SilentMan
join:2002-07-15
New York, NY
| reply to Transmaster
Here's food for thoughts
Well, the much hated and much maligned RIAA has sued 261 file swappers as of today. It has been the general assumption ( and the RIAA lawyers are happy to confuse people and they hope to confuse Judges as well) that when someone *uploads* a song to somebody else using a P2P program like Kazaa, BT, edonkey, etc., that person is infringing copyright because he/she is sending the whole copyrighted work to somebody else which, as we all know, is NOT true!! It happens that most of the time, that uploader only uploads FRAGMENTS of that file, be it an mp3, movies, pics etc.
To make file sharing more efficient, people downloading files get fragments of the file from many different people on the network.
Now the question is: is anyone who only shares out a few frags of a file, most of the time accidentally, guilty of copyright infringement? Can he or she be made to pay $750 to $150,000 only because he shared out maybe 10 secs of a music file??
One thing is to willfully ftp someone a whole copyrighted work, but it is another thing when someone gets a song in bits contributed by a lot of people, who are not even aware that they are contributing small bits of a file. I hope some legal eagle read this an put it in a legal frame.
Now here's a brilliant thought posted by some brilliant mind that got me thinking about this. I hope you all get brain storms after you have read this:
Posted by BeerSlurpy. Rated as "Insightful" by Slashdot mods.
Beging Quote:
===============
Bingo. For years the feds tried to shut down pirate bbses and ftp sites with no luck, because most pirates do it for fun and make no money from their efforts. Judges basically said "no financial gain, no fault" and threw out the cases.
In 97, the whores in congress passed the "No Electronic Theft Act" 17 USC blah blah blah that:
1) changed the definition of financial gain to mean "receiving anything of value" such as a copyrighted work- so running an FTP site that receives files is now financial gain, as is a program that sends and receives copyrighted files- but it's much more complicated than that
2)by the reproduction or distribution, including by electronic means, during any 180-day period, of 1 or more copies or phonorecords of 1 or more copyrighted works, which have a total retail value of more than $ 1,000 shall be punished
however....!
evidence of reproduction or distribution of a copyrighted work, by itself, shall not be sufficient to establish willful infringement.'.
c) some details
In case it wasnt obvious, the burden of proof to prosecute someone under this statue is pretty difficult to meet unless you are going after a pirate bbs or a pirate ftp site with a permanent address and fairly static library of files.
A sporadically connecting (and constantly moving) p2p client that is only sharing fragments of files is not really an entity that you can easily track. In addition, since the files on any individual client change often, or are (most often) unshared the second they finish downloading, it is almost 100 percent certain that "copyrighted works" (as well-formed files) are not shared by more than a small percentage of users, except perhaps accidentally.
It is also amusing to note that verifying that a user actually has a file is nearly impossible- its hard to distinguish between a client sending you the real file and a client sending you nonsense. Also, what about fakes, and files that dont exist in complete format anywhere? I've come across releases of movies where everyone has 99 percent of the file, but no one has the final 1% and the file might as well be random bits. Actually downloading files from a specific user on a P2P network to verify that it is copyrighted content is very difficult for one user, let alone millions spread across international borders.
To summarize- NET was formed to combat piracy that revolved around whole-file transfer protocols like FTP, HTTP and irc file servers. It is not well suited to prosecuting the massive file sharing networks that exist now. Even if it were possible to do so, it would be political suicide, since a hundred million voters will be a much bigger headache than a few whiny content industry lobbyists.
End of quote.
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Source: »yro.slashdot.org/yro/03/09/08/17···8&tid=99 |
footballdude
Premium
join:2002-08-13
Imperial, MO
| said by SilentMan  :
It is also amusing to note that verifying that a user actually has a file is nearly impossible- its hard to distinguish between a client sending you the real file and a client sending you nonsense. Also, what about fakes, and files that dont exist in complete format anywhere? I've come across releases of movies where everyone has 99 percent of the file, but no one has the final 1% and the file might as well be random bits.
Here's another thought. The whole point of ripping a song from a CD into MP3 format is to discard data on the fringes of human hearing and compress the whole thing into a smaller ball. How is that an exact copy of a copyrighted work? |
