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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.
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
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.
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.
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
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. ]
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
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
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.