After its transformation into a pirate tracking outfit Nexicon launched its Getamnesty program which offers copyright holders a chance to turn piracy into profit. They cleverly circumvent privacy protection laws by using ISPs to forward settlement requests for various copyright holders to alleged infringers. One of their most successful partner programs is the Payartists website which is a misleading name to say the least.

The money collected through Payartists is not going to any artists at all. The only artist they collect ’settlements’ for on the site is Frank Zappa, and he passed away in 1993. All the settlement money collected now goes to The Zappa Family Trust which is headed by Zappa’s widow.

Most recently a new Nexicon franchise emerged, as the ‘Video Protection Alliance’ (VPA) has teamed up with several porn studios to track down and force settlements from alleged copyright infringers. The methods they use are very similar to Getamnesty and Payartists and are designed to get cash payments from illicit file-sharers without even having to first find out who they are.

The process is simple. Their software monitors BitTorrent swarms and other filesharing networks and records the IP-addresses of those people who share the work of their clients. It then automatically sends an email to the ISP linked to the IP-address with a request to forward it to the associated customer.

Thus far, this is very similar to the warning letters that the movie and music studios have been sending out for years. However, there is one big difference. The emails sent out by Nexicon to alleged infringers contain veiled threats of legal action if they don’t choose to settle within 10 days.

In their email they write that “it may be beneficial to settle this matter without the need of costly and time-consuming litigation.”

If you don’t settle they are “prepared to pursue every available remedy including damages, recovery of attorney’s fees, costs and any and all other claims that may be available to it in a lawsuit filed against you.” To make it even more scary, they point out that ISPs might cut your Internet connection if you don’t comply.

In the FAQ on the VPA website it is noted that consulting a lawyers is an option, but it would be a rather silly thing to do since it will cost more than the settlement itself. “It is likely that the cost incurred to retain a lawyer will exceed the settlement amount offered.”

Indeed, the settlements are rather cheap compared to the fine that was handed out to Jammie Thomas recently. The settlement offer for an adult movie is close to the retail price of a DVD and for a single Frank Zappa track you’ll pay $10. In comparison, Jammie Thomas was ordered to pay $80,000 per song.

However, because of these low fees and the use of threatening language we cannot help mentioning the word ‘extortion’ once more. Even if they handle with the best intentions they should adjust their tracking software to be more accurate. We confirmed at least one case where they sent a settlement offer to the wrong person, and we’re pretty sure that this is not the only mistake they’ve made (here’s another one).

Still, even people wrongfully accused of sharing [insert obscene porn title here] may be inclined to pay a few bucks rather than risk being taken to court. The threats are worrying enough for some people to pay for an offense they didn’t commit. But there might be an even easier way out.

Unsurprisingly, very little happens when the threats are ignored. A Manhattan College employee dealing with DMCA notices wrote recently. “We have not passed the settlement info on to the students linked with the allegedly infringing IP address and have not had any follow up notices from them.”

This aside, we are not aware of any legal action taken by any of Nexicon’s partners to back up their threats. To the best of our knowledge they don’t even have a proper license to act as private investigators which is a felony in several US states and renders the ‘evidence’ they have in their spreadsheets useless.

Our advice, if you get a settlement offer from one of Nexicon’s partners please forward it to your spam folder – after forwarding it to us first of course.

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

Sony’s PSP Product Manager John Koller told Multiplayer recently “[There] certainly has been some piracy on the PSP. We’ve seen that as a significant issue — it’s trending down right now, we’ve seen the piracy not be as such prevalent in the last month to two months”

According to Koller, more and more PSP users are joining the “good side” and standing up for the intellectual property rights of the company. “We’ve noticed there’s kind of a ‘good vs. evil’ battle that we track on many of the forums and many of the pirated web sites,” he said. “There are certainly people that are standing up and fighting for what we consider the good side, the rights of developers and publishers to make money on their IP.”

To verify this assesment, we decided to take a look at the piracy rate of PSP games. This data, based on direct monitoring of BitTorrent trackers seems to contradict Sony’s statements. From our statistics, there seems to be an increase instead of a decrease in the past months, which is true for all content. There is a steady increase in downloads for PSP games throughout 2008, and an even steeper one over the last three months.

To give an example of the piracy rate of PSP games, Dissidia: Final Fantasy was downloaded 200,000 times via BitTorrent over the past 5 days, which is pretty significant for a PSP game. The two most pirated games for the PSP in 2008 were Final Fantasy VII and GTA Vice City Stories, with an estimated 650,000 and 550,000 downloads. As a comparison, the average PSP game sells 133,000 copies. We’re curious where Sony got their statistics, perhaps it was just a PR stunt, to give pirates a guilty conscience.

Despite the increase in pirated downloads, for other types of games, more units were sold November this year compared to the same month in 2007, adding up to an impressive $4 billion in sales.

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

What the community needs right now is less drama, a place to call home and some well-deserved fun. We spoke to a senior staffer at the brand new mac tracker, SaveTheCoratee.org, to get some answers on the important stuff – like what the hell a coratee is?

“A coratee is an animal that is similar to a manatee, its primary diet is sea cabbage” he told us. “It was hunted and killed by tuna companies and sold to you because they are easier to fish. They are slow and stupid animals that are loving and soft and on the brink of extinction, meaning they are in desperate need of saving.”

The BrokenStones community parallels are obvious – minus the “slow and stupid bit” perhaps. But, an equal (if not greater) amount of love, of course. And cabbage.

“We picked Save the Coratee because of two real reasons. One, I try to live my life and everything I do with a healthy sense of the ridiculous. Two, the mac community is a creative and innovative community. Hand them a fake animal with no description rather than ‘It’s kinda like a manatee’ and people love it. It builds community and creates a family feeling that is ‘fun’.”

So bizarre mammal protection aside, what inspired the staff to start the site? Our source told us: “When BrokenStones went down we started talking with people about getting a site up but Vortex beat us to it.” As we know, things didn’t go to plan at Vortex but in the background, slowly but surely, SaveTheCoratee was still in development. “We started talking and we were kinda moving slow, brain-storming etc. Then stuff started to go down hill at Vortex so we kicked it into gear,” the staff member said.

So, apart from all the regular categories and well-seeded torrents and cabbage-eating sea mammals one would expect at a site like this, what else is there to this site? Well, for a start, the site is based on the Project Gazelle codebase, but it’s been put together ‘in-house’. The team at What.cd weren’t involved beyond the initial development, although they did save the first coratee (a female), and managed to effect some sort of virgin birth and a successful breeding program. I didn’t pry any deeper.

Nevertheless, I was told that a big achievement during the development was that the coders managed to convert the music-based source of Gazelle into a multi-app, multi-purpose site in just 4 days, which certainly sounds like an achievement.

The staff member further told us that SaveTheCoratee hopes to develop into a small, dedicated group (5,000 members, maybe more) of users who love both Apple Computers and BitTorrent sites: “I never want the site to be big or to loose personality” he told us. The site currently has around 1000 members but it’s growing fast.

So what might convince potential users of the site to head over to their IRC channel with a big bucket of sea-cabbage bribes to smooth the entrance interview?

Our source told us: “We included a lot of…. how would I put this… win in the site……or love…….”

According to a message on the site, once you have loved a coratee, you cannot go back to a plain old manatee, because it will seem rough and stupid by comparison.

Sounds like a good time to stock up on sea-cabbage.

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

November last year saw Mininova breaking into Alexa’s list of the 50 most visited websites on the Internet, which is an amazing achievement in just 36 months . Close to 5 billion torrents have been downloaded already, and with the torrents, the numbers of visitors continues to grow.

Here is a comparison between Mininova’s traffic last month, and a year before that.

March 2007

57,605,816 visits
261,460,196 pageviews

March 2008

109,304,822 visits
530,181,594 pageviews

Mininova’s visitors literally come from all over the world, Google analytics even reports 63 visits from the Vatican and 12 from Antarctica. However, most of the visitors come from the United States, followed by the UK, France, Canada and Australia.

Other BitTorrent sites are seeing similar visitor boosts but in terms of traffic, Mininova is definitely leading the pack. TorrentFreak spoke with Niek, one of the founders of the site, and he sees opportunities to grow even further.

“We expect that Mininova will at least sustain its current number of visitors. As BitTorrent and P2P in general become more and more accepted by the general public, new users will find their way to Mininova and other torrent search engines,” says Niek. “What Google has done for the web, we try to accomplish for BitTorrent and P2P.”

As a result of the increased popularity, Mininova had to upgrade their hardware numerous times. Unfortunately the current setup still has some weak spots. Yesterday Mininova went down for over 12 hours due to hardware issues.

“The extensive downtime of the last few days was a result of very unfortunate accidents, namely a crashing hard disk and a failing network card of the load-balancer in combination with two successive holidays in The Netherlands. We will do our utmost to prevent such issues in the future,” Niek said.

We wish them all the best and will keep you informed when their traffic has doubled again.

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

Mininova’s search cloud is a nice illustration. Below is a screenshot of the search cloud on Mininova 12 hours after the Oscar winners were announced, and for comparison, here is another one taken two days ago.

Most prominent in the search cloud is yesterday’s winner “No Country for Old Men”, that received four Oscars, including the one for the best movie.

There is more though. Almost all awarded movies are in the list of most popular searches – There Will Be Blood, Michael Clayton, La Vie en Rose, Juno, The Counterfeiters, Once, Sweeney Todd, Taxi to the Dark Side, Elizabeth, Ratatouille and Golden Compass. There is only one remarkable absentee from the list, and that is The Bourne Ultimatum.

People are not only trying to find the movies on BitTorrent, it seems that a lot of people are downloading the award ceremony as well, because search terms like Academy Awards and Oscars are also among the most popular search terms.

Last year we reported on the OscarTorrents site, a site where BitTorrent users could choose their own winners. Unfortunately, the site was not available this year as the creators have no time, but they’re promising to be “back next year”. In the meantime (and as usual), the full range of movies will be available at dozens of other torrent sites, right around the world.

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

An established, but outraged musician has decided to shun conventional distribution methods by following other recent initiatives (such as Radiohead’s ‘In Rainbows’ promotion) by making his latest album available for free download. It’s available on BitTorrent on sites like The Pirate Bay, with so-called ‘OiNK replacement’ site, What.cd, providing the album on ‘free leech’ to encourage more downloads.

TorrentFreak caught up with Benn Jordan who told us he’s not just disillusioned, he’s ‘outraged’ that iTunes is selling his work without permission and seemingly keeping all the money.

TF: Please tell us a little bit about yourself and your musical journey.

Benn: I’m Benn and I’m 29 years old. I started playing classical guitar when I was about 5, and since then, all I’ve wanted to do with my life was make music. Now 20-some odd years later, I feel lucky to tell you that I make music for a living. I’ve been releasing albums for about 14 years on various indy labels, and in the last 5 years I’ve also been composing for television, film, and ads. Music has allowed me to travel the world, meet thousands of wonderful people, and express myself through my work. It seems impossible to me that I’m on this planet for any other reason than writing music.

My label, on the other hand, doesn’t have a complex or radical plan. Our goal is to simply compensate our artists as much as possible, and that includes utilizing the “digital revolution” to our advantage, instead of punishing our artists by punishing their fans.

TF: Tell us a little about your dealings with labels and ‘the industry’ and why you became disillusioned.

Benn: Luckily, my record contracts were always negotiated well. Once things started moving with small labels I was approached by some larger ones, but there was always some seedy stipulation that prevented me from ever signing.

Still, with a 50/50 contract, I’d be selling 2,000 albums and would get $250 for it somehow. Many people that i’d meet at my shows would say that they bought my music on iTunes, yet I’ve never signed any sort of agreement allowing iTunes to host my music, and I’ve certainly never seen a dime of money for my albums hosted there.
So I started investigating the numbers from the label, which led me to some shocking revelations about how little the artist and label was getting in comparison to the retailers. When I got around to asking about iTunes, the owner of Sublight Records pleaded with me to “leave it be”. Everyone else made an extraordinary effort to ignore my calls and emails.

When I finally got a hold of the digital distributor (I must note that “digital distributor” is the most pathetic job title I’ve ever heard), I was told that once the files are in the iTunes system, it literally couldn’t be removed or taken down for a year. So, either Apple has created a self-aware doomsday machine that cannot be stopped or reasoned with, or everyone involved is just enjoying the gravy train of ripping off artists like myself and using Apple’s backbone of attorneys as an intimidation factor.

Even after having a lawyer working for me on this matter, this is the one and only response we’ve EVER been able to get from Apple:

Dear Benn,
I understand that you are writing to the iTunes Store because you are upset about finding your own album “The Flashlight” and some of your other album as well on the iTunes Store, and that you feel that you are owned
royalties for this music that his being purchased. I am sorry that you have to found this upsetting. My name is Wendy, and I would be happy to link you to right people to talk to about this issue

So, who’s the pirate I should go after? A kid who downloads my album because it isn’t available in non-DRM format and costs $30 on Amazon? Or a huge multi-billion dollar corporation that has been selling thousands of dollars worth of my music and not even acknowledging it?

I’m not disillusioned, I’m outraged, and anyone who ever spent a dime on buying music through these distribution methods should be outraged too. Here we are pleading with people to not steal music, and then we hand them dog shit when they go out of their way to buy it.

TF: You were a member of OiNK. Could you tell us a bit about your time there and how you used the site?

Benn: OiNK was an amazing network. As an avid-collector of ultra-rare old jazz records, I’ll tell you right now that it was the most complete and diverse library of music the world has ever seen. I filled some requests by uploading some of my rarer albums there. Eventually I started being harassed by someone on the network who was sending screen grabs of my seed lists to record labels. Upon complaining, a moderator simply removed my ability to communicate with anyone on the network or post comments on torrents. I can understand the paranoia and strictness.

I guess I just sort of laughed it off and stopped using it. When Oink went down, the only thing that surprised me was that the servers weren’t hidden in some weird country.

TF: Could you tell us more about the support you’re getting from one of the so-called ‘OiNK replacement’ sites, ‘What.cd’ ?

Benn: It was really a fresh breath of air for What.cd to promote the idea of artists having involvement with their own torrents. Not only does it benefit the artist to no end, but I can’t imagine that any court in the world would be able to pin someone on copyright infringement for a torrent the copyright holder created.

TF: Aside from uploading your own albums, at times you took an anti-piracy stance at OiNK, why the big change of heart?

Benn: I don’t think my stance has changed all that much. It’d be a great PR move to say that I’m pro-piracy, but I’d be lying. I keep seeing these internet news stories saying things like “The Flashbulb Promotes Piracy”. It is totally out of control. How could I be promoting piracy if I’m uploading my own material with a “buy it if you like it” message in the torrent?

What I’m promoting is the artist’s freedom to choose what can and can’t be done with his/her music, and more importantly, the listener’s freedom to do what he/she wants with their own computer, MP3 player, or internet connection.

After a journey through miles and miles of bullshit in this industry, you learn one thing: If you want something done right, you’ve got to do it yourself. Whether you’re downloading my music to check it out, to accompany the CD, or even pirating it…I want you to have a version/rip of it that I’ve listened to and approved of.

TF: You say you’re not pro-piracy yet you downloaded stuff from OiNK and also What.cd. One position seems to conflict the other. How do you explain this?

Benn: In my case I think that visible list of downloads strengthens my point. Most of those downloads are actually albums I already own (much easier to download than to record an entire vinyl album), albums I previewed but didn’t like, or albums I simply cannot find available in a suitable DRM-free format (including CD). Some of the software, like the TomTom DVD on my list, is actually impossible to technically “pirate” because you can’t buy a US TomTom GPS unit without the software. The thing is, when a tracker gets busted, the companies count these towards their losses.

So, my new album currently has 6381 downloads at the time of this interview on what.cd alone. Using that deceitful equation, my losses are over $100,000. If I wanted to, I could subtract those losses from my profit and completely get out of paying any income taxes. It makes sense from an evil, corporate, criminal-minded standpoint, right?

Beyond that, iTunes and other services simply are not acceptable to me. No company will have any control over a product that I legally own after I buy it, period.

Oink was the biggest music library in the world. People didn’t use it because they were criminals, people used it because it was literally better than any service you could pay for. It was the stubborn behavior of the record labels, artists, and government that wouldn’t allow that music library to have a cash register at the front door.

The thing RIAA is scared of is that their billion dollar backbone can no longer shelter people from exploring music themselves. Their business plan had evolved into telling the world what they will want to listen to and buy, and now they’ll have to actually compete with talented artists again. As the people regain control of the market, music will be judged by it’s content again and will be subjected to it’s own Darwinism. It is a very interesting time for the music industry…and since my entire life is devoted to making music, bring it on. I hope that this situation with my new record proves to other labels and artists that giving people exactly what they want is the smartest way to conduct any business.

TF: How do you feel about people being heavily punished for sharing music?

Benn: Obviously, the last thing I would want is anyone to be fined or imprisoned for listening to my music. Another feature of uploading my own torrent is that it creates a little legal nesting area on a network otherwise deemed illegal by most governments and RIAA. When someone else uploads a torrent of my music, it is without my approval…on the other end of things, and more importantly, when someone raids an admin’s apartment…no police officer is asking me if I want to press charges.

TF: What happens when people donate?

Benn: If you decide that you like the album, you’ll have the option of donating directly to the artist. If you decide that you’d like a CD, you’ll be able to order it directly from my label. I’ve even hired my mother to run our shipping department since she’s the most obsessive-compulsive-perfectionist office worker that I’ve ever laid eyes on.

Finally, every detail of my album’s content, release, and business is done exactly the way I want it to be done. I hope other artists realize how liberating and profitable it is compared to the distribution system we’ve all become so accustomed to.

TF: Radiohead did really quite well after they offered ‘In Rainbows’ online for free. You’re a few days into this experiment – how is it going for you?

Benn: My donations have a way to go before they match the numbers from CD pre-orders, but I’m still crossing my fingers. In a week or so I plan to release a detailed statistical report. For some reason I really like making pie charts.

TF: I’ve listened to the album – Soundtrack To A Vacant Life – and I really enjoyed it. Could you tell us some more about it?

Benn: It was 2 years in the making, and is conceptually me attempting to write the soundtrack to my own life. Of course this means that it is much more cinematic than electronic, and the songs all connect chronologically. Those who have heard my previous albums can expect this one to be a lot more melodic, tame, and instrumental. Suggested listening is with a decent pair of headphones from start to finish.

TF: I have some, I’ll try that later. Thanks for your time.

Benn Jordan’s blog can be found here.

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

For those who are not familiar with the term, RSS is an acronym that stands for ‘Really Simple Syndication’. It allows you to keep up-to-date on content from sites you are interested in. Most news sites, blogs and podcasts have RSS feeds that let you automatically receive updates when a new article (or episode in the case of podcasts) is published (we have one).

These days, many BitTorrent sites have also started publishing RSS feeds of their listings. These feeds are often highly customizable, and can send you updates on whatever you want. Some even enclose .torrent files like podcast feeds enclose media ones.

In this article we will focus on RSS feeds for TV-torrents. Here are 5 ways to use these feeds. From completely automated downloading and watching, to simple updates when a torrent for your favorite TV show is published.

Downloading TV-shows can be illegal in some countries. If so, consider moving to another country, download share friendly shows only, or collect the torrents just for fun.

First, you might want to know where you can find these feeds. A great site to find TV torrent feeds is tvRSS.net. Click on one of the shows and you will see a list of the torrents for the latest episodes. In the blue bar above the search results you might notice the “search based RSS feed”, that is the feed that indexes releases of a particular show. This is the feed were going to use, so copy the url.

It is worth pointing out that other, less TV-focused sites like mininova also offer search-based RSS feeds. The reason they’re called “search-based feeds” is because they are feeds that relate to particular search terms. For example, if you search for ‘Rocketboom’, at the top of the results page you will get a feed that will send you updates on all torrents with the word ‘Rocketboom’ in their name.

OK, so now you know how to find a feed for your favorite TV show. Although, you might still be wondering what you are to do with these feeds. Some people prefer to receive only an alert, others might want to have their torrents start downloading automatically. Here are a couple of suggestions.

Torrents in your feed reader

This is probably one of the easiest ways to receive updates on the latest episodes of your favorite TV shows, especially if you already use a feed reader. You can use either a desktop or a web-based reader. Some popular web-based feed readers include Bloglines, Google Reader and Netvibes. Desktop feed readers vary from platform-to-platform. The most common desktop reader for Windows would have to be the appropriately named Feedreader. On Linux, Liferea is a good option. And on Mac OS X, Vienna is possibly the best free desktop reader available. All three of these are Open Source too.

Torrents by Email

If you use an email application like Thunderbird with RSS support you can directly add the feed in there. If not, you can try a feed-to-email service that will forward the latest torrents to your email account. FeedBlitz and Squeet are two popular feed-to-email services.

TV Torrent Software

TVTAD and Ted are applications that help you to get the latest TV torrents by using RSS feeds. Both applications are advanced feed readers that you can customize to find and download your favorite TV shows. These applications have a pre-loaded list of TV torrent feeds and some advanced filter options built in. They are especially useful when you use a BitTorrent client that doesn’t have RSS support.

BitTorrent Clients with RSS Support

There are a couple of BitTorrent clients that are able to handle RSS feeds. Azureus, Bitcomet and uTorrent for example can all subscribe to RSS feeds. You can check this list to see if your favorite BitTorrent client supports RSS feeds. uTorrent has a great tutorial how to configure the feeds to automate downloading.

Broadcatching / Internet TV Applications

To quote the Wikipedia entry on the topic, “broadcatching is the downloading of content that has been made available over the Internet using RSS Syndication for listening on mobile devices and personal computers”. These internet TV players allow you to automatically download and watch the latest TV shows, video podcasts and more. These players might be useful for people who only use BitTorrent to download video files. Personally I’m not too excited about these players yet. Most players are still pretty buggy, and not very advanced in their configuration options. The EFF has its own such application. It was previously known as Broadcast Machine, but was subsequently renamed to Democracy Player. It too is still quite buggy, hogs RAM and crashes often. Here’s a review of three popular “broadcatching” applications we did a while ago.

Did this tutorial help you? Or do you already use BitTorrent and RSS to download and watch content?

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