[Infowarrior] - Entertainment Industry Wants More People To Know About OpenBitTorrent Tracker

[Richard Forno]

Entertainment Industry Wants More People To Know About OpenBitTorrent  
Tracker
from the for-what-reason? dept
http://techdirt.com/articles/20091118/1218246994.shtml

The definition of insanity, the saying goes, is doing the same thing  
over and over again and expecting different results. For the past  
decade, the entertainment industry has sued one site or service after  
another that was used for unauthorized file sharing at some time. In  
every single case, the act of suing that site or service ended up only  
serving to massively increase attention and usage of those services.  
Suing Napster made Napster into the service to use. Ditto with Kazaa  
and Grokster. The Pirate Bay wasn't that big until Hollywood got  
Swedish authorities to raid the operations and confiscate the servers.

So, here we go again -- except this time it's even more ridiculous.  
Entertainment industry representatives have filed a lawsuit against  
the OpenBitTorrent tracker's hosting company (Update: noting that the  
lawsuit is against the hosting company), which is not a file sharing  
site or service at all. It's just an open tracker. Now, I recognize  
that folks in the entertainment industry aren't particularly  
knowledgeable about how technology works, but at some point, aren't  
they supposed to at least understand the basics? The tracker alone is  
not responsible for anything here -- and even more ridiculous is that  
the OpenBitTorrent guys (despite not being in the US) set up a DMCA- 
like process for taking down any info_hash if they want (which, by the  
way, was the reason the industry claimed it didn't sue Google --  
because it took down links on request -- but now that OpenBitTorrent  
does the same thing, it's a problem?). Either way, with the rise of  
trackerless solutions means that even taking this site down won't much  
matter. Still, it makes you wonder what they're thinking over in the  
entertainment industry other than ways to increase their legal bills.