RIAA won't sue, but will throttle

Hmm...

So they are changing tack and stopping suing people just before their methods are ruled illegal...

Giving themselves the right to use the same (potentially illegal) methods to go after people in the future for more money??

The dinosaur...

...decides to stop eating innocent bystanders because they give it indigestion. Instead it makes ludicrous claims about how much money it's losing and seeks to equate what's, at best, a civil issue with a criminal one and demands that ISPs become its Righteous Army and punish, in its own say-so and without judge or jury, anyone it points it hoary old finger at.

It'd be high farce if the RIAA hadn't bought enough politicians to give it political clout.

Not good enough

After they sued a chronically ill teen who was unable to defend herself in court because she was hospitalized I decided the RIAA was unforgivable forever.

I will never buy music from an RIAA member again.

FYI

They also serve you copyright infringment notice for the cracks they didn't write

Isn't America...

...The lawsuit capital of the world?

What will happen if the ISPs cuts there customers connections on the say so of a commercials organization who has no powers of law to demand such things and then what happens when it comes to light that some if not most are innocent....lawsuit city that's what.....

Maybe the public should be made aware at a national level of the crimes the riaa has committed againsts "suspected" file shares and the artists they suppositly represent and the customers in general they sell to.....standard new release CD £20 or $ or E always could this be called the criminal action price fixing? same price all the time despite the cost dropping? price fixing.

People and companies covered in mud should not sling dirt and complain about how everyone is filthy

-J

Loose contract canons

Third party organisations are a buffer for these crooks. The ISPs have been the jam in the sandwich for years for supplying the tubes to load the dumper trucks and now they are the sandwich for the tubes that make the bread that goes down the tubes into the truck.

Why don't the ISPs just flag the file sharers and tell the crooks where the pirates live so they can get the tubes and the trucks sorted out between themselves?

I suppose it all depends on what contracts which parties have with their custonsumers. Sort it out Paris, you got rich on Fail.

fail or phail?

So... they tried and tested one unworkable method that got them beaten to death in the courts so now they are going to bypass the legal system altogether and go for the ISP with just as little evidence as the did before? Nothing has changed, they have simply got more underhanded.

Sandwichs, tubes, bread, dumper trucks, jam...

Eh??

I'm sure she would be confused too!

RIAA

FAIL

This is *really* going to work

What ISP is going to voluntarily get rid of thousands of customers???

And if your ISP was stupid enough to kick you off, just go to a new one. Easy.

saitan playing at snowball fights on the way to work....

" Shareholders come first, not the customer."

that's where the paradox begins, without customers there is no dividend for the shareholders, no dividend, the shareholders wll dum the shares, the dumping of shares will force the price of those shares to fall, making them worth little or nothing... no further investments means little or no future investments in infrastructure, that means crap service, that means no customers....

there is no way the ISP's will stand for the RIAA or any other non government body telling them to cut someone off.... Would you cut your own throat? no, thought not....

At best, the ISP's will fire out a few warning letters, they may even cut someone off until they call CS for a telling off and a promise they will quit it.... if it goes much further than that, i will be supprised..... and i bet the ISP's will the RIAA "oh yes,,, we told them off and cut them off....."

flame,,,, because its gone cold in hell....

When will the ??AA

Realize that the only way forward is to tap the revenue stream, rather than sue its bollocks off. $10 a month for the rest of their life from every internet subscriber in the world sounds like a pretty sizable chunk of cash. Reliable, subject only to variations in population, and virtually cost free, oodles of cash coming in and little in the way of costs going out. These neanderthals are giving capitalism a bad name (ok not as bad as Madoff) and being incredible shortsighted to boot.

Paris cos she knows how to swallow a good stream.

Efros

Hang on a minute...

"Under the new plan, the RIAA will send notices to ISPs that identify the IP addresses of suspected file sharers. ISPs will then send warnings to their customers and then cut them off if the users fail to curb their illegal downloads."

Um, did you really mean 'downloads'? And if so, how does the RIAA identify downloaders? I find it hard to believe that the RIAA are going to the file sharing sites and saying 'tell me everyone who's downloading anything' and getting any response other than 'go away'.

Warning: Fire risk

"To many, internet connections are essential lifelines to school, work, and other important parts of daily life. " And driving is any different? If you drive illegally, you're likely to get banned. Point made?

Good now to counter that point, the RIAA etc are as corrupt as the governments, I lost my driving license with little more evidence than: male, 20yrs old, had a crash (on a notorious bend). i.e. I lost my driving license to make up some pocket change and improve their figures.

Now I'll just add, that I do not agree with the RIAA/MPAA and their tactics. And I don't believe any ISP should act on any information provided by them.

Former Interent service rep

As a former ISR of a well known cable company, I can tell you that they (the corporate big wigs) don't really give a shit about their customers. This trickles down to lowly employees also. They have a policy of three strikes and your out based solely off of info provided by the RIAA which simply tied to an IP addy. While the IPs are dynamic, they rarely change.

This approach by the riaa would completely fall apart if everyone who does bit torrent sharing would start using proxies. It would have the effect of completely making all IP evidence completely unreliable. Maybe all BT clients should start wirting something into their code that by default use tor or something similar. Problem solved, Freetards happy and $$$tards thwarted again!

RIAA

And I'm sure we can rely on the RIAA to ensure that their methods of correctly identifying genuine cases of infringement will be oh so much more efficient this time...

How many dead people are going to get their internet connection revoked I wonder?

how in God's name can this be happening...

.. that a private company thinks it can simply packet-sniff my internet traffic and compel another company to stop doing business with me? If I told the US Post Office that I'd peeked at my neighbors mail, decided he was doing mail fraud and demanded his mail service be cut off, how much luck would I have? And which one of us would be most likely to be prosecuted?

So many ways around this...

Just off the top of my head:

1. proxy e.g. torrentprivacy

2. using your neighbour's open wireless network

3. "someone must have cracked my wireless network. You know the encryption used with wireless isn't 100% secure, right?"

4. public internet connections

5. enable bittorrent encryption (doesn't prevent some methods, but it works very well for others), you should always have it enabled anyway.

6. use an ISP with a dynamic ISP

7. challenge the accuracy of their data since it has been proved to be inaccurate before.

The reason the RIAA is doing this due to the Harvard Law Prof suit

Prof. Charles R. Nesson ’60, the founder of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, is suing the RIAA. The basis of the suit, which legal scholars pretty much say he'll win on, is that the law that the RIAA exploits (The Digital Theft Deterrence and Copyright Damages Improvement Act of 1999) are an unconstitutional delegation by Congress of executive prosecutorial powers to private hands.

More at:

http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=525151

Bittorrent? HA!

I think its funny how everyone talks about Bittorrent when the methods of distributing files from the major release groups don't utilize Bittorrent at all. Bittorrent is slow and insecure, most major release groups still rely upon older methods like IRC and Newsgroups where massive bandwidth is available and security is easier to control.

If the RIAA/MPAA is serious about taking down file sharing (which is impossible at this point) they need to target release groups instead of the insignificant downloaders.

/mines the one that says "F the RIAA/MPAA"

i'll never understand

How the RIAA could sue anyone anyhow. If you've ever tried to bring a frivilous lawsuit against someone "like most of the RIAA ones are" your usually slapped as having no, ah what's that word, no grounds to sue, like you aren't the party being affected by the situation. I can't remeber the actual legal term, im no lawyer but usually if you aren't the one affected by the situation you have no grounds to sue.

The RIAA has operated as a racketeering organization for years now and it's about time they get slapped back, who do they think they are. If artists released real music people won't be grabbin the stuff off the net for free, who wants to buy a cd, especially now. The music industry has been 'price fixing' for years and technology caught up with em.

The RIAA sucks.

The problem that I see is...

...who counts the three strikes? The RIAA finds the IP address of some downloaders and informs the ISP. The ISP puts an e-mail addressed to the offender on its server (assuming that it provides an e-mail service). The addressee may or may not collect the e-mail (he might be using a different e-mail service). Presumably the the ISP will know if the e-mail has been collected (and perhaps sent to the great bit-bucket in the sky by a SPAM filter).

The RIAA now continues looking for the IP address of downloaders. But supposing it finds the same address again. It now has to inform the ISP that it suspects the same address and has to ask if it is the same customer. The ISP now has to check. If the IP address has been reassigned, the RIAA has to start all over again.

This seems like a stupid, unworkable, scheme to me.

Association?

"You called them the "Recording Industry Association of America". When did they stop being an "Ass"?

@Roger Jenkins

"RIAA doesn't need to have 'thousands' of ISP accounts closed, in fact a few well publicised account closures will have the required effect."

There have already been high profile cases of the RIAA suing people. It made them look bad and didn't do anything to discourage filesharing (incidentally, I presume you meant unlawful filesharing, as filesharing per se is not unlawful). Anyway, it may sound good in theory, but in the real world it doesn't discourage anybody.

"it shows the IP's of all the seeds and peers for a given torrent download"

This is precisely why so many torrents are packed with random bogus IP addresses, so that nobody can tell which ones are from the real seeders/leechers. This is why little old ladies get threatened for downloading gay porn.

"How would ISP's regulate a dynamic IP? Easy, after all it is they who issue the IP's and log who has which and when"

Yes and these logs have repeatedly been shown to contain errors.

"I would have thought that many ISP's would be only too happy to rid themselves of a 'serial' downloader, I doubt they make any money from those accounts anyway."

Of course they make money from these accounts. Those subscribers pay, er, a subscription. Why do you doubt it? Do you think they get free connections? In fact, those who use massive amounts of bandwidth pay more than most for their account.

The real issue here is that it should not be lawful for an unregulated non-statutory body to impose its will on an ISP. It certainly should not be lawful for an ISP to disclose my personal information to them, simply because they say so.

If the RIAA or BPI think they can prove that I'm unlawfully infringing copyright, they should pursue me in a civil case for copyright infringement. If not, they should just piss off instead of trying to find me guilty by suspicion.

Re: "So many ways around this... "

8. Just buy the fucking CD!!

I doubt anybody who has been posting on here complaining about being stopped from ILLEGALLY downloading music works for free??? So why should musicians??

It is a myth that all musicians are rich, most earn less than £15,000 a year, and even before all this downloading lark started 90% of albums DO NOT MAKE MONEY.

I just love the fact that people here are saying the RIAA's actions are illegal, but you are ILLEGALLY downloading music!

An easy solution...

Lets just ignore everything we know about the RIAA and pretend for a minute that they do have the best interest of their artists in mind and that piracy actually loses them money...

It seems to me that the running costs for the RIAA must be many times what they recover/protect with their handful of semi-successful lawsuits (does anyone know whether this is correct?).

If so, I don't even need to continue because even she can see where this is going.

Test case in Australia

When Australia signed a FTA with the USA a year or so ago, the US copyright laws were cut and paste wholesale into Australian law.

AFACT (Aussie arm of MPIAA) are now prosecuting a test case against a smaller (iiNet 5% market share) ISP here for failing to disconnect a user they said was filesharing illegally (they were actually paying the user to do the filesharing, so technically the user wasn't acting illegally, and the ISP did forward their accusations on to the police for investigation, but AFACT refused to co-operate with the law enforcement authorities).

IANAL but given our laws are a wholesale cut and paste of the US laws, I expect this result of this case will have repercussions for US ISPs.

Skull and cross bones cause the RIAA and MPIAA and their cronies are the biggest pirates out there.

Best thing to do!

If RIAA/MPAA told all their members to stop producing music altogether, then the Freeturds who download with no belief in the system of how civilised society works would have scored an own goal. Most of todays music is crap anyway, so it would do us all a favour.

Analogy

One belongs to an underground file sharing community who share music CDs courtesy of the Royal Mail.

The RIAA decide that this illegal sharing of music is denting their profits and start opening everyone's mail, just to check that there are no illegally shared CDs.

Upon discovering these dangerous and illegal CDs in someone's mail, they instruct Royal Mail to cut off one's postal service.

On a side note, how long will it be before it's illegal to play music on anything other than earphones, lest someone without a valid licence overhears it?

Let's get this straight

They haven't got enough evidence to get illegal file sharers in court.

So they're going to take the same evidence to their ISPs?

...and they're going to ask for proof, same as the courts would?

Mine's the one with deja-vu in the pocket.

@ mines the one that says "F the RIAA/MPAA"

surely just:

Fuck the Ass. of America

ermm okey did I go to far?

@Just buy the [expletive excised] CD

I usually do, if it's any good.

"before all this downloading lark started 90% of albums DO NOT MAKE MONEY"

So most albums never did make any money anyway. Nothing's changed then. Unlawful filesharing has not made any hole in the revenue stream. It's just a convenient Aunt Sally for the RIAA/BPI to throw rocks at, instead of facing up to the fact that their business model is a dead duck. What really worries them is that people have realised that they don't need these obsolete middle men and can now sell direct to their fans via the internet.

"but you are ILLEGALLY downloading music"

No I'm not. If I was doing it, I'd be unlawfully infringing copyright. There is a world of difference between "unlawful" and "illegal". That is why the law makes the distinction - it isn't some kind of accidental loophole. Stick that in your morally indignant pipe and smoke it.

@Alexis Vallance

"And if your ISP was stupid enough to kick you off, just go to a new one. Easy."

In a free country, that could be an option indeed. But not in the USA, where it feels like most areas have one provider only -- or at best, one of each type (only one for cable, only one for DSL).

In spite of what anyone says

I can hardly wait for the first lawsuit when some stupid ISP listens to the RIAA or MPAA and cuts off someone's service. They may have any kind of terms of service they want, but if the message is never read, it's never been delivered...it's not like they're going to send out registered mail to each use accused by the AA's...the ISPs aren't going to want that expense shoved back on them...not to mention the hassle of dealing with potentially thousands of these requests are year...have to search through logs and figure out who was online when....you would have to be frikkin crazy if you were an ISP to go along with this harebrained scheme.

Do you really think....

...they are going after the downloaders? No, they will insist the the ISPs block the trackers. Still should make for a bit of fun when uTorrent move to the UDP/uTP protocol, http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/01/richard_bennett_utorrent_udp/, run it on a onion or VPN, then add one time pad encryption for each session. Before long the RIAAss will need more computing power than the NSA to find what's moving over the interweb thingy.

Paris, 'cos she's done a lot of deep packet inspection in her time