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10-31-24 11:53 PM
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Acmlm's Board - I3 Archive - General Chat - It's a glorious day for P2P; 'closing letter' delivered to RIAA, MIAA, etc.
  
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drjayphd
Posts: 841/1170
Originally posted by MathOnNapkins
And who says you couldn't download the art over the internet? etc.

Admit it you just like the smell of the glossy new paper in a freshly opened CD.


Actually, yeah, I do. But once downloading art gets more widespread, I still hang my hat on that.
||bass
Posts: 412/594
Originally posted by HyperHacker
Just like non-free debuggers and hex editors that allow their own executables to be opened.
I never understood that logic with the hex editors and debuggers. You could always just use one set to crack the other and then switch.
HyperHacker
Posts: 2987/5072
Just like non-free debuggers and hex editors that allow their own executables to be opened.
||bass
Posts: 410/594
Here's a bit of irony that's somewhat on-topic: Many P2P clients have ads in them that you can remove if you buy the "premium version". Guess where you can download the premium version for free?
MathOnNapkins
Posts: 706/1106
And who says you couldn't download the art over the internet? etc.

Admit it you just like the smell of the glossy new paper in a freshly opened CD.
drjayphd
Posts: 839/1170
Originally posted by Jilkon
Originally posted by witeasprinwow
And you're forgetting about the artists who are trying to make a living off their music. True they will still get money from other music-related sources, but you're still unfairly cutting into their margins.

Plus there are some solo artists who like being a one-man act and not going out on tour, and letting piracy run rampant would screw them all over.

Are you hired by them? Seriously, are you? Because no one with a little knowledge about that stuff would say such things. The music companies are screwing artists over, they are taking the big part of the money and they decide what should be allowed to be released. Selling music on the internet (lossless+mp3 so you have the real quality and a nice-size version) is what will let lesser known artists make some dough, and having free songs etc is a great way to let people try before they buy. Also, music is too expensive. Buying single songs (online) at a much lower cost is better since you can pick just the stuff you like.


Awwww, he's trying to make the whole "performance royalties uber alles" case. Most touring acts make their money, well, touring. And selling merch. And publishing. Not selling CD's. Are the labels screwing artists over? Besides Touch and Go and some other indies, yes. But the majors are pretty much where the crap will sell, and as long as that holds true, they aren't going anywhere. You know, music for people that have no taste in music. That'll only get worse when they start selling video game soundtracks, but that's just my opinion, I could be wrong. I'm not, but in theory, I could.

Originally posted by Jilkon
"Omg but I like to have the cd :<", so uh, burn one. If (when) the online music industry hands it to the cd companies, artists will probably just release some collector's edition cds for the hardcore fans. Or something.


(puts you through a table)



The artwork, at least for me, is just part of the experience. Maybe I'm the only one here who sees music as more than a commodity.
emcee
Posts: 508/867
Originally posted by HyperHacker
So what counts as discouraging piracy? A message in the installer that says "piracy is bad, don't do it"?


They all do that. But apparently that wasn't enough. I think the ruling said something about filtering results, or blocking transfers. Which isn't really technically feasible. Content owners could contact the software venders about intellectual property violations on a network being accessed by their software, and the vender could then add filters for files matching that checksum (probably through so auto-update system), but then just changing a single byte anywhere in the file would easily bypass the filter.
Jilkon
Posts: 158/227
Originally posted by witeasprinwow
And you're forgetting about the artists who are trying to make a living off their music. True they will still get money from other music-related sources, but you're still unfairly cutting into their margins.

Plus there are some solo artists who like being a one-man act and not going out on tour, and letting piracy run rampant would screw them all over.

Are you hired by them? Seriously, are you? Because no one with a little knowledge about that stuff would say such things. The music companies are screwing artists over, they are taking the big part of the money and they decide what should be allowed to be released. Selling music on the internet (lossless+mp3 so you have the real quality and a nice-size version) is what will let lesser known artists make some dough, and having free songs etc is a great way to let people try before they buy. Also, music is too expensive. Buying single songs (online) at a much lower cost is better since you can pick just the stuff you like.

"Omg but I like to have the cd :<", so uh, burn one. If (when) the online music industry hands it to the cd companies, artists will probably just release some collector's edition cds for the hardcore fans. Or something.
Sukasa
Posts: 1508/2068
No, hiring a band of mercenaries to kill anyone found pirating software/MP3s/whatever. Like that one clip I saw somewhere on the net, some violent RIAA anti-piracy ad.
HyperHacker
Posts: 2964/5072
So what counts as discouraging piracy? A message in the installer that says "piracy is bad, don't do it"?
emcee
Posts: 501/867
Originally posted by ||bass
[Yes except you're missing a critical point. Grokster was a private corperation that marketed software for use with a centralized network. OFF is an open system that users will eventually be able to integrate into any system. It's a methodology moreso than a product. If implemented on a decentralized network such as Kad, they would have to prove that every specific user was sharing copyrighted files one at a time. Not only would the legal costs of millions of court cases bankrupt even the largest companies, they would lose every individual case because in order to litigate against a specific user, the burden of proof would be on the MPAA/RIAA/etc to prove that the specific user is promoting piracy, something you can't do without knowing the exact identity of the user as well as the file being served (a feat FAR more easily said than done on the new OFF system).

I don't know how many times I have to say this. The fact you can't justify something had ZERO impact on whether or not you can prove it in a court of law. The legal rules of evidence are far stricter than any rules set down for a phylosophical debate.



No, Grokster ran on a decentralized network. And that fact won them several cases until appeals made it to the supreme court. The intial verdicts were that since they didn't control the network their software ran on they weren't taking affirmative steps to promote piracy, and therefor weren't resposible for the action of those using their product under the precedent of the Betamax case. However, SCOTUS said that since the network is overwhelmingly used for piracy, supporting that network (in this case, by making software to access it) without taking steps to discourage piracy, was in itself promoting piracy.

Since pretty much all modern filesharing software run on a decentralized network, shutting the software venders down won't make the software stop working. But the AA's have started suing individual users, not in an attempt to shut down the network one user at a time, but instead to scare other users into switching to legal pay services. Since it can easily be proven that these users have commited piracy, there is no need to use the Grokster ruling. But if this OFF system ever catches on, then they can just switch to using that. The Grokster ruling wasn't so much that they had directly promoted piracy but that they supported a network that promoted piracy. So it wouldn't matter whether it could proven what copyrighted file a user transfered to who, or whether a copyrighted file was transfered at all, only that their computer acted as a node on a network primarily used for piracy.

Originally posted by windwaker

My analogy could've been better, but it's accurate if you say that the gravel isn't really gravel, but pieces of the other statues... just use the puzzle analogy.



No that's not it either. It's more like you have two bags of gravel that when mixed together a statue pops out that in no way resembles the gravel. A very simple example, say this is the file:

68144209

So the program would create files like this:

1307
0303

And files like this:

0502
1403

The files created in no way resemble the original file or each other. But when combined:

13*05=68
07*02=14
14*03=42
03*03=09

They create the original file. This obviously isn't exactly how it works, and much larger numbers are involved, but this is the basic concept.
blackhole89
Posts: 227/427
This technology sounds indeed interesting... from what I got, it would basically lead to the providers of the information not being suable by nowadays' laws; disregard that, the situation wouldn't change much for people who use the service for downloading pirated software or whatever juristically.

No matter wheterh internet piracy is to be considered a positive or negative thing... I think the RIAA and comparable organizations already went too far with the privacy intrusions that go with their investigation tactics. Of course, one might argue that an effective countermeasure, like this technology might turn out to be, would only lead to more supervision or even be just another step in a spiral of countermeasure-supervision-countermeasure-supervision escalation. In fact, I think industry lobbies and anti-piracy organizations have sufficient power in capital countries to ban the technology even if there's no objective thing illegal to it.

But there's another point I would like to make... Let's take a short look at the late 19th century, when jurisdiction based on the assumption of everybody being equal before the law started becoming popular among countries. A first, naive look over the situation might tell you this kind of law served the purpose of protecting the socially weak (middle class people, commoners, software users etc.) against the socially strong (industry representatives, landlords, software companies, what-not), who naturally used and abused their positions of power before. A long-forgotten, especially by the latter, aspect of this kind of jurisdiction is that it also served to protect the socially strong from the socially weak. Why, one might ask? Well, the socially strong might have money, power and status, but they socially weak have one major advantage which is really all it ultimately comes down to - manpower. Brute strength, one might say. And history has shown sufficient evidence they do not hesitate to use it if they feel gravely mistreaten by their superiors. While the actual intent of these revolutions rarely, if ever, was achieved due to lack of planning in an inhomogenous mass defined as "everybody but the upper class", they usually well served their initial purpose of removing the previous elites from power. In that sense, law that forces social superiors to limit usage of their natural power over social inferiors, ultimately, serves their own protection by keeping the society, which is the main source of their power, stable.

Although we are nowhere near the edge of a civil war or revolution in the industrialized countries right now, I dare say a further increase in copyright-based supervision, or even more so a kind of privacy intrusion that affects wider parts of the people like the numberless ones which the omnipresent and blown up to immeasurable extent by politicians "threat by international terrorism" yields ("They could strike anywhere the next minute! What, you won't let us set up a video camera in your bathroom? You want to support the terrorists killing innocent citizens?"), could quickly lead to something comparable if the credibility basis for those measures crumbled. (Imagine what would happen if the majority realized that more people die in car accidents in Germany in a year than from terrorist strikes in the whole western world within 10 years and figured that the fear of the latter let them abandon citizen rights they fought for for the last 150 years without consideration)

Heck, that was quite a rant. I hope some of you read it anyway.

edit:
11:52:23> <laptuna> also please for the love of god
11:52:26> <laptuna> double-space paragraphs
HyperHacker
Posts: 2939/5072
Just FYI, illegally downloading music doesn't always mean "lol why buy it when i get it free". I use it to sample songs. If I like what I hear I buy the album, because MP3s suck compared to the originals anyway. This is one major thing these people always fail to account for, especially when stating how much is "lost" to piracy - they assume that everyone who pirates a copy of something would have bought it if piracy wasn't an option. Like Joe Pirate would have gone out and bought every NES game if he couldn't download the entire set? This can even work in reverse; there's many a CD I wouldn't have bought if I hadn't downloaded a song from them first, because I wouldn't know what I was buying.
Kind of ironic too, with a decentralized system like this, these claims are even more skewed by the fact that there is no longer a 1:1 ratio of illegal copies downloaded to illegal copies in use. Someone's client may have downloaded the file without them knowing it to keep the network healthy, and it's just sitting in a cache while they continue to use legal files. In this case even though a pirated copy has been downloaded, a copy hasn't been pirated.

Originally posted by emcee
I've read through the technical details, and I think I see how this works. It's clever, and it certainly creates a techinal loophole. But not a legal loophole. As long as a network implementing this system can be shown to promote piracy (which, according to the supreme court, means simply not trying to stop it), then just acting as a node on that network could also be consider promoting piracy, allowing you to be sued under the same precedence that won them the case against Grokster, without ever having to prove you, yourself, actually commited piracy.

Well then it sounds like an easy solution is to all start using this to share legal files. Just as BitTorrent was originally invented to share Linux ISOs because direct HTTP/FTP downloads ate up server bandwidth. Maybe from now on when I release a program/hack/etc I'll include an OFF link as well to cut down on the load to my server. If most people are using it for legal purposes they can't really say it's promoting piracy. That'd be a bit like saying people who use cars are murderers because murderers often transport their victims' bodies in cars. If that's mainly what they're being used for, then they may have a case, but in the real world where very few cars contain the body of someone that was just killed, or indeed anything illegal, to make such a claim would be ridiculous.
||bass
Posts: 387/594
Technically it's not smuggling because you aren't moving the product itself ilegally. It's like this: If Picasso made a painting worth millions and brought it across the border, he would be subject to tax. If however, Picasso simply brought canvas and a paintset and didn't paint the actual painting until afterwards, the tax would not be applicable in this case. There is also no way to say that Picasso should be taxed higher for the canvas and paint because he WILL make it into an expensive masterpeice because the paints and canvas are too generic to make that assumption. There is no way to know how the painting will turn out until after it's already been painted.

Similarly, there's no way to know what the data blocks are going to build until after the file has been fully assembled on the destination hard drive, at which point it's too late. This is not encryption, this is not data hiding. There is mathematically NO way to say what the blocks build because the correlation between blocks and finished files is not one-to-one. The blocks can be assembled to form basic_shoe_repair.pdf just as easily as they can be assembled to form copyrighted_song.mp3. You would literally need a time machine to know how things turn out before it's too late.

Even if the MPAA connected to the network and retrived a file, it wouldn't work because there is at least a possibility that every single user that sends a block to the downloading machine does not have a copy of any parts of the song anywhere on their computer. The block that my computer sends to the MPAA computer might very well have origionally come from basic_shoe_repair.pdf. I don't have copyrighted_song.mp3 anywhere on my computer, in fact I may have never even heard of the song. That doesn't stop my computer from sending a 128k block that just happens to fit what the MPAA machine is asking for.
Rom Manic
Posts: 262/557
Has anyone tried installing the software? It doesn't seem to work, or maybe I did it wrong somehow...

Anyway, whether or not you can prove anything in court about this in court remains to be seen, because it's a win-lose situation. It's still the same file, but the RIAA can't say it's their file. At the same time, it may be disguised, but isn't that what we call smuggling (Like someone earlier here said), which is outlawed?
||bass
Posts: 381/594
Originally posted by emcee
I've read through the technical details, and I think I see how this works. It's clever, and it certainly creates a techinal loophole. But not a legal loophole. As long as a network implementing this system can be shown to promote piracy (which, according to the supreme court, means simply not trying to stop it), then just acting as a node on that network could also be consider promoting piracy, allowing you to be sued under the same precedence that won them the case against Grokster, without ever having to prove you, yourself, actually commited piracy.
Yes except you're missing a critical point. Grokster was a private corperation that marketed software for use with a centralized network. OFF is an open system that users will eventually be able to integrate into any system. It's a methodology moreso than a product. If implemented on a decentralized network such as Kad, they would have to prove that every specific user was sharing copyrighted files one at a time. Not only would the legal costs of millions of court cases bankrupt even the largest companies, they would lose every individual case because in order to litigate against a specific user, the burden of proof would be on the MPAA/RIAA/etc to prove that the specific user is promoting piracy, something you can't do without knowing the exact identity of the user as well as the file being served (a feat FAR more easily said than done on the new OFF system).

I don't know how many times I have to say this. The fact you can't justify something had ZERO impact on whether or not you can prove it in a court of law. The legal rules of evidence are far stricter than any rules set down for a phylosophical debate.
sandrocklq
Posts: 82/210
The RIAA needs to grow a brain. Suing 12 year olds and grannies is a poor PR move. There will always be piracy unless we live in a total police state(and no one wants that).

I'd have less of a problem with it if they just told the people they caught that you have to pay for the cost of what you downloaded if you want to keep it. That's only fair, if nothing else to make sure the artist gets compensated. The problem is that the recording industry will screw any artist without a good agent. I like the solo guys approach best. Just sell albums directly. I think Weird Al does it that way now.
witeasprinwow
Posts: 467/613
Originally posted by Jilkon
Perhaps not. But you can justify file sharing. And it stands as clear as day that what the music industry is doing is but a desperate fight to hang on to what soon will be long lost. The internet will make music more interesting and more available (and cheaper!), for everyone's (except the record company CEO dudes) good. Fighting it is dumb.


No. If you don't give people some risk of being caught, almost nobody is going to buy the CD's.

And you're forgetting about the artists who are trying to make a living off their music. True they will still get money from other music-related sources, but you're still unfairly cutting into their margins.

Plus there are some solo artists who like being a one-man act and not going out on tour, and letting piracy run rampant would screw them all over.
Jilkon
Posts: 157/227
Originally posted by witeasprinwow
I think I've made my viewpoint clear on this before: You cannot justify internet piracy.

Perhaps not. But you can justify file sharing. And it stands as clear as day that what the music industry is doing is but a desperate fight to hang on to what soon will be long lost. The internet will make music more interesting and more available (and cheaper!), for everyone's (except the record company CEO dudes) good. Fighting it is dumb.
emcee
Posts: 498/867
I've read through the technical details, and I think I see how this works. It's clever, and it certainly creates a techinal loophole. But not a legal loophole. As long as a network implementing this system can be shown to promote piracy (which, according to the supreme court, means simply not trying to stop it), then just acting as a node on that network could also be consider promoting piracy, allowing you to be sued under the same precedence that won them the case against Grokster, without ever having to prove you, yourself, actually commited piracy.
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