The Veil of BTChina's "Licenseless" Shut Down

It's a mourning day.

BTChina (btchina.net), one of the most famous BT sharing sites, is totally put to death. The rumour that its webmaster has been detained was once spread like wildfire over the internet, though yesterday, the webmaster of BTChina left a very brief message at the webpage to clarify the case.

Not merely BTChina, many other well-known websites sharing  BT seeds are shut down since last week. It is apparently that a campaign of cracking down online piracy has been kicked off by some Chinese central government officers, coordinating another campaign of shutting down pornographic wap sites for mobile phones.

Now, if we read the above story from a new perspective, we can get something very useful out of these cases.

On the surface, the campaigns are aiming at piracy. But the reason of shutting down those websites is not that they don't have copyright license, but that they don't have an administrative license of online dissemination of audio-visual programs issued by the government. Interesting enough?

In a nutshell, we learnt from these stories that proving a website "has no administrative license" in China is far easier than proving the content of that website "has no copyright license"

In this circumstance, the copyright owners' best strategy of fighting piracy may not be filing the case to court, but reporting the authority that the targeted website does not obtain the license of disseminating Audio-Visual programs (or license of disseminating other contents).

These cases, it seems to me, herald a fresh way of fighting privacy.

Posted via email from Dennis & Zoe