Slashdot Mirror


MPAA Goes After More Bittorrent Site Operators

Just another Coward writes "DSL Reports grabbed a copy of the lawsuit threat letters sent by the MPAA to the bittorrent website owners. This latest document was sent to a Torrent site called 'demonoid.com', which is now offline."

13 of 698 comments (clear)

  1. Re: I'm just waiting for someone to find a way.... by wpmegee · · Score: 5, Informative

    Just use filetype:torrent. Not pretty, but it works...

  2. Re: I'm just waiting for someone to find a way.... by Zocalo · · Score: 5, Informative

    What, like this? You just type "filetype:torrent moviename" into the seach box. Of course, this means that Google will be in violation of the INDUCE act should it ever get passed...

    --
    UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
  3. They were vulnerable by KarmaOverDogma · · Score: 3, Informative

    Demonoid went down only because the site owner(s)/operator(s) and/or their site host reside in a country that has and actually cares to enforce DMCA-like/Copyright laws. A site similar to this will probably pop up in Russia or elsewhere in due time.

    Notice that bi-torrent.com, supernova.org and their kin are still alive and well, and likely remain so for a quite a while.

    The only way **AA will make any real headway here is to sue the .torrent users themselves.

    --
    uR iGn0ranc3, Their Power
  4. Re:frist post by jafomatic · · Score: 4, Informative
    First replier to your post explained the solution, but not so much why. Your bandwidth looks much like mine (Verizon DSL) and it is because of the "a" in aDSL that we would suffer that horrific downstream problem when uploading and downloading at the same time.

    In short, the downstream and upstream share a buffer; if the buffer becomes full (i.e. maxxed out your upload capacity) then both streams will suffer. As the guy pointed out, Azureus (and other clients) will allow you to throttle your upstream.

    In addition to this, you should also throttle your downstream just a bit (in case you are able to max it out, I believe the same problem could arise). I had mine throttled around 90% of each maximum (so about 175KB/12KB) and it worked like a charm.

    As to the memory requirements, you might want to look into how often the client commits its memory cache to disk in order to alleviate this.

    --
    ::jafomatic
  5. Re:Color me surprised... by DanielJosphXhan · · Score: 3, Informative

    Quite wrong.

    Try searching for "csi filetype:torrent" sometime. They do directly link to torrent files, from CSI episodes to TeleSyncs of new movies.

    However, search engines are protected from things like __AA by US law, I believe.

    --
    [ think ]
  6. Re:And? by Tom · · Score: 4, Informative

    First off, piracy is still stealing.

    No, it is not and never has been(*).

    Theft, according to the criminal code in my country is defined as:
    "The taking away of a moveable thing owned by someone else."

    Note: "taking away"

    Unauthorized copying is not stealing. It is illegal, but it is not theft.

    If you have any education in logic - and as a geek I simply assume you do - then you know that if your assumption is false, your entire train of argument derails, since it is impossible to get a correct result from a false assumption.

    (*) actually, unless you talk about actual piracy, that thing with the boats and the parrots on the captain's shoulder. That, of course, is stealing.

    --
    Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
  7. Re:They should at least post funny responses... by chill_17 · · Score: 3, Informative
  8. Re:They should at least post funny responses... by mjmalone · · Score: 4, Informative

    I am not sure about Swedish law, but in most countries simply _signing_ a treaty does not make the treaty provisions legally binding. In the United States, for example, the Congress must pass legislation that conforms with the treat provisions before any of the provisions are _law_. Further, many treaties (like the bullshit international copyright treaties) have a lot of room for interpretation, so very different laws may be crafted from the same basic framework provided by the treaty. International copyright law is enormously complex, and it's not surprising that it would be difficult for a US company to sue a person residing in another country over a copyright related matter, especially if that 'other country' is a country like Sweden.

  9. Re:amazing by Tod+Hsals+5000 · · Score: 3, Informative

    Upon discovering DSL reports has no bugmenot account, I promptly created one:

    user: asdffdsaasdf
    password: asdfasdf

    If just one of five people emailed the 'RIAA dentist' to inform him of his excessive douchebaggery (moppenheim@jenner.com) the world would be a better place.

    P.S. ARRR ARRRRR Sir Tandeth; i've come to take your booty!

  10. MPAA: You do not hold the copyright on .torrents by huge+colin · · Score: 3, Informative

    Haha -- at some points, the letter from the MPAA is just wrong. They list Columbia, Twentieth Century Fox, Warner Bros., etc., as the copyright owner for files such as 50_First_Dates.torrent. Take a look at page 5, linked from here.

    Do they even know what a .torrent is? Someone should inform these lawyers that their clients don't, actually, own what they're claiming to own. There's probably some felony charge associated with that sort of behavior.

  11. Re:Can any swedish lawyers comment? by Lachek · · Score: 5, Informative
    The Pirate Bay is run in parallel with Piratbyran ("the Pirate Company") which is a Swedish organization created to encourage new approaches to IP laws and media culture. They are probably Sweden's foremost champion of P2P file sharing, having participated in numerous national radio and TV interviews and debates, and organizing and sponsoring events related to P2P file sharing and internet media culture.

    If you know Swedish, their site provides you among other things with P2P and IP related news, tutorials on ripping, compressing and distributing media on various P2P networks, papers on how various P2P protocols work, links to articles and research papers on P2P, internet media and Open Source, as well as an entire section on legal matters regarding P2P in Sweden and abroad.

    This is not what I would consider typical "geek fare", although I must say that I would generally lend more credence to a well-informed geek's knowledge of IP law than, say, whatever FUD the **AA happens to be spouting on a particular day.

  12. Re:Centralised .torrent distribution does not work by kryptkpr · · Score: 3, Informative

    What if the .torrents were put on a P2P network? The files are no longer very big so the scaling issues are not that important. If people are worried that the MPAA are going to go after people who store .torrents, why not encrypt them, or spread them between two/three "buddy" hosts...

    The MPAA is not just going after big .torrent hosts, that's either shitty reporting or a diversion. They're going after big trackers.

    Storing and distributing .torrents anonymously isn't the problem.. they're such little files, you can usually cram them just about anywhere (DNS maybe even?). Storing and distributing peer lists is the real problem.

    BT isn't a p2p network in the conventional sense, it's a network of p2p networks. Each "torrent" is a p2p network on it's own, self contained and independent of any other torrent.

    This p2p network needs a way to keep track of it's members, and hereing comes the tracker. The tracker's primary duty is to deliver random subset of the peerlist to peers when they request it.

    So, an effective tracker must

    1) Know of -all- the peer's IPs in the swarm
    2) Be easy to contact
    3) Give away peer's IPs to anyone who asks

    Thus, BT as it currently sits (a quick, efficient way to offload some server bandwidth onto users) is not suited for illegal content: That same thing which makes it good/strong/fast (the trackers) is what makes it easy to litigate.

    PS: In BT, pieces very, very rarely arrive from a single source.. I don't think this has stopped anyone from litigating.

    --
    DJ kRYPT's Free MP3s!
  13. Re:Color me surprised... by Unordained · · Score: 3, Informative

    17 USC 512

    Okay, so they have to comply with take-down requests from copyright owners if received, but may otherwise allow transmission so long as they don't filter, modify, or keep longer than needed any of the content being exchanged by users across their equipment. Oh, and they have to not know what's going on, and not get money directly from illegal activity. And the service provider has to make clear and accessible a way to send take-down notices. And have a stated policy of banning users if they are repeat infringers (note that the law specifically states repetition is involved.) The same applies to linking, indexing, referecing, pointing, or using informatin-location-tools, and "service providers" is defined very broadly. I'd say it applies to bittorrent trackers. And based on subsection (j), the most courts get to do is somehow order the service providers to make stuff stop, including just terminating specific users' accounts if that's sufficient, or ordering the service provider to block of IP's, etc. There's also mention of "standard technical measures" and mention of cost burden to service providers, such that if the service provider cannot reasonably find out who's infringing or whether or not the content is being illegally copies, the law seems to just let them off the hook. But hey, I'm not a lawyer either. (Then again, the law really shouldn't be the realm of lawyers. We should just as soon sue priests for misleading us on theology when God sends us to hell. People are just whiny babies about advice.)