The case progressed in the Federal Court today, with iiNet barrister Richard Cobden continuing with his closing submissions.

As detailed earlier in the case, after AFACT sent many thousands of copyright infringement notices to iiNet, the ISP responded by sending them to the police. Cobden defended that decision today, claiming that the notices could constitute evidence of copyright crimes.

While the studios had earlier insisted that they would never sanction unlawful investigation methods, ITNews quotes Cobden as saying that in gathering that evidence, it was likely the investigators themselves had also committed offenses, breaching section 132AJ(1) of the Copyright Act.

The barrister said that both investigators committed primary acts of infringement online, and while AFACT had earlier claimed that iiNet users burned copyright material onto DVDs after downloading it, in fact the only evidence of that being done relates to the copies made by AFACT investigators.

Continuing to attack the evidence provided by AFACT and its anti-piracy partner DtecNet, Cobden returned to an earlier assertion that DtecNet investigators did not behave as normal BitTorrent users would. Regular users would allow their torrent client to connect to any peers, but DtecNet filtered out any that weren’t issued with iiNet IP addresses.

ARN quotes Cobden as saying this action was “foolish” as it slowed download times to several days. As we heard earlier in the case, this led to investigators counting the same infringement more than once.

Last week, Cobden argued that AFACT hadn’t provided any evidence that iiNet customers had engaged in copyright infringement as they were only sharing small parts of files (such is the nature of BitTorrent), rather than the “substantial” parts, as required under the law. In order to prove his point, Cobden went on to cite an earlier copyright case.

In 2002, Australian TV station Channel 9 sued Channel 10 citing infringement under the Copyright Act 1968. Channel 10 had broadcast short sections of Channel 9 programs The Today Show, Who Wants to be a Millionaire, Days of Our Lives and Sale of the New Century in their television show called The Panel. The view was that of the 11 segments played, only 3 were long enough to constitute infringement.

As anti-piracy tracking companies such as DtecNet only record an instance of alleged copyright infringement timed to a single second, Cobden is arguing that there is no evidence to prove any “substantial” part of any movie was shared by iiNet users.

Cobden went on to insist that in order to confirm that evidence of infringement provided by AFACT was indeed accurate (before passing notices to their customers), it would be necessary for the ISP to breach copyright.

“If one wanted to check the DtecNet evidence and see on a range of IP addresses supplied by iiNet that infringing material was online, the only way to do it would be to use the BitTorrent client like DtecNet did, construct the parameters of the IP address range, locate the file and compare it to details in the spreadsheets,” said Cobden, as quoted by ITNews.

Cobden said that if iiNet passed unproven infringement notices to its customers, it would face problems if the account holder disputed the claims. After all, iiNet had only AFACT’s word that an infringement had been carried out, but absolutely no proof or other information to have a meaningful discussion on the issue.

It is likely that Cobden will finish his closing submissions next Tuesday 24th. The Internet Industry Association’s application to become a ‘friend of the court’ will be heard on the afternoon of that day, bringing the original date forward by two days.

The case will then end either next Wednesday or Thursday, but readers are advised not to hold their breath for the verdict – it could take several months to arrive.

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

Ink was downloaded more than 400,000 times last week and ended up in fourth place in our weekly chart of most downloaded movies on BitTorrent, where Zombieland occupied the top spot.

Zombieland co-writer Rhett Reese has been following our most pirated movies chart as well, and thus the online success of his film. “Zombieland currently the most pirated movie on bit torrent. Over one million downloads and counting,” he tweeted a few hours ago.

However, unlike the makers of Ink, Reese is not pleased with this achievement, claiming that this piracy disaster may very well prevent a Zombieland sequel from being shot. “Beyond depressing. This greatly affects the likelihood of a Zombieland 2,” he wrote.

Reese’s comments are the classic Hollywood response we wrote about yesterday. Piracy is causing billions of dollars in lost revenue and prevents new movies from being funded, is the doomsday scenario they often paint. But is there any truth in this hunch, or is it just another Hollywood performance? Facts seem to support the latter.

More piracy is not necessarily linked with a drop in box office grosses or DVD sales. ‘The Dark Knight’, which was the most downloaded movie on BitTorrent in 2008 sold millions of DVDs, and grossed a record breaking billion dollars in cinemas worldwide. But what about Zombieland?

The Hollywood Insider wrote that the movie is “alive and kicking” at the box office, putting its success down in part to “strong word-of-mouth”. The release also marks the most successful debut of Woody Harrelson’s career, hitting the No.1 spot and taking $9.4m on its first day and a worldwide $84m to date – all this on a production budget of less than $24m.

Zombieland grossed more than $60.8 million in 17 days, even surpassing the remake of the Dawn of the Dead to become the top-grossing zombie film in history. That does not really sound like something that will prevent a sequel to us.

On the contrary, if anything success on BitTorrent has a direct relation with success at the box office. Since unauthorized ripped versions of virtually all movies appear on the Internet nowadays, it would be a really bad sign if no pirate would want to download it.

But of course, Reese and others could still argue that they would have made even more money if there was no piracy. There are no hard facts to refute this, but with the box office revenue steadily increasing since P2P file-sharing became mainstream, it has to be doubted as well. The same can be said for the claim that less films receive funding.

As many independent filmmakers have already experienced, BitTorrent and the Internet in general can be a boon to the film industry. Instead of seeing it as a threat Hollywood might want to embrace it before it’s too late.

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

In this short time span it was downloaded by more than 400,000 people on BitTorrent alone, earning it a spot in TorrentFreak’s chart of top 10 most pirated movies this week.

For most Hollywood bosses this is usually a trigger to start complaining about lost revenue, but the makers of Ink are welcoming their new pirate audience.

In an email to the followers of their newsletter, Jamin and Kiowa Winans say that they have “embraced the piracy” and are “just happy Ink is getting unprecedented exposure.” Thanks to the pirated copy their movie jumped to 16th place on IMDb’s movie meter, and according to the makers this increased popularity also boosted DVD and Blu-ray sales.

Who needs a hefty marketing budget to promote a movie (and merchandise) when they have BitTorrent? Sent out a few hours ago, here’s the mailing in full plus a follow up response from Kiowa.

Dear Fans and Friends,

Over the weekend something pretty extraordinary happened. Ink got ripped off. Someone bit torrented the movie (we knew this would happen) and they posted it on every pirate site out there. What we didn’t expect was that within 24 hours Ink would blow up. Ink became the number 1 most downloaded movie on several sites having been downloaded somewhere between 150,000 to 200,000 times as far as we can tell. Knowing there’s absolutely nothing we can do about it, we’ve embraced the piracy and are just happy Ink is getting unprecedented exposure.

As a result, Ink is now ranked #16 on IMDb’s movie meter and is currently one of the top 20 most popular movies in the world.

This all started as a result of the completely underground buzz that you’ve each helped us create. We’ve had no distributor, no real advertising and yet the word of mouth that you’ve generated has made the film blow up as soon as it became available worldwide. So many of you came to see the movie multiple times, bringing friends and family and many of you have bought the DVD and Blu-ray from us. All of this built up and built up and suddenly it exploded.

We don’t know exactly where this will all lead, but the exposure is unquestionably a positive thing.

Ink hits Netflix, Blockbuster, iTunes and many more tomorrow! Remember to get your signed copies, t-shirts and posters at the Ink Store.

Thank you so much for the constant love and support.

Jamin and Kiowa
Double Edge Films

And the follow up response we got from Kiowa, in reply to this article.

Dear Ernesto,

To say we are shocked by all this news and are digesting it rapidly is an understatement. We made this film in Denver, CO on a budget of $250,000 and have fought to bring it to 15 cities ourselves over the past ten months. Hollywood has claimed that they don’t know how to market the film or that it doesn’t have an audience, and what BitTorrent has done in the last four days is prove, unequivocally, that Hollywood is wrong.

So is this the best thing that could happen to our little film? Absolutely! There is no way this many people would know about the film otherwise, or that our IMDb MovieMeter would have shot up an astounding 81,000% from a few days of activity over the torrent sites. What Hollywood would calculate as lost dollars, we calculate as fans earned. Due to many suggestions from downloaders over the past few days we have established a Donate button on our Store page for people to contribute what they can. Thank you for posting that info.

We’re not looking to get rich, but would like to pay back our investors and the enormous amount of personal debt we’ve gone into making the film. We’re also not looking to make Hollywood films (Jamin has had several opportunities) and plan on continuing the march of making fiercely independent films. In order to do that we have to count on the power of the people, eyeballs all over the world and torrenters to throw our film a few bucks apiece. It’s the indie film model of the future and we appreciate each and every person who takes the time to watch our film. It appears we’re all rebels here… so let’s wave that flag proud.

Again, we are really floored that all of this is happening and that you’ve opened up the conversation!

All the best,

Kiowa K. Winans

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

The case continued Thursday in the Federal Court, with iiNet CEO Michael Malone taking the stand for the fourth consecutive day, and possibly his last.

Not unusually for a copyright trial involving BitTorrent, the issue of The Pirate Bay was raised.

Yesterday AFACT barrister Tony Bannon incorrectly suggested that iiNet’s very own BitTorrent tracker’s functionality had been taken down, later to discover that in fact the court’s network blocked BitTorrent transfers.

Bannon indicated that he would like to be able to give a courtroom demonstration of The Pirate Bay Thursday, and the judge agreed that it would be possible to lift the block so he could do so.

According to ITNews, Bannon was today true to his word.

After the demo, Bannon enquired of Malone whether iiNet had a desire for its subscribers to be able to access the world’s largest tracker, “…when the only purpose it serves is providing a way to download unauthorized copies of films?”

This question was met with objection from iiNet barrister Richard Cobden, who argued that customer “desire” was irrelevant to the case. The judge, Justice Cowdroy, was also keen to discover the relevance.

Bannon then became the latest in a long line of movie and music industry lawyers to reveal that should his clients win the case, they will take legal action to have not only the world’s largest tracker blocked from iiNet’s customers, but other similar sites.

He also revealed that around 50% of the alleged copyright infringements in the case came courtesy of The Pirate Bay.

Then Bannon attempted to show that by allowing its customers to access The Pirate Bay, iiNet effectively sanctioned and authorized their infringing activities.

“We seek Mr Malone’s position as to whether or not his customers should have access to sites such as this,” said Bannon.

However, after legal argument, Bannon withdrew the question.

Malone did, however, concede that iiNet had taken no steps to block The Pirate Bay, but qualified this by indicating that the company didn’t possess the means to do so. Bannon asked if it was technically possible and Malone replied that he could achieve a primitive block with additional equipment, but even that could be easily circumvented

“To completely and conclusively block access to The Pirate Bay, I believe it to be beyond our technical capability or of any ISP,” replied Malone.

Asked by Cobden if iiNet had ever blocked any web sites, Malone said the company had not.

This technical inability led to iiNet pulling out of the Australian government’s filtering trials, reports ComputerWorld. Malone has been an outspoken critic of the filtering scheme, labeling it “fundamentally flawed” and saying his company would only participate in the trials to prove that filtering would fail.

The case continues.

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

While delaying a final decision until the next parliament, Business Secretary Peter Mandelson yesterday confirmed plans to have UK residents accused of illicit file-sharing disconnected from the Internet as a “last resort”.

Preceded by months of sending warning letters with an aim of achieving a 70% reduction in online piracy by 2011, Mandelson claims that only persistent offenders would be affected by the harshest measures – those accused of infringing copyrights multiple times.

However, downloading a single music track constitutes an infringement, so being accused on the basis of three or four tracks downloaded over a period of months could be enough to have an entire household disconnected from the Internet. Hardly the promised “proportionate” response.

While the Business Secretary is insisting that there will be an independent appeals process to ensure that any accusations are accurate, his words aren’t inspiring confidence with Internet service providers.

Yesterday, BT Group made a statement indicating its concern at the government’s proposals, noting its disappointed that ISPs will have to bear some of the costs of the scheme, resulting in increased prices for broadband customers.

As detailed earlier, those costs are likely to spiral to £365m per annum, putting the alleged music industry piracy “losses” of £200m in the shade.

“We are also interested to hear whether or not customers will have some form of fair legal hearing before their broadband supplier is required to take any action against them,” said BT.

TalkTalk, the UK’s second largest ISP, owner of the Tiscali and AOL brands and operator of the Dont Disconnnect Us website, went much further.

“The approach is based on the principle of ‘guilty until proven innocent’ and substitutes proper judicial process for a kangaroo court. What is being proposed is wrong in principle and it won’t work in practice. We know this approach will lead to wrongful accusations,” said Andrew Heaney, TalkTalk’s Executive Director of Strategy and Regulation.

According to a report this morning, TalkTalk is now threatening to launch legal action if Mandelson makes good on his threats and implements any disconnection scheme without due process.

“If the government moves to stage two we would consider that extra-judicial technical measures and would look to appeal the decision because it infringes human rights,” Heaney told The Guardian. “TalkTalk will continue to resist any attempts to make it impose technical measures on its customers unless directed to do so by a court or recognised tribunal.”

One pressing issue that seems to have been completely ignored is the existence of current copyright laws which are already being used to punish alleged file-sharers in the UK.

Companies like ACS:Law are already making accusations against UK Internet users who they claim are infringing the rights of their clients, demanding £600+ for the alleged infringement of a single music track.

Are we to have a dual system where Internet users can be both disconnected by the government and financially punished by private companies for the same offenses? The government should decide which system is to prevail and pick one, changing the law if necessary.

The full proposals for the graduated response scheme will be detailed in the Digital Economy Bill, set to be published later on this year.

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

However, none of this stopped the lobby groups, or the politicians looking to push for the ruling.

In the EU, the amendment, which would protect against 3-strikes laws by requiring due judicial process to occur before any sanction (such as cutting off Internet access), has been substantially watered down. Meanwhile, in France the Constitutional Court has ruled in favor of a slightly modified version of HADOPI – their legislation which includes a 3-strikes sanction.

On Tuesday, the Parliament gave up on Amendment 138, which had been voted on twice by the assembly, gaining a majority both times. The amendment was supposed to protect the rights of citizens from being treated as guilty upon the accusations of an industry group, and punished based on the same. It read;

Applying the principle that no restriction may be imposed on the fundamental rights and freedoms of end-users, without a prior ruling by the judicial authorities, notably in accordance with Article 11 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union on freedom of expression and information, save when public security is threatened in which case the ruling may be subsequent.

Instead, they are now considering a version which does not guarantee the right to an effective and timely judicial review.

Christian Engstrom, the Pirate Party’s MEP, commented on the amendment in his blog. He included the differences in text that have been made since Tuesday (bold denotes added text, strike-through indicates removed) in a meeting between three negotiators for the European Parliament and representatives for the Council of Ministers.

The changes included the removal of the judicial guarantee, that any measures should come only after a fair an impartial procedure (and should now just ‘respect’ such things), and the ACTA-like inclusion of ‘National Security’ clauses.

He summarized things simply, saying: “It shows utter contempt for Parliament by totally ignoring everything it says. The Council plans to bypass Parliament and once and for all prove that it is they who make the decisions, end of story.”

Meanwhile, France’s highest Constitutional Court has approved a slightly modified version of HADOPI. While initially blocked last September, a change to require a judge to sign off on the disconnection action (rather than the Agency itself) has meant it passed the Court. However, such court measures will be ‘fast tracked’ rather than given full judicial process, a situation the New York Times describes as ’similar to traffic violations’.

This has angered many, including (of course) the Pirate Party. Laurent Le Besnerais of the Parti Pirate and Pirate Party International called it “a huge blow for Internet Freedom.”

“In June 2009, this same Council declared that Internet access is a fundamental right which cannot be restricted without judicial process,” he told TorrentFreak. “Today, the council gives a judge the right and responsibility to pronounce a closure of Internet access to anyone suspected of having shared illegally. Furthermore, the suspect will have to prove his innocence, which creates a presumption of guilt.”

With the flip-flopping over these measures, it can only be seen as a greater boost for the European Pirate Parties in future elections. However, since much of the party works and draws its support online, there is the risk that members could start having their net connections cut off. With evidential standards so low, would it really be beyond the realms of possibility that political critics of these plans could end up being cut off at the say-so of those they oppose?

If all goes as planned the agency will be staffed next month, with letters starting in the new year, and terminations starting as soon as next summer. How long the law will stay once the innocent start being punished is harder to predict. As with IPRED, the people the law aims to deal with will just use seedboxes, VPNs, and open WiFi hotspots instead of their home connections.

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

According to a recently published paper by Prithula Dhungel, Di Wub 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.

Titled “Escape From Terror Byte City” the book tells the story of two young boys who attempt to download the latest Transformers movie from a P2P website. Of course, when the two fire-up their file-sharing software all hell breaks loose.

Surprisingly, the story itself has nothing to do with the consequences of copyright infringement. The comic book that is supposed to educate children about file-sharing is nothing more than a scary story about viruses, worms, trojan horses and identity theft.

It’s quite sad really when you think about it. Apparently the MPA and their anti-piracy partners have decided to give up on the message that piracy hurts their business in the hopes that horror stories about infected computers will deter youngsters from downloading copyrighted works instead.

That aside, the risks of being exposed to viruses and malware on P2P networks have always been greatly exaggerated. If we follow the logic of the MPA we might as well ban email because of all the trojans and phishing scams that are sent around. Or stop selling USB drives because people might lose them and potentially expose personal information that shouldn’t be on there in the first place.

The comic is conveniently avoiding the word copyright, perhaps because the 10 year crusade against copyright infringement hasn’t led to any results. The propaganda doesn’t work without providing alternatives, and every parent knows that forbidding something quite often leads to the opposite result.

Still, the entertainment industry seems unconcerned with innovation and new ways to adapt to the digital era. Instead they prefer to focus on promoting new ways to punish potential consumers. Aside from pushing the comic book, the Hollywood lobbyist also lobbied for the return of the controversial ‘3-strikes’ legislation which was scrapped earlier this year after public pressure.

Will they ever learn? A scanned copy of the full comic book is available on Mininova. This one’s going to be a collectors item, for sure.

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

These are the words of singer songwriter James Blunt in The Times today, in response to the opinions of Lily Allen published and republished a thousand times last week. Allen had taken a swipe at Radiohead’s Ed O’Brien and Nick Mason, the Pink Floyd drummer, after they came out and said that file-sharing is beneficial for artists.

Both O’Brien and Mason are members of the Featured Artists Coalition (FAC), which opposes plans by Peter Mandelson to disconnect persistent file-sharers, but they are becoming quite a problem for the rest of the industry.

The major labels, who hold the opposite opinion on the issue of unauthorized downloading, have been in intensive talks with FAC over the last week, trying to reach some sort of consensus on the way ahead. Somehow the music industry needs to show a united front to the government, but at the moment that seems very unlikely. Yesterday FAC said that so far they have failed to find a way forward with the rest of the industry.

“[The] power to demand suspensions of accounts is only achievable through a wide-scale invasion of personal privacy which we believe would result in a dangerous reduction in the rights to protection of the individual. Putting this power in place would reduce the civil liberties of every one of us in the country in order to afford a disincentive threat to a small minority of ‘egregious offenders’. We believe this would be both disproportionate and unenforceable,” said FAC in a statement.

FAC said that while it negotiated with the labels all last week, they cannot be moved from their insistence that file-sharers should be disconnected from the Internet. FAC says it is steadfast in its opposition to this route.

In an attempt to soften their edges and appear less aggressive, UK Music, yet another music industry umbrella organization, has removed the actual word “disconnection” from its press releases and statements. However, even a cursory glance at their current wording shows that this omission is purely cosmetic, instead stating: “…..Ofcom should be granted appropriate and proportionate powers as directed by the secretary of state.” Of course, Ofcom are the people that are being proposed to have the power to disconnect file-sharers.

So as FAC and the British public stand on one side, Peter Mandelson, the record labels and the likes of Lily Allen and now James Blunt stand on the other.

“At long last the Government is looking to legislate to protect the industry,” writes Blunt, while completely forgetting that the UK has some perfectly good copyright laws to deal with, surprisingly, copyright infringement.

“Peter Mandelson is looking to engage the internet service providers who, in my opinion, handle stolen goods, and should take much more responsibility,” Blunt continues, while forgetting that as a carrier, under the law ISPs have no responsibility for the traffic they carry or the actions of their subscribers.

“How this legislation pans out, and if it goes through at all, is critical to the survival of the British music business; critical to thousands of jobs; and critical to our ability to nurture and develop great musicians and the songs and albums that we would hope to listen to in the future,” Blunt concludes.

Bringing in draconian laws to scare the public into buying music is not the answer. Taking away people’s Internet is definitely not the solution. The labels need to realize this and instead provide some high quality all-you-can-eat music services at a price that everyone can afford.

And as UK ISP Virgin Media sends its message to the government that a “heavy-handed, punitive regime will simply alienate consumers” and that “persuasion not coercion” is the key to solving this illicit file-sharing ‘problem’, I’ll end with a few lines from martial artist and best-selling author Geoff Thompson’s book Watch My Back, as he writes about a gang trying to impose their will on others;

This crew had gained respect in the city, but it was respect born through fear; stolen not given. Respect is worthless unless it’s earned. Any half-wit can point a loaded gun and demand respect but it brings hate with it. Real respect encourages co-operation and understanding

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

Then TorrentFreak got word from Alex, the admin of BTArena. He had downloaded the archive and spent quite some time putting all back together. “I made an online copy of The Pirate Bay,” he told us. The news flashed around the world and was covered by hundreds of news outlets – The Pirate Bay had been successfully cloned.

Then yesterday, quite unexpectedly, TorrentFreak received an email from AIMR (Asociatia Industriei Muzicale din Romania) – Romania’s answer to the RIAA.

We are Music Industry Association of Romania, and we represent the local labels for both romanian and international content. The website btarena.org (The Pirate Bay clone) is hosted in Romania and we already started the legal action against it.

Immediately we contacted Alex and asked him if he had a comment. He told us he knew of the legal action, but only because he’d read about it on a local news site.

According to AIMR, last Friday they contacted BTArena’s host and informed them about “illegal activity” and the ISP said it would pass on the notification.

It is worth noting that the backup of The Pirate Bay available via BTArena does not offer the full structure of The Pirate Bay. It is just an archive of TPB’s .torrent files and BTArena makes no attempt to track any of the torrents with its own tracker – that task is still being carried out by The Pirate Bay.

At the time of writing, BTArena.org is intermittently available and BTArena.net, the location for the TPB backup, is unavailable.

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

Today, the judge ruled that the world’s largest BitTorrent indexer has been ordered to clean up its site and remove all torrents that link to infringing content.

BREIN’s intention was not to shut down the site. Instead, the organization called for a filter based on infringing keywords and possibly digital fingerprints to guarantee that the rights holders have sufficient means to protect their content.

The court agreed with BREIN’s assessment that Mininova is not doing enough to protect the rights of copyright holders, and ordered the site to remove all torrent files that link to infringing content within three months, or pay a penalty of 1000 Euro per infringing torrent with a maximum of 5 million euros ($7 million).

Mininova’s notice and takedown policy that allows copyright holders to remove infringing torrents is not sufficient, the court said. Interestingly, the recently announced copyright filter that Mininova launched together with the Motion Picture Association (MPA) wasn’t mentioned in the verdict.

The court did not agree with Mininova’s defense that it is impossible to moderate all torrents that are uploaded to the site. It further said that Mininova is encouraging its users to download copyrighted material, helped by the several moderators that the site has in place.

The moderators keep the site clean and ‘family friendly’ by removing torrents that link to adult content, viruses and fake files. They do this proactively and in response to user feedback, the court concluded, pointing out that they should also be able to moderate torrents that link to copyrighted material.

It was further concluded that Mininova profits from copyright infringement though the ads that appear on the site.

Mininova co-founder Erik Dubbelboer said in a response: “We are obviously not happy with the verdict.” Mininova is considering to appeal the decision, which they have to do within three months

Developing story.

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

Now, according to a report, the leak has been confirmed by Simon Cowell’s Syco, part of Sony BMG.

The report in Britain’s The Sun tabloid, says that ‘hackers’ targeted computers at Syco and lifted the track and later put it on the Internet, but the author seems a little confused over how these things work.

Sure, the assertion that there can be “huge kudos” to be gained by the ‘hackers’ in leaking a track like this is absolutely correct, but the article goes on to say that there is a huge financial motive too.

“Dodgy file-sharing websites pay hackers top dollar for stolen tracks as they try to attract more downloaders to the site so they can rake in more money from advertisers,” is the claim from the article.

But everyone familiar with these situations understand, as soon as a track is leaked onto the Internet word gets round very quickly. Soon everyone has a copy and the track is available from dozens of other sites, probably within minutes. It’s very difficult to imagine that paying a hacker “top dollar” would be a worthwhile investment for any site – their offering would be pirated in seconds.

A Syco spokesman confirmed that the label is working with IFPI, BPI and the police to track down the leakers. “We will certainly look to bring charges against those who are responsible. We cannot give any more details at this stage for operational reasons,” he said.

At this point it seems that Syco are doing a reasonable job of containing the leak of the mp3 itself – scanning various sites which have listed the track as available reveals that most have been subject of takedown notices from Sony. At this point it appears that the track didn’t leak via the Scene, as searches on the usual release databases reveal no sign of the song.

Despite the evil hackers and investigations by anti-piracy police and the real police, coupled with rantings by Cowell, anyone can listen to the leaked song on YouTube. Go figure.

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

Late last week the band’s BitTorrent link was revitalized after a new Radiohead track leaked onto the Internet. After this advance release of “These Are My Twisted Words,” rumors began to grow that Radiohead themselves might be behind the ‘leak’.

Speculation grew on the back of comments made by Thom Yorke of the band to The Believer: “We’ve actually got a good plan, but I can’t tell you what it is, because someone will rip it off. But we’ve got this great idea for putting things out”.

Today, on the band’s Dead Air Space blog, Jonny Greenwood (lead guitar and keyboard) seems to solve the mystery:

So here’s a new song, called ‘These Are My Twisted Words’.

We’ve been recording for a while, and this was one of the first we finished.
We’re pretty proud of it.

There’s other stuff in various states of completion, but this is one we’ve been practicing, and which we’ll probably play at this summer’s concerts. Hope you like it.

At the bottom of the post are two links to downloads, one directly from Waste and the other the original torrent uploaded to Mininova a few days ago. In fact, it was uploaded twice.

An enthusiastic commenter on Mininova exclaims: “OMFG! This torrent is being redirected from the radiohead official store, so there’s no album, just this song finished, this is very edgy, i mean thom yorke is way ahead from any other artist, at least we know he’s not doing his music to get some profit, at least not anymore, this is history being made, again, GREAT!”

Sounds like the first of many happy listeners.

Mininova is happy with Radiohead’s move also. The site’s co-founder Erik Dubbelboer told TorrentFreak: “It’s great to see that artists use Mininova to distribute and promote their content for free. We encourage everyone to do this, which is why we provide our Content Distribution service.”

Radiohead uploaded the torrent the old fashioned way though, seeding it themselves. Apparently they are well aware of the latest developments in the BitTorrent community, as they used the newly founded OpenBitTorrent tracker.

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

“DRM serves all sorts of pro-consumer purposes,” he said at the time, without going into detail about the alleged benefits.

However, in the year that followed the numbers of consumers calling for DRM-free music increased and more labels and music services started to offer music without digital restrictions. Still, the RIAA was not convinced that there could be a future without it, and predicted a comeback for DRM last year.

Quite the opposite happened. Although DRM is still present in the majority of the legal music stores, most of the big players have decided to ditch it. Most importantly Apple announced in early 2009 that all music sold via the iTunes store would be free of DRM. This time even the RIAA doesn’t believe that it can be resurrected.

Jonathan Lamy, chief spokesperson for the RIAA declared DRM dead, when he was asked about the RIAA’s view on DRM for an upcoming SCMagazine article. “DRM is dead, isn’t it?” Lamy said, referring to the DRM-less iTunes store and other online outfits that now offer music without restrictions.

Update July 20: Yes, it seemed to good to be true and it is. We just learned the the RIAA never used the word dead in its reply to the reporter. Lamy told TorrentFreak that he only said that there is almost no DRM on (downloaded) music anymore nowadays. In other (our) words: it’s an endangered species, not extinct.

When the most vocal forefighters of DRM say so, it must be for real. Although this is the first time that the RIAA have actually said on record that DRM is dead, other players in the music industry have seen the light before them. Most notable IFPI, who said earlier this year that stripping DRM would “significantly boost download sales.”

In this we have to agree with them. All DRM has ever done is annoy consumers who actually paid for their music. No single piece of DRM has ever stopped anyone from pirating music, it’s quite the opposite as the music industry now realizes.

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

IFPI and representatives from the movie industry argue that Telenor is willingly infringing copyright by allowing its customers to access the prominent BitTorrent tracker, but Telenor disagrees with this assessment. In a public announcement today Telenor explains why.

“If Telenor were considered complicit in any illegal activities online, we would have to block access to websites and customers on any suspicion of illegal activity. Telenor would then act as some sort of private police or private censorship authority, which would be very worrisome in light of important issues such as freedom of speech,” Telenor writes.

Blocking websites upon request from the entertainment industry is “unacceptable” according to Telenor. The ISP agrees that piracy is a problem and they don’t support customers who engage in these activities, but they are refusing to censor the Internet without a court order.

“Instead of demanding that Internet providers censor the Internet and monitor the content that’s transferred, Telenor believes that the best way to decrease illegal file sharing is to put more effort into making legally downloadable content available.”

The entertainment industries should find ways to monetize legal content in a way that satisfies both the copyright holders and customer. Blocking access to websites instead would “violate principles which constitute important prerequisites for any democracy”.

It is good to see that an ISP like Telenor is willing to go to court to protect their rights and those of their customers, instead of taking the easy route and giving to the wishes of the copyright lobby. Telenor rightfully emphasizes that the entertainment industry should focus on the source of the problem by developing legal alternatives that satisfy the need of their customers, a position also held by EU Commissioner Viviane Reding.

Even if IFPI wins in court, blocking The Pirate Bay is not going to be very effective. There are several ways to get around it and thousands of other BitTorrent sites. On top of that, the new owners of the site plan to get rid of all the copyrighted content indexed by the site.

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

Many BitTorrent users are looking for the holy grail that will boost their download speeds to the maximum, and tweaking your client can indeed help a bit. However, selecting the right torrents is far more important, and those are not necessarily the torrents with the most peers. Bram Cohen, the inventor of the BitTorrent protocol addresses this common misconception in a recent blog post.

“Cohen designed BitTorrent to be able to download files from many different sources [...] the more popular a file is, the faster a user will be able to download it, since many people will be downloading it at the same time, and these people will also be uploading the data to other users,” writes Cohen while quoting an erroneous article.

This is indeed an explanation we often hear – the more people who download a file the better – but unfortunately it’s not very accurate. Or to put it in Cohen’s words, this description of BitTorrent is “somewhere between grossly misleading and wrong.”

Cohen goes on to explain why: “There’s a classic fallacy because if one person stands up during a concert they get a better view, then if everybody stood up during a concert they’d all get a better view. This is of course is not true – they wind up slightly worse off by all standing, because they all compete with each other for a view.”

So how do you get the most out of BitTorrent then? Or to put it differently, what torrents perform the best and generally give you the fastest download times? We’ll try to explain it as simply as possible leaving math out as much as possible.

The fastest torrents will be those where downloaders (leechers) can tap into the most upload capacity. If you have a swarm (seeders and leechers) with a hundred people in total it will be faster when there are relatively more seeders. Why? Very simply it’s because seeders don’t download while their upload capacity is available for the leechers.

Many people understand these basics. A torrent with 30 seeders and 70 leechers (30% seeders) will go faster than one with 10 seeders and 90 leechers (10% seeders). However, it get confusing when you compare swarms of different sizes.

For example, a torrent with 30 seeders and 70 leechers (30% seeders) will generally be faster than one with 500 seeders and 2500 leechers (20% seeders). Why? Simply because the swarm has a smaller percentage of seeders. When picking the right torrents to download, the percentage of seeders that a swarm consists of is the most important thing to look at.

A higher percentage of seeders means that the average upload capacity available to the leechers will be higher. The fact that leechers also upload themselves is irrelevant because all peers have more download capacity than upload capacity. The seeders make the difference.

This is one of the reasons why private trackers generally have such great download speeds. Since users are required to seed as much as possible, they have torrents with 100 seeders and only two or three leechers.

So what can we learn from this? If you’re looking for fast torrents pick those with the best seeder/leecher ratio or the highest percentage of seeders. Or when you don’t have a choice, don’t complain about slow speeds when there are only a few seeders in a large swarm. Perhaps even more importantly, remember to seed as much as possible if you don’t need your upload speed for something else.

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

The first single from the album was “Shot in the Back of the Head” which is accompanied by a video directed by none other than David Lynch. However, instead of being forced to put their hands in their pockets to pay for the track, Moby released the track for free download directly from his site. Indeed, even though the album is released, anyone can still obtain that particular track for free, completely legally.

So of course, thousands and thousands of Moby fans have been downloading the track for free (just like many could do from file-sharing networks) and this has been hitting Moby financially.

Readers will be heartened to know that the above paragraph is nonsense. Moby is doing very well indeed from that track thank you very much, despite its ‘free’ status – or maybe because it’s free.

In an email to US music industry figure Bob Lefsetz, Moby revealed something of great interest;

“The album just came out and it would be #1 [in the] euro charts if not for michael jackson re-releases. So that’s good. But here’s something funny: the best selling itunes track is ’shot in the back of the head’. Why is that funny?”

“Because its the track we’ve been giving away for free for the last 2 months and that we’re still giving away for free. Odd.”

Do your part in making Moby even more successful by downloading his track “Shot in the Back of the Head” for free, here. Judging from the comments, Moby’s fans love his music and are very grateful indeed.

Free downloads don’t equal lost sales but actually increase them? What will they think of next?

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

BREIN says that FTD operates illegally but the Usenet community and its specialist IT lawyer, Arnoud Engelfriet of Ictrecht law firm vigorously deny this and are now taking legal action the Dutch anti-piracy outfit. The background to the case can be found in our earlier article, and a more detailed report on the action against BREIN here.

Yesterday, while BREIN’s site was still supposedly out of action following an alleged (or Hoaxed) DDoS attack from Pirate Bay fans, it published a further report about FTD, which was hidden on its site away from easy public viewing. Strangely the same page at the time of writing is password protected and the report unavailable, but we have a copy and translation.

Entitled ‘BREIN Demands Closure of FTD’, the anti-piracy outfit went on to say that if FTD does not close it will require a penalty of 50,000 euros ($70,000) per day against the service, in addition to compensation and full reimbursement of costs. BREIN said that FTD “organizes and promotes” Usenet content, most of which is illegal.

BREIN then refers to earlier discussions it had with FTD, noting that it asked FTD to cease its “structural use of illegal content” in early 2009. The two sides had entered discussions to see if they could iron out their difficulties. Following on, FTD pro-actively modified how they operate to ensure that there could be no doubt as to their legality.

“After we made the changes, we got complete radio silence from BREIN. No confirmation, no rejection, nothing,” Arnoud explained. “Only after several days we found out what BREIN thought – but only by reading the online news. That was a huge disappointment.”

The news saw BREIN declare that FTD was a criminal operation in an article titled “You do not pay for it, it’s unlawful” and this led to FTD taking legal action against BREIN to try to clear their name by having their operation declared legal by a court. Now BREIN is counter-claiming against FTD.

Tim Kuik from BREIN now says that it is clear that FTD “continued their abuses unabated” and that the modifications they made were only made to hide the “true nature” of the site.

“It is a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” said Kuik. “FTD earn money with a system that exists by virtue of the huge supply of illegal content to Usenet.” Mirroring the disappointment felt at FTD, Kuik added: “It is disappointing but illustrates that BREIN’s outstretched hand has been cut off.”

So what exactly does this claim for 50,000 euros per day mean for FTD? Lawyer Arnoud Engelfriet told TorrentFreak that BREIN did not ask the court for damages. Legally they are barred from asking for damages – article 3:305a of the Dutch Civil Code says that an organization that represents the interests of a certain group can never ask for damages. They asked instead for a penal sum of 50k euros if FTD were ordered by the court to shut down but it refused.

“The idea is that a court can order you to shut down but you can ignore the court,” said Arnoud. “With the penal sum, you risk that the court will then sell your house or seize other assets. In principle that’s legal, but the amount is of course ridiculous.”

“Ridiculous also sums up my view of the BREIN counterclaim. Instead of addressing any of the points we raised, they simply repeat their standard rhetoric. Nowhere is the distinction made between uploading works and telling people that someone has uploaded a work for (legal) download. And downloading illegal uploads is legal in the Netherlands,” notes Arnoud.

“BREIN is not known for its careful handling of the truth,” he added. “They are a propaganda organization after all.”

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

Tomas Wennström of What’s Next managed to secure a recorded audio interview with The Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde. In it Peter says why the site was sold, talks a little about the future for the site and touches on the huge disappointment being expressed by the site’s fans. It’s a very interesting interview, although in common with everything else going on today, it raises even more questions.

Some key points from the interview:

GGF approached The Pirate Bay with a deal several weeks ago. TPB considered GGF to be the correct company to bring the project “to the next level” since they didn’t feel capable of doing it themselves. Peter said he feels that GGF share the same values as TPB.

Peter said that TPB have been approached by companies before to sell out, but they didn’t understand the value of TPB. He said the value of the site is to be found in the userbase and nothing else. He added that if a company is interested in buying that userbase they have to keep up spirits or they will find themselves owning something that rapidly decreases in value.

Tomas Wennström said that he found it crazy that TPB would become a listed company. Peter responded that they think the concept is “super funny” and that’s one of the main reasons they are doing this.

Peter said in the past they’ve had to hide the financial details of the site and who is doing what “for legal reasons” but says that in the future there will have to be more transparency about how the operation is run, adding that people now not only have the chance to share files, but also buy shares in the site.

Peter explained that he and the original owners of TPB disposed of the site in 2006. He refused to name who took the site but referred to a single owner in one of his responses, using the word “he”.

Peter noted that the site hadn’t yet been sold to GGF and the company will have to find funding inside 4 weeks. He said he doesn’t know who the financial backers are, but if GGF cannot find the money then everything goes back to exactly the way it was before.

Peter said that the perfect situation would be if the users of the site set up something to buy The Pirate Bay. Certainly, with all the previous fund raising for buying islands etc this might have been a possibility but this has never even been put forward as an option. The idea seems optimistic considering the backlash among the users.

Currently the site is down after suffering a minor DDoS attack, and TPB’s TiAMO told TorrentFreak that the site’s load balancer had crashed .

Peter says running Pirate Bay has resulted in ‘bad pay’, i.e minus SEK 30 million in fines – incidentally an identical amount to the cash payment part of the deal with GGF.

Tomas Wennström put a scenario to Peter – what if GGF screws up and makes all that is good about The Pirate Bay go away – which seemed like a veiled reference to the availability of the usual TPB content.

“I’m agnostic about it, I think it could be true, could be faulty, but whatever happens at least something happens, which is the big thing here. I’d rather see The Pirate Bay die in a chance of becoming better, than just dying.”

For the time being The Pirate Bay crew will assist the new owners in operating the site. In addition a new tracker will be launched as well as a new torrent hosting service.

The interview can be downloaded here.

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