Thing is, I'm not absolutely convinced SuprNova and the other tracker sites are doing anything illegal. The only thing they do is provide links to files hosted on other sites, and those files themselves don't constitute copyrighted material.

But that doesn't help the guys who host the tracker sites fight the lawsuits.

a copy of Ozzy's "Mama I'm Comin' Home."

I can confirm that iTunes has several versions of this song available.

Whoo hoo! Time to tie up my downloading channels for a couple of hours tonight.

I don't think there's a version of iTunes for Windows 98.

What I did on Suprnova was download TV episodes I had missed. I don't see any difference between this and Tivo or a VCR. I hope the courts agree with me, eventually.

I hope the courts agree with me, eventually.

That presumes this will ever get to the courts. If none of the tracker sites have the finances to fight the lawsuits, they'll just keep disappearing.

Although one of them just switched to a .tv site, which, if memory serves, is outside US and EU jurisdiction.

a .tv site, which, if memory serves, is outside US and EU jurisdiction.

Tuvalu, if I remember the name right. It's a wee island somewhere in the south Pacific that makes an absurd percentage of their GNP on domain registrations.

Torrentreactor dot net seems to still be alive.

To be perfectly honest, if they had a download site where I could download eps for $1 a pop, I'd consider downloading them. Granted, I would hope that volume discounts would be available because it is possible that some weeks, I've downloaded 7 eps at a time.

But I worry that if such a service existed, they'd start charging DVD prices for eps and I'd still have to suffer through download delays and shitty video quality in some cases.

Even if they do come down on the idea that downloading a file is the same as using a Tivo, providing a file FOR download (which you are also doing, if you use bittorrent - it's the genius of the system) is most certainly not. It'd be the same thing as if I recorded a TV show from my HDTV Tivo onto a DVD, stripping commercials at the same time, and went out to a street corner in New York and made copies for the cost of the DVD-Rs, starting about an hour after the show aired. (Well, that's more like running an FTP server, not bittorrent. But if I made one copy, gave it to somebody on the street in exchange for them sitting there long enough to make one other copy and give it to somebody else, and so forth, then that would be bittorrent.)

Pretty obviously illegal. Nobody has distribution rights except the people that made the show. They still want to air reruns, and they want those people in Times Square to watch the reruns, and they have every right to shut down people that help kill the profitiability of the market, as that market is in fact protected by copyright law.

That doesn't mean it's a good business decision to attack it at this point, before they have any form of iTunes-like substitute of their own worked out. Built on a bittorrent-like technology backed by central servers. But they were attacking it anyway, because of movie and game pirates, so they went ahead and decided to go whole hog.