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TorrentSpy Ordered By Judge to Become MPAA Spy
PC Guy writes "TorrentSpy, one of the world's largest BitTorrent sites, has been ordered by a federal judge to monitor its users. They are asked to keep detailed logs of their activities which must then be handed over to the MPAA. Ira Rothken, TorrentSpy's attorney responded to the news by stating: 'It is likely that TorrentSpy would turn off access to the U.S. before tracking its users. If this order were allowed to stand, it would mean that Web sites can be required by discovery judges to track what their users do even if their privacy policy says otherwise.'"
now no one will use torrentspy. It never ceases to amaze me how hard some people will try to put the genie back in the bottle.
Which is to say, game, set and match, MPAA.
rj
My blog - This link wouldn't be interesting even if we set fire to
Using bittorrent in itself is perfectly legal and everyone who questions that is missing a couple cogs in their brain.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Getting paid for work is one thing.
Getting paid perpetually for the work you did in 1974 is another thing entirely.
If I write a piece of code that helps my employer do something, I get paid for the amount of time I worked on it. I don't get paid every time my company sells the software, and every time they re-use the code, forever and ever amen.
Artists should definitely get paid when they perform their popular song, which is real work, paid for at the time of service.
Should artists get paid forever for the same 6 hours of work in the recording studio? How is that different from me and my code?
Um. Ok here's what I suggest. Go through the effort to learn an instrument. Then, hang your livelyhood on the stake of selling an album. Then, watch with glee as it becomes popular. Then watch with horror as nobody pays for it. Paying for things is "outdated" you see, and not paying artist is the only way to "right" a wrong.
It basically boils down to, if you want the damn product pay for it. If your favourite artist signs with a label, THAT'S THEIR RIGHT. Who are you to say "because you signed with, say, EMI, I won't pay for your music?" You can vote with your dollars. If labels piss you off so much, don't buy [or pirate] label owned music. Only buy truly indy music.
People who pirate label music "to stick it to the man" are just hypocrites.
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
>> You know, I heard in some countries, they can tap the phones if they get a court order, even though the privacy policy of the people talking says otherwise.
You're referring to wiretaps placed on specific individuals. This is very different.
Here this judge has ruled that the equivalent of wiretaps be placed on all customers of this company, regardless of their standing, oblivious to all issues of privacy, and at the behest of another corporation rather than a government agency. It is quite without precedent.
But this ruling won't stand for long, is my guess.
Every company wishing to undermine its competitors could demand that they implement similar internal monitoring to ensure that there is no infringement of their copyrights. For example, Microsoft could demand that all fileserver transactions in named large corporations be monitored and their logs be made available to MS in support of suits for infringement of Windows and Office copyrights.
In that direction lies madness, even worse than the current one. It's so grossly anti-competitive and so utterly dismissive of privacy considerations that it'll get overturned pretty quickly, I would guess.
In fact, that judge is going to get severly panned for a whole raft of reasons brought out in this thread. His ruling really verges on the incompetent. Or of course, it could be much worse than simple incompetence --- this does smell a bit of corruption, not necessarily driven by MPAA dollars but by old-boy network handshakes with their lawyers.
Pretty grim all 'round, even by the US's rapidly collapsing standards.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
The government has no reason to care about the whole IP debacle really. What it really is a question of is an old industry with awfully rich people in charge (don't give me crap about starving artists, the fat cats that took their money in the first place could starting paying it back...) that has grown accustomed to ripping artists and consumers alike off. Music survived an awful long time before the RIAA, and so did acting before MPAA. It is a transition, which no government should interfere with. The industry and the artist and consumers alike must find a new balance. I've heard that people pay to listen to live music for instance, maybe that is how music should pay the bills, not recordings of it? Who knows but the future.
What the government *SHOULD* interfere with is price fixing, Mafia tactics, scare tactics, extortion, invading of privacy, breaking the law, etc. Which these bloody people are doing all the time. This what is getting to me, why should any government on earth be allowed to persecute individuals the way RIAA/MPAA and their friends are doing. I do not live in the US, but please please, everyone, do read this Wikipedia entry and really think about what it says. If what the RIAA/MPAA is doing isn't cruel and unusual, nothing else. When beating and raping people is seen as a lesser crime than copying certain combinations of 1s and 0s, this are both cruel, and soon getting all to usual!
1. My original comment was a joke, and a way of expressing that I see no value whatsoever in most forms of modern music and movies. Obviously the fact that people DO pirate this stuff suggests others do not agree. /. is not a news organization. It's a site that links to other stories on other pages. Do you KNOW of any articles concerning this topic? Have you submitted them?
2. The reason the RIAA/MPAA make the news here is because of their behavior. They sue many, many, many people. Joe Shmoe who owns a record shop in Detroit does not. "Nobody sues no one" is not a news story.
3. You accuse slashdot of picking only stories that make the RIAA look bad, without the stories detailing the harm piracy causes to the little guy. Well, care to cite a few sources?
4. Should the market collapse due to piracy (And I have my doubts to this), big and small, well, that's capitalism for you. Goods were not provided at a cost people were willing to spend, especially ones that are easily replaceable, and the market was not willing to adapt, so it dies. That's the way the cookie crumbles.
Throughout most of human history, music flourished without any copyright. If the MPAA/RIAA had their way, even humming a tune would be a copyright infringement with micropayments, instead of just something people naturally do - which is, by the way what music is - something people naturally do.
There's nothing to stop you from going on tour if your music becomes popular - and the more people "pirate" it, the wider the audience for your tour gigs. Its why people want their stuff to get lots of air play, right?
In the previous century, a large part of the cost of each copy of music was the physical production and distribution (pressing each copy, shipping it to warehouses, then to wholesalers, then to retailers). Those costs are gone, but the price hasn't gone down to compensate.
Now consider the production costs. There is no way that any music CD ever produced costs as much as a blockbuster movie. And yet, the movie on DVD costs about the same as, and often less than, the music CD. Why? If a move costs $100M to produce, and a music cd $1M, shouldn't the music CD cost a lot less?
Must be the crack math skills of those RIAA accountants. Or just the crack. A song is worth a few cents in todays economy, not a buck or two.
Kevin Smith on Prince
Yes, do be careful not to step in the sarcasm.
I think it may be time, seriously, to step away from this argument, because who is right and who is wrong is quickly becoming irrelevant. File sharing -- yes, of copyrighted material -- is on the increase, despite all the attempts of various concerned bodies to curtail the practice. Copyright infringement is illegal -- whether it's wrong or not is an entirely different question, which I won't go into, but suffice to say that both sides have good arguments to support their side.
But I advance that it's all irrelevant, because regardless of whether it's illegal, regardless of whether it's wrong, it has become so commonplace and so completely defies any attempt to control it that there arguably not much that can be done about it, anymore. So TorrentSpy is ordered to spy on its users -- so what? They'll probably comply and say as much on their website, and people will use some other torrent service instead, stopping exactly no one from file swapping. Or maybe the RIAA/MPAA will find some way to kill BitTorrent entirely, which would be a shame. But as Napster showed, this will not stop p2p -- even if it is completely illegal, it will persist. In fact, one could argue that the technology has actually gotten better over the years thanks to the RIAA and MPAA's meddling. Sort of like the hydra -- cut off one head and it grows back two.
At some point, when you're a business, you need to be pragmatic. The law protects you only when relatively few people break it and you can litigate the hell out of those that do, scaring the remaining would-be-ne're-do-wells into compliance. But when 60% (I don't know the actual numbers, but substitute any substantial percentage and the fact remains) of the population is breaking the law, well, you're basically fucked.
All this arguing about whether file sharing is right or wrong -- it's a bit like arguing about whether premarital sex is right or wrong. Many people in the US feel strongly that premarital sex is deeply wrong, not just for them, but for everyone. Ok, it's not illegal -- I'll address legality with another example in a bit -- but the point is: it's not going stop. No matter how you feel about premarital sex, it isn't going to stop, and there's no way -- none -- that you can make it stop. Heck, if premarital sex is alive and well in Saudi Arabia, there's no way that you'd ever have any hope of killing it in the USA.
Or what about prohibition? Drinking is most certainly bad for you -- many people don't realize just how bad it is for you. Alcoholism destroys families, the substance is addictive and harmful, and polite society just shouldn't put up with it, or so the teetotalers said. You know what? They're right. But you'll notice that it didn't make a lick of difference that they were right, nor did it make a lick of difference that the law agreed with them. People didn't stop drinking.
There are lots of examples like this, and I fear that file sharing is just the latest. No matter how you feel about it, understand: it's not going to stop. The RIAA and MPAA are yelling into the wind, and it's time they saw the writing on the wall. As it stands, their business model -- at least with the margins it has historically enjoyed -- is doomed.
What does this mean for the artists? Good question. Like many others, I don't think people are going to stop making music, for the simple reason that people were making music before there was a recording industry and will continue making music if said industry collapsed tomorrow. Movies are a more difficult question -- it costs an arm and a leg to make even a low-budget indie movie, requires the hard work of many people, and the institution of copyright is what makes most of the films we see possible. With music, you can make an argument about people making it in their garages and using the internet to distribute it -- fine. But with film, well, that's a much tougher sell, because so many more people are involved. Perhaps we'll see a resurgenc
"Throughout most of human history bittorrent did not exist."
And what does that have to do with anything, except to show that most people believe that the current "mode of distribution" of the RIAA/MPAA is obsolete, overpriced, and in need of some good competition?
A song is not worth a buck. Maybe a nickel
- movie at $100 million to produce, 2 hours of entertainment, and you can buy a copy of the DVD, including DVD case, for $7.99 5 years later
- music - 20 songs, $1 million to produce, 15 songs (10 or more crappy), and 5 years later they still want $1 a song or $15 for all 15 - no madia, no case.
If movies were priced like music, your movie dvd should cost $800.00 per copy. In reality, the RIAA is using the "monopoly what the market will bear" pricing scheme - and bittorrent sites break that artificial monopoly.Most songs aren't even worth a buck. A lot of the stuff being "traded" isn't even available to most people, so its not like anyone's losing any revenue, anyway. Both the RIAA and MPAA should get over it, and find a different economic model.
Kevin Smith on Prince