Hacker News Reader

Comment by yAnonymous | Hacker News Reader

For one, the way it's implemented now, it's only a matter of time until we see WebRTC torrent malware downloading copyrighted files to give copyright holders a reason to sue / C&D users.

In a time where sharing an MP3 can cost thousands of dollars, having a protocol that can share data like that without the users' consent is crazy.

View on HN

What is crazy is that “sharing an MP3 can cost thousands of dollars”, not any protocol.

Agreed, but it's not something that we can easily change.

Cases like the one I described could actually help by giving users plausible deniability, but that would just end with browser developers being pressured into disabling the feature.

That's pure FUD. Regular HTTP can do all that now.

Can they actually sue users when the copyright holders are the ones distributing the content?

In many European countries they can. They set up honey pots, log everything and then send costly C&Ds to thousands of people. Courts usually believe their "proof", no matter how bad it is.

It's probably a billion dollar business by now.

Citation please.

>http://www.pcwelt.de/ratgeber/Die-Abmahnindustrie-Jeden-kann...

Estimates of 500,000 yearly C&Ds in Germany from 2011.

>http://www.wortfilter.de/news11Q1/news3945.html

C&D industry in Germany makes about 400 million a year.

Don't have numbers from other countries, but it's definitely a big business in Europe.

Those are about the Abmahnungen, no mention of honeypots.

To get the required log files, they have to seed the files themselves. No other (legal) way to do it.

Swarm information is not enough as it doesn't prove that any data has been transfered.

You could easily download a few chunks from the clients to verify that they are sharing copyrighted works without ever uploading anything to them.

Nothing to do with WebRTC but it's (allegedly) a tactic that has been used by a US-based LLC known as Prenda via torrents:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/06/pirate-bay-data-s...

Earlier this week, Prenda faced a new and serious allegation: that it had actually put some pornography on BitTorrent itself, intending for it to be downloaded so that it could start a campaign of lawsuits and threat letters.

The Pirate Bay gave the data to TorrentFreak, which says that the IP address 75.72.88.156, which uploaded some porn files that Prenda has litigated over, "was previously used by someone with access to John Steele’s GoDaddy account."

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/07/pirate-bay-founde...

That is one (alleged) example. I was looking for proof of the widespread use of honeypots yAnonymous mentioned.

If we're talking about instances where "Courts usually believe their 'proof', no matter how bad it is," Prenda Law is not one I'd bring up.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/06/judge-finds-prend...

I'd expect the honey pots to require at least consent before incriminating someone. Successfully incriminating people based on an action that the "damaged" party forced them to do without even their consentiment is a bit too much to expect.

But then, I'm not completely insane. Laws often are.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com