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Sony Pictures Leak Reveals Quashed Plan To Upload Phony Torrents
retroworks writes Motherboard.vice offers an interesting scoop from the hacked Sony Pictures email trove. A plan championed by Polish marketing employee Magda Mastalerz was to upload false versions of highly-pirated Sony programming, effectively polluting torrent sites with false positives. For example, a "Hannibal"-themed anti-piracy ad to popular torrent sites disguised as the first episode. Sony Pictures legal department quashed the idea, saying that if pirate sites were illegal, it would also be illegal for Sony Pictures to upload onto them. There were plans in WW2 to drop phony counterfeit currency to disrupt markets, and I wonder why flooding underground markets with phony products isn't widespread. Why don't credit card companies manufacture fake lists of stolen credit card numbers, or phony social security numbers, for illegal trading sites? For that matter, would fake ivory, fake illegal porn, and other "false positives" discourage buyers? Or create alibis?
Youtube is full of phony videos about "full movies" with a stupid blonde talking, or with malware links. Last time I started reported them, a received a message back as was flagging to many movies.
Why get your hands dirty with that sort of thing when there are so many contractors in the world?
No.
That is the most stupid thing I have read all day and I went on 4chan earlier.
Pirate sites are illegal, so that OBVIOUSLY means anything uploaded to them are illegal.
This is the kind of retards that work in business.
This doesn't even get on to the fact that they aren't exclusively pirate sites most of the time.
If police would just produce 6000000 FAKE childporn images and upload them all around the web, I'm sure the real CP industry would soon be out of job!
Fake ivory is dangerous. You are selling to someone who already are in an illegal trade. They can't go to the cops when you cheat them - so they have guns for these purposes. And a fairly good idea about what real ivory looks like. A buyer that can be cheated won't last long in such games. You might as well sell fake dope to the mafia.
Fake credit card numbers could work. The card companies knows them, and can reject them immediately. No risk, but would there be any positive effect?
Fake sony stuff is not illegal - sony owns their own material and is free to upload to any torrent site. Use of pirate sites is not automatically illegal, uploading to them is not illegal - unless the copyright holder objects. Strange that Sony lawyers don't know this!
Fake sony stuff can hurt their reputation though. "Leaked" stuff is a marketing channel of its own - just make sure they don't get all the episodes . . .
Fake porn? It is ALL fake. Both the tits and the orgasms are fake!
That's basically what law enforcement does with undercover agents pretending to sell drugs / cruise for sex in public places / trade under-age porn. Not only do they do this, they make it known that they're doing it, with the intention of scaring people away from it.
Used to be that you could buy genuine fakes. Made in the same factory, from the same material etc..
Shame they clamped down on it.
I seem to remember a brief time period when I had to download 3 or 4 copies of everything because 2 of the were actually "Duce Bigalow" but just named something different.
Surely 'pirate websites' are not actually illegal as such, it's the specific pirated content that is illegal. If someone uploads their own holiday video to the Pirate Bay then they've done nothing wrong, and neither has TPB in hosting it and others in downloading it.
Mmmmmh... I *thrive* on fake MILF! Preferrably when it's ASCII art.
I thought the word was "shuttered"?
They never say it would be illegal to upload false content, only that they shouldn't use the sites for marketing purposes, because it sends the wrong message. Which doesn't apply to the use of false torrents.
Because it doesn't work?
It takes a handful of comments to stop a fake torrent being seeded any further, and why would you continue to seed a fake-torrent anyway? It's just sucking up bandwidth for something that you know is worthless.
Similarly with CC numbers - if you flood a ton of fake ones, it'll be next to no time before someone flags which ones work and which don't, and which uploaders were reliable and which not.
As such, it's a pathetic idea to do either.
How about you offer a DRM-free copy in a reasonable format for a half-decent price on a half-decent timescale? Or is it too hard to DO WHAT YOU'RE PAID TO DO? Make a movie, sell it to the masses.
The Imitation Game I went to see in the cinema - my first cinema movie in about 10 years. Unless I want to pay full-price again, I have to wait until the DVD comes out to watch a movie I'm interested in again. When will that be? God knows. But I can't watch it until they choose to bring it out. And then it will be region-protected, copy-protected and almost certainly won't work on my laptop (like most Disney movies).
I'm sure they'd rather I went to the cinema multiple times, like my ISP would rather I take out multiple lines. I'm sure they'd rather I pay a fortune for a DVD I can't backup or watch on a laptop, like my car company would love to be able to stop me adding on third-party components and only use them. I'm sure they'd rather I wouldn't be able to download it or stream it until it's a 10 year old movie or more and generating no income for them, like I'm sure my local McDonald's would rather give me an old piece of lettuce instead of a new one.
But if you want to keep your customers, it might be an idea to not seed fake torrents, and spend your time in court shutting down torrent site, but sell your damn product in a less restrictive way in the first place.
Uploading a fake torrent would only work for about an hour before all the leechers find out it's bad and stop downloading, reducing the number of seeders to less than a dozen.
All these studios (not just Sony) need to realize that people don't want to subscribe to an entire suite of channels just to watch 1 show. HBO seems to get this, but I imagine their new service will only work in the US, meaning the rest of us will have to get Game Of Thrones the usual way.
Summation 2
.....Using a torrent site is not illegal. Copying copyrighted material is illegal (but not theft).
Second, you no more upload anything to a torrent site than you upload your site to Google. You are simply submitting to an index a link to a file you are sharing. The file itself never gets anywhere near the torrent site.
Also, breaking the law to catch criminals is, last I checked, illegal.....
So if it is illegal to release a list of credit card numbers, then ta credit card company that release credit card numbers should be charged. If the act is NOT illegal, then have at it.
If Sony wants to equate torrent == illegal, then they cannot use torrents and keep a straight face. Sorry.....
IIRC, there was a Madonna music video from many years back (before YouTube had pretty much every much video available), where the pirate sites were flooded with a fake video of Madonna bad-mouthing pirates, posing as the real music video.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
So, real cash?
-----
Sorry, I'm only a 1336 h4x0r.
That was my first thought when I read this in TFS:
There were plans in WW2 to drop phony counterfeit currency to disrupt markets, and I wonder why flooding underground markets with phony products isn't widespread. Why don't credit card companies manufacture fake lists of stolen credit card numbers, or phony social security numbers, for illegal trading sites? For that matter, would fake ivory, fake illegal porn, and other "false positives" discourage buyers? Or create alibis?
Oh shit, did I just give him an idea? !?!?!
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Go to usenet, you'll see countless copies of mainstream movies and shows, usually just a few hundred K. In addition a lot of the downloads are pretty poor quality.
Torrent sites don't have that. They have ranking mechanisms and other techniques that allow real users to say whether something is real. They get rid of the crap pretty quickly.
Chances are the fake films are better than the one you thought you were getting.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
As someone that gets pretty much all of my media from peering... they didn't "Quash" anything. They (or someone) used to upload all kinds of fake files to try and disrupt the community a few years back. They even got clever and would intentionally fake seeders so it'd look very popular.
That's why the aggregate sites have a comments and up-vote section. There are usually dozens of versions of any particular movie and you can sort by vote. That effectively killed the attack. They don't really try this anymore because their fake will get down voted almost instantly. You can even preview what you're downloading in most clients.
To be honest, I think they should be happy with the system they have now. It's pretty hard to get something before it hits DVD in a quality that's worth watching. If you want to see what's new and hot, you need to go to the theater. Getting a DVD or better quality version of a film is difficult enough that I bet most people just buy it. Their real problem is their continued fight against modernizing with some sort of streaming service. For example, imagine if you had a "Pandora" television station... TV shows were sent to you, you upvoted/downvoted them, etc... I'd pay for that. Keeping track of thousands of files for my kids TV shows is a PITA.
If Sony uploads anti-piracy messages or other stuff, using the names of popular movies, I can download those popular movies while claiming I wanted to download the anti-piracy movies from Sony.
Sony's own actions would make this a (somewhat) credible defense.
I'm sitting on the edge of my seat waiting Bennett to chime in on this topic.
For credit cards anyway. Put a bunch of "fake" credit cards out there. Some of them "work" but are actually traces. Users of these CC numbers get investigated and arrested immediately, because there are NO authorized users.
--PM
Sony's lawyers will want to emphasize that generally, it is unlawful to build something specifically designed to be part of an unlawful act. Court rulings vary based on the actual facts , the jurisdiction, and the particular court, but in general building HollywoodTorrent.com, which has links to torrents of the top grossing movies of the week on the front page, would be PART OF an unlawful plot.
This makes sense of you think about another unlawful act, such as a bank robbery. Suppose I gather together some body armor, ski masks, a getaway car, etc. and hand them to my friends so that they can go into the bank and rob it. I'd rightfully go to jail because I willingly participated in the plan to rob the bank. Not only the team members who went into the bank are guilty- the guy driving the getaway car, the gal monitoring the police scanner, and the guy who acquired and assembled the equipment are all part of the robbery gang.
Contrary to what some believe, the law is not dumb; this does not imply a sporting goods store that sells winter apparel is guilty because they sell ski masks along with boots and coats. The store is selling things to keep you warm, the bank robbery guy is assembling the items for a bank robbery - his intention is to help people commit the unlawful act of bank robbery . Not the same thing at all.
Similarly, Google provides an index of the web. The entire web, all 5 billion pages. That's not unlawful. Maintaining a site full of unlawful material for the purpose of assisting people in unlawful activity, as links, is generally unlawful.
Sony was found to have uploaded the data knowingly they then couldn't prosecute you for downloading a copy, even if you found a working copy and not their phony copy I imagine.
by posting 'legitimate' fakes why should any one else?
... if there weren't some jurisdiction in which Sony could enlist a proxy to do the deed, without blowback.
I can't speak to the other fake flooding ideas, but I do recall hearing a story where the reporter was shocked to learn that many who sell compromised CC lists offer a refund for any CC numbers that don't work. Putting out a long list of free numbers might district a few newbies, but the people with the experience and the financial backing wouldn't have been distracted by such free lists of dubious origin.
for this sort of practices --> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torrent_poisoning
Sony Pictures legal department quashed the idea, saying that if pirate sites were illegal, it would also be illegal for Sony Pictures to upload onto them.
I don't think 'sites' are illegal, only the content that is distributed is illegal. That's like saying a Ford Mustang is illegal because sometimes they are used to transport illegal drugs, so don't ride in one of them.
BUT! Sony reportedly considers the leaked data itself worthy of uploading phony torrents.
http://www.theguardian.com/tec...
It is amazingly simple to create a script to:
While (1) {
1. Open your browser and go to Amazon, Google, Ebay, etc with embedded "search" for random words out of the dictionary or strings of words out of a text.
Note: Search terms can be embedded in URL
2. Pause (some of these sites will stop you from doing it X times per second)
3. Close browser
}
I've run a script like this before. What follows are some amusing Amazon recommendations.
I've always wondered what would happen if my script searched for some hot button NSA phrases? What would happen to the market cap of these customer information based sites if everyone started running this script? Do these have the intelligence to distinguish between my searches and the script's searches?
IANAL but uploading a file that pretends to be something it's not is itself illegal. That's why my fake cocaine business failed.
I was under the impression that the sharing of copyrighted material was the problem. I don't see what's illegal about Sony uploading an anti-piracy ad and naming it "DOWNLOAD Fury (2014) 720p BrRip x264" so long as they own the copyright on the ad. I mean, it's a pretty horrible name for an ad, but whatev. I was unaware that the protocol itself had been outlawed.
Let's let the court speak for itself, rather than you making shit up right out of your ass. The court ruled:
"one who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement, is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties."
That's a restatement of the Sony rule (1984), in Grokster this time. See also Napster, in which the court ruled that Napster was "promoting its use to infringe copyright".
Sony's lawyers are quite familiar with the rule since it was decided in the Sony Betamax case is is therefore called "the Sony rule". In Sony, the court ruled that VCRs could legally be sold, if the seller didn't promote their use for infringement of copyright, but only becuase they had "substantial non-infringing use". So the two-prong test under Sony is a) does'the product have substantial non-infringing use and b) does the seller / manufacturer/ superior promote the product as useful for infringement.
Or password protected RAR's which is even more infuriating because they're the correct size but the password collection thing is just a scam... I don't know how to get SABnzbd to stop downloading them and I don't know how to get Sickbeard to select a different one...
Back in 2005-ish a friend of mine worked for a MPIAA contractor. His job was to seed bad torrents. THat is torrents that would go to 99% complete but never finish (I forget the trick for that, I think it was to control.remove all the 100% seeds after a couple days or something). Another was to simply mis-label torrents, give people a PBS show or something instead. The thing is, all the torrent sites are self-moderated, which roots out the shady torrents pretty quickly.
Based on your synopsis, Sony posting false versions onto torrent sites would not be illegal in any sense, as their intention is not to commit a crime, they would in no way be assisting or aiding in committing a crime, in fact their intention is exactly the opposite, their intention is to foil those who are committing crimes, and to make it harder for them to commit crimes. As they would be the rightful copyright owner of any materials posted on the sites it would not be any different from upload onto youtube.
Yeah, except for the YouTube part. They believe (and courts agree) that sites made for specifically unlawful purposes are unlawful, but Sony themselves wouldn't be doing anything unlawful, they'd just be "hanging out with criminal gangs". That's something I personally avoid.
Additionally, and maybe more importantly, under the 1984 Sony case, "substantial non-infringing use" is hugely important. Sony wants to argue that the sites contain virtually no legal content. It's harder to make that argument if Sony PUT the legal content there.
Contrast that with YouTube- YouTube is mostly non-infringing videos now, so it certainly meets the "substantial non-infringing use" criterion.
"I wonder why flooding underground markets with phony products isn't widespread."
it is, it's called 'made in china' a bit stereotypical but anytime a corporation convinces one group of people to pay more than fair market value, on come the copiers who make substandard duplicate items.
"Why don't credit card companies manufacture fake lists of stolen credit card numbers, or phony social security numbers, for illegal trading sites?"
credit card number the first 4 id the bank the last 4 the account number with the numbers in between being a 'code' of numbers that are random and which leave fake numbers between real ones. at the time it was 'good enough' because they would use carbon imprints at the wares store which was difficult to make a duplicate of the card just from the store copy (until 3d printers came along) credit cards are horribly insecure the magnetic stripe made it so that they could add three more numbers (also on the back of the card) to have more people with credit cards and supposedly more secure... anyways because of the legacy support issues credit cards releasing fake accounts would be an exercise in futility. as they would then have less possible working numbers from the ones they have available.
"For that matter, would fake ivory, fake illegal porn, and other "false positives" discourage buyers? Or create alibis?"
fake ivory is easy to find. fake illegal porn is out there too i think they were calling it 'child abuse' evidence. and don't think this is something new, magazine photographers from nation geographic, famous images of Vietnam when the usa igniting whole towns and some of the burn victims were children but still got published.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
I thought Sony already did that with P2P networks. Did I confused with something else?
I don't know about "most", since I haven't done a survey. I'm guessing you haven't either. What I can say is the freemoviestorrents.com is completely and obviously all about infringement, of Hollywood movies specifically. http://linuxtracker.org/ , on the other hand, is clearly not.
The protocol is as neutral as http. There are lawful web pages, and there are unlawful web pages.
Everybody else went ahead with their phony torrents. They're all over the web, and usually have a worm or somesuch. We all know this.. so somehow Sony decided NOT to follow through with it? Suuure..
I don't know about "most", since I haven't done a survey. I'm guessing you haven't either. What I can say is the freemoviestorrents.com is completely and obviously all about infringement, of Hollywood movies specifically. http://linuxtracker.org/ , on the other hand, is clearly not.
I say "most" because when a site does not meet both of those criteria, it tends to get taken down. So maybe transient sites that pop up and are then taken down might constitute a majority. I don't know. But I can say with some confidence that the majority of long established and successful sites do meet those criteria.