specifically illegal.
"Making copies" is illegal.
A "very strong possibility" is all that's needed to win in civil court.
Put those two things together, and a "very strong possibility that you made copies" is enough to get convicted.
No, there's not a 'very strong possiblity', which you seem to be using to mean 'preponderance of the evidence'. You can't arrest a prositute for prostitution because she's standing on the street solicting. (You can obviously arrest her for solicitation, though.)
To commit a copyright infringement, you have to commit a specific infringment. They have to be able to say 'On March 14, 2003, you copied the Beatles' song 'Hey Jude', contained in an MP3 format file named 'Beatles-Hey Jude.mp3', on your computer, and then transmitted one of the copies to 10.0.0.2. You cannot commit a crime 'in general'.
And they cannot do that. The only copy they can prove you made is the copy they themselves downloaded, which is, as I said below, not a crime on your part.
So, you content that their machine would have just randomly made a copy and handed it out to some passerbyer if the RIAA hadn't asked?
The RIAA's lawyers would contend that the machine would hand out copies to any random passerby who attempted to download it, without first checking if the passerby was the copyright owner, or otherwise authorized to possess the file. The fact that the RIAA's detective was able to make a copy without presenting any identifying information will be sufficient to prove this in court.
The fact it will hand random copies out is not illegal.
The RIAA has the perfect right to let people make copies. If a copyright owner walks up to someone on the street and asks for a copy of their work, there's an implication there that they have granted you permission to make said copy.
If I approach a stranger in a bar, and hire him to climb in the back window of my house and remove my TV, is he committing a crime?
Yes, if I didn't tell him it was my house. He willingly performed an act he thought was criminal, and he can be imprisoned for it. This happens all the time in current US law.
No, sorry, that's not illegal. It's impossible for him to do it, so he can never be guilt of it. (It's impossible to trespass and break and enter on a property you have permission to do so.)
Committing something that you think is a crime, but is not actually illegal, is not in any way illegal. (Neither is attempting to commit a crime that is physically impossibly.) This is why they use actual underaged people to purchase alcohol, etc, as it is impossible to sell alcohol to an underaged person if the person is not underaged, and hence it's completely legal, even if the clerk thinks it's not. Back to law school with you.
(Note, of course, you could be guilty of 'attempted' crimes even if said crime is impossible, because the legal issue is the attempt to commit the crime, not the crime itself. But 'attempted copyright violation' isn't illegal.)
Yes you can. You can sue for almost anything, and you can win by showing that it is highly probable that your claims are true.
You can obviously sue anyone for anything. However, the 'possiblity you made copies' is not a violation of copyright law.
To successfully sue someone, either they must have violated a specific civil law which allows you to sue them, or they must have damaged you in a way not specifically illegal. The possiblity that your computer copied a program is not illegal, and it has not damaged anyone. (A possiblity can't damage anyone at all.)
There are civil violations that let people sue you based on possiblity, but those have been made explicitly illegal.
and none of those programs keep logs.
The downloaders can keep logs if they want. Since the downloaders will be detectives hired by the RIAA, I think they'll keep fairly accurate logs.
Can they demonstrate that you didn't delete that copy of the file after they downloaded it?
unless the RIAA went around downloading them themselves. If so, the judge is going to look at them funny and dismiss the case. Making illegal copies for someone who's in charge of enforcing the copyright
Judges are quite used to getting testimony from undercover cops that bought heroine from a suspect. They never seem to look at it funny- instead, they see that if someone willingly performed an illegal act with a detective, it's good evidence he's been doing it with other people too.
It's not illegal to make copies of copyrighted materials at the copyright owner's request.
(And the standards of proof are lower in civil courts)
If they were cops it'd be entrapment.
Nope. Cops frequently ask people to commit crimes (mainly drug sales or prostitution). Then they arrest those people, and they usually get convictions. The standards for an entrapment defense are very high: you must prove that before interacting with the cops, you had no inclination to commit the crime. The entire idea must have been the cop's, and the burden is on the defendant to prove it.
So, you content that their machine would have just randomly made a copy and handed it out to some passerbyer if the RIAA hadn't asked?
And, entrapment is only a defense if police committed it. Get entrapped by a civilian, and you're 100% liable.
Except in this case you were asked to do something by someone who is allowed to give you permission to do it.
It's rather akin to claiming a doctor assaulted you with a knife when he performed surgery you consented to.
The RIAA has the perfect right to let people make copies. If a copyright owner walks up to someone on the street and asks for a copy of their work, there's an implication there that they have granted you permission to make said copy.
No, the burden of proof is still on the accuser. It's just lower.
People who share music have set up their computer to make copies and pass them. However, that's not the same as making copies and passing them out.
I hope some of these people getting sued have good lawyers, because the RIAA's case is crap...they can't prove any illegal copies were actually made. You can't sue someone for what might have happened, and none of those programs keep logs. (In addition to proving you didn't get rid of your only copy.)
Of course, I'm in serious favor of outbound SMTP blocking in general. With the ability to have it disabled for people who know what they are doing. While trojans can still check what network they are on and spam though the right relay server, that requires custom code for each ISP and it's a hell of a lot more noticable by the ISP.
Before all you people start whining that you run Postfix behind a dynamic DSL, note I said 'the ability to have it disabled', and thus, not only can you turn it off, it's a hell of a lot more likely your entire dialup range isn't blocked somewhere because one third of the lusers on your ISP are running open proxies.
The exceptions are some, very few, cable stations, like Disney and Sci-Fi, and all the premium channels, of course.
But ABC and USA have never seen a penny of your cable bill.
Interuption based advertising is simply evil. I'm not standing there like a slack-jawed yokel wondering what I should be purchasing.