The Pirate Bay crew had already essentially been disbanded, the site dissected, and its remnants sold to a somewhat dubious company that simply wants to turn the site's visitors into little P2P cash cows. So an announcement today over at the official Pirate Bay blog that they're officially shutting down the site's tracker probably surprises nobody. According to the site, they're not shutting the site down however -- they'll still annoy the entertainment industry by going trackerless and using the Distributed Hash Table (DHT) for file distribution:According to the site, with the use of a more decentralized system of handling tracking (DHT+PEX) and distributions of torrent files (Magnet Links), downtime and outages should be less of a problem. According to a follow up report at Torrent Freak, the site owners are apparently trying to convince other BitTorrent portals to ditch torrents entirely and decentralize, perpetuating the entertainment industry's game of whack a mole. Sweden's The Legal has more on how this impacts the site founders' court case.

Earlier this week we reported how a free, tiny (1,000 feet total) municipal Wi-Fi network in Ohio was forced to shut down after an MPAA legal warning. A network user had apparently transferred a file copyrighted by Sony Pictures, and instead of risking a costly legal fight, the network decided to simply shut down. The news quickly spread across the Internet, something that apparently didn't make Sony all that comfortable. One local user sends us this local NBC affiliate report that says the network has been turned back on after a request by Sony:Sony says they'll kindly "help the county identify ways to prevent similar offenses from happening in the future." Of course if the MPAA and Sony had approached the network owners like human beings in the first place -- instead of engaging in the kind of scorched earth tactics they've employed for several years now -- they probably wouldn't have gotten the bad press to begin with.

Verizon already forwards copyright notices to customers who are tagged by the entertainment industry's intelligence-gathering organizations, but they don't disclose the customer who was actually using the IP address at the time the infringement occurred. In a move that signals a ramp-up in their cooperation with the entertainment industry, CNET cites inside sources at Verizon who say the company is about to launch a new letter notification campaign in cooperation with the RIAA. The new campaign is a "test" according to the source, and doesn't include references to account termination: story continues..

Techdirt directs our attention to the fact that a free Wi-Fi network in Ohio was shut down completely after just one user was found to be uploading a copyrighted file. According to the Coshocton Tribune, Sony Pictures Entertainment sent a copyright complaint to the network operator, who in turn decided to shut the entire network down. Safe harbor protections should have given the county the right to at least keep the network operational while they investigated the culprit, and shutting the entire network down seems absurd -- but perhaps the local government didn't want the legal hassle. Instead of admitting the move was excessive, the MPAA of course takes the opportunity to preach about the evils of piracy to the Tribune.

The entertainment industry would really like ISPs to play content police, booting P2P users from their networks. But given ISPs don't want to take on the added expense and liability for an effort that might not work anyway, the entertainment industry will try to pass laws forcing them to. While such "three strikes" laws have seen more luck in France and the UK than here, it seems like only a matter of time before they take root. Wired News points out how the MPAA wrote a letter to the FCC this week urging Congress to take action: story continues..