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Would this be considered illegal?
Hello everyone,
I have an idea of sorts, that although in my mind is a 'good idea', could possibly be illegal. Sort of.
Currently, I have an old desktop sitting in the cellar with a few hundred gigs of music running 24/7.
This desktop only runs SqueezeCenter, which co-ordinates and streams music to the 4 SqueezeBoxes around the house.
The issue with this setup is that electricity costs for a P4 are quite high, not so good.
So here's the plan.
Grab one of those huge storage VPSs from either @mitgib (Hostigation) @subigo (ZenSix) or @francisco @aldryic (BuyVM) and have it running off there instead, all running remotely, and finally retire the poor old P4 beast.
Latency isn't a huge problem with these kind of things; as long as it can stream it back without falling over, then it'll do.
The 'having 300GB music floating around on a VPS' seems the most illegal part of it to me. Although I would intend to limit IPs, to ensure it's for personal use, I'm unsure if it's acceptable or not.
Aside from that, I presume it'll need to re-encode the media in some form for the stream.
Could anyone let me know if it's 'okay' or not? I've purposely included the providers I'd be interested in purchasing from since they offer storage plans, and since others may be considering backing up personal media, I guess it could be useful for others to know the 'do's' and 'don't's.
Thanks in advance!
Comments
When it comes to files it's usually an issue when you upload back, not when you have it 'for personal use'. At least that's how it used to be in canada until they made uploadiing legal as well.
Francisco
Nope to my knowledge it is completely legal aslong as you don't share it and aslong as you got the music legally in the first place.
As long as you paid for every single song and intend on using it for personal use ... you will be fine.
Check out google music and icloud.
google music only allows a certain amount of songs to store. icloud is..... apple.
get a raspberry pi or a cheap wm8505 tablet and install debian on it
... and it's US only. Which makes me wonder if it's for 'gradual roll-out' reasons, or a huge EU legal cesspit they need to work around.
The majority of my music is either 320 CBR MP3 or FLAC, all ripped from CDs/Vinyl making using either relatively impossible. However, I presume my legal defence would be similar, if not the same.
Not sure if I understood that correctly, sorry
So it's okay for 'personal use'? I presume when you said 'upload back', you meant 'if I decided to be an idiot and share it'?
Very, very tempting with a Pi. My issue is how the little bugger would handle media re-encoding and Java, since the server software is Java based.
That and the general unavailability of them, which is kinda sucky.
right.
Francisco
That and the general unavailability of them, which is kinda sucky.
Java? Damn, didn't know that. How about XBMC or something?
I think Hostigation only allows their backup plans to be used for backup only - "are not allowed to run any programs not intended to store or assist in the backup of clients data". I'm sure @miTgiB will be along to clarify.
buyvm doesn't have any such restriction from what I see. @Francisco - any new stock on storage in the near future?
No idea on zensix's policies...I gave up trying to find anything on their site some time ago.
Damn, just read that. Shame
Correct, that is why I sell backup plans, BuyVM sells storage plans. A lot of overlap can happen, but the wording is different for a reason.
Yeah, you're fine legally. The only thing with that situation is 1) you have to upload all that music to the VPS, I don't know your upload speeds and considering some of the VPSes you're considering are U.S. VPSes, that could take quite some time to do. Another small downside is that now that streaming isn't local, I don't know if you have download caps, or torrent, or download a lot, but that could get annoying.
What about trying to find a cheap old netbook and swapping in the HDDs from your p4 (or put them in an external enclosure if they case doesn't fit a SATA drive, as some little netbooks don't)? I'm sure you could find one used that someone doesn't want anymore and will sell it for really cheap.
edit: Another option you could do, grab one of these http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819116410 and http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813186214 and reuse the existing parts of your p4 build. The G440 has a TDP of 35, significantly lower than most p4' which are in the 85-115 range.
Same. It seems they change their 'public' plan weekly though.
This line of thinking has been presented so many times in the past, but it seems to always boil down to what is cheap now, not what is cheapest over time. But seriously @ElliotJ you need to look at what it costs in power to run those old heater P4's vs an Atom or something equally conservative on power, and take that difference and would it buy you the new gear needed and leave something in your pocket over the course of a year or three?
I agree, the idea of simply just leaving it to run somewhere else completely, effectively acting as a remote backup at the same time was the main appeal though.
I'm the type that tends to fiddle, and, well, mess stuff up.
I'm using 4 2TB external hard drives though, so I'd need to get 4 powered USB ports; something my laptop doesn't even have, pathetically enough.
I knew it was only a matter of time before @Francisco acquired the BigButtVPS brand.
This new keyboard is going to drive me insane at some point.
@raindog308
Dat butt. So much storage.
You can get a powered USB hub, that'd be fine.
@miTgiB http://www.anandtech.com/show/2668/2 I don't know what power costs are like where @ElliotJ lives, but that shows some good examples of the cost differences in a year. I don't know what P4 he has, but take for example the one in this review: http://www.anandtech.com/show/1543/13 idling at 118w. The G440 idles at 13.9W (http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/celeron-g540-g440_8.html).
They need a storage plan.
Call it...wait for it...Junk in the Trunk.
http://bigbuttvps.com/unmanaged-vps/
Screw Cloud... Butt Computing will be the next marketing buzz.
Public plans change weekly/monthly.
I stream from my dedicated server all the time. You'll be fine and if laws aren't retarded it should be legal :P
Why dont you just buy a cheap NAS box?
That and the general unavailability of them, which is kinda sucky.
Production is picking up fast I'll have mine in a month!! - In a few months they should be freely available if you can wait.
It doesn't do java well though - can you use an alternate software? (and does it have an ARM version?)
I am not totally sure of the laws in US, but doing a copy, even of your own cd/vinyl, even for your personal use only, is considered outlaw in a lot of countries.
And don't misunderstand me, I am not saying it should be like that.
This got me thinking about how much my old desktop is costing to run. I will just connect it to my energy meter and see what it says as that will be the actual cost rather than theoretical, but I bought this processor
AMD ATHLON XP2600 333FSB 256Cache Retail Boxed Inc Heatsink & Fan with 3year Warrantyon 30 September 2003, but when I do acat /proc/cpuinfo, it shows:That's showing 512K cache. Did they give me a more expensive processor for the same price or is it reporting incorrectly?
it is probably cheaper keeping existing configuration or at least replacing motherboard and CPU than getting $5-10/month plan... and you can have much more space than any of LEB providers can offer you for that money.
The 2600+ has 512KB L2 cache, I can't really find anything on a 2600 version (without the plus), so maybe they did give you an upgraded one.
You should look into Subsonic. I have an old laptop, it sits on my desk closed, running 24/7. Along with VNC/FTP/Nginx it also runs subsonic. It's an old Athlon XP-Mobile with 512 megs of ram. Most of the time it's idle, and it just sips a little trickle of power.
You should also think about re-encoding for streaming. I have a 120GB drive in the old laptop, and I store music on there in HE-AACv2 AAC at 25-40kbit/s. When I'm out, I use the Subsonic android client to listen to the music remotely from my laptop over the mobile network. It's seamless. If you like, I could PM you the details of my subsonic server so you could check it out.
2,478 artists
2,301 albums
51,548 songs
41.92 GB (~ 651 hours)