Canada may be facing its own DMCA according to Michael Geist, Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa. And, “given the strength of the copyright lobby, we may need protection from the next copyright bill,” he says. With that in mind, tomorrow Giest launches 30 Days of DRM page [...]
The Pirate Bay claims to have uncovered more dirt from behind the scenes in the controversial raid against PRQ and The Pirate Bay in May. They write on their blog that they have gotten hold of inside information from the MPA, including confidential e-mail correspondence between the MPA’s judicial representative in Sweden, Monique Wadsted and [...]
The UK Anti piracy lobby BPI (British Phonographic Industry) bans the 12 year old Amy Thomas from the “school kids music chart because her record label refuses to sue music fans. The Inquirer writes: Amy had been chosen as one of ten young artists to feature on the My Music chart that launches in October [...]
Teaching kids how to copy. Poster campaigns in schools, and a PirateBay for kids. The most brilliant idea’s are often generated at the dinner table. A quote from the Wired article about how piracy divides Sweden: Pirate Bay’s Peter is dining with a crew of pirates from all over Europe. Over tabbouleh and sausage, the [...]
True nerds. Great lyrics combined with slammin beats, these gangsta Nerds have it all. TorrentFreak will review CC-licensed albums (with BitTorrent links) on a weekly basis. This one is a pretty geeky one, but there will be “normal” ones in the future. Futuristic Sex Robotz was founded by Coaxke and PC Speaker during a Keystone [...]
Convert? Or be shut down for eventual transmogrification? The commercial p2p scene is beginning to look like a Borg movie with former independent commercial p2p operators being sucked into the corporate maw one by one, to reappear as rigidly controlled mutations of their former selves. The Borg are known, “both within and beyond Star Trek [...]
Allpeers is a revolutionary Firefox extension that makes it possible to share pictures, music and video’s within Firefox. The files are distributed using BitTorrent. Allpeers is not yet squeezing everything out of BitTorrent, but Matthew Gertner from Allpeers told TorrentFreak that this will definitely change in the near future.
Here’s a pilot of our weekly podcast. Welcome to TorrentPod, the official podcast of TorrentFreak.com. Join your host Charlie as he delves into this weeks latest news, and what really pisses him off about the RIAA. This show is a pilot, so please leave a (audio) comment to help Charlie improving this thing. The podcast [...]
Two weeks ago the Austrian Pirate Party was founded. The party has ambitious plans, and is trying to participate in the upcoming elections in October. Time to have a chat with Florian Hufsky, the captain of the “Austrian Pirates”.
After being pressured and condemned throughout the blogoshere, the RIAA dropped the Scantlebury case.
Earlier today we wrote that the Swedish Pirate Party introduced a completely anonymous internet service called relakks. However, how anonymous is it, and is it really a darknet?
The Swedish Pirate Party introduced a completely anonymous internet service called relakks. Relakks makes it possible to browse the web, and use p2p-applications (like BitTorrent) without being monitored by your ISP or anti-piracy gangs like the MPAA and RIAA.
A week ago Apple CEO Steve Jobs gave the public a sneak peak of the Leopard OS at Apple’s developer conference. A few days later a BETA version of Leopard, handed out to members of the Apple Dev Connection, is being shared on several torrent sites. Despite the fact that the Beta versions are distributed [...]
A weekly returning chart listing the most popular BitTorrent movie downloads. Ranking Movie Seeds / Peers 1 (1) Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest 49,623 2 (NEW) Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby 48,247 3 (2) Superman Returns 47,723 4 (3) The Benchwarmers 45,502 5 (NEW) Barnyard: The Original Party Animals 43,430 6 [...]
The Dutch ISP XS4all stated that they are willing to work with the anti-piracy organization BREIN in their “war on piracy”. At the same time, another ISP (UPC) said they were planning to release the names and addresses of some of the heavy “illegal filesharers” to BREIN. Interestingly, last month the Dutch court ruled that [...]
If it was up to the RIAA, nobody would copy music anymore. The funny thing is however, blank media and media recorders bring a lot of money to the RIAA. You might probably not be aware of this, but every time somebody buys a cd-recorder in the US, $2 goes directly to the RIAA. And [...]
Johan Linander, a member of the Swedish parliament for the Center Party writes that a new law, based on EU directives, has been proposed by the Ministry of Justice. This law makes it possible for “copyright holders” to demand customer info tied to IP addresses that allegedly infringe copyright. We all know that “copyright holders” [...]
The RIAA is known for their shameless actions, there’s really now way to escape a lawsuit. Take the Warner Bros. v. Scantlebury case for example.
Last week was the Stockholm Pride festival, which is arranged by the Swedish homo/bi/transsexual community. The festival has been a huge success in recent years. It is supported by the established Swedish society – authorities, media. organizations of various kinds back it up.
TorrentFreak was pretty much a one man thing, but that’s about to change. I would like to introduce you to Mathias Hellsten, our new contributer from Sweden. Why? Well there are a couple of reasons. First of all, I thought it would be nice to have an insider reporting from pirate-loving Sweden. So Mathias will [...]
I heard some stories about the Asus WL-700gE, aka “the BitTorrent router” a couple of months ago. It was announced as the ultimate gadget for torrent freaks, so I decided to buy one as soon as it was available. That was three weeks ago.
A few months ago we posted some articles about “tribler”, the first “social” BitTorrent client. Tribler is a successful research project funded by the Dutch government. However, it looks like Tribler will have some competition form “torrent swapper”. So what’s the deal? Torrent Swapper is an open sourced powerful, clean, fast, and easy-to-use BitTorrent client [...]
BookMooch is a new p2p book sharing protocol for printed books. It works a little like BitTorrent, the more you share, the more you receive. And you will be banned if your share ratio gets below 5:1. The inquirer writes: The cashless site runs on a simple points system. Members receive one point for sending [...]
TorrentFreak gets a makeover. The site can be a little buggy the next 24 hours but I’m working on it. I will tell more about the new stuff, and credit the people who contributed when it’s done. update: For those who are interested. TorrentFreak is using wordpress. The current theme is a modification of the [...]
CacheLogic and BitTorrent announced a strategic partnership to further enable the widespread adoption of P2P technology as a distribution network for commercial video and other rich digital content. One of the key projects is the development of the revolutionary Cache Discovery Protocol (CDP).
Torrentspy, still one of the most popular torrent sites on the web, is about to undergo a change of appearance. It seems like they’re hopping on the web2.0 bandwagon. It looks neat though, have a look.
It’s real easy to get started with BitchTorrent for your distribution needs. To begin, all you need is a feeder. The feeder takes and seeds files called bleeders. “With the feeders soon seeding bleeders, you’ll find yourself flooded with needers needing bleeders finding feeders in the seed. When your feeder seeds the seed, you need [...]
A couple of weeks ago the LimeWire team announced that they were planning to implement BitTorrent support in their popular filesharing application. Now the’re sued by the RIAA. Slightly more than a year ago the word was going around that LimeWire, at the time download.com’s most popular commercial p2p file sharing application, was going down. [...]
Apparently he can solve two Sudoko brainteasers during his 30-minute commute on the ferry between Marin and San Francisco. And he has earned a high score of 320 on Tringo, a combination of Tetris and Bingo. The San Francisco Chronicle, from BitTorrent’s hometown San Francisco wrote a great piece on Bram Cohen, the founder of [...]
A weekly returning chart listing the most popular BitTorrent movie downloads. Ranking Movie Seeds / Peers 1 (1) Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest 48,933 2 (2) Superman Returns 48,796 3 (NEW) The Benchwarmers 47,768 4 (NEW) Final Destination 3 45,496 5 (4) The Devil Wears Prada 43,305 6 (5) Cars 42,763 7 (3) [...]
One thing that has emerged as a concept in the Swedish blogosphere over the last two years is the Bodström society. It obviously derives from the Swedish justice minister Thomas Bodström. The term relates to a society that is going in an Orwellian direction towards more and more monitoring of its citizens, often in a deceitful way.
New York lawyer Ray Beckerman provides an excellent overview of how the RIAA litigation process works. “The RIAA lawsuits pit a small number of very large recording companies against individuals who have paid for an internet access account. On the plaintiff’s end, the owners of the underlying copyrights in the musical compositions are not involved [...]
The Canadian animation series Odd Job Jack releases every episode plus additional resources for free. The content is released under a Creative Commons license, and distibuted over BitTorrent. What do they offer? Master flash files and bitmaps of every piece of art used in this season of Odd Job Jack. Every character, prop, and background [...]
A New Zealand woman was busted recording an anti-piracy commercial that was playing ahead of the popular Disney movie “Cars”.
An internal BETA version of the PSP game “Gangs of London” has been leaked onto several BitTorrent sites last week. Sony spokesman David Wilson warns potential pirates that “the leak” is incomplete and that it might be a bit “buggy”. He said: “The version of Gangs Of London that you have brought our attention to [...]
I stumbled upon this great collection of free and open source software applications. The CD is created by the Trinidad and Tobago Computer Society and contains over 100 useful applications.
Mashboxx is the first p2p application that offers music downloads authorized by major record labels. This week Mashboxx finalized their deal with SONY BMG.
The Pirates are throwing a party, and you are invited! Why? 1. PiratbyrÃ¥ns website has, as reported, returned after a political repression. 2. Copy Me (swedish), an anthology of texts from the website, has been a huge success and quickly sold out but will now be released in a new edition. 3. It’s time to [...]
Is an ip-address enough evidence to sue a person for downloading copyrighted material? Recent cases suggest that the RIAA and the MPAA will need more evidence than that. And that’s certainly a good thing if you take into account how many people share the same ip, or leave their Wifi unsecured.
It’s been almost one year since the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its ruling in the MGM v Grokster case, determining that Grokster and Streamcast can be held legally liable for what it calls “inducing” copyright infringement by users if they market their filesharing programs “with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright.” [...]
Austria now has its very own pirate party. Initially the communist party KPÖ presented itself as the national Pirate Party, but it appeared that not all pirates wanted to be associated with the communist ideals. The Austrian Pirate Party is planning to participate in Austria’s national elections this October and has three main points: 1. [...]
Handling DMCA notices is probably one of the most effortful tasks of a BitTorrent site admin. In order to lighten this load, and to please copyright owners, snarf-it.org introduced a “delete it yourself” (DIY) service. On Snarf-it.org we read: A couple of days ago we received this email from Microsoft asking us to remove about [...]
Podtropolis, the popular “Ipod” torrent site had to close its doors a couple of weeks ago. Podtropolis had financial problems and wasn’t able to pay the bills. But it looks like things changed for the better. Gary from Isohunt.com came to the rescue…. At Podtropolis we read: Well, I just hate good community and nice [...]
A weekly returning chart listing the most popular BitTorrent movie downloads. Ranking Movie Seeds / Peers 1 (1) Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest 49,594 2 (2) Superman Returns 48,032 3 (3) Nacho Libre 47,431 4 (7) The Devil Wears Prada 45,267 5 (4) Click 43,289 6 (5) Cars 42,081 7 (8) Eight Below [...]
A lot of things happened after the Swedish police attempted to take down The Piratebay. It’s time to recap and look ahead.
Evidently, very little is happening in Sweden right now. This is indicated by an attack against the Bureau of Piracy that turned out to be quite a funny story. Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet ran a story about Piratshoppen, the website that sells Piratbyrån and the Pirate Bay related material such as T-shirts, stickers and so [...]
The popular BitTorrent client Azureus received funding by BV Capital, a company that previously supported del.icio.us and peerflix. Azureus is currently implementing a “content layer” where commercial downloads will start to appear. Users will be able to search for certain keywords, or browse through the available content by tags. Azureus is downloaded almost 2million times [...]
In days of yore, when the corporate record labels wanted air-time for one of their tunes, they’d fire CDs at every DJ and his brother. But not any more. That’s because they’ve found a clever, new ‘high tech’ way of getting the music out. It’s called Kazaa, the self-same p2p file sharing application used by [...]
Shawn Hogan, CEO of Digital Point Solutions is sued by the MPAA for downloading a movie over BitTorrent. The MPAA wants to settle the case for $2,500, but Hogan rather spends $100,000 on legal fees, than giving in to the MPAA’s scare tactics. Hogan says: “$100,000 in legal fees is a small price to pay [...]
A couple of months ago we posted that demonoid’s registration opened (for a couple of hours). It closed soon after that, but visitors kept asking for invites in the comments.
The Piratebay openly supports the war against Ladonia, a micronation located in the south of Sweden. Yet another political statement by those fearless pirates. TPB supports an initiative by the AFCI to help the Ladonians in their quest for internet connectivity. The AFCI demands: * No copyright laws! * Internets connectivity from every stone! * [...]
Filesharing is getting more popular in Japan according to a recent survey by the Recording Industry Association of Japan (RIAJ). 3.5 percent of the Japanese Internet users is actively using p2p software to share files, compared to 2.7 percent last year.
Pirates are popular these days, Pirate Parties are popping up like mushrooms, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest is leading the BitTorrent movie download chart, and became the fastest film ever to go beyond $300 million in Canada and the US. so sing along.. You are a Pirate! WoW! Pirates are popular these days, [...]
P2Pnet owner Jon Newton is facing a libel suit filed by Kazaa CEO Nikki Hemming. To help Newton with his legal fees, Toronto based singer/songwriter Neil Leyton has written a song about the situation, and has organized a fundraiser for August 5th at the Rivoli, with fellow Fading Ways Music label-mates Aceface, as well as [...]
SqrtBoy published a whitepaper on discussing his ideas on how BitTorrent webmasters should design their BitTorrent RSS feeds. SqrtBoy is known for his work on Torrent Trader Lite, VBTT, IPBTT and other several BitTorrent tracker php/mysql scripts. It is great to see that someone is proposing a standard for BitTorrent rss feeds. Every webmaster probably [...]
A weekly returning chart listing the most popular BitTorrent movie downloads. Ranking Movie Seeds / Peers 1 Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest 49,397 2 Superman Returns 47,792 3 Nacho Libre 47,298 4 Click 45,102 5 Cars 43,289 6 X-Men: The Last Stand 41,951 7 The Devil Wears Prada 41,782 8 Eight Below 39,291 [...]
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The MPAA teams up with Guba in their war on piracy. Guba introduces Johnny, a content filter for their online video download and share service. Guba recently signed a deal with Warner Bros. to spread DRM loaded movies and TV-shows online. According to the press release “GUBA is filtering movies and TV shows using a [...]
Done the impossible is the story behind the rise, fall, and rebirth of the cult TV show Firefly. Firefly was ressurected thanks to efforts of the fans of this popular sci-fi show. In the documentary “done the impossible” the fans tell their part of this success story. They explain why and how they managed to [...]
Cheggit.net is an adult content torrent site founded by a group of former members and admins from empornium.us. They were not happy with some of the changes a empornium, so they launched their own torrent site, not without success.
The world leaders are discussing todays world threatening problems at the G8 summit in Petersburg. They talk about the escalating situation in the Middle East, nuclear terrorism and… the war on piracy. The leaders of Britain, Canada, Russia, Germany, France, Italy, Japan and the United States agreed to combat piracy. Among other points they state: [...]
John Edwards, one of the democratic presidential candidates in 2004 is using BitTorrent to spread his campaign stuff. Campaigns are pretty expensive, so sharing bandwidth is a good idea. Edwards is likely to run for President again in 2008, so if you live in the USA, and you want a president that supports BitTorrent, vote [...]
Last week we reported that that several pro-piracy organizations launched the international project. Today an international meeting point for pirate-parties was announced. On their website they state: Across the world we may have loads of various experiences and ideas, resources that are untapped. This place will hopefully make for a great place to pick up [...]
Elephants Dream is a computer generated short movie. The movie was produced in about 8 months and the rendering of the graphics took 125 days with each frame using 2.8GB of memory. The great thing about the project is that the movie is made entirely using Open Source software. The movie is 11 minutes, including [...]
Two months ago P2Pnet owner Jon Newton and four anonymous commenters were drawn into a libel suit filed by Sharman Networks and Kazaa CEO Nikki Hemming. But now it seems that Sharman Networks dropped the case for some mysterious reason Jon writes: Two months after receiving a summons telling me I was being sued for [...]
BitTorrent founder Bram Cohen was interviewed by Chris and Josh on the Web2.0 Show. Bram talks about BitTorrent’s deal with the MPAA and Warner Bros. And about the past and the future of his amazing filesharing protocol. No breaking news, but it’s a good podcast. link BitTorrent founder Bram Cohen was interviewed by Chris and [...]
Dutch anti-p2p organization BREIN has been thwarted in its bid to force five ISPs to reveal the identities of alleged file sharers
A heartbreaking tale about a pig that invents his very own DRM to protect the powers of the magic box he found. Inspired by the harsh Anti-Piracy campaigns targeted at kids. The Pig and the Box is about a pig who finds a magic box that can replicate anything you put into it. The pig [...]
Earlier today we reported that the Pirate parties are getting more and more popular. Today we found out that a international Pro Piracy Lobby has launched. So far, this international cooperation consist of the following members: * ArtiLiberated (Sweden) * Piratbyrån (Sweden) * Piratgruppen (Denmark) * Piratgruppen (Norway) * The Pirate Bay (Sweden) from the [...]
The raid on the PirateBay, and the responses in Sweden to the case motivated a lot of pirates around the globe to organize themselves into Pirate Parties.
Earlier this year Warner Bros and BitTorrent announced that they are working together to distribute movies online. Today, more movie studios follow this example. According to Cnet BitTorrent teamed up with more movie studios to distribute movies online “The filmmakers that signed with BitTorrent are Hart Sharp Video, Egami Media (a subsidiary of Image Entertainment), [...]
A lot of rumors circling around in the BitTorrent community about the Israeli advertising company Targetpoint and their alleged attempts to buy several torrent sites.
Interesting developments at one of the largest porn torrent sites on the net. Targetpoint, an Israeli advertising company took over Empornium, changed the design and locked out the former site admins.
The fact that The Piratebay Founders profit from ad revenues could mean that they are facing stricter laws in the upcoming court case. Piratebay founder Fredrik Neij said to Svenska Dagbladet on Wednesday: “If there is money left over, it will go to us who work at Pirate Bay as salaries” This could mean trouble [...]
Always wanted to kill some leechers? With Torrent Raiders you can.
Limewire is including BitTorrent support in the future. This can be a huge step forward for the most popular non-BitTorrent filesharing application. But how are they going to pull this off? The limewire blog interviewed Zlatin who’s handling the BitTorrent integration What prompted the decision to integrate BT into the next version of the LW [...]
Podtropolis, the most popular “Ipod” torrent site is in trouble. The site was recently covered in a brand new web2.0 sauce, but they are still not able to pay the bills. They are asking their visitors for a little help: it’s looking like we are going to have to close our doors in the next [...]
Mirosoft gave the guys behind vistatorrent.com a framed version of the cease and desist letter that took down their site. Although the demand for Microsoft’s second Vista Beta is extremely high, Microsoft refused to release a torrent for “security” reasons. At the Gnomedex conference Chris Pirillo, one of the organizers, and the initiator of vistatorrent.com [...]
The lightweight BitTorrent client just released version 1.6. uTorrent is an extremely light, but feature rich torrent client, and the winner of the BitTorrent client comparison. changes, fixes and new features include: * Added “Completed On” column * Allow torrents in list to be renamed * Pause in tetris!! (we needed that) * Show speed [...]
Allpeers is a revolutionary Firefox extension that let you share pictures, music and videos within Firefox. The extension makes it possible to share pictures, music and video’s within Firefox. The extension is currently in the Beta-testing phase. Dmitri Popov, one of the Allpeers Beta testers wrote a reviewed the extension om NewsForge. He concludes: there [...]
Piratebay’s hosting company PRQ had demanded the return of both paperwork and computer equipment seized by police However the Stockholm District Court ruled that they stay with the police a little longer, and prosecutor HÃ¥kan Roswall defended this by comparing The Piratebay and the Bureau of Piracy (PiratbyrÃ¥n) with terrorists.
A Swedish company is offering insurance against p2p lawsuits and fines. And it’s pretty cheap actually, just $19 US Dollars per year. So if you get in trouble with the MPAA or the RIAA, your insurance company will handle the bills for you. Now this is a great idea. And on top of paying your [...]
The police will not return the Piratebay servers that were raided last month. The servers were seized after the US government threatened Sweden According to the local, Internet hosting company PRQ had demanded the return of both paperwork and computer equipment seized by police, saying that the material had no significance for the investigation and [...]
The Grokster decision made filesharing companies vulnerable. The court ruled that they can be sued if they encourage people to share copyrighted material was a great victory for Hollywood, and was believed to be the end of filesharing by some. But now, one year later, peer-to-peer technologies flourish more than ever. P2P traffic is rapidly [...]
BitTorrent inc. is developing a video download website to distribute movies online. They are still negotiating with several movie studio’s, but today they selected GNi to “host” their online Video Store. GNi signed an agreement with BitTorrent Inc., to provide an IP transit Internet address for streaming videos at one gigabit per second. GNi’s Service [...]
Warner Bros is using a Guba, company specializing in online pornography searches, to sell its DRM-loaded Warner movies and TV online. “You may well know that some of the best porn gets circulated on newsgroups,” says Supervert. But, “You need a news reader, and often you miss some of the best posts, or you end [...]
Is the MPAA is losing the “war on piracy”? Hollywood lost 6.1 billion according to reasearch by the MPAA, 75% higher than they expected. Although The DVD sniffin Dogs “Lucky and Flo” help a little bit, the pirates are on the loose. The MPAA claimes “major victories” in their war against piracy but if you [...]
BitTorrent can be fun, as long as you get decent speeds. Not satisfied with your current speeds? These suggestions might help to optimize your download pleasure
Sealand is on fire. The self-proclaimed safe haven for everything that’s forbidden elsewhere suffered from a fire, probably caused by a generator. Firefighters attacked the fire from a ship, but it is unknown if they succeeded and what the damage is. Sealand and it’s hosting company havenco have no regulations concerning copyright, patents, libel, restrictions [...]
A month ago Torrentspy sued the MPAA because an alleged hacker, hired by the MPAA, retrieved private information from the BitTorrent indexer. But according to Cnet Robert Anderson (the hacker) is now helping Torrentspy to fight the MPAA. Among the claims by Valence Media (Torrentspy) is that as part of its attempt to gather information [...]
BitTorrent just released version 4.20. The new version gives ISP’s a “customer friendly” alternative to manage the increasing bandwidth need that is caused by BitTorrent traffic; caching traffic instead of throttling or shaping. In an attempt to decrease the bandwidth generated by BitTorrent traffic, ISP’s started to shape and throttle BitTorrent traffic on their networks. [...]
The IFPI announced a new round of lawsuits last May, but once again it is shown that their threats sort little effect. Pirates are not easily scared and p2p traffic continues to grow. Ipoque studied survey anonymized date supplied by some large German network operators and concludes: Illegal P2P file sharing has had tremendous effects [...]
Limewire, one of the most popular filesharing applications just released V 4.12 and announced that limewire will support .torrent downloads in the near future.
Hollywood, The MPAA and the US government demanded action from the Swedish government. If Sweden decided not to give in to their wishes the US would impose trade sanctions.
Say what you will about those dry-land pirates created by the entertainment cartels, but they’re driving a number of cottage industries. There’s a whole slew of companies trying to dream up ways to stop people from freely using CDs and DVDs they’ve bought and paid for, and let’s not forget all those high-priced lawyers getting [...]
Today Mininova announced that they banned 3652 spam/scammers. Fake files, “free stuff”, and poker deals; Torrent sites are a great tool to spam and scam “innocent Pirates”. Some time after we started mininova there were a few people that thought that uploading spam torrents would be a good idea to advertise their “GET A FREE [...]
Sab but true. What’s next? What were they actually looking for? *** For those of you who haven’t followed the Swedish news, a quite funny (or tragic) thing has surfaced: Apparently, on several different occasions, MPAAs Swedish lawyers hired a private eye to stalk me! This must’ve been very entertaining for the poor Tex Murphy [...]
I came across an awful “top torrent site” list yesterday so I decided to make my own. So Here it is, TorrentFreak’s one and only top torrent sites + firefox search plugins, June 2006. No Login required.
Teeth Are Not for Biting, Hands Are Not for Hitting, Feet Are Not for Kicking, and Words Are Not for Hurting. It’s all about ethics. Filesharing is also ILLEGAL, just like murder. If you share files, you are a pirate! Educate the childeren, it’s not too late! Check out the latest part in the X [...]
The rumor that the MPAA pressured Sweden to take down the Piratebay is not new, but there’s finally some proof. Here’s a letter that the MPAA sent to Sweden’s state secretary this March. Clearly the complaints that we filed on behalf of our members in 2004 and 2005 with the Police in Stockholm and Gothenborg [...]
The Pirate leaders are quite talkative today. First the US Pirate leader, now the leader of Sweden’s piratpartiet.
Newnova.org, the torrent site based on the famous suprnova.org code is gone. Suprnova.org’s successor launched in October 2005, but they never came near the popularity of suprnova, or the other big players in the torrent scene. Both the newnova site and forums now point to David Stanley’s freelance website design. It is likely that this [...]
Two weeks ago, in the aftermath of the Piratebay raid, the US equivalent of the Swedish pirate party “piratpartiet” was founded.
The rumor goes that Apple is currently working out a deal with some major players in the movie bussiness to start a movie download store. According to an article in Variety Apple CEO Steve Jobs wants the movies to be $9.99, but the Studio’s are giving him a hard time: Studios have resisted Jobs’ initial [...]
Sweden again. The Filesharing debate continues, and the Pirate’s vote might be an important one in the upcoming election. Justice minister Thomas Bodström is flirting openly with filesharers, while the Pirate Party is getting bigger and bigger. Lars Ilshammar, an information-technology historian who recently suggested Sweden to impose a fee similar to the one proposed [...]
BitTorrent offers free high-res movie downloads of “The Duke City Shootout Film” Festival. All 42 movies will be available for free. The 7th annual Duke City Shootout starts June 21st, fresh movies will be added on a daily basis. But there’s more, all previous winners of “the world’s strangest little film festival” are available at [...]
Could this be our future? Stop the MPAA and RIAA before it’s too late. Support the battle! Donate and send a letter (or more) to Congress. Could this be our future? Stop the MPAA and RIAA before it’s too late. Support the battle! Donate and send a letter (or more) to Congress.
Apparently, Sweden’s crime rate is so low it can afford to allocate national police resources to the MPAA.
The Dutch court ruled that the MP3 search engine “zoekmp3.nl” is infringing copyright. This is a remarkable ruling, since none of the files that the search engine is linking to are actually hosted at zoekmp3′s servers. Initially the lower court decided that it was not illegal to link to illegal files, however, the appeal court [...]
Vistatorrent.com received the well known “cease and desist” letter from Microsoft. Apparently they are still planning to take down the internet. Although the demand for Microsoft’s second Vista Beta is extremely high, Microsoft refused to release a torrent. They stated: There are legal and privacy issues which unfortunately make that not an option for Microsoft [...]
It looks like The Piratebay is back home again. The Piratebay had to move because the Swedish police raided their servers. But, after a short stay in The Netherlands the torrent tracker returned to their provider “PRQ” in Sweden. At least, that’s what the ip info tells us. Another point of interest is the “reverse [...]
In a previous article I pointed to the article in Wired with some tips and tricks to watch the world cup online. But it seems that quite a lot of people still have problems watching world cup streams online. Don’t worry, there’s another p2p world cup stream player, and it’s easier to use. People from [...]
Sweden may add charges to broadband subscriptions to, “compensate music and film companies for the downloading of their work, while legalizing the downloading of copyright-protected material,” The Local quotes justice minister Thomas Bodström as saying. And in the process, it might drop the ban on file sharing, it states, going on: “Bodström told Sydsvenskan that [...]
75% of the young voters in Sweden support filesharing, even if it’s illegal, according to a recent survey. This indicates that filesharing is going to be a hot topic in the coming elections. Over 75 percent of those asked said it was OK to download illegally from the Internet, said the survey. These figures indicate [...]
The demand for Microsoft’s second Vista Beta is so high that they have to limit the bandwidth to prevent the internet from collapsing (not my words). However, they can’t release it over BitTorrent for some vague reason. At least, according to a chat Chris Pirillo had with MS Mindshare Manager Aaron Coldiron. Coldiron said: We [...]
Breaking File-sharing, Copyright and Privacy News
Newsnight interviewed Dan Glickman (MPAA) and John Perry Barlow (EFF), to hear what they got to say about each other. It’s pretty amusing. Barlow was the songwriter of “The Grateful Dead”, advising its fans to share. He’s also a co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Here’s what Barlow has to say about the MPAA: “These [...]
Wired published an article on how to watch the World Cup on your PC. Over 750million people watch the World Cup on TV, but the article can be useful in case your TV breaks down, or if you’re stuck behind your desk.
The Football World Cup started yesterday in Germany. The MPAA has a great sense of timing and announced yesterday that they “hired” the footie legend Pelé, to score a goal against piracy. Pelé, the Brazilian legend, worked with the MPAA before in 2004, when his very own movie “pele forever” was pirated and distributed among [...]
The US now has its very own Pirate Party. The party is founded by Brent Allison, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Georgia, inspired by the Swedish pirate party “piratpartiet”. The pirate party has three issues on its agenda, one of these is to reform copyright law: The official aim of the copyright system [...]
P2Pnet owner Jon Newton and four anonymous commenters are facing a libel suit filed by Sharman Networks and Kazaa CEO Nikki Hemming. Apparently they were quite upset by the words of some anonymous commenters in a P2Pnet post on swimming pool incident. It sounds absurd, but it’s true. As if Kazaa isn’t evil enough as [...]
The PocketPacket project (or PPP) is a simple idea aimed at taking p2p sharing to street level, while putting out the word on open source and free culture. Anyone who’s used bit torrent has taken something and given it pack to people they will never meet. PPP is all about simplifying, and personalizing that act. [...]
Online media outlets like Google Video and Youtube have become extremely popular over the last year. However, they miss one thing.. BitTorrent. But that’s about to change. A (small) team of dedicated designers and coders is working on a huge project. Their aim is to scrape every online media file (audio and video), index these [...]
A lot of fuss these days about The Piratebay raid, but nobody ever mentioned anything about seedler.org. Seedler, another BitTorrent site hosted at PRQ, has been taken down as collateral damage. No word from them ever since… Seedler started their BitTorrent site about a year ago and became quite popular within the next few months, [...]
WizBit is a BitTorrent client for symbian S60 smartphones, using python. WizBit is not fully functional yet but David Hulbert, the developer of the Mobile BitTorrent client is planning to release the first major release on July 7.
Fredrik Neij from the piratebay held a speech at the successful pirate demonstration yesterday. He responded to the Piratebay raid stating: “AntipiratbyrÃ¥n, Bush, Bodström, or whoever gave the order for this pathetic attempt at an attack , give it up, and stop messing with the internet! It’s a battle you will not win!”. Full speech: [...]
Rasmus Fleischer form the Swedish pro-piracy organization PiratbyrÃ¥n gave a talk at the Reboot8 conference., he discussed copyright issues and PiratbyrÃ¥n thoughts and vision. The Reboot8 conference is “a journey into the interconnectedness of creation, participation, values, openness, decentralization, collaboration, complexity, technology, p2p, humanities, connectedness and many more areas”. The Grey Commons Intro There has [...]
The Piratebay moved their servers to the Netherlands and is (almost) fully functional. They changed the title of the BitTorrent tracker to “The Police Bay”.
The Swedish Pirate Party and PiratbyrÃ¥n are organizing a protest demonstration in Stockholm and Göteborg on Sathurday (tomorrow). The protests are starting at at 3pm (Stockholm) and 4.30pm (Göteborg) local time. Marcin de Kaminski from PiratbyrÃ¥n stated: “This is no longer about just a raid on the Pirate Bay, but has become a major justice [...]
The website of the Swedish police was forced to go offline after a DOS attack. Although it is still unclear who initiated the attacks, the link between this incident and the raid on the Pirate Bay seems obvious.
Hollywood’s MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) has filed lawsuits against 22 web sites it says allow people to download movies without authorization. The sites – in New York, Delaware, Massachusetts, Florida and Texas – include allmoviedownloads.com; Flixks.net; freedvddirect.com; mykazaa.com; and, unlimiteddownloads.com. They typically charge a subscription fee of anywhere from $20 for a three [...]
The Piratebay was raided by the Swedish police yesterday. Today we read that the site will be back within two days, what reminds me of the trick they pulled off last year. In May 2005 all major media outlets reported that The Piratebay was taken down by Swedish anti-piracy organisations. However, that was a hoax, [...]
CBC interviewed Gary Fung, the man behind Isohunt.com. Isohunt was recently sued by the MPAA, but planned to fight back. Gary is glad his voice is heard: I’m glad CBC gave me the opportunity to voice our stance, what we do and why the MPAA is after us. Media distributions are converging and decentralizing at [...]
The largest BitTorrent tracker on the net just got raided. The Swedish police took their servers to check whether they actually commit a crime or not. This is obviously a huge setback for BitTorrent pirates “safe haven”.
Hot on the heels of news that Sweden’s ThePirateBay.org is down comes MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) disinformation release, complete with a fantasy picture. And you know what they say about pictures. click to enlarge “The operators of The Pirate Bay have publicly ridiculed copyright holders and taunted law enforcement for years claiming immunity [...]
Ashwin Navin from BitTorrent inc. announced at the Cannes film festival that BitTorrent is working out deals with various Chinese movie and TV-companies. Navin hopes commercial distribution of movies and TV-shows in China will be up by the end of 2006. Navin said: “They’ve (Chinese movie and TV-companies) been very receptive. Everyone knows what BitTorrent [...]
BitTorrent is working on a new and improved version that will incorporate superseeding by cachelogics servers. This means that the content will be copied to cachelogic servers to dramatically increase the download speeds. Currently, “regular” BitTorrent is traffic is suffering from throttling ISP’s that claim that BitTorrent traffic is cluttering their pipes. However, this new [...]
Torrentspy is suing the MPAA because an alleged hacker, hired by the MPAA, retrieved private information from the BitTorrent indexer.
A bug in the popular torrentbits tracker code makes it extremely easy to increase your ratio on most private torrent sites. With HTTP analyser and Firefox you can increase your upload/download ratio pretty easy. Leeching without being recognized as a leecher. I guess you were expecting a link here? Too bad. People who want to [...]
Mininova now has over 400 million torrent downloads, nearly 16 months after it’s launch. Currently, mininova is the most popular torrent site, leaving the piratebay and torrentspy behind. At this very moment they’re even more popular than suprnova in the “old days“. And they continue to grow with over a million downloads per day. Mininova [...]
More great examples of “legal” BitTorrent sites. Filesharing goes beyond piracy. Movies PublicDomainMovies StarWreck (star trek parody) Cactuses Star Wars Revelations “TV”-Shows MariposaHD (first HDTV show) NerdTV (TV for Nerds) The Scene Marcus hates his job Stageside Tech-TV — Legal Torrents * Games, Music and Software * Movies and Videos More great examples of “legal” [...]
BitTorrent is often associated with piracy and copyright theft. However, it’s not all bad. Check out these less controversial sites using BitTorrent.
Jon Newton at P2PNet.net is facing a libel suit. The details on the case remain unknown however. Well, curiosity got the better of me, so I went to the Province of British Coloumbia to search through their Court Services Online. It would appear that the plaintiff in this is Sharman Networks. Yes, Sharman Networks who [...]
BitTorrent is believed to be one of the fairest P2P protocols. The built in tit-for-tat mechanism makes sure that you get what you give. But there are several ways to cheat and exploit BitTorrent in order to increase your download speed. But how vulnerable is BitTorrent? Nikitas Liogkas, Robert Nelson, Eddie Kohler, Lixia Zhang from [...]
I will be spending the next 10 days on a deserted island, far away from any connection to the www. I’ve scheduled a couple of posts so there will be “a little action” while I’m gone. Hang in there, I will be back. Ernesto. — update 25-05 still on vacation. I rushed some posts from [...]
Trojan/Erazer-A is a new trojan that spreads through P2P networks. Apart from infecting your pc with malware and disabling anti-virus applications, it also actively deletes music, video’s and pictures from “shared folders’, used by p2p applications.
TIOTI, short for “tape it off the internet”, is about to enter the BETA stage. The first invites will be sent on May 25. We have a preview of some of the TIOTI goodness. Sign up for invites now. What is TIOTI? It’s a revolutionary approach to socialize and optimize your TV-torrent experience. TIOTI combines [...]
Burger King and Myspace join forces. They will start selling episodes of the popular TV-Show “24″. The first episodes of season 1 and 5 will be for free, just to warm the customers up, the other episodes will cost for $1.99 per download. They will advertise with the popular slogan: “Have it your way”. However, [...]
John Naughton wrote a great column about the announced cooperation between Warner and BitTorrent earlier this week. It’s a good thing that Hollywood is embracing BitTorrent, but not like this. The great thing about BitTorrent is that it has really important legitimate uses – ones that do not infringe copyright. If you want to distribute [...]
A couple of weeks ago we reported that BitTorrent.org is still indexing a lot of copyrighted material. Although they made a deal with the MPAA to ban illegal content, their policies do not differ from sites like Mininova or Torrentspy. BitTorrent spokeswoman Lily Lin confirmed to TorrentFreak Our MPAA arrangement is strictly about taking down [...]
The Piratebay is having some issues with their site at the moment. The tracker is unreachable at times, and the seed / leech info is not showing. The solution is: 1. Be patient, and wait till the tracker connects. 2. Don’t pay attention to the seed / leech info, just try the torrent to be [...]
Meet Lucky and Flo, the MPAA’s DVD sniffing dogs. They can’t tell if the DVD’s are illegal (yet), but they do smell if packages contain DVD’s. The two black Labradors are the newest tool in the MPAA’s rather unsuccesful “war on piracy”.
Snarf-it.org, the torrent site built on the remains of the Suprnovaforums is back. New owner, same torrents. snarf-it.org is now back online with it’s 300k torrent database and clean easy to use interface, no popups or sell out ads there. That however is the last time you will see any information from ourselves promoting it [...]
Ktorrent, a popular BitTorrent client for Linux now supports encryption. This makes Ktorrent the first alternative to Azureus for Linux users who suffer from throttling ISP’s. Protocol header encryption makes it harder for traffic shaping devices to recognize BitTorrent traffic, and should recover your bandwidth. Get Ktorrent over here. Ktorrent, a popular BitTorrent client for [...]
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Breaking File-sharing, Copyright and Privacy News
The Hong Kong movie industry won a case against four local ISP’s, making BitTorrent pirates easy targets. ISP’s must identify their customers if they download illegal material. According to Hong Kong Cable TV the ISP’s have three weeks to comply. The movie companies demanded the user info belonging to 49 IP addresses, but it’s likely [...]
Titaniumtorrents is a tracker dedicated to E3 video game media. Trailers, previews, interviews and more. Most of the trailers are in high def. Check it out Titaniumtorrents is a tracker dedicated to E3 video game media. Trailers, previews, interviews and more. Most of the trailers are in high def. Check it out
Warner Bros will announce today that it plans to sell movies and TV-shows online. They are going to use BitTorrent to distribute their content, again a huge step forward for BitTorrent.
Tribler, the “social” BitTorrent client is developing a personalized, tag-based navigation system for wikipedia multimedia content. By introducing a tag-based, BitTorrent enabled, wikipedia browser it is possible to add multimedia content to wikipedia. So the idea is: sharing knowledge, but also bandwidth. The p2p wikipedia browser makes it possible to add large multimedia files to [...]
Suprnova.org, once the biggest and most popular BitTorrent site on the net is for sale. Suprnova went offline 19 december 2004 and returned in 2005 as a P2P news site. Currently Suprnova still has pagerank 6 generating quite a lot of traffic. A year after the closedown, Sloncek, the brain behind the legendary torrent site [...]
The Queen Mother Hospital’s (Margate, UK) server was down for two days because it was stuffed with illegal music, movie and software downloads. While the server was down X-rays had to be processed using film. The sysadmin tried to regenerate some of the most vital data from the server, but some essential data had to [...]
Movie producer Steven Soderbergh said he is going to use BitTorrent to distrubute a short High Def movie. Soderbergh discussed the possibilities BitTorrent has for Hollywood together with the MPAA’s Dean Garfield and Ashwin Navin from BitTorrent at the Tribeca Film Festival. This is not the big breakthrough, but it’s a step in the right [...]
National Australia Bank and St George accidentally advertised on The Piratebay. The Bank first denied to advertise on world’s largest BitTorrent tracker, but later admitted the “mistake”. Last Friday a spokesman from NAB said: “I can say without a shadow of a doubt that we are definitely not advertising on that site. We are very [...]
The movie industry lost 6.1 billion according to a recent study by the MPAA, 75% higher than they expected. So it seems like the MPAA is losing “the war on piracy”. In the US alone the movie studio’s lost 1.3 billion in 2005. And it is even worse, these figures only account for the losses [...]
Slyck interviewed BitTorrent CEO Ashwin Navin. They talk about the future of BitTorrent, their cooperation with the MPAA, Azureus & uTorrent and a lot more. The edited Slyck version can be found here. — Tom: So what do you think one of the biggest misperceptions is from what you read, from what we were talking [...]
Times are changing. It’s just a matter of time before Hollywood’s first blockbuster will have its premiere online and in theatres at the same time. And BitTorrent will probably play a significant role in this “culture shock”. A great example of a successful BitTorrent release is the movie Star Wreck. This indie movie was released [...]
Jamendo is the number one source for free, creative commons licensed music. The site is growing rapidly, since the article we did on Jamendo three months ago it doubled its content, and it is certainly not the end. Jamendo recently reached the 1000 albums mark.
Bitcomet is trying to get to V1.0 as soon as possible. While the popular BitTorrent client only released 4 new versions in 2005 (0.57 – 0.60), it now releases three “brand new” versions in one month.
The idea is simple, Apple will include a torrent client in OS X. You will save Apple a lot of bandwidth by helping to distribute their software updates. Your reward: free goodies from the Itunes store. brilliant!. It’s a perfect example how both companies and users can benefit from BitTorrent. You will donate a little [...]
Opera released a 9.0 public beta version last week. The new and improved Opera browser now supports .torrent downloads. The question is: Do we really need BitTorrent support in a browser? First a quick review of Opera‘s BitTorrent support: Opening torrents If you click on a .torrent file, a window pops up asking you where [...]
One of India’s leading newspapers “The Hindustan Times” published an article on BitTorrent. They point their readers to the top-torrent-sites, and list some of the top torrents. Not long ago the BBC said that BitTorrent aids terrorists and pedophiles, but the Hindustan Times obviously doesn’t agree. BitTorrent gives you freedom! A quote from the article: [...]
BitTorrent is now a beast with two heads: it’s widely used by anyone and everyone with a large file to share, but it’s also an application that’s becoming a Hollywood favourite. P2pnet interviewed Bram Cohen, the mastermind behind BitTorrent p2pnet: Hi, Bram. I know you must be up to your ears in alligators and I [...]
Azureus, one of the most popular BitTorrent clients is planning to add a “content layer”. This integrated platform “should” make it possible to share videos and other large files with friends, family and strangers all around the world. The Azureus team aims to improve the user experience and make sharing and finding content easier and [...]
Are you a big fan of Tech TV? If so, you really need to check out the 300+ Tech TV collection torrent. This compilation is probably the most extensive Tech TV collection on BitTorrent
The revolution starts in Canada. Canadian musicians are rising up against p2p lawsuits, statutory damages, DRM and the prohibition of copying and sharing Music. They’ve started a new group called the Canadian Music Creators Coalition. “Fans who share music are not thieves or pirates,” they state unequivocally. “Sharing music has been happening for decades.” A [...]
Snarf-it.org, the torrent site that was created by the hardcore members of the Suprnovaforums died. The site recently reopened exactly 1 year after the famous BitTorrent site ‘suprnova.org’ died. It ressurected after the site was relocated to stay out of legal troubles. Snarf-it, was becoming a synonym for change over the past year. Snarf-it went [...]
We’re not asking for money this time, just a petition that needs to be signed. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) started collecting signatures for a petition, trying to stop the RIAA from destroying lives. A great initiative, if you support it, sign it. If the EFF reaches their target of 100.000 signatures they will deliver [...]
The indie rock band “The Decemberists” has more faith in BitTorrent than MTV. The band from Portland, Oregon want their video to be available to a wide public, and BitTorrent is the easiest way to do so. Dawn Barger, manager of the Decemberists says: For the most part, MTV and VH1 won’t touch video unless [...]
What is the best BitTorrent client? Although it’s not an easy question to answer, we will give it a try. We compared more than 20 BitTorrent clients (windows) on 9 features and the overall impression. Some features are of course more important that others, depending on the users needs.
Demonoid Downtime
What else happened this week? * How to get BitTorrent working in Itunes * I steal TV because I have to! * Fenopy, the Ajax Torrent Search Engine * Secret Cinema & Camera Obscura (private), for the cult and arthouse movie junks * RIAA bandwidth leeching * BitTorrent & TV at macworld What else happened [...]
And yet another fresh release of the popular BitTorrent client Bitcomet. Bitcomet 0.64 now supports rss-feeds and the optional IE toolbar has been removed. Other changes: – GUI Bugfix: chat user list is removed temporarily – Core Bugfix: fix the bug that the play button doesn’t work after click stop button in task preview window [...]
Internet TV players are a great tool to download and watch TV-shows, podcasts, and video blogs. They are easy to use, let you browse for new shows, and add your favorite show. However, they’re not ready for BitTorrent yet.
Bush likes to listen to the Beatles on his Ipod. However, there’s no way Bush can have a legal copy on his Ipod according to the RIAA. We got it on tape.
More and more ISP’s are limiting and throttling BitTorrent traffic on their networks. By throttling BitTorrent traffic the speed of BitTorrent downloads decrease, and high speed downloads are out of the question.
Different countries, different p2p preferences. Singapore has the highest percentage of BitTorrent users, the US has the most Gnutella fans, and South Korea is totally hooked on eDonkey.
I have NO words to describe the RIAA’s latest actions.
BREIN did it again. The Dutch anti-piracy organization forced TorrentIt and NLexperience to go offline. Although BREIN has no legal power, threatening with lawsuits and high fines seems to be an effective strategy to take the smaller BitTorrent sites down.
A new, revolutionary compression method makes it possible to shrink movies down to 50MB. This means that downloading a movie will take just a couple of minutes. The new compression method developed by Euclid Discoveries has a great potential for both legal and illegal video distribution.
On February 21 the MPAA claimed a “major victory” in their war against piracy. The Belgian police managed to shut down Razorback2′s servers. Razorback2 was considered to be the heart of the Edonkey2000 network, with over a million users.
Two months ago we posted a story on the new encryption methods to prevent ISP’s like Rogers and Shaw from throttling BitTorrent traffic. The encryption methods seem to work, and the three most popular torrent clients support it.
Coca Cola started a free music TV program called Stageside. The show is completely DRM-free and downloadable through BitTorrent, Gnutella, Ed2K and fasttrack. Island Def Jam R&B star Ne-Yo is the first artist that appears on “Stageside”.
UConn (Univerity of Connecticut) Information Technology Services says it’s going to in effect ban all p2p file sharing programs, except DC++.
Allpeers is names “Guidewire Group Global Innovator” and invited to present the BitTorrent extension for Firefox at the Innovate!Europe event. Allpeers, started sending out invitations for their BETA program a couple of days ago.
Targetpoint, an ad-company that is offering targeted ads is targeting BitTorrent sites. Targetpoint recognizes the potential that most BitTorrent sites have, and is already a partner of several torrent sites. Most of the time it stays with serving ads on a pay per click basis, but they sometimes go even further, and try to buy these sites.
Downloading TV episodes has become extremely popular within the BitTorrent/P2P community. However, some of you might not be completely familiar with all the TV-Torrent tags. The filename of a TV-Torrent contains a set of tags that give you information things like the source, quality, and release group.
What else happened this week? A list of BitTorrent and P2P stuff we didn’t blog about.
The Piratebay is known for their hilarious responses to legal threats. They recently added a response to linotype’s cease and desist request. Linotype is a German company that sells fonts, so you can probably guess the piratebay response to that.
The Spanish police made 15 p2p related arrests today, and closed down several BitTorrent, eMule and Edonkey sites. The victims are accused of facilitating “copyright infringement”. Today’s arrests are the result of a large scale investigation by several Spanish “copyright protection” organizations that started in October 2005.
Azureus won the award for “most popular open-source software” This is the result of the first annual SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards. Azureus is one of the most active and most downloaded project on SourceForge. It seems that P2P software is popular, because Emule finished in second position.
During the past two weeks the Dutch anti-piracy organization BREIN forced 6 (small) torrent sites to stop their services. Brein is known for its intimidating techniques, and is successful in taking down sites, mostly set up by hobbyists.
A Swedish prosecutor says Big Six studio efforts to nail a man they say shared a movie online may have effectively slammed the door in their faces. This means that individual filesharers in Sweden can feel a little more safe.
Allpeers, the BitTorrent extension for Firefox is sending out invitations for their BETA program. Allpeers is a revolutionary Firefox extension that makes it possible to share pictures, music and video’s within Firefox.
Today the IFPI announced a new wave of lawsuits (2000) in Europe. But how new is this wave? It seems like they keep suing the same people over and over again. If you compare today’s press release with the one they put out last year you will see that in both cases they sued a “German judge”, a “British Councilor” and a “French Chef”. What a coincidence!
According to lightreading, P2P traffic is not hurting the major U.S networks at the moment. This was the conclusion of interviews with the leading technology executives from three of the four largest carriers in the U.S. At the same time it means that throttling BitTorrent, and other P2P traffic can not be justified at the moment.
In November 2005 BitTorrent and the MPAA announced that they were going to cooperate in the “war against piracy”. The agreement was called a “historic event” and a “major breakthrough”. But now, 4 months later BitTorrent.com is still indexing pirated movies and other copyrighted material.
It’s been a year since mininova started and they finally reached the no1 spot of all torrent sites. There has an ongoing battle for the first place over the past three months between torrentspy, the piratebay and mininova. However it seems that mininova is definitely going to take the lead. If you take a look [...]
Because I sometimes implicitly assume that everybody is completely familiar with the BitTorrent jargon. I decided to make a little BitTorrent dictionary to explain some of the nerdy stuff. I hope this hope this is useful to some of you.
Torrentspy, one of the biggest BitTorrent search engines, filed a “motion to dismiss” the lawsuit initiated by the MPAA a month ago. Torrentspy is accused of “supporting” copyright infringement. However, torrentspy reacted to these accusations saying that everything they do, Google can do to… and even better.
Germany just agreed on a new law that makes it possible to put downloaders behind bars for two years. This is if you use the movie for personal use, commercial downloaders face up to five years in prison. Germany is considered to be one of the leading filesharing counties in Europe so this law will [...]
Two days ago we reported that NiteShdw, one of the MPAA’s latest targets, was planning to settle the case without too much damage. However, the MPAA is not willing yo cooperate and demands at least $10.000 from the owner of the relatively small BitTorrent site. NiteShdw’s admin says: Ongoing discussions with the MPAA’s lawyers are [...]
Michael Geist’s interpretation of a recent study on how downloading affects the music bussiness caused quite some controversy. Geist concluded from the study that filesharing does not hurt the record industry. P2Pnet interviewed Geist, they discuss several p2p related issues and it seems that Geist is a fan of BitTorrent. Dr Michael Geist has become [...]
The CRIA (Canadian Record Industry Association) did a study on the effects of downloading on record sales. Interestingly enough, they found that downloaders buy more music that non-downloaders. Michael Geist went through the complete study report and concluded: In summary, CRIA’s own research now concludes that P2P downloading constitutes less than one-third of the music [...]
It’s almost a month after the MPAA targeted 5 of the bigger torrent sites. In the meanwhile Isohunt has been planning to fight the MPAA and is currently raising money to do so. Niteshdw on the other hand doesn’t have the money to fight and tries to settle without taking too much damage. The official [...]
Torrents are great, they are the best way to share large files with your friends, or even with people you don’t know at all. But surprisingly enough, not many people create torrents when they need to share something. I have “a lot of” friends who know how to download torrents, but when they need to send me their latest 200MB vacation picture collection, they ask me to “get on msn”.
Always funny to see how people get here. Here are some highlights of the past day.
Amazon S3, short for “simple storage service” is a cheap way to store and download data from anywhere on the web. Storing data is cheap, $0.15 per GB a Month, and downloading data costs $0.20 per GB. Sounds like a great service, S3 allows you to uload files as big as 5GB. And the greatest [...]
Podtropoplis is the leading Ipod torrent site. Like they say “its grown from camp to village to bustling metropolis in no time”. Ipod formatted torrents are getting more and more popular every day, so there sure is a market for these content specific sites. Podtropolis is providing the service for a while now and its [...]
People who think that anti-piracy campaigns are something new are wrong. Back in 1992 they had their own DRM, if you tried to “copy a floppy” back then, you were presented with a 10 minute pro-copyright / anti-piracy lecture by the SPA. Read More at WikiPedia The rap:, by MC Hart Did I hear you [...]
Torrentspy, one of the biggest torrent sites out there “lost” their TV and Movie directory. This obviously makes it harder for people to browse through the torrent listing and find the files they want. The categories in question are replaced by a more general “video” directory. And categories like DVD-screener, Telecine and Cam are totally gone.
The Dutch pubic TV broadcasting channels (omroep.nl) are going share TV shows using BitTorrent. The deal was announced earlier today on a workshop on P2P TV. They are going to experiment with the new “social” BitTorrent client called Tribler. Johan Pauwelse (tribler) and William Valkenburg (omroep.nl) shaking hands Johan Pauwelse, one of Triblers developers said [...]
Peer to Peer traffic is increasing according to Cachelogics David Ferguson. Ferguson presented some interesting data during a workshop on P2P TV hosted by Creative Commons earlier today. Tim Kuik, head of Brein, the Dutch anti-piracy organization that took down 6 BitTorrent sites earlier this week listened carefully.
You probably never expected it but even George Bush has his personal torrent site. The rumor is that he got interested in BitTorrent when Bono gave him a new Ipod. George likes to “shuffle the shuffle” and calls it “pretty high tech stuff”. Check out George and his Ipod Bush: Beach Boys, Beatles, let’s see, [...]
Azureus just released a brand new version. Azureus is still SourceForge’s most active project, and in the top 3 of most downloaded utilities. There are no new gadgets, primarily bugfixes and performance improvements. including: Encryption bug fix Faster crash recovery hashing Reduced the # of windows popping up at once on first run after installation [...]
Tribler is a new BitTorrent client that adds a social layer on top of the regular features. Tribler allows you to create groups, friends and it supports tags and profiles. The official release of this Social BitTorrent client is tomorrow, but everyone is free to grab a test version from tribler.org. This first version is [...]
Allpeers is a revolutionary Firefox extension that let you share pictures, music and videos within Firefox. There’s no public BETA yet, but Rocketboom went to Prague to get some answers and a demonstration of how it works. It’s clearly not vaporware. To put it simple, Allpeers combines BitTorrent, buddy lists, tagging and easy sharing in [...]
Two weeks ago the deal between PeerFactor and the uTorrent developer Ludvig Strigeus caused quite some controversy in the p2p and BitTorrent scene. This is mainly because PeerFactor is known for their Peer-against-Peer and other anti-piracy work. However, they take another route now. focusing on improving legitimate filesharing techniques. Today p2pnet’s Alex H did an [...]
Brein, the Dutch anti-piracy organization has taken down 6 dutch torrentsites. Among these sites is Dutchnova, a torrentsite with 25.000 members. Brein gave the sites a choice: admit you infringe copyright and give us all the information about your members or we will sue you. These threatening and intimidating talk seems to work, although Brein [...]
Thanks to Petter Nilsson, a candidate of the Swedish TV show Toppkandidaterna (Top candidates), the Piratebay just won over 6000$. Petter Nilsson said earlier that he would donate over 6000$ (20% of the total prize money) to ThePiratebay if he won. The contestants of the show had to pretend they were a politician and convince [...]
Star Wreck, a movie directed by Timo Vuorensola backed up by a crew of independent film makers became a great success thanks to BitTorrent. The Star Trek parody, released under a Creative Commons lisence has been downloaded millions of times. The movie became Finland’s most popular movie within just a couple of months, and is [...]
Filesharing technologies like BitTorrent have a bad name to most people who are not using it. Take the BBC Newsnight report for example, or the MPAA rallies. However these enemies are at the same time BitTorrent’s greatest fans, and the ones who can make or save a lot of money with it. Today, legal implementations [...]
hehe hehe
Bitcomet, one of the most popular BitTorrent clients decided to follow Azureus and uTorrent by implementing PE/MSE encryption in its latest release. Bitcomet was the first BitTorrent client that supported protocol header encryption, the switch to the new encryption method means that the three biggest torrent clients out there are using compatible encryption methods, good [...]
Last week we had a story on the long-lost Penn and Teller videogame Desert Bus. The goal of the game is to drive a Bus through the desert from Tucson, Arizona to Las Vegas in real-time, without scenery, while the bus slightly veers to the right. It seems that a lot of people downloaded the [...]
And yet another uTorrent release. Version 1.5 has a couple of new features, some changes and a few bugfixes. Rss support is optimized and has some new configuration options. The controversial Protocol Encryption has been implemented, and last but not least, a new “easter egg”. Easter Egg: Go to the About screen and press the [...]
Allpeers is a revolutionary Firefox extension that makes it possible to share pictures, music and video’s within Firefox. According to Red Herring allpeers has received a first round of funding from two venture capital firms that backed Skype. Red Herring:“AllPeers co-founder and CEO Cedric Maloux declined to disclose the amount of funding from Mangrove Capital [...]
Ross Cohen, chief technology at BitTorrent inc. and BitTorrent founder Bram Cohen’s brother “has left the building” according to gigaom. Apparently they couldn’t get along anymore. What I heard was that there was some nudging by brother and Bit Torrent founder, Bram Cohen. I popped an email to the company’s director of communications, Lily Lin, [...]
last night the Oscar winners were announced
Bram Cohen, the founder of BitTorrent will be at the next Python Convention (PyCon), and python is taking questions. They can’t guarantee that any of your questions will be asked, but they will doubtless be helpful to the interviewer (Steve Holden). If you want to suggest any questions for Bram (Python related), you can add [...]
Here’s an analysis of the popularity/market-share of the various TV release groups. The sample data was taken from all the eztv releases since June 5, 2005 up to today March 6, 2006. This totals 1728 releases. Below is a pie graph showing the market share of the 15 most popular release groups. Market Share (cte) [...]
With the uprise of digital cinema, movie companies are looking into different ways to distribute digital movies. One of the best alternatives is obviously BitTorrent. Using BitTorrent to distribute digital movies will reduce distribution costs to nearly 0$.
I just bumped into a video of some guy singing about torrents, rips, and ISO’s. The vocals could be better but he knows how to stroke the keys. The video is subtitled for those of you who are not really familiar with all the terms. The plottwist is brilliant. I just bumped into a video [...]
PeerFactor and the uTorrent developer Ludvig Strigeus signed a six months experimental agreement. Their goal is to develop “new content distribution applications on the Web”. This is interesting because Peerfactor is known for their Peer-against-Peer and other anti-piracy work.
The Big Four record labels are fighting tooth and nail to kill the French decision to make it legal to share music and movies online. MPs, who’ve already voted once on the matter, will debate it again next week and if they confirm the earlier decision, turning it into law, France will become the first [...]
The Matrix ASCII is probably the oldest torrent out there. This text version of the original Matrix movie is now seeded for almost 778 days (with a short break in between). If you didn’t see it yet you should definitely check out this movie or one of the smaller samples. And keep it seeded.
Ronnie Apteker, a dotcom millionaire, one of the founders of South Africa’s largest corporate ISP, a movie producer, and sometimes a stand up comedian talks about his love for BitTorrent and e-mule. Finally someone from the other side who writes something positive about BitTorrent. Ronnie writes: So what is the nature of all this traffic? [...]
BitTorrent inc. is planning a video download website to distribute movies online. According to BitTorrent’s spokesman Lily Lin her company is currently negotiating with several content owners. This move is not really a big surprise after the announced collaboration with the MPAA and a british cable company. BitTorrent co-founder and President Ashwin Navin states: “We [...]
Desert bus is probably one of the best games ever. Unfortunately the game was never released, until now. 11 years after the planned release date Waxy is hosting a torrent for this mythical game. The game is part of a long-lost Penn and Teller videogame. The goal of the game is pretty straightforward. You have [...]
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Below are TorrentFreak's most discussed articles of the past month. Join the discussion if you like.
Left Quote“The Pirate Bay has been one of the most important movements in Sweden for freedom of speech, working against corruption and censorship.
Peter Sunde Left Quote
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