RIAA kills university p2p i2hub
p2p news / p2pnet: i2hub is a network linking more than 200 universities from A (Arizona State) to Y (Yale) which Ed Felten once described as being like a, “set of express lanes for the Internet, built so that network traffic between Internet2 member institutions can go faster”.
It shows, brilliantly, just how effective p2p communications can be.
Or it used to.
Organized Music [read Vivendi Universal (France), Sony BMG (Japan, Germany), EMI Group (Britain) and Warner Music (American, but with a Canadian running it] has finally succeeded in shutting i2hub down. With a little, or a lot, of help from its friends, Hollywood Howard Berman and Lamar Smith, the man who wants file sharers thrown into jail.
“Last December two influential members of Congress sent a letter to Douglas E. Van Houweling, president of Internet2, asking him to crack down on the rogue network,” says the Chronicle of Higher Education.
“The congressmen – Lamar Smith, a Republican from Texas, and Howard L. Berman, a Democrat from California – are the ranking members of the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property.”
By an amazing coincidence, Organized Music’s RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) recently bought its way into Internet2. It and fellow entertainment cartel bully organization the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) are now full-blown corporate members.
i2hub, founded in 2004 by Wayne Chang, then a student at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, ran on p2p application Direct Connect.
But, “In April record companies and movie studios started filing lawsuits that accused students of using the network to pirate music and films,” the Chronicle of Higher Education goes on.
“The Recording Industry Association of America has since filed suit against 635 i2hub users at 39 different institutions.”
When Berman and Smith started their Kill i2hub on behalf of the Big Four, “Internet2 officials responded by sending the committee a report on the steps they had taken to control illegal file sharing, according to Lauren Rotman, Internet2’s media-relations manager,” says the story.
“Internet2 does not condone piracy, Ms. Rotman said in an e-mail interview. But campus officials, not Internet2 administrators, are ‘in the best position to take responsibility for network issues that occur at the campus network level, including file sharing,’ she wrote.
“As pressure mounted against i2hub, the network made an attempt to prove that it had legitimate applications, experimenting with features like a textbook exchange and a dating service. But the U.S. Supreme Court’s June decision in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd. – which found that peer-to-peer networks could be held liable for acts of piracy if they “induced” the violations – further compromised i2hub’s legal standing. In September the recording industry sent cease-and-desist notices to seven peer-to-peer networks, including i2hub.
Internet2 had probably been carrying a nonzero amount of infringing traffic for a long time, just because it is part of the Internet, said Felten in his i2hub post. What was different wasn’t that some traffic moved over Internet2, “but that it was apparently structured so that its traffic would usually travel over Internet2 links. In theory, this could make transfer of any large file, whether infringing or not, faster.
“The extra speed of Internet2 doesn’t seem like much of an issue for music files, though. Music files are quite small and can be downloaded pretty quickly on ordinary broadband connections. Any speedup from using i2hub would mainly affect movie downloads, since movie files are much larger than music files. And yet it was the music industry, not the movie industry, that brought these suits.
“Given all of this, my guess is that the RIAA is pushing the Internet2 angle mostly for policial and public relations reasons. By painting Internet2 as a separate network, the RIAA can imply that the transfer of infringing files over Internet2 is a new kind of problem requiring new regulation. And by painting Internet2 as a centrally-managed entity, the RIAA can imply that it is more regulable than the rest of the Internet.”
i2hub founder Chang, “declined to comment on the reason for i2hub’s closure,” says says the Chronicle of Higher Education. “But he said in an e-mail interview on Tuesday that i2hub was already being commemorated by its campus fans. ‘Students are hanging signs, painting campus boulders with Remember i2hub, etc., across the country,’ he wrote.”
Will i2hub’s death make a major difference to p2p file sharing, particularly with respect to students?
OM boasts it’s successfully prosecuted some 16,000 people, many hundreds of whom were students. And yet no-one has ever been found guilty of anything, and no-one has appeared before a judge.
The RIAA says its sue ‘em all marketing campaign has resulted in significant numbers of file sharers swearing off the p2p networks in favour of corporate ‘product’.
However, the truth is very different.
Around the world, in October, 2004, the number of individuals simultaneously logged onto the networks at any one time was 6,255,986, says p2p research company BigChampagne..
By this October, the number had soared to 9,168,812, OM lawsuits notwithstanding.
Stay tuned.
(Thanks, Evan)
See:-
express lanes – Lamar Smith crows over victory, October 3, 2005
thrown into jail – Internet governance, the position of Reporters Without Borders, November 11, 2005
Chronicle of Higher Education – Threatened by Entertainment Companies, High-Speed File-Swapping Network Closes, November 16, 2005
amazing coincidence – RIAA, MPAA, penetrate Internet2, September 10, 2005
Not even nearly – More IFPI p2p bullshit, November 15, 2005
November 16th, 2005 at 6:17 pm
Computers on a specific FreeWan Cell can trade movies almost as fast as on Internet2, however the speed of (encrypted) data transfer between cells depend on the type of connection between the communnicating cells. In theory, over a hundred movies can be transfered between two FreeWan Cells in about 3 days. That is if a package of encrypted DVD’s are shipped snailmail or UPS. The Cartels really ought to give it up, because they will never stop filesharing.
November 16th, 2005 at 10:40 pm
This is way too tragic for words. We are being cut off from technical innovation so that a few can profit at our expense. This sort of thing has also happened with cloning. South Korea is now leaps and bounds ahead of us just because that research isn’t stifled there as it is here. The more times this sort of thing happens the faster we move toward being at a big(ger) disadvantage in the world arena. Russia collapsed because they wouldn’t open their society to compete freely with other countries.
But I guess these idiots just don’t care.
November 17th, 2005 at 4:21 am
Makes little difference anyway, 100mb lines are becoming standard across the world. With that kind of speed, movies aren’t a problem
November 17th, 2005 at 2:44 pm
Rather than allowing this B.S. to hurt us. We should use it as an opportunity to design new gadgets to get around it. I am trying to hack two Sprint DSL modems so that they can communicate with each other rather than having to be connected to a DSLAM. If I am successful, people will be able to have over 700KBSEC link to computers about 2 miles away. The link could be anything from a simple wire to even piggybacking on cartel infrastructure (check the law). We have purchased little black boxes that can be hacked to do wonderfull things (at the price of a warranty being voided). One reason why many good hackers are Russian is because thay have had to deal with repression. Rather than whine about it, many innovated around it. I say that we need to keep whining about the loss of our freedom as well as innovate around all the stupid rules.
November 18th, 2005 at 3:16 pm
I’ve been saying this all along, The RIAA and MPAA have never been about stopping downloads, its never been about the money (as evidenced by the settlement offers that are reinvested in tracking down more victims) Its about the control of the web. Limiting your access, what you can do, and raising the bar to make it harder for no major label artists to participate. In effect giving the MPAA and RIAA membership a closed monopoly.