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."

Comments

Legally

[Omkar]

Are BitTorrent users more vulnerable legally (not practically) since they automatically upload? I'd think that makes them distributors, which presumably brings higher penalties than consumption.

Re:Legally

[Porn Whitelist]

There is only one way to accurately track the use of a file on BitTorrent, and that is to have a complete block of data sent from your BT client to the intellectual property tracking company's BT client. As you start uploading straight away, there is a high probability that your client could send data to the "wrong person".

Since they're also uploading, they'd have a hard time arguing that you're breaking their copyright - they're helping distribute their copyright material ...

That's the real problem with going after torrent users. Unless the accuser actually downloads the file from the same torrent, they have no proof that the file is actually what it says. Once they do this, though, they are distributing their material knowingly.

So,

1. Movie studio downloads file using bittorrent
2. Accuses other torrent users of copyright violation.
3. Defendants show that accuser was sharing the file with them via bittorrent
4. Judgment for the Defendant

Re:Legally

[ichimunki]

Copyright law does not have any language regarding intent that I'm aware of. Anyway, if you are using BitTorrent to download copyright restricted works, I can't imagine how that's going to engender any sympathy on the part of your local judge or jury. There is already a prevailing feeling (among the people I talk to, anyway) that even downloading is not morally acceptable.

In this case, it would be wise to simply not use BitTorrent for sharing copyright restricted works without permission from the person or organization that has the copyright for the work. BT was never intended to anonymize users or be a one-way stream. The BT application works best when users share data and client and tracker software can accurately detect which IP is doing what. If no one shared while using BT, the whole process would be no more efficient than a simple HTTP or FTP transfer. Anonymity would interfere with the tit-for-tat algorithm that throttles upload and download to different clients depending on their own sharing practices.

Personally I'm done using BT for "sharing" copyrighted works. Too bad for the MPAA and RIAA, really. My latest discovery via P2P was "Penn and Teller's Bullshit!" After viewing several episodes downloaded via BT, I went out and bought the DVD set of the first season. A $45 purchase I would have never made otherwise. Oh well, there's still USENET. :)

Or for the same price I could just get cable and subscribe to a few premium channels and record all this stuff directly to digital (for now). You'd think the MPAA would learn from the RIAA and move quickly to get direct digital distribution going. I'd pay $2 for a commercial-free 1/2 hour show and $4 for hour shows. $5 or $6 for a movie. Skip all the useless DVD packaging. Of course, the files will need to be at least as good quality as the rips out there, and playable on GNU/Linux.

What's the problem?

[tesmako]

I really don't see the problem here, other P2P apps are tricky since the users themselves make the content available, but with BitTorrent it should be very clear-cut who to complain to if content you own show up as a download; the tracker.

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. While foreign hosting and such might make this trickier it sure is way simpler than trying to attack the typical P2P network where the users are also the ones bringing the content to the table.

Re:What's the problem?

[EpsCylonB]

Fucking AC and ./ grammar Nazis... If you understand the message, what else does it matter?

This isn't nam, this is slashdot, there are rules.

So many legit uses

[Zorilla]

Perhaps the difficulty in battling BitTorrent is because it's harder to argue that its only purpose is to pirate material? We've seen plenty of good uses for it, such as alleviating the bandwidth pains of downloading Windows XP SP2, high demand game patches (Take THAT, Gamespy and your system of waiting behind 400 people in line!), etc.

Why don't they use it instead

[tero]

I'd be willing to pay for legal (non-DRM:ed) downloads of movies and tv-shows. Subscription or just per download, take you pick, I don't care.

I fail to see why Hollywood won't learn from RIAA's mistakes (and Apple's success) and start a service like this, the audience is global, there's tons of cash to make!

I live in a small nordic country (Sweden) where you have to wait 1-2 years for most "cool" shows (and even then they might get a timeslot around midnight) or get passed altogether (example, they just started running Angel Season 1, 01:00), so downloading series and buying them in DVD formats is more of a norm for me and many of my friends.

Now, a legal torrent.. that I'd pay for (and they'd even get my upload bandwidth for free).

Re:I don't think BitTorrent will be much of a prob

[mowler2]

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) :)

Re:PeerGuardian

[TheRealJFM]

happily:

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.php ?f=41

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/peerguar di an_2_review.cfm
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

Re:Peerguardian

[TheRealJFM]

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

I think BitTorrent users are harder to sue

[swilver]

"Anyone who uses BitTorrent and is under the illusion that they are anonymous are sorely mistaken," Malcolm said. "There is no reason why those lawsuits wouldn't include BitTorrent" users.

Actually, there is a reason why the lawsuits wouldn't include BitTorrent users. It is much harder to sue BitTorrent users for multiple infringements at once, which (I think) is what makes the current lawsuit approach cost effective.

When you find a BitTorrent user participating in a big swarm, you can only sue them for that single infringement, not for sharing hundreds of movies or music files via programs like Kazaa. In order to make it cost effective they would have to keep track of your online BitTorrent activity for quite a while to collect multiple infringements.

The Stuff You Can't Get

[josefek]

I receive tons of hits from various groups sniffing about while I'm d/ling via BitTorrent (I run PeerGuardian) and I often wonder how culpable I am. While not all of my downloads are technically "legal," it's all stuff I'm pulling down because it's the only way I can get it.
My most recent downloads, for instance, have been copies of Sifl & Olly (which hasn't been released on DVD) episodes of the BBC's Spaced (which, while released on DVD, is only available in the UK on region 2 media, and I'm in the states), and the Drive-By Truckers Pizza Deliverance, which is woefully out of print. In the case of the Truckers, I already own a copy of the record, but it's beat to shit. Supposedly they'll be re-releasing it sometime in 2005, and I'll undoubtedly be buying myself a new copy. In the meantime, however, I'd like to be able to listen to it.
I'm one of those folks who would happily purchase the stuff I pull via BitTorrent... if I could. It irritates the shit out of me to be snooped online, and to read article after article about the RIAA and MPAA pissing and moaning over downloading, when they don't really seem to be paying attention to what is being downloaded.
Sure, there's a shit-ton of folks dealing in warez and publicly available media, but there are also tons of sites dealing specifically with stuff people seek that can't currently be purchased legitimately (I don't understand downloading a crappy boot of a movie destined for DVD release, or downloading a movie that can be purchased for a few bucks online or rented. Frankly, it's a waste of my bandwidth). You'd think they'd look at the popularity of, say, Sifl & Olly torrents and say "Well shit, there's a market. Maybe we should release a DVD of that stuff."
And hey; how about not pricing it outlandishly (a la Carnivale or Six Feet Under)? Nothing makes me consider downloading more than knowing that, by purchasing it, I'm voluntarily allowing myself to get screwed.

Wrong

[Q2Serpent]

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.