Recording Industry Takes Down BitTorrent & NZB Sites

Although many stories about anti-piracy activity seem to come out of the United States, Europe, Canada and Australia, operations are certainly not limited to these countries. Today, news is filtering through that South Africa’s biggest BitTorrent and Usenet NZB sites have been taken down by the recording industry.

According to reports received today, two South African BitTorrent trackers have fallen to anti-piracy action. BitFarm.co.za was the largest tracker in the country with more than 10,000 members but that site has been closed along with a smaller private tracker known as NinjaCentral. Furthermore, BitFarm’s sister site, NewsHost, which specializes in Usenet indexing via .NZB files, is also receiving unwanted attention.

The legal threats emanate from the country’s equivalent of the RIAA, the Recording Industry of South Africa, otherwise known as RiSA. Instead of targeting the individual sites directly, it seems RiSA notified South Africa’s ISPA (an industry group for ISPs) who accepted the complaints.

Read more at Torrentfreak.com.

Comments

[TheThinMan]

Sucks for them, but that's what it's coming too. But, as soon as this one goes down ten more will pop up. Unless they make a big strike and take a bunch of sites down at one time, then this cycle will continue.

[jawide]

it#s never gonna work. the 'illegal' means will ALWAYS succeed... ALWAYS. the best thing to do i would think would be is to cut the price of music or something..

[evangreenblo]

I submitted this as I'm from South Africa. This was a big blow because as South Africans we pay a heavy price for bandwidth, and local bandwidth is charged a lot cheaper. $15 buys you 30gb local or 2gb international.

[kranoscorp]

If the record companies fight the torrent sites will fight back harder, which is the worst that could happen. If they just ignored the sites and did not give them press, there would still be pirating, but not enough so that it would matter.

[zalitz]

Its true, the internet is a bitter and vicious community. A lot of people have this "we protect our own" mentality, and the retaliation for this will make things a lot worse than before. Hell, I'M tempted to download some torrents I've been procrastinating on because of this :P

[true_bacon22]

As if we could afford the bandwidth to download a billion albums anyway -_-.

[ticklemeemo]

I have to say, I'm not totally against radical solutions. What happens when the record companies go out of buisness? Besides the effect on new artists, think about the people who will lose their jobs because of this.

[imthehitcher]

I have to say, I'm not totally against radical solutions. What happens when the record companies go out of buisness? Besides the effect on new artists, think about the people who will lose their jobs because of this.

if they go out of business it is their own fault; for years ovr pricing records, screwing over artists and fans alike, not adapting to new technologies the list of record companies failures is massive. the point of business is to be innovative if business isn't it may aswell just be nationalised

[Chimpy101]

if they go out of business it is their own fault; for years ovr pricing records, screwing over artists and fans alike, not adapting to new technologies the list of record companies failures is massive. the point of business is to be innovative if business isn't it may aswell just be nationalised

Can't argue with this

[Jools88]

I buy cds and recently have started buying vinyls. But I must say, I would buy a heck of a lot more if cds were cheaper. Seriously, production and distribution costs of the cd just do not justify the 25-30 dollar (Aus) price tag we have here. I'm sure a lot more people would buy cds if they were.

[marron]

The executives at the RIAA are quite naive if they believe they can continue to conduct business the way they have been (charging incredible prices while giving little to the artists) and stop these sorts of file-sharing websites. The RIAA is failing to fix the underlying problem, itself. Until they realize this, their legal battles against file-sharing sites will be perpetual.

[The_Fuzz22]

Frankly I'm glad in a way. I'll openly admit to downloading albums from file-sharing sites BUT if I actually like the album enough to listen to it say... More than once, I'll go out and buy it anyway.
If not. Well nobody's losing are they, because I'm not benefiting from music I haven't paid for.

I think a no-nonsense approach to this problem is all it's going to take. None of this "oh we're not responsible for what our users use our sites for" NO. Your site is responsible for gigabytes of illegal file transfer a day, and until you can sort that out consider yourselves closed. End.