You know, I use Torrent search engines to time-shift TV (we pay for pretty much every piece of premium cable except Cinemax), and so I get a lot of value out of sites like Isohunt, but even so it's hard to escape the fact that these sites are deliberately coming as close to the line of "overtly criminal" as you can get.
Because, give me a f'ing break: the first link in the categorized breakdown of indexed Torrents on Isohunt is to "Videos/Movies"; it is only the fact that Isohunt is a crappy torrent search site that results in that link not being entirely composed of trivially regexable horrific copyright violations.
For what it's worth, I'm slightly queasy about calling "torrenting whole seasons worth of shows I paid for" "time-shifting"; to whatever extent that that's a reasonable definition of what I'm doing, it also ignores the fact that many (most?) torrent peers haven't paid for the content in any form and are free-riding with my assistance.
> I'm slightly queasy about calling "torrenting whole seasons worth of shows I paid for" "time-shifting";
That's because it's illegal. You haven't actually paid for the shows. You've paid for access to the stream of content, but that doesn't automatically grant you access to acquire that same content from a third party. It'd be the same as if you saw it in the theater and then said to yourself "hey I've already paid for this once so I'm just going to torrent the dvd rip."
I'm not judging. I do this too, even for shows I don't "pay for", but let's face facts: we're minor criminals. I'm not entirely comfortable with it either so I'm weaning myself off of it. Eventually, everything becomes available on netflix, so really it just takes patience. (Sometimes my patience is worn thin by netflix's fucked up queue-jumping practices, then I torrent. I'm weak.)
Do you have any legal basis for that? Sony vs. Universal Studios (1983) hinged on timeshifting being legitimate fair use: "because the District Court's factual findings reveal that even the unauthorized home time-shifting of respondents' programs is legitimate fair use". If it's legal to timeshift broadcast TV, why would it be illegal for subscription TV?
Similarly, if timeshifting subscription TV is not fair use, then Tivo and all the other DVR makers would exist solely for infringing purposes, and I doubt we'd see them on the market.
IANAL, but I'm guessing that UANAL either, so I'd like to see some evidence that it actually is illegal before being stated as such...
"Time shifting" is legitimate fair use if you record the shows yourself for your own personal use. If you claim that because the episode you are downloading was at one point in the past shown on broadcast TV you are "time shifting" it then you would not get very far on court.
Perhaps "it's illegal" is too bold a statement, but I do think that if tptacek got sued by HBO for torrenting True Blood then a fair use defense would not hold up. That's just my not-a-lawyer opinion, and I don't know of any precedent for this fair-use-timeshifting-by-proxy defense (do you?) but hey we might actually see a case like this soon. Last season HBO was monitoring the True Blood torrents and sending out C&D's to the ISPs of all peers with US IP addresses, if the Pirate Bay comments were to be believed.
Anyway, here's my not-a-lawyer reasoning: copyright law grants all rights of copying and distribution to the originator of the work and these are only transferred to a second party by written contract, EXCEPT for fair use (and first sale and other exceptions like that.) According to Wikipedia, fair use is a nebulous thing and varies from case to case but from what I can see it only gives you the right to copy for personal use (Tivo good) and never distribution (torrents bad). In fact Joel Tenenbaum and Jaimie Thomas both tried and failed to use fair-use as a defense for filesharing. So in order for hypothetical HBO v. Tptacek to not be summarily ruled in favor of the plaintiff, tptacek would have to show that his subscription to HBO constituted a contract which granted him the right to acquire and distribute HBO recordings. AND his torrent peers would all have to be HBO subscribers too. I doubt you'll find any language like that on his cable bill.
I'm pretty sure it's not lawful for someone to use their own equipment and their own pay cable feed to record a show and distribute it to someone else. I'm just saying, I don't think "of course it's legal" is the answer to your hypotheticals.
A more plausible reason TV studios don't go after torrent sites, apart from the fact that the TV business is more decentralized, is the fact that torrenting does less damage to them. TV is primarily ad supported. Motion pictures make a large chunk of their money directly off the new release window of the DVD release.
> Is it legal to ask someone to record a show for you? I think yes.
That's possibly illegal; but it's one of those things that has never actually been tested and I cant find any part of the law that actually fully covers such a scenario.
The legal problem with torrents you already pay for access too is probably more founded in that your probably (unless your leeching the torrent ofc) facilitating others to download it - who might not have the access.
That's because it's illegal. You haven't actually paid for the shows.You've paid for access to the stream of content, but that doesn't automatically grant you access to acquire that same content from a third party.
I actually don't think that's settled law. IsoHunt's "business model" or lack thereof isn't my problem.
In the case of LOST in particular, I torrent each show as it comes out, then buy the DVDs at the end of the season, which stay shrink-wrapped and unwatched in the closet. To be (more) ethical, I suppose I should probably bury the box sets in the back yard to make sure nobody else can derive entertainment value from watching them.
The reality, of course, is that copyright as an enforceable legal concept is over, for better or worse.
Speech can also constitute a crime. Hiring a hitman, joining a criminal conspiracy, or inducing copyright infringement are crimes; the fact that you may speak or express yourself while doing so doesn't make it a free speech issue.
The more that people seek "knowledge" for its own sake,
the stranger the world will become.
The more laws that are made,
the greater the number of criminals." - The Tao
The MIAA/RIAA wishes to impose more regulations regarding the distribution of cultural goods. This mean less ease of access to cultural goods. Everyone will be poorer, checked.
Lawsuit is used to coax individuals into paying rather than focusing their energy on adapting their business model to the internet. Weapon usage, checked.
This cause chaos in society by inciting an angry crowd of consumers who felt the injustice resulting from agression. So chaos does follows, check.
Hmm, don't know about what knowledge seeking means, but I'll try. Everyone is asking the question which length of years is correct for copyright to maximize economic benefit. It can be said that they seek knowledge without questioning the reason "why?". A check, maybe?
Copyright laws make everyone a criminal when they merely copy something. With a push for more power to punish people, this mean more force of law. So the law is making people into criminals, checked.
So in the end, what the court did is rules in favor of chaos over harmony.
Been done. Gnutella et. al. were doing distributed search by design, because Napster's central index was ruled to be infringing. Everything old is new again...
A better alternative would be to find a way to dump the searchable information in "the cloud", but encode it in such a way to make it very difficult to detect or differentiate from "normal" content. The clients would know how to read and even search this "subliminal channel", and use it for rendezvous, etc.
"Cloud" could really be any public hosted online content, a social bookmarking site like reddit, S3, etc. I wonder how much data you could even stash inside flv video or mp3.
I'm not saying this would be easy, it would need to be redundant enough to withstand constant takedowns, etc. but it would be much more difficult to stop.
It sounds as though the issue is whether or not the site responds promptly to takedown requests. Any torrent site that did would not be popular for long. They probably don't bother sending those requests to Google because Google doesn't host the torrent files, but if someone did manage to find a way to disseminate torrents using _only_ Google then you can bet Google would get on that. They do it with YouTube, and fast too.
The content of a torrent file is closer to an HTML link. The torrent file contains no copyrighted content, so a take down notice doesn't make much sense. In fact, the torrent file only lets you recognize the content, and doesn't strictly provide a link to it, for that, you need a tracker.
Google is not similarly exposed to liability just because its search function can be used to facilitate infringement.
The issue here is one of potential liability for contributory infringement.
When a party's technology is being primarily used for infringing purposes, and its independent, non-infringing uses are at best marginal, such a party can be held liable for contributory infringement of the copyrights at issue. That in essence appears to be what the court concluded here.
Contributory infringement, though, does not extend to technologies that can only incidentally be used for infringing purposes - were it otherwise, then any technology involved in facilitating an infringing use could be swept in (e.g., the manufacturers of hardware devices used to play the infringing material).
This line of legal reasoning has gradually evolved from the 1980's Betamax case through Napster to a variety of iterations in the modern law. It is a complex area of law but, in essence, it defines a level of culpability by which the law deems it fair to impose liability on a party not directly infringing on copyrighted materials but whose technology facilitates such infringement. Here, the court concluded that IsoHunt was sufficiently culpable to be held liable in spite of the fact that it can be used for innocent purposes as well.
Google's search function, on the other hand, obviously has major uses apart from those facilitating copyright infringement and Google is nowhere close to being a contributory infringer even though its technology might be misused for this purpose.
But Google's business is actually 99.99% infringing. Everything is copyrighted, including but not limited to this website. (Under current U.S. law, Federal government publications are nearly the only thing not copyrighted.) In no case has the copyright owner expressed permission for you to copy the copyrighted text to your computer. And yet, that is very very close to 100% of Google's business - locating copyrighted texts and sending users to them in order for those users to copy them, presumably illegally, to their computers. Only in the very rare case (.gov websites, users finding their own websites) is the user not infringing copyright. Nor is it possible for the user to determine whether he/she is infringing copyright; for example, the text on a .gov website could be written by a government contractor and therefore be copyrighted.
I was not trying to defend the current law or any of its possible inconsistencies but only to give a sense of how it applies to this type of situation - as that law is currently interpreted, there is a near-zero risk that Google's search business will be held to create liabilities for contributory infringement.
That doesn't mean the law is correct and people can reasonably differ on what is or isn't fair under copyright (or even whether copyright should exist) - but that argument is a philosophical one and not one for explaining what the current law is.
The copyright owner "expressed permission" for a limited degree of copying by making the content available on a publicly accessible website in a form intended for distribution and not utilizing any means to restrict the copying in the first place.
Good luck finding any judge that'd agree with you that Google's business is "99.9% infringing".
How is it a complex area of law? It seems to me the law is left ambiguous enough that it can be used to prosecute at the whims of the highest bidder, while making sure that the right parties are never held to the same standard.
There's a level of naivete to this line of reasoning that makes this amusing. Both Google and The Pirate Bay allow you to search for torrents. The critical element that's missing making what Google does criminal is Mens Rea. The Pirate Bay's got it, and Google doesn't.
I see a clear difference between editorial promotion of copyvio versus algorithmic promotion of copyvio, especially when the latter is made possible only by the former. You clearly disagree.
The implementation details of category or quick links shouldn't matter. How do you know that a particular torrent index's frontpage category links are not also algorithmically generated?
Maybe I'm being pedantic, but you need a better explanation than you have offered olegk. Google wrote their quick link feature with the intent of applying it to all URLs they index. Torrent index sites categorise their content with the intent of applying it to all torrents they index.
If the vast majority of URLs on the internet were infringing copyright, would you still support Google's right to index them?
I wonder what percentage of an index needs to refer to infringing content before allowing users to search the index is considered facilitating infringement. This percentage seems to be (a large part of) what judges use as evidence of intent.
All this is doing is just giving the bright minds behind the services that we love so much reasons to move and incorporate offshore and stop worrying about the evil power organizations such as MPAA and RIAA have to sue them, shut them down, send them to prison, you name it.
File sharing is not stealing.
File sharing is caring.
Because, give me a f'ing break: the first link in the categorized breakdown of indexed Torrents on Isohunt is to "Videos/Movies"; it is only the fact that Isohunt is a crappy torrent search site that results in that link not being entirely composed of trivially regexable horrific copyright violations.
For what it's worth, I'm slightly queasy about calling "torrenting whole seasons worth of shows I paid for" "time-shifting"; to whatever extent that that's a reasonable definition of what I'm doing, it also ignores the fact that many (most?) torrent peers haven't paid for the content in any form and are free-riding with my assistance.