[LINK] iiNet case now in court

Stilgherrian stil at stilgherrian.com
Thu Mar 26 14:55:41 AEDT 2009


On 26/03/2009, at 2:44 PM, Rick Welykochy wrote:
> As well, DtecNet's evidence would likely consists of inspection and  
> recording
> of individual packets of bit torrent data streams. If they solely go  
> by the
> name of the file being transfered, that, IMHO, is not sufficient  
> proof of
> copyright infringement.
>
> The question becomes whose copyright? Just because a bit torrent  
> file is
> called "Crash 2003.avi" does not mean the file contains either of  
> the two
> popular commercially released films called Crash.

Whether this specific technology does it this way or not, I don't  
know, but...

The BitTorrent protocol includes transmitting a hash of the file  
contents, so the recipients cn be reassured they've got the right  
file. One anti-piracy thingo which was described at a recent  
conference matched that hash against a list of "known infringing  
copies" of files.

Now that still doesn't address the fundamental question of whether a  
copy of a file is an "infringing" copy, because that depends on the  
context.

And quite frankly I thought the guy selling this technology was full  
of snake oil. I change one byte of the "infringing" copy an the hash  
is different, and no longer on their list of "known infringing"  
copies. Plus it all fails as soon as people turn on the encryption  
tools in their BitTorrent clients.

Still, I'm sure he did a sufficiently impressive demo to get a few  
dollars out of his investors... [sigh]

Stil


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