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MPAA Being Sued For Allegedly Hacking Torrentspy
goldaryn writes "Valence Media, the parent company of Torrentspy.com, one of the web's largest torrent search engines, has filed a lawsuit against the MPAA for allegedly hiring a hacker to steal e-mail correspondence and trade secrets. From the suit: 'The Motion Picture Association of America willfully and intentionally obtained without authority, conspired to obtain without authority, purchased, procured, used and disclosed private information that it knew was unlawfully obtained through unauthorized access to Plaintiffs' computer servers and private email accounts, in violation of United States and California privacy and computer security laws.'"
But wait- How can it be wrong if the MPAA does it? laws only apply to us mortals...
And All I Ask is a Tall Ship And a Star to Steer Her By
I would have preferred the headline "DMCA Bites MPAA in A$$" but I suppose the current one will do.
Now, it's only a matter of time before we see the "MPAA Sues MPAA" headline. I'm certain there's money floating all over the place inside the MPAA and those law-talking guys are going to get to thinking that they better sue first for the rights to that money. You don't know the phrase "every man for himself" until you've visited an association of lawyers.
Anyone else praying for the MPAA to implode in on itself like flan left in a cupboard?
My work here is dung.
If this happens, and MPAA loses, who will be the stewards of our movies? Who will be there to serve the movie-viewing public? Who will ensure we go en masse to the theater over an opening-weekend to recoup movie-making costs before word spreads of what a turkey that movie is (more on that in sec)?
This looks serious. Please, please, please... leave the MPAA alone! They are our shepherds.
(I saw an interview a long time ago about one of the MPAA techniques to ensure ROI on their turkeys. Multi-screen theaters were extorted into showing and advertising known turkeys to maximize viewers before word spread about how bad the movie really was. They also had to commit to a minimum number of showings. In return, they were "allowed", given the privelege, of showing true blockblosters. So, if it's a movie's first weekend, and it's getting HUGE publicity (Steve Martin's
- RV
), consider it a red flag, and wait for word of mouth about the movie's worth.)Glad I only download less prosecuted television shows from there. Where do I contribute to money to help sue them?
iNTERcEPTOR|SdB I own a Camaro
That's exactly what they're going to say. The MPAA is, after all, practically a subsidiary of our government now. They are going to say that they had no choice but to fight fire with fire!
And, do you know what? Since people have only a rudimentary understanding of the "dark Internets," everyone will eat their explanation up, and then head to the nearest Wal-Mart to purchase a CD published by a RIAA affiliate.
Sorry to burst your bubble, Torrentspy.
Its like trying to put a celebrity in jail, won't happen. There needs to be a big swing taken first by someone who packs a lot of punch to open a wound big enough for this type of lawsuit to have more teeth. Torrentspy does not have that kind of clout to land one :\
Fear Breeds Knowledge
This is a tough one for me. As an anarcho-capitalist, I believe that the MPAA's power comes not just from bribing and lobbying, but directly from the entire implementatin of copyright and patents -- any law that offers the use of force and legalizes a monopoly eventually creates distribution cartels and really powerful political cronies.
Here we see an eye-for-an-eye. Gandhi said if we followed that rule the whole world would be blind. I think it's appropriate here as in the long run, it isn't consumers who will "win" if this case continues, it is the lawyers and the law itself that wins. As cases are won and lost and precedents are set, we don't see the market of sellers and buyers made easier, instead we see more laws and legal precedents that put more power in the hands of those who can afford the legal costs.
So what happens if the MPAA loses? Can you or I use the same case tactics to defend our own information? What happens if the MPAA wins? They only get more powerful. In the end, someone else is enhancing their power (through the State), rather than a market that really doesn't need any more powerful players in the game.
I'd rather see someone sue the LAWS that are bad rather than take advantage of other bad laws to try to fix the system in their favor.
I thought that the MPAA/RIAA were campaigning for the government to give them special exemption status with regard to the anti-hacking laws in the Patriot Act so that they could hack with impunity, even in the case of causing lost data, on the suspicion of copyright infringement.
--jeffk++
ipv6 is my vpn
Torrentspy's complaint includes claims that the man whom the MPAA allegedly paid $15,000 to steal e-mail correspondence and trade secrets has admitted his role in the plot and is cooperating with the company.
MPAA: How much to get us information on this evil company
h4x0r: d00d 3y3 c4n pwn3rfy th3m f0r ch3ep w1f my 0d4y j3etsp34k to0lbar!
Infiltrated dot Net
Perhaps their army of high-priced lawyers will come up with some great defenses, ways to beat back the various laws.
Then we can all use them.
Very clever, let the MPAA pay for attacking these insane anti-citizen's rights laws.
No proof is in the article - presumably not wanting to prejudice the court case. The MPAA deny it, of course:
"These claims (by Torrentspy) are false," Kori Bernards, the MPAA's vice president of corporate communications, said in an e-mail to CNET News.com. "Torrentspy is trying to obscure the facts to hide the fact that they are facilitating thievery. We are confident that our lawsuit against them will be successful because the law is on our side."
Conceivably both lawsuits will succeed, both parties allege (different) illegal activities. The question is, whose suit will attract the most damages - one stolen spreadsheet or a few million stolen movies?
This is what happens when a corporate consortium declares itself a vigilante in the fight against pirrracy. What makes it worse is there own twisted view of what is morally right and what isn't (suing students into bankruptcy and hacking into people's computers to justify there ends most certainly isn't).
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Which is a good hint that good people don't.
Anyway, back on topic. Ever since the RIAA started providing corrupt or malformed songs on P2P networks[1] it was only a matter of time before the MPAA started futzing with things too. However it is surprising that the MPAA would outdo the zealoutry of even the RIAA.
[1] I don't condemn all file sharing, only the illegal kind.
I don't get it.
I'm willing to bet that the MPAA can claim ignorance on this one. While I have no doubt that the MPAA execs greenlighted this project, I also don't doubt that the MPAA will scapegoat the executive in charge. I expect a press release to be forthcoming stating that the executive in charge of the project undertook this act on his own accord, without the knowledge or approval of MPAA.
Unless the hacker has more direct contacts than one or two people inside the MPAA, I'd expect this to be swept under the carpet fairly quickly. I really hope the MPAA gets some bad press because of it, but I'm not going to hold my breath.
Besides, there is still the old idea that you can't call downloading "theft" because there really is no proven loser. We should all of us contact a lawyer and have legal documents drawn up, and notorized that say something like "In the event that any digitally copyrighted material is found on this hard drive, let this document serve as a legally binding guarantee that said materials would never have been purchased otherwise and therefore no loss of revenue can possibly be proven solely based on the posession and or existance of these materials."
See, the problem is they have managed to convince too many judges that ALL of the material you or I may have on a hard drive would have absolutely been purchased had we not had the opportunity to download it.
I call bullshit. Who's with me?
Windows has more viruses because linux has more virus coders.
So in this case it's Spy vs. torrentSpy
-tgpo
Why are the authorities not involved in raiding the MPAA offices in this case? That seems to be the *first* step when the MPAA are after someone else.
I'm confused as to why this is a lawsuit brought by a private company and not a criminal investigation conducted by the FBI. IANAL, but I would have assumed that breaking into a company's computer systems to retrieve this information would violate criminal law, and I would have assumed that paying someone to do this would also violate criminal law. What's going on here?
Is paying someone to break into a computer system not a criminal act? Are the FBI knowingly ignoring a criminal act (perhaps because the MPAA is rich and politically powerfull)? Is Torrentspy just misrepresenting the situation to make it sound worse than it actually is (and, therefore, sound criminal)?
"You call it a new way of thinking; I call it regression to ignorance!" -- Operation Ivy
IANAL! Ok, now that's out of the way...
Can someone tell me why this is a matter of sueing the MPAA? I would think that if there was solid evidence of the MPAA being caught up in this activity that the cuffs would come out and some suits would be hauled off to the klink.
That, in and of itself, makes this seem like something that may be hard to attack in a court of law. If you have a legal conviction it would make the civil suit seem solid. A civil suit on it's own seems weak.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
It's quite sad that people get to hide under the laws that protect individuals in that corporation. They basically do horrible illegal things, and the answer to everything is a small fine. A non-human entity doesn't make these illegal decisions. _People_ do. I understand why the government seperates a corporation from individuals, but when people make knowingly illegal decisions, they shouldn't be able to hide under that umbrella.
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
If the hacker only makes a copy of the trade secrets he isn't really stealing is he? At least that's what people keep telling me when they try to justify illegal file sharing. Well right after "I don't have enough money".
I'm not saying the MPAA doesn't deserve to be sued, just pointing out something I found rather hypocritical.
that the MPAA represents a small number of mega-businesses that are trying to control our images. A similar cartel exists in the News business, which is why we have had an increasing amount of crap, and less and less journalism, since about 1990, when the mega-mergers started happening.
In a less cartelized world, bittorrent would be seen for what it is: an alternate means of distribution that is enormously powerful, and incredibly cheap for the distributor, since they wouldn't have to invest in much storage or bandwidth. SOMEBODY would be offering their product for download at a reasonable price. Say $5.00 for a full DVD9 movie that you'd have to burn yourself. A couple more bucks, and they remove the copy protection. Piracy, which is inevitable, would be seen as wastage and free publicity for the studio, the director, the actors and so on. It would be prosecuted only when done for resale.
But since there are only a few studios, they band together in the RIAA and MPAA, and no real competition is required.
If I remember correctly, something similar happened to the RIAA. (Note: This is based on my memory and may not be perfect) But this is what I remember reading about:
Kazaa (or Sharman, if you want to be "right") sued the RIAA because they used Kazaa Lite when finding people's IP addresses. Kazaa Lite was totally and completely illegal to use, and Kazaa said something about it in one of their terms. Kazaa lost, though, because the courts said that they didn't enforce the "non-pirate" clauses of their terms well enough, so this other part shouldn't be enforced either.
They're going to find some stupid excuse to let the MPAA go. I have no doubt in my mind about it.
That doesn't address legitimacy or (come to think of it) uniqueness. Counterfeits of widely accepted currencies would be everywhere and everyone would be printing up their own "brands" of bills, for which there would need to be an insane web of exchange rates.
I disagree. When gold is money (as it has been for almost 8000 years until 1913), people use it as a store of wealth and a unique article of barter. When paper was redeemable for gold, we had a VERY strong and stable currency (the dollar of 1790 was only devalued about 5% by 1912). From 1913 to 2006 the paper unbacked dollar has devalued almost 96%.
In fact, the US experienced this in its earlier days of currency. The gov't decided to allow banks to print their own currency, and it was a complete mess. The US gov't finally had to step in and take over all minting itself.
Again, I disagree. Check out Rothbard's What Has Government Done To Our Money, a free e-book. Rothbard explains what happened with banks -- they were nationalized after Lincoln tried a central bank (it failed). Nationalized banks fell under a national charter that let them loan out more money than they had reserves for -- causing the historic runs. This was NOT free market banking. In fact, Lincoln (and Greenspan and now Bernanke) all believe in the monetary policy that is generally called the "real bills doctrine" which repeatedly has been found to be false.
Lastly, without some kind of backing of the currency, its worth remains very low. US currency is backed by the economic and military power of the US gov't. I would argue that any sufficiently valuable and stable currency, in the absence of government, would make whatever group produces that currency into the gov't, ipso facto.
Untrue. Government backing of the dollar through faith has caused the dollar to fall 96% in less than 100 years. Before this time, currency backed by gold has held value for thousands of years. The only time gold faltered was during gold rushes which was quickly corrected by increased buying power in one market that shipped gold elsewhere to equalize. Before that, gold standards fell apart usually when _government_ debased gold with cheaper metals.
You can't (easily) counterfeit gold, and you can use gold in an economy much larger than the one we have today. It might instill a small soft and beneficial deflation, but this would be good for every economy as it encourages savings and smart investing.
Everything we see negative in society today can be attributed to fiat currency -- wars, socialism, powermongering and wage destruction. Housing bubbles, tech bubbles and even the Great Depression occured due to fiat currency. Faith comes from a hard money standard (gold), not from war and power which require more money devaluation to occur.
When they say "The law is with us", they mean the appropriate politicians have been paid off. No district attorney will file criminal charges, no matter how much information they've stolen, or how may systems they paid someone to break into. Conspiracy charges are right out.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
Copyright infringement is to stealing as cp is to mv.
Definition of theft:
1. The act or an instance of stealing; larceny.
or from the Thompson & Gale Legal Encyclopedia:
A criminal act in which property belonging to another is taken without that person's consent.
Definition of steal:
1. To take (the property of another) without right or permission.
Definition of take:
To get into one's possession by force, skill, or artifice, especially:
1. To capture physically; seize: take an enemy fortress.
2. To seize with authority; confiscate.
So...
"for instance if I plug something into an outlet at your house, you are not deprived of anything yet I have stolen, have I not."
My electic bill would be greater because of you. As a direct result of your action, I have to pay more money. You have taken something of value that wasn't yours.
"How about unused bandwidth on an open wifi spot. (open by stupididy, not on purpose). Again you are not 'deprived' of anything yet it is still 'stealing'"
I can see people mistakenly calling it 'stealing'. But as long as it's an unmetered connection (in other words, not charged per kilobyte or whatever), the owner is not suffering any loss. Of course there may be laws against unauthorized access, but those are generally for security reasons. I have an open wifi connection, and don't see why I should get angry if people use it. If people abuse it, I'll secure it.
I hope TorrentSpy saved a lot of money to fight what is sure to be a loooooonnnnnnggggggggg drawn out court battle. I can't imagine the ad revenue of every torrent site on the planet since the beginning of torrenting even approaches the yearly legal budget of the MPAA.
Of course, the brilliant and slap-in-the-face method of winning this would be to take it far enough to get a nice huge settlement out of the MPAA, and then use that money to defend TorrentSpy users in future court cases. Or fund a trip or two to the Supreme Court.
Self-referential Sigs are cool on /. these days...
54
On the face of it, it looks as though what **AA did was only (allegedly) break in and steal some emails while TorrentSpy is (allegedly) facilitating copyright infringement (but not actually infringing themselves).
But the act of breaking into a computer system breaks CRIMINAL laws while copyright infringement breaks only CIVIL laws. BIG difference.
Where are the FBI Raids? This country is so turned around now that, if you are big and powerful, you can get away with criminal acts while if you are a small timer you get the book thrown at you for minor offences.
I am very disappointed!
Bet this
Anyone who pirated Gighli? Anything they can use as an excuse for it tanking?
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!