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

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/05/biggest-bittorrent-case/

by ygreek • 15 years ago

71 37 15 years ago

wired.com

hessenwolf2• 15 years ago

Ooops...

Erm, what should I be using instead?

jrockway4• 15 years ago

Usenet.

vabole• 15 years ago

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.

pwg• 15 years ago

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

josefresco• 15 years ago

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.

lhnz• 15 years ago

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

hessenwolf2• 15 years ago

Example?

johnphillips542• 15 years ago

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.

johnphillips542• 15 years ago

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?

lutorm3• 15 years ago

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.

barefoot• 15 years ago

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.

officemonkey• 15 years ago

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...

bane• 15 years ago

In other news

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

lutorm3• 15 years ago

Yeah, they apparently didn't get the memo.

funkshanker• 15 years ago

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

lini2• 15 years ago

--- 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.

yock2• 15 years ago

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.

lini2• 15 years ago

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?

ZoFreX• 15 years ago

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 ;)

jrwoodruff• 15 years ago

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.

lutorm3• 15 years ago

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

geoffc• 15 years ago

$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.

Trufa• 15 years ago

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

tripzilch• 15 years ago

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)

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

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