TorrentFreak

The place where breaking news, BitTorrent and copyright collide

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  • Australian Internet Filter Will Target BitTorrent Traffic

    Previously thought to be limited to HTTP and HTTPs web traffic, the touted Australian Internet filter will also target P2P traffic. In response to a comment posted by a user on his department’s blog, Broadband Minister Stephen Conroy has admitted that BitTorrent filtering will be attempted during upcoming trials.

  • Spanish ‘Pirates’ Share Files on Government Doorstep

    Fed up with the growing power of the anti-piracy lobby, a group of free-culture supporters gathered in front of the headquarters of the socialist party with their laptops, and started trading copyrighted files. The goal was to show that sharing copyrighted files is legal in Spain, something they appear to have achieved.

  • The Inside Story of the Araditracker Shutdown

    At the end of August 2008, the Araditracker BitTorrent tracker disappeared. At the time, sources close to the case said that legal action had been taken against the site, but the exact events were surrounded in mystery. Here is the inside story of the police raids in August and another just three weeks ago.

  • The Pirate Bay Launches Free Mobile Video Converter

    The Pirate Bay has established itself as the largest BitTorrent tracker, and helps to distribute millions of files a day. Today, the Pirate Bay team adds yet another service to its arsenal, a free video converter that allows users to put their favorite movies and TV shows on almost every mobile device.

  • BitTorrent Crash Linked to Military Satellite Hack

    When you want to get a precious cargo moved in a cool way in a Hollywood movie, look no further than Frank Martin, aka The Transporter. When you want to get precious stuff from A to B over the Internet, the ‘cool’ way is by using BitTorrent. But did you know you can hack a military satellite with it in seconds?

  • RIAA Stops Lawsuits, But Not the Threats

    For years the RIAA has been filing lawsuits against thousands of individuals who allegedly shared copyrighted music. Following recent court setbacks, the lobby group has announced it will stop mass lawsuits. Instead, it will focus on cutting deals with ISPs to disconnect ‘IP-addresses’ that repeatedly share copyrighted music.

  • TorrentFreak TV Episode 5

    In this episode we talk about BitTorrent Inc’s search engine, Resident Evil CG animation, the Pirates of the Amazon add-on, the most downloaded games & movies of 2008, and we explain how to control uTorrent with an iPhone,

  • FireTorrent Brings BitTorrent to Firefox

    Firefox is the web browser of choice for many people, but unlike Opera, it can’t download .torrent files natively. With FireTorrent you can now add BitTorrent support to Firefox. The add-on makes it possible to download .torrent files in the browser, and integrates BitTorrent downloads into the existing download manager.

  • The Mighty ShareReactor Returns – Now With Added Torrents

    ShareReactor was one of the world’s biggest and most popular eDonkey indexing sites with over a quarter million members. The Swiss police shut down the site in 2004 but now, four years later, the file-sharing giant is set to make a full return. Supported by The Pirate Bay team, it’s adding BitTorrent to its arsenal.

  • Movie Studios Spied On ISP’s BitTorrent Users

    Last month we reported how seven major Hollywood studios teamed up to sue iiNet, Australia’s third largest ISP. The studios monitored iiNet’s customers using BitTorrent – including a ‘copyright infringing’ subscriber they planted there themselves – and on whose shoulders the case appears balanced.

  • Virgin Media to Throttle BitTorrent Users

    In contrast to the US, net neutrality does not seem to be an issue in the UK as one after the other, British ISPs start to throttle BitTorrent users. Most recently, Virgin Media announced that it will target BitTorrent, which will render their newly released 50Mbit/s plan unusable for the people who really need it.

  • UK TV/Film Stars Urge ISPs to Stop Piracy

    A group of British actors, directors and producers have written an open letter to The Times newspaper. Their concern – downloads of TV episodes and films. What is needed, they claim, is for the government to force the ISPs to do something about it.

  • MPAA Fears Economic Downturn Will Boost Piracy

    Following the banks and the car companies, the movie industry might be the next to be hit by the economic downturn. No bail-out plan has been suggested as of yet, but MPAA chairman Dan Glickman is worried that piracy will grow to a new high during the current financial crisis – and he might just have a point there.

  • Canada Increases ‘Music Industry Subsidy’ on Blank CDs

    Canadian users again face an increase in the cost of blank CDs, as the Copyright Board has increased levies on them by 38%. The raise was authorized in response to rises in music compression and increases in songwriter royalties. With this rise, the Copyright Board is simply ignoring all technological advances since 1999, while the music industry enriches itself.

  • OiNK Admin and Uploaders Appear in Court

    Yesterday, well over a year since the initial raids, Alan Ellis the ex-admin of OiNK, appeared in crown court along with five users accused of uploading music via the now-defunct BitTorrent tracker. Ellis appeared charged with conspiracy to defraud, while the others faced copyright charges.

  • Anti-Piracy Outfit Shuts Down 75 Torrent Sites

    The Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN claims to have taken down 75 BitTorrent trackers today. Although most of the sites were relatively small and private communities, together they had more than half a million registered users. This is the first time that so many sites have been taken offline at once.

  • Ubisoft Dumps Prince of Persia DRM, Remains Skeptical

    Earlier this year we reported that Ubisoft faced with problems with the DRM on Rainbox 6: Vegas 2, and released a fix – in the form of a no-CD crack actually created by warez group. Following on from this bad experience, Ubisoft has just released the PC version of Prince of Persia without DRM, but expect piracy to be high.

  • Top 10 Most Pirated Movies of 2008

    As 2008 moves toward its end, we have been taking a a look at the most pirated titles in various categories. Following our Top 10 games post where ‘Spore’ headlined, we now take a look at movies. Unsurprisingly, The Dark Knight comes out on top, with the rest of the chart featuring a few surprising entries, and some unexpected absentees.

  • Pirate Parties are “A Classic Civil Rights Movement”

    PiratPartiet, the Swedish Pirate Party, has started its march on Brussels with a bang. The party hopes to make a strong showing in June at the European Parliament elections, and has been bolstered in its aims by comments in major Swedish newspapers, which have termed the party “a classic civil rights movement.”

  • Pirate Bay Censorship Case Not Over Yet

    Earlier this year a Danish court ordered the ISP ‘Tele2′ to block its customers from accessing The Pirate Bay. The appeal of this initial ruling was lost two weeks ago, but the case is far from over. Tele2 has decided to appeal the decision before the Supreme Court, supported by Denmark’s telecommunications industry association.

  • Raise a Small Fortune By Selling Your Unwanted MP3s

    In these credit-crunching times, many people are trying to raise extra money. Some people clear out the garage and have a sale, while others drop their unwanted items on eBay. If your purchases are digital in nature, don’t worry. A new site has appeared where you can sell your unwanted MP3s.

  • FrostWire P2P Client Starts Artist Promotion

    A common criticism leveled at most p2p clients is that they just ‘help people steal’, but they are actually a great tool to help promote undiscovered artists. This is exactly what FrostWire is trying to accomplish with their new FrostClick service. The results from their first featured artist are very promising.

  • Police Threats Close Many BitTorrent Sites

    Yesterday we reported on the plight of RARBG, a large tracker forced to close by anti-piracy outfit, BREIN. Now it appears that this is just the tip of the iceberg. A whole raft of trackers are being forced to close or relocate following police action, including ArenaBG and several other large sites.

  • How BitTorrent Can Teach Students DNA Sequencing

    DNA sequencing is complex, and teaching students how it works can be quite a challenge. It often helps to use analogies, and give real life examples people are familiar with. At the University of Toronto they have found the perfect analogy to explain how DNA sequencing works: BitTorrent.

  • BREIN Chases Another BitTorrent Tracker to Sweden

    RARBG, probably one of the biggest BitTorrent trackers you’ve never heard of, has been ordered to close by anti-piracy outfit, BREIN. The 100,000 member site, which is particularly popular with Bulgarians, doesn’t intend to comply but simply move to a different host, outside of BREIN’s jurisdiction.

  • Resident Evil Degeneration: BitTorrent Blockbuster

    ‘Resident Evil: Degeneration’ is the first CG animation film inspired by the popular video game. Although it skips most US theaters and is scheduled to be released on DVD no sooner than late December, it has been downloaded on BitTorrent close to a million times already – in just four days.

  • Google Blocks World’s Largest Porn Torrent Tracker

    Visitors to the world’s largest adult BitTorrent tracker were met with a surprise this morning. According to Google and Firefox, users accessing Empornium.us are exposed to four trojan horses and three exploits. The malware doesn’t appear to be hosted by the site itself, but it is coming from outside sources.

  • BitTorrent Shuts Down Video Store, Brings Back Search

    February 2007, BitTorrent Inc. launched its ‘Torrent Entertainment Network’ where users could download movies and TV-shows legally, via BitTorrent. Despite the ever increasing popularity of BitTorrent as a download tool, the store never became profitable and has now closed. The store is replaced by a BitTorrent search portal.

  • BitTorrent Site Pwns Anti-Piracy Outfit

    Anti-piracy organizations are known for their excellent lobbying skills. However, knowledge of the Internet and technology doesn’t seem to be a prerequisite. Recently the Lithuanian anti-piracy outfit changed its name, but forgot to register the new domain. It now belongs to the owner of one of the largest BitTorrent sites in the country.

  • Accused of Illegal File-Sharing? Complain to the Government

    Lawyers in the UK are obtaining the personal details of over 25,000 alleged file-sharers for the purposes of sending them a £500+ bill accompanied by threats of being sued. Read why the government’s Information Commissioner has let down every single one of them and why each disclosure could be a serious breach of the Data Protection Act.

  • Despite Arrests MovieX BitTorrent Tracker Back Online

    Just over a day since the MovieX BitTorrent tracker disappeared following the arrest of two admins, the 400,000 member site has returned. A remaining admin is adamant that TorrentFreak completely fabricated the story and that the brothers who ran the site weren’t arrested. All the indications point to the opposite being true.

  • Top 10 Most Pirated Games of 2008

    As 2008 is slowly moving toward its end, we start taking a look at the most pirated titles in various categories. First up are games. As expected, Spore is by far the most downloaded game on BitTorrent, in part thanks to the DRM that came with the game.

  • MovieX BitTorrent Tracker Busted By Australian Police

    MovieX, a very large BitTorrent site which made the headlines last year for its controversial tracker policy, has been shut down by Australian police. The site, thought to have as many as 400,000 users, is being blamed for the ‘transfer’ of 14 million movies and TV shows. So far, two people have been arrested.

  • Movie Industry: London ‘Fake-Free Zone’ by 2012

    Touted as the biggest ever anti-piracy collaboration, the MPA and several major anti-piracy groups have announced that by the time the 2012 Olympics begin, they will have made London “a fake-free zone”. This impossible mission to stamp out DVD piracy was launched by Intellectual Property Minister, David Lammy.

  • Firefox Pirates Take Over Amazon

    Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer, is under attack by online pirates. An add-on for the Firefox browser called ‘Pirates of the Amazon’ makes it possible to shop at the Amazon store but leave without paying a dime. Instead, on Amazon product pages the add-on integrates links to ‘free’ copies on The Pirate Bay.

  • Obama Embraces Creative Commons

    US President-Elect Barack Obama is a man with a message, and according to the speeches made during his campaign, that message is ‘Change’. One of those changes has been somewhat of a snub to the creative industries and their lobby groups – the embracing of Creative Commons licensing.

  • Will uTorrent Really Kill the Internet?

    An inflammatory article published by Richard Bennett in The Register makes the claim ‘BitTorrent will kill the Internet’, or at least VoIP and games. However, are Bennett’s claims based in reality, or is it just another round in the FUD war that envelops the Internet?

  • Sexpert Uncovers Shades of Dahl in Piracy Witch-Hunt

    When TorrentFreak broke the news that lawyers had started going after alleged downloaders of gay porn, we knew that this time the anti-piracy dynamic would be different. Named in Forbes’ Web Celeb 25, Violet Blue, a sex columnist and educator has surprisingly added her dissenting voice into the mix, unwittingly highlighting similarities to a story put to paper years ago by writer Roald Dahl.

  • Top 10 BitTorrent and RSS Tips

    RSS can be a real time saver for BitTorrent enthusiasts. Rather than manually trawling many torrent sites hunting for material, most will agree it’s much more convenient for the content to come to the user. This is exactly what you can achieve by using RSS and these ten handy tips.

  • TorrentFreak TV ‘On The Streets’

    In this episode we go out on the streets in San Francisco to ask people how they feel about internet piracy. We also talk about new style of in-video ads, another ISP being sued, fanedits not liked by studios, and we give away a free t-shirt

  • Anti-Piracy Lobby Defeats European Democracy

    An amendment designed to protect Internet users from the anti-piracy lobby has been rejected by President Sarkozy of the European Council. The rejection goes against the will of the European Parliament, where 88% of the members already voted in favor of the amendment, which was originally destined to protect file-sharers from Internet disconnection under the ’3 strikes’ framework.

  • Orange: Our Customers Can Now Access The Pirate Bay

    A week ago today, customers of the ISP Orange across the UK and France found that they could no longer access The Pirate Bay. Many of them fired off emails to the service provider, worried that Orange was censoring their access to the Internet. Now, a week later, Orange have answered officially – its customers should have no further difficulty accessing the world’s largest tracker.

  • Atari Cancels Anti-Piracy Witch-Hunt

    After Atari received some bad press recently for mistakenly accusing an elderly couple of pirating one of its games, the company has now stopped the anti-piracy campaign in question. The “witch-hunt”, carried out by the UK law firm Davenport Lyons on behalf of Atari, based on spreadsheets full of IPs gathered by a company named Logistep, continues to lose credibility.

  • uTorrent Releases Long-Awaited Mac Version

    Until today, uTorrent – the client of choice for most BitTorrent users – was only available on Windows PCs. Now, after years of waiting, Mac users finally have the chance to try uTorrent, to see for themselves how it fares against the competition.

  • ISP Must Continue to Block The Pirate Bay

    In February 2008, a Danish court ordered the ISP Tele2 to block its customers from accessing The Pirate Bay. The controversial ruling was under appeal but today, in a move which will delight the IFPI, the High Court upheld the decision to force the ISP to stop its customers from accessing the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker.

  • The Pirate Bay Celebrates 5th Anniversary

    In the fall of 2003, a group of friends from Sweden decided to launch a BitTorrent tracker named ‘The Pirate Bay’. Today, roughly 5 years after this historic day, the founders of the site are celebrities in Sweden, and rockstars on the Internet.

  • Reports: Orange Customers Blocked From The Pirate Bay

    The Pirate Bay isn’t new to the experience of being blocked by European ISPs. Now, according to many customers of the ISP Orange, it has been impossible to access the site for the last five days, unless they route their traffic through a proxy. Are Orange really taking the bold step of censoring the world’s largest tracker?

  • Search and Download Torrents from your iPhone

    The iPhone is a superb gadget and of course, we all know that BitTorrent is a very special tool, so why not combine the two? With the uTorrent WebAPP for iPhone you can monitor, search and add torrents to your PC client wherever you are, making handling torrents on the move easier than ever before.

  • Recording Industry Negotiates With BitTorrent and NZB Sites

    Earlier in November, South Africa’s recording industry body RiSA took action against the country’s largest BitTorrent and NZB sites. BitFarm and Newshost looked to be in peril but a lawyer experienced in dealing with RiSA stepped up to help them. Now it appears that a negotiated settlement could be on the horizon.

  • MPAA ‘Castrates’ World’s Biggest FanEdit Movie Site

    Fanedits are fan-created versions of officially available movies. Fans spend huge amounts of time with sophisticated software to add, cut or alter scenes to improve the original or simply create different versions of a movie. Fanedit.org is the largest such community in the world and the MPAA has, in the words of the admin, just ‘castrated’ the site.

  • Google Powered BitTorrent Seach Engines

    Running a BitTorrent site can be quite costly. Most of the larger sites need over a dozen servers to keep everything running smoothly. There are some scalable alternatives for BitTorrent startups though. Two relatively unknown meta-search engines have taken a different route by using Google’s App Engine, which provides optimal scalability, for free.

  • The Inside Story of the TV-Links Bust

    In October 2007, while most tech media attention was focused on the OiNK raid, another large site got police attention. TV-Links, which linked to videos on YouTube-like sites was raided and shutdown, with the admin arrested. A year later, we catch up with the ex-admin of TV-Links for the entire story.

  • How to Make the Best Torrents

    Making a torrent properly is one of the most overlooked aspects in torrenting. Most users of bittorrent only create the .torrent files occasionally, if at all, and others make bad choices and mistakes, which can antagonise people, or make torrents slow to propagate, and lead to an early death.

  • Music Industry Takes Soulseek to Court

    Soulseek is one the greatest music sharing communities that most of the world has never heard of. Covering all genres, Soulseek is an active network specializing in electronic music, where many of the members are musicians themselves. The music industry, however, sees the filesharing application as a threat, and will go after Soulseek in court.

  • Movie Studios Sue ISP Over BitTorrent Piracy

    Seven Hollywood studios including Paramount, Sony, Twentieth Century Fox, Universal, Warner Bros and Disney have teamed up to sue iiNet, Australia’s third largest ISP. iiNet is accused of doing little to stop its subscribers from sharing copyright works via BitTorrent. The ISP denies the accusations.

  • Toyota Admits Wrongdoing in Wallpaper Case

    Overreaching corporate claims are nothing new, certainly when it comes to copyright. Toyota vastly over-reached recently, requesting all images containing their products be removed from a wallpaper site, citing copyright issues. Finally, Toyota responds.

  • India Huge Growth Market for BitTorrent Sites

    BitTorrent’s popularity is on the rise in India, and with a massive increase in broadband subscribers just around the corner, it is the number one growth market for BitTorrent sites. With a population of over 1.1 billion people and only 4.5 million broadband subscribers, there is huge amount of untapped potential.

  • Mininova Trials Video Torrent Ads

    Mininova, one of the leading BitTorrent sites, is testing a new technology which allows content producers to include subtle ads in their videos. By providing more opportunities to monetize free content, Mininova hopes to attract even more premium publishers.

  • Anti-Piracy Lawyers Start Protecting Gay ‘Gestapo’ Porn

    After going after thousands accused of sharing video games in the UK, lawyers Davenport Lyons are now branching out into other areas. This week sees them start going after those it accuses of sharing the movie “Army Fuckers”, hardcore gay porn featuring ‘farm boys’ and Gestapo officers. Accusing the wrong people this time could prove very costly indeed.

  • Mininova Down, to Return Stronger Than Ever Before

    Mininova, the leading BitTorrent search engine, has been offline for most of the day. Inevitably, BitTorrent addicts having been getting nervous, worrying about what is happening at the same time as they long for their daily fix. We have good news for them, the wait is almost over and when the site returns it will do so, fully prepared for the future.

  • ‘The Dark Knight’ Conquers BitTorrent

    Amassing over a million downloads in under seven days, ‘The Dark Knight’ is by far the most pirated movie of this week. Earlier this year, Cam and DVD-screener versions of the latest in the Batman series already found their way onto the Internet, making this blockbuster the most pirated movie of 2008.

  • TorrentFreak TV Episode 3

    In this episode we talk about Obama’s victory speech getting torrented, Quantum of Solace getting pirated, Finnish kids admitting to downloading, The Pirate Bay tracking 25 million peers and of course TV-show statistics.

  • Hacker Takes Over Torrentz, Sort Of…

    A hacker has successfully changed the nameservers of the popular BitTorrent meta-search engine Torrentz.com. For a few hours the site was replaced with an Adbrite ad, and a link to a warez forum. To top it off, the hacker then contacted the Torrentz admin to brag about his hacking abilities.

  • The Pirate Bay Sees Traffic and Peers Surge

    Only a few days before the largest BitTorrent tracker will celebrate its 5th anniversary, the Pirate Bay reached a new milestone. The site now tracks 25 million peers, which is more than the entire populations of Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland and Denmark combined.

  • Canadian Anti-Camming Laws Net First Conviction

    Canada has its first conviction under the controversial Bill C-59. A man has been found guilty of ‘camming’ the movie ‘Sweeney Todd’ in Calgary on its opening day. The 21 year-old was given a $1,495 fine and placed on probation for a year. During this time he is also excluded from all theaters and is forbidden to possess any video recording equipment, even that on a cellphone. He avoids jail.

  • Toyota Claims Ownership of Fan Wallpapers

    Motoring giant Toyota is normally ahead of the curve when it comes to technology. The company is known for innovations like the Synergy Drive in the Prius, as well as long term reliability. However, if you take pride in your Toyota, and have it as a wallpaper on your system, Toyota doesn’t want you sharing.

  • Record Labels to Sue Vuze, Limewire and SourceForge

    French record labels have received the green light to sue four US-based companies that develop P2P applications, including the BitTorrent client Vuze, Limewire and Morpheus. Shareaza is the fourth application, for which the labels are going after the open source development platform SourceForge.

  • Anti-Piracy Group Hints at Disclosure “On Demand”

    The chief executive of UK anti-piracy FAST says the chances of a completely voluntary agreement between rights holders and ISPs to tackle file-sharing is “unlikely”. John Lovelock, boss at the Federation Against Software Theft goes on to imply that what his outfit would really like is file-sharers’ names and addresses on demand, with no need for a court order. This would be “gold plating” he said.

  • TorrentValley Raided and Shut Down

    TorrentValley, one of the larger BitTorrent sites with millions of visitors each month, has been shut down by Bulgarian authorities. The site’s servers were seized by a Cyber Crime Unit, which acted based upon evidence provided by the Bulgarian music industry.

  • Piracy Rampant Among Finnish Youth

    A recently published survey on the ‘criminal’ habits among 15 year old Finns has revealed that more than two thirds of the youngsters have used file-sharing applications to downloaded copyrighted material. Online piracy was by far the most prevalent form of ‘criminal behavior’ among Finnish youth.

  • TorrentFreak Turns Three

    Exactly three years ago, November 12, 2005, TorrentFreak first saw the light of day. Since then we have published 1,788 articles, while our readers wrote 88,987 comments. It’s been a great ride so far, thanks to all of you…

  • No Solace for Bond: Movie Pirates Evade Camcorder Spies

    Hitting US theaters this week, the latest Bond movie ‘Quantum of Solace’ has already been released in the UK. However, despite searching the bags of paying customers, monitoring movie audiences with Bond-style night vision goggles and proffering misinformation, the industry has failed to stop the movie leaking to the Internet.

  • Defiant, BitTorrent and NZB Sites Fight Back Against ‘Intimidation’

    Last week TorrentFreak reported that South Africa’s answer to the RIAA had taken down the country’s largest torrent site and an affiliated Usenet NZB site. According to the lawyer representing the sites for free, the recording industry had no standing to make a complaint. Furthermore, the actions of the sites’ host were unconstitutional. Both sites, BitFarm and NewsHost, are coming back online.

  • isoHunt Founder Gary Fung on Copyfight

    In 2006, isoHunt was one of the first BitTorrent sites to get caught up in a legal battle with the MPAA. In a guest post for TorrentFreak, Fung gives his view on this copyfight, the right and wrong of the current copyright system, and how it’s abused by lobbyists for the wrong reasons.

  • Piracy Leads to Less Crap says BitTorrent Co-founder

    Ashwin Navin, former president and co-founder of BitTorrent Inc. has left the company after four years. Thus far, the company hasn’t been a great success, but the BitTorrent protocol is more alive than ever. Now he can talk more freely, we ask Ashwin about his view on the future of BitTorrent, piracy and online media.

  • China Hijacks Popular BitTorrent Sites

    China is not new to censoring the Internet, but up until now, BitTorrent sites have never been blocked. Recently however, several reports came in from China, indicating that popular BitTorrent sites such as Mininova, isoHunt and The Pirate Bay had been hijacked. The sites became inaccessible, instead redirecting to the leading Chinese search engine Baidu.

  • Online Piracy Becomes a ‘National Sport’ in France

    Edging ever closer to becoming law, France’s “three-strikes” proposals have received support in the French Senate which voted overwhelmingly in favor for these draconian measures to deal with piracy. Now, a new report suggests that online piracy has become something of a ‘national sport’ in France.

  • Recording Industry Takes Down BitTorrent & NZB Sites

    Although many stories about anti-piracy activity seem to come out of the United States, Europe, Canada and Australia, operations are certainly not limited to these countries. Today, news is filtering through that South Africa’s biggest BitTorrent and Usenet NZB sites have been taken down by the recording industry.

  • Ex-MPAA and IFPI Anti-Piracy Enforcer Shot Dead

    A man described as an “anti-piracy hero” has been gunned down in Thailand. Kasim Cha Tong, a former director of the MPA and anti-piracy campaigner for the IFPI, died by a single shot from a sawn-off shotgun. The killer escaped. Police are investigating the possibility that this was an assassination.

  • Torrentz Faces Hostile Domain Takeover

    Torrentz.com, the largest BitTorrent meta-search engine on the Internet, is currently dealing with a hostile attempt to take over the site’s domain name. The admin of Torrentz has posted a message to all its users to inform them about the situation, and is optimistic that the issue will be resolved soon.

  • RIAA CEO Backs John McCain

    November 4, 2008, election day in the United States. As votes are cast right across America to determine who will become the 44th president, we take a look at where the sympathies of some of the key anti-piracy and filesharing figures lie, with a particular interest in RIAA CEO Mitch Bainwol, who is a keen John McCain supporter.

  • ShowInsider Ranks Pirated TV-Shows

    BitTorrent is the main distribution method for TV-shows online. Despite the availability of legitimate streaming sites, millions of people prefer to download their favorite TV-shows using torrents instead. ShowInsider is a new project that reveals the latest TV piracy trends.

  • BitTorrent Sites Step Closer to Legality in Spain

    In September a Spanish court decided that the eDonkey indexing site Sharemula operated legally, indicating that linking to copyright infringing material is permitted under the law. Now that decision has been reinforced as a court decides that a torrent site previously shutdown by the police, also operated legally.

  • VIPeers Intoduces Free BitTorrent Hosting

    Today, VIPeers has launched a new and totally free BitTorrent hosting service. With VIPeers, everyone can easily share large files up to 5 GB with as many people as they wish, without having to seed it themselves. The service can be best described as a mashup between one-click hosting sites like Rapidshare and BitTorrent.

  • ISP Disconnects Customers with Open WiFi

    Open wireless networks have served as a successful defense strategy for several alleged filesharers, as it is often impossible for content owners to prove that the person they accuse, has actually distributed the files they claim they did. Unfortunately, for the customers of the UK ISP Karoo, running open WiFi might also get them disconnected – even if it’s unintentional.

  • The Pirate Bay Tops 20 Million Peers

    The Pirate Bay has reached yet another milestone. Today, they track more than 20 million unique peers for the first time since the site was launched. It is estimated that the Pirate Bay tracks more than half of all BitTorrent users at any given point in time.

  • Chinese State Bans Video Sites, Huge eDonkey Site Survives

    The Chinese government has stepped in and banned 10 video sites, while giving warnings to 17 others. The sites were accused of ‘regulations violations’ ranging from running a service without authorization, through to displaying violent or horrific content. None of the charges relate to piracy, even though one of the sites is China’s biggest eDonkey indexing site.

  • Pirate Bay Talk: How To Dismantle a Billion Dollar Industry

    Pirate Bay co-founders Peter Sunde and Fredrik Neij gave a keynote speech at the Hack In The Box Security Conference 2008, entitled “How to dismantle a billion dollar industry – as a hobby.” The two discuss how The Pirate Bay grew to be the largest BitTorrent site on the Internet, and some of the challenges they face today.

  • Use BitTorrent to Upgrade to Ubuntu ‘Intrepid Ibex’

    Ubuntu, the open source GNU/Linux based operating system, is about to release its next big update – Intrepid Ibex. In the past, the update servers would crash very quickly on a big release day, making it hard for people to get the latest update. With BitTorrent, however, this can be easily avoided.

  • P2Pnet Wins Landmark ‘Hyperlinking” Case

    The file-sharing oriented news website, P2Pnet, has won its case against the Canadian businessman Wayne Crookes. The Supreme Court ruled that linking to defamatory material doesn’t constitute as publishing. Since the case is about linking, the outcome will have implications for all websites on the Internet, including BitTorrent sites.

  • Tribler Set to Make BitTorrent Sites Obsolete

    The Tribler BitTorrent client, a project run by researchers from several European universities and Harvard, is the first to incorporate decentralized search capabilities. With Tribler, users can now find .torrent files that are hosted among other peers, instead of on a centralized site such as The Pirate Bay or Mininova.

  • UK Music Groups Launch Super Anti-Piracy Coalition

    Umbrella groups in the UK which represent various parts of the music industry have decided that, in order to win the war on Internet piracy, what they really need is an even bigger umbrella group for all the other umbrella groups to shelter under. That new group, UK Music, is launched today.

  • Anti-Piracy Lobby Loses Against “Non-Filtering” ISP

    A Belgian ISP ordered by a court to stop all piracy on its network, only to discover that it was an impossible task, has seen that decision reversed. The court recognized that the anti-piracy solutions recommended by the music industry didn’t work, which left the ISP Scarlet in an impossible position.

  • NiN’s Donation Model Doesn’t Work for Most Artists

    This year, several established bands have decided to give away their music for free, while giving fans the option to donate whatever they seem fit. For Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails it was a great success since they made more money from the donation model than they would have otherwise. However, it seems that this doesn’t hold for less established artists.

  • Stoners, Vegans and a Junky Elephant Conquer BitTorrent

    An animated Norwegian movie featuring sex, violence, stoners, a junkie elephant and even vegans, has been panned by UK critics. However, much to the dismay of the distributor, file-sharers don’t agree with this assessment and have downloaded it 500,000 times, which the movie’s producer thinks is ‘Great!’

  • Wikipedia DVD Released on BitTorrent

    Today, the latest edition of the Wikipedia school edition has been released by SOS Children’s Villages, a charity organization that aims to help orphans and vulnerable children worldwide. The 08/09 edition can be downloaded for free, via BitTorrent only, and comprises over 5500 hand-picked educational articles aimed at helping schools to enhance their curriculum.

  • Sweden to Introduce Controversial Anti-Piracy Law

    Sweden, home of The Pirate Bay and the most active pro-piracy lobbyists and politicians, is drafting a new law that would make it easier to go after individuals who share copyrighted files on filesharing networks such as BitTorrent. The new law, likely to be opposed by a large number of Swedes, will go into effect April 2009.

  • How to Bring Dead Torrents Back to Life

    Eventually, particularly when trying to download old torrents, most BitTorrent users find themselves with a transfer which stops due to the swarm having no seeds, not enough peers to cover the full release, or the tracker going down. btReAnnouncer is a handy site which could prove vital in reaching that magic 100%.

  • Tackling College Piracy: At What Cost?

    The Higher Education Opportunity (HEO) Act of 2008 requires US universities and colleges to undertake measures to reduce piracy, and go after students who use filesharing networks to share copyrighted files. A recent study found that, per institution, between $350,000 and $500,000 a year is spent tackling the piracy problem.

  • ‘Shocking’ 61% of all Upstream Internet Traffic is P2P

    Sandvine, best known for manufacturing the hardware that slowed down BitTorrent users on Comcast, has released an Internet traffic trends report today. The report shows that, on average, P2P traffic is responsible for more than half of the upstream traffic, but mostly the report seems an attempt to sell their traffic shaping products.

  • Pirate Bay Celebrates Microsoft’s Global Anti-Piracy Day

    Today, Microsoft announced Global Anti-Piracy Day, to draw attention to the ever growing piracy problem. While Microsoft itself celebrates October 21st by launching anti-piracy enforcement actions in 49 countries, The Pirate Bay does so by linking to counterfeit Microsoft products on their frontpage – in every country in the world.

  • IFPI Wins Danish File-Sharing Case

    A man who was tracked sharing over 13,000 music tracks on Direct Connect back in 2005 has lost his appeal. The Vestre Landsret, one of Denmark’s higher courts, has ordered the middle-aged man to pay $24,400 (160,000 kroner) in compensation.

  • Pirate Bay Tricks Anti-Pirates with Fake Peers

    The Pirate Bay has always made it clear that they don’t obey takedown requests from content owners. That doesn’t stop Hollywood from going after the Pirate Bay’s users, however, and they do so on a large scale. The Pirate Bay is well aware of these pirate tracking outfits, and does what it can to give them a hard time. Reporting fake peers is one of the tricks they use.

  • Record Label ‘Infringes’ Own Copyright, Site Pulled

    The website of a record label which offers completely free music downloads has been taken down by its host for copyright infringement, even though it only offers its own music. Quote Unquote Records calls itself “The First Ever Donation Based Record Label”, but is currently homeless after its host pulled the plug.

  • Stanford University Embraces BitTorrent

    While some universities restrict the use of BitTorrent clients, others embrace the popular flilesharing protocol and use it to spread knowledge. Stanford University is one of the few to realize that BitTorrent does not equal piracy. They use BitTorrent to give away some of their engineering courses, with some success.

  • New Zealand First to Adopt 3-Strikes Law for Pirates

    New Zealand is known for sheep, rugby, and dramatic filming locations. However, it will also be known for being the first place in the world with a 3-strikes law for copyright infringement. The Copyright Amendment Act 2008 gained royal assent earlier this year, and goes into effect at the end of February 2009. Opposition to this bill, despite being signed into law, is still growing though.

  • Sweet, BitTorrent Users – Pirate My Book Please!

    Dan Morrill, Program Director at City University of Seattle, who has appeared in previous TorrentFreak articles, has written a book entitled “Selling Books On Amazon, Tips and Secrets”. In true BitTorrent style, he’s not selling his work, but asking people to please pirate it, courtesy of Mininova’s CDN.

  • Anti-Pirates Wipe Out Movie and TV ‘Fansub’ Sites

    This week many sites offering homemade Greek subtitles received legal threats from an organization representing the TV and movie industries. Very quickly, fansub sites closed down or removed access to subtitles, leaving thousands of Greek file-sharers quite literally in a position of not understanding what is going on.

  • DistriBrute: P2P Powered Desktop Deployment

    Keeping large networks up to date can be a costly practice. Large corporations or government institutions often need dozens, if not hundreds of servers to distribute updates and patches, for which they pay hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. With DistriBrute, the first P2P based desktop deployment product, this is no longer needed – thanks to the BitTorrent protocol.

  • The Pirate Bay Removes Fake Trackers from Torrents

    In an attempt to make BitTorrent more secure, and to reduce some of the load on their own tracker, The Pirate Bay has started to remove all duplicate, dead and anti-pirate trackers from the torrents they host. These changes will improve the trackers’ performance, and increase ‘security’ for its users.

  • Donate Your Piracy Savings to Reduce Poverty

    If the MPAA and RIAA are to be believed, rather than buying media, file-sharers around the world are saving billions of dollars by downloading copyrighted material instead. For these people, we now have the ultimate solution to salve their ‘guilt’. Donate a week in piracy ‘savings’ to reduce poverty among those who need it.

  • Norway Mulls Anti-Piracy ‘Complaint Board’ Proposal

    Anti-piracy organizations send out thousands of infringement notices a year to alleged pirates. Strangely enough, these infringement notices are hardly ever backed up by solid evidence. The Norwegian Consumer Council is now proposing to create an independent committee to deal with copyright infringement disputes between alleged pirates and rights holders.

  • Bush Signs Draconian Anti-Piracy Law

    Over in California, champagne corks are popping. In the offices of the MPAA and RIAA, lawyers turned lobbyists are dancing jigs. In houses all around the US however, people are left dumbfounded by the passage of a bill based on appeasement to big money, at a time when the country is in economic turmoil.

  • Vuze Reinvents Its BitTorrent Client

    Vuze, formerly known as Azureus, will soon launch version 4.0 of their BitTorrent client. Inspired by feedback from users, the user interface has been completely revamped. The client itself seems to move towards an all-in-one solution, with built in search and a built in media player.

  • Artists See a Future With BitTorrent

    The music industry is changing. While the record labels are desperately trying to protect the revenue stream from album sales, a new generation of artists is starting to realize that they are better off when they give away their music for free. By now, we’re all familiar with the industry’s view, but what drives these artists?

  • TorrentFreak TV Launches

    TorrentFreak is proud to present the first episode of ‘TorrentFreak TV’, a recap of some of the best, most interesting or remarkable stories from the wonderful world of BitTorrent. The show is directed by none other than Andrej Preston, who some people might remember as the founder of the legendary Suprnova.org.

  • AC/DC Electrify BitTorrent Album Downloads

    AC/DC will release its new album ‘Black Ice’ worldwide on October 20th, in physical format only since the band doesn’t sell its music online. However, the upcoming album has already been digitized by pirates, as it leaked to BitTorrent five days ago. In that time it has taken the trackers by storm, racking up a staggering 400,000 downloads.

  • Canadian Democrats are Pro BitTorrent and Against Throttling

    Three days before the Canadian elections, the party leader of the New Democrats has spoken out in favor of BitTorrent sites, calling them “fundamental to democracy.” At the same time, isoHunt, the largest Canadian BitTorrent site advises its users not to vote for the Conservatives, considering their stance on copyright issues.

  • Real-Time BitTorrent Search Engines Expand

    ‘Real-Time’ BitTorrent search engines are the trend of 2008, and new sites emerge every other week. It all started in January with the launch of YouTorrent, but soon after it went legal, other sites took over. We catch up with the founder of one of YouTorrent’s successors to find out more.

  • TextBook Torrents Turns The Final Page and Closes Down

    From relative obscurity, Textbook Torrents, the world’s largest BitTorrent index of textbooks, found itself in the world spotlight during July 2008 and was forced to close down by its host. The site returned weeks later, growing massively in the process, but now, just a couple of months on, the site has closed for good.

  • Court Deems Pirate Bay Block to be Illegal

    This August The Pirate Bay was “censored” in Italy following a decree from a public prosecutor. The Pirate Bay appealed the block and eventually won the court case. Earlier this week the Court of Bergamo detailed its decision, and ruled that no foreign website can be censored for alleged copyright infringement.

  • Santa Cruz University Fights Back at RIAA

    The RIAA sends out pre-settlement letters and lawsuits to all manner of students accused of file-sharing across the US. Some schools, as we’ve covered in our Tackling College Piracy series, have capitulated. Others, like University of California Santa Cruz, have fought back.

  • DDoS Attacks Force Norbits to go Offline

    NorBits, the largest Norwegian BitTorrent tracker, has been pulled offline by their webhosting company due to the continuous DDoS attacks suffered by the site. The host has nullrouted the IPs and told the Norbits staff to find a new home. Meanwhile, NorBits’ staff are trying to calm their users down after a turbulent month.

  • IFPI Loses Another P2P ‘Wireless Defense’ Case

    A man accused of being a music pirate has been cleared by a Danish court. The man denied the claims of the IFPI, based on his assertion that someone else must have accessed his wireless router to commit the infringements. This is the second major defeat for the IFPI in Denmark over the so-called ‘wireless defense’.

  • Michael Moore on Slacker Uprising’s Piracy ‘Problem’

    Michael Moore decided to give away his latest film ‘Slacker Uprising’ for free, but only to people in the US and Canada. However, since he chose to use BitTorrent, and open trackers such as The Pirate Bay, it was fairly easy for the rest of the world to download it as well. Was this done on purpose? Moore responds.

  • BitSmash Launches BitTorrent Statistics Tool

    BitSmash is a new service that aims to provide statistics on all BitTorrent downloads. The site allows users to search from keywords, just like the average BitTorrent site, and sort the results in various ways. For every torrent, it also shows graphs of changes in various statistics over time.

  • Tackling Campus Piracy with FUD

    Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) is one of the oldest, and perhaps most effective anti-piracy strategies. MPAA’s “You can click, but you can’t hide” campaign is perhaps one of the best known examples. Today, we take a peek at how FUD is used by universities to counter campus piracy.

  • Hollywood Illegally Demands Money From Kindergartens

    A company collecting royalties on behalf of Hollywood studios has illegally demanded payments from kindergartens in Ireland. The MPLC requested 10 Euros ($14.00) per child per annum, so that they can watch DVDs legally. However, by doing so they breached the 2000 Copyright Act since MPLC failed to register with the Patent Office.

  • News Site Criticized for Linking to Pirate Bay Torrents

    The Swedish news site Nyheter24 has been criticized for including a list of most downloaded TV-shows on their site, and linking directly to the torrent detail pages on The Pirate Bay. According to Henrik Pontén of the Swedish Anti Pirate Bureau, who led the Pirate Bay investigation, the news site is assisting copyright infringement.

  • Judge Spanks Insatiable Gay Porn Pirate

    A federal judge from California again backed a major gay porn distributor by slapping a previously convicted pirate. The man in question, Gilbert Michael Gonzales of Palm Springs, has now been told told that he will be arrested the next time he is caught with his pants down.

  • “Saw” Director Recruits ‘Army’ to Post Fake Torrents

    Are you the director of some high profile movies, feel you have a piracy problem but no longer do business with MediaDefender? Do you want to fail, badly? Then maybe you should follow the lead of Darren Bousman, director of the Saw movie sequels – and ask members of the public to upload fakes files on BitTorrent sites.

  • EA Downplays Spore’s DRM Triggered Piracy Record

    Spore, love it or loathe it, Will Wright’s new game has stayed in the news in the way his previous games have never managed. The game could also bring about big changes in both DRM and copyright law, as the debate heats up over it’s DRM. While EA puts a brave face on things, as a class action suit is filed.

  • Sony Urges ISPs to Cooperate Against Piracy

    In a keynote speech at the Broadband World Forum, John McMahon, President of Sony Pictures Television asked ISPs to join their battle against piracy. McMahon further said that DRM is one of the major causes of piracy, but says Sony doesn’t have any plans to get rid of it.

  • Cox Disconnects Alleged Pirates from the Internet

    The anti-piracy lobby has been putting pressure on ISPs to act against customers who download copyright infringing content. Thus far, most ISPs have simply forwarded the takedown requests they receive, but Cox Communications is taking it one step further, by disconnecting alleged copyright infringers.

  • Massive Warez Scam Architects Run For Cover

    Two brothers who made millions from an empire of scam file-sharing sites have had their identities revealed. Matt and Jake Dylewski mis-sold subscriptions to FullReleases.com and dozens of similar sites, misleading customers and motivating them to take action. Most of the sites have been taken offline.

  • The Pirate Bay Clashes with Book Publishers

    Swedish book publishers have presented a study in which they show how widespread book piracy is in Sweden. The publishers think that this copyright infringement has a disastrous effect on their income, while The Pirate Bay is surprised to see that the publishers used their torrent database illegally.

  • Georgia Negotiates With Internet Movie Pirates

    Georgia had been in the headlines recently for its military confrontation with Russia. Before hostilities engulfed the country, however, it was celebrating 100 years of film-making. But, with no laws protecting the movie industry from piracy, how does Georgia cope with the Internet pirates?

  • Lessig’s ‘Free Culture’ Now Available with DRM

    There is a continuing battle surrounding Digital Rights Management (DRM). While most rights holders see it as a way of maximizing their profits, users see it as a way to reduce their ability to actually use the products they bought, the way they want to. Ironically, one of the books that spells out what is wrong with DRM, is now available with DRM.

  • Legal Bullying Continues for Icelandic BitTorrent Tracker

    It has been almost a year since a coalition of anti-piracy organizations forced Torrent.is, the largest BitTorrent site in Iceland, to go offline. In the months that followed, the BitTorrent site has won in court more than once, but it has not returned yet, as the anti-piracy groups continue to come up with new claims.

  • Warez Scene Member Gets 3 Years Probation, $2000 Fine

    A Florida man was sentenced to three years probation on Thursday for his part in running a ‘warez’ server. The 55 year old, known online as ‘kidzap’, would’ve most likely been sent to jail, but avoided incarceration by pleading guilty to conspiring to commit copyright infringement. He collects a $2,000 fine.

  • RIAA’s Week of Hell

    It’s been a bad week for the RIAA. First their headline campaign victory over Jammie Thomas was thrown out, and then the government said it ‘strongly opposes’ a bill lobbied for by the entertainment industries.

  • CopySense Sleek Predator, or White Elephant?

    If you believe the anti-piracy lobbies, Audible Magic’s CopySense system is the absolute best system you can buy, protecting Universities, and more importantly, their students, from copyright violation accusations. However, the question has to be asked, “Does it really work?”

  • Pirate Bay Wins Court Case, Italian Block Lifted

    The Pirate Bay has successfully appealed the decision of an Italian judge who had ordered ISPs to block access to the popular BitTorrent tracker last month. The Court of Bergamo decided that this block was unlawful, and that Italian users should regain access to the site.

  • European Parliament Says No to Three-Strikes Law

    The European Parliament has voted in favor of an amendment that will prevent member states from implementing three-stikes laws. Disconnecting alleged file-sharers based on evidence from anti-piracy lobby groups restricts the rights and freedoms of Internet users, according to the amendment.

  • ‘Heroes’ Causes BitTorrent Boom

    Two fresh episodes of the US hit series ‘Heroes’ were released Monday night. In the day that followed each episode was downloaded well over a million times by BitTorrent users all over the world, making it the busiest day ever on many torrent sites.

  • OiNK Six Appear in Court, Faced By Pirating Police

    Today, Alan Ellis the admin of OiNK, will appear in court along with five users accused of uploading music via the BitTorrent tracker. The six will appear before magistrates to learn if their cases will be sent on to a Crown Court. They are joined by Cleveland police, who face a copyright infringement crisis of their own.

  • Slacker Uprising’s Torrent Available Worldwide, by Accident

    Michael Moore’s new film about the run up to the 2004 US election was released online today, only for US and Canada residents. In order to maximize capacity, they’ve even embraced BitTorrent, and the official download is using the Pirate Bay tracker. To the dismay of their lawyers, however, this also lifts the geographical restrictions.

  • Mininova Breaks Download Records

    Mininova, the most visited BitTorrent site, broke two download records today. Since its inception, the site has served 6 billion torrent downloads and today reached an all time record of more than 10 million downloads served in a single day. Has today been BitTorrent’s busiest day ever?

  • ISP: It’s Impossible For Us to Stop Illegal P2P

    An ISP which was ordered by a court to stop illegal file-sharing on its network, says it simply can not. The Belgian ISP Scarlet says the court’s verdict is unworkable and after trying to slow traffic and also filter it, it says it’s not possible to stop the flow of illicit files since Audible Magic doesn’t work.

  • uTorrent’s Mac Client Leaked

    An early Alpha release of the long awaited Mac version of the popular BitTorrent client uTorrent has leaked to the public. The application is still in development, but most features seem to work just fine. As expected, the application looks very Mac-like, and better than its Windows counterpart.

  • Uganda Sued for Pirating its National Anthem

    The Ugandan government has been sued by the 83 year old composer of its national anthem “Oh Uganda, Land of Beauty.” Prof. George Wilberforce Kakoma seeks compensation for the continuous infringement of his work on national festivities, for which he received no royalties.

  • Customs Officials Arrest 14 Year Pirate

    In their infinite wisdom, customs officials in Hong Kong have arrested a child for sharing music on the Internet. The 14 year old boy, who is too young to be named, is alleged to have uploaded Chinese language pop songs, known as Cantopop, for others to download for free.

  • The Pirate Bay Tops 15 Million Peers

    Today, The Pirate Bay reached a new milestone, as they now have more than 3 million registered users. On top of that, they track close to 15 million unique peers. The largest BitTorrent tracker just keeps growing and growing, and there is no sign that this will be put to a halt anytime soon.

  • TorrentIt Makes Long Awaited Comeback

    TorrentIt is far from a newcomer in the BitTorrent community. The tracker has been around since 2004, but since it ran into the Duch anti-piracy lobbyists from BREIN, it has been offline. This weekend, however, the site officially relaunched, with help from their friends over at DigitalHive.

  • MediaDefender Secretly Sells Porn to P2P Users

    MediaDefender is widely known for their anti-piracy operations, spoofing and decoying on file-sharing networks for the entertainment industry. The company is doing more than that though, as we recently found out that adult affiliate programs were a significant source of income for them too.

  • Warez Scene Member Sentenced to 18 Months Jail

    A member of the pioneering warez group aPOCALYPSE pRODUCTION cREW (aPC) has been jailed for 18 months. Barry Gitarts, also known as ‘Dextro’, was sentenced after he was convicted of Conspiracy to Commit Criminal Copyright Infringement. Thus far, there have been 15 convictions of aPC members.

  • Linking to P2P Downloads Confirmed Legal in Spain

    A court has ruled that a site providing links to P2P downloads is operating legally. The Provincial Court of Madrid ruled that Sharemula.com, a site offering eDonkey links to movies, music, software and games does not break the law. The court’s decision is final and cannot be appealed.

  • Police Arrest ‘Wanted’ P2P Pre-Releaser

    Cyber-crime police have arrested a man who uploaded the movie ‘Wanted’ to a file-sharing network. The man, Kazushi Hirata, was detained after he added custom subtitles to a pirated copy of the movie and uploaded it to the Internet, in advance of its Japanese theatrical release. He faces up to 10 years in jail.

  • Norbits Hackers Threaten to Release User Info

    Norbits, the largest Norwegian BitTorrent tracker is going through some rough times. For several days now, the site has been offline due to a DDoS attack. The site has allegedly been hacked by a group called MORRADi, which is threatening to publish all IPs and more information on the users, unless the tracker is closed.

  • Danish ISPs Reject Anti-Piracy Proposals

    Danish ISPs have rejected proposals from the IFPI for a “3-strikes and you’re out” policy to deal with illicit file-sharers. In a joint statement, the telecoms companies said that they would not be a part of “detection and monitoring” activities and that the solution to piracy should come from elsewhere.

  • BitTorrent Uploader Escapes Jail, Loses Job

    Another member of EliteTorrents has been sentenced. An Duc Do, an uploader on the site and former student of Drexel University, yesterday escaped jail but was sentenced to 3 years probation, a $15,000 fine and 400 hours of community service instead. As a result he loses his job at Lockheed Martin.

  • Football Fans Eye World Cup Piracy Options

    Last week, football fans in the UK were disappointed after satellite broadcaster Setanta failed to reach a deal with free-to-air terrestrial channels to show England’s World Cup qualifier against Croatia. Of course, availability isn’t something that affects those wishing to view the match via unauthorized sources.

  • MediaDefender, One Year After the Email Leak

    Exactly a year ago, the anti-piracy company MediaDefender was put to shame after a hacker gained access to their systems. Many of the deepest secrets of the company were published online, and now, twelve months on, the company is walking the plank to bankruptcy as its shares are worth less than one cent each.

  • BitTorrent to Speed up Game Distribution

    BitTorrent Inc. has partnered with two major online game providers, providing technology to accelerate the downloads of clients and patches. BitTorrent Inc. sees the online games space as one of their target markets, as there is a lot of bandwidth to be saved.

  • Metallica Interview Canceled after Pirate Bay Row

    Metallica’s label Universal stepped in and canceled an interview with a Swedish newspaper last week after one of its writer reviewers said he got his copy of the album via BitTorrent. The writer, Jonn Jeppsson, who actually reviewed an edited version of ‘Death Magnetic’, admitted he downloaded it from The Pirate Bay.

  • The Secrets of a Running A BitTorrent Tracker

    Most site admins go about their business in secret, which makes it difficult for enthusiastic outsiders to make the leap from user to site owner, since they can’t get the benefit of the accrued knowledge of others. Now that has changed with TorrentFries – a unique website demystifying the running of a tracker.

  • RIAA: Lobbyists or Law Enforcers?

    When a story appears in the media involving piracy, it inevitably mentions how lobby groups like the RIAA get involved in helping establish evidence. Is this really needed, or does this compromise the cases? Should representatives for the victims really be used to form the basis of a criminal case, or should evidence be gathered by the police?

  • Spore: Most Pirated Game Ever Thanks to DRM

    Spore was without doubt the most anticipated game of the year. The game itself has blown away the people who have played it, but the DRM encouraged thousands to get their copy illegally. Already Spore has been downloaded more than 500,000 times on BitTorrent, and this number is increasing rapidly.

  • Is it Time To Make File-Sharing a Criminal Offense?

    All the media reports about cracking down on file-sharers in the UK are starting to annoy me. I’m sick of hearing about Topware, their 2nd rate pinball game and their hired-gun lawyers. This needs sorting out, once and for all. Is it time to make file-sharing a police issue in future, one for the criminal courts?

  • Study Says Intellectual Property System Should Die

    A recently released study has claims that the current ‘Intellectual Property’ situation in the world is not working well. Driven by a fear of losing out, and bolstered by an attitude that profit is the aim of IP, progress is hampered. Not only by the entertainment industry, also in biotechnology where medicines are sometimes restricted or withheld, causing deaths.

  • Pioneer’s Live Bittorrent Streaming Device

    Pioneer recently announced a prototype set-top box that supports BitTorrent streaming. The device already caught the attention of the BBC, as it opens up the possibility for TV-networks to offer their content via the Internet without having to spend millions of dollars on bandwidth bills.

  • Slipknot Frontman Says Labels Cause Piracy

    Slipknot vocalist and frontman Corey Taylor says it’s time for the music industry to stop taking legal action against downloaders. He feels it is the labels themselves who are to blame for online piracy, since the quality of released music is so bad, no-one wants to buy it.

  • Europe Gets Prison Break Fix via BitTorrent

    Last week the fourth season of Prison Break aired in the US with over 6 million viewers on TV. On BitTorrent the season premiere was downloaded more than 2 million times this week. The majority of the downloads go to Europe though. Poland alone is responsible for 12%, compared to only 4% US downloads.

  • Ipernity Media Sharing Site Embraces BitTorrent

    A site dedicated to the sharing of all kinds of media, from blogs, through photos and video, has embraced BitTorrent. Ipernity.com has been in operation since 2007 and has just finished work on a ‘secret project’ – to implement the sharing of bulky media on the site via BitTorrent and their own tracker.

  • Anti-Piracy Scam Emails Target BitTorrent Users

    A new trend is surfacing, as spammers have sent out millions of emails targeting BitTorrent users. The emails, that claim to come from MediaDefender, warn the receiver that he or she has been logged using BitTorrent and points them to an attachment supposedly containing evidence, but which is in fact infected with a virus.

  • Danish File-Sharers Not Responsible For Wi-Fi Theft

    Two Danish women taken to court by IFPI affiliates for sharing music were found to be innocent. The two claimed they were the victim of WiFi theft, had no knowledge of the alleged infringements and therefore shouldn’t have to pay the damages. The court agreed and acquitted them of all charges.

  • Furious Author Cancels Pirated Book

    Writer Stephanie Meyer isn’t too happy with the Internet. The first 12 chapters of her eagerly awaited book, a counter-view novel to Twilight, has hit file sharing sites. Despite knowing who was responsible, Meyer’s anger seems only to be for her Internet fans, while she plans to cancel the book.

  • ISPs Hand Over Details of ‘Several Thousand’ Pirates

    Two major UK ISPs have been ordered by the High Court to hand over the identities of several thousand alleged file-sharers. BT has confirmed it is involved while Virgin Media was less direct in admitting that lawyers Davenport Lyons, working with Topwear Inc., are about to start threatening thousands more people.

  • City Market Bans Legitimate Traders to Beat Pirates

    A city in the north of the UK has taken drastic action to beat pirates. From today, not only will sellers of pirate DVDs and CDs be stopped from selling their goods at Hull’s biggest street market, but legitimate businesses selling audio visual products will be banned from selling their products there too.

  • Prison Break Downloads Popular on BitTorrent

    Less than a day after the first two episodes of Prison Break’s fourth season aired on TV, close to a million people have already downloaded the episodes on BitTorrent. This is an impressive number and in the days to come it might even come close to the 6.5 million TV viewers on FOX.

  • MPAA Wants ISPs to Cut Off Pirates

    Following on from the IFPI-inspired Italian blockade of The Pirate Bay, the MPAA’s President has been in Italy offering ideas on how to deal with the ‘problem’ of unauthorized file-sharing. Not wanting to flirt too much with originality, Robert Pisano is backing a 3 strikes-and-you’re-out policy. Just how far will the Italian government go in its currently tough anti-piracy mood?

  • BitTorrent Searches Skyrocket as Sites Grow

    The Pirate Bay, Mininova and isoHunt all have millions of visitors every day, searching for music, movies, software and especially TV-shows. Together, the three BitTorrent sites serve an impressive 500 million searches each month, and this number is going up every month.

  • Google’s Insights on BitTorrent Clients

    Google is a great tool to compare the popularity of searches in a similar niche. When the number of people searching for something goes up, it is often a sign of increased popularity. We take a look at the search volume for three popular BitTorrent clients, how this changed over time, and how it differs worldwide.

  • TorrentRelay’s BitTorrent Download Service Expands

    In June we wrote about TorrentRelay, a site which enabled anyone with a web-enabled device to download torrent without a BitTorrent client. A few months later, the site has evolved quite a bit. We take a look at the new site and the range of useful features that were added by the developer.

  • Indiana Gregg to Beat Pirates with Music Download Site

    Indiana Gregg has become a well known name around the net, mainly for her contradictory, and self-obsessed rants regarding piracy. The Scottish singer and her producer husband are now going to try and cash in on that ‘net notoriety’ with a new site they claim will help the artists; the name, Kerchoonz.com

  • Qwest’s Unofficial 250 GB Data Cap

    Today, Comcast officially announced a 250 GB cap, while threatening to disconnect users who exceed this limit more than once. Comcast is taking the heat once again, but they are not the only ISP that limits its users. Other ISPs, Qwest being one of them, have exactly the same policy – and the same threats.

  • Trial Against The Pirate Bay Delayed

    The upcoming trial against ‘The Pirate Bay Four’ has been delayed and at its earliest will begin at the end of this year – maybe even next year. Stockholm District Court initially said that the trial would start by the end of the summer, but gathering damage claims and serving summons took longer than expected.

  • Gazelle Rejuvenates the BitTorrent Tracker Community

    Some months back, Project Gazelle was launched. It was an attempt to build a new and improved BitTorrent tracker script. The ultimate goal is to produce a new framework for private torrent sites, faster than the common TB source, while being more secure from a code point of view, easier to modify, and more flexible.

  • LimeWire Music Store Adds 1.2 Million Tracks

    Most people know Limewire as the application that can be used to download music for free, but earlier this year, the Limewire team opened up their very own music store. Starting at $0.27, the Limewire store offers high quality, DRM-free MP3s, and today they added 1.2 million tracks to their library.

  • RIAA’s Anti-Piracy Trade Agreement Wishlist

    It might not come as a surprise when we tell you that the RIAA wants to turn the Internet into a virtual police state. Still, it’s quite scary to see what their “future Internet” would look like. Let’s take a closer look at the RIAA’s suggestions for the Anti-Piracy Trade Agreement Wishlist (ACTA).

  • Acoustic Band ‘Utterly Depends’ on Piracy

    Steve Knightley is one half of ‘Show of Hands’, an award-winning acoustic and folk duo from the UK. Steve says he is thankful to the people that pirate the band’s music and go out of their way to promote the band. In fact, he says the band utterly depends on them.

  • Alleged UK Pirates Offered Free Legal Representation

    Over the last year, UK residents accused of sharing games like Dream Pinball have been threatened by lawyers Davenport Lyons. Stuck in a trap of not having enough money to defend themselves, many choose to pay compensation demands – guilty or not – fearful of a much bigger punishment if things go bad. Now a UK IP lawyer says he will defend as many people as he can – for free.

  • Uncovering The Dark Side of P4P

    P4P is touted as the new and improved P2P. The technology has the potential to lower bandwidth costs for ISPs and speed up downloads for P4P enabled filesharing clients. There is a dark side to this new technology though. The strong anti-piracy connections are fuel for conspiracy theorists, and Net Neutrality might be at stake.

  • Find and Share Music with TinySong

    TinySong is an easy to use website where users can search for music and share tracks with friends via a direct link. The website is linked to Grooveshark, a P2P powered music service, that allows users to manage and store their entire music library “in the cloud”.

  • Noel Gallagher of Oasis Speaks Out on Piracy

    Noel Gallagher from the 50 million-selling band Oasis has been chatting about piracy on the UK’s Radio 1. He jokes about mainstream journalists asking him about non-existent leaks from the new album and encourages everyone to download the music of rival bands. Overall, he’s pragmatic and upbeat, looking forward to filling his swimming pool with mineral water.

  • Comcast vs. BitTorrent, What’s Next?

    Yesterday, the FCC ruled that Comcast’s network management practices that specifically targeted BitTorrent users, were unfair. The ruling is a small victory for Net Neutrality, but it wont stop ISPs from going after the heavy bandwidth users, not at all.

  • UK Game Piracy: Propaganda, Evidence and Damages

    This week, alleged game pirates in the UK have been condemned to the ruination of huge fines and misery. Well, not quite. See, if defendants don’t turn up in court, it’s easy to get a default judgment and huge damages because no-one contests the evidence. So what’s the truth and what evidence do the lawyers really have?

  • The Pirate Bay Appeals Italian Blockade

    The Pirate Bay has decided to fight the decision of an Italian judge after it ordered ISPs to block access to the popular tracker. The blocks didn’t prove particularly effective as traffic from Italy only increased but nevertheless, The Pirate Bay is determined to reverse the decision.

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