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TorrentSpy Ordered By Judge to Become MPAA Spy
PC Guy writes "TorrentSpy, one of the world's largest BitTorrent sites, has been ordered by a federal judge to monitor its users. They are asked to keep detailed logs of their activities which must then be handed over to the MPAA. Ira Rothken, TorrentSpy's attorney responded to the news by stating: 'It is likely that TorrentSpy would turn off access to the U.S. before tracking its users. If this order were allowed to stand, it would mean that Web sites can be required by discovery judges to track what their users do even if their privacy policy says otherwise.'"
Interesting point.
Both europe and asia have more users online than north america at this point. When it comes to the internet, populationwise we are shrinking in power.
Anecdotally, most of the innovation I see in web design recently comes out of Sweden. I actually think that other countries might (if not already have already) surpass the US in terms of net export of brainpower, invention, and developmental progress (as opposed to hardware progress). Not only with our national deficit, but with this trend.. Well, I'm not an analyst.
Anyway, actions like the MPAA's (if indeed TorrentSpy decides to cut access to the US), while relatively minor in the scope of things (there will always be other trackers) is evidence of a trend of self-sanctions. Instead of us putting economic sanctions on other countries (iraq, cuba), our actions are causing other countries to effectively sanction us...
Example: A friend of mine sets up a DC++ hub on our college campus to get around the off-campus bandwidth caps. Entirely through word of mouth, we have 20TB and 200 people at any given time logged in. (out of 3500 students). Everyone who shares any decent amount and/or can call themselves a geek is on it.
The new content is provided by those of us with accounts on private sources, such as newsgroups, ftp, or private torrent sites. It's also provided by the incoming freshman class each year that has new things to share. We've provided for at least 80% of the campus' filesharing needs.
There will always be ways around any specific source that gets nerfed.
Being modded funny doesn't boost one's karma. Lately more people have been modding insightful or informative to help boost fellow contributor's karma points.
Either that or someone is really digging a hole in their garden.
No, DRM won't go away even if suddenly all people stopped pirating music and movies. DRM is an effective* way of preventing format shifting and personal copying, so that you have to buy the same content several times if you want to have it available in several places at once, like in your computer media library, in your portable player, in your car, on your phone, etc. If everyone just stopped pirating, the content companies would simply say "thanks for all the extra money" and keep the DRM in place.
*= Effective against casual copying and format shifting, not uncrackable for the determined cracker.