When it comes to enforcing a three strikes law, one of the more immediate things that don't come to mind is how expensive it could be to enforce. For ISPs in France, this is a very big issue because the bill could be quite high.

There's been no shortage of opinions on the issue of downloading music. From average citizens to activists to labels to mainstream to small time artists, just everyone affected by the music industry has an opinion on the digital environment. So why not throw in a band manager - namely the manager of Pink Floyd - in to the mix?

“It seems to me that in the online world, the marginal cost of a digital file is essentially zero,” he says, making it an “inescapable reality” that the digital world is pushing the price of music towards zero. “If we rely on a copyright law – i.e. a right to copy law – we’re clearly barking down a historical blind alley.” He says the comparison is making airline legislation based on the rail network. “There aren’t many signals in the sky…”

Onto the digital world – “attempts to stop people copying are clearly a waste of time, and not only are they a waste of time, they make the law offensive. It’s very similar to prohibition in America in the 1930s.”

Doctorow is flat-out brilliant and pretty much anything he writes is worth reading, and this most recent contribution is no exception.  He ably sketches what he sees as a growing consensus among content distributors that streaming is the answer to their problems with piracy, since, in theory at least, a streamed piece of media is not saved on a local hard drive, and the customer must then go back to the distributor for repeat viewings (sales), and cannot then distribute the content themselves to their friends or the Pirate Bay.

As anyone with much technical savvy knows, however, streaming and downloading are basically the same thing, it’s just that the streamed content is not supposed to be saved.  Users have worked around these kinds of restrictions for as long as streamed content has been around, and I personally used a number of programs to capture Real audio streams of Internet radio shows back before pod-casts became standard.  There are currently dozens of applications, plug-ins, widgets, you name it, to capture YouTube video, and if enough people were interested, I’m sure there will be some for Hulu as well.

As Doctorow eloquently explains, if big media companies do actually believe in the streaming “illusion” then they are in for a shock, and as with so much else, their clumsy legal attempts to make their wishes come true will likely so harm to all Internet users.  Not to mention the incredible inefficiency and network strain a world of constant streaming would create.

One area, however, where I think the media companies may have more reason for optimism with streaming than Doctorow believes is with video.  Music and video may diverge more strongly in regards to streaming than in other aspects of digital distribution.  While storage is getting cheaper every day, high definition video remains relatively sizeable, and generally there is not as much repetition as with music, decreasing the inherent inefficiency of streaming.

Less mobile consumption of video, away from reliable network bandwidth also allows for more streaming advantages in this area, as I think YouTube and Hulu are demonstrating.  Regardless of what actually serves user needs best, however, Doctorow is absolutely correct that the big content companies will continue to push for business and legal frameworks that serve their own interests first, at the cost of our own privacy and access to innovative technology.

To provide an extremely brief summary of my experience, I’ve been writing news for about 3 years, but my file-sharing experience dates back to the Napster era. So suffice to say, I’ve developed some knowledge on this area.

While there is no real universal term for what has been described in the commentary since some simply refer to these sites as upload sites among other things, I’ll use the term “Share links” merely for consistency.

Has there ever really been a revolution within the revolution of file-sharing at any time? Many would argue that Napster was the revolution that kicked off the era of file-sharing clear back in 2001 mainly because it pushed file-sharing from the obscure digital underground to the main-stream conscious. It’s a very sound argument that resonates clear to today where it is often a staple description for media to describe how it all began. While this argument has been around for years, other “revolutions” that some might call them really depends more on what one considers a revolution in the first place. Was Kazaa revolutionary for being the first mainstream file-sharing client to be decentralized? Was Lime Wire revolutionary for being the first mainstream open source p2p client? Was eMule revolutionary for it’s serverless Kademlie network or protocol encryption techniques? Was BitTorrent revolutionary for it’s unique tracker/client system? Was Shareaza revolutionary for its multiple network concept? Indeed, there are many advances to be cited in file-sharing, but sometimes what is deemed “revolutionary” is often mainly an advance in one’s preferred client or network. Here, we see this question clearly being raised again with the idea of “share links”.

Still, when one thinks historically on file-sharing, it is sometimes easy to think in a linear fashion (i.e. first Napster, then Kazaa, then BitTorrent – or – first UseNet, then Napster, then Lime wire, then BitTorrent, etc.) when in actual fact, the evolution of file-sharing has been anything but linear. While there were protests on the streets over the downfall of Napster, many were also quietly downloading on UseNet or ICQ. While the URN hash system on Kazaa was getting cracked, many were also sharing on eDonkey2000/eMule and Lime Wire. While Grokster was getting dragged through the US courts, many were searching through others shared folders on Shareaza or chatting in WinMX. This is not denying what was popular, but accepting that there were almost always multiple ways of getting files off of p2p or a p2p-like system.

This also raises the question, do users stick to one network? While there are those that swear by a single network, I find that most users are using multiple networks to get what they want these days. This is particularly the case with those using private BitTorrent websites because if users stuck to one network, invite trading would simply never take place – yet it’s cited as one of the ways that users jump from one site to another (some consider this a way of ‘moving up the chain’) The very nature of BitTorrent demands that every release be a separate network effectively speaking. Each private site can be viewed as a community that encompasses many of these networks. Put it in another way, how many BitTorrent users, especially since the downfall of Suprnova, use one website for their BitTorrent needs and one website only anyway?

So we pretty much established that there has almost always been more than one network in existence at any given time in the file-sharing era and that users are using multiple networks and often multiple protocols. So here comes the existence of “share links”. Is it really revolutionary as DCInteractive describes it? To say that it is new would be greatly mistaken. The earliest kind of service of this nature that I can recall is YouSendIt. According to Wikipedia, YouSendIt was founded in 2004. It’s original intent was to help people send large files over e-mail when e-mail restrictions are extremely tight (i.e. when hotmail had a 4MB restriction – enough to fill a floppy disk basically) Such a service was definitely heaven-send in such circumstances, yet wasn’t exactly meant for file-sharing by any stretch of the imagination. Other similar services popped up like Megaupload (2005) and Rapidshare (2006) – the product of open competition more than anything else.

The concept of sharing these links are probably as old as when the companies were founded in the first place, but weren’t popularized in the file-sharing realm until around 2006 – 2007 when people caught on to the idea. Sites like, often referred to as, “sharity blogs” and forums which allow file-hosting links started cropping up because finding links like these wasn’t exactly as easy as browsing a list of hosted content on the official website. Of course, all this was made a lot easier when people designed search engines which crawled through the internet to try and find these links and put them into a searchable database (in a way, kind of like how NZB files made UseNet significantly easier)

It may be one of the big reasons why file-hosting services have become popular for users, but what about any risk from copyright holders? In fact, there has been some legal battles in 2007 and 2008 between organizations like GEMA (a German Copyright Collective) and Rapidshare where familiar arguments like the web application creator is responsible for copyright infringement (an argument that appeared in the MGM vs. Grokster case and, as recently brought up, the Lime Wire case) While these arguments were flying against file-hosting companies, there doesn’t appear to be a renewed effort against these sites in recent times so far.

Still, for older file-sharing users, the concept may sound familiar – put a file on a server and users download that file from the server. This concept definitely exists with FTP sites that have also been around for a considerable amount of time. Another protocol that goes along with these principles is UseNet which definitely dates back to before Napster became popular. There was also the really old style of bulletin boards which is sometimes cited as the earliest form of file-sharing. So much rather then something new, file-hosting might be more easily seen as a way file-sharing has basically come full circle back to its core roots.

The question remains, though, how popular is this? For the mainstream conscious, it’s not anywhere near as popular as BitTorrent or Lime Wire. Are there a number of people using it? Absolutely. Is it just the next iteration of file-sharing? It’s questionable if it’s just ‘the next big thing’ given that file-sharing’s history is not linear anyway, but it may very well be just another tool in a file-sharers toolbox to get what they want. These days, that toolbox appears to only be getting more and more crowded. This, I think, is excellent news because it just makes the whole file-sharing movement much more robust. You can’t catch ‘em all.

Sample from the DCInteractive article:

Share Links as I am calling them are the new era of file sharing on
the Internet. They use the power of the Internet to work for them
instead of relying on other end users. This provides greater bandwidth,
more reliability and much higher completion rates. This revolution has
started in the past year and is growing in popularity tremendously
among Internet users although it has kept below the radar of most
file-sharing e-zines. Majority of the Share Link distributors offer
unlimited amount of uploads usually with a 100-1000mb cap per
individual upload.

“We’ve just released a major update to Miro, version 1.2″ The announcement says, “This version adds lots of tweaks and bug fixes that make Miro smoother and slicker. It also lays the groundwork for some big improvements that are coming soon.”

The release notes (Google Cache for those who have as much trouble loading the page) contain the following improvements:

• Update to VLC 0.8.6e (which fixes a security flaw in vlc)
• Reorganization of frontend / backend (with cool implications for developers)
• Separate preferences to control manual and automatic simultaneous downloads.

There was also a number of bug fixes including:

• global preference to control autodownload settings
• A preference to set torrent upload ratios
• All revver searches return 0 results.
• DailyMotion? videos downloads give File Not Found errors
• Can’t Minimize to Task Bar via task bar on First run
• An extra directory level for downloaded torrents

Miro implements many things including the BitTorrent protocol which is known for efficiently distributing large files to users. Miro suggested that shows such as Democracy Now! could save thousands (in this case, $1000 a month) in bandwidth costs by implementing the BitTorrent technology.

There is high hopes for applications such as Miro given that the CBC has already announced it’s plans to distribute TV shows such as “Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister” through BitTorrent. The hope is that this first step by a major TV broadcaster would open the floodgates to many North American broadcasters to follow suit.

digg_url = ‘http://digg.com/tech_news/BitTorrent_Democratic_TV_App_Miro_Upgrades_to_Version_1_2′;

Can the Recording Industry Association of America sue someone for having a song in a shared directory or share point? That’s what the RIAA is hoping for. Not only would there be no need to download the song to make sure it is legitimately their content and not an independent artist faking a file to promote their own works, but there would be no need to sue someone for uploading a song to anyone to prove that an infringement has occurred in the first place.

If that doesn’t sound fair and balanced, the Electronic Frontier Foundation would most certainly agree. Tomorrow, the EFF will be on the defense in court trying to stop a lawsuit against two allege Pheonix file-sharers for having copyrighted works in a “shared” folder. The idea is a newer twist to the RIAAs “making available” theory which suggests that even if a song is not downloaded, there is still damage being done to the copyright holders and, thus, allows a record label to sue a particular IP address.

“This amounts to suing someone for attempted copyright infringement — something the Copyright Act simply does not allow,” said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Fred von Lohmann. “If the RIAA wants to keep bringing these suits and collecting big settlements, then they have to follow the law and prove their case. It’s not enough to say the law could have been broken. The RIAA must prove it actually was broken.”

While it’s a newer approach in the courts to bring into law “attempted copyright infringement”, it isn’t new in US politics. The idea was proposed by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales last year in the Intellectual Property Protection Act of 2007.

The Atlantic Records, et al. v. Howell case, as it is officially known, is scheduled to commence at 2PM tomorrow. The EFF has posted a brief (PDF) in the case.

“We just have to make [piracy] as difficult and as tedious as possible,” Dan Glickman, Motion Picture Association of America said during an interview on the internet documentary filmSteal this Film 2, “and we have to let people know that there are consequences if they are caught.”

It’s one of the bigger lines pushed by the movie studios on movie piracy. Unfortunately for the MPAA, an authorized venue may be much more difficult and tedious, let alone expensive, to rent movies on iTunes for some iPod owners than some alternatives.

Some are speculating that it is the result of Digital Rights Management, the same DRM that major copyright holders say offers consumers choice – whether it be a seucirty flaw or simply a way to encourage 5th generation iPod owners to buy the latest iPod. Some Apple iPod owners expressed frustration and anger when they found out that they are the proud owner of an incompatible iPod. This is despite the fact that the iPods are actually capable of video playback in the first place. Whether it’s a security glitch or something more sinister at work, Apple has yet to make an official statement on the matter.

For some, the DRM incompatibility argument dates back to at least since the launch of Napster 2.0. This is particularly the case when the Electronic Frontier Foundation posted a guide entitled, ‘The Customer is Always Wrong’ back in 2005. Since then, some music services like

Podmaxx lets you copy music from ANY iPod to your computer without hassle. Not only that, but Podmaxx will also burn a CD for you. No need to fire up nero when you can just plug in an ipod and burn straight from it.

You can also copy movies from your ipod to your pc using Podmaxx, which is pretty cool. But Podmaxx takes it to another level by letting you rip DVDs straight to iPod. That’s right just throw a DVD in the drive and click one button and the movie is copied to your iPod.

If that wasn’t enough, Podmaxx also creates ringtones of your music and sends them to your phone – FREE.

Podmaxx costs $29.95 which is a one-time fee and they have a 30-day no questions asked guarantee so if its not working you can get your money back.

Download Podmaxx Now

]]>