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New here. Just got struck with an idea, thought this would be the place to air it.
Back story:
A local internet provider in my country has been forced to disclose the details of thousands of customers who were tracked by a motion picture company that watched them download some of their films from torrents.
My standard advice to people is to make sure Protocol Encryption is forced so that at the very least, the only people that can see what you're sharing are those *sharing the same files*.
The problem here is that copyright owners can do this anyways, join the torrents, and use their position as encrypted "partners" in the torrent to take information (namely IP addresses) which they can then bring to a court in various countries and force ISPs to reveal their customer's information. They do this because of laws on the books that give them the ability to do so.
But that made me realize something. One group can't own the copyright for everything.
What if video files that were shared on torrents had more than one copyrighted piece of video contained inside?
If I make my own copyrighted content, I can choose who I allow to own it, and who I'm going to sue the pants off of if I find they have "stolen" it.
So let's say I have a video file "Mary Poppins.AVI". The file contains 30 seconds of a piece of copyrighted work that I own. The next 2h30 or so is another video. Then the last 30 seconds are another piece of copyrighted video that some other party owns.
Legally, any person who participates in the download could be sued by any three of the copyright owners under current laws in my country. What this means is that if any one group was to try to sue for copyright infringement, they would expose themselves as downloaders and be subject to the same laws.
If media shared on torrents ALL contained this sort of patchwork of copyrighted works, (heck you could add A LOT MORE than just 2 other works), no media company could get away with sneaking onto a torrent without fear of facing the same laws that they have pushed into legislation.
TL;DR: Insert multiple other copyrighted works into the same files that people are being prosecuted for, use piracy laws against companies that try to prosecute file sharers.
Thoughts?
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Wouldn't work.
Just like they have to prove you were sharing the work in question, you would have to prove they were sharing the work you have the rights to. Do you have the time and money to mount that kind of law suit?
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Feb 21, 2014, 18:56 pm
(This post was last modified: Feb 21, 2014, 19:16 pm by skepticle. Edited 2 times in total.)
(Feb 21, 2014, 18:43 pm)kjf Wrote: Wouldn't work.
Just like they have to prove you were sharing the work in question, you would have to prove they were sharing the work you have the rights to. Do you have the time and money to mount that kind of law suit?
That's the thing. Their proof is yours. I'm not saying that you would ever use it proactively. Only in the case that they ever used their evidence in a court of law.
I'm not saying it *HAS* to be a simple change, as in, just make the media and that's that. There might need to be more to it, sure. You might have to make some changes to how your client accepts other peers and handles these special files. Heck, build it into the protocol. Extend the protocol. Only allow peers that offer the "safe" parts of the file first, (being the copyrighted parts that are created with this idea in mind) ensuring that the only peers you ever share the "dangerous" parts of the file with are the ones who have already shared the parts that will entrap the entrappers, if you follow.
If the entrappers just sent parts of the file that didn't contain your "safety" part, don't send them anything. In fact, ban their address.
Don't be so quick to dismiss it as a concept. Even if it requires forking the bittorrent protocol, it may save bittorrent as a medium of file sharing in places like my country where people are being outed and fined because of sneaky leeching spies.
EDIT: Just quickly brainstorming about this, you wouldn't even have to extend the protocol. You could just create customized clients. Just include a file inside the torrent that detailed information about which parts of the torrent were which, and like I said, instruct your client to only ever share the "dangerous" parts with peers that have already given you pieces of the "safety" parts. And it might not be a legal defense directly, as in, it wouldn't stop the individual from being caught, but any action a company took to prosecute would expose them, and they could then be sued by an electronic freedom group representing the "safety" copyright holders.
skepticle
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(Feb 21, 2014, 18:56 pm)skepticle Wrote: but any action a company took to prosecute would expose them
No it wouldn't. The organization bringing the law suit didn't download anything. They only represent the rights holders.
You are still personally on the hook for identifying who did the downloading and that they in fact downloaded something you own the rights to.
Maybe it was yet another organization they pay to monitor bittorrent swarms.
While you are out there trying to track them down, they've sued you, your neighbor, your grandma, your dog, and your toaster.
If the laws in your country are so back-assward that they can sue and levy fines with no proof, then education is a better answer than trying to change the bittorrent protocol or develop a whole new client.
Until you can change the laws, use a VPN.
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Feb 21, 2014, 19:36 pm
(This post was last modified: Feb 21, 2014, 20:17 pm by skepticle. Edited 2 times in total.)
(Feb 21, 2014, 19:17 pm)kjf Wrote: No it wouldn't. The organization bringing the law suit didn't download anything. They only represent the rights holders.
You are still personally on the hook for identifying who did the downloading and that they in fact downloaded something you own the rights to.
Which should all be meticulously described in any evidence that THEY have used in court. All you would ever have to show would be an explanation of your protocol and reference the exact evidence they used, which you could obtain from anyone who was on the receiving end of a piracy lawsuit.
Quote:Maybe it was yet another organization they pay to monitor bittorrent swarms.
Which should all be meticulously described in any evidence that THEY have used in court.
Quote:While you are out there trying to track them down, they've sued you, your neighbor, your grandma, your dog, and your toaster.
No. What I'm trying to say that we mold it so that their evidence, along with the way we share our files, proves unequivocally that they downloaded our copyrighted content already because they ALREADY used their evidence, trail and all, in court.
Quote:Until you can change the laws, use a VPN.
A VPN is a great idea, but it's also an external service. Sure there are free ones, but honestly, they cost money to run, and having to subscribe to some sort of service is not necessary! What I'm suggesting is rigging the basic way we file share so that the laws that are being used against sharers are turned on those prosecuting. Sure it's possible that for a while the companies will be able to dodge the prosecution by using third parties, but those third parties have to provide detailed information to the courts in the first place, and expose themselves. If they try to hide or obfuscate themselves, or operate anonymously, their usefulness as "witnesses" in court cases drops to nil. And, if you really condense a lot of, for instance, expensive art into your "safety" blocks, you could make torrent trolling (is there a better word for it?) a seriously dangerous business to be in.
Anybody else have any thoughts on how to make it work, instead of just telling me how it's not going to work?
Look, I'm aware that there are ways to avoid this kind of IP tracking. VPNs, private trackers, etc. But what I'm proposing is changing the landscape of piracy prosecution by turning these media companies' lawsuits against them and those who co-operate with them in the entrapment of file sharers. VPNs mean you're giving your trust to a third party. That third party could still be pressured to release information about you, or could be set up specifically to harvest information from you. You don't know, you just have to trust them. I'd rather subscribe to a system where we all value and trust each other not to go running off to the law because we shared some computer files.
What I'm saying is that if we all force each other to pass a "sniff test" before we agree to share works whose copyrights may be held by hostile groups, every single time we share anything, we can collectively force anybody who tries to use the law against us to face exactly the same laws. With enough artists and electronic freedom fighters together, this could easily turn the tide of prosecutions against any group that tried it, with a minimum of effort. I think it's worth at least thinking about.
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You can't sue someone for accepting something from you that you were entitled to send them. [Such as a snippet of a movie you created.]
You can't sue someone for accepting something from you that you were not entitled to send them. [Such as a snippet of a movie someone else created.]
One rightsholder is not going to sue another rightsholder on your behalf so that you can carry on downloading content you're not paying either of them for.
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(Feb 22, 2014, 01:42 am)NIK Wrote: You can't sue someone for accepting something from you that you were entitled to send them. [Such as a snippet of a movie you created.]
You can't sue someone for accepting something from you that you were not entitled to send them. [Such as a snippet of a movie someone else created.]
One rightsholder is not going to sue another rightsholder on your behalf so that you can carry on downloading content you're not paying either of them for.
Maybe I'm not being clear how this would work.
I'm not talking about having any individual downloader sue anybody. What I'm talking about is packing in other works that are owned by people who do not give their consent to distribute the material to anybody who is collecting information about downloaders, in order to protect people whose downloading habits are being spied on by people who are sneaking into the same encrypted torrent swarms. That, combined with forcing any new untrusted peer to "compromise" themselves by *REQUIRING* that they first send you a part of this package, which implicates them in a possible future copyright infringement lawsuit, that will only ever be activated if they are discovered to have ratted on the file sharers in a copyright infringement case. The rightsholders whose works are packaged would need to be part of a movement or group which monitors legal cases of this type, and then collectively take action against anyone who uses information gained from one of these exchanges in litigation. This would not prevent the cases from going forward, what it would do is expose anybody who was going to provide evidence to even more copyright infringement than they themselves are producing evidence for. Essentially, it would make being a witness to infringement, a crime of infringement itself, built into the way we share files.
Am I in the wrong place here? Does anybody even follow my idea?
skep
(Feb 22, 2014, 11:30 am)skepticle Wrote: Am I in the wrong place here? Does anybody even follow my idea?
the issue is that it just won't work... every few months or so, someone comes up with the exact same idea.
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(Feb 22, 2014, 12:04 pm)stormium Wrote: (Feb 22, 2014, 11:30 am)skepticle Wrote: Am I in the wrong place here? Does anybody even follow my idea?
the issue is that it just won't work... every few months or so, someone comes up with the exact same idea.
Then please explain why. Somebody has to put their neck out in a legal case and provide evidence, I'm proposing a system where doing so becomes a legal liability for anyone that tries. Any other methods require putting your trust in some external service, what this does is create a web of trust between sharers automatically, with no extra effort other than a small extra package that is included with torrents and a few extra connection rules between peers. None of the arguments against have explained in any detail why this wouldn't work to increase security. Telling me what can and can't be litigated as if I don't understand, but I think it's not me that isn't understanding. You can say "it wouldn't work" over and over, but to convince me you're going to have to explain why not because it makes no sense to me. So far arguments have only refined the idea for me (thank you!) or been totally irrelevant.
In any case I do believe that I'm in the wrong forum, so I'll go to the Online Privacy & Censorship Busting forum and talk about it there. Thanks.
skepticle
NIK edited Feb 22, 2014 17:07 pm this post because:
I've moved this thread from General Discussion to the Law forum, which is the most appropriate place for it.
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1) you used a copyrighted work without authorization
2) you edited copyrighted work without authorization
3) you distributed a copyrighted work without authorization
4) you committed the first three offenses with the intent to bring a fraudulent suit against another party
5) you don't have the vast amounts of capital that you are going to need to back up your claims in a court of law (money talks, bullshit walks)
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