Microsoft Sues BitTorrent Tracker
from the jumping-into-the-game dept
After already targeting a bunch of users of a popular Lithuanian BitTorrent tracker, Microsoft has apparently now tried suing the owner of the torrent tracker itself, though the guy claims he stopped running it at the end of last year. But, again, it seems backwards to sue the operator of a tracker, when that tracker does not host or transmit any copyrighted material itself. On top of that, Microsoft has sued for $43 million, when Lithuanian law apparently limits the potential damages in this case to $53,000. Either way, due to the case, the (previous?) owner of the site has had his assets frozen -- which seems pretty extreme based on just an accusation, rather than a conviction.Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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Filed Under: bittorrent, lawsuit, lithuania, tracker
Companies: microsoft
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Speeking of accusation based presumption of guilt
This is too painful to watch..
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Vote the Bum Out
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Talking about MicroSludge, not Obama
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Re: Talking about MicroSludge, not Obama
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Re: Re: Talking about MicroSludge, not Obama
If only it were that simple... There's many reasons why MS have maintained a monopoly despite having what most people agree are inferior products. Especially if you operate in business, you don't really have much of a choice on the desktop.
"But with the U.S. Government and our President we can only choose to put someone else in there once every 4 years."
So... what's your solution? Would you rather have a system where the president is essentially campaigning the whole time during his office? I can guarantee that little would get done, and nothing controversial would even get suggested if a term of less than 4 years was in place.
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Re: Re: Re: Talking about MicroSludge, not Obama
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I don't have that problem.
Now owners of torrent sites should all use LLC(aka plc, ltd., ltda) to limit their exposure to such things.
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They can sue all they want
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Shakespeare had it right
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full of shit.
there are no other applications named "microsoft office". if torrent network operators had a shred of credibility, they'd do a few searches to gather up all the hashes of these OBVIOUSLY pirated copies, and then ban the naming of anything with "microsoft office" or similar, and ban the upload of torrents for anything with those hashes. shit, they could even just wait until they received a takedown notice. it's REALLY simple, and would eliminate 99% of public tracker piracy in a matter of minutes. but the ops don't want to do that because their traffic would look like mininova's http://www.quantcast.com/mininova.org (note: that plummet is when mininova started filtering).
when your service gets overrun by unlawful uses, and the cost for you to stop the unlawfulness is virtually nothing (seriously, i could code the hash/name filter in an under an hour), there's nothing wrong with making you stop the unlawfulness.
this is not like filtering the internet at large (which has been shown to be ineffective and politically abused time and time again). mininova is now the second instance where a major p2p network tried filtering and died from abandonment (napster was the first). sure, there are third party plugins that allow some sort of transposition in names of uploads, but most people won't go that far. they sure didn't on napster.
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Re: full of shit.
You're silly.
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Re: full of shit.
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Full of something...
Let's see... I'll do a quick search on the internet...
All of those have Microsoft Office in the description... possible in the title. And none are from Microsoft.
And that was 3 seconds of searching
It's not that easy to do a search and trash. Not only that, but in other coutries, where they don't even speak english... it could be translated differently, or they may simply have no interest in learning English.
Get a brain... then use it.
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Microsoft office XP
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