The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) representing Hollywood's major film studio has won a very important case against movie pirates. They have brought down LokiTorrent.com.
LokiTorrent, which was owned by Edward Webber, directed people to downloadable copies of copyrighted movies. Webber is finned $1-million in a judgment issued by a Dallas court. An MPAA notice has replaced the home page of the site.
The court has also ordered the site owners to handover the records such as IP addresses of those who downloaded movies through the site. The records will help investigators to pinpoint thousands of people who downloaded unauthorized copies of movies, TV programme etc.
John G. Malcolm, head of the MPAA's anti-piracy efforts said, "It will have a lot of records as to who these people are and what they provided, and that information will be of great interest to our members. The MPAA would turn over information to prosecutors in appropriate cases."
The site Lokitorrent.com was serving as a tracker that allows people who want to download files to connect with those who have them and want to swap them.
The site works on software like BitTorrent. BitTorrent is a simple protocol designed for transferring files. It is peer-to-peer in nature where users connect to each other directly to send and receive portions of the file. It is the tracker, like LokiTorrent.com, which coordinates the action of all such peers. The tracker only manages connections, it does not have any knowledge of the contents of the files being distributed, and therefore a large number of users can be supported with relatively limited tracker bandwidth.
The key philosophy of BitTorrent is that users should upload (transmit outbound) at the same time they are downloading (receiving inbound.) In this manner, network bandwidth is utilized as efficiently as possible.
Although the file sharing network operators claim that they don’t have any idea or control on what is being transferred on their network, movie makers feel otherwise. After all if your site boasts to be one that fastest downloads and keeps a track of what is available where, then you cant pretend to be an innocent bystander.
Why would that Webber guy even keep the logs?
If he didn't delete them after he got that first MPAA notice (which triggered the donation thing), he deserves a hard pummeling.
If your outside of US then your probally safe, if you downloaded any movies from loki in the past 6 to 7 months then you might get in trouble. Probally a letter to the ISP. Also the donation thing loki was doing, was to pay off the MPAA.
Many other sites had loki torrents including suprnova, torrentspy and many many more.
I "got" a "movie" from "somewere" whilst I was on my "wireless broadband"
My ISP got an email from the MPAA and my ISP forwarded it to me. Luckily my ISP was a good bloke and replied saying that he had warned me saying that If I dont stop "P2P" I will be banned and disconnected...
So I got of with a warning...
The wireless broadband system went down because person who had loaned the wireless equipment to the ISP took all the money and equipment back...
inphlict wrote:...Also the donation thing loki was doing, was to pay off the MPAA.
i read about this on Slashdot a day or so ago. they were saying what will probably happen (since he has amassed about $45,000 in donations) will be that he'll settle out of court for $10,000 or so and pocket the rest. then again, this was on Slashdot... so take it with a grain of salt.
According to several articles I read he has been making quite a bit of money from the ads on his site, at the same time he began taking donations before he was ever sued. After he reached the 30,000 mark, he continued taking donations for maintance apparently. He was also having talks with the MPAA.
What this means is that he has made some serious money off the website for the past couple of years it has been up. At the same time he's collected enough money to payoff the MPAA, he also released all the logs. He basicly sold the whole community, instead of standing up and fighting which he could of easily done provided he left his site open for donations and continued with the ads. :icon33:
/ Also I noticed 2 dork icons in the emoticons menu.
If half you asshats would stop fucking downloading popular movies and instead rent them and rip them, you wouldnt be getting fucked up the ass soon over it.
Rare stuff, and pornos and software, noone gives a shit about that. But nooo, you cunts have to get the latest emimem album and what was in the boxoffice last week.
zeeko wrote:so what kind of stuff are we talking about here? just movies and music?
Mostly movies, but the MPAA is connected to all sorts of things. They are probally going to set some "examples" by suing people who uploaded a lot of stuff. Then they will mail all the ISP's and tell them to warn the other people. After this who knows, they will probally pass it off to RIAA if they can do that.
Either way a number of people in the United States are seriously fucked, however what they don't realize is that you cannot kill off piracy. You simply cannot, people will invent more anonymous software that would not keep any logs, block any surveillance, have no central servers or websites.
I can already think of at least 3 ways on how this can be created.
