LokiTorrent is going to fight
It’s all going down in torrent town. LokiTorrent owner/operator Edward Webber is raising funds to mount a legal defence against the threatened action by the MPAA. It will be interesting to see if the Electronic Frontier Foundation helps him out. He makes a good point:
“Personally, it’s ludicrous to be suing a tracker for copyright infringement that hosts no copyright material,” he said. “It’s tantamount to suing the highway department for having roads that drug smugglers use. The random pirating of software just doesn’t add up to being able to shut down the site.”
The force will be strong with the MPAA though if they can demonstrate that the majority of the content linked to by the site is copyrighted - ala napster.
Link to internetnews.com article. (via.)
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Yay, Lara Croft in Ireland!
Feshti's back and this time he's counting down the top 10 movie opening scenes of all time.
Is American opinion and culture crowding out all others?
The highways department has roads that everyone uses for all sorts of reasons, mostly legal. The torrent sites being shut down are purely there to assist with breaking the law.
I can’t believe the people hosting them didn’t work out that assisting people in breaking the law, is foolish to say the least.
Comment by James — January 2, 2005 @ 7:35 pm
I agree with you to a point, but what about Google? If I put filetype:torrent ahead of a search term, I can find copyrighted content - Google is clearly assisting people in breaking the law there. Should it’s filetype search capability be disabled? How far is a web site responsible for the content that is submitted to it or it indexes? The various torrent sites also disseminated game patches, demos, movie trailers - all legal. I’m not defending them, I’m just pointing out that they had substantial non-infringing uses as well as the obvious law breaking uses. So it’s possible they could have the betamax defense, but unlikely, given the current climate. The MPAA/RIAA who shut down these services are just shooting themselves in the foot. They could have used the centralised structure of the torrent sites to at least experiment with new business models - instead they’ve pushed them offline, forcing innovation in the form of eXeem etc.
Comment by dave — January 2, 2005 @ 7:46 pm
[…] om/”> Take a look at lokitorrent. Are they still mounting the legal defence? (previous posts.) Seems like the site is dead. Story at the register. […]
Pingback by » Lokitorrent gone The Community At Large — February 10, 2005 @ 10:53 pm