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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!?
Exactly, a site and set of trackers dedicated to legal material will facilitate the argument that there are, in fact, legal uses for torrents. This fact is utterly lost on many legislators thanks to the lobbying of Big Content. They need all the help they can get to see beyond the lobbyists and this is a step in the right direction. If the LegalTorrents community can demonstrate that a community can self-regulate to avoid infringement it will make the arguments of the RIAA more transparently false.
Big Content will eventually die off simply because they aren't needed anymore. Artists no longer need big labels to publish their content and the more tools that artists have to avoid Big Content the better.
So if this is the future...where's my jet pack?
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.
I'd think the use of BitTorrent for things like World of Warcraft updates, for about 5 years, is more validation than someone hosting a pay-to-join tracker for legal content.
Aren't there already totally free trackers for legal content (like Linux ISOs, etc)?
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
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...
Exactly, a site and set of trackers dedicated to legal material will facilitate the argument that there are, in fact, legal uses for torrents.
The name of this particular service - LegalTorrents.com - serves to focus undue attention on the ubiquity of torrents providing access to infringing content.
Moreover, it comes down squarely on the wrong side of an important issue: torrents themselves are arguably never illegal, in that they only provide a means of finding content, and leave the actual distribution up to participating clients. Google indexes plenty of content that is either illegal or infringing, and though they deal with plenty of copyright-related complaints, they have not seen the need to establish an explicitly "legal" search service.
The company would also do a tremendous disservice to those advocating legitimate uses of torrents, if the number of torrents it tracks becomes a convenient shorthand for the number of legal torrents available. It might be good for business to publicize those numbers, to the extent they aren't readily visible, even if it is very bad for other legitimate users of the protocol. For instance, it would be trivial to assert that only 5% of torrents are available through LegalTorrents.com, and to imply that the other 95% are somehow illegal or questionable.
Frankly, it would be better for everyone if they had simply picked a name they could brand and advertise effectively. I can't see "LegalTorrents.com" getting the same sort of traction with Fortune 100 businesses as Akamai has, and it draws an inordinate amount of attention to the fact that the legality of the underlying protocol is controversial.
It depends on where you live, but out here on the West (U.S.) Coast, the prevalent heating fuel is natural gas, which is used in the vast majority of forced air furnace and hot water heaters. They work with open flame. Unless you have an electric hot water heater (they do exist, but are phenomenally expensive to run, by comparison, according to my brother-in-law in Florida who has one), it's very likely that your hot water needs are met by fire.
If that's not enough, there's more: Your house likely has copper plumbing pipe in it. Which would have been sweated together with an open flame. You probably have neighbors who occasionally grill meat either over charcoal or natural gas. The list goes on and on.
In other words, it's unlikely that you can entirely escape the metaphor, and even if you can, all it does is demonstrate that you are an outlier.
Well, people actually do, but only if it's worth it:
Indepedent movie Nasty Old People:
-> Financed by a bank loan
-> Freely distributed via bittorrent at TPB
-> Released October 10
-> 16 day later (October 26), they had paid 25% of the loan, all with donations
http://nastyoldpeople.blogspot.com/
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Torrents themselves do not infringe copyrights.
They might however be unauthorized derived works of the material whose hashes they contain.
For sure though once a tracker has knowledge that one of their torrents is being used to facilitate copyright infringement they become an accessory if they fail to remove it.
Copyright infringment is BS. Aiding and abetting, however, I'd be more apt to buy.
and yet you're the only one who is making such an absurd and asinine claim.
Really?
In a lawsuit filed in August 2009, BREIN claimed that "80 to 90 percent of all torrents... [link] to copyrighted material." (citation)
All that remains is to take the number of torrents on LegalTorrents.com, estimate the number of torrents available through other sites, compare the two numbers, then revise upward the estimate of illegal torrents.
Absurd and asinine it may be, but such claims are already being made.
Admittedly, it's overstating the importance of LegalTorrents.com by quite a lot. This is a site that has tried and failed to reinvent itself a number of times over the last six years, and seems destined to fail again.
But in response to the claim that it will someday support the argument that torrents have substantially non-infringing uses, it's fair to point out that it is far more likely to damage such arguments.
I'm not criticizing these film-makers, but it's disingenuous for you to say that this validates some kind of sustainable financial business model. According to the second sentence, "nobody got paid". This sounds like an expensive hobby.
If torrent files are derivative works because they contain hashes of other works, then any work with a bibliography is a derivative of the works it references. Hashes merely identify the a work; they aren't a copy of it.
Moreover, to the best of my knowledge as a non-lawyer, if something wouldn't qualify for copyright on its own (and thus isn't a work at all) then it can't be a derivative work. Hashes certainly wouldn't qualify by themselves, and it's rather unlikely that any torrent file containing them would either.
The "aiding and abetting" argument would indeed be the most sound approach. To that end—if you wish to support copyright—then once the copyright holder has established in court that a given swarm (identified by hash) is infringing on their copyrights, or the court has granted them an injunction pending a final decision, then you should blacklist that particular hash. However, allowing the swarm to continue when its illegality has not been established in a court of law should never be considered "aiding and abetting", since the tracker doesn't have "knowledge that one of their torrents is being used to facilitate copyright infringement"; they only have the copyright holder's allegations to that effect.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
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