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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.
Yet another reason to use the Pirate Bay - being based in Sweden, it's incredibly unlikely that much action will be taken against it, especially in the current political climate there (as a direct result of the raid). Now they just need a way to clearly mark torrents that are tracked only by them...
- Frans.
Which is to say, game, set and match, MPAA.
rj
Um, Does anyone remember FTP? Or the other 69 methods of moving files around? This is just another sad attempt for someone to try to control something they dont like! The internet has become The Tree of Knowledge that God banned from us long ago, and some people don't like it!! This will stop piracy about as well as burying a goat's head in your back yard to ward off evil spirits!! DEATH TO THE MAN!!!
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.'"
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.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
Buggy whip makers relied on the horse drawn carriage to protect their livelihood, and look where they ended up. Sorry, but capitalism means no one owes you a living, and if you refuse to adapt by providing something people can't get on their own, then you're toast.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
Poor little copyright violators are going to have to find a new source to steal from while making high and mighty moral claims about how evil the **AA groups are. I think the RIAA and MPAA can rot, and sincerely hope that this trend of the government to support their broken business model of attacking the citizens with insane claims ends soon. However, I am so sick of people getting up in arms about these shutdowns, and then wave their tiny little banner of "but bittorrent is used for legal stuff" yeah...so...it is...but I would guess that most of the people who parade out that silly argument have never used it for anything legal themselves, and just continue to download copyrighted works.
In a nutshell, get some self discipline and quit crying. I think all of the illegal download places should be shut down permanently. These stupid people cry about prices of software, about treatment of customers, and then they get the software and use it anyways. So, the company still gets its massive userbase knowing full well that many will be illegal copies, but as long as it grows their market share they will get more sales in the long run than what anyone "stole" from them. I went to linux because I can get any of the software I could need easily (no crack/serial/download searching) free (no astronomical sticker prices), and legally (no mega fines, or any of the recent trend of jail terms) and actually pay for the tiny amount of Win32 software that I ever use. The same goes with music, I just don't buy it anymore. And here is a shocker folks, when you don't use OS/Software from the commercial world who cuts all the stupid DRM deals...when you DO put one of those "copyright protection highjacker" type disks in that install all manner of rootkit type garbage...not much happens.
In closing, for all you who are going to respond to this... If you are doing so from an illegal install of Windows or other OS... Go switch to a legal alternative through download or purchase before you even bother.
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
everyone start sharing goatse material with torrentspy. The MPAA will freak out:)
Ok, so if they do just "block the entire US" whats to say somebody won't set up a mirror, a howto on using Proxy servers outside the US, or IP spoofing (not sure if that would work with downloads though...) or any of a billion other ways to get around this?
I don't believe the courts have the power to make an order like this, regardless of whether or not it is enforceable.
Actually, by the sounds of this, I think the judge could get impeached. Let us hope the ACLU or someone gets involved.
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
It was only a matter of time before governments began trying to figure out a way to regulate the Internet. All governments like control and the internet is by its very nature hard to control, and designed to be a nigh bit diffcult because of redundancy, etc. Sure China and Saudi Arabia and other countries try by limiting the number of ISPs and including filters, but people still find a way.
If you want to do something illegal on the net and can find a way to make money at it (the real tragic flaw of Napster), then there are a host of countries that would be happy to host for a percentage. And I'm not sure if anything can really be done to stop that. Trying to stop drugs hasn't worked.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
I thought the RIAA and MPAA's current strategy was working quite well: Produce shit so awful, no one would even want it for free. Lord knows I don't pirate movies or music. It'd be a waste of hard drive space.
I really think that with all these torrent-sites providing access to content people should pay for, things have gone too far, but so does going after sites that link to sites that host torrents that provide connection to a tracker to find people sharing the files - and even these people are in most cases still far away from the original source.
The overwhelming majority of people using bittorrent use it to trade in pirated content and everyone who questions that is missing a couple cogs in their brain.
Using openSUSE instead of Windows since 9th of October, 2007 and liking it.
Or maybe not. Your analogy is weak.
Other countries seem to have far more liberal standards when it comes to p2p. As already mentioned, Pirate Bay is hosted in a foreign country over which we do not currently have jurisdiction, nor plan to. (no oil.) So, unless the US can apply pressure to the government over there, those people are immune to the consequences. The only option the US would have is to go the China route, start blocking access to servers Big Brother feels don't support of morals and standards of Fremurica.
I think we've already established that the MAFIAA are DDT and file-sharing sites are cockroaches: all their efforts to kill off the population just drives the evolution of the technology and breeds a better roach. Seriously, without the MAFIAA we'd probably all still be using Napster and complaining about the broken songs.
Where is the endgame here? Does P2P win and the MAFIAA is reduced to paying for a few token arrests and prosecutions? Does it go the route of illegal drugs where p2p is available if you know where to look for it but no intelligent person would run the risk of losing everything with a bust? A lot of casual pot smokers I know have gone that route, they'd love to spark up now and again but they have too much to lose now between career and family, it's just not worth it.
What's kind of funny here is that stuff can go on under the radar for years before it blows up big enough for the media to comment on. Digital content piracy was going on for years and years before we even had broadband. All the porn getting traded over bulletin boards via dial-up was nothing more than scans from porno mags. I can't say there were never any lawsuits filed over this but I certainly never heard of them. And still, this was obscure enough that only the geeks even knew it existed or commonly had computers to download it. The closest most girls ever came to a computer in those days was asking a geek friend to help them type up a report. Filesharing met that perfect storm when more non-geek kids got computers for school, broadband became commercially available, and Napster made the whole process so easy no geek had to explain it. And those broadband speeds meant that images were no longer the only feasible thing to trade.
One thing is for sure, this genie is not going back in the bottle. Our economy is in decline, real earnings are down, we're getting squeezed on gas, food costs, etc. We can't pirate a tank of gas but we can download the latest blockbuster. What do you think is going to happen? I think most geeks here can see the difference in their own consumption dynamics. When I was a teenager, I didn't have any cash so I downloaded all my software. In college, still no cash so I pirated all my anime. And damn, it took a long time to hunt down all the individual episodes of a series. But three hours of effort could save me $150 for the DVD's, well worth the effort. But once I graduated and had a real income, my time became more valuable than what I could save by pirating, it was easier to buy. I don't have to hunt down crappy encodes, then waste time organizing and burning to CD's, etc. But if I was ever reduced to the cashflow of a college student, the entertainment budget would be the first to get cut.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
>> 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!
Doing a quick IP trace http://visualroute.visualware.com/ tells us that Torrentspy is located in the Netherlands. How exactly does that fit into all this?
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.
It's not a method to identify "pirates" (and I use the term very loosely here.) The MPAA has, so far, not implemented the RIAA model of suing the very people that like and use their products. Hopefully, they're too smart for that (not holding my breath though.) What they do want is a high-profile case such as this, to scare casual torrent users into not being torrent users. Same sort of thing the RIAA has done, and it will probably have about as much success in terms of reducing casual infringement.
... but there are too many of them, I can't control them, and to ignore them would result in disaster. Consequently, I adjust my driving to avoid a bad outcome. The media companies are in the same boat with regards to their customer base, and at some level I think they realize that.
I get the impression that these people just can't see another way, don't feel that we, as their customer base, have the right to demand another way. We do, as it happens. We don't want your product on the terms you are offering it. In the past, that would have meant we either did without, or the suppliers changed their product or way of doing business. Nowadays, we can make do with a reduced quality copy of your product whether you want us to or not. And you know what? That's good enough for most of us. The time may come when we all have the bandwidth to receive a full, unabridged, untranscoded version of your product. If you don't have a mechanism in place then to stop us (good luck with that) or a better way for us to buy your product, you're screwed.
So times change: they do, and it doesn't matter whether you want them to or not, doesn't matter whether copyright infringement on a massive scale is morally akin to murder (as some apparently believe.) Doesn't matter who is right and who is wrong. I liken the advent of downloading to driving on the expressway. Yeah, most of the people around me are idiots who drive too fast, or too slow, make gratuitous lane changes and other stupid and often illegal moves
As their front organization is run by lawyers, however, it's not surprising that all of their proposed solutions involve the legal system.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
If you don't want DRM then stop pirating, you can't have it both ways.
My neighbour stopped pirating because he didn't want DRM. Unfortunately, when he drank the rooster blood, the moon wasn't full and no matter how many times he shouts "DRM BEGONE FOR I AM PURE!", the DRM refuses to vanish in the usual red puff of smoke.
Any ideas on what he should do next?
Thanks!
In that direction lies madness...
You know, people really don't talk this way anymore, and that is a shame. Common discuorse vocabulary has lost most of its verve and spice, as we aim for ever more dull verbal constructions that, above all, avoid emotional reactions in our communicative subjects. I know this verges on off-topic, but I think that 'madness' is an appropriately gravitic and perjorative term for what most would simply describe as unfortunate or lamentable, even if they truly felt much deeper.
Veering back on topic, I think that either of your two theories as to why any judge would rule in this way are quite plausible, and I would only add a third that judges (in my admittedly limited experience) can often be ornery and fickle sorts who can take an irrational dislike to a particular lawyer (e.g. "he was young and had a saucy tone") and punish his side with impunity under the color of prima facie legitimate procedural decisions. This could be just judical crankiness that in this particular case, due to a lack of care often associated with anger, actually overreached by a good distance the legitimate bounds of procedure.
All the techniques ever used to make men moral have been themselves thoroughly immoral... (Nietzsche)
From the Fourth Amendment "nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself."
You have the right to not testify against yourself. However, if you go down to the police station and brag that you just committed a crime, your words will be admissible in court against you. Similarly, if you keep a ledger of all the people you shake down, that ledger can be used as evidence that you committed extortion. Also note that you only have the right to not testify against yourself in a criminal case. If you're involved in a civil case and refuse to present evidence that the judge ordered for discovery, expect to go to jail for contempt of court.
What is Unconstitutional is if the police refuse to let you have a lawyer after you've requested one, forcing you to sign a confession you didn't make, forcing you to take the stand against yourself in a criminal case (though if you opt to take the stand to defend yourself, you open yourself to cross examination and can be compelled to testify against yourself which is why many defendants will opt to not take the stand (for example, Scooter Libby)).
Don't leave your mind so open that your brain falls out. Don't close it so much that you cut off the blood.
You DO realize that NONE of those people get royalties, right? So they don't get a dime from CD sales.
So the only harm they might suffer is if recordings aren't made at all.
Guess you took that stupid brain washing ad they stick before movies too seriously?
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.
Note: This is not a flawed equality between copyright infringement and stealing. But capitalism covers both and it's easier to understand with a physical example.
No, that's not capitalism at work. If you make a gizmo for $80 and sell it for $100 but noone wants it, that's capitalism. If your neighbor figures out how to make them for $60 and sell them for $75, obviously people would buy at the lower price. Driving you out of business is also capitalism at work. But if the local thief take them at no cost and sell them for $50 (or for that matter give them away for free), that's not capitalism.
Yes, the demand side is acting rationally by going for the lower price (ignoring a host of things like legality, ethics, convienience, quality and brand, but I'm simplifying a lot here). But the supply side would make the market collapse, because noone can produce at that price and so nothing would get produced (ignoring things like subsidies and dumping strategies). It's not the goods were provided at a cost people weren't willing to spend, it's that illegal goods were provided at a lower cost than could possibly be matched. There's no way to "adapt" to that.
Of course, at this point someone would say that the cost of producing a digital copy is $0, so there's no "below cost". That is a really cheap trick with numbers when you look at the individual copy, and not the work as a whole. Let's say you want to make a sci-fi movie. Once you add up the costs for scipt, director, equipment, location, actors, makeup, props, models, sound effets, editing, special effects and so on you get a total of $10mio. Those you have to recover some way, across all your copies.
Let's say you plan to do that selling 1 million DVDs at $10, and we can assume they'd be willing to pay that. But, they are offered a pirated DVD instead at $2. Is $2 less than $10? Yes. Willing to spend != Willing to spend more than necessary. And at $2*1mio = $2mio the pirates can afford to make one million DVDs - but there's no way it could pay for the movie. It's not the goods were provided at a cost people weren't willing to spend, it's that illegal goods were provided at a lower cost than could possibly be matched. There's no way to "adapt" to that either.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
It's not the goods were provided at a cost people weren't willing to spend, it's that illegal goods were provided at a lower cost than could possibly be matched. There's no way to "adapt" to that either.
Yes, it *could* have been matched or beaten, and yes, there is a way to adapt. Do a bit of research on Bollywood. That's a polar opposite example of the US. Piracy, by comparison, is pretty much non-existent here. There are movies being made, far too much money spent to make them, and all for the hope of being the summer blockbuster, when it is unneccessary. We don't need super-stardom. These companies are NOT guaranteed a profit. Piracy generally occurs because things are sold at a higher price than they need to be. True, capitalism speaks that you should always sell at the highest price any demographic is willing to spend, but...well, I don't have the time nor energy to go into a full-blown econ lesson here. The movie was made for $10mil. It didn't have to cost that much, that was a production choice. (Note - I'm not saying it's right or wrong, simply a choice.) If it costs $5mil, yes, it still costs twice as much as the expense of the pirates, but bear in mind that there's also labor duplication and distribution duplication. The market becomes more competitive, even vs pirates, and as distribution costs approach 0, then the legit option will become increasingly more palatable than the pirated of the same. This is without taking DRM and barriers to consumption into account (which throws an already bleak picture for the MAFIAA in even further turmoil).
I sell legit, Tony Cola for $.75/glass, but in order to buy it, you have to prick your finger at time of purchase. The Cola's pretty good, so people put up with the pricks. Eventually someone across the street manages to make a perfect duplicate of Tony Cola (and in our imaginary world there are no production or distribution costs), they get all of the great taste of sucking on Tony without the pricks. Where do *you* think they'll go?
The answer is clear. Ditch the pricks.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
A hacker that had hacked TS and was paid by the MPAA to do so has turned double-agent and is now giving every detail out to TS. TS might likely sue the MPAA for employing someone to perform an illegal activity.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.