dendriet.nl p2p news

Bram Cohen talks about bittorrent, benchmarking it, it's usefulness, and about not upsetting you while guessing how much time a download will take. Here's the torrent of the 50MB windows media file. (It was originally a streaming file.)

In the discussions about filesharing, DRM is a hot topic. DRM stands for Digital Rights Management, the fact that you can't copy certain files. The problem is that these files are ignorant of my rights. Our school, the Theatreschool in Amsterdam, pays money to the BUMA to play music for audiences, yet our minidiskplayers still fall into copy protection at the most annoying moments.
Boingboing found an exellent example of DRM: The Senseo.
Senseopads can be considered to be fileformat. And as long as you can prevent people from producing 'content' in that format, it is a rights management tool, with the same flaws, hacking and court cases. Therefor it's a nice way to explain what DRM is.

Note 27-2-2005, 20.00h: Modiprof, the author of the senseo article, however, could not understand the anology at all, and feels he should be credited for his senseo hack. But this article is not about his hack, it's about the DRM anology. It doesn't matter if it's hacked or not.
Interestingly enough, this guy has a double standard considering copyrights. On hand he is publishing ways to copy senseo coffee pads, while he knows that Philips and DE dislike that. On the other hand he violently reacts to my quotation of his mail, while it was done to give him the space to say what he thinks and to give him the link to his site, which he was asking for. Also, the law does give me the freedom to quote from mail that was sent to me. He is now sending my friends rude email about me.

The RIAA is busy sueing p2p users, but the US ISPs are not willing to give the name+address information about their customers. So The RIAA wanted to sue unknown p2p users (that is, they only knew their IP address) in order to force their ISPs to forward their name and real life address to the RIAA. "You see, you holding back information about criminals!" This plan was as clever as it was absurd, and got rejected by the US supreme court.

Registration with the Guardian is needed, but they do not check email you a login code, so you might as well register with a fake address that doens't bounce. Once you're in, there are tons of articles on filesharing. Artists like Travis and Robby Williams think it's 'brilliant', while producers like Pete Waterman are totally annoyed by those remarks.
Sometimes the piracy issue (selling illegal copies) is mingled with the peer to peer issue (sharing with people for free), but most of the articles are clear. This is a good starting point.
Note that the Brittisch are also sueing kids. And they sue them for downloading, while the Dutch anti piracy organisations always communicate that merely uploading is illegal.

I find that really strange. If I want to have a copy of an album, I have the option of buying it, or downloading it. There's a choice between a legal action and an illegal one. But I still feel filesharing can't be illegal, as sharing is one of the ways to enjoy music. You think the music cool, so you share it. It's as natural as giving a round in a bar. In real 3D life, sharing is allways considered to be good behaviour. The more you share, the better person you are. The music industry will have a hard time explaining how this intrinsic good behaviour is bad in this particular exception.
If money is the problem, we should make a system in which the downloader is paying his peer for the bandwidth, and the musicians (not only the composer) for the music. I would absolutely love getting my music through such a net work, and I would enjoy every cent that I might get through it. Now that is fair.

Dutch anti-piracy organisation is situated in Hoofddorp, a little piss stain under the smoke of our national airport Schiphol. On the contact page of their website I see a pretty large office building.

Who paid/is paying for that builing?
Ladies and gentlemen let me hear your guesses....

While the RIAA tries to stop the copiers, the copying technology is develloping futher. Here's a discussion on compression methods, which is relevant for sharing and distribution.

I read this on the Synthesizer DIY list:

At last, it have hapend! A american court have ruled in fawor for Genesis!
Genesis sued a composer/musican for using ONE snare drum sound in a tune. The musician had as the court ruled sampled, reversed, down speeded, bit reduced, effectoriced, reversed it back and then used that sample in a tune!
Fantastic that the court had the infinitive wisdom to judge the way they did! I simply wonder, how could the jury find that the sound was the same? As far as i know sounds can not be copyrighted or can they now?
Karl D (as heard from [swedish] national radio broadcast news).

Please post any links.

The RIAA lost court cases against Grokster and StreamCast, an probably will lose the case against eDonkey, on the grounds that the services can be used for legal file sharing as well. "RIAA lawyers say that not only is the decision precedent-setting, it promotes file trading by supporting the argument that there are substantial non-infringing uses of P2P technology."
Here's the Grokster decision as a pdf.

The RIAA claims innocense, and expresses the view that all their customers are out to steel from them. Meanwhile, the 5 major japanese recordlabels (incl. Sony) got 'home searched' themselves, as they are monopolizing sales of hit songs as ring tones for mobile phones and keeping the prices for those files extremely high, higer then the original song at al legal download site.
I bet the artists and composers who get ringtoned, get next to nothing for a ringtone download.

"Copyright policy:
The copyright in all material released, published or otherwise made available by Synesthetic Recordings resides with the contributing artists and is operated on their behalf by Synesthetic Recordings. We strongly defend and actively support the artists' rights to complete control of their intellectual property. Synesthetic Recordings therefore refuse to adopt the common and unethical practice of artists assigning the copyright of their work to a record company or management."

From: synestheticrecordings.com

A view that I highly appreciate. And also something that is a common thing in the publishing world. Writers of books keep their copyrights, why do musicians put up with the criminal situation that is maintained by the big record companies?

I came across this label when visiting Lasse Marhaug's excellent webpage. Marhaug is Norway's most famous noisemaker.

Targeted in the raids were people operating "hubs" in a file-sharing network based on Direct Connect software. [...] In order to join the network, members had to promise to provide between one and 100 gigabytes of material to trade, or up to 250,000 songs, Ashcroft said. [...] Each of the five hubs contained 40 petabytes of data, the equivalent of 60,000 movies or 10.5 million songs, Ashcroft said.
This is not filesharing for the love of music, but for the love of using Direct Connect, which, I feel, is a different case.

As we all probably have noticed, cds with a copy protection are inferior products that defy the red book cd standard. There are loads of problems with playing these 'defect' discs (that's what they are!) on car stereos and disc men. I have a personal policy of not buying cds with copy protection anymore. I have two of those discs and they suck. In more ways than you would think!
Example: The radiohead disc, hail to the thief, I have keeps on skippin in track four on portable cd players. It was however really easy to convert the disc to AAC files with help of iTunes and my G4 laptop and then transport these files to my iPod.....
Now I ask you: what is the use of this copy protection??

The French are now preparing a courtcase against EMI and storechain FNAC for selling an inferior product. Good!
Rumours say that cases are prepared in Belgium and Germany as well. Read more about it here (in Dutch).

News from courtland: Jibjab, who created a film feat. Bush and Kerry, which spread like anthrax accross the internet and old-school pushing media, have won the courtcase. The song they used, by Woody Guthrie, is public domain, as it has been printed in 1945, after which the copyright was never renewed. Slashdot has the whole story.