BitTorrent search engine isoHunt is the first foreign website to partner with New York Attorney General Cuomo in an effort to keep the Internet clean from child pornography. By using the Attorney General’s hash value database to filter its search results, isoHunt will prevent thousands of images from spreading on BitTorrent.
There is outrage amongst sections of the online community as it is revealed that at the behest of copyright holders, a free online library has been raided by police. Chitanka carried user translated and submitted books, poems and other literature and as an “altruistic library” was thought to be legal under current legislation. Instead the site was raided and subjected to criminal procedures.
The criminal proceedings against P2P index site ShareConnector is turning into an embarrassing fiasco for the Dutch Department of Justice. A court has decided to reopen the case and summons the public prosecutor as it doubts the legitimacy of the criminal prosecution and the fact that it acted on evidence brought in by local anti-piracy outfit BREIN.
The Dutch public broadcasting organization NPO has launched a trial project which will see it publish all recent video broadcasts via BitTorrent downloads and streams. With the trial NPO wants to gauge the demand for BitTorrent downloads, and whether P2P technology can cut down distribution costs significantly.
As the US Copyright Group continues with its plans to force settlements from thousands of individuals who they claim illegally shared copyright movies using BitTorrent, opposition to their turn-piracy-into-profit scheme grows. Tomorrow the EFF steps up to the mark in a federal court to argue for the breaking up of the lawsuits. If successful they could strike a significant blow to this operation.
The top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent, ‘Green Zone’ tops the chart again this week followed by ‘She’s Out of My League’. ‘Brooklyn’s Finest’ completes the top three.
BitAudit is by far the most elaborate tool to track communications between BitTorrent users we’ve seen to date. Although its creator built the application to give BitTorrent users insight into the inner workings of the protocol and the public nature of it, anti-piracy outfits might use it as inspiration to update their own tracking systems which are usually pretty weak.
Last month one of three injunctions obtained by Hollywood lawyers required that Swedish ISP Black Internet must stop providing access to the world’s most famous BitTorrent site. The provider has just complied with the court order and in turn became the first in Sweden to cut their customers off from the site. Whether this opens the floodgates for other ISP blocks remains to be seen.
BitTorrent search engine isoHunt is fighting the permanent injunction the District Court of California issued in their case against the MPAA. According to isoHunt’s owner, a site-wide filter based on a list of keywords provided by the movie industry is an unworkable solution that would impede freedom of speech and bring China-style censorship to the U.S.
After failing to shut down The Pirate Bay, the movie industry in The Netherlands has been trying to find other ways of limiting access to the site. Earlier they began threatening an ISP with court action unless it blocked access to the site. Now one of the ISP’s rivals is joining the fight against anti-piracy group BREIN in the hope of avoiding an undemocratic precedent.
BitTorrent is the ideal way to transfer large files to thousands of locations in a short period of time. This doesn’t only apply to movies and music that are downloaded by the average BitTorrent user, companies can benefit from it as well. With help from BitTorrent, Facebook can now push hundreds of megabytes of new code to all servers worldwide in just a minute.
As soon as Sweden’s IPRED legislation was passed, Antipiratbyrån working on behalf of several book publishers somehow managed to gain access to a private FTP server containing audio books. That copyright case involving ISP ePhone is with the Supreme Court but allegations that the anti-piracy group illegally hacked into the server to gather evidence persist in the background.
As one of the pioneers of a ’3 strikes’ mechanism for dealing with P2P piracy, France is moving closer to its full implementation. In order to warn and punish alleged file-sharers, it will first be necessary to monitor them whilst engaged in infringement. The scope of that monitoring has just been confirmed.
Google has won its court case against Viacom, where it was facing a $1 billion claim for allowing users to upload copyrighted clips to YouTube. The landmark case is expected to have a major impact on future cases dealing with the responsibilities of the operators of user-generated media libraries, including BitTorrent sites.
The on-going fight against file-sharing link sites in Spain is turning into a farce. Despite many rulings which state that the sites break no laws, still anti-piracy groups waste their money pursuing them. As yet another site is cleared of wrong doing, a lawyer who speaks out for civil rights on the Internet is clear on the piracy issue – either join the revolution, or perish.
In 2003 a group of friends from Sweden decided to found Piratbyrån (the bureau of piracy), a lobbying organization to promote the sharing of information and culture. A few months later the group took a decision that would change the Internet – the launch of a BitTorrent tracker named ‘The Pirate Bay’. Today marks the end of an era with the announcement that Piratbyrån has disbanded.
Vice President Joe Biden introduced the Joint Strategic Plan to combat intellectual property theft today. In his speech Biden declared war on ‘pirate’ websites, both foreign and domestic, arguing that piracy is theft and a potential threat to national security.
A recent copyright takedown notice from the UK’s BPI revealed that the music group has been demanding that Google take down links not just to precise URLs where music is hosted on cyberlockers, but rather more generally referencing the entire site. Now it appears that IFPI, the BPI’s big brother, is trying a similar strategy, this time with The Pirate Bay.
A movie director in India is threatening legal action against lawmakers after it was revealed they gathered and watched a pirate copy of his hit movie. The film, titled ‘Raajneeti’ (‘Politics’), was released early this month in theaters but dozens of lawmakers from the Indian Bharatiya Janata Party didn’t visit one. They were caught after their illicit screening was broadcast on TV as part of a news report.
A Swedish court is looking into one of the strangest file-sharing cases we’ve ever heard of. With a Pirate Bay username as the prime evidence, a Swedish man is suspected of distributing a film about moose hunting. The filmmaker, who hunted down the alleged infringer by himself, is demanding $15,000 to compensate his losses.
The top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent, ‘Green Zone’ tops the chart this week followed by ‘The A-Team’. ‘She’s Out of My League’ completes the top three.
RapidShare will no longer offer incentives to users who share popular content. After having stopped cash payouts for their rewards program some time ago, RapidShare has now decided to discontinue the entire program. The file-hosting service cites complaints by copyright holders that the rewards were facilitating piracy as the reason for this move.
This week Swedish police arrested three individuals on suspicion of copyright infringements. The trio are suspected of having connections to ‘Scene’ warez servers known as ‘Darkside’. According to anti-piracy group Antipiratbyrån, the servers carried huge amounts of data making the case the biggest so far in Sweden, and possibly in Europe.
Transmission, the most used non-commercial BitTorrent client, has reached a new milestone with the release of version 2.0. The community driven application, installed on millions of computers worldwide, is now faster and smarter than ever before. We get the lowdown from Transmission developer Charles Kerr.
Through co-ordinated raids across the country, Hungarian police have attempted to decimate the country’s BitTorrent scene. Following the deployment of many officers, dozens of servers were seized and many of the country’s trackers shut down, including the prominent 900,000 peer ‘ncore’ tracker. An ISP, university and many seedboxes were also targeted.
Millions of BitTorrent users who have chosen to hide their identities through a VPN service may not be as anonymous as they would like to be. Due to a huge security flaw, those who use IPv6 in combination with a PPTP-based VPN such as Ipredator are broadcasting information linking to their real IP-address on BitTorrent.
As existing distribution models for music and movies continue to be disrupted, creators unhindered by old business models are looking towards alternative ways of bringing their product to the world. Filmmakers behind a new horror movie called The Tunnel are selling individual frames of their soon to be released BitTorrent-only venture, with one lucky investor picking up 1% of the profits.
At a hearing yesterday, several experts told the US International Trade Commission that many of the estimates of piracy losses touted by the entertainment industries were inflated or misleading. Others claimed that current enforcement methods aren’t working and suggested they try something else.
The largest P2P conglomerate ever assembled is supporting today’s launch of the first episode of ‘Pioneer One.’ The show, made for and made possible by the P2P community, is actively promoted by uTorrent, Limewire and a variety of prominent torrent sites including The Pirate Bay and EZTV.
Keeping its promise to Ireland’s largest ISP, Eircom, the music industry has targeted the country’s second largest ISP, Vodafone. According to a new report, Vodafone is in talks with the Irish Recorded Music Association about issuing warnings and eventually disconnecting its file-sharing customers. Since its introduction last month, around 800 Eircom customers have already received their first strike.
Anti-piracy campaigns come and go every other month – most of them are either endlessly boring or end up becoming an object of ridicule. A new one just launched takes the form of a site which appears to offer free downloads from top artists, but with a twist. Clicking to download results in various pop stars meeting a grisly end by a bullet to the head or a careless hand grenade.
BitTorrent Inc. has made the remote access ‘web’ feature of its Falcon client iPhone compatible. uTorrent users can now remotely control their downloads from wherever they are with their iPhone. Torrents can be added, paused and removed using an interface with a look and feel identical to that of the uTorrent application.
In response to the country’s “3 strikes” Hadopi legislation, last week a French ISP began offering a service to block file-sharing on customer connections for ‘just’ 2 euros per month. It didn’t take long for awful vulnerabilities in the system to be found which breached not only the privacy of subscribers, but exposed them to new security threats.
In the fall of last year The Pirate Bay took its tracker offline. Luckily, for the stability of the BitTorrent ecosystem several new trackers emerged to take its place. Time for us to provide an overview of the largest public BitTorrent trackers currently around.
The top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent, ‘Green Zone’ tops the chart this week followed by ‘She’s Out of My League’. ‘Hot Tub Time Machine’ completes the top three.
Last month an early cut of the unreleased movie Hackers Wanted found its way to BitTorrent. As the director’s cut of the movie also leaked out last night, TorrentFreak caught up with director Sam Bozzo who through the prism of 15 years in movie making gives his opinion on how leaks, BitTorrent and file-sharing affects the industry.
If the U.S. Copyright Group (USCG) is to be believed, tens of thousands of BitTorrent users are at risk of receiving a settlement letter in the mail if they have shared films without authorization. The group behind the ‘Hurt Locker’ case says it is tracking hundreds of other films for various movie companies.
Thousands of individuals receiving settlement offers from US lawyers following allegations that they shared movies such as Hurt Locker are being offered other opportunities to deal with the problem. Today the EFF launched its ‘Subpoena Defense List’ which shows lawyers across the States prepared to defend letter recipients. Another company is even suggesting it can reduce settlement amounts.
BitTorrent is the most effective way to share large files online, but it can also be used to stream live events. In some cases it’s the only way for people to access cultural events. After a Palestinian filmmaker was denied a visa to visit a film festival in Norway where one of his films is to be screened, the festival’s organizers are turning to BitTorrent to stream the festival live to Gaza.
A law firm which previously sent threatening letters to alleged file-sharers in order to receive cash settlements has complained to WordPress over a hosted blog. According to the complaint, Automattic Inc. can be held liable for copyright infringement and defamation due to the fact it hosted a FaceBook-sourced picture of one of the firm’s lawyers which had been Photoshopped into a ‘Wanted’ poster.
Forecasts from Cisco’s Visual Networking Index reveal that P2P traffic is predicted to grow to more than 7 Petabytes per month by 2014. This is more than double the amount of data P2P traffic generated in 2009. The majority of the bandwidth consumption will be generated by BitTorrent, which is the dominant file-sharing protocol today.
As it moves from one controversy to the next, Whistleblower site WikiLeaks is rarely out of the news lately. The site offers thousands of previously confidential documents to download from its own servers resulting in huge bills for bandwidth. Now in addition to these direct downloads, WikiLeaks is offering both torrent and magnet links.
Approximately 700 IP-addresses of BitTorrent users who allegedly shared a copy of ‘The Hurt locker’ have been submitted to the Washington D.C. District Court. The public court records show that nearly all IPs in the group were tracked from the last week of April until the first week of May.
After raids in 2005, Spanish police arrested four people and dismantled a popular file-sharing site. The case has been dragging on ever since but now has finally been closed. Three judges decided that no offense had been committed and likened file-sharing to the ancient practice of sharing books.
The integrity of the judge who handed out a negative judgment to the Usenet community FTD has been called into doubt. After it became apparent that the lawyer representing the movie studio and the judge were giving copyright courses together, the Pirate Party is hinting at a corruption scandal.
Today a federal court of appeals in the US will consider if selling so-called promo CDs is illegal. Over in the UK another investigation is running its course after James Hyman, a high-profile ex-MTV executive and radio DJ, became suspected of selling hundreds of discs on eBay, some of which are believed to have fallen into the hands of groups who later released them on the Internet.
For the second time in two months, the world’s most popular release news site RLSLOG has been kicked out by its webhost due to a copyright complaint. The site, which has never hosted any copyrighted material on its servers, is currently looking for a new home where it hopes for a longer stay.
The top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent, ‘She’s Out of My League’ tops the chart this week followed by ‘Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time’. ‘The Wolfman’ completes the top three.
Google has threatened to shut down Trackhub, a free service that provides a BitTorrent tracker fail-safe on Google’s App Engine platform. The search giant claims it has received numerous complaints about the service, but seems to be clueless about what it’s actually doing.
MegaUpload is one of the most prominent file-hosting services on the Internet. It is owned by an unbelievably colorful individual who is probably better known for his multiple convictions for computer fraud, embezzlement and insider trading. He owns several luxury cars, for which he is currently under investigation, and has just acquired New Zealand’s most expensive house – a snip at just over $20m.
The RIAA has asked a New York District Court to shut down the world’s most installed file-sharing application, Limewire. The record labels argue that the Gnutella-based download client might have caused billions of dollars in lost revenue and that it’s therefore one of the largest threats to the music industry’s revenue.
The past few weeks has seen the somewhat unlikely resurrection of Newzbin. The world’s premier Usenet indexing site was crushed by huge debts but through a tangled web worthy of the most dramatic soap opera, it has somehow been reanimated. While ex-owner Caesium eyes future opportunities away from file-sharing, lawyers already have plans to bring Newzbin2 to its knees.
The UK Government has discovered that BitTorrent is the cheapest and most effective method of sharing large files with the public. As part of the UK Prime Minister’s transparency initiative, the Treasury has today released several torrents with details on how the Government spends the public’s money.
A movie studio has won a lawsuit against Dutch Usenet community FTD. In a surprising decision, a court reasoned that by allowing the publication of the location of pirate movie stored on Usenet, FTD was effectively publishing the movie as if they had actually hosted it on their own servers.
Two weeks ago the largest BitTorrent tracker on the Internet vanished. The hosting company of the tracker was ordered to take it offline after Hollywood managed to get a court decision in their favor. Today, OpenBitTorrent returns to the web from a new home, managing torrent connections as if nothing happened.
In 2005 there was C-60, in 2008 it was C-61, and now in 2010 it’s C-32. As we reported a month ago, a new Bill was about to be rammed through Canada’s Parliament, and on Wednesday it was announced. It is, like its two predecessors, mostly a collection of stricter enforcement rules with an occasional benefit to consumers thrown in, almost as an afterthought.
Operators of BitTorrent sites are used to receiving takedown requests from Hollywood, it is part of their daily business. Usually the notices concern rips of DVD quality or leaks that were camcorded in theaters. Twentieth Century Fox, however, has surprised several site administrators with a notification for a film that is far from finished.
Yesterday saw the announcement that The Pirate Bay has launched a new dating site. PirateDate.com carries the unmistakable Pirate Bay galleon and replicates the well-worn pirate-style font, but how connected with The Pirate Bay is it? Well, perhaps not as closely as some might presume, but being mentioned in the same breath could be good enough.
Five years after uTorrent was released for the Windows platform the development team has announced that it’s working on a Linux version of the torrent client. The massive demand from users is cited as one of the main reasons why Linux users will have a native uTorrent application this coming summer.
After a surprise visit to his home by lawyers and anti-piracy group executives earlier this year, the admin of a BitTorrent site has been hit with a large claim for damages. The 18 year-old operator of the EliteBits private tracker now faces a demand for more than $261,000, but will be assisted in his fight by pro-sharing group, Piratgruppen.
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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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