Feds Shut Down Elite Torrents 738
honkimon writes "Cnn Money reports,
"Government agents said the onslaught included 10 search warrants and
the shut down of a central Web site used to coordinate all file-sharing
activity on the Elite Torrents network. That Web site,
Elitetorrents.org, had a selection of copyrighted works
that government officials described as virtually unlimited.""
Re:Department of Homeland Security was involved? (Score:3, Insightful)
Hydra (Score:4, Insightful)
And this ended piracy for all time... (Score:5, Insightful)
Title of the post should have been: (Score:3, Insightful)
Perhaps they should have been using an artifical intelligence content-authoring program [autoblogger.net]?
It seems unreal... (Score:5, Insightful)
Most people don't know any better... (Score:5, Insightful)
Average Joe American, is not savvy / educated enough to understand the mechanics of torrents, Hollywood (for instance that - Star Wars was an insider leak) or that this is a misuse of the DoH's resources. To them, pirates, downloaders and terrorists are one and the same.
Why? Because somewhere along the last couple of decades, peoples' knowledge of their own laws, (especially laws involving quickly changing technology) took a significant downturn. Simply try asking people on the street about the USAPatriot Act or the DMCA. Most - know nothing. Some may have a different perception of the act due to propaganda and only a few will care about it.
Unless it is directly affecting the person, it's not important to them for the most part...
Democracies, in order to be effective, require active and INFORMED citizens - something that is slowly dissappearing (for a multitude of reasons).
The Cost of Idiocy (Score:5, Insightful)
Amount of downloads: Aprox 10,000
Amount Star Wars grossed in just the first weekend: $158.5 million
I suppose that somehow, somewhere that extra $95,000 that they may or may not have made anyway is worth all this.
I'd bet that 9K out of the 10K downloaders actually paid to see the movie anyway.
Re:Hydra (Score:5, Insightful)
So they shut down a site that was trading in illegal stuff. What is the big deal? (other than the fact that the feds are concerned with THIS and not so much things that really hurt human beings)
Re:Most people don't know any better... (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe the old impulse cannon you target at your heads all day long has something to do with this?
Fair and balanced, my ass!
Dear Americans:
Stop letting TV control your view, and check things out for yourselves. It might be interesting to see what is going on outside of the living room.
Re:Hydra (Score:2, Insightful)
Wonder how many people are going to be getting a little certified letter in the mail about 90-120 days from now.
Re:Department of Homeland Security was involved? (Score:2, Insightful)
It's not even covert. Most people are lobotomized within 10 seconds of turning on the TV. The job won't be finished until the same thing is done with the internet. This is a tiny peek into the new world order that 99% of you voted for.
Since when (Score:2, Insightful)
You may or may not agree with the copyright violations , but i don't really see how anyone can justify this being handeld by criminal actions , Civil violations are not criminal
Give me liberty or give me death.
FBI Shot itslef? (Score:2, Insightful)
Ripoff? (Score:4, Insightful)
George Lucas sure will make a profit off that, but is all profit-making a ripoff?
Interesting Verbage. (Score:5, Insightful)
"Federal agents launched a crackdown on users of a popular new technology used to steal the latest "Star Wars" movie..."
Download instead of "steal" would have worked fine in that sentance. I guess steal just conveys a more sinister idea. Like roaving bands of junky Bit Torrent users are going to break into your home at any moment. The will "steal" anythign to get their fix!
"Within 24 hours, more than 10,000 copies of the "Star Wars" film had been swiped."
Ahh yes "swiped" the files were swiped from the servers, depriving the poor innocent children of their Star Wars!
I really hate CNN, they are getting as bad as Fox News.
-Orcspit
The fewer pirates will offset the new income... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Hydra (Score:2, Insightful)
Compulsory Buying, Eh? (Score:3, Insightful)
Just how is anyone selling anything ripping off anyone? No one is forcing anyone to buy anything.
Since most of the
Smacks more than a bit of the obese bitching that Big Macs cost too much.
Re:Department of Homeland Security was involved? (Score:1, Insightful)
I mean, it's bad enough that you have to come in here spouting the truth, but to do it calmly and intelligently is just going to piss everyone off!
What were you thinking?
Re:RTJKJAS? (Score:3, Insightful)
Psst... Hey buddy, can you spare a
Re:Most people don't know any better... (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you kidding me? You guys don't even have a Constitution to provide an foundation to object to laws like PATRIOT. Have you ever checked out the UK's anti-terror laws? Check out the "Anti- Terrorism, Crime and Security Act of 2001" (which, BTW I'm unclear whether its anti terrorism, crime, and security, or only anti terrorism and crime; I would presume that it is pro-security, though the title is a bit ambiguous on that point.) Its chock full of fun bits.
Better yet, check out the laws in the UK in the 1970's and 80's to deal with the IRA--I'm not defending any group or act here, just pointing out that many of those laws make PATRIOT look benign. Just a hint: indefinite detention without any trial, and there's more where that came from.
Far from what the rhetoric of
Re:It seems unreal... (Score:2, Insightful)
Obviously we're talking about subsets of unlimited (Score:3, Insightful)
So this is virtually unlimited, but selective. As there are an infinite number of positive integers, but there is a larger infinite set of real numbers, EliteTorrents had a virtually unlimited selection, but they still didn't have everything.
I agree with what some others have said here - this looks like a DNS hijacking and fake warning. The Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement have absolutely nothing to do with copyright enforcement.
Re:Thepiratebay.org (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyway, just a thought. You can throw words like "illegal" and "rape" around all you want, but when Elite Torrents has more than a hundred thousand members alone... the people have spoken. It's time for something new.
From TFA... (Score:0, Insightful)
Re:Most people don't know any better... (Score:2, Insightful)
it seems like a conflict of interest to have a government that relies on an educated populated to also be responsible for the education of that very same population.
Calm down... (Score:1, Insightful)
Get a grip. Either you pay for the software/movie/music you want, or you satisfy yourself with free legal alternatives. But if you pirate it, and actively help others pirate it, and then get caught, at least take it as a man!
Copyright exists for a reason, and in most cases it works pretty well. The latest Star Wars prequel cost a lot of money to make. It would not have been made, unless George Lucas expected to get even more money in return. If you are against all copyright, you should not enjoy Star Wars at all!
Re:Ripoff? (Score:5, Insightful)
Mass produced media has all but killed small theatres and live entertainment. Even the local jobs from Cinemas are near-minimum wage mcjobs, and even those are being replaced by machines. The Cinema operations are franchised so as to lock in who can operate the enterprise and how they operate it, and the distribution of film quality is even monitored to keep cinemas on their toes.
It's a vertical monopoly where studios own the cinemas and the distribution. Worse, the studios and cinemas collude to ensure minimum competition and maximum revenue from their films.
Blockbuster cinema houses starve out independent cinema houses, then for the mostpart refuse to air local content which might not fill the seats. It's a rape of our culture and funnels money out of the local economy and right into Hollywood.
The revenues are used to empower legal teams to change copyright legislation so as to artificially protect their intellectual property. The rights which copyright gave them to make their bililons of dollars is just not enough for them.
In a world of six billion people, we should see more films and creative content than ever in the history of the earth, but for some reason, all we care about is the production of a few films from these big corporations.
In other words, George Lucas is a role model for Americans to screw the little guy.
I've got a plan!!!! (Score:3, Insightful)
If genocide isn't enough to get the good old USA to act, "stealing" a few bucks from their VERY wealthy citizens should do it.
Re:Ripoff? (Score:5, Insightful)
I actually liked Revenge of the Sith, so I let others argue over whether the ticket price was a ripoff to see that particular movie. :-)
However, I don't need to argue about that. I can think of a few other ways we're being ripped off pretty quickly:
That's just off the top of my head. Anyone else care to add to the list?
So no, not all profit-making is a ripoff. But that doesn't change the fact that some of it certainly is. And no, illegally downloading and/or sharing movies isn't legal or ethical. But in the grand scheme of things, I think it's a hell of a lot less serious an offense than what the movie studios and especially the **AA are doing.
Re:Most people don't know any better... (Score:3, Insightful)
This should read 'dear humans', but I guess some europeans can't admit that their folks are just as fucking ignorant as our own.
Max
Re:Ripoff? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Ripoff? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Interesting Verbage. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Hydra (Score:5, Insightful)
Torrents wouldn't be so bloody popular unless the current distribution model for media was a source of widespread dissatisfaction. Despite a plethora of laws passed to uphold aging business models, the number of Americans (just Americans) engaging in illegal downloading activity passed more than an estimated *70 million* last month. When a quarter of your citizens consistently and repeatedly break the law despite the imposition of relatively harsh (even ludicrous) prison sentences then there's something seriously wrong with the law - by definition. The citizens supposedly define the law, and if a good chunk of them ignore it (with the numbers rising every month) it's a fair bet that the law they're dismissing doesn't reflect their own interests or goals.
The RIAA and MPAA refuse to adapt to changing market conditions. Just plain, flat-out refuse. Probably because they know that in this case while adaption might very well preserve or even increase profits, it'll almost certainly strip them of the non-economic power they've acquired over the last fifty years - power that the tin-pots in the industries love more than money itself. So instead of adapting and avoiding this whole mess they buy laws and send Americans to jail over COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT, which is just fucking stupid.
And yet despite this, the increasingly stiffer penalties, and the crackdowns, the number of Joes and Janes breaking these laws is climbing faster than at any other time in history since the Prohibition! That should tell you something right there about how well the law reflects the will of the people it supposedly serves.
Max
Grabbing onto the remaining US assets (Score:1, Insightful)
This Intellectual Property grab is to make sure that those at the top can continue to siphon assets out of the U.S., convincing the public that it's all just part of a larger "war on crime" or "war on terrorism".
People spend inordinate amounts of money on entertainment IP. The force of the state being used to enforce IP, indicates that the market isn't acting freely. Otherwise prices would fall.
I'm at the point now where I'm not going to expend energy fighting, but I'm saving it for survival later.
I've already grabbed all the non-fiction IP I wanted (1/2 terabyte or so), so even if the internet were to shut down tomorrow, I would have enough to go on for the immediate aftermath of the collapse (the Long Emergency, as James Howard Kunstler puts it).
I don't risk P2P anymore because of the fascist regime in power in the U.S. I share files with close friends but not through the internet which can be monitored. Even postal mail, I've thought about encrypting. (DVDs sent by Priority Mail can have more bandwidth than a bittorrent.)
Join Sunni [sunnimaravillosa.com] and others in the RealID Rebellion [blogspot.com].
What does this have to do with my rights online? (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't trade in this stuff, so I'm not diminished in any way. I haven't lost anything at all.
It might even be a small positive for me. If users on my probably oversubscribed DSL providers network are deprived of the ability to swap some torrents, then possibly there will be a little less lag, etc, when I'm doing stuff online. I can hope at any rate.
Just seems like a case of the government doing it's job, to me.
Re:Ripoff? (Score:5, Insightful)
<rant style="rant-type:soapbox;">
they can either become investors or quit
Okay, this is the last reply I'm going to post on this topic, because this is as close to a flame war as I want to get. If you want the last word, feel free to post a reply and I'll let everyone bask in your victory. I diligently try to avoid the soapbox like this, but man, you just caught me at just the wrong moment.
Your post is typical of someone who has had a relatively nice middle-class ride through life and doesn't truly know what it's like to be an ordinary working class schmoe. It's awful easy to say stuff like "become and investor" and "quit" when you have spare money to invest and could find another job relatively easily.
I'm guessing that you don't understand what it's like to have no spare money or to be forced to work a miserable job to keep food on the table because I'm guessing you can't relate. You think that you "pulled yourself up by the bootstraps" and "made yourself what you are today" because you went to college on your parent's dime and/or government-provided scholarship, grant, and/or student loan programs. If you lost your job today, I'm guessing you probably have money stashed away that you could fall back on, or at worst, a family that would find some way to take care of you. You think you've earned everything you have, and if someone else is poor, they're not unfortunate, they're just lazy because they didn't work as hard as you did.
Well, I've got some news; news that you will probably not believe because you've so successfully fooled yourself into believing that you've earned everything you have, but others reading will probably understand all too well. In America today, how hard you work has very little to do with how successful you are. I'm not saying the executives don't work hard, because a lot do. But they like to think that their sixty to eighty hours a week somehow entitles them to the lion's share of profit. Guess what: Sixty to eighty hours a weeks is a normal work week for a LOT of people who are barely making ends meet. In fact, some of the people in the corporate trenches would consider a sixty hour week a vacation.
These people would like nothing better than to find a good job somewhere else and quit, but the other company they go to will be just as bad, and they would lose any vested time in any pittance of a retirement plan they may have, vacation time they have built up for being at the company several years, and so on. So yeah, it's easy to armchair-manage people's lives, telling them to quit and lose what little they have for something worse, if you're not the one who will actually have to pay the price for it.
It's not like executives sit down with the grunts on the line and work out what everyone thinks is fair compensation for all employees. No, they TELL employees what they'll get, and that will be as little as they can get away with. These days, it's gotten even worse because many executives don't really even care about the long term well-being of the company, as long as they get their bonus this year and their golden parachute next year. As a general rule (exceptions are few and FAR between), the executives that can get away with screwing the employees the hardest will be the most lavishly rewarded for doing so. Why? It's built into the corporate culture. Their job is to maximize profit and minimize costs (i.e. things like salary and benefits for average schmoes). Being fair to the employees isn't part of the equation; in fact, it is a significant hinderance.
Bringing it back on-topic, most of the people working on the film AREN'T being paid what they're "supposed" to be paid. They're being paid the bare minimum they can be paid. Even though both are in a sad state under the constant attacks they've suffered lately, we fortunately have things like unions and liberals around to try to ensure that the bare minimum will at least allow these people to eat. They "signed up" for it not because it
Ripoff?-Starved artist. (Score:1, Insightful)
You mean like those concerts everyone's always saying musicians can make a living off of, while they continue to download said artists music without permission?
"Blockbuster cinema houses starve out independent cinema houses, then for the mostpart refuse to air local content which might not fill the seats. It's a rape of our culture and funnels money out of the local economy and right into Hollywood."
Yes I can see how free will is being twarfted. Maybe the "independent cinema houses" business model is "old and busted" and they should trade it in for the "new and improved" slashdot version.
"The revenues are used to empower legal teams to change copyright legislation so as to artificially protect their intellectual property. The rights which copyright gave them to make their bililons of dollars is just not enough for them."
Yes I can see how the consumer was forced to watch "Return of the Sith" and held at gunpoint till they gave money.
"In a world of six billion people, we should see more films and creative content than ever in the history of the earth, but for some reason, all we care about is the production of a few films from these big corporations."
Nothing misterious about "we". It's simple really. We're not you. "We" simply made economic and cultural decisions you don't like.
"In other words, George Lucas is a role model for Americans to screw the little guy."
And Al-Que'da is a role model for how to liberate the planet from people like George Lucas.
Re:Most people don't know any better... (Score:3, Insightful)
Are you even listening to yourself? To translate: no one should have power over anyone else... except for the UN, which is made up of people, who would then have power over other people?
That would be the UN, which has done such a fabuluous job of protecting people in Africa? Or in preventing Iran for forging ahead with nukes? Or in helping the poor bastards living in North Korea? Or in stopping China from threatening Taiwan? Or which kept the Baltics all nice and tidy when the Serbs and the Croats blew up? Or the UN that did such a great job of making Saddam even richer as they put together a totally corrupt oil-for-food program? Ask the people living in Darfur how protected they're feeling.
Re:Ripoff? (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, it used to be true that houses owned all of the theaters in which their movies were shown, but that ended in 1948 when an antitrust case was brought against paramount (U.S. vs. Paramount Pictures, et. al) causing them, and others in suit, to divest their theaters.
I'd like to also point out that all of your examples of the movie industry "robbing america of its right to culture" are not the result of an evil mastermind, but the American Free Market. It's simple economy of scale, and it's the reason that you're paying $3.99 for a movie that cost millions to produce.
A CRUCIAL part to any free-market is the protection of individual property rights, and as value is increasingly being assigned to intangible property, this includes intellectual property, too.
So yes, George Lucas IS a role model for Americans.
Americans, remember. Not socialists.
This is ridiculous.. (Score:2, Insightful)
That's what
"Curse those BitTorrenters.. if it wasn't for them, we'd have the highest three day weekend grossing movie of all time instead of just the second-highest."
Elite Torrents was not just movies/TV/Music (Score:2, Insightful)
The shutdown of Elite Torrents isn't really comparable to the recent shutdown of various TV torrent sites. Their range of categories went well outside of the grey area of TV downloading and its ilk.
Re:Ripoff? (Score:5, Insightful)
I will admit to being the guy with the nice middle class ride through life to whom you refer. I have never in my life worked a minimum wage job, and the least I was ever paid was $6.25 an hour as a lab assistant in college. I have never had difficulty finding work as a soccer referee for over $15/hr on weekends, I have taken entry level grocery bagger positions for $9/hr and I have babysat for $7.50 an hour. During college I mostly worked internships at around $13/hr, which combined with $30,000 in government subsidized loans paid my tuition.
As bad as the school system is in this country, schools and public libraries offer sufficient resources for any interested person to obtain an education. I was homeschooled from K-12 grade, which meant that for the most part I taught myself. By buying used books online, you are looking at an investment of a couple hundred dollars a year. (And if you don't believe me I can put together a book list to show you.) It does not require a privleged middle class upbringing to obtain a quality education. I will agree though that for a kid whose parents don't really care, getting a quality education is much more difficult.
Obtaining a state college education is also not difficult for someone wanting to do so. My local state school has in-state education costs of under $500 a semester. Take your highly motivated examples who work two full time jobs. At $10/hr each job, that person is making about $40,000 a year. While $10/hr is high for starting salary, it is well within the reach of someone who is a good employee and is willing to relocate. Particularly if said party is willing to live in an inexpensive area (ie NOT San Francisco), they can very quickly have enough savings to go to school. If they can continue to work while in school, they may be able to avoid even needing much from their savings.
The real way a person gets into an untenable position is by making poor decisions. Not obtaining a quality high school education is the first mistake most people make. They then follow this by getting married or having kids they can support that family. Our society is unwilling to wait for anything or plan for the future. A person cannot end up a single mother with 3 kids working a minimum wage job without making some stupid decisions. While I do believe we should help such people recover from those mistakes, your claims that people aren't at fault for where they are in life just do not reflect the facts.
Re:Ripoff? (Score:3, Insightful)
But they want to see it anyway?
Re:Ripoff? (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh, that and when it's the just the wife and I, she thinks it's kinky to play around or get busy in the back seat like we're a couple of teenagers.
Re:I was with you until the last part.... (Score:1, Insightful)
I know I would be called a communist by most americans but I'm not. I just think that in the capitalist system that we have, greater regulation is needed to ensure that the big guys are not screwing over the little guys.
I agree that no political party will be able to 'fix' the problems in the short term, however you have to let them have time to settle in. A few years is by no means a long enough time to repair any mess caused by the previous government.
Re:Ripoff? (Score:1, Insightful)
Last time I checked, the two were orthogonal. Being an American is almost always an accident of birth. Being a socialist is almost always a purely personal decision made by an adult after considering the competing merits of various political philosophies.
As such, George Lucas is not a role model for Americans - he is a role model for capitalists.