The Department of Justice and copyright groups may have recently taken down several prominent file sharing websites, but the actual real-world effect of these actions is most likely very limited.
It's not uncommon to see these piracy services and file sites have fast resurrections once taken down. The original file-sharing service, Napster, started a peer-to-peer file sharing program wave that still plagues the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) today.
As part of 'Operation In Our Sites,' nine websites and 15 bank and advertising accounts were seized during raids earlier in the month. The pirate sites taken down included: Movieslinks.tv, ZML.com, Planetmoviez.com, Thepiratecity.org, TVShack.net, Filespump.com, Ninjavideo.net, Ninjathis.net, and Now-movies.com. Movies-Links and TVShack are back up with new domain names, as several other sites are expected to pop up again as well. I'd be surprised if all nine recently shut down sites don't reappear at some point in the next week or two, especially on servers outside of the United States.
The US government also recently launched Operation Global Hoax, a 35-nation effort that will crack down against pirated and counterfeit goods. President Obama is following up with his plans to try and reduce piracy and counterfeiting that supposedly costs manufacturers and copyright groups millions of dollars in lost revenue each year.
"How many threats, takedowns, rulings, decisions, blockages and raids will it take to remove The Pirate Bay from the Internet?" a recent TorrentFreak article said. "It seems that nothing can do the job. Threats didn’t work. Civil action hasn’t worked. Police raids didn’t work. Threatening ISPs hasn’t worked. Even the promise of jail sentences has produced no results."
I understand the government and copyright groups have future piracy operations planned, but efforts against anything but organized piracy likely won't do any good. Even with the DoJ, FBI and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) cracking down on piracy, if fines and jail time don't work -- it's time to go back to the drawing board.
