Hello all.

I haven't posted in a long while, just checking back in to hear some opinions on the subject of the recent mass prosecutions of peer to peer file trading.

Does anyone know about the software the RIAA is using and any countermeasures that have been developed or are in the works?

Does anyone know anyone who has gotten a summons, or has gotten a summons themselves?

I have read the information on www.riaa.com and it looks like they are prosecuting people on the grounds of piracy. I thought piracy was attempting to re-sell or somehow use the shared data for profit.

If anyone has an opinion on this matter, or some information about the technical aspects of the software used in evidence collection, please post.

Thanks ~ EG

i have opinions on everything. on this subject.. here's what i have to say:

1 - the RIAA can suck my dick (if i had one)
2- it pisses me off that people are getting trouble in for "piracy" and such. not just because i am an avid fan warez and downloading free software, but because there are so many more worse things that the government could be spending our tax money on. if you think about it, all of us have really paid our dues and deserve to be able to download whatever we like. look at how much we shell out each year to the government in the form of income tax! i figure with all that money that we are forced to just hand over, i've paid them enough to cover the costs of all my pirating. i'm sure all of us have. also, like i said. so many worse things going on in this country. we should be concentrating on USEFUL domestic policies. things such as public education, eliminating un-needed social programs like welfare and affirmative action. maybe even getting a decent policy for minor drug offenders.
we should also work on immigration laws, and more secure borders. oh yeah, the economy is pretty sshitty too. that needs to be worked on too, but do we? no. the government would much rather re-build a country we just demolished. would rather prosecute kids for downloading mp3s and software. the one question i really want answered is this: who, besides huge oppressive corporations, are the pirates hurting? nobody. they don't run around killing people, they aren't the ones responsible for the shitty education system, or the useless socialist programs. they aren't the ones squandering other people's money for stupid reasons. they really aren't hurting anyone besides huge companies that charge way too much for their products in the first place. perhaps the RIAA should set a limit as to how much a cd should cost these days. say..$7? i know i would purchase a lot more albums if they were that cheap. i think a lot of people would. that way they can still get money, and the consumer doesn't feel like they've just been [censored] [censored] by the company they purchased the product from!

sorry, i realize that was a bit of a rant.. i could on for ever about topics like these. but i'll stop myself now. it just makes me mad that time, money and effort are being wasted on something as trivial as piracy. this country would be a much better place if we had our priorites straight and weren't ruled by money. it's a nice dream, but unfortunatly that will never happen.

I don't see why everyone is getting all riled up honestly. 1000 supenas out of 60 million file sharing users. So .00019% get slapped in the face. Let them spend there millions AOL gives them for fighting p2p networks and so forth. Anybody with just a little bit of common sense knows there impact will be very minimal.

If RIAA goes to a college or ISP and asks for a list of people who use p2p programs the school or ISP is obligated by law to provide.

Once RIAA began to file charges against people using p2p, file transfers dropped by 15%.


The following are just my extrapolations based on what I have read.


I do not think that that RIAA will go after any more people then is necessary. They want to make a point, not start a war against illegal p2p users. I think that the 1000 subpoenas that have been issued have been planed to cause the most turmoil among the public in the news and among, the law makers, it would not be worthwhile for them to try and prosecute everyone. So they choose a handful of people that whose fall will produce the desired effect. That effect is not to stop illegal p2p one there own, but to get the government to step in whether it be local or federal. Why would RIAA try to fight this battle with there money when they can convince the rest of the population it is wrong and get the government to use its money?

Ummm. According to kazaa file sharing increased 10% since the RIAA came out with all this supena crap. It was posted on /. and a number of other places.

I heard that it dropped 15% on NPR. I do not remember where they got 15%.

I suppose one should be skeptical of any numbers that are released. No matter where they come from.

"The first wave of lawsuits, which can carry penalties as high as $150,000 per infringement, or shared song, are expected to arrive at defendants' doorsteps in mid-August."

Wow, thats pretty expensive that would work out to $147 900 000 for me.

"The RIAA honestly has no idea what they're up against. They will be toast the first time they try to shut down a P2P network being used by any serious black hats," Ferrell said.

LOL, from what i have been reading the RIAA is gonna have some fun, there web site hacked 6 times in 6 months.

RIAA wins battle to ID Kazaa user


By Declan McCullagh
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
January 21, 2003, 3:57 PM PT


update A federal judge on Tuesday ordered Verizon Communications to disclose the identity of an alleged peer-to-peer pirate in a legal decision that could make it easier for the music industry to crack down on file swapping.
In what is widely viewed as a test case, U.S. District Judge John Bates said the wording of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) requires Verizon to give the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) the name of a Kazaa subscriber who allegedly has shared hundreds of music recordings. Bates said, "The court disagrees with Verizon's strained reading of the act," and ordered Verizon to comply with the DMCA request from the record labels.

The dispute is not about whether the RIAA will be able to force Verizon to reveal the identity of a suspected copyright infringer, but about what legal mechanism copyright holders may use. The RIAA would prefer to rely on the DMCA's turbocharged procedures because they are cheaper and faster than other methods, but Verizon and civil liberties groups have said the DMCA does not apply and that it does not adequately protect privacy.



Bates rejected those arguments, saying in a 37-page decision that Congress used "language that is clear" when crafting the DMCA. "Under Verizon's reading of the act, a significant amount of potential copyright infringement would be shielded from the subpoena authority of the DMCA," Bates wrote. "That would, in effect, give Internet copyright infringers shelter from the long arm of the DMCA subpoena power, and allow infringement to flourish."

This case represents the entertainment industry's latest legal assault on peer-to-peer piracy. If its invocation of the DMCA is upheld on appeal, music industry investigators would have the power to identify hundreds or thousands of music pirates at a time without filing a lawsuit first. That could presage filing lawsuits against individual copyright infringers, a legal club the RIAA has been hesitant to wield so far.

"We appreciate the court's decision, which validates our interpretation of the law," RIAA President Cary Sherman said in a statement. "The illegal distribution of music on the Internet is a serious issue for musicians, songwriters and other copyright owners, and the record companies have made great strides in addressing this problem by educating consumers and providing them with legitimate alternatives."

Verizon plans to appeal the decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, said Sarah Deutsch, the company's vice president and associate general counsel. "This is not a case in which we believe the court was right," Deutsch said. "This kind of decision could open the floodgates to copyright holders, sending numerous subpoenas to Internet providers seeking identities of subscribers."

The details
At issue in the RIAA's request is section 512 of the DMCA, which permits a copyright owner to send a subpoena ordering a "service provider" to turn over information about a subscriber. The service provider must promptly comply with that order, and no judge's approval is required first.

When challenging the subpoena, Verizon said that section 512 does not apply to ISPs that are merely conduits for peer-to-peer users and which are not hosting potentially infringing material on their own servers. Bates rejected that argument, saying that "the court concludes that the subpoena authority of section 512 applies to all service providers within the coverage of the act, including Verizon."

A dozen consumer and privacy groups in August filed an amicus brief siding with Verizon and arguing that section 512 of the DMCA is unconstitutional. Their brief said the law violated Americans' rights to be anonymous online: "Purported copyright owners should not have the right to violate protected, anonymous speech with what amounts to a single snap of the fingers."

Megan Gray, an attorney who wrote the brief on behalf of groups including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Consumer Alert, the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the National Consumers League, said Tuesday that she was not surprised by the decision. "I was disappointed that the court did not exert the time and energy to more thoroughly analyze the constitutional issues, which from our perspective were the crux of the case," Gray said.

Bates said he did not consider the First Amendment claim since Verizon had not argued that point, but predicted that even if he had, the outcome would have been the same. "Neither Verizon nor any amici has suggested that anonymously downloading more than 600 songs from the Internet without authorization is protected expression under the First Amendment," Bates wrote. "To be sure, this is not a case where Verizon's customer is anonymously using the Internet to distribute speeches of Lenin, Biblical passages, educational materials, or criticisms of the government--situations in which assertions of First Amendment rights more plausibly could be made."

"Verizon didn't bring an explicit challenge to the DMCA because we were one of the parties that negotiated it," Verizon's Deutsch said. "What we did tell the judge was that there were constitutional issues that required the court to construe the law narrowly."

In a signal that last week's ruling by the Supreme Court in a copyright-extension case will reverberate in Internet lawsuits, Bates said the Supreme Court's decision stressing "the wisdom of Congress' action" isn't within his power "to second guess."

A second pro-Verizon amicus brief filed by the U.S. Internet Industry Association, Yahoo and other groups said that the RIAA was unfairly trying to shift the burden of copyright enforcement to ISPs. "Can anyone doubt that RIAA intends this as a test case?" the brief said. "If this subpoena is enforced, others will soon follow. That will impose substantial costs both for the large ISPs, who may receive thousands of subpoenas, and for the smaller ISPs, for which the burden of even an isolated subpoena may prove overwhelming."

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) had backed the RIAA. In its own amicus brief, the group said: "Like the sound recordings implicated by the RIAA's subpoena, the motion pictures produced and distributed by MPAA members are persistently subject to theft by Internet pirates. No tools are more critical in combating this digital piracy than the protections Congress enacted in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act."

Well these guys are going head strong into it, I don't see it lasting to long, from what I remember reading a while ago is Microsofts Palliduim system will try to do the same type of thing if it ever happens....By searching ur system for illegal mp3's and [censored] and erasing them....

Well should be interesting to follow none the less

I READ that Sherman Networks (whatever, the guys who made Kazaa) says the fluctuation is nothing to worry about, rates are constantly changing and the up-and-down usage scale is always tipping back and forth. BTW, another point on something Fleshy said, the RIAA can't set prices for CDs. Sure, they could get the producers of CDs to sell the discs to retailers at lower costs, but they cannot themselves set prices. It would be a violation of anti-trust laws and such, plus what's to stop retailers from just marking the CDs up?

The shutdown of P2P is relativly impossible, they can not individually sue the millions of users that share, hyperthetically the only solution is to shutdown all the P2P sharing servers, and programs (Kazaa, etc.) which won't work because look at the shutdown of napster, all that did is start the bringing in of new companys. Plus if the company is located outside of the US, they can not shutdown, yet only attempt to block access to it from the US....Hrmmm.....*Wonders if this crap will spread to Canada* anyway.........

For all the lawyers or those of us with a good deal of free time:

http://www.loc.gov/copyright/legislation/dmca.pdf

http://www.loc.gov/copyright/legislation/hr2281.pdf

am I the only one using the new kazaa k++ with all the blockers to (supposedly) keep the RIAA out? It's just like kazaa lite but with security measures

i have the latest version of kazaa light. It's wonderfull. Fast downloads, no ads, spyware, etc.

I mainly stick to newsgroups though.

I think the RIAA, is going to back off on their supena distributing high horse soon, because soon or later they are going to realize they are not even scratching the paint on this issue. All this is doing is getting people that haven't heard of kazaa and other p2p programs(If their are any)to go try them and see what the fuss is about. Also by making over protective parents more weary about letting their kids online unmonitored.

RIAA Hit list

The link has a list of the users.

http://www.techtv.com/news/culture/story/0,24195,3484600,00.html

thanks obi.

are there any p2ps that are immune to the RIAA scanning software?

does anyone know anything about their software?

~ EG

K++ advertises the ability to block the riaa...go to kazaa-lites site and read up

i can here looking for info on Encryption and sen this post.. i am a Bit torrent user and i see lots of people talk about the riaa and mpaa. they all recommend to use a program called peer guardian. i installed it to see what its all about. but it was a cpu hog so i uninstalled it.. anyways it suppose to block a crap load of ips that belong to different companys..

They are not obligated by law, as far as I know. It is a matter of how much pressure RIAA puts on the ISPs. Verizon (I think it was) refused to give out it's customer's names and such for a long time. I think they gave in.

My download patterns didn't change at all, but the RIAA can [censored] eat themselves.

they didn't give in, they were taken to court and ordered to turn it over. i believe they are still appealing it.

universal music group has just released a statement that they are droping new cd prices by 30% that brings them down to $12 from $18

The whole thing is blown out of proportion
if you think about it.. there are always going to be people sharing music and you can easily do it without the riaa knowing its just propoganda..
The best thing to do is take over the riaa website and post the proper message of sharing being the best thing.. *oh thats already been done.. they hired some noobie system admin who left very cummon backdoors on the box.. my advice dont worry.. They are just trying to get money but it won't last

As the register pointed out, Universal isn't doing anything special. I would summarize it, but you really must read the article, they have a rather colorful way of putting it. See it here .

I think I can summarize it in one word: "karma."

i saw in the newspaper today how they are thinking of allowing people to send in a notorized admission of their file sharing habits in return for a guarantee from the riaa that they will not be sued. however, the guy from the electronic frontier foundation pointed out that the riaa is not the only group who owns copyrights and can sue you, so it may not be a good idea.

my 2 cents:
"when you buy a cd a tape any form of music, you own it, and seeing as how the law hasn't changed your allowed to dub it and give it to your friends without charge. Artist didn't mind when you made a copy of the tape for your friends.. but now that its mp3 they decide to complain about it. But on what legal grounds do they stand, your not selling the song
your not making any profit at all from sharing it. so how can you be sued for something that has been done for years now but by different means"
end my 2 cents :p