James Burt, a 24 year-old manager at games retailer Electronics Boutique, admitted uploading the game on November 6th, a week before its commercial release in Australia.

In a statement the Japanese games giant said it used a range of forensic techniques to track down the uploader and on 23rd November obtained a Federal Court search order. This was used to locate and seize items from Burt’s property in Sinnamon Park, Queensland, to be used in evidence in the case against him.

As part of the investigation, Burt was also ordered to allow access using his passwords to social networking sites, email accounts and other websites he had used.

Australia traditionally lags behind the United States and Japan when it comes to media releases, but with the release of New Super Mario Bros. for the Wii the reverse was true, leading Nintendo to refer to the leak as a “global issue”.

“This legal proceeding was commenced to protect the creative rights and innovation of game developers, and to combat the growing international problem of Internet piracy,” the company said in a statement.

The game was a sure fire hit on BitTorrent. Data collected by TorrentFreak indicated that by December 27th 2009, the game had been downloaded 1,150,000 times.

Nevertheless, the game was still a huge commercial success. The game sold in excess of 10 million units in its first 2 months on sale – that’s 1 in 6 of all Wii gamers buying a copy – making it the fastest-selling single-platform game ever.

It’s unclear how Mr Burt will be able to pay this huge amount in damages. His salary at Electronics Boutique is unlikely to cover it – if he still has a job there.

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

Below is an excerpt of Twitters blog post revealing the threat.

It appears that for a number of years, a person has been creating torrent sites that require a login and password as well as creating forums set up for torrent site usage and then selling these purportedly well-crafted sites and forums to other people innocently looking to start a download site of their very own. However, these sites came with a little extra — security exploits and backdoors throughout the system. This person then waited for the forums and sites to get popular and then used those exploits to get access to the username, email address, and password of every person who had signed up. Additional exploits to gain admin root on forums that weren’t created by this person also appear to have been utilized; in some instances, the exploit involved redirecting attempts to access the forums to another site that would request log-in information. This information was then used to attempt to gain access to third party sites like Twitter.

So, the company blames ’someone’ of installing backdoors in a torrent site script that was sold to prospective torrent sites operators, something that has apparently gone unnoticed for years. The question that comes to mind immediately is, if this is such a serious and widespread threat, why doesn’t Twitter name the source or at least give some examples of affected sites?

All of the popular public torrent sites are custom built and cannot be the source of the exploit. From the information Twitter has made available it seems they could be blaming a private tracker script for the attack – most private trackers also operate forums which matches Twitter’s description of the sites involved.

There are quite a few private tracker scripts out there and the most established ones, such as TBDev and Gazelle for example, have been examined by untold numbers of experts and come free of charge – any suggestion that they could be involved in underhand activity is unthinkable. But there are also a few scripts that are created by middle-men whose reputations are less-easily tested.

Accusations of including back doors and exploits in tracker code are not new. The owner of Template Shares, a site that sells a heavily modified version of the TBDev BitTorrent tracker script, has been accused by several people of installing backdoors which provide access to the user databases of customers’ sites.

Template Shares is used by hundreds of smaller private BitTorrent trackers.

To warn the public, other online services and the operators of the affected torrent sites, it would be appropriate if Twitter gave out some more information. TorrentFreak will continue to look into this case and will post an update if we find out more.

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

At the 2010 event held in early January, Johnny Depp fought off Brad Pitt, Hugh Jackman, Robert Pattinson and Ryan Reynolds to be come Favorite Movie Actor, with Sandra Bullock triumphing in the Favorite Movie Actress category.

In music, Lady GaGa was awarded Favorite Pop Artist, with Favorite Female Artist going to Taylor Swift and Favorite Male Artist going to Keith Urban. During his acceptance speech, Urban had quite a surprise for his file-sharing fans.

After thanking people for voting, those watching the show at home and people who took the time to see him on tour, Urban gave credit to his fan club, Monkeyville, whose members work tirelessly to get his music out there.

“I don’t even care if you download it [my music] illegally, give it to your friends, I really don’t care,” said Urban. “I love the people to hear the music and come out and see us play live.”

It seems that Urban understands the positive influence the free download can have on his tour ticket sales. But speaking with Tennessean.com, Urban now says that his words came out all wrong.

“What I said came out nothing like I meant,” explained Urban. “I was referring to the old days when you’d buy a record, do a cassette tape and give it to your girlfriend, and then maybe she likes it and becomes a fan.”

That’ll be copying music and sharing it round then, just 1980’s style. Nevertheless, Urban is sure of his stance now.

“For the record, I absolutely care about my music not being taken for free,” he added. “But I love when people are passionate and want to turn friends on to music.”

Urban is on RIAA-member Capitol Records Nashville and they cannot have appreciated his comments one little bit, but apparently it was the show format that caused Urban to say something he didn’t mean.

“I’ve never done an awards show where they seem to let you talk infinitely,” he said. “I was waiting for the ‘wrap’ sign to come up, and it never came up.”

Urban’s speech was roughly 50 seconds long, so who knows what he would’ve endorsed if it had gone on for much longer.

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

After years of trouble-free operation as the MPAA focused on shutting down the growing ‘threat’ of the snowballing BitTorrent scene, in May 2008 the operator of Newzbin made an announcement.

The company which owns Newzbin had received a threatening letter from the Motion Picture Association (MPA), the MPAA’s big brother. In the letter the MPA claimed that some of the site’s editors (users who report on the location of material uploaded to the worldwide Usenet system) were listing NZBs which linked to movies on Usenet which infringed their member’s copyright.

“Newzbin has recently received two serious complaints regarding the indexing we perform, and raising doubts as to its legality. It is likely that we will in the coming weeks be presented with a court case and have to defend our rights,” said ‘Caesium’, the owner of Newzbin.

Caesium added that the site had never condoned the distribution or indexing of copyright works and insisted that site staff would act immediately to remove any items found to be infringing copyright.

Noting that Newzbin would defend itself vigorously against the complainants, Caesium said he believed that linking to content on Usenet is entirely legal and that the site’s procedures for dealing with unlawful content were appropriate.

“We believe that, or we wouldn’t still be here,” he added.

In December 2008, Newzbin confirmed that it had been removing NZB files which allegedly linked to copyright works stored on Usenet. The MPA still chose to file an injunction against the site.

Now, well over a year later, the showdown of Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation & ors v Newzbin Ltd is set to begin next week before Mr Justice Kitchin in London’s High Court.

According to an announcement yesterday by Newzbin’s legal team, the case should last around a week but it’s unknown when any verdict will be handed down following its conclusion.

As we all know, the recent trial of Alan Ellis ended in an acquittal for the ex-OiNK admin and, just like Newzbin, his site hosted no copyright works and provided only meta data which linked to material hosted elsewhere.

However, Ellis’s charge was one of fraud, allegedly conducted by an individual and dealt with under criminal law, while that leveled against Newzbin is one of allowing and inducing illegal copying, i.e copyright infringement, but carried out by a bona fide company under civil law.

After Ellis’s acquittal, John Kennedy of the IFPI expressed disappointment at the “spectacular failure” of the criminal action and suggested that these type of complex cases should not be held in a crown court, but in the Chancery Division of the High Court.

This is exactly where the Newzbin case is being heard, so this is certainly one to watch. Unlike Ellis who faced possible jail time, Newzbin faces a claim for damages should it lose its case.

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

All around the world, hundreds of larger and smaller ISPs are actively interfering with BitTorrent traffic, allegedly to keep their networks in good shape. Thus far, only Comcast has been punished for doing so.

In 2008 the FCC looked into Comcast’s BitTorrent blocking and concluded that the company’s network management practices were unfair because they specifically targeted BitTorrent, not any other protocols.

The FCC ordered Comcast to stop blocking BitTorrent transfers, and last year the communications commission decided to take up the task of ensuring that the Internet remains neutral. At least, that was the initial plan, the reality is less hopeful.

Although it was Comcast’s anti-BitTorrent measures that sparked the current Net Neutrality debate, the FCC’s current proposals are not going to stop ISPs from slowing down or even blocking BitTorrent traffic. In fact, if these rules are implemented, BitTorrent users will be worse off than three years ago.

In the 107 page proposal detailing the Net Neutrality regulation, the FCC says that all traffic on the Internet should be treated equally, but it allows ISPs to slow down or block traffic if it’s considered to be “reasonable network management”.

So the key issue is, what are reasonable network management practices and how may these affect BitTorrent traffic? Let’s take a look at what the FCC has to say about this.

Reasonable network management consists of reasonable practices employed by a provider of broadband Internet access service to [...] (i) reduce or mitigate the effects of congestion on its network or to address quality-of-service concerns; [...] (iii) prevent the transfer of unlawful content; or (iv) prevent the unlawful transfer of content.

In short, this means that ISPs have plenty of options to target BitTorrent traffic and keep the Net Neutral at the same time. Let’s take a closer look.

As the EFF has also pointed out, the latter two conditions (iii and iv) would make it perfectly reasonable to block BitTorrent traffic for the purpose of preventing piracy. The terminology is rather vague, but we expect that when the MPAA or RIAA produce a report stating that 95% of all BitTorrent traffic involves copyright violations, blocking BitTorrent may become perfectly reasonable.

And that’s just one of the many loopholes. There are also plenty of options for ISPs to target BitTorrent traffic without going for the piracy/copyright angle. In fact, congestion issues and quality-of-service concerns are even more viable and can be implemented to target BitTorrent traffic specifically, but indirectly.

Under the proposed plans, ISPs could simply manage their networks by slowing down connections that use “too many” TCP connections, one of the key characteristics of BitTorrent traffic. There are plenty of arbitrary rules that may look reasonable and neutral, but will specifically (not exclusively) hinder BitTorrent transfers to ease the strain on the network.

In fact, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) which develops and promotes Internet standards is working on a proposal that might kill BitTorrent traffic if implemented. The proposed protocol will mark all packets which are expected to cause congestion as “negative packets,” which is likely to apply to and slow down most peer-to-peer traffic.

One way or another, the FCC’s Net Neutrality plan is no guarantee that BitTorrent will be able to download at full speeds. On the contrary, the plans might actually encourage ISPs to use Deep Packet Inspection technologies to check if the traffic of its subscribers is lawful, if it’s the last resort to slow down BitTorrent. We don’t want that to happen do we?

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

At the end of July 2009, new anti-piracy legislation took effect in South Korea which aggressively targeted illicit file-sharers and other online copyright infringers. The laws, created by the country’s Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, gave the authorities the power to disconnect pirates for up to 6 months.

According to the annual report of state-run piracy monitor the Korea Copyright Commission, it detected 35,345 cases of copyright infringement from so-called ‘cyberlocker’ services and P2P sites in 2009, nearly three times as many as the 2008 total of almost 12,000. Video and music infringements accounted for around 32% of all violations. Cases against individual file-sharers are still to be revealed.

This tough legislation was welcomed by the IFPI, who in their Digital Music Report 2010 labeled the action as the correct response to a “crisis”. The music group noted that digital sales had jumped 53% in the first 9 months of 2009, although sales of the same had already risen by 18% in the first 6 months of the year – pre-legislation – largely due to the fresh availability of legal alternatives.

However, according to the results of a survey carried out by Hong Kong-based Music Matters of 8,500 people in 13 countries, South Koreans still committed the second greatest number of online music infringements in 2009.

Released at the 2010 MIDEM event, the results revealed that the top spot was taken by the Chinese, with around 68% of users admitting they had downloaded music without paying for it. The South Koreans took second position with 60% with the Spanish coming in third with 46%.

The South Korean Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism has cast doubt on the report though. Apparently the question asked by Music Matters to those surveyed was a rather ambiguous “Have you downloaded music from the internet without payment?”

It’s impossible to say if the respondents felt that, for example, an ad-supported service like Spotify or other legitimately free services should be taken into account when giving a response.

In the meantime, the South Korean government has asked news outlets not to publish the results of the survey until they’ve had a chance to look into its validity. Those calls have been widely ignored.

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

This week, Microsoft joins the fight as the software company announces that it will pursue LinkoManija’s alleged operator Kestas Ermanas and his company in court.

The action against Lithuania’s largest BitTorrent site, which is in the top 10 of the most visited websites in the country, has been approved by the US headquarters of the software giant.

The defendant and his company are accused of facilitating copyright infringement of Microsoft’s Office 2003 and 2007 through their involvement with the BitTorrent tracker.

Together with local anti-piracy outfit LANVA, Microsoft has requested 107 million Lithuanian litas ($43 million) in damages at the Vilnius Regional Court. However, under Lithuanian law Microsoft can get up to $53,000 in damages at maximum.

In response to the demands from Microsoft, the assets of Kestas Ermanas and his company were seized and associated bank accounts frozen.

TorrentFreak briefly spoke with the defendant who is pretty shaken up by the news, but is claiming Microsoft sued the wrong people. We were told that as of 2010, he and his company no longer run LinkoManija. Kestas and his company operated the site until December last year.

Kestas further told us that Microsoft’s move surprised him, as the company has never sent a torrent takedown request to the popular BitTorrent tracker. “We informed them that we wanted to cooperate with them, they just had to give us the links to the infringing torrent files,” Kestas said, adding “they never wrote back to us.”

In addition to Kestas and his company, Microsoft is also pursuing legal action against LinkoManija’s users. In November last year, 106 users of the site were reported to the police and one of them will go on trial next month.

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

With ReactorFeed, brought to you by the people from ShareReactor, this can be done with relative ease.

Instead of downloading the torrent directly, users can simply add the torrent to their personal RSS feed. ReactorFeed supports torrents that are hosted anywhere on the web and is not restricted to one torrent site.

When added to your personal feed, the torrent will download automatically when your BitTorrent client is running at home. That is, if your favorite BitTorrent client has RSS support. Luckily, almost all popular clients do by now.

Additionally, users can choose to share their feed in public so it can be accessed by others with similar interests. For those who would rather keep their feeds private, it’s recommended to set the feed as private, since URLs of the public ones are easy to guess.

Overall, ReactorFeed is a simple but extremely useful service for those who want an easy way to add torrents to their BitTorrent client on the go.

For those looking for feeds where the torrents are added automatically based on pre-selected content, we have a tutorial for that on our side-blog FreakBits.

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

The project was supposed to generate a healthy revenue stream to support the company in tough economic times. A few months later, however, the project has been canceled and the site closed, as the company focuses on other ways of satisfying its users.

“Over the past six months, we prioritized our projects to focus development on features that were gaining significant traction with our community. As part of this prioritization, StudioHD was closed in November,” a spokesman at Vuze told TorrentFreak.

Although Vuze officially claims that the closure of StudioHD is a matter of changed priorities, we assume that it was not as profitable as the company had projected. This is not really a big surprise, as even the ‘free’ adult torrent sites are having trouble keeping up with the increasing popularity of adult video streaming sites.

The Vuze spokesman told TorrentFreak that the company will instead focus on integrating devices and torrent search capabilities into its client.

“Almost half our active community use Vuze Device integrations to watch their media on screens other than their computers (iPhone, iPod, PS3, Xbox 360 etc). They’ve successfully transferred more than 50m files to other screens since launch last March.”

In addition to the successful device integration, the built-in search capabilities using existing torrent sites such as isoHunt and BTjunkie, has gained in use significantly. Three quarter of all Vuze users are searching for torrents using the feature, compared to 55% a year ago.

Ironically, this integrated search allows users to find thousands of adult torrents that can be downloaded for free. No paid subscription needed. Could that be one of the reasons why the StudioHD subscription service was canceled?

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

“We’re talking to the other torrent admins on doing magnet links,” a Pirate Bay insider told TorrentFreak, adding that they might even stop serving torrents in the future.

Following this announcement, several torrent clients quickly added support for magnet links. The format was already supported by uTorrent and Vuze, but Transmission, BitComet and others soon followed after the Pirate Bay announcement.

Although magnet links work very well, BitTorrent cannot rely solely on this type of link just yet. The .torrent files still hold crucial information needed to start the downloading process, and this information has to be available in the swarm.

Despite this, it is possible to setup a torrent site without torrents, solely relying on magnet links and saving precious bandwidth and resources. This is exactly what the newly-launched TorrIndex does.

Instead of hosting torrent files, the site uses magnet links exclusively. The magnet links on TorrIndex also include the trackers from the original torrent, and they are properly formatted so they look just like regular torrent downloads in your torrent client.

TorrIndex gathers the links from various other torrent sites on the net and also allows users to add magnet links to the site. At first sight it seems that the site uses well respected and moderated sources, since the number of fake and spammy magnet links are lower than on many regular torrent sites.

Aside from the fact that TorrIndex is the first magnet-only torrent index, the site’s setup is pretty straightforward. There is no option to comment on any of the links and there are no other fancy features, it’s just a searchable index of magnet links.

TorrentFreak contacted the owner of the site, who told us that everything is totally automated. The magnet links are put in categories automatically based on the filetype, size and a few other parameters.

Another novelty is that TorrIndex is the first to use DHT information for their seed and peer count, in addition to the statistics reported by the trackers. “We collect the numbers from trackers and the DHT cloud,” the owner said.

TorrIndex is currently still in the Beta testing phase, so don’t be surprised if something appears to be broken. We’re told that the design will be updated and comment and torrent rating features are under consideration.

The site proves that it’s possible to start a torrent site without having to host actual torrent files. We predict that many sites like this will follow in the months to come, and it wouldn’t surprise us if The Pirate Bay also converts to a magnet-only index in the future.

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

Last November The Pirate Bay shut down its own trackers, arguing that they have been made redundant by DHT and PEX. At the same time, The Pirate Bay team said that they might move away from torrents entirely and switch to offering Magnet links instead.

These are all interesting developments, but to really decentralize BitTorrent one has to take it up a notch. The way most torrent sites are setup makes them vulnerable to legal action from copyright holders, so the real solution might be to move away from web-based torrent indexes.

A rather primitive way to do this is to share torrents over another file-sharing network, and this is exactly what the Gnutella/BitTorrent client Frostwire has now made possible. Without any public announcement and stuffed away in the changelog of FrostWire’s upcoming release we find the following lines:

- New Feature: Gnutella Torrent Search. FrostWire now can search for .torrent metadata files in the Gnutella network.
- Upgraded feature: Optionally FrostWire will copy all .torrent meta files to a shared torrent folder.

Technically speaking these are just minor adjustments to the file-sharing application, but the implications could trigger a revolution in how torrents are shared in the future.

When FrostWire users start downloading a torrent with FrostWire, the client will keep and share the .torrent file on Gnutella. The idea is that as time goes by and more users download more torrents, even if torrent websites are shutdown, all the torrents will live on the P2P network forever.

To make it easier to find torrents on Gnutella, FrostWire also added a specialized “Torrent Search Mode”. As more users install this and later versions – and keep downloading more torrents – the richer these search results will be.

Now FrostWire only needs to offer support for trackerless torrents and they will have completely decentralized the BitTorrent operation with just a few simple adjustments.

Although we believe that FrostWire’s approach is interesting, it will also introduce one major problem. It is relatively easy to make a P2P-powered torrent index, but keeping it clean and malware-free will prove to be very difficult.

Most people might not even be aware of it, but one of the benefits of most torrent sites is that they remove thousands of torrents linking to spam and fake files every day. This will be much harder to do in a P2P-based environment, but not entirely impossible.

Over the last five years the Tribler BitTorrent client has been working on a decentralized torrent index that would make BitTorrent sites obsolete. Unlike simply sharing the torrent files among users, the upcoming release of the Tribler client has built in several spam control and moderation options that allow users to keep the network clean. In addition, newly created torrents can be shared with peers, instead of uploading it to a central server.

We don’t know if FrostWire has plans to implement similar moderation options, but they are absolutely required for a fully decentralized BitTorrent environment.

It will be interesting to see if the idea of a P2P powered and searchable BitTorrent index takes off. For now there are still plenty of good and reliable torrent sites out there, but with continued pressure from the entertainment industry they are not to be taken for granted.

Disclaimer: FrostWire is a TorrentFreak sponsor.

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

Sounds great, but let me start off with the downside to Usenet. The biggest disadvantage is that high speed Usenet servers are not free. You need at least some kind of paid subscription plan to be able to get decent speeds on Usenet. For some people this is not a problem, their argument often is that they already pay a lot of money for high speed broadband access, so why not pay a little extra to get the best speeds out of it.

The Easy Solution

For those who are new to Usenet and want the easy route, we recommend trying a free trial at Binverse. This give you all the tools to start downloading from Usenet quickly, and guarantees fast downloads. Binverse has its own built in search engine and a custom download client.

If you’re not satisfied with Binverse you can try other providers. However, a premium service will always cost a few bucks.

The Alternative Solution

1. Download Grabit here.

2. Double click the downloaded file and proceed to install.
When installing make sure ‘Associate Grabit with NZB files’ is selected.

3. Before clicking “Finish” select “Launch Grabit”. If you missed this look for the grabit icon on the desktop and double click it.

4. Once launched you’ll be asked to enter the name of your usenet server. If you have a premium server (highly recommended, e.g. a free trial at Binverse) select the check box and press next.

5. If you selected the checkbox you’ll then be asked for your news server username and password. Enter them and press next.

Note: Your username/password are case sensitive! Be sure to enter them correctly.

6. You be asked whether to retrieve a list of groups from the news server. Select the checkbox and click finish.

7. Grabit will load fully and begin downloading the grouplist. While it’s downloading continue to step 8.

8. Go to the ‘Edit’ menu and select ‘Preferences’.

9. Select the ‘Folders’ tab. Click the button right of the box containing the download directory. Here you can select the folder you want files to download to.

10. Go to your favourite NZB site (eg. newzleech, yabse) and download an NZB file. Double click the NZB file. You’ll be asked whether you want to import the NZB file, just click ‘Grab’.

11. The NZB file will be imported. If you’ve done everything right the files should then begin to download.

Downloading:

That’s all there is! Well done you’ve downloaded your first files from Usenet.

The following isn’t completely necessary but can save alot of time, especially if you don’t want to deal with 100s of par/rar files.

1. Download ParNRar here

2. Double click the downloaded file and install.

3. Launch the ‘ParNRar’ by double clicking the purple icon on the Desktop.

4. Click the button on the right of the monitored directory and select your download directory. This is the same place you used for saving files with Grabit.

5. Click ‘Go’. ParNRar will then scan your Grabit download directory checking and extracting any files present.

For extra customization click the ‘Options’ button. There are a range of options to choose from.

One useful option is to have ParNRar check the download folder every X seconds for new parts. To do this select the ‘When done scanning:’ box and change to restart. Then enter a delay between restarts.

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

Sounds great, but let me start off with the downside to Usenet. The biggest disadvantage is that high speed Usenet servers are not free. You need at least some kind of paid subscription plan to be able to get decent speeds on Usenet. For some people this is not a problem, their argument often is that they already pay a lot of money for high speed broadband access, so why not pay a little extra to get the best speeds out of it.

The Free and Easy Solution

For those who are new to Usenet and want the easy route, we recommend trying a free trial at Binverse. This allows you to try a premium Usenet provider for free. It gives you all the tools to start downloading from Usenet quickly, and guarantees fast downloads. Binverse has its own built in search engine and a custom download client.

If you’re not satisfied with Binverse you can try other providers. However, a premium service will always cost a few bucks.

The Alternative Solution

1. Download Grabit here.

2. Double click the downloaded file and proceed to install.
When installing make sure ‘Associate Grabit with NZB files’ is selected.

3. Before clicking “Finish” select “Launch Grabit”. If you missed this look for the grabit icon on the desktop and double click it.

4. Once launched you’ll be asked to enter the name of your usenet server. If you have a premium server (highly recommended, e.g. a free trial at Binverse) select the check box and press next.

5. If you selected the checkbox you’ll then be asked for your news server username and password. Enter them and press next.

Note: Your username/password are case sensitive! Be sure to enter them correctly.

6. You be asked whether to retrieve a list of groups from the news server. Select the checkbox and click finish.

7. Grabit will load fully and begin downloading the grouplist. While it’s downloading continue to step 8.

8. Go to the ‘Edit’ menu and select ‘Preferences’.

9. Select the ‘Folders’ tab. Click the button right of the box containing the download directory. Here you can select the folder you want files to download to.

10. Go to your favourite NZB site (eg. newzleech, yabse) and download an NZB file. Double click the NZB file. You’ll be asked whether you want to import the NZB file, just click ‘Grab’.

11. The NZB file will be imported. If you’ve done everything right the files should then begin to download.

Downloading:

That’s all there is! Well done you’ve downloaded your first files from Usenet.

The following isn’t completely necessary but can save alot of time, especially if you don’t want to deal with 100s of par/rar files.

1. Download ParNRar here

2. Double click the downloaded file and install.

3. Launch the ‘ParNRar’ by double clicking the purple icon on the Desktop.

4. Click the button on the right of the monitored directory and select your download directory. This is the same place you used for saving files with Grabit.

5. Click ‘Go’. ParNRar will then scan your Grabit download directory checking and extracting any files present.

For extra customization click the ‘Options’ button. There are a range of options to choose from.

One useful option is to have ParNRar check the download folder every X seconds for new parts. To do this select the ‘When done scanning:’ box and change to restart. Then enter a delay between restarts.

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

There are 74 proposed amendments to the Bill.

In terms of file-sharing, amendments are suggested to the section which obliges ISPs to inform their customers that an infringement has taken place via their account.

In addition to informing subscribers who have allegedly infringed themselves or subscribers who allow another individual to use their account to infringe, the following category is proposed:

“..infringement of the owner’s copyright appears to have taken place through peer-to-peer filesharing networks on a subscriber’s IP address;”

This means that all copyright infringements that occur on an IP-address will be attributed to the person who pays for the account.

As pointed out by PaidContent, this addition is “sure to rile campaigners who protest that IP numbers do not correspond to identity.”

However, another amendment asks for the removal of the clause which allows action to be taken against subscribers whose connection was used to infringe copyright by someone other than the subscriber.

Amendment 52, proposed by Lord Lucas, states that the copyright infringement reports sent to ISPs by rights holders should also set out “the value of the infringement on the basis described in the initial obligations.”

This is an interesting one. When an anti-piracy company working on behalf of the music and movie industries track an infringement, it is only possible for them to track a single infringement, for example, the uploading of one track, movie, or part thereof. It is impossible for them to prove any additional infringement took place, i.e uploading the same to others.

This means that not only will the reported loss per infringement be very low, but it could also force the rightsholders to claim that an upload to the anti-piracy company equates to a lost sale.

Amendment 71 from Lord Whitty asks for the section below to be completely removed;

…the number and nature of copyright infringement reports relating to the subscriber may be taken into account for the purposes of any technical measures.

Should the amendment be accepted, this suggests that taking technical measures (3 strikes, throttling) on the basis that a subscriber has been ‘caught’ multiple times, will be disallowed.

There are also amendments tabled to change a number of instances where the term “infringement” should be changed to read “infringement allegations”.

The next sitting of the committee stage will be heard January 12th.

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

His first website, Moneysavingexpert.com, was founded in 2003 for around £100 but has since grown to receive around 7.5 million users each month. Lewis’s new venture, Tunechecker, is designed to help music fans get the best deal from online music stores.

Recent research by the site has revealed some alarming differences in prices for exactly the same products. Downloading all of 2009’s top 40 albums from the cheapest retailers would cost £864 less than if they were all bought from iTunes. That’s a lot of money.

When looking at singles, specifically last week’s number 1 record in the UK, the cheapest retailer offers the track for 29p, while iTunes wants 99p – nearly two and a half times more. The cheapest retailer sells Michael Bublé’s number 1 album at £5, while the iTunes price is £7.99.

Not surprisingly, recent research by TorrentFreak and millions of users worldwide reveals that the biggest savings are to be made on file-sharing networks, where all tracks by all artists, big and small, on any label, in any country, are to be found for free.

These are savings that Lewis can only dream about, but being realistic, most people recognize that the labels, musicians and the companies behind them have to earn a living. Lewis notes, as we did yesterday, twice, that the solution lies with competing with piracy.

“The music industry needs to wake up and embrace price competition. it’s facing annihilation from illegally download tracks, yet there are still remnants of an attitude that price doesn’t make a difference.

“If it promoted cheaper, legit music it’d mean fewer illegal downloads.”

Yet while millions flock to file-sharing networks and the knowledge on how to use them continues to spread, there is still a huge and largely untapped market out there, eager to funnel money through the official channels.

“Since we launched the TuneChecker.com a month ago we’ve had 400,000 users, an indication there’s a real appetite to download music at the lowest price,” concludes Lewis.

We get the feeling it’s is going to be a recurring theme in 2010. Pressurizing ISPs, monitoring Internet users and throwing around meaningless warnings is going to do little to bring customers back to the music industry.

The solution, the only solution, is good product, available now – right now, at a fair price. But that’s not going to happen, not for a long time yet.

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

One of the explanations for this apparent ‘lack of piracy’ is the fact that eBook readers are still an exclusive gadget. When compared to uptake of MP3-players, only a tiny fraction of the online population has an eBook reader, which makes it a niche audience.

Theoretically the piracy figure could explode when eBook devices become both affordable and desirable to the mainstream public, especially if the publishing industry makes the same mistakes as the major record labels did. Let’s take a look at how they’re doing thus far.

Before we start it’s worth noting that three of the classic mistakes discussed below are made by the publishers or authors whose books were pirated the most. Coincidence?

DRM

DRM doesn’t work. It only takes one person to strip the DRM from an eBook to make it available to millions, but it also prevents legitimate customers from using the book they way they want to. Unfortunately not all book publishers have learned from the music industry’s DRM failures.

According to CNN, Hachette Book Group, publisher of the ‘Twilight’ series, “considers copyright protection to be of paramount importance,” claiming that “piracy is a serious issue for publishers.” You can almost hear the fear in these statements, fear that will most likely result in a strong focus on DRM instead of offering a great service to readers.

Stephenie Meyer, the author of the ‘Twilight’ books, is even more pro-DRM than her publisher. After one of her forthcoming books leaked onto the Internet in 2008, she simply cancelled the book. You can’t get more restrictive than that.

Delay

Simon & Schuster, the publisher of Stephen King’s ‘Under the Dome’, delayed the release of the eBook version for a few weeks, allegedly because they feared that it would cannibalize hardcover sales. This is one of the stupidest mistakes a publisher can make. The only thing it does is annoy customers, guaranteeing less sales.

Those interested in a digital version of the book could get one on file-sharing sites anyway. Within days, scanned versions of ‘Under the Dome’ surfaced online, and even perfect replications of the book in text format. The result for the publisher is that tens of thousands of people have downloaded the unauthorized eBook versions, many of which might have bought it if it was available.

Digital Ban

J.K Rowling is copying the Beatles by refusing to make her Harry Potter books available in digital form. As a result her books are among the most pirated titles year after year. Every single book from the Harry Potter series is available digitally, either scanned or transcribed by fans.

Luckily, there are also publishers who have learned from the mistakes made by the music industry. CNN quotes Ana Maria Allessi, publisher for Harper Media, who focuses on the upside of digital books. According to Allessi, new technologies will offer benefits to consumers, authors and publishers.

“Consumers who invest in one of these dedicated e-book readers tend to load it up and read more,” she added. “And what’s wrong with that?”

Alessi’s right. The focus should be on offering an outstanding product and user experience. Give consumers what they want, for a decent price, and don’t let those music industry folks scare you.

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

LokiTorrent

Born in early 2004, LokiTorrent grew from comparative humble beginnings, especially when compared to the mighty Suprnova. However, as a recipient of one of the growing number of cease and desist letters sent out by the MPAA, LokiTorrent found its fame.

In mid-December 2004, as the MPAA was yet to formally identify the site’s owner, a ‘John Doe’ lawsuit was filed against the operators of LokiTorrent. Rather than caving into the threats as other BitTorrent and eDonkey services already had, the site’s operator, the then 28 year-old Ed Webber (aka ‘Lowkee’), took a rather more aggressive stance.

Webber refused to comply with the MPAA’s demands, which went down an absolute storm with many in the BitTorrent community, who believed that their very existence was under threat. If Lowkee was prepared to fight, so were they. The battle lines were drawn.

This rallying of support reached fever pitch, with the site’s membership swelling to almost 700,000 users and Webber receiving donations in record time and in record amounts. Within a short period of time around $43,000 was collected to go to war with the MPAA.

Then something something suspicious came to light. Webber was trying to sell the LokiTorrent domain name on Sedo. The community was not pleased – in fact it went absolutely nuts.

Under huge pressure, on January 27th Webber made an announcement saying that he put the domain up for sale because he was curious as to its worth, noting that for $75k he’d sell it and simply move to a new domain. Selling the entire site, he said, would never happen. The Sedo listing suggested otherwise, with Webber offering the full source code and email addresses of the members.

So what about the donations thus far? Were they safe?

“As for the legal fund.. if I were going to run off, I would have already. That money is for the lawsuit, as stated. Only those who would run off with the money thought we would,” said Webber in an announcement.

Around two weeks later the site disappeared, replaced by the MPAA’s infamous ‘You Can Click But You Can’t Hide’ campaign artwork. None of the donated money was handed back and although the existence of a lawsuit was later confirmed, there was no fight.

Webber’s attorney, Charles S. Baker, said parts of LokiTorrent’s operations were defensible in court, particular since Webber had already offered to remove links to pirated movies. But it wasn’t to be.

According to court documents, Webber was eventually ordered to pay the MPAA $1m in damages and hand over all of the user data held on the LokiTorrent servers. There is no evidence he paid a cent. Webber also claimed that all of the donations were swallowed up by legal fees, few believed him, and it would be a long time before BitTorrent users dug deep again.

EliteTorrents

Despite the misery surrounding the LokiTorrent closure, other sites continued to blossom, although the emphasis switched to the relatively more underground scene of invitation-only trackers.

With around 130,000 members, EliteTorrents was one of the most prominent torrent sites in the growing, but still fairly undeveloped, private tracker scene. With its good staff and strong community, for many Elite was the site to be seen at.

On June 25th 2005, it all came crashing down in a huge and unprecedented fireball.

Despite many thousands of torrents being uploaded during the site’s lifetime, a single release – a pre-release version of Star Wars: Episode 3 – attracted the interest of the FBI, who shut down the site and arrested the admins and uploaders.

Several of them served substantial jail sentences, a punishment previously unheard of in BitTorrent history.

In 2006, Scott McCausland pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement and one count of criminal copyright infringement for his uploading of Star Wars: Episode III. He received jail time and home confinement.

Fellow site admin Grant Stanley, then aged 23, pleaded guilty to the same offenses as Scott and received the same sentence with the addition of a $3,000 fine. Other admins and uploaders who were found guilty included Sam Kuonen, then aged 24, 22 year old Scott D. Harvanek, An Duc Do, aged 25, and Daniel Dove.

Before the EliteTorrents shutdown, while many BitTorrent trackers were hosted in the United States most had been pressured to leave, largely due to MPAA pressure. Right up until the introduction of the Family Entertainment Act – the criminal legislation used to justify FBI involvement and shutter the site – action against torrent sites would have taken place in the civil domain. The law governing the distribution of pre-release movies changed that perception forever.

The aggressive action against both LokiTorrent and EliteTorrents ensured that no-one, especially a US citizen, would ever openly place a big movie BitTorrent tracker on US soil again. Only search engines such as isoHunt and TorrentSpy would dare to stay, but eventually, even they would have to leave.

While United States-based BitTorrent trackers had plenty of drama in 2005, during the next two years Europe would become the next theater in the ever-increasing war on copyright infringement.

More dramatic shutdowns will follow later this week in Part 2

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

The toolbar was never promoted in public, because it was just as useless as most toolbars, and, up until today, it had just one install.

In fact, we totally forgot that it still existed until Conduit sent us an email yesterday, which informed us that our Publisher Agreement had been terminated for using inappropriate words. Apparently Conduit has decided that the ‘torrent’ in TorrentFreak is a direct violation of their terms and conditions.

“It has recently come to our attention that the name and the content of the community toolbar that you publish contains materials (such as marks, signs, images, or texts) that are not allowed in the Conduit platform, and specifically: Torrent, Emule and P2P,” Conduit wrote TorrentFreak in an email.

The company further stated that using such words is considered as a violation of the terms and conditions of the publisher agreement, and that our long-standing and fruitful relationship would be terminated immediately.

Just out of curiosity and to find out what terms or conditions we could possibly have violated, we skimmed through the agreement, but to no avail. There is no mention of a list of forbidden words mentioned in the Publisher Agreement.

Not every ‘torrent’ toolbar is considered evil though. The popular Torrent Search Bar and Torrent Toolbar, that both use Conduit, still seem to be working. Similarly, Mininova told TorrentFreak that they haven’t been contacted by Conduit either.

Of course we don’t mind that Conduit pulled the plug on our toolbar, but the reason for the termination is just so ridiculous, we simply had to bring it up. We can only hope that other companies will refrain from using such arbitrary ban lists.

Conduit has been contacted for a comment on their radical censorship policy, but thus far we haven’t heard back from the company.

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

Dozens of notable BitTorrent sites have emerged since things really began to take off in 2002/2003, and literally thousands of lesser known private communities have flourished. But in terms of sheer volume of torrents, users and mainstream awareness, a trio of sites have stood head and shoulders above the rest.

By scale and exposure, The Pirate Bay, Mininova and isoHunt became the three most prominent BitTorrent sites in the latter half of the decade, serving billions of torrents to multiple millions of BitTorrent users.

Due to this massive and unprecedented level of interest, it became increasingly clear – the movie and music industries, just as they did with dozens of sites and services before them, would move to crush or suffocate them into submission. 2009 became a painful year for all three of them.

The Pirate Bay

On April 17th 2009, after being hounded continuously by the combined might of the movie and music industries, the four defendants in The Pirate Bay trial were eventually found guilty.

While the court said that it was the users of The Pirate Bay that committed the first infringements by sharing copyright files, it went on to dismiss most of the technical details, and judged the case on intent. It was declared that the intention of the defendants was to facilitate the sharing of copyrighted works.

Categorizing the infringements as ’severe’, the court said the team of four were well aware that copyrighted material was being shared using The Pirate Bay and that they made it easy for the users and assisted the infringements. The lack of a ‘notice and takedown’ certainly did not help the defense.

The four defendants were sentenced to one year in prison and a fines of $905,000 each. The case will be appealed.

The crushing verdict did not close the site, however, despite further legal attacks on its bandwidth infrastructure and bans forbidding the founders from operating the site.

Indeed, with adaptation, the site remains alive and fully operational today, proving that in The Pirate Bay’s case, suffering pain is not a terminal condition.

Mininova

After operating for almost five full years, the BitTorrent giant Mininova also succumbed to relentless entertainment industry in 2009, deleting over a million torrent files and shutting down the majority of its website.

Mininova was left with little choice, being forced into these drastic measures following a negative verdict in their court battle with the local anti-piracy outfit BREIN in the summer.

The Dutch court told Mininova that it must remove all infringing torrent files from its index on pain of huge fines, but as this proved technically unfeasible, the site’s owners took the decision to remove all torrents uploaded by regular users, many of which were not infringing any copyrights at all. This proved disastrous to the site. As a force to be reckoned with, Mininova has been taken back to the stone age.

isoHunt

In 2006, several Hollywood studios filed a complaint about then US-based site, isoHunt. In common with claims against The Pirate Bay and Mininova, the studios stated that the site’s owner was guilty of profiting from, and inducing, copyright infringement.

Just 8 days ago, on December 21st 2009, a US federal court in California ruled that isoHunt was indeed guilty of inducing copyright infringement, stating that the site’s operators had engaged in “purposeful, culpable expression and conduct, aimed at promoting infringing uses of the websites.”

Since the circumstances of the case were so similar to earlier ones involving Napster and Grokster, the judge decided there was no need to have a full trial and instead granted a summary judgment against isoHunt.

No damages awards against the site have yet been announced and isoHunt remains fully operational at the moment, pending an appeal. In common with The Pirate Bay, isoHunt has not yet succumbed to the pain of its court defeat, despite overwhelming odds.

Lessons to be learned and the future of torrent sites

While Mininova is almost certainly out for good, The Pirate Bay and isoHunt remain active, despite their losses. Nevertheless, there are plenty of lessons to be learned from the court defeats of all three sites. Although some may believe that the negative verdicts point to the illegality of torrent sites, that is not the full picture.

In all three court defeats – notably in three distinct jurisdictions (Sweden, The Netherlands and United States) – indexed content aside, none of them stated that torrent sites are illegal. However, fingers were pointed firmly at the operators and their conduct when running their sites.

Being prepared to filter out fakes and malware from sites but not having a ‘notice and takedown’ system for copyright holders can prove fatal. But in the cases of Mininova and isoHunt, who both operated such systems and even co-operated with copyright owners, participating in discussions about copyright infringement on their forums can undo all the hard work.

In future, if site owners are to reduce liability, they will have to remain a lot more detached from their operations than they have been previously. The lessons to be learned are many, a few of which are detailed here.

Already TorrentFreak is informed that next-generation torrent sites are in development, meaning that 2010 will prove yet another interesting year.

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

On Christmas day the idea was born and just a few hours later the tracker named ‘BaconBits‘ was already up and running, with the first torrents being uploaded by an enthusiastic crowd. The day after Christmas the number of users who signed up at BaconBits had already exceeded 2000, and more were coming in nearly every minute.

When the tracker’s founding member deemed that BaconBits was stable enough, an announcement was made on Reddit under the title “Sharing is caring: Late Christmas Present, Fresh BitTorrent Tracker For Redditors,” which was upvoted by nearly a thousand Redditors.

In the announcement the tracker staffers explained that BaconBits is meant to be a private BitTorrent tracker for established Reddit users only. “The site will only accept Reddit users who have been signed up for at least 3 months, have at least 100 comment karma, and have at least 1 link Karma,” they explain.

Reddit users who meet these requirements can send a private message to the user baconbitsinvites on Reddit, and if deemed eligible, will then be invited to join the tracker.

Unlike most other trackers, BaconBits does not have any ratio requirements, instead trusting that the Reddit-sourced community will be sufficiently self-motivated to share. “The site does not require a minimum ratio, we trust that most Reddit users will upload as much as possible,” they say.

Currently the site has more than 1300 torrents being shared by nearly 3500 peers, 3000 of which are seeding.

The swift emergence of the tracker and its democratic nature are not the only surprises. Ironically, a vote among the site’s users has resulted in a ban on adult content. In contrast with the “no censorship” stories that often surface on the Reddit frontpage, the community decided to censor itself, much like the Australian democracy did.

The enthusiasm of the people involved in the project is skyrocketing and appears to be highly contagious, with dozens of people contributing to the site’s overnight success. That said, the emergence of the tracker came about so rapidly that it may cause problems in the long run.

Talking to some of the staff members, TorrentFreak learned that not all of the people involved fully understand the risks involved with running a BitTorrent tracker. Some staff members are openly uploading copyrighted files under the same name they use on Reddit, and hosting and payment issues weren’t thought through beforehand.

With operators of other BitTorrent trackers being arrested left and right, a bit more caution might be appropriate here or the ‘fun’ will end prematurely.

Nitpicking aside, BaconBits may have set a new trend where social networks and communities form the basis of private BitTorrent trackers. Niche BitTorrent trackers that specialize in specific types of movies, TV-shows or musical genres have grown significantly throughout 2009, and community based trackers may become a new niche.

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