Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Intellectual Property Law Blogs -> Threat Level

Intellectual Property Law

: Threat Level

BitTorrent Textbook Tracker Shutters Amid Legal Threats

By Ryan Singel, Kevin Poulsen, Sarah Lai Stirland, Kim Zetter, and David Kravets

A leading textbook torrent-tracking service has gone belly up. Textbook Torrents, whose logo -- "Because You Can't Torrent Beer" -- fell as its admin shuttered the site amid fears of being personally sued for copyright infringement.

"We heard from several reputable sources that there was a lawsuit in the works against myself personally," admin Geekman said during an internet chat.

Before the site went down Wednesday, a welcome message informed web surfers: "There are very few scanned textbooks in circulation, and that's what we're here to change. Chances are you have some textbooks sitting around, so pick up a scanner and start scanning it!"

The pirating of textbooks -- like music, movies and software -- runs rampant on BitTorrent tracking services, according to the Association of American Publishers. Geekman boasted that the site had some 100,000 members eating into the $5.5 billiontextbook market. The site tracked about 80,000 titles, with an estimated 10 million downloads, Geekman said.

The 2-year-old TextbookTorrents.com site took off in July when its presence landed on Slashdotafter a report about textbook piracy appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

The Chronicle described the site as one in which "Users must simply set up a free account and download a free software program that uses a popular peer-to-peer system called BitTorrent."

That article caught the attention of book publishers, including behemoth Pearson Education. Pearson, and other publishers that market textbooks for $100 or more, sent takedown notices to host xlHost and registrar Dreamhost, which had suspended the tracker's account in July, forcing Geekman offline for weeks before transferring the domain.

Geekman, who said he is a college student somewhere outside of the United States, started the site when he "got fed up with paying ridiculous prices for textbooks, so I set out to do something about it."

The Association of American Publishers, in response to Geekman's site and other textbook pirating venues, hired a law firm last summer to search the web for pirated textbooks.

"In any given two-week period, we found from 60,000 files all the way up to 250,000 files," Edward McCoyd, director of digital policy for the publisher's group, toldthe Chronicle.

Hatnod: Ernesto

Full post as published by Threat Level on October 10, 2008 (boomark / email).