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Comcast Allegedly Confirms That Prenda Planted Porn Torrents
lightbox32 writes "Porn-trolling operation Prenda Law sued thousands for illegally downloading porn files over BitTorrent. Now, a new document from Comcast appears to confirm suspicions that it was actually Prenda mastermind John Steele who uploaded those files. The allegations about uploading porn to The Pirate Bay to create a 'honeypot' to lure downloaders first became public in June, when an expert report filed by Delvan Neville was filed in a Florida case. The allegations gained steam when The Pirate Bay dug through its own backup tapes to find more evidence linking John Steele to an account called sharkmp4."
The problem for Prenda being that initiating the torrent would give anyone who grabbed it an implied license.
The only thing that would make this any juicier now is if Prenda itself didn't have the rights to distribute that porn.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
." The problem for Prenda being that initiating the torrent would give anyone who grabbed it an implied license.
Good luck using that idea in court.......
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
You may not understand how a torrent works.
In order to "upload the files" there is no passively seeing who downloads them. .torrent file itself isn't illegal.
Downloading a
The torrent file links you to someone who has the files in question, and that person actively uploads them to you.
So what has happened is the copyright holder posted a link to their files on one of their computers, and actively uploaded the files to several users, who in turn uploaded them to more users.
Prenda directly uploaded their copyrighted material to users who requested it. This is not a passive function.
This would be the same if you walked into a store, and the owner pulled a book off the shelf, walked out side and handed it to a stranger.
Said nothing, and walked back inside. Then phoned the police and said you didn't have permission to have that book from their store.
Prenda, should they have done this, circumvented all password and user functions to protect their content, and uploaded it freely to those who requested it.
It would be like if you fell on a webpage looking for content, and it started playing in the video box, then they sued you for not signing in / paying for their content.
They settled so fast out of court is was not even slightly funny.
Marvel essentially tried to sue City of Heroes out of existence because of its character creator. Then their lawyers decided to get cute and made their own characters with Marvel's IP. (I think it was Hulk, Captain America and a couple others).
The City of Heroes creators proved this and Marvel suddenly settled out of court in a sealed contract.
No! It's a *SIG*. Keep the Special Interest Groups away! (Con joke!)
You can find a copy of the actual Comcast letter here.
For background :-
It's ironic that the method copyright trolls like to abuse, namely linking IP addresses to alleged infringers is now being used against them in this case.
As for your "good luck" comment, the same point was raised in the Viacom International Inc. v. YouTube, Inc. lawsuit. Specifically, Google claimed that:-
Although summary judgment was granted to Google on other grounds, I'd say this argument has at least a fair chance of success.
I mean it makes perfect sense to me as a person that a possible legal defense could be, "Well if they didn't want us to have it they wouldn't have sat there and uploaded it to us." But in copyright law they're within their legal rights to do what they did. Enter the world of licensing.
Yes, they're within their rights to upload a self-replicating copy to the cloud -- but that's the important bit: self-replicating. They actively made it available in a form they knew would spread.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
The issue with copyright infringement is that it's copying without permission. If I buy it in a store, I have explicit permission. If I buy it off a sale rack in a store, I have explicit permission. If I buy a stolen copy off the back of a truck in the parking lot, I don't have permission. Now, if I were to buy it off a truck in the parking lot, but that truck is run by the store, I have explicit permission no different than if I bought it off the sale rack. The only difference is that it's being claimed that if I didn't know the truck was affiliated with the store, they can revoke the explicit permission they gave to me. I would claim that estoppel applies. Permission to seed the torrent was given no differently than when I'm absolved of copyright infringement against Activision when my battle.net client is in P2P mode. They started the share and directed me to it. I'm merely participating in what they already started.
Learn to love Alaska
Actually, the supreme court just ruled otherwise for someone who was doing this with textbooks. Google can give you more details, but basically Person A bought textbooks in mass quantities from out of country, imported them in, and then proceeded to sell at a "discount" to the ones available here for a nice profit.
It's more like offering to sell watches in a dark alley for prices and under circumstances that should make anyone believe that the books are stolen, but actually they are not stolen. Which still shouldn't be illegal, I would think, but it's less innocent than your scenarios.
Receiving stolen goods requires that the goods be actually stolen, in addition to obviously being so. If they are obviously stolen, but not in fact stolen, then it isn't receiving stolen property. The same should apply here. They may single out the downloaders and complain about it, but as they gave it away for free, they can't turn around and sue someone for accepting something they were legally given.
Learn to love Alaska
I'm not sure the Viacom situation applies. Legally Viacom would have been well within its rights to upload a clip, then demand YouTube take down an identical clip uploaded by a user, it's their content.
When you hit the upload button, you also agree to some terms... Google give you the ability to login with the user that uploaded the video and remove it.
But if you file a DMCA take-down notice, and/or sue over it, that's probably abuse of the legal system. Considering that the upload terms explicitly grants Google a license to the work (probably an irrevocable licence).
*as you haven't contravened
"The true measure of a person is how they act when they know they won't get caught." - DSRilk
Prenda voluntarily chose to use bittorrent as a method of distribution. This means that they themselves approved of the method and the inherited consequences of distributing content via bittorrent. Not only that, but they made the content easy to find, by posting on well known file sharing websites like TPB. By all means, they wanted people to download this, without even giving them a proper payment method, let alone telling them that the content was copyrighted before they downloaded or simply forbidding downloading before payments were made. This inherently means, that they were knowingly giving away the content for free and promoting this free give-away.
If a fake (police) prostitute is being approached and asked to sell sex for money, the john is committing a crime (in most states/countries). If the same fake prostitute was giving away free blowjobs and advertising this loudly, and later on was claiming that people didn't pay for it and they were committing a crime for a going to a prostitute, I doubt any judge would have to think long about who's guilty here.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Except, with torrenting, you're distributing without authorization.
Torrenting does not amount to "distributing without authorization." Here's a motion picture that was distributed through torrenting by its author from the get go:
http://www.sitasingstheblues.com/
When I torrented it, I did not distribute it without authorization! And I'd expect posters on this site to know that Linux distros are distributed by torrenting, again, with authorization.
I know that the RIAA, MPAA and their ilk want everybody and their brother to believe that torrent == illegal but we should not swallow their bullshit.
IANAL, but, very wrong.
All "creative" works (music scores, music lyrics, movies, TV episodes, static images, on whatever mix of photograph and drawn manually or with mechanical or electronic assist, ...) are all subject ot copyright. Printed circuit digrams and the 3D printer files are also subject to copyright. Even, IIRC, works thats might be illegal in some jurisdiction or other can still have copyright protection.
Whilst the ability of American circuit courts to come up with decisions contrary to obvious and established law never ceases to amaze me, you have things back to front. Except where the intent to do something is itself explicitly an offence (intent to kill, for example), it's NOT normally an offence to simply be aware that you MAY be doing something illegal. The overriding issue is whether an offence actually took place - and that's purely a question of law. Prenda had authority to make the file available, and they made it available with the (undeniable) intent that it be shared. Further, they actively assisted in that sharing. A court might find otherwise - but, in my book at least, that's permission.
how were they supposed to know under what license the material was? porn sites routinely upload advert clips to torrent&other sites.
moreover it doesn't really matter.. what you're claiming is that ANYTHING ON PIRATEBAY is illegal because it's on piratebay. WHAT FUCKING KIND OF LOGIC IS THAT?! go fuck yourself, make a video of it and sue yourself.
(the _really_ funny thing is that prenda didn't have the rights to distribute the material themselves to begin with, the copyright holders should have sued them for all they had)
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
The issue is that there are legit files torrented. PB has been host to them, as the promo bay and so fourth. So since the only distinction between illegally downloading and distributed copyrighted content without authorization is when people without authorization upload the content, then other people download the content and continue to distribute it.
So if an authorized person uploaded content to other users, those users didn't do anything wrong. You can't actively upload files to people and then turn around, sue them saying you're not allowed. If they permitted that then it's not a crime, it's a new business model, and I'll get right on suing you for reading this content without approval or authorization even though I posted it online to slash dot you're not authorized to view it.
Make sense when I put it that way?
Walking is more natural than driving, but I'll take a Porsche over a pair of running shoes anyday.
Cciting case law about this is pretty easy, provided you know the US legal term for it is "equitable estoppel".
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
They didn't contact the downloaders personally and specifically. However if they indeed did posting the torrent on TPB and then continuing to share the content, there was an implicit permission to download it. They are, in essence, saying "look at this porn, it's free, go download it" by they themselves putting it on TPB.
That's why you're so fat.
Get some exercise, fatty.
Honeypots should be illegal.
If I am a band and I decide to distribute my music free to anyone that wants it, it's still copyright "my band", but apparently free to distribute. I've given users on the internet an implied license to download and use.
I cannot turn around later and start suing people who downloaded my music.
So, if you are the copyright holder of a porn movie and you set up a honeypot to sue people, your act of uploading the movie creates an implied license for others to download and use.
Therefore you should NOT be able to sue. It seems to me that copyright holders want it both ways; to be able to freely distribute and freely sue anyone they want, whenever they want.
But the real irony is that; once it's on the internet, the NSA has a copy, and good luck trying to sue those guys...
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Does this mean that leaving my car in the street with the keys in the ignition means that I've given implicit permission to drive it?
Hmm. My girlfriend and I once came across an idling Volkswagen Beetle parked in a fire lane without the parking brake on. The owner was nowhere to be seen and the car, being a manual, did not have a park gear, but was instead in neutral. The owner clearly did not understand that being in neutral does not lock the transmission and that some torque may (that really should be "will") be applied to the wheels. We watched the car drive itself about a meter or so gradually picking up speed, looked around at the parking lot with various children and elderly people who might not be able to move out of the way of even a slow moving driverless car, then I stood in front of the car and stopped it from moving forward while my girlfriend got into the car and applied the parking brake. The woman who owned the car came out of the store in short order and thought we were stealing her car or something, but we just told her that her car was driving itself away and went on our way.
Anyway. If the parking brake in that car didn't work, I would have had no problem getting into it and driving it out of the fire lane and parking it in a parking spot, then turning off the ignition, then possibly popping the trunk and using the jack or something to block the wheels. If the owner had called the police and a reasonable police officer had come along, they would have fined the owner and thanked me (an unreasonable police officer would, of course, have arrested me for grand theft auto and I would have had to wait for a hopefully reasonable court). Basically, by leaving their car illegally and dangerously parked, I would say the owner gave me implied permission to save them from potential negligent manslaughter charges.
So, the car analogy is not as cut and dried as you presented it. At this point, you might say that the situation I described doesn't map very well to the copyright situation. Of course, your original car analogy doesn't really map properly to it anyway.
Actually, the SSID part implies that you are conferring authorization to any who see it.