Another battle in the ongoing legal war vs. P2P is about to ensue, this time with the MPAA filing suit against torrent sites featuring links to download movies. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out which sites are likely to be targeted first, with suprnova, btorrents, and torrentreactor being some of the most active. I’m not sure if this will force the sites themselves to shut down, or to simply kill their respective copyright-infringing sections (probably the latter, as was the case with another torrent site, filesoup).
This sucks for me, because I haven’t bought a single DVD (pirated OR original) since I started using bit-torrent this year, and I’ve gotten so used to leaving my machine on all night so I have new movies or TV shows to watch the next morning.
On the other hand, I think it’s safe to assume that P2P will be continue to be under attack for as long as there are copyrights to infringe. And even if the courts can kill a certain P2P technology, the online community will simply move on to use other newer, unknown-in-meatspace tools to grab their movies and music. Then when the lawyers catch wind of it, they’ll pull out their law-suit templates, and the cycle will begin again.
For additional info, Ars Technica’s writeup on the upcoming Supreme Court hearings of the MGM Studios vs. Grokster case is a great bit of encapsulated P2P history.
[ UPDATE (1:17pm): Fixed the suprnova link. Thanks Richard! ]