P2P File Sharing and Paranoia News Comments 2006-06-29
Look! RIAA lawsuit insurance! Odds are computed worldwide. The insurance is only being offered to sweedes in Sweden i think, and you probably also have to be sued through a Swedish court. I think Sweden is a small minority country for RIAA lawsuit targets. They may be requiring a trial conviction as well and won’t pay out for a settlement. Its more profitable than the articles make it look if these things are true. I doubt any payouts will ever be made. I can’t read Swedish though so I can’t be sure on what their terms are. Insurance is a complicated thing and its generally screw or be screwed kind of thing (especially doctors vs medical insurance middlemen).
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Laws like this are unenforceable to its intention without iron-hand rule / surveillance and martial law. Most violators are non-collaborative individuals and will require extensive Goverment-ISP surveillance and house-to-house warrant-less searches and maybe even on-the-spot beatings or executions.
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I like the Pirate Bay’s legal threats page. It is funny. The Pirate Bay might have wiggled from the cops but now they are a big visible target now for a variety of motivations. Humans are just so evil.
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Case of wrong department syndrome. MPAA is working with backwater departments of the bureaucracy. Goerge Bush would know nothing about it. I still think threats were issued though they were worded subtlety and that its all orchestrated by the MPAA/RIAA and that George bush is in passive support of it all.
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I think this article is a good prediction of the world if the governments and corporation fail to defeat P2P filesharing through iron-hand rule. It gives insight on how businesses can compete with P2P filesharing as if it were an actual business competitor. The paragraph starting with ‘P2P networks have weaknesses too which are permanent’ largely applies to Kazaa and to a lesser extent, gnutella though. The bandwidth-hogging part is true for non-geeky users, but Emule can be taught to not hog the connection. The article is really good. I suggest reading it and even keeping a copy in case it goes down and becomes unavailable.
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Companies in America and Europe and maybe China too could care less. If it isn’t through the marketing (company) or Public Relations (government) department, its piracy if its copied. It don’t matter if its educational, going to the poor or whatever.
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RIAA/MPAA PIs and lawyers do make up most of the enforcement these days, even in China. Imagine when big government really gets involved. Massive non-compliance social unrest and example-making abound.
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Not surprising. Until I was about 23 about I though America was the only country of significance in the world. It is not at all surprising that American companies push American law to the rest of the world. Problem is that American cultural influence, more from the large corporations, is influencing other countries to be more like America, including in it’s laws.
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Havn’t seen the commercial in the first commercial. The commercials are so ironic though. Apple is not ‘freedom’. It is proprietary and DRM-slavery. They make the drones and the barcode-heads. Kazaa lawsuit victim conned into a commercial for pro-DRM service. I don’t think Pepsi know she was a RIAA lawsuit victim. I know the commercial because I downloaded the commercial from Emule and then deleted it because it sucked. I kept the 1984 mac commercial though maybe it’s ‘freedom’ is out of the text-based DOS interface and not open standards and no-DRM.
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I better get my homebrew DVR before this stupid law passes. Otherwise it will cost triple or more in the black market. Kudos for those who release their recordings onto Emule, Broadcast-flag free forever.
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It was 100% of my portable MP3 player’s content. I had it for a year. It got stolen though. Havn’t replaced it yet. I will never buy an IPod. If I get one free I will give it away or just use it for storage, if it is usable as a mass-storage device without iTunes software.
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Looks like people are copyrighting and patenting India’s traditional yoga moves or just programs/conglomerates of them or derivatives, to gain monopolistic power or just to get free money in lawsuits or both. Certainly looks like products of the RIAA’s education, role-modeling and example-making.
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I would stop accepting ALL windows updates at least at home. The ‘kill switch’ will probably be embedded in one of the ’security patches’. Go ahead and use your job as a guinea pig though. Who cares if your work machine gets locked out as long as you got your work backed up elsewhere beyond company control.
If you already installed WGA RemoveWGA should be able to get rid of it. It may be possible that the kill switch may only be in Windows Vista, or it will be in a ‘update’ to Windows Genuine DisAdvantage. Half of Windows Genuine Advantage seems to be actually an transitionary upgrade to the serial number validation system. It probably won’t even be necessary in Vista as it will be built-in to the install-time serial number validation system – at least the part that make sure that your VLK serial number that you put in belongs to the company distribution cluster that your particular windows belongs to (if its a VLK edition at all) or that your are not using a Dell OEM serial on a Toshiba OEM windows or any VLK or OEM key on a retail version. The other part of Windows Genuine Advantage probably is checking the Microsoft database every week against a piracy blacklist database on Microsoft’s server and that will probably be put into a no-name code module in Vista. So WGA isn’t going to be ‘dumped’.
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These MPAA / RIAA corporations are EVIL. They try to be legal and ask for permission for something totally non-profit and difficult to reproduce (well somebody could take a picture and put it up on WebShots). Takes a press frenzy for them to reverse their ‘NO’ answer. I say don’t bother asking. They will only say ‘NO’. If you want it enough and its copying related (somebody not actually losing a physical item) and its non-profit just do it anyway.
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Google’s good image is marred by its own video service (but its better than YouTube). Stream only but it gives the author the option to allow downloads, but downloads are in a proprietary-wrapper that makes the video work only in Google’s player software. Looks like ‘open format’ and ‘free’ was just a single-generation fad of the 80s and early 90s (when the PC and most of the current internet implementations were researched). It makes me neutral on google having its own internet because I no longer think that google for sure to create capitalistic incentive for net neutrality. I do prefer a stubborn big corporation that is not as evil as the rest of them to establish net netrality via capitalistic competition over laws, regulation and heavy foot of goverment though. If all rather than just some of the people in power are too evil then its bye bye internet and hello services like late 80s-Early 90s Compuserver and the current ‘Get It Now’ services – propreitarized, shopping mall business models with lots and lots of DRM.
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Looks like the monopolistic corporations are getting their way with French law
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China sucks. I know they do sieze land and forcibly move people. Thats the kind of media that the law targets. But i assume you could be busted for reporting on car accidents or natural disasters too. I guess you’re stuck with the human to human gossip file sharing network. Maybe DVDs could be slipped around. Hot vid of chinese cop punching a reporter in the stomach until he bleeds through is mouth. Thats the kind of enforcement that happens in China because of goverment secrecy.
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If these download sites had DRM, then I would never miss them.
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Not surprising. Propaganda often must use old or inaccurate information. Often it is further twisted. Sometimes it is an outright lie. The outright lies are often believed more also.
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Put it onto emule if you’re proud enough of it. Might already be there. I’ll search. I think the script should’ve only been used as an idea base. That doesn’t mean that they won’t sue anyway though. They want monopoly on the ideas too. The law is only a tool and corporations who can afford the lawyers have the upper hand in using it.
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Warez Groups are largely non-profit. Bootlegger groups are more crinimal. Got people like me too – individual users. I’m pretty sure al-queada and many other anti-american goverments and organizations uses Emule and BitTorrent for espionage and propaganda material. Wheather its leaks, analytical mining off of copyrighted works and homebrew material. The battlefield2 video presented in congress as terrorist training material was portrayed as delibrately made as such by terrorists for terrorists, but it turns out to be made by some non-terrorist kid and possibly pirated (more legally than not but enough lawyers and its not) by terrorists to use for training or more likely, propaganda. But it might not have been used by terrorists at all. But all that would be classified so you’ll never know how much evidence the US goverment has or doesn’t have.
