A few thoughts on the P2P jihad
 

I'm sure everyone's heard by now that the RIAA is <a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/31833.html">on a rampage</a>, and has prepared close to a thousand subpoenas for music sharers.

The sheer scale of the user base is at least momentarily comforting. (If every Kazaa user had a square inch of turf, the estimated user base would fill up seven or eight football fields. The RIAA's subpoenas would cover about six square feet inside the first field's one-yard-line, with a half-a-square-foot added each day.) Of course, those odds are a little deceptive; remove non-habitual users, users who don't share files, users who have removed <a href="http://www.riaa.com/about/members/default.asp">RIAA-affiliated artists and labels</a> from shared directories, and those scared off by the legal implications, and there aren't quite as many potential targets any more.

If you happen to hit the Unlucky Lottery and are served with a subpoena, the options aren't promising. The RIAA is clearly hoping that the vast majority will simply say "We'll settle" and fork over cash in four or five figures; that would provide them with lots of "See? The Internet IS full of pirates who are pleading guilty" PR material, save them court costs, and help finance the costs of the legal battles against those who don't cave in. But when you're up against big-corporation lawyers and you're a Joe Average, can you afford the risk of losing your case and being on the hook for a hell of a lot more cash? For that matter, will even the falsely-accused refuse to settle for precisely those reasons?

Realistically, I can't complain much; this is the approach the RIAA should've taken in preference to going after the likes of Napster. Napster was a carrier; users actively provided the infringing material. The viability of RIAA members' business models, copyright infringement vs. theft, the latest in <a href="http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,59654,00.html">Howard Berman's</a> string of ridiculous proposed legislation and such are different matters.

But I have two thoughts floating around in my pea-sized cranium:

* Why has Jack Valenti of the MPAA not rushed to a microphone to announce a "me too" lawsuit program? Valenti is a publicity hound, would blow up a station wagon full of nuns if it contained something he considered threatening to the status-quo business model, and has a long history of refusing to be the voice of reason. Considering that P2P serves up movie and television files with great regularity, and that he's crusaded against that before, what's holding the MPAA back?

* Are the RIAA's infringement-hounds leaving no stone unturned in their searches? Are they investigating IRC, FTP, USENET, eDonkey, LimeWire, SoulSeek, WinMX, and other sources of often-musical bandwidth? Are they looking for all kinds of infringement, popular and obscure alike?

Or are they, as some articles have suggested, merely trolling Kazaa each day for familiar names like "Avril Lavigne" and "Michael Jackson" and going after whoever turns up in those searches? (This would be more in character for them.)

Considering that my ISP (Verizon) has been the most directly targetted by the RIAA (a payback for not caving in quickly on the ISP-privacy-rights fight that opened the door for these lawsuits), I'm being very careful about what I put in my shared directories these days...

I read today that they're going after downloaders too. I suppose they're sharing files and seeing who downloads? I'm not sure. I'm also not real worried, 'cause I use iTunes Music Store. :)

Got a link for that? Going after downloaders just sounds strange. Isn't that treading in entrapment waters?

(iTunes is a big step in the right direction. When it's Windows-accessible, it'll be a HUGE step in the right direction, and one that I can take advantage of.)

UT and I were discussing this last night, and I was telling him about a great setup that AOL Time Warner is apparently doing.

For example, on Seal's website, you can listen to a "jukebox" of his songs, then if you want to buy one of them, you're taken to paypal, and the cost is $1.49. I'm cool with that.

So far, everything I've seen refers to "distributors" and "people who share files."

As far as entrapment, nah...free choice as to whether to download or not.

Yeah, and the guy who propositions an undercover cop on the streetcorner has free choice whether to proposition her or not. It's still entrapment if the cop is openly offering a service, as compared to standing there and being made an illicit offer.

No money's changing hands in P2P, but the principle still stands. The downloaders are actively searching for the goods, but the uploaders have to actively put it in a shared directory and effectively say "Here, you can have this" for it to be accessible, and if the uploaders' act doesn't happen, there's no violation.

Where it's going to get quite ugly is when the RIAA's searchbots misfire -- it's not like it <a href="http://news.com.com/2100-1025_3-1001095.html">hasn't happened before</a>. Whether it's gray-area stuff (remixes, sampling, etc.) or mistaken identity, how many non-infringers will be able to afford to defend themselves, given that the RIAA is eschewing warning letters and suing on the first offense now?

I was actually the target of a threatening letter that incorrectly identified some stuff I was hosting. My server was shut down without any notification whatsoever; it was only after I called the hosting company that I found out that it was because I had DeCSS (that's De-Cascading Style Sheets) on a page that <b>very explicitly said</b> "this cannot be used for making illegal copies of DVDs". I wrote an angry letter to the hosting company; they wrote a very very <b>very</b> angry letter to the MPAA's attorney, and my server was restored (total downtime: about four hours). But it's still a big bag of suck.

I'm looking for my source right now, and I'll post it when I find it. But it was just today when I read it.

Re: A few thoughts on the P2P jihad
 

Yes, but won't it be fun when they hit the "jackpot" and get somebody with the resources to fight it.. or more likely, some folks (EFF?) decide to put together a legal assistance team.


You're right, it would be in character. But I think that since disk space and bandwidth limitations CURRENTLY make it not worth the trouble to share video at a reasonable quality level, he's decided to lie low and let the RIAA (and its expensive legal team) do the dirty work, and establish precedents so that at a later date when the technology has improved, the MPAA can just waltz on in and it will be business as usual to arrest P2P users.

Oh and speaking of the MPAA, I wonder how long it will be before the RIAA admits that all those shiny new hot-selling DVDs have something to do with the drop in CD sales?

I doubt it. They're going after easy targets. And artists who make more money can prove more damages. I'm not saying they wouldn't like to prevent me from sharing a rip of Stravinsky's "The Rake's Progress" (this is a hypothetical example BTW so don't arrest me! :cool: ), but it's way way way way down on their list of priorities.

This comment comes up a lot, and it is worth noting that entrapment is perfectly legal if it is not done by a person or persons in law enforcement. The RIAA can use entrapment methods as much as they want to.

I am curious whether my recent use of P2P is actually illegal... I have been downloading all the songs from CDs which I already own, but are all scratched up and won't play without skipping. I paid for a digital copy of the music itself, so I should be entitled to replace the music with CD quality music when the media becomes unusable. Right? I dunno.

For those who haven't seen it, the new release of KaZaA Lite K++ (the bootlegged version of KaZaA with the spyware stripped out) has RIAA-blocking stuff built in. Not sure how effective it is, though.

I'm pretty sure you're legal there hp, but how much would it cost you to argue your lawsuit if you received a subpoena?

Surely somebody's going to start tunneling it through SSH. Then it would get interesting.

From the article quoted:

In a subpoena addressed to MIT, the association is demanding the name, address, and phone number of a student who used the nickname ''crazyface'' to download at least five songs, including Radiohead's ''Idioteque'' and Dave Matthews Band's ''Ants Marching.''

Hmmph. Dave, I guess you were right and they _are_ going that route. I have to admit that I'm surprised at that. Ah, well, time to teach my wife how to pull music from USENET instead! (I'd like to see the RIAA track _that_ on the client end, though they can certainly still go after file-posters.)

(The common thread so far seems to be Kazaa, which I don't use, but I don't want to be the guinea pig when they move on to SoulSeek and WinMX.)

[quote]Originally posted by hot_pastrami
I am curious whether my recent use of P2P is actually illegal... I have been downloading all the songs from CDs which I already own, but are all scratched up and won't play without skipping. I paid for a digital copy of the music itself, so I should be entitled to replace the music with CD quality music when the media becomes unusable. Right? I dunno.

I suspect that you'd find that the RIAA would sue you whether you owned zero, one or fifteen copies of a given CD.

If they really do decide to get tough, will there be a backlash? Is it possible that smaller record companies and distributors will come up with a 'non-RIAA' label or sticker to use as a selling point?

I'm wondering about the impact this is going to have on music sales. It will be interesting to see if the RIAA's sales decrease dramaticly with this attack on their customers. How will they explain that?

Look! Up in the sky!

It's a bird!

It's a plane!

No! It's the ACLU!

How would this help? They would still have your ip address. SSH only prevents people in the middle from snooping or altering the packets, neither of which the RIAA is doing.

And their even-more-relevant-in-this-case cousin, the <a href="http://www.eff.org/">Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)</a>. (Not that I'd knock ACLU support, of course, but the EFF has been on this and similar issues like white on rice for years.)

Hmm it does quite a bit by obscuring the content of what's being shared.... unless an RIAA shill actually signs onto the network to participate. Never mind.

Of course if there were some kind of IP-laundering service.. and it were located in an off-shore data haven.... hmmmm.... maybe this is the sequel to Neal Stephenson's "Cryptonomicon"!

How do they ID?
 

If all they have to go by is IP address, what do they do in, say, my case? I'm on ADSL and the IP the outside world sees is rotated pretty regularly. Would my ISP even be tracking what it is? I would think that sort of thing is heavily automated. Would they bother to log all that information? If they scan for more information I'm heavily firewalled so any scan would turn up zip.
I don't use any of the knutella clones some I'm pretty safe for now (I think ) but in the future....:confused:

Sure your ISP can track back to you -- and sure they have an easy mechanism to do it, because so many people abuse their Internet provider in every way imaginable.

I'm positive they could right now. But 30 days from now, if they get a court order to reveal who 142.177.13.143 was on such and such a date, could they do it? My ip at times has changed hourly.

The ISP's servers automatically log all that stuff.... that's the way that they find spammers, too. I'll betcha they could determine what user had what IP to the very minute. They'd have to wade through log files, but that's not too difficult.

Bugger.

So much for that slim hope.

How long before before they start on the DC++ hubs? Most of them are hosted in Europe. I might still have time.....

Dave's company could do that in their sleep.....and more.:eek:

An interesting exception may be public WiFi hot-spots. If they don't require a login there's no way you can trace it back. (On a wired network you can usually figure out pretty easily which switch port a particular MAC address is coming from.)

This list of file-sharing users targetted by current action is linked by /. today. As you can see Sycamore has made the list:

TMONEYNDHIZOUSE@kazaa

Shame, Syc!

This is a real dilemma. The RIAA is technically not wrong; person A has shared a copyrighted song. IANAL, but I believe fair use states I share this with my immediate friends. I don't klnow if fair use takes into account my closest 1.5 million friends, though.

OTOH, the RIAA is just about the most unethical corporation there is. They regularly rip off the people they have signed with them and they have filed frivolous lawsuits -- remember the 97 billion dollar suit against the college student sharing within his campus? They badger, threaten, and bar their customers from exercising their legal rights. Their behavior should qualify them for RICO status.

Hey Syc, if you need a character witness, I'll testify. I'll swear and affirm, you're a character.:rolleyes:

That name is funny, as that is some shit I would say...but it's not me.

Though after he gets hit with a lawsuit from the RIAA, I'm going to break out my Sam's Club-sized can of whoopass on him for lifting my name. Fucker!

That's the whole crux of the argument of the 2 universities that are fighting: they don't consider the subpoenas legitimate because they were not issued by a court, but just by the RIAA. (My understanding, and don't hold me to this cause it's been a looong day, is that the DCMA speciifically authorizes this, and it's IMO one of the worst parts of the law.)

Oh, the other issue is jurisdictional.. I believe they said they'd comply with a properly issued subpoena from a Massachusetts court.

What I don't know is, what makes them think they can when when Verizon couldn't?

Maybe because Verizon is interstate commerce.

Uh, fair use doesn't say shit about your friends. At all. You can use work for parody, you can make a copy of a purchased copyrighted material for your own backup purposes. You <b>cannot</b> redistribute in any way unless you're licensed to do so.

Here is an interesting proposed solution... anybody got a spare $2 million they can loan me?

Dave might. :)

Here's how to get $2 million:

MBNA owns about six kabillion credit card issuers, and if you have halfway-decent credit they're always peppering you with offers.

What you do, is accept an offer for a card for each of them. Then call MBNA and have them consolidate the credit lines into one card. Keep this up until you have a $2 million credit limit. Now wait until they have one of those promotional offers where you pay no interest and no transaction fees for 6 months. Borrow out that $2 million and invest it, and hope you make that profit before the first interest payment becomes due :-)

I was thinking a bit more about this last night. So the RIAA is going after downloaders, too.

So if someone gets "busted", what's to stop them from simply going out and buying a copy of the CD (or single) they downloaded? Doesn't fair use cover the right to obtain a backup copy to works you paid for?

Yes and moreover, if something is later found to not be fair use, how can the consumer possibly be held at fault? If they quote song lyrics in the local paper, do the cops go around busting people who might be readers? (Do they put plainclothes offers near paper boxes? Do they put flash-bombs in the stacks in the hopes that readers' entire stacks get burned?)

The EFF has a database where you can check your IP addy to see if a subpoena is headed your way.

Which is great, if you have a static IP.

According to the RIAA, downloading MP3s and obtaining a backup copy are not equivalent. Their argument is simple: the person providing the MP3s did not have the rights to distribute them, and thus you are receiving "stolen" intellectual property. If you want a backup copy, you have to either make it yourself (while you still have the technological capabilities to do so) or deal directly with the point-of-purchase retailer (and good luck convincing the drones at Best Buy that your CD was defective when you got it).

We're all free to disagree with that Draconian standpoint, as well we should. But how many of us have a spare fifty grand or so lying around to fight them in court, should our numbers come up in the Subpoena Lottery?

As usual, the RIAA is full of feces.

#1, the term "Intellectual Property" refers in this case to copyrights. Not the copyrighted work, but the copyright itself. There is no "stolen" intellectual property except by fraud.

#2, this argument has been tried and gone all the way up to the Supreme Court. Infringing copies of copyrighted works are not stolen property.

Don't buy RIAA music. Not from stores, not from iTunes, not from buymusic, not from anywhere. Doing so is merely forging your own chains.

I will note that the above were my paraphrasings, not their actual statements. Replace "stolen" with "infringing" or "prosecutable," as desired. If the RIAA site wasn't perpetually in the process of being hacked, slashdotted or both, I could dig up their own language more easily.

Regardless, you get the gist. Infringement != theft, but given the potential penalties being tossed around for the former, you might actually get off lighter committing the latter.

Agreed.

Silly RIAA.

Lets sue the people who buy your product.

I pesonally use Kazaa Lite to download rare tracks that are not easily obtained from the so called music stores. So you want to make me a criminal because I my goal is to have every johnny cash recording ever made???? Why don't you use your vast resources and put an end to (insert world/us problem here). Crack mothers are spitting out babies like an ATM machine, but you want to preach to me what is right and wrong? NO You want to protect your own greedy selfs. You cheated the artists into giving their first male born child in return for a record contract, and then tell them how/what to sing. and now we have found a way to cheat you....Isn't their honor among theifs?????

Most artists barely see a dime from record sells. URL=http://more.abcnews.go.com/sections/business/entertainment/forbes_concertcash_030711.html](see abc news)[/url] The real money is in concert tours and merchandising...why is ozzy on tv???? Why is metallica coming out with a video game? because the riaa gets the money from cd sales and they have to find something to support their habits.

When a product in the marketplace isn't selling well, what do other companies do? Most try to make their product better.

Remember the day when you bought an album that had impressive cover art, full lyrics and usually fun stuff that made you want to buy the album (remember pink floyds wish you were here brown plain wrapper. or the fact that black sabbath's debut album was realesed on friday feb. 13th.) Instead your lazy greedy bastards barely put the track listings on the cd. And heaven forbid your a kid who doesn't live in a major metropolis and your only source of music is the local censored wal-mart racks.

If the product is bland and isn't worth the value you charge for it Why should I buy it. I listen to it on the radio for free all day long, but I can't listen to it on my computer all day long, unless I listen to something like spinner.com?

Granted it's hard to download a new ford truck from the internet, but the principal is the same. If Ford or any manufacturer didn't come out with something new, wouldn't you just use your old one until it wore out? (that is if they didn't design them to break down. They aren't in the automobile business ford (and every car maker) is in the parts business.)

Give me something that is worth the $20 you want and I'll start buying again.

Give me something that isn't total crap and sounds like everything else out there and I'll be back.

Hell charge me an extra quarter more for my blank media so I can record my own songs my own way.

Until then you can shove my IP Address, well there might be kids listening.

I'm just glad the RIAA isn't involved in the movie business. I'd hate to be sued cause I watched it on a friends hbo subscription instead of paying $12 to watch it at the theater.

Er, if you're Metallica or Ozzy (who's fucking a record exec), you have such a good record deal that you probably get quite a bit of royalties. It's the bands like Coldplay and Incubus and whatnot that are getting eaten alive. That's why I've seen Incubus live five times. Because they gotta tour that much to make a living.

I agree Jeep-man: if I made the rules, if an album or game goes out of print it should become legal to copy. If you can't even get it legally and nobody's seeking to make current money, it should be freely shareable. All those old game ROMs, all those old Procol Harum albums, shareable.

I agree, but I'll also play devil's advocate. First, concerning games...

There are a lot of "classics" compilations out there, some of which are actual emulators running the old ROMs themselves on console/handheld/PC hardware. (There are also recreations of old games (same appearance and feel, different code), and bastardized remakes of older games that share little beyond aesthetics and intellectual property. What they've done to the Frogger name, for instance, is frightening. But I digress.)

In the early days of DIY arcade emulation, clashes between commercial and hobbyist interests were common. For instance, the PSX release of <a href="http://www.gamespot.com/ps/puzzle/midwaypresentsarcadesghtmc2/index.html">Midway Collection 2</a> came only a month after MAME .28 had incorporated MCR I/II/III drivers, which emulated two major games from that collection (Spy Hunter and Tapper) and thirteen other Midway games from that era.

Digital Eclipse was largely responsible for the above PSX release, their followup to <a href="http://www.digitaleclipse.com/live/main/main.php?v=pr&id=53">Williams Arcade Classics</a> for MS-DOS and the <a href="http://www.digitaleclipse.com/live/main/main.php?v=pr&id=49">Digital Arcade series</a> for the Mac, _the_ undisputed catalysts for the entire arcade-emulation movement. This wasn't a case of some faceless company locking their games in a vault; this was a company that was working hard to bring back lost classics and make them playable in new environments, packaged with interviews and other extras. The games were unavailable and out-of-print before Digital Eclipse came along, but there were several commercial products in the works, and at least one of their staff members was a regular presence in the classic-games and emulation newsgroups, so the projects weren't guarded secrets. (This was a "seeking to make current and future money" situation.)

MAME was thus a serious kick in the ass for Digital Eclipse. Not only was their upcoming $49 product beaten to the market by a FREE emulator that played many of the same games, but a lot of games that they might've wanted to package as "Midway Collection 3" were also now freely available. It was unquestionable that Midway and Digital Eclipse had the legal rights to use the ROMs in such a manner, and that assorted ROM sites did not have distribution rights, but once the genie was out of the bottle...

Many people (myself included) went ahead and bought the PSX compilation, as a "thank you" to DE for releasing it at all. Many others looked at a $49 disc and a free download and made a reasonably obvious choice.

To their credit, DE didn't throw lawsuits around or abandon the genre; they're <a href="http://ps2.ign.com/articles/433/433090p1.html">still at it</a> today, repackaging old games for newer consoles. But the flamewars were legendary at the time, and I wonder how many compilations (DE's or others') were canned when someone said "Forget it, it's already out there for free, even though we still own the rights, so it won't sell the way it could've sold." It's easy to look at a game and say "it's out of print and abandoned," but can you _prove_ that the owner won't rerelease it or do something cool with it sometime in the indeterminate future?

And there's nothing new under the sun. Nowadays, emulations can surpass commercial apps in quality, such as with <a href="http://www.gamespot.com/pc/puzzle/williamspinballclassics/index.html">Williams Pinball Classics</a> being measurably inferior to the games' recreations in <a href="http://www.randydavis.com/vp/">Visual Pinball</a>. Since VP uses the original sound and rules ROMs from real pinball machines, the same standard as with Midway II above applies.

Now, there are also tens of thousands of ROMs out there that can more justifiably be considered "abandoned" -- companies have changed hands dozens of times or gone out of business, properties have been unused for decades, responses to inquiries about games go unanswered. The MAME folks have always firmly demanded that it remain open-source and that their code should never be sold with ROMs for any for-profit uses, and have shied away from emulating brand-new games. Yet how long is long enough to wait? (The one-year rule-of-thumb that applied for a while was a sham -- I honestly think that MAME was a major contributor in running SNK out of business. Who would pay $250 for a King of Fighters 2001 cart when it would be emulated perfectly in MAME a year later)?

Similar logic can be applied to music, especially if you replace "new consoles" with "new formats," as I'm sure replacements for CDs will be coming down the pike sometime within the next few years.

Keep in mind that even after all that ranting, I am on the side of the user -- I'd rather see fair-use provisions that are _too_ permissive than not permissive enough for currently-noncommercial works. The above are just some of the issues that tend to crop up...

What! You mean I can't go to the record store and buy Procol Harem Lp's any more?:eek:
How about an 8 track?