Finnish police raid BitTorrent site

The MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) is targetting tracking sites like SuprNova.org.  Not the actual users of BitTorrent.  If you don’t understand the technology this policy is akin to a copyright holder suing the person that sold you a cassette which “enabled” you to copy an album for your friend.

BitTorrent unlike most other P2P (peer to peer) software requires no “centralized” database of searchable content.  Instead it requires each torrent file to have a big brother file that points all the seeders (uploaders) and leechers (downloaders) of that torrent to one another, it’s called a tracker file.  Without the tracker seeders and leechers would be blind from one another. Though this file is integral in downloading with BitTorrent it doesn’t contain any data besides directions.  The MPAA’s ability to sue servers hosting these files is a stretch.

This fight is not about copyright infringement or intellectual property.  It’s about big business versus small individual.  Understandably so, money is obviously the motivating factor,.  But when options such as Voluntary Collective Licensing (VCL) are out there I tend to wonder, what is the RIAA and MPAA gaining by suing their customers?  Maybe a pyrrhic victory?  I can’t imagine arresting people, seizing computers, and suing for 3k a pop is solving their financial woes.  It seems to me this merely creates more sneaky ways to share files.

The solution is not to attack but adopt.  Technology is changing the flow of information (just look at Google collecting college libraries).  These agencies will either bend, or break.  Being an indie fan, I hope it’s the latter.