Battleangel

MPAA has launched a new legal volley aimed at what seems to be indexing sites.

In all, nine indexing sites have been targeted (Isohunt.com, BTHub.com and TorrentBox.com all owned by one individual.) BitTorrent: ISOHunt, TorrentSpy, NiteShadow.com, BTHub.com and TorrentBox.com; eDonkey2000: Ed2k-It.com; Newsgroups: NZB-Zone.com, BinNews.com and DVDRs.net.

However, according to Slyck, the MPAA forgot to tell the site operators about this development. There is nothing going on over at Niteshdw either. And the question is, can torrent indexing sites, that don’t have their own trackers and act more like search engines, be included in such a sweeping law suit? Or is it just a bunch of hot air to maybe trick hosting companies to cut these sites loose.

And in the meantime in the UK, some zealous Trading Standards clerk tried to teach Mozilla a thing or two about how they ought to conduct business with regard to Firefox. You just can’t give software away, that is crazy talk?

“I can’t believe that your company would allow people to make money from something that you allow people to have free access to. Is this really the case?” she asked.

“If Mozilla permit the sale of copied versions of its software, it makes it virtually impossible for us, from a practical point of view, to enforce UK anti-piracy legislation, as it is difficult for us to give general advice to businesses over what is/is not permitted.”

I felt somewhat unnerved at being held responsible for the disintegration of the UK anti-piracy system. Who would have thought giving away software could cause such difficulties?

See also:

• Isohunt and Torrentbox are determined to fight back
• Also, Niteshdw preemptively chose to remove all torrents from the forum. I guess that he was easy pickings so to speak, just like the MPAA likes ‘em. Someone with a job, a family, kids … or indeed a life … is not very likely to risk losing all that. It’s lucky though for all of us that there are those out there that have neither.