Find Out if You’re a Target in the Biggest U.S. BitTorrent Lawsuit Ever | Hacker News Reader

Find Out if You’re a Target in the Biggest U.S. BitTorrent Lawsuit Ever

wired.com

28 pointsvabole20 comments

Want to know if you're involved? Did you download The Expendables? If so, seek both legal and psychological support. If not, happy torrenting.

Being afraid of something like this is a good reason to start using Netflix. You have to wait for the disc to get to you, but than you can just rip and watch it later. Or use newsgroups I guess.

My son wanted to see some Wizard movie with Nic Cage in it. Through Tivo I forked over $2 and was informed we had 48hrs to watch it before our rental expired. We managed to do that. That was last month.

This month, I'm browsing through my Netflix immediate-watchable list and what do I see? Yeah, that Nic Cage movie.

Or Rapidshare, megaupload, etc, etc

The diabolical genius is that (as far as I understand it) you can avoid the enormously high payouts because you don't share it with anyone you just download it. The services are in the clear as long as they respond to DMCA requests and nobody goes after the uploaders.

Replaced my IP with 123.123.123.123 in the paste below

  mike@gum:~$ lynx --dump http://admintools.wired.com:8080/lawsuit_app/check.php
     {"suits":[],"ip":"123.123.123.123","guilty":"false"}
  
  mike@gum:~$

Retroshare, friend to friend encrypted p2p filesharing, chat, and distributed forums.

http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/

I wonder how many of these we will see before people started using anonymous prepaid VISA credit cards to purchase non-logging VPN subscriptions from internet cafes, and then used these VPNs to do downloading.

I imagine trying to track that down would be placed into the too-hard basket.

Isn't there some US case law that discredits presenting IP addresses as evidence of identity? Anyone know?

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

Now if only the rulings of the District Court in the Central District of Illinois applied to US federal law. (I'm not a lawyer, and I have no idea how things like that work.) Regardless, I've come to expect such little consistency from the law.

I haven't read the judgment but I would think that the judgment can act as a precedence unless there is a rider associated with it. This probably probably has nothing to do with Federal/State law. The courts are generally very specific about consistency in different judgments.

IANAL but just finished a course on cyberlaw and I remember something about little knowledge and things that are dangerous.

I don't use torrents anymore, but there was a time when I did, and I would probably be on this list. Not sure they want to pick a fight with 23k people.

Yeah, I remember the hullabaloo about some shitty movie about bomb squads in Iraq last year as well. 5000 in that case. Funnily enough, I did dl that one and noticed it shares one major fact with the Expendables -- shitty movie suing pirates. Like someone said earlier, this is turning into a pretty nice biz model, considering how many must lose their shit and settle for whatever outrageous fee on receiving the scary letter in the mail.

Agreed. I expected not to be blown away, but wow was it horrid.

The top 10 torrents for movie The Expendables on thepiratebay.org still have a total of 4595 seeders, 500 leechers. Healthy numbers, I wonder if they'll drop dramatically over the next couple of weeks.

This would make an amazing honeypot.

In what way?

I don't think I'll be giving Wired my IP. The lawsuit probably has a 'guilty conscience' clause and I'll be added just for thinking that I might be involved.

They know your IP just by visiting their site.

It is joke. When there is bad news, some people make light. It helps them cope with reality.

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