Australian ISP Argues For BitTorrent Users

taucross writes "Australian ISP iiNet is making a very bold move. They are asking the court to accept that essentially, BitTorrent cannot be used to distribute pirated content because a packet does not represent a substantial portion of the infringing material. They are also hedging their bets purely on the strength of the movie studios' 'forensic' evidence. This ruling will go straight to the heart of Australia's copyright law. At last, an ISP willing to stand up for its customers! Let's hope we have a technically-informed judge."

Wow

[niner69]

An ISP grew a pair?

Terrible news!

[Anonymous Coward]

One packet per customer, sorry folks.

Shut Down All Possible Ways To Break Laws...

[quangdog]

Perhaps I'm misinformed, but is there any evidence to suggest that BitTorrent is used exclusively to distribute copyrighted materials? It seems to me that the argument against it is that it *may* be used to distribute copyrighted materials. If this is truly the case, then I guess we had better go ahead and unplug the whole internet. It was fun while it lasted, but it *may* be used for evil, so while I agr*#&$@@ NO CARRIER

Re:Terrible news!

[SCPRedMage]

Wow, that's not even enough to get through DHCP...

Re:In that case...

[Anonymous Coward]

Right, but they are patented. [theonion.com] :)

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

What does slashdot have to do with shambleses?

Re:SO if I

[Skye16]

I think I had that quest in WoW

Re:SO if I

[iron-kurton]

My head just exploded because I can only think in terms of car analogies.

Re:SO if I

[McGiraf]

apology accepted

Re:SO if I

[Zerth]

Actually, for a while I ran a modded bittornado client that deliberately would never upload more than 10% of the torrent to any one IP for expressly this purpose. It also lied to the tracker about my ratio for additional deniability.

Not that I thought I'd get away with it, but I figured that if I was that screwed, it'd be amusing to have my lawyer whip out the client source in court showing that I couldn't have supplied anyone with a complete copy, that my actual transfer was substantially different than what the tracker showed, and thus any evidence they had could not show a complete infringement.

Then I got a real job.

I smell a technical loophole in this...

[jonaskoelker]

the downloader [is violating] the reproduction right by fixing the transitory data stream to a medium on his computer.

Allow me to conjecture wildly, and see where that takes me.

• If someone streams music to me, it's illegal for me to use mplayer -dumpstream.
• OTOH, I'm allowed to listen to the stream, which means I'm allowed to buffer the stream in memory.
• Say the default mplayer.conf says "buffer EVERYTHING first, then play it back". I'm allowed to buffer the whole file for purposes of playing it back (you can't expect me to know the technical details of how my program works).
• So if I buy a fuckton of RAM and a UPS unit, I could torrent everything to a RAM disk and play it from there: it's not the case that I fix the "stream" to a medium in a way that I don't do when I stream audio which I'm allowed to do.

From the {RI,MP}AA's point of view, there are two steps missing: "???" and "Lost profit!"

It would be interesting to see how this plays out in court. Maybe that's a way to be a law-abiding citizen while still getting Free Shit (tm)... otherwise, there's always Jamendo :D