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.
