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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."
If you ask me, the other 5900 BitTorrent users should come forward and say "I'M SPARTACUS!"
I say, it's about time China recieved the same lack of freedoms that we have right here in the good old US of A.
Changa hates change.
...to something like Manslaughter or Murder 3.
Pulp Audio Weekly - Geek News and Reviews
This is just to scare the sheeps. Very common tactic.
How can you expect the RIAA to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate uses of BitTorrent when slashdot editors cannot be bothered to do the same? Hong Kong is not cracking down on BT Users, but on wilful copyright violators who happen to use BitTorrent.
You might as well run a headline "US police crack down on Drivers", leading to a report detailing the arrest of a guy who drove a getaway car in a robbery.
Sheesh.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
BitTorrent is not inherently illegal. You could use a similar argument to prohibit downloading of ANY files, since they just use a different method.
It appears that their government is throwing out the baby with the bathwater. If they tried that sort of stuff in the United States, then the government would catch so much flak from people claiming this is an invasion of privacy (which it is.)
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
People are pirating entertainment in Southeast Asia?
Am I the only one who glanced at the headline and wondered why Hong Kong was cracking down on Blue Tooth users?
Is there such a thing as legitimate download of copyrighted material? For instance, if I own a DVD, would I be within my rights to go and download a rip of that dvd? If so, doesn't it become very difficult for authorities to prove who is and is not violating copyright by downloading from services like Bit Torrent?
I find laziness to be an excellent motivator.
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?
So sad, I wonder if there was another reason for arresting this man?
He should have done what everyone else does in China, just go to the local street market and buy the pirated copy.
They should also reduce the sentence due to the bad selection of movies he made (Daredevil, Red Planet, Miss Congeniality), he deserves no more than a slap on the wrist and good movie guide.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
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?
Although Hong Kong is now technically under the control of China, it is not a part of China. If you've seen the term SAR, it's an acronym for Special Administrative Republic. (One country, two systems) In all reality Hong Kong basically just an independent state. So China != Hong Kong.
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
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.
but in some people's eyes, all p2p is priacy... when i worked at a (then) major isp (think #5) our free web hosting brands both cracked down on ANYONE using rar to archive files... they thought it was only used for piracy.
i found this out when i uploaded my collection of starcraft maps to my starcraft page (rar gave me 25% better compression than zip) and i was promptly closed down.
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.
Is their gov't doing this because the torrenters are infringing upon the hundreds of those hard-working $1-a-dvd companies? I mean, those companies go out of their way to make their DVDs Region Free, show off their creative subtitling skills (for Anime (Jpn->Cat->Eng)), and put them in nice little sleeves instead of those overly inefficient cases we're used to. Because we sure need those companies. ;)
0- Eamonman Proud member of DNRC
And then take away their torrent access...
Is this what they call "Chinese Torture"?
Personally, if that was the upper limit of the punishment, I'd go for the caning over three years in prison. Hell, I'd set up weekly appointments for canings just so I can keep torrenting. (yes, I just verbed that word. Grammar Nazis ho!)
Hell, I'd set up weekly appointments for canings just so I can keep torrenting.
Go ahead and admit it. You're not really interested in the torrents, are you?
The article stated that he uploaded 3 movies to a web site. What does this have to do with bit torrent?
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.
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!
Neat.
Instead of lotteries being a tax on the numerically challenged funnelled through the state to gambling operations, they're now becoming a direct tax for the benefit of copyright holders.
You, too can become a winner!
I forget what 8 was for.
"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
It's the part where you use the torrent file to connect to a tracker to download the contents from other users. All they have to do is get a listing of users who are uploading/downloading the file from the tracker.
It should be noted that torrents offer some of the worst privacy amongst p2p applications since there is nothing preventing a person from seeing who is uploading and downloading a particular file. With the exception of registration agreements and sometimes needing to have the torrent first -- minor problems.
Considering that in the U.S., the RIAA wants you to pay $150,000 per song.
For all of the oppression done by the communist party, the RIAA still has them beat.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
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!