Elliott C. Back: Technology FTW!

ISOHunt MPAA Letter

Posted in Law, P2P by Elliott Back on January 22nd, 2005.

Check out the following letter between ISOhunt and the MPAA (via BoingBoing):

Mr. Oppenheimm,

On Wed, 19 Jan 2005 10:12:13 -0500, Oppenheim, Matthew J wrote:

Dear Mr. Fung:

We are writing to follow up on our prior correspondence. As you know by now, we have filed suits against a number of significant BitTorrent operators. We continue this correspondence in the hope that we might resolve matters with you such that litigation is unnecessary.

This is such an obvious intimidation tactic that I’m glad ISOhunt doesn’t fall for it. “We’ve sued others… now we’ll sue you…” is not a friendly overture, and smacks of desperation.

Yes we are aware of your lawsuits. Despite the fact that I don’t live in the US and the laws MPAA follows does not apply here, it is our intention to cooperate in resolving issues you have, in a reasonable fashion.

As we have said repeatedly, a significant amount of copyright infringement is occurring as a result of your website and tracker. Apart from the knowledge you have by virtue of your day to day operation of the site and server, we have put you on notice that the infringement is occurring. The list of representative works that was attached to our notice letter was merely a sample of the infringement occurring on your site. We have requested that you stop the infringing conduct immediately. That you have automated the process of adding torrents to your website is not a defense. You have the ability to review torrents before posting them. You also have the ability to search your website and review the torrents that are already being distributed. There should be little doubt, for example, that “Ocean’s Twelve” which is a torrent offered on your site is copyrighted and should not be distributed. A copyright holder is not obliged to monitor all the websites and the servers around the world to police and protect each and every work from those who would choose to close their eyes to ongoing infringement. It is incumbent on you to distribute only those torrents that correspond to files that you know are authorized to be distributed.

You repeatedly mention the “representative” list of works, which serves only to intimidate us as a search service. If you look at the Betamax vs. Universal case, the VCR was not deemed illegal since it is capable of legal use. isohunt.com is a content agnostic search service on indexing torrent links over the net, which is very much capable of legal use. While as a service we can filter content, and that is exactly how we cooperate by filtering identified copyrighted titles, we do not have the man power to manually verify the tens of thousands of torrent links, nor is it even technically possible without a complete list of copyrighted works to filter against. Since you seem to have trouble producing a complete list, a technical difficulty I can understand, you should also understand the same difficulty we have in making your copyrighted works magically disappear… somehow. So instead of calling it a complete list, which seems unfeasible, it should be referred to as a sufficient list. Without it, we cannot help you in filtering your works in our search results.

Although you have suggested that you would like us to provide an index of copyrighted works to which you can refer regarding the torrents on your website, we simply do not find it credible that you are unable to identify as copyrighted material the many popular motion picture titles currently referenced on your website. To the extent you need further guidance, the United States Copyright Office maintains records of every motion picture and television program in the United States that has a copyright registration. Additionally, on-line databases provide information regarding who distributes motion pictures and television programs. You are already aware of at least one such source, the website imdb.com, to which you provide your users deep-links for motion pictures.

Read above. According to normal procedures of DMCA takedown, it is your responsibility to identify what maybe infringing your copyright, and then we will comply. Your notion that we should know every title MPAA owns, while you have difficulty producing such yourself, is absurd. Links to websites such as imdb.com is user submitted, while torrent links may be user submitted or indexed from other sources on the internet. We do not moderate this process, we don’t have the resource to do so and it is not our policy.

This reply is genius. I love the argument. Because the MPAA cannot produce a list of copyright works that it “owns,” ISOhunt cannot filter their search results. Because ISOhunt is automated, it can’t manually filter, by policy choice. This is quite clever, until the MPAA does produce a masterlist…

Finally, it continues to appear to be true that you have addressed the infringement of which we have put you on notice. Indeed, you have not removed those torrents that we specifically gave you notice. Your response that you should not have to undertake any action to address the ongoing infringement until we have agreed to the “arrangement” you have offered is not acceptable. You have an obligation to address the ongoing infringement. You may not offer less protection than we have a right to expect, and then condition that lesser protection on our agreeing that you should have to do nothing more.

The MPAA lawyers want immediate action and a precedent for future actions. ISOhunt wants a policy for removing copyright works, which it will then apply uniformly. Doesn’t the latter seem more sane?

It is not an arrangement, it is information necessary for us to cooperate. Unless filtering against your “representative” list is sufficient, which we then can use to filter to your satisfaction, please provide us with a list that is sufficient.
–
Cheers,
Gary
isoHunt.com

What will happen next? Who knows, but the ongoing squabble with the MPAA lawyers is beginning to become heated.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 22nd, 2005 at 4:59 pm and is tagged with intimidation tactic, mpaa letter, isohunt, ocean s twelve, representative works, copyright infringement, oppenheim, dear mr, torrents, desperation, lawsuits, virtue, correspondence, litigation, intention, jan 2005, torrent, suits, doubt, servers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.

Viewing 50 Comments

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    whoa... this is a pretty good reply against MPAA tho... wonder what will come next?
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    More negotiations, then court possibly. It might settle, but ISOhunt seems pretty tough. The MPAA will attempt to influence their hosts--who knows!
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    f*** the mpaa. pencil dick b*******
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    So by the MPAA's logic its perfectly suitable to sue motorbike manufacturers because "users do not wear helmets?"

    And dont the MPAA have any concept of mistitling? I can easily upload a torrent called Whatever_hot_new_release.avi and it could contain absoloulty anything.

    The same premise goes for reversing the procedure, a filter goes up and users could easily resort to hex links or some other form of simple cypher to workaround the magical filter.

    As usual people get the most inept and underqualified to stage an offensive in an area they have no real experience in.

    Piracy has been a valid problem since the dawn of "intelectual property", when will people finaly realise that trying to fight it is only a loosing battle? it happens on a GLOBAL SCALE, regional laws have no place on a global network.

    You find a way to prevent one form of piracy and another two crop up in its place, its like trying to fight back the tide with a mop and bucket.
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    It is clear to anyone who does not have entrenched ties with either side of this conflict that we are witnessing the birth of a new form of media distribution. Until now, two factors have prevented small companies from being able to compete with large media conglomerates: Production and Distribution.

    The production barrier has already been shattered. High quality cameras are selling in the sub-$1000 range, and film and photo editing software has fallen to similar levels. All it takes for a small group of people to produce a high quality film is a now acheivable amount of production money.

    The distribution barrier is now being chipped away. Cheap web hosting unleashed a flood of websites on the internet, as anyone older than 15 can attest to. But for high bandwidth services, like videos, the costs of distribution are still too high. This is where technologies like bittorrent come in. By hosting and seeding a torrent of their files, a poorly financed group can easily share their productions without going broke.

    The real goal of the MPAA is not to lock up copyrighted material. It is to prevent the release of millions of grassroots production groups from breaking apart their monopoly on media. When the next smash comedy is coming not from a multimillion dollar studio in Hollywood, but the garage next door, the corporate control of the media market will come crashing down.
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    That's exactly how I'm going to distribute my movie if it ever gets finished. Art should not be about profit. All I want is enough money to keep making movies and stay alive. No mansions, entourages or fancy cars. By way of donation fans can donate money DIRECTLY to the people who made the movie. Direct to the artist. And that's IF they deem the art worthy. If not that's cool too. I'd be quite a hypocrite to call myself an artist and demand payment from everyone who saw my work. Especially since I've downloaded countless movies and deemed them crap and thus unworthy of my hard earned money. But that's how the hollywood system works. Pay first, complain later. Now with cheap(er) production methods and free distribution the revolution is almost here.
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    I like your theory, Geogriffith. I mean honestly, how much money is the film industry losing in the end? They make so many millions of dollars PER FILM that anything they would lose due to P2P sharing, etc is merely a drop in the bucket. And when you think about it, where does the majority of the money go? To the middleman. Distribution, advertising, etc. If you look at the music industry, how many groups/artists are on the verge of going broke even though they have a hit album out? All that profit goes to the agents, etc. Most of those artists make their real money from live concerts and other merchandise sales, not from the record sales. I think paying a film star several million dollars for a 90 minute movie is so absurd it borders on mental insanity. Seriously, how many people in this country couldn't survive comfortably off of just $100,000 a year? And these people are making $100M a year?! The way I see it, the only people being hurt by internet sharing of movies and music are the people that deserve to be hurt, the ones that shouldn't even be involved. They are parasites and leeches that deserve to shrivel and die. More and more the "arts" are becomming less and less artistic and more and more "What kind of slop can we throw into the trough to bring in some more profit this time?" I say long live the independant movie makers and song writers who are in it for the fun and the expression. Of course everyone needs to make a living, but there is no need to go out fleecing the sheep of this country in doing so. And I use the word "sheep" for more than one reason....
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    This is all absolutely true. While organisations such as MPAA liken downloading movies to stealing a car or a handbag, this is like comparing a friendly slap on the back with attempted murder. The only people who are really losing out are the people who get paid far too much for doing next to nothing. Sure, the nearby movie library may lose out a couple of bucks, but this is only if I would have hired the movie from them, not one of their competitors. For that matter, the movies I download tend to be ones which I was vaguely interested in, but not enough to actually pay money to see. Were downloading not an option, I would simply have never seen these movies. Worthwhile moives, I tend to buy or rent or see at that the cinemas, both as a way of getting good quality and a way of paying respect to the makers of a good movie.
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    i think its just all a load of poo
    if microsoft made printer and file sharing and i upload a file off my friends pc that he put on it like a film he went a got from a shop am i doing the mpaa rules in?? really microsoft should not have ,made it so people can download things in the end i dont think that the MPAA right to even try and force people into making things go there way by just being down right rude to all the web sites..
    it just goes to show what the yankies are like just because they are one of the bigest cuntrys in the world does not mean they can push pepole around but hey they do and its not right just like bum man gorge bush or what ever his shitie name is..
    i think its all down to the yanks what a load of spanks
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    Err, thanks for that DMX.

    I live in England, what do the MPAA have on me? Fuck all because I'm English, right? probably....

    I download films. I download music. I download games Why? Because its free, simple as that.

    I like to own originals, I mean who doesn't, right? If something is good enough for me to buy I'll buy it and get rid of my "illegal" copies. Good enough also includes the price.

    A CD should not cost me £20....$40, the CD costs little under 5 pence to make, on average around 30 pence per copy of the CD that would add up to pay for the design costs of the covers and art. 35 pence an album should cost. Then you take into account the cost of paying the artists £4 per CD.

    I would be happy to pay £4.35p for a CD, but instead, I have to pay £20 for a double disc. Insanity.

    The day I see a film star slumming it ont he streets is the day I'll stop downloading (That or when they start to execute for it) If the MPAA ever tried to sue me, I'll refuse.

    People want to claim ownership on my favourite bands music, OTHER than my favourite band, well f**k you too.

    Greedy American corperations wanting to silver line there pockets even more.

    I respect people running torrent site, I respect people like ISOHunt for standing up to these c**ts and refusing to back down.
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    fuck the mpaa. i live in n.ireland and the day that i see any movie star or a singer doing a hard days graft in a factory or on the railways or even in the police will be the day that i die. it is bollocks that they are sitting in their million pound mansions while dicks like us work our balls off just to buy their movies or cd's. i will buy their crap, but only after i have heard what i am going to buy. torrent up loaders deserve the respect that they are not given as they go (most times) and buy the product and share it with us to evaluate for ouselves. the only people who are losing out are the people that pay £20 for a cd for just one or two songs. whart is the differernce between downloading it on the net and going to your mate who has bought it and putting it in your hi-fi and copying the thing. beats me!
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    Ty Isohunt for all your hard work! I have finally been able to enjoy music and movies without going bankrupt to do so. In my profession, anyone can copy any part of my service or product without infringement copyright laws affecting them. I take it as a compliment. Movie stars, Music artists, and Sport figures make multi-millions per year in income...grossly overstated. Sharing should be the world way...giving makes people smile...i know i'm smiling now, due to bittorrent sites like Isohunt and Box torrent. Tom
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    I know I don't feel bad at making Tom Cruise lose a million on his movies. The cunt gets 12 million per film, he needs what? 12 fucking million in the bank to see him to the end of his days.
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    All movies are dumb and low quality cultural material wich noone would ever watch if it wasnt for free. I would never pay to watch all this dump stuff. Hollywood movie makers get enough money from stupid/drunk users that pay for it.

    MPAA, etc. they also get alot of money to fight piracy but it's completely pointless now that we have p2p. Many have tried to stop p2p but it's only growing. Many have tried to stop content servers but everyone is jumping to p2p and its again growing. What's the pint MPAA/whatever ? Your work is pointless.

    The whole way intelectual propery stuff is sold in the world is wrong. Why would I buy a buggy MS OS when I need the money for electricity bills etc. ? US corporations maybe think that the whole world is rich like them and would pay their prices ? Well the whole world thinks their products kinda suck.
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    Come on guys. The theoretical underpinnings of open information and ethical p2p rest on the positive ideas of "share and share alike," as well as the assumption that p2p doesn't directly deprive artists of earnings. Once you start talking about p2p as if it's a vehicle to steal $$$$ from artists, studios, producers, et cetera, your claims lose all legitimacy!
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    Without money put into those MS OS's from people buying them they can't become less buggy.

    On the otherside, I disagree with everything MS does. Data Rights Management won't stick by me
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    Has ISOHunt been shut down. I hasnt been up in days.
    Think they may have eventually given up.
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    ISOHunt is up right now. Sound like they only just switched to their new servers.
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    I don't think it is up. I haven't been able to access it from home or work for at least 3 days.
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    It must be your isp. I have no problem accessing the site and doing a few sample searches.
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    its gd 4 the ppl who can b movie stars ect but no im the only 1 who doesnt no how we have 2 pay 2 b a movie ster n stuff im like 11 years old and i dont have enough money 2 pay 2 b on tele but no i cant b cos the money is 2 high 2 b an actor!!
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