Prosecuting Pirates
Lawsuits against servers that host illegal movies
P2P networks bring a long trail of issues which span from copyright infringement to violated broadcasting rights, along with all those things that relate to the interests of the major corporate TV channels and movie studios. However it is impossible to sue them or take legal action as these servers are mostly hosted in countries like China and Eastern Europe where the international laws do not reach.
However the end-users mostly reach such servers through fan-sites / sites / blogs of people in their own countries.
In Italy there is an ongoing case against two Italian webmasters who used their web sites to spread information on how to download the P2P software with which it was possible to watch the sport games legally transmitted by the Chinese servers and also providing the links to those sites. Roberto Pavanello of the Italian newspaper La Stampa, already reported on this fact at the beginning of 2006, adding an important detail which - if true - could lead to further paths: "Being incapable to act in China, for the first time in history the Italian financial police requested to the major Italian internet service providers to forbid Italian users to access the Chinese servers. Furthermore, investigators will also blacklist an additional number of sites that Italian users will not be able to visit".
See below..
Lawsuits against sites that point to illegal movies
Most of the pirates upload movies and music to servers in countries like Russia, China, etc., and then create web sites or blogs and provide links to the content. Usually they will follow it up with messages like "We don't host any of the movies/ music. We only link to the web sites that it is hosted in" or "The contents of the links displayed on this web site are not created, published or owned by ......com. This site is an attempt to encourage users to contribute to bring together media relevent to Indian Community.Please contact the original owners or publishers of the content pertaining to any copyright issues. We don't host any of the videos showed here. We only link those videos."
Recent court rulings around the world have given anti-piracy crusaders hope against such sites. Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA)'s case against ShowStash and Cinematube resulted in $4 million in fines for the two companies who maintained they were not breaking any laws as they didn't host any files, but just linked to them. According to the judges' opinions both were found guilty of contributory copyright infringement, because they searched for, identified, collected, and indexed links to illegal copies of movies and TV shows. Aside from monetary damages, both sites are now prohibited from engaging in further activity that would infringe upon the studios' work.
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What are Torrents?
BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file sharing protocol used to distribute large amounts of data. BitTorrent is one of the most common protocols for transferring large files, and by some estimates it accounts for about 35% of all traffic on the entire internet. The initial distributor of the complete file or collection acts as the first seed. Each peer who downloads the data also uploads them to other peers. Because of this, BitTorrent is extremely efficient. A minimum of one seed is needed to begin spreading files between thousands of users (peers). The additions of more seeds increases the likelihood of a successful connection exponentially. Relative to standard Internet hosting, this provides a significant reduction in the original distributor's hardware and bandwidth resource costs. It also provides redundancy against system problems and reduces dependence on the original distributor.
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There has been much controversy over the use of BitTorrent trackers. BitTorrent metafiles themselves do not store copyrighted data, hence BitTorrent itself is not illegal-it is the use of it to copy copyrighted material that contravenes laws in some locations.
Various jurisdictions have pursued legal action against web sites that host BitTorrent trackers. High-profile examples include the closing of Suprnova.org, Torrentspy, LokiTorrent, Demonoid, OiNK.cd and EliteTorrents.org. The Pirate Bay's servers in Sweden were raided by Swedish police on allegations by the MPAA of copyright infringement.
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