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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."
Rather, they prosecute bad taste in Hong Kong.
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.
I'd nearly finished that download too! Why don't the authorities pick on the torrents with a lot of seeds to give people a chance?...
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
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?
Since when does Hong Kong care about copyright/patent enforcement? The last time I was there I could have gotten a (counterfeit) North Face coat, Rolex watch, and Prada bag, and for about $100US. What gives? 3 movies? I mean, seriously...
Bull.
My rights are not affected by the prosecution of some pirate. We don't have, nor should we expect, the right to pirate movies.
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?)
The punishment for distributing Miss Congeniality, legally or illegally, should be death.
There are 2 kinds of people in this world. Those that can keep their train of thought,
Don't call it a "BitTorrent Arrest" -- some of my best friends use BitTorrent for perfectly legitimate reasons... It's really an arrest for piracy.
who's moderating the meta-moderators?
Uh oh. Be careful! That statement goes against the slashbot groupthink!
We don't have, nor should we expect, the right to pirate movies.
But I love Pirate movies! The Curse of the Black Pearl was awesome!
"I planned within my means and got a fixed rate mortgage, so where's MY bailout?" -cafepress
...$6,400 fine for every copy distributed without copyright owner's permission.
Luckily, there were no downloads of these fine films.
If you're distributing Daredevil you deserve to be arrested, piracy or not.
...and so it should. You don't get to break the rules when programming. Why should you get to break them in real life?
The man wasn't arrested for using BitTorrent, or for using the Internet, or for using his computer, or for having an opinion, or for speaking out. He was arrested for committing a crime which he knew to be a crime. This is as it should be.
The truth is that the Hong Kong street vendors selling pirated copies of movies, software, etc are taking a beating from the people choosing to use P2P methods of obtaining their media. A group of street vendors has taken it upon themselves to turn in every BT user they can identify in the hopes that people will quit using P2P and go back to the street vendors. The cops are rather upset about it to as they get kickbacks from the street vendors which have gotten smaller as well.
Mord
Ironic the link is posted on 'iWon' news. Well, he's certainly going to get a prize...
"How are they going to prove he "distributed" the movie if he is only serving chunks out piecemeal to various clients?"
Under U.S. copyright law, you don't have to actually prove that distribution occured -- it is generally sufficient to make a copyrighted work available for distribution. You don't have to prove that anyone downloaded the file -- simply making it available on Kazaa or whatever is sufficient. There's a case on this, Playboy v. Chuckleberry or Playbou v. Harbough, or one of the Playboy v. someone cases that raised this point.
"That's not even wrong..." -- Wolfgang Pauli
I wonder which this guy feels dumber about, getting arrested for using bittorrent, or getting arrested for distributing crap.
:P
And, I take it that figure is in USD, correct? 'cause I could probably find that much in HKD in my COUCH.
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
Bittorrents don't upload copyrighted files - people do.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
Can anyone explain to me why it's my right to violate copyright law while on the internet?
Hey, anyone want to go see a pirate movie?
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.
What do you mean? This guy is singlehandedly responsible for over ONE BILLION DOLLARS (pinky-to-mouth) of our losses for the year!
</RANT>
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
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!
Pirated DVDs actually bring money into the local/Chinese economy and encourage trade. Online piracy doesn't, since no money changes hands. So from a Chinese perspective, this guy really was hurting the economy for much the same reasons as the *AA claims, just with the added irony of those reasons being themselves illegal in a much more conventional sense.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
We don't have, nor should we expect, the right to pirate movies.
That's not the issue, not by a mile.
What rights are you willing to surrender so that the state and corporations may more effectively combat piracy?
Your rights most certainly are affected by the laws, many created just recently, that protect intellectual property holders. The Betamax decision, which made home taping legal, is being eroded at an ever increasing pace. The powers-that-be are actively seeking an end-around against Fair Use and the Doctrine Of First Sale.
You know this, right? You're supposed to know this, this is Slashdot. Idiots like me blather and foam about this stuff all day.
I realize the perp is in Hong Kong. I thought that it might be a useful tidbit of info to outline what U.S. law says about this. That's why I prefaced my remark by saying "Under U.S. copyright law."
However, I guess my thought was wrong. I am so sorry.
But hey, at least I learned that I am a douche bag, so it wasn't a complete waste of time...
"That's not even wrong..." -- Wolfgang Pauli
Mentioning it only smacks of propoganda.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
One of the many rules copyright law is that you do not have permission to redistribute any piece of any copyrighted work; this is why musicians must get permission before using a sample of someone else's work.
Therefore, distributing ANY small slice of the movie, no matter how small, is infringement.
Of course, this is somewhat silly, since the movie is in a digital format, and therefore distributing any number which appears in the digital stream is technically illegal.
I ain't evil, I'm just good looking.
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.
Associated Press says a 38-year-old was arrested in Hong Kong for uploading Daredevil, Red Planet and Miss Congeniality via a BitTorrent client.
He should have been arrested for his taste in movies.
I am more concerned about the image of useful software getting dragged through the mud by a handful of people using it for illegal purposes. By the time this makes it to CNN, all Joe Internet-User is going to know is that bittorrent is used for bootleging media. More fuel for the media conglomerates to use in their war on p2p. This is bad for everyone who uses p2p apps for legitimate purposes.
itadakimasu
That would not work with bittorrent.
Once you are associated with the tracker your IP address is visible to everyone in the swarm.
All the *IAA has to do is pretend to be a user, connect to your client, and decrypt data received from *YOUR* IP address and it's game over....
- PS. This is what part of the alphabet would look like if Q and R where eliminated.
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
Jose Padilla. US citizen. Born in Brooklyn. Detained in the US. No charge. No trial. Indefinite.
What fascinates me most is not that a govenment flouts their own constitution so blatantly - What's much more interesting is the state of denial so many of that country's citizens are in.