IsoHunt Guilty of Inducing Infringement 243
roju writes "The MPAA has won a summary judgment against torrent indexing site isoHunt for inducing copyright infringement. Michael Geist notes that '[t]he judge ruled that the isoHunt case is little different from other US cases such as Napster and Grokster, therefore concluding that there is no need to proceed to a full trial and granting Columbia Pictures request for summary judgment.' Attorney Ben Sheffner, who worked on the case for Fox, explains some of the implications, noting that 'the most significant ruling in the opinion was the court's holding that the DMCA's safe harbors are simply not available where inducement has been established.' This case could have implications on other indexing sites, and creates a gap in the DMCA safe harbor provisions that could have far-reaching implications on other sites."
Team America: World Police (Score:1, Insightful)
Distributing their own brand of fascism to the world.
what I'm unclear about.. (Score:3, Insightful)
What neither writer makes clear is why isoHunt and Fung, both Canadian, are participating in a lawsuit in California.
International "Commerce" (Score:3, Insightful)
Because the MPAA could legitimately claim that his service was available to U.S. citizens, U.S. based equipment, and/or passed over U.S. network lines, the court (correctly) ruled that the MPAA had standing in this country.
If isoHunt turned off access via U.S. IP address blocks, it would theoretically no longer be in violation of U.S. law - only potentially Canadian law (which Fung states he is not violating...).
Re:Is there a way for a US judgement to be enforce (Score:3, Insightful)
Hey moron 5there is no extradition for civil cases.
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you familiar with the Berne Convention?
Are you? Are you familiar with Canadian Law?
My guess would be proving infringement in the US is a first step to getting it shut down in Canada.
Um.... WHAT!?!?!?
I would imagine that suing in Canada would be the first step to getting it shut down in Canada.
Ignore the gyrations of management (Score:4, Insightful)
I used to read stuff like this and get upset. But then I realized that my entire generation knows it's baloney. They can't explain it intellectually. They have no real understanding of the subtleties of the law, or arguments about artists' rights or any of that. All they really understand is there is a large corporation charging private citizens tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars, for downloading a few songs here and there. And it's intuitively obvious that it can't possibly be worth that.
So what's happened is that this entire generation has disregarded copyright law. It's become a moot point. They could release attack dogs and black helicopters and it wouldn't really change people's attitudes. It won't matter how many websites they shut down or how many lives they ruin, they've already lost the culture war. At this point the only thing these corporations can do is shift the costs to the government and other corporations under color of law in a desperate bid for relevance. That's pretty much what they're doing.
But what does this mean for the average person? Well, it means that we google and float around to an ever-changing landscape of sites. We communicate by word of mouth via e-mail, instant messaging, and social networking sites where the latest fix of free movies, music, and games are. If you don't make enough money to participate in the artificial marketplace of entertainment goods -- you don't exclude yourself from it, you go to the grey market instead. And all the technological, legal, and philosophical barriers in the world amount to nothing because there's a small core of people like you and I, here on slashdot, that do understand the implications of what they're doing and we continually search for ways to screw them over and liberate their goods and services for "sale" on the grey market. It is, economically and politically, structurally identical to the Prohibition, except that instead of smuggling liquor we are smuggling digital files.
Billions have been spent combatting a singularily simple idea that was spawned thirty years ago by a bunch of socially-inept disaffected teenagers working out of their garages: Information wants to be free. Except information has no wants -- it's the people who want to be free. And while we can change attitudes about smoking with aggressive media campaigns, and sell people material goods and services they don't really need, we cannot change the fundamental aspects upon which our generation has built a new society out of.
You can't stop people talking -- and just as we have physical connections to each other, increasingly we have digital connections to one another as well. These connections have, and continue to, actively resist attempts at control because doing so fundamentally impedes the development and nature of the relationships we have with one another. We will naturally seek the methods which give us the greatest freedom to express ourselves to each other. That is a force of nature (ours, specifically) that has evolved out of our interconnectedness, and it goes far, far beyond copyright. Ultimately, this is a battle they cannot win -- they can only delay, building dams and locks to stem the tide, but they will fail. Forces of nature are unpredictable and in the end it always wins.
Eh, so what (Score:1, Insightful)
Private media "clubs" are already taking care of this little problem. This is just another lesson that those who violate the law, no matter how unjust, shouldn't be bragging about it.
Re:International "Commerce" (Score:4, Insightful)
Isn't it the USERS in the US who are violating US law?
Anyway, it'll all be moot in the next couple of decades, as it gets to the point where software-generated 3d movies and pro-quality music will be able to be generated by anyone in their own home with consumer-grade hardware and software.
We're already seeing self-publishing getting a toe-hold in the literary and music worlds, and it's freaking out the old school. When everyone can generate content, who needs the content rent-seekers?
Re:Huh? (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually Grokster shouldn't apply since the materials hosted on IsoHunt don't actually contain any materials belonging to MPAA. Nor does any MPAA material pass through the IsoHunt system.
Nor am I certain that the judges decision that a provision of federal law can just be thrown out because he wants to is going to stand up to an appeals decision.
Finally, suing a Canadian company with no assets in the US is a crock of shit. Since the courts are continually complaining about their load, I would really hope that more of them would start to throw these cases out based on jurisdiction.
Re:Inducing copyright infringement (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes. Legitimate copies won't let you skip it. Sometimes even the ads are unskippable. That's minutes of your life wasted for every single legitimate disk you watch. Bootleg copies on the other hand will let you just start watching the movie you wanted to watch.
Something is broken horribly in a world where the knockoffs have full feature and quality parity with the originals and in addition are superior in other ways as well.
Re:Summary judgment (Score:4, Insightful)
"Essentially, this stems from the concept that juries are intended to be finders of fact, not judges of law."
Which is ridiculous. The entire point of a jury is to determine if it is just to apply a black and white law in a specific full color world scenario.
This is the only direct power the people have to check government. Well that and the right to bear arms but both have been subverted at this point.
The power of juries has been subverted by the courts who decided they no longer had to inform juries of their rights and obligations in this area (a recent development in truth) and the right to bear arms by both the legislative and the executive.
Re:Huh? (Score:4, Insightful)
Grokster does apply, because it created the precedent of "inducement".
http://w2.eff.org/IP/P2P/MGM_v_Grokster/ [eff.org]
The "Safe Harbor" defense is a red herring. That doesn't apply because IsoHunt wasn't hosting material and then taking it down when asked. It was inducing users to click links which allowed copyright infringement.
The Berne Convention agreement, in conjunction with a closed court case, makes it very likely that Canadia will throw the book at this guy.
Basically, this is the final patch of the legal loophole that allows linking to content as long as you're not hosting it. You have to be a generic search engine, not one dedicated to finding illegal software. (The name "ISO Hunt" does not have that many non-infringing connotations, especially the comments made on the site about being the best place for juarez).
Re:Ignore the gyrations of management (Score:5, Insightful)
I seem to have a bit of cynacism about it, though. I'd like to get rid of that, but I think it has a solid foundation. Your reference to Prohibition was absoutely right. The problem is, this country has not learned from it. Prohibition taught us that you cannot stop a powerful economic force, and if you try too hard to do it, you will create a black market and you will provide fertile soil for organized crime. No one fought with submachine guns and died in the streets over alcohol until it was made illegal. Alfonso Capone would be an anonymous figure if not for Prohibition. Imagine all the tax dollars, buildup of increasingly paramilitary police forces, involvement of the federal government in basic law enforcement issues and lives lost just to enforce a law that should never have been written, a law designed to enforce one group's Puritannical moral objections on everyone else.
For anyone who's actually familiar with American history and tradition, it's hard to imagine anything more un-American than using law to micromanage the personal lives of others. You cannot tell a person what they may put into their body without also, implicitly, claiming ownership of their body. Yet that happened, right here in the "land of the free." And we tolerated it, because we were told that it was for our own good.
Then consider that we haven't really learned anything from it because we still have Prohibition. We still have The War on (some) Drugs. Only the object of the prohibition has changed, but the process is the same. So are the problems. We have learned nothing.
I would like to think that when iron-fisted copyright proves to be a failure, we will learn from this and find more reasonable approaches. But the utter failure of Prohibition hasn't stopped us from implementing similar laws. I would like to believe that a cultural war has been won, that when the old guard retires those who replace them will have a more enlightened viewpoint. I truly want to believe that. But I really don't see much precedent for it.
Re:Ignore the gyrations of management (Score:4, Insightful)
You've proven her point. We know what is happening in China. We read blogs about people in China. People who obviously know whats going on in China.
See how well they locked it down? Not as well as you might think.
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
The name "ISO Hunt" does not have that many non-infringing connotations
Apparently, you are not a Linux user.
Re:International "Commerce" (Score:3, Insightful)
You think practice is going to help these folks? You sir, are an optimist of the most impressive degree.
A little bit. But more importantly, as the cost of production reaches joe sixpack prices, there will be many more folks creating. Hollywood likes you to think they have a monopoly on talent when all they have is a monopoly on distribution. Even if 99.99% of the independently created stuff is crap, when you have millions of folks creating, you will still get thousands of gems.
The rent-seekers will lose the war, if for no other reason than they've chosen to make it a war of attrition and they are vastly outnumbered.
Re:Huh? (Score:3, Insightful)
They'd freak out since Americans are rarely smart enough to understand "unintended consequences" of international law.
International law is surrender of sovereignty and should be viewed as such.
The idea of regulation and micro-management of nations by laws their publics didn't vote for is quite popular with politicians, but treaties work both ways.
I'm not sure why all the anti-American angst in these threads are directed towards the US. No question that it's a ridiculous perversion of our system, from the viewpoint of an american. But why aren't you angry at the various countries who cave to the ridiculous whims of these American-based corporations and the courts/legal system they leverage? You speak about sovereignty but I see no pushback from Canada and the like. These types of [relatively, in the scheme of international politics] petty issues simply aren't the types of things that affect head of state-level relations between allies. There is no bullying or peer pressure here.
tl;dr = start complaining about your own politicians not having the balls to tell our courts to get bent.
Didn't you know - America rules the world (Score:5, Insightful)
Until the Chinese tell them otherwise ;)
Re:Huh? (Score:4, Insightful)
Providing links to users who are actively looking for them is not "inducing" anything. Facilitating, perhaps, but inducement means that ISOHunt caused a course of action. Does the mere presence of ISOHunt encourage users in this behaviour? No, because there are so many alternatives. Back in the day there weren't many places one could go, and the presense of Napster or Grokster arguably inspired people to infringe... but these days? Please, it's one of a bazillion places to find links to torrents of ISO images. They should fight this ruling.
Re:Huh? (Score:1, Insightful)
That is such a load of crap. Where do you find ISO files where copyright is broken? 99% of ISO files are GNU/Linux or related. now .bin or other files maybe not. But ISO files? Come on.
Re:Summary judgment (Score:4, Insightful)
Mod this AC up.
Just mentioning these rights or having literature that mentions them can result in a judge declaring a mistrial. That is because in this instance the jury not only checks the legislature, it checks the judicial.
Judges don't like the fact that juries outrank them and jumped on the first excuse to subvert the power of the people (juries abused this power in the Jim Jones south).
Re:Most BitTorrent sites submit entries to Google (Score:3, Insightful)
Torrent sites exist for the sole purpose of aiding and abetting the violation of copyright.
No. http://www.torrentbox.com/torrents-browse.php?cat=51 [torrentbox.com]