A recent courts decision has the torrent community shaking. 6 major Hollywood studios have won a $111 million copyright infringement case against popular bit torrent site, torrentspy.com. Does this spell trouble for bit torrent sharing in general?
This week's judgment is a huge win for the studios that have been desperately trying to find a way to extract money from bit torrent sites allegedly allowing users to download copyrighted material.
So far they've had a terrible time winning a case due to the difficulties that exist in finding exactly who is the party offering the copyrighted material to others, the site owner or the site participant?
The six major Hollywood studios went after the site, torrentspy.com causing them to shut the service down in March due to a legally hostile environment.
From TorrentSpy.com
Friends of TorrentSpy,
We have decided on our own, not due to any court order or agreement, to bring the Torrentspy.com search engine to an end and thus we permanently closed down worldwide on March 24, 2008.
The legal climate in the USA for copyright, privacy of search requests, and links to torrent files in search results is simply too hostile. We spent the last two years, and hundreds of thousands of dollars, defending the rights of our users and ourselves.
Ultimately the Court demanded actions that in our view were inconsistent with our privacy policy, traditional court rules, and International law; therefore, we now feel compelled to provide the ultimate method of privacy protection for our users - permanent shutdown.
Nonetheless the court battle continued, ultimately resulting in this massive settlement being awarded to the studios.
The case accused
torrentspy.com of hosting around 3,700 illegal movie and TV show downloads and the judge opted to fine the site $30,000 per violation, creating the gigantic settlement amount.
Yahoo News writes that the Motion Picture Association of America said the judgment sends a strong message to copyright violators.
Lawyers for torrent spy's parent company Valence Media LLC say they filed for bankruptcy protection before the judgment and hope to be protected from paying the settlement.
This judgment could mean trouble for other torrent sites out there who have been able to side-step the entertainment industry thus far. You can be sure that lawyers everywhere are hopping up and down with excitement, trying to decide who to sue next.
