MPAA Goes After More Bittorrent Site Operators 698
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."
Re: I'm just waiting for someone to find a way.... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I don't download this stuff... (Score:2, Informative)
Actually, the "gouging" for food and drinks is what keeps the theaters there. The studios take almost all of the profits from ticket sales. The theaters get their profit from concession sales. A theater could sell out every seat in the house for every showing for every movie. But if no one buys anything to eat or drink, that theater will close in short order.
Support your local theater, especially second-run and independent theaters. Buy some popcorn.
Re: I'm just waiting for someone to find a way.... (Score:5, Informative)
Sometime Demonoid user... (Score:2, Informative)
It was a good site, reasonably well run--content was well categorised, reasonable commenting system, but they went down often too--too much load caused the site software to meltdown.
They had the usual forum too, where it was always pointed out that Demonoid did not host illegal software--all they hosted was .torrent files, which are meta files for any software or data.
It was paid through donations, and donators (more than $5) had their Up/Down ratio reset to 1 for a month. If you went below 0.25 Up/Down for too long, you faced being banned.
I saw it go down many times, and each time the owner resurrected it and promised donors their month back.
I mostly checked for software, and most of it worked.
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".
Re:And? (Score:3, Informative)
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
Re:66.250.450.10 - www.demonoid.com (Score:2, Informative)
Regards,
Steve
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.
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: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) It assumes they are smart enough to actually install it.
Fault of Freenet:
1) It uses 1 gig of traffic for every 10 megs you personally download.
2) It uses 500 megs of storage for every 10 megs you download.
3) The limiting factor for downloading a file known to exist on freenet is your patience, not your bandwidth.
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.
Re:They should at least post funny responses... (Score:3, Informative)
Here (Score:2, Informative)
When people stop pirating.
Re:And? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:They should at least post funny responses... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:amazing (Score:3, Informative)
user: asdffdsaasdf
password: asdfasdf
If just one of five people emailed the 'RIAA dentist' to inform him of his excessive douchebaggery (moppenheim@jenner.com) the world would be a better place.
P.S. ARRR ARRRRR Sir Tandeth; i've come to take your booty!
MPAA: You do not hold the copyright on .torrents (Score:3, Informative)
Do they even know what a
Re:They should at least post funny responses... (Score:1, Informative)
Careful there, this nearly did happen. The UN passed around a treaty a few years back backed by the EU, pushing for international cybercrime enforcement. Big Business Right backed it in America for a few days (we could shut down websites of warezers and other bad people!), until Big Religion Right shot it down, pointing out that it would enable countries like China to have American sites taken down for breaking their religious propoganda law or France to take down educational sites about the KKK.
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.
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.
Re:And? (Score:3, Informative)
I think you are toally missing the point, in at least two key areas.
The difference is, the two forms of the word "bark" were not selected to be deliberately misleading. They arose because of some weird coincidences of etimology. They were not the illegitimate spawn of lawyers and marketing executives to dupe people.
Again, a complete red herring. The point is that the record companies, who WERE found guilty of collusion and price fixing, were the ones setting the wholesale prices, which then dictated the exorbitant retail prices. Even if WalMart and Best Buy realized that the CDs were grossly overpriced and decided to sell them at a loss to attract customers, that does not in any way take away from the fact that RIAA companies were selling CDs for WAY more than any reasonable costs for the materials and reasonable compensation for the artists and distributors.
Like the anti-trust suits against Microsoft, the settlement against the RIAA was completely without teeth, and the RIAA continues to operate in a very anticompetitive manner. They use the government to prosecute people who violate their intellectual property rights. If they wanted to stop people from making illegal copies, they should first and foremost start competing with each other, which would naturally reduce their prices. When they offered reasonable value relative to their added costs, consumers would respond in kind. A lot of people rightfully feel ripped off by the RIAA companies, and use that as a lame excuse to break copyrights. Illegal, yes, but it still isn't stealing, and it certainly isn't piracy, arr, arr.
The real problem here is the lack of competition. If you want to listen to Zamfir play the pan flute, only one label represents him. You're single sourced. A monopoly is created. We need a new method to distribute music. If artists produced their own music independent of music distributors, they could take their pick of multiple competing distributors with non-exclusive distribution contracts. The artists could either use technology to produce their own music, or take their pick of competing recording studios and freelance producers. That sort of competitive market where the artists are adequately compensated for their UNIQUE contributions and the record companies are competing with their COMMODITY contributions is the last thing the RIAA wants.
I hope the replacement for RIAA arrives soon. It'll be a natural byproduct of the enabling technology, which is why the RIAA is so actively fighting the new technology. When it comes, it'll be guys like these who make it happen. They prove that not all indie music sucks.
http://tempusband.com/ [tempusband.com]
humaneness (Score:3, Informative)
The entire concept of "intellectual property" is based on the idea of taking something that is immaterial and treating it as if it were material.
So you cannot argue that it "isn't theft" or that it's "not stealing" without undermining hundreds of years of legal precedent that constitutes the very core of copyright law. You just simply can't do it. Those arguments don't hold. By saying that it's "not stealing" because nothing physical is taken, you are simply pointing out something that has been recognized for centuries; you are simply pointing out the very reasons that copyright and intellectual property law exist in the first place.
But all is not lost... there should be an exemption. If you (or someone you are downloading from) are sharing files, free of charge, and those files are going to be used for personal, non-commercial uses, there should be an exemption. It is not necessary to undermine centuries of legal precedent concerning copyright in order to make sense of the dilemna we have before us.
I feel that it boils down to the simple physical reality that if something is for "personal" use, then that means that you have to consider that a human being has to eat, sleep, work. study, and do other things besides watch movies 24/7 - so any outstanding royalties that might be due simply cannot be greater than the amount of movies that any reasonable individual can watch in a certain period of time. That, in and of itself, is a significantly limiting factor, compared to, for instance, an individual who manufactures illegal disks and sells them on the black market, perhaps to thousands of individuals - the outstanding royalties in that situation are not limited by the amount of time one person can spend watching movies, but the amount of time thousands of people spend watching movies. Personal use implies that an individual is only watching one movie at a time - I suppose if you are an alien from outer space you can have a wall of monitors and be watching 25 different films at the same time, but realistically, it's not going to happen.
On top of that, in order to download with a torrent, you must also upload, so there's even another exemption there - there is no one single source that is providing multiple downloads to multiple individuals - you download, you upload as well - there is no analogy to a single individual manufacturing hundreds or thousands of black-market disks and profiting from them. It's more or less a 1:1 ratio, as far as each individual torrent user is concerned - you download, you also upload.
The best way to look at it is that there should be some kind of exemption; there should be some sort of compromise. Furthermore, services like Netflix should be promoted and the industry should see to it that they don't discourage innovation in this area by attempting to continue their stranglehold on the industry.
People need to recognize that technically, file sharing is copyright infringment and theft; but instead of using some kind of mathematical or logical "formula" to determine guilt or innocence, we need to use our common sense to come up with solutions that can create some types of limited exemptions. Personally, I think that bittorrent already has one possible exemption available to it, something that creates the greatest legal risk, something that the industries have attacked vociferously - that being the moral of "don't enable leeches". By not being a leech, by being required to upload when you download, you are adjusting the ratio, and preventing any one individual from providing multiple downloads to multiple individuals. It's no wonder that the industry is "encouraging" leeching - that way the content providers become centralized.
I understand that the original idea behind Netflix was to make the content available online, but the bandwidth costs made it unfeasible. We need to find a way to transition from limitations of physical media for rental
Due process is Gone. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Color me surprised... (Score:3, Informative)
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.)