In light of the recent ruling in favour of RIAA against Verizon that (as I understand it) demands that Verizon help the RIAA track a KaZaa user on their (Verizon’s) network, I thought of a situation where I wondered what would happen:
Say a company sets up a huge (able to handle billions of connections) proxy server that is physically at a place overseas that doesn’t follow everything the United States says (for fun, we’ll say Vatican City). So there’s this giant proxy server set up at Vatican City that allows people to have free unlimited SOCKS5 connections to it. Everyone filters their KaZaa connections through it. The RIAA gets pissed off and comes along demanding the original IPs of the KaZaa users. This company pretty much gives the RIAA the finger and doesn’t comply. What happens now? What can the RIAA do? Can they go to someone in the US government, or must they go over to that country and lobby support for their requests?
This is a lot like an anonymous surfing proxy, but I just wanted to emphasize(sp?) that it’s not within the United States, and it’s not in a country that deals closely with the US.
Please ignore anything that would limit this (like the giant hole of “why would the company offer this service for free?” Offering free services online is sooooooo pre-dotcom crash 1998.)
I’m not sure this is the right forum, because I don’t think there is a factual answer to your question.
On a small scale, I doubt anything would happen. The RIAA has plenty of targets, and they will focus on the areas that provide the greatest return. In fact, in many areas (gambling, in particular), what you describe is already happening (companies basing their servers offshore to avoid US law).
If a few companies did this in a major way, particularly in one country, I think you would see the RIAA lobbying the US government to apply diplomatic pressure to crackdown on the copyright abuse. Despite the lack of legal jurisdiction, don’t underestimate the power and influence of the US government.
If many small companies, across many different countries, all offered similar services, the Genie is out of the bottle. The RIAA would then need to focus on how to modify their (members’) business model to combat the threat (as they won’t likely be successful regulating it).
IANAL, but I would think the RIAA would have to go through the legal system of the country where the server is.
However, the RIAA has a much simpler possibility. Since the proxy in question is used for illegal activities it would be rather simple for them to get a court order that forces US ISPs to block any connection to the proxy.
Also, sniffing SOCKS5 traffic is trivially easy. An ISP could track exactly what their users were doing through this proxy and still easily detect Kazaa (or similar) traffic. If the RIAA and the (increasingly consolidated) broadband internet providers got together and decided to ban this sort of thing, they could.
Uh, zwede, technically correct, but it is currently without precedent, as far as I am aware. Forcing (and enforcing) ISPs to filter specific addresses (or domains) due to illegal content is fraught with both technical and legal difficulties. Bypassing such restrictions is trivial. IMHO, this line of thinking is the major obstacle in getting folks like the RIAA or Congressman to understand the global nature of the Internet. Isolationism has some regulatory attractions, but it leads nowhere.
And pestie, again, technically correct, but not particularly relevent. I avoided talking about the technical issues, but certainly technologies such as IPsec could be used to provide just such a service, with both privacy and anonymity.
Fortunately (or unfortunately depending on who you are), counter techniques will constantly be invented for every security technology RIAA comes up with. Just think about Napster and their centralized server back in the day. Now we have Kazaa and a non-centralized server system. I can think off many other, current examples but I wouldn’t go into them on this board. It does seem like there are more ways now to get around the RIAA then there were back in the Napster days. I guess this is just elaborating on what AZCowboy wrote anyways.
I believe that is the business model used by Kazaa, Latch. I read some articles on CNET which stated Kazaa was incorporated in Africa but based in Amsterdam but operates in… (you get the idea). However, they did say the record companies had filled a lawsuit in California courts and were trying to track down the CEO of Kazaa. They didn’t get in to specifics but this would imply that the US legal system has some type of jurisdiction. I believe this would only apply if the CEO were to step foot on American soil though. I’ll have to find those articles again and look through them for more concise info. My memory is a little haze.