Through legal action the music industry outfit hopes to force the Internet provider to install a filtering mechanism on its network, so it can block the transfers of copyrighted works on file-sharing networks. In 2007, SABAM scored a victory as the court ruled that the ISP should stop illegal file-sharing using Audible Magic, a system that was recommended by the music industry.

This verdict was controversial for several reasons. Firstly, the ISP believed that it would be breaking the law when it started spying on its customers. Managing director Gert Post commented at the time: “This measure is nothing else than playing Big Brother on the Internet. If we don’t challenge it today, we leave the door open to permanent, and invisible and illegal, checks of personal data.”

Privacy was not the most urgent problem though, as implementing the filtering system also proved quite problematic. It turned out that the recommended ‘Audible Magic’ simply didn’t work and neither did any of the alternative filtering systems. The ISP could not comply with the verdict even if it wanted to.

A lawyer for SABAM later admitted that they had misled the court over the effectiveness of Audible Magic, which prompted the judge in the case to reverse the ruling. The ISP could continue without having to take measures against illicit file-sharers until the appeal was heard.

Last week the Brussels Court of Appeal started on the case. But, instead of looking into the content of the dispute, it was referred to The European Court Of Justice which will look into some of the fundamental questions posed in the case.

In Europe, this is a landmark case that will define whether or not ISPs are responsible for copyright infringements committed by customers. In recent years the entertainment industry has continuously lobbied for copyright filters and the views of the European Court Of Justice will be pivotal in this regard.

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

This week, Microsoft joins the fight as the software company announces that it will pursue LinkoManija’s alleged operator Kestas Ermanas and his company in court.

The action against Lithuania’s largest BitTorrent site, which is in the top 10 of the most visited websites in the country, has been approved by the US headquarters of the software giant.

The defendant and his company are accused of facilitating copyright infringement of Microsoft’s Office 2003 and 2007 through their involvement with the BitTorrent tracker.

Together with local anti-piracy outfit LANVA, Microsoft has requested 107 million Lithuanian litas ($43 million) in damages at the Vilnius Regional Court. However, under Lithuanian law Microsoft can get up to $53,000 in damages at maximum.

In response to the demands from Microsoft, the assets of Kestas Ermanas and his company were seized and associated bank accounts frozen.

TorrentFreak briefly spoke with the defendant who is pretty shaken up by the news, but is claiming Microsoft sued the wrong people. We were told that as of 2010, he and his company no longer run LinkoManija. Kestas and his company operated the site until December last year.

Kestas further told us that Microsoft’s move surprised him, as the company has never sent a torrent takedown request to the popular BitTorrent tracker. “We informed them that we wanted to cooperate with them, they just had to give us the links to the infringing torrent files,” Kestas said, adding “they never wrote back to us.”

In addition to Kestas and his company, Microsoft is also pursuing legal action against LinkoManija’s users. In November last year, 106 users of the site were reported to the police and one of them will go on trial next month.

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

From the very beginning, the music industry has pictured the site’s founder as someone who charges users for access to the site, claiming that it was set up to make profits from infringing on the rights of the major record labels.

Its users were criminals who conspired to steal from the music industry for reasons other than the enjoyment of music, music industry groups claimed. “This was not a case of friends sharing music for pleasure,” Jeremy Banks of the IFPI said shortly after the site fell, insinuating that profits were made behind the scenes.

Last week the prosecution in the OiNK trial continued down the same path, pointing out that Ellis had gathered nearly $300,000 from voluntary donations over the years. They made it seem like Ellis was running a profitable business but failed to mention that a large chunk of this money was continuously invested back into the site and its running costs.

No proof was provided that Ellis used any of the donation money to enrich himself. He had the equivalent of $32,500 in several savings accounts at the time of his arrest. Ellis planned to use this money to buy servers for the tracker.

This week Ellis has the chance to start telling the Court his side of the story, and has been detailing how he initially hosted the tracker in his own bedroom when he was studying at Teesside University.

Ellis explained how OiNK began as a pet project with the sole purpose of improving his “outdated” UK honours degree in software engineering. “I didn’t have an intention, I was furthering my skills as a programmer, as a software engineer,” Ellis told Teesside Crown Court today.

Ellis, who was working on the backend of the site to make sure that everything kept running, was merely providing a platform for OiNK’s users to share whatever they wanted. He denied the charges of conspiracy to defraud the music industry.

The case continues.

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

The jurors were further warned by Judge Briggs not to Google for OiNK or do any other form of research on the Internet. This might be a good suggestion, as many of the mainstream press reports thus far have been littered with inaccuracies.

Even the BBC report the site was free to join, but in the very next sentence say it cost £5. In another article they report it cost $5.

“It would be most unfortunate if any of you did any private research on the internet relating to this matter. Please don’t,” said Briggs. “It’s only likely to cause difficulties and could in theory abort the trial. So, ladies and gentlemen, no independent research.”

Judge Briggs told the jurors that the defendant, OiNK admin Alan Ellis, is charged with an offence of conspiracy to defraud.

“Put very simply it is suggested he was involved in a website that was used to distribute sound recordings and things of that nature in breach of copyright,” he said.

Ellis denies the charge that he “conspired with others unknown” to defraud the music industry.

Today the trial continued and the jury was told by the prosecution that the OiNK tracker facilitated 21 million downloads. Ellis, who accepted donations from members, had gathered almost $300,000 (£190,000) in several PayPal accounts over the years, money that allegedly came from donations.

“Every penny was going to Mr Ellis,” said Peter Makepeace, prosecuting. “He hadn’t sung a note, he hadn’t played an instrument, he hadn’t produced anything. The money was not going to the people it rightly belonged to, it was going to Mr Ellis.”

The prosecution failed to mention that the money was used by Ellis to pay for the servers and hosting, which probably cost him several thousand dollars a month.

The court was further told how OiNK did not host or distribute any music itself, but instead indexed files shared by its users for others to download.

When responding to a description of how BitTorrent works, that leechers share what they download with other peers, thus speeding up downloads, Mr Makepeace commented: “That is the beauty of the Oink website. It never had to upload any music itself, all it did was provide the facility of linking one person to another who wanted that music.”

After his arrest, the prosecution said that Ellis told officers: “All I do is really like Google, to really provide a connection between people. None of the music is on my website.”

The case continues.

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

It might not come as a surprise to most people, but Bono’s wish is a little out of touch with reality. By mimicking the words of the record label bosses high up the food chain of the music industry, he fails to see where the real problem lies.

Over the last ten years the RIAA mounted the most aggressive anti-piracy campaign against file-sharers seen anywhere, collecting millions in settlements from thousands of households. The songwriters didn’t benefit much from that.

The RIAA also collected as much as $400m from settlements from the likes of Napster, KaZaA and Bolt. That money was supposed to go to the artists whose rights had been allegedly infringed upon, but the labels weren’t that keen to hand any of that over either, even when faced with the threat of lawsuits from the artists themselves.

The major labels, Warner, Sony, EMI and Universal, are currently being sued by another group of artists over sales of compilation albums featuring their music for which they haven’t been given a cent. The money they’re owed collectively is a staggering $6 billion. Looks like the ‘little guy’ is in trouble without the assistance of file-sharing.

While one set of corporates ripping off musicians doesn’t get a mention in Bono’s top 10, other supposed evil-doers do. Singing from the same sheet as his paymasters at Universal, Bono also takes aim at ISPs, claiming that their “swollen” profits “perfectly mirror” the lost revenues in the music business.

This “blaming of the messenger” will be a continuing theme in the next decade, and one which Bono dwells on for a moment, noting that if it’s possible to crack down on online child pornography in the US, and China has the ability to suppress online dissent, then it’s also perfectly possible to track downloads of copyrighted music.

Well, yes, of course it is. That’s been perfectly possible for the last decade, but what good does it do? The RIAA has largely given up suing individuals and even when countries like France pass fairly draconian legislation to have people removed from the Internet for sharing content, there are plenty of ways around it.

“The only thing protecting the movie and TV industries from the fate that has befallen music and indeed the newspaper business is the size of the files,” says Bono. “The immutable laws of bandwidth tell us we’re just a few years away from being able to download an entire season of “24” in 24 seconds. Many will expect to get it free.”

While it’s true that we are only a couple of years away from being to download huge amounts of data in just a few seconds and that will have an impact on the volumes of movie and TV show downloading, we can’t actually watch a full season of “24″ in 24 seconds. Real-time will suffice, though.

Right at this moment via sites like Watch-Movies-Online, it’s possible to view the very latest movies instantaneously. With the new streaming functionality available in the latest beta of uTorrent, the same can be achieved via torrent swarms.

Bono, the future is now. Suing Internet users does not work and blaming the ISPs will only prove counter-productive. Monitoring the Internet will prove futile. The only way to deal with piracy is to compete with it.

As we pointed out in our article covering the most downloaded TV shows of 2009, there is huge interest in on-demand TV and there are millions of viewers that can potentially bring in millions of dollars in revenue.

The growth in unauthorized downloading of TV shows and other media is a sign that consumers want something currently unavailable through the official channels, and while price is a factor, it is not necessarily all about ‘free’.

Serving the insatiable demand during the next decade at a reasonable price should be the main aim of the media industry, as locking down the Internet will not only suffocate their customers, but also their own business. That definitely won’t help the songwriters.

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

By the end of 2004, a year after the site launched, the tracker was already tracking a million peers and more than 60,000 torrent files. Around the same time the founders also became aware that it wasn’t just Scandinavians showing an interest in their site. Because of increasing worldwide popularity, The Pirate Bay team completely redesigned the site, which became available in several languages from then on.

This change was much appreciated by the site’s non-Swedish speaking users, but hated by anti-piracy outfits. They saw the tracker as a serious threat, and in response launched a dozen lawsuits to have it removed from the Internet. Today, while nearing the end of the decade, The Pirate Bay has changed its homepage back to its 2003 look, Swedish only.

Despite all the legal trouble, the buyout soap and the decision to close the tracker, The Pirate Bay website is still around at the end of the decade. According to the Pirate Bay team, they are not yet ready to give up or throw in the towel.

“We believe that we have changed something. Not just us, but all of us. The Pirate Bay has always been something extra. We didn’t just wanna run another tracker. We wanted it to mean something. And you our users have helped us with that. The history of the bay is still being written, it’s way too early for a conclusion,” The Pirate Bay team writes.

“2010 has no room for boring debates about old worn out values that old rotting industries try to shove down your throats. 2010 will be the year of the hydra. Let thousands of new exciting projects emerge,” they add.

The past has indeed shown that with every setback the Hydra grows stronger. More new sites and trackers will emerge in the new year while old favorites fade in the background.

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

Now, at the end of the decade where BitTorrent has become a synonym for file-sharing, hundreds of millions of people have high speed broadband connections at their homes. Downloading a popular movie or TV-series often takes less than an hour nowadays, but for the demanding web users of today this delay can still prove quite annoying.

Spoiled by the many streaming video sites that have surged in popularity since YouTube’s launch in 2005, many people simply want to start watching instantly. To satiate this demand the popular BitTorrent client uTorrent has now added streaming support to the latest uTorrent beta release, which allows users to play video files while they are downloading.

“Our hope is to transform getting media using uTorrent from a ‘load-wait-watch-tomorrow’ to more of a ‘point-click-watch’ experience,” Simon Morris, BitTorrent’s VP of Product Management said in a comment.

Although several other BitTorrent clients have already implemented similar streaming capabilities, uTorrent will finally make BitTorrent streaming possible for the majority of BitTorrent users.

In our tests the new feature worked flawlessly on well-seeded torrents. Users simply have to click on the play button next to the download, and after a few seconds or minutes it will turn green, ready to be streamed.

By default the latest uTorrent release is configured to use the DivX web player to stream video. This works well for most files but for us it caused problems with some video formats. Changing it to VLC or any other media player is relatively easy though, by nominating a different streaming player in uTorrent’s preferences.

Aside from streaming regular downloads, uTorrent’s parent company BitTorrent Inc. is also working on BitTorrent-powered live streams. BitTorrent inventor Bram Cohen himself aims to develop a piece of code that is superior to all the other P2P-based streaming solutions on the market today.

“I think there’s a very large market for live [streaming] in general, and to date no-one has proven that a p2p solution can meet the real-world requirements for being an acceptable live solution. I intend on changing that,” Bram told TorrentFreak earlier this year.

For now, uTorrent users will have to settle for on-demand streaming. Those who do not intend to use the feature can be assured that the streaming implementation used by uTorrent is designed on the principles of tit-for tat sharing, meaning that it does not slow down regular downloads.

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

Cory Doctorow, blogger, author and columnist, is not shy of technology or the Internet. His last book, Little Brother, covered the internet, RFID, terrorism and even the Pirate Party. Doctorow also served as the European Director for the EFF and co-founded the ORG. When it comes to DRM, he knows his stuff, and he also knows that DRM doesn’t work

So, when he wanted to release an audio version of his new book ‘Makers’ without DRM, it seemed a fairly simple prospect. The publishers, Random House Audio, were amenable to it. The problem was one of distribution. There are two major players in this area, Audible and Apple. Unlike the publishers, they are not so keen on the ‘no DRM’ position.

Audible, writes Doctorow in Publishers Weekly, turned them down flat when it came to a DRM-free version of Little Brother last year. Since they’re the only retailer on the iTunes music store, that locked out an huge market. When it came time for ‘Makers,’ this time they said yes. Apple, however, said No. audiobooks have to have DRM.

Doesn’t matter what the author or publisher wants, Apple wants DRM, so it’s DRM or nothing.

The backup plan then was just to sell via Audible. The problem then, writes Doctorow, is that while the files might not contain DRM, they come with an End User Licensing Agreement (EULA), which effectively does the same thing – DRM by contract.

DRM might be be gone from music as apple proudly proclaimed early this year, but it’s still alive and kicking. Often not because of the artist or the publisher wants it, but because it’s a store requirement. Indeed, Mr Doctorow is very happy with his publisher, telling TorrentFreak “Random House Audio has been remarkably flexible and committed to letting me sell my audiobooks without DRM and I’m incredibly grateful to them and to my editor, Amy Metsch, for all their hard work.”

Now for Apple and Audible to similarly be flexible and hard working, after all, they didn’t create the work, they’re just selling it.

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

The case progressed in the Federal Court today, with iiNet barrister Richard Cobden continuing with his closing submissions.

As detailed earlier in the case, after AFACT sent many thousands of copyright infringement notices to iiNet, the ISP responded by sending them to the police. Cobden defended that decision today, claiming that the notices could constitute evidence of copyright crimes.

While the studios had earlier insisted that they would never sanction unlawful investigation methods, ITNews quotes Cobden as saying that in gathering that evidence, it was likely the investigators themselves had also committed offenses, breaching section 132AJ(1) of the Copyright Act.

The barrister said that both investigators committed primary acts of infringement online, and while AFACT had earlier claimed that iiNet users burned copyright material onto DVDs after downloading it, in fact the only evidence of that being done relates to the copies made by AFACT investigators.

Continuing to attack the evidence provided by AFACT and its anti-piracy partner DtecNet, Cobden returned to an earlier assertion that DtecNet investigators did not behave as normal BitTorrent users would. Regular users would allow their torrent client to connect to any peers, but DtecNet filtered out any that weren’t issued with iiNet IP addresses.

ARN quotes Cobden as saying this action was “foolish” as it slowed download times to several days. As we heard earlier in the case, this led to investigators counting the same infringement more than once.

Last week, Cobden argued that AFACT hadn’t provided any evidence that iiNet customers had engaged in copyright infringement as they were only sharing small parts of files (such is the nature of BitTorrent), rather than the “substantial” parts, as required under the law. In order to prove his point, Cobden went on to cite an earlier copyright case.

In 2002, Australian TV station Channel 9 sued Channel 10 citing infringement under the Copyright Act 1968. Channel 10 had broadcast short sections of Channel 9 programs The Today Show, Who Wants to be a Millionaire, Days of Our Lives and Sale of the New Century in their television show called The Panel. The view was that of the 11 segments played, only 3 were long enough to constitute infringement.

As anti-piracy tracking companies such as DtecNet only record an instance of alleged copyright infringement timed to a single second, Cobden is arguing that there is no evidence to prove any “substantial” part of any movie was shared by iiNet users.

Cobden went on to insist that in order to confirm that evidence of infringement provided by AFACT was indeed accurate (before passing notices to their customers), it would be necessary for the ISP to breach copyright.

“If one wanted to check the DtecNet evidence and see on a range of IP addresses supplied by iiNet that infringing material was online, the only way to do it would be to use the BitTorrent client like DtecNet did, construct the parameters of the IP address range, locate the file and compare it to details in the spreadsheets,” said Cobden, as quoted by ITNews.

Cobden said that if iiNet passed unproven infringement notices to its customers, it would face problems if the account holder disputed the claims. After all, iiNet had only AFACT’s word that an infringement had been carried out, but absolutely no proof or other information to have a meaningful discussion on the issue.

It is likely that Cobden will finish his closing submissions next Tuesday 24th. The Internet Industry Association’s application to become a ‘friend of the court’ will be heard on the afternoon of that day, bringing the original date forward by two days.

The case will then end either next Wednesday or Thursday, but readers are advised not to hold their breath for the verdict – it could take several months to arrive.

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

However, despite the shunning of the multi-colored approach of the above, among those millions of Internet users for whom BitTorrent has become a way of life, or those technology reporters who have written so much about the site, the logo employed by The Pirate Bay is also very recognizable indeed. The ship emblem, with its sails featuring the outline of a cassette tape-and-crossbones, has been reproduced millions of times on countless numbers of websites and products.

The Pirate Bay, in line with their sharing ethos, has always allowed people to use the logo free of charge and even makes the artwork publicly available in usable, scalable formats to ease its reproduction, some of which were used to create fan tattoos. But that is still not enough for some greedy individuals.

Today news broke that a private Swedish company, noticing that the logo had no commercial protection, took the opportunity to hijack it. The outfit, Sandryds Handel AB, have officially registered the emblem as their own with the authorities, with the intention of commercially exploiting it.

While admitting they have absolutely nothing to do with The Pirate Bay, in a radio interview Sandryds Handel spokesman Bengt Wessborg defended his company’s action.

“The idea is to sell USB drives using this brand,” he told SR. “We saw that it was not already allocated to someone else. It was not registered,” he added.

A spokesman for Sweden’s Patent and Registration Office said that they were unable to find that any rights to the logo were held by The Pirate Bay, therefore they were able to allocate them to Sandryds.

The logo registered by the company is very slightly different in color to that of the original Pirate Bay design, with ‘The Pirate Bay’ written as “The Piratebay”.

Commenting on the news, ex-Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde told TorrentFreak: “It will be turned over quite easily, it’s a preliminary registration that is being ‘tested’,” adding that while anyone can use the logo for any purpose they like, they may not take any action which limits the way other people can use it.

Peter says he wrote to Sandryds, and they replied telling him “…that they were amazed themselves and just wanted to try.”

TorrentFreak asked if The Pirate Bay is going to try and get the logo back, and we were told that they would try to get the decision by the patent office anulled, adding that the registration wasn’t legal and is therefore prohibited by law.

“It’s a person at the registration office that has made an error – willingly or not, we’re not sure,” they added.

“It would be nice if they liked it,” said the Sandryds spokesman in a statement. “But we may perhaps enter into dialogue with them if needed,” he added.

Needless to say, certain Pirate Bay supporters will not “like” this hijacking at all, and offering discussions over the reappropriation of an emblem they already see as their own will be tantamount to waving a red rag at a bull.

History shows us what happens to outfits who take negative actions against The Pirate Bay, so on past experience, if Sandryds Handel hope to keep doing business on the web in any meaningful way, they may want to quickly reassess their position.

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

Just over a month has passed since the first stable public release of the software and PeerBlock has now managed to clock up more than 100,000 downloads. To mark this milestone, TorrentFreak caught up with Mark from the project for the lowdown.

Mark told us that the creation of PeerBlock was inspired by him upgrading his PC from 32 to 64 bit in order to utilize 6gb of RAM. Everything worked fine – until he tried to get PeerGuardian (another IP blocker) to work.

Having hacked away and jumped through hoops to get around driver-signing it would still only work half the time and often crashed without warning. As a software engineer who has worked in the commercial sector for more than 13 years, Mark – who admits to being “an arrogant bastard who truly believes he can do just about anything better than just about anybody,” decided he could find a solution. It was “put up or shut up time,” he told TorrentFreak.

Noticing that the PeerGuardian code was open-source but hadn’t been touched for a couple of years, Mark contacted another developer who had the same thing in mind, but having heard nothing back, he went at it alone.

“I started setting up a Sourceforge.net project for it so we could get free source-control, but they took too long to set it up for me so I instead created a project over at Google Code where it was ready within minutes,” he told us.

Having heard from a few people who were interested in helping out with the development side – “night_stalker_z” who’d earlier started trying to hack the PG2 code into shape, “DarC” / “DisCoStu” who wanted to help out with fixing up the installer, XhmikosR who rewrote the installer, and some testers, things moved forward.

After facing troubles due to the lack of a “signed driver” for 64-bit versions of Vista (which resulted in Mark having to set up a registered company before they were allowed to buy a $230 code-signing certificate), a couple of blogs wrote articles on PeerBlock which attracted some much-needed publicity to the project. This resulted in 10,000 downloads in just one weekend.

“We’re still getting donations from people and we now have enough to pay for next year’s annual code-signing certificate, and we’re saving up to be able to rent our own VPS with full root access etc, upon which we’ll be able to build a ‘real’ online-update system, a custom web-app to tie our forums/issue-tracker/website all together, and some other neat things,” Mark explains.

The first stable release of PeerBlock came out on September 27th, and as of November 5th had clocked up an impressive 100,000 downloads. The site now receives up to 7,000 visitors each day.

Aside from fixing one or two bugs, the team has lots of new features planned for PeerBlock. Anyone that has tried to surf the web with a blocklist in place will know how painful that can be, so PeerBlock will have some new features which allow the “whitelisting” of certain apps, such as a browser, the creation of a proxy server to let users configure PeerBlock to listen on certain ports, possibly an integral “AdMuncher” style ad-blocking feature on a per URL basis (as opposed to just an IP-address), and an encrypted chat feature.

TorrentFreak asked Mark why users should choose PeerBlock over the competition.

“Well, first off we need to ask ‘Who IS the competition?’ The only ones I’m really aware of are: Protowall by the folks over at Bluetack which is closed-source and I don’t believe was ever updated for Vista, and Outpost Firewall, which is closed-source and basically just a hack add-on to a more professional firewall product,” he responded, while noting that uTorrent’s built-in IP-filtering feature only handles one manually-updated list.

“We protect your entire machine, and give you the option to try out any P2P app you want – this freedom of choice is a very important thing, I think. And since it does everything automatically, including list-updates, it’s one less thing to think about,” he added.

Another important question relates to the blocklists that have to be used in conjunction with PeerBlock in order for it to block anything.

He told TorrentFreak that he’s a big fan of iblocklist, who serve up a staggering 10TB of blocklists every month for free. The site doesn’t create the lists, but does offer those from Bluetack, including the Level1 list (renamed to ‘P2P’ in PG2/PeerBlock, which contains both Gov and Anti-P2P IP-addresses) and others.

Mark admits that even in a best case scenario, the available blocklists aren’t 100% effective. That said, there have been studies which show that using blocklists along with software such as PeerBlock can help speed up downloads, but no-one knows how many of the potential “bad IPs” are covered by currently available blocklists.

P2P aside, Mark says there has been feedback to suggest that PeerBlock discovered a Conficker infection on a user’s machine that their anti-virus programs missed, and can also stop ads appearing in browsers that lack in-built blocking.

One other exciting thing for the future of PeerBlock is porting it to the Mac. Mark says they’re saving all the donations for additional development and this is the most-requested request right now.

Users of PeerBlock are encouraged to give as much feedback as possible to Mark’s team, via their forums, IRC (#peerblock on freenode.net) or email.

PeerBlock can be downloaded here.

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

The main problem is that most people just don’t understand what DHT is, what it does, and how it works. Not really a surprise since the documentation and even the Wikipedia page are filled with technical jargon, and no simple explanation.  Without that basic understanding confusion is inevitable. We did explain DHT in our jargon piece back in 2006 but after 3 years, we decide to cover it again.

The easiest way to think about DHT is to imagine it as a form of ’super tracker’, in some ways a lot like WinMX and Kazaa of old. A large ad-hoc network of peers pass on information requests about torrents without a central server, meaning no control or single point of failure. No information about the contents or even the names of torrents are passed around, making this legal and hard to shut down.

Myth: You must turn off DHT when you use private trackers.

Wrong — There is an element to a torrent that is called the ‘private flag’. It’s a small flag that marks to a client that the torrent is ‘private’ and disables any method of sharing peers (including DHT), except via the tracker. This flag also changes the hash, so peers on a non-flagged torrent could not connect to a flagged torrent in any case. Most private torrent sites check for the flag, and add it if missing when the torrent is initially uploaded to their site.

Myth: Certain clients leak DHT data and should be avoided.

Wrong (with one exception) — There are always going to be people that want control. When it comes to torrent sites (especially the private ones) they like to express their control through lists of clients you can and can’t use (a form of DRM) and sometimes give reasons to support this. An example would be this statement from a staff member at a private tracker:

Not all torrent clients respect the private flag. But if you are using a client like Vuze, uTorrent or similar if the private flag is on (set by the tracker) the DHT, peer exchange settings etc are ignored. However, if you are using something like BitComet, BitLord or their ilk they ignore the private flag so if you have DHT etc enabled it is going to be enabled no matter what.

This statement is completely false. All torrent clients that support DHT respect the flag. The flag is set by the torrent file, not the tracker (although the tracker can add the flag to the file, it’s still set by the torrent), and BitComet does NOT ignore the flag. The one exception is a single build of BitComet (0.60) that was available for 2 weeks at the end of 2005, and even then, was a fallback only if the tracker was unable to be contacted for a 30minute period. Bitlord is unable to leak to DHT, as it doesn’t use DHT at all.

If you see staff making claims like this, it’s a good indication that the staff is clueless, which might be an idea to leave that tracker. If they can’t get the basics right who knows when else is wrong. Of course, we ask those claiming other clients leak to let us know so we can test it.

Myth: You can be tracked by DHT / AntiP2P groups use DHT to find you

Unlikely — It’s much easier and simpler to use the tracker. Blocklists, used on your client and on the trackers, are generally ineffective and easily circumvented through the use of residential connections. Last year’s University of Washington study showed that they will send letters just based on tracker info.

Myth: DHT slows your system down

Generally not true — It can slow down your connection depending mainly on network hardware. The actual data used in running DHT is low, generally less than 1kilobyte a second. Some routers and modems, however, can have problems with DHT causing lockups and restarts if they run out of ram. This mostly happens with lower spec ‘home’ equipment (such as older Belkins, Netgears and D-links), or telco-provided hardware.

Myth: You need to connect to a tracker, before you can use DHT

Wrong — When DHT is enabled (certainly in uTorrent) it connects to a bootstrap node (such as router.utorrent.com or router.bittorrent.com for mainline, or dht.aelitis.com for Vuze) and uses that to enter the DHT ’swarm’. It’s handed a set of DHT nodes and uses that to build up a small group of connected nodes. Those nodes are then used to get peers. No tracker is required at any time.

Myth: When enabled, it sends usage data back to [insert company]

Wrong — This is another case of people not knowing what they’re talking about. Generally they’re misinterpreting the bootstrap node connection for their client.

When the demonoid tracker was finally resurrected last year, many of it’s torrents were still active thanks mainly to DHT. DHT with Peer Exchange (PEX) is a very powerful addition to the torrenting world, and allows torrents to stay active, irrespective of the trackers stability or even existence. Also, Azureus/Vuze users, despite having their own DHT system, can join in using a mainline DHT plugin.

Should you use DHT? Not if you only use private trackers, but if you use public ones and your network hardware can cope, then yes. It can help reduce tracker load. If you have a question about DHT not answered here, then again, let us know.

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

One major site that has showed an acute aversion to saying just about anything to outsiders is Demonoid. This semi-private site has nevertheless made the news dozens of times, most recently due to its recent downtime, as reported here on TorrentFreak.

“We are experiencing power outages that have caused some ram and hard drive issues. We might have to shut down everything to fix and prevent further damage,” said Demonoid in a statement six weeks ago, warning that downtime could run to “…days maybe, until we can change the power circuit.”

However, TorrentFreak has received possibly conflicting information from Demonoid’s host, Colocall in Ukraine, who said in a statement: “There were no problems with power supply at the location where Demonoid servers are hosted.”

While information about Demonoid is always scarce, information coming out of Colocall is a rarity too, since the company has previously refused to speak with journalists about their most infamous customer. That’s why it was of great interest when Ukrainian blogger Pavel Golubovskiy contacted TorrentFreak to say he had netted an interview with Colocall. Here is a translation of the questions related to Demonoid;

Why did you choose to host Demonoid?

The customer came to us and ordered a particular service. For us it wasn’t a political decision, Demonoid is an ordinary client for us.

What exactly do you host, the inferno.demonoid.com tracker?

They brought their servers, which are now located in our data center. We don’t know what information is stored there – we do not have access to this information. These servers are supported remotely by Demonoid technical staff.

Is there a way to contact the Demonoid admins?

They will not answer you. Many people want to contact them – journalists, fans, police, local authorities from different countries. But the Demonoid admins have a very selective approach to e-mail correspondence. When the police wanted to contact them, I specifically warned the admins that they had to respond to this request.

So the police already inquired about Demonoid?

Well, our local authorities are interested in Demonoid all the time. Rightholders associations are constantly trying to put pressure on us, including pressure with the help of Ukrainian authorities. We redirect them to the admins, but do not interfere or try to negotiate.

Are they putting any serious pressure on you?

It sounds strange, but Ukraine is still a jural state. Therefore IFPI’s personal opinion is just that, their personal opinion, despite the fact that the budgets of the IFPI participants are comparable to the budget of the Ukraine.

Aren’t you afraid that there can be a similar situation with Demonoid’s servers as there was with Infostore.org site? [famous Ukrainian file-sharing site, its servers were confiscated by police about a year ago]

As a hosting-provider we take such risks into account. This can happen not only with Demonoid, but with any client. We do not control what information is stored on servers, anybody can buy our hosting service.

Anti-pirates and the media-lobby are now trying to shift all the responsibility for file-sharing onto Internet providers, so that providers will have to monitor user activities. Will this affect hosting providers too?

We have such laws in draft in our parliament periodically. But the Ukrainian law “On communication” is clear about this: providers are not responsible for what their customers do. And the fact that rights holders want to change that is their personal opinion, they are not legislative bodies. Let them buy a parliament member and lobby for such law, then we will observe this law. But until then they are nobody to us, and we are nobody for them too.

About a month ago Demonoid reported technical problems. Due to those problems all data for the last several months has vanished. In an attempt to recover from these problems the site went offline. Do you know what happened?

Some time ago several of their hard-drives crashed. But that was several months ago and we don’t know what was the reason of recent problems.

According to their admins, the man who can restore the tracker is not available. Are they speaking about some Colocall programmer?

No, all the technical support of servers is performed remotely. They aren’t speaking about one of our specialists.

Torrentfreak wrote about the president of Lithuanian antipirates, who demanded the closure of access to Demonoid. He said that it is very hard to even make contact with you. Have you spoken with him?

Yes, someone called us. We just could not speak with him: from the start of the conversation he immediately began to threaten us, he was absolutely non-constructive. We sent him to the court and have said that if he brings the court’s decision, we will be happy to execute it, because we observe all Ukrainian laws. Until then we are not going to speak with him.

Access to Demonoid is blocked for several countries including Ukraine. Is this your initiative or the tracker’s decision?

It is the tracker’s policy, not our initiative. I think this is due to DDoS-attacks.

Are there any DDoS-attacks aiming at Demonoid?

Yes, there are many large and serious DDoS-attacks. But they are always the problem of every hosting provider. We have learned how to neutralize them, so such attacks have almost no effect on Demonoid’s operations. And, incidentally, Demonoid isn’t the only site to be attacked: during the last election we hosted the server of the central election commission committee, it was constantly under DDoS-attacks.

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

After receiving a complaint from Microsoft, GoDaddy temporary hijacked the myBittorrent domain, but after emails back and forth the owners managed to regain control. In the years that followed the two founders continued business as usual, frequently changing the look and layout of the site.

In fact, the two changed plans so often that they never really managed to add new features to the site. “Instead of adding new things we were always spending time on fixing features that used to work just fine,” Rex, one of the site’s founders told TorrentFreak.

Nevertheless, myBittorrent grew out to become one of the largest torrent sites, serving torrents to millions of visitors every month. This popularity, together with the increased legal pressure against fellow torrent sites such as The Pirate Bay and Mininova, raised doubts with Rex’s partner, who wanted to scale down.

Eventually this led to a rift between the two owners. Rex wanted to continue with the site, but his partner opted to close down the operation permanently. To resolve the dispute the two decided to go their separate ways. This summer myBittorrent was shut down for good, but not before a replacement was in place.

To fill the gap left by myBitTorrent, Rex launched a new site under a new name – yourBittorrent.

“The biggest difference between both sites is that yourBittorrent has verified and adult torrents,” Rex told TorrentFreak, adding that he plans to include many new features in the near future, including an integrated subtitle search engine.

“YourBittorrent will soon have a few million subtitles and IMDB-links linked to all movies and TV-shows. The advanced search will also be extended to allow people to look for subtitles. YourBittorrent is going to be the first site where you can do that,” Rex said.

Another key feature is that the site will verify torrents to prevent the appearance of fake files and spam. “YourBittorrent has its own verification system with 60,000 verified torrents, and unlike some other torrent sites, we do take measures against fake files,” Rex told TorrentFreak.

Thus far 2009 has not been the best year for BitTorrent. Many sites have gone down or received negative verdicts in court, so it’s good to see that yourBittorrent continues where myBittorrent left off.

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

But the high costs involved are not the only problem the Internet providers are worried about. In a recent blog post, Andrew Heaney, Executive Director of Strategy and Regulation of the ISP TalkTalk points out that the new legislation will not only lead to numerous wrongful accusations, but it also violates human rights.

“It would put in place a principle of ‘guilty until proven innocent’ that contradicts fundamental human rights. But moreover the proposals will be totally unworkable – and today we’ve proved why,” Heaney writes.

To show how easily people might get disconnected for ‘crimes’ they did not commit, one of their Internet security experts went out to a residential road to see how many unsecured Wi-Fi connections he could run into. It didn’t take long for him to find several unsecured connections from which he could easily download whatever files he wanted to.

Under the new law, these unsecured hotspots could earn their unsuspecting owners a temporary Internet disconnection, and that’s not a good thing according to TalkTalk. “It is absurd to make people, in effect, legally responsible for the traffic on their internet connections and require them to prevent any unauthorised traffic,” Heaney says.

“TalkTalk acknowledges that there is a problem with illegal filesharing and that solutions must be found. First and foremost the content industry must develop new business models to make content more easily available and more affordable,” he adds.

So, instead of trying to overcome the piracy problem by flawed legislation, the entertainment industries should focus on innovation and develop new business models that will convert pirates to paying customers.

Until that happens, TalkTalk will do everything in its power to prevent the current plans from being signed into law. “We will continue to strongly resist any approach that does not protect the innocent,” Heaney concludes.

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

The defendants – Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundström – had hoped that they could get a ruling from the European Court of Justice (EC) before their appeal is heard in November.

Time and again during the original trial The Pirate Bay was compared in functionality to Google, so the defendants lawyers wanted to know if the EC would classify The Pirate Bay as a legitimate search engine.

Jonas Nilsson, the lawyer for Fredrik Neij (TiAMO), now says that the Court of Appeal does not want a decision made by the EC as they hope that the issue will be addressed by the Court of Appeal itself.

If, however, the Court of Appeal makes a positive interpretation of e-commerce law in favor of the site’s legality as a seach engine, Nilsson says the four could go free.

The defendants also made a request for the trial to be moved to a new court in Skåne in order to get new judges, this following a growing lack of confidence in Stockholm’s Court of Appeal.

That request has also been denied by Judge Ulrika Ihrfelt, who said that the court had seen no reason to have the trial in any other place other than Stockholm.

A further request by the defendants to change the date of the appeal for personal reasons, was also denied. The appeal will start next month, as was previously scheduled.

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

Last Friday we reported that The Pirate Bay was forced to move outside of Sweden, and that the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker had found a new home in the Ukraine. Unfortunately this was a short-lived solution, with TPB now moving to Cyberbunker.

CyberBunker is located in a former military nuclear warfare bunker in The Netherlands. The facility was built by NATO in the 50s to survive a nuclear war, but after the nuclear threats were over it was sold to its current owners. The bunker is now used as a webhosting data center.

The bunker is equipped with Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) shielding and Nuclear/Biological/Chemical (NBC) air filtration to guarantee that the servers they host stay up no matter what happens. As of this week it is also the new home of The Pirate Bay.

According to Sven Kamphuis, one of the owners of CB3ROB/Cyberbunker, there were some initial troubles with setting up The Pirate Bay in its new location as several carriers refused to pass on the relay information after they received threats from the entertainment industry led by the Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN.

Despite these troubles the site is now accessible again in most locations, and Cyberbunker will continue to host the site and does not intend to cave in to the threats of the entertainment industry.

“I don’t expect BREIN to do pretty much anything at this point. The last conversation we had with them was about some mp3 site they wanted to have shut down somewhere in 2001/2002. It took around 3 hours at 2am at night and the end result was that both parties agreed not to agree,” Kamphuis told TorrentFreak.

Whether The Pirate Bay is actually located in one of the server racks at the bunker or another hideout was not confirmed.

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

The studios – Village Roadshow, Universal Pictures, Warner Bros Entertainment, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, Disney Enterprises, Inc. and the Seven Network (all under the umbrella of AFACT) – claim that iiNet knew about the copyright infringements of its subscribers, yet did nothing about them.

The case, officially known as Roadshow Films Pty Ltd ACN 100 746 870 & Ors v iiNet Ltd ACN 068 628 937, is particularly serious, since its outcome could determine if ISPs can be held liable for the infringing actions of its customers.

Earlier, AFACT investigators claimed to have recorded around 100,000 copyright infringements carried out by iiNet’s customers using BitTorrent.

For the benefit of the court proceedings, AFACT presented just under 30,000 sample infringements covering 86 copyright works, including two Batman movies, Spiderman 3, Happy Feet, Pirates of the Caribbean and TV shows The Simpsons, Family Guy, Bones and Heroes.

The Angelina Jolie movie Wanted was the title claimed to be most infringed by iiNet’s subscribers, with Will Smith’s Hancock coming in second place. Both clocked up more than 1,000 instances of alleged infringement.

“By making those films available in those 29,914 instances, iiNet customers invited any and every user of the freely available BitTorrent software program to download any and every part of those infringing copies,” said an AFACT lawyer. He then went on to speculate that the 29,914 figure would have to be multiplied many times to get the overall picture of the making available carried out by iiNet’s customers.

AFACT claimed that it had sent information about these infringements to the ISP and demanded that iiNet disconnect the culprits, but the ISP did nothing.

AFACT barrister Tony Bannon also said that iiNet failed to enforce its own user agreement, which includes a clause prohibiting its users from using the service for illegal activities.

Bannon went on to argue that iiNet benefits from piracy since illegal downloaders use a lot of bandwidth and the more they use, the more the ISP makes. He said that disconnecting them would mean that iiNet would lose a customer, something the ISP wishes to avoid, hence the lack of action.

It’s always been somewhat of a mystery why AFACT chose to single out iiNet for legal action, particularly since all other ISPs in Australia have been operating on a similar basis. However, when iiNet made an earlier request to include as evidence how other ISPs responded to AFACT complaints, it was denied.

However, after Bannon gave a video presentation of AFACT’s investigator downloading Batman Begins using BitTorrent, Justice Cowdroy then asked if he could be shown other ISPs said to be facilitating file-sharing.

“Can you show me, Mr Bannon, how many other internet providers are providing the same sorts of information? What other ones right now are doing this?” he said, noting that that iiNet had appeared just four times.

Bannon could not recall the names of the other ISPs and the judge indicated he would be keen to see a live BitTorrent demonstration, rather than just a recorded demo.

The case continues. The defense will present its case later this week.

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

Last week music industry body IFPI requested Niemelä to be taken off the case, since he is connected to the music streaming application Spotify which is partly owned by the major record labels. This request was soon backed by movie industry lawyer Monique Wadsted. “There should not be any doubt in this case,” she said in a response.

The Court today agreed with this assessment and disqualified Niemelä because he holds stock options in Spotify. This despite the fact that Niemelä himself denied a conflict of interest. The decision by the Appeal Court is unanimous and can not be appealed.

The question remains why the music industry was so eager to have this lay judge removed, since they usually keep quiet when the person in question supports their case. However, as we’ve pointed out before, there could be more to this lay judge issue than initially meets the eye.

Niemelä’s involvement with Spotify was limited to the technical side. In fact, he is a tech savvy programmer who co-owns a streaming technology patent along with the original developer of uTorrent and knows the ins and outs of BitTorrent.

Instead of having a bias towards the music industry, as IFPI wanted the Appeal Court to believe, he might actually be one of the rare candidates who knows how BitTorrent really works. Judging from the plaintiff’s discrediting of other tech experts in the previous trial, it might be that IFPI’s true motivation to remove Niemelä was not that humble.

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

During the next few days, maybe hours, Demonoid may go down due to some serious-sounding technical issues. They have already caused some damage to the site so the operators want to limit further damage.

“We are experiencing power outages that have caused some ram and hard drive issues. We might have to shut down everything to fix and prevent further damage,” they say in a statement.

The downtime could be extended, “…days maybe, until we can change the power circuit,” they add.

Several Demonoid users already report connection issues, but the site is still accessible to most people at the time of writing. The blackout won’t mean much to millions of Russian and Ukrainian BitTorrent users though, since they are already blocked from the site.

Over the years Demonoid has had its fair share of downtime. In June 2007 Demonoid was pressured to leave their host in the Netherlands, mainly because of legal threats from the Dutch anti-piracy outfit, BREIN. The site then relocated to Canada, but after threats from the CRIA, it decided to shut down there as well.

In 2008 the site eventually reappeared in full glory after being offline for six months. This time the downtime shouldn’t last that long. Any Demonoid users stuck for ideas on alternatives if the site goes down, can check here. If you’re looking for high speed downloads you could also consider to try Usenet instead (our Usenet guide).

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