More MPAA witch hunt madness with news that some of the major BitTorrent sites are shutting down for the first time due to legal action for copyright infringement.
Last week the MPAA launched worldwide legal actions against people and groups who run the infrastructure for the BitTorrent networks. These networks are used to distribute files by copying small chunks of a file from different sites at the same time, this allows a user who is downloading a file to share the part he has downloaded to other users to download. It means there’s not a central location for the storage of the files, merely a place to store the tag to allow you to begin sharing the file.
BitTorrent, a computer program designed to distribute large files efficiently, has grown quickly in popularity this year, and now accounts for more than a third of all traffic on the Internet, according to network monitoring company Cachelogic. Much of this traffic was dedicated to full-length, high-quality movies and software.
Personally, unless there is hard evidence to say otherwise I feel that last statement is anecdotal and very reminiscent of the UK anti-pirating statement that revenue of pirated movie sales goes to organised crime and drug gangs. Surely the main use will be pornography, not that I would know anything about that!
One of the leaders in the BitTorrent hosting stakes was Suprnova, according to Xinhua, China View news:
A statement post on the SuprNova site read, “We do not know if SuprNova is going to return, but it is certainly not going to be hosting any more torrent links,” and “we are very sorry for this, but there was no other way, we have tried everything.”
Another site that carried BitTorrent links, N4p.com, said it had shut down due to a civil complaint that cited the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
It’s a good article and balances the story of the MPAA’s success with what is always the case with the criminalising of an act which the public do not see as criminal offence.
The disappearance of the big sites is unlikely to eliminate BitTorrent swapping altogether, but it does bring to a close an era of operating in the open without fear of legal reprisals. The resulting shift to the underground will likely make files harder to find, as traders move onto private networks or smaller communities, technology news magazine CNET reported.
Exactly. Now it goes underground and the sharing continues, if not increases, making it impossible for the MPAA to track and shutdown, so much so that they will start pouring millions into the act of hunting the sites down and closing them off, and all the time the movie go-er will be paying. Oh, and in case you are unsure where my sympathies are it’s with the movie go-er and not at all with the MPAA.
The file sharing community can now thank the MPAA for the added advertising, and let’s just watch that CNET report for the increase in sharing traffic. I’m with John on this, if only the MPAA had concentrated on exploiting the technologies instead of fighting them, embrace the music industry model or just deal with that fact that there is piracy, that’s not the problem in your over inflated salary business.
