Learn more about why file sharing is not theft and the false claims of the RIAA due to P2P, From the Educational CyberPlayGround.

Music: Copyright Law Book 1 • This is Page 4

Music: Free Music Book 1 • This is Page 8

Free Music Downloads: Why file sharing is not theft

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"Copyright violation is NOT a crime, unless in the pursuit of profit. It is and always has been a civil matter at the end user level. Of course, if you press 1000 DVD's with the motive to sell the work, that is in fact a crime.
When will informed people stop towing the MPAA/RIAA line of misstatements around as gospel. Simply read the FBI warning on ANY DVD word by word and you'll note the subtle distinction, as they cannot call it a criminal offense, and do not, because simple filesharing and personal violation of copyright is not a crime.
(Note: Rather than suing end users, do you not think it would be easier for the RIAA/MPAA to simply swear before a magistrate for an arrest warrant if they could?; they cannot, and therefore, are only able to extort via threat of civil judgements)" ~ Andrew Burnette

The Law
The lawyers and Judges do not tell you about the RIAA and Your Jury Rights which would void the RIAA suit against you.

Courtney Love

Courtney Love gave an excellent unedited speech to the Digital Hollywood online entertainment conference, given in New York on May 16, 2000 on the creative math that the record companies do with regards to the artists. 6 pages long - good read. takes on record label profits, Napster and "sucka VCs."

Courtney Love Manifesto By Courtney Love June 14, 2000

Today I want to talk about piracy and music. What is piracy? Piracy is the act of stealing an artist's work without any intention of paying for it. I'm not talking about Napster-type software.
I'm talking about major label recording contracts. I want to start with a story about rock bands and record companies, and do some recording-contract math:
This story is about a bidding-war band that gets a huge deal with a 20 percent royalty rate and a million-dollar advance. (No bidding-war band ever got a 20 percent royalty, but whatever.) This is my "funny" math based on some reality and I just want to qualify it by saying I'm positive it's better math than what Edgar Bronfman Jr. [the president and CEO of Seagram, which owns Polygram] would provide.
What happens to that million dollars?
They spend half a million to record their album. That leaves the band with $500,000. They pay $100,000 to their manager for 20 percent commission. They pay $25,000 each to their lawyer and business manager. That leaves $350,000 for the four band members to split. After $170,000 in taxes, there's $180,000 left. That comes out to $45,000 per person. That's $45,000 to live on for a year until the record gets released. <snip/>

Artist Courtney Love issued a letter to the music industry explaining that until recently, Congress believed that the RIAA spoke for recording artists, and not a trade group that is paid for by record companies to represent their interests. Her letter calls for support over collective bargaining in negotiations with record companies because singers are served by the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA), and musicians are served by the American Federation of Musicians (AFM), and there is no single organization to negotiate health care and pension plans [7]. In her speech to the Digital Hollywood Online Entertainment Conference in 2000, she tells the story of a Congressional aide named Mitch Glazier, who, with the support of the RIAA, added a "technical amendment" to a bill that defined recorded music as "works for hire" under the 1978 Copyright Act. Under the 1978 Copyright Act, artists could reclaim the copyrights on their work after 35 years. This amendment would mean the copyright would never revert back to the original owner. Ever. On the bright side, three months after the "amendment", the RIAA hired Mr. Glazier to become its top lobbyist.[8]
[1] http://www.riaa.com/Licensing-AARC-2.cfm
[2] http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2000/05/cdpres.htm
[3] Michael Robertson, Chairman and CEO, MP3.com, Inc., Testimony Before the Senate Judiciary Committee
[4] Hank Barry, CEO, Napster, Inc., Testimony Before the Senate Judiciary Committee
[5] http://www.negativland.com/riaa/dowesue.html
[6] Supreme Court Reaffirms Rejection Of Prior Restraints in CBS Inc. v. Davis, U.S., 114 S. Ct. 912, 127 L. Ed. 2d 358, 22 Med. L. Rptr. 1285 [1994] Justice Blackmun. An article about this case is on Negativland's website.
[7] http://www.mindspring.com/~gerryhem/piracy2.html
[8] http://www.mindspring.com/~gerryhem/piracy.html

Why File Sharing Is Not Theft

Bob Dylan has written folksongs and explains what influenced him.

Never forget that the height of Napster coincided with the greatest CD sales in history. The original Napster had a fine proposition: they would charge their users for signing onto their network and write a cheque for as-many-billions-as-you-like to the record industry every quarter. After all, they had the fastest-growing technology in the history of the world at their disposal, 70 million internet users in 18 months, and they'd found that the average American user was willing to spend $15 a month for the service. The record industry sued them into a smoking hole instead, and out of the ashes of Napster arose dozens of new networking technologies. Each one was more hardened against monitoring and disconnection than the last.

Why Most Artists Profit from Piracy
Piracy is not all that bad for musicians. In fact, research has shown that less popular artists actually profit from piracy. This can be concluded from, and is supported by several studies. Frustrated as they are, the music industry claims that they lose millions a year due to piracy, but is this really the case? Two facts:

Album sales are declining.
75% of all artists profit from filesharing.

Ohio University (April 25, 2007)
announces changes in file-sharing policies April 25, 2007 Ohio University announces changes in file-sharing policies.
In an effort to ensure that every student, faculty member and researcher has access to the computer resources they need, Ohio University announced today it will restrict the use of all peer-to-peer, or P2P, file-sharing on the campus computer network. http://www.ohio.edu/students/filesharing.cfm

Comments:

"illegal" can mean many things.
Ohio University, an agency of the state, is inspecting the content of packets being sent between ordinary citizens in its enforcement activities in this regard. While employers have a precedent regarding inspecting *employees* network data transfers, there is little precedent for inspection of packets of citizen-customers (i.e. students who pay tuition and room and board, which includes payment for Internet services).
CALEA provides facilities. However, use of those facilities to spy on traffic requires a judicial warrant. It is not proper or legal for the owner of network facilities to use those facilities *as if they are a law enforcement agency*. Ohio U is not a law enforcement agency, and its CIO has no judicial warrant.
Professor James Gibson of the Richmond Law Intellectual Property Institute approves of distributing the Institute's movies via p2p software, specifically bittorrent compliant clients. Podcast
"After students at Swarthmore College posted the files, Diebold made a demand under the DMCA that the college remove the materials or face suit for contributory copyright infringement. The students were therefore forced to remove the materials. However, in order keep the materials available, the students asked students at other institutions to mirror the files, and injected them into the eDonkey, BitTorrent, and FreeNet file-sharing and publication networks.

Ultimately, a court held that the unauthorized publication of files that were not intended for sale and carried such high public value was a fair use." source

CALEA Compliance for Packet Equipment, And Equipment for Facilities- Based Broadband Internet Access Providers and Providers of Interconnected VoIP http://www.fcc.gov/calea/
All facilities-based broadband Internet access providers and providers of interconnected VoIP service have until May 14, 2007 to come into compliance with CALEA.
CALEA only requires surveillance under a court order, which Ohio University doesn't have "across the board".
Under CALEA, the University almost certainly operates a private network. In reviewing concerns about CALEA raised by the acadamic community, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit rejected those concerns specifically because private networks are not covered by the order requiring compliance by May 14, 2007. As the Court confirmed:
"The Order on review-like CALEA-expressly excludes "private networks" from its reach." See Circuit Lead Decision at page 20. So, although some universities are going down the CALEA road in an overabundance of caution, they are not obligated to take any action under CALEA.

Whoever owns the Language Owns the Conversation

" Susan Crawford, a professor at the Cardozo Law School of Yeshiva University and an author of the report said that a growing number of business leaders are worried that the trend toward 'equating intellectual property with physical property' might be hampering innovation. 'Bits are not the same as atoms,' she argued, contending that the distinction is being blurred by Hollywood. 'We need to reframe the legal discussion to treat the differences of bits and atoms in a more thoughtful way.'" http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/01/technology/01rights.html
The Committee for Economic Development (CED), http://www.ced.org/
"Promoting Innovation and Economic Growth: The Special Problem of Digital Intellectual Property,"
http://www.ced.org/docs/report/report_dcc.pdf [full report

January 2012 Filesharing is a religion in Sweden
The church, called the Church of Kopimism is devoted to filesharing and won official recognition in Sweden. Philosophy student and church founder is Isak Gerson. The fact that the religion is officially recognised does not mean that its members can lawfully download and share material without inspection by ISPs.
"There's still a legal stigma around copying for many. A lot of people still worry about going to jail when copying and remixing. I hope in the name of Kopimi that this will change." ~ Isak Gerson
At its heart is the belief that people should have the right to share and that people whose work is shared should be glad about that.

"The missionary kopimistsamfundet is a religious group centered in Sweden who believe that copying and the sharing of information is the best and most beautiful that is."

"Throughout history, various groups around the world have been persecuted by oppressors. It has since taken refuge in religion and wanted a peaceful coexistence. Without threats and harassment. In our belief, communication is sacred. Communication needs to be respected. It is a direct sin to monitor and eavesdrop on people.The absolute secrecy is holy in the church of kopimism."

"Dec. 22 2005 -- The French Parliament voted last night to allow free sharing of music and movies on the Internet, setting up a conflict with both the French government and with media companies." -- " The amendment, which is attached to a bill on intellectual property rights, states that ``authors cannot forbid the reproduction of works that are made on any format from an online communications service when they are intended to be used privately'' and not for commercial use." If the amendment survives, France would be the first country to legalize so called peer-to-peer downloading, said Jean-Baptiste Soufron, legal counsel to the Association of Audionautes, a French group that defends people accused of improperly sharing music files. The law would be a blow to media companies that increasingly use the courts worldwide to sue people for downloading or sharing music and movie files. Entertainment companies such as Walt Disney Co., Viacom Inc. and News Corp.'s Fox say free downloading of unauthorized copies of TV shows and movies before they are released on DVD will cost them $5 billion in revenue this year.

The Technology - What is peer to peer file transfer?

It is software that when downloaded onto someone's computer, enables that person to access another person's hard drive and to find and copy certain files that the software is designed to recognise. In effect, it allows a direct link between two computers and can be an effective way of transferring data.

"Some Like It Hot" by Lawrence Lessig " Wired" 3/2004 page 103
P2P - Much of the 'piracy' that file-sharing enables is plainly legal and good. It provides access to content that is technically still under copyright but that is no longer commercially available - in the case of music, some 4 million tracks. More important, P2P networks enable sharing of content that copyright owners want shared, as well as work already in the public domain. This clearly benefits authors and society.
Moreover, much of the sharing - which is referred to by many as piracy - is motivated by a new way of spreading content made possible by changes in the technology of distribution. Thus, consistent with the tradition that gave us Hollywood, radio, the music industry, and cable TV, the question we should be asking about file-sharing is how best to preserve its benefits while minimizing (to the extent possible) the wrongful harm it causes artists."

Matt Blaze - For the historically minded, my 1992 dissertation, which anticipated what we now call "peer-to-peer file distribution" by at least five years, can be found here, in PostScript format. Of course, you can still only get it via a centralized server...

Understanding BitTorrent: An Experimental Perspective 11/10/05
BitTorrent is a recent, yet successful peer-to-peer protocol focused on efficient content delivery. To gain a better understanding of the key algorithms of the protocol, we have instrumented a client and run experiments on a large number of real torrents. Our experimental evaluation is peer oriented, instead of tracker oriented, which allows us to get detailed information on all exchanged messages and protocol events. In particular, we have explored the properties of the two key algorithms of BitTorrent: the choke and the rarest first algorithms. We have shown that they both perform remarkably well, but that the old version of the choke algorithm, that is still widely deployed, suffers from several problems. We have also explored the dynamics of a peer set that captures most of the torrent variability and provides important insights for the design of realistic models of BitTorrent. Finally, we have evaluated the protocol overhead. We have found in our experiments a small protocol overhead and explain under which conditions it can increase.

Learn how nginx! is aggregating user generated content is going to reshape the entertainment business in the coming years and Hype Machine http://hype.non-standard.net/ is a perfect example.
Anthony Volodkin, a 21 year old Russian immigrant who now studies at the City University of New York's Hunter College created it. "The Hype Machine is a MP3 blog aggregator with slick tools to listen and read about music. Once you register with THM (for short) an MP3 feed is created. This MP3 feed encloses each MP3 in your blog separately. You can then take this feed, run it through FeedBurner and enable SmartCast. Now you have an MP3 music blog and podcast.
Use Google to find files hosted at free file hoster like rapidshare.de or Megaupload. 22 file hosters are included: rapidshare, megaupload, mediafire, mytempdir, slil, sendspace, turboupload, speedshare, hyperupload, getfile, depositfiles, webfile, file2share, rapidupload, yourfile, yourfilehost, filehd, mooload, scambia, filepost, justupit, simpleupload.
FFHS- Firefox version enter something, for example "spiderman 3 trailer" You will be redirected to a Google result page.swen.antville.org/
FFHS - IE version
Bookmarklets do a Google search for Audio and Video files at the same time.

Mp3 Podcast: Conceptual artist, writer and musician Paul D. Miller, also known as DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid, joins Word of Mouth to talk about what "digital culture" means today. Greg Gillis talks about the [mashup] "hunter-gatherer" image of DJ culture, and sampling as a primal quest, and a route to reconnect us to our tribal roots. His fourth LP "Feed the Animals" will be available for download this week. The album will take advantage of the so-called "Radiohead" model of making digital copies available as a download for whatever people choose to pay, and later releasing physical copies.

Dr. Mashup; or, Why Educators Should Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Remix

The best-known "mashups" are astute combinations of artistic product -- vocals from a hip-hop album laid over Beatles tracks, for example, or a Sergio Leone film set to a new score. But as Brian Lamb points out in Educause Review, the world of mashups now incorporates not just art, but also online applications and other forms of digital media. Mr. Lamb, the manager of emerging technology and digital content at the University of British Columbia, makes a strong case that professors ought to take mashups seriously. That doesn't mean every educator should painstakingly edit Disney films into a treatise on copyright but it does mean that professors should learn about "data mashups" and strive to make course content open and remixable. "We might ask if the content we presently lock down could be made public with a license specifying reasonable terms for reuse," Mr. Lamb writes. "When choosing a content management system, we might consider how well it supports RSS syndication."

Beyond Free

What can't be copied?
Eight Generatives Better Than Free: Immediacy, Personalization, Interpretation, Authenticity, Accessibility, Embodiment, Patronage, Findability.