MPAA to Sue BitTorrent Tracker Servers

Mirkon writes "The Register and Reuters report that the Motion Picture Association of America is planning to begin a legal assault on websites that host BitTorrent trackers for copyrighted movie files. An announcement is supposed to be made by the MPAA President/CEO today, along with help from CEO of private P2P network developer Red Swoosh, and the CEO of BayTSP, 'which offers file-branding and -tracking applications.' Not that they have any vested interests in this of course. Though the articles take care to mention that this action is not against standard users, how long is it until BitTorrent itself is targeted?" Apropos of nothing, I saw a movie in the theaters a few days ago. At the official start time, the lights dimmed. Then there were 14 minutes of commercials (Pepsi, hair mousse, cologne, etc.) followed by 13 minutes of movie trailers (which are also advertising), followed by a few minutes of junk, followed by a 100-minute movie. I can't imagine why people would want to download movies when they have that great theater experience to compare against.

ATTENTION

Please make sure you do not link to Bittorrent sites here on Slashdot, such as suprnova.org [suprnova.org]. If you do, then Slashdot will become liable as they'll be linking to a site that links to copyright materials.

Also, if that happens, please make sure you remove all links to Slashdot, or links to sites that link to Slashdot, as you'll also be liable.

P.S. michael, we're sorry you didn't like Blade Trinity, but Triple H was pretty hot, right?

Woo!

Apropos of nothing, I saw a movie in the theaters a few days ago. At the official start time, the lights dimmed. Then there were 14 minutes of commercials (Pepsi, hair mousse, cologne, etc.) followed by 13 minutes of movie trailers (which are also advertising, of course), followed by a few minutes of junk, followed by a 100-minute movie.

Wow--heavy, insightful stuff. Looks like somebody is gunning for a Pulitzer!

Advertising

Apropos of nothing, I saw a movie in the theaters a few days ago. At the official start time, the lights dimmed. Then there were 14 minutes of commercials (Pepsi, hair mousse, cologne, etc.) followed by 13 minutes of movie trailers (which are also advertising, of course), followed by a few minutes of junk, followed by a 100-minute movie.

How many of you remember MTV, Nickelodeon, and other cable-only channels were originally commercial-free back in the early 80's?

Just because these media conglomerates are making money off of you directly doesn't mean they won't try to make it indirectly as well.

Dan East

Re:Advertising

Not only were they commercial free, that was part of the advertising plan to get people to switch to cable ' its commercial free'..

That lasted a long time didnt..

Re:Advertising

How many of you remember MTV, Nickelodeon, and other cable-only channels were originally commercial-free back in the early 80's?

Ad free television??? You Can't Do That On Television! [ycdtotv.com]

Best. Show. EVER.

Reform

So, the MPAA is putting comercials in the movies, sueing people that might help support the effort for movie sharing. Are they hurting for money????? I have not seen any reports on it.

So, is there a way to reform that indusrty? Or, are we just screwed. Will it become like tv where the movies get shorter just to make room for more comercials and how long until there are comercials in the middle of movies?

Re:Reform

So, is there a way to reform that indusrty? Or, are we just screwed.

Are they forcing you to watch their shite? No. Yet you cannot, for whatever reason, seem to look away.

The key: look away.

Don't consume mass media, either free or for a fee. Just look the heck away. They will then reform themselves, or die.

Write your own stories. Make your own movies. Who cares if they're "crap"; share them with friends and give em to strangers. Do anything you can, just don't feed the established media industry.

Start creating. Stop consuming.

I know. Unrealistic hippie talk. Lay off the crack pipe. Blah blah blah...

SWAP in person!

Again, I must proclaim this awesome website I found a few months ago:

WWW.MEDIACHEST.COM !! It's awesome. You can catalog (even use a CueCat if you got one) your entire movie, book, CD, game collection, and place the titles online for others to browse. Meet people in your neighborhood, get together with them, and swap your stuff. Watch each other's movies, read each other's books. Last I checked there is no law against that. (Yet).

And you get to venture outside, and blink haphazardly at the bright yellow object in the sky that you may not have seen in a while. And maybe make a new friend with like interests.

(Check my sig for a link to the website)

Re:SWAP in person!

that this site is of no use whatsoever to anyone who has the good luck not to live in the USA,

So, what, he shouldn't have mentioned it unless he can solve the problem for the entire freaking world?

nor is it actually P2P

Actually, it is the most P2P method of sharing imaginable. It's Person 2 Person without the computers in the way.

What if...

But the sites themselves do not carry the files. They only have information about the trackers, and are not involved in the actual distribution or sharing of the files.

So how do they plan to sue them?

As far as the last paragraph in the article... I don't know what to say... Let's say I wrote a new program to copy files from one destination to another and someone used it to copy a bunch of MP3's and movies, I guess the RIAA/MPAA can knock down my door and come get me... even though I had the totally benign idea to simply copy files from one place to another...

I guess they should attack any file transferring program no-matter how benign it is? That's like saying let's put the gun in prison instead of the guy that fired it.

Re:What if...

What they're going to argue is that the tracker sites are designed and operated specifically for the distribution of copyrighted materials. We might like to think they're on shaky ground with that kind of argument, but legally they have a pretty good chance of winning if certain things are evident.

1: Jurisdiction.

2: Intent.

Jurisdiction is something the MPAA has been good at manipulating for years. They'll find a way to get jurisdiction over anyone they actually sue, or mirrors, etcetera. Intent will be really easy in case of sites like Suprnova that have entire sections named off for things like Movies, Comics, Music, Games, etcetera. The sub-grouping of categories, show titles and other such breakdowns within those areas I listed above will be the most presentable evidence used to show "Hey, these people knew they were distributing copies of X TV show or music by this specific artist - they have a section with X's name on it.".

Re:What if...

Suprnova is located in Slovenia, who apparently doesn't care or has yet to care about what they do.

We should applaud this...

The fact that the RIAA and MPAA are now going after the people breaking copyright law instead of writing legislation aimed at crippling technology and suing service providers is a good thing.

Now, of course there are still some stupid hybrid technological/legal measures they're pushing like 5C encryption and the broadcast flag. But if unlawful uses of file sharing/copying/archiving diminish due to fear of individual suits, then legitimate fair use will become a significant part of what is being prevented by these measures and they'll hopefully stop or be forced to stop them. Hopefully.

Rolling the same joke just once more...

MPAA: What happen ?
Minion: Somebody set up us the Tracker.
Minion: We get packet.
MPAA: What !
Minion: Packet Sniffer turn on.
MPAA: It's you !!
Torrents: How are you gentlemen !!
Torrents: All your MOVIES are belong to us.
Torrents: You are on the way to destruction.
MPAA: What you say !!
Torrents: You have no chance to survive make your time.
Torrents: Ha Ha Ha Ha ....
MPAA: Sue every Tracker!!
MPAA: You know what you doing.
MPAA: For great PROFIT.

Finnish Police & BSA Busted BitTorrent Site

Tuesday, 14 December 2004

Early this morning National Bureau of Investigation and BSA have busted finnish BitTorrent link site Finreactor for distributing copyrighted material worth of million euros.

According to sources, NBI raided the admins homes today and seized all the computer equipment and storage media for further investigation, but released the suspects shortly after the raid. The site itself has been down since early hours of today. Site had over 37,000 registered members and had links to more than 6,000 pirated releases on BitTorrent network.

Read the Full story [2039.org].

PS. If you are finnish, read this [waymeet.net].

Which would work great, except...

.. that the BitTorrent trackers will just migrate to places like Russia and China, where there are no intellectual property laws to speak of, and where the Clerk of the Court would laugh if a lawyer for the MPAA tried to file a lawsuit against people for running trackers.

What are they going to try next? Snooping on people's personal net connections at home? They'll add a trivial encryption layer to BitTorrent - just try and prove what's being transferred over that link to Russia. Firewall China and Russia off from the rest of the Internet? Make encryption illegal? I don't think (or rather, I desperately hope) that people will accept such measures.

The information genie is out of the bottle. Business models that rely on the sale of information are doomed. It may take 50 years for them to finally give up on these models - they'll fight tooth and nail to save them, since they essentially rake in mountains of cash for doing nothing except copying digital media, which is now practically free. The long, slow decline of the viability of selling information has begun.

On the other hand, the active propagation of disinformation in schools has successfully managed to convince many people that "drugs are bad, mmmmmkay..." in the absence of any rational logical supports for the arbitrary classification of certain drugs as "bad", and others as "not drugs". (Only certain drugs - caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol are socially acceptable and legal; marijuana is (somehow) not, even though alcohol clearly has far more deleterious social and personal health effects).

Perhaps they'll wage a similar disinformation campaign to indoctrinate our children to believe in the sacredness of intellectual property, and thus get people to accept that encryption should be illegal, to prevent information piracy....

Here's the great irony

Ah, but you forget that they need encryption for their DVDs. And here's the beautiful part: once they add an encryption layer to BitTorrent, it will be impossible to sue anybody over movie sharing. Thanks to the DMCA, if they sue you, they obviously illegally broke encryption somewhere along the line and would be liable themselves (as well as nullifying their evidence). So they're heading to an oh-so-delicious Catch-22. If they lobby to repeal the DMCA, it will become legal to crack DVDs. If they don't lobby, they can't legitmately find out who's actually trading movies.

Of course, they'll then sue for the movie rights.

Re:Vote with dollars

The only ad that pissed me off is the one about copying movies, getting really tired of seeing it, and I see it several times a month. I don't copy movies, I go to see them in theatres. Yet after giving my money to the theatre I need to learn a lesson about how stealing is wrong.

ugh. /rant

Re:Vote with dollars

If that ad really bugs you, just download a cam version of the movie...they usually edit out the commercials.

Re:Vote with dollars

The way to deal with it is vote with your dollars.

I thought I was!

But apparently suprnova is now going to get sued because of it.

actually, vote with abstention...

Someone suitably creative could create a website that tracks how much time commercials and crap take out of a movie, and POST it for all to view. The idea being that people know how many minutes they can skip before the feature starts, and avoid all the commercials. I think the very existence of a site like this, and a good amount of traffic to it, could send a powerful message: "We are NOT a captive audience!". The caveats being A) someone has to initially watch the commercials to time it, and B) you could lose a good seat :P

Re:actually, vote with abstention...

and a good amount of traffic to it, could send a powerful message...

Just think of all the revenue you could generate with popup ads on the site.

Re:Vote with dollars

The way to deal with it is vote with your dollars.

Unfortunately, this will not work. If that were the case, then only cars that don't need to advertise are the only viable ones to buy (Rolls Royce, Ferrari, Bentley, etc) And even those may advertise in higher dollar markets that I'm simply not a member of.

However, money protests may work if people demand their money back after watching an advertiser supported movie. I simply refuse to pay a rental fee for any rented movie that has ads that are blocked out by the remote. That has got to be one of the most annoying things out there. I hear that Disney does that with thier store bought DVDs.

I believe that there are simply too many mouths to feed and not enough real jobs to fill them. Its getting to the point that I feel like I'm being accosted by a begger everywhere I go, but the people begging are typically people that have more money than I do. Salesmen lying to me and badgering me all the time. Telemarketers. SPAM. Billboards. Ads are _everywhere_. Baseball has greenscreened the infield to overlay different ads, because one was not enough. Tickmaster shoves more ads down my throat and these people are a monopoly in providing different random (I love those 2 terms together) numbers to people, and asking me to PAY MORE for printing the damn tickets on my own printer and paper. Ads have been integrated into movies for some time as called "product placement" ads. I only see people drinking Dunken Doughnuts coffee in movies. Sometimes they are downright distracting to the point that I think I can hear the marketing dweebie from the paying company in the background yelling "Please keep the product label visable at all times!"

Oh, and with the MPAA. Go for it. What are you going to sue for? What are you going to get? I've never downloaded a movie off of the net because I consider it a waste of time. If I really want a movie that bad, I'll pay the $20 at a store for it.

It is about time that the members of the ??AA groups start thinking about what they are going to do about their stupid antiquated business model. Its not that difficult, but I guess these people are simply that stupid. There is supply and demand and cost is relative to that supply and demand. The demand appears to be there. I mean people spend a great amount of time downloading low quality crap all the time where the downloads don't finish, the quality is worse than they thought, the movie just sucks, and so on. If these people can't figure out a way to entice people to pay something for their product, then they deserve to go out of business like all other businesses that can't make it.

No it's not

just went to check on Suprnova to see if it's been taken down because of this, but today it has become a For Pay site! Sad day....

You probably went to suprnova.com or suprnova.net which are pay sites pretending to be suprnova. Suprnova.org looks like it still is the same as usual.

Re:I call BS...

30 solid minutes of ads?? Sorry, I don't buy it (no pun intended). I might see a one or two movies a month, and while I've never put a stopwatch to it, there is no where near an entire sitcom's length of ads before a movie.

It really depends on the theater.

Near the place I live there are several movie theaters. One is an oldish small theater. One is a big shiny megamultiplex or whatever they are called. Obviously the megamulti has bigger screens, better sound system, etc. etc. Yet I don't go there to watch movies. Why?

Because in the oldish small place they'll show me two-three trailers and then show me the movie. That's what I came there for.

In the megamulti I'll have to sit through tons and tons and tons (yes, 15-20 minutes) of commercials before they even get to the trailers. Really stupid and obnoxious ones, too. So I stopped going there.