Filesharing Up 10% After RIAA Threatens Users

Moldy-Rutabaga writes "Technews says filesharing has gone up 10% on some sites such as Grokster since the Recording Industry Association of America's announcement on June 25 that it will start tracking down and suing users of file-sharing programs. Wayne Rosso, president of Grokster, commented 'even genocidal litigation can't stop file sharers'."

Re:How?

[gilesjuk]

1. Initiate a download.
2. Do a netstat.
3. Write down IP address and date/time.
4. Contact ISP and request user information after providing IP address.

Re:How?

[silas_moeckel]

Get an IP address

Look up Address with whois

Send a letter tot he required contact field citing the DMCA demanding all the info for who was logged in on IP address at date/time

Receive responce file suit to owner of the account. Or collect and wait you have time to file after all.

It's a pretty straight forward the DCMA abusing the right to due proccess. Yea having to go to civil court to get a supena for the info wasent much harder but at least it was another step. Oh yea I can do this as I own copyrighted (just about everybody does) and just need to be reasonably sure of infringment with no oversite isnt it great you can look up people on IRC etc now?

New P2P

[Pros_n_Cons]

Has anyone tried Earthstation5 [earthstation5.com]?

supports SSL, Proxys, tunneling of UDP though port 80 and some other goodies to hide from ISP's, RIAA, etc?

I've downloaded and tried it and was quite happy with it. You take a speed hit for your privacy but when the RIAA is screaming bloody murder it might be the only alternitive. Now all we have to do is e-mail them like made to get it ported to other OS's!

Personal Take

[Catiline]

My Gnutella node was loaded down with Linux ISOs, Cygwin software, and free ebooks (mainly PG texts). I say was because when this announcement came out, I decided getting caught in the crossfire was too high a risk (even if my offerings are 100% legitimate) and removed myself from the P2P scene. Given the RIAA's violent thrashings here -- for example, suing the college students for running mere indexing services -- I'm standing as far back as I can to watch the dinosaur's death throes. I'm sure I am not alone in that attitude, and the P2P traffic went up 10% anyway. I'm sure when you start seeing the stories entitled such things as "10,000 file traders arrested" we'll start seeing the boycott movement start in earnest.

RIAA their own worst enemy.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's true.

Just as many here on /. speculated, the RIAA's setting their sights on the end users is spurring the creation of P2P systems where the identity of the end user and/or what they are sharing are practically impossible to ascertain. [wired.com]

Nothing motivates people quite like the fear, however small, of being prosecuted and having to cough up your life's savings to a bunch of greedy bastards.

Memo to RIAA: Just give up, okay? You made your bed with the years of overcharging and price-fixing, now it's time to lie in it. Your customers are fed up with being overcharged and assumed to be criminals. If I have to pay you a piracy tax for every blank CD I'm buying, then I'm going to download some shit-- after all, I've already paid you for it.

Your business model has been obsoleted. Get with the times, give the people what they want, or prepare for termination.

bitTorrent

[bstadil]

Why use this old system when your are perfectly safe using Bit-torrent?

Lot's of search sites [bytemonsoon.com]has emerged so you can pick and choose what you want, and leaving a few uploads open all the time as quid pro quo.

You can even rate the stuff out there.

Aruments of file sharers

[panurge]

The answer is NOT to have a compensation charge per CD or per CD burner. Quite apart from the fact that some of us use CD writers to produce backups of work, the entire principle that there should be specific legislation in favor of a commercial organisation creating a tax which goes to fund its revenue is wrong. Literally, it is fascism (a form of government in which big business is in direct league with the government).

The example of Prohibition shows that if enough people regard a law as a bad one, it will eventually fall. If enough people believe that there is a de facto monopoly in the music business which results in the product being hugely over-priced and managers being over-rewarded, and they choose to circumvent that over-pricing, the effect is no different from if they simply stop buying the product altogether, which is legal.

I can't resist a plug at this point for Terry Pratchett's book Soul Music which manages to make some of the issues amusing.

Re:bitTorrent

[elohim]

http://www.lowta.cx/upload/c/comcastwtf.png

Interesting stuff. I'll be using PeerGuardian from now on.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:New P2P

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah I hated that flash thing too the docs are also kinda hard to find [earthstation5.com]
The main points are here if you need them.

Stealth Technology Components:

One-Click Proxy Server - ES5 provides users with the instant ability to transmit and download via a "proxy server." Not to be confused with a corporate firewall/proxy/socks proxy, ES5 allows users to send connection requests through intermediary proxy servers located throughout the world so that the download destination of a file cannot be traced by any entity whatsoever.

SSL - Secure Sockets ö Ensures that the agents of the Evil Empire cannot monitor a userâs uploading or downloading activity. When a user downloads a file, ES5 will provide the user the option to automatically deploy SSL by right clicking. The only negative side effect is that SSL causes the download to be slower due to processing overhead.

UDP - User Datagram Protocol - It is not possible to reliably scan UDP so Big Brother cannot examine a userâs computer to determine if ES5 is running, unless they themselves are connecting to the ES5 network. However, it is not possible to batch scan computers at random to establish if ES5 is in operation on a userâs computer.

ES5 Security Key - ES5 utilizes a standard HTTP server to transmit files, but deploys a special "security key" so than only ES5 users can access your shared files.

erm.

[BHearsum]

http://freenet.sourceforge.net/index.php?page=what is

"Communications by Freenet nodes are encrypted and are "routed-through" other nodes to make it extremely difficult to determine who is requesting the information and what its content is."

" The network can be used in a number of different ways and isn't restricted to just sharing files like other peer-to-peer networks. It acts more like an Internet within an Internet. For example Freenet can be used for:

* Publishing websites or 'freesites'
* Communicating via message boards
* Playing simple turn-based games like Chess
* Content distribution "

It's been around for awhile :o)

Re:eDonkey vs. Kazaa

[CharterTerminal]

If any, definitely Kazaa.

Naturally when you say "Kazaa" you mean Kazaa Lite [kazaalite.tk]. (All the file sharing, with none of the spyware or adware popups.)

kazaa/fasttrack usage

[millette]

According to the logs I keep of kazaa's traffic [waglo.com], usage has declined by something like 2%... Maybe I'm not getting the whole picture. The way I sample the data to make the pretty plot is simply by reading from my kazaalite client's status bar, and logging those numbers (users, files, GiB) to a text file which I massage with php+gd every once in a while.

Let me know if you need more data, I have over a years worth.

It is not about the RIAA it is about cheap'n'easy.

[nlinecomputers]

Most people I've know that do P2P, not counting the computer geeks, don't even know what the RIAA is. Nor do they care that the RIAA is ripping people off. They just know that they can download a song they like for FREE. They don't understand or care that it is stealing or if they do they figure it is a victimless crime because they don't have to faceoff a shopkeeper while trying to shove a CD down their pant leg.

Re: Is copyright going the way of prohibition?

[jwilcox154]

For 1, please do a little spellchecking "as in, how can you 'raed' on prohibition" people will take you more seriously, and 2, the person was talking about if Corporate America gets a hold of marijuana, then there is numerous ways that they could ruin it like "Big Tobacco" has ruined tobacco.

What I mean by it is cigarettes originally started in the siege of Acre, during the Napoleonic Wars in the 1830s, and the first time it was in widespread use in the US was during the Civil War. That was when the tobacco in cigarettes was pure.

Then in the 1940s it became commercialized, and Corporations began adding additives here and there so people would inhale the cigarette smoke so they would become addicted. Now there is over 600 Chemicals in cigarette tobacco, just to keep people addicted.

So imagine what Corporate America will do with marijuana, I can just see someone addicted to both THC and nicotine.

I think that's the point jcsehak was trying to make.

Re:How?

[comcn]

Looks like they can be found here [methlab.tech.nu] (in both HTML and "plain" text).

Re:Anecdotal Evidence - not so good

[geckofiend]

#1 Those people have nothing to worry about from the RIAA.

#2 I'd bet a weeks pay that those account for less than one percent of P2P downloads.

Re:Artists Against iTunes

[the end of britain]

This is a real canard. On iTunes, classical music--where the tracks are often 17 minutes long--can frequently be purchased ONLY as a complete album. Metallica could have, I suspect, made the same deal. So I don't buy the "its about preserving the album" rationale. Metallica has obstructed every attempt to offer online music services since the technology's inception--this is merely the latest maifestation of their total commitment to derail ANY download based distribution model.

Re:Anecdotal Evidence - not so good

[TCM]

No, that's not the only practical way. In fact, with the eDonkey network you can link from web sites "into" the p2p net using ed2k://|name|size|MD4 hash| links. If you click on it your already running eMule/mldonkey/whatever will pick up the info and start downloading if you've setup the whole thing properly.

The artists could easily set up a web page and link to their work this way.

Have you ever seen this site [sharereactor.com] or this [musicdonkey.org]? I have never searched the eDonkey network using an eDonkey client, those "meta" pages are the way now.