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RIAA wants the Internet shut down

Interesting argument of the day


By Nick Farrell: Rabu 29 Nopember 2006, 08:38

ONE OF THE lawyers involved in defending cases bought against people by the RIAA claims that if the music industry wins a crucial case, the Internet will have to be switched off.

Speaking on the DefectiveByDesign anti-DRM campaign site, Ray Beckerman said the case of Electro vs. Barker has become very important for the web's future.

Barker was being defended by Beckerman who made a motion to dismiss the case because the RIAA had forgot to provide any acts or dates or times of copyright infringement as the law normally requires.

The RIAA argued that by merely making files available on the Internet Barker was making a copyright infringement.

Beckerman said that it was a shocking argument because if it were accepted by the court it would probably shut down the entire Internet. If you send any file on the Net the RIAA will be allowed to suspect that you are in breach of copyright.

What was more disturbing is that the RIAA called up its mates in Washington to back it up. Apparently the United States Government has put in motions supporting the RIAA.

So typical of RIAA. First the internet, and then what's next? Our ears?

Won't happen, our economy is so deeply tied to the internet now that pulling the plug just to satify the RIAA's power trip would like taking a shotgun blast to the head to get rid of a wart.

Hell I'm not even sure anyone can shut down the internet anymore. So many servers and what not hooked up togather.

Hahahaha, so very stupid. It will never happen. There's no off switch to the internet.

It's just another lawyer on a power trip. You can't shut down a global telecommunications network.

Hotfoot wrote:You can't shut down a global telecommunications network.

You could, but it would be nearly impossible. To forcibly shut down and disable every single webserver in existence would involve travelling to every single country on the globe and going around every single college campus, every single business, every single home with a computer hobbyist, and forcibly shutting it down there.

Is it possible? Certainly.

Is it possible in practical terms? Not a bloody chance.

frigidmagi wrote:Hell I'm not even sure anyone can shut down the internet anymore. So many servers and what not hooked up togather.

And that's not to go into the political ramifications. To shut down the internet would imply that you would have to literally get every other country to do the same. A significant part of it isn't called the World Wide Web for no reason, y'know.

The RIAA argued that by merely making files available on the Internet Barker was making a copyright infringement.

Okay, the article doesn't make this explicitely clear but it looks to me like they're referring to ANY files. Um- how can making available files that aren't copyrighted (like, I dunno, my own fanfics) be copyright infringement?
Am I missing something major or are the RIAA really this dense? I mean I KNOW they are dense but this is overboard even for them.

Narsil wrote: To forcibly shut down and disable every single webserver in existence would involve travelling to every single country on the globe and going around every single college campus, every single business, every single home with a computer hobbyist, and forcibly shutting it down there.

Not really.

There are 13 root DNS servers which can be shut down, though by 'server' it no longer means physical computer; many of them are now decentralised clusters, but never the less, they are all controlled by the same organizations who could shut them down.

Then it would be up to the DNS caches in other minor servers, such as those owned by the ISPs. They could be forced down too. The net could then fall back to addressing by the IP numbers.


An even more effective method than that could be cutting off the backbone. There are relatively few high bandwidth lines that connect the parts of the Internet together, and these are controlled by big Internet routers (I mean real routers, not like the ones you buy for $50, these things are big specialized machines). Though the Internet could fall back to phone lines, or even radio connections.

But taking down the routers spells game over for the Internet. Problem: they are located all over the place, and the system is designed so if one goes down, it automatically tries to find one that is still up and reroute traffic through it. It would take a great many of them going down to take down the Internet at large, however, taking out the ones in the US only might be possible to such an extent that general usage (military usage would probably still work; they have some of their own separate systems in place) becomes impossible (for Americans; to hit the rest of the world, we would have to actually hit the rest of the world, and they wouldn't appreciate that).



Not that it would actually happen though. This would take a highly organized effort and no one would really support it.


Positive change to the Internet is harder to implement than taking it down. Such as SMTP is a shitty protocol that has been overhauled to prevent spam, but getting it implemented at large? Too much established stuff would have to be changed for it to happen. But when taking it down you wouldn't care about the established infrastructure failing.



So technically, I would say it can be done, at least taking it out of the average user's hands. Politically? A better way to go about it would be to lobby for huge taxes on communication, and even that wouldn't work. Never going to happen.

Narsil wrote:You could, but it would be nearly impossible. To forcibly shut down and disable every single webserver in existence would involve travelling to every single country on the globe and going around every single college campus, every single business, every single home with a computer hobbyist, and forcibly shutting it down there.

Is it possible? Certainly.

Is it possible in practical terms? Not a bloody chance.

You know, when someone says you're never going to spontaneously teleport to Pluto, most of the time, it's OKAY to say "yes, that's right" and not go in to an overblown departure into quantum physics unless someone asks you to.

There's no way some power-crazed lawyer is going to shut down the entire internet. It's as simple as that.

Is this a joke, or is the lawyer just that stupid? Not that I would rule out massive stupidity. He might have taken a computer tech class at the same place as Sen. Ted "It's a series of tubes" Stevens.

Hey now, the series of tubes thing is somewhat accurate. It is a simplification of what is going on, but it isn't wrong.

Some (but not all) of the other things he said there were wrong, betraying he doesn't really understand what is going on on a remotely technical level, but the series of tubes metaphor really isn't that bad itself.