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Swedish Court Rules ISP Must Reveal OpenBitTorrent Operator's Identity
2phar writes "An ISP must hand over the identity of the operator behind OpenBitTorrent, a court in Sweden ruled [Wednesday]. The ISP must now reveal the identity of its customer, operator of probably the world's largest torrent tracker, to Hollywood movie companies or face a hefty fine. 'OpenBitTorrent is used for file sharing, and we suspect that it is the Pirate Bay tracker with a new name. It is added by default on all of the torrent tracker files on Pirate Bay,' Hollywood lawyer Monique Wadsted said in an earlier comment. The ruling covers the customer behind the IP addresses 188.126.64.2 and 188.126.64.3 and/or any other IP addresses in Portlane's entire range (188.126.64.0 – 188.126.95.255) which have been allocated to tracker.openbittorrent.com since August 28, 2009."
...it's the lobbies.
Guess who's putting everyone down a deep hellhole?
Yep, usury.
Fuck them.
Smile, don't click...
OpenBitTorrent is just a tracker. That's all; not a torrent indexer like TPB. They are not responsible for whatever people choose to use their service to download or distribute. I'd also imagine they can't do anything about what people move through their service.
They don't condone piracy; in fact, their website asks that users not illegally distribute copyrighted material with the tracker. This, combined with the fact that OBT is non-profit (as far as I know) means that they aren't profiting from infringement and they aren't condoning or aiding infringement.
Finally, even if it gets shut down, the project is open-source. It won't take long at all for one or two or a dozen clones to pop up.
I pray the Swedish judge has an ounce of sense.
That Anonymous Coward guy is pretty annoying. Can we have the government censor him or something?
Swedes, you used to be cool. What happened?
Piracy never hurt anyone more than the various industries are hurting themselves and their customers, and filesharing in itself is only a good thing. Filesharing is what the Internet is all about, and the Internet would hardly exist without it.
Hollywood, you can keep producing ridiculously expensive and wasteful movies, but you gotta come up with better excuses when you're losing money. It's never piracy. A good movie will make money no matter what, and it'll get advertised through filesharing around the world, faster than you apparently are able to do. Though it might not make a profit if you spent more than a small nation's budget to make it.
We are all God's parents.
http://www.piratpartiet.se/donate
I was just reading this headline on slashdot, then browsed to some other place where people mentioned that the DNS for openbittorrent.com now points at 127.0.0.1
Seems to be constant across all the major DNS servers.
Coincidence?
Am I missing something blatantly obvious that the courts seem to be able to see? TPB was clearly condoning piracy, we all know that.. but OBT is just a generic public platform that people can use to share nondescript files. It's like.. going after the state because somebody was murdered on THEIR streets, the streets are a generic platform to get from A to B through the medium of walking, but of course, somebody will exploit that medium.
whatta catch guys. She'll clearly put out for ANYONE..... (with $$$$$$$$)
Opentracker is the software behind many public trackers. The people behind this software project gave a talk at the 24th Chaos Communication Congress in 2007. There is a video recording of this talk (in German). (The talk is titled "Tracker fahrn". It's a play on words: "Trecker" is pronounced like "tracker" and means "tractor", hence the picture.)
In the talk they explained the basics of the Bittorrent protocol, how their project came to be and what they learned writing and running a high throughput open tracker (denis.stalker.h3q.com). Comments about their experience with XS4ALL at 33 minutes - hilarious; how the PirateBay tracker switched to Opentracker at 43 minutes; but watch the whole thing.
I think the reason for the subpoena is that the Hollywood gang thinks that the people behind Open Bittorrent and The Pirate Bay are the same.
Right after the PB trial there was a lot of discussion regarding whether TPB would have been illegal if it hadn't done so much. For example, TPB was convicted because they were actually hosting torrent files, which caused them to fall under a different law than, for example, and ISP. But what if the illegal parts were dropped? Why, you'd be untouchable. The problem is then, is there a way to distribute the functionality of TPB so that the constituent websites are all legal, but taken together, they provide exactly the same service as TPB?
A little while later, Open Bittorrent opened up.
So when the next lawsuit comes up, it will not be Hollywood vs. one site that in itself isn't illegal, but Hollywood vs. a bunch of sites that taken together are claimed to be illegal. However, in order for this to work, there must be proof that the websites are really connected. That's what they're going for.
My prediction: OpenBittorrent will be convicted. TPB was found guilty because they received and hosted torrent files, which in turn triggered liability. You don't have to actually host illegal copies, as long as you receive, store information for a longer period of time than (roughly) the actual transmission of the information, and then send it to one or more consumers, you do not have "common carrier" immunity under Swedish law, and must not only not host illegal content - you must not host anything connected with any illegal acts. Such as a torrent file that is used for illegal purposes.
Now OpenBittorrent doesn't host torrent files. But it does host something else - the list of peers. It is a tracker, after all.
So I think any OBT trial will be pretty much like TPB trial. The TPB verdict showed that it is very easy (almost too easy) to become an accessory to a crime in Sweden.
They should consider the many ways of forming legal collective associations. Corporations. And how to caracterize themselves as practically pro-bono collective information-flow-shaping "brokers" (a better word needed). Or information-flow Market-makers. Collateral Monetizers. Information-flow equity condensators.
Ads and donations could then be augmented by loans, fractional reserve self-lending and reciprocal exchange lending leveraged expansion. You know, standard financial banking bubblinflation. Then do a sort of open-community refund, or "bonus"-forecast advanced refund (or some other such gibberish). Distributing money to workers is socialism. Distributing it to clients (and "normal" bribes) is "market development". Distributing it to shareholders is merely good ol' healthy ideal shinig - "glorious" - capitalism.
Plus, there are tax cuts, incentives, and - ventually - bailouts. Maybe they should form up as abstract intermediation-morfing banking financial corporations. Open-community collaborative lawyers ? That sounds hefty.
Ah! Coffee is ready. I'll wake up now...
Convince them filesharing is good for the Euro. If they actually gestapo-SS go after the ISP-hosts-sharers, all the Swedish and EU's national-debt's unsupported credit-fraction will be exposed. All h* will ensue. The Iceland volcano will move to somewhere near Hadrian's wall. North-Sea drilling will hit a huge cavern and the North-Sea will be half-drained into it - letting Germans, Franch and Britons _walk_ over. They'll reconsider then.
All of this has been set in stone the moment people decided (for sheep-like herd mentality reasons) to flock to BitTorrent, a protocol that depends on centralized trackers and search engines.
BitTorrent is in fact a giant step backwards from the traditional P2P systems that preceded it and light years behind systems like Winny or PerfectDark which feature not only decentralized search but also end-to-end encryption, encrypted disk caches and routing that attempts to provide full anonymity.
But then again, some people are incapable of learning about foibles of fads any other way then the hard way.
I foresee that within few years we will see a rapid decline of BitTorrent, after majority of trackers and search websites are brought down by a combination of draconian penalties, scare tactics aimed at ISPs and similar aggressive measures .... at which point sanity will prevail over fashion and the development in distributed (and thus for all practical purposes unkillable) systems will resume again.
by bringing Eu regulations and laws into the matter ? If you take that to Eu, if basic privacy rights of individuals are violated in lieu of Eu rules, sweden would get heavily battered in European courts.
Read radical news here
apparently the article was written before word reached torrentfreak about an important development.
teliasonera says it feels so strongly about user privacy that it will take the matter all the way to the swedish supreme court.
"'what we have done today is to announce to the public that we will appeal,' patrik hiselius, the senior adviser of public affairs of the swedish-finnish firm told AFP, adding the company had until june 7th to submit its appeal."
more here
- js.
99% of what Hollywood turns out is crap that isn't worth paying for, anyway. No bit loss. I've never seen anyone complain so much when their pile of manure is stolen.
Why is it so expansive?
Disagree != mod troll.
I2P can reach speeds an order of magnitude faster than, say, Tor. You still have to have patience for large torrents, but they do get through just fine ...and with a very high degree of anonymity.
Can't they just do what governments and big companies do? Say 'golly gosh, all that got accidentally shredded, we have launched an internal inquiry whose results will remain secret' ?
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
Here we go again. A poster in America now must be concerned about foreign laws. Foreign laws should only effect foreign people.
We use the OpenBitTorrent tracker to legally spread our large Free software dvd ISO because none of our developers have the resources to host that traffic on their own but we can expect that 5 or 6 cable modems will be running at any one time (but can't guarantee which 5 or 6).
If it gets shut down it will be a bad day for us as we've come to rely on it. :-(
I can't see them losing the court case on the facts, but then I can't see them affording to stage a defense legal against the MPAA either.
I noticed that while TPB's tracker was 'officially down' all the torrents were operable on the openbittorrent tracker. It wouldn't surprise me at all to find out they just slapped a new name on their tracker. Did it honestly take authorities THIS long to figure out what was going on? Oh well, there will be a big battle over it, it will get shut down and renamed then they'll be back up and running with no problems.
Dont by SONY products they rip ppl of and removes functions in their products and has rotkits in their cds
DONT EVER BY SONY STUFF
Man, fuck Hollywood, fuck the mpaa, fuck the riaa, and while we're at it, fuck the mpeg-la!
Huh? - Don't they know anything about Internet address allocation and assignments?
To cut a long story short, a pool of addresses (usually a /19, /20 or /21) are allocated to a LIR (Local Internet Registry) by the relevant RIR (Regional Internet Registry), in this case RIPE. This is just a pool from which to make assignments. No customer controls the entire range by default, at least not in RIPE territory. Now from this range assignments can be made, based on well-documented requests from the customers. The IPs in question belong to the ISPs customer network "PORTLANE-CUST-NET", a /24 netblock. The next netblock in the allocation is "SERVER4SALE-NET" and the next "PLAYNATION-NET" (skipping an unassigned /24). Obviously various customers.
In other words, the netblock 188.126.64/19 is an allocation, not an assignment. It contains several netblocks belonging to various customers, not Portlane itself. Portlane AB is a LIR and thus has the ability to assign netblocks from their allocation to customers, including themselves. The only relevant range to discuss is the assigned /24 from which the IPs come, not the entire allocation given to the LIR. The fact that both the customer and the LIR is Portlane AB doesn't matter.
It's not surprising that a Hollywood lawyer doesn't know the difference between a LIR, a netblock owner and the end customer (openbittorrent.com I guess), but it makes all the difference in our world. After all, you don't get search warrants valid for every house in a town when you just want a specific house.
Now, what do they want with that tracker? - It has been discussed countless times but it appears that Hollywood lawyers still don't get it. Okay, one more time for the totally brain dead morons in Hollywood:
A BITTORRENT TRACKER DOES NOT CONTAIN A SINGLE BIT OF COPYRIGHTED DATA! - NOR DOES IT POINT TO PLACES WHERE A COPYRIGHTED FILE CAN BE FOUND.
IT POINTS TO PLACES WHERE DATA WITH A CERTAIN HASH CAN BE FOUND. IT KNOWS NOTHING ABOUT THE CONTENT OF THE HASHED FILE, NOR CAN THE HASHED FILE IN ANY WAY BE RECONSTRUCTED FROM THE INFORMATION ON THE TRACKER.
Get it this time? - chasing tracker owners is noting but a witch hunt! - They are not illegally sharing copyrighted material! - The pointing they do are every bit as anonymous as other forms of pointers in the Internet, like DNS or search engine results.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --