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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.
which is now offline
:)
And redirects to google.
At least they don't have to worry about being slashdotted now.
They should at least post funny responses, like like pirate Bay
http://www.piratebay.org/frame.html
Here was a sample response PirateBay sent to Dreamworks
lol. oh and first post?just a web application developer and instructor in Toronto, ON Canada
Where can I get an IP address like that? :)
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.
...because I'm a stickler for quality and don't feel like monopolizing my connection for so long to get it.
The more I read about this, though, the more it pisses me off...so there's little seed in the back of my head that tells me not to waste my time with movies...and I don't. Gouging for a ticket is bad enough, but the additional gouging for food and beverage just adds insult to injury anyway.
// Agent Green (Ian / IU7 / KB1JQO)
// IEEE 802.3: All 10base Are Belong To Us
to use google to search for torrents directly.
-=fshalor
people mistake "free exchange of ideas" and "I don't have to pay for it."
"Wow. Now THAT'S a lot of angry Indians." - Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer
Well the article is somewhat interesting, like where they point out that the cited address has a '.450' in it.
But the real gem so far (in my oddball opinion) has been the discussion of anthracite vs. bituminous coal that followed. That thread was nine messages and two pictures of coal long last time I checked. AND, I felt like I actually learned something on slashdot. Not something I'm likely to use, but interesting trivia for Christmas parties at least.
Death to transfers that stop at 99.8%, sit around with 10x more uploading than downloading on a connection that does 3mbit/356kbit
This has always been my biggest gripe with BitTorrent. I have a 1.5 down/128 up DSL. Whenever I fired up BitTorrent, it would always upload at the full 12 KB/sec but download at closer to 1.2 KB/sec. I got so frustrated that I just shut it off and suffered with downloading from the company's main FTP site at a whopping 2.7 or 2.8 KB/sec, but it was still faster. (Yes, it was actually for legal purposes.) It should probably be renamed to BitTrickle.
I still think that it's a great tool that can be used for a lot of completely legal purposes, not the least of which would be game and application patches and updates. I can only imagine what the bandwidth costs must be to companies like Sun, any Linux distributor, Microsoft, etc. Why host the file when you can proviede a BT link and let everyone else distribute your patches for you?
But as long as BT gives abysmal download rates, I'll stick with the various Gnutella clients, newsgroups, or straight FTP.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
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.
Just use filetype:torrent. Not pretty, but it works...
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.
TFA says: 66.250.450.10
Maybe mirror is located at 666.666.666.666...
There you are, staring at me again.
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.
Now we just need a way to make torrents look like html so google will cache them....
then they'll have to shut down Google!
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!
Why hasn't freenet taken off yet? Is enough of this going to happen where freenet becomes the show-stopper?
Berto
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.
It was a good site, reasonably well run--content was well categorised, reasonable commenting system, but they went down often too--too much load caused the site software to meltdown.
They had the usual forum too, where it was always pointed out that Demonoid did not host illegal software--all they hosted was .torrent files, which are meta files for any software or data.
It was paid through donations, and donators (more than $5) had their Up/Down ratio reset to 1 for a month. If you went below 0.25 Up/Down for too long, you faced being banned.
I saw it go down many times, and each time the owner resurrected it and promised donors their month back.
I mostly checked for software, and most of it worked.
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.
.torrent users themselves.
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
uR iGn0ranc3, Their Power
you can
I'd hate to be his mom. "You went to jail for WHAT?? Couldn't you have been doing something I wouldn't be embarrassed to tell my book club about, like drugs or attempted murder!?"
Shareaza does it, kinda, but it's basically eDonkey and a couple other things mixed into one. It has a BT client built-in, and you can use eDonkey/Mule/Dingo/Fox to search for the torrent files (usually they were torrents from SuprNova), then run the torrents (don't think there's a way to automatically do it though).
Granted, this was 2.0. 2.1 may be different. I stopped using Shareaza because it felt pretty slow. I suppose a similar way to do this would be to use eMule to download the torrents and then run them in whatever torrent client you use.
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 ----
Comment removed based on user account deletion
and guess what? setting up your firewall correctly and using a non standard port (ISPs sometimes throttle standard filesharing ports) and limiting your upstream to about 5k/s less than its max, you get damn goo results. Learn how to use something before saying its broken.
The thing is Torrents were out there for any newbie to google for torrent sites and download them.
I agree that private ftp's must have a hoard thats wonderful but how do i find out about them?and then gain access to them?
Wanted : A Signature.
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
I heard there are lots of legal uses for Google...
Linux is not Windows
The vulnerability of centralized networks in high threat environments is well known. The gray area of sharing of copyrighted materials between users is such environment. Networks built for that purpose should surely not rely on any central piece of infrastructure, there is nothing new about that. Publicly exposed marginal activity is only survivable until someone with some form of power takes aim at it, so current event should not be surprising.
All the BitTorrent sites need to move to developing nations, and parts of Asia where there are few or no copyright laws. In places where people are struggling just to find food, the idea that vapor has value is too absurd to even consider. Move your sites there.
How ya like dat?
..the strange thing is the "Sponsored Links" part of the link you just posted ..
.. a search result containing the "filetype" and "moviename" but a Google add for downloading the movie?
The Incredibles
Download this great movie along
with 1000's of other favourites aff
www.downloadshield.com
Personally I find that very strange
You don't, an thats what makes them so much better. Theres so few people with leech access, the quality remains great. You (and the authorities) can't find out about them, because even people with accounts dont always know the real ip (they connect through a BNC). It just works better.
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
Where does it end?
When people stop pirating.
My firewall is fine, my throttleing is fine (I've even written my own rules with tc before). I can routinely get 200+ kB/s down ON POPULAR TORRENTS.
Plenty will hit 0.989 availability and noone with that last piece will join, or there will be only one person with the full file per dozens and dozens of people trying to get it, and due to async connections that just doesnt work.
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
They're trying for a decapitation attack. It's not going to work long term (any more than shutting Napster down did), but I can see how they'd feel they had to do something.
Of course, the problem with doing this is a lot like the problem with antibiotics. If you use them too much, the target adapts.
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
First they came for Napster
and I did not speak out
because I switched to Kazaa.
Then they came for Kazaa
and I did not speak out
because I switched to bit torrents.
Then they came for bit torrents
and I did not speak out
because I switched to ED2K.
Then they came for ED2K
and there was no one left
for the entertainment industry
to blame for their troubles.
So they went out of business,
and now there is only me.
True, the ISPs stingyness with upstream can be somewhat blamed. But community trackers often accept reseed requests, which is why certain trackers going down really annoys many people.
Don't use the word, "gay" to mean bad. That's so retarded.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
In practice, if your large BitTorrent download stops at above 99 percent, then the submitter probably changed a readme file after making the torrent. Your "big files" are probably still in working order; try playing one. And if you have typical Comcast rates, try using Azureus with your upload capped at 80 percent of your true upload in order to allow your downloads' ack packets to go back.
I agree with you, but I cannot buy less than zero of their products....
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.
is to use the word piracy -- which implies ilegality, immorality, violence, etc -- to designate "copyright infringement" -- which is a totally different beast, and in some sane countries is not even a criminal offense, even if it is a civil illicit. In doing that, you are effectively participating in the forementioned smear campaign. Understand?
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
How about GTorrent?
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.
Are you sure that isn't indouche act? It will supposedly "clean things up".
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
I think its becoming very clear that centralised torrent distribution isn't going to work.
If you are going to host a popular torrent site then you are going to need bandwidth (for the site alone, no mention of trackers yet). Most bandwidth providers (a.k.a ISPs) are getting very paranoid about letters like these arriving. In fact I'm guessing that most ISPs have terms and conditions stating that they can switch you off faster than a light-bulb if they get such a letter.
The problem with these ISPs is that they need things like credit card details for payment, etc. etc. etc. This trail will eventually lead to a physical person who paid for the hosting - and thus someone the MPAA can put the rap on.
Lets just rewind here a sec. First there was FTP/HTTP for downloading "stuff". This worked while demand was average, and no one was paying much attention. The head came on, people (read: lawyers) took notice. Letters were sent, people abandoned FTP/HTTP for P2P networks.
Everything was good so far until it came to delivering large content (read: Movies, Apps, whatever). The P2P networks simply scale well to delivering this content well. But they still provided a reasonable amount of privacy.
Next (roughly speaking) came BitTorrent - it fixed the P2P bottle necks of gnutella & co. But it now depended on a centralised infrastructure for informing people on where to find the Trackers.
More experienced hands at BitTorrent and Gnutella might be able to help out here:
What if the
This could be taken to the next level then - if the content is coming from multipe sources, and if individually the "copyright" material does not arrive from a single source - what can you prosecute the individual sources for - serving up a fragment ? If the data is interleaved between 10 hosts and every 10th byte is stored on one host, it would be very difficult to prove that the host contains the material.
Just my $0.02
[ Monday is a terrible way to spend one seventh of your life. ]
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"
Please make your mind up whether you're pro-free market or against it.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
At most it copyright infringement, not theft. Geesh Get it right.
Regardless, its a LINK site, it doesn't host anything that is even remotely infringing anyone's copyrights.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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!
You lost that argument a long time ago. Definitions change with usage. Common usage, whether you like it or not, is to conflate piracy with unauthorised duplication. I say duplication, because current anti-piracy music disk mangling is aimed at preventing duplication, nor distribution. The RIAA tried to go further with their lawsuit against Diamond over the Rio just because it played mp3s, but they backed down on that one, so for the moment, piracy == unauthorised duplication, as it's meant by the people who actually use the word the most.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
They're trying for a decapitation attack
...not really. They're trying to remove the single-most userfriendly and simply way to get pirated content. They have no illusions that this will stop most filesharing. Remember, that to a common user, it went like this.
1. Install BitTorrent
2. Click on link
They don't really care how it works. There's no ratios, no shares, no slots, no configuration, nothing. And it was fast, at least with popular content (which is, by definiton, what the common user wants). Many of these will find other P2P apps too complex.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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!
People in the entertainment industry are basically the personification's of greed, I assure you that cheaper actors wouldn't make a cheaper product for the consumer.
Take a movie like Clerks, this movie was made for less than $30000, still the DVD was just as pricey as the rest of them.
And lets not forget the blair witch, that silly movie made $248 Million dollars in theaters worldwide. And with a production budget of $35000 , that a pretty neat profit. Still, did the DVDs and Video's cost less? No, of course not(you can never have to many Bentleys mind you).
And don't even get me started on some of the television series, a complete collection of Voyager has a list price of ~$900. For a product which was already making a nice profit before hitting the DVD media.
Greed killed the cat, and hopefully it will kill Hollywood too. As long a products are getting priced the way that they are today, there will be pirating. No CSS, DRM or insert-name-of-latest-MPAA-holy-grail-here will change that.
I was going to go with the slightly less contentious "linux" as a search term, but that same "Sponsored link" swung it. Besides, using a recent box office smash makes a point too: Supernova and other Torrent index sites are a convenience, nothing more. The horse has already bolted and all that the MPAA/RIAA lawsuits will achieve is to close the barn door. It wasn't that long ago that the BSA tried marching roughshod over all the sites offering cracks and keygens for applications. You don't have to look very hard to find that aspect of the Internet is still very much alive and well, so what makes anyone think that these lawsuits are the death knell for online distribution of music, movies and TV shows etc?
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
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.
.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.
Do they even know what a
I believe that's one of the reasons they, and many other companies, are lobbying against it...
Best. Webhost. Ever. Dreamhost.
Do we blame companies for catering to our desire for possessions?
No, but I do blame companies that spend millions of dollars a year to sow artificial desires in the shared mindspace of society, via ubiquitous advertisements. And yes, this is offtopic. So, to bring it full circle:
If the MPAA adjusted their prices to reflect more accurately the value the market assigned to their movies, there would be less interest in downloading them and burning them to DVD (which is a time consuming process). It worked for the music industry.
Oh, I left my tag open. How mortifying.
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.
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...
.torrent hosts, that's either shitty reporting or a diversion. They're going after big trackers.
.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.
The MPAA is not just going after big
Storing and distributing
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!
What really gets me is that there is tons of child porn, snuff, and other illegal stuff on the torrents and p2p networks. Why don't people get upset about this? It seems to me that the message being sent is "If you download our stuff, you are in trouble. But, if you download illegal sex films, that is OK." Seems a bit backwards to me...
DISCLAIMER:
I don't believe what I write, and neither should you.
the spammers need to start attaching torrents to their crap to get people to read them
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
You can't win, Darth. If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
--
make install -not war
I might be way off base, but if someone uses a gun to commit a crime, is the arms dealer breaking any laws? Shouldn't ATF sue that arms dealer for making that act of crime possible? No, and neither should MPAA/RIAA sue bt trackers. But hey, what can they do about it...
I mean, bittorrent tracker's are not the ones breaking laws. Not to my knowledge at least.
Making something possible that is illegal, is not illegal per se. IANAL tho.
-Is the meaning of life vanity, or is vanity the meaning of life?
The problem isn't where to host the .torrent files, its how to host the trackers.
Now if every client was a tracker, that might be different.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Why not take it to the next level and host *.torrents on Freenet?
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
Actually it's even funnier. Piratbyrån actually means The Pirate Bureau and i believe it was created as a response to Anti-pirat Byrån (the Anti-pirate Bureau), which seems to be the swedish equivalent of a very watered-down fusion between MPAA and RIAA.
What happens if the pirates invoke the right of parley?
It depends on a lot of factors, how much bandwidth I'm willing to push up. My Verizon line isn't quite as asymmetric as Comcast's (1536:384 vs. 3072:256), which might help.
Some torrents, I throttle to BitTornado's minimum of 3 K/s. Others, if I feel like helping to seed (e.g., stuff I have a direct involvement in, or stuff where I'm exceptionally grateful to see a seed actually show up), I push sometimes up to 40 K/s (which is just below 90% of my 45 K/s effective uplink).
I have to keep my uplink low, though, since I run IRC file servers, and they are very popular (I am almost constantly uploading over IRC).
Moll.
What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
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
If it was just stealing from large corporations, I'm sure we could all say "they can afford it" and forget about the problems. It isn't. Look at the software available on warez web sites. OK, some of it is from Microsoft and that just hurts Microsoft, right? What about the little guys that are hoping to be able to pay their credit card bill this month?
If your sole income is from software sales, piracy hurts you and your family. Don't give me that "it should all be free - charge for support" crap. Properly-written user software better not need support much, and when it is needed it better be free.
I just read your post title (LOL) and only have this to say: That's why suprnova.org shut down and will re-open with Exeem links. No, they didn't shut down because MPAA knocked on their door, but as a precautionary measure so they wouldn't get caught.
:-P
:-D
There's a blog with the news and screenshots of Exeem, but I forgot where it was and can't find the forum thread about the reopening on Neowin either.
You'll just have to trust a random internet stranger on it.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Your law is strong. Our lawyers are puny. Crush them!
Slightly OT, but just so you know, Reeves handed out $82 million of his own money to the various crew members who worked on the three Matrix movies. So while he may be making a lot more money than what his talent is worth, at least he sees the value in everyone else working on the project.
Here's a source for that information, btw
this dude downloads fast : http://www.livejournal.com/~usernotfound/
You call it excessive, I call it ambitious.
I was just trolling for responses like this. It worked. :)
/.
:)
Best way to point out the obvious, get links to it, and have 5 other people do all your research: say it can't be done on
God I love this site.
-=fshalor
Maybe i'm wrong but isn't this the exact type of cases the EFF loves to fight?.
here we have a small electronic company who is getting beaten up by larger lawyer driven companies.
Personally, i don't see a shred of evidence or a claim of breaking the law in the material i browsed.
Providing links is a far ways off to distributing content. I think it would be intresting to see this one fought out because it's an obvious scare tactic.
What about Sealand? Looks like server heaven to me.
I bet your ISP limits the default BT ports and your still using them. Try a different range. I started using a different range and my speeds went from maxing a 30K to 200K. ABC allows you to limit the up load speed. You'll have to set the range in the BT client and you firewall. Limit your client to 1-2 downloads.
I just spent 20 minutes looking you your sig... Is that your quote or did someone else say it.
w &i d=107
Found it referenced here"
http://zoidtechnologies.com/mantra.php?mode=vie
-=fshalor
Sorry, but you are wrong. He made the not unreasonable assumptions that
I defy you to argue (with a straight face) that either of these assumptions is false.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
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.
I had sort of figured out s/moviename/other keyword/ , but I must admit that I hadn't used the filetype: method before. :-)
.. in the end, they will loose though.
The MPAA/RIAA are fighting against the sea, thinking that they are beating it back because of the tide. There will come a flood, make no mistake. On the other hand, they HAVE to fight, because this is the foundation of their world. If they let go, they loose everything. So, they have to hold as hard as they can, for as long as they can
They may not hold the copyright on a .torrent, but did you notice that the MPAA took the time to download the actual .torrent and see what was subsequently downloaded? They own the material that has been downloaded due to the information contained within the .torrent file.
This was posted by a user named "footballdude" on DSLreports.com, so I cannot take the credit for it but it made me laugh and I think it's worth re-posting here (I added the part about the invalid address).
.45!"
___________
The conversation in court, regarding the letter to the website owners where the complaintant claims they face "severe sanctions" should they delete any pirated material or usable evidence in the case against them, might go something like this:
"Your honor, these malcontents deliberately destroyed evidence against them."
"What evidence?"
"The stuff you destroyed."
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"Our programmers traced your IP address and saw copyrighted material."
"You mean the impossible address of 66.250.450.10 you listed? Who has that address, anyway?"
"We meant to say
"They were mistaken, I don't have any copyrighted material."
"Because you deleted it!"
"I never had any. Even if I did, wouldn't you want me to delete it?"
"No! We wanted you to keep it."
"If you want me to keep it, why are you suing me for having it?"
"Your honor, please remove the defendant and issue a summary judgement for twenty thousand dollars."
uR iGn0ranc3, Their Power
Think of it this way.
:-)
IRC is the supply lines.
Napster/Kazaa/Bittorrent is the battle grounds.
The AOL users are the green soldiers sent into battle not knowing what faces them.
If the pressure keeps up, the MPAA/RIAA will eventually crack. They can only keep fighting this losing battle for so long. Since our soldiers never die, they just move onto new battle grounds.
That's right - a new form of class struggle.
Those with the IP, and those without 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
IANAL (I doubt a real lawyer would have the time, or the inclination, to read /.). But at a guess, the sites hosting .torrent files to copyrighted content could probably be nailed for contributory infringement. Sure, they don't have an actual hand in the infringement, but it seems quite obvious that they are enabling the infringment to take place. .torrent files would be ruled contributory infringement. e.g. If you host LotR:RotK-EE.torrent, and it is actually a valid tracker, you are knowingly assisting someone in the infringment of the copyright on the movie. And that specific file doesn't really have any non-infringement purposes.
Just going by the definition presented here
Even though you may not actually make software directly available on your site, providing assistance (or supporting a forum in which others may provide assistance) in locating unauthorized copies of software, links to download sites, server space, or support for sites that do the above may contributorily infringe.
To succeed on a contributory infringement claim, the copyright owner must show that the webmaster or service provider actually knew or should have known of the infringing activity.
I would guess that hosting specific
Of course, this probably just means thet we will see torrent sites moving onto freenet, or just have wholseale distribution if torrent files on P2P networks. Whether you agree with mass copyright infringement, or not, its happening and its not going to go away any time soon. Such activity will probably ebb and flow as new techniques are invented to enable it, and new laws/lawsuits are invented to stop it. In the end, such activity will probably just become yet another accepted fact of life, with those affected doing what they can to minimize the damage.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
Lawyers may know the law but do they know the technology? "filetype:torrent moviename" may be obvious to the technically "elite" but I really doubt the thought would occur to a lawyer, working for Google or otherwise, without some prompting.
"Using the same logic, a country where web sites are forbidden could press charges against you for having one."
Yes... this is the intent of the WTO.. be afraid.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
That would be Martin Niemöller.
"Stop failing the Turing test!" -- Dilbert
He probably still has them firewalled. #1 cause of bittrickle rage.
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
I happened to take an "Entertainment Law" course, taught by a Harvard-educated laywer.
The entire concept of "intellectual property" is based on the idea of taking something that is immaterial and treating it as if it were material.
So you cannot argue that it "isn't theft" or that it's "not stealing" without undermining hundreds of years of legal precedent that constitutes the very core of copyright law. You just simply can't do it. Those arguments don't hold. By saying that it's "not stealing" because nothing physical is taken, you are simply pointing out something that has been recognized for centuries; you are simply pointing out the very reasons that copyright and intellectual property law exist in the first place.
But all is not lost... there should be an exemption. If you (or someone you are downloading from) are sharing files, free of charge, and those files are going to be used for personal, non-commercial uses, there should be an exemption. It is not necessary to undermine centuries of legal precedent concerning copyright in order to make sense of the dilemna we have before us.
I feel that it boils down to the simple physical reality that if something is for "personal" use, then that means that you have to consider that a human being has to eat, sleep, work. study, and do other things besides watch movies 24/7 - so any outstanding royalties that might be due simply cannot be greater than the amount of movies that any reasonable individual can watch in a certain period of time. That, in and of itself, is a significantly limiting factor, compared to, for instance, an individual who manufactures illegal disks and sells them on the black market, perhaps to thousands of individuals - the outstanding royalties in that situation are not limited by the amount of time one person can spend watching movies, but the amount of time thousands of people spend watching movies. Personal use implies that an individual is only watching one movie at a time - I suppose if you are an alien from outer space you can have a wall of monitors and be watching 25 different films at the same time, but realistically, it's not going to happen.
On top of that, in order to download with a torrent, you must also upload, so there's even another exemption there - there is no one single source that is providing multiple downloads to multiple individuals - you download, you upload as well - there is no analogy to a single individual manufacturing hundreds or thousands of black-market disks and profiting from them. It's more or less a 1:1 ratio, as far as each individual torrent user is concerned - you download, you also upload.
The best way to look at it is that there should be some kind of exemption; there should be some sort of compromise. Furthermore, services like Netflix should be promoted and the industry should see to it that they don't discourage innovation in this area by attempting to continue their stranglehold on the industry.
People need to recognize that technically, file sharing is copyright infringment and theft; but instead of using some kind of mathematical or logical "formula" to determine guilt or innocence, we need to use our common sense to come up with solutions that can create some types of limited exemptions. Personally, I think that bittorrent already has one possible exemption available to it, something that creates the greatest legal risk, something that the industries have attacked vociferously - that being the moral of "don't enable leeches". By not being a leech, by being required to upload when you download, you are adjusting the ratio, and preventing any one individual from providing multiple downloads to multiple individuals. It's no wonder that the industry is "encouraging" leeching - that way the content providers become centralized.
I understand that the original idea behind Netflix was to make the content available online, but the bandwidth costs made it unfeasible. We need to find a way to transition from limitations of physical media for rental
When did a jury find that bittorrent links are illegal in any way, shape , or form? If anyone knows by what priveledge that they are stealing from people and opressing speech, please let me know.
The article "MPAA Goes After More Bittorrent Site Operators" follows immediately after the article "China Closes 1,129 Web Sites".
Coincidence? Or not.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
I'm not denying that the MPAA holds/controls the copyrights for movies that are being pirated, but the fact is that they just don't hold the copyrights to .torrent files.
They claim that they do, of course, because, without doing so, they don't technically have any grounds to prosecute torrent distribution sites for copyright infringement.
From the man himself:
4. Generate a metainfo (.torrent) file using the complete file to be served and the URL of the tracker.
So, a .torrent file could be considered a derivative work of the file to be served, so to speak. Thus, it could be reasonable to believe that they have copyright on the .torrent. Or, as my feeble understanding of the law leads me to think, producing a .torrent (a potential derivative work) of a copyrighted file without the owner's authorization is illegal in and of itself.
-- listen to interesting music, support independent radio... WPRB
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.
As long as you don't see it for what it is, but instead mix it up with images of bloodshed and destruction, your judgement is clouded.
I can't speak for anyone else, but although piracy in the true sense of the word does still exist (people board small boats slowly navigating narrow straits in order to steal the cash used to pay payroll and port fees, according to Wikipedia), and although the term now means illegally reproducing media ever since people used to broadcast music from boats just offshore where laws no longer applied, to me the word "pirate" will always conjure up imagery of insult sword fighting, eye patches, bandanas and wooden legs.
Arr, the stereotypin'!
Does it really cause that much harm to call people who break copyright pirates?
Why doesn't anyone go after child porn distributors? Because no one is losing money.
nothing.can.stop.me.now
...but then I saw that these guys were using bandwidth to distribute Garfield: The Movie.
For that, I say "Hang the fuckers. Hang 'em high."
Then find the people that actually downloaded it and hang them, too.
s'wut i sed.
one could design a meta-indexer site (possibly running on freenet?) that indexes indexing sites? Using such a scheme, the primary indexing sites could be created and destroyed on the fly. For example, when it gets too popular (maybe when it serves X amount of torrents), site A sends all its torrents to a decentralized torrent database and automatically terminates. Sites B and C immediately emerge and request Y amount of torrents from the database.
... Oh, wait...
This process continues, with the primary, disposable indexing sites rising and falling as the need arises with meta-indexer site coordinating the whole show. New torrents would enter the system through one of the primary indexers and be uploaded to the database for distribution when that indexer goes down.
This would achieve the nice feature of having torrents publicly available but not so available that the **AA gets wise and sic their legal minions on them. Additionally, since the system provides for the inevitable (indexers dying), it would be much more robust and nearly impossible to shut down.
Theoretically, the **AA could also monitor the meta-indexer, but since the primary indexers could rise and fall within hours, it would be infeasible to try to attack them all, and they cannot shut down the primary indexer.
Just an idea...
Stupidity is inversely proportional to idiocy...
They will sue at whatever level necessary. I think the only true answer is to go to systems where nothing goes directly from sender to reciever but trough an unknowing intermediary, the way that MUTE does. Sure it uses a lot more traffic, but the ever increasing technology will help with this problem. The **AA is simply driving the development of these technologies, they cannot win.
So then, what if my dvd gets stepped on? Then I can't watch my movie anymore. I could then go onto one of these sites and download the movie, which I already own the rights to watch, and then make a personal use copy with a dvd-r.
It seems to me that this is legal. If, therefore, the content of the site (torrents) can be used legally, how can the site be held responsible for illegal use?
Isn't that like holding a rental place responsible for people copying their movies, a gun store for armed robbery, or a car dealership for illegal drag racing?
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.
Overruled. The legal system is not against me here. As I already said, the MPAA does not hold copyrights on the files in question, so the only possibly legitimate legal concern here is whether the MPAA is liable for falsely claiming copyright.
It's also not at all funny that people like beneficial things, and dislike detrimental things. If this surprises you... well, I'm sorry.
Why am I even replying to an AC? Because you're massively wrong, I suppose.
As an AC pointed out elsewhere in this thread, a hash of a movie is as "derivative" a work as the page count of a book, or the weight of a statue.
It may uniquely identify the original work, but it communicates none of the original information within that work. If a one-way hash is used, it can actually be mathematically demonstrated that the hash alone cannot be used to recover the original content.
That's the whole problem here. The people that host torrents are legally in the right, but it doesn't seem to matter because the MPAA has more laywers.
Most normal people won't even bother to look for kiddy porn on the p2p. If they found any, I'm sure they'll raise a stink about it. Therefore, only the sickos will bother and somehow, I don't think they'll get all bothered over it. Therein lies the problem.
Kaseijin> It's a mathematical transformation of the initial work.
Kaseijin> What distinguishes it from a sample processed beyond recognition?
Indeed.
I hereby direct your attention at the following mathematical transformations:Now, I admit that these hash functions are not the best ones to choose from, due to a higher than average percentage of collisions, but that is beside the point -- a crappy hash function is still a hash function.
That said, I submit that every instance of the numbers "1" and "0" and any combination thereof (in particular, binary code) is an application of the hash functions above to copyrighted material, child pornography, terrorist activity or any other type of illegal content.
Possession and distribution of such data is therefore criminal.
God bless America!
RIAA & MPAA: You're going down my friend, along with the rest of them stinky pirate skum.
- Voice of Ambience -
Why should the parent be modded down? Slashdot moderators do not exist to enforce Lowtax's silly little rules.
Oh, but mjh49746, piracy costs consumers more by paying higher prices and by having to impose copy controls on them.
Bullshit! They can set any arbitrary price they want and make up any reason that they want, so don't feed me the WIPO line. Drop the price, treat your customers with respect, and go after the REAL pirates and piracy will drop. Raise the price, treat your customers with contempt, and sue everyone in sight and piracy will only get worse as well as them having to deal with more angry people like me.
You're right. Try wondershaper and play a bit with the settings. It really works well!
WE DON'T NEED NO BLOG CONTROL.
Everyone I know with a disposable income less then 30,000GBP owns something pirated, has pirated something or sells pirated goods.
I don't know that many people with >30kGBP [they tend to go to dinner parties ow something] but a lot of them download from the Internet.
So, on my estimates (the adv income being about 25kGBP) more than half the population on the UK breaks copyright laws.
I'd like to see someone product figures that go against this because I don't believe that they can.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Every year with inflation, or currency trade markets, your dollars in your wallet and bank are devalued.
That is partial THEFT, because really, you have less purchasing power, ie, you really buy less for what you have. Now a small decrease of 4-7% might be not too noticeable for one year, but do it continously and after 20 years, you have devalued by 80%+. Now that is DAMN stealling in my book and its 100% legal because the smart govt/financial people KNOW that things like this are too hard to comprehend for the average dumbo out there who hates maths.
Please file a theft report with the police, "err LEO, the govt stole 20% of my money over the last 3 years, please arrest the govt bankers."
Just as legit as MPAA suing downloaders for 'potential theft', the inflation theft is more REAL and we are all slaves to it.
If the govt cant be fair to its citizens, then I do not respect the govt or its laws that dont agree with me.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Please don't use the word "retarded" to mean stupid. That's just crazy.
That is all.
What I hated was minimum transfer speeds of 5kbs or 15 kbs , if you dropped for one second below that rate, then your cut off, totally utter crap code coded by utterly useless C grad drop outs. Any smart person would add a average over last 30minutes value, and if it drops below 10% of the MARK for more than 10 minutes.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
I don't think it's been tested, but I think SCOTUS would say, NO, congress does not have to make law to legalize a treaty, to enter into a treaty their must be a 2/3rds majority and presidential approval beforehand.... they are AUTOMATICALLY equivelant to the constitution in degree of enforcement..
Clause 2: This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
That's because you couldn't figure out how to fix your configuration, something everybody seems to do, hurting those who are properly configured.
The only evil bits that I know of are sticky bits, but those aren't that evil once you get to know them and understand how they work :)
See my art -> http://herbevore.deviantart.com
I wonder what IP the witchhunters at /. has ever produced, to constantly chant these rabid, knee-jerk responses. The whole IP issue would be solved very quickly if people just expanded the acronym and realized that the 'I' in 'IP' stands for "Intellectual", and then classified whether the "property" should fall into that category or not. The producers of real "IP" seems to have no problems with sharing their intellectual wealth - the complaints always originates from those whose property would not qualify anyway.
OK. I don't accept that as valid usage. It's usage that betrays one as either ignorant or biased.
And I do feel that either it's a deliberate attempt to color the discussion, or it reveals that the person so speaking is biased, perhaps through ignorance, in a way that renders his opinions suspect. If you don't want me to consider you in that way, you need only refuse to abuse the word.
N.B.: This doesn't mean that I always go out of my way to correct people. Many people would not appreciate being told, however politely, that their use of words revealed them to be either ignorant or biased. But I do consistently interpret the words in that way. If you don't, that's your choice, but don't expect to improve my opinion of your arguments.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I've heard of a few distributed tracker projects, which I don't want to name here because this kind of suprnova thing will happen again. Suffice to say the P2P technology satisfies a huge need, and it will only get harder to stop, and easier to use. We all know that "information wants to be free", or whatever accurate, yet cliche phrase, you want to say.
WASTE was cool, though it's sad that Frankel had to go and get fired from his gig, and it is too complex to spread like Bit Torrent has.
On a side note, the MPAA is a lame duck dead organization, and so is the RIAA. Artists make a lot of their money from touring, and movie stars are beginning to leverage themselves across industries. Soon, we won't have to deal with this crap.
The internet could be the greatest tool ever, if the initial hurdle of copyright could be overcome. But I don't need to tell people here that.
I've been wondering this as well. Freenet might only be as fast as one would get with a dial-up connection, but that's fast enough for a text only site such as a torrent list. Sure, it'd lack some of the modern nicities, but not getting sued for running it, and not having to pay hosting fees, would seem a nice payoff.
Everything will be taken away from you.
You may not be aware of this, but copyright law is not a natural law created by a higher power - it was merely an invention to preserve some market force momentum after the printing press was invented and mass copying became feasible, and in its early stages it was a way to protect authors from predatory copiers and distributors who would profit off of works that were not their own. In its current incarnation however, it is a way for predatory printers and distributors to enforce their "right" to profit off of works that they "control" but did not ultimately create. At this point in time, IP law is achieving the opposite of that which is set out to do - it is ensuring the continuation of profiteering without production and is hindering the progress of new intellectual production by handing over total control of the raw materials to those who wish for nothing but total domination of the field. It is my belief that this bastardization of IP law is cause to revisit the legislation, keeping the original intent in mind and considering the purpose of "law" to begin with - to protect and further society for the good of all, not to protect and further the right of a few to rake in immense profits on the backs of others.
Whereever you may stand on the issue, it is foolish to claim that organizations that present an alternative view to conventional wisdom should just shut up because they're thieves. Stop the witch calling already.
Plus they love abusing and exploiting the stuff whenever they Spam/DDos places.
And don't you guys deny it, SA goes out of their way to find people, write up a long "humorous" flame to inspire and work up the SA "troops," and then give their email/forums/im/etc just so that you can spam the hell out of them. When ever directly addressed about how they encourage this, the sites runners weasel around it, and yet they still present the links in a "nudge nudge wink wink, say no more" kind of way.
People claim they ban those on the forum who do this, but you have to give it to them that none of them are stupid enough to do it under their name. They claim no responsibility about those SA readers they encouraged to spam/DDos. I know one recent rant piece that got featured on several sites(including slashdot) encouraging their readers to spam the hell out of one place because they couldn't get their way.
I was a visitor of the place they attacked, and lets say things didn't work out as SA had planned. At least it is nice to know that sometimes you pick a target that is bigger then you, and you get the slap down you disserve.
These dumb shits. go ahead sue your customers. Waste the common resources on lawsuits.
It may sound trite, but it's simply inevitable:
Information wants to be free. People will make it so. Technology will enable them.
They more deep pockets attack individuals, the more technology will enable distributed information sharing. When is someone going to write a simple mysql torrent database that rsyncs with peers. The next generation of p2p will include completely distributed search. Try and sue everyone you morons.
These people are so closed minded it's astounding... their business model is OVER. wake up, play ball with the rest of us. If they would simply realize that *can not control* distribution any longer, we would all be better off.
I run a tracker. There is no way for me to know what goes on in the tracker. I used it to track files for JPL's Maestro project. The torrents for Maestro are all located on my web server.
.torrents that point to your own tracker, than I see a problem, but with my server, I don't see anyway to be convicted.
.torrents are so small, it can handle), then it seems the *AAs would be powerless to stop it.
However, the only things I know are being hosted there are things I put there myself. There are things being hosted, but I have no way to know what they are. I can see occasional spikes in my download graphs, and it makes me wonder what they are, but I can't possibly know. All I see are IPs and hashes. If someone where hosting illegal torrents on my tracker, I don't see anything I can do about it or anyway I could be held responsible (since I have no knowledge of what is being tracked and no way (to my knowledge) to stop it). The tracker runs in the background on my server, I don't touch it for weeks or months and yet it can help move terabytes of data that I know nothing about.
However, if you hosted a torrent site that posted
So here is the thing, if people made torrents with random trackers they found on the internet (by, for example, a Google Search) and posted them on Freenet (which would be okay since
Andrew
im going to start a protest group at my school.
they are a bunch of high schoolers who live to rip music off their friends, so i dont think they'll have a problem with fighting the organization that wants to take everything away from them.but i dont know how to start. any advice? i dont even think my tecchies know what the MPAA is _
help...
You have to build your own network, and it has to have moderately strong anonymity. Nothing else will work.
Fortunately, you can build that network on top of the existing insecure, tracable internet. freenet/tor/MUTE are incubators for the next generation of fully anonymous, high performance p2p. It's a matter of time until one good coder puts all the pieces together.
And then there's WiFi p2p, which is going to be unbelievable once we all have nodes in our cars, backpacks, etc.
Nail, meet MPAA coffin. Slashdot, meet nail.
I resent that!
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
"RIAA President Cary Sherman cautioned the U.S. Senate that Kazaa could be a tool for adults to lure children into having sex."
Might as well outlaw the internet itself, then; as well as telephones, public parks, and candy stores.
[Posting on this topic, I should specifically point out that my sig is a joke I got from Last Comic Standing.]
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
So now it's OK to deprive someone of part of their rightful income by infringing their copyright, as long as it's not all of it? Perhaps it's wrong to keep their rent from them, but the money for their daughter's Christmas present doesn't matter?
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
No, but they can make you want something by lying to you. In the end, if you purchase the product, does it matter whether they tricked you into buying it or "made" you?
This whole subthread is about that. Please go and read the original posts again.
That depends what you mean by "full compensation". Do you mean "fair compensation", in the sense that if others benefit from my work then I am entitled to proportionate compensation in return? If so, then morally yes. Anything else disadvantages the person actually creating the work in favour of the free-loader, which is not in the interests of society.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Exactly what sanctions are they talking about? Last I checked:
1) copyright infringment cases were civil, not criminal cases
2) The MPAA was not a government
So, exactly how can a corporation levy "sanctions" against a person for "destroying" evidence in a civil case? What are they going to do, blockade his house?
Isn't this just an empty threat? Or is it pure stupidity? Isn't this just Police Chief Wiggum telling Homer to bring that evidence to court, or they have no case?
Seriously, wtf are they talking about?
UTF-8: There and Back Again
The MPAA (over 50% owned my non-american Jap companies) is insane. The MPAA is working against technology and freedom which cannot be allowed. In the end they will lose. They(big monopolistic film) represents a very small tiny fraction of the US economy and yet they are asking for measures which will stop freedom for everyone else. We need to have digital theatres with digital projectors we need to stop allowing the MPAA companies to control film distribution. If it takes it we need to boycott their products entirely. Small filmmakers have taken the lions share of film awards because their product is better in every way. We need to break up news monopolies and cable monopolies too. We need to so we can have an explosion of choice in a low-priced super competitive free market.
Is something I really don't believe in. I created a lot of poetry, prose, music, scientific research, legal research and computer programs/software, and I believe that their *creation* should generate revenue, not their *repetition*.
So, I don't use the forementioned word. I use the "right" words: copyright infringement. Yes, I would be insulted if someone made money out of my songs/poetry/other stuff (not likely) but NOT to the point of having such person imprisoned for a substantial term (here in Brasil, 2 to 6 years IIRC). I would seek -- maybe -- civil legal remedies and compensation/damages, nothing else. But I am not -- and you probably knew that -- Madonna nor Eminem. In one angle, my poetry and songs are better -- at least in MY opinion, and that's what counts to me. In another, they make millions of dollars by propagandizing their pop culture and inciting its repetition to death. If they (unlikely) do this to some of my work and make a lot of money, hey, it's my work, my copy-rights, my money. But I wouldn't put them in jail for that.
OTOH, I would put people behind bars for plundering boats, killing people and robbing property -- and THAT is piracy.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
So what if I own this work, and want a compressed version and don't want to take the time to do it myself?
Then perhaps the MPAA should prosecute on charges such as those? The fact is, they're prosecuting for copyright infringement, while the defendants have not infringed upon any copyright. The MPAA is just wrong here. That point really shouldn't even be open to argument.
Yes i'm advertising, but sifting through google results for torrents is a major pain. Use my site at the sig, gives you all the peer and torrent details.
VIVA1023.com | Political Fashion.
O jumento e o cavalo
...
Eles nunca andam só
Quando sai pra passear
Levam a eguinha Pocotó
Pocotó, Pocotó, Pocotó,
minha eguinha Pocotó
(something like:
The mule and the horse
They do never walk alone
When they goes for a ride [SIC]
They take the Clap-a-clap mare
Clap-a-clap, Clap-a-clap, Clap-a-clap,
my litlle Clap-a-clap mare
)
And THIS was one of the most copyright infringed things. I do (and a lot -- but not millions -- of people) think anything I wrote when I was 14 is better poetry than that.
a. I never said I was alone in my appreciation for my poetry/prose/music nor that I was alone in my disgust for the cream of the Pop. do YOU like Britney, Justin, etc songs?
b. this takes me to the next item: nowadays, BAD poetry is being rewarded, not the good one. REALLY BAD poetry (see above) is what you are describing as "a more elevated activity"
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048