You would think that Titan would incur far greater legal liability by showing a fisting scene to a twelve year-old than any possible benefit from mislabeling.

i hope someone fights and a judge sees what these dicks are doing

I see what you did there.

Its also bad form to not put in your complaint that the files were mis-labelled, thereby deceiving the Judge as to what realy happended.

I wish this wasn’t tragic, so I could find it fucking hilarious, out of context.

It’s trivially easy to fake digital information like this, so it is, to me, hard to justify relying on the copyright holder to provide evidence to the court that someone was infringing. Given the massive fines for violations, copyright holders would have a pretty big incentive to lie about such things.

Imagine how frustrating it would be to be on the receiving end of an accusation that six months ago your IP was sharing some protected porn title disguised as a well-known open-source software package, and that the proof of this infringing act is a nothing more than a sworn statement by an agent of the accuser, both of whom stand to gain several thousand dollars if they win the suit or if you settle out of court to avoid the defense costs.

I’d be more embarrassed about listening to dire straits than watching gay porn.

Hey! I resemble that comment!

“We’re the sultans of swing…”

*listens to Ryuichi Sakamoto’s “Energy Flow”* Wow, this guy makes beautiful music! The things I find while reading blog items about gay porn… ;)

When I started reading the article I thought, that’s par for the course with media companies; but when I got to the part where they’re spoofing Sakamoto, it got personal. On the other hand, perhaps this should be looked at as free publicity. Now a whole bunch of people will get to hear of him that otherwise never would have.

Also I recommend checking out his older material with Yellow Magic Orchestra.

There are also far more instances of copyright infringement of our content than we could ever hope to keep up with. We don’t need to generate them.

Incidentally, the name on a torrent file is of basically zero concern to us, as we use a sophisticated digital fingerprint to track down illegal use.

Simply renaming the file does not remove the copyright. Whether your intent is download “Barney’s Birthday Greetings” or “Folsom Filth” you are infringing the rights of someone. In this case, it happened to be us.

~Aaron Zolkin
IT Manager
Titan Media

He’s done a ton of excellent soundtracks.

Unaware of this change, I download the file. And you believe this action alone constitutes a copyright infringement severe enough to sue the sh*t out of me? How did that meeting go?

“Hey Aaron. We got some people downloading our pr0n.”

“Well, lets sue em…”

“But there’s a thing, the file… it wasn’t labeled as our pr0n”

“So they didn’t actually know they were downloading our stuff?”

“Ehrr, no man”

“They weren’t actually intentionally infringing our copyright?”

“Nope”

“A f*ck it, we got lawyers on staff. Sue em anyway”

Dude, an infringement, like all crime, needs intent. I wreck your car with my baseball bat: intent makes it vandalism, which is a crime. I blow a tire and crash into the same car: no intent, makes it an accident, which is not a crime. okay, so what about damages? Dude, for 1600 bucks (the initial demand) I could make MY OWN porn movie. Sh*t, I’d could probably wreck your car! This thing is just unreasonable. Simple as that.

If a media company seeds one of their torrents, deliberately, whether for a honeypot or to ‘leak’ something and generate buzz, does that in effect grant implied permission for people to download it (and in the case of torrents, upload it)?

Likewise, let’s say I had a stereo system, that’s completely mine, legally, but for whatever reason, I don’t want it. So I find somebody on the street and say, “Here, you want this? $10.” A reasonable person might assume it was stolen, but it wasn’t. So they can’t be charged (or can they?) with receiving stolen property.

So if a media company puts a movie they own all the rights to out on the internet as a torrent saying, “here, download this and share it”, isn’t that the same thing, whether they think it’s put out by a pirate or not?

How funny is “honeypot” in this context?

What I can answer unequivocally is the question of the headline: “Is Titan Media mislabelling gay porn torrents to make it easier to blackmail downloaders?”

The answer is “No.”