LokiTorrent

» see lokitorrent.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

in early 2005 i was twenty one and at university, and bittorrent was the thing you started before going to bed because the line could not do that and anything else at the same time. lokitorrent was one of the half dozen tracker names in circulation then, not the biggest and not obscure. what makes it worth writing down is not the closing, which was ordinary. it is the forty thousand dollars.

edward webber, who posted as lowkee, opened it on 24 february 2004. at its peak it carried around 680,000 registered members and was taking 1.8 million hits a day, which put it in the same conversation as suprnova without ever actually being suprnova. it indexed torrents, it did not host films, and that distinction was the one everybody in the category was betting on.

on 14 december 2004 the mpaa sent cease and desist letters to a batch of tracker operators at once. most of the batch closed inside a week. loki did not. the site announced it would fight the case, and then it asked its own members to pay for the defense.

~ the case file ~

~ the forty thousand dollars ~

the drive ran for about eight weeks and brought in more than forty thousand dollars in small amounts from users, most of whom were in no danger of being sued themselves. no file sharing site had asked its audience to fund a legal defense before, and the audience answered anyway. that is a genuinely strange thing to have happened and it is why anybody still writes the name down twenty years later.

then he settled. the terms were a million dollars to the mpaa, an undertaking to stop running any bittorrent hub, and the surrender of all server data. webber posted afterwards on his other site that every donation to that point had gone on legal fees, and later that no donation money had gone on personal expenses. where the forty thousand actually ended up has never been established, because a confidential settlement does not come with an itemized receipt.

~ what the page said ~

on 10 february 2005 lokitorrent.com stopped being a tracker and became an advertisement. the archived copy from 1 march is nine hundred and thirty seven bytes with the page title set to MPAA NOTICE, carrying the campaign graphic that read you can click, but you can't hide.

the text under it opened with a line the industry had clearly workshopped: there are websites that provide legal downloads. this is not one of them. it went on to say the site had been permanently shut down by court order because it facilitated illegal downloading, and it closed on two sentences that were the actual message. stealing movies leaves a trail. the only way not to get caught is to stop. that page sat there, unchanged at about eleven hundred bytes, for the better part of three years.

~ the logs ~

the million dollars was the headline and the logs were the point. the settlement gave the mpaa access to and copies of all server data, and the association said so out loud, describing what it had obtained as a roadmap to others who had used the site. that sentence was aimed past webber at every other tracker's user base. the operator can be bought, and when he is, you are in the file he hands across.

no wave of user lawsuits ever came out of those logs, at least not visibly. the deterrent worked as a sentence rather than as a program. what did follow is the shape trackers took afterwards, which was to move out of american jurisdiction and keep as little on disk as possible, answering to somewhere that would not produce a court order in eight weeks. loki's entire run, from first torrent to mpaa notice, was under a year.

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