IFPI Turning To Lawsuits 85
Sherman's doppleganger writes "The IFPI (the "European RIAA") has made a lot of noise about filtering this year, but it looks as though 2008 is instead becoming the year of the lawsuit. The IFPI has now sued an Irish ISP in an attempt to keep copyrighted content off of its network. 'The lawsuit accuses Eircom of abetting illegal downloading by allowing copyrighted material to traverse its network unimpeded. The IFPI... wants the ISP to start filtering traffic to scrub all illicitly uploaded and downloaded copyrighted material on its network.' The lawsuit comes less than a week after an Israeli court forced the nation's three biggest ISPs to block access to HttpShare.com."
"Turning" to Lawsuits? Come Now (Score:5, Informative)
I recall them dishing out 2100 lawsuits at once in 2005 [arstechnica.com] and 8000 lawsuits at once in 2006 [arstechnica.com]! And evidence that it's been going on since 2004 [mit.edu].
You might be able to convince me that the IFPI is getting smarter (or stupider, depending on your views) at stopping file sharing by targeting ISPs with lawsuits but to say they're only now with litigating to stop these losses is ignorant.
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I can think of a thing or 102.
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So all traffic should be banned (Score:3)
So, basically, nearly all traffic traversing the ISP must be blocked because most is covered by copyright. Also most webcontent falls in the same category. What a prospect.
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root@gateway.eircom.com.eu# exit
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We tried asking the ISP to pay a 5 Euro levy per kilobyte to cover the costs of its users downloading copyrighted content. As you already know, the ISP refused, so we must resort to the proffitable$wnasty business of suing to get our way.
Cheers and hope you live in Europe,
IFPI
Re:So all traffic should be banned (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:So all traffic should be banned (Score:5, Insightful)
How do you know what is illicit and what is allowed?
Is the content of the website you are downloaded owned by (for instance) perfect 10?
Have I given permission to YOU to download a css stylesheet I designed for use on my website?
Is the Code in the software update you are getting copyrighted to the person you are getting it from?
Did the original rights owner give you permission to distribute that mp3 file to your IM friend?
the list is endless.
Without knowledge of what is illicit and what is allowed you might as well block the whole lot.
Re:So all traffic should be banned (Score:5, Informative)
What they are trying to do is to use the non-authenticated, plaintext nature of the negotiation phase as it is today to determine whether it's illegal or not. Creating an HTTPS version of torrents/trackers that doesn't leak anything to the ISP would be fairly trivial, so would adding authentication if the ISP tried its own SSL connection. At that point, the ISP is quite frankly guessing. They know you connected to TPB, but not what you searched for, what torrent you're getting and if it happens to be a legal download (many torrent aggregators just pick up everything) and you talk SSL to all your peers. There's no possible theoretical or practical way they can tell the difference between you downloading Ubuntu 7.10 (700MB) or a illegal DVD rip (700MB) over a torrent, the traffic patterns would be exactly the same.
To take a practical example where this is already all encrypted, I can connect via NNTPS to my news server. How the hell is my ISP supposed to know what I'm doing? They haven't got the faintest possibility to know anything at all. Of course in this case there's a server at the other end they could go after instead, but in a P2P network it's simply impossible. P.S. For anyone trying to make the lame pun about "The first rule about Usenet..." it's near 30 years old, and everyone that cares to know already knows about it. The only possible way an ISP could prevent copyrighted works from going over their networks is to turn off the lights.
httpshare.com? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:httpshare.com? (Score:4, Interesting)
Makes you wonder why rapidshare didn't implement this, oh wait - that would prove that most of the traffic is infringing copyright. Plus it would make it easier to sue those uploading. *AA must love httpshare.
On a more serious note I'm still surprised by the concept of keeping piracy down by going after those distributing it on the internet. Maybe that's the only way to go if you can't win in the long run. I'm still waiting for the hdd offering enough capacity to store all music ever produced. After that the one storing all movies is just a matter of time. Just calculate the current size of the ITMS and compare it to the growth rate of hard disks - makes it kinda silly to talk about this issue anymore...
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While it is by no means a complete index, http://rapidsearch.yi.org/ [yi.org] combined with http://warez-bb.org/ [warez-bb.org] allow you to find most of what you could possibly be looking for on rapidshare.
Re:Good (Score:5, Informative)
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common carrier? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:common carrier? (Score:5, Insightful)
Should a toll road's owner be fined if someone transports illegal goods on it? Or required to search all cars that pass?
Should Disneyland be fined if someone manages to smuggle in 'shrooms and consume them waiting in line for Pirates Of The Carribean? Or conduct drug searches and tests on all patrons?
Should a taxi driver be fined if a passenger sneaks trash out the window? Or required to maintain all windows and doors to be sealed at all times?
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Well put. If ISPs should be held liable for what passes through their networks, it stands to reason that telephone companies should be liable for what passes through theirs (which I'm pretty sure is protected by common carrier laws in the US). The police don't try to stop people from discussing illegal activities over the phone, they just listen in when they get a warrant for a wiretap and catch the criminals in the act.
I suppose it's understandable that the RIAA is unhappy about how things are set up,
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"common carrier" vs. "common carrier" (Score:4, Informative)
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COUNCIL OF EUROPEAN COMMUNITIES (2007). Council directive of 21st June 2007 on Electronic Commerce (Terrorism Act 2006). (07/1550/EEC). Section 5 Paragraphs 1 & 2 read,
"(1) A service provider is not capable of being guilty of a relevant offence in respect of anything done in the course of providing so much of an information society service as consists in--
(a) the provision of access to a communication network; or
(b) the tra
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Interesting... If that exact law applied to the US, ComCast could be in bigger trouble than they are now:
(a) initiate the transmission;
(b) select the recipient of the transmission; or
(c) select or modify the information contained in the transmission."
You don't get it... (Score:2)
Doesn't matter if they win or not, they're being paid to send out letters and harass people, hopefully generating some press coverage along the way.
Comply! (Score:2)
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IANAL but this could cause problems.
If the block is small enough it isn't covered by copyright (the same way Jive Bunny couldn't get sued for copyright infringement).
Sending one block does not prove the user is sharing the whole file. Just because their bittorrent software says it has the whole file doesn't make it true. I'll admit the odds say they
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I always keep my wifi open. it's just common courtesy.
when my internet goes down, I log into my neighbours internet to do the online work I have to get done. I keep mine open so if they are in the same situation, they can do the same.
really, how much harm can they do to your computer by using your wifi?
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really, how much harm can they do to your computer by using your wifi?
Your argument reminds me of a 3com sales guy who told me encryption isn't important for home connections since no one wants to break into your computer anyways. The problem is that it's not your computer they want; it's your internet connection.
They could start spamming and get your account disabled. There was also the time I got called in to find out why the office internet was so slow only to discover that one of the neighbourin
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Turns out he was using someone's wifi connection to browse child porn. Imagine having that traced to your ip. Given the current guilty until proven innocent attitude when it comes to crimes against children your likely to lose your house and job before they even bother (if they bother) to find out you were innocent in the first place.
1. you have my IP records. its an open account, no encryption...look at this, (opens .bat file that reveals internet activity) my neighbour, the creepy grade 3 teacher, is using it right now...how strange...
2. you have a list of the material that was downloaded.
3. Here is my hard drive,
4. here are all of my monthly backup disks
5. if you find any of that material, let me know.
the police are people, too. if you are kind, pleasent, honest, and up front with them, they tend to not be dicks.
as for the DoS att
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the police are people, too. if you are kind, pleasent, honest, and up front with them, they tend to not be dicks.
I completely agree with you. I just find that being human some topics make people go completely off the wall. I agree that every child porn creator should be nailed harshly but I find that the search for them tends to be in the witch hunt category.
I think I will check my wifi activity more often. but because most of my neighbours are really freaken old, i don't think i have to worry abou
Legal filesharing should be kept legal (Score:5, Interesting)
But direct HTTP downloads can bankrupt a struggling musician if their music suddenly becomes a hit. To allow mass distribution at modest expense, I offer Bit Torrent downloads [geometricvisions.com] of my music.
I can't really see how an ISP could filter out copyright infringement without also filtering out files that are non-infringing.
Bit Torrent distribution is also crucial to Free and Open Source software projects, whose installers are sometimes hundreds of megabytes or even gigabytes in size.
In the debate about file sharing, please speak up for the legal uses of it.
And yes, I know I can host my work on free sites like MySpace, but then it would be MySpace's website and not my own that would benefit from links placed by fans. For business reasons, it's much better for a musician to have their own website if they possibly can.
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I guess what I'm asking is whether the technology is available to make it possible for the ISP to do
There's a way it could be done, but impractical (Score:3, Informative)
But you can't do a bit-for-bit comparing, or a hash, because there are a lot of ways to change the precise data in a file without changing what it sounds like in a way that is noticable to the human ear.
For example, you could re-compress it to a different bit rate, or transcode it say from MP3 to Ogg Vorbis, or what have you.
I'm sure there are known algorithms that can tel
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it would be so computationally expensive that no ISP could afford to actually implement it.
Agreed. The discussed uses of this kind of technology were for sites like YouTube and MySpace. The key difference is, an ISP would somehow have to do the same filtering in realtime.
Of course, leaving asaide the issue of trying to match tracks without having more than snippets of the data. The reality of many P2P technologies is that pieces of the file are fetched in a more or less random order. Not particularly conducive to any prospective filtering.
More than likely, the IFPI would want wholesale block
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MySpace is horrid purely for functionality, it's awkward to download and I frequently have problems.
(PS, I'm amazed that US Post won't post to North Korea. I wondered if Royal Mail (UK) would, and the answer was yes -- but post by the 7th December to make Christmas
I'm grateful for your help! (Score:2)
I'll get a PHP order form up on that page Real Soon Now.
Re:Legal filesharing should be kept legal (Score:5, Insightful)
And that is one of the reasons it must be stopped.
You are the real enemy.
Unclear on the concept (Score:4, Insightful)
People here are unclear on what the RIAA and their European cousins are trying to do. They are not dummies, and they know perfectly well that personal sharing ("piracy") actually helps their sales. They also know perfectly well that these lawsuits will not stop real piracy ("Psssst. Honorable Sir! Look here! 5 CDs for one dollar!"). They are willing to forgo those lost sales in pursuit of their real purpose. The purpose of the lawsuits is to create a climate of fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) surrounding *legal* downloads. That is because what they *really* hate is not "piracy", but independent musicians. By stifling music sharing, they stifle independents, and keep the music distribution monopoly to themselves. They don't especially hate FOSS, but they don't feel especially guilty about innocent bystanders getting nailed either.
These people need to crawl in a hole somwhere. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:These people need to crawl in a hole somwhere. (Score:5, Interesting)
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Of course you're right about the difference between immoral and illegal. And copyright law is made more problematic in that it benefits more than just the original artist/creator. Nonetheless, I believe that not paying a copyright holder for music is immoral - precisely because there is no actual need for anyone to have the product.
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Education? (Score:1)
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A single pirate? No. Pirates as a group? That's debatable. They've done their half of the work to perpetuate this conflict, and the natural response to abuse of freedoms is to attempt to take them away. I'm not saying the **AA should be absolved of blame here, but neither should these pirates. They should've stopped when they were asked, especially since they were the ones who perpetrated illegal activity in the first place.
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(Oh, and on a side note, is it okay to ask questions like this in
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some pirates download and burn movies, and sell them for $3 each on street corners (see Asia)
It is my opinion that selling somebody elses work without their permission is both legally and morally wrong.
but the **AA and lawmakers lump people who just share music with their friends in with these pirates.
I see nothing wrong with sharing.
It's what they told me to do back in kindergarden.
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Re:These people need to crawl in a hole somwhere. (Score:4, Informative)
So how about radio? if a song is broadcast on the radio, and people can hear it for free, then record lables are losing hundreds of thousands of sales each time a song is played. you would think they would have regulated that, made the radio companies pay millions in royalties. Instead, the law adapted to fit new technology.
Today, the law has failed to adapt to new technology (p2p) and instead, its forcing new technology to adapt to fit the law. this is not a healthy situation, or a battle than can be won through laws as they are today.
1. how many people are involved in filesharing. (US only)
2. how many people voted for the current administration
If more people support the activity, why is it illegal?
please note: I am not trying to ridicule your position, I strongly oppose organized piracy and distribution of illegal goods.
But I see a big distinction between commercial distribution, and non-comercial distribution.
I'm an artist myself. When someone takes a picture of my work and gives it to a friend, i'm flattered and pleased that they are distributing my material. but if they were to sell that image, then I would have a problem with that. they are directly profitting off of my labour.
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The radio analogy doesn't entirely work. A song can only be heard for free when the radio station chooses to play it, which I guess leads to people actually wanting to acquire songs they like for their own collection. So the copyright holder is likely to gain sales. This isn't the case with filesharing.
I think that different assumptions are made about online vs. "real-world" behaviour. I'm sure that most of us think that CDs a
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Cassette [wikipedia.org]
That made it INCREDIBLY easy to save music off the radio.
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Don't you remember the stickers from the 70s?
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Not necessarily.
Certainly not legally, but morally, the consensus (a.k.a groupthink) here on Slashdot is that the former is considerably worse. I disagree however, because both commercial and non-commercial copyright infringement have roughly the same impact on the copyright holder.
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What does raiding ships at sea have to do with this discussion?
Anyway, as far as I have seen, the organizations representing the entertainment industry have done very little to directly attack the actual copyright infringers. Even in the lawsuits the RIAA conducted, they didn't seem to put much effort into finding actual infringers or verifying in any way the person they sued had anything to do with infringement. The whole thing seemed to be "let's find some random people and sue them. Who cares if they e
HTTPShare (Score:1, Interesting)
Abbetting (Score:2, Insightful)
Censorship and P2P (Score:2, Interesting)
I wonder if we're going to see a change in the role of P2P. It used to be about evading responsibility due to the mistaken idea that P2P was anonymous.
Somewhere along the way, people wised up to that nonsense, and it started to be about performance (though at the cost of efficiency, which really pisses off the ISPs).
Lately, it seems we're seeing a lot of censorship of websites, either by forcing ISPs to block, or forcing DNS registrars to remove the name. I guess the websites were a jumping-off point to
Correct headline (Score:2)
Perhaps it's time to bring back the evil bit.
I Still Don't Understand (Score:3, Insightful)
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In the past, record compagnies controled everything because they were the only way to get your music published and therefore had the upper hand. Now, they control everything because they say so.
Luddites (Score:2)
I just got done reading the Times Atlas of World History and this seems like the modern equivalent of heresy -- threatening the established economic order of copyrights.
Hopefully in the annals of history this will merit just a sentence or two in the wider scope of things.
httpshare.com... (Score:3, Interesting)
Thats IFPI, Not IRAa (Score:3, Informative)
Seriously, the technology to filter gigabytes per second traffic looking for specific music signatures does not exist at a reasonable price point. And, as others have pointed out, simply Zipping the file would be enough to bypass any packet inspection anyway. (In fact, it would need to inspect the entire stream, because packet inspection would be insufficient!) (Let alone the variety of compression formats that currently exist.)
I would not be at all surprised that if you encode analog audio files to MP3 that each version would produce different digital streams. For digital files, the addition of several random bytes just before the stream to be encoded would produce the same result. (That is, totally different looking digital data streams.) At the very worst, the added few bytes might produce a click. (even that could be kept inaudible!)
Alternatively, multiply the data by some small factor during encoding. (EG:Data * 0.995 would be inaudible, but the resultant MP3 stream would definitely not match any SIMPLE filtering stream.
IF the RIAA were to provide the filtering hardware to each and every ISP, that might get them to install it, given that filtering does not slow down the ISPs traffic.
If the filter isn't 100% effective, and falsely terminates legitimate streams, then the RIAA [IFPI] would be liable, not the ISP. Lets see how long the RIAA would last after that!
I would say that the RIAA needs to demonstrate to the courts that 100.00000000% accurate AUTOMATED detection (especially at the data rates an ISP might have!)is possible before they can even begin to suggest the ISP is involved. I will lay money down that they cannot even demonstrate 10% reliable detection rates. (Indeed, I personally think the ISP does not have the authority or the responsibility to inspect/filter any traffic.)
Also in the News (Score:2)
Isn't it a bit far fetched? (Score:2)
> material to traverse its network unimpeded.
Wow. How about suing tollway operators for allowing illegal drugs/weapons/stolen goods/etc to traverse their tollways unimpeded? Or the state for that matter, that operates public roads? Or the public transport operators?
The "intellectual rights" industry is just getting more and more insane with each passing day. Next they will sue the electricity board to provide support f
Correction.. (Score:2)
Did yyu mean to say "The "intellectual rights" industry is just getting less and less intellectual with each passing day"?
The reasons given are BS (Score:1)
As stated in an article here [ireland.com], Irish music sales has seen a steep decline of just over €40m in 7 years. They attribute this to filesharing, but I think that's bollocks. First, that is a drop of roughly 33%. Broadband penetration in Ireland is still one of the lowest in the EU. AFAIK, something like 40% of households now have broadband. It is now 2008, the decline has been happening since 2001, and trust me, in 2001 if you were one of the extremely privledged few who could even get broadband in Ireland y
Really, a Meta-Look at This is Warranted (Score:1)
Artists will promote themselves on a level playing field and the necessity of a corrupt middleman will be antiquated.
Music will be distributed freely and artists will live off performance revenues. You can't bottle music like beer to sell
Music is information and longs to be free and will break all bonds to be so. filesharing will still flourish in E