P2P File Sharing News Comments – RIAA 2006-09-20
The RIAA definitly likes Alabamba. Shows that the RIAA is streaming their lawsuits instead of flooding now. Settlement ratio is about 40%. Alabamba is a poorer, less educated state, so there are more users using shitty Kazaa or using Emule or BitTorrent without any IP blocker. NetSentry’s bots have been very aggressive lately, Though Cyberverse is worse, but less spread out than NetSentry. Cyberverse is MPAA I think. 70% of users on Emule are not using IP blockers and NetSentry can hit a client over 50,000 (adding all the NetSentry entries together) times in a week. CyberVerse goes over 200,000 hits per week.
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Edonkey going away will barely affect the network. ED2K is 90% Emule, and most of the remaining 10% are not original EDonkey cleints. Edonkey clients (EDonkey Hybrid in the stats) make up about 2% of the network. Shareaza and MLDonkey, both open-source multi-protocol (ED2K, BitTorrent, Gnutella, Gnutella2 for Shareaza, Overnet for MLDonkey) clients, both each outnumber EDonkey Hybrid clients. The court order is impossible to comply with. Lugdunum controls the servers now. What are they going to do? Revoke the license? Well Lugdunum is concerned about being legal, but reverse engineering the orginal metamachine dserver wasn’t legal to begin with. They just let him have a license (possibly a permanment partial or complete rights waiver with no revokation clause) because they knew they were being negiligent on server development in favor of developing overnet. Open source Emule took over Metamachine Edonkey and the Lugdunum Eserver took over Matamachine’s DServer. The ED2K network is here to stay. Overnet was a very abusable network. KAD is better. Plus, with well sourced files, one can operate soley on source excanges for a day or longer, and there are a few Emule mods that will operate only on source exchange (pure client-to-client source queries) and ad-hoc server UDP source requests (Regular Emule already does this to query sources from servers other than the one you’re conencted to), though these tend to work poorly with rare files. These are generally considered bad mods because they don’t publish upload lists to anywhere because it doesn’t connect to KAD or to a server and are hence tend to be leeching mods.
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The RIAA doesn’t want anything to do with Sharman. They only care for AltNet. But they’ll get all the money they can. They continue sueing to IT execs despite Sharman already having paid their settlement in full. The banks that financed Sharman’s debt are sooo screwed. The RIAA could care less. And they want more. And they want to steal the patents for the Global File Registry after they use Altnet as research puppets to complete it. The RIAA is EVIL. Except, maybe… Warner music (open sharing agreement with YouTube) … BOYCOTT the RIAA! Especially Universal Music Group!!
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Let’s make the RIAA’s Compaus Downloading propaganda program as expensive as possible! Order lots of DVDs and put them to frivilous uses!! The article also demonstrates the RIAA’s own encouragment to exploit P2P networks to save on shipping and bandwidth costs!! The suggested use in a classroom is a demonstration of “examples of deceptive advertising and propaganda”.
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More RIAA not having enough trial-grade evidence. This time they were faced with a counter-suit and they wanna run, and not pay the lawyer fees.
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Fairly informative… Confirms RIAA’s chronic lack of court-suitable evidence. The lawyer seems to lack deep knowledge on how various P2P clients / networks work though and had difficulty with tough ‘is it legal’ questions, but is knowledgable in general. The lawyer definitly is open to the option of ‘defaulting’ — ditching court on a civil summons. I think it would depend on how garnishable you are, and how agressive the RIAA is in post-judgement garnishment, and how the individual state’s laws allow garnishment. I only know AZ’s garnishment laws — wages (which usually results in termination unless it is a middle class or better job and you have a near-perfect employment record), bank accounts (including CDs and money-market), and most registerable assets like cars, boats, houses, public stock. And it requires a 2nd trip through court, taking 2-4 weeks after judgement usually, usually slow enough to find better people to ‘loose’ your more liquid assets too (and there are lots of ‘ugly houses’ cash buyers too), such as open source charities and electronic toys (if you don’t own a house). Also non-small claims civil summons have to be hand-delivered through the sherrif’s department. Small claims summonses are $24 and don’t need to be hand delivered, but still costs $6 to send through registered-confirmation mail (total of $30). Hand delivery of a civil court summons through the sherrif’s department is a few hundred dollars.
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Further proves that the RIAA is doing a bulk operation that relies on scare tactics used by their outsourced collections agency counterpart, ‘The Settlement Support Center’. When the Settlement Support Center calls, no lawsuit has been filed in court yet, just like defaulted credit card debt collections. The lawsuit has only be ‘filed’ with the law firm (with a big call center of non-lawyers and probably not even paralegals). The RIAA may revise their system and not so quickly jump to the actual lawsuit, because I think the first court apearance is only a week or two after the inital summons, and the RIAA obviously has shown that their bulk automated system doesn’t get trial-grade evidence. It gets Just enough for the debt collector / telemarketer fear tacticians to use to intimidate people into settlement. I’m pretty sure the lead acquisition are outsource to NetSentry, lead discovery, which is ISP subpoena backed up by finding contact info and other personable identifiable info linked to the IP from the web such as ‘logged ips’ from message boards (Neither work well in the case of dynamic IPs! Especialy of ISPs that automatically disconeect after a period of time to reduce bandwidth hogging or commercial abuse) and then reading the poster profile, is probably outsourced too, and then the lawsuit is handed to ‘Settlement Support Center’ for settlement, and then if the settlment is overtly refused (and maybe wishy-washy refused in the case for some debt collectors, so don’t answer the phone if you don’t recognize the caller id), then it goes back to the RIAA for litigation.
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Looks like the record companies are hypocritcally ordering radio stations to use P2P to get their ‘licensed copyrighted songs’ to save on shipping and employee salaries.
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P2PNet fabricated this to project the RIAA’s business practices onto the newspaper industry. Considering
