p2pnet - rss feed: MPAA sues LokiTorrent
p2pnet.net News:- LokiTorrent is yet another BitTorrent site to be targeted in the MPAA crush p2p, sue file sharers vendetta.
The Big Seven movie studios claim they’re being ruined by file sharing and that thousands of ancillary staff are suffering terrible hardships as a direct result.
And yet, at the same time, they’re reporting mind-boggling revenues. For a taste, check out the Big Earners list.
One film, Titanic, raked in more than half a billion dollars and this year, in June alone, the North American movie industry took in $1.03 billion, a 14% increase over June 2003’s previous monthly record.
Now LokiTorrent is looking for $30,000 to go towards, “legal and other costs associated with saving peer-to-peer as a whole”.
Dominate online environments
The MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) attacks against BitTorrent servers are part of a concerted effort involving the major software companies, record labels and movie studios to dominate online environments in order to turn them into tightly controlled corporate marketing and sales divisions and enterprises.
Of Suprnova.org, Youceff.com, Lokitorrent.com and Piratebay.org, four popular torrent sites mentioned by Johan Pouwelse in The Bittorrent P2P File-sharing System: Measurements and Analysis, only Piratebay.org has escaped the MPAA’s direct attentions.
We say ‘direct’ because although Piratebay.org hasn’t yet been nailed like the other three sites, it was named in a lamentable MPAA effort to use the purely American DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) in an attempt to con site owners in foreign countries.
LokiTorrent’s request for donations towards its legal costs epitomizes a major part of the entertainment industry strategy.
In the same way that the RIAA, the MPAA’s opposite number in the recording industry, is suing mom-and-pop p2p users, knowing full well that never in a million years will they be able to match the industry’s financial and legal resources, the studios are counting on the same thing happening with their sue ‘em all campaign.
Guilty until proven innocent
Not one of the RIAA’s (Recording Industry Association of America) thousands of victims has ever been found guilty of anything because they’ve never appeared in a court.
They’re all ordinary people who share music with each other not for profit, but for pleasure. They’re not the hard-core crooks the members of the Big Four music label cartel portray them to be.
Big Music knows its victims will never be able to afford a court appearance. So it makes ‘settlement’ offers which, although the payments impoverish many of victims, they’re forced to accept.
This makes a mockery of the ‘innocent until proven guilty’ concept, allows the cartel to imply it’s successfully sued rafts of people for ‘illegally’ sharing files online, and wards off the possibility of a court actually hearing a case and deciding file sharing is not, after all, illegal.
In the meanwhile, the real criminals, the organized counterfeiters making their fortunes on world black markets because the labels, studios and software companies continue to churn out easily copied physical CDs and DVDs in their billions, as much as anything else, go largely unscathed.
And everything that applies to the music cartel sue ‘em all campaigns similarly applies to the movie industry onslaughts.
No clue
In The Netherlands, the major studios used their Brein anti-piracy enforcement unit against ED2K and Bittorrent sites.
As Raymond Blijd reported, Brein conned Holland’s FIOD-ECD, the government agency assigned to the criminal pursuit of fiscal, financial and economical fraud, into getting involved.
FIOD-ECD, “can by any constitutional means go after hard-core criminalism,” says Blijd, “So, getting access to and information from an ISP isn’t an issue. Simply said, FIOD-ECD can do what Brein can’t.”
FIOD-ECD got into it believing investigators would find servers loaded with illegal materials, and “neatly kept balance sheets showing the profits generated by all the ‘illegal’ activities”.
During interrogations, one investigator, “in obvious frustration, grabbed a random piece of PHP code and offered it up it as a scorecard for keeping tabs on funds. Finally, it became abundantly clear to all that FIOD-ECD were in way over their heads. They had no clue as to what they were dealing with.”
And the criminals they were chasing?
Suspects aged18 to 26 and who, far from being members of an organized conspiracy set up to milk the industry of millions of dollars, barely knew each other and were surviving mostly on donations from site users.
In the meanwhile ————
- It’s never been proven that a downloaded and/or shared file equals even a single a lost sale, let alone millions of them
- RIAA claims that its war against file sharers is having a marked effect have proven to be spurious, and the same will certainly apply to the MPAA’s efforts
(Thanks, TT)
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See:-
targeted - Hollywood vs BitTorrent, p2pnet, December 15, 2004
Big Earners - All-Time USA Boxoffice takes
June alone - Movie studio record revenues, p2pnet, July 7, 2004
Suprnova.org - Hollywood nails SuprNova, p2pnet. December 20, 2004
Piratebay.org - BitTorrent: chapter and verse, p2pnet, December 14, 2004
nailed - DMCA League of Nations, p2pnet, August 30, 2004
profits generated - ED2K and Bittorrent raids, p2pnet, December 23, 2004
December 29th, 2004 at 7:47 pm
If all of those sued would band together and pool resources, then this thing could be defeated. Maybe p2p.net should set up a website and allow victims tlearn each other’s names so that they can pool resources so they can fight the cartels and win.
December 29th, 2004 at 11:14 pm
Not many left now. Are TV torrents next?
If so, I’m going to be pissed because I’m already paying for it.
December 30th, 2004 at 12:38 am
that does sound like a good idea. I’m not, nor do i think will be sued(but who reaaly does expect it for casualy grabbing the occasional song? except life is funny that way, not ‘Hah-hah’ funny, but funny like when a nun gets hit by a bus- you dont expect it to happen to you, but there you are, with nun all over your bus, trying to explain to all the kids why there are pieces of nun guts all over the windshield.), but i do think creating a more organized defense of the thousands being presently or the (perhaps millions of) people ‘eligible’ to be sued. There has got to be someone out there with the organizational skills to give the targets of lawsuits any other option besides grabbing thier ankles and taking one for the team.
As you can probably tell i am not that person, but surely there has to be somebody, somewhere, looking for a cause to become fanaticaly devoted about, and organize some sort of group defensive strategy. I doubt the mPAA or RIAA, or any other lettered organization will stop without having complete control of all media works distribution systems and ingraining themselves so far into every mediafriendly electronic product in your house, that the book ‘1984′ will seem like the good ol’ days.
or you can just sit back and bitch, like i do, making no real difference.
eh, feel free to delete this if it sounds too much like a rant, it kind of is.
December 30th, 2004 at 7:32 am
It’s total and utter nonsence. Lokitorrent and all bittorrent sites alike are nothing more than hash file servers. They do not offer any of the software, music, or movies that are on their lists. Just a simple pointer file to where they are located. Since they are not directly handling the files themselves, this lawsuit is frivolous to say the least. Trying to make a website cease it’s operations for giving information goes against freedom of speech.
December 30th, 2004 at 1:29 pm
I have said much on Loki itself and would say that if this continues then corporations will have abject control and interference in areas of law and order that only the police should have. Corporations should NEVER have control of public destiny, NEVER as they are not under bond to protect and serve!
What the US users should do is this, band together as suggested elsewhere and form a lobby or pressure group to influence the members of the houses, not all Senator’s and Governor’s agree to what the MPAA and RIAA are doing and many are aware of the illegality of their current campaigns in overseas nations.
Fight fire with fire, these organisations invade peoples machines with their scans, it opens the gambit somewhat and whats sauce for the goose….
I am surprised that no-one has worked out that the MPAA and RIAA’s tool of warfare and detection is the internet, without a valid and reliable system to prove things would make their tasks more difficult.
What the two organisations is defending is similar to the Union created closed shops, the MPAA and RIAA both savagely defend their right to monopolise, price fix and milk the system for every penny it can at maximum bloated profits that rarely see its way to the creative people in any case. The companies behind the two cartels on average take between 70-80% of earnings.
Sony is also a company that is milking it both ends, it supplies the industry with technology to create DVD’s and such and also is recompsated for loss of earnings yet the levies imposed on the industry is taken as a tax hike so Sony get paid a lovely double payday, this is what the levy on burners is supposed to put right, why isn’t anyone saying, right, the Bit-torrent situation is much less so the levy should be much lower, no-one will because corporations are so used to taking BUT never giving.
People are sick to death of receiving drivel and being charged a fortune to be given the privilige and again the MPAA should be using this situation as a means of quality assessment and make changes within the industry.
Both organisations began dropping personal vendetta’s against individuals simply because the populace would not stand to watch more twelve year olds or college kids or other minnows in this pond get fried by mulltibillion dollar industries but I would put hard money that once they start to lay their hands on IP logs and email databases this could change.
I am also most surprised that neither have attempted the link to terrorism, it seems to open doors for virtually anyone else and despite the lame attempt recently to try and claim Bit-Torrent was a servery for child pornography, what let this down is that in the end of it it is superbly proven that terrorist materials or child pornography is not tolerated in the Bittorrent community.
So I would say that a supreme effort from all would see a blow to their plans, they have money, the US users have voting power and boycotting power, protesting and demonstrating power even, the MPAA and RIAA cannot move very quickly but the users can, the two orgs have defined this on a war footing, fine, then lets make sure that they know we are aware of this and fight back.
I was rather amazed in conclusion the disparaging comments against Loki on SuprNova forum, because Loki has asked for money to fight back, it showed a double hypocrisy that people are always willing to leech but never seed.
Good luck to Loki
AO
find the AO on Loki….
December 30th, 2004 at 7:57 pm
Paying??
It’s a free site. Use the http://www.tvtorrents.tv site. The others are fakes, asking money. Also read http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=628
January 1st, 2005 at 3:20 am
That club picture hits the nail on the head!!!!!!! Beat into submission to but product!!!!!!!
January 2nd, 2005 at 7:36 pm
What we need is a gnutella style application that searches the web for active .torrent files.
Open source that bad boy, and we’ll at least free up a lot of people from this idiocy. Keeping lists of links (like lokitorrent and others, akin to yahoo) is what gets these people in hot water.
We need a base for a new tool. Perhaps it’s even possible to do this from the existing codebases. Hell, I knew a guy that created a pearl script to search for game servers on our lan, in about 10 minutes.
I see no reason why someone with the requisite skills couldn’t just code up a basic tool to search for the files, and then list them in a GUI output. Release this under FOSS/GNU style licensing, and the MPAA and RIAA can’t really sue anyone can they?
January 4th, 2005 at 12:02 pm
Now at first glance this seems like a top idea. Like a kinda .torrent spider or whatever. However, I dont see how this could really work. After all, if there are no websites which list torrent (or eDonkey, gnutella, etc) files, then where exactly would this tool look for it’s sources?
I do not know by which means the above mentioned Perl script found the game servers on the LAN but I imagine it would be checking either for open ports with services running on them (correct me please if i am wrong). Or otherwise maybe some sort of packet sniffing variant (which I think may be illegal in some countries).
If this is the case then this proposed .torrent tool would in effect give the MPAA and RIAA the perfect tool for chasing down and prosecuting ‘offenders’!
I would like to note that this post is merely stream of conciousness babble as, currently, I have no really deep knowledge of the technology behind networking, only a general idea… I just thought I would sling my voice into the foray!
Happy P2Ping
January 5th, 2005 at 3:13 am
I’m not sure what the script did to ID games underway, but it just made me think about it. I’m no programmer, but I’m sure that there could be a way to do this.
Every .torrent is listed SOMEWHERE and within a default range of ports. Further, the packets must be somehow identifiable.
Now, your argument is a good one, but how come all the gnutella clients (bearshare, limewire, etc) aren’t blocked?
Cuz it’s the ISP’s that would have to do it.
ISP’s already can identify who is sharing a .torrent, and it’s pretty easy to do. Currently, there are no secure .torrent clients that I am aware of, unlike awesome tools like filetopia, that encrypt all P2P traffic in hashes with YOUR favourite encryption, vice some default only.
Still, someone should think about this…. .torrent is sooo much better at file sharing than other P2P’s… maybe the gunutella clients will add this feature in? hmmm who knows.
Of course, the gnutella network is a great place to START seeding your torrents!!!!
Of course, the whole “search” thing, makes me think that the .torrents are at least listed in a tracker… right??? These trackers are NOT neccissarily part of the websites that index and search them. They are just listing known/previous .torrents.
So the thing would be to build a tool that queries the .torrents trackers, maybe even all the p2p nets for relavent links, hell, even google for that matter; do some magic (like pinging the file to see if it’s active, etc), and release it as open source.
January 5th, 2005 at 9:36 am
Go to yotoshi.com
Also, ever heard of eXeem?
January 7th, 2005 at 5:24 pm
How about making your own multi-million dollar budget stuff and share it for free and then have be good enough so that everybody downloads your free stuff over their pirated stuff and have it so even that your free stuff even cuts into the MPAA companys’ sales instead of the pirated stuff?? That that is something much more morally right to refuse and resist down to the storming swat team for. screw the lawyers.
January 10th, 2005 at 6:01 pm
Sorta reminds me when that idiot Micheal Moore said “I think it’s ok to share my <extremely biased, full of lies and mistruths and twisted half-truth propaganda> Movies” and then you couldn’t find them anywhere on the net.
January 10th, 2005 at 9:50 pm
Hell no… It doesn’t matter what they do, we will still sit and rant.
They could abolish the idea of having the internet alltogether, and still we will sit and moan, they could up the prices of CD’s, cassettes, DVDs, Videos, Records, anything and we will still rant. They could lower them similarly, and we will still rant on.
See some people make billions from a movie, which takes a few months, maybe a year or two of hard work…
I will soon stop going to school every day, and working at burger king every weekend, and move on to some other job, and then die. And within the many years of my lifetime i will not make anything like the money other people make.
So why not lay off and let us have our fun…
Even if you did take my internet off me, and i wasn’t able to download anything, it wouldn’t make me think ‘Oh! I better go and buy it now.’
Infact it would probably make me work the time i wasn’t listening/watching/playing…
DAmn