It might not come as a surprise to most people, but Bono’s wish is a little out of touch with reality. By mimicking the words of the record label bosses high up the food chain of the music industry, he fails to see where the real problem lies.

Over the last ten years the RIAA mounted the most aggressive anti-piracy campaign against file-sharers seen anywhere, collecting millions in settlements from thousands of households. The songwriters didn’t benefit much from that.

The RIAA also collected as much as $400m from settlements from the likes of Napster, KaZaA and Bolt. That money was supposed to go to the artists whose rights had been allegedly infringed upon, but the labels weren’t that keen to hand any of that over either, even when faced with the threat of lawsuits from the artists themselves.

The major labels, Warner, Sony, EMI and Universal, are currently being sued by another group of artists over sales of compilation albums featuring their music for which they haven’t been given a cent. The money they’re owed collectively is a staggering $6 billion. Looks like the ‘little guy’ is in trouble without the assistance of file-sharing.

While one set of corporates ripping off musicians doesn’t get a mention in Bono’s top 10, other supposed evil-doers do. Singing from the same sheet as his paymasters at Universal, Bono also takes aim at ISPs, claiming that their “swollen” profits “perfectly mirror” the lost revenues in the music business.

This “blaming of the messenger” will be a continuing theme in the next decade, and one which Bono dwells on for a moment, noting that if it’s possible to crack down on online child pornography in the US, and China has the ability to suppress online dissent, then it’s also perfectly possible to track downloads of copyrighted music.

Well, yes, of course it is. That’s been perfectly possible for the last decade, but what good does it do? The RIAA has largely given up suing individuals and even when countries like France pass fairly draconian legislation to have people removed from the Internet for sharing content, there are plenty of ways around it.

“The only thing protecting the movie and TV industries from the fate that has befallen music and indeed the newspaper business is the size of the files,” says Bono. “The immutable laws of bandwidth tell us we’re just a few years away from being able to download an entire season of “24” in 24 seconds. Many will expect to get it free.”

While it’s true that we are only a couple of years away from being to download huge amounts of data in just a few seconds and that will have an impact on the volumes of movie and TV show downloading, we can’t actually watch a full season of “24″ in 24 seconds. Real-time will suffice, though.

Right at this moment via sites like Watch-Movies-Online, it’s possible to view the very latest movies instantaneously. With the new streaming functionality available in the latest beta of uTorrent, the same can be achieved via torrent swarms.

Bono, the future is now. Suing Internet users does not work and blaming the ISPs will only prove counter-productive. Monitoring the Internet will prove futile. The only way to deal with piracy is to compete with it.

As we pointed out in our article covering the most downloaded TV shows of 2009, there is huge interest in on-demand TV and there are millions of viewers that can potentially bring in millions of dollars in revenue.

The growth in unauthorized downloading of TV shows and other media is a sign that consumers want something currently unavailable through the official channels, and while price is a factor, it is not necessarily all about ‘free’.

Serving the insatiable demand during the next decade at a reasonable price should be the main aim of the media industry, as locking down the Internet will not only suffocate their customers, but also their own business. That definitely won’t help the songwriters.

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

24 is traditionally one of the hit shows on BitTorrent. Together with Heroes, Lost and Prison Break, every episode is downloaded well over a million times. The show also has a reputation of leaking out, just before it premieres.

Similar to the unscheduled appearance of season 6, the first four episodes of the new season were uploaded onto several BitTorrent sites earlier today. The source appears to be a promo DVD sent out by the studios to several media outlets, TV editors and reviewers. According to early reports, the quality of the rip is mediocre, unlike the usual high quality scene rips usually posted on BitTorrent. Indeed, the leak appears to have bypassed The Scene altogether, leaking to P2P networks first.

It is often suggested that these leaks might be intentional, that broadcasters use them to hype the show just before the season starts. Although this is often impossible to confirm, it would not be the first time that this has happened.

In 2007, a Warner Bros executive admitted that he helped to leak the pilot of ‘Pushing Daisies’. The exec wanted to make sure the show “got out there,” and said his goal was to “help the cause.” He didn’t upload it himself though, but used his neighbor’s kid to do it instead.

The leak of these 24 episodes, whether intentional or not, is guaranteed to result in a surge of word of mouth promotion, and free promotion throughout the blogosphere. If anything it will help the show, rather than hurt it.

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

Rather than manually trawling many torrent sites hunting for material, most will agree it’s much more convenient for the content to come to the user, especially when it’s possible to take advantage of the RSS feature built into many BitTorrent clients.

TVNanny is a site dedicated to indexing various torrent sites around the world and bringing the latest in TV torrents to its users, as quickly as possible after they appear on the web.

It’s easy to sign up to TVNanny. Simply enter a username and a password along with an email address (no validation required) and registration is complete.

Clicking on the ‘Shows’ button reveals a fairly comprehensive list of TV shows, currently numbering nearly 200. Popular shows are highlighted, as are shows which have new episodes freshly indexed during the previous 24 hours. Clicking on any show name displays a page giving some detail about the plot, the actors involved and other useful information. More comprehensive reading material is made easily available by the TV.com link provided at the bottom of each page.

Once the ‘Subscribe’ button is clicked, the ’subscriptions’ page appears where it’s possible to indicate the season and episode numbers to be monitored, the desired quality (ranging from TVRip to HDTV) and a convenient release name filter. The page supplies the URL of a custom RSS feed tailored to the user’s subscriptions which can be entered into the RSS section of a BitTorrent client such as uTorrent or Azureus, providing automatic downloads as soon as the required episodes are indexed.

In the unlikely event that a certain show doesn’t appear, requests for the indexing of new shows can be made via the ‘Suggest a new show’ button.

For users who operate a client that doesn’t support the downloading of .torrent files via RSS, the TVNanny site provides a standalone piece of software which will work alongside the existing torrent client. Those using a client like uTorrent which already has RSS support can find additional information about the feature on the official uTorrent site.

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