‘Criminalize creation of P2P filesharing apps’
p2pnet news | RIAA News:- In his open letter to the RIAA and MPAA, Allen Harkleroad says there’s one filesharing bill he’d like to see pass —- to “criminalize the creation of P2P filesharing software that facilitates music, movie and software piracy”.
Not only but also, “In additional such a bill should criminalize the use and distribution of P2P filesharing software that facilitates the theft of intellectual property,” he says.
His post attracted a number of Readers’ Writes, among them this from Josh, who asks >>>
How do you go after the people who write every p2p client? Let’s use bit torrent as an example there are now literally dozens upon dozens of different clients written by companies, and individuals in the closed source and open source communities. You can’t seriously claim that every one of those ‘flavors’ was written with under the premise of stealing intellectual property.
Even if you went after a few of the authors the source code is out there, you’ll never shut it down. It’s been embraced by many companies as a cost effective way to distribute large files, data, software etc to their customers abroad. How would making p2p illegal benefit these companies in any way? It would be devastatingly costly to many of them and could be a very damaging blow to their business. One prime example, Blizzard Entertainment distributes Patches for is most popular game via it’s own integrated torrent client. These patches can range from a few megabytes up to 600+megs every few months. It would be virtually impossible for them to distribute this to 9million+ subscribers; there network system wouldn’t be capable of it.
Many open source software projects are distributed via torrent. How would projects that are open and free distribute themselves to the masses if they were then charged with supplying the entire download bandwidth for said project? That would in some cases seriously call in to question the ability of many of those projects to continue, and could hurt the buisness models of many companies that distribute %100 legal software this way.
Do you seriously think piracy started the day p2p software was invented? SERIOUSLY? I’ve got news for you, it’s been going on far far longer then that. Newsflash, it was going on pre-wide scale internet use. Do you seriously think removing a few p2p software programs is going to stop it? SERIOUSLY? Are you that narrow sighted?
Perhaps what needs to be examined is the US copyright rules themselves, they need to be reviewed, rewritten. This time with the public being consulted, concepts like ‘fair use’ put into play. Do seriously expect me to accept that if I legally purchased a CD, that I’m stealing from the RIAA if I rip that cd and put it on my computer, then copy it to my iPod? And that it should be illegal for me to modify any electronic device I legally paid for?
What next? Let’s totally bow to industry, let’s make it illegal for you to change the operating system on a computer that you legally purchased. Let’s make the fine up to $1million dollars and life imprisonment. Then force consumers to prove they have a licensed copy of their operating system installed every 30days to the manufacturer. Man would Microsoft ever love that, think of it, they’d get rid of all those pesky illegal copies of windows. But even better, you’d get rid of that pesky thing called Linux. Think of how great that would be! No more people using free open source operating system, they could get rid of things like open office. And their biggest nemesis,Google would overnight be gone and all it’s assets would be for the legal pillaging of Microsoft.
The current copyright laws in the US are backwards; prohibitive and like many of the patent laws, do nothing but slow progress and fill the pockets of a few; they serve no greater good or cause.
The recording industry is fast going the way of the dinosaur, as is the video rental store, the music store, the lp, cassette tape, beta, vhs, CD’s, and yes even DVD’s. No Virgina there isn’t a Santa Clause; and these things will be extinct in your lifetime. In time there is a change even the idea of 3rd party retailers selling music online may come to an end. Why is it in the interest of a band to have someone else sell their music online? Wait a minute, eventually they’ll figure out they can sell it themselves via their web page. But the big money will never be in music sales again. Most bands are starting to figure out where the money now lies, see my friend all industries change, and you either adapt or get left behind. In music the big money today is in big production live shows. Why do you think bands of the past are suddenly getting back together to
do shows? You don’t think bands eg. The Police, Van Halen, Led Zepplin etc are stupid? They know where the buck stops.
Eventually all these businesses will adapt or be pummeled into complete irrelevance and become nothing more then a relic of the past. Changing a few laws, fighting the consumer tooth and nail isn’t going to work; and will do nothing more then speed up their very demise.
Your buisness included! You need to change, you need to adapt, not us, The consumer isn’t going to adapt to your buisness model. Alienating your customer base isn’t that way. Besides the biggest threat to you and your company isn’t intellectual property theft (piracy) by a few customers, the biggest threat over time to your buisness model is going to come from the open source community; the one place I highly doubt you currently anticipate or actually consider to be a real threat.
And the one company who takes it the most serious right now is Microsoft. They have publicly mused about throwing lawsuits around again the open source community. They consider it to be a major threat. It for them would be pointless, they would be unlikely to recoup any significant sums of money. It would really be to late as any code they claim rights to is already out of the bag. And what I believe to be the two main reasons, they know it would be a publicity nightmare for a company that is already referred to as the ‘Evil Empire’ (think of Googles motto on this one) and it could force them to open up their code to the entire open source community to pick through it..I would be seriously surprised if that didn’t open them up to some serious lawsuits which could be quite damaging and not just financially.
And this from Harle >>>
This letter started out making some valid points, but quickly devolved into something perhaps even more absurd than the original issue. At least by attacking the pirates and networks you are attacking someone for committing a crime(however you feel about the harshness or integrity of the law). By attacking P2P program authors, you’re making direct user to user file transfer illegal. Do people use torrents and torrent clients to pirate? Absolutely. But they also use them to obtain perfectly legal data.
It’s becoming increasingly common for software developers to send torrents of demos, trailers, free add-ons, and so on. It’s always been common for individuals to post torrents of their own created content, as game mods, or artwork, or programs they’ve created.
To outlaw this kind of data communication would be criminal in itself, it is effectively denying everyone the right to share data. Here is some news for you; the big media conglomerates do not have a monopoly on data.
If simply providing people with a means to share data that -might- be illegal, suddenly becomes a crime, then I guess you’ll have to start targeting AIM, ICQ, Skype, and so on and so forth, all of which provide people with a means to exchange data. The only real difference is that in these cases, the programs don’t allow for users to find specific data anywhere on the network.
The P2P software you’re referring to simply allows people to distribute their data to anyone who wants it. And making that illegal prevents anyone from distributing anything for free, even if they have the legal right to do so. Which, hey, the media corporations would just love, wouldn’t they? They’d love to cripple the average user from distributing their own content. That would mean more people would have to buy their content from them.
Great idea.
Keep the internet free.
Stay tuned.
Also see:
RIAA and MPAA – Open letter to the RIAA, MPAA, December 31, 2007
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January 2nd, 2008 at 2:26 pm
i wouldn’t mind bram and his mpaa/riaa cohorts seeing the inside of a jail cell.
ok, well maybe not bram, even though he sold out to the cartels. making a fast buck is the american way.
but definitely mpaa and riaa heads should go to prison – whether or not p2p apps are criminalized.
January 2nd, 2008 at 5:30 pm
It’s very unfortunate but this guys advice was taken quite literally in France recently. Torrentfreak has the story here.
http://torrentfreak.com/conspiracy-against-shareaza-and-open-letter-to-the-recording-industry-080102/
It’s becoming a discouraging fact that so many battles are being lost before we will finally win the war.
January 2nd, 2008 at 5:34 pm
This just shows how stupid the RIAA/MPAA really is.
Bit Torrent is used for various purposes.
Linux uses it to distribute
January 3rd, 2008 at 1:11 am
This is two days now we have heard the same bullshit from this loser?
January 3rd, 2008 at 11:23 am
“definitely mpaa and riaa heads should go to prison”
Agree. So are the executives at Vivendi/Universal, Sony/BMG, EMI and Time Warner and the coghort of parasites suronding them such as the dentist. If the justicve does not do his job on this we will have to do it ourselve.
January 3rd, 2008 at 11:28 am
“this guys advice was taken quite literally in France recently”
This French are a apack of Morons. They are going nowhere with this fast exept to disaster.
The Dadvsi law that by the way did nothing for the music industry was followed by a 30% drop in music sale during the next folowing 3 months. They can go away with this and make our day. The faster they go out of business the better for all of us.
January 4th, 2008 at 12:06 pm
Criminalize weapon creators.