MPAA launches seven lawsuits against torrent, ed2k and usenet sites

From Wikinews, the free news source you can write!

Friday, February 24, 2006

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has launched seven separate lawsuits against Internet sites in its latest anti-piracy crackdown. The MPAA claims the targeted sites had been "facilitating the distribution of copyright works".

The MPAA has commenced legal action against the following BitTorrent tracking sites—isohunt.com, bthub.com, and torrentbox.com which 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.

The lawsuits mark the first time that the MPAA has targeted Usenet related sites; in the past the MPAA has only brought action against sites who actually hosted copyrighted material or who assisted in the running of the networks used to distribute it.

Generally, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) limits the liability of search engines for providing links to unauthorised copies, so long as the site operators do not know the content is infringing, are not making profit from the distribution of copyright works, and remove links when requested by copyright owners.

It is thought that the DMCA limitations will not apply to the sites targeted as they are allegedly filled with almost nothing but copyrighted movies, software, and music.

Isohunt.com, one of the search engines targeted, provides a copyright statement claiming that "We respect copyright, and will filter such P2P links at your request".

Sources

• Josh Borland "MPAA sues BitTorrent, newsgroup search tools". ZDNet, February 23, 2006

• Andrej Preston (Sloncek) "MPAA sues torrent, ED2k and newsgroup websites". Suprnova, February 24, 2006
  

Share this:

This page is archived, and is no longer publicly editable. Got a correction? Add the template {{editprotected}} to the talk page along with your corrections, and it will be brought to the attention of the administrators. Please note that due to our archival policy, we will not alter or update the content of articles that are archived, but will only accept requests to make grammatical and formatting corrections. Note that some listed sources or external links may no longer be available online due to age.