Swedish Court Gets One Right: Won't Shut Down OpenBitTorrent

from the about-time dept

With the movie industry's lawyers recently demanding that ISP Portlane shut down the OpenBitTorrent tracker, claiming (without any evidence) that it was just a rebranded version of The Pirate Bay's tracker, it seemed possible that the Swedish courts would roll over again. However, in a bit of a surprise, the court has pointed out that it's a big stretch to hold the ISP liable without more evidence, and has refused to order the shutdown of OpenBitTorrent. Nice to see that the courts don't always just accept what the movie industry says without further examination.

Filed Under: bittorrent, openbittorrent, sweden
Companies: openbittorrent

Entertainment Industry Wants More People To Know About OpenBitTorrent Tracker

from the for-what-reason? dept

The definition of insanity, the saying goes, is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. For the past decade, the entertainment industry has sued one site or service after another that was used for unauthorized file sharing at some time. In every single case, the act of suing that site or service ended up only serving to massively increase attention and usage of those services. Suing Napster made Napster into the service to use. Ditto with Kazaa and Grokster. The Pirate Bay wasn't that big until Hollywood got Swedish authorities to raid the operations and confiscate the servers.

So, here we go again -- except this time it's even more ridiculous. Entertainment industry representatives have filed a lawsuit against the OpenBitTorrent tracker's hosting company (Update: noting that the lawsuit is against the hosting company), which is not a file sharing site or service at all. It's just an open tracker. Now, I recognize that folks in the entertainment industry aren't particularly knowledgeable about how technology works, but at some point, aren't they supposed to at least understand the basics? The tracker alone is not responsible for anything here -- and even more ridiculous is that the OpenBitTorrent guys (despite not being in the US) set up a DMCA-like process for taking down any info_hash if they want (which, by the way, was the reason the industry claimed it didn't sue Google -- because it took down links on request -- but now that OpenBitTorrent does the same thing, it's a problem?). Either way, with the rise of trackerless solutions means that even taking this site down won't much matter. Still, it makes you wonder what they're thinking over in the entertainment industry other than ways to increase their legal bills.

Filed Under: bittorrent, lawsuits, trackers
Companies: openbittorrent