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Alleged founder of world’s largest BitTorrent distribution site arrested

arstechnica.com

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Re: Alleged founder of world’s largest BitTorrent distribution site arrested

#321

Post by antisthenes »

dmix wrote: post #307
mthoms wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So is the drug war. It all depends on where you're standing.

Prisons, lawyers, judges, social workers running drug rehab programs, feds (DEA, FBI), local police, defense industry selling helicopters, airplanes, surveillance technology, etc, etc. An unthinkable amount of money has been spent and made from the drug war for highly questionable ROI to the public. What type of reduction in police work would take place if the drug war was ended today? 20%? 30%? The war on drugs is a…

> highly questionable ROI to the public

Only if you exclude people working for the public sector from you know, the public.

Those things create jobs for voting constituents. That's the main ROI here. Reduction in crime, drug use and increased security are just beneficial, but not necessary side effects of these initiatives.

Re: Alleged founder of world’s largest BitTorrent distribution site arrested

#322

Post by pbhjpbhj »

MichaelGG wrote: post #206
CyberDildonics wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only can bitcoin be tumbled, but think about the scenario where it is exchanged for another crypto-currency like litecoin then exchanged for bitcoin at another site, then exchanged for cash. Good luck tracing that.

> Good luck tracing that Subpoena the trading sites? An active adversary would be running the trading sites, though I doubt they'd waste that info on a low-level case. LocalBitcoins says they retain all messages for 180 days, up from their previous 90. Is that purely for internal disputes? Sure, if you're not doing anything illegal enough, you can get away with simply using sites in multiple jurisdictions and hoping…

>"LocalBitcoins says they retain all messages for 180 days" //

Can't you just wait longer than 180 days then? The investigators then subpoena for the transaction records to link it all back together and the records longer exist (in theory).

Re: Alleged founder of world’s largest BitTorrent distribution site arrested

#323

Post by pbhjpbhj »

blowski wrote: post #176
nikdaheratik wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an American living in Australia, I'd say your perspective is kind of skewed by the American market. A large number of torrenters aren't cheapskates or thieves but are from outside the U.S. and unable to even get ahold of this stuff due to the way licensing overseas works. Or if they do, it's at 1.5x-2.5x the price. We have a 21st century distribution model tied to a mid-20th century legal framework and business mo…

I'll give some more examples of use cases where the torrent system serves users better than the legal distribution, but has nothing to do with money. My wife is Brazilian and I'm British, so we're trying to bring our son up as bilingual. Trying to find legally distributed mainstream kids films dubbed in Portuguese is incredibly hard. Sure, you can buy them in Brazil... and then they don't play on hardware in the UK.…

Similarly in the UK - if [!] our DVD player broke, someone might torrent the content we've paid for when we bought the DVDs on our shelf here.

Of course that may be a tortuous infringement. In the UK we briefly had a right to format shift but the media corps managed to kill that breakout of common sense pretty quickly.

We're in a pretty ridiculous legal situation again now, https://torrentfreak.com/itunes-is-illegal-under-uk-copyrigh... - ripping a CD you own is considered copyright infringement. It's moronic, there's no way the public would ever vote for this situation.

If such format shifting were to happen, I don't see what could possibly considered morally wrong about it?

Re: Alleged founder of world’s largest BitTorrent distribution site arrested

#324

Post by aerovistae »

dmix wrote: post #305
cookiecaper wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While this comment and its siblings do mention methods that can, in theory, be used to launder bitcoin, it's still really difficult to do it correctly. People vastly overestimate the privacy benefits of bitcoin. In many practical cases, bitcoin is probably one of the least private ways to get payment; every transaction is publicly recorded and can easily be traced through the blockchain without subpoena, warrant, soc…

> This is a treasure trove for law enforcement and will likely allow them to find criminals that never would've otherwise appeared on their radar. If this was the case then why has it never been used as a means to catch someone so far? There have been hundreds of darknet related arrests and none have been related to bitcoin. Pretty much every other investigative means is easier than tracking down bitcoin like that.

Give it time. Bitcoin's still pretty new. I don't think law enforcement is quite on top of it yet, if I had to guess.

Re: Alleged founder of world’s largest BitTorrent distribution site arrested

#325

Post by pbhjpbhj »

CM30 wrote: post #264
tomp wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main difference is that Zara uses piracy to earn money, whereas most other pirates don't. That's the general model of copyright that I support - it's legal to copy anything for non-commercial use.

Don't most torrent sites run advertising? Yes some of that likely goes to maintain the server, but I doubt it all does in most cases. A lot of sites distributing content like this are set up as for profit ventures.

What's the problem with making a profit from the legal provision of information? They're not infringing copyright themselves anymore than Google are - put "torrent $mediaName" (eg https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=torrent+mad+max+hash&oq=to...) in to Google and you can get all you need to torrent that film.

Re: Alleged founder of world’s largest BitTorrent distribution site arrested

#327

Post by pbhjpbhj »

derefr wrote: post #19

It seems like a lot of the most well-known pseudo-legal BitTorrent "groups" (PopcornTime, YIFY, ISOHunt, now Kat) turn out to be one-man shops, and as such, just completely dissolve as soon as their owner crosses paths with law enforcement. In some cases, these services are integral enough to the "scene" to be brought back by others. But other times, everything just stops for a while. This seems like a bus-factor pro…

Copyright infringement isn't a tort in San Marino, nor Ethiopia AFAIK, setting up there would seemingly put you beyond legal obstructions.

USA government always have a way though, there's no way either place would stand up for their own citizens once the USA start threatening sanctions.

Re: Alleged founder of world’s largest BitTorrent distribution site arrested

#329

Post by pbhjpbhj »

6nf wrote: post #111
joering2 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any good examples of when this works the other way around? A US citizen being extradited to another country for non-violent crimes? Something in tune of computer hacking or hosting a website? Other than drugs and murders, I have a hard time believing US govt to give out its citizens to third parties...

The USA will not extradite someone for a crime that is not also a crime in the USA itself.

They will cause people to be extradited from countries where the actions weren't criminal ... what sort they dish to arrange those one-sides extradition treaties I wonder.

This sort of hypocrisy seems pretty immoral.

Re: Alleged founder of world’s largest BitTorrent distribution site arrested

#330

Post by pbhjpbhj »

blastrat wrote: post #314
DanBC wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> extradition treaties are reciprocal, no country is going to extradite its citizens if the other country won't extradite theirs in return. That's not quite accurate. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-16041824 > A critical test set out in the treaty is that the British request must include "such information as would provide a reasonable basis to believe that the person sought committed the offence for which extra…

thanks for that, interesting article! but your quotes are a little selective and tell only one side of the story of that more nuanced article, I think leaving a deep misimpression for readers here on HN. another quote from the article says "a Home Office-commissioned independent review...found the US had not refused any extradition requests since the treaty came into force. A total of seven US requests were refused b…

>"if the US complied in the other direction as the UK does, the UK courts would grant more of the extradition requests." //

You seem to have put a lot of weight on the numbers here. Do you know the total number of requests on both sides? Without that we can't really ascribe meaning to the refusal of 7 requests by the UK.

Even then we don't know if, for example, the UK seek tacit agreement before entering a request, which would account for no official refusals by the USA.

All I really know that's pertinent is there was an extradition of a young website operator who hadn't broken UK law (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_O%27Dwyer) and had never left the UK, not even was hosting content in the USA - any cases like that happen in the USA?

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