Blocking The RIAA And MPAA From Sites?
from the good-or-bad? dept
It seems there’s been quite a flurry of activity the last few days, with sites all over the place setting up their servers to block out any visitors from IP addresses associated with the RIAA or the MPAA. This was all started via a decision by Techfocus to do so, after the RIAA took a comment out of context from an interview they did with the EFF’s Fred Von Lohmann. Now, the idea of blocking those IPs is snowballing, and lots of sites have been following suit. Since I’m no fan of either organization (what, you noticed?), you might think I’d want to do the same thing. However, it actually goes against what Techdirt stands for. While the move does have the benefit of raising issues by getting attention, I’m still hoping that people from the RIAA and the MPAA read what is written here and use it to get a clue. I know that there are some people associated with both organizations that do read Techdirt on a regular basis, and I’m still hopeful they’ll realize I’m trying to help them to convince their member companies to offer consumers what they want – thereby increasing the overall market, and opening up new opportunities.
Comments on “Blocking The RIAA And MPAA From Sites?”
Not worried about the RIAA and/or MPAA
I’m worried about folks like OverPeer and BayTSP who are the folks who actually do the baiting, confirmation and report the the enforcment organization (Law Firm) supporting the RIAA’s and MPAA’s efforts.
Re: Not worried about the RIAA and/or MPAA
Yeah, but they’re not looking for stuff on your website. What good does blocking them from your website do?
Re: Re: Not worried about the RIAA and/or MPAA
remember, they’re going after the P2P servers of content, not the downloaders.
Shut down the servers of content and the downloaders go away (or so the theory goes).
…and yes, they’re the ones who supply the IP address and time/date stamp to the lawyers who then subpena the ISP who will supply your real identity so that papers can be served which cause you to end up in court with a very expensive lawyer by your side.
Spoof the source IP and the entire house of cards comes crashing down around the RIAA/MPAA’s enforcers.
Re: Re: Re: Reading it on Techdirt
Regarding the RIAA – Yeah, I’m sure your fair and balanced coverage, with your reasoned arguments and deep understanding of their pain will change their minds about file sharing!
Oh, gee, you mean being negative and sarcastic wasn’t a good way to get the point across to you? Then I don’t suppose you’ll change their minds either. Negative criticism just sets people off, sets them more against you than anything.
Doesn’t matter that they are doing the wrong thing. You might as well block the site. I think it’d be quite funny if everyone adopted this, and the RIAA people couldn’t surf anywhere…
Re: Re: Re:2 Duh!!!
Ever heard of a proxy? I don’t think the tactic of blocking ips will be effective nor necessary.
There's a very simple and elegant solution for P2P
When serving up packets to download requests simply spoof the src IP to be the same and the dst IP. ISPs that don’t allow spoofing will see their P2P using customer base slowly shift to ISPs that do allow spoofing. The enforcment organizations employed by the RIAA/MPAA will get confused by the massive amount of downloading that seems to be originating from their very own servers.
All the client needs to be able to do is reliably assemble target binaries from incomming UDP packets (and re-request from multiple destination via broadcast ignoring anything that doesn’t spoof).
Simple.
No Subject Given
Well I’ve added the IPs to my .htaccess file (amongst other IPs I deny). Although anonymizer.com can get around this….
I will later be doing the more effective measure of adding these to my firewall’s IPTABLES rules.