The RIAA says that copying of songs is going to be their downfall and blame it on Napster, Kazaa, Morpheus and all the other P2P systems, but I have never heard them complain about newsgroups. Same with the movie industry, hate P2P but are silent on newgroups.
For those who don’t use newsgroups, you can download pretty much anything you want, in most cases at a much faster rate around 1.2Mbps, the quality of the songs are always excellent, the movies rips are generally well done and there are never false files (ie only 15 seconds of a song but same file length, wrong song, etc). Any computer discs you want are there as well. Only downfall is you can only download whats posted, but if you post a request its usually filled within a couple of hours. Stuff is posted on newsgroups first generally and then to the P2P systems. It seems to me that if you wanted to shut down copying you’d go after newgroups, but the big guns haven’t yet.
Um, maybe they just haven’t gotten around to it yet? Or maybe because they don’t have the time, money, and other resources to go after all those newsgroups?
Far fewer songs are pirated in newsgroups, and for fewer people. Others (like Harlan Ellison) have successfully gone after those distributing copyrighted work in newsgroups, so there’s no reason the RIAA couldn’t do it; it’s just a smaller target.
These people would LOVE to go after the newsgroups, but really can’t. The problem is that Usenet is completely decentralized - there is no one “master” usenet server - each server can have some, all, or none of the groups. There is no one person or entity that the MPAA, RIAA and the ilk to sue or demand that it stop (at least on the alt.* groups - don’t know about comp., rec., etc). It is impossible to shut usenet down - 'bout the only thing that can be done is to bully ISPs into not carrying certain groups on their servers - which is done, but all you need is a subscription to one of the national (or overseas) newsgroup services which don’t give a flying fig what the media giants say, and as long as you have a 'net connection, you can point your newsreader to the appropriate server and get all you want.
Posts can be deleted, but by the time the deletion command propagates down through all the different servers, it’s a case of shutting the barn door after the horse gets loose.
If a person posts ussing their real ISP account info, they can be traced. Once they are traced their ISP is contacted. But as you know, most people use a fake account or anon proxy.
i believe they will. they are more interested in going after the individual person’s running the servers. after all, you need to go to a person’s computer to download it.
how are they going after individuals? by placing the burden on the isp, so that if they tell the isp that this person is serving illegal software, the isp will need to ban that person from the network and disclose to the riaa who that person is.
they are also going to upload viruses to the swapping p2p services, but i dunno if they had started it.