Slashdot Log In
MPAA Ignores Usenet, Goes After Bittorrent
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Thu Oct 19, 2006 08:41 AM
from the well-wouldn't-you-too dept.
from the well-wouldn't-you-too dept.
mjeppsen writes "The Motion Picture Association of America is turning a blind eye towards movie piracy on Usenet, going after torrent link sites instead. PC Magazine says it is because the studios are in bed with GUBA, who is also shilling downloadable movies for the MPAA at a premium price."
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
MPAA Ignores Usenet, Goes After Bittorrent
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 232 comments
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Shhhhhhhhh (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Shhhhhhhhh (Score:4, Informative)
(http://www.mattowen.com/)
-Jar.
MPAA doesn't need "moral high ground" (Score:5, Insightful)
The MPAA is perfectly free to choose who to go after. If they choose to allow GUBA to continue (at least for now), that is their right. It doesn't take away from their valid position to protect their copyrights.
As an aside, I had never heard of GUBA before this. I may have to look into it...
No authority (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.a4fs.net/blog/)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laches_(equity) [wikipedia.org]
But I don't think this defense works very often. The copyright holder could basically say "we have to use our resources sparingly; there's so much infringement out there that we can't bring cases except where there's a very good chance of winning"
Re:MPAA doesn't need "moral high ground" (Score:4, Informative)
(http://slashdot.org/)
No they're not.
They are required to take reasonable action to protect their property, or they lose the ability to enforce their rights at all.
That's pretty incorrect. There are some estoppel arguments, I suppose, and with trademarks, the trademark will simply cease to exist if it can't function as a source identifier. But really, no one is required to litigate.
The first rule of Usenet is... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://members.aol.com/JesusImages/)
Re:The Second rule of Usenet is... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://k2wrpg.org/ | Last Journal: Friday December 17 2004, @11:43PM)
The Third rule of Usenet is... (Score:4, Funny)
No (Score:5, Insightful)
Great (Score:2, Funny)
How do they do that? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:How do they do that? (Score:5, Funny)
GUBA? (Score:2)
(http://arungoodboy.wordpress.com/ | Last Journal: Monday June 18, @06:41AM)
Asking as someone who wasn't around when Usenet was the biggest thing, is this really as proliferate as torrent sites?
Re:GUBA? (Score:5, Funny)
Usenet and ISPs (Score:4, Informative)
(http://kadin.sdf-us.org/ | Last Journal: Tuesday October 16, @01:46PM)
Generally -- at least in the good 'ol days -- Usenet was a service that you got from your ISP. Along with x many email addresses and everything else, ISPs would advertise their Usenet breadth and retention. A good ISP would have its own servers that would mirror the popular newsgroups and retain articles for a set length of time, usually 90 days.
As the size of the newsgroups grew and grew (a 90-day cache must be up in the petabyte range now), and its popularity with average readers waned, fewer ISPs kept good feeds. Now, if you want a really good newsfeed, you may have to pay for it, or you're going to have to do some research on your ISP's web page to figure out how to access theirs, and what groups they have and what their retention rate is. Some ISPs don't carry the binary groups, or have short retention spans.
I know that with Comcast, they have a fairly complete newsfeed, but they limit you to 2GB per month of transfer; basically if you want to leech more than that, you have to go to a different provider like Giganews. (This is tremendously dumb on Comcast's part, because if I download gigs of stuff from somebody else's servers on the internet, Comcast has to pay for that traffic from their higher-tier ISP; if I download it directly from Comcast's servers, then it's free for them, since it only ever travels over their wires. They already have the content on the servers, so that's a sunk cost.)
The WP article on Usenet is fairly good:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet [wikipedia.org]
But who's the victim? (Score:1)
(Last Journal: Friday June 11 2004, @11:15AM)
Is it a crime to be stupid?
Uh-huh (Score:5, Funny)
(Last Journal: Thursday November 08, @06:00PM)
Re:Uh-huh (Score:4, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Wednesday April 27 2005, @01:58PM)
When they're on their death beds will they look back on their lives and say "I'm glad I never kissed a girl, it was much more fun watching the latest Hollywood bullshit, then bitching about it, and all for free, hahahalolroflmao..."
As long as there's pay, MPAA will play? (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.gamerspre...tasy_XII_Walkthrough)
So right there, Guba has some sort of DRM system in place that keeps people from just watching any movie at any time - and since they use the Usenet archives at times to snag their movies, the MPAA doesn't have to worry about "clean" copies - they'll still get paid for crappy Usenet archive copies that Joe Geek ripped from the DVD.
But there's something else that Guba offers as well: tracking of content. Does Hollywood want to know what movie might be a good pick? What if there's been a lot of traffic in "Santa Claus versus the Martians", and it's pretty constant - maybe rereleasing the DVD will make some cash.
Either way, the selective nature of just what the MPAA will go after and what they won't is rather interesting. I read through the artcle which seemed to show pretty clearly that the MPAA can ignore copyright violation when it wants to. Anyone else have a better idea than I why that may be?
Bittorrent is centralized, Usenet is decentralized (Score:5, Interesting)
Bittorrent is more or less centralized. Centralized targets are easy to shutdown and pillage.
Usenet is decentralized and distributed. It would be very hard to deal with. So this is just a matter of the MPAA/RIAA picking the low hanging fruits. Governments had trouble censoring Usenet, the MPAA/RIAA aren't going to do much better.
The easy money is going after the centralized servers and then getting the big ISPs to pull the plug on Usenet. First, steer people away from the clients. If they don't know that it exists, they don't get the service. Second, stop providing clients. That raises the bar even further. So no NNTP client from the ISPs, and I bet MS Windows doesn't even ship with a program that can handle NNTP either. Even ten years ago, back when people were constantly fiddling with their computers, something like 65% kept the default programs and configurations, the percentage must be much higher nowadays. Lastly, when their Usenet usage drops enough, they can quietly pull the plug.
Since as a side effect of being distributed and decentralized, Usenet is dreadfully difficult to track or censor or charge extra for. The largest ISPs are owned by MPAA/RIAA interests anyway and not being able to charge extra rubs them the wrong way. So, these interests steer people instead to Facebook, MySpace, and other ad revenue generators. Many western governments appear to have issues with free flow of information, and especially troubled by sources that are difficult to censor. Remember, Usenet got around blocks that even seasoned reporters couldn't when covering dramatic events like the fall of eastern block governments or even China's Tienamen Square massacre.
For those who don't know, Usenet is a distributed, decentralized, threaded messaging network which predates the Internet. There are problems with how it is designed, but keep in mind that it was set up in the mid-70's and back then if you were on the network, you were probably supposed to be there, eventally helped improve it, and for the most part were accountable.
If (when) the One Laptop Per Child project takes, of then the mesh network will need a new communications network with many of the characteristics of Usenet. HTTP just is not practical over slow, intermittent connections, so without a distributed, decentralized communications system, mesh users are cut out of web forums and such. Even e-mail is difficult if several of the nodes between you and your correspondents are frequently down or out of contact.
Re:Bittorrent is centralized, Usenet is decentrali (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.myspaceistakingover.com/)
Bittorrent was designed to be as decentralized as possible. Usenet still has to be hosted on servers of one kind or another; Bittorrent shares are distributed by a system of peers. The distributed database system means that Bittorrent metadata does not even need a
PS FYI, there is at least one client installed with Windows XP capable of handling NNTP -- Outlook Express. Also, Google still has most of the worthwhile news groups.
Usenet versus Bittorrent (Score:5, Informative)
(http://kadin.sdf-us.org/ | Last Journal: Tuesday October 16, @01:46PM)
So if I want to find a bunch of would-be copyright infringers, or opposition journalists, or whatever, all I need to do is create a file with an enticing name (say, "tiananmen_square.mpg" or "TheLionKing.avi"), fill it with garbage data, and toss it out in a likely place where people will see it and start downloading. As soon as they connect, you've got their IP. Ask/subpoena/rubber-hose their ISP for the billing records, and cue the men with guns.
With a Usenet or Usenet-like system, an individual user is only ever connecting to one server. It's centralized, but there's also more trust. You're never exposing your IP address -- and thus your identity, because the two are effectively one and the same when the government or another entity can force your ISP to reveal it -- to any unknown or untrusted people.
In a really paranoid environment, Usenet can be compartmentalized; you would pull the feed from the person directly above you in your hierarchy, and they would pass traffic to someone else above them, without you knowing who the upstream provider is. If the network gets compromised at the bottom, it's a rather painstaking process to follow the traffic up in order to get the rest of the network. Rather than being able to grab a lot of users at once, you can only get one "cell" at a time, if it's being run as a darknet.
Usenet seems more centralized on the surface, but in some ways it's far less so. Perhaps its security is mostly accidental rather than by design, but it can survive in situations that are highly adverse to the free flow of information, while BitTorrent basically assumes that a high percentage (all?) of the people you're exchanging traffic with are friendly, and that your IP address is OK to give out.
Re:Bittorrent is centralized, Usenet is decentrali (Score:5, Insightful)
BT vs. Usenet (Score:2)
(http://www.ygil.org/)
Seriously though, the real difference between the two (at least when it comes to finding movies and other *AA offensive material) is the ease (or lack thereof) with which it can be found by the average Joe.
Having been on Usenet for some time, finding one episode out of the many legit postings, spam, incomplete files, bad encodings, etc... is a real hassle and PITA. Try finding a posting that was left say... 58 days ago, when dealing with large files (like a 4.6 GB movie in multiple parts) and the number of headers you have to download and sort becomes quite a time consuming chore. In my experience, I have only found 2 *good* ways of finding content easily on Usenet. 1 is a serach engine in the
With BT, there's plenty of sites out there that offer well indexed, and decently maintained search listings for torrents so that the average user (savvy enough to install a BT client and run it anyways) can find and download pretty much anything on a whim.
What makes usenet nice (and a peripheral threat to *AA), is fast downloads, and retention. A torrent might die off or significantly drop in speed/peers/seeds after 3-7 days, stuff on usenet (depending on your provider) has retention of 70 days+, and you're only limited to your download cap on your account (unless you know of a free provider). What makes it bad, is the lack of an easy reliable search mechanism.
The MPAA partnering with GUBA, seems to me, a way for the MPAA to put a spin on usenet akin to putting up a 2 ft fence to keep out an 8ft gorilla.
Nooooo! (Score:5, Funny)
(http://thepreacher.cac2.net/)
GUBA!!! You said I was the only one...
Because free usenet sux (Score:4, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Monday April 30 2007, @10:21PM)
I guess GigaNews still isn't big enough to attract the attention of the MPAA. I hope GigaNews wouldn't give up the user's data without a fight anyway.
Also, one person posts on usenet and there are many free "anonymous" posting servers out there. Several people download. Getting the uploaders is more important to the RI/MP-AA than the leachers/lurkers. With bittorrent, nearly eveyone who downloads also uploads so all users are just as guilty.
Finally, the IP addresses of the users are easier to find via torrent than they are via usenet.
I knew this day would come (Score:1)
Usenet as profit center? (Score:3, Insightful)
(http://mogrify.org/)
The Usenet as an MPAA profit center? I don't buy it.
So, there's no way that if the MPAA knows the full scope of the Usenet, that they would be making enough money off of GUBA to offset the perceived losses of keeping the Usenet in operation.
Here's a better explanation: to crack down on the Usenet, the MPAA would have to put pressure on the ISPs who provide Usenet connectivity as part of their plans. ISPs don't like reducing the value of their services by limiting features (it makes it harder to justify their monthly rate hikes). And the MPAA needs to be friendly with the ISPs to keep getting those juicy log files.
So it's not that they like the Usenet, it's just that they don't have a way to shut it off, yet.
Thank Average Joe. (Score:5, Informative)
(http://robvincent.net/ | Last Journal: Tuesday October 09, @01:55PM)
Usenet piracy, however, still requires a bit of fiddling with to get working. You need to choose and install a client. You need to set it up with your server's settings. You need to learn about binaries, how to rejoin split files, how to use RAR archives, how to recreate missing parts by using multiple servers or fiddling with PAR2s, and so on.. and that's just to leech. If you want to contribute, there's another whole list of things you need to learn how to do to make usable posts.
There's also the fact that everyone's a target with P2P. If you're leeching, you're also sharing with others, your IP is out there, and you're counted among the trackable. One file can possibly lead to hundreds or thousands of guilty trraders for the **AA to prosecute. On Usenet the only ones they can go after are the posters, and one successfully posted file can be grabbed by a virtually unlimited number of downloaders before it vanishes from the ether forever.
Subpoena (Score:2)
(http://anomalyent.com/)
TV Shows? (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://www.fiestyturtles.com/ | Last Journal: Tuesday October 23, @09:07PM)
Enable end-to-end encryption, ALWAYS (Score:2)
It doesn't matter whether or not what you're downloading is legal or not under our messed up copyright system. It is simply a message saying "we're not going to let you stifle legitimate technologies because 'they might be used for piracy'". In fact, let's have everybody enable RC5 end-to-end encryption, and then keep trading Ubuntu images and other legal stuff back and forth.
This, of course, can't stop them from attacking torrent trackers, but I'm sure the whole "not being in the USA" thing will help many of them.
Doubtful (Score:1)
Has anyone here actually tried to download anything of significant size from USENET? It's a baffling and frustrating experience. If your news server happens to carry all 30,000 messages related to whatever movie it is you're downloading, then you've got to make sure your newsreader supports whatever obscure 7-bit encoding format the poster used. In all likelihood, you'll never get that far because it's highly doubtful that your news server carries all the messages you want. For something small, say 20 or 30 parts, I'd say you have a 1 in 10 chance that your news server even carries all the messages. You could always pay a monthly fee for a much better news server, but the average person wouldn't want to bother with that.
I don't even see why anyone bothers getting binaries off USENET, honestly.
I was curious so... (Score:1, Funny)
While in my extensive research, I found no MPAA content.
Perhaps I was sidetracked by all the boobies.
Better late than never? (Score:2)
(http://obruo.com/ | Last Journal: Wednesday November 22 2006, @06:34PM)
To quote a old academic paper on USENET (Score:5, Informative)
(Last Journal: Wednesday August 25 2004, @12:59PM)
And here is a relevant quote:
"Generally speaking, government regulation in this country seems to be most effective only when dealing with large, centralized entities (such as corporations). These entities need to pay taxes, file documents, utilize the courts, etc. These entities are also willing to put up with a number of impositions because of their overriding interest in attaining profits. However, when we are dealing with an entity that is not driven by profits and a decentralized activity that has no real controlling agent (i.e., the Usenet), the regulatory system seems to break down. The only channel of consequence to the Usenet is one of existence. Its demolition (perhaps the only real regulation available) would be a regrettable loss to society.[ 59 ]
Moreover, even though banning the structure of the Usenet could technically be instituted in the U.S., its center of gravity would most likely shift abroad and be imported through Telnet or other methods. In that case, as with any undesirable overseas activity, a customs system could be established if there was a strong enough governmental interest. However, such a system would pose a huge burden to the international flow of information. Certainly, the argument could be made that the U.S., in implementing such an Internet customs system, might be crippling itself economically for the commerce of the future.
Finally, one should note that the regulation of the Usenet by foreign nations can potentially affect Usenet services in this country. For example, a German prosector in Munich ordered CompuServe to discontinue service of over 200 "alt.sex" and related newsgroups on charges that they contained illegal pornographic material. [ 60 ] Since CompuServe lacked the technical means with which to tailor Usenet content simply for German subscribers, the company blocked access to these newsgroups for all of its subscribers worldwide. [ 61 ] Although CompuServe corrected its technical problem within a matter of weeks, the incident received tremendous criticism domestically. [ 62 ] One source even characterized the event as "the most dramatic and far-reaching attempt to restrict the free flow of information online." [ 63 ]"
All that and I still firmly believe that the only reason USENET hasn't been shut down is because its too good a source of leads for catching Child Abusers/Child Pornographers -- if USENET went away then those criminals would just be driven further underground and would be harder to catch-- plus, thanks to USENET, the FBI/et al can maintain a regular series of arrests by simply perusing USENET every now and then, finding someone who hasn't masked themselves well enough and arrest them.
well duh (Score:2)
The difference between Usenet & BitTorrent (Score:3, Insightful)
Also, these days, I'd wager that there are more simply people downloading via BitTorrent than binaries newsgroups, given the lower learning curve and generally faster download speeds.
woah! (Score:1)
tongue firmly in cheek (Score:1)
NZB Sites (Score:1)
Moo (Score:1)
(http://tkatch.com/ | Last Journal: Monday October 29, @02:09PM)
Then again, i use USENET mostly for tech newsgroups. My job would be that much harder without the wealth of material. Torrents can be shut down without too much adverse affects, no so for USENET.
MPAA, RIAA lawyers already messed this up (Score:2)
Reasons (Score:2)
(http://drivemeinsane.com/)
Usenet also has a bit of a learning curve. ISP newsservers for the most part are a crapshoot, so if you actually intend to USE it, you'll have to find a commercial usenet server and purchase an account. That's one more monthly bill to pay, as opposed to the P2P programs which are typically free. You'll have to find and learn (and sometimes purchase) some decent newsreader software that can handle the binary attachments with ease, as well as learn the
archiving schemes typical to usenet (rar, pars, etc). That added complexity tends to keep the majority of people off. And that's a good thing if you ask me.
There's also the difficulty in tracking a usenet downloader. On all the P2P programs, you need only monitor the data stream or design your own client to sniff addresses and offerings of multitudes of people using the service. With usenet, the only information about a file you can gather is the hostname of the individual who posted it
originally, and if they are smart, that will have been proxied. The usenet servers might maintain records of
downloads, but that information will be hard to come by, and a lot harder to use as useful evidence. They could go after the servers themselves, but those are typically owned and managed by corporations that can afford lawyers, and therefore don't make easy targets.
When it comes down to it, everyone's heard of bittorrent, and kaaza, and if you're reading in the newspaper about 1000 college students getting busted for using it, it will at least get everyone's attention. A similar report about 1000 usenet users getting busted will just result in a bunch of people going "what's this usenet thing? and where can I download it?"
-Restil
There's a difference between binaries and text... (Score:1)
(http://www.killfile.org/~tskirvin)
If anybody is any good at publicity and wants to help with Usenet, give me a mail.
Re:Just curious... (Score:2)
Re:Just curious... (Score:2)
(http://www.fooindustries.com/ | Last Journal: Tuesday April 08 2003, @02:29PM)
Re:Helloooo? (Score:3, Funny)
The first rule of Slashdot is that we don't talk about Usenet.
And it's quite possible someone here may give you a Chinese burn for mentioning NNTP.
Re:Just curious... (Score:2)
Isn't that the same sor of question as "Is it illegal for me to sell naked pictures of myself as a child"?