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August 15, 2004
Bit torrents and big brother
I've come to the party very late, but have started to use Azureus to get and send bit torrents. I haven't tried to figure out how it works, but seems to function peer-to-peer for exchange of large downloadables.
There's a lot of shareable bits out there that people seem to want to diffuse more than they want to copyright and prevent you from checking out until you pay. For example, I've downloaded a Grateful Dead and Trey Anastasio shows from torrents found at nugs.net, which says it distributes only free music. I'm downloading a couple of VCD files of a talk by Chomsky last year concerning the world after after the invasion of Iraq. You can probably get GPL-ware this way, though I haven't looked too hard.
Trouble is, if you go Googling for a bit torrent, it's not necessarily clear what's shared legitimately and what's shared illegally. The University of California at Riverside has posted guidelines for example explaining to students how to comply with the DMCA:
Very simply, do not download or distribute copyrighted materials without appropriate permissions.
In other words, it's up to you to know. Furthermore, Chuck Rowley reacted in what seems like a very normal way for a sys admin to react to something like the DMCA:
In compliance with the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and the University of California Guidelines for Compliance with the Online Service Provider Provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, UCR expeditiously takes action when notified of potential DMCA violations from sites located on the campus network. All of these incidents are referred to various campus officials and appropriate actions are taken to stop unauthorized downloading or distribution of copyrighted materials.
What other choice do you have if you want to keep your job?
So these "various campus officials" probably have overflowing inboxes, because all file sharing potentially violates copyright. It's a shame that instead of DMCA there's not just an RFC or two on labelling downloads cheaply as copyright protected, copyleft or whatever. Download and upload apps could then verify for themselves whether the material is protected, and could ask for confirmation before performing operations whenever it looks like the material is not marked as freely sharable. You could even have a protocol for handling it, which the military probably already has, anyway.
Chuck Rowley at UCR has the right idea when he writes:
Of course, there are legitimate applications of file-sharing software, and discussion as well as research on such peer-to-peer software is expanding rapidly in the academic community. We will ensure that such inquiry, as well as the legal use of peer-to-peer software, remains unimpeded at UCR.
It's a shame that our overburdened and probably for the most part underconcernced elected officials did not find a way to make it a snap for everyone to do the right thing, rather than vote in the DMCA, a 94-page legal document that covers both downloads and vessel hull designs, and includes such dubious provisions as the one disallowing you to "reverse engineer" software (whatever that means) for any other purpose than figuring out how to interoperate with closed software. Presumably any documentation I do without asking beforehand is therefore in violation of DMCA. Good grief!
Posted by Mark at August 15, 2004 01:51 PM