Marvel and DC, the two biggest comic book publishers in the world have begun to aggressively enforce their copyrights over their comics by filing legal threats against internet torrent sites that host "illegal, scanned and pirated"copies of their comics on the latter's trackers. And they have met with success.
Zcult, a popular download site for comic book fanatics had to take its tracker off line for some time while site administrators mulled over the legal threats. Administrators of DCPSearch, another popular site have agreed to remove any marvel comics from their tracker.
No reason for the sudden desire to protect their copyrights was stated in the cease and desist letters sent to site administrators but Marvel has recently opened its online comic book archive service and DC is speculated to follow suit.
In retaliation, comic book geeks have threatened to boycott Marvel and DC comics but the effectiveness of this boycott has yet to be seen. After all, these are the guys who are too cheap to shell out money to buy original non-scanned copies.
The attack on comics only torrent sites is just one of the battlegrounds in the war between supporters of public peer to peer torrent sites on one hand and associations of artists and big multinational companies that represent the copyright holders on the other. It is a war that the copyright holders are winning. With international treaties and domestic laws in their favor, copyright holders have been able to force the "pirates" to stop by threatening the companies renting servers to these "pirates" or by threatening the ISP providers of said buccaneers. A landmark victory for these "rightists" was the closure of Demonoid, a well known and well loved torrent site. Alas, old friend, rest in peace.
There have been some holdouts against this new wave of regulation. The most prominent being THE PIRATE BAY.org or TPB as it is called by its admirers and detractors alike. TPB's servers were seized by local authorities in the country wherein they were hosted sometime in 2006 and several site administrators were held for questioning. The site was forced off line for a time before TPB's lawyers got the persons and goods released. The experience prompted TPB to consider the acquisition of the micronation of Sealand, a man-made sea platform, so that it would be free from restraints imposed by local copyright legislation. However, Sealand's government refused to sell to TPB. Also, Swedish prosecutors have announced that charges will be filed in January 2008 against 5 people who are connected to TPB.
It seems only a matter of time before the "rightists" achieve total victory in this online copyright war.
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