A little late, but here’s our list of this weeks most popular BitTorrent movie downloads. Ranking Movie Seeds / Peers 1 (1) Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest 50,013 2 (2) Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby 48,725 3 (5) V for Vendetta 48,706 4 (NEW) RV 46,260 5 (3) The Benchwarmers 43,995 [...]
Here we go again, Yet another episode of our weekly podcast. Enjoy and drop a comment. Our DNS servers went down last night, so Charlie wasn’t able to grab the latest comments. Sorry for that. Welcome to TorrentPod, the official podcast of TorrentFreak.com. Join your host Charlie as he delves into this weeks latest news, [...]
The Big Four record labels will do anything, anything, rather than work up front with their customers and with the independent innovators who are, so far, wholly and solely responsible for turning p2p into the primary communications and distribution media for the digital 21st century. They’d rather sue them. But enormous and continuing opposition from [...]
Tribler, the “social” BitTorrent client has just released a new version. The recommendation function has been optimized, along with other bugfixes and improvements. Tribler is far from anonymous, and therefore probably not suited for sharing content you’re not supposed to share. However, the social aspect of Tribler has the potential to be helpful to sites [...]
The traffic shaping battle continues. Allot Communications announced today that their traffic management device “NetEnforcer is able to detect, and throttle encrypted BitTorrent traffic.
On August 28, the Pirate Party of Sweden made their election program official. An introduction stating the ideas and ideology behind their program, the party stated their program for the election in a number of concrete points.
Snakebite will pimp your web-server into a torrent creator, and supports web-seeding. The snakebite project is one of the results of the successful Google Summer of Code program. Here’s how it works 1. Install snakebite on your server (Debian only at this point) 2. Upload a file. and Snakebite will automatically create a .torrent for [...]
The UK anti-piracy lobby (BPI) demanded immediate action against CD pirates. Piracy has increased because the punishments are too mild according to the BPI. And the BPI doesn’t like being “mild” at all. Earlier this month the BPI banned 12 year old from the “school kids music chart because her record label refuses to sue [...]
Slyck did its best to dig up as much dirt as possible about the AllPeers extension. The article raises valid questions, but perhaps it would have been a good idea to actually confront the guys from AllPeers with these questions. Anyway, judge for yourself Slyck article vs. Allpeers response
Game developer “introversion” is planning to release “faked” versions of their new games as soon as a pirated copy pops up. The faked versions will look like the real deal, but are in fact nothing more than a demo version. Introversion states: “You can’t stop peer-to-peer file sharing, so the best route to combat it [...]
We’ve all seen those download pages where a couple of http, ftp and BitTorrent mirrors are listed. We often just pick one of there, but wouldn’t it be great if you could use them all at the same time? Metalinker has the solution. It works like this, the .metalink file tells your download manager where [...]
Here’s a roundup of some of the how-to articles that appeared on TorrentFreak over the past few months. Might be useful to some of the new readers.
It seems that quite a lot of Universities completely ban p2p traffic, without paying attention to the content that’s being shared.
AOL efforts to offset losses expected following its decision to drop subscription fees for some high-speed customers mean it, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer will team up. Buffy is among movies and TV shows AOL hopes to peddle for between $10 and $20 each through its new video site. “The offerings also mark the latest [...]
A Dutch judge has decided today that ISP UPC has to hand over the name and address of one of its customers to the Piracy Watchdog BREIN. The customer in question is a so called “heavy” illegal filesharer. Last week we reported that UPC said they were planning to release the names and addresses of [...]
Mark Achbar, Producer and Co-director of the award winning documentary “The Corporation” just released an official “share” version of the documentary on BitTorrent.
Several Apple Retail employees were fired after downloading a copy of the “Leopard OSX 10.5 preview” that was leaked on several BitTorrent trackers last week. Apparently Apple’s headquarters was not pleased with these pirates. After being confronted with the rumors, the alleged pirates readily admitted that they had breached the non-disclosure agreement. However, this honesty [...]
Charlie’s back! with the second episode of our weekly podcast. Welcome to TorrentPod, the official podcast of TorrentFreak.com. Join your host Charlie as he delves into this weeks latest news, and talks about Copyright Law. Enjoy, and feel free to leave a (audio) comment if you have something to say to Charlie, or if you [...]
Last week TorrentFreak wrote a review on “allpeers”, the BitTorrent extension for firefox. Today allpeers will go live with a public beta!
The Web2.0 bloated music streaming site “Soundpedia” just added a new section where Indie artists and labels can upload their singles and albums. A BitTorrent download section will be added in the near future. Soundpedia is a relatively unknown community, indexing albums and videos from commercial artists (for free). The new feature allows indie artists [...]
Sony Pictures aquired the Youtube-like video sharing service “grouper”. CEO Michael Lynton announced this deal earlier today, and said Sony is paying $65 million dollar for the internet startup. For now Grouper will keep its current management, but they will be working closely with a team at Sony Pictures. Lynton stated: “Consumers are spending more [...]
Bill Gates admitted to watch pirated content on youtube. As you might know, the MPAA and RIAA are targeting youtube at the moment for its pirated content. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal Bill Gates said: WSJ: You watch physics lectures and Harlem Globetrotters [on YouTube]? Gates: This social-networking thing takes you to [...]
The popular BitTorrent client (2 million downloads a month) Azureus just released version 2.5.0.0. The new release includes some great new features. To list a few: send a friend (screenshots) Reduced CPU usage Auto upload speed Ability to best guess folder you want to save torrent data to based on existing torrents Ability to rename [...]
Anne Sweeney, the president of the Disney-ABC television group was “inspired” after seeing a pirated copy of the hit-show “desperate housewives”.
“Steal this film” is a series of documentaries about filesharing, and p2p networks. The first part is about the Piratebay, and their vision on the things that went down the end of May. In this documentary you’ll hear it straight from the Piratebay admins. How the raid went down, what happened after the raid, how [...]
“The major labels are using fear as a tactic to push these kids away from these P2P systems, you can’t use fear to change these behaviors, it just isn’t effective. These lawsuits have hurt my artists. We need to stop these lawsuits.” This is what Nettwerk CEO Terry McBride said at the Bandwidth music and [...]
A weekly returning chart listing the most popular BitTorrent movie downloads. Ranking Movie Seeds / Peers 1 (1) Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest 49,952 2 (2) Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby 48,630 3 (4) The Benchwarmers 48,370 4 (5) Barnyard: The Original Party Animals 45,953 5 (NEW) V for Vendetta 43,685 [...]
The RIAA sues dead people, The MPAA is stalking and hacking, The BPI mistreats children. So…
Gmail is more than a useful email service. In just a few steps you can turn it into your personal torrent search engine. And by using labels and filters you can keep your inbox clean.
Canada may be facing its own DMCA according to Michael Geist, Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa. And, “given the strength of the copyright lobby, we may need protection from the next copyright bill,” he says. With that in mind, tomorrow Giest launches 30 Days of DRM page [...]
The Pirate Bay claims to have uncovered more dirt from behind the scenes in the controversial raid against PRQ and The Pirate Bay in May. They write on their blog that they have gotten hold of inside information from the MPA, including confidential e-mail correspondence between the MPA’s judicial representative in Sweden, Monique Wadsted and [...]
The UK Anti piracy lobby BPI (British Phonographic Industry) bans the 12 year old Amy Thomas from the “school kids music chart because her record label refuses to sue music fans. The Inquirer writes: Amy had been chosen as one of ten young artists to feature on the My Music chart that launches in October [...]
Teaching kids how to copy. Poster campaigns in schools, and a PirateBay for kids. The most brilliant idea’s are often generated at the dinner table. A quote from the Wired article about how piracy divides Sweden: Pirate Bay’s Peter is dining with a crew of pirates from all over Europe. Over tabbouleh and sausage, the [...]
True nerds. Great lyrics combined with slammin beats, these gangsta Nerds have it all. TorrentFreak will review CC-licensed albums (with BitTorrent links) on a weekly basis. This one is a pretty geeky one, but there will be “normal” ones in the future. Futuristic Sex Robotz was founded by Coaxke and PC Speaker during a Keystone [...]
Convert? Or be shut down for eventual transmogrification? The commercial p2p scene is beginning to look like a Borg movie with former independent commercial p2p operators being sucked into the corporate maw one by one, to reappear as rigidly controlled mutations of their former selves. The Borg are known, “both within and beyond Star Trek [...]
Allpeers is a revolutionary Firefox extension that makes it possible to share pictures, music and video’s within Firefox. The files are distributed using BitTorrent. Allpeers is not yet squeezing everything out of BitTorrent, but Matthew Gertner from Allpeers told TorrentFreak that this will definitely change in the near future.
Here’s a pilot of our weekly podcast. Welcome to TorrentPod, the official podcast of TorrentFreak.com. Join your host Charlie as he delves into this weeks latest news, and what really pisses him off about the RIAA. This show is a pilot, so please leave a (audio) comment to help Charlie improving this thing. The podcast [...]
Two weeks ago the Austrian Pirate Party was founded. The party has ambitious plans, and is trying to participate in the upcoming elections in October. Time to have a chat with Florian Hufsky, the captain of the “Austrian Pirates”.
After being pressured and condemned throughout the blogoshere, the RIAA dropped the Scantlebury case.
Earlier today we wrote that the Swedish Pirate Party introduced a completely anonymous internet service called relakks. However, how anonymous is it, and is it really a darknet?
The Swedish Pirate Party introduced a completely anonymous internet service called relakks. Relakks makes it possible to browse the web, and use p2p-applications (like BitTorrent) without being monitored by your ISP or anti-piracy gangs like the MPAA and RIAA.
A week ago Apple CEO Steve Jobs gave the public a sneak peak of the Leopard OS at Apple’s developer conference. A few days later a BETA version of Leopard, handed out to members of the Apple Dev Connection, is being shared on several torrent sites. Despite the fact that the Beta versions are distributed [...]
A weekly returning chart listing the most popular BitTorrent movie downloads. Ranking Movie Seeds / Peers 1 (1) Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest 49,623 2 (NEW) Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby 48,247 3 (2) Superman Returns 47,723 4 (3) The Benchwarmers 45,502 5 (NEW) Barnyard: The Original Party Animals 43,430 6 [...]
The Dutch ISP XS4all stated that they are willing to work with the anti-piracy organization BREIN in their “war on piracy”. At the same time, another ISP (UPC) said they were planning to release the names and addresses of some of the heavy “illegal filesharers” to BREIN. Interestingly, last month the Dutch court ruled that [...]
If it was up to the RIAA, nobody would copy music anymore. The funny thing is however, blank media and media recorders bring a lot of money to the RIAA. You might probably not be aware of this, but every time somebody buys a cd-recorder in the US, $2 goes directly to the RIAA. And [...]
Johan Linander, a member of the Swedish parliament for the Center Party writes that a new law, based on EU directives, has been proposed by the Ministry of Justice. This law makes it possible for “copyright holders” to demand customer info tied to IP addresses that allegedly infringe copyright. We all know that “copyright holders” [...]
The RIAA is known for their shameless actions, there’s really now way to escape a lawsuit. Take the Warner Bros. v. Scantlebury case for example.
Last week was the Stockholm Pride festival, which is arranged by the Swedish homo/bi/transsexual community. The festival has been a huge success in recent years. It is supported by the established Swedish society – authorities, media. organizations of various kinds back it up.
TorrentFreak was pretty much a one man thing, but that’s about to change. I would like to introduce you to Mathias Hellsten, our new contributer from Sweden. Why? Well there are a couple of reasons. First of all, I thought it would be nice to have an insider reporting from pirate-loving Sweden. So Mathias will [...]
I heard some stories about the Asus WL-700gE, aka “the BitTorrent router” a couple of months ago. It was announced as the ultimate gadget for torrent freaks, so I decided to buy one as soon as it was available. That was three weeks ago.
A few months ago we posted some articles about “tribler”, the first “social” BitTorrent client. Tribler is a successful research project funded by the Dutch government. However, it looks like Tribler will have some competition form “torrent swapper”. So what’s the deal? Torrent Swapper is an open sourced powerful, clean, fast, and easy-to-use BitTorrent client [...]
BookMooch is a new p2p book sharing protocol for printed books. It works a little like BitTorrent, the more you share, the more you receive. And you will be banned if your share ratio gets below 5:1. The inquirer writes: The cashless site runs on a simple points system. Members receive one point for sending [...]
TorrentFreak gets a makeover. The site can be a little buggy the next 24 hours but I’m working on it. I will tell more about the new stuff, and credit the people who contributed when it’s done. update: For those who are interested. TorrentFreak is using wordpress. The current theme is a modification of the [...]
CacheLogic and BitTorrent announced a strategic partnership to further enable the widespread adoption of P2P technology as a distribution network for commercial video and other rich digital content. One of the key projects is the development of the revolutionary Cache Discovery Protocol (CDP).
Torrentspy, still one of the most popular torrent sites on the web, is about to undergo a change of appearance. It seems like they’re hopping on the web2.0 bandwagon. It looks neat though, have a look.
It’s real easy to get started with BitchTorrent for your distribution needs. To begin, all you need is a feeder. The feeder takes and seeds files called bleeders. “With the feeders soon seeding bleeders, you’ll find yourself flooded with needers needing bleeders finding feeders in the seed. When your feeder seeds the seed, you need [...]
A couple of weeks ago the LimeWire team announced that they were planning to implement BitTorrent support in their popular filesharing application. Now the’re sued by the RIAA. Slightly more than a year ago the word was going around that LimeWire, at the time download.com’s most popular commercial p2p file sharing application, was going down. [...]
Apparently he can solve two Sudoko brainteasers during his 30-minute commute on the ferry between Marin and San Francisco. And he has earned a high score of 320 on Tringo, a combination of Tetris and Bingo. The San Francisco Chronicle, from BitTorrent’s hometown San Francisco wrote a great piece on Bram Cohen, the founder of [...]
A weekly returning chart listing the most popular BitTorrent movie downloads. Ranking Movie Seeds / Peers 1 (1) Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest 48,933 2 (2) Superman Returns 48,796 3 (NEW) The Benchwarmers 47,768 4 (NEW) Final Destination 3 45,496 5 (4) The Devil Wears Prada 43,305 6 (5) Cars 42,763 7 (3) [...]
One thing that has emerged as a concept in the Swedish blogosphere over the last two years is the Bodström society. It obviously derives from the Swedish justice minister Thomas Bodström. The term relates to a society that is going in an Orwellian direction towards more and more monitoring of its citizens, often in a deceitful way.
New York lawyer Ray Beckerman provides an excellent overview of how the RIAA litigation process works. “The RIAA lawsuits pit a small number of very large recording companies against individuals who have paid for an internet access account. On the plaintiff’s end, the owners of the underlying copyrights in the musical compositions are not involved [...]
The Canadian animation series Odd Job Jack releases every episode plus additional resources for free. The content is released under a Creative Commons license, and distibuted over BitTorrent. What do they offer? Master flash files and bitmaps of every piece of art used in this season of Odd Job Jack. Every character, prop, and background [...]
A New Zealand woman was busted recording an anti-piracy commercial that was playing ahead of the popular Disney movie “Cars”.
An internal BETA version of the PSP game “Gangs of London” has been leaked onto several BitTorrent sites last week. Sony spokesman David Wilson warns potential pirates that “the leak” is incomplete and that it might be a bit “buggy”. He said: “The version of Gangs Of London that you have brought our attention to [...]
I stumbled upon this great collection of free and open source software applications. The CD is created by the Trinidad and Tobago Computer Society and contains over 100 useful applications.
Mashboxx is the first p2p application that offers music downloads authorized by major record labels. This week Mashboxx finalized their deal with SONY BMG.
The Pirates are throwing a party, and you are invited! Why? 1. PiratbyrÃ¥ns website has, as reported, returned after a political repression. 2. Copy Me (swedish), an anthology of texts from the website, has been a huge success and quickly sold out but will now be released in a new edition. 3. It’s time to [...]
Is an ip-address enough evidence to sue a person for downloading copyrighted material? Recent cases suggest that the RIAA and the MPAA will need more evidence than that. And that’s certainly a good thing if you take into account how many people share the same ip, or leave their Wifi unsecured.
It’s been almost one year since the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its ruling in the MGM v Grokster case, determining that Grokster and Streamcast can be held legally liable for what it calls “inducing” copyright infringement by users if they market their filesharing programs “with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright.” [...]
Austria now has its very own pirate party. Initially the communist party KPÖ presented itself as the national Pirate Party, but it appeared that not all pirates wanted to be associated with the communist ideals. The Austrian Pirate Party is planning to participate in Austria’s national elections this October and has three main points: 1. [...]
The latest news from around the web, not covered on the frontpage
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Below are TorrentFreak's most discussed articles of the past month. Join the discussion if you like.
Left Quote“The Pirate Bay has been one of the most important movements in Sweden for freedom of speech, working against corruption and censorship.
Peter Sunde Left Quote
A selection of some TorrentFreak's classics dug up from our archives.
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Privacy is important on the Internet, and BitTorrent users are certainly not excluded. Already, hundreds of...
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BitTorrent can be fun, as long as you get decent speeds. Not satisfied with your current...