Last week the Digital Economy Bill was released and included tough measures to deal with illicit file-sharing. It was preceded by a consultation period where individuals, consumer groups and ISPs voiced serious concerns over the proposals. The government seems to have completely ignored them - not so the rights holders.
The Pirate Bay's tracker closure has spurred several discussions about DHT, BitTorrent's fallback technology for when central trackers are unavailable. According to some, DHT has some problems of its own. Novell, for example, decided to ship openSUSE with the BitTorrent client Transmission, but not before stripping DHT support.
Piracy is without a doubt, truly evil. It doesn't help the artists, it robs them of their rightful revenue and is such a poor basis for a business model, it's unworthy of consideration. Of course, new streaming sites are miles better, offering a legal way to listen to free music.…
This week The Pirate Bay confirmed it would shut down its tracker for good, instead encouraging the use of DHT, PEX and magnet links. This move confounded many BitTorrent enthusiasts, who although wishing to adapt, were confronted with hard to grasp terminology and technology. Time for some explaining.
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.