p2pnet - rss feed: RIAA lawsuits help terrorists
p2pnet.net News:- Kai Stinchcome is a first year doctoral student in political science at Stanford University and the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) caught his attention.
He says the RIAA’s sue ‘em all policy could lead increasing numbers of people to anonymous, encrypted technology and, "The only effect will be that other encrypted traffic, such as communication among terrorists, will also become impossible for the U.S. government to trace."
Now read on >>>>>>>>>>
RIAA lawsuits help terrorists
By Kai Stinchcombe - Stanford University
It’s a cliche these days: The Bush drug czar says smoking pot helps terrorists; John Ashcroft says Senate oversight of the Justice Department helps terrorists and Arianna Huffington says driving SUVs helps terrorists. Why shouldn’t file-swapping college students jump on the bandwagon and accuse the recent crackdown on file-sharing as helping the terrorists?
It’s a fact. Though deterring online music piracy is a worthy goal, the new lawsuits launched by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) against alleged music sharers will have little effect on piracy and will significantly hinder U.S. antiterrorism efforts.
To explain why, a quick look at the history of file-swapping is in order. The first major peer-to-peer network, Napster, featured centralized servers that processed users’ searches. When the RIAA sued them for aiding copyright infringement, the servers were quickly shut down. Two types of successors jumped in to fill the gap. First were overseas servers, who hoped (mostly in vain) to stay beyond the reach of the long arm of U.S. law enforcement. Second, architectures such as Gnutella and Kazaa avoided law enforcement by decentralizing search functions, making users responsible for searching as well as transfer, sharing and storage. Within just a few months, millions of users had adopted the new technology to sidestep to the RIAA’s legal assault.
Lacking central search servers to attack, the RIAA’s new tactic is to sue individual users who allow others to copy their music illegally. For the moment, this may scare a handful of users away from music sharing. But inevitably the market will adjust to this legal attack. With approximately a hundred million users out there, there is a large incentive to provide a file-swapping technology with which users feel comfortable.
Time and again, the authors of music-sharing programs have managed to stay one step ahead of the law. If the RIAA lawsuits continue, the outcome will likely be a switch to something like Freenet, a technology promoted by cyber-libertarians that makes it impossible to trace the author, origin, destination and content of documents. Individual Freenet users have no way of even knowing what files they are storing, effectively blocking any assignment of responsibility for content. Two million users have already downloaded the software. Even if Freenet itself is not the next big file-swapping technology, whatever replaces Kazaa and Gnutella will surely rival Freenet in encryption and anonymity.
Currently, the bulk of encrypted traffic on the Internet is within the government or between known companies. The National Security Agency is able to monitor or selectively decrypt much of the rest. If the RIAA lawsuits continue, millions of college students are going to start using strong encryption to pass terabytes of MP3s across the Internet. The computers at the NSA will be completely overwhelmed. Not only will they be unable to determine who is copying illegal MP3s, they will also not pick up conversations among terrorists planning new bombings, hijackings or other attacks.
Freenet’s proponents argue that it makes censorship almost impossible and point to its growing use in China and the Middle East, where it addresses a real need. Yet secure, anonymous communication technology is not an unmitigated good. There are tradeoffs in limiting governments’ capacity to monitor communication, and these tradeoffs must be acknowledged.
Hard-core libertarians have advocated that everyone switch to encrypted e-mail to overwhelm government computers. A more balanced perspective might recognize that while we don’[t want the government spying on what books we check out of the library, there are good reasons for the NSA to monitor some communications. A smart policy would restrict activities likely to tempt political abuse and allow those useful in fighting terrorism. It’s difficult to choose between preventing repeats of the FBI smear campaign against Martin Luther King, Jr. and other civil rights leaders and preventing events like Sept. 11. These tradeoffs can only be resolved through democratic political debate.
But our democratic decision-making process is in danger of being undermined. If the RIAA lawsuits continue to intimidate millions of music-swappers, more and more of them will choose anonymous, encrypted technology that allows them to swap music even more confidently. The only effect will be that other encrypted traffic, such as communication among terrorists, will also become impossible for the U.S. government to trace. If we are going to blindfold the NSA at the cost of our national security, it should be a deliberate decision rather than an unintended consequence of an RIAA ’sue your fans’ policy that is already doomed to failure.
April 9th, 2004 at 8:00 am
I am not registered yet, my handle on the net is ln_solitude. Making one point bluntly clear, this is a wake-up call for free world governments to pay attention to this. To be the fetchers for the entertainment industry is utterly ridiculous and should concentrate their attention to greater needs. Defending our freedom and the right to choose or it means nothing.
CHEERS BACK
April 10th, 2004 at 5:27 am
It’s not that the NSA will suddenly shift their focus to help the RIAA hunt down fileswappers — rather, it’s that the encrypted filesharing traffic will drown out the targeted terrorist chatter that the NSA wants to focus on. It could end up like trying to find an encrypted needle in an encrypted haystack, so to speak.
September 24th, 2004 at 8:53 am
Your title has it all reversed. If you had a well-formed moral conscience, you should have titled it, “Pirates causing RIAA lawsuits help terrorists”. Then you’d have causality taken more properly into account. Please read St. Thomas Aquinas’ 1st book of Summa Theologicae for lessons in causality–trust me, it will help your PhD candidacy, coming from a fellow Stanford peer in your town.
Who started it in the first place? You the citizen pirate did, who expect music for free, and don’t even pay your best church organists who give you Bach and Handel–better food for society than murder gangster rap.
Not only do 90+ million music pirates in your neighborhood bring the wrath of Terrorism down upon us all, but they destroy real musicians’ livelihoods, like those indie artists formerly on mp3.com like myself who were truly great, but then lost our shirts to the pirate sites. When foreigners of any serious religion see an entire US culture without a conscience, ready to steal others’ property, how good does that make us look as a “moral” nation? The more morally bankrupt you encourage our folk to be with titles like yours, the more our people earn the hatred of those around the world who respect the 10 Commandments, thou shalt not steal, and the more cause for war people like you cause.
Kindly be more considerate in your thinking–don’t blame the RIAA, whom people like me rely upon because I don’t have the money to educate the public against piracy. Blame the pirates–you and your friends and parents who need to lose their house and car before they finally learn.
November 18th, 2004 at 1:03 pm
It’s interesting that the “Recording Industry”, which has been stealing from musicians and artists for years, is so willing to label others as thieves… this rant, for example, is filled with similar hypocrisy and transparent self-righteous stupidity… the issue of digital media and copying is much more complex than wishing fire and brimstone on “you and yours”, as this writer did.
“Who started it in the first place? You the citizen pirate did…”
Again, simplifying a complex issue with rant and venom… ignoring the fact that it costs less than 50 cents to produce a CD, yet the price of CD’s has never dropped… ignoring the fact that the artists rarely see any significant percentage of the other 95% of the CD selling price… ignoring the fact that the “Recording Industry” picks and chooses who gets published with as much cowardice and stupidity as the major TV networks or movie studios show in backing new “product”… ignoring the fact that, like the book publishers, the “Recording Industry” gladly lets old content become out-of-print and refuses to publish “on demand” (which would be so easy to implement in this digital age), thus making it impossible to obtain copies of old books and recordings unless one does “steal” — hey, I’ve tried buying, BUYING, old CD’s and books, by very popular artists and authors, only to be told, “oh, that’s out of print, sorry, we can’t order it”… the people the RIAA represents usually don’t give a rat’s ass about the music or the artists… they certainly don’t give a rat’s ass about Bach or Handel or church organists — unless they’re sure they can make a quick buck off of them in a one-year time frame… otherwise, pffft, out-of-print, throw it on the trash heap… that’s the kind of people the RIAA, the MPAA, and other “big business” trade orgs represent…
stupid, greedy, unimaginative pirates, if you ask me…
and who’s to say that random indiscriminate lawsuits aren’t a form of modern terrorism? i think that little 12-year-old girl the RIAA so bravely sued might agree with me… and don’t forget the innocent parties the RIAA mistakenly sued (collateral damage) in their haste to enforce their monopoly on screwing the artists…
and citing St. Thomas to back up an immoral argument, as this writer does, strikes me as the height of hubris and hypocrisy… “if you had a well-formed moral conscience…” — puh-lease, i’m gonna barf… hypocrite! i declare shenanigans!
May 7th, 2005 at 6:47 am
Have you ever considered that paying the outrageous price for a cd where you only like maybe 3 songs is why the pirate downloads music? The RIAA needs to step up to the plate and offer a more viable product and enter the 21st century…What used to work in the recording biz no longer applies…The inferior service and product offered by the RIAA could easily be replaced by giving the public what they want…a FULL CD with every song being a tune that the consumer likes…no more of this 1/4 blank CD where the waste in the industry has reached epic proportions. If the RIAA really was into serving the public interest they’d already have millions of users lining up to pay for what they want…compilations of what they really want to hear…and pay for!!!
August 10th, 2005 at 10:30 am
RIAA lawsuits help TERRORISTS when THEY SUE!
They sued girl scouts for singing Puff the magic dragon and Happy Birthday!
I don’t buy music anymore unless I see someone singing it and they have CD’s.
After it’s sung, it’s yesterday’s thunderstorm.
I hear their music for free on the radio.
And if I didn’t, I might hear it on someone else’s radio.
And I’m so pissed I’ve been studying music theory and incidentally discovered
I can not only make my own music but make my own music makers too.
And the birds do sing! Who pays them to?
RIAA has loosed a wolf in sheeps clothing into churches called the CMIA or
something like that. You don’t sell things in church, that gives God a FIT!
Matthew 21:12. Is your bible copyrighted? Gutenberg invented the printing
machine so that more people could have copies of the book God wrote!
The gideons do give away God’s bibles, or sometimes sell them cheap
if they need to. If you do anything for money in church you might as well
be a “ho”! And where can you find lots of ho’s and music? Who promotes
bands that sing about all kinds of evil things and the devil and 666?
My research shows that even though CDs can’t be played backwards even
new ones have been recorded that way. It can be detected by negative-
phase echoes. If the lyrics are evil enough one way they are worse in
reverse! And it seems to me you’re all so enchanted by the bass notes
that you can’t even hear the lyrics, which explains why even nice people
blast nasty music really loud out of their cars like an earthquake.
Now, about pirates. I said this once before. It’s too bad you can’t let kids
go out on the high seas anymore and listen to music, or piRIAAtes will
hear them and rob them to hell! Piracy is the act of robbery on the high
seas according to the dictionary. The sea is international, so is the net.
A computer is like a radio if it plays music. And you can’t tell where
the wind blows. There are no longer any records. If you make a disc it
won’t play on everything unless the “tape tax” has been paid for the disc.
Since it has, there is no infringement, exept by the RIAA who pockets
the tape tax and doesn’t give it to the person whose voice is on the disc.
If the music is on the hard drive it’s not going to last too long, probably
won’t survive the next windows coming out. And if it’s on MP3 player,
you’ll have to take it off to put more on. And your Ipod will not last as
long as my vinyl collection has!
Listen to the radio. Boycott the digital stuff. It’s trash you’ll throw away
next year. Why the hell are they suing about it? Get a boom box. They
have a radio and a tape recorder. They are legally made to copy music
for free off the radio. What, You don’t like old stuff like boom boxes?
Well let me tell you the news, movies were invented in the 1800s!!!
Sing a new song and toot your own horn!
Tell the piRIAAtes where to stick it, don’t sell your soul for a song!
It’s a free country, a democracy, We The People are the King!
Let’s not beat “around” the bushes, get rid of the terrorists hiding in them!
Have a boston tea party when the next shipful of pirate music comes in!
And vote Libertarian next time.
August 24th, 2005 at 6:33 pm
What tie RIAA doesn’t want th public to tie together is the fact that they want to control the music we hear and what we buy and when we buy it. I believe the real reason they want to control is to manipulate to buying public for ratings and sales. The RIAA lost a recent federal lawsuit concerning payola to the tune of 10 million dollars, thats a lot of future lawsuits for P2P. File sharing allows music fans the ability to listen to the music they want to. As a music fan, the P2P environment has provided an opportunity to taste music morsels from the past and new artists not promoted by the RIAA. My music appetite has actually increased as has my spending on new artists. The RIAA is listing all files listed on the John Doe suponeas as exhibit B and I believe this violates the forth admendment. Just say NO to the RIAA…