MPAA Needs No Evidence To Sue You
The following remark was made by Marie. L. van Uitert, MPAA attorney in the Jammie Thomas trial. She wrote in a brief:
It is often very difficult, and in some cases, impossible, to provide such direct proof when confronting modern forms of copyright infringement, whether over P2P networks or otherwise; understandably, copyright infringers typically do not keep records of infringement. Mandating that proof could thus have the pernicious effect of depriving copyright owners of a practical remedy against massive copyright infringement in many cases.
The rest of the brief goes on to list the reasons why the MPAA feels it should not have to meet the full burden of proof in its case (i.e. proving actual distribution). For them, the existence of a location where the copyright material could be copied is sufficient grounds for prosecution. When you take this off the internet, this is equivalent to suing some for 12 * $150,00 for loaning someone a CD they later copied.
For more coverage, see Wired and TorrentFreak.
Cease and Desist Form Letter
Since I have to deal with all the time, I’m saving a form letter here for future use:
Hello **infringing party**,
It’s come to my attention that you are illegally reproducing content from the Elliott Back Blog Network on your site. If you are unfamiliar with copyright law and how it applies to the Elliott Back Blog Network, please review our legal notice at elliottback.com/legal/.
Here are some examples of your infringing content:
**some urls**
The Elliott Back Blog Network takes our own intellectual property very seriously. Please remove all of our network’s material, cease and desist further copying, and reply in writing of your compliance within 24 hours. A list of our network properties can be found for your convenience at elliottback.com.
Thanks,
Elliott C. Bäck
CEO, EBBN
I’m also going to make a list of URLs I need to hear back from, and when I emailed them:
iTunes Yanks Movie + TV Downloads
As of iTunes 7.02, the Apple Music Store is not offering TV or Movie downloads, as far as I can tell:
Perhaps Apple has been served with heavy legal paperwork from other Movie companies seeking to bar it from the business, or has withdrawn due to other pressures. If anyone knows why TV and Movies are not on iTunes right now, please leave a comment. I’m clueless.
Inside Elite P2P Filesharing Networks
An Introduction
You’ve heard that private file sharing networks exist, but you’ve probably never had a chance to explore one from the inside. These networks of software, music, television, and movie pirates often are run on the internal network infrastructure of private educational institutions. Because a university network has a fixed set of IP addresses, college pirates can run DC++ and write simple scripts to only allow users from the internal IP pool, or even the residential dormitory pool. This prevents unwanted interference (RIAA, MPAA, Police) with the network by simply making it invisible to the outside world. Also, most university networks are lightly-satured high-speed ethernet, giving student pirates the bandwidth to share large files.
While I attended Cornell University, students there ran a large DC++ hub to share files. There were anywhere between 1000 and 2000 users of the DC++ hub, which provided access to terabytes of shared files. Before I left the University to work, I transfered a complete set of users’ file lists to my home computer for later analysis. With 1215 XML file lists from DC++, I wrote a few perl scripts to calculate metrics on the 600mb data set.
Interestingly, the DC++ hub appears to still be around at its old redirect address thchub.no-ip.com:3307. Apparently a student r253141224 is hosting the service on his dorm computer 128.253.141.224.
Data From 20,000 Feet
From the file lists I have, there were 2,456,462 unique files, 5,424,446 total files, 19.07 unique terabytes, and 75.55 total terabytes. Here’s a histogram and data listing of the most popular file types:
mp3 1857432 jpg 828815 m4a 312173 png 264820 gif 224034 avi 203304 dll 133889 wma 116851 htm 82130 zip 79114
The file types follow a classic long-tail distribution, and let us query the data in more interesting ways. For example, for avi movie files, what were the most popular file names? Here’s the top 20:
crash.avi 90 pulp fiction.avi 76 garden state.avi 74 office space.avi 74 good will hunting.avi 72 wedding crashers.avi 67 sin city.avi 66 lost - 2x05 - ...and found.avi 65 super troopers.avi 63 zoolander.avi 60 robin hood - men in tights.avi 59 lost - 2x09 - what kate did.avi 58 eternal sunshine of the spotless mind.avi 57 lost - 2x04 - everybody hates hugo.avi 57 memento.avi 57 american beauty.avi 55 batman begins.avi 55 mean girls.avi 55 lost - 2x07 - the other 48 days.avi 54 old school.avi 54
We can take advantage of common patterns in the data to try and find other patterns, but I’ll save that for another day, and another post in what will undoubtably become a series.
