The latest Futurama movie, Bender’s Game, is released in a few days and as usual it’s already on BitTorrent. However, Matt Groening has included a nice extra on the DVD – a pretty amusing parody on one of the classic anti-piracy messages.
The Chinese government has stepped in and banned 10 video sites, while giving warnings to 17 others. The sites were accused of ‘regulations violations’ ranging from running a service without authorization, through to displaying violent or horrific content. None of the charges relate to piracy, even though one of the sites is China’s biggest eDonkey indexing site.
Pirate Bay co-founders Peter Sunde and Fredrik Neij gave a keynote speech at the Hack In The Box Security Conference 2008, entitled “How to dismantle a billion dollar industry – as a hobby.” The two discuss how The Pirate Bay grew to be the largest BitTorrent site on the Internet, and some of the challenges they face today.
A married couple with a combined age of 120 have been accused by UK games lawyers Davenport Lyons of pirating an Atari game, and faced demands for over £500. However, the shocked couple enlisted the help of a popular consumer magazine, and unsurprisingly, the lawyers have backed down.
Ubuntu, the open source GNU/Linux based operating system, is about to release its next big update – Intrepid Ibex. In the past, the update servers would crash very quickly on a big release day, making it hard for people to get the latest update. With BitTorrent, however, this can be easily avoided.
The file-sharing oriented news website, P2Pnet, has won its case against the Canadian businessman Wayne Crookes. The Supreme Court ruled that linking to defamatory material doesn’t constitute as publishing. Since the case is about linking, the outcome will have implications for all websites on the Internet, including BitTorrent sites.
The Tribler BitTorrent client, a project run by researchers from several European universities and Harvard, is the first to incorporate decentralized search capabilities. With Tribler, users can now find .torrent files that are hosted among other peers, instead of on a centralized site such as The Pirate Bay or Mininova.
TV shows are by far the most wanted files on BitTorrent, and according to some, it’s becoming the modern day TiVo. But what are all those people downloading?
Two arch rivals from the KaZaA copyright infringement case have teamed up to produce what is being touted as a formidable anti-piracy system, converting pirates into paying customers. Installed at the ISP level so that users can’t easily bypass it, ‘Copyrouter’ is defeated by BitTorrent.
Umbrella groups in the UK which represent various parts of the music industry have decided that, in order to win the war on Internet piracy, what they really need is an even bigger umbrella group for all the other umbrella groups to shelter under. That new group, UK Music, is launched today.
The top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent. A lot of newcomers, while “Kung Fu Panda” tops the chart this week.
A Belgian ISP ordered by a court to stop all piracy on its network, only to discover that it was an impossible task, has seen that decision reversed. The court recognized that the anti-piracy solutions recommended by the music industry didn’t work, which left the ISP Scarlet in an impossible position.
This year, several established bands have decided to give away their music for free, while giving fans the option to donate whatever they seem fit. For Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails it was a great success since they made more money from the donation model than they would have otherwise. However, it seems that this doesn’t hold for less established artists.
An animated Norwegian movie featuring sex, violence, stoners, a junkie elephant and even vegans, has been panned by UK critics. However, much to the dismay of the distributor, file-sharers don’t agree with this assessment and have downloaded it 500,000 times, which the movie’s producer thinks is ‘Great!’
Today, the latest edition of the Wikipedia school edition has been released by SOS Children’s Villages, a charity organization that aims to help orphans and vulnerable children worldwide. The 08/09 edition can be downloaded for free, via BitTorrent only, and comprises over 5500 hand-picked educational articles aimed at helping schools to enhance their curriculum.
Sweden, home of The Pirate Bay and the most active pro-piracy lobbyists and politicians, is drafting a new law that would make it easier to go after individuals who share copyrighted files on filesharing networks such as BitTorrent. The new law, likely to be opposed by a large number of Swedes, will go into effect April 2009.
Eventually, particularly when trying to download old torrents, most BitTorrent users find themselves with a transfer which stops due to the swarm having no seeds, not enough peers to cover the full release, or the tracker going down. btReAnnouncer is a handy site which could prove vital in reaching that magic 100%.
The Higher Education Opportunity (HEO) Act of 2008 requires US universities and colleges to undertake measures to reduce piracy, and go after students who use filesharing networks to share copyrighted files. A recent study found that, per institution, between $350,000 and $500,000 a year is spent tackling the piracy problem.
Sandvine, best known for manufacturing the hardware that slowed down BitTorrent users on Comcast, has released an Internet traffic trends report today. The report shows that, on average, P2P traffic is responsible for more than half of the upstream traffic, but mostly the report seems an attempt to sell their traffic shaping products.
Today, Microsoft announced Global Anti-Piracy Day, to draw attention to the ever growing piracy problem. While Microsoft itself celebrates October 21st by launching anti-piracy enforcement actions in 49 countries, The Pirate Bay does so by linking to counterfeit Microsoft products on their frontpage – in every country in the world.
TV shows are by far the most wanted files on BitTorrent, and according to some, it’s becoming the modern day TiVo. But what are all those people downloading?
A man who was tracked sharing over 13,000 music tracks on Direct Connect back in 2005 has lost his appeal. The Vestre Landsret, one of Denmark’s higher courts, has ordered the middle-aged man to pay $24,400 (160,000 kroner) in compensation.
The Pirate Bay has always made it clear that they don’t obey takedown requests from content owners. That doesn’t stop Hollywood from going after the Pirate Bay’s users, however, and they do so on a large scale. The Pirate Bay is well aware of these pirate tracking outfits, and does what it can to give them a hard time. Reporting fake peers is one of the tricks they use.
The top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent, “Get Smart” tops the chart this week.
The website of a record label which offers completely free music downloads has been taken down by its host for copyright infringement, even though it only offers its own music. Quote Unquote Records calls itself “The First Ever Donation Based Record Label”, but is currently homeless after its host pulled the plug.
While some universities restrict the use of BitTorrent clients, others embrace the popular flilesharing protocol and use it to spread knowledge. Stanford University is one of the few to realize that BitTorrent does not equal piracy. They use BitTorrent to give away some of their engineering courses, with some success.
New Zealand is known for sheep, rugby, and dramatic filming locations. However, it will also be known for being the first place in the world with a 3-strikes law for copyright infringement. The Copyright Amendment Act 2008 gained royal assent earlier this year, and goes into effect at the end of February 2009. Opposition to this bill, despite being signed into law, is still growing though.
Dan Morrill, Program Director at City University of Seattle, who has appeared in previous TorrentFreak articles, has written a book entitled “Selling Books On Amazon, Tips and Secrets”. In true BitTorrent style, he’s not selling his work, but asking people to please pirate it, courtesy of Mininova’s CDN.
This week many sites offering homemade Greek subtitles received legal threats from an organization representing the TV and movie industries. Very quickly, fansub sites closed down or removed access to subtitles, leaving thousands of Greek file-sharers quite literally in a position of not understanding what is going on.
Keeping large networks up to date can be a costly practice. Large corporations or government institutions often need dozens, if not hundreds of servers to distribute updates and patches, for which they pay hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. With DistriBrute, the first P2P based desktop deployment product, this is no longer needed – thanks to the BitTorrent protocol.
In an attempt to make BitTorrent more secure, and to reduce some of the load on their own tracker, The Pirate Bay has started to remove all duplicate, dead and anti-pirate trackers from the torrents they host. These changes will improve the trackers’ performance, and increase ‘security’ for its users.
The Performing Rights Society, the UK outfit collecting royalties for the music industry, seems it will stop at nothing as it demands money from small businesses, charities, playschools, and now, kids’ community centers, all so that they can listen to music without fear of prosecution.
If the MPAA and RIAA are to be believed, rather than buying media, file-sharers around the world are saving billions of dollars by downloading copyrighted material instead. For these people, we now have the ultimate solution to salve their ‘guilt’. Donate a week in piracy ‘savings’ to reduce poverty among those who need it.
Anti-piracy organizations send out thousands of infringement notices a year to alleged pirates. Strangely enough, these infringement notices are hardly ever backed up by solid evidence. The Norwegian Consumer Council is now proposing to create an independent committee to deal with copyright infringement disputes between alleged pirates and rights holders.
TV shows are by far the most wanted files on BitTorrent, and according to some, it’s becoming the modern day TiVo. But what are all those people downloading?
Over in California, champagne corks are popping. In the offices of the MPAA and RIAA, lawyers turned lobbyists are dancing jigs. In houses all around the US however, people are left dumbfounded by the passage of a bill based on appeasement to big money, at a time when the country is in economic turmoil.
Vuze, formerly known as Azureus, will soon launch version 4.0 of their BitTorrent client. Inspired by feedback from users, the user interface has been completely revamped. The client itself seems to move towards an all-in-one solution, with built in search and a built in media player.
The music industry is changing. While the record labels are desperately trying to protect the revenue stream from album sales, a new generation of artists is starting to realize that they are better off when they give away their music for free. By now, we’re all familiar with the industry’s view, but what drives these artists?
The top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent, “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” tops the chart for the second week in a row.
TorrentFreak is proud to present the first episode of ‘TorrentFreak TV’, a recap of some of the best, most interesting or remarkable stories from the wonderful world of BitTorrent. The show is directed by none other than Andrej Preston, who some people might remember as the founder of the legendary Suprnova.org.
AC/DC will release its new album ‘Black Ice’ worldwide on October 20th, in physical format only since the band doesn’t sell its music online. However, the upcoming album has already been digitized by pirates, as it leaked to BitTorrent five days ago. In that time it has taken the trackers by storm, racking up a staggering 400,000 downloads.
Three days before the Canadian elections, the party leader of the New Democrats has spoken out in favor of BitTorrent sites, calling them “fundamental to democracy.” At the same time, isoHunt, the largest Canadian BitTorrent site advises its users not to vote for the Conservatives, considering their stance on copyright issues.
‘Real-Time’ BitTorrent search engines are the trend of 2008, and new sites emerge every other week. It all started in January with the launch of YouTorrent, but soon after it went legal, other sites took over. We catch up with the founder of one of YouTorrent’s successors to find out more.
From relative obscurity, Textbook Torrents, the world’s largest BitTorrent index of textbooks, found itself in the world spotlight during July 2008 and was forced to close down by its host. The site returned weeks later, growing massively in the process, but now, just a couple of months on, the site has closed for good.
This August The Pirate Bay was “censored” in Italy following a decree from a public prosecutor. The Pirate Bay appealed the block and eventually won the court case. Earlier this week the Court of Bergamo detailed its decision, and ruled that no foreign website can be censored for alleged copyright infringement.
The RIAA sends out pre-settlement letters and lawsuits to all manner of students accused of file-sharing across the US. Some schools, as we’ve covered in our Tackling College Piracy series, have capitulated. Others, like University of California Santa Cruz, have fought back.
NorBits, the largest Norwegian BitTorrent tracker, has been pulled offline by their webhosting company due to the continuous DDoS attacks suffered by the site. The host has nullrouted the IPs and told the Norbits staff to find a new home. Meanwhile, NorBits’ staff are trying to calm their users down after a turbulent month.
Just over 12 months since one of Romania’s most popular BitTorrent trackers was raided by the police, Torrentbits.ro is suffering more problems. Customers of one of Romania’s largest ISPs, UPC, can no longer access the site.
TV shows are by far the most wanted files on BitTorrent, and according to some, it’s becoming the modern day TiVo. But what are all those people downloading?
A man accused of being a music pirate has been cleared by a Danish court. The man denied the claims of the IFPI, based on his assertion that someone else must have accessed his wireless router to commit the infringements. This is the second major defeat for the IFPI in Denmark over the so-called ‘wireless defense’.
Michael Moore decided to give away his latest film ‘Slacker Uprising’ for free, but only to people in the US and Canada. However, since he chose to use BitTorrent, and open trackers such as The Pirate Bay, it was fairly easy for the rest of the world to download it as well. Was this done on purpose? Moore responds.
BitSmash is a new service that aims to provide statistics on all BitTorrent downloads. The site allows users to search from keywords, just like the average BitTorrent site, and sort the results in various ways. For every torrent, it also shows graphs of changes in various statistics over time.
The top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent, “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” tops the chart this week.
Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) is one of the oldest, and perhaps most effective anti-piracy strategies. MPAA’s “You can click, but you can’t hide” campaign is perhaps one of the best known examples. Today, we take a peek at how FUD is used by universities to counter campus piracy.
A company collecting royalties on behalf of Hollywood studios has illegally demanded payments from kindergartens in Ireland. The MPLC requested 10 Euros ($14.00) per child per annum, so that they can watch DVDs legally. However, by doing so they breached the 2000 Copyright Act since MPLC failed to register with the Patent Office.
The Swedish news site Nyheter24 has been criticized for including a list of most downloaded TV-shows on their site, and linking directly to the torrent detail pages on The Pirate Bay. According to Henrik Pontén of the Swedish Anti Pirate Bureau, who led the Pirate Bay investigation, the news site is assisting copyright infringement.
TorrentFreak recently ran a story about a movie director’s unique approach to piracy. Now, Darren Bousman, director of Saw II, III and IV, talks to us about his decision to target BitTorrent, the fallout and his dreams, as 10 years of effort comes to fruition with his latest movie, Repo! The Genetic Opera.
A federal judge from California again backed a major gay porn distributor by slapping a previously convicted pirate. The man in question, Gilbert Michael Gonzales of Palm Springs, has now been told told that he will be arrested the next time he is caught with his pants down.
Are you the director of some high profile movies, feel you have a piracy problem but no longer do business with MediaDefender? Do you want to fail, badly? Then maybe you should follow the lead of Darren Bousman, director of the Saw movie sequels – and ask members of the public to upload fakes files on BitTorrent sites.
After Michael Moore encouraged everyone to download his latest movie ‘Slacker Uprising’ for free and do what they like with it, lawyers working for him have sent a takedown requestto a DNS company, for a torrent of the movie to be removed from BTJunkie. The problem? Well, several as it so happens.
Spore, love it or loathe it, Will Wright’s new game has stayed in the news in the way his previous games have never managed. The game could also bring about big changes in both DRM and copyright law, as the debate heats up over it’s DRM. While EA puts a brave face on things, as a class action suit is filed.
In a keynote speech at the Broadband World Forum, John McMahon, President of Sony Pictures Television asked ISPs to join their battle against piracy. McMahon further said that DRM is one of the major causes of piracy, but says Sony doesn’t have any plans to get rid of it.
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Peter Sunde Left Quote
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