James Burt, a 24 year-old manager at games retailer Electronics Boutique, admitted uploading the game on November 6th, a week before its commercial release in Australia.

In a statement the Japanese games giant said it used a range of forensic techniques to track down the uploader and on 23rd November obtained a Federal Court search order. This was used to locate and seize items from Burt’s property in Sinnamon Park, Queensland, to be used in evidence in the case against him.

As part of the investigation, Burt was also ordered to allow access using his passwords to social networking sites, email accounts and other websites he had used.

Australia traditionally lags behind the United States and Japan when it comes to media releases, but with the release of New Super Mario Bros. for the Wii the reverse was true, leading Nintendo to refer to the leak as a “global issue”.

“This legal proceeding was commenced to protect the creative rights and innovation of game developers, and to combat the growing international problem of Internet piracy,” the company said in a statement.

The game was a sure fire hit on BitTorrent. Data collected by TorrentFreak indicated that by December 27th 2009, the game had been downloaded 1,150,000 times.

Nevertheless, the game was still a huge commercial success. The game sold in excess of 10 million units in its first 2 months on sale – that’s 1 in 6 of all Wii gamers buying a copy – making it the fastest-selling single-platform game ever.

It’s unclear how Mr Burt will be able to pay this huge amount in damages. His salary at Electronics Boutique is unlikely to cover it – if he still has a job there.

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

James Cameron and the rest of the Avatar crew probably cracked open a few bottles of Champagne to celebrate, but today they will wake up with a serious hangover.

Only a few days after the nominations were announced, a DVD screener of Avatar (2D) appeared online. Before today, only a lower quality Telesync copy of the film has been available on BitTorrent and other file-sharing networks.

Ironically, the DVD screener that is now widely available online most likely leaked through one of the Academy Awards voters.

There is no doubt that Avatar will also score big in the list of most downloaded movies this year. The Telesync copy of the film that has been available for over a month was already downloaded by more than two million people.

It is expected that the DVD leak will easily double or even triple these figures. Avatar has been among the most searched for keywords on nearly every torrent site for more than a month already.

Twentieth Century Fox has been extra careful with sending out the DVD-screener of Avatar, as more Academy members received it mid January, just a few days before they had to vote. Although this did delay the leak, it couldn’t be prevented.

How and if the DVD-screener will affect the box-office revenues is up for debate. The film has already grossed more than $2 billion worldwide, which is an absolute record despite the relatively high piracy rate. In fact, high piracy numbers are often an indicator of success at the box-office and vice versa.

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

Below is an excerpt of Twitters blog post revealing the threat.

It appears that for a number of years, a person has been creating torrent sites that require a login and password as well as creating forums set up for torrent site usage and then selling these purportedly well-crafted sites and forums to other people innocently looking to start a download site of their very own. However, these sites came with a little extra — security exploits and backdoors throughout the system. This person then waited for the forums and sites to get popular and then used those exploits to get access to the username, email address, and password of every person who had signed up. Additional exploits to gain admin root on forums that weren’t created by this person also appear to have been utilized; in some instances, the exploit involved redirecting attempts to access the forums to another site that would request log-in information. This information was then used to attempt to gain access to third party sites like Twitter.

So, the company blames ’someone’ of installing backdoors in a torrent site script that was sold to prospective torrent sites operators, something that has apparently gone unnoticed for years. The question that comes to mind immediately is, if this is such a serious and widespread threat, why doesn’t Twitter name the source or at least give some examples of affected sites?

All of the popular public torrent sites are custom built and cannot be the source of the exploit. From the information Twitter has made available it seems they could be blaming a private tracker script for the attack – most private trackers also operate forums which matches Twitter’s description of the sites involved.

There are quite a few private tracker scripts out there and the most established ones, such as TBDev and Gazelle for example, have been examined by untold numbers of experts and come free of charge – any suggestion that they could be involved in underhand activity is unthinkable. But there are also a few scripts that are created by middle-men whose reputations are less-easily tested.

Accusations of including back doors and exploits in tracker code are not new. The owner of Template Shares, a site that sells a heavily modified version of the TBDev BitTorrent tracker script, has been accused by several people of installing backdoors which provide access to the user databases of customers’ sites.

Template Shares is used by hundreds of smaller private BitTorrent trackers.

To warn the public, other online services and the operators of the affected torrent sites, it would be appropriate if Twitter gave out some more information. TorrentFreak will continue to look into this case and will post an update if we find out more.

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

At the 2010 event held in early January, Johnny Depp fought off Brad Pitt, Hugh Jackman, Robert Pattinson and Ryan Reynolds to be come Favorite Movie Actor, with Sandra Bullock triumphing in the Favorite Movie Actress category.

In music, Lady GaGa was awarded Favorite Pop Artist, with Favorite Female Artist going to Taylor Swift and Favorite Male Artist going to Keith Urban. During his acceptance speech, Urban had quite a surprise for his file-sharing fans.

After thanking people for voting, those watching the show at home and people who took the time to see him on tour, Urban gave credit to his fan club, Monkeyville, whose members work tirelessly to get his music out there.

“I don’t even care if you download it [my music] illegally, give it to your friends, I really don’t care,” said Urban. “I love the people to hear the music and come out and see us play live.”

It seems that Urban understands the positive influence the free download can have on his tour ticket sales. But speaking with Tennessean.com, Urban now says that his words came out all wrong.

“What I said came out nothing like I meant,” explained Urban. “I was referring to the old days when you’d buy a record, do a cassette tape and give it to your girlfriend, and then maybe she likes it and becomes a fan.”

That’ll be copying music and sharing it round then, just 1980’s style. Nevertheless, Urban is sure of his stance now.

“For the record, I absolutely care about my music not being taken for free,” he added. “But I love when people are passionate and want to turn friends on to music.”

Urban is on RIAA-member Capitol Records Nashville and they cannot have appreciated his comments one little bit, but apparently it was the show format that caused Urban to say something he didn’t mean.

“I’ve never done an awards show where they seem to let you talk infinitely,” he said. “I was waiting for the ‘wrap’ sign to come up, and it never came up.”

Urban’s speech was roughly 50 seconds long, so who knows what he would’ve endorsed if it had gone on for much longer.

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

Sounds great, but let me start off with the downside to Usenet. The biggest disadvantage is that high speed Usenet servers are not free. You need at least some kind of paid subscription plan to be able to get decent speeds on Usenet. For some people this is not a problem, their argument often is that they already pay a lot of money for high speed broadband access, so why not pay a little extra to get the best speeds out of it.

The Easy Solution

For those who are new to Usenet and want the easy route, we recommend trying a free trial at Binverse. This give you all the tools to start downloading from Usenet quickly, and guarantees fast downloads. Binverse has its own built in search engine and a custom download client.

If you’re not satisfied with Binverse you can try other providers. However, a premium service will always cost a few bucks.

The Alternative Solution

1. Download Grabit here.

2. Double click the downloaded file and proceed to install.
When installing make sure ‘Associate Grabit with NZB files’ is selected.

3. Before clicking “Finish” select “Launch Grabit”. If you missed this look for the grabit icon on the desktop and double click it.

4. Once launched you’ll be asked to enter the name of your usenet server. If you have a premium server (highly recommended, e.g. a free trial at Binverse) select the check box and press next.

5. If you selected the checkbox you’ll then be asked for your news server username and password. Enter them and press next.

Note: Your username/password are case sensitive! Be sure to enter them correctly.

6. You be asked whether to retrieve a list of groups from the news server. Select the checkbox and click finish.

7. Grabit will load fully and begin downloading the grouplist. While it’s downloading continue to step 8.

8. Go to the ‘Edit’ menu and select ‘Preferences’.

9. Select the ‘Folders’ tab. Click the button right of the box containing the download directory. Here you can select the folder you want files to download to.

10. Go to your favourite NZB site (eg. newzleech, yabse) and download an NZB file. Double click the NZB file. You’ll be asked whether you want to import the NZB file, just click ‘Grab’.

11. The NZB file will be imported. If you’ve done everything right the files should then begin to download.

Downloading:

That’s all there is! Well done you’ve downloaded your first files from Usenet.

The following isn’t completely necessary but can save alot of time, especially if you don’t want to deal with 100s of par/rar files.

1. Download ParNRar here

2. Double click the downloaded file and install.

3. Launch the ‘ParNRar’ by double clicking the purple icon on the Desktop.

4. Click the button on the right of the monitored directory and select your download directory. This is the same place you used for saving files with Grabit.

5. Click ‘Go’. ParNRar will then scan your Grabit download directory checking and extracting any files present.

For extra customization click the ‘Options’ button. There are a range of options to choose from.

One useful option is to have ParNRar check the download folder every X seconds for new parts. To do this select the ‘When done scanning:’ box and change to restart. Then enter a delay between restarts.

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

Sounds great, but let me start off with the downside to Usenet. The biggest disadvantage is that high speed Usenet servers are not free. You need at least some kind of paid subscription plan to be able to get decent speeds on Usenet. For some people this is not a problem, their argument often is that they already pay a lot of money for high speed broadband access, so why not pay a little extra to get the best speeds out of it.

The Free and Easy Solution

For those who are new to Usenet and want the easy route, we recommend trying a free trial at Binverse. This allows you to try a premium Usenet provider for free. It gives you all the tools to start downloading from Usenet quickly, and guarantees fast downloads. Binverse has its own built in search engine and a custom download client.

If you’re not satisfied with Binverse you can try other providers. However, a premium service will always cost a few bucks.

The Alternative Solution

1. Download Grabit here.

2. Double click the downloaded file and proceed to install.
When installing make sure ‘Associate Grabit with NZB files’ is selected.

3. Before clicking “Finish” select “Launch Grabit”. If you missed this look for the grabit icon on the desktop and double click it.

4. Once launched you’ll be asked to enter the name of your usenet server. If you have a premium server (highly recommended, e.g. a free trial at Binverse) select the check box and press next.

5. If you selected the checkbox you’ll then be asked for your news server username and password. Enter them and press next.

Note: Your username/password are case sensitive! Be sure to enter them correctly.

6. You be asked whether to retrieve a list of groups from the news server. Select the checkbox and click finish.

7. Grabit will load fully and begin downloading the grouplist. While it’s downloading continue to step 8.

8. Go to the ‘Edit’ menu and select ‘Preferences’.

9. Select the ‘Folders’ tab. Click the button right of the box containing the download directory. Here you can select the folder you want files to download to.

10. Go to your favourite NZB site (eg. newzleech, yabse) and download an NZB file. Double click the NZB file. You’ll be asked whether you want to import the NZB file, just click ‘Grab’.

11. The NZB file will be imported. If you’ve done everything right the files should then begin to download.

Downloading:

That’s all there is! Well done you’ve downloaded your first files from Usenet.

The following isn’t completely necessary but can save alot of time, especially if you don’t want to deal with 100s of par/rar files.

1. Download ParNRar here

2. Double click the downloaded file and install.

3. Launch the ‘ParNRar’ by double clicking the purple icon on the Desktop.

4. Click the button on the right of the monitored directory and select your download directory. This is the same place you used for saving files with Grabit.

5. Click ‘Go’. ParNRar will then scan your Grabit download directory checking and extracting any files present.

For extra customization click the ‘Options’ button. There are a range of options to choose from.

One useful option is to have ParNRar check the download folder every X seconds for new parts. To do this select the ‘When done scanning:’ box and change to restart. Then enter a delay between restarts.

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

The jurors were further warned by Judge Briggs not to Google for OiNK or do any other form of research on the Internet. This might be a good suggestion, as many of the mainstream press reports thus far have been littered with inaccuracies.

Even the BBC report the site was free to join, but in the very next sentence say it cost £5. In another article they report it cost $5.

“It would be most unfortunate if any of you did any private research on the internet relating to this matter. Please don’t,” said Briggs. “It’s only likely to cause difficulties and could in theory abort the trial. So, ladies and gentlemen, no independent research.”

Judge Briggs told the jurors that the defendant, OiNK admin Alan Ellis, is charged with an offence of conspiracy to defraud.

“Put very simply it is suggested he was involved in a website that was used to distribute sound recordings and things of that nature in breach of copyright,” he said.

Ellis denies the charge that he “conspired with others unknown” to defraud the music industry.

Today the trial continued and the jury was told by the prosecution that the OiNK tracker facilitated 21 million downloads. Ellis, who accepted donations from members, had gathered almost $300,000 (£190,000) in several PayPal accounts over the years, money that allegedly came from donations.

“Every penny was going to Mr Ellis,” said Peter Makepeace, prosecuting. “He hadn’t sung a note, he hadn’t played an instrument, he hadn’t produced anything. The money was not going to the people it rightly belonged to, it was going to Mr Ellis.”

The prosecution failed to mention that the money was used by Ellis to pay for the servers and hosting, which probably cost him several thousand dollars a month.

The court was further told how OiNK did not host or distribute any music itself, but instead indexed files shared by its users for others to download.

When responding to a description of how BitTorrent works, that leechers share what they download with other peers, thus speeding up downloads, Mr Makepeace commented: “That is the beauty of the Oink website. It never had to upload any music itself, all it did was provide the facility of linking one person to another who wanted that music.”

After his arrest, the prosecution said that Ellis told officers: “All I do is really like Google, to really provide a connection between people. None of the music is on my website.”

The case continues.

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

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.

“I was interested in making a film that depicted how people actually get their media today,” filmmaker Josh Bernhard told TorrentFreak, as he explained his decision to introduce a fictitious torrent site. “There’s this whole underbelly of community-oriented filesharing sites out there that, as much as DVRs and DVD box sets and 99-cent iTunes singles, has fundamentally changed the way we obtain and experience media.”

“The Lionshare site in the movie felt like a good basis from which to bring up these issues and how they have ramifications for people – consumers and producers of content – in the real word.”

The film is an independent production which was shot for just a few thousand dollars. If anything, it shows that film making is an art where talent can easily compensate for a lack of a multi-million dollar budget. And thanks to BitTorrent, it can be distributed to millions of people at no cost.

Today the film makes its official debut on BitTorrent through VODO. Short for voluntary donations, VODO offers a novel distribution platform for indie filmmakers, fully supported by The Pirate Bay, isoHunt, Mininova and many other well known file-sharing partners.

Thus far, VODO has been a great success for all the people involved, in particular the filmmakers.

Previous releases though VODO were downloaded hundreds of thousands of times, making it the ideal platform for up and coming as well as established film makers. Because it carries the name of a fictional BitTorrent site, The Lionshare most definitely has to be distributed among peers.

Like many other filmmakers, Josh is more than happy to share his work through BitTorrent. “I think new technologies like BitTorrent can benefit indie filmmakers, but beyond that, I don’t see it as much of a choice,” he said. “I could never have made this movie unless I made it on my own, and online venues allow me to get it out there to be seen by people.

“I’m not looking to make a million bucks, just enough to make another movie. It’s hard to say what distribution model is going to take a firm hold in the future, but it’s definitely not going to be the way big media companies have been doing business in the past,” Josh Added.

The film can be downloaded through VODO or one of the many partner sites including The Pirate Bay. Don’t forget to donate to the makers if you like what you see.

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

When it comes to copyright policy, there appears to be only one set of people the government is willing to listen to, and that’s the copyright lobbyists groups. Groups that don’t represent the creators as much as those that manage the creators; the middlemen. And so it is with the attendees of today’s meeting with US Vice President Joe Biden.

Biden, whose political career – like many US politicians – has been partly funded by pro-copyright groups, came out to say that he is offended by the “flat unadulterated theft” some call piracy. A bold statement, but not really that surprising when you take a look at the one-sided list of attendees.

There are no consumer groups, no technology companies, and few representatives of the artistic creators themselves. There are plenty of are representatives of middlemen companies though. Companies that make their money from managing, distributing and promoting, tasks that are increasingly being made obsolete with technological progress.

We’re talking about the likes of Sony’s Michael Lynton, who on behalf of an industry that’s having one of it’s best ever years, plead poverty less than two months ago. And Edgar Bronfman, head of WMG – you remember, the company that claimed copyrights that aren’t theirs.

What will have been on the agenda? Well, probably no items on how factually inaccurate the recent CBS piece was, or how anti-piracy studies would be improved with the release of supporting data. Instead, it will be the likes of future anti-piracy laws such as ACTA, and questioning the ability to introduce similar legislation to France and the UK.

Not that we will find out though, as apparently the press has been kicked out. Perhaps, like ACTA, this is a national security issue too. After all, who says terrorists don’t download Die Hard films for training purposes?

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

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 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.

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.