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In the legal world, this is why something called "specific performance" is rarely ever enforced by the court. Say I hire someone to build me a house and they f

by MWil 13y ago

In the legal world, this is why something called "specific performance" is rarely ever enforced by the court. Say I hire someone to build me a house and they fail to do so for whatever reason. Should the court really be in charge of babysitting and making sure this party builds me the house I ordered in exactly the way I ordered it? Probably not. This filter was a bad idea from the beginning. If someone had ordered my business to do something like this, I would have said "You build a working filter without any help from me and you can order me to install it if it is compatible, but you can't order me to build a working filter because that's indentured servitude"

anologwintermut 13y ago
Except the MPAA's filter could be: Disallow * Or realistically, just overly restrictive. So it's almost an impossible road to go down in either direction.
shasta 13y ago
Except the order wasn't to build a filter, full stop. It was to build a filter if isohunt wants to continue operating in the US.
- AnthonyMouse 13y ago
  That doesn't seem any different in practice than ordering them to build the filter under penalty of a fine equivalent to 100% of their US-derived income.
  - eru 13y ago
    Not quite. The fine would be conceivably bigger than 100%.
fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
I'm surprised that a screenshot counts as evidence. I guess it probably goes along with testimony about how it was obtained?
IanCal 13y ago
If you hired someone to do a job, and as far as you could tell they simply hadn't done anything, you could certainly go to court. Even more seriously, if you had been ordered to do something by the court, and it looks like you hadn't then you'd be in trouble. And rightly so. Given the example in the article, if IsoHunt were given a list of films that included "Zero Dark Thirty" from 2012 and the search results are full of Zero.Dark.Thirty.2012... Then it looks like the filter is either 1) nonexistent or 2) horrendously bad at its job. It's not like they were filtering it out but people were putting in "One.Light.Sixty.3012" or being accused of letting through anything with the word "zero" in it, this is a specific example where a keyword filter should work easily. You can argue that the original ruling was unfair, but if they were ordered to do something by the court and say they have when they really haven't (or have deliberately built it wrong) then I have little sympathy. It's not like the filter would be hard to build.

by MWil 13y ago

anologwintermut 13y ago

Except the MPAA's filter could be: Disallow * Or realistically, just overly restrictive. So it's almost an impossible road to go down in either direction.

shasta 13y ago

Except the order wasn't to build a filter, full stop. It was to build a filter if isohunt wants to continue operating in the US.

AnthonyMouse 13y ago
That doesn't seem any different in practice than ordering them to build the filter under penalty of a fine equivalent to 100% of their US-derived income.
- eru 13y ago
  Not quite. The fine would be conceivably bigger than 100%.

fnordfnordfnord 13y ago

I'm surprised that a screenshot counts as evidence. I guess it probably goes along with testimony about how it was obtained?

IanCal 13y ago

If you hired someone to do a job, and as far as you could tell they simply hadn't done anything, you could certainly go to court. Even more seriously, if you had been ordered to do something by the court, and it looks like you hadn't then you'd be in trouble. And rightly so. Given the example in the article, if IsoHunt were given a list of films that included "Zero Dark Thirty" from 2012 and the search results are full of Zero.Dark.Thirty.2012... Then it looks like the filter is either 1) nonexistent or 2) horrendously bad at its job. It's not like they were filtering it out but people were putting in "One.Light.Sixty.3012" or being accused of letting through anything with the word "zero" in it, this is a specific example where a keyword filter should work easily. You can argue that the original ruling was unfair, but if they were ordered to do something by the court and say they have when they really haven't (or have deliberately built it wrong) then I have little sympathy. It's not like the filter would be hard to build.