The site has grown steadily over the years and continues to do so, despite a setback in court this summer. In fact, today the 10 billionth torrent file was downloaded from Mininova, an impressive achievement to say the least.

Although the site is still going strong, with the increasing visitor numbers month after month, things have definitely changed behind the scenes.

When asked for a comment on whether they had predicted the site would grow this rapidly, Mininova co-founder Erik Dubbelboer told TorrentFreak: “We never really expected anything. We don’t really tend to focus on these numbers, we are just trying to run the site the best way we can.”

Previously the Mininova team welcomed these download records with more enthusiasm, but times have changed. In common with their counterparts at the Pirate Bay, we get the impression that the torrent site is not their core business anymore, which is not really that surprising considering the legal troubles Mininova faces.

In August, Mininova lost in court against Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN. The judge ruled that the world’s largest BitTorrent indexer had to clean up its site and remove all torrents that link to infringing content. Mininova has yet to decide whether or not they will appeal the case.

Possibly related to this uncertain future, Erik said that they are not going to release any new features or major upgrades to the site anytime soon. “At the moment we are mainly focusing on other projects besides Mininova,” he informed us.

This year has undoubtedly been a turbulent one for Mininova. Nevertheless, we want to congratulate the Mininova team for reaching this new milestone, whether they like it or not.

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

Despite this success, The Pirate Bay operators today decided to pull the plug and close down the tracker permanently. The evolution of the BitTorrent protocol has made trackers redundant they say, as BitTorrent downloads work well with trackerless solutions such as DHT and PEX.

“Now that the decentralized system for finding peers is so well developed, TPB has decided that there is no need to run a tracker anymore, so it will remain down! It’s the end of an era, but the era is no longer up2date. We have put a server in a museum already, and now the tracking can be put there as well,” the Pirate Bay crew write on their blog.

Aside from this shutdown, there is also another major development quietly under discussion.

TorrentFreak has learned that behind the scenes the Pirate Bay operators are talking to other BitTorrent site owners to encourage them to follow suit and completely ditch torrents in the future. BitTorrent has reached a point where trackers and torrents are no longer needed to download files successfully. Supported by all of the major BitTorrent clients, DHT and PEX can handle the transfers and Magnet links can largely replace traditional torrent files.

“We’re talking to the other torrent admins on doing magnet links and DHT+PEX for all sites. Moving away from torrents and trackers totally – like pick a date and all agree ‘from this date, we’ll not support torrents anymore’,” a Pirate Bay insider told TorrentFreak.

Switching to trackerless and torrentless downloading on public BitTorrent sites does indeed seem to be an option. Previously, many people thought that BitTorrent would collapse if a dominant tracker like the Pirate Bay went down, but this doomsday scenario never unfolded. In fact, the recent downtime of the tracker did not slow down or stop many transfers, as DHT and PEX seamlessly took over.

Those BitTorrent users who don’t want to go trackerless just yet can of course still use OpenBitTorrent and PublicBitTorrent, or indeed one of the many other alternative trackers currently available.

Whether or not The Pirate Bay and others will move away from torrent files in the future, the closure of the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker is nevertheless a milestone in the history of the Internet. Starting today, the Pirate Bay has changed its tagline from “The world’s largest BitTorrent tracker” to “The world’s most resilient (magnetic) BitTorrent site.”

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

Just over a month has passed since the first stable public release of the software and PeerBlock has now managed to clock up more than 100,000 downloads. To mark this milestone, TorrentFreak caught up with Mark from the project for the lowdown.

Mark told us that the creation of PeerBlock was inspired by him upgrading his PC from 32 to 64 bit in order to utilize 6gb of RAM. Everything worked fine – until he tried to get PeerGuardian (another IP blocker) to work.

Having hacked away and jumped through hoops to get around driver-signing it would still only work half the time and often crashed without warning. As a software engineer who has worked in the commercial sector for more than 13 years, Mark – who admits to being “an arrogant bastard who truly believes he can do just about anything better than just about anybody,” decided he could find a solution. It was “put up or shut up time,” he told TorrentFreak.

Noticing that the PeerGuardian code was open-source but hadn’t been touched for a couple of years, Mark contacted another developer who had the same thing in mind, but having heard nothing back, he went at it alone.

“I started setting up a Sourceforge.net project for it so we could get free source-control, but they took too long to set it up for me so I instead created a project over at Google Code where it was ready within minutes,” he told us.

Having heard from a few people who were interested in helping out with the development side – “night_stalker_z” who’d earlier started trying to hack the PG2 code into shape, “DarC” / “DisCoStu” who wanted to help out with fixing up the installer, XhmikosR who rewrote the installer, and some testers, things moved forward.

After facing troubles due to the lack of a “signed driver” for 64-bit versions of Vista (which resulted in Mark having to set up a registered company before they were allowed to buy a $230 code-signing certificate), a couple of blogs wrote articles on PeerBlock which attracted some much-needed publicity to the project. This resulted in 10,000 downloads in just one weekend.

“We’re still getting donations from people and we now have enough to pay for next year’s annual code-signing certificate, and we’re saving up to be able to rent our own VPS with full root access etc, upon which we’ll be able to build a ‘real’ online-update system, a custom web-app to tie our forums/issue-tracker/website all together, and some other neat things,” Mark explains.

The first stable release of PeerBlock came out on September 27th, and as of November 5th had clocked up an impressive 100,000 downloads. The site now receives up to 7,000 visitors each day.

Aside from fixing one or two bugs, the team has lots of new features planned for PeerBlock. Anyone that has tried to surf the web with a blocklist in place will know how painful that can be, so PeerBlock will have some new features which allow the “whitelisting” of certain apps, such as a browser, the creation of a proxy server to let users configure PeerBlock to listen on certain ports, possibly an integral “AdMuncher” style ad-blocking feature on a per URL basis (as opposed to just an IP-address), and an encrypted chat feature.

TorrentFreak asked Mark why users should choose PeerBlock over the competition.

“Well, first off we need to ask ‘Who IS the competition?’ The only ones I’m really aware of are: Protowall by the folks over at Bluetack which is closed-source and I don’t believe was ever updated for Vista, and Outpost Firewall, which is closed-source and basically just a hack add-on to a more professional firewall product,” he responded, while noting that uTorrent’s built-in IP-filtering feature only handles one manually-updated list.

“We protect your entire machine, and give you the option to try out any P2P app you want – this freedom of choice is a very important thing, I think. And since it does everything automatically, including list-updates, it’s one less thing to think about,” he added.

Another important question relates to the blocklists that have to be used in conjunction with PeerBlock in order for it to block anything.

He told TorrentFreak that he’s a big fan of iblocklist, who serve up a staggering 10TB of blocklists every month for free. The site doesn’t create the lists, but does offer those from Bluetack, including the Level1 list (renamed to ‘P2P’ in PG2/PeerBlock, which contains both Gov and Anti-P2P IP-addresses) and others.

Mark admits that even in a best case scenario, the available blocklists aren’t 100% effective. That said, there have been studies which show that using blocklists along with software such as PeerBlock can help speed up downloads, but no-one knows how many of the potential “bad IPs” are covered by currently available blocklists.

P2P aside, Mark says there has been feedback to suggest that PeerBlock discovered a Conficker infection on a user’s machine that their anti-virus programs missed, and can also stop ads appearing in browsers that lack in-built blocking.

One other exciting thing for the future of PeerBlock is porting it to the Mac. Mark says they’re saving all the donations for additional development and this is the most-requested request right now.

Users of PeerBlock are encouraged to give as much feedback as possible to Mark’s team, via their forums, IRC (#peerblock on freenode.net) or email.

PeerBlock can be downloaded here.

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

Previously the international music industry has taken legal action to order various ISPs in several countries to block The Pirate Bay, but to our knowledge none have offered to help block BitTorrent sites voluntarily – until now.

Charles Dunstone, chief executive of Carphone Warehouse which operates the ISP TalkTalk, said the company would introduce a cinema-style ratings system for web content.

Aside from the self-explanatory 18 rating, there will be two others. Parents setting their connection to U and 14 will trigger a pornography and gambling filter, but they will also have the power to ban file-sharing and BitTorrent sites too.

“This is something that we are going to do anyway, as a service to our customers,” Dunstone told FT. “But through doing it we can also help the content industry by blacklisting sites that have BitTorrent files on them,” he added.

It’s not difficult to see how a system like this might prove attractive to the music industry if used in conjunction with the proposed “3 strikes” mechanism. Customers receiving an industry warning after their account is flagged as sharing illicit files could then have the immediate option to switch on this ISP-level firewall to thwart their kids.

But like all ’solutions’, for the tech-savvy they’re just another problem to be solved.

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

Not everyone in the music business agrees with this assessment though. When the indie rock band Barcelona saw one of its latest tracks featured in a viral video with nearly a million views, they responded quite differently. They claim that the clip below actually boosted their album sales and concert visits.

So, instead of demanding that YouTube pull the video, the band posted a response to the ‘Kuroshio Sea’ video on the site, thanking their new found fans and the uploader who posted the original video.

“We’re so flattered to learn that it features one of our songs called Please Don’t Go,” Barcelona’s lead singer Brian Fennell says in the video response.

“We want to let you know that it’s been affirming in the last week to watch in the iTunes store a correlation with the sales of our record ‘Absolutes’, growing in the rock charts as a result of having the song placed in the video,” drummer Rhett Stonelake added.

Aside from the boost in record sales, the band says that they’ve also met some new fans who came to their concerts after seeing the video on YouTube. It is a great way of promoting music online, especially when it’s coupled to a great video.

Unfortunately for most artists, anti-piracy outfits such as the RIAA, BPI and IFPI are increasingly policing YouTube to get all copyrighted music taken off the site. One such artist to suffer recently is the unfortunate Calvin Harris, who clashed with the music industry lobby group BPI.

“IT’S MY FUCKING SONG YOU ABSOLUTE BASTARDS,” Harris wrote on Twitter when he found out that YouTube had removed a clip he uploaded himself, following a copyright complaint from the BPI.

“FUCK YOU ‘The BPI’ what have you ever done for anybody you useless shower of cunts,” he added. As if that wasn’t enough Harris labeled the BPI the “worst organization to ever walk the earth” and their online employees “massive retards.”

Like many other artists, Harris just wants his music to be heard, and he believes that putting a clip on YouTube might in fact introduce new people to his music. If people like what they hear, they might even buy his album or visit his gigs, much like what happened with Barcelona.

YouTube is free promotion for bands and artists, it has the potential to drive revenue instead of killing it. It is time for the major labels and anti-piracy outfits to listen to the artists for once, and perhaps ask them if they actually want to have their content removed or not.

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

Rapidshare was also ordered to delete any and all of those same tracks from its servers and ensure that they are not uploaded again by users. Previously Rapidshare had been using file hashes to recognize tracks that were already removed after requests from GEMA, to ensure that they weren’t uploaded again. The court decided that the technique used was ineffective.

The court found Rapidshare guilty of breaches of copyright law and estimated the value of the tracks at €24 million ($34 million).

“The decision of the Hamburg Regional Court is a milestone in GEMA’s fight against the illegal use of musical works on the Internet,” said Dr. Harald Heker, Chief Executive Officer of GEMA. “We are confident that in this way we will be able to reduce the illegal use of the GEMA repertoire on the Internet to a negligible level,” he added.

Understandably, Rapidshare sought to downplay the ruling. Bobby Chang, COO of RapidShare, Switzerland, said: “We do not consider the court’s decision to be a breakthrough. As other proceedings in similar disputes with GEMA have shown, there is considerable disparity amongst the individual courts in some cases.”

Noting that the courts of appeal “tend to restrict the scope of the decisions made by the lower courts,” Chang said it would make more sense to offer music fans the right products and services at the right price to “open up a new source of income for music-markets on the Internet.”

Update: We initially reported that Rapidshare was fined $34 million on the back of this report. This information is wrong, the court only stated that the value of the tracks was estimated at $34 million. The article is updated accordingly and we’re sorry for the confusion.

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

Just under a year ago in June 2008, Warner Music, Universal Music, EMI and Sony under the umbrella of PROMUSICAE (Productores de Música de España) – Spain’s answer to the RIAA – filed a lawsuit against Pablo’s company, MP2P Technologies.

The group didn’t care how they got their ‘evidence’ against Pablo either. The record companies even hired a private detective who turned up at Pablo’s offices pretending to be a customer. Using a hidden camera, the detective took photographs, which can be seen in various pages in the complaint against Pablo’s company.

Demanding a massive 13 million euros ($17.8m) from the Spaniard, they claim that his software – which allows people to share files over the Internet – has caused them to lose a substantial amount of earnings. Pablo has never denied that he created the applications for commercial purposes and that he made some money from them. However, Pablo denies any destructive intentions against the music industry.

For their part, the record companies claim that Pablo designed the software with the express intent of providing a platform for Internet users to download and share music for free, a situation they describe as “unfair competition.” Pablo is also accused of creating these applications to profit from work to which the plaintiffs own the copyright.

But of course, since the case is taking place in Spain, there are some other interesting issues being thrown into the mix. Spanish courts have ruled again and again that no crime is committed if people download music for personal use and no profit is directly generated from any infringement. Additionally, Spaniards already pay special taxes on things like CDs, DVDs, memory cards and mobile phones to compensate the music industry for supposed losses.

But the almost undoubted legality of sharing files in Spain goes even further. In all cases presented so far, the courts have ruled that even BitTorrent and eDonkey-type sites are legal, if operated within the aforementioned parameters.

Furthermore, as pointed out by his legal team consisting of P2P and copyright experts Javier de la Cueva and David Bravo, Pablo merely created software and at no time has he ever had control over what users choose to do with it.

“This claim is illogical and goes against every principle of law. If every time someone builds something he has to ensure that any illegal use of it is impossible, we would all still be living in caves,” said Pablo. “You can not block a tool because of the use that someone might make of it. We designed a ‘tool’ for transferring files as efficiently as possible, full stop,” he added.

The case began in Madrid’s Superior Court on Tuesday and will continue today. So far Pablo says that although he is no lawyer, “Things are looking good,” despite a courtroom mishap. Unfortunately for Pablo, his iPhone received an unexpected incoming call. “My geek ultra edition R2D2 tone began to sound at full volume, and due to my nerves I dropped the mobile on the floor. This left the room clear that (a) I’m freaky and (b) I am clumsy,” he said.

Pablo also notes that he was touched when Marti Lafferty, chairman of the Distributed Computing Industry Association (DCIA) flew all the way from Washington to testify in the case. He told the judge that “Spain should be proud of Pablo.”

A decision is expected within a month, but it is entirely possible that the case will end up in Spain’s Supreme Court and could take many years to reach a final conclusion.

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

In order to get the word out, the label booked a monthly banner advertisement campaign on isoHunt, and linked that to a torrent file of the album that everyone can download for free. By doing so they hope to get people excited about their music and eventually build a strong fanbase.

“As far as we know, we are the first record label/band to advertise directly on a torrent search engine,” Colin Foord, the creative brain behind the campaign told TorrentFreak. “We are sponsoring isoHunt with a banner that links directly to our homepage where the album can be downloaded for free.”

In a music industry that is changing quickly, Honor Roll Music recognizes that torrent sites such as isoHunt should not be vilified, but turned into partners instead in order to reach millions of music fans eager to discover and download new music. BitTorrent sites have proven to be a stepping stone for developing artists, rather than a threat.

With a limited marketing budget the label can’t afford to buy ad space on all major torrent sites, but the isoHunt sponsorship is a sign of good faith and shows that they do recognize the value of reaching out to the millions of active BitTorrent users.

The latest Awesome New Republic album titled “Rational Geographic Vol 1″ is available on several torrent sites, and everyone is free to download a copy and share it with friends. Volume II will be released in July and Volume III, with a physical 3-volume bundle, in October.

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

The 5 minute segment focused on an MPAA funded study by a group called the RAND corporation. The study – which was widely criticized early last month – is back with a new coat of paint. This time though, it’s being broadcast to the movie-going British public with the appearance of solid fact, and has addressed none of the questions we brought up just after the study was released.

Perhaps the choice of interviewees might shed some light on ‘why?’ a bit better.

* Keiron Sharp – Director General, Federation Against Copyright Theft.
* John Woodward – CEO, UK Film Council.
* Gregory Treverton – Director of RAND, the study’s authors.
* Callum McDougall – Executive Producer for Quantum of Solace.

This selection seems to be a bit one sided to say the least. If you’re wondering what’s so special about the last name, it might be because you didn’t go to see that film at the cinema. Just before the film was played, a short advert voiced by Quantum star Daniel Craig, talked about how “piracy was costing people jobs”.

McDougall also gave a speech last winter to a UK copyright industry lobby group saying how the industry will fall “like a house of cards” if downloading continues at current levels. This same group, the Industry Trust for IP Awareness, tried to push much the same message on terrorism and piracy almost 5 years ago.

One of our readers was angered by the bias of the segment and wrote a complaint to the BBC. After a few weeks of waiting a reply came back from BBC Complaints, and it was none too satisfying.

Thank you for your e-mail regarding ‘Film 2009 with Jonathan Ross’ as broadcast on 31 March.

I note you felt the report on this programme about copyright theft wasn’t adequately balanced as it only featured interviews with people from the film industry. I appreciate you felt we allowed a distorted view of this issue to be portrayed and note you have strong views regarding this matter.

This report focused in on a legitimate problem for both the film industry and the authorities as they try to tackle what is an ever increasing and profitable criminal activity. We feel the report outlined the laws surrounding the issue of film piracy adequately and that the interviewees from the film industry were entirely appropriate people to comment on the problem.

Impartiality is the cornerstone of all our output, and we feel this report was fully balanced in it’s coverage of copyright theft. Nevertheless I appreciate our audience has a wide range of opinions and inevitably this means that not every viewer will agree with the content of every programme we broadcast. We know all our editorial decisions are subjective and we’d never expect our audience to agree with every decision we make.

With this in mind that I’d like to take this opportunity to assure you that I’ve recorded your comments, including that you believe this topic deserves a more in depth investigation, onto our audience log. This is an internal daily report of audience feedback which is circulated to many BBC staff including senior management, producers and channel controllers.

The audience logs are seen as important documents that can help shape decisions about future programming and content.

Thanks again for contacting us.

Regards

Liam Boyle
BBC Complaints

Of course, there’s also a fine piece of irony in this show. The preceding segment was about a film called ‘The Boat That Rocked‘, a film about a 60’s pirate radio station. The irony is that it’s written and directed by one Richard Curtis. The same Richard Curtis that last year co-signed a letter to The Times urging ISPs to stop piracy.

It seems it’s only ok to profit from piracy, if you’re making a film about it.

UPDATE: The video of the segment is now available.

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

There have been many cases where bands and music labels have been publicly vocal about the fact that their album has been heavily pirated. Complaining that their business has been torn apart, most of them appear to ignore the link between accumulating many unauthorized downloads and the retail success of their product. Short and sweet – if your product is good, thousands will buy it. If your product is good, thousands will pirate it too – the two scenarios go hand in hand.

One band who thought that evil pirates were taking all their money are Sweden-based Stockholm Stoner. In a recent interview picked up by brokep of The Pirate Bay, the band explained that since releasing their album on January 21st this year, they had sold a pretty-unimpressive 379 copies.

Apparently, however, their music is a smash hit on BitTorrent, racking up an impressive 80,000 downloads. This ratio of legal to unauthorized downloads seems unprecedented and the band were quick to express their dismay. While noting that they aren’t specifically against P2P networks, the band said it “would be fun” to get paid for their work and that “adults must understand that they can not steal,” while saying that the Internet should be filtered – “..the Chinese can do it after all,” they said.

But this is the Internet, and not everything is how it seems. What could be worse than getting pirated 210 copies to every one sold? How about… not getting pirated at all? Unfortunately for the band the download stats for their album were gathered from entirely the wrong place, via scammy links on a torrent meta search engine. As can be seen from this search for Stockholm Stoner, the site shows many thousands of downloads. They are fake – you can type anything in that search box and the site will return ’stats’.

Rather than being relieved, I can’t help but think that having found out that they’re not popular with pirates after all, the band would be hugely disappointed. Searching in the usual places, TorrentFreak couldn’t find any significant downloads of this band at all. Better to be popular and downloaded, than not downloaded at all, surely?

Another artist who claims to be hugely popular with pirates is Indiana “The Internet Police Are Coming” Gregg. In an interview with the BBC, Gregg claimed that one of her albums had been downloaded 250,000 times – a figure we found just too outrageous to be taken seriously, with our own calculations indicating this assessment was inflated by around 240,000 downloads.

Using the publicity from her spat with The Pirate Bay to great effect, Gregg went on to create Kerchoonz – a site paid for by £250,000 of public money where people could download and listen to music for free. Trying to convert ‘pirates-with-morals’ to the site, every listen or download would result in the artists getting paid, emphasized Gregg.

Indiana Gregg herself is touting her own music on the site and is actually the #4 artist in the Kerchoonz ‘Top 100′ list. Since she’s so popular with pirates (250,000 downloads remember?) she must be tearing it up on Kerchoonz. Wrong. Current stats indicate that her tracks have been streamed 1180 times and downloaded just 310 times. Presuming she’s getting paid at the same rates as the other artists on the site, Gregg netted $2 for this effort, which is exactly $2 more than she accused The Pirate Bay of giving her.

Overall it seems that getting heavily pirated is an indication of success, and a pointer that good money is to be made at retail – The Dark Knight was pirated at least a million times but has already made over $1 billion dollars worldwide.

If no-one wants to pirate your music or download it for free, don’t expect to be able to sell it either. Come back pirates, the music industry needs you.

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

Sitting at the top table from left to right were Rasmus Fleischer of Piratbyrån, Sara Sajjad of Piratbyrån, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg (aka Anakata), Peter Sunde (aka Brokep) and Magnus Eriksson of Piratbyrån. Fredrik Neij (TiAMO) and the fourth defendant Carl Lundström were not at the table.

First off, they said that the whole case can be best described as a theater play and that all the people involved are potential actors. They vowed to make a reality TV-show of the whole trial, in fact Rasmus Fleischer has written the prologue for the show already. It’s a Spectrial, and they are happy to play along. As soon as the cameras stopped flashing, the panel took questions from the media that was present.

The Pirate Bay said that they feel that their overall case would not end quickly, implying legal appeals and were defiant that no matter what happens to them, the site will continue. “What are they going to do? They have already failed to take the site down once. Let them fail again,” said Gottfrid. It isn’t the site facing the courts noted Peter Sunde. “It has its own life without us,” he said.

The Pirate Bay team said that although they face huge financial claims, they weren’t going to be intimidated, with Gottfrid declaring, “I already have more debt in Sweden than I will ever be able to pay off. I don’t even live here. They are welcome to send me a bill. I will frame it and put it on the wall.”

Peter went on to explain there was no basis for the massive financial claims. “It does not matter if they require several million or one billion. We are not rich and have no money to pay,” he said. “They won’t get a cent.”

When asked if it was ok to download media without paying for it, Peter deemed the question to be “uninteresting” and said he was tired of hearing it.

A member of the media then posed this question: “Do you feel like defendants, or defenders of technology?”

Peter responded: “I think it is something in between actually. We have a personal liability for this, we have a personal risk which has some impact on our feelings. But definitely it’s not defending the technology, it’s more like defending the idea of the technology and that’s probably the most important thing in this case – the political aspect of letting the technology be free and not controlled by an entity which doesn’t like technology.”

Gottfrid added that the prosecutor of the case seems to focus a lot on the individuals in the case. “At least one fourth of the evidence is character assassination of the people involved,” he said.

Peter went on to explain that when he was arrested the police didn’t immediately start questioning him about site, rather his motivation. “When I had my only hearing with the police the first question was if I wanted to explain my ideology and my politics, not if I was involved in The Pirate Bay, which kind of sets the tone for all of this.”

The site’s finances were brought up, with the pair saying they started it and keep it going through advertising revenue, although the pair don’t make any money themselves.

A reporter from the BBC asked what the on-going maintenance costs of The Pirate Bay amount to. Peter responded, “So, the costs for Pirate Bay, I don’t actually don’t have any numbers for it. We use quite a lot of bandwidth and we have to buy new servers every other week.”

Gottfrid said that the tracker itself uses an average of 600mbits of bandwidth which increases further at weekends. He also revealed that their current hardware has to be replaced once a year and is currently estimated to be worth $120,000, therefore it is depreciating at the rate of $10,000 each month.

Towards the end of the conference the pair were asked for their assessment of the way they have been handled by the press.

“Well, that’s a very interesting question,” said Peter. “There are some members of the press who we don’t like so we didn’t invite them today and they are very mad at us.” Peter didn’t mention them by name at this point, but they were Aftonbladet, Metro and TV4. He explained the problem he has with these publications;

“They are just interested in doing something spectacular instead of actually discussing the issues. The media that are not invited today are basically the media that have not been negative, but lying instead and keeping things from the public.”

“We don’t have a problem with negative press,” Peter continued. “There are a lot of people in this room who don’t like us and we don’t really care about that as long as they discuss the issues. But I would say that most of the press have been very good towards us actually, in discussing more and more the issues surrounding The Pirate Bay instead of focusing on us as persons, which is what we actually want.”

The trial starts tomorrow and of course, TorrentFreak will keep everyone updated, but in the meantime, a thought-provoking comment from Peter;

“I do not believe The Pirate Bay will be a major player in five years. But I think BitTorrent technology will improve. File sharing will always exist. I think people will tire of the debate.”

Update: More goodies at Spectrial.

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

One business model in operation for some time now is the selling of otherwise free software to unsuspecting entrants to file-sharing and P2P. Unaware that everything they need can be legitimately acquired for free, they hand over payments for access to public sites such as Mininova or The Pirate Bay. Equally, they end up paying for uTorrent or other P2P clients via credit card or other methods.

Recently there has been an increase in sites offering these type of services, but utilizing premium rate SMS to collect revenue. One such site being complained about right now is Bittorrent-net.info. The site offers downloads of most of the popular P2P clients including uTorrent, Vuze/Azureus, LimeWire, eMule and Ares.

However, the downloads have a sting in the tail. Once downloaded and the installer is run, the software package requires the user to SMS a provided number via cellphone to get codes to ‘activate’ the software. The site has sections for users around the world, but for UK users this sequence of events ends up costing individuals around £9 in call charges. Spot the deliberately obscure gray-on-gray prices in the screenshot below, written in letters instead of numbers so they don’t attract the eye.

On closer inspection of the rarely viewed ‘Legal Terms‘ section of the site which is buried away in the usual legalese, it does indeed say that that the ’service’ will cost £9. Unfortunately for the site this just isn’t enough to give it legality under regulations just introduced in the UK.

Under new rules from premium-rate phone regulator PhonepayPlus, hiding away charges as BitTorrent-net.info has done is strictly disallowed. In effect now is this rule:

Clearer pricing – No matter where you see a mobile phone-paid service advertised (whether it’s in a magazine or newspaper, on TV, on the internet or somewhere else), the pricing of the service must be given just as much space and attention as the rest of the advert – the cost shouldn’t be hidden in small print. Also, providers must not say a service or download is ‘free’ unless there really are no other costs involved.

The number that people have to SMS to obtain ‘activation codes’ is 78881, which is currently operated by mBlox Ltd. Touting itself as “The world’s largest mobile transaction network” and the company behind delivering the ‘Crazy Frog’ ringtone, mBlox does not provide the content or schemes behind such SMS’s, merely the infrastructure.

In a response to rising complaints as outlined in this article, mBlox provides an online tool to find the companies behind these numbers. Unfortunately our searches using this method drew a blank, but two company names kept cropping up linked to these operations – Netlink Network Corp. and Panama-based Soletto Group SA.

TorrentFreak’s calls for comment from mBlox have so far gone unanswered but we did managed to discuss the situation with SMS regulator PhonepayPlus, who gave us this statement:

Following intervention from PhonepayPlus, as a result of public complaints and its own internal monitoring, this service has been suspended from operation. Readers [in the UK] affected by this service should contact PhonepayPlus on 0800 500 212 (Mon-Fri, 8am-6pm), or at www.phonepayplus.org.uk

We are unable to confirm at this stage if people affected will be able to get a refund, but it certainly looks like the chances of people getting scammed by this method in the future are diminishing.

On other sites using the same business model the software BitComet, BitSpirit, Frostwire and Kceasy feature, but unfortunately this scheme doesn’t stop at P2P clients. Messenger Plus! Live, WinAce, WinZip, 7Zip, DirectX, CDex, and Adobe Acrobat have all appeared with similar installers.

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

Most of the users of the service have reported great results. BitTorrent has proven to be an ideal marketing tool for musicians, writers and other creative minds who want to promote their work and engage fans. In fact, the Dutch Band ‘Silence is Sexy’ won the Interactive Award 2009 for releasing their album for free on Mininova.

Erik, co-founder of Mininova said in a response to the new milestone: “Content Distribution enables producers and artists to bring their work to the attention of the public, free of charge. It’s the perfect solution for bands that don’t have the means to bring out a record yet.”

“Through content distribution, we have already had about 5,800 uploads and 15 million downloads,” Erik commented. “That means some 40,000 downloads a day. The amount of data that has been downloaded equals a pile of CDs of about 30 kilometers high.”

Aside from the marketing aspect, sharing files on BitTorrent is also a great cost saver. Terabytes of data can be transferred without having to invest thousands of dollars in server capacity. If only Microsoft had used BitTorrent for its Windows 7 Beta release, they would not have been forced to delay the release and annoy thousands of eager early adopters, and could have even saved thousands of dollars at the same time.

Slowly, more established companies are realizing that BitTorrent is indeed a great way to reach out to a wide audience, for a fraction of the costs usually incurred. Last year, Canada’s public television broadcaster CBC used Mininova’s services to distribute one of its TV-shows, after they ran into distribution problems.

With BitTorrent’s ever growing popularity, Mininova is predicting a boom in the number of premium users in the coming year, as well as a steep growth in regular users. It might be a good idea for the entertainment industry to embrace these sites, rather than attempting to take them out.

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

Last year, the band were working on their yet-to-be-released studio album “Tonight”. Like many other albums, however, a copy of “Tonight” leaked out before the official release date, and it is now widely available online. Given the previous pro-piracy stance of the band, which got them on the front page of Digg, you wouldn’t expect that they would make a big deal out of it.

The contrary is true. The band, together with the record label, have instructed the one and only Web-Sheriff – who also works for Prince, Michael Jackson and Village People – to take on the sites that posted the album, or links to it. One of the sites that received a takedown notice recently is Scene Releases. Web-Sheriff wrote in an email to the site:

On behalf of Domino Records and Franz Ferdinand, we would kindly ask you not to post copies of ‘Tonight’ on your site. We do appreciate that you are fans of / are promoting Franz Ferdinand, but the label and artist would greatly appreciate your co-operation in removing your links to the pirate files in question.

Web-Sheriff, who sent similar emails to dozens of other sites, is known for his politeness – if you cooperate, that is. Normally, this takedown request would hardly be newsworthy, but this one is special. Only a few months ago, Franz Ferdinand openly encouraged its fans to pirate one of their new tracks, advocating downloading using LimeWire. They even confessed to being pirates themselves, by admitting copying CDs for use on their iPods – currently illegal in the UK. So, understandably, the partnership with Web-Sheriff comes as quite a surprise.

Faolan, one of the editors of Scene Releases, was as baffled as we are, and decided to ask the sheriff for an explanation. Instead of explaining why Franz Ferdinand performed this 180, Web-Sheriff replied with a list of threats, claiming that Scene Releases could be held liable for putting links up to the unreleased album. He replied:

Joking aside, you are currently acting as a de facto digital distributor of this (unreleased) album and, if you do not remove / de-activate the links that you have published, our clients shall be obliged to take legal action both to stop what you are doing and to seek compensation for the (extensive) commercial losses directly arising from your illegal activities.

Furthermore, the sheriff stressed that the email should not be shared with third parties, a tactic also employed by UK lawyers Davenport Lyons, in an attempt to stifle discussion. Faolan told TorrentFreak that the reply from the sheriff inspired him to keep the conversation going. He believes that he didn’t break any laws by merely linking to files that are hosted on other sites. In fact, the links that Scene Releases posted at the bottom of their article were already dead (removed by the associated hosting sites) by the time Web Sheriff sent his reply.

Scene Releases was not the only release blog that was contacted by Web-Sheriff, the conversation that he had with RLSLOG is just as entertaining. After RLSLOG pointed out to Web-Sheriff that he misspelled the domain name, he didn’t back off, and sent the following demands:

You must also arrange for the following apology to be published on the relevant page of the site for a period of seven (7) days : “RSLOG wishes to apologies to Franz Ferdinand, Domino Records and Web Sheriff for the disruption caused to their sales, marketing and promotion plans by our publishing of pirate file details relating to the unreleased album “Tonight”.

Yes, you’re reading it correctly, the Web -Sheriff is asking RLSLOG (or RSLOG) to make an apology, and he repeated his spelling mistake. The admin ignored all his requests, and replied with the following email:

Thanks for good laugh, i will probably publish this whole conversation somewhere, it’s too good to remain unknown! Once again, learn to type instead of drinking brandy in saloon.

Yours, Old Shaterhand

The question remains – does Franz Ferdinand know about the involvement of Web Sheriff and his threatening tone towards the site admins, or is it all orchestrated by the record label? We hope that it’s the latter, but thus far the band hasn’t responded to our inquiries. Franz Ferdinand’s new album Tonight will be available in stores on January 26th.

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

In 2008 the site passed several milestones, and in December Mininova broke a new record of 44.7 million unique visitors in one month. More users download more torrents, and just about every three to four months the site added another million torrent downloads to its counter. Today, just a few days into 2009, Mininova is close to recording the 7 billionth download, a double up compared to a year ago.

Mininova co-founder Niek told TorrentFreak that he expects this growth to continue in the new year. “Traffic is still growing according to Quantcast and Google Analytics. Unless something drastically changes, I see no reason why this will be different in 2009,” he commented.

Over the past months we’ve reported on the trend of more artists and publishers taking BitTorrent seriously, and Niek has noticed the same. “That’s definitely true,” he said. “We have almost reached the point of 1000 active CD publishers. We expect that free content distribution will play an increasingly important role in the music and video industry during the coming year.”

While existing Internet users are turning to BitTorrent at an increasing rate, most growth can be expected from rapidly developing countries such as India. With only 5 million broadband Internet subscribers, India is a relatively small player. However, the government plans to increase this number to 50 million by 2012, a 1000% increase, and we expect that many of them will be eager to try BitTorrent.

The exponential growth reported by Mininova and other torrent sites shows us that the BitTorrent hype is far from over. ISPs should brace themselves.

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

Carried out by several police officers and representatives of anti-piracy group FACT, at the end of August the owner of Araditracker was subjected to simultaneous raids at both his home and work addresses in Northern Ireland.

In addition to being arrested, all IT related equipment was removed from the Araditracker owner’s home and place of work. The police left no stone unturned, taking away desktop computers, laptops, monitors, media, cameras and video tapes containing footage from family events. They even took the UPS.

The owner was taken to the station and questioned by police, with FACT officers present. Bearing a striking similarity to the TV-Links case, it appears the police were led to believe that Araditracker was a commercial business venture and that pirate material was being sold for cash. The overall impression was that the police were expecting a full-scale duplicating operation when they conducted the raids. They found no such thing, even on a small-scale.

Had FACT led the police up the garden path – again?

Undeterred, police and Trading Standards officers raided a second person at his home in North Wales, just 3 weeks ago. The police seized desktop PCs and laptops, in addition to digital cameras and sundry media. The search warrant stated the following:

Section 93(2) of the Trade Marks Act 1994 to enter and search the premise and search computer equipment, invoices, books and documents associated with the selling of films in convention of Section 107 of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 & Section 92A of the Trade Marks Act 1994

After the initial arrest, the subsequent interview wasn’t carried out by the police, but by Trading Standards on their own.

Up to now the site owner hasn’t been charged with anything and has been bailed to appear at the end of January 2009. The second arrested person has also not been charged, but is ordered to answer his bail in mid-January 2009.

Yet again in the UK we are witnessing the police getting involved in areas which were previously believed to be an issue for civil law. Faced with copyright laws which don’t ‘fit’ their aims, there appears to be a concerted effort on the part of anti-piracy groups such as FACT to dress up civil issues as being a matter for the police. And make no mistake, they are succeeding. Not a good time to be a UK tracker admin, unless tracks have been particularly well covered.

Ex-members of the Araditracker community have a new home at NeverStrangers.net.

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

When we broke the news on 18 November we noted that things would be very different this time, particularly when the frailties of the evidence gathering were exposed by the wrongful accusation of innocent parties.

It didn’t take long. On 29 November The Guardian reported that a couple in their sixties were horrified that they had been wrongfully accused of illegally sharing the gay porn movie Army Fuckers.

Many people have commented on these developments, and now it’s the turn of a sex writer. Placed by Forbes in their Web Celeb 25 and named by Wired in their Faces of Innovation 2008, Violet Blue is, amongst seemingly a million other things, sex columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle and a best seling author. She also lectures cyber-law classes at UC Berkeley and is a Geek Entertainment TV reporter.

Writing in her blog, Violet Blue headlines her article “The New Face of Porn Racketeering?” Pointing out that this isn’t just any old porn, but “a Nazi gay male hardcore flick”, she goes on:

It’s sort of like if someone came up to you on the street and said, ‘hey I think you slandered me in a way that could be really embarrassing to you if anyone found out — but if you give me a couple hundred bucks, I won’t take you to court [where you’d lose even more money].’

Having enjoyed the work of writer Roald Dahl in both written and TV form (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach and the genius of Tales of the Unexpected), Violet’s description of how she sees this operation reminded me again of something i’d mused upon earlier.

In 1987, Playboy published a short story by Dahl, entitled The Bookseller. The story features a gentleman called William Buggage who ran a rare book shop in London with his secretary Miss Tottle. Their business model was a little unconventional. Every day the pair read the newspaper obituaries looking for the deaths of married men who had left a wife behind. Armed with this information, they would send invoices to the grieving widows demanding payment for books their husbands had supposedly ordered. The books contained European hardcore pornography and ’sexual deviance’. Rather than face the ruination and humiliation of being named in court or the press, the widows would quietly pay up.

Those familiar with Dahl’s work will know that this master story teller is famous for the ‘twists’ revealed at the end of his stories, and The Bookseller is no different. In the end, Mr Buggage and Miss Tottle were found out when they tried to get money from a widow who revealed that her husband – far from quietly titillating himself with porn – was in fact, blind.

While most people acknowledge that Davenport Lyons have made some pretty big mistakes, no-one is suggesting that they or their clients simply make things up. However, for every set of allegations they get right (around 50% admit infringement and pay up), they absolutely get some wrong. They wouldn’t have expected that their allegations of sharing Atari’s Race 07 would’ve landed on the mat of a pair of pensioners and we will see if they choose to withdraw the allegations that the other pair of pensioners shared Army Fuckers. At the moment they find themselves in the position of the blind man – in receipt of a sordid accusation against them and absolutely no way of defending themselves.

In a statement to The Guardian, Davenport Lyons said: “We allow ample opportunity for the recipient to respond, and if they have done nothing wrong they have no reason to be concerned.”

The truth is much less straightforward. No matter how people defend themselves in the face of these allegations, Davenport Lyons continually argue that they are right, and the accused is wrong. When I pointed out the Dahl story to someone involved in the cases, this was the reply, which is an adaptation of a real response to those who try to plead their innocence:

It’s a shame for Mr. Buggage and Miss Tottle they didn’t have the knowledge and expertise of messrs Davenport Lyons. They could have easily argued in that case that “it is irrelevant for the purposes of our clients evidence how the European books of pornography and sexual deviance (”the Work”) came to be acquired in your blind late husband’s name. What our client’s evidence shows is that the Work was made available from an Internet connection registered in your late blind husband’s name on a certain date and time”

But while there are certain similarities with Dahl’s story, one point appears entirely mirrored. While the widows in The Bookseller pay up to avoid appearing in the press, those wrongfully accused by Davenport Lyons are going to the press for protection. Those that don’t have age on their side don’t find the going quite so easy.

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

Peter Sunde (Brokep), one of the co-founders together with TiAMO and Anakata, later said that their initial goal was to build a Scandinavian BitTorrent community. “At this time there was one big torrent site, which was called Suprnova, but they mainly had international content. We and Piratbyrån wanted more Swedish and Scandinavian content. So we started a big library, and that is The Pirate Bay.”

When the site launched exactly remains a mystery though, as we read on The Pirate Bay blog. “The official birth date of the site is not 100% sure. We’ve been discussing it back and forth the past week and decided that screw it, you don’t need to know which day. We’ll celebrate anyhow!”

The hardware setup was really primitive initially. When the site launched it was hosted in Mexico, where Anakata hosted the site on a server owned by the company he was working for at the time. The site moved to Sweden later, where Fredrik hosted the tracker on his laptop for a while, But, as the site grew, it had to move on to a more powerful setup.

The Pirate Bay soon became one of the largest BitTorrent trackers on the Internet. By the end of 2004, a year after the site launched, the tracker was already tracking a million peers and over 60.000 torrent files. Around the same time, the founders also noticed that not only Scandinavians were interested in their site. In fact, 80% of their users case from other parts of the world. Because of increasing worldwide popularity, The Pirate Bay team completely redesigned the site, which became available in several languages from then on.

Due to these changes, The Pirate Bay grew even faster, and the number of peers tracked by the site grew to 2,500,000 in 2005. Its popularity didn’t go by unnoticed in Hollywood either. Copyright holders started to send out takedown notices, which were often mocked by the site’s founders. Eventually, however, The Pirate Bay got raided, following pressure from Hollywood and the USA.

The raid brought the site into mainstream press, not in the least because it came back online within three days. All this publicity consequently resulted in a huge traffic spike, sorting quite the opposite effect of what Hollywood had hoped for. In the years that followed, ISPs in other countries including Denmark and Italy were forced to ban the site, again it only increased The Pirate Bay’s popularity.

Last week the tracker reached another milestone, as it broke the 25 million peers mark. This effectively means that at any given point in time, more than 25 million people actively trade files thought the Pirate Bay tracker. Not worried by the upcoming court case in 2009, the ship sails on, larger than ever before. That is certainly something to celebrate.

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

Flippy, the admin of Torrentz told us that he noticed some worrying changes when he checked his website late last night. There were banners from Adbrite at the top and bottom of the site, banners that didn’t belong there. It turns out that “the hacker” we mentioned before, managed to change the nameservers of the torrentz.com domain. In the middle of the new page torrentz.eu was now loading in a frame, so the site was usable apart from the extra ads.

When Flippy added some Javascript to the torrentz.eu site to prevent it from loading inside the frame, the .com domain suddenly linked to some fresh warez forum and an image hosting site. The warez forum, warez2share.com, was apparently hosted on a shared hosting account, and it didn’t take long before the account was suspended because of the traffic overload.

The hacker didn’t stop there of course, and he soon changed the page to a single Adbrite banner. And as if that wasn’t enough, he decided to email Flippy, to tell him how good of a hacker he is. “So, I emailed him back, and informed him that I have a lawyer who will subpoena Adbrite first thing in the morning, to get the account’s details,” Flippy told us.

After some emails back and forth, the hacker suddenly changed his tone. After Flippy reminded him that forging a US driver’s license is a serious crime, he suddenly became surprisingly cooperative. Instead of bragging about his hacker skills, he was suddenly willing to change the nameservers back. At the time of publication, the domain details have indeed been reverted, and until the changes clear, torrentz.com is being redirected to the backup domain, torrentz.eu.

It is not over yet though, as Flippy told us that he will do everything he can to find out the identity of the ‘hacker’, so stay tuned.

Update: The hacker is from California and forged a CA drivers license, which he can be put in jail for. Flippy, however, decided not to go after him, since it would be very costly to do from Poland, and it’s not worth it for 4 hours downtime.

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

In the years to come, The Pirate Bay established itself as the largest BitTorrent tracker on the Internet. Recently, the number of peers that use the tracker at any given point in time grew larger than the entire population of Scandinavia. In fact, over the past 12 months, the number of peers more than tripled, to 25 million.

At the time of publication, The Pirate Bay tracks 25.064.271 peers, divided over close to 1.856.243 torrent files. Quite an accomplishment when you consider that it is not even 2 months ago since they the 15 million mark. Coincidentally, the server that tracks the statistics crashed due to a hard drive failure, right around the time they reached the new milestone.

We asked Peter Sunde, co-founder of the site, how this huge surge can be explained, and whether the traffic to the site is also increasing. “I think it’s because of the new updates to the software and recent additions in hardware,” Peter told TorrentFreak. “We’re putting up new trackers all the time to cope with the traffic increase. And yes, the traffic to the site is also increasing. New visitor records every week.”

In an attempt to make their “torrent tracking” record official, The Pirate Bay applied for an entry in the Guinness book of world records last week. A record that they will probably break themselves every weekend. It is estimated that The Pirate Bay tracks 50% of all public torrents, which means that they are responsible for a significant part of the total Internet traffic.

“It’s just weird,” says Peter in response to these mind boggling statistics. “It’s cool to do something that big, but it’s scary that it’s so few people managing that of a big system. PLEASE, people, start more trackers! Put them out there, have open systems! We need the diversity.”

It might indeed be a good idea to spread the load a bit. There are plenty of private trackers, but good and reliable open trackers remain scarce. Meanwhile, The Pirate Bay will continue to update their hardware, and tweak their software, while working on side-projects such as the recently updated email service Slopsbox.

Hollywood will probably not be too happy when they hear that the Swedish deviant has broken yet another record, but Peter and the other Pirate Bay founders couldn’t care less what they think. Peter has a message for them though: “Stop hating the future. Be smart and come over from the dark side.”

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