edit: I made this post hurriedly after seeing the news somewhere I lost the link to. Searching for it in The Register, I found this. I’m not so savvy in legalese, so if there’s something wrong with what I said below, lemme know.
The supreme court of US… They ruled yesterday that a couple of P2P services, Grokster and Morpheus [edit](it belongs to Streamcast, right?)[/edit], <strike>are co-responsible</strike> can be held liable for the copyright infractions practiced by their users. In other words, if you download a song from Morpheus, RIAA will sue not only you but also Morpheus for it.
Blame MGM, they’re the ones moving this case.
This is just the most absurd thing I’ve ever seen. Soon it’ll spread to every P2P service. Ones like eDonkey and Bit Torrent sites will only be able to work legally if they find a way to asure 100% of the content flowing through them is legal, for they will be responsible and guilty for every single pirate file distributed.
Last year, in August, there was a ruling saying that the only responsibles for piracy were the ones distributing the warezed files. But it wasn’t the supreme court yet, and since the big fish’s now swallowed the smaller ones, I wonder what’ll be of eMule and torrent sites from now on.
If everybody thought the same way those judges do, then traffic departments/paving companies would be responsible for car crashes, ISP’s would be responsible for the act of hackers, electricity companies would be responsible for eletrocution and so on.
Idea from one of my colleagues: since software developers will be held liable for their file sharing soft, let’s use Messenger to spread Warez and watch M$ get sued for it.
In all technical respects, you are never really sharing “a file” but rather, downloading strings of coding that make up that “file” from multiple people at the same time. So in essence you arent really downloading software but rather the “puzzle pieces” that make it what it is.
Think of bit torrent like this:
I have Adobe Photoshop CS (see below for a fun fact! ^.~)
~Adobe Photoshop is a puzzle that I have put togather and I want to share it with the world.
~I host it online and people start to download it from me. But rather than downloading the whole image, they are taking pieces of the puzzle from myself, while others are taking other ones.
~The more people that download it, the more pieces get shared and pulled from each “user”.
Once all the pieces are collected on the person’s hard drive, the puzzle gets remade and viola, you have Adobe Photoshop CS!
While downloading, you avoided the legal problems of distributing a file because in technical respects, you shared pieces of coding, not the actual file itself!
While this is the way it has been described to me, I may be wrong, but that is why I HEARD torrent sharing gets around many piracy laws.
Fun Fact: The Microsoft Anti-Piracy website was designed and all the graphics for it were created using a PIRATED copies of Adobe software. Funny and ironic, eh? A guy from Microsoft who works in that department came into Gamestop one day and was telling us about it, I love the way things work.
It won’t change much. Sure, it might stop you and me who download an anime episode and a song every now and then, what it certainly won’t stop is the big guys, who have already gone on to use encrypted and standarised network services like sftp and irc.
It’s been illegal for years. It’s just official now, and it’s only targetting a small number of groups.
The law will most certainly be expanded as far as it can go, of course, but there’s a few things keeping it from blocking ALL P2P. First, not all P2P software is made in the US; if the parent company is outside of its jurisdiction, the courts can do little to stop it, other than go back to ineffectively targetting individual users. This is why Kazaa wasn’t included in the ruling; the rights to the software are owned by an Australian company.
The big thing I’m worried about is Bittorent, but that’s a bit of a grey area for law makers. Many sites use bittorent for perfectly legal reasons, and since there’s no central company to take down, it’s impossible to fully shut down the distribution of the programs. They could also target trackers, but once again, if they are located in a country that has no ties to the RIAA (as many are), the courts will have a hard time shutting them down.
Are the RIAA and MPIA greedy bastards? Yes. Do I think it’s wrong that they’re devoting nearly all their time and energy to shutting down P2P technology, rather than utilizing it in a way that benefits everyone? Yes. But in the end, another P2P software will come, file sharers will find ways to escape the RIAA, and everything will continue as it is now.
Every time piracy gets easy, it gets harder again for a few years. Then the pirates find a way to make it easy again, and then it gets harder for a few years. Whenever piracy is easy, enjoy it and get as much as you want, cause it’ll likely only last a little while.
You’re also paying the people who actually made the music, so there’s a chance that those people can make more music. I don’t know about you guys, but not all of the music I listen to is made by some major artist who already gets coverage on MTV and through ClearChannel, so those people could definitely use the support if we want to see more from them.
You know what I don’t get? Why the technology (and software) for making copies of Media was made available to the public in the first place.
I remember back when VCRs were introduced. I remember wondering, “but won’t people now tape stuff from TV and sell it?” And yup, video piracy was born. Why not just sell video players, so that people could only watch stuff sold by the companies owning the shows and movies? OK, so the public always wanted something like this, and the manufacturers knew they’d make millions of dollars that way. But the production companies should’ve known that giving the public the power to copy their products would result in rampant piracy. After VCRs came portable video cameras, and BAM! people started copying movies in theaters and selling them. And then cassette recorders- there goes music piracy. And eventually, of course, CD burning and file sharing online.
Yeah, it’s likely that the tech would have been invented sooner or later, and that it would’ve fallen into the wrong hands anyway… but at least the general public wouldn’t be to blame. We wouldn’t be in this ridiculous situation where millions of people shared stuff online for years only to THEN be told it’s illegal and being threatened with legal action.
:noway:
Because it’s pretty simple to record as well as play. If it can view it, then they’d find a way to reverse the process somehow. In the case of tape players, that is.
In the case of digital media, copy and paste was implemented in computers as a way to move data from one place to another. How would you like to not be able to move any of the files on your computer at all? That’s basically how it would be.
You wouldn’t be able to burn CDs/DVDs of things you’ve recorded, such as family gatherings, a wedding, or anything like that.
When there’s something made for good, it will be used for bad. That’s just how it goes.
Because people deserve to be able to create thier own forms of media as well as the big named companies that profit from high budget endevors like Television and Movies.
Saying that the solution to stoping piracy is to get rid of the means to do so, is punishing EVERYONE because of a few people’s mistakes. And thats evil, and evil is bad.
