![]() "I've argued for years that the real battle rights holders are fighting isn't with individual users or file-sharing sites, but with search," Garland says. That means preventing a user from downloading copyrighted files would mean not simply shutting down the Pirate Bay, but every one of the lesser-traveled sites that Google or Yahoo! provide links to. In focus groups, Garland says he's found that users begin their searches for pirated movies on search engines as often as any source, including the Pirate Bay. Have always been a starting point for peer-to-peer piracy, says Eric Garland, chief executive of the bittorrent research firm Big Champagne. Yahoo! did not respond immediately to requests seeking comment. "We are committed to respecting copyrights and have a well-established process under the for removing links to infringing content when they appear in our search results," a company spokesman wrote in an e-mail. Google, for its part, says it is vigilant about removing illegal content. For example, search for "the maltese falcon torrent," and the first result links to, which in turn links to other sites listing torrents for the Bogart classic, including Mininova, BTjunkie, Torrenthound and Seedpeer. Googling more obscure films works just as well. In fact, searches for "wolverine torrent" on Google have more than quadrupled since the movie file was first leaked to peer-to-peer networks on April 5, according to Google Trends. Those looking for the upcoming film X-Men Origins: Wolverine, for instance, can search for "wolverine torrent." The first result is a link to file-sharing site isoHunt, with a torrent tracker file that allows the user to download the full film. "And if they're prosecuted, they would have much more interesting arguments in their defense."īy searching for pirated music or video, Google users can easily scan a range of lesser-known pirate sites to dig up illicit content. "Google now can and does do what the Pirate Bay has always done," Edelman says. And according to Ben Edelman, a professor at Harvard's Business School focused on Internet regulation, that longer-tail assortment of piracy outlets means the starting point for finding pirated content has shifted to an even more resilient source: Waiting in the wings to absorb the site's audience are dozens of second-string bittorrent tracker and index sites that have avoided the Pirate Bay's level of notoriety, including Mininova, isoHunt and Demonoid. And though the sites' owners say they plan to appeal the decision, it may nonetheless lead to the takedown of the Web's most popular index of peer-to-peer downloads.īut even if the Pirate Bay sinks, putting an end to file-sharing isn't so simple. The verdict comes as a surprise to many who assumed the site, which indexes the "tracker" files that allow users to share video and music, was beyond prosecution in its home country of Sweden. On Friday, the trial of the Pirate Bay, the Web's highest-profile source of TV shows, movies and music, came to an end when a Swedish court found the administrators of the site guilty of copyright infringement, sentencing them to a year in prison and more than $3 million in fines.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |