New wave of Torrent lawsuits
After second week spent by skiing down mountains in Austria, Switzerland and Italy I’m back to bring you some new information. The first and probably most important is about new antipiracy attack of MPAA against many torrent and emule sites. On tuesday was taken offline famous eMule server Razorback2 by Belgian Police, in conjunction with the MPAA. On 23rd, the MPAA has announced a tremendous escalation in their fight against online piracy - this time targeting BitTorrent, eDonkey2000 and Newsgroup NZB indexing sites. More from Slyck, focusing on torrent sites:
In all, nine indexing sites have been targeted (Isohunt.com, BTHub.com and TorrentBox.com all owned by one individual.) BitTorrent: ISOHunt, TorrentSpy, NiteShadow.com, BTHub.com and TorrentBox.com; eDonkey2000: Ed2k-It.com; Newsgroups: NZB-Zone.com, BinNews.com and DVDRs.net. The operators of these indexing sites appear surprised at the MPAA’s decision to sue, as they have yet to receive any notification.
“Funny, they didn’t email me,â€? Gary from ISOHunt said. “I’m not too concerned because we deal with copyright requests everyday, some of them from studios MPAA represents.â€? “Justinâ€? from TorrentSpy echoed Gary’s skepticism. “I guess I will learn more when I see what they have filed exactly. [I’m] not sure why they are suing when we comply with DMCA requests but I guess we will learn more down the road.â€?
A point to consider is TorrentSpy and ISOHunt are search engines - not trackers. Their role in the BitTorrent community is considerably different from previous lawsuit recipients such as the trackers EliteTorrents and LokiTorrent.
“We haven’t had a case that really tests the case of whether providing an indexing service by itself an infringement,” von Lohmann said. How the above mentioned indexing sites will react remains unclear, considering they have yet to actually receive the complaint. While large scale sweeps such as this typically happen once per year, the major difference this time is the inclusion of Newsgroup indexing servers – a radical departure from typical copyright enforcement actions.
So it looks we may have small problems with NewTorrents.info. This site isn’t as big as TorrentSpy or Isohunt, but still quite famous and popular. The main difference is that both of these are US located and we aren’t. The thing is, that they are still running without any change or difference, and they haven’t been even contacted by MPAA. Isohunt experienced some problems with MPAA already, but is working fine now. I’ve been always thinking that these organizations focus on trackers - and we are not tracker, we are just indexing site targeted on specific kind of torrents. I’ve not received any letter connected with this action, so I hope it will be OK. You can read MPAA press release commenting the situation. Stay connected to be more informed about this situation…
interesting how they are targetting isohunt and torrentspy but then again, they are very large and public.
they are knocking out some mass public access but not solveing there main problem of where to cut off the sources.
How does this make you feel Martin? you have 2 sites now with newtorrents getting more and more popular, do you receive many warnings every week?
How would you react if MPAA or other organisations put you in the spotlight like “Gary” from isohunt.
If you dont mind answering that is..
MPAA are weird. how come they want to bust free public torrent sites but dont do shit about sites that blatantly sell bootleg goods with economic profit in mind (like f.ex. http://www.catchmovie.com)
i dont think i got two torrent sites at the moment, this one is quite small and is more weblog than some torrent dump. i haven’t received any letter from MPAA or RIAA in last 1 year, only something from MS and few others, and we always cooperated to make both sides satisfied. and of course, if i would feel somehow in danger, i would close it, because my personal security is much more important for me…
other thing is that although these sites are on MPAA’s list, their admins haven’t been contacted by RIAA and are still running. it happened year ago when lokitorrent was closed by antip2p organizations’ pressure and then few others died too. but as always, now we got even more and better sites like mininova running. they can’t stop it…
Why is MPAA shuting down this free torrent sites and do shit abou sites that u have to pay for files?
i dont wanna mess the with the atmosphere here but when i look at all the torrent sites across the web and imagine that these sites i know were only the tip of the iceberg..man illegal filesharing of copyrighted material has become a huge business. last month i finally upgraded from 64k to 6MB connection. one week later i had downloaded almost 100gigibyte of all kind of stuff that i never payed for. I feel guilty cuz i know that its not right to steal this stuff but…i dont know. how could this happen…
100GB… that’s quite a lot… the thing is whether you will ever use or install all of this stuff. i don’t like all these p2p kids who download everything just because they must have everything and they never install or use it. when I download something, I’m 100% sure I need it and if it’s really good, I buy it - that’s case of some dictionaries, video editing software or photoshop. I’m also author of few applications so I know how hard is to make something really good. But yeah, its much more easier to find it on the net than order in some shop
Looks like the end could be closing in…….
Suprnova are gone.
Unrealtorrents have just closed by the look of it, although that was financial rather than MPAA related, apparently.
The MPAA are definitely starting to attack Bittorrent now though.
ISOhunt will be gone any day.
Well, it was all too good to last.
Be interesting to see what they’re going to do about the newsgroups.
Also there will be a huge resurgence of hard-copy pirating (not that it isn’t already strong).
Looks like “Niteshdw.com” (tracker) is up the creek as well………
I like your website I will share this with friends