Slashdot Mirror
Crackdown on BT Users in Hong Kong
griffinn writes "100 BitTorrent users in Hong Kong are about to receive legal threats from the MPIA (Hong Kong's equivalent of the MPAA), BusinessWeek reports. The users were randomly selected from more than 6000 IP addresses collected by investigators. Customs officials are also following through on their previous arrest of a 38-year-old man who allegedly uploaded three movies." From the article: "If convicted, the suspect faces up to four years in prison and a fine of 50,000 Hong Kong dollars ($6,400) for every illegal copy."
This is just to scare the sheeps. Very common tactic.
Simply leave your apartment, go to the nearest corner, buy all the DVDs you want for about a buck each, then go home and watch them!
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
4 years in prison? I can understand thieves and murderers doing prsion time, but some dude uploading a movie on the internet? Kinda a waste of jail space, I think. That and he (or she) won't really fit in, because there are plenty of decent people who swap movies and music.
aside from that, is it just BT users in general, or ones who were found to be swapping illegal content?
http://www.6765656b.com it's the ~ for us geek's.
Sounds a lot better than getting sued for tens of thousands of dollars...
Agile Artisans
The real issue here, I think, is that the (presumed guilty) copyright offenders are looking at 4 years in a Chinese prison. Is that an appropriate punishment for the offense? Is that proportionate to what other offenders get under the Chinese justice system? If not, what political and financial influence was exerted to provide disproportionate protection to copyright holders... and why?
These are the rich topics for debate here, not BitTorrent per se.
Think of the state the world would be in if drug dealers could afford to buy legislation and law enforcement like the media cartels can?
There is something seriously wrong when your "randomly" select someone to be legally procecuded.
Do they get a group of murders and randomly select which one is going to have a trail, and let the rest of scott free?
Its obvious that stealing music is wrong. Just as software pirating is wrong, stealing TV is wrong, stealing movies is wrong, etc etc etc.
But the question I always ask myself when I hear about the RIAA and the MPAA suing individuals is, "What good can come from this?"
And the answer is obviously, "Nothing good can come from this."
Suing customers isn't going to help. Most people who steal media do so for the fun of it. Many are just collectors who would most likely not purchase the media if they couldn't steal it.
Are the lawsuits preventing the piracy? I don't think so. I think they are just driving the piracy deeper underground.
Are the lawsuits pissing off people? Just read slashdot, of course they are.
I think corporate America's whole tack on DRM is completely out of whack. Instead of attacking perspective customers, they should be trying to win their money by providing product that is more compelling than the free copy by being less expensive and easier to get than the illegal stuff.
Instead of being control freaks, trying to control all the people in America to prevent loss of money, they should focus on improving content and find ways lower the cost of digital media distrobution to the point that stealing isn't as fun anymore. Everyone has a different "fun" threshold and for many, releasing tunes for 33 cents or 50 cents a piece would remove the fun of trying to get a decent download.
And that's my main point. Its fun to get something for practically nothing and to collect a massive music collection on the cheap. And that's why people do it, for the fun of it. If Joe P2Per has 2 million mp3s on his music server, how often does he get to hear each and every one of them? Not very often. He sticks to the songs he really likes, and I'll bet he's got those on CD, because he wants to support the bands he likes because he wants them to succeed.
I think RIAA and MPAA need to step back and re-analyze the situation. I think they're going down the wrong path and they need to stop.
Raydude
OMFG, you actually drink the kool aid!
I regularly go to the houses of friends and relatives to help them with their computer problems.
Typically, during the course of unfouling the mess I find, there are several gigabytes of movies, music, software, and other files in directories made by various malware programs. I uninstall the software and delete the files.
Just because a movie was uploaded from a particular computer, it doesn't mean the user knew about it. It takes a person of greater expertise than is common among end users to discover the problem (even though the average user notices lower performance, that's not the same as knowing that the machine is hosting a "Spiderman 2" torrent).
If you don't know that you are doing something, you shouldn't be held accountable for it. There are various levels of "knowing" something in a legal sense: knowing of the problem, knowing the problem *could* occur, knowing with certitude, etc.
The standard (in the U.S., anyway) is that the user must know that a program is on his computer that will transfer files illegally. He doesn't have to put the software there knowingly, put the unlicensed material there, nor actively initiate the illegal transfer itself. If and only if he knows the facility for the illegal transfer exists and he fails to stop it is he liable when the transfer happens.
It's like this: suppose you have a dog that never bites anyone and has never left his yard. If someone else comes along to give your dog PCP, you aren't liable when your dog goes nuts. If you know that the dog has gotten the PCP, you are liable whether you are present when the dog goes nuts or not.
O'course, that's just the theory; you still may be stuck proving your innocence, either with a drugged-up dog or a mal-P2P-infected PC.
sigs, as if you care.
So, last week, we get an article about Hong Kong and gig sized pipes to residents, now they are going after the file sharers.
I have no comment.
And then take away their torrent access...
Is this what they call "Chinese Torture"?
So China != Hong Kong.
Are you sure? When we say China != Taiwan, they throw a fit.
Heh, yes, you do forget. The fine for spitting, littering, and not cleaning up after your dogs is a fixed HK$1500 (~US$192, ~EUR$150). Basically, it's public nuisance stuff. Smoking-in-prohibited-places fines are worse, up to HK$5000. HK$50,000 isn't really pocket change, unless you've got $100mil++ sitting in the bank. And jail time is no fun for anyone. I'm a BT user in Hong Kong, and I've stuck to private sites for anything that's had ligigation filed against people who up/downed it for a long time. They're faster than public sites, and at the ones I frequent, you get pure scene releases, including repacks and propers. Now we just need more people using I2P/Tor (included with the latest betas of Azureus) for true anonymous BT usage and we should see better speeds overall and no more snooping on what data gets sent.
I'd say it's smarter to stop wasting time downloading, and just steal your DVDs in shops. Afterall the punishment for shoplifting are much lower.
China isn't quite so communist anymore (well, of course, they were never really "communist" just non-capitalist and authoritarian, but that's pretty much been what passes for communism in the actual world). They've been moving bits and pieces towards a free-ish market (ie. free but still can be subject to every whim of the government if they felt like it) for quite some time now, and of course Hong Kong, where this occurred, only returned to Chinese hands recently in history (1997), so we have the legacy of British corporate freedoms to blame for this kind of incident for the most part . . . but what they hell, easier to blame China.
Actually, come to think of it, China gets the best of both worlds. Since the government is all-powerful but lets corporations operate, people get to be oppressed by the Dictatorship Of The We're-Proletariat-We-Swear, AND by the Corporate Pig Dog Capitalists! So when people ask for freedoms they can be persecuted as bourgeois swine, and when they steal movies they can be likewise persecuted for being dirty communists. Brilliant!
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
In which case, they end up being jointly and severally liable, and the Romans kill everyone, counting on the rebellious slaves to sort it out amongst themselves later.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
"Death," they responded.
"And what is the penalty for rebellion?"
"Death," They replied.
The commander looked at his troops for a moment then shrugged, "Congratulations gentlemen, welcome to the rebellion."
As punishments become more and more out of line with the crime, and as the laws become more ubiquitous, eventually the population will feel obligated to protect itself from a government that has gone insane. I'm not saying that the criminalization of a civil matter will be the last straw, but each straw tossed on will start to pile up unless some sanity is restored to the system.
"The bass, the rock, the mic, the treble. I like my coffee black, just like my metal" - Mindless Self Indulgence
free but still can be subject to every whim of the government if they felt like it
And that differs from the US-model in what way...?
US Government: Microsoft, stop that.
Microsoft: Make us!
long legal battle ensues
????
Microsoft: Profit!!!
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!