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BitTorrent Gives Hollywood a Headache
fudgefactor7 writes "Although the MPAA and the RIAA, and practically anyone else who has an interest in protecting their intellectual property rights online, are fighting against P2P programs like EDonkey, Morpheus, and Napster, BitTorrent is coming under even greater scrutiny, albeit with less actual success so far, and that is giving Hollywood a headache, since they really don't know what to do about it and they can't go to Cohen and moan. Once he let the genie out of the bottle there was no way to put it back in. And with the likes of PeerGuardian, et. al., it only gets harder for the corporations to put the virtual, and legal, smackdown on file sharing."
problem is with trackers outside of the USA...
The tracker is what facilitates the download, the person who runs the tracker has set it up with the intent to share the specific file being shared. The tracker site is typically also the root of all the sharing through being a base seeder as well. So, basicly this brings things back to the days of piracy over public FTP and HTTP download sites, just attack the one facilitating the downloads.
Man, you're so wrong. The tracker only hosts the .torrent files, if that! It's primary roll is to just keep a database of who is sharing what as that is the information the bittorrent client's request from it. This is why it's so hard for the MPAA to crack down on them, as it basically does the job of google but for a specific audience. It doesn't host or upload or share any copyright material, it just tracks those that do.
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
In some countries, like sweden, bittorrent trackers are legal. Since they do not spread copyrighted material but just link to where one can find copyrighted material.
:)
Also there is a court ruling from the BBS-time that says that the BBS administrators is NOT responsible for what the users do on the BBS (such as trading warez). It is argued that the same reasoning can be done for a torrent tracker. However if there are copyrighted material transferred without the copyrightholders approval, people that USE the tracker is still doing something illegal.
The industry has tried to remove torrents from piratebay.org, which is the biggest torrent tracker in sweden, with limited success. (they have even gotten calls from Microsoft when Halo 2 was up for downloading)
happily:
p ?f=41
r di an_2_review.cfm
:)
PeerGuardian is based around the idea of an open list of blocklists collected from known fake files/scaners etc.
The **AAs are not very sophisticated in their searching - man scans come from a very small number of ranges.
The ranges are found by:
1) Whois searching, If we know the name of the company we can easily find them by scanning whois databases. They *have* to give their company name (eg BayTSP) so they are easy to find.
2) Log comparison. PG collects a log of every ip you connect to against the time. If someone gets a letter we get them to cross-reference the time the infringement is said to be on the letter (this must legally be included) with the ips in their log. 9/10 it is an obvious IP doing the scanning that can be found.
see our forum on this topic here:
http://methlabs.org/forums/forumdisplay.ph
PeerGuardian is simply a low level firewall that blocks these ips. PeerGuardian 2 will be open source, and will update automatically.
We're also trying to make the database more open, by adding a system where all the ranges can be viewed on a webpage, and users can comment, report bad ranges, and vote on how useful a range is.
See the reviews of PG2 *closed beta* here:
http://www.afterdawn.com/guides/archive/peergua
http://www.p2private.org/review/
I expect PG2 to be out before the new year, but it will be out when its ready, not beforehand.
Thanks
Joseph Farthing
Administrator & News Editor
Methlabs.org
Joseph Farthing
http://josephfarthing.com
Or is there some technical reason that they can't do anything about them?
I believe Harlan Ellison successfully sued somebody who was posting copies of his stories to alt.binaries.e-books (or similar). He also tried to sue AOL, who settled out of court for an undisclosed sum.
See details here: http://www.authorslawyer.com/c-ellison.shtml
This is very simple:
:)
collecting the IP addresses of people connected to a tracker does not ammount to proof of infringement. You have to actually recieve some data from them to prove they are illegally transmitting copyrighted material.
Joseph Farthing
Administrator & News Editor
Methlabs.org
Joseph Farthing
http://josephfarthing.com
Perhaps because ISPs are unwilling to provide data on who downloaded what from Usenet? I know if my newsfeed did I'd switch.
I was explained to that torrents are not easily traced because all the data is sent in small packet chunks.. I think it might be in 256k chunks.
:)
And that since all these data packets are being sent randomly from various sources, it would be much more difficult to actually point a finger at a source or destination.
It was described that sure you might be able to intercept the transmition of data, but you are not witnessing the transfer of a in-tact file.
So you could see that maybe it's some sort of mpeg stream or maybe part of a larger compressed archive, but it's just a piece of it. And once the next version of the torrent system comes along with the ability to transfer without use of trackers or servers, it becomes here-say on any legal action.
So does this packet chunk bit torrent stuff actually hold true? And if not, Why?
we do *check* ranges before they go in
if someone comes onto our forum and posts a range we don't just add it without any thought.
other lists may do this but we *don't*
Joseph Farthing
http://josephfarthing.com
Well, because your IP is being blasted around to trackers and users everwhere unhidden, the RIAA could track you that way. But the most effective way would be to just go after trackers themselves.
Various trackers a while ago came under a flood of DOS attacks. We dont know who, but that they did. 100MBS connections were maxxed out in minutes. The RIAA/MPAA could do something like this similar to Lycos (now scrapped) anti-spam screensaver. Just call it an "anti-piracy screensaver" and say that by using it you lower the cost of movies as they dont need to compensate for piracy in the price as much (note: I dont actually think that they would give a deal, let alone drop prices if it was effective).
For example, the MPAA/RIAA gets a few thousand people to download the screensaver, suddenly the Pirates Cove tracker goes way overloaded and you suddenly cant get listings for people anymore. Eventually they would be able to get around it (changing DNS/IP addresses and such), but not before it knocked thousands of people off their download.
Effective? Yes, legal? Probably not, but its not the goal to crash the server, only to "increase the cost of doing buisness". As far as I know TPC does not have advertisements (though its been a while since i have been there), so they would need to rely increasingly on donations and such.
Well i suppose sometimes it makes sense for the seeder to start a tracker on his own computer, thats not the recommended way.
A properly run tracker should never host any data. Just torrents. A torrent is merely a file with checksums + some info.
How do you think for instance, www.thepiratebay.org (swedish) can stay online?
to hold up a case in court they have to actually *prove* the person is sharing the file.
/ 23 51242&tid=188&tid=123&tid=17&tid=1 06
getting a list of ips just won't be good enough without some sort of evidence
then again we have seen some stupid occasions where stupid takedown notices have been given:
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/09/20
Joseph Farthing
http://josephfarthing.com
The tracker only hosts the .torrent files
"The tracker hosts only the".
It's primary roll is to just keep a database
"Its", "role", "is just to keep".
the bittorrent client's request from it
"clients".
any copyright material, it just tracks
"copyrighted", ";".
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't Peerguardian just stop incoming and outgoing connections to it's list of banned IPs? If so, how does this stop a member of the **AA from connecting to a tracker and simply receiving the list of all the IPs connected to that torrent... How does it make a difference?
The tracker can also run peerguardian. Many people I know who run trackers also run PG.
As I said I don't know if it really is illegal, but the intent of the law is fairly clear, the tracker distinction is just a technicality.
The point of the argument was that I don't think it should matter what the tracker has, it should matter what the tracker is there to do. So I am saying:
The tracker has only one single purpose, to make illegal to download file A downloadable for users.
While the tracker does not have the file the hosts that do the distribution only do so under the organisation of the tracker.
the fact that most of us don't live in the US?
I don't know... no one has ever tried to collect logs from us - we don't keep them
its our users who have the logs.
Joseph Farthing
http://josephfarthing.com
There's some funny examples of various copyright holders' cease-and-desist-mails (and the replies they got) to a Swedish torrent site on: http://static.thepiratebay.org/legal/
One they day will get a clue and start hunting down the users instead.
Uh no, that is not how it does work. I have created many torrents and shared them on SuprNova. My local machine at home have always been the initial seed for the .torrent, never the SuprNova tracker.
Cute, but no sale.
Cassette tape didn't destroy the recorded music or movie business because it was a recording medium, not a distribution network. One person copying an album onto a tape poses no threat. One person copying a CD onto his server and offering it up to anyone with Internet access is a distinct threat.
I am not equating illegal copying with "zero legit sales". I am saying that, left unchecked, illegal copying will make it unprofitable to stay in the recorded music business. It is not necessary to reduce sales to zero. It is only necessary to reduce sales to the point at which it becomes more attractive to engage in another kind of business.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
I agree with your point but not your wording.
There is more and more quite legal content on BitTorrent (though probably not a large percentage)
That statement is very misleading and will only confuse people or incorrectly allow them to directly associate BitTorrent with other P2P apps like KaZaa and old Napster. No one including yourself has absolutely no idea what percentage of what is being offered with BitTorrent. In fact, nothing is "on" BitTorrent at all as there is no BitTorrent network in any way shape or form. Anyone anywhere can run it and provide pointers to anything. BitTorrent provides no central point for people to connect and see what trackers are offering, other then the transfer method, BitTorrent is NO different then FTP. You can not log into an FTP server and see what other FTP servers around the internet are offering either. They are completely isolated and seperate from each other. I think it is important to have the those details correct to help people understand that BitTorrent is not central to the problem of copyright violations, it is what some individuals do with BitTorrent that is questionable but again, that can happen with any protocol.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
what if the tracker is running PeerGuardian?
As I said elsewhere, sales and, hence, profits, only need to be reduced to the point that other lines of business become a more attractive investment. At that point, people will stop trying to sell CD's and DVD's because they can get a better return on their money selling something else.
And, no, it isn't ridiculous that the price of CD's and DVD's is more than the 3-5% you say the "hardware guys" accept as their profit. No one is interested in the hardware. A blank CD is no more attractive than 400 blank pages bound together as a book. It is the data and information, not the hardware, that people want. Would you by a DVD player if no DVD's were available?
I disagree that we gave "our culture" to corporations. Pop entertainment isn't much of a culture in the first place, so, even if your assertion was correct, I would not lament that fact.
It is not the responsibility of any corporation or other business to bring to the "masses" products you, or I, believe the "masses" ought to purchase. It is the responsiblity of businesses to try to sell, to as many individuals as possible, as many products as possible. If people don't like the affect of buying those products, then the blame rests with them, not the corporations.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
There was even a 30GB torrent with the 15 first simpsons seasons floating around.
*ahem* That torrent was 35.7GB, and it took a loooong fucking time to download. If the MPAA didn't want me to download it they should have released the first 15 seasons on DVD by now. But no! They've only released the first 4 seasons, with the 5 coming on December 21st. Those were aired in 1992 and 1993! What if I want to watch the more recent episodes, or even something 10 years old? I can't do it legally without waiting for the rerun to make it to TV, and with something like 400 episodes out there who knows when I could see the one I wanted.
With Bittorrent, I am able to see any episode I care to when I want.
No it doesn't always point to you.
.torrent file you add a site with an announce.php to it.
After someone else downloads and seeds you can leave and the other person can start seeding...
THere is tracker software that is being run on the servers though. It announces who is seeding and who the peers are. When you build a
The bbc was considering doing something like this but they ran into problems with the amount of money they would need to pay the actors. I think equity kicked up a fuss about 'residual' payments.
I *was* going to say that here in Canada, (thanks to a supreme court ruling) placing stuff in a shared folder is legal (because it is) and doesn't qualify as distribution of copyrighted material. But then I stopped and thought for a moment and I realized that BitTorrent might not be protected by that. It could be said that an inherent function of the program is that when you run it you send material to other people, instead of just placing it in an accessible shared folder. I'm no lawyer, but I'd say us Canadians might have to watch out in the near future after all.
With BitTorrent you are forced to share. So when you start downloading something you are also sharing copyrighted material.
You fell for a small but important trap. Just because you are downloading something doesn't mean you are downloading copyrighted material. And just because you are downloading copyrighted material it doesn't mean you are doing anything illegal. And just because you are downloading copyrighted material and at the same moment share it to other people interested in the same material you are still not doing anything illegal.
Many people distribute their own stuff with BitTorrent, because so they only need to seed the material and have maybe to handle the amount for two or three complete downloads from their site. All the other people get their data from those who already got the block in question. This is a huge bandwith saver for all involved parties. Mandrake Linux gets distributed that way for instance, and you can also get other distributions that way, completely legal.
So different than KaZaA or other file sharing networks where you have to look out to find some legitimate use, with BitTorrent it's easy.
On the other hand: The article especially points out that one of the counter technics employed by MPAA and RIAA is to put bogus files with an interesting file name up for sharing. So people searching for a special file may end up with a file with the same name but a different content. Centralized hosting of "proven" files like Napster did made them liable for copyright infringement. Calculating checksums would only help if you could compare the checksums with a trusted database, which is open to the same type of liability, because the database has to calculate the checksums by using the original files. So infecting KaZaA with bogus files and forged checksums is easy. And you know how many files everyone is actually sharing, because you can just query the client and ask. This makes KaZaA and similar systems vulnerable to two types of attacks: Tracking people distributing immense amounts of files, and poisoning the data pool with fake files.
With BitTorrent it's different. Everyone seeding a file is taking technical responsibility for the correctness of the file. But the actual data blocks are coming from other computers. The tracker keeps track of the different computers sharing exactly this file. For every other file there is another tracker. So with the tracker data you can actually find out who's sharing a specified single file, and because of checksumming you can be confident that all people listed in the tracker are sharing the same file derived from the same original data. But you don't know which files else are being shared on the same computer, because their trackers are being somewhere else. So all a copyright infringement tracking bot connecting to that tracker gets to know is information about this single file. Quite ineffective, and if you go to a judge with an IP address and tell them: "From this IP this one file was distributed" he'll probably tell you that he has more important stuff to do.
So people sharing large amounts of data don't appear any different to the bot than people just sharing a single file. And poisoning the data is also not easy, because you can't spoof someone elses seed and tracker. So you have to establish yourself as a second source, with your own seed and tracker, and if you don't provide correct data, your seed will die out soon. There may be an attack possible if you hack BitTorrent yourself (it's GPLed, after all), and if you take part of the actually ongoing BitTorrent sharing, but send fake blocks to every request you get. But then the checksumming will detect you quite soon, and you loose again.
> You aren't allowed to upload 1 second of the material,
> since you don't own the copyright!
> Is it that hard to understand? They can distribute as much of it as they want,
> because they OWN IT. You, however, do NOT.
Actually, you are allowed to quote/use up to either 30 seconds or 10% of the original work under fair use laws.
While there is no way to assure this in bittorrent, it goes to show even the pro-IP like yourself also seem to find copyright hard to understand...
An additional point to be made, if the copyright holders intent is for their copyrighted work to be distroyed or become lost, then their copyright claim is invalid, and a criminal act as far as private contracts go.
Thusly, the copyright holder can not simply do 'anything they want' with it just because they hold the copyright.
Its faster because the person you are uploading to is not downloading from the same source you are, which allows you to download from the server or a seed at a much higher speed than everyone downloading from the same source. Yeah I know grammatical errors etc etc.
Calm down people, its a religion not an operating system.
step 6:
discover that BT uses SHA-1 and not MD5 so you wasted all that time trying to corrupt peoples downloads while only forcing them to redownload a few hundred K at most.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Think about what happens when you download music, I'd say 40% of the time. You find that there's a click or a pop or an early cutoff in the song. Not 100% recording studio quality, or maybe even the encoding rate is less than 128k.
Hey, 1998 called. They said it's time for you to move out.
Really.. clicks and pops? No one uses analog ripping anymore, and jitter correction is a problem that was solved long ago. Bitrate less than 128 kbps? Haven't seen that for years. Even 128 is getting hard to find these days; most of what I see is 192.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
By what rational is it that "because you upload and download in parallel" that makes BT 'fast'.
On an individual basis when there's only one downloader, it's not. But given that many people will be attempting to get a file at once, it's faster because instead of ALL of them going to the original providers, they get some of their data from the other downloaders.
Specific example: You start to download, and get 50% of the file at 1 Mb/s (which is the provider's upload cap). Then a new person starts to download too. Under HTTP or another conventional method, your rate goes down to 0.5 Mb/s, because the provider is now serving double the clients. But with bittorrent, the new client can instead start downloading from YOU (on your unused outgoing bandwidth), instead of obstructing your connection to the original source.
There are times that single-stream downloads can be faster - if you're downloading from a fast lightly loaded server that has more bandwidth per user than your Internet connection, that's as fast as it gets, while if you're running BitTorrent on an asymmetric connection like ADSL or cable modem and the community of people who want the same file is still mostly downloading, then your download speed ends up limited by your upstream bandwidth until lots more people have the file. But it's pretty common for BitTorrent users to leave their clients uploading after they've finished downloading, particularly for big downloads that run overnight (because if it finishes before you get up in the morning, it keeps running.) There are exceptions - not just greedy leeching downloaders, but also people who download when the community has a lot of spare capacity and low demand, but that's when it's really not a problem.
Because BitTorrent doesn't need a fast server to support a lot of downloaders, there's also more material that can be published. If you're running your own tracker for the material you're publishing, that does take some bandwidth, but it's a lot less than actually downloading the file to lots of people.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
If you don't upload, nobody will upload to you. It's the inherent nature of the protocol.
If that were true, then the protocol wouldn't work. All downloaders would stick at 0%. In reality, there are many bittorrents that go for days with only seeds and no downloaders, and where new downloaders are immediately serviced at a high rate. (This tends to happen with Linux ISOs after the first week's rush to grab them is over)
You could use a client like Azureus to limit the upstream bandwidth used though.
Almost any bittorrent client can do that, including the original.
"By what rational is it that "because you upload and download in parallel" that makes BT 'fast'."
It makes file transfers faster for at least two reasons. You need to understand at least a little about how it works. The file is divided into a number of hashed chunks. The torrent file contains the hash information (and the IP address of the tracker used). The bittorrent client provides chunks to other clients randomly. So no matter how much of a file a particular client has it is likely to have chunks others need and they are likely to have chunks it needs. As soon as a client joins a torrent and has part of the file it can both upload and download.
A consequence of this is that as more clients are added you also get that much more upload capacity. It scales up nicely so transfers can be faster due to added upload capacity compared to centralized transfer protocols.
Another aspect is that even clients on slow links can contribute to making transfers faster for others. Somebody with a big pipe can get pieces from a number of others who only have a limited amount of bandwidth to use. This works also for clients that have limited time periods for being connected. A transfer can be stopped and started any number of times and the client makes progress and helps others when connected. Very beneficial robust behavior.
Notice that I mentioned hash values for these chunks. As a client receives each chunk it can compare the actual hash with the advertised value and accept or reject a chunk based on that. This makes it more difficult to spoof the network with bad data.
Bittorrent is fast as hell because it spreads big data like a virus. If one person were to offer a DVD rip of Spiderman2 on Kazaa or Limewire, how many people are going to really be able to download a 1.5 gig file before the original person decides their bandwidth would be better used by gaming or some other activity? Of those people who successfully got the original file, how many are going to also allow uploads of it and so on? Probably not a lot. In the Bittorrent model, the original host for the file only needs to send the 1.5 gigs of data out a single time. If several other people download it at the same time, then they take the place of the original host and provide peices of it for download. And so on. It's a pyramid scheme that actually works.
At least it works when people aren't throttling their upload speeds, which is what you are seeking to do. In fact, if you examine your logic, you'll recognize that you are self-defeating in your quest to suppress your upload transmissions. If everyone does that, then your original complaint of slow download speeds will only be exacerbated.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
There's a big difference between a suspicion and proof.
True. Serious suspicion is what makes the police smash down your door to take your computer, and on it's hard drive they find the proof.
There are so few other explanations of what you could've been doing connected to that bittorrent that they've easily got justification for a search warrant.
Additionally, that 30 seconds of material isn't fair use anyway- the quantity is sufficiently small to be fair, but the manner in which you use it is not.