Torrent Search Engines Unlawful, U.S. Judge Says
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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.
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.)
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.
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...
Perhaps "it's illegal" is too bold a statement, but I do think that if tptacek got sued by HBO for torrenting True Blood then a fair use defense would not hold up. That's just my not-a-lawyer opinion, and I don't know of any precedent for this fair-use-timeshifting-by-proxy defense (do you?) but hey we might actually see a case like this soon. Last season HBO was monitoring the True Blood torrents and sending out C&D's to the ISPs of all peers with US IP addresses, if the Pirate Bay comments were to be believed.
Anyway, here's my not-a-lawyer reasoning: copyright law grants all rights of copying and distribution to the originator of the work and these are only transferred to a second party by written contract, EXCEPT for fair use (and first sale and other exceptions like that.) According to Wikipedia, fair use is a nebulous thing and varies from case to case but from what I can see it only gives you the right to copy for personal use (Tivo good) and never distribution (torrents bad). In fact Joel Tenenbaum and Jaimie Thomas both tried and failed to use fair-use as a defense for filesharing. So in order for hypothetical HBO v. Tptacek to not be summarily ruled in favor of the plaintiff, tptacek would have to show that his subscription to HBO constituted a contract which granted him the right to acquire and distribute HBO recordings. AND his torrent peers would all have to be HBO subscribers too. I doubt you'll find any language like that on his cable bill.
But what do I know.
So, how is using a torrent to get a show you have legal access to illegal?
And don't say commercials, since it's perfectly legal to ask/pay someone to record a show for you, while pausing the recording during the commercials.
There is a reason TV studios have never gone after torrent sites, while movies studios have.
A more plausible reason TV studios don't go after torrent sites, apart from the fact that the TV business is more decentralized, is the fact that torrenting does less damage to them. TV is primarily ad supported. Motion pictures make a large chunk of their money directly off the new release window of the DVD release.
That's possibly illegal; but it's one of those things that has never actually been tested and I cant find any part of the law that actually fully covers such a scenario.
The legal problem with torrents you already pay for access too is probably more founded in that your probably (unless your leeching the torrent ofc) facilitating others to download it - who might not have the access.
(Arguably, a criminal conviction may require "intent". If you use Bittorrent with the intent to only download, are you liable for your uploading?")
True. Too bad that's perfectly within his rights. "Free speech", have you heard of it?
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.
"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.
This article reads much more like a condemnation of ISOHunt specifically, though.
Note the "quick" links to Hindi movies, movies & tv, music. How many of those are legal torrents?
If the vast majority of URLs on the internet were infringing copyright, would you still support Google's right to index them?
I wonder what percentage of an index needs to refer to infringing content before allowing users to search the index is considered facilitating infringement. This percentage seems to be (a large part of) what judges use as evidence of intent.
The issue here is one of potential liability for contributory infringement.
When a party's technology is being primarily used for infringing purposes, and its independent, non-infringing uses are at best marginal, such a party can be held liable for contributory infringement of the copyrights at issue. That in essence appears to be what the court concluded here.
Contributory infringement, though, does not extend to technologies that can only incidentally be used for infringing purposes - were it otherwise, then any technology involved in facilitating an infringing use could be swept in (e.g., the manufacturers of hardware devices used to play the infringing material).
This line of legal reasoning has gradually evolved from the 1980's Betamax case through Napster to a variety of iterations in the modern law. It is a complex area of law but, in essence, it defines a level of culpability by which the law deems it fair to impose liability on a party not directly infringing on copyrighted materials but whose technology facilitates such infringement. Here, the court concluded that IsoHunt was sufficiently culpable to be held liable in spite of the fact that it can be used for innocent purposes as well.
Google's search function, on the other hand, obviously has major uses apart from those facilitating copyright infringement and Google is nowhere close to being a contributory infringer even though its technology might be misused for this purpose.
That doesn't mean the law is correct and people can reasonably differ on what is or isn't fair under copyright (or even whether copyright should exist) - but that argument is a philosophical one and not one for explaining what the current law is.
Good luck finding any judge that'd agree with you that Google's business is "99.9% infringing".
* http://www.eff.org/wp/iaal-what-peer-peer-developers-need-kn...
If he says it's complex I take his word for it.
I guess that means google image search should be forbidden too as most images are copyrighted.
You can also find child porn on Google if you know how: but no one would consider them a distributor or a facilitator.
cough cough
File sharing is not stealing. File sharing is caring.
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