Two of the largest adult BitTorrent communities are Empornium and PureTNA. Both sites have well over half a million members, and these giants are a thorn in the side of the adult entertainment industry. Copyright issues don’t seem to be the largest threat for these sites though – adult YouTube-type spinoffs are – and they are taking over quickly.

Streaming adult content appears to be much more appealing to the Internet user out for a quick fix. They are easily accessible and offer instant gratification, with many not even requiring the user to sign up. While some would argue that the wait for a complete download is half the fun, the majority of the porn surfers are not interested in such foreplay.

The popularity of these streaming sites didn’t go unnoticed at the adult BitTorrent communities either. Both Empornium and PureTNA have launched their very own ‘tube’ alternatives, realizing that’s what the public seems to want nowadays. Not without success too, as the streaming sites they launched are outgrowing the BitTorrent sites in number of visitors.

PureTNA is currently hiring for their streaming site, and they have some interesting job offers. They are looking for a part-time porn expert with “encyclopedic knowledge of Porn Stars, Labels, Studios and the Adult Industry”, among other things, hoping to expand the site even further.

It is interesting to see how quickly these torrent sites have adapted to the demands of the market. Hollywood could learn a thing or two from them, as instead of aggressively promoting their old technology, they simply acted in response to the public’s demands.

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

Luckily for Jeremy, one of the world’s largest adult film creators, Vivid Entertainment Group, has had enough of these sites as well. Last December the company announced that it was taking legal action against PornoTube.com, and after that similar video streaming services.

“Now Vivid is suing them,” said Jeremy, while demanding the same treatment as his colleagues in Hollywood. “You wouldn’t see YouTube play a full-length feature of a Steven Spielberg film. But they think that it’s just porn so they can get away with it. So now Vivid is striking back. Piracy is piracy, whether the film is PG, R or X. We deserve the same respect.”

Jeremy is not the only one who is upset with all the pirates clips that float around on the Internet. In September we reported that some of the leading adult webmasters were discussing how they could take on BitTorrent sites, something they haven’t succeeded in so far.

There is no doubt that adult clips are widely shared on the Internet, especially via BitTorrent. Approximately 5% of all files being shared on public BitTorrent trackers are adult content, and most of these files are copyrighted. On top of that, sites such as Empornium, PureTnA and Cheggit solely focus on sharing porn, and are among the most popular private BitTorrent trackers on the Internet.

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

Private trackers are extremely popular, for example, OiNK alone tracks hundreds and thousands of torrents with over a million peers, more than most public trackers.

Most of the trackers listed here are not as big as TorrentLeech or OiNK But, you have to start somewhere, and these sites are worth your while if you want to try a private tracker.

If you’re looking for high speed downloads, a free Usenet trial might be a good alternative.

1. BitNation [BN]

BitNation offers a wide variety of torrents, sofware TV shows, movies, music and more.

2.TVtorrents

The TVtorrents tracker specializes in TV-shows.

3. BitGamer [BG]

The name pretty much gives it away.

4. Cinematic

Cinematic is a great tracker for film fanatics.

5. TorrentBits [Tbits]

TV shows, Movies, Music, DVDs and more.

6. IpTorrents [IPT]

Again a tracker with TV shows, applications, movies, music and more.

7. ILoveTorrents [ILT]

ILoveTorrents indexes all kinds of torrents.

8. GrabThe [GTI]

Again a tracker with a wide variety of torrents.

9. PureTNA

PureTNA is for pron, the biggest tracker in this list with over a million registered users.

10. BitTorrents [BiTT]

Another tracker with different types of torrents..

More open private trackers can be found at Btracs. If you know a good private tracker that is open for signups, let us know in the comments.

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

Plan A: Starve the Internet of Pirate Porn

ALL Major Content Producers / Studios / Big Brand names IN HERE NOW!!!!

Hit me up, I have extremely important information regarding content theft, distribution of both Interactive Online Media as well as DVD movie releases. I’m onto a major site that is one of the main sources in distributing new fresh stolen content on a daily basis on usenet but also most torrent sites grab their content from this source to add it to the torrent networks. I not only have info but also everything needed to legally deal with them and to get them permanently shutdown. I’m not joking, I’m not bullshitting I already have taken all the steps needed to get them shutdown…..but want to collect as much evidence from companies who their content is listed before getting them closed down. Doing so will ensure they’ll stay down…..I will assist every step that’s required to get this done properly I need you to confirm on the content that’s yours and your approval to include that info in the documentation to be used to whipe them out.

ServerGenius (SG) reveals the plan to stop porn piracy and starve torrent sites:

I’m after a forum which is very active releasing adult content by using usenet…..The site offers .nzb downloads for its users to download everything without having to look for it……..it’s a usenet for dummies kinda thing as well as a community for quite a few of the bigger release teams that do porn.

The forum is also used a LOT for the torrentsite owners as their main source for new releases……example: Shane’s World releases a new DVD today……it’s ripped, uploaded and added with all the info, screen shots and full dvd-rip tomorrow…..same day or day after…..same content is listed on sites like: puretna.com, empornium.us and many others.

Do I make this up? No I don’t, are you sure about that? Yes I am…… I have logs and any other info that will backup everything I claim….how did you get all this info? Believe it or not, they gave it themselves to me…….but more about that later…..

So the plan seems to revolve around taking down a single NZB site (a site which simplifies UseNet downloading) so that adult trackers immediately lose their source material, just like that. The problem with this plan is – well, everything really. 1) Taking down an NZB site doesn’t remove the content from Usenet. 2) There are lots of other NZB sites and sites which enable you to make your own NZBs. 3) Experienced Usenet users don’t need NZB sites. 4) Releasers have multiple sources, not just Usenet. 5) They’re discussing their take-down plans on the open internet. People read and report on such things.

Plan B: The Solutions to BitTorrent Sites

Ron Cadwell CEO of CCBill (processer of credit card transactions for porn sites) weighs in with some ideas of his own:

I was reading a post that Raw Alex (very smart guy) made in another tread that got me thinking on how you could stop the Torrent sites. You need to attack them like the Spam Groups did on spammers. They went after the backbone providers (Level 3, Sprint, ATT etc). If you could get 7 out of 10 of the major providers to blackhole them they are dead.

The question is how do you do that? Simple.

1. You get a group of adult webmasters to file DMCA notices by the truck load or allow you to file them on their behalf to the backbone providers. The laws are very specific on Damages and what an ISP must do if a proper DMCA notice is files. (Be Very Annoying Here)

2. You start sending them URL’s like what Raw Alex showed about Child Porn. This is a HOT topic and no backbone provider that is a PUBLIC COMPANY would want to be associated with Child Porn Traffic?

3. Each of the large adult hosting companies have a good relationship with 1 if not more major backbone providers. We can also put pressure on their Abuse Departments to blackhole them also due to the complaints?

I am not sure if it will work but if you put enough pressure on them and the fear of newspapers/major companies finding out about it they will want to distance themselves very quickly from these sites.

Bingo Problem Solved

Not even the mighty MPAA/RIAA with their gargantuan anti-piracy budgets seem to have thought of this plan, however Ron Cadwell felt that spamming DMCA notices is the way to go:

With a little programming I am sure A1R3K’s new group could put an online system that could make it very easy to send hundreds of complaints a day to each backbone provider and really put the pressure on them to black hole the sites.

Drunkspringbreakgirls sees no complications and is eager to get on with it:

We need to make a list of all the torrents, which backbone they are using and then we can all start contacting their abuse departments of the providers.

RawAlex steps in with his way to take down The PirateBay:

Swedish embassies based in the US are great places to drop off DMCA notices. Their government not wanting to take action on obvious copyright violation is a real issue, and raising this issue to this level may in fact make a difference.

…and continues:

…with due respect, 90% of the companies providing the actual connectivity are either based in the US or are owned by US companies. As such, to a greater or less extent, they can be touched by a DMCA because they have responsibilities as good corporate citizens in the US.

Example, is piratebay.org – “hosted” by p80.net, which is (shock) registered at Directnic. That would be a good place to send a DMCA.

P80.net is getting their connectivity (the route I get) from sprintlink. Spring comes up with an address in Kansas.

There are all sorts of fun places to deal with on this issue. If P80 / port80 / rix internet is not going to remove connectivity from pirate bay (and like pirate bay will try to hide behind lax swedish laws) then you get the US based companies that provide their connectivity to take the action that US law obliges them to take……

…Piratebay is hiding in Sweden because they know pretty much anywhere else they would get escorted to a cell with Bubba for recreation for the next few years. Again, shows a consciousness of guilt. If they thought they were right, they wouldn’t be hiding under the ice in Sweden.

….unless the guys from PirateBay happened to be a) Swedish and b) not hiding and c) not breaking any Swedish law.

Brokep, one of the founders of The Pirate Bay is not really impressed by these plans. He told TorrentFreak in a response: “We welcome the porn industry to contact us, we need more updates for the legal page, hasn’t been any fun legal threats for a while – and the porn industry have a good sense of humor, just look at the movie names they copy and remake.”

The porn industry certainly isn’t getting much sympathy from the guys on Digg either. Kikkomann felt that torrents provided great publicity for their stars while str3ama felt that the adult industry had some infringement issues of it’s own to deal with.

homesickalien couldn’t understand how the porn movie business could ever lose any money: “it’s not like they’re shelling out millions to some a-list actors or spending loads on CG effects” he said. “All you need is a $50 hooker, a dv camcorder and a dvdburner. the porn industry couldn’t lose money if it tried to.”

However, the industry maintains that it loses 4% of its total worldwide revenue to piracy. ButterBuddha feels they should proceed with caution:

“The fight for that 4% will ruin the industry…”

The full discussions on GFY can be found here and here.

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

In an attempt to stop these sites from spreading their content the porn industry organized an anti-piracy conference. AVN quotes Andrew Blake, one of the 65 adult industry representatives at the conference and director of Studio A Entertainment: “What I’m getting out of this [conference] is that this is so pervasive, and we all kind of laughed when they came for the record industry , ‘Eh, couldn’t touch us’ , but here it is, a lot of people on the verge of extinction almost, from a business point of view.”

The adult industry representatives that took part in the three hour anti-piracy session estimated that they lose approximately $2 billion a year thanks to piracy, about 4% of their total income worldwide. The main consensus was that P2P networks, and BitTorrent in particular, posed the greatest threat to the porn industry.

Several countermeasures were discussed during the meeting. One of the suggestions was to create an MPAA/RIAA equivalent for the adult industry that helps to track down pirates and pursue legal action.

Greg Piccionelli, a Los Angeles based attorney with a professional interest in porn, explained the benefits of such an overarching organization: “If a neutral party does it [suing pirates], then they’re the face. And it shields the various parties that are being damaged. We believe that there is a substantial amount of interest, especially now that what is finally beginning to happen is that virtually every producer of content now is feeling the pinch of this rampant piracy, and it’s only got to get immeasurably worse as the technology improves.”

There are also more amateuristic ideas to fight porn piracy. For example, Megan Stokes from Shane’s World announced that they are launching a forum where content owners can post screenshots of pirated content. Somehow Stokes thinks that these screenshots could be of great help in upcoming court cases: “It’s for any kind of stolen content, because with the time-stamp and the screenshot, it’s something that we can start using as evidence in court cases.”

Stokes further stresses that the adult industry has to take action before it’s too late. “I really think studio owners need to stop turning a blind eye,” Stokes said “This isn’t going to go away, and just to sit and complain and do nothing doesn’t solve anything, and at this point, in five years, because of this, there’s a lot of people who are going to be disappearing from the business, if they don’t take a proactive stance.” Stokes is probably right, but taking screenshots of BitTorrent sites is the most clueless solution to the problem I’ve ever heard.

Update: How the Porn Industry Plans to Wipe Out BitTorrent

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

All three websites continued to grow in 2006, especially in the first half of the year. The graph below shows that they all entered the Alexa top 500 this spring, which means that they are among the 500 most visited websites on the Internet.

Over the past 6 months the traffic ranks began to stabilize. Here’s a graph of the traffic rank of October, November and December. As you can see, the traffic is quite stable in this period, apart from the returning spikes in the weekends.

Other BitTorrent sites that made it to the 1000 most popular sites on the Web in 2006 are:

329. Isohunt.com
454. Demonoid
642. Torrentz.com
962. Puretna.com (adult content)

The award for the most effective advertising campaign goes to BTjunkie. Overnight they jumped from a traffic rank of 20,000 to a spot among the 2,000 most visited sites, and they managed to keep the people in.

We reported before that BitTorrent sites are slowly taking over the Internet. And it is not only the larger search engines and trackers that continue to grow. I wouldn’t be surprised if the number of torrent sites in Alexa’s top 1000 doubles in 2007. Let’s see what the new year brings.

Note: Alexa’s data gathering is quite dubious. The exact figures may be not be completely accurate, but it is a great tool (especially the traffic rank) to compare sites within the same niche and to get a global impression of traffic shifts over time.

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

Empornium

Targetpoint has nothing to do with Empornium.us’s recent changes. The fact is that a former Targetpoint employee Oded Daniel was involved in the transfer and sale of empornium.us to its new owner. Daniel operates as a broker and he is listed as the registrant of the site, but the site is owned by a group of people, not related to Daniel. It might look suspicious that Oded Daniel is the domain registrant, but as a domain and site broker he is the registrant of more sites which he does not own.

At least, this is what we learned from my recent conversation with Mr. Daniel. He told that the present owner prefers to stay out of the picture. He also stressed that empornium still is a free site, but that new members can buy their way into the community when registration is closed.

So basically it is a paysite when registration is closed, but people can join for free when it’s open.

So Daniels statement on Slyck

Registration will continue to be free for all users, new and old

is not completely true… (Update: Slyck fixed it)

Wait a minute… How can he make these statements anyway if he is not involved with targetpoint or empornium? Ah… he is in charge of the monetizing of empornium.

Targetpoint Buying BitTorrent Sites

In our initial article three months ago we reported that Targetpoint tried to buy several BitTorrent sites. The fact is that three unrelated torrentsite owners told TorrentFreak that Targetpoint opted to buy their site. Among these sites is one of the biggest players in the BitTorrent scene and Meganova. Meganova who posted Targetpoints attempts to buy their site openly on their blog.

According to Meganova owner Bogaa he spoke to Ran Yehud from Targetpoint. Bogaa quotes the email correspondance at Slyck forums my emails

Quote:

Hi Bogaa,
It’s Ran from Targetpoint.
I wanted to speak with you about something please contact me or leave me a phone where I can reach you.
Thanks,
Ran

Bogaa continues: “Later on when we made the news public, we received this email:”

Quote:

Hi Bogaa,
I got this earlier this week: http://TorrentFreak.com/targetpoint-is-buying-BitTorrent-sites/
I see you are doing nice PR for you site, as long as you didn’t made us look bad that is fine with me!
Anyhow, happy holidays.
Bye and best regards,
Ran

When we contacted Targetpoint about these actions they stated:

Targetpoint is an advertising network. We do not own any commercial/content sites. For that matter, we do not own any of the following sites:Empornium.us, puretna.com, imagefap.com, Thepiratebay.org and mininova.org.

However, Oded Daniel, a former Targetpoint employee and related to all the sites Targetpoint mentions told TorrentFreak:

Targetpoint’s CEO indeed confirmed to me that they tried to buy Meganova. This is not unique, these deals happen all the time. Direct deals, external deals, partner agreements and exclusive ownerships are a part of out bussiness.

So we’ve got a little contradiction here.

The Piratebay and Mininova

This is probably one of the more sensitive points, implying that “pirates cuddle toy” the Piratebay is partly owned by a third party is pretty controversial.

Let me start with saying that Targetpoint does NOT own any part of mininova.org. The only relation Mininova has with Targetpoint is strictly business; they deliver the ads, that’s all.

The Piratebay case is more complicated; two credible sources reported to TorrentFreak that former Targetpoint employee Oded Daniel has a share (37%) in The Piratebay. One of these sources got this information directly from one of The Piratebay owners.

This means that it is not Targetpoint that owns a piece of TPB, but Oded Daniel. The same person who happens to be the CEO of Random Media. A recent article on rixstep.com argued that it is Oded Daniel’s company who handles TPB’s ad revenues.

When SvD rang Oded Daniel he refused to reveal what Random Media are and why the company have an address in Switzerland but a telephone number in Stockholm. And he refused to reveal where the ad revenues for The Pirate Bay disappear to.

‘Who said I take care of the money? There are a lot of bit torrent sites. They all work the same way. Go after them instead’, said Oded.

An interesting detail is that randommedia’s website is hosted at PRQ, TPB’s hosting provider…

In our recent conversation with Oded Daniel he said that his company is delivering the ads (url: clicktorrent.info) on TBP but that there are no shares. This is actually a good point because TBP doesn’t have any shares, the only thing they can share are server costs and ad revenues. Perhaps the 37% is the shared ad revenue figure?

It is funny to see that Mr. Daniel and TPB respond exactly the same to the question about the relationship between Targetpoint and TBP:

TPB/Targetpoint used to work with Targetpoint/TPB before, currently we do not. We might in the future again

…

So lets wrap it up.

1. Targetpoint does not own Emponium, some guy who doesn’t wants to reveal his identity does. Mr Daniel, a former employee of Targetpoint is monetizing empornium.

2. Several sources confirm that Targetpoint is buying BitTorrent sites. Targetpoint denies these allegations.

3. Targetpoint has no shares in TPB. TPB probably has a shared ad revenue agreement with mr. Oded, but that’s pretty common. Mr. Daniel had strong links with The Piratebay and other torrentsites, the website of his company randommedia is hosted at TPB’s hosting provider.

This is what I found out, there are a lot more (minor) details, and there’s always room for conspiricy theories and other wild fantasies, but that’s why we have comments.

To quote a former admin at Empornium (slyck forums):

Like Broham said, I never claimed Oded owned anything. I personally had discussions with Oded a couple times while I was an Emp admin, and he represented himself to me as an employee of Targetpoint. Targetpoint was always represented as the investor, not Oded.

He also made it perfectly clear on more than one occasion that he did not want Targetpoint’s involvement with the site publicly disclosed, even going so far as to have Noos log into our boxes and delete forum threads and threaten anyone, including admins, with box-banning if they said anything negative about Targetpoint. The latter occasion is when the “Targetpoint is full of shit” avatars disappeared.

So it comes as no surprise to me that he is desperately trying to deny Targetpoint’s involvement. They know that corporate involvement in peer-to-peer, in porn, and a corporation asking for “donations” stinks.”

…

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

“no hits due to politics”

The Dutch Anti-Piracy organization “Brein” can welcome a new target. Although it’s doubtful that their intimidation tactics will work on these “hardcore pirates”.

A while ago Brein sent a complaint to the Swedish authorities, requesting for legal action. However, The Netherlands seems to be the save haven for pirates now, hosting some of the largest torrent sites on the web. Torrentspy, Mininova, TPB, Torrentz, Demonoid, and private trackers like Puretna, Empornium, Scenetorrents, Torrentbytes, Oink, Filelist, and Filemp3.

We stumbled upon some camera footage of the raid:

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

TorrentFreak asked Meganova owner Bogaa if these rumors are true. And indeed, Bogaa confirmed the story:

Yes, Targetpoint made an offer to buy Meganova. They offered $20.000, 30% of the ad revenues and an additional $1000 per month. We do however prefer to continue working with Targetpoint on a pay per click basis.

Meganova is not the only BitTorrent site that Targetpoint is interested in. They are currently working with sites like Isohunt, The Piratebay and Mininova. And according to a our source they even have a 37% share in The Piratebay .

It started a couple of months ago when Targetpoint contracted two major adult content BitTorrent sites Empornium and PureTna. Empornium has approximately 650,000 active users; they moved their servers from the US to The Netherlands after the acquisition by Targetpoint in August 2005.

So it seems that Targetpoint is willing to invest in sites that have trouble getting advertisers through other channels such as Google’s Adsense because these sites are (assumed to be) associated with copyright infringement.

Targetpoint was founded in 2004 and is an Israeli company, with servers located in the Netherlands. In these countries offering .torrent files is not considered to be act of copyright infringement.

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