Cyber Sleuths vs. Secret Networks 640
amnfinch writes "I saw this article on BBC news and frankly, I was blown away. Just another example of the relentless campaign to treat file swappers as criminals when their 'crime' is murky at best." Sir Haxalot provides an article on the flip-side: "CNN has a story on 'exclusive' Peer to Peer networks, that require 'knowing the right people and having a wealth of content on your hard disk to get into the clique.'"
Quoting a P2P "cyber sleuth": (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not about whether or not there's a lock to pick, nor how strong it is; it's about the fact that there's about 30 million locks which have to be picked at any one time.
That's why clamping down on P2P is going to be so hard. It's not because of the difficult of catching people - after all, most of the make virtually no effort to cover their tracks even when using centralised services - but the fact that there are simply so many of them. It's like trying to delete every single byte of data on a hard disk - it's not very easy to do at all without completely destroying the disk itself.
It's a deterent (Score:4, Insightful)
The RIAA doesn't want to prosecute everyone who shares files, they want more people to stop sharing files. The idea is that if for everyone they do go after 10 (or whatever) other people will stop.
You may well be correct. (Score:4, Funny)
Joe Sixpack: Wow! I can download ten songs a day for free!
Joe Sixpack's friend: Cool! So am I!
One week later
Joe Sixpack: I got a letter from the record companies. They tracked me down, so I think I'll stop.
Joe Sixpack's friend: Wow, guess I'd better stop too.
They stop. One week later, Joe Sixpack and Joe Sixpack's friend see a Geek using a P2P service
Joe Sixpack: Dude, I thought the record companies sued you if you shared files.
Geek: Only a few people. They're just trying to scare everyone else straight.
Joe Sixpack: Really?
One week later
Joe Sixpack: Wow! I'm downloading more songs than ever before, and the record companies really haven't busted me!
Joe Sixpack's friend: Me too!
They all live happily ever after, except for the media giants which have to switch to a proper business model. The end.
Re:You may well be correct. (Score:5, Insightful)
Not really. Lesser known bands make much more from concerts than record sales. The only point of having a record label is to they can distribute your record to different markets. Bands only make a very small percentage of what you pay for an average CD anyway. Lesser known bands survive by touring relentlessly and if music is what they love, I don't see a problem with them having to make their money that way. I'm not terribley concerned with the welfare of millionaire pop stars.
Deterrence is Ineffective & Farcical (Score:5, Insightful)
The idea is wrong, both ethically and practically. Ethically it is absolutely heinous to make some people pay an exaggerated price in order to frighten others. Indeed it could be argued that it is unconstitutional (14th amendment) to go around destroying some lives in order to 'communicate' a point to others (some are getting very, very harsh treatment, while others are being left alone). Practically, deterrence has been shown not to work, as we see every day with speeding and the woefully ineffectual and counterproductive War on Drugs(tm, Reagan & Daddy Bush). Indeed, deterrence of such crimes is only marginally effective at best, and more often ineffective altogether, particularly with teens, whose notorious "it will never happen to me" attitude is more or less hardwired into their biology and often remains intact well into adulthood. The entire youthful 'immortality syndrome' conspires against any such efforts at deterrence at several levels, something the RIAA and other cartels seem to be unable to grasp (talk about not knowing your market, or your customers).
A teenager sees a few thousand people get busted, out of several million, and (virtually every one) rightly concludes that they'll never be prosecuted. Indeed, any one filesharer is far more likely to be killed in a car accident than to be brought to trial by the cartels, and we've seen what a deterrence death by physical mutiliation resulting from a high speed automobile impact has on teen driving
Re:Deterrence is Ineffective & Farcical (Score:5, Insightful)
Making unauthorized digital copies of music is copyright infringement. It is not theft, and it certainly is not piracy.
Re:Deterrence is Ineffective & Farcical (Score:5, Insightful)
Who are you to decide.
(A) The RIAA was found to have been illegally price fixing by the legal system. And it *is* their place to decide that.
(B) It doesn't matter either way. It has absoltely nothing to do with whether or not copyright infringment is "theft".
That is rubbish. Who are you to decide. That's like me breaking into your house
That's rubbish. Breaking into a house is a crime - a completely unrelated crime. You may as well have compared copyright infringement to theft by saying it's like murdering someone and swiping their wallet.
and stealing something with dust on it and claiming innocence because "you would never have used it anyway".
Again you are relying on a non-existant case of taking someone's property. In copyright infringement nothing is taken. It has absolutely nothing in common with theft. You might as well try to argue that slander is theft.
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Re:Deterrence is Ineffective & Farcical (Score:3, Funny)
You've stolen my line... YOU THIEF!
Re:Deterrence is Ineffective & Farcical (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it's intended to either gain reparations or isolate the offender from society.
The whole principle of "deterrence via punishment" is broken (and immoral). If laws are just, the majority of people will follow them (and the people that don't, wouldn't anyway). Not to mention the vast historical record demonstrating that it doesn't work.
Stealing music is the equivalent of shoplifting.
Bollocks. They're not even remotely similar crimes (legally *or* morally).
Deterrence has in fact been shown to work as a general principle of the justice system [...]
It has ? Where ? History is replete with examples of people who broke unjust, immoral and unethical laws regardless of the punishment. So is modern society, for that matter (P2P being just one of many).
Indeed, about the only way to make punishment a somewhat effective deterrent is to make the punishment so ridiculously out of scale with the crime that the consequences*probability equation is affected (and even then, it doesn't work for long - particularly in a modern democratic-style society - as there is significant social backlash).
If you think people don't break the law because they're afraid of being punished and similarly, if you believe the principle of deterrence via punishment is the philosophy behind modern justice systems, then you have my deepest sympathies. I wouldn't want to live in your neighbourhood.
Not really (Score:5, Informative)
If you look at the contracts that most musicians sign, you will see that they are exceptionally one-sided. So, while the musicians ARE getting screwed by p2p, the real losers from p2p are the record labels. And frankly, I don't have much compassion for record labels.
I also want to mention the Lifetime + 70 years copyright length. I think that the RIAA/MPAA are trying to keep the public domain as empty as possible, in the hopes that the public domain withers away. Yet the corporations will take as much from the public domain as possible (e.g. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen)
Re:Deterrence is Ineffective & Farcical (Score:4, Insightful)
I believe that property rights are essential to pure capitalism. Clearly, we do not experience pure capitalism, but that is no reason to give up on it and subscribe to a collectivist notion of fileswappers as modern-day Robin Hoods merrily redistributing intellectual property to society's victims.
Property rights are crucial to Capitalism because they form the basis for much of our individual freedom. Contrast land ownership with mere occupancy as was the case during medieval surfdom. When you own land you have an undisputable right to occupy that land and to do with it as you choose, with some minor limitations known in the modern world as zoning.
When you engage in the capitalist enterprise of production, you create a product. That product is your exclusive property, and you may do with it as you see fit. If you build a bird house, you may sell it to the neighbors for $50 if they are willing to pay for it.
The digital age has opened up a whole new realm of production and reproduction. While in the above example you would have to build birdhouse after birdhouse, you can now write a song or a computer program, and instead of worrying about how you will make enough to sell to everyone who might wish to buy one, you have the luxury of being able to dedicate your efforts to the first copy, knowing that as soon as it is done you can effortlessly produce more copies as you see fit (or as demand dictates).
If someone comes along and steals your master copy, then that person deprives you of your just rewards for your initial effort. If that person gives away copies of your software for free against your will, he/she deprives you of the ability to profit from your ingenuity. Just because someone can copy your work does not make it right to copy it.
So, property (intellectual and physical) rights are critical to successful capitalism because they protect the outcome of production, and in capitalism production is the way that individuals express their freedom.
The Robin Hood who steals the product of one individual's freedom diminishes the creator's freedom by limiting the ways in which the creator may use it to benefit himself.
Thus, if you believe that (pure) capitalism is a system that maximizes individual freedom, then theft or unauthorized copying and distribution of the product of that freedom dilutes and diminishes the freedom of the creator and is therefore counter to the ends of Capitalism.
Re:Quoting a P2P "cyber sleuth": (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Quoting a P2P "cyber sleuth": (Score:2, Insightful)
Oh, wait - does the DMCA only apply when it's being used against the little guy by a huge corporation and never the opposite?
uhhh (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, it's pretty clear. Distributing copyrighted material without the copyright holder's permission is illegal. Nothing murky about it. The sense that I seem to get from slashdot is people really, really want to share files, so they tell themselves there's nothing wrong with it.
Re:uhhh (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:uhhh (Score:4, Insightful)
Why do you sound so much like a RIAA stooge? (Score:3, Informative)
Easy.
FM broadcast usage... it's called mandatory broadcast licensing.
Analog tape recording and swapping, legally defined as "fair usage".
Why is the digital equivalent (128K MP3 via P2P) of taping and tape trading illegal?
Campaign contributions aka legal bribery to elected Federal officians. If you want to construct some great moral principle out of this, be my guest. But don'
Re:What exactly are you trading that's 50 yrs old? (Score:5, Interesting)
There are people who trade rare, hard to find (read: suppressed by the studios) cartoons. Most are indeed over 50 years old. Let me mention a few names. "Song Of The South." "Coal Black and De Sebben Dwarves." "Tin Pan Alley Cats." "Uncle Tom's Cabana." "Herr vs. Hare." "The Blitz Wolf." "Tokio Jokio." "The Japoteurs." etc. etc. Most have either politically incorrect stereotypes and/or inflammatory anti-German or anti-Japanese content that was part of popular culture during World War II.
From a cartoon historian's standpoint, this is all stuff that should not be suppressed. Maybe it should also not be shown to impressionable children, as well -- at least without an accompanying history lesson as part of the deal. But not everyone who is interested in animation is a kid. Some of us are adults. And it is the adults that are being denied by the embargo on certain politically incorrect cartoons.
And as far as creative people having their food stolen: the screenwriters and songwriters and musicians whose "rights" are supposedly being "protected" by the RIAA/MPAA Sturmabteilung are also systematically being raped up the butt, no Crisco offered, by the same Big Media companies that the RIAA and MPAA actually represent. A recent post I made in my Slashdot blog [slashdot.org] is all about this.
Moreover, my husband is a musician, who has seen things from both the side of the struggling, unsigned musician and the exploited, swindled musician signed to a contract which in other businesses would be laughed out as being horrifyingly one-sided and biased towards Management. He is now beginning to release all his back catalog of music that he himself owns copyright and publishing on, for free, on the Internet. The only strings attached are that he'd like people to talk to him if they want to either put a song of his on a retail compilation album or use one of his songs in a movie or TV show. If you want a look, here is the link: http://www.richiehass.com/ [richiehass.com]. Why is he doing this? Because his gamble is that once people get acquainted with his back catalog, when he finally gets an indie CD of new stuff done and up on CD Baby [cdbaby.com] people will be sufficiently interested enough to buy it.
The actions of the RIAA and the MPAA are the actions of frightened Luddites fearing the loss of their livelihoods. As history shows, when old industries die, new ones spring up to take their place. The economic models that have supported musicians and other types of artists over the millenia have shifted considerably. They will likely shift again with the flow of technology. Like the song goes, "It's Evolution, baby." Adapt or die.
Re:What exactly are you trading that's 50 yrs old? (Score:3, Insightful)
I think The Constitution said it best: (Score:3, Informative)
Also, here's some discussion [pbs.org] on the issue.
Re:What exactly are you trading that's 50 yrs old? (Score:3, Informative)
Incorrect;
Sec. 506. - Criminal offenses
(a) Criminal Infringement. -
Any person who infringes a copyright willfully either -
(1) for purposes of commercial advantage or private *financial gain*, *or*
(2) by the reproduction or distribution, including by electronic means, during any 180-day period, of 1 or more copies or phonorecords of *1 or more* copyrighted works, which have a total retail value of more than $1,000
Since they redefinded "financial gain"
Copyright law (Score:3, Interesting)
It's not at all clear that sharing a file with a friend is illegal, and it's clearly not immoral.
Copyright exists to provide incentives to push works into the public domain, not to keep them out of it.
--Mike--
Re:Copyright law (Score:4, Insightful)
Copyrights exist to provide an incentive to push works into the public domain, by providing a means for the publisher to make money off the published work. Sharing files with friends deprives him of that income. I don't see how sharing files with friends is 'clearly not immoral' (though one could argue that it isn't).
Re:Copyright law (Score:2)
Re:uhhh (Score:5, Insightful)
The RIAA is clearly trying a scare tactic, by making examples out of a few individuals. It's a bit like the old days, when they would cut off the hands of shoplifters (though not quite as bad). Respectable people like you and me may shrug about that, but just you wait until you are singled out for being made into an example... and you don't have to have committed any actual crime; if the RIAA dislikes what you do, you're a viable target. Look at that student with the search engine.
Re:uhhh (Score:3, Interesting)
And yes, I swap a lot of files that I own the copyright to. I am a musician and I like to make my music available to everyone. More people trade on Kazaa than visit mp3.com on any given day so it just makes sense to use P2P t
How wrong can you be? (Score:4, Insightful)
Ahhh, the classic "what I do in my own house" defence. Presumably you think that within the privacy of your own home it's OK for you to do anything, regardless of whether society considers it legal or illegal.
By that rationale, you're allowed to rape, torture and murder people without a care in the world as long as you do it at home. After all, it is your house.
Please, stop living in a dreamworld and come back to reality. Just because it's your house it doensn't make you immune from the law - right or wrong - within it.
Re:How wrong can you be? (Score:3, Insightful)
The above example, while not directly related to the "fileswapping" argument, is pertitinent in that if you are doing something illegal, the "Justice" system has a process to follow to prove that you are breaking the law. They do so, so that your rights are protected and to make sure that they are no
Re:uhhh (Score:2, Insightful)
-Eyston
Cople of things (Score:2)
So when saomeone says files swapping/sharing is illegal, they are wrong.
You do not need the copyright holder permission to exercise fair use.
hat is where it gets murkey. Is it fair us to download a copyrighted file that I already own? foe example, I have song 'A' on cd I bought. Can I download song 'A' from the net?
Is it illegal to share a file? hard to say, since it has
Re:uhhh (Score:2)
There's nothing wrong with it.
These multinational corporations have, for years, had a free ride on our backs, and the backs of the artists they exploit. They fix prices, pay crap to the bulk of their workers, and 90% of the
Re:uhhh (Score:5, Insightful)
To put your analogy in perspective: instruments + composition are to music what groceries + recipes are to cuisine.
Re:uhhh (Score:4, Insightful)
The only thing wrong with filesharing is that there is a statute which, by sheer overbreadth, makes it technically illegal. Other than that, there is absolutely nothing wrong with filesharing copyrighted material.
Re:uhhh (Score:2, Interesting)
What do you do for a living?
I'm serious. I want to know what you do that you expect to profit from to the degree that you can keep comfortably yammering away at this anti-copyright mantra.
Re:uhhh (Score:3, Funny)
I am going to step out on a limb here and guess that that he/she is a HURD developer.
Re:uhhh (Score:4, Informative)
It is against the law to distribute copyrighted material without the copyright holder's consent.
Re:uhhh (Score:5, Informative)
You didn't listen carefully to your wife, because there's no way a cyber-law class in ANY school would define fair use in the terms you just described.
By your definition of fair use, all those CD bootleggers on the streets in New York City are legitimate, since they are copies of a purchased album. And that is obviously not the case.
The law governing fair use is actually fairly easy to understand: (link [cornell.edu])
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include -
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
It doesn't take an economist or a lawyer to understand point 4 - sharing copyrighted content that you do not have rights to millions of people would have DEFINITELY have a substantial impact upon the value of the copyrighted work.
Just helping you out in case you spout off that "big media companies" argument in front of a judge.
Notification...with extreme prejudice (Score:2)
newsgroups and the IRC (Score:3, Informative)
Re:newsgroups and the IRC (Score:2)
You search em, they tell you what server, channel, and bot to hit up for your stuff.
Newsgroups are a pain in the ass to get anything from. UUDECODE and other formats are used and generally the files are split over MANY messsages.
Re:newsgroups and the IRC (Score:3, Informative)
Re:newsgroups and the IRC (Score:2)
UUDECODE is passe. yEnc is better and smaller. Yes the posts are split up over multiple messages, but who cares. There are many newsreaders that will automatically sort, download, and decode the messages so that they appeared as one file to the user. With the introduction of PAR files, multipart RAR (which are sent as multiple articles themselves) work great
Re:newsgroups and the IRC (Score:2)
I get 200kB/s+ on BitTorrent downloads. Much faster and easier.
Re:newsgroups and the IRC (Score:3, Informative)
Re:newsgroups and the IRC (Score:2)
Re:newsgroups and the IRC (Score:2)
Yes, receiving anonymously is fairly easy (if you use a server that doesn't keep download records), but sending anonymously is somewhat more difficult.
Re:newsgroups and the IRC (Score:2)
Almost every other ISP? I highly doubt it. Are binary groups to be found anywhere but on for-pay services which get subscriptions exactly for this reason, the availability of copyrighted material?
Re:newsgroups and the IRC (Score:2)
Re:newsgroups and the IRC (Score:2)
I use a usenet [usenetserver.com] service that respects my right to privacy by not keeping access logs.
That's probably about as anonymous as I'm going to get without being my own usenet feed.
Re:newsgroups and the IRC (Score:3, Informative)
The security of newsgroups depends entirely on whose news server you're using. If the nntp server you're accessing records your ip along with your requests, then you can be tracked in the same way as they're using for p2p. Ditto IRC, though usually with IRC, someone will setup a temp ftp site and tell interested parties what the ip address and username/password is to access the site.
let's fight back (Score:5, Interesting)
quote:
"Recently, Republican Senator Sam Brownback offered an amendment to an FTC reauthorization bill that would force "owners of digital media products to file an actual case in a court of law in order to obtain the identifying information of an ISP subscriber" rather than the current standard where the subpoena power is virtually unchecked."
Sounds like Sam Brownback has the right idea, and I want to give him some encouragement...
It seems that money is the only thing these people seem to care about, so I think I will take what I would have spent on a music CD (about 20 bucks) and send a money order to this guys campaign fund instead. I think I will add a nice little note on why I did that. Too bad I can't vote for him directly...
I think I'll send a note to my senator as well, along with a copy of the Brownback note, explaining why I'm not sending HIM any money.
Twenty bucks isn't much.... but what happens if just one percent of the people who read this do the same thing? Hell I might make this an ongoing project, and send twenty bucks a month to whatever congress-critter seems to deserve it the most at the moment.
Re:let's fight back (Score:2)
no where to hide using software? (Score:3, Interesting)
"We got an e-mail last week from someone saying 'How did you find me? I used Peer Guardian' and he thought that would save him from our spiders. There is nowhere to hide."
What about P2P networks that encrypt all traffic? How are they going to determine what media you have (based on the 30s that they apparently download from you) when it's all encrypted?
How about when I trading legal copies of music (like SHN/FLAC/etc Grateful Dead shows?) Will these 30s clips match up?
Of course the article is narrow on details.
This "spider" crap worries me.
Re:no where to hide using software? (Score:2)
It is 100% illegal and I guess you can say anything illegal *should* also be considered immoral. I disagree on this particular subject though. If I were trading music I wouldn't consider Robin Hood tactics immoral. It is my personal opinion that 99% of the musicians out there lead their own immoral lives, raping the good public of their hard earned money to live lives of lavish expense (i.e. Brittany going to the clubs, doing coke, and getting wasted, along with
Re:no where to hide using software? (Score:3, Interesting)
I expect that if they released the code in such a way as to make it difficult to
'Crime'? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:'Crime'? (Score:4, Insightful)
no its not. I can freely trade you my copy of "The Hobbit", for your copy of "Jaws".
You can even resell your copy! as a mattter of fact, there is probably a place where you can get copyrighted material for free! its called the Library.
Now if you copy and redistribute computer data, that is probably a different matter, but I don't think its been fully put to the test.
Most Bootlegged Songs?!? (Score:4, Funny)
Busta Rhymes: Pass the Courvoisier
U2: I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For
Bon Jovi: You Give Love A Bad Name
Van Halen: Hot for Teacher
Re:Most Bootlegged Songs?!? (Score:3, Funny)
Only the idiots will believe this crap, they will go and download the files, and they will be able to quickly find you because NO ONE ELSE WOULD DOWNLOAD THAT CRAP.
Busta Rhymes my ass
Going away (Score:5, Funny)
Especially if they have dynamically allocated IP addresses.
How secure is this? (Score:2, Interesting)
'knowing the right people and having a wealth of content on your hard disk to get into the clique.'"
If anyone already on the network can allow someone onto the network, then there is still a possibility of someone charming their way into the trust of others. They need to take it one step further, and give a unique public key/private key to each individual, and have a single person responsible for adding people to the network. Otherwise, if anyone on the network can invite anyo
Re:How secure is this? (Score:2, Interesting)
Yeah, your circle of trust can be corrupted.
It's still safer to be the guy in the limo distributing bricks of cocaine, than the kid on the streetcorner selling it in $10 bags.
The digital detectives have it easy (Score:5, Funny)
Hell, given that most computer geeks have trouble getting out of their chair, let alone run, I'd say they're in pretty deep trouble
The Risk of Private Networks (Score:3, Insightful)
A private network can never have the volume of sharing, and hence harm to the copyright holders, that the big public networks like Kazaa have. And the cost of tracking them down is prohibitive. So I don't see this as something the RIAA needs to get worked up over any time soon. "Private" sharing, in some form or another, has been going on for decades. Analog tapes and software piracy before the days of the Internet are just two examples of tacitly-accepted piracy which was simply too low-volume to be an issue.
Now, if something like Freenet were to provide fully anonymous, public sharing with the ease-of use and pervasiveness of Kazaa, I think the RIAA would be scared.
Re:The Risk of Private Networks (Score:4, Insightful)
Duh, that's why they are publically saying it is hard to use in every article they can. They want the public to be afraid to even try it.
They know that us geeks don't care, but they know that the public only believes what they are fed.
If Joe Blow 13 year old (clueless) hears that Freenet is hard to use over and over, he is less likely to try it.
Re:The Risk of Private Networks (Score:3, Insightful)
Sharing music is illegal. (Score:2)
People who use any publically available service to upload copyrighted works without the copyright holder's consent are breaking the law.
If you consider this crime to be a measure of "civil disobedience" against the evil entertainment industry, then you should be prepared to face jail time as many famous practitioners of civil disobedience have in the past.
I don't understand what is so "murky" about this issue.
Scaremongers (Score:2)
In non-RIAA-threatening lingo : "we know how to run tcpdump".
Re:Scaremongers (Score:2)
Nah. I doubt they're that intelligent. They probably just mean that they can look at the username, and then type netstat from their Win command prompt (guess there's no DOS prompt anymore, eh?).
Silent Tristero P2P? (Score:2)
getting a large number of people that you trust using the same network -- so that you have access to large amounts of files -- is going to be a bigger problem than security, and that's a big problem in and of itself, really. Are the other private groups/programs that can be used for filesharing?
Overblown Language? (Score:3, Funny)
Sounds like something the "Your computer is broadcasting an internet address" guys could use. It could link to a place selling Raid by mail.
Hi tech (Score:5, Funny)
"Matching Technology"? Oh no! They've learned to use regular expressions to parse an unencrypted text stream! Good lord! Now no one will be safe swapping files online! However will the file sharers bypass the modern technological marvel of grep?
Investigate Buymusic.com (Score:5, Interesting)
Then again, possibly not (Score:3, Informative)
OMG My F*$&@# Record is on there!! (Score:3, Informative)
You know, I don't care if its on P2P, but someone *selling* songs off my record is not fucking cool. I sure not getting any $$$ Orchard is NOT a label! It is/was? only for distribution. They have NO rights to this. This was paid out of our pockets. All of it.
Hmm - this may make it to my journal...I've got some calls to make tonight. BTW - We have some CDs left (the band is no more), if
$anonymity (Score:2, Interesting)
Does anyone remember what happened to anon.penet.fi? And now hotmail.com and the equivalent msn are owned by
Enough with the editorializing (Score:5, Insightful)
I really wish article submitters would stick with the facts and stop injecting their opinions into the stories they are submitting. Statements such as that only makes one sound like a zealot (granted, though, there are plenty of people who agree with it).
This is news? (Score:2)
I remember people using war-ftpd [jgaa.com] to share so-called "warez" to each other, long before the average person had ever heard of Winamp.
How is it newsworthy that people do the same thing with music?
Ugh ugh ugh.
If this story is worth the front page, then this comment is worth reading.
Hint: neither i
Since when are private warez sites a new thing? (Score:2)
Re:Since when are private warez sites a new thing? (Score:2)
Because warez and ftp was a geek thing.
Ever since Napster and Kazaa, file sharing has been accessible to the lowest common denominator Joe Sixpack and Sally Soccer Mom trading popular media--music and movies.
Re:Since when are private warez sites a new thing? (Score:2)
Pinkerton? (Score:5, Funny)
Ok, that may not be the best example there, guys.
Re:Pinkerton? (Score:5, Informative)
This quote is very telling (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:This quote is very telling (Score:5, Interesting)
Underground (Score:2, Insightful)
CNN story (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, you don't even know they're talking. A program can send small encrypted blocks regardless of whether the user actually sent a message. If nothing is to be exchanged some no-op message can be transferred which is as large as a normal encrypted message block. Don't let the attacker know more than necessary.
As for the elitist country-club type of sharing cliques - those always existed. Whether they are using private IRC channels, FTP or some newer p2p system like DC, that's not much of a difference. Of course release groups don't let anybody join, to name one example.
The problem with private circles - they can always be infiltrated by 'traitors'. It's not a technical problem anymore once a person feels threatened enough to cooperate with the police.
Cringley profiled him last year (Score:2)
6 degrees of separation (Score:5, Interesting)
The twist would be that the system would allow relaying of searches and of actual files. In other words, if I request a file that is on my friend's friend's computer, then the file has to come through the computer of our mutual friend. The whole idea is to keep things as encapsulated as possible... kinda like how terrorist cells work.
Now, I know that this increases network traffic... adds a lot of opportunities for a "weaker link" in the chain (imagine if one of the people in the relay chain is using a 56k modem)... decreases the "connectedness" of the whole sharing network, etc. However, I think this is the only real way to keep the RIAA from just being able to download a song and, *pow*, have the IP of someone to sue.
Also, some of these problems mentioned might be assuaged by the fact that people might feel more comfortable leaving their stuff shared. I, for one, have gobs and gobs of stuff that I could share, but I don't... because I have way too much to lose. However, if I knew that the only people who could connect to me would be people that I know... I'd have tons of stuff up and shared... 24/7.
The strange thing is that it seems to me that this was Aimster's plan, but they got shut down for some reason. But I don't know why.
You're missing the point, gang (Score:5, Interesting)
HA! (Score:3, Interesting)
"This is just over a few hours and I have almost 14,000 records with a variety of different titles ranging from Daddy Day Care to Anger Management and Charlie's Angels."
What the BBC didn't mention is that she is using the newest ueber-kewl anti-piracy spider PACKETNEWS.COM [packetnews.com]
For any similar industry stoolie morons lurking here - welcome to the net. You must be new here. "Pirates" switched from BBS to FTP to HTTP to IRC to P2P. The next step will be using crypto to obtain anonynimity that WILL foil IP traces. You will have to do better than chasing down sharers with a glorified webcrawler:
inform your clients that resistance is futile and they have to change their business model to catch up with new distribution technologies that the net enables.
Nice try though, and again: welcome to the digital era.
in response to the most common of comments. (Score:5, Insightful)
One could argue that since copyright is effectively broken (ie: it doesn't push anything into the public domain due to the fact that its been constantly extended every few years for the last hundred years) that there is no obligation for the populus to obey copyright laws as they gain no benefit.
Social contracts only work if both sides hold up their end of the bargain, and in this case, the RIAA and associated industries have failed to do so. Once they start releasing material into the public domain after a relatively short amount of time, I (and I imagine many others) will start rewarding them by paying for some of the material they have copyright on.
If P2P dies (Score:4, Insightful)
One thing I do know is that current mainstream media distribution methods are horrible. Let's take a look:
1) Television. Most any content consists of 30% ads. Even paid content can be costly (esp. in the US) b/c if you subscribe to a blanket movie network, you may find a competing one gets exclusive access to a certain studio's movies.
2) Radio. I live in a city with a population in the millions. I am into electronic music and have a very hard time being able to find any at, say, 4 in the afternoon. Even when I do hear it it's during some "live-to-air" session where they're continuously plugging the club's name and how great the atmosphere is. Again, it's interrupted by huge amounts of ads. I know I'm not the only one feeling this way as I've heard the same kind of gripes for different genres.
3) PC Gaming. I can't say how many games I've wanted to try and ended up purchasing due to a lack of a demo that ended up being terrible. It was even worse in the C-64 days, where a games' box art would have screenshots from the arcade rather than the C-64 screenshots. Ever play a demo of The Sims or Sim City 4000? Neither have I.
All that said and done, it's not hugely traumatic, just a shift in lifestyle. Don't buy games unless they have demos or incredible word of mouth, be very stingy with how many times you go to the movies (or at least support directors/writers/studios who aren't just creating the next cash grab movie), try to find an internet radio station playing what you like.
It's not like we're going to war here and lives are at stake. I could just go nuts and warez the universe, but spending even 1ms in jail just b/c I wanted to download Glitter to see if it REALLY WAS that bad doesn't seem worth it to me.
I know someone can reply and say I have my head in the sand, but I think it's more a matter of picking your battles carefully.
Sony is one of the two studios... (Score:5, Insightful)
Two of the industry's top seven movie studios have engaged the sleuthing services of BayTSP, but because of contractual arrangements they can't be named.
A snapshot of illegal movie downloads by BayTSP's chief technology officer Evelyn Espinosa was revealing.
"This is just over a few hours and I have almost 14,000 records with a variety of different titles ranging from Daddy Day Care to Anger Management and Charlie's Angels."
Well, since Daddy Day Care, Anger Management and Charlie's Angels are all Sony films, Sony must be one of their customers.
If exclusive networks are the wave of the future.. (Score:4, Interesting)
At my university there's a Direct Connect hub run by an anonymous student that is accessible only by people in university IP addresses. It's crazy fast, has TONS of good (and quite illegal) media, and the university looks the other way because it helps relieve the MASSIVE (and expensive) bandwidth pressure back when everyone was trying to use Kazaa.
Makes me want to live on campus until Freenet turns into AnonymousKazaa
Not doing anything new (Score:3, Interesting)
One thing BayTSP's spider programs don't do is sit at the Internet peering points sniffing all packets as they go by. "That would be wiretapping, which is illegal," he says. "All we do is go to the same places any user could go, look at the same files anyone else could look at, and we only probe the ports on your computer that you have made public."
The BBC article acts like this is some new big deal, but it's exactly the same thing they've been doing since at least September last year. I think they've spun the article to make it seem a lot worse than it is. Perhaps the only difference is that they have more clients demanding the info now, or that they've decided to prosecute people at a lower level of infringement?
Re:They are criminals! (Score:5, Funny)
Remember, folks: if you go to the bathroom during the commercials, you are stealing that television broadcast!
Didn't we learn anything from prohibition? If half the population routine violate a law, then perhaps it makes more sense to change the law than to put half the population in jail.
Re:They are criminals! (Score:2)
As far as driving without your seatbeat deserving the death sentence, that's unnecessary. Let them dig their own graves.
And furthermore, not only is it legal to not watch commercials, but it is illegal to tape a show and fast forward through the commercials. So long as you are not showing the video tape in a non-private (commercial) area.
Re:Bluffing? (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course, that might or might not happen, as we know the public to be easily scared and all. On the other hand, it is very possible that it will not work, like things do not work for, say, marijuana. Of course, the penalties the RIAA wants to impose on file-sharers are orders of magnitude worst than the penalty for simple possession of marijuana, but it is my opinion that these penalties will not hold for long once they start applying it to too many people.
As for the smaller, encrypted P2P networks, I don't think the RIAA is after them for now, as they don't really cause them that much trouble. Just as music-sharing before the era of P2P, a P2P network of 30 people does not make as much noise as one of millions of users, and arguably, in the eyes of the RIAA at least, not as many missed sales.
In the end, the first people who get caught in RIAA scare tactics and decide to fight back(there shouldn't be too many of them) will be the ones who will decide of big P2P network's future. If they manage to win their case, or even bring the penalty to something affordable and acceptable for a 'normal' person, there will no longer be any way for the RIAA to scare people. On the other hand, if they end up having to pay 1000$ a month or worse for the rest of their lives, you can expect that a lot of users will shy away from the network, making them less and less efficient...
Re:Bluffing? (Score:4, Insightful)