Why are they going after torrent users and not.........
 

the uploaders to Rapidshare/Hotfile/Filesonic/Megaupload etc?

on a scale of 1 to 10 in piracy threat to the industry - torrents are a '3', free file hosts are a '10'

Well last I heard the free file hosts have the following in favor of them:

1) They are pretty good about taking stuff down in response to complaints
2) Some have even gone as far as to replace links to stolen content with links to purchase legitimate copies.
3) There will always be a significant legitimate use for their services even if it is frequently abused by pirates.

look at the alexa of those hosts.

the laws need to change to protect the developers, designers, etc.

its ok for a site to host a file even though they know its costing the people who made it money, but as long as they take it down when they are asked.

not talking about the free file hosts, even though they suck hard they are fully protected by DMCA - i'm talking about the users who upload and download. they do much more damage than torrent users. torrents are like Usenet, over the head of the majority of surfers.

Your sig is stopping me from getting some damn work done!!

Just going for who is easiest to catch.

Easier to track them down. Download the torrent and go after all the IPs connected to it.

And if you think that torrents are over the head of the average user, you better think again.

So far. Who knows what will happen if this snowballs. :thumbsup

because being smart is so out of trend, dumb is the new smart! :thumbsup

Some of them are good about taking stuff down, others not so much.

I'm not gonna give the bad ones any free publicity here, but I can think of one that takes a week or more to comply with DMCA requests and another that ignores them altogether.

The real question is, why does everyone expect someone ELSE to solve the problems?

Steve Lightspeed

the reason is ease of access...
an inspector can just install utorrent start downloading and pickup ips
with rapidshare he needs to request that kind of info from them...

The file sharing sites are without doubt a huge problem, and in my experience most (not all) of them are pretty quick to remove content.

It would be nice if they would create a black list and stick to it.

Because that's how Capitalism/Business works...leave it to the PROFESSIONAL "problem handlers", and you are free to go about your own line of work.

People use too many different free hosts, while it's certainly a huge issue in piracy, it's just annoying enough to download from that I don't think people are happy using the free hosts to get their free stuff. Honestly outside of tubes, the other forms of piracy seem like a drop in the bucket as far as porn goes, movie companies though I'd guess would view bittorents as enemy number 1.

They don't go after the uploaders because the upload service doesn't nessesarily have to keep logs on who uploaded what. If they don't log the time and ip, then they would have nothing to go off of.

I say bullshit. The file hosts know exactly who these people are because the uploaders get a monetary kickback from the file hosts for each download they send.

IMO the current lawsuits against the torrent users are for building up a legal warchest to eventually fight the illegal file hosts and tubes.