Crackdown on BT Users in Hong Kong

griffinn writes "100 BitTorrent users in Hong Kong are about to receive legal threats from the MPIA (Hong Kong's equivalent of the MPAA), BusinessWeek reports. The users were randomly selected from more than 6000 IP addresses collected by investigators. Customs officials are also following through on their previous arrest of a 38-year-old man who allegedly uploaded three movies." From the article: "If convicted, the suspect faces up to four years in prison and a fine of 50,000 Hong Kong dollars ($6,400) for every illegal copy."

Bloody typical

[gowen]

How can you expect the RIAA to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate uses of BitTorrent when slashdot editors cannot be bothered to do the same? Hong Kong is not cracking down on BT Users, but on wilful copyright violators who happen to use BitTorrent.

You might as well run a headline "US police crack down on Drivers", leading to a report detailing the arrest of a guy who drove a getaway car in a robbery.

Sheesh.

If this happened in the US...

[Veinor]

BitTorrent is not inherently illegal. You could use a similar argument to prohibit downloading of ANY files, since they just use a different method.

It appears that their government is throwing out the baby with the bathwater. If they tried that sort of stuff in the United States, then the government would catch so much flak from people claiming this is an invasion of privacy (which it is.)

Legal download of copyrighted material.

[iolaus]

Is there such a thing as legitimate download of copyrighted material? For instance, if I own a DVD, would I be within my rights to go and download a rip of that dvd? If so, doesn't it become very difficult for authorities to prove who is and is not violating copyright by downloading from services like Bit Torrent?

Re:Legal download of copyrighted material.

[meester fox]

That's a good point. I suppose it could be argued either way. I think if your copy was too beat up to play, that it would be within your right to go and download another copy of it. Though they would probably still get after you for it, it would (I think) be legal, since your just replacing a broken copy. "They" already got money from you for it.

Re:Legal download of copyrighted material.

[ShawnDoc]

Depends on the laws in your country. In the United States, the answer is no. When you buy a DVD, you have a liscense to the content on that DVD only. You are allowed to make a personal backup copy of the DVD, but that does not intitle you to make copies of other people's DVD's, or other people's version of the movie (VCD, VHS, Film, etc).

bt != priacy && rar != piracy

[Anonymous Coward]

but in some people's eyes, all p2p is priacy... when i worked at a (then) major isp (think #5) our free web hosting brands both cracked down on ANYONE using rar to archive files... they thought it was only used for piracy.

i found this out when i uploaded my collection of starcraft maps to my starcraft page (rar gave me 25% better compression than zip) and i was promptly closed down.

Re:Bloody typical

[LordSnooty]

The real issue here, I think, is that the (presumed guilty) copyright offenders are looking at 4 years in a Chinese prison. Is that an appropriate punishment for the offense?

Considering that apparently every street corner in China has guys selling pirated DVDs for thier OWN PROFIT, it does seem a little disproportionate, yes.

I don't get it

[eamonman]

Is their gov't doing this because the torrenters are infringing upon the hundreds of those hard-working $1-a-dvd companies? I mean, those companies go out of their way to make their DVDs Region Free, show off their creative subtitling skills (for Anime (Jpn->Cat->Eng)), and put them in nice little sleeves instead of those overly inefficient cases we're used to. Because we sure need those companies. ;)

Just 6,900,400 more to go.

[Anonymous Coward]

They'll have this all cleared up in no time now. Yeah right.

A few hundred thousand more arrests wouldn't even be one percent of the poplulation of the place [wikipedia.org] and it's just one city. Despite being huge, it's not even among the top three of the largest in China. Old media interests can get as ugly as they want. The simple fact is that copyright laws are unenforceable on the Net if for no other reason than because of the demographics.

As of 1990 just the largest hundred cites in China have a larger population than the entire US. Just the top ten had over fifty million people and that was fifteen years ago. It would literally bankrupt the country to apply the law to the numbers of people who are currently violating these laws. Prison labor isn't cheap compared to what they already have when you factor in the cost of the guards and the room and board. The scare tactics can only continue for so long because it is, in fact, a bluff. This is obvious according to the numbers.

Re:Bloody typical

[grumpyman]

The situation in Hong Kong is quite different from the rest of China. Hong Kong judicial system [flyingchair.net] is based on British common law. The basic law set the guiding prinicple around the system after 1997.

I think the judges still wear that stupid wig from colonial days, and vast majority of them are actually ethnicity of non-chinese last time I checked [judiciary.gov.hk]. "MORTIMER", "HOFFMANN", "Hon Sir Ivor RICHARDSON" doesn't sound Chinese to me. The official language in court is actually English, unless approved by the judge to use Cantonese.

Please, please, please, fellow slash-dotters, for once stop making sweeping statement about China, that because they're communist, they must be evil in every aspect. I'm not saying communist is better but check out how well western democratic is working for all of us. We in Canada are ruling by a party of 35% support (liberal), and soon we'll probably be ruled by a party of 30% (conservatives).

If you want to read more about politics/judicial/business corruption mess, please first check with Halliburton and Enron.

I urge all of us to read more before making judgements.