TorrentFreak

Last month RapidShare discovered that they had been reported by the MPAA and RIAA to the US Government for being one of the world’s “most notorious pirate markets”. Now, on the heels of reports that the entertainment industries spent a small fortune lobbying for domain seizures in the last quarter, RapidShare has hired a Washington based lobbying firm to represent its interests in the US and to start correcting misconceptions.

BitTorrent search engine isoHunt is fighting the permanent injunction issued by the District Court of California last summer in their case against the MPAA. isoHunt contests the imposition of a site-wide keyword filter based on a list of movie industry keywords. By doing so, the search engine also makes a case for the public’s ‘freedom of search’, not just on BitTorrent, but on the Internet in general.

The recent action by US authorities against so-called rogue websites comes on the heels of significant lobbying efforts by two well known anti-piracy groups. In the last quarter the MPAA and RIAA together spent a total of $1.8 million on lobby efforts in Washington. Public records reveal that the industry groups focused heavily on legislation and authorities involved in domain name seizures.

Three months ago, TorrentFreak discovered that the Motion Picture Association were about to make an unprecedented move against file-sharing in the UK. Their targets were ISP BT and Usenet indexing site Newzbin.com. In discussions the MPA refused to confirm our suspicions. Yesterday, however, the MPA went to court to obtain an injunction to have BT block Newzbin in the UK.

The MPAA and their colleagues in The Netherlands appear to have shut down more than two dozen BitTorrent, Usenet and other file-sharing sites today. Accused of linking to movies, music, TV shows and games, at least one domain appears to be redirecting to the website of Dutch anti-piracy outfit, BREIN.

Starting tomorrow, the MPAA will send out letters to higher education institutions in the United States, urging them to protect the interests of the six major movie and television studios. In addition, the MPAA will announce that it will start warning college and university students who are illegally sharing motion picture movies on college campus networks. Those who don’t abide will have to face the consequences.

In a response to a request from the Office of the US Trade Representative, the MPAA has submitted a list of “notorious markets” for pirated goods located outside the United States. Among them are some of the world’s leading torrent sites including BTjunkie, Demonoid, isoHunt, KickAssTorrents and The Pirate Bay. Usenet service UseNext makes an appearance alongside file-hosters MegaUpload and RapidShare.