UFC 1, as it was later numbered, was a 86,500 buy pay-per-view hit, ensuring the originally intended one-off was repeated over and over. By UFC 12, however, the controversy generated by the events was reaching fever pitch. They were banned in dozens of US states and dropped by the country’s major pay-per-view distributor.

Many, especially the millions in the largely untapped international audience, turned to piracy to stay in touch, with VHS videos of the events passed around among the passionate and growing fanbase.

After introducing more rules banning the most frowned upon fighting techniques and mandating the use of gloves, the UFC was back on course to bring in the money, but by late 2000 it was all going wrong.

Then in 2001, casino moguls Frank and Lorenzo Fertitta stepped in and saved the UFC from bankruptcy with a $2m buyout. It was to be a golden investment.

Mainstream success for the UFC came on the back of the TV series ‘The Ultimate Fighter’ and the huge following it created. UFC 52 in 2005 generated more than 300,000 pay-per-view buys, doubling the previous best audience, with UFC 57 climbing to more than 400,000.

In 2006, things exploded. UFC 60 pulled in 620,000, UFC 61 clocked up 775,000, with UFC 66 generating a massive 1 million buys on pay-per-view.

Labeled by Time Magazine as “the fastest growing sports brand in the United States,” in 2007 it was reported by Forbes that the UFC was now worth a staggering $1 billion.

Despite this incredible success story and the huge wealth that accompanied it, in December 2009 UFC CEO Lorenzo Fertitta testified at a hearing of the US House Judiciary Committee on how piracy on the Internet affects live broadcasting. He claimed that his company is losing millions of dollars to the phenomenon.

“Just last month, the broadcast of UFC 106 from the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, Nevada, had over 271 unauthorized streams with over 140,000 views, and those are the ones that our anti-piracy team and consultants identified,” Fertitta reported. “There were likely more streams that we simply couldn’t find.”

Fertitta criticized sites like Justin.tv for carrying the streams, with ESPN Executive Vice President Ed Durso going on to name others involved including UstreamTV, LiveStream, TVU, channelsurfing.net, adthe.net, Sopcast, TVAnts, and myp2p.eu.

While UFC 104 pulled in a very respectable 450,000 buys, at just 350,000 the figures for UFC 106 had proven a disappointment, which is probably why the company singled out that event as a victim of piracy. Fertitta didn’t mention them, but other factors had affected the sales.

Ex-WWE star Brock Lesnar was due to fight at the event and had to pull out with illness and the replacement fight clearly didn’t mean enough for people to hand over around $50 to see it. With UFC 105 having aired free on TV the week before, casual fans had perhaps seen enough fighting for one month.

With a great fight card at UFC 107, however, it was good times revisited with pay-per-view buys rocketing to 620,000. Good product, good sales.

But according to the company, these pay-per-view buys aren’t generating enough money for the UFC. In a new interview, UFC President Dana White has confirmed that his company is readying a legal assault on sites offering unauthorized streams of their content.

For a company of their size, no-one should be surprised at this development. However, the next revelation will have eyebrows raising all over. The UFC will now, RIAA-style, go after individuals who pirate their content online.

“When people start going to jail,” says White, “people will stop doing it.”

After trying the cease and desist route in dealing with illicit content, White, who is famous for not being able to speak a sentence without cursing, says UFC are ready for the next level.

“It’s going to be a battle, man,” he said. “It’s going to be a battle, but I’m ready to (expletive) fight,” he said. “We’re gonna go after them, we’re gonna go after them hard, and we’re gonna hurt em.”

Lawrence Epstein, general legal counsel for the UFC, said the UFC could subpoena sites in order to gain the IP address of people who are illegally downloading and sharing UFC events.

Bizarrely, Dana White acknowledges that suing sites and individuals will cost a hell of a lot of money, more in fact than the UFC claim to lose from piracy.

“(Piracy) hasn’t cost us anything compared to what it’s going to cost us to go after these guys. It’s gonna cost us a lot of money, but guess what – it’s gonna cost them a lot of money. It’s gonna get to the point where it’s like, you know what, (expletive) it, maybe we shouldn’t pirate MMA any more,” he explains.

Interestingly, UFC commentator Joe Rogan, a long-time fan-favorite who is about to become even more popular with many viewers, doesn’t agree with proposed crackdown.

“I think that kind of stifles innovation. It stifles the direction the internet is going. I like things being out there,” he said.

“They’re trying to protect their money,” he concludes, adding, “but the internet is a strange animal.”

Having watched hundreds of hours of Jiu-Jitsu, what Dana White and the Fertitta brothers should realize by now is that for every move, there is a counter move, for every counter there is yet another counter. UFC will soon discover that it’s not possible to knock out, choke out or otherwise submit piracy on the Internet. Their opponents know all the moves – and then some.

But beyond that, forcing everyday UFC fans to tap out in court under a barrage of legal strikes is plain lunacy. This is a fight that cannot be won by force.

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

Faced with technical issues surrounding the DRM on the PC version of Rainbow Six Vegas 2, developer Ubisoft made a ‘fix’ available. Unfortunately, it became clear that far from being their own code, the patch was actually a ‘No-CD crack‘ created by warez group, Reloaded.

Getting caught pirating in an attempt fix broken anti-piracy measures was probably a step too far for Ubisoft, so it has taken the radical step of removing the DRM from the PC retail version of its latest ‘Prince of Persia‘ game.

Posting on the company’s forum, Ubisoft community development manager Chris Easton announced the move.

“You`re right when you say that when people want to pirate the game they will, but DRM is there to make it as difficult as possible for pirates to make copies of our games. A lot of people complain that DRM is what forces people to pirate games but as PoP [Prince of Persia] PC has no DRM we`ll see how truthful people actually are.”

But does Chris really expect that dropping the DRM will be a success? How ‘truthful’ will people be when it comes to not pirating the title?

“Not very, I imagine,” he adds.

One user of the forum responds, “Did anyone here mention how devs blame piracy for everything these days? If the game sucks to begin with, they blame piracy. If they don’t have money or are just lazy to make a decent PC port…they blame piracy.” He finishes up with a common statement – If you make a good game, people will buy it.

“Well this time we’ve got a good game with no DRM so there really is no reason to pirate it, right? We should expect good sales because there’s no reason to not buy a copy,” notes Chris, although he doesn’t seem that confident overall.

“I’m fairly skeptical as it’s an easy answer given by a lot of people why they pirate games but if you’re going to buy this game instead of pirating purely because of no DRM in the store version, then if I ever meet you in real life I’ll happily shake your hand and buy you a drink.”

Just recently, developer 2D Boy released their ‘World of Goo’ without DRM. It was heavily pirated, but sales were high enough to make the project worthwhile. At the time, TorrentFreak spoke with Kyle Gabler from 2D Boy who told us that he believed that their customers realized that the company was trying to do “the right thing” which they hoped would translate into a certain amount of goodwill.

If the backlash linked to the terrible DRM included with Spore is anything to go by, Kyle might be on to something and time will tell if Ubisoft’s experiment pays off too. In the end, games always will be pirated, with or without DRM, and there is no reason to believe that piracy increases when there is no ‘protection’. In fact, it only annoys legitimate customers who bought the game.

TorrentFreak will count the downloads and report back in a little while…..

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

The data is collected by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. Currently both DVDrips and R5 rips are counted.

RSS feed for the weekly DVDrip chart.

As of September 1st, 2008…

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

The data is collected by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only.

RSS feed for the weekly DVDrip chart.

As of August 25, 2008…

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

The data is collected by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only.

RSS feed for the weekly DVDrip chart.

As of August 18, 2008…

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

One of the btjunkie admins has found a unique way to identify trackers that host these fake files, which makes it easy to efficiently remove them.

Virtually all the servers that spread these fake files are located in Southern California and Las Vegas. The administrators of these servers follow patterns that make it easy to identify them. The content of the trackers and seed amounts make them stand out. There are more unique characteristics, but we wont reveal all the tricks because they could take counter measures. Here are some examples of servers that host and track fake torrents:

Tracker 1, Tracker 2, Tracker 3 & Tracker 4. (Screenshots: One & Two)

All the information was provided to me by one of the admins of btjunkie, who works together on this with other torrent site admins. He says that the MPAA and friends use a variety of tactics. The tracker will either stall everyone at around 90% or the content will just be a blank monochrome screen.

“I really think this is being done by professionals with a budget, that’s a lot of servers to setup and it takes some expertise to setup in the manner that they did it,” says the btjunkie admin. “I don’t think I really need to say who would spend money on something like this.”

Here are some good examples of how these fake torrents clutter up the search results. Virtually all of those X marked torrents are coming from the ip-ranges we mentioned, and are fake files. The good thing is that Torrentportal’s report system is well used by their users.

The server boxes that host these torrents fall in serveral ip-ranges. Here are a few of the ranges that were discovered recently. You can easily add these to the blocklist of your torrent client (if it supports one), filewall, or blocklist manager.

The anti-piracy servers use hostnames like 101tracker.dhcp.biz, aplustorrents.qhigh.com, bitnova.squirly.info, bittorment.ocry.com, and pirate-trakkrz.leet.la. All these hostnames can be traced back to the same IP Ranges, these ranges contain possibly hundreds of fake trackers, so feel free to block them:

A list of infohashes of fake torrents can be found over here.

Note that it’s not only MPAA material that is hosted on these fake trackers. It is more likely that the servers are owned and operated by an organization that logs IP addresses for several copyright owners and or anti-piracy organizations.

Update: according to one of out readers these ip-ranges belong to “Media Defender“, a company that is hired by copyright owners, to log IP-addresses. This reader, who worked for Media Defender until recently, confirmed that some of the torrents that were mentioned, are indeed on the MPAA’s list.

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

It seems that a lot of people downloaded the torrent, but until today only one person completed the trip (responded). Matt commented in the original post and emailed the screenshot.

So Matt is the official winner and is rewarded with 25$.

I asked him about the experience and he commented:

The experience was well…boring. A quadruple shot of espresso and loud music helped keep me awake. When you get to 5 hours a bug hits the screen which leaves a green splat so by the end it becomes “keeping the green splat from hitting the area to the right side of the road.”

Respect Matt, respect…

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

The goal of the game is pretty straightforward. You have to drive a Bus through the desert from Tucson, Arizona to Las Vegas. The hard part is that the whole trip is in real-time, so it takes 8 hours at least. And it gets even better:

There is no scenery or even other cars on the road, just plain desert, for 8 hours. Oh, and your bus veers to the right just slightly, so it’s impossible to just tape down a button and go do something else. Rumor has it that if you make it to Vegas, you score one point.

Really, you have to try this one.
So grab the torrent (810MB, it’s a collection of great games), install a free SEGA cd emulator, and you’re ready to go.

Have a nice trip. I will give 10$ 25$ to the first person who beats the game, mail me.

More info on this
via

Instructions: (from waxy.org) If you have an actual Sega CD, just burn the disc images and you’re set. Otherwise, you’ll need a copy of the GENS emulator and the Sega CD BIOS to play. After unpacking both archives, start the emulator and go to the “Options: BIOS” menu. Set the “Sega CD BIOS: USA” directory to the folder you saved the BIOS file in. Then use “File: Open ROM” to open “PTSM1.bin.”

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

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