File-sharing and AOL 319
Andrew Leonard writes "Farhad Manjoo's cover story in Salon today, on AOL's refusal to take a stand on the RIAA's (so far) successful attempt to get subscriber information from Verizon, is a detailed look at the most important battle in the file-sharing world right now."
Not in a possition (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry about the spelling, too much free beer.;)
Thats funny (Score:4, Insightful)
AOL is a part of the AOL-Time-Warner corporation; so is Warner music. Is there therefore a conflict between divisions of the company? Hmmmm... me thinks it's time to sell my ATW stock.... wait, I don't have any anyway.
I don't see the big deal (Score:5, Insightful)
If _I_ had an ISP, I wouldn't comment either (I'd just go for another swim in my money....)
These big companies rarely have a unified front, as
Who writes the law? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why are industry people there in the first place, to draw up the law? Are they balanced by ten representatives of the public?
Re:Was that my IP? (Score:3, Insightful)
User vs IP address (Score:5, Insightful)
They have a warrant to search...
IP WW.XX.YY.ZZ, but THAT is the IP of the NAT proxy/firewall. Oops, no music THERE! No warrant for any OTHER IP, such as the PC which is 192.168.0.100...
User "Joe Schmoe", who, by the way, HAS no MP3s. THOSE are all stored on his friend's PC -- who isn't named in the warrant.
OR, "Joe Schmoe" doesn't OWN the PC, he only is paying for the service. The PCs actually belong to someone else -- who is not named in the warrant.
OR, the PC with the goods belongs to a minor, who just happened to be the purchaser of all the CDs that he ripped and shared. A minor who CAN'T ENTER INTO A LEGALLY BINDING CONTRACT such as a music licensing agreement...
OR... take your pick. The costs for the RIAA to start tracking down and legally pursuing individuals would be astronomical.
Good luck proving successful downloads of songs for copyright infringement. Not to mention proving the downloads were of the SONGS claimed, and not some other file with the same name. Even if the file "baby_one_more_time.mp3" exists on the subject's machine, and the RIAA downloaded it and tracked back to to the subject that is only ONE violation. There is no way they can legally prove other infringements -- maybe the person was sharing a copy of bible reading masquerading as Brittany Who's-Dumping-Me-Today Spears? Maybe the RIAA was the only one that got the real thing?
The sheer expense will deal with this issue.
Prejury Punishment from RIAA? (Score:1, Insightful)
IANAL, but it would appear that if i put "Harry Potter Book Report.rtf" or Metallica fan.mp3 or MatrixParody.avi on Kazaa, and the RIAA bot sends a letter to a court demanding my home address, name, etc, that they could get in trouble for violating the "good faith" intentions, which apparently carry quite severe punishments. That would be a good way to screw over the RIAA and MPAA. They would have violated that provision and my right to privacy.
encrypted networks (Score:4, Insightful)
as much as they fight it, AOL/RIAA/whatever are only shooting themselves in the foot. embrace digital content as a viable content delivery mechanism or die....
Re:User vs IP address (Score:5, Insightful)
Man in Utah arrested for downloading music files, gets 20 years
not...
Man in Utah arrested for giving 50,000 copies of unreleased movies away to people on P2P and selling copies of CDs and making kiddie porn and...
That will be enough to scare most of the people away from P2P, thanks to half truths. They don't intend to actually go after everyone because that wouldn't be cost effective, as you've noticed.
Re:Not in a possition (Score:5, Insightful)
Economic Hit (Score:2, Insightful)
"And that's not surprising," says Oppenheim, "because everybody knew 512h allowed that. So you have to ask: Why would Verizon suddenly change their view? And, well, I have my answers. They've got an enormous base of infringers. Their view is there would be an economic hit if they started to allow this."
Isn't it widely held that the DMCA is intended to maintain revenue streams for the prosecutors in this case? So this case is essentially about whose revenue is more important: The RIAA components, or ISPs. Since I'm on Slashdot, you know which one I'd regard as more important.
End of the Internet (Score:2, Insightful)
Obtaining of media will never be the same! It's been brought up many times in the past; to have video on demand. Well get on with the implementations already. Perhaps do such with audio as well, although this will probably have to be free since it can be obtained freely anyway. Perhaps, in regards to audio, add some quirks and then charge for them. In my opinion, 75%+ of the population of the U.S. ages 12-30 download their music instead of buying. Although, there probably are some accurate statistics already (anyone know where) which would be interesting to see. We need to stop trying to censor our technological advances, but rather develop upon them while allowing them to flourish.
This gets modded up? (Score:5, Insightful)
Two Things: (Score:5, Insightful)
2. Yes, TW is in the music business. They don't have a good way, however, of preventing filesharing from happening. As others have poined out, the slow speeds within AOL itself are enough of a deterrant there -- where they ought to be concerned is in the TW broadband area.
So they're gonna cool their jets and see what happnes. Makes sense to me.
Do filenames prove us guilty (Score:2, Insightful)
Ok all they have are a list of filenames.
if a person have say 1000 zero-byte or whatever-byte sized files with filenames of whateversong.mp3.
Does having just a list of filenames provide enough evidence to use DMCA as a legal stance?
Does anyone know with some fair amount of detail what evidence the RIAA provided in court to provide some proof other than the list of filenames?
Maybe the kid had 666 files of porn and he renamed them so his parents wouldn't find out...ha ha ha
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tkt
Re:User vs IP address (Score:1, Insightful)
The warrant will usually specify something broad enough to make it useful, like "The premises at 123 Cherry Street" and then go on to detail the items covered under the search. This won't be "The computer which had IP address 1.2.3.4 on November 13th 2002," it will be more like "All computer systems, computer storage devices, disk drives and devices, compact disc drives and devices, Digital Video Disc drives and devices..."
Bottom line is that when they come busting into the dorm room, it doesn't matter who lives there, and it doesn't matter whose computers are inside. _All_ of the computers will be searched (or perhaps seized).
Delegated enforcement (Score:4, Insightful)
Ideally the *AA's would also want to make p2p expensive to condone/tolerate on their networks. Pestering ISPs with subpoenas is one avenue of doing this. Hopefully p2p customers bring in more revenue than it costs to service the RIAA.
Xix.
Er, how 'bout file-sharing with non-US buddies (Score:3, Insightful)
This is very silly of them. I see a couple of problems if they do start attempting mass-enforcement
Try and subpeona someone outside the US.
Try and explain to average, white upper-middle-class parents that their "little angel" is a "criminal" and NOT have a bad publicity stink about it when parents complain of "needless harrassment".
Try and keep the egg off your face as people start to use proxies outside the US to reroute the download to their computer.
Am I missing something here?? I feel like we're being scared by the big, ominous shadow on the wall and missing the little dork casting the shadow with his hand.
blue
Re:One question about this article (Score:2, Insightful)
Personally I think, as a former AOhelL subscriber, that AOL's public non-stance speaks as loudly as if they had taken a stance one way or another on the Verizon case, which is the reason AOL has a non-stance in this article.
Re:Not in a possition (Score:5, Insightful)
1> At the beginning of 2003, there are thousands of ISPs which offer internet service to about 100 million people in North America. Of all these people, about maybe ten to twenty million use P2P occasionally.
The RIAA monitors the P2P networks and assumes that they own everything that is flowing across any P2P network.
The RIAA selects one million or so intercepted P2P streams a month at random and orders the smaller ISPs to identify and turn over the identification of the 'criminals' to them. All legal threats to AOL are ignored by AOL as 'under review for possible questionable activity'
The smaller ISPs immediately cancel the service of their clients randomly selected by RIAA. Their names go to the RIAA and RIAA sends these names to the other small ISPs and threatens 'legal action' if anyone on this black list is allowed to sign up on a different ISP. AOL allows allows these little lost lambs the opportunity to sign on for $24 a month plus a small surcharge for being a 'criminal'.
2> The RIAA threatens AOL. AOL tells the RIAA to back off or Warners will leave the RIAA. Faced with the possible loss of 25% of its membership and its subsequent breakup, the RIAA allows AOL Warner to 'continue to study the situation for any possible wrongdoing'. It backs off. AOL gives a small percentage of 'criminal surcharge' (which is growing by millions of new customers per month) to the RIAA for 'operations research'.
3> Early 2004, all the small ISPs are gone. There are one or two medium sized ISPs that handle nothing but people who hate everything offered by the P2P networks and never have or would download anything from them, and AOL. AOL has tens of millions of new customers all paying $35 a month at least and about half of them also paying a 'criminal surcharge' (which will never be removed).
4> AOL Time Warner's stock price goes back to the mid-50s. Levin, Turner, and Case are brought back from exile at the pig farm to run the company in its new glory era.
Conflict of interest... (Score:3, Insightful)
Or another way to look at it (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:"Online Privacy" (Score:3, Insightful)
Most of the maintream news sources claimed that opium was a major source of funding for the Taliban. Usage may have been discouraged, but from what I hear, the Taliban activey encouraged opium poppy cultivation over food production. The poor farmers got about as much per acre for the poppies as they would have from foodstuffs, with the Taliban/warlords gtting the lion's share of the markup.
Of course, there is a good deal of US propaganda in there, but I'd like to hear your sources.
Re:This gets modded up? (Score:1, Insightful)
I installed squid and AdZap months ago, and have been living ad-free for a looooong time.
The ad-revenue model is hopelessly fscked up, and somebody needs to come up with a new way to make money off the web.
Re:What's the article about? (Score:4, Insightful)
If they have enough info for a subpoena, then can take your name to the feds to make a little "surprise visit" to your residence, taking your computer (and cd's, and x-box, and stereo, and cordless phone, and anything else remotly related to alleged file sharing) back to their ofice for "further investigation" .
In this case, even if they don't find a single thing to nail you to the wall with, they still made an example out of you and still won.
Re:What's the article about? (Score:3, Insightful)
- The health insurance might want to know all about your occasional stomach problems you discussed with your mom yesterday
- Your employer might want to know which bars you frequent in order to know if you hang around known places of vice, gambling and drug abuse.
- Your bank and the IRS might want to know if you plan to go shopping for a new car while owing someone money etc.
- Your wife may want to check on you, so she may call your friend if you are with him or with a woman.
- Spammers want to know the size of your penis. (Granted, few people talk about that in public.)
All information can be misused. And at one point, twenty years from now, Joe Doe, a reformed christian and good father to his children, will most certainly not want someone to post his teenage pr0n habits on the net. Even if it is old stuff, you would wonder if he is still into it...Why is this a surprise? (Score:3, Insightful)
Real Internet Providers have no vested interest in releasing their customers' private information. They're not in the marketing business, at least not directly. Nor are they in the business of enforcing the law. Companies like AOL think they ARE the law, and will have no problem rolling over on anyone who they think is eating into their media revenues. They have plenty of money for lawyers and politicians, mostly because stupid people are *STILL* willing to pay $22/mo for dialup access and/or pay by the hour (!?).
Besides the obvious reason that AOL is a media company and obviously wants file-sharing ended, they really have no reason or interest in protecting their customers' privacy and therefore aren't going to life a finger to protect that poor sap that the RIAA is going to make a huge public example of.
If I were that person, I would at the very least be arranging to obtain a passport and a one-way ticket to some country whose government hasn't been bought by the RIAA and other special interest groups with gobs of money and a Napoleonesque desire to take over the world.