'VertiNazis' Stop The Traffic // BitTorrent site 'easytree' forced to shut down
Disillusioned and rabid, a minority of U2 fans (aka VertiNazis) hell-bent on making sure that no U2 bootleg recordings ever sell on eBay may have inadvertently hit a larger target as BitTorrent site easytree.org was forced to shut their doors today leaving thousands of U2 fans (and hundreds of thousands of other music fans) unable to download live shows. easytree.org administrators, citing pressures from their hosting provider as well as industry attorneys opted to take the path of least resistance and shutter their site. easytree, widely recognized as an above-board player in the taping community may, in the end, have been ultimately taken down by the recent spike in downloading of U2 Vertigo shows. It seems more than a coincidence that the site based in Denmark (and which has been online since June '02) is being shut down a little more than a week after U2's first shows appeared on their tracker. Several other sites (that will not be mentioned here...) have essentially been shut down as well, as their servers are now overloaded from the sudden influx of traffic, an inadvertent denial of service attack, if you will.
We will be the first to say that there have been rumblings for awhile now in the general U2 community regarding many aspects of this year's tour that have differed from Elevation '01. On such boards as Zootopia and Interference.com, fans have formed a sort of 'e-militia' who have taken it upon themselves to police the internet for ticket sales essentially labelling all sellers as 'scalpers', to rant about an implemented lottery system for access to the bomb shelter until something changes to benefit them, and to report bootlegs on eBay. Many have been made bitter by the pre-sale ticketing fiasco, some are upset about the ellipse lottery system, and others are just angry, who have been jaded to the point where they can no longer distinguish between 'fandom' and reality. They will not be happy until their U2 universe is free from unwanted members and made pure... sound familar?
So we ask anyone who has reported an eBay auction or reported a download site to any authority... 'Was it worth it?' The silence is deafening.
posted by The Captain at 4/06/2005 11:15:00 PM
2 Comments:
Chrisedge, thanks for your efforts in producing the internal easytree memo. While this certainly clears up the alleged source of the shutdown, the Vertiblog still stands by our statements that the 'rabidness' of a minority group of fans to stop sales on eBay (including legitimate ticket sales) at any cost and that combined with the increased attention that the recently added U2 shows created on bittorrent trackers, MAY have been an indadvertent contributing factor to easytree's troubles. We may be completely wrong, however this is an opinion that can be substatiated by several witnessed accounts of a small group of unnamed fans who make it their daily goal to report everything that is not branded by U2 themselves. While we do not condone the sale of recordings that tapers like yourself make, we also do not condone the attitude of a minority of fans who feel obligated to ruin the efforts of legitimate fans trying to sell their tickets. While there is evidence emerging that a non-U2 torrent may have been the Achilles heel of easytree, there is also evidence that suggests that obsessive fans trying to self-police the internet in the name of 'doing the right thing' may find themselves contributing to the downfall of sites that benefit the larger music community.
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