All Things Digital

If the Motion Picture Association of America is so intent on shuttering BitTorrent trackers, perhaps it should set its sites on the really big offenders, like say … Google (GOOG). It’s going to have to sooner or later, because some day there won’t be any smaller operations left for it to sue.

After a prolonged, and quite nasty, legal battle with the MPAA, TorrentSpy is shutting down. “The legal climate in the USA for copyright, privacy of search requests and links to torrent files in search results is simply too hostile,” reads a statement posted to the site’s front page by founder Justin Bunnell. “We spent the last two years, and hundreds of thousands of dollars, defending the rights of our users and ourselves… [W]e now feel compelled to provide the ultimate method of privacy protection for our users–permanent shutdown.”

When the transparency group Wikileaks was censored in China last year, no one was too surprised. After all, the Chinese government also censors the Paris-based Reporters Sans Frontieres and New York-based Human Rights Watch. And when Wikileaks published the secret censorship lists of Thailand’s military junta, no one was too surprised when people in that country had to go to extra lengths to read the site. But on Friday … in the home of the free and the land of the brave, and a constitution which states ‘Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press,’ the Wikileaks.org press was shut down.”

–Excerpt from Wikileaks’ press release

Talk about slamming the barn door shut on a long-ago departed horse. A U.S. district court in Northern California has ordered whistle-blower site Wikileaks.org shut down after Switzerland’s Bank Julius Baer complained that the site had posted bank documents that allegedly link it to money laundering and tax-evasion schemes in the Cayman Islands.

The court ordered Wikileaks’ Web host, Dynadot, to “immediately clear and remove all DNS hosting records for the wikileaks.org domain name and prevent the domain name from resolving to the wikileaks.org Web site or any other Web site or server other than a blank park page.”

Dynadot was quick to oblige, not that it mattered much. Wikileaks remains available from a number of so-called cover names and its content has already been widely mirrored and torrented. As “NewsRadio” ’s Joe Rogan once said, “Dude, you can’t take something off the Internet. … That’s like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.”

When the manuscript of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows”– the seventh and final novel in the Harry Potter series by JK Rowling–was carried by hand from London to New York, the attorney for Scholastic, the book’s American publisher, sat on it throughout the flight. When it was bound and printed, the factory workers who oversaw its production were reportedly forced to work in near-darkness to prevent them from reading it. And when it was shipped to retailers, the vehicles carrying it were tracked by satellite to ensure that they did not deviate from their intended route.

All this for naught. Because the book’s been leaked. And torrented. And uploaded to a number of image hosting sites as well–even as millions of preordered copies sit sealed in closely guarded boxes around the world.

Now granted, the leaked book is being distributed as a poor-quality scan–legible only if the reader possesses some rudimentary Photoshop skills and a lot of free time. Still, some $20 million was spent to prevent exactly this sort of thing from happening. And for what? Harry.Potter.and.the.Deathly.Hollows.Complete.jpg.screenshots.torrent? “We have a litigation specialist poised 24 hours a day, seven days a week to deal with any breaches,” a spokesman for the series’ British publisher, Bloomsbury, told the Telegraph last week. “It is our intention to enforce the embargo vigorously and seek an immediate injunction if required.”

Best get to work on that, guys.