Federal Court Issues Permanent Injunction For Isohunt 212
suraj.sun writes with this excerpt from NewTeeVee: "Judge Stephen Wilson of the US District Court of California, Southern District, issued a permanent injunction (PDF) against the popular torrent site Isohunt yesterday, forcing the site and its owner Garry Fung to immediately prevent access to virtually all Hollywood movies. The injunction theoretically leaves the door open for the site to deploy a strict filtering system, but its terms are so broad that Isohunt has little choice but to shut down or at the very least block all US visitors. ... The verdict states that they have to cease 'hosting, indexing, linking to, or otherwise providing access to any (torrent) or similar files' that can be used to download the studios' movies and TV shows. Studios have to supply Isohunt with a list of titles of works they own, and Isohunt has to start blocking those torrents within 24 hours."
Last time I checked (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Last time I checked (Score:5, Informative)
As a Canadian citizen who has visited the US a few times in the past, I'm actually scared to travel to your country, knowing what I know about what you do to some of your guests.
I'll stay up here, thanks.
Re:This proves how clueless (Score:4, Informative)
It proves how clueless the geek is about how the law works.
Re:Last time I checked (Score:5, Informative)
Vacationing is a pain in the ass too. We usually fly out from Detroit metro, so we always have a hard time in the airport coming back home. They just can't seem to grasp why Canadians from Windsor would fly out of, and into, Detroit.
Re:Last time I checked (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Last time I checked (Score:3, Informative)
I don't think North Korea is safer than US of A - just that they will treat you less like a criminal.
Re:Last time I checked (Score:3, Informative)
Living in a border city, we cross several times a year from Windsor to Detroit (shopping, sporting events, etc) and each and every time we enter the US my ass puckers up. I HATE entering the states even though I have absolutely nothing to hide... it's brutal.
Brutal? What are you subject to? I'm curious to see if your experiences are much different than mine when I fly domestic.
ISO Hunt disagrees with the summary (Score:1, Informative)
Despite rumors that we are ordered to filter by keywords for the US, there's only a proposed order, no actual order. Freedom of speech, non-infringing use and technical implementability issues are still being debated in further court briefs. We have not done any keyword filtering and are fighting all we can not to
I don't have the legal skills to know which one is right, but ISOHunt is still not actually filtering.
Re:Last time I checked (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Last time I checked (Score:5, Informative)
Good point: Mark Emery (the so-called "Prince of Pot") was extradited from Vancouver to the US yesterday to face 5 years in a US prison for selling pot seeds by mail order (which is punishable in Canada by a $200 fine).
Re:ISO Hunt disagrees with the summary (Score:4, Informative)
Despite rumors that we are ordered to filter by keywords for the US, there's only a proposed order, no actual order.
The isoHunt announcement is dated April 5 Annonucements [isohunt.com]. The permanent injunction was filed May 20th. isoHunt Permanent Injunction [scribd.com]
The court had this to say about its right to act:
The Court further clarifies that this injunction covers any acts
of direct infringement, as defined in 17 U.S.C. 106, that take place
in the United States. To the extent that an act of reproducing,
copying, distributing, performing, or displaying takes place in the
United States, it may violate 17 U.S.C. 106, subject to the generally
applicable requirements and defenses of the Copyright Act.
As
explained in the Court's December 23, 2009 Order, "United States
copyright law does not require that both parties be located in the
United States. Rather, the acts of uploading and downloading are each
independent grounds of copyright infringement liability." Summary
Judgment Order at 19. Each download or upload of Plaintiffs'
copyrighted material violates Plaintiffs' copyrights if even a single
United States-based user is involved in the "swarm" process of
distributing, transmitting, or receiving a portion of a computer file
containing Plaintiffs' copyrighted content.
Re:Last time I checked (Score:2, Informative)
C&D's are extraditable in Canada, not even from province to province. Which of course would be insane if you thought of it any other way.
Of course people like to bring out the Mark Emory thing all the time too, but they forget that in the US it's a felony, in Canada it's equivalent to the same thing. Either side of the border it's a federal crime, the only difference is the amount of punishment you get for it. Sorry potheads, but that's the way life works. Canada is still 10yrs away from decriminalizing it.
Re:Freedom (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I hear Wildcard Studios just licensed their wor (Score:3, Informative)
Trackers are needed so that the peers can locate each other efficiently. If you're downloading a file, the tracker will tell you who is hosting the various pieces so you can connect to them. Without the tracker your client would have no way to know the IP's which are hosting the file.
It's the same problem that's been present since the early days of P2P. You need to have some hosts which keep an index of the files and the IP addresses of clients which are hosting them. The RIAA can always target these sites.
Torrent trackers are static hosts with large centralized indexes, which means they are fast for clients to query but also can be easily targeted by the RIAA.
FastTrack and Gnutella get around this by offloading the tracker functionality to individual clients with high bandwith (which makes them harder to target). Each query must be forwarded from clients to their trackers, and from their trackers to other tracker nodes, and then the results must be returned the same way. This means it can take a long time for a query to complete as you wait for responses from each node.
There have been some P2P designs which eliminate tracking nodes altogether by having the clients maintain a list of close peers. The clients contact their peers which forward search requests to their list of peers and so on. Every search must be cascaded across many clients and returned from each one, so they are slow. You also must always maintain a good list of peers, or you will end up stranded from the network.
Re:Last time I checked - warning (Score:1, Informative)
Being that I live in Canada, and get more hassles going into the US then I do Japan, I wouldn't want to travel there either.
A warning to those traveling to/from Canada and South East Asia - make sure your flight doesn't stop in Hawaii. Doesn't matter if you're in transit only - they'll still send you through US customs. I had a wonderful time going through customs there for the "privilege" of seeing the airport carpark.
Re:Last time I checked (Score:4, Informative)
I hope you dont give that access to your US employees. They could be compelled to access this information for the US Government and be prevented from telling you about it because of those national security letters.