The latest Digg Dialogg stars none other than Brüno, the über-famous Austrian model and host of the Funkyzeit fashion and celebrity show. To make sure that Brüno’s interview is well-seeded at all times, Digg has teamed up with Mininova.
On the day that The Pirate Bay announced that they will be sold to a commercial company for $7.8 million, Tomas Wennström secured an audio interview with TPB spokesman Peter Sunde. The interview is of great interest but raises even more questions as shockwaves continue through the P2P community.
Alongside the news that The Pirate Bay will sell shares on the Swedish stock market come some other significant changes. The site itself will decentralize and stop hosting and tracking torrents. Instead, The Pirate Bay will use a third party tracker and torrent hosting service to serve its users.
According to gaming company Global Gaming Factory X, it is in the the process of acquiring The Pirate Bay for $7.8m (SEK 60 million). The acquisition is scheduled to be completed by August and will see the site launch new business models to compensate content providers and copyright owners.
During the last few days a virus scam targeting torrent site users has reappeared. Internet users receive an email informing them they have been monitored by anti-piracy company MediaDefender on various torrent sites. Although a log file is included to ‘prove’ infringements, it contains what is being described as a “banking trojan”.
Lawyers ACS:Law and their anti-piracy partners Logistep are currently harassing around 6,000 alleged file-sharers, demanding £665 from each to make threats of legal action go away. In yet another blow to their tenuous claims, ISP association ISPA says that its members are “not confident” that the evidence accurately identifies infringers.
The top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent, ‘Knowing’ tops the chart this week for the second week in a row followed by ‘The Haunting in Connecticut’. ‘Angels and Demons’ completes this week’s top three.
Piracy watchdog Nexicon has found the ultimate way to turn piracy into profit for the fresh copyright holders added to their clientele. They offer alleged file-sharers the chance to settle for $10 per downloaded song or an equal amount for a pirated movie. If you decide not to settle, they promise to bankrupt you in court.
The Pirate Bay team has continued developing its video streaming site – which will open up to the public within 5 years. On The Video Bay users can share video clips without having to worry about getting them taken offline due to copyright violations, true Pirate Bay-style.
Since 2005, a Brazilian senator has been championing new cybercrime legislation which would include tough measures against file-sharing. Yesterday, at the International Free Software Forum, the Brazilian President openly criticized the bill, and then posed for pictures with The Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde.
Norway’s largest dairy products producer is redesigning the logo they use on one of their chocolate milk products. They invited the public to design cows of their own, and then vote on them to decide the winner, which then becomes the new logo. Right now a Pirate Bay-inspired cow is in second place.
The ‘King of Pop’ may have died but his music lives on, and on file-sharing networks, maybe stronger than ever. Less than 24 hours after Jackson passed away hundreds of thousands of file-sharers have downloaded one or more of his albums on BitTorrent.
To users of Cydia, Icy and Appulous, alternatives to Apple’s App Store are nothing new, but soon there will be a new and unqiue player in the market. Promising to become “the most beautiful application repository on the market” appDowner will be the first App Store competitor to use BitTorrent technology.
Today the Swedish Appeal Court decided that the judge who handled the Pirate Bay trial was not biased, despite his membership of several pro-copyright organizations. In true Pirate Bay style spokesman Peter Sunde responded full force, and says they are ready to sue Sweden for human rights violations.
To determine if the verdict in the Pirate Bay trial was affected by bias, the connections of Judge Tomas Norström to national and international pro-copyright lobby groups have been reviewed by the Appeal Court. Their ‘no bias’ ruling can’t be appealed which means that there will not be a retrial, instead the verdict in the Pirate Bay trial will be appealed.
Millions of people use BitTorrent daily, but little is known about the market share of the available clients – until now. An objective sample of more than 150,000 unique IPs shows that uTorrent is the client of choice for more than half of all BitTorrent users. Vuze is in second place with close to 17 percent followed by the mainline client with 12 percent.
The Regional Court in Hamburg, Germany, has ruled that file-hosting service Rapidshare must proactively filter certain content. Music industry outfit GEMA asked the court to ban Rapidshare from making 5,000 tracks from its catalogue available on the Internet. The court estimated the value of the tracks at $34 million.
The Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN has summoned The Pirate Bay’s founders to court through Twitter and Facebook. Emboldened by recent events in Sweden, BREIN is demanding a total blackout of the site in the Netherlands and has scheduled a court hearing for July 21st.
Just days after ISPs in Spain confirmed talks with the music and movie industry had ended without success, entertainment companies have now backed away from their “3 strikes” demands after it became clear the Spanish government does not support their plan. They will go after 200 BitTorrent sites instead.
Yesterday from the Palace of Versailles, Nicolas Sarkozy became the first president to address Parliament in 150 years. He took the opportunity to show his determination over the proposed HADOPI legislation, promising that he will “go all the way” to enforce law on the Internet.
Just days after Norway’s data protection department told ISPs they must delete all personal IP address-related data three weeks after collection, it’s now become safer than ever to be a file-sharer in Norway. The only law firm with a license to track pirates has just seen it expire and it won’t be renewed.
Users of BitTorrent and other file-sharing networks are increasingly seeking solutions to hide their identities from the outside world. With pressure from anti-piracy outfits mounting on ISPs to police their networks and warn those who share copyrighted content, many file-sharers have decided to negate this by going anonymous.
The top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent, ‘Knowing’ tops the chart this week followed by ‘Angels and Demons’. ‘Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li’ completes this week’s top three.
Just two weeks after the Swedish Pirate Party won a seat in the European Parliament, the German PiratenPartei has gained a seat in the German government. Jörg Tauss has left the Social Democrats Party (SPD) and has joined the Pirate Party.
Earlier this year Ireland’s RIAA, IRMA, and the country’s largest ISP, Eircom, reached private agreement to implement 3 strikes and disconnections for alleged pirates. At concerns that this would place Eircom at a competitive disadvantage, part of the deal would see IRMA go after Ireland’s other ISPs too. IRMA kept their promise.
The two million dollar fine handed out to Jammie Thomas by a Minnesota jury this week hasn’t done the music industry’s image much good. While lawyers and high level managers at the major labels cracked open the Champagne, artists such as Moby and Radiohead shook their heads in shame at what the music world has become.
Internet service providers in Spain have now ended all government mandated talks with the music and movie industry after earlier refusing to disconnect alleged pirates. The talks were supposed to reduce online piracy but the ISPs say this is impossible if legal alternatives aren’t provided.
Jammie Thomas-Rasset has lost her retrial against the RIAA and was ordered to pay $1.92 million for 24 songs she shared via Kazaa. The defense had argued that it might have been her children who shared the files instead of Thomas-Rasset, but the jury didn’t buy this and found her guilty.
The entertainment industry battle to decrease the use of file-sharing networks to share copyrighted content never seems to end. Just this week, four more European member states came out with initiatives to continue to crackdown on piracy, many of which are not only draconian, but also doomed to fail.
Customers of Be Broadband haven’t been able to get access to their favorite torrent sites for several hours, causing a widespread panic among BitTorrent addicts. With the government pushing for tougher anti-piracy legislation many feared the worst. They are safe for now though.
The Swedish Supreme Administrative Court has ruled that collecting and storing IP addresses is in violation of the Personal Data Act. But as some celebrate this ruling as the death of the notorious IPRED anti-piracy legislation, the truth is a little more sobering.
A major online warez release group has been severely disrupted after a police and music industry investigation. A contender for the most prolific in its field, the group has suffered arrests, with the latest coming yesterday after police and the BPI conducted an early morning raid.
The top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent, ‘The Horsemen’ tops the chart this week followed by ‘He’s Just Not That Into You’. ‘Push’ completes this week’s top three.
After several victories in Danish courts, the entertainment industry is now trying to get The Pirate Bay blocked in Norway. The country’s largest Internet provider ‘Telenor’ is now being dragged to court by IFPI, after it refused an earlier request to disable customer access to the world’s most prominent tracker.
With millions of page views every month PizzaTorrent was one of the Internet’s larger torrent meta-search engines. Unfortunately for the site’s owner, being in the spotlight also had its downsides. After ongoing DDoS attacks on the site the founder decided to pull the plug and shut the site down for good.
Several studios are currently taking legal action against Australian ISP iiNet. They accuse iiNet of failing to take steps to stop its subscribers from sharing files by disconnecting them from the Internet. Now iiNet has been ordered to hand over the personal details and logs relating to twenty alleged pirates, to anti-piracy group AFACT.
The Digital Britain report will be published shortly. However, no government department will be completely knowledgeable in such a nuanced subject as peer-to-peer file-sharing. So what basic errors might the generalists make based on the submissions made to the BERR last year?
Furk is not your regular torrent site. Not only does it function as a meta-search engine, but you can also download ‘torrents’ via Furk’s servers using HTTP. And it doesn’t stop there. Furk holds these downloads in a searchable database that anyone can use, turning the site into a kind of mashup between BitTorrent and Rapidshare.
The UK Internet provider Virgin has struck a deal with Universal to offer their customers unlimited DRM-free music at a fixed monthly rate. As part of the deal Virgin committed to doing everything in their power to prevent people from sharing music on its network, including the option of disconnecting persistent offenders.
Anti-piracy groups and lawyers across Europe are unmovable – they say that since they logged a copyright infringement from a particular IP address, the bill payer is responsible. Now a court in Rome has decided that on the contrary, an IP address does not identify an infringer, only a particular connection.
Following a request from the entertainment industries, a French court has ordered the P2P news site Numerama to cover the cases of 27 convicted file-sharers. For their efforts the site receives 10,000 euros which they promise to spend wisely by supporting a pro file-sharing cause.
For more than a year Project Chanology has been protesting against the Church of Scientology, both on the Internet and in real life. As of today they are joined by The Pirate Bay, who are helping “Anonymous” to rally support for their upcoming protests aimed to make Scientology walk the plank.
A disgruntled artist (or maybe an international coalition) has set up a clone Pirate Bay site selling anti-Pirate Bay T-shirts. While it looks like The Pirate Bay, the site is much less useful than the original and doesn’t have any torrents. What it does have though, is a sense of fun, humor and irony – all topped off with a truckload of fail.
Three judges are currently reviewing the judge that handled the Pirate Bay trial to discover if he was biased or not. No decision has yet been made but the New York Times and several other publications report inaccuracies and plain wrongs that claim otherwise. Time to get the facts straight.
Fleet Foxes’ self titled album was considered by Pitchfork and many other music critics to be the best album of 2008. Interestingly, Fleet Foxes frontman Robin Pecknold says the band could not have made the album without the inspiration he got from the hundreds of albums he pirated over the years.
There can be little doubt that the provision of an effective and free service for BitTorrent anonymity would prove hugely popular. Today we bring you a detailed report on BitBlinder – a brand new open source project which promises to cloak your torrents, hide your browsing and get round many obstructive filters.
While the MPAA sees BitTorrent as enemy number one, many filmmakers dream of getting their work into the top 100 download list on The Pirate Bay. Filmmaker Tommy Pallotta is one of them. His previous film was already immensely popular on BitTorrent, and he hopes to repeat this success with his latest work.
Norway’s data protection department has indicated that ISPs must delete all personal IP address-related data just 3 weeks after collection. The instruction, initially given to two ISPs but applicable to them all, means that it will be incredibly difficult to take action against file-sharers.
The French Hadopi legislation passed last month introduced draconian measures to combat piracy, including a “three strikes” regime for persistent copyright infringers. However, France’s highest constitutional authority today ruled that Internet access is a fundamental human right and killed the three-strikes provision.
ISPs and the entertainment industries are in negotiations to set up a so-called ‘pirate review board’ in Denmark. The body will oversee and mediate in cases of copyright infringement by alleged online pirates and try to stop large organizations ending up in court, such as in The Pirate Bay and AllofMP3 domain blocking cases.
In July a group of enthusiasts will start uploading as many video mixtapes as they can to The Pirate Bay. A couple of the most controversial, shocking, hilarious, absurdly weird and in parts, downright sickening examples come from the Retard-O-Tron series. TorrentFreak caught up with the creator to find out what mixtapes are, where they’re from and where they’re going.
With more than million searches each day NowTorrents is one of the larger torrent search engines on the Internet. The site has grown steadily during recent months, and everything was looking great until a few hours ago, when the owner lost its domain. The domain was hijacked and parked on an account at the popular registrar GoDaddy.
The top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent, ‘He’s Just Not That Into You’ tops the chart this week followed by ‘Friday the 13th’. ‘Push’ completes this week’s top three.
Drama has struck parts of the BitTorrent community recently as the popular DVD ripper aXXo hasn’t uploaded any torrents for several weeks. Recently a rumor surfaced that aXXo went to join a private BitTorrent tracker and continued to share his work there exclusively. But is this really the case?
The micro-blogging service Twitter continues to increase in popularity but while it’s great to hear about what that B-grade celebrity had for breakfast or where your best friend woke up this morning, readers of TorrentFreak will probably prefer hearing about torrents. That’s where TorrentTwitter steps in.
With 7.1 percent of the vote, the Swedish Pirate Party has shocked its critics and secured a seat in the European Parliament. The Pirates received more votes from those under 30 than any other party in the European elections yesterday, and this was celebrated with pints of rum and loads of pirate chants.
The Pirate Party has won a huge victory in the Swedish elections and is marching on to Brussels. After months of campaigning against well established parties, the Pirate Party has gathered enough votes to be guaranteed a seat in the European Parliament.
Antipiratbyrån lawyer Henrik Pontén, one of the Pirate Bay’s arch rivals, had quite a surprise recently when he received an unexpected piece of mail. The letter from the Swedish tax authority informed him that his request for a name change had been accepted and from now on, he would be officially known as ‘Pirate Pontén’.
Back in 2007, the Z-Cult FM comic book tracker experienced difficulties when it came under legal pressure from Marvel and DC Comics to remove torrents linking to their copyright works. The site complied and extended this service to other publishers but in the end, this courtesy ended up draining the life from the site.
This week police and anti-piracy groups moved to close down a very large BitTorrent tracker. With 250,000 users, Snowtigers was possibly the largest French tracker. According to reports, police arrested 10 members of staff and seized more than 20 servers, after the military assisted in locating the operators.
Earlier this week Mininova and the Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN fought out a civil dispute in court. In broad terms, BREIN demanded a copyright filter but an in-depth look at their demands reveals that they also suggest the BitTorrent site to block torrents tracked by The Pirate Bay and ban uploaders such as aXXo.
With the Pirate Bay verdict in hand, the music industry lobby group IFPI are threatening the hosting providers of torrent sites to take down everything BitTorrent related, or else. While some have complied with these demands, the Swedish web host Portlane refuses to do so and uses commercial marketing legislation in its defense.
Since 2005, a Brazilian senator has been pushing for tough new ‘cybercrime’ legislation which would include measures against file-sharing. However, before thinking of unleashing new laws on the public, the government should look closer to home, since the senate’s intranet is loaded with an impressive amount of warez.
A Swiss court has ruled that an anti-piracy tracking company can continue monitoring the public on the Internet. The court said that the need to fight illicit file-sharers outweighs the need to protect an individual’s privacy on the Internet, and that the ends justified the means.
Hundreds of millions of Europeans will cast their vote in the European elections this week. In Sweden, The Pirate Party is confident that it will get at least one seat, but they are not the only party aiming to legalize file-sharing for personal use. The Green parties in Europe are also known for their pro-sharing views.
Two weeks ago, Prison Break season 4 ended in the US, and many fans were left in the dark about what happened to Scofield. Even though episode 23 and 24 of Prison Break never aired on US television they are available on BitTorrent, and that didn’t go unnoticed to the millions of of dedicated followers of the show.
The head of Spain’s Popular Party says he will take legal action if the government implements Internet disconnection for alleged file-sharers. Leader of the opposition Mariano Rajoy says that if the Prime Minister of Spain mimics Sarkozy and brings in a “3 strikes” regime, he will take the whole issue to court.
The largest torrent indexer on the Internet defended itself in court today in a landmark case for the BitTorrent community. The outcome of the civil dispute between the anti-piracy group BREIN and Mininova will decide if the BitTorrent indexer has to actively filter torrents from the site.
Hiphop group Advance Patrol was used by the music industry in the Pirate Bay trial, portrayed as artists suffering losses from illegal downloading. However, the group itself was never consulted, and they are now striking back at the music industry by releasing their new album for free – on The Pirate Bay, of course.
Several prominent film and TV anti-piracy groups and other industry bodies have teamed up to create yet another group, this time with the aim, among other things, to teach Australia’s children that copyright infringement is wrong.
The top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent, ‘Coraline’ tops the chart this week followed by ‘Push’. ‘X-Men Origins: Wolverine’ completes this week’s top three.
In just a few weeks the UK government will announce their new anti-piracy legislation that aims to put an end to most illegal file-sharing. The exact nature of the proposals are still unknown, but installing “speed bumps” for pirates is a good option according to the film industry.
Russian police have carried out what is believed to be the first raid against a BitTorrent tracker. Prompted by the MPA, police arrived at the site’s Moscow office and arrested the owners and several staff. As is so often the case, the arrests failed to close the site, which is currently still operating from The Netherlands.
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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
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