24 ms·
Alleged founder of world’s largest BitTorrent distribution site arrested
- blackflame7000 10y agoIf you think about it, torrent sites are like a modern day robinhood. They take profits from the rich and bring enjoyment to the poor.
- bathory 10y agoi don't remember robin hood lining his pockets with truckloads of money he made off of the dodgy ads that all these torrent sites serve. and if its not ads, then it's the donations.
- josho 10y agoI suspect robin hood would have had the support of the people that he helped, so donations is appropriate. I'd say where the analog breaks down is the media companies aren't exactly extorting the people, nor price gouging.
- na85 10y ago>media companies aren't exactly extorting the people, nor price gouging. In your opinion.
- josho 10y agoOk, I'll bite. What makes you feel they are extorting consumers or price gouging?
- blackflame7000 10y agoBecause they bundle 200 channels of crap with the 5 channels that you actually want forcing just about everyone to overpay for what they're receiving.
- seanp2k2 10y agoHence the popularity of HBO Go. Showtime, Discovery, History, BBC are also working on theirs and have launched them in some countries. Sadly, Comcast refuses to make deals with most of them, so we can't e.g. Get a Discovery account because we already pay them through Comcast, AT&T, or Verizon despite a similar deal with nearly every other provider: https://www.discoverygo.com https://www.discoverygo.com . At least where I live, we get a choice between AT&T or Comcast, where AT&T is over land line DSL @768k not guaranteed, plus I'd have to pay for a phone line vs Comcast at up to 300mbit. Guess which I went with Anything that accelerates the downfall of the toxic incumbents in the US is a win in my book.
- dozzie 10y agoAT&T, obviously, as Comcast offers connection measured in millibits instead of kilobits per second.
- cabalamat 10y agoCopyright and patent laws amount to extortion because they are enforced by initiation of force.
- ekianjo 10y agoI don't remember Robin Hood being poor in the first place.
- ricksplat 10y agoIndeed Sir Robin of Locksley had been knighted so he was no mere rogue ...
- benbristow 10y agoIt's not cheap to supply all the bandwidth and infrastructure required for sites of KAT's magnitude. Also, the owners have got to eat as it's likely their full-time day job.
- draugadrotten 10y ago> If you think about it, torrent sites are like a modern day robinhood. They take profits from the rich and bring enjoyment to the poor. Over 2.1 billion people in the developing world lived on less than US $ 3.10 a day in 2012. Downloading torrents means you've got a computer, power, internet and most likely food and clean water. You're not 'poor'. You're mingy.
- blackflame7000 10y agoYes and some people make millions per day and on that scale I'm closer to $3.10. Poor is a relative term if you haven't figured that out. Thanks for lecturing us all on our extreme wealth though, I'm sure everyone feels better about themselves because of your statement.
- superuser2 10y agoA very, very small number of the people who work on films, television, and music are rich. Let's at least be honest here: to the extent that they're cutting studio revenues, the people who are going to feel it most are tradesmen making even shittier wages for sporadic project work as it comes even less frequently.
- CaptSpify 10y agoAs an American, I wish we would stop doing this. It isn't effective, and it's a waste of time/resources that could be better spent elsewhere. I'd even argue that its counter-effective to progress. Instead of punishing people for making more efficient systems, we should reward them, and try to integrate.
- tn13 10y agoWell, Americans have been saying that about drug war, civil forfeiture, surveillance and many others things for a long long time.
- cdumler 10y agoExcept that civil forfeiture is extremely profitable enterprise [1]. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/11/23/cops-took-more-stuff-from-people-than-burglars-did-last-year/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/11/23/cops-...
- mthoms 10y agoSo is the drug war. It all depends on where you're standing.
- dmix 10y agoPrisons, lawyers, judges, social workers running drug rehab programs, feds (DEA, FBI), local police, defense industry selling helicopters, airplanes, surveillance technology, etc, etc. An unthinkable amount of money has been spent and made from the drug war for highly questionable ROI to the public. What type of reduction in police work would take place if the drug war was ended today? 20%? 30%? The war on drugs is a job machine. DEA agents fly around like international playboys from the books I've read. Plus international governments get tons of money from the US to run their own interdiction programs. There has to be some level of influence to keep the 'war' going from these perverse incentives.
- neurocroc 10y agoThis is really unfortunate and sad news.
- kayman 10y agoThe cat and mouse game continues. Remember The Pirate Bay? Why don't studios have their own similar sites where they allow free torrents of some shows and offer paid torrents. As a busy person, I'd much rather pay for something which guarantees: - high quality - no subtitles - no buffering issues - no viruses - click and play
- gmuslera 10y agoAdd "no backdoors" to the mix. Something that some of those studios (i.e. Sony) intentionally gave to their faithful clients.
- huac 10y agoVirus, backdoor, what's the difference really?
- gear54rus 10y agoCan you please share the story you're on about?
- ht85 10y agoGoogle "Sony Rootkit DLC"
- gear54rus 10y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk... > Although the software isn't directly malicious, the used rootkit hiding techniques are exactly the same used by malicious software to hide themselves. The DRM software will cause many similar false alarms with all AV software that detect rootkits. ... Thus it is very inappropriate for commercial software to use these techniques. > In order to download the uninstaller, he found it was necessary to provide an e-mail address (which the Sony BMG Privacy Policy implied was added to various bulk e-mail lists), and to install an ActiveX control containing backdoor methods (marked as "safe for scripting", and thus prone to exploits). Freakin' unbelievable. And I have to pay for that shit if I'm someone who is willing to be sony's paying customer...
- steve19 10y ago" unlawfully distributing well over $1 billion of copyrighted materials.” bullshit of course. He simply hosted hashes of torrents that other people uploaded. As far as I know he even acknowledged dcma takedowns.
- ceejayoz 10y ago> It also shows that Apple handed over personal details of Vaulin after the investigator cross-referenced an IP-address used for an iTunes transaction with an IP-address that was used to login to KAT’s Facebook account. I find it darkly ironic that a legal purchase of music helped them catch the guy.
- chj 10y agoDoes that mean that Apple basically feeds every transaction information to Feds so that they can find this match?
- ceejayoz 10y agoUnlikely. KAT apparently had a Facebook page, so step one was serving Facebook with a search warrant demanding the list of IP addresses used to administrate that page. They likely then went to major companies like Apple, Google, etc. with search warrants for any billing activity (valuable as it comes with a cardholder name and address, usually) matching those IP addresses.
- tyjy011621 10y agoSo he may have been fine by simply using a VPN?
- ceejayoz 10y agoMaybe, maybe not. Plenty of VPN providers are in places within the reach of US law enforcement, and it only takes one slip up to expose yourself.
- joering2 10y agoMost likely. They become PRISM partner right after Jobs passed away, so at this point its a valid guess they share everything. Or by now Apple simply has its own room 641A.
- spodek 10y ago> Assistant Attorney General Caldwell said that KickassTorrents helped to distribute over $1 billion in pirated files. So, two or three files, by Hollywood accounting.
- akavel 10y agoArsTechnica seems to have the most detailed and best linked (PDF + DoJ press release) article as of now: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/07/kickasstorrents-alleged-founder-artem-vaulin-arrested-in-poland/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/07/kickasstorrents-a... Somewhat more/complementary details seem to be available on: https://torrentfreak.com/feds-seize-kickasstorrents-domains-charge-owner-160720/ https://torrentfreak.com/feds-seize-kickasstorrents-domains-... — e.g. regarding methods: [...] The complaint further reveals that the feds posed as an advertiser, which revealed a bank account associated with the site. It also shows that Apple handed over personal details of Vaulin after the investigator cross-referenced an IP-address used for an iTunes transaction with an IP-address that was used to login to KAT’s Facebook account. [...] Some aspects which seem interesting to me, from what is reported: • that apparently KAT owner tried to shield off DMCA takedown requests (which I'd see as trying to affirm being legal); • that according to the articles he seems to not have used Tor (or fumbled in it). (Assuming no parallel construction and that he's actually the guy, etc. etc.) EDIT: I couldn't really find any Polish sources — suppose because it's middle of the night here... (the single article — http://www.dobreprogramy.pl/Zalozyciel-Kickass-Torrents-zatrzymany-przez-polska-policje-chce-go-amerykanska-prokuratura,News,74921.html http://www.dobreprogramy.pl/Zalozyciel-Kickass-Torrents-zatr... — seems to be written based on the above English-language ones)
- xanderstrike 10y agoThanks for posting this, OP's link is broken for people with adblockers.
- executesorder66 10y agoI use uBlock Origin and it works just fine for me.
- drcross 10y agoShould have used bitcoin :(
- aerovistae 10y ago
- cocotino 10y agoWow, this sucks, I love KAT, what now? TPB is rubbish.
- parthdesai 10y agoIp torrent! Granted it's a paid service though.
- amelius 10y agoYikes. If it's paid, there is a money trail cops can follow.
- johnmarius 10y agotorrentz.eu
- ue_ 10y agoUnfortunately torrentz.eu takes a big hit to certain searches due to DMCA requests, it even says at the bottom of a page how many results have been removed. It's a real shame, and it would be nice to have an indexer on Tor or Freenet that isn't as susceptible to this sort of takedown.
- lkjhgfdsa57 10y agoThere is a freenet site that lists torrents, magnet links and inserts the file into Freenet but they use the kat API so I assume it's dead too. It shows that a Freenet based site could be workable though.
- GadgetJax 10y agoWhip out that credit card and start buying stuff instead? Who cares if you don't use it much, it's all relative. I like buying CDs and Bluray, then I rip them for everyday use. But its nice to have something tangible to back it up. Plus its all legal and protected, since I don't rebroadcast any of the content, just private enjoyment.
- josho 10y agoI find it interesting that a Polish man was charged by US laws, rather than under Polish law. I think he opened himself to US law by hosting the servers at one point in the US. Regardless, it is rather fascinating that his first visit to the US could potentially be from extradition.
- ikeboy 10y agoAnyone doing things that affect the US is automatically subject to US jurisdiction. But whether they can be extradited depends on the particular treaty the country in question has with the US.
- joering2 10y agoAre there any good examples of when this works the other way around? A US citizen being extradited to another country for non-violent crimes? Something in tune of computer hacking or hosting a website? Other than drugs and murders, I have a hard time believing US govt to give out its citizens to third parties...
- ikeboy 10y agoYou could start with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:People_extradited_from_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:People_extradited_fro... Of those, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stein_Bagger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stein_Bagger, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaston_Bastiaens https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaston_Bastiaens, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kirk_(New_Zealand_politician) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kirk_(New_Zealand_politic... are not drug or violence related on a quick glance.
- joering2 10y agoThanks for searching this. On the first link I only found one US citizen though.
- themartorana 10y ago
- derefr 10y agoIt seems like a lot of the most well-known pseudo-legal BitTorrent "groups" (PopcornTime, YIFY, ISOHunt, now Kat) turn out to be one-man shops, and as such, just completely dissolve as soon as their owner crosses paths with law enforcement. In some cases, these services are integral enough to the "scene" to be brought back by others. But other times, everything just stops for a while. This seems like a bus-factor problem. Why does it keep happening? Why aren't these sites being run by multi-national teams that can survive a loss like this? Even The Pirate Bay is "just" Swedish, so a sufficiently-motivated Swedish Government could shut TPB down. Meanwhile, there's no single country that could shut down e.g. Wikipedia.
- toomuchtodo 10y ago> This seems like a bus-factor problem. Why does it keep happening? Why aren't these sites being run by multi-national teams that can survive a loss like this? Trust. You have to be sure the people you're working with are diligent, careful, and won't turn you in (and likewise for them).
- drawnwren 10y agoI'd also wager more communication makes more vulnerabilities. Thinking back to lulzsec and dread pirate Roberts, both were caught thanks to communication.
- DSMan195276 10y agoTo add to this even more, Lulzsec got outed by a member who chose to cooperate with the FBI, and in doing so got a reduced sentence. So in many ways, your security is entirely dependent on the security of everybody else - if they don't hide their identity well, then your identity can be in jeopardy too. If someone starts cooperating with some type of law enforcement you're screwed, and if anybody gets caught and is facing a 50 year charge unless they cooperate, you can probably bet on which one they'll choose.
- Jach 10y ago
- msie 10y agoSo Bittorrent is decentralized but you need a centralized index of the available torrents? Is this correct? Can you find anything without a site like KAT? TIA.
- scrollaway 10y agoDistributed discovery is possible, but you quickly run into spam/noise problems. Centralized communities generally have features such as curation and deduplication (duplication is bad for torrents, as it causes peers to be spread across multiple slightly-different packages of files, reducing the available peers for both). It's not a technical problem, it's a social one.
- pablovidal85 10y agoI wonder if mediachain [1] could be repurposed as a decentralised tracker. [1] http://www.mediachain.io/ http://www.mediachain.io/
- supergreg 10y agoIn a blockchain-based system, proof of work could give users points so they could spend them to show their trust on a file (or maybe transfer them to whoever they trust so they can release files with a number of points from the start). For the duplication problem, solve it like IPFS does, the file's hash is it's Uri so a duplicate would just point to the same resource. Actually, people could build KAT-like sites entirely in IPFS and users loading (and thus, serving them to other users) said sites would be the trust mechanism.
- pablovidal85 10y agoProof of work burns money and I guess users won't pay for some content's reputation score, there are no incentives to do it other than altruism. POW-based currencies work well because you can exchange the points for stuff or services, not because you can spend them within the system (proof of stack does exactly this indeed and its long-term reliability has been questioned many times).
- 10y ago
- avree 10y agoCan't read this site because of their adblocker detection.
- codecamper 10y agoWhen will the feds learn that this is whack a mole.. and every time the mole improves. (I am 1428x times smarter...)
- rhino369 10y agoWhackamole has uses. Sure diehard users will find new trackers but it makes it harder for the average consumer to pirate. My dads favorite tv show tracker went down and he couldn't figure out how to get another private one. He's had to get a dvr and borrow my HBO password.
- AlexCoventry 10y ago> it makes it harder for the average consumer to pirate. How diehard do you have to be to type "Best torrent sites" into google?
- dwaltrip 10y agoYou are ignoring a few factors. The knowledge on how interpret the results intelligently, the likely feeling of discomfort or danger of viruses, confusion about which torrent client to use, etc..
- bickfordb 10y agoI'm surprised he didn't use a virtual currency to sell ads.
- jerrac 10y agoDoes anyone know if there is data somewhere on how much money has been spent by governments (specifically the USA) on attacking copyright related stuff? My main complaint about this is that I'd rather my tax dollars be spent stopping crime that causes physical harm.
- MichaelBurge 10y agoYou're free to ask your congressmen to change the copyright laws. Until then, they should be enforced: Having some manager deprioritize certain crimes because he thinks they're too expensive to enforce moves power from the legislative to the executive. You didn't directly make this distinction, but your point about preferring to allocate tax dollars to physical crimes would be a strange way to view changing the law.
- jerrac 10y agoDeciding how to enforce and execute the law is the job of the Executive branch. That, by necessity, requires prioritizing. The only exception is if the law actually prioritizes itself. If we the people don't like how the law is executed, we can try to get the Legislature to pass a law that forces the Executive branch to do it our way. Or we can elect a President or Governor who agrees with us.
- redblacktree 10y agoEnforcement priorities are never equal. There are a lot of laws still on the books that no one cares about, so they haven't bothered to repeal them. It's naive to think that all laws are always enforced equally all the time. It's an impossible ideal.
- bduerst 10y agoWhat a strange, strange straw man to knock down, especially since they were just asking for more data and explaining why they were curious.
- ionised 10y agoYour congressman is most likely accepting large sums of money from companies supporting these draconian laws. Sums you can never hope to compete with. So break these laws. Break them as much as is possible. Convince others to do the same. Civil disobedience is the engine of progress.
- ben_jones 10y agoIf I was making millions of dollars from illicit activities I would practice incredibly rigorous opsec. I realize modern lifestyles don't align with any kind of anonymity but come on. Here's a short list: - No Apple - No Facebook - No Google - Don't live in a 5 eyes or affiliated country - Know the extradition and legal precedent in all countries visited
- cloudjacker 10y agoIts really hard to do.... I was shorting the A50 via deutsche bank swaps on an ETF on the NYSE while China was arresting people for short selling. Is there an arrest warrant for me valid in Singapore if I happen to visit 3 years from now? What if the TPP gets ratified? Fact is, nobody knows.
- dmix 10y agoAnother black market business opportunity brought to you via fed money. DOJ, FBI, polish police, etc, etc all spent tax money on this takedown. All working so the next guy can make a website and make $16 million / year. And it only takes one guy to run the site apparently. Who knows maybe the next guy will use Tor, Bitcoin, read Grugq's blog and be 5x as expensive to hunt down. Thanks US tax payers!
- kevindong 10y agoThe disincentive to start the next pirate website is the fact that the owners/operators of said website are subject to arrest and jail time. If actions like the ones in linked article didn't occur, you would find a large array of piracy websites pop up and operate with impunity. Under such a scenario, each website would individually earn less. Yes, piracy websites will always exist, but the purpose of these shutdowns is to minimize the net profitability of operating piracy websites and to deter would-be operators. However, the constant shutdowns of piracy websites does create a perverse incentive in which those that succeed do so at a massive scale.
- kybernetyk 10y ago>The disincentive to start the next pirate website is the fact that the owners/operators of said website are subject to arrest and jail time. But it takes only one guy who thinks "they will never get me as I'm smarter" to have your next KAT/Pirate Bay that will (allegedly) cause billions dollars of damage.
- androtheos 10y agoTime and resources well spent, glad we have our priorities in order. Maybe Hollywood actually runs the country and not the banks and corporations, ahh, ahh, I mean elected officials of the government.
- novaleaf 10y agoVery interesting. It seems he got busted by making the mistake of once-upon-a-time hosting in the US and Canada, thus providing them grounds for persecution. So reading in that context, they would have been free and clear if it were not for that mistake!
- cloudjacker 10y agoBig opportunity for a zero knowledge data center provider in Switzerland that only accepts Monero
- ZoeZoeBee 10y ago^This, if you're working with copyrighted material its best to not leave a paper trail to a server in the US
- prodigal_erik 10y agoEver? Isn't there a three-year statute of limitations on copyright infringement?
- cm3 10y agoIs there a legal lesson to take from this when it comes to using cloud services hosted in the US where you can be affected by US laws just because you hosted a site with links to PDFs from Elsevier in an S3 bucket which itself happens to be pointing to a US datacenter? I haven't read it all, but there must be more to it than having used a US hoster that made the guy an easy litigation target.
- seanp2k2 10y agoSounds like he "does business in the US" in that case. The laws haven't exactly kept up with modern times and the Internet, but DAs are happy to apply them liberally to Hoover up more cash whenever they can.
- simbalion 10y agoThe folks who operate sites like KAT and TPB are heroes.
- LeoPanthera 10y agoWell we all switched from TPB to Kickass... which one do we switch to next?
- kbart 10y agoTPB, or more likely it's clone, still works (with .se extension).
- LeoPanthera 10y agoIt's incredibly sketchy these days. I wouldn't recommend it.
- obj-g 10y agoI kind of like TorrentProject. The UI leaves something to be desired (make sure to use advanced searching) but...
- pYQAJ6Zm 10y agoThank you! TorrentProject indeed looks like the proper alternative to KAT.
- ionised 10y ago1337x.to maybe?
- roozbeh18 10y agohow are newsgroups safe all these years? how comes feds aren't going after newsgroups?
- dublinben 10y agoAll news providers comply with the DMCA nowadays. They are legally protected as hosts of user-generated content.
- Kenji 10y agoWait, you can get extradited to the US for hosting (magnet) links? Madness.
- ElCapitanMarkla 10y agoKA also had torrent files
- downandout 10y agoThis will be interesting to watch. Torrent sites only host torrent files; I'm sure he'll argue that the DMCA requests were invalid because the people filing them didn't own copyright to the torrent files, which were the only thing that the site distributed. Where do we draw the line? Do we prosecute people for posting a magnet link? If a movie studio puts an MP4 of a not-yet-released film on its servers, is it illegal to link to it? It will be an interesting case to watch if he takes it all the way to trial. I don't think it's nearly as open-and-shut as the DOJ would like everyone to believe every case it files is though.
- posterboy 10y agoAren't file-hashes derived works?
- downandout 10y agoThat would be news to me. More likely, they're just going with a conspiracy argument (and indeed he is charged with conspiracy): he didn't actually commit copyright infringement himself, but aided others in doing so. Even then, conspiracy laws have very specific requirements for conviction, and this may not check all the boxes. It will be interesting to see.
- pYQAJ6Zm 10y agoThere is a very improbable risk of hash collision for two different original works, so… no, they aren’t? Interesting (and somewhat very worrying) proposal, however.
- syshum 10y ago>>> Torrent sites only host torrent files; They do not even host those any more All of the Torrent Sites are only Indexers of Magnet Links, no different than google. The BT Client then takes the Magnet Link, downloads the torrent file from peers in the network. When you Click on a download link from KAT nothing is downloaded from their server, it is simply a protocol link that tells your BT client what file you want. It is Technologically No different than a HTTP url, so if KAT if violating Copyright law then every other Search Engine is as well
- youngButEager 10y ago"Do you have a legal right to distribute this content?" "No." "Do you respect the people who spent their personal time and their money to make the content you distribute?" "Yes of course." "No you don't or you would get their permission first." "I don't think whether I respect the creators or not has anything to do with making their content available, which is what I want to do." "Will you please get their permission to distribute what they spent their time and money -- part of their life -- to create?" "Nope, sorry. I'm distributing it for free. They can take a hike." Real sad, these modern morals. Real sad. If you don't respect others, they ain't gonna respect you.
- ank_the_elder 10y ago"How much did Return of the Jedi cost to make?" "$32.5 million" "And how much was the revenue?" "$475 million" "So you had a $442.5 million profit!" "No, no. We had no profit - we use Hollywood accounting" Repeat for Forrest Gump, Spider-Man, etc. Real sad, these modern morals. Real sad. If you don't respect others, they ain't gonna respect you.
- youngButEager 10y agoYou can try but you'll never be able to rationalize stealing from someone. Especially when you use someone(s) else's actions to try to justify stealing from them. You folks are young. If you're lucky enough to learn some of these things, the fact that a lot of bad karma will suddenly disappear from your life and things will go shockingly smoothly -- will only be the dessert. The real banquet will be knowing that you went through a time when you made bad decisions but by a stroke of genius, realized you were actually hurting someone (financially in this case) and were able to set aside your selfish wants on their behalf. One of the best things you will discover is this: when a person is making bad decisions in one part of their life, they're rarely able to confine that bad decision making to just one part of life -- they're making bad decisions across the entire spectrum of their behavior. That was a cool lesson to learn. I had to become in charge of a lot of young techies to discover it. A near-karma-free life is waiting for you guys. Shalom.
- liquidise 10y agoPerhaps this is pedantic, but i wonder if magnet links provide any legal securities when compared to actually hosting the torrent files themselves.
- sergiotapia 10y agoSo that's why KAT's been down all day. Two things: If you're going to build a torrent indexer, don't profit from it. Keep it alive yourself, with NO ads, just plain HTML and JS and images. Second: This is why I vastly prefer usenet.
- benbristow 10y agoBut you have to pay to access Usenet - sort of defeats the point. And the whole retention thing sucks.
- sergiotapia 10y agoSonarr + Usenet + Nzbgeek, no issues whatsoever and I can download my public access public broadcasted tv shows at my full ISP speed.
- pYQAJ6Zm 10y ago> If you're going to build a torrent indexer, don't profit from it. It just occurred to me, what if someone wanted to go the legal(ish) way, setting up a non-profit organization to host the tracker? Such an organization could still manage ad-derived profits, keeping only those necessary for its continued operation, and donating the rest to cultural entities, like museums, libraries, independent producers, etc. Would this be viable in some country?
- eggy 10y agoAside from the legal technicalities here, I mostly ponder the future of IP. I think Napster positively affected the music distribution world in the long run. I am not very black-and-white on this issue, however, since there are many contradictions by both sides. I read the majority of comments here on HN about dated business models, big corporation dislike, the old executives don't understand the new market, etc..., but then a young indie artist in LA finds out Zara the clothing retailer has obviously copied her designs, and the lynch mobs are out to boycott Zara, send letters and other things to Zara and their attorneys. [1] I have not inquired directly, but I am guessing a number of the indie artist's supporters have downloaded a torrent or two. How do they morally distinguish the two, or how does anybody who is against copyright or property rights of IP? [1] https://www.buzzfeed.com/victoriasanusi/an-independent-artist-has-accused-zara-of-stealing-her-desig?utm_term=.duwxvQBeek#.hr3OM54qqg https://www.buzzfeed.com/victoriasanusi/an-independent-artis...
- DanBC 10y agoSomething like: "When I pirate a movie they only lose that single sale, and they wouldn't have had it anyway because I would never have paid to see that movie. But when a commercial company like Zara makes a profit from stealing designs, well, they're scumbags"
- guard-of-terra 10y agoI'm not a commercial company, who said I should be held at same level of scrutiny?
- DanBC 10y agoNot me. And not international copyright treaties either. When I download a movie it's unlawful, but they can only sue for damages. (US - a tort?) If I make a business out of downloading and selling the copyright material that tips it into criminal law.
- blowski 10y agoI get where you're coming from, and I think you make a good point, so I'll attempt to answer it. -------- Note that the following is an analogy. I have no idea about the facts of the case, but I'm trying to compare it to downloading illegal torrents. -------- Imagine there's one designer for most of the world's t-shirts but she won't sell them to the UK so you can't buy one. Zara attempts to do a licensing deal which is profitable for the designer, but she's greedy and thinks she can get more money without the licensing deal. So Zara simply copies the t-shirts, UK customers get their t-shirts and the designer gets nothing. This is essentially the problem. Disney has an almost complete monopoly over the distribution of kids films, and like all monopolies, they end up over-priced with poor service. The government doesn't seem to care. But torrents allow us to break that monopoly. It's not just about the cost. It's about how the digital distribution industry fails to service customer needs because its monopoly means the status quo is so profitable.
- Rfgakmall 10y ago01001110011000000101
- Rfgakmall 10y ago010000000111000101011
- marty69 10y agoSomeone has taken a dump of db ? I can't access to api to download dump. I try to connect on mirrors like http://kickasstorrents.video/ http://kickasstorrents.video/ or https://kat.host/ https://kat.host/
- ktta 10y agoHere's the paperwork: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2996082-Artem-Vaulin-Complaint.html#document/ https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2996082-Artem-Vaulin... PDF link:https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/2996082/Artem-Vaulin-Complaint.pdf https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/2996082/Artem-Vau...
- stop1234 10y agoI just had a crazy brain fart, what if bitTorrent and bitcoin had a child?
- megous 10y agoSo if extradited he may be tried. Now has jury of your peers (fellow citizens) any meaning in case of trying a non-US citizen? Jurors must be US citizens, but they will not be his peers, really.
- bekirbek 10y agokat was actually the best torrent website at the moment, and I'd say by far. This is a very inefficient way for the US government to spend resources and money, they won't be getting anywhere.
- ungzd 10y agoToday such databases of cultural works metadata (movie descriptions, music album track lists) are illegal because you can use some of metadata (checksum of files) as identifier to associate it with actual content in p2p network. What if we modify bittorrent dht or similar thing so it'll use some other identifier: wikidata id, oclc, instead of "checksum of checksums of files"? Next day Wikipedia and library catalogs become illegal?
- ForFreedom 10y agoIn the light of KAT and PirateBay being down, which is the next most worthwhile torrent website.
- gggggg11111 10y agoAfter reading the whole PDF document of the complaint one thing jumped out Here we have Apple, Google, Facebook, Coinbase, FDC Servers and few others handing over info on email accounts, wallets, hosting records and so on.
- pYQAJ6Zm 10y agoSo, I imagine, they asked Facebook for a list of IPs having logged to the Facebook KAT page, and then maybe they went around asking Apple – and who knows whom else – if they got those IPs in their records? If it was like this it doesn’t seem proper to me, but IANAL.
- sergiotapia 10y agoNow that's KickAssTorrents is dead, what alternatives are there?
- jonathansizz 10y agoYou could try paying people for their work, or else forgo enjoying it.
- sergiotapia 10y agoNo way to do that in Bolivia.
- jonathansizz 10y agoBut you can in Boston.
- chatmasta 10y agoWhat if I live in a country where that's not an option?
- LeonM 10y ago> “Vaulin is charged with running today’s most visited illegal file-sharing website, responsible for unlawfully distributing well over $1 billion of copyrighted materials,” Assistant Attorney General Caldwell said in the statement. I can't keep myself from giggling and thinking about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZadCj8O1-0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZadCj8O1-0
- DyslexicAtheist 10y agoA gentle reminder that the US can hunt you down and punish you under US law even you have never stepped foot in the country: >> "According to a Department of Justice press release sent to Ars, Vaulin was arrested on Wednesday in Poland. The DOJ will shortly seek his extradition to the United States."
- Strom 10y agoYes, but it's not exclusive to the US. This is standard procedure among allies, and US & Poland are definitely strong allies. The same thing happens between Germany & Latvia, or Russia & Uzbekistan. Beyond that, this can happen even between non-allies if the pursuer is powerful enough. The US & Russia are probably with the widest grasp due to this.
- belorn 10y ago> KAT does not host individual infringing files but rather provides links to .torrent and .magnet files What is a .magnet file? My understanding is that .magent link is the key hash in a distributed hash store (DHT).
- Strom 10y agoPretty sure there is no such thing and the author actually meant magnet links.
- Grollicus 10y ago~15 Years ago I went to to Poland on a student exchange. They held a presentation about their school and stuff and in the middle of the presentation theres a popup from emule saying it has finished downloading something. Mind you this was a school computer on their school network. I suspect this has changed, but back then they were pretty laid back about that sort of thing.
- ommunist 10y agoOh shit! And why Google is still running than?
- fallo 10y agoR.I.P.
- jbverschoor 10y agoSo he pays for software and goes to jail :-)
- prirun 10y agoI think it's ridiculous that Homeland Security is involved in a copyright infringement case.