4 ms·

"You can't stop the signal"

by andyzweb 14y ago

gtt 14y ago
With enough money, you can. Unfortunately.
- leoedin 14y ago
  Is that the case? Piracy is still a fairly rampant problem for the music and film industry. Any reduction in piracy seems to be due to convenient and cheap digital music stores presenting a better option than piracy, rather than any progress in actually stamping out piracy. You could stop piracy almost completely - deep packet monitoring, extensive web filtering, fast and harsh penalties and the complete cooperation of the government probably could cut it to essentially zero. I think most governments (and even rights holders) recognised that taking it to that level wasn't worth the consequences. Maybe 3D printing will be different, but I'd imagine that like with music, there will be very little public appetite for harsh penalties for downloaders, and so they probably won't happen.
  - betterunix 14y ago
    Sure, they still claim "piracy" is a problem. Yet I cannot help but notice the fundamental shift that occurred over the past decade: fully decentralized systems are basically dead, everything now involves central servers that large numbers of downloaders depend on in one way or another. I think the RIAA and MPAA can safely count that as a win, because it gives them a single point of failure to attack. The biggest threat to the RIAA and MPAA was fully decentralized peer to peer (e.g. Gnutella); those systems could not just be sued out of existence like Napster or removed from existence by government action like Megaupload. By scaring everyone away from such systems and towards Bittorrent (with its trackers) and cloud storage, the industries contained the threat. Just centralizing the search systems was a big victory for them -- they can effectively use the DMCA to make it harder to even find the files you are looking for. Cultivating a producer-consumer mindset, even if it involves TPB, is good for the RIAA and MPAA: it makes it much easier to introduce their own download services. To put it another way, the copyright industries have always had to deal with infringement. What they feared most in the early 2000s was not infringement, but infringement that did not require any heavy-duty equipment. Coypright, the DMCA, and related laws are designed to be used against businesses, not hoards of individual people. "Happy Birthday to You" is routinely heard in homes and offices, but never in restaurant chains or movies, for that reason: the copyright on it cannot be effectively enforced against small gatherings of people, but it is easily enforced in the case of business use.
    - leoedin 14y ago
      I think you're giving the MPAA/RIAA more credit then they're due. The driving force behind centralised peer to peer systems has always been convenience, curation and quality rather than fear. Gnutella and similar couldn't provide the same experience that bittorrent based systems did. Users got tired of not getting what they thought they were getting, and so when a technology with a superior user interface (torrents) came along, they adopted it. Although recently there have been successes in removing torrent sites, a large number ran for many, many years with no real challenges. I don't think the RIAA/MPAA are advanced enough to "cultivate a producer/consumer mindset". Their actions in the last 10 years against all sorts of infringement methods (napster, kazaa, TPB, suprnova, Jammie Thomas-Rasset and others) are demonstrative of a rights organisation which didn't really know how to react to the huge piracy increase in the early 2000s. The record companies realised that their business model (sell CDs) was being obliterated by piracy. It took them years (and the lobbying of Apple and Amazon) to get to a point (todays DRM free digital download market) that they could compete. It wasn't so much that they managed to get rid of piracy, but that they provided a more convenient solution to consumers' demand (getting music) than piracy. My original comment was made because, in reply to "You can't stop the signal", gtt said "With enough money, you can. Unfortunately". I would consider the results of the last decade of music piracy to be a fairly good indication that in fact you truly can't stop the signal. The only way that rights organisations have made any progress against piracy is by providing their own, higher quality, signal. That is something that I believe will translate into the 3D printing domain.
      - betterunix 14y ago
        I do not think it is accurate to say that Gnutella could not provide the same "experience;" at the height of its popularity, Gnutella was basically the same experience as we have with TPB and file hosting services today. People still have to navigate around trojan horses when they download illegally, people still have to deal with long wait times, people still encounter seemingly good results that fail to deliver what they want (with torrents and file hosting). "Curating" is only relevant with the officially endorsed services, and those services would never have been able to compete in a world where people thought of things in terms of peer-to-peer sharing. The reason you saw Gnutella and the like die was the wave of lawsuits from the RIAA, which led to people being terrified to upload anything. Peer to peer does not work if people are unwilling to share. The RIAA also successfully killed the companies that were trying to make peer to peer more usable by developing spam filters and improving robustness (e.g. Limewire). It is not as though the concept of people downloading music was introduced to the RIAA by Napster. Several months before Napster started, the RIAA began work on SDMI, an attempt to thwart music downloading. The RIAA knew that people were downloading music over the Internet: anonymous FTP, IRC, Usenet, etc. It is not that the RIAA did not know how to react to the increase in copyright infringement; they were already working on a way to fight downloading. The record companies did not think for a moment that their business model was being "obliterated" by downloading. They were working on DRM because they believed that downloading was the next technological change that they would need to exploit to stay in business. Home taping had been dealt with years earlier, after all, so why do you think they were afraid of downloading in and of itself? What the RIAA was really afraid of was peer to peer. The RIAA's executives view the world in terms of one-to-many interactions: one producer serving the needs of many consumers. What made them panic was the idea that music could be spread without any centralization at all. With nobody to sue, buy out, tax, or otherwise deal with, the RIAA was basically left with none of the weapons it previously wielded. The only strategy left to them was to kill the idea of peer to peer sharing, by scaring people away, and get people to think like customers again. The point of suing college students, grandmothers, and other people whose net worth was not even a blip on the RIAA's RADAR was to scare people away from peer to peer, and back to systems that allowed the RIAA to use its legal weapons. That they eventually managed to create competitive download services is a separate issue; they were going to do that anyway, just like they eventually exploited FM radio and eventually exploited cassette tapes. They understood that computers could be music players long before peer to peer, they just needed a few years to figure out how they could make money from that. As long as people believe they require the services of some industrial-scale operation to obtain their music, the RIAA is not afraid. As for stopping the signal with sufficient money, I think you absolutely can do that, and I think you are going to see it happen within your lifetime. Eventually, you are going to buy a locked-down device that can only connect to your ISP's movie and music streaming sites, and a few other "approved" websites, and only use "approved" protocols; in exchange, you'll pay less for an Internet connection (anyone who wants more will be directed to "business class service," which will cost twice as much for half the throughput). Your computer will not allow you to download anything you did not get permission to download, and will not be able to upload anything audio or video related. You will not be allowed to run unapproved software. Shortsighted people will say it is more secure and will say that their grandmother does not need anything else. Yes, there will be jailbreaks, but you'll have to know someone who has a computer that can even download and run the jailbreaking software (think mod chips). That's what money can buy. Lots of corporations with lots of money are working to make that a reality, and in the absence of a "killer app" for uninhibited Internet use (like, say, a peer to peer network) it will only be matter of finding the right price point and features.

"You can't stop the signal"

gtt 14y ago

With enough money, you can. Unfortunately.

leoedin 14y ago
Is that the case? Piracy is still a fairly rampant problem for the music and film industry. Any reduction in piracy seems to be due to convenient and cheap digital music stores presenting a better option than piracy, rather than any progress in actually stamping out piracy. You could stop piracy almost completely - deep packet monitoring, extensive web filtering, fast and harsh penalties and the complete cooperation of the government probably could cut it to essentially zero. I think most governments (and even rights holders) recognised that taking it to that level wasn't worth the consequences. Maybe 3D printing will be different, but I'd imagine that like with music, there will be very little public appetite for harsh penalties for downloaders, and so they probably won't happen.
- betterunix 14y ago
  Sure, they still claim "piracy" is a problem. Yet I cannot help but notice the fundamental shift that occurred over the past decade: fully decentralized systems are basically dead, everything now involves central servers that large numbers of downloaders depend on in one way or another. I think the RIAA and MPAA can safely count that as a win, because it gives them a single point of failure to attack. The biggest threat to the RIAA and MPAA was fully decentralized peer to peer (e.g. Gnutella); those systems could not just be sued out of existence like Napster or removed from existence by government action like Megaupload. By scaring everyone away from such systems and towards Bittorrent (with its trackers) and cloud storage, the industries contained the threat. Just centralizing the search systems was a big victory for them -- they can effectively use the DMCA to make it harder to even find the files you are looking for. Cultivating a producer-consumer mindset, even if it involves TPB, is good for the RIAA and MPAA: it makes it much easier to introduce their own download services. To put it another way, the copyright industries have always had to deal with infringement. What they feared most in the early 2000s was not infringement, but infringement that did not require any heavy-duty equipment. Coypright, the DMCA, and related laws are designed to be used against businesses, not hoards of individual people. "Happy Birthday to You" is routinely heard in homes and offices, but never in restaurant chains or movies, for that reason: the copyright on it cannot be effectively enforced against small gatherings of people, but it is easily enforced in the case of business use.
  - leoedin 14y ago
    I think you're giving the MPAA/RIAA more credit then they're due. The driving force behind centralised peer to peer systems has always been convenience, curation and quality rather than fear. Gnutella and similar couldn't provide the same experience that bittorrent based systems did. Users got tired of not getting what they thought they were getting, and so when a technology with a superior user interface (torrents) came along, they adopted it. Although recently there have been successes in removing torrent sites, a large number ran for many, many years with no real challenges. I don't think the RIAA/MPAA are advanced enough to "cultivate a producer/consumer mindset". Their actions in the last 10 years against all sorts of infringement methods (napster, kazaa, TPB, suprnova, Jammie Thomas-Rasset and others) are demonstrative of a rights organisation which didn't really know how to react to the huge piracy increase in the early 2000s. The record companies realised that their business model (sell CDs) was being obliterated by piracy. It took them years (and the lobbying of Apple and Amazon) to get to a point (todays DRM free digital download market) that they could compete. It wasn't so much that they managed to get rid of piracy, but that they provided a more convenient solution to consumers' demand (getting music) than piracy. My original comment was made because, in reply to "You can't stop the signal", gtt said "With enough money, you can. Unfortunately". I would consider the results of the last decade of music piracy to be a fairly good indication that in fact you truly can't stop the signal. The only way that rights organisations have made any progress against piracy is by providing their own, higher quality, signal. That is something that I believe will translate into the 3D printing domain.
    - betterunix 14y ago
      I do not think it is accurate to say that Gnutella could not provide the same "experience;" at the height of its popularity, Gnutella was basically the same experience as we have with TPB and file hosting services today. People still have to navigate around trojan horses when they download illegally, people still have to deal with long wait times, people still encounter seemingly good results that fail to deliver what they want (with torrents and file hosting). "Curating" is only relevant with the officially endorsed services, and those services would never have been able to compete in a world where people thought of things in terms of peer-to-peer sharing. The reason you saw Gnutella and the like die was the wave of lawsuits from the RIAA, which led to people being terrified to upload anything. Peer to peer does not work if people are unwilling to share. The RIAA also successfully killed the companies that were trying to make peer to peer more usable by developing spam filters and improving robustness (e.g. Limewire). It is not as though the concept of people downloading music was introduced to the RIAA by Napster. Several months before Napster started, the RIAA began work on SDMI, an attempt to thwart music downloading. The RIAA knew that people were downloading music over the Internet: anonymous FTP, IRC, Usenet, etc. It is not that the RIAA did not know how to react to the increase in copyright infringement; they were already working on a way to fight downloading. The record companies did not think for a moment that their business model was being "obliterated" by downloading. They were working on DRM because they believed that downloading was the next technological change that they would need to exploit to stay in business. Home taping had been dealt with years earlier, after all, so why do you think they were afraid of downloading in and of itself? What the RIAA was really afraid of was peer to peer. The RIAA's executives view the world in terms of one-to-many interactions: one producer serving the needs of many consumers. What made them panic was the idea that music could be spread without any centralization at all. With nobody to sue, buy out, tax, or otherwise deal with, the RIAA was basically left with none of the weapons it previously wielded. The only strategy left to them was to kill the idea of peer to peer sharing, by scaring people away, and get people to think like customers again. The point of suing college students, grandmothers, and other people whose net worth was not even a blip on the RIAA's RADAR was to scare people away from peer to peer, and back to systems that allowed the RIAA to use its legal weapons. That they eventually managed to create competitive download services is a separate issue; they were going to do that anyway, just like they eventually exploited FM radio and eventually exploited cassette tapes. They understood that computers could be music players long before peer to peer, they just needed a few years to figure out how they could make money from that. As long as people believe they require the services of some industrial-scale operation to obtain their music, the RIAA is not afraid. As for stopping the signal with sufficient money, I think you absolutely can do that, and I think you are going to see it happen within your lifetime. Eventually, you are going to buy a locked-down device that can only connect to your ISP's movie and music streaming sites, and a few other "approved" websites, and only use "approved" protocols; in exchange, you'll pay less for an Internet connection (anyone who wants more will be directed to "business class service," which will cost twice as much for half the throughput). Your computer will not allow you to download anything you did not get permission to download, and will not be able to upload anything audio or video related. You will not be allowed to run unapproved software. Shortsighted people will say it is more secure and will say that their grandmother does not need anything else. Yes, there will be jailbreaks, but you'll have to know someone who has a computer that can even download and run the jailbreaking software (think mod chips). That's what money can buy. Lots of corporations with lots of money are working to make that a reality, and in the absence of a "killer app" for uninhibited Internet use (like, say, a peer to peer network) it will only be matter of finding the right price point and features.