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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.
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?
Evolution or ID?
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)
Check out the best P2P sharing website: MEDIACHEST.COM
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.
Vivin Suresh Paliath
http://vivin.net
I like
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.
The same thing happened to me this weekend. And just when I was getting frustrated I thought, "But, wait, I'm still here and until it get's bad enough for me to stop going to the theater they're going to keep shoveling the crap on us."
I read Slashdot for the articles
Although I'd hate to see torrent trackers get sued, this might have a positive side-effect:
Movies on torrent sites are generally of sub-par quality, the field is ripe for a good distributer to fill the void between the content and paying consumers.
Apple has 2 things going for it:
- they have an acceptable DRM policy, and
- they have shown users don't mind paying reasonable prices for copyrighted content.
Not to mention that with all the bandwidth apple has, they probably could offer such a service (movies for download).
With a few advances they could start offering movies to be downloaded to iPods, and then played on the TV.
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
I watch several new movies a month, and I have never seen that ad. Maybe I should go to a theater some time to catch it.
A bittorent tracker disclaimer:
None of the files shown here are actually hosted on this server. The links are provided solely by this site's users. The administrator of this site cannot be held responsible for what its users post, or any other actions of its users. You may not use this site to distribute or download any material when you do not have the legal rights to do so. It is your own responsibility to adhere to these terms.
Can anyone who knows about legal stuff probably explain to me if such a disclaimer is of any use for a BT tracker?
Century theaters do not show TV ads before their movies. AMC is absolutely intolerable because of their advertising practices. I absolutely refuse to go to AMC theaters because of this. Century has all the same movies with a much better experience.
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!
Best. Show. EVER.
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
.. 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....
> Why not just quit paying actors millions per film?
Because the presence of those actors almost always has a direct correlation to the amount of money the film brings in. I know, I know - you're one of those people who thinks that they should cast an unknown shlub in every movie that comes out, thereby slashing the budget and enabling you to go see movies for $.50. But eventually one of those shlubs is going to be interesting/talented/attractive enough that more people go see *his* movies than anyone else's and *then* some crackpot capitalist will realize that casting that guy = more box office and offer him more money than the unknown shlub that nobody cares about - but not you, no-sir-ree! You go see movies based solely on how low-paid the actor is, because that's the kind of appreciator of fine cinema you are.
Stupid hippie...
In Sollog's name, amen.
If anyone needs to host their tracker site out of jurisdiction of American and European law, you might be interested in hosting it on one of my servers here in Russia.
write to sale (at) winlink.ru. We'll provide a great rate with unlimited traffic.
MTV was originally advertised as being "24hour music commercial free" hosted by VJ's who really did not waste much time in-between videos. Pretty cool. However, I made the mistake of tuning in to MTV a couple of months ago and I can certainly say that it is not "My MTV". Most of it is an ad for something including all of their product placements, and What happened to the videos? There do not appear to be ANY videos.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Here in Canada, when you go see a movie (at least, downtown Toronto at the Paramount or some of the larger "Famous Players" theatres), they are screening a short, 5 minute film before the feature presentation.
The film, at first, looks kind of interesting. It shows a portly teamster-looking gentleman talking about rigging up explosives to place on the back of cars in order to accomplish the spectactular car crash stunts seen in many movies (the example they show is in Enemy of the State, when the Will Smith and Gene Hackman characters are being persued by the NSA agents along the railway tracks). He talks about different special effects techniques and how dangerous, yes rewarding it can be both for the stuntmen, and ultimately the viewer.
This, of course, promptly degrades into a sermon about how "I'm such a nice portly man and I put in all this time and then someone makes a few clicks on their computer and STEALS all of that hard work.", followed by the new catch phrase of a movie industry that recently made this piece of shit: MOVIES: THEY'RE WORTH IT.
Then, following this propaganda, we were all warned warned that staff equipped with night vision technology would detain, violate and then charge anyone caught with any technology being used to record the film.
When I returned home, i stole 3 movie off the internet... and I never download movies from the internet.
When, oh when, is the MPAA going to notice that even the foolish RIAA is way ahead of them? At least the RIAA has tried to "meet us halfway" with things like the iTunes Music Store and Napster 2.0, etc. The MPAA is still locked into their early 20th century mentality and shows no signs of change. Perhaps when the current crop of studio execs retire and the younger, more enlightened next generation takes over, things will start to improve.
Then again....
bash-3.00$ uname -a
SunOS panda 5.10 Generic sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-2
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.
if(!toilet_paper) roll.replace(new roll);
call the movie theater and ask what time the movie ENDS, and how long the movie is.
if the movie starts at 6pm and is 88 minutes and ends at 8:42 then you can go buy your ticket and get in at 7:15 and not worry about watching the 75 minutes of commercials.
Yep, I agree. Trailers are informative. I see enough Pepsi ads on billboards, on tv, hear them on the radio, in newspapers, magazines, etc. I can understand promoting a product but c'mon, don't these big companies have enough exposure already? I can't picture going anywhere in the developed countries in the world and finding people who *don't* know what the hell Pepsi or any other big name brand item is.
It's an interesting court case, much more so than the P2P cases. First off, they're suing the people who operate the web sites, not the seeders // leechers of the files.
Second, the three major sites (btmusic, suprnova and pirates bay) are all located entirely outside of the United States, where our wonderful copyright system does not apply. The folks at Pirates Bay are on the record as saying that in no uncertain terms to Sega's lawyers, after they received a C&D.
My favorite is the fact that more than 90% of the trackers I've seen are passed out over IRC. BT doesn't require anything more than a small file with hashes and a list with at least 1 other peer before it will work correctly. The seeders themselves have blocklists that are updated about once a week with any known **AA subnets. And then, once you get the file, you have to get the key from someone that trusts you. Generally people use the GnuPG password encrypt.
The final interesting point is, the RIAA suits are succeeding because they have thousands of incriminating files all on one user's computer. For this to happen in the BT world, they would have to start watching trackers and recording each time they saw your IP. The chance is astronomically small, but still there.
I don't think they can practically achieve a lockdown or manage to scare people off. Perhaps it will stop casual piracy, but anyone who's looked at the BitTorrent system is laughing at them.
At least the war on the environment is going well
Then I remembered, I started going to a movie theatre that caters to movie enthusiasts. I can't remember the last time I saw an advertisement before the feature movie. I also can't remember the last time someone talked during a movie or was disruptive or anyone under the age of 18 was in attendance. No screaming babies either. Maybe because they don't allow children under 6 at all, and no one under 18 without parents and they are very intolerant of bullshit and very responsive about complaints.
Somehow, they still manage to charge about the same price as every other theatre in town. No wonder I go there for every movie -- and if it doesn't show there, I wait for DVD.
There are good movie theatres out there, you just have to find them.
-------------------------------------------------
It think it is in Slovenia (or maybe Slovakia).
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.
I've already told the local theater owner that if I ever go to see a movie at his theater and get ANY commercials except the movie trailers, I will never go there again, and do as much as I can to make sure no one else does either. When he started to stammer, I told him that if he wasn't making enough to pay the bills that he needed to raise prices, not put advertisements in. It's bad enough that he has a slide show with local ads (but they play before 'start time' so they are easy to avoid if you don't go to the movie on the day it's released) We don't have any of the 'national chains' here. It's a locally owned theater.
If he ever does put the ads in, I'll just wait for the DVD. And before someone chimes in about how they will be in the DVD too, well, let's just say that my modded Xbox doens't care. I can start where ever I want on the DVD. That includes skipping the commercials.
bork bork bork!
It's actually tremendously difficult to achieve 9 movies a week on the 3 movies at once plan -- in my experience, it requires no shipping screwups and for you to actually return the movie on the same day you got it:
Monday: Netflix sends you three movies
Tuesday: You get them, send them back
Wednesday: Netflix gets them, sends you three more
Thur: You send them back
Fri: They get them, send you three more
Sat: You get them, send them back
Monday: Repeat
The additional problem is that it means you have to rip all three movies on Saturday before your post office stops pickup (which is typically earlier on Saturdays). The only time I managed to approximate 9 movies a week was when I was unemployed for a while -- and on average, during two of those months, I still only did about 24 movies a month, or a movie every 1.mumble days. I did have a month I managed to achieve >30, but it's not at all reliable.
I live pretty close to two distribution points for Netflix, and it still takes one day -- I've not heard of anyone who gets their movies from Netflix the same day that Netflix sends them.
This, of course, only disagrees with a specific supporting fact of your case -- I still agree with your overall assertion regarding the usefulness of Netflix. As a point of reference, in the 418 days since I became a member, I've rented 260 movies. If I was at all inclined to pirate movies (which of course I'm not, because it's illegal and immoral and I wouldn't want to deprive starving artists like Tom Cruise and Will Smith of their fair wages), why, I'd have one of those huge CD wallets STACKED with DVDs, and already have additional CD wallets on order from Amazon!
And the movie industry wonders why movie theaters aren't performing well.
Take the family of four(I live in a cheap area): Tickets: $18 (two adults @$5, two kids @$4)
Popcorn&Soda: $20 (easy, for four drinks & two large popcorns).
Total: $38
At home:
Buy DVD: $20
Popcorn: $1-4 (air popped/butter or microwave)
Soda: $2-3 (couple two-liters)
Total: $27, and you get to keep the movie.
If you rent: ~$10-12?
I don't read AC A human right
I can still avoid all that bullshit. I buy combat boots for every day wear. I have a pair of Land's End something-or-anothers for loafing around when I'm too lazy to strap up. My shoes have warranties, not logos and ads.
Slashdot is proof that Sturgeon's Law applies to mankind.
I'm not the most tech savvy person around, but it seems to me that it should be possible to have a BIG master list that serves the purpose that suprnova serves that itself is passed around by a bittorrent like application. That way there's no one place to go after.
I guess you'd have to have some way of initially connecting "your" bittorrent to this network to get "on board", but once you're in, you're in, and no one can ever break it apart.
Seems pretty straight forward to me, what's wrong with this idea?
What I don't know I just fake...
Really, it's pretty typical behavior for people in general.. "I waited an hour and a half for a table!" == "I waited twenty minutes for a table!"
Same bullshit. Twenty-something minutes of lead from the start time would add way too much overhead to the presentation schedule. Even when we had a shitload of NCNs to lead we started them prior to the showtime. Now we start them prior to the showtime so that the film previews start at exactly (give or take a minute or two) at the showtime.
I download movies. I go see movies. Before you bitch about how much movies cost, remember:
$10 ticket,
$10 of junkfood at concession,
$20 for the experience of a $100,000,000 movie.
== Stop whining.
Do you know how much it costs to run a theatre? Like, really know? NO, YOU DON'T.
Downloading aside, if you want to see movies.. go see movies. Don't take for granted the fact you CAN go see Star Wars XXII on a fucking huge screen with amazing sound surrounded by a house of people experiencing the adventure/Jar-Jar along with you.
And that while sales were up, they were still well under that of every year since at least 1994.
Because, again, they are selling a lousy product (CD's which might contain one or two "radio songs" and the rest filler, and 45 minutes worth of music on a CD which we well know can hold about 80), at an inflated price.
Jobs that will be destroyed without copyright protection. Pretty simple.
Unfortunately, jobs are lost and gained every day. And going to a new distribution and marketing business model will simply shift the jobs, not destroy them. We don't government-mandate that anyone else has a right to profit competition-free off of their product to "save jobs".
And movies haven't even begun to be hit with big problems from downloading - bandwidth is still way too limited for most people.
So what are they yowling so loud about?
So, um, where in my post did I call anything "theft"?
"Gandhi didn't take British salt, he made his own." You equate an act of theft (stealing salt) with an act of copying (online sharing of music/movies). You do that again in your current post with the comparison of chop shops (theft) to copying.
Would you agree to work for your boss for a year and at the end of a year he or she would evaluate your work and decide if they felt it was worth paying for?
While I will grant you that most employees do not work this way, most businesses do. If I own a business, customers will come into my store, look at my stuff, and decide if it's worth buying. If they purchase it and find out it looked good but was really a turd, they'll request their money back. If my products, service, or presentation are poor, they won't buy. However, in this case, they'll have competitors they can buy from.
I've got a better idea - get away from the entire *AA groups and seek out independent artists who will gladly let you download their products to evaluate them.
Great idea, I fully agree and already do. However, not everything I like is on an indie label.
The RIAA is so far from having a monopoly at this point that it's laugable. If you really want a starting point, I'll give you a list of independent musicians who are well worth supporting.
Send the list to my email if you like, always glad for a good indie band recommendation. (This is not intended to be sarcastic at all, if you know some good ones please let me know.) However, your next point clearly states that the smaller labels -can't- deal with what is -for now- the dominant distribution medium (the stores). This, in theory or practice, gives the *AA's a virtual monopoly-no one else has near the major labels' resources or connections, and massively successful acts are almost always major label.
This applies even more to movies, indie filmmakers without major studio backing have vanishing to no chances of ending up in a theater or being marketed so that more than a handful hear about them.
The good news is that this internet thing has changed all that, so consumers can now buy music directly from the small artists.
Amen.
The reason that the RIAA has a grip on stores is the same reason that you'd have a very hard time selling a BBQ sauce that you manufacture directly to grocery stores - it's simply not feasible for retailers to deal directly with the tens of thousands of small manufacturers, hence the necessary evil of distributors.
Not so, most retailers -choose- to deal through a distributor so that they have to hire less people to oversee purchasing. I don't have much sympathy for that.
Movies are tricky because even an inexpensive indy film costs more than most people will earn in a decade to make. Have you worked making a movie? Do you actually know what the costs are when you say how much they *should* cost? And those inexpensive movies are the ones that are most likely to die in the creation process, leaving the investors with nothi
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
If acting required that much talent, there would be no room for nepotism in hiring practices, yet Hollywood, mainstream music, and politics are filled with it. For comparison, there is absolutely no nepotism in sports, because there is such strict competition on talent that selection by any other means would mean sacrificing talent. In Hollywood there is an abundance of talent. Tom Cruise is expensive because he's popular, but hundreds of people could have taken his place and become just as popular. They didn't, so they're not expensive, but that doesn't change the fact of the matter. Fame is something of a natural monopoly, that's all.
Wow. Congratulations. I don't think you could possibly have been any more wrong about so many different things in a single post if you'd have pulled that little marble-sized lump of hardened carbon out of your head and flushed it down the toilet before you began spilling your infinte lack of wisdom for the masses.
First of all, if "miss priss" fails half of her class of simpletons, not only will she answer to the principal, school board, and parents, if it continues to happen she will lose her job and, possibly, her teaching credentials. On top of that, "miss priss" is charged with educating people regardless of how dumb they are. That puts the burden of success squarely on her shoulders and, unlike big bad Mr. Matt Damon, she can't write her miserable failings at her job off on bad writers.
In addition, whereas "miss priss" cannot "coast" through her job, Halle Berry has been coasting for years. Sorry to point out the obvious to you, since you're clearly too much of an ignoramous to see it yourself, but Halle Berry is a pretty face, not a good actress.
Continuing on this romp of mindless ignorance you called a thought, we'll point out that a doctor's real job is to save your arrogant ass from death, not make you feel like you're warm and loved (unless they're a head doctor, but if I were you, I wouldn't worry about it because it's hard to hold cognitive therapy sessions with a person who clearly has no cognitive processes). In addition, the reason you had any bad teachers, I'm sure, is that you are a complete and utter moron and they simply got tired of trying to teach the kid who just couldn't figure out that he wasn't supposed to eat the glue.
If your post is any reflection on you as an individual, your competency, or your knowledge, you are a terrible person, you are a complete idiot, and you couldn't possibly know less if you actively tried to forget things. I have no doubt in my mind that you are a bible belt Bush voter, and, if nothing else, you certainly are stupid enough to fit right in with them. I think you should strongly consider suicide before you have the chance to procreate, as we really can't afford to have you dragging down the national averages for any future generation.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!