back to article Bollywood 'recruits DDoS hired guns to fight movie pirates'

An Indian firm claims it was hired to carry out denial of service attacks against film download and torrent tracker websites at the behest of Bollywood movie distributors in India. Girish Kumar, managing director of Aiplex Software, said it was paid to search for sites offering download of newly released films, before issuing …

COMMENTS

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  1. DavCrav

    Isn't this also illegal?

    I'm just thinking countersuit time...

    1. F111F
      Paris Hilton

      Smart Move?

      Wouldn't that be like the guy who calls the police to complain someone stole his cocaine?

      Paris, for well, it's obvious, innit?

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Pirate

      in indian courts?

      it'll take forever.

      me thinks this bozo is just trying to get some cheap publicity and is hoping to cash in.

      i must say, the piratebay is not working at present and there were a awful lot of bollywood crap out there for download.

    3. david wilson

      @DavCrav

      >>"I'm just thinking countersuit time..."

      But who would take legal action?

      I doubt someone giving away copyright material would be likely to turn up to court.

      Even the company providing hosting for them might have limited grounds if they'd already been properly informed about what they were hosting and done nothing. Many people might tend to see it as partly their own fault.

      If there was some innocent party who was also harmed, (fellow user of the same hosting company?) they might have a case, but even then, they might not get a particularly sympathetic hearing, and they'd also have to have good evidence as to exactly who was behind the attack.

      1. DavCrav

        Hence countersuit

        @people: That's why I said countersuit, rather than lawsuit. The Indian RIAA cannot now bring it to court because their actions are also illegal.

  2. Shane8
    Thumb Up

    Interesting....

    Reminds me of the incident at school.

    Boy 1: boy 2 hit me.

    Teacher: No proof, cant do anything

    Boy 1: Fine

    Boy 1 and friends beat up boy 2

    Teacher: Boy 1 did you do this?

    Boy 1: Well you wouldn't do anything...

    Teacher: Detention!

    I dont believe that DDoS is legal even in india so im thinking this could make a nice lawsuit and interesting PR...

    1. DavCrav
      Joke

      Boy 1 and Boy 2.

      Their parents must have been very unimaginative!

    2. david wilson

      @Shane8

      Shouldn't Boy 1 have had the wit not to effectively admit guilt?

      Detention is not the punishment for /doing/ the crime, it's punishment for getting caught, or for being dumb enough to confess.

  3. Shane Kent
    WTF?

    with millions and millions of requests...

    And does that not also tie up the middle (routers) thus robbing bandwidth from legitimate Internet users? I would say it is time to start checking router logs, etc. for traces of this and bill/sue for the wasted bandwidth and time used. Not good to let them fight crime with crime, especially when it is so obvious that legitimate/innocent users are affected to some degree.

  4. leakyPC
    Coat

    Maybe...

    Maybe this is the reason the Film industry think they are losing loads of money to pirating.

    They think the millions of requests are people who are not paying for their film.

    Mines the one with a book in the pocket.

  5. JaitcH
    WTF?

    Two illegal acts don't make it right!

    So when will the Indian InterNet authorities cut off Aiplex Software because Indian InterNet resources are already strained and have some do-gooder outfit won't improve things.

    I'm not surprised Murdoch's gang is also up to this business - it's in line with his business morals and practices.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    plain text

    No idea.

    I know nothing about Indian law.

  7. steward
    Pirate

    In 1984...

    the Bhopal gas tragedy occurred in India.

    It took until 2006 for all court orders for settlement money to finally be carried out.

    I don't think anyone's much worried about pursuing suits or countersuits for things like this through the courts there. Bhopal was simple: Union Carbide screwed up and poisoned lots of people. This took 22 years to settle completely, more years than the Web has been in existence.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      you're right.

      Union Carbide should have shut down their operation and moved it another 100 miles into the middle of nowhere, like their current site used to be.

      Yes, the leak was bad, but those same people probably would have built downstream from a dam, too.

  8. Daniel Garcia 2
    WTF?

    Do they hire hitmen?

    when the justice path is to tedious?

  9. mafoo

    Which is more illegal

    Which here is more illegal hosting a link to a file or bombing someones ip.

    And how exactly is he executing the DDoS? A botnet?

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Pirate

    Fair enough

    I'm Anonymous Coward and I'm a freetard.

    Having said that, I think it's a bit rich complaining about tactics like this. I hate the normal approach where the only winners are the lawyers, but I think that this approach is not unreasonable.

    Nothing they have tried so far has worked so why not try something more forceful? People who knowingly break the rules (like me) have no cause for complaint when others break the rules trying to stop them.

    It's gloves off time - he he, I'm looking forward to it.

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    Oh my god, Bollywood

    The world of film would be the better for its complete dismantling. I had the misfortune of spending two weeks in India; most disturbing was the abject poverty surrounding pockets of obscene wealth - second-most disturbing were the Bollywood movies shown on the plane. The questions Bollywood producers seem to ask themselves are:

    a) How many saturated, clashing colors can we put in each scene?

    b) How many people can we get to dance at once?

    c) How can we make sure the performances are so utterly absurd that it's obvious even from watching without sound that 'in character' is a term utterly foreign to the actors?

    1. Pascal Monett Silver badge
      Thumb Down

      Two weeks in India

      Gosh, go to a 3rd-world madly industrializing country and complain about poverty. Well done. Left your sparkling, air-conditioned commercial malls and got culture shock, did you ?

      Say, have you ever been to Los Angeles ? You know, in California ? Because there are two distinct sides to that city as well, and there certainly is a pocket of obscene wealth over there.

      Mote in the others eye and all that.

    2. Manas Straw
      Pint

      'Tis not enough

      to gargle at the fountain of entertainment, one must drink deeply. That would cause one to lose all objectivity and start enjoying the happenings on screen.

  12. David 45

    Legal?

    This sounds highly dubious to my untrained faculties. By the way, their site is:

    http://www.aiplex.com

  13. I didn't do IT.
    Joke

    "...have to put the site down."

    Bad Doggie!

    Seriously, however, this is a disturbing precident that could become seen as tacit approval of reprisal techniques; especially if some of these "sites" are spoofed or merely proxies.

    One goes down, another comes online and slips under your search because you are busy pounding away on the hapless zombie...

  14. Deadly_NZ
    Stop

    Oh really

    I bet they keep away from 4chan lol it don't pay to annoy those boys ..... cos they have been known to bite back

    1. david wilson

      @Deadly_ZZ

      >>"I bet they keep away from 4chan lol it don't pay to annoy those boys ..... cos they have been known to bite back."

      That does kind-of rely on knowing who to bite back at.

      Someone hosting copyright content is likely to be getting all kinds of takedown requests sent to them from numerous people.

      How could they know even roughly accurately who is actually attacking them unless someone goes out of their way to tell them?

      It isn't even necessarily someone acting on behalf of a person who just wrote to them - it could be someone who wrote ages ago, or it could be someone who sees content being hosted, is sure or is told that a request wouldn't be listened to, and just launches an attack anyway.

      Even if someone admitted (or at least claimed) to have arranged an attack this time, there's no guarantee they'd do that /every/ other time, or even /any/ other time.

  15. Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge
    WTF?

    Floods of tens, even dozens, of requests

    Since when does India have enough spare bandwidth to be running distributed attacks against distributed servers? Contracting illegal botnets would be a sure-fire way to get yourself and your service provider completely disconnected from the rest of the planet.

  16. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    All talk

    Taking down a web server for a few hours is possible but not multiple servers, trackers and trackerless groups that form. All spread around different networks and countries and constantly trying to complete their download

    Any one pirate can create unlimited copies, all a very large botnet could do is take down a popular site and stop those who come by while it's down. Assuming they only visit one torrent site and never come back to it later in the day.

  17. heyrick Silver badge

    Indian films?

    I've had the misfortune to watch three Bollywood films. It's like High School Musical for adults, only the acting is terrible and the films go on for an eternity and I think in said eternity we ran the gamut of every human emotion possible, plus had a choreographed musical number to go with it.

    My friend at the time was very into Bollywood and was trying to give a running explanation, while I was trying to work out how this film was in any way different to the two previous.

    I know judging an entire movie industry from threee films is a bit bogus (try judging Hollywood by Cobra, Demolition Man, and Passenger 57... oh, wait... ;-) ) but if these are what Bollywood movies are like, I figure there's probably a rather specific audience for them!

    1. Manas Straw
      Welcome

      Specific Audience?

      Yes, very specific target audience, size of one billion only.

      I, for one, welcome our Bollywood watching, industry and country judging overlords.

  18. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    An observation.

    Making available for download a torrent file which points towards files hosted by other people is not a crime.

    Denying access to that file by means of an attack on the network which hosts the torrent file is a crime.

    1. No, I will not fix your computer
      Thumb Up

      Almost....

      >>Making available for download a torrent file which points towards files hosted by other people is not a crime.

      That is still under debate, it is [enabling] crime which is illegal [sometimes|someplaces].

      >>Denying access to that file by means of an attack on the network which hosts the torrent file is a crime

      Again, most places would probably agree, but this isn't true for all countries in all situations.

      Potentially a good test case?

  19. Tigra 07
    IT Angle

    Private Botnets?

    Where do they get the manpower to take down such sites?

    Does the music and film industry have its own botnet?

  20. Anonymous Coward
    Flame

    PUT THESE ASSHOLES IN JAIL, do it NOW

    "plan B - launching a denial of service attack against offending websites"

    Somebody better be looking to prosecute these assholes. DDOSing a site effects the entire global internet. PUT THESE ASSHOLES IN JAIL, do it NOW.

  21. Frederick Karno
    Thumb Up

    oh dear

    They appear to be getting a taste of their own medicine, pun intended.......site unreachable

  22. Chris Hatfield
    Pint

    They are being DDoSed by 4chan

    according to http://torrentfreak.com/4chan-ddos-takes-down-mpaa-and-anti-piracy-websites-100918/

    Karma's a bitch

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