Wow, there hasn't been a "pure" file sharing story posted on this site in a while. While organzing my bookmarks and watching a truly horrible movie on (a new) TV, I decided to visit one of my favorite sites, FastTrackMovies.com to see if said movie was available. Now I had not visited the site in a while, due mainly to the fact that I've been busy with ReplayTV (and thus television in general), so I haven't been looking for movies - I'm already behind in what I have as it is. However, what to my eyes should appear upon visiting the site: Our site has been temporaily closed by the MPAA.
FasttrackMovies has been mentioned previously on this site, but a quick recap of its purpose.
Kazaa, as insinuated by this entry, has a high garbage ratio for some searches - usually proportional to the popularity of the file. Not as bad as I've seen on Gnutella, but there are quite a few false weeds in the garden of hits. Now when people have fast connections and are looking for small files, sorting through these contestants is not so bad, but spending hours to download a 700 MB movie to find out it is of a dancing blob is not so good.
Enter FasttrackMovies, which provided user verified ID's for movie files found on Kazaa. Did the creator(s) of this web site store these movies? No. Did they create Kazaa? No. Admittedly, did they create / copyright these movies? No. However, did they illegally upload them to the Internet? No. It was purely an organizational service populated by like-minded individuals, probably at a monetary loss by it's purveyors - I'm sure my $10 didn't help keep them a float that long.
The author was being a little facetious in saying that the site will be closed temporarily, since I doubt they have the funds to fight the hordes of MPAA lawyers and I would donate some money to the cause, but this doesn't seem like a winnable battle. The best hope is probably to put the site up with its database on a server outside of the US and the reaches of the MPAA.