TorrentSpy Slapped with $110 Million Judgement

[olddays1]

TorrentSpy Slapped with $110 Million Judgement   http://torrentfreak.com/torrentspy-slapped-110-million-080507/
Written by Ernesto on May 07, 2008

TorrentSpy has been ordered to pay a $110 million fine by a federal judge in Los Angeles. The BitTorrent site was found guilty on the charges of copyright infringement of several movie studios represented by the MPAA.

This default judgment is the result of an ongoing court case between the MPAA and Valence Media, TorrentSpy owner Justin Bunnel’s company, that started early 2006.

It is uncertain at this point whether TorrentSpy will appeal.

Unsurprisingly, MPAA’s Dan Glickman was very pleased with the outcome of the case that lasted over two years, as he said:

“This substantial money judgment sends a strong message about the illegality of sites. The demise of TorrentSpy is a clear victory for the studios and demonstrates that such pirate sites will not be allowed to continue to operate without facing relentless litigation by copyright holders.”

“The claims made by the MPAA in this case don’t stand up to any sort of scrutiny,” says Andrew Norton, head of the US Pirate Party in a response. “It is also clear that our judicial system urgently needs some unbiased education in modern technical matters, as anyone that has watched this case knows the judge is out of her depth. What chance does justice have in that situation?”

In 2006 TorrentSpy was more popular than any other BitTorrent site, but this changed quickly in August 2007, when a federal judge ordered TorrentSpy to log all user data. The judge ruled that TorrentSpy had to monitor its users in order to create detailed logs of their activities, and hand these over to the MPAA.

In a response to this decision - and to ensure the privacy of their users - TorrentSpy decided that it was best to block access to all users from the US. This led to a huge decrease in traffic and revenue.

This was not enough for the MPAA, who argued that TorrentSpy had ignored the court decision. The legal battle continued, and this lead to a preventative closure of the site by Justin, to protect the privacy of its users.

[fuzzytomcat]

This dosen't surprise me a bit, the MPAA ( Motion Picture Association of America ) have been really pissed off ever sence VHS tape recorders were made, and now have so much money and power they will go to any extreem to capitalize on their so called pain and suffering, from hiring hackers to break into torrent web sites to fake torrents to track IP's. The next web sites Isohunt and Pirate Bay seem to be on their hit list next ......... but what about Google it must be somehow emune from the same laws. 

Reference -

http://www.wired.com/politics/onlinerights/news/2007/10/p2p_hacker

http://torrentfreak.com/mpaa-caught-uploading-fake-torrents/

[olddays1]

 More on fake torrents.....    http://www.afterdawn.com/news/archive/13891.cfm

Sources from the security firm McAfee have stated that over 500,000 machines have reported being infected by a new trojan going around that's disguised as media files shared on popular P2P networks. These files can either look like a popular and heavily seeded music or movie file and often contain the name of whatever popular file is going around the P2P networks now is actually a trojan loaded with tons of malware packages to make a file sharer's day a lot less enjoyable.

McAfee states that this fake file outbreak is the worst that its seen in three years. Users who get attacked by the fake file are treated to an array of pop-ups and open back doors to the world for their computers to be compromised. These files are mostly predominant on the eDonkey and Limewire networks and are often labeled with a different language to confuse users. The titles make the file appear to be music tracks, pornography and full versions of popular movies. Once downloaded, the user is asked to install a specific codec to view the media, and its then that the trojan is launched.

Included in the bundled of malware from this package is a media player that will only play included media files, thereby disabling any other media player or media files on the user's machine from being played. McAfee stated that of the 500,000 cases it's seen, only 10% of those have gone as far as installing the malicious package.

[fuzzytomcat]

I had a bad experience with several downloads that required a " Vodei " video player, one that I hadn't heard of. I looked at it's one page Web Site and downloaded it into a simple Windows OS system computer with networking only, my troll target special. Sniffed the package real good looked ok, but shouldn't have un-ziped it, bad idea .......... free isn't free sometimes .........

Looked at my notes and the torrents were from "Movies Empire" that requires the "Vodei Player" both have nothing on contact or webmaster information "BEWARE" .............. Good Luck 

http://www.moviesempire.com/
http://www.vodei.com/