Targeted by Hollywood, OpenBitTorrent lives to fight another day

Not a day goes by without coming across one or more stories related to The Pirate Bay. Today is no different, with OpenBitTorrent (a tracker that Hollywood has accused of being The Pirate Bay’s spiritual successor, serving some 550,000 “works”) being given a new lease on life by a Swedish court. The gist is, Hollywood wanted the tracker shut down, but said Swedish court denied the action.

OpenBitTorrent is merely a tracker; there’s no .torrent files to download from the Web site. That is, you create a .torrent using http://tracker.openbittorrent.com/announce as the tracker, then upload the .torrent file somewhere else. I don’t know, a message board or something. Oh, or ThePirateBay.

That was Hollywood’s beef. Lawyers tried to argue that OpenBitTorrent was merely a continuation of ThePirateBay, and that it should be shut down.

It should be noted that OpenBitTorrent is proactive with regards to copyrighted material using the tracker, unlike ThePirateBay. That is to say that if Hollywood wanted, it could have just gone after the offending torrents rather than try to get the entire tracker shut down.

We all know where this is going.

Hollywood made its case to a Swedish court (OpenBitTorrent is based in Sweden), but the court didn’t buy the lawyers’ arguments. Why should an entire site be shut down when there’s no proof that the whole operation is crooked? You want to go after individual files, fine, but don’t think you can go after en entire site just because it’s easier than other alternatives.

That’s it.