The data for our weekly download chart is collected by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are DVDrips unless stated otherwise.

RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.

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“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.

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.

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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.

In five days the game’s worldwide sales climbed to $550 million, crushing previous record holders Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (only $394m) and The Dark Knight (just $203.8m).

“In just five days of sell through Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 has become the largest entertainment launch in history and a pop culture phenomenon,” Activision CEO Bobby Kotick said commenting on the game’s success. This is, of course, reflected in the number of pirated copies being traded on BitTorrent.

With 4.1 million unauthorized downloads of the PC version alone, the game more than doubles the achievement of last year’s ‘winner‘ Spore. Modern Warfare 2 leads both the PC and Xbox 360 lists, by a landslide.

The overall trend across all platforms is that, unlike last year, all of the games are 2009 releases. What makes Modern Warfare 2’s chart-topping even more impressive is that this has been achieved after just two months of availability. We further see that the figures for the most downloaded titles have more than doubled compared to last year, equaling the growth in uTorrent users.

PC games are by far the most downloaded titles, with on average more than three times the number of downloads compared to Xbox 360 and Wii releases. As expected, Mario titles are in high demand on the Wii.

The data for these lists is collected by TorrentFreak from several sources, including reports from all public BitTorrent trackers. All the data is carefully checked and possible inaccuracies are systematically corrected.

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

Last month the Times Online published an interesting graph plotting the various revenue figures over the last 5 years, as reported by the UK music industry themselves. The data clearly shows how the distribution of music industry income has shifted over time. Music labels earn less from recorded music today than they did five years ago, while artists have seen a huge increase in revenues from live performances.

In part inspired by the Times Online article, Swedish researchers came up with similar calculations for the Swedish music industry, which reached a very similar conclusion. Since Napster and later Limewire and BitTorrent gained an audience of hundreds of millions of people, less revenue was made from album and single sales.

For the people who actually perform on stage the outcome is entirely different though. Revenue for musicians actually went up through increased income from live gigs, perhaps thanks to piracy which offers an easy tool to discover new music. Please note, however, that no causal relationship between illegal filesharing and music revenues has been researched.

What is crystal clear from the data, though, is that the revenue streams within in industry are quickly changing. This hugely benefits the musicians who now get a much bigger share of the proverbial pie than a decade ago. Much of this shift can be attributed to the increased income from live performances which nearly doubled to 774 million Swedish Kroner in 2008.

The income figures for the music industry as a whole are less positive though. The overall revenue for the music business has remained pretty much the same since 2000, and that’s just the raw number without an inflation correction.

TorrentFreak contacted Daniel Johansson, researcher at the Royal Institute of Technology, who carried out the research together with his colleague Markus Larsson. Johansson told us that he’s not a supporter of theories suggesting that illegal downloading benefits musicians.

“I can not say anything about how filesharing has influenced the figures, since that is not part of the study,” Johansson told TorrentFreak. “Everyone seems to make the assumption that file sharing is ‘good’ for artists because of this, I disagree,” adding that he cannot back this up with data.

Nevertheless, some have argued that illegal downloading makes it easier to discover new artists, which may indeed boost the number of concert visits, explaining the study’s findings. Another explanation could simply be that the tickets for live gigs have doubled since 2000, while the attendance didn’t increase or decrease.

Whatever the reasons, musicians are doing better now than at the beginning of the decade, despite or in spite of piracy.

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

As demand grew Tony’s business expanded year after year, but by 2001 and although still busy, profits were being squeezed. By 2004 demand started to fall dramatically and in 2005 he had to close down his factory unit. Tony told TorrentFreak there was a new competitor in town.

“File-sharing, P2P – call it what you like. When you asked a customer why he wasn’t buying anything, 9 times out of 10 it was ‘BitTorrent this, LimeWire that’. Add that to the fact that huge numbers of PC users have burners and fast broadband and it’s obvious why I had to get out and earn a living another way. We had it good for a while but I don’t think those days are coming back.”

Cheap pirate media had just got even cheaper. With the advent of super-fast broadband there was little point in visiting the local counterfeiter when everything was just a few clicks away for free on increasingly user-friendly BitTorrent and other file-sharing sites. But what happens to the physical piracy market when the file-sharing sites are no more? Maybe China is about to find out.

During the last month Chinese authorities shut down hundreds of video sites, including some of the biggest BitTorrent trackers such as BTChina, for operating without an appropriate government license.

Now, according to a Chinese illegal DVD vendor, these shutdowns could be set to bring him and his competitors a sudden windfall – the exact mirror image of what happened to Tony several years ago.

“Pirated DVDs are the cheapest choice for people without free downloads online,” he said. “I expect my sales to triple before Christmas.”

While it’s still early days, officials in charge of clearing illicit vendors from the streets said that they had not yet witnessed a surge in demand for illegal DVDs. A spokesman for a Chinese IP lawfirm said that while there could be an increased demand short-term, file-sharers are resilient.

“Simply shutting down those websites might have an immediate impact, but where there’s a will, there’s a way,” he said. “The problem is, if you shut down the top two BitTorrent sites, then people are simply going to go to number three, number four or number five on the list,” he said. “You can cut off the head but sooner or later two more will grow back.”

Time will tell if an Internet crackdown on video sites will force customers back onto the streets, but perhaps more intriguing is the answer to this question – will it push them back into the arms of the legitimate vendors of movies and music? It seems unlikely.

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.

In December 2004, the demise of the mighty Suprnova left a meteor crater in the fledgling BitTorrent landscape. This gaping hole was soon filled by the dozens of new sites that emerged to fulfil the public’s increasing demands for torrents. Mininova became the most successful of all.

Mininova was founded in early 2005 by five Dutch students, just a month after Suprnova closed its doors. The site started out as a hobby project created by tech-savvy teenagers, but in the years that followed the site’s founders managed to turn it into a successful business that generated millions of dollars in revenue.

With increased popularity also came numerous complaints from copyright holders, who saw their intellectual property being shared by users of the site. For years Mininova has complied with these takedown requests, but earlier this year the Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN decided to take the torrent site to court nonetheless, demanding that the operators proactively filter torrents pointing to copyrighted material.

The case went to court in June and a few weeks later the verdict was announced. The judge ruled that Mininova is not directly responsible for any copyright infringements, but ordered it to remove all torrents linking to copyrighted material within three months, or face a penalty of up to 5 million euros.

To avoid having to pay these penalties, the Mininova team saw no other option than to disable access to all torrents except those that were uploaded to their content distribution platform. This means that only approved uploaders can share torrents through the site for now.

During the last few months, Mininova has extensively tested several filtering techniques, but none of these proved 100% effective. “It’s very unfortunate that we’re forced to take this action, but we saw no other option,” Mininova co-founder Niek told TorrentFreak.

Mininova still hasn’t decided yet whether they will appeal the verdict, Niek further told TorrentFreak. They have appealed the verdict pro-forma, which gives the company more time to decide whether they will indeed continue with the appeal. As it looks now, a successful appeal is the only option for Mininova to bring all torrents back.

In the meantime the Mininova team will focus on other projects besides Mininova, as well as growing the number of users for their content distribution platform.

The implications of Mininova’s decision will have a huge impact on the BitTorrent community. The millions of Mininova users and uploaders have to look for a new home, but perhaps even more importantly, Mininova had the largest collection of user-submitted torrents that were used by dozens of smaller torrent indexers.

More information on the consequences and background of Mininova’s decision will be addressed in a follow up article.

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

Nevertheless, Uggla insisted that Spotify is a fantastic service with a great range of music to sample. However, he felt that the fact he wasn’t getting paid was the fault of the major labels involved in the project (Sony BMG bought 5.8% of Spotify for 2,935 Euros, Universal Music got 4.8% for 2,446 euros, Warner Music paid 1,957 Euros for 3.8% and EMI pocketed 1.9% for an investment of 980 Euros), claiming that he “earned as much in six months as a BUSKER could earn in a day.”

As the dust settled on the story, many non-Swedish readers were saying “Magnus who?” and wondering if this artist’s lack of mainstream popularity was the real reason behind him earning virtually nothing. But what about big artists? What about really, really big artists with huge international appeal. Say, an artist like Lady Gaga, who has sold more than 4 million albums and shifted in excess of 20 million paid digital downloads?

According to a report today, Lady Gaga’s track “Poker Face” was one of the most popular tracks during a five month period on Spotify and was played more than a million times. So how much money does she get paid by STIM (the Swedish Performing Rights Society) for this massive achievement?

SEK 1150 – that’s around $167 or roughly 113 Euros.

Commenting on the story, Douglas Léon, better known as Swedish rapper Dogge Doggelito, said he was dismayed.

“It is totally sick. We musicians have no rights, you may not charge [for music] anymore,” adding that Lady Gaga could’ve earned more driving an illegal taxi-cab.

Swedish artist, music producer and philosopher Alexander Bard, however, said that this payment was better than Lady Gaga would have achieved from her music being available via The Pirate Bay, noting that the amount was “…more than zero.”

Technically Bard is absolutely right, but let’s be honest – Lady Gaga would blow the money she earned from STIM in a 20 minute hotel mini-bar bender. Looking at the overall downloads, let’s face it, per track she earned pretty much near to nothing from both services.

While Spotify is to be commended for having the guts to try something new, for providing a truly wonderful service and for having achieved such a lot technically in a such a short space of time, one can’t help but wonder if it is ever going to bring in decent money for the artists.

After all, aren’t these the very people the music industry continually holds up as the important ones to encourage, nurture and support?

Lady Gaga’s example shows that Spotify’s business model needs some work, and the labels seem to agree on this. The US launch of the service has been delayed earlier this week, allegedly because of concerns about Spotify’s ability to upgrade free users to paid customers.

“We think Spotify is a great service but they’re going to have to convince us they can convert enough people from free to paid subscriptions to make it worth our while,” one label told the Financial Times. “As an ad-supported service the economics don’t work at all.”

Despite the startup troubles for Spotify the reviews from users, many of which were avid file-sharers, are still extremely positive. The service recently launched an iPhone app that allows users to play the tracks on the go, with or without an Internet connection, which many saw as the missing link. Now all they have to do is come up with a plan to actually make money.

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

The data for our weekly download chart is collected by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are DVDrips unless stated otherwise.

RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.

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

The case continued Friday in the Federal Court, with iiNet’s chief regulatory officer, Steve Dalby, taking the stand following his first appearance Thursday afternoon.

Yesterday, Dalby recalled having difficulty in understanding some of the terminology utilized by AFACT in the infringement notice spreadsheets it submitted to iiNet.

Dalby told AFACT barrister Tony Bannon that iiNet had told AFACT there was an issue with some items being unclear in the spreadsheets.

“There was no legend associated with this spreadsheet. I had to make an assumption. We asked AFACT for more information,” ITNews quotes Dalby as saying.

Bannon then criticized Dalby for not being specific and expecting AFACT to guess at which terms were not understood, but Dalby pointed out that he expected AFACT to contact the ISP for clarification.

Further discussion took place on the issue of IP addresses and how iiNet allocates them to customers. Time and again, Dalby explained that IP addresses are allocated to a customer account and they do not necessarily represent any particular computer that the customer may use.

In what is becoming a recurring theme, today Dalby told the court that iiNet had no intention of forwarding AFACT’s copyright infringement notices to its customers purely on their allegations.

“Our position was that we should not be doing AFACT’s work,” said Dalby. “If we had received authorization by way of court order, that would have changed our position.”

AFACT went on to tender a draft e-security code of practice from the Internet Industry Association (IIA) created earlier this year. It proposes that in future, ISPs could contact, and maybe even disconnect subscribers, who have malware-ridden computers which negatively affect networks. Despite Justice Cowdroy indicating that its relevance was peripheral to the case and wouldn’t but much use when he comes to make his decision, it was allowed.

Dalby said he believed that iiNet had not been involved in the draft and he was personally unfamiliar with it. CW reports that he had been quoted on the issue in the media, but Dalby said that it was a regular occurrence for the press to call him to comment on issues he was not yet familiar with, and in this particular case his comments were “neutral and non-committal”.

In September we reported that Australia’s Internet Industry Association (IIA) felt it had something to offer these court proceedings. IIA applied to be amicus curiae, a ‘friend of the court’, but AFACT objected, insisting the group would not be impartial and would favor iiNet.

The decision on whether this will be allowed or not has been delayed until next week.

In an indication that AFACT still objects to an IIA appearance, Bannon said that “….there’s a conceivable possibility they don’t want to add anything other than to say ‘hear, hear’,” apparently to the amusement of the court.

AFACT barristers are scheduled to make their closing statements next Monday afternoon.

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The case continued Thursday in the Federal Court, with iiNet CEO Michael Malone taking the stand for the fourth consecutive day, and possibly his last.

Not unusually for a copyright trial involving BitTorrent, the issue of The Pirate Bay was raised.

Yesterday AFACT barrister Tony Bannon incorrectly suggested that iiNet’s very own BitTorrent tracker’s functionality had been taken down, later to discover that in fact the court’s network blocked BitTorrent transfers.

Bannon indicated that he would like to be able to give a courtroom demonstration of The Pirate Bay Thursday, and the judge agreed that it would be possible to lift the block so he could do so.

According to ITNews, Bannon was today true to his word.

After the demo, Bannon enquired of Malone whether iiNet had a desire for its subscribers to be able to access the world’s largest tracker, “…when the only purpose it serves is providing a way to download unauthorized copies of films?”

This question was met with objection from iiNet barrister Richard Cobden, who argued that customer “desire” was irrelevant to the case. The judge, Justice Cowdroy, was also keen to discover the relevance.

Bannon then became the latest in a long line of movie and music industry lawyers to reveal that should his clients win the case, they will take legal action to have not only the world’s largest tracker blocked from iiNet’s customers, but other similar sites.

He also revealed that around 50% of the alleged copyright infringements in the case came courtesy of The Pirate Bay.

Then Bannon attempted to show that by allowing its customers to access The Pirate Bay, iiNet effectively sanctioned and authorized their infringing activities.

“We seek Mr Malone’s position as to whether or not his customers should have access to sites such as this,” said Bannon.

However, after legal argument, Bannon withdrew the question.

Malone did, however, concede that iiNet had taken no steps to block The Pirate Bay, but qualified this by indicating that the company didn’t possess the means to do so. Bannon asked if it was technically possible and Malone replied that he could achieve a primitive block with additional equipment, but even that could be easily circumvented

“To completely and conclusively block access to The Pirate Bay, I believe it to be beyond our technical capability or of any ISP,” replied Malone.

Asked by Cobden if iiNet had ever blocked any web sites, Malone said the company had not.

This technical inability led to iiNet pulling out of the Australian government’s filtering trials, reports ComputerWorld. Malone has been an outspoken critic of the filtering scheme, labeling it “fundamentally flawed” and saying his company would only participate in the trials to prove that filtering would fail.

The case continues.

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The case continued Wednesday in the Federal Court, with iiNet CEO Michael Malone taking the stand for the third consecutive day.

Again AFACT barrister Tony Bannon tried to portray iiNet as an encourager of copyright infringement on its network, by referring to iiNet marketing where the ISP measures bandwidth in terms of how much music or TV episodes people can download. Malone said the company did this simply to give a customer an easier barometer by which to measure their consumption.

When questioned on the music aspect, Malone said the company referred to legal downloads, such as those from iTunes. Bannon countered by saying this could not be the case, since iiNet did not count downloads from iTunes towards a customer’s bandwidth quota.

According to iTWire, a welcome email from iiNet to new customers ended with, “Thanks for choosing iiNet. Happy downloading.”

By drawing attention to the above ponts, AFACT hopes to show that iiNet encouraged infringements, thereby losing its safe habor protection as a carrier.

CW reports that AFACT presented press articles regarding the levels of BitTorrent transfers on the Internet, in the context of actions taken by ISPs in order to limit P2P traffic.

In one article, Malone had said that BitTorrent transfers accounted for around 50% of all Internet traffic and admitted in court that BitTorrent had been used on iiNet’s network since it became available. He went on to agree that while much of this traffic involved the transfer of movies and TV shows, he didn’t feel that “..every young person in Australia is downloading illegally using BitTorrent.”

One exchange apparently raised a laugh in the courtroom when Bannon accused Malone of attracting heavy-usage customers in order to boost iiNet profits.

“I would prefer [those customers] go to someone else and let someone else be sued,” said Malone.

“And you’re happy to take their money in the meantime?” Bannon asked.

“Yes,” he replied.

Yet again, Bannon raised the issue of iiNet’s failure to forward AFACT copyright infringement allegations to its customers. However, an email presented from the Internet Industry Association’s Peter Coroneos, indicated that he was concerned that doing so could lead to an assumption that ISPs are responsible for the actions of their customers.

In the email exchange with Malone, Coroneos said it would be preferable and advantageous for all involved if the content owners could provide some legal alternatives.

After Bannon showed the court documentation showing policies in place at rival ISPs to deal with allegations of copyright infringement, Malone again confirmed that iiNet has no formal policy on how to deal with these type of allegations, noting that the company had yet to be presented with evidence of what he described as a “repeat infringer”.

Earlier in the case, Malone had defined a repeat infringer as one who had been proven as such by a court, but Bannon mocked Malone, asking if the iiNet CEO had just heard what he’d said and would he like to think about the question again for a moment.

Malone said he didn’t and Bannon accused him of treating the proceedings as a game.

The case continues tomorrow.

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

Continuing first from yesterday’s proceedings, ITnews reported an exchange between iiNet CEO Michael Malone and movie industry barrister Tony Bannon, over Malone’s understanding of BitTorrent.

Malone told the court that while he had an understanding of the protocol, he had never used uTorrent, the client used earlier by Bannon to give the court a technical demonstration. Bannon’s demo used iiNet’s own tracker (an installation of RivetTracker) which it has used to distributed several press releases which all relate to the trial.

It is difficult to see where Bannon was going with his questioning, but it began with an admittance by Malone that the torrent files were intended to be used by people with access to a BitTorrent client. Malone then denied that the releases were specifically targeted at iiNet customers, noting that anyone can access them

Under further questioning regarding the inclusion of a note in the torrent files dialogue box indicating the files were non-pirated, Malone reiterated that while he had an understanding of the BitTorrent protocol, he did not have experience of the client used by Bannon

Then, with an apparent deafness towards Malone’s perfectly clear response, and demonstrating an apparent ignorance between a BitTorrent client and the BitTorrent protocol, Bannon sought to press Malone into admitting to his 400,000 customers that he didn’t understand BitTorrent.

Again, Malone stated that he didn’t know how to put a comment on a torrent file, but Bannon persisted in trying to get Malone to admit that he knows how uTorrent 1.8.4 works, but Malone said he’d never used it. There could, however, be people in iiNet who had, he conceded.

Bannon then said that in the last 24 hours the torrent file functionality for the press releases had been removed. Malone said that if it had, he certainly hadn’t requested it, asking Bannon how he was attempting to access the Internet, suggesting that a firewall in the court was stopping the transfer.

TorrentFreak’s checks show a single seeder on each torrent and each one worked absolutely perfectly.

Moving on to iiNet’s handling of copyright infringement allegations, iTWire reports that Bannon tried to paint a picture that iiNet’s policy of forwarding AFACT notices to the police was little more than a cynical attempt to pretend that they were dealing with them, when in fact they were not.

For the umpteenth time in this case, Malone said that he was under no obligation to act on mere allegations from AFACT which were not backed up by a court order.

“AFACT was telling us to disconnect customers without further ado,” said Malone. “The question is, what should we do when confronted with illegal activity? And our response is, report it to the proper authorities.”

While iiNet said it had always been policy to forward the notices to the police, ITWire notes that evidence emerged that the company had sent notifications twice, although there was no indication of how many infringement notices were in each batch.

Yesterday Malone said that the evidence provided by tracking company DtecNet’s investigation was “compelling” and should be reviewed by a third party and the courts. In the face of this statement, Bannon asked Malone why he had not taken action based on AFACT’s allegations.

“This is a right,” said Malone, “not an obligation of iiNet.”

These days arguments in favor of anti-piracy action seem almost incomplete with the obligatory reference to child pornography, as we heard in yesterday’s propaganda piece from CBS. This case is no different.

Bannon put it to Malone that if the evidence provided was “compelling” and Malone had received “compelling evidence” that an iiNet customer was accessing child porn, would the company allow the user to do so “day after day?”

Of course, any allegations of this nature would involve the police, and the police or the courts would do the investigation, get the proper paperwork and order iiNet to comply, which they naturally would. Malone said that on mere AFACT allegations of civil infringement (as apposed to an infinitely more serious and jailable criminal offense), such action would not be permitted.

Bannone then pressured Malone to admit that “…you’re happy to tell your customers this from the witness box,” that iiNet will not disconnect subscribers for infringing copyright.

At this point one has to wonder if Bannon is deaf or just plain stubborn. It is absolutely crystal clear to anyone following these proceedings that yes, iiNet will disconnect customers for copyright infringement, providing there has been due process and a court has ruled that disconnection is appropriate.

The case continues tomorrow.

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Today, iiNet CEO Michael Malone was questioned at length over dealings he had with Westnet, another ISP which was acquired by his company for AUS $81 million in May 2008.

Westnet had developed an automated system to pass on infringement notices from copyright holders to its customers, a process which Malone earlier described as “making more work for no benefit,” and was said to be scathing in defense of due process and consumer rights.

“Taking the opposing argument, a random third party is lodging an unsubstantiated accusation against a customer and you’re passing it on?” wrote Malone in an email to Westnet, continuing, “Your current approach is doing damage to the industry and iiNet’s position on this matter.”

According to itNews, today Malone admitted he had “hit the roof” when he had discovered Westnet’s policy on infringement notices.

When any company acquires another there is often a need to standardize procedures and policies, and with iiNet and Westnet the position was no different. Malone said that whenever he found differences in policies between the two companies he took steps to bring those of Westnet into line with those at iiNet. He also stated that he was unaware that Westnet had failed to follow his instructions and adopt iiNet group policy following the acquisition.

One of the reasons he sought to change the Westnet policy, he said, was to bring the company into line with the position held by the Internet Industry Association on the issue.

Cross-examining Malone on iiNet’s role in providing a broadband service which enabled users to share movies using BitTorrent, senior counsel Tony Bannon for the movie industry referred to infringement notices sent to iiNet for the Sony movie, Pineapple Express.

According to CW, Malone responded that as a mere service provider, iiNet had no way of knowing if any of its customers were engaged in copyright infringement, but could confirm that the individual who allegedly committed the breaches was still an iiNet customer.

The company was not aware, however, if the customer continued to breach copyright.

The case continues tomorrow.

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

After AFACT dropped the claim that iiNet was a primary infringer by caching copyright works on their servers, according to ZDNet the case will now examine a sample of 20 iiNet customer accounts.

Earlier in the case, AFACT submitted evidence that it claimed showed around 95,000 breaches of the studios’ copyrights by iiNet subscribers. iiNet barrister Richard Lancaster cross-examined AFACT lawyer Michael Williams on techniques used by AFACT’s investigators to count these alleged breaches of copyright.

The recording of these claimed breaches were described by iiNet lawyer Richard Cobden during day two of the trial as a “novel composition and adventurous” and “a dramatic extension of the application of the law”. He then went on to describe AFACT’s claims of 94,942 infringements as “artificially inflated by a contrived process”.

It was then revealed in court that AFACT had probably counted some of the same infringements more than once – if it checked in the morning for infringements and then again in the afternoon, if the same infringement on an individual’s computer was still ongoing, AFACT counted it as yet another infringement, not a single extended one.

Another process AFACT used to record alleged breaches of copyright breach was by using a Reverse DNS Lookup – a process used to determine a domain name associated with a an IP address by using the Domain Name System (DNS) available on the Internet.

iiNet’s lawyer Richard Lancaster said this was not a reliable method since DNS records were often out of date. Lawyer for AFACT Michael Williams agreed this method was “not 100 per cent reliable”.

While re-addressing the possibility that AFACT was relying on evidence which artificially inflated the number of alleged infringements, following cross-examination both AFACT and iiNet conceded that technical issues can cause iiNet subscribers to leave and then reconnect to the network, resulting in the same iiNet users being allocated multiple IP addresses during an online session. If AFACT was tracking these particular users, it would then identify each IP address as a separate infringement, which would inflate their claims on numbers of infringements.

Of course, the accuracy of such evidence is important, since any damages awarded for, say, 50,000 breaches, would be substantially less than 95,000 breaches.

“If the judge finds further down the track that iiNet is guilty of the claims AFACT is making – which I don’t believe they will – because they are seeking damages, the number of offences does matter in terms of the final decision on what the damages will be,” an iiNet spokesman told ARN.

Today’s proceedings bring an end to the first two weeks of hearings in the case. It will resume November 2nd.

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The law is intended to make it easier for copyright holders to obtain the personal details of alleged file-sharers from ISPs, but the ISPs are not handing information over without a fight.

This April, five book publishers handed a request to a local court for information on the owner of an FTP-server that allegedly stored more than 2000 audio books. Although it was a private server and the audio books couldn’t have been made available to the general public, the court ordered the ISP Ephone to hand over the details of the person behind the IP address.

In a response to the negative decision Ephone consulted its customers, asking them whether they should appeal the case or not. Of the 20,000 customers who responded, a massive 99% were in favor of an appeal, so Ephone duly took the case to the Appeal Court.

Yesterday the Appeal Court announced its verdict, which turned out to be a win for the ISP and the alleged copyright infringer. The Appeal Court nullified the earlier decision of the District Court against the ISP, and ruled that Ephone does not have to hand over the details of the FTP owner to the book publishers.

The Appeal Court argued that, even though the FTP server contained copyrighted works, probable cause for copyright infringement had not been proven. Since the server in question required login credentials there was no distribution to the public, the Appeal Court said.

The decision of the Appeal Court was received with huge disappointment by the book publishers, but welcomed by Ephone and the majority of its customers. Still, this decision may not be the end of the first IPRED case as it may still be appealed at the Supreme Court.

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