Slashdot Mirror
Federal Court Issues Permanent Injunction For Isohunt
suraj.sun writes with this excerpt from NewTeeVee: "Judge Stephen Wilson of the US District Court of California, Southern District, issued a permanent injunction (PDF) against the popular torrent site Isohunt yesterday, forcing the site and its owner Garry Fung to immediately prevent access to virtually all Hollywood movies. The injunction theoretically leaves the door open for the site to deploy a strict filtering system, but its terms are so broad that Isohunt has little choice but to shut down or at the very least block all US visitors. ... The verdict states that they have to cease 'hosting, indexing, linking to, or otherwise providing access to any (torrent) or similar files' that can be used to download the studios' movies and TV shows. Studios have to supply Isohunt with a list of titles of works they own, and Isohunt has to start blocking those torrents within 24 hours."
Wildcard Studios is allowing the MPAA to use the name of their movie "*" in their list of films to block.
The last time I checked, Isohunt was based in Canada as was Garry Fung. And last time I checked, Canada was (not yet) part of the US. Just another arrogant American judge who thinks that the entire world should be subject to US rule and law.
Can someone clue me in to why isohunt was hosting movies/music in the first place?
Because they're they favorite food of isos, and isohunt was luring them in for the kill.
It proves how clueless the geek is about how the law works.
Actually we all know how it works... It's very simple. The law is whatever appointed, corrupt judges say it is... and generally is applied differently to those with wealth and power
It takes a big man to cry, but it takes a bigger man to laugh at that man.
I wonder how much of his traffic is actually from the US.
And how is he supposed to prevent someone from setting up "http://isohunt.mydomain.notus" to just proxy Isohunt so he can anyway get hits on his adverts? If the proxy would siphon off some of the ads for their own income stream, this might be an interesting business model.
Again, this proves just how utterly clueless judges (and politicans) are of how the Internet actually works
Heh...yeah. Those idiots think that torrents actually get used for piracy!..And that its not completely impossible to write a regex to filter out a list of file names. Oh, wait.
And clueless about international borders.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
What country are YOU in? Do laws in OTHER countries apply to YOU when YOU are NOT in those other countries, at all?
Just a friendly tech-support related tip, I think there may be an intermittent issue with your shift or caps lock key. You might want to get that checked out.
Someone should set up a torrent for that.
The American government will have to claim a military state over everywhere they distribute copyrighted content to, to "get this under control".
only when the majority of people in the world are sitting at their computers with an armed guard watching to ensure that each and every one of us is complying with american copyright laws, will they get to maintain their fucking Draconian laws.
at which point, the people getting paid to watch people will begin thinking they're "entitled to a little piracy, as they're the ones enforcing it" and that whole system will fall apart.
which brings us back to the issue at hand. change. continue changing to meet the needs of your people, or stand aside and let somebody else try.
because what you're doing obviously isn't working.
I have to confess, I'm an engineer/scientest not a lawyer*. Can he get an injunction to block enforcement of the previous injunction? Dueling injunctions? My pride is hurt by the America bashing (wouldn't yours be too, if it were your mother counry?), but I feel anger at the wrongness of the situation.
* scientests study nature to learn laws, not just make them up on the spot like lawyers (and mathematicians)
Chaos maximizes locally around me.
Despite rumors that we are ordered to filter by keywords for the US, there's only a proposed order, no actual order.
The isoHunt announcement is dated April 5 Annonucements. The permanent injunction was filed May 20th. isoHunt Permanent Injunction
The court had this to say about its right to act:
The Court further clarifies that this injunction covers any acts
of direct infringement, as defined in 17 U.S.C. 106, that take place
in the United States. To the extent that an act of reproducing,
copying, distributing, performing, or displaying takes place in the
United States, it may violate 17 U.S.C. 106, subject to the generally
applicable requirements and defenses of the Copyright Act.
As
explained in the Court's December 23, 2009 Order, "United States
copyright law does not require that both parties be located in the
United States. Rather, the acts of uploading and downloading are each
independent grounds of copyright infringement liability." Summary
Judgment Order at 19. Each download or upload of Plaintiffs'
copyrighted material violates Plaintiffs' copyrights if even a single
United States-based user is involved in the "swarm" process of
distributing, transmitting, or receiving a portion of a computer file
containing Plaintiffs' copyrighted content.
I messed around with FreeNet once. What a slow piece of junk. Reminded me of the BBS days, but not the good BBS's.. the bad ones.
"His name was James Damore."
Trackers are needed so that the peers can locate each other efficiently. If you're downloading a file, the tracker will tell you who is hosting the various pieces so you can connect to them. Without the tracker your client would have no way to know the IP's which are hosting the file.
It's the same problem that's been present since the early days of P2P. You need to have some hosts which keep an index of the files and the IP addresses of clients which are hosting them. The RIAA can always target these sites.
Torrent trackers are static hosts with large centralized indexes, which means they are fast for clients to query but also can be easily targeted by the RIAA.
FastTrack and Gnutella get around this by offloading the tracker functionality to individual clients with high bandwith (which makes them harder to target). Each query must be forwarded from clients to their trackers, and from their trackers to other tracker nodes, and then the results must be returned the same way. This means it can take a long time for a query to complete as you wait for responses from each node.
There have been some P2P designs which eliminate tracking nodes altogether by having the clients maintain a list of close peers. The clients contact their peers which forward search requests to their list of peers and so on. Every search must be cascaded across many clients and returned from each one, so they are slow. You also must always maintain a good list of peers, or you will end up stranded from the network.
The clash of honour calls, to stand when others fall.
"I don't think piracy will be so widespread for many more years."
Are you that blind that you forget about sneakernet?
Holy shit half of slashdot needs Alzheimer's medication.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
As MLTS has already stated, the *IAA's may be winning a few battles, but they haven't won the war. They'll have to do a lot better to prevent people like me from downloading anything and everything they want to download.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
High income does not equate to wealth and power. Your average IT professional is going to be upper middle class, which is to say prime sheep for fleecing, not wealthy and powerful.
How does isohunt know which torrents are actual movies and which aren't? do they have to download and watch every file? I understand that the studios own the movies, but do they also own filenames?
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
ACTA won't end piracy. Piracy will adapt. These corporate tycoons and their congressional meat puppets are sloppy and naive. So what if IsoHunt blocks all US addresses ? This is the goddamned internet! Proxies. Use them.
Swedish courts can write injunctions until their fingers bleed, it only means people will get their fix elsewhere. TPB can't work on and other "torrent related site" ? Ok, Garry Fung can hire them up here in Canada, at least until they replace Obama with another oil baron to which our P.M. can suck up.
The biggest problem with these unconstitutional laws is they open up opportunities elsewhere. If the U.S., Sweden, or even Canada becomes unlivable for piracy sympathizers, we will find some other place to work our jobs, pay our taxes and live our lives, and there will always be at least one nation that will welcome our money with open arms. Even if that nation is China, if push comes to shove, I'll learn some Mandarin and Cantonese and go help them destroy the west.
Regardless of your stance on piracy itself, at some level you need to take a step back and look at what they're really doing here. If it's not piracy it's drugs, if it's not drugs it's sex, if it's not sex it'll be something else. Underneath it all, these are people who want our money, can't get it via normal means - in other words, they're not selling something we want to buy - so they enact arbitrary laws that force us to give up our money, whether we like it or not. Why is Oxycontin legal if you buy it from this rich guy, but it's a heinous offense if you buy it from this other guy down the street ? Why ? Because the rich guy bribes the congressmen, who bribe the regionals, who bribe the chiefs of police, who tell their lackeys which agenda to push that week. It's not about right vs wrong, it's about who paid for those Audis.
Freedom, they don't like us having it. Pick one thing, anything you hold dear. If there is a financial incentive, they will take it away from you, then sell it back at a premium.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
What's an acceptable price for a steaming pile of shit ? That accounts for 95% of the *IAA's output.
I get that I'm a freak, but I would much rather torrent an album, then send a $20 paypal to the artist if I liked it, than spend $10 at Walmart to buy the same music on disc - and I'm not even tabulating my irrational hatred of Walmart yet. The big problem is that we all know the people who profit off the arts are not the ones responsible for our enjoyment. They are pimps, nobody likes a pimp. No, not even with the fuzzy purple hat and cane. Pimps are parasites, and so is the bulk of the *IAA.
Another example: in recent years I've become highly interested in the local music scene. When I find a band I like, I buy them a round and a copy of their album, or hand them a $10 and ask them to email it to me. Sometimes I help them put up a little web site, pro bono. I like that, no middleman. If it helps them make more of the music I like, great! If they want to spend the money on hookers and blow, that's cool too (call me!). If I was entertained, they deserve to be entertained, that's just how I see it.
You couldn't give me that end-to-end experience in a shrink-wrapped package, or a faceless download on iTunes. Real music fans want to connect with the artists, shoot the shit with them and thank them personally for creating something enjoyable. They don't go to shows to hear the same old music and sing along, otherwise bands wouldn't bother with the stresses of touring, they'd film the set in their backyard and sell DVDs to everyone. Fans go to shows because it's an intimate event, where they might meet & greet the idols, and meet like-minded individuals in the crowd.
Music is a social thing, you can't dumb it down to a number and a dollar sign. That's the most infinitesimally small part of it.
-Billco, Fnarg.com