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Poisoned Torrents Plague Mybittorrent
jambarama writes "One of the biggest problems with the Fasttrack network has been poisoning. This is the practice of sharing a file on a P2P network that looks like the real thing, but isn't. Bittorrent until recently has been largely immune to this. Now a new type of torrent is tricking bittorrent sites to rising to the top of the download lists." From the article: "According to Rex, about 50 new torrents have been released from what he calls "fake" trackers (~31 in total.) These trackers are seemingly part of an elaborate plot to infiltrate the BitTorrent community with intentionally corrupt files. These movie and film titles are specifically designed to report false information to trackers, thereby gaining artificially inflated popularity."
Show me a place I can buy, rent, watch or download the entire X-men oringal series cartoon and I will stop downloading it now and buy it.
In fact most of what I download are things that I simple cannot buy or or so expensive that I wouldn't ever consider paying that much money for it (would you pay £180 / $321 USD (£150 now) for My So Called Life which is only 19 episodes long and a one of my faviourate shows from when i was a kid, or would you download load it for free?).
If they would be reasonable about the whole thing I would be happy to pay for old shows and films, but this simply isn't the case.
"In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act." - George Orwell
Well, I'm a Canadian. I break no laws when I download music on bittorrent... but these people are making it extremely difficult to download my music in peace.
I bought Photoshop CS. Photography is a hobby, but one I take seriously enough to be semi-pro at it with the occasional paid job. The product activation in PS CS turned out to be a real problem. Nearly every time I did a system restore, PS CS would deactivate, requiring I call Adobe to reactivate it. Windows being the way it is and me liking to tweak with my laptop, I had to restore a lot. It was getting beyond annoying and I was starting to worry about Adobe blacklisting my copy of PS CS. So I downloaded a pirated copy of it along with a key generator. I kept that on my hard drive and started reinstalling instead of having Adobe reactivate.
At the end of a trip to Europe, I was working at editing and printing a bunch of pictures I'd taken of an event. I needed to use a photo printer someone else provided. The printer driver install went awry and I had to do a system restore to fix it. Sure enough Photoshop deactivated itself. I was at a hostel in the mountains, about 12 hours before my departing flight, without any Internet access, at 4 am, with no idea what phone number I was supposed to call to reach Adobe tech support if they were even open at that time on a Sunday. So I uninstalled Photoshop, dug up the pirated copy, and installed that. Worked like a charm. I got the pictures edited and printed, the people at the event were happy, and I made my flight home.
When Photoshop CS2 came out, I bought that as well. And I downloaded a pirated copy of it off bittorrent. Of course the real irony is that if Adobe handn't put in product activation as an anti-piracy measure, I never would've needed to get the pirated version.
If someone harm you, and you fail to do anything about it for long enough, despite you being in communications with them, you can't sue them for damages. You must make some effort to migrate the damages beforehand.
Civil law is based on the idea of 'tort', that other people caused harm to you, and you can't let other people keep 'hurting' you and then sue them when you think they've racked up enough damages. You have to try to stop them at some point. Otherwise the court rightly supposes that you weren't really being harmed, or didn't mind the harm.
I.e., I can't let my next-door neighbor can't drive over a corner of my grass for ten years as he pulls into his driveway, keep track of how much grass he's killed, and then sue him for that amount. I have to actually have tried for stop him for the last ten years, via talking to him and even putting up a pole so he can't do that anymore. (And then I can sue him for the cost of the pole. ;) )
And you can't cause people to keep 'hurting' you and then sue them for it. That'll get you laughed out of court so fast it's not funny.
If the MPAA hands out a torrent into a network that is designed for end users to share the files, they can't complain when exactly that happens.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?