German officials have taken down a private BitTorrent tracker this week, adding that they raided three apartments and confiscating multiple PCs, HDDs, DVDs, CDs and cash.
The authorities, along with the German anti-piracy organization GVU, added: “Members of the file sharing networks were able to buy download packages for up to 75 Euros. Users who paid 100 Euros or more received special privileges.”
P2Pblog makes a quick note however of the bust, and it seems it is a giant waste of taxpayer money and time. The tracker only listed 300 torrents, and in comparison, The Pirate Bay currently has close to 2 million listed torrents. One could argue that TPB is a public tracker and cannot be compared, but most large private trackers have 15000 torrents available at any given time, a giant number compared to the lowly 300.
The press picked up on the story and stretched the facts a bit however to make it look like a great victory for the GVU. Spiegel.de reported that the tracker was a “so called paytracker, meaning a file sharing server that only provided access to paying users.” That was not true, as users could download for free, but faced extended waiting times until their ratio was high enough.
Result for: privileges
The premier Usenet indexing site Newzbin has announced that it is now under attack from the MPAA and it seems the the service will either have to change significantly or face a shutdown.
Newzbin is the creator of the NZB format, generally considered to be Usenet’s equivalent of a .torrent file. Usenet was generally considered to be complicated to use before the format emerged.
It seems the MPAA has noticed as well however. Newzbin administrator ‘Caesium’ made this announcement last week:
“Newzbin has today received a letter from the Motion Picture Association (MPA). In the letter, they claim that some editors may be reporting material from Usenet that is infringing the copyright of their members.
While these claims have not been substantiated, it should be noted that Newzbin does not condone the distribution or indexing of such materials. We will immediately act to remove any items that are found to be infringing copyright.
Please take a moment to refer to our Terms and Conditions, in particular sections 4 and 4.2.
Please note that we may revoke privileges, or ban accounts, of users found to be violating these Terms and Conditions.”
The MPAA could have issues however. The company complies completely with UK laws and they remove any infringing files when notified. In the past the MPAA has shut down several US-based NZB sites such as NZB-Zone and forced others to adjust the way they operate.
Caesium also noted that there might have to be changes implemented for the site to keep running, such as having all “.NZB related reports removed.” They could also follow the arrangement of BinNews.com which removed “only the posts related to movies and TV shows,” when the MPAA came knocking.
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