Mininova’s lawyer argued that the site is already taking measures to ensure rights holders can protect their content, and this amounts to more than they are required to do under the law. The site has a ‘notice and takedown’ policy and recently started offering an infohash filter where content owners can blacklist torrents.

Mininova’s case against BREIN was heard at the Utrecht court. Three judges have been appointed to the case. One of them is a replacement for a judge who was taken off the case a few weeks ago because he was connected to the entertainment industry. The hearing started at 1 PM with BREIN’s lawyer Dirk Visser.

Visser began by informing the court that Mininova has over 5 million daily users who use the site to download copyrighted content. A brief look at the site’s homepage clearly shows that they link to illegal content, and their business models is to make money off the millions of ads that are displayed, he said.

Mininova’s attempt to offer a distribution platform to publishers through their “featured content” section is nonsense, BREIN’s lawyer insisted. According to research conducted by BREIN 92% of the torrents on Mininova point to ‘illegal’ content, and the tag cloud with popular searches also shows that illegal content is what people are mainly looking for on the site.

In 2006 and 2007 BREIN and Mininova had lengthy discussions on how to deal with copyrighted content, Visser said. Mininova wanted BREIN to come up with specific infohashes that should be in the filter, and BREIN wanted Mininova to cover the costs. They never reached an agreement and the negotiations ended.

All in all Visser is arguing that Mininova aids in distributing copyright infringing works, and BREIN demands that the site installs a filtering mechanism that will put an end to this. Mininova will have to cover the costs of such a copyright filter themselves, they say.

Next up was Mininova’s lawyer Vita Zwaan. She started out by informing the court that this is a landmark case because it’s the first to make a judgment about the legality of the BitTorrent platform in The Netherlands, pointing out that this case obviously has far reaching consequences.

Zwaan further told the court that, while the hearing was taking place, approximately 180 torrents would be added to the site’s database and that Mininova has no knowledge of the content currently tracked by these torrents. In addition Zwaan explained that Mininova has partnerships with content owners to distribute works though their distribution platform.

On top of this, Mininova offers several options for content owners to take ‘infringing’ torrents off the site, the lawyer explained. Together with the Motion Picture Association (MPA), Mininova started experimenting with a content filter through which torrents can taken off the site by the content owners.

The filter trial is a success according to Mininova’s lawyer, who quoted one of TorrentFreak’s recent articles to point this out. BREIN also had to option to participate in the filtering trial so they could see for themselves how it works, but BREIN rejected this offer.

It is unclear what BREIN’s demands actually are according to Zwaan. They want Mininova to implement “preventive measure” but are vague about the details. However, BREIN doesn’t want to provide the info-hashes for the torrents it wants removed, and argues that this is something Mininova should do themselves. This is the opposite of what the MPA (a member of BREIN) is doing now.

According to Mininova’s lawyer, this disagreement on who should provide information on what to filter is what the case is all about.

A keyword filter that was proposed by BREIN is unworkable according to Zwaan because it would result in too many false positives. A filter for the keyword ‘office’, as BREIN suggested, would result in the removal of 92 torrents linking to “Open Office” she said.

Mininova’s lawyer then discussed some of the costs Mininova made thus far to take down torrents upon request from copyright holders (though the old system). She said that 155,876 takedown requests have been reviewed which cost the site 250,000 euro ($350,000). In addition, Mininova invested several thousand euros in the content filter.

Zwaan went on to explain that Mininova is not a necessary nor sufficient part of the BitTorrent download process. Unlike The Pirate Bay they don’t host a public tracker, and neither do they offer a BitTorrent client through which users can download torrents. BREIN argued otherwise and this is incorrect Zwaan said.

Towards the end of her plea, Zwaan argued that Mininova is not infringing the rights of various copyright holders as BREIN stated. She cited several cases in and outside The Netherlands to make point out why, and pointed out that The Pirate Bay may not have been found guilty if they had a notice and takedown policy like Mininova has.

After a short break the hearing continued briefly and the judges asked both lawyers for clarification on some issues. Mininova’s lawyer was asked about the moderators that Mininova has, and why they remove porn but not copyrighted content. Mininova explained that the moderators handle problem reports from users (about virusses, porn, etc.), while the Mininova admins handle the copyright complaints. The site has around five moderators, a number which the changes from time to time.

After roughly three hours the hearing ended and it’s now up to the judges to come up with a decision. The verdict is due on July 15. Erik Dubbelboer and the other Mininova founders think they have the law on their side. “We have confidence in the outcome of the case and we believe Mininova will continue to exist,” Erik told TorrentFreak.

This is a developing story, info might be added.

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

In January TorrentFreak published the list of “most downloaded TV-shows“, where we showed that the most popular episode of “Heroes” was downloaded 2.5 million times on Mininova alone. Even more impressive -across all BitTorrent sites- more than a billion episodes are downloaded every year worldwide.

The graph below shows the percentage of .torrent files per category downloaded on Mininova over the last 2 years – over 40 percent are TV-shows. To support this, we analyzed a sample of 400,000 torrents earlier this year. That data indicated that approximately half of all the people using BitTorrent at any given point in time, were using it to download a TV-show.

The popularity of TV-torrents hasn’t gone unnoticed. In fact, there are reports of TV-studios that allegedly use BitTorrent as a marketing tool, by leaking unaired pilots intentionally. While the movie and music studios continue to fight their “war on piracy”, most of the TV-studios lay low.

On the contrary, Anne Sweeney -the president of the Disney-ABC television group- admitted that she was “inspired” after seeing a pirated copy of the hit-show “Desperate Housewives”. The pirated copy of this popular TV show was the main reason (besides the money) for Disney to sell their shows online. “Coming ‘face to face’ with the high-quality, commercial-free pirated version (of Desperate Housewives) told Disney that it was not just competing with other broadcasters, but with digital pirates and as such was an experience that prompted us to do the iTunes deal with Apple.” Sweeney said at the time.

BitTorrent’s popularity hasn’t gone unnoticed by actors either. Masi Oka who plays Hiro Nakamura in the popular show “Heroes”, made some pro-BitTorrent comments earlier this year. When he was in France to promote the series (before they aired), he was surprised to see how many people had already seen the show thanks to BitTorrent. Oka said that BitTorrent is a great promotion tool, but added “Hopefully, if they can buy the DVD after they watch it on BitTorrent, that would be great.”

One of the members of EZTV, the leading TV-torrent distribution group, told TorrentFreak in an earlier interview that he doesn’t think their work has a negative impact on the TV-industry either. “The only possible impacts can see are positive ones,” Boggibill said “it is free publicity, which may lead to higher ratings when people “discover” new shows and also larger numbers of DVD purchases – it is my understanding that many of the people that download TV shows from us are avid TV fans and will usually buy DVD boxsets of shows they like.”

A factor that plays a role in the rise of unauthorized downloading of TV-shows is that most people simply don’t see it as stealing. It is a signal that customers want something that is not available through other channels and it’s more about availability than the fact that it’s free. It’s not a threat, but more an opportunity.

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

When asked about the purpose of the memo in 2006, party spokesperson Peter Eriksson said: “Our aim is to make laws in line with the new technologies. The other option is to pretend that you can go on like you always have, although it’s practically impossible. Reality has changed.”

One of the driving forces behind the recent “I Wouldn’t Steal” campaign from the European Green parties was the Swedish politician Carl Schlyter, and his initiative seems to have spurred others in the party to join the debate. Earlier this week, an editorial was published in two local Swedish newspapers. It was titled “Filesharing is not theft” and was written by Akko Karlsson, member of the Swedish Green Party’s executive board.

In the editorial, Akko argued that filesharing can’t be compared to theft, as theft is when someone takes away the possibility for another person to use something, whereas filesharing only creates a new copy without erasing the original.

“For me, this is a generation issue,” said Akko Karlsson when TorrentFreak asked her why she decided to write the editorial. “You should always endorse the new technologies’ possibilities.”

In her editorial, Akko criticizes the entertainment industry’s failing to enter the information age with working business models:

“You could argue that filesharing hinders some people from earning as much money as they would have if filesharing was not possible. But now it is possible, the technology is there, and then the industry needs to find new ways of handling it. They’ve had the chance to work on new ways for 10 years but haven’t come up with much else than silly trailers that say filesharing is theft. [...] When new technology emerges, it’s not necessarily it that must be adapted to the old ways. Sometimes, the industry itself must adapt.”

Akko further told TorrentFreak that she’s convinced that filesharing, copyright and integrity will be important issues for Green Party in the 2009 elections for the European Parliament and the 2010 elections in Sweden.

“Because there is also the democratic aspect of this,” she says, “There are so many people under repressive regimes for whom filesharing and the Internet is the link to the rest of the world that inspires, gives hope and makes it endurable to fight for human rights and democracy. The state’s control system is expanding. We used to heavily criticize the intrusions of privacy and control systems in place behind the Iron Curtain, but now we are building this ourselves.”

In Swedish old media, there’s currently a heated argument against filesharing, with novelists like Liza Marklund and Jan Guillou using every inch of their weekly columns in Swedish newspapers to lobby for tougher measures. With the trial against The Pirate Bay coming up, the debate has sunk even deeper in the trenches. In this climate, for politicians to step up to the plate with sound arguments why filesharing should be legalized seems like a bold move.

But Akko Karlsson is not alone.

On January 31, an editorial was published in Gothenburg’s daily newspaper. It was written by Green Party’s Lage Rahm, member of Parliament, party spokesperson on IT issues and substitute member on The Committee on Industry and Trade. On the subject of the ongoing case against The Pirate Bay, he called for reason when it comes to impose tougher measures on filesharing:

“Not only is the struggle [to end illegal filesharing] doomed to fail, it also creates a risk that filesharing on the Internet becomes anonymized and encrypted. An increased availability of untraceable networks will make it harder to fight organized crime.”

As an example, Lage Rahm put forward the bust of a pedophile ring with more than 700 suspects in 33 countries last year. This was done by tracking chatrooms, downloaded photos and e-mail.

“Most people realize that the police and copyright interest groups are fighting against windmills. [...] Convicting sentences against The Pirate Bay would have merely marginal effects on the scope of illegal filesharing. More severe is that the hunt will lead to an increased interest for absolute anonymity among Sweden’s approximately 1 million filesharers. Their activity will move to untraceable darknets.”

He focused on the dangers of Internet communities going underground and concluded:

“New technologies mean we as legislators are faced with an entirely new reality. Tougher measures against filesharing means risking the police’s possibilities of fighting child pornography and organized crime. It is worrying that the Minister of Justice doesn’t seem to realize this. For The Green Party, this is one of the main arguments of legalizing non-commercial downloading. [...] The Minister of Justice should leave to the industry to clear up the mess they have made for themselves. Judicial resources should be diverted to fight severe online criminality instead of hunting filesharing sixteen-year-olds.”

So, what does this all mean for the European filesharer? Well, one thing is sure, political parties that actually have power are taking a pro-filesharing stance. A sign that things are moving forward, slowly, but in the right direction.

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

The press releases put out by the recording industry focus solely on piracy for declining sales, while in reality there are so many reasons. Most have been covered so many times by the media and academics, but we’ll re-iterate a few here.

The Decline in Music Sales

The CD format has now been around for over 25 years. Back-catalogues have been re-released on the medium and consumers lapped it up, replacing their analogue copies of music they own. However, there’s only so many back-catalogues to buy, leaving consumers either only purchasing new music or none at all. A decline in CD sales is an indication of saturation in a market where innovation is lacking. There’s also only so many “best of’s”, “greatest hits” and other compilation albums consumers are going to buy before thinking “I already own three copies of most of these songs, why would I buy another one?”

Format-shifting, the art of moving from one medium to another is on the rise. In the past consumers have moved their collection of music to different formats, usually because of quality improvements and convenience, and paid for the privilege. Now it seems consumers don’t think they should have pay to move their collection of music to their computers and media players, and especially not pay to receive an inferior quality copy of something they already own. It just doesn’t make sense. “Illegally downloading” seems logical. Digital copies of music, which were until recently usually DRM crippled, and are still poor quality in relation to CDs, are simply unattractive.

The thought also never seems to occur to the music industry that perhaps Avril Lavigne, Utada Hikaru, Rihanna, T-Pain and Akon (the artists behind the top 5 digital downloads in 2007) are simply unattractive to the public. How much manufactured pop can society take?

The Problems With P2P Statistics

There is no doubt that piracy is on the rise. This in in part due to the aforementioned, overpriced, inferior or non-existing alternatives. This aside, it is absolutely ridiculous to compare downloads with actual sales. Let’s sum up a few of the reasons.

Firstly, just because someone chooses to download music via P2P doesn’t mean they’re doing it illegally. The recording industry has stated numerous times that it will not sue people for format-shifting, whereby consumers would want a digital copy of music they physically own. Why go to the hassle of copying a CD you own to your PC/media player, when someone else out there has done it for you? There’s a lot to consider when digitizing music from CD, though the one-click approaches of programs like iTunes would let you believe otherwise. Indeed their exists numerous guides on how to best digitize music you own, most notably jiGGafellz’ guide.

Secondly, do these numbers include the antics of MediaDefender? They flood P2P networks with fake files, which unsuspecting users will often download. How many fake files does someone download before managing to get a genuine copy? Even when they have a real copy, how many times before they get one in a high enough quality to suit them?

Thirdly, what about those who download with the sole intention of improving their share ratio on private sites? Sites like OiNK were notorious for users downloading popular releases with no intention of listening to them, just to try and better their ratio. Similarly, users often download entire albums just to listen to one track. While BitTorrent clients have the ability to do selective downloading, broadband connections are becoming so fast that users don’t feel the need to. Other P2P networks where albums might be shared in archives such as .zip, .rar or .tar remove the ability to selective download.

Fourthly, a great deal of people seem obsessed with discographies. They would download an artist’s entire back catalogue of music just because they like collecting, often without listening to it.

A New Business Model?

The million dollar question of course is, what should the recording industry do? We know that there is no straightforward answer to this question, but we speculated about some of the options before. The Internet has changed the way people interact with music. Sites like OiNK made is easy to find and share virtually every piece of music ever produced. Services like last.fm on their turn made it easy to discover new artists, and interact with other fans.

The Internet and filesharing technologies make it possible to make production (of the copies) and distribution costs disappear, yet the prices still don’t change. Why? Because they cling onto their old business models.

Today, the average consumer buys approximately 3/5 CDs a year. Let’s say the labels make $25 a year per consumer. Now, what if the record labels decided to make their entire collection available online, and charge people $2.50 a month for a subscription. This way they could easily double their revenue. New business models will emerge, and I’m pretty sure piracy will pretty much cease to exist. The record industry can even outsource the distribution to online music services, who can even offer the music for free if they come up with other revenue streams to compensate the $2.50 a month per user. I’m just thinking out loud here, but there are tons of possibilities.

So, stop complaining about biased statistics, go back to work and do what you’re supposed to… distribute music to the fans!

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

“Maybe he’s talking trash because he invested $1.7 million in a ‘BitTorrent-like’ company. He’s been transparent about such motivations before. That said, he does has some claim to punditry in the bandwidth space because his $5 billion sale of broadcast.com for yahoo stock set the precedent for valuing bandwidth supply companies based on how quickly they flush money down the toilet. (Amusingly, if you go to broadcast.com today it simply redirects to yahoo.com.)”

Apparently Mark Cuban did not like the tone of the post. He fights back in a comment:

“I like your complexity analogies. You are right. BT has huge challenges. It works great for stealing content. Getting people to contribute bandwidth in order to get content for free. To quote Borat “Thats Nice”. But as you know yourself, you haven’t been able to make a real business out of content being bought and sold using BT. Could it be that there are users, the ones willing to pay for content, have challenges using the clients out there now?”

Cuban’s rants continue for a while, and he starts a discussing with the other commenters. Luckily, Bram was wise enough not to comment, at least up until this point. It is funny to see how personal this rant gets. In his initial post Cuban just said that BitTorrent, as a P2P protocol, has its challenges, but now he’s doubting BitTorrent Inc’s entire business model.

Here’s a great example, taken from Cuban’s comment:

“But where are they ? Not just the customers Bram. The content? I searched for Prison Break. Lots of torrents. None of them Legal. Is this what Fox had in mind when they signed up with you? They wanted people to find bootleg copies of their content? I”m a big shareholder in LionsGate. Is this what they had in mind when they signed with you ? Im sure if I call the CEO, they would say it wasn’t.”

Obviously Cuban doesn’t know that the BitTorrent store hasn’t even been launched yet, but he has a point when he says that it’s strange to see that much infringing content on bittorrent.com. It wouldn’t surprise me if BitTorrent Inc will (partially) take down the links to other BitTorrent sites when the video store goes live.

Anyway, for those of you who can’t get enough of Mr. Cuban, here is a lengthy comment he wrote in response to our “BitTorrent is Doomed” post.

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

The lawsuit against Finreactor has just come to a close (Finnish report). This is believed to be only the first of many filed against the site.

Three of the four administrators found guilty are under the age of 18. It is unclear how they are going to scrape together enough money to pay their fines.

With a little help from Finland’s National Bureau of Investigation (Keskusrikospoliisi), the Finnish equivalent of the RIAA (Teosto) shut down Finreactor in late 2004. It was, at the time, possibly the largest Finnish BitTorrent tracker with more than 37,000 registered members.

The Keskusrikospoliisi, after getting the go-ahead from Teosto, raided the administrators’ homes and seized computers and hard drives. The evidence they found was condemning.

Niko adds that at least one admin avoided the lawsuit because his hard drive was encrypted, and that there were more people on trial:

Alltogether 32 people were on trial. 21 of these 32 were declared guilty by the court. The eight admins mentioned here were probably only the ones represented by Turre Legal. The others were represented by another law firm.

Update: The IFPI just released a press-release which confirms that 21 admins were convicted. They have to pay compensation, damages and expenses of approximately $700,000 (in total) to the copyright holders.

21 operators of the Finreactor peer-to-peer-network were convicted yesterday by the district court of Turku in Finland. Finreactor was a BitTorrent network that had 10,000 registered users. Fourteen operators were convicted for copyright offences and seven for aiding for copyright offences. The operators were in charge of the technical operation of the system as well as the user control.

It is sad to see under-age BitTorrent fans get sentenced in court. The reality is that the content industries have decided that they are going to sue to compete with illegal filesharing. However, if a phenomenon like filehsaring is taking place at such an extraordinarily large scale, maybe there’s something to it. Maybe we need to find a new business model. Either that, or soon fans aren’t going to have enough money to legally buy the content they normally would, let alone the stuff they’re “pirating.”

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

and a lot more

The router comes with a setup utility, thus configuring the router is pretty easy. The goal of this article is to review the BitTorrent related functionalities of the router, but I have to say that the router does pretty much everything it promises. To name a few things:

But now the BitTorrent part. The Asus WL-700gE comes with a “download master” utility that supports ftp, http, and BitTorrent downloads. There are two ways to download torrents, you can upload a torrent with the “download master” utility on your pc or you can access the “download master” in your web browser.

The progress of the downloads can be monitored in the transfer panel of the download master. It lists the filename, progress, size, speed and ETA. The web-based download master has a few extra monitoring options (peers!, download/upload).

Download Master

Web Download Master

The transfer monitoring is quite buggy, the speed and filesize update every 10 seconds or so, but the torrents have the strange tendency to stop downloading if you watch the transfer progress for more than a minute. They resume downloading as soon as you minimize the window.

And there are more bugs. About 50% of all the torrents I paused, never resumed after the pause. This means I had to redownload all the data.

The overall speed is ok, and it shouldn’t matter too much, since most people will use it to download torrents overnight.

There is not much to tweak. The only option you have is to set the time the torrent should seed once the download is finished (default is 1 hour). Too bad they didn’t include a ratio seed setting.

Conclusion:
Overall I would say the router performs very well and is worth the money (I paid approximately $300). However, the BitTorrent client is very buggy and limited. It works but it could and should be improved significantly. The router would not yet replace my regular torrent client, but it does the job at night.

pro’s:

con’s

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

No one has to pay for numbers anymore. No one is threatened for merely experiencing the development of their own culture. No one is sued for participating in its creation or propagation. The old media business models are gone, burned away by their total inability to adapt to the reality of new technology. In the end they simply failed to comprehend that any product which can be reproduced endlessly by anyone at virtually no cost has, in any reasonable estimation, a market value of zero. Trying to break the technology that threatened them was the final desperate tactic – it hadn’t stopped the Industrial Revolution and it didn’t stop this one.

Copyright is your right to copy… anything. You are permitted to duplicate, to alter, to republish any piece of information, any text, sound, image or source code, even any object, anything that does not impinge on the privacy of another individual. It even protects your right to make money out of such duplication, if you can. In non-profit situations it also supersedes the now very limited and expensive application of patents. About the only right retained by an artist after they have released a work is their moral right to attribution. So don’t get carried away, fraud, forgery and counterfeiting are still crimes.

Like all the technology in your home, your computer and everything on it is your own, down to the last resistor, the last byte. Ironically it still runs Windows. The old proprietary OS has been rebuilt into dozens of open source flavours – there was no point throwing out codes and standards with years of work behind them and such a vast catalogue of useful applications already developed. Even more unexpected is that Trusted Computing has become universal. The technology that would have allowed big business to monitor your activity, to reach into your home and control your computer and your data, is now used to stop just that kind of interference. Encrypted drives, curtained memory and protected media paths prevent malware snooping on your personal files or siphoning away your home movies. Ubiquitous VoIP, secured by privacy amplified encryption, means the national security agencies of the world have to actually investigate threats instead of sitting around waiting for potential suspects to blurt incriminating evidence over illegal wiretaps.

Your culture is faster and more fluid than it has ever been, or ever could have been had the rules not changed, you’ll only ever experience a tiny fraction of it in your lifetime. The new movie you glimpsed playing on the back of someone’s animated t-shirt at the bus stop last week has already spawned a handful of mash-ups and parodies, by next month the spreading ripples of its influence will be unrecognisable. Even then, if the feeds do not provide what you’re looking for, there are the vast peer-distributed media libraries from which you can retrieve almost anything that has ever been digitised, any talk show or radio play, video game or comic, newspaper article or published photograph.

Time and space shifting of media is the norm rather than the hard won exception. You rarely notice the exact source of the information and entertainment you receive, it may have come through the traditional broadcast television channels, via the manifold multimedia blogs piped through your fibre optic Internet connection or picked up virally from wireless peers by your personal server while walking down the street. You rely on your intelligent agent to filter this never-ending flow of information, an application that reduces and organises the mass of live data to a few dynamic feeds, constantly adjusted to match your profile, habits and even your mood. But still, there is so much material even this system has to co-operate with others on local networks to process it all.

With free and instant access to every book ever written there is little use for bookshops, the few that are left sell limited ranges of bound paper works as charming novelties. Often those buying them are just doing so to get their favourite author’s signature. For those who miss the feel of a real book but want access to more than the few pulp prints in the shops there are ‘magic books’ with simulated bindings, touch sensitive e-Ink pages and voice interaction to let them summon an approximation of any volume ever written. The primary functions of public libraries today are the maintenance of municipal servers in the back rooms, used to ensure that less frequented material is never lost from the peer networks, and public access to the Internet for those who might find themselves without a mobile device. The stacks are now roped-off museum exhibits.

You just don’t see physical media anymore. Awkward, low-end portable storage like CDs and DVDs are rarely useful, not with ever-increasing bandwidth availability, and not without the requirement to divide culture up into tradable units, the need to trick consumers with physical objects in exchange for their money and their rights. Blu-ray and HD-DVD, their technology moulded to constrict the hold on consumers, never had a chance, too rapidly overtaken by faster, more versatile and more open live storage devices.

The cinema chains have been decimated. Those that persist cater to customers who seek an authentic movie theatre experience. You’ll often find movie sponsors subsidising tickets, food and drink sales in return for screenings of ‘official’ versions of films, desperate to have their product placements seen by audiences in a controlled environment. You often find yourself return to really good movie again and again, drawn by dynamic content generation and commissioned extensions. There’s no point banning cameras and threatening legal action, the movie doesn’t need to be protected, quite the opposite, and almost everyone there has already seen it. When you walk into a cinema you probably have versions of all the latest films stored in your inside pocket, if you don’t you can download them from the cinema’s own server as you’re watching, or access countless other titles through the powerful ad-hoc networks that settle invisibly over any significant gathering of people.

read on

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