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Australian ISP Argues For BitTorrent Users

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the potential-for-more-harm-than-good dept.

taucross writes "Australian ISP iiNet is making a very bold move. They are asking the court to accept that essentially, BitTorrent cannot be used to distribute pirated content because a packet does not represent a substantial portion of the infringing material. They are also hedging their bets purely on the strength of the movie studios' 'forensic' evidence. This ruling will go straight to the heart of Australia's copyright law. At last, an ISP willing to stand up for its customers! Let's hope we have a technically-informed judge."

11 of 207 comments (clear)

  1. Wow by niner69 · · Score: 5, Funny

    An ISP grew a pair?

    1. Re:Wow by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

      What does slashdot have to do with shambleses?

  2. Terrible news! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    One packet per customer, sorry folks.

    1. Re:Terrible news! by SCPRedMage · · Score: 2, Funny

      Wow, that's not even enough to get through DHCP...

      --
      My sig can beat up your sig.
  3. Shut Down All Possible Ways To Break Laws... by quangdog · · Score: 3, Funny

    Perhaps I'm misinformed, but is there any evidence to suggest that BitTorrent is used exclusively to distribute copyrighted materials? It seems to me that the argument against it is that it *may* be used to distribute copyrighted materials. If this is truly the case, then I guess we had better go ahead and unplug the whole internet. It was fun while it lasted, but it *may* be used for evil, so while I agr*#&$@@ NO CARRIER

  4. Re:In that case... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    Right, but they are patented. :)

  5. Re:SO if I by Skye16 · · Score: 4, Funny

    I think I had that quest in WoW

  6. Re:SO if I by iron-kurton · · Score: 4, Funny

    My head just exploded because I can only think in terms of car analogies.

    --
    Change is inevitable, except from a vending machine -- Robert C. Gallagher
  7. Re:SO if I by McGiraf · · Score: 4, Funny

    apology accepted

  8. Re:SO if I by Zerth · · Score: 3, Funny

    Actually, for a while I ran a modded bittornado client that deliberately would never upload more than 10% of the torrent to any one IP for expressly this purpose. It also lied to the tracker about my ratio for additional deniability.

    Not that I thought I'd get away with it, but I figured that if I was that screwed, it'd be amusing to have my lawyer whip out the client source in court showing that I couldn't have supplied anyone with a complete copy, that my actual transfer was substantially different than what the tracker showed, and thus any evidence they had could not show a complete infringement.

    Then I got a real job.

  9. I smell a technical loophole in this... by jonaskoelker · · Score: 3, Funny

    the downloader [is violating] the reproduction right by fixing the transitory data stream to a medium on his computer.

    Allow me to conjecture wildly, and see where that takes me.

    • If someone streams music to me, it's illegal for me to use mplayer -dumpstream.
    • OTOH, I'm allowed to listen to the stream, which means I'm allowed to buffer the stream in memory.
    • Say the default mplayer.conf says "buffer EVERYTHING first, then play it back". I'm allowed to buffer the whole file for purposes of playing it back (you can't expect me to know the technical details of how my program works).
    • So if I buy a fuckton of RAM and a UPS unit, I could torrent everything to a RAM disk and play it from there: it's not the case that I fix the "stream" to a medium in a way that I don't do when I stream audio which I'm allowed to do.

    From the {RI,MP}AA's point of view, there are two steps missing: "???" and "Lost profit!"

    It would be interesting to see how this plays out in court. Maybe that's a way to be a law-abiding citizen while still getting Free Shit (tm)... otherwise, there's always Jamendo :D