LokiTorrent owner to pay $1-million
2005-02-13 07:03:35
The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) representing Hollywood's major film studio has won a very important case against movie pirates. They have brought down LokiTorrent.com.LokiTorrent, which was owned by Edward Webber, directed people to downloadable copies of copyrighted movies. Webber is finned $1-million in a judgment issued by a Dallas court. An MPAA notice has replaced the home page of the site. The court has also ordered the site owners to handover the records such as IP addresses of those who downloaded movies through the site. The records will help investigators to pinpoint thousands of people who downloaded unauthorized copies of movies, TV programme etc.
John G. Malcolm, head of the MPAA's anti-piracy efforts said, "It will have a lot of records as to who these people are and what they provided, and that information will be of great interest to our members. The MPAA would turn over information to prosecutors in appropriate cases."
The site Lokitorrent.com was serving as a tracker that allows people who want to download files to connect with those who have them and want to swap them.
The site works on software like BitTorrent. BitTorrent is a simple protocol designed for transferring files. It is peer-to-peer in nature where users connect to each other directly to send and receive portions of the file. It is the tracker, like LokiTorrent.com, which coordinates the action of all such peers. The tracker only manages connections, it does not have any knowledge of the contents of the files being distributed, and therefore a large number of users can be supported with relatively limited tracker bandwidth.
The key philosophy of BitTorrent is that users should upload (transmit outbound) at the same time they are downloading (receiving inbound.) In this manner, network bandwidth is utilized as efficiently as possible.
Although the file sharing network operators claim that they don’t have any idea or control on what is being transferred on their network, movie makers feel otherwise. After all if your site boasts to be one that fastest downloads and keeps a track of what is available where, then you cant pretend to be an innocent bystander.