Just over a week after becoming available online in early November 2009, Ink pushed into TorrentFreak’s chart of top 10 most pirated movies with an incredible 400,000 downloads.

Unlike the majority of Hollywood movie bosses, the creators of Ink – Jamin and Kiowa Winans – decided to embrace their new-found pirate fans after the extra publicity pushed the movie to 16th place on IMDb’s movie meter and boosted DVD and Blu-ray sales. Kiowa wrote to TorrentFreak and said that the movie ending up on BitTorrent was “absolutely” the best thing that could’ve happened to it.

Now, Lars Sobiraj from German news outlet Gulli has interviewed Kiowa to see how things have progressed a couple of months on from the initial excitement.

As previously reported, Ink has been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times, so just how many of those translated into real-world sales? Kiowa says that is really hard to put an exact figure on that – they haven’t sold a DVD or Blu-ray for every download but sales have unquestionably gone up.

Money also came in from other routes too. As the movie gained popularity on BitTorrent, many Ink downloaders suggested that there should be a ‘donate’ button on the movie’s website so that fans could give money freely.

“We put that [donation link] up at the urging of some of the downloaders with the message ‘if you have watched Ink online for free and would like to contribute what you can, click here’,” Kiowa explains.

“Guess what country has been the most generous? Germany! Germans have been twice as generous as Americans so… thank you Germany. We have also shipped a lot of Deluxe Bundle fan packs to Germany so Ink seems to be a big hit there.”

Gulli asked Kiowa if she felt the movie had fallen victim to piracy, a notion she strongly denies.

“I think to say victim is to characterize piracy as an all-together awful thing. The piracy of Ink is unquestionably responsible for its popularity around the world. Sure our trailers have been out for over a year and have had plenty of views outside the US, but we think that 70% of the illegal downloads are coming from outside of the US and we do get a good number of international buyers at our online store every day,” she explained.

Before Ink was pirated, the movie’s IMDb rating was a lowly 12,991. As reported in our earlier article, it reached 16 and even moved up to the 14th position at one stage. Incredibly it has stayed as one of the top 200 movies in the world for the last two months, a feat that would have been impossible without the extra exposure.

Looking forward to future distribution models, Kiowa feels that everything will change during the next 10 years as people demand instant and simple access to media and their TVs and computers merge together into one device.

“That said, I’m not sure what the revenue model will be for films,” she notes. “Hollywood producers are quickly finding out that the instant films start circulating on DVD they will wind up on torrent sites.”

Kiowa broadly puts BitTorrent users into two camps – those who want media in an instant and those who want it for free. Noting that there are those who fall into both categories, she acknowledges the challenges that lie ahead in figuring out a way to make this situation bring revenue to the filmmakers.

“I think a reasonably-priced instant download the moment the movie becomes available would largely cure the piracy issue so we will see how it all shakes out over the next several years,” she adds.

As most observers are aware, many music and movie companies consider torrent sites as entities to be crushed and in recent years have set about a strategy to achieve that. Gulli asked Kiowa if she believes that is the correct strategy to deal with the problem.

While one could argue that non-physical digital formats such as MP3 are part of the reason that piracy has flourished in recent years, Kiowa feels that the invention of the iPod has helped to reduce piracy, largely through the existence of competition from one service – iTunes. The movie industry needs to catch up.

“Until the equivalent of the iPod is invented for film or long-format video files I think that piracy is going to be a huge battle ground, one in which I doubt Hollywood will win,” Kiowa predicts.

“There is always a smarter programmer out there that can move faster than bureaucracy. The film industry really needs to set its sights on overhauling its distribution system. Right now there are horrible things like region-coded DVDs that tie up a film’s rights in various countries and this is what has made the film business plenty of money over the years.”

The industry needs to move its thinking to encompass global distribution, says Kiowa, not concentrate on pushing movies out to dozens of separate territories.

“We are going to keep all the rights to Ink and not give them away country-by-country so that when that iPod-for-movies emerges Ink can be the first film that debuts to the whole world,” she says, adding: “That is the hope anyway.”

Looking to the future, partner Jamin is currently working on scripts for two new films, one a sci-fi psychological thriller called ‘The Frame’ and another a sci-fi fantasy called ‘Myth of Man’.

“For the time being we’re just really happy that Ink is rolling along and gaining fans around the world. How ever people come to the film, we’re just happy that they are watching it, Kiowa concludes.

“As Jamin likes to say, the battle of independent films is not piracy, it’s obscurity. Hey – at least we’re winning that one!”

The full interview conducted by Lars Sobiraj, is available here.

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

After years of trouble-free operation as the MPAA focused on shutting down the growing ‘threat’ of the snowballing BitTorrent scene, in May 2008 the operator of Newzbin made an announcement.

The company which owns Newzbin had received a threatening letter from the Motion Picture Association (MPA), the MPAA’s big brother. In the letter the MPA claimed that some of the site’s editors (users who report on the location of material uploaded to the worldwide Usenet system) were listing NZBs which linked to movies on Usenet which infringed their member’s copyright.

“Newzbin has recently received two serious complaints regarding the indexing we perform, and raising doubts as to its legality. It is likely that we will in the coming weeks be presented with a court case and have to defend our rights,” said ‘Caesium’, the owner of Newzbin.

Caesium added that the site had never condoned the distribution or indexing of copyright works and insisted that site staff would act immediately to remove any items found to be infringing copyright.

Noting that Newzbin would defend itself vigorously against the complainants, Caesium said he believed that linking to content on Usenet is entirely legal and that the site’s procedures for dealing with unlawful content were appropriate.

“We believe that, or we wouldn’t still be here,” he added.

In December 2008, Newzbin confirmed that it had been removing NZB files which allegedly linked to copyright works stored on Usenet. The MPA still chose to file an injunction against the site.

Now, well over a year later, the showdown of Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation & ors v Newzbin Ltd is set to begin next week before Mr Justice Kitchin in London’s High Court.

According to an announcement yesterday by Newzbin’s legal team, the case should last around a week but it’s unknown when any verdict will be handed down following its conclusion.

As we all know, the recent trial of Alan Ellis ended in an acquittal for the ex-OiNK admin and, just like Newzbin, his site hosted no copyright works and provided only meta data which linked to material hosted elsewhere.

However, Ellis’s charge was one of fraud, allegedly conducted by an individual and dealt with under criminal law, while that leveled against Newzbin is one of allowing and inducing illegal copying, i.e copyright infringement, but carried out by a bona fide company under civil law.

After Ellis’s acquittal, John Kennedy of the IFPI expressed disappointment at the “spectacular failure” of the criminal action and suggested that these type of complex cases should not be held in a crown court, but in the Chancery Division of the High Court.

This is exactly where the Newzbin case is being heard, so this is certainly one to watch. Unlike Ellis who faced possible jail time, Newzbin faces a claim for damages should it lose its case.

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.

Yesterday the music industry lobby group IFPI presented its 2009 figures, again putting the blame for decreased physical sales on file-sharers. Unfortunately, most mainstream media outlets simply reposted the IFPI press release and their flawed analysis. In general, no effort is made to actually balance out or check the message being sent out to millions of readers.

In their annual Digital Music Report, IFPI states that file-sharers are half as likely to buy physical CDs than the average music buyer. Although the report is about digital music, they carefully avoid saying anything about file-sharers and digital sales. That would actually show a completely different picture as we will explain below.

The music group made this statement based on an IFPI-commissioned study that was executed by Jupiter research. Although IFPI refused to share the entire research report with TorrentFreak, we can conclude the following from the two pages that were published online.

Compared to music buyers, music sharers (pirates) are…

* 31% more likely to buy single tracks online.
* 33% more likely to buy music albums online.
* 100% more likely to pay for music subscription services.
* 60% more likely to pay for music on mobile phone.

These figures (as reported by the music industry) clearly show that file-sharers buy more digital music than the average music buyer. In fact, the group that makes up the music buyers category actually includes the buying file-sharers, so the difference between music sharers and non-sharing music buyers would be even more pronounced.

How can this be true and why was there no mention of this in the Digital Music Report? They must be spending less on digital music then, right? But again, this is not the case at all. On average, file-sharers actually spend more than non-sharing music buyers. At least that’s what Mark Mulligan, Vice President and Research Director at Forrester Research who conducted the study for IFPI told us.

Mulligan has his hands tied and couldn’t say much about the findings without IFPI’s approval, but we managed to get confirmation that paying file-sharers are the music industry’s best customers. “A significant share of music buyers are file sharers also. These music buyers tend to be higher spending music buyers,” Mulligan told TorrentFreak.

So why do file-sharers download music without paying? According to the annual IFPI report, one of the main reasons people share music is because it’s free. This leads the music industry group to conclude that they are cheapskates and not willing to pay for music at all. But, as the above clearly shows, they are misinterpreting this finding, and we’d like to explain why.

In the digital age, people’s demand for music has changed significantly, but their budgets are still limited. The average file-sharer is currently spending $100 a year on music according to IFPI’s own research, not really a group that can be classified as freeloaders. However, their demand for music simply exceeds their budget and that’s where they start downloading music on file-sharing sites, because it’s free.

Just to be clear on our motivation to balance the ‘facts’ as reported by IFPI. We are not advocating that all music should be free and neither do most of the music lovers who share files online. However, the music industry continues to ignore that file-sharing is much more of a signal from the market that it is the increased demand for music that fuels piracy.

The solution to the problem is relatively easy. Start offering more unlimited and unrestricted music services and piracy will go into a free-fall. File-sharers are already paying for digital music, and they pay more than the average music consumer. File-sharing is simply a market signal showing that there is a need to compensate for the lack of high quality and affordable subscription services.

If anything, the music industry should have more respect for file-sharers, as they are their most valuable consumers. They are ahead of the curve and actually leading the way for the future of digital music, buying more digital music than anyone else. It’s the music industry that has to change, not the other way around.

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

There are 74 proposed amendments to the Bill.

In terms of file-sharing, amendments are suggested to the section which obliges ISPs to inform their customers that an infringement has taken place via their account.

In addition to informing subscribers who have allegedly infringed themselves or subscribers who allow another individual to use their account to infringe, the following category is proposed:

“..infringement of the owner’s copyright appears to have taken place through peer-to-peer filesharing networks on a subscriber’s IP address;”

This means that all copyright infringements that occur on an IP-address will be attributed to the person who pays for the account.

As pointed out by PaidContent, this addition is “sure to rile campaigners who protest that IP numbers do not correspond to identity.”

However, another amendment asks for the removal of the clause which allows action to be taken against subscribers whose connection was used to infringe copyright by someone other than the subscriber.

Amendment 52, proposed by Lord Lucas, states that the copyright infringement reports sent to ISPs by rights holders should also set out “the value of the infringement on the basis described in the initial obligations.”

This is an interesting one. When an anti-piracy company working on behalf of the music and movie industries track an infringement, it is only possible for them to track a single infringement, for example, the uploading of one track, movie, or part thereof. It is impossible for them to prove any additional infringement took place, i.e uploading the same to others.

This means that not only will the reported loss per infringement be very low, but it could also force the rightsholders to claim that an upload to the anti-piracy company equates to a lost sale.

Amendment 71 from Lord Whitty asks for the section below to be completely removed;

…the number and nature of copyright infringement reports relating to the subscriber may be taken into account for the purposes of any technical measures.

Should the amendment be accepted, this suggests that taking technical measures (3 strikes, throttling) on the basis that a subscriber has been ‘caught’ multiple times, will be disallowed.

There are also amendments tabled to change a number of instances where the term “infringement” should be changed to read “infringement allegations”.

The next sitting of the committee stage will be heard January 12th.

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.

When ‘caught’ uploading copyright works for the first time, the owner of the Internet connection used for the alleged infringement will receive an email warning. On allegations of a second offense, a physical letter will drop through the door. On the the third, the account holder will be summoned to appear before a judge who will have the power to fine, or even disconnect them from the Internet.

French senator Michel Thiolliere has told the BBC that the so-called Hadopi legislation will have the desired effect, with nearly everyone warned a second time abandoning illegal file-sharing for good.

“What we think is that after the first message… about two-thirds of the people (will) stop their illegal usages of the internet,” he explained

“After the second message more than 95% will finish with that bad usage.”

It is, however, much more likely that after getting a first warning, or even before, French Internet users will try to find a way round this system. They will discover that it’s surprisingly easy.

6 Ways Savvy Internet Users Will Neutralize Hadopi

Free options

MP3 Search Engines

One of the simplest ways to find music online is to use an MP3 search engine. That won’t be difficult as there are dozens to choose from. Sites like Skreemr, Songza, beeMP3, MP3Realm and AirMP3 are very simple to use and since there is no uploading, they drive a cart and horses through Hadopi. For those who don’t mind getting their hands dirty, Google offers similar functionality with their filetype: search operator.

Direct Downloads

During 2008 and 2009, the continued rise of blogs and forums that link to music, movies, tv shows and games stored on so-called cyberlocker sites was difficult to ignore. Although links can get taken down very quickly by copyright holders, they are often replaced just as swiftly by the communities that frequent such sites. The international music industry is particularly worried about the phenomenon, as tracking those that download from sites such as Rapidshare and MegaUpload is completely impractical.

Of course there are also perfectly legal alternatives, such as the excellent Jamendo.

Streaming Music and Video

While there are dozens of sites to visit directly, for those who really can’t be bothered to look any further and don’t mind closing a couple of slightly annoying popups, OVGuide is a huge portal to thousands of movies, TV shows and general video. With the assistance of the DivX plug-in, most content can be streamed directly in compatible web-browsers.

Music fans who don’t mind to stream tracks in their web browser actually have a few dozen legal alternatives. Grooveshark is one of the most elaborate music services. It holds more content than the average download store, supports playlists and it will roll out an iPhone app.

Premium options

Overseas MP3 Sites

Just over the English Channel from France lies the UK. Research carried out there recently by the BPI indicated that usage of MP3 pay sites had increased by 47%. While users do have to hand over money to use these services, at a tiny fraction of prices they would pay in their homeland they prove attractive to those on a tight budget.

Newsgroups

Using Usenet, or newsgroups as they are commonly known, is one of the most secure ways of downloading movies, TV shows, music and video games.

While the learning curve on Usenet is considered by many to be quite steep, once an individual discovers .NZB files – the .torrent of the newsgroup world – everything is hugely simplified. Within seconds of starting a transfer, the user’s connection will be completely maxed-out.

On a practical basis, and certainly as far as Hadopi is concerned, paying a few euros each month for a decent newsgroup account means that French citizens need never fear being disconnected from the Internet. Indeed, not even the first warning email will arrive.

Anonymous VPN

While the above options require that Internet users modify their behaviors, by spending a few euros a month on an anonymous VPN account they won’t have to change any of their habits at all. They can continue to use BitTorrent, eD2K or any other P2P method of file-sharing.

Once subscribed to a service such as Netherlands-based ItsHidden (who also offer a free, but speed-limited service), Hadopi file-sharing investigators will believe that the user behind that IP address is from another country and simply move on.

As the failed and now largely abandoned campaign against file-sharers in the United States proved, scare tactics simply don’t work. There are millions of file-sharers in France and many will simply carry on their activities in the belief that the odds of being caught are extremely slim.

And they would be absolutely right.

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

The new year starts without The Pirate Bay tracker, which was closed in November, and also without Mininova, which saw its site being censored and stripped down by a Dutch court. To counter these losses, several public tracker-only services have made a comeback along with multiple torrent-only storage sites.

Where do we go from here? Let’s make some predictions.

Prediction 1: The Pirate Bay will cease to offer torrent links

After closing its tracker in 2009, The Pirate Bay will further evolve by removing all torrents from its index in the new year. The site will be reduced to a BitTorrent platform that no longer stores torrent files. Users will still be able to submit torrents through a third party service such as Torrage, but instead of linking to these torrent files, The Pirate Bay will list only Magnet links.

During the second half of 2010, The Pirate Bay four will appear before the Appeal Court. They will be found ‘not guilty’ and walk away free. Shortly after this victory in court, Pirate Bay’s YouTube killer The Video Bay will be released to the public.

Prediction 2: A BitTorrent client will be dragged to court

In 2009, the entertainment industry and authorities took legal action against various BitTorrent users and numerous sites. They left BitTorrent clients alone, but this will change in the new year. A coalition of copyright holders will file a lawsuit against one of the major BitTorrent clients, in an attempt to stop the ever increasing piracy rate.

The copyright holders will argue that BitTorrent clients play a vital role in downloading and uploading copyrighted files, and that the software is assisting in copyright infringement. They will demand that the torrent client implements a filtering mechanism to prevent users from downloading movies, music or games without the permission of the copyright holder.

Prediction 3: More people will use BitTorrent anonymously

2010 is the year where copyright holders gain more control over the Internet. Three-strikes legislation will be rolled out in various countries and global trade agreements such as ACTA will result in humongous fines for casual downloaders.

As a result of this newly founded Internet police state, millions of BitTorrent users will take measures to hide their identities online. By the end of the year, a quarter of all BitTorrent users will use a VPN service or similar anonymity software, with another quarter looking to do so in the following 12 months. This will make new legislation ineffective, and lead to further lobbying by the entertainment industry for even harsher anti-piracy measures.

This cycle will repeat itself until the entertainment industry decides to innovate.

Prediction 4: BitTorrent (live) streaming will take off

Advances in technology and growing broadband penetration have brought us to a point where BitTorrent-powered streaming solutions have become reality. BitTorrent inventor Bram Cohen is working on a streaming implementation and experiments have shown that it is possible to stream high definition content.

In the second half of 2010, the first BitTorrent-powered YouTube competitors will be launched. These new BitTorrent sites will mainly offer streams of pirated movies and TV-shows. Live BitTorrent streaming will gain worldwide traction during the 2010 soccer world cup in South Africa. In the second half of the year, commercial implementations will follow, allowing broadcasters to stream live content at zero cost.

Prediction 5: uTorrent will become a resource hog

In 2010, uTorrent will be transformed from a lightweight BitTorrent application into a media portal similar to its nemesis, Vuze. Unlike Vuze, BitTorrent Inc. will continue to offer a lightweight uTorrent version for the the people who don’t want to make this switch, preventing a revolt among conservative uTorrent users.

The new uTorrent will be a resource hog, featuring a full blown search engine, video conversion, iTunes integration and a video player. The browser interface will allow uTorrent to be put on set-top boxes, which opens up the possibility for BitTorrent Inc. to reopen a new and improved version of their video store that can be easily hooked up to TVs.

Due to the changes, uTorrent will obviously have to remove its tagline ‘a (very) tiny BitTorrent client.’

—–

Happy new year to all of you from TorrentFreak. Let us know what your predictions are for 2010 in the comments below. We will feature the best on our side-blog FreakBits during the coming days.

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

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.

On Christmas day the idea was born and just a few hours later the tracker named ‘BaconBits‘ was already up and running, with the first torrents being uploaded by an enthusiastic crowd. The day after Christmas the number of users who signed up at BaconBits had already exceeded 2000, and more were coming in nearly every minute.

When the tracker’s founding member deemed that BaconBits was stable enough, an announcement was made on Reddit under the title “Sharing is caring: Late Christmas Present, Fresh BitTorrent Tracker For Redditors,” which was upvoted by nearly a thousand Redditors.

In the announcement the tracker staffers explained that BaconBits is meant to be a private BitTorrent tracker for established Reddit users only. “The site will only accept Reddit users who have been signed up for at least 3 months, have at least 100 comment karma, and have at least 1 link Karma,” they explain.

Reddit users who meet these requirements can send a private message to the user baconbitsinvites on Reddit, and if deemed eligible, will then be invited to join the tracker.

Unlike most other trackers, BaconBits does not have any ratio requirements, instead trusting that the Reddit-sourced community will be sufficiently self-motivated to share. “The site does not require a minimum ratio, we trust that most Reddit users will upload as much as possible,” they say.

Currently the site has more than 1300 torrents being shared by nearly 3500 peers, 3000 of which are seeding.

The swift emergence of the tracker and its democratic nature are not the only surprises. Ironically, a vote among the site’s users has resulted in a ban on adult content. In contrast with the “no censorship” stories that often surface on the Reddit frontpage, the community decided to censor itself, much like the Australian democracy did.

The enthusiasm of the people involved in the project is skyrocketing and appears to be highly contagious, with dozens of people contributing to the site’s overnight success. That said, the emergence of the tracker came about so rapidly that it may cause problems in the long run.

Talking to some of the staff members, TorrentFreak learned that not all of the people involved fully understand the risks involved with running a BitTorrent tracker. Some staff members are openly uploading copyrighted files under the same name they use on Reddit, and hosting and payment issues weren’t thought through beforehand.

With operators of other BitTorrent trackers being arrested left and right, a bit more caution might be appropriate here or the ‘fun’ will end prematurely.

Nitpicking aside, BaconBits may have set a new trend where social networks and communities form the basis of private BitTorrent trackers. Niche BitTorrent trackers that specialize in specific types of movies, TV-shows or musical genres have grown significantly throughout 2009, and community based trackers may become a new niche.

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

“I was interested in making a film that depicted how people actually get their media today,” filmmaker Josh Bernhard told TorrentFreak, as he explained his decision to introduce a fictitious torrent site. “There’s this whole underbelly of community-oriented filesharing sites out there that, as much as DVRs and DVD box sets and 99-cent iTunes singles, has fundamentally changed the way we obtain and experience media.”

“The Lionshare site in the movie felt like a good basis from which to bring up these issues and how they have ramifications for people – consumers and producers of content – in the real word.”

The film is an independent production which was shot for just a few thousand dollars. If anything, it shows that film making is an art where talent can easily compensate for a lack of a multi-million dollar budget. And thanks to BitTorrent, it can be distributed to millions of people at no cost.

Today the film makes its official debut on BitTorrent through VODO. Short for voluntary donations, VODO offers a novel distribution platform for indie filmmakers, fully supported by The Pirate Bay, isoHunt, Mininova and many other well known file-sharing partners.

Thus far, VODO has been a great success for all the people involved, in particular the filmmakers.

Previous releases though VODO were downloaded hundreds of thousands of times, making it the ideal platform for up and coming as well as established film makers. Because it carries the name of a fictional BitTorrent site, The Lionshare most definitely has to be distributed among peers.

Like many other filmmakers, Josh is more than happy to share his work through BitTorrent. “I think new technologies like BitTorrent can benefit indie filmmakers, but beyond that, I don’t see it as much of a choice,” he said. “I could never have made this movie unless I made it on my own, and online venues allow me to get it out there to be seen by people.

“I’m not looking to make a million bucks, just enough to make another movie. It’s hard to say what distribution model is going to take a firm hold in the future, but it’s definitely not going to be the way big media companies have been doing business in the past,” Josh Added.

The film can be downloaded through VODO or one of the many partner sites including The Pirate Bay. Don’t forget to donate to the makers if you like what you see.

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.

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.

Private sites commonly operate a ratio-based system where users are expected to upload around the same amount of data as they download, to ensure that the tracker’s ‘economy’ stays healthy. Some sites experiment with different methods of achieving the same ends, but whatever the technique the result is often more users ’seeding’ than can be commonly found on similar torrents on public trackers, resulting in higher speeds and shorter download times.

For many in the BitTorrent community, private sites are where the real action can be found, but they also face some serious problems of their own. FileShareFreak has recently come up with a list of more than 300 private trackers launched in 2009 – of these only 179 remain online today. So what is causing the death of these sites before they even reach infancy?

In many cases sites are started by people who have no idea of the scale of the task that lies ahead of them and simply give up. Some sites are started by people who break off from other trackers after a dispute and believe they can do better and find out they can’t. While some thrive, others simply can’t carve themselves an audience or a big enough niche to satisfy their world-beating ambitions, while being hamstrung by their own invitation policy in an attempt to stay attractively exclusive.

Increasingly, however, more and more sites are simply running out of money, which is a fairly curious situation. After all, wasn’t BitTorrent created to make it really cheap to shift data around?

In themselves, the average private tracker and forum don’t cost that much to run, with many decent sized sites managing to operate for less than $150 each month – an amount easily covered by a generous sysop and a handful of small donations. But in recent years many private trackers have become very competitive – particularly with each other – as they literally race to bring content to their sites as quickly as possible and offering their demanding users the fastest download speeds.

What they are trying to achieve are great ‘pre-times.’ ‘Pre-time’ is a term used to describe how long it takes for a private tracker to make available a Scene release after it has been released (pre’d) on Scene topsites. The shorter the pre-time, the bigger the bragging rights, with the ultimate aim of the site winning the ‘race.’

Participating in these ‘races’ costs a lot of money, as the roles traditionally fulfilled by users (providing content and bandwidth) are increasingly taken on by the site itself. For many, this is becoming a crippling burden. So how much does this all cost?

Thanks to a smallish private site (6,000 users) known as StN (StoreTheNet) which chose to make its bills public as it tried and failed to justify turning their previously free site to a subscription model, we have an idea. (Please note: All the following information is already in the public domain, many private sites make no secret that they engage in this activity and StN will shutdown tomorrow.)

Around $200 per month goes to pay for site and IRC hosting and additional features to increase site security. For a ‘traditional’ torrent site setup (users provide all content and content bandwidth), that’s where the costs would end.

But of course, since this site and many others feel they have to become involved in ‘racing’ content to their site and providing ultimate download speeds, from here the costs start to skyrocket.

Around $330 is being paid every month to operators of so-called ‘topsites’ where the latest releases are ‘raced’ from, and while users of the site do contribute bandwidth via their normal sharing, these releases are initially seeded directly to the members via an unmetered bandwidth seedbox which StN says is approx $630 per month.

All these bills add up to approaching $1,200 in costs every month for what is essentially a pretty small site, so what’s the solution to bring costs down and avoid the death of yet more trackers during their first few months?

Well, first of all, many sites can achieve this amount through voluntary member donations, but a lot of private site members are also members of other trackers and they can’t possibly donate to them all. So inevitably, some are favored and others aren’t.

Another option for struggling sites (and many private site users will be stamping their feet with reddened faces at the mere suggestion) is to get out of racing altogether, instead letting users bring content and allowing BitTorrent and its users to propagate it naturally with their own home bandwidth and if they’re lucky, their own seedboxes. This will be much slower admittedly, but probably preferable to a site closing altogether. It also drastically reduces the security risk for the site itself.

Something that proves very successful for many sites is to find a niche. While all the latest movies may be a major attraction, they are also what cause the biggest burdens on a site in a myriad different ways. Niche material sites usually have great communities, great speeds and usually fly easily under the radar. Expect to see many more of these in the future.

There are hundreds of private sites out there that don’t operate in the fashion outlined above and don’t have the accompanying financial burdens, yet still achieve good times and speeds. Time will tell if the craze of the ‘race’ dies down in favor of lower running costs, or if the need for Blu-ray rips at lightning speeds prove simply too irresistible.

If the latter is true, in the end someone is going to have to pay for it.

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

One of the options for the government is to criminalize unauthorized downloading by making it punishable by law. The entertainment industry, represented by Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN among others, have lobbied extensively for such a change. Consumers, on the other hand, prefer to keep things the way they are right now.

Backing interests of the general public, Dutch consumer rights organization Consumentenbond has started a campaign where they defend the public’s right to download copyrighted material without repercussions.

“Sometimes I buy, sometimes I download, but I am not a criminal..,” is the message the consumer organization is trying to put across in the newly launched campaign.

The rationale behind the campaign is that the the entertainment industry has failed to provide sufficient legal alternatives to online piracy, leaving consumers no other choice than to consume online media through file-sharing sites.

“At the moment, paid downloads don’t offer any added value compared to unauthorized downloads,” Bart Combée, Director of the Consumer Rights Organization said . “Before criminalizing consumers, the industry has to make sure that they offer a decent amount of content. Once that improves, I think consumers are willing to pay,” he added.

Previously, the consumer rights organization also stood up for users of The Pirate Bay, after the Amsterdam court ruled that the site should block Dutch users without reviewing the evidence carefully.

The present campaign reiterates what many others have said before. There has to be a fair balance between the interests of multi-billion dollar companies and the individual rights of consumers. And since a report commissioned by the Dutch government recently concluded that file-sharing actually has a positive effect on the economy, it might be best to keep things the way they are for now.

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

Talking about copyrighted content on Usenet is illegal they argue, and BREIN wants FTD to be shut down for allowing this. The newsgroup community, however, is not prepared to tolerate BREIN’s accusations and has decided to take action. Earlier this year FTD took BREIN to court, demanding that it should retract its numerous statements that FTD operates illegally.

In a letter to the court in this ongoing case, FTD’s lawyer Arnoud Engelfriet stated yesterday that BREIN is going too far with its statements. Downloading copyrighted files and music for personal use is perfectly legal in The Netherlands, so he sees no reason why merely talking about it should be illegal.

FTD users do not ‘make files available’ and are therefore not acting against the law. “Hyperlinks, torrents, NZB-files or other technical possibilities to download copyrighted works are not provided. BREIN says in effect that it should be forbidden to talk about downloading material,” Engelfriet added.

Undeterred, BREIN maintained their stance and declared FTD a criminal operation. In a counter-claim against FTD, the anti-piracy outfit has demanded $70,000 a day in penalties if the Usenet chatter continues.

Needless to say, if BREIN wins their case this will have serious implications for many other websites and communities, including TorrentFreak. Simply mentioning that a movie such as 2012 can be downloaded through BitTorrent would no longer be allowed according to Engelfriet.

FTD’s lawyer is confident about the positive outcome of the case, arguing that FTD is operating within the boundaries of Dutch copyright law.

“We fully expect to win our case. BREIN is big on statements but often short on facts and legal arguments to back them up,” Engelfriet told TorrentFreak earlier, adding that they “have the law and the facts” on their side.

The verdict in this case is expected to be announced sometime next year. Until then, here’s our Usenet tutorial.

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

Downloading torrents files through Put.io is achieved with just a few clicks. All that it takes is pasting in a torrent url and Put.io takes care of the download through their connection. Once the download is finished, users can transfer it to their computer, or stream it directly from the remote server if it’s a video file.

The user interface and design of the site is intuitive and easy to use, but perhaps more importantly it was extremely fast during our tests and easily maxed out our connection. However, when more people join and the load on the servers goes up, there could be a degradation in performance.

So what’s the catch you might ask? For beta users the service is totally free, no strings attached. However, once the service goes out of beta it will require users to pay a monthly fee. One of the major downsides, however, is that the service currently requires an invite to join.

There’s some good news for BitTorrent enthusiasts, though. “Right now we’re in private beta. We’re testing our capacity and we need heavy torrent downloaders,” Put.io’s Hasan informed us, while generously offering some invites to curious TorrentFreak readers

We have 200 beta invites to give away, we lobbied for more but Hasan didn’t want to take that risk, expressing concern that the service could not handle the surge in load and bandwidth at this stage.

“I wish I could, but unfortunately we have to go slow with the invites. You can imagine that the load and bandwidth can go up quickly. I can go as high as 200. If it turns out, we can take the load, I’ll add more later,” Hasan said.

The lucky few can use t0rr3ntfr34k to get in. Others will have to try one of the alternatives, or wait before more invites arrive and check out the video below in the meantime.

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

As first reported here on TorrentFreak, Digiprotect is the company working with lawyers ACS:Law in the UK to prepare tens of thousands of letters to go out to Internet users they say have been sharing pornographic movies.

Each of these letters sent in the UK will carry a cash demand – a very profitable one at that – which mirrors the ones it sends to menace Internet users in Germany.

Now, according to Christian Solmecke, a lawyer with Wilde & Beuger law firm who works to defend alleged file-sharers in the country, Digiprotect appears to be stooping to new lows.

Solmecke says that his company has come into possession of a letter being sent out by debt collection agency Media Inkasso to a file-sharer who thus far appears to have refused to cave in to previous demands to “pay up or else”.

In it is a claim on behalf of Digiprotect for 650 euros plus around 11 euros in interest, plus what it refers to as “collection costs” of 127 euros.

The body of the letter informs the letter recipient that “..since you have not responded to earlier demands for payment by the rightsholder [Digiprotect]” the debt agency is now instructed to collect damages in respect of a previous allegation of copyright infringement – most likely the alleged sharing of a pornographic movie.

“If by the listed date no money has been deposited in our account, our client will commence court proceedings against you at considerable cost to you,” it adds.

So it appears that based on just an allegation of copyright infringement along with a demand to pay 650 euros, the letter recipient has not responded, so therefore it is now being considered by Digiprotect as a debt to be enforced by debt collectors.

Let’s hope that the recipient refuses to be cowed and stands up to this scheme, which is difficult to describe in any terms other than extortion.

This news is the latest in a long line of controversies hitting Digitprotect’s business. A couple of weeks ago we reported on the leaked documents that were handed to news outlet Gulli.

After analysis, a German lawyer now believes that the way the project was handled between Digiprotect and its lawyers could actually be illegal, meaning that thousands of individuals may have received fraudulent demands for payment.

The debt collection letter can be viewed here.

The government in the UK is now sitting up and listening on this issue and at long last there appears to be moves to deal with the similar scheme in operation there. In the meantime, readers in the UK are reminded that if they receive demands from ACS:Law on behalf of Digiprotect, they should visit BeingThreatened.com for advice.

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

OpenBitTorrent is merely a tracker, carries no .torrent files and also operates a full DMCA-style notice and takedown policy. Despite this, during mid-November Hollywood movie studios moved to try and shut down the fledgling service.

However, rather than deal with the tracker’s operators (who we are told offered to co-operate) they instead sued the site’s hosting provider, Portlane.

“OpenBitTorrent is used for file sharing, and we suspect that it is the Pirate Bay tracker with a new name. It is added by default on all of the torrent tracker files on Pirate Bay,” Hollywood lawyer Monique Wadsted said in a comment.

Even though it was agreed that the tracker could be used to facilitate the distribution of copyright works, the Stockholm District Court has now rejected Hollywood’s request to shut down OpenBitTorrent.

The court ruled that in order for Portlane to be considered as contributing to copyright infringement, it must be guilty of more than just providing Internet access to the site.

“We are happy with the court’s decision. It is indeed the only correct decision. We as an ISP should neither act or get the task to police the Internet,” a Portlane spokesperson told TorrentFreak in a statement.

Hollywood lawyer Monique Wadsted is disappointed that the court didn’t consider their “suspicions” that OBT is linked to The Pirate Bay.

“The court has not touched on the link between the tracker and The Pirate Bay, and that all the .torrent files on The Pirate Bay include [OBT's] tracker as the default tracker,” she said in a statement, adding: “The day we checked, there were 550,000 works that file-sharers [could download] through the tracker.”

The District Court’s decision is interim and the issue will be settled fully sometime next Summer.

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

In reality, the truth proved somewhat different.

No one could argue Grokster had been defeated, but the consequences for file-sharing were limited. The real impact was that providers of file-sharing services could now be held liable if it could be shown that they promoted their products for infringing purposes. Careful advertising was all that was required. Furthermore, the decision only affected the United States. Considering the epic scale of the case and the supposed victory, the results were far from devastating.

And now, 4 years later, Mininova, another file-sharing giant that rode on the crest of the BitTorrent wave since the Grokster verdict, has effectively been forced to close down the vast majority of its site, prompting many to feel that BitTorrent is heading for its twilight years.

However, with careful consideration, it may just be possible to create another Mininova that avoids its namesake’s fate, since the court’s decision was not solely related to the existence of links to infringing content, i.e the .torrent files.

The DMCA is widely known in BitTorrent circles. It is the US copyright act (but accepted by many indexers and trackers regardless of location) which many sites quote when offering to take down torrents that link to infringing content. “If you’re the content owner, let us know,” they say, “..and we’ll take down torrents that link to your works.” Complying with so-called ‘DMCA takedown requests’ is widely accepted as a way to stay within the law.

Although Mininova operated such a system, comments by the site’s staff on their forums called their commitment to it into doubt. There are many samples given in the court’s decision, here are just a few. It’s worth noting that many of them date back to 2005, when users, staff and site admins would have been much more relaxed.

“May have been just a take down request (…) i’d say just re upload it (…) thanks for sharing” (posted by site moderator)

“Thanks for reporting, I deleted the fake version and uploaded the correct one” (posted by site admin)

“I made a mistake of downloading a shareware version of Monopoly Jr. only to find out it only allows you to play it for 15 minutes and then it becomes useless,” said a user. “Check the site, it’s there now” (posted by site admin).

Mininova also took pride in their efforts to proactively filter fake files (including in the decision are comments by staff who admit to downloading material to check if it is indeed as labeled), viruses, malware, pornographic and drug-related material, but this seems to have backfired by the corresponding lack of commitment to proactively filter copyright content in the same manner.

The site also carried some very specific categories for its torrents. Not just ‘movies’ or ‘TV’, but also sections such as “CSI” and “Desperate Housewives” which are widely known to be copyright works. One section highlighted in the decision was labeled ‘Disney’. The court decided that since so little Disney material is copyright-free, the section could have little other use than to infringe.

Mininova has never denied making profits (it is a company after all) and the court ruled that the site encouraged and profited “from infringements of copyrights and related rights of the holders represented by Brein.”

To see things from a different perspective, TorrentFreak has been discussing the closure of Mininova with Aldor Nini at digital distribution and anti-piracy solutions company, Easycom, who has been following the case closely.

Interestingly, Aldor informs us that 8 out of 10 torrents on Mininova were not covered by the BREIN lawsuit, which makes us wonder if the site could’ve stayed alive if the other 2 out of 10 were removed before the court’s hand was forced.

“We are very sorry to see a platform like Mininova shut down millions of torrent files,” he told TorrentFreak. “Based on our research we have found out that only 21% of the content was infringing rights of content owners for content used in the proceedings by BREIN. This 21% could probably be the most popular files on the platform, but we cannot confirm this for sure.”

“However, Mininova’s decision to completely remove everything was to 100% conform with what the judge has ruled. A 100% working filter was requested, and the removal of all non moderated user submitted torrents is the only 100% filter available nowadays,” he told us.

In a similar way that file-sharing applications similar to Grokster’s continue to flourish post the ‘big’ 2005 verdict, torrent sites can follow suit, if they are prepared to adapt.

“We do not think that this judgment will directly apply to other torrent portals at all,” Aldor told us, “but rather the way Mininova was operated as a torrent portal.”

Aldor has some interesting thoughts on how torrent sites can continue, without making the same mistakes as Mininova. He argues that torrent sites should behave neutrally, meaning that if they remove fake and spam comments they should filter copyrighted content too.

Based on Aldor’s reasoning, it seems another option is for sites to switch to user-based moderation, where content is automatically removed after a fixed number of downvotes. The bottom line is that the site’s operators (or moderators) should stay neutral.

Further suggestions are to take the takedown procedure seriously and make it easy to use. Sites should notify users that copyrights are to be respected and refrain from using specific categories (such as Disney). Again, based on the basis that site staff should stay neutral, user submitted tags should be fine.

Other more problematic ideas are the increased co-operation with content owners and to “stop thinking in black and white” – surely great advice for both sides and ultimately, the only long term solution.

Not making any profit or donating part of the site’s income to innovative music artists and film makers, and steering clear of scammy advertisers could be further plus points.

Aldor concludes that the lessons are there to be learned from Mininova’s demise.

“The next torrent portals, which will cover the next millions of torrent files, will hopefully learn from this situation. All in all Mininova’s partial shut-down will not influence the worldwide BitTorrent activity, it has just set up the rules for the successors of Mininova.”

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