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MPAA Cracking Down on TV Torrent Sites
sallgeud writes "It appears the other shoe has dropped and the MPAA is now going after sites which link to torrents of TV shows. The beef with redistributing copyrighted material seems to make sense... but I'm wondering if it makes a difference in the world of DVR. The vast majority of downloads appeared to be of content that is broadcast free over the airwaves. I'm wondering how much different this is than going after Tivo? Would these sites have been hit with lawsuits if they had stuck to purely over-the-air broadcasts?"
I think the main issue here is that the shows are being distributed with the ad-breaks cut out so there are a bunch of advertisers paying the TV networks to air their ads and the online people are getting them with no ads at all.
Have you metaroderated recently?
Can you be sued if you havn't downloaded any content, and havn't uploaded any content, but provide a website that hosts .torrent files? The MPAA can send you a cease and desist order, can't they? but is there much they can do to enforce it.
This post is in reply to your subject, not your unfounded accusations about out feline overlords.
Zonk is not the new timothy. Check out his journal. He posts replys to other peoples comments, so he clearly reads a few comments on Slashdot at least once or twice a week. That can't be said of very many of the Slashdot editors.
But I couldn't help noticing that right now all except one posts of the posts on the main page are made by him...
Try out fish, the friendly interactive shell.
As much as I know it is still illegal and considered wrong. I live and work in Germany, and these shows and movies just aren't available here. I don't have the option of going to the local cinema to see a film, and when they do get here, they are always dubbed into another language.
When I do try to play by the rules and order a DVD from the US of a movie I want to see (ie.. incredibles) It won't play on my player because of the region code.
I am not saying that downloading and watching the dailyshow everyday is right, but there is definitely a moral grey area. Even with the most expensive satellite package, I can only get this 'dailyshow weekly update' on CNN.
I mean I can see how shows ripped without commercials would be frowned upon, but they advertise products that aren't available here anyway.
#2) Even if the commercials were kept in you could still fast forward through them.
I do that while watching LIVE tv. (sorta)
I start watching an hour show at 20 after the hour, and using my DVR, rewind to the beginning and FF thru the commercials. this way I am done watching it as it really ends. Also, when I just record and watch later, I do the same thing.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
I think it is not really clear how fair use works in this case. I think what it boils down to, is that it is perfectly legal to download one copy of a show, but it is illegal to distribute. This would explain why the MPAA is going after the sites that offer tv torrents, and not the people downloading them(yet).
This link is being reported to be a backup of all of btefnet's torrents as of the day it went down. It appears to have several tens of thousands of torrents and is 24 MB.
B 7F 9B97482AF94535EA8930A|/
ed2k://|file|torrents.tar.bz2|24171559|75405CBD
Bittorrent is shut down, ED2K Forever.
Promote freedom; fight fascism.
I have only ever had a problem with one zonk posted story and and i did question it and from what i can tell he is very open to suggestions .
.
I personly find this story intresting , don't know if its a dupe nor do i care(the only people who care about it being a dupe are the ones who have already read it , the others get an opertunity to discuss something they missed, and they ahve been rather good in avoiding dupes this past week or so).
On the issue
"The MPAA claims that since it began action against torrent sites, the amount of time required to download a pirated file has increased "exponentially."
"
*cough*sckollob*cough* , All the MPAA chasing after random sites has done is move people to new pastures , they kill one torrent site and another three pop up in various locations , it has exponentialy increased anon trackers and sites which link to external torrents.
I am no supporting or attacking people who choose to download Films
I am quite in support of TV downloads but that is another issue( i download alot of stuff from the UK and the USA which i dont get here in germany or its dubbed horribly , ala the simpsons and i do own every simpsons DVDs i just dont fancy waiting 5-14 years till it comes out on DVD to see it).
The MPAA and RIAA are begining to sound more and more like king Canute , You cant stop the tide . You either learn to work with it or you drown
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
The MPAA must really hate the BBC then :)
No commercial ads on it - at all.
Mind you, its paid for through a license fee, so wouldnt it be reasonable to assume that since its been paid for already through the license fee, that UK people have a right to watch anything on the BBC however they choose.
Even torrents of the shows.
Yep, this is happening even for downloaders and uploaders including myself.
t e for samples).
Stargate Atlantis was one of the T.V. shows. Back in December 2004, Adelphia terminated my cable service account (for forever -- blacklisted) for D.M.C.A. because I was sharing two Stargate Atlantis episodes over BitTorrent according to BayTSP and M.G.M.'s hardcopy letter copy (http://www.google.com/search?q=baytsp+mgm+starga
Has anyone wondered if IRC will be cracked down anytime soon? I mean, btefnet posts the torrents which are taken from IRC (#bt of effnet). People still can get the torrents from IRC (in fact, here is how the chain goes, the ripper will talk to someone in IRC, they will create torrent, then it is released to the masses on IRC, then it is posted on website, and then the whole world gets it. As far as I know, that is how it goes).
- Teja
The studios make a lot of money selling entire seasons of shows on DVD free of ads. Advertising isn't the issue here. The studios don't want free shows on the internet when they are trying to sell DVD's of what they broadcast on TV sometimes decades ago.
TV shows are FREE as beer, but they are the property of their authors or their channels.
...) for free, but why would that mean that you can download them without their terms ? They don't authorize you to watch the show without complying to their terms. They can.
They broadcast them on TV under their terms (ads, logo,
People don't understand that. You can argue P2P helps shows. I'm ok with you. Still, it's illegal.
So please somebody start a company broadcasting TV shows WITH ads under a CC-by-nc-nd license and bittorrent.
That already exists for music albums : http://www.jamendo.com/ and it rocks !
On this BBC news article it was stated at the end that "The MPAA says it wants to encourage legitimate download sites instead. Several TV companies are experimenting with legal peer-to-peer based downloads, including the BBC." This provides a bit of hope for those that were hoping to pay to see shows by paying legally.
- Teja
I hope legal section on piratebay gets some fresh content. http://static.thepiratebay.org/legal/
I think what it boils down to, is that it is perfectly legal to download one copy of a show, but it is illegal to distribute.
Nope. Every time you have a purported fair use, you run through the analysis again. There's no sort of numerical limit involved, nor a hard rule against any kind of infringement rather than any other.
MPAA, like RIAA, has just been going after people that are easy for it to find, and who are further up the chain.
I.e. getting rid of P2P networks (as they tried in Napster and are trying in Grokster) prevents or impairs lots of people downstream from sharing since they can't use that network any more. Getting rid of trackers affects lots of people further down as well. Getting rid of uploaders at least affects some downloaders and leechers. Getting rid of downloaders doesn't really have affects on others at all. It's a simple 'attack the head of the snake' principle.
-- 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.
I would see it differently. Extending copyright encourages creativity because it shows that if you can come up with good original concept that catches the popular imagination you can make an absolute mint off it. If that does not encourage people to create, or investors to back creative people nothing will.
Well, Disney began at a time when terms, among other things, were much less than they were now. Clearly he didn't need additional encouragement later, so why should there be a retroactive copyright for his work, especially long after he's dead?
But this really ignores the main issue: we don't want to encourage creativity too much. What we want is to best serve the public interest. But the public has several, equal interests. First, they want original works created. Second, they want derivative works created. Third, they want works to be unencumbered -- this means free as in beer, and free as in freedom.
Without copyright, we have fully satisfied the third, somewhat satisfied the second, and slightly satisfied the first. We can sum this up and determine the net satisfaction of the public interest.
If we then offered a copyright of, say, 5 years, we'd reduce the immediate satisfaction of the third and second, but hopefully increase satisfaction of the first by a greater amount, and also some satisfaction of the second. We can sum these up too, and see if the net satisfaction is greater or lower than in other scenarios.
What we want is to find the scenario that involves the least restrictive laws and the greatest satisfaction of public interest. This will almost certainly not be the point at which we maximize the first interest -- which is what you were talking about -- because there are other interests at issue as well. (And plus copyright holders don't like competition, so they're known to use their rights as a sword, rather than a shield, and claim infringement to keep up-and-coming artists out of the marketplace; maximum creation of original works is thus probably impossible)
Given that most artists will never see economic value from their copyrights at all, and yet are encouraged to create, and given that in the rare cases that they do, this is almost always realized immediately (the vast majority of revenue for any medium is made when a work is first released in that medium, and dies off days-months afterwards), I think that we could still get the vast majority of creation we see now -- maybe more -- even if copyright terms were extremely short. And we'd all be better off too, since this would encourage more work in derivatives, and more freedom with regards to created works.
Preventing people from rehashing old ideas from the 30's and 40's is not necessarily a bad thing.
It is actually, all else being equal. A lot of the best work is derivative, where people spend more time on polish than the underlying concept. For example Shakespeare's plays were virtually all either based on history, or earlier plays and stories which he made new versions of. He was not a big original thinker. That shouldn't be held against him -- he was good.
-- 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.
Make the shows available for bittorrent. Include extra advertisement directed towards the Internet crowd. Put advertisemnet in another corner.
You have 4 corners. 1 for the network and three to sell. Also include small extra's that are not available on the TV show and organise a '7 differences for 7 shows' contest so peole want to see BOTH.
Learn wat viral advertisement is and abuse it so much people are not even interested anymore in bittorrent.
Embrace it, do not fight it. Talk to your marketing people and tell them you have 10.000.000 people who watch your show and do not watch TV. Ask them if they are interested in that.
These people will be humping your leg so fast you will not know what hit you. You can even sell these services to others in other countries, so they can do the same with subtitled or syncronised shows and programs.
These people are a new market for cross and deepselling my friends. As lomg as people watch, you have a place to sell.
Put in a blue screen somewhere in the show that during normal broadcast is a building and on the bittorrent is an advertisement. I asure you, people from marketing and advertisement will go apenuts over this. You will be offerd so much sex, you wich you were impotent (well, you probably are, but you get my point).
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
It's the huge fear of losing control over distribution. Without control of distribution on one side, there can be no control of artists on the other. It's the frigging middle man getting squeezed out of the picture and fighting for his life scenario.
Wake up folks. It's not about their stuff, it's abotu your freedom. Why the hell do you think you don't have enough upstream bandwidth to support an ad-hoc, real time distributed distribution system?
I'll tell you. Because the TeeVee, radio, and theatre middle men would become extinct....The artists? They'd thrive because the demand for material is independent of the mode of distribution.
But that is NOT what copyrights are about. they are not about making tons of money at all, but to encourage creativity by allowing people a temporary monopoly on a work, but AFTER that LIMITED time it HAS to enter the public domain. What you are asking for an extention on, and what Disney has done will only end up stifling creativity because those raw ideas (like just asking to draw a talking mouse for example) will be locked away and any attempt to draw one of those [talking mice] no matter how un-similar to Disney's Mickey Mouse will end up in legitation.
Because they are not (mostly) original works. They were ripped from the public domain stories. the whole "why should they drop copyright and let others make inferior duplicates ad nauseum until the original concept is destroyed." thing is horsecrap as well, IMO. The original concept would be an intellectual though, like "what would it be like if a mouse talked?" Steamboat Willie and Mickey Mouse are all implementations of an idea, and disney alot of the work they used was actually ripped from public domain/NonPublicDomain stories, so look who did "alot of work."
Horseshit.
While good creators equal good creativity in many cases, which I agree, it is not the only grat cause of stifled creativity. Disney's lobbying to extend copyrights to not only protect their icon, but to prevent people from doing what they did, that is take and make into something big out of the pbulic domain.
Copyrights are not like what they were meant to be and you know it, instead of creativity and innovation, we get "innovation" and legitation. If we keep on extending the rights, we won't have things entering the public domain that we can use to build on, improve, and morph into something new in people's lifetimes eventually. Is this REALLY what the founding fathers wanted?
SUPPORT COPYRIGHT REFORM! ALLOW PUBLIC DOMAIN TO EXPAND!
If you believe in privacy, and believe you have "nothing to hide" at the same time, you're a goddammed idiot
I think perhaps one of the larger issues here is that the vast majority of people who download TV shows have already paid in order to see them, because they subscribe to dish or cable. Other stations - the local ones - are free anyways: most people can pick them up on antenna.
I don't understand how the MPAA could sue someone who has paid for their right to view the program. Arguably, the MPAA and its cohorts would prefer to peddle the DVD sets rather than have people simply download every episode for free. If people have already paid for the right to view the program by paying a dish/cable subscription fee, shouldn't they be allowed to view any network programming for which they have paid at any time?
As previously mentioned in other posts, how is this different from simply using a VCR or DVR? It's a more permanent medium, they might say. Well, so is DVR. Cassettes can copied with no more of an investment than an additional VCR. Thus, they could be considered permanent. How is this different?
I could still see lawsuits out of this. If someone downloads a show, gets caught, and doesn't pay for service, sue them until their arses bleed green. Conversely, for someone such as myself who pays US$45/month for cable, I should be able to download shows from the channels for which I pay all I want.
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
Why don't local affiliates brand the tv shows with their commericals and logo, and let people download them off their website.
That way local commericals are shown that matter to the advertisers in addition to the national ads.
Sure you could download an episode from another affiliate, but if you have one in your city, it would probably be faster download so why bother.
People who don't have an affiliate that airs said show can also watch it, but I'd hardly consider that a loss since your gaining a viewer who wouldn't be able to watch it in the first place.
Love it cant get it in Florida, found it on Usenet and now I download it.
Corner Gas
All the MPAA chasing after random sites has done is move people to new pastures , they kill one torrent site and another three pop up in various locations , it has exponentialy increased anon trackers and sites which link to external torrents.
I really fail to understand why everyone is making this such a huge problem.
All these torrent website operators need to do is host their content in eastern European (Russian) networks and all their problems magically go away. Why is this so difficult to understand?
The other problem is the mentality of these operators. I have tried to help them on numerous occasions to realize the simple fix to their problems (by donating free bandwidth in eastern European networks to them). Have you been on any of these type of IRC channels? These guys all have enormous attitudes and think themselves on a level of no less of God himself. They tell me that I don't know what I'm talking about. As an owner and operator of a large ISP in eastern Europe, let's just say that indeed I do know what I'm talking about. I can host anything I want, completely free of worry of European or American jurisdiction and laws.
The networks here are the wild, wild west of the Internet. No local authorities (laws or jurisdictions) or higher level ISP's block or attempt to block content infringing on copyright and/or intellectual property.
So, until these website operators learn to host their content on webservers outside of American or European jurisdiction, their problems will never go away. Unfortunetly, their heads are too big to realize simple truth.
The difference that you ask about is that it's legal, with legisation backing it up, to record tv shows broadcast over public or cable television, and tivo certainly falls into that category. Yes, there is quite a bit of grumbling about the ease by which commercials can be skipped through, but for the moment, all is kosher on that front.
However, nothing gives anyone the right to redistribute the recorded shows. If I download a show, I didn't have to buy a tivo, and chances are good I'm not going to have to even skip through advertising. Studio makes no money off of me as the advertisers aren't going to consider downloaded commercial free shows in their rating calculations.
For fear of overextrapolating, should the trend continue unabashed, they choose not to embrace a new distribution medium and instead look for other ways to cut costs, they'll instead create more shows that have low overhead budgets and appeal to a demographic less likely to use computers for obtaining and watching television shows. That's right, you'll probably end up with more reality TV.
I'd personally prefer a different distribution model. Even a subscription based service would work. As the trek fans were pointing out in their ill-fated effort to save Enterprise, even with the abysmally low ratings the show was getting, if everyone who watched it paid slightly less than 50 cents per episode, they'd have enough to fully fund a season. That's pretty cheap entertainment, and far far less than they charge for the DVD sets of the same seasons years later. Heck, millions of people willingly pay more than 50 cents for a SONG. It's not out of the question to assume they'd do the same for a TV show that was worth watching. But as long as they want to stick with the old medium, you can expect them to fight it tooth and nail until they're forced to either adapt or die.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
Since I can get an entire season of pretty much any show I'd be interested in on Amazon used for around $20. I stay legal and the MPAA's affiliates still don't make a dime off me.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Hell, the idea of copyright didn't even exist anywhere until 1710 -- but there's a lot of art that was created before then.
Yes, but a great deal of art created under such systems were propaganda made for the benefit of patrons, which is not in the public's interest either. The best thing that happened to art was when it was turned into a viable career for anyone to pursue.
Besides, copyright harms culture too, by preventing people from getting copies for the lowest possible price (or free),
That's not culture, though, that's the pocketbooks of consumers. We have to distinguish between the public's need for culture and the public's need for things to be free. I want apples to be free, but I can't go into someone's farm and pick a bunch and go sell them at half the going rate because it benefits society. I agree it would be GREAT if that's how the world worked, but it doesn't and all it accomplishes is putting an apple farmer into the poorhouse.
preventing people from creating derivatives without authorization
This is where copyright went all wrong. If I write a book about "Bob", I don't see why you couldn't write a story about him too. In fact, I would hope you WOULD. I would hope we could work together to make Bob a better-developed cultural fixture, without worrying about licensing and other silliness. On the other hand, I don't want you to take my book and sell it word-for-word without paying me anything. The two do not need to be tied together (though they currently are, in today's world).
Either way, the price is now effectively $1 since rational people will not pay more than they have to.
It's funny you say that because I have learned that people seem to think that ANYTHING is worth $1, no matter what it is. I can't say why, but everything gravitates to that. Now, on DVD, that's hard to hit, because it's too close to production costs. But for purely torrent-based distribution, $1 is actually a doable price point for media. That's the beauty of online sales of media: it cuts out the person trying to profit on the backs of artists. The downside, though, is that it's a slippery slope into $0. Which is where the social contract comes in.
where they want the producers to get the minimum possible reward that ensures that they'll keep making more movies.
I would suggest that the public is not properly aware what the minimum possible reward should be. But that is very much the fault of $20M actors and special effects at the sake of art. It still doesn't change the fact that $0 is not going to pay the colour corrector's rent.
Sure. In fact, I bet that if you watched, you'd find that most people don't pay street performers.
And fewer would if the performers had large thugs holding pedestrians hostage till they paid for overhearing a song on a public sidewalk, which is what the current system is like. But I don't think we WANT it to come to the point where all the street performers disappear before we realize what we've lost. If we re-balance the system, we will have art and artists without anything unpleasant... but that means dropping a buck into the hat voluntarily, even if you COULD get it for free.
I'm interested in how copyright can best serve the public interest. Not in providing jobs for the crews of TV shows, or whatnot.
If the public's interest is in watching more Lost (rightly or wrongly), it is also in their interest to take care of the people who make that possible. I think the public has largely forgotten about all that because of years of "buy this record! buy this tape! buy this DVD!"... which masks the people behind the medium. Copyright is meant to serve the public's best interest with the artist in mind, not despite them. This is why there is a temporary monopoly, and not a simple declaration that all art must be shared immediately. But I think we agree on this point...
If optimum copyright la
The world's only surviving livewriter.