Does the use of P2P technology mean that consumers will lose out on content – or that the total quantity and quality of such intellectual material will decline?

No – it means that the creation and distribution of such content will be democratized – thus more variety and more choice for consumers.

The only losers are existing institutions with outdated business models – and artists who choose to distribute their material through these channels.

This looks like the PGP/certificate issue – by trying to shut down torrent indexing sites in the US – the courts will open the way for such sites outside the US.

Do the US courts wish to bring about a repetition of the Thawte scenario?

^^ From somewhere in the beginning comments.

By that logic, earth if flat if enough people think it’s flat. Just beacuse majority of the people who use it for illegal purposes doensn’t make the whole thing illegal.

“It also has helped in distributing linux and independent films and songs.”
I’ll give them a pat on the back…….

“Just because you look for movies does not mean the sole existence of a site is to find them for you.”
Did you bother to read everything i had said or just part of it then make the rest up?

I said, when it was first created that is what it was made for. Even if the owner says “no it wasn’t” he is wrong. No site could get big by solely distributing non-copyrighted material unless they are the manufacturer of it and then it is not a site for the sole purpose of seeing the content. They are the content source too. There is not the demand for it like there is for copyrighted material.

I have never yet failed to find anything i have wanted from ISOHUNT. Sometimes the seeds and peers are crap and ill use piratebay but both of the sites are basically interchangeable.

If one hasn’t got it the other one has.

“I think your got mixed up with the pirategays.”
They were made for doing copyrighted material too, they just haven’t tried to bluff everyone into thinking their sole intention was not to distribute copyrighted work. At least they are upfront about it.

Like i said though, any judgement in favour of the RIAA or MPAA in any cases is wrong. isohunt is NOT a manufacturer, distributor or worker in the process of copyrighted material.

They are more like a library that has no books but only information on how to get the books you want. They started off with records of where to find books such as “how to grow cannabis” and “the jolly roger cookbook” and loads of people went there because they knew that is where they would be able to find how to get their hands on the books of that nature. Now the library has got its fame it has decided to start stocking references and sometimes the books themselves to such things as the bible and the dictionary to make themselves look legit.

There is nothing illegal about what ISOHUNT is or does, even though its initial intention was for facilitating illegal activity, even if that is not the case now.

Good point, another analogy

you can’t sue the owner of a gun shop if the guns are used for violence.

the user who USED the gun for violence should be liable, not the owner of the gunshop, he is only distributing a variety of guns.

thus saying this

Gary Fung (ISOHunt Owner) should not be liable for such an action taken upon him by the MPAA.

He is only giving us (the users) a search engine to look up sources.
It is OUR choice whether to use this for legal or illegal purposes. It isn’t his fault we use it for illegal purposes.

Get a brain, isoHunt has had a DMCA policy since the day it started. It also has helped in distributing linux and independent films and songs. Just because you look for movies does not mean the sole existence of a site is to find them for you.

If you own a movie, song or whatever there’s a page on the site telling you how to identify your property to the sites admins to have them remove it from their index.

I think your got mixed up with the pirategays.

I would take a guess a very very substantial portion of adult sites have content on them they don’t own the copyright to.

Therefore google links to copyrighted content. (Think their image search…)

The good news is that now after it time and the thought of being sued the site has tried to change to offer legal content only under the guise of removing illegal content.

It has done absolutely nothing at all to stem the download of illegal content. If i want the newest edition of lost….i go to isohunt.com and search “lost 4 11″ and i will be able to download it in an hour.

So in short, while isohunt is nothing more than an illegal content download linker there is nothing illegal about the site itself other than allowing you to find downloads to copyrighted content that others have uploaded.

Any judgement in favour of the MPAA is wrong.

Perhaps that would be more like facilitating the illegal selling of cocain (which probably is illegal in some countries).

My main point is, however, that there are many much more serious reasons for legalizing file sharing and therefore also bt trackers, that “so and so are also doing it”.

And I’m not so fond of the kind of logic that says “guns don’t kill people, people do” because if you are to rid one of guns and people, which would you prefer to rid? Also, by that logic, isn’t selling cocain really not a bad thing? It’s up to the buyer to use it (which could have health implications) I’m merely the messenger (the google, the drug dealer).

I think it’s a matter of intent. At least that’s how the courts are going to look at cases like isohunt or the pirate bay. What did google want their service to be used for? Sharing material that is in most cases copyrighted? What did bittorrent tracker so and so want their service to be used for? Sure, you can share anything on ThePirateBay (wonder why they choose that name, by the way), but how are people using it?

I’m all for the “don’t shoot the messenger”, “net neutrality”, “file sharing is good for society and not necessarily causing any economic harm” and “there are much worse crime that they should focus on” kind of arguments.

I’m just saying that running a torrent search engine AND tracker software, isn’t exactly like Google (and certainly isn’t used the same way google is and for the same purposes or even using the same tech).

[quote comment="374552"]
Perhaps you should rethink your train of thought, because you can’t have it both ways. You can’t have Isohunt guilty while Google is innocent, nor can you have Isohunt innocent and while Google becomes guilty.
[/quote]

I’m not so sure that’s how things are going to end. I think neither should be found guilty but that’s not like saying they are the same.

Its not a tool for you. Its a tool to watch you.

Most of them? lmfao

“Still a tracker doesn’t do anything illegal, it connects me to you and then we do illegal stuff.”

This is one thing that makes the analogy with Google invalid. A tracker *is* facilitating the sharing of the copyrighted material, while google is pointing to a file (torrent) that is pointing to the tracker that is connecting the peers doing the illegal sharing.
[/quote]

Nope a tracker facilitates the sharing of material, copyright or not. We, you and I are the ones using the trackers for ‘t3h 3vils’. We, you and I are solely the ones responsible for our actions whether it be creating and/or seeding pirate media or peering for it.

No, they don’t, n00b.[/quote]

Who’s the n00b? Isohunt collect, index, and host .torrent files from some 418 sites you dumbass.

No, they don’t, n00b.

Except that it wouldn’t be $2 a month, it would more likely be $10 a month. Also, it wouldn’t stay at $10 a month for long. The MPAA would claim that people were downloading even more, so they need to raise the price to cover it. How much has your cable bill gone up in the last 5 years?

[quote comment="374370"]Why doesn’t MPAA facilitates the creation of a big server from where they can distribute movies to those who are registered thru their ISP. And than the money wil very simple be distibuted to the movie companies according to the number of downloads.[/quote]

Because they’re stupid and don’t want to adapt. IF they ever did anything like this, the files would be a DRM locked format that could only be watched on the computer they were downloaded on. Plus, not everything would be available, because copyright laws are such a mess that they wouldn’t have the proper rights to sell some movies online as downloads.

[quote comment="374370"]This method could easily be applied also to music files, apps, games s.a. It seems right to me and i wouldn’t mind to pay a few extra dollars for downloading legal stuff.
Maybe i’m wrong but at least this is a solution as far as i’m concerned.[/quote]

Great idea!

$10 – Movies
$5 – Music
$10 – Games
$10 – Apps

So that’s only an extra $35 a month. Then after 6-12 months, it becomes;

$12 – Movies
$7 – Music
$12 – Games
$12 – Apps

For a total of $43 extra each month, and so on.

http://scriptfreak.org/forums/

http://www.ezee.se/

You’re right.

Trackers are guilty of facilitating copyright infringement because they act as pointers to computers sharing copyrighted data. Google, on the other hand, also acts as a pointer to computers sharing copyrighted data… But they do it by indexing Torrent sites. This makes Google innocent of facilitating copyright infringement, and in no way comparable to a tracker… Even though they both achieve the exact same ends, and even though they both achieve those ends by functioning as pointers to a means of obtaining copyrighted material.

…

Do you realize that going by your logic, if you had the names and numbers of thousands of cocaine dealers, and you gave them out freely to anybody looking for cocaine… You wouldn’t be guilty of facilitating cocaine use?

Perhaps you should rethink your train of thought, because you can’t have it both ways. You can’t have Isohunt guilty while Google is innocent, nor can you have Isohunt innocent and while Google becomes guilty.

[quote comment="374370"]I don’t know why the MPAA doesn’t sign contracts with all the ISP and allow their subscribers to pay a small fee to download all the movies they want.[/quote]

Because the MPAA is an organization composed of greedy, dinosauric misers who would rather die than give up on gouging consumers for all they possibly can.

[quote comment="374370"]So instead of loosing billions of dollars every year because of piracy[/quote]

Before that could happen, wouldn’t they have to start losing billions of dollars a year to piracy?

Because, sadly for them, lying about it doesn’t count.

On their site: “”ANONYMOUS P2P file sahring”"

Please, never fking trust a site that can’t get simple spelling correct!!

“Still a tracker doesn’t do anything illegal, it connects me to you and then we do illegal stuff.”

This is one thing that makes the analogy with Google invalid. A tracker *is* facilitating the sharing of the copyrighted material, while google is pointing to a file (torrent) that is pointing to the tracker that is connecting the peers doing the illegal sharing.

BT site: Lets you find torrents, and connects peers (i.e. facilitating illegal filesharing).

Google/any SE indexing torrents among other files: Lets you find torrents, but does not connect peers.

So to be honest, there is a difference between indexing a trillion files (among which some are torrents), and indexing only torrents AND acting as the middleman (being a tracker).

Never the less, running a tracker should not equal violating copyright, but perhaps facilitating the violation of copyright. And why should society spend huge resources on that rather harmless crime? Perhaps that is what people really should debate.

What has happened is that the justice system is investigating and prosecuting those crime whose alleged victims are the ones most successful in lobbying politicians claiming *their* crime/problem is the one most important for the society to fight — no matter if it takes orwellian measures and the filtering of the internet etc to stop those “crimes”.

It would be nice then.

In terms of “facilitating copyright infringement”, Google is 110% identical to torrent sites. Literally, there is no difference.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=1&q=%22pirates+of+the+caribbean%22+torrent&spell=1

To call the comparison a stretch is downright fucking delusional, especially when you base it on something as mindnumbingly irrelevent as what you guess most people use Isohunt and what you guess most people use Google for.

[quote comment="373500"]
The argument that “Google does it too” does not necessarily save isohunt.[/quote]

By indexing torrents, Isohunt is no more responsible for facilitating copyright infringement than Google is for indexing Isohunt. That is not an argument, nor is it necessarily a defence – rather, it is a humble statement of fact.

Actually they do, they have 2.
From isoHunts bitTorrent clarification response.
[quote]Defendants run trackers torrentbox and podtropolis.[/quote]

Still a tracker doesn’t do anything illegal, it connects me to you and then [b]we[/b] do illegal stuff.