Attempts to Shut down BitTorrent community

Last month has been really bad for the BitTorrent community. If you are not completely sure of what I’m talking about, the last month saw BREIN trying to shut down Demonoid.com, ISOHunt and TorrentSpy deciding to filter out copyrighted content, the Swedish police trying to shut down The PirateBay…

The Kickoff

February 2006
The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), which represents Columbia Pictures and other top Hollywood film studios, sues TorrentSpy and a host of other bitTorrent search sites and trackers as part of a sweep against file-sharing companies. According to the MPAA, the search engine was sued for allegedly making it easier to download pirated files.

Jacqueline Chooljian, a federal judge for the Central District of California in Los Angeles ruled on May 29th that TorrentSpy must begin tracking users’ activity on the site by the June 12th deadline it was given.

The BitTorrent tracker site has repeatedly argued against tracking visitors to the site because it explicitly states in its privacy policy that it will never do so.

“ TorrentSpy.com does not sell, trade or rent your personal information to other companies. TorrentSpy.com will not collect any personal information about you except when you specifically and knowingly provide such information. “

Most Torrent tracker sites are not based in the US and the US laws do not apply.

TorrentSpy decided that instead of being forced to comply with the judge’s ruling to track user activities, it would instead merely cut off access by users in the United States.

By the end of June 07, TorrentSpy decides to not block US visitors and chooses to filter pirated content from its search results instead, something which ISOHunt plans to do as well. TorrentSpy and ISOHunt plan to use a hash-based system called FileRights to automatically filter BitTorrent trackers that link to pirated content from its search results to help satisfy a suit brought against them by the MPAA for the illegal facilitation of copyrighted material.

Demonoid

The BREIN foundation, a joint Dutch anti-piracy program of authors, artists and producers of music, film and interactive software in the fight against Intellectual Property theft, have now set their sites on the ubiquitous Demonoid.com. Demonoid has been offline for a few days due to an apparent HDD drive crash. Hmmmm…

The Pirate Bay
One of the most popular trackers is The PirateBay. They’re infamous for their responses to the legal threats they receive. [If you havent read them, I strongly recommend that you do… they are downright hillarious]
Anyways, The PirateBay is yet another tracker (one of the most popular ones) that has been receiving legal threats from many corporations like MS, Dreamworks, EA Games,Apple etc.. But they always managed to dodge off the threats quoting stuff like

“As you may or may not be aware, Sweden is not a state in the United States of America.
Sweden is a country in northern Europe.Unless you figured it out by now, US law does not apply here.
For your information, no Swedish law is being violated.Please be assured that any further contact with us, regardless of medium,will result in
a) a suit being filed for harassment
b) a formal complaint lodged with the bar of your legal counsel, for sending frivolous legal threats. “

The latest news is that Swedish police is trying to shut down The Pirate Bay by classifying it as a child pornography site, so that Swedish ISPs would put TPB in the blacklist.