BitTorrent 2005 part 1, A rough start
The year 2005 started without Suprnova.org. Suprnova was taken offline by it’s admin on 19 december 2004, which left a huge gap that was initially filled by Lokitorrent. It did’t take very long though. Nearly a month after Suprnova died, Lokitorrent was being sued by the MPAA.
Lokitorrent’s owner Ed Webber decided to fight the MPAA, and was actively collecting donations to pay for the legal costs and penalties. Within a few weeks Lokitorrent raised over $40,000 However, not long after that, Lokitorrent was shut down, and all that was left was this MPAA notice. So, the donations didn’t help, Lokitorrent even gave it’s logfiles to the MPAA, containing all the ip-adresses of their users (press release).
This obviously came as a shock to all the people who donated money. They thought the money was going to be spend on paying penalties, but intead, lokitorrent’s users were penalized. The MPAA said they were going to use the collected ip-adresses from Lokitorrent’s logfiles in future court cases.
John G. Malcolm, head of the MPAA’s anti-piracy efforts said, “It will have a lot of records as to who these people are and what they provided, and that information will be of great interest to our members. The MPAA would turn over information to prosecutors in appropriate cases.”
As I said, a rough start.
part 1: A rough start
part 2: Legal stuff
part 3: Going Down
part 4: Bram Talking
part 5: Filling the gap
part 6: Torrent Clients
part 7: Advancing
