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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.
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.
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.
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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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.
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.
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?
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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.
No need to turn it off completely. Just tell it to only share over the local network so you can still benefit from less overall downloading between multiple computers.