Senate Majority Leader Takes On File Sharing

An anonymous reader writes "Colleges are up in arms — and the entertainment industry is ecstatic — over Sen. Harry Reid's plan to crack down on file sharing by students. Floor votes could be imminent." A commenter on the post said, "Unfortunately we are likely to see neither sense nor principle from the Democrats on this issue, as Hollywood is their biggest cash machine."

No way to combat filesharing

[Opportunist]

Let's be honest here, P2P will continue. Legally or illegally. The only difference is that if it becomes "illegal", only illegal content will be distributed via P2P and distributors of Linux and other legal distribution of software and content suffers. Currently, a lot of distributions benefit from being able to use their users' connection for distribution, taking pressure from their own lines. If P2P is "outlawed" (or not outright outlawed, but disallowed by universities and ISPs), people wanting to share illegal content will find a way around this filtering (because, well, whatever the ISP could do against you is peanuts against being sued by the mafiaa), while people who now spread Linux distributions will not risk breaking the law just to keep spreading their legally spreadable software.

What do you want to do to avoid it? Log the IP addresses of people using it? People will start onion routing their packets, using also existing onion routers so you can't tell that an IP you got is actually a culprit. Also people will start using "private" trackers and networks more than they already do. To avoid packet identification through mandatory logging at ISPs, packets will get wrapped in other headers (HTTP offers itself due to being the perfect "noise" to duck into).

Sad... But Not Suprising

[Shifty Jim]

I think a lot of us have seen something like this coming for a while. In fact the point in Reid's proposal that requires colleges to report their policies for policing and dealing with illegal file-sharing were already in the reauthorization bill before this. Congress is simply going after the easiest target in the conflict. There is plenty of illegal file sharing that goes on outside of colleges and universities, but if you target colleges and universities you get to blanket a number of people through a state-supported middleman without having to go after big telcom companies.

But I think the biggest points in the bill are the following. From the Article:

"Provide evidence" to the Education Department that they have "developed a plan for implementing a technology-based deterrent to prevent the illegal downloading or peer-to-peer distribution of intellectual property."

How can any viable and self-respecting college network do anything like this without crippling their network and expending an obscene amount of money and man-hours. Congress constantly proves themselves to be less that tech-savvy, and this extremely tall order is just more proof. And, more importantly, the last thing I need is another tuition increase to pay for it. :P

And secondly:

The measure would also require the education secretary to annually identify the 25 colleges and universities that have in the previous year received the most notices of copyright violations using institutional technology networks.

I think the /. has had enough articles knocking and attacking and explaining the DMCA and how easy it is to use them without any basis whatsoever. The threat of a public scolding is only going to make already jumpy school administrators more likely to cave to pressure and/or institute stiffer punishments.

But, I don't really think it matters all that much, something like this is going to go into law eventually, I'm afraid.

ya rly!

[Curien]

http://www.opensecrets.org/softmoney/softtop.asp?t xtCycle=2002&txtSort=amnt [opensecrets.org]

A slightly premature story?

[More_Cowbell]

Yes I RTFA, It is (from what I can tell) a possible amendment the Senator is "expected to try to attach" and "While those provisions are in the amendment Senator Reid unveiled last week, they could easily change today or tomorrow, and lobbyists following the situation described it as fluid."

Sorry, not biting. Given the number of bills and amendments that do not pass, I think this narrowly escapes being described as FUD.

Re:Any hope of balanced coverage?

[robot_love]

You imply that if the current system were gone, there would be nothing to replace it. I disagree. Something will replace it (for humans have always told stories). In fact, I think that whatever replaces it will actually be much better.

Technology now allows anyone with minimal finance to create their own movies or music. What will happen, when the current colossus tumbles, is that you will experience more and better movies and music than you ever dreamed possible. Certainly, at the beginning there will be less big budget action spectaculars, but honestly, is that a bad thing?

With the current gate keepers gone and the internet there to do the distribution, a much brighter and vibrant world awaits. We should do all we can to hasten the demise of the media industry.

A little matter of history?

[tjstork]

forget what party gutted habeus corpus, thinks torture is OK,

Didn't the Democrats put 200,000 Japanese citizens in concentration camps during World War II?

Run MK-ULTRA, and numerous CIA / FBI abuses during the Cold War?

Allow J Edgar Hoover's FBI to amass data on US Citizens for almost 40 years?

Run illegal wiretaps throughout every Presidency since Truman?

The whole notion of Democrats having of moral superiority when it comes to civil rights has no historical basis in fact.

Our best hope would have been to have conservatives acting like conservatives, gutting the government rather than expanding it.

Re:No way to combat filesharing

[Opportunist]

...then route said packet through an onion router network and even the whereabouts are lost. Yes, you'll know that you forward a packet to another host, whether that host is the destination or just another router is something you won't know.

incredibly stupid

[circletimessquare]

money is a serious corrupting influence on the us government

however, republicans!=democrats, really. mainly because money isn't the only issue. gee, i dunno, i cast about for a difference. hmm, i'm going to way out on a limb here after thinking really really hard: ideology maybe? seems like a big stinking issue, ya think einstein?

how anyone could arrive at such a conclusion like republicans==democrats is beyond my understanding. it betrays a colossally dim understanding of the world you live in

Re:oh really?

[SirStanley]

... It boggles my mind that someone could not be aware of Hollywood's significant backing of Democratic Candidates... But since you aren't, here is a nice primer story to get you going

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/Decision2008/story? id=3381169&page=1 [go.com]

In 2004 Presidential election 70% of the "Tinseltown" donations went to Democratic candidates.

Re:*gasp* democrats can be evil?

[Dhalka226]

Raise your hand if you thought your congressman would listen to you.

I didn't, but largely because they're not supposed to. At least not if "listen to you" means "vote the way of the majority opinion of his constituents." We are not a democracy. We do not vote on issues. We elect people who vote on issues for us. If we want those votes to be bound to the majority will, let's just scrap the system and do a straight vote of all Americans. Or hell, I suppose a telephone survey of 1,200 random respondents would suffice so long as the results were more than 4 percentage points or so apart.

Like I said, we vote for people who vote on issues. The key part of that is: we vote for people. If we are displeased with how we are being represented, it is our duty to VOTE, first and foremost, and to vote in people we think will do a better job. If we fail to do so, I'm not going to blame the politicians. The reason they take big money from lobbyists and vote against your wishes is because they can. They can because they aren't being held responsible by those constituents.

I've heard the "the system is rigged in favor of the two major parties!" excuses. There's a fair bit of validity about that, but I don't think it is the problem at all. The major problem is that not enough of us vote. But the secondary problem is that we don't make changes. I believe that nationally, the rate of retention for Congressmen (ie, those who are re-elected) is around 90%. Even in our "big vote for change" election of 2006, 30 seats changed hands in the House and 6 in the Senate. 36 seats changed out of 468 up for election, for a rate of change of 7.7%. That puts the retention rate nearly 92%* in an election trumpeted as calling for change.

One would assume that if we were really as disgusted as we say we are with our politicians, that we would see much greater rates of turnover--even if they just flip back and forth between the two major parties due to the "rigged system."

Yes, the system plays a part; yes, voter apathy plays a part (though blame yourself for that, not the politicians); yes, other things play a part--but the bottom line is we're not nearly as disgusted as we should be, or as we say we are. How seriously are they supposed to take our supposed disgust when we give them a 26% approval / 61% disapproval [pollingreport.com] rating but retain the incumbent 90% of the time?**

Congressmen want to keep their seats. Right now the best way for them to do so is to screw you a moderate amount, take a lot of money from corporations to buy air time and leaflet mailings and such, and get re-elected with around 9-to-1 odds. Really the only danger is if they accidentally screw you just a bit more than you're prepared to accept. You want that to change? Hold them accountable. Once they see that all the corporate donations in the world won't save their jobs if they don't represent their constituents, they'll come around. Of that I have no doubt.

* It's not quite this, necessarily, because some seats had incumbents not running again and sometimes there was a challenge within the part, but I'm too lazy to look up all this information and this figure is near enough for the sake of argument.

** It actually reminds me of a West Wing quote (the polling data may be made up or may be real, I'm not sure, but the point is still valid): "68% [of Americans] think we give too much in foreign aid, and 59% think it should be cut." A scene unfolds as follows:

Will: You like that stat.

Josh: I do.

Will: Why?

Josh: Because 9% think it's too high and shouldn't be cut. 9% of respondents could not fully get their arms around the question. There should be another box you can check for "I have utterly no idea what you're talking about. Please, God, don't ask for my input."

Re:oh really?

[captainjaroslav]

I think you missed his point. He's not claiming that Hollywood doesn't favor Democrats over Republicans. It's the statement "Hollywood is their biggest cash machine" that rings false. According to opensecrets.org's listing of contributions by industry, the sector that they call "TV/Movies/Music" gave the Dems about $14M in 2006 and $22M in 2004. It's true that they only gave Republicans $8M and $10M in those same years, however, here are the contributions to Democrats for other sectors in those same years:

Construction
2006 $16M (more than TV/Movies/Music)
2004 $20M (less)

Finance/Insurance/Real Estate
2006 $110M
2004 $140M

Health
2006 $36M
2004 $48M

Lawyers/Lobbyists
2006 $96M
2004 $150M

Misc. Business
2006 $57M
2004 $85M

Labor
2006 $57M
2004 $53M

Ideology/Single-Issue Money
2006 $98M
2004 $110M

So, according to these numbers, the Democrats have several bigger "cash machines" than Hollywood, even if you include the music industry in there. Your mind may stop being boggled now.

This proposal has already been withdrawn

[Doug_Tygar]

Slashdot is simply out of date. From the Chronicle of Higher Education's Today's News (for subscribers) [chronicle.com]: Facing widespread outrage from college officials, a prominent senator withdrew legislative language on Monday that would have required some institutions to buy technological tools to curtail illegal file sharing on their campuses....

Re:No way to combat filesharing

[AKAImBatman]

In this case, yes. The movie file is provides by the Azureus service Vuze [vuze.com]. From what I understand, they have permission to provide HD trailers to Vuze users. Their business model, in fact, is based around the core idea that HD content is too expensive to host through a standard HTTP download model. To combat that cost they provide a Bittorrent service that allows content producers to upload their HD content to Vuze for ultra-fast seeding on Vuze's servers combined with the extra bandwidth of P2P users.

While it is still a long way from becoming the "Youtube in HD" that they originally pitched it as, it does still have its uses. HD Trailers are one example. Another is the HD version of various short films which have been freely distributed. (Though that "Elephant's Dream [elephantsdream.org]" sci-fi/fantasy movie makes absolutely no sense. It was amazingly good CG, but perhaps next time they could include a story?) ;-)