IsoHunt Settles With MPAA, Will Shut Down And Pay Up to $110 Million 245
hypnosec writes "The MPAA and Gary Fung, owner of IsoHunt.com, have settled their case out of court, with the torrent indexing site closing as part of the deal. The judge presiding over the MPAA vs. IsoHunt.com case, Jacqueline Chooljian, canceled the hearing which was planned after she was informed that both the parties have settled outside court. 'The website isoHunt.com today agreed to halt all operations worldwide in connection with a settlement of the major movie studios' landmark copyright lawsuit against the site and its operator Gary Fung' reads the press release."
Only a few days after the MPAA was accosted by the judge for seeking damages several times the total worth of isoHunt: "But if you strip him of all his assets — and you’re suggesting that a much lesser number of copyright infringements would accomplish that, where is the deterrence by telling the world that you took someone’s resources away because of illegal conduct entirely or 50 times over?" Still, the settlement seems unfair: The MPAA has asked the court for $110 million, when the MPAA itself admitted that isoHunt only has $5 or $6 million. So much for the optimism for isoHunt's successor.
The more you tighten your grip (Score:5, Insightful)
The more will slip through your fingers.
Distributed architecture, anyone? (Score:5, Insightful)
Dysfunctional legal system. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Distributed architecture, anyone? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yup, and this is why I'm a ham fighting to keep shortwave clear of RFI.
And why I would encourage all hams to experiment with UHF, with a view to taking back centralised private ownership of the modern popular internetwork.
Proportionality (Score:5, Insightful)
Still, the settlement seems unfair: The MPAA has asked the court for $110 million, when the MPAA itself admitted that isoHunt only has $5 or $6 million.
The legal system does not hand out punishment on the basis of whether or not the defendant can pay for it; It hands it out on the basis of how much harm was done. If you run someone over and they're a cripple for the rest of their life, the Judge doesn't say "Well, you only got $20 and a cracker... so give me the $20 and we're even." You are fined and jailed on the basis of how much pain and suffering that person endured.
Unfortunately, the law says that every time you share an MP3, god kills $150,000 worth of kittens. Statutory damages don't allow for any discretion on the part of the judge. Thank Congress for that.
And the argument can also be made that proportional damages levied against very wealthy individuals or corporations is good practice, though it doesn't often happen. Fining people for dumping millions of gallons of toxic waste into the ocean the maximum $50,000 per infraction means they just video tape the whole thing, send in the tape and a check for $50,000 because it's cheaper than going to court, and much, much cheaper than disposing of the waste properly. But alas, that is not how the law is written.
The system is totally broken, but let's endeavor to be specific in our criticism of it... rather than simply saying "Oh that's unfair!" ... Fairness is relative. Justice shouldn't be.
Re:Fortunately we still have Google. (Score:5, Insightful)
The takedowns mostly consist of links to forums that link to filelocker sites which have also been DMCAed, so they are of limited use in finding infringing files. Sure, a determined pirate can use them to follow a trail, but it's a lot of work.
Oh, pirates. Request for you. Those NFO files? Include hashes. File size, ed2k, aich, btih, sha1 and tth. That covers all the major hash-search-capable p2p networks. That way even if all the filelocker links are down, people can still try to use the hashes to aid in their quest.
Re:Is anybody surprised? (Score:2, Insightful)
some technical fault in Tor
That technical fault is called "PRISM". When you have the "metadata" of all the packets on the internet, you can watch the packet leave your computer, bounce around all the tor routers, arrive at the "hidden" service and the response packet come back without needing to know what's in it. Have your guy sit there and hit reload on silk road enough times and all the other packets become background noise. Tor openly admits it has a timing attack problem, and that's exactly what the government has been doing. They don't need to know what's in your packet, they can go to the silk road website themselves and guess. Same with the kiddy porn sites.
From there, it's just a matter of sending some guy to canada to mail a bunch of fake IDs to the guy and letting canadian post know that they should open the box with the red sticker on it, and suddenly you have a real case against the guy and don't have to mention anything to anyone about how you really found him.
Freedom Hosting's downfall was running tormail. All the pedos that got swept up was just icing on the cake to distract everyone from the real target. Weeks later Lavabit goes down, then Silent Circle.
Re:another solution, proven to work (Score:5, Insightful)
That might kind of work. Another method that's proven to work is called "Netflix", aka "Amazon Prime". You want them to spend a few million dollars making something cool for you to watch, you pony up ninety-nine cents. You get what you want, the costs are covered and everyone is happy.
Except for the little detail that the most popular stuff that gets torrented is point blank not available from those sources.
ISOhunt had 5-6 million dollars?!? (Score:5, Insightful)
ISOhunt had 5-6 million dollars - presumably from hosting ads along with links?
That makes the "we weren't hosting any infringing content ourselves" defense, which I've always been sympathetic toward, somewhat inconsequential.
The fact that the site (owners) profited to the tune of multiple millions of dollars by facilitating copyright infringement kind of rubs me the wrong way. Had they done it for not much more than hosting fees I'd be more aligned with them receiving a "shut down, now" penalty.
And before I'm called a corporate shill, I fight the mess that copyright laws have become by boycotting the big content producers. They haven't made one single cent from me in many years, nor have I pirated any of their content. I've learned that I just don't need what they're selling.
Re:Dysfunctional legal system. (Score:4, Insightful)
Punchline: Even with all the grocery stores gone the people still cannot afford to dine in the restaurant, and some cant even enter because 'we dont serve people living in your neighborhood'.
Re:let's look and see (Score:4, Insightful)
They may work in the US but try in my country and you don't get to even see that they exist.
Re:Fortunately we still have Google. (Score:4, Insightful)
Freenet already has the locations of all users hidden. It's possible for a listener to determine you are using freenet, but not what you inserted or what you are retrieving. Likewise, no takedown capability.
Pirates do use freenet, but not much. That's because all that privacy comes with a performance penalty: Freenet is *slow*. Same applies to Tor.