Music Industry ‘Shuts Down’ Top Torrent Trackers

[shamu726]

A regional court in Hamburg has ordered a hosting company to identify the operators of three iconic BitTorrent trackers that together coordinated dozens of millions of transfers per day. The order is the result of a complaint from German music group BVMI, which says it's behind the shutdown of the trackers shut down earlier this year.

OpenBitTorrent, PublicBT and Istole.it have long been the three largest BitTorrent trackers on the Internet, coordinating the downloads of 30 million people at any given point in time.

This means that these non-commercial services, powered by the open source Opentracker software, handled a staggering three billion connections per day – each.

We say handled, because the trackers have been offline since mid-January. The trio mysteriously disappeared, but the German music industry group BVMI now takes credit for the shutdowns.

According to BVMI’s lawfirm Rasch, the hosting company took the tracker offline after they were ordered identify the operators. However, the host initially refused to disclose the personal details.

In an injunction released this week a Hamburg court ordered that the hosting company now has to hand over the personal details of the tracker operators.

The ruling follows a complaint from BVMI and is the first against so-called standalone BitTorrent trackers. These trackers do not host or process any infringing material themselves and are a content neutral part of the BitTorrent ecosystem.

According to BVMI CEO Florian Drücke the music industry has recently expanded its focus beyond traditional torrent sites such as The Pirate Bay, to include these standalone trackers.

“Without the Tracker, it will be much more difficult for those who offer and seek illegal content to make the first connection,” Drücke says.

The downside, however, is that legal torrents also use these trackers to coordinate connections.

According to Christian Solmecke, a German IT lawyer who has experience with file-sharing cases, the verdict comes a a surprise.

“The court ruling amazes me. Apparently the court assumes that BitTorrent trackers are by definition something illegal. This is not the case,” he says.

The lawyer doesn’t deny that the trackers play a role in both legal and illegal transfers, but they are content neutral and merely passing on metadata, similar to a DNS provider.

“By the same argument these BitTorrent trackers are switched off you might ultimately forbid an ISP to continue to provide Internet access to end users, if copyright violations are committed,” Solmecke adds.

While the three targeted trackers have been offline for months already, the ruling means that these type of services had better avoid Germany as their home base in future.

“Apparently, the music industry sees the entire BitTorrent network as ‘evil’,” Solmecke concludes.

Source: TorrentFreak

[PrEzi]

Following that line of attack/thoughts - an vehicle can also be evil - because with a car you also can kill pedestrians -- These should be BANNED!!

E-mails should be banned - because you can send some mp3z with themz....

Oh ! And Printers too - cause - god forbid - you could use them to e.g. re-print some documents or even parts of books !

And many many more.... eh.... the only question remains - what has the judge smoked before making this decision ? Cause I want some of that sheeeet too.

[ugurano]

your can kill all trackers, but the hydra can not killing :showoff:

[anakin206]

your can kill all trackers, but the hydra can not killing :showoff:

Yes you can. If you cut all of its heads at once.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lernaean_Hydra

[steven36]

You may can kill p2p but you cant kill file sharing .Per say. Before there was p2p there was other ways .

In June 1999, Napster was released as an unstructured centralized peer-to-peer system, requiring a central server for indexing and peer discovery. It is generally credited as being the first peer-to-peer file sharing system.

Gnutella, eDonkey2000, and Freenet were released in 2000, as MP3.com and Napster were facing litigation. Gnutella, released in March, was the first decentralized file sharing network. In the gnutella network, all connecting software was considered equal, and therefore the network had no central point of failure. In July, Freenet was released and became the first anonymity network. In September the eDonkey2000 client and server software was released.

In 2001, Kazaa and Poisoned for the Mac was released. Its FastTrack network was distributed, though unlike gnutella, it assigned more traffic to 'supernodes' to increase routing efficiency. The network was proprietary and encrypted, and the Kazaa team made substantial efforts to keep other clients such as Morpheus off of the FastTrack network.^{[citation needed]}

In July 2001, Napster was sued by several recording companies and lost in A&M Records, Inc. v. Napster, Inc .

From 2002 through 2003, a number of BitTorrent services were established, including Suprnova.org, isoHunt, TorrentSpy, and The Pirate Bay. In 2002, the RIAA was filing lawsuits against Kazaa users. As a result of such lawsuits, many universities added file sharing regulations in their school administrative codes (though some students managed to circumvent them during after school hours). With the shutdown of eDonkey in 2005, eMule became the dominant client of the eDonkey network. In 2006, police raids took down the Razorback2 eDonkey server and temporarily took down The Pirate Bay.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_sharing

There's still other ways to share besides p2p .. When I 1st came on the computer there was no p2p and we got by with out it . Just like what Peter Sunde says P2P is old technology all it is a big thorn in everyone's side .Its being monitored 24/7 by the police . I don't use it unless I can't find something by better means . All its doing is hindering some new better technology to take its place witch all trough history it has .

The warez scene started emerging in the 1970s, used by predecessors of software cracking and reverse engineering groups. Their work was made available on privately run bulletin board systems (BBSes).The first BBSes were located in the U.S., but similar boards started appearing in Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and mainland Europe. At the time, setting up a machine capable of distributing data was not trivial and required a certain amount of technical skill. The reason it was usually done was for technical challenge. The BBSes typically hosted several megabytes of material. The best boards had multiple phone lines and up to one hundred megabytes of storage space, which was very expensive at the time.^[3] Releases were mostly games and later software.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warez_scene

We have went from BBSes to P2P time for P2P move on and let the next thing take its place . ;)

The real scene still don't release there releases on p2p only some leakers upload it to p2p . Any scene Groups that get caught posting stuff on p2p gets kicked out they hate p2p . Most stuff comes from them to begin with not p2p and the rest mostly comes from the web not p2p. Mostly all p2p is bots uploading others works . :)