BitTorrent: Sysadmins to face the music

An anonymous reader writes "Two sysadmins in Australia are set to get sued by the music industry after the federal court ruled that Melissa Ong and Ryan Briggs did ignore calls to remove Web sites that were in breach of copyright. All major music labels in the country have banded together to take action against the duo's employer Swiftel, an ISP which allegedly hosted BitTorrent file-sharing hubs (which contained pirated music etc)."

Comments

Farce

[BlackMesaLabs]

They were never delivered legal documents. Only sent emails and (apparently) there was a phonecall. Why would you comply with emails? Remember that site a while back that made phony cease&desist emails and sent them from hotmail/fake accounts to see how many ISP's complied? Everyone booed the ISP's who went along with it. This ISP ignores the emails and now they're getting sued. I wouldn't blame them. Why would they act on a legal matter if they weren't sent any legal instruction/documents? The whole thing is stupid. More info here: http://whirlpool.net.au/

Wrong.

[iLEZ]

"(which contained pirated music etc)"
.. No they didn't.

Only .torrent files are saved at the server. No illegal material needs to be sent out from, or hosted at a bittorrent server.
That's the beauty of Bittorrent you see..

Y'know, this is about right.

[Anonymous Coward]

I work for an ISP that does some hosting.

We recieve copyright complaints all the time, and every single time we contact our user and let them know we received a notice and to cease file sharing. Most of the time it is their kids anyways.

One guy wanted to try to do the whole "I'm entitled to download this movie" speech. We just told him that we were warning him that we received it. In other words we CYA'd. In the case of multiple complaints we would lock the account (multiple being several over a few weeks).

Mainly, reading TFA, these admins not only knew about, but helped set up and maintain the bittorrent hub (considering they had access logs from it). Plus documentation had been requested and not provided, and they had deliberately ignored several notices (for deliberately ignored phone calls have to go unanswered).

I'm not saying they are so guilty as to go to prison, however they kept the site going, and ingnored request by the copyright holder AND court. That does count for something.

Re:Instead of sharing non-free music

[DenDave]

And alot of it is really good. It's just that these artists don't get MTV coverage..

This being said, www.magnatune.com has a great collection. So pop on over and check it out.

John Buckman has been working pretty ahrd at getting artists onboard and he's done a great job. I am sure he's been covered on /. before but everytime I see this RIAA crap I am reminded by the magnatune motto...

we are not evil

Re:Instead of sharing non-free music

[Scarblac]

Use iRATE.

It's a program that has a collection of links to legal music to download; it starts off with a standard list of tracks, you can rate then, and then it tries to find tracks you might like by comparing your ratings to those of other users. So it's legal, based on what you like, and not recycled radio crap.

It's GPL and works on Linux, MacOS and Windows. Heck, it might even run on OpenBSD.

C&Ds, the unexpected consequences

[Dancin_Santa]

There used to be a time when companies didn't send Cease & Desist letters. They just subpoenaed the offending party and took them to court. This was looked down on because sometimes the poor little copyright violator didn't realize what he was doing wrong and was suddenly staring down the legal departments of the big guys. So they came up with the idea of C&Ds which give fair warning to any party who might be offending the party in question.

It was a method of 1) encouraging the offending party to see the error of his ways and stop doing the bad thing, and 2) to establish in no uncertain terms that the offending party was aware that their actions were causing offence.

With that, everyone and their brother started sending C&Ds instead of actually suing. It's cheaper and doesn't require any court action, so both sides come out way ahead if the C&D works.

Unfortunately they have become so much like "Final Notice" bills that just seem to keep coming without actually reaching a conclusion. Offenders just toss the C&D in the trash and the Offended just send another C&D. Neither side really wants to take it to court because that would entail actual lawyering.

There ought to be a law that mandates that only one C&D per offence may be sent to any customer. Once that has been ignored for a certain amount of time, the offended party would either have to stop sending it or actually take the offender to court.

I'd love to see some P2P violators squirm in the courtroom. Currently they hide behind their anonymity and the knowledge that despite any C&D they receive, that many others are also receiving them and the odds of actually getting tapped by the RIAA is slim to none.

Re:This just in... information is free

[Kjella]

My point is, that the RIAA cannot boo and make this go away with legal measures, it will be always possible to copy data while a Neumann-principle based computer exist, i'd hazard the guess that such computer will exist for a while...

Ah, but you require program code that will actually read those data. What they are trying to create is a world where everything exists only within its own signed keyspace. On a TCPA-machine, the TCPA root is the only real machine. What you believe to be the machine, is just one special "virtual machine".

Essentially, each Trusted Computing-program runs on a Neumann-principle machine, but it will only run code signed by that entity. No/wrong signature = no access. And since you can't sign your code with their key, you don't get to alter it so you can read it. You may exploit flaws in their code, (by making data become code, that's Neumann for you), but in flawless code you're pretty much SOL

Kjella