Buzzsonic.com

December 14th, 2004

Major Hollywood studios, through the US. film trade industry body the MPAA ( a conglomerate of Universal Studios, Disney, Sony Pictures, Warner Bros, MGM, 20th CenturyFox and Paramount ) stepped up their anti piracy action against online distributors of illegally copied feature films today with the announcement that 100 individuals had been targetted in a new international campaign targeting the BitTorrent, Direct Connect and eDonkey file-swapping networks, technologies widely used to trade movies online and designed specifically to speed downloads of very large files.

The MPAA said that people who download copyrighted movie files were not the targets of its latest legal actions. Instead, the group is working with law enforcement agencies in the United States and Europe to target and arrest individuals who provide key roles in the functioning of each type of network. The BitTorrent and eDonkey P2P programs differ from traditional file-sharing programs like Kazaa and Grokster in that they use what has been called a “swarming, scatter and gather” file transfer protocol in which files such as movies and songs aren’t transferred in one piece from one person’s hard drive to another. Rather, small bits of a file are pulled from many user’s hard drives and reassembled by the program on the requester’s computer. The Direct Connect network is widely used across the high speed i2Hub college P2P network in the USA.

“The operators of these servers exercise total control over which files are included on their servers and even determine if some kinds of files aren’t allowed,” said John Malcolm, the MPAA’s Senior Vice President and Director of Worldwide Anti-Piracy Operations.

“For instance, some operators won’t post pornography on their systems, but they have no compunction allowing illegal files of copyrighted movies and TV shows to flow through their servers. We are moving to stop that. The message today is clear: if you illegally trade movies online, we can find you and we will hold you accountable.”

“These kinds of P2P networks rely on servers to index and efficiently deliver files of all kinds. The operators being targeted by these actions have helped online pirates steal hundreds of millions of illegal copies of movies and TV programs.” The MPAA and local rights-holder organizations are also sending cease-and-desist letters
to Internet service providers worldwide that host eDonkey servers and DirectConnect hubs.

According to Net monitoring firm BayTSP, eDonkey recently passed up Kazaa as the most popular file-swapping network in the world, measured by number of users. Other network monitors have said that BitTorrent has long been the most popular measured by the amount of data transferred between users. BitTorrent is distributed freely under an open source license and was created three years ago in the Python programming language by Bram Cohen who came up with the idea while working on an open source content-distribution project called Mojo Nation.

Since September 2003, recording industry lawyers have sued more than 6,100 people suspected of stealing copyrighted music. The film industry held off on suing individual downloaders until last month, when the MPAA announced that the major Hollywood studios would sue about 200 people as the first wave of a legal blitz modeled on the music industry campaign.

Official MPAA press release (PDF)