Hacker News Reader

Comment by scorpion032 | Hacker News Reader

If you download a copyrighted file, it is your fault. Not of the tool you use for downloading it.

Yeah, let's call Sean Parker and tell him that. He'll be delighted.

Enough with the upvotes. It's not that insightful.

They are downloading and redistributing pirated movies. They're basically helping piracy, and they're an easy target. They'll get shut down eventually if they don't die sooner on their own.

Yup how is this different from the Lime Wire case. Basically I don't see how this will work. As an aside, except distros and open Documentaries, what all do people download legally through bit torrent?

Since the infringing content is moving directly to their servers and then being offered for download it seems an even clearer example than limewire. In the end though it comes down to "substantial non-infringing use" -> something services like rapidshare or usenet hosts seem to be able to show (or at least IP lawyers think they would be able to) but typical bittorrent trackers or other p2p nets haven't seemed to be able to.

Other types of legal software - I was given the option of using bittorrent when I downloaded humble indie bundle games, blizzard uses BT for world of warcraft patches, some large scientific datasets, large password dictionaries / rainbow tables and a produced for BT TV series are a few of the examples I've seen. But of course it's hard to consider much of this 'substantial' as compared to the traffic volume of pirated content.

There are other examples of services like this though, so who knows.

"Substantial non-infringing use" was the Betamax standard, but now they have to meet the Grokster standard as well.

As an aside, except distros and open Documentaries, what all do people download legally through bit torrent?

World of Warcraft

It's also how many get their Ubuntu ISOs!

Officially bought Nine Inch Nails albums in lossless (FLAC and ALAC) and "pro audio" (24bit 96kHz multitrack WAV IIRC). You can legally get The Slip [1] and Ghosts I for free [2], and Ghosts I-IV [2] for a few bucks. Oh, and DRM free.

[1] http://theslip.nin.com/ (completely free)

[2] http://ghosts.nin.com/ (order includes a "free" option, but only paid one offers lossless and pro through BitTorrent)

The NIN BitTorrent system includes a token that will allow you to start the download "once" (in fact it seems you can start the download many times during a limited time span, then any started download will be allowed to complete even past that cut-off, but the tracker will refuse new fresh downloads).

The system is strict enough to prevent blatant copy-pasting and email the download link, yet resilient enough to not get in your way.

BT is a data transport medium with perfectly valid use cases. It can very helpfully reduce swarm costs on various intense digital products releases. It's basically bandwidth parallelization and DHT helps to palliate possible tracker downtimes/overloading. It's a shame official release channels don't use it more.

exactly. it's the cheapest content distribution method on the planet. even amazon s3 supports it. i think a service utilizing this is totally justified

Exactly. That's why guns and knives have no legal issues at all, nor strong cryptography or various questionable instruction manuals!

"guns and knives have no legal issues"..?

I guess people downvoting me somehow haven't heard gun control laws?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_law_in_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_law

There quite obviously ARE legal issues to do with owning guns and knives, not just the misuse of them. For example in England you can't even carry a knife around with you legally, with just a few exceptions.

I am not so sure if that applies in all countries. IIRC in central europe (at least in some states) the "bad thing" is copying, not downloading. But I am not a layer and I hope someone with more knowledge can correct me.

You're wrong. But enforcement may make things closer to the position that you state. However I think relying on the media companies not to enforce their copyright is a bit naive.

Just done a bit of research (google), it seems to be more complicated then an easy yes/no (in Germany). Something to do with if the source is obviously illegal, then the download is also illegal, otherwise it seems OK. But the copyright laws are getting more and more complicated....

Never heard of contributory infringement?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com