German Censorware Targets Music 334
If you only read one link, read Fitug's fact sheet (in English). It summarizes the situation pretty well. See Declan McCullagh's Politech for some more links.
Basically, the German recording industry is selling the idea that they should have carte blanche to block any incoming packets they see fit, at the router. As Lawrence Lessig and others have warned, the large ISPs are the weak link, subject to easy regulation. And as Fitug's paper says, only the large service providers need be forced to use this system: small providers get their feeds from the large ones, auto-censored for their pleasure.
Think for a moment about how this system will work in practice. Pirate websites, by definition, operate under the radar: they are hard to find. They are often up only briefly, or require a password to access. They aren't linked to search engines. Sharing copyrighted material is illegal is every major Western country, so these sites aren't going to list themselves on Yahoo.
But it's already been shown that censorware can't even block what's on Yahoo. That's not an exaggeration. I work with the Censorware Project, and we did a report on Bess in 1999. The software didn't just fail to block a lot of hardcore sex. It failed to block hardcoresex.com - and hundreds of other porn sites listed on Yahoo.
This new "Rights Protection System" is going to use the same technologies as existing censorware and have about the same results:
"Im Prinzip funktioniert das 'Right Protection System' also ähnlich wie das Programm Cyberpatrol..."
"So in principle, the 'Rights Protection System' will work like the program Cyber Patrol..."
Someone has to maintain this "Rights Protection System," just like someone has to maintain Cyber Patrol. What chance does it have to find even a fraction of the napster servers, hotline servers, IRC channels, and, yes, even websites where pirate MP3s are being traded?
And when a pirate site is found, the rock'n'roll will be blocked the same way existing censorware blocks sex or drugs. Let's say a directory full of copyrighted MP3s is at
http://BigUniversity.edu/users/joepirate/secret/
The RPS staffers have no way of knowing whether "joepirate" is going to have friends who share MP3s, is going to change user IDs, or is going to put his songs into some other directory. The block will be made not on the /secret/ directory. If the university is lucky, there will be a block on the /users/ directory.
But since the "filtering" takes place at the router, it is much more likely that the entire webserver will be blocked. Big University probably won't be getting many exchange students from Germany next year.
And on what basis is the country going to ask its service providers to put this extra software on their routers? According to a spokesperson for the German branch of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI):
"The packet forwarding process in the router is not a passive forwarding of the incoming signals. The packet is processed and manipulated by the router before it is transmitted onwards. So the [service providers] that purchase and install these routers have a heavy participatory role in the operation of the Internet."
In other words, since the hardware is already routing ("manipulating") packets from one network to another, it's really no different to add a blacklist that forbids certain URLs or IP numbers.
The executives speaking in favor of this proposal make it sound like it's going to benefit the little musician, the one struggling to make it. The IFPI points out magnanimously that it invests some of its profits in unknown artists (duh):
"Jede dritte Mark, die mit den Hits der Megastars erwirtschaftet wird, fließt heute in die Förderung junger Künstler."
"Today, every third Mark made by the megastars' hits goes toward the promotion of young artists."
Isn't that nice. But what about the "young artists" who haven't been signed with a label yet?
If I'm trying to make a name for myself by giving away my own music, and the RPS staffers spot a directory full of my MP3s, are they really going to compare each of my files' titles against their libraries? Are they going to listen to each MP3 they find? More likely, they will assume that files named "my_heart_will_go_on.mp3" and "song-001.mp3" are songs copyrighted by someone else, and not my own original work.
Simple solution: block my whole directory. Or my whole server. If there's a little collateral damage - well, less competition for their own artists.
And they won't bother to tell me about it, of course; so my music is now blocked from eighty million potential listeners - customers - and I will never know.
This doesn't help "young artists" - unless you think enslaving them to the existing labels is helping them. The IFPI chooses to ignore that giving away MP3s can help a struggling artist, not hurt.
Meanwhile, executives for the German Authors' Rights Society (GEMA) redefine arrogance. My German is rusty and Babelfish is almost no help, so bear with me. First, they count their money:
"Erfolgreiche Jahresbilanz. Zunächst aber habe ich die Ehre, Ihnen den Geschäftsbericht 1998 vorzulegen. Er dokumentiert mit seinem Gesamtertrag von DM 1,465 Mrd. und einer Verteilsumme von DM 1,263 Mrd. die wirtschaftliche Ertragskraft unserer musikalischen Verwertungsgesellschaft..."
"Successful Annual Balance. But first I have the honor to submit the business report for 1998. It documents total proceeds of 1.465 billion Marks and a distribution total of 1.263 billion Marks for our commercial music corporation..."
(Incidentally, Babelfish translates "unserer musikalischen Verwertungsgesellschaft" as "our musical exploitation corporation" - which may be accurate but probably isn't what was intended.)
Then, two sentences later:
"...auch die den kreativen Schöpfer bedrohenden Kräfte, die sich hinter Schlagworten wie 'arbeitsplatzschaffende Kommunikationsgesellschaft' oder 'Digitalisierung der Welt' verstecken, nicht aus den Augen verloren werden dürfen. Hier drohen uns - allerdings zu bewältigende - Gefahren. Und in der Tat, sie werden auch nicht eine Sekunde aus den Augen verloren, diese Gefahren. So wird denn die GEMA nicht müde, die globalisierungssüchtigen Verfechter absoluter Kommunikationsfreiheit und damit Verächter von Kultur und geistigem Eigentum immer wieder in die Schranken zu verweisen."
"...and we should not lose track of those powers who threaten creative people*, who hide themselves behind slogans like 'job-creating communications company' or 'digitalization of the world.' We are threatened by these dangers - which nevertheless can be overcome. Indeed, these dangers will not for one second be lost from our eyes. GEMA will never, ever tire of putting these globalization-addicted advocates of absolute freedom of communication - the depisers of culture and intellectual property - in their place."
Boy. How serious are these guys?
But of course they're serious. After all, negative billions are at stake.
Finally, consider what will happen once the German music industry, or any other, manages to install content-based blocking at the routers of the entire country.
Pirated music isn't the only illegal content in Germany. And once the software's in place, no politician will be able to resist adding one more type of content to block.
What will be the next category they enable on their nationwide blacklist? You might think sex. I'm betting it's Holocaust-denial. The denial of the Holocaust is something I've been working against for eight years (wearing one of my other "activist hats"). And for eight years I've been repeating that the most effective way to repudiate this dishonest political ideology is to expose it to the light of day.
Let people read the junk. And let them read refutations of the junk. That's the best way for people to recognize that deniers are liars: give them access to what everyone says, and let them make up their own minds.
But the German government disagrees. Unfortunately, they don't realize that the best way to convince a confused citizen that Holocaust-deniers are saying something valuable is to have the government ban it. "After all," goes the logic, "they wouldn't ban it if it weren't dangerous - and what could be more dangerous than the truth?"
Then, finally, after they make free-speech martyrs out of neo-Nazis, will come the effort to block sexual content. All of these blocking efforts - music, Holocaust-denial, sex - will work approximately as well as censorware has worked anywhere else. And will do approximately as much collateral damage.
This approach to censoring an entire country - block content at the incoming routers - has not yet been tried on a large scale in any Western country. Many Asian countries (notably excepting Japan) and most if not all fundamentalist Islam countries have adopted nationwide blocking. We'll see if this is the first step toward bringing the technology to the West.
If anyone has information about who will be creating and maintaining the blacklists used by the "Rights Protection System," please post a comment here or email me.
Re:Blocking URLs at the router is impossible (Score:1)
Moore's law is the ONLY thing keeping the routers on the internet from bursting at the seams. Unless the internet stops growing for a couple of years, or Moore's law doubles in speed, development isn't going to be fast enough to implement FASTER connectivity that everyone at home is getting (cable modems, etc...) AND filtering (on the router).
No, I don't see it happening unless some company wants to double their R&D. That won't happen unless someone else pays for it -- I guess it is possible after all
As far as making it "technically difficult" to get the stuff, well, I think that you just opened up another market right there -- unfiltered surfing! It'll be the latest rage! Like pirate satellite cards and pirate cable decoders were in the early 80s!
I'll stand to make some BIG dough if this happens. It'll be worth my time to find a way around the restrictions if I can get some cash for it!
Geez... (Score:1)
Not even 12 hours has gone by, and I've already got a use for the mail tunneling protocol [detached.net] posted earlier.
some thoughts (Score:1)
Re:Scarcity is irrelevant (Score:1)
Ah, but this is where the problem with your reasoning becomes apparent.
Theoretically, there is no reason to presume that their will be an inequitable transfer of value.
In real life however, generally one of the participants in the transaction will have access to more information than the other and as a result of this, inequalities in the value of the goods and/or services involved are commonplace.
Trying ( perhaps vainly ) to try and draw this thread back on-topic, in the case of the music industry, most performers ( the people who produce the music ) generally make the majority of their money from concerts rather than record sales.
In short, the record/CD sales main benifit for the primary producer ( the people who actually make the music ) is by providing them with advanced publicity for their next concert tour.
In this regard then, the music companies have a very good reason to scream about mp3's. They threaten to undermine the whole situation that enables them to make enourmous amounts of money from performers without providing them with a fair exchange of value.
And yes, I'll admit that this post is a troll. Seems only fair in view of the way that you have trolled this entire topic.
Re:You *have* no "rights" to their property. (Score:1)
Shadowcaster - wishing he would get more karma for this post. :(
Also (Score:1)
Re:Your Translation (Score:1)
He's not being "knee-jerk"; you are being obtuse.
It is already illegal to "deny" the "holocaust" (which is never really defined) in most European countries; in France they even went so far as to make it illegal to deny the "facts" established by the Nuremburg trials (so I guess the Germans really did murder all those Polish officers at Katyn, and not the Soviets!).
This is a really serious threat to freedom of speach and conscience; making interpretations of historial events into a crime. Not to mention that there are wide differences between different types of "holocaust denial". These legal ursurpations lump them all together and use the legal system for something it should never be used for - enforcing orthodoxy of opinion concerning historical events.
He's damn right that if this goes through it will be used against unpopular political opinion. The German government has already blocked certain domains that host sites which contain political speach that is illegal under German law.
Re:You *have* no "rights" to their property. (Score:1)
Too bad. I guess you don't agree with me cracking a bought (not stolen) Autocad so I can use it on a computer without a parallel port?
I guess you also have a problem with me cracking software that I have bought, but have lost the registration key for?
I suppose you might say that I shouldn't be allowed to change the locks on my doors in a leased apartment? (In the same vein as removing the protection on LICENSED software.).
I guess you would also say that it should be ILLEGAL for me to jimmy my leased car open with a coat hanger if I forgot the keys. I should just throw away the car and buy a new one. (In the same vein as generating a new key for LICENSED software).
And, absolutedly, changing the lock mechanism on the car doors to allow "remote keyless entry" would certainly be a crime?
>All you have to do is apply software to other situations, and you'll find that cracking isn't a moral crime at all. Unless you feel This used to be a Libertarian forum, but all I see nowadays is criminal after criminal demanding that the taxpayer aid him in his crimes. changing locks or forcing your car open is illegal.
Yes, in some countries cracking software is illegal. If you live in the US, sure. Not everywhere. And furthermore - do you feel it is illegal to change locks or force them open when you have leased them? Well that is EXACTLY what a software license is - A LEASE from the company to access their software. So why the hell SHOULDN'T I treat it like any other lease? Because some proven ineffective in the court of law bullsh*t shrinkwrap license says no?
If you paid the month's rent, and found a notice tacked on the door after that saying "By opening this door you agree not to change the locks" wouldn't you sue the LANDLORD for denying you entry?
If you paid the month's lease on your car already, and later you find covering the ignition was a sign saying "By inserting your keys, you agree not to open your car with a slim jim or add a remote keyless entry system to this car", wouldn't you make a fuss?
>It's pathetic.
No, it is pathetic that you beleive you feel morally obliged to do everything written on a piece of non-legally-binding paper.
Well, I will print out a peice of paper saying you need to send me $500. I will mail it to you. Will I get $500? Are you THAT whipped?
Re:Blocking URLs at the router is impossible (Score:1)
Re:Blocking URLs at the router is impossible (Score:1)
Actually, it's just "HTTP/1.1 GET
HTTP/1.1 GET /
Host: slashdot.org
And naturally, two returns afterward.
Re:You *have* no "rights" to their property. (Score:1)
You seem to misunderstand the meaning of morals/morality. Morals are about what is right and wrong. These are completely static throughout time. It is people's values that change. Back in the early part of last century, people felt slavery was fine. That doesn't mean possessing another human is right, just that they adjusted their values so they didn't feel bad about it. The morality of it has always been that it is wrong.
I know this goes against the modern day notion that, "Whatever I want is right." Murder and maiming is always going to be wrong, but Ted Kaczynski/Timothy McVey just rationalized their value system to be that it is OK for a certain cause. The beauty of life is rising above your wants and doing what is right/good/moral. It keeps society running.
As for the MP3 issue, well we all say the author of some software is free to copyright it with whatever license he wishes. So, likewise, creators of music are free to license it how they like. Unfortunately many musicians are tied to these big agencies and only get a penny per CD, but that just goes with what they chose. Part of that "license" is that you must own the CD to make an MP3 of it. If you don't, then you are in the wrong, just as anyone would be if they closed up source to some Linux kernel modification. Now, you must simply choose what path you want to take in life, the easy/"I want" way, or the moral way.
it's a joke (Score:1)
--
BeDevId 15453
Download BeOS R5 Lite [be.com] free!
Re:You *have* no "rights" to their property. (Score:1)
Mankind has always dreamed of destroying the sun.
don`t make the horses shy (Score:1)
Re:You *have* no "rights" to their property. (Score:1)
Truely, I do not see how you managed to get a score of 3, since I believe you are just trolling. Did you read the article? Or are you just spewing crap to spew? Get a life, you hide behind AC, so you do not have to take responsibility for your words.
It's pathetic.
Troy Roberts
Re:This is a great idea (Score:1)
>>especially ripped off mp3s.
>That's right, when will people learn? You have >no right to view mp3s!!!
Maybe Shadowcaster just hates plugins.
Re:Yeah... (Score:1)
Re:Your Translation (Score:1)
>BTW, in the US, Nazi propaganda is legal (AFAIK),
>and I've yet to ear an American to ridicule them.
This is not true. For every neo-Nazi group in North America, there's about a dozen different groups educating people about the Holocaust. Believe me, except in the deep, deep south of the US (and even there it's very rare) you will not find anyone who will defend the Nazis. Hell, not even the most right-wing of the christian churches will say anything encouraging about the Nazis.
I believe it's because of our collective guilt over our own Holocaust, the genocide of the Native Americans/Indians (whatever term you prefer) over the past centuries. It may not be as blatant as the Jewish Holocaust, but these mass murders also occured. I think everytime that the public here demands that the US and Canada get involved in the ethnic conflicts going on elsewhere in the world, it's because of that guilt.
There are a few cases where some neo-Nazi made some public comments, but the public here is extremely hostile to those publicity-seekers
that spread neo-Nazi propaganda.
Here's one case that's happened very close to where I live, actually: A public school teacher named Malcolm Ross in the city of Moncton in New Brunswick, Canada, wrote a book that downplayed the death toll of the Holocaust. Apparently, he did this in private, and never discussed his views in class at all. (I believe he was a math teacher, but that's just rumor. The media never said what he taught.) When someone found out about this book, he was fired on the spot. He appealed the firing to the Labour Relations Board (a board that decides on whether disputed firings are reasonable and maintains standards on workplace safety, among other things) and won, but was not given a teaching job after the DOE's phones rang off the hook for several days straight. This wasn't censorship, this was public pressure.
Nazi propaganda may be legal, but it's harshly condemned by everyone. It doesn't need to be made illegal, because everyone knows it's a lie, and parents make damn sure to tell thir kids about the Holocaust.
Err, sorry for the long post...
Re:It is about suppressing competition, not copyin (Score:1)
As stated, FreeUser was expressing h/er opinions about the pragmatics of rebuilding post-holocaust Germany. In fact s/he acknowledged the USA's own overbearing censorship, so why you chose to reply to this particular comment is beyond me. Your reply sounds as if you read only the first paragraph.
You are quite right that it is nobody else's business but your own, but these people are offering their opinion. Do you seek to censor that?
Hamish
Question on song rights. (Score:1)
Yeah... (Score:1)
I just wish most Americans knew what we have done in the past, from slavery, to the Native Americans, to Vietnam, to Latin America and even in our own cities. We are *still* in sorry shape.
Jeff
Re:Yeah... (Score:1)
Jeff
Re:You *have* no "rights" to their property. (Score:1)
By the book, and well done.
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blue
Re:You *have* no "rights" to their property. (Score:1)
fact that the whole point of the GPL is that it requires making the source available.
People, even moderately enlightened people, are generally pretty damned dumb when it comes to having buttons pushed. The chat-room moral higher ground stance isn't often used on
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blue
Re:Positive side-effect (Score:1)
Analyze the content, not the type (Score:1)
OK, they want to block illegal mp3s. Whether or not you agree with this is a different issue.
How about they analyze the packets, and, in the case of an mp3, check the ID3 tag to ensure whether or not it is illegally distributed, *then* decide if it should be blocked or not?
The technology is there to acheive this properly, but it won't happen. It will come down to all or nothing, and Cowboy Neal's groovy tunes will be blocked, just because they are mp3s.
Sure, it's a shame, those are unexpected groovy treats, but if you're German, you won't get to hear them. Not without an offshore shell account and encryption, but how long until PGP packets are banned? Then they ban usenet, then email, then web. Welcome to the new net. An engineer's playground, brought into check by those who know better than you. You might have helped built it, but the goverment knows better. [geocities.com]
'Think for yourself, and question authority.'
Timothy Leary vs. the Grid
Probably on Napster as an mp3, if you can't find it, get napigator and search for it. It's in there, and I doubt anyone involved would object to it's distribution.
Support freenet [sourceforge.net] & blacknet [attrition.org], it's the only realistic way to can advance without interference.
Germany's political censorship (offtopic) (Score:1)
Good reason? Feh. I think we should all encourage Nazis get their message out -- so that everyone can see what dumbfucks they are. Suppressing them makes them underdogs, and makes them look "cool" to people who just wanna rebel against something. It also gives them a legitimate reason to hate their government. (IMHO, a government that censors its people, forfeits the right to govern those people, and they are morally free to act against that government in any way, without restrictions.)
Germany's censorship policies are doing the Nazis a big favor. That's a funny way to act if they want to appear anti-Nazi. It makes me wonder if they feel that the Nazi viewpoint actually merits supression instead of merely ridicule. That's creepy!
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Where can I sign up for this? (Score:1)
Only one figure of speech is needed: (Score:1)
Encrypted FTP session
Free Loving Freaks (Score:1)
"GEMA will never, ever tire of putting these globalization-addicted advocates of absolute freedom of communication - the depisers of culture and intellectual property - in their place."
I just wish we could get some RIAA and MPAA people to repeat this. How good would their PR be if people really understand that Free Speech is the mortal enemy of "culture and intellectual property".
Maybe I'm getting closer to a
chris
Re:Your Translation (Score:1)
It is claimed by some involved in Anti-Fascist movements that there is a correlation between public meetings led by such luminaries as the Holocaust denier David Irving and attacks on perceived enemies afterwards.
I should point out that I haven't seen actual statistical proof for this. ( I have witnessed an instance first-hand, but anecdote doesn't count for much unless it occurs en masse.)
Re:You *have* no "rights" to their property. (Score:1)
Or am I totally on crack here?
Re:Oh, really? Flamebait? I mean it. (Score:1)
Re:Putting on the flame retardant clothing (Score:1)
>She did the work of recording the music. You did nothing.
So, her right to not have her music illegally distributed is more important than my right to distribute *my* work any way I see fit?
-Nick
Re:Putting on the flame retardant clothing (Score:1)
No, that is the wrong question. The right question is are Mariah Carey's rights more important than yours or mine?
-Nick
Re:Not Particularly Surprising... (Score:1)
HTTP: (Score:1)
Not to nitpick, but that should be
GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: slashdot.org
(note the two newlines at the end of the request).. And that would be in a packet addressed to slashdot.org:80. but, if you don't put the Host: whatever header, http 1.1 implementations (at least apache) will give you an error message. I've spent most of this week coding an HTTP server in java so I'm still 'fresh'
Re:Collateral Damage (Score:1)
No, you should get modded down for posting twice
Re:Arrogant Americans at it again (Score:1)
Now, now. Don't think that just because our "leaders" here in America are clueless, insane, greedy, bloody idiots that the rest of us are, too. Too often that's the case; guilt by association just doesn't cut it when you're talking about 260,000,000 people being led... err, manipulated... by a few hundred, who are themselves being led by a few tens, who are being led by their own greed and misguided "self-preservation" instincts. Those with the power make the rules. Money is power. And power corrupts. Draw your own conclusions.... :)
This is an attitude that is far too prevalent in the world. We barely even get to choose who leads our political world, and have no choice over who leads the financial world, yet many citizens of other countries always pigeonhole every American alive into this "Asshole" category that simply doesn't apply to the vast majority of us -- either because we just aren't assholes, or because we don't have enough power to be assholes. Believe me, if I, or any of the other tens of millions of us who aren't assholes, were in charge, had some power, things would be vastly different. I wonder how I can get myself initiated into the Bilderbergs... now that's power.
So all you terrorists who attack innocent US citizens who just happen to be in, say, Libya are doing nothing that will harm those who are your real targets; all you're doing is taking innocent lives and greatly increasing your chances of being a cockroach in your next few lives. All you people who speak out against "Americans" instead of "greedy capitalists" don't see the full picture; it is not Americans who are grinding you under their bootheels. It is the Nelson Rockefellers, the Bill Klintons, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization who are your real enemies. Fight them... not us.
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
Re:Not to be picky, but... (Score:1)
GET / HTTP/1.0\n\n
indeed... The HTTP 1.1 protocol wants a Host: header, as it is said in another post.
But you also can do:
nc proxy.whatever.com 8080
GET http://www.slashdot.org/ HTTP/1.0
Re: Video Cameras in London (Score:1)
Video taping the city is a _good_ idea IMHO, maybe we can have a lower crime rate dispite the amazing stupidity of European law dissalowing video evidence to be substantial enough to convict.
Re:Scarcity is irrelevant (Score:1)
Exactly, that's why DL'ing MP3 isn't pirating. It's free advertising.
The bottom line is that A must not receive value from B without providing value to B in return, no more and no less.
So given a non-scarce product, I can exchange very little value, something like my attention or my bandwidth or my harddrive, for something of very little value, since it's not scarce, and we're square. Unless you think my attention has no value, in which case the whole advertising industry is a scam. So I am giving something of value (albeit an amorphous value), that's on par with the value of what I'm "taking".
--
ba-bu-ba-ba-baaa, da-da-dum. Re-boot the ser-ver.
ba-bu-ba-ba-baaa, da-da-dum. Re-boot the ser-ver.
Re:What it's all about... (Score:1)
Indeed. Wait a minute, I've got it -- lets take a page from Microsoft's book and implement automatic symlinking of identical comments!
Re:You *have* no "rights" to their property. (Score:1)
I'm trying to figure out what you mean by "'cracking' copy-protected software to release it under the GPL"--do you mean creating open source clones of closed source products? If copyright isn't violated, do you still think this is wrong? Does creating a piece of software mean you "own" the idea of software to perform that function? Except in the case of software patents, the current law (which is pretty highly in favor of intellectual "property" owners) isn't even with you on that one.
Re:You *have* no "rights" to their property. (Score:1)
Whether copying an MP3 without authorization is legal, illegal, moral, or immoral, it is fundamentally different from physically stealing a CD from a record store. How? Because if I steal a physical object from you, you don't have it anymore. If I copy something from you, it is still in your posession.
As a society we have decided (or in some cases, those with lots of political power have decided for us) that it is economically adventageous to create a monopoly on some forms of information as a means to stimulate its creation. If I copy for free something that you would like me to pay for, then you don't receive the revinue you would have received under your monopoly on your creation. If I do this, I may have violated the law, and I may have comitted an immoral act, but you are no worse off than if I had decided I didn't want it in the first place.
Naturally, if everybody were to do this, then the "incentive" created by the monopoly would be lessened, but it's becoming easier and easier for people to do this. The response to that is to either strengthen the power of the monopoly holders, ergo further eroding the rights of others, or to give up and start over with a new system.
Re:Germany already restrictive (Score:2)
Re:It is about suppressing competition, not copyin (Score:2)
There are no "good" reasons for this. If anyone commits real crimes - murder, robbery, arson, whatever - then bust 'em. Otherwise, you are creating a class of political crime.
If you think that these political persecutions are doing any real good, remember what Nietzsche said: "that which does not kill me makes me stronger".
Also, these groups are always among the first to figure out the new technology (computers, BBS's, internet, mp3's, etc) because they are forced to by government restrictions. They will always figure out how to regroup and reorganize around these obstacles.
Re:It's not about the Holocaust (Score:2)
Fundie Islamic gulags
I hate religious fundamentalists at least twice more than the rest of you, but I doubt that islamic fundies can be described by a Russian abbreviation for "State Agency of [Penitentiary] Camps" (GULAG), converted to plural.
Don't we already have more than enough insulting distortions of Russian history planted in American brain, to avoid at least this cheapening reference to one of the scariest thing in recent Russian history?
Promotion (Score:2)
People are, I hope, fully aware that 'promotion of young artists' means printing of posters and things, the physical pressing of albums, making of cardboard signs that hang in stores, and does not in any way shape or form translate to 'giving the money to young artists'? I don't mention recording costs because the young artists actually stand those costs themselves through advances on royalties. I'm only talking _promotion_ expenses. This doesn't mean artists don't go broke, it means the companies are willing to print up cardboard signs _while_ the artists go broke.
On a happier, more personal yet still vaguely ontopic note- finally got the ADAT and I've hacked the electronics until the thing begins to sound as warm as my open-reel deck- airwindows rides again! And I will still offer free recording to opensource authors willing to release the results as free mp3s. (You'll have to get yourself to Brattleboro Vermont on your own, tho). I hope to have some mind-blowing tracks out soon- still building equipment like mad, hacking the ADAT was more exciting than building the multiband compressor I need for serious mastering :)
Re:My meaning is clear. (Score:2)
I'm impressed that you managed to answer him in such a civil way. :) I seriously doubt I could have managed to do it. The bit about people cracking software to release it under GPL had me completely baffled since I've never heard of this happening, and even if it did happen it wouldn't make any difference legally. I figured the guy was seriously confused or perhaps mentally ill.
This is absolutely pointless... (Score:2)
You can't try to block all MP3's, because if you do so then you block out the legal ones as well (and yes, there are many legal MP3's out there; too many for this sort of witch-hunt to start up and not raise a stink).
But if you block based on filenames, you're still sunk, because filenames are trivially easy to change. You block *.mp3? Fine. Excuse me while I send leet-music.empeethree to my friend in Germany. Or leet-music.nc3 (nc3 = mp3 rot13'd).
And you can't even block based on content either, because you would have to block based on specific bit patterns. All I have to do is change the quality, use a different encoder... heck, I can just decompress, change formats, and recompress; there are lots of ways to change the sequence. If they try coming up with sound-analysis software, then there's always steganography.
My point? Censorware never works. Apply it to mp3's and it's even less effective than for Websotes, which at least have to keep some attributes (such as address) constant. But I can think of literally hundreds of ways to circumvent these filters. So in the end, this "Rights Protection System" is a joke.
Re:pesimist view (Score:2)
Filtering fat Internet pipes is perhaps feasible, but doing it provides not real benefit for the ISPs. Is the music industry preasure big enough to block parts of the Internet? "
I guess so. There's only a handful of really big providers. Once these implement the filtering the smaller providers get it automaticly. And I fear it's rather likely that the big providers will implement it as there are some dubious legal possibilities to sue them for any illegal content that goes over their lines.
We have a law that makes providers responsible for the content they provide as long as it's "technicaly feasible" to monitor the content. With the proposition of this RPS it would be "feasible", so it's likely that they get sued to hell if they dont implement it. The only legal ground that might actually prevent this from happening is our 5th ammendement (I'm not sure if that's the right word but you get the idea
And german politicians might actually like the idea of a nationwide filtering system. After all they could be protecting the poor musicians, prevent the kids from accessing porn and the bad Nazis from spreading their crap. The same negative hype that caused the whole library censoring in the US is comming up in germany, also. So it's likely some conservative politicians will use this for their own agenda.
And with the decreasing interest in politics and self-education that's currently ongoing here (well, maybe i'm cynical, but what the heck) those claims might be taken for true without a closer look at the consequences.
All in all, yes, I am worried...
Re:Lots of rhetoric, no substance (Score:2)
Amen (Score:2)
The worst thing possible for the Nazis is to expose them to the light of day.
Even the slightest censorship is harmful.
--
Re:You *have* no "rights" to their property. (Score:2)
Ripping off songs and distributing them through the Internet is obviously not legal. The question though is whether heavyhanded web censoring using flaky software is the answer. Not to mention that the hardcore offenders will probably just start using encrypted communications to escape detection, or tunnel around the blocks.
A third issue is that backbone routers have better things to do than filter on individual IP addresses. The custom silicon in these boxes is not designed to handle this.
Re:Blocking URLs at the router is impossible (Score:2)
I don't think that this is some unsolvable technical problem. If this fails it is going to be legislative, not technical.
If they want to bankroll this they could probably make it happen. Yes, MP3 pirates (using the word loosely) would probably find annother means of distribution (different ports, changing servers frequently, free accounts, etc.) but it could be very effective against the average Joe surfer. Most people aren't technically inclined enough to try very hard to find this stuff, if they (the Government) can make it difficult or inconvienent then they have achived their objective.
Re:It isnt about piracy and live music terrifies t (Score:2)
They should have though of this first.
What's even scarier to them is the thought that somehow, some day, somewhere, somebody is going to start creating *EDUCATED* music consumers who recognize that there's more to appreciating music than hit singles. If and when demand starts driving the market, things are going to get really ugly, because (good) musicians won't need the industry to shovel their crap into people's ears.
This will not work... (Score:2)
Okay, so how do we route around this:
1) Encoding the MP3's into other formats to eliminate the possibility of having a filter figure out whether the traffic is an MP3 or something else. I mean heck, you could just ZIP the damn things and accomplish this
2) Smaller ISP's in Germany can establish peering agreements with other countries. Granted this is a risk to the them and so probably wouldn't happen.
3) People who want to trade in illegal MP3's already move around like mad, so this isn't really a big change for them.
What's screwed up about this is that ultimately the people they want to fight (those evil mean hackers) are the people most capable of elluding their efforts. The people who get screwed are the common person, the small record label trying to make a place for themselves, etc.
Someday I envision that there will be pratcially two Internets. One, heavily regulated and strictly controlled. The other, ironically the same physical network, will be the realm where those with the technical know how ellude these goofy and poorly implemented laws.
---
They won't do that (Score:2)
Link in German [heise.de]
Babelfish translation [altavista.com]
It wouldn't work and they know that. In Germany everybody remembers the XS4all case that lead to the world-wide mirroring of the far-left texts they wanted to block.
some facts about situation in germany... (Score:2)
The freedom of speech is kind of limited, if it comes to NeoNazi and other "extreme"-stuff. The german government has tried some time befor to get some sites of the net (zuendel et.al.), but hasn't had much success with it. I think this is result of some old anti-nazi-laws, which were introduced after WW-II. The whole thing is then called "Volksverhetzung" (distributing hate-speech) and you will definitly get yourself into trouble, if you deny the Holocaust...
You are laughably out of context. (Score:2)
Wow, your Porsche dealer has that special model where anyone can walk up, press a button and make a perfect copy a billion times over and he still has his?! That's awesome, give me the address.
Well, go back and read it. The fact that you're losing your bandwidth, or your attention, or your HD space is irrelevant, because I am not gaining it.
So I guess, by your logic, all those pizza delivery people working for Domino's are NOT, in fact, using their cars to help distrubute Domino's product. Domino's isn't gaining a huge personal delivery fleet, just a bunch of people delivering pizzas. ?!?!?
How irrational can a person be? Look, here, I'll pull a dollar bill out of my wallet, tear it up, and throw it in the wastebasket. By your logic, I have "given" you a dollar.
How metaphorically challenged can a person be. First off, you need to stop using examples with physical objects. They don't apply. None of them. We're talking about magnetic charges and electrons, and until E, MC and C come around, they don't have much to do with physical objects that can't be infinitely reproduced. This is a very important point, it's the basis for the rest of the argument, and why MP3s are NOT Porsches.
Furthermore, if I own a thing, I have a perfect right to protect the scarcity which preserves its market value.
You have a right based on the law of the land, not on any natural or perfect model. The only way you can even begin to protect that right it through MASSIVE outside interference, given that your product is inherently infinite, you must CONSTANTLY be making an effort to keep it scarce. This costs money (lawyers are expensive). So, what you're saying, is that you want a market where I pay to help keep an infinite product scarce, so I can pay more, to help keep it scarce. Riiiiight.
--
ba-bu-ba-ba-baaa, da-da-dum. Re-boot the ser-ver.
ba-bu-ba-ba-baaa, da-da-dum. Re-boot the ser-ver.
Re:You *have* no "rights" to their property. (Score:2)
I have never stated a belief that illegal copying is moral--to the contrary, I have remained intentionally agnostic on the subject precisely because there is an important distinction which is completely orthogonal to the issues of morality. There is continued usage of the word word "theft" to describe copyright infringement. Copyright infringement is illegal, but is different from theft--this is my entire point.
I am not rationalizing thievery. I am not even attempting to rationalize copyright infringement. What I am trying to point out is the fundamental difference between physical and intellectual property--that it is impossible to "steal" the latter, unless you somehow destroy the original. It may be illegal, it may be immoral, it may give you herpes, it may kill your dog, it may cause the collapse of civilization as we know it, but they're not the same thing, and only confusion (and $400/hr if you're a lawyer) results from conflating the two.
Don't read more into my statements than is there. If you define property to include ownership of human beings against their will, then I believe I have no moral obligation to respect that right, especially if it's me who you're claiming to own. My point is that just because you say you have a moral right to ownership of something doesn't mean you do. As a general rule, shouldn't morality of ownership derive from more than just telling people to "repeat after you" or to "get it into their pointy little heads."
If you create a physical object from raw materials you own (based on some system of legality), then it makes perfect sense that said system of legality should recognize you as the owner of the final product. Why? So nobody can take away the product of your labor.
If you create an idea from raw "intellectual" materials you own (to the degree this is even possible; creative artists draw on elements of the culture they inhabit, inventors draw upon the work of predecessors), then it also makes sense that nobody should be legally allowed to take away the product of your labor without your consent. Such is the wonderful nature of ideas--it's very hard to take them away!
At some point, it was decided that if authors were given exclusive control over their creations, then they would be able to require people to get their permission to use their work, thereby creating scarcity, and value. This necesarily entails restricting the freedom of others, but it benefits the authors, enabling them to make a living creating, rather than having to do it as a hobby. When a society decides they're willing to give up their intellectual freedom (the freedom to act on ideas entering your mind, regardless of the source, which I present as a legal concept rather than a inviolable moral right) in exchange for the benefits a society gains from having full-time authors who can make a living off their work, then they create IP laws, copyright, patents, etc. Similarly, when a society decides they're willing to give up their freedom to kill with impunity (again, as a legal concept rather than an inviolable moral right) in exchange for the (obvious) benefits of being able to live without worrying about people murdering you without consequence, then they create laws against murder, etc.
Morals, then, are like absolute truths. We assume they exist, but there's apparantly no way to verify them. Throughout time, various people have held differing views of slavery. I believe slavery is morally wrong, but a Greek who owned slaves may honestly have held the belief that another group of humans was "destined" to be slaves, and it was perfectly moral to treat them as such. That doesn't make it right, but if it is against "absolute morality", why didn't he know that? You can pick a religious work and interpretation, but they aren't unanimous on the subject (and have little to say about intellectual property in most cases) and in so doing, you are choosing to believe in that moral schema, and choosing not to believe in another. Holding a vote based on popularity of beliefs seems a stupid way to do it. All that's left is honest introspection, along with rational assumptions about the consequences of one's actions. The only other option is for me to take -your- word for what is, and isn't, moral, and you very well might be wrong. I'm told by many that absolute ownership of intellectual property is a moral right of the author. Why? "Because it just is." I wasn't born knowing this, the Bible doesn't tell me so, and the notion that IP is a utilitarian social convention designed to balance the rights of the many with the ability of authors to profit makes sense. If you believe IP ownership is a moral right, how can you be sure it won't be the 23rd century equivilent of slavery?
Really Collateral Damage (Score:2)
If this is implemented wrong, or someone trying to set up this kind of blocking blows it, or some other godforsaken issue that no one considered about this kind of packet filtering shows up, Germany could end up blackholing or even completely blocking itself on port 80, or whatever else they plan to filter. I'm sure the Germans would just love that situation. The people who put that system in place, and who wanted/ordered it put in place, would have some fast explaining to do.
It's all supposition, but there are always RISKS...
Re:Blocking URLs at the router is impossible (Score:2)
Re:It is about suppressing competition, not copyin (Score:2)
They had the option of adopting one particular infringement of civil liberties, or of witnessing their country self-destruct, probably violently. Would you rather have another Nazi industrial giant in Europe today, or would you have a Germany the way it is currently? Given time things will heal and restrictions will be lifted...but WWII is not something people forget that quickly.
I'm sure it wasn't an easy decision, but there are "good" reasons. Everything is not black and white.
Re:It is about suppressing competition, not copyin (Score:2)
so what can we do? (Score:2)
So, what can we in the USA do? Any suggestions?
Want to work at Transmeta? Hedgefund.net? Priceline?
Re:Your Translation (Score:2)
Yes Nazi Germany is a difficult subject, especially in Germany, but I don't think that there is any denial going on or the attemp to silence the other speakers, just the fear that people might like to listen to them more then to the reality.
No I am not for censoring it, I believe that it should be available for all to read, and I read it myself to get an idea what they are proposing, but I also understand the fear some people have about it.
Face it. Whenever Germany is doing something unpopular very fast the past is pulled out and stuck into our face. So it isn't very surprising that there are people (3, 4 Generation after everything has happened) that they WANT to forgot. Not because they deny that it happened, but because they don't want to feel responsible for it. I know I don't want to, and I never will feel responsible for what happened back then.
If it would happen today: Other story.
Michael
Re:Putting on the flame retardant clothing (Score:2)
but please don't think that i support not paying the musician. mp3's make a great try-before-you-buy thing like shareware... thats how mp3.com works.
pesimist view (Score:2)
Filtering fat Internet pipes is perhaps feasible, but doing it provides not real benefit for the ISPs. Is the music industry preasure big enough to block parts of the Internet? Shouldn't we look at things in perspective: they just getting in panic mode now that the Napster phenomenon and other threaths are here to stay.
Try to predict the infuence of Napster technology, compression, and Terabyte storage on the future of the music industry. Their future looks grim. Now it is possible for consumers to store 12 audio CDs/ CDrom. With recordable DVDs and the AAC [mpeg.org] compression standard the audio track/disc are raised to more then 2500... Here at the Delft university of Technology we are working on compression algorithms that compress audio with a factor of 24, without perceptual loss. Combined with new recordable devices it will become possbile in 5 years to store all the popular music produced of the last year on a single disc. Just imagine the impact on the music industries business model.
Re:Your Translation (Score:2)
I find it disturbing the extent to which the cult of "personal responsibility" is allowed to overwhelm soceital responsibility in these cases. Basically, you're saying that if everytime a certain person speaks, an innocent gets killed, it doesn't matter. Not only will we not hold that person responsible to deaths which arguably would not have occured if they hadn't been there, we won't even try to prevent it from happening again.
Hey, an inflamatory speaker is coming to town. Almost every speaking event he has held in the past has been followed by listeners injuring or killing members of the group he opposes. I guess we'll just hold a few spaces in the emergency room and a few others in jail. But god forbid we touch that sacred cow of freedom of expression to prevent someone from dying.
Personal responsibility is a great thing. Except when it clouds your mind to actually solving problems instead of laying blame for them. When a person harms another person, they hold the legal blame. But the fact that you can't hold an instigator legally responsible for the violence that follows them doesn't mean you have to stand back and let them just keep speaking. There are other rights than free speech. Some are even more important. Real ethics are about balance, not using personal responsibility to find the one person for blame for every action and declaring everything that happened up to their personal decision irrelevant.
-Kahuna Burger
Re:Your Translation (Score:2)
Yes you cannot buy it on Amazon, because the german goverment requires that the reader must be over 18 years old.
And the Nazi part of our German history is the biggest part in our history lessons. (And every pupil has to take history lessons, there is NO way around them.)
And I think we in German have a greater knowledge of our faults in the past than other countries of their faults.
daniel
A good idea (Score:2)
Re:It is about suppressing competition, not copyin (Score:2)
The Cunning Ploy... (Score:3)
This can't work? Sure it can. (Score:3)
A government can go a step further and outlaw all on-line audio and video formats that don't incorporate copy protection; if you break those laws, they would be able to confiscate your equipment and assess penalties, and any dealer who sells or distributes such equipment would face stiff penalties as well.
This is clearly where the RIAA, the MPAA, and their equivalents in other countries would like things to go. They want to replace all open audio and video formats with proprietary formats, formats that incorporate copy protection and per-use payments. Restrictions on reverse engineering and "breaking copyright protections" make open implementations impossible. Patented compression and encryption schemes would further limit the ability of others to legally access that content.
Even personal content you create would be subject to those restrictions. If you want to be able to look at your kid growing up in copy-protected, proprietary video 20 years from now, think again. The proprietary players will not work on the new hardware and software, and since they never got documented or reverse engineered, your data will be lost. And if you are a small artist, you will, of course, have to pay the "inventors" of those proprietary formats a pretty penny for the privilege of using their technology; funny that the same "inventors" are also your big name competition in the media markets.
Media companies want to control the distribution channels (Sony music, Polygram, and all those others sites, of course, wouldn't get blocked, but small artists would) and the formats (have you tried making a consumer-readable DVD recently? why do you think it's so expensive?).
It's not surprising that these organizations have a sympathetic ear in Germany, where free speech is not quite as cherished as in the US. But in both countries, everybody should get scared by this. Allowing big media companies to control the formats by which we communicate is a direct attack on our most basic rights. Streaming MP3 and MPEG-2 will likely become the formats of choice for audio and video mail and conferencing once bandwidth catches up (their quality is too low for real music enjoyment anyway). MP3 and similar formats are the direct equivalent of the air, paper, and wires we communicate over today. Do we want to hand control over those to a few large companies?
I hope politicians will get sufficiently frightened by such a future to prevent it. Open media formats and open access to those media formats is essential in a free, democratic society. Most other considerations ought to be secondary.
Not Particularly Surprising... (Score:3)
Deutsch Grammophon
Polygram
BMG
Bertlesmann
etc.
I wouldn't be surprised, in fact, if the entertainment industry comprised a larger percentage of Germany's GDP than it does our own...
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
Re:Putting on the flame retardant clothing (Score:3)
There are exceptions to this rule. If you're a musician who's willing to work long hard hours touring, you can make an AWFUL LOT. This is exactly what the Grateful Dead did. They sold out arena after arena for years (decades even), and got very wealthy in the process
Even better, they essentially gave away their music. They pioneered the practice of encouraging people to record their shows, and make copies for their friends. You could get "taper's tickets", and get a nice spot behind the soundboard to set up your reel-to-reel, DAT, Minidisc, whatever.
And when you think about it, music is great stuff. But is one song worth all the money that is squeezed out of it?
I am a musician and a songwriter. I'm going to "do the dream" this june. I'm moving to Colorado with my band, and we're going to work very very hard. We have (what I think are) some great songs. I hope people like them. I don't think that I deserve millions of dollars for them. I already wrote and recorded them for chissake!
How much is a flash of inspiration really worth. I don't think it's worth millions of bucks.
On the other hand, touring is HARD WORK - and also requires *talent* - something studio musicians don't really need as much of. While touring you're working very long days in uncomfortable surroundings. It ain't all Sex and Drugs.
Furthermore, do you know why touring is "advertising"? It's because these one hit wonders have just that - one hit. Even if it's good, people aren't going to come back to see them perform it more than once or twice. Real, live musicians have a repitoire, they sometimes play different sets every night. They play the same song in different ways, and improvise. You hear a performance. Let talented musicians (those for whom performance != lip-syncing) work hard, be creatively challenged to keep the show interesting, and people will buy tickets for every night of a four night stand. hundreds of thousands of people have done this and will continue to Just my two cents. Click this link in my sig to hear 2-year old tracks from my band.
Re:Your Translation (Score:3)
Censorship is a slippery slope; once you start down it, everything is vulnerable.
Well, everything can be claimed to be a slippery slope to some undesired destination. Mostly though we're able to avoid the undesired consequences if we wish to: in the case of censorship the implementation of antagonistic review bodies and safeguards operating in the public domain should be enough to prevent the destruction of democratic debate providing there are enough people that care about it. There's no way to implement a comprehensive set of rules that will function without superintendence - a constant struggle between interested parties carried out in the public eye is probably the best way to ensure that any abuse that happens is condoned by a large number of people in our society.
One holds it out for the world to see... and ridicule and spit upon and point and laugh and use as an object lesson for your kids
That sounds good. What happens though if there are people convinced by these arguments and they act upon them? It is claimed by some involved in Anti-Fascist movements that there is a correlation between public meetings led by such luminaries as the Holocaust denier David Irving [nizkor.org] and attacks on perceived enemies afterwards. Indeed Searchlight magazine, a british publication quotes Irving as stating that the setting up of "fascist cells" is the object of his League of St.George appearances. So, these things are not necessarily just academic debates about how many died. They are potentially the nucleus for the death or maiming of some "degenerate". IMHO it is the same problem that always attends discussion of free speech: the decision to allow it should take into account its likely effects. Your post seems to advocate an absolute right to speech without this consideration. Do I misunderstand you? If not how do you propose to avoid these problems?Re:Your Translation (Score:3)
Your fist, my nose.
That is where the line is drawn. The old Flip Wilson line "The devil made me do it" is an abandonment of personal responsibility. One is free to say what one wants; one is also free to decide what to do about it. It is the rioters who are at fault, not the so-called inciter. If they use force against people or property, they should be brought to justice.
Now, it is the function of government to punish force, or fraud. If one can prove an inciter to riot used some sort of fraud (anything from fallacious argument to outright lies) to inspire the people to riot, then he can and should be held responsible in civil court for his damages. Same thing with "fire" in a crowded theatre... unless there really is a fire, in which case Good Sam clauses apply.
It's about each person taking responsibility for his or her own self, and not being led around by the likes of the last scuzzball orator they just heard, no matter how outrageous it might have been, or how much sense it might make.
--
"It seemed the logical thing to do at the time." -- Sarek
Germans get mixed signals about Nazis (Score:3)
Actually, I tend to agree with jamie's point that censorship is not the way to deal with something like this. However, as an American who has lived in Germany for over ten years now, I've also come to understand Germans who are exasperated at Americans and others for the contradictory messages that they send about dealing with latter-day Nazis and other right-wing extremists in Germany.
For every rallying cry for freedom of speech such as jamie's, even in the face of the worst kind of speech, there is someone else in the world darkly warning that the Germans are a congenitally dangerous people who are constantly in danger of turning into Nazis again, and so they damn well better do anything, no matter how ruthless, to make sure it never happens again.
This message was communicated very strongly by the Allies after the war, and they institutionalized it in the German constitution and in their efforts at "de-Nazification". It's constitutional in Germany to ban political parties, strip citizens of their civil rights in certain very extreme cases, and possibly even censor Holocaust denial (I think the courts are still unsure about that), specifically because the Allies wanted Germans to do all those things to drive the Nazi mindset out of the culture. To this day, there are many people around the world who fully expect the Germans to keep on doing all of these things.
Americans often get frustrated at the feeling that Europeans will criticize us no matter what we do -- it seems like it's damned if you do, damned if you don't all the time. Many Germans' reaction to criticism such as jamie's is very similar. To be sure, one can't expect everybody in the world to have the same opinion about what to do, but I often wonder if someone like jamie realizes how controversial his suggested solution is around the world.
The Germans are very sensitive about their image in the rest of the world and are trying to the right thing. But they're just as uncertain as everyone else about what the right thing is.
Germany already restrictive (Score:3)
______________________
interesting observation, but wrong conclusion IMHO (Score:3)
So, while you're completely correct about observing that it is illegal to publicly display 3rd Reich symbols in Germany, I think you are mistaking that as a sort of general passive attitude in dealing with restrictions of democratic freedom(s) and rights.
You have to understand that freedom has a million different interpretations and that those interpretations as laid down in laws naturally arise from the historical background of when those laws were written. In Germany (IMHO) we still have quite some problems dealing with WWII history, even though it's been 50 yrs now since it all happened. So, at the time (of writing the constitution) it was ca. 5yrs since 6million people were killed in KZ's. I think it is quite natural (even if you now might think of it as an overreaction now) that you get strict laws against openly campaiging for that or even openly stating that most of it is untrue. After all, Germany caused an unimaginable pain to a whole people. To make it short, those laws have a background and I think in Germany not many people oppose it and that that is not necessarily a bad thing.
Does it limit your freedom of speech? Sure. But it also grants the German people (government and citizens) to effectively combat any major effort to disrupt the process of healing.
Another example: in Germany you don't have the universal right to bear arms. Surely this impairs said freedom but it also grants you the freedom of not having to worry a whole lot about life-threats when sending your kid to school.
Also, as we all have been watching here, it is very difficult nowadays to ensure the freedom of speech (and the right to bear arms and others), which have (yet again) so profound historical and therefore emotional roots in the US.
My point being is that in a democracy there are freedoms which need to be restricted, so more important freedoms are granted, such as the restriction of killing people and so on.
Example in US: here you don't have the freedom to drink alcohol until you're 21 although you can already be sentenced to death at age 16. Different cultures, different laws. Is one better than the other? Wrong (too simple) question. If you think about it, almost any item in the Bill of Rights has so far been reduced, some sensibly some not.
With all that being said, I don't have the slightest doubt in my mind, that this kind of vastly pro-corporate restriction on your internet content will be as fiercely combated in Germany as in the US. In Germany we IMHO have a very strong sense of civil rights and their upkeeping. And actually for that reason I don't think laws like this will even pass our parliament, but that's speculation.
BTW, the German constitution also has a passage ensuring the legality of (if necessary violently) overthrowing a government which tramples on your basic human rights.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not pissed or offended or anything, I just think you have to evaluate things in context. I e.g. think, it is downright crazy to allow everybody to have a gun, but then if you look where it comes from, it makes more sense.
To make this a little more on-topic:
This stuff is politically and technoligically not really feasible, as also pointed in other posts. But if stupidity takes over, I'll be there to campaign against it!
Amen,
Roland
A simple, effiective solution (Score:3)
1) There is nothing wrong, legally or morally, with music encoded into MP3s, or the distribution of music encoded in the MP3 format.
2) Artists (and their agents, the record labels) have the legal and moral right to demand payment in exchange for their product, like any other legal business.
Everyone is all up in arms over the MP3 format because it seems that the two points above are in conflict, as MP3 files are quickly and readily shared, often illegally. But there is a simple solution that requires no new laws to be formed.
The goverments of the world need to combine forces to create a clearinghouse organization that would have the power to force an ISP to remove digtal media content (software, music, video, etc) that is illegally copied. Call them the ICE (International Copyright Enforcers).
If an artist came across their materials that were illegally available on the web, they could report it to ICE and shut the site down. This means that if an artist (say Mariah Carey) really wants to protect against her music being copied, she or her record label could hunt down MP3 music (via web searches and napster, etc) and report violating sites to ICE. But if another artist (say Skippy Martens [mp3.com]) didn't care about his music, there would be no reporting to ICE, and thus no problem.
This puts the ball in the artist's court: if they want to stop illegal copying -- go find it and tell us about it. But don't blame the media format (MP3) or the distribution channel (Napster) because those are legally neutral.
Now, this would work because if I can find illegal MP3s, so could the artists. And the labels (not to mention software companies) would be more than happy to have a small staff of people devoted to hunting illegal files. And if you want to rip MP3s, make several copies -- that's fine as long as no one can find it (and why would the artists care about it if no one can find it?).
What it's all about... (Score:3)
It's funny... slashdot's turned into this great little place where everybody says the same thing over and over again. It's always about "Us Vs Them", or more often "U.S. Vs Them". The People Against the Govenment(s). Linux Against Microsoft. The Geeks Against The Corps. To be honest, I'm getting a little tired of it.
Yes, it's about rights. People should have a right to look at whatever they want - be it porn, how to make a bomb, or how to create a more effecicient O/S.
The thing is, it's not just about your rights. Policians have to think about the rights of childeren, the rights of artists, or more to the point, they think about the rights that people with money believe they have.
I have downloaded MP3's. I think nearly everybody has. I have about 400 CD's worth of MP3's. The thing is, I bought about 300 CD's and MP3'd them. I figure that I paid to listen to them, and if I wish to listen to them in another format, that's my choice. The other 100 CD's are mostly old 80's hits you can't get anymore...
On the other hand, I'm not denying the fact that the artists have rights. If any of the artists in question want royalties, they can come around and I'll pay them the same 5 cents the record company would.
It's a similar story with CSS. I think the worst thing about CSS are the region codes.
The term "free as in speech, not as in beer" has kind of been warped around here. If you were to ask RMS, he'd tell you that programmers should be paid as much as possible. They (we) work very hard, and deserve to be rewarded. On the other hand, any program you pay for, you should be able to modify, change, give away, spraypaint pink or do whatever you feel is appropriate with, because one you pay for something it should be yours.
None of this license crap.
The other thing is the hidden internet. People have been talking about encryption, filtering, hidden or removed networks for longer than I've been here - so I ask everyone: Have ANY of you ever set anything like that up? Any IPv6 experts here? Anybody know how to set up a root server? Any CA's here? Many IMAP guru's? Everybody know how to configure SSL under Apache or AOLServer? Christ, do any of you even know how to untar Apache?
I've done most of those. It took an afternoon to get IPv6 running properly on all the Linux boxen and the NT servers - although I had a lot of fun tunneling through the switch (thanks 3Com), I have 3 DNS servers running fine and dandy here (with rob.is.a.turnip. pointing to
I'll tell you what, if any of you are REALLY serious, I'll run as the root server, the CA, and offer SSL hosting for anybody that can prove they're a real geek. I'll run a tutorial showing everybody how to configure dial up networking so you can see what's going on. I'll explain how to configure IPv6 to anybody that wants to route packets around Germany / America / Mongolia. Better yet, I'll do the root server, CA, and help bit for free.
Who's interested?
</RANT>
Don't worry too much. It's impossible. (Score:3)
Yeah, that's a huge task in itself. But what about Gnutella? Forget blocking it. It's not going to be possible. Anyone can set up a server and by it's very nature, it's meant to be uncensorable (AKA unblockable).
kwsNI
Re:Collateral Damage (Score:3)
Re:It is about suppressing competition, not copyin (Score:4)
Some German folks should probably weigh in on this one, but at the risk of annoying everyone on both sides of this touchy issue I'll weigh in with my unsolicited opinions, as an Auslander (foreigner) who lived there for a number of years.
While I too disagree with Germany's approach to their Nazi, and more recently, neo-Nazi problem, one must consider the practicalities of their situation. After world war II there were still a large number of people who, privately, still supported much of what the Nazis had stood for. The allies and early German administrations felt the danger represented by this anomolous political sitiuation was simply too severe, and too immediate, to allow themselves the luxery of tolerating it in the name of free speach or expression, so yes, in effect, they did create a "political class" of criminals. It is illegal in Germany to be a Nazi, period. You can go to jail for espousing Nazism, displaying Nazi symbols, making Nazi salutes, etc. This is their solution to an intolerable problem. It is not necessarilly a good solution, and it does have a heavy price, but it is the solution they have chosen.
Whether they were right or wrong in this assessment is an interesting discussion of its own. Nevertheless, their reasons for this policy were very obvious, very good, and very, very compelling. One of the aforementioned "heavy prices" Germany is paying today IMHO is an expression of pent up, suppressed speach in the form of neo-Nazism. Another is the much more insidious (and possibly more dangerous) tendency for institutions in Germany to engage in large scale, draconian censorship which other democratic nations would be reluctant to consider (the USA being a possible exception) for reasons which, while much less compelling than the Nazi issue, appear to them to be nevertheless "good."
This isn't a justification, merely a commentary on the state of things as I see them. Again, while I disagree with their choice to use censorship to address the Nazi issue (far better to allow your opponent to make an ass of themself and then ridicule them publicly than to suppress their right to express themself), I think one must be a little understanding as to why the felt compelled to do so. This empathy should not, however, be extended to include the modern day abuses of this power which some institutions in Germany appear to now take for granted as their "right."
If Germany is indeed a mature, "grown up" democracy (to borrow a phrase from the press), then they really should reevaluate the role censorship is playing in their society.
On the other hand, so should we here in the USA, as you imply and as numerous stories here on slashdot and elsewhere have made abundantly clear, time and time again.
Re:Blocking URLs at the router is impossible (Score:4)
That's why the more likely (and scary) approach would be to block entire servers. A router could easily block packets from/to a specific IP address, it would simply drop them, no added overhead. The client web browser would just think that the server doesn't exist, because it isn't returning any of its packets.
Of course, what would make more sense is to impliment this as firewalls, not routers. You would have to replace all ISP's gateways with transparent filtering firewalls/proxies, which could selectively block URLs at any level, with much less of a performance hit. However, this still has the problems of bad filtering.
All in all, this is a bad idea, no matter how it is implimented.
Collateral Damage (Score:4)
Retaking the moral high ground (Score:4)
Half-baked idea...
First, if you have any illegal .mp3's - that is, any mp3s of copyrighted songs by artists you don't already own the CDs for - delete them from your system, especially if the same computer is your webserver. Just trust me on this...
Second, go find a site put up by an independent artist that offers some full songs or clips for download. Grab them, then politely ask the band if you can mirror them on your own site.
Third, if you get the OK, offer them for download. Hell, devote a small section of your site to independent bands. Offer links to their sites and the mp3s. Encourage visitors to at least follow the links, maybe buy a CD or two.
Fourth...when organizations like RIAA, CRIA, the German organization, and the like bitch and whine about "stolen music" and "artists' rights", bring up your own site, with music by indies which is perfectly legal to download, supporting indies' rights to promote themselves. And if blocking systems like the "Rights Protection System" are implemented anywhere, you and the bands can legitimately say their exposure is being blocked by big labels. Large companies do not like having a public image of squashing the little guy for their own profit, even if it's true.
This won't eliminate the issue of copyright violations of music by label artists, but you'll have retaken the moral high ground by having a working example of what we've been pointing to as a useful aspect of MP3 the whole time, along with backing up your own music collection.
Remember - do not offer any music for download that you don't have permission to mirror! I don't know how many bands would have issues with having the music they offer for download mirrored. Some, certainly. Still, it's worth a shot, as it would prove that the mp3 form of distribution can legally work to build exposure for an artist, or at least get some of their music out and about. It's also a good chance to tweak the attack lawyers and execs who try to make .mp3 look like crack cocaine.
DISCLAIMER: I haven't done the above...yet. I've become a bit more aware of digital distribution, copyright, fair use, and control issues. I may do the above soon, if this doesn't end up alongside the other 5000 ideas I come up with and forget about every day. It's certainly an attractive cause, though...especially after the visit by CRIA goons to my school...
Re:This is a great idea (Score:4)
Now, beyond that. There are a lot of legitimate MP3's out on the market. Is it right to block those just because there is also pirating going on. I mean, that's like the police trying to shut down your local mall to prevent more shoplifting.
You say: "You don't have a "right" to view mp3s, especially ripped off mp3s". That's only half right. The law doesn't give you the right to view (listen) to ripped off MP3s. I have every right in the world to listen to the interview with some celebrity that CNN just put on there site for download that I want to hear. I have every right to go to MP3.com [mp3.com] and download the latest songs from these new artists. I have every right to go to an established artists page and download the MP3 that they are giving away in the months before they release their CD. And you can not take that right away (or make sure that I only do the things within my rights) with software.
kwsNI
Re:You *have* no "rights" to their property. (Score:4)
The issue is, are we attacking someone's "property"? Are digital recordings property? There is, I personally believe, a massive paradigm shift (ugh) happening, wherein the very definition of "property" is changing in people's minds. Perhaps, a generation down the line (or two) people will look back and be amazed that anyone seriously embraced the concept of "intellectual property".
As has been pointed out, by Stallman et al, "intellectual property" differs from real property in that my use of an idea (or a digital recording, or a piece of software) does not necessarily preclude your simultaneous use of the idea, song, etc. An idea, once released, is not a scarce resource -- and so it does not fit the "property" model.
Should people be able to make money off of their creative pursuits? I certainly believe so. Should the model for making money be some kludged, ad-hoc, and unwieldy attempt to cut-and-past laws for physical property into virtual space? Not at all. I don't know how an artist can make money on the Net -- but the current method is not a long-term viable one, no matter how many people turn blue screaming "Property violation! Property violation!"
I contend that "intellectual property" has always had this tension implicit in it. Now the Internet has made it impossible to gloss over them.
As a historical parallel, consider the modern corporation. Prior to the rise of the corporation, anyone running a business was held personally and completely responsible for it. Say you ran a shipping company whose ship went down. Action could be brought against not just the holdings of the company, but against your personal wealth -- and the wealth of any investors in the company.
This scared off investors -- the only sin recognized in early 21st century America -- and so, our history books tell us, this was a Bad Thing. In response, things like the limited liability partnership and the modern corporation were put into place, so the vast engine of commericialism could be unleashed.
Don't you think back then that people who had succeeded with the old model, in the old circumstances, cried "foul!" and screamed that people were taking away their rights to recoup lost investments. Of course they did. SO what? The social understanding of liability was changed becasuse it was recognized that the old model was limiting and out-moded.
Sort of like the situation we find ourselves in today, regarding "intellectual property".
Open Standards. Open Source. Open Minds. The Revolution will be Intercast!
Your Translation (Score:4)
It should read "we should not lose track of those powers who threaten creative people", not "those creators of threatening powers"
I really think you're being knee-jerk about the Holocaust. I don't see the connection at all. It's just some pompous corporate posturing by some guys who would rather protect the market share they inherited than risk innovation.
Blocking URLs at the router is impossible (Score:5)
If I've got this right, this shows an abysmal lack of understanding of how routing actually works. See, IP packets have an "envelope" and a payload (the content). The envelope contains the source and destination addresses and ports ("From: 123.45.678.90:12345, To: 234.87.53.309:80"). It also contains some information destined to be used at the other end, such as whether the packet was fragmented along the way and which fragment # this one contains so that the original information can be reconstructed at the receiving end.
The "payload" of the packet is the content; what's inside the envelope. This is where all the data is put, including the HTTP "GET" requests. When you fetch a web page, your browser sends something like the following inside an IP packet:
HTTP/1.1 GET http://slashdot.org/
(There's more to it; read RFC 2616 [faqs.org] to learn all about the HTTP/1.1 protocol). The point is that this is *inside* the packet. How are you going to tell which packets contain HTTP GET requests, huh? Look inside every packet? Sorry, buddy, not gonna do it. That would slow down ping times by at least a factor of ten: instead of 100-200ms, you'd have ping times of one or two seconds. For every communication.
Or maybe you just look inside packets with a destination port of 80? Yeah, that'd work, right? Nope -- web servers can run on any port. You'd immediately see lots of web servers hanging off port 8080, 8088, or even weird port numbers, serving up MP3's with unfiltered impunity.
There are a lot more reasons (which I won't go into) as to why this thing won't work as suggested. Thought exercise: where are the blocking lists going to live? And how will they be updated? Turn in a 500-1000 word essay to my desk by Monday for extra credit. :-)
Not to say that SOME kind of required-filtering law may be passed in Germany, but this isn't going to be it. If this gets passed, it will either (a) be utterly useless, or (b) slow down ALL Internet usage in Germany so much that the law would get repealed in record time as the German legislation realizes that it just cut its entire country off from the Internet.
I'm sure there are some factual errors in the above, as I whipped it out with virtually no research whatsoever. But the technical details of how routing works are pretty much as described. For the full story about IP and how it works, read RFC 791 [faqs.org]. For more about HTTP version 1.1, see the link several paragraphs above.
-----
The real meaning of the GNU GPL:
It is about suppressing competition, not copying (Score:5)
The RIAA, and its foreign equivelents, are confronted with the unpleasant situation in which artists are refusing to sign contracts giving the recording companies 99.9% of the profits from CD sales and instead are selling (or giving away) their music on-line in exchange for 50% (!!!) of the CD sales proceeds, or simply greater exposure of their work.
Worse still, artists are actually defecting from the recording industry, discovering that they can make better money selling 1000 CDs and taking home $5/CD, than they do by selling 90,000 CDs and only keeping $0.05 per CD.
This, the old-guard recording companies simply can't abide. Their strategy is, of course, under the guise of fighting unauthorized copying, to use the clout of a dysfunctional legal system and the long arm of government law enforcement to destroy the emerging paradigm shift in its infancy and protect their defacto monopoly.
Germany has for a long time been actively censoring right wing and neo-nazi hate groups, with obvious and very, very good reason. The unfortuante side effect of this is that they are in some respects much further down the slippery slope of censorship than many other countries, so much os that such draconian measures as these are not only thinkable, but remarkably reasonable sounding to the powers-that-be. Other examples include the indictment of compuserve execs for their customers use of the internet to access foreign porn sites, the xs4all political web censorship fiasco, and so on.
Of course, warez kiddies will still be swapping their musing using ssh tunneled ftp, new protocols, or even old protocols encapsulated or stealthed to get around the packet blocking. The only thing that will be killed will be legitimate, competing businesses such as mp3.com, not children swapping warez and illegally copied music.
This, as far as the old-guard recording industry is concerned, is a perfectly acceptable solution.
Lots of rhetoric, no substance (Score:5)
Although your post has the ring of flaimbait, I will assume you are just woefully misinformed about both the mp3 community (where both legal and, unfortunately, a great deal of illegal copying does occur) and open source software, and are lashing out at offenses you perceive which in fact are either not as pervasive as you think, or completely non-existent (to my knowledge no program has been "cracked" and subsequently distribued under the GPL as open source software).
As a counter example, I will use myself. My situation is by no means unique to slashdot or the net as a whole, indeed, if you search prior archives for mp3 related discussions, you will hear many others voicing the exact same scenerio.
All of my mp3's are legal. Yes, that's right, every last one of them.
90% of them are ripped from my own CD collection.
Another 5% are authorized downlaods from mp3.com [mp3.com] and elsewhere, by artists who are trying to get exposure. On occasion I buy the CD, either to support the artist or to have available in places I can't listen to mp3's (e.g. my airplane, or a friend's car), although I am by no means obligated to do so.
Even those that I have downloaded which are "unauthorized copies", as defined by the RIAA, are not illegal! How can I make this bold claim? Because I already own the vinyl record, or the cassette tape, or some other medium (8 track in one particulary archaic case, CDs in others). I have already paid for the right to store the music in whatever medium I wish, including mp3 format on my hard drive. This has been decided in court decision after court decision. Whether I hook up my friend's turn table and arduously rip the record to cd or mp3 format (I have done this for some rare Hungarian pop music form the mid 1980s), or download the exact same song from someone who has already done the work using napstre, makes no difference. Indeed, I can even pay a third party, commercial enterprise, to convert the data from one medium and format to another, perfectly legally. This right, as well, has been sustained in numerious court rulings, the recording industries protestations notwithstanding. I own a right to the music, as evidenced by the physical record in my possession, and am entitled to be able to listen to it with the tools at my disposal and to store it in whatever form I wish, be it mp3 or binary code tatooed on my left bicep. This, too, has been decided more than once in a court of law.
In other words:
I. Do. Have. Every. Right. To. My. Property. Which. I. Have. Paid. Good. Hard. Cash. For.
Re:Your Translation (Score:5)
The Jews have a saying, which, for personal and private reasons, I share.
Never Again.
One doesn't squash Holocaust-deniers, or Marxists, or pedophiles, or any idea, no matter how revolting. One holds it out for the world to see... and ridicule and spit upon and point and laugh and use as an object lesson for your kids when they're old enough to handle it. This is why my mother has not one, but two, copies of Mein Kampf (one in the original German). These ideas, and the havoc they're capable of wreaking on the entire world, should not be forgotten.
To hide them, pretend they do not exist, suppress them, not teach our children how to handle them, is unhealthy, dysfunctional, and a recipe for disaster. There will always be Bad Men out there, with terrible weapons and evil intent, and it is up to us, and our children as they grow, and their children's children, to always be ready to deal with them with dispatch.... and without sinking to their level. We must learn our history, and the lessons it contains... or we are doomed to repeat it.
The Germans want to censor. What really doesn't matter, we must do what we can to stop them, simply on principle.... because censorship leads to thoughtcrime, and everyone who has ever read 1984 knows where that leads.
--
It Means Us, Too
-- Afterword to 1984
Re:Your Translation (Score:5)
That may very well be true. Our high school history books don't tell us, but the Germen Eugenics program and ghastly experimentation was based on the model provided by the mass sterilization of criminals, native americans, blacks, and the mentall ill in America in the 1910s - 1930s, which they very much admired. Yup, that's right, the good old USA.
Long before the Germans we ourselves had a large Eugenics program, were measuring distinctive racial facial features and sterilizing people. The Germans were quite impressed and took back this knowledge and greatly expanded on it. They were very proud of beating the USA as the leader in Eugenics (from what I have read). They based their profiling and "cleansing" of Jews on our profiling and "cleansing" of Native Americans.
I believe Himmler kept a picture of a Native American in his office to remind him of the United States' successful campaign. I also think one of Germans in the Nuremburg trial said something to the effect of "Why are you prosecuting us? You taught us this."
Positive side-effect (Score:5)