response 53 of 163:

Jan 22 03:02 UTC 2003

In one of the music industry's biggest legal wins to date, a federal
judge has ruled that copyright holders can use the expedited subpoena
powers of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act to compel ISPs to 
disclose the subscriber ID associated with a given IP address when
the copyright holder has observed that IP address
offering copyrighted files on a peer-to-peer service, such as Kazaa.
 
No judicial review is required of such expedited subpoenas.

The DMCA procedures clearly applied in cases where the suspected
copyright infringement resided on a web server at the ISP's office;
 
The case turned on whether the DMCA applies to ISPs in their role 
passing through files which resided on subscribers' own computers.

It would appear that, at a minimum, many thousands of P2P users will
shortly be getting direct communications from the RIAA.

This was the "RIAA vs. Verizon" case.

http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,57330,00.html

response 55 of 163:

Jan 23 15:36 UTC 2003

resp:53 ::  I want to paste in two quotes about the privacy implications
of the RIAA/Verizon ruling.   The first is from a Washington Post 
online dicussion with intellectual property attorney Megan Gray, who 
filed friend-of-the-court briefs in the case on behalf of the 
Electronic Frontier Foundation and similar groups.  She describes the 
mechanism the court has upheld:

   "The burden of proof ((to get a DMCA subpoena)) is zero.
    All RIAA or any purported copyright holder needs to do is submit
    a signed letter saying  (1)  I am a copyright owner in [insert name
    of copyrighted work];  (2)  The material at [insert description]
    infringes my copyright;  (3) I swear under penalty of perjury
    that the purpose that I am submitting this paper is to get the 
    identity of an alleged infringer and I will use that information
    only to protect my copyrights.   The purported copyright holder
    submits this signed letter to a court clerk -- no judge or lawyer
    at the court reviews this document, ever.  Under the DMCA, the court
    clerk is *required* to approve the letter and issue a subpoena."
 
http://discuss.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/zforum/03/sp_technews_gray012203.h
tm

Salon runs an AP story which quotes Verizon's counsel Sarah Deutsch:
 
   "The case clearly allows anyone who claims to be a copyright holder
    to make an allegation of copyright infringement to gain complete 
    access to private subscriber information without protections 
    afforded by the courts."

http://www.salon.com/tech/wire/2003/01/21/verizon/index.html
http://www.cdfreaks.com/news2.php3?ID=5565

----------

Recall that this case was not about whether Verizon could be forced to 
disclose the subscriber information; rather it was about whether Verizon
could be forced to disclose it without judicial review.   In the matter
of uncovering the identity of Internet users, Congress and courts have 
now delegated the subpoena power to any private party who wishes to grab it
and is willing to run the trivial legal risk of signing a false statement.

response 57 of 163:

Jan 24 14:06 UTC 2003

Re #56: I know there were various groups working on anonymous file
sharing software of some sort, but I haven't heard anything about them
lately.  In the one I vaguely recall hearing about, the design was
distributed in the extreme -- files were spread across systems, and
connections were forwarded around the network so that you couldn't know
where the various chunks had come from.  The on-disk storage was also
encrypted so that any particular user had no way of knowing what files
were stored on thier system.  (Plausible deniability, of a sort.) 
Interesting stuff.

response 59 of 163:

Jan 24 19:35 UTC 2003

this may have been mentioned, but I think it's funny that Disney is trying
so hard to keep pushing out the length of copyright, when they've made
billions off of things in the public domain. 

response 61 of 163:

Jan 25 01:47 UTC 2003

Russ's resp:56 refers to the polemic from Charles C. Mann, who has been 
writing about copyright issues & the music industry at least since 
Napster appeared.  It's the cover story on the dead-tree issue of Wired
for February, and you can now read it at:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.02/
 
Mann frames his piece with an account of his last chat with Timothy 
White, the editor of Billboard Magazine who died suddenly last year.
According to Mann, White was predicting the collapse of the whole 
music biz.  The article does make the observation that the recording
industry needs friends, lots of them, to tackle each of its big problems,
and it doesn't have many friends -- it is resented by its talent, its 
its customers, its retailers and its co-business people in the hardware 
industry in a way that might be unique.
 
Two amusing quotes:
  "Why, when most industries are using technology to slash costs, is 
   Michael Jackson running up $30 million in studio bills?  Or, rather,
   why is Sony Music letting him?"

  "Ultimately, Timothy ((White)) suggested to me that night, the 
   industry as we know it could vanish not so much because of technology
   but because few people over the age of 30 would care if it did."

---------

Might as well stick in some more dark gloom pieces.  The Boston Herald
runs a piece with a local focus where the music biz complains more about 
CD burners than about online file sharing -- oops, that piece from 
last Friday has gone into the for-pay archive.    Two quotes:

After discussing the widely shared view that most current releases 
aren't very good:  "Or as one major label executive said in a recent
issue of Billboard, 'The storm might pass more quickly if someone 
would make a decent record.'
 
Also:  "One other cultural factor that must be pointed out is the 
decreasing importance of music as the generation-defining cultural
touchstone," followed up with a couple of retailers and students 
offering quotes suggesting that music is not the all-consuming 
passion that it was for many of us 15-25 years ago.
 
---------

And for doom, you can't get much better than Norman Lebrecht, author of 
"Who Killed Classical Music?"  In a November column, Lebrecht kicks 
around the rubble of the classical music recording industry which 
he already thinks is dead.
 
   http://www.scena.org/columns/lebrecht/021127-NL-dilemma.html

Lebrecht points out that in two of the remaining "success" stories
in classical music, the recording artists aren't getting much more 
than beer money.  Naxos, the very successful budget label, pays its
artists a flat $1000 with no further royalties.

And, for the widely reported venture where the London Symphony started
releasing its own discs:  the orchestra divvied up the profits among
the musicians, and each musician made only about 100 UK Pounds ($150)
for all the dozen albums the LSO issued -- that's just a little more 
than US $10 per album recorded.

response 63 of 163:

Jan 25 19:56 UTC 2003

Couldn't they borrow a copy from a friend and burn a CD from it?

response 65 of 163:

Jan 26 01:06 UTC 2003

they can be.  the studios and record labels need to be paid much less,
and the RIAA needs to be paid nothing.

response 67 of 163:

Jan 26 07:13 UTC 2003

I think Sindi is making a joke in resp:63.
 
Twila and Tony in resp:64 and resp:65 ::  Lebrecht's argument is that
it  is unclear how the artists *can* get paid any more in "serious"  classical
music recording.  The major labels can no longer make money  off of their
classical artists; the major labels are cancelling the contracts of almost all
their classical artists, except for  a handful of stars like Cecilia Bartoli.  

response 69 of 163:

Jan 27 03:19 UTC 2003

Re #58:  That would be a reason to run either a proxy node or
a storage node, but not both.  Helping other people hide without
any knowledge of what you're hiding or transferring is unlikely
to do more than make the authorities terribly grumpy; what could
they do?

response 71 of 163:

Jan 27 12:38 UTC 2003

Accessory after the fact. You can be tried for murder in Texas if you
simply start a riot in which someone is killed.  Conspiracy. 

What can they do?  Lots.

response 73 of 163:

Jan 28 05:23 UTC 2003

Re #72:  You're using an incorrect premise.  People running
proxy nodes *would not have any data*; all they would do is
decrypt and forward requests, and encrypt and forward responses.
The purpose of the proxies is to anonymize the traffic.  There
might be more than one level of indirection.  People trying to
find the data would have to follow proxy connections which
change from day to day, or even minute to minute.

AFAIK, there is no law, regulation or precedent which says that
you're committing a crime for refusing to leave your name and
address everywhere you go, or helping someone else to do the
same.  This is more or less analogous.

And on the funny side:

http://www.chron.com/content/chronicle/comics/archive/showComic.hts?date=20
03/1/27&name=Fox_Trot&quality=g

response 75 of 163:

Jan 28 15:03 UTC 2003

I wonder if an open, anonymous proxy could be considered an "attractive
nuisance" for legal purposes?  At very least I suspect anyone running such a
thing would quickly find themselves forwarding vast quantities of spam.

response 77 of 163:

Jan 29 02:58 UTC 2003

Re #74:  No, I'm assuming that a siezure without probable cause will
be struck down by the courts, and police agencies won't do that more
than once in a given milieu.

Re #75:  Anonymous remailers stayed up for some time after spam
became a problem.  So have many anonymizing http proxies.  One 
could always require "hash cash" or the like to prevent abuses.

Re #76:  Since such proxies have many lawful uses (such as merely
being able to research privately, without leaving traces in the
http logs of competitors), I doubt the courts would uphold a ban.