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I'm confused by this article--is the RIAA actually going after downloaders, or just people uploading music? The article repeatedly calls the alleged offenders "downloaders".

It's part of the FUD, like using the words "stealing" and "piracy" instead of copyright violation, which is illegal but doesn't sound so ominous and just so chock full of villianry. And there's the matter of the RIAA and the people they're lobbying being fairly clueless about computer use in general.

I quite like eMule Plus myself. Even if the application doesn't provide access to see an IP, you can sniff the traffic to see who everyone is. None of the common p2p systems use encyption.

I doubt that there are many folk running p2p through a proxy. It's quite a bandwidth hog, you'd need to pay for a service like that.

Kurt, it doesn't take being a SuperNode to reveal your IP. As Eli notes, you need to have an IP address to do anything on a network. The data has to go *somewhere*. Anonymizing techniques vary, but somewhere someone still has to know the end user's IP, and wherever that information is known is where the RIAA will be sending their legal notices.

As for "downloaders" vs "uploaders" - as far as I can tell, it's sloppy journalism. They're suing the people who are sharing the files. Using the term "downloaders" is part of the fear campaign, no doubt.

There are lots of reasons to not use KaZaa aside from the lawsuit potential. Spyware, draconian EULA, most of the warez are trojaned, etc. Gnutella (ie limewire, bearshare, morpheus) or OpenNap (ie winmx, xnap) are much better choices.

Any website or internet service you touch will see your IP
address. That' is how it can communicate back to you.

For the systems that 'anonymize' connections there are two
basic techniques. One is a masquarade system. You contact the
anonymizing server, along with many others, and it contacts
the remote site and relays the stuff to you. (Local networks
with NAT work like this, too.) The other system is uses a
network of cooperating computers. When you make a request it
might come right from your computer or it might be relayed
through one or more cooperating computers. And those other
computers will relay stuff through you, too. Afterwards there
is no record of which computer in the network issued the
original request.

I like this bit at the end of the article:
"I think they're trying to scare people," Barnes said.

Nice understatement.

Edited by author 07-25-2003 12:29 PM
KurtJester said...
Which of the most popular file-sharing apps provide users' IP addresses?

All of them. Doing so is a functional requirement.

And how?

Computer magic.

Bob Barnes, a 50-year-old grandfather in Fresno, Calif., and the target of another subpeona, acknowledged sharing "several hundred" music files. He said he used the Internet to download hard-to-find recordings of European artists because he was unsatisfied with modern American artists and grew tired of buying CDs without the chance to listen to them first.

One of the great promises of the Internet was that it would tear down all of the distribution barriers, and one would be able to access the independent labels and individual artists directly. Why then do most people spend all of their time downloading music from the RIAA labels if it such crap?

I'm catching on slowly but How Not To Get Sued By The RIAA For File-Sharing answers many of my questions.

I guess SuperNode status on the FastTrack apps enable one's IP address to be seen [and harvested].

I'm confused by this article--is the RIAA actually going after downloaders, or just people uploading music? The article repeatedly calls the alleged offenders "downloaders".

As far as I know, their efforts (and the laws for that matter) have all been against people uploading music, and thus infringing on copyright. Is this just sloppy journalism? If not, how exactly does the RIAA find out who is downloading what?

Could someone enlighten me?

Which of the most popular file-sharing apps provide users' IP addresses? And how?