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MPAA Sues Hotfile for 'Staggering' Copyright Infringement
The lawsuit, filed by the MPAA against Hotfile, is on behalf of 20th Century Fox, Universal Studios, Columbia Pictures, and Warner Brothers. "The MPAA argues that Hotfile not only encourages its users to upload illegal content, but actively discourages them from uploading files for personal use, because the site offers incentives for users to upload the most popular files (which invariably end up being copyrighted movies). And because the site charges membership fees before people can download the content uploaded by others, the MPAA says Hotfile 'profits richly while paying nothing to the studios' for the bootleg files."
I don't want to support what you're doing but, charging to download other people's IP that you have no rights to is so horribly stupid.
What the hell was HotFile thinking? At least no one's profiting off of P2P(well, as far as I know, the developers behind Bittorrent and clients aren't) of IP.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
the site offers incentives for users to upload the most popular files (which invariably end up being copyrighted movies).
I don't think Hotfile should be held liable for its users' poor taste.
It's one of the few, perhaps the first plausible claim I've heard from the MAFIAA. They've still got a lot of work to do to prove it, but it's at least a plausible claim.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
i dont know these people who use words like 'staggering', 'shocking', 'outrageous' etc while describing things like these think that they can fool the public into buying their word through that wordage still.
its 21st century. not 19th. pretty much everyone knows that the only one 'staggered' with situations like these, are private interests or governments catering to them.
so its pointless to attempt portraying a self-interest, public-enemy move as something positive and socially acceptable. they should just cut to the chase.
Read radical news here
When a bank robber drives to the bank he is going to stick up no one suggests banning driving or suing the road designer; how is this any different?
The difference is that the site's incentive structure actively discourages noninfringing use, unlike roads and automobiles whose design generally does not discourage noncriminal use. Copyright has a long-established doctrine of secondary liability. If the maker of a product or service knows that infringement is occurring using the product or service, and the product or service has no substantial noninfringing use, the maker of the product or service is a contributory infringer. If the maker of a product or service profits from infringing use that it has power to prevent, the maker of the product or service is a vicarious infringer.
private interests or governments catering to them
Of course governments cater to the private interests that control the means by which legislators are elected. MPAA studios' parent companies own the major TV news outlets.
They have a DMCA form for copyright holders to use. If the MPAA doesn't wanna use it, tough shit. It's why the safe harbor clause exists. They have a way to get the files taken down, and are choosing not use it and instead are doing an end run around the law plain and simple.
Did they somehow miss what has happened to every other site that has attempted to use that same business model over the the past several years? Am I missing something or is this kind of like jumping off a boat to go for a swim after a shark has just devoured every other member of your party that got in before you?
Eh, isn't your ISP profiting off P2P, especially if you have some form of usage-based billing, or are paying extra for higher speed and/or transfer cap?
As for the "must pay to download", it's blatant bullshit -- all these sites (hotfile, rapidshare, megaupload, and a host of others) offer basic service for free and charge more for premium -- typically free users get something like 1 download at a time, 30-60 seconds staring at ads before you can start a download, and maybe a 1GB/hour download limit. If you pay for a membership, you get fewer or no ads, no delays, and greatly relaxed limits on downloading.
Using bittorrent, where your download bandwidth is provided by some other bittorrent user's upload bandwidth, everyone only sees bandwidth on the order of one file. Here you're downloading from a server farm, which sees the aggregate load of all downloaders -- and that has to be paid for somehow. You're not paying for the content, you're paying for (or watching ads to pay for) transport -- all the "xxxx should be treated like a common carrier" arguments apply here.
And, like bittorrent, there are legitimate uses -- I've seen some open-source software distributed this way (little scripts where the author didn't have a web server), and one Android tablet has even got official firmware updates from the manufacturer via rapidshare.
"the site charges membership fees before people can download the content uploaded by others" I got to call bullsh*t on that... Without registering, I could download Ubuntu Maverick Meerkat from hotfile.com: http://www.google.com/search?q=http://hotfile.com/dl/65769082/cd84b25/Ubuntu.10.10.i386.part1.rar.html
The MPAA has found the solution to all kinds of crime!
Instead of going after individual perpetrators we should instead go after the post office because the post office allows people to exchange everything from child porn to music discs and does nothing to discourage it!
Complying with DMCA notices isn't really sufficient. The EFF has a pretty good analysis of the status quo of US copyright law: https://www.eff.org/wp/iaal-what-peer-peer-developers-need-know-about-copyright-law
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
So what's the solution? Content verification won't work: file sharers already encrypt it using passworded rars. So what do you propose? Banning any kind of file hosting service?
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your argument is not even remotely on center. Hotfile is a storage locker. They are paying for the bandwidth in advance and just charging users to use it.
This has nothing to do with IP or even copyright infringement for that matter. Additionally, the lawsuit here is another of MPAA's "we hope the judge is a technology moron" lawsuit.
It's not Hotfile's job to give two shits what is on their website, and it's also not their job to watch or monitor it for illegal or other activities. Section 230 among others covers them from that in it's entirety.
I've also seen more than one open source software distributed this way, but it's not really relevant, unless they only make a profit on open-source software.
My ISP isn't directly profiting by this, any more than AT&T, my telephone provider (protected monopolist) is. Any use that I might have for Hotfile is indirect, in respect to my ISP, or AT&T. If I download a movie (I won't and wouldn't) any profits or the phone company or my ISP are distinctly indirect. Hotfile, however, is making a direct profit, assuming that they're profitable.
When a bank robber drives to the bank he is going to stick up no one suggests banning driving or suing the road designer; how is this any different?
The difference is that the site's incentive structure actively discourages noninfringing use, unlike roads and automobiles whose design generally does not discourage noncriminal use. Copyright has a long-established doctrine of secondary liability. If the maker of a product or service knows that infringement is occurring using the product or service, and the product or service has no substantial noninfringing use, the maker of the product or service is a contributory infringer. If the maker of a product or service profits from infringing use that it has power to prevent, the maker of the product or service is a vicarious infringer.
Remember when Sony was sued for helping people infringe copyright by selling Betamax VCRs?
The "Beta can be used to make illegal copies" lawsuit alerted more people that such could be done and Sony sold a bit more units because of this newly publicised use-case.
Lets not kid ourselves, Betamax cassettes were primarily used to "pirate" TV or other cassettes; Sony knew this hence: double cassette "duplication" models, models with timed recording settings, etc.
So, Universal sues Sony -- Sony Inc. v Universal Studios:
The Court's 5-4 ruling to reverse the Ninth Circuit in favor of Sony hinged on the possibility that the technology in question had significant non-infringing uses, and that the plaintiffs were unable to prove otherwise.
On the question of whether Sony could be described as "contributing" to copyright infringement, the Court stated:
[There must be] a balance between a copyright holder's legitimate demand for effective - not merely symbolic - protection of the statutory monopoly, and the rights of others freely to engage in substantially unrelated areas of commerce. Accordingly, the sale of copying equipment, like the sale of other articles of commerce, does not constitute contributory infringement if the product is widely used for legitimate, unobjectionable purposes. Indeed, it need merely be capable of substantial noninfringing uses....
(emphasis mine)
So, WTF, file sharing services meet the qualification of merely being capable of substantial noninfringing uses.
It's amazing how X on a Computer or X on the Internet somehow requires a whole new legal precedent rather than just X on a cassette or CD.
Ignorant judges and jurors are the main cause of my copyright rage today... It's quite simple to understand, yet blows my mind on a regular basis just how ignorant the general public (including courts) are about such things.
File sharing technology much like Sony, has made available something that could help people infringe copyright; In neither case does the file sharing site or Sony's Betamax cassettes require that the users infringe copyright. If someone does infringe copyright using a file sharing service, Bittorrent search site, or a Betamax cassette then you don't hold the creator of the tools in use responsible.
Hint: Betamax cassettes, blank CDs, blank DVDs, Flash USB drives, magnetic hard drives, the Internet, file sharing protocols & websites -- All these things havesubstantial noninfringing uses. The DMCA exists, if the MPAA issuing take-down notices and the hosts are not removing the content, they lose safe harbor and may be culpable. Simply charging for a service (or for Betamax cassettes) which can be used to commit copyright infringement, does not imply contributory infringement.
As far as I can tell, the DMCA does not protect Hotfile with the safe harbor clause. The safe harbor clause gets voided when you directly profit off of the infringement.
Hotfile doesn't directly profit from the infringement -- i.e., they aren't selling you copies of movies. They charge you for access to their system. What you do with that access is none of their concern. If people are uploading improper content then send Hotfile a DMCA takedown notice.
Hotfile is no more "directly profiting" than Youtube, which makes many millions of dollars every year. When Viacom tried to sue Youtube they lost because Youtube demonstrated that they have a policy in place to properly deal with DMCA takedown notices. As long as Hotfile takes stuff down when notified of infringement then I see no difference between them and Youtube.
So Pirate Bay is registered as a non-profit and has open books that are freely auditable?
What difference does that make? I don't have to register as a non-profit to not make money.
Sure, it's all speculation, but I agree with the GP that between operating the site and paying lawyers and other professionals, there's probably not a lot of profit in running the Pirate Bay.
Breakfast served all day!
The service (Google search) has no substantial noninfringing use
For one thing, Google Search and Google Image Search don't have an incentive structure with the effect of deterring noninfringing use. I use Google every day to search for documents on the web that aren't obvious infringements, as do millions of other U.S. residents. For another, Google can claim safe harbor because it responds swiftly to OCILLA notices from copyright owners.
Heck you can go even further and sue Google Videos for copyright infringing video
MPAA member Viacom tried that and lost due to Google's OCILLA safe harbor.
Hi MR AC! While I agree with most of what you are saying, the big "uh oh" that Hotfile did was this: they reward popular uploaders which kinda blows all your other arguments out of the water. Because by doing that they aren't just "charging for the bandwidth" they are actively encouraging people to upload...well...hot files.
Because doing so gets them bonuses they otherwise wouldn't get if they uploaded legal files because those Linux ISO or tunes of your band will NEVER get even a fiftieth of the hits say the latest HD Rip will get. It's just common sense.
So I'd say THAT is the line where they screwed up and will probably get bit in the ass. With the others IIRC the only "rewards" are for buying a membership which just as you say pays for more bandwidth and can be easily explained as such. But by rewarding those that upload popular files simply for that reason? Well THAT was some kind of stupid.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
ISPs make money selling bandwidth, file hosts make money from advertising, most usenet servers charge a subscription fee. There's nothing inherently wrong about offering a commercial service, even if you know a significant portion of your users will pirate.
What you don't get to do is cater specifically to that use or encourage piracy, which is what they may run afoul of here. That said the arguments aren't exactly watertight. For example imagine if YouTube had a profit split model where the uploaders got part of the ad revenue. You might say that'd encourage piracy, but you might also argue it's an incentive to create popular content. That people upload pirated material is not as such a fault of the model.
No doubt they're in the gray area of the law, but as long as there's money in it companies will test those limits. What we do know is that RapidShare is legal and Grokster was illegal. Hotfile is floating somewhere in between, either way we're likely to see another precision of what you can do and not.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I'm obviously going against the mob here, but i think Hotfile.com is just a GENERAL service provider... No more responsible for "copyright infringement" than your ISP.
I personally don't think they deliberately set out to achieve "staggering copyright infringement", just like I don't think the guys who hacked together the first BitTorrent client and tracker, the first Gnutella servent, and the first 'Internet' were "out-and-out" encouraging copyright infringement (well, at least publicly... I certainly can't speak for their personal views.) I think the coolness of these technologies speaks for itself, and I for one have used ALL of them for copyright-irrelevant tasks, Hotfile included, and was glad to have them. I don't think anyone would sue the inventors of the Internet for "staggering copyright infringement" because of the irrefutable FACT that a LARGE portion of the content available on it infringes someones's copyright. But maybe I'm wrong... Maybe that's the next step. (Heads up guys...)
FWIW, Hotfile.com has a usage policy forbidding illegal uses (of course), INCLUDING copyright infringement (of course), and an easy-to-find DMCA-takedown page (of course; 2 clicks in, at http://hotfile.com/reportabuse.html). How else is the Internet supposed to work?
The truth of the matter is that the people USING Hotfile.com are uploading copy-written content, not (to my knowledge) the operators. This fact stands in stark contrast to the general consensus here, and the obvious paradox leads (me at least) to some interesting conclusions. One is that people (here, there, and everywhere) are incredibly two-faced about the whole situation, and another is that people are glad to have a commercial scapegoat to take the heat.
Looked in a mirror lately?
people are constantly stealing their content and then slamming them for protecting it.
The movie studios are notorious for taking from the commons without giving back. Walt Disney Pictures especially is known for adapting films, often right after they go out of copyright (such as Pinocchio and The Jungle Book), and then closing the barn door behind it by not only successfully lobbying for successive legislative extensions of the term of copyright in all works published during the existence of the company but also acting like it owns the original work and harassing smaller studios that make their own adaptations. Case in point: Disney owns a trademark on "Pinocchio" for dolls, so good luck selling toys based on your own film adaptation of Collodi's novel. Disney has also sued GoodTimes Entertainment over "trade dress" rights in the packaging of its direct-to-video adaptations of the same stories that Disney had adapted.
Publishers of proprietary computer programs such as Apple also own copyrights. But some Slashdot users have a better view of Apple and tolerate its action to defend its copyright in Mac OS X (Apple v. Psystar) in part because Apple does charitable work by contributing to Darwin, WebKit, and select other free software projects. If the major record labels and major motion picture studios were to do some analogous pro bono work* by releasing some of their back catalog under a license for free cultural works, Slashdot users might have a better opinion of them.
* That's pro bono, not pro-Bono.
Well, this is a little more like suing a limo company that specialises in clients who walk out of banks with bags of money, wearing masks and waving guns around...
Why not go for a more realistic example. Most car manufacturers sell vehicles capable of travelling well over the maximum speed limit on public roads and yet I have yet to see one of them being successfully sued for encouraging drivers to speed. Of course technically you could use them to drive at high speeds on private roads but the overwhelming use of the vehicles is on public roads where they cannot exceed $LEGAL_MAX m/s.
It seems that this is exactly like Hotfile: you can use the service to share legal files but the overwhelming use is to share illegal files. The only difference is that big corporations gain from selling fast cars but lose when people share files.
Question: What does a service provider have to do in order to qualify for safe harbor protection?
Answer: In addition to informing its customers of its policies (discussed above), a service provider must follow the proper notice and takedown procedures (discussed above) and also meet several other requirements in order to qualify for exemption under the safe harbor provisions. ...
Finally, the service provider must not have knowledge that the material or activity is infringing or of the fact that the infringing material exists on its network. [512(c)(1)(A)], [512(d)(1)(A)].
If it does discover such material before being contacted by the copyright owners, it is instructed to remove, or disable access to, the material itself. [512(c)(1)(A)(iii)], [512(d)(1)(C)].
The service provider must not gain any financial benefit that is attributable to the infringing material. [512(c)(1)(B)], [512(d)(2)].
Question: What is third-party liability, also known as "secondary liability"?
Answer: The concept of third party liability refers, as the name implies, to situations in which responsibility for harm can be placed on a party in addition to the one that actually caused the injury. The most common example comes from tort law: a customer in a grocery store drops a bottle of wine and another customer slips on the puddle and injures himself; he may bring an action for negligence against the customer who dropped the bottle and against the owner of the grocery store. Under the common law doctrine of third-party liability, a plaintiff must show not only that an injury actually occurred, but also (in most cases) that some sort of connection existed between the third party and the person who actually caused the injury.
As such the concept of third-party liability is often divided into two different types: contributory infringement and vicarious liability.
Typically, contributory infringement exists when the third party either assists in the commission of the act which causes the injury, or simply induces the primary party to do so commit the act which caused the injury.
Vicarious liability often requires the third party to have exerted some form of control over the primary party's actions.
In copyright law, vicarious liability may be established if the third party had the "right and ability to control" the infringer's activities, and if the third party received some financial benefit from the acts of infringement.
Frequently Asked Questions (And Answers) about DMCA Safe Harbor
If you know you are hosting infringing content and do nothing about it you are dead.
You can't let things slide until someone rats you out.
If you are aiding the infringer in any way - or rewarding him for posting infringing content - you are dead. If you penalize the legitimate content provider you are dead.
If you are making money on the infringement you are dead.
hotfile is selling additional bandwidth & less hassle to access any content on their servers. this includes the plethora of legitimate software on their servers. they aren't selling access to the files (which are freely available on their servers with a small wait) any more than your isp is selling you access to the files by giving you higher broadband speeds.
Reading the brief they've filed, it's pretty apparent that they're stretching quite a ways. The only evidence of HotFile encouraging users to upload pirated content to their servers is that HotFile encourages users to upload files which are a) heavily downloaded by others and b) large. The MPAA is asking the courts to assume that large, heavily-downloaded files must be illegal content. They make a big deal in their brief of being scandalized by the fact that HotFile is not a service for people to store their own files, as if that's the only legal thing that a website which allows people to upload files can be. That might somehow bolster their case if HotFile was claiming to be an on-line locker service, but there's no reason to believe that they will make any such claim. The MPAA also accuse HotFile of having, prepare to be shocked, an affiliate program.
It's not just that the brief they've filed doesn't contain a smoking gun: it doesn't even assert that one exists. They're accusing HotFile of being what it is: a site which facilitates the distribution of large files to a wide audience and asking the courts to declare any site which does that to automatically be illegal despite full compliance with the DMCA and no evidence that they induced users to engage in piracy. I certainly hope that the courts don't do that because it would set a terrible precedent and effectively rewrite the law to amend the safe harbor clause of the DMCA to say "except for big files which a lot of people download because those must be pirated".
Mostly, though, what all this shows is that the *AA groups are going to have to reach farther and farther. They pretty much got to write the DMCA, but now it turns out that even it doesn't go far enough for them. The problem is that they didn't foresee that sites like HotFile (ad/subscription-supported large-file distribution sites which are completely content-ignorant and have no search or index mechanism) could exist. Now that they do, they want them gone. The reason that these sites can exist and be profitable is that bandwidth and storage costs have fallen so low that a peer-to-peer model is no longer necessary. As bandwidth and storage gets cheaper and cheaper, newer types of sites will be used for piracy too. Next will probably be sites which allow you to host your own blog or other website. As storage becomes cheaper, their maximum allowed file size will reach a point where you can slap a movie up on your blog without violating the maximum file size. Once that happens, the MPAA is going to want those sites gone too. Any site or program which allows ordinary, anonymous users to host and distribute large files (for some definition of large), is going to be on their hit list.
I'm no particular fan of piracy, but you can't remove the sites which allow people to distribute pirated files for free without also removing the sites which allow artists to distribute their own albums and music videos for free because those are the same sites. The long-range eventuality of the plan the MPAA is following will be a total lock-down on any means of widely distributing large files. That's too high a price to pay for stamping out piracy.
Linux ISOs. No, wait....
But seriously, this is where the difference between per se and per quod comes in. Giving bonuses for illegal movie downloads is infringement per se, but giving bonuses for popular downloads that turn out to be illegal downloads is infringement per quod. It isn't illegal on the face, but it might be illegal in light of extrinsic information---specifically the fact that the vast majority of popular downloads are illegal. The MPAA should have a hard time proving this, or at least one would hope so. That said, it's not remotely airtight.
I'd expect there to be at least some popular downloads that are non-infringing. That said, most of those are likely to be flash-in-the-pan popular---a bright flash, then squat. For example, if someone posts a game mod through that service, it could be non-infringing (depending on whether the "derivative works" issue bites the author, and on whether the original game publisher cares enough to press the issue), but that traffic would rapidly die down after the few dozen hardcore gamers on a particular site have all downloaded it.
To that end, long-term popular downloads should be treated as suspect, and I have a hard time believing that any sysadmin would be so naive that he or she wouldn't realize this. That's why the MPAA might actually have a case.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
No doubt they're in the gray area of the law, but as long as there's money in it companies will test those limits. What we do know is that RapidShare is legal and Grokster was illegal. Hotfile is floating somewhere in between, either way we're likely to see another precision of what you can do and not.
I've used the free versions of both RapidShare and Hotfiles and they seemed pretty much the same to me. Are the paid versions so different that Hotfiles is breaking the law but RapidShare isn't? I just assumed that all of these sites operated the same way...
That explains why people always look so confused when a baseball player steals a base, or a lover steals a kiss, or a plagarist stole someone's idea, or a cute girl stole their heart, or a blowhard stole their thunder, etc. Because the FIRST THING people think of when they hear steal is "loss of previously owned property". No, the only people who have (or claim to have) any trouble at all understanding what steal means are morons who try to pretend that copyright infringement ISN'T stealing.
There's no legal aspect to stealing bases in baseball, or stealing a kiss in love, etc. But on the other hand, if someone said that my lighting a cigarette in an area where smoking was prohibited was arson, I think it would be perfectly acceptable to point out how that's wrong. Before I went to law school and learned about it, I once annoyed a policeman by using robbery and burglary as synonyms. Which they're not, and in any case, neither described the circumstances anyway.
I'm sure most of the people here find it at least a little irksome when they hear people call a monitor a computer, and a CPU a hard disk. Or when a person says that not having enough RAM requires deleting files from a drive. At the very least it tends to expose the person using those terms incorrectly as someone who just doesn't know much about computers, and who shouldn't be treated as a knowledgeable user.
Copyright infringement is a legal issue; 'stealing' is a different one. They're not the same, they're not even vaguely similar. The histories, the policies, the elements of the offense, the defenses -- they're all very, very different.
Calling infringement by loaded terms like theft or stealing doesn't help conversations. It's just an inarticulate slur. If you're interested in having an honest discussion about copyright, it won't harm you to use the proper terminology. Unless you have no real argument, and just want to stir up unthinking passions. If that's the case, why call it stealing? Call it murder or terrorism or something; still inaccurate, but you get more of a punch.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Just in case the above loses some people, here's an analogy:
Hotfile is like a club owner who charges an entrance fee to get in his club where he knows that illegal drug trades are taking place, but he gives the drug traders free drinks because he knows they bring in more customers (people who pay the entrance fee). Technically, the owner's not trading drugs, but they are fostering a climate that lends to drug deals, and profiting off that climate.
TPB is like a billboard owner who puts up an electric eye (IR beam) to measure traffic flow and puts up billboards in the area, charging based on the pedestrian traffic. Who knows what the pedestrians are doing? Maybe it's illegal, maybe it's legal. That's between them and the cops. The billboard owner makes money from the advertisers.
You asked. I answer. Pull up a chair, lad, it's story-telling time:
Once upon a time, there was a company called 3dfx. They made video cards, the first of their kind, with all kinds of gee-whiz video acceleration.
Now, along comes nVidia. Their first few 3D chipsets sucked, but later on, they grew up and made real competitors to the 3dfx line.
Eventually, 3dfx was bought by nVidia.
And, it just happened that the weekend after this, I was at a small LAN party with my PC.
3dfx's website was gone. No 404, no response, no nothing. nVidia didn't mirror anything. And I, of course, needed drivers for my 3dfx Voodoo3 2000.
Every. Single. Fucking. Link. From. Every. Single. Fucking. Web page. was a dead link to 3dfx's defunct site. So, there simply weren't any drivers to be found. I didn't even know, yet, that 3dfx had been bought out: I failed miserably at playing games that weekend, despite my keen sense of Internet-fu and the help of the fellow geeks around me.
Some time later, an ad-hoc support structure of hobbyists began providing 3dfx drivers, but that was far too late.
In addition, 3dfx's sudden demise abolished what was left of STB's drivers and documentation. See, sometime before all of the above, 3dfx bought STB, who used to make a variety of different add-on cards for PCs, including video adapters and other stuff.
I have here, somewhere, an STB I/O card which is completely inoperable. Why? While 3dfx did keep STB's old support site alive, nVidia flushed the whole lot. This, despite written, personal assurance from a pre-3dfx STB that they'd keep the old information online indefinitely. The information is simply lost to time, which is plainly fucking retarded.
And don't get me started on the X-Fi card in my desktop. It's an OEM variant that, while quite good and versatile, was never sold separately. Instead, it only came in (IIRC) some Dell, Alienware, and HP machines -- I haven't even seen it for sale in the white-box OEM market.
Creative Labs, in their infinite wisdom, will not let you install software items that have been downloaded from their website unless you already have that software installed (can you spot the glaringly-obvious Catch-22?). Alienware, in their own infinite wisdom, packaged a bad driver disk with the system, wherein the X-Fi drivers and software were both broken and did not match those that were pre-installed with the default load of Windows. And both Dell and HP seem to ignore the fact that the card exists at all when it comes to software support.
Now, Alienware does have 32-bit drivers, with a complete and installable suite of software, available for download on their website (unlike Creative Labs). And, lo, they do work. It's a few hundred megs of shit, though, and it's difficult to find (and Google isn't much help except to find other people looking for the same thing, but failing to find it), and much of it doesn't work on a 64-bit system.
I eventually found and downloaded this, and made it all work on my desktop Alienware box after upgrading to 64-bit Windows. And things are good, the Creative Labs update program works well and automatically downloaded and upgraded stuff, and I'm able to stay current with things.
But: Alienware's buried download is the only place the drivers are available from. If/when it vanishes (and it's not so much if as it is when -- see above), it will be gone. I've burned them to CD, of course, but I'm by no means the only person with this card.
So, while currently functional, it's a fragile situation. The next installation of Windows may not be so easy.
Accordingly, having learned from my previous STB/3dfx experiences, I tried to seed the drivers on The Pirate Bay, hoping that TPB's high Pagerank would let others find them easily. I included a good description of how to make them work, what card they were for, and why I was posting it, but they banned my account and nuked the .torrent after a
Kid-proof tablet..
Legal defence in Sweden is paid by the state, and in the parts it wouldn't be, the TPB guys have been without counsel.
Only one defendant in the case, Carl Lundström, has any money and he inherited that money. As his only involvement with TPB seems to have been the donation of some rackspace and bandwidth, it appears likely that the only reason he's been included in the lawsuit at all has been that nobody else has any money.
For example imagine if YouTube had a profit split model where the uploaders got part of the ad revenue.
They do.
It appears from your description that Comcast is prioritising their own 'local' users on P2P protocols - which may be a technique for saving money.
Comcast got in trouble for throttling P2P before, so now regard it as a 'necessary evil'; a service that costs them bandwidth (and thus money) but that their users demand.
As such it's potentially cheaper for them to keep P2P traffic on their own network rather than pay the interconnect fees for traffic to external ISP's.
Any network engineers care to comment on the practice?