IsoHunt Petitions Canadian Court For Copyright Blessing 217
A Cow writes "As an act of self-defense, the popular BitTorrent site isoHunt has decided to file a petition to ask the Court of British Columbia to confirm that isoHunt — and sister sites Torrentbox and Podtropolis — do not infringe copyright. isoHunt owner Gary explains to TorrentFreak: 'Our petition summarizes BitTorrent technology, its open nature and a whole ecosystem of websites and operators that has developed around it, that CRIA does not own copyright to all files distributed over BitTorrent or on isoHunt websites, and we seek legal validation that we can continue to innovate within this emerging BitTorrent ecosystem on the Internet.'"
Re:paraphrased (Score:5, Informative)
"...and has developed not just one but several ways to illegally distribute content."
what?
It's not the method that's illegal in the case of P2P, it's the content, for certain values of content. There's nothing illegal about Bittorrent itself.
Re:Sickening (Score:5, Informative)
There's a flaw in your logic. It's called "common carrier."
and as has been pointed out before, ISP's, at least in the US, were removed from "common carrier" and placed under the category "information service".
Re:The law has it all wrong. (Score:5, Informative)
since when does isohunt brag about providing illegal, copyrighted works on it?
try "linux" http://isohunt.com/torrents/?ihq=linux [isohunt.com] wow i didn't know a version of linux had had over 10,000 seeders (parsix, linux by name)
okay not a fan of formatting and installing, how about a vmware appliance http://isohunt.com/torrents/?ihq=vmware+appliance [isohunt.com]
yeah, isohunt suggests that you get full iso images, but what full iso images? of copyrighted contet? or of gnu linux isos?
Re:Subscription (Score:4, Informative)
The easy solution would be to give everybody welfare checks, but then we'd become the Romans, and everybody knows how that worked out for them...
the romans didn't have welfare, and it didn't fall because of welfare.
It fell because they didn't have their own citizens serving in their military, because they expanded beyond the capacities of their social structure and economy to govern their territory, and because of internal corruption resulting from too much consolidated power at the top.
as for the "spread of american ideals and values", I don't know what starry-eyed landscape you're looking at, but i'm here on planet earth where the spread of "american ideals and values", especially in terms of copyright, has plunged the entire western world into an economic tail-spin.
Re:paraphrased (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, in Canada there is an extra levy on blank optical media. This levy is basically a "you-might-be-a-pirate" tax. So you can't be caught for copyright infringement if it's for personal use on discs you paid for.
It's more of a gray area than anything, right now in Canada. Bill C61 was going to explicitly legalize backing up(if you back up in a certain way), while also explicitly outlawing many other things (including many forms of backing up that might bypass so-called "digital locks").
Re:Sickening (Score:3, Informative)
Because drug traffickers are people, and it is easy for said people to determine that what they are selling is illegal.
There's not a a special kind of bit with "COPYRIGHTED" written on it that is easy to distinguish from the trillions of others.
I'll also point out that IsoHunt doesn't even _see_ the possibly copyrighted data.
Keeping with your silly argument for a bit...
The drug traffickers are listing themselves in the phone book, and some bright people such as yourself want to sue the publisher.
Re:paraphrased (Score:5, Informative)
Fair use Canada? Or fair use USA? And just for the hell of it. Please define the boundaries of this "fair use" so that others may not cross it.
We don't have a clear legal definition of fair use in Canada. In this situation of recorded audio we have "personal use" which is defined in the Copyright Act. It includes things like making a mix CD for the car or loaning a friend a CD so they can copy it (really!). For these privileges we pay a levy on blank media.
Re:Subscription (Score:2, Informative)
"the spread of "american ideals and values", especially in terms of copyright, has plunged the entire western world into an economic tail-spin."
A quibble: American policy on copyright has largely followed European policy - see Berne Convention.
No, I don't blame the Europeans for how the bankrupt American legal system is using copyright laws, but concepts like "life plus XX years" is European in origin.
Re:paraphrased (Score:1, Informative)
Oversimplification of copyright law, which is based on a fairly complex statutory framework, is a dangerous thing.
In Canada, Part VIII of the Copyright Act provides a limited exemption to copying music only and only to an "audio recording medium" (i.e. media which, if blank, would be subject to the levy). The reason there's no levy on an iPod is that they're not considered "audio recording media" and, therefore, copying your music to such a medium constitutes copyright infringement, unless you're licensed (i.e. you downloaded from iTunes).
There is absolutely no private copying exception for downloading videos, and don't even think about calling it "fair use" -- in Canada, that concept doesn't exist. What we do have is "fair dealing", with a number of limited, listed exemptions much narrower than our southern neighbours enjoy.
Re:Subscription (Score:5, Informative)
>the romans didn't have welfare, and it didn't fall because of welfare.
Sorry, but you're way off.
"When Julius Caesar came to power in 48 B.C., he found 320,000 persons on government grain relief. Temporarily slowing the welfare state bandwagon, he ordered the welfare rolls cut to 200,000. Within a half-century, the rolls were back up to well over 300,000.
Government Bread
A real landmark in the course of events came in the year 274 A.D. Emperor Aurelian, wishing to provide cradle-to-grave care for the citizenry, declared the right to relief to be hereditary. Those whose parents received government benefits were entitled as a matter of right to benefits as well. Aurelian gave welfare recipients government-baked bread (instead of the old practice of giving them wheat and letting them bake their own bread) and added free salt, pork, and olive oil. Not surprisingly, the ranks of the unproductive grew fatter, and the ranks of the productive grew thinner.
Surely, many Romans opposed the welfare state and held fast to the old virtues of work, thrift and self-reliance. Just as surely, some of these sturdy people gave in and began to feed at the public trough in the belief that if they didn't get it, somebody else would. That attitude only hastened the slide into bankruptcy..."
From http://www.mackinac.org/article.aspx?ID=3 [mackinac.org]
Re:Paralyzed (Score:3, Informative)
Yes. YMMV depending on your country of residence of course, but in general the fact that a protocol obscures either the participants or the payload is in no way illegal. Or at least it wasn't at the time of this posting. Similarly it isn't illegal to use an anonymous remailer if you so chose or to encrypt your email. The content of the email on the other hand might be illegal if you were threatening someone, for instance.
Re:paraphrased (Score:1, Informative)
"We don't have a clear legal definition of fair use in Canada. "
We don't have "fair use" in Canada, we have something called "fair dealing [wikipedia.org]". And although it was poorly defined, a Supreme Court case [wikipedia.org] a few years ago (2004) clarified things significantly, including the interepretation that fair dealing is a user RIGHT that complements and balances the rights copyright holders have. Here's a quote from the wikipedia page:
"The fair dealing exception, like other exceptions in the Copyright Act, is a user's right. In order to maintain the proper balance between the rights of a copyright owner and users' interests, it must not be interpreted restrictively. ... 'User rights are not just loopholes. Both owner rights and user rights should therefore be given the fair and balanced reading that befits remedial legislation.'"
They actually got it! As far as I'm concerned, that statement ought to be framed. And they listed 6 factors to evaluate in terms of whether something constituted fair dealing, whereas there was hardly anything previously. So, there's been some progress. Well, up until Bill C-61 !#!@#$!# it up, but in that respect there's been progress too.