MPAA targets TV sites
p2pnet.net News:- Hollywood has moved into a new phase in its efforts to target sites that use the BitTorrent p2p application.
The major movie studio cartel’s MPAA ( Motion Picture Association of America) says it’s filing lawsuits against six BitTorrent sites that feature TV shows.
If it succeeds in shutting them down, it hopes to “work” with them to, “provide entertainment products legally like it does with Napster”.
MPAA mouthpiece Dan Glickman claims that thanks to the enforcement organ’s efforts, “the time that it takes to download a file on BitTorrent has increased exponentially”.
Sites attacked by the MPAA include:
- ShunTV [www.shuntv.net] ShunTV
- Zonatracker [www.zonatracker.com] Zonatracker is mostly Spanish
- Btefnet [www.btefnet.net]
- Scifi-Classics [scifi-classics.net]
- CDDVDHeaven [cddvdheaven.co.uk]
- Bragginrights [www.bragginrights.biz] Bragginrights
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May 13th, 2005 at 3:12 pm
You disappoint me P2Pnet. You’re not going to label these poor souls as humble victims?
May 13th, 2005 at 4:14 pm
There’s a certain insanity here. Take content that is transmitted free to air, remove the ads, rip it to Divx, post it on Bittorrent. Fairly obssessive people then spend considerable time downloading it so they can watch shows they’ve missed. The MPAA then goes after the tracker sites.
Meanwhile the BBC is hard at work trying to find ways to give away it’s content in ever more useful ways.
Now somewhere around that 2nd stage (remove the ads) the TV industry’s business model fell apart. Which makes the final action by the MPAA inevitable. And ultimately it’s the obsessive end user who suffers.
So you business model is screwed. How is that my problem?
May 13th, 2005 at 6:11 pm
You raise an interesting point. If most of the TV broadcast divx rips still included the adverts would the MPAA still be so bent out of shape? IMHO yes they would. When the big media um… thugs can sell TV shows for $30 to $100 a season (aprox) on DVD they will fight tooth and nail to “protect” that chunk of public gouging, advertisers be damned.
May 13th, 2005 at 9:49 pm
Personally I wouldn’t mind watching the shows with the ads included, but I think you miss the point. Unless the number of people watching the ads is tracked, the distributors can’t charge advertisers for the coverage. There probably is a business model that works for distributing free-to-air TV shows on p2p nets with the ads included, as long as:
a) the viewing audience size is tracked in some way like Neilson ratings
b) advertisers are willing to pay a higher rate to reach the increased audience size
c) distributors in other secondary markets (like TV networks in other countries, syndication channels etc) correspondingly pay less because their audience size is reduced.
But several things have to change for us to get there.
May 13th, 2005 at 9:54 pm
Better not miss any more episodes of your favorite TV show!
The MPAA’s strategy may make some twisted kind of sense to them, but if I were a broadcaster or advertiser, I would be thinking:
a) we go to a lot of trouble to “hook” viewers so that they need to keep following the show
b) if we lose them because they missed an episode or two and lost the thread, then we’re the losers
c) too bad there isn’t a convenient way for people to catch up if they miss an episode
They should be thanking TV bittorrent sites like btefnet.
May 13th, 2005 at 11:36 pm
“the distributors can’t charge advertisers for the coverage”
good point
May 14th, 2005 at 8:51 pm
i’ve been looking around, reading and listening to people involved and it seems that several – if not all – of these places actually have not even been served with a court summons, and are really not “being sued” at the moment.
They got some ISPs to take down websites and then said they sued everyone, but so far it looks like that’s all BS. As Usual from the MPAA.
this is what i’m hearing on irc.
like i said, i’m trying to follow this in trusted areas, and i haven’t come across anyone who has actually been given a summons.
May 17th, 2005 at 9:22 am
Bit Torrent is particularly irritating to the Copyright Stasi. All of the clients communicate directly with one another through a TCP connection. Clients can engage filters that will not allow certain IPs, IP ranges, or reverse DNS values to connect to them. Furthermore, they only exchange small fragments (’pieces’) of a much larger file. Examining just one piece it would be hard to determine exactly what it was. Content is frequently uploaded in ‘packs’ with software, music, e-books, comic books, etc, all bundled together. Users (depending on their client) can ‘opt-out’ of receiving certain pieces of the torrent they are not interested in. Even if you are observed in a particular torrent, it is not certain that you’ve even gotten any of a particular protected work that is being monitored for.
The only thing that is a constant in the torrent in the tracker. However the tracker does not perform transactions with any of the data that could be alleged to be infringing. Since it’s the only thing that isn’t moving, yet it’s not doing anything explicitly bad, they try to blow it out of the water, which could be interpreted as a Denial of Service attack as the tracker is not trading in the ‘forbidden fruit’ and there may be perfectly legitimate permitted content in the torrent.
The can’t get their arms around it, so go after proverbial wounded fawn, the tracker. However, if a torrent has got 200+ clients in it and the tracker takes a powder, the torrent will continue just fine for a while based on the existing connections. Clients joining will probably not have much luck. It would be interesting to distribute the tracker functions among the seeders, thus providing the disrupters with an experience tantamount to trying to stab a rolling hardboiled egg with a paper drinking straw.
The more decentralized the deployment of the control structures of a mechanism are, the harder it is to disable it. Gone are the days when someone right out of central casting can bark, “I’m pulling the plug on this show and none of you are ever going to work in this town again!”
–TurboGeek