Sentenced to 5 months of prison for running tracker
Grant T. Stanley, the man behind the Elite Torrents BitTorrent tracker that came under fire last year for posting a print of Star Wars Episode 3 before the film’s theatrical release, will spend five months in jail for his role in running the site. U.S. District Court Judge James P. Jones has sentenced Stanley to a five-month prison term plus five months of house arrest, a $3,000 fine, and three years of “supervised release.”
In other news, four out of eight administrators of the Finnish BitTorrent tracker ‘Finreactor’ have been declared guilty in court and have to pay damages totaling 60,000 dollars each. The lawsuit against Finreactor has just come to a close. This is believed to be only the first of many filed against the site. Three of the four administrators found guilty are under the age of 18. It is unclear how they are going to scrape together enough money to pay their fines. With a little help from Finland’s National Bureau of Investigation (Keskusrikospoliisi), the Finnish equivalent of the RIAA shut down Finreactor in late 2004. It was, at the time, possibly the largest Finnish BitTorrent tracker with more than 37,000 registered members. The Keskusrikospoliisi, after getting the go-ahead from Teosto, raided the administrators’ homes and seized computers and hard drives. The evidence they found was condemning. It looks it’s slowly becoming quite a risky hobby to run a torrent website in some countries :-/.
damn the RIAA & MPAA
It’s not the real RIAA and MPAA here, but equivalent organizations. Well Martin, once Germany starts to mess with BitTorrent I suggest you get the hell out of NewTorrents before you get such a huge amount worth of fines and a bit of jail time. You can always defend RLSLOG by saying that you were merely informing people about torrents, but you were not encouraging them to actually doownload them!!
agreed with kevin. we are only the information center.
USenet is the safest form of gettin stuff, am tryin to stay clear of bit torrent. Unless there is somethin on there i cant find any where else.
Yeah I used to do that but ever since I joined a private tracker I rather use BitTorrent.
Another vote for usenet. The fastest and best way to get what you need just $10 for 20GB with easynews .
Do keep in mind that most BitTorrent users will have to go back to KaZaA when BitTorrent is shut down. And when all other P2P networks are shut down only Usenet, IRC and FTP servers will remain but those are quite advanced methods to get what you need and the thing is that you need to actually join a forum or a Usenet community and then request a movie/game/app/music in order to get it posted and then be online for only a limited amount of time, unlike P2P networks which have search functions that can look up old but still seeded Torrents. P2P networks’ downside is that you depend completely on seeders and their upload speed, which often sucks… a lot, and you need either a lot of seeders or a few seeders with no peers. That’s why I joined my private tracker, everybody has a ratio which has to stay as close as possible to 1.0 which means that you downloaded as much as you’ve uploaded. So if you don’t upload, you can’t download. Which means that I download torrents at an average speed of 300 Kb/s and sometimes even close to 800 Kb/s. I can’t give the URL of the tracker because it has a user limit (which they just increased) and the less people know about it, the better.
at least TPB will never die
Kevin, what’s the short of the community? I’m a member of ScT
I’m with RTT.
And also, as soon as Sweden is forced by the EU to change their laws on piracy TPB will be the first to go down since they already have TPB targeted.
if they can change law now after they have failed miserable
well i think the authourities should go after “real criminals”
I know piracy damages the industy, but its not like beating up a granny for her pension?
seriously why should they target the owners or mods of a site?
its the peers like myself that are doing the damage!!!
your not forcing them to download it…the choice is theirs : )
personally i think bit-torrent will last a long time,and with m@sters help long live NTi
The “Industry” is not hurting, they are turning out crap nobody wants to see!! Bitorrtent is a technology, and how do you stop that? The RIAA and others like it are only DRIVING the quest for a more Anonymous and secure way to download, so in a couple months something else BETTER will come along, then the fight will continue, but they can’t beat technology and progress, it’s better if they were to USE it.
5 Months Of Prison…
Young operators of this Finnish BitTorrent site get a few months in the slammer…….