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ISP To Court: BitTorrent Usage Doesn't Equal Piracy (torrentfreak.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The music industry has long argued that evidence of BitTorrent is evidence of piracy, and ISPs have generally gone along with them. But now, ISP Cox Communications is pushing back against that claim. They have been sued by publishers for failing to halt service for users alleged to have pirated music. Not only has Cox argued that the piracy evidence is invalid, they're also contesting the idea that BitTorrent is only used for piracy (PDF). "Instead of generalizing BitTorrent traffic as copyright infringement, the music companies should offer direct proof that Cox subscribers pirated their work. Any other allegations are inappropriate and misleading according to Cox." The company says, "the Court should preclude Plaintiffs from relying on mere innuendo that BitTorrent inherently allows individuals to infringe Plaintiffs' copyrights."
Aside from file sharing, how many programs use BitTorrent? I'm not challenging the defense here, as I also don't equate BitTorrent with piracy, especially since my main use is personal file synchronization using BitSync and downloading Linux ISOs.
I seem to recall that Blizzard's Battle.net uses it, which I suspect is a non-trivial percentage of traffic. Do any other game management systems make use of it?
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Um. Who is this, and what did they do with Cox?
Ignorance killed the cat. Curiosity was framed.
Once they have argued that BitTorrent use is automatically infringing, Plaintiffs seek to introduce other testimony and documents showing that some proportion of data traffic on Cox’s network is associated with BitTorrent in order to mislead the jury into thinking that Cox knew or should have known about the infringement that Plaintiffs allege.
Offhand I can think off two different uses of BitTorrent that are legal: Linux distributions and Blizzard game updates. I would suspect Cox came come up with more. The music companies have been trying to shortcut the process for a long time. They tried sue a collection of IPs without filing separately. They argued they don't need to do a cursory look at each case before filing DMCA takedown notices.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
I had to convince my previous boss of the same fact. Security called him to say that I was using the piracy tool BitTorrent. I sent him this link: http://linuxtracker.org/index.php?page=torrents and told them to leave me alone.
They never did accept that I was using Tor as a quick way to view our public services from outside the network.
I should have asked them to pay me in Bitcoin just to see their reaction.
It's time these guys got held to some damned level of standards instead of just making sweeping, bullshit claims like "if they used this protocol they were doing teh piracy".
If they have specific evidence of specific infringement, use it. But simply accusing based on using the protocol is completely wrong. The problem is the copyright cartels essentially want a veto on any technology on the grounds it might be used to infringe. It doesn't work that way, but they keep pushing for it. And some idiot lawmakers are inclined to give it to them.
The courts need to start slapping them down and saying "innuendo and snide suggestion is not evidence, and things which aren't infringing aren't illegal.
Can we introduce into court that all statements made by representatives of the copyright cartel are self serving statements by lying assholes who routinely mislead courts and make claims with no evidence, and routinely resort to obfuscation and perjury to bypass meeting any legal threshold for evidence?
Because that would be awesome.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Everybody knows bittorrent isn't only used for piracy - many software packages come that way. Unfortunately everybody knows there is rampant software piracy that is almost certainly 98% or more of bittorrent-induced traffic.
I'm sure that I would get flagged using that kind of logic. I don't download anything illegally, but I play Blizzard games. The Blizzard downloader uses BitTorrent. And it makes sense for them because it eases the pressure of millions of clients downloading when they can share the load between them. This is just laziness and greed on the part of the music industry.
I suspect what is starting to happen is COX is starting to realize that before it was fairly passive, all they had to do was hand over info. However, with TIPP and other programs being pushed through it will cost them actual dollars to police for the entertainment industry, payments that can not be so easy to extract from users. They want to now make sure that burden is placed on the entertainment industry and not themselves. There is no altruistic goal here, just who has to pay.
I've had both residential and now business grade internet with Cox, and I've been generally happy with the service. It's been reliable, tech support when I've needed it has actually been helpful and on-site repairs are usually same-day or early the next day. The only real problem I had was when their repairmen mis-coded a service call and I got billed for it. But Cox billing fixed it right away.
So it doesn't surprise me that Cox is bucking the anti-consumer wave by challenging music industry subpoenas. And it's also good business, so they don't have a bunch of lawyers poking around their data, while paying their own lawyers to watch over them.
Cox asks the court to "preclude Plaintiffs from relying on mere innuendo".
windows 10 update system uses a bittorrent like system
Funny, just this week-end I set-up a torrent to help distribute some large files whose distribution is free (as claimed by the right holder) because other file sharing solutions had issues (too much traffic for Dropbox, too large files for MEGA, causing the browser to die on it).
I wonder how they would turn this to say I'm a big evil pirate.
I have to agree. I get my books, movies, and whatever else I buy from the Humble Bundle (that isn't a video game) using torrents. 100% legit and paid for.
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Looks like I'm the only one after trading these comments. But there are many other ways to pirate without it, no big deal if it goes away.
In addition to install images of GNU/Linux distributions, the LibreOffice suite's installer is available as a torrent.
Wow, didn't realize spyware used BitTorrent as well.
an ISP standing up the the **IA mafia.... something is going on behind the scenes...
Then why not put the update installer on a service that can't be overwhelmed, such as Amazon S3? Or is S3/CloudFront too expensive for Wargaming?
when it comes to the people who are plowing the cable into the ground and lashing up the fiber on the poles, that shit is ridiculously expensive
I've said it before: When the city is doing road work for other reasons, it can bury a half dozen conduits at the same time for later sale to utilities who pull their own fiber through those conduits.
Um, no. Bit torrent is a protocol, not a service. There may be a torrent database at bittorent.com or something, I can't say I know, but bit torrent is another story.
The proper comparison would be to something like Flash or HTML5 which I don't expect either responsible body to address the piracy issue.
Then you're doing it wrong.
You are welcome on my lawn.
"Looks like I'm the only one after trading these comments"
I can see you meant 'reading' instead of 'trading' and mis-typed one key to the right (assuming a UK/US keyboard).
Now you've got me looking for any other words that can be formed the same way. Nice distraction !
prove the recipient doesn't have a license for the use of the IP?
Even if the holder of a license is able to prove that an individual obtained a copy via what ever protocol, be it from a swarm, FTP or any method, how is that proof the recipient lacks license? How much longer do we have to wait before the burden of proof is restored to a legal level from the current mobster level that exists?
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B - D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Using normal mail should of course also be considered illegal.
HTTP has also been involved in crimes. Your Facebook viewing is definately illegal.
But why pirate anything at all? Music is pretty cheap now and you can buy individual songs instead of albums. There is Netflix, Hulu, Amazon to watch movies or you can spend $9 - $20 on a dvd movie. For gaming, you have steam which they sell games at very low prices compared to their console counterpart or there is the Emulators which is great for playing old games. As for software, If you want to learn a software program you can download and re-download trial versions from adobe, autodesk, corel, and even Microsoft. Anyway, a professional(photographer, 3d graphics, programmer, etc...) would not have the need to be pirating since they are making tons of $$$. It takes money to make money.
Why are people still pirating?
BitTorrent users make the most illegal file sharing. Likewise, Windows users use the most illegal copies of MS Office. Lets arrest all the Windows users.
I can get a Discography (everything they've ever done) for most artists. 1 click I have it all, for "free" (as in for the cost of the equipment power and bandwidth I'm already paying for and have various other uses), and I know that some of you believe the bullshit 5% unemployment rate but a whole hell of a lot of the US is still poor as fuck with no real wage increases in a decade or still unemployed and no longer being counted.
I'll buy something from an individual but not from a label - middle management ;)
The Fantasy: Thinking that they are making a rational stand because it is the right thing to do. Because it is.
The Reality: They can smell the blood in the water and they know if they don't fight this tooth an nail it will be their dollars on the line when the acronyms come marching on them to the tune of "facilitating piracy".
The Cancer Genomics Hub uses BitTorrent based software to distribute huge public domain data sets (multiple TB each) from DNA sequencing and related studies. BitTorrent is simply the most efficient way to distribute data on such a scale. This does get interesting when you are at a university which is under pressure from the RIAA to shut down BitTorrent, however. I had to spend way too much time working this all out with a firewall administrator.
There is a sizable community which legitimately records concerts, with consent from the band (encouragement even), and shares them with the world.
example: http://bt.etree.org is all bittorrent.
https://archive.org/details/etree allows direct download of MP3's, but if you want a 1gb set of flac files, they encourage use of bittorrent.
To put half a cent per update per user into perspective, we first need to understand how much continuing revenue per user per update period the publisher derives.
HOW do you know that i"the protocol is nearly entirely used for piracy"?
Please do NOT just sit there on your arse and claim it's "certainly right", because it's certainly right that you're a paedophile.
Because you use the internet.
You don't use your real name.
And that's what paedos do.
Ergo, you're CERTAINLY a paedophile!
They seem to be implying that it is industry practice to just cut someone off from the internet becuase someone deteced that you used the BT Protocol for something unknown and unspecified. First off, how would a rights owner even know I was using bittorrent without knowing which torrent I was DLing? My ISP could sense general torrent traffic, but from my understanding it is the rights holders that do the snooping, and all they do if torrent their own work and write down peer addresses.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
[The game's revenue model] doesn't matter... [...] There is no reason to leave that money on the table, if you don't have to.
Other than to improve the user experience for those subscribers behind networks that disallow access to BitTorrent, which could help them remain subscribers.
How dare they accuse BitTorrent of being nothing more than a platform for piracy! My torrent library contains numerous Linux ISOs, libre software installers, and Creative Commons-licensed movies and books.
That's all non-infringing material, and it makes up nearly 3% of my library!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
And as ISPs continue to push subscribers onto carrier-grade network address translation (CGNAT) to work around IPv4 address exhaustion, "ISPs that block BitTorrent" are likely to become more and more common.
No, really. All guns are sold with the intent of murder. No gun has ever been sold that wasn't used in a murder.
Also, all money is used to buy or consume drugs. This is evidenced by the fact that there are traces of cocaine on every dollar bill in circulation.
Money is never used for anything other than buying drugs. Never. It's never used to, say, buy milk or eggs.
Yeah, and bitcoin can be used for legal things too.. but what are most people using both for? ILLEGAL STUFF.
civil cases have lower burden of proofs then criminal cases. So make copyright crime have jail / prison time and see how many cases can make it though court and how many states will pay the costs of running that as well.
really music piracy off years ago plenty of legit methods that are even free you hear your songs these days. in other words the horse is dead quit beating it.
So the copyright mafia is arguing someone, somewhere, some day, may have used bit-torrent on their Internet Service for IP piracy so it's the ISP's responsibility to make their customers law-abiding individuals.
The true horror is that the courts want to listen to this unsubstantiated 'coulda, shoulda, woulda' version of "I'm the victim". Yes, courts are a place for persons (mostly corporations) to voice their grievances. No, obscene wealth does not make your grievances more valuable or real.
Bitcoin Armory distributes the bitcoin blockchain with the use of torrents
https://bitcoinarmory.com/
So $COMPANY wants the ISPs to block bittorrent traffic because it *CAN* be used for piracy. But hey, so can FTP or HTTP or even DNS. And thanks to deep packet inspection one knows whats going on inside a connection. So lets block all traffic that contains $COMPANY or $PRODUCT, because that will be used when searching or often is in the name of files and so on. For example in HTTP you have "Host: $COMPANY". :) Do you see where I'm going? Lets see how $COMPANY will like it when their whole internet presence is blocked. After all the user could be involved in piracy and they did ask for that to be blocked.
re: BitTorrent inherently allows individuals to infringe Plaintiffs' copyrights.
Yes, it allows... So does a photocopier. That does not mean that a photocopier user or a BitTorrent user inherently does violate copyrights.
Does it bother anybody else here that the lawyers are essentially gaming the jury?
The whole point of this process is to decide what arguments will be "allowed" during the trial, in other words, what can be said in front of the jury.
But the USA has an open-ended Bill of Rights (the 9th Amendment provides for unspecified rights "retained by the people" and the 10th Amendment for unspecified rights "reserved to the people"), which creates some major legal ethics problems associated with gaming the arguments in advance of the trial. After all, it's not the lawyers who get to decide what rights are retained by the people! The legal profession, as a class in society, does not equal the people. Worse, the legal profession is in a position of ethical conflict of interest with respect to recognizing the open-ended nature of the Bill of Rights. The jury might not be competent to decide what rights arise under the 9th and 10th Amendments, of course, but they should at least be given the chance to think about the issues from this perspective.
By constraining what is said during the trial, the lawyers could easily end up invalidating the entire trial, from a 9th Amendment perspective.
Of course, the legal profession in the USA has seemingly figured out that by simply not acknowledging the open-ended nature of the Bill of Rights, they sidestep this problem. But what happens when somebody outside the profession realizes the Emperor's New Clothes don't actually exist! When viewed from a 9th Amendment perspective, huge portions of the current practice of law in the USA existing in violation of the Bill of Rights. In the pre-Internet era, the lawyers could get away with this because there wasn't good enough access to information for people to really understand what was going on, but it seems unlikely that can be sustained much longer.
Certainly the right to ethical practice of law is one of the most important rights "retained by the people", and perhaps a large part of the reason the US legal profession would prefer to pretend the 9th and 10th Amendments don't exist.
It is clear that creating a useful protocol, and using that protocol, are both reasonable things to do. The right to reasonable conduct is protected by the 9th and 10th Amendments, as both a fundamental right in a free society, and as a consequence of the right to ethical practice of law. After all, if the government (or even in some cases private entities) can interfere with reasonable conduct, that makes people scared of their own legal system, and hence creates an artificial demand for the services of lawyers.
If the lawyers for the plaintiff are claiming that BitTorrent equates to piracy, they are engaging in unethical practice of law and violating their oaths to uphold the highest law in the land, the Bill of Rights!