Today we can visit over at LokiTorrent and see that they have fallen under the legal crosshairs of the MPAA. Bram Cohens program BitTorrent, is not in danger from legal assaults because just like Napster, it has legal uses. The Linux community is a good example, BitTorrent networks can distribute these large ISO's efficiently and it is quite legal of course. Therefore, this puts the program itself and Bram Cohen in the same catagory as an office copy machine or a VCR and it is safe due to the Betamax ruling. These trakers are being looked at in a different light though.
$13955 in support so far, $30,000 needed Every penny of this fund will be going towards legal and other costs associated with saving peer-to-peer as a whole. This may sound like a lot of money, but legal fees are VERY expensive, and $30,000 is the minimum required. |
At one time we felt that the BitTorrent model was invincible, that there was no way to bring it down and stop illegal filesharing. However, it looks like the strategy of taking down certain trackers might just do it. Of course, the only trackers that need to worry are the ones that are helping to distribute copyrighted content. Even so, the legal strategy will have to be different than when the other P2P members were sued like Napster users. These were the so called supernodes, making thousands of illegal files available for upload that were stored on their own computers in the shared folder. It seems though only a slight difference, that these trackers are merely pointing people to a file and to me this would be more of a case of inducement. Plus, what helped the Napster style cases was the facy that each file held a $150,000 penalty. This would always lead to a settlement rather than a fight.
What are your thoughts on this issue? What do you think the MPAA will use as a legal point to try and stop these trackers. Is it all a bluff? Were they gambling that like all the other tracking sites threatened so far that LokiTorrent would just roll over and shut down? Looks like they have a community that is willing to put their money where their mouth is and back them up. It also looks like the group at LokiTorrent don't scare that easy. I just hope $30,000 is enough to lock horns with the MPAA.
Source: LokiTorrent
