Another week, and another BitTorrent site has been shut down. This time round, it's LokiTorrent - with the site being replaced with a message from the Motion Picture Association of America, warning: "You can click, but you can't hide".
"There are websites that provide legal downloads," the message says. "This is not one of them. This website has been permanently shut down by court order because it facilitates the illegal downloading of copyrighted motion pictures. The illegal downloading of motion pictures robs thousands of honest, hard-working people of their livelihood, and stifles creativity. Illegally downloading movies from sites such as these without proper authorization violates the law, is theft, and is not anonymous. Stealing movies leaves a trail. The only way not to get caught is to stop."
LokiTorrent, of course, was different from some of those shut down in that the site's administrators were raising money through the site to try to defend the case. Thousands of dollars had been donated by users. The site was taken down after a Dallas court agreed that Hollywood lawyers would be allowed access to LokiTorrent's server records which could let them single out those who were sharing files illegally. It's also being reported the MPAA is attempting to shut down hosts who operate central servers for the eDonkey network - a more traditional peer-to-peer system.
The trackers shut down so far - Suprnova being the most high-profile - served all sorts of different files. Of course, the MPAA is particularly interested in the films being shared, many of which are only just out at the cinema with others being ripped off pre-release DVDs and all but indistinguishable from a genuine copy. It's easy to see why they wanted to crack down on the problem. But where next for movie downloads?
Neowin spoke to LokiTorrent's owner, Lowkee, a few weeks ago, as the legal battle was just getting underway. "I run a completely legal website that the MPAA or anyone else has no right to force me to close," he said. "In just the past few weeks, the MPAA has forced the shutdown of many other BitTorrent sites which were set up to do nothing more than allow people to share what they wished. It will be a dark day when we roll over to let organizations such as the RIAA and MPAA make our freedom of speech laws for us.
"Piracy is a byproduct of peer sharing," he added. When peer-to-peer software is being written, there aren't 10 developers wringing their hands together over how much software and music people can steal from those who make a living selling it. Peer sharing is used to allow people who don't have the financial funding of the MPAA and RIAA to share their works, for free, to a worldwide audience without the massive costs of bandwidth punishing them for being popular."
Remember, for all its faults (including the odd lawsuit against 12-year-olds, or dead people), the Recording Industry Association of America did do one thing differently. It waited until there was a mainstream, easily-available and legal alternative to the P2P networks before it launched its legal actions. Napster, iTunes and all have taken off - they may not yet have the same volume of downloads as services like Kazaa did in their hey-day, but it's growing all the time, and surely it won't be that much longer until legal music downloads actually do take over.
The movie business, however, is nowhere near this level. Napster has mentioned it plans to get into it at some point in the future, but no dates have been mentioned yet. There are a few services up and running now, but many of them are (once again) American-only - and others have a small selection of films that most of us have never heard of. Hardly that great of an incentive when a quick search will yield the latest blockbuster, watchable within just a few hours. Link up your computer to your TV and a decent surround sound system, and it's pretty much impossible to tell it apart from the real thing.
I have no doubt legal movie downloads - whether they're pay-per-view, download and keep, or a 24-hour "licence" to watch (pretty much like getting a movie out of Blockbuster or somewhere else at the moment) will come. However, it seems that it's still quite a long way off. More and more people have broadband, more and more people are wanting to use it to its full potential. More and more people are discovered the wonders of downloading films quickly and easily; until there are some viable, legal alternatives, the MPAA is facing an uphill struggle in shutting down BitTorrent trackers.
Neowin's Tom Graham contributed to this report
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