News written by Petteri Pyyny (May, 2005)

MPAA has turned its attention to rapidly growing TV piracy and has sued six websites offering BitTorrent trackers for TV shows. The sites were extremely popular among non-Americans, who typically have to wait between 6 months and several years in order to have the major American TV shows aired in their home country.

Each site can be sued for hefty fines, ranging between $30,000 and $150,000 per each and every downloaded file. But, it is interesting to see how the American legislation will handle BitTorrent trackers, as the distribution of the files is done by users themselves (assuming that the sites themselves didn't "seed" the original files).

This is the first time that MPAA has attacked against TV show piracy and the reason for the move is obvious -- sales of DVD "box sets" of TV shows are huge.

MPAA said in its press release: "On these sites, anyone in the world can download entire television seasons in a single click. Every television series depends on other markets -- syndication, international sales -- to earn back the enormous investment required to produce the comedies and dramas we all enjoy, and those markets are substantially hurt when that content is stolen."

We introduced a new feature on our site that allows you, our users, to suggest new glossary entries to our ever-growing glossary of digital audio/video terms. Now we simply ask everybody to help us out and make our glossary the definite guide for digital a/v terms.

All submissions go through our team of admins before they get approved to the actual glossary, so even if you aren't exactly sure about the term's definition, suggest it anyway and we try to gather as much information as possible for it before the approval.

-AfterDawn.com Team

Just wanted to let all of our users know about various site changes we've completed during the last couple of days. First of all, we've finally launched a dedicated Sony PSP forum after receiving about gazillion posts requesting one. Enjoy.

Additionally, we've slightly improved our guide section by re-organizing most of the guides to new categories. Further improvements to the guide section will also follow very soon.

And last, but not least, our WAP site, available at wap.afterdawn.com now has also the news comments available, if you happen to own an XHTML-capable handset.

Again, thanks for all of our users who have sent us tons of ideas on how to improve our site. It is a slow task to implement all of those great ideas, but don't worry, all the feedback will be read and if the idea is worth implementing, it will get done as well.

-Petteri Pyyny, webmaster
AfterDawn.com