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."
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: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.
Re:it's not the justice... (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
You can stop the madness. (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.piratpartiet.se/donate
Re:Come on (Score:2, Informative)
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:it's not the justice... (Score:1, Informative)
Another swede here. Parent is completely right, but despite all this, IPRED has become mostly toothless in fighting individual filesharers. There is another old law that says that information about who has what IP has to be thrown away when it's not neccesary anymore (most people have dynamic IPs I believe), and ISPs (even the larger ones) have started removing logs in compliance with this law, so when they get an IPRED inquiry they can just answer "we don't know".
Thanks to this, though, the police has complained that they can't trace communication in real crimes anymore (in swedish [sverigesradio.se]), meaning it's not just ineffective but damaging. The data retention directive would change this, of course, but with the pirate movement, we might be able to evade it.
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)
Re:Inevietable (Score:3, Informative)
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 do all these things, it won't be BitTorrent anymore but a poor approximation of one of the P2P protocols I mentioned earlier.
Clear answer is of course a P2P protocol that was designed with all of these things in mind from ground-up, i.e. a protocol that assumes a severely hostile environment.
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.
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.