"Government tries to enforce new fiat currency where a written dollar sign on a piece of paper counts as legal tender. Is furious that everyone writes dollar signs on paper without permission and is baffled why nobody will do anything about it."
Texas ISP slams music biz for trying to turn it into a 'copyright cop'
An ISP based in Texas has complained to a judge that the music industry to trying to turn internet providers into the "copyright police." "This case is an attempt by the US recording industry to make Internet service providers its de facto copyright enforcement agents," reads the latest filing [PDF] in an ongoing court case …
COMMENTS
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Tuesday 21st August 2018 23:35 GMT Mark 85
the music industry argues Grande benefits financially from selling faster speed internet connections to copyright infringers. "The greater the bandwidth its subscribers require for pirating content, the more money Grande receives."
This could become a "case" for certain ISP's to hold back on upgrading users to higher connection speeds.
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Wednesday 22nd August 2018 11:32 GMT Nick Ryan
Re: illegal
In America theft is merely taking some thing that does not belong to you . Even if you intended to give it back.
As in taking something and depriving the owner of it. Copyright violation is not theft, copyright violation is copyright violation. This does not make it any more or less acceptable.
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Thursday 23rd August 2018 15:03 GMT Mike Moyle
Re: illegal
"As in taking something and depriving the owner of it. Copyright violation is not theft, copyright violation is copyright violation."
Copyright is the right to determine who can legally own a copy of something... It's kinda right there in the name. Copyright, in the U.S., is a property right, and property rights are defensible in court, even if the property in question is not physically removed (e.g., trespass).
Further, appropriating the fruits of someone else's labor without their consent constitutes "theft of services", or doesn't the U.K. have that one?
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Thursday 23rd August 2018 15:00 GMT Charles 9
Re: illegal
"I noticed that the complaint used the word theft, I'm waiting for some smart lawyer to ask the copyright holder how making a copy of a song permanently deprived them of that song."
The theft is of the revenues from a legitimate transaction. Kind of like how organized criminals get nailed for tax evasion.
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Wednesday 22nd August 2018 10:10 GMT Cuddles
"the music industry argues Grande benefits financially from selling faster speed internet connections to copyright infringers. "The greater the bandwidth its subscribers require for pirating content, the more money Grande receives.""
Because obviously downloading music with file sizes generally in the 3-5MB range is the only reason anyone could ever want a fast internet connection. Nothing to do with streaming gigabytes of HDTV, or downloading games that are starting to top 100GB, and the idea of teenagers away from home for the first time downloading any amount of porn is simply ludicrous. No, the demand for faster internet these days is driven entirely by the occasional mp3 download of things they couldn't find on Spotify or Youtube.
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Wednesday 22nd August 2018 03:21 GMT fishman
Music files are small
"the music industry argues Grande benefits financially from selling faster speed internet connections to copyright infringers."
You don't need a fast connection to download music files, especially when you torrent them - relatively small files that can be downloaded in the background. Its video streaming that needs the bandwidth.
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Wednesday 22nd August 2018 16:54 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Music files are small
They probably started using this argument when the enforcement began in the mid 2000s - it was true back when many people were still upgrading from dialup to first gen DSL/cable.
Unfortunately for them, technology has changed and when people upgrade today they're going from "more than fast enough to download music" to "way more than fast enough to download music".
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Wednesday 22nd August 2018 05:01 GMT eldakka
Of course the likelihood that thousands of university students are using BitTorrent to share files that everyone has a legitimate right to own is virtually zero.
Actually, the likelihood of that is nearly 100%. BitTorrent, like the Internet itself, is a tool for sharing files. It makes no value judgement on what the files are. Could be Linux distro's, public domain movies and video (yes there is such a thing), the lecturers themselves could distribute video and audio recordings of their lectures to their students via BitTorrent.
However, the chances that that is solely what is shared is virtually zero.
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Wednesday 22nd August 2018 07:01 GMT TonyJ
From the article...
"... a system developed by Rightscorp that "identifies actual infringements and the perpetrators of these infringements (by IP address, port number, time, and date)*."
The system monitors BitTorrent and, according to the music industry, "has the capability to acquire entire files from the infringing host computers."..."
So...Rightscorp run up a BT client and note down the IP addresses...
* My emphasis because as we all know here, no one ever uses say a VPN or their neighbours insecure WiFi or spoofs IP addresses...no siree! IP addresses are ALL you need for proof positive.
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Wednesday 22nd August 2018 07:22 GMT Anonymous Coward
ip-echelon.com are idiots
As someone that runs a Tor exit, I get regular missives from ip-echelon.com, telling me that I need to deal with copyright violating users.
As a result, I have an SMTP-time block rule telling them to sod off -- they never reply to mails, despite claiming to have a ticketing system.
I seriously doubt that anyone has ever succeeded in sharing a movie (their repeated claim) via my 5Mbit/s Tor exit, so would agree that there is no proper effort to establish infringement by these dodgy lawyers.
What is presumably actually going on is that the client is advertising an allegedly infringing file via Tor, but the infringement (if there is any) is going on via a non-Tor transport. That being the case, their claim of the infringement as being related to my Tor exit is drivel.
They just assume that if a client is advertising a file, it must a) have a copy of the file, and b) be willing to share it, c) have enough bandwidth to actually share it, and d) have at some point done so.
They might as well assume that all Internet users are infringing copyright.
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Wednesday 22nd August 2018 10:51 GMT SolidSquid
Re: They might as well assume that all Internet users are infringing copyright.
Depends on whether you need intent to violate copyright. Technically if you're visiting sites where they've used images without the permission of the copyright holder, your system is going to download them without the owner's permission to store it in cache and so potentially could be considered copyright infringement
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Wednesday 22nd August 2018 15:10 GMT Fatman
Re: They might as well assume that all Internet users are infringing copyright.
<quote>... your system is going to download them without the owner's permission to store it in cache and so potentially could be considered copyright infringement.</quote>
A very good reason to clear the cache on exit.
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Wednesday 22nd August 2018 08:15 GMT Philip Hands
Re: Infringing files
I'm sure that I read about a researcher writing a BT client that claims to have popular files (but only a few blocks in the middle IIRC), and if anyone asks for those blocks, they hand out a block of NULs (or some such).
Inevitably, they got a load of take-down notices claiming infringement, despite there having been no (or almost no) attempts to grab the supposedly available blocks.
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Wednesday 22nd August 2018 15:27 GMT Alan Brown
Re: Infringing files
" setting up a group of torrents named after this weeks top 40, is there still such a thing?, selling records containing a sound track of me reading a poem I wrote "
This has been done, the results of such trolling are relatively funny and the music cartels haven't modified their tactics in response.
It's worth noting that in order to _prove_ that copyright materials are being circulated in a swarm, the accusers must actually participate in them rather than just monitor the advertisments and that means uploading as well as downloading - being employed by the cartels means they're authorised to do so, which starts raising questions along the lines of "Prenda Law?"
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Wednesday 22nd August 2018 08:53 GMT Pascal Monett
Personally, I love how Grande dissected Rightscorp's tool
And clearly demonstrated that Rightscorp are nothing but a bunch of tools in the first place.
Their tool doesn't do a single thing it purports to do.
And of course, the music industry loves it, because they don't have a clue either.
Hoping for and looking forward to a Grande win.
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Wednesday 22nd August 2018 09:45 GMT Anonymous Coward
Why do they ignore the German study that shows pirates tend to have much larger paid for media collections than non-pirates?
I pirated two albums this week and will be buying the physical copies of one this weekend since it is worth paying for. The other, not so much... Without pirating them the music industry would have made zero sales since i wouldn't know that these albums were any good.
No piracy = no music sales from me since i don't own a radio
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Wednesday 22nd August 2018 09:52 GMT Will Godfrey
Arrogance
The music industry have brought this on themselves. They should have thought about it 20 years ago when the demand first materialised. Instead they tried to stifle it, and have failed at every step of the way since, all the time further alienating the listeners. Had they worked out a system for on-line sales at a reasonable price they would have annihilated the organised infringers, as (contrary to their statements) the majority of listeners like to stay within the law.
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Wednesday 22nd August 2018 11:48 GMT Nick Ryan
Re: Arrogance
Yes. Within reason a consumer will take the easy route to getting what they want. For a long time it's been easier to download tracks illegally rather than legally. The price gouging of consumers for the download editions of music really doesn't help either and neither do all the various reports about how the artist receives almost bugger all from the purchase and the record companies get the largest amount. At least days many more artists have their own record company which does help alleviate this, but only for them.
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