LOKI TORRENT LAWSUIT :: A HOAX Written by: SharePro
As unknown facts continue to reveal themselves in the MPAA vs. LokiTorrent case, we feel a need to update the community with the following facts.
Please note: Attributing to the confusion surrounding this case, we have established that Ed Webber was not sued directly by the MPAA, rather was sued by individual media corporations such as Columbia, Disney, & Fox. Since the "MPAA" (Motion Picture Association of America) does not appear anywhere in the actual court filing, any search query for "MPAA" via the Texas Court Search Engine came up empty. In other words, the MPAA did not officially sue Ed Webber, rather the individual media companies, in a joint case, sued Ed Webber. We apologize for any confusion.
1) In several p2p interviews and on Lokitorrent.com website, Ed Webber accepted a responsibility to fight the MPAA in court on behalf of both his website(s) and the p2p community. By accepting such a task and responsibility, Ed Webber received not only the trust of millions of p2pr's worldwide, but also tens of thousands of dollars monthly to support legal fee's.
2) Ed Webber did not fight a case in court and it is doubtful whether he ever intended to. Mr. Webber settled his case in the preliminary stages of a court filing outside of court.
The title of our original article, "LOKITORRENT COURT CASE :: HOAX" is and remains to be TRUE. No judge or jury of our peers ever had the chance to review the facts of this case as it was never deliberated in a court of law. The "court order" is nothing more than a private agreement between the MPAA and Ed Webber, which was given legal standing by a judge.
Ed Webber knowingly manipulated the p2p community into donating a large amount of funds while during the same exact time, without the knowledge or agreement of the p2p community, closed a deal that potentially puts each and everyone of his supporting bit torrent community and website visiting members at risk.
During the time that Mr. Webber was accepting funds from the p2p community, and also instructing his lawyers to screw the p2p community, he also found time to try and secretly sell the domain on Sedo.com
On January 3, 2005, Slyck.com reported Lokitorrent.com required funds to support "legal fees". Most lawsuits, such as the Kazaa vs. RIAA case in California, take years to reveal themselves yet the p2p community was very willing to support this legal endeavor. Exactly one month after the Slyck.com article, all funds raised by Ed Webber via Lokitorrent.com were transferred to the MPAA.
3) Ed Webber accepted donations while in fact his lawyers were busy selling out the p2p file share community whose funds were being used to support the court case. Ed Webber failed to update the p2p community with the necessary details of the legal proceedings, thus everybody was left in the dark. We do not know the exact details of when or how Ed Webber and the MPAA made a deal, however, the fundraising began on January 3, 2005 and the deal between the MPAA vs. Ed Webber was signed by a judge on Feb 15, 2005.
It is assumed that the deal between Ed Webber and the MPAA deal was being "cooked" at least 30 days prior to the actual court order which means that Ed Webber began (from the get go) accepting funds from the p2p community when in fact he already knew that he was going to close a deal with the MPAA. In other words, Ed Webber committed FRAUD.
4) Ultimately, Ed Webber accepted the MPAA's position that BIT TORRENT sites are financially responsible for providing "illegal files" and folded before any legal lawsuit could realize themselves in a court of law. Ed, as trustee of tens of thousands of file sharers dollars, not only sold out the file share community that he represented, but also set a very dangerous precedent for future file share sites who are interested in encouraging community members to donate money to fight the RIAA & MPAA.
Mufftorrent.com and Websense.com continue to display their original website homepage features (without the torrents) while Lokitorrent.com & Torrentstop.com display an MPAA message warning potential file sharer's "you can click but you cant hide". At first this confused the best of us.
After reviewing Section 4, Article "(C)", of the LOKITORRENT AGREEMENT WITH MPAA, please note the following text: "Shall affirmatively monitor and patrol for, and preclude access to...". In other words, Ed Webber has agreed to become an affirmative informant for the MPAA. That explains why the site is still owned and controlled by Ed Webber.
Original Article about LokiTorrent.com
Quote:
LOKI TORRENT LAWSUIT :: A HOAX Written by: SharePro
At the end of December 2004, the RIAA and MPAA began an international rampage in efforts to close down major bit torrent and ed2k file sharing sites.
Some sites like Suprnova.org, Youceff.com, ShareTv.com, and others went down without a fight while other sites, including ShareConnector and Releases4U were closed down by authorities.
The lawsuits set off a wide spread of panic and dismay within the p2p community as many of the veteran ed2k and torrent contributing societys soon found themselves "homeless" and their works "confisquated" by investigative authorities.
During the turmoil, one such MPAA targeted Bit Torrent site claimed it was willing to stand up against the evil powers of motion picture media thugs by fighting the legal issues in a court of law. LokiTorrent.com began accepting donations from the p2p community to support what they called "necessary legal fee's".
According to a Slyck.com - January 3, 2005 (Slyck.com promoted people to donate to Loki Torrent), within two weeks (5 days public) of announcing their fund raising campaign, Loki Torrents was only $710.00 dollars away from reaching their initial goal. At the time of writing Slyck.com's initial article, Loki Torrent claimed to have raised an impressive $29,290.00 from the p2p community.
Today, just weeks after the initial Slyck.com interview with Edward Webber, owner of LokiTorrent.com, the entire p2p file share community is back in turmoil.
Quote:
A) Are the logs of Lokitorrent.com in the hands of the MPAA?
B) Where is the money that was donated to the legal fund?
C) Can P2P'rs who uploaded / downloaded torrents be tracked down via the logs.
The above and more were the initial questions most p2pr's had in mind when news broke that the MPAA had gained control of Loki Torrent.
As the writing of this article began to gain momentum, many inconsistencies began arising that clearly show that Lokitorrent is not in the hands of the MPAA (At least not because of a court order), nor we're the owners fined a million dollars.
1) LokiTorrent never provided the name or details of any lawyer representing the internet site. No federal judge's name has been listed anywhere throughout the so-called proceedings. Texas courts have no record of any filed judicial proceedings on behalf of the MPAA against Loki Torrent and/or Ed Webber.
2) During the same period of time that Loki was making tens of thousands of dollars monthly via donations, the owners of Loki Torrent were also actively trying to sell the domain. LokiTorrent.com for Sale :: Sedo.com
In effort to convince p2p'rs to continue donating and not to believe Loki's intent to sell, this is what the owner published in his defense:
If some guy offers me $75K for the domain name, he's more than welcome to it, and I'll simply move the site to a different domain. Selling the entire site will never happen. I have way too much of myself in this site to sell it for any price (well, 2 million could get me to part with it, lol.. but let's live in reality).
3) The only reports of this so-called "law suit" are based entirely on the front page of the LokiTorrent.com internet site. The MPAA and Texas Federal Court list no public record of a lawsuit nor is the MPAA or the courts willing to back up Lokitorrent claims of being ordered to hand over webserver ip logs and pay a 1 million dollar penalty. J. Borland of News.com (and other related news resources) apparently based their entire news articles by information received directly from Mr. Ed Webber (the owner of LokiTorrent.com). This information was received by calling Mr. Webber directly at telephone number (207) 752-3481.
4) Was LokiTorrent ever actually sued by the MPAA? According to the initial reports published via various websites, most people were led to have believed that the torrent site was "surrendered" to the MPAA.
According to a recent News.com article, Loki was alledgedly sued in Dallas, Texas federal court. Besides the testimony of the owner of Lokitorrent, no other information, public or private, can be found to establish the veracity of that statement.
A quick search to Texas Court RecordsDOES NOT reveal any court appearances or cases filed on behalf of the MPAA and/or Edward Webber, owner of Loki Torrent.
If LokiTorrent.com had been sued in Dallas Federal Courts, then some type of public record would appear. NO ONLINE RECORD APPEARS WHATSOEVER! ( Texas Court Search Engine )
5) While writing this report, a quick WHOIS for the ownership information of LokiTorrent.com reveals the following info:
Code:
Domain Name: lokitorrent.com IP: 216.32.85.114
Administrative Contact, Billing Contact, Technical Contact:
Webber, E admin@webbsense.com
WebbSense
PO Box 7662
Portland, ME 04112
US
Phone: +1.2077523481
Why would Edward Webber of LokiTorrent.com still appear as "owner" and "administrator" of Loki Torrent if in fact the MPAA had taken over the site?
Edward Webber is still in full control of Lokitorrent.com. As evidence, I submit the fact that Webbsense.com and Mufftorrent.com
(two additional domains that are registered to Edward Webber) are still ONLINE, and the ping traceroute traffic is directed to the same exact machine lokitorrent.com is hosted on (i.e. 216.32.85.114).
A fast ping / traceroute to the MPAA's official website reveals the hosting IP address MPAA.ORG (the official MPAA Site) to be 66.252.129.187 while the IP address of Lokitorrent.com is 216.32.85.114. In other words, the MPAA and LOKITORRENT are hosted at 2 different hosting locations several thousands of miles apart.
Loki Torrent is not hosted on the MPAA's network, thus the front page warning p2p'rs against file sharing currently posted at LOKITORRENT.COM is a HOAX. Lokitorrent.com is hosted in Washington DC at the ISP "SAWIS" while the MPAA is hosted just South of Glendale, California by Ware.Net
6) In there ongoing efforts to prevent file sharing, The RIAA / MPAA have become notorious for publishing the names and addresses of file shares and webmasters who they sue. The MPAA has not mentioned one single word in any public news release. Official MPAA Internet Site :: Press Releases
While writing this article, it soon became very apparent that besides Ed Webber's claim to have been sued by the MPAA, there is absolutely no public evidence to back up or substantiate his claims. No court records, no MPAA publicity news releases, no federal judge's name on court orders, etc. All we have to go on is Lokitorrent.com hosting a front page "scare tactic" website that Ed Webber hosts on his personal servers. Ed Webber is paying for the bandwidth on behalf of the MPAA? Nah, that doesn't even sound right. Ed Webber allowed the MPAA to re-design his website and then host LokiTorrent as if its a anti p2p site on his own servers? Nah, that doesnt even make sense.
The fact that Lokitorrent.com is still registered under the name Ed Webber and the fact that this and other torrent sites under his name are still hosted on his personal machines have convinced the best of us that this is nothing more than a dirty hoax and that nothing was confisquated or surrendered.
As one top Texas lawyer kindly put it "Dallas courts have no presidence in this case because Lokitorrent.com was never hosted on Texas ISP servers. The owner of Lokitorrent is not a resident of Texas, and the MPAA's main offices are not in Texas. The MPAA has no reason in the world to sue in Dallas, but even if they did have presidence and sued in Dallas, you can be sure that the due dilligence on a case like this would take years. No way in the world could the MPAA have won a court case of this magnitude in just one month"
Quote:
"It seems that the owner of LokiTorrent decided to take the donation money and run, and to cover his tracks, scare the hell out of the entire p2p community. The scare tactic was probably nothing but a decoy to convince intelligent people not to ask the right questions". - Anonymous Filesharer
Last edited by SharePro on Fri Feb 25, 2005 12:50 pm; edited 3 times in total
NeverOne Contributor
Joined: Dec 19, 2004
Posts: 177
Posted:
Mon Feb 21, 2005 1:06 am
must hand it out to Lokitorrent for useing there own community, there own memebers and so on to make fast money.
i wonder how many other sites will accompany this "scam"
RIAA/MPAA name semes to come in handy for this kind of scam.
i wonder however, how would Loki memebers act on this info after donateing money?
job well done SP!
nigenet Newbie
Joined: Feb 23, 2005
Posts: 1
Posted:
Wed Feb 23, 2005 12:36 pm
Not quite true that MPAA have made no statement regarding LokiTorrent. There is a press release on their website, but not in the most obvious place. To be honest, theirs is not a very good or intuitive site. Anyway, they say "One such site that will no longer exist is LokiTorrent—one of the largest BitTorrent host servers. The operator of that site, Edward Webber, agreed to not only pay a substantial settlement with even greater financial penalties for any further such actions, but by Court Order must provide the MPAA with access to and copies of all logs and server data related to his illegal BitTorrent activities, which will provide a roadmap to others who have used LokiTorrent to engage in illegal activities." (full press release at: http://mpaa.org/CurrentReleases/2005_02_10_BitTorrentLokitorrent.doc - an M$ Word document). All still sounds a little too quick for me though, suggesting there was an out-of-court settlement, but then how could there be a court order? Of course, IANAL...
Cheers,
Nige
SharePro Site Admin
Joined: Dec 16, 2004
Posts: 414
Posted:
Wed Feb 23, 2005 3:03 pm
I must have missed that Microsoft Document as it is not posted directly on there website. That article doesnt change anything. There is no mention of a million dollar settlement. It says he "agreed" (which means that the dealings with the MPAA never reached court).
Last week, I googled up a couple of lawyers telephone numbers to try and get info. Some of the lawyers didnt want to offer info on a case they knew nothing about to a total stranger on the phone. I finally found a leading Dallas intellectual property lawyer who was real cool on the phone and provided all the leads to check the veracity of this lawsuit. There was no lawsuit filed or deliberated in court.
Ed Webber still owns and controls the Lokitorrent.com , mufftorrent.com and other torrent domains. They are not in the hands of the MPAA and never were.
Ed Webber still appears as the WHOIS adminstrational contact and owner for the website. Additionally, there is no link on Lokitorrent.com to the MPAA.
What lawyer defended him? What's the name of the judge who made the order to surrender the logs and possibly infringe on peoples privacy? Why was the domain secretly offered for sale on sedo.com while money was being collected via donations? (I say "secretly" because if Lokitorrent.com wanted to sell out, then they should not have taken donations and also, they should have offered the domain for sale on their own site instead of a 3rd party site). The reality is the law suit, as I said in the article is a HOAX.
You need a judge, a lawyer, a public filing at the court house, afidavits and protocols to have a lawsuit. Anything less is either a hoax, or a private deal (in which case Ed should have first notified the community he took money from).
Dealings with the MPAA may or may not be. I dont know. What I do know is that Lokitorrent.com is not hosted on the MPAA's network thus it makes me wonder who the hell re-designed Lokitorrent.com with the MPAA's bullshit scare tactic?
Afterall, Lokitorrent.com is still hosted on Ed's private servers and that much I did prove.
DaddySlipDisk Newbie
Joined: Feb 23, 2005
Posts: 1
Posted:
Wed Feb 23, 2005 4:01 pm
Personally I think that the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Obviously as seen here, we were able to locate an article on the MPAA website regarding LokiTorrent, but the details of which are sketchy. It looks as if Ed Webber was very concerned about the possibility of legal ramifications and decided to inform people that this was further along than it actually was. On the flip side, the reality truly is that running/owning a torrent site is very dangerous legal-wise and it equates to potential HUGE fines and/or jail-time. $30K is peanuts compared to what someone running a torrent site should be earning if not only being compensated for the potential risks.
Now IF this really is a scam, Ed has pulled off a good hoax. The only victims of which however are people like us that are downloading thousands of dollars worth of videos, music, and software for free. So in essence, it's a case of the pot calling the kettle black.
The only thing that concerns me is the link to the sale of the lokitorrent domain that SP provided. That really is the smoking gun here. But as far as the hoax is concerned, it's a matter of a dishonest person ripping off other dishonest people. Because whether you justify it as "trying before you buy", "putting it to the man", or whatever the excuses we come up with, there really are programmers, musicians and artists behind the scenes who deserve to be paid for their work.
In Ed's case, karma will always come back around. For those that bought into Ed's scam, you paid for what you got (or downloaded as the case may be). Hail to the leechers...
mystique Earthreactor Addict
Joined: Dec 23, 2004
Posts: 262
Posted:
Wed Feb 23, 2005 9:46 pm
DaddySlipDisk wrote:
For those that bought into Ed's scam, you paid for what you got (or downloaded as the case may be). Hail to the leechers...
that's a very jaded way of looking at it, DSD . . . had the people "paid for what they got", I would think that their money would have gone to the programmers, musicians, and artists that created the material . . . not to some unconnected third party who intentionally misled the people into believing their money was helping to preserve p2p for future users.
I feel very strongly in preserving a right that I've enjoyed immensely since the beginning of p2p. Contrary to what you've indicated, I don't believe that I've taken money out of anyone's pocket, but rather am simply utilizing a new tool to do virtually the same thing that I've done in the privacy of my own home for years with my vcr and even my tape recorder. I don't do the black market thing and in fact am very much against anyone making money from the sharing of files between two individuals. If I really like something, then I buy it . . . I assure you there is nothing that I've downloaded that I would have purchased had it not been available through p2p; therefore I can't see how the artists, programmers, or musicians could possibly accuse me of stealing from them.
Last edited by mystique on Wed Feb 23, 2005 11:56 pm; edited 1 time in total
SharePro Site Admin
Joined: Dec 16, 2004
Posts: 414
Posted:
Wed Feb 23, 2005 10:57 pm
mystique wrote:
DaddySlipDisk wrote:
For those that bought into Ed's scam, you paid for what you got (or downloaded as the case may be). Hail to the leechers...
that's a very jaded way of looking at it, DSD . . . had the people "paid for what they got", I would think that their money would have gone to the programmers, musicians, and artists that created the material . . . not to some unconnected third party who intentionally misled the people into believing their money was helping to preserve p2p for future users.
I feel very strongly in preserving a right that I've enjoyed immensely since the beginning of p2p. Contrary to what you've indicated, I don't believe that I've taken money out of anyone's pocket, but rather am simply utilizing a new tool to do virtually the same thing that I've done in the privacy of my own home for years with my vcr and even my tape recorder. I don't do the black market thing and in fact am very much against anyone making money from the sharing of files between two individuals. If I really like something, then I buy it . . . I assure you there is nothing that I've downloaded that I would have purchased had it not been available through p2p; therefore I can't see how the artists, programmers, or musicians could possibly accuse me of stealing from them.
Donating to a site for bandwidth is one thing. Sure, we all need the money to pay for hard drives, servers, bandwidth, ISP bills, etc.
This can cost a hundred to a couple thousand a month. All depends on what type of a system you have, bandwidth required, and how many machines.
But asking for money for legal fee's and then either pocketing the money or even worse then that, closing a deal with the MPAA without the knowledge of the p2pr's (worse then that, if what is said is true, Ed made an out of court agreement to sell out his users by providing logs without even going to court and then pays the MPAA off with the users money!)
Is that fucking perverse or what?
There never was any court trial or orders. Thats for sure. We're only discussing whether or not he ran off with the money or used the peoples donatation money to pay the MPAA.
If he uses the same donation money to pay back the MPAA, and also is ratting out those same people who donated, then that really is fucking a new low for shitty morality and ethics. Only the MPAA lawyers could think up something so fucking devious like that.
But I still dont believe shit. I dont believe the MPAA and I dont believe his words either.
mystique Earthreactor Addict
Joined: Dec 23, 2004
Posts: 262
Posted:
Wed Feb 23, 2005 11:55 pm
sharepro wrote:
Donating to a site for bandwidth is one thing. Sure, we all need the money to pay for hard drives, servers, bandwidth, ISP bills, etc.
a great mind once said: "P2P is not about being the Salvation Army. Its about CONTRIBUTING. We've put out a lot of money in resources and while this is a NON PROFIT society, that doesnt mean we dont need operational funds."
if I owned a p2p site, you can bet I'd ask for donations to help cover the expenses too!
trecital Newbie
Joined: Feb 24, 2005
Posts: 5
Posted:
Thu Feb 24, 2005 8:15 pm
One of the worst aspects of this whole affair (no matter what the truth actually is) is the bad effect this story will no doubt have on peoples willingness to donate to p2p sites.
Those that genuinely need the money to maintain the site could suffer. And thats an effect that RIAA/MPAA will definitely try to encourage.
Clicking on google ads etc will cost nothing but a small amount of time, and will not leave you worrying about being duped.
So off to click some ads right now.
Newby Newbie
Joined: Feb 25, 2005
Posts: 1
Posted:
Fri Feb 25, 2005 2:10 am
You sir, confirmed my suspicion of LokiTorrent's "legal fee donation" scam.
Thank you very much for the read. :)
jcgratz Newbie
Joined: Feb 25, 2005
Posts: 1
Posted:
Fri Feb 25, 2005 2:31 am
The suit is real and appears in Northern District of Texas federal court records. It's case number 3:04-cv-02642. I've downloaded the MPAA's complaint and the judge's order entering the parties' settlement and posted the PDFs on my blog:
It does exist on line.
I'm looking at the docketing sheet right now.
3:04-cv-02642
Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc et al v. Edward Webber
Someone didn't check their facts.
I would provide linkage but you need an account to view it.
https://ecf.txnd.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/login.pl [uscourts.gov]
1) The judge's name can be found in the docket sheets that have been linked to in previous posts. Docket sheets are also available here: http://unicast.org/stuff/lokitorrent/ (Click on the numbers)
3) Just wondering, why are you posting his phone number? If you are hoping that people will call him as a form of revenge, that is a rather low tactic.
4) Did you simply type his name into the Texas Court Records search box that appears on the website? Just making sure, you know that box only searches the website, and not the database of court records, right?
5) Both Webbsense.com and Mufftorrent.com state on their homepage that they are down due to legal issues. So yes, you can access the homepage, but they are effectively inoperative. A check with Google cache shows that this has been true for some time now.
Also, LokiTorrent does not need to be hosted on the MPAA network in order for the MPAA to change the content on it. If LokiTorrent was hosted by a server company (you say the ISP named Sawis), it would not make any sense whatsoever for the MPAA to take control of the entire company, or the entire server on which LokiTorrent was hosted.
6) See link in previous post for MPAA's official announcement
As people have pointed out, numerous public evidences exist, including court documents and MPAA official announcements.
You say that the page is hosted by Sawis, but then state that the site was hosted on his personal machines. This is contradictory.
You cite a Texas lawyer, but don't give a name. You also quote an anonymous filesharer. Fascinating.
Last edited by IdntUnknwn on Fri Feb 25, 2005 11:16 am; edited 1 time in total
hamacles Newbie
Joined: Feb 25, 2005
Posts: 1
Posted:
Fri Feb 25, 2005 5:10 am
sharepro wrote:
Ed Webber still owns and controls the Lokitorrent.com , mufftorrent.com and other torrent domains. They are not in the hands of the MPAA and never were.
Ed Webber still appears as the WHOIS adminstrational contact and owner for the website. Additionally, there is no link on Lokitorrent.com to the MPAA.
Afterall, Lokitorrent.com is still hosted on Ed's private servers and that much I did prove.
Have you? The fact that he still owns the domain lokitorrent.com does not mean he owns the server that the site which www.lokitorrent.com points to is running on.
www.lokitorrent.com currently resolves to 216.32.85.114, which is owned by Layered Technologies, a hosting company.
I also happen to know for a fact that on the first day I found out about the site going down, a friend I mentioned it to couldn't view the site directly, because the DNS change hadn't propagated to his network yet. So, although I'm afraid I don't have the old IP address, I do know that it changed when the site changed.
dmcbride Newbie
Joined: Feb 25, 2005
Posts: 1
Posted:
Fri Feb 25, 2005 6:01 am
ahahahahahahahaha
sharepro needs to actually do a little researching I think.
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