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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.
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.
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.
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!
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
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
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
Quite a few reasons, not all of which are freenet's fault.
Fault of the users:
1) It assumes that the average warez dude actually be aware of all the copyright nazidom going on, at a "current events" level of awareness.
2) It assumes they are smart enough to recognize that freenet would be a solution to the legal problems that they *will* eventually face.
3) It assumes that they are smart enough to use it (this will cease to be a problem when the freenet guys figure out how to dumb down the interface enough).
4) It assumes they are smart enough to actually install it.
Fault of Freenet:
1) It uses 1 gig of traffic for every 10 megs you personally download.
2) It uses 500 megs of storage for every 10 megs you download.
3) The limiting factor for downloading a file known to exist on freenet is your patience, not your bandwidth.
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.
Don't use the word, "gay" to mean bad. That's so retarded.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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
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"
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!
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!
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
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!
You can't win, Darth. If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
--
make install -not war
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)
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.
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.
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
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
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.
...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.
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.