Google and Bing Have No Obligation To Censor Searches For Torrents (betanews.com) 62
Microsoft and Google are under no obligation to weed out 'torrent' results from their respective search engines, the High Court of Paris has ruled. BetaNews adds: French music industry group SNEP went to court on behalf of a trio of artists, requesting that Microsoft and Google automatically filter out links to pirated material. The group had called for a complete block on searches that include the word 'torrent' as well as blocking sites whose name includes the word. The court found that SNEP's request was far too broad, saying: "SNEP's requests are general, and pertain not to a specific site but to all websites accessible through the stated methods, without consideration for identifying or even determining the site's content, on the premise that the term 'Torrent' is necessarily associated with infringing content".The court added that 'torrent' is a common noun, which has a range of different meanings.
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It is, since how otherwise do you describe "a large amount of water that moves very quickly in one direction" (m-w entry [merriam-webster.com])?
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Actually, it describes
- Cours d'eau de montagne, rapide et irrégulier, de faible longueur, plus ou moins à sec entre des crues violentes et brusques.
- Liquide qui coule en abondance : Des torrents de larmes.
- Abondance de quelque chose qui semble se répandre : Un torrent de lumière. Un torrent d'injures (http://www.larousse.fr/dictionnaires/francais/torrent/78539)
Because Torrent just happens to also be
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Ah yes Catalan, Gallego... I stand corrected; although I'm sure the point wasn't missed.
.torrent!=pirated (Score:5, Informative)
Not everything bittorrent is pirated content. Lots of Linux distributions offer torrent files as an alternative download method (often much faster than the mirrors), for example.
Re:.torrent!=pirated (Score:5, Interesting)
Doesn't blizzard distribute its update using bittorrent?
Sounds like it is : http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/c... [blizzard.com]
Re:.torrent!=pirated (Score:5, Insightful)
Torrents are a protocol relating to efficient and distributed file transfer, that in no way is inherently piratical or illegal. There are legitimate uses for the protocol, even if piracy of music and entertainment is a fairly common use, too. Even if these groups got what they wanted, and people weren't allowed to search for "torrent", guess about how long before a new term would come into common use meaning the exact same thing? Hint: not long.
Re:.torrent!=pirated (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm fairly sure "magnet" already works as an alternative.
Well... "magnet -juggalo", just to be safe.
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I nominate "LawsuitBait" as a replacement..
This coming from a guy that actively runs a torrent client which is serving up legal content 24/7 to the dismay of my ISP I'm sure.. I consider it my way to support CentOS and Debian to name a few.
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Torrents are a protocol relating to efficient and distributed file transfer
Distributed yes. Efficient no. Its the opposite of efficient.
Re: .torrent!=pirated (Score:2)
And should add is only really effective for popular content. Less popular content (where there is only the original seeder sharing) works out to be no better than an http file transfer.
Efficiency depends. If the whole office is downloa (Score:4, Informative)
My office employs mostly nerds who are into comic books, StarvWars, video games, etc. When a major new game version comes out, the office mostly shuts down for the day as everyone stays home to play the new release of the game.
If a dozen of my co-workers are downloading the new Star Wars fan flick the day it comes out, Bittorrent is much more efficient than regular ftp or http downloads. Only one copy need be downloaded from the far-away server to our office. Mostly everybody copies it around the office, downloading from each other over the local LAN. That's WAY more efficient than downloading a dozen copies from a server 1,000 miles away. (In actual practice maybe twice the file size may be downloaded over the internet, which is six times more efficient than downloading a dozen copies over the internet).
In less extreme cases, it's still more efficient to download mostly from other people in Texas than from the origin server in California.
On the other hand, there is some overhead. In worst cases, Bittorrent can use more bandwidth than ftp.
Also there are of course several ways to measure efficiency. Bittorrent is normally time-efficient. It's bandwidth efficient in that rather than requiring someone to buy a high upstream speed connection, it uses the idle upstream bandwidth that people are already paying for anyway. It can often be less bandwidth efficient in that there is overhead, using more total bandwidth.
So whether or not it's efficient very much depends on a) the specific situation and b) which type of efficiency you're interested in.
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He said "fan film" - presumably at least some of those are legal.
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Cough, cough, the number 1 definition of torrent :a strong and fast-moving stream of water or other liquid. The data transmission protocol (which can be named anything) was named after it for the obvious reason (also used to define heavy rainfall and based upon that, any mass movement of any large number of things). They could have bound the term to bittorrent but that is not the word used generally in listing data availability by that transmission protocol. This is of course exactly why the pigopolists ta
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Actually, torrent in French means the exact same thing as “torrent” in English as it comes from the Latin word torrens.
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Yes of course, everyone is downloading hundreds of gigabytes of Linux ISOs every month :)
I'm curious what this would actually mean in practice. Right now there's a ton of content removed due to automated DMCA complaints, and it seems like those won't be affected.
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Strike! (Score:5, Funny)
French musicians will now strike in the streets, blocking traffic and blaring awful music in protest.
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Be grateful they don't play bagpipes.
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I have heard the last few years' entries into the Eurovision Song Contest from France ... Bagpipes would be preferable.
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Tri Yann use them sometimes, though you could argue that they're about as French as the Welsh are English.
Re:Strike! (Score:4, Funny)
That's about as much of a threat as a strike at the DMV.
I kid you not, when some bureaucrats around here threatened a strike, the general sentiment was "You're gonna tell us or how are we gonna know when you start?"
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I thought you said they'd be striking.
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These organisations are not worthy of feeling anything for them. Essentially, if they drown the most they an have from me is a glass of water.
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These organisations are not worthy of feeling anything for them. Essentially, if they drown the most they an have from me is a glass of water.
I say water is to good for the MPAA. Drink the water then drown them with it after.
Comment removed (Score:3)
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Cut them some slack, they're French. They probably didn't even know there's any other language where that funny word "torrent" actually means something and isn't just some made up cute term.
Re: So you're telling me... (Score:2)
Probably more a question of old school businesses who just don't want to get it? There are too many of them in France and too much paper work and risk adversness to create a healthy startup culture.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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>Cut them some slack, they're French. They probably didn't even know there's any other language where that funny word "torrent" actually means something and isn't just some made up cute term.
Except that 'torrent' is, in fact, a French word. It means the exact same thing as in English. English got the word from French which in turn got it from Latin. Being of latin descent the word 'torrent' and close variations are common in over a dozen languages.
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Mais non, je peux aussi repondre a cela en francais.
Oder waere Deutsch angenehmer?
Preferiresti la risposta in Italiano?
I'll spare you Russian, /. still has issues with the Kyrillic alphabet and it feels weird to type Russian in Latin letters. And talking about it, my Latin sure isn't good enough anymore to even pretend I could answer you (though I should still be able to read it, mostly. You start forgetting if you don't need something for a while).
So, no, I do speak a few languages. Some of them more often
Re:Streaming (Score:4, Insightful)
Prepare (Score:3, Funny)
... for the torrent of angry musicians
moderator (Score:1)
So this moderator, manish (@srcref), posts a story from his former employer's site (Beta News) every day. The worst part is that this story is actually a second-hand copy-paste from TorrentFreak. And even worse is that no user has submitted this story, but has been shoved down our throats by this guy. Are you still looking for reasons why Slashdot is going down?
High court of Paris? (Score:3, Interesting)
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What is this "high court of Paris"? There is no court named like that in France. Is it Tribunal de Grande Instance de Paris? or Cour d'Appel de Paris? Or even Cour de Cassation, which is french supreme court?
See the NextImpact article (French) [nextinpact.com] : it is the "tribunal de grande instance de Paris".
As it lost, the SNEP has to pay €10,000 to Microsoft and as much to Google.
Anyone know... (Score:1)
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