Justice Department Hanging Onto Torrent-Finder Because It Doesn't Like How Search Engines Work
from the well-that's-just-great dept
In the wake of the news about the federal government completely censoring dajaz1.com for over a year on no legal basis, we've been wondering about some of the other websites that ICE has seized that have asked for the domains back -- without any further due process. Torrent-finder.com, which unlike the blog Dajaz1.com, is just a search engine, let us know that their situation is just slightly different. But what it comes down to is that the Justice Department doesn't like search engines and is waiting for Torrent-Finder to come up with a way not to find infringing materials:The status of torrent-finder is different than other domains: we’re working with ICE to regain the domain by proposing methods torrent-finder can modify its search engine to ameliorate problems identified in the seizure. Broadly speaking, these are problems that IPR has identified with search engines in general. We’re confident that this process will result in release of the domain name, and validation that torrent-finder.com’s business is not based on infringement. In the meantime, my client’s torrent-finder.com business has essentially been given the death penalty: over one year has passed with the domain offline, while the wheels of justice seem to grind more slowly than ever.Is this really what we want or what the law allows? For the government to completely shut down a search engine for over a year with no actual court process, while the search engine gets to "propose" different ways to build a search engine... while waiting (and waiting and waiting) for DOJ officials to get back to them on how search engines should work in their "expert" opinions?
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Filed Under: doj, domain seizures, free speech, ice, search engines, stalling
Companies: torrent-finder
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On what grounds?
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Actually, it sounds more like the guys who were running the site are desperately trying to find a way to make ICE happy enough to get their domain back, knowing that on the basis of what was there, they would never see it again.
Sounds like it's all them... and not the government.
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Re: On what grounds?
Even when it passes, the way it is written, it will probably be unconstitutional.
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Bizarre
This sounds like a bully keeping a kid's lunch money until the kid promises to do the bully's homework for them.
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Idiots
They seriously need reminding that a search engine only returns what people search for. You can't blame a third person (oh the Devil/Search Engine/Drugs/Tooth Fairy made me do it) if people want unlawful instead of lawful content.
I would just turn around and say the Government should have removed all infringing material from the Net and since they have FAILED to do their job then it is not Torrent-Finder's fault its search engine contains infringing content.
Or maybe we should blame ISPs for allowing all this to happen and demand they cease immediately by terminating all Internet connections. Thus copyright infringement solved in one foul swoop... or would it?
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Broadly speaking, these are problems that IPR has identified with search engines in general
They are a search engine. The supposed problems their site has are the same any search engine has. But you don't see ICE going after Google, Bing or Yahoo.
But the question is, why should they? Search engines are a third party not directly involved in the criminal acts. ICE should be detaining those responsible for the copyright infringement.
Taking down torrent search engines will do nothing to stop copyright infringement. By the time the sites are down, 10 more would've popped up. I mean, just look at The Pirate Bay, possibly the most well known "pirate" website in the world. How many times have they been raided? And what did that do to them? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
Target the sources of infringement and the pirate sites will dry up quickly. This game of whack-a-mole is a complete waste of time and resources, but, worst of all, gives law enforcement agencies an excuse to implement nuclear options that benefit no one and only push you further into 1984.
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Well isn't this silly....
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Concern
They stands much better chance in front of a Judge than the stupid demands they are making on them. A fair point when they demands they make are not what the law requires of a search engine.
Don't believe in justice here when these people are all paid up corrupt bitches of the copyright industry. Harassment is their goal and not justice. Keep mad, never fearful.
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Torrents. Which may or may not contain infringing content.
I'm sure you must think you have some sort of point, what could that possibly be?
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Or maybe even all of Sir Issac Newton's notes that just recently were released to the public.
Maybe the journals from the Royal Society, one of the, if not the oldest, science institutes in the world making available 350 years worth of science journals?
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Re: Re: On what grounds?
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Torrents is a transfer protocol. It defines how data is moved from A to B. There is no thing as an unlawful transfer protocol and neither does it infer any morality or ethics.
Like a piece of virtual wire...
So again what is wrong with the name Torrent Finder?
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Re: Re: Re: On what grounds?
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So what? I am sure that the majority of cars on our highways are violating speeding laws. Should we outlaw cars and highways because of it?
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In both cases, the reason pirated stuff is\was in the majority is because the companies with the rights were refusing to offer it that way. Not because there is something inherently bad with MP3s\torrents.
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It's the old "kitchen knife" problem, Google is a kitchen knife, with many uses that may include one or two bad ones. Torrent finders? They are generally bad things with a maybe one or two good uses, sort of like an AK47.
If you can't understand the difference, it's pretty hard to explain the rest.
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Re: Bizarre
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You guys are just funny as hell at times.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent_%28protocol%29
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Re: Re: Bizarre
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Re: Re: Re: Re: On what grounds?
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Got any proof of that?
Their website says that they do if it's an actual link on their site.
http://torrent-finder.info/dmca.php
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Shouldn't the gubnent be workin'....
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I'd say the raids were very effective.
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Google and Torrent Finder are both search engines, they only differ in terms of scope. Google is broad and TF is specific. Simply because TF indexes torrents does not make it an AK47. Your analogy is based on lies and ignorance.
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Re: "... vast majority of torrent traffic is infringing ..."
If there is a guilty party there it is the person(s) who are OFFERING the infringing content. Search engines are not in business to offer content, infringing or otherwise. They are in business to sell advertising. To do this they try to get as many people as they can to visit their website to see the adds. They entice visitors by offering something the visitor needs, a way to find what he or she is searching for. The search engine is NOT responsible for the irresponsible actions of other people who choose to post infringing content online. An often used analogy is that you can't sue the automaker for a driver's negligence in operation of the automobile.
Why do so many people think that this is a reasonable expectation? That because a website is popular then it becomes the websites responsibility to be accountable for an individual person's actions?
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There is only one use for torrents: distributed downloading.
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Now as for torrent finders. The point being made here is that it is a search engine. In the wrong hands yes it is used to pirate things. Google is used to pirate things as well. Even worse Google is used every day by hackers to break into webpages or lead people to malware.
The really big issue here is that our government is no longer playing within the rules set for them. The government has gone rouge and is turning against the people. Look back through history and really look at what has happened in the past. Nations are not built over night and they rarely fall overnight. Instead they do as Germany did in WWII. They slowly attack one group at a time. Each group they demonize and attack one at a time untill by the time people wake up it is too late.
Look around people. Really stop and look at the things this government is doing. They are moving to pass laws that will censor the internet. At the same time they are working on a law giving them the right to indefinatly detain anyone in the world including US citizens. Does it not bother you that your government is slowly taking away all our rights?
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Most torrents contain pirated or illegal material
See, if you wanted to distribute something, torrents are perhaps the least efficient way to do it, because it's slow, distributed, and depends on tons of people to make the item available and keep making it available, otherwise you have no distribution. It's only legit advantage is that the costs are very low, because once you have seeded a file out to a bunch of people, it's their bandwidth and not yours that is getting used up.
Now, if you are trying to share something illegal, pirated, or questionable, torrents are great! They are wide spread, hard to track, hard to trace, and it is very hard to figure out who first seeded a file without a fair bit of research (and some luck). If you were sharing a pirated movie, Torrents are excellent!
So what happens is that, if you run a "torrent only" search engine, you are by definition going to be listing 90% or more illegal material. If you have any experience with torrents (and I am sure that someone writing a torrent search site would have that experience) you would know it too. If they didn't, a short review of customer searches and file clicked on would show them reality.
See, the problem of a torrent search (or torrent guide, or a torrent whatever) is that since most of the material out there is illegal, unless you are going to manually check everything, you will always be a conduit for illegal activity.
So in the end, the torrent search is like an AK47 - almost all of it's uses are illegal, and only a few are legal, and most people aren't going to perform the legal ones anyway (like being in the military).
The difference between a torrent only search and Google is rather large.
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Re: Re: Bizarre
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FALSE. You as the original uploader can dedicate as much bandwidth to seeding the file as you would like. So you can provide the same connection speed as say a direct download from your website. Only it becomes much faster because downloaders can also share some of the upload bandwidth.
Blizzard distributes their patches via torrent. Do you think they are relying on other peoples connections to get that content out? No they have multiple dedicated seed servers pushing out the content and then end-users have the option to add some upload bandwidth if they want.
Keep attacking shit you don't understand though, it looks good on you.
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No no youre right Ac everything here is broken no need to concern yourself with it any longer
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Torrents, you dullard.
"What could that possibly be?"
ANY file. Again, your lack of intelligence is showing.
If the company's name was 'infringementfinder' you might have a point...
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Is a stupid, fucking tool.
Christ, some of you ACs aren't worth shit paper.
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flawed
WRONG. A torrent with enough fast peers can easily fill your bandwidth.
distributed
Obvious.
and depends on tons of people to make the item available
WRONG. It only needs your one seed. Rent a seed box if you want. People who download can often help to seed or at least hit the 1:1 ratio.
and keep making it available
WRONG AGAIN. As long as you have your one seed it never dies. The good part of BitTorrent is the more people downloading means the more people uploading so it achieves a good supply balance.
otherwise you have no distribution
You clearly don't know about Torrents.
It's only legit advantage is that the costs are very low
Correct but that is not the only advantage. Are you aware that Facebook use the BitTorrent protocol to update their many servers? So many changes all over the place and BitTorrent is the fastest, least costly, most efficient method there is for them to keep everyone updated.
because once you have seeded a file out to a bunch of people, it's their bandwidth and not yours that is getting used up.
Yes or your own internal servers like Facebook do.
They are wide spread
Yes.
hard to track
WRONG. Copyright sharks like ACS:Law made a very efficient business out of tracking torrents and they exploited over $1 million from the public.
Now such efficient tracking comes to US court cases.
hard to trace
WRONG. Any search engine will find what you seek.
and it is very hard to figure out who first seeded a file without a fair bit of research (and some luck)
WRONG AGAIN. Anyone serious in protecting their media can just do a frequent search for when their product hits BT, quickly join the swarm, then note down the IP of the only seed with 100%
This evidence can soon obtain a court order discovering the real life side and shutting it down. Of course by then it is too late but they can punish who did it.
The FBI also did very well finding the original seed of The Xmen: Wolverine workprint. A shame they never found the studio leak.
If you were sharing a pirated movie, Torrents are excellent!
That it is. :-)
There is much more to BT than infringement. There is the whole Creative Commons industry, many products are now made for BT distribution, then anything made by the US Government is public domain and freely available on BT.
Consider it like YouTube as when they started they did some serious infringement but as they grew so did their lawful media share.
So ICE censoring Torrent-Finder are blocking the American public from finding the lawful content their tax dollars funded.
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Your entire argument is predicated on this assumption. You're blaming technology for the action of people. Just because you can't form an effective model to deal with these individuals does not mean you get to break the technology they use.
Your approach would be exactly like ripping out the highway signs to keep people from transporting illegal drugs. Sure, it's less convenient for the drug dealers, but it doesn't stop them and all you've done is made it hell for all of the innocent people who had perfectly legitimate uses for those roads. It's immaterial what portion of the traffic is carrying illegal drugs, because you're attacking something that you have no business meddling with. Would it be acceptable to remove road signs if 90% traffic was illegal drugs or other contraband?
Wouldn't you find it terribly debilitating for you if you rely on those highways to get from place to place? How about that? What if we demanded that you lose something that you rely on be removed or neutered because we don't like how some people are using it for illegal purposes?
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Re: Idiots
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One one day, TPB is evil incarnate. The next day it is a hollow shell of its former self.
Make up your mind.
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Got the slightest bit of evidence of that? Any studies of that? Or mere speculation?
In short, can you back that statement up beyond the "they gotta cause the RIAA says so" bull.
Put another way, do you have an original, independent thought in your head?
Take your time. I don't need to know this year.
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Gotcha!
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Not faith, facts. You are the one making the accusation so you bear the burden of proof, AC, old lad.
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Probably Fidonet.
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So, Google, Yahoo, MS and every other search engine in the world should be shut down if they return so much as a questionable file on any web sit on the planet?
Any torrent site is automatically guilty? Next up will be ZIP, RAR, TAR-BZ and other compress file format that just might encoded is guilty?
You're the alleged law student. Have you ever heard of things like due process, unreasonable search and seizure and other things like that there or did you nap through those classes?
I guess you must have.
So let me enlighten you. In civil, common and criminal law a hearing is required before property can be seized. There has been no hearing where accuser had met accused (plaintiff vs defendant or whatever). But property, to wit, a business name and a server have been seized. Both are considered property under the law. Nor have criminal charges been laid.
Due process has not occurred yet you say "good riddance". Nice to see you want to take the authorities word for everything. Sounds like you're dusting off the Nuremberg defense, "We were just following orders!" Not valid then, not valid now.
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Re: flawed
Oh heck. I forgot. GPL/Open Source is infringing and illegal cause SCO said it was and the court was wrong in slapping SCO down and bankrupting a valiant company fighting the good fight against infringement.
I'm soooooooo bad.
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Were these pirates friends of yours? They're lucky they're not in jail.
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If all the road signs said "crack house, this exit", then yeah, I would take them down. The signs that don't point specifically to illegal activity could stay. But clearly, most of the signs would point to crack houses. So why keep them up?
" You're blaming technology for the action of people. "
Nope, I am just looking at the results of technology + people. There are legal uses for torrents, there are legal uses for AK47s. For the most part, if you come in contact with an AK in your life, it isn't a good thing, because it is usually in the 90% bad mode. The guns aren't bad, the way people use them is bad, and so the best answer is to ban the gun. The few people who have legal, good uses for them can still obtain them, but making them generally available just ain't right.
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There may be good and legal uses for it, but the illegal uses (and the repercussions of it) is intolerable in our society.
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So your approach, with the road signs, would be to specifically target those signs that point to illegal activity, and leave the other ones alone no matter how few they are. Yet with torrents, you're ready to condemn an entire site (an entire protocol?) to destruction if it goes above some threshold of copyright infringement?
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If you can't stop the people from doing something you don't like, then you don't get to take away civil liberties by censoring free speech to achieve it. Torrents are a perfectly legitimate technology, as are search engines that index them. Your profits do not supersede our right to communicate as we see fit. Your damn profits don't deserve any consideration when it comes to civil rights. If you can't make money doing it the way you do, then you can find another way. The people don't owe you a living, it's up to you to find a way to convince them to buy. Learn to find other ways to monetize art that doesn't rely on controlling the supply of copies in circulation.
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Showing results for a query?
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Finding answer for a query?
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Is that luck?
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To you maybe to the majority of people they not only don't care they do it everyday.
Law is only law when you have a majority of people to defend it and fallow it otherwise is no law and will fade away from memory.
Meaning copyright days are numbered.
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See, you don't have a effing clue what you talk about. Torrents are the cheapest and fastest way to distribute content cause all swarm members donate their bandwith. Just ask Blizzard.
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Because you're the one claiming torrents are evil which makes it your obligation to substantiate your claims?
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High tax and plenty Cadillacs Da haahh, da haahh
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The number of illegal roadsigns in this case would be so high, that it would be almost impossible to take them all down. Worse yet, large groups of people would be behind you putting more signs up. It's not a simple thing.
I suspect that the site owner is having that discussion with ICE, and is having a very hard time coming up with an answer that works. Further, if they remove all the offending torrents (perhaps by whitelisting only, example), they will find that nobody is interested in using their "clean" service, because most people are looking for illegal stuff, not legal.
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So your legal use of the AK is the 10%, on par with linux distros and patches for WoW.
"If you can't stop the people from doing something you don't like, then you don't get to take away civil liberties by censoring free speech to achieve it."
Illegal activity is not protected speech. There is no free speech in aiding and abetting a criminal act. There is no "I was just watching the door holding my AK" excuse in free speech. It isn't a question of profits, it's a question of legal or illegal. It's nice that you try to turn it into a problem of the content companies, but no matter what they do, it cannot justify your illegal actions.
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Re: Re: "... vast majority of torrent traffic is infringing ..."
Incorrect.
Let me tell you an old story about search engines. Back in the day (96-99) there were a couple of big search engines online. Hotbot, Altavista... Yahoo was still really a directory. Well, one of them decided that it was going to filter out porn results as much as possible, basically meaning that using that search engine to find porn would be impossible. They disappeared pretty quickly.
Thus the term "no tits, no hits".
In the torrent world, it's "no pirated material, no hits". When torrent sites in the US tried to be "clean" with a whitelist tracker, they discovered that nobody (and I mean nobody) would bother with them.
It's not hard. If you open a torrent search engines and don't show the illegal content, you fail. If the illegal material suddenly couldn't be listed, the torrent search sites would fold like cheap suits. The business model is pretty much entirely predicated on there being the promise of pirated material to drive surfers to the search sites.
It's the same reasons why Mega upload gets 50 million visits a day. They aren't there for the great site design or to trade family pics with strangers. They are there for pirated material. Take down the material, make it unavailable, and the mega business model dies instantly.
You have to be blind and ignorant not to understand why these businesses "work".
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Re: flawed
Most torrent distribution depends on end users downloading and re-peering. Without them, it's a fail. As a protocol, it's much heavier than direct FTP download would be, so if you are going to be your own single peer, it would be better to just allow a direct download.
"Correct but that is not the only advantage. Are you aware that Facebook use the BitTorrent protocol to update their many servers? So many changes all over the place and BitTorrent is the fastest, least costly, most efficient method there is for them to keep everyone updated."
Actually, facebook uses it in part because they don't need the information to be accurate at all locations at the same time. They have great allowance for their servers to be far out of sync. It's the nature of the game. However, they are using the PROTOCOL, not the trappings of public P2P.
"There is much more to BT than infringement. There is the whole Creative Commons industry, many products are now made for BT distribution, then anything made by the US Government is public domain and freely available on BT."
Even with that "impressive" list, you still come up with about 1% of the total bandwidth used in P2P. It's nice to come up with excuses, but let's get real: P2P would not work without a critical mass of users, and the users are there mostly for illegal content.
"Consider it like YouTube as when they started they did some serious infringement but as they grew so did their lawful media share."
Actually, with the price of hosted bandwidth coming down, and with fears of poisoned or polluted distributions, it seems that most companies are back to direct downloads. At the end of the day, they can control their user experience better, be more reliable, and assure timely rollout of their material. Consider Wordpress - millions of downloads, all direct. Why do you think they avoid P2P?
"So ICE censoring Torrent-Finder are blocking the American public from finding the lawful content their tax dollars funded."
Not at all. If I want the US government stuff, I go to the US government site, which links directly to the torrent file, which lets me get it. I don't need a "torrent search" packed full of illegal content to try to find it. If I want it, I go to the source.
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You are so damn stupid. I didn't say the infringement was protected speech. I said that non-infringing speech was protected. By banning torrents to prevent people from using it to infringe, you've also infringed on the civil right to use it for protected speech. You're just willfully twisting my words to suit your own ends. Let me make this explicitly clear: YOU DO NOT GET TO CENSOR PROTECTED SPEECH IN AN EFFORT TO CENSOR INFRINGEMENT. Speech is a constitutional right and copyright is a legal right. The first has priority over the second. Now move along before you make a bigger fool of yourself.
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Why is it the search engine's responsibility to filter out search results to other peoples' stuff?
The number of illegal roadsigns in this case would be so high, that it would be almost impossible to take them all down. Worse yet, large groups of people would be behind you putting more signs up. It's not a simple thing.
Does that make it OK to take down the legal street signs? Or is it time to rethink the whole quixotic plan?
I suspect that the site owner is having that discussion with ICE, and is having a very hard time coming up with an answer that works.
Your suspicions are noted.
Further, if they remove all the offending torrents (perhaps by whitelisting only, example), they will find that nobody is interested in using their "clean" service, because most people are looking for illegal stuff, not legal.
See my question above. Second, that isn't any of ICE's concern.
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So you believe it's important to narrowly target only infringing communications for censorship, or are you in favor of censoring both legal and illegal speech (for whatever reason - 90% illegal, too hard to patrol, take your pick). Do you believe it's important to get to those responsible for breaking the law, or is it a good idea to also hold third parties liable?
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I disagree. It fed them many more users as the litigation made The Pirate Bay name a brand name that even non-Internet-savvy people knew. It could be argued that it also popularized BitTorrent as well.
All in all the constant attacks against The Pirate Bay have likely worked against the original goals.
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Re: Re: Re: On what grounds?
> cowboy policing of the entire country
Not likely. What usually happens in cases involving constitutional/free speech/prior restraint issues is that the court issues an injunction against enforcement of the law until the courts issue a final verdict on the matter. This prevents exactly what you said: years of potentially unconstitutional prior restraint of protected speech by the government.
This is what happened with the Child Online Protection Act. It was passed in 1998 and the ink wasn't even dry on Clinton's signature before its constitutionality was challenged. The court issued an immediate order enjoining the government from implementing/enforcing the law until the constitutional issues were decided by the court. The law never actually took effect, as three separate rounds of litigation led to a permanent injunction against the law in 2009.
Hopefully SOPA will share a similar fate.
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> finder are going to be unwilling or unable
> to filter out the bad results
Bottom line is that nowhere else in the wider world is it illegal merely to tell someone where bad stuff happens.
But for some reason, the moment you add 'on the internet' to it, all the normal rules are supposed to change.
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