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

How is this going to end?

[Mr_Tulip]

These guys are sysadmins, right? Not saying they are poor, but their annual income is probably less than that of the record-industry legal team's costs of going to the toilet.

Here's how this will pan out:
They will get sued and ordered to pay 50 gadzillion dollars, AND court costs.
The court will look at their income, and the lack of prior convictions, and order them to pay 20 bucks a week for the next 100 gadzillion years.
In the meantime, at least 42 new torrent sites will open to replace each one that has been shut down, and these will be progressively harder to shut down due to being physically hosted in
(a) Russia
(b) China
(c) An Oil platform, and finally,
(d) The moon.

Meanwhile our sysdamins have paid off the 20% of the court costs of the guy that brings in the suitcases for the lawyers. They are now old, but venerated figures in the piracy underground.

Who wins? No-one.
The Records companies have lost heaps of money, our sysadmins have also lost heaps of money, the effect on global piracy was imperceptibly small, and the legal teams of both parties are sitting together on their company yacht, toasting their victory with pina coladas under the stars.

Re:Sysadmins..

[Kirth]

who ignore email infringement notices are hardly uncommon.

We throw them away too. Because YOU writing ME that some customer of mine violates your copyright doesn't imply that he really is, you could be lying. Only a judge can rule that something really is an infringement and order us to take action. WE ARE NOT JUDGES, we therefore ARE NOT ALLOWED to make a legal decision whether something is illegal or not. This is the law, and we citizens are not allowed to take it into our own hands and decide that our customer is "guilty".

And in fact, this false allegiations of copyright infringement already happend. Some wanted to have removed works which really were in public domain, others sent complaints according to laws that do not exist in our country, and still others sent complaints because of similar filenames (in one case, some open source package was confused with a movie, just because of the same name).

So we simply don't act on them. You have to write us a letter, on paper, and then we'll forward this to the respective customer alleged of infringing, for him to do what he sees fit. If our customer does not do what the sender wants, he may involve a judge to order us to put the material down, or to disclose the identity of the alleged infringer.

Re:Instead of sharing non-free music

[nmx]

You want the benefit of something that isn't yours without paying for it, until you decide that it's worth paying for... by which point you've already derived the benefit of it, regardless of whether you think it's worth anything or not.

What's the difference between this and borrowing a friend's CD and listening to it a bunch of times before buying it? I used to do that all the time before the advent of p2p. Furthermore, should I feel guilty for listening to a song on the radio without buying the single? Or does that also count as having "derived the benefit of it" without paying? (Of course we do pay by listening to advertising).

You even acknowledged that your analogy isn't accurate - stealing a shirt, a physical object, is not the same as downloading music - especially if it's later deleted. Neither the artist nor the label has actually lost anything. That's not stealing.

Most new music sucks; why should I buy a whole CD for one or two good songs? CDs are overpriced. People can get the music cheaper by downloading it. It may be illegal, but when a large portion of the population is breaking the law, maybe the law needs to be examined.

For the record, I, like the grandparent poster, also spend a good deal on music. I don't bother downloading anymore because I got sick of dealing with spyware and the possibility of RIAA action. Unfortunately for the RIAA and its artists, this also means I haven't listened to as much new music lately as I used to, and I haven't bought as many CDs either. If I'm going to spend $15 on an album, it better have more than one good song on it. The only CDs I've bought lately are ones I already heard because friends had them (I'm now back again to the days before MP3s). I don't see how limiting my selection to what my friends own is helping the RIAA any.