I guess that the get-out clause for isohunt and other torrent sites, are that they remove links to the infringing content when told about them. Thereby maintaining supporting there argument that they have substantial non-infringing uses. Not sure what will happen to The Pirate bay eventually unfortunately, as they openly want to stick it to Big Media. Even though their site is not currently illegal in Sweden, I wonder how long it will be until the American Corporate Government twists their arm into making it illegal?

Naturally, Big Media wants to crush isohunt and any other site like it regardless of other legitimate uses, because they want to maintain their old, outdated business model. This has been discussed to death on p2pnet and other sites, so no need to go over it again.

My turn for an analogy. Say a total stranger steals your car and kills someone with it. Are you responsible? You would probably say no at this point. How about if you left the keys in the ignition? Does that make you more liable? How about if it was because you honestly forgot the keys in the ignition, something that normally never happens. How liable should you be then? Who gets to dictate how liable, how guilty YOU are? Should it be the family of the person killed? Some would say yes to that. When it comes to determining liability, things tend to become complicated very quickly. Some folks in the government don’t want to even touch these matters and it is not hard to see why. Others barely skim the surface, wanting to create new laws haphazardly without actually understanding what the people want or what is at stake here. These are dangerous waters we’re in and we must navigate them very carefully.

No. That’s still active. For anyone who doesn’t know what this refers to, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/5230776.stm

Cheers!

I don’t see a lot of difference here between the links on the net for torrents and the magazines, other than moneyed influences and self-interest. You figure if the magazines were rolling in dough, they would try the same?

One could make an analogy with giving someone the key to a safe, so that the other person can grab the gun and commit murder. In this case, both are guilty. Why is this different?

For all our sakes, I’d love to be wrong on this one – and hopefully I am.

Does this mean that Hemming has dropped her suit over P2Pnet’s anonymous user comments?

Notice what seems to be the undercurrent theme here. The idea “we don’t want to put in the effort to police sites for infringement”. They want you to do that, each and every site owner. So DMCA has a barb in it they would rather not deal with. A commonly sought scheme each and every time they start making legal theories.

However, none of the major labels have made it easy to identify any of their “owned works”. They have immensely complicated the issue by making labels for the star artists when they reach a certain point of recognition or sales. They don’t generally make that info public. So you never know what label owns what, if it is connected to a major label, and is often hard to tell if it is even under copyright in the sense there is no info on it. The majors have gone to great lengths to remove the identifications for many reasons. Acknowledgment of funding and possibilities of owing artists are some of the reasons. If an artist can’t come up with the data, then it is far harder to make a claim. If total income can’t be verified in some manner, no one can counter argue that business is other than the labels claim. All this vagueness now bites them on the butt, as no one but them can properly identify which items belongs to them and which does not. Even the Magnetic site that attempts to identify what is owned property by the majors has problems with this.

If it is that hard to identify what is owned property, by whom, for whom, how can any run of the mill citizen with an on-line site be able to do so? Saying you ought to know, doesn’t identify which is which nor make the job any easier. Being as this is the case, only the labels themselves know this info and they are not parting with that info up front unless by complaint to isolated individuals, whom do not collectively share all info, the average site owner has no clue to what is owned by whom and no way to identify them. This leaves it right back to the labels themselves having to do that job, no matter how much they might hate the idea of paying someone to do that.

By ‘these files’, hopefully Gary refers back to the file parts exchanced over BT.
Interesting to know if it is even possible to copyright metadata / computer generated data like torrents, pars, hashes ect.