An NBC representative explained that the network will only cover the highlights because people “are not dying to watch lots of long-form content on a 13-inch screen.” However, at the same time NBC contradicts itself by announcing that it will do all it can to prevent people from accessing unauthorized live feeds or downloads of Olympic broadcasts.

While NBC doesn’t believe there is much demand for live coverage, it will do all it can to prevent the ‘few’ people who do from downloading or streaming the events online. “Our aim is to make access to pirated material inconvenient, low quality and hard to find,” said Rick Cotton, NBC’s Executive Vice President commenting on their Olympic mission.

Once again one of the major entertainment industry outfits has got it entirely wrong. If NBC really wants to prevent piracy they have to offer at least some sort of alternative. Cutting 2,200 hours of live web coverage back to just a few hundred is certainly not going to help in stopping piracy.

NBC reportedly has teamed up with Ustream and Justin.tv, two popular live streaming sites, to use filtering schemes in order to prevent illegal broadcasts. However, it is inevitable that they won’t be able to stop them all since there are dozens of live streaming sites. Preventing torrents from being uploaded will turn out to be even more problematic for the network.

During the Beijing Olympics two years ago, The International Olympic Committee (IOC) asked for “assistance” from the Swedish government with preventing video clips from the Olympics in Beijing being shared via The Pirate Bay. This didn’t help much and during the weeks that followed millions of people continued to download broadcasts of Olympic events.

We assume that in the coming weeks most events will again appear online, despite NBC’s efforts to prevent the Olympics from being pirated.

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

The Pirate Bay chose to appeal the decision and eventually won the court case. The Court of Bergamo ruled that no foreign website can be censored for alleged copyright infringement and the block was lifted temporarily as the case was appealed once again.

A few weeks ago the Supreme Court reviewed the case and ruled that ISPs can be forced to block BitTorrent sites, even if they are not hosted in Italy or operated by Italian citizens. According to the decision by the Supreme Court, sites offering torrent files that link to copyrighted material are engaging in criminal activity.

This week the case once again appeared before the Court of Bergamo where it was decided that all Italian ISPs will have to deny their customers access to The Pirate Bay.

Pirate Bay lawyers Giovanni Battista Gallus, Giuseppe Campanelli and Francesco Micozzi told TorrentFreak that the Court followed the same reasoning as the Supreme Court, and deemed it unnecessary to bring the case before the European Court of Justice.

According to the two lawyers The Pirate Bay is still considering whether to appeal this decision or not, but that will not prevent or delay the block. “We don’t know when Italian ISPs will begin to re-apply the Pirate Bay filters, but we think that this will happen very soon,” Micozzi commented.

Aside from appealing to the Supreme Court, the Pirate Bay’s legal team is also considering bringing the case before the European Court of Justice.

It is doubtful that the verdict will have a strong impact on the piracy rate in Italy. The proposed DNS-filtering scheme can be easily bypassed by Pirate Bay users and there are hundreds of alternative torrent sites that can replace The Pirate Bay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Italy, Fapav (Federazione Anti-Pirateria Audiovisiva) is currently embarking on one such mission. It has gone to the Civil Court of Rome asking it to compel Italy’s largest ISP, Telecom Italia, to take unprecedented action to deal with subscribers the anti-piracy group claims are infringing their members’ copyrights.

Fapav has several demands. It wants Telecom Italia to monitor their users and eventually report those who file-share to the authorities, block a whole host of sites (including The Pirate Bay, 1337x and isoHunt) and collaborate with them in the future to fight piracy. If it does not comply, Fapav wants the ISP to pay 10,000 euros per day by default.

Fapav insists that Telecom Italia has not done enough to stop its users from file-sharing and point to their own monitoring research which indicates that “hundreds of thousands” of the ISP’s subscribers had downloaded around 1.6 million copies of copyright movies.

Telecom Italia is refusing to comply and in turn has accused Fapav of breaching the privacy of its subscribers by spying on them, referencing an earlier case where German record label Peppermint Jam spied on Internet users via Swiss monitoring firm Logistep in order to extract money from them.

The label was ordered to stop by the authorities who deemed the activities to be illegal.

Paolo Nuti, President of ISP association AIIP, told Repubblica that Fapav were trying to force ISPs to become “sheriffs of the Internet” while taking responsibility for the activities of their subscribers. He went on to criticize the anti-piracy group’s unauthorized monitoring, stating that in his view Fapav had not only violated the norms of privacy but also committed a crime punishable by up to six years in prison.

The positions of both sides will be tested next week. The hearing will take place before the Civil Court of Rome on February 10th.

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

After many years of keeping a low profile, on Monday 27th July 2009, police and the MPAA-funded anti-piracy group FACT conducted a raid on the home address of the owner – known to all in the torrent community as ‘TheGeeker’.

It didn’t matter that since 2005 FileSoup hadn’t operated a tracker and never hosted any copyrighted content, Geeker’s offense was initially labeled as “Distribute Article Infringing Copyright”. The full details of the raid and aftermath can be read in our previous article.

Despite all the turmoil, Geeker was never asked or told to close down the site, so naturally it stayed open, supporting the loyal and passionate community it had built over the previous 6 years.

But then, on January 6th this year, without warning FileSoup simply vanished. Of course, as the days went by there was the usual speculation, but the reason for the disappearance was not as sinister as some believed.

A few days before FileSoup went down, TorrentFreak was told by a number of readers that a company they had rented seedboxes from had simply stopped responding. Despite their claim to offer “premier customer satisfaction,” JMHServices.com disappeared leaving many of its customers out of pockets, some by hundreds of dollars. In an email, NetDirekt, a provider that JMH co-located with, confirmed that the company had not been paying their bills.

Unfortunately, JMHServices was FileSoup’s host too, and when they went down, so did the site.

On Monday 11th, Geeker returned to the police station to answer his bail and was again interviewed at length about FileSoup. Various items that were originally seized were returned, including a mobile phone, sat nav and video camera.

Understandably this experience with the police is proving upsetting for Geeker, the JMH situation was yet another kick in the teeth and for a while it looked like FileSoup would be no more, such is the pressure.

Geeker told TorrentFreak that the goal for FileSoup right from the very beginning was always to be a really friendly and open community site all about BitTorrent and filesharing – a place where people could come and find out everything they needed to know in a fun and helpful atmosphere, not just to get torrents.

“It is so upsetting for me and for every member I’ve heard from since Filesoup went offline, to think that we’re all going to lose the friends and the site we all worked so hard to build up over the last 6+ years,” Geeker explains.

But things are looking up.

The hunt is now on to find people with the necessary expertise, knowledge and free time to bring FileSoup back as a great community site.

“Over the next couple of weeks, I’m hoping to find and speak with some like minded people to help me, so fingers crossed, if everything works out well, Filesoup could be back online again real soon,” he told us.

Geeker’s new bail date is currently set for Tuesday 13th April. I’m sure our readers will join us in wishing him well.

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

The jury at Teesside Crown Court took just a couple of hours to return a unanimous verdict of “Not Guilty” – Ellis walked away a free man.

Ellis kept a low profile as he left court, refusing to comment to waiting reporters. The recording industry, fronted by the BPI, didn’t hide their feelings.

“This is a hugely disappointing verdict which is out of line with decisions made in similar cases around the world,” the group said in a statement.

“The defendant made nearly £200,000 by exploiting other people’s work without permission. The case shows that artists and music companies need better protection.”

Behind the scenes, some observers felt that while this defeat for the music industry was welcome, there were still concerns that things wouldn’t end with Ellis’s acquittal. And they appear to have been right.

Speaking at a press conference to launch the annual Digital Music Report, IFPI spokesman John Kennedy said that the ‘not guilty’ verdict was not the end of the road. The recording industry would “find other ways” to punish Ellis, and is now seriously considering taking action against him through the civil courts.

Kennedy said there is a commitment by the industry to retrieve the money the users of OiNK donated to the site, and give it to the artists whose music was shared there.

He also attacked the decision to charge Ellis with fraud instead of copyright infringement, and criticized UK legislation for being out of date.

Ellis confirmed earlier that his acquittal did not mean that OiNK was set for a revival. “Absolutely not,” he said, while adding that he would just like to get on with his life now.

It seems that IFPI have other plans.

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

File-sharers on the other hand haven’t been sitting still either, as many have chosen to negate these initiatives by going anonymous.

Users of BitTorrent and other file-sharing networks have increasingly turned to solutions that hide their identities from the outside world, rendering these new anti-piracy initiatives useless. The IPREDator service from the founders of The Pirate Bay opened up to the public this week, and is undoubtedly the most talked about newcomer in this business.

With a beta launch coinciding with the introduction of the controversial IPRED law in Sweden, the service promised to offer users an anonymous connection to the Internet. IPRED gave the copyright holders increased power to track down pirates, and with the launch of IPREDator the creators neutralized this new ‘threat’.

Much like many other comparable VPN services, Ipredator allows users to connect to the Internet while hiding their own IP-address. The interest in services like this is booming. In Sweden alone, an estimated 500,000 Internet subscribers are already hiding their identities online, and that number is expected to rapidly grow in the new year.

Ipredator is currently using the same platform as several other VPN franchises including Relakks, which means it’s not really anything we haven’t seen before. The servers are maintained and provided by Pirate Bay affiliates though, which may be more trustworthy to the average BitTorrent user than a random VPN provider.

That aside, we were told by former Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde that contrary to what the legal page states, no logs of any kind are kept by Ipredator. The text that is in there is a left over from the standard template they got from the provider of the VPN platform.

And, according to Sunde, there will soon be even more advantages and added security to Ipredator.

While Ipredator owes its name to the IPRED legislation, the team behind it is also working to crush the Swedish wiretapping law (FRA) that was introduced earlier. Sunde explained in a recent writeup how they are planning to not only encrypt the connection between individual users and the VPN, but also the entire stream of outgoing data from the VPN until it has passed Sweden’s borders.

This will make it practically impossible for the Government to decrypt the data and find out what’s being sent. “The only thing they can do is to make it illegal to encrypt,” Sunde told TorrentFreak.

“People don’t understand why I want to encrypt the traffic, since they’re already hidden when they connect to our system. But they must understand that the same traffic can be found unencrypted, traveling across borders again,” Sunde told TorrentFreak. “Also, using a VPN outside of Sweden is bad for Swedes, since it will raise a suspicion flag at FRA,” he added.

Although these wiretap-busting plans haven’t been implemented yet, Ipredator does already offer a secure VPN connection. The service guarantees that anti-piracy outfits or even your ISP will be unable to record or spy on your BitTorrent downloads. Ipredator has just opened its doors to the public for those who did make the beta and are interested in giving it a try.

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

He rose to fame in the wider BitTorrent community when in early 2008 a Danish court ordered the ISP Tele2 to block its customers from accessing The Pirate Bay.

In response, the Pirate Bay team created a site in his name, TheJesperBay, which contained information and code allowing Tele2 users to evade the block.

Not only did Bay have a site named after him, Copenhagen’s ‘Pirate Cinema‘ even briefly changed their name in his honor.

But after many cat and mouse games with his opponents, Jesper Bay has just announced he will quit as IFPI Denmark’s director and spokesman at the end of January.

“I’ve been here six and a half years and think that maybe it’s time to try something else,” he told Computerworld.

Although Bay’s job has been very demanding with an understandably high workload and lots of pressure, he says that’s not the reason for his departure – he just feels he’s been in the position long enough. Bay admits that at times, things have been tough.

“Sometimes it may have been frustrating to be in a role where you know you have right on your side, but it is very difficult to penetrate with the message, because there are so many other interests at stake in the ongoing debate,” he conceded.

Bay went on to criticize the media’s coverage of the battle between online pirates and the recording industry.

“We are continuing to experience relatively sensible people at relatively reasonable media outlets, writing completely what suits them. And very often very poorly researched,” he said.

Noting that the issue of piracy and copyright is a hot one at the moment, largely due to the fact that there is so much at stake for the many parties involved, he accepts that while the industry has not won the war, they have won several battles.

Conceding in late 2008 that Denmark would not see the introduction of “3 strikes” for music file-sharers must have been one of the more bitter pills to swallow.

Bay explained that part of his job has been to refine the debate surrounding these issues, and extend it beyond combating piracy to include discussion of new business models and the way forward in a digital world.

But despite his upcoming departure, Bay says he has nothing lined up and will just take some time off to assess his future. He insists, however, that he has not received a better offer of employment from the pirates.

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

“We’re talking to the other torrent admins on doing magnet links,” a Pirate Bay insider told TorrentFreak, adding that they might even stop serving torrents in the future.

Following this announcement, several torrent clients quickly added support for magnet links. The format was already supported by uTorrent and Vuze, but Transmission, BitComet and others soon followed after the Pirate Bay announcement.

Although magnet links work very well, BitTorrent cannot rely solely on this type of link just yet. The .torrent files still hold crucial information needed to start the downloading process, and this information has to be available in the swarm.

Despite this, it is possible to setup a torrent site without torrents, solely relying on magnet links and saving precious bandwidth and resources. This is exactly what the newly-launched TorrIndex does.

Instead of hosting torrent files, the site uses magnet links exclusively. The magnet links on TorrIndex also include the trackers from the original torrent, and they are properly formatted so they look just like regular torrent downloads in your torrent client.

TorrIndex gathers the links from various other torrent sites on the net and also allows users to add magnet links to the site. At first sight it seems that the site uses well respected and moderated sources, since the number of fake and spammy magnet links are lower than on many regular torrent sites.

Aside from the fact that TorrIndex is the first magnet-only torrent index, the site’s setup is pretty straightforward. There is no option to comment on any of the links and there are no other fancy features, it’s just a searchable index of magnet links.

TorrentFreak contacted the owner of the site, who told us that everything is totally automated. The magnet links are put in categories automatically based on the filetype, size and a few other parameters.

Another novelty is that TorrIndex is the first to use DHT information for their seed and peer count, in addition to the statistics reported by the trackers. “We collect the numbers from trackers and the DHT cloud,” the owner said.

TorrIndex is currently still in the Beta testing phase, so don’t be surprised if something appears to be broken. We’re told that the design will be updated and comment and torrent rating features are under consideration.

The site proves that it’s possible to start a torrent site without having to host actual torrent files. We predict that many sites like this will follow in the months to come, and it wouldn’t surprise us if The Pirate Bay also converts to a magnet-only index in the future.

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

The verdict read that if they failed to comply with the court’s decision, this would result in fines of 500,000 kronor ($71,000) each.

The two were granted an appeal little over a month later, but the record labels do not intend to wait and are going after their money. They have sent the District Court a letter where they ask the authorities to collect the fines.

The labels argue that, since the site is still operational, Neij and Svartholm must be involved in the operation one way or another. Whether they or the authorities can back this up with evidence is highly doubtful.

Both Pirate Bay founders currently live outside Sweden, and aside from their whereabouts, it will be hard to prove that either of them is still actively involved in the site’s operation without monitoring their every move.

Commenting on the announcement, Fredrik Neij said: “I am no longer involved in the operation of The Pirate Bay, so there is no opportunity for the penalty to be issued. I think the law is quite clear on this.”

Whether or not the fine will be enforced doesn’t matter that much to Neij, who already owes over 50 million kronor ($7 million) due to previous legal cases. He can’t pay the money anyway he said, adding “a few million more or less doesn’t really affect me.”

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.

Last November The Pirate Bay shut down its own trackers, arguing that they have been made redundant by DHT and PEX. At the same time, The Pirate Bay team said that they might move away from torrents entirely and switch to offering Magnet links instead.

These are all interesting developments, but to really decentralize BitTorrent one has to take it up a notch. The way most torrent sites are setup makes them vulnerable to legal action from copyright holders, so the real solution might be to move away from web-based torrent indexes.

A rather primitive way to do this is to share torrents over another file-sharing network, and this is exactly what the Gnutella/BitTorrent client Frostwire has now made possible. Without any public announcement and stuffed away in the changelog of FrostWire’s upcoming release we find the following lines:

- New Feature: Gnutella Torrent Search. FrostWire now can search for .torrent metadata files in the Gnutella network.
- Upgraded feature: Optionally FrostWire will copy all .torrent meta files to a shared torrent folder.

Technically speaking these are just minor adjustments to the file-sharing application, but the implications could trigger a revolution in how torrents are shared in the future.

When FrostWire users start downloading a torrent with FrostWire, the client will keep and share the .torrent file on Gnutella. The idea is that as time goes by and more users download more torrents, even if torrent websites are shutdown, all the torrents will live on the P2P network forever.

To make it easier to find torrents on Gnutella, FrostWire also added a specialized “Torrent Search Mode”. As more users install this and later versions – and keep downloading more torrents – the richer these search results will be.

Now FrostWire only needs to offer support for trackerless torrents and they will have completely decentralized the BitTorrent operation with just a few simple adjustments.

Although we believe that FrostWire’s approach is interesting, it will also introduce one major problem. It is relatively easy to make a P2P-powered torrent index, but keeping it clean and malware-free will prove to be very difficult.

Most people might not even be aware of it, but one of the benefits of most torrent sites is that they remove thousands of torrents linking to spam and fake files every day. This will be much harder to do in a P2P-based environment, but not entirely impossible.

Over the last five years the Tribler BitTorrent client has been working on a decentralized torrent index that would make BitTorrent sites obsolete. Unlike simply sharing the torrent files among users, the upcoming release of the Tribler client has built in several spam control and moderation options that allow users to keep the network clean. In addition, newly created torrents can be shared with peers, instead of uploading it to a central server.

We don’t know if FrostWire has plans to implement similar moderation options, but they are absolutely required for a fully decentralized BitTorrent environment.

It will be interesting to see if the idea of a P2P powered and searchable BitTorrent index takes off. For now there are still plenty of good and reliable torrent sites out there, but with continued pressure from the entertainment industry they are not to be taken for granted.

Disclaimer: FrostWire is a TorrentFreak sponsor.

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

In the mid-nineties, the band dominated the charts with their first single “Cotton Eye Joe,” which was followed by several other number one hits in the years after. Despite these successes, the band say they were never really taken seriously by the music industry.

“We are often labeled as the ugly duckling and the black sheep by the artist community and music media for our unconventional methods and appearances,” they say. The band is about to distance themselves even further with their most recent move.

Today, Rednex have released their latest single “Devil’s On The Loose” on The Pirate Bay, turning their back on the music industry for good.

“Now we are doomed to once again headline the music news as we have chosen to turn our back on the music industry and form a partnership with its No.1 nemesis: The Pirate Bay,” said the band, commenting on its decision.

The Pirate Bay is currently promoting the new Rednex single on its frontpage, which guarantees exposure to millions of downloaders. Rednex believes that new forms of distribution will eventually make the record labels redundant.

“We think that this is undoubtedly the future method of releasing music. Within 12 years all the record companies will be extinct and the copy-free system will rule, no matter what anyone tries to do about it. It is inevitable and we are simply adapting to the coming reality. We admire the file-sharing communities and the unrestricted spread of information, as this will ultimately lead to great all-round benefits,” they add.

“We see the record companies as dying, phlegm-coughing dinosaurs that have no function in the new system.”

Along with the release of the new single, Rednex has published a massive 28 page essay, explaining that the record labels are dying, while file-sharing will continue to flourish. Whether you appreciate the band’s music or not, the essay is well worth reading.

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.

Hollywood lawyer Monique Wadsted, seemingly without any solid proof above mere suspicion, said her clients believe that OBT is simply a re-branded version of the tracker previously operated by The Pirate Bay.

In December 2009, the case went to court. For the studios, the outcome wasn’t good. Even though it was agreed that OpenBitTorrent was being used in some cases to facilitate the distribution of copyright works, the Stockholm District Court rejected calls to force Portlane to close down the site.

The court ruled that Portlane would have to be doing more than just hosting the site in order to be considered guilty of contributing to copyright infringement. The District Court’s decision was interim and the issue is set to be settled fully sometime next summer.

Unsatisfied with this decision, the 13 Hollywood studios who brought the action against Portlane are now taking their case to the Court of Appeal.

The application says that Portlane has not done enough to stop the illicit file-sharing claimed to be facilitated by OpenBitTorrent, so the ISP should take responsibility for the infringements.

Going on to incorporate an interesting sexual analogy, the studios are comparing Portlane with property owners who knowing allow prostitution on their premises without doing anything to stop it.

Just like those that ignore the sex-for-money activities of their tenants, the studios say that by turning a blind eye to activities on OpenBitTorrent, Portlane should be deemed to have encouraged law breaking via the tracker.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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 Pirate Bay chose to appeal the decision and won the court case. The Court of Bergamo ruled that no foreign website can be censored for alleged copyright infringement and the block was lifted. However, two months ago the Supreme Court nullified this victory, opening up the possibility for anti-piracy groups to censor The Pirate Bay and many other torrent sites in Italy.

This week the Supreme Court detailed its decision. According to the verdict, BitTorrent sites that host torrent files are playing a significant role in the downloading and uploading process of their users. By doing so they are more than an agnostic search engine such as Google.

The fact that a site is not hosted in Italy or operated by Italians is irrelevant according to the court. The site is visited by many Italians who (in part) use it to share copyrighted material, the Supreme Court argued.

With this verdict in hand, copyright holders can now request The Pirate Bay and other BitTorrent sites to be filtered by Internet service providers. The Pirate Bay is first in line, as its case has now been sent back to the Court of Bergamo.

Pirate Bay lawyers Giovanni Battista Gallus, Giuseppe Campanelli and Francesco Micozzi have informed TorrentFreak that the site will remain accessible for now. “There will be another hearing before the Court of Bergamo,” they told us, “which will have to decide again whether to block The Pirate Bay in Italy or not.”

“We will go again before the Court of Bergamo, where we will have ample grounds to defend The Pirate Bay,” the lawyers noted, adding “And we could even appeal the new decision before the Supreme Court.”

The Supreme Court decision has nevertheless set a dangerous precedent. If The Pirate Bay loses its case it is expected that many other BitTorrent sites will face a shutdown order in the future.

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