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MPAA Caught Uploading Fake Torrents
An anonymous reader writes "The MPAA and other anti-piracy watchdogs have been caught trapping people into downloading fake torrents, so they can collect IP addresses, and send copyright infringement letters to ISPs. The battle between P2P networks and copyright holders seems to be a never ending battle. It will be interesting to see how much the anti-piracy groups practices change once they begin begin selling movies and TV shows legally on bittorrent.com."
If you are part of the MPAA and you download a torrent from someone else just to prosecute, technically isnt the MPAA breaking the law as well??
The MPAA operates with the authorization of its member companies. They've presumably authorized the association to make reproductions of the copyrighted content for anti-piracy purposes, and copyright infringement is the unauthorized reproduction (or distribution, or ...) of the protected works, so, at a guess, I'd say they're pretty safe on that one.
geek. lawyer.
There is an allegation that article about the use of fake torrents by the MPAA to harvest IP address so they can use them to send out infringement notices, which has then been converted to a fact by the submitter.
I suspect that the MPAA has these fake torrents to confuse people and waste their time downloading junk, in the hope that they'll give up using torrents. It's a very weak link to suggest that these are being used to send copyright infringement notices.
Waking Up - There must be a better way to start the day.
No, you're wrong.
A better name for entrapment would be inducement.
If you're willing to engage in a crime, it isn't entrapment for the police to offer you an opportunity to break the law. So in your example, the policeman who does nothing more than offer to sell you drugs and who does sell you drugs, is not breaking the law and is not entraping you.
If you aren't trying to break the law, and you're more or less strongarmed into doing so -- i.e. induced by something more than a mere opportunity to do so -- then it can be entrapment. So if you didn't want to buy drugs, and refused the offer, but then the police threaten you into doing it, you'd have a decent entrapment defense.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
AFAIK, nobody has actually gotten around to forcing the **AA into proving anything in court.
And again, AFAIK, the **AA hasn't had anything more than screenshots of alleged sharing as evidence
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From the article:
The anti-piracy servers use hostnames like 101tracker.dhcp.biz, aplustorrents.qhigh.com, bitnova.squirly.info, bittorment.ocry.com, and pirate-trakkrz.leet.la. All these hostnames can be traced back to the same IP Ranges, these ranges contain possibly hundreds of fake trackers, so feel free to block them
I don't have a lot of time to work with, but there are a few points going around here that I think ought to be collected in one place:
/dev/unrandom. They are fine with that.
Entrapment: No, it's not. Entrapment, in order to work as a legal defense, is when the government takes action that induces you to commit a crime that you would not otherwise have committed. Walking up to you on the street and offering you $100 commission to steal a Rolex is entrapment. Putting up a website that purports to sell illegal machinegun parts is not entrapment, because you would have found some website to buy the parts from anyhow. Sending you a brochure to advertise child pornography and waiting for you to order some is questionable. This activity is somewhere between the child porn brochure and the machinegun parts website, but it is not government action so entrapment isn't a defense. It also doesn't matter, because the MPAA is interested in suing you into oblivion in civil court more than it is interested in seeing you behind bars. (After all, behind bars you can't make any more paychecks for the MPAA to garnish.)
MPAA consent to downloading content: Nope. They're uploading fake torrents. You are downloading something else, maybe a dump of
Downloading fake torrents is legal: Yep, it is. It's just that they're logging your IP address and will file a lawsuit that alleges, "[o]n information and belief, the Defendant has infringed the Plaintiff's copyright by downloading an illegally distributed copy of [the movie you were trying to download when you got the fake torrent]." They know you are going to find a real torrent later and download it, or at least some other movies. They know all they need to: you are a person using a given IP address to attempt to download their copyrighted material and you probably didn't give up when you found out that the torrent they fed you was fake.
Grabbing your IP address from the fake torrent download doesn't help the MPAA: See previous paragraph.
Did I miss anything? These seem to be the main issues being covered in the comments so far. The simple fact is that this tactic will probably work for the MPAA.