My dealings with the press on this issue have all gone essentially like that as well. They can't seem to accept the fact that it searches for anything... after all, if the recording industry is suing about music piracy, how could it be doing anything else but helping people pirate music?
I've found that it's really not until you provide about 5 concrete examples and several analogies that they even will talk on your terms. And even then they're not likely to put that version on the air/in print. It's incredibly frustrating--I talked with CBS for more than an hour, and said about 10 times that I didn't create a filesharing network, but what do they say when the time comes to air it? "Brendan Dolan-Gavitt, who created a file sharing network at Wesleyan University..."
My hope is that as this issue starts getting more press, the interviewers will start to get a little bit more clueful.
The networks in question were your basic MS Windows SMB networks. They were pretty clearly not designed for copyright infringement, so I don't see the argument that "the ONLY reason those networks exist is to trade free stuff that is supposed to cost money".
Furthermore, at what particular point does one draw a line between a network that is used for illegal purposes "too much"? At some fixed percentage of the network? Whose job is it, then, to go through and check that percentage? The file network search engine I run at Wesleyan indexes 233,157 files as of this writing, and it would be well-nigh impossible for me to give any sort of estimate about what percentage of those files are illegal. A lot of them are pornography and viruses:P
The issue really isn't nearly as clear as "these networks are only used for infringing copyright. Therefore, they can just be shut down".
Section 512 (h) of the DMCA states that a copyright holder can ask for a subpoena from a service provider in order to identify the person they believe is infringing copyright. They essentially only need to provide:
A copy of the takedown notice that they sent to the service provider as per section 512 (c)(3).
A proposed subpoena.
A statement that the information will only be used to protect the holder's rights under copyright.
It seems that the RIAA would have no problem satisfying these three requirements... yet another reason why the DMCA is not such a good law:P
By my reading of the section, "service provider" seems to be a general term that covers anyone who is providing services (tautological, I know). In each section, they start off with "A service provider shall not be liable..." and then specify a specific set of circumstances. In subsection (c), that set of circumstances is "for infringement of copyright by reason of the storage at the direction of a user of material that resides on a system or network controlled or operated by or for the service provider". In subsection (d), by contrast, it is "for infringement of copyright by reason of the provider referring or linking users to an online location containing infringing material or infringing activity, by using information location tools, including a directory, index, reference, pointer, or hypertext link".
In fact, the only clause in (d) that refers to (c) refers only to (c)(3), which describes what constitutes notification. It does not seem to require a designated agent, by my reading.
At the very least, I think it's less clear-cut than you make it seem.
Since I run a very similar indexing and search engine at Wesleyan University, I'm more interested than most in how this is going to turn out (and a bit worried that I'm going to be sued too, though it was really cool when PySMBSearch got mentioned in the analysis posted by the Princeton student). The idea that I could be liable for up to 15.1 billion USD (checking just a second ago, there are 100,921 files ending in.mp3 returned by my search engine) just for indexing other people's files, without explicitly providing any method of accessing them is just ridiculous.
I haven't taken the search down yet, but I'm seriously considering it, given how much the RIAA is asking, and given that I'm doing no more than any of the current defendants were (though I'm not sharing any copyrighted materials myself, so they wouldn't have the "direct infringement" case).
Nearly all do this nowadays (based on a sample size of about 4--Wesleyan, Harvard, Washington University, and Tufts). The way it works here at Wesleyan is this:
When you do a DHCP request, it checks to see if your MAC address is known. If it is, it gives you the address associated with your MAC and nameservers etc.
If you're not in the database, it gives you an address in a specified range (we have a class B here, so there are plenty of free IPs) that the routers facing the outside world know not to route. So you can get to anywhere within campus, but not outside. It also gives you different nameservers that always resolve to the address of the registration server--a server that tells you to enter your username and e-mail password, and then adds you to the database on the DHCP server so that you'll get correct nameservers next time your DHCP lease renews.
I was just listening to Science Friday on NPR (rm stream is available at the Science Friday site), and it had both Micheal Robertson and Bruce Perens on the show talking about Open Source Software. I wonder how the discussion would have gone if Bruce knew at the time that Robertson had just bumped him off the agenda?:)
On the other hand, that show did convince my Mom to switch to Linux (her old Windows machine just died). And it wasn't Bruce Perens going on about freedom and rights, it was Robertson talking about how much cheaper it was. So he seems to be taking the right tack to get regular people to use Linux...
It seems that the solution to the bandwidth problem is to have some kind of 3D markup language that can degrade gracefully, in essentially the way HTML works today. Don't have a GeForce10e32 ? You get lower quality versions of the textures, simpler polygons, etc.
The only issue is how much bandwidth is required to receive a minimal scene--and that might well be above what we have right now. Has anyone actually tried to implement such a thing, or at least gotten the preliminaries done so we have some data to work with?
It also seems like a true Metaverse (ala Stephenson) would require a better interface than we have right now. I doubt the general public is going to go for a world where they have to type to speak all day; some kind of voice system is necessary (perhaps incorporating something like Rojer Wilco would help, but most VoIP solutions today are a bit raw...) Plus some of those goggles Hiro wears in Snow Crash would be pretty nice;)
I like the idea of a property server--it sounds a lot like DNS today, and it could be distributed across multiple servers in the same way; you'd do a lookup of the coordinates, and get an IP back. If the IP's down, it would appear as a fenced in "default" property, otherwise you'd connect to their server, and grab their object information.
Anyway, I've babbled enough. The point is, I think that with a proper 3D language, we really could implement something like this today, though it might be slow as hell for a while, and only really be useful on large LANs (colleges, anyone?).
No, you missed the part where it says he's a Debian developer. He's actually referring to the software package, "aptitude". Damn useful little tool. Don't know if I would put it above communication skills et al, though...
He says, out loud, "LOL" when he thinks something's funny. Doesn't laugh. Just states, in acronym form, that he's laughing out loud. KILL KILL DEATH DEATH.
"And in Snow Crash, the distributed organic computing of the nanotech virus is the focus." should probably be "And in The Diamond Age, the distributed organic computing of the nanotech virus is the focus.", no?
they don't care if they die as long as they get the job done... No sane, healthy person could be willing to give up their own life for any nonsense cause like religion.
Huh? What happened to "Give me liberty, or give me death" ?
I wonder how many other people on the internet have, at various times, made this same statement? I think law enforcement would have trouble determining exactly which one let the cat out of the bag...
I really don't think that civil disobedience is going to do the trick. The RIAA's argument is that its listeners are outlaws, and locking up a few of them for not paying their royalties would only reinforce that argument--never mind that the argument is utterly specious.
Besides which, if you believe Lawrence Lessig, it'll just result in a whole lot of felony convictions:
Reason: Some of them would argue that they're active in the form of civil disobedience.
Lessig: In a world where civil disobedience was treated with toleration, that might be a good strategy. But we're in a world where disobedience is treated with felony convictions. The idea that you are going to get lots of civil disobedience against the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is just crazy. You're going to get lots of prosecutions and people going away to jail. The cost of disobedience has become too high, and I'm not sure it's a viable strategy anymore.
There's some basic cultural differences here. Many of the people who have great ideas in the Slashdot context about the way to run the world.. if you put them in Washington, they just don't fit.
I'm sure some people have exciting stories of battling the talking paperclip...
Heh, you bet I do. Take a look at this:
Once upon a time, there was a small boy. He loved to use Microsoft Word, and was, unlike most, paricularly fond of that lovable scamp known as Clippy. Clippy would always pop up just when he needed help with something, and was the best friend a boy could have. Paperclips live forever, but not so little boys, and so, as time passed, the boy, who was not so little any more, began to grow tired of Clippy's constant popping up. Clippy, sensing that he would soon be abandoned, began to pop up more and more frequently, even when he had no advice to give. Matters came to a head one April night, when the boy, sick of Clippy's shenanegins, tried to close the irksome paperclip. Sensing his life was in danger, Clippy leapt from the screen, snarling ferociously. The ensuing struggle lasted for three hours. At its completion, the boy stumbled out, battered, and with thousands of paperclip-shaped bruises and gashes all over his body, but victorious.
What was the point of this story? I was that boy.
Note: Normally I would just give a link to fanfiction.net, where I originally posted it, but since the site seems to be down (and because that version is slightly altered to be *cough* backstreet boys fan fiction), you'll have to make do with this. If you really need to, you can search for the author's name--moyix--on http://fanfiction.net/ when it comes back up.
Would it be right if we used our resources to annihilate whole populations to exact a small measure of justice from a much greater injustice? No. Would I loose sleep over it? Not likely.
My God. I'll sleep less easily knowing people like you are alive.
Slashdot Mirror
My dealings with the press on this issue have all gone essentially like that as well. They can't seem to accept the fact that it searches for anything... after all, if the recording industry is suing about music piracy, how could it be doing anything else but helping people pirate music?
I've found that it's really not until you provide about 5 concrete examples and several analogies that they even will talk on your terms. And even then they're not likely to put that version on the air/in print. It's incredibly frustrating--I talked with CBS for more than an hour, and said about 10 times that I didn't create a filesharing network, but what do they say when the time comes to air it? "Brendan Dolan-Gavitt, who created a file sharing network at Wesleyan University..."
My hope is that as this issue starts getting more press, the interviewers will start to get a little bit more clueful.
-Brendan
The networks in question were your basic MS Windows SMB networks. They were pretty clearly not designed for copyright infringement, so I don't see the argument that "the ONLY reason those networks exist is to trade free stuff that is supposed to cost money".
Furthermore, at what particular point does one draw a line between a network that is used for illegal purposes "too much"? At some fixed percentage of the network? Whose job is it, then, to go through and check that percentage? The file network search engine I run at Wesleyan indexes 233,157 files as of this writing, and it would be well-nigh impossible for me to give any sort of estimate about what percentage of those files are illegal. A lot of them are pornography and viruses :P
The issue really isn't nearly as clear as "these networks are only used for infringing copyright. Therefore, they can just be shut down".
-Brendan
Section 512 (h) of the DMCA states that a copyright holder can ask for a subpoena from a service provider in order to identify the person they believe is infringing copyright. They essentially only need to provide:
It seems that the RIAA would have no problem satisfying these three requirements... yet another reason why the DMCA is not such a good law :P
-Brendan
Newer versions of gaim come with a program called gaim-remote. Add a handler for aim:// that passes the URI to gaim-remote with the following syntax:
gaim-remote uri [uri]
Hope this helps.
-Brendan
Bizzare. Dana and I were looking at this just last night. Way to get Slashdotted ;)
-Brendan, who you don't know
By my reading of the section, "service provider" seems to be a general term that covers anyone who is providing services (tautological, I know). In each section, they start off with "A service provider shall not be liable..." and then specify a specific set of circumstances. In subsection (c), that set of circumstances is "for infringement of copyright by reason of the storage at the direction of a user of material that resides on a system or network controlled or operated by or for the service provider". In subsection (d), by contrast, it is "for infringement of copyright by reason of the provider referring or linking users to an online location containing infringing material or infringing activity, by using information location tools, including a directory, index, reference, pointer, or hypertext link".
In fact, the only clause in (d) that refers to (c) refers only to (c)(3), which describes what constitutes notification. It does not seem to require a designated agent, by my reading.
At the very least, I think it's less clear-cut than you make it seem.
Since I run a very similar indexing and search engine at Wesleyan University, I'm more interested than most in how this is going to turn out (and a bit worried that I'm going to be sued too, though it was really cool when PySMBSearch got mentioned in the analysis posted by the Princeton student). The idea that I could be liable for up to 15.1 billion USD (checking just a second ago, there are 100,921 files ending in .mp3 returned by my search engine) just for indexing other people's files, without explicitly providing any method of accessing them is just ridiculous.
I haven't taken the search down yet, but I'm seriously considering it, given how much the RIAA is asking, and given that I'm doing no more than any of the current defendants were (though I'm not sharing any copyrighted materials myself, so they wouldn't have the "direct infringement" case).
Nearly all do this nowadays (based on a sample size of about 4--Wesleyan, Harvard, Washington University, and Tufts). The way it works here at Wesleyan is this:
When you do a DHCP request, it checks to see if your MAC address is known. If it is, it gives you the address associated with your MAC and nameservers etc.
If you're not in the database, it gives you an address in a specified range (we have a class B here, so there are plenty of free IPs) that the routers facing the outside world know not to route. So you can get to anywhere within campus, but not outside. It also gives you different nameservers that always resolve to the address of the registration server--a server that tells you to enter your username and e-mail password, and then adds you to the database on the DHCP server so that you'll get correct nameservers next time your DHCP lease renews.
-Brendan
I was just listening to Science Friday on NPR (rm stream is available at the Science Friday site), and it had both Micheal Robertson and Bruce Perens on the show talking about Open Source Software. I wonder how the discussion would have gone if Bruce knew at the time that Robertson had just bumped him off the agenda? :)
On the other hand, that show did convince my Mom to switch to Linux (her old Windows machine just died). And it wasn't Bruce Perens going on about freedom and rights, it was Robertson talking about how much cheaper it was. So he seems to be taking the right tack to get regular people to use Linux...
It works because characters are really integers in C. So:
someVar = 'C';
someVar++;
printf("%c", someVar);
Would, in fact, give "D"
I used Kazaa at college to grab a few albums I had left at home. Cheaper than having a box of cds sent...
They're replacing all his dangerous speech with perl code! The fiends must be stopped!
It seems that the solution to the bandwidth problem is to have some kind of 3D markup language that can degrade gracefully, in essentially the way HTML works today. Don't have a GeForce10e32 ? You get lower quality versions of the textures, simpler polygons, etc.
The only issue is how much bandwidth is required to receive a minimal scene--and that might well be above what we have right now. Has anyone actually tried to implement such a thing, or at least gotten the preliminaries done so we have some data to work with?
It also seems like a true Metaverse (ala Stephenson) would require a better interface than we have right now. I doubt the general public is going to go for a world where they have to type to speak all day; some kind of voice system is necessary (perhaps incorporating something like Rojer Wilco would help, but most VoIP solutions today are a bit raw...) Plus some of those goggles Hiro wears in Snow Crash would be pretty nice ;)
I like the idea of a property server--it sounds a lot like DNS today, and it could be distributed across multiple servers in the same way; you'd do a lookup of the coordinates, and get an IP back. If the IP's down, it would appear as a fenced in "default" property, otherwise you'd connect to their server, and grab their object information.
Anyway, I've babbled enough. The point is, I think that with a proper 3D language, we really could implement something like this today, though it might be slow as hell for a while, and only really be useful on large LANs (colleges, anyone?).
No, you missed the part where it says he's a Debian developer. He's actually referring to the software package, "aptitude". Damn useful little tool. Don't know if I would put it above communication skills et al, though...
He says, out loud, "LOL" when he thinks something's funny. Doesn't laugh. Just states, in acronym form, that he's laughing out loud. KILL KILL DEATH DEATH.
1 Infinite Loop
I bet they direct all mail to that address into the circular file
"And in Snow Crash, the distributed organic computing of the nanotech virus is the focus." should probably be "And in The Diamond Age, the distributed organic computing of the nanotech virus is the focus.", no?
Have a look at the KDE User Interface Guidelines.
(Yes, the title is a gratuitous Neal Stephenson reference, thank you)
How long before we see a virus designed to cause physical harm by making a CD explode?
they don't care if they die as long as they get the job done ... No sane, healthy person could be willing to give up their own life for any nonsense cause like religion.
Huh? What happened to "Give me liberty, or give me death" ?
I wonder how many other people on the internet have, at various times, made this same statement? I think law enforcement would have trouble determining exactly which one let the cat out of the bag...
Definitely agree with some of the above posters--release it anonymously and securely. This sounds like a job for... Freenet!
I really don't think that civil disobedience is going to do the trick. The RIAA's argument is that its listeners are outlaws, and locking up a few of them for not paying their royalties would only reinforce that argument--never mind that the argument is utterly specious.
Besides which, if you believe Lawrence Lessig, it'll just result in a whole lot of felony convictions:
(excerpted from an interview with Reason magazine)
Heh, you bet I do. Take a look at this:
Note: Normally I would just give a link to fanfiction.net, where I originally posted it, but since the site seems to be down (and because that version is slightly altered to be *cough* backstreet boys fan fiction), you'll have to make do with this. If you really need to, you can search for the author's name--moyix--on http://fanfiction.net/ when it comes back up.
Would it be right if we used our resources to annihilate whole populations to exact a small measure of justice from a much greater injustice? No. Would I loose sleep over it? Not likely.
My God. I'll sleep less easily knowing people like you are alive.
-Moyix, who is very, very afraid