Actually, what they are asserting is that, given a limited amount of total bandwidth for any given customer or service, there is no way to assure all packets and all data reach their destination in a timely manner. If you have network congestion, the lack of the ability to provide QoS or to have preferential treatment of certain traffic over others would be an issue.
Oversold capacity is an issue, as are applications and services that require much more bandwidth than is normal for internet usage. it's simply not economically viable in the US for companies to set up their networks to meet full peak demand at all times. Google already proved that.
One of the issues is that free speech has turned from stating your opinion to yelling down the opinion of others.
Free speech use to be a positive. Haul out your actual soap box, stand in the middle of the park, and yell out your opinion as loud as you like. People might laugh, people might point. but you could do it.
Now you try to bring your soap box and people beat you up for showing up and expressing an opinion they don't like.
People seem to have confused unpopular speech with illegal speech. Instead we have a mob rules problem.
Remember Ann Coulter being blocked from speaking at a Uni? I think she's a dumb (insert foul word here) but I also respect her rights to express her opinions - providing that those opinions are legal. That universities have to cancel her legal speech because of mob rules is a really sad thing.
Yes, the mob is expressing their opinion. But their free speech ends where it impinges on the free speech of others. When the schools have to shut down events because of threats of violence and destruction of school property, something is really wrong. Laws like this, while perhaps overbroad, are an attempt to find a solution to this oppression of rights and opinions of others.
Fine? Nope. I think it's a massive damning of the US justice system. It's so complex and has so many avenues for action that you can "win" merely by bankrupting the other side. That is incredibly sad, actually.
My comments are only that Mike and the Floor64 crew appear to be starting to set up the "post lawsuit" future, which may or may not be on this site. It's actually a pretty realistic thing to do, as no matter the end results, Techdirt is already wounded and may never actually recover to it's full power.
No, they aren't destroyed, but they are put on a lower level and thus treated unequally. That is a form of censorship, like it or not.
Look at the posts flagged in this discussion. Aside from PaulT calling people names, the rest are perfectly normal and acceptable ranges of opinions. But some people feel the need to flag anything they don't agree with.
The difference is subtle, but huge at the same time. Can you imagine if everything you posted required extra clicks to be read? Would you think that fair or equal?
Yes, then the consumers will be back pining for the days of cable where they could pay one company a fixed amount and get access to everything.
Be careful what you wish for, you might get it. In this case, the "cord cutting" has lead to the inevitable, as companies move to profit as much as they can from this delivery system.
The funny part is a third party VPN has all the makings of a man in the middle attack. There is no simple way to know what (if anything) a VPN company is looking at. Are they logging all your URLs? Are they capturing passwords?
Considering this one was recommended by Techdirt (and Torrentfreak, I think) it's hard to say any of them are much good now.
Congratulations Karl, you have selected cord cutting. Tell him what he's won Johnny!
Right you are Dave! First, Karl has won short term initial savings, as he cuts the cord and feels all smug because he isn't paying the cable guys anymore. That is followed by the satisfaction of selecting only the things he likes via Netflix or Amazon. Karl also wins inevitable fragmentation and the frustration of having to pay for multiple programming sources, managing multiple accounts and paying late fees or losing service when he forgets to renew. Finally, Karl gets to pay more for less, finally spending more each month for fragmented services than he paid for cable. Congratulations Karl, you earned it!
No tin foil required... I am just pointing to more than a few dots that exist, you can draw your own lines between them to see what animal you draw.
As for Mr Stone, "So what?": Well, let's see. First and foremost, you have to ask "are we getting the full story?". For a site that pushes hard on transparency, not revealing how crowdfunding is going, and not mentioning that the key group that they are partnering with also just happens to handle the funds. I don't imply any improper actions, just a weird lack of transparency up front. Since Mike is usually verbose as can be, the small oversight really stands out.
I will express my opinion. PaulT will probably hate it, but if he calls me names or insults me about it, I hope the community will flag his abusive posts.
My opinion is this: Mike has figured out that Techdirt has run it's course, and potentially is doomed the result of a lawsuit that he may win, but will either go broke getting there or will have to settle long before it's over.
Unless, of course, he can raise enough money from people and other groups by wrapping himself in the free speech flag and trying really hard to be a martyr for the cause.
The I Support Journalism thing is fun. It's a crowd funding site that doesn't appear to disclose how much funding it's getting, doesn't have a goal, and doesn't appear to report any of that information. It's hard to read, but it appears to be more "step2" than "techdirt" in it's success range.
The other part that makes it interesting is this quote:
"I'm happy to announce today that we've further partnered with the Freedom of the Press Foundation"
Yet, one of the four members of the steering committee of the isupportjournalism site "Trevor Timm Executive Director, Freedom Of The Press Foundation". Oh, the only article I could find on their site about Techdirt was written by Timm himself. Hmm!
You can draw your own conclusions, but it appears that either a takeover is in the making, a merger, or just an in kind trade of space for Freedom of the Press and others to rant to a much larger audience than they command.
I agree to a point. Part of the question is who is offering a "service" and who is a willing participant in illegal activities or is encouraging non-protected (aka illegal) speech.
Too often, it seems section 230 is used as another way of separating the income from the bad acts. It also acts as a wall to protect those bad acts by making it nearly impossible to get subscriber or user information in the course of a lawsuit or legal action.
It's much like bit torrent and piracy. Bit Torrent the protocol isn't at fault, but those who use it are. Having a "service" be able to protect people who are actively pirating and profit from that active piracy is wrong.
What you are seeing here is the sort of pushback that should be expected. The Congress and such are starting to realize that section 230 is potentially more than a little overbroad and has allowed for things online that would not stand in the real world.
It's difficult for them to fix it well and not cause great harm, but generally they work like a herd of elephants so plenty of stuff will get squished on the way by.
"Your refusal to address anything said in the article, the actual arguments, any verifiable facts or the responses to you have yet again been noted."
The actual arguments are the same old same old, excuses as to why we shouldn't look at the overall site and realize that it's nothing but a pirate site operated for a profit by a guy who knew exactly what it was.
Mike spends a lot of time hand wringing over the concept that torrents aren't infringing. This is true. However, they are the first step in an act of infringement, you need the torrent file or magnet link to be able to download the rest. That is the "aiding and abetting" part of the deal.
See, Kickass wasn't a random search engine that displayed automated results. It was a site packed with individually created pages, with information about each of the movies, tv shows, and record albums, and had featured links coded by the site operators to the best of the links. It wasn't a blank search engine, it was a guide to pirating.
Without pirated materials (which made up almost all of the sites listing and pages), the site would have been barren, and would have not been very popular - and not at all profitable!
The court ruled clearly - it's each to see the what the site was doing and how it was operating, and any attempt to say it wasn't a pirate site would be dishonest.
"I do remember local suppliers being shut down, I do remember suppliers being prosecuted or otherwise blocked in their home countries where appropriate. I don't recall them being prosecuted according to another country's laws or anyone being held liable for "secondary" infringement."
You need to think a little harder. If a guy in the UK sells a pirated CD or VHS tape that was made in France, he gets prosecuted in the UK under UK laws, even if the item was made somewhere else. In extreme cases, it wouldn't be out of the question for the French to also have a go if the guy in the UK was paying someone in France to create it specifically for him (conspiracy).
Torrent sites are a perfect criminal conspiracy in that manner. Each of the parties involved does a little part of the job to further the criminal action. Those who create the torrent files and originally seed it, the sites that help make those torrent files available, and those who download the content and re-seed it or peer it are each parts of a conspiracy to achieve a single goal, pirated materials.
Just like physical materials, the legal system generally stays away from prosecuting those who purchase or receive the content only as that is whack a mole at it's finest. Instead, they go at the key actors in the conspiracy, which are those who create the torrents (rippers and eoncoders) and the pirate torrent sites which list them and aid and abet the distribution.
Torrents exist in their current form as an attempt to dodge responsibility or make it hard to prosecute by splitting up the process into individual slices that have a certain amount of plausible deniability. It's the same manner (almost to the letter) that drug street gangs use these days to sell drugs. You ask one guy, you pay a second guy, and you received the product from a third guy who got it from a fourth guy... it makes it a lot harder to prove an individual criminal transaction. If you stand back, it's not hard to see that drugs are being sold.
So yeah, points addressed. Now can you manage it without personal attacks?
"It's hard to believe Singleton isn't aware of the numerous opportunities indie directors have now that weren't available when he first broke into the business. "
it always comes back to the same place. The new chances and situations are there generally to let people play in the minor leagues at best. Cheaper technology, equipment, and editing suites mean that yes, more people can turn out movies. We can see it by the number of movies competing to even get into many of the "alt" film festivals.
Yet, very few of them are breaking through. Very few of those people are actually going on to making a career out of it at a level that makes it possible for them to only make movies for a living.
It's almost a glass ceiling.
The same thing has already been shown in the music world. More people making music, more people making a little money at it, and fewer people and groups breaking through to the top levels. The mid and lower level pie has been chopped up differently so that there are more lower end people and the mid level people make less, in no small part because of fewer live music venues and more competition for them. That doesn't even consider the people who "play for exposure" or "play free and sell your CD" type gigs.
I think what this guy is pointing out is the same thing we see in music - that middle step is now missing. The ladder has more, closely spaced rungs at the bottom for usre, but then there is a gap that few people can climb over that gets them climbing the steps nearer the top of the ladder.
Is piracy at fault? I think we know that since piracy has become a big issue, Hollywood has turned towards what they feel is more sure things, name stars, sequels, and the like. The terd-riffic Emoji movie is perhaps the most out there that they will dare try. No more Waterworlds!
Mid range past winners like Kevin Smith have hit he skids. His last one (Yoga Hosers) made a shocking 40k of ticket sales on a 5 million budget - and that with all of his internet fame, his followers, and all that - they essentially sold about 40k tickets total.
So yeah, something is different. Piracy? Who knows. Just something is different and it's not all that good.
I think that if you actually read the whole story (I know you don't often) you would note that the judge went over and above what was required and explained why, even if the defendant himself made the request that the charges would not be thrown out.
I was agreeing with Roger - torrents in and of themselves (as a protocol) should not be found illegal - but it's not the protocol that is on trial. So the point either way is moot.
"ignored the actual arguments in the article to pick on something you think you can easily reject."
I did no such thing. I agreed with Roger, but I pointed out that it's not relevant in the case, and that I consider torrents as a protocol legal, just their use is not.
See, the problem here is people are making the incorrect assumption that torrents = piracy. They aren't always. But even you can remember the guy who took his pirate site, after losing in court, and turned it into a legal torrent site. He lasted a very short period of time because people were not coming to a site looking for legal content. That legal content (as listed) is generally distributed directly in the games or is used internally as a transfer protocol between data centers. Again, the protocol itself isn't illegal.
"Nobody is doing that, although the people prosecuting these cases are very happy to try and treat the crime differently because the action has "on the internet" as part of the action."
I don't think so. They are going to where the crimes are happening. With millions of Americans pirating every day, it's clear that the internet is the hot spot for piracy of all sorts - and most importantly, where people profit from it. Kim Dotcom made millions off of piracy, playing the "just a file host" card but then taking steps to launder all the income away from the site as fast as possible. Other sites that have faced justice have been making hundreds of thousands and even millions running their pirate sites. When there are millions in ill gotten gains, there will be law enforcement on the case.
Too often, the excuse is "on the internet" to mean it's not important or somehow not real. Read Mike's post careful and you will see how hard he is working to try to build up layers of excuses as to why a guy building pages for unreleased movies and such and putting download links on them is somehow NOT responsible "because torrents". It's an insane technology dodge that requires everyone ignore the reality of the situation, that he was making a boat load of cash running pirate site. People didn't come to the site for his personality or witty conversation, the came to download the latest movie and TV shows, and the site happily made link buttons to the very best of them. It's pretty hard to deny reality, unless of course it's "on the internet".
So yeah, summary (because you likely didn't read). I agreed with Roger, said it's not relevant anyway, and explained why. You shit yourself trying to come up with a way to slam me. You failed (again). Thanks for playing.
It's great to say bit torrent has it's non-criminal uses. In fact, bit torrent is neutral, a nothing.
Bittorrent isn't on trial here, for that very reason.
Kickasstorrents is on trial not because of the protocol they happened to use, but how the used it and to what end. KAT was about sharing pirated stuff, plain and simple. The site operator(s) went out of their way to create information pages for many of the movies and TV shows - and part of that "top of the page" was links to download in various formats including "cam". The site operator cannot deny that his business was predicated on piracy.
"You're insisting that torrent search engines be responsible for everything they link"
Actually, all the courts (and some of us) are saying is that if you build a site with the intention to aid and abet piracy, then you will be treated as such. Based on everything that was on the site, it would be impossible for the site operator(s) not to know that their site was helping people pirate.
It's pretty simple, when you stop trying to hide it behind technology.
On the post: AT&T Lies Again, Insists Net Neutrality Rules Will Hurt First Responders
Re:
Oversold capacity is an issue, as are applications and services that require much more bandwidth than is normal for internet usage. it's simply not economically viable in the US for companies to set up their networks to meet full peak demand at all times. Google already proved that.
On the post: Disney Pulls Content From Netflix As Users Face An Annoying, Confusing Rise In Streaming Exclusivity Silos
Re:
On the post: North Carolina Passes An Entirely Misguided Restore Campus Free Speech Act
Free speech use to be a positive. Haul out your actual soap box, stand in the middle of the park, and yell out your opinion as loud as you like. People might laugh, people might point. but you could do it.
Now you try to bring your soap box and people beat you up for showing up and expressing an opinion they don't like.
People seem to have confused unpopular speech with illegal speech. Instead we have a mob rules problem.
Remember Ann Coulter being blocked from speaking at a Uni? I think she's a dumb (insert foul word here) but I also respect her rights to express her opinions - providing that those opinions are legal. That universities have to cancel her legal speech because of mob rules is a really sad thing.
Yes, the mob is expressing their opinion. But their free speech ends where it impinges on the free speech of others. When the schools have to shut down events because of threats of violence and destruction of school property, something is really wrong. Laws like this, while perhaps overbroad, are an attempt to find a solution to this oppression of rights and opinions of others.
On the post: Techdirt: Now With More Free Speech Reporting
Re: Re:
My comments are only that Mike and the Floor64 crew appear to be starting to set up the "post lawsuit" future, which may or may not be on this site. It's actually a pretty realistic thing to do, as no matter the end results, Techdirt is already wounded and may never actually recover to it's full power.
On the post: Techdirt: Now With More Free Speech Reporting
Re: Re: Re:
Look at the posts flagged in this discussion. Aside from PaulT calling people names, the rest are perfectly normal and acceptable ranges of opinions. But some people feel the need to flag anything they don't agree with.
The difference is subtle, but huge at the same time. Can you imagine if everything you posted required extra clicks to be read? Would you think that fair or equal?
On the post: Disney Pulls Content From Netflix As Users Face An Annoying, Confusing Rise In Streaming Exclusivity Silos
Re: Re:
Be careful what you wish for, you might get it. In this case, the "cord cutting" has lead to the inevitable, as companies move to profit as much as they can from this delivery system.
On the post: Complaint Filed Over Sketchy VPN Service
Considering this one was recommended by Techdirt (and Torrentfreak, I think) it's hard to say any of them are much good now.
On the post: Disney Pulls Content From Netflix As Users Face An Annoying, Confusing Rise In Streaming Exclusivity Silos
Right you are Dave! First, Karl has won short term initial savings, as he cuts the cord and feels all smug because he isn't paying the cable guys anymore. That is followed by the satisfaction of selecting only the things he likes via Netflix or Amazon. Karl also wins inevitable fragmentation and the frustration of having to pay for multiple programming sources, managing multiple accounts and paying late fees or losing service when he forgets to renew. Finally, Karl gets to pay more for less, finally spending more each month for fragmented services than he paid for cable. Congratulations Karl, you earned it!
On the post: Techdirt: Now With More Free Speech Reporting
Re: Re:
As for Mr Stone, "So what?": Well, let's see. First and foremost, you have to ask "are we getting the full story?". For a site that pushes hard on transparency, not revealing how crowdfunding is going, and not mentioning that the key group that they are partnering with also just happens to handle the funds. I don't imply any improper actions, just a weird lack of transparency up front. Since Mike is usually verbose as can be, the small oversight really stands out.
It's just one of those things.
On the post: Techdirt: Now With More Free Speech Reporting
My opinion is this: Mike has figured out that Techdirt has run it's course, and potentially is doomed the result of a lawsuit that he may win, but will either go broke getting there or will have to settle long before it's over.
Unless, of course, he can raise enough money from people and other groups by wrapping himself in the free speech flag and trying really hard to be a martyr for the cause.
The I Support Journalism thing is fun. It's a crowd funding site that doesn't appear to disclose how much funding it's getting, doesn't have a goal, and doesn't appear to report any of that information. It's hard to read, but it appears to be more "step2" than "techdirt" in it's success range.
The other part that makes it interesting is this quote:
"I'm happy to announce today that we've further partnered with the Freedom of the Press Foundation"
Yet, one of the four members of the steering committee of the isupportjournalism site "Trevor Timm
Executive Director, Freedom Of The Press Foundation". Oh, the only article I could find on their site about Techdirt was written by Timm himself. Hmm!
You can draw your own conclusions, but it appears that either a takeover is in the making, a merger, or just an in kind trade of space for Freedom of the Press and others to rant to a much larger audience than they command.
On the post: Techdirt: Now With More Free Speech Reporting
Re: Re: Re: Re:
Will the community act to flag the aggressor?
On the post: Techdirt: Now With More Free Speech Reporting
Re: Re:
Some people find the truth abusive, I guess.
On the post: Section 230 Matters. Congress Needs To Be Reminded Of That
Re: Re:
Too often, it seems section 230 is used as another way of separating the income from the bad acts. It also acts as a wall to protect those bad acts by making it nearly impossible to get subscriber or user information in the course of a lawsuit or legal action.
It's much like bit torrent and piracy. Bit Torrent the protocol isn't at fault, but those who use it are. Having a "service" be able to protect people who are actively pirating and profit from that active piracy is wrong.
On the post: Section 230 Matters. Congress Needs To Be Reminded Of That
It's difficult for them to fix it well and not cause great harm, but generally they work like a herd of elephants so plenty of stuff will get squished on the way by.
On the post: Kickass Torrents Creator Can't Get Criminal Case Tossed Out
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
The actual arguments are the same old same old, excuses as to why we shouldn't look at the overall site and realize that it's nothing but a pirate site operated for a profit by a guy who knew exactly what it was.
Mike spends a lot of time hand wringing over the concept that torrents aren't infringing. This is true. However, they are the first step in an act of infringement, you need the torrent file or magnet link to be able to download the rest. That is the "aiding and abetting" part of the deal.
See, Kickass wasn't a random search engine that displayed automated results. It was a site packed with individually created pages, with information about each of the movies, tv shows, and record albums, and had featured links coded by the site operators to the best of the links. It wasn't a blank search engine, it was a guide to pirating.
Without pirated materials (which made up almost all of the sites listing and pages), the site would have been barren, and would have not been very popular - and not at all profitable!
The court ruled clearly - it's each to see the what the site was doing and how it was operating, and any attempt to say it wasn't a pirate site would be dishonest.
"I do remember local suppliers being shut down, I do remember suppliers being prosecuted or otherwise blocked in their home countries where appropriate. I don't recall them being prosecuted according to another country's laws or anyone being held liable for "secondary" infringement."
You need to think a little harder. If a guy in the UK sells a pirated CD or VHS tape that was made in France, he gets prosecuted in the UK under UK laws, even if the item was made somewhere else. In extreme cases, it wouldn't be out of the question for the French to also have a go if the guy in the UK was paying someone in France to create it specifically for him (conspiracy).
Torrent sites are a perfect criminal conspiracy in that manner. Each of the parties involved does a little part of the job to further the criminal action. Those who create the torrent files and originally seed it, the sites that help make those torrent files available, and those who download the content and re-seed it or peer it are each parts of a conspiracy to achieve a single goal, pirated materials.
Just like physical materials, the legal system generally stays away from prosecuting those who purchase or receive the content only as that is whack a mole at it's finest. Instead, they go at the key actors in the conspiracy, which are those who create the torrents (rippers and eoncoders) and the pirate torrent sites which list them and aid and abet the distribution.
Torrents exist in their current form as an attempt to dodge responsibility or make it hard to prosecute by splitting up the process into individual slices that have a certain amount of plausible deniability. It's the same manner (almost to the letter) that drug street gangs use these days to sell drugs. You ask one guy, you pay a second guy, and you received the product from a third guy who got it from a fourth guy... it makes it a lot harder to prove an individual criminal transaction. If you stand back, it's not hard to see that drugs are being sold.
So yeah, points addressed. Now can you manage it without personal attacks?
On the post: Film Director's Op-Ed Ignores Reality To Push Hollywood Lobbying Talking Points
it always comes back to the same place. The new chances and situations are there generally to let people play in the minor leagues at best. Cheaper technology, equipment, and editing suites mean that yes, more people can turn out movies. We can see it by the number of movies competing to even get into many of the "alt" film festivals.
Yet, very few of them are breaking through. Very few of those people are actually going on to making a career out of it at a level that makes it possible for them to only make movies for a living.
It's almost a glass ceiling.
The same thing has already been shown in the music world. More people making music, more people making a little money at it, and fewer people and groups breaking through to the top levels. The mid and lower level pie has been chopped up differently so that there are more lower end people and the mid level people make less, in no small part because of fewer live music venues and more competition for them. That doesn't even consider the people who "play for exposure" or "play free and sell your CD" type gigs.
I think what this guy is pointing out is the same thing we see in music - that middle step is now missing. The ladder has more, closely spaced rungs at the bottom for usre, but then there is a gap that few people can climb over that gets them climbing the steps nearer the top of the ladder.
Is piracy at fault? I think we know that since piracy has become a big issue, Hollywood has turned towards what they feel is more sure things, name stars, sequels, and the like. The terd-riffic Emoji movie is perhaps the most out there that they will dare try. No more Waterworlds!
Mid range past winners like Kevin Smith have hit he skids. His last one (Yoga Hosers) made a shocking 40k of ticket sales on a 5 million budget - and that with all of his internet fame, his followers, and all that - they essentially sold about 40k tickets total.
So yeah, something is different. Piracy? Who knows. Just something is different and it's not all that good.
On the post: Kickass Torrents Creator Can't Get Criminal Case Tossed Out
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
I don't remember people with physical media selling into the US in huge numbers.
The rest, well... take a rest, you are straining yourself to be witty and proving you are only a half wit.
On the post: Monkey Selfie Case May Settle: PETA Knows It'll Lose, And The Photographer Is Broke
Re:
On the post: Kickass Torrents Creator Can't Get Criminal Case Tossed Out
Re: Re: Re: Re:
I was agreeing with Roger - torrents in and of themselves (as a protocol) should not be found illegal - but it's not the protocol that is on trial. So the point either way is moot.
"ignored the actual arguments in the article to pick on something you think you can easily reject."
I did no such thing. I agreed with Roger, but I pointed out that it's not relevant in the case, and that I consider torrents as a protocol legal, just their use is not.
See, the problem here is people are making the incorrect assumption that torrents = piracy. They aren't always. But even you can remember the guy who took his pirate site, after losing in court, and turned it into a legal torrent site. He lasted a very short period of time because people were not coming to a site looking for legal content. That legal content (as listed) is generally distributed directly in the games or is used internally as a transfer protocol between data centers. Again, the protocol itself isn't illegal.
"Nobody is doing that, although the people prosecuting these cases are very happy to try and treat the crime differently because the action has "on the internet" as part of the action."
I don't think so. They are going to where the crimes are happening. With millions of Americans pirating every day, it's clear that the internet is the hot spot for piracy of all sorts - and most importantly, where people profit from it. Kim Dotcom made millions off of piracy, playing the "just a file host" card but then taking steps to launder all the income away from the site as fast as possible. Other sites that have faced justice have been making hundreds of thousands and even millions running their pirate sites. When there are millions in ill gotten gains, there will be law enforcement on the case.
Too often, the excuse is "on the internet" to mean it's not important or somehow not real. Read Mike's post careful and you will see how hard he is working to try to build up layers of excuses as to why a guy building pages for unreleased movies and such and putting download links on them is somehow NOT responsible "because torrents". It's an insane technology dodge that requires everyone ignore the reality of the situation, that he was making a boat load of cash running pirate site. People didn't come to the site for his personality or witty conversation, the came to download the latest movie and TV shows, and the site happily made link buttons to the very best of them. It's pretty hard to deny reality, unless of course it's "on the internet".
So yeah, summary (because you likely didn't read). I agreed with Roger, said it's not relevant anyway, and explained why. You shit yourself trying to come up with a way to slam me. You failed (again). Thanks for playing.
On the post: Kickass Torrents Creator Can't Get Criminal Case Tossed Out
Re: Re:
Bittorrent isn't on trial here, for that very reason.
Kickasstorrents is on trial not because of the protocol they happened to use, but how the used it and to what end. KAT was about sharing pirated stuff, plain and simple. The site operator(s) went out of their way to create information pages for many of the movies and TV shows - and part of that "top of the page" was links to download in various formats including "cam". The site operator cannot deny that his business was predicated on piracy.
"You're insisting that torrent search engines be responsible for everything they link"
Actually, all the courts (and some of us) are saying is that if you build a site with the intention to aid and abet piracy, then you will be treated as such. Based on everything that was on the site, it would be impossible for the site operator(s) not to know that their site was helping people pirate.
It's pretty simple, when you stop trying to hide it behind technology.
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