The Pirate Bay's PirateBrowser, a tool that allows people to bypass ISP filtering and access blocked websites, is a great success. The Firefox and Tor-based software eliminates the need to use a proxy site and has already been downloaded more than 1,000,000 times, TorrentFreak has learned. Currently around 0.5% of…
New research from Boston's Northeastern University shows that with the shutdown of Megaupload, the U.S. Government took down at least 10.75 million legitimate files. The researchers examined the percentage of legal and copyright-infringing content on six file-hosting services. While infringing content outnumbers legitimate files on all sites, the volume of…
An anonymous group of disgruntled artists have launched a banner campaign spoofing the billboard promotions BitTorrent Inc. ran last week. The banners, which suggest that BitTorrent doesn't care about artists, appeared on several popular websites including Rollingstone.com, The Drudge Report, Mashable, GrooveShark and MediaFire. "Instead of paying artists, we spent…
The season finale of Breaking Bad ignited passions lat month when it clocked up half a million unauthorized downloads in just 12 hours. Now the creator of the show has been speaking out, noting that while ultimately piracy is a problem, it's one that has helped the show become more…
Torrent search engine isoHunt today announced that it has settled its legal battle with the MPAA for $110 million. The site's owner has decided to throw in the towel and shut down the site for now, but an application for an appeal at the U.S. Supreme Court is still pending.…
Two years ago the MPAA and RIAA teamed up with five major Internet providers to announce their “six strikes” anti-piracy plan.
In line with the entertainment industry's stance of making unauthorized content more difficult to find, a fresh batch of court orders has today targeted several of the world's leading torrent sites. In addition to indexers ExtraTorrent, 1337x, H33T and TorrentHound, unconfirmed reports suggest that Italian ISPs will have to block…
The Institute for Policy Innovation has criticized a new website that compares piracy rates with movie availability. After implying that the researchers are "friends" with pirates, IPI president Tom Giovanetti attacked TorrentFreak for "brazenly" providing stats on unauthorized downloading. Those who believe that piracy is a market force are "losing…