Pure L wrote:Just out of curiosity, why doesn't the record industry go after sites like bittorrent or soulseek? Seems like they've gone after the people on Kazaa before.
Or maybe I should ask, how long will it be until they go after these sites?
Or is the technology different in these instances?
The technology is different, yes.
Althuogh Bittorrent is a peer-peer protocol, it still relies on server/client relationships for the setting up and organization of the peer network. The servers that host the bittorrent files and manage the peer-to-peer transactions are called trackers.
The MPAA and RIAA have indeed gone after Bittorrent trackers and have even shut many of them down. There used to be a huge tracker based in Eastern Europe called
SuprNova.org, which distributed thousands of torrents and managed the delivery of a motherload of music files, commercial movies and television series.
In 2004, SuprNova's owners were forced to shut it down due to threats of expensive legal action by the MPAA and RIAA. This was the first really high-profile case of a bittorrent tracker being forced out of business by the Recording and Cinema industries, and it became a moral rallying point for the P2P filesharing community in general. Many new trackers opened up in the wake of SuprNova's demise, a few of them adopting the suffix "-nova" as a show of solidarity and an homage to the fallen giant. Among these are Mininova, iPodnova, Bitenova, AnimeNova...
Last year the domain "www.suprnova.org" was taken over by the world's largest Bittorrent tracker,
The Pirate Bay who have vowed to reopen the tracker in Sweden, which country doesn't have legislation forbidding bittorrent filesharing.
Since the early 00's, many bittorrent trackers have been threatened or sued into oblivion. But new ones keep popping up all the time, faster than the old ones can be taken down. Most newer trackers require user accounts, authentication and some of them allow new users by invitation only. The admins of most big trackers closely monitor the IP addresses of their clients in an effort to ensure that user accounts are not being creataed by the authorities in the interest of legally ensnaring them or their members.
I don't know much aobut SoulSeek. It's a pretty shitty system for sharing, so I never really got into using it. Users of P2P networks like Kazaa and Gnutella get busted often because the way those systems are designed, it's easy to browse users' IP addresses and to peruse their list of shared files looking for material that violates copyrights.