Terminally Incoherent

RIAA just decided to sue LimeWire, heavily leaning on the super-idiotic Grokster ruling. If you don’t remember what the Grokster thing was all about, let me remind you.

Remember that one time we were all pissed off, because a bunch of senile, technology illiterate lusers (known as the US Supreme Court) said that if your software encourages infringment, then you are liable.

RIAA is using that stupid decision now to destroy a useful file transfer technology that has absolutely nothing to do with piracy. Sure, you can use it to distribute illegal stuff. You can also distribute illegal stuff via HTTP, FTP, BitTorrent and Bob’s new spiffy DVD Burner. LimeWire is definitely not advertising copyright infringement. I looked on their website, and there is no mention of free RIAA tunes, warez or any other stuff like that. In fact, their website clearly states the following:

LimeWire is legal software, but it is illegal for you to use LimeWire to share copyrighted files without permission. Purchasing LimeWire PRO does not constitute a license for obtaining or distributing unauthorized files. When you download LimeWire software from www.limewire.com, you agree to refrain from using LimeWire for the purpose of copyright infringement.

I think this notification is really clear. LimeWire does not condone piracy.

But RIAA collectively suffer from that rare condition called “lack of touch with reality” and so they are not bothered by things like facts, details and laws. They are claiming that LW is actively facilitating copyright infringement by not filtering and censoring the network traffic generated by their software. That is quite an interesting use of the term active.

Using that logic, since I’m not buying RIAA crap I’m actually actively taking the money out of their pockets. Sweet! Take that RIAA! I just made you loose another $40 buy not caring about your newest pop-music CD!

This lawsuit should be kicked out of court for the sake of technological progress. But it wont. And if RIAA wins this case, it will give them complete freedom to kill any technology they do not like. They will ruthlessly set ablaze any budding software project that could even remotely threaten their precious business model.

If your existence is dependent on business plan that resembles a house of cards, you are every right to be afraid of even the smallest draft, or wind gust that could upset it’s delicate balance. But this is no reason to ban doors and windows, and make sue the makers of oscillating fans. All you achieve this way is to delay the inevitable. Sooner or later, someone in the room is going to sneeze and the whole thing is going to crumble down leaving you with nothing.

Technological progress just stop for RIAA. Either get on with it, or get out. Just stop holding us back damn it!

Are you surprised that BitTottent.com is launching a subscription service distributing MPAA movies? I’m not. It’s a freaking brilliant move! Let me break this down for you:

1. sign a deal with MPAA
2. use your technology to distribute their content
3. break even, or make marginal profit
4. next time MPAA wants to outlaw P2P, they end up looking like idiots because they use BT themselves

It’s a 4 step plan to make it much harder for MPAA to stamp out illegal Bittorrent use. Because most likely, the legal BT traffic will be indistinguishable from the illegal one. In fact, legal packets will happily swim in the sea of warez. And unless you do something really clever it would be difficult to throttle down illegal bittorrent activity without hurting legal downloads at the ISP level. MPAA doesn’t care about linux distros, indy movies and music and personal videos being distributed this way. But they are bound to care when their own legal content in torrented across the globe.

Would I subscribe to this service? Probably not. If they use DRM, forget it, most people will ignore it. No one likes crippled media. But then again, world is full of gullible idiots who like to throw away money by buying locked down files.

This is a smart PR move from BitTorrent. It shows that they are trying hard to be legit, and that their technology can be used in a good constructive way. This is what we call sticking it to the man, while letting the man think he is sticking it to you

It seems that everyones favorite Swedish bittorrent heroes got themselves raided by the police. ThePirateBay.org headquarters were stormed by 50+ armed policemen who arrested several people and seized the servers.

Apparently Swedish authorities still are still diligently working to find something illegal that was stored on those servers. Torrets are perfectly legal over there, and it seems that ThePirateBay.org may get off with a warning provided that nothing is found or planted on their drives.

Of course you never know with the RIAA and MPAA types. Somehow they managed to bribe Swedish officials into opening an official investigation on the website so perhaps they are planning something even more sinister. Or perhaps Swedish government is tired of protecting a very vocal, and defiant file-sharing community. I would suspect that they get allot of heat from EU and US because of TPB.

That said, if nothing is illegal is found and if they can’t bring TPB up on charges this may turn into a big victory for the file sharers. For one, it would show the world that torrent sites in Sweden are untouchable under current law.

Also, TPB is affiliated with the Swedish Pirate party, whose servers apparently were also seized in the raid. IANASL but I think they could potentially make a big fuss of this. They could claim political discrimination, illegal seizure and etc…

It will be interesting to see how this unfolds. One thing is sure - the Pirate Party will have tons of free publicity over this.

Update Sun, June 04 2006, 12:45 AM

They are back.

I missed BSG yesterday. I’m really beginning to like this show, but I haven’t got into habit of watching it every Friday yet. I’m a total airhead when it comes to remembering stuff. If it’s not a scheduled task on my PDA there is no way in hell I’d remember it (and I’m also horrible about scheduling things). I would probably forget to put my pants on before leaving the house if this was not a routine thing now. I can’t tell you how many times I forgot my cell phone in the morning, because it was not on my desk with my keys and my wallet. But I digress…

I did not watch BSG. Now they probably will be rerunning this episode at some point this week but I’m just to lazy to track it down. And chances are that I would also miss the rerun due to my forgetfulness But, that does not mean that I have to miss an episode!

I did what any self respecting geek would do. I scoured bunch of torrent sites, found the ep and two hours later I was able to watch it. Was it wrong? Perhaps… But then again, if you think about it - I do pay for my cable. So I already paid for the privilege of watching this episode on TV - I just didn’t happen to be watching at the time. The version I got had the commercials cut out but I would not mind if it had them intact.

What I’m trying to say is - if I had to pay for downloading this episode I would never do it. Especially if it came with some DRM. But I would not mind downloading slightly longer version with full commercial spots. The whole concept of selling multimedia is a joke. But I’m terrified that this is where we are heading. Soon it will be difficult to find a movie or a song that’s not crippled by DRM. I’m truly scared that my children will live in a world of pay-per-view media and all present DRM.

Why can’t people figure out a way to make P2P work for them instead of fighting it. Here is my concept - why don’t we insert non-intrusive advertisement into the media files and release them into the wild? Get the well established P2P networks copy distribute your stuff for you. Now, it’s true that someone can simply cut out the ads - but if they are non-intrusive, why bother? Better yet - use non-intrusive product placement when possible.

The only way to really get rid of “piracy” is to make it part of your business model. Now, if RIAA and MPAA have their way, it might be perfectly legal to distribute DRM’d files via P2P. But who will want to do that? People will still prefer to share the illegal cracked copies without any DRM. If they can’t break the DRM they will simply record the video output. Or they will simply get a non DRM’d version straight from the source. There will be always ways to get illegal copies of movies and shows. The only way to remedy this, is to make sure that there is no such thing as illegal copy…