The Cartel are up to old tricks again folks by trying to attack a p2p developer who they see as competition, this time in the Spanish courts.
http://opinion.latimes.com/bitplayer/2008/06/so-1999-music-c.htmlPromusicae, the Spanish trade association for the major record companies (e.g., the Madrid version of the RIAA), filed suit in Spain this week against p2p developer Pablo Soto, creator of the Blubster, Piolet and Manolito music file-sharing networks. Soto's networks represented the second generation of p2p, which eliminated the central controls that got the original Napster into legal trouble. He later added a layer of anonymity to sharing, making it harder to identify those who were swapping songs illegally.
Their press release accuses Soto of developing software with the intent of profiting parasitically from other people's works. It also argues the the networks were created specifically to share songs online:
The lawsuit seemed a little odd, given that Soto's networks are small potatoes compared to BitTorrent and other third-generation p2p applications. Soto suggested that the labels were running out of options for deterring piracy in Spain. The record companies' efforts to identify individual infringers on p2p networks have been blocked by the courts, as have their claims against sites to bootlegged songs.
It was expected that we would see this sort of action this year as emboldened by their successful bully-boy legal tactics they had recently threatened to attack many of the smaller networks, often this has meant illegally as they pay companies to launch denial of service attacks and break into servers as well as flood fake files on networks stealing bandwidth.
Now it seems they believe they have some sort of legal case against this operator/developer, one has to ask why if they think they have a case that it has taken them so long to bring it to court, unless of course we can expect to see a repeat of the paid off police officer scenario, as we saw in the pirate bay fiasco where a serving police officer was receiving cash from Warner, ostensibly no doubt to help "process" their claims by "modifying" evidence, it seems no dirty trick is beneath these big 4 record companies when it comes to acting like petty criminals, lets hope Pablo turns this around and asks the courts to look into their attacks on people utilising his network, such as those launched by media defender who offer such a service, if that's not a commercial illegality I don't know what is.
