IsoHunt Told To Pull Torrent Files Offline 392
suraj.sun writes with this excerpt from Ars Technica: "The founder of popular Bit Torrent site IsoHunt, Gary Fung, has been ordered to remove the .torrent files for all infringing content — an order that could result in the site shutting down. US District Judge Stephen Wilson issued the order last week after years of back-and-forths over the legality of IsoHunt and Fung's two other sites (Torrentbox and Podtropolis). Fung claims he's still hoping for a more agreeable resolution that won't result in IsoHunt closing its doors, but for now, things aren't looking good for the torrent site."
Decentralised tracker (Score:2, Interesting)
So when is someone going to develop a peer-to-peer system for hosting and tracking torrents? What happened to this technology [slashdot.org]?
Re:they come and they go but there is one constant (Score:2, Interesting)
Pirate sites will go, and others will replace them, but there is a constant: like death and taxes, piracy will go on.
Once the admins and users will start getting jail time and huge fines more often, I'm sure the amount of people wanting to run such a site decreases dramatically. It's not an endless river.
The war on torrents... (Score:4, Interesting)
... is about as likely to be won by the content holders as the 'War on Drugs' to be won by the Federal Govt.
The parallels are striking, starting with 'Just say no' / 'Don't copy that floppy', and then escalating internationally to ACTA.
As long as the demand for unauthorized content exists, supply will find its way.
Until consumers have a compelling reason to buy an authorized copy (iTunes is a great example of this), torrents or some other tech like .nzb will give the people what they want.
Hmm (Score:2, Interesting)
I am saddened by the judge striking down this use of the internet. A television network should do a news piece on this, in order to transfer knowledge about this subject to the masses. I'm sure they have a protocol to deal with internet stories.
Someone please keep me posted. Why?ENCASE THIS BECOMES A HUGE STORY instead of just letting it die! please! For the good of us all!
Re:Bah....Bah (Score:5, Interesting)
Legality these days is determined by the depth of your pockets and the size of your lawyer-army.
Re:Bah....Bah (Score:3, Interesting)
Flip side, although they are not the sole source of said legitimate content, they are a primary source. As an occasional Linux downloader, ISOHunt is where I've always gotten those ISO images. Admittedly, it takes a two second Google search to find another source, but the point is that it's the first place I and a lot of other people think of when they want to download a Linux ISO. Thus, clearly that constitutes substantial non-infringing use, regardless of what the MPAA lawyers might say.
I have a really hard time believing that this site doesn't fall under the 512(d) [cornell.edu] safe harbor. It seems pretty cut and dry unless they can prove not just that the ISOHunt folks had reason to believe that infringing content existed, but that they had reason to believe that at least one specific ISO was infringing, which is completely unprovable unless they can prove that a human inspects and approves or rejects a sizable percentage of torrents. This provision is there specifically to prevent lawsuits like this one from having any traction, and this case is a pretty clear indication that this safe harbor is not strong enough or sufficiently clearly worded, IMHO.
Bam...Bam ... Whack-a-mole (Score:4, Interesting)
The internet is all about copying, it's fundamental, and it's never easier. It's what Turing machines do. Consider Streaming even, there is not such thing as streaming, it's still downloading, however renamed to keep rightsholders from realising what it really is.
Theoretically it's possible to create a file sharing service that is incredibly difficult perhaps almost impossible to monitor and trace. Onion routing works pretty well, there are robest methods of key exchange, and it seems encrypted links are good enough to protect online banking.
All the while bandwidth, computational capacity and digital storage is getting better, faster and cheaper. If one thought piracy was at an all time high now and the tide will start to turn against it, then one is like a luddite before the industrial revolution.
Maybe Big Content does end up shutting down P2P faster than it can pop back up, and even win some candy floss in the process. Piracy will just move back to untraceable anonymous physical media. You see, one underestimates the bandwidth of a portable hard drive or USB stick moving from A to B.
What about ACTA border searches of your iPod and laptop? Considering the size of a 32gb MicroSDHC Card now,
Still don't get what I mean? A high end 32gb SDHC card costs alot, but so did a $10 4gb card once upon a time. What happens when these things hit 500gb, 1000gb? Become so cheap that you give them away like we do with burned CD/DVD-Rs now?
Another example, my entire music collection (legit) took up most of my expensive 80gb harddrive in 2003/2004. Today that same price point, buys me a 1.5TB drive, with change. My music collection that has only grown a little suddenly has a trivial footprint.
A hypothetical pirated movie collection of hundreds of 700mb VCD-quality movies now fills up a good chunk of ones hypothetical 1TB drive.
In six years that will be nothing on my $100 50TB drive.
By the end of the decade you could afford to have a desktop computer with every major movie of the last 50 years stored on it with room to spare.
Repeat.
Yeah so you were thinking maybe we are seeing the end of piracy, but it's only just getting started. Suddenly Big Content seems like a bunch of luddites tearing down the machines of the revolution, failing to see the precipice of change coming.
Re:Bah....Bah (Score:4, Interesting)
> 99% copyrighted material with no distribution rights from authors
Google is in the same spot, unfortunately, unless you believe that not blocking their spider in robots.txt is equivalent to giving distribution rights. Somehow I don't think that's going to fly in court ("fair use" might).
By the way, if your idea would fly, it would be practically impossible to run a site which distributes legal user-created content: the minute this site became a threat to Big Media's profit margins, they could easily pay for it to be "DoL"-ed (that's a "Denial-of-Legality" attack, when they pay third parties to upload enough illegal content to make it possible to sue and shut it down).
After all, Big Media has already been caught uploading its content to YouTube via third parties in a way to make it appear illegally pirated. I wouldn't put it past them to try this "DoL" shtik.
Re:Bah....Bah (Score:5, Interesting)
Check out your local library. I've been using the library for about a year now. My library's selection is probably comparable to Netflix (I've recently watched several older movies like the Godfather series, and some WW2 era movies, the X-files series, soon going to watch the Farside), and if they don't have something, I've actually had pretty good success about requesting that they buy items I want and having them acquire them. My library actually has an Annex just for the older videos that they don't have on the shelves right now, and I have access to all of this material that I neither want to pay to watch one time nor want to store, I'm protected against my kids scratching disks.
Now, I live a 25 minute round trip from our library, but once a week, they send a Bookmobile (bus with shelves) all over the county, and I can request that they send my requested materials out on the local Bookmobile, which is a 6 mile round trip, which is closer than my nearest video store. I have had a couple of items that were so scratched I couldn't watch the whole thing, but I just requested a new copy and put a note in the old one so they could remove it from circulation. You're probably paying property taxes (even if you rent, the landlord is paying some of your rent in taxes) to support a library and this is a far better option than paying for the video store (I also get all items for 1 or 3 weeks depending on the item, and cheaper fees if I keep it too long), risking getting sued, or buying it myself.
Re:Bah....Bah (Score:4, Interesting)
Whatsmore, Google makes it easy for a user to find known piracy websites, so they're complicit! If we say that linking to pirate stuff, not the act of copying it, is also illegal then how many steps removed do you need to be before it becomes OK? This is why I don't like the apparently common point of view that these sites "might as well" be infringing copyright.
Re:They should more to a more civilized country (Score:2, Interesting)
Until there's honesty from this (significant) population of the "copyright is unjust" crowd as to their actual motivations, the conversation can't go forward very much.
it is completely unjust if one side of an agreement keeps changing the rules, especially when the officiator is in their pocket. extending the length every 20 years or so is not finite. if they extended criminals' sentences every time they were about to be released, would you be for that? would their cries of "i served my time" not be a good enough excuse? what more motivation would be needed? should we let everything be like this? you can change whatever contract you want as long as you pay a judge enough money? that is just to you?
The problem is the 'inducement' standard... (Score:1, Interesting)
> The thing that accused infringement-aiding sites have to prove is that they have significant non-infringing uses. This is obviously true for Google. It is not so obviously true for IsoHunt and others. Sure, you can find legal content (like the latest Linux distros and so forth) - but IsoHunt and its brethren are a) not the sole distribution method for aforementioned legal content and b) the amount of illegal content is significantly larger than the amount of legal content.
Also, they'll rake you over the coals if you're ever seen committing infringement (which they might use as evidence of inducement) or if you say things like "download movies here!" (which they assume are the infringing kind). Even in Viacom v. YouTube, Google had to create a special filter program to do the (nearly) impossible task of policing copyright owner's "property" for them and they're STILL fighting for their lives with expensive lawyers.
So what you have to do is to convince the judge (and jury) that you were attempting to set up a mostly legitimate site and that the infringing activity was secondary to the purpose of your site, never approved of by anyone running the site, and that you did your best to stop or discourage it.
Which sucks, because it cuts into your DMCA Safe Harbor by making you an agent for the copyright cartels even if it's their own damn problem that information cannot be made uncopyable.
Re:Bah....Bah (Score:1, Interesting)
You ask me for a file, I tell you to search Google for it, with Google you find the site isohunt, with iso hunt you find a torrent seed. With that seed, you use a bitorrent client to start downloading that file. You put that file on your external hard drive. What legal criteria is used to determine where in this process where it became illegal? The RIAA and MPAA is confusing convenient for them with illegal for you.
Another issue. You steal my wallet and buy a few CDs with the money but eventually get caught, you face a $500 fine and possible jail time. In reality this being your first offense, you will probably get nothing but maybe a small fine consisting of court costs and I might get some of my money back. You steal my CD from the floor of my car, same thing. You download a copy of a copyrighted song and suddenly you are subjected to fines that are in excess of $5k-50k per song. Wow, the RIAA and MPAA must have some friends in the federal government. You steal a physical product from me and I get basically nothing and you get a slap on the wrist, you make a copy of a song from them that costs nothing (possibly $0.39 from them if you would have even bought it) and you are completely phucked. People wake the hell up up and think about that!