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New Litigation Targets 20,000 BitTorrent-Using Downloaders
Hugh Pickens writes "The Hollywood Reporter reports that more than 20,000 individual movie torrent downloaders have been sued in the past few weeks in Washington, DC, federal court for copyright infringement, and another lawsuit targeting 30,000 more torrent downloaders on five more films is forthcoming in what could be a test run that opens up the floodgates to massive litigation against the millions of individuals who use BitTorrent to download movies. The US Copyright Group, a company owned by intellectual property lawyers, is using a new proprietary technology by German-based Guardaley IT that allows for real-time monitoring of movie downloads on torrents. According to Thomas Dunlap, a lawyer at the firm, the program captures IP addresses based on the time stamp that a download has occurred and then checks against a spreadsheet to make sure the downloading content is the copyright protected film and not a misnamed film or trailer. 'We're creating a revenue stream and monetizing the equivalent of an alternative distribution channel,' says Jeffrey Weaver, another lawyer at the firm."
"The difference between the MPAA's past approach and the new one being offered by the US Copyright Group is that the MPAA took a less targeted approach going after a smaller sampling of infringers in a single suit for multiple films, to send a message. In contrast, the US Copyright Group is using the new monitoring technology to go after tens of thousands of infringers at a time on a contingency basis in hopes of coming up with the right cost-benefit incentive to pursue individual pirates."
While I know the usual piracy-crowd here on slashdot will mod me down, I'm happy they will do this. Widespread piracy is causing problems. There are already good equivalents so you don't need to resolve to piracy. I'd like to have some good alternative games, and when developers can again take a change and risk in their games, instead of the shit mainstream games. Piracy causes them not to do that.
These types of lawyers give other types of lawyers an even worse name.
And before you sue me for that statement I'm sure that there is some sort of 'fair use' or 'truth' defense, so phfffft!
"...and monetizing the equivalent of an alternative distribution channel."
The equivalent of a distribution channel where tens of thousands get movies for free, but then a randomly selected group has to pay a hundred times the cost of the movie in litigation fees.
At least they're innovating...
I'm still unclear on the business benefit to the MPAA companies that comes from suing their customer base. This isn't going to win them any friends and is even less likely to increase their profits. It was stupid when they were suing dozens of people - but stepping this lunacy up to 50,000 lawsuits looks more like a death wish than "monetizing the alternate channel".
If the only way to keep a business model working is to "open up the floodgates to massive litigation" then we should take a close look at why our society keeps those businesses afloat.
Personally, I think the basic reason we built the amazing companies in the "entertainment industry" is that distribution used to be difficult, and it required a lot of capital to set up channels to get media to consumers. This is no longer true; & the other reason - funding the creation of great media - obviously does not create enough value to justify the business that many of these companies continue to sue to protect.
"We're creating a revenue stream and monetizing the equivalent..." What a surprise. As opposed to pursuing the protection claimed, my brethren offer their true motivation.
Checks against a spreadsheet! What kind of Mickey Mouse organization is this anyway? Don't they know they could haul in 10x more pirates with a proper database backend. Maybe it helps the lawyers boost their billable hours if they can have an intern do as much manual work as possible.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Good thing enabling encryption only requires checking a single box.
http://reporter.blogs.com/files/complaint-boll-ag-_far-cry_.pdf
I hope the judges recognize that whoever downloaded Uwe Boll's movies has suffered enough already. Have these lawyers no shame?
Since when are lawsuits intended as a revenue stream? I thought they were supposed to be reparations for real damages incurred with a side of punitive hand slapping.
I'm all for shutting down pirates, and sending the message that expensive to produce media isn't free. But specifically "monetizing" the lawsuits, in the hope of getting rich off pirates? That just reeks of evil.
The ______ Agenda
Next logical step is for this to evolve into a sort of a speeding ticket system. You get caught - pay a nominal fee and get X points on your name. Get caught enough times and they sue big time, till then you just keep paying nominal fees.
Not sure how I feel about it, but it sure as hell sounds more reasonable than suing 8-5 $35k/year crowd, kids with $5/hr dish-washing jobs and stay-at-home moms for millions of dollars.
Too bad my university doesn't keep logs =]
Can we bill them for the court's time? If they are going to use the court system to "create an alternative revenue stream", they can damn sure pay for the costs of handling all that paperwork. If an average citizen decided to do this (by using the court system to send out tens of thousands of nastygrams and collecting on the handful that pay) they'd be facing serious-ass jail time.
A while back, a colleague and I had a discussion about unauthorized downloading, and I quipped something to the effect that I would avoid infringement penalties by buying the content and then ripping it. He, OTOH, asked why. Why would I pay for something I could legally record from broadcast for free.
There's an interesting double standard here:
In both cases you've acquired the same content, in the same form, for the same price. But now we're supposed to believe that because it happens via the internet, a crime has been committed? That their business is now suddenly failing because people are doing the same thing they've done for years with tape players and vcrs?
The VCR didn't kill tv and movies. Nor did the tape player kill rock and roll. If you can't make a living as an artist in the era of mp3's and youtube, well, you couldn't have made a living back then, either. Stop blaming the Internet for your own failure.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Litigation, even on this scale is unlikely to prevent piracy. As anti-piracy technology and techniques evolve, so will the technology and methods used in filesharing. How long until we have BitTorrent with TOR and encryption built in? The copyright juntas will always be chasing the pirates tails, and unfortunately they're likely to continue throwing money at hopeless schemes like this until they've bankrupted themselves, rather than develop a successful business model for the 21st century.
Yes use american tax payer money to pay to sue them... The power of fake democracy is great!
Anyway after watching the latest ep of 24 and hearing that governments number priority is to protect its citizens its good to see USA doing what it does best, protect the people that lobby the most corrupt senate in the world....
"Then checks against a spreadsheet to make sure the downloading content is the copyright protected film and not a misnamed film or trailer."
How the hell does that work?
The Devils advocate position is that by requiring customers to wait for arbitrary showtimes and having an arbitrary limited selection pretty significantly impedes the flow of copied materials.
If I want to watch "Uncross the Stars" tonight, I don't have any way of doing that other than paying the movie companies (or downloading it).
In fact, I would wager that said movie will never be aired on any sort of television station that many people have.
So, while the concept of suing customers is unpalatable to me, as well as you, I disagree that it's "exactly the same thing" as a VCR.
In addition, there are questions about IP addresses being an identifier of a pirate since users can steal or borrow another's IP address to commit file infringement.
Time to invest in proxies.
now suing everyone who they detect downloading a film can be beneficial, they're opening themselves up to a world of hurt.
.... tying up courts for small matters of downloading (compared to murder, fraud and assault), also considering proxies, TOR, encrypted traffic, peer blocking there are so many ways technology overcomes this "tracking" that if taken to court the burned of proof, potential for technical flaws and other aspects will make most cases moot.
Technology these days allows routing pretty much through a toaster, many courts have said (not US) that an IP address is NOT an identifiable piece of information, some other courts also have rules that IP and any personal information should remain private unless court ordered to do so. So in turn they would need to get 20,000 court orders for identifying names, and then 20,000 summons
I can see many judges just dismissing these cases just cause of the shear number of them. The industry may look at the numbers and think ok 20,000 people = $20 million in revenue, they dont think ahead and consider the social and legal implications.
It's not a typo if you understood the meaning!
In the first, content providers have explicitly opted to broadcast it. Incidentally, I don't think sharing a recording you make is considered ok.
In the latter, content is being acquired and redistributed without permission.
A more direct comparison would be suing people for saving youtube videos to home storage that the publisher uploads. I don't think I've heard of someone saying they want to go after youtube users for things like youtube-dl.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Say your name is the one your Comcast account is under, but someone else such as a roommate is pirating movies. Who then is identified by the law firm as the pirate? I have always wondered this. I don't download pirated material due to it being a big hassle and worries about viruses, etc., but I have no control over what other people in my household do on their own machines.
All the MPAA has to do is get me a girlfriend and I'll gladly spend 10 to go out and see a movie. Until then its torrents from my parents basement using my neighbors wifi connection.
Each of those soon to be 50,000 people is entitled to a jury trial. That's a LOT of resources tied up on this and for a long time. The logistics could get ugly. And this is supposedly just the test run that could open the floodgate?
The courts will have a choice. Either shred any semblance of justice, reject this litigative spam, or devote itself exclusively to these suits and hope they get to the last of them before the revolution comes.
Shouldn't it be enough for the defendant to deny the possession of the media in question? I hardly expect the police to execute tens of thousands of search warrants, therefore the most important part is missing: the evidence.
I thought copyrights, patents and trademarks had value.
You obviously don't pay attention to these things. if they actually had value or worth, the MAFIAA, Hollywood, and a few stupid game companies wouldn't know how stupid DRM is because it wouldn't exist, and the MAFIAA wouldn't be called that because their job wouldn't be to sue people, it would be whatever its supposed to be.
I reserve the right to have a physical object so I can sell it later, and recover my money.
Say your name is the one your Comcast account is under, but someone else such as a neighbor leeching on your wireless network ...
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Hi
I am sorry I stopped the download once I realised what it was - never downloaded the whole thing, never able to play it - prove otherwise :)
Now how are these first 2094 does even going to know they've been sued? Oh wait, they don't need to know; they are presumed guilty by the plaintiff.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Speaking as someone in the 40-50 demographic, i now only download movies.
Let's see how long it takes for a Guardaley (the offending party)workaround to emerge as a plugin for torrent programs.
It's free as in free because we can.
Couldn't this proprietary software package being used to track downloads be construed as a wire tap ergo inadmissible in a court of law?
Or is this AC being a silly little AC again?
With love
The Anonymous Coward
How can they prove the person responsible for this and it is not some kid in the neighborhood. Seems they would need
1. the log from the stream source
2. Evidence that you have the pirated movie
Anyone want to start a pool on how long it takes before this is revealed to be the legal equivalent of astro-turf (i.e., funded by a major studio or by the MPAA) ?
Isn't this sort of like putting a meter on a sewer pipe and counting the turds as they go by?
I wouldn't worry - these guys don't sound like they know much.
"Research suggests that once a copyright infringer is forced to pay settlement damages far in excess of the actual cost of the stolen content, he will never steal copyrighted material again." http://www.savecinema.org/index-1.html
Yea because hes living out of a card board box.
Every time I hear good things about a movie or I really like a song on the radio, I consider breaking my 'don't give any money to the MPAA/RIAA' policy. Fortunately they keep doing shit like this and I'm recommited to only giving my entertainment dollars to independents.
Insanity: voting in the same two parties over and over again and expecting different results
Looks to me like the proxy server business is about to get a big bump.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Is it me, or is everything getting shittier everyday. It feels like more and more, articles, columns, and information leaks point to the ever diminishing rights of citizens of the world. The United States is broke, and its overlords are continuing to spend more money. The rest of the world is either pussyfooting under political correctness, stripping their citizens of any rights they once had, while other countries continue to grow their nuclear arsenals and further fuel the idiotic self-destructive nature that humankind cannot seem to shake.
I am ranting, I know, but for mother fuck-fuckity-fucks sake how much longer are the rational, intelligent, and reasonable going to continue to stand for this? Are the aforementioned independent free-thinkers to disjointed, apathetic, and outnumbered to ever turn the tide? I feel this civilization is edging towards a serious crises, one much worse than we have ever seen. Be that crises a nuclear holocaust, or the silent denigration of of the common sense rights that a democratic mentality provides, the crises is coming, and we don't seem to be heading anywhere near the appropriate direction to turn the tides of destruction.
Perhaps my tinfoil hat is too tight, maybe I need to get some sunlight. I don't know. But it is hard as a relatively young individual to imagine a positive environment for future children. Each day that passes, more rights are stripped, more debt is incurred, more inflation rapes the dollar, more political seats are bargained, more people hate democracy, more people get lazy, more people become passive obedient workers, taking the big red, white, and blue dick right up the ass, while the bourgeoisie reap the benefits of a society that becomes more mentally jellified by mass-media induced mind-fucking every day.
Sorry about that. Your regularly scheduled broadcasting will now continue.
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
The problem with this attempt is that in order to nab downloaders they have to be online downloading or sharing in a torrent themselves, hence infringing their own law. Even then torrents are downloaded in hundreds of pieces from multiple sources so just knowing that someone is downloading is not enough to know if they completed the file. Without a completed file they have done no infringing on any copyright.
Have you even seen "Going Postal"? AWE-FUCKING-SOME!
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
Fellow pirates,
I implore you to continue your campaign on Slashdot to make me feel less guilty. I know that not paying someone for their work is wrong, but if Slashdot posts enough articles bashing the RIAA/MPAA/copyright law/whatever, it's easier for me to accept what I'm doing emotionally by visualizing someone else as the bad guy. Once on the forefront of relevant IT news, Slashdot is now a lame repository of mainstream pseudoscience links and pro-piracy articles to appease a dwindling readership. I am overjoyed.
Even though the open source community is about giving back as much as it is taking, I'm just going to take. I'm a human leech with self-serving beliefs and an inability to empathize with content creators who are trying to make a living.
I don't believe John Carmack should be paid for his work. I'm going to sit on my ass while he spends years coding the next advanced 3D engine from id Software. When their game comes out, I'm going to pirate it without giving a second thought about paying John Carmack for his work. I'm just so used to pirating things now that I take it for granted. If anyone mentions John Carmack to make me feel guilty, I'll look for Slashdot articles that bolster my viewpoint, such as this one, amusingly posted in the Your Rights Online section even though none of my rights are being violated.
According to that study, it's okay to not pay people for their work because there's some vague hope that they'll make up the difference in income through "concerts and speaking tours." Artists are now forced to take time out of doing what they want to do. John Carmack must stop programming in order to make money from programming. It's genius. The study does exactly what I need it to--make me feel less guilty when I pirate. We've managed to stretch the truth so far that we're actually telling ourselves that we're helping artists by not paying them for their work. Excellent job.
I look forward to Slashdot telling me everyday who the bad guys are. Even though Slashdot has sued websites in the past for copyright infringement, and they've pretended to care about plagiarism, we're supposed to go along with Slashdot's anti-copyright agenda. I'm okay with that hypocrisy because it serves me. It makes me feel less guilty when I pirate something. Remember, I'm not the bad guy--the RIAA/MPAA/whatever is. That makes it okay for me to not pay people for their work.
EULAs and copyright licenses are wrong, yet the GPL is good. Piracy isn't theft, yet GPL violations are referred to as "stolen GPL code." I accept all of these double-standards because it serves me. I pretend not to notice when someone points out that the GPL relies on copyright law, and if I want to get rid of copyright, my beloved open source code will no longer be protected by the GPL. I don't care, because I'm too busy concerning myself with what I want for free, not about the consequences. I want to get rid of copyrights because I've been told that copyrights are the bad guy, and they are an obstacle to my rampant piracy.
Fellow pirates, let us continue our selfish leeching. Let us paint others as the bad guys to absolve us of our emotional guilt. Our goal is to convince people that piracy is something the good guys are doing in a fight with the evil corporations. Making money is wrong, even though Slashdot displays ads, and it cost me money to buy the computer I'm using to pirate stuff.
Yours truly,
A fellow Slashbot
Foolishness like this is why you configure your network to retain IP->User details only as long as needed for your own internal network management.
By the time I see any of these subpoenas for our users, the requested information simply will not exist.
...we all got on bit torrent and downloaded the titles...just because...could that not, as an act of revolt force the strategy to fail?
While IANAL, I would assume that there is some requirement to sue "all known" infringers (you can't just decide to sue one person and not the others arbitrarily). And since suing "everybody" would bring down the system, it would leave the only remaining option of not allowing the suits against anybody.
Ironically, it sounds like democracy in action. People voting with their actions.
But, clearly I am not a lawyer...so maybe it is possible to selectively prosecute...
I am not an economist, but...
The fundamental problem with selling music or other media over the internet is that data is not a scarce commodity. Copying music does not deprive anyone else of access to that music. It's much like copying an entire book without buying it. The book is still available for buying, and the store still owns it, so who cares?
Of course, this is a harmful position to take. If everyone thought nothing of "pirating" music, then artists would receive no compensation for their efforts, which is wrong. (Of course, imagine for a second an ideal world where all music purchases went right to the artist. The RIAA/MPAA just muddies things a bit.) Artists deserve compensation, but it will never work to sell data, which is inherently non-scarce, for money, which is scarce. Why spend money on something that has no actual scarce value at all? At least, there will always be people who will say that.
(Yes, the creative work of the songs themselves would be a scarce work, but in the end you're paying for a copy of the work, not the idea of the work itself. More on that in a second.)
The best solution would be for us to pay for copies of music with some non-scarce currency, but that sort of system is hard to set up and harder to maintain inside a predominately scarcity-based economy, because people tend to attach no value to non-scarce goods when there are scarce goods around. The two economic systems don't mix well at all. I suggest that, instead, artists give music away for free (or for Whuffie, real or imaginary), and sell the primary scarce thing they have left to sell: performance. Get artists to make their money on tour! Give the music away for free to get fans, and the fans will come to the concerts!
...
For more fun, consider that numbers cannot be copyrighted, and that all data can be represented by one really long number. I'm not so much trying to say that data can't be copyrighted, as I am that copyright should be seriously looked at again.
I go to the cinema a couple times each month. I also have a fairly decent home theatre setup, and about half a wall of shelves holding legitimately purchased DVDs. I also have a media server with at least as many downloaded rips.
Why?
I happen to not live in DVD region 1. And some Hollywood studios think we're less deserving to buy movies in this country or somesuch. Or maybe they just think it's funny to make us wait. It doesn't really matter why, I guess. But it has ofttimes been months, even years after the region 1 release that they'll deign to take my money.
(That is to say nothing of the fact that they often make us wait until well after a movie is in the American cinema before allowing the local establishments to show it. An equally odious practice, in my opinion.)
Well, if they're going to be asses and engage in shenanigans; so will I. But when they offer me a way to legitimately be a customer; I will do that as well.
This is why I gave up downloading movies, I now resort to buying all of my movies on blu-ray.
Sure, most of them fell off the back of a truck, but the fines are much less harsh than getting sued by the movie industry...
I'm not in the US or a lawyer but I wonder, if you sue everybody who has infringed your copyright can you still get punitive damages from them?
I thought the way punitive damages worked was by saying there this case is one of x but is the only one that has been brought to court therefore your damages can be multiplied by x.
If you can still get x times your actual damages from each of x people then it would seem to be a very good revenue stream indeed.
But if you can only get your actual damages from each case then you are not going to be making any money from this.
N.B. this user is far too lazy to write a witty and intelligent sig.
Will PeerBlock/PeerGuardian still work? If not, what counter measures does one take? Also, does this apply to the USA only?
Entrepeneurial law firms in Germany seem to have perfected this business model over several years. More background here from the good people at Heise: http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=1&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.heise.de%2Fct-tv%2Fartikel%2FHintergrund-Abmahnen-statt-verkaufen-901244.html&sl=de&tl=en
They should sue everybody for a fair market value (just download anything using bittorrent and get billed later).
I thought the way punitive damages worked was by saying there this case is one of x but is the only one that has been brought to court therefore your damages can be multiplied by x.
That's not how punitive damages work. Punitive damages, as the name would suggest, are intended as punishment.
> I actually agree in principle that piracy is wrong. But where I have a problem is with their method of determining guilt. I wish Ray Beckerman or one of the other attorneys here would explain to me how they can *prove* that I, and I alone, am the one responsible for an illegal download with an IP address???
They don't have to, not the way you mean. There are a few things that complicate matters. Don't depend on any of this in court and IANAL, but:
First, it's a civil case, which means they only have to prove it by a preponderance of the evidence.
Second, even proof beyond a reasonable doubt isn't a very rigorous standard of proof in scientific terms, and this is much easier to show.
Third, juries are generally allowed to make reasonable inferences.
If someone uses your internet connection to download a movie, most of the time that someone is you (or perhaps a minor residing in your home). Basically, the plaintiff says "It was you because X" and you say "no it wasn't because Y" or else you say "X doesn't show anything" or else you say "not X." The jury then decides (1) if X or Y are disputed, whether they occurred, and (2) whether it was probably you.
Also, I think providers keep records of IP leases, so the static IP doesn't matter much. Proxies might. (Can someone who works for a provider confirm this?)
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
To those who advocate that pirates buy if they like:
When the movie comes out the only way to tell how good it is to watch it in theatre or rent it. If it's bad - you already spend your $$$ - better luck next time.
Considering that there are 0-1 movies worth watching in a year, internet sampling results in at huge loss of revenue to any mediocre movie.
At least, for now, they're targeting people who downloaded some shitty movies. Anyone who wasted their time on Far Cry's movie deserves to get sued.
Unfortunately, as lawyers often do, the plaintiff's counsel factually misrepresent BitTorrent technology and process in their claims to their favor. Any decent lawyer would get these suits thrown out on its face. In their pre-amble, they claim that due to the nature of BitTorrent, anyone who is a member of a swarm after the monitoring agent has accessed the swarm is necessarily distributing some part of the file, and therefore guilty of distribution of a copyrighted work. However, this is not how the technology works. To participate in a swarm, you do not actually have to have the file available, nor must you have downloaded it from someone else in an illegal fashion. You do not HAVE to upload anything, or even download anything infringing to participate in a swarm. As always, unless a 3rd party specifically downloads data from you that is copyrighted material one cannot demonstrate copyright infringement. Additionally, without some form of physically captured copyrighted materially downloaded from a peer, I would love to see them prove jurisdiction. Them requesting a list of seeds from a tracker, does not constitute your IP committing an act of copyright infringement in the District of Columbia, and I would like to see them demonstrate the routing information showing that whatever you did, necessarily passed through their, particularly if you are in the North East or Northern California. They may succeed in monetizing this flow, but only because most lawyers would be too clueless to defend themselves properly — it bothers me that one can get away with making such materially false representations about the way that a technology works to a court, in order to get judgements on one's side. They either don't understand, or are lying, and given the amount of technology used by the monitoring service, I'm betting someone somewhere has advised them more accurately how the technology works.
Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
ThAT'S CAUSE I WANT O YELL
JuST AS SCO
ThEY ARE BANKRUPT AND OUT OF CASH
SeE HOW IM ABLE TO KEEP YELLING
I copied this directly from the U.S. Copyright Group web site (http://www.savecinema.org):
"Solution: at no cost to our clients, the Us Copyright Group will:
Identify illegal donwloaders by ISP address
Subpoena identifying contact information
Send a cease & desist letter to demand payment of damages
Obtain settlement of approximately $500 - $1,000 per infringer & promise to cease future illegal downloading
Process settlements & provide records to the client
Disburse client’s portion of the damages"
----
Hmmmm....
- "donwloaders": they either can't spell, don't use a spellchecker or more likely, this site was put very hastily, just in time for the news cycle. Many of the links are dead.
- They are pursuing damages on a "per infringer" basis. This is dramatically different from the RIAA's tactic of going after a small number of cases and seeking huge damages based on each pirated song. And it explains why they are suing so many people.
While it might be fun to think about clogging the courts with thousands of jury trials, the most likely outcome is that unless they are convinced that they have a very good chance of prevailing, the vast majority of plaintiffs will choose to settle, esp. if it's close to $500, rather than face the time, stress & expense of going through a trial that may wind up causing them a LOT more if they lose.
Don't get me wrong, I detest what these sad excuses for human beings are doing but if their evidence is very detailed and tight, they have a very good chance of accomplishing their goals of making a lot of money for themselves and the assholes they represent. And don't hope for any common sense or relief from the present administration. Obama is 100% behind ACTA and you can be sure that he'll support this.
The equivalent of a distribution channel where tens of thousands get movies for free, but then a randomly selected group has to pay a hundred times the cost of the movie in litigation fees. At least they're innovating...
Not really; sounds exactly like "speed enforcement." Most everyone drives over the limit, because they're so ridiculously artificially low (they were designed for cars with 1950's-era radial tires, drum brakes, etc), but the police 'randomly' pull people over and ticket them, supposedly because it'll discourage the population as a whole and "make the roads safer".
Then, the people caught speeding pay much higher insurance rates for the rest of their lives (like in Massachusetts, for example), which pays for all the idiots crashing their cars into things because they were yakking on their cell phone while balancing a cup of coffee on their lap.
Please help metamoderate.
I thought that it is now established in law that a dynamic thing like an IP address can't be used as an identifier for someone. These guys are recording IP ADDRESSES and saying that they are going to take PEOPLE to court. How much money are the lawyers making pretending that they can somehow fix a flawed & unprofitable business model.
Copyright falls automatically to the creator of a work (it is called Mechanical Copyright because it happens automatically).
Record & Movie distribution companies are NOT the creators of the works. They never had copyright!
Legally, copyright used to be about attribution, duplication for sale and broadcast of a work.
People who download are NOT broadcasting, duplicating for sale or attributing themselves as the creator of the work (it is possible, but they are not). They are, therefore, NOT infringing copyright.
The recording/movie companies and distributors ARE infringing copyright (they are broadcasting the work, are claiming ownership of something they did not create and are duplicating for sale). Their entire business model is based upon illegal activity.
I know a lot of friends, myself included, who purchase movies/music/games instead of pirating them - at least some/most of the time.
Why do we do this when pirating is so easy? It's not because of a threat of litigation, it's because we think some of it is worth paying for.
DRM is more likely to stop people buying it than stop people torrenting it. Good quality entertainment that's affordable and portable is worth paying for, and most people will.
Hmmm,
Reading the link to one of the sample requests to the ISP for a name to go with the IP one comes upon some interesting information.
Thomas M. Dunlap (D.C. Bar # 471319)
Ellis L. Bennett (D.C. Bar # 479059)
David Ludwig (D.C. Bar # 975891)
Nicholas A. Kurtz (D.C. Bar # 980091)
DUNLAP, GRUBB & WEAVER, PLLC
1200 G Street, NW Suite 800
Washington, DC 20005
Telephone: 202-316-8558
Facsimile: 202-318-0242
tdunlap@dglegal.com
Attorneys for the Plaintiff
I think we should consider spamming this phone and email. Me thinks much fun could be had for all involved.
Let's all tell them where to stick it by voting Pirate Party for all our elections. 50,000 people is a lot to piss off. If each had a couple friends that felt sympathetic or likewise threatened and all would vote Pirate then we could possibly at least show up on the charts. THAT should make the MPAA/RIAA crap their pants if the public could get mobilized to fight back.
Which state has the lowest population? Everyone move there and let's make a data haven. Only half kidding.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Once a studio commits to DRM, it is a part of the package. What they are doing (the studios) is taking a candy (game) and wrapping it up with a layer of used toilet paper (obtrusive DRM). Word gets out about the used toilet paper packaging, and the studio heads are wondering why fewer people are buying their candy. "The candy is great!" they scream. (It probably is. But, it doesn't matter, because YOU WRAPPED IT UP IN USED TOILET PAPER.) The studios are free to "protect" their investments as they see fit -- however, at the same time, we are free to "NOT BUY IT" if we don't like the product, including the packaging/(non)delivery method. That being said, there is an entire generation which has effectively ignored the DMCA, and the companies think that people will suddenly change their behavior to be more "moral" now that they've driven their desires into legislation. We already went through this many years ago. It was called prohibition back then. Millions of people ignored it and alcohol still abounded. Now, millions of people ignore the DMCA, and pirated software still abounds. Not content, they are now working on ACTA, as well. We already know how the story ends, but we unfortunately have to live through it until those in charge realise they've made a mistake.
They're only targeting those that are best, most efficient, hardest working at what they do-- share movies.
Socialism in action. Cut off the productive top while the rest get everything for free.
The US Copyright Group, a company owned by intellectual property lawyers, is using a new proprietary technology by German-based Guardaley IT that allows for real-time monitoring of movie downloads on torrents.
You got to praise German engineering...
In theory.. The only way bittorrent knows you're uploading is if you tell the cloud you are, or someone reports you are. Both of which could be fake.
The only way someone knows if you downloaded something _for sure_ is if you downloaded it directly from them.
I'm sure the subtlety of this technical aspect will be completely lost during any litigation.. but it's a fact.
COLD HARD DELICIOUS FACTS.
I'm not a lawyer, but this "monetizing" sounds like bullshit to me. If they are aware of infringement happening, and do nothing to stop it, or mitigate their damages, they lose rights to claims.
Anyone else think the US Copyright site is not legit? as in, someone is trying to bait Slashdot? Lots of fake links, stock worker photos, spelling error "oyu" on http://www.savecinema.org/index-4.html smells fishy to me.
And what happens if every one of this first group heads off to court?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Are they really independents or are they MPAA's "indie" studios? You know, to prevent legitimate competition and keep their stranglehold tight.
Sort of like how MS has proxies that they use to achieve their goals without showing that they're involved?
Science : Proprietary , Knowledge : Open Source
I hope this is just the beginning. May they flood the courts with tens of millions of lawsuits. That's the only thing that will finally get the law changed.
Young people in Denmark share their songs through Microsoft Messenger and mobile phones' bluetooth. Biggest IP in Denmark, as a part of its internet service offers free download of a millions of songs. Play these songs in Microsoft Player, record them with Audacity, transfer them via bluetooth to you mobile phone and all your friends have them. And if you don't care so much about excellent quality, just go to YouTube, and with one click download & convert any music video to mp3 directly to you computer. Guys, sharing is here to stay.
My overall point is that the Internet didn't change the copy prevention game.
It shouldn't be about copy prevention. It should be about compensating the artist according to the merit of their works. This notion of copyright, patents, and IP is holding back the progress of technology and support for the arts.
More to the point, think about it this way: Suppose you are totally legal with respect to copyright. You buy your favorite artist's CD. You listen to it everyday for the rest of your life, you like it so much.
The artist will never see another dime from you for the rest of his life. Is that fair?
OTOH, why should he get paid when you pay for the equipment and electricity to play his music? Why should an artist get paid *per copy* when he only sang the song once, and is now free to pursue other labors? Should he get paid an essentially unlimited number of times for a finite amount of work?
Copyright is a kludge. Enforcement is arbitrary and capricious. And it doesn't prevent corporate greed from oppressing the artists, doesn't adequately compensate those who make indelible marks on our culture, and indeed, deprives us of a common culture by making our culture a pay-to-experience kind of thing.
This notion that a copy of something is illegal because *someone else* doesn't want you to have it has to go. While it may be immoral for pirates to enjoy the fruit of someone else's labor without compensating them, it is just as immoral for the content cartels to compel monetary restitution for a loss that never *actually* happened.
Or think of it this way: by not buying media, I've had the same economic impact that a pirate would have. The difference, though, is that I simply choose to do without. But neither I nor the pirate have actually committed theft against the content cartels, a distinction I think the cartels would like to blur. The only thing we both have done is refrain from contributing to the bottom line of a corporation, and this, I believe, is what the likes of the MPAA and RIAA find so appalling. In their eyes, there is no sin greater than freedom from corporate bondage.
It's not about the artists. It's not about the music, or the movies. It's about this odd notion that people don't like - in the words of Tom Petty - "paying for what you used to get for free".*
* - The Last DJ.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
What if all the people who get sued simply refuse to respond to the lawsuits? They can't arrest them all.
Come on. Who the hell would torrent the movies in TFA anyways?
My guess, this is one REALLY elaborate April Fool's joke.
This "you should just buy the movie" thing is getting old. Old as in DVDs, you know the discs whose DRM has been defeated so that if you buy the movie, you can actually play it. With BluRays, there is only one program that can read them, and it's proprietary and hasn't been ported beyond one OS. If you buy the movie, chances are, you still can't play it. That is, unless you're willing to spend a lot of time cracking it yourself (and people with assets aren't going to have that amount of free time). For most people, buying isn't an option. It isn't about the money, it's about the basic functionality. Buying the movie gets you nothing.
oh and i highly doubt 20,000 people have been sued in the last week in a DC court. courts take months to process even a single straight forward claim.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
How long until we have BitTorrent with TOR and encryption built in?
TOR wasn't designed to handle large P2P transfers. The only anonymous network I've seen that is robustly handling torrent traffic is I2P. One you install it and set the proxy on your browser, just go to tracker2.postman.i2p to see what is on the most popular tracker.
The I2P software is open source and comes with anonymized email, bittorrent and http software built in. Other programs either written for or adapted to I2P are available, such as Tahoe-LAFS file system and iMule. I2P just recently got a new plugin architecture to make it easy to distribute new apps to interested users, and they could use some coding talent on the many ideas bouncing around on the main forum site.
It seems that I2P aims to be very TOR-like in terms of internal routing and anonymizing capability (they call it "garlic routing"), but in a mostly darknet fashion. This means that the trackers, torrents and web sites you visit through I2P will be 'inside' the anon network. However, there are 'gift' gateways to regular www as well as to freenet and TOR. Another difference with TOR is that all running I2P 'clients' are also routers and route at least a minimal amount of traffic for the network (this increases anonymity because there is no built-in "exit node" capability). Yet another difference is that the I2P network is supposed to be less centralized, though I'm not intimate with the code and can't say for sure.
Why don't they just bill every infringer for the actual current cost of the item in question? Rather than all the expense (not to mention bad publicity) of suing hundreds of thousands of people. And if they don't pay, send them to collections.
I bet a lot of those people would probably just pay the $20 and be done with it, especially after hearing about all the lawsuits. How many of those people probably actually don't know they shouldn't be downloading movies? How many are kids and their parents would gladly pay the money and then ground their kids for a week.
Seriously, nobody is thinking about this in a reasonable, practical way. Both sides are wrong. The content owners are being dicks for suing everyone in sight, but the people downloading stuff are also being dicks because they don't have the right to just take stuff.
Everybody needs to stop being a dick and just settle this reasonably.
Yeah, right..
-- Senior Software Engineer, Attorney appearance services, locallawyerapp.com.
It's obvious how this is going to play out. If I click on a Family Guy video on YouTube, I haven't broken any laws. That's what takedown notices are for, stopping the guy who did break a law. Clicking on Family Guy: The Movie is no different. All Torrent users have to do is not seed, problem solved. All you IANAL and IALBNYL types can quote anything you want but in the end this is going to hold true.
Local municipalities have been playing a similar scam for awhile.
1. Create a local municipal police force
2. Post artificially low speed limit signs and irrational parking meter zones and enforce it vigorously
3. ???
4. Profit
5. Become addicted on the enforcement revenues, and do more of #2
Given the amount of money it would take to convince even one girl to date your average /. reader.....
In related news: The UK government is rushing through a law on filesharing in the last week of parliamentary business before the general election. It's bypassing the normal line by line debate in committees etc and will become law shortly after next Tuesday April 6th on current plans.
The proposed law will essentially enable the copyright holder to get warning letters sent to those who are believed to be illegally sharing files - these go to the broadband account holder, and if the incidents continue, they can be disconnected (or other unspecified "technical measures" may be taken). It doesn't matter if a family member or guest did the file sharing, or someone freeloading on your WiFi.
See http://www.openrightsgroup.org/campaigns/disconnection/why-care for more details and what to do about this. There are only a few days left to try to stop or at least delay this.
If you live in the UK, write to your MP now - it only takes a few minutes via the link above, just put in your postcode.
If you have mod points, please consider modding this up so that more people will write to their MP (member of parliament), and if you agree, then blog/twitter/Facebook/etc about this issue. Similar laws are being passed or planned in many other countries.
They can sue til they are blue in the face, it wont stop anyone from pirating.
Its like the drug war, they keep filing prisons and throwing people in jail, clearly its not working, there are more, better drugs out there than ever. We need to stop repeating the same thing over and over expecting a different result. Decriminalize and regulate all drugs (legalize weed, regulate less than alcohol), help addicts get clean. Same with piracy, get us away from the creepy guy or the corner selling dope, hes got annoying flash banners for camwhores anyway. Id gladly pay, say $15-20 a month, to be on a legit, MPAA approved tracker that lets me download the best quality movies, music and shows from a trusted uploader. I think most people feel the same.
Pleas forgive spelling errors I just woke up from a coma
I2P for the win!
These types of lawyers give other types of lawyers an even worse name.
And before you sue me for that statement I'm sure that there is some sort of 'fair use' or 'truth' defense, so phfffft!
Wake up America you are bieng sucked up by a bunch that have NO no zilch zero interest in anything else than their own back pockets , You need to wake up over there and get your heads out of your collective backsides and start doing a little bit for yourselfs instead of just blindly following yet another bunch of tossers this lot are NO different to the MPAA or the RIAA or is it too late for America now maybe the only way to wake you up over there will in the end be to NUKE you all at least then the remaining few would be alert and pay attention , Get the blinkers off you think you are world leaders well Show it Prove so far all you have shown is that you are world class SHEEP
--
In my experience Karma is just a pendulum of vengeance wrapped in a ugly brown robe and a poorly draped orange sarong.
--
What the F*** is Kharma i do got teeth i don't got no kharma
It still ain't stealing. *You* like to use the metaphor of 'stealing' for that, as someone might like to use the metaphor of raping for "charging too much money for some service" or the metaphor of murder for "breaking into one's PC". Luckily, those are not rape or murder (and everyone knows that), but some economic interest groups are insistently trying to equate copyrights/patent rights/trademark rights to property rights (and thus a violation of those to stealing).
Guess what, they are not. That's why there are special laws for them. And I hope they don't become real property rights, and am ready to fight for that -- for the better of our society.
Yes, capitalism is desperate to find yet another place where to speculate; real estate is reaching its limits and so-called "IP" seems ideal for it. As an old-school academic, I'm convinced that knowledge is for the better of humankind and not to line the pockets of the few.
What about those of us who don't use Bit Torrent? Say, a different way of pirating that does not involve uploading/sharing/distributing? Are we still ok?
Call, fax and write. Tell them off.
MPAA
New York (Anti-Piracy Office)
200 White Plains Road 1st Floor
Tarrytown, NY 10591
(914) 333-8892 (main)
(914) 333-7541 (fax)
How do these lawyers determine that the download is breaching copyright laws? They have to download it first, so they are breaking.
And also downloading something via p2p doesn't mean breaking the law, there are many legitimate downloads available. How one can be sued for downloading something that he didn't know was illegal before downloading. When you go onto torrent websites they don't advertise/label torrents as 'illegal'. You can't tell until you complete downloading it.
I think someone should regulate these firms as they splash money for court trials just to bully internet users, who will get scared and comply with their unlawful requests without a fight.
Lol, good thing I don't torrent movies. However, some computer games and programs are nice to have. Why don't we ever hear about lawsuits for games or programs? I think it's because the developers have a brain and know that good product bring in sales.
Avatar is just too awesome NOT to go and buy/see it, even if you torrented it.
Bad movies are not worth anything, and they blame lack of sales on piracy.
Hello???? Twitter?
"Just torrented the dragonball movie, yeah it sucked ass."
You just lost, ONE SALE! They can't judge "collateral damage".
everyone else now knows not to go and buy your shitty movies, but it's just the same without torrents, and they will never have enough logic to figure it out.
really, what does hollywood have to bitch about? They are one of the few industries still showing growth in profits with the american economy in the shitter, they are making more last year than the year before, and that trend CONTINUES. In fact, since the advent of easily accessible internet sources for copies of media, the film and music industries have never done better. But my main complaint is that the quality of films latley vs the number in theaters is ridiculous. The quality of films up until around the mid 90's to early 2000's really were leaps and strides above previous films in terms of cinematic technology, but the fact is that a large portion of films seeing theater time today are utter shit compared to titles produced 15, 20, or even 30 or more years ago. Look at how rare it is to see a film hailed as a true gem of a film, we have the occasional one, but look at the kind of ratings vs number of films coming out today compares to film history taken on a whole, how many films like Seven Samurai, the Godfather, Star wars, Schindlers list, Shawshank Redemption, Lord of the rings, casablanca, Cross of Iron, Snow White, Toy Story, The nightmare before Christmas, Monty Python, Animal house, Die Hard, Wizard of Oz, the Exorcist, Haloween, Jaws, Psycho, the Matrix, 6th sense, Forrest gump, Jurrasic Park, singing in the rain, Apocalypse Now, and Harry Potter. Now how many of these were made recently? Maybe we would come see your movies in the theater if they were bloody worth watching. You know what we have had lately? I can name very few off the top of my head. The dark Knight, Serenity, Sin City, Murderball (all films that were made to please the kind of people who pirate allot of movies, the overlap of net savvy individuals and comic book nerds is high) and you know what? A massive number of people went and saw them in the theater, even if they pirated it, I know I did, because if its a good film, you WANT to see it on the big screen, and you WANT to own a copy of the DVD and buy merchandise related to it. The damn Harry Pottter films are on the top 100 highest grossing films list, so is Dark Knight, Lord of the Rings, and Star Wars, you know why? because they were GOOD films, and yet those were also on the top 100 most downloaded movies list of all times for places the pirate bay, demonoid, isohunt, and a dozen other torrent sites. Guess what, a couple of them are still on the top 100 most popluar torrents (most seeds/downloaders active), and DVD sales are still higher than average on all of those based on how long they have been available. So the most pirated films of all time are making the most money and have the longest curve on dvd sales. Well film industry, you just keep alienating your core group of supporters and see what happens to your profit margin.
"then checks against a spreadsheet" ... very odd business innovation.
Leave your door open, have everyone steal your stuff, empty your bank account etc. Nothing to pay the fines. Do they imprison you?
In the UK, that's like being given free room and board with satellite TV and three hot meals a day, access to free gym equipment, and free educational materials.
The only problem is that you have to keep infringing to live the high life of jail. Hilarious!
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
I agree that pirating won't stop, but I don't actually think that the real objective is to stop pirating or drug use.
I strongly suspect that this is only what they tell the enforcement people on the front lines and the various others who are not on board with the true agenda.
This is about control. When 1% of the population holds 99% of the wealth, a high level of fear must also exist that the 99% will catch on and cut off their heads. This is a recognized problem and the vast resources of the 1% have been used to sculpt solutions which are being exploited all around us right now.
(And if anybody manages to croak out the words, "conspiracy theorist" through the various knots of their mind-programming, well, guess what? Everybody I've ever met who remains paralyzed by such thinking has also been without fail riddled with a fabulous array of psychological fault lines and blind spots and the inevitably resulting broken/incomplete reasoning, all of which quickly becomes apparent even through the most fortified personality facades. To those people, I would ask in the interest of saving time and energy that before taking a swing at me, you spend a few moments to ask yourself if your criticisms will actually be able to hold up under rudimentary examination or if you are just throwing them out due to some emotionally driven impulse you think originates in your mind but which probably is just the remnants of some TV show you watched combined with the worry-lines etched into your brain through years of torment in junior high school. Thank you.)
And so. . .
One way to manage the 99% is through drugs, (either with chemicals or electronic media), and the second way, through the same vector, is to make sure that everybody is culpable for a crime. -This way, if anybody gets out of line, by say, talking back to the plantation master, (blogging?), there will always exist ample reason to throw that person in jail.
This isn't about protecting copyright or the minds and health of our youth. This is about ensuring a state of slavery without having to call it slavery. Everybody is in debt, and everybody is a criminal.
So, no, they are never going to decriminalize drugs and they are never going to adopt rational strategies for copyright. They are going to make sure everybody is addicted and that addiction is both expensive and illegal. It is simply another ploy among many which allow the 1% to remain the 1%.
-FL
They lost me right there.
...that the "revenue stream" is actually just lawyer-speak for "we are pissing in the wind and hoping that we hit something."
"Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet." General James Mattis
There are easy ways to rip BR movies these days.
Yes there are.
The point of the poster is that they shouldn't need to.
Nothing of what the father is doing (watching legally bought movies discs) is illegal or morally wrong.
But in order to achieve that, the father shouldn't need to break a Blueray's DRM.
(Which itself could be illegal in some jurisdiction like USA or Germany)
If he does need, it's a proof that something is broken in the system.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
And in the stories case, how is the government "forcing you"? It's clearly not the government forcing people to download torrents illegally. It is the laws of the government and the due process that's finding people guilty of violating copyright. But then the argument could be made that either the government shouldn't find copyright infringement illegal and hence prosecutable, or simply not be in the business of enforcing laws period. The latter is absurd and as for the former I've found none that have came up with a demonstratively better allocation scheme than the preexisting system.
And my wife wonders why I think twice about bringing any more kids into the world... aren't there enough ALREADY?
I'm not advocating this, but doesn't a VPN service like ipredator or strongvpn hide your IP address when using Bittorrent?
a city trying to increase their tax pool by setting up cameras to catch people j-walking then mailing them tickets on mass. I don't think the citizens of that city would be happy, yet somehow I think were just gonna take it :S
Yadda yadda yadda. Vermin like this continue to infest the country because pussies like you yap on slashdot instead of exterminating them. you know where they are. you know who they are what are you waiting for
The 5 films they are suing over are "Steam Experiment," "Far Cry," "Uncross the Stars," "Gray Man" and "Call of the Wild 3D."
Are you kidding? I don't know anyone who's gone to the movies after watching something at home.
When you have a 50" or greater plasma tv at full hi-def, a nice surround-sound system, the fridge, friends, air conditioning set exactly right, your favourite couch, the best seat in the house, AND the ability to hit "pause", why would you want to go to the movies?
Oh, right - the "movie experience "...
I haven't been to the movies in years, and I doubt if I will ever go again. Movie theatres are so last century.
This won’t go forward, and here’s why: filing fees. I am a law clerk to a judge in another district, and we used to get a ton of cases where Cablevision would sue individuals for using illegal cable boxes. Essentially, the police would raid an illegal cable box manufacturer. Cablevision would subpoena all the sales info from the manufacturer, and then use the credit card payment info to track down and sue anyone who bought a cable box (who wasn’t smart enough to use a prepaid credit card). There would be hundreds of defendants all brought under a single case, many of whom defaulted or settled for a couple grand. Given the amount of court resources used, and the fact that the liability of each defendant was unrelated (the evidence proving the actions of one defendant have nothing to do with any others), the court ordered that the cases were unrelated and had to be filed separately, meaning one defendant per case. The effect of this ruling was that Cablevision had to pay the $350 filing fee for each defendant. Given the collection rate, it wasn’t worth it, and the suits stopped. I imagine the same thing will happen here. There is no way the plaintiff is paying $7M in filing fees. As I haven’t read the complaint, so I don’t know for certain, but I am willing to bet these suits were brought as one (or a few). I doubt the judge or judges handling this case will just sit and let this proceed as one action. They’ll want their filing fees, all $7M worth.
Unless I'm the seed and there is only one peer, I do not give the entire file to anyone in the swarm. I only give a piece that they request; in and of itself, the piece I have given them is a meaningless, useless set of 1s and 0s. I give an IP address 1/10000th of a file, and somehow I've shared the file with them?
Bittorrent is inherently different from other P2P networks. I don't give a file in it's entirety, or even majority, to anyone. It's like a scavenger hunt, or a distributed jigsaw puzzle. If I give someone a trigger and they use it to build a gun, did I give them a gun?
The bittorrent protocol itself should be sufficient means to protect anyone against litigation.
My first reaction when I learned of this last night was that it must be a twisted April Fools joke. But I went on PACER & actually found the documents in one of the suits. Here 's my blog post, which links to the complaint, ex parte discovery order, and ex parte declaration.
Incredibly, the Court's order:
-makes no provision for the customers to be notified;
-relies on a representation that the plaintiff has "proprietary" evidence which shows the infringement;
-required no evidence or detailed allegation as to why jurisdiction and venue could be placed in that district; and
-allows 2094 defendants to be joined in 1 case, although there is no basis for doing so under the federal rules.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
'We're creating a revenue stream and monetizing the equivalent of an alternative distribution channel,' says Jeffrey Weaver, another lawyer at the firm."
This seems pretty different. I wonder if somehow someone will find a way of suing drug users, dealers, hookers, drunks, corrupt administrators, and on-the-job slackers to convert them all into a revenue stream. Perhaps it's time to get a job in law firms, salaries are about to go up.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Judge Judy, Joe Brown, and the rest just got their seasons all extended by 5 years!
Seriously though, put enough of this in the public face, and not behind closed doors, and we shall see how long thing travesty goes on for.
Think it's time for organized protests at their building. 1200 G St, NW, Suite 800, Washington DC, 20005. Grab a mask, stay anonymous and go go go.
Bittorrent clients could implement a "poison the well" feature where occasionally they privately request a random .torrent file from a single peer. The peer that receives this request will randomly either pass on a torrent from its own collection or perform a recursive operation and get a random torrent from any one of its peers - this way it won't be possible to remotely build an inventory of a peer's collection.
Once the original requester receives the torrent, it then downloads a few megabytes of that file from different peers to /dev/null. That would give plausible deniability to all bittorrent users, which I'd say would be worth the relatively slight increase in bandwidth overhead.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
1. I should be able to get my money back if a movie sucks if they want to go this route. 2. If they magically did stop all file sharing, they wouldn't make a single extra dime. Then what would they say? As a side note, I quit buying music a long, long time ago. Way before torrents. Why? Because the music industry got greedy and whole albums sucked. So F them.
Hmm, I wonder if they track ipv6 IPs?
My email addy? should be easy enough.
This makes me mad. I have already purchased a movie and now i want it on my ipod to watch at work. So i just download from torrents to import into my ipod. Why would i go and buy it again from itunes when i already own it. this doesn't make any since. I now they are starting to make digital copies on some movies you buy but not all. This is just one of those case's where the Rich want to me Richer and they want to take from the poor man is all.
How is the person downloading supposed to know if it the movie they thought is was, or if it was a trailer, until they have downloaded it and seen it? "No Your Honor, I thought it was Avatar the trailer I was downloading" or "Avatar the mini-documentary". "And of course I deleted it straight away when I realised it was the wrong thing". "I was misled by those horrible pirates".
follow the example of Spain , where downloading is not considered illegal as long as the download isn't used for profit
beware he who denies you access to information for in his mind, he already deems himself to be your master (SMAC-ish)
Dear fellow Slashbot,
No offence, without `free information; you probably wouldn't type a single word in your beloved native language, since
as we all should be aware of the irrevocably truth that ALL OUR knowledge/WISDOM etc is based on free information.
information that was provided TO YOU ALONE for your CONVENIENCE by a society/system that allows information to travel
unhindered and most of all pretty much unchecked thru all the channels we as human perceive. hence, even the fundamental
construct of knowledge itself; which is passed on by generations to following generations is/has been freely obtainable
and must be uncensored (if it wasn't for the true pioneers of 'OPEN SOURCE' in a more metaphorical sense) noone on this planet
would know how to produce/use a single WATT, or any form of energy, nor would anyone be able to solve an equation, code/write a c++/python/tcl/whatever string of code, use UNIX/BSD, create bitnet relay, use ARPANET,
use a computer (which was build by k zuse etc..) to post here, spell the word FOOL, xfer your pirated material, or use copyright material which is by what standard? 90-130 years protected and then later used by WALT DISNEY to make their OWN profit (namely brothers grimm material) since the copyright on the grimm material isn't intact anymore. or for what it's worth, copyright might have been invented just to suit ppl when they can benefit of etc. what i'm saying is that without FREE INFORMATION, we most likely
wouldn't be sitting here trolling about copyright issues.
i could go on as to why a plane was created, why our planet/universe is more or less explored, why time is relative ETC
why we have knowledge based on empiric facts. why we sing the songs we sing, why we know of our ancestors and so forth..
to address the issue about information flow control, this merely reflects my personal view of things (as the above stated as well), when we start to invest in information thieves and start to judge what's right or wrong / valid or false, we can't just limit it too poor 14 year old innocent and ignorant children and their mothers sitting at home seeking some entertainment in dlding a product. we should then, and BY ALL MEANS, start to look into everything, GLOBALLY, to see if there and everywhere is something odd going on. we'd have to look in each transmission, in each packet, in each transaction, in each discussion, in each
document, and by the way, give credit to each inventor, creator, and pay a dime to even the DEAD, and hey wait! perhaps we
should start and pay god for everything he gave to US little creatures.
your humble slashdot nub
post scriptum, i just did knock that out, without any research, funded knowledge and even without checking spelling.
i additionally consider myself to be quite uneducated, but i strive to be wise and decent. although i'm a billion
miles away from being the perfect human.
and i've not even did pay a dime for latin.
this comes from the heart of europe and from a more or less reflected personality. cheers
quite witty, if i encode my real name to A=6 b=12 c=18 and then add up the sum etc, i end up with the number 606, which happens to be in the date/time :>
of my prior entry, guess this must have been my fate to write this more or less adept. or not
what i find most amuzing is that i've already looked beyond the kosmos, and that most of 'our' issues are truly trivial and banal.
and you wouldn't believe what i found. OHMY how i sincerely adore it ALL.
amusing* :>
i wish i could use wildcards only
enough of me. take care all, be good and be safe.
Any use of Bittorrent or any other P2P pretty much by definition "includes receipt, or expectation of receipt, of anything of value, including the receipt of other copyrighted works". It is also quite easy for offline non-commercial infringement to fall under that definition.
I am not as knowledgeable like you, but judging by what you said the use of the internet itself falls under the same category like P2P. So using the internet is a felony or something? Because every time I use the internet I expect to "receive anything of value" and sometimes this might include copyrighted work as well. Can you please help me understand this? thanks, Val