MPAA to sue Suprnova, eDonkey hubs

[muchspl2]

Monday, December 13, 2004
New MPAA lawsuits against BitTorrent, eDonkey expected
The Motion Picture Association of America is expected to announce new legal actions this week against operators of indexing servers for two major peer-to-peer filesharing networks. In the US, action is expected to be filed against operators of BitTorrent tracker servers; in Europe, against parties responsible for the hosting of eDonkey servers. The MPAA has not confirmed or denied that these actions are forthcoming, but have announced that a press conference will be held Tuesday to launch a "significant expansion of the global fight against movie piracy."
Participants in Tuesday's conference will include MPAA CEO Dan Glickman and Anti-Piracy chief John Malcolm; Mark Ishikawa, CEO of file tracking tech provider company BayTSP, and Redswoosh's Travis Kalanick (previously co-founder of the now-defunct P2P service Scour.net).
Update: Variety's Ben Fritz now has a story online.

[W]hile P2P networks themselves are still legal despite industry efforts to shut them down, indexing servers that help users locate and download pirated content are not.
The fact that the defunct Napster ran such servers, while Grokster and Streamcast Networks, defendants in the Supreme Court case, do not, was cited by lower courts as a key reason why Napster was ruled illegal but the newer networks weren't. Developers of BitTorrent and eDonkey don't run their own indexing servers. However, many individuals and groups involved in online piracy do, and they're expected to be the targets of the new legal crackdowns .

"If it can be demonstrated they lent substantial assistance to copyright infringement and had knowledge of what they were doing, it's a strong case that fits in line with Napster," explained Michael S. Elkin, head of the entertainment and media group at law firm Thelen, Reid & Priest. Several sources close to the MPAA confirmed the planned actions, although reps for the group weren't talking before today's press conference in Washington, DC.

http://www.boingboing.net/2004/12/13/new_mpaa_lawsuits_ag.html

[Vargas]

good thing KAD and overnet are serverless

[cpt_azad]

They can never shut down BT.

[- Nightmare -]

They can never shut down BT.

Viva La BT!

[muchspl2]

yoceff is down, who is next

[4play]

They can never shut down BT.

wrong all they have to do is shutdown alot of the major trackers that are used for warez. im pretty sure it would take less then a few hours on suprnova to make yourself a massive list of trackers and have them served with cease and decist letter.

of course it will not be too hard for them to setup trackers in countries with little to no copyright laws but this does increase costs and might force the copyright holders to try to have these adresses blocked by major isps.

in the end bt is too centralized to be safe to share warez. but it does have a bright future for distributing legal content.

[nsane]

they can't shutdown servers or clients for the actions of their users. it's ganna get thrown out of court, just like before, and everything will be back to normal

watch and see

[4play]

they can't shutdown servers or clients for the actions of their users. it's ganna get thrown out of court, just like before, and everything will be back to normal

watch and see

you sure. the servers do hold files that are clearly links to get copyrighted material.

defendant: i had no idea people where trading illegal content on my site, i though incredibles.dvdrip.dvl.avi was just someones home video, the fact the link next to it points to the imdb page for the film incredibles was just coincidence.

and the trackers also have deal with file names like this so how can they claim its all down to the users.

does anyone else remember the case bought against the site that linked to the decss code. they got in trouble just for linking to the site holding the illegal material.

edit : the site was the hacker magazine 2600 which was prosecuted for providing some of the decss code and links to it.