Kurt wrote: | On 30-Jan-2003 John Chambers wrote: | > | > This sort of site is a real threat to the recording industry, and is | > really what the "music piracy" fuss is all about. Their main goal is | > to take control of the Internet and put distribution back into the | > hands of the oligopoly. The Internet can't be killed, but there is | > still a chance that it can be made illegal for you and me to put our | > own stuff online. If they can do this, they can then force us to sign | > over our rights to our own stuff to get it online, and they'll be | > back in the saddle. | | I followed you this far. But are there any laws or technical proposals being | made right now that would make it impossible to put your own stuff online? Or | are you worried that that's their next target? The only things I've heard about | so far, while draconian, do seem to be aimed at piracy. But maybe I'm missing | something.
Well, here in the USA, a lot of ISPs have licenses that include a "no servers" rule. They generally aren't well enforced, but they can kick you off if you have any program listening on any port. Most American ISPs now block port 80, the standard web port, so you can't run a web server on that port. You can run one on another port, of course, and change the port number when they block you again. When they terminate your service for this violation, you have little recourse, unless you want to spend a few million in a court battle with a giant corporation. One of the reasons they do this is that they want to sell server "space" on their machines. Part of the motive is that if your files are on their machines, they can easily see them and do things without you knowing. An extreme case of this was last year, when customers discovered that a lot of MSN advertising contained material (mostly images) from customers' web sites and email. Their license states explicitly that any files stored on their machines became the property of msn.com and Microsoft corporation. A lot of small ISPs have been bought up by msn.com in the past couple of years. In one recent case (in Arizona) the customers found that email on the ISP's server was now only readable from a Microsoft mail reader. Unix users with a persistent connection (cable or DSL) can run their own SMTP server, of course, but those customers found that port 25 was now blocked, killing their home email and forcing them to use msn's. There have also been sporadic reports of ISPs "editing" their customers' web sites and email. This isn't just for piracy or porn; it has also been used to wipe out text that was critical of the ISP. In most of the country, the local ISP is a monopoly. If you don't like them, well, you don't have to have internet service, now do you? In most of the rest of the country, the ISPs are forced to use either the phone lines or the cable modem, and there is at most one of each of those. The phone and cable companies (often the same company) are now involved in a major campaign to give them more control over their own lines. That is, they want to eliminate those competitors who are able to sell service over "their" lines, and make internet service into a monopoly that they control. It's no secret that the Bush administration is on their side, and is pushing to eliminate the "regulations" that force them to lease out their lines to ISPs. Draw your own conclusions. (And note that if you put your own recordings online on an ISP's machine, you may be handing over the copyright to the ISP.) To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
