one for the road

While I'm hoping this weblog will continue past this semester's demise, here's one last parting shot just in case.

BitTorrent mega-site Suprnova.org has been shut down.

The website creators got a little scared at the MPAA's recent gustappo tactics and decided that closing down the website was probably the safest plan of action.  And who can blame them?  Finnish (yes...Finland) police raided a website that purported to have torrent files for over 10,000 illegal movies, music, and software.   

So now we've got an international policing of America's copyrights.  Anyone else just a bit scared of the possibilities of this?   Global copyright protection is the next wave of the copyright battle.  America and the few big businesses in it that own a lion's share of the creative works are trying to put pressure on foreign countries through the WTO and other trade related organizations to comply with our increasingly stringent copyright laws.   So now we have instances like the Finnish police goin SWAT style on website owners, and legitimate sites like Project Gutenberg Australia being forced to take down publicy allowed works from their website.  I guess now you can rob a bank and move to mexico to escape jurisdiction, but you cant escape the long arm of copyright owners... 

Comments

[John Lotfi]

Holy cow, that's pretty big news. Suprnova.org was the "go to" spot in order to get find torrents questionable in legal status. But the site just played host to links for the torrents, and didn't host the files themselves.

Wow.

[jon wallace]

yea, i was a bit shocked as well as a few of my friends who use it religiously. But with the latest crackdowns, its getting to the point of risk outweighing the benefits of keeping the site open. I'm not sure if suprnova could escape liability if the MPAA tried to go after them or not. BitTorrent does create a lot of major questions in current copyright litigation: is just linking other torrent sites enough for infringement or liability? can the individual torrent files, which are just small pieces, be argued as so insignificant they arent a "substantial" copying at all?

i just dont think suprnova wanted to find out firsthand the answer to these vagueties..i cant blame em, but its too bad for the rest of us.