Billy Ray has been remixed by some big names including Junior Vasquez, David Morales, BT, Roger Sanchez and Todd Terry. By embracing BitTorrent and giving away two exclusive remixes, she hopes to reach out to a new audience.

“The reason why I chose this path is as a path to generating renewed attention to my stuff,” Billie Ray told TorrentFreak.

“I’ve been keeping up to date with online developments over the years and frankly I find it more fun than chasing indie labels around, waiting for someone to sign you for no money. It’s more fun to put out my own stuff and part of that is making sure people get to hear it.”

The remixes released on Mininova are part of the forthcoming ‘Crackdown Project’ which will kick off officially on the March 6th at the release party in Berlin.

In the past year Billie Ray has been sending out some free music to blogs, through which she received a lot of positive feedback, but this is the first time she has used BitTorrent to distribute her music.

This doesn’t mean that her music wasn’t available on BitTorrent already, of course. When we asked her how she felt about these unauthorized copies that are floating around, Billie Ray said: “It happens, so I can’t grumble really. I make some money from selling that work still so it’s all good. It’s all pocket-money these days.”

Unlike many other artists, Billie Ray doesn’t seem to have much faith in the new (legal) music streaming services that have surfaced in recent years, labeling them as rip-offs.

“Things like Spotify and Last.fm I do not wish to support. They give free unlimited streaming without paying the artists. They say they do, but they don’t,” she said, adding that she made less than $4 from these services so far. “I think they’re killing music off for good.”

She is not the first artist to complain about the revenue generated by Spotify. Lady Gaga has been complaining bitterly as well, although the labels might be to blame for this, since they tend to keep a big chunk of the money.

From her release on BitTorrent she’s not making any more direct money, that’s for sure, but seeing thousands of downloads in a week might cheer her up a little. Being heard, whether it’s through BitTorrent or Spotify, will eventually benefit artists in the long run.

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

It is difficult to downplay this success. BREIN must have been absolutely delighted that all their hard work and investment had paid off, stopping Mininova in its tracks just a short time after the site had served up its 10 billionth torrent.

The Dutch anti-piracy group also had a fairly significant victory over The Pirate Bay. In common with the earlier decision against Mininova, a Dutch Court ruled that The Pirate Bay has to remove a list of torrents linking to copyrighted works by 1st March 2010.

While it had a win over Mininova and a limited win over The Pirate Bay, both of which attracted mountains of press, it seems the Netherlands-based group has been hiding its biggest successes from almost everyone.

According to figures just released by BREIN, the group shut down a staggering 615 “illegal websites” in 2009 and, apparently, BitTorrent sites made up the majority.

TorrentFreak knew that BREIN had shut down a handful of torrent sites, 19 very small sites for example (plus TorrentVault which was targeted but still operates today via Sweden), but we were absolutely oblivious to the sheer numbers now being claimed.

Total BitTorrent sites BREIN said it closed down in 2009 – a staggering 393.

And it doesn’t stop there. The anti-piracy group also says it shut down 35 eD2K servers, 38 streaming video sites and 14 Usenet portals/NZB sites.

While these closures would have no doubt been very noticeable for those that used the sites and services in question, one has to question how many people were actually using them. Unfortunately, we’re a little bit in the dark, since aside from the sites we mentioned above, a grand total of zero emails flooded into TorrentFreak during 2009 requesting information on the other several hundred closures.

So, if you know any of those we haven’t listed, please post them in the comments. We’d love to know exactly how much damage these closures did to BitTorrent. Our suspicions at this point are, not very much at all.

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

These exchanges often started off politely but later turned into an email fight when it became clear that The Pirate Bay didn’t intend on removing any torrents from their site. However, some rights holders are furious from the start and don’t even have to be triggered by such takedown refusals.

One such copyright holder, Paul Harris from ReverbXL, couldn’t hide his frustration when he harassed several torrent site admins. In his email, Harris holds the admins responsible for the illegal downloading that occurs though their site, and warns them about the consequences of their actions.

“You won’t win this fight. And not because the big mean corporate world will beat you, because you’ll end up as an insignificant foot note in history,” Harris writes.

Harris’ full rant is pasted below, for your consideration.

Paul Harris wrote:

Hi there webmaster. We are a music publisher and your web spiders are linking to songs by TURIN BRAKES, who we publish. We have not given permission to be distributed.

Please remove all links. I would appreciate it if you could monitor your service and ensure that NO copyrighted material is linked in it. If you do not have the technology to ensure this, then I advise you to invest in it before you are closed down or forced to remove all links. May I draw your attention to this recent ruling.

Mininova. Was the biggest, and the most uncooperative, now the humblest, and the most co-operative. You will be the same. Maybe it would be best to remove the links yourself?

From a moral standpoint, you are not only hurting the music industry but also the writers and the artists involved. Think about it, please. There are plenty of legal alternatives now where people who do not want to buy music can listen. But the contributors deserve to be paid.

Think about it. It’s like a company using their fleet of white vans to move other people’s stolen goods around – no you haven’t done the actual stealing, but you are facilitating the crime!

I work my balls off trying to make a living in music – I’m not some jerk off in a suit. Nor are my artists. But you cast us as such whilst knowing nothing of the reality.

If you are so brave, so keen to take a swipe at the corporate world, why don’t you go and picket Shell, Nike, HSBC, any number of industries who actually ARE immoral. But you won’t, because your moral stand point is totally warped. I can’t wait to see you go down. You won’t win this fight. And not because the big mean corporate world will beat you, because you’ll end up as an insignificant foot note in history.

Thanks very much.

P

Although we can sympathize with Harris somewhat, this is definitely not the best way to get links to content removed from a torrent site. In the case of Turin Brakes, a little patience might have gone a very long way since there are only a handful of torrents on public trackers so the job would’ve been pretty easy.

Despite the aggressive approach, most torrent site operators are still willing to cooperate and remove the associated torrent files. After a quick search though, Google turns up as many links as most public search engines. Whether they would respond favorably to an email like this is up for debate.

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

Despite this, there will also be labels that perform badly for unrelated reasons. How convenient is it then, to blame evil file-sharers for your disappointing results. The Finnish hard rock label Lion Music is doing just that, with rather dramatic consequences.

Because of all the stealing and looting by Internet pirates, the label has decided not to sign any new acts until politicians have found a remedy.

“We are NOT able to sign more artists. No demos or masters you send us will be considered for release. We will NOT listen to any mp3 files or check out your websites and we will NOT respond to questions regarding releasing your album,” the label’s bosses write on their website.

“The illegal file sharing on the net is killing independent music. We are sorry about this situation but we are sure you are aware of what is going on,” the dramatic rant continues.

“Our demo policy will not change before our politicians have stopped the P2P sites. Illegal file sharing is not just about stealing from rich major companies. It is about killing independent music and making it impossible for many great musicians to have a chance to release albums and have a musical career even as a part time job.”

“Next time you consider downloading an album for free or adding new torrents please think of the impact you are having on the artists – would you like it if we came into your home and stole your pay check?”

The label’s bosses then go on to show various statistics of how many times the albums of their artists were pirated though an unnamed BitTorrent site, arguing that these downloads are responsible for their disappointing results.

To add to the drama the label has asked their musicians to write up their thoughts on piracy in a section called “The Murder of Music.”

One of the artists that penned up his thoughts on piracy is guitar hero Borislav Mitic. Mitic is just as gentle in his commentary as the label’s bosses.

“Just because you CAN download music for free today on the Internet doesn’t mean you SHOULD,” he writes. “You CAN also beat up an old lady on the street and steal her pension from her wallet … but somebody CAN beat you up too and do the same to you. Would you like this?”

According to Borislav, illegal downloading will lead to a “society of filthy, wild savages.” To those people who dare to continue stealing through BitTorrent sites he adds, “the blood will be on your hands…”

Those who have the courage to read the rest of the artist entries will be amazed at the hostile tone towards the readers, who they assume are pirates.

Don’t get us wrong. Despite research that points in the opposite direction, it could be that piracy is hurting the sales of Lion Music. But even if this was true, their way of bringing the message across is not going to help their cause, it will only alienate the fans.

A label taking completely the opposite stance, embracing both file-sharing and their fans, is Thorny Bleeder Records, who have just released the second volume of their free download series. Entitled Get Thorny 2, the album features new music from seventeen independent Canadian artists. (link to torrent on Mininova)

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

Yates was asked by his employer to make a promotional copy for the Jay Leno show, but made an extra copy which he shared with friends and family.

Yates’s actions didn’t go unnoticed by his employer and the FBI, who tracked him down through the company’s surveillance cameras. Yates was later arrested and admitted that he distributed the movie among friends and family. The arrest led to a sentence of six months in a federal prison from which he was released in September last year.

The damage done by the leak didn’t stop there though. A member of the Yates family passed the film on to Mischa Wynhausen, who decided to upload it to Mininova. Following an FBI investigation, Wynhausen, a 31 year-old from Irvine CA, was busted as well.

Wynhausen confessed to uploading the film to Mininova and accepted a sentence of three years probation.

Although Wynhausen’s offense is considered to be more severe than that of Yates, he doesn’t have to serve time in jail. According to Thom Mrozek, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office, this difference is in part because Wynhausen cooperated with the FBI, while Yates initially lied about his actions.

On BitTorrent the movie was never a big hit, despite the fact that it was available online before the theater release. This lack of interest mimics the box office earnings. With a production budget of $62 million, ‘The Love Guru’ was a big flop for Paramount Pictures, bringing in little over $40 million at the box office worldwide.

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

The new year starts without The Pirate Bay tracker, which was closed in November, and also without Mininova, which saw its site being censored and stripped down by a Dutch court. To counter these losses, several public tracker-only services have made a comeback along with multiple torrent-only storage sites.

Where do we go from here? Let’s make some predictions.

Prediction 1: The Pirate Bay will cease to offer torrent links

After closing its tracker in 2009, The Pirate Bay will further evolve by removing all torrents from its index in the new year. The site will be reduced to a BitTorrent platform that no longer stores torrent files. Users will still be able to submit torrents through a third party service such as Torrage, but instead of linking to these torrent files, The Pirate Bay will list only Magnet links.

During the second half of 2010, The Pirate Bay four will appear before the Appeal Court. They will be found ‘not guilty’ and walk away free. Shortly after this victory in court, Pirate Bay’s YouTube killer The Video Bay will be released to the public.

Prediction 2: A BitTorrent client will be dragged to court

In 2009, the entertainment industry and authorities took legal action against various BitTorrent users and numerous sites. They left BitTorrent clients alone, but this will change in the new year. A coalition of copyright holders will file a lawsuit against one of the major BitTorrent clients, in an attempt to stop the ever increasing piracy rate.

The copyright holders will argue that BitTorrent clients play a vital role in downloading and uploading copyrighted files, and that the software is assisting in copyright infringement. They will demand that the torrent client implements a filtering mechanism to prevent users from downloading movies, music or games without the permission of the copyright holder.

Prediction 3: More people will use BitTorrent anonymously

2010 is the year where copyright holders gain more control over the Internet. Three-strikes legislation will be rolled out in various countries and global trade agreements such as ACTA will result in humongous fines for casual downloaders.

As a result of this newly founded Internet police state, millions of BitTorrent users will take measures to hide their identities online. By the end of the year, a quarter of all BitTorrent users will use a VPN service or similar anonymity software, with another quarter looking to do so in the following 12 months. This will make new legislation ineffective, and lead to further lobbying by the entertainment industry for even harsher anti-piracy measures.

This cycle will repeat itself until the entertainment industry decides to innovate.

Prediction 4: BitTorrent (live) streaming will take off

Advances in technology and growing broadband penetration have brought us to a point where BitTorrent-powered streaming solutions have become reality. BitTorrent inventor Bram Cohen is working on a streaming implementation and experiments have shown that it is possible to stream high definition content.

In the second half of 2010, the first BitTorrent-powered YouTube competitors will be launched. These new BitTorrent sites will mainly offer streams of pirated movies and TV-shows. Live BitTorrent streaming will gain worldwide traction during the 2010 soccer world cup in South Africa. In the second half of the year, commercial implementations will follow, allowing broadcasters to stream live content at zero cost.

Prediction 5: uTorrent will become a resource hog

In 2010, uTorrent will be transformed from a lightweight BitTorrent application into a media portal similar to its nemesis, Vuze. Unlike Vuze, BitTorrent Inc. will continue to offer a lightweight uTorrent version for the the people who don’t want to make this switch, preventing a revolt among conservative uTorrent users.

The new uTorrent will be a resource hog, featuring a full blown search engine, video conversion, iTunes integration and a video player. The browser interface will allow uTorrent to be put on set-top boxes, which opens up the possibility for BitTorrent Inc. to reopen a new and improved version of their video store that can be easily hooked up to TVs.

Due to the changes, uTorrent will obviously have to remove its tagline ‘a (very) tiny BitTorrent client.’

—–

Happy new year to all of you from TorrentFreak. Let us know what your predictions are for 2010 in the comments below. We will feature the best on our side-blog FreakBits during the coming days.

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

Suprnova was founded by Andrej Preston, a Slovenian teenager better known as Sloncek, who started the site as a fun project to show off to some friends on IRC. The site started off with a very primitive setup, hosted on a Linux box at Sloncek’s home.

In the weeks that followed, word of the “Universal BitTorrent Source” spread like wildfire. It was no surprise that the traffic generated by Suprnova quickly maxed out the meager 16kb/s upload capacity Sloncek had at home.

The increased popularity of Suprnova came around the same time as other torrent sites like donkax.com, bytemonsoon.com and torrentse.cx, decided to quit. These sites were more or less forced to go offline, either due to bandwidth constraints or cease and desist letters. But Suprnova made it very clear that it wasn’t going anywhere.

Suprnova continued to grow, and Sloncek spent most of the time looking for mirrors to guarantee that the site stayed up. At its peak it indexed almost 60,000 torrents and served around 1.5 million visitors per day. Suprnova had a very active community, and its forum was among the biggest on the Internet.

In November 2004, Suprnova’s ISP told Sloncek that the servers had been taken into custody by the Slovenian police. The raid was initiated by the French anti-piracy lobby RetSpan. The police never contacted Sloncek about this personally, but it was a sign that things were about to change.

Around the same time, Reuters wrote about Sloncek and his rapidly growing site in one of their articles, which soon after spread out to the Slovenian press.

This was the turning point for Sloncek. He later said: “So I ended up reading about myself in Slovenian newspapers. And right about that time, I had a feeling something was wrong. I do not really know what the feeling was or where it was coming from, but I decided it was time to take Suprnova.org offline.”

Sloncek eventually pulled the plug on December 19, 2004, which marked the end of an era, and the beginning of a new one.

The fall of Suprnova resulted in an avalanche of new sites that aimed to fill the gap. Among these new sites was Mininova, which despite its name outgrew Suprnova within a year, establishing itself as one of the leading torrent sites for nearly five years.

In 2007, Suprnova returned to the BitTorrent stage, resurrected by the folks behind The Pirate Bay. The site never even came close to what it was though, and as of today it is just serving a few torrents a day to some lost souls.

Sloncek himself moved on with his life. He moved to San Francisco in 2007 where he’s attending the Academy of Art University. He didn’t cut his BitTorrent roots completely though, as he’s currently directing TorrentFreak TV in his spare time.

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

The toolbar was never promoted in public, because it was just as useless as most toolbars, and, up until today, it had just one install.

In fact, we totally forgot that it still existed until Conduit sent us an email yesterday, which informed us that our Publisher Agreement had been terminated for using inappropriate words. Apparently Conduit has decided that the ‘torrent’ in TorrentFreak is a direct violation of their terms and conditions.

“It has recently come to our attention that the name and the content of the community toolbar that you publish contains materials (such as marks, signs, images, or texts) that are not allowed in the Conduit platform, and specifically: Torrent, Emule and P2P,” Conduit wrote TorrentFreak in an email.

The company further stated that using such words is considered as a violation of the terms and conditions of the publisher agreement, and that our long-standing and fruitful relationship would be terminated immediately.

Just out of curiosity and to find out what terms or conditions we could possibly have violated, we skimmed through the agreement, but to no avail. There is no mention of a list of forbidden words mentioned in the Publisher Agreement.

Not every ‘torrent’ toolbar is considered evil though. The popular Torrent Search Bar and Torrent Toolbar, that both use Conduit, still seem to be working. Similarly, Mininova told TorrentFreak that they haven’t been contacted by Conduit either.

Of course we don’t mind that Conduit pulled the plug on our toolbar, but the reason for the termination is just so ridiculous, we simply had to bring it up. We can only hope that other companies will refrain from using such arbitrary ban lists.

Conduit has been contacted for a comment on their radical censorship policy, but thus far we haven’t heard back from the company.

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

Dozens of notable BitTorrent sites have emerged since things really began to take off in 2002/2003, and literally thousands of lesser known private communities have flourished. But in terms of sheer volume of torrents, users and mainstream awareness, a trio of sites have stood head and shoulders above the rest.

By scale and exposure, The Pirate Bay, Mininova and isoHunt became the three most prominent BitTorrent sites in the latter half of the decade, serving billions of torrents to multiple millions of BitTorrent users.

Due to this massive and unprecedented level of interest, it became increasingly clear – the movie and music industries, just as they did with dozens of sites and services before them, would move to crush or suffocate them into submission. 2009 became a painful year for all three of them.

The Pirate Bay

On April 17th 2009, after being hounded continuously by the combined might of the movie and music industries, the four defendants in The Pirate Bay trial were eventually found guilty.

While the court said that it was the users of The Pirate Bay that committed the first infringements by sharing copyright files, it went on to dismiss most of the technical details, and judged the case on intent. It was declared that the intention of the defendants was to facilitate the sharing of copyrighted works.

Categorizing the infringements as ’severe’, the court said the team of four were well aware that copyrighted material was being shared using The Pirate Bay and that they made it easy for the users and assisted the infringements. The lack of a ‘notice and takedown’ certainly did not help the defense.

The four defendants were sentenced to one year in prison and a fines of $905,000 each. The case will be appealed.

The crushing verdict did not close the site, however, despite further legal attacks on its bandwidth infrastructure and bans forbidding the founders from operating the site.

Indeed, with adaptation, the site remains alive and fully operational today, proving that in The Pirate Bay’s case, suffering pain is not a terminal condition.

Mininova

After operating for almost five full years, the BitTorrent giant Mininova also succumbed to relentless entertainment industry in 2009, deleting over a million torrent files and shutting down the majority of its website.

Mininova was left with little choice, being forced into these drastic measures following a negative verdict in their court battle with the local anti-piracy outfit BREIN in the summer.

The Dutch court told Mininova that it must remove all infringing torrent files from its index on pain of huge fines, but as this proved technically unfeasible, the site’s owners took the decision to remove all torrents uploaded by regular users, many of which were not infringing any copyrights at all. This proved disastrous to the site. As a force to be reckoned with, Mininova has been taken back to the stone age.

isoHunt

In 2006, several Hollywood studios filed a complaint about then US-based site, isoHunt. In common with claims against The Pirate Bay and Mininova, the studios stated that the site’s owner was guilty of profiting from, and inducing, copyright infringement.

Just 8 days ago, on December 21st 2009, a US federal court in California ruled that isoHunt was indeed guilty of inducing copyright infringement, stating that the site’s operators had engaged in “purposeful, culpable expression and conduct, aimed at promoting infringing uses of the websites.”

Since the circumstances of the case were so similar to earlier ones involving Napster and Grokster, the judge decided there was no need to have a full trial and instead granted a summary judgment against isoHunt.

No damages awards against the site have yet been announced and isoHunt remains fully operational at the moment, pending an appeal. In common with The Pirate Bay, isoHunt has not yet succumbed to the pain of its court defeat, despite overwhelming odds.

Lessons to be learned and the future of torrent sites

While Mininova is almost certainly out for good, The Pirate Bay and isoHunt remain active, despite their losses. Nevertheless, there are plenty of lessons to be learned from the court defeats of all three sites. Although some may believe that the negative verdicts point to the illegality of torrent sites, that is not the full picture.

In all three court defeats – notably in three distinct jurisdictions (Sweden, The Netherlands and United States) – indexed content aside, none of them stated that torrent sites are illegal. However, fingers were pointed firmly at the operators and their conduct when running their sites.

Being prepared to filter out fakes and malware from sites but not having a ‘notice and takedown’ system for copyright holders can prove fatal. But in the cases of Mininova and isoHunt, who both operated such systems and even co-operated with copyright owners, participating in discussions about copyright infringement on their forums can undo all the hard work.

In future, if site owners are to reduce liability, they will have to remain a lot more detached from their operations than they have been previously. The lessons to be learned are many, a few of which are detailed here.

Already TorrentFreak is informed that next-generation torrent sites are in development, meaning that 2010 will prove yet another interesting year.

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

The misleading reports all based their conclusions on data supplied by a network-management firm, which showed that of all Internet traffic, the percentage consumed by P2P has slowly declined. However, those who take a closer look at the data will find that in absolute traffic, P2P continued to grow, with bandwidth used by streaming just growing a little bit faster.

BitTorrent is by no means dying, nor is there a decline. Quite the opposite. All the major BitTorrent sites saw a significant increase in visitor numbers over the past months. TorrentFreak asked Simon Morris, BitTorrent’s VP of Product Management, if this growth is also reflected in the usage stats of uTorrent.

“Probably the emergence of things like Hulu and continued growth of Youtube make it seem like Bittorrent is not the only thing driving demand for consumer bandwidth. But we see no evidence whatever that BitTorrent clients are any less popular,” Morris told TorrentFreak.

Around this time last year uTorrent had 28 million unique users a month, and by November 2009 this figure had almost doubled to 52 million monthly users. And things have been going equally well for uTorrent’s little brother, BitTorrent Mainline.

“In addition to this, at the start of this year we saw almost 5 million monthly users of BitTorrent Mainline,” Morris said. “In November 2009 we saw over 10 million.”

These statistics show that despite the legal setbacks The Pirate Bay, Mininova and isoHunt have faced in court, the number of people who are using BitTorrent has continued to grow significantly. There is no indication that this growth will slow, let alone stop, in 2010.

The uTorrent development team also has some major improvements in the pipeline. Last week streaming support was added to the client, and in the coming year it will add file security features and the option for torrent site owners to promote their content within the client.

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

On December 21st 2009, a US federal court in California ruled that isoHunt is indeed guilty of violating US copyright law by way of inducement, with the operators having engaged in “purposeful, culpable expression and conduct, aimed at promoting infringing uses of the websites.”

In noting the similarities between this case and earlier ones involving both the Napster and Grokster file-sharing services, Judge Stephen Wilson ruled that a full trial was not required and granted the plaintiffs request for summary judgment.

As noted by Michael Geist, the court also concluded that inducement liability and the safe harbor provisions under the DMCA are incompatible. In this case it means since isoHunt was found to have induced infringement, it did not qualify for safe harbor.

In common with the Mininova court defeat earlier this year, the court was critical of isoHunt (and associated sites) staff actions on the site and in their forums.

The court said the clearest instance of encouraging users to commit infringements was the ‘Box Office Movies’ section of the site. These pages listed the top 20 highest-grossing movies in the US, for which users were invited to upload associated torrents.

“By implementing this feature,” said the court, “Defendants engaged in direct solicitation of infringing activity.”

Furthermore, when isoHunt generated torrent categories, such as ‘Top 20 Movies’, the court said that the fact that these lists “almost exclusively contained copyrighted works and that Defendants never removed these lists” indicated that isoHunt knew about ongoing infringement yet failed to take action to stop it.

Several other instances of staff members giving users advice on how to download copyright movies (including providing .torrent links), rip copyright DVDs and use software such as PeerGuardian were also cited.

Even the forum user ranking system didn’t escape criticism. Since user ranks included titles such as “I pir4te, therefore I am” and “All Day I Dream About W4rez,” the court concluded that the Defendants “promoted their users’ infringing activities by consciously fostering a community that encouraged – indeed, celebrated – copyright infringement.”

The court’s judgment can be downloaded here, or viewed online here. At 46 pages long it’s a pretty heavy read, but contains essential information for anyone interested in what can’t be done when operating a torrent site or other similar service in the US.

At this stage it’s unclear if isoHunt will appeal the US decision, but of course, in the meantime the site is fully operational in Canada, and will remain so for the foreseeable future.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Understandably, Mininova’s traffic took a huge hit in the last week which is likely to continue in the months to come. For most other torrent sites, however, 2009 has been a successful year with growing visitor numbers all around.

We have compiled below a list of the 25 most-visited torrent sites as of today. Only public and English language sites are included. The list is based on traffic rank reports from Compete, Alexa and SiteReport’s World Rank. The number of daily visitors and page views are estimates.

#1 THEPIRATEBAY.ORG - Daily Visitors: 4,467,074 - Pageviews: 26,177,054 (5.86 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #104 - Compete Rank: #787 Visit Site | Full Report
#2 TORRENTZ.COM - Daily Visitors: 2,656,483 - Pageviews: 12,963,637 (4.88 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #180 - Compete Rank: Currently Not Available Visit Site | Full Report
#3 ISOHUNT.COM - Daily Visitors: 2,461,643 - Pageviews: 16,566,857 (6.73 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #186 - Compete Rank: #1,226 Visit Site | Full Report
#4 MININOVA.ORG - Daily Visitors: 1,406,653 - Pageviews: 6,597,203 (4.69 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #96 - Compete Rank: #1,123 Visit Site | Full Report
#5 BTJUNKIE.ORG - Daily Visitors: 1,321,113 - Pageviews: 6,143,175 (4.65 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #403 - Compete Rank: #2,286 Visit Site | Full Report
#6 TORRENTREACTOR.NET - Daily Visitors: 898,167 - Pageviews: 1,796,334 (2 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #391 - Compete Rank: #1,500 Visit Site | Full Report
#7 TORRENTDOWNLOADS.NET - Daily Visitors: 888,663 - Pageviews: 1,581,820 (1.78 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #1,086 - Compete Rank: #3,477 Visit Site | Full Report
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Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

In the verdict of the initial appeal, the Court ruled that The Pirate Bay has to remove a list of torrents linking to copyrighted works.

This list is to be provided by BREIN, which is similar to the earlier ruling against Mininova. The three defendants were given three months to comply, facing penalties of 3000 euros per person, per day.

In addition to removing the torrents, the defendants were ordered to block Dutch users from accessing certain parts of the site where it’s possible for them to download torrents which link to copyright works.

Ernst-Jan Louwers, the lawyer for the three Pirate Bay defendants, initially told TorrentFreak that his clients were considering an appeal against this judgment, but according to a BREIN press release issued today, this is not going to happen.

BREIN says the whereabouts of the three defendants is currently unknown, and unfindable even for their own lawyer. Because of this, BREIN used Twitter again to notify them about the verdict, which is now final. Earlier this year BREIN has also served the defendants though twitter, but these notifications went unnoticed.

The defendants now have until the 1st March 2010 to comply with the Court’s orders. Whether or not they can actually remove any torrents is doubtful. Thus far the defendants have argued that they do not control or own the website.

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

Most news sites have RSS feeds that let you automatically receive updates when a new article is published. Similarly, most BitTorrent sites also publish RSS feeds for their content, allowing users to download or receive notifications on new torrents without having to search for files manually.

Most of the popular torrent clients support RSS downloading which works well with the RSS feeds produced by most torrent sites. However, nearly every site uses a slightly different format which doesn’t do the usability of the RSS feeds much good.

Dave Winer, the original designer of RSS, has noticed this ‘mess’ as well and has opted to change it. Although Winer saw BitTorrent winning at the 2003 Wired Awards where RSS was also nominated, he doesn’t hold a grudge against the popular file-sharing protocol.

“After Mininova shut down their main service, I decided to look into how BitTorrent might be better decentralized,” Winer told TorrentFreak.

‘One of the keys to that will be to improve the RSS the various sites produce. It’s pretty much a mess, but that’s understandable because there have always been good search engines to do the centralization. Now that that’s in doubt, let’s clean it up,” Winer added.

To help BitTorrent’s move forward, Winer started by reviewing the RSS output produced by a few torrent sites and wrote up some comments and suggestions on how the various implementations can be improved.

His writing was soon picked up by isoHunt’s Gary Fung and EZTV’s NovaKing, who have already implemented some of Winer’s suggestions and started discussing a more standardized RSS output, as well as a BitTorrent RSS namespace.

Although the technicalities may not be of interest to most users, everyone who uses RSS feeds on BitTorrent sites will eventually benefit from standardization. Winer encourages torrent site and application developers to join the discussion, add comments and come up with suggestions.

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

Mininova was forced to take such a drastic measure following a negative verdict in their court battle with the local anti-piracy outfit BREIN this summer. The torrent indexer was told by the court to remove all infringing torrent files from its index. This was technically unfeasible according to the Mininova team, who were left with no other choice than to remove all torrent files uploaded by regular users.

This move resulted in the deletion of more than a million torrents, many of which were not infringing any copyrights at all. As expected, the consequences of this decision for Mininova’s traffic, as well as the number of searches and downloads on the site, are disastrous.

In just a few days Mininova’s traffic plummeted by 66%, from well over 5 million visits the day before the torrents were removed, to just 1.8 million yesterday. If the downward trend continues at this rate, the site will have less than a million visits a day a week from now, throwing it out of the top 10 most visited torrent sites that it led for two years in a row.

Even more striking perhaps is the drop in downloads and searches. As can be seen from the graph below, the number of downloads dropped from over 10 million a day to just 371,424. The number of searches went down from 10 to 3 million, a less steep drop than the downloads, probably indicating that not everyone is aware of the reduced number of torrents on the site.

So what’s next?

There is no doubt that Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN will be proud of their accomplishment, but aside from ruining Mininova’s business it will not have a significant impact on the overall volume of BitTorrent traffic. As always, new sites emerge by the dozens as old ones are shut down and users quickly adapt to the new situation.

A network engineer at a major Aussie ISP has confirmed that Mininova’s partial shutdown has had no noticeable effect on traffic volumes. “I didn’t notice any reduction in [torrent] traffic when The Pirate Bay went down. It’s hard to see how there’d be any significant change from Mininova’s withdrawal.”

That said, the ‘end’ of Mininova does leave a scar behind. For years most torrent indexers heavily relied on torrents that were uploaded to Mininova. With over a million user-uploaded torrents, the site was without a doubt the main torrent provider on the Internet. Although most of the torrents are still mirrored on other sites, Mininova’s role as content provider has to be taken over by others.

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

The Pirate Party currently holds two seats in the European Parliament thanks to the massive support from Swedish voters. In the aftermath of this accomplishment several new parties were founded worldwide. In the UK the Pirate Party was officially registered at the Electoral Commission in August and Canada has been pursuing the same goal for a while, now followed by Australia.

The Pirate Party Australia just announced that it is now accepting founding members in their attempt to get the party officially registered with the Australian Electoral Commission. In order to get registered the party needs 500 members who sign and send in their application form, plus a $20.00 founders fee.

“With this small but significant step, we will be one step closer to providing Australian electors with the option of voting ‘Pirate’ at the next Federal election, to fight for a fairer and more balanced copyright, greater innovation and access to culture, information and knowledge, greater government transparency and the protection of our civil liberties,” the Party announced.

David Crafti, President of Pirate Party Australia, stresses the importance of a political party that defends citizens rights against the ever-growing power of pro-copyright lobbyists.

“With the current government attempting to implement an Internet censorship regime, continuing secretive ACTA negotiations and an increasingly belligerent war on sharing, here and across the globe – it is now more important than ever that we work to protect our civil liberties, and our democracy,” Crafti said.

The Aussie Pirate Party hopes to have the 500 required membership applications in before the end of the year. They encourage prospective members to send in their application forms (pdf) as soon as is possible, so the party can become officially registered and get to work.

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

As always, we’re looking forward to your commentary. For questions or suggestions, feel free to contact the crew at tv@torrentfreak.com. We encourage contributions from viewers!

An iTunes feed is available here, and a regular RSS feed here.

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

In reality, the truth proved somewhat different.

No one could argue Grokster had been defeated, but the consequences for file-sharing were limited. The real impact was that providers of file-sharing services could now be held liable if it could be shown that they promoted their products for infringing purposes. Careful advertising was all that was required. Furthermore, the decision only affected the United States. Considering the epic scale of the case and the supposed victory, the results were far from devastating.

And now, 4 years later, Mininova, another file-sharing giant that rode on the crest of the BitTorrent wave since the Grokster verdict, has effectively been forced to close down the vast majority of its site, prompting many to feel that BitTorrent is heading for its twilight years.

However, with careful consideration, it may just be possible to create another Mininova that avoids its namesake’s fate, since the court’s decision was not solely related to the existence of links to infringing content, i.e the .torrent files.

The DMCA is widely known in BitTorrent circles. It is the US copyright act (but accepted by many indexers and trackers regardless of location) which many sites quote when offering to take down torrents that link to infringing content. “If you’re the content owner, let us know,” they say, “..and we’ll take down torrents that link to your works.” Complying with so-called ‘DMCA takedown requests’ is widely accepted as a way to stay within the law.

Although Mininova operated such a system, comments by the site’s staff on their forums called their commitment to it into doubt. There are many samples given in the court’s decision, here are just a few. It’s worth noting that many of them date back to 2005, when users, staff and site admins would have been much more relaxed.

“May have been just a take down request (…) i’d say just re upload it (…) thanks for sharing” (posted by site moderator)

“Thanks for reporting, I deleted the fake version and uploaded the correct one” (posted by site admin)

“I made a mistake of downloading a shareware version of Monopoly Jr. only to find out it only allows you to play it for 15 minutes and then it becomes useless,” said a user. “Check the site, it’s there now” (posted by site admin).

Mininova also took pride in their efforts to proactively filter fake files (including in the decision are comments by staff who admit to downloading material to check if it is indeed as labeled), viruses, malware, pornographic and drug-related material, but this seems to have backfired by the corresponding lack of commitment to proactively filter copyright content in the same manner.

The site also carried some very specific categories for its torrents. Not just ‘movies’ or ‘TV’, but also sections such as “CSI” and “Desperate Housewives” which are widely known to be copyright works. One section highlighted in the decision was labeled ‘Disney’. The court decided that since so little Disney material is copyright-free, the section could have little other use than to infringe.

Mininova has never denied making profits (it is a company after all) and the court ruled that the site encouraged and profited “from infringements of copyrights and related rights of the holders represented by Brein.”

To see things from a different perspective, TorrentFreak has been discussing the closure of Mininova with Aldor Nini at digital distribution and anti-piracy solutions company, Easycom, who has been following the case closely.

Interestingly, Aldor informs us that 8 out of 10 torrents on Mininova were not covered by the BREIN lawsuit, which makes us wonder if the site could’ve stayed alive if the other 2 out of 10 were removed before the court’s hand was forced.

“We are very sorry to see a platform like Mininova shut down millions of torrent files,” he told TorrentFreak. “Based on our research we have found out that only 21% of the content was infringing rights of content owners for content used in the proceedings by BREIN. This 21% could probably be the most popular files on the platform, but we cannot confirm this for sure.”

“However, Mininova’s decision to completely remove everything was to 100% conform with what the judge has ruled. A 100% working filter was requested, and the removal of all non moderated user submitted torrents is the only 100% filter available nowadays,” he told us.

In a similar way that file-sharing applications similar to Grokster’s continue to flourish post the ‘big’ 2005 verdict, torrent sites can follow suit, if they are prepared to adapt.

“We do not think that this judgment will directly apply to other torrent portals at all,” Aldor told us, “but rather the way Mininova was operated as a torrent portal.”

Aldor has some interesting thoughts on how torrent sites can continue, without making the same mistakes as Mininova. He argues that torrent sites should behave neutrally, meaning that if they remove fake and spam comments they should filter copyrighted content too.

Based on Aldor’s reasoning, it seems another option is for sites to switch to user-based moderation, where content is automatically removed after a fixed number of downvotes. The bottom line is that the site’s operators (or moderators) should stay neutral.

Further suggestions are to take the takedown procedure seriously and make it easy to use. Sites should notify users that copyrights are to be respected and refrain from using specific categories (such as Disney). Again, based on the basis that site staff should stay neutral, user submitted tags should be fine.

Other more problematic ideas are the increased co-operation with content owners and to “stop thinking in black and white” – surely great advice for both sides and ultimately, the only long term solution.

Not making any profit or donating part of the site’s income to innovative music artists and film makers, and steering clear of scammy advertisers could be further plus points.

Aldor concludes that the lessons are there to be learned from Mininova’s demise.

“The next torrent portals, which will cover the next millions of torrent files, will hopefully learn from this situation. All in all Mininova’s partial shut-down will not influence the worldwide BitTorrent activity, it has just set up the rules for the successors of Mininova.”

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

“This is our preemptive strike with a narrowly defined petition for Declaratory Relief that we do not infringe, in anticipation they are going to file their own lawsuit that we do infringe (their copyright),” Fung told TorrentFreak at the time.

In March 2009, isoHunt and the CRIA appeared in court where the judge ruled that the issues in question were too complex and consequences too far-reaching not to move to a full trial. This decision was appealed by isoHunt, but without result, meaning that isoHunt has to go through the costly process of a full trial.

This week, isoHunt’s founder continued his crusade and filed the statement of claim (pdf) with the Supreme Court. The document describes the functionality of the search engines he operates (isoHunt and sister sites Torrentbox and Podtropolis) and asks the court to declare that these do not violate Canadian copyright law.

Despite the worsening copyright climate in other parts of the world, Fung remains confident that Canadian law is on his side. “I have high hopes for Canadian copyright laws and its courts to not make the mistakes that have been made elsewhere in the world. We must fight the increasing noise we are drowned in, that file sharing is stealing,” he said.

“As for CRIA and member record labels, if you come to your sense of reason, I would love to talk to you outside of court. The ball you’ve dropped on us is back to you,” Fung concludes.

After the partial shutdown of Mininova yesterday, isoHunt is now the second largest torrent site around in terms of traffic, trailing only behind The Pirate Bay. However, all of Fung’s torrent sites combined draw more traffic than any other torrent site around. Aside from the three torrent sites mentioned in the case and despite the legal troubles, Fung recently launched Hexagon, a new ‘social‘ BitTorrent site.

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