The new year starts without The Pirate Bay tracker, which was closed in November, and also without Mininova, which saw its site being censored and stripped down by a Dutch court. To counter these losses, several public tracker-only services have made a comeback along with multiple torrent-only storage sites.

Where do we go from here? Let’s make some predictions.

Prediction 1: The Pirate Bay will cease to offer torrent links

After closing its tracker in 2009, The Pirate Bay will further evolve by removing all torrents from its index in the new year. The site will be reduced to a BitTorrent platform that no longer stores torrent files. Users will still be able to submit torrents through a third party service such as Torrage, but instead of linking to these torrent files, The Pirate Bay will list only Magnet links.

During the second half of 2010, The Pirate Bay four will appear before the Appeal Court. They will be found ‘not guilty’ and walk away free. Shortly after this victory in court, Pirate Bay’s YouTube killer The Video Bay will be released to the public.

Prediction 2: A BitTorrent client will be dragged to court

In 2009, the entertainment industry and authorities took legal action against various BitTorrent users and numerous sites. They left BitTorrent clients alone, but this will change in the new year. A coalition of copyright holders will file a lawsuit against one of the major BitTorrent clients, in an attempt to stop the ever increasing piracy rate.

The copyright holders will argue that BitTorrent clients play a vital role in downloading and uploading copyrighted files, and that the software is assisting in copyright infringement. They will demand that the torrent client implements a filtering mechanism to prevent users from downloading movies, music or games without the permission of the copyright holder.

Prediction 3: More people will use BitTorrent anonymously

2010 is the year where copyright holders gain more control over the Internet. Three-strikes legislation will be rolled out in various countries and global trade agreements such as ACTA will result in humongous fines for casual downloaders.

As a result of this newly founded Internet police state, millions of BitTorrent users will take measures to hide their identities online. By the end of the year, a quarter of all BitTorrent users will use a VPN service or similar anonymity software, with another quarter looking to do so in the following 12 months. This will make new legislation ineffective, and lead to further lobbying by the entertainment industry for even harsher anti-piracy measures.

This cycle will repeat itself until the entertainment industry decides to innovate.

Prediction 4: BitTorrent (live) streaming will take off

Advances in technology and growing broadband penetration have brought us to a point where BitTorrent-powered streaming solutions have become reality. BitTorrent inventor Bram Cohen is working on a streaming implementation and experiments have shown that it is possible to stream high definition content.

In the second half of 2010, the first BitTorrent-powered YouTube competitors will be launched. These new BitTorrent sites will mainly offer streams of pirated movies and TV-shows. Live BitTorrent streaming will gain worldwide traction during the 2010 soccer world cup in South Africa. In the second half of the year, commercial implementations will follow, allowing broadcasters to stream live content at zero cost.

Prediction 5: uTorrent will become a resource hog

In 2010, uTorrent will be transformed from a lightweight BitTorrent application into a media portal similar to its nemesis, Vuze. Unlike Vuze, BitTorrent Inc. will continue to offer a lightweight uTorrent version for the the people who don’t want to make this switch, preventing a revolt among conservative uTorrent users.

The new uTorrent will be a resource hog, featuring a full blown search engine, video conversion, iTunes integration and a video player. The browser interface will allow uTorrent to be put on set-top boxes, which opens up the possibility for BitTorrent Inc. to reopen a new and improved version of their video store that can be easily hooked up to TVs.

Due to the changes, uTorrent will obviously have to remove its tagline ‘a (very) tiny BitTorrent client.’

—–

Happy new year to all of you from TorrentFreak. Let us know what your predictions are for 2010 in the comments below. We will feature the best on our side-blog FreakBits during the coming days.

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

While the evidence gathering techniques differ from agency to agency, they all have one thing in common. None of them can provide proof that the account holder has actually committed copyright infringement. In fact, some anti-piracy outfits cannot even prove that the IP-address they have on file was used in an actual file transfer, although they claim otherwise.

The Video Protection Alliance’ (VPA) belongs to the latter group. Instead of simply warning the alleged infringers, they take it one step further and actually ask for cash to settle immediately on behalf of the copyright holder, a known extortion-like technique that is also used by spammers.

The process used by VPA and others is simple. Their software monitors BitTorrent swarms and other file-sharing networks and records the IP-addresses of those people who share their clients’ copyright works. It then automatically sends an email to the ISP linked to the IP-address with a request to forward it to the associated customer.

“Someone using this account has engaged in illegal copying or distribution (downloading or uploading) of [title],” the VPA writes in one copyright/settlement notice, adding: “The information in this notification is accurate.”

But is it really accurate? We beg to differ and we’re certainly not the only ones.

As outlined in an elaborate article posted on on Freedom to Tinker earlier this week, the VPA does not verify whether the IP-address is actually uploading or downloading content. They simply take it from the swarm list reported by the tracker.

This is wrong for several reasons. First of all, some trackers are known to insert random IP-addresses into swarm reports to provide plausible deniability. Secondly, anyone can easily create a url that would put someone in the swarm list when it’s clicked. This link can be posted everywhere on the Internet and it wouldn’t even require the recipient to have a BitTorrent client installed.

Of course, this information is nothing new to people who are familiar with these anti-piracy evidence gathering techniques. Last year researchers from the University of Washington revealed the same flaws, but outfits such as VPA apparently don’t see the need to back up their claims with solid evidence.

Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of these notices are sent out every year, some of which include cash requests to settle the case. Even worse perhaps, in countries that adopt three-strike legislation millions face the threat of being disconnected by their ISP, based on shoddy and unverified evidence, and without judicial oversight.

Unfortunately, the outfits that collect the evidence for the copyright holders are not very open about the techniques they use. When the RIAA’s evidence was disputed (pdf) in court earlier this year they decided to drop the case and settle with prejudice for $0.00. How convenient.

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

Just over a month has passed since the first stable public release of the software and PeerBlock has now managed to clock up more than 100,000 downloads. To mark this milestone, TorrentFreak caught up with Mark from the project for the lowdown.

Mark told us that the creation of PeerBlock was inspired by him upgrading his PC from 32 to 64 bit in order to utilize 6gb of RAM. Everything worked fine – until he tried to get PeerGuardian (another IP blocker) to work.

Having hacked away and jumped through hoops to get around driver-signing it would still only work half the time and often crashed without warning. As a software engineer who has worked in the commercial sector for more than 13 years, Mark – who admits to being “an arrogant bastard who truly believes he can do just about anything better than just about anybody,” decided he could find a solution. It was “put up or shut up time,” he told TorrentFreak.

Noticing that the PeerGuardian code was open-source but hadn’t been touched for a couple of years, Mark contacted another developer who had the same thing in mind, but having heard nothing back, he went at it alone.

“I started setting up a Sourceforge.net project for it so we could get free source-control, but they took too long to set it up for me so I instead created a project over at Google Code where it was ready within minutes,” he told us.

Having heard from a few people who were interested in helping out with the development side – “night_stalker_z” who’d earlier started trying to hack the PG2 code into shape, “DarC” / “DisCoStu” who wanted to help out with fixing up the installer, XhmikosR who rewrote the installer, and some testers, things moved forward.

After facing troubles due to the lack of a “signed driver” for 64-bit versions of Vista (which resulted in Mark having to set up a registered company before they were allowed to buy a $230 code-signing certificate), a couple of blogs wrote articles on PeerBlock which attracted some much-needed publicity to the project. This resulted in 10,000 downloads in just one weekend.

“We’re still getting donations from people and we now have enough to pay for next year’s annual code-signing certificate, and we’re saving up to be able to rent our own VPS with full root access etc, upon which we’ll be able to build a ‘real’ online-update system, a custom web-app to tie our forums/issue-tracker/website all together, and some other neat things,” Mark explains.

The first stable release of PeerBlock came out on September 27th, and as of November 5th had clocked up an impressive 100,000 downloads. The site now receives up to 7,000 visitors each day.

Aside from fixing one or two bugs, the team has lots of new features planned for PeerBlock. Anyone that has tried to surf the web with a blocklist in place will know how painful that can be, so PeerBlock will have some new features which allow the “whitelisting” of certain apps, such as a browser, the creation of a proxy server to let users configure PeerBlock to listen on certain ports, possibly an integral “AdMuncher” style ad-blocking feature on a per URL basis (as opposed to just an IP-address), and an encrypted chat feature.

TorrentFreak asked Mark why users should choose PeerBlock over the competition.

“Well, first off we need to ask ‘Who IS the competition?’ The only ones I’m really aware of are: Protowall by the folks over at Bluetack which is closed-source and I don’t believe was ever updated for Vista, and Outpost Firewall, which is closed-source and basically just a hack add-on to a more professional firewall product,” he responded, while noting that uTorrent’s built-in IP-filtering feature only handles one manually-updated list.

“We protect your entire machine, and give you the option to try out any P2P app you want – this freedom of choice is a very important thing, I think. And since it does everything automatically, including list-updates, it’s one less thing to think about,” he added.

Another important question relates to the blocklists that have to be used in conjunction with PeerBlock in order for it to block anything.

He told TorrentFreak that he’s a big fan of iblocklist, who serve up a staggering 10TB of blocklists every month for free. The site doesn’t create the lists, but does offer those from Bluetack, including the Level1 list (renamed to ‘P2P’ in PG2/PeerBlock, which contains both Gov and Anti-P2P IP-addresses) and others.

Mark admits that even in a best case scenario, the available blocklists aren’t 100% effective. That said, there have been studies which show that using blocklists along with software such as PeerBlock can help speed up downloads, but no-one knows how many of the potential “bad IPs” are covered by currently available blocklists.

P2P aside, Mark says there has been feedback to suggest that PeerBlock discovered a Conficker infection on a user’s machine that their anti-virus programs missed, and can also stop ads appearing in browsers that lack in-built blocking.

One other exciting thing for the future of PeerBlock is porting it to the Mac. Mark says they’re saving all the donations for additional development and this is the most-requested request right now.

Users of PeerBlock are encouraged to give as much feedback as possible to Mark’s team, via their forums, IRC (#peerblock on freenode.net) or email.

PeerBlock can be downloaded here.

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

What’s most interesting about the site is that its users can also browse torrents based on an actor or director, a feature that other torrent sites lack. With just a single click users can list all the films where Patrick Swayze made an appearance, or all the films directed by Quentin Tarantino.

“The actors and directors can be added by the users when they upload a torrent file,” Files24 founder Oleg told TorrentFreak. “Also if we recognize the movie, we automatically check and fill in any missing data,” he added.

Although the site also lists music and games, thus far these advanced searches only work for movies. TV-shows are oddly enough listed in the movies section but Oleg told TorrentFreak that a TV and software section will be added in the near future.

The navigational structure and design of the site is not the only thing that’s unique to Files24 though. According to one of the site’s founders, Files24 also has a dedicated tracker that is optimized to facilitate the highest download speeds.

“We track which country users come from and the tracker then gives priority to peers from their own country. As a result users can download at much higher speeds,” Files24’s Oleg told TorrentFreak.

One of the downsides of the site is that users are only permitted to upload torrents with a Files24 tracker, so this may severely limit the number of torrents that will be added to the site. On the other hand this is also one of the upsides, since this will stop a great deal of spam and fake files from being uploaded.

Files24 went live yesterday and currently lists some 40,000 torrents. It is clear that the site is still work in progress but the new features the site has to offer will be welcomed by many BitTorrent users. Of course they will also be frowned upon by Hollywood. Nothing new there.

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

According to a recently published paper by Prithula Dhungel, Di Wu and Keith Ross, these effort are a waste of time and money. In the paper titled “Measurement and mitigation of BitTorrent leecher attacks,” the researchers show that BitTorrent swarms are hardly influenced by attacks from anti-piracy outfits.

The research looked into the effectiveness of two popular attack methods used by companies such as MediaDefender. The first is a ‘piece attack’ where the hostile leecher attempts to slow down downloads by creating as many hash fails as possible. The second method is the ‘connection attack’ where the hostile leechers try to tie up as many TCP connections as possible in order to make it impossible for downloaders to connect to real peers.

The different methods were tested in a real-life BitTorrent swarm of a popular music album that was targeted by these attacks. “We present measurement results for a torrent for a new album, which was verified to be under attack,” the researchers report, adding “This popular album was released a few weeks before our experiments. At the time of the experiment, it held the number 1 position on the UK album chart and iTunes ranking list.”

The researchers then downloaded the ‘attacked’ torrent several times with both Azureus (Vuze) and uTorrent. For each download they recorded the time it took to complete, both with and without using blocklist software that bans (some) of the attackers’ IP-addresses.

The results were quite remarkable. The researchers found that, on average, downloads with a blocklist were 30 to 35% faster. In other words, the efforts of the anti-piracy outfits do slow down the targeted swarms, but only for a few minutes at most, and not long enough to deter anyone from downloading.

A more detailed look at the peer distribution of the two BitTorrent clients further reveals that without the IP-filters, uTorrent encounters only 2% of malicious peers, who all use the ‘piece attack’ method. Azureus on the other hand encountered no ‘piece attack’ peers at all, but 18% ‘connection attack’ peers.

Not surprisingly, the researchers conclude from their research that the methods used to attack BitTorrent swarms are highly ineffective. “The anti-P2P companies are not currently successful at stopping the distribution of targeted assets over BitTorrent. We have also found that blacklist-based IP filtering is insufficient to filter out all the attackers,” the researchers write.

What the researchers have overlooked is that both Azureus and uTorrent have implemented various technological measures against these automated attacks. The results may differ for other BitTorrent clients. Azureus (now Vuze) has put a lot of work in preventing ‘piece attacks’ and uTorrent has implemented similar anti-pollution measures.

The overall conclusion put forward in the article is most likely the right one, and to most people not even that surprising. The millions of dollars spent by the entertainment industry to protect their works from being shared on BitTorrent is at best only a mild annoyance to the ‘pirates’.

Via.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The article claims that:

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

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

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

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

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

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

In September 2006, Scott pleaded guilty to two charges – ‘conspiracy to commit copyright infringement’ and ‘criminal copyright infringement’. For his ‘crime’, Scott was sentenced to 5 months in jail and 5 months home confinement but his release didn’t mean his life was back to normal.

After his release in 2007, Scott was fitted with a monitoring ankle bracelet which restricted his freedom, but the government hadn’t finished limiting his life. Scott had to have special software installed on his computer to monitor his online activities, but since it was Windows only, he had to give up his beloved Ubuntu.

In the months that followed, Scott publicly shared details via his blog of his struggle to come to terms with his severe treatment for uploading a single movie, which at times made pretty upsetting reading. Thankfully his nightmare is now coming to an end.

It has been around 3 weeks since Scott was taken off the US government’s monitor list, which means that he is no longer on probation. Scott says things have been pretty good since and he can now do things we all take for granted – like being able to use Ubuntu instead of Windows.

TorrentFreak caught up with Scott who said he was happy to send a message to his friends and readers here to mark his official freedom.

“I have officially been off probation since July 12th. What a great feeling to finally be free from the clutches of evil (or the federal government). It was actually a really easy time on probation. It was 2 years, dealing once a month with my probation officer… who was really a great person,” he told us.

For those of us who remember the exact time and date of the EliteTorrents raid, it seems like only yesterday, but so much has happened since and as Scott puts it, his freedom has been a long time coming.

“I haven’t had a clear head since May 25th, 2005. Over 4 years of what I would call the worst period of my life is over,” he recalls.

But in the end the release from the nightmare comes from Scott himself and he is certainly trying to make the best of things now.

“I have been focusing a lot of time on my family. We bought a house in November, while I was still on home confinement. I am working at a local college, dealing with ERP implementations, specifically Oracle, and I am still actively participating in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, and MMA,” he told TorrentFreak.

As if these things won’t keep Scott busy enough, he’s looking forward to a brighter future and a very special occasion.

“I will be hopefully starting back to school for my MBA in the spring. And I am getting married in May 2010. Aside from the economy, I couldn’t ask for anything more.”

Scott told us that he felt his story is probably no longer worthy of news, so he will take this opportunity to move back into the shadows to get on with his new lease of life.

“This will be the last time most of you hear from me – although there is sk0t.com. The good majority of you have been really supportive… so thank you all for caring, and for
those of you who didn’t care… thanks also.”

I’m sure that the readers will join us in wishing Scott all the best for the future and every happiness in his forthcoming marriage. Good luck Scott.

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

Jamie mused: “What if someone was to simply scrape and copy all The Pirate Bay’s torrents over to a new tracker and Mininova and all the other indexes currently using the TPB tracker were to change their listings to point to that? OpenBitTorrent.com for example, an independent open tracker which started recently.”

So today we ask this question – was Jamie’s article incredibly prophetic? Or did it provide the spark, the catalyst, the inspiration needed to bring the BitTorrent community out of its premature misery this week, instead prompting it into positive action rather than self-destruction?

Whatever the truth, whatever the route, today the BitTorrent community has reason for cautious optimism – or possibly a full-scale celebration.

Try this for yourself, don’t take my word for it. First of all find a torrent on The Pirate Bay – I chose Montt Mardie’s “We Are All The Pirate Bay” for symbolic demo purposes here. Now paste the URL of the torrent into the editor on TorrentEditor.com and click ‘edit it’. TorrentEditor will return the seeds and peers – in this case 182 seeds and no peers.

For the next step, remove the Pirate Bay’s trackers from the torrent and replace them with the announce URL for OpenBitTorrent’s tracker, which is http://tracker.openbittorrent.com:80/announce and click ‘update’ at the bottom of the page. Result: 182 seeds, no peers.

I haven’t got time to check all 1,720,650 torrents on Pirate Bay right now but after trying a few, I reached the same result each time. Also, the scrape file of the OpenBitTorrent tracker is exactly the same size of that of The Pirate Bay tracker.

GGF would like you to think that they will control The New Pirate Bay but I believe that accolade is for the community to bestow. So is OBT (c’mon, what’s a tracker without an acronym these days?) the New TPB?

It is if you say it is.

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

After its transformation into a pirate tracking outfit Nexicon launched its Getamnesty program which offers copyright holders a chance to turn piracy into profit. They cleverly circumvent privacy protection laws by using ISPs to forward settlement requests for various copyright holders to alleged infringers. One of their most successful partner programs is the Payartists website which is a misleading name to say the least.

The money collected through Payartists is not going to any artists at all. The only artist they collect ’settlements’ for on the site is Frank Zappa, and he passed away in 1993. All the settlement money collected now goes to The Zappa Family Trust which is headed by Zappa’s widow.

Most recently a new Nexicon franchise emerged, as the ‘Video Protection Alliance’ (VPA) has teamed up with several porn studios to track down and force settlements from alleged copyright infringers. The methods they use are very similar to Getamnesty and Payartists and are designed to get cash payments from illicit file-sharers without even having to first find out who they are.

The process is simple. Their software monitors BitTorrent swarms and other filesharing networks and records the IP-addresses of those people who share the work of their clients. It then automatically sends an email to the ISP linked to the IP-address with a request to forward it to the associated customer.

Thus far, this is very similar to the warning letters that the movie and music studios have been sending out for years. However, there is one big difference. The emails sent out by Nexicon to alleged infringers contain veiled threats of legal action if they don’t choose to settle within 10 days.

In their email they write that “it may be beneficial to settle this matter without the need of costly and time-consuming litigation.”

If you don’t settle they are “prepared to pursue every available remedy including damages, recovery of attorney’s fees, costs and any and all other claims that may be available to it in a lawsuit filed against you.” To make it even more scary, they point out that ISPs might cut your Internet connection if you don’t comply.

In the FAQ on the VPA website it is noted that consulting a lawyers is an option, but it would be a rather silly thing to do since it will cost more than the settlement itself. “It is likely that the cost incurred to retain a lawyer will exceed the settlement amount offered.”

Indeed, the settlements are rather cheap compared to the fine that was handed out to Jammie Thomas recently. The settlement offer for an adult movie is close to the retail price of a DVD and for a single Frank Zappa track you’ll pay $10. In comparison, Jammie Thomas was ordered to pay $80,000 per song.

However, because of these low fees and the use of threatening language we cannot help mentioning the word ‘extortion’ once more. Even if they handle with the best intentions they should adjust their tracking software to be more accurate. We confirmed at least one case where they sent a settlement offer to the wrong person, and we’re pretty sure that this is not the only mistake they’ve made (here’s another one).

Still, even people wrongfully accused of sharing [insert obscene porn title here] may be inclined to pay a few bucks rather than risk being taken to court. The threats are worrying enough for some people to pay for an offense they didn’t commit. But there might be an even easier way out.

Unsurprisingly, very little happens when the threats are ignored. A Manhattan College employee dealing with DMCA notices wrote recently. “We have not passed the settlement info on to the students linked with the allegedly infringing IP address and have not had any follow up notices from them.”

This aside, we are not aware of any legal action taken by any of Nexicon’s partners to back up their threats. To the best of our knowledge they don’t even have a proper license to act as private investigators which is a felony in several US states and renders the ‘evidence’ they have in their spreadsheets useless.

Our advice, if you get a settlement offer from one of Nexicon’s partners please forward it to your spam folder – after forwarding it to us first of course.

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

Sadly, ACS:Law don’t appear to be practicing what they preach, despite taking the moral high-ground with the hundreds of recipients of their letters.

In an article published on their site entitled “20th Century Fox hit by illegal downloads” (Google cache copy here, since the page has been removed after we published this). ACS:Law appear to have taken the easy option and instead of writing their own article, chose to cut and paste paragraph after paragraph of other people’s work, passing it off as their own, without so much as a link to any source or a mention of an author’s or publication name.

Paragraph 1 of ACS:Law article

Almost a month before Wolverine hit the movie theaters a workprint copy of the movie was “leaked” onto the Web. It was a copy that was half finished as far as the special effects were concerned with green screens and wire framed character models visible for all the world to see. The great fight scene at the top of the nuclear reactor was more stickman like drawing that anything to do with the actors. In the end it was an incomplete movie that really only left the majority of those that watched it wanting to see the real thing

Original source article: Written by Steven Hodson over at inquisitr.com

Paragraph 2 of ACS:Law article

AFACT’s director of operations Neil Gane thanked the member of the public who had called attention to the racket and claimed Australian businesses suffered greatly from piracy.

Original source article: Written by Suzanne Tindal for zdnet.com.au

Paragraph 3 of ACS:Law article

“That pirated copies of X-Men Origins: Wolverine were discovered amongst the haul is especially disappointing. The film was made in Australia, employed over 1000 Australians, engaged over 100 Australian companies and contributed over $80 million to the local economy. The flagrant sales of pirated copies of the film is a slap in the face to the hard work and creativity that so many Australians put into the movie,” he alleged in a statement. The film has not yet been shown in cinemas worldwide

Original source article: Written by Suzanne Tindal for zdnet.com.au

Paragraph 4 of ACS:Law article

The woman’s arrest and the discovery of the discs led police to what was allegedly a disc burner lab in Sydney’s Westmead. The lab allegedly had the potential to produce 378,000 pirated discs a year, worth $1.8 million on the street.

Original source article: Written by Suzanne Tindal for zdnet.com.au

Paragraph 5 of ACS:Law article

Marketed as one of this summer’s blockbusters, downloads topped 75,000 within hours of the film being uploaded to BitTorrent and 20th Century Fox, the studio behind Wolverine, said the uploaded version was “stolen, incomplete and early”

Original source article: Fraser McIntyre and Jennifer Whitehead for The Scotsman

Paragraph 6 of ACS:Law article

The computer-generated imagery had not been added, there were missing scenes, sound and music and Wolverine himself had not yet acquired his enhanced strength with the wires attached to the actor Hugh Jackman still visible on screen.

Original source article: Fraser McIntyre and Jennifer Whitehead The Scotsman

Paragraph 7 of ACS:Law article

Reviews based on an unfinished film and which have already cost influential Fox News columnist Roger Friedman his job. He was fired for commenting on illegal footage. Richard Mollet is from record label trade body the BPI. He says the industry lost around £200m last year because of illegal downloading.The illegal copy became available on the internet on March 30. According to the Hollywood Reporter, “at last year’s average ticket price of $7.18, the piracy could conceivably – though not likely – have cost Fox $28.7 million.”

Original source article: Fraser McIntyre and Jennifer Whitehead The Scotsman

Even though there are clearly no references to any sources, links back to the original articles or mention of the author’s name in the ACS:Law article, TorrentFreak contacted all three publications to double check that permission had not been granted. Of the trio, Duncan Riley editor of Inquisitr.com was most vocal, telling TorrentFreak;

“No, we have not given permission for the content to be used. What perhaps is the height of hypocrisy, besides the wholesale theft of the text word for word, is that the paragraph they have taken is from a post that argues that piracy helped Wolverine, and then they’ve added anti-piracy statements to the end.”

We must admit we are very confused. On the one hand ACS:Law speak constantly about how their clients suffer at the hands of copyright infringement, yet the company itself appears to have a different approach when it comes to its own dealings.

Just recently, a support site set up to help recipients of ACS:Law letters cope with their predicament was ordered to stop its activities by ACS:Law (under threat of legal action) after they objected to the link between the site’s domain name (beingscammed.com) and their firm. The owner of the site was forced to publish an apology on the site’s homepage. As expected, another site has taken its place.

ACS:Law have forced others to publish an apology on their site too after comments were made that the law firm objected to. In the interests of fairness, it seems fitting that that Mr Andrew Crossley, as main partner of ACS:Law, publishes his own apology on his site’s homepage for making use of other people’s copyright works and exploiting them for commercial gain.

Andrew Crossley was already fined by the UK’s Solicitors Regulatory Authority (SRA) for engaging in “conduct unbefitting a solicitor” (pdf) back in 2006. We believe that a law firm claiming to uphold copyright law on behalf of its clients but infringing copyright in the process warrants the same label, but we’ll let the Conduct Investigation Unit at the SRA decide.

And to those that think these infringements by ACS:Law are small ones to be brushed off or discounted, then in an ideal world, yes, you would be absolutely correct. No one should care about small infringements of copyright. No-one should have to write articles about petty copyright infringement, but these are the depths to which this arena has sunk.

But consider which games these threats and lawsuits are all about. Two Worlds from Reality Pump is available on Amazon for £12, Topware’s Dream Pinball 3D is available for under £10, Call of Juarez by Techland much less than that. At absolute best ACS:Law has evidence that copyright was infringed via an IP address for a mere second on a few kilobytes of these titles. For these equally small infringements, ACS:Law demand around £600 from the public to satisfy them and their clients, backed up by the threat of ruination in court.

That’s how low we’ve sunk. It must stop, all of it.

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

There are softer approaches available. In 2007 we interviewed Trey Harrison, a developer who instead of threatening the people who cracked his software (‘Salvation’), actually took the time to engage them instead. The group responsible actually agreed not to crack any more of his software – quite a result.

Now it is the turn of ACE Team, an independent game development studio located in Chile. Their latest game, Zeno Clash, is described as a fighting/first person shooter and was nominated in January as a finalist in the Independent Games Festival competition, in the category of ‘Excellence in Visual Art’.

Of course, none of this can stop a game being pirated and Zeno Clash has turned up on various torrent sites – nothing out of the ordinary there. However, what is unusual is the developers’ response to the situation. Instead of getting in touch with the sites and demanding that the torrent be removed, ACE Team have decided to tackle would-be pirates head on – with an appeal posted in the comment sections of the torrent.

I’m one of the developers of Zeno Clash. I would appreciate you read this if you are about to download this file.

Zeno Clash is an independently funded game by a very small and sacrificed group of people. The only way in which we can continue making games like this (or a sequel) is to have good sales.

I am aware that at this moment there is still no demo of the game, but we are working on one which will be available soon.

We cannot do anything to stop piracy of the game (and honestly don’t intend to do so) but if you are downloading because you wish to try before you buy, I would ask that you purchase the game (and support the independent game development scene) if you enjoy it. We plan on updating Zeno Clash with DLC and continuing support for the game long after it’s release.

Thanks for taking the time to read this… hopefully it will make a difference.

Carlos Bordeu
ACE Team

Interestingly, although posted officially on at least one site, this message has been spread by the torrent’s uploader – who says he wants to help ACE Team. “I want to help developers to sell more of this good game, that’s all,” he said.

Carlos Bordeu from ACE Team told TorrentFreak, “Our ‘anti-piracy’ technique is basically the best approach we thought was possible. I think appealing to the conscience of people who download the game is the best we can do. Zeno Clash is not an expensive game. We don’t believe in restrictive DRM.”

The responses from file-sharers have been pretty positive too – even from the hardcore over at The Pirate Bay. Here are a few of them – note, not a “F**K the MPAA/RIAA” in sight……

“It was a touching comment (seriously) I will dl it and see if I like it and then will see if I buy it or not.”

“I love how the developers are commenting in here. Thanks a lot for doing it, instead of fighting the piracy.”

“I have not bought a game in 5 years, but the attitude of the developers has made me want to purchase their game. Fuck, if I like this game, I’m gonna buy it!”

“Developers like this deserve the money. They didn’t come on here with a preconceived notion that we are all thieves who don’t buy our software. I like that, because I and most of the people who use this actually do buy the software and other goods that we enjoy.”

Carlos told us, “We honestly think that ‘converting’ the people who download the game into buyers is a much better strategy than trying to fight them. We are also improving the original game, so it will include features and content that people who download the game will probably miss.”

At the moment downloads of Zeno Clash are pretty low, although it’s hard to say if the developer’s message has had anything to do with that, but a fresh approach is always welcome.

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

InfoPSP didn’t host any illicit content itself but instead offered links to video games, movies and music hosted on 3rd party sites. In Spain, merely linking to copyright works is not illegal. InfoPSP carried advertising and it was widely reported in the Spanish media that this was the reason the admin, Adrián Gómez Llorente, aka Kuve, was found guilty and sentenced to fines and 6 months in jail. However, in the murky world of copyright infringement, it’s no surprise to discover that all is not as it seems.

In September 2008 we reported on the case of Sharemula, a site which offered eDonkey links to movies, music, software and games. Just like InfoPSP, Sharemula found itself the subject of legal action but eventually the admins were found not guilty, since they had not carried out copyright infringement for profit. Here’s the strange part though – Sharemula DID carry advertising, just like InfoPSP.

Seeking clarification, TorrentFreak contacted the offices of David Bravo, a Spanish lawyer who specializes in intellectual property rights. According to Spanish law, the reason why the Sharemula admins were acquitted was because in order to have committed a crime, direct profit must’ve been made from the actual dissemination of the copyright works. Since the site carried only links, any dissemination was carried out by the site’s users and not the site itself. In short, no crime was committed on Sharemula and bizarrely, no crime was committed on InfoPSP either.

So it begs the question; how on earth did the admin of InfoPSP get found guilty of criminal copyright infringement and sentenced to 6 months jail and fines of 4,900 euros?

The answer lies, unsurprisingly, with the complainants in the case – the Spanish Association of Publishers and Distributors Entertainment Software (ADESE) and the Spanish Videographic Union (UVE). Of course, file-sharing site admins being protected under Spanish law is the last thing these groups need. What they actually need is someone’s severed head displayed prominently on a pike in order to deter others, and a widely-reported 6 month jail sentence is ideal for reaching this aim.

To get the truth, lawyer David Bravo conducted an interview with KUVE, the convicted InfoPSP admin, which shines an awful lot of light on this issue – and pretty shocking it is too. First off David asked Kuve if he’d ever carried any copyright material on the InfoPSP server;

“Absolutely not. The web server contained only the files needed for the operation of the forum,” explained Kuve. “Under no circumstances did we ever host any copyrighted works.”

David then asked Kuve if it was true that InfoPSP simply displayed links which were supplied by users of the site. “Indeed, the website was a forum where users could share a link to a file,” Kuve replied. “These links were torrents, hosting servers or file upload sites like Megaupload, Gigasize, Rapidshare etc.”

Kuve then went on to explain that he and his lawyer understood that all ongoing trials against similar sites (such as Sharemula) were resolved in the favor of the sites in the criminal courts. However, the threat of being chased by the complainants for damages through the civil courts was very real and the costs associated with this would have been too much for Kuve to cope with.

So a deal was done. Kuve would admit to being a criminal and accept the court’s decision with the assurance that he wouldn’t be chased through the civil courts by the plaintiffs. Kuve and his lawyer decided that it would make sense, financially at least.

“I am a student and therefore do not have the financial resources needed to hire a defense expert that could ensure results in the trial. Besides, continuing with the trial meant that the civil courts could convict me and I would be forced to pay financial compensation which I couldn’t cope with,” said Kuve.

“I would have loved to defend my interests to the end and it is for this that I wish all the people in my situation who can afford to stay and fight for something that affects us all, the best of luck.”

“The real news here is that a person has been found guilty of something that was not an offense under 100% of the judges who had resolved earlier identical cases,” says a concerned David Bravo.

Javier de la Cueva, a lawyer working with David, told TorrentFreak something that will be of interest to lawyers representing admins like Kuve in the future. Javier and David maintain a repository relating to Spanish court decisions on hyperlinking and release these documents under a CC-By License.

Thanks to this repository, any lawyer in Spain can use the documents to defend similar cases. The documents have already enabled lawyer Franciso José Andújar to successfully defend TVMix.

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

It all started with rumors about two US ISPs, Comcast and AT&T, who were said to be doing a three-strikes deal with the RIAA. It soon became known that this rumor was completely fabricated, but not before hundreds of other news oulets reproduced the story. At the end of the week it turned out that there was no news at all.

Yes, the RIAA, MPAA and other outfits do plan to send copyright infringement warnings to ISPs, but they’ve been doing so for at least half a decade. Every other month these Hollywood lobbyists pitch their anti-piracy efforts to the public, and that’s exactly what they are paid for. This doesn’t mean, however, that something is about to change.

The anti-piracy outfits are happy with all the free publicity of course, that is exactly what they are after. Their purpose is to scare people. In this post we hope to clear up some of the misunderstandings, as we show that the scary stories published this week have no substance at all.

Copyright infringement warnings?

For years, content owners such as record labels or movie studios have been sending copyright infringement notices to ISPs, who are legally obliged to forward these to their customers. Some ISPs simply ignore them, while others faithfully forward the emails to the customer account associated with the infringing IP-address. Many ISPs don’t keep records of these events.

So, is my ISP spying on me?

No. This is a common misunderstanding. ISPs don’t look into your specific downloading behavior, they never have and there is no indication that this will change anytime in the near future. All the ‘evidence’ comes from organizations that work for the copyright holders.

What do they know about me?

If you receive a warning, all copyright holders know about you at this stage is your IP-address and what files were (partially) shared via your account, or more accurately – the bill payer’s account. The MPAA, RIAA and others don’t know your name and they never will unless they get a court order forcing your ISP to hand over the information. In the bigger picture, this is very rare.

How did they track me down?

The copyright holders hire companies such as BayTSP and DtecNet to track down people who share certain titles on BitTorrent and other file-sharing networks. They join the swarm and request files from others. When someone shares a piece of the file with them they log the IP-address, look up the ISP and send out a copyright infringement notice automatically. Unlike the file-sharers, these companies are authorized to download these files, so they are not infringing copyright themselves.

Will I get sued if I receive a warning through my ISP?

No. These copyright infringement warnings are not related to any legal action. Copyright holders do go after people who share their work on file-sharing networks, but this has nothing to do with the warnings they send out via ISPs.

Will they take my Internet away?

No. Although there is a lot of talk about “three strikes” policies, no ISP has agreed (or was forced) to disconnect users after they receive their third warning. In New Zealand they came close to implementing a law that would require ISPs to do this, but this proposal was pulled.

In France they are also considering three strikes legislation, but this has not passed into action yet. In Ireland the largest ISP Eircom said it would disconnect repeated infringers only if they receive a court order.

It is worth mentioning though that ISPs may cut off people whenever they think it’s necessary. Cox does this in the US for example, without an agreement with the MPAA or RIAA. ISPs have terms and conditions and most forbid copyright infringement, but really this is just to cover their own backs under the law.

Do I have to be worried?

Receiving a regular infringement notice is nothing to be worried about. However, if you download copyrighted files without authorization from the copyright holder you are breaking the law in some countries. If you receive a warning without having shared anything yourself (which happens quite often) then there’s nothing to worry about.

Can I protect (hide) myself?

If you don’t want to be spied on when using BitTorrent the best option is to hide your IP-address. You can do so by subscribing to a VPN service or by using software such as TorrentPrivacy. Blocklist software such as PeerGuardian is often recommended, but it is also highly ineffective as the lists are never fully up-to date or accurate.

What’s the point in all this?

The MPAA and RIAA don’t want their products on file-sharing networks and they use these warning emails to deter people from sharing these files with others. Since it’s much cheaper (and effective) than suing people, this is now their strategy of choice. Using news outlets to spread their doom and gloom scenarios is just part of their operation.

In the future the amount of warnings they send out to alleged infringers will increase and the studios and ISPs will work together to keep the associated operating costs down, if that’s not what they’ve already been doing in their recent meetings. It’s just the old model, scaled up with a rumor or two on top.

Let’s move on already.

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

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

The Good

DNS Blocking

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

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

URL Filters

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

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

Swarm Poisoning

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

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

Fingerprint systems

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

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

DRM

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

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

The Summary

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

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

The Bad

URL Whitelisting

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

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

Automatic detection tools

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

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

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

The Ugly

Using Exploits

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

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

The Great!

Encrypted communication

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

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

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

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

Instead they engaged the cracker in dialogue, and the results have proved interesting. Not least, sales are up 100% and people are donating freely.

James told TorrentFreak that after the initial disappointment, they tracked down the cracker’s email address and surprisingly he responded. “Connie read the emails I sent and thought it was really amazing that we were having a civil conversation with the guy who was directly responsible for pirating our game,” said James. “I had decided to be really nice and accommodating in the emails to have a better shot at getting the pirate to respond.”

The email exchanges are detailed in our earlier story, but it’s developments since that really shows the importance of dialogue, with James telling us that the feedback has been excellent for the company. The game was originally up for purchase on the iTunes App store, but things have changed, he notes. “We decided to release a free version supported by ads to accommodate the issues that folks were reporting with the iTunes App Store, a.k.a the ‘Crapp Store’ – no try before you buy, lack of demo versions, and too expensive.”

The game hasn’t been withdrawn from the iTunes though, with James and Connie now preferring a dual-track option for the customer – a choice to either pay for it through iTunes or download the free ad-supported version. “We feel that a free app that still provides us with revenue through advertising is the best possible solution to the issue. Ads can be annoying for some people, so we’ve left the 99 cent version out there for folks who love the game but don’t like ads. Very hopefully, this will work for us and we can use the proceeds to fund future games.”

The ad revenue is being generated through AdMob, after the company approached James and Connie with their solution. AdMob is currently offering a promotion to around 200 iPhone software developers and giving them $5,000 worth of free advertising. “The folks at AdMob were awesome,” James explained. “They got us into the promotion and we’re now utilizing all of the tools they have available, such as in-game banners, click through reporting and detection to see if someone buys your game after clicking on one of your ads.”

James also took the opportunity to tell the game’s cracker, most_uniQue, about the new, free ad-supported version. He responded saying, “People love to hate me, but that just means they don’t understand. I’m glad you try to work things out properly and I hope you get good revenue from your ads. But the thing we all would like to know is this – did this adventure boost the sale of Whack ’em All?”

Good point. Before Whack ‘em All was reported pirated, the game was getting around 10 sales each day. Now, with all the extra publicity, sales are up to 20 a day, a nice 100% increase. Piracy might be viewed as a bad thing by some, but it sure beats obscurity it seems, and with extra revenue coming in from the ad-supported version, things seem to be looking up.

Additionally, a TorrentFreak reader suggested that the developer should put up a ‘donate’ button on the site so that pirates could still show their appreciation. It’s not a huge amount, but in just a few days people donated more than $75.

most_uniQue told James that he hopes that Apple learns from this situation and allows people to try before they buy, noting that he wouldn’t be surprised if Apple contacted him at some point, while hoping it’s to thank everyone for bringing the issue to their attention.

Hopefully it’s not, “most_uniQue: Wanted dead or alive’,” he joked.

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

The RIAA recently announced that it would stop its massive legal campaigns and limit the court visits to a minimum. No surprise there. Lawsuits are expensive and the RIAA lost more of those than they had hoped, so they turned their attention to lawmakers, local governments and ISPs instead.

The new plan is to get legislation implemented that will allow the entertainment industry to spy on the filesharing behaviors of individual Internet subscribers, and order their disconnection when they are suspected of repeated copyright infringements. Ideally they would like to make “downloading” a criminal offense of course, and this is exactly what the Pirates Prison Project is anticipating.

According to Dimitri Johnson, CEO of Pirate Prisons Project (PPP), billions of Internet users around the world will have to be thrown in jail if the anti-piracy lobbyists have their way. “Everyone is guilty by default: since nobody will want to do without Internet access, no matter what, everyone will end up going to jail. All of our kids, parents, friends and peers. Off to jail we go,” he writes.

“This trend has led PPP to foresee a gigantic business opportunity,” Dimitri adds, while introducing his plans to build thousands of prisons where these Internet pirates can be locked up. Investors can buy shares in these yet to be built prisons, and pirates have the opportunity to book a comfortable cell in advance. PPP currently offers three options:

1. Buy Shares

You can invest in the new prisons due to be built, which is a solid investment according to the PPP. 150 shares currently trade at $10,000, but people with a smaller budget can get 2 shares for just $200.

2. Denounce Someone

If you happen to know someone who pirates music, software or movies on the Internet, you can first report them, and then send them over to the PPP website to book their cell early on. There are several options to choose from, and early birds get the best picks.

3. Book a Cell Yourself

Last but not least, you can book a cell yourself, and make sure that you’ll have a comfortable time in prison once you’re locked up. If your budget allows it, you can book the “jail premium” package: the largest cell available, complete with broadband Internet.

TorrentFreak contacted one of the project leaders, who told us that he hopes to get the RIAA and MPAA on board as one of the main investors in the project. He’s right, it’s their future…

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

One of the software engineers at Spotify is Ludvig Strigeus, the creator of uTorrent. It is therefore no surprise that the application uses very few resources, just 12k memory when we tested it. The rumor goes that some of the money made when uTorrent sold to BitTorrent Inc., has actually been invested in Spotify, an application that competes with piracy.

When we asked Andres Sehr of Spotify to describe the service, he told us “Spotify is a new way of enjoying music. We believe Spotify provides a viable alternative to music piracy. We think the way forward is to create a service better than piracy, thereby converting users into a legal, sustainable alternative which also enriches the total music experience.”

The quality of the music on Spotify is comparable to 160kbps MP3s, which is more than decent for a streaming application. To fill its library, Spotify has cut deals with EMI, Warner Music, Sony BMG and three other major labels, which all responded positively to the new concept. Interestingly, Spotify also uses P2P technology to stream the more frequently accessed tracks.

“Spotify uses a hybrid p2p system where music is delivered both by our servers and using P2P,” Andres Sehr said. “This allows us to deliver the long tail of music which may not be very popular, as well as quickly serve up the latest hits that the majority of users listen to. P2P allows us to both increase the speed that we deliver music and also lower the cost of streaming it.”

Aside from being a music streaming application, Spotify also allows users to create and share playlists with each other, the top 100 tracks of 2008 according to Pitchfork editors for example. On top of that, the Spotify interface helps you to discover new artists with its “similar artists” and “artist radio” feature.

The overall response from Spotify users seems to be very positive, but can it compete with piracy? Time will have to tell, but Spotify invites are actively being traded within the BitTorrent community, and it has even been well received on some of the most elite music trackers.

One user at the music tracker What.cd wrote: “Honestly it’s going to be huge. I’ve been browsing and playing from its seemingly endless music catalogue all afternoon, it loads as if it’s playing from local files, so fast, so easy. If it’s this great in such early beta stages then I can’t imagine where its going. I feel like buying another laptop to have permanently rigged.”

Spotify is not perfect though. One of the mentioned downsides is that it is not compatible with iPods and other portable MP3 players. The Spotify team hasn’t ruled out the option of an iPod compatible version in the future, but for now they will focus on optimizing the Windows and Mac application.

Overall we can conclude that Spotify definitely has potential, but time will tell if it’s able to compete successfully with piracy. Spotify is currently in Beta stage, invites to the free (ad-supported) version can only be used in the UK, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Spain and France, but restrictions usually don’t stop pirates.

Update: We have a few invites left, please remember though that it’s only available in the UK, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Spain and France. Those who’d like to receive an invite, send me an email with “spotify” as subject. According to some of the commentary, an invite is not even needed though.

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

The site goes even further though. For every video file, Vertor takes several screenshots so users can verify that it is actually the film the title says it is. Similarly, for music torrents users can preview 20 seconds of the tracks, to avoid downloading the wrong files, wasting precious bandwidth.

Alex, the founder of Vertor explained to TorrentFreak: “If there is a video we extract screenshots, if there is a text file we save it on our server, if there is music we extract 20 second samples and if there is archive we open it and extract the list of files. Then we manually remove video files protected with DRM.” On an average day, 6000 torrents are downloaded, and between 2000 and 2500 torrents are verified and get published.

There is a downside to verifying all the torrents though. Since it takes some time to process, it can take one or two days before a fresh torrent appears on the site, which might be a problem for those who want to catch up with a TV-episode that aired yesterday. On the server side, the drawback is that these processes require some additional hardware. Alex told us that they use 6 Dual Xeons with 4 GB ram and 500GB of hard disk space.

It is therefore no surprise that it took a few weeks of verifying torrents before the Vertor project could go live. Currently there are 138439 torrents verified, and more than 5000 were removed because they contained a virus or a passworded archive. In addition, the site’s moderators blocked another 14445 torrents. Alex told us that they started to use new anti-virus software this week, which should be resulted in higher percentage of virus recognition.

Aside from the verification part, Vertor has another user friendly feature, as it allows users to download torrents in their browser with Bitlet, by clicking the “download from the web” button on the torrent detail page. For now, the site is completely ad-free, and Alex told us that he will try to keep it like that for as long as possible.

In summary, we think that Vertor has a lot of potential, especially for those people who are not familiar enough with BitTorrent to spot the bad stuff themselves.

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

Compared to the next largest eD2k site ‘Filenexus’, ShareReactor was twice the size, with millions of pageviews pushed through its servers before The Pirate Bay and Suprnova had even registered their domains.

On March 10th 2004, the site was shut down by Swiss police, who seized the servers and detained the site owner, Christian Riesen, aka Simon Moon, for a day for questioning. Almost immediately the ShareReactor forum reappeared but without the popular eD2k links, and it took until September 2006 for the site to make a full return under new management. However, it wasn’t to last, and within a month the site was closed again.

Of course, there are few things that the file-sharing community love more than a big comeback, and today they aren’t going to be disappointed. ShareReactor, one of the original file-sharing giants, is to return, this time with completely new management team and some serious backing in the form of The Pirate Bay, who will assist with hosting and PR.

Episode 19, in a network far, far away a lone technician plugs in the final cable into an almost forgotten big machine complex, identified by a faded green label as ‘ShareReactor’. Everything hums and comes alive. The first input from the technician is ‘But what does it all mean?’, to which the machines in unison reply: 42!

For eDonkey fans – particularly those who used the site back in 2004 – the site will immediately provide some nostalgia. Although the site has been redesigned, the team has decided to keep the original spirit of 2004 alive with a familiar theme and graphics. Additionally, all of the eD2k links the site had in its database will return, making a truly impressive library, and these are being complemented with fresh links across the whole content spectrum.

Some will argue that BitTorrent is a crucial requirement for a successful P2P site in 2008, and this fact hasn’t eluded the new ShareReactor team. The site will now index both eD2k and .torrent links, offering the very best that the world’s major networks have to offer. Indeed, some 500 new releases have been added already, with some releases on the site offered in dual format – both BitTorrent and eD2k.

‘Utopat’, who leads the four man admin team consisting of ‘chaykin’, ‘DCJoeDog’ and ‘O-MEGA, told TorrentFreak that the site will be keeping up to date with the latest TV series, with links to these being posted promptly to the site. Furthermore, each release – no matter if it relates to a TV show, movie, software or game – will not have multiple versions.

“If it’s not a private torrent site, you see the same TV show episode 20 times, the same game 50 times and with applications you might see hundreds of copies of the same thing,” he told TorrentFreak. On ShareReactor there will be just one .torrent and eD2k link for each release and these will be moderated, ensuring an easy choice for the user and guaranteeing quality.

“There are so many viruses, fake torrents or simply not-working torrents, it’s hard for many users to find what they want. Sure, the seasoned users know how to spot the bad apples, but let’s face it, that’s not the majority,” Utopat told us. These problems won’t be appearing on ShareReactor.

The core of many file-sharing sites lies in the strength of its forum community, and ShareReactor will be no different. The site will have a dedicated standalone forum and for ex-members looking for immediate membership, all they have to do is enter their previous username and password, since they have all been retained. Anyone with a shorter memory or simply new to the site can create a new login with ease.

For those looking to make a few friends and maybe meet up with some faces from the past, ShareReactor has an IRC channel – #ShareReactor on EFNet.

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

That’s where sites like Jamendo and last.fm come in. Often they work in a relational way – “you like this, so we think you’ll like this…” – and can draw a number of new fans. However, it’s rare for peer-to-peer clients themselves to start promoting artists directly, but that’s what FrostWire has done.

Through their new welcome screen, FrostWire users were offered the 6-track album “Oh My” from Sean Fournier for download via BitTorrent. To make things even easier, streaming versions were also available to play, so the music could be sampled without even using the torrent. The key here is the simplicity. With one click, the songs could be played. With another click, the torrent for the songs was launched in the client, and the tracks downloaded.

The question that first comes to mind is: Was it a success? Well, in the first weekend, there were over 25,000 downloads according to the FrostClick site. Now, there are over 32,000 completed, and over 1 terabyte of data transferred via BitTorrent. While it’s no longer being promoted, and due to the limited reach and knowledge of the torrent (to FrostWire users), the growth is still impressive.

The rulings involving peer to peer software over the past few years have directed p2p software companies from trying to build the best network for swapping your Madonna and Metallica mp3s, to ones that actively promote their ’significant non-infringing uses’. It may cost the company a little in bandwidth (for the streaming of the example tracks) but the cost of this is less than lengthy court cases around vicarious infringement. The goodwill generated is also a nice bonus, being known as a p2p client that actively promotes small artists is good publicity.

For artists, FrostClick is a unique opportunity to reach out to an audience of millions of music fans. Sean was impressed with the results of the campaign, stating on his blog “My downloads have spiked tremendously since FrostClick / FrostWire stepped in so I wanted to take time to thank everyone over there and let them know that I appreciate all the support! This is awesome!”

FrostClick’s Kademlia told TorrentFreak they want to promote people that could get signed. “We’ll be constantly looking for more professional independent content creators to give our users more legal alternatives and great media for free.” FrostClick is currently promoting Audra Hardt, and they have several other artists lined up for their free promotion service.

Disclaimer: FrostWire is one of our ’sponsors’. This article is written out of free will though, independent of any sponsorship.

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