Petteri Pyyny
13 May 2005 14:26
MPAA has turned its attention to rapidly growing TV piracy and has sued six websites offering BitTorrent trackers for TV shows. The sites were extremely popular among non-Americans, who typically have to wait between 6 months and several years in order to have the major American TV shows aired in their home country.
Each site can be sued for hefty fines, ranging between $30,000 and $150,000 per each and every downloaded file. But, it is interesting to see how the American legislation will handle BitTorrent trackers, as the distribution of the files is done by users themselves (assuming that the sites themselves didn't "seed" the original files).
This is the first time that MPAA has attacked against TV show piracy and the reason for the move is obvious -- sales of DVD "box sets" of TV shows are huge.
MPAA said in its press release: "On these sites, anyone in the world can download entire television seasons in a single click. Every television series depends on other markets -- syndication, international sales -- to earn back the enormous investment required to produce the comedies and dramas we all enjoy, and those markets are substantially hurt when that content is stolen."
These are the sites that were sued: ShunTV, ZonaTracker, Scifi-Classics, CDDVDHeaven, Braggin'Rights and #BT @ EFnet.
While the abovementioned sites are down, at least for now, you can still search for torrents (and torrent sites) using, for instance, TorrentTyphoon. TorrentTyphoon is a meta search engine which catalogs the contents of several trackers and provides a simple, yet effective interface for searching the sites.
Source: MPAA