TorrentSpy Ordered By Judge to Become MPAA Spy


Recommended Posts

Here in the U.S. if you see a torrent that has the name of Gone.In.60.Seconds.torrent and you think because of the name that it is in fact the movie and you download it, you can be busted for it even though it wasn't the movie. A friend of mine was busted over the very same thing. The judge ruled that he thought he was getting the legit movie so that makes him guilty.

That's why there's such a thing as 'attempted murder'. That's also why you can go to jail for trying to rob a convenience store with a fake gun. It doesn't matter what you actually do, it's what you're trying to do that counts.

I "sample" 3 or 4 songs and if I like it enough to think the rest of the album is just as good, I buy the CD and remove the downloads. If I don't like it, I don't buy the CD, and I remove the downloads.

May I humbly suggest that you are in the tiniest of minorities in that regard. People don't download 30-40GB of torrents just to sample material they will end up buying. Most online music stores allow you to sample music at low bit rates, or portions at high bit rate, absolutely free of charge. You don't need to download a full high bit rate song to sample it.

As Occam's Razor says, "All things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the best one." In other words it seems quite likely and most logical that people who use torrent sites are by and large copying copious amounts of material they do not have a right to get for free, precisely so they don't have to ever pay for it.

I don't know about you, but how I was raised, I was never taught to believe I have the right to get something for nothing. Obviously an entirely new generation of thieves believe otherwise...

I don't know about you, but how I was raised, I was never taught to believe I have the right to get something for nothing. Obviously an entirely new generation of thieves believe otherwise...

I was also raised in the same manner. But I'm also not one who's happy to be stolen from, and the prices demanded for new albums or even old ones tbh are a total joke. It doesn't even make any sense. They charge huge amounts for what is essentially an extremely cheap piece of material, the CD. And when they start trying the guilt trip about the artists? Coming from publishers is unbelievable, being that if I recall correctly the majority of bands signed by these large publishers (upwards of 90%) are failed horribly and left to rot by these publishers. In what other industry would a company be allowed to get away with a 90% failure rate? The only thing they are looking out for is their wealth. As far as they are concerned, it's a case of 'screw the artists, screw the customer, so long as we can fleece people for as much as possible we will'. And they do. It's a massive insult.

If some supermarket started charging ?100 for a bunch of bananas and then told you it was stealing if you grew your own or bought some from some black market style thing, you wouldn't just accept it. The only reason people accept it in the case of music CDs is because it's been slowly drip fed into culture that these prices are 'normal' for music.

The real thieves are the huge corporate publishers.

That's why there's such a thing as 'attempted murder'. That's also why you can go to jail for trying to rob a convenience store with a fake gun. It doesn't matter what you actually do, it's what you're trying to do that counts.

May I humbly suggest that you are in the tiniest of minorities in that regard. People don't download 30-40GB of torrents just to sample material they will end up buying. Most online music stores allow you to sample music at low bit rates, or portions at high bit rate, absolutely free of charge. You don't need to download a full high bit rate song to sample it.

As Occam's Razor says, "All things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the best one." In other words it seems quite likely and most logical that people who use torrent sites are by and large copying copious amounts of material they do not have a right to get for free, precisely so they don't have to ever pay for it.

I don't know about you, but how I was raised, I was never taught to believe I have the right to get something for nothing. Obviously an entirely new generation of thieves believe otherwise...

Yes there is something called attempted murder.. When you open that pandora's box you also have a judge and a jury. You have to prove something is or isn't and beyond a reasonable doubt.

Then there is that little thing called intent.

Pretty easy to figure out intent when somebody tries to rob a convenience store right.

Why is that?

ca

Eye witnesses, Video tapes, cams etc.

I'm sure you know the steps after that....

The difference is gone in 60 seconds could be the Major Motion Picture with Mr. Cage... or it could be me blowing the doors off a random car, me smoking a blunt as fast as i can to see how gone i can get in 60 seconds.

Yes all those things could be what somebody is downloading.... But i guess the only people who know what they are intending to do or not to do would be the said person. Why because NOBODY actually witnessess this alleged crime.

It's a bunch of 1 and 0's that say somebody tried to do something. Doesn't say who or what exactly, and it's not a bulletproof case either.

Then there is that little thing called intent.

Pretty easy to figure out intent when somebody tries to rob a convenience store right.

Why is that?

ca

Eye witnesses, Video tapes, cams etc.

I'm sure you know the steps after that....

The difference is gone in 60 seconds could be the Major Motion Picture with Mr. Cage... or it could be me blowing the doors off a random car, me smoking a blunt as fast as i can to see how gone i can get in 60 seconds.

Seems pretty straight forward to me. Your friend was trying to download a file called 'Gone.in.60.seconds' from a torrent link, and unless he is the habit of randomly downloading files he has no idea of the contents of, it's pretty clear he was trying to download and hence obtain a movie without paying for it. Do we really need a judge and jury for something so obvious?

I was also raised in the same manner. But I'm also not one who's happy to be stolen from, and the prices demanded for new albums or even old ones tbh are a total joke.

Simple solution - don't buy them. Music, movies and games are not necessities, they are luxuries. The major record companies are not 'stealing' anything from you, you are willingly getting into a purchasing arrangement with them. If you really want to make an impact and still retain your morals, then don't buy and don't listen to these 'overpriced' albums. Downloading them and hence getting them for free makes you the thief and them the victims.

Two wrongs don't make a right. None of this is rocket science, none of it really requires the law to get involved. If you're getting entertainment without giving any compensation to the people who create and provide that entertainment, you are stealing. You're not doing it to keep yourself from starving, or to feed small children in Africa. You're doing it because it's easy and it's free, and all the nonsense arguments in the world don't make it right.

Simple solution - don't buy them. Music, movies and games are not necessities, they are luxuries. The major record companies are not 'stealing' anything from you, you are willingly getting into a purchasing arrangement with them. If you really want to make an impact and still retain your morals, then don't buy and don't listen to these 'overpriced' albums. Downloading them and hence getting them for free makes you the thief and them the victims.

Two wrongs don't make a right. None of this is rocket science, none of it really requires the law to get involved. If you're getting entertainment without giving any compensation to the people who create and provide that entertainment, you are stealing. You're not doing it to keep yourself from starving, or to feed small children in Africa. You're doing it because it's easy and it's free, and all the nonsense arguments in the world don't make it right.

Sorry but that doesnt seem like a very straight forward argument. IF you simply dont like the way a company is doing business or its practices, you dont just stop buying what is being sold just because they are the ones doing it wrong. You find other alternatives, in this case the other alternative is or could be if the artists themselves sold their own music or to buy it from itunes where the music is kind of priced fair. THe only problem with this scenario is that the company (MPAA and RIAA) are the only ones in business that do this kind of work. Entertainment is a necessity, i don't know about you, but listening to music is very necessary to me, and watching the ocassional movie. You can't go your days without listening to music or wanting to watch a brand new movie. This is how it works, they have what you want, and they will overprice it because you know you want it, is pretty dumb to say, well i will not buy it because they are overpricing it. Speak out about it somehow, so that they know that this shiet that they call music and want to charge an arm and a leg for is not worth it. Some movies are worth it, as well as some songs.

Thats just the way i see it. the MPAA and RIAA are in fact crooks, crooks that are way out of most of our league, because of the fact that they have so much money they have been piling up in the last years. Us as a single person can't do anything about it, but hopefully sites like TorrentSpy and other torrent sites, will make these greedy ****ers know that some of the **** they want to sell it just plain sucks and is not worth $20 or whatever currency you pay for it.

if I recall correctly the majority of bands signed by these large publishers (upwards of 90%) are failed horribly and left to rot by these publishers.

Of course, that's why the record industry pays comparatively little to artists... the record labels have to finance a huge number of artists that fail and get nowhere in order to find the decent acts. It's great that they do, otherwise musicians like myself wouldn't have much of a chance.

the MPAA and RIAA are in fact crooks, crooks that are way out of most of our league, because of the fact that they have so much money they have been piling up in the last years.

The damages they seek from individuals are excessive but they have the right legally to do so because the people they sue (with few exceptions) have infringed upon copyrighted works - the biggest issue is that courts won't stand up to them and demand the amounts they seek are reasonable and fair. I disagree with their business model but calling the MPAA/RIAA crooks is just an excuse to pirate content. I don't claim to be squeaky clean but I accept that downloading music I don't own is illegal. I hate whingers. Pirate music but don't try to excuse yourself for it. At the end of the day you have no entitlement to music and if you can't afford it (whether due to excessive pricing or not) you shouldn't have it.

Of course, that's why the record industry pays comparatively little to artists... the record labels have to finance a huge number of artists that fail and get nowhere in order to find the decent acts. It's great that they do, otherwise musicians like myself wouldn't have much of a chance.

The damages they seek from individuals are excessive but they have the right legally to do so because the people they sue (with few exceptions) have infringed upon copyrighted works - the biggest issue is that courts won't stand up to them and demand the amounts they seek are reasonable and fair. I disagree with their business model but calling the MPAA/RIAA crooks is just an excuse to pirate content. I don't claim to be squeaky clean but I accept that downloading music I don't own is illegal. I hate whingers. Pirate music but don't try to excuse yourself for it. At the end of the day you have no entitlement to music and if you can't afford it (whether due to excessive pricing or not) you shouldn't have it.

YOu are definitely right about the part that if i cant afford it then i cant have it, and also the part about calling them crooks. But the only reasoning behind me calling them crooks is because by them overpricing the content and them not wanting other alternatives to people acquiring the music, makes them crooks. They want to be the only fish in town, they want to be Number 1 and case closed. Itunes is doing very well in selling music, but what exactly do they want to do, overprice it even at that level, so they can enrich themselves filthy even more. Now that, in my opinion deserves them to be called crooks. They already make enough money when albums sell around a million or more copies, which till this day are plenty of good albums done by good artists. I myself download music, and if i like it then i buy it, because sometimes is nice to have an album before other people, and once is available then i purchase it. By being a consumer and knowing how much i have to spend to watch a movie, or listen to a song or an album, is not fair. But like i said you are definitely right about the part that if i can't afford it then i can't have it...

Even if TorrentSpy lose the appeal, they won't comply or they'll get branded with the same bend-over-part-the-cheeks label applied to Yahoo for giving private information to the Chinese government under "threat" of restriction of commercial opportunities. I would hope they have sufficient personal integrity to never agree to what amounts to a fishing exercise, move their servers to anywhere but the US and tell the judge / MPAA to get stuffed.

If sueing dead people, those without internet access and those who have downloaded legally isn't crooked (look up extortion) I don't know what is. It's just a shame sheeple believe the propaganda and continue to spout the corporate line which is in place to screw everybody apart from themselves and to lobby to have sentencing greater than that for killing someone for copying a file.

This topic is now closed to further replies.
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
  • Posts

    • For some reason I suddenly have the urge to go shopping at Sears.
    • So I did a quick test based on 3+ different public instances from the litany at searx.space ... and it spins everything rather differently. It seems that SearXNG is a meta-search engine (queries multiple search indexes rather than only Google's or Bing's or Wikipedia's or Reddit's) that operates in two modes: > public instances ... each instance opens itself to outside users who piggyback on its cached search history; this instance's own identity becomes known/tracked but end-users are hidden similar to an anonymization proxy; this instance's querying of major search indexes may be API based [rated limited, blocked, etc.]). > private instances ... your private install/instance that itself queries multiple (configurable) search indexes of crawled web content; every major Search Engine associates all traffic to your private instance (so your traffic is tracked via network usages) but client-side tracking (your own browser/computer specs) is flushed because it's a "server" doing the querying rather than your browser. My test asked the same 1 question to the 3+ engines and they all returned vastly different results: some had CAPTCHA failures against Google, some had failures against Wikipedia, and the actual results were also different -- some had auto-complete enabled, others returned a wikipedia highlighted excerpt despite the Wikipedia failure (hinting at results being cached from previous keyword matching), and others just gave an Are-You-Human non-CAPTCHA loop before returning random results. So this begs the caveat: Search query results will vary based on which instance is used because every instance queries the other search indexes separate (and thus its results are influenced on that instance's aggregate search history and index-access limitations). The major distinctions for SearXNG versus DDG or Brave: > The search UI is 'untracked' since no UI trackers are baked-in which would phone home or lay cookies into your browser (for DDG/Brave usage stats), > There is no 'crawler' that canvasses the Internet to discover fresh content (it leaves that to the major search indexes), > Queries multiple search indexes ("meta-search engine") based on the configurations and usage history of the server instance, > Privacy-friendly due to its ability to shield user tracking via standing up a non-local server instance connectable to major VPN providers: queries would all appear to come from general VPN/Proxy providers rather than your private instance (whether installed locally or on your own VPS in the cloud). PS: I've previously come across specialized search engines of this nature that indexes searches across media assets like YT, OF, etc. SearXNG seems to be a good backbone...if the rate-limiting/captcha/etc. issues were resolved.
    • For a guy who claims to hate Farage and the ignorant, gullible, rightwing racist skinheads sponsored by Putin that his lies represent, you sure are quoting them time and time and time again, mate. I guess you're conveniently ignoring the fact that your country and commonwealth just happened to work much better when it was still part of the E.U.? Denial isn't just a river in Egypt.
    • Do you live in the U.K? Do any of the people here that are against the UK leaving the E.U, live in the U.K? If not then why are you bothered? If you do live here then it is a different thing . Brexit was a good idea, should have done it years before, it was done badly, but the idea was good. You are saying the same thing as remainers do, oh we did what Putin wanted, we listened to the lies and Farage. I hate Farage and never believed most of what he said, certainly did not believe the £350m a week for the NHS. But we did pay a lot of money to the E.U and yes some of it came back, but what is the point of paying it out for only some of it to come back? Get out of the E.U, no money to them and in theory we can use the money to do things in the country. I said in theory, but our governments are a total and complete waste of space. No matter what colour rosette they wear. You and others say it was a mistake and yet the two main parties in the U.K are not looking at rejoining the EU, I wonder why that is? I was not tricked by anyone. Makes no odds now, we are out and have been for 10 years, what we need is a decent government to run the country. All they do is shout at each other like a load of kids and seems to do nothing and make this country more into a police and nanny state. Getting more like China all the time.
    • 4TB TEAMGROUP MP44Q, 2TB T-Force G50, and 2TB WD My Passport SSDs drop to great prices by Fiza Ali Prime Day may be over, but there are still worthwhile storage deals available, including discounts on SSDs for shoppers who missed the event or are looking to upgrade their storage solution. Particularly, 2TB Western Digital My Passport, 2TB TEAMGROUP T-Force G50, and 4TB TEAMGROUP MP44Q SSD are selling at great prices with up to 23% off. The 2TB TEAMGROUP T-Force G50 is an M.2 2280 PCIe 4.0 x4 NVMe SSD with sequential read speeds of up to 5,000MB/s and sequential write speeds of up to 4,500MB/s. The drive has an endurance rating of 1,300 TBW (terabytes written) and features a DRAM-less design. The company specifies a mean time between failures (MTBF) of 3 million hours. The drive includes an "ultra-thin" graphene heat spreader that helps dissipate heat without significantly increasing the drive's thickness. It also supports S.M.A.R.T. monitoring, allowing compatible software to monitor drive health and operating status. The SSD is rated for operating temperatures from 0°C to 70°C, with a storage temperature range of -40°C to 85°C. The drive is backed by a five-year limited warranty as well. 2TB TEAMGROUP T-Force G50 SSD: $269.99 (Amazon US) The TEAMGROUP MP44Q is an M.2 2280 PCIe 4.0 x4 NVMe SSD that delivers sequential read speeds of up to 7,000MB/s and sequential write speeds of up to 5,900MB/s. It uses 3D QLC NAND flash memory to provide 4TB of storage capacity for games, applications, media files, and other data. The drive has an endurance rating of 2,000 TBW and an MTBF of 1.6 million hours. The SSD features a DRAM-less design and supports TEAMGROUP's S.M.A.R.T. monitoring software, allowing users to monitor drive health, temperature, and remaining lifespan. For thermal management, the MP44Q also includes an "ultra-thin" graphene heat spreader. It is designed to operate at temperatures between 0°C and 70°C and can be stored at temperatures ranging from -40°C to 85°C. The SSD is also backed by a five-year limited warranty. 4TB TEAMGROUP MP44Q SSD: $478.99 (Amazon US) The 2TB WD My Passport SSD connects via a USB-C port using the USB 3.2 Gen 2 interface. It delivers sequential read speeds of up to 1,050MB/s and sequential write speeds of up to 1,000MB/s through NVMe technology. In terms of security features, the drive includes password protection with 256-bit AES hardware encryption. The SSD is also designed to resist shock and vibration and is rated to withstand drops from heights of up to 6.5 feet. The recommended operating temperature range is 5°C to 35°C, while the non-operating temperature range is -20°C to 65°C. This drive is also backed by a five-year limited warranty. 2TB Western Digital My Passport SSD: $279.99 (Amazon US) Good to know This Amazon deal is U.S. specific, and not available in other regions unless specified. We only use first-party seller links (at the time of article publishing); ensure that you purchase from a first-party seller link only. Check out Today's Deals on Amazon | or our recent tech deals. Become a Prime member (for Students or SNAP) via Neowin Get Prime Access - Prime for half price (for qualifying Medicaid, EBT, SNAP) Subscribe to Prime Video, Audible Plus, Music Unlimited or Kindle Unlimited via Neowin As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases.
  • Recent Achievements

    • Week One Done
      flexorcist earned a badge
      Week One Done
    • One Month Later
      Woland13 earned a badge
      One Month Later
    • Week One Done
      Woland13 earned a badge
      Week One Done
    • One Year In
      bernmeister earned a badge
      One Year In
    • Week One Done
      Scoobystu earned a badge
      Week One Done
  • Popular Contributors

    1. 1
      +primortal
      491
    2. 2
      +Edouard
      225
    3. 3
      PsYcHoKiLLa
      147
    4. 4
      Steven P.
      74
    5. 5
      FloatingFatMan
      71
  • Tell a friend

    Love Neowin? Tell a friend!