Open Letter From TorrentFreak To Brein
Here's what the MPAA has to say about what Brein did: "Piracy is the unauthorized taking, copying or use of copyrighted materials without permission. It is no different from stealing another person's shoes or stereo, except sometimes it can be a lot more damaging."
Context & Ripple Effects
This open letter lands mid-escalation between TorrentFreak and the anti-piracy establishment. Days earlier, the MPAA had urged America's largest universities to deploy custom software that pinpoints students downloading pirated films on campus networks — a proposal that immediately drew privacy objections over monitoring student activity. Earlier in 2007, TorrentFreak had already documented that some of the decoy torrents circulating on BitTorrent trace back to the studios themselves, when it caught the MPAA uploading fake torrents to track alleged pirates.
First-order effects
- Brein is put on the spot to answer for tactics it shares lineage with — including the fake-torrent decoy practice TorrentFreak attributed to the MPAA in January 2007 — while the MPAA's 'no different from stealing shoes' framing hands TorrentFreak a quotable target.
- Universities facing the MPAA's November 23 toolkit request now confront a public counter-narrative that questions both the monitoring software and the moral authority behind it.
Second-order effects
- Anti-piracy groups' enforcement-by-decoy methods cut against their theft rhetoric: every fake torrent traced back to rightsholders gives sites like TorrentFreak material to argue the campaign is entrapment rather than property protection.
- Campus network administrators get pulled into a policy fight they did not start, weighing MPAA pressure against student-privacy complaints over the proposed monitoring tools.
Third-order effects
- If decoy-based tracking and campus surveillance become standard industry practice, the piracy debate shifts from persuading the public that copying is theft toward contested technical surveillance of ordinary network users — a legitimacy problem for bodies like the MPAA and Brein regardless of the legal merits.
The trend: Hollywood's anti-piracy effort is migrating from public-morality arguments toward technical enforcement and network monitoring, with adversarial outlets like TorrentFreak documenting each tactic as it surfaces.