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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" "
Shoot him.
I've been looking for a good example of pure capitalism to follow. Now I have my new religion :)
If it's such a hoax what exactly do you call this? (Google's HTML Version)
"The MPAA's efforts to date have resulted in a 40 percent reduction in the number of servers that continue to operate. One such site that will no longer exist is LokiTorrent?one of the largest BitTorrent host servers. The operator of that site, Edward Webber, agreed to not only pay a substantial settlement with even greater financial penalties for any further such actions, but by Court Order must provide the MPAA with access to and copies of all logs and server data related to his illegal BitTorrent activities, which will provide a roadmap to others who have used LokiTorrent to engage in illegal activities."
The premise of the article is based entirely on the fact that there is no documentation from the MPAA--but indeed there is such documentation. I know we'd all love to believe the MPAA created that release to capitalize on this so-called hoax but no doubt that would be subject to legal action for such blatant lies.
The article also states "If LokiTorrent.com had been sued in Dallas Federal Courts, then some type of public record would appear. NO ONLINE RECORD APPEARS WHATSOEVER!"
So...if it's not on the internet, it must not exist right....right!?
Did anyone bother contacting the MPAA for a comment on the Lokitorrent case rather than providing more fire to the rumor mill?
...There's no honor among thieves.
Don't take a knife to a gunfight, or even a knife to a knife fight. Take a gun to a knife fight.
Where can I find these intelligent people? I have a bridge to sell to them...
The owls are not what they seem
If you gave $0.02, Paypal would have taken it away in fees anyway ;)
2b || !2b =?
Purveyors of Bittorrents can be unscrupulous?! WTF!! Where's the honor amongst thie^^^^H content aggregators!?
"Moderate drinking can help prevent amputated limbs" -- Abigail Zuger, NYTimes, 12/31/02
because in teh internet ur anonymus & supr leet.
Oh crap, I hope I didn't offend that Macromedia Flash artist I donated to then when I said that was all I could afford..
LOKI TORRENT LAWSUIT :: A HOAX
:: Sedo.com
:: Explanation
Written by: SharePro
At the end of December 2004, the RIAA and MPAA began an international rampage in efforts to close down major bit torrent and ed2k file sharing sites.
Some sites like Suprnova.org, Youceff.com, ShareTv.com, and others went down without a fight while other sites, including ShareConnector and Releases4U were closed down by authorities.
The lawsuits set off a wide spread of panic and dismay within the p2p community as many of the veteran ed2k and torrent contributing societys soon found themselves "homeless" and their works "confisquated" by investigative authorities.
During the turmoil, one such MPAA targeted Bit Torrent site claimed it was willing to stand up against the evil powers of motion picture media thugs by fighting the legal issues in a court of law. LokiTorrent.com began accepting donations from the p2p community to support what they called "necessary legal fee's".
According to a Slyck.com - January 3, 2005 (Slyck.com promoted people to donate to Loki Torrent), within two weeks (5 days public) of announcing their fund raising campaign, Loki Torrents was only $710.00 dollars away from reaching their initial goal. At the time of writing Slyck.com's initial article, Loki Torrent claimed to have raised an impressive $29,290.00 from the p2p community.
Today, just weeks after the initial Slyck.com interview with Edward Webber, owner of LokiTorrent.com, the entire p2p file share community is back in turmoil.
Quote:
A) Are the logs of Lokitorrent.com in the hands of the MPAA?
B) Where is the money that was donated to the legal fund?
C) Can P2P'rs who uploaded / downloaded torrents be tracked down via the logs.
The above and more were the initial questions most p2pr's had in mind when news broke that the MPAA had gained control of Loki Torrent.
As the writing of this article began to gain momentum, many inconsistencies began arising that clearly show that Lokitorrent is not in the hands of the MPAA (At least not because of a court order), nor we're the owners fined a million dollars.
1) LokiTorrent never provided the name or details of any lawyer representing the internet site. No federal judge's name has been listed anywhere throughout the so-called proceedings. Texas courts have no record of any filed judicial proceedings on behalf of the MPAA against Loki Torrent and/or Ed Webber.
2) During the same period of time that Loki was making tens of thousands of dollars monthly via donations, the owners of Loki Torrent were also actively trying to sell the domain. LokiTorrent.com for Sale
In effort to convince p2p'rs to continue donating and not to believe Loki's intent to sell, this is what the owner published in his defense:
Loki Torrent's Selling on Sedo.com
Quote:
If some guy offers me $75K for the domain name, he's more than welcome to it, and I'll simply move the site to a different domain. Selling the entire site will never happen. I have way too much of myself in this site to sell it for any price (well, 2 million could get me to part with it, lol.. but let's live in reality).
3) The only reports of this so-called "law suit" are based entirely on the front page of the LokiTorrent.com internet site. The MPAA and Texas Federal Court list no public record of a lawsuit nor is the MPAA or the courts willing to back up Lokitorrent claims of being ordered to hand over webserver ip logs and pay a 1 million dollar penalty. J. Borland of News.com (and other related news resources) apparently based their entire news articles by information received directly from Mr. Ed Webber (the owner of LokiTorrent.com). This information was received by calling Mr. Webber directly at telephone number (207) 752-3481.
4) Was LokiTorrent ever actually sued by the MPAA? According to the initial reports published via various websites, most people were led to have believed that the
So...if it's not on the internet, it must not exist right....right!?
I can be googled, therefore I am.
You can't take the sky from me...
...Are you taking about Lokitorrent or the RIAA?
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
There's a link to the related press release on the MPAA's website.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
Someone found a business model to get pirates to pay for content!!
Step 1) set up torrent site
Step 2) claim MPAA takedown
Step 3) collect money from torrent downloaders, then run away and PROFIT !!!
The process probably can't be repeated too many times, though... do you figure they made more money than they would have through advertisements ? I'm guessing they did...
The site is blocked for "sexuality" by websense. Thanks
Can we add a Nigerian email to this story, please?
quoting from this mpaa press release:
/. tradition of journalistic excellence, we'll probably see this same "story" reposted several times in the next few days.
"The MPAA's efforts to date have resulted in a 40 percent reduction in the number of servers that continue to operate. One such site that will no longer exist is LokiTorrent -- one of the largest BitTorrent host servers. The operator of that site, Edward Webber, agreed to not only pay a substantial settlement with even greater financial penalties for any further such actions, but by Court Order must provide the MPAA with access to and copies of all logs and server data related to his illegal BitTorrent activities, which will provide a roadmap to others who have used LokiTorrent to engage in illegal activities."
took all of like 3 seconds to find this.
in keeping with the usual
I mean, if I were paying a thief, I'd expect him to be honest with me.
Mercy was given to me by Christ...I must give the same to others.
Norse god of, among other things, practical jokes.
Hmmmmmm....
668: Neighbour of the Beast
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
So unless the MPAA is also in on this hoax (which wouldn't really surprise me), there are some issues with this story.
http://www.mpaa.org/CurrentReleases/2005_02_10_Bit TorrentLokitorrent.doc
To link to a article about someones opinion is one thing but to support and spread lies and slander is just plain wrong
Personal Website
Remind me again why we can't mod down stories? The submitter is an idiot for believing what an uninformed 12 year old wrote on some random site. The editor is an idiot for approving such a bullshit "story". We're all idiots for bothering to read past the first post linking to the MPAA press release.
this is getting old and so are you
blog
This article is written by SharePro of ES5 -- the same fellow who was threatening to post pictures and personal information about the bloke who found the 'remote file deletion' utility in the ES5 p2p program awhile back.
Take whatever this man says with a grain of salt and call me in the morning...
The Yasashii Syndicate ||
The new generation of hoaxes that label real events as hoaxes and hoaxes as real. Perhaps the above post is a hoax too?
Side note from the MPAA's war-cry page: "By deeply cutting into revenues, movie piracy limits the choices for consumers at the box office. Sixty percent of all movies never recoup their production and marketing costs which average well over $100 million."
Sigh. The fact that most movies didn't recoup production costs in the decades before p2p, the Web or VCRs ever existed seems to have slipped under the radar.
I'm not good in groups. It's difficult to work in a group when you're omnipotent. - Q
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.
It's perfectly real. I downloaded the court documents from Pacer (the online docket system of the US Courts) and put on my website. It includes the permanent injunction signed by the judge that closed the case.
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
You clearly did not RTFA. The lawsuit was a hoax, start to finish.
You clearly did not read the relevant documents the article's author didn't bother to look for.
Don't believe everything you read on the internet.