The studios also filed suit against 80 websites accused of aiding and abetting the distribution of the illegally uploaded movies.

A National Police Agency spokesman said that the lawsuit was filed at 10 police stations in the South Korean capital, Seoul, and in the Gyeonggi province. The studios asked the police to investigate the infringements, which carry a potential jail sentence.

However, from the 10,000 complaints issued, prosecutors charged just 10 people with copyright infringement. In response, the disappointed studios say they will fight back. Next week they promise to re-file their lawsuit, but this time will increase the number of individuals accused to 65,000.

Kim Han-Seo, a lawyer representing the movie producers, said that the prosecutors were not tough enough so they had decided to up the ante.

“Now, we’ve drawn up a new list of some 65,000 users who fit this guideline,” he said. “We’ll see whether the prosecutors will press charges against them all.”

As we reported earlier on our sister site FreakBits, at the end of August distributors of a hit Korean disaster movie called in the police after it was leaked to the Internet and was downloaded 100,000 times. Kim Han-Seo said that the Korean authorities had responded quickly to that local problem, but accused them of different standards when it comes to protecting foreign content, such as the material produced by his porn movie employers.

“We believe that [the prosecution] should not be discriminatory in applying copyright laws. Illegal copying and distribution run rampant in Korea because it is one of the world’s most wired countries. We decided to take legal action to minimize our past business losses and to protect anticipated future profits,” he said.

The threat now is that if the local Korean authorities fails to act in a way that pleases the porn producers, they will take their case directly to the US government instead.

The initial lawsuit indicated that the studios had also harvested the IP addresses of around 100,000 individuals who downloaded the adult movies but to date, there is no indication that they will become a target.

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

In what appears to be a new marketing campaign by fast food giant Burger King, the company likens its cheeseburgers to piracy. A scan of a promotional flyer sent to TorrentFreak says that BK’s burgers are just like downloading music from the Internet, but better because they’re “legal”.

Maybe i’m getting old, but I can’t in any way see how cheeseburgers are like downloading music off the Internet. That said, if BK want to complete the analogy, I want their burgers leaked to file-sharing sites before their promotion starts, available 24/7 via The Pirate Bay, I want to be able to share this food with my friends (and them with their friends) without ever taking my hands off my ‘copy’. And I want my burger for free, if you don’t mind.

Here’s your chance to “Have It Your Way®”. If any creative souls out there think they could create a better (preferably funnier) flyer for Burger King on the same theme, or feel they could tenuously refer to burgers (or anything else) in a campaign to promote file-sharing, feel free to send them to me on enigmax[@]torrentfreak.com and i’ll link the best into this post.

Update: Reader Entries

The Burger Bay by Matt
BK Longwinded by Zacqary Adam Green
The New BitTorrent Deal by Basil
The BK Yummy by Wally
Like Eating a Cheeseburger, Only Free by Ascense
Ours Are Cheesy by =M=
Tell The Internet by Jason
Extortion, But Legal by Xentar
Burger Download byQuagmire_Jr

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

In preparation for a brand new promotion set to launch in hours, Japanese motor manufacturer Mitsubishi has (virtually) disassembled a brand new 2009 Colt car and uploaded its parts to the Internet. The components (30 different types in all) have been hidden on hundreds of regular plus BitTorrent and eDonkey websites.

The first Internet user to find all 30 parts will be the winner of a brand new Mitsubishi Colt car – already assembled for their convenience. The promotion is premiered to coincide with the launch of the Barcelona Motor Show, which begins this Friday May 8.

Anyone interested in entering should register at Bajateuncoltgratis.com. Just pretend to be Spanish.

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

It almost seems they are actively blocking the public from having their say, while in contrast they continue to receive input from anti-piracy lobbyists such as the RIAA and MPAA. However, as time progresses more details about ACTA become public, largely thanks to Wikileaks.

With the most recent draft that leaked a few days ago, another piece of the puzzle is completed. The leaked draft covers a wide range of issues which are impossible to cover in one article, so here we focus on the damages section. In this section, it is explained how copyright infringers should be compensated by those who share copyrighted content.

It starts as follows:

1. Each Party shall provide that:

(a) In civil proceedings, its judicial authorities shall have the authority to order the infringer of intellectual property rights to pay the right holder.

(b) In determining the amount of damages of intellectual property rights, its judicial authorities shall consider, inter alia, the value of the infringed goods or service, measured by the market price, suggested retail price, or other legitimate measure of value submitted by the rights holder.

This basically means that the courts should be allowed to make those who share copyrighted content pay compensation to the rights holders. By itself this is not that groundbreaking, but combined with point (b) it means that the RIAA, MPAA and others pretty much have a carte blanche for the amount of damages they want to request.

But it gets even worse.

2. At least with respect to works, phonograms, and performance protected by copyright or related rights, and in the case of trademark counterfeiting, in civil proceedings, each party shall establish or maintain a system that provides:

(a) pre-established damages
(b) presumptions for determining the amount of damages

In the footnote of paragraph 2b it is detailed that the damages should be equal to the number of infringed goods, multiplied by the profit that would have been made if the infringement had not taken place. The “would have been sold” part is crucial here. Is every copyrighted file shared to be considered a lost sale or will there be another formula to calculate the claimed loss in sales?

If this paragraph ends up in the final version of the agreement the participating countries are encouraged to come up with a standardized fine for copyright infringers based on lost profit. The way we see it this could easily lead to a situation where file-sharers face thousands of dollars in fines if their IP-address is found sharing a popular movie or music album.

The damages section of the ACTA draft continues with the following paragraph that suggests giving rights holders full control over how they want to be compensated.

3. Each party shall provide that the rights holders shall have the right to choose the system in paragraph 2 as an alternative to the damages in paragraph 1.

This is even more absurd. It basically means that the RIAA and MPAA will have the right to come up with their own damages formula, where they will probably cite one of their own studies to legitimize asking for exorbitant amounts of damages.

Even though this leaked ACTA text is just a draft, and many member states have suggested it should become less extreme, it is crystal clear that the legislation is heavily skewed towards the rights holders. The rights of the public, their privacy and the general criticism on the claimed “loss in profit” because of illegal downloading are all completely ignored.

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

“We just upgraded the trackers from 12 old boxes to 8 new ones that handle the same load, but now only at 20% CPU usage, so we can grow a bit more,” Pirate Bay co-founder TiAMO told TorrentFreak. “Having some spare power in the servers has allowed us to collect some fun stats,” he added, pointing us to a map showing where all the connections to the Pirate Bay tracker come from.

Interestingly, according to the geo-IP data, the map reveals that 33% of all connections come from China – around 7 million peers. This is an impressive statistic by itself, but even more interesting when you consider that the Pirate Bay website is actually blocked in China. The tracker seems to be popular elsewhere in Asia also, with 5.9% of connections coming from Taiwan and 4.2% from Japan at the time of writing.

We further see that the United States comes in second with 8%, and Sweden – the home of the Pirate Bay – is responsible for little over 1% (250,000 peers) of the tracker connections. Since Sweden has a population of approximately 9 million people, this is actually quite an accomplishment. These statistics are of course just a snapshot. They are updated frequently and vary depending on the time of the day.

This relatively simple map is just the beginning, TiAMO told us. In the near future more statistics will be added, such as the type of BitTorrent clients people use, and the average download and upload speeds per region. Some raw data will also be made available to the public, but not without guaranteeing the anonymity of the tracker’s users of course.

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

Last week, the extent of the measures became clear, when reporter Kathryn Carr spoke with Alan Coward, a team leader at Vue Cinemas in the UK. “We have staff going in for the first 20 minutes with the goggles, and the last 15 minutes. They also make regular checks in between,” said Alan, adding, “We have also been searching people’s bags on the way in.”

Spying on theater audiences is not an unusual event – US theater-goers have been subject to this treatment for a while now, but such actions are comparatively rare in the UK. Not that the UK is completely innocent when it comes to being a source for camcorded movies. It has been in the past, with movies such as X-Men: The Last Stand, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Pirates of the Carribbean 2 and V for Vendetta, all rumored to have first hit the ‘net from a UK cammer. But despite this handful of high-profile leaks, UK theaters are not a hotbed of camcorder piracy.

The fact that the UK is not a major source of camcorded movies is probably down to most movies being released elsewhere first. ‘Cammers’ like to get the movie quickly, and that usually means recording it from a US or Canadian source, so a UK release is usually unattractive since it comes too late.

However, there are other attractions for those looking to cam a movie in Britain. “If someone is found to be recording the film they would be banned from the cinema for life, and they would probably be arrested,” said Alan Coward. One can’t argue with the ban, but Mr Coward’s assessment of an arrest is fanciful. While criminal law in the UK makes it illegal to offer for sale (or rent) an infringing copy of a copyrighted movie, unlike the United States, Canada and Japan (and much to the disappointment of the MPAA), simply ‘camming’ a movie on its own is not a criminal offense in Britain.

In September 2007, Dan Glickman of the MPAA visited the UK to have meetings with senior people from the UK government and representatives of the UK Film Council. His mission was to persuade the government to introduce legislation to change ‘camming’ from a civil infringement, to a serious criminal offense. So far, that legislation has not appeared. Since theater staff cannot detain a suspected ‘cammer’ by force because the law simply does not allow it, they instead attempt to disrupt the recording by ‘peaceful means’ and notify FACT for further instruction.

However, all the lobbying, bag searches and James Bond-style night vision goggles in the world don’t seem to make any difference to the availability of pirate material. Quantum of Solace is already available on the Internet in Telesync format (video recorded via a good camcorder, with audio added from a ‘direct’ source, such as a T-Loop). It has been available for a few days in French and maybe even another couple of languages but it is now fully available in English, with what many will consider to be a half-decent picture quality.

I’d end this post with a Bond catchphrase, but for Quantum they banned them all. Shame.

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

Now it is the turn of Japan to target a pre-releaser, this time of the movie ‘Wanted‘. The movie, starring James McAvoy, Morgan Freeman and Angelina Jolie, was released early September in the United States and Europe, but won’t enjoy an official Japanese release until Saturday. The movie is, of course, already available for download on P2P networks in its native English, but thanks to the work of Kazushi Hirata, a 33 year-old from the city of Sendai, the movie is also available with Japanese subtitles.

According to the authorities, after adding his own home-made subtitles to an already-released pirate version of the movie, Hirata uploaded it onto the Winny network, which is hugely popular in Japan. Hirata was tracked down on Thursday by the Kyoto Prefectural Police, who were also responsible for the 2004 arrest of Isamu Kaneko, the creator of the Winny software.

The arrest of Mr Hirata is believed to be the first in Japan relating to the uploading of a pre-release movie. According to a report, he faces up to 10 years in jail and a $95,000 fine.

The Winny network has always been touted as anonymous, and indeed functions on this level to a degree. The police were unable to crack the encryption used by the file-sharing part of the software, however, they did manage to exploit a loophole to identify certain users. Winny’s forum feature fails to protect the anonymity of people who start discussion threads. In the past the police have searched for copyright material in such threads and recorded the IP address of the poster. By initiating a file-transfer but denying connections from all IP addresses apart from the suspected infringer, when someone started to upload to them they knew that the original poster was sharing the illicit material.

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

The downside to having a seedbox is of course that they are not free. To some this isn’t a problem, “I pay for my Internet connection, so why not pay a few extra bucks to get the best out of it,” is an argument we often hear. Others, however, are satisfied with the speeds they get, and don’t want to pay extra for BitTorrent traffic.

So why should people use these seedboxes? What are the benefits? Here are some of the advantages.

1. Competition.

Whether you’re aware of it or not, users on private trackers are extremely competitive. No matter how many torrents you have seeding, or how you’ve managed to tweak the BitTorrent client settings, there’s just no competing with the uploading power of a seedbox. With many elite private trackers, a seedbox is not just recommended, they’re almost essential for account longevity.

2. Speed.

Most seedboxes are on 100Mbit lines, which makes them really fast. Unquestionably faster than your home Internet access – unless you live in Japan or Sweden, that is. You can sit back, relax and watch in amazement at how fast the torrents finish. Gigabyte files will be downloaded in minutes, practically without limitations. Of course, you’ll still be limited to the speed of your home connection when you want to transfer these files from the server to your computer.

3. Uploading.

Some users of private trackers are less concerned about the downloading, and more about seeding. Good ratios are crucial to a healthy membership – without them, the account will wither away and die. With a seedbox, your ratio will be 1:1 within minutes, not days. 10:1 ratios are not uncommon within the first hour for popular torrents. No more do you have to seed the torrent for weeks just to stay in the good graces with your private tracker. You’ll be free to delete seeding torrents, and replace them with other ones.

4. No more throttling and bandwidth limiting ISPs

ISPs like Comcast are known to throttle your BitTorrent traffic, and they will soon introduce a monthly bandwidth limit of 100GB. With a seedbox you can bypass these limitations. Your seedbox traffic is not counted towards your ISP account stats and won’t be throttled. The only time it becomes ‘your’ traffic is when you choose to download the files from a finished torrent to your home PC, and uploading torrent traffic will not eat into your cap.

5. They’re Secure & Safe

With a seedbox, you don’t even need to use a BitTorrent client on your home computer – your worries about the RIAA or MPAA spying on you are over. No more DMCA notices or warning letters from your ISP – and more importantly, no lawsuit letters will be coming either.

Where to get a Seedbox…

Seedboxes aren’t cheap, but they don’t have to break the bank. Many services now offer a ‘torrent-specific’ seedbox packages that are great for entry-level users. Here is an affordable seedbox solution:

Happy torrenting…

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

So, let’s see how well Google does, and how their traffic estimation and ranking compares to actual traffic data and Alexa’s ranking respectively.

One of the interesting features of Google’s site comparison is that it gives an estimation of the daily traffic when you’re logged in on a Google account. The data used for the traffic statistics comes from Google analytics, consumer panels, and other third-party market research.

The traffic data seem to be quite accurate, for some sites at least. The daily (absolute) unique visitors for Mininova, for example, is estimated to be slightly above 2 million a day, which matches with real traffic stats we got from the Mininova team.

As we look at the graph below we can clearly see that Mininova is in the lead judging by the number of visitors, followed by The Pirate Bay. isoHunt and Torrentz compete for the third place. After these four sites there is a huge gap to other BitTorrent sites such as BTjunkie, TorrentReactor and TorrentPortal.

It is interesting to see how many similarities there are between Google’s ranking, and the daily reach according to Alexa.

The regional differences in popularity of the sites are also worth mentioning. The Pirate Bay, for example, is more popular than Mininova in the US, and especially in Sweden. Torrentz, on the other hand, does really well in India, while isoHunt has a relatively large fanbase in Japan.

Overall it seems that BitTorrent sites are still growing, especially The Pirate Bay, since they nearly doubled their traffic in a year. This is pretty much in line with the growth in the number of peers on The Pirate Bay trackers, which went from 5 to well over 10 million in the last 12 months.

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

According to Christian Solmecke, a lawyer defending file-sharers in Germany, the system typically operated like this: “Based on the data provided by Logistep and other P2P tracking enterprises, an offense is reported. The public prosecution service is obliged to investigate because a copyright infringement is a criminal offense in Germany.” This would then force an ISP to hand over the identity of an alleged file-sharer and they would be threatened to pay up – or else.

Not any more.

In what could be a landmark victory for file-sharers, the Federal Constitutional Court (FCC) in Germany has just issued a ruling. With it comes a new level of privacy to protect personal data and communications and, fortunately for file-sharers, this enhanced privacy is good news for them.

No longer will it be possible for media companies to force ISPs to give up the identities of its subscribers who they accuse of copyright infringement, which will undoubtedly be a huge relief to the ISPs too. After all, these are the ISPs biggest customers we’re talking about. For Germany at least, it seems like 3-strikes-and-you’re-out schemes, could’ve been ruled out.

In future, it will only be possible to get an identity behind an IP address if dealing with a ‘heavy’ crime, such as terrorism, murder, child pornography or kidnapping.

A German law student told TorrentFreak: “At the moment, I cant imagine any realistic way file-sharers can be caught. It’s possible lobby groups will try to make file-sharing count as a ‘heavy crime’, but I doubt they will have much luck. The German criminal justice judicial system is quite overextended, and the people are overworked. Public prosecutors and judges alike were quite pissed off that they had to invest time in the many file-sharing cases, which were obviously irrelevant in a criminal law sense. The public interest to put file sharers in prison is simply not there.”

This ruling will stand for 6 months, after that, the main decision will be made final. The common consensus among legal commentators is that the Federal Constitutional Court is extremely unlikely to change their decision on this matter.

The privacy issue is becoming a hot topic in the file-sharing world. Just this week, anti-piracy company Logistep was told that it had been acting illegally by spying on Italian file-sharers.

‘The European Right to Pirate in Private’ – who would’ve thought it?

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

Now, under huge pressure from the movie, music and software industries, the four major ISP organizations in Japan are at it again, and have agreed to take drastic action against online pirates.

According to the report in Yomiuri Shimbun, the agreement would see copyright holders tracking down file-sharers on the Internet using “special detection software” and then notifying ISPs of alleged infringers. ISPs would first send out emailed warnings to those traced, then interrupt the Internet connection if action to cease the activity isn’t taken. For persistent breaches, the ISP would ultimately terminate the accounts of its subscribers.

These four major ISP organizations – which include Telecom Service Association and the Telecommunications Carriers Association – are made up of around 1,000 other ISPs, a large portion of the Japanese market. In collaboration with the copyright holders, the ISPs will set up a panel in April to decide exactly how the system should operate.

Right now, there is a lot discussion surrounding the suggestion that persistent file-sharers could be banned from the internet. So far there have been proposals in France, the UK and Australia.

During December last year we reported that the number of internet users file-sharing in Japan had increased by a 180% in a single year.

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

Unfortunately, protocol header encryption doesn’t help against more aggressive forms of BitTorrent interference, like the Sandvine application used by Comcast. A new extension to the BitTorrent protocol is needed to stay ahead of the ISPs, and that is exactly what is happening right now.

Back in August we were the first to report that Comcast was actively disconnecting BitTorrent seeds. Comcast of course denied our allegations, and ever since there has been a lot of debate about the rights and wrongs of Comcast’s actions. On Wednesday, Comcast explained their BitTorrent interference to the FCC in a 57-page filing. Unfortunately they haven’t stopped lying yet, since they now argue that they only delay BitTorrent traffic, while in fact they disconnect people, making it impossible for them to share files with non-Comcast users.

In short, the Comcast interference works like this: A few seconds after you connect to someone in a BitTorrent swarm, a peer reset message (RST flag) is sent by Comcast and the upload immediately stops. Most vulnerable are users in a relatively small swarm where you only have a couple of peers you can upload the file to.

For the networking savvy people among us, here’s an example of real RST interference (video) on a regular BitTorrent connection. In this case, the reset happens immediately after the bitfields are exchanged. Evil? Yes – but there is hope.

The goal of this new type of encryption (or obfuscation) is to prevent ISPs from blocking or disrupting BitTorrent traffic connections that span between the receiver of a tracker response and any peer IP-port appearing in that tracker response, according to the proposal.

“This extension directly addresses a known attack on the BitTorrent protocol performed by some deployed network hardware. By obscuring the ip-port pairs network hardware can no longer easily identify ip-port pairs that are running BitTorrent by observing peer-to-tracker communications. This deployed hardware under some conditions disrupts BitTorrent connections by injecting forged TCP reset packets. Once a BitTorrent connection has been identified, other attacks could be performed such as severely rate limiting or blocking these connections.”

So, the new tracker peer obfuscation technique is especially designed to be a workaround for throttling devices, such as the Sandvine application that Comcast uses. More details on the proposal can be found at BitTorrent.org, which aims to become a coordination platform for BitTorrent developers.

TorrentFreak talked to Ashwin Navin, president and co-founder of BitTorrent Inc. who has some of his employees working on the new extension. He told us: “There are some ISPs who would like people to believe that “slowing down” BitTorrent or “metering” bandwidth consumption serves the greater good. Consumers should be very weary of this claim.”

“In recent months, consumers enjoyed unprecedented participation in the political process thanks to the ability to upload opinions and feedback in the YouTube presidential debates. Musicians, filmmakers and artists are finding ways to connect with their audiences across the world thanks to MySpace and BitTorrent. Students are engaging with interactive learning tools in their schools. Which bandwidth intensive application will banned or shaped or metered next by these ISPs? The creative spirit of millions has been ignited, and our need to participate, to communicate will not be silenced.”

“The US government should encourage ISPs to innovate and invest in their networks,” Ashwin said. “Permitting them to interfere or interrupt in the communications of consumers, to protect ISP profit margins, would be a tremendous set back for our country and economy, when we are already slipping behind the first world (UK, EU, Japan, Korea, Singapore, etc) in its broadband capacity.”

We wholeheartedly agree with Ashwin on this one, as we’ve said before. The Internet is only a few years old, if the plan is to keep using it in the future, ISPs need to upgrade their networks. So, invest in more Internet gateway capacity, 10Gbps interconnect ports, and peering agreements. BitTorrent users are not the problem, they only signal that the ISPs need to upgrade their capacity, because customers will only get more demanding in the future. The Internet is not only about sending email, and browsing on text based websites anymore.

The new protocol extension is still under development, but the goal is of course, to get it out as soon as possible.

Hang on…

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

Odex used a tracking system to collect IP address of alleged sharers and then in court cases, successfully forced the ISPs StarHub and Singnet to give up the identities of their customers involved in the sweep. Next up, they tried to force another ISP, PacNet to give up the same. However, PacNet refused, so Odex went to court to try to force them to comply. To the dismay of Odex, the court decided that Odex had ‘no right of civil action’ against those it accused of infringing its copyrights, as Odex is only a sub-licensee of the anime titles it distributes, not the copyright holder.

In a very short-lived victory for file-sharers on Tuesday, the High Court dismissed attempts to force PacNet to give up its customers details to Odex. The judge, Justice Woo Bih Li, decided that as Odex had no right in this case to take copyright action, it could not be allowed to see the personal details of PacNet’s customers either.

However, in 2007, Odex added the names of the real six Japanese copyright holders to its case (GDH, Kadokawa Pictures, Showgate, Sunrise, TV Tokyo MediaNet and Yomiuri Telecasting) which, it turns out, was a smart move. Although Justice Woo Bih Li denied Odex a chance to see the records, the real copyright holders are in a position to sue – so he granted them full access to the records instead.

A spokesperson for PacNet said: “Pacnet is glad that the court has ruled in favour of us and has dismissed Odex’s appeal with costs. We will abide by [the] ruling and provide these copyright owners with the details of about 500 IP addresses.”

By some estimates, Odex could’ve made as much as $9m if everyone they accused paid up so they are understandably pleased at the result of the case. A spokesman said: “This ruling in favor of the Japanese copyright owners is a significant boost for us and our principals, as we have always acted for and on behalf of the copyright owners. We are very pleased that Pacnet will now be required to hand over information on the infringing accounts to our copyright owners.”

It’s likely that this decision will encourage Odex to continue with their tactics against file-sharers, tactics which have already resulted in death threats for its boss, Stephen Sing and his family, after being dubbed ‘the most hated man in Singapore’s anime community’.

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

“This is a visit from the prevalent Piro virus! Stop P2P! If you don’t I’ll tell the police!” it exclaimed, while another message threatened: “Ah, I see you are using P2P again……if you don’t stop within 0.5 seconds, I’m going to kill you!”

Graham Cluley, a consultant for Sophos said of the virus: “This is one of the most bizarre pieces of malware we have seen in our labs for quite some time, but it’s data-destroying payload is no laughing matter.”

Now, the Japanese police say that they have apprehended the three man gang responsible for the creation and distribution of the virus. One man wrote the code, they say, and the others placed it on file-sharing network, Winny.

However, due to Japanese law, it’s going to be tricky for the police to nail someone for creating the malware. They have a trick up their sleeve though, explains Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos: “It isn’t illegal to write viruses in Japan, so the author of the Trojan horse has been arrested for breaching copyright because he used cartoon graphics without permission in his malware.”

The virus creator is a a 24 year old graduate student from Izumisano City in Osaka. It’s claimed he illegally used copyrighted images from an anime television show to create the virus.

The other two members of the group – a 39 year old man from Osaka and a 35 year old man from Hyogo – were also arrested for copyright offenses, unrelated to the virus. The men are suspected of uploading anime episodes onto the Winny network.

One of the images from the virus includes a song about fish-shaped pancakes stuffed with jam, which makes about as much sense as arresting a virus creator for copyright infringement. But hey, this is the 21st century – what did you expect?

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

The survey – carried out online and financed and operated by a trio of industry organizations, similar to their well-known US counterparts – RIAJ (music), the Japanese MPAA and ACC (software) – concluded that the number of internet users sharing authorized media climbed from 3.5 per cent in June 2006, to 9.6 per cent by September 2007, a near 180% increase.

The numbers of files downloaded increased by a large amount too. June 2006 saw an average of 194 files downloaded per user which increased to 481 by September this year. Audio files topped the download charts with 211 per user with video coming in next with 183. People downloaded an average of 43 images, 33 documents and 14 pieces of software.

The survey found that the favorite P2P sharing application in Japan is still Winny with 27 percent. LimeWire, which is very popular in the West took 18.8 per cent of the vote with WinMX sitting at 15 per cent.

BitTorrent, which is incredibly popular all over the world with tens of millions of users, ranked just 6th with 7.4 per cent.

Japan hit the file-sharing news headlines earlier this year when a bizarre virus on the Winny network attacked files and displayed strange messages.

TorrentFreak looks forward to being able to report a dramatic growth in Japanese BitTorrent users next year.

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

Here’s a demo of a BitTorrent accelerated demo video that is available worldwide. In order to play the video you need to install BitTorrent DNA and restart your browser. This demo also shows how much bandwidth you share with other peers who are watching the same video. It works like this; the user who wants to watch a stream first has to install the BitTorrent DNA application, which is also bundled with the BitTorrent mainline client. When the user plays a BitTorrent accelerated stream it will not only download data, but also upload it to other people who are watching the same stream, similar to a regular BitTorrent download.

Most ISPs probably wont be happy with peer-to-peer streaming because their customers will use even more bandwidth, but it will be a great cost saver for sites like Youtube. In fact, it is safe to say that it could save them thousands of dollars a day in bandwidth costs. TorrentFreak talked to Ashwin Navin, president and co-founder of BitTorrent Inc., and he told us: “It’s safe to say that this product is relevant to all major players in the video space. Any company who is pushing lots of video can benefit from BitTorrent DNA, because it’s very easy to implement, and it delivers dramatic benefits. Whether a company is delivering video, software, or games, BitTorrent DNA can increase the reliability, efficiency, and quality of content delivery. Users notice the benefits immediately when streams are higher quality and are no longer choppy.”

The Watch Now section currently list thousands of clips, some of which are supported by ads. Unfortunately it is only available in the US at the moment, but this will change in the near future. Ashwin told TorrentFreak that this is just a soft launch, international versions will be rolled out as soon as we identify some sponsors to make them available. Another downside is that there are no big movie or TV distributors in the “Watch Now” program just yet, but they are always a bit behind when it comes to technological innovation. However, this does not mean that they start empty, Ashwin told us: “Our partners have published some great content, such as the entire “Ring” series in Japanese, the “Zatoichi” sequels, and hit Bollywood films like “Rang De Basanti”, which have huge fans around the world. We even have some stand-up comedy and special interest automotive videos from GT Channel.”

BitTorrent Inc’s next step will be to move beyond the PC environment into other consumer electronics devices such as moblile phones and DVD-players. The possibilities are endless, as Ashwin notes: “We will soon be announcing more progress with device manufacturers integrating BitTorrent technology into the next-generation of consumer electronics. Between the hardware makers and a new slate of partners deploying BitTorrent DNA, I believe the BitTorrent ecosystem will grow from its current 150 million installed clients to a billion clients installed in the next few years.”

Interesting times, stay tuned!

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

The MPA must be serious if they gave it it’s own codename like the police and military do. Nice touch.

“Illegal camcording remains a high priority with our member companies. We will ramp up our anti-camcording activities during these region-wide blitzes which are a key component of our annual enforcement operations” said the MPA’s Senior Vice President, Mike Ellis.

Running right up to 31st January 2008, dangerous missions against people with cameras will be carried out in Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand. Operations will be focused on screens showing brand new movies and those caught will probably be made an example of, as part of the wider aims of the movie industry to re-educate the public by putting them in jail.

The start of ‘Operation Blackout’ will be accompanied by the launch of a new interactive web site (down at the moment) which itself is linked to a DVD-based training package. Aimed at cinema management, this combination of services will be their route to direct advice from the MPA on how best to catch the evil cammers in their own theater.

With a deadly straight face the MPA’s Mike Ellis sang this ominous warning:

“We can say this to all the pirates out there: you’d better watch out, you’d better not try”

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

Following this, a couple of weeks ago we reported that Odex had tracked down thousands of BitTorrent users it accused of breaching its copyrights and was pursuing them for compensation payments. Lots of BitTorrent users received threatening letters after their ISP SingNet gave Odex their personal details. Other ISP’s stood their ground and refused to hand over the information.

After sending out these letters, Stephen Sing became very unpopular in the anime community with fans putting his personal information on the internet and making threats against him and his family. Add this to the claims that Odex stood to pocket $9 million if their threatening letters paid off, Odex must’ve realized that they were in the middle of a PR disaster and are taking steps to improve their image with their customers.

According to The Star Online, Sing said: “We didn’t expect such a reaction”. Quite. He continued “we learnt to be more humble and yes, we’ve made mistakes” which was probably a reference to his perceived gloating (in respect of chasing downloaders) on an online forum.

In several postings on the official Odex forum, Sing laid out his new strategy:

If an individual stop downloading now, today, on the 3rd September, 2007, he will have no possibility of ever receiving any letters from the copyright holders, (aka the Odex letter) as we will not take anything that he has downloaded before this date against him. We will not send any letters to him.

If an individual continues to download and shows up on our investigation we will send him a letter to ask him to explain why it is so. If he cannot give us a reasonable explanation of why that happened, we will reserve the rights to take legal action against him, with all the evidences that we have collected before and after the 3rd of September (there would necessarily be evidence after the 3rd in order for this to happen).

Addressing the claims that they were profiteering from their anti-piracy activities, Sing said:

We will invite or engage a reputable auditor to audit our accounts pertaining to the collection and costs of this exercise. If (note the word IF) there is any profit, we will donate all of them to a charitable cause.

Additionally, Odex went to court to force the ISP PacNet to give up their customer’s details but the judge decided that PacNet didn’t have to. In a post on their forum, Mr Sing has now confirmed that “…the current group of PACNET users will not be receiving letters from us.”

Wrapping up, Mr Sing said that Odex will from now on “focus enforcement efforts on those who have continued to download illegally even after the publicity in the press on this issue.”

In conclusion, referring to those who have already received letters, Sing said:

For those who have already received our letters, they have already been identified as heavy or persistent downloaders. We will continue to negotiate with those who have not settled the matter yet, or take action if we are instructed to do so by the copyright owners.

So ‘business as usual’ then.

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

Odex Pt. Ltd is a Singapore-based company that distributes anime in South East Asia. Created in 1998 it started distributing anime in 2000, later with titles such as Bleach, Fullmetal Alchemist, Mobile Suit Gundam and Chrono Crusade.

In 2007 a decision was made in the company to start targeting people who share their material via BitTorrent after they claimed their sales had dropped 60-70 percent in just 2 years. After using a tracking system to collect the IP addresses of sharers, they have successfully forced StarHub – an internet service provider – to reveal the identities of 1000 BitTorrent users they accuse of breaching their copyrights. It had previously forced the ISP SingNet to reveal its customers details.

In all fairness, StarHub did put up a fight to keep the privacy of its users but it was little use. According to StarHub spokesman Michael Sim, although the company originally said they had “an obligation to protect our customers’ information”, the pressure from the courts was too great. A court order against StarHub was obtained in a closed chamber session in the Subordinate Court which forces them to hand over their customer’s details.

“In the instance of Odex,” said Sim, “they have satisfied the court of their need for the information. As such, we will comply with the court order”

The next step for Odex is a familiar one to file-sharers: they will use the list of names that StarHub supplies to send them threatening letters(pdf) declaring that they’ve been caught sharing anime, such as the hugely popular ‘Bleach’, and that the only alternative to being dragged through the courts, is to pay a $3000-plus ‘fine’. Not that they’ll have much time to think about the next step – Odex gives around 9 days for a response before it threatens legal action.

According to Stephen Sing (a director of Odex) the “downloading situation” in Singapore is very bad: “We have engaged companies to track illegal downloads in Singapore, and ratio-wise, we’re actually right up there in the illegal downloads in the world, in terms of Japanese animation.”

Interestingly, Stephen Sing is also a director of the AVPAS – Anti Video Piracy Association of Singapore and has become very, very unpopular. Just after the Odex anti-BitTorrent campaign began, Mr Sing made the mistake of using an online forum to joke about how many sharers he was taking action against, and the guys over at HardwareZone caught him at it, via their dedicated (Official) Anti-Odex Club.

Mr Sing has been dubbed ‘the most hated main in Singapore’s anime community’, with anime fans putting up his photographs and personal information onto the internet, making wanted posters of him, posting pictures of his wife on the internet, threatening him with violence and promising to set fire to his house. At this point, Sing called in the police.

Next ISP on the Odex hit-list is Pacific Internet – if they win, that’s another 1000 BitTorrent users about to get threatening letters and demands for $3000 – thats 3000 users in total.

Should everyone pay up, Odex stands to collect a massive $9 million. No wonder the death-threats didn’t deter Mr Sing.

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

It’s reported that one of the images, which includes a song about fish-shaped pancakes stuffed with jam, has a telephone number included although it’s unclear to whom the number belongs.

Another exclaims “This is a visit from the prevalent Piro virus! Stop P2P! If you don’t i’ll tell the police!” while another threatens “Ah, I see you are using P2P again……if you don’t stop within 0.5 seconds, i’m going to kill you!”

Graham Cluley, a consultant for Sophos said of the virus “This is one of the most bizarre pieces of malware we have seen in our labs for quite some time, but it’s data-destroying payload is no laughing matter. It acts as a timely reminder to companies that they may want to control users’ access to P2P file-sharing software not just because they can eat up bandwidth, but also because they can present a security risk to your corporate data.”

Winny is the most popular P2P application in Japan. In 2006 the developer of the Winny file-sharing software was found guilty and fined 1.5 million yen for assisting users in copyright violations.

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