MPAA Caught Uploading Fake Torrents

An anonymous reader writes "The MPAA and other anti-piracy watchdogs have been caught trapping people into downloading fake torrents, so they can collect IP addresses, and send copyright infringement letters to ISPs. The battle between P2P networks and copyright holders seems to be a never ending battle. It will be interesting to see how much the anti-piracy groups practices change once they begin begin selling movies and TV shows legally on bittorrent.com."

Re:is that even legal?

[crankyspice]

If you are part of the MPAA and you download a torrent from someone else just to prosecute, technically isnt the MPAA breaking the law as well??

The MPAA operates with the authorization of its member companies. They've presumably authorized the association to make reproductions of the copyrighted content for anti-piracy purposes, and copyright infringement is the unauthorized reproduction (or distribution, or ...) of the protected works, so, at a guess, I'd say they're pretty safe on that one.

Calm down

[MEGAMAID]

There is an allegation that article about the use of fake torrents by the MPAA to harvest IP address so they can use them to send out infringement notices, which has then been converted to a fact by the submitter.

I suspect that the MPAA has these fake torrents to confuse people and waste their time downloading junk, in the hope that they'll give up using torrents. It's a very weak link to suggest that these are being used to send copyright infringement notices.

Re:ZOMG!!

[eric76]

They can only prosecute the child predators when the predator goes to meet with the child.

My understanding is that in Texas, arranging to meet someone for sex who you believe to be under the age of consent is a crime in itself whether or not you actually show up.

Re:Today's word is entrapment

[cpt kangarooski]

No, you're wrong.

A better name for entrapment would be inducement.

If you're willing to engage in a crime, it isn't entrapment for the police to offer you an opportunity to break the law. So in your example, the policeman who does nothing more than offer to sell you drugs and who does sell you drugs, is not breaking the law and is not entraping you.

If you aren't trying to break the law, and you're more or less strongarmed into doing so -- i.e. induced by something more than a mere opportunity to do so -- then it can be entrapment. So if you didn't want to buy drugs, and refused the offer, but then the police threaten you into doing it, you'd have a decent entrapment defense.

Re:ZOMG!!

[Score Whore]

Dunno about Texas specifically, but that is what the entire class of crime is about: the intent to have sex with a child. And it's been upheld repeatedly.

Re:ZOMG!!

[TubeSteak]

So what exactly are they claiming when they "notify" the ISPs?

That you downloaded/uploaded a file called "XXX.YYY.AVI"

AFAIK, nobody has actually gotten around to forcing the **AA into proving anything in court.

And again, AFAIK, the **AA hasn't had anything more than screenshots of alleged sharing as evidence

Use peerguardian and block the following ip set

[vivek7006]

66.172.60.XXX,
66.177.58.XXX,
66.180.205.XXX,
209.204.61.XXX,
216.151.155.XXX

From the article:
The anti-piracy servers use hostnames like 101tracker.dhcp.biz, aplustorrents.qhigh.com, bitnova.squirly.info, bittorment.ocry.com, and pirate-trakkrz.leet.la. All these hostnames can be traced back to the same IP Ranges, these ranges contain possibly hundreds of fake trackers, so feel free to block them

Re:ZOMG!!

[kfg]

If I buy a bootleg DVD, am I making a copy?

No. You are purchasing a physical object. The bootlegger made the copy.

In "computer terms", you're copying the data, but you're not making a copy in the traditional sense.

Is there a pattern of ones and zeros on your drive that wasn't there before that matches the pattern of ones and zeros of the source?

If so, I'm afraid you have made a copy. A copy that even has a physical instantiation, even you fail to understand the latter point.

KFG

SOME FACTS

[Anonymous Coward]

Attempted copyright infringement is a new crime introduced by The Intellectual Property Protection Act 2006 [wikipedia.org]. The act has not yet been passed, so downloading fake torrents appears to be legal at the moment. But IANAL.

Re:Today's word is entrapment

[geekoid]

Entrampment is being enticed to do something you wouldn't have done otherwise.

"...the defendant has the burden of proving either that he or she would not have committed the crime but for the undue persuasion or fraud of the government agent, or that the encouragement was such that it created a risk that persons not inclined to commit the crime would commit it, depending on the jurisdiction. When entrapment is pleaded, evidence (as character evidence) regarding the defendant that might otherwise have been excluded is allowed to be admitted."

This is why a police officer posing as a prostitute won't ask for money, or make the intial offer.

Re:What's law breaking about this?

[hammock]

Except we in Canada have the right to download copyrighted media. By paying the blank media tax on all recordable media, we are granted license to fill said media with movies and music that we didn't buy: that's where that extra tax has been going, the Canadian Private Copying Collective.

http://www.cpcc.ca/english/index.htm [www.cpcc.ca]

Click the link, see how happy that canuck is for paying tax on something he might not even use for piracy? Paying a tax on backup media is fun!

Re:They can have my IP...

[Kalriath]

Do you spoof your MAC? They have that too. LK

No they don't. Every single router on the path between your computer and the remote computer changes the MAC address on the packet. Research TCP/IP before making that sort of statement.

Getting fired for downloading fake data???

[heroine]

This sounded rediculous the first time I heard about it. They said people were getting fired from their day jobs and their ISP service disabled not for downloading illegal copies of movies at all. They downloaded a piece of random data that happened to be created by the MPAA.

Under this law, you can get fired for downloading literally anything. All the lawyers have to do is say any data at all, from a slashdot comment to a DNS entry, was deliberately put there by a client for the purpose of trapping pirates.

According to Google, there are anecdotes of people losing their home internet access for using BitTorrent, but they don't say if they were busted for downloading fake data or using too much bandwidth.

There have only been 3 arrests linked to BitTorrent usage. They were all people who made the first copy and who administered the tracker. The MPAA boasts 4 but you can only find 3 names. No-one has been busted for running a client.

Re:PeerGuardian?

[Klaus_1250]

The only provide a false sense of safety if you don't read their website :-) Peerguardian may help, and yes, it blocks a lot of copyright enforcing evil-doers, but it is not meant to be tool that will give you complete protection. It is not pretending to be either. I would never use p2p without it, but, I don't expect miracles from it either.

General Recap

[ari_j]

I don't have a lot of time to work with, but there are a few points going around here that I think ought to be collected in one place:

Entrapment: No, it's not. Entrapment, in order to work as a legal defense, is when the government takes action that induces you to commit a crime that you would not otherwise have committed. Walking up to you on the street and offering you $100 commission to steal a Rolex is entrapment. Putting up a website that purports to sell illegal machinegun parts is not entrapment, because you would have found some website to buy the parts from anyhow. Sending you a brochure to advertise child pornography and waiting for you to order some is questionable. This activity is somewhere between the child porn brochure and the machinegun parts website, but it is not government action so entrapment isn't a defense. It also doesn't matter, because the MPAA is interested in suing you into oblivion in civil court more than it is interested in seeing you behind bars. (After all, behind bars you can't make any more paychecks for the MPAA to garnish.)

MPAA consent to downloading content: Nope. They're uploading fake torrents. You are downloading something else, maybe a dump of /dev/unrandom. They are fine with that.

Downloading fake torrents is legal: Yep, it is. It's just that they're logging your IP address and will file a lawsuit that alleges, "[o]n information and belief, the Defendant has infringed the Plaintiff's copyright by downloading an illegally distributed copy of [the movie you were trying to download when you got the fake torrent]." They know you are going to find a real torrent later and download it, or at least some other movies. They know all they need to: you are a person using a given IP address to attempt to download their copyrighted material and you probably didn't give up when you found out that the torrent they fed you was fake.

Grabbing your IP address from the fake torrent download doesn't help the MPAA: See previous paragraph.

Did I miss anything? These seem to be the main issues being covered in the comments so far. The simple fact is that this tactic will probably work for the MPAA.

Re:It's the uploads!

[whoever57]

Unless they provided a license agreement prior to download then redistribution would be legal. Public Domain

Err.... No. Nothing makes it public domain. It's as if you bought a copy of a book. You did not sign a license agreement, but you are still not entitled to make copies of the book.

In this case, the copyright holders gave you permission to download, but unless you can show that they also gave you permission to upload, you may be SOL. One might be able to argue that simply by making it available on bittorrent, there was implicit permission to upload, since the download/upload capability is built into the protocol, or, rather than permission, that the MPAA is estopped from pursuing uploaders due to their own actions with respect to making the content available via bittorrent.

A New Zealand example?

[meowsqueak]

Funny, only a few minutes ago I read elsewhere about someone in New Zealand who got stung by this a few days ago when Paramount contacted their backwater ISP and had his account temporarily disabled. He got away with a 'warning'.

http://nzdsl.co.nz/PNphpBB2-viewtopic-t-479.phtml [nzdsl.co.nz]

No, they don't

[Sycraft-fu]

MAC is a layer-2 address, specifically for Ethernet protocols. Thus MAC address is only passed across switches. As soon as you hit a router, the MAC is gone. If you try and find out the MAC of slashdot.org, you'll find that the furthest you can get is your default gateway. Past that there's no info.

Re:ZOMG!!

[egypt_jimbob]

You will be tracked when you come back to BT for a real file.

No, your IP address will be recorded and a form letter will be sent to your ISP saying whoever had XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX on Thu Jan 11 20:16:44 PST 2007 has downloaded an illegal file "Battlestar Galactica S03E07 REPACK DSR XviD-ORENJi", please turn off their connection or we will sue you.

Re:IP-holders don't think international

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

(Forgive the ignorance if iTunes sells these only to the US...)

Bingo.

Re:ZOMG!!

[xiaomai]

hmm, i think since you're using a wildcard it would just be *AA, or maybe you could use the '?' ... ??AA

Re:If the MPAA uploads to you then it is legal

[Artifakt]

These may well be arguements that can sometimes affect a judge and are very likely to affect a jury, but it's not really required that they do so. If this were about trademark law, where there is a compulsory requirement to defend, then the RIAA would have done something that could automatically void their whole position, but since there's no requirement to defend a copyright or lose it, there's also no real requirement that the RIAA not give away some copies unless it wants to also give blanket permission for everyone else to keep on giving.
          Giveaways are much more likely to affect the willfullness test than the whole law. Since without willful intent to infringe, damages per instance are limited to $30,000 U.S., this doesn't matter much - typical settlements are for less than $30,000/instance already. The RIAA is still able to threaten a bigger loss than most private citzzens can afford to risk, so the excess above that doesn't have as much significance.

The MPAA dont though

[grahamsz]

The MPAA would have to get:

1) Your WiFi provider to turn over the Mac address from the logs (if they even archive them for that long)
2) The manufacturer of your network chip to divulge which OEM it got sold to (easier if the chip belongs to dell, but many of them are broadcom)
3) The OEM to figure out whether the sold it to you directly or to a reseller

It'd be easier to go after someone else.