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."

Comments

OBT is not breaking any laws

[Andorin]

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.

Re:OBT is not breaking any laws

[snowgirl]

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.

So far, the *IAA is just looking for the identity of the people operating the OBT. They suspect that they are simply The Pirate Bay under a new name.

Let me give a good example. I operate an open Wi-Fi access point. A neighbor uses it to download copyrighted material. The copyright owner then sues the ISP to obtain the identity of the individual operating my IP. They receive it, so that they can then sue me to obtain the identity of the individual who properly violated their copyright.

They may potentially need this information in order to be able to subpoena an individual in a copyright claim court case.

While we don't particularly like the idea that people can sue to obtain another's identity, in order to provide for proper civil actions to be taken, sometimes you have to sue for the identity of another individual.

Re:OBT is not breaking any laws

[snowgirl]

In other contexts, similar actions would definitely be illegal. For example, one person walks up to another person and says "Hey, I want to murder Bob Jones, but I don't know where he lives, can you help me?" and the second person says "Yeah, he lives at 123 Fake Street, here's copy of his house key. By the way, here's where you can get a really nice shotgun which would be a really effective murder instrument to use."

In this case, the ISP is bound by a court order. If I were in the similar situation, where a court order held me responsible, and I had reason to believe that they intended harm against the other. a) I would present it in court... this should be seen as an invalid reason to know the identity of another. (this is obviously not the case. the *iaa in this case simply intend to bring about legal actions... which is a legitimate reason for discovery of another's identity) b) should the previous argument fail, I would refuse to release the individuals identity, and let the plaintiff sue me to obtain the funds, and present argument (a) again, arguing that under a reason of necessity, I am violating the law to protect the life and rights of another. c) should (b) fail, which is likely would, if it even got that far, I would likely face the penalty myself... which I would pay. Because $$$ out of my pocket is worth saving the life of another.

Re:OBT is not breaking any laws

[Stephan Schulz]

In other contexts, similar actions would definitely be illegal.

I agree, but your example is somewhat off. OBT is only providing infrastructure in a content-agnostic way. They are more like an ISP, or the phone directory, or Google Maps - or even the city that builds a street through a high-crime area. The question is if such a "don't ask, don't tell" policy is acceptable.

Re:OBT is not breaking any laws

[Andorin]

Usually, a content provider (Youtube for example) is obligated to take down infringing content on request, or otherwise to make a counter-argument against the take-down notices. They can't just say "we aren't responsible for the content." Now, you may argue that because it's just a tracker, they aren't trafficking in infringing content. But in reality, there isn't that much separation. They are facilitating the downloading of that content.

I think the distinction between YouTube and a BitTorrent tracker is fairly substantial. YouTube actually hosts the infringing content on its website. With BT, it's the users that are doing the hosting. The tracker can't take down any content, nor can they remove infringing torrents (as you later said), because it's not a hosting service. They can't tell what's copyrighted and what's not any more than other software can; all they have are file names and hash values.

In other contexts, similar actions would definitely be illegal. For example, one person walks up to another person and says "Hey, I want to murder Bob Jones, but I don't know where he lives, can you help me?" and the second person says "Yeah, he lives at 123 Fake Street, here's copy of his house key. By the way, here's where you can get a really nice shotgun which would be a really effective murder instrument to use."

Then the second person is knowingly aiding and abetting a crime. A tracker doesn't do this when it connects peers, because again, it doesn't know what is legal and what isn't.

That's pretty unconvincing. They all say that. Words are cheap, actions matter more. If they were actively removing infringing torrents, that would be another matter.

Regardless of how cheap the words are, I would imagine the notice would give them some protection against the "aiding & abetting" accusation. But you're right; actions do matter more. And they're not taking steps to block infringing torrents (because I'm sure we both understand that such steps would take an ungodly amount of the owners' time, and would ultimately be futile anyway), but they're also not encouraging infringement or profiting from it. This makes me see OBT as a "dumb" tracker, sort of like how BitTorrent itself is a "dumb" protocol for file transfer. Its purpose is to move the files, not to care about what the files are.

Re:OBT is not breaking any laws

[daveime]

Mod parent up.

You might as well accuse any node on the series of hops between your computer and the "dirty file-sharing bastard" who is actually seeding the file, of copyright infringement.

Request = I am looking for X. Response = X is located here, here and here.

It's a protocol router, nothing more or less than say the DNS system, or an indexing service like Google.

This nonsense that "they know they are infringing because they can read the filenames" is just that ... nonsense.

The next version of popular torrent software should think about hashing the file names also ... then the only request / response passing through the tracker will be "Hash 0x345fed017 is located at IP 1.2.3.4".

Try proving that a one-way hash of a filename is "infringing", and that the tracker can do anything about "taking it down".

Re:OBT is not breaking any laws

[X0563511]

Actually it's closer to this:

Bob hands Charlie a note written in Spanish, and asks him to hand it to Sue.. Charlie can't read Spanish, but before accepting notes Charlie did ask that they not use him to talk about blowing up the White House. Charlie hands the note to Sue, and hands the return message back to Bob.

Keep in mind, this whole time, Charlie can't read Spanish. Turns out, the notes were bomb-plot arranging.

So, is Charlie really at fault or otherwise responsible for the contents of said note? I think that, upon demonstration of Charlies request, and demonstration of Charlies lack of Spanish literacy, he would be found innocent.

So. Change "note" to "bittorrent tracker data," and "bomb plot" to "copyrighted material." Oh shit! Charlies in big trouble now!!

Re:OBT is not breaking any laws

[PopeRatzo]

about blowing up the White House

So far, we've had hosting a bittorrent tracker compared to murder and blowing up the White House.

Can we have a little perspective please? We're talking about sharing pop music and shitty hollywood movies, for god's sake. It's the equivalent of a kid sneaking into the circus, not capital crimes.

The fact that countries are being bullied into giving up their sovereignty by a bunch of greasy lawyers for the entertainment industry is a travesty.

Re:OBT is not breaking any laws

[icebraining]

Do torrent sites publish the hash in the HTML page? I've never saw it. If they don't, you'd have to download every torrent file, index them and then search the hashes, which is way more effort than "not looking away".

Re:OBT is not breaking any laws

[snowgirl]

You have the right to be left alone as long as you're not doing anything illegal. If the Bittorrent tracker operators do not themselves break the law, their identity is nobody's business.

Actually... you kind of don't. You can still be subpoenaed for information that you might have regarding a crime/tort.

Example: you are renting a house from a home owner, and you have a guest over. This guest goes next door and damages a neighbor's rose plant. That neighbor wishes to sue this individual, but they don't know who the person is. Not only that, but they don't really know who you are. They get property records, and discover who the landlord is. They are allowed to open a suit against the John Doe, subpoena the landlord to find out your identity, so that they may subpoena you, so that they may learn the guest's identity.

Come on

[KarlIsNotMyName]

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.

Re:Come on

[etnoy]

We're still pretty cool. I don't think any other country has such a debate around intellectual property and YRO as ours. Also remember that the Pirate Party movement, that now involves dozens of countries all around the globe, started in Sweden. We're putting these issues on the agenda, and people are gradually realizing the ridiculousness of, among many other things, the *IAA mafia.

Re:Come on

[Securityemo]

You don't realize how, well "Lawful" (for a lack of a better word) Swedish society is. This is both a blessing and a curse.

Re:Come on

[Opportunist]

This is not sense, logic, reason or "what's good".

This is Spar... I mean, this is the law!

Re:Come on

[Aladrin]

First off: Unions have their place. In certain situations, they are necessary to prevent a lot of atrocious behavior.

Having said that, very few unions are worthwhile these days. Most of them just exist to make sure people get more wages than their work is worth. They even out the good and back workers as well, making sure that nobody can get ahead for doing a good job and guaranteeing that nobody works extra hard because of it.

California is the only place I have lived that actually needs unions still. The attitude of employers out there is astonishing. They seem to think that anything they can get away with is acceptable. Unions keep them in check.

Re:Come on

[Zironic]

There is no DMCA safe harbor because there is no DMCA equivalent law and there is fair use, could you please atleast glance at the Swedish IP law before spouting off misinformation? (Fair Use in Sweden is almost exactly the same as in the US, you can make copies of anything you own, you can share with friends and family etc)

Re:Come on

[Anonymous Coward]

I think its more about half the budget being for one actor then anything else.

Re:Come on

[mpe]

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.

Given the strange accounting practices in Hollywood it's incredible that anyone has the slightest idea which movies make a profit and which make a loss.

Re:Come on

[91degrees]

And what was the defence doing all this time?

Suggesting that Hollywood were bribing judges is a serious allegation. I submit that TPB simply had incompetent representation.

Re:it's not the justice...

[xerent_sweden]

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.

Re:it's not the justice...

[snowgirl]

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...

Re:it's not the justice...

[Anonymous Coward]

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 ...

You can stop the madness.

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.piratpartiet.se/donate

Re:it's not the justice...

[Jurily]

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.

The Reason for This Subpoena

[lacoronus]

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.

Inevietable

[IgnoramusMaximus]

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.

Re:Inevietable

[IgnoramusMaximus]

Both of which are after-thought, duct-tape-and-chewing-gum add ons which are incompatible between clients and which suffer from all sorts of swarm fragmentation issues and other flaws brought on by severe deficiencies of the BitTorrent protocol in this area.

BitTorrent was not designed to support such functionality and even with these desperate modifications it is still way behind on other features, such as anonymizing routing, store encryption, steganography etc. In fact by the time you get BitTorrent to do all these things, it won't be BitTorrent anymore but a poor approximation of one of the P2P protocols I mentioned earlier.

Clear answer is of course a P2P protocol that was designed with all of these things in mind from ground-up, i.e. a protocol that assumes a severely hostile environment.

Re:Inevietable

[IgnoramusMaximus]

I'm not sure, as time progresses more and more people I know are moving away from BitTorrent due to these actions, but not to more decentralised protocols, but to less decentralised services such as rapidshare, etc...

It will last only as long the copyright crusaders take their time to get around to targeting the Rapidshares of the world. Once they go after these sites and after a few spectacular 20-year prison convictions for some of their owners, that loophole will disappear as well. Just a matter of time.

I personally don't understand why. It's like a massive step back, even worse than going to back to FTP due to all the restrictions unless you pay to be a "premium" member. Not to mention that it's even more centralised than before, it makes no sense to me.

The truth is that most Internet users are technological illiterates and on top of that suffer from a severe case of herd mentality. They simply click on all of these "Direct Download 100x Faster!!!" ad links and then tell all their friends about these wondrous "new" ways of "getting stuff". It will take a few well-televised prosecutions of some downloader scapegoats (who all believe themselves to be immune because "downloading" is not "breaking copyright") to put that to rest.

Re:Inevietable

[IgnoramusMaximus]

I doubt we'll see those features in consumer p2p applications because they'll probably make the speed suck..

Will see? Winny, Share and PerfectDark are fairly old systems that dominate the Japanese P2P scene for many years now. All of them have the features I mentioned, in addition to built-in bulletin-boards, message streams and what not.

Speed problems in the USA and many other places have nothing whatsoever to do with these protocols, but everything to so with pathetic broadband services. BitTorrent is "faster" then older P2P technologies only because it was introduced later when broadband became more available and the general public, in its usual brainless way, decided that BitTorrent was somehow responsible for their perceived speed increase.

In fact BitTorrent has no speed advantage whatsoever when compared to many other P2P protocols, many of them based on exactly the same idea of dividing files into chunks and exchanging them individually.

Re:it's not the justice...

[PopeRatzo]

Copyright infringement is a criminal offense in Sweden

There's your problem, right there.

will appeal

[JackSpratts]

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.

Re:will appeal

[JackSpratts]

warning: nuances ahead

they may be convinced that casual personal copyright infringing, even when nearly everyone's doing it, doesn't present a threat to society so grave the "remedy" requires eroding personal civil liberties.

end of nuances

- js.

Re:it's not the justice...

[aliquis]

There's your problem, right there.

... on the other hand our sentences isn't decided on who's got the most money.

shredding?

[zmollusc]

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' ?