Hollywood movie studios on Tuesday launched new legal action against operators of sites that help connect people to movies on two major peer-to-peer filesharing networks.
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Hollywood movie studios on Tuesday launched new legal action against operators of sites that help connect people to movies on two major peer-to-peer filesharing networks.
In the United States, the Motion Picture Association of America, the main lobbying arm of American film studios, filed civil lawsuits against operators of BitTorrent tracker sites, which point to locations where downloadable files can be found. In Europe, legal action in partnership with international law enforcement are expected against parties responsible for the hosting of servers in the eDonkey network.
Both BitTorrent and eDonkey allow millions to share copies of movies, music, software and games. Because of its efficiency in helping users handle very large files -- such as digital copies of feature-length films -- BitTorrent has attracted the enmity of Hollywood.
The MPAA has filed previous suits against individual downloaders. Its actions come just days after the Supreme Court agreed to take up the landmark MGM v. Grokster filesharing case.
In August, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that peer-to-peer companies cannot be held responsible for intellectual property infringement that may take place on their networks, because the technologies can be also used for legitimate, non-infringing purposes.
After urgent requests from the MPAA, the Recording Industry Association of America and a class of 27,0000 songwriters and musicians, the high court agreed last week to decide the case on appeal.
For now, P2P services such as Grokster, BitTorrent and eDonkey are not illegal. But so-called "indexing servers" that help users download copyrighted content are. In its original architecture, the Napster network used a centralized database to keep track of which file sharer had which file. Other decentralized nets such as Grokster do not have a central repository -- and this distinction became a key reason why the courts banned Napster while permitting Grokster and Streamcast to continue.
The BitTorrent tracker sites do not hold content themselves, but serve as a dynamically generated library of urls that show users where portions of files are located within the constellation of participating nodes. They help to connect users who want a file with other users who have that file on their hard drive.
Regardless of whether the tracker sites host content or not, people close to the matter say the MPAA is likely to argue that the people who host such sites are aware that the servers make acts of copyright infringement possible, and should therefore be held liable.
While this new round of legal attack would represent the first time the MPAA has attempted to sue parties responsible for hosting trackers, both BitTorrent and eDonkey have been in the entertainment trade group's sights for some time. As the popularity of both services boomed in recent months, the MPAA has escalated its attempts to compel ISPs to take action against action within their domain.
MPAA representatives declined to comment in advance of Tuesday's press conference