Monthly Archives: February 2011

70% of the Public Finds Piracy Socially Acceptable

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A recent study on moral standards and whether some law breaking is socially acceptable has revealed an interesting stance on file-sharing among the public. Of those questioned in the study, 70% said that downloading illicit material from the Internet is acceptable. Three out four, however, felt it was completely unacceptable to then sell that product for profit.

During the last decade the entertainment industries have tried numerous strategies to thwart Internet piracy. One of the most common, especially with the music industry, was to sue some file-sharers into submission thereby creating a climate of fear designed to deter others. Needless to say, that didn’t work particularly well.

The movie industry has largely concentrated their legal efforts largely on taking sites down but have also been active in trying to educate Internet users through various schemes that piracy is ‘wrong’ and causes real damage. On the whole, that hasn’t worked either, and a new study just released appears to back up the assertion.

The study, published by the Rockwool Foundation Research Unit, questioned participants on morals and ethics, and included discussion on which laws they believe are socially acceptable to break.

The Danish study, which ultimately concluded that moral standards are just as high as they were 10 years ago, covered issues such as tax evasion, insurance fraud, the morality gap between men and women and, to the interest of our readers, piracy.

In the piracy section respondents were asked to rate, on a scale from 1 to 10, whether they thought unauthorized downloading for personal use is a socially acceptable act. The researchers found that 7 out of 10 of those questioned felt, to a greater or lesser degree, that it is socially acceptable. 15-20% of the total group believed that piracy is totally acceptable.

A minority of just over 30% of the respondents voted at the very bottom of the response scale, an indication that they feel piracy is completely unacceptable.

Interestingly, despite the never-ending anti-piracy campaigns of the last decade, the attitudes of the public don’t seem to have changed much. When questioned for a 1997 study on whether it was acceptable to use pirate software, the same proportion – 3 out of 10 – said the activity was unacceptable.

However, in the new 2010 study, there is an interesting common moral denominator among respondents. When questioned on whether it is acceptable to download something and then sell it to a friend for profit, 3 out of 4 said that would be completely unacceptable.

The results of the study show that it is nearly impossible for copyright holders and anti-piracy groups to change the attitudes of the public in their favor. If they want piracy to decrease, their best bet is probably to focus on lowering the incentives for people to pirate, there seems to be more opportunities in that area.

The study can be found (.PDF) in Danish.

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Chaos Computer Club Revive Famous BitTorrent Tracker

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After a brief leave of absence, the famous Denis.Stalker BitTorrent tracker has returned under a new name. Worries about the recent US domain seizures has resulted in the move from a .com domain to that of the well respected hacker group Chaos Computer Club. Meanwhile, The Pirate Bay is offering to reboot the new tracker by adding it to all their newly uploaded torrents.

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With more than 10 million peers and 1,614,356 active torrents, Denis.Stalker ended up in third place in our ranking of the largest public BitTorrent trackers last summer. Running on the Opentracker software, the tracker has been a household name in the BitTorrent community for years.

A few months ago, however, the tracker suddenly went offline for no apparent reason. The official blog went silent and calls from the public to the once popular tracker remained unanswered.

Even today the old denis.stalker.h3q.com is still unresponsive, but the people behind the project did revive it under a new name a few days ago. The denis.stalker tracker has moved to a new home at tracker.ccc.de.

One of the reasons for the change in domain name is the recent rounds of seizures where several file-sharing related domains were pulled offline. Although the standalone tracker is not the first target that would come to mind, a non-US controlled domain is simply the safest option nowadays.

The tracker is now hosted on the main domain of the influential hacker organization Chaos Computer Club (CCC), which is one of the best spots to be in. The German based CCC has more than 4000 members and hosts Europe’s largest hacker congress December each year.

One of the main motives of CCC is to strive for “freedom of information,” with fits well with the operation of one of the largest BitTorrent trackers on the Internet.

The new tracker address responds on port 6969, just like the old one. This means that people who know how to edit their hosts file can update it to allow torrents with the old domain-name to work.

http://denis.stalker.h3q.com:6969/announce => http://tracker.ccc.de/announce
udp://denis.stalker.h3q.com:6969/announce => udp://tracker.ccc.de:80/announce

To help the adoption of the new tracker address The Pirate Bay is adding it to all new torrents that are uploaded to the site. At the time of writing, the new domain has been in use for just a few days, but it is already tracking 58,787 torrents and over 500,000 peers.

Tracker.CCC.De Stats

Image is Loading....So, although the denis.stalker.h3q.com name is not coming back, the service it provided has been reinstated. That, plus an army of hackers to defend it in case outside forces try to silence it. Not a bad change at all.

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Should Piracy Punishments Scale To The Quality Of The Copy?

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In a case involving the administrator of a BitTorrent tracker this week, a judge felt that punishments should reduce if low quality movies were being shared. On the other hand the plaintiffs argued that since their product was being devalued with poor quality reproduction, compensation should actually increase. In a separate case in Argentina, seven pirates just walked because their copies were poor, and the public knew it.

Considering the huge crackdown against illegal camming in recent years it’s clear that the movie industry, rightly or wrongly, perceives this type of piracy as a serious threat. Indeed, they have succeeded in making the activity a criminal offense in many parts of the world.

One might argue that their actions have been pretty successful. Five years ago or more, very high-quality cammed movies were commonplace on the Internet and the release of the best Telesyncs (cammed video with a direct sound source) from Scene groups such as Centropy and maVen were a highly prized and anticipated event. These days, although cams are still reasonably common, very high-quality releases are much less prevalent. Mission accomplished then? Maybe not.

This week the case against the administrator of the EliteBits BitTorrent tracker came to its conclusion, with the judge pondering on an interesting issue.

The judge said that since he could not assess the quality of the movies being offered via EliteBits, he found it difficult to know how much compensation to award the movie companies. The implication was that rightsholders should get less money if the product was low quality – cammed movies for instance – but lawyers for the plaintiffs disagreed. They said that rightholders lose goodwill when films are distributed in poor quality so the compensation should be more.

This raises an interesting argument. There is a school of thought which suggests that when people are presented with a cam copy of movie they will expect it to be poor. However, if they enjoy it, they will invest in a trip to the theater to see it properly. Others won’t even want to spoil their enjoyment by watching these inferior copies and will see the movie in the theater straight off. It’s probably fair to assume that people expect some aspect of a copy to be lower quality that the original.

There can’t have been many people who didn’t appreciate that when the workprint copy of Wolverine leaked out, they were getting an unfinished product. Did the lack of effects ruin the reputation of the movie? Sales seems to suggest not. Would the movie industry have preferred it if a perfect copy had leaked out in this instance rather than a second-rate version? Hardly. Nevertheless, the Wolverine leaker was still hauled over the coals, much more so than those who leak perfect copies. However, if he had lived in Argentina, things might have been different for him.

This week a case was heard in Argentina’s Federal Court. It involved the issue of seven individuals caught selling pirate movies on the streets in 2008. In the first hearing the individuals were found guilty of copyright and trademark offenses but in the latest hearing that decision was overturned – and it all came down to the quality of the product they sold.

The judge decided that it was “impossible to jeopardize the credibility of the legitimate manufacturers” since the buyers of the pirate copies knew full well they were getting an inferior product. One might argue that individuals downloading cammed material from EliteBits also knew that they wouldn’t be getting a good copy, yet rightsholders in that case would certainly have disagreed with the judge’s assertion here.

So, if there is to be any punishment at all for sharing copyright material, should quality be taken into consideration? Should a perfect DVDrip of a movie attract a higher fine because people are less likely to seek out and pay for an original?

Should those sharing low bitrate MP3s be left alone because they providing a low-quality try-before-you-buy service, or should they be heavily punished for ruining the reputation of the artist with a pale imitation of the real thing? As usual, we’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

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Hosting Company: Anti-Pirates Stole $138,000 In Kit & Hijacked Our Email

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After seizing back equipment wrongfully seized by Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN, the owner of the servers which previously housed a huge warez topsite has spoken out. With claims that BREIN ruined his business, the man from Costa Rica says that the anti-piracy group stole $138,000 of his equipment and hijacked his email accounts. He will now pursue the matter with the police.

In January, Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN targeted one of the Internet’s largest warez piracy topsites. The site, known as Swan, was taken down by hosting provider WorldStream and in a cosy arrangement the company handed over the servers to the anti-piracy group with no legal oversight.

This week, with the support of Solv Advocaten, one of The Netherlands’ top law firms, server owner Alejandra Transporte SA, a small South American hosting provider that had nothing to do with the topsite, managed to get their servers back. Unlike BREIN, Alejandra Transporte did so through the legal system, obtaining authorization from the Court of Haarlem.

Now in an interview with Webwereld, Alejandra Transporte boss Craig Salmond has been explaining how the actions of BREIN have “ruined his business” by “stealing” $138,000 worth of his equipment.

“BREIN – with the active participation of WorldStream – effectively killed my business,” said Salmond. “My equipment was stolen and the keys to my reputation.”

Salmond said that Alejandra Transporte is a small ISP that takes the privacy of its users very seriously and says the facilities offered are similar similar to those provided by renowned bullet-proof hoster PRQ in Sweden. The manner in which Alejandra Transporte can accept payments from customers to maintain their privacy is also innovative.

“Customers can transfer money through Western Union but also, for example through a deposit at different poker sites,” Salmond explains. “So we reach people who do not have access to services such as PayPal or for privacy reasons do not want to use it.”

But of course, in January Alejandra Transporte went offline thanks to BREIN and WorldStream. Salmond says that when he called WorldStream, they refused to tell him anything, instead referring him back to BREIN.

“[WorldStream] are actually responsible for this,” Salmond told Webwereld. “WorldStream has a contract with me, I entrusted them to take care of and manage my property. They have grossly violated my trust and given my servers away.”

Disputing BREIN’s claims that they seized 12 of his servers (they took only 8), Salmond says that to know exactly how much capacity they had, BREIN must have gained illegal access to the machines. Furthermore, in correspondence with Salmond, BREIN themselves indicated that they somehow had acquired what is described as “a temporary account” on the servers before they were seized, leading to accusations that BREIN could have easily uploaded any material they liked, thus contaminating the investigation.

And the accusations don’t stop there.

Salmond says that following the seizures he could no longer access some GMail accounts since their passwords had been changed. He attributes this to BREIN having hijacked the accounts.

“What BREIN and WorldStream have done, can not be tolerated,” said Milica Antic of Solv lawfirm who are representing Salmond. “My client sees this as theft of his property. He has also suffered enormous financial and reputational damage.”

This case again appears to highlight the perils of copyright-supporting outfits such as BREIN – who have no official authority – carrying out investigations in a manner more fitting of governmental bodies such as the police or the courts.

Just this week the case against two administrators of the FileSoup BitTorrent site was thrown out. FACT – another Hollywood-backed private anti-piracy group with confusions as to the extent of their powers – had conducted their own investigations into the site but the evidence proved worthless to a criminal case and was dismissed.