The Pirate Bay Returns After 2 Days Downtime
torrentfreak.com
torrentfreak.com
"Sorry for not fulfilling your pirate needs tonight. It's ok if you cheat on us with another site, just once. We know that you still love us, deep down in your cursed pirate heart. ♥"
Actually I think this fact is an even better justification for pirating stuff. Anyone, anywhere can get sued by the media cartels--all that has to happen is that their ISP has to at some point assign them the same IP as a past file sharer. So if I could get sued tomorrow even if I'm a saint, why not download today and at least reap the benefits?
ISPs must surely keep logs of IP addresses -> account holders and make a record of when these are changed. I also assume that content enforcement companies get a hold of these records before deciding to take something to court otherwise they risk looking very foolish.
Of course it is possible that the ISPs record keeping is wrong, and there is also the worry about "3 strikes" type laws which may or may not require any level of evidence beyong a complaint being made. However AFAIK you can't be made to pay damages unless they directly sue you.
- What's the definition of an ISP?
- Are all defined ISP's required to log IPs? If so, how long?
- Are ISP's required to make records public or offer them to 'enforcement companies'?
Basically in the US, the RIAA and others who were/are suing people based on internet activity are doing so under the belief that a person is responsible for all activity under an IP (1 IP = 1 Person). So they track a download to an IP, get the customer from the ISP, and file a lawsuit with the customer as the defendant. I _think_ most of those lawsuits have been thrown out or settled. Generally, you'll need more evidence than a public IP address to take someone to court.
We all know very well that a public IP address isn't an accurate way to identify someone. For example, you can torrent at most local coffee shops, libraries, schools, etc. Do you think that school keeps a log of all it's private IPs issued, tied to students, faculty, or others? Do ISPs really keep records of issued IPs for decades? IP addresses are generally public anyway, we don't see the sites or ad networks using them much for identification, they use cookies, and even that's flawed.
So what are the downsides? Will we get sued or sent to jail? I'd rather risk that than being afraid.
Jut saying: If torrents are your thing, you might want to invest in some VPN... http://torrentfreak.com/torrentprivacy-fast-and-anonymous-bi... (Now would MPAA executives link to that?)
Now you get a nice offer from some men in fancy suits who represent some company that has some link to the MPAA/RIAA/whoever. They offer to help subsidise your server costs and in return they get access to your log files. Now maybe this country does not have such privacy laws as other places, so you aren't compelled to tell your customers about this change.
The new subsidies however do allow you to lower your prices to a level where you start getting a huge chunk of the business.
Since we're talking about torrents, (almost) every downloader is also an uploader, so there's plenty of recorded evidence of copyright infringement, and the RIAA has already sent thousands of threatening letters. But it's still a drop in a bucket compared to the dozens of millions of file sharers in the US alone.
This isn't exactly simple stuff - there are lots of legal questions that have yet to be answered.
> Is a few pieces of a copyrighted file still copyrighted? How many chunks do you need to have before you are actually infringing anything?
Probably yes, by connecting to that particular swarm that is sharing "Piratesofthecarribean12.avi" you are showing intent to download that file. The onus would most likely be on you to persuade the court that you had some other reason for connecting.
What possible reason could you have for downloading a few kb of a 1GB file other than to get the whole thing?
Remember this is civil law , not criminal law so the burden of proof on the people suing you is somewhat lower.
> What if it's encrypted?
That the transfer was encrypted doesn't really mean much, the way these people would catch you is to join the swarm themselves and send pieces of the file to others. So essentially they are the ones doing the encrypting so will know what the data was before encryption.
> How do you prove what a torrent says in its title is actually what it contains?
I assume they will just connect to the swarm, download the file themselves to verify it's contents and then serve pieces of that out to others. So they will know exactly what is being transmitted.
> How do you prove that a download was willful?
Again, I imagine the onus would be on your to suggest another reason such as someone broke into your wifi etc. Whether you have absolute responsibility for what happens on your internet connection appears to be a grey area however.
> What if individual files in an overall torrent are non infringing?
I don't imagine it would matter, they would be more concerned with the parts that were infringing.
Of course the data is useful apart from hunting down unlicensed usage, for one thing it's an interesting way to measure a given product's popularity.
At the same time, privacy laws may requireISPs to delete the data; I don't think German ISPs are currently permitted to keep the logs longer than necessary for billing, and, if a minimum retention time is passed again, they probably won't be allowed to keep them after the time has passed.
The annoying thing is that its not the studio company that is suing you its the IT company that is scraping your IP address. They then according to my lawyer do a geo-location lookup and based on your location determine if your worthwhile suing.
If your in affluent area your a target because they are confident you will settle. They reason people settle is that its almost impossible to fight the case with out revealing your identity. And I will tell you do not want to do that because they then resell that information because most of these IT scraping companies are offshore.
I heard from one lawyer when its all said in done they have done the risk analysis (counter-suing, cases dropped, etc) and they on predict on average making about $50 or more a case.
Could you clarify more? An offshore IT company that does not own any copyright is suing bittorrenters? On what basis exactly? And they're scraping IPs and are allowed to bring that up in court?
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/83073/why-not-use-tables-...
It's no coincidence that the w3c finally created a grid layout spec as well as the flex layout to surpass the "flow" mess, or that all desktop UI layout tools use some grid and/or constraint based system for layout.
Plus, content-presentation separation should be at the level of CMS/database/RESTful service where the data come from, not imposed at the level of the published content.
It's 2012, and CSS is easy. With a little work, all the problems you can point out can be fixed easily, including flexible grid layouts, and columns, responsive design. Can you even make a flexible table layout?
Also, every site I maintain that uses tables for layout, uses more than one, and it's source is absolutely horrible. While you say that a CMS should level should handle this, that doesn't factor in responsive design, site creation, or massive overhauls to style. Semantics will be an important element in the web soon, and doing html tables for layout, is considered wrong by anyone who cares. http://www.w3.org/2002/03/csslayout-howto
Good job, judge!