t’s been a busy week in Hollywood. The studios have managed to win over $100 million dollars in their fight against the evils of internet piracy, alienate the Screen Actors Guild (which could lead to another strike), and close down two distributors of independent art films. Yep, it’s a great time to be a film fan.

R.I.P. Torrentspy

A recent court settlement spells bad news for anyone who enjoys downloading movies (aka anyone who knows how to do it). Torrentspy—arguably the most popular bittorrent site around—has been hit with a $111 million lawsuit from the major Hollywood studios. The website shut down in March when the lawsuit kicked off and was charged with this rather absurd sum earlier this week. The owners of Torrentspy obviously can’t afford to pay this settlement and have filed for bankruptcy. Apparently internet piracy isn’t as lucrative as the studios want it to be.

For anyone who doesn’t know, Bittorrent sites are the latest downloading craze with all the kids and have superseded peer-to-peer file sharing programs like Napster and Kazaa. Websites host small torrent files that can be downloaded and used to share data between users with the same torrent program. The defense for the proprietors of torrent websites is that they don’t actually save any copyright-protected files, the users do. This defense obviously didn’t hold up in court.

The Hollywood studios most likely won’t be receiving any of the money for this deal, nor do they particularly want to (each studio would make less money off the case once the funds are split up then they would for funding a David Spade movie). This case was merely designed to be a warning for other torrent websites in an attempt to crush the fledgling industry. The studios are playing dirty pool and even paid a disgruntled former torrentspy employee $15,000 to hack into the server and find financial information for the website. This type of behaviour would be understandable if Hollywood wasn’t continuing to make record numbers at the box office. It’s just another example of pure Hollywood greed and the studios wanting to ensure that they will get any money that is available for them to accumulate.