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| IFPI Seizes Control of LimeTorrents Hard Drives Posted: 29 Apr 2011 03:21 AM PDT While the MPAA has shown a major interest in torrent sites over the years, their counterparts in the music industry have tended to focus their legal action on individuals and “shared folder” type services such as Napster, Kazaa, Grokster and more recently, LimeWire. Not that the IFPI and their major label members are strangers to the torrent scene though. Dealing with The Pirate Bay has naturally taken up quite a lot of their time but it’s questionable whether that time has been well spent. The same cannot be said about LimeWire, who they utterly destroyed in the United States. So having strangled Mark Gorton’s baby, where now for IFPI? The answer, it seems, is LimeWire’s namesake, LimeTorrents.  A relative newcomer to the BitTorrent scene, LimeTorrents has made rapid progress. Overall it was the best newcomer of 2010 in terms of traffic, even though it only appeared halfway through the year. It ended 2010 as the 10th largest torrent site in the world, a huge achievement. Then, on April 5th and with no warning, LimeTorrents went offline. TorrentFreak learned that LimeTorrents had been ‘raided’ but unusually there was no announcement by the Swedish police, who are usually keen to publicize such events. So what happened? The root of the story goes back to October 2010. IFPI wrote to Itstaden/ServerConnect, the host of not only LimeTorrents but several other major sites including KickassTorrents. In an attempt to pressure the host, IFPI were waving The Pirate Bay verdict around. Specifically, they drew attention to the decision of the Svea Court of Appeal, which said that The Pirate Bay’s former host, Black Internet, could be held liable for TPB’s activities. Following this IFPI contact some of the sites at ServerConnect relocated to new hosts abroad, but KickassTorrents, TorrentDownloads and LimeTorrents all remained in Sweden. This prompted further communication from IFPI in March 2011, advising ServerConnect that among other things they could be guilty of “receiving payment from criminal activities”. So, paraphrasing IFPI: “You’re hosting torrent sites, you know what they’re doing, shut them down, or we’ll get the courts to do it for you.” But courts have expensive and long-winded processes and, as can be seen from The Pirate Bay’s case, they don’t necessarily have much effect. So IFPI tried a tactic previously employed by Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN. Without a court ruling or assistance from the police or any official authority, IFPI simply asked ServerConnect for LimeTorrent’s hard drives. And, under threat of legal action similar to that used against Black Internet, ServerConnect handed them over, taking LimeTorrents completely offline. LimeTorrents’ owner received no warning and was given no chance to make a backup. ServerConnect were told by IFPI that the drives and data would be returned, but that has not happened. The owner of LimeTorrents was forced to restore the site from a 2 month old backup and return with a new ISP, but not before being ‘punished’ by Google for the unexpected downtime. He is now trying to rebuild the site. This morning, TorrentFreak asked IFPI why they were so interested in LimeTorrents and what they were hoping to find on their servers, but perhaps unsurprisingly we are yet to receive a response. But let’s hazard a guess. Could to be that IFPI is hoping to build a case against LimeTorrents on the basis that it has a similar name and logo to LimeWire, and thus hoped to attract users from that “illegal service”? If so, it wouldn’t be the first time that the major labels had tried that. A similar strategy worked against LimeWire itself when they were shown to have targeted users of Napster, another service which was deemed illegal. |
| BitTorrent Tracker Becomes Official Movie Distributor Posted: 28 Apr 2011 10:50 AM PDT
Demanding $45 million in damages, Microsoft accused the site and its operator of assisting in the illegal distribution of Office 2003 and 2007. The software giant failed to shut down the site through the courts, but the main trial against LinkoManija's operator and his company is still ongoing. Luckily, however, there are also copyright holders who see the BitTorrent tracker as a useful means to promote and distribute their works. Today, the independent movie production company Iron Cat announced that it has partnered with LinkoManija to distribute their upcoming film Barzda (The Beard), both in Lithuania and abroad. The film will be distributed in collaboration with other torrent trackers to gain maximum exposure. Previously, Iron Cat experimented with sharing a movie on Linkomanija and this turned out to be a great success. The film “Knygnešys” (The Book Smuggler) was downloaded 25,000 times in the first day alone, generating a lot of press and positive comments from the public. “We have been using Linkomanija for quite a while, so when an opportunity for mutually beneficial cooperation presented itself, we did not hesitate to take it. Of course, the popularity of Knygnešys was an important factor in this decision," Bardza director Jonas Trukanas said, commenting on the news. Linkomanija says that it will ensure that users notice the upcoming release. “Our objective is to make the film accessible to the widest possible audience,” Linkomanija’s owner said in response to news of the unusual partnership. If anything, the deal illustrates that BitTorrent trackers are more than the piracy havens they are often portrayed as. For many independent artists obscurity is still a bigger problem than piracy, but it’s a problem that BitTorrent can solve. In the near future Linkomanija and Iron Cat hope to experiment further with new ways to finance and promote Lithuanian cinema. Outside Lithuania, BitTorrent’s potential as a promotion, revenue generating and publishing platform for filmmakers has been illustrated best by the Vodo project. Through this BitTorrent powered project, several filmmakers have already reached an audience of hundreds of thousands of viewers, and today two major new releases (P1 episode 4 and Zenith part 2) were added to this list. It may not be in the interests of the MPAA and the major movie studios, but it appears that BitTorrent does indeed democratize culture and media, whether they like it or not. Source: BitTorrent Tracker Becomes Official Movie Distributor |
Last year Microsoft joined the movie and music industries by suing a major BitTorrent tracker. With approval from their United States headquarters, Microsoft | You are subscribed to email updates from TorrentFreak To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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