Swedish Court Rules ISP Must Reveal OpenBitTorrent Operator's Identity 230
2phar writes "An ISP must hand over the identity of the operator behind OpenBitTorrent, a court in Sweden ruled [Wednesday]. The ISP must now reveal the identity of its customer, operator of probably the world's largest torrent tracker, to Hollywood movie companies or face a hefty fine. 'OpenBitTorrent is used for file sharing, and we suspect that it is the Pirate Bay tracker with a new name. It is added by default on all of the torrent tracker files on Pirate Bay,' Hollywood lawyer Monique Wadsted said in an earlier comment. The ruling covers the customer behind the IP addresses 188.126.64.2 and 188.126.64.3 and/or any other IP addresses in Portlane's entire range (188.126.64.0 – 188.126.95.255) which have been allocated to tracker.openbittorrent.com since August 28, 2009."
OBT is not breaking any laws (Score:4, Insightful)
OpenBitTorrent is just a tracker. That's all; not a torrent indexer like TPB. They are not responsible for whatever people choose to use their service to download or distribute. I'd also imagine they can't do anything about what people move through their service.
They don't condone piracy; in fact, their website asks that users not illegally distribute copyrighted material with the tracker. This, combined with the fact that OBT is non-profit (as far as I know) means that they aren't profiting from infringement and they aren't condoning or aiding infringement.
Finally, even if it gets shut down, the project is open-source. It won't take long at all for one or two or a dozen clones to pop up.
I pray the Swedish judge has an ounce of sense.
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Re:OBT is not breaking any laws (Score:5, Informative)
OpenBitTorrent is just a tracker. That's all; not a torrent indexer like TPB. They are not responsible for whatever people choose to use their service to download or distribute. I'd also imagine they can't do anything about what people move through their service.
So far, the *IAA is just looking for the identity of the people operating the OBT. They suspect that they are simply The Pirate Bay under a new name.
Let me give a good example. I operate an open Wi-Fi access point. A neighbor uses it to download copyrighted material. The copyright owner then sues the ISP to obtain the identity of the individual operating my IP. They receive it, so that they can then sue me to obtain the identity of the individual who properly violated their copyright.
They may potentially need this information in order to be able to subpoena an individual in a copyright claim court case.
While we don't particularly like the idea that people can sue to obtain another's identity, in order to provide for proper civil actions to be taken, sometimes you have to sue for the identity of another individual.
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More simply:
- If the court discovers Opentorrent's owner is the same as Piratebay's owner, they will argue that each individual site may be technically legal, but the OWNER is using them together to commit a crime.
Just as it not illegal to own fertilizer. And it's not illegal to own a detonator. But if you put the two together under the same owner, then you have a potential criminal and he needs to be examined.
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- Oh! I see you read Bush's last executive order!
- Oh! I see you read Obama's latest exectuive order!
(Pick whichever one-liner you like best.)
Re:OBT is not breaking any laws (Score:4, Informative)
You have the right to be left alone as long as you're not doing anything illegal. If the Bittorrent tracker operators do not themselves break the law, their identity is nobody's business.
Actually... you kind of don't. You can still be subpoenaed for information that you might have regarding a crime/tort.
Example: you are renting a house from a home owner, and you have a guest over. This guest goes next door and damages a neighbor's rose plant. That neighbor wishes to sue this individual, but they don't know who the person is. Not only that, but they don't really know who you are. They get property records, and discover who the landlord is. They are allowed to open a suit against the John Doe, subpoena the landlord to find out your identity, so that they may subpoena you, so that they may learn the guest's identity.
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The question here would be: how does the neighbour know that I know the dude who damaged his plant? Though clearly, in the case of OBT the ISP knows who the people behind OBT are, but your example, unless the owner of the plant plans to subpoena all of his neighbours, it's not a good analogy. And that's assuming he has proof that at least one neighbour knows something about what happened, which he might not have. After all the culprit could have been somebody completely unrelated to anyone else living in that building.
Coming up with hypothetical variations of the argument that contradict facts given does not attack the argument in any way.
In particular, to answer your question, because the plaintiff knew them to be a guest of yours. This was explicitly stated as a given to the hypothetical. This certainly gives them reason and belief to presume that you know the tortfeasor's name.
Of course, it is entirely possible that you do not actually know the name of the tortfeasor, and they made an incorrect assumption that you o
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Stop being an asshole. I specifically stated that the person is a guest. We're not dealing with real world shit, we're dealing with a hypothetical set of events in order to demonstrate a legal notion.
OF COURSE the real world version of this hypothetical is going to be complicated.
Now get off yourself, and shut up. The analogy is fine, and the hypothetical is fine, if you would just put away your retarded trolling.
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OpenBitTorrent is just a tracker. That's all; not a torrent indexer like TPB. They are not responsible for whatever people choose to use their service to download or distribute.
Disclaimer: I don't think this tracker should be shut down, and I find the RIAA, MPAA & Co to be despicable.
However, I'm not really sure this argument holds up legally. Usually, a content provider (Youtube for example) is obligated to take down infringing content on request, or otherwise to make a counter-argument against the take-down notices. They can't just say "we aren't responsible for the content." Now, you may argue that because it's just a tracker, they aren't trafficking in infringing content.
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In other contexts, similar actions would definitely be illegal. For example, one person walks up to another person and says "Hey, I want to murder Bob Jones, but I don't know where he lives, can you help me?" and the second person says "Yeah, he lives at 123 Fake Street, here's copy of his house key. By the way, here's where you can get a really nice shotgun which would be a really effective murder instrument to use."
In this case, the ISP is bound by a court order. If I were in the similar situation, where a court order held me responsible, and I had reason to believe that they intended harm against the other. a) I would present it in court... this should be seen as an invalid reason to know the identity of another. (this is obviously not the case. the *iaa in this case simply intend to bring about legal actions... which is a legitimate reason for discovery of another's identity) b) should the previous argument fail, I
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I agree, but your example is somewhat off. OBT is only providing infrastructure in a content-agnostic way. They are more like an ISP, or the phone directory, or Google Maps - or even the city that builds a street through a high-crime area. The question is if such a "don't ask, don't tell" policy is acceptable.
Re:OBT is not breaking any laws (Score:5, Insightful)
Usually, a content provider (Youtube for example) is obligated to take down infringing content on request, or otherwise to make a counter-argument against the take-down notices. They can't just say "we aren't responsible for the content." Now, you may argue that because it's just a tracker, they aren't trafficking in infringing content. But in reality, there isn't that much separation. They are facilitating the downloading of that content.
I think the distinction between YouTube and a BitTorrent tracker is fairly substantial. YouTube actually hosts the infringing content on its website. With BT, it's the users that are doing the hosting. The tracker can't take down any content, nor can they remove infringing torrents (as you later said), because it's not a hosting service. They can't tell what's copyrighted and what's not any more than other software can; all they have are file names and hash values.
In other contexts, similar actions would definitely be illegal. For example, one person walks up to another person and says "Hey, I want to murder Bob Jones, but I don't know where he lives, can you help me?" and the second person says "Yeah, he lives at 123 Fake Street, here's copy of his house key. By the way, here's where you can get a really nice shotgun which would be a really effective murder instrument to use."
Then the second person is knowingly aiding and abetting a crime. A tracker doesn't do this when it connects peers, because again, it doesn't know what is legal and what isn't.
That's pretty unconvincing. They all say that. Words are cheap, actions matter more. If they were actively removing infringing torrents, that would be another matter.
Regardless of how cheap the words are, I would imagine the notice would give them some protection against the "aiding & abetting" accusation. But you're right; actions do matter more. And they're not taking steps to block infringing torrents (because I'm sure we both understand that such steps would take an ungodly amount of the owners' time, and would ultimately be futile anyway), but they're also not encouraging infringement or profiting from it. This makes me see OBT as a "dumb" tracker, sort of like how BitTorrent itself is a "dumb" protocol for file transfer. Its purpose is to move the files, not to care about what the files are.
Re:OBT is not breaking any laws (Score:5, Insightful)
Mod parent up.
You might as well accuse any node on the series of hops between your computer and the "dirty file-sharing bastard" who is actually seeding the file, of copyright infringement.
Request = I am looking for X. Response = X is located here, here and here.
It's a protocol router, nothing more or less than say the DNS system, or an indexing service like Google.
This nonsense that "they know they are infringing because they can read the filenames" is just that ... nonsense.
The next version of popular torrent software should think about hashing the file names also ... then the only request / response passing through the tracker will be "Hash 0x345fed017 is located at IP 1.2.3.4".
Try proving that a one-way hash of a filename is "infringing", and that the tracker can do anything about "taking it down".
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The next version of popular torrent software should think about hashing the file names also ... then the only request / response passing through the tracker will be "Hash 0x345fed017 is located at IP 1.2.3.4".
That's already the case -- the tracker only ever sees the info-hash, which is a SHA-1 hash of one part of the .torrent file. The filenames only appear in the .torrent file.
Of course, finding the filename corresponding to an info-hash is usually just a web search away [scroogle.org].
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Do torrent sites publish the hash in the HTML page? I've never saw it. If they don't, you'd have to download every torrent file, index them and then search the hashes, which is way more effort than "not looking away".
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Yeah, and all those warez/serial/crack sites, that say that their cracks are "purely for academic and research purposes, and are not to be downloaded or used in any way", despite having download links and usage text - if that's some defense, well, the law, she be an ass.
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But a torrent file is essentially a virtualization of the contents of a file. If you remove the torrent, the infringing data will for sure still exist among the users, but good luck sharing it any more.
Re:OBT is not breaking any laws (Score:5, Funny)
Actually it's closer to this:
Bob hands Charlie a note written in Spanish, and asks him to hand it to Sue.. Charlie can't read Spanish, but before accepting notes Charlie did ask that they not use him to talk about blowing up the White House. Charlie hands the note to Sue, and hands the return message back to Bob.
Keep in mind, this whole time, Charlie can't read Spanish. Turns out, the notes were bomb-plot arranging.
So, is Charlie really at fault or otherwise responsible for the contents of said note? I think that, upon demonstration of Charlies request, and demonstration of Charlies lack of Spanish literacy, he would be found innocent.
So. Change "note" to "bittorrent tracker data," and "bomb plot" to "copyrighted material." Oh shit! Charlies in big trouble now!!
Re:OBT is not breaking any laws (Score:5, Insightful)
So far, we've had hosting a bittorrent tracker compared to murder and blowing up the White House.
Can we have a little perspective please? We're talking about sharing pop music and shitty hollywood movies, for god's sake. It's the equivalent of a kid sneaking into the circus, not capital crimes.
The fact that countries are being bullied into giving up their sovereignty by a bunch of greasy lawyers for the entertainment industry is a travesty.
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We're talking about sharing pop music and shitty hollywood movies, for god's sake. It's the equivalent of a kid sneaking into the circus, not capital crimes.
Unless it's an "Evil Big Company" violating the GPL on some product, and they it's a "Big Deal" again.
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That's not the point. Blowing up the White house isn't either.
You both should STFU and read my post again, and try not to freak out halfway through and jump on the reply button.
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Should someone be fined hundreds of thousands of dollars because they "pissed off" some big corporation?
I think we can finally set aside the notion that the money we spend on movies or music goes to "content creators". There are more efficient ways of supporting "content creators" than giving $18 to Sony so that they can give $0.28 to the musician who is actually the "content creator".
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How can a torrent infringe? It's the content that infringes, no?
I've looked at a torrent file in Notepad, and it does not appear to be copyrighted material.
Come on (Score:4, Informative)
Swedes, you used to be cool. What happened?
Piracy never hurt anyone more than the various industries are hurting themselves and their customers, and filesharing in itself is only a good thing. Filesharing is what the Internet is all about, and the Internet would hardly exist without it.
Hollywood, you can keep producing ridiculously expensive and wasteful movies, but you gotta come up with better excuses when you're losing money. It's never piracy. A good movie will make money no matter what, and it'll get advertised through filesharing around the world, faster than you apparently are able to do. Though it might not make a profit if you spent more than a small nation's budget to make it.
Re:Come on (Score:5, Interesting)
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I am starting to wonder if the MPAA is behind the PACT act. I just had to order 10 rolls of snus because in a month, it will be illegal to send it through the mail, and UPS is voluntarily complying. Normally I order direct from Sweden (obviously) but now my "drug" of choice, that got me to FINALLY quit smoking after 30 years, is illegal to transport, under the guise of protecting children....
Re:Come on (Score:4, Insightful)
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My bet is that the MAFIAA has choosen Sweden as their battleground. There are likely more pirates per capita here than in any other place of the world. Plus the tech industry is strong and we rely on IP rights for lots of exports such as "Swedish design." If Hollywood can win here, they will win all over the world.
And while it may appear otherwise, Sweden actually has much stricer IP laws than for example the US. There is no DMCA Safe Harbour provision or concept of fair use.
Re:Come on (Score:4, Informative)
There is no DMCA safe harbor because there is no DMCA equivalent law and there is fair use, could you please atleast glance at the Swedish IP law before spouting off misinformation? (Fair Use in Sweden is almost exactly the same as in the US, you can make copies of anything you own, you can share with friends and family etc)
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"you can make copies of anything you own"
Actually you don't have to own it. The only requirement (added in 2005) is that the original you make the copy from was not created in an infringing way and that it is not made available to the public in an infringing way. In addition, computer software is excluded completely as well as complete or substansial parts of books. You are also only allwed to make a few such copies of each work.
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I think what the parent post meant was that the *AA has decided that if they can knock over Sweden, the rest of Europe will fall like dominos to the *AA's will, which of course is to outlaw all filesharing entirely.
Re:Come on (Score:4, Insightful)
This is not sense, logic, reason or "what's good".
This is Spar... I mean, this is the law!
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Given the strange accounting practices in Hollywood it's incredible that anyone has the slightest idea
Re:Come on (Score:5, Interesting)
First off: Unions have their place. In certain situations, they are necessary to prevent a lot of atrocious behavior.
Having said that, very few unions are worthwhile these days. Most of them just exist to make sure people get more wages than their work is worth. They even out the good and back workers as well, making sure that nobody can get ahead for doing a good job and guaranteeing that nobody works extra hard because of it.
California is the only place I have lived that actually needs unions still. The attitude of employers out there is astonishing. They seem to think that anything they can get away with is acceptable. Unions keep them in check.
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Unions have become a self perpetuating bureaucracy.
http://www.jerrypournelle.com/ [jerrypournelle.com]
"Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. Examples in education would be teachers who work and sacrifice to teach children, vs. union representative who work to protect any teacher including the most incompetent. The Iron Law states that in all
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"Having said that, very few unions are worthwhile these days. Most of them just exist to make sure people get more wages than their work is worth."
And who determines what work is worth? Why should human beings who have ownership of capital get to determine how much work is worth? The market is not efficient or even good much of the time at pricing and if you believe it is this you are incredibly stupid.
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I think its more about half the budget being for one actor then anything else.
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FTFY.
Seriously, have you read the news about the trial? The prosecution was totally ignorant about how BitTorrent works, tried to introduce evidence mid-trial, and the court after convicting them for $3.5 million and one year of jail, said "responsibility for assistance can strike som
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Suggesting that Hollywood were bribing judges is a serious allegation. I submit that TPB simply had incompetent representation.
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Sweden do not produce crap for the world, creativity is not one of their well known skills.
Umm.. I think these old geezers [youtube.com] are pretty creative.
You can stop the madness. (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.piratpartiet.se/donate
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They can't do that, that would be illegal (since the pirate party is a political party).
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That would be both illegal (as we're a political party) and futile (as we do not keep any such records). We have no idea who gives us money.
The Reason for This Subpoena (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the reason for the subpoena is that the Hollywood gang thinks that the people behind Open Bittorrent and The Pirate Bay are the same.
Right after the PB trial there was a lot of discussion regarding whether TPB would have been illegal if it hadn't done so much. For example, TPB was convicted because they were actually hosting torrent files, which caused them to fall under a different law than, for example, and ISP. But what if the illegal parts were dropped? Why, you'd be untouchable. The problem is then, is there a way to distribute the functionality of TPB so that the constituent websites are all legal, but taken together, they provide exactly the same service as TPB?
A little while later, Open Bittorrent opened up.
So when the next lawsuit comes up, it will not be Hollywood vs. one site that in itself isn't illegal, but Hollywood vs. a bunch of sites that taken together are claimed to be illegal. However, in order for this to work, there must be proof that the websites are really connected. That's what they're going for.
My prediction: OpenBittorrent will be convicted. TPB was found guilty because they received and hosted torrent files, which in turn triggered liability. You don't have to actually host illegal copies, as long as you receive, store information for a longer period of time than (roughly) the actual transmission of the information, and then send it to one or more consumers, you do not have "common carrier" immunity under Swedish law, and must not only not host illegal content - you must not host anything connected with any illegal acts. Such as a torrent file that is used for illegal purposes.
Now OpenBittorrent doesn't host torrent files. But it does host something else - the list of peers. It is a tracker, after all.
So I think any OBT trial will be pretty much like TPB trial. The TPB verdict showed that it is very easy (almost too easy) to become an accessory to a crime in Sweden.
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TPB wasn't convicted by a technical argument, they were convicted because the court became convinced that they actively encouraged and profited by Piracy, that makes OBT quite a different case.
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True, the court did find that. But the law they used only requires "willful ignorance", so while different, I suspect that the same law will be used again - especially since it is the only law I know of that defines the rights and responsibilities for an internet service provider (not just providers of connectivity, but also websites etc.).
If OBT is found to be completely unaffiliated with any websites or organizations that do actively commit copyright infringement, then proving "willful ignorance" is that
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Yes, they might still be convicted (I really need to get around to reading the TPB ruling properly sometime) but I think it's unlikely they'll be convicted by the same argument that TBB was.
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"they were convicted because the court became convinced that they actively encouraged and profited by Piracy,"
The fact that they profited, or not, is completely irrellevant for the question if they did anything illegal or not. It is an issue when determining the ammount of money they would have to pay though.
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It's relevant because the law is largely designed to make commercial distribution illegal while allowing private, thus profit becomes an important part of the legal argument.
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you must not host anything connected with any illegal acts. Such as a torrent file that is used for illegal purposes.
Your argument basically makes Google illegal, so doesnt really wash. While it may very well be that as-written, Google is illegal in the country, we know that in fact it is not considered so in-practice.
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you must not host anything connected with any illegal acts. Such as a torrent file that is used for illegal purposes.
Your argument basically makes Google illegal, so doesnt really wash.
Actually, what you just said would be true - if it weren't for the fact that Google actively removes links to infringing content. So yes, if you link to a webpage that links to an illegal torrent, you are guilty. But if you remove the link on request you are considered in the clear.
During the Pirate Bay trial, this distinction was made, and it was made clear that Google's compliance with DMCA takedown letters is the only thing that keeps them from being sued.
TPB's compliance with DMCA takedowns (or the Swed
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Actually, what you just said would be true - if it weren't for the fact that Google actively removes links to infringing content.
Google does not remove links to links to links to infringing content.
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Actually, what you just said would be true - if it weren't for the fact that Google actively removes links to infringing content.
Google does not remove links to links to links to infringing content.
They do. See here [chillingeffects.org], and you'll see a list of URLs that aren't themselves copies of "Avatar", but that are pages that link to a torrent or something similar. You'll also see search pages that link to pages that in turn link to the content. (The "http://torrentreactor.net/search.php" ones.)
Now whether this post will be removed... well, we'll have to just wait and see.
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Even if I agree with the rest of your post, there's a little something that I find somewhat objectionable, if only because it's impossible to apply in a rational way without incurring in a double standard:
So yes, if you link to a webpage that links to an illegal torrent, you are guilty.
And if I link to a webpage that links to a webpage that links to an illegal torrent? And if I link to a webpage that links to a webpage that links to a webpage that links to an illegal torrent? And if... Well, you get the idea.
I really have no idea exactly where the line is drawn. Ultimately it comes down to case law.
Do I have to check every link of every webpage I link to, and every link of each of the linked pages, and so on and so forth, to the Infinite and Beyond?
No, it appears that the MPAA/RIAA will do that for you. :)
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So when the next lawsuit comes up, it will not be Hollywood vs. one site that in itself isn't illegal, but Hollywood vs. a bunch of sites that taken together are claimed to be illegal. However, in order for this to work, there must be proof that the websites are really connected. That's what they're going for. My prediction: OpenBittorrent will be convicted.
Basically TPB had one huge problem during their defense, they knew both what was being shared (as per their torrent site) and who was sharing it (as per their tracker) and the information was all linkable in-house via the infohash they possessed. But in this case I would say that unless they've screwed up really bad, there'll be nothing formally binding TPB and OBT together. Even if there were, I'm sure a truly independent tracker would appear in no time.
The Pirate Bay hosts torrents still, but they are no
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But in this case I would say that unless they've screwed up really bad, there'll be nothing formally binding TPB and OBT together.
Well, this is the score: Peter Sunde, who was one of the four convicted of TPB, said:
Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde has informed TorrentFreak that the site will soon decentralize and stop running a BitTorrent tracker of its own. Instead they will encourage their users to use a yet to be launched third party tracker for their torrents.
48 hours later, Openbittorrent was launched.
Sunde and the four have claimed that they have sold TPB, but could not show any sales contracts or money transfers, or anything else to support that they had actually sold anything to anyone. In particular, they could not name who it was that signed the contract on behalf of the buyer.
If it is now shown that Sunde or another one of the four, or someone with ties to them are behind
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Inevietable (Score:3, Interesting)
All of this has been set in stone the moment people decided (for sheep-like herd mentality reasons) to flock to BitTorrent, a protocol that depends on centralized trackers and search engines.
BitTorrent is in fact a giant step backwards from the traditional P2P systems that preceded it and light years behind systems like Winny or PerfectDark which feature not only decentralized search but also end-to-end encryption, encrypted disk caches and routing that attempts to provide full anonymity.
But then again, some people are incapable of learning about foibles of fads any other way then the hard way.
I foresee that within few years we will see a rapid decline of BitTorrent, after majority of trackers and search websites are brought down by a combination of draconian penalties, scare tactics aimed at ISPs and similar aggressive measures .... at which point sanity will prevail over fashion and the development in distributed (and thus for all practical purposes unkillable) systems will resume again.
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The newer bit-torrent clients support both decentralized tracking and searching.
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Both of which are after-thought, duct-tape-and-chewing-gum add ons which are incompatible between clients and which suffer from all sorts of swarm fragmentation issues and other flaws brought on by severe deficiencies of the BitTorrent protocol in this area.
BitTorrent was not designed to support such functionality and even with these desperate modifications it is still way behind on other features, such as anonymizing routing, store encryption, steganography etc. In fact by the time you get BitTorrent to d
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I doubt we'll see those features in consumer p2p applications because they'll probably make the speed suck..
Re:Inevietable (Score:4, Interesting)
Will see? Winny, Share and PerfectDark are fairly old systems that dominate the Japanese P2P scene for many years now. All of them have the features I mentioned, in addition to built-in bulletin-boards, message streams and what not.
Speed problems in the USA and many other places have nothing whatsoever to do with these protocols, but everything to so with pathetic broadband services. BitTorrent is "faster" then older P2P technologies only because it was introduced later when broadband became more available and the general public, in its usual brainless way, decided that BitTorrent was somehow responsible for their perceived speed increase.
In fact BitTorrent has no speed advantage whatsoever when compared to many other P2P protocols, many of them based on exactly the same idea of dividing files into chunks and exchanging them individually.
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And you forget that Japan has 100 Megabit fiber for $20/month. They can have inefficient, multi-hop routing, bandwidth hogging protocols, because they have tons of bandwidth. Inside the country, anyway.
I wouldn't say that (Score:2)
I2P can reach speeds an order of magnitude faster than, say, Tor. You still have to have patience for large torrents, but they do get through just fine ...and with a very high degree of anonymity.
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I'm not sure, as time progresses more and more people I know are moving away from BitTorrent due to these actions, but not to more decentralised protocols, but to less decentralised services such as rapidshare, etc...
I personally don't understand why. It's like a massive step back, even worse than going to back to FTP due to all the restrictions unless you pay to be a "premium" member. Not to mention that it's even more centralised than before, it makes no sense to me.
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It will last only as long the copyright crusaders take their time to get around to targeting the Rapidshares of the world. Once they go after these sites and after a few spectacular 20-year prison convictions for some of their owners, that loophole will disappear as well. Just a matter of time
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You honestly think that'd put it to rest? They've tried that (though with civil rather than criminal court), and it blew straight up in their faces. Even the RIAA, slow dinosaurs that they are, seemed to realize that their strategy of "making examples" of everyone from soldiers to Grandma was not exactly influencing publi
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It may take the demise of normal Bittorrent before pent up demand for sharing leads people in a new direction.
In the case of I2P, at least its being steadily developed and has continued to grow for over 5 years now. I think this reflects the great care the devs have been taking to create something that is entirely decentralized, anonymous with encrypted onion routing, yet has acceptable transfer speeds.
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I think a technology such as I2P is likely to be a part of it. Note the word "part". The general dufus public is simply not ready to set up individual components to assemble them into a working system. What is required is a simple to install application that covers all the required functionality out of the box. This is what a major part of appeal of systems like BitTorrent is, all you need is a single program and your web browser. Any soccer mom can pull this off.
Until we have an all-in-one solution like t
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You clearly were not following the PirateBay legal wrangling developments. Hosting mere magnets is no longer an excuse that lets you avoid legal assault by the copyright crusaders. This was in fact the cornerstone of the massive defeat PirateBay has suffered and set the precedent for all future sites.
Google will also be required to filter all "magnet" or "torrent" links, and is already doing some filtering.
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I already mentioned that Google is gearing up to filter all "torrent" and "magnet" links out, thus avoiding any legal responsibility.
Then they'll be called something else. "downpour" and "lodestone", perhaps. And it'll be a few years before the **AA's catch on and force those to me filtered, too. And then we'll move on to 'rain' and
'attraction' links... etc..etc.
It's the circle of life.
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The point is of course that none of this is necessary. A P2P system far superior to BitTorrent can be constructed that is completely immune to these stunts.
If you insist on depending on pathetic kludges like BitTorrent, the media conglomerates do not even need to eradicate all related websites to be successful, they only need to Balkanize and fracture the sharers into hundreds of small camps each independent of another (say "private trackers") which have no overlap and in which scenario locating a file wou
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Pirate bay tracker has been offline for ages now. What the courts decided was that PirateBay itself "facilitated copyright infringement" and that is enough for both torrent
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This is of course largely irrelevant. I hold the entire copyright scheme illogical and contrary to basic properties of information, but even if it is so, what counts is what judges and men with guns call "infringement" and "aiding and abetting". Logic and reason have no place at the table in this contest. And since these men are all pretty much in the pockets of the "big media" ...
Note that not so long ago Sweden and other Nordic countries were thought to be lands of reason and restraint in this area ... b
will appeal (Score:5, Informative)
apparently the article was written before word reached torrentfreak about an important development.
teliasonera says it feels so strongly about user privacy that it will take the matter all the way to the swedish supreme court.
"'what we have done today is to announce to the public that we will appeal,' patrik hiselius, the senior adviser of public affairs of the swedish-finnish firm told AFP, adding the company had until june 7th to submit its appeal."
more here [thelocal.se]
- js.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
warning: nuances ahead
they may be convinced that casual personal copyright infringing, even when nearly everyone's doing it, doesn't present a threat to society so grave the "remedy" requires eroding personal civil liberties.
end of nuances
- js.
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IP Range (Score:2)
shredding? (Score:4, Insightful)
Can't they just do what governments and big companies do? Say 'golly gosh, all that got accidentally shredded, we have launched an internal inquiry whose results will remain secret' ?
Foreign Spider Webs (Score:2)
Here we go again. A poster in America now must be concerned about foreign laws. Foreign laws should only effect foreign people.
Re:it's not the justice... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:it's not the justice... (Score:4, Insightful)
The answer was another lie; equivalent to "The original statement was that swedish police should not hunt these criminals. We have other methods for that." which essentially means that it's okay to pass laws that lets the Hollywood lawyers play police.
There is a difference between criminal and civil law. Police enforce criminal law, and private citizens enforce civil law.
Are you claiming that private citizens play police when they enforce defamation law? or other delicts (torts in Common Law traditions)? No.
Decriminalizing something like copyright law does not automagically make it ok to do no matter what. When OJ was found innocent of murder, he was still found civilly liable for her "wrongful death". Doing harm to others still results in a responsibility... just not necessarily under criminal penal law.
Individuals are entirely responsible for enforcing their rights, and claims in civil court. So far, nothing you've attributed to the politician is a lie... it may be misleading if you don't understand the intricacies of law...
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There's your problem, right there.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
There's your problem, right there.
... on the other hand our sentences isn't decided on who's got the most money.
Re:it's not the justice... (Score:4, Interesting)
Decriminalizing something like copyright law does not automagically make it ok to do no matter what.
One problem though: there's nothing to decriminalize about it, at least not in Sweden.
Just make sure the judge you get is not a board member of a copyright lobby group [gizmodo.com].
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Are you claiming that private citizens play police when they enforce defamation law? or other delicts (torts in Common Law traditions)? No.
The point is that ordinary citizens don't have police powers. Oh, you can think that IP 1.2.3.4 defamed you and go to the civil courts and maybe they'll subpoena the ISP but you can't demand that subscription information yourself. Unless you are in Sweden and the accusation is copyright violation, then IPRED says the ISP just have to hand it over to whoever asks with no oversight. There is in fact less requirements for the MAFIAA private police than it is for the real police, they actually have to have a re
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But ACTA would apply to Sweden, US, Canada, France, New Zealand,... [youtube.com].
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In Sweden, all crimes were investigated by the police - until IPRED. As far as I know, there's no difference between criminal and civil law - if it's again some law then it's criminal. We don't have the lawsuit paradigm over here.
Then again, I'm not a Swedish lawyer, are you?
The distinction in the USA is that criminal law can be punished with jail time, while civil law generally cannot (the only thing that can, is contempt of civil court).
Straight from the Wikipedia article for IPRED: "The directive covers the remedies that are available in the civil courts, but not criminal offenses."
From Swedish Wikipedia we have Civilprocess [wikipedia.org] which covers civil lawsuits in Sweden, that are not criminal law.
Sometimes civil law and criminal law overlap. (Something that is a crime typically als
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If he then forms a law which help copyright holders find out the personal data of people infringing on copyright to prosecute them for that he has turned them all into criminals which may be punished for a very common crime made by millions of people.
No. He has not made them criminals. If I slander someone else, then even if I am found at fault in court, I am still not a "criminal", because I have not violated a criminal statute.
In fact, (at least in the USA) some civil suits don't even hold that something wrong was done at all. There is an idea of "unjust enrichment", where no one did anything wrong, but one party benefited, by accident, from the acts of another.
The young(?) copyright infringing population is still at risk of getting punished and seen as criminals, something he said we couldn't have.
Just because they're not criminals, does not mean that they might not be "punished". The
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Copyright infringement is a criminal offense in Sweden.
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Copyright infringement is a criminal offense in Sweden.
It is also most definitely a civil offense. In fact, IPRED establishes the civil legal issues of coypright, rather than criminal.
Then also according to http://www.sweden.gov.se/sb/d/10634/a/117091 [sweden.gov.se], "Infringements of intellectual property rights can also result in criminal sanctions such as fines or imprisonment, but this is more of a complement to the civil remedies."
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Jesus christ. You expect people to actually read that? I'll sum up how the lack of formatting made it appear.
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa bbbbbbbbbbbbbbb ccccccccccccccc ddddddddddddddd eeeeeeeeeeeeeee fffffffffffffff ...
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa bbbbbbbbbbbbbbb ccccccccccccccc ddddddddddddddd eeeeeeeeeeeeeee fffffffffffffff
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa bbbbbbbbbbbbbbb ccccccccccccccc ddddddddddddddd eeeeeeeeeeeeeee fffffffffffffff
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa bbbbbbbbbbbbbbb ccccccccccccccc ddddddddddddddd eeeeeeeeeeeeeee fffffffffffffff
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa bbbbbbbbbbbbbbb ccccccccccccccc ddddddddddddddd eeeeeeeeeeeeeee fffffffffffffff
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa bbbbbbbbbbbbbbb ccccccccccccccc ddddddddddddddd eeeeeeeeeeeeeee fffffffffffffff
cant you fuck it up (Score:2)
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ACTA will be next [youtube.com] and make IPRED worse.
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Seems a number of domains/hostnames are returning 127.0.0.1 - two that I tried are openbittorrent.com and tracker.thepiratebay.org).
I hope the registrars will be refunding the registration fees for these domains. And that they be sued for breach of contract.
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openbittorrent.com. 172800 IN NS ns1.idnz.net.
openbittorrent.com. 172800 IN NS ns2.idnz.net.
openbittorrent.com. 172800 IN NS ns3.idnz.net.
ns1.idnz.net.
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As a responsible DNS operator, they redirected the traffic in such a way as to not cause unnecessary bandwidth to their old provider, until they switch to a new host. This DNS blackholing of traffic is perfectly understandable and legitimate IMHO.