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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."
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.
While I wouldn't share the harsh language of the hating parent, the spirit of it I can agree with. The IPRED law (which this ruling is about) essentially bypasses the fundamental rights of citizens to please the lobbyists. The law was frowned upon by civil rights groups and several relevant parts of the Swedish government protested publically. The law was proposed anyway by the Reinfeldt government after explicitly promising that "Vi tycker att upphovsrätten ska värnas, men vi vill inte kriminalisera en hel ungdomsgeneration." or "We think copyright should be protected, but we don't want to make the entire youth generation criminals." and passed by the Riksdag and went into effect on April 1, 2009 (what a joke). This law essentially turned the Hollywood lawyers play police on their own (what could possibly go wrong?). I had the opportunity recently to have a question relayed to Mr. Reinfeldt and the question I posed was essentially "Why did you say one thing and then do the opposite after the election?". The answer was another lie; equivalent to "The original statement was that swedish police should not hunt these criminals. We have other methods for that." which essentially means that it's okay to pass laws that lets the Hollywood lawyers play police. I have a recording of that answer here (Swedish, MP3) as proof of these deceptions. Of course, the ISP:s didn't want to play along and this went to court over the privacy of their customers, citing fundamental laws of the European Union. But that's vapor to Hollywood. I'm sure we havn't seen the last of this yet. Oh, and by the way, the opposition in Sweden is playing on this. They've stated that they would like to remove the IPRED law. What they fail to mention is that they also would like to implement something even more hideous.
The answer was another lie; equivalent to "The original statement was that swedish police should not hunt these criminals. We have other methods for that." which essentially means that it's okay to pass laws that lets the Hollywood lawyers play police.
There is a difference between criminal and civil law. Police enforce criminal law, and private citizens enforce civil law.
Are you claiming that private citizens play police when they enforce defamation law? or other delicts (torts in Common Law traditions)? No.
Decriminalizing something like copyright law does not automagically make it ok to do no matter what. When OJ was found innocent of murder, he was still found civilly liable for her "wrongful death". Doing harm to others still results in a responsibility... just not necessarily under criminal penal law.
Individuals are entirely responsible for enforcing their rights, and claims in civil court. So far, nothing you've attributed to the politician is a lie... it may be misleading if you don't understand the intricacies of law...
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
Jesus christ. You expect people to actually read that? I'll sum up how the lack of formatting made it appear.
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa bbbbbbbbbbbbbbb ccccccccccccccc ddddddddddddddd eeeeeeeeeeeeeee fffffffffffffff ...
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa bbbbbbbbbbbbbbb ccccccccccccccc ddddddddddddddd eeeeeeeeeeeeeee fffffffffffffff
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa bbbbbbbbbbbbbbb ccccccccccccccc ddddddddddddddd eeeeeeeeeeeeeee fffffffffffffff
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa bbbbbbbbbbbbbbb ccccccccccccccc ddddddddddddddd eeeeeeeeeeeeeee fffffffffffffff
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa bbbbbbbbbbbbbbb ccccccccccccccc ddddddddddddddd eeeeeeeeeeeeeee fffffffffffffff
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa bbbbbbbbbbbbbbb ccccccccccccccc ddddddddddddddd eeeeeeeeeeeeeee fffffffffffffff
http://www.piratpartiet.se/donate
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.
Don't assume that because it works that way where you are it works that way everywhere. Copyright infringement is a criminal offense in Sweden, it is supposed to be enforced by the regular police.
Posted by a Debian GNU/Linux user
In Sweden, all crimes were investigated by the police - until IPRED. As far as I know, there's no difference between criminal and civil law - if it's again some law then it's criminal. We don't have the lawsuit paradigm over here. Then again, I'm not a Swedish lawyer, are you?
Decriminalizing something like copyright law does not automagically make it ok to do no matter what.
One problem though: there's nothing to decriminalize about it, at least not in Sweden.
Just make sure the judge you get is not a board member of a copyright lobby group.
Seems a number of domains/hostnames are returning 127.0.0.1 - two that I tried are openbittorrent.com and tracker.thepiratebay.org).
I hope the registrars will be refunding the registration fees for these domains. And that they be sued for breach of contract.
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...
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.
openbittorrent.com. 172800 IN NS ns1.idnz.net.
openbittorrent.com. 172800 IN NS ns2.idnz.net.
openbittorrent.com. 172800 IN NS ns3.idnz.net.
ns1.idnz.net. 172800 IN A 194.50.187.134
ns2.idnz.net. 172800 IN A 194.0.182.1
ns3.idnz.net. 172800 IN A 193.227.117.124
openbittorrent.com. 3600 IN A 127.0.0.1
Domain names in the
with many different competing registrars. Go to http://www.internic.net
for detailed information.
Domain Name: OPENBITTORRENT.COM
Registrar: KEY-SYSTEMS GMBH
Whois Server: whois.rrpproxy.net
Referral URL: http://www.key-systems.net
Name Server: NS1.IDNZ.NET
Name Server: NS2.IDNZ.NET
Name Server: NS3.IDNZ.NET
Status: ok
Updated Date: 30-jan-2010
Creation Date: 03-feb-2009
Expiration Date: 03-feb-2012
Interesting. The nameservers in use are on a domain registered to openbittorrent. This means that the registrar is not at fault.
Oops.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Another swede here. Parent is completely right, but despite all this, IPRED has become mostly toothless in fighting individual filesharers. There is another old law that says that information about who has what IP has to be thrown away when it's not neccesary anymore (most people have dynamic IPs I believe), and ISPs (even the larger ones) have started removing logs in compliance with this law, so when they get an IPRED inquiry they can just answer "we don't know".
Thanks to this, though, the police has complained that they can't trace communication in real crimes anymore (in swedish), meaning it's not just ineffective but damaging. The data retention directive would change this, of course, but with the pirate movement, we might be able to evade it.
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
There's your problem, right there.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
ACTA will be next and make IPRED worse.
But ACTA would apply to Sweden, US, Canada, France, New Zealand,....
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.
"Vi tycker att upphovsrätten ska värnas, men vi vill inte kriminalisera en hel ungdomsgeneration."
I don't know if you read too much into the "kriminalisera" part or what.
But none the less what he said is more or less "I like the idea of copyright but we can't look at millions of people as 'criminals'", shall they judge them all?
If he then forms a law which help copyright holders find out the personal data of people infringing on copyright to prosecute them for that he has turned them all into criminals which may be punished for a very common crime made by millions of people.
The young(?) copyright infringing population is still at risk of getting punished and seen as criminals, something he said we couldn't have.
What I find even lamer though is that instead of trying to catch and punish all those millions of people actually breaking copyright (which wouldn't be popular ..) they go after the TBP operators which IMHO haven't committed any crimes whatsoever just because it's easier, more well-accepted among the general population and won't hurt their own popularity (or rather kill it totally .. what if the kids of everyone/all families got ridiculous Hollywood damage compensations fees?)
For a government to criminalize (I don't care about your definition of the word) a major part of the population is probably more or less suicide. To just go after the leaders somewhat easier.
I don't think EU let us just say that copyright infringement for personal/non-commercial use is ok though. But in that case just fix it at EU level then .. Or rather reform copyright laws so it's only illegal/breach of copyright if you earn money on someone else work (don't know where that will put OSes and other very generic tools though.)
The law, morals, right and wrong aren't set in stone and can be discussed.
There's your problem, right there.
... on the other hand our sentences isn't decided on who's got the most money.
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.
real crimes>/quote>.. :D
The problem is that copyright infringement is seen as a crime at all. Naughty behavior maybe ;)
In Sweden, all crimes were investigated by the police - until IPRED. As far as I know, there's no difference between criminal and civil law - if it's again some law then it's criminal. We don't have the lawsuit paradigm over here.
Then again, I'm not a Swedish lawyer, are you?
The distinction in the USA is that criminal law can be punished with jail time, while civil law generally cannot (the only thing that can, is contempt of civil court).
Straight from the Wikipedia article for IPRED: "The directive covers the remedies that are available in the civil courts, but not criminal offenses."
From Swedish Wikipedia we have Civilprocess which covers civil lawsuits in Sweden, that are not criminal law.
Sometimes civil law and criminal law overlap. (Something that is a crime typically also creates a civil case for a delict.)
So, no, I am not a Swedish lawyer, however I do understand that the Civil Law tradition still has a criminal trials and a civil trials.
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
If he then forms a law which help copyright holders find out the personal data of people infringing on copyright to prosecute them for that he has turned them all into criminals which may be punished for a very common crime made by millions of people.
No. He has not made them criminals. If I slander someone else, then even if I am found at fault in court, I am still not a "criminal", because I have not violated a criminal statute.
In fact, (at least in the USA) some civil suits don't even hold that something wrong was done at all. There is an idea of "unjust enrichment", where no one did anything wrong, but one party benefited, by accident, from the acts of another.
The young(?) copyright infringing population is still at risk of getting punished and seen as criminals, something he said we couldn't have.
Just because they're not criminals, does not mean that they might not be "punished". They can still be found legally responsible for their actions that injure another party. As to being "seen a criminals", that is a social perspective that the courts cannot control. The USA sees OJ as a criminal, even though the legal system sees him as not. (Wait, this is to be read as if it were before he kidnapped that one guy at weapon-point.)
This also is not a suit against individual downloaders, but rather those who provide the mechanisms by which individual downloaders obtain their material. So again, the general populace is not being touched at all. (Unlike in the USA, where the *IAA has been going after individuals.)
What I find even lamer though is that instead of trying to catch and punish all those millions of people actually breaking copyright (which wouldn't be popular ..) they go after the TBP operators which IMHO haven't committed any crimes whatsoever just because it's easier, more well-accepted among the general population and won't hurt their own popularity (or rather kill it totally .. what if the kids of everyone/all families got ridiculous Hollywood damage compensations fees?)
For a government to criminalize (I don't care about your definition of the word) a major part of the population is probably more or less suicide. To just go after the leaders somewhat easier.
This seems to directly contradict your previous posts. You quote them saying "we don't want to make a whole generation criminals", and agree with this statement, but then directly call for them to criminalize the individuals, rather than the media?
What is your proper position here? Mine is that copyright infringement doesn't appear to be criminal, but it certainly can create a civil action, this civil action should not be brought against the individuals at all, but the medium is unfortunately responsible for distribution.
Namely, since copyright is supposed to be the exclusive right to distribute, individual downloaders are not distributing.
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
As a responsible DNS operator, they redirected the traffic in such a way as to not cause unnecessary bandwidth to their old provider, until they switch to a new host. This DNS blackholing of traffic is perfectly understandable and legitimate IMHO.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
Are you claiming that private citizens play police when they enforce defamation law? or other delicts (torts in Common Law traditions)? No.
The point is that ordinary citizens don't have police powers. Oh, you can think that IP 1.2.3.4 defamed you and go to the civil courts and maybe they'll subpoena the ISP but you can't demand that subscription information yourself. Unless you are in Sweden and the accusation is copyright violation, then IPRED says the ISP just have to hand it over to whoever asks with no oversight. There is in fact less requirements for the MAFIAA private police than it is for the real police, they actually have to have a reasonable suspicion and get a court warrant.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Copyright infringement is a criminal offense in Sweden.
Nice try, but actually, people will pay for bandwidth AND copyright (contents) when that becomes possible and affordable.
There is no substitute for common sense. Especially, no body of rules will do.
Copyright infringement is a criminal offense in Sweden.
It is also most definitely a civil offense. In fact, IPRED establishes the civil legal issues of coypright, rather than criminal.
Then also according to http://www.sweden.gov.se/sb/d/10634/a/117091, "Infringements of intellectual property rights can also result in criminal sanctions such as fines or imprisonment, but this is more of a complement to the civil remedies."
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
You're reading too much into that. It's still a criminal offense, it's just that you can also sue for damages. The only file sharing cases that's ever gone into Swedish court have been criminal ones and it'll probably remain that way, the reason is quite simple. In Sweden you can only sue for actual damages(rather then punitive) so being able to sue for all of $10 per movie you prove he downloaded isn't a very good use of your time.
You're reading too much into that. It's still a criminal offense, it's just that you can also sue for damages. The only file sharing cases that's ever gone into Swedish court have been criminal ones and it'll probably remain that way, the reason is quite simple. In Sweden you can only sue for actual damages(rather then punitive) so being able to sue for all of $10 per movie you prove he downloaded isn't a very good use of your time.
Every suit in Sweden that has been under IPRED has been a civil offense. In particular this very case is an IPRED case, and thus a civil offense.
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
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) --
Yeah well at least we don't have to pay millions if we're guilty. There is no such thing as punitive damages paid to the opposing party here, only actual damages that can be proved. Also if you're sentenced to a fine (which would be the most likely sentence for a file sharer) that fine is based on how much income you have, its never so much that it'll drive you bankrupt for the next 50 years. You might be sentenced to pay, for example, 30 days of your income after taxes.
Posted by a Debian GNU/Linux user