14 DAY TRIAL // Following in the footsteps of the MPAA, the Recording Industry Association in America (RIAA) is also taking a swing at torrent sites and has complained about them to the US Government.
TorrentFreak indicates that the report includes many of the sites that we’ve come accustomed to see on the blacklists of copyright owners, such as The Pirate Bay, Kickass.to, Torrentz.eu, IsoHunt, Rapidgator, and social network VKontakte.
“Some observers continue to suggest that the protection of expression is a form of censorship or restriction on fundamental freedoms, and some pirate sites cloak themselves in the language of freedom to justify themselves—sites like The Pirate Bay,” writes RIAA’s Executive Vice President Neil Turkewitz.
“We must end this assault on our humanity and the misappropriation of fundamental human rights. If the protection of expression is itself a restriction on freedom of expression, then we have entered a metaphysical Wonderland that stands logic on its head, and undermines core, shared global values about personhood,” he continues.
The complicated copyright issue
The RIAA wants for everyone to stop doing business with these sites, which should help fight the piracy problem. They believe they’re not going to be able to eradicate piracy, since there will always be a number of “isolated” individuals or enterprises prepared to steal whatever they can, but one thing that must be stopped is providing the moral cover by conflating copyright enforcement with censorship.
Of course, if they stopped demanding for entire sites to be pulled down instead of individual links, then maybe the entire situation wouldn’t be an issue of censorship. By shutting down the Pirate Bay, for instance, they’d block access to plenty of open source software, free music and videos and so on, that aren’t covered by any copyright or affected by such battles.
It’s not just sites that host torrent files that are targeted by the RIAA, but also indexing services that generate revenue from advertising, donations and “suspected arrangements with ISPs.”
It’s been argued time and again that piracy would be a lot lower if Hollywood groups focused their efforts on bringing legal alternatives at decent prices to all countries around the world, without delay between geographical areas, but the suggestion has been systematically ignored.
The RIAA list is quite long and includes The Pirate Bay, Kickass.to, vKontakte, IsoHunt, ExtraTorrent.cc, Torrenthound.com, Fenopy.se, Sumotorrent.sx, Seedpeer.me, Rapidgator.net, Turbobit.net, Freakshare.com, Filestube.to, Songs.to, Hitsmp3.net, Bajui.com and so on.