The Italian file sharing community is living rowdy weeks since the news about a new lawsuit promoted by the copyright industry representatives against TNT Village and Luigi Di Liberto, admin of the portal and promoter of the Associazione Scambio Etico (Ethical Exchange Association) emerged. The publishers accused Di Liberto and one of the most important sites for Italian BitTorrent P2P of copyright violation, and as revealed by Di Liberto himself on Facebook the Court of Milano already carried out a raid in his house and copied 2 Terabytes of data from 6 disks. Many saw the event as the beginning of the end for TNT Village, but after a few weeks the “village” is still on-line and torrents are still flowing as usual – though with a reduced flow and beyond “visitor” users’ reach as it has already been for almost 2 years now.

TNT Village is a historic community for Italian P2P, a site that with the Associazione Scambio Etico intends to share creative works (both in Italian and other languages) with no profit goals, which openly and clearly goes against copyright regulations but with a policy imposing temporal restrictions for sharing those contents especially guarded by the industry like newly released films. Also thanks to this particular approach to piracy, TNT Village was able to survive in a world where lawsuits are commonplace and the most popular torrent sites die like flies and get replaced straightway by younger and nimbler sharing initiatives.

The outcome of the new lawsuit is still to be evaluated, for the time being Di Liberto says he wants to oppose the majors’ (Associazione Italiana Editori, Rai Cinema, Eagle Pictures, Garzanti, Longanesi and others) move by playing the privacy violation card (as explained in a private discussion on the Village forum) while TNTVillage users able to access the site are still sharing and exchanging contents as usual. A previous lawsuit started in 2006 ended up with the server seized but TNTVillage was back in business a year later. Di Liberto vows to open, for the end of 2018, a new platform finally open to everyone.

The first concrete result of the legal assault against TNTVillage is the shutdown of TNTRip, a service born to simplify content search on the Village which is now off-line but vows to come back as soon as possible. And it’s highly likely that TNTVillage isn’t the only target of the industry assault and its political henchmen, considering that in the past days the remains of Forza Italia proposed an unlikely penalty increase for camming, the act of recording films in the darkness of a movie theater, while the most popular pirate streaming sites – the fate of which yours truly doesn’t give a fuck about, by the way – have been targeted by Polizia Postale and Guardia di Finanza. Italiansubs, at last, decided to act in advance by deleting copyright-protected subtitles for TV-series and films.

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