James Delahunty
25 Aug 2005 23:05
Major Hollywood movie studios have filed another round of lawsuits against file sharers it alleges to have distributed copyrighted movies over the Internet. However, this time is different from all over lawsuits. The studios have not been searching through P2P networks for IP addresses, they got the IP addresses from P2P companies own logs. In total, 286 lawsuits were filed against sharers in the United States. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) said the logs were from file sharing sites shut down earlier this year.
These would be BitTorrent websites that were shut down although even though a court in Texas ordered LokiTorrent to turn over server logs in February, the MPAA admitted that none of the lawsuits filed were related to that. This is sort of "propaganda" by the MPAA to try to dissuade file sharers from using BitTorrent sites in fear that their trading actions might be logged. "Internet movie thieves be warned: You have no friends in the online community when you are engaging in copyright theft," MPAA Senior Vice President John Malcolm said in a statement.
However, while a lot of BitTorrent sites log how much you upload and download (for reasons of ratio and to weed out leechers) most don't log what files you uploaded and downloaded. Last December the MPAA launched an aggressive campaign against individual file sharers and some services like BitTorrent hubs. Since then, many sites have closed their doors either voluntarily or because of legal action taken against them.
BitTorrent is legal and is increasingly being used for legitimate distribution. Bram Cohen, creator of BitTorrent has long warned that using BitTorrent to share copyrighted material is a "dumb idea" because it's not designed to hide the identities of people sharing. Operators of BitTorrent sites argue that they do not host any copyrighted files at all, they just host .torrent files which are then used by file sharers to start downloading and sharing with each other.
Source:
ZDNet