Biggest BitTorrent Downloading Case in U.S. History Targets 23,000 Defendants | Hacker News Reader

Biggest BitTorrent Downloading Case in U.S. History Targets 23,000 Defendants

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71 pointsygreek37 comments

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That's an interesting business model.

1. Make a terrible low-budget porno that few would ever actually buy.

2. Wait for it to hit the torrent networks

3. Harvest IP addresses

4. Sue for millions

It's possible some of these firms will make more money this way than they would have from regular sales.

I think that's essentially what the EFF is arguing.

I wonder how many people read the article and saw "The Expendables" and breathed a sigh of relief.

I just checked Wikipedia and realized that "The Expendables" was a pretty big hit (80 mil USD to make, 103 mil USD made domestically, 274 mil USD world-wide). Who knew...

In other news

http://torrentfreak.com/ip-address-not-a-person-bittorrent-c...

Yeah, they apparently didn't get the memo.

When they sue you, isn't it actually for the uploading (the "posting" of copyrighted material by allowing other torrent users to download bits of the file from your computer) and not the actual downloading?

Is that why they don't target DDL users of sites like Rapidshare and Hotfile, because the file is only downloaded but not uploaded by the user, unlike on torrents? I'm sure trying to seize the user logs of DDL sites through some form of legal action might be difficult as well.

Sorry to reply to my own post, but I'm now wondering if they can sue you for just downloading from DDLs or USENET (without the uploading activity inherent to torrents,) couldn't they theoretically also sue users of youtube or other video sites for the playing of copyrighted material, which I imagine from a legal perspective is essentially the same as downloading it from a DDL?

I think the idea is that while downloading a copyrighted work is still illegal, uploading is distribution, which is one of the indicators of "willfulness" which exposes you to the high statutory limits.

Yea. If they were to sue you for downloading (but not uploading) they could have huge landmark cases for millions of dollars in damages. Because the current math goes like:

  statutory damage limit = $150k
  people we *think* you distributed to = 1 million people
  damages = $150k * 1m = profit!

You would have a hard time convincing a judge that either: a) the copyright owner suffered millions in damages over a single download of a movie or b) that the person needs millions of dollars in damages to 'teach people a lesson.'

The "This Week in Law" podcast has touched on this issue a few times:

http://twit.tv/twil

Although I can't remember the specific episodes.

--- Film companies pay snoops to troll BitTorrent sites, dip into active torrents and capture the IP addresses of the peers who are downloading and uploading pieces of the files. --- This is a very vague way of gathering evidence. I am sure that the ISPs don't hold logs of the actual connections each IP is making, so I am wondering how is it possible to prove that the accused person actually downloaded the files in the torrent. Unless the snoops use a hacked BT client that downloads a whole file from only one specific peer, which is highly unlikely and will take a huge amount of time for all 23000 people.

I'm fairly certain that deep packet inspection would be required for an ISP to connect customer to IP address to visited resource. That being said, it would be trivial for an ISP to log the date and time each customer held a given IP address. If a plaintiff were to provide that date and time information, it seems at least technically possible to link that activity to a subscriber account.

What I don't see though is how you prove that the person listed on the account was the one performing the activity. Then again, all it takes is convincing a few people (6 for a civil trial jury?) who weren't clever enough to get out of jury duty.

What I was implying is that a snapshot of the peers in a given torrent is not exactly hard evidence that each of those peers has a 100% downloaded copy of the files. For example, I remember that some torrent clients have a "super-seed" mode, where they appear as a normal peer with less than 100% completion. I know this sounds a bit like "the dog ate my homework" excuse but it sets a bad precedent of what constitutes an infringement - is it downloading a whole copy, uploading a whole copy, or just a part (unusable by itself) of the work?

Well, what's a worse precedent? Being technically innocent of infringement since you skipped a single bit on the end of a download or the court ignoring your intent? Intent has been the cornerstone of many copyright infringement defenses. It would seem a bad move to claim that intent is irrelevant at this point.

Peers in a bittorrent swarm advertise which pieces of a file they have, it is very easy to see which IP addresses in a swarm have 100% of the data (and thus have downloaded the complete files).

Proving that a particular person downloaded those files is an exercise left to the reader ;)

Ooops...

Erm, what should I be using instead?

Usenet.

That's interesting, why don't we hear much about fighting copyright infringement on usenet? Even though it would seem that taking down a usenet server is easier than trying to disable a p2p network.

Usenet service providers and search engines have taken most of the legal heat[1][2], presumably because they're easier targets than anonymous usenet users.

[1]: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/10/17/big_record_labels_fi...

[2]: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/03/30/usenet_search_engine...

But they're not anonymous, they pay a credit card subscription. This enables prosecutions for child porn offences, even if the offence was carried out in another jurisdiction.

BitTorrent requires you to give up your IP address to join a swarm of users downloading a file. Usenet doesn't. That's what I meant by anonymous.

The Usenet server is centralized though. They could sue the provider to get the names of everyone that downloaded a set of posts. This is made much easier by the fact that most popular Usenet servers are paid for nowadays (especially ones that carry alt.binaries.*).

They would first have to pass laws to force Usenet providers to log their customers' viewing and download history.

Many Usenet providers make a 'will not track' promise to their customers. This is from Giganews' homepage, for example: "We will never sell your information to third parties or track what you download." http://www.giganews.com/

Has anyone ever been prosecuted for downloading something? Every case I have seen is about uploading, otherwise you can't even safely browse youtube--someone might have used a copyrighted song in their cat fart video.

They could. The answer they'd get is, "it's too expensive to store everything people downloaded, and our paying customers don't want us storing that information anyway."

A law could be passed requiring Usenet providers in country X to log downloads, but then you could just use a server hosted in some other country.

Preventing people from copying information is like preventing water from being wet. You fail.

I don't know why anyone would use a real credit card tied to their name & SSN for Usenet. That's just asking for trouble, considering how more and more people are mentioning it on public boards. The day I saw a post on how to download nzbs from Usenet from Lifehacker complete with detailing how to setup sab and sickbeard + couchpotato, I almost had a heart attack.

Usenet is protected by "common carrier" legal immunity, not by secrecy. I am sure the MPAA and RIAA know what Usenet is... but consider how flaky their "we have proof of you uploading the video to us" cases are, and then consider how they would go after people who didn't even upload anything.

Most major NNTP providers purportedly don't track user downloads. Some of them even claim to not retain upload logs.

It's also somewhat difficult to determine, given a file on Usenet, which provider it came from.

I2P: http://www.i2p2.de/

Apparently you missed the direct download movement a couple years back. BT is history for the leading edge consumer pirates, DD sites are the next wave and are not long for this world given how popular they have become.

Disagree. For niche content, private torrent sites are still king.

Example?

$3K claim letter to 23K defendants is $69M in potential revenue. The defendant has potential liability of $150K and probably has to pay more than $3K in legal fees to defend themselves. My SWAG is 10-20% pay for a $7M - $14M payday for the lawyers.

There doesn't seem to be any mention of what tracker(s) these IP addresses were harvested from.

And THIS is what you call a turning point, let's see what comes out of all this.

A friend of mine is in this list. And he didn't download anything.

(I know for sure because he's a vocal proponent of copyrights)

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