Remember the piracy presentation I reported on last month? Turns out the pirates are real mad at the movie studios and their reps, and things are getting serious.
The Motion Picture Association of America's website was temporarily brought down Saturday by pirates enraged by an escalation in anti-piracy efforts.
MPAA.org and the website of AiPlex Software, a company the MPAA hired to target websites where piracy was rampant, were incapacitated for much of the day ...
Why do I have the feeling that this trouble with internet pirates won't be going away anytime soon?
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10 comments:
"Why do I have the feeling that..."
Because you have feelings and a platform.....
Firstly, I don't condone piracy. I believe one should pay for the media they watch.
But what the pirates were angry about is that AiPlex were launching DoS attacks on torrent sites.
Fact 1: Torrent sites do not host copyright material, they only help connect users who have it to other users who want it (P2P). Kind of like if I told you that Jimmy down the street was selling bootleg DVD's, then I am essentially doing what torrent sites are doing. But since I am not providing the actual material, I can not be held accountable for the person who is providing the material.
Fact 2: Torrent sites host torrents to legitimate content as well.
Now I have no illusions that the percentage of illegal material to legal torrents is severely skewed, but the fact is that torrent sites do have legitimate users. Movie studios are aiming at the wrong target, they should be going after the downloaders, instead of DoS'ing torrent sites (which is actually an illegal practice itself).
Simply put, the MPAA can't complain of being the victim of DoS attacks when they employ the same measures against others.
And again, DoS attacks by anyone are illegal.
Unless these torrent sites you're defending police what is being made available by others and remove the ability to post bootleg materials then they are accessories in bootlegging..
If I see someone on the street looking to by illegal drugs and I go "psst, I know where you can buy those drugs.Go to the guy around the corner and he'll hook you up" and if I'm profitting in some way (as these torrent sites must be even if it's just from amount of traffic coming in) from the owner of the illegal substance then I'm guilty as well.
You're trying to split hairs and that won't fly in court or here.
If they were indeed launching DOS attacks, then that company should get slammed with a lawsuit. I don't care what the torrent website was doing. That is illegal isnt it?!
one illegal activity doesn't condone another.
You're trying to split hairs and that won't fly in court or here.
Well you obviously don't know what you are talking about because Torrent websites are perfectly legal. What is also good to know is the fact that websites are not liable for the actions of their users. The MPAA are using illegal methods against websites that are legally allowed to operate.
But they are well within their right to go after the individuals that trade in copyrighted material, which I fully support.
Bottom line is that two wrongs don't make a right.
YouTube doesn't exactly police what is available (and even won a landmark case about it). And Google happily tells me where the bootleg YouTube material is. Won't fly in court, huh?
sure...youtube is constantly being forced to remove content...nice try though.
So as long as a torrent site makes a file unavailable when a claim is made, I assume they'd be okay. The initial statement here seemed to be that all torrent is inherently bad. They just need to follow the rules and make files unavailable when a claim is made.
The offending user presumably would just rename the file and do it all over again. Same as with YouTube. My understanding is that there is no legal burden on YouTube to proactively do anything. They only have to act when individual claims are made.
what's a "dos" attack?
what's a "dos" attack?
Denial Of Service attack. Basically the generate so much [bogus] traffic to a site that its servers can't handle the load and the site goes down.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial_of_service_attack
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