Just over a week after becoming available online in early November 2009, Ink pushed into TorrentFreak’s chart of top 10 most pirated movies with an incredible 400,000 downloads.

Unlike the majority of Hollywood movie bosses, the creators of Ink – Jamin and Kiowa Winans – decided to embrace their new-found pirate fans after the extra publicity pushed the movie to 16th place on IMDb’s movie meter and boosted DVD and Blu-ray sales. Kiowa wrote to TorrentFreak and said that the movie ending up on BitTorrent was “absolutely” the best thing that could’ve happened to it.

Now, Lars Sobiraj from German news outlet Gulli has interviewed Kiowa to see how things have progressed a couple of months on from the initial excitement.

As previously reported, Ink has been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times, so just how many of those translated into real-world sales? Kiowa says that is really hard to put an exact figure on that – they haven’t sold a DVD or Blu-ray for every download but sales have unquestionably gone up.

Money also came in from other routes too. As the movie gained popularity on BitTorrent, many Ink downloaders suggested that there should be a ‘donate’ button on the movie’s website so that fans could give money freely.

“We put that [donation link] up at the urging of some of the downloaders with the message ‘if you have watched Ink online for free and would like to contribute what you can, click here’,” Kiowa explains.

“Guess what country has been the most generous? Germany! Germans have been twice as generous as Americans so… thank you Germany. We have also shipped a lot of Deluxe Bundle fan packs to Germany so Ink seems to be a big hit there.”

Gulli asked Kiowa if she felt the movie had fallen victim to piracy, a notion she strongly denies.

“I think to say victim is to characterize piracy as an all-together awful thing. The piracy of Ink is unquestionably responsible for its popularity around the world. Sure our trailers have been out for over a year and have had plenty of views outside the US, but we think that 70% of the illegal downloads are coming from outside of the US and we do get a good number of international buyers at our online store every day,” she explained.

Before Ink was pirated, the movie’s IMDb rating was a lowly 12,991. As reported in our earlier article, it reached 16 and even moved up to the 14th position at one stage. Incredibly it has stayed as one of the top 200 movies in the world for the last two months, a feat that would have been impossible without the extra exposure.

Looking forward to future distribution models, Kiowa feels that everything will change during the next 10 years as people demand instant and simple access to media and their TVs and computers merge together into one device.

“That said, I’m not sure what the revenue model will be for films,” she notes. “Hollywood producers are quickly finding out that the instant films start circulating on DVD they will wind up on torrent sites.”

Kiowa broadly puts BitTorrent users into two camps – those who want media in an instant and those who want it for free. Noting that there are those who fall into both categories, she acknowledges the challenges that lie ahead in figuring out a way to make this situation bring revenue to the filmmakers.

“I think a reasonably-priced instant download the moment the movie becomes available would largely cure the piracy issue so we will see how it all shakes out over the next several years,” she adds.

As most observers are aware, many music and movie companies consider torrent sites as entities to be crushed and in recent years have set about a strategy to achieve that. Gulli asked Kiowa if she believes that is the correct strategy to deal with the problem.

While one could argue that non-physical digital formats such as MP3 are part of the reason that piracy has flourished in recent years, Kiowa feels that the invention of the iPod has helped to reduce piracy, largely through the existence of competition from one service – iTunes. The movie industry needs to catch up.

“Until the equivalent of the iPod is invented for film or long-format video files I think that piracy is going to be a huge battle ground, one in which I doubt Hollywood will win,” Kiowa predicts.

“There is always a smarter programmer out there that can move faster than bureaucracy. The film industry really needs to set its sights on overhauling its distribution system. Right now there are horrible things like region-coded DVDs that tie up a film’s rights in various countries and this is what has made the film business plenty of money over the years.”

The industry needs to move its thinking to encompass global distribution, says Kiowa, not concentrate on pushing movies out to dozens of separate territories.

“We are going to keep all the rights to Ink and not give them away country-by-country so that when that iPod-for-movies emerges Ink can be the first film that debuts to the whole world,” she says, adding: “That is the hope anyway.”

Looking to the future, partner Jamin is currently working on scripts for two new films, one a sci-fi psychological thriller called ‘The Frame’ and another a sci-fi fantasy called ‘Myth of Man’.

“For the time being we’re just really happy that Ink is rolling along and gaining fans around the world. How ever people come to the film, we’re just happy that they are watching it, Kiowa concludes.

“As Jamin likes to say, the battle of independent films is not piracy, it’s obscurity. Hey – at least we’re winning that one!”

The full interview conducted by Lars Sobiraj, is available here.

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.

A self-proclaimed Internet and digital addict, Fry claims to have owned the second ever Mac sold in the UK and has joked that he has owned every smart phone available today. Indeed, he recently wowed Top Gear’s Jeremy Clarkson by showing him a pretty unusual use for his iPhone. Fry even has more than 500,000 Twitter followers.

So, unlike many who speak about Internet issues, there is a good chance that Stephen Fry actually knows what he’s talking about. Yesterday, to an audience gathered for the iTunes Festival in London’s Camden Town, he was a little more honest than most would’ve expected on the issue of illicit downloading, even if just hours before he revealed that he was finding his appearance unnerving, admitting, “I haven’t the least idea what I’m going to say.”

But it came good in the end. In a speech about copyright and the future of music introduced by Stuff’s editor-in-chief Tom Dunmore, Fry poured scorn on the music industry for attacking the public in file-sharing cases. “Making an example of ordinary people is the stupidest thing the record industry can do,” he said.

Noting a problem that was earlier outlined here on TorrentFreak, Fry said the Digital Britain report did not represent the views of the public, but those of “industry insiders” instead.

While Fry is pragmatic about the piracy situation, he’s not a supporter of large-scale infringers, described by him as those who download on an “industrial scale”. When asked how he felt about his own media output being pirated, Fry said: “I’m against cynical bootlegging but I work in a very molly coddled, overpaid business.”

But unsurprisingly for a clued-up digital native in 2009, there are some kinds of piracy that Fry isn’t completely against. He told the audience at London’s Roundhouse that he is a BitTorrent user himself and has grabbed episodes of 24 using the protocol.

Interestingly, he went on to reveal that he had also downloaded the season finale of House, the hit US show which stars the comedian most known for partnering Fry, Hugh Laurie.

However – and drawing a somewhat interesting analogy – Fry said that in the end, illegal downloaders may well feel a little guilty over grabbing something without paying for it. “Most of us feel guilt when we masturbate,” he said, “even though we live in 2009.”

Appearing a little concerned that his slightly pro-piracy stance might be misinterpreted, Fry then appeared on his beloved Twitter. “Well, finished my bit. Hope I’m not misunderstood. Such a pity if I get misrepresented as a ‘help yourself and be a pirate’ advocate.”

Not at all Stephen. The fact is there could be as many as 6 million people in the UK doing exactly as you are doing, largely because there still isn’t an attractive, workable, widespread and convenient legal alternative. You set the example. You buy lots of media and download too, which proves that participating in one doesn’t exclude you from the other.

Pirates are customers too. Even famous ones.

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

Our traffic sponsor Digg is no stranger to BitTorrent. Before the MediaDefender debacle Digg’s weekly video podcast Diggnation was published on Revision3’s very own BitTorrent tracker, but times have changed.

However, with their latest Dialogg video Digg has again decided to embrace the Internet’s most powerful distribution method. They’ve teamed up with Mininova, the largest BitTorrent indexer, to make the file available to millions of Bittorrent users.

“We see BitTorrent as a smart way to legitimately distribute content amongst millions,” Matt Van Horn, Business Development Manager for Digg told TorrentFreak. “That’s why we’re excited to share Digg Dialogg via torrents as one of the ways in which people can enjoy Digg’s interview with Bruno,” Matt added.

In addition to a regular torrent, Mininova is also testing a BitTorrent-powered video stream using Bitlet’s services. By clicking on the “stream this video” link users can directly watch the stream in their browser, fully powered by BitTorrent.

Mininova co-founder Erik Dubbelboer told us that they are delighted to be working with Digg. “We have always liked Digg so when they asked us to work together we jumped on it immediately. This was also a nice opportunity to test the new video streaming from Bitlet which we had just implemented into our Content Distribution service,” he said.

With its Content Distribution service Mininova is seeding the file on its servers which guarantees a high speed download. The advantage for the Digg team is that they save some bandwidth and don’t have to seed Bruno themselves.

The Dialogg with Bruno can be both downloaded and streamed using on Mininova. Geil!

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

Now things are back on track as Alec has teamed up with a new designer Miles Lorry to revitalize the newly and slightly renamed ‘appDowner’. Available in beta “soon”, appDowner will be compatible with iPhone 3.0 devices, so what’s the deal?

“The concept of appDowner has changed slightly, from being a simple ’smart’ BitTorrent application to a full on App Store replacement,” explains Alec.

“No longer will you have to remember and type in the URL to your torrent file, simply click the “Store” tab on appDowner, and you’ll be brought to a beautiful interface designed by Miles (which isn’t quite ready to be shown off yet, but he assures us that it will be very, very soon!) which will allow you to search and find the apps you’re looking for.”

Unlike the official App Store, there will no iTunes-like approval process to get your own applications onto the appDowner store, with Alec promising that submissions to the system will be accepted within a week.

While BitTorrent is employed to serve apps to the user, the appDowner torrent client can also be used for non-appDowner downloads too

When released in beta, appDowner should become available via Cydia/Icy.

Stay tuned for updates

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

This system hasn’t had much serious competition but all that changed recently when a new service/app appeared. Known as ‘Mega’, this application/system currently offers direct downloads of a staggering number of App Store apps, over 4000 at last count – a full list is available here.

However, while Installous operates on a donation basis and doesn’t host any copyright infringing content itself, Mega offers its services via paid subscription – $9.99 for 1 month, $23.99 for 3 months and $41.99 for 6 months – which at least in part probably reflects the large costs associated with Mega hosting the content themselves.

It’s also alleged that Mega ‘borrowed’ some code previously developed for Installous and this along with the ‘pay for warez’ issue seemed to really motivate the Installous crew, and they set about ruining this money maker.

“If you’re forced to spend money to use a service, you should be spending it on the actual apps you get, not making some greedy pirate rich,” said coder Kyek. And with this Kyek created a new application known as ‘Grabulous’. Once downloaded from the Hackulo.us repo on Cydia, this software allows iPhone users to instantly download any of the 4000+ apps from Mega’s servers – free of charge. Grabulous was a command line app, but a GUI is now available.

The stated aim of Grabulous is to give iPhone users the Mega service for free, or alternatively crash the Mega servers through being overloaded by non-paying users. “Both options are cool with us,” says Kyek.

TorrentFreak spoke with Murda, founder of iPhone hack site FSMdotCOM who explained he had no time for Mega. “Grabulous should be saluted and applauded by consumers AND devs. This is common sense, it’s not cracking , it’s not hacking. Paying for cracked apps is a crime against common sense.”

“To be honest I think Mega tried it and thought they could outsmart everyone. But unfortunately (for them) the iphone/touch community proves itself to be a fantastic one once again,” Murda told TorrentFreak. “Mega had a major ‘uppercut’ from Hackulous when they released Grabulous but everybody smelled the fish right away, and we are not shy to send a message out to the people, and warn them. That is why we are here.”

Of course, the release of Grabulous didn’t go unnoticed by the people over at Mega and this ignited a round of technical cat and mouse as Mega tried to block Grabulous, with at least some initial success. Kyek promised a new version of Grabulous to get around these measures but at this point in time it looks as if Mega has taken the hint that charging subscriptions for access to warez is unacceptable to some.

In a statement, Mega has advised that they will no longer require monthly subscriptions but will instead ask for donations while supporting this revenue stream with advertising. Due to this new system, users will be limited on the number of apps they can download each day, dependent on server load.

“They should have done this since the very beginning,” noted Murda.

The Appulo.us service itself has been down for a week after they outgrew their hardware – and their budget. On the first day of taking donations Appulo.us received $1700 but said they wouldn’t return until they had received enough money to rent 3 servers (up from 1) for 6 months. The service is back in operation today.

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

Wesley has a talking ‘tracker watch’ that is able to tap into the power of TorrentSphere when needed, and transform him into TorrentBoy. Together with a laser blaster-carrying, speech-impeded teddy bear named Crash, he defends the world against all evil, including giant leeches.

Although the book isn’t literally about BitTorrent, it is inspired by it says MCM. “The underlying concept of the TorrentSphere is that all people in the world are connected through a massive invisible network, and that the network makes us all smarter and better people.

“It’s BitTorrent philosophy, but very abstracted. Then again, TorrentBoy battles giant leeches. Take from that what you will,” the author adds.

The book is a pleasure to read, and certainly not just for kids. It has a Creative Commons license, which means that people are free to add, edit, remix and share the book for non-commercial use. In fact, the author encourages readers to do so with the TorrentBoy project that was launched in addition to the book.

With the project MCM hopes to get a swarm of people involved in the TorrentBoy series. The best ideas will get licensed, and those who help out will of course get their share of the revenue generated. All is explained in the video at the bottom of this article.

‘TorrentBoy: Zombie World!’ can be downloaded for free, but a paperback and e-book (.epub) version are also sold on Amazon, Barnes and Noble and other book stores. TorrentBoy has to be on BitTorrent of course, so we’ve uploaded a torrent to Mininova as well.

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

Uploading fakes to a BitTorrent network is relatively easy, but keeping the torrents active is a much more difficult task. The moderation teams on private trackers remove fakes as soon as they appear – if people are stupid enough to even try to upload them. Other directories such as The Pirate Bay and Mininova, however, are more difficult to police due to their open nature but these sites continually battle fakes too.

There are several forces driving this phenomenon. Of course, the likes of the MPAA and their partners like to upload fakes in order to waste downloader’s time and to monitor their activities. That said, there are others who are uploading fakes in order to make themselves money, with many of the fakes simply encouraging the use of malware such as Domplayer, or sending the user ostensibly to get passwords to view the video, but in reality directing them to spammy sites.

Unless you’ve been on Mars for a few years, you will be aware that aXXo is one of the strongest BitTorrent-related brands and as such, the aXXo name is ripe to be exploited with fake torrents and the schemes behind them. This morning, Mininova was bombarded with hundreds of fake aXXo torrents linking to various malware and spam schemes. Luckily the moderation staff at Mininova are very much on the ball, and their skills and experience allowed them to remove them very quickly. Indeed, the thousands of users at Mininova also help by informing the site that a torrent is not what it should be, but it’s an on-going battle.

When a fake is removed from the site, the IP address of the uploader is also banned, meaning that unless the uploader gets himself a new IP, he won’t be able to upload any more. However, the problem is a lot deeper than just the odd person here and there uploading a fake. Just recently malware and spam peddlers have been advertising online for people to work for them on a freelance basis, uploading fakes to torrent sites and getting paid for each one. Hundreds, maybe thousands of people have taken them up on their offers, getting paid around 20 cents for each successful upload. The scammers mitigate the effects of their worker’s IPs being banned by torrent sites by advertising for people with dynamically assigned IP addresses, while encouraging them to use proxies.

We spoke with Moe1210 at Mininova who told us that for them, although time consuming, the aXXo fakes are easiest to spot, and they are often removed from the site in a matter of minutes. However, due to these teams of hired individuals doing the uploading, the sheer number of fake torrents is significant. Even though the mod team are checking the site every 5 minutes, sometimes in that period 50 fakes could’ve been uploaded. On a regular day, the amount of fakes uploaded can reach 2,500.

In the ongoing battle the scammers are getting a little smarter, adjusting the way they operate as the challenge is met by Mininova. They became aware that at certain times of the day the fakes stayed on Mininova for longer periods before being removed, which was down to fluctuating staffing levels due to people having to sleep, rest and venture back into real-life every now and again. To counter this, Mininova now have a worldwide team which cover the major time zones.

Speaking of fake aXXo torrents, Moe1210 told TorrentFreak, “It’s a pretty pointless task uploading a torrent with aXXo in the title trying to trick people [on Mininova]. I’d say that 75% – 80% of our members know that if the torrent is not from aXXo’s account, its fake – meaning, if they check the ‘general’ tab and aXXo’s name is not in red letters, it’s fake! They [the scammers] have no way of spoofing this.”

Many fake torrents are using a tracker located at http://bt9.c7q.fast1010.info, which is hosted with Ecatel in The Netherlands. In order to trick users into believing the torrents it tracks are real, the tracker is faking the download statistics, as can be seen with this fake on TorrentPortal, which at the time of writing is reporting 76278 seeders and 82380 leechers.

The torrent contains an unusable video and a password.html file which claims to reveal a password to play the file, but instead leads the user into a quagmire of spammy sites.

Users looking to avoid these fakes should read our previous article entitled Stop Downloading Fakes and Junk From BitTorrent. In the meantime be aware that the same people behind the aXXo fakes are behind file names such as ‘Race to Witch Mountain 2009 DVDRIP XviD BangeR’, and ‘Watchmen 2009 DVDRIP SeedeRz’.

As a final thought, TorrentFreak asked Ecatel if they intend to do anything about the fakes tracker. They told us, “Ecatel does not allow any spam and malware in its network.” And then it became clear. The tracker hosted at Ecatel doesn’t host the content, the users do – like all trackers. Sometimes the law’s such an ass.

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

Among the early adopters of the BitTorrent protocol were several Linux projects, saving thousands of dollars in bandwidth costs. In 2005, Linuxtracker started to aggregate these Linux distributions, and it has been growing steadily over the years, racking up more than 130,000 unique visitors each month.

The site’s server currently tracks more than 40,000 peers and in the past 12 months it coordinated the distribution of 180 terabytes worth of Linux software. TorrentFreak caught up with Mark Angeli, the founder of the site, and we asked him what motivated him to create Linuxtracker.

“I was getting into the BitTorrent ‘movement’ downloading the shows I missed at night while at work. At this time I was also trying out new Linux distributions on a fairly regular basis and while I had decent download speeds, I wanted to find a better way to download and share Linux,” Mark told us.

“Some of the bigger distributions were beginning to use BitTorrent as a means of distribution, but the smaller ones were having a hard time. I wanted to make it easy for them, so I put up a site and a tracker,” he added.

The first Linux torrent Mark uploaded was for Slax 4.2.0. but it was only the beginning. Soon dozen of torrents followed, and with it their community of Linux enthusiasts started to expand. Mark told us that they have some exciting plans for the future, but these remain between him and the other admins of the site for now. One thing he did reveal is that they are looking to add a “lighter” version of the site for those on smaller devices like netbooks and smartphones.

One of the great advantages of the Linuxtracker community is that the seed/leech ratios are extremely good, even though the site doesn’t require users to register. The site is currently celebrating the month of February with some giveaways from their sponsors, so for all the Linux fans who haven’t discovered the site already, it’s well worth checking out.

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

Entitled “Using Torrents As A Successful Marketing Tool” their concept describes how BitTorrent can help bands to get noticed and build a fanbase. “The music industry keeps fighting new ways to distribute music. Silence is Sexy decided to do things differently and bring their music to the place where people like to get their music these days: torrent sites,” it reads.

So last fall they did, publishing their latest album “This Ain’t Hollywood” on Mininova. And they are not alone. Many artists are embracing BitTorrent, and releasing music for free has become commonplace these days. In fact, Georgia Wonder, one of the other contenders for the award, also used Mininova to distribute its music and of course, no-one needs reminding of the success enjoyed by NiN.

The free music experiment was a great success for Silence is Sexy. With over 15,000 downloads on Mininova and several positive responses from the press and (new) fans, BitTorrent has proven to be a great marketing tool. Thanks to their upload, one of their songs was included in the popular Indie/Rock Playlist of November, which gave them some additional exposure.

True to the name of the award, the public now has the chance to decide which of the 5 nominees wins the award. The winner will receive 5000 euros and 2 days of recording time in a Dutch studio. You can give 5 stars to Silence is Sexy on the award site if you think that BitTorrent can actually help artists and bands. The winner will be announced January 15th.

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

Of course, a country with plenty of ‘pirates’ has to have its own anti-piracy organization, and Lithuania is no different. The local anti-piracy outfit goes by the name ANVA, an acronym for ‘Antipiracines Veiklos Asociacija’. Their main targets are the local BitTorrent sites, which they have announced they will sue for millions in damages.

To use the word ‘Lithuania’ in a Lithuanian organization’s name requires government approval. Recently, ANVA changed its name to LANVA, after they succeeded in getting this authorization. This seal of approval may give the organization more credibility, but there is a small problem. They forgot to register the domain lanva.lt when they changed their name. Before, they were using anva.lt, but while they did make a new logo with the L included, registering a new domain didn’t come to mind.

Usually, mistakes like this can be easily overcome by paying a certain amount of money to the person who was smart enough to register the domain, but not this time. Kestas Ermanas, the owner of one of the largest BitTorrent sites in Lithuania, registered the domain as soon as he found out about the name change, and he is not planning to hand it over to his arch rival.

The domain Kestas bought currently displays the following message: “This is how it works. Whatever you sink, we build back up. Whomever you sue, ten new pirates are recruited. Wherever you go, we are already ahead of you. You are the past and the forgotten, we are the Internet and the future.”

LANVA has scheduled an emergency meeting next Thursday to discuss what they can do to get the lanva.lt domain in their possession. The chances that they will get the domain through a dispute are very slim though. There have been several cases in Lithuania where large companies sued owners of domain names, and they lost every single time.

This is not the first time that an anti-piracy organization has had a domain dispute with a BitTorrent site. October last year The Pirate Bay got hold of the domain name of IFPI, under which they wanted to launch the “International Federation of Pirate Interests.” The case was later lost by The Pirate Bay, but the fact that they acquired it in the first place is yet another example of the tech illiteracy of these organizations.

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

In the years to come, The Pirate Bay established itself as the largest BitTorrent tracker on the Internet. Recently, the number of peers that use the tracker at any given point in time grew larger than the entire population of Scandinavia. In fact, over the past 12 months, the number of peers more than tripled, to 25 million.

At the time of publication, The Pirate Bay tracks 25.064.271 peers, divided over close to 1.856.243 torrent files. Quite an accomplishment when you consider that it is not even 2 months ago since they the 15 million mark. Coincidentally, the server that tracks the statistics crashed due to a hard drive failure, right around the time they reached the new milestone.

We asked Peter Sunde, co-founder of the site, how this huge surge can be explained, and whether the traffic to the site is also increasing. “I think it’s because of the new updates to the software and recent additions in hardware,” Peter told TorrentFreak. “We’re putting up new trackers all the time to cope with the traffic increase. And yes, the traffic to the site is also increasing. New visitor records every week.”

In an attempt to make their “torrent tracking” record official, The Pirate Bay applied for an entry in the Guinness book of world records last week. A record that they will probably break themselves every weekend. It is estimated that The Pirate Bay tracks 50% of all public torrents, which means that they are responsible for a significant part of the total Internet traffic.

“It’s just weird,” says Peter in response to these mind boggling statistics. “It’s cool to do something that big, but it’s scary that it’s so few people managing that of a big system. PLEASE, people, start more trackers! Put them out there, have open systems! We need the diversity.”

It might indeed be a good idea to spread the load a bit. There are plenty of private trackers, but good and reliable open trackers remain scarce. Meanwhile, The Pirate Bay will continue to update their hardware, and tweak their software, while working on side-projects such as the recently updated email service Slopsbox.

Hollywood will probably not be too happy when they hear that the Swedish deviant has broken yet another record, but Peter and the other Pirate Bay founders couldn’t care less what they think. Peter has a message for them though: “Stop hating the future. Be smart and come over from the dark side.”

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

The data is collected by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. Currently both DVDrips, DVD Screeners and R5 rips are counted.

RSS feed for the weekly DVDrip chart.

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

The data is collected by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. Currently both DVDrips, DVD Screeners and R5 rips are counted.

RSS feed for the weekly DVDrip chart.

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

The data is collected by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. Currently both DVDrips, DVD Screeners and R5 rips are counted.

RSS feed for the weekly DVDrip chart.

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

The data is collected by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. Currently both DVDrips, DVD Screeners and R5 rips are counted.

RSS feed for the weekly DVDrip chart.

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

The data is collected by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. Currently both DVDrips, DVD Screeners and R5 rips are counted.

RSS feed for the weekly DVDrip chart.

As of September 29, 2008…

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

The data is collected by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. Currently both DVDrips, DVD Screeners and R5 rips are counted.

RSS feed for the weekly DVDrip chart.

As of September 22, 2008…

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

The data is collected by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. Currently both DVDrips, DVD Screeners and R5 rips are counted.

RSS feed for the weekly DVDrip chart.

As of September 15, 2008…

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

Apparently the IOC has been reading the article we wrote last week, which showed that millions of people are downloading the Olympic opening ceremony on BitTorrent. In the meantime, several other Olympic clips have been posted. Although these are not as popular as the opening ceremony, the gymnastics finals and other events get close to 50.000 downloads.

The press secretary of the Minister of Justice has stated that it is primarily clips from the Opening ceremonies that the IOC wants to stop. The Committee also questions the legal situation and wants to be informed on whether they can take measures themselves to prohibit videos of the Olympics to be shared.

It’s interesting that the IOC chose to contact the Swedish government, instead of The Pirate Bay. They probably realize that sending a takedown notice wouldn’t be that effective. Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde told TorrentFreak: “I think it’s good that IOC understands that they will get nowhere with sending a legal threat to us. It shows they’re smart and without manners.”

“We were going to ignore the Olympics, but now we’re loading our cannons. Our weapons of mass distribution are pointed towards China.” The first action The Pirate Bay took is creating a new logo for the site, and renaming it to The Beijing Bay. In true Pirate Bay style the front page logo now links to the tag “give us the gold,” Peter said.

The tag refers to the incident with the Swedish wrestler last week, who tossed away his bronze medal after he lost his chance on a Gold medal because of an error made by the jury. Peter told us: “I also hope that the Swedish government will report back to them and tell them to give us the gold that the IOC stole from the Swedish wrestler. And to tell them to not host the Olympics in a country with poor respect for human rights.”

Most BitTorrent sites do take down torrents when they are asked to. However, none of the admins TorrentFreak spoke to received a takedown request so far. Of course, the solution to IOC’s BitTorrent problem is easy. By not televising the closing ceremonies, the IOC not only hinders filesharers, but also makes sure VHS tapers worldwide won’t be able to steal the Olympic spirit. Sounds like a winner.

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