MPAA Ignores Usenet, Goes After Bittorrent 232
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."
Shhhhhhhhh (Score:5, Funny)
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Nice FF plugin as well, hellafox. [z0g.org]
Re:Shhhhhhhhh (Score:4, Informative)
-Jar.
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If the RIAA/MPAA/TV Networks provided a site like that (for a similar price; $10/month), I think piracy would be stamped out forever.
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I should now I wrote it..
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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...
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No authority (Score:5, Informative)
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"
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Just fill in the target's name and send it via recorded delivery.
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Re:MPAA doesn't need "moral high ground" (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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Unlike trademarks, copyrights have explicit constitutional protection in the United States.
The exercise of "due diligence" may -- someday -- limit damages for the infringement in good faith of so-called orphaned works. Infringement Is Everywhere: Congress Addresses 'Orphaned Works" [law.com]
But
The first rule of Usenet is... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The Second rule of Usenet is... (Score:5, Funny)
The Third rule of Usenet is... (Score:4, Funny)
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1. You do not talk about Usenet.
2. You *do* *not* *talk* *about* *Usenet*.
3. You *do* *not* *post* *in* *HTML*.
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P.S. This posting pause thing is getting ridiculous. It says I only waited 16 seconds after posting... my last post was last night!
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The second rule of Usenet is that AOL wasn't the first or last provider to drop the service.
No (Score:5, Insightful)
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If I register with e.g GigaNews or whoever, they have at the very least my contact / credit card details, and even if they may not leave private information to just about anyone, I wouldn't be too confident in antipiracy organizations not being capable of using their user registries to proceed with their investigation.
My point is -- at least with BT, I wouldn't be registering myself on some company. With Usenet, you often have both that way for them to attack you, as we
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With UseNet, it'd be alot harder for them to locate people downloading the binaries, and it's pretty easy to hide your identity when you're uploading, too.
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First Rule of Usenet: don't talk about Usenet (Score:2)
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Interestingly, I'm told that they stopped hosting binary newsgroups a couple of years ago, saw their international bandwidth bills shoot through the roof from BitTorrent, and brought back the binaries. The moral of this story is 'if you offer DRM-free movies at reasonable qua
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See we used to sneak into our local $2 cinema and the guys would not care who were standing way at the other end; the only reason they set a guy up there and later secured the doors even more was because everybody started abu
Great (Score:2, Funny)
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How do they do that? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:How do they do that? (Score:5, Funny)
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GUBA? (Score:2)
Asking as someone who wasn't around when Usenet was the biggest thing, is this really as proliferate as torrent sites?
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Re:GUBA? (Score:5, Funny)
Usenet and ISPs (Score:4, Informative)
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]
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--
Oh yeah! The only thing that realy shut down the popularity was the very lousy spam to content ratio. It was worse than the current e-mail situation. For the most part, it became useless except for the few with lots of time on their hands to sift through the rubble heap that remained of usenet.
Like in the early days of e-mail, It was very popular for finding information online. Now it'
Uh-huh (Score:5, Funny)
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"idiots"? How does this make anyone an idiot? It makes perfect sense to critisize the MPAA when they sue people and to also criticize them when the fail to do so. This way, they're damned if they do and damned if they don't. Which is kind of the point. What you're proposing leaves them a way to wriggle out of their damnation, and that just won't do.
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Re:Uh-huh (Score:4, Insightful)
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)
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?
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It's perfectly simple. With trademarks, if you do not defend it, you risk losing it. That does not apply to copyright (or patents); they're yours whether you go after infringers or not.
More to the point though, GUBA will
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If you're referring to Santa Claus Conquers the Martians [archive.org], it's in the public domain now. So anyone can rerelease it on DVD.
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)
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)
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.
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Bittorrent only requests and exchanges parts or chunks of a file.
I guess it's enough to get you a lawsuit, but on the other hand even being associated with an IP address is now enough to get you sued. So, it really matters anyway. Somebody could be sending out packets with your IP address saying you're a BT client with the movie.
But, you're right. Bittorrent was mostly designed for speed of download and not privacy.
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But if the data is NOT a copyrighted work, (its filled with garbage data), then how can they sue you for that? Furthermore, it is them who have made it available! IANAL but that sounds like en
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Sure, if you just use a torrent client wide open. Smart users will use something like Peer Guardian2 http://phoenixlabs.org/pg2/ [phoenixlabs.org] to keep all the bad guys IP addresses from connecting to you...
Bittorrent popular, easy to use. Usenet obscure. (Score:2)
Re:Bittorrent is centralized, Usenet is decentrali (Score:5, Insightful)
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There is no shortage of trolls and morons on USENET, not all of whom are "in IT circles."
I'm afraid the cat's been out of the bag for a long, long time.
BT vs. Usenet (Score:2)
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, wh
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70 Days retention (Score:2)
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Cheers.
Nooooo! (Score:5, Funny)
GUBA!!! You said I was the only one...
Because free usenet sux (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Usenet as profit center? (Score:3, Insightful)
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)
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.
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Uh... that's why there's
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Subpoena (Score:2)
TV Shows? (Score:3, Interesting)
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'
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In that case, it seems traffic over an onion network is the only solution...
Better late than never? (Score:2)
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To quote a old academic paper on USENET (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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That's a pretty narrow view of what Usenet is, considering that it's a lot more than just porn,warez, and movies.
Over the years, it's been a great repository of information, and the exchange thereof.
Saying that it's only around to catch kiddy porn purveyors, is at the very least, uninformed.
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Well, that may have been true when the paper was written, but I'm not sure it's all that true now. If you want to participate in usenet, you have to sign up for an account with a profit-driven, centralized entity. That profit-driven, centralized entity had to spend quite a bit of money, time and effort setting up a datacenter that can retain all that
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.
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Because, as the saying goes, when you critize somebody's personal hygiene, you'd better make sure you smell nice yourself.
In other words, the MPAA can't go about suing people right and left for piracy and copyright infringement and behave differently when said people are their buddies. They're just not credible.
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There are providers of Usenet feeds that have made the whole process point-and-click. One of them (they're a real "easy news" provider!), you literally open up a web browser and go to their URL, log in, and start downloading. They even are nice enough to UnRAR the files for you and automatically reassemble PARs (PAR is designed to fix the 'missing hunk' problem using techniques similar to RAID 5), so you get a nice AVI file, mp3, iso, or whatever you are trying to get.
And, as TFA point
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