Hi,

First of all I’d like to congratulate you on your story. I found it very interesting and persistent. I’m also assuming that you are French (bon j’avoues c’est ton nom qui m’as mis la puce a l’oreille mais bon ca fais plaisir d’avoir le point de vue d’un fr ).

I may be not be looking into the technical side of “URI” and trackers as you’ve already mentioned earlier, but i do believe laws on p2p are not making it very clear to users. While you clearly condemn Lokitorrent’s effort to fight back, i think it’s important to take a look at the “bigger picture” of Infringement in today’s Internet society

When you say “infringement” what do you mean in general? Stealing or Sharing illegally someone’s copyrighted work right? While the big guns are being pointed to movie filesharing websites (lately torrent sites like lokitorrent and supernova), what’s happening with other copyrighted material?

Take a look at the number of webmasters who’ve stolen stuff (images, files, material in general) from other websites. Are they infringing? Yes. Do people really care? I guess the people involved do, but what can they really do about it when millions of webmasters out there are doing the same thing. It’s attained such gigantic proportions it’s literally impossible to monitor or control these infringements.

Now let’s take a look at the music industry. The law is changing worldwide as we speak to impose “fines” on people who have downloaded free mp3’s. So while the music industry is loosing loads of money on sales, who do you think is making all the big bucks? Do you think the people who have downloaded alot of mp3’s illegally are the beneficiary’s of all this. Well I’m not saying they aren’t but i still think you should take a look at Apple’s net sales in IPod last trimester before you answer.

I’m just here to argue that companies like Apple who work around the problem of “infringement”, “copyright”, etc… are still making business while other organizations like the MPAA are getting involved in endless lawsuits on Internet filesharing.

One day the law will be clear and straightforward enough so that everyone abides to it. Right now we’re living in an era of online copyright chaos where closing down websites like “Lokitorrent” & “Supernova” only brings the MPAA one step closer to the real problem of p2p in the world today.

Lets say you buy a DVD movie. It has a title, length and barcode o­n it.

Ask a judge whether posting these three pieces of information o­n a website (or catalogue) is legal. There is no doubt in my mind that it is because the o­nly thing you do is to identify a (copyrighted) work. If this were illegal then companies like amazon would be violating copyright law.

An ed2k-link contains the same kind of information: title (filename), length (filesize), barcode (hash). These three kinds of information have exactly the same function: identification. If you were to put a couple of these ed2k-links and their corresponding title/length/barcodes o­n o­ne piece of paper it would become perfectly clear there isn’t any real difference.

When however somebody says to you: “you can get a pirated DVD at that address” he is (most likely) breaking the law. So would you (most likely) be if you told somebody where to get a copyrighted file. But this a matter of localization not identification. Ed2k-links have nothing to do with localization.

While “normal” links point to (or resolve into) a single address (analogy: it gives you the streetname and number of a pirate) ed2k-links only give a description of a (copyrighted) work (analogy: the movie contains 321 scenes, 34 shots are fired and the total age in days of all the actors is 532489: id=32134532489).

Hope this helps.

Just my 2 cents…

PS. What would happen if Amazon would use hash-codes for their “Catalogue Numbers” of DVDs? In other words: is a hash copyrighted itself?

It can’t be an URI, becouse of this (^^^) and to the definicion or “URI”. Since it’s not an URI it’s just some technical stuff, which looks like an URI.

Why this is important?

Becouse in most country hosting copyrighted material without permission is a crime. But a direct link to a file, hosted elsewhere, can also be a crime.
This URI and search thing can protect any ed2k publisher at any court.

Step 0. The torrent clients should be able to retreive “twin torrent” site pairs from SITE0 like this:

SITE1 TWIN SITE2
SITE3 TWIN SITE4

Step 1. you select a twin torrent pair from the list in your client (e.g. SITE1 TWIN SITE2)
Step 2. your client uploads the torrent to SITE1
Step 3. SITE1 generates a hash from the torrent
Step 4. SITE1 stores only the first half of the torrent and displays the download URL for this first half like this
http://www.site1.com?id=hash

Step5. your client uploads the torrent to SITE2
Step6. SITE2 generates a hash from the torrent based on the same algorithm as SITE1
Step7. SITE2 stores only the second half of the torrent and displays the download URL for this second half like this
http://www.site2.com?id=hash

Step 8. when a user clicks a SITE1 link the client realizes that SITE1 is a twin of SITE2 so it downloads the one half first from SITE1, then it merges the other half from SITE2, so the full torrent is assembled.

The conclusion: neither SITE1 nor SITE2 can be sued because they don’t have the full information to commit the “infringment”. (Neither one has the full torrent).
Furthermore SITE1 knows nothing about SITE2 and vice versa.
It’s SITE0 that knows about SITE1 being the twin of SITE2, but SITE0 can’t be sued since it doesn’t have a torrent on it at all.

There can be variations of how sites store the torrent (e.g. SITE1 stores the odd index bytes, and SITE2 stores the even index bytes etc.)

Cheers,
Nani

LokiTorrent has become a very popular site and it would be a full-time job for someone to effectively monitor every torrent submitted to them. They have a link on their site that allows rights holders to notify them if they find their software listed on the site. LokiTorrent claims they will remove it once they are notified.

Although I’m completely behind torrent and verified links sites in general, I realize that it will be difficult for LokiTorrent to defeat the MPAA in court, especially considering the fact that the MPAA has countless politicians in their pocket.

However, I don’t think it’s an open and shut case.

Drake

As far as I know, it seems to me eDonkey and eMule use an MD5 algorithm and chances of a collision are virtually zero (there had been rumors of the algorithm being broken but I didn’t hear of any confirmation).

> “it only starts a search so it can’t be an URI”
I’m not sure I understand what you mean. To me, it *is* because it is a URI that the search can be started (thanks to the hash code). Am I wrong?

Cheers,
Guillaume Champeau

It’s a common belief that an ed2k (or magnet) link starts a download. Technically it only starts a search, so it can’t be an URI.