The (MPAA) is steamrolling across the great indexing plains.
The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) said that it sued a new round of popular Web sites associated with movie piracy, including several that serve as search engines but do not distribute files themselves.
Some recent events brought news that the eDonkey2000 indexing server Razorback2 was taken offline by Belgian Police, in conjunction with the MPAA. Then, the MPAA has announced a tremendous escalation in their fight against online piracy.
The MPAA has commenced legal action against the following BitTorrent tracking sites—isohunt.com, bthub.com and, torrentbox.com who are all owned by the same person; torrentspy.com; niteshadow.com as well as ed2k site ed2k-it.com and, Usenet search engines—nzb-zone.com, binnews.com, and dvdrs.net.
Specifically, seven lawsuits were filed in Federal Court across the United States. Most remarkable of these lawsuits was the MPAA’s strategy to target Newsgroup NZB indexing sites. Newsgroup indexing sites function much differently than eDonkey2000 or BitTorrent sites, as their role is to supply "NZB" or Newzbin files. These NZB files greatly simplify the task of downloading material from the Newsgroups. It eliminates the once lengthy process of digging through multiple groups and headers to find the desired archive.
The lawsuits mark an expansion of the copyright holders’ legal strategy in the file-swapping world, targeting sites that help make downloading easier, but aren’t actually delivering the files or the swapping technology themselves.
The lawsuits mark the first time that the MPAA has targeted Usenet related sites; in the past the MPAA has only bought action against sites who actually hosted copyrighted material or who assisted in the running of the networks used to distribute it.
It is also the first time the group has sued organizations that direct their members to the Usenet newsgroup system, an MPAA spokeswoman said. The movie group makes little distinction between a peer-to-peer network and the search engines that point to pirated works, saying that all facilitate the distribution of copyright works.
Because of the Newsgroups’ long standing reputation of being a legitimate online source of information and community interaction, such associated indexing sites were considered immune from prosecution. The recent action dismisses this notion.
Website operators who abuse technology to facilitate infringements of copyrighted works by millions of people are not anonymous – they can and will be stopped, said John G. Malcolm, Executive Vice President and Director of Worldwide Anti-Piracy Operations for the MPAA.
Disabling these powerful networks of illegal file distribution is a significant step in stemming the tide of piracy on the Internet, Malcomsaid in a statement.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act protects search engines from liability for linking to pirated works, but only if the site operators do not know that the specific content is infringing, or is not deriving any financial gain from the links, and act quickly to remove the links when contacted by copyright holders.
Unlike a traditional search engine such as Google, the sites targeted are filled almost exclusively with links and references to copyright movies, software and music.
IsoHunt, one of the largest search engines targeted, does provide a copyright statement that says, "We respect copyright, and will filter such P2P links at your request."
In all, nine indexing sites have been targeted, the sites sued includes: Torrentspy.com, IsoHunt, BTHub.com, TorrentBox.com, NiteShadow.com, Ed2k-It.com, NZB-Zone.com, BinNews.com and DVDRs.net.
The operators of these indexing sites appear surprised at the MPAA’s decision to sue, as they have yet to receive any notification.
- "Funny, they did not email me," Gary from ISOHunt said. "I’m not too concerned because we deal with copyright requests everyday, some of them from studios MPAA represents."
- "Justin" from TorrentSpy echoed Gary’s skepticism. "I guess I will learn more when I see what they have filed exactly. I’m not sure why they are suing when we comply with DMCA requests but I guess we will learn more down the road."
A point to consider is TorrentSpy and ISOHunt are search engines – not trackers. Their role in the BitTorrent community is considerably different from previous lawsuit recipients such as the trackers EliteTorrents and LokiTorrent.
The issue of targeting search engines rather than actual file-swapping networks themselves has been a touchy one in Silicon Valley, because ordinary search engines such as Google and Yahoo also can be used to find pirated works.
Trackers are responsible for directing BitTorrent community traffic by hosting the actual torrent file. Conversely, indexing sites operate in a fashion similar to Google or Yahoo! and only search a tracker’s database. They host no actual torrent files.
Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Fred von Lohmann said that the courts had not yet ruled on whether search tools could be held liable for copy infringement. Most relevant cases, such as record labels’ suit against MP3Board several years ago, have been settled before the issue has come to trial, he said.
We have not had a case that really tests the case of whether providing an indexing service by itself an infringement, von Lohmann said.
How the above mentioned indexing sites will react remains unclear, considering they have yet to actually receive the complaint. While large scale sweeps such as this typically happen once per year, the major difference this time is the inclusion of Newsgroup indexing servers – a radical departure from typical copyright enforcement actions.
File-swapping traffic has continued to grow globally throughout the course of the legal actions, however. Net monitoring firm CacheLogic estimates that P2P still accounted for more than 60 percent of overall Internet traffic at the beginning of 2006, with video files accounting for about 60 percent of that data.
Traditional peer-to-peer software companies such as eDonkey and LimeWire have not been targeted by lawsuits in recent months. However, they have faced warnings from record labels and the MPAA that their turn could come soon if they continue to allow unregulated swapping online.
The MPAA previously announced an agreement with BitTorrent.com, the creators of the BitTorrent file-swapping technology who also run a file search engine. Under that agreement, BitTorrent agreed to take down links to feature films in its search tool.
The recent suits are part of a growing series of lawsuits, criminal and civil actions taken around the world, as the movie industry works to stamp out the still-strong growth of film and TV show swapping online.