In this short time span it was downloaded by more than 400,000 people on BitTorrent alone, earning it a spot in TorrentFreak’s chart of top 10 most pirated movies this week.

For most Hollywood bosses this is usually a trigger to start complaining about lost revenue, but the makers of Ink are welcoming their new pirate audience.

In an email to the followers of their newsletter, Jamin and Kiowa Winans say that they have “embraced the piracy” and are “just happy Ink is getting unprecedented exposure.” Thanks to the pirated copy their movie jumped to 16th place on IMDb’s movie meter, and according to the makers this increased popularity also boosted DVD and Blu-ray sales.

Who needs a hefty marketing budget to promote a movie (and merchandise) when they have BitTorrent? Sent out a few hours ago, here’s the mailing in full plus a follow up response from Kiowa.

Dear Fans and Friends,

Over the weekend something pretty extraordinary happened. Ink got ripped off. Someone bit torrented the movie (we knew this would happen) and they posted it on every pirate site out there. What we didn’t expect was that within 24 hours Ink would blow up. Ink became the number 1 most downloaded movie on several sites having been downloaded somewhere between 150,000 to 200,000 times as far as we can tell. Knowing there’s absolutely nothing we can do about it, we’ve embraced the piracy and are just happy Ink is getting unprecedented exposure.

As a result, Ink is now ranked #16 on IMDb’s movie meter and is currently one of the top 20 most popular movies in the world.

This all started as a result of the completely underground buzz that you’ve each helped us create. We’ve had no distributor, no real advertising and yet the word of mouth that you’ve generated has made the film blow up as soon as it became available worldwide. So many of you came to see the movie multiple times, bringing friends and family and many of you have bought the DVD and Blu-ray from us. All of this built up and built up and suddenly it exploded.

We don’t know exactly where this will all lead, but the exposure is unquestionably a positive thing.

Ink hits Netflix, Blockbuster, iTunes and many more tomorrow! Remember to get your signed copies, t-shirts and posters at the Ink Store.

Thank you so much for the constant love and support.

Jamin and Kiowa
Double Edge Films

And the follow up response we got from Kiowa, in reply to this article.

Dear Ernesto,

To say we are shocked by all this news and are digesting it rapidly is an understatement. We made this film in Denver, CO on a budget of $250,000 and have fought to bring it to 15 cities ourselves over the past ten months. Hollywood has claimed that they don’t know how to market the film or that it doesn’t have an audience, and what BitTorrent has done in the last four days is prove, unequivocally, that Hollywood is wrong.

So is this the best thing that could happen to our little film? Absolutely! There is no way this many people would know about the film otherwise, or that our IMDb MovieMeter would have shot up an astounding 81,000% from a few days of activity over the torrent sites. What Hollywood would calculate as lost dollars, we calculate as fans earned. Due to many suggestions from downloaders over the past few days we have established a Donate button on our Store page for people to contribute what they can. Thank you for posting that info.

We’re not looking to get rich, but would like to pay back our investors and the enormous amount of personal debt we’ve gone into making the film. We’re also not looking to make Hollywood films (Jamin has had several opportunities) and plan on continuing the march of making fiercely independent films. In order to do that we have to count on the power of the people, eyeballs all over the world and torrenters to throw our film a few bucks apiece. It’s the indie film model of the future and we appreciate each and every person who takes the time to watch our film. It appears we’re all rebels here… so let’s wave that flag proud.

Again, we are really floored that all of this is happening and that you’ve opened up the conversation!

All the best,

Kiowa K. Winans

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

The Danish company is not limiting its services to the RIAA though. It is also working with an Irish ISP to support their “3 strikes” regime, and in Australia the company also conducted investigations against alleged pirates.

Apart from their pirate tracking activities, DtecNet also has a business intelligence unit to help their entertainment industry clients “Understand what’s happening and where, and to develop smarter strategies to guide their development, marketing, retailing, distribution and investment initiatives.” The intelligence unit utilizes its insights into the file-sharing community to help out, but unfortunately the unit is not that knowledgeable.

In fact, the whitepaper (pdf) that was published by the DtecNet unit and mirrored all around the web during the last 24 hours, clearly shows that they have no clue about BitTorrent.

In the paper that deals with the recent downtime of the Pirate Bay tracker and how this affects BitTorrent usage, they make several false claims, draw bogus conclusions and report inaccurate statistics. Bogus reports from anti-piracy companies are nothing new, but this is definitely one of the worst we’ve ever seen thus far, and it is already being cited by several respected news outlets.

Let’s take a look at some of the things DtecNet claims and why these claims are bogus, inaccurate or just plain stupid.

Claim: — “After Swedish authorities forced the Internet disconnection of The Pirate Bay, online piracy worldwide dropped substantially on BitTorrent networks as file traders scrambled to find replacement trackers.”

This claim is based on a graph presented by DtecNet (see below) which shows that the number of infringements recorded by the company dropped significantly. This is of course a direct effect of the Pirate Bay tracker downtime. Companies like DtecNet use the tracker to find and report pirates and if it goes down there are less recorded infringements. However, there is no evidence that piracy went down. Most BitTorrent transfers were working fine due to the wonders of DHT (trackerless torrents), including the ones that were using only the Pirate Bay tracker.

Claim: — “The impact of the shutdown is strongly obvious, [...] file trading on BitTorrent, easily the world’s most popular peer-to-peer protocol, dropped virtually overnight by nearly 80 percent.”

This second claim is even more absurd because it suggests that BitTorrent usage dropped by 80 percent based on a graph of recorded infringements. Remember, DtecNet doesn’t track any BitTorrent traffic data. The only thing that their data proves is that, because of the tracker downtime, DtecNet was unable to connect to some of the trackers listed in their database of torrents. Again, the torrents might have worked just fine for users because of DHT.

Claim: — “Over time, infringements through that network [BitTorrent] began to rise again as new trackers became available.”

This seems to suggest that after the Pirate Bay trackers went down several new trackers have appeared, which is simply not true. In fact, DtecNet uses OpenBitTorrent and the Denis Stalker tracker as an example in their paper, two trackers that are hosted on the same network as The Pirate Bay tracker. The only reason the number of recorded infringements began to rise is that these trackers also suffered downtime from which they recovered. DtecNet however seems to be unaware of the relation between the three trackers.

Claim: — DtecNet has created a nice graph (below) that “illustrates the chaos the shutdown caused among various BitTorrent tracker networks, and how more recently the situation appears to be clarifying itself as users find new favorite sites.”

The only confusion we see here is at the DtecNet offices. The company apparently fails to understand that a tracker is something different than a site. There is absolutely no indication that BitTorrent users were looking for new sites (note that The Pirate Bay site was still up), but even if they were this does not mean that there will be any changes in the usage of the various trackers.

Claim: — “About two weeks after the Pirate Bay shutdown, two of the successor trackers – OpenBitTorrent and DenisStalker – temporarily shut down, possibly because they could not handle rising demand.”

This claim is almost hilarious. As pointed out earlier, OpenBitTorrent and DenisStalker are hosted on the same network as The Pirate Bay. It takes no genius to figure this out, and this should be especially obvious for an outfit that deals with BitTorrent trackers on a daily basis, trying to catch pirates. So, the two successor trackers did not collapse under the increased load at all, they went down together with The Pirate Bay.

We could go on for hours refuting pretty much every sentence in the report and we are not the only ones who dispute the know-how of DtecNet’s self-proclaimed business intelligence unit. P2P expert Dr. Pouwelse of the Tribler team at Delft University of Technology looked into the report as well and told TorrentFreak: “They are completely technically incompetent, they are just trying to get sensational press coverage, or both.”

“Mixing up terms like trackers versus website and failure to do basic homework like DNS lookups means they would fail our master course in P2P. Their work suffers from a fundamental methodological error: what our company can’t see does not exist, thus we can make wild absolute claims on a complex global phenomena,” Pouwelse said.

Companies such as DtecNet are earning millions of dollars from the entertainment industry thanks to their piracy tracking activities and the business intelligence they claim to offer. Considering this position it is striking to see how little they actually know about what’s going on, and we fear that this amateurish white paper might actually lose @DtecNetBI some customers, instead of adding new clients to their portfolio.

Chances are, DtecNet will be responsible for gathering evidence against British file-sharers so that Peter Mandelson can have them kicked off the Internet in 2011. Nice to know that important job will be in safe hands.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Earlier this month, blogger Aldor Nini (who also works for anti-piracy solutions company Easycom) wrote an independent article that was published on BuildBlog.de.

The post titled “UseNeXT: Legitimate downloading of pirated movies” gave a highly detailed account of UseNeXT’s operations, along with information on how the service operates in respect of pirated movie content. For anyone interested in the company or Usenet in general (and can take the anti-piracy objective and language with a pinch of salt), it is a must-read – but not without controversy.

As many people who have written potentially negative pieces or forum posts about UseNeXT will confirm, the company is very quick to notice such items, and in this case the reaction was no different.

Within two days the author and publisher of the post received “pre-litigation” letters from UseNeXT’s lawyers, ordering it to censor certain claims made in the article. UseNeXT says that they received information that the article had been sent to an employee at Warner Bros and are insisting that claims made within are erroneous and will negatively affect UseNeXT’s public image.

Article author Aldor Nini gave TorrentFreak a list of claims made in the article which he says are being disputed by UseNeXT’s lawyers;

The article claims that:

Undeterred, Nini says that he stands by his claims. “The comments are correct and true,” he told TorrentFreak, “and we’re looking forward to proving that!”

Nini also points out a section about free-speech on UseNeXT’s website, translated from German below;

“Everyone has the right to gain knowledge as well as to make public and disseminate, in written and spoken, his word by using the UseNeXT service. Nobody should be afraid to be discriminated due to his religious or political position by using the Usenet.”

Nini says that he believes that this is a great statement that should apply to everyone. Therefore his article will stand uncensored on both Usenet and the web.

TorrentFreak will monitor the situation closely and report on further developments and (possible) threats against ourselves.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Most TV-show downloads come from overseas where the episodes haven’t aired yet, let alone that it can be streamed online. The only option left for these unfortunate souls is to use BitTorrent, or wait.

However, it seems that people don’t want to wait for months when they know that their favorite TV-show is out there, just a few clicks away. Indeed, at an increasing rate people have started to use BitTorrent to get their TV fix.

Traffic to the leading TV-torrent distribution site EZTV is up over 50% compared to last year. The site had more than 15 million visits in September compared to 9.2 a year earlier.

TV-torrents are particularly popular in Australia where most US TV-shows air with a delay of months or even years. EZTV is among the 300 most visited websites Down Under, and Mininova, The Pirate Bay and isoHunt are all in the top 100.

Stopping TV piracy is not that hard though. TV distribution companies should get rid of the long delays and offer streams to people outside of the US. If they can pull that off there is no doubt that the number of ‘pirated’ downloads will plunge.

Below is the list of most downloaded TV-shows on BitTorrent last week. Heroes is leading the chart with well over a million downloads in just one week.

The data for the most recent TV episodes are collected by TorrentFreak from a representative sample of BitTorrent sites and is for informational and educational reference only.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol is one of the rare exceptions to this rule. The book appeared on several file-sharing sites just hours after its official release and has been downloaded by more than one hundred thousand pirates scattered across the globe.

For some people the ‘pirate’ route is the only way to get their hands on the much anticipated book, simply because it is not yet available in their country.

“Thanks a lot for sharing the book so early with us. I was eagerly waiting for this because it is still to be released in India. Now I can read it before anyone else,” a downloader of the high quality PDF version of the book commented.

Since it was uploaded two days ago the eBook has been downloaded by approximately 40,000 BitTorrent users. The unabridged audiobook copy is even more popular with close to 60,000 downloads since its release.

This most downloaded audiobook torrent currently has well over a thousand seeders, which is quote unusual as one commenter noted. “It’s really amazing to see thousands of people downloading and seeding an audiobook torrent because usually I see only a few hundred people downloading an audiobook torrent.”

Alison Barrow, associate publicity director for Transworld, the book’s publisher in the UK said that they are asking sites to take down links to pirated copies. “We are not being complacent about this,” she noted.

Whether or not the availability of unauthorized copies will have a negative effect on the book’s sales remains to be seen. Bestselling author Paulo Coelho has shown that giving away free digital copies of book can actually boost sales to quite an extent.

Coelho, who is an avid BitTorrent user himself and a passionate supporter of The Pirate Bay has encouraged many of his fellow authors to share their work. “A person who does not share is not only selfish, but bitter and alone,” Coelho told TorrentFreak. Perhaps Dan Brown took Coelho’s advice?

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

In film circles, Pallotta is known for his outstanding animation work that defines most of his work thus far. His last film, A Scanner Darkly starred Keanu Reeves and was a smash hit on BitTorrent. With more than a million downloads, the movie earned a place in our list of Top 10 most downloaded movies four weeks in a row.

Pallotta’s latest work is something totally different though. It’s a follow up documentary to film legend Martin Scorsese’s cult-classic American Boy that was shot more than thirty years ago. In American Boy Scorsese documented the life of his friend Steven Prince, who was also the inspiration for one of the best known scene’s in Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. With American Prince Pallotta continues the saga.

Since Scorsese’s original documentary is a rarity nowadays, Pallotta had to ‘pirate’ much of his material on BitTorrent sites and YouTube. In return, Pallotta is giving the film away for free on BitTorrent. This of course caught our attention and we decided to catch up with the director to lear a little more about his motivation to embrace BitTorrent.

TF: First off, A Scanner Darkly – which you produced – became quite successful on BitTorrent and was downloaded by hundreds of thousands of people. Were you aware of that at the time? What do you think of people who use BitTorrent to download the film?

Tommy: Really, A Scanner Darkly was successful on BitTorrent? GREAT! I wish it was more so, I have to admit, I get jealous when I look at the top 100 downloads on the trackers and I don’t see my movies. In fact, part of the reason I am releasing American Prince on BitTorrent is for the hope that it breaks the top 100. I live in Amsterdam now, so the only way I can keep up with some of my favorite shows, events, and films is to download. I think it is great, especially for filmmakers of niche movies. My movies tend to get limited releases and are more of the cult film status, so the initial release is often overlooked or simply the movie is unavailable in many areas. For me as a filmmaker it is most important that the work I make get seen. I feel for many people and places, downloading is the only way they will get to see my movies. Waking Life is a movie that I produced that is a pretty interesting example of that. It seems more popular today that when it came out in 2001. I think BitTorrent and steaming sites like YouTube are completely responsible for that phenomena. Since I use BitTorrent, I wanted to give back to the community, that was part of the motivation is releasing American Prince via BitTorrent.

TF: The MPAA has often argued that the movie industry loses billions of dollars through piracy. Others think that it has close to no impact. What’s your position in the ongoing ‘piracy debate’?

Tommy: Well, everyone has a different opinion. It is pretty simple to me: The exact same thing that happened to the music industry will happen to the film industry. I suspect the film industry knows that and is trying to hold off the inevitable as long as they can. My guess is that they will try to make as much money as long as they can until they have to change or someone comes in and organizes and unifies the industry in the way Apple did for music. But even that is tricky because obviously Apple benefited more than the music industry. So they should be looking at alternative revenue streams, I find it hard to believe that many DVDs will be sold a few years from now. I would rather embrace new technologies and distribution methods, I feel this gives me greater and more immediate access to an audience.

TF: For American Prince you’ve used material from BitTorrent and YouTube, which is great. Did you license all these clips, or are they pirated copies?

Tommy: Yes we used material from BitTorrent and YouTube for American Prince and no, we did not license them. I did receive the Master copy of American Boy from Steven Prince himself, but we found a copy via BitTorrent that was better than that copy, so we used that! Plus, there is some confusion as to who actually owns the rights to American Boy. Part of the motivation of this film was to get a proper release for Scorsese’s American Boy. I felt this film would help uncover who has the rights and hopefully get it in front of a larger audience.

TF: Why did you decide to release American Prince for free on BitTorrent and what do you expect from it?

Tommy: Scorsese’s American Boy has been and is still generally unavailable for over 30 years, yet so many filmmakers have been influenced by it. The way we saw it is through multi-generational VHS tapes. Now with BitTorrent, there is a whole new audience and generation ready to be influenced by that film and I hope mine. Steven Prince is a gold mine of future cinema scenes and I hope a whole new generation of filmmakers will understand how he has influenced American Cinema. My biggest expectation is that the most people possible will watch my film! Also, I would really like to encourage people to talk about the film, with each other as well as on the Internet. It would make me happy to see Wikipedia entries and IMDB boards as well as Internet sites. I would love for people to get together and have screenings of it with their friends, or for universities to suggest to their class for the students to watch it. I look at American Prince as the film school I never had, what I always imagined film school to be.

TF: Do you think that the Internet and file-sharing technology will play an important role in shaping the future of film distribution?

Tommy: I absolutely believe how we watch and share movies will shape the future of film distribution. I believe it will have such a profound influence that it will even change how movies are made. I think it is a win-win for the filmmakers and the viewers. Filmmakers will have a more direct reach with audience and viewers have more to choose from. I wanted to release this film in support of file sharing and to prove to myself and others that it can have a profoundly positive effect.

TF: Amen.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

“Total visits by Australians to BitTorrent websites including Mininova, The Pirate Bay, isoHunt, TorrentReactor and Torrentz grew from 785,000 in April last year to 1,049,000 in April this year, Nielsen says. This is a year-on-year increase of 33.6 percent,” The Age wrote a few days ago.

This may sound like a lot of traffic, but since Nielsen reports the number of visits and not the unique visitors we expected it to be much higher. Luckily, Mininova was kind enough to give us some insight into their statistics so we could check how accurate Nielsen’s estimates are. The results are quite a shock.

When we look at the statistics of Mininova alone, we see that the site had 6,268,969 Aussie visits in April and a massive 33,162,846 Aussie page views. Compared to the same month in 2008 (4,144,556 visits), this is an increase of more than 50 percent.

So, the Australian visitors to Mininova alone are already 600% higher than Nielsen’s estimates of the total traffic to Mininova, The Pirate Bay, isoHunt, TorrentReactor and Torrentz. Unfortunately we don’t have any details on the methodology or sample Nielsen used, but it’s certainly not very representative.

Perhaps even more worrying, The Age attributes the surge in traffic to the economic downturn, without providing any evidence for a causal relationship between the two events. Over the past 5 years most BitTorrent sites have seen huge traffic increases every year, also when the economy was in an upswing.

Even more so, the money generated by (legal and illegal) use of BitTorrent and other file-sharing networks is greater than the combined revenue of the various entertainment industry bodies who try to stop piracy. One could argue that without piracy the whole economy would collapse.

The downloading itself is not so much about cost saving. In Australia, BitTorrent is especially popular among those who want to catch up with US television shows that appear months or years later on TV down under. Money is not so much of an issue for them, they simply want to see the latest Lost or Heroes episodes.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

So why do pirates buy more music? The simplest explanation for this finding might be that people who are not interested in music don’t have the need to pirate or buy it. I have to agree that it’s not the the sexiest, most controversial or inspiring answer, but it does tell us something about the core of the piracy ‘problem’.

The real reason is in fact very simple. The true music enthusiasts simply want to consume, sample and discover as much new music as they possibly can, and the most straightforward and convenient way to do this is through file-sharing networks. Music pirates are just regular consumers really, and they love music just as much as anyone else.

Although I personally believe that the ability to sample music through file-sharing has a positive effect on music sales, much of the correlation between piracy and sales is simply caused by a third factor – a passion for music. This is one of the main reasons why most users of music oriented BitTorrent sites love an initiative such as Spotify where they have access to one of the largest music libraries online.

Although piracy can breed consumers, it’s generally happens the other way around. The Internet has freed music and the music labels’ greed and abuse of copyright is the only barrier that stands between the artists and millions of potential fans. Creative business models where consumers have instant access to unprotected and high quality music are the future.

The labels of course fail to see this all too obvious connection and continue to exploit their acquired (copy)rights.They would rather pump yet more millions into overpaid pro-copyright lobbyists and expensive lawyers trying to keep their outdated business model alive – the model where the artist gets 1 to 10% of the total music sales while the labels are filling their pockets. No wonder the passionate music fans flee to BitTorrent.

What we can learn from the studies is that true music fans buy and pirate more music. The labels are fighting against those who generate a large chunk – perhaps even the largest – of their yearly revenue. The labels should understand that piracy is merely a signal that they are on the wrong track.

The Internet makes it possible to offer unlimited access to music cheaply with virtually no production and distribution costs. Unlimited access is exactly what most consumers want. It’s an opportunity not a threat.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

When combined, Mininova’s visitors have been downloading well over 10 million torrents a day and performing an equal number of searches on the site. These millions of downloads add up quickly and since the birth of the site a massive 8 billion torrents have been downloaded by Mininova users.

Mininova’s growth rate is not reducing either, and the site still has several relatively untapped and upcoming markets to look forward to. India for example, where torrents are quickly gaining popularity. Over the past year the number of visitors to Mininova from India has doubled, and with 1.1 billion people and only a couple million broadband subscribers to date, there is a huge amount of untapped potential.

In common with fellow torrent sites such as The Pirate Bay and isoHunt, Mininova hasn’t been spared from legal troubles. The site will appear in court this May, where the local anti-piracy outfit BREIN will demand a filtering mechanism to restrict access to copyright infringing ‘links’.

The Mininova trial is likely to set an important precedent for all other BitTorrent indexers hosted in The Netherlands. Erik and the other Mininova founders think they have the law on their side. “We have confidence in the outcome of the case and we don’t think Mininova will cease to exist,” he told TorrentFreak earlier.

In the meantime, Mininova continues business as usual in their new office. Lately they have been emphasizing the legal use of BitTorrent currently employed by hundreds of independent filmmakers and musicians. In March the site released a new feature that aims to help artists to not only distribute, but also monetize their work.

Whatever the outcome of the trial will be, Mininova will undoubtedly see the 10 billionth torrent download later this year.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

The new ‘HADOPI’ (Creation and Internet) law introduces unlimited options for copyright holders to go after individuals and sites that are alleged to have infringed copyright, without having to actually prove that the accused are categorically guilty. Now, a new survey by French Institute of Public Opinion (IFOP) for LeJdd shows just how (un)popular this so-called ‘graduated response’ is with the public.

From a survey of 1004 individuals representative of the French Internet user, 60% of respondents said they were not in favor of the law (42% were strongly against), with a third saying they support it “somewhat”. Only those respondents over 65 years old showed greater support, with 53% in favor and 41% against. Despite this, 64% of the respondents in this category felt that the graduated response wont be affective at all.

Interestingly, there was no difference between the different age groups in the expected effectiveness of the new anti-piracy legislation. Overall, the majority responded quite negatively. Just 24% of respondents said that they felt the ‘graduated response’ would be “very” or “somewhat” effective, with a huge 69% believing it will fail.

As in most countries, illegal file-sharing is widespread in France. One in four of the respondents admitted that they downloaded copyrighted music or movies regularly. There is a clear generation gap here, as 40% of those younger than 30 years categorized themselves as active downloaders opposed to 6% in the 65 years and older group.

Not not everyone is sceptical of the scheme. While repeating the IFPI nonsense that 95% of all music is pirated, U2 manager Paul McGuiness writes that not only is the Creation and Internet law “the right solution to an enormous problem” but also “a fair and balanced solution” that “will work in practice.”

Clearly not everyone agrees. The full survey is available in French here (.pdf)

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

At the time of writing the film is also topping The Pirate Bay’s Top 100 most popular torrents and is listed among the most popular search terms on other torrent sites.

In an attempt to keep the damage to a minimum, Fox has been sending out takedown notices to various torrent sites. Most site operators are kind enough to take down the links, but new ones are already uploaded before the requests are processed.

Interestingly, most people think that the leak will actually do the movie good, as a poll among our readers indicates that 40% would be more excited to see it in the movie theater or on DVD, even if they had downloaded it. Only 6% of the respondents believe that the leak will be detrimental to the film’s success.

The data for our weekly download chart is collected by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are DVDrips unless stated otherwise.

RSS feed for the weekly DVDrip chart.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Luxembourg-based music platform and community Jamendo has well over half a million members, more than 100,000 album reviews and in excess of 17,000 albums on offer – all of them free to download. Jamendo lets artists keep 50% of the revenue generated and almost 100% of the donations received by the site go to the artists too.

In order to make a statement amidst escalating discussion on ‘3 Strikes’ regimes, Jamendo has launched a scheme of its own. Called ‘3 Thanks’, Jamendo has turned the music industry’s strategy on its head. From now on, Jamendo will send a ‘thank you’ email to anyone who downloads any of the tracks (currently around 200,000) from the site, while encouraging them to share with their friends.

Jamendo’s ‘2nd Strike’ will be signaled by the most active downloaders receiving not a warning letter, but a ‘thank you’ note bundled with an “accomplice kit” containing stickers and other goodies.

In complete contrast to the plans of IFPI (which plans to disconnect people on their ‘3rd Strike’), Jamendo will seek out their most active supporters who are able to convince a bar, restaurant, shop or hotel to sign up to the PRO service, and actually pay their ISP bill for the month.

TorrentFreak caught up with Jamendo creator Sylvain Zimmer who told us that he is delighted to be able to launch this initiative worldwide. Clearly Jamendo feel there are better methods of doing business than lobbying for punitive measures against consumers. But what should be done instead?

“We strongly think that the music economy is all about the relation between the artist and its fans : punishing them won’t do any good,” Sylvain told TorrentFreak.

“On Jamendo we try to make that relationship stronger, and we have seen over the years that it creates much more value, even for the artist though great feedback, donations, a large community/fanbase, loyalty and viral marketing. Our job is to make the artists understand that, and we have 10,000 of them on the platform now that do,” Sylvain added.

Sylvain told us that punishing downloaders will only alienate artists from their fanbase and make them less popular. “Maybe we have to help amplify that backslash, and make it the accepted standard to put your music online for free and monetize other revenue streams, such as concerts, music licensing, Jamendo PRO etc.”

Visitors to torrent sites will be aware that Jamendo artist torrents are appearing there more and more. We asked Sylvain if this is helping Jamendo to grow.

“Yes we have partnerships with Mininova, isoHunt and Vuze among others, and yes they did help us grow a bit,” he said. “I think what’s also important is the service for the artists, it is one of our advantages compared to competitors. We offer the artists that upload on Jamendo a very large reach, mainly via these partners.”

As torrent sites struggle to be accepted as a legitimate platform for media distribution, Sylvain feels that a relationship with Jamendo can be a reciprocal one.

“Through our partnerships, we also help them prove that their torrent websites can be used for legal content, so it’s win-win for everyone,” Sylvain told us.

All downloads on Jamendo are completely free for everyone, but users are encouraged to support any of the bands if they like what they hear. The Pro package on the other hand is interesting for owners of bars, restaurant and other public spaces. They avoid paying the traditional royalties and the money goes directly to the artists.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Operating out of its new offices in Utrecht, The Netherlands, Mininova and its five company directors go about their daily business with unparalleled openness. In a new interview with ORF.at, they further peel away the mystique usually associated with running a huge torrent site.

Erik Dubbelboer, President of Mininova told ORF that although some people believe that The Pirate Bay is the largest torrent site, in truth Mininova is quite bigger in terms of page views. The site is commercially-driven now, however, it hasn’t always been that way. Erik explained that in the beginning there was no plan to have Mininova operate as a company. “We wanted to make a cool website and experiment with the exciting Bittorrent technology,” he told ORF

But of course, the site was a huge success and now receives a staggering number of visitors. Managing Director Niek van der Maas explained that this substantial traffic is used to drive the site’s main source of revenue – advertising, including deals with companies like Yahoo.

The increased popularity of the site has allowed the Mininova team to grow. “We have turned Mininova from our hobby into a profession,” said Erik. Indeed, the site now has five young employees (average age of 24) who are all studying computer science.

While other torrent site admins choose to stay in the shadows, Mininova’s owners operate openly as they believe that under current law in The Netherlands their operations are entirely legal. Unlike other large ‘open’ sites, such as The Pirate Bay, Mininova does not operate a public tracker, and unlike their Swedish counterparts they operate a proper copyright takedown request system. If a copyright holder wants a torrent removed, they can write to the site and the necessary action is taken promptly.

Unfortunately, even this isn’t enough to keep anti-piracy outfits at arms length and like The Pirate Bay before them, Mininova also faces legal action. BREIN, the prominent Dutch anti-piracy group (which has already run many torrent sites out of The Netherlands) had been in secret talks with Mininova for over a year, ostensibly trying to reach a negotiated settlement.

But it wasn’t to be. BREIN wanted Mininova to proactively filter their search engine, something the site was not prepared to do. At the time, Erik told TorrentFreak that Mininova will not cave in to pressure from BREIN.

“We will proceed to court with full confidence. We operate within the law, as we maintain our ‘notice and take down’ policy. That is, we remove search results if a copyright holder asks us to.” The court showdown with BREIN will take place May 20th. Mininova is being defended by lawyer Christiaan Alberdingk Thijm, who is known for his legal victory while representing KaZaA in The Netherlands.

Erik told ORF that he believes the first major process in the case will try to determine if the type of service operated by Mininova is legal or not. He noted that there are key differences between their case and the recent one involving The Pirate Bay – the action in The Netherlands is a civil suit, while the case in Sweden was a criminal trial directed at the individuals, not the site itself.

Erik went on to say that he’d spoken recently with Peter Sunde about the TPB case, one which Peter firmly believes they will win. Erik says they speak with Gottfrid too on technical issues but other than that, there is no cooperation between the sites. When asked how he felt the court would rule in The Pirate Bay case, Erik said it was too difficult to call.

One of the reasons that sites like Mininova exist is due to the changing viewing habits of tech-savvy individuals, something which torrent sites have embraced while mainstream media continue to lag behind. “I would like to see content when I have time for it – not only at the time when it’s broadcasted,” Erik told ORF. “Some companies are starting to think and rethink, asking us how they can benefit from our “content distribution” model. They recognize that the fight against file-sharing is hopeless,” he said.

In a further indication that BitTorrent is able to move from the PC screen to the living room, regular visitors to Mininova will have noticed the recent addition of a link labeled ‘New: Devices Overview‘. Listed here are various BitTorrent-compatible ’set-top box’ type devices recommended by Mininova. Erik Dubbelboer says that at the recent CeBIT trade show, several manufacturers showed an interest in having a ‘Powered by Mininova’ logo/license for their devices, including Hauppauge who are perhaps best known for their PC TV tuner cards.

Mininova is very interested in experimenting with new business models for content creators, Dubbelboer said. He said that most people download copyrighted files because it’s so easy and convenient, not because they’re free. One thing is certain, BitTorrent is a great distribution model which allows many artists just setting out to get their work in front of millions of people.

Silence is Sexy is one band that has teamed up with Mininova to distribute their latest album for free, with great success. They even put up a ‘Powered by Mininova’ banner at one of their latest concerts.

This year will be an exciting one for the Mininova team. On the one hand they are still experiencing a substantial increase in visitor numbers as well as interest from content producers and device manufacturers. However, the legal battle with MPAA’s affiliate BREIN may ruin this party if the worst case scenario becomes truth. Let’s hope for the best.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Outlaw.lv, one of the largest trackers in Latvia is currently offline following pressure from the Economic Police, while rumors say that one of the top uploaders was detained for a few hours. “Economic Police has shut down our project. Outlaw LV will be back in a new way and with a new mission,” reads a message on the front page.

It is clear though that the authorities aim to take more sites offline. Danger.lv is another tracker that has received a letter from the police, and they decided to pull the plug voluntarily, for the time being.

Similar to last summer, several other BitTorrent trackers became extra cautious after the renewed attention from the authorities. Bithack.lv was one of the trackers that took action. The site didn’t close however, but now serves recipes instead of torrent files.

TorrentFreak spoke with one admin of a local BitTorrent tracker, who informed us that they have also been receiving letters from anti-piracy organizations. “A handful of popular trackers are taking severe countermeasures to avoid any possibility of takedown and continue to serve the community for now, hoping that no takedowns will follow,” he said.

As with many of the takedown attempts in other parts of the world, lobbyists from the entertainment industry are the ones tipping off the police, and assisting in ‘evidence gathering’ and even raids. In Latvia it’s LAmpA, but the BPI and IFPI have also been assisting the authorities, most notably with the raid on the popular music tracker OiNK.

Needless to say, these anti-piracy outfits are not the most objective partner when it comes to solving these type of digital ‘offenses’, and it’s worrisome to see how they appear to be increasingly intertwined with local authorities.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Earlier this month a code of practice was drafted by the copyright holders and ISPs which should outline the manner in which the new Section 92 ‘3 Strikes’ regime should be handled by the ISPs. However, the parties involved couldn’t agree on the content of the code and Prime Minister John Key has just announced that the law has been delayed until a workable solution can be found. If the parties involved can’t reach an agreement, the law might be changed, he noted.

Most of the opposition is worried about the “Guilty Upon Accusation’ part of the law, and rightly so. Regular readers know how shoddy anti-piracy groups are at accurate take-down notices, either they’re for stuff that you can share, never had, or are incapable of having.

Last week, many people blacked out their profile images on social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook, and today several bloggers announced a blackout of their entire website. The protest is being spearheaded by Creative Freedom, which was formed two months ago in response to this law – and not without success.

The protest caught the eye of many, including some celebrities. Stephen Fry, author of 7 novels, and a prolific screenwriter, actor, and presenter, is supporting the cause. “My picture is blacked out for good reason,” he twittered last week. The Quite Interesting Fry, ranked second most popular by twitterholic, was one of the first to black out his profile picture.

For now the protests have resulted in a delay of the law, perhaps not directly, but we are pretty certain that it would have been in effect already without all the opposition.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

The paper, which claims to “provide an as objective as possible assessment of the countermeasures for P2P” initially left us skeptical. But, with one or two exceptions, it does what it claims to do. Other companies and politicians should take note of this. Below we look at the conclusions of the report – some we were actually moved to applaud, while others were slightly cringe worthy.

The Good

DNS Blocking

“Blocking of IP addresses could be an additional measure in a combination of different measures, but is not the salvation of the problem itself.“

Ipoque comes to the right conclusion here. Indeed, DNS blocking is not very effective. As has been proven by The Pirate Bay in their dispute in Denmark, these methods really don’t work.

URL Filters

“URL filters are widely available. Centrally hosted services such as Piratebay and even BitTorrent trackers could be blocked. An up-to-date list of URLs is a necessary prerequisite to make this measure effective. Unfortunately, it is nearly impossible to keep the URL database current. Affected sites could rapidly change URLs and propagate these changes. Ultimately, this would result in a never-ending cat and mouse game.“

Again the report is spot on. The Internet Watch Foundation in the UK showed that blocklists don’t work well when applied to known sites and content. On a sidenote, file-sharers who use blocklists like PeerGuardian to filter peers of uncertain identity, face the same problem.

Swarm Poisoning

“[The injection of counterfeits] have driven file sharers to the BitTorrent network, that is nearly immune against injection of fake files, mainly because content distribution is organized through web based torrent directories such as thepiratebay.org. Conclusion: The injection of counterfeits is no effective countermeasure anymore.”

They are right, it doesn’t. Not on well moderated torrent sites at least.

Fingerprint systems

“Due to its computational complexity, fingerprinting does not work in real-time for high-speed networks. Also, even though ever more file and compression formats are supported, fingerprinting is blind to encrypted archive files (e.g. password-protected ZIP files), and these are becoming more and more popular. Largescale deployment of fingerprinting technology would push the popularity of all kinds of encryption and render the whole technology useless as a countermeasure.”

This ties in with what we said last year about such systems and BitTorrent. These methods are highly ineffective.

DRM

“In the past, any DRM mechanism was hacked or otherwise circumvented. This is highly likely to happen to new systems as well.”

DRM doesn’t work, and has not worked. One person breaching it is all it takes, thanks to the Internet. Spore is a great example of how DRM only affects legitimate purchasers, and not the people it attempts to target.

The Summary

“First, and most importantly, content providers need to provide other high-quality, well priced and easily accessible online content. New business models are inevitable. In the long run, this will make illegitimate sharing of copyright-protected material through the Internet a lot less interesting.”

This is the crux. It’s why rights owners are burying their heads in the sand, in the hope it will go away. It’s not surprising, however, that rights owners do not wish to move to a model that gives a smaller return-per-unit.

The Bad

URL Whitelisting

“An example is Ipoque’s BitTorrent tracker whitelisting, that allows access to guaranteed legal BitTorrent content, while blocking access to all other P2P content. This approach works because nearly all legal P2P content is distributed over BitTorrent using dedicated and controlled BitTorrent trackers.”

Simply banning a huge number of BitTorrent trackers because they are open to all users doesn’t seem to be a good idea. One of the most eye-opening things about P2P is the sheer wealth of data it gives access to. Some may be in violation of civil or criminal law, but a lot isn’t. The same applications that can be used to share a game, can be used to promote a band, or distribute political protest by groups large and small.

Automatic detection tools

“Such systems can detect infringements nationally and internationally. The location is not important. Especially automatic detection systems work highly efficiently and produce court-proof evidence data. This measure is very difficult to circumvent”

Yes, the only problem is that these tools are not very accurate. They target dead people, printers, those that have never shared, and everyone else falsely accused. Strangely, they point this out themselves 2 paragraphs earlier:

“Active monitoring has garnered a bad reputation because content providers have in the past often tried to criminalize copyright infringers and imposed ridiculous penalties as a deterrent. In addition, there have been flawed lawsuits with verdicts about persons with no Internet access. Careful investigation along with adequate penalties are necessary to improve the reputation of this measure”

The Ugly

Using Exploits

“As for any computer system, attacks are possible, and there are commercial providers offering this as a service. An attack on eDonkey, for instance, may have the effect that the downloaded file is larger than the original, and the download never finishes. There are similar attacks for BitTorrent.”

Using exploits in file-sharing networks and clients is of course insane. Moreover, depending on the vulnerabilities exploited, this could be a violation of criminal law. At best, as with the Sony Rootkits, exploiting software systems like this is at least reputation-damaging. Of course, there’s also…

The Great!

Encrypted communication

“Encrypted communication and private file sharing networks can only be controlled by criminalistic methods involving a high effort.”

Again we applaud Ipoque for reaching the right conclusion. Not much we can say about this, except it’s the truth, and can’t be repeated often enough.

Is it a paper that is objective? Well, its the most objective one yet, but then that’s not saying much.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Most of the users of the service have reported great results. BitTorrent has proven to be an ideal marketing tool for musicians, writers and other creative minds who want to promote their work and engage fans. In fact, the Dutch Band ‘Silence is Sexy’ won the Interactive Award 2009 for releasing their album for free on Mininova.

Erik, co-founder of Mininova said in a response to the new milestone: “Content Distribution enables producers and artists to bring their work to the attention of the public, free of charge. It’s the perfect solution for bands that don’t have the means to bring out a record yet.”

“Through content distribution, we have already had about 5,800 uploads and 15 million downloads,” Erik commented. “That means some 40,000 downloads a day. The amount of data that has been downloaded equals a pile of CDs of about 30 kilometers high.”

Aside from the marketing aspect, sharing files on BitTorrent is also a great cost saver. Terabytes of data can be transferred without having to invest thousands of dollars in server capacity. If only Microsoft had used BitTorrent for its Windows 7 Beta release, they would not have been forced to delay the release and annoy thousands of eager early adopters, and could have even saved thousands of dollars at the same time.

Slowly, more established companies are realizing that BitTorrent is indeed a great way to reach out to a wide audience, for a fraction of the costs usually incurred. Last year, Canada’s public television broadcaster CBC used Mininova’s services to distribute one of its TV-shows, after they ran into distribution problems.

With BitTorrent’s ever growing popularity, Mininova is predicting a boom in the number of premium users in the coming year, as well as a steep growth in regular users. It might be a good idea for the entertainment industry to embrace these sites, rather than attempting to take them out.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Gottfrid, aka Anakata of The Pirate Bay offered to become Mininova’s temporary host, with the site moving again later on to be hosted by Gary Fung of isoHunt. As the site continued to develop, Mininova needed their own servers and in the years to follow its growth has been nothing short of spectacular.

From a standing start in 2005, by mid-2007 Mininova had entered the list of Top 100 most popular sites on the entire Internet with 2 million daily visitors, an amazing achievement.

Then, at the tender age of just three years old, Mininova was breaking more records. By January 2008, the site was serving 3 million daily visitors who were downloading almost 10 million .torrent files every day. In February the site introduced torrent streaming and by the end of that month had served over 4 billion .torrents.

The innovations didn’t stop there. In March last year, Mininova began its Beta testing of BitTorrent powered video streaming. The new streaming feature allowed users to watch videos instantly, streamed from .torrent files. The Open Source “Swarmplayer” was developed in collaboration with the Tribler team from the Technical University Delft and Free University Amsterdam.

In April 2008, the BitTorrent community realized just how big Mininova had become, after technical problems took down the site, resulting in massive traffic surges on other indexers. Although the site quickly returned, May was disappointing, as anti-piracy outfit BREIN flexed its muscles and threatened the site – filter, or else. However, by the end of the month it became clear that Mininova’s popularity was far from on the wane, as it served up its 5 billionth torrent.

Niek, CEO of Mininova, told Torrentfreak: “The growth rate is above every expectation. Mininova’s download numbers almost doubled this year – and the number of visitors grew almost just as hard. We are excited about the coming year and its challenges: stay tuned for some important announcements in the coming months.”

Just a few days ago, Mininova announced it had delivered its 7 billionth torrent, which left everyone wondering where it was all going to end. Today, the BitTorrent behemoth reached its 4th birthday and like someone else with a birthday today, the dream appears to have turned into reality.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

The new device can play videos from several large streaming sites, including YouTube, Google Video and Metacafe. However, its true power comes from the built-in BitTorrent client. Millions of people use BitTorrent to download TV-shows every week, so there are a lot of potential customers out there.

‘Whenever’ and ‘wherever’ are two words that are often heard when people explain why they use BitTorrent, and Netgear cleverly acknowledges this with their new player. “It is ideal for those who are geographically displaced from their preferred television content, such as international sporting events and Bollywood productions,” is how Netgear’s marketing promotes it.

If Netgear is indeed hoping for BitTorrent users to embrace the device, most of the potential lies outside the US, where 90% of all the TV-torrent downloads take place. The main reason being that fans sometimes have to wait for weeks or even months before the show airs on TV in their country.

For those who have a large library of video files downloaded already, the Internet TV Player also supports external USB drives. Plug it in, and all your videos will be available on your TV instantly, easy as that. Netgear expects that the Internet TV Player (ITV2000), priced at $200, will be available in stores early Summer 2009.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

One of its victims, who got the trojan from downloading a torrent from The Pirate Bay, contacted TorrentFreak. He told us: “I didn’t follow the well established rules of downloading. It was a file with a low number of seeds, many leechers and no comments. I’ve downloaded the file and didn’t visit the torrent page again to view if there were any negative comments.”

It turned out that the trojan originated from a keygen supplied with a copy of pirated software. Instead of generating a key, it modified the hosts file of the computer so that it redirects The Pirate Bay, Suprbay (The Pirate Bay forums) and Mininova to 127.0.0.1, which means that the sites never load.

Aside from blocking the three sites in question, the trojan caused popups and even played a sound file saying that “downloading is wrong”. The bad torrent was removed from The Pirate Bay soon after users commented that the key generator didn’t work, but it is safe to assume that this is not the first and only attempt to spread a trojan like this one.

The question remains, who is behind this? While some might argue that the MPAA, RIAA or other anti-piracy advocates might be the source, we think it more likely that the attack originates from a relatively innocent prankster targeting pirates.

The good news is that it is fairly easy to fix, manually removing the entries from the hosts file solves the problem. “Overall a bad experience, but the computer is fine now,” the affected user told us. Advice and tips about the Windows Hosts file can be found here.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.