File swapping to become a felony!?

coma · Jul 17, 2003

msnbc.com

House proposal targets file swappers

Bill would make swapping of copyrighted file a felony

July 17 — Peer-to-peer users who swap copyrighted files could be in danger of becoming federal felons, under a new proposal backed by Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives. Their legislation, introduced Wednesday, would punish an Internet user who shares even a single file without permission from a copyright holder with prison terms of up to five years and fines of up to $250,000.

Written by Michigan's John Conyers, the senior Democrat on the House judiciary committee, the Author, Consumer, and Computer Owner Protection and Security Act (ACCOPS) represents Congress’ boldest attempt yet to shutter peer-to-peer networks, which the major record labels and movie studios view as a serious threat.

Currently, under a little-known 1997 law called the No Electronic Theft Act, many P2P users are technically already violating criminal laws. But if the ACCOPS bill were to succeed, prosecutors would not have to prove that a copyrighted file was repeatedly downloaded. Conyers’ proposal would require them to prove only that the file was publicly accessible.
Other sponsors of ACCOPS are Reps. Howard Berman of California, Adam Schiff of California, Marty Meehan of Massachusetts, Robert Wexler of Florida and Anthony Weiner of New York. No Republican has supported the proposal.

One legal scholar viewed the legislation as an over-the-top measure. "The business of expanding the criminal law so that making unauthorized personal copies of copyrighted works becomes a criminal violation is overreacting six ways from Tuesday,” said Jessica Litman, who teaches copyright law at Wayne State University. “It’s exceptional. But that does seem to be what the bill is trying to do.” Litman said that without ACCOPS, copyright infringement currently is “hard to prove because you had to prove that a copy was actually distributed.”

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group in San Francisco, also criticized the bill. “Jailing people for file sharing is not the answer,” said EFF lawyer Fred von Lohmann. “Proponents of this bill are casting aside privacy, innovation and even our personal liberty as collateral damage in their war against file sharing.”

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Ridiculous.

StupidMoniker · Jul 17, 2003

Originally posted by coma
No Republican has supported the proposal.
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Right on.

Sonny · Jul 17, 2003

Big Mofo at Federal Pound Me in the A$$ Prison: "What are you in for?"

Young Punk: "Sharing MP3s"

Big Mofo at Federal Pound Me in the A$$ Prison: "Well I've got something I wanna share with you."

Man whoever gets time for this offense, they are gonna have it really rough in jail.

ima_drummer2k · Jul 17, 2003

Someone wake me up when they figure out how to stop it.

Major · Jul 17, 2003

Someone wake me up when they figure out how to stop it.

Threats of individual lawsuits cut file-sharing 15% the week after it was announced. If this goes into law, you can bet it will cut it 50%+ even if only a few people actually get put in jail for it.

goophers · Jul 17, 2003

I wonder why Berman supports this? Could it have something to do with the fact that he gets over 25% of his campaign bribes from the music and movie industries?

coma · Jul 17, 2003

I never did download much, only when I want to check out an artist. Well, the other day I wanted to check out some stuff from Pete Yorn. Well, although I went ahead and downloaded a few songs, I definitely thought twice about doing so. These measures, as Major pointed out are effective.

Jeff · Jul 17, 2003

Just the discussion of this in public will cause people to stop downloading. The perception that a crackdown MAY be coming is enough to stop most casual file swappers.

It won't knock it out, but even the proposal of measures like these have a chilling effect.

Sonny · Jul 18, 2003

I think there are at least two types of file swapping apps that are completely anonymous. What can they do about that?

Link

The Anonymity Doomsday Factor

July 7, 2003
By John C. Dvorak

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) may become indirectly responsible for our inability to stop the next terrorist attack on the US. Hear me out on this one. The association's recent move to bust individuals, mostly students, for music trading will spark a movement toward anonymous computing unlike anything we've ever seen. Already two anonymous music swapping systems have appeared: Filetopia and Blubster. This is just the beginning.

We can expect to see the development of new stealth technologies that will be used routinely by everyone. A massive trend toward true Net anonymity will have repercussions that are all bad. Child p*rn rings will be harder to uncover. E-mail sources will be harder to find. Spam will rule. Virus coders will remain in the shadows. Terrorism can flourish in such an environment. And the RIAA still won't win the battle over file swapping. But it will have set off a bad chain of events.

There have been bursts of activity concerning anonymity on the Net, with paranoid users finding ways to hide themselves from any sort of scrutiny. There are still a few remailers out there through which you can send anonymous e-mails. You might do this to prevent your e-mail address from being harvested by so-called spam bots. It's also handy for writing poison-pen letters to the boss or whomever. Many of these anonymous remailers were compromised by various governmental security agencies (or so it was believed) and their use has declined recently. Also, the general public didn't seem to have a serious interest in extreme anonymity, since the openness of the Net didn't seem to be causing anyone's exploitation.

Some years ago, you could even subscribe to an anonymity service that would route all your surfing and even IRC activity through various routers and servers in such a way that you could never be tracked by either IP address or MAC address/serial number. The service cropped up during the dot-com era. A few years ago, I saw the CEO of the company that had provided the service, and he told me that people simply weren't interested enough to subscribe.

That was then and this is now. Nobody was subscribing to the anonymous Net because there was no fear. There would have been no groundswell of technological change to protect a child p*rn ring. This is not the case with kids in college who are computer science majors. Especially when the kids like swapping MP3 files around the campus. I would recommend to the RIAA that if it is going to bust people for music trading as a way of making money, it should file as many suits as it can in the shortest amount of time. Anonymity technology is coming on fast.

None of this is new. Concern about anonymity has simply been moribund until now. In 2001, for example, the CIA took up with Oakland-based SafeWeb to implement Triangle Boy—a software system that could keep the Net activities of CIA employees anonymous. The public-at-large saw no particular value in this.

What I'd like to see is some research on Net users that will show how many of them have downloaded even one song illegally. Just one. During the heyday of Napster there were millions and millions of users. With new software coming from Microsoft and others that will allow just about anyone to peruse your hard disk remotely, I can see the public at large getting a little more cautious, especially when it sees the RIAA bankrupting students with legal action.

And you can be certain that the ISPs out there—all of them—will do whatever they can to help users implement anonymity strategies. They fought against the RIAA when it wanted them to give up user names. This is not because ISP's care about protecting users. It's a huge pain for ISPs to have to police the users and do extra paperwork for the benefit of some outsider. Screw that.

If you want to follow the issues I've described here, I recommend a look at ZeroPaid (www.zeropaid.com), the file sharing portal that maintains an interesting forum on file sharing and has up-to-the-minute news. It's kind of an RIAA watchdog with ongoing reviews of almost every file-sharing system.

In the meantime, as anonymity software ups the technology ante and throws the ball back into the RIAA's court, I suspect that the organization will have to open some anonymous file-sharing portals of its own to snare and scare off users. It has to do this sooner rather than later. And, of course, that will up the ante one more time, and eventually we'll end up with completely anonymous computing—with all its negative implications. Won't that be peachy?
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Blubster doesn't conceal your identity entirely

P2P's little secret

By Declan McCullagh
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
July 8, 2003, 12:01 PM PT

Read more about P2P

File swappers hoping to share music and other works online without exposing their identity to the prying eyes of copyright enforcers face a tough choice.
Popular peer-to-peer networks such as Kazaa, where the lion's share of online trading of music and other files takes place, are designed such that participants who wish to remain completely anonymous must pay a severe price in terms of convenience and usability, experts warn.

"There is no good system out there for hiding identities," said Randy Saaf, president of MediaDefender, a Los Angeles-based company that investigates peer-to-peer networks for the music industry. "If they're sharing content, they're wide open--they're running the risk. It's hard to anonymize people on a big public network."

There are plenty of incentives for Web surfers to try to cloak their identity these days. Recently, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) pledged to sue individuals who infringe copyrights, and it won a court order forcing Verizon Communications to divulge the identity of a Kazaa user. The RIAA has already filed suit against four university students, and some schools have disciplined students for inappropriate file-swapping.

So far, the RIAA's threats of litigation have had no effect, said Wayne Rosso, president of peer-to-peer company Grokster. "As far as I can see, nobody really cares," Rosso said. "Our downloads are up, traffic is holding steady. Come on, users know they can't sue 60 million of them. Who are they kidding?"

Hiding on a file-sharing system is hard for a very simple reason: Peer-to-peer networks are designed for efficiency, not anonymity. They rely on a straightforward mechanism that is ruthlessly efficient at trading files. But, by broadcasting the contents of shared folders, the system leaves users vulnerable to identification and, therefore, to possible legal action.

On a peer-to-peer network, files are directly swapped between computers, each of which has a unique Internet Protocol (IP) address that can be traced back to the Internet service provider, corporation or university to which it belongs. Because computers on a peer-to-peer network transfer files without going through an intermediary, the IP address of one person on the network is generally available to everyone else.

Typically, a copyright holder can unmask a suspected infringer by sending a subpoena--which invokes a controversial section of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)--to the company or university providing network connectivity to the IP address in question, asking it to reveal the identity of the suspect. Once it knows the suspect's name, a copyright holder has the option of filing a lawsuit or simply sending a cease-and-desist notice.

Donning the mask
Products that offer privacy for activities such as Web surfing and e-mail have been available for some time, although most have been greeted with indifference by consumers. That attitude could change, however, with the RIAA's new policy of filing lawsuits against individuals, potentially sparking a renaissance in anonymizing tools for peer-to-peer networks.

Anonymous P2P file trading?
Wayne Cunningham, senior editor, Download.com
A surge in interest in anonymizing technology could radically change the character of the Net, if strong privacy software were to become widely adopted.

In response to the possible threat to file swappers of litigation or even criminal prosecution, some companies have begun to offer products they say will make filing a lawsuit against file swappers more difficult. Last week, for instance, a peer-to-peer service named Blubster announced a new version of its software that it touted as a "new, secure, decentralized, self-assembling network that provides users with private, anonymous accounts."

Consumers hoping for a painless way to hide their identity on peer-to-peer networks may be disappointed, however. For example, Blubster does not conceal the telltale IP addresses used to connect to the file-swapping service, meaning copyright investigators can, in practice, unmask anyone on its system.

Blubster counters that, in practice, its system will still make it more difficult for RIAA investigators to figure out the total number of files an individual is offering for download, as it does not list the files at a specific IP address. On the other hand, Blubster's method would not block a software program that maps the network by performing thousands of automated searches.

Because the RIAA will seek to sue the most flagrant infringers, the thinking goes, its investigators may target peer-to-peer networks that make such information available--without requiring as much discovery effort.

RIAA spokesman Jonathan Lamy declined to discuss the specific techniques the group employs when investigating infringement on peer-to-peer networks. But Lamy said "not only can these services be held criminally responsible, but users who try to avoid detection can face the same charge as well, in addition to the obvious civil liability."

That's not to say that there are no techniques available for savvy file swappers who wish to keep their identity secret.

One way to achieve reasonable anonymity for downloading files, experts say, is to find a free 802.11 Wi-Fi access point that does not require a password or a subscription. Because anyone can access the wireless network without identifying herself or himself first, lawyers from the RIAA would have difficulty tracking down individual users.

Scores of wireless access points exist in New York City, and some municipal governments have funded free access points with tax dollars. Last month, a working group of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers gave a boost to the growing interest in 802.11 by approving the 802.11g specification as a standard, a faster version of the early 802.11b protocol.

MediaDefender's Saaf admitted that this method offers effective cover for downloaders, but said he believes it is too inconvenient to become a serious conduit for illicit music and video files. "You can go into a Kinko's and plug into your laptop, too, and put files up on a P2P network," he said. "But, if people can't do it at home, they won't do it on a massive scale."

In addition, he predicted that wireless operators could come under fire from copyright holders if Wi-Fi file-sharing hubs become too widespread.

One file-distribution system that is trying to conceal even its users' IP addresses is the venerable Freenet, which breaks from the traditional mold of peer-to-peer networks by cloaking the identities of both the people distributing copies of a file and those downloading it. Because Freenet is intended to provide a near-uncensorable and encrypted way to communicate, its designers specified that individuals may not even know what files are stored on their hard drives. The downside: Freenet remains more difficult to search and offers less content than do the most popular file-swapping networks.

Ian Clarke, the project's inventor, said in an interview that the RIAA's recent legal actions and threats of additional lawsuits have heightened interest in Freenet. "The Freenet site has seen a threefold increase in Web traffic since the RIAA announcement," Clarke said. "We've received more donations to the project in the last week than we had in the past two months before that."

"We like the attention to some degree, and we certainly appreciate the donations, but it places us in a strange position," Clarke said. "Our concern and our goal is to protect political dissidents living in repressive regimes, not to let some kid get the latest Britney Spears album. But we can't prevent that without compromising the goal of Freenet."

Freenet's Web site describes the project as "free software designed to ensure true freedom of communication over the Internet. It allows anybody to publish and read information with complete anonymity. Nobody controls Freenet--not even its creators--meaning that the system is not vulnerable to manipulation or shutdown."

MediaDefender's Saaf admits that Freenet is a "a much more compelling technology" than its rivals. "But the problem with it is that it's not very user-friendly at this point," Saaf said. "It's always been more hype than practical utility. I don't know of anyone who uses Freenet."

In a recent debate, Matt Oppenheim, the RIAA's senior vice president of business and legal affairs, downplayed the problems that Freenet's anonymity may pose to lawyers for the music industry. "Other than the fact that most infringers do not like to use Freenet because it is too clunky for them to get their quick hit of free music, it is no more of a threat than any of the popular P2P services," Oppenheim wrote.

Lance Cottrell, founder and president of Anonymizer.com says one reason he has chosen not to extend his identity-cloaking service (which sells for $30 a year) to peer-to-peer networks is the threat of lawsuits from the music industry. Anonymizer provides only anonymized Web browsing and dial-up services.

"We have not enabled our service to work with the Gnutellas of the world," Cottrell said. "The problem is that the RIAA has the kind of money that, whether you're right or wrong, you're out of business. It's not whether you win or lose, but whether you survive the litigation."

Under a 1995 Supreme Court ruling, McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission, and other precedents going back to the pseudonymously published Federalist Papers, Americans enjoy a broad right to anonymity, especially for political speech. But courts have also held that someone's identity can be unmasked through a DMCA subpoena to an Internet provider or by filing a "John Doe" lawsuit.

In a ruling last week in the Aimster case, a federal appeals court went even further, suggesting that a file-swapping network that cloaks its users' activities might run afoul of copyright law, precisely because it is designed to conceal illegal acts.

"Aimster hampered its search for evidence by providing encryption," wrote Judge Richard Posner, a respected economist and jurist. "It must take responsibility for that self-inflicted wound."

Posner, who serves on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, wrote: "A service provider that would otherwise be a contributory infringer does not obtain immunity by using encryption to shield itself from actual knowledge of the unlawful purposes for which the service is being used."

Anonymity services
If large copyright holders begin to target privacy-protecting Internet services, advocates worry that the tiny industry may not be able to survive the eventual fusillade of laws and litigation. (In October 2001, Zero-Knowledge Systems, a pioneer in the type of identity-shielding technology that would be a boon to peer-to-peer networks, closed its flagship anonymity network, Freedom.)

Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, says that anonymity should remain the default condition both online and offline. "It is in many different contexts in the physical world, whether it's travel or commerce," Rotenberg said. "The burden typically falls on organizations that want your personal identity to justify their reason."

Given the RIAA's history of lawsuits, Rotenberg said he fears the worst. "To the extent that anonymity appears on the RIAA radar screen--as have P2P and other technologies that stand in the way of copyright enforcement--you can be sure that RIAA attorneys will launch a frontal assault, regardless of the constitutional implications," Rotenberg said.
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TheFreak · Jul 18, 2003

No Republican has supported the proposal.

That can't be, Republicans only care about the rich (in this case, record labels).

Rocketman95 · Jul 18, 2003

Originally posted by TheFreak
That can't be, Republicans only care about the rich (in this case, record labels).
Click to expand...

Unless they're liberal Hollywood/entertainer types.

count_dough-ku · Jul 18, 2003

That can't be, Republicans only care about the rich (in this case, record labels).
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Rocketman95 is right. The Democratic Party has been in bed with Hollywood and the entertainment industry for a while now.

peleincubus · Jul 18, 2003

This is the first time i have seen a republican help a person or the public and not a big business in a long time.

Still freaking hate them

ima_drummer2k · Jul 18, 2003

Save all the Republican bashing for the D & D....

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File swapping to become a felony!?

coma Contributing Member

StupidMoniker I lost a bet

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