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Music Media

Why Offshore Napster Won't Work 218

Posted by Hemos from the bad-bad-leroy-brown dept.
Klaruz writes "There's an interesting writup here on why the idea of hosting an offshore OpenNap server on Sealand won't work. It looks like the idea of offshore hosting isn't all it's cracked up to be, I wonder if there are any ways around this."
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Why Offshore Napster Won't Work More

Why Offshore Napster Won't Work

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  • eventually they will get tired of playing wack-a-mole

    Yes, and that is the scary part. Notice that napster has to be especially wary of both contributory copyright infringement and vicarious copyright infringement.

    The latter is the real stickler, because extra effort (aside from the current wack-a-mole strategy) must be expended to shield from this type of liability.

    This means that napster would have to proactively monitor their network for infringing material.

    The wack-a-mole system will end soon enough, but what replaces it will be much more constricting and may cause napster to abondon sharing and move entirely to their secure content system.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Re:Listen to me very carefully... (Score:3)

    by KahunaBurger ( 123991 ) on Monday March 12, 2001 @08:26AM (#369767)
    Hastings says that because a 1968 British court decision effectively recognized the basketball court-sized island as a sovereign nation called Sealand, HavenCo can provide more privacy and legal protections then anyone else on the planet.

    So hastings is a liar. (or uses a very liberal meaning of "effectivly".) From what I've read, ALL the court said was that they were not under UK juristdiction at that time. While the Sealand tykes may want to pretend that thats the same thing as granting them sovereign nation status, there's no logical reason for anyone else to draw that conclusion. They probably would have said the same thing if he was living in a house boat out there. Lots of people are outside the juristdiction of lots of countries! It doesn't make them nations!

    If Sealand does anything to truely piss off the UK, they will go and arrest the guy again, and they will take him to court again to revisit the issue of jurisdiction, and the UK court will take into account any changes in international law and territorial waters in the meantime in deciding if the UK now has jurisdiction over this individual. And if this guy starts ranting about the soverign nation of sealand and diplomatic imunity as the leader of a forgien nation, the barristers will just roll their eyes and quietly talk arround him, just like with the montana militia, just like with the "independant nation of texas" and just like with every other group of posers.

    It all well and good to talk up this sort of "independant nation" story for fun and profit, but if they are dumb enough to believe their own propaganda, they are in for a rude awakening some day.

    Kahuna Burger

  • Also, Sealand is not recognised by the British Government as independant, and quite rightly too

    The reason that Sealand is not recognised as independent is mainly because it lies within British territorial waters. once upon a time, it was outside; but european legislation changes (Sadly, I forget the date) extended the definition of territorial waters to 12 miles offshore. Sealand's proponents seems to have developed a blind spot for that unfortunate fact.

  • What about sea horses :)
  • It seems that the point of the article is that Matt is a Canadian who will incorporate in Canada. So, why can't he incorporate somewhere else where his identity will protected? Can he do this in Sealand?
  • It sounds like you got your PhD from 'the Mask of Zorro' with Anthony Hopkins and Antionio Banderas. You can take my pride, but you will never get my silly Arts degree. Z.
  • Huh ?
    You mean bunch of Cubans with guns would be harder to deal with than entire Iraq army ?
  • Pope is everything and consequently everything starts and ends with him.
    Something like that ...
  • 1) Have the payments sent directly from the users to Sealand or to a Swiss bank account via credit card, Paypal, or whatever.

    2) There are, what, 50 million Napster users? Go to a fee-based model; $1 for a LIFETIME MEMBERSHIP would keep the service running for decades if only 1/50th of current Napster users paid in the first year. You could even set up a trust fund at that point, and pay Sealand out of the interest.

    3) DON'T GIVE OUT YOUR FRIGGEN NAME AS THE PERSON WHO IS ORGANIZING THIS. (Duh!)
  • Actually you have to have at least one(1) cow to be a nation under the UN regulations. (See sec17.4.78 of the UN designation rule book) Greenland currently spends >260,000 GreenDollars every year to keeps thier cow alive and defrosted.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • >Approximately 20-25 years ago, someone attempted to run a pirate radio station on a rebuilt cargo ship...

    In the UK (or nearby) there was a period when the seas were crowded with pirate radio stations. One of these, Radio 390, was based on the seafort now known as Sealand.

    This period ended in 1967 (dear God, is it that long ago?) with the Marine Offences Act, which made it illegal to supply/advertise on the pirates.

    DC http://www.strum.co.uk

  • Lawyer: nor is a corporation (Score:3)

    by hawk ( 1151 ) <hawk@eyry.org> on Monday March 12, 2001 @02:02AM (#369778) Journal
    I am a lawyer, but this is not legal advice. If you need legal advice, contact an attorney licensed in your jurisdiction.


    A corporation won't even get as far as the author suggests. "Piercing the corporate veil" wipes out the corporation for all purposes, leaving the individual liable for everything. If he followed corporate procedures properly, that would not likely be a concern here. The problem, though, is that working on behalf of a corporation does *not* shiled you from liability for your own actions. Instead, the corporation is *also* liable. in the typical case, employees are not worth suing, and only the corporation is targeted. Here, though, it would be the torts committed by the individial that *are* the focus, and he would still be tartgeted without any additional defense.

  • The situation is not that bad. (Score:5)

    by Amphigory ( 2375 ) on Monday March 12, 2001 @02:03AM (#369779) Homepage
    I saw the following in Napster's MOTD:
    Record companies and other rights holders are required to certify that they hold the rights to specific songs that are available on Napster. When we receive notices from them, Napster will take every step within the limits of our system to exclude their copyrighted material from being shared.
    Notice the order of operations:
    1. The file is shared.
    2. The record companies find it.
    3. The record companies have to certify that they own copyright on it.
    4. Napster must then attempt to stop sharing it.
    This leaves an awful lot of wiggle room. Must the record company certify each iteration of the file, as identified by napsters checksumming algorithm? (I forget the details, but there is one.) If so, I can foul it up by adding three bytes of static to the end of the file and post it. The CRC is the only way that this can work, because as many have pointed out it is easy to misspell titles etc. Furthermore, live recordings are not necessarily under RIAA copyright and many artists *like* Napster. However, even the CRC can be subverted. How long will it take to come up with a napster client that automagically changes the CRC every time it advertises a file?

    The point? All is not yet lost. The record companies do not have infinite resources (even if it does seem that way), and eventually they will get tired of playing wack-a-mole. I really think they are just trying to buy some time until they can come up with a post-Internet business model. By now, they've figured out that any copy protection can be broken, any law can be subverted, and that, as they currently stand, they will be about as useful as a chocolate covered wrist-watch in ten years. The Napster thing is at best a pyrrhic victory, and they know it. In the past, copyright infringement required a manufacturing facility to make a dubbing tape deck, a betamax, or whatever. Now it does not -- it's all in software -- so there's no fixed target they can go after.

    If you really care about this (I don't) just make sure there are many, many moles to whack. Use OpenNap. Start an OpenNap server. Write that napster client that munges titles and crc's. Come up with something like Napster over IRC. Make all the clients advertise by logging into an IRC channel, chosen by a random protocol daily, then doing DCC connection to each other.

    There are many, many ways around this that the RIAA will never be able to stop. So stop fretting.

    --

  • Have the client broadcast its existance on mbone every few minutes. Other clients could then detect and query the clients at will. Thus far the RIAA has been hesitant about going after the users themselves which is why Napster was such a nice juicy target. It kept them from having to sue the 50 some odd million people using the service.

  • I think somewhere like Cuba would be perfect. It's a poor nation because of the continued mistreatment by the U.S. ...

    Cuba is poor mostly because Castro & Co. think that free markets are a bad idea. Whether or not they realize that free markets are more efficient than command economies is arguable. The embargo may have a large effect if you first subtract that whole "communism" bit...

    Randall.
    On a visible but distant shore, a new image of man;
  • $1 for a LIFETIME MEMBERSHIP would keep the service running for decades if only 1/50th of current Napster users paid in the first year. You could even set up a trust fund at that point, and pay Sealand out of the interest.

    send $1 to:

    happy dude
    742 evergreen terrace
    springfield USA

  • Well, the OECD (including the US) has threatened most of the world's tax havens with economic sanctions (including cutting off their food supply) by 2005 if they don't implement less competitive tax regimes and relax their bank secrecy laws.

    Apparently having low corporate taxes now qualifies you as being a terrorist state.

    Such threatened states include the Cook Islands and St.Kitts-Nevis, along with 30 or so others, all large, scary nations. Not.

    In other words, I don't think the US is all that concerned about looking like a bully when it comes to protecting it's economic interests.
  • if i were a record company exec with millions of dollars at risk then i would consider sending Matt CAD110,000 one day before the end of the financial year.

    sending this information to the RevCan would ensure that Matt has to declare income or deal with tax evasion charges.

    if you're looking for a non-berne treaty country, try china. there behaviour recently doesn't indicate any regard for copyright.

  • Why were the broadcasters pirates? They were in international waters, beyond the jurisdiction of the FCC.

    They were pirates for the same reason that killing someone in international waters is still murder. The definition of the crime has to do with the location of the crime, not the location of the criminal. Location of the criminal is only taken into account when trying to punish the criminal.

  • Isn't it nice that, for once, it's the corporation that has to opt-out?
  • Considering how the FCC has ben subject to US corporate radio/media payola for almost as long as radios have existed? Considering how much crap they force people to go through in order to get licenses? Considering how alternative radio (eg: public, college, or community) stations have been repeatedly squashed by the same FCC, paid to outlaw and derail such stations by the aforementioned corporate radio/media conglomorates?

    You'd be amazed at what any federal organization would do if you crossed their palms with sufficient silver...

    And you thought that the phone company being the biggest organization of evil in 'The President's Analyst' was just a clever joke...;)
  • HavenCo is the hosting corporation. Sealand is the country where HavenCo's first facility is located. HavenCo is not Sealand. HavenCo's web site states that they plan to set up facilities in other locations around the world, which is probably a good idea in the event of the entirity of Sealand is swallowed by a tidal wave. Read what you just quoted. "does not allow content illegal in a given country to be hosted on servers at HavenCo facilities within that specific country." That means that content illegal at Sealand can't be hosted at the HavenCo location in Sealand. Which part of "HavenCo facilities within that specific country" is unclear? HavenCo has no facilities in Canada, so they'd place no restrictions based on Canadian law.

  • The court ruled against Napster (the company) not against OpenNap (people running servers).

    Also I don't know any way - except for reconfiguring your router/firewall - to get Napsters official client to point to OpenNap servers.

  • Ask your average Cuban about their government and they will tell you that they support it.

    Yeah, it's getting closer to the point where US citizens will have to say stuff like that, too.

    Randall.
    On a visible but distant shore, a new image of man;
  • Napster has been accused of contributory and vicarious copyright infringement, not direct copyright infringement. Contributory infringement because their service clearly contributes to the users infringement. Vicarious because Napster have the right and ability to supervise the service and a direct financial interest in the infringing activities. More detail can be found in this excellent article [eff.org] from EFF, which was mentioned in a Slashdot story a week or so ago. As far as it applies to Napster the court ruled that the contributory infringement law means that if notified by the copyright owner Napster must take reasonable steps to block further distribution of the material.
  • I actually looked into moving to the Cayman Islands. It's very nice there, plus that whole no-income-taxes thing makes it kind of nice.. Too bad the whole island group only has a 3 Mbps link to the net. 128k ISDN costs over $2k a month. Maybe someday..

    --
    PaxTech

  • Re:Maybe it shouldn't work? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The idea of whether it is right or wrong is IRRELEVANT. Technology dictates morality in digital commodities such as music. Furthermore, the idea of "theft" is a relative one which changes from culture to culture and from time to time. In the late 20th century, a few major labels determined what is sold as music. Soon, in the 21st century, music will be NOT be distributed by the few, but by the masses -- and it will be FREE. Musicians will be making money some other way. The Record Labels will be obsolete.
  • Taiwan would never do such a thing...They rely too much on the American economy (import/export) and the blanket of American defense to even begin to feel like pissing them off.
  • Horses? Give me a break!

    WIRED carried a story on Sealand last year. I can't find my magazine here about it, but pulled a quote off of their site:

    Hastings says that because a 1968 British court decision effectively recognized the basketball court-sized island as a sovereign nation called Sealand, HavenCo can provide more privacy and legal protections then anyone else on the planet.

    Don't you know that most things in the world are decided on paper? Although the continued existence of Sealand being an independent country is shaky, as the British government figure out what to do...Sealand IS and has been a "Country" since 1966 or '68. They claimed independence back then, and were granted it.

    The "horse clause" hasn't been invoked yet. They are still independent.

    Rader

  • How much clout do you think the German government has? How much money do you think the German intelligence service has? Unlimited when it comes to Nazis. So why dispite all this is "Radio Wolfschanze", run by a few skinhead ape men still operating? All the Germans have to do according to that logic is pass a few Petrograd Cops a few hundred D-marks under the table and basta.... that Russian ISP's office gets trashed.

    Fact is there is plenty of sites in Russia includig ones that would make the DVD mafia go green that havent been touched for months. Even if local officials could be bribed these sites just migrate somewhere else. What would be required is to bribe a minister to go after these sites. In view of the fact that Russian tax-collectors move in armoured vehicles and do their collecting dressed in combat gear I think the Russians have bigger fish to fry than nailing a few copiright violators to enrich bloated western record companies.
  • ... and it's very good and very effective.

    You sell only to people you know (or friends of friends, a la "this guy's cool, I can vouch for him") and buy only from same.

    Yes, people get busted, but only at huge law enforcement expense. Prolly not worth it for a few hundred or a thousand "pirated" CDs.

    I wholeheartedly recommend fhwang's proposed model as the proper mechanism for civil disobedience in this case.

  • The worst kind of problems (Score:4)

    by skoda ( 211470 ) on Monday March 12, 2001 @01:07AM (#369800) Homepage
    "But, the problem is problematic..."

    Boy, how I hate those problematic problems. They're the worst.
    -----
    D. Fischer

  • Probably won't work (Score:4)

    by NeuroManson ( 214835 ) on Monday March 12, 2001 @12:05AM (#369803) Homepage
    Approximately 20-25 years ago, someone attempted to run a pirate radio station on a rebuilt cargo ship... They were broadcasting just off of Long Island NY, in international waters, whilst claiming to be under another country's citezenry...

    The attempt failed, when the country denied any knowledge of their citizenship, and promptly the US Coast Guard zipped in and shut down the radio station...

  • Correct. We rate-limit individual servers to 256kbps at present, to ensure everyone gets fair access to bandwidth. We upgrade individual servers to 1mbps for an additional fee. We have 50Mbps of low latency bandwidth, and pretty much arbitrary amounts of VSAT 600-1000ms bandwidth, at the present time.

    We can get enough bandwidth to do 100mbps for individual servers, but it's like 30-90 day leadtime. We're working on enhancing the overall bandwidth situation, and will upgrade servers automatically when more bandwidth is available.

    Our competition is places in the third world where a T1 with 95% reliability will cost you USD 30k/month or more, though, and have like 60ms latency to any real internet center, so even with our current situation, USD 1500 for colo and 256kbps bandwidwidth is pretty competitive.
  • Here's the text of the article:

  • if i were a record company exec with millions of dollars at risk then i would consider sending Matt CAD110,000 one day before the end of the financial year. sending this information to the RevCan would ensure that Matt has to declare income or deal with tax evasion charges.

    That's an interesting idea, but if the record company throws cash or a cheque for $110,000 at Matt, he's not obliged to accept it, receive it, or cash it. It's not income if he doesn't accept it. The record company can lie and tell Revenue Canada that "Matt accepted it", but unless he really did and there is a cashed cheque or bank transaction to prove it, then their claim is going to be shot down. No transaction took place.

  • Going to the press right away with his grand plan was probably the wrong idea - obviously charges can still be brought against him as long as he controls the main server, regardless of its physical location.

    The promising prospect of running a Napster like service from Sealand is that they have said (IIRC) that they will protect the identity of their customers - so with enough care it should be possible for somebody to run a service like Napster from there without being in the public eye or corporate crosshairs. The problem is of course that of funding the operation, since taking payments anonymously is a hard problem in todays world (one could sell account passwords through underground channels - though that is certainly a much more risky enterprise).

    The best model today would probably be if some rich philantropist was willing to fund the service until a good way of making money off it emerges. If anybody is serious about that, feel free to contact me and I will gladly help draft designs for file-sharing networks that minimize the load on the central server (just having a central point makes life easier - most of the work can then be farmed out). My public key is in my user info.

    // Oskar Sandberg (The Freenet Project)
  • Well, for the sake of argument, though, note that when Sealand did declare it's independence, it was, at that time, outside of British territorial waters.

    The United States can't just announce one day that's it's extending its waters and now gets Cuba.

    In fact,there is at least one case decided before the British courts that did uphold the independence of Sealand.

    For more information look up some of the previous stories about HavenCo and Sealand on /.

    --
    Ian Peters
  • last year, my college (good sized technical institute) firewalled napster, due to bandwidth restrictions. So some people set up an opennap server inside the network, only accessible to people inside the network. At any given time you'd get a good 200-300 people on it, all with a good sized library, and all connections were fast. It worked great. The only reason it still isn't running is that the college more than tripled its bandwidth and allowed access again. Personally, i wish it were still there.

  • Long-term solution: All clueless legislators die off and are replaced by tech-savvy, clueful legislators. This, of course, could take a while. Unless some of us decide to get, um, aggressive about pursuing such a solution.
    Who says that 'tech-savvy' legislators will still allow copyright whores? Just be careful what you wish for. Think its bad now with these 'clueless' legislators, wait till you get some in there that actually have ideas of their own on how to regulate P2P networks.....
  • I think I'm a little tired of all the silly people who come up with some strange theory for having their own government. Pose Comitatus [posse-comitatus.org], The Republic of Texas [republic-of-texas.org], The Kingdom of Araucania [geocities.com]. I've even heard arguments that the US Articles of Confederation [earlyamerica.com] were never formally revoked. Hey, anybody want to start an alternative federal government?

    I once thought of making fun of this nonsense by re-establishing the Roman Empire. I mean, Romulus Augustulus wasn't properly deposed, don't you know! Alas, somebody with no sense of humor beat me to it [chivalricorders.org].

    Let's get real. It doesn't matter how good your legal theories are (and most of them are pretty awful). Pseudo-entities like Sealand exist in a fantasy world. They can operate only because nobody can be bothered to disestablish them. The very nanonsecond they piss off an established authority, in come the cops and marines, and everybody's looking for a new job. As such, they are absolutely the worst place to put a data haven.

    __________________

  • That's really cool. All the universities that were having bandwidth problems, (read=all) should have tried something like this!

    Reminds me of the businesses that go ahead and download the Star Wars trailers, etc, and tell the employees to take it off the network instead. It's admitting defeat without admitting defeat.

    Rader

  • Why? Since when does his opinion on the Pope have anything to do with the quality, and hence (at least, in theory :), the mod level of his posts?
  • You are right that piercing the corporate veil is not common. However, it isn't really rare either. In a situation as described in the article, it is a real risk. In the U.S., at least, courts tend to look at a number of factors in determining whether to pierce or not to pierce:

    1. Whether all of the corporate formalities have been observed over time. For a small corporation, it is very hard to keep everything straight. You have to have separate books, regular board meetings, stockholder meetings, official minutes, . . .. Any failure to do these things may be used to justify a claim that the corporation isn't being operated as an independent entity.
    2. Whether the corporation has been funded sufficiently. Part of the "bargain" for the limited liability is that the founders have to make it a good faith effort to operate a business. If the corp is woefully underfunded, it is seen as an attempt to deflect liability into a worthless corporate shell. Courts hate that.
    3. Whether the corporate acts as an independent entity. This is very hard to do when there is only a single person involved in running the corporation. What's in the corporate best interest is not always the same as what is in the individual's best interest.

    So, it seems to me that there is a large risk in these circumstances that the corporate structure wouldn't insulate the individual from civil liability.

    But then again, I'm not sure why this is relevant. Civil liability is the least of this person's worries. Since he is under the jurisdiction of a Canadian court, the court could just ORDER him to shut down the server, which after the RIAA make a preliminary showing, it just might be willing to do. Failure to follow that order would put him in contempt of court. The good thing, from the court's view, of a civil contempt order is that the judge gets to put you in a cell until you comply with the order.

    Also, there are criminal provisions in the U.S. copyright act. (I don't know about Canada.) No corporate veil will help you here if you are the person actually performing the act on behalf of the corporation.

  • The Washington Post editorial states that InfoSplit can determine the geographical location of computers accessing the Internet. (So it was indeed claimed during the Yahoo trial, but never confirmed.)

    But in the case of AOL users, all of them seem to be located in Virginia. Does this mean that Virginia law (UCITA, etc.) applies to everybody? And then there are the various anonymizer services (which don't get around some censorship problem that Jeremy raises, such as files that have bits set so they don't pass through routers.)

    I agree we ought to oppose censorship, whether it comes from governments, or, more likely, big media corporations such as AOL/Time Warner. An OpenNapster server at Havenco would be a good trial and I think it deserves our support.

  • Sealand isn't part of the solution (Score:5)

    by eXtro ( 258933 ) on Monday March 12, 2001 @12:22AM (#369833) Homepage
    First of all, Sealand is only a haven till some country gets pissed off enough to blow it out of the water. Assuming that this doesn't happen then there is a possibility but its remote. Sealand itself, or a citizen of Sealand, would have to offer the Napster service.

    This is remote for two reasons: Sealand itself probably wants to avoid doing anything thats outright illegal. Sure, they store data, and maybe that data is suspicious, but they can claim ignorance of it. It's all encrypted ones and zeroes to them. Once they offer a service that violates the law of some country their "see no evil, here no evil and speak no evil" act disappears. It may not be contrary to Sealands laws, but its contrary to other countries laws. This increases the chances of them being blown out of the water.

    The second reason is that even if they threw caution to the wind, is Sealand really suitable for this? They've got a 256K connection, how saturated would it be? They'd effectively apply their own slashdot effect against themselves. Their other business interests would not be able to connect (the ones who actually pay the bills).

    I think the only real solution is civil disobedience, but be prepared and willing to take your lumps if they come. Do your best to minimize this though. Don't take funds, don't run a site with banner adds and don't engage in any form of barter. Make sure that YOU DO NOT BENEFIT IN ANY WAY FROM SHARING FILES, in fact MAKE SURE THAT IN TOTAL YOU CAN SAY THAT IT COSTS YOU.

  • In the UK (or nearby) there was a period when the seas were crowded with pirate radio stations. One of these, Radio 390, was based on the seafort now known as Sealand.

    This period ended in 1967 (dear God, is it that long ago?) with the Marine Offences Act, which made it illegal to supply/advertise on the pirates.

    Radio 390? Would that happen to be the setting of the old Secret Agent (aka Dangerman) episode ("Not So Jolly Roger") that took place at an offshore pirate radio station? Here's someone who says that it was filmed at "Radio 309"... but I get the feeling he made a digit transposition error:
    http://members.aol.com/irahome/17.3.html [aol.com]
    One of this later batch 'Not So Jolly Roger' involved the topical subject of pirate radio, with J.D. going undercover as a replacement disc jockey on a pirate radio station. The location footage was shot at the Red Sands off shore platform, home to Radio 309. Much of the incidental music was made up of fictitious performers having their 60's style discs spun on Radio Jolly Roger's turntables, with two notable exceptions, an instrumental 'The Scorpion' credited to Ted Astley and Patsy Ann Noble's 'He Who Rides The Tiger' neither of which was made available officially.
  • Using Sealand is a useful and viable way to ensure privacy, but is not designed with something like Napster in mind. They have to buy bandwidth from either companies willing to run fiber to their location (guaranteed to be from a EC nation), or satellite links to a satellite in range of what their dishes can see (also pretty much guaranteed to be, at the very least, a WIPO nation). The purpose of Havenco appears to be more oriented towards activities that are legal but require high security.

    By virtually all standards, Napster _is_ illegal as it stands (I'm not stating that this is right or wrong by saying that - my own opinion doesn't count here), and therefor not suitable to run at Havenco.

    Where OpenNap servers _could_ be run, though, is in some of the countries that already have limited or nonexistent copyright enforcement mechanisms - China and Russia come to mind immediatly as nations where piracy is winked at (and in China, piracy is managed by the government). If someone wanted to make an arrangement in one of those countries, it would be a great deal easier to protect and run a Napster clone. If the country where the company and server are located isn't a WIPO nation, then RIAA enforcement becomes an order of magnitude more difficult. Sealand's legal status is shaky enough to make it a poor choice.

    - -Josh Turiel
  • Good point. RIAA has a lot of resources, but not enough resources to get everyone. That's why they aim at Napster and web sites that hold mp3's. People trading mp3's by snail mail (even when trading 100-500 at a time) are probably safe due just to sheer lack of numbers.

    Rader

  • The point keeps being made that the weak link in this chain is that the centralized server is operated as a business, that some sort of financial transaction is being made resulting in money flowing to the operator of the server.

    How about these scenarios:

    Scenario 1:
    Some wealthy individual interested in upholding the constitutional provisions of fair use puts enough capital in an interest-bearing account (yes, in Switzerland or the Caymans) to pay the bill for Sealand or to pay for hosting in a number of places and/or rotate the service to new countries as it gets knocked down by the various legal systems. Or before it gets knocked down - staying one step ahead.

    This would take the money issue out of it entirely. Is there any legal standing by the RIAA to knock this (these) server(s) down since no profit is being made and no money is transferred anywhere other than to the hosting service(s) as gift from a wealthy benefactor?

    Scenario 2 (less likely):
    Sealand decides to host the service out of the good of their hearts as a gift to the community. Again, no profit is made, no money changes hands at all. And the individual responsible for the hosting doesn't live in a country vulnerable to US law or trade pressures. Ok, this one forces the issue of the sovreignty of Sealand, and an argument could be made that hosting this service could be considered advertising for their other services.

    Anyway, I'd like to hear what the legal issues are surrounding this. Any legal folks want to weigh in?

  • The court ruled against Napster (the company) not against OpenNap (people running servers).
    This is an important point. There's a significant difference between a Napster server and an OpenNap server - the latter will index any sort of file, not just an MP3. This should give them more chance of passing the "Substantial non-infringing uses" test which Napster failed. This would render them legal.
  • "Unacceptable publications include, but are not limited to:

    1.Material that is ruled unlawful in the jurisdiction of the originating server (Such as child pornography in the case of our flagship Sealand datacenter). HavenCo fully complies with content restrictions on a jurisdiction by jurisdiction basis, and does not allow content illegal in a given country to be hosted on servers at HavenCo facilities within that specific country." http://www.havenco.com/legal/aup.html, HavenCo Ltd.; 1 January 2001 (quoted today, March 12, 2k+1)

    This seems to me to say that they will abide by copywright laws /etc. of other countries. Thus makeing the whole thing less than realistic in the first place
    -CrackElf
  • The reason Taiwan has such a small pipe is because all Net connections go through a government data center for security reasons - a justifiable degree of paranoia considering that mainland China is anxious to invade, execute the current government leaders, and harvest their organs for transplants [nytimes.com].
  • I'm sorry, I can't divulge information about that customers secret, illegal account.

    Oh crap! I shouldn't have told him he was a customer!
    Oh Crap! I shouldn't have told him it was a secret!
    OH CRAP! I certainly shouldn't have told him it was illegal!

    --
  • > The court ruled against Napster (the company)
    > not against OpenNap (people running servers).

    They have served the OpenNap people [slashdot.org] with cease-and-decist letters as well.

    > Also I don't know any way - except for
    > reconfiguring your router/firewall - to get
    > Napsters official client to point to OpenNap
    > servers.

    Napigator [napigator.com]

    Nice try, though. =)

    1st Law Of Networking: Loose ends are bad, termination is good.

  • Maritime law is very common sense rules and regulations, Just about anybody with a law degree or a good logical sense could understand it.

    the problem mentioned was abour the 6 mile rule and the right of the search.

    When a vessel declairs it's flag ( nation of registry ) it also will abide by the governing conventions of that flag. And when a vessel is declaired unflagged or not known by the flag state that they have declaired, it's an open target for ANY government to search and even inpound.

    Would you like a leaky oil tanker trading in the USA. Certain flag states have such lax rules that Life and Limb can be at risk for the sailors.

    To let trading with lax flag countries continue, USA, Great Britain, Germany ... inspect all these vessels as they come into their home waters. If the vessel does not pass inspection, it is held until the repairs are done. This little trick acts like a filter. The toughest laws are from Germany, Canada and the USA. ( Great Britain remade there laws (late 80's) after certain enviromental problems ).

    Maritime laws can be traced all the way to the time of GREECE, some laws like General average, are from that time or even older ( it a very basic law that states... if a vessel is saved by throwing overboard someones cargo, everyone else's cargo is subject to put up some money to recoup that persons loss. ) Still used today and a very effective tool in covering/sharing certain risks.

    ONEPOINT

    ONEPOINT



    spambait e-mail
    my web site artistcorner.tv hip-hop news
    please help me make it better
  • Civil law in Canada depends on whether you're in Quebec or not. Technically, most of Eastern Canada was a French territory, which England conquered or was ceded after Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo. As far as that goes, I believe the author of the article is correct, as was the poster who pointed out that if enough of a fuss was made, Britain would quite likely make moves to "reintegrate" Sealand. (Incidentally, if my grade 8 Social Studies and Grade 11 Law classes are recalled correctly, generally Canadian civil courts follow US precedence, if there's no prior Canadian or British precedent.)

  • Re:Various solutions (Score:5)

    by SnowDog_2112 ( 23900 ) on Monday March 12, 2001 @12:27AM (#369855) Homepage
    I agree almost with what you say. Basically, the near future is not so bleak as people would think.

    People have been trading illegal bits (pirated software, digitized music and video, whatever) for a long time. They will still do so, just perhaps not with the ease of Napster. The reason Napster got the attention it did was because of its scope. If you use Aimster, or opennap, or IRC channels, or usenet, or whatever, and trade with a small group of friends/strangers -- nobody is going to notice. File trading on IRC is not going to make the cover of Time. And by extension with that old "7 Degrees of Kevin Bacon" you'll eventually be able to track down all the music you want, by friends-of-friends-of-friends, etc.... Just not instantly.

    If something like Napster (huge, open) exists, and is somehow (boggling the mind) regulated to only trade legal bits, that's even better. It gives you the ability to find the lesser-known music you might otherwise not get, stuff that people are distributing through these methods intentionally, bootleg live performances that the artist has allowed to be distributed, etc.

    Now, the distant future may be more bleak. Through bullying of the legal system, bullying of the standards, etc ... the big companies will eventually make it illegal or technically difficult to copy/time-shift our recordings. However, as has been stated multiple times here ... if you can _hear it_ you can _record it_ and nothing can really stop that.

  • Move it to Africa, and use the profits to employee natives into factories to build robotic war machines. Once you have a military power, it'd be a pain to get you out. Wait screw Napster, just get a bunch of natives to help build robotic war machines of mass destruction.
  • Yes, he overstated himself. However, more than half the fortune 500 companies are incorporated in Delaware. About a third of the companies listed on the major domestic stock exchanges (NYSE, American, etc) are also incorporated in Delaware. Also, remember that many corporations are essentially mom-and-pop type stores, not major corporations. In other words, it's not totally unreasonable to say that most large companies prefer to be located in Delaware if they can afford to and where it makes sense. The corporates taxes (or rather, lack thereof) and the well established body of business law are a very large consideration.

    That said, this whole Sealand argument is silly on its face. It simply wouldn't work. Corporate veil or no, the United States, or any other major nation, is not going to allow any other nation, but especially a little questionable entity such as Sealand, to flaunt blatant violation of its laws over the internet. It wouldn't even require a storming of the platform. Rather the same outcome could be had by any number of methods. I.e., by simply getting their uplinks to cut off their connection.
  • I guess my question then is: how do the free/open source supporters who support music piracy reconcile this apparent ethical inconsistency.

    Here's how:

    Free/open source supporters believe that information wants to be free. Better, has to be free. Most GPLs only ask that you keep the credit for the work in the source files, but you don't really have to. Nobody strips the artist and title tags off thier MP3's. In a lot of people's opinions, this is the same thing. The artist gets the credit for their work. Just like a GPL. There is no inconsistency, there is, in fact great consistency.

    The 0's and 1's that are computer code, graphics, movies, and yes, music aren't owned by anyone. Sequences of 0's and 1's aren't owned by anyone, even if they add up to Dr Dre's latest hit. The same is true of open source software(if you excuse the transition from binary to ascii). I don't see how you would think that is hipocracy, that is perfectly congrouous.

  • Also, "private financial gain" has apparently been held to include receiving (or expecting to receive) other infringing works in exchange, so 506(a)(1) may apply to a casual Napster user.

  • Caman Islands Holding Company (Score:3)

    by tenzig_112 ( 213387 ) on Monday March 12, 2001 @12:33AM (#369882) Homepage
    We at the Caman Island Holding Company extend our best wishes to you and hope you will host your highly-illegal web content on our no-questions-asked principality.

    Need a place to stash your cash in a place Uncle Sam cannot find? The CIHC would be glad to help you as well as extend a generous interest rate.

    Sure, you may have to renounce your citizenship and live on some far-away island with no family or friends. But hey, it worked for Marc Rich. Off-shore auction site sells human organs, children [ridiculopathy.com]

  • They've got a 256K connection, how saturated would it be?
    No, each server gets a 256K connection. Sealand has multiple links to Amsterdam and England, I don't know their total bandwidth but it is probably well over 10MBps. It would be possible to also buy more than 256K I am sure. I am more in favour of the communitity Napster style services that someone mentioned earlier.

  • What does location have to do with it? (Score:5)

    by BillyGoatThree ( 324006 ) on Monday March 12, 2001 @12:48AM (#369885)
    Let's say Taco has an MP3 of "Nothing Else Matters" by Metallica, called nem.mp3. He ripped the MP3 from a CD he owns and uploads it to some server inside the US. I (also in the US) download it.

    Question 1: Who has broken the law? Taco, the server owner or me? The RIAA has gone after the server owner, but that's largely pragmatics (not to mention PR).

    Now let's imagine a mythical, ideal offshore server location. Call it Luna (see my other post). Let's say Taco has an MP3 of "Nothing Else Matters" by Metallica, called nem.mp3. He ripped the MP3 from a CD he owns and uploads it to Luna. I (also in the US) download it.

    Now the RIAA is unable (hypothetically) to get the server owner, right? Taco does a "magic upload" and I do a "magic download". But if your answer to Q1 was either "Taco" or "Me" (or both) then answer this question:

    Question 2: How is the mythical, Luna server with the "magic" ul/dl any different than a strictly peer-to-peer, decentralized system that has NO server where Taco just sends the file right to me?

    My contention is that it's not. Instead of figuring out where to PUT the server, we should be figuring out how to ELIMINATE the server. This would especially be the case if your answer to Q1 was "the server"--because then the system would even be legal. Bonus!
    --
  • 1) Find a country which does not like the united states, is too big and powerful to simply blow away, is not easily bullied.

    2)Place server there.

    Here are some suggestions for you.
    Isreal is not easily bullied ans a sacred cow no politician would dare even critisize them let alone attempt to nuke them. They might be pressured politicaly but they are stubborn as hell.
    China would love to tweak the US and for all practical purposes are immune to anything kind of pressure that US or the corps can throw at them.
    Most of south america has nothing to lose really.
    India and Pakistan have to be dealt with lightly so they can easily host something like this.
    Of course there is always russia they need money in a bad way.
    Even some former republics like khazakstan have lots of oil and nukes (left over from russia) that we want to go away.
    Maybe some arab countries like saudi arabia or egypt would be good candidates.
    Maybe turkey or greece but they could be pressured politically. Both are pretty stradegic though.

    Anyway you get the picture. Anybody can kill a dozen people and call it a day and corporations wouln't even flinch. Declaring war on China on the other hand would scare shit out of anybody.

  • Then you get to file trespassing charges.

    You don't think 2 million people broke into Napster's servers, under their noses?

    Napster Admin: Our OC48 is full!? How can that be?

    You ever see one of those weekend flee market places on the side of the highway? I'm sure the organizers weren't going to each vendor and saying: "Make sure you don't sell guns & drugs" *wink* *wink*. If the place DID turn out to be a hotbed of drugs & arms sales, the organizers would definately get in trouble.

    Remember, the police never broke into Napster HQ and said "FREEZE! The RIAA says you're under arrest". Napster has been told that illegal copyright infringment has been happening via their service for quite some time, many many many times, and even I don't think Napster tried to prove otherwise. At the least, there is no way they can claim ignorance of what has been going on.

    Rader

  • Once again they would have to be pressured or bullied to comply. Just because they signed on to some treaty that does not mean anything. The US signed on to the ABM treaty and are developing a missle defence system anyway. Treaties are only enforcable if you are willing to declare war and kill people. So who is going to declare war on india, pakistan, israel, china or russia?
  • ..., isn't the US, or anyone else, free to do whatever they want out there, without the need for any jurisdiction?
  • The lesson here is perhaps napster needs to create a diversion here, and instead of paying the RIAA a billion dollars, perhaps start taking that money and bribing officials with it.
    In other words, give a "campaign contribution" to said officials... :->
    --
    You think being a MIB is all voodoo mind control? You should see the paperwork!
  • I genuinally don't understand the empathy shown to 'music sharers' from people who claim to be supporters of Free Software.

    Music sharing is analogous to software piracy. It seems clear to me that musical artists, much like program authors, have the right to license their works however they see fit. You shouldn't say, "I don't like their license, so I'm going to steal their product. The correct action is to not listen to their music.

    Richard Stallman didn't start a crusade to pirate proprietary operating systems; he simply said that he wouldn't use them. There are a lot of artists out there who are providing their music for free...patronize them.

    I guess my question then is: how do the free/open source supporters who support music piracy reconcile this apparent ethical inconsistency.

  • DUH! (Score:2)

    by sheldon ( 2322 )
    Thanks for pointing out the obvious.

    There's also a question as to whether 256kb/s is enough bandwidth, or if the server will be overwhelmed.

  • Sealand is to small (Score:3)

    by euroderf ( 47 ) <a@b.c> on Monday March 12, 2001 @12:10AM (#369907) Journal
    Also, Sealand is not recognised by the British Government as independant, and quite rightly too. It is a small island, which is presently on sufferance - if it ever starts doing anything to irritate the international community, like host Napster, it will be squashed. An artificial structure created by the Royal Navy for wartime purposes will be under the dominion of the British Government as soon as it starts to annoy.

    I think a far better bet for Napster would be Taiwan or some other such similar country. Taiwan is well known for the total lack of copyright control within its borders, and is much more powerful than Sealand. Although still a pygmy in international terms, it is unlikely to be challenged or compromised over an issue such as Napster.

    The only problem might be that its sole internet connection to the outside world is a 2MBit pipe. Hopefully the government of Taiwan will correct this soon - strange to think my office has a bigger Internet pipe that the entire nation of Taiwan.

    I think that Napster type companies could well have a future in the far east. Perhaps China itself would be a good bet - good infrastructure these days, and a government unlikely to be influenced by the DMCA or US government. I wish they would consider these radical alternatives.
    --

  • It's illegal to hold a meeting place for illegal activities to take place. I'm sorry I'm not 100% sure, but I think it's called racketeering?

    Examples I read about this back when Napster was first under fire (day one? :) was the argument: I'm an owner of a rundown, out of the way warehouse. Each friday night I open it up so that drug dealers and arms dealers can trade/buy/sell.

    Although I won't get busted for selling drugs myself, I do get busted for racketeering.

    Rader

  • Except that this is the problem that people have complained about the centralized Napster model. There has to be at minimum a list of napster servers to connect to.

    That's why you don't host the Napster servers on Sealand, you host the dynamic list of napster server ip addresses on Sealand. When one gets shut down, you start up a new one. Put sealand at the top of the pyramid, tree out from there. Keep everything except sealand consumer based and not-for-profit and there's no way in hell to shut it down without shutting down sealand. P2P always needs *some* centralization to work, but very little is actually necessary.

    Just to clarify, these suggestions are for a legally run napster serving only constituionally protected free speech, not metallica mp3s.

  • They have a similar problem, since they are
    illegal in most states.
    The US governemnt has gone after the principals.
    They either stop business or emigrate under indictment.

  • Re:Sealand is to small (Score:3)

    by dachshund ( 300733 ) on Monday March 12, 2001 @12:36AM (#369918)
    The Sealand website [sealandgov.com] states that the day before Britain expanded its territorial waters to 12 miles, Sealand did the same. If you accept the thesis that Sealand is a sovereign nation, then they have a right to those waters (otherwise they would have no right of access.) Also, note that the expansion of territorial waters does not make an existing sovereign nation the "property" of the expander. There's a lot more on the site about British court decisions placing Sealand outside of UK jurisdiction.
  • Sealand would doubtless also point out that quite a large part of the UK is inside their territorial waters. (They extended their waters to 12 miles the same day the UK did ;-)

    Territorial waters give you no right or claim to any land that happens to be in them.

  • > If you took a metal bunker and put a flag on it and declared it "land land", would that make it independent ?

    Sure, as long as that land is still unclaimed. Only problem: nowadays every single square inch of charted land is claimed by some nation or other. Your only hope is to find a yet unknown island somewhere remote in the Pacific, or whereever.

  • I thought the RIAA did prove it.
    All they have to do is do a search on a metallica song, download them, play them, and voila! They have proof.

    Maybe I misunderstood you, but Napster isn't just a cardboard box that says "illegal files".

    Rader

  • I don't know about Canadian law (I suspect it depends on whether the provice was originally a British or French territory way back in the day), but in the United States courts are extremely hesitant to pierce the corporate veil, and avoid doing it as much as possible. Because most companies incorporate in Delaware, where there is a rich body of business law, Delaware is generally the one here in the US that manages these decisions. If you look back through the ages, the number of times the veil was actually pierced compared to the number of times corporations were taken to court is minute. So, while I'd agree with the general thought process of the article, I think it needs to be taken with a grain of salt.

  • Revenue Canada clarification (Score:3)

    by dstone ( 191334 ) on Monday March 12, 2001 @02:54AM (#369935) Homepage
    Another step that might be taken would be to move the money collection mechanism offshore -- say, to a Swiss bank account. This wouldn't work, as one must still declare one's offshore holdings to RevCan (Matt's equivalent of the USA's IRS). Declaring this income would be evidence of doing business. Simply not declaring it would be problematic as well, as one would then be subject to tax evasion charges.

    IAAC (I am a Canadian.) Yes, offshore holdings must be declared in Canada. But only if those holdings exceed CAN$100,000. Here [ccra-adrc.gc.ca] is a recent clarification from Revenue Canada, and the original policy is here [ccra-adrc.gc.ca]. Canadians must still declare all foreign income, just not all foreign holdings (such as a USD$65,000 off-shore bank account). So Matt can transfer the contents of that account over to HavenCo when it hits the USD$15,000 level each year to cover his bill. Such a bank account would not need to be declared to Revenue Canada. This may help him stay under the radar and keep evidence against him to a minimum. But the question remains... can he get money into that account via some clever foreign transfer that doesn't constitue income and therefore does not need to be declared? IANATL (I am not a tax lawyer).
  • I think the assumption here is that the RIAA stands to gain when the public is exposed to more/different artists. I don't believe that this is the case. The RIAA and the several companies that own all the radio stations out there have a pretty tight control over what music the average person is going to hear. Is it any coincidince that the top 40 stations roll over their playlist every 2 weeks? The RIAA doesn't necessarily want everyone to realize that they like songs and artists that were popular a few years back and now are mostly available in used CD stores. I think Napster threatens the record labels more in this area than in revenue, as the financial numbers have been showing for a while.
  • If you want free everything and want to just hand over your wages, that's called socialism and look to the friendly island nation to the south of Florida for an example of how well that worked.
    Cuba is a communist, not socialist country. If you don't know the difference I suggest Political Science 101...

    Ask your average Cuban about their government and they will tell you that they support it. Those who are against Castro were too cowardly to fight for their island and fled to Florida.

    Just because you hear a lot of Cuban-Americans in the U.S. bitching about Castro doesn't mean that he does not have the support of the Cuban people...
    --
    You think being a MIB is all voodoo mind control? You should see the paperwork!
  • Sebastian Malaby has an a href="http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A5 5529-2001Mar11.html">interesting Op-Ed piece in the Washington Post, in which he argues that the original anarchic fantasies of a Internet transcending national bounderies, is unrealistic because at some point, there is always a human involved, who ultimately is subject to national law.

    I believe that Malaby may be misintepreting John Perry Barlow's Declaration of CyberSpace Independence [eff.org] This declaration rests on the assumption that the Internet was (or could be) designed so that national bounderies would be irrelevant.

    Malaby argues that certain steps can be mandated by various courts of law and legislatures that would reimpose traditional sovereignty on the electronic domain. He suggests that sales taxes, for instance, would not present much of a burden for electronic merchants, and recent steps taken by US auction sites to satisfy French concerns regarding Nazi related merchandise, are indicative of how easily the Internet can be renationalized.

    Barlow's decalaration appeared in February of 1996 . In late August, 1996, Jaohan Helsingus closed down his anonymous remailing service [penet.fi] because a court order (since reversed) compelled him to reveal the names of some of his clients. Incidentally, the case was brought by Scientologists, alleging copyright infringement.

    The extension of national sovreignity into cybersapce is technically possible. However, it is also technically possible to design a telecommunications system that uses a combination of encyrption and anonymity to limit national intrusions to a minimum.

    At the same time, we must also actively resist and/or circumvent proposals to embed censorship into network hardware and software. (I have seen at least on mention of the possibility of mp3 rejecting routers (The Absolute Sound, Issue 128 [theabsolutesound.com]))

  • ...is Man or Wyoh to put a good word in with Mike. Then we can have "offshore" hosting in Luna Free State. Only problem is the time-delay. On the plus side, I'd love to see a big rock dropped on the RIAA...
    --
  • I think somewhere like Cuba would be perfect. It's a poor nation because of the continued mistreatment by the U.S. (why do we still have an embargo against them when the cold war ended years ago?) Because they are generally poor, they need money. They do not have financial ties to the U.S., so they can also ignore the laws and would probably do this just to spite the government. They just need to have a way to connect to the internet other than via the U.S. That is the real tricky part. However, I am sure that it could be overcome. Once the Cuban government run business opened up, companies would probably flock to it in order to do business out of the country. I know that it would be a little difficult for U.S. based businesses to do so, but I am sure they could find a way (perhaps opening a subsidary in the Netherlands, then having them do business with Cuba.) There's a lot of potential here, it would help Cuba recover from the poverty the U.S. has pushed onto them, and we would all benefit because we don't have to put up with stupid laws to brown nose corporations like the world seems to be full of these days.
  • If you set up a company correctly, it's true that you should get quite a bit of legal protection. However, incorporating is far from being a catch-all defense against personal liability. The courts haven't been hesitant in going after people who clearly are using a corporation as a shield for their illegal activities, and I can't really see how you can set up a corporation for the express purpose of violating copyright law and not expect the courts to come after you personally. You are still liable for your personal actions, whether you're the employee of a corporation or not.
  • The United States can't just announce one day that's it's extending its waters and now gets Cuba.

    Well that's more or less what they did in the Cuban War [onwar.com]. More exactly, they busted Spain out of it, and occupied the island for a few years (virtually making it a protectorate of the USA).

    To use cryptology terms, international law is definitely weak against brute force attacks. The US can still extend their waters and claim ownership of Cuba - they'll just have to manage the international outroar (easy part) and destroy Fidel's army (much less easy part - Pigs Bay, Episode II anyone ?)

    The problem is that as of now, there is no Cuban army on Sealand to protect it from English invasion and... Hey, wait, that's an idea ! I'm sure Uncle Fidel would happily accept to send Cuban troops to protect Sealand - just to annoy the Imperialists. Besides, it would be much easier to find Ruben Gonzalez's old tracks on Napster :o)

    mail fidel.castro@gov.cu -s "Hi, could you send me one or two airborne divisions before mid-June, please ?"

    Thomas Miconi
  • > Not Taiwan. They do way too much trade with us and you can bet if they disregarded our IP laws like that there would be sanctions.

    Not only that, but Taiwan also depends on the US's protection for its survival as an "independant" nation. The US would only need to hint to China that they no longer care about Taiwan's independance, and that'd be the end of the story.

  • Re:Sealand isn't part of the solution (Score:3)

    by Artagel ( 114272 ) on Monday March 12, 2001 @01:01AM (#369965) Homepage

    Getting a lot of nights with Spike doesn't require making money, at least in the U.S.

    17 U.S.C. 506 - (a) criminal infringment

    Any person who infringes a copyright wilfully either --

    (1) for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain, or

    (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 $1000, shall be punished as provided under section 2319 of title 18...

  • I lived there. Expats can get a work permit for up to 6 years, then they have to leave. They have to have a Cayman employer in order to get a permit. Don't just plan on moving there to live. It won't happen. The import duty is kinda steep also. Electric power is by diesel generator so it's not cheap. Not only do they tax the price of imported items, they also tax the shipping and handeling. (there is no duty on localy manufactured stuff though so local produce is cheap.) The oxtail stew, jerk chicken, and sea turtle steak is delicious. (they farm grow sea turtles) Porn and gambeling in all forms is illegal. You can be busted for a playboy magazine. The drug laws are strict. The phone monopoly had a 25 cent per minute internet service that dropped to 15 cents when I left 4 years ago. All local calls are per minute. Long distance is over $1.50 per minute to the USA. It's a nice place if you get out and enjoy the sunshine. The have the highest per capita density of FAX machines due to the phone rates. Nobody just chats on the phone. Likewise people don't hang out in chat rooms online. It's too expensive. I didn't do internet until I got back in 1998. This is no place for a server farm due to the phone monopoly, import duty, salt air, and power costs.
  • That's what you get on Sealand for $15,000. After reading this and several other articles about it, it just looks like Sealand isn't for Napster. The bandwidth is WAY too low, and Sealand isn't setup for people with the kinds of legal problems Napster is having. It really looks like it caters to the other kind of legal problems... problems where you want your transactions themselves to remain entirely private and anonymous. And protected by a small army^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H heavily armed body guard.

    The real solution for Napster, if they want to continue with doing busines... which despite the great idealism and the wonderful technological revolution they've helped to start, may not be the best idea in the world at this point... anyways... the REAL solution for Napster is to go Gnutella. You know, multiple anonymous servers, except for Napster, just rotate among them. Go underground in such a way that there is no legal entity who owns and manages the service. Just like with Gnutella clients, the company from which you download your client only sells the client, not the service. Napster needs to go the same way. My only problem is that I just don't see any way to do that...

  • How hard would it be for an industrious youth (or some other hard-working individual) to produce a web application that would unassisted solict funds through a PayPal account into a Swiss bank to pay HavenCo etc. and then run it from a SeaLand server? At some point any business venture that had been established could be pre-programmed to be purchased and dissolved by the application. End result is a self propigating business without personal representation in any country that might be able to prosecute for IP infringement, and without a legal fiction anywhere to hang a lawsuit on.

    It seems worthwhile to make a disclaimer here that, like anyone with a stake in IP laws, I have no interest in advocating their removal or circumvention. Not to say that I don't think that they are broken and need fixing - but that's a different thread.

    I also wonder how clever such a device would have to be to survive. Consider that the legal device could be erected: the seed money gets to the right accounts to start the thing, and the responsibility there implied is repaid. Perhaps someone loans the money to someone they've never seen and who the agent then claims to be at repayment. Unlikely, but possible. Frankly, the legal hack isn't to much my cocern, only the result.

    But now there is implied an interesting AI problem, and one that's not neccesarily insurmountable. The agent has a year to raise 15,000USD or it will be destroyed. And in order to this, it needs to flexible enough to invent or solicit suggestions for (and understand) new business models (or to refine its current one.) It'd also have to be rock solid rather than buckling when RIAA hires hackers to attack it. Maybe it could hire a network security officer to maintain its code. Man, there's a line - "So what do you do." "I maintain my boss' codebase and try to do damage control when corporate hackers attack it."

    Ushers will eat latecomers.

  • Well, it really deosn't matter. You see, when the RIAA agreed to Section 1008 of the Home Recording Act (in exchange, I might add, for large sums of money), they agreed that "no action may be brought under this title alleging infringement of copyright" based on activities defined in the Act. Well, unfortunately, I believe that to allege/prove contributory or vicarious infringement, you must first allege/prove the infringement.

    Assume for a moment that Napster's users' actions fall under Section 1008 protection. Well, now we can't say that Napster's users are infringing, because then we'd be alleging infringement (in essence, they are-since Section 1008 never says that it is now legal to do these things, it simply says that nobody can allege that these things are illegal). Since we now have no infringers, we can no longer have a contributory infringer, can we?

    For those that still didn't get it, how's this for an explanation. Can you be charged with accessory to murder (not conspiracy to commit murder, as I'm sure someone will bring up) if nobody's dead? How about if we're not sure if anybody's dead? How about if somebody is dead, but they were killed in self-defense (therfore-no murder...)? I would say the answer to all those are 'no'.

    Now, the only thorn is to prove that Napster's users do indeed fall under the scope of Section 1008. Well, the US Gov't, being the business whore that it is, feels they do not. Read their brief here [loc.gov]. Unfortunately, they didn't pay their lawyers enough to write this brief, and I explain why here [ufl.edu].

    If you don't want to look, here's the basics. Npaster's software falls under the definition of "device", as does a PC's audio recording functions, as does a CD-R. Napster's users are making "digital musical recordings", you just have to think in terms of hard drive clusters, not the entire hard drive. Napster's users are engaged in noncommercial copying, not public distribution "by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending". Napster is used to make "digital audio recordings" (copies of the music in the brief's own words). Napster's users can't be said to be infringing.

  • What's wrong with monitoring the "free speech"? If it's posted on a public server, it's by definition public, anyone can monitor it.

    Metallica is free to do whatever it pleases. You are free to not listen to their music if you don't want to follow their rules. If you think you have a better system, follow RMS's lead. Implement your better system, and use it.

  • Various solutions (Score:4)

    by fhwang ( 90412 ) on Monday March 12, 2001 @12:15AM (#369982) Homepage
    Short-term solution: Run your own "friends-and-acquaintances-only" OpenNAP
    Not every OpenNAP server is on Napigator. Although I don't know know anybody who's done this, I wouldn't be surprised if people are starting to set up servers and only announcing them by word-of-mouth to friends and acquaintances. This way, the RIAA will never hear about it. So you get a user base of only 20 instead of 2000, and you get a lot less songs, but you could still a decent amount of file-sharing. Not ideal, but okay for now.

    Long-term solution: All clueless legislators die off and are replaced by tech-savvy, clueful legislators.
    This, of course, could take a while. Unless some of us decide to get, um, aggressive about pursuing such a solution.

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