A Dallas federal court has ordered file-swapping site LokiTorrent.com to shut down and provide Hollywood lawyers with access to its full server logs, including data that could expose hundreds of thousands of people to copyright lawsuits, CNET News reported.
The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) said last week that it had won a quick court victory against LokiTorrent, and was launching a new round of actions against what it termed as other online piracy hubs. The data provided by the onetime file-swapping hub would provide “a roadmap to others who have used LokiTorrent to engage in illegal activities,” the trade group said.
Hard numbers on the site’s traffic are hard to come by, CNET reported. However, according to researchers at the Delft University of Technology, LokiTorrent was responsible for more than 800,000 downloads in the month of October alone.
MPAA executives said the information could “quite possibly” lead to lawsuits against individuals.
Like other big BitTorrent sites, LokiTorrent had served as a clearinghouse for links to pirated copies of movies, TV shows, software and music. The site provided access to more than 30,000 different files in October 2004. For the last several months, the site also benefited from the disappearance of larger peers including SuprNova.org and Youceff.org.
The pressure from the MPAA is shifting use of BitTorrent, which until recently accounted for more data traffic online than any other single application, according to Net monitoring firm CacheLogic.
Traditional file-swapping services, including Morpheus, eDonkey, Shareaza and newcomer Exeem, all have built some level of BitTorrent support into their software. That could let people using the technology avoid the easily targeted Web sites like LokiTorrent.
