MPAA Files Lawsuits Targeting Major Torrent Sites

diverge_s writes "Slyck news reports on a new wave of lawsuits the MPAA has filed against major Bit Torrent search sites including: Torrentspy, Isohunt, Torrentbox, Niteshadow and Bthub. From the article: '"Website operators who abuse technology to facilitate infringements of copyrighted works by millions of people are not anonymous - they can and will be stopped," said John G. Malcolm, Executive Vice President and Director of Worldwide Anti-Piracy Operations for the MPAA. "Disabling these powerful networks of illegal file distribution is a significant step in stemming the tide of piracy on the Internet."'"

Comments

But noone told the sites be sued?

[sandstorming]

From the article: 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," Gary from ISOHunt said. "I'm not too concerned because we deal with copyright requests everyday, some of them from studios MPAA represents." "Justin" 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."

They're going after NZB sites too

[grubbymitts]

NZB-Zone has been targetted along with binnews and a couple of others. It is interesting to note that they have only gone for nzb sites and not the actual usenet providers - they appear to have the same rights as ISPs when it comes to common carrier status, but I'm no lawyer.

Re:A Message from the Internet to the MPAA

[cliffski]

An interesting but flawed philosophy. You seem to imply that if the IP holders were just scraping by and making ends meet, you would be happy for the torrent sites to be taken down?
Im just about making ends meet as a software develoepr, and one of my games is available as a torrent. No doubt this isnt exactly helping sales. So I suppose that the torrent sites you support check the financial data of each submitted torrent, will spot that I'm a solo developer who needs the cash, and decline to list torrents of my stuff right?
Bullshit. This is just freeloaders getting everything they can for free because they think they wont get caught. Dont insult everyones intelligence by dressing it up as some kind of robin hood tale.
Many things the **IA do is bullshit, but closing torrent sites that encourage illegal content is fine by me. Bittorrent is a superb system that works wonders for distributing game demos and movie trailers etc. By defending its usage to steal IP, your just going to bring the whole system down.

Re:Shooting themselves in the foot

[laughingcoyote]

I know your comment was a joke, but actually in many countries there's a tax on blank media that goes to content providers. So...in many cases, blanks DO count.

Re:Shooting themselves in the foot

[msobkow]

The problem I see is that they take down legal content in the pursuit of pirated DVDs. Why should the BT community that isn't pirating DVDs be paying for the abuse of a few?

With the approach the MPAA applies, bars, clubs, etc. would be shut down when a couple patrons are arrested for drug dealing or prostitution because they're "enabling" the illegal activity. For some reason, there doesn't seem to be a lot of precedence for the *AA approach of shutting down entire businesses when pursuing a few criminals.

Re:Up-side-down People!

[LordLucless]

It's one advantage to being a cartel^H^H^H^H^H^H assosciation. It's always "the RIAA" or "the MPAA" doing the suing. The individual companies aren't being assosciated with the bad publicity. If you started seeing "Sony sues grandpa without computer" or "Vivendi sues 13 year old girl", then you might start getting some reaction to the bad press. As it is, the MPAA is sort of like a meta-corporation. Corporations exist to limit the risk to individuals involved in the corporation. The MPAA exists to limit the risk to the companies involved in it.