Slashdot Mirror
LegalTorrents Launches Copyright-Compliant Tracker
drDugan writes "Many legitimate media providers are using Bittorrent to distribute content, but the recent Pirate Bay legal verdict and closures left many content downloads unavailable. Along with the ongoing legal issues at Mininova and other sites, options have been scarce for legitimate Bittorrent tracking service. Once a torrent is created with a tracker URL, that tracker has to stay running for normal distribution to continue. LegalTorrents.com has quietly launched a solution with three open Bittorent trackers for its members, including a fully automated, community-based flagging system to blacklist and immediately remove copyright-infringing content. Users submit SHA1 hash values for content with infringing materials. Site members can include and track their own published materials regardless of flagging."
This slashvertisement conveniently left out the fact that
1) You need to add the hash via their website, which for you need a member account and
2) Member accounts start at $20 an year up to $399 an year
While the trackers itself are "open", as in everyone can get the peers via them, you need to add the hash first for it to function. So no, this isn't open tracker.
Torrents that have been approved by your masters, is more like it.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
There's no benefit as whatever may be available on "their" side isn't as appealing anyhow. Wake up, give people what they want and you'll make money. Keep trying to force your business model on people, you'll go under.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
It's a bit like the invention of fire. You can't suppress it, despite its danger - sure, people are burned with it every day (and there are people out there who use it to burn people!) but if you want to cook food or refine metal, you can't throw it out.
There are legitimate users of BitTorrent technologies, and there will continue to be legitimate uses of it. This site/service, whether it's directly useful to you or not, serves as documentation of that fact.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Ah, right, the media industry cares. Maybe they will use it. I hear they have atrocious up/down ratios though. When will they get through their thick heads that the cat is out of the bag? There will never be a time again when people have no way of communicating with one another across huge distances without needing someone else to approve the message. Digital information can be copied at next to no cost. If you believe that you can make people attribute value to something which can be copied and transported at negligible cost, then you're delusional.
Which version of copyrights? The MPAA and the RIAA where fair use doesn't exist? The US one where anti-circumvention tools are legal? The German version where hacking tools are illegal? Or the Canadian version where fair use and privacy actually matter ('till ACTA is signed and forces us to change our laws, at least)? Something might be legal in one situation and not in another. In the end, only the proper authorities and legal system (aka the courts and judges in most countries) of the users can fairly decide what is legal and what isn't.
And this "community-driven" system for black-flagging "illegal" content looks rife for exploitation.
If he explores all forms and substances Straight homeward to their symbol-essences; He shall not die.
Their SHA1 hashing method will not be sufficient to detect most copyright infringements. Even one bit change in a file will result in a completely different SHA1 hash. I am the creator of pHash, which is well suited for this type of similarity search. The hashes do not need to be identical in order to detect duplicate or similar files, and similar files will have hashes that are "close" to one another. This is really what they should be using.
The eMule Content Database has been doing that, very successfully and for many years. Legit content, that is.
And you need no tracker in eMule. As long as the file/collection is moderately popular, once a few people download it from you it will exist in the network for ever. I know as I have published service manuals there and I can still find them after 4 years...
What is with this fud about TPB being closed?
it's still there! It hasn't gone anywhere!
Why does slashdot keep quoting media sources written by people who are obviously either too old or too ignorant to type in a URL and watch a page load?!
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
November, 2015: the world's first and only legal movie torrents tracker announces a breakthrough as they register more than over 100 (one hundred) simultaneous active transfers. The website's administrator, who strangely declined to reveal his name (mumbling something about a "revoked geek card") credits the help and careful surveillance of the RIAA for this feat. The RIAA spokesman adds: "We are more than content with the outcome of our 1.5 (one point five) billion dollars investment in trained personnel, storage for copies of every published work in existence, recognition software and processing raw power. We look forward to the new H2D2 video formats stored on petabyte-sized disks, that will double our investment and your satisfaction".
For some reason I thought of this clip. In light of this, I think we shall call it TheFlandersBay.
The view was horrible and the smell was even worse; Julie severely regretted becoming a proctologist.
I would find it a little less questionable if it was made clear in the summary that the story promoting a "for pay" site had been submitted by a representative of that site.
It depends on the pirate. For music, I think you're almost always right.
For TV and movies, what some pirates want is unDRMed files. They're willing to pay for it, but it's not for sale at any price. Try playing a BluRay with mplayer sometime, or get a cablecard driver for Linux, and you quickly run into trouble. Pirates offer files without DRM.
Same goes for most offline Windows games too. If the non-pirate version requires a weirdo CDROM driver that does fuck-knows-what to your system, then they could offer the game for free but it still wouldn't be nearly as good as the pirated version.
Shit for money can't compete against good stuff for free, but good stuff for money might be able to compete with good stuff for free. Or maybe not, but if publishers don't even try, then I'm not going to cry for them.
We have not yet had to reply to any DMCA takedowns yet - all the content on the website must have a share-friendly license before content can be uploaded.
Say someone develops a video game in the vein of Quadra, Quadrapassel, or KBlocks. These games are free software, and they implement substantially the same rules as Tetris. The Tetris Company claims that other computer programs that implement the rules of Tetris infringe the copyright in Tetris, despite a U.S. Copyright Office publication to the contrary. If someone develops a Free video game with the same rules as Tetris and hosts a mirror of the game on LegalTorrents, how do you plan to handle a DMCA request from The Tetris Company?
If you're serious, consider The Internet Archive. Servers around the world, zero cost, unlimited uploading and downloading for all, and no size limits (as far as I know). IA hosts a lot of large files (full-length movies, DVDs, some periodic TV shows upload broadcast-quality episodes). I'm sure they'll host your images too.
So are you looking for gratis hosting or aren't you?
Digital Citizen
Which 'assholes'?
Anyone opposed to torrenting would likely appreciate the extra bandwidth.
Presumably, if the author of the software says it doesn't infringe, the site will put it back up.
The problem with the DMCA safe harbor is that it enforces at least 2 weeks of downtime before a service provider relying on the safe harbor can put the work back up. Quoting 17 USC 512(g): "the service provider [...] replaces the removed material and ceases disabling access to it not less than 10, nor more than 14, business days following receipt of the counter notice".
Is being able to report the SHA1 of the content not an admission of ownership? Reporting "I downloaded this data with this SHA1, and that was an illegal act" sounds like a stupid thing to do.
On the up-side, the SHA1 can come in very handy if you want to get the magnet link for a file, so I hope they create a Bitzi like page with "SHA1: this_and_that, is an illegal episode of Some Series, do not try to download it (quality is very good, I would rate it a 5 out of 5 for being very illegal)".
We've had decentralized tracking for years now, based on the Kademila distributed hash table. As long as the .torrent creator didn't turn on the private flag DRM, this system works really well, and I think it tends to provide an even richer set of peers from which to choose.
We also have OpenBittorrent which is a tracker that has no idea what it's tracking, putting it in a safer legal position than trackers have normally been in. Any torrent can use that if they wish.
The legal bottleneck is in distributing the .torrent files themselves. This involves more than just distribution, too. You want to have user feedback to weed out malicious or fake torrents. You want to have up-to-date seeder/leacher information. This is the weak spot in BitTorrent right now. That's what makes TPB and Mininova and the like so important.