Remember SP2Torrent.com? This was the BitTorrent site that was helping distribute copies of the Windows XP Service Pack 2 (which is so unweildy and yet so critical and sought-after that MSFT is having a hard time distributing it effectively) via BitTorrent, a system that enlists everyone who tries to download a file into distributing it as well, so that the more popular a file becomes, the easier it is to download.
Anyway, the site is no longer providing this free service to Windows users, because the company threatened to sue them if they kept it up. Lucky MSFT customers, huh?
Microsoft sent DMCA takedown notices to our two webhosts, one of which was just linking to a torrent file on another server. We’ve stood up to these kinds of legal threats before (see the Grey Tuesday protests), but we decided not to bother this time, because we started this site primarily as a demonstration and to that end it’s already been a huge success. SP2torrent.com showed how filesharing technlogy gives people without budgets or huge servers the power to solve problems themselves, without waiting for the government or some corporation to do it for them. For another demonstration that’s still in action, check out p2pcongress.org. If you need Windows XP SP2, you can download it from Microsoft’s inscrutable webpage.
[Via Boing Boing]
My guess is Microsoft wants to be as much in control of this distribution as possible and the distribution based on BitTorrent is less/not controlable.
You can read more about what you can and cannot do with Microsoft software on Permission: Use of Copyrighted Material.
