Filesharing-the future

[king mob]

Reading this article does not make the future of filesharing look very good for all.
I cant see the point of sueing private individuals to gain small profits apart from the fear it may install in people downloading.
It seems to be something the American music industry is pushing but does anyone know what the situation is in the U.K?

[Neil]

I don't think there;s that much they can do here because of the Data Protection Act.  As far as I'm aware (and I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong), if they tried the same thing here as the RIAA is doing in America, your ISP would have to come to you and say "Hey this company wants your details, can I pass them on?"  Which is your chance to say "NO!!"

[blue jammer]

ISP's will most likely just pass the details onto them without letting you know, I got a mail last year (April) from NTL via Universal Studios for downloading My Little Eye.

It worried me a little for a week or so, then I carried on again.

[Uncle_Z]

your ISP would have to come to you and say "Hey this company wants your details, can I pass them on?"

Without your consent I think the copyright owner would have to get a court order for this.  Would probably have to be public interest / security based to override Data Protection.  Whether they could get an order against the ISP against a class of users / a list of IPs I dunno.  Cost of individual orders for each IP would be excessive, but lumping some gubbins who swiped a couple of files with the multi-gig thieving monsters would make the public interest argument disproprtionate.  (Okay okay I'll go away and think about it ;))

With Cable if you switch off the modem now and again don't you get a new IP?  Not much of a barrier but it would mean loads of numbers and the ISP would have to track who owned the IP address on named dates.

[El Unicornio, mang]

I'm not particularly worried. The only people who are being sued are people who use Kazaa, but even that can be used safely as long as you don't upload (although that would be a bit selfish)
Bittorrent and Soulseek seem to be fine.
Incidentally, in Canada downloading files is perfectly legal, you can only be prosecuted if you upload files.

[TOCMFIC]

Unicorn is correct. In Canada, the record companies ran whining to the government a few years ago and said "All these blank CD's must be for pirating music, therefore we want the government to charge a levy and give it to us". "Okay" said government, so any blank CD I buy, a chunk of change goes to the recording industry, despite the fact that I've made precisely 4 audio CD's in 5 years.

So, last year, the recording industry went to the government and said "We're still not getting enough money, can you please up the levy?" Canadian government says "Okay, there you go... Oh, by the way, just a little thing, in doing this, we've decided downloading MP3's is illegal. I mean you're getting money for the disks, so the consumer should be allowed to do what they're paying for. Have a nice day."

Now, while it's grossly unfair the recording industry gets a chunk of change when I, for example, send my Dad video of his grandson, at least the government decided to do something good and make downloading lega,

The CRIA, Canada's answer RIAA (all the evil, one fifth the population, or the same as the RIAA, only in lumberjack shirts) is going after 29 people for UPLOADING on Kazaa. Several ISP's, including mine. Someone went to the courts and got the information. The ones on my ISP aren't even in this province.

So the CRIA have gone to the ISP's and asked for the details. There is no data protection act here, though I believe the government are working on it, but the reactions are interesting.

Shaw, a cable TV and Internet provider have told the CRIA to fuck off. (YAY SHAW! Too bad they get pissy if you download a lot, else I'd go with them for my internet when I move.)

Videotron, a big ISP in Quebec have rolled over. (Insert joke about the French here.)

The others, including my ISP, have said at the very least, they are going to contact the customers first and tell them what's going on before handing over the information.

So while downloading is legal, the wankers are at least TRYING to get the uploaders, though compare the numbers sued in the US with the numbers here.

Oh yeah, all 29 are on Kazaa.

[TOCMFIC]

Incidentally, I think some Soulseek users have been harassed, at least according to a friend of mine.

As I read the other day, all this is doing is making the push for totally anonymous P2P more impressive. There are already two P2P apps out there that claim to be anonymous, and one of them is open source, meaning you could audit the code to back up the theories.

Rather than stopping P2P, all this bullshit is going to do is lead to development of apps with tougher security and anonymity. I mean really, if they want to go after downloaders, someone only has to come up with an app that, for example, makes it look like you're in Canada...

Really, the protocols the net is built on are so broken that I highly doubt ANY organisation can bring down P2P. It's just going to push development further and faster. If the RIAA had embraced it and been sensible, they could have maintained a degree of control. Instead, with their stormtrooper tactics, they're just fuelling rapid development of newer, better P2P.

Maybe one day these fucktards will learn, you can't cram the genie back into the bottle once it's out. You'd think they'd have learnt that with Napster. Cut off one head, three grow back.

[king mob]

The worry i have is that theres companies selling peoples details to the highest bidder, regardless of data protection & its something thats really easy to get hold of.
I know of at least 5/6 comapnies(Experian are a minor example)who have massive contact lists that dwarf anything any directory enquiry company has & manage to get around any DPA law we have in the U.K.
The position as i can see it is(this is based on experience & nothing "tangible" but it happens on a regular basis) that your details can reach those who want to know if they pay the right price but can you be prosecuted under current U.K or E.U law?

[Bilko]

Sony is a company that a double standards in it's attitude against file sharing.. There are company that is an electrical manufacturer and also a record company if they are so against file sharing why do they then continue to sell HI FI that can play CD-R/RW. Sure we could us this technology to only copy our CD's we have bought and own for safety reasons (who ever has actually done that!!!) or we could use an legal pay music site. But that isn't true Hi-fi's have been able to play CD-R/RW's for a few years now, long before legal music pay sites appeared. Sony (and other electrical companies) knew there was a massive market for CD players can that play CD-R/RW's and would make a shit load of money out of it.

Sony last year ran an advertisement last year on billboards that had a picture of a woman and underneath written. 'She just downloaded her first music track' (or something along those lines). She/and us COULD use a legal site to pay for track, but we and Sony know where we are getting the music tracks fro. This advert did nothing to deter file sharing which is what Sony want.

[Jon]

Well I think the thing is companies like Sony are so large and spread out they don't always act as a single entity.  The parts of Sony who sell recorded music undoubtedly want to stop p2p and copyright infringement, but the parts which manufacture hi-fi equipment just want to sell as much as possible, and if the consumers are into mp3 and cd-r, then they'll give them equipment which can play them.  And since the electronics equipment market is probably far more profitable for Sony than the recordings sales they're not about to stop selling that equipment no matter how much their music recordings division complains.

I don't think p2p is going to stop any time soon, nor do I think the RIAA or anyone else actually expects it to.  Filesharing had been long before Napster was around, but music companies only really became concerned when a lot of people started doing it.  They don't have to make filetrading impossible, they just have to make it difficult enough that the majority of people won't do it.

[TOCMFIC]

Sony are hypocrites. I mean they make MP3 players for crying out loud, plus they do their own proprietary compression players as well.