Police raid BitTorrent site

[PtP]

Some more details (http://www.techspot.com/redir?target=http://www.theregister.com/2004/12/14/finnish_police_raid_bittorrent_site/) are emerging on the targeting of BitTorrent (http://www.techspot.com/story16531.html) by the powers that be on the grounds of piracy.

The Police force in Finland have made raids on a popular BitTorrent file download site, arresting staff and seizing equipment including servers. Arrests included not only the four people who work on the site, but also some 30 volunteers who help administer and run the site. The site, which apparently had some 10,000 users, contained some 6000 torrents, which Police say amounted to millions of dollars worth of films, videos, music and games. If convicted, the site operators face jail of up to two years.

[Viss]

Interesting here is some statistics from the suprnova sit one of the largest torrent sites out there.

Known trackers: 334548 seeded torrents (552847 total), 6849665 seeds & 8531934 downloaders (15381599 peers), on 1464 active trackers.
SuprNova.org cache: 54900 seeded torrents (80002 total), 1289081 seeds & 3166976 downloaders (4456057 peers), on 1361 active trackers.
New torrents: 967 today, 959 yesterday

The interesting thing is nova is a tracker of trackers pulling all its torrents from other sites none of these torrents are actually hosted on novas site, so does this make them liable ? One wonders you would think that thay would go after the biggest first. The scary thing about trackers is thay are very statistical when you log on to a tracker your ip address is recorded they do this to keep track of your records ie: share ratios. The tracker also keeps a record of what you downloaded and when. Should equipment be seized that has these logs on them and the authorities get hold of this I would say you would be pretty screwed. But looking at the stats above its going to be a rather huge task to shut this type of thing down, as they close one cell down another simply pops up in its place. These people will simply host the service in a country where there is no laws on piracy and the authorities cant touch them.

[Diggler]

It's quite easy to just have these sites mirrored to countries like Sweden, China, India, Pakistan or Russia. These countries have very lax laws on issues like this, so they really are flogging a dead horse.

Also having a torrent file is not illegal per-se. A torrent file is not a game, program, video, etc... it is just a tiny little file that gives you access to these things. That would be like throwing you in jail for having IRC, an FTP client or File Sharing software on your PC.

Look at ISONEWS! They were closed down by US authorities. Withing 3 weeks it was back up and now mirrored around the world. This is yet another dismall excuse on the part of Modern American conglomerates that they can push anyone around without admitting the fact that they created this mess in the first place

[Viss]

Well you know how things turn around and bite you on the ass well nova just bit me :) after saying what I said above heres the latest from the nova site.



Greetings everybody,

As you have probably noticed, we have often had downtimes. This was because it was so hard to keep this site up!
But now we are sorry to inform you all, that SuprNova is closing down for good in the way that we all know it.
We do not know if SuprNova is going to return, but it is certainly not going to be hosting any more torrent links.
We are very sorry for this, but there was no other way, we have tried everything.

Thank you all that helped us, by donating mirrors or something else, by uploading and seeding files, by helping people out on IRC and on forum, by spreading the word about SuprNova.org.
It is a sad day for all of us!

Please visit SuprNova.org every once in a while to get the latest news on what is happening and if there is anything new to report on.

As we wish to maintain the nice comunity that we created, we are keppig forums and irc servers (irc://irc.suprnova.org/suprnova.org) open. Thank you all and Goodbye!
sloncek & the rest of the SuprNova Team

Another one bites the dust :(

[PtP]

It does appear that p2p has seen its better days, thank heaven for ftp and irc as these will be peoples main source of not so legal files ;)

[Viss]

Agreed and also irc is getting bigger aswell this would be very hard for them to police. The only drawback with it is its not very user friendly if you can get around the 20 or so commands your ok ;)