CRIA now taking action

[Oobie-]

Hey guys,

Demonoid is down and the reason behind it is this:

As of now it is still unsure what exactly happened, but the popular Dutch news site nu.nl reports that the CRIA is responsible for the downtime.

http://www.shoutwire.com/viewstory/1...wn_by_The_CRIA

I was just thinking, what would the internet (and in some respects life) be like without p2p such as torrents for all this content? Be it illegal or not.

My mate said "ha" when I told him it looks like legal action may be taken against these sites.
I know TPB came out on top (for now) when they took on the MPAA or RIAA, cant remember which now.

Your thoughts...

[Clunk]

Whoever wrote that blog needs to be congratulated on their use of font and background colour

[Saracen]

Whoever wrote that blog needs to be congratulated on their use of font and background colour

Hmmm.

The first time I looked at that site, after a moment or two, the background cleared and the site came up as standard black text on a white (or light) background. But now ..... invisible text, and even a Ctrl-F5 makes no difference. Strange.

[Saracen]

As for the subject matter, can I ask people to be a bit careful about what they post in here. The whole subject of "content" on P2P sites has some legal grey areas.

Our stance on HEXUS (as I understand it) is that there is no problem with discussing news like this, or about the legality of such content, or about whether the law or right or wrong .....

BUT .....

we do require that people follow the law, whether they agree with it or not.

We won't permit people to post links to, for instance, illegal content.

Let me be clear. P2P as a concept is, as far as we know, perfectly legal and legitimate. But the fact remains that a LARGE proportion of content on many P2P sites is not. We do not want to see posts advocating sites that may contain some legit content if the post is of the "nudge, nudge, wink, wink" variety of barely concealed hint to illegal content. There is a potential legal liability if HEXUS contains illegal material, and we have no wish to have to engage lawyers to define exactly where that line is. So PLEASE don't decide to post such material, because we won't be at all amused.


So to be clear, generic discussion of the issues is fine. But if you're posting site links, software recommendations, etc please be VERY careful what you do. We don't want to stomp on debate, and finding whatever material you want in the big, bad internet-world isn't exactly hard, so please don't tread on the legally dubious side on HEXUS, however strongly you (and I) may feel that some of the law is wrong. If you want to get involved in the illegal side, do it somewhere else, please.

[IBM]

Sounds sensible

[MadduckUK]

sounds ominous

[alsenior]

the site will go back up as soon as someone realises that demonoid has done nothing wrong.If i am correct ,hosting meta data and links to copyrighted materials on-line is not illegal in most countries.but if i am wrong please tell me.

[moogle]

nah, i been reading a response from the demonoid irc thingy. the guys say the story is from a dutch site just spreading rumours.

linky

love the opening paragraph though

Ok folks, here it is. Demonoid is down. It has been for around 1 day 2 hours. The reason is down is unkown. It hasnt been RAIDed, shutdown, terminated, deleted, burned, mamed, or thrown under a bridge. There have been speculation as demonoid.com whereabouts. Well the rurmors are false. A no name site in Netherlands has a blog about Demonoid.com being down. As I don't speak douche, I can not translate. However TorrentFreak Decided upon there own free will to further spread this and rumors. Torrent freak has known to be a sleazy site they post false rumors and hope they turn out true. They do this in order for money and popularity. Quite sad isn't it.

might have some swearwords in it.

still even if they shut it down people can still use google to search for torrents.

[Saracen]

the site will go back up as soon as someone realises that demonoid has done nothing wrong.If i am correct ,hosting meta data and links to copyrighted materials on-line is not illegal in most countries.but if i am wrong please tell me.

As far as I know, it's one of the legal grey areas I referred to. It has certainly been held in some jurisdictions that it is illegal, Sweden being one of them.

But in many respects, the technology is still some way ahead of the law and we're still finding out exactly what the law is. I mean, a government somewhere passes a statute, and it often didn't have the particular situation that someone subsequently tries to apply it to in mind when it passed the law. So .... one set of lawyers try to convince the court that it means what they say it does, and another set of lawyers tries to convince the court otherwise.

Whichever set of lawyers wins effectively creates a nuance in law .... right up until either statute overrules it or yet another bunch of lawyers either appeal that case or another similar one in a higher court.

This sort of thing is why HEXUS doesn't want to get involved in legal arguments about whether us providing, for instance, links to pirate software, is illegal. Whether it is or isn't is not only rather beside the point, but could be extremely expensive to find out. It may well be that a P2P site operator would take the same attitude. If you have a well-organised and well-funded pressure group claiming it's illegal and being prepared to take it through several levels of court case to establish or uphold precedent, it takes someone ballsy and either wealthy or stupid to be prepared to risk challenging it.

The law can be used, by those that can afford it, as a weapon against those that can't.

Suppose you decided to host such a site. You then get a 'cease and desist' love-note from a copyright protection group, and find that you either comply and shut the site down, or perhaps risk a court battle that could stretch to tens, or hundreds of thousands of pounds in legal fees and potential costs. Does it really matter if you think it's legal? Do you risk bankruptcy if you're wrong?

Oh, and just to complicate matters, the global nature of the internet gives rise to considerable problems over where jurisdiction lies. Suppose you, living in the UK, host a site based on US servers, but have users in 20 countries. What court has jurisdiction? The UK, where you live? The US, where the servers are? Or one of the 20 countries where your users are and where the dubious links are "published"?

Or, potentially, do you face possible legal action in ALL of those countries?

Let me give you a hint. There have been a couple of fairly prominent defamation cases between two US citizens both of whom are resident in the US, on a US-hosted American site, but where UK courts were used to try the case. Why? Because some readers of the defamatory remarks were in the UK, which means the remarks were "published" in the UK where some readers were, by that US site, and the subject of the defamation's lawyers felt the UK defamation laws were better suited to the action than the US courts. The sheer nature of the internet makes jurisdiction a rather tricky matter, all by itself.

It is not, by and large, a good area to experiment in unless you are either very sure you're right, or have very deep pockets, or preferably, both.

[TooNice]

I was just thinking, what would the internet (and in some respects life) be like without p2p such as torrents for all this content?

It depends how much you rely on P2P I guess. I've lived without P2P when I first used the net in 1995, and there are many viable alternatives content distribution mediums. I'll put as a question mark as to whether that would affect demand for faster Internet.

[Whiternoise]

Demonoid Shuts Down Again | TorrentFreak

[charleski]

This is just another stage in the protracted whack-a-mole game that has been going on for years now. Remember when the MPAA crowed about shutting down Suprnova? How much impact did that have? None.

The pirate community fragments for a few months and then coalesces again around a different set of sites. I have to say I don't really understand the motivations of those who set up and administer these sites, as any income from ads or donations must barely cover hosting costs, if that. But I suppose the status of being in charge of a popular site must outweigh the personal effort and legal risks in many people's eyes, and there is already evidence that several people see the actions against Oink and Demonoid to be an opportunity to advance their own standing in the community by replacing them.

BTW, despite vigorous denials for a while by some people purporting to be associated with Demonoid admins, TorrentFreak was correct about the previous CRIA action against Demonoid which led to them being forced to filter Canadian IPs. So I'm inclined to place credence in their reports.

[UltraMagnus]

what hosting costs? the average .torrent file is about a kibibyte.

this will never work, demonoid wasn't even a perticuallary good site anyway.

even if somehow they manage to get rid of bit torrent, there is still freenet and dozens of other content distrobution systems, some of them even more anonymous than bit torrent.

there has been this sort of thing going on all through time, as technology advances it stops selfish people trying to stifle innovation and keep information to themselves for their own greedy purposes.

[moogle]

torrents are small yes, but they still gotta pay the hoster each month, they also run the trackers on the dedicated servers too which cost quite a bit. supporting a million or however many they have needs quite a decent server with alot of ram so it's probably more than a £100 a month, dedicated server alone.

[charleski]

what hosting costs? the average .torrent file is about a kibibyte.

The .torrent file download is only the start of the bandwidth costs. After a couple of years of activity, a well-run private site will have about 10000 users and be tracking around 50000 torrents, at least half of which are active over the course of any one day. Each torrent client communicates with the tracker once an hour at least, so that the tracker can maintain current activity lists. While each communication is only a few bytes, this is multiplied by the tens of thousands of active torrents and represents a persistent bandwidth cost over and above that of hosting the web pages and forums. It's little wonder that greedy clients that spam the announce port repeatedly are swiftly banned from use by most sites.

The bandwidth costs of running even a small private tracker are significant. The costs of running a large public tracker are scary.

[chuckskull]

A lot of large trackers have been shutdown recently. Usually they just move servers and carry on like nothing happened. This kind of tit for tat approach at taking down trackers is never going to work. Even if you can take down the biggest sites, 10-100 more are going to appear to replace them.

The one thing they seem to be focusing on is the uploading of pre-release material, all I can say about that is they should stop the leak at the source rather than going for this approach which at most is an inconvenience for anyone involved in illegal downloading.

I personally prefer getting a real CD, I enjoy shopping for music, but even I could name 20places to download music off the top of my head, that's before I even get to googling and for that exact reason this approach will never work.

Personally I think this kind of thing should be dealt with exclusively by the police, the current setup means the victims(RIAA, CRIA and the rest of the record industry cartel) are judge, jury and executioner, via a mixture of harrasment and threats. This would not be allowed in any modern justice system under any other circumstance. Corporate vigilantism is not the way to beat piracy.

No money from RIAA lawsuits has even reached the artists, that part really bothers me.