IFPI Gets Israeli Court To Block (And Advertise) File Sharing Site

from the down-goes-another-one dept

The entertainment industry really has a way about convincing judges and politicians that something really awful is going on with bittorrent search engines -- despite the fact that they have yet to present any evidence that any of them are illegal. Since they're search engines, they are not hosting any infringing content, and there are plenty of legitimate uses of these systems, as can be seen by the fact that Trent Reznor just used various torrent sites to help promote his latest album (which appears to be doing quite well). If there are problems with particular content, the answer isn't to blame the site, but to go after those responsible for offering up the infringing content itself. Yet, through various scare tactics, the entertainment industry convinces judges and politicians that it's the search engines' fault. The latest is in Israel, where the IFPI has convinced a judge to order the country's largest ISPs to block a torrent site named Httpshare. This doesn't appear to fit with the laws in Israel at all, which has some wondering why the judge would make such an order. Of course, the end result will likely backfire on the IFPI. Remember, it was just a few weeks ago that a Danish court similarly ordered ISPs to block Pirate Bay. The end result was just to generate a lot more attention for Pirate Bay increasing traffic greatly from Denmark. The same thing is likely to now happen in Israel with Httpshare, a site I'd never heard about. There will be rather easy workarounds for users who want to get there, and thanks to the IFPI putting it in the headlines, chances are many more people will go check it out.
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Filed Under: blocking torrent sites, ifpi, israel, streisand effect
Companies: httpshare


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  1. identicon
    another mike, 6 Mar 2008 @ 4:16pm

    free advertising

    Yet another site that can advertise themselves as the google of bittorrents. And with the IFPI doing all the publicizing, their advertising dollars will go much further.
    The next phase of these search engines is that someone will write one that runs in memory only. That way when the record industry sues them, they can hand over all their harddrives, letting the industry go crazy looking for all their infringing content which doesn't exist of course. But since they don't actually need their harddrives, they continue on business as usual. It's like a lizard dropping its tail for a predator.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  2. identicon
    krsd, 6 Mar 2008 @ 4:43pm

    I would think that with live distro CD's like knoppix or slax, that would be fairly possible to be happening already. Of course unless the data is stored somewhere it would be lost on any power down of the system and need to be recollected in some way.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  3. identicon
    paul, 6 Mar 2008 @ 5:05pm

    Re: free advertising

    I guess,they aren't including PHP scanners etc...Don't trust anyone,by the above analysis!Since,it isn't even showing knowledge of:the pain people put up with when they get hacked!

    link to this | view in thread ]

  4. identicon
    Lucretious, 6 Mar 2008 @ 7:43pm

    and what do we call this phenomenon?

    I call it Lucretious' law!




    oh.....wait.....

    link to this | view in thread ]


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