Usenet.com May Find Safe Harbor From RIAA lawsuit 126
Daneal writes "Ars Technica has some interesting analysis of the RIAA's lawsuit against Usenet.com. There's reason to believe that Usenet.com — and most other Usenet providers — could qualify for protection under the DMCA's Safe Harbor provision. 'The DMCA's Safe Harbor provision provides protection for ISPs from copyright infringement lawsuits as long as they take down offending material once they are served with a notice of infringement. "Whether the Safe Harbor applies is the central legal question that is going to be raised," EFF senior staff attorney Fred von Lohmann told Ars. An RIAA spokesperson tells Ars that the group has issued "many" takedown notices to Usenet.com, but von Lohmann says that the volume of takedown notices isn't what counts. "The DMCA's Safe Harbor makes it very clear," von Lohmann said. "The number of notices doesn't matter as long as you take the infringing content down."'"
Seem to remember... (Score:5, Informative)
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"Usenet.com has been refusing the labels requests"
Re:Seem to remember... (Score:5, Informative)
"To date, Usenet.com has refused to remove content or discontinue offering certain newsgroups."
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I ask , because the way usenet works , stuff doesnt stay on the server forever.
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The Wired article [wired.com] has a link to the actual lawsuit in PDF format. It actually makes an interesting read.
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Re:Seem to remember... (Score:5, Informative)
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"If Usenet.com can show that it complies with the DMCA by removing access to infringing content and by suspending the accounts of repeat offenders, it may be enough to provide it with protection under the hosting and linking provisions of the DMCA."
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Binary Retention Periods (Score:2, Informative)
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It's worth noting that Usenet.com does not own/operate usenet, they are just a download service for usenet. They cannot remove things from usenet, they can only prohibit downloads of certain content from their servers, I'd imagine.
As a former INN server admin from 1994 to about 2001, that's bunk I'm sorry to say. I resisted modding you down (even have the points for it!) just to clear the air here. If you stream news to someone else, your removal of an article affects your downstream servers as well. It's quite easy to remove an article - always has been.
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Re:Seem to remember... (Score:5, Interesting)
They probably refuse to take down content that is legally protected or that is legally not a full work and even if they take it down, within a few minutes another version might be up again so it sounds like the RIAA is going to have to send a lot of notices to take every single Usenet post down.
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In many cases the kind of "spiders" used by the RIAA/MPAA/etc don't even appear to look at the file size or even the whole filename. Thus they get all sorts of str
USENET? (Score:5, Interesting)
They wanna take down USENET?
And they're gonna target a single NNTP provider to do it?
OMFG, USENET was P2P before P2P was invented. It's so distributed, diffuse, and attributionless that it's practically untouchable.
Who keeps picking out windmills for RIAA to tilt at? Their legal attack strategist needs to put down the crack pipe and step away from his desk.
Seriously...
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Re:USENET? (Score:4, Interesting)
Some ISPs don't provide newsgroup access anymore, make it a pain to get or have limits on uploading or downloading binaries. RIAA pressure could make this the norm.
Services like Usenet.com and Giganews are quite possibly vulnerable, as we see from this lawsuit. Maybe they'll try to go for customer logs next?
It may not be possible to take down Usenet, but it is quite possible to make it a little more difficult or risky than it is now for the average college student to access binaries.
Although I think the real point of this is to instill paranoia. RIAA lawsuits are a more than anything else a scare tactic and an effective PR campaign designed to instill fear in casual downloaders. That may be why they're going after Usenet.com instead of Giganews or similar sites, to instill some confusion and so that the aforementioned college student thinks he's at risk of a lawsuit himself if he downloads from Usenet (no matter what provider he uses.) My theory at least, take it with a grain of salt.
They might (Score:1, Insightful)
They might, but for downloaders, it might not do that much good.
Remember that the RIAA won their last case because the woman "made available" certain songs on P2P. But if you download, you aren't making something available, and thus less likely to raise the ire of a retarded jury in kansas.
Plus, if a nntp provider is smart, they won't keep logs beyond the amount a user has downloaded.
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Bummer. But it was bound to happen. The binaries hosts have gotten a bit too blatant with their marketing and have made USENET binary downloads a far easier endeavor than it used to be. The critical mass of users which triggers copyright lawsuit
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If the large binary providers go down, it will be back to the days of scattered binaries, ever changing group names, and, any time a group gets too big, your provider will drop it.
It will no longer (or won't become) be a distribution method for the masses.
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It doesn't need to be in popular groups. If it's on there, the global search will find it. It can even be seperated into 30 different groups.
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It's not all that distributed where the binaries are concerned. Unless it's your primary business, you don't carry the binaries groups. I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of USENET piracy could be disrupted by taking down less than a dozen USENET providers.
You could. At least in the U.S.
On a lark, I went and drew a little back-of-the-envelope map of Usenet based on a random selection of Path headers from some binary postings. It's not scientific or anything (although I'm sure somebody could probably write a little Perl script that would do it to a few thousand messages and produce a nice peering map), but you start to see who the big players are pretty quickly.
I don't even think you'd need a dozen. If you could force maybe four or five major U.S. sites to di
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I hear they hired a guy named Don Quixote.
-
Re:RIAA's biggest mistake.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Seriously...
--
The RIAA's biggest mistake is picking up the role of angry bull elephant. When an angry bull elephant starts attacking the village with intent to cause as much harm as possible, the villagers are quick to;
1 Run and hide.
2 Put up defenses.
3 Directly attack the threat.
In short.. Number 1 is trade offline with the sneaker net. USB drives, USB music p
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Even the congress is looking at changing copyright law.
Could you please supply a reference for this statement? TIA
Re:Supplied refrence.. (Score:2)
The top entry is responses to questions from Slashdot.. Nice!
Rep. Boucher:
I am in the process of drafting comprehensive legislation which will
reaffirm the fair use rights of the users of information and create a
better balance between the copyright owners, who currently dominate the
Congressional debates on intellectual property measures, and the users
of copyrighted information.
http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/bparchive?year=2001&post=2 [upenn.edu]
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How's the RIAA or MPAA going to stop that nonsense?
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Usenet.com? Yes. NNTP? no. The real problem with Usenet.com is that they provide a web gateway to access their newsgroups. To a n00b, the web browser is *THE* internets and how all the tubes connect together via The Google. Most other usenet providers avoid the web gateway and require the old fashion NNTP client. By not providing a web gateway and not providing a web-based (searchable) index of their content, other commercial NNTP hosts avoid the potential Usenet.com is
Common Carrier Defense ... (Score:4, Interesting)
Along these lines, what about Google/other search engines that show "copyrighted" content - either in the snippet or in their cache?
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Along these lines, what about Google/other search engines that show "copyrighted" content - either in the snippet or in their cache?
The very short answer: No. They're protected by the DMCA safe harbor protections but they are not legally common carriers, which is probably a good thing since it carries a bunch of regu
Re:Common Carrier Defense ... (Score:5, Informative)
The issue is that Usenet.com blatantly (from a common-sense point of view, whether it's legally meaningful I have no idea) markets themselves as a way to illegally obtain copyrighted content. As someone put it yesterday, if the phone companies ran commercials advertising "Telephones -- the best way to plan your terrorist activities!" that would cut into their ability to claim common carrier status as a defense. Same thing for Safe Harbor.
Incidentally, didn't we have a story a few months ago complaining that the MPAA and RIAA weren't suing usenet providers, and how that proved some conspiracy theory? If that faction is relieved at this new development, I haven't seen them mention it.
Re:Common Carrier Defense ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Where I think they get into trouble is that, in order to claim Safe Harbor, they basically need to be able to claim "hey, somebody put that up onto our system, we didn't know it was infringing, we didn't even know it was there!" And it's a bit tough to do that with Usenet, seeing as how it's about 99% binaries and anyone who's ever opened up the alt.binaries.* hierarchy can tell that it's got a lot of bootlegs and warez in it.
It would be a little comical to see a whole bunch of seasoned network engineers and other greybeards try to claim that they had no idea there was copyrighted material on Usenet. ("Warez? On my Usenet?") But that's sort of the position they have to put themselves in, in order to get a successful 512(c) defense.
They also have to show that in the past they've complied with DMCA takedown orders against content that a copyright holder has pointed out as being infringing, which it seems like they weren't doing. That may also be a problem, although maybe they can argue that they didn't have the capability to delete articles (after all, if they took them out of their store, would they just have come in on a feed from another site that they peer with?). It might be difficult to get a judge to swallow that, though.
I think they're in trouble, but I'm not sure exactly how much trouble just yet.
Re:Common Carrier Defense ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is that a barrier to a successful 512(c) defense? If the host, Usenet.com in this case, services all take down notices in a reasonable and timely fashion and makes reasonable efforts to accommodate copyright holders (the court decides what is and is not reasonable) then have they not fulfilled their obligation under the law? How would they know if there was a copy of Eric Clapton's greatest hits on their network? Sure they could search for it if they wanted to but are they required to have automated agents searching all of the time for everything that might be copyrighted? Is that reasonable or even feasible? Certainly not, it is the responsibility of the copyright holder to locate infringement and take the legally required step of sending a take down notice. As long as there is a reasonable system in place to service requests from copyright holders, then the content host has fulfilled its obligations and should be able to take refuge in the safe harbor.
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When dealing with a massive corporation shoveling buckets of money into the hands of the senators, the "won't somebody think of the children" argument is remarkably hard to hear.
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Pretty blatant, if you ask me.
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Federal funds did * not * build the phone network (Score:5, Informative)
The first US telephone exchange opened in 1978. AT&T and the regional Bell companies were privately financed from day one and evolved into regulated public utilities.
The common carrier rule can be traced back to the days when Western Union was in its prime and censoring telegrams it found inconvenient.
With the the exception of civil engineering projects like the Panama Canal, federal spending on infrastructure begins with the New Deal of the 1930s.
Re:Federal funds did * not * build the phone netwo (Score:2)
Uh... What?
1878 (Score:2)
It's a typo. So sue me. Bell's patent was issued in 1876 and the telephone was a big hit that year at the Centennial Expo in Philadelphia.
The rub. (Score:5, Informative)
To be honest, I don't know how Usenet.com can not qualify for DMCA protection, since it's exactly the type of service that the Safe Harbor exception is supposed to protect. The only thing that seems like it could harm Usenet.com is their advertising, which does veer a little into "wink, wink, nudge, nudge" territory. However, damning a company because it says it respects users' privacy, without actually advocating any type of criminal activity, seems like pretty terrible precedent, and I can only hope (although at this point I have little faith) that a judge will see it similarly.
I think the mention in the Ars article about Safe Harbor being related to "transitory network communications" is irrelevant here. Transitory network communications is covered under 512(a) of the OCILLA (which is part of the DMCA); the portion that I would expect Usenet.com to seek protection under is 512(c), "Information Residing on Systems or Networks at Direction of Users".
You can read the relevant section here [cornell.edu], but the significant portion, IMO, is:
The major things they're going to have to avoid are that they "had actual knowledge" that the material was infringing (which might be tough -- I mean, anybody who opens up alt.binaries.movies can probably tell pretty quickly that it's full of bootlegs) and that they didn't receive a "financial benefit directly attributable" to the infringing activity. I think that second one is actually a little easier (for Usenet.com) than the former. And, of course, they have to successfully argue/explain that they don't really have the power to remove articles from Usenet, because of the nature of the network -- it would probably help their case if they started at least deleting articles from their spool/store when they receive a complaint.
I suspect that this may lead to a shakedown in the Usenet provider world, if Usenet.com loses. At the very least, the big providers might have to do more in order to maintain a veneer of plausible deniability (deleting some of the more obviously movie and/or warez related groups, perhaps), or move their servers out of the U.S.
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Wow. Suicide by advertisement. (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.usenet.com/articles/free_download.htm [usenet.com]
To wit: (in case they take the page down, which I sure would if I were them)The hell with it: They're pretty fucked.
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Looks like the tired old argument about free files equating or not equating to pirated files is still alive and kicking.
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Totally beyond plausibility. (Score:2)
Hmmm, are you familiar with something called public domain? Maybe you live in a world where everything has a copyright, but I don't. Copyrights expire and for good reason; so the public can take the work and expand it which can enrich the market more so than the original work - think Shakespeare, Dickens, etc. So, is this advertising to pirates? I don't think so. Although, when a pirate sees the above article, that is what they read. Please take your myopic blinders off and remember that the world has been creating content since the beginning of recorded history, not just the twentieth century.
Seriously?
Do you have any idea how much public domain content has actually been digitized? I suspect that if you took all the PD music and video that's around in digital form, combined it with all the text, you still wouldn't get close to the capacity of a big Usenet site. (Keep in mind the entire Library of Congress -- which is mostly filled with post-1923 content -- is estimated to be about 20TB; a big newsfeed might take in 3-4TB a day.)
Yes, there is a lot of old stuff around. (In fact, I'm a rather ard
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By the way, here's a link [dance-industries.com] I happen to like to another "Where Can You Get Free Downloads These Days?" place. I'm sure most of those free downloads are also on Usenet somewhere or other, but the site I linked is much better organized and has rating systems and other helpful stuff. I foun
Not exactly.... (Score:2)
In 1995, that advertisment makes a lot of sense, as not-for-profit copyright infringment was non-actionable.
IANAL
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Heck, even warez sites and BBSes in 1995 were less obviou
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I was looking at Top1000 yesterday and they're actually the top provider in terms of traffic, even bigger than Giganews, which surprised me (because Giganews is the default provider for a lot of broadband ISPs, i.e. Comcast, who don't do their own news servers anymore).
Isn't that just the top servers by "article flow", aka "number of posts made by subscribers"? It seems that experienced, heavy posters have their favorite service, which may or may not overlap with the preferred "leeching" news servers.
I used UNS first before trial-ing and switching to Giganews. Side-by-side comparison showed that while retention was comparable, UNS's completion was awful. PAR files became mandatory on nearly everything I downloaded vs. Giga not needing them on the same exact files. Intere
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Isn't that just the top servers by "article flow", aka "number of posts made by subscribers"? It seems that experienced, heavy posters have their favorite service, which may or may not overlap with the preferred "leeching" news servers.
I'm not totally sure. I think that it's some metric which is supposed to measure peering, not necessarily the number of messages originating there. So you could get a high rating either by originating a lot of messages and sharing them with only one other server, or you could do it by sharing a smaller number of messages with a lot of servers. At least, I think that's how it's measured -- I'd be interested if anyone wanted to clarify.
It's entirely possible that UNS.com wins because it's where the traffic
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Along with every single high-speed broadband provider on earth.
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Common Carrier - Not Safe Harbor (Score:2)
Why doesn't the MAFIAA just sue all the telcos-- without them, nobody would be able to download unauthorized copies of their material!?
I'm sure USENET.COM will lose the battle, but it is really sick that this is the case.
RIAA-Free Zone (Score:2)
That, my friends, would be a good thing.
At this point -- seriously -- I'm actually quite interested in knowing whether or not an artist I am interested in purchasing an album from is with a label that is part of the RIAA.
By promoting the downloading of commercial-type stuff, filesharing apps and sites are just "working" the same marketing machine set up by these huge organizations.
Better to get rid o
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Ok, let's begin with the obvious stuff (Score:2)
1) Usenet != usenet.com, which is merely a host. The RIAA is not attacking a protocol. They are suing a company that hosts a lot of NNTP traffic, some of which may be infringing on copyright.
2) It's fscking hilarious that the DCMA may wind up being used against the RIAA. Kudos to Ars for thinking up that one.
3) If the DCMA doesn't help, maybe the supreme court ruling stating that an ISP is not responsible for user generated content will. Details here. [dotcomeon.com] (Note: The article isn't about copyright, i
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The DMCA specifically says that. this isn't new and it's what protects google et. al.
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1) True, but there are not really all that many major Usenet servers of this type. It won't be difficult to kill them off, much as we've seen with various commercial P2P developers (Napster, Grokster), torrent trackers, etc.
2) I wouldn't pin my hopes on it. There's a number of hurdles and I doubt that usenet.com will get over them.
3) You're thinking of 47 USC 230. It doesn't apply in copyright cases by its own language. And it is quite distinct from the idea of a common carrier (w
if usenet.com takes down stuff (Score:1, Interesting)
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Take Down Notices? (Score:2)
a host not a carrier (Score:2)
Usenet.com is a host, not a carrier. It advertises easy access to pirated content. It is Usenet.com that may be going down, like Grokster.
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Re:Take Down Notices? (Score:5, Informative)
Of course, that assumes the party issuing the takedown notice knew to cite the offending articles by Message-ID. The canceled messages will not re-propagate to the server. The poster, anywhere else in the world, could still repost under a new Message-ID (automatically generated for every posting). The cancel messages can even contain the takedown notice in each message body, which would be readable in the newsgroup named "control" and/or in "control.cancel" if it is present.
They wouldn't necessarily even have to cryptographically sign the cancels since they are local, though it might be wise to prevent fellow users of the same server wildly canceling other articles.
These organizations could technically send out their own cancel messages with unrestricted distribution, though I'm not familiar with the current state of the art in preventing forged cancels. If spammers have truly lost interest in Usenet, it may have come to the point where cancel messages are generally ignored.
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I think that's incorrect.
First, cancellation messages have a tortured history and generally aren't honored.
Second, the issue is with content on usenet.com's own servers. All they would need to do is to null out the body of each message and leave the header information (for administrative purposes, etc.). This is indeed what a number of providers act
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First, cancellation messages have a tortured history and generally aren't honored.
Well as I said they only have to work on one server, and that's on the server that's issuing them, and if done in response to a DMCA notice, it would be the administrators of that server issuing them, so they can easily honor them. In fact, if their own administrative tools had no effect on their own server, that would be incompetence.
They have no responsibility to remove the content from any other servers, and the Distribution: local header would ensure that the cancel message doesn't leave their server
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I believe altering the body of a message while maintaining the same Message-ID would be a violation of RFC 1036.
There is a technical reason: blanking out the body in the news spool while retaining the headers risks propagating the altered message to other servers. Deleting the message completely from the server could allow it to re-propagate to that server, making it look like the site failed to comply with the notice. A local administrative cancel won't propagate anything, so there's no altered message competing with the altered message in the flood, and a record remains to prevent it from re-propagating to the s
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So the **AA's plan is (Score:3, Interesting)
This is going to be interesting. If Usenet.com goes down, next will be NNTP service filters on every ISP in the US, and then by association, such efforts will be made in the rest of the world. Perhaps it might not work in Russia for fear of being mistaken for a spammer, but in the rest of the world, the US government and the **AA will push to have the entire Internet filtered...
The next step? To filter all your email, IM, and VoIP traffic as well, and in fact any method of sharing data. Sounds like tin foil hat stuff, but that seems to be the writing on the wall. If the **AA has those filters in place, guess who will be using them? Why the NSA of course. Any bets on whether the **AA are digging so deep into their wallets on the legal battles because the NSA is promising to refund some portion of the cost, if they are not already secretly funding them from money that went missing in Iraq?
yeah, sounds a bit crazy, but after the lies that have been discovered lately, it would NOT surprise me.
Protocol war (Score:2)
But it'll be reversed: the monopolists roll out a new litigation tech battlefront, and the real people roll out a new tech before the first lawsuit goes on the docket.
Like the copy protection wars,
How far does this go? (Score:1)
Does this also protect torrent trackers? I thought isohunt had to take down US trackers because of riaa pressure. Does this protect them too (as I know they have a takedown option)?
I would have thought this was the first defense any of the trackers would have used. Why would it apply only here,
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Read 17 USC 512 carefully (it's not as well-organized as one would prefer) making careful note of various cross-references, definitions (which may be in section 101 as well as 512), etc. and also take a look at the page here [copyright.gov].
Further, I'd take a look at cases where 512 was an issue, including Napster, Ellison, and Perfect 10.
The safe harbor is useful, but it takes work to qualify for it, and it doesn't apply to everything or everyone.
Streisand Effect (Score:1)
So how does this work for .... (Score:3, Interesting)
Does the genuine originator ever get notified and given an opportunity to counter?
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I doubt it.
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</anecdote>
"They don't host it!" (Score:3, Interesting)
This is absolutely wrong. They may not be the initial point that the file enters the network, but they DO host the files on their own servers there -entire- time that it's available to their customers. Every usenet provider does this. It's how the entire system works.
Each provider can choose which groups they will bother to handle (it used to be common for free services not to handle the 'alt.' newsgroups) and they -can- remove anything from that server that they choose. It wouldn't be fun to find exactly what the RIAA has requested a takedown for without specific post IDs, but it can be done.
Places that don't host the files are merely indexing services (like newzbin.com) and truly do not host the files. It's just a list of the post IDs that you need to grab what you are looking for from usenet.
I've never heard of a usenet provider that has removed partial content... Only entire groups, and never (that I've heard of) because someone asked them to.
So while it is theoretically possible for this law to protect them, they've never complied with it and it won't do them a bit of good.
It won't do the RIAA any good, either, though... Hundreds or thousands of servers all over the world mirror the same information from 3 to 200 days... They would have to individually ask for the files to be removed from each of them individually.
(Before anyone objects, I know they aren't stored as 'files', but that's irrelevant to the conversation.)
Number of takedown notices could be huge... (Score:1)
So, for this to be effective against any one program/video/MP3/e
Kinda Sad (Score:2, Insightful)
What is, to us, a distributed and self-replicating system of nodes to distribute information (in the form of text "articles") worldwide is, to a judge, a website that sells access to copyrighted materials and refuses to remove them.
It's the same sort of roadblock torrent sites run into: computer illiteracy. Though, to be fair, it's not like judges should be required by l
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In all the decade that I have used the Usenet, I have never encountered a free provide that actually provided the *.binary.* groups, in fact most people considered posting binary to the Usenet a pretty stupid idea and in many Usenet hierarchies its not even allowed in the first place. Usenet.com, Giganews and friends really don't look to me much like a harmless Usene
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That being said, I feel like binaries were a natural evolution of Usenet's purpose of information sharing (copyright issues notwithstanding). And I agree that the expressly binary providers are a lot like warez sites, however a suit against one provider (especially one called "usenet") will be bad PR for Us
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The computer literate does not pretend that binary content cannot be encoded as text. That "articles" cannot be quickly and easily combined and decoded as movies, mp3s, etc.
What the judge sees when h
Educating Judges (Score:1)
When judges are judging technology based lawsuits, why won't they ask for "Friend of the Court" briefs explaining the technology and what are practical steps that can be done (i.e. reasonable steps that any competent system admin can do). After all, in this society, no one can know everything of every technology. If you study la
I claim prior art (Score:1)
I claim prior art. I advertised that I wanted to sell one of my textbooks when I dropped a course.
RIAA owes me money.
All MP3's Are Infringing (Score:3, Insightful)
The attitude of the RIAA appears to be that any and all MP3 files are by their very nature illegal, and that they deserve huge woges of money for anyone who has ever touched one. This, of course, is not true at all -- except in the mind of the RIAA.
If anyone at all is going to kill the rich culture of this country, it won't be the filesharers. It will be the RIAA, and copyrights extended to infinity -- and beyond!
I thought most if not all of Usenet is encoded. (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe i'm missing a point or two here. But it seems to me in order for anyone including the RIAA to define the content of Usenet they would have to decode the binary "and probably have to have a special reader for text" messages. UUencode YENC and MIME seem to be the major encoding types and seeing as the servers store purely code in an unidentifiable format there is no way they could actually SEE what is posted without downloading it and re-encoding it back to a compiled file. Movies/audio etc are all converted TO ascii and then back.
You cannot watch a stream coming into a usenet server and say it's an MP3 or MPEG or AVI If memory serves me. It's possible the subject line would be clear/plain text but more than that is encoding.
Correct me if I am wrong.. I've been using Usenet since 97 but it's been since like 98 since I investigated what made it work.
Dummies... (Score:2)
Anyone reminded of Don Quixote yet?
sue the internet (Score:2)
What I want to know is, how long until the RIAA sues Internet.com, because of infringing stuff they found on the internet?