Popular file-sharing service BitTorrent today took a double hit as a large BitTorrent server site was raided by police in Finland, while in the United States hundreds of peer-to-peer system operators were sued by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA).
The Finnish raid lead to the arrest of 34 people, and authorities say that the site, which featured movies, music, and games, had at least 10,000 users, who had collectively downloaded material valued at millions of dollars.
At the same time, on the other side of the globe, the MPAA announced lawsuits against hundreds of operators of systems such as BitTorrent, eDonkey, and DirectConnect, all peer-to-peer file sharing systems.
It’s been a double-take day for eDonkey as well. In addition to the suits filed by the MPAA, Dutch authorities announced that they raided and seized files from two sites whose primary purpose seems to have been hosting links to PCs participating in eDonkey file-sharing. Authorities raided ShareConnector and Releases4u; between them the two sites provided music, game, and movie files to 50,000 users.
Apparently Miss Jones back in the kindergarten class of PS 53 had it wrong when she told us that it was nice to share.
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You can read more about the Finnish raid at the Register, about the Dutch raid at the Register, and about the MPAA announcement at [Page no longer available – we have linked to the archive.org version instead].
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