Ares Connect

Dean Garfield works as a ‘hit man’ for the Motion Picture Associate of America (MPAA), the Hollywood enforcement group responsible for monitoring and preventing misuse of copyrighted material.
In an interview Garfield told reporters that his aversion to new technology – specifically technology that assists in the recording and distributing of Hollywood material – is not based on paranoia of that technology, but rather a mistrust of the people that are going to be using it:

If you look at the list of movies that have broken new ground, from Star Wars to Polar Express, nobody would look at those movies and suggest that our industry is afraid of technology. The truth is quite the opposite.

His job is to find ways to limit the copying and distribution of the feature films and ‘help the film industry not to end up like the music industry’. The music industry, Garfield reckons, is losing the battle against ‘piracy’. Movie and music downloads are blamed for fueling the opposition force. And he should know all about it: before joining the MPAA Garfield held the post of vice president of Legal Affairs for the RIAA. This wealth of experience means that Garfield is now known as the ‘face of copyright enforcement’.

Users of file sharing programs such as Ares sometimes fear to use the P2P file sharing to its full potential because of people like Garfield and organizations like the MPAA and RIAA. Whether this means they are wrong to use the software is an entirely different question, however.

The scare mongering and threats from the industry to its users shows no sign of abating.

TorrentSpy has formulated a novel way to get around the federal court ruling that ordered it to track users’ usage of the site: it simply banned all US usage of the search features. Hmmm. This was decided as the best course of action to ‘protect user privacy’.

A notice on the website stated:

Torrentspy.com, an International search engine that provides links to torrent files, has decided to stop accepting visitors from the United States. … Torrentspy.com has a strong privacy policy protecting site users against the linking of personal identifying information to searches absent user consent.

Reportedly more than 15% of visitors to the site, mainly filesharers looking for movie and music torrents for download with a software client like Ares, are based in the US. Residents are far from happy with the move which, as one comment put it, feels like Torrentspy has turned its back on its user base.

But it’s not entirely the fault of TorrentSpy, we say. Instead it’s the US courts and the RIAA’s crusade of righteousness that should be blame: without these there would not need to be any ban. It’s easy to understand TorrentSpy’s position and at the end of the day it is protecting its own interests.

Until this is resolved in the US courts – which may not be for some time – the only real option is to find somewhere else from which to source your torrents.