Rapidshare Divulges Uploader Information 281
Gorgonzolanoid notes a post on TorrentFreak reporting that the German Rapidshare is divulging uploader information to rights holders. Record labels are apparently making creative use of "paragraph 101" of German copyright law, which gives them a streamlined process to ask a court to order disclosure of information such as an IP address. "In Germany, the file-hosting service Rapidshare has handed over the personal details of alleged copyright infringers to several major record labels. The information is used to pursue legal action against the Rapidshare users and at least one alleged uploader saw his house raided."
Non-German users? (Score:5, Interesting)
Was the act of uploading to Rapid Share from country X a violation of copyright laws in Germany, X, or both? Also, if no one downloaded the content you uploaded, have you still distributed?
Just curios... I could never make out the captchas so this doesn't affect me.
I always wondered... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I always wondered... (Score:5, Interesting)
simple
they comply with take down requests
while thepiratebay rubbed salt on the MAFIAA wounds and then pissed on top for good measure
Re:Some basic rules to follow. (Score:2, Interesting)
Everything is illegal. By your logic, you're fucked.
Re:Some basic rules to follow. (Score:5, Interesting)
You hear this argument on slashdot a lot:
Post A) I disagree with copyright and therefore I download; not out of personal profit but as an act of protest
Post B) You should not break the law: obey it and meanwhile try to change it through political process
A essentially calls for civil disobedience, which is a relatively ethical way to change laws and society when poltical process is exhausted or futile. A burglar stealing my TV, however, is not a political protester trying to change property law, he is just a criminal stealing my shit. The essential difference between a crime and an act of civil disobedience is not breaking the law, however, but the manner in which this is done.
The Dutch sociologist Kees Schuyt formulated a number of rules for something to classify as ethical disobedience (rather than eg anarchist revolt or petty crime). Gandhi formulated a similar set of rules for his non-violent protest.
Let's have a look at Schuyt's rules:
1) The act is illegal;
2) The act is conscionable; it appeals to your conscience and that of your fellow citizens;
3) There is a link between the criticized law and the chosen illegal act;
4) The act is thought out and not impulsive;
5) The act occurs in public;
6) You co-operate with arrest and prosecution;
7) You accept that you might be punished;
8) You used legal means of protest before;
9) You are non-violent and remain non-violent;
10) The rights of your fellow citizens are respected as well as possible;
Especially important is 5-7, and possibly 7 and 10. The idea behind these rules is that civil disobedience means breaking a law in order to show other people that the law is bad, and accepting possible consequences. You sacrifice yourself for the higher cause.
Downloading songs from behind tor or other means of hiding yourself disqualifies your action from civil disobedience. If you want to make a political statement, buy a CD which you strongly believe should be out of copyright, upload it to your personal homepage, and write an open letter to the RIAA stating what you did and why. Get all the people who agree with you to do the same. If RIAA sues you, don't settle and escalate to the highest court you can afford. If enough people do this, your fellow citizens will react, and so will politicians.
If you are not prepared to do that: by all means download everyhing you want (information wants to be free, right?!), but please don't act all ethical. If you stand behind your actions, do them in public. If you just want to get free music, raid the pirate bay while they're there but don't brag about it.
Re:Some basic rules to follow. (Score:3, Interesting)
Wow.. House raided (Score:4, Interesting)
Gotta appreciate the lazy cowardly policemen that chose to raid a music pirate instead of dealing with serious violent/criminal offenders.
I love (no I don't) how the police will spend hours, if not days, of their man-hours dealing with petty nothings while the most blatant criminal elements are perpetually neglected.... I suppose this comes from giving the police the option which crimes deal with. In that case of course they will avoid dangerous battles and cowardly resort to minor traffic infractions and (as made evident) music pirates.
NWA said it best.
My proposal? Double the pay and bennies for the police, half the number on the force, and then expect a LOT more out of them and focus them on worthwhile crime. Then implement a very small, separate force to deal with traffic infringement and all the other petty crap.
When I served in the military, if there was more work to be done, you don't go home. That is part of service. I fail to understand how the police go home after a shift of handing out speeding tickets when there is quite obviously a *lot* more to be done --- that is not what they have sworn to do when joining the force, nor is it what we should permit them to maintain.
I would rather have very little or no police than to have a force that operates under convenience and laziness.
Re:This is what you get... (Score:5, Interesting)
If I didn't want people to use tOR for whatever they thought should be anonymous; I'd currently be adjusting my exit policy to not allow everything (but SMTP).
In my mind, that is the point of a free, neutral network. YMMV.
Re:Some basic rules to follow. (Score:2, Interesting)
Just remember that we are talking about Germany where a judge makes the decisions and never a jury.
Re:This is what you get... (Score:5, Interesting)
IMO hiding in a crowd of thousands is much better than trusting anybody, sure they can sue one person but they can't sue all of us. i take my chances of being the one in 1.3 billion sued, even thier own site [riaa.com] puts the chance of getting caught at >0.4%, that number is only going to get smaller as more people use torrents.
unfortunately (Score:2, Interesting)
- the fact that you're paying for a license to listen to the music, not the music itself is a bit of a fiddle. (correct me if i'm wrong). if i pay for music, i want to be able to do with that particular music, what i wish. if i want to play it from the rooftops for all to hear, i should be able to.
- the fact that, out of the money you pay for music, only a small percentage of that money actually goes to the artists. the rest goes to the record labels, and covers the costs of advertising, paying the production team and fueling corporate profits. the band make most of their money from live concerts, which, in my eyes, far exceeds the experience of listening to an album on my headphones. in accordance with this level of experience, live concerts cost a substantial amount more than a cd, but i really dont care. if i managed to get all my albums free of charge, i'd be able to pick the best ones to go and see live, and have more money with which to fund such a venture.
- the fact that, when a law suit is filed for copyright infringement, the amount demanded is so far in excess of the amount of music that has actually been downloaded. this can only lead me to think that its the record labels suing fans, not the bands, and that the record labels are looking to recoup their losses to copyright infringement on the few scapegoats hap-hazardly chosen from the masses. if it was a case of "okay, you've been caught, hand over the money"... "okay, here you go"... *hands over money for the 3 cd's he downloaded for a friend*... then i would be quite willing to co-operate. but that'd be honest, and more expensive, quite un-corporate. instead they sue for hundreds of thousands of *currency* to make up as much money as they can manage.
i suppose all the above is indicative of a flawed system. as a band, the last thing you want to be doing is hassling your fanbase for money that you're not getting anyway... i just question the higher level affiliations between the record companys, production companys, parent conglomorates and the policing services. i'd imagine the governments of the world are quite sympathetic to the industry that makes an extremely substantial amount of money, and has the ultmate influence on popular culture in society. you have large record companys paying for "britney spears 2.0" to keep us away from thinking about the real issues... like in the USA, and their laws about income tax, or lack of them... or in england, and their complete lack of understanding of how money is created (nobody knows the answer to a simple question - "where does money come from?").
i've probably missed stuff, but jus add to it when you feel free.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Some basic rules to follow. (Score:4, Interesting)
Standing in front of a tank as was done in Tiananmen Square doesn't count as civil disobedience because the guy had to be dragged away kicking and screaming? (point 6). That's obviously not true. You can have civil disobedience and still fight when caught. Point 6 can be ruled straight out.
As for point 5. Simply the support or the act of civil disobedience should be public, not the individuals themselves. A million people wearing masks at a rally for an illegal political party is still in public and is still civil disobedience. Likewise a million people downloading a torrent is still public, the seeders/leachers recorded is still increased despite the individuals remaining anonymous. So point 5 doesn't apply to using torrents with Tor. The act of civil disobedience is still made public, the individuals are all that is anonymous.
As for points 7 and 10. Yes, i think everyone accepts they may be punished and you really should respect your fellow citizens rights as well as possible. I can't argue with that but is downloading something owned by a billionaire really breaking point 10?
Re:Some basic rules to follow. (Score:3, Interesting)
Not sure why my post showed up as AC, but here it is again for those of you filtering ACs:
Maybe I just don't read Slashdot enough, but I really don't think many people make your argument A, at least as you phrase it. For example the post you're replying to doesn't say what you're implying it says. They said "The only alternative is to defy the laws. If enough people do so, then either the laws will be repealed, or there will be too many people breaking the law it'll be untenable to prosecute everyone". Nowhere in their post do they claim that the reason that they download is in order to change the law, only that it's one possible effect of their downloading (which is possible, though highly unlikely). They also do not make claims of a lack of self-interest.
Just seems a little odd to me that you're criticizing someone for a position that he doesn't claim to hold. If he had actually made claim A, I would agree. As it is, his statement is reasonable, even if his dream of changing the copyright law through downloading is just a teeny, tiny bit optimistic.
It puts the "war" in War on Drugs (Score:4, Interesting)
Resistance during war-time occupation is a different ball game from civil disobedience
How is it different? In the United States, the drug czar has declared a war on some drugs [wikipedia.org], and now the copyright czar is about to declare a war on sharing.
Gandi and Jews and some Other Things (Score:5, Interesting)
This is interesting in a political and an historical context. Gandhi worked with non violent means as a choice, but not as the only choice except by circumstance. Although he was a pacifist, he recognized that the "gun control" laws that prohibited the Indian people from ownership (mostly) were designed to quell any insurgency against the British colonial powers. The Indian people had been disarmed by the British, on purpose and "by law", (privately and even for the most part they had no armed governmental workers either) and as such they had no means to use force against their "masters". Non violent resistance then became their only option, and they suffered a lot for it. And in Germany, one of the very first acts the fascists managed was the almost total disarming of the civilian populations, making it quite easy for them to implement their "solutions". There's a pattern...
People seem to forget, civilization doesn't necessarily equal freedom or peace. Civilizations can be quite organized and have a great amount of civil governmental infrastructure, but still be violent with state sponsored terrorism and oppression of all the people or selected subgroups of the people there. Civil does not equal free. A full oppressive police state can be quite "civilized". Or like they are wont to say, "pacified".
I'll also add this as a personal anecdotal. As a civil rights worker back in the day (belts..onions..), there was some success, but it was one step back for every two forward and it was scary and it sucked mostly. It wasn't until the scene changed as more and more vets came back from viet nam who were either black and returned to still oppressive society or poor whites, who had gotten drafted while their richer peers got off with basket weaving majors in college with the 2s deferments, and those dudes weren't all necessarily into being non violent, quite the opposite actually, they had just returned from where being very violent was the expected norm. Whoops....
These folks and a growing sense of direct action combined with some other factors led to the major riots in the mid to late 60s. The powers that be (here comes my opinion) finally got scared enough to actually DO something about the situation rather than just talk about it. They didn't want to, they were *forced* to make some concessions.
The 64 civil rights act didn't do much of anything until the fatcats realized they could wake up one day with one or several major cities no longer under their control, important big cities. They would have been seized and occupied by outright rebels with a cause and several legitimate and rather large beefs, or burnt to the ground, either way, lost to their control. They capitulated, although they won't admit it, that is exactly what happened and it went beyond non violent protest or threat and promise of same to get there.
And everyone knew it.
Then stuff changed, for real this time. They *really* starting enforcing the civil rights laws, in a lot more places. They changed the draft to a lottery system so no more fatcats kids getting out of it. That backfired on them though, because that in turn lead to the war finally ending (started to become obvious it would end, put it that way), because the protests then quintupled/more in size from all these new kids suddenly realizing it wasn't going to be just the blacks from the ghettoes and rural farmers kids going, but THEM too, so they joined in the protests. It went from thousands to hundreds of thousands at protests, and rather quickly. And the situation was clearly not going in wallstreet's/government puppets favor, they had to keep backing down or they were eventually going to face the "heads on pikes" stage of social readjustment.
Now they did have a goonish reactionary success that they weaseled through, the passage of the 68 gun control act. That was a huge disappointment for true second amendment rights, and was clearly a racist and reactionary bill (you had to really be there to ca
Re:Some basic rules to follow. (Score:1, Interesting)
I actually earn enough now to buy my music and movies unlike I did 7 years ago when I was still a teenager and had no income. I do buy computer games and so on.
But despite the fact I do earn enough to buy music and movies, I still don't. It's not simply because I want free stuff because I have the money and it's just as easy to go to Play.com as it is The Pirate Bay to get my music.
I don't download because I want to make a stand against copyright either, I have no problem with copyright in general when it's not abused.
But that's where my reason comes in, copyright is abused by the movie and music industry, it's even abused by the artists as seen by the EU's new 70 year copyright term laws. You see, I don't download music and movies because I want them free, I don't download them because I'm making a stance, no, I download them out of sheer malice towards the music and movie industry.
To put it another way, my view is this, why should I have any interest in supporting laws that didn't take my interests into account such as the copyright extension? I choose not to recognise it thanks. Why should I train for years to get a special skill and then work 40hrs a week for 50 years to earn money to help pay for someone like Cliff Richard's millionaire lifestyle when he only ever worked for a few weeks in just a few years using a skill he was born with and had to make little effort to perfect?
If they want my money, they can work for it, and do concerts. If they want me to pay for a freely made copy of something they did years ago, they can go jump.
So it's not always about free shit - sometimes, just sometimes, there's actually a feeling of malice towards these lazy fuckers such that they deserve to have copies of their work pirated. There's plenty of people willing to pay for them to actually work and do live performances if they want to go and earn money like the rest of us - the fact concert tickets always sell out within minutes is proof enough of that. But for me, if they aint gonna work, then sorry, they aint gonna get paid either.
Just a simple question (Score:1, Interesting)
Here's a thought. Wouldn't it just be easier to actually pay for the copyrighted material? It seems like the /. crowd is spending a lot of time and energy trying to do something that is illegal. If you want the song -- buy it. If you want that book PDF -- buy it. What's wrong with actually paying for something?