News Groups go after music swapping in Canada, Europe

From globeandmail.com:


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LONDON — Recording industry associations in Europe and Canada are going after 247 people for illegally swapping music on-line, taking up a tactic used by music companies in the United States.

The London-based International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) said Tuesday that action had been taken in Germany, Denmark, Italy and Canada. The IFPI, which represents the recording industry worldwide, said lawsuits would be launched in more countries in coming months as part of its campaign against music piracy.

"This is our first co-ordinated effort to take this campaign over the range of countries where file stealing is a problem," said Allen Dixon, IFPI's general counsel and executive director.

The group claims music piracy is a major cause of the global decline in music sales over the last five years. It said worldwide sales of recorded music fell 7 per cent in 2002, and added that it expected figures for 2003 to show sales dipping by at least the same amount.

Rest of article is here...


Well, all I have to say is welcome to the madness Canada and Europe!

 

/me hides all downloaded music on my pc

 

i have my music folders encrypted..windows decrpts during playback, causes for the file to play roughly a second longer as it decodes but all in all is good...i believe as long as you dont share the files, your safe...thats what ive heard anyways :|

 

Well, I'm not ashamed to say that I am all for file sharing music. We can listen to it for free on the radio, why not get it free on our computers? I understand that radio has advertising, but I mean... come on. It just doesn't make sense to me. So put a line in the title of the song that says buy Coke or something, theres your advertising and my free music. LOL, yeah I know my idea is lame, but I'm stickin' to it. LOL

 

Oh joy. Extortion on a global scale. Let me get my toilet plunger, I know where this one's going to stick.

Bee, yeah, they don't care about downloading, in fact no law forbids you from downloading music or whatever, it's just the sharing of it. To that extent, remove the source, and the traffic stops.

Personally I'm all for what the internet was designed for: The free flow and sharing of information, data, and ideas between globally connected communities and people. No one said anything about what kind of data and information would be shared, can't be helped if they never read the fine print. Funny how when the fine print isn't read, whether by corporaitons or governments or individual people, it' salways the individual peopel who are attacked.

 

agreed
but that would mean kiddy porn is legal, and i think its bad, along with other things like death and stuff
BUT
music? htf cares noone bought cds before, and because artists are making crappier songs with the release of every cd, noone wants to pay $20 for a cd full of crap -1single that they want to listen to, nor put up with the hassle of wasted space and constant switching between cds
its just something for them to blame drop in sales prices on anyways
and then you have the fact that there are burners out there, and a few people that do buy the cd, well, everyones just going to burn that off of that person anyways, because lets face it, no copyrighting technology will ever be 'unbreakable' by the computer using society...everyone will contribute their 2 cents and come up with a crack, its just a matter of minutes.

 

god almighty where did I put my firewall software.

 

It seems Canada is willing to compromise though. Article from a thread in Serious Discussion from Astrum, here.

So you don't have to worry about kiddy porn then Bee, it'll still be illegal.

 

Unfortunatly in the UK we do actually pay for the radio by paying out TV licence some of the proceeds goto the BBC radio stations for instance BBC radio 1, why do ya think ya get no adverts or hardly any on bbc radio than you do on most others for instance if you listen to TFM in stockton it has way too many adverts bah!

unfortuantly you get what you pay for or not pay for in some instances that probably why a lot of mp3's downloaded on the net could contain a potential virus.

But back to this topic the music industries are getting lamer and lamer they say there losing money by 7% and you know why?? because there making there people goto 250 peoples homes to check to see if there illigally downloading there music, why can't they do something good with there money and pick up bands that people want to listen to not crappy pop idol singers.

 

Wasnt downloading music via p2p just legalized in Canada a few days ago?

 

i tihnk these companies will pretty soon work out that the decline in sales is mostly due to them hiking the prices for lower quality goods

one day they will understand!

 

An mp3 file can't contain a virus. Only programs and files which contain scripts (e.g. MS Word files) can contain viruses.

 

yes they can as they can be programed to open a webpage at a certain poin tin the song that webpage can contain a potentioal virus.

 

The mp3 standard does not support this 'feature' and I have never encountered it in several years of using mp3 software. This sort of thing can happen in .wmv files, and I agree you shouldn't trust them as far as you can throw them (bloody Micro$oft trying to be too smart and opening up security holes again!), but mp3 is safe.

 

warrmr is correct, I have seen MP3 files that can trigger websites. No I don't know how, I don't deal with MP3 very much, I hate the format, it's so irritating.

 

Okay, I stand corrected. Sorry warrmr! Still, I've never seen an mp3 do that. Maybe it depends if you're running WMP or a decent player (i.e. winamp)??

 

I've personally sen it in MPlayer2 (old school WMPlayer, I think v6) and WinAMP. Really it doesn't matter what file you have, unless it's a plain ASCII TXT file, it can be manipulated to do various things. Even then you can bundle malicious code into files so that when one executes, it executes the hidden file. It's actually two files, but one is hidden within another. That seems to be the popular method, that or having the virus masquerade as a different file type, a la those lovely eMail virii everyone gets a dozen of everyday lately.

 

This may well be true, but it's pure bad programming that causes it. A block of data should NOT be able to execute anything, especially a virus. I don't see any reason why a media player should do anything with a file other than look at it and reconstruct the sound from it. Anything else in an mp3 file should be ignored IMHO (well, except id3 tags!)

It's more of a grey area where you have "smart" data - things like documents with ActiveX controls in them, scripts in Word files etc. Sometimes, for a data file to do what it should you need some code built in, but the security features of the program should be able to lock down what such scripts can do very tightly.

As I see it, the problem is that programmers seem to be looking at things the wrong way round. Rather than saying "here are the things we will permit a script to do", they say "a script can do anything except a, b and c" then they add d, e, f and g to the rules, and a virus writer comes along and figures out how to use h to do something malicious. It's perverse logic to me.

 

You couldn't have hit the nail any harder on teh head.

The problem with data and software, is that everyone wants their MP3 player to make them coffee, play a tune, and finish their paper work. To this extent most programmers run off to do just that, creating smart data within the most basic of files, where it isn't needed usually. The ID3 tags are a perfect example, they are simple, and convenient, a really nice feature. However many other file types go by fine without them, and if ID3 tags can be added in, then a simple script inside can be placed.

*Why I use WAVs*
"screw ID3 tags, learn yer damn songs."

 

Agreed

This I disagree with. I love my ID3 tags and feel they are an integral feature of media players and the MP3 system as a whole, rather than bells and whistles, as you imply. Regardless, personal opinion aside, it should be perfectly possible for a file to incorporate short text data without opening up the possibility for malicious code to be inserted. The MP3 player should not try to be too smart with the tags, it should just read them and output the text into its playlist or whatever. That is all it should have to be able to do, since that is the whole point of the ID3 tagging system.