In its ongoing effort to crack down on Internet thieves who steal the copyrighted creative works of its member studios, the Motion Picture Association of America, Inc. (MPAA) today announced that it is filing lawsuits against six popular BitTorrent web sites responsible for the illegal swapping of millions of dollars of motion picture and television programming.
This is the first time that the MPAA has targeted TV-oriented sites for illegally swapping TV shows which has become a serious and growing problem. An Internet-monitoring company called Envisional reported recently that TV show piracy increased by 150 percent just in the past year.
MPAA President and CEO Dan Glickman said,
"Internet thievery of all creative materials is unacceptable and these thieves need to realize they are not anonymous. There are thousands of people in the entertainment industry who are working to develop, produce, and promote television shows. Those shows and those jobs are worth protecting. Every television series depends on other markets-syndication, international sales to earn back the enormous investment required to produce the comedies and dramas we all enjoy and those markets are substantially hurt when that content is stolen. On these sites, anyone in the world can download entire television seasons in a single click."
MPAA officials said they have been making progress in shutting down many of the BitTorrent sites that are dedicated to illegally swapping movies. Over 90 percent of the sites that have been sued have been shut down entirely. The percent of servers that are operating have decreased by well over 40 percent. On some of these torrent site's original homepages like Lokitorrent, UK Torrent and s0nicfreak there now appears the MPAA warning message: "You Can Click But You Cannot Hide".
MPAA provided us details of the six BitTorrent sites being sued. Together, these sites facilitate the illegal swapping of copyrighted material to over 100,000 people daily.
ShunTV - ShunTV specializes in distributing recent television shows. It has around 10,000 registered users. A regular team of users (dubbed "TeamTV") appears to upload content on a daily basis as shows are broadcast. The site even includes a "Calendar" of television programs showing the date of broadcast and whether a copy is available on the server.
Zonatracker - Zonatracker is mostly in Spanish and has over 2500 users. It offers hundreds of popular movies, including many movies
still in theaters. The Zonatracker tracker is also used by another Spanish language torrent site, Zonadivx.com.
Btefnet - This torrent site and the eight associated servers specialize in distributing television shows. The torrent site shows that there are over 48,000 registered users seeding files on the servers.
Scifi-Classics - This site is designed to distribute science fiction content. Torrents are posted in the forum section and tracked by the associated server. There are over 1600 registered users in the forum section.
CDDVDHeaven - This site has over 8000 registered users, and averaged over 1500 visits a day in March 2005 according to statistics
posted on the site. It currently lists over 100 torrents for a variety of movies and televisions shows. The site profits by giving privileges to users who make monetary contributions to the site, allowing them faster downloading speeds without requiring them to upload torrents.
Bragginrights - Bragginrights has over 12,000 registered users and a wide variety of torrents, including those for films currently in theaters. It solicits donations to make money.
Dan Glickman continued,
"Since we began shutting these sites down, the time that it takes to download a file on BitTorrent has increased exponentially which means the experience of downloading copyrighted films and TV shows is not what it used to be. We intend to make it even worse. Protecting the television industry is essential."
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