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Pirate Bay Tracker Offline for Good – Though the site will continue pushing files via DHT+PEX

William — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 06:57:47 +0000

The Pirate Bay crew had already essentially been disbanded, the site dissected, and its remnants sold to a somewhat dubious company that simply wants to turn the site’s visitors into little P2P cash cows.

So an announcement today over at the official Pirate Bay blog that they’re officially shutting down the site’s tracker probably surprises nobody. According to the site, they’re not shutting the site down however – they’ll still annoy the entertainment industry by going trackerless and using the Distributed Hash Table (DHT) for file distribution:

The development of DHT has reached a stage where a tracker is no longer needed to use a torrent. DHT (combined with PEX) is highly effective in finding peers without the need for a centralized service….

Now that the decentralized system for finding peers is so well developed, TPB has decided that there is no need to run a tracker anymore, so it will remain down! It’s the end of an era, but the era is no longer up2date.

According to the site, with the use of a more decentralized system of handling tracking (DHT+PEX) and distributions of torrent files (Magnet Links), downtime and outages should be less of a problem. According to a follow up report at Torrent Freak, the site owners are apparently trying to convince other BitTorrent portals to ditch torrents entirely and decentralize, perpetuating the entertainment industry’s game of whack a mole. Sweden’s The Legal has more on how this impacts the site founders’ court case.

Link to the original article…

Wi-Fi Network Shuttered By MPAA Re-Opens – After week of bad press, Sony suddenly feels cooperative

William — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 05:19:31 +0000

Earlier this week a free, tiny (1,000 feet total) municipal Wi-Fi network in Ohio was forced to shut down after an MPAA legal warning. A network user had apparently transferred a file copyrighted by Sony Pictures, and instead of risking a costly legal fight, the network decided to simply shut down. The news quickly spread across the Internet, something that apparently didn’t make Sony all that comfortable. One local user sends us this local NBC affiliate report that says the network has been turned back on after a request by Sony:

Levine says the news of the shut down spread very quickly from D.C. to California in less than a week, and people from across the country bombarded Sony Pictures Entertainment with complaints about big companies picking on small towns. Finally, Levine explains that Jim Kennedy, SVP of Corporate Communications for Sony Pictures Entertainment, e-mailed the county and asked them to turn the wi-fi service back on because of the complaints.

Sony says they’ll kindly “help the county identify ways to prevent similar offenses from happening in the future.” Of course if the MPAA and Sony had approached the network owners like human beings in the first place — instead of engaging in the kind of scorched earth tactics they’ve employed for several years now — they probably wouldn’t have gotten the bad press to begin with.

Link to the original article…

RIAA Joins MPAA In Thinking Proof Isn't Necessary – Groups want to be able to file $150,000 lawsuits without evidence of a crime

William — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 19:37:21 +0000

I’ve recently highlighted several reports showing that the RIAA’s method of identifying and suing P2P users is painfully inaccurate. This was further illuminated by the recent case of Jammie Thomas, a Minnesota woman who was originally ordered to pay $220,000 for making files available via broadband, but may now see a new trial.

Why? Because the Judge has decided that actually showing evidence of a crime might be a good idea. In response to that ruling, a few weeks ago the MPAA publicly stated that they should be able to collect as much as $150,000 in damages from individuals without any real evidence of wrong doing. Says the MPAA:

“Mandating such proof could thus have the pernicious effect of depriving copyright owners of a practical remedy against massive copyright infringement in many instances”

Wired’s Threat Level Blog says the RIAA has now filed their response to the Thomas case, and like the MPAA, apparently the organization feels that that concepts like “evidence” and “proof” are somewhat over-rated:

“Requiring proof of actual transfers would cripple efforts to enforce copyright owners’ rights online and would solely benefit those who seek to freeload off plaintiff’s investment.”

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