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Discuss the world of file sharing, from philosophy to help with applications.

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battye
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How much would you per month for this? Personally, I wouldn't pay more than $10 a month, because sometimes I might download nothing in a month. But a fee as small as that, which would allow people to download unlimited amounts of music, I don't think would be enough to satisfy the music authorities. They probably will want something like a $60 - $70 flat fee per month.
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I would pay maybe 10-20$ extra per month to legally download on p2p networks.
Yea knowing the content industry they probably would want something like 60-70$ dollars per month.
Maybe have different plans say like 2 gig , 5 gig ect..limits per month in different price ranges.The more you want to download per month it'll cost you more.
It's be cheaper for them too if they use decentralized networks which would save them money & in return that'll make them more money cause their cost will be down. All they have to do is upload one copy & let the peers spread it around the networks themselves, so that one copy can turn into millions of copies of the same file.
They would save more money too cause they wouldn't have to spent money making the physical products CDs, DVDs , packaging etc which would put more money in there pockets.
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iPod Levy - Copyright Board decision quashed by Federal Court of Appeal

The Federal Court of Appeal ("FCA") has quashed the Copyright Board's July 19, 2007 decision to go ahead with its planned hearing to certify a levy of up to $75 on iPods and other Digital Audio Recorders.

The FCA hearing on the judicial review of the Board's decision was held yesterday. It took the Court less than 24 hours to render its decision - which told the Board that the Court's previous decision on the same issue from 2004 is "dispositive."

The Court, per Sharlow, J.A., said:

I read that case as authority for the proposition that the Copyright Board has no legal authority to certify a tariff on digital audio recorders or on the memory permanently embedded in digital audio recorders. That proposition is binding on the Copyright Board....

It follows that the Copyright Board erred in law when it concluded that it has the legal authority to certify the tariff that CPCC has proposed for 2008 and 2009 on digital audio recorders, and in dismissing the applicants’ motions.
excesscopyright.blogspot.com
Wow I'm happy that they shut down that levy plan.iPod's are expensive enough now imagine how much more it would've cost with the extra 75$ levy. :shock:
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http://sigfrid.wordpress.com/2008/01/07 ... e-sharing/
Decriminalize File Sharing

This is an English translation of an article that I, and six other Members of the Swedish Parliament representing the Moderate Party, had published in Expressen on January 3, 2008. The article, calling for decriminalization of all file sharing, has started a loud debate in Swedish media.

Last fall, Sweden’s government-appointed copyright analyst Cecilia Renfors released a report proposing to close down file sharers’ Internet connections, banning them from the online world. The responsibility to execute the ban is put on the Internet Service Providers. Internet Service Provides who refuse to cut their subscribers’ connections would be fined.

When the Swedish government sent the Renfors proposal out to agencies and organizations for consideration the criticism was harsh. The Swedish Courts of Appeal questions whether banning citizens from the Internet would indeed reduce online file sharing. Despite several other countries having already taken similar action, none have had good results to show for it.

The Data Inspection Board, responsible for safeguarding the individual’s integrity, asks whether the Renfors proposal is consistent with the protection of private correspondence that is granted by the European Convention on Human Rights. EU directives as well as national legislation say that the responsibility of the Internet Service Providers is to offer a tool for communication – not to keep track of what individuals discuss or what information they exchange. The Competition Authority adds that it’s unreasonable to give private businesses responsibilities that should belong to a government agency. The decisions to ban subscribers from the Internet would be arbitrary without a proper legal process. And so it continues when you read the comments from the major agencies. Agency after agency slams the Internet-ban proposal

...
Banning file sharers from using the internet. Would it work? It would stop someone from re-offending. If a man shoots someone, the best way to ensure he doesn't shoot any more people is to make sure he never has a gun in his hands again.

But mainly the article is about "decriminalizing all non-commercial file sharing". Non-commercial confuses me, does that mean only open source/non-for-profit P2P programs can be decriminalised? Let's assume it means all P2P programs and something was lost in translation. It is hard to imagine a future where we can download copyrighted music for free, legally. If it happened, where is the incentive to become a musician? Royalties would be limited to radio/tv play and concert performances. Removing physical sales (because I think it will come to the point, as I discussed at http://www.cricketmx.com/articles/read/ ... ll-the-cd/ that MP3's will overtake CD's) will mean a significant profit cut for not only the music associations, but the artists.

I have no problem paying for a track off iTunes. It is $1.69 in Australia, ideally I'd like to see it come down to 99c. I think it is a touch too expensive. If the prices were lowered I think we would see more and more people willing to pay for music.
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http://www.wired.com/entertainment/musi ... sony_music
DRM Is Dead, But Watermarks Rise From Its Ashes
By David Kravets 01.11.08 | 6:30 PM

After dumping DRM, Sony is experimenting with digital watermarking.
Photo: Associated Press
With all of the Big Four record labels now jettisoning digital rights management, music fans have every reason to rejoice. But consumer advocates are singing a note of caution, as the music industry experiments with digital-watermarking technology as a DRM substitute.
Watermarking offers copyright protection by letting a company track music that finds its way to illegal peer-to-peer networks. At its most precise, a watermark could encode a unique serial number that a music company could match to the original purchaser. So far, though, labels say they won't do that: Warner and EMI have not embraced watermarking at all, while Sony's and Universal's DRM-free lineups contain "anonymous" watermarks that won't trace to an individual.
Still, privacy advocates were quick to point out that the watermarking is likely to produce fresh, empirical data that copyright material is ping-ponging across peer-to-peer sites -- data the industry would use in its ongoing bid to tighten copyright controls, and to browbeat internet service providers to implement large-scale copyright-filtering operations.
Interesting idea, I must say. Don't know if it's foolproof, I'm sure someone will find a way around it.

It seems to me though, that this only affects digital downloads (I may have missed something). In other words, what you purchase online can be traced back to you, but purchased CD's are not affected, so ripping a CD and sharing it online would circumvent this? It would be impossible to track CD purchases surely... "Just the one CD sir, hold on a second while I copy down your drivers license number. Do you have any other forms of identification? Now let me copy down the CD serial number. Okay, thank you for your purchase, that will be $30." :P
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In a recent announcement, the RIAA says that it has sent 407 "pre-litigation" letters to 18 universities across the United States.

They include a detailed list of where the lawsuits went: Arizona State University (33 pre-litigation settlement letters), Bowdoin College (11), California State University, Monterey Bay (25), College of William and Mary (15), Duke University (16), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (19), Mount Holyoke College (15), Rhode Island College (22), Saint Mary's College of Minnesota (13), Stanford University (15), Texas Christian University (14), University of California, Berkeley (26), University of California, Los Angeles (26), University of Connecticut (25), University of Iowa (24), University of Nebraska-Lincoln (22), University of Texas at Austin (50), and Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University (36).

“The record industry is partnering with a variety of innovative services to offer fans an extraordinary array of musical experiences and generate new business opportunities,” said Jonathan Lamy, Senior Vice President, Communications, RIAA. “College students are among music’s most tech-savvy fans. The latest legal alternatives now come bundled with fan favorites such as social networking features, music videos, and movies. The many alluring legal options currently available are free or deeply discounted and going legal means that students avoid getting in trouble with their university and the law.”

Noticeably missing again seems to be Harvard University. Some who watch these news stories have asked if the RIAA has ever sued anyone in Harvard. This wave of letters indicates that no letters were sent to the law school.

“Bringing lawsuits has never been our first choice,” Lamy added. “But for those who continually ignore enticing legal alternatives and plentiful warnings, it’s a necessary part of the equation.”
zeropaid.com
:roll: More useless lawsuits suing their own consumers isn't gonna help them stop people from using p2p networks to download their copyrighted content.It might increase users p2p usage with more people boycotting the RIAA's products.
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The Motion Picture Association (MPA) has announced (PDF) that 25,000 DVDs were confiscated and 5 arrests were made in a Bangkok bust.


The Motion Picture Association were congratulating police recently after the success of "Operation Blackout" recently. The bust happened in the Banmor area of Bangkok. They say that while they did make 5 arrests, many more escaped police when lookouts warned them by blowing whistles.

“The police have no day off when it comes to pirates selling their products. We will
continue to do everything within our powers to stop these criminals.” said General Visuth
after the raid.

“We are happy that the Thai authorities have taken Operation Blackout to heart and
persisted in cleaning up Banmor despite all the challenges faced,” said Mike Ellis, Senior
Vice President and Regional Director, Asia-Pacific for the MPA. “It is a very promising start
to the New Year and we look forward to many more such success stories from Thailand.”

No famous dogs were involved in this raid.

The MPA says that many big titles that were confiscate in the raid including Alien vs. Predator 2, American Gangster, and I Am Legend.
zeropaid.com
I have no problems with them arresting commercial Pirates , online piracy for personal use is fine with me, most people that can afford to buy the cartels content end up buying it if they like it.I see nothing wrong with sampling content before you buy it.Beside stats show the p2p users are more likely to buy copyrighted content then the average consumers anyways.
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That's 25,000 DVD's. In one small district. In Bangkok. In Thailand. In the whole of Asia.

Raindrop in the ocean effect, there are so many more out there that it's not funny.
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MPA & RIAA continue Wrath into 2008
Only 10 days into the New Year and the two groups are at it again. On behalf of the major record companies, the Recording Industry Association of America has sent yet another (the twelfth) wave of 407 pre-litigation settlement letters to 18 universities nationwide...
Meanwhile, as part of the Motion Picture Association’s anti-piracy initiative Operation Blackout, which runs through the holiday season till the end of January 2008, a team of 22 officers from ECOTEC and MPA representatives raided two distribution centers and 11 retail outlets located in the notorious Banmor area in Bangkok. During the raid, over 25,000 optical discs were seized and five individuals were arrested.

Of the former, 6,000 were infringed MPA member company titles including “Alien vs. Predator 2”, “American Gangster” and “I am Legend”. “The police have no day off when it comes to pirates selling their products. We will continue to do everything within our powers to stop these criminals,” said General Visuth, who led the officers, after the raid.
And once again They show bogus stats again that they most likely pulled out of their asses to support their cause.
As usual, the RIAA is backing up its methods with statistics:

* a survey by Student Monitor from 2006: more than half of college students download music and movies illegally
* Market research firm NPD: college students alone accounted for more than 1.3 billion illegal music downloads in 2006
* Institute for Policy Innovation: global theft of sound recordings cost the U.S. economy $12.5 billion in lost revenue and more than 71,000 jobs and $2 billion in wages to U.S. workers per year


“Bringing lawsuits has never been our first choice. But for those who continually ignore enticing legal alternatives and plentiful warnings, it’s a necessary part of the equation,” said Jonathan Lamy, Senior Vice President, Communications, RIAA.

The MPA also cites losses – MPA studios have reportedly lost US$6.1 billion to worldwide piracy in 2005. About US$2.4 billion was lost to bootlegging, US$1.4 billion to illegal copying and US$2.3 billion to Internet piracy. Of the US$6.1 billion in lost revenue to the studios, approximate $1.2 billion came from piracy across the Asia-Pacific region, while piracy in the U.S. accounted for $1.3 billion.
neowin.net
The RIAA speaks--and it gets worse
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"iPod Tax" smacked down in Canada
Canadians (and even their neighbors to the south) can breathe a sigh of relief as the Canadian Federal Court of Appeal quashed a proposed levy on digital music players late last week. The proposed levies weren't cheap: CAN$5 on each Memory Stick or SD card between 1GB and 4GB of memory, and "digital audio recorder" levies which top out at CAN$75 for players with 30GB+ of space.
arstechnica.com
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EFF tries to quash labels' "making available" claims
The music labels' case against Jeffrey and Pamela Howell has taken on mythic dimensions over the last few weeks after the Washington Post went a little nuts and implied that the labels were suing the couple for making personal rips of their CDs (it later corrected the story). The truth is that Howells are being sued for having those rips in a shared KaZaA folder. But lost in the controversy over the RIAA's refusal to say that personal CD ripping is legal is the fact that the Howells aren't being sued for swapping songs with thousands of people around the world; instead, they are charged with making songs "available" for download. In a new amicus brief (PDF), the EFF argues that there's no such thing as "attempted copyright infringement." Yet.
arstechnica.com
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http://torrentfreak.com/mediadefender-h ... ks-080114/
The whole Media Defender scandal needs little introduction. The anti-piracy company is incredibly unpopular with most of the file-sharing community, so when they fell victim to a hacker and their company secrets spread all over the Internet, few held much sympathy for them.

Soon it became known that a shadowy group known as MediaDefender-Defenders appeared to be behind the attack - they host the Media Defender emails on their website to this day, but little was known about the chain events, or who was behind them - until now.
Really good article, worth a read.
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Yes, indeed it's a interesting read, I didn't know it was teen who hacked their site etc..
Death to Media Defender. :evil:
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p2p-sharing-rules wrote:Yes, indeed it's a interesting read, I didn't know it was teen who hacked their site etc..
Death to Media Defender. :evil:
Yeah - and the FBI are after him! :shock:
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Pfff , The FBI should be going after Media Defender for illegal DOS attacks against p2p networks, not some teen who saw an injustice and tried to do something about it.
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