The entertainment industries have quite a long history when it comes to hammering other companies who could potentially disrupt their competitive advantage. One of the grey areas that they seem to permanently target is file sharing. Needless to say that several businesses have gone extinct thanks to the relentless lawsuits, however the numbers of new companies keep growing as illustrated by these quotes.

“The Internet’s graveyard is deep with companies that have been sued out of business by the entertainment industry. I think the prevailing sense is that they are winning the battles but losing the war. Despite the lawsuits, there is more file sharing than ever.”

“We are rooting out those who enable copyright infringement on the Internet. We will continue to take such actions against sites that are profiting from the theft of other people’s creative works…Our strategy is to go after people committing copyright theft on the Internet at all levels.”

“The lawsuits are little more than ’scare tactics’. The MPAA is using legal muscle to scare people but really they are the ones who are afraid. They fear technology but technology always prevails.”

The first quote is from Fred Von Lohmann who is the advocate for EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation), while the second is from Hollywood MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) and the third is a retaliation statement from Peter Sunde, The Pirate Bay co founder. The Pirate Bay was also a target of MPAA.

Quoted from Greg Sandoval’s CNET News article:

“Seven years after a judge ordered Napster to halt music swapping, online piracy continues to thrive. Some estimates hold that the large video and music files passing back and forth over the Internet chew up more than a third of the Web’s bandwidth. Meanwhile, the movie industry is following in the footsteps of the record companies by waging prolonged legal battles.”

In accordance to these lawsuits, TorrentSpy who previously said that it will never monitor users’ activities now follow the safe road by logging its users’ activities following a successful lawsuit from MPAA. MPAA used bribery as its last resort in bringing TorrentSpy down. Dean Garfield, MPAA’s legal director of affair, have promised informant US$15,000 for stealing TorrentSpy information.

“Dean Garfield expressly told the informant, on behalf of the MPAA, regarding the information that he requested, “We don’t care how you get it.” He assured the informant, when the informant expressed concerns about potential liability for obtaining or providing such information to the MPAA, that the MPAA would protect the informant from any liability for obtaining or providing such information.”

Isohunt has traveled the same route taking the cue from TorrentSpy by establishing FileRights, which is a filtering service designed to please the big entertainment industries. These advances have brought worry to the people that the ‘scare’ tactics, as quoted by Peter Sunde above, do really work in scaring the companies.

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