BitTorrent: toying with the MPAA?
p2p news view / p2pnet: In November 2005 Bittorrent and the MPAA announced that they were going to cooperate in the “war against piracy”. The agreement was called an “historic event” and a “major breakthrough”. But now, four months later, bittorrent.com is still indexing pirated movies and other copyrighted material.
It’s striking because the MPAA is filing lawsuits against sites such as Isohunt and Torrentspy, but not against their partner, Bittorrent.com.
And the funny thing is, they all index the same torrents.
BitTorrent Inc did change its search engine. It even improved the look and feel by covering it in a web2.0 sauce. But it’s still not filtering out the pirated flicks. And that’s strange because in November, Bram Cohen (Bittorrent founder) said:
BitTorrent, Inc. discourages the use of its technology for distributing films without a license to do so. As such, we are pleased to work with the film industry to remove unauthorized content from BitTorrent.com’s search engine.
The press release continued:
Cohen confirmed BitTorrent, Inc.’s commitment to removing links that direct users to copies of pirated content owned by MPAA companies from its search engine at BitTorrent.com. The announcement today is historic in that two major forces in the technology and film industries have agreed to work together and proactively identify ways to l and to promote constructive innovation in this area.
The MPAA was happy and said:
We are glad that Bram Cohen and his company are working with us to limit access to infringing files on the BitTorrent.com website,” said Glickman. “They are leading the way for other companies by their example.
However, it seems nothing has been removed from Bittorrent.com at all, or they do a very, very poor job.
If you search for Universal’s latest blockbuster. ‘inside man,’ the CAM rips will pop up. And if you try other piracy sensitive terms such as ‘dvdrip’, and ‘dvdscr,’ you will see there’s a lot of pirated content available.
In fact, I believe more than 90% of bittorrent.com users search for pirated content.
So what’s going on here?
Is Bittorrent just messing around with the MPAA?
Why is the MPAA going after other torrent search engines and not after Bittorrent.com?
Torrentfreak - The Netherlands
April 4th, 2006 at 2:57 pm
There may be greater value for the MPAA in having torrent announcements forwared to them as soon as they become available and monitored for activity. That would make them complicit though.
April 4th, 2006 at 4:23 pm
Are we sure that all of the torrents are real? What are the chances that the MPAA has put up some of its own to catch users?
April 4th, 2006 at 6:42 pm
I bet they’re just collecting IP addresses. Don’t use Bittorrent.com.
April 5th, 2006 at 12:05 am
this is a bit paranoid, and it would be a gross violation of the privacy policy on their site..
April 5th, 2006 at 2:53 am
Also kind of pointless if your isp uses dynamic ip assignment like mine does. <evil grin>
April 5th, 2006 at 3:39 am
are you serious? dynamic ips don’t protect you. no one on the internet is anonymous. (bitch and moan all you want, it is technically IMPOSSIBLE for your IP to be hidden if you intend to receive packets)
a subpoena with the time and date of the alleged illegal activity and the ISP will dig through its databases for the IP address and the MAC address that it corresponds to. then they cross reference the MAC address with the account holder that device belongs to.
point 2: setting up a site to catch IP’s may indeed be illegal (entrapment). but IANAL
April 5th, 2006 at 3:49 am
Using an ex-territorial proxy server will seriously hamper efforts to obtain the identity of the individual sending and receiving packets through the proxy. A great many of these proxy servers do very little, ephemeral, or no logging. Data that was never collected nor stored at the time of alleged misconduct can not be turned over no many how many subpoenas are issued.
MAC addresses are only relevant on the local ethernet, until the first gateway is encounterd. If you have a router on your home network, you MAC address does not leave the house.
April 5th, 2006 at 3:58 am
The only thing that Bram promised the MPAA was that they would strictly adhere to DCMA take down request procedures. In most cases index entries are only removed from bittorrent.com after a complaint is received.
It still remains to be seen whether indexing torrent files that are not stored on the index site’s assets are indeed ‘contributory’ infringement. This is not one, but two levels removed from the actual infringing files.
If two clicks away constitutes infringement, does three? If three does, does four as well? If any level of recursion in the click-stream constitutes infringement, then we might as well just bundle up the internet and throw it away.
April 5th, 2006 at 10:43 am
AFAIK Torrentspy responds to such takedown requests as well, so the original quetsion still stands: why isn’t Bittorrent.com being sued too? Or could it be - perish the thought! - that the MPAA is just trying to intimidate torrentspy and isohunt, knowing it doesn’t have a legal leg to stand on?
April 5th, 2006 at 11:02 pm
Er… you are of course aware that BitTorrent.com will have a log of the IP address of everyone who uses their site to access a ‘pirate’ torrent? Can you not put two and two together?
April 7th, 2006 at 1:26 pm
Routers have MAC addresses too - so they still know whose house the file sharing is being done at, and therefore the account holder is still liable.
April 9th, 2006 at 10:56 pm
my guess is that they assumed torrentspy et al would fold under the legal pressure as the other sites did..
there is also a major difference between the sites visibly.. bittorrent.com doesnt actually “get their hands dirty” by calling out tv shows, movies, games, etc etc.. thats kindof a slap in the face if you want to keep your DMCA privileges..