RIAA/MPAA hit men private enforcement site indexed by Google

Salim sez, "Techdirt are reporting that the data collection systems ued by BayTSP (the company appointed by the RIAA and MPAA to deal with p2p infringers) is wide-open. Thanks to BayTSP's inability to write a robots.txt file, Google has indexed just about every page on their server. You can get a good idea of the kinds of things that the company are seanding C&Ds for, including items like this which are neither movies nor music. Techdirt suggest that this information might be used by phishers seeking to impersonate BayTSP, however a more obvious notion is that it could be used by law-firms who want to know the names of everybody that BayTSP has threatened. A smart lawyer could make a great deal of money from a class-action."

Thanks, Sal!)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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@#5

use “google cache” :)

eg.
http://74.125.77.132/search?q=cache:43avZZWQ8fkJ:webreply.baytsp.com/webreply/webreply.jsp%3Fcustomerid%3D131%26commhash%3Daf36fb1762bc84fd3c98ef8121147003+%22infringement+information%22+site:baytsp.com&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk
demidan

ooooooH, fun hehehe
pyrmontvillage

Is there anything out publicly by RIAA about this?
Anonymous

heh, that infringer’s IP (from the link) is a high school in Taiwan:

210.70.62.168 = [ ]

(Asked whois.twnic.net:43 about 210.70.62.168)

PROVINICAL KEE-LUNG VOCATIONAL HIGH SCHOOL
Netname: KLCIVS.KL-NET (KEELUNG Taiwan; TW)
Anonymous

Looks like it’s gone from google cache now as well. :(
dculberson

I assume that the Audacity of Hope is the audio book version, hence RIAA’s involvement. I don’t know if that makes sense, though, just an idea.
Slicklines

I’m sure this has been discussed before, but my question is: How much are these goons spending on all this tracking that 1) Doesn’t stop anyone, 2) Appears to be a security nightmare, and 3) Makes themselves, not to mention the very material they are trying to market, wildly unpopular?
Garbanzo

Barack Obama The Audacity Of Hope.zip could contain anything. It could be that a student in Taiwan didn’t realize he left his homework in his eDonkey share folder.
Anonymous

The Customer IDs appear to be a series of consecutive integers. The URL is validated by an MD5 checksum… what if that checksum were based on something stupid… such as the ID? We’d be able to read the whole thing.

:-)

Sal
Anonymous

“Hulk vs.” is the VERY FIRST THING? Ruh-roh.
TheCrawNotTheCraw

The premise that because this company did not write a “correct” robots.txt file, it was indexed is itself incorrect.

robots.txt serves an *advisory* purpose, which *requests* that compliant search engines do not index (parts of) the site.

It does not prohibit or prevent *non-compliant* search engines from doing whatever they choose to do.

I am not accusing Google of doing anything inappropriate. I’m just saying, the purpose of robots.txt is not to absolutely prevent search engines from indexing the site. It’s a hint or request, not a padlock.

If you *really* want parts of your site to be off-limits (or to not be searched by specific search engines who are willing to comply with your request), there are other ways to do that, e.g. directory and file permissions (chmod), .htaccess, authentication, etc.
Anonymous

Is anyone (wikileaks) copying this? The site looks like it’s down, but google cache is still up.
Anonymous

In the FAQ; “I donâ€™t recognize the title of the material listed as infringed. Is it a movie, a game, or something else?”

Isn’t that a good sign that if they are frequently asked that, then they frequently target the wrong person?
Anonymous

Looks like the links come from random people posting about the notices in forums. I did searches on a few of the URLs and found forums linking to them.
Anonymous

actually, the riaa doesn’t use baytsp…
DWittSF

Be ready for high dudgeon from the **AA spin mill:

OMG we’ve been hacked by pirates!!!!!!!
johnphantom

Seems that baytsp.com has fixed the issue.

Anybody have a mirror?
Anonymous

All of those links have little buttons where you can “resolve” the issue by saying you took down the material.

How hard would it be to write a script that will cycle through all of those pages and click the “I got rid of the stuff, honest to moses” button for all of them?