LokiTorrent Shut Down

wan-fu writes "LokiTorrent, a popular torrent site, has officially been shut down. After asking for donations from users for the past couple of months to fight the MPAA's lawsuit. LokiTorrent succumbed today and the MPAA took over the website with a stern warning, stating, "You can click, but you can't hide." A variety of outlets are carrying the story."

Comments

Re:Death by Litigation

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

They had raides $45,000, which the site owner said should be enough for almost two months legal defence. As it turns out, he gave the MPAA the site, the server logs and $5-10k and walked away with a PROFIT.

Re:check out lowkee's YAHOO profile

[XorNand]

They actually took in closer to $70k.

I long predicted this, for obvious reasons. Loki succeeded in getting a lot of naive idealists rallied around the call to "fight the Man". People donated thinking that they'd have ring-side seats to an exciting legal battle. It was all bullshit... Of course it was. There was absolutely zero change of them successfully defending themselves, based on mountains of preceding case law. If you were sitting on $70k in real cash (not just discussing a hypothetical situation on the semi-anonymous Intraweb), would you really flush it down the toliet? Even if you met with several lawyers who told you to expect the exact same outcome?

I'm sorry, but this outcome was obvious to any rational observer. It saddened me to see Loki take advantage of their users like that. But, it also enraged me to see them actually monetarily profit from distributing software that was not within their rights to sell.

Re:Parent is flamebait and trollish. Mod down

[Warped1]

I was reading this book (Stiff by Mary Roach) and it mentioned how airline companies determined if they should deploy certain saftey devices on airplanes. The formula was like the one rattled off in Fight Club, based on the cost of the settlement payouts for those who died or were injured.

I think it was something like 2 or 4 million USD a human life was worth in a settlement. And the number shown on the FBI warning screen says something like $250k for violating the copyright. So basically, in monetary value, a human life lost due to neglegence or whatever is worth about 8 to 16 video pirating charges. Kind of sad.

This is all based on my memory of the book quote of the settlement price, so I may ... will ... be off a bit, but the concept holds I think. I googled a bit to try and find the numbers, but didn't net anything. If someone wants to correct the numbers, feel free. ;)

Re:Wow - that was fast!

[Mr_Silver]

No, theft is when you take something away from someone.

Actually that isn't true.

The definition of theft is what the laws of your country define, not what US law states.

In the UK for example, the act of theft does not have to be the removal of a physical object.

I appreciate the majority of Slashdotters come from the USA and therefore, for them, theft != copyright infringement but don't assume that holds for everywhere in the world.

ps. Interestingly enough, there is no concept of "fair use" in the UK either - so if you haven't bought your iPod music off iTunes, you're technically breaking the law. Strange, but true!