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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."
Remember the napster trial? Saying "I just post links" doesn't cut much cheese against deep-pocket *AA's lawyers.
Last I checked piracy was still piracy. What gives you the right to faciliate piracy?
/. pandering.
.../rant
It's wrong to draw from this that "MPAA is making BitTorrent illegal". That's just stupid
What the MPAA is doing is cracking down on people who pirate and help people pirate movies. Big whoop.
Though I have my own ideas on how the movie studios could save money. STOP PAYING THEM SO MUCH. I mean how many studios are there? A dozen at most? If they all colluded and salary capped the stars to say 50,000$ per movie [give or take] we wouldn't have "multi-million dollar movies" where most of the money goes to the actors and not the actual crew behind the scenes WHO ACTUALLY MAKE IT HAPPEN.
You think Keano made the matrix? No it was 100s if not 1000s of "much lower paid" crew that did the CG, the sets, costumes, makeup, lighting, cameras, editing, etc...
I'll never understand how they can get off and say things like "oh the Olsen twins are worth 20 million dollars"... um to who? They're a pair of uneducated no-talent actors who ride their "being twins and decently good looks". Let's see what they're upto in 20 years shall we?
Same goes for all the other little "artistes". They poperzize their music, everything is staged, etc, then think they're worth a couple million per performance...
Well hate to break the news to ya little gal and guys. Most people work their entire lives and don't see a couple million. They "earn" a million dollars for a day long shoot then blow it on a rave and some diamonds... Then they have the audacity to wonder why people [other than brainwashed puppet teenagers] despise them... Hmmm...
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
It should read something like "Bittorent Site Operators Invite Lawsuits". Seriously, who could have predicted that posting so many links to copyrighted works would draw the ire of the MPAA?
There's a Mercedes gap too. I want one and can't afford one, but it's not government's job to do anything about it.
I think it's a bit of a pitty because BitTorrent has/had such potential to revolutionize how the internet worked, but in the end it just became a place for illegal file sharing. Everyone talks about filesharing and the terrible things that the RIAA and MPAA want to do to stop it, but they act like illegal filesharing is a good thing - like it is a pious act. The EFF has kept defending it as if they have a righteous cause. Filesharing technologies do have legitimate uses. At the beginning, the EFF was telling the RIAA/etc. to go after indivivuals who were using it for illegal purposes. Now, the EFF has decided that those illegal actions need to be defended too. I think that someone needs to create a movement around real fair use. Nothing more, nothing less. Not stealing and not totalitarian MPAA/RIAA crap. Something that would allow me to use my music in the ways that I should be able to and for a fair price without resorting to stealing. Something that the majority of people in America (and the world) could agree with.
Well, when mp3's became hip, I downloaded them off sources on IRC. Then napster came out and every moron with an aol account was downloading mp3's. Then napster was shut down. Then connection speeds improved and I started downloading movies and apps from IRC. Then Kazaa/Fastrack came out. Then every moron with an aol accound was on Kazaa. Then they started suing said morons that put their email address in. THEN I started using bittorrent to download Linux ISO's, the pirating started with Bittorrent, and before I knew it, more morons with aol accounts were talking about suprnova. Then it died. Meanwhile I'm still on IRC and still no problems.
By downloading episodes my wife missed, she was able to keep up with the story and now she watches the show on a regular basis. Had I not downloaded them, "Disney" would have one less viewer... not that it really matters to them I guess.
Peerguardian is a joke. When it comes time to sue you, the MPAA or their BayTSP minions will simply use a consumer broadband account to gather the evidence. Duh.
If we knew every single employee of both companies, adn we have our spies working at all major ISPs on the lookout for those names (and assuming they don't use other names), we *might* be able to have some level of protection. Maybe. That's assuming that "our guy" isn't out sick the say they sign up, or the day that their cable modem gets a new DHCP lease.
P2p still sits on the internet, and for that reason, it's no safer than anything else. You have to build your own network, and it has to have moderately strong anonymity. Nothing else will work.
These sites don't have any repository of any pirate material. They are a repository of LINKS... What the links are, ore are not, is not their responsibility. As is how you use them. In court, the *AA would loose, but of course these cases will never get to court as the people running the sites cant afford to fight. Its "justice" for the one with the most money. So if I link to some where else that has something offensive to you, does that make me the bad guy? No its your fault for going to the link.. Not mine.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
And what's this about piracy is only for the elite? That has to be the most half-cooked concept I've heard on piracy to date. I'm just as frustrated as the next nerd by 12 year old 1337 h@>0®5 and soccer moms downloading with abandon, but I don't think one can justify taking a stance against someone's "right" to piracy based on their level of computer literacy.
I have a 1.5 down/128 up DSL
Well.. that's not DSL, it's very ADSL.
Bittorrent is a system that rewards you the more you upload. If you're on an asymmetric line it will probably max the UL even if the DL is not so good. If most users in the swarm are on massively asymmetric lines, well the total upload bandwidth available will be terrible. And you'll all be maxed UL while throttled DL.
The real issue here is greed, bittorrent is a co-operative system. Do you let torrents run to a share ratio over 1:1? I leave them until I've shared twice what I downloaded. I Contribute. If you are not willing to pay for the upload bandwidth to contribute properly, don't expect sympathy from those of us who do.
Oh, and you have to be willing to -wait- (yep, strange concept to most people I realize) for the torrent to complete. Of course you can always try to find a ftp, or whatever, site that can match your awesome download bandwidth. But I bet you want that for free too.
Basically, Bittorrent is socialist, greed is not a attribute that it rewards. But it's in a capatalist system, so you can have an alternative. Try Kazzaa.
"Oops, I always forget the purpose of competition is to divide people into winners and losers." - Hobbes
"It Begins."
The constant repeating of the same arguments counter-arguments that we had the last two times this subject came up. There are no listeners, just a bunch of people all trying to out shout each other.
At least with a college/ university education they teach you to listen and debate in a reasonable manner. Rather than the "he who yells loudest wins" that the YRO and Politic section currently represents.
What does this mean for the owners of the domain? they can comply with the request, exactly as written.
"Your Honor - we had not destroyed or tampered with any evidence associated in anyway with the IP address 66.250.450.10. - No. Really."
If they are gutsy, they'll wipe anything associated with all other IP addresses, and encrypt the data file and to secretly send it to the free 1 terabyte storage online folks
Not quite as bad as the recent email virus redirecting people to 192.168.2.153 (or whatever it was), but really.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Personally I'm sick to death of hearing about the MPAA sueing everybody and their brother over illegally trading music. Why do people trade in the first place?
If they would address that issue and rethink their production and distribution of media then maybe people would be more likely to goto the record store and purchase it.
Until they rethink their business model and do a radical change of their whole system, I for one won't buy shit. If everyone stopped buying music and didn't download it, artists would start to beg us to download and trade their music. How long is a record label going to back an artist that can't sell one ticket to a concert?
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
No, this is what happens when certain people take "protect artists's works" and pervert it to "control, rip off and then criminalize the customers".
66.25.045.010
(sorta)
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"
The theft claim comes from the idea that part of the value (in the form of potential profits) is removed.
It's similar to the doctorine of "partial taking". Courts use that to force payments to landowners out of zoning/land-use planning agencies when they drastically reduce an owner's property values by changing the rules to reduce the things that can be done with the property. "Partial taking" applies the fifth amendment prohibition on "private property be[ing] taken without just compensation". Even though the property is still there, some of the value has "been taken".
If the Supreme Court applies this interpretation of "taking" to GOVERNMENTS, you can bet it will apply it to individuals as well. And other people than judges can grasp the concept easily, as well.
So splitting hairs with dictionary entriesmight make you feel good. But it isn't going to convince any judges, anyone leaning toward the other side, or bring any significant numbers of fence-sitters around to your position. Instead it makes you look like you're disconnected from economic reality, making it counter-productive.
IMHO the thing to do is avoid this argument and concentrate on the Founders' original one: That copyright is a TEMPORARY PRIVILEGE intended to INCREASE the amount of creative material FREELY available in the middle-distant future by letting authors and their publishers make money on it without competition from copiers for a SHORT TIME after its creation.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
No, centralized torrent distribution works just fine for what it was designed for! At no time was the capability of providing anonymous services for warez a consideration.
Don't like it? Solve the problem yourself. Bram Cohen has stated time and again that he has no interest in solving it for you. The BitTorrent code is readily available in several languages, now. You are free to use that as a starting point if you really care that much about it.
It would be nice to see one of these sites get the EFF on their side to fight this out. I am not sure how a judge would rule. For example, is it illegal for someone to tell another person where to go and get illegal drugs or where to go to get stolen goods? I don't know since IANAL.
One other thing I think some of these sites that have closed shop should do is stay open and just allow legit .torrents. For example, .torrents of tons of OSS software. Obviously this wouldn't attract all the warez kiddies but would give strong proof of the benefits of P2P.
If any lawyer reads this, I have a Q? Is it legal to share a TV show that you recorded on P2P? I can record my favorite show and give it my friends to watch, so how would doing the same thing electronically be illegal?
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
Before you flame me on my headline, I am talking about the .torrent files, not what can be downloaded from them.
.torrent file is just like a movie review. Both contain information about the movie, the only difference being that a computer reads the hashes and a human reads the review. This make be a bit of a loose analogy, but go with me here.
I feel a
You can't figure out the whole movie just by reading one review, just like a computer can't figure out the file based on what hashes it recieves from the tracker.
But with the same information, you can make sure you are going to see the right movie by reading a review, just as a computer can make sure you are downloading the right file by comparing hashes.
Correct me if I am wrong, but I don't think any defense will stand for making torrents illegal. If they declare them illegal, they will have to make movie reviews, and everything else that even describes a movie illegal.
It seems that the majority of people seem to agree with the current state of our copyright laws, and they think that the actions of the **AA is just, yet damn near everyone has commited copyright infringement at some point, and those that haven't surely have freinds or family that have. So why aren't more people turning themselves and others in and paying their $10,000 fines so that copyright holders can recoup their losses? Personally, I have always felt that those in glass houses should not throw stones, but the 'Holier than thou' group seems to think that breaking the law is okay so long as you do not get caught.