On Fri, 16 Aug 2002, Richard A Steenbergen wrote:

Ok here's a question, why are they sueing AT&T, CW, and UU? I see Listen4ever behind 4134 (China Telecom), who I only see buying transit through InterNAP. Wouldn't it be simpler for them to sue InterNAP? I guess it would sure be nice precedent, if they could make some big tier 1 providers do their bidding to filter whoever they want whenever they want.

The problem with BGP is you only see the "best" path more than one hop away. The network in question is reachable through transit providers other than InterNAP, such as Concert. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/17/business/media/17MUSI.html The New York Times says the companies named in the suit are AT&T Broadband (not AT&T's backbone?), Cable & Wireless, Sprint Corporation and UUNet technologies. "David Farber, a University of Pennsylvania computer scientist and an early architect of the Internet, filed an affidavit in the case, saying it would be relatively easy for the Internet companies to block the Internet address of the Web site without disrupting other traffic. "It's not a big hassle," Mr. Farber said. "There's no way to stop everybody, but a substantial number of people will not be able to get access."

A question : Doesn't Internap use BGP as part of its load balancing ? Don't they sell / market this service ? Isn't each Internap node connected to > 4 providers ? SO, wouldn't canceling China Telecom BGP through AT&T CW and UUnet do nothing except cause some BGP advertisement changes at Internap ? Marshall Sean Donelan wrote:

On Fri, 16 Aug 2002, Richard A Steenbergen wrote:

...

Ok here's a question, why are they sueing AT&T, CW, and UU? I see Listen4ever behind 4134 (China Telecom), who I only see buying transit through InterNAP. Wouldn't it be simpler for them to sue InterNAP? I guess it would sure be nice precedent, if they could make some big tier 1 providers do their bidding to filter whoever they want whenever they want.

The problem with BGP is you only see the "best" path more than one hop away. The network in question is reachable through transit providers other than InterNAP, such as Concert.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/17/business/media/17MUSI.html

The New York Times says the companies named in the suit are AT&T Broadband (not AT&T's backbone?), Cable & Wireless, Sprint Corporation and UUNet technologies.

"David Farber, a University of Pennsylvania computer scientist and an early architect of the Internet, filed an affidavit in the case, saying it would be relatively easy for the Internet companies to block the Internet address of the Web site without disrupting other traffic.

"It's not a big hassle," Mr. Farber said. "There's no way to stop everybody, but a substantial number of people will not be able to get access."

-- Regards Marshall Eubanks This e-mail may contain confidential and proprietary information of Multicast Technologies, Inc, subject to Non-Disclosure Agreements T.M. Eubanks Multicast Technologies, Inc 10301 Democracy Lane, Suite 410 Fairfax, Virginia 22030 Phone : 703-293-9624 Fax : 703-293-9609 e-mail : tme@multicasttech.com http://www.multicasttech.com Test your network for multicast : http://www.multicasttech.com/mt/ Status of Multicast on the Web : http://www.multicasttech.com/status/index.html

Or maybe, the four providers named are the same 4 being used by Internap at that node, so effectively terminating the announcement from all 4 directions to Internap solves the problem.

There is a "historical" precedent that supports this theory. For those who can set their Way-Back Machines far enough to remember, Opus once had a brief career as a paparazzi. While photographing Madonna, he was punched in the node by Sean Penn. The camera manufacturer was sued, though, on the basis that they had the money. The application of logic to this situation is laudable; as many of you know, I'm a big fan of logic myself. It would seem, though, that the brand of logic being applied at the RIAA is not technology logic (our favorite, clearly), but a logic designed to encompass as many people in their definition of infringement as they can. The more entities they can encompass, the more "control" they can exert. Shutting down a specific website probably has much less appeal than establishing a precedent to force backbones to filter. What's truly sad in this case is that if the RIAA (and MPAA) would spend a little bit of time listening to what people want and thinking about how to implement it, instead of furiously entrenching themselves in the 1970s, *real* content delivery as the next "killer app" might lift our little corner of the tech industry out of the muck. If they spend all their energy playing whack-a-mole, though, they'll just continue to contribute to the stagnation (and hopefully progress will pave them over sooner rather than later). kc pointed out some very thoughtful commentary by Janis Ian on this topic, URLs are: http://www.janisian.com/article-internet_debacle.html http://www.janisian.com/article-fallout.html The notion of a "risk-free" trial of the content delivery business concept using the out-of-print catalog is very appealing. Stephen

On Mon, 19 Aug 2002, Tim Thorne wrote:

I'm not even sure if shutting listen4ever down is on the RIAA agenda. Wouldn't the easiest course of action be to file suit against Verisign and have their DNS nuked?

that would be the logical approach. or they could get an order against the usg and block it at A.root-servers. no need to bring in a private company when the usg root can block all queries to it. the best approach may be to hit the usg dept of commerce with the order - they control the root. it maybe difficult for verisign as the registrar for listen4ever.com is MELBOURNE IT, so the US government maybe the fast track method to square this. regards joe baptista

In the meantime, you will have to continue to pay your staff, spend your own time and upgrade your routers to do the RIAA's dirty work for them. Happy networking.

Doesn't anyone have any balls? The lawyers are making lots of money sending out nastygrams, so billing for work related to finding customers who infringe on copyrights is more than fair. http://www.istop.com/BSALetter.txt -Ralph

On Sun, 18 Aug 2002 11:36:32 +0300 Petri Helenius <pete@he.iki.fi> wrote:

Tim Thorne wrote:

...

They'd probably end up filing suit for that too. I don't believe that will affect them much. The whole music industry seems to be running scared of new media. They obviously like the revenue from album sales and figure that if people buy only a couple of mp3s tracks they will earn less revenue. Try and buy an mp3 of something from Sony:

http://usa.sonymusic.com/music/catalog.html

File sharing will continue until the recording industry gives people what they want. It is not about piracy, its about convenience.

How do you classify Pressplay in this view?

Pete

Pretty lame. They have only 3 of the 5 "majors", and various restrictions on what you can do, how you can copy downloaded files, etc. See http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/aug2002/tc20020812_4809.htm for a description of how things stand. Note that pressplay and the other paid services have together maybe 100,000 customers - about 2 to 3 orders of magntitude below the free services. Please remember that the music business is one where bullying and hard ball tactics are routine. They _will_ try to bully ISP's, and, BTW, they _will_ monitor this list and bring e-mails posted to this list up in court if it suits them. In my opinion, it is not until the rear-guard action to stop the use of new technology has failed, and has seen to have failed, that things will improve. This has not happened yet, and things are likely to get uglier and nastier until it does. Regards Marshall Eubanks

Apologies for posting this to NANOG, but I am in a mood, and it's difficult to reach anyone at Prodigy. For the past several weeks, every other day, I've received 10 messages sent through Prodigy's mail servers, all of which appear to be a Win32/Yaha message. (http://www.ravantivirus.com/virus/showvirus.php?v=101) Today I got 10 more messages, dated 18 August 2002, which is the same date appearing on dozens of other messages over the past few weeks. I'm posting this to NANOG in the hopes that someone on the list who works for Prodigy and/or L3 (the dialup provider) can ruffle some feathers on this for corrective action. The header of the message appears below - note that in other cases, I've received messages from "this person" from pimoutX-ext.prodigy.net, where X is the number (1-5) of their mail server. And, yes, as of today, I've added this latest crap to my filters. :) Thanks in advance, and again, sorry for the Sunday afternoon complaint. Cheers rick Return-Path: <jfay291@prodigy.net> Received: (from daemon@localhost) by web1.nidhog.com (8.12.5/8.11.3) id g7IJdt5l046337 for rforno@infowarrior.org.CLEAN; Sun, 18 Aug 2002 15:39:55 -0400 (EDT) (envelope-from jfay291@prodigy.net) Received: from pimout5-ext.prodigy.net (pimout5-ext.prodigy.net [207.115.63.98]) by web1.nidhog.com (8.12.5/8.11.3) with ESMTP id g7IJdsuQ046332 for <rforno@infowarrior.org>; Sun, 18 Aug 2002 15:39:54 -0400 (EDT) (envelope-from jfay291@prodigy.net) Received: from smtp.prodigy.net (dialup-65.58.64.224.Dial1.Indianapolis1.Level3.net [65.58.64.224]) by pimout5-ext.prodigy.net (8.11.0/8.11.0) with SMTP id g7IJdcf286002 for <rforno@infowarrior.org>; Sun, 18 Aug 2002 15:39:38 -0400 Message-Id: <200208181939.g7IJdcf286002@pimout5-ext.prodigy.net> From: JANE FAY<jfay291@prodigy.net> To: rforno@infowarrior.org Subject: Fw: Enjoy Romantic life ! Date: Sun,18 Aug 2002 14:37:29 PM X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.50.4133.2400 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary=voeuogm

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- On Mon, 19 Aug 2002, Jeff Ogden wrote:

The thing that I find most disturbing with this latest approach to enforcement by the RIAA is that they have targeted backbone providers who probably don't have any business or other relationship with the parties that are alleged to be infringing the RIAA's rights. Just as bad is the fact that if one of the backbone providers chooses or is required to filter or block a site, then that site will become unavailable to the backbone provider's downstreams and the downstreams won't have had any say in the matter. And, if the same filtering and blocking isn't done by all networks, the sites will be available to some people and not to others. Sure seems like a real mess.

Indeed, to be effective all ISPs with international connectivity from the US could bring this route in and they must all block the routes else it will be possible to reroute either automatically by BGP reconvergence or by intentionally taking bandwidth from a non-compliant ISP. And as you say theres a lot more ISPs that those listed with a fair number of them being non-US companies so how to enforce?? Steve

I am also concerned that the backbone providers might not put up a rigorous fight against the RIAA since they would mostly be defending the rights of people and organizations that they don't do business with directly. I can imagine that Worldcom may feel that it has better things to do with its money and its lawyers' time these days. But that might lead to a less that desirable outcome for everyone. Sorry, I don't mean to pick on Worldcom here, the same could be said for any of the backbone providers that have been targeted. And, perhaps, since several backbone providers have all been targeted, they will work together to put up a rigorous fight on behalf of us all. I sure hope so.

-Jeff Ogden Merit

At 10:58 PM -0400 8/16/02, Richard A Steenbergen wrote:

...

On Fri, Aug 16, 2002 at 10:03:37PM -0400, John Ferriby wrote:

...

A number of major music labels have joined forces and are seeking relief from backbone providers, see:

Ok here's a question, why are they sueing AT&T, CW, and UU? I see Listen4ever behind 4134 (China Telecom), who I only see buying transit through InterNAP. Wouldn't it be simpler for them to sue InterNAP? I guess it would sure be nice precedent, if they could make some big tier 1 providers do their bidding to filter whoever they want whenever they want.

Might I suggest filtering the websites of the offending "major labels" as an appropriate retort?

-- Richard A Steenbergen <ras@e-gerbil.net> http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras PGP Key ID: 0x138EA177 (67 29 D7 BC E8 18 3E DA B2 46 B3 D8 14 36 FE B6)

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On 08:43 AM 8/19/02, Jeff Ogden wrote:

I am also concerned that the backbone providers might not put up a rigorous fight against the RIAA since they would mostly be defending the rights of people and organizations that they don't do business with directly. I can imagine that Worldcom may feel that it has better things to do with its money and its lawyers' time these days. But that might lead to a less that desirable outcome for everyone. Sorry, I don't mean to pick on Worldcom here, the same could be said for any of the backbone providers that have been targeted. And, perhaps, since several backbone providers have all been targeted, they will work together to put up a rigorous fight on behalf of us all. I sure hope so.

If one voluntarily caves in, they will almost certainly see their sales plummet. Would you buy bandwidth from a provider who has caved in to a demand that they not carry traffic to/from certain named offshore networks? At what point would they then draw the line on where they will transit your packets? If they were willing to cut off another network because of a specific type of traffic frequently sent to/from that network, we would have a small fraction of the spam problem we have today because the backbones would just sever access to overseas networks that are notorious for spew spam. I'm sure that having a 'spam free' network would be much more of a selling point than having a network that can't reach a network full of MP3s. jc

On Sat, Aug 17, 2002 at 03:31:03PM -0400, Jeff Ogden wrote:

...

IANAL, but last I looked -- admittedly a long, long time ago -- ISPs were not afforded protection as common carriers (18 USC?), no matter how much they tried to act like them. Has this changed?

I agree that ISPs aren't common carriers in the legal sense, but an ISP's liability under U.S. copyright law is limited for "transitory communications". The following is taken from a December 1998 publication "THE DIGITAL MILLENNIUM COPYRIGHT ACT OF 1998--U.S. Copyright Office Summary" (page 10, http://www.loc.gov/copyright/legislation/dmca.pdf ):

IANAL,

Limitation for Transitory Communications

In general terms, section 512(a) limits the liability of service providers in circumstances where the provider merely acts as a data conduit, transmitting digital information from one point on a network to another at someone else's request. This limitation covers acts of transmission, routing, or providing connections for the information, as well as the intermediate and transient copies that are made automatically in the operation of a network.

In order to qualify for this limitation, the service provider's activities must meet the following conditions: --The transmission must be initiated by a person other than the provider. --The transmission, routing, provision of connections, or copying must be carried out by an automatic technical process without selection of material by the service provider. --The service provider must not determine the recipients of the material.

One could argue (in theory) that a routing-table lookup may satisfy this.

--Any intermediate copies must not ordinarily be accessible to anyone other than anticipated recipients, and must not be retained for longer than reasonably necessary. --The material must be transmitted with no modification to its content.

Same theory here also, where one decrements ttl, since we are talking about ip packets here. but the packets (as a whole) aren't copyright nor are the routers looking at the data part in most cases except possibly for load-sharing purposes.. Either way, this is an interesting test case and I do hope it receives immediate dismissal. This would be like asking the phone company to turn off phone service for people that arrange drug deals or similar. Not something that I see happening. - jared -- Jared Mauch | pgp key available via finger from jared@puck.nether.net clue++; | http://puck.nether.net/~jared/ My statements are only mine.

On Sat, Aug 17, 2002 at 07:33:45PM -0700, Majdi S. Abbas wrote:

On Sat, Aug 17, 2002 at 05:04:05PM -0400, Jared Mauch wrote:

...

...

--The service provider must not determine the recipients of the material.

One could argue (in theory) that a routing-table lookup may satisfy this.

I'm not so sure. Generally speaking, a destination network is a given ISP, not a given individual. And it's highly impractical for an ISP to know the /individual/ a packet is destined for from the address.

I read "determine the recipients" as the process of putting the dst ip on the packet when it is originated, not figuring out where the traffic is going for the purposes of delivery. Obviously to carry something (as in to be a carrier) you have to know where it is going, but to not be the originator you need to have no role in determining where the message is destined. -- Richard A Steenbergen <ras@e-gerbil.net> http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras PGP Key ID: 0x138EA177 (67 29 D7 BC E8 18 3E DA B2 46 B3 D8 14 36 FE B6)

Please, the intent of that sentence is to say that the ISP cannot set the destination IP address for the content. The intervening backbones don't do that, they merely copy it to the next hop as the MAC addresses are modified to send it along it's way. The RECIPIENT is DETERMINED (set) by the originator of the communication. There are two hosts which could be argued to participate in this process, and they are at the ends of the conversation. The routers in between do not meet the test. If this is the basis of your argument, multicast backbones would be a legal liability. How about a 1-800 conference circuit? The concept is

On Mon, 2002-08-19 at 11:46, Owen DeLong wrote: *snip* the same, as is the level of content participation. The difference is the legal protection offered to the voice common-carrier is greater than what is offered to IP carriers. -- Jeff S Wheeler jsw@five-elements.com Software Development Five Elements, Inc http://www.five-elements.com/~jsw/