Hollywood Studio IP Addresses Sharing Hollywood Movies Via BitTorrent

from the well-look-at-that... dept

The folks over at TorrentFreak teamed up with BitTorrent monitoring firm Scaneye to look and see if files being shared via BitTorrent happened to be coming from some IP addresses held by the big Hollywood studios... and they found what appears to be tons of Hollywood flicks shared from Hollywood studio IP addresses. Of course, plenty of caveats apply: it's possible that these are super ham-fisted honeypots for copyright trolling, in which they're recording the IP addresses of downloaders. It's possible that the system is wrong. It's possible that the IP address information is wrong. But... it's also possible that some employees at these studios are (whether on purpose or not) using BitTorrent and sharing films -- sometimes films from other studios. For example, they found a Paramount Pictures IP address sharing Happy Feet, which is a Warner Bros. film. In the end, there could be any number of reasons they were able to find these results, but given that when the shoe is on the other foot, the studios and other copyright holders seem to insist that a single IP address is proof positive of liability, doesn't it seem reasonable to question the studios about this bit of evidence as well?

Filed Under: bittorrent, file sharing, hollywood, ip addresses, studios
Companies: paramount, warner bros.

BitTorrent Book Promotion Drives 40% Of Downloaders To Book's Amazon Page

from the well,-look-at-that... dept

Popular author Tim Ferriss got some attention recently when his latest book, The 4-Hour Chef, was published by Amazon, with a big push to try to make it a best seller (the first Amazon published book to get such a push, apparently). This scared off Barnes & Noble who refused to sell the book, because, apparently, it's run by childish and petulant execs. Ferriss, who is known for his rather extreme ability to market the hell out of anything, has actually been using this to his own advantage, continually calling out the fact that Barnes & Noble is refusing to carry the book, and using non-standard promotion techniques, including having the book sold via Panera restaurants and... doing a big promotion deal with BitTorrent. To be honest, I found some of the language used to promote that deal a bit misleading, as it appeared some people thought he was distributing the book itself via BitTorrent. Instead, he teamed up with the company to distribute "an exclusive bundle" of extra, related, content. That's still cool, but having watched some of the hype behind it, you could see how some might see it as bait and switch.

However, it appears that my concerns may have been overblown. Late last week, Ferris revealed that not only did the book land on various best seller lists (despite the lack of Barnes & Noble sales), but an astounding number of people who downloaded that extra content bundle on BitTorrent also clicked a "support the artist" button:

For instance, BitTorrent conversion is NUTS. Of 210,000 downloads (of this bundle) earlier this week, more than 85,000 clicked through “Support the Author” to the book’s Amazon page. We all had to triple and quadruple check that to believe it.

Now, of course, not everyone who clicks will buy -- and he admits that as well. But, that's still an extra 85,000 people going to the Amazon page. Some of them are likely to buy.

Even at a 1% conversion after clicking an effective “buy now” link, that translates to 850 books… and BitTorrent is only accelerating. Wow.

But BitTorrent is only for pirates and only hurts authors and artists, right?

Filed Under: bittorrent, clickthroughs, promotions, tim ferriss
Companies: amazon

Porn Copyright Trolls Argue That Verizon Should Be Held In Contempt Of Court For Trying To Protect Its Users

from the privacy-schmivacy,-we're-trolling dept

Three of the bigger porn copyright trolls out there, Patrick Collins, Malibu Media and Third Degree Films, have teamed up to make a court filing arguing that Verizon should be held in contempt of court for failing to cough up the names of account holders based on the trolls' list of IP addresses. As you're probably aware by now, hundreds of thousands of people have been "sued" by copyright trolls, but not actually taken to court. The strategy is just to file a lawsuit and force ISPs to identify account holders, then bombard those account holders with threatening letters (and calls and emails) saying that they will be sued if they don't pay up (often a few thousand dollars). Verizon, like many other ISPs, has fought back against these demands for info on a variety of grounds -- including improper joinder (i.e., that the cases improperly lump together multiple people who had nothing to do with one another in an attempt to keep costs to the trolls down). These claims of improper joinder have been somewhat effective in getting a lot of these cases thrown out -- but usually those claims are raised by the account holders themselves, rather than the ISPs.

These three trolls have teamed up to argue that Verizon should shut up and hand over the names, claiming that it has no standing to object, given that it's not a party in the case. They also claim that even if Verizon can argue misjoinder, the argument is not valid (which is laughable considering how many courts have agreed that it's perfectly valid). Then they try to chop down every other argument from Verizon -- who actually has a really strong history of protecting subscribers against copyright threats. In fact, the trolls use this history against Verizon -- claiming that their victory nearly a decade ago, against the RIAA's attempt to use subpoenas to identify users without filing a lawsuit, shows that as long as they've filed lawsuits, they should have a free pass to identify the account holders named.

The really amusing part is the trolls' response to Verizon's point that the trolls have failed to show that the discovery would be used for the "proper purpose" of litigation. That's because it won't be. Everyone knows that the information will be used to try to force people into settling, and not to file lawsuits. But the trolls claim this is just dandy:

To the contrary, and as argued above, the “purpose” of the discovery is entirely proper: to obtain information identifying unknown Doe Defendants infringing Plaintiffs’ copyrights “in order to consider whether to name and serve them as defendants.”

Note the careful choice of words. They don't say that they're asking for discovery in order to actually sue, but to "consider" whether or not to sue. Meaning, of course, that they're extremely unlikely to file an actual lawsuit and are more likely to threaten account holders to demand a settlement. Hopefully the court sees through these attempts by these trolls to force discovery where it's clearly not appropriate.

Filed Under: bittorrent, contempt of court, copyright trolls, joinder, porn, privacy
Companies: malibu media, patrick collins, third degree films, verizon

Musicians Weave Elaborate CNET Conspiracy Theory In Attempt To Get BitTorrent Banned

from the scorched-earth dept

Last year, we wrote about a silly and uninformed lawsuit filed by eccentric rich guy Alki David against CBS. David has an online TV company, FilmOn, which has some similarities to Aereo and other online rebroadcasters. The networks sued the company, of course, and David has since gone on an odd and vindictive campaign against them. As someone who tends to think services like his should be both legal and embraced, I'd like to support him, but his legal campaign is just ridiculous and now has the possibility of causing real and serious harm. His reason for suing CBS was that a few years ago CBS bought CNET, and CNET has (for many, many years) run a site called Download.com. Download.com is a service that many software providers use to distribute their software. David claimed that because Download.com (a site owned by CNET which was -- only relatively recently -- purchased by CBS) distributed Limewire -- which was eventually found to be infringing -- that CBS was also guilty of copyright infringement. That original lawsuit was dumped pretty quickly, after the judge noted that David had failed to show what copyrights were being infringed (a key piece in any copyright claim).

David regrouped and found a group of musicians to file a similar lawsuit -- led by Sugar Hill Music -- and so far that lawsuit has had slightly more success, though it has serious problems. The latest filing in the case, embedded below, involves the plaintiffs arguing that the court should issue an injunction blocking CNET/CBS from allowing any BitTorrent client from being downloaded. Yeah. The proposed injunction is full of complete crazy talk.

True to form, Defendants have enthusiastically embraced this new engine of piracy, distributing over 65 million copies of bittorrent applications and, again, shamelessly promoting their use for purposes of infringement. Defendants' inducement has sometimes become somewhat more sophisticated and subtle, in that, for example, Defendants now include a mild, disingenuous disclaimer about piracy on some of their web-pages and evidently no longer host certain P2P applications on their servers. Defendants, however, still expressly and explicitly show users how to use bittorrent programs to find copyrighted files to download. At all times, Defendants were aware that the bittorent programs they distributed were used overwhelmingly for infringing copyrighted works – primarily music, software, movies and video games. Although some court cases have found the proprietors of torrent websites liable for secondary copyright infringement,3 no court case has yet directly involved bittorrent applications and technology itself. Like a leopard that cannot change its spots and despite this Court’s clear admonishment that Defendants cannot simultaneously distribute software applications that they have encouraged to be used for purposes of infringement,4 Defendants continue to distribute bittorrent applications under the intentionally lazy and under-reactive guise that they cannot be held liable for this activity until a court order specifically prohibits the use of bittorrent technology to infringe Plaintiffs’ works. Although Plaintiffs believe it probable that courts will soon explicitly find the popular bittorrent applications to be secondarily liable for copyright infringement just as Napster and LimeWire were, it is beyond doubt that Defendants’ distribution of these programs and concurrent intent to induce infringement subjects Defendants to inducement liability, independent of any further inquiry. Bittorrent is a clear and present danger to copyrighted works. From evidence readily available in CNET’s own “news” articles, it is clear that bittorrent applications like uTorrent are growing explosively to fill the infringement vacuum left by Gnutella applications.

Yes, despite the fact that BitTorrent itself has been around for many, many years, and the software/protocol has never been found to be infringing in any way, these musicians are now insisting that it's "only a matter of time" and that CNET should be forced to block downloads of any and all BitTorrent products. There are so many crazy points here. First, Download.com is just a platform provider, which software providers use to distribute software, not the creator of the software. Second, BitTorrent is just a protocol and is quite different than the apps that the lawsuit relies on as previous generations, which were often complete ecosystems. BitTorrent software has always been just about a tool to download or distribute content -- legal or infringing. And, yes, there are a ton of legal uses of BitTorrent, even if the plaintiffs here pretend otherwise.

There are some other howlers as well, including the rise of copyright trolls, filing over 250,000 lawsuits against people for copyright infringement -- which the filing here uses as some sort of weird evidence that BitTorrent must be illegal, apparently completely unable to distinguish between a tool and the actions that some use that tool to accomplish.

Even more bizarre, the filing uses the fact that CNET had an article highlighting a legal use of BitTorrent (by the band Counting Crows who purposely released some tracks via BitTorrent) as evidence that CNET encourages people to infringe:

Defendants also use the purported “news” arms of their websites to dress up the marketing of bittorrent applications as legitimate news reporting. For example, CNET editor Seth Rosenblatt (the same individual who authored the fivestar review of uTorrent), wrote a May 14, 2012 article published and available on Defendants website titled “Download This Mr. Jones,” ostensibly about how the recording artist the Counting Crows had partnered with the software publisher of uTorrent to release their music for free download via torrent.... In a portion of the article quoting the lead singer of the Counting Crows regarding the 150 million users of uTorrent, Rosenblatt included hyperlinks accompanied by the word “download” to the CNET download pages for uTorrent and BitTorrent.

The idea that CNET's news operation deserves sarcastic "quotes" around it is ridiculous. News.com has been one of, if not the, leading tech news publication for at least a decade and a half. And the idea that this story wasn't actually newsworthy, as implied here, is simply ridiculous. Lots of publications covered it, not to push people to download BitTorrent, but because it was newsworthy. But much of the argument relies on news reporters talking about various issues related to BitTorrent, and then arguing that this is all some sort of front to push more people to download BitTorrent. To put it simply: this is insane. News.com and Download.com. I've known people associated with both properties, and the idea that they write articles about BitTorrent to try to drive more downloads is ridiculous.

But, even ignoring that, then arguing that all BitTorrent-related products should be barred from download isn't just overkill, it's pushing a rather scary and unique legal theory that sites should be barred from distributing software -- made by parties not even represented in the lawsuit -- just because one party doesn't like how some of the users of that software use it. If there's infringement it's on the part of some potential end users, but rather than going after them, this lawsuit doesn't just go one step back (to the software providers), but an even further level back to the platform that enables software downloads, and claiming that somehow they're all responsible for this.

It seems pretty clear that this lawsuit is really designed to be a nuisance for CBS, but the legal theories are highly questionable and the requested injunction is a massive overreach. Hopefully the court recognizes just how much an overreach this request really is.

Filed Under: alki david, bittorrent, copyright, injunction
Companies: cbs, cnet, sugar hill music

BitTorrent Uploader Ordered To Pay $1.5 Million After Not Showing Up In Court

from the default-judgment dept

Torrentfreak has the story of a default judgment against someone for infringement of some porn videos, in which Kywan Fisher has been ordered to pay $1.5 million for uploading 10 movies. Default judgments are basically what happens when the other party doesn't show up in court. Many judges will then enter a judgment against them, more or less accepting everything that the plaintiff says and asks for. Courts don't have to accept the plaintiff's claims in default judgment cases, but too many judges just rubberstamp such requests, and that seems to be the case here.

Unfortunately, copyright trolls will now use this ruling to threaten more people into paying up. They'll ignore that the facts here are a bit different than ordinary cases. Here, beyond it being a default judgment, the copyright holder, Flava Works (whose name you might recognize from another case where they haven't fared well) has additional evidence against Fisher. Apparently Flava Works watermarks files that paying customers access. In this case, Fisher was a paying customer who then took the works -- with watermarks intact -- and posted them online for others to download. So, there's significantly more evidence against Fisher, beyond just an IP address.

Even so, it's a bit disappointing that the judge simply accepted what Flava Works asked for in terms of the award. Flava Works justification for the $1.5 million figure is tremendously disingenuous:

Plaintiff seeks statutory damages for willful infringement of $1,500,000 for the willful infringements of 10 videos that were downloaded 3,449 times. Exhibit “E”. Defendant caused 3,449 infringements of the Plaintiff’s videos. Plaintiff is seeking the maximum statutory damages of $150,000 per infringement. $150,000 times 3,449 infringements is over $517,000,000. Thus, Plaintiff, Flava Works, Inc.’s request for an award of $1,500,000 is very reasonable.

Except... Flava Works is being misleading. The statute on statutory damages (17 USC 504) makes it clear that statutory damages are to be awarded per work, not per infringement. So the whole point about 3,449 infringements and a possible award of $517 million is way outside of what the law actually says is allowed. Yes, others have tried this "per infringement" argument rather than "per work" before, most memorably in the Limewire case, where the judge outright rejected that request, noting that statutory damages are to be awarded per work infringed, not per infringement. In the end, the court in this case goes with $1.5 million, which is the upper bound for what it can really provide as statutory damages, so it doesn't appear that the court went beyond what was allowed, but hopefully it wasn't influenced by that ridiculous $517 million claim into thinking that $1.5 million "is very reasonable."

In all likelihood, as often happens, the fact that it was a default judgment situation led the judge to just go with $1.5 million -- the maximum possible amount under the law. The problem, of course, is that this number isn't "very reasonable" at all. It's way way out of line with the action. Even if we grant that 3,449 people downloaded the work, and each would have paid, say, $20 otherwise (to choose an arbitrarily high number) we're still talking less than $70,000. And that's even assuming that everyone who downloaded would have bought at such a ridiculously high price -- an obviously laughable assertion. In other words, while statutory damages don't need to relate to actual damages, it's not difficult to look at this and think that the award is still ridiculous, even if you feel that there's sufficient evidence to suggest Fisher did break the law.

And, once again, we're left with a situation that creates even less respect for copyright law. From the (one-sided) evidence presented by Flava Works, it certainly seems much more likely that Fisher broke the law, and as such I don't think there's any issue with him losing the lawsuit (though, as a default judgment we have no idea if he has a legitimate defense). But a $1.5 million award just seems so out of proportion to reality that the court really ought to have gone with something slightly more reasonable. Not that Flava Works will ever collect from Fisher, but it's doubtful anyone really cares about that. The whole point of this is to get the judgment on the books so that Flava Works and others can now use it on tons of others.

Filed Under: bittorrent, copyright trolls, default judgment, statutory damages, uploads
Companies: flava works

New Research Sets The Stage For Next Round Of Cat-And-Mouse Between BitTorrent Users & Snoopers

from the don't-look-now,-you're-being-watched dept

The BitTorrent protocol is an extremely efficient way of moving files around the Internet, especially big ones. That makes it highly popular with those seeking to download unauthorized copies of music and films, for example. But the clever approach that enables BitTorrent to do that, which involves downloading fragments of a file from a shifting swarm of fellow peers holding some or all of it, is also a weakness from these users' point of view: it means that downloads take place in public, rather than as a private transaction from a client to a server (as with cyber lockers.)

Fascinating new research entitled "The Unbearable Lightness of Monitoring: Direct Monitoring in BitTorrent" (pdf), from researchers at the University of Birmingham, explores just how public. It seeks to quantify how many peers in a swarm are actually being run by companies monitoring unauthorized downloads, and how long it takes for them to detect such activity:

From our experiments, we derived a number of interesting properties of monitoring, as it is currently performed: e.g., that monitoring is prevalent for popular content (i.e., the most popular torrents on The Pirate Bay) but absent for less popular content, and that peers sharing popular content are likely to be monitored within three hours of joining a swarm.

Many BitTorrent users are aware that such monitoring is going on, and try to avoid detection by using some kind of blocklist designed to catch peers being run by companies offering digital forensics. But if the current research is accurate, those lists have big gaps: of the peers the researchers identified as likely to be run by monitoring companies, only 69% were found on the blocklists they checked. In other words, there was nearly a one in three chance that they would not be blocked, and would therefore be able to monitor unauthorized downloads. Despite this, one of the study's authors, Tom Chothia, told New Scientist that file sharers needn't be worried too much by the revelation they are being monitored -- at least, not yet:

"All the monitors connected to file sharers believed to be sharing illegal content. However, they did not actually collect any of the files being shared. So it is questionable whether the observed evidence of file-sharing would stand up in court."

More cautious users of BitTorrent may find other ways to avoid detection, using VPNs or proxies. But as Tim Lee points out, the main effect of this new analysis will probably just be an escalation of the long-standing arms race between file-sharers and copyright enforcers:

Users will presumably take advantage of the new monitor-detection techniques identified by Chothia et al to produce more accurate blocklists. Monitoring firms may respond by tweaking their monitoring clients to behave more like real clients, and by more frequently changing the subnets they use for monitoring.

And so the game of cat-and-mouse will continue.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

Filed Under: bittorrent, monitoring

Wide Disparity In Which ISPs (In Which Countries) Throttle BitTorrent

from the so-does-it-work? dept

The folks over at M-Lab have apparently updated their data on BitTorrent throttling to look at how much different ISPs throttle BitTorrent connections. TorrentFreak has an excellent summary of the data, showing that thanks to Comcast getting slapped down for its BitTorrent throttling years ago, there's very little happening in the US. Other countries, however, show a very different story (though it seems to vary wildly from ISP to ISP. For example, in the UK< 65% of BitTorrent traffic on BT gets throttled, but none gets throttled on O2. Similarly, up in Canada, 80% is throttled on Rogers, and none on Telus.

With all this data out, it will be interesting to see two things: (1) If people start switching providers based on this data -- and, no, not just for unauthorized access, but for all the many legitimate uses of BitTorrent these days. (2) If this leads to any additional research on the impact of throttling. This data points to some areas where researchers could do either cross-country comparisons between those that have high throttling and those that have low throttling, or intra-country comparisons between ISPs with exceptionally different policies.

Filed Under: bittorrent, countries, throttling
Companies: m-labs

What Happens If File Sharing Can Also Be Prosecuted As Trademark Infringement?

from the messy dept

In the arguments over ACTA, one criticism seemed widely accepted: that it tries to bundle together two quite different challenges -- tackling counterfeit goods, like fake medicines, and dealing with unauthorized file sharing. One popular suggestion was that ACTA should be split in two in order to handle those separately – for example, David Martin, the politician who played a key role in convincing the European Parliament to reject ACTA this week, supports this approach.

But a case reported on TorrentFreak suggests that the distinction between the two worlds is starting to blur:

A New York federal court has ordered a rare default judgment in favor of John Wiley & Sons, one of the world’s largest book publishers. Robert Carpenter from Poughkeepsie, New York, has been ordered to pay the publisher $7,000 in damages for sharing a copy of "WordPress All-in-One For Dummies" on BitTorrent. According to Judge William Pauley, the man is guilty of both copyright and trademark infringement.

The judge specified that $2,000 of those damages were "for Carpenter’s counterfeiting of Wiley’s Trademarks". As TorrentFreak notes:

To our knowledge, this is the first time that sharing files on BitTorrent has been viewed as counterfeiting, a description that’s usually reserved for fake goods sold as the real deal.

That's troubling, because it would seem to open the door for anti-counterfeiting measures aimed at tackling serious trademark infringement to be applied routinely to P2P sharing of copyright files simply because they are exact copies of originals. That, in its turn, would mean that separating ACTA's measures against counterfeit goods from those dealing with online infringement might not be enough to solve the treaty's problems, since the former would still apply to the digital world. Yet another reason to bin ACTA completely and to start again from scratch.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

Filed Under: acta, bittorrent, counterfeiting, david martin, european parliament, file sharing, robert carpenter