7 ms·

Torrent Search Engines Unlawful, U.S. Judge Says

59 points by phsr 17y ago

tptacek 17y ago
You know, I use Torrent search engines to time-shift TV (we pay for pretty much every piece of premium cable except Cinemax), and so I get a lot of value out of sites like Isohunt, but even so it's hard to escape the fact that these sites are deliberately coming as close to the line of "overtly criminal" as you can get. Because, give me a f'ing break: the first link in the categorized breakdown of indexed Torrents on Isohunt is to "Videos/Movies"; it is only the fact that Isohunt is a crappy torrent search site that results in that link not being entirely composed of trivially regexable horrific copyright violations. For what it's worth, I'm slightly queasy about calling "torrenting whole seasons worth of shows I paid for" "time-shifting"; to whatever extent that that's a reasonable definition of what I'm doing, it also ignores the fact that many (most?) torrent peers haven't paid for the content in any form and are free-riding with my assistance.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- chancho 17y ago
  > I'm slightly queasy about calling "torrenting whole seasons worth of shows I paid for" "time-shifting"; That's because it's illegal. You haven't actually paid for the shows. You've paid for access to the stream of content, but that doesn't automatically grant you access to acquire that same content from a third party. It'd be the same as if you saw it in the theater and then said to yourself "hey I've already paid for this once so I'm just going to torrent the dvd rip." I'm not judging. I do this too, even for shows I don't "pay for", but let's face facts: we're minor criminals. I'm not entirely comfortable with it either so I'm weaning myself off of it. Eventually, everything becomes available on netflix, so really it just takes patience. (Sometimes my patience is worn thin by netflix's fucked up queue-jumping practices, then I torrent. I'm weak.)
  - CamperBob 17y ago
    That's because it's illegal. You haven't actually paid for the shows.You've paid for access to the stream of content, but that doesn't automatically grant you access to acquire that same content from a third party. I actually don't think that's settled law. IsoHunt's "business model" or lack thereof isn't my problem. In the case of LOST in particular, I torrent each show as it comes out, then buy the DVDs at the end of the season, which stay shrink-wrapped and unwatched in the closet. To be (more) ethical, I suppose I should probably bury the box sets in the back yard to make sure nobody else can derive entertainment value from watching them. The reality, of course, is that copyright as an enforceable legal concept is over, for better or worse.
  - nostrademons 17y ago
    Do you have any legal basis for that? Sony vs. Universal Studios (1983) hinged on timeshifting being legitimate fair use: "because the District Court's factual findings reveal that even the unauthorized home time-shifting of respondents' programs is legitimate fair use". If it's legal to timeshift broadcast TV, why would it be illegal for subscription TV? Similarly, if timeshifting subscription TV is not fair use, then Tivo and all the other DVR makers would exist solely for infringing purposes, and I doubt we'd see them on the market. IANAL, but I'm guessing that UANAL either, so I'd like to see some evidence that it actually is illegal before being stated as such...
    - evgen 17y ago
      "Time shifting" is legitimate fair use if you record the shows yourself for your own personal use. If you claim that because the episode you are downloading was at one point in the past shown on broadcast TV you are "time shifting" it then you would not get very far on court.
      - jrockway 17y ago
        Before we get to court, why don't you decide what crime this is?
    - chancho 17y ago
- sp332 17y ago
  It's mainly illegal because, as part of the swarm, your computer is uploading as well as downloading. This makes you an unlicensed distributor.
  - jrockway 17y ago
    My body distorts broadcast television and rebroadcasts it. Is any conductive object infringing copyright? (Arguably, a criminal conviction may require "intent". If you use Bittorrent with the intent to only download, are you liable for your uploading?")
cookiecaper 17y ago
Pretty sad. Google links almost completely to copyrighted content. Why isn't it illegal? This article reads much more like a condemnation of ISOHunt specifically, though.
- Perceval 17y ago
  Indeed. Can Google be sued for this kind of search capability: http://www.google.com/search?q=%22always%20sunny%20in%20philadelphia%22+filetype%3Atorrent http://www.google.com/search?q=%22always%20sunny%20in%20phil...
  - chancho 17y ago
    It sounds as though the issue is whether or not the site responds promptly to takedown requests. Any torrent site that did would not be popular for long. They probably don't bother sending those requests to Google because Google doesn't host the torrent files, but if someone did manage to find a way to disseminate torrents using _only_ Google then you can bet Google would get on that. They do it with YouTube, and fast too.
    - thwarted 17y ago
      The content of a torrent file is closer to an HTML link. The torrent file contains no copyrighted content, so a take down notice doesn't make much sense. In fact, the torrent file only lets you recognize the content, and doesn't strictly provide a link to it, for that, you need a tracker.
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
iamaleksey 17y ago
Now that we have DHT + PEX + magnet links (http://lifehacker.com/5411311/bittorrents-future-dht-pex-and-magnet-links-explained http://lifehacker.com/5411311/bittorrents-future-dht-pex-and...), someone should come up with distributed torrent search and make the whole chain distributed.
- ajross 17y ago
  Been done. Gnutella et. al. were doing distributed search by design, because Napster's central index was ruled to be infringing. Everything old is new again...
- cmars232 17y ago
  A better alternative would be to find a way to dump the searchable information in "the cloud", but encode it in such a way to make it very difficult to detect or differentiate from "normal" content. The clients would know how to read and even search this "subliminal channel", and use it for rendezvous, etc. "Cloud" could really be any public hosted online content, a social bookmarking site like reddit, S3, etc. I wonder how much data you could even stash inside flv video or mp3. I'm not saying this would be easy, it would need to be redundant enough to withstand constant takedowns, etc. but it would be much more difficult to stop.
olegk 17y ago
Tell that to Google.
- kingkilr 17y ago
  There's a level of naivete to this line of reasoning that makes this amusing. Both Google and The Pirate Bay allow you to search for torrents. The critical element that's missing making what Google does criminal is Mens Rea. The Pirate Bay's got it, and Google doesn't.
- tptacek 17y ago
  There's no reasonable comparison. Virtually every torrent index leads off with a link to Hollywood movie torrents.
  - omouse 17y ago
    So does Google: http://i.imgur.com/Wy8cQ.png http://i.imgur.com/Wy8cQ.png Note the "quick" links to Hindi movies, movies & tv, music. How many of those are legal torrents?
    - tptacek 17y ago
      I see a clear difference between editorial promotion of copyvio versus algorithmic promotion of copyvio, especially when the latter is made possible only by the former. You clearly disagree.
      - omouse 17y ago
        Those "quick" links are editorial promotion by Google. Algorithms don't pick those links.
        tptacek 17y ago
        Quick links on websites are algorithmic.
k0n2ad 17y ago
"These technological details are, at their core, indistinguishable from the previous technologies" cough cough
zandorg 17y ago
I love ISOHunt! Confound those lawmakers...
kiba 17y ago
"The more prohibitions there are, The poorer everyone will be. The more weapons are used, the greater the chaos will be in society. The more that people seek "knowledge" for its own sake, the stranger the world will become. The more laws that are made, the greater the number of criminals." - The Tao The MIAA/RIAA wishes to impose more regulations regarding the distribution of cultural goods. This mean less ease of access to cultural goods. Everyone will be poorer, checked. Lawsuit is used to coax individuals into paying rather than focusing their energy on adapting their business model to the internet. Weapon usage, checked. This cause chaos in society by inciting an angry crowd of consumers who felt the injustice resulting from agression. So chaos does follows, check. Hmm, don't know about what knowledge seeking means, but I'll try. Everyone is asking the question which length of years is correct for copyright to maximize economic benefit. It can be said that they seek knowledge without questioning the reason "why?". A check, maybe? Copyright laws make everyone a criminal when they merely copy something. With a push for more power to punish people, this mean more force of law. So the law is making people into criminals, checked. So in the end, what the court did is rules in favor of chaos over harmony.
- RevRal 17y ago
  +1 For the cool poem.
sebastian 17y ago
All this is doing is just giving the bright minds behind the services that we love so much reasons to move and incorporate offshore and stop worrying about the evil power organizations such as MPAA and RIAA have to sue them, shut them down, send them to prison, you name it. File sharing is not stealing. File sharing is caring. http://www.vincentchow.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/piracy.png http://www.vincentchow.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/piracy...
elblanco 17y ago
Then the popular torrent search engines should become really crappy general purpose search engines, that just happen to be good for torrent searching.
jrockway 17y ago
Fung was “fostering a community that encouraged — indeed, celebrated — copyright infringement.” True. Too bad that's perfectly within his rights. "Free speech", have you heard of it?
- xsmasher 17y ago
  Speech can also constitute a crime. Hiring a hitman, joining a criminal conspiracy, or inducing copyright infringement are crimes; the fact that you may speak or express yourself while doing so doesn't make it a free speech issue.
  - jpd 17y ago
    I concur that speech can be a crime: "…Whitney has been thoroughly discredited by later decisions. See Dennis v. United States, 341 U.S. 494, at 507 (1951). These later decisions have fashioned the principle that the constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a State to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force or of law violation except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action." -- wikipedia.
  - jrockway 17y ago
    "Celebrating [copyright infringement]" is definitely speech, however.

59 points by phsr 17y ago

You know, I use Torrent search engines to time-shift TV (we pay for pretty much every piece of premium cable except Cinemax), and so I get a lot of value out of sites like Isohunt, but even so it's hard to escape the fact that these sites are deliberately coming as close to the line of "overtly criminal" as you can get. Because, give me a f'ing break: the first link in the categorized breakdown of indexed Torrents on Isohunt is to "Videos/Movies"; it is only the fact that Isohunt is a crappy torrent search site that results in that link not being entirely composed of trivially regexable horrific copyright violations. For what it's worth, I'm slightly queasy about calling "torrenting whole seasons worth of shows I paid for" "time-shifting"; to whatever extent that that's a reasonable definition of what I'm doing, it also ignores the fact that many (most?) torrent peers haven't paid for the content in any form and are free-riding with my assistance.

deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
chancho 17y ago
> I'm slightly queasy about calling "torrenting whole seasons worth of shows I paid for" "time-shifting"; That's because it's illegal. You haven't actually paid for the shows. You've paid for access to the stream of content, but that doesn't automatically grant you access to acquire that same content from a third party. It'd be the same as if you saw it in the theater and then said to yourself "hey I've already paid for this once so I'm just going to torrent the dvd rip." I'm not judging. I do this too, even for shows I don't "pay for", but let's face facts: we're minor criminals. I'm not entirely comfortable with it either so I'm weaning myself off of it. Eventually, everything becomes available on netflix, so really it just takes patience. (Sometimes my patience is worn thin by netflix's fucked up queue-jumping practices, then I torrent. I'm weak.)
- CamperBob 17y ago
  That's because it's illegal. You haven't actually paid for the shows.You've paid for access to the stream of content, but that doesn't automatically grant you access to acquire that same content from a third party. I actually don't think that's settled law. IsoHunt's "business model" or lack thereof isn't my problem. In the case of LOST in particular, I torrent each show as it comes out, then buy the DVDs at the end of the season, which stay shrink-wrapped and unwatched in the closet. To be (more) ethical, I suppose I should probably bury the box sets in the back yard to make sure nobody else can derive entertainment value from watching them. The reality, of course, is that copyright as an enforceable legal concept is over, for better or worse.
- nostrademons 17y ago
  Do you have any legal basis for that? Sony vs. Universal Studios (1983) hinged on timeshifting being legitimate fair use: "because the District Court's factual findings reveal that even the unauthorized home time-shifting of respondents' programs is legitimate fair use". If it's legal to timeshift broadcast TV, why would it be illegal for subscription TV? Similarly, if timeshifting subscription TV is not fair use, then Tivo and all the other DVR makers would exist solely for infringing purposes, and I doubt we'd see them on the market. IANAL, but I'm guessing that UANAL either, so I'd like to see some evidence that it actually is illegal before being stated as such...
  - evgen 17y ago
    "Time shifting" is legitimate fair use if you record the shows yourself for your own personal use. If you claim that because the episode you are downloading was at one point in the past shown on broadcast TV you are "time shifting" it then you would not get very far on court.
    - jrockway 17y ago
      Before we get to court, why don't you decide what crime this is?
  - chancho 17y ago
sp332 17y ago
It's mainly illegal because, as part of the swarm, your computer is uploading as well as downloading. This makes you an unlicensed distributor.
- jrockway 17y ago
  My body distorts broadcast television and rebroadcasts it. Is any conductive object infringing copyright? (Arguably, a criminal conviction may require "intent". If you use Bittorrent with the intent to only download, are you liable for your uploading?")

cookiecaper 17y ago

Pretty sad. Google links almost completely to copyrighted content. Why isn't it illegal? This article reads much more like a condemnation of ISOHunt specifically, though.

Perceval 17y ago
Indeed. Can Google be sued for this kind of search capability: http://www.google.com/search?q=%22always%20sunny%20in%20philadelphia%22+filetype%3Atorrent http://www.google.com/search?q=%22always%20sunny%20in%20phil...
- chancho 17y ago
  It sounds as though the issue is whether or not the site responds promptly to takedown requests. Any torrent site that did would not be popular for long. They probably don't bother sending those requests to Google because Google doesn't host the torrent files, but if someone did manage to find a way to disseminate torrents using _only_ Google then you can bet Google would get on that. They do it with YouTube, and fast too.
  - thwarted 17y ago
    The content of a torrent file is closer to an HTML link. The torrent file contains no copyrighted content, so a take down notice doesn't make much sense. In fact, the torrent file only lets you recognize the content, and doesn't strictly provide a link to it, for that, you need a tracker.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]

iamaleksey 17y ago

Now that we have DHT + PEX + magnet links (http://lifehacker.com/5411311/bittorrents-future-dht-pex-and-magnet-links-explained http://lifehacker.com/5411311/bittorrents-future-dht-pex-and...), someone should come up with distributed torrent search and make the whole chain distributed.

ajross 17y ago
Been done. Gnutella et. al. were doing distributed search by design, because Napster's central index was ruled to be infringing. Everything old is new again...
cmars232 17y ago
A better alternative would be to find a way to dump the searchable information in "the cloud", but encode it in such a way to make it very difficult to detect or differentiate from "normal" content. The clients would know how to read and even search this "subliminal channel", and use it for rendezvous, etc. "Cloud" could really be any public hosted online content, a social bookmarking site like reddit, S3, etc. I wonder how much data you could even stash inside flv video or mp3. I'm not saying this would be easy, it would need to be redundant enough to withstand constant takedowns, etc. but it would be much more difficult to stop.

olegk 17y ago

Tell that to Google.

kingkilr 17y ago
There's a level of naivete to this line of reasoning that makes this amusing. Both Google and The Pirate Bay allow you to search for torrents. The critical element that's missing making what Google does criminal is Mens Rea. The Pirate Bay's got it, and Google doesn't.
tptacek 17y ago
There's no reasonable comparison. Virtually every torrent index leads off with a link to Hollywood movie torrents.
- omouse 17y ago
  So does Google: http://i.imgur.com/Wy8cQ.png http://i.imgur.com/Wy8cQ.png Note the "quick" links to Hindi movies, movies & tv, music. How many of those are legal torrents?
  - tptacek 17y ago
    I see a clear difference between editorial promotion of copyvio versus algorithmic promotion of copyvio, especially when the latter is made possible only by the former. You clearly disagree.
    - omouse 17y ago
      Those "quick" links are editorial promotion by Google. Algorithms don't pick those links.
      - tptacek 17y ago
        Quick links on websites are algorithmic.

k0n2ad 17y ago

"These technological details are, at their core, indistinguishable from the previous technologies" cough cough

zandorg 17y ago

I love ISOHunt! Confound those lawmakers...

kiba 17y ago

"The more prohibitions there are, The poorer everyone will be. The more weapons are used, the greater the chaos will be in society. The more that people seek "knowledge" for its own sake, the stranger the world will become. The more laws that are made, the greater the number of criminals." - The Tao The MIAA/RIAA wishes to impose more regulations regarding the distribution of cultural goods. This mean less ease of access to cultural goods. Everyone will be poorer, checked. Lawsuit is used to coax individuals into paying rather than focusing their energy on adapting their business model to the internet. Weapon usage, checked. This cause chaos in society by inciting an angry crowd of consumers who felt the injustice resulting from agression. So chaos does follows, check. Hmm, don't know about what knowledge seeking means, but I'll try. Everyone is asking the question which length of years is correct for copyright to maximize economic benefit. It can be said that they seek knowledge without questioning the reason "why?". A check, maybe? Copyright laws make everyone a criminal when they merely copy something. With a push for more power to punish people, this mean more force of law. So the law is making people into criminals, checked. So in the end, what the court did is rules in favor of chaos over harmony.

RevRal 17y ago
+1 For the cool poem.

sebastian 17y ago

All this is doing is just giving the bright minds behind the services that we love so much reasons to move and incorporate offshore and stop worrying about the evil power organizations such as MPAA and RIAA have to sue them, shut them down, send them to prison, you name it. File sharing is not stealing. File sharing is caring. http://www.vincentchow.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/piracy.png http://www.vincentchow.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/piracy...

elblanco 17y ago

Then the popular torrent search engines should become really crappy general purpose search engines, that just happen to be good for torrent searching.

jrockway 17y ago

Fung was “fostering a community that encouraged — indeed, celebrated — copyright infringement.” True. Too bad that's perfectly within his rights. "Free speech", have you heard of it?

xsmasher 17y ago
Speech can also constitute a crime. Hiring a hitman, joining a criminal conspiracy, or inducing copyright infringement are crimes; the fact that you may speak or express yourself while doing so doesn't make it a free speech issue.
- jpd 17y ago
  I concur that speech can be a crime: "…Whitney has been thoroughly discredited by later decisions. See Dennis v. United States, 341 U.S. 494, at 507 (1951). These later decisions have fashioned the principle that the constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a State to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force or of law violation except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action." -- wikipedia.
- jrockway 17y ago
  "Celebrating [copyright infringement]" is definitely speech, however.