They are content providers - not ISPs - which explains their stance. What they are saying is not that piracy will prevent the adoption of broadband by users, but that it will prevent the content providers from using it as an alternative TV service like they want to.
The spammers themselves are well aware that nobody wants to receive it. They just do their best to make sure their customers don't know it.
Similarly, they will promise to send out X million emails on the customer's behalf without mentioning that half of those will go to people in irrelevant countries.
Actually the police are quite good at making sure CCTVs are undergoing 'maintenance' whenever there's a rally, just to ensure that they don't get taped doing anything they shouldn't.
Well, for a start, 'file-sharing traffic information' is neither kept, nor is it needed in this case. The only relevant information is who had the IP address at a particular time.
The trouble is, people often take a long time to report, or even notice, problems. If you purge your logs too often, the information just isn't going to be there when you need it for technical reasons.
Maybe it's just that uunet (my provider) is in bed with RIAA.
It's that your 'provider' is an ISP and most ISPs, although they like to advertise its availabilty, can't afford or be bothered with, the space and maintenance that a proper newsfeed requires. If you want good retention and full completion, you have to use a paid-for news provider.
As I've found out when planning a couple of treasure hunts, this happens with whole villages in the UK, either because they once had something important enough to make them worth naming, and no longer do, or (I'm almost certain) because some of the fake villages that were added back in WWII still get reproduced on modern maps.
I don't think the clarification of "placing of a copyrighted work" to allowing a file (worth at least $2500 _retail_) to be downloaded 10 or more times is going to affect many P2P'ers
The current law requires that the file be downloaded 10 times at a total value of at least $2500 before the distribution counts as a felony. what the new law seems to be clarifying is that if a file is uploaded to a P2P network, it can automatically be assumed to meet those requirements.
The reason is that there is no charge for local calls in the US, so there's nothing for them to get a cut of. Everyone's expecting the same to happen in the UK eventually, but the difference is that we have got used to the 'lo-call' rate having different rules from normal local calls, whereas the US already had free local calls before dial-up became common, so people wouldn't have put up with charges based on call time.
That would answer which market drives these spammers, but as far as the law is concerned in stopping the spammers we still need to know where they operate from right?
Not really. A technical solution requires knowing where the spam is sent from, but a legal solution only really requires knowing on whose behalf it is sent.
Well, I'm in the UK and I think I have probably had one or two spams, ever, relating to UK products. All the rest of the 10-15 spams per day relate to US products. The country the actual email originates from is irrelevant, I'd class it all as being 'from' America if that's where the advertised product is available.
If people are going to harvest email addresses, you'd think they'd at least check that the ISP in question was in the right country...
The recent versions of K++ (not sure about the basic KazaaLite) will let you jump supernodes, and keep hitting 'search more' until you run out of local supernodes. I'm finding it much easier to get matches on obscure stuff with these options.
It would be really stupid of KaZaA (Sharman Networks) to do, yes. But they're not the ones doing it, KazaaLite and K++ are ripped and modified versions of the program done by individuals (although with all the modifications they're adding, they're getting to the point where even SCO would have trouble finding any code in common with the original;-))
What KaZaA did do was add the Participation Level, which basically improves your chances of downloading if you're sharing a lot of popular files. And in my opinion that was a modification which would encourage piracy.
This PL = 1000 thing is actually rather bad for the P2P network as a whole. If noone sees the need to share files fewer people will share files I sort of agree but I think the mistake was introducing the PL in the first place. I know there were a lot of leechers but was it really necessary to find a way to force people to share? I'm sharing stuff for the simple reason that I want other people to have it (freeware that I've found useful, my and other people's fan music videos) and the PL would have made no difference to that.
Nothing, except that as soon as anyone finds out they were using them (which will happen if they take any action) then those blocks will be added to the database. So whoever uses them afterwards is likely to find those IPs no longer being trusted by Kazaa users.
It's actually nothing to do with protecting identity. All the new features are intended to reduce the chances of the RIAA finding out that you're sharing infringing files, so they won't be looking for your identity in the first place.
And before you ask, yes, those features will reduce the chance of other legitimate users finding your files as well.
Actually, that's already an option in the version I'm using. Just that the feature list for the new version made it sound like it was no longer optional.
It doesn't use a fixed list of IPs, it links in to a user-created database, so that shouldn't be a problem.
Some of the other upgrades sound a bit less convenient. One is the ability to block people from requesting 'show all files from this user' - great for people with a directory full of infringing material, not so great for someone like me who's sharing fan music videos and wants anyone who downloads one to be able to see what else I've got - so if this feature isn't optional, I won't be upgrading.
There are some, yes. I was actually quite impressed after I went to the trouble of digitising an old (never-released on CD) tape before it wore out, only to find the whole album available on Kazaa. But with films, particularly, it's unusual to find much that's older than about three years - people seem much more likely to go to the trouble of making a barely-watchable cam of something that's just hit the cinemas, than a high-quality cap from VHS of something that's no longer easy to get hold of.
Unfortunately it doesn't work that way. If a song requires conversion from anything other than a CD, or a film has to be capped in realtime from video rather than just ripped from DVD, you will be very lucky to find it. Just like the commercial labels, most P2P users would rather share this year's crap than something decent from ten years ago, because it's less work.
So, Saddam should have been allowed to keep Kuwait '91?
He may or may not have been trying to keep it. His main motivation was to stop them slant-drilling into his country's oilfields, and the US happily told him he had every right to go to war without actually mentioning that they would join the other side.
In any case, Kuwait is a country run by an oil company for the benefit of the West, and should have been part of Iraq in the first place.
The US is currently the largest single political, economic, and military power currently. Simpley from size we are going to make enemies. We do realize this, hence our concentration on developing our political and military power.
Your solution to the fact that you're going to make enemies is to do more of the things that make you those enemies?
I released one shareware game on the Atari ST, and had some success with a hybrid approach. The released version was the full playable game, and registering got you the editor, support files, and even the source code if you specifically asked for it. So anyone who just wanted to play the included scenarios (it was a wargaming system) was under no obligation, and those who did register had enough interest in creating content that they were worth corresponding with.
The registration fee was fairly nominal, I'd written the game for my own use and it was only the fact that it could be neatly divided into game and editor that prompted me to try a shareware release. A few people even sent more than I asked for on the basis that it had given them as much playing time as any commercial game.
Mind you, all this was in the days when recieving a registration meant sending out a floppy containing the new content. Being able to do everything on-line makes the whole business a lot easier, but it has also killed off the concept of public domain libraries, which were the primary way of getting the unregistered version out there in the first place.
UT2003 had a demo before release - but only a couple of weeks before, which wasn't enough for Epic to use it for feedback like they said they wanted to. It was Unreal 2 which had the demo after release.
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You're all assuming that this advisory group is made up of ISPs. It's not, it's made up of content distributors.
They are content providers - not ISPs - which explains their stance. What they are saying is not that piracy will prevent the adoption of broadband by users, but that it will prevent the content providers from using it as an alternative TV service like they want to.
The spammers themselves are well aware that nobody wants to receive it. They just do their best to make sure their customers don't know it. Similarly, they will promise to send out X million emails on the customer's behalf without mentioning that half of those will go to people in irrelevant countries.
Actually the police are quite good at making sure CCTVs are undergoing 'maintenance' whenever there's a rally, just to ensure that they don't get taped doing anything they shouldn't.
Except that they're not doing it, and never will - they're just talking about it to drive the stock price up.
Well, for a start, 'file-sharing traffic information' is neither kept, nor is it needed in this case. The only relevant information is who had the IP address at a particular time. The trouble is, people often take a long time to report, or even notice, problems. If you purge your logs too often, the information just isn't going to be there when you need it for technical reasons.
It's that your 'provider' is an ISP and most ISPs, although they like to advertise its availabilty, can't afford or be bothered with, the space and maintenance that a proper newsfeed requires. If you want good retention and full completion, you have to use a paid-for news provider.
As I've found out when planning a couple of treasure hunts, this happens with whole villages in the UK, either because they once had something important enough to make them worth naming, and no longer do, or (I'm almost certain) because some of the fake villages that were added back in WWII still get reproduced on modern maps.
The current law requires that the file be downloaded 10 times at a total value of at least $2500 before the distribution counts as a felony. what the new law seems to be clarifying is that if a file is uploaded to a P2P network, it can automatically be assumed to meet those requirements.
The reason is that there is no charge for local calls in the US, so there's nothing for them to get a cut of. Everyone's expecting the same to happen in the UK eventually, but the difference is that we have got used to the 'lo-call' rate having different rules from normal local calls, whereas the US already had free local calls before dial-up became common, so people wouldn't have put up with charges based on call time.
Not really. A technical solution requires knowing where the spam is sent from, but a legal solution only really requires knowing on whose behalf it is sent.
Just noticed that I referred to spammers as 'people'. Sorry!
If people are going to harvest email addresses, you'd think they'd at least check that the ISP in question was in the right country...
The recent versions of K++ (not sure about the basic KazaaLite) will let you jump supernodes, and keep hitting 'search more' until you run out of local supernodes. I'm finding it much easier to get matches on obscure stuff with these options.
What KaZaA did do was add the Participation Level, which basically improves your chances of downloading if you're sharing a lot of popular files. And in my opinion that was a modification which would encourage piracy.
This PL = 1000 thing is actually rather bad for the P2P network as a whole. If noone sees the need to share files fewer people will share files I sort of agree but I think the mistake was introducing the PL in the first place. I know there were a lot of leechers but was it really necessary to find a way to force people to share? I'm sharing stuff for the simple reason that I want other people to have it (freeware that I've found useful, my and other people's fan music videos) and the PL would have made no difference to that.
Nothing, except that as soon as anyone finds out they were using them (which will happen if they take any action) then those blocks will be added to the database. So whoever uses them afterwards is likely to find those IPs no longer being trusted by Kazaa users.
It's actually nothing to do with protecting identity. All the new features are intended to reduce the chances of the RIAA finding out that you're sharing infringing files, so they won't be looking for your identity in the first place. And before you ask, yes, those features will reduce the chance of other legitimate users finding your files as well.
Actually, that's already an option in the version I'm using. Just that the feature list for the new version made it sound like it was no longer optional.
It doesn't use a fixed list of IPs, it links in to a user-created database, so that shouldn't be a problem. Some of the other upgrades sound a bit less convenient. One is the ability to block people from requesting 'show all files from this user' - great for people with a directory full of infringing material, not so great for someone like me who's sharing fan music videos and wants anyone who downloads one to be able to see what else I've got - so if this feature isn't optional, I won't be upgrading.
There are some, yes. I was actually quite impressed after I went to the trouble of digitising an old (never-released on CD) tape before it wore out, only to find the whole album available on Kazaa. But with films, particularly, it's unusual to find much that's older than about three years - people seem much more likely to go to the trouble of making a barely-watchable cam of something that's just hit the cinemas, than a high-quality cap from VHS of something that's no longer easy to get hold of.
Unfortunately it doesn't work that way. If a song requires conversion from anything other than a CD, or a film has to be capped in realtime from video rather than just ripped from DVD, you will be very lucky to find it. Just like the commercial labels, most P2P users would rather share this year's crap than something decent from ten years ago, because it's less work.
He may or may not have been trying to keep it. His main motivation was to stop them slant-drilling into his country's oilfields, and the US happily told him he had every right to go to war without actually mentioning that they would join the other side.
In any case, Kuwait is a country run by an oil company for the benefit of the West, and should have been part of Iraq in the first place.
The US is currently the largest single political, economic, and military power currently. Simpley from size we are going to make enemies. We do realize this, hence our concentration on developing our political and military power.
Your solution to the fact that you're going to make enemies is to do more of the things that make you those enemies?
The registration fee was fairly nominal, I'd written the game for my own use and it was only the fact that it could be neatly divided into game and editor that prompted me to try a shareware release. A few people even sent more than I asked for on the basis that it had given them as much playing time as any commercial game.
Mind you, all this was in the days when recieving a registration meant sending out a floppy containing the new content. Being able to do everything on-line makes the whole business a lot easier, but it has also killed off the concept of public domain libraries, which were the primary way of getting the unregistered version out there in the first place.
UT2003 had a demo before release - but only a couple of weeks before, which wasn't enough for Epic to use it for feedback like they said they wanted to. It was Unreal 2 which had the demo after release.