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IsoHunt Told To Pull Torrent Files Offline
suraj.sun writes with this excerpt from Ars Technica: "The founder of popular Bit Torrent site IsoHunt, Gary Fung, has been ordered to remove the .torrent files for all infringing content — an order that could result in the site shutting down. US District Judge Stephen Wilson issued the order last week after years of back-and-forths over the legality of IsoHunt and Fung's two other sites (Torrentbox and Podtropolis). Fung claims he's still hoping for a more agreeable resolution that won't result in IsoHunt closing its doors, but for now, things aren't looking good for the torrent site."
First it's the Pirate Bay, then Mininova, Newzbin, and now IsoHunt? Where or Where are we to get our stuff from? Itunes?
Pirate sites will go, and others will replace them, but there is a constant: like death and taxes, piracy will go on.
So when is someone going to develop a peer-to-peer system for hosting and tracking torrents? What happened to this technology?
... is about as likely to be won by the content holders as the 'War on Drugs' to be won by the Federal Govt.
The parallels are striking, starting with 'Just say no' / 'Don't copy that floppy', and then escalating internationally to ACTA.
As long as the demand for unauthorized content exists, supply will find its way.
Until consumers have a compelling reason to buy an authorized copy (iTunes is a great example of this), torrents or some other tech like .nzb will give the people what they want.
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
It's called a parabola. It's just a morality tale.
And yes, if you could glean some sort of moral from a kid's book, it too would be a parabola.
I don't like isohunt (for reasons I can't remember) and I think copyright violations are wrong in some/most cases (I'm in the 10-20 year copyright crowd), but why would isohunt or anyone else who gets hit by judgements care much? It doesn't take too many hours to move the site to some other country. And as a former abuse-handler of a large webhost, I know that simply hosting whatever you're doing in a different country that the people who wants to shut you down will make it very hard for them (at least in countries not ruled by the RIAA or MPAA.)
(as abuse-handler, the best part of my job was to tell all morons sending me DMCA-notices to stuff it, since the DMCA is a US-thing and if they had a valid complaint to make they would say so instead of using silly DMCA-mails to abuse@xxx.com).
I am saddened by the judge striking down this use of the internet. A television network should do a news piece on this, in order to transfer knowledge about this subject to the masses. I'm sure they have a protocol to deal with internet stories.
Someone please keep me posted. Why?ENCASE THIS BECOMES A HUGE STORY instead of just letting it die! please! For the good of us all!
If I do work today I don't continue getting paid for it 70 years after I'm dead... why should you?
When people start infringing copyrights, they are attacking centuries of legal thought.
No, less than a century of legal thought, as before the 20th century copyrights had reasonable lengths. I wonder how much "pirated" material is older than 20 years?
Copyright is not about ownership, it is about a limited time monopoly to get creators to create. Jimi Hendrix will perform no more; his work should be in the public domain, as should anything else longer than the length of an invention's patent. Nothing made before 1990 should be covered by copyright, and if it wasn't I believe there would be little piracy.
I'm sure creativity would evolve much faster. Like technology, art is built on what has come before. Nothing is created out of a vacuum.
Free Martian Whores!
Because you weren't smart enough to copyright or obtain the copyright for the work?
Just because you choose to do all your production as a work-for-hire, doesn't mean everyone else wants to do so.
Because you don't pay the full cost of my work when you license it while you are fully paid for each hour you work.
It's not an endless river.
Yes, yes it is. As far back as I can recall -- and that is a long way -- there has always been piracy. To think or even suggest that you can "dent" or outright stop piracy is just wishful thinking. It always has been.
The method will differ, that's all. Goodbye torrents, hello ?????
The only reason this seems odd is because over the last 10 years, the general public has gotten into piracy in a big way. If that hadn't have happened and it was much more "low key" -- we wouldn't be having this discussion and you, most likely, would not even realize piracy was taking place. Now we have torrents. Before that we had http. Before that we had SFTP. Before that we had FTP. Before that we had Zmodem on BBS's. Before that, we had X/Ymodem. And before that we had sneakernet.
The evolution continues...
(sidenote: Remember rule #1. I purposely have a glaring oversight in the list above. Can you spot it? LOL)
Who gives a fuck what you want? The law is unjust.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
And when copyright terms are extended, it is also an attack on centuries of legal thought. The sole purpose of copyright is to enrich the public domain by promoting the publishing of art and sciences by granting a limited monopoly on distribution. Extending the term of that copyright is a direct attack on that sole purpose, while "piracy" is merely an attack on the method of promotion.
Copyright law is a misnomer, it is really copyright restriction. We all have a right to copy anything we want, this is a natural right inherent in our humanity. It is as natural as our freedom to think, speak, walk or defend ourselves. Copyright law restricts that right temporarily, so that in time we will have a richer and deeper culture to share in the future. The extension of copyright for profit is theft of the highest order, it is stealing from every man, woman and child in existence and leaves humanity as a whole poorer.
Ah, but your premise is incorrect; you will indeed be shut down by the police. In a drug ring they will use words like "conspiracy". In a copyright context they'll use words like "contributory infringement". In both cases it means "you can't legally profit from helping others to commit crimes".
When I was a lad long, long ago we had no internet and only two tv channels. Usually there wasn't anything on worth watching. I read a lot of books.
Most cities have these buildings full of books and even media, which they seem perfectly happy to loan out for free. I'm not entirely sure what their business model is, but they've been doing this for as long as I can remember, so it appears viable, strange though that may seem. It might be time to rediscover them.
Loose lips lose spit.
It's a game of whack-a-mole. My concern is the same is the real game of whack-a-mole. One game I played as a kid (sharks not moles), the better you did, the more the game speed up until it was impossible to win.
, (I was amazed when these things came out at 2gb!) it becomes possible to move 40+ VCD movies in something as big as your fingernail which a data smuggler could stitch into clothing for gods sake.
The internet is all about copying, it's fundamental, and it's never easier. It's what Turing machines do. Consider Streaming even, there is not such thing as streaming, it's still downloading, however renamed to keep rightsholders from realising what it really is.
Theoretically it's possible to create a file sharing service that is incredibly difficult perhaps almost impossible to monitor and trace. Onion routing works pretty well, there are robest methods of key exchange, and it seems encrypted links are good enough to protect online banking.
All the while bandwidth, computational capacity and digital storage is getting better, faster and cheaper. If one thought piracy was at an all time high now and the tide will start to turn against it, then one is like a luddite before the industrial revolution.
Maybe Big Content does end up shutting down P2P faster than it can pop back up, and even win some candy floss in the process. Piracy will just move back to untraceable anonymous physical media. You see, one underestimates the bandwidth of a portable hard drive or USB stick moving from A to B.
What about ACTA border searches of your iPod and laptop? Considering the size of a 32gb MicroSDHC Card now,
Still don't get what I mean? A high end 32gb SDHC card costs alot, but so did a $10 4gb card once upon a time. What happens when these things hit 500gb, 1000gb? Become so cheap that you give them away like we do with burned CD/DVD-Rs now?
Another example, my entire music collection (legit) took up most of my expensive 80gb harddrive in 2003/2004. Today that same price point, buys me a 1.5TB drive, with change. My music collection that has only grown a little suddenly has a trivial footprint.
A hypothetical pirated movie collection of hundreds of 700mb VCD-quality movies now fills up a good chunk of ones hypothetical 1TB drive.
In six years that will be nothing on my $100 50TB drive.
By the end of the decade you could afford to have a desktop computer with every major movie of the last 50 years stored on it with room to spare.
Repeat.
Yeah so you were thinking maybe we are seeing the end of piracy, but it's only just getting started. Suddenly Big Content seems like a bunch of luddites tearing down the machines of the revolution, failing to see the precipice of change coming.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
If I do work today I don't continue getting paid for it 70 years after I'm dead... why should you?
Although I completely agree that the extention of copyright to ever-increasing terms is scandalous and that it should be restricted to the original 10-20 years, I don't buy the argument above. Say I build a house today that I rent out and which generates income for me during my lifetime - should my family be denied that income (or even the house itself!) after I die?
Similarly, if a writer publishes a book today, and then dies a year from now, his family should be able to benefit from his work for a reasonable period of time.
Obviously, the house is a tangible asset while a work of art is not (at least, not in the case of books), but you cannot simply state that my descendants shouldn't receive any income from either asset after I die.
Wrong question. Would having a 20-year copyright have a deleterious effect on creating new works? I rather think not; I doubt many business ventures rely on payments 20 years away for their justification.
Now, what benefit would I have from a 20-year copyright? Far more material in the public domain. Far less lost creative material (it's easy for things to get lost over 70+ years of neglect). Less problem with reproducing creative work; consider the TV show "WKRP in Cincinatti" which cannot be reproduced due to music copyright issues, or Infocom's "Shogun" and "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy". No drags on derivations from stuff that came out in my lifetime.
I don't know that 20 years is the right number, but it looks like a whole lot better bet than life + 70.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Until there's honesty from this (significant) population of the "copyright is unjust" crowd as to their actual motivations, the conversation can't go forward very much.
it is completely unjust if one side of an agreement keeps changing the rules, especially when the officiator is in their pocket. extending the length every 20 years or so is not finite. if they extended criminals' sentences every time they were about to be released, would you be for that? would their cries of "i served my time" not be a good enough excuse? what more motivation would be needed? should we let everything be like this? you can change whatever contract you want as long as you pay a judge enough money? that is just to you?
...
From Isohunt's twitter feed: @arstechnica, @wired on us "Ordered to Remove Infringing Content". There's no order, only PROPOSED order & I'd appreciate better reporting