One of the prime examples is best-selling author Paulo Coelho, who said he sold thousands of extra books because he pirated his own books. “Sharing is part of the human condition. A person who does not share is not only selfish, but bitter and alone,” Coelho told TorrentFreak in a follow up interview, explaining why he decided to share his books for free.

Responses to unauthorized filesharing vary. Those that have embraced it have seen dividends. Others fight it and throw tantrums, or use it as an excuse. A prime example of the last category has emerged, in the form of author Stephanie Meyer. Meyer, best known for her recent hits based around vampires, caters to the ‘young adult’ market re-popularized by the Harry Potter books.

In what seems like an echo of what happened to Potter author Rowling, Meyer’s latest book, Midnight Sun, has leaked online. Not the entire book, but a major part of the first draft, comprising the first 12 chapters. Meyer says the source is known to her. In a statement on her website, she says

“I have a good idea of how the leak happened as there were very few copies of Midnight Sun that left my possession and each was unique. Due to little changes I made to the manuscript at different times, I can tell when each left my possession and to whom it was given. The manuscript that was illegally distributed on the Internet was given to trusted individuals for a good purpose. I have no comment beyond that as I believe that there was no malicious intent with the initial distribution.”

Instead of rolling with it, working on reader feedback, and moving on and forward, Meyer is ‘throwing in the towel’ on the book for now, putting it “on hold indefinitely”. However, as was reminiscent of the buckcherry debacle, it smells of contrived events. A June update to her site said that she was working on it, partly due to fan pressure.

A leak that makes her so frustrated to want to write the book in the opposite way from intended, shouldn’t at the same time leave her ambivalent to the person and actions that caused it. It certainly shouldn’t leave her attacking her fans with statements such as:

“Just because someone buys a book or movie or song, or gets a download off the Internet, doesn’t mean that they own the right to reproduce and distribute it. Unfortunately, with the Internet, it is easy for people to obtain and share items that do not legally belong to them. No matter how this is done, it is still dishonest. This has been a very upsetting experience for me, but I hope it will at least leave my fans with a better understanding of copyright and the importance of artistic control.”

Yet again, P2P is blamed for ‘ruining’ something, and this will no doubt be added to the big list of ‘reasons filesharing should be dealt with more harshly’ that the governments of the world get hit around the head with (paid/lobbied/bribed).

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

However, in a testament to its structure and security, BitTorrent is almost immune from these type of attacks and that is why you never hear the RIAA and IFPI talk about viruses and BitTorrent in the same announcement. In terms of sharing files and avoiding malware, BitTorrent does really well.

This recent malware attack revolved around people downloading files which were renamed to look like music and movies, but instead engineer a situation where lots of other stuff gets installed on the host PC, causing all sorts of problems. While viewing some of the filenames listed by McAfee, I had to remind myself that I was a novice once too – but it was still a stretch for me to believe so many people would download files that look like these:

preview-t-3545425-adult.mpg
preview-t-3545425-changing times earth wind .mp3
preview-t-3545425-meet bambi in kings harem.mp3
preview-t-3545425-middle eastern chick.mpg
preview-t-3545425-theme godfather.mp3
t-3545425-bentley bizzle.mp3
t-3545425-haloween special.mp3
t-3545425-just got lucky.mp3
t-3545425-peanut butter jelly amende.mp3

The good news is that the chances of these type of files appearing on BitTorrent are very low as trackers have moderators who remove such junk, something which is largely impossible on Gnutella (LimeWire) and eMule (ed2k). As long as the ‘infected’ users keep this stuff in their shared folder, there is little that can be done to stop it spreading. If they don’t clean this stuff out, no-one will, and it’s in this department BitTorrent comes out tops – again.

First of all, BitTorrent isn’t a ‘folder sharing’ client like LimeWire or KaZaA, which means that the user needs to use a torrent site to distribute (publish) his torrent. If the content is legitimate (and there are very few rules in most places, save obviously illegal material) the .torrent file will be up for all to download, with links to malware and viruses mostly filtered out by humans – otherwise known as ‘mods’ or ‘moderators’.

BitTorrent has thousands of hard working and largely unpaid moderators, who work tirelessly to make sure that files like these don’t make it to the BitTorrent user’s computer. In reality, files presented like the ones above could never slip by the site mods, they would see them a mile away and remove them quickly.

BitTorrent isn’t 100% malware free but compared to Gnutella and ed2k, it is astonishingly healthy and that is largely down to the strength of the system and the mods, who work non-stop behind the scenes to keep BitTorrent an enjoyable experience.

For the few small things that slip through the net, try our guides.

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

You get the impression that Biohazard frontman-turned-pornstar Evan Seinfeld isn’t going to be releasing any music for free on file-sharing networks in the near future.

In an interview with Metal Edge, the heavily tattooed self-confessed “sexual deviant pervert” doesn’t pull any punches with his views on file-sharing and doesn’t mind threatening file-sharers with physical violence. All in a day’s work for a rock star.

When it was put to Evan that part of his disillusionment with the music industry might be down to downloading, he said:

Downloading free music is stealing. There’s no other way about it. The same people who don’t have the balls to walk into a record store, take things off the shelf, and put it in their pocket because they are afraid that that are going to get busted think nothing about going on line and downloading a band’s music. That’s the way the band makes a living. If you like that band, you shouldn’t download their music for free because it can make the band go out of business. I know it’s not very rock and roll to say that; all the kids are going ‘fuck Metallica, we are going to steal their music.’ OK, how about if the guys from Metallica will go into your father’s hardware store and steal a hammer off the shelf.

Well Evan, file-sharing is generally a civil issue but stealing a hammer is criminal so, ask any file-sharer, Metallica should go to jail, obviously.

So how does the availability of free porn on the Internet affect Evan’s adult movie business?

Well, it cuts into our revenues. We spend a lot of time and money on attorneys and policing the Internet. We employ special technology to make it harder. You will never get rid of theft completely, but we have to do everything we can to prevent it. There should be some honor amongst people. Do people wake up in the morning, look into the mirror, and say, “I steal other people shit all day”? If so, you should know that you are a scumbag, and if I catch you I will kick the shit out of you.

I think most people are aware that porn stars “employ special technology to make it harder” but Evan, please be advised that “kicking the shit” out of people is a criminal offense (even more serious than Metallica’s blatant hammer theft), and punishable by imprisonment. Much more serious than file-sharing.

While actively trying to combat P2P, Evan notes that due to the way it operates, BitTorrent is more legally challenging.

We send out a lot of legal notices and have sued people. But usually by the time we send the letter they have already taken the stuff down. The real problem is these P2P bit torrent sites because the host of the site says they aren’t legally responsible, even though they really are.

Finally, Evan gives us an insight into why he believes people file-share, and suggests that it’s actually ok to “steal” stuff – as long as you do it to someone who can afford it……said the 4 million record selling musician with a $30m porn empire.

….I think the nature of people is that they want to get something over on someone, see what they can get for free. Personally, as a creative guy, [I feel that] it’s wrong. If you are going to steal from someone, steal programs from Microsoft ’cause they can afford it, but don’t steal from creative artists who make movies and music and TV programs for your enjoyment because you become part of the problem. You’re a shoplifter. I know it’s very heavy metal to get shit for free. That’s why there are no more hardcore bands out there anymore. They are all out of business. Are you happy you killed it?

To be fair, it’s not quite dead. Biohazard will have a reunion tour this summer and everyone will be heartened to know that according to Evan, they will only be taking on the “highest paying” work.

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

The lawsuit states that the “defendant’s business plan depends on the uploading, posting, display and performance of copyrighted audio-visual works belonging to Vivid and others” and that the defendants “knowingly built a library of infringing works to draw Internet traffic” to its website.

Listing dozens of Vivid movies available to view on PornoTube (PT), the lawsuit claims that these were uploaded by PT’s users after being encouraged to do so by PT. Under US copyright law, each offense could carry damages of $150,000 per infringement. In addition to an injunction to halt any further potential infringements, the lawsuit seeks damages of $4.5 million.

Additionally, it’s claimed that PornoTube fails to comply with the federal Child Protection and Obscenity Enforcement Act. Although the Act covers those who produce sexually explicit material (PornoTube do not), there is another category of producer known as a ’secondary producer’ – which is anyone who publishes and reproduces content – a category under which PornoTube seems to fall. Vivid’s attorney, Paul Cambria said: “Once they put up any material on their site and fit it into their format, they are no longer just a ‘pass through’ medium—they have become producers or distributors under the law.”

According to the suit, PornoTube fails to take steps to validate the age of the actors in the videos it carries, explained here by Steven Hirsch, co-chairman of Vivid: “PornoTube and AEBN have exactly the same responsibility as any other adult content distributor or producer to obey U.S. copyright laws and 2257 regulations”

Vivid also believe that due to PornoTube avoiding the costs associated with conforming with the ‘2257′ regulations, they have an unfair competitive edge: “Vivid spends enormous sums to copyright its content and to comply with the Child Protection and Obscenity Enforcement Act age verification process. PornoTube and AEBN have been getting away with a practice that unlawfully earns it millions of dollars at our expense.”

Apparently, Vivid’s attorney, Paul Cambria, is happy to use the DMCA against PornoTube but is unhappy at the way it operates in other areas, particularly take-down requests: “Vivid should not have to take responsibility for policing PornoTube on a minute by minute basis to protect its rights,” he said.

Interestingly, AEBN – owner of PornoTube, who describes itself on its site as the “Global Leader in Pay-Per-View”, is actually already a big customer of Vivid Entertainment, as can be seen from this section on their site, where they are listing 971 Vivid movies available for paid download.

The RIAA and MPAA have been sueing their own customers for years, so the porn industry is playing catch-up here. However, this action against PornoTube is just the tip of the iceberg. The porn industry is about to start targeting file-sharers using the same tactics as the RIAA and MPAA – infringement notices will be appearing in mail boxes shortly.

Stay tuned for that report very soon.

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

“Never work with children or animals” said WC Fields. TorrentFreak takes a chance:

TF. Hi Hannah! How old are you?

- I’m 10 in 12 days

TF. What sort of music are you listening to right now?

Sean Kingstone, Shayne Ward and High School Musical 2

TF. Where did you first get into music?

- On the music channels, on MTV.

TF. When did you get a PC?

- People had computers but I couldn’t go on them but my Dad bought me one last year. I have internet.

TF. What do you do on the internet?

- MSN, talking to friends and cousins, games and dressing-up games [dolls]

TF. When did you first start using the internet to get music?

- My cousin showed me YouTube and then LimeWire and I was like “whoa cool!”

TF. What was cool about it?

- Because you can put anything in and it will come up and you don’t actually pay for it. Well you have to pay for the internet and LimeWire comes with the internet but you have to pay for that so LimeWire isn’t really free.

TF. Ok…I see….Do you get music from anywhere else?

- My cousin gets it from BEBO. She copies it from other people’s pages and puts it on her own.

TF. Do you think it’s ok to copy the music?

- Yes it’s ok because she only does it to make her page better.

TF. So you’re sure that it’s ok to copy it? What do you think about copying?

- I suppose it’s not ok to copy but people copied it off her site so she just copies theirs. It’s like, you’re copying my t-shirt so i’m copying you on shoes.

TF. Ok, so a bit like copying school work?….Hmm….ok, let’s talk about copying on the computer again. When you started using LimeWire, did anyone ever mention that if you did certain things you might be breaking some laws?

- Why would they put it [music] on the internet and invent mp3 players if it was against the law?

TF. Confusing isn’t it?….You mentioned you like Sean Kingstone – what if I told you that Sean Kingstone’s boss might send you a letter asking for money because you shared his album on LimeWire? What would you say to him?

- W.E! [whatever!]

TF. Come on, play along with me. What would you say if he did?

- I’d say “tooooo strict!” and anyway he can’t make me do anything. He’s not the boss of me, he’s the boss of Sean Kingstone.

TF. What do you think might happen if you didn’t pay him?

- Nothing. I’m too young to be charged by the government so he can’t charge me.

TF. Would you carry on using LimeWire after he sent the letter?

- Yeah!

TF. Why?

- Because you can get good albums off there. Duh!! My CD’s don’t work in my mp3 player so LimeWire is the only way to do it. I bought High School Musical 2 on CD but it won’t go on my mp3 [player]

TF. How would you make LimeWire better?

- To speak to the person sending the music to make sure they send the right one, sometimes they send stuff that doesn’t even play.

TF. Do you know what a pirate is?

- They have parrots [effects 'arrrrr']

TF. Do you think its legal or illegal to copy a CD or DVD?

- Some men right, they sell you a DVD at the market but when you get home it doesn’t play, that’s illegal.

TF. Why is it illegal?

- Duh!! Because they tell you it works and when you get it home it’s rubbish and jumps in the middle and its a waste of money!

TF. Do you think you should be paying for stuff off LimeWire? You have to buy CD’s from the shop…

- You have to pay for CD’s because they’re actually on a disc not on the computer. My cousin, right, she uses LimeWire when she doesn’t have any money for CDs.

TF. Did you ever download anything by anybody and then go to see them?

- I got stuff by Lee Ryan and Simon Webbe and then I went to see Blue. Why don’t you ask me what my favorite hobby is?

TF. Ok, what’s your favorite hobby?

- Dancing to music, it’s fun!!

Thankyou, Hannah. That’s it! Have a nice birthday!

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

Bram Cohen: I really enjoy making products which I personally want to use, and like to empower people to do things they couldn’t do without BitTorrent’s efficiency and reliability. I also enjoy working with my team. We’ve recruited a really talented group of engineers from the P2P community and the tech industry, as well as some of the best business people in Silicon Valley. Together, we’re taking BitTorrent to new heights while still remaining true to our original goal of delivering content to the masses.

TorrentFreak: How do you see the future of BitTorrent Inc, what will its core business be?

Bram Cohen: We have two core businesses. We have a content delivery service to power websites which have downloadable and streaming objects on them, and we also have an entertainment destination at BitTorrent.com which will allow consumers to both publish and download high-quality digital content. Professional publishers have licensed over 5,000 downloadable video, music and game files, some of which will be free, and some for rent or purchase. We expect our network to be very prominent and an extension of our well-known brand.

TorrentFreak: Are there still “puzzles” that need to be solved to improve the BitTorrent protocol?

Bram Cohen: I had lunch with Vint Cerf at Google last week, and we discussed this at length. BitTorrent is a mature protocol at this point, but there are still a number of interesting things to work on. For example, improving tit for tat, making seeding optimizations for enterprise use, and trying to figure out if there’s any good use for error correcting codes. Regarding that last one, it turns out that there are, but most of the academic work has been barking up the wrong tree. We also have a great testing environment built, so we can test the impact of protocol extensions on real, live swarms, which is critical when making enhancements that benefit the BitTorrent community at large.

TorrentFreak: More and more ISPs have started to throttle BitTorrent traffic. How do you feel about this, especially related to the upcoming BitTorrent video store?

Bram Cohen: ISPs have historically thought that all P2P traffic is illegal, which most definitely is not the case today. Identifying traffic as BitTorrent versus http is a very poor proxy for determining legal versus illegal. Even more so as content creators have begun using our self-publishing service to distribute their own work and major studios have signed up because they recognize the enormous potential of BitTorrent as a sales channel.

Legal traffic is growing within the P2P ecosystem and piracy also travels with HTTP and FTP in high volumes. ISPs have to invest in making their networks better and faster rather than stifling applications which consumers use and love. That’s just bad marketing and customer service, especially given the competition which exists in the broadband industry and consumer focus on network neutrality. For instance, in Japan and Korea, consumers currently enjoy true all-you-can eat symmetric fiber-to-the-home at 100 mbps. That’s a great environment for P2P development to make the Web a truly powerful medium for on-demand media, with broadcast economics. Of course, it also leads to the question: Why is the United States two generations behind?

TorrentFreak: What would you advise BitTorrent users to do, when they find out that their ISP is throttling BitTorrent traffic?

Bram Cohen: Switch. Competition is the best thing for the consumer. If you’ve got a couple of options, try the alternatives. If you have no alternatives or both alternatives suck, call customer service. And call them a lot. It turns out that angry customers are more expensive to ISPs than providing unadulterated access to popular applications and websites.

TorrentFreak: The mainline client now supports encryption, but there are no settings to control this (correct me if I’m wrong). Does this mean that the client encrypts all transfers?

Bram Cohen: No. The mainline client accepts incoming encrypted connections, but makes unencrypted outgoing connections by default. We added support for that primarily for our users in unfriendly ISP environments. As I’ve said before, protocol encryption is at best a temporary hack around ISP rate limiting, until identification techniques are put in place which use transfer patterns rather than packet inspection to identify traffic. There are better approaches to evade traffic shaping, although we’re still trying to work productively with ISPs, who own the network after all. But if we can’t find a way to work together to provide a better experience for BitTorrent users, then the arms race will begin.

TorrentFreak: You said before that you’re not a big fan of encryption. What would you suggest as an alternative?

Bram Cohen: I say just leave things in the clear, and try to use caching technology to improve the ISP network. Or better yet, ISPs should lay more fiber and build bigger pipes.

The so-called ‘encryption’ of BitTorrent traffic isn’t really encryption, it’s obfuscation. It provides no anonymity whatsoever, and only temporarily evades traffic shaping. There are better approaches to obfuscation, and I’ve got a great team of engineers who are quite eager to fight that battle, but I’m hoping that everything can be resolved amicably without getting into a serious arms race.

TorrentFreak: What was the main reason behind the acquisition of uTorrent?

Bram Cohen: uTorrent has both an impressively clean codebase and large user community, although we were already working on our own C++ implementation. Moving forward, you’ll see announcements related to BitTorrent being embedded on silicon and on non-PC hardware thanks to the new C codebase we have (based on uTorrent and our protocol extensions).

TorrentFreak: Are their plans to remove any of the present features uTorrent has?

Bram Cohen: No, uTorrent users are quite happy with it, and we wish to keep things that way. In fact, be on the lookout for a Mac and Unix port, which we have the resources to do thanks to the size of our engineering team.

TorrentFreak: What will happen to the mainline client in the future?

Bram Cohen: Our mainline extensions and uTorrent’s will converge. However, we are still committed to offering an open source BitTorrent reference implementation.

TorrentFreak: Will the uTorrent client be integrated into the BitTorrent Video Store?

Bram Cohen: We’re going to launch our entertainment network with support for whichever BitTorrent client the user wishes to install.

TorrentFreak: Can you give us any details on the pricing of the products in the BitTorrent Video Store, and the quality of the video files?

Bram Cohen: We haven’t announced any firm pricing yet. The video quality will be the best possible with the available codecs. In addition to being a “store,” our site will be a destination for publishing and discovering digital entertainment, and will have plenty of free files in addition to the pay ones.

TorrentFreak: You said before that some of the content from the video store will be “protected” by Windows DRM. What is your personal view on DRM, do you see other, more user friendly alternatives?

Bram Cohen: Right now most of our content partners are insisting on DRM for the content we’re making available. It’s causing an awful lot of headaches, but we’re trying to minimize the impact on user experience and support.

TorrentFreak: Over the past year we’ve heard quite a lot of rumors about the arrangement between BitTorrent and the MPAA. Can you tell a little more about the nature of this agreement?

Bram Cohen: We support keeping copyright infringing material off of our site, and have deals with most of the MPAA member companies to make their content available through our entertainment network. The MPAA is actually a lot less of a hive mind than many people think. We’ve had to negotiate individually with each member company regarding business deals. We don’t currently have any investment from any of them.

TorrentFreak: Several other BitTorrent sites like mininova.org and torrentspy.com have the exact same policy, and remove infringing material whenever they are asked to. Though, they are often seen as the bad guys. The MPAA even sued torrentspy and isohunt, and refuses to start a dialogue, while they index the same torrents and bittorrent.com does. What’s your opinion about this?

Bram Cohen: It’s easy to make the mistake that thinking the exact letter of the law is all that matters in such situations. I have no legal opinion of what mininova and torrentspy are doing, since I’m not familiar with the exact details. But being antagonistic will result in predictable outcomes, regardless of how well defended one thinks one is legally.

TorrentFreak: Due to the arrangement with the MPAA most people might think that most of the content they search for on bittorrent.com is legal. However bittorrent.com does index a lot of copyrighted work. Don’t you think this might confuse some of the users of the site?

Bram Cohen: We’re cooperating to get copyrighted work out of our search index, and when our new site launches, much more emphasis will be placed on the self-published and licensed content within our own index, instead of the general Web search.

TorrentFreak: In March the MPAA urged the Swedish government to take down the site because it is linking to infringing material. bittorrent.com indexes the torrents from thepiratebay.org , a site that is often referred to as “Pirate Heaven”. Has the MPAA ever asked BitTorrent Inc to stop indexing The Pirate Bay?

Bram Cohen: The focus of takedown notices has primarily been on particular pieces of content, not so much where they came from.

TorrentFreak: Is there a future for BitTorrent in the development of streaming online content. For example, would it be possible for video streaming sites like YouTube to use (a modified version of) BitTorrent?

Bram Cohen: Yes, we’ve developed a streaming version of BitTorrent. Stay tuned for more details around the middle of this year.

TorrentFreak: BitTorrent is slowly starting to replace the video recorder, especially among younger people. Popular episodes of TV shows like LOST are downloaded (illegally) more than 500,000 times in just one week over BitTorrent. These figures clearly show the potential that BitTorrent has, and it’s an indication that TV as we know it is about to change. Do you think BitTorrent Inc can play a role in the future of TV? And what kind of product or business model do you think could compete with these pirated shows?

Bram Cohen: Our new site will launch with thousands of movies and TV shows, so yes, we clearly have a role in the future of video. As far as competing with the piracy experience, the better consumer experience we provide, the less people will feel the need to rely on piracy. To do that, we’ll be providing an extensive and valuable catalog of content at a good price. In the future, we’ll expand into free, ad-supported content as an integral part of our site. We’re also going to give independent publishers a platform to distribute, promote, and ultimately sell their own content as part of that experience.

TorrentFreak: If you look back at the past 5 years, what is the thing you’re most proud of?

Bram Cohen: Looking back at the past 5 years, I can still say that I’m proud of getting BitTorrent to work in the first place. When I first started working on it, nobody knew whether it was possible to overcome all the logistical problems of handling a flash crowd. It was challenging, but not only did I get it to work at all, but got it to work extremely efficiently. More recently, I’m proud of being part of the team that has worked hard to convince content publishers and enterprise businesses that unlike other p2p architectures, BitTorrent is a legitimate and incredibly powerful tool for content delivery.

TorrentFreak: Thanks for taking the time to answer these questions!

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