The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the European anti-piracy group BREIN have assisted in shutting down a dozen torrent websites while a massive attempt to crackdown against file sharing continues. Copyright groups continue to crack down on websites, torrent service operators and online file repositories that are found to be sharing large amounts of copyrighted material with users.
The dozen sites still haven't been identified, but the sites were removed after their hosting providers received complaints from MPAA officials. The BREIN anti-piracy group -- which has helped temporarily and permanently banish around 1,000 torrent sites in Europe -- is now working in the United States and other select markets.
Even though BREIN helped the MPAA remove these sites quietly, the anti-piracy group has future efforts planned.
"New sites are popping up, but we take these down faster and faster so they can't gain an audience," said Tim Kuik, BREIN executive, in a press release. "Our goal is to limit the availability of illegal sites so people rather use legal platforms. BREIN doesn’t publish any names because some sites relocate and start over elsewhere.”
The BitTorrent community is trying to sort itself out and try to figure out which sites were removed. None of the popular BitTorrent sites have gone missing, which means that the ones taken down were likely smaller targets. Several popular torrent destinations recently went down due to recent DDoS attacks, but that activity might be unrelated. The realization that BREIN and MPAA don't want to publicly list the sites shows a smarter tactic to fight piracy, as the copyright groups adjust from a former effort that relied on high-publicity crackdowns.
The MPAA plans to continue lobbying government officials and working to remove online file sharing services.
