Petteri Pyyny
19 Apr 2001 2:26
MPAA has taken first action against P2P network, Gnutella -- dubbed often as "impossible to stop". Gnutella is a peer-2-peer network, pretty much like Napster and co with one big difference -- there's no company behind it and it doesn't have any central servers at all.
So, because of these reasons MPAA and other copyright owners can't sue any company or individual behind the whole scene. Instead, MPAA has tracked few major movie spreading "traders" that use Gnutella as a way to distribute the content.
MPAA has sent out requests for ISPs to stop these users as soon as possible and at least Excite@Home has taken some action and has sent out 20 letters and emails asking users to stop trading movies via Gnutella or their broadband accounts will be shut down.
MPAA doesn't have any big worries yet, because most of the users on the Net still use regular 56k or ISDN connections and downloading movie, even in DivX ;-) format, is a pain -- one average quality full-length DivX ;-) movie takes appx. 600 megs and downloading that with 56k would take days.