The founders of infamous torrent tracker Pirate Bay have been acquitted in a Belgian court of criminal copyright infringement and abusing electronic communications.
Gottfrid Svartholm, Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundström have spent the last decade in legal issues across the planet but at least they can breath easy now on one case.
The alleged crimes were committed between ... [ read the full article ]
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Originally posted by Bozobub: Good; this case was pretty obviously meant as harassment in the first place.
unfortunately this isn't the best outcome... it leaves open the possibility to arrest the current owners
unless the site seeds for themselves then the issue should be moot. but claiming they were the wrong people just means the question is still hanging.
and even if someone seeds to 10.0 that doesn't mean they seeded full copies. in fact i can say with a mathematical certainty that unless they intentionally try to only seed "x" number of copies then seeding to X.00 ratio guarantees that they did NOT give X copies... rather there would have been X+1 copies of some packets, X-1 of others and entirely possible that some packets were never given to anybody. in fact, seeding to a ratio of a million still doesn't even guarantee one single person got the whole file, let alone got the file from from any specific person.
Originally posted by Bozobub: Good; this case was pretty obviously meant as harassment in the first place.
unfortunately this isn't the best outcome... it leaves open the possibility to arrest the current owners
unless the site seeds for themselves then the issue should be moot. but claiming they were the wrong people just means the question is still hanging.
and even if someone seeds to 10.0 that doesn't mean they seeded full copies. in fact i can say with a mathematical certainty that unless they intentionally try to only seed "x" number of copies then seeding to X.00 ratio guarantees that they did NOT give X copies... rather there would have been X+1 copies of some packets, X-1 of others and entirely possible that some packets were never given to anybody. in fact, seeding to a ratio of a million still doesn't even guarantee one single person got the whole file, let alone got the file from from any specific person.
I assume form the above comments that in seeding packet do not count for copies so not fault can be inferred. Thanks for this explanation.
The base argument (which I agree with) is that The Pirate Bay (and other similar torrent aggregator sites) simply do not hold ANY of the copyrighted information, nor can they be held responsible for pointing to where information (that they cannot possibly vet, because they do not possess it) is.
Nosredneh makes the - quite true - point that seeding statistics don't take into account which data you have uploaded, but how much; there's no actual guarantee, unless you have a client connected to that machine that actually receives 100% of the file(s) from it, that the PC in question ever uploaded each and every single packet contained in the file(s) in question. It becomes statistically almost certain, eventually, but never 100% certain.
The reason this won't fly legally, is that this is actually true for fingerprint and DNA data; there's a finite but very small chance (for the better DNA tests; some aren't very good, actually) that either (or both) can be duplicated any number of times, possibly even within the same locale. Yet these types of evidence are routinely used for attaining convictions in criminal cases...
I assume from the above comments that in seeding packet do not count for copies so not fault can be inferred. Thanks for this explanation.
transmission across the internet is in small packages of information called packets. unless the total "message" being sent is that size or less then multiple packets need to be sent
most people can understand this by thinking of Twitter, 140 characters per tweet means if you want to send a 275 character message you need to split it into two tweets.
in bittorrent transmission packet size of internet is usually too small for efficient transfer so a bittorrent file is broken up into a middle size called blocks these blocks while the same throughout the torrent can be made larger or smaller at the time torrent is made to allow smaller torrent files on larger end products. the torrent file is just a count of blocks and a check sum to verify if each block is correct. so more blocks means more checksums means bigger torrent file but less blocks means each block is larger meaning more lost data each time a checksum says there was an error sending that data.
packets have check-sums imbedded into the packet to check it for errors but occasionally the info has error not detected. the blocks have their checksum in the torrent file so after all the packets are collected the block is checked to verify its check-sum is same as one in torrent file
and i believe after the whole file, all the blocks, have been recieved there is a file checksum too.
this is why bittorent is so reliable. packets are checked, blocks are checked and file is checked the likelyhood that a packet messes up but still checks true is very low but can happen but if it does the block check most likely will catch the error
but because of this small pieces are sent not the whole thing. and the law requires what sent to be considered not the whole
now another comparison example
most know their laws prohibits or greatly restricts sale of automatic firearms. where a one shot weapon is allowed an automatic version is not. but internet will sell you conversion sets that are legal because they are missing one or two pieces.
without those pieces the weapon is just a door stopped shaped like a gun. but the extra pieces can be bought from another online store and when assembled you have an automatic weapon
thus, the person putting the packets together to make up the blocks which are put together to make up the file received is responsible for the content of that file they put together not the people who supplied the pieces he used.
by the way, anything that is patented by definition is legal to put together from pieces you buy or make yourself for your own use... so anyone using patent law to protect electronic software is going to lose
sorry for the digression...
bottom line, the file you receive is your responsibility charging you a thousand dollars for each copy you gave away via bittorent is fundamentally flawed since you do not give them the entire file and someone who just says "hey, that guy has awesome movie X" and tells you his address or P.O. box has no real involvement yet the so called torrent sites are only doing just that... they are yelling "Movie X is over there!"
