Something similar happened to me and I knew the lawyers realized they had no case but they wouldn't let it drop as long as their client was paying. My mother was a judge, so I knew how to aproach this. See the lawyers would never bring this to trial because the judge would repremand them when it was so clear they had no case. But that won't stop them from threatening me. So, first, because I wasn't a lawyer, I sent copious letters to the lawyers and their client repeatedly telling them they in as many ways that they had no case. Each letter sent to the lawyer cost the client money. Each letter sent to the client cost the client money when they turned the letter over to the lawyers as they must. Each reply from the lawyer, and they must reply to each letter, cost the client money. You can't wear lawyers down, but you can wear the client down.
Do not have a lawyer send the letters. It is considered unethical for a lawyer to send a letter to the another lawyer's cleint and it is really the client you want to get to.
Unfortunately, the US has government backed telecommunication monopolies. E911 is a good example of how it works. In most places in the US, E911 is contracted by the counties with the local telephone monopoly. When the FCC decided that VoIP providers had to provide E911 and gave them only 120 days to invent a method for doing that and putting it into place, the telephone monopolies refused to allow the VoIP providers to connect to E911 because they weren't regulated wireline telephone companies. It took court action to call the FCC off; the court stating that the FCC could not impose a regulation that was impossible to meet and order the phone companies to allow the VoIP carriers to connect to E911. However, there are still many areas of the US where the phone companies are still refusing to allow the VoIP carries to connect to E911 services.
Wiretapping is another example. The monopolies get paid to tap phone lines - averaging about $60,000 per tap. The equipment to do this is expensive, so the government gave the money to the monopolies to implement wiretaping capability years ago. However, the FCC says that not only will they not give money to the VoIP carriers to implement wiretaps, the VoIP companies (unlike the monopolies) must do each wiretap for free or face heavy fines.
On the happy side, Congress exempted from regulation anyone providing VoIP as long as their service doesn't connect to the publicly switch telephone network, PSTN. This means that any one with control of their own DNS can setup a SIP server, sign people up to use their server and it will complete calls to anyone else using SIP. This will break the telephone monoplies once enough people have broadband and realize they don't have to pay to have telephone service (except some tiny charge to the guy with the SIP server, or he may just do it for free). I would suggest an open source SIP server project for Windows because more people would be able to operate a Windows based server and that would speed up the whole process. There is an open source project for Linux, OpenSIP, but it is too difficult for the average enthusiest to setup and operate.
How I see this happening is that there are (soft) SIP phones and SIP PBXs that can select the least cost path to complete a call. This allows the user to use the free route when it is available. As more and more calls are completed by the free routes, people will drop the paid VoIP services. The greatest impact of this will be the phone monopolies PSTN and their very restrictive, high priced VoIP services.
The reason ISP's are not common carriers dates back to dial-up modem Internet. The Telco's wanted to charge ISP's by the minute just like they do long-distance carriers for access to their network. The FCC got involved in this and used AOL as a model. AOL had these huge caching servers so AOL customer's web page requests rarely went out onto the Internet; instead they were served from the caches. So the FCC ruled that ISP's were delivering content and were not themselves carriers.
The Telcos are now (with broadband) satisfied with the content provider status as it saves them a lot of headaches, fees and taxes on their own Internet services. Broadband is far closer to a carrier service than a content service, but I don't see thing changing.
The don't have to be 100% effective to be effective. If they can say we are stopping 99%, then they can claim victory. Protecting the childern just means doing something 99% of the children find too difficult to circumvent. No law or technology is ever 100% effective in achieving its purpose.
The whole point of In re Bilski is that this court, which had several years ago expanded the definition of what was patentable and lead to the mess the USPTO is now in, has now stated that they were wrong in doing so and that they were now adhering to an earlier definition that did not expand upon those decissions that SCOTUS had handed down. Software was not originally patentable (believe me, I've been programming since 1968). If they adhere to an earlier definition, it follows that it is not patentable. The exception they make is for firmware or other software necessary to the functioning of a particular machine - such as a milling machine, plotter, etc. Computers simply don't qualify as a particular machine although I know this is being debated. But I think those who believe computers become specific machines just by running a specific program on them are dreaming - it will never pass the courts.
Oops, have to reply to my own post. Not only would the software need to run on only one make and model of computer, it would have to be included with every instance of that computer. Think embedded firmware.
A computer is not a "specific machine". A washing machine, Westinghouse Model 293DQ, is. So, unless your software runs on only one make and model of computer, it isn't patentable.
As an ISP, under the DMCA, we receive notices all the time and we call the "offender" and ask them to stop doing whatever. It's just extra work and expense for us that we don't appreciate. The only difference between the letters we had been receiving and this one is that this one is talking to the offender rather than us. I suspect the RIAA hopes it will be scarier than one telling us someone on our network is violating their copyright. I have no problem with forwarding it to the offender as we really hate arguing with them about whether P2P is legal and how did we know what they were doing (violating their privacy, I guess).
"what would entice an ISP to follow the RIAA's 'suggestions'?"
Very simple. ISP's put up with P2P users if they have lots of unused bandwidth because the extra money helps. But when things become congested, cutting of the P2P users increases profits and customer satisfaction. This is because the cost of the bandwidth used by a P2P user exceeds the amount they are paying and satisfied customers reduces churn (and therefore increases profits).
Net neutrallity will probably pass under Obama preventing ISP's from kicking P2P users off, so a more likely response from ISP's will be to use bandwidth quotas and charge for going over the quota. That will turn P2P users into a attractive profit center. It has the added benefit of indirectly making money off high bandwith services like NetFlixs. Most major ISP's are already testing this model in limited areas of the country. It's coming.
Actually, there used to be, in 1981, a $5 fee to copyright software. Also, you had to send the Copyright Office a complete copy of your source code. That was back in the days I was writing games for Apple II's and Atari 800's. As programs got longer, they started requiring only the first 50 pages and the last page.
Actually, I started my son off with Visual Basic at age 12. It wasn't very difficult and it may well be better to start them off with event driven programing rather than procedural. Rather than writing the answer on a command text line, put the results in a text box. Push buttons to actually execute code. The kids will really like writing a program that looks more like what they are used to than some antiquated program written for use on DecWriters. My son loved it and now at 24 he is a programming project leader for a software development company.
Most backbone contracts state that their services cannot be used for illegal purposes. Researchers pointing out to those backbone providers that the contracts have been broken doesn't strike me as vigilantism. Neighborhood watch gets my vote.
If they receive a proper DMCA notice and remove the offending files then they have no further liability under the law. Toyota is blowing smoke; this is just a typical lawyer scare tactic that has no basis in law.
Actually, Toyota could be the one billed should Desktop Nexus comply. By demanding that Desktop Nexus identify for Toyota the offending files, one might argue that Toyota was hiring them as a contractor to fulfill Toyota's obligation under the DMCA. To cover themselves, Desktop Nexus should send a proposal to Toyota offering to identify and remove the offending photos, to the best of their ability (thus not guaranteeing to find them all), for, say, $1000 each.
Wasn't there a topic a couple months ago where someone was charged with a federal felony for giving false information for the purpose of gaining access to a social network? I'm a bit foggy on this. Does anyone have a reference?
I'm an ISP of 14 years and it really troubles me that so many people don't understand what the ISP model is.
High bandwidth lines are expensive, very expensive. Almost no one could afford one for web browsing and email. So an ISP pays for that expensive line and then shares it among hundreds or thousands of people, each paying very much less than the cost what the high bandwidth line actually costs. For this to work, people must be willing to share nicely. Too many are not sharing nicely having some rediculous notion that they are actually paying for the bandwidth available to them rather than a share of the bandwidth.
We term people who can't share nicely bandwidth hogs. No ISP, no matter what they say publicly, wants bandwidth hogs on their network under the current ISP model. Why? Because they want their customers to have a good experience using their service, keep it forever, recommend it to friends and so on. Bandwidth hogs degrade that experience and cost ISP's not only money, but reputation and customers.
14 years ago the average per user usage over all customers was 50 bits per second. Now the average per user usage averaged over all customers is 20,000 bits per second. A typical bandwidth hog averages over 900,000 bits per second (on a typical DSL line) 24 hours per day.
We know to the byte exactly how much bandwidth each customer is using; there is indeed an odometer to measure the overall bandwidth usage of each and every customer. We use a Redback SMS 1800 subscriber management/router and it gives us exact figures. Cisco makes a similar unit also used by many ISP's.
There are no allotments; things don't work that way. But 10 years ago and ISP could correctly figure a user was actively downloading something 1/30 of the time, but only because they were on a dialup modem. Broadband users were downloading more like 1/1000 of the time when broadband first became available because files downloaded faster. P2P destroyed that model and raised costs hugely.
Now the problem with P2P is that it expands to fill all available bandwidth. At one time, after Kazaa first appeared we saw our lines starting to become congested, so we doubled our bandwidth. That relieved the problem for almost 10 days. Other ISP's I've talked to agree, increasing bandwidth doesn't solve the P2P/bandwidth hog problem.
I think I take exception at saying it is ISP greed; I'm more inclined to say it is a small handful of P2P users that can rationalize their theft of copyrighted material as (astonishingly) helping the people they are stealing from.
As an ISP in the US, we've been asked many times to hand over information wholesale to the FBI. Such warrants are not inforceable and we always ask them what it is they really want. Then they tell us specifically what they are looking for and we tell them if we have the data. If we do, they issue another warrant, signed by a judge, and they get the data. We narrow the FBI request down to the point that it identifies a single account. If it can't be narrowed to a singe account, the data would be worthless to them in court and they don't ask further.
Many/. readers work in similar jobs. My favorite is a subscriber that cancelled his account because the only websites he could go to were pornography sites and he was sure we were causing his problem. He was a long-time employee of one of the local university's IT department, so he knew we were doing it.
The AT&T contract allows the owner of the iPhone to use the Net. Sharing that connection with unrelated people would constitute theft of service (just like sharing your TV cable, for example). Creating a program whose purpose is to fascilitate theft of service is a legally bad position to be in.
Being one of the first to download and install the patch, it can confidently tell you the service crashes - frequently - where the unpatched version was solid as a rock. I don't blame Apple for waiting.
"So by 'not regulating' he means that ISP's should be free to throttle whatever they please? Interesting stance."
Comcast was throttling BitTorrent because of a problem with the DOCSIS 2.0 protocol that was preventing users, including other BitTourrent users, from being able to schedule packets upstream when upstream traffic was heavy. This is an engineering problem and McDowell is smart enough to realize that even if some of the other Commissioners and the Press were not.
BitTorrent users could have switched to DSL as DSL doesn't have this scheduling problem. That's what competition is about. Net Neutrality isn't interested in solving problems through competition or engineering and neither is the majority of the FCC. Fortunately, it is doubtful the FCC has the authority to force Net Neutrality on ISP's when Congress has not authorized such powers over private networks - which shows uncommon good sense on the part of Congress.
Very unlikely to be litigated. Courts generally do not tell regulatory agencies how to make their rules. They only concern themselves with constitutionality, ability to comply, and capricious application.
Slashdot Mirror
Something similar happened to me and I knew the lawyers realized they had no case but they wouldn't let it drop as long as their client was paying. My mother was a judge, so I knew how to aproach this. See the lawyers would never bring this to trial because the judge would repremand them when it was so clear they had no case. But that won't stop them from threatening me. So, first, because I wasn't a lawyer, I sent copious letters to the lawyers and their client repeatedly telling them they in as many ways that they had no case. Each letter sent to the lawyer cost the client money. Each letter sent to the client cost the client money when they turned the letter over to the lawyers as they must. Each reply from the lawyer, and they must reply to each letter, cost the client money. You can't wear lawyers down, but you can wear the client down.
Do not have a lawyer send the letters. It is considered unethical for a lawyer to send a letter to the another lawyer's cleint and it is really the client you want to get to.
Unfortunately, the US has government backed telecommunication monopolies. E911 is a good example of how it works. In most places in the US, E911 is contracted by the counties with the local telephone monopoly. When the FCC decided that VoIP providers had to provide E911 and gave them only 120 days to invent a method for doing that and putting it into place, the telephone monopolies refused to allow the VoIP providers to connect to E911 because they weren't regulated wireline telephone companies. It took court action to call the FCC off; the court stating that the FCC could not impose a regulation that was impossible to meet and order the phone companies to allow the VoIP carriers to connect to E911. However, there are still many areas of the US where the phone companies are still refusing to allow the VoIP carries to connect to E911 services.
Wiretapping is another example. The monopolies get paid to tap phone lines - averaging about $60,000 per tap. The equipment to do this is expensive, so the government gave the money to the monopolies to implement wiretaping capability years ago. However, the FCC says that not only will they not give money to the VoIP carriers to implement wiretaps, the VoIP companies (unlike the monopolies) must do each wiretap for free or face heavy fines.
On the happy side, Congress exempted from regulation anyone providing VoIP as long as their service doesn't connect to the publicly switch telephone network, PSTN. This means that any one with control of their own DNS can setup a SIP server, sign people up to use their server and it will complete calls to anyone else using SIP. This will break the telephone monoplies once enough people have broadband and realize they don't have to pay to have telephone service (except some tiny charge to the guy with the SIP server, or he may just do it for free). I would suggest an open source SIP server project for Windows because more people would be able to operate a Windows based server and that would speed up the whole process. There is an open source project for Linux, OpenSIP, but it is too difficult for the average enthusiest to setup and operate.
How I see this happening is that there are (soft) SIP phones and SIP PBXs that can select the least cost path to complete a call. This allows the user to use the free route when it is available. As more and more calls are completed by the free routes, people will drop the paid VoIP services. The greatest impact of this will be the phone monopolies PSTN and their very restrictive, high priced VoIP services.
The reason ISP's are not common carriers dates back to dial-up modem Internet. The Telco's wanted to charge ISP's by the minute just like they do long-distance carriers for access to their network. The FCC got involved in this and used AOL as a model. AOL had these huge caching servers so AOL customer's web page requests rarely went out onto the Internet; instead they were served from the caches. So the FCC ruled that ISP's were delivering content and were not themselves carriers.
The Telcos are now (with broadband) satisfied with the content provider status as it saves them a lot of headaches, fees and taxes on their own Internet services. Broadband is far closer to a carrier service than a content service, but I don't see thing changing.
The don't have to be 100% effective to be effective. If they can say we are stopping 99%, then they can claim victory. Protecting the childern just means doing something 99% of the children find too difficult to circumvent. No law or technology is ever 100% effective in achieving its purpose.
The whole point of In re Bilski is that this court, which had several years ago expanded the definition of what was patentable and lead to the mess the USPTO is now in, has now stated that they were wrong in doing so and that they were now adhering to an earlier definition that did not expand upon those decissions that SCOTUS had handed down. Software was not originally patentable (believe me, I've been programming since 1968). If they adhere to an earlier definition, it follows that it is not patentable. The exception they make is for firmware or other software necessary to the functioning of a particular machine - such as a milling machine, plotter, etc. Computers simply don't qualify as a particular machine although I know this is being debated. But I think those who believe computers become specific machines just by running a specific program on them are dreaming - it will never pass the courts.
Yes, but only if that is its ONLY function.
Oops, have to reply to my own post. Not only would the software need to run on only one make and model of computer, it would have to be included with every instance of that computer. Think embedded firmware.
A computer is not a "specific machine". A washing machine, Westinghouse Model 293DQ, is. So, unless your software runs on only one make and model of computer, it isn't patentable.
I think people fail to remember that the law REQUIRES them to defend their copyrights or lose them.
As an ISP, under the DMCA, we receive notices all the time and we call the "offender" and ask them to stop doing whatever. It's just extra work and expense for us that we don't appreciate. The only difference between the letters we had been receiving and this one is that this one is talking to the offender rather than us. I suspect the RIAA hopes it will be scarier than one telling us someone on our network is violating their copyright. I have no problem with forwarding it to the offender as we really hate arguing with them about whether P2P is legal and how did we know what they were doing (violating their privacy, I guess).
H20
"what would entice an ISP to follow the RIAA's 'suggestions'?"
Very simple. ISP's put up with P2P users if they have lots of unused bandwidth because the extra money helps. But when things become congested, cutting of the P2P users increases profits and customer satisfaction. This is because the cost of the bandwidth used by a P2P user exceeds the amount they are paying and satisfied customers reduces churn (and therefore increases profits).
Net neutrallity will probably pass under Obama preventing ISP's from kicking P2P users off, so a more likely response from ISP's will be to use bandwidth quotas and charge for going over the quota. That will turn P2P users into a attractive profit center. It has the added benefit of indirectly making money off high bandwith services like NetFlixs. Most major ISP's are already testing this model in limited areas of the country. It's coming.
Actually, there used to be, in 1981, a $5 fee to copyright software. Also, you had to send the Copyright Office a complete copy of your source code. That was back in the days I was writing games for Apple II's and Atari 800's. As programs got longer, they started requiring only the first 50 pages and the last page.
Actually, I started my son off with Visual Basic at age 12. It wasn't very difficult and it may well be better to start them off with event driven programing rather than procedural. Rather than writing the answer on a command text line, put the results in a text box. Push buttons to actually execute code. The kids will really like writing a program that looks more like what they are used to than some antiquated program written for use on DecWriters. My son loved it and now at 24 he is a programming project leader for a software development company.
Now we can throw them in prison instead of just cutting off their Internet. I don't get it; how is forcing stronger measures good news?
Most backbone contracts state that their services cannot be used for illegal purposes. Researchers pointing out to those backbone providers that the contracts have been broken doesn't strike me as vigilantism. Neighborhood watch gets my vote.
If they receive a proper DMCA notice and remove the offending files then they have no further liability under the law. Toyota is blowing smoke; this is just a typical lawyer scare tactic that has no basis in law.
Actually, Toyota could be the one billed should Desktop Nexus comply. By demanding that Desktop Nexus identify for Toyota the offending files, one might argue that Toyota was hiring them as a contractor to fulfill Toyota's obligation under the DMCA. To cover themselves, Desktop Nexus should send a proposal to Toyota offering to identify and remove the offending photos, to the best of their ability (thus not guaranteeing to find them all), for, say, $1000 each.
Wasn't there a topic a couple months ago where someone was charged with a federal felony for giving false information for the purpose of gaining access to a social network? I'm a bit foggy on this. Does anyone have a reference?
I'm an ISP of 14 years and it really troubles me that so many people don't understand what the ISP model is.
High bandwidth lines are expensive, very expensive. Almost no one could afford one for web browsing and email. So an ISP pays for that expensive line and then shares it among hundreds or thousands of people, each paying very much less than the cost what the high bandwidth line actually costs. For this to work, people must be willing to share nicely. Too many are not sharing nicely having some rediculous notion that they are actually paying for the bandwidth available to them rather than a share of the bandwidth.
We term people who can't share nicely bandwidth hogs. No ISP, no matter what they say publicly, wants bandwidth hogs on their network under the current ISP model. Why? Because they want their customers to have a good experience using their service, keep it forever, recommend it to friends and so on. Bandwidth hogs degrade that experience and cost ISP's not only money, but reputation and customers.
14 years ago the average per user usage over all customers was 50 bits per second. Now the average per user usage averaged over all customers is 20,000 bits per second. A typical bandwidth hog averages over 900,000 bits per second (on a typical DSL line) 24 hours per day.
We know to the byte exactly how much bandwidth each customer is using; there is indeed an odometer to measure the overall bandwidth usage of each and every customer. We use a Redback SMS 1800 subscriber management/router and it gives us exact figures. Cisco makes a similar unit also used by many ISP's.
There are no allotments; things don't work that way. But 10 years ago and ISP could correctly figure a user was actively downloading something 1/30 of the time, but only because they were on a dialup modem. Broadband users were downloading more like 1/1000 of the time when broadband first became available because files downloaded faster. P2P destroyed that model and raised costs hugely.
Now the problem with P2P is that it expands to fill all available bandwidth. At one time, after Kazaa first appeared we saw our lines starting to become congested, so we doubled our bandwidth. That relieved the problem for almost 10 days. Other ISP's I've talked to agree, increasing bandwidth doesn't solve the P2P/bandwidth hog problem.
I think I take exception at saying it is ISP greed; I'm more inclined to say it is a small handful of P2P users that can rationalize their theft of copyrighted material as (astonishingly) helping the people they are stealing from.
As an ISP in the US, we've been asked many times to hand over information wholesale to the FBI. Such warrants are not inforceable and we always ask them what it is they really want. Then they tell us specifically what they are looking for and we tell them if we have the data. If we do, they issue another warrant, signed by a judge, and they get the data. We narrow the FBI request down to the point that it identifies a single account. If it can't be narrowed to a singe account, the data would be worthless to them in court and they don't ask further.
Many /. readers work in similar jobs. My favorite is a subscriber that cancelled his account because the only websites he could go to were pornography sites and he was sure we were causing his problem. He was a long-time employee of one of the local university's IT department, so he knew we were doing it.
The AT&T contract allows the owner of the iPhone to use the Net. Sharing that connection with unrelated people would constitute theft of service (just like sharing your TV cable, for example). Creating a program whose purpose is to fascilitate theft of service is a legally bad position to be in.
Being one of the first to download and install the patch, it can confidently tell you the service crashes - frequently - where the unpatched version was solid as a rock. I don't blame Apple for waiting.
"So by 'not regulating' he means that ISP's should be free to throttle whatever they please? Interesting stance."
Comcast was throttling BitTorrent because of a problem with the DOCSIS 2.0 protocol that was preventing users, including other BitTourrent users, from being able to schedule packets upstream when upstream traffic was heavy. This is an engineering problem and McDowell is smart enough to realize that even if some of the other Commissioners and the Press were not.
BitTorrent users could have switched to DSL as DSL doesn't have this scheduling problem. That's what competition is about. Net Neutrality isn't interested in solving problems through competition or engineering and neither is the majority of the FCC. Fortunately, it is doubtful the FCC has the authority to force Net Neutrality on ISP's when Congress has not authorized such powers over private networks - which shows uncommon good sense on the part of Congress.
Very unlikely to be litigated. Courts generally do not tell regulatory agencies how to make their rules. They only concern themselves with constitutionality, ability to comply, and capricious application.