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Copyright Trolls Order Wordpress To Hand Over Critics’ IP Addresses
- acabal 14y agoAnonymity online, one of the most important problems of the coming decades. Even if you don't think it's important to be anonymous to the eyes of the government, being anonymous to the eyes of drive-by troll litigants is almost undoubtedly a good thing. (And I think drive-by litigation powered by increasingly easy access to information is only going to be getting worse.)
- betterunix 14y ago"Anonymity online, one of the most important problems of the coming decades" ...and a solved problem. We have numerous technologies for this.
- pavel_lishin 14y agoThat's like saying that drunk driving is a solved problem because we have breathalyzers, seat belts and airbags.
- martinced 14y agoIt's not really "solved" as long as the technologies are too complicated to use for the regular user. It's good that the legal framework allowing anonymity is already in place in some countries (like Germany and... Even the EU seems to be going in this direction) but technically it's complicated. I don't expect regular people to know how to connect to free public WiFi hotspots and then to use Tor and browser(s) able to dodge Panopticlick-like detection anytime soon. This may come at one point but we're not there yet and we probably won't be there anywhere soon seen that there are big governments out there determined to crush for fun and profit the very notion of anonimity.
- eksith 14y agoGermany is still a complicated case since, even though they value anonymity and privacy, they're by and large quite happy to prosecute for infringement. And the threshold for that infringement is still a bit murky. That's not to say, I condone piracy, but we have far too many cases of people being punished for fair use and/or disproportionately. Using Tor has now become fairly straightforward with the Browser Bundle and I expect similar packages to be available for mobile devices soon.
- jiggy2011 14y agoAnother big obstacle is that there is no way to run tor on iOS without a jailbreak.
- sneak 14y agoThis is absolutely false. There is no good way to cheaply host a high-traffic site anonymously right now.
- wwwtyro 14y agoMuch less use it to make money anonymously.
- Karunamon 14y agoHow do you figure? Hosting providers exist out there that accept bitcoin right now. With that one crucial link between you and the hosting provider severed, i.e. who's paying for it, what's left to link the server to your identity?
- eis 14y agoBitcoin is not anonymous. Too many people make this wrong assumption. It's the least anonymous currency/payment system I've ever seen. After all every single transaction is public. Of course it depends on who is trying to get the data about you. If it's the hoster then yea, he wont get it. But if it's the authorities/government then they'll get it. Plus theres a chance of you by accident exposing all your payments with your name...
- icarus_drowning 14y agoAnonymity is different though. Every single transaction is public, yes, but that only leads you to a bitcoin address, which is trivial to change. Perhaps there's a way to unmask them (even if you are smart about changing your "bitcoin identity"), but it is far more anonymous than many other options.
- sp332 14y agoIf you open a new wallet, it has no money. Any transfer you make from your old wallet to the new one is public and trivially traceable. It's not anonymous to anyone who puts 5 minutes work into tracing you.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- rayiner 14y agoWhy is anonymity online so important? We have never had the amount of anonymity we do today. Being able to communicate to large numbers of people while remaining anonymous was something that was just not that practical before the internet. Society functioned just fine then. So why is it so important now? Not that I support what this troll is doing of course. But I fail to see why a start of affairs that basically only existed for a small group of people from 1970-2000 is so crucial to civilization now that the internet is just an extension of real life and not a playground for the technological elite.
- jlgreco 14y agoI take it you have been fortunate enough to never have to deal with online stalking/harassment that made the jump to meatspace. Perhaps it is that experience that has rendered the status quo unable to satiate. "The needs of society" can kindly go stuff itself, I need anonymity.
- drcube 14y agoAnonymity has always been easier than it is now. Before sophisticated record keeping, you were anonymous to any stranger or new acquaintance. Moving to a new town was an opportunity to become a new person. Anything you published could be pseudonymous or anonymous. Letters and phone calls were essentially anonymous, unless you specifically announced your identity. With modern technology, all that is slipping away, or already gone.
- wglb 14y agoI am wondering if you ever lived in a small town. There was no real anonymity.
- bluntly_said 14y agoThis misses his point entirely. Sure, everyone in a small town knows each other, but it used to be that when you moved to a NEW small town (or anywhere else for that matter), almost nothing followed you. You could re-invent yourself, move past old failures. Now you have a constant and easily accessible record of your life online, which anyone can look up. There is no space you can go to that people can't easily find records of who you used to be. THAT is a loss of anonymity.
- binarymax 14y agoI know its torrentfreak, so I should expect it, but there is way too much hyperbole in this article. Just give us the facts! </rant>
- cstuder 14y agoComing up with facts related to Prenda Law is not quite easy. Have a look at the recent Ars Technica article which has a handy organisational chart of the law firm: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/03/angry-judge-calls-porn-trolls-bluff-orders-entire-firm-to-court/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/03/angry-judge-calls...
- AYBABTME 14y agoI found this article to be very pleasant and easy to read. Facts were there and presented swiftly in a humorous style, with references if you want the dry read.
- eksith 14y agoApparently, these folks (or is it 1 or 2 people?) have never heard of the idiom, "when you find yourself in a hole..." This is by far the most surreal, almost TwilightZone-like, behavior of any legal entity I've ever seen. I'm tempted to almost take it as a desperate attempt to self-destruct in some spectactular way as to deflect any sort of punishment for the abuse of the justice system. But that would assume they actually knew what they were doing. They have no standing to demand this information as visitors haven't conducted any sort of copyright infringement (we're not talking Viacom-YouTube stuff here) and second, among the visitors were journalists and (surely) representatives from the government. Someone had to research the trolls. "The TL;DR is that there is going to be an unprecedented showdown in a Los Angeles court on Monday that could lead to someone associated with Prenda going to prison." Uh, make that everyone, if there's any justice left. Except maybe that Cooper fellow who had his identity usurped as CEO.
- wiredfool 14y agoPopehat's comments on this are illuminating. http://www.popehat.com/2013/03/06/what-prenda-law-is-facing-in-los-angeles/ http://www.popehat.com/2013/03/06/what-prenda-law-is-facing-... Do not taunt super happy fun federal judge.
- rozap 14y agoThis was a great article, summed it all up really nicely. Judge Wright's moves in this big game of chess are especially good. He really wants to get to the truth.
- coditor 14y agoI don't believe a court has ordered this, it's just Prenda Law's threat. Thus has zero meaning, other than more Prenda hilarity.
- jstalin 14y agoHere's the actual subpoena: https://dietrolldie.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/automatticworpresssubpoena_prenda.pdf https://dietrolldie.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/automatticwo... It looks like they domesticated it to California, so they (wordpress) would need to file a motion to quash.
- mpclark 14y agoI like what you did there - I clicked on the link to read the doc and then slowly realised that my IP now falls within the scope of the requested information.
- Zuider 14y agoI found myself reluctant to open the links to FightCopyrightTrolls and DieTrollsDie. Even if there is no consequence to following those links (and smackfu has argued plausibly above that there could be) there is a chilling effect from this demand.
- danielweber 14y agoI want to do a "I am Spartacus" thing now.
- Natsu 14y agoWorse, because they almost certainly will look for some way to sue readers of those sites. On the other hand, it might give you not-so-free front row tickets should they be sanctioned by the judge.
- smackfu 14y agoI'm surprised the subpoena doesn't have anything on it that makes it seems like a judge read it. I understand that most subpoenas are just approved by the judge and issued without review, and that the opposition is expected to file a motion-to-quash if they don't like it, but this doesn't even seem to have a signature or anything from a judge.
- lutusp 14y ago> ... the sites mentioned above have been keeping up to date, complimented [sic] brilliantly by ... * sigh * ... the desired word is not "complimented", it's "complemented". http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2011/04/compliment-or-complement/ http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2011/04/compliment-or-com...
- EliRivers 14y agoUpvote for correcting a common mistake, massive downvote for doing it with a remarkably patronising * sigh *.
- derleth 14y agoAlso, 'television' is not a word.
- ZoFreX 14y agoWhat?
- derleth 14y agoIt's a barbarism, a mixing of Greek and Latin roots into the same word. Barbarisms are errors in usage. "'Television' is one of the most recent offspring of linguistic miscegenation." -- Leslie A. White, The Science of Culture, 1949 http://grammar.about.com/od/ab/g/barbarismterm.htm http://grammar.about.com/od/ab/g/barbarismterm.htm
- ZoFreX 14y agoIt's in the OED, that's good enough for me!
- tptacek 14y agoIt's sad that Torrentfreak gets to own this issue on HN instead of Popehat, an excellent blog run by former prosecutors turned First Amendment attorneys, and if you have the slightest inclination towards legal nerdery you owe it to yourself to read their (superior) coverage of the Prenda Law debacle. Here's a starting point: http://www.popehat.com/2013/03/06/deposition-reveals-prenda-law-business-model-monetizing-squalid-douchebaggery/ http://www.popehat.com/2013/03/06/deposition-reveals-prenda-... This is a rare instance in which Torrentfreak may be covering a story accurately, although don't race to pat them on the back for that because this does seem to be a case in which copyrights are being prosecuted by parodically conceived comic book supervillains. As Popehat reports it, what seems to have happened is this: * A small law firm in Chicago, through a series of shell transactions, acquired the rights to some porn properties. * The firm began running a variant of the movie studio lawsuit playbook on people it determined had shared those files over the Internet. * The firm did not disclose to the court that it had a direct interest in the media properties, instead representing that it was counsel for 3rd party firms that owned the properties (this is technically true, but wait...). * Another attorney, Morgan Prietz, began inquiries into these suits, smelled a rat, and started collecting evidence. * Among the evidence discovered: one of the shell owners of the porn videos was an "Alan Cooper", who is evidently a former acquaintance of one of the Prenda attorneys with no actual relationship to the business and who has in effect had his identity stolen as a figurehead for the lawsuits. * Prenda manages to bring a case in the court of Judge Otis Wright. Prietz reaches out to Judge Wright, filing a document that more or less directly accuses Prenda of fraud. Prenda replies to the filing by addressing ancillary issues in it without rebutting the core allegation. Judge Wright notices, and brings down the righteous legal hammer of a vengeful god down on Prenda, ordering them to his courtroom next week in person to either cough up a real Alan Cooper and a very compelling explanation of what they're up to or potentially face immediate incarceration. I'm leaving out all sorts of fun details here, which is all the more reason you should be reading Popehat. For starters, you really need to dig into Popehat to see how one of Prenda's outside counsels explained the business relationship between the porn-video shell companies and Prenda itself. [PS] A big problem with Popehat vis a vis HN is that the blog titles are never congenial to this site, and the ethos on HN is now "don't mess with the titles". So it never seems productive to submit their articles. That's a shame, because Popehat legal coverage is everything Torrentfreak's and Techdirt's isn't: thoughtful, careful, technical, accessible, well-written.
- mkopinsky 14y ago> Our client is requesting all Internet Protocol addresses (including the date and time of that access in Universal Coordinated Time) that accessed the blogs located at diretrolldie.com and fightcopyrighttrolls.com between January 1, 2011 through the present. >Please provide this information in an Excel spreadsheet. Easy. Give them an Excel 97-2003 spreadsheet with the first 65,535 and tell them the format can't support any more.
- pixl97 14y agoJust print them out on paper in an unordered format.