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.'"

Comments

The Pirate Bay

[Brother Dysk]

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...

Re:The Pirate Bay

[the_womble]

I respect their right to make a living by selling their productions.

You could reword that "...make a living by being paid the licensing fees required by their government mandated monopolies."

Why not get a job and just by whatever media you like.

Because the only thing I have ever pirated does not appear to be available in the country in which I live. Is that a good reason? If they do not have a mechanism for me to pay them, they can hardly complain about not being paid.

Re:The Pirate Bay

[paganizer]

If I don't like it, i'm not too likely to download it.
most of the music I like, except for a couple of flukes, isn't on Torrent or P2P.
What I do use shareaza (P2P) for is to make up for living half the year someplace where I only have dialup; shareaza works better than getright. Since I retired from the network biz, i'm also kinda a busy amateur photographer, CGI "artist", and 3d object designer, I throw my stuff out in the world using P2P, to keep my bandwidth bills down on my website. I sell some stuff at renderosity.com and a few other places...and I've seen my for-sale stuff on P2P. I'm not bothered by it. it's free advertising, and I've had people purchase my stuff then tell me that they tried it from P2P, liked it, so they bought it. I suppose the possibility exists that i'm losing sales in this way, but I really doubt it.
I'm not a Evil money grubbing pig, so maybe that explains my attitude... but P2P is the perfect way for a lot of markets to advertise. Bands should see music downloading as a way to advertise their gigs, or other value-added product that they actually get a fair chunk of the proceeds from.
How about this; if a band, lets say somebody who isn't famous for trying to jail their fans, put up on their band website a simple little paypal button next to a list of their songs; they could ask for .50+ for each one, as soon as the paypal is paid, you are sent a link to the ftp, edtk or .tor for the track. and no DRM, no death threats, no nothing. they would make more money in that way than they currently make from the M(af)IAA system.

Re:The Pirate Bay

[trolltalk.com]

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.

Re:The Pirate Bay

[StupidKatz]

I write a piece of code that helps my employer do something, I get paid for the amount of time I worked on it. ... 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?

... and authors should only be paid for the time they are actually writing, researching, or otherwise working on a book, not for each copy they sell.

Yes, do be careful not to step in the sarcasm.

Re:The Pirate Bay

[808140]

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

hey

[dominious]

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

Why isn't the MPAA being prosecuted for hacking

[Anonymous Coward]

Unbelievable.

One way or another, it seems that the MPAA is determined to obtain information about TorrentSpy and its users. A complaint issued by TorrentSpy suggests the MPAA paid a hacker $15,000 to steal e-mail correspondence and trade secrets. The hacker admitted that this was true.

Re:Quit Crying!!!

[Lazarian]

Being modded funny doesn't boost one's karma. Lately more people have been modding insightful or informative to help boost fellow contributor's karma points.

Either that or someone is really digging a hole in their garden.

Re:well

[Afecks]

and a few dozen blue mountain spiders

Those things in The Legend of Zelda? Those things are real?!

This may surprise you, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

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?