Back in December 2004, BitTorrent was under a major attack by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) which ran a campaign to try and shutdown many major BitTorrent and eDonkey2000 hubs. The major BitTorrent hub SuprNova.org decided to voluntarily shut down its torrent tracker site, likely due to the pressure. As a result of these closures, this was seen as a great victory for the MPAA.
However, just 1.5 months after closure of SuprNova.org torrent tracker site, BitTorrent still remains to its original state and is presently by far the largest file-sharing network out there. Even the shutdown of SuprNova.org and several other BitTorrent hubs showed insignificant change in BitTorrent's overall network size. Like the shutdown of the original Napster, users simply fled off, but to other BitTorrent hubs instead. All the MPAA did was remove the weak points (main torrent tracking sites) and even encouraged the development of decentralised BitTorrent tracker variants such as eXeem.
It looks like that the best way for the MPAA to tackle this problem is to make use of the technology such as to use it to distribute pay-per-view content. They probably believe that no one would be willing to pay to watch content if they can get it freely, however if this were the case for music iTunes would never have taken off like it did. If the entertainment industry keeps up its lawsuits and keeps publishing
how many people they sued or sites they shutdown, this publicity likely does
more to advertise file sharing than discourage those who already use it.
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The second blow came on December 19, 2004, when Sloncek announced that SuprNova.org would discontinue its existence as a BitTorrent listing site. Many feared this would spell the end of BitTorrent and the exchange of large files. The MPAA's plan is and was to eliminate or seriously damage the trading of movie files over the BitTorrent network. After the initial success of placing fear into BitTorrent tracker operators and forcing several sites offline, the mainstream media heralded these events as a great victory for the MPAA and impending doom for file-sharing. However, after a month and half since the fall of SuprNova.org and the MPAA's anti-piracy campaign, the BitTorrent network not only remains fully intact, it still is by far the largest file-sharing network. Read the full article here. |
At the moment, it looks like the movie industry is probably doing a bad mistake by trying to shut down the most popular file sharing websites. For example, when the majority of consumers were on the original Napster, the music industry's best approach would likely have been to gradually convert it to a music store similar to iTunes. It would not take much to persuade those who are willing to purchase music to buy the songs they like, such as guarantee high quality skip-free audio and get the full song. However rather than even giving this technique a shot, they just killed it off.
The move industry could do the same by guaranteeing a certain video quality, complete movies, fast download speeds and so on. Those who would not be willing to 'rent' these movies probably would never do so anyway if the movie industry did manage to totally rid the Internet of illegally shared movies.
Feel free to discuss and find out more about file sharing on our Music Downloads, Peer-to-Peer (P2P) & Legal Issues Forum.
Source: Slyck News
