TorrentSpy Ordered By Judge to Become MPAA Spy 372
PC Guy writes "TorrentSpy, one of the world's largest BitTorrent sites, has been ordered by a federal judge to monitor its users. They are asked to keep detailed logs of their activities which must then be handed over to the MPAA. Ira Rothken, TorrentSpy's attorney responded to the news by stating: 'It is likely that TorrentSpy would turn off access to the U.S. before tracking its users. If this order were allowed to stand, it would mean that Web sites can be required by discovery judges to track what their users do even if their privacy policy says otherwise.'"
well (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:well (Score:2, Insightful)
New people discover filesharing every day and how would they know about this ruling?
The other possiblity is that people will just not hear about the news, you could post it on slash everyday (it probably will actually...) and there would always be people who won't have heard.
Neat move (Score:5, Insightful)
Which is to say, game, set and match, MPAA.
rj
Deep well (Score:1, Insightful)
There's ONE way. Simply stop producing content. Kind of hard to "steal" what doesn't exist.
Re:Quit Crying!!! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:well (Score:5, Insightful)
The same way they discovered filesharing in the first place -- word of mouth.
Re:Boo-hoo (Score:4, Insightful)
Awww (Score:2, Insightful)
In a nutshell, get some self discipline and quit crying. I think all of the illegal download places should be shut down permanently. These stupid people cry about prices of software, about treatment of customers, and then they get the software and use it anyways. So, the company still gets its massive userbase knowing full well that many will be illegal copies, but as long as it grows their market share they will get more sales in the long run than what anyone "stole" from them. I went to linux because I can get any of the software I could need easily (no crack/serial/download searching) free (no astronomical sticker prices), and legally (no mega fines, or any of the recent trend of jail terms) and actually pay for the tiny amount of Win32 software that I ever use. The same goes with music, I just don't buy it anymore. And here is a shocker folks, when you don't use OS/Software from the commercial world who cuts all the stupid DRM deals...when you DO put one of those "copyright protection highjacker" type disks in that install all manner of rootkit type garbage...not much happens.
In closing, for all you who are going to respond to this... If you are doing so from an illegal install of Windows or other OS... Go switch to a legal alternative through download or purchase before you even bother.
Re:Quit Crying!!! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Howto delete torrentspy account (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:The Pirate Bay (Score:2, Insightful)
So hide you IP address:
https://www.relakks.com/?lang=en [relakks.com]
or
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(anonymity_netwo
or both
(Note: I don't care what you say about using TOR in this way. There's nothing you can do about it, and really you want *all* activity - voip, email, surfing - funnelled through it.)
Re:well (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Howto delete torrentspy account (Score:5, Insightful)
secondary copyright infringement? (Score:3, Insightful)
I really think that with all these torrent-sites providing access to content people should pay for, things have gone too far, but so does going after sites that link to sites that host torrents that provide connection to a tracker to find people sharing the files - and even these people are in most cases still far away from the original source.
Re:The Pirate Bay (Score:1, Insightful)
Do you get paid for your work? Why can't your employer just force you to work for free? Because you want to sell your services? How is this any different? Where I draw the line is the DMCA since it takes away the ability of society to freely [and appropriately] build upon existing culture.
As for the various regions of things, you can always buy the media in the other nation. I can buy discs from Amazon.co.uk. Why can't you?
You can buy it from the uk [or wherever] then decss it to play it locally.
OMG I R GENIUS.
Re:Howto delete torrentspy account (Score:3, Insightful)
Coming soon, the Great Firewall of America (Score:3, Insightful)
I think we've already established that the MAFIAA are DDT and file-sharing sites are cockroaches: all their efforts to kill off the population just drives the evolution of the technology and breeds a better roach. Seriously, without the MAFIAA we'd probably all still be using Napster and complaining about the broken songs.
Where is the endgame here? Does P2P win and the MAFIAA is reduced to paying for a few token arrests and prosecutions? Does it go the route of illegal drugs where p2p is available if you know where to look for it but no intelligent person would run the risk of losing everything with a bust? A lot of casual pot smokers I know have gone that route, they'd love to spark up now and again but they have too much to lose now between career and family, it's just not worth it.
What's kind of funny here is that stuff can go on under the radar for years before it blows up big enough for the media to comment on. Digital content piracy was going on for years and years before we even had broadband. All the porn getting traded over bulletin boards via dial-up was nothing more than scans from porno mags. I can't say there were never any lawsuits filed over this but I certainly never heard of them. And still, this was obscure enough that only the geeks even knew it existed or commonly had computers to download it. The closest most girls ever came to a computer in those days was asking a geek friend to help them type up a report. Filesharing met that perfect storm when more non-geek kids got computers for school, broadband became commercially available, and Napster made the whole process so easy no geek had to explain it. And those broadband speeds meant that images were no longer the only feasible thing to trade.
One thing is for sure, this genie is not going back in the bottle. Our economy is in decline, real earnings are down, we're getting squeezed on gas, food costs, etc. We can't pirate a tank of gas but we can download the latest blockbuster. What do you think is going to happen? I think most geeks here can see the difference in their own consumption dynamics. When I was a teenager, I didn't have any cash so I downloaded all my software. In college, still no cash so I pirated all my anime. And damn, it took a long time to hunt down all the individual episodes of a series. But three hours of effort could save me $150 for the DVD's, well worth the effort. But once I graduated and had a real income, my time became more valuable than what I could save by pirating, it was easier to buy. I don't have to hunt down crappy encodes, then waste time organizing and burning to CD's, etc. But if I was ever reduced to the cashflow of a college student, the entertainment budget would be the first to get cut.
Re:Deep well (Score:1, Insightful)
Well aside from the subjective nature, the fact that Piratebay and others even exist shoots down the "It's crap!" argument. Like I said, if there's no content to "steal" then there's no longer a piracy problem. Some will say the small guy will step up to the plate. But that ignores two things. Piracy hurts the small guys far more than it hurts the big guys. It's also on a larger scale because there are more 'small guys'*, and they don't have the money to defend themselves. And in this vacuum the small guys will take the big guys demise to heart and say "that's not going to be me", and try something safer. So yes the genie can be put back in the bottle. The problem is that everyone, both honest and dishonest will suffer.
*And their piracy problem passes under everyone's radar. When was the last time slashdot had a story on the small guys and how piracy affacted them? Nope. RIAA this, and MPAA that. We pick our forests well, and ignore the trees.
Re:The Pirate Bay (Score:5, Insightful)
Getting paid perpetually for the work you did in 1974 is another thing entirely.
If I write a piece of code that helps my employer do something, I get paid for the amount of time I worked on it. I don't get paid every time my company sells the software, and every time they re-use the code, forever and ever amen.
Artists should definitely get paid when they perform their popular song, which is real work, paid for at the time of service.
Should artists get paid forever for the same 6 hours of work in the recording studio? How is that different from me and my code?
Re:The Pirate Bay (Score:5, Insightful)
It basically boils down to, if you want the damn product pay for it. If your favourite artist signs with a label, THAT'S THEIR RIGHT. Who are you to say "because you signed with, say, EMI, I won't pay for your music?" You can vote with your dollars. If labels piss you off so much, don't buy [or pirate] label owned music. Only buy truly indy music.
People who pirate label music "to stick it to the man" are just hypocrites.
This ruling won't stand long, for numerous reasons (Score:5, Insightful)
You're referring to wiretaps placed on specific individuals. This is very different.
Here this judge has ruled that the equivalent of wiretaps be placed on all customers of this company, regardless of their standing, oblivious to all issues of privacy, and at the behest of another corporation rather than a government agency. It is quite without precedent.
But this ruling won't stand for long, is my guess.
Every company wishing to undermine its competitors could demand that they implement similar internal monitoring to ensure that there is no infringement of their copyrights. For example, Microsoft could demand that all fileserver transactions in named large corporations be monitored and their logs be made available to MS in support of suits for infringement of Windows and Office copyrights.
In that direction lies madness, even worse than the current one. It's so grossly anti-competitive and so utterly dismissive of privacy considerations that it'll get overturned pretty quickly, I would guess.
In fact, that judge is going to get severly panned for a whole raft of reasons brought out in this thread. His ruling really verges on the incompetent. Or of course, it could be much worse than simple incompetence --- this does smell a bit of corruption, not necessarily driven by MPAA dollars but by old-boy network handshakes with their lawyers.
Pretty grim all 'round, even by the US's rapidly collapsing standards.
Re:The Pirate Bay (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The Pirate Bay (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure you can justify pirating really old obscure media that is hard to find, but just because something went out of print last year doesn't entitle you to pirate it. You don't suppose if demand went up they wouldn't reprint it?
Tom
The government tries to do too much (Score:5, Insightful)
What the government *SHOULD* interfere with is price fixing, Mafia tactics, scare tactics, extortion, invading of privacy, breaking the law, etc. Which these bloody people are doing all the time. This what is getting to me, why should any government on earth be allowed to persecute individuals the way RIAA/MPAA and their friends are doing. I do not live in the US, but please please, everyone, do read this Wikipedia entry [wikipedia.org] and really think about what it says. If what the RIAA/MPAA is doing isn't cruel and unusual, nothing else. When beating and raping people is seen as a lesser crime than copying certain combinations of 1s and 0s, this are both cruel, and soon getting all to usual!
Re:The Pirate Bay (Score:2, Insightful)
Artists actually have a revenue stream the record companies don't tend to decimate; it's called the "gig".
Look at the credits for an album (if you actually own any) and you will see how many artists work on a CD who aren't the band or the label.
People constantly use the "well artists have the gigs" defence when pirating their music, I can't think of a better (and more frequently used) example of 'convenient ignorance', your argument works only if you forget how music is actually made.
If you don't want DRM then stop pirating, you can't have it both ways.
Re:The Pirate Bay (Score:3, Insightful)
If people like the music they're rewarded with more royalties. Why is that bad? If you don't want to pay the artist then the music isn't worth it to you. Why are you pirating it then?
Royalties promote diversity.
I don't disagree that most labels abuse it. But frankly, it's up to the artist to sign on terms they can live with. If you give a homeless dude all your money, don't feel bad if they do what THEY want with it. Similarly, if a good artist signs a stupid contract, it's their own damn fault. The media execs only get away with what people let them.
Tom
Re:Deep well (Score:5, Insightful)
2. The reason the RIAA/MPAA make the news here is because of their behavior. They sue many, many, many people. Joe Shmoe who owns a record shop in Detroit does not. "Nobody sues no one" is not a news story.
3. You accuse slashdot of picking only stories that make the RIAA look bad, without the stories detailing the harm piracy causes to the little guy. Well, care to cite a few sources?
4. Should the market collapse due to piracy (And I have my doubts to this), big and small, well, that's capitalism for you. Goods were not provided at a cost people were willing to spend, especially ones that are easily replaceable, and the market was not willing to adapt, so it dies. That's the way the cookie crumbles.
Re:The Pirate Bay (Score:1, Insightful)
You defend copyright and draconian protection schemes like every artist would be homeless and starving without them.
Re:The Pirate Bay (Score:5, Insightful)
Throughout most of human history, music flourished without any copyright. If the MPAA/RIAA had their way, even humming a tune would be a copyright infringement with micropayments, instead of just something people naturally do - which is, by the way what music is - something people naturally do.
There's nothing to stop you from going on tour if your music becomes popular - and the more people "pirate" it, the wider the audience for your tour gigs. Its why people want their stuff to get lots of air play, right?
In the previous century, a large part of the cost of each copy of music was the physical production and distribution (pressing each copy, shipping it to warehouses, then to wholesalers, then to retailers). Those costs are gone, but the price hasn't gone down to compensate.
Now consider the production costs. There is no way that any music CD ever produced costs as much as a blockbuster movie. And yet, the movie on DVD costs about the same as, and often less than, the music CD. Why? If a move costs $100M to produce, and a music cd $1M, shouldn't the music CD cost a lot less?
Must be the crack math skills of those RIAA accountants. Or just the crack. A song is worth a few cents in todays economy, not a buck or two.
Re:Umm... there seems to be something missing here (Score:4, Insightful)
I get the impression that these people just can't see another way, don't feel that we, as their customer base, have the right to demand another way. We do, as it happens. We don't want your product on the terms you are offering it. In the past, that would have meant we either did without, or the suppliers changed their product or way of doing business. Nowadays, we can make do with a reduced quality copy of your product whether you want us to or not. And you know what? That's good enough for most of us. The time may come when we all have the bandwidth to receive a full, unabridged, untranscoded version of your product. If you don't have a mechanism in place then to stop us (good luck with that) or a better way for us to buy your product, you're screwed.
So times change: they do, and it doesn't matter whether you want them to or not, doesn't matter whether copyright infringement on a massive scale is morally akin to murder (as some apparently believe.) Doesn't matter who is right and who is wrong. I liken the advent of downloading to driving on the expressway. Yeah, most of the people around me are idiots who drive too fast, or too slow, make gratuitous lane changes and other stupid and often illegal moves
As their front organization is run by lawyers, however, it's not surprising that all of their proposed solutions involve the legal system.
Re:The Pirate Bay (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, do be careful not to step in the sarcasm.
Re:The Pirate Bay (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The Pirate Bay (Score:5, Insightful)
But I advance that it's all irrelevant, because regardless of whether it's illegal, regardless of whether it's wrong, it has become so commonplace and so completely defies any attempt to control it that there arguably not much that can be done about it, anymore. So TorrentSpy is ordered to spy on its users -- so what? They'll probably comply and say as much on their website, and people will use some other torrent service instead, stopping exactly no one from file swapping. Or maybe the RIAA/MPAA will find some way to kill BitTorrent entirely, which would be a shame. But as Napster showed, this will not stop p2p -- even if it is completely illegal, it will persist. In fact, one could argue that the technology has actually gotten better over the years thanks to the RIAA and MPAA's meddling. Sort of like the hydra -- cut off one head and it grows back two.
At some point, when you're a business, you need to be pragmatic. The law protects you only when relatively few people break it and you can litigate the hell out of those that do, scaring the remaining would-be-ne're-do-wells into compliance. But when 60% (I don't know the actual numbers, but substitute any substantial percentage and the fact remains) of the population is breaking the law, well, you're basically fucked.
All this arguing about whether file sharing is right or wrong -- it's a bit like arguing about whether premarital sex is right or wrong. Many people in the US feel strongly that premarital sex is deeply wrong, not just for them, but for everyone. Ok, it's not illegal -- I'll address legality with another example in a bit -- but the point is: it's not going stop. No matter how you feel about premarital sex, it isn't going to stop, and there's no way -- none -- that you can make it stop. Heck, if premarital sex is alive and well in Saudi Arabia, there's no way that you'd ever have any hope of killing it in the USA.
Or what about prohibition? Drinking is most certainly bad for you -- many people don't realize just how bad it is for you. Alcoholism destroys families, the substance is addictive and harmful, and polite society just shouldn't put up with it, or so the teetotalers said. You know what? They're right. But you'll notice that it didn't make a lick of difference that they were right, nor did it make a lick of difference that the law agreed with them. People didn't stop drinking.
There are lots of examples like this, and I fear that file sharing is just the latest. No matter how you feel about it, understand: it's not going to stop. The RIAA and MPAA are yelling into the wind, and it's time they saw the writing on the wall. As it stands, their business model -- at least with the margins it has historically enjoyed -- is doomed.
What does this mean for the artists? Good question. Like many others, I don't think people are going to stop making music, for the simple reason that people were making music before there was a recording industry and will continue making music if said industry collapsed tomorrow. Movies are a more difficult question -- it costs an arm and a leg to make even a low-budget indie movie, requires the hard work of many people, and the institution of copyright is what makes most of the films we see possible. With music, you can make an argument about people making it in their garages and using the internet to distribute it -- fine. But with film, well, that's a much tougher sell, because so many more people are involved. Perhaps we'll see a resurgenc
Re:The Pirate Bay (Score:4, Insightful)
"Throughout most of human history bittorrent did not exist."
And what does that have to do with anything, except to show that most people believe that the current "mode of distribution" of the RIAA/MPAA is obsolete, overpriced, and in need of some good competition?
A song is not worth a buck. Maybe a nickel
- movie at $100 million to produce, 2 hours of entertainment, and you can buy a copy of the DVD, including DVD case, for $7.99 5 years later
- music - 20 songs, $1 million to produce, 15 songs (10 or more crappy), and 5 years later they still want $1 a song or $15 for all 15 - no madia, no case.
If movies were priced like music, your movie dvd should cost $800.00 per copy. In reality, the RIAA is using the "monopoly what the market will bear" pricing scheme - and bittorrent sites break that artificial monopoly.Most songs aren't even worth a buck. A lot of the stuff being "traded" isn't even available to most people, so its not like anyone's losing any revenue, anyway. Both the RIAA and MPAA should get over it, and find a different economic model.
Re:Deep well (Score:3, Insightful)
Note: This is not a flawed equality between copyright infringement and stealing. But capitalism covers both and it's easier to understand with a physical example.
No, that's not capitalism at work. If you make a gizmo for $80 and sell it for $100 but noone wants it, that's capitalism. If your neighbor figures out how to make them for $60 and sell them for $75, obviously people would buy at the lower price. Driving you out of business is also capitalism at work. But if the local thief take them at no cost and sell them for $50 (or for that matter give them away for free), that's not capitalism.
Yes, the demand side is acting rationally by going for the lower price (ignoring a host of things like legality, ethics, convienience, quality and brand, but I'm simplifying a lot here). But the supply side would make the market collapse, because noone can produce at that price and so nothing would get produced (ignoring things like subsidies and dumping strategies). It's not the goods were provided at a cost people weren't willing to spend, it's that illegal goods were provided at a lower cost than could possibly be matched. There's no way to "adapt" to that.
Of course, at this point someone would say that the cost of producing a digital copy is $0, so there's no "below cost". That is a really cheap trick with numbers when you look at the individual copy, and not the work as a whole. Let's say you want to make a sci-fi movie. Once you add up the costs for scipt, director, equipment, location, actors, makeup, props, models, sound effets, editing, special effects and so on you get a total of $10mio. Those you have to recover some way, across all your copies.
Let's say you plan to do that selling 1 million DVDs at $10, and we can assume they'd be willing to pay that. But, they are offered a pirated DVD instead at $2. Is $2 less than $10? Yes. Willing to spend != Willing to spend more than necessary. And at $2*1mio = $2mio the pirates can afford to make one million DVDs - but there's no way it could pay for the movie. It's not the goods were provided at a cost people weren't willing to spend, it's that illegal goods were provided at a lower cost than could possibly be matched. There's no way to "adapt" to that either.
Re:The Pirate Bay (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Quit Crying!!! (Score:3, Insightful)
There's a reason funny doesn't get the karma bonus, it's to encourage GOOD DIALOG, not one-liners.
Re:The Pirate Bay (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is that with information (which is what digitally stored media is) the price being proposed and paid each time is almost solely for the information itself, which is replicated effortlessly and even communicated in other forms...sung in hymns or scribbled as strings of 1s and 0s on bits of toilet paper.
Tangible products will never have a problem unless organized crime actively pirates hardware (books..etc). Information however, wants to be free. In fact, we never pay for the media, but for the PERMISSION of the seller/original creator to obtain the information on the media, and people get really really tired of asking for permission to use something they have already bought.
DRM and other MAFIAA nonsense attempt to render information as "physical" by hampering replication, but due to the very nature of information, that is impossible. Because of their efforts in restricting our rights as consumers, we are entitled to fighting them by refusing their authority completely.
If you are an artist, I suggest that you stop trying to make your money on information. If you are reasonable and provide your music at decent prices with no restrictions, people will not risk virus ridden undergrounds and instead come to your sources. Still, your real money will be made in the tangible service/good that you can provide, which is your live performance.
Software is a similar but more complex issue not fit for this discussion.
Re:well (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The Pirate Bay (Score:2, Insightful)
That may be so, but it looks like things are changing, simply due to the vast number of people who refuse to blindly purchase media without getting to hear/see it first. In my opinion, that should be the right of the consumer, to view or see what they are purchasing beforehand. It seems many people agree with this viewpoint, perhaps enough to help change the relevant laws. (As far as I remember, it used to be like this in the old record stores, the person working there would be more than happy to play you the record you were planning on buying. It certainly wasn't law, it was directly contributing to a good customer experience. Perhaps we should simply go back to that model. 30-second previews are a good start, but are also occasionally misleading.)
Perhaps limiting copyright to 5 years would be a better incentive than the current exorbitant length is proving to be.
Re:The Pirate Bay (Score:4, Insightful)
Here are another few "rights" I think it is my option to exercise:
I think I have the right to download, as MP3's, tracks from my extensive vinyl collection.
(Note: if I was technically unable to rip from vinyl to digital, I would feel bad about downloading the MP3. I don't know why I have that idea. but as my goal is to spare the vinyl, I don't feel bad about it)
I think I have the right to download MP3's for CD's I've bought that are damaged or don't work.
I think I have the right to download a copy of anything I purchased, as long as I retain the original product. I've bought games that have malware copy protection (starforce, et al) and the only way to play the game is to download the pirate version.
Now I understand that what I think I have the right to do, and what the law says I have the right to do, seems to be different. But as my father once told me, "there is Right & Wrong, and there is Lawful & Unlawful. they don't mean the same things"