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."
it's not the justice... (Score:0, Interesting)
...it's the lobbies.
Guess who's putting everyone down a deep hellhole?
Yep, usury.
Fuck them.
Re:OBT is not breaking any laws (Score:3, Interesting)
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 would refuse to release the individuals identity, and let the plaintiff sue me to obtain the funds, and present argument (a) again, arguing that under a reason of necessity, I am violating the law to protect the life and rights of another. c) should (b) fail, which is likely would, if it even got that far, I would likely face the penalty myself... which I would pay. Because $$$ out of my pocket is worth saving the life of another.
Re:Come on (Score:5, Interesting)
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].
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.
Persona Coletiva (Score:1, Interesting)
They should consider the many ways of forming legal collective associations. Corporations. And how to caracterize themselves as practically pro-bono collective information-flow-shaping "brokers" (a better word needed). Or information-flow Market-makers. Collateral Monetizers. Information-flow equity condensators.
Ads and donations could then be augmented by loans, fractional reserve self-lending and reciprocal exchange lending leveraged expansion. You know, standard financial banking bubblinflation. Then do a sort of open-community refund, or "bonus"-forecast advanced refund (or some other such gibberish). Distributing money to workers is socialism. Distributing it to clients (and "normal" bribes) is "market development". Distributing it to shareholders is merely good ol' healthy ideal shinig - "glorious" - capitalism.
Plus, there are tax cuts, incentives, and - ventually - bailouts. Maybe they should form up as abstract intermediation-morfing banking financial corporations. Open-community collaborative lawyers ? That sounds hefty.
Ah! Coffee is ready. I'll wake up now...
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.
Re:Inevietable (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
The truth is that most Internet users are technological illiterates and on top of that suffer from a severe case of herd mentality. They simply click on all of these "Direct Download 100x Faster!!!" ad links and then tell all their friends about these wondrous "new" ways of "getting stuff". It will take a few well-televised prosecutions of some downloader scapegoats (who all believe themselves to be immune because "downloading" is not "breaking copyright") to put that to rest.
Re:Come on (Score:3, Interesting)
Given the strange accounting practices in Hollywood it's incredible that anyone has the slightest idea which movies make a profit and which make a loss.
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.