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."

Comments

Programs using BitTorrent

[Martin Blank]

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?

Re:Programs using BitTorrent

[JestersGrind]

Facebook and Twitter also use BitTorrent. http://arstechnica.com/busines...

Re:Programs using BitTorrent

[Captain Hook]

I use BTSync to synchronise my own files to my various devices.

Re:Programs using BitTorrent

[SharpFang]

World of Tanks uses BT for its updates. You may choose a http alternative but download times will balloon to days; everyone who can't use BT uses them, and overwhelms the update servers every time there is something to update, so using BT to get the update through peer players is no-brainer.

Re:Programs using BitTorrent

[TheReaperD]

I use it for things such a LibreOffice downloads and ISO images of things such as The Ultimate Boot CD (UBCD) and I know World of Warcraft uses it for its update engine. There are also a lot of other non-infringing uses of the protocol. The media companies just want the protocol and anything like it to be declared blanket illegal as it is an effective way to transfer large files which the media companies would like all such ability removed from the internet. They want both control over the content itself as well as any possible method of transferring such content so they can double-dip like they do on cable TV.

Re:Programs using BitTorrent

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

The UK Government use BitTorrent.

https://data.gov.uk/dataset/coins

Re:Programs using BitTorrent

[Mashiki]

Blizzard uses it for all their games, KoTOR:Online. In the first couple of years that I was playing WoW, and they switched to BT there were a lot of college and university students who could suddenly no longer download patches because their admins blocked access to anything using the torrent protocol. Myself and a couple of friends used to run a small server to host the patches on for guildies and a few others, because you know, direct downloads are fine and aren't used in piracy at all.

Good ...

[gstoddart]

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.

"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."

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.

Generally happy with Cox

[david.emery]

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.