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Was the Lokitorrent Suit a Hoax?
kamhp writes "Recently earthreactor.com published an article
stating that the whole Loki Torrent suit was a fraud and that it was all staged to collect donations toataling in the tens of thousands then sell the domain.
"It seems that the owner of LokiTorrent decided to take the donation money and run, and to cover his tracks, scare the hell out of the entire p2p community. The scare tactic was probably nothing but a decoy to convince intelligent people not to ask the right questions" "
If I recall correctly, wasn't there a Paypal donate button? Fairly sure they can find out each and every person that donated to that POS. Glad I didn't give him my $0.02.
why has nobody noticed for such a long time?
See pictures of tits
If people have SO much money to donate why didn't they just buy the stuff instead of paying Lokitorrent so they could steal it.
I'd also like to add that I do think something if fishy with the Lokitorrent case--especially the fact that the site is still hosted on the original server rather than actually being taken over by the MPAA.
I also find it strange that the site up and closed about the same time that donation bar stopped moving.
In the days leading up to the closure of Lokitorrent, I noticed you had to click through some odd copyright infringement agreement. Not to mention searches for popular movies started resulting in generic messages like "At the request of MAJOR_STUDIO_HERE the search for SEARCH_TERM has been blocked"
Regardless, rather than spreading rampant rumors people should check their facts and stop relying on anonymous sources and he-said-she-said conjecture.
Like so many here, IANAL - but how exactly would you mount such a case?
"Your Honour, I used this website to knowingly violate copyright law, and then gave the owner of said site some money in the belief it was in order to defend a case against him, and therefore keep the site up. I want my money back, because no such case existed".
Response:
"So, you gave money in exchange for the possibility of continued use of an illegal service"
It would be very, very hard to argue that you gave money without previously using the site to download illegal material, or that when you parted with your money you had no hope at all it would result in the continued usage of the illegal service LokiTorrent provided.
Donate X amount or more and win some prize. It was innovative and I may use it in the future myself. As to the hoax? I got nothing.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
Why don't people who start these sites in the first place register them as a corporation. That way when the RIAA et al. come knocking on your door you can just let the company take the fall.
Limited liability people.
...it's in the form of a question.
/. editors would be complicit in the execution of a Fox News tactic.
What a crock of shit. To think
You can say anything you want without fear of reprisal as long as it's in the form of a question. You people don't fact check a goddamn thing, and just publish away. Never mind that the author of the original "article" is in bed with the MPAA.
Remember Loki, the norse trickster god and a master of deception.
Not saying anything about the truth of these accusations, but maybe this guy's choice of domain name could (ironically enough) turn out to be fitting...
My first thought was that the MPAA press people may have been working from news reports without bothering to check with their own legal people. (Or that they have multiple legal fronts that aren't fully up on each other's cases.) Wouldn't be the first time something like that happened. The release you mentioned looks pretty informed, though.
Anyway, if you throw out the hoax conspiracy theory, that still leaves the guy collecting $30K for his defence fund and then folding like a burrito. I'd say that's worth discussing.
Kudos for your quick fact checking, in any case!
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
IMO, Artists should be able to live from their art. That's one thing. IMO, Information, including art, should be Free (as in Free Speech).
It would be WRONG to not pay artists. It would also be wrong to deny people they legitim right to accesss art.
So, we need a solution in which the artist gets paid , and the people get the content they diserve.
For example, people is free to do whatever they want to music. The artist sells disks. Those that want to help the artist, and also receive the disk with a nice poster, lirycs, etc, buys the disk for a reasonable price. The artist also charges for tickets for they concerts, interviews, merchandise, etc.
And there is no MPAA/RIAA/Sony/Other-Bloodsuckers in this history.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
That's the problem with centralized distribution methods :P Torrents are a great design... but they're only part of what you need. You also need an effective torrent distribution method which guarantees anonymity. It's not impossible.
I'm working on a library called Uso designed to send encrypted data from fake source IPs/ports to fake dest IPs/ports (faking as much as physically possible while still allowing the information to make it; it does various network probes to determine what it can and cannot do). You use libnet to write raw packets to the network and use pcap to sniff them back off; clients don't recognize each other by the source and destination IPs, but by codes contained in the UDP headers. The codes are unique per client, but not across the system, making recognizing the packets to firewall them quite a challenge (easily recognizable content is inside the encrypted section). I'm about half-done (I've got my encryption classes (Blowfish and RSA - both wrappers around openssl) done and tested, and have sent basic packets back and forth with part of the probing done; I need to do remote probing and implement the full protocol spec - plus some arp flooding and cache poisoning would be nice options). It should be able to tunnel through most NAT setups, although I won't know for sure until I get the full protocol spec implemented.
Another option is limited proxying. If you proxy a small but significant percentage of your traffic, you can't tell who was requesting the content and who was just being an unwitting proxy. It makes mass lawsuits unfeasable. Plus, proxying can confer some advantages on its own, especially if you use a "smart" target selection method.
Don't take a knife to a gunfight, or even a knife to a knife fight. Take a gun to a knife fight.
P.S. I just finished reading the judgement.
It orders him to pay 1 million dollars in damages and he has to turn over all the logs.
It also states he isn't allowed to sell the source code for loki torrent.
Though he wasn't required to turn over the domain name or servers to the MPAA just the logs. So the notice on the website looks to be his own doing?
If anyone wants me to email a copy to them so they don't have to pay the 64 cents to download and can post it some where let me know.
Technology, the cause of and solution to all of life's problems.
This is a great illustration of how the MPAA fail to acknowledge reality. BitTorrent and other protocols who allow evil corporations like MPAA to find your identity are already drawing their last breaths, these are on the way out. They are currently being replaced by I2P, Freenet and other systems who allow users to anonymously share what ever they want. By attacking their customers instead of providing real alternatives (I have yet to find a site where I can legally download movies and view them on my Linux-based entertainment system) they simply encourage peer to peer systems who allow users to participate free from prosecution threats.
MPAA, you are wrong. It is possible to hide. And your idiotic attacks on the general public will only make the systems where this is possible more popular. I have said this numerous times, users want to use simple peer to peer system to acquire movies. This is because divx is the preferred format, p2p is the preferred way of delivery. If there was a way to just enter the movie title of any movie and pay $5 or something for the right to do so, then most p2p users would pay that sum. Allow free distribution, allow fair use, and most importantly: Provide ways of paying for your products...
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
I wonder if the author wrote the original article with his tin foil hat on or without? At least he can't be accused of being a journalist, they actually research their stories before writing them. This one is loaded with potholes.
c y11feb1 1,1,1373904.story?ctrack=1&cset=true
The name of the lawyer is Charles S. Baker
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-pira
The post further up detailed where it was mentioned in court.
If it was a hoax, why is he using his name to register all these domains? Why did he run so many torrents and have so many features on the site? Why would the MPAA, an organisation already denigrated by many net residents, blatantly lie in its press release?
It was already found within an hour of the site becoming an MPAA ad that everything was still being hosted on lokitorrent servers. Is this evidence of wrong doing, or MPAA cost cutting? Besides, with all the PeerGuardian users around, they would have MPAA IP blocks and would not have seen the ad if it was hosted on MPAA servers.
Point 6 is pretty dumb. Apparently the site is hoax because they didn't announce the name of the webmaster they were suing....um, duh, isn't Ed Webber the webmaster? And isn't the MPAA going after tracker sites at the moment to shut them down?
I'd say he was running a website, saw he was going to get into trouble and decided to find ways to profit.
I wonder whether loki was really a giant honeypot...
Mmm...
Too sneaky for the MPAA...
In any case... I think the reverse would be fun. A honey pot for the MPAA. name a bunch of linux files after celebrities names and movie titles. So that they will sue for Independece_Day.exe, Madonna.c, and Eminem.class, bittorented all over the internet.
Actually, no. I think what needs to happen is that people stop bying movies and music for a month. Pick a month, like July, and advertise the "NO MPAA PURCHASE MONTH", and buy only independents and so on. The press will eat that up as "Public Decries MPAA Tactics, Boycotts DVDs!"
That, or send letters (on paper) to the President, hum, to your local representative... No, to his political party headquarter, and tell them that the situation is untenable and that you will... Hum, nothing... They don't CARE about you.
So I guess P2Ping is an Act of Civil Disobedience and thus the Voice of the People calling for Redress from an Oppressive and Corrupt Government!!!
whew, need to catch my breath...
Ok, that's better.
And now, [with my finest british accent:]
"Gentlemen, synchronize your servers. We attack at oh-six-hundred."
"Piter, too, is dead."
Yes SharePro is not to be trusted. That mp3 search engine on earthreactor.com's first page was written completely by my friend and myself. We were having financial problems and posted the fact on our website, which is when SharePro offered to help out. We were happy to have a new host at no cost and we hadn't heard anything of SharePro at that point. After a while we raised enough money to move onto our own server again, but when we did that, SharePro decided to keep the search engine online and then decided to change the graphics to his own. You will however notice that his mp3 database is quite out of date due to the fact that he did not get a copy of our spider. The second I saw that SharePro had anything to do with this, I figured it was a big lie.
So, almost two-thirds of Hollywood's output loses money. Bah. In the age of video distribution I sincerely doubt that. But, okay ... taking them at their word, if I were the CEO of a company that had a track record that poor I'd expect to be relieved of my duties, and have the straps cut on my golden parachute just before being pushed out of my top floor office window. By crying poor they're trying to make their customers accept responsibility for whatever is really wrong with the industry, as well as justify continued high prices and lawsuits. However, what that comment really tells us is that the studios have fundamentally incompetent management. They've been intoxicated by their monopoly high for so long that they are terrified of having to come down, get efficient, and actually compete. Oh sure, they can come up with all the justifications in the world as to why the business is run the way it is. But if that sixty percent figure is anywhere near accurate then the studios' stockholders should simply vote these people out since they're obviously doing a poor job. And if they are lying (that would be a huge surprise) and they are more profitable than they are claiming, then they have even less rationale for this "war on piracy."
... good movies were made before actors started getting multimillion-dollar paychecks and they'll still be making good movies after that particular bubble bursts. Most businesses, when faced with an economic downturn, have to tighten their belts, economize. Hollywood seems to have the idea that they can avoid having to do that if they can just squeeze us hard enough.
What this really comes down to is "We don't have the control we're accustomed to, we're not making as much money as we feel entitled to, and we don't care who we hurt as long as we get what we want." You'd get a similar line of reasoning from your average Mafioso, I'm sure.
The movie studios will get little sympathy from me, and anyone that bothers to understand the damage that has already been done at the hands of the motion picture industry would be hard-pressed to defend it.
What continually amazes me is the degree of arrogance these people exhibit, the remarkably high regard in which they hold themselves and their products. Jack Valenti exemplified this sort of "we are an international treasure that must be preserved at all costs" attitude that belies the fact that what they are selling are "luxuries" that all of us could easily do without. Regardless, if by some miracle the MPAA and all of its' member organizations disappeared overnight, it really wouldn't take long for a new business model to take over and the flow of movies to continue.
The idea that a good movie has to cost a hundred million dollars is a bit extreme anyway. Take the TV series' Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis. The production team for those shows produces cinematic-quality special effects week after week on a fraction of the budget of a typical third-rate movie. Sure, the actors don't command the same prices that the big boys do, but so what
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Fortunately, the algorithms used are good enough that it's not usually noticable. (Note that I said `not usually' -- there are certainly cases where you can notice the compression artifacts.)
If you want video that's not compressed, get a Video Disc player. They're analog, though some do have a CD quality digital soundtrack. Or a VHS tape deck.