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MPAA Goes After More Bittorrent Site Operators
Posted by
michael
on Thu Dec 23, 2004 08:55 AM
from the money-for-nothing dept.
from the money-for-nothing dept.
Just another Coward writes "DSL Reports grabbed a copy of the lawsuit threat letters sent by the MPAA to the bittorrent website owners. This latest document was sent to a Torrent site called 'demonoid.com', which is now offline."
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Color me surprised... (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember the napster trial? Saying "I just post links" doesn't cut much cheese against deep-pocket *AA's lawyers.
Re:Color me surprised... (Score:3, Informative)
Try searching for "csi filetype:torrent" sometime. They do directly link to torrent files, from CSI episodes to TeleSyncs of new movies.
However, search engines are protected from things like __AA by US law, I believe.
Re:Color me surprised... (Score:4, Informative)
Okay, so they have to comply with take-down requests from copyright owners if received, but may otherwise allow transmission so long as they don't filter, modify, or keep longer than needed any of the content being exchanged by users across their equipment. Oh, and they have to not know what's going on, and not get money directly from illegal activity. And the service provider has to make clear and accessible a way to send take-down notices. And have a stated policy of banning users if they are repeat infringers (note that the law specifically states repetition is involved.) The same applies to linking, indexing, referecing, pointing, or using informatin-location-tools, and "service providers" is defined very broadly. I'd say it applies to bittorrent trackers. And based on subsection (j), the most courts get to do is somehow order the service providers to make stuff stop, including just terminating specific users' accounts if that's sufficient, or ordering the service provider to block of IP's, etc. There's also mention of "standard technical measures" and mention of cost burden to service providers, such that if the service provider cannot reasonably find out who's infringing or whether or not the content is being illegally copies, the law seems to just let them off the hook. But hey, I'm not a lawyer either. (Then again, the law really shouldn't be the realm of lawyers. We should just as soon sue priests for misleading us on theology when God sends us to hell. People are just whiny babies about advice.)
Parent
They should at least post funny responses... (Score:5, Funny)
They should at least post funny responses, like like pirate Bay
http://www.piratebay.org/frame.html [piratebay.org]
Here was a sample response PirateBay sent to Dreamworks
lol. oh and first post?Re:They should at least post funny responses... (Score:5, Funny)
Classic.
Parent
Re:They should at least post funny responses... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:They should at least post funny responses... (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Can any swedish lawyers comment? (Score:5, Informative)
If you know Swedish, their site [piratbyran.org] provides you among other things with P2P and IP related news, tutorials on ripping, compressing and distributing media on various P2P networks, papers on how various P2P protocols work, links to articles and research papers on P2P, internet media and Open Source, as well as an entire section on legal matters regarding P2P in Sweden and abroad.
This is not what I would consider typical "geek fare", although I must say that I would generally lend more credence to a well-informed geek's knowledge of IP law than, say, whatever FUD the **AA happens to be spouting on a particular day.
Parent
66.250.450.10 - www.demonoid.com (Score:5, Funny)
Re:66.250.450.10 - www.demonoid.com (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:66.250.450.10 - www.demonoid.com (Score:5, Funny)
BTW, if this lawyer has figured out a way to encode 450 in 8 bits, please tell me so I can make a fortune with compression software
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Re:66.250.450.10 - www.demonoid.com (Score:3, Informative)
The text of the threat letter talks about "the website, www.demonoid.com, and server at 66.250.450.10".
And? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's wrong to draw from this that "MPAA is making BitTorrent illegal". That's just stupid
What the MPAA is doing is cracking down on people who pirate and help people pirate movies. Big whoop.
Though I have my own ideas on how the movie studios could save money. STOP PAYING THEM SO MUCH. I mean how many studios are there? A dozen at most? If they all colluded and salary capped the stars to say 50,000$ per movie [give or take] we wouldn't have "multi-million dollar movies" where most of the money goes to the actors and not the actual crew behind the scenes WHO ACTUALLY MAKE IT HAPPEN.
You think Keano made the matrix? No it was 100s if not 1000s of "much lower paid" crew that did the CG, the sets, costumes, makeup, lighting, cameras, editing, etc...
I'll never understand how they can get off and say things like "oh the Olsen twins are worth 20 million dollars"... um to who? They're a pair of uneducated no-talent actors who ride their "being twins and decently good looks". Let's see what they're upto in 20 years shall we?
Same goes for all the other little "artistes". They poperzize their music, everything is staged, etc, then think they're worth a couple million per performance...
Well hate to break the news to ya little gal and guys. Most people work their entire lives and don't see a couple million. They "earn" a million dollars for a day long shoot then blow it on a rave and some diamonds... Then they have the audacity to wonder why people [other than brainwashed puppet teenagers] despise them... Hmmm...
Re:And? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:And? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:And? (Score:5, Informative)
No, it is not and never has been(*).
Theft, according to the criminal code in my country is defined as:
"The taking away of a moveable thing owned by someone else."
Note: "taking away"
Unauthorized copying is not stealing. It is illegal, but it is not theft.
If you have any education in logic - and as a geek I simply assume you do - then you know that if your assumption is false, your entire train of argument derails, since it is impossible to get a correct result from a false assumption.
(*) actually, unless you talk about actual piracy, that thing with the boats and the parrots on the captain's shoulder. That, of course, is stealing.
Parent
The claim that it is stealing comes from... (Score:4, Insightful)
"The taking away of a moveable thing owned by someone else."
Note: "taking away"
The theft claim comes from the idea that part of the value (in the form of potential profits) is removed.
It's similar to the doctorine of "partial taking". Courts use that to force payments to landowners out of zoning/land-use planning agencies when they drastically reduce an owner's property values by changing the rules to reduce the things that can be done with the property. "Partial taking" applies the fifth amendment prohibition on "private property be[ing] taken without just compensation". Even though the property is still there, some of the value has "been taken".
If the Supreme Court applies this interpretation of "taking" to GOVERNMENTS, you can bet it will apply it to individuals as well. And other people than judges can grasp the concept easily, as well.
So splitting hairs with dictionary entriesmight make you feel good. But it isn't going to convince any judges, anyone leaning toward the other side, or bring any significant numbers of fence-sitters around to your position. Instead it makes you look like you're disconnected from economic reality, making it counter-productive.
IMHO the thing to do is avoid this argument and concentrate on the Founders' original one: That copyright is a TEMPORARY PRIVILEGE intended to INCREASE the amount of creative material FREELY available in the middle-distant future by letting authors and their publishers make money on it without competition from copiers for a SHORT TIME after its creation.
Parent
Re:And? (Score:5, Insightful)
No. The truth is, in this context, "piracy" is an emotionally charged word used to make copyright infringement sound a lot worse than it is.
Piracy involves stealing, raping and murdering innocent people when caught in remote locations where society can offer no protection. Copyright infringement is illegal, and should be punished appropriately. But calling it piracy is ridiculous. So are the ridiculous "you're punishing the gaffers and set builders" propaganda commercials.
At the heart of this is money, like everything else. this is about the MPAA and RIAA executives making a LOT of money for making the stupid executive decicisions that Michael Eisner apparently makes every day.
When something is stolen, something is missing. When a copyright is enfringed, the original work remains. Does that help clarify the difference?
If you call it piracy and stealing, you are a tool of the MPAA and RIAA viral marketing campaign.
We should all insist on the correct term "copyright enfringement" as society deals with these intellectual property issues. The illegal behavior is being made a lot worse by the RIAA and MPAA who cling to outdated distribution methods to try to maintain a profit margin that is normally only seen in organized crime and illegal narcotics. There are laws against what the RIAA does, and the major companies in the recording industry have all been found guilty of collusion and price fixing. The settlement? After consumers fill out forms and other high-hassle jumping through hoops, they get a discount on their next CD purchase. So, who are the REAL criminals here?
There is plenty of behavior among RIAA executives and those enfringing copyrights that is both illegal and immoral. I say we start calling the record company executives "rapists".
Parent
Re:And? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:And? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:And? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:And? (Score:4, Interesting)
Last I checked, pirates used cannons and cutlasses, had beards and a bad accent.
"unauthorized distribution" is the proper term, and I'm not nitpicking for the heck of it. A chinese proverb says "Calling things by their proper name is the first step of wisdom." I think they got that right. As long as you don't see it for what it is, but instead mix it up with images of bloodshed and destruction, your judgement is clouded.
Parent
Re:And? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, and murder is still murder, but AT&T is not responsible when someone uses a telephone to conspire to commit murder. IANAL (nor do I want to be), but I would think the "common carrier" laws that protect the phone companies should also protect these sites. But then again, the MPAA has More Money than I, so they are obviously More Right (in the US, at least).
Parent
Re:And? (Score:3, Insightful)
Sans that we would have to have our ISP inspect each packet to make sure it was "legal". You could also kiss encryption bye bye [or use escrow...]. Then at the same time we could limit mail to postcards only so that they can be readily viewed, etc. etc. etc.
I think it's not too much to hold the invididual users accountable for thei
I don't download this stuff... (Score:3, Interesting)
The more I read about this, though, the more it pisses me off...so there's little seed in the back of my head that tells me not to waste my time with movies...and I don't. Gouging for a ticket is bad enough, but the additional gouging for food and beverage just adds insult to injury anyway.
RE: I'm just waiting for someone to find a way.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: I'm just waiting for someone to find a way.... (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re: I'm just waiting for someone to find a way.... (Score:5, Informative)
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This is what happens when... (Score:5, Funny)
Somewhat Misleading Title (Score:5, Insightful)
Filesharing to Fair Use? (Score:4, Insightful)
This really Ircs me (Score:4, Insightful)
1337 ip! (Score:4, Funny)
Maybe mirror is located at 666.666.666.666...
They were vulnerable (Score:4, Informative)
Notice that bi-torrent.com, supernova.org and their kin are still alive and well, and likely remain so for a quite a while.
The only way **AA will make any real headway here is to sue the
The List (Score:5, Funny)
I'd hate to be his mom. "You went to jail for WHAT?? Couldn't you have been doing something I wouldn't be embarrassed to tell my book club about, like drugs or attempted murder!?"
Where does it end? (Score:3, Interesting)
Does the MPAA have jurisdiction over sites hosted overseas as well???? Many of these web sites will eventually just off-shore to places where the MPAA can't touch them. This is rediculous, it's like the war on drugs. You can't fight this wholly on the supply side - you shut one down, and three more pop up. Why are they being so naive?
Re:Where does it end? (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course, the problem with doing this is a lot like the problem with antibiotics. If you use them too much, the target adapts.
Parent
Raising the bar... (Score:5, Interesting)
1. Install BitTorrent
2. Click on link
They don't really care how it works. There's no ratios, no shares, no slots, no configuration, nothing. And it was fast, at least with popular content (which is, by definiton, what the common user wants). Many of these will find other P2P apps too complex.
Kjella
Parent
First they came for... (Score:5, Funny)
and I did not speak out
because I switched to Kazaa.
Then they came for Kazaa
and I did not speak out
because I switched to bit torrents.
Then they came for bit torrents
and I did not speak out
because I switched to ED2K.
Then they came for ED2K
and there was no one left
for the entertainment industry
to blame for their troubles.
So they went out of business,
and now there is only me.
Centralised .torrent distribution does not work ! (Score:4, Interesting)
I think its becoming very clear that centralised torrent distribution isn't going to work.
If you are going to host a popular torrent site then you are going to need bandwidth (for the site alone, no mention of trackers yet). Most bandwidth providers (a.k.a ISPs) are getting very paranoid about letters like these arriving. In fact I'm guessing that most ISPs have terms and conditions stating that they can switch you off faster than a light-bulb if they get such a letter.
The problem with these ISPs is that they need things like credit card details for payment, etc. etc. etc. This trail will eventually lead to a physical person who paid for the hosting - and thus someone the MPAA can put the rap on.
Lets just rewind here a sec. First there was FTP/HTTP for downloading "stuff". This worked while demand was average, and no one was paying much attention. The head came on, people (read: lawyers) took notice. Letters were sent, people abandoned FTP/HTTP for P2P networks.
Everything was good so far until it came to delivering large content (read: Movies, Apps, whatever). The P2P networks simply scale well to delivering this content well. But they still provided a reasonable amount of privacy.
Next (roughly speaking) came BitTorrent - it fixed the P2P bottle necks of gnutella & co. But it now depended on a centralised infrastructure for informing people on where to find the Trackers.
More experienced hands at BitTorrent and Gnutella might be able to help out here:
What if the
This could be taken to the next level then - if the content is coming from multipe sources, and if individually the "copyright" material does not arrive from a single source - what can you prosecute the individual sources for - serving up a fragment ? If the data is interleaved between 10 hosts and every 10th byte is stored on one host, it would be very difficult to prove that the host contains the material.
Just my $0.02
Re:Centralised .torrent distribution does not work (Score:4, Informative)
The MPAA is not just going after big
Storing and distributing
BT isn't a p2p network in the conventional sense, it's a network of p2p networks. Each "torrent" is a p2p network on it's own, self contained and independent of any other torrent.
This p2p network needs a way to keep track of it's members, and hereing comes the tracker. The tracker's primary duty is to deliver random subset of the peerlist to peers when they request it.
So, an effective tracker must
1) Know of -all- the peer's IPs in the swarm
2) Be easy to contact
3) Give away peer's IPs to anyone who asks
Thus, BT as it currently sits (a quick, efficient way to offload some server bandwidth onto users) is not suited for illegal content: That same thing which makes it good/strong/fast (the trackers) is what makes it easy to litigate.
PS: In BT, pieces very, very rarely arrive from a single source.. I don't think this has stopped anyone from litigating.
Parent
Re:Centralised .torrent distribution does not work (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't like it? Solve the problem yourself. Bram Cohen has stated time and again that he has no interest in solving it for you. The BitTorrent code is readily available in several languages, now. You are free to use that as a starting point if you really care that much about it.
Parent
Hack the Force (Score:4, Funny)
Re:p2p torrent (Score:5, Insightful)
If we knew every single employee of both companies, adn we have our spies working at all major ISPs on the lookout for those names (and assuming they don't use other names), we *might* be able to have some level of protection. Maybe. That's assuming that "our guy" isn't out sick the say they sign up, or the day that their cable modem gets a new DHCP lease.
P2p still sits on the internet, and for that reason, it's no safer than anything else. You have to build your own network, and it has to have moderately strong anonymity. Nothing else will work.
Parent
Re:p2p torrent (Score:3, Interesting)
Granted, this was 2.0. 2.1 may be different. I stopped using Shareaza because it felt pretty slow. I suppose a similar way to do this would be to use eMule to download the torrents and then run
!= Large repositories of pirate material (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:frist post (Score:5, Informative)
In short, the downstream and upstream share a buffer; if the buffer becomes full (i.e. maxxed out your upload capacity) then both streams will suffer. As the guy pointed out, Azureus (and other clients) will allow you to throttle your upstream.
In addition to this, you should also throttle your downstream just a bit (in case you are able to max it out, I believe the same problem could arise). I had mine throttled around 90% of each maximum (so about 175KB/12KB) and it worked like a charm.
As to the memory requirements, you might want to look into how often the client commits its memory cache to disk in order to alleviate this.
Parent
Re:frist post (Score:4, Insightful)
Well.. that's not DSL, it's very ADSL.
Bittorrent is a system that rewards you the more you upload. If you're on an asymmetric line it will probably max the UL even if the DL is not so good. If most users in the swarm are on massively asymmetric lines, well the total upload bandwidth available will be terrible. And you'll all be maxed UL while throttled DL.
The real issue here is greed, bittorrent is a co-operative system. Do you let torrents run to a share ratio over 1:1? I leave them until I've shared twice what I downloaded. I Contribute. If you are not willing to pay for the upload bandwidth to contribute properly, don't expect sympathy from those of us who do.
Oh, and you have to be willing to -wait- (yep, strange concept to most people I realize) for the torrent to complete. Of course you can always try to find a ftp, or whatever, site that can match your awesome download bandwidth. But I bet you want that for free too.
Basically, Bittorrent is socialist, greed is not a attribute that it rewards. But it's in a capatalist system, so you can have an alternative. Try Kazzaa.
Parent
Re:Freenet? (Score:3, Informative)
Fault of the users:
1) It assumes that the average warez dude actually be aware of all the copyright nazidom going on, at a "current events" level of awareness.
2) It assumes they are smart enough to recognize that freenet would be a solution to the legal problems that they *will* eventually face.
3) It assumes that they are smart enough to use it (this will cease to be a problem when the freenet guys figure out how to dumb down the interface enough).
4
Re:DMCA IS GAY (Score:4, Funny)
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