The Latest Attack Against Torrent Sites
The Motion Picture Association of America and major
film and TV studios filed suit February 23 against seven Web sites for copyright
infringement. The suit alleges that defendants knowingly enable, encourage,
induce and profit from massive online piracy by indexing so called eDonkey hash
links, thus enabling users to locate and download infringing copies of
Plaintiffs' copyrighted motion pictures and television shows for free and
without authorization. By clicking on the file name, an illegal copy of the
movie or television program is automatically copied to a user’s computer. Sites
sued include Torrentspy.com, TorrentBox.com and Ed2k-it.com. It is the first
time that the studios and the MPAA sue indexing Web sites in the US (we have seen
similiar lawsuits in Germany; they were successfull!)
One complaint can be found at
http://pub.bna.com/eclr/060037.pdf.