The battle between movie studios, record labels, artists, and basically copyright holders against pirate websites such as torrent websites has been going on for a while now. Sometimes the studios win but usually these victories are short-lived since taking down one pirate basically means a few more pop up in its place.That being said it seems like the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has had enough and has since issued an ultimatum to pirate websites, giving them 24 hours to shutdown, or else. The emails being sent out are reportedly from the MPAA’s VP Jan van Voorn and have targeted torrent indexes, linking sites, and hosting services. So far the major websites such as The Pirate Bay and KickassTorrents have yet to heed their warning.
According to the email, “This Notice requires you to immediately (within 24 hours) take effective measures to end and prevent further copyright infringement. All opportunities provided by the Website to download, stream or otherwise obtain access to the Entertainment Content should be disabled permanently.”
It also seems that this extends to the use of artwork that might be part of the copyrighted content, like TV show posters and so on. “Finally, we draw your attention that any use of the artwork of the Entertainment Content (e.g. movie or TV show posters) (‘Artwork’) is prohibited without authorization of the rights holder. Since the MPA Members haven’t authorized the Website to publish the Artwork, the Website is infringing copyright on that basis as well.”
There are no threats in the emails but safe to say that legal action will be taken should these websites not comply with their demands, which is usually the case. Will these websites comply with this stern warning from the MPAA? We guess we’ll just have to wait and see.