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First BitTorrent Arrest in Hong Kong
prostoalex writes "Associated Press says a 38-year-old was arrested in Hong Kong for uploading Daredevil, Red Planet and Miss Congeniality via a BitTorrent client. Hong Kong laws provide for a maximum of 4 years in prison and $6,400 fine for every copy distributed without copyright owner's permission."
He was a bittorrent freeloader so he's only responsible for uploading 0.013 copies. That's... what? 83 bucks? I think he'll be fine.
FACT: At some point in any file distribution protocol on the Internet a 'client' has been directed to a 'server' (peers, whatever) for a piece of information. The 'client' asks for this info and the 'server' provides it.
If the info being transfered is copyrighted then it is not legal for the 'client' to ask for and accept this info nor it is it legal for the 'server' to respond to these requests. If both the 'client' and 'server' are coroporating then this transfer will happen just fine.
If however either the 'client' or the 'server' are undercover 'good guys' then they can easilly rat out the other party; who, in the Internet, can eventually be tracked down and served with a lawsuit.
If you are running software that either requests (a 'client') or distributes (a 'server') information subject to copyrights then the copyright holder or an agent acting on their behalf can bust you, provided that the magic peer-to-peer search leads them to you (or your search leads you to them).
The only legal questions are whether this constitutes entrapment. If it does the pirates win and copyright law is broken. If it doesn't then the RIAA/MPAA/whoever wins and copyright law is safe.
All the fancy peer-to-peer protocol magic in the world can't change these basic facts. You don't anonymously receive and send packets on the Internet, you have a designated IP address and that can be followed to you.
On the other hand a different argument based on 'first principles' makes 'Digital copyright management' schemes such as CSS, HDCP, and Windows media also can't work.
The end result is that reality is set up to make copyright infringement impossible to stop and also impossible to hide (unless you absolutely trust who you are sharing information with, an unreasonable assumption).
This is just like the rest of life, breaking the law (murder, terrorism, etc) is VERY easy but getting away with it is VERY hard thus we make the punishment too great to worth the risk. Of course terrorism fails to respond to this formula and thus results in an up-hill battle that no one likes (lack of freedoms, privacy and security), one that eventually is destined to fail terribly.
With Bit-Torrent you upload piece-meal, so if he say only uploaded 1/4 of a movie's worth would he get 1 year? Or did he just upload the tracker? But, that really wouldn't be a copyrighted work, because the file isn't contained in the tracker, right?
4 years for every COPY distributed? Or 4 years for every copy DISTRIBUTED? (IE is he potentially going to jail 12 years for putting up 3 movies or 4 * 1000 thousand downloads?)
Oh, and by the way, if you ever go to Hong Kong and decid to buy counterfeit clothing, DVDs, or whatever, don't pay with a credit card, or else you'll become part of another classic Triad racket - counterfeit credit cards.
Zagreus sits inside your head, Zagreus lives among the dead, Zagreus sees you in your bed and eats you in your sleep.
Arrested? Thats nothing.
Yesterday, here in Malaysia a pirated VCD seller was shot in the chest with an automatic handgun by enforcement officers. Not only that, this took place in front of an coffeeshop and the slug that exited the VCD seller hit a guy having a meal.
The VCD seller was unarmed.
The MPAA ought to be proud of us.
Sometimes I wish I was a plumber, then I'd know how to deal with other people's shit.
Pardon me, but how do they define "a copy"? seems to me that most of the time when i download off bittorrent i'm getting hundreds of peices from many sources, unless there's only 1 seed and no peers, there's no way i'm going to get the full copy from 1 person.
MABASPLOOM!
And by maybe 2010 you won't have, or would you expect, the right to:
1) watch a movie on any device you want
2) make a backup copy of any information you own
3) loan a movie to a friend (you do now, don't you? do you report yourself to the nearest police station? does the guilt overwhelm you?)
4) learn how movie-playing devices work
5) share the knowledge publicly, with your name on it, without fear of having your computer taken by the state?
6) use next-generation information sharing networks, even if the information is available with the consent of the "rights holder"
7) install any software you want on your computer, including software you wrote
8) avoid advertisements you don't want to see
But hey.. if they eliminate some "pirates" along the way, we're all better off, right?
>disingenuity at its best!
>Look, it's illegal to photocopy books.
It's illegal to photocopy some books. I have several which can be legally photocopied. I have a great many more which cannot be legally photocopied, but I see no moral reason that should be so.
>Everybody understands why, ...
My understanding is that (ignoring the history, and focusing on the current state of the U.S. law) all copyrighted material is protected indefinitely (perhaps eternally) so that a few big media outfits with big lobbying budgets can enjoy a monopoly at my and your expense.
> ... and yet I'm only capturing photons with a photocopier. Right? Well, same with bytes that encode a movie.
Are you saying that illegal == wrong? Does it follow from that that legal == right? Just curious.
Getting back on topic for this thread, I agree with the GP post's assertion that copyright violations aren't theft, in any sense of the word. That's why they are not called theft in the law, and are not covered by laws which prohibit theft, and so on.
Copyright violations are the ``crime'' of violating a monopoly established by the government to benefit another at your expense.
See what I've been reading.
There's a problem with that: RTC v. Netcom. (see Netcom, 907 F. Supp. 1361 (ND Cal 1995))
2 5 )
If someone can create a filesharing system where traffic is routed from one node to another, and when a node routes it hides the identities of the parties it communicates with, then filesharing becomes safe again.
Just as in RTC v. Netcom, where the Religious Technology Center (a.k.a. Scientology) attempted to sue Netcom (and was denied), automated acts of routing on a filesharing network will probably be found NOT to be contributory copyright infringement.
In other words, if your network is arranged like this:
Client <----> Server
then either side can turn in the other side, as the parent post described. However, if your network is arranged like this:
Client <--> Node 1 <--> Node 2 <--> Server
then unless someone controls all of the systems in a particular communication path, they can't learn the identity of all of the nodes they don't control.
(See an earlier article, at http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/08/10/20492
One of the problems with this kind of routing system is fair division of labor. For this kind of P2P system to work (where your client must route data that it didn't actually request) the system must be designed well enough to distribute a burden of anonymous-routing to your client which corresponds with the amount of anonymous-routing load you're placing on the rest of the network. But how can people measure how much data you're sending and receiving, if they can't know who you are?
I don't have a solution for that problem, but it's not unsolvable.
So the question then becomes, will the general public begin to prefer a filesharing system that must transfer 400 MB of data over the network for every 100 MB of information it saves to disk, if that system is nearly impossible to audit or prosecute?
--Michael Spencer