Easily digestible tech news... http://www.techdirt.com/ en-us http://www.techdirt.com/images/td-88x31.gifhttp://www.techdirt.com/ Wed, 27 Jan 2010 19:10:00 PST Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100127/1444427947.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100127/1444427947.shtml users of a popular Lithuanian BitTorrent tracker, Microsoft has apparently now tried suing the owner of the torrent tracker itself, though the guy claims he stopped running it at the end of last year. But, again, it seems backwards to sue the operator of a tracker, when that tracker does not host or transmit any copyrighted material itself. On top of that, Microsoft has sued for $43 million, when Lithuanian law apparently limits the potential damages in this case to $53,000. Either way, due to the case, the (previous?) owner of the site has had his assets frozen -- which seems pretty extreme based on just an accusation, rather than a conviction.

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]]> jumping-into-the-game http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20100127/1444427947 Tue, 17 Nov 2009 13:41:34 PST Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20091117/0149566962.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20091117/0149566962.shtml shut down its tracker for good, and switched entirely to a distributed, decentralized system, called DHT. As others are noting, this is quite a milestone, but I actually wonder if it will also have legal implications. Basically, using such a distributed system takes The Pirate Bay even further out of the equation in terms of its role in the sharing of content, and in theory could impact the ruling against The Pirate Bay. Of course, the entertainment industry will say it doesn't matter, and the courts (who don't seem to understand these things very well) might not realize the difference, but it is meaningful in terms of how involved The Pirate Bay actually is in the activity that's happening.

But, of course, even if this makes no difference in how the courts view The Pirate Bay (as expected), it does show the inevitable trend of these things: making them ever more and more decentralized and harder to shut down. When the RIAA shut down Napster, what came out of it was even more decentralized and harder to stop. Now the same thing is happening with the attempted shut down of The Pirate Bay. Even if you don't like what sites like The Pirate Bay do, at some point you have to wonder what good it does to keep shutting down these offerings when all it does is drive people to the "next" offering that's even more difficult to stop? At some point, someone is going to get the message that you can't stop this stuff. So why not figure out a way to use it to your advantage?

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