Remember that Russian site that keeps track of all the torrents you"ve downloaded? If you do, you might also remember that several IPs originating from major film studios were caught illegally downloading materials. The hypocrisy reached a whole new level today, when illegal torrent downloads were traced to the RIAA and the Department of Homeland Security, as reported by TorrentFreak.
The RIAA has joined the ranks of several major film studios by being implicated in piracy themselves. Being one of the biggest opponents of piracy – these are the people who want pirates banned from the web – and it comes as a bit of a surprise (or not) to learn that they have been illegally downloading Jay-Z and Kanye West albums. Any chance they had of passing it off as being for "research purposes" was brutally murdered and unceremoniously disposed of when someone downloaded every episode of DEXTER.
American taxpayers will be pleased to hear that the Department of Homeland Security is putting their dollars to good use. Besides using them to shut down dangerous threats to mankind like the torrent search engine Torrent-Finder, they were also caught red handedly engaging in some piracy of their own. In fact, some 900 unique IP addresses originating from the DHS. Either someone at the Department was engaging in a bit of not-so-legal goofing off on the job, or it"s all part of a project to download and catalogue every torrent on the web, all bets being on the former.
Maybe the RIAA should focus on weeding out piracy in their own office before they turn their attention to the world at large. You"ve got to wonder if the RIAA and DHS will end up facing the same penalties as everyone else if SOPA becomes law?
Image courtesy of TorrentFreak