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Feds Shut Down Elite Torrents
honkimon writes "Cnn Money reports,
"Government agents said the onslaught included 10 search warrants and
the shut down of a central Web site used to coordinate all file-sharing
activity on the Elite Torrents network. That Web site,
Elitetorrents.org, had a selection of copyrighted works
that government officials described as virtually unlimited.""
Bittorrnt is a hydra-headed deal. THey will never be able to lop off enough heads to make a difference. Torrenters will just adapt.
Madre de Dios! Es El Pollo Diablo! -- Captain Blondebeard
Why the FUCK would the FBI (who's purpose is to prevent communism) even get involved in copyright infringement? This seems to be in the **AAs' field to send cease and desist letters, or even the FTC to step in and bitch at ET, but not the FBI...
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
True - to most people this isn't a misuse of terrorist fighting powers, but then again most people don't know what a torrent even is.
Average Joe American, is not savvy / educated enough to understand the mechanics of torrents, Hollywood (for instance that - Star Wars was an insider leak) or that this is a misuse of the DoH's resources. To them, pirates, downloaders and terrorists are one and the same.
Why? Because somewhere along the last couple of decades, peoples' knowledge of their own laws, (especially laws involving quickly changing technology) took a significant downturn. Simply try asking people on the street about the USAPatriot Act or the DMCA. Most - know nothing. Some may have a different perception of the act due to propaganda and only a few will care about it.
Unless it is directly affecting the person, it's not important to them for the most part...
Democracies, in order to be effective, require active and INFORMED citizens - something that is slowly dissappearing (for a multitude of reasons).
There is always a frontier where there is an open and willing mind
Movie Tickets in my area $9.50
Amount of downloads: Aprox 10,000
Amount Star Wars grossed in just the first weekend: $158.5 million
I suppose that somehow, somewhere that extra $95,000 that they may or may not have made anyway is worth all this.
I'd bet that 9K out of the 10K downloaders actually paid to see the movie anyway.
I find the specific words the author of that article used to be kinda interesting.
"Federal agents launched a crackdown on users of a popular new technology used to steal the latest "Star Wars" movie..."
Download instead of "steal" would have worked fine in that sentance. I guess steal just conveys a more sinister idea. Like roaving bands of junky Bit Torrent users are going to break into your home at any moment. The will "steal" anythign to get their fix!
"Within 24 hours, more than 10,000 copies of the "Star Wars" film had been swiped."
Ahh yes "swiped" the files were swiped from the servers, depriving the poor innocent children of their Star Wars!
I really hate CNN, they are getting as bad as Fox News.
-Orcspit
How many people would have paid to see SW:III on opening night if they could download it, in order to avoid the lines? How many then would have paid again to see it in the theater to see in in full special effects glory? How many people now just buy their music from iTunes rather than pirate it, simply because it's easier? The huge gains media companies can reap from modern distribution would substantially lessen and offset the losses from piracy.
Anyway, just a thought. You can throw words like "illegal" and "rape" around all you want, but when Elite Torrents has more than a hundred thousand members alone... the people have spoken. It's time for something new.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
Mass produced media has all but killed small theatres and live entertainment. Even the local jobs from Cinemas are near-minimum wage mcjobs, and even those are being replaced by machines. The Cinema operations are franchised so as to lock in who can operate the enterprise and how they operate it, and the distribution of film quality is even monitored to keep cinemas on their toes.
It's a vertical monopoly where studios own the cinemas and the distribution. Worse, the studios and cinemas collude to ensure minimum competition and maximum revenue from their films.
Blockbuster cinema houses starve out independent cinema houses, then for the mostpart refuse to air local content which might not fill the seats. It's a rape of our culture and funnels money out of the local economy and right into Hollywood.
The revenues are used to empower legal teams to change copyright legislation so as to artificially protect their intellectual property. The rights which copyright gave them to make their bililons of dollars is just not enough for them.
In a world of six billion people, we should see more films and creative content than ever in the history of the earth, but for some reason, all we care about is the production of a few films from these big corporations.
In other words, George Lucas is a role model for Americans to screw the little guy.
I actually liked Revenge of the Sith, so I let others argue over whether the ticket price was a ripoff to see that particular movie. :-)
However, I don't need to argue about that. I can think of a few other ways we're being ripped off pretty quickly:
That's just off the top of my head. Anyone else care to add to the list?
So no, not all profit-making is a ripoff. But that doesn't change the fact that some of it certainly is. And no, illegally downloading and/or sharing movies isn't legal or ethical. But in the grand scheme of things, I think it's a hell of a lot less serious an offense than what the movie studios and especially the **AA are doing.
Fair comment. The trouble is that I'm not sure what people downloading the latest Hollywood blockbusters on Bittorrent, burning a DVD and then spending the night at home watching it are doing to help those local independant cinemas.
<rant style="rant-type:soapbox;">
they can either become investors or quit
Okay, this is the last reply I'm going to post on this topic, because this is as close to a flame war as I want to get. If you want the last word, feel free to post a reply and I'll let everyone bask in your victory. I diligently try to avoid the soapbox like this, but man, you just caught me at just the wrong moment.
Your post is typical of someone who has had a relatively nice middle-class ride through life and doesn't truly know what it's like to be an ordinary working class schmoe. It's awful easy to say stuff like "become and investor" and "quit" when you have spare money to invest and could find another job relatively easily.
I'm guessing that you don't understand what it's like to have no spare money or to be forced to work a miserable job to keep food on the table because I'm guessing you can't relate. You think that you "pulled yourself up by the bootstraps" and "made yourself what you are today" because you went to college on your parent's dime and/or government-provided scholarship, grant, and/or student loan programs. If you lost your job today, I'm guessing you probably have money stashed away that you could fall back on, or at worst, a family that would find some way to take care of you. You think you've earned everything you have, and if someone else is poor, they're not unfortunate, they're just lazy because they didn't work as hard as you did.
Well, I've got some news; news that you will probably not believe because you've so successfully fooled yourself into believing that you've earned everything you have, but others reading will probably understand all too well. In America today, how hard you work has very little to do with how successful you are. I'm not saying the executives don't work hard, because a lot do. But they like to think that their sixty to eighty hours a week somehow entitles them to the lion's share of profit. Guess what: Sixty to eighty hours a weeks is a normal work week for a LOT of people who are barely making ends meet. In fact, some of the people in the corporate trenches would consider a sixty hour week a vacation.
These people would like nothing better than to find a good job somewhere else and quit, but the other company they go to will be just as bad, and they would lose any vested time in any pittance of a retirement plan they may have, vacation time they have built up for being at the company several years, and so on. So yeah, it's easy to armchair-manage people's lives, telling them to quit and lose what little they have for something worse, if you're not the one who will actually have to pay the price for it.
It's not like executives sit down with the grunts on the line and work out what everyone thinks is fair compensation for all employees. No, they TELL employees what they'll get, and that will be as little as they can get away with. These days, it's gotten even worse because many executives don't really even care about the long term well-being of the company, as long as they get their bonus this year and their golden parachute next year. As a general rule (exceptions are few and FAR between), the executives that can get away with screwing the employees the hardest will be the most lavishly rewarded for doing so. Why? It's built into the corporate culture. Their job is to maximize profit and minimize costs (i.e. things like salary and benefits for average schmoes). Being fair to the employees isn't part of the equation; in fact, it is a significant hinderance.
Bringing it back on-topic, most of the people working on the film AREN'T being paid what they're "supposed" to be paid. They're being paid the bare minimum they can be paid. Even though both are in a sad state under the constant attacks they've suffered lately, we fortunately have things like unions and liberals around to try to ensure that the bare minimum will at least allow these people to eat. They "signed up" for it not because it
I'm guessing that you don't understand what it's like to have no spare money or to be forced to work a miserable job to keep food on the table because I'm guessing you can't relate.
I will admit to being the guy with the nice middle class ride through life to whom you refer. I have never in my life worked a minimum wage job, and the least I was ever paid was $6.25 an hour as a lab assistant in college. I have never had difficulty finding work as a soccer referee for over $15/hr on weekends, I have taken entry level grocery bagger positions for $9/hr and I have babysat for $7.50 an hour. During college I mostly worked internships at around $13/hr, which combined with $30,000 in government subsidized loans paid my tuition.
As bad as the school system is in this country, schools and public libraries offer sufficient resources for any interested person to obtain an education. I was homeschooled from K-12 grade, which meant that for the most part I taught myself. By buying used books online, you are looking at an investment of a couple hundred dollars a year. (And if you don't believe me I can put together a book list to show you.) It does not require a privleged middle class upbringing to obtain a quality education. I will agree though that for a kid whose parents don't really care, getting a quality education is much more difficult.
Obtaining a state college education is also not difficult for someone wanting to do so. My local state school has in-state education costs of under $500 a semester. Take your highly motivated examples who work two full time jobs. At $10/hr each job, that person is making about $40,000 a year. While $10/hr is high for starting salary, it is well within the reach of someone who is a good employee and is willing to relocate. Particularly if said party is willing to live in an inexpensive area (ie NOT San Francisco), they can very quickly have enough savings to go to school. If they can continue to work while in school, they may be able to avoid even needing much from their savings.
The real way a person gets into an untenable position is by making poor decisions. Not obtaining a quality high school education is the first mistake most people make. They then follow this by getting married or having kids they can support that family. Our society is unwilling to wait for anything or plan for the future. A person cannot end up a single mother with 3 kids working a minimum wage job without making some stupid decisions. While I do believe we should help such people recover from those mistakes, your claims that people aren't at fault for where they are in life just do not reflect the facts.
Atanamis