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Torrent Site Founder, Moderator and Users Receive Prison Sentences
- dleslie 10y agoAnd the site is back up; but the odds of it being a honeypot are high. What happens in France when you are fined damages far in excess of your wealth, do they garnish future wages?
- gerby 10y agoAn "unknown third-party" has it back up as a public torrent index. I think it's a honeypot too. Don't use this service ever. Many people will still use it though..
- 314 10y agoWhat is the danger if you connect through a VPN?
- a1a 10y agoTechnically speaking they could target VPN users by infecting uploaded files with a simple trojan that pings home to a server, I assume you disable VPN after the download is complete.
- 314 10y agoIt's been a few years since I've downloaded a torrent. Spotify and Netflix are more convenient for me. My own routine was a VM purely for running a client in a VPN-only environment, tables to drop all non-VPN traffic and file transfers using shared folders. The VM was "virgin" to prevent any identifable info leaking out. It is possible that this is slightly more hardened that a "typical" use if a VPN. I was thinking in this context when I posed the question.
- appleflaxen 10y agoCopyright law is too draconian. At this point, the US should repeal the law completely, and let the chips fall where they may. Hollywood says we'll see a loss of culture (fewer movies, songs, books). Let's find out.
- GarrisonPrime 10y agoFewer media wide-releases sounds good to me. Perhaps we'll get better fare then. :P
- FilterSweep 10y ago>Hollywood says we'll see a loss of culture Seems like some scapegoating is going on here: (2011) http://www.slashfilm.com/infographic-hollywoods-waning-creativity/ http://www.slashfilm.com/infographic-hollywoods-waning-creat...
- CM30 10y agoHow about if a bunch of other large countries simply dropped the laws and outright encouraged their population to 'pirate' American media? If the countries/regions were large enough (like say, the whole EU, or China or Australia or whatever else), that'd really put the US in a bad situation. Either compromise and fix copyright laws, or 'fight back' against countries powerful enough to threaten them in return. How far would anyone go to 'save' the status quo?
- zentiggr 10y agoHence TPP and every other confidential trade agreement negotiation.
- maxxxxx 10y agoCopyright and IP (and probably real estate) are pretty much the only way for capitalists to make money the more things like internet, 3D printing, AI, robotics and so on are available to the masses. To me it's the only way to keep the current power structures intact so for a lot of powerful people copyright laws are probably the most important laws. They don't need the state for personal protection (they can pay for security guards instead of police) but they need the state for protecting their livelihood.
- tombert 10y agoI find the entire law on this to be pretty nebulous. Torrent sites inherently don't host the files people are stealing.
- PieterH 10y agoThe law is clear: complicity in copyright violation, for profit. It became a criminal offence across Europe in the last decade. This puts costs for prosecution on the state, not rights holders, and it allows for jail time. Whether the law is fair or right, that's a different question. Many people lobbied hard against criminalisation of copyright and patent violations, and lost. The movie industry is just too powerful and had too many friends. But it's not nebulous. Help others commit a crime, you are an accessory and you are liable for fines and prison.
- abiox 10y agowhat "help others" means can be stretched pretty far.
- DanBC 10y agoI can understand (but don't agree with) jail time for the site owner. I don't know if I understand that for the mods, unless they got some money from the site. I really don't understand it for the users, unless again they got money from the site. As I understand it copyright infringement is only criminal if it's part of trade. The article describes those users as downloaders, which to me means the rights holders can sue for damages as a civil action, but not that the state can prosecute as a criminal case.
- laurent123456 10y agoThat they jail and fine the founders is somewhat understandable, if only for tax evasion and for making money off other people's IP, but jailing regular users is going too far. There aren't making any profit from watching films, and since we don't know if they'd be ready to pay for that content, it's not clear at all that the film industry is losing anything.
- cmiles74 10y agoIt's too bad they didn't state how much profit this person actually made.
- brian-armstrong 10y agoJailing them does seem like going too far, but I can see where it makes sense to at least fine the top users. The top users pay monthly to run seedboxes. They are investing in the infrastructure of the site in a measurable way. That does make them seem involved in its operations, at least to an extent.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- bobthechef 10y agoThe non sequiturs rationalizing piracy (most likely as a proxy for rationalizing their own) in the comments is amusing, to say the least.
- M_Grey 10y agoCan you point me to a few of these "non sequiturs rationalizing piracy"? I can't find them, and I'm just reading people criticizing the state of the law and its penalties.
- zigzigzag 10y agoThe arrested guy's spoutings are quite funny because they're exactly what the people on the receiving end of piracy tend to say: “To all the [anti-piracy groups and authorities]: You are a lot of vile shit, destroying lives of people who are already struggling to pay their rent, their food, their bills,” he said. Right, it's only pirates who have bills to pay. The people who make content get their homes for free! “Why all this? Because they wanted to watch and because they didn’t necessarily have the capabilities to buy a DVD / BluRay or go to the theaters.” If you own a computer and an internet connection good enough to torrent blurays then you can afford a DVD and a cheap player, certainly a theatre ticket. "Didn't necessary have the capabilities" is pure rationalisation - it's a fantasy entirely divorced from reality, intended to let him tell himself that he's a good person really.
- TheSpiceIsLife 10y agoJust a thought: what if I only ever buy secondhand DVDs. I can only afford (read: justify the expense of) secondhand DVDs and CDs. The content makers / publishers / distributors never see a cent of the secondhand DVD market. Downloading pirate films is similar in that sense. Ok, the argument could be made that the secondhand market props up the primary market, but I don't buy it. I don't think people buy new DVDs with the thought of "I'll be able to sell this for $2 to the pawn shop after I've watched it" as a motivating factor. And, there is no secondhand market for digital media. Media piracy is the flea market of digital downloads. So an argument could be make that media piracy severs that sector of the market we would only buy secondhand DVDs anyway. Also 2x adult theatre tickets, AUS25 each, costs as much as my monthly Internet connection bill. I know there are a lot of Australians who would not be able to justify that expense.
- wrigby 10y agoAfter studying copyright law for music business classes in college, I think that most conversations about piracy could be enhanced by a common understanding of some concepts that current (US) copyright law is based on. The most important, I think, is an understanding of the first-sale doctrine[1], and how it differs from reproduction and distribution rights. Many advocates for piracy argue that distributing copyrighted materials on the Internet is no different than reselling a DVD they previously bought. However, the distinction becomes more clear when we consider that by distributing a movie or song through the Internet, we are also making a copy of it. Modern computers have made it incredibly easy to make a copy of a work, to the point that it doesn't even feel like we're copying something. Because of this, it doesn't feel wrong to share a song or movie. The actual amount of lost sales is immaterial when addressing the binary question of whether or not someone should be allowed to share a movie publicly on the Internet. The right to reproduce and distribute a copyrighted work to the public is solely that of the copyright holder - whether your doing so results in them losing money or not. The question of appropriate penalties, though, is much less clear, and I think it's a shame that prosecutors and rights-holders have pursued defendants as viciously as they have. In many of these cases the judgments are unfairly strict (or at least appear that way), which just makes the MPAA and RIAA look more evil, and hurts everyone in the long run. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine
- klagermkii 10y agoI feel that by reducing it to a binary legal question you've already dropped so many layers of nuance which help shape peoples own moral or ethical view of it. We all know that distributing copyrighted goods is against the law, reducing a complex question to an irrelevant simple one does nothing to help settle what people may feel is legal overreach. Also even the "right to reproduce and distribute a copyrighted work to the public is solely that of the copyright holder" is not an absolute when you look at things like mechanical royalties.
- wrigby 10y agoThat's a very good point - I wanted to point out that the issue is clear from a binary legal perspective, and my personal stance from an ethical perspective is that reproduction and distribution _should_ be the sole right of the original creator (unless otherwise assigned). I don't think I communicated that effectively though. I can definitely see that it's not a simple issue, and I think you're right to point out the nuance that I didn't acknowledge. Compulsory mechanical licenses are an interesting beast for sure. I'm not really sure what to make of them from an ethical standpoint.
- grondilu 10y agoIs the industry winning the war against piracy? I know some people -cough- who told me -cough (damn what's wrong with my throat?)- that lately it's been extremely hard to find new stuff on bittorrent networks.
- fataliss 10y agoEvery time there is a copyright law debate I think about this: https://github.com/philipl/pifs https://github.com/philipl/pifs. As far as we understand the number pi, every single combination of digit is part of it at some point. So technically Pi already contains a copy of any of your work and your future work even before you think of making it! Doesn't that make digital copyright laws completely obsolete? Now don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating pro-piracy or anything. I just think that our laws made in the 17-18-1900's and monkey-patched to these days are not prepared to handle digital matters. We should reboot our legal system. At least it's digital-matter version.
- myle 10y agoWe don't know whether Pi is a normal number. We assume so.
- bdrool 10y agoPeople who actually understand information theory know why that argument is facile.
- setra 10y agoReally? Why not explain why this is wrong instead of just attacking. I could very well randomly generate material "owned" by someone. As the size increases the chance goes down to being very low of course.
- myle 10y agohttp://math.stackexchange.com/a/216578 http://math.stackexchange.com/a/216578
- novaleaf 10y agoif I understand the concept correctly, basically it's wrong because your index/seed values will be much more complex than the data you are supposedly extracting. So basically you have to already know the data you want in order to "find" it in pi.
- dang 10y agoPlease don't call names or be rude. If you know more than others, a good way to comment here is to teach some of what you know. If you don't want to do that, posting nothing is also an option. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12517875 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12517875 and marked it off-topic.