IsoHunt Guilty of Inducing Infringement

roju writes "The MPAA has won a summary judgment against torrent indexing site isoHunt for inducing copyright infringement. Michael Geist notes that '[t]he judge ruled that the isoHunt case is little different from other US cases such as Napster and Grokster, therefore concluding that there is no need to proceed to a full trial and granting Columbia Pictures request for summary judgment.' Attorney Ben Sheffner, who worked on the case for Fox, explains some of the implications, noting that 'the most significant ruling in the opinion was the court's holding that the DMCA's safe harbors are simply not available where inducement has been established.' This case could have implications on other indexing sites, and creates a gap in the DMCA safe harbor provisions that could have far-reaching implications on other sites."

Comments

Re:Huh?

[schon]

Are you familiar with the Berne Convention?

Are you? Are you familiar with Canadian Law?

My guess would be proving infringement in the US is a first step to getting it shut down in Canada.

Um.... WHAT!?!?!?

I would imagine that suing in Canada would be the first step to getting it shut down in Canada.

Ignore the gyrations of management

[girlintraining]

I used to read stuff like this and get upset. But then I realized that my entire generation knows it's baloney. They can't explain it intellectually. They have no real understanding of the subtleties of the law, or arguments about artists' rights or any of that. All they really understand is there is a large corporation charging private citizens tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars, for downloading a few songs here and there. And it's intuitively obvious that it can't possibly be worth that.

So what's happened is that this entire generation has disregarded copyright law. It's become a moot point. They could release attack dogs and black helicopters and it wouldn't really change people's attitudes. It won't matter how many websites they shut down or how many lives they ruin, they've already lost the culture war. At this point the only thing these corporations can do is shift the costs to the government and other corporations under color of law in a desperate bid for relevance. That's pretty much what they're doing.

But what does this mean for the average person? Well, it means that we google and float around to an ever-changing landscape of sites. We communicate by word of mouth via e-mail, instant messaging, and social networking sites where the latest fix of free movies, music, and games are. If you don't make enough money to participate in the artificial marketplace of entertainment goods -- you don't exclude yourself from it, you go to the grey market instead. And all the technological, legal, and philosophical barriers in the world amount to nothing because there's a small core of people like you and I, here on slashdot, that do understand the implications of what they're doing and we continually search for ways to screw them over and liberate their goods and services for "sale" on the grey market. It is, economically and politically, structurally identical to the Prohibition, except that instead of smuggling liquor we are smuggling digital files.

Billions have been spent combatting a singularily simple idea that was spawned thirty years ago by a bunch of socially-inept disaffected teenagers working out of their garages: Information wants to be free. Except information has no wants -- it's the people who want to be free. And while we can change attitudes about smoking with aggressive media campaigns, and sell people material goods and services they don't really need, we cannot change the fundamental aspects upon which our generation has built a new society out of.

You can't stop people talking -- and just as we have physical connections to each other, increasingly we have digital connections to one another as well. These connections have, and continue to, actively resist attempts at control because doing so fundamentally impedes the development and nature of the relationships we have with one another. We will naturally seek the methods which give us the greatest freedom to express ourselves to each other. That is a force of nature (ours, specifically) that has evolved out of our interconnectedness, and it goes far, far beyond copyright. Ultimately, this is a battle they cannot win -- they can only delay, building dams and locks to stem the tide, but they will fail. Forces of nature are unpredictable and in the end it always wins.

Re:Ignore the gyrations of management

[causality]

That was a beautifully written post and a pleasure to read. Thank you for that.

I seem to have a bit of cynacism about it, though. I'd like to get rid of that, but I think it has a solid foundation. Your reference to Prohibition was absoutely right. The problem is, this country has not learned from it. Prohibition taught us that you cannot stop a powerful economic force, and if you try too hard to do it, you will create a black market and you will provide fertile soil for organized crime. No one fought with submachine guns and died in the streets over alcohol until it was made illegal. Alfonso Capone would be an anonymous figure if not for Prohibition. Imagine all the tax dollars, buildup of increasingly paramilitary police forces, involvement of the federal government in basic law enforcement issues and lives lost just to enforce a law that should never have been written, a law designed to enforce one group's Puritannical moral objections on everyone else.

For anyone who's actually familiar with American history and tradition, it's hard to imagine anything more un-American than using law to micromanage the personal lives of others. You cannot tell a person what they may put into their body without also, implicitly, claiming ownership of their body. Yet that happened, right here in the "land of the free." And we tolerated it, because we were told that it was for our own good.

Then consider that we haven't really learned anything from it because we still have Prohibition. We still have The War on (some) Drugs. Only the object of the prohibition has changed, but the process is the same. So are the problems. We have learned nothing.

I would like to think that when iron-fisted copyright proves to be a failure, we will learn from this and find more reasonable approaches. But the utter failure of Prohibition hasn't stopped us from implementing similar laws. I would like to believe that a cultural war has been won, that when the old guard retires those who replace them will have a more enlightened viewpoint. I truly want to believe that. But I really don't see much precedent for it.

Re:Inducing copyright infringement

[zippthorne]

Yes. Legitimate copies won't let you skip it. Sometimes even the ads are unskippable. That's minutes of your life wasted for every single legitimate disk you watch. Bootleg copies on the other hand will let you just start watching the movie you wanted to watch.

Something is broken horribly in a world where the knockoffs have full feature and quality parity with the originals and in addition are superior in other ways as well.

Re:Huh?

[Venik]

The name "ISO Hunt" does not have that many non-infringing connotations

Apparently, you are not a Linux user.

Didn't you know - America rules the world

[Snaller]

Until the Chinese tell them otherwise ;)