MPAA Demands Source Code of isoHunt’s “Failing” Piracy Filter
torrentfreak.com
torrentfreak.com
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"
Or realistically, just overly restrictive. So it's almost an impossible road to go down in either direction.
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.
The major hollywood movie studios have filed a motion for contempt against the popular torrent site isoHunt, arguing that a court-ordered piracy filter is not working properly. The MPAA informs the court that isoHunt has “deliberately engineered the filter to ensure that it is ineffective” and wants the site to turn over its source code to prove their claims. In addition, the MPAA wants millions of dollars in compensation for the damages the studios have suffered through the isoHunt site.
isohuntAlmost three years ago the U.S. District Court of California ordered BitTorrent search engine isoHunt to start filtering its search results.
The injunction was the result of isoHunt’s protracted court battle with the MPAA that began back in 2006. The Court ordered the owner of isoHunt to censor the site’s search engine based on a list of thousands of keywords provided by the MPAA, or cease its operations entirely in the U.S.
isoHunt implemented the filter for U.S. visitors which allowed it to remain online, but at the same time owner Gary Fung took his case to the Court of Appeals. Through the appeal, isoHunt hoped to reverse the permanent injunction, but this didn’t come to pass.
With the appeal concluded the movie studios are now asking for a summary judgment, hoping that the court awards them compensation for the many pirated movies that were downloaded via the isoHunt site. In addition, the MPAA has filed a motion for contempt claiming that the current keyword filter on the isoHunt Lite site is not doing its job.
“The Isohunt Lite filtering problems are too serious and consistent to be mere matters of innocent ‘mistake’ or unavoidable filtering ‘leakage’ as Defendants have variously claimed,” the MPAA tells the court, suggesting that isoHunt is making these mistakes intentionally to keep up its profits.
“The record to date supports the inference that Defendants have deliberately engineered the filter to ensure that it is ineffective in preventing access to Plaintiffs’ copyrighted works. As the Court found, because Defendants profit from infringement, they have a powerful economic incentive to continue providing users with access to Plaintiffs’ popular movies and television programs.”
Backed up by screenshots, the MPAA cites several examples of popular movies whose titles are on the ban list, but are still available thought the site.
“One work on Plaintiffs’ title list is the popular film ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ for which Plaintiffs provided Defendants the movie title, release date and media type. Yet, the movie is available to any Isohunt Lite user who looks for it. Typing the term ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ into Isohunt Lite’s search box returns innumerable dot torrent files for the movie.” MPAA’s screenshot of isoHunt
zerodark
The movie studios argue that nearly all movies are still accessible through the site, which would mean that isoHunt is not in compliance with the injunction. While isoHunt has claimed that these are mere mistakes, the MPAA believes that it supports their motion for contempt.
“These are not isolated instances. Virtually every movie Plaintiffs looked for using Isohunt Lite returned innumerable dot torrent files for Plaintiffs’ copyrighted works. Defendants’ so-called filter does not even appear to block access to dot torrent files that match a movie’s exact title,” MPAA writes.
“Facially, such a filter is wholly ineffective and cannot be the basis of compliance with an injunction that enjoins Defendants from ‘hosting, indexing, linking to, or otherwise providing access to any Dot-torrent or similar files that correspond, point or lead to any of the Copyrighted Works.’”
The MPAA asks the court to order isoHunt to hand over all filter-related source code and databases, so the movie studios can show that the filtering failures are not “innocent mistakes” or “mere unavoidable leakage.”
TorrentFreak asked isoHunt owner Gary Fung for a comment on the allegations put forward by the MPAA, but he chose not to respond at this time.
It is clear that the MPAA is not letting the isoHunt case rest just yet. In addition to the motion for contempt there is also a motion for summary judgment pending. The movie studios are currently in the process of calculating the damages they have suffered as a result of isoHunt’s operations, which is expected to be in the millions.
The MPAA previously won a $110 million judgment against the TorrentSpy site, and it’s expected the damages claimed against isoHunt will be in the same range, or perhaps even higher.
Did anyone of those actually get the court to force disclosure of source code, in what capacity/scope, and did anyone win a legal case because the software was found as faulty after source code was disclosed and inspected?
Convenience really is my big issue; Steam has proven it's true for others too. It's much quicker to get a movie via tpb or where ever, than to go hunting around the few remaining video stores or try to find any legit place online (especially if it's a foreign film or an obscure 70's one).
The other annoying thing is Youtube take-downs. There have been so many times where I wanted to show a clip of some show/movie to a friend and then couldn't find it on Youtube anymore :(.
Follow-up question: how come the Usenet providers are not caught in this dragnet?
Another way to think about it this: you have some property that has now become a haven of illegal activity (through no participation of your own) that is disrupting the local community. IANAL, but in such a case I'm guessing you could be compelled by the law to clean your property up. Even if the law has no way to compel, shouldn't there be?
Usenet is not immune: http://torrentfreak.com/newzbin2-the-mpaas-usenet-enemy-1-ca...
For all practical purposes, they have become the same thing. Courts are not obliged to accept carefully worded definitions when the technology involved is a mere instrumentality.
Also, even if we do accept the description argument, you still have to consider that it's a description of how to obtain someone else's property. The first amendment doesn't give you the right to market detailed instructions on how to rob individual branches of a bank, for example, which is loosely analogous to IP infringement (insofar as physical currency is only a representation of a currency abstraction, this is actually a good parallel).
Citation needed.
Relevantly, the section reading:
The Supreme Court held that "advocacy of the use of force or of law violation" is protected unless "such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action."
This was specifically referring to the case the famous line about "shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic" not being protected speech; it would certainly seem to me that attempting to "market detailed instructions on how to rob individual branches of a bank" would match the exception above. You can publish material telling someone how to make an explosive device, but material telling readers precisely where best to put that explosive device to crack open the safe at the Bank of America office on Fifth Street? Probably not going to survive a legal challenge.
As a result, binary usenet is more or less devoid of easily searchable content nowadays. It was only a matter of time.
One of the earliest DMCA cases, ALS v. Remarq, involved Usenet. Usenet has the same "whack-a-mole" problem as P2P and cyberlockers where deleting infringing content often results in a different user re-uploading the same content (perhaps with a minimally different file name) within hours. IMO this kind of situation is handled very poorly by the DMCA, but I don't have any specific suggestion about how to fix it.
Make it easy to obtain the content legally?
10 PRINT "GET FUCKED"
20 GOTO 10