Bill Lets Music Firms Hack Napster-Like Systems
Thu Jul 25, 4:12 PM ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Media companies would be allowed to sabotage Napster ( news - web sites)-style networks to prevent songs, movies and other copyrighted materials from being swapped over the Internet under a bill introduced in Congress on Thursday.


The bill would permit recording companies and other copyright holders to hack onto networks to thwart users looking to download free music, and would protect them from lawsuits from users.

Although Congress has little time to debate the bill before the August recess, sponsor Rep. Howard Berman, a California Democrat, said the measure was necessary because the decentralized systems were impossible to shut down.

"No legislation can eradicate the problem of peer-to-peer piracy. However, enabling copyright creators to take action to prevent an infringing file from being shared via P2P (peer-to-peer) is an important first step," Berman said in remarks on the floor of the House of Representatives.

Many large record labels have already resorted to a method known as "spoofing," where they hire firms to distribute "decoy" files that are empty or do not work in order to frustrate would-be downloaders of movies and music.

Additionally, sources have said the major recording companies, like Bertelsmann AG ( news - web sites) BMG, EMI Group Plc ( news - web sites) , Vivendi Universal and Sony Corp ( news - web sites) are considering taking a new tack by suing individuals who use the services, rather than the companies that host them.

The industry's trade group, the Recording Industry Association of America ( news - web sites), on Thursday welcomed the bill.

"We applaud Congressman Berman for introducing bipartisan legislation that takes an innovative approach to combating the serious problem of Internet piracy," said Hilary Rosen, chairman and chief executive officer of the RIAA.

"Online piracy undermines the growth of legitimate music sites and hurts all consumers in the long run. Every dollar lost to piracy is a dollar that cannot be invested in fresh, new artists we have all come to expect and enjoy," said Rosen.

The bill does not specify what measures copyright owners could take to foil online song swapping, but does impose some limits on their efforts.

Copyright owners would only be able to stop the trading of their own songs, and would be required to notify users and the Justice Department ( news - web sites) when they took action.

Overzealous companies could face a government ban and lawsuits from users who suffered economic harm.

The recording industry blames rampant online piracy for a decline in CD sales last year and has prosecuted online networks aggressively.

But while the industry succeeded in shutting down the pioneer Napster service last summer, other less centralized networks like Kazaa and Morpheus continue to attract millions of users.

"The current landscape for online music is dangerously one-sided, with the peer-to-peer pirates enjoying an unfair advantage," Rosen of the RIAA said.

"It makes sense to clarify existing laws to ensure that copyright owners -- those who actually take the time and effort to create an artistic work -- are at least able to defend their works from mass piracy," Rosen said.

Members of the movie industry also embraced the initiative, but not entirely.

"We're pleased that a bipartisan group of lawmakers .. want to curb the explosion of Internet piracy," said Jack Valenti, president and chief executive officer of the Motion Picture Association of America, in a statement.

"However, there are aspects of the bill we believe need changing as it moves through the legislative process. We look forward to working with Congress in this regard," he said.

A spokesman for Valenti was not immediately available to elaborate.

A law to allow illegal stuff???????

Hipocresy at its best.

Oh, yeah, FIRST POST!!!

Even if such a bill is passed in the U.S., them hacking into computers from anywhere outside the United States would be considered illegal! So I say let em try to hack in to my computer! I'll sue because hacking in ALL its forms would still be a crime where I live!

Heh, this is funny. What makes these arrogant fools think that they're invincible of being hacked? . I mean seriously won't this do more bad then good? This won't stop p2p at all if even slowing it down and... ehh they'll get the message when it happens

Now searching filesharing services for hacking toolz....

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shutup reuters

lol, what a stitch.

wow turn up the effort people

The boys at http://www.fuckmicrosoft.com/
were working on a new p2p that's more secure... hmm what was it called again ? (pog ponders)

Six/Four dooh ! It's still on the dmusic homepage, silly me

man fuck them.

thats a deliberate violation of my rights...not my constitutional rights..but my personal rights...invading my privacy like that...shit, dont think i wont sue some-muthafuckin'-body gotdamnit...i only download underground music anyway, but stilll...thats a fucked up law...

Suddenly, I am like our brave President, an instant Texan
They can come take my hard drive when they pry it from my cold dead fingers.

I will be waiting for them, and once in my legally-owned property (my computer) I can repulse them or defend myself using any tactic I like and get away with it.

They won't know the length and size of THAT legal bill. First person to get hosed by them, just call up Johnnie Cochran. We whould collect some monthly dues so we can pay for the legal team to sue them on this.

Firewalls protect from hackers. They dont protect against a billion-dollar corporation with a dozen T3s leading to its hacking station and a room full of high-spec PCs.

The thing is they don't have that technology at their disposal. They hire "Copyright Bounty Hunters" to do the dirtywork. There is a whole new business sector being built around this type of thing. The RIAA hires these guys, tells them the artist and song, then they do searches every so often (automated of course) to find the song. Usually there is a base cost per song, plus a per scan fee (around a penny and a half) plus a fee for every file found (also about a penny and a half.) They usually scan once an hour and scan the p2p networks. Doesn't sound like a lot, but it can add up in a hurry. The label starts the process, runs up a tab of about $100,000 or so and then charges it to the artists recouplable account, regardless if they follow through with takedown notices or not. (that can also be done automaticaly @abut 5 cents per.)

Do they REALLY think that they can stop what the public wants. Any record company that starts to hack at a user will relize that there are hackers out there that live for shit like this. These companies would find there company web sites in the shitter!

The RIAA just did

They probably wont attack the users much, just the central servers. They will only attack users when they ahve crushed the p2p networks and want to move on to IRC and FTP instead.

from the article:

..and would protect them from lawsuits from users."

you can ALWAYS sue.

(btw) the bill i'm going to pass gives me a magic cape and some silver slippers, 'invincible-man' i will be ordained..and i will henceforth operate all computers telepathically with a click of my heels

Too many absolutes in here. First off NOTHING is beyond hacking. Security firms boom because this is a universal truth.
Second, NOTHING is beyond litigation. You can sue for coffee that was TOO hot, you can sue for this.

The RIAA website has been getting whomped lately, what a pity. I think they will target the network too, it's not cost-effective to aim for the users personally.

Excuse my ignorance, but how do you know if you are being port scanned?

Thanx.

Some personal firewalls detect it. IDS usually picks it up too, but your not likely to find one of thoe on a home PC.

They are not talking about our style or hacking, precision work with the software scapal. They intend to effectivly march into the network carrying a digital double-barrled shotgun, point in the general direction of a suspected infringer and pull the trigger. If anyone else is in the way perhaps they could sue, but it would be difficult. If the RIAA/MPAA admits to it, which they dont have to, and if the person or company caught in the crossfire can prove damages over $2500 then perhaps they could try, but not nessicarily win. And there is still the possibility of a countersuit for copyright infringement.

Read the law, not just a summary of it.

The proposed law is fairly narrow scope. While section A does promote 'active countermeasures' but there is a big IF in section B. In that section the 'active countermeasures' cannot delte files on the target system and cannot interfere with the distribution of materials for which the provider has a valid right to distribute, which would include items in the public domain. So if your site has a lot of public domain stuff on it and the attack interferes with distributing the public domain stuff then the protections in section A do not apply and it is an illegal intrusion. In all honestly I cannot think of a means of disrupting your computer that can stop some materials from being sent but not others. Do you?

Frankly I agree that the whole approach of this law is wrong because it encourages vigilante action rather than working through the law.

I know that this will get some shrieks from the folks here who think that everything should be free, but the eventual solution will need to be some sort of a p2p solution that requires royalties be paid to the folks that own the copyrighted content, similar to the way in which radio stations must collect and pay royalties through a clearinghouse for each song that they play.

I said this in another forum and I'll say it here as well: Be Careful RIAA!!!
You may really be crossing the line with this one! The Johnnie Cochrans of the lawyer world would just love to get their hands on the first innocent victim of an RIAA DoS, or other hack. And when they do....kiss some more of your profits goodbye. The ACLU will probably have something to say about it as well.
You should not be able to break the law in order to enforce the law. Hacking is illegal for a reason - it invades privacy.
Whatever happened to the good old days of getting a search warrant to rummage through other people's stuff?
Everyday it seems more of our rights to privacy are just being eroded at.
Completely off the subject, but here to make a point:
It took Nancy Reagan to plead with Rain Man (my pet name for George W.) to get him to change his position on stem cell research (and thus his definition of "when life begins"). When did this happen? After Ronnie got Alzheimer's!
When did Rudy Giuliani's opinion change? After he got cancer.
While I'm not wishing disease on ANYONE, sometimes it takes a little dose of reality to hit some of these idiots in Congress for them to get the point.
Maybe if their computers were hacked, they'd have a slightly different opinion on how it feels to have your private life ransacked through by total strangers....

Polititions do need a dose of reality. I probably said this before, but there is an intresting example in the Thames Stench. A river getting full of raw sewage is going to stink, but the polititions ignored it saying it wasn't worth the money to clean it. Until the stench reached parliment and the snob district. They cleaned it up quickly then! (but they did try scented blinds first).

In the same way the polititions wont worry about privacy until someone invades theirs. They wont get hacked because that could endanger the RIAAs lobbying plans, and they need those to pass more bad laws. The polititions wont worry about accidential damage to the internet until it affects their votes.

Althrough the bill doesn't allow copyright holders to delete files or deliberatly cause damage to legal content it does make it quite hard to sue if they do it accidentially. Althrough they have to file for permission a week in advance there it nothing forceing them to admit they did it, and the records are closed. Unless you already suspect a copyright holder has launched an attack and have a good idea which one it would be quite hard finding out. I also suspect by the time the bill passes it will have been altered to make it even harder.

And as for not allowing interuption of legal files - the whole point of it is to attack p2p networks. The RIAA has worked hard on convinceing people p2p is synomous with pirate.

Everybody get a firewall!!!!!!
The RIAA will never break into your computer thru a firewall (e.g. ZoneAlarm, etc.)

"Every dollar lost to piracy is a dollar that cannot be invested in fresh, new artists we have all come to expect and enjoy." - Rosen

Well, that's bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, and totally fucking bullshit!!!!
***Don't you realize that the RIAA is trying to suck more and more money out of your pocket? When you go to the store, a CD usually costs $13. Well, when you buy a CD, the artist gets a several cents (or less) out of it, and a few more cents are allocated to producers related to the artist. GUESS WHERE THE REST OF THE MONEY GOES......???? THE STINKING RIAA!!!!! THEY'RE the ones who are trying to stop music swapping, and it's because they're one of the many BIG RICH FAT CATS of society!!! All they care about is MONEY, MONEY, MONEY, MONEY, MONEY, MONEY, MONEY, and more MONEY.... They DON'T care about CONSUMERS - they ONLY produce more of what's POPULAR in THEIR opinion (Which means that it's hard to find a rare-style CD you like but no longer popular). The ARTIST deserves the money from selling CDs, not the stupid RIAA!!! And what does the RIAA do? It tries to make MORE MONEY off of YOU, the CONSUMER, and doesn't give a rats about anything else!!!

--------------

"The current landscape for online music is dangerously one-sided, with the peer-to-peer pirates enjoying an unfair advantage." - Rosen

Well duh... The P2P users are taking an unfair advantage over the RIAA, and NOT MUCH against the artists, because the artists gets about nothing from the sales of a CD. So yes, the selfish, money-lusting, miserly RIAA people has made TOO MUCH money. And it's a good thing - we DESERVE the "unfair advantage"!!!!

I'm with Dee, FUCK THE RIAA.

Isn't it ironic that in the so called "land of the free" they would seriously consider allowing corporations to legally hack into people's personal computers? This sounds exactly like an idea the Russian government would come up with. Before, I believed that the RIAA was simply a bunch of greedy corporate executives, but now I am convinced that they are truly evil people. File sharing has been a musical godsend for me, not because it's free, but for other, more important reasons. It would be a tragedy if it was destroyed. All music lovers of the world must unite against the music mafia. Stay away from the music stores and urge your family and friends to do the same, continue supporting gnutella by sharing quality files, and don't let the recording industry intimidate you. Music is my greatest love, and if the RIAA wants to take it away from me they'll have to break into my house and fight me to the death!

Or they could use the CDTBPA. Wait for your sound card to break and then sell you a new one with a built-in watermark detector. It would be illegal to disable the detector.

Ok everyone I hear a lot of talk about the RIAA mounting Denial of service attacks, well it has to be reciprocated then! Bless the lord for the invention of DDoS tools, we can shut down their networks for hours and screw their bandwidth to hell! Just download the tribal flood network source at the following link, compile it and point it RIAAs webservers! ENJOY!hehehehe http://209.100.212.5/cgi-bin/search/search.cgi?searchvalue=TFN2k

We could, but its been done. How about attacking the servers being used to send spoof files over p2p networks?

yes, but how do we identify the source of the crappy files

oh land of the free,
i applaud thee!

what a great law and what a great government. they ought to read a biography of themselves, it's a little book called '1984'. wouldn't george orwell be proud to see his novel (what was meant to be futuristic) turn into bitter reality in just a few decades?

isn't it great how america, the land of justice and freedom fight so bravely and persistently in the name of justice to defeat the oppressive totalitarian regimes of muslim theocracies (government by the law of god), and at the same time employ very similar if not worse tactics in the homeland?

sounds to me alot like the kgb. well the kgb were defeated by partisan, guerrilas; and so i forsee 21st century partisans (hackers) starting a new brand of guerilla warfare with the riaa and international counterparts. god speed and all the power to them.

With the slight difference that the country will be ruled by corporations, not government.

Goldenpi, Luhua, Eurotrash147 (and I mean that in the nicest way...), you're all right.
1984, as Orwell wrote it is here. The thought police are just around the corner. Hacking computers? Spoof files? If anyone else did something like this, it would be called spamming, wasting bandwidth, impeding progress, criminal....

As for Hilary Rosen, not to bog down the forum with more of her ridiculous, hypocritical, self-righteous babble, but I have a quote from her on an article in our local newspaper.
The article is dealing with the demise of many of the web-based radio stations that the RIAA is putting out of business via exorbitant royalty fees.
I don't have the paper in front of me, but when she was asked about all of these stations being put out of business, her reply was to the extent of:

"We're not in this to try and shut down the mom-and-pop radio stations. It's not us against them. But when you have a business model that doesn't work, you certainly can't keep the store open using it..."

How ironic is this? The RIAA has government backing to keep their outmoded business model going.
We really haven't needed the record industry since the internet (specifcally broadband) really took hold. But, if there were no artists using the RIAA's services, they too, with their dated business model, would be finished.
Ever since Rain Man took office, the entire country has turned into a corporate-run government, who's sole purpose is to line their pockets at the expense of personal freedoms.
The fair use act is DEAD! We, as consumers, have been royally screwed. Fair use allows us to make a backup for personal use. However, in one of these forums, someone pointed out to me that the industry was not required to provide us a means in which to copy material. BUT, the programs that will defeat copy protection and allow you to make a backup are illegal to download! What kind of crap is this?
It's synonymous with the law here that says that the use of illegal narcotics is not a crime, however, possession of illegal narcotics is (?!?). Who writes this stuff? What do they think, we're stupid or something?

Don't be afraid of the RIAA, be afraid that some day, police won't need a search warrant to look through your stuff.
This is nothing more than a further assault on personal freedom and our right to privacy.

Anyone who says the internet is a public place and that your right to privacy does not hold up in public, I have one thing to say: Let's check out YOUR internet traffic and see what YOU are looking at! Maybe if that information was made public, the Congressional views on the RIAA's proposal would be very different.

I wonder, could there be a compromise to this mess? such as offerring to pay a "fair" fee per download so as to be forthright to the dillema. I will probably get beaten up and eggs thrown at me for this suggestion but, I feel cooperation, not opposition would be a better step to regain our privacy and a bit of old fashioned honesty on some parts wouldn't hurt. If we ask ourselves the question "what made everything free to us on the internet" what would be the answer? Could a five or ten cent download per song be fair for example? use a site that would work with riaa and mpa to delegate funds to the "artist's" involved instead of creating a venue for big brother to allow groups to hack into the sites and maybe our personal pc's open minded. thanks.