Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community - View Single Post - You Can Click, But You Can't Hide! (lokitorrent go bye bye)

SecretMethod70 · 02-11-2005, 01:59 PM

Alright, some of the official story is coming out. Here's an article from arstechnica (emphasis mine):

Quote:

Judge orders torrent site to close, release logs

2/10/2005 10:15:50 PM, by Eric Bangeman

In a victory for the Motion Picture Association of America, a US District Court judge in Texas has shut down BitTorrent site LokiTorrent.com and orded them to turn over their server logs to the MPAA's attorneys. As of now, visitors to the site are greeted with a friendly message from the MPAA. (Whether the message current LokiTorrent.com is part of the court order or an attempt on the part of the site's owner to curry favor with the MPAA is unclear.)

Quote:

This website has been permanently shut down by court order because it facilitates the illegal downloading of copyrighted motion pictures. The illegal downloading of motion pictures robs thousands of honest, hard-working people of their livelihood, and stifles creativity. Illegally downloading movies from sites such as these without proper authorization violates the law, is theft, and is not anonymous. Stealing movies leaves a trail. The only way not to get caught is to stop.

Ah yes, the old identifying trail. Since they now have the server logs, the MPAA plans to pore through them looking for identifying information that could lead to lawsuits against users of the site. A spokesperson for the MPAA said that such actions against high-volume users of the torrent site are likely, assuming they can be identified via IP addresses.

In December 2004, the MPAA decided to follow the trail blazed so spectacularly by the RIAA and file lawsuits against those they believed were sharing movies and other copyrighted material. The result was a barrage of lawsuits against torrent sites, Direct Connect hubs, and eDonkey servers. Popular sites like Supernova went dark as a result, while LokiTorrent raised over US$40,000 from its user base to cover legal costs. According to a statement by the MPAA, it looks as though most of that money will go towards a "substantial settlement," with more financial pain if the owner transgresses again.

With torrent sites under attack, it looks like those determined to trade movies and tv shows will have to move further underground. In its press release, MPAA boasts that there has been a 40 percent reduction in the number of servers in operation, and claims that piracy cost them upwards of US$3.5 billion in 2004. While widespread piracy of DVDs endemic to some nations definitely cost the motion picture industry money, studies have shown that downloading movies does little to change the habits of the US public when it comes to going to the movies, buying, or renting DVDs. In the meantime, I wonder how many P2P site operators will be checking out this bit of software from the EFF.

The widespread piracy he speaks of is primarily in places like China, etc. Places where the industries don't have the power to influence politicians greatly. It's funny, the downloading of movies has been shown to make little difference in the movie spending habits of Americans, but I'd love to see what kind of effect the witch hunt has had.