Penguins & judges

Penguins are native to Antarctica (and some other places in the southern hemisphere). The only ones living north of the equator are in zoos and the odd Linux enthusiast.

Odd being the word if they want to be called a penguin.

Those who believe that information wants to be free are invited to publish their credit card numbers. Don't forget the expiry date and CSV.

While I agree that current copyright laws are ridiculously out of proportion the verdict is in no way surprising. The judge's job is the enforce the law as it is, not the law as we would like it to be. Ragging on the judge for doing his job is a bit low.

...Ronny

Money?

The first poster states they will likely declare bankruptcy (spelling...)

Do they have even close to that money anyway? IS this not a bunk ruling, in that they will not get jail time ect...

soo

it is illagle to make avaible now?

so all thouse shops I see selling bongs for "tobacko" somkeing are making avaible for drug habits how about all thouse pepol selling siringes shure they "can" be used for medicle purposes but we know most pepol use them for ilalgel drugs

Hang on a sec...

"...The judgment was defaulted against the tracker after it destroyed IP log evidence, claiming it was protecting users' privacy..."

They wilfully destroyed evidence required by the court, they are lucky they didn't end up on a perverting the course of justice or contempt of court rap. There are many places where you would go down for a _long_ time for this sort of thing.

hmmmm

@ michael

i think you need to lay off the bongs youself mate. i seriously hope english isnt your first language :)

i love the way they can just assume that if someone downloads a movie they would have bought it. maybe they d/l to effectively rent the film? i know i just used to download loads of movies etc... didnt even watch some (same with mp3s) so its stupid to assume that hollywood is missing out on $$$ for every download. in napster days you just used to download anything that sounded interesting - and often deleted the crap you didnt like.

i remember back in the day i used to download loads of divx... now i buy and rent a lot of dvds. in fact i bought a lot of the movies i downloaded in divx. crap films dont deserve to be bought!

@Fraser

"They wilfully destroyed evidence required by the court, they are lucky they didn't end up on a perverting the course of justice or contempt of court rap. There are many places where you would go down for a _long_ time for this sort of thing." - unless you are an MP or a celeb!

from what I remember

didn't they say they didn't log IP's and all transactions were executed in RAM ? hence why they couldn't produce the logs, or am I getting confused with "another" court case along similar lines ?

"Publish your credit card numbers"

Thats personal information, not copyright. There is a universe of difference.

The MPAA and RIAA etc must be slowly bleeding to death - I wonder when Peak Blood (or should that be Trough Blood?) will occur?

Contributory infringement

Hey, El Reg (USA arm), you'd better watch out. Now that linking to copyright infringement is considered copyright infringement (and criminal, at least as far as finding out who it is), then you linking to a place that links to copyright infringement is aiding and abetting a criminal act.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

PS the upside is that Jammie and all the others can say that their copyright infringement has already been paid by the $110M from BitTorrent, so no further damage was done.

You know it's funny

When I was a broke student I downloaded a number of computer games for free. Inevitably I lost most of them to either lack of space or corruption and now I'm gainfully employed guess what I'm doing to get them back?

Sure, I could download them again but you're never quite sure what you'll get and frankly it usually takes longer than mail order.

All those zeroes

The MPAA lawyers must have got so excited they missed off the zero in the court order and so the MPAA have been awarded "$30,00" (sic) per infringement. http://regmedia.co.uk/2008/05/07/torrentspy_fine_and_injunction.pdf

Is that 30 dollars or three thousand?

I bet junior pigopolists share stuff with their friends without permission so could we encourage MPAA to have a campaign to pursue music industry executives and their children and grandchildren for $30,000 per illegally copied/downloaded DVD?

Could we also have every MPAA witness who swears in court that one illegal download costs the industry one full price sale prosecuted for perjury and perverting the course of justice?

The michael translator...

"it is illagle to make avaible now?

so all thouse shops I see selling bongs for "tobacko" somkeing are making avaible for drug habits how about all thouse pepol selling siringes shure they "can" be used for medicle purposes but we know most pepol use them for ilalgel drugs"

Beepbeepbeepitybeepbeepitybeepbeep. Beep.

It is illegal to make available now?

So all those shops I see selling bongs for "tobacco" smoking are making available for drug habits, how about all those people selling syringes? Sure, they "can" be used for medical purposes, but we know most people use them for illegal drugs.

@Michael

Your posting omiited the "Sent from my Blackberry Wireless Device".

Oh dear

Rather odd as, to my knowledge, they never actually even hosted the torrent files, let alone the data on the end of them. Seems like the *AA wanted to get a nice little tight foothold to start out against the actual torrent sites.

So how do you get $110M out of someone who most likely only has a few grand and a couple of PCs to their name?

To put it in perspective, I read a comment that the US only offered Burma $3M in aid, which works out to around $30/ person, this case places each infringement at $30,000. As they say "Money talks and BS walks.".

In the end though, can't see it making much difference, with the freebie culture in full swing with today's yoof.

@ the @michael pepol

first off thanks for the translate

yes basicley I was saying that

actuley english is my main /only language (if you exclude BASIC / C) but being dyslexic I spell and wirte Very bad and can not be bothered to spend 30mins on a post spelling it right (anyway my boss would complane more)

the point of my post was that I did not think it was illage to sell things that "could" be used for a crime

sent from my dell laptop throught my hands

@Derek

I seem to remember the case being along those lines as well - that they weren't maintaining logs. A judge then (iirc) said they must start maintaining logs, they refused to comply, and at that point began blocking US IP addresses from accessing the site.

Refusing to comply seems like a much different animal to me than "destroying evidence"

When they started blocking US IP addresses, I just assumed they were not hosted here. Is that not the case? I have to admit, regardless of thoughts on freedoms and legalities, hosting a torrent search here in the USofA is really not the brightest move to make... not unless you have deep pockets and can hire top-notch attorneys.

@ Liam

Actually, a lot of the best programmers are dyslexic - note I modestly include myself in this elite group. I seem to remember some research many years ago about this. Something to do with the brains being wired differently somehow giving one a oneness with computers.

I started with 370 assembler code but these days mostly do Java or PHP, just trying to picck up Python but I find I can read things in most languages.

One bad habit I did have was using two character variable names - less to make mistakes spelling -- and in the days before spell checking editors comments were a real effort.