CRIA now taking action

[acrobat]

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

The costs are significant when you consider the volume of traffic.

[chuckskull]

The costs are significant when you consider the volume of traffic.

OiNK the last large site to shut down had over a hundred thousand users. Even more torrents, each of which when downloaded, contacts the tracker on a regular basis to update seeds and peers, on a schedule of anything from 5 minutes to an hour, for the duration the torrent is active. So yeah, a LOT of traffic.

[Mama Sumae]

From demonoid website:

The CRIA threatened the company renting the servers to us, and because of this it is not possible to keep the site online. Sorry for the inconvenience and thanks for your understanding.

Is that possible? can the company be held responsible for the contents provided?

[acrobat]

Probably doesn't matter when these companies are involved. They are above the law They probably threatened to murder the families of everyone involved, and kill 5000 kittens with a hammer, unless the site was taken down.

[Oobie-]

Tis annoying that demonoid got shut down
Was a great site. But like always, it will probably spawn another 5 sites!

[moogle]

Tis annoying that demonoid got shut down
Was a great site. But like always, it will probably spawn another 5 sites!

it'll bounce back you'll see

[Saracen]

.....

Is that possible? can the company be held responsible for the contents provided?

There are many situations in which companies can be held liable in that sort of way. For example, if you write an article and a newspaper, or magazine or website publishes it, and it turns out to be defamatory, it is not only you, the writer, that's liable but the newspaper, magazine or website. That's one reason why sites like HEXUS reserve the right to edit or delete posts.

And without a shadow of a doubt, in cases like the above, the willingness (or otherwise) to remove such material from servers has a significant effect on liability if you lose any resulting lawsuits.

Take a look at Dr Godfrey versus Demon Internet. A third party published remarks on a newsgroup that Dr Godfrey maintained were defamatory. He asked Demon to remove them and they refused, so he sued. Demon simply mirrored the newsgroups. They didn't initiate the remarks and, as far as I remember, weren't even the source publisher, but merely mirroring the remarks was held to be enough. Demon maintained, for a variety of reasons, including that they were just a 'common carrier', like BT, that they weren't liable. They also maintained that they refused to remove the remarks precisely because to do so would imply that they exercise editorial control over the content and that, as such, they were publishers not common carriers.

In any event, they lost. The cost was reported to have been about £250,000 in their own legal fees and £500,000 in damages and Dr Godfrey's legal fees.

Anyway, all that is about libel not copyright, but the principle of being held liable for the material on your servers, even if you didn't put it there, is clear and could well be used outside libel.

In any event, as I pointed out much earlier in this thread, if you get served with notice of offending content and don't act on it, you might well subsequently be held to account for that failure to act in any subsequent court case, if such occurs. So if you get served with a such a warning, by the CRIA or anyone else, you have to decide if you're going to comply, even though you may not be legally obliged to, or if you're going to risk a court case, the costs and effort and hassle implied by that, and the potential for a large award against you if you lose. Why would ANY hosting company be prepared to risk that kind of huge bill over a customer hosting allegedly illegal material? Is any customer important enough to risk bankrupting your business for?

That, I would guess, will be why they complied with the threat.

[Kumagoro]

I found the recent closure of tv links more interesting. As far as I know there is
no law in this country about linking to pirate stuff like there is in the US. Apparently
TV links didnt host any trackers and it was just basically a search engine targeted at
a coupe of sites... Seeing as google can be used to search a certain site why should
they not be shut down???

[kinnth]

the reason alot of these site cant be held libel is due to the terms and conditions you sign when you register. If they could have been held libel the sites would have been shut down long ago. If anyone ever read the terms and conditions they would know that you agree to not distribute any copywrite content, and by doing so you are breaking the site rules, not endorsed by the site, and they can remove responsibility as you knew this when you signed up.

[Agent]

the reason alot of these site cant be held libel is due to the terms and conditions you sign when you register. If they could have been held libel the sites would have been shut down long ago. If anyone ever read the terms and conditions they would know that you agree to not distribute any copywrite content, and by doing so you are breaking the site rules, not endorsed by the site, and they can remove responsibility as you knew this when you signed up.

Terms and conditions don't overrule the law sadly, in the same way that putting on your door "Trespassers will be killed" makes it legal

If the law says one thing, the T&C's say another - its the law you want to listen to

[Saracen]

Well ..... the general situation is that T&Cs may often be able to define how a contract operates, and that the law defines the default situation in the absence of specific contractual terms. Then again, there are situations where the law defines what's what and not only will contract terms not be effective but attempting to impose limitations granted by statute may be an offence in it's own right.

But there's two completely separate lots of liability going on here. The first is any liability that may occur as a result of the contract between the hosting company and their customer. Subject to the limits mentioned above, the contract will define liability between those two parties.

Copyright law, however, imposes a potential liability on both parties in it's own right. The UK law, for instances, specifically grants copyright holders certain rights over their material (such as the right to copy), and gives the ability to seek certain legal remedies in the event of those rights being breached. Those remedies will include injunctions against further infringement of copyright (and if you break that, you can be in serious trouble with the court), seizure orders for infringing copies and, of course, damages for any losses suffered. Nothing in any hosting contract can limit the rights of third parties to seek those remedies.

And beyond that, under some conditions, copyright infringement isn't only a civil matter, as has been discussed so far, but can be a criminal offence as well, with penalties including quite substantial fines and prison sentences. The criminal aspects aren't commonplace, other than in such situations as counterfeiting, but they're on the statute books and could be used.

So in the context of this thread, Agent is dead right - hosts can't avoid liability where the law says it exists. But those same contracts CAN make the customer responsible for any legal costs incurred by the host and any financial penalties imposed - look out for clauses referring to you indemnifying the host if you breach this or that condition. If you signed that, there's a good chance that if you breach those conditions and the host gets sued and decides to fight through the courts, they'll come after the customer to pay their legal bills. Ouch!

[Spud1]

Excellent news - one can only hope that more torrent sites and trackers which host links to illegal content follow suit and start to vanish.

Unfortunately torrents are not the real problem here, as they are just the bottom end of chain here, not the suppliers. They are the equivalent of the bottom end street dealers in a drug chain - easy to get rid of but the second you get rid of one another 2 spring up in their place. Whilst I am always glad to get rid of a torrest site (or a drug dealer) I know that its ultimately futile.

I would be much happier seeing the relavent agencies and groups focussing on the real problem - the core warez groups and suppliers who actually do the ripping/encoding/packaging/couriering..if you take down the real suppliers then the torrent sites will have nothing to link to and will close down of their own accord - or actually become useful and link to legal content. It can and does work - look at what happened a few years ago when FairLighT got busted, or Razor1911..or look further back for the even older groups that got busted..that caused relative chaos for a few months, causing much more damage than closing down a single torrent site ever did. Its the same with movie groups - Centropy vanished and suddenly all the good TC and Screeners vanished - it took a while before another group came along to carry on.

I imagine the reason is that its much easier to shut down a website - its there, visable and theres a person behind it all..whereas with a warez group you actually have to do some work to stop them

[UltraMagnus]

From demonoid website:



Is that possible? can the company be held responsible for the contents provided?

they probably threatened to pull a few strings and get a very picky auditor employed to find problems in their taxes no matter what.....

this is how all evil corporations work, if they cannot find a way to get their own way using the rules, they just go over them...

[TooNice]

Terms and conditions don't overrule the law sadly

Sadly? Microsoft would own your soul, or at least your loved ones' if it wasn't the case

[kinnth]

spud1 although you make some good points I disagree when you say that it is a good thing that these sites are getting shut down.

These site allow the distribution of media. Most of this media is always available and althought alot of artists and producers loose out through copywrite I maintain the fact that if someone watches / listens and likes it they would go and see the band / movie or buy it on proper DVD. I myself have a wealth of music that i have got through various sources over the years and the majority of bands that i have big collections of I have seen live more than once, bought promotional goods or bought them on vinyl as I am also a DJ.

If I had not heard them before I would have not seen them nor bought there music as readily. Many artists are now recognising these facts and are giving music away either for free or at massivly reduced costs. This is the end is helping their sales and I am sure they get bigger participation at their gigs / tours.

The only real people that are loosing out are the record companies and producers that have been living in luxury and lavish lifestyles since the dawn of the CD. Music has been far too overpriced for too long. With global markets, cheap production, distribution and marketing but the price of cd's never reducing, the record companies have been making the real profit.

These sites, or realistically, itunes like sites give the power back to the artists who fundamentally are the ones who deserve it.

[Fabula]

I would be much happier seeing the relavent agencies and groups focussing on the real problem - the core warez groups and suppliers who actually do the ripping/encoding/packaging/couriering..if you take down the real suppliers then the torrent sites will have nothing to link to and will close down of their own accord - or actually become useful and link to legal content. It can and does work - look at what happened a few years ago when FairLighT got busted, or Razor1911..or look further back for the even older groups that got busted..that caused relative chaos for a few months, causing much more damage than closing down a single torrent site ever did. Its the same with movie groups - Centropy vanished and suddenly all the good TC and Screeners vanished - it took a while before another group came along to carry on.

I imagine the reason is that its much easier to shut down a website - its there, visable and theres a person behind it all..whereas with a warez group you actually have to do some work to stop them

But Fairlight seem to be back and doing fine, along with Razor1911. Certainly caused some problems for a time, but there's enough release groups to pick up the slack when threats appear. The time/effort/money required to take down a serious release group is significant. The content will still be released, though it may take an extra week for a less experienced group to release.

Taking down trackers affects the many more people who don't know about how to get releases from source (or a few dumps downstream). It is not possible to stop the dedicated warez fan, but by taking down nice and easy to use trackers, normal users may be less inclined to download for free.