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LokiTorrent Shut Down
wan-fu writes "LokiTorrent, a popular torrent site, has officially been shut down. After asking for donations from users for the past couple of months to fight the MPAA's lawsuit. LokiTorrent succumbed today and the MPAA took over the website with a stern warning, stating, "You can click, but you can't hide." A variety of outlets are carrying the story."
- quote from their site.
So does that mean if you have downloaded stuff, and you stop, they can't catch you? Does it imply an amnesty? Or is it just sloppy wording on their part?
Jolyon
Please read my Canon EOS tech blog at http://www.everyothershot.com
Something to worry about:
What's really alarming the swapperati, though, is that Lokitorrent has agreed to turn over the server's user logs.
In a normal situation, you could make the case that agreeing to turn those over is a violation of users' privacy. In this situation, even if you could show that the site's terms and conditions promised never to disclose its users' information, you would almost certainly lose: a court that has just shut down a site for illegal activity is hardly likely to agree to protect its users. Especially not since the Supreme Court decision in Illinois v. Cabbales, which held that sending a sniffer dog to find drugs through a car stopped for speeding does not violate the Fourth Amendment (the one that prohibits search and seizure without probable cause). Around now, the MPAA is probably gleefully poring over the logs, going through IP numbers, and compiling a list of the "hundreds of thousands" of individuals it might sue next. Fun!
From http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=21216
They had raides $45,000, which the site owner said should be enough for almost two months legal defence. As it turns out, he gave the MPAA the site, the server logs and $5-10k and walked away with a PROFIT.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
Well several of the sites are claiming it was a "settlement" between the MPAA and Lowkee/Ed Webber. The general consensus seems to be that this entails handing over of the site, any logs and an unspecified amount of money to the MPAA and a promise not to do it again, or face further more severe sanctions. A jail sentence, or even a criminal prosecution, does not appear to be in the offing, although there *is* a court gagging order in effect. However, for a different take on what "settlement" might have been, check out this article, which should be especially of interest to the suck^H^H^H^H people who donated money.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Definitions of theft on the Web:
larceny: the act of taking something from someone unlawfully
If I download a movie what have I taken? Profit? They never would have gotten it in the first place. I don't go out to movies, but I buy them on DVD if they're good (as judged by the file I downloaded)
So if I purchase their product on DVD (Where most of their profit is actually made) who am I forcing to sell their child into slavery? The stars who make $xxMillion per movie? The crew who was paid before the movie was released to theaters? Or the already rich management bastards at the movie company?
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
Where are these BitTorrent servers located? The Internet is "virtual", but the MPAA raids are physical, in one country or another. Loki, SuprNova, others - in which countries are the MPAA moviecops raiding offices? MPAA claims to operate police in at least "Austria, Hong Kong, Finland, France and the Netherlands as movie industry cops". Which countries now retain their jurisdiction sovereignty, and which are now just muscle for the US adfotainment hegemony?
--
make install -not war
They actually took in closer to $70k.
I long predicted this, for obvious reasons. Loki succeeded in getting a lot of naive idealists rallied around the call to "fight the Man". People donated thinking that they'd have ring-side seats to an exciting legal battle. It was all bullshit... Of course it was. There was absolutely zero change of them successfully defending themselves, based on mountains of preceding case law. If you were sitting on $70k in real cash (not just discussing a hypothetical situation on the semi-anonymous Intraweb), would you really flush it down the toliet? Even if you met with several lawyers who told you to expect the exact same outcome?
I'm sorry, but this outcome was obvious to any rational observer. It saddened me to see Loki take advantage of their users like that. But, it also enraged me to see them actually monetarily profit from distributing software that was not within their rights to sell.Entrepreneur : (noun), French for "unemployed"
Just so you know.. there was a time in this country that the ethical guidelines that people lived by were a bit more stringent. It wasn't all patina tinged 50's vision, but still...
...my grandparents never would imagine talking to a salesperson and getting information from him unless they had already decided to buy a product from that outlet. Today, people go and shop around, and talk to different sales people before making a decision to buy a something. You might go to 3-4 car dealerships and take test drives, kick the tires, and spend an hour or two at each one before you decide.
There are people who really consider that unethical. Those sales people could have lost another sale, or another opportunity by spending time with you, and it causes them have to spend lots of time with a large number of people all for no payoff. Today, it's a fact of business. Salespeople for big products will chase you down, fly to your business, whatnot.
To this day my grandmother would never walk into Best Buy, talk to the sales person about TVs, which are good, which are junky, which are just right and then go buy a similiar TV at Wal-Mart cause it's $20 cheaper. It just won't happen. She considers it theft. Clearly, it's not stealing it from the shelves, but it's costing them opportunity.
Likewise, with copyright infringement. Downloading a movie without authorisation isn't purely theft. No one is deprived of something they didn't have before. Things are net neutral in the physical property department, save maybe bandwidth, but that's not relevant here.
What you have done is deprived the people involved in that movie of a head to add to their headcount. The movie theater owner of $8 plus maybe concessions. The advertisers who paid to get their products on screen, etc. Do they have a right to your money and eyeballs? No, not at all. Just like a TV sales person has no right to sell you a TV. It's all optional.
Regardless, I am just saying, there are people alive who believe that if you examine an action, and ask the question "what would happen if everyone did this activity?", and the answer is negative, you shouldn't do it. They would and do consider that loss of opportunity - the opportunity for a sale, the opportunity for popularity, all that - as a form of theft. Maybe no punishable like theft of a physical object, but certainly no more respectable.
"guns don't kill, people do..."
You suggest the site's maintainer didn't mean to provide access to illegal content? C'mon, grow up.. 99% of his traffic was what?
If your logic is sound then why aren't all torrent hosting sites taken down? agha... because they don't all allow torrents of copyright protected content.. they maintain their sites and assure that the legal torrents get a spot..
-if at first you don't succeed, stay the heck away from paragliding.
'Tracker' Site Loses Piracy Judgment
By Jon Healey, Times Staff Writer
The major Hollywood studios have drawn their first blood in court against a popular new type of online piracy, obtaining a $1-million judgment against a website that steered people to downloadable copies of bootlegged movies.
Edward Webber, operator of LokiTorrent.com, agreed not only to pay the damages to studios and shut down his site, but also to give the Motion Picture Assn. of America voluminous records his site has collected over the last two years.
These records could lead investigators to tens of thousands of people who distributed and downloaded unauthorized copies of digital goods, said John G. Malcolm, head of the MPAA's anti-piracy efforts.
Malcolm said the site had more than 750,000 registered users and helped distribute more than 35,000 movies, songs and other items.
"It will have a lot of records as to who these people are and what they provided, and that information will be of great interest to our members," Malcolm said. He said the MPAA would turn over information to prosecutors "in appropriate cases," but did not elaborate.
Webber did not respond to a request for comment. His website describes him as a 28-year-old computer-network consultant in New England whose main hobby is building websites. He agreed to the judgment to settle the lawsuit the MPAA brought against him, but there was no indication Thursday that he could afford to pay the $1 million in damages.
The judgment, which a federal judge in Dallas signed Thursday, came less than three months after the MPAA launched an international crackdown on "tracker" sites for people using the BitTorrent file-sharing software. The effort in December also targeted people offering bootlegged Hollywood movies on powerful computer servers connected to eDonkey, the most widely used file-sharing network.
Also Thursday, the MPAA announced that it had filed a second wave of lawsuits against BitTorrent tracker sites in the United States and more lawsuits against individual file sharers. The organization also said it filed more notices asking Internet providers to shut down eDonkey servers on their networks and lawsuits against four websites that sold file-sharing programs. The MPAA also prompted authorities in Austria to raid operators of BitTorrent trackers and eDonkey servers. Malcolm declined to say how many individuals or sites were reached by the crackdown.
BitTorrent has skyrocketed in popularity over the last year because it can deliver large files faster than other file-sharing technologies. But the software has no built-in method for finding files; instead, users rely on people who run tracker websites such as LokiTorrent that act as directories.
These tracker sites compile links to digital files that are being shared online as "torrents," the format used by the BitTorrent software. The links connect users to the Internet addresses of the people supplying copies of the file.
Charles S. Baker, Webber's attorney, said at least parts of LokiTorrent were defensible in court. In particular, he said, Webber offered to drop links to any pirated goods that copyright owners found on the site.
But the studios had plenty of money for legal fees, and "there was nobody coming to the table willing to write a check for him to defend this lawsuit," Baker said. "Like a lot of David vs. Goliath situations, he's got stones to throw, but he didn't have any money to go get a slingshot."
From what you said: "I told him he should take it down. He did not. I removed his hardware. Problem solved.".
;)
From your sig: "Hacking your Xbox? Start here".
Do you realize that what you advertise in your sig is massively illegal and when collided with your message it produces a vast amount of irony? Be careful
Entrepreneur : (noun), French for "unemployed"
If you buy a Coke instead of a Pepsi, you just deprived Pepsi of a sale.
Bull. I didn't deprive them of anything. I made a choice favoring their competitor. They can't "lose" a sale they never made. They may be unhappy, but they should get over it.
I agree with your conclusions 100% in principle, but the example is no good as an analogy. I will give you one that is more applicable:
Buck Rogers builds a duplicative liquid synthesizing machine. Whenever you pour in a sample of any liquid, it can produce an unlimited quantity of that liquid for very low expense per unit of liquid.
Now I legally purchase an ounce of Pepsi, pour it into the machine, and cause the machine to produce 1000 gallons of a liquid which is indistinguishable from Pepsi. I drink some of the produced liquid, and sell the rest.
The question is, does Pepsi have a case against me? Obviously they do in US law, but I submit that they do not have a case in natural law. To tell me I cannot do what I just did is restraint of free human activity. I did not steal any physical material which they own, and if the law attempts to criminalize me for stealing some fiction in the form of "intellectual property", the law should be rethought.
My message to intellectual property law is "get over it". You have been overtaken by technology. Adapt or disappear.
I was reading this book (Stiff by Mary Roach) and it mentioned how airline companies determined if they should deploy certain saftey devices on airplanes. The formula was like the one rattled off in Fight Club, based on the cost of the settlement payouts for those who died or were injured.
... will ... be off a bit, but the concept holds I think. I googled a bit to try and find the numbers, but didn't net anything. If someone wants to correct the numbers, feel free. ;)
I think it was something like 2 or 4 million USD a human life was worth in a settlement. And the number shown on the FBI warning screen says something like $250k for violating the copyright. So basically, in monetary value, a human life lost due to neglegence or whatever is worth about 8 to 16 video pirating charges. Kind of sad.
This is all based on my memory of the book quote of the settlement price, so I may
***
Many people do use theft in this way, ie "That store down the street is stealing my customers". It's a common, emotional way of reacting when you feel like you're owed something. It's also wrong, because nobody owes you anything, least of all thier money or patronage.
***
Some Los Angeles area courts disagree. Two businesses that I used to patronize were both hauled into court by their competitors, and forced to stop doing business with the public.
One was an individual who would sometimes provide medical services to homeless people for little or no money; his competitors took him to court for "not charging the going rate" and "depriving competitors of a chance to earn a living" (yes, the suit was worded something like that -- I saw the actual legal documents), and the upshot was that his license was suspended by the court. Right, like homeless people are going to pay anything regardless??
The other was a large vertical manufacturer who both made and sold their own raw materials and finished products, hence could sell either at a much lower price than any of the competing businesses -- who in fact usually bought their raw and finished inventory FROM this manufacturer (one of many in their field, tho they are the largest in this immediate area). Naturally word got around, and pretty soon everyone bought from the source instead of paying the small retailers' markup. So the retailers got together and dragged this manufacturer into court under some sort of "restraint of trade" charge -- and WON. This manufacturer can no longer sell to the public, by court order, SOLELY so their competitors can make money. (BTW this is why a few years ago, the local price of chainlink fence and chainlink prefabs abruptly tripled.)
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
I completely agree.
I just object to the use of the term theft, because it's clearly an appeal to emotion.
Incidentally, if the movie studios offered me non-DRM-encumbered films for a few pounds I would gladly pay it. I use bittorrent for the convenience.
Actually that isn't true.
The definition of theft is what the laws of your country define, not what US law states.
In the UK for example, the act of theft does not have to be the removal of a physical object.
I appreciate the majority of Slashdotters come from the USA and therefore, for them, theft != copyright infringement but don't assume that holds for everywhere in the world.
ps. Interestingly enough, there is no concept of "fair use" in the UK either - so if you haven't bought your iPod music off iTunes, you're technically breaking the law. Strange, but true!
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
JMS (lord master of all things B5) wrote an interesting USENET article on how these folks actually get paid. Don't get me wrong, the RIAA/MPAA are still talking out of their arse in many ways, but it does give some perspective.