| MPAA sues LokiTorrent |
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The
Big Seven movie studios claim theyre being ruined by file sharing and
that thousands of ancillary staff are suffering terrible hardships as a
direct result. And yet, at the same time, theyre reporting mind-boggling revenues. For a taste, check out the Big Earners list. One film, Titanic, raked in more than half a billion dollars and this year, in June alone, the North American movie industry took in $1.03 billion, a 14% increase over June 2003's previous monthly record. Now LokiTorrent is looking for $30,000 to go towards, legal and other costs associated with saving peer-to-peer as a whole". Dominate online environments Of Suprnova.org,
Youceff.com, Lokitorrent.com and Piratebay.org, four popular torrent
sites mentioned by Johan Pouwelse in The Bittorrent P2P File-sharing
System: Measurements and Analysis, only Piratebay.org escaped the MPAAs direct attention. We say direct because although Piratebay.org hasnt yet been nailed
like the other three sites, it was named in a lamentable MPAA effort to
use the purely American DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) in an
attempt to con site owners in foreign countries. LokiTorrent's request for donations towards its legal costs epitomizes a major part of the entertainment industry strategy. In
the same way that the RIAA, the MPAAs opposite number in the recording
industry, is suing mom-and-pop p2p users, knowing full well that never
in a million years will they be able to match the industrys financial
and legal resources, the studios are counting on the same thing
happening with their sue em all campaign.
Theyre all ordinary people who share music with each other not for
profit but for pleasure. Theyre not the hard-core crooks the members
of the Big Four music label cartel portray them to be. Big
Music knows its victims will never be able to afford a court
appearance. So it makes settlement offers which, although the
payments impoverish many of victims, theyre forced to accept. This
makes a mockery of the innocent until proven guilty concept, allows
the cartel to imply its successfully sued rafts of people for
illegally sharing files online, and wards off the possibility of a
court actually hearing a case and deciding file sharing is not, after
all, illegal. In the meanwhile, the real criminals, the organized counterfeiters
making their fortunes on world black markets because the labels,
studios and software companies continue to churn out easily copied
physical CDs and DVDs in their billions, as much as anything else, go
largely unscathed. And everything that applies to the music cartel sue em all campaigns similarly applies to the movie industry onslaughts.
As
Raymond Blijd reported, Brein conned Hollands FIOD-ECD, the government
agency assigned to the criminal pursuit of fiscal, financial and
economical fraud, into getting involved. FIOD-ECD,
can by any constitutional means go after hard-core criminalism, says
Blijd, So, getting access to and information from an ISP isn't an
issue. Simply said, FIOD-ECD can do what Brein can't. FIOD-ECD
got into it believing investigators would find servers loaded with
illegal materials, and neatly kept balance sheets showing the profits generated by all the 'illegal' activities. During
interrogations, one investigator, in obvious frustration, grabbed a
random piece of PHP code and offered it up it as a scorecard for
keeping tabs on funds. Finally, it became abundantly clear to all that
FIOD-ECD were in way over their heads. They had no clue as to what they
were dealing with. And the criminals they were chasing? Suspects
aged 18 to 26 and who, far from being members of an organized conspiracy
set up to milk the industry of millions of dollars, barely knew each
other and were surviving mostly on donations from site users. In the meanwhile ------------
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