As we reported earlier, the decision to use BitTorrent for facilitating distribution of the movie made a bit of a mockery of the limitations of Moore’s offer, since using The Pirate Bay’s tracker sent the movie worldwide. So, even for a completely free movie, it seemed inevitable that the legal profession would get involved at some point, it was just a question of time.

It didn’t take long. In a letter dated September 25th, lawyers representing Westside Productions LLC, owner of the Slacker Uprising copyright sprang into action, demanding the removal of a torrent linking to the movie. However, they managed to make a novice error. Instead of contacting the host of the torrent site in question, the Swedish-hosted BTJunkie, they actually sent the US copyright takedown request (email & fedex) to their DNS provider, easyDNS.

easyDNS are based in Canada and, just like BTJunkie in Sweden, are not subject to the laws of the United States, although most lawyers don’t seem to understand this. Furthermore, since easyDNS aren’t even BTJunkie’s host, they are in no position to do anything about the torrent anyway.

Mark Jeftovic, a co-founder of easyDNS wrote: “But really, come on folks, please tell us that isn’t the basis for this take down request. Anybody with half a clue knows the net doesn’t work like that. In any case, I’ve sent them our standard ‘we’re not the web host, we’re just the lowly DNS service’, but I did point out this seeming contradiction in Michael Moore’s message vs his lawyer’s actions.”

Now that the lawyers managed to get a grasp of the role of a DNS server, they have withdrawn the complaint against easyDNS. They state that the problem is due to the fact that the infringing .torrent was hosted outside of the US and Canada, a situation which for some reason is unacceptable to their client and a ‘problem’ worth spending large sums of money on to remedy. Let’s be clear – no amount of money will solve this issue and it is absolutely absurd to even try.

“I’ve replied that they [the lawyers] should know it is highly impractical to attempt to impose geographical constraints on otherwise freely available files,” said Mark at easyDNS, “but I guess they want to give it a shot.”

Meanwhile, the admin of BTJunkie told us he has not yet received a takedown request.

Mo(o)re money down the drain….

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

“Lately we received more complaints from anti-piracy organizations on behalf of major companies, because some of our members post our torrents on your indexer. I take the freedom of you ask whether it is possible to remove all torrents related to my tracker, and not to accept new ones in the future.”

The administrator had already asked the members of his tracker not to post their torrents elsewhere, but this didn’t work out, as he writes: “We already put announcements on the tracker, but our +120,000 are not very co-operative.”

Most BitTorrent sites owners are more than familiar with handling takedown requests, however, these usually come from copyright holders or anti-piracy organizations, not fellow site admins.

Other than that, it is of course impossible to prevent torrents from being shared, since it is the whole purpose of filesharing. The only option to prevent people from spreading ELiTE-TEAM torrents is to take down the tracker.

ELiTE-TEAM, on the other hand, is simply trying to stay out the firing range of anti-piracy organization by showing that they are willing to cooperate with content owners. They even posted the takedown requests and removal logs on their disclaimer page. However, I doubt that sending takedown request to torrent indexers is the optimal solution.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.