Library.nu and Ifile.it Shut Down

Ralph Spoilsport writes "A coalition of 17 publishing companies has shut down library.nu and ifile.it, charging them with pirating ebooks. This comes less than a month after megaupload was shut down, and SOPA was stopped. If the busting of cyberlockers continues at this pace and online library sharing dismantled, this under-reported story may well be the tip of a very big iceberg — one quite beyond the P&L sheets of publishers and striking at basic human rights as outlined in the contradictions of the UN Charter. Is this a big deal — a grim coalition of corporate power? Or just mopping up some scurvy old pirates? Or somewhere in between?" Adds new submitter roaryk, "According to the complaint, the sites offered users access to 400,000 e-books and made more than $11 million in revenue in the process. The admins, Fidel Nunez and Irina Ivanova, have been tracked down using their PayPal donation account, which was not anonymous. Despite the claims of the industry the site admins say they were barely able to cover the server costs with the revenue."

Comments

MegaUpload bust was highly successful

[Harry Nelson]

It's been a month now and literally every upload site has either closed down or shut down their affiliate programs that offered money for uploaders. Those who uploaded pirated material to gain money are devastated on forums and cannot find any good upload site anymore. This was highly successful bust against piracy, and rightly so.

Re:MegaUpload bust was highly successful

[kiwimate]

best thing about the "pirates" is that they are extremely resourceful and have many, many different outlets to get their files.

Also the worst thing. Someone has a sense of entitlement - "I don't want to pay for this, so instead of doing without or being responsible I'll just take it" - and so they make more and more run-arounds just so they can get their stuff for free.

Utterly predictable response - media gets very heavy and starts going after everything.

Net result for me, an innocent bystander who doesn't pirate stuff, because, you know, it's wrong - the internet gets more rules and becomes less useful.

So thanks a lot, pirates. (And I don't care if you call yourself a pirate, or insist it's copyright infringement, or whatever. That's all semantic nonsense. It's still wrong, it's still illegal, and it's still immoral. So stop arguing over what label you want to be applied to you.) You're ruining the internet for me.

What on earth do you expect the reactions of the media giants to be? Just roll over, shrug their shoulders, and say "oh well"? All the moaning about SOPA and whatever else - you brought it on yourselves and you deserve it, but you also brought it on everyone else. So thanks a lot. Jerks.