TorrentFreak

Details of Lord Mandelson’s draconian pro-copyright plans contained in the Digital Economy Bill leaked out yesterday, provoking a wave of dissent. The Liberal Democrats have now made a statement, voicing dismay at this “utterly shameless” attempt to introduce major rules without proper Commons assessment.

Tomorrow morning Lord Mandelson will present the Digital Economy Bill to the public, which among other things is aimed at reducing illicit file-sharing. According to parts of the bill that leaked today, the legislation could lead to jail terms for file-sharers and unprecedented power for the entertainment industries.

iiNet’s chief barrister argued today that there is insufficient evidence to show that when customers shared movies using BitTorrent, they shared “substantial parts” of said material, an essential requirement for proving infringement. Furthermore, in order to verify AFACT claims, iiNet itself would have to infringe copyright.

Despite negative court verdicts against the two leading torrent sites, the BitTorrent popularity surge is still underway judging from ever increasing download figures. Mininova, the most visited BitTorrent indexer, broke an impressive record today. Since its inception, the site has served a dazzling 10 billion torrent downloads.

The Swedish hosting provider Portlane is being sued by several Hollywood movie studios for hosting the standalone BitTorrent tracker, OpenBitTorrent. The movie studios are claiming that OpenBitTorrent is a re-branded copy of The Pirate Bay tracker that shut down yesterday.

After discovering the Pirate Bay logo hadn’t been registered with the patent office, a Swedish company took the opportunity to claim it as their own in order to commercially exploit it. After bloodless negotiations, the company now seems prepared to play nice and let their application slide. But they don’t go away empty-handed.

If you have ever used a public or open tracker, you know that reliability often comes with a half-hearted smile – trackers can go offline and return again, often without explanation or warning. To help keep track of the status of public trackers, there’s now Trackon, the BitTorrent Tracker Tracker.

Today marks the end of an era, as The Pirate Bay team announces that the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker is shutting down for good. Although the site will remain operational for now, millions of BitTorrent users will lose the use of its tracker and will instead have to rely on DHT and alternative trackers to continue downloading.

MC Hammer, rap phenomenon and self-confessed geek, has kicked the major music labels in their over-sized pants with regard to their anti-piracy strategy. Hammer said that the labels’ decision to go after individual filesharers and ISPs has failed, because it only alienated paying customers.

The top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent, ‘Funny People’ tops the chart this week followed by ‘The Hangover’. ‘2012′ completes the top three.

Seen by millions of people worldwide, the ship design used by The Pirate Bay is one of the most recognizable logos on the Internet today. But after discovering that the iconic emblem had not been officially registered, a Swedish company has hijacked the trademark as their own, with an eye on commercial exploitation.