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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.
everyone start sharing goatse material with torrentspy. The MPAA will freak out:)
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.
>> 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!
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?
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).