The RIAA has submitted a new list of “notorious websites” to the U.S. Government, sites that the labels would like to see disappear . The list includes all major torrent sites, cyberlockers such as RapidShare, and so-called linking sites. The music group acknowledges that most sites respond to takedown requests, but says it’s tired of playing “cat and mouse” with the site’s users who simply re-upload the infringing files.
Billionaire Alki David and a number of recording artists have not given up on their copyright infringement battle with CNET’s Download.com. Continuing with their allegations that Download.com induced piracy, the coalition have asked a court to issue a sweeping injunction, one that would ban all BitTorrent client downloads from the popular software download portal. Even an article published by CNET about the band Counting Crows legally distributing their music on BitTorrent is painted in a bad light
After a study pointed out that file-sharers spend more money on music than their non-sharing counterparts, the RIAA felt the need to respond. The music industry group is now characterizing news reports on the findings as “misleading” and is ready to burst the bubble. According to the RIAA there is a straightforward reason why P2P users buy more – they are simply better engaged music fans than average music consumers. … Eh?
The Pirate Bay is suffering some downtime this morning due to a DDoS attack that appears to originate from a Twitter user who goes by the handle Zeiko Anonymous. The connection flood targeted at the site originates from a small botnet and isn’t worrying The Pirate Bay team too much. Instead, the BitTorrent site is taking this opportunity to do some database maintenance.
A judge in the United States has denied attempts by plaintiffs in three BitTorrent mass lawsuits to obtain the identities of individuals behind IP addresses. Chief United States Magistrate Judge Leo T. Sorokin said the plaintiffs had shown no interest in presenting a plan that would identify actual infringers and were instead relying on an action that “..smacks of a bad faith effort to harass the third-party subscriber.”
The RIAA has welcomed a mind-boggling jail sentence handed to a man who sold pirated movies and music. The 37-year-old man pleaded guilty to six felony counts of selling counterfeit media after he sold five movies and one music CD to an undercover investigator without the permission of copyright holders. As a result he will go to jail in Mississippi for 15 years to be followed by three years of supervised release.
Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom has confirmed that the new domain for his fresh Mega project will be New Zealand-based. Next January it will launch on Mega.co.nz, a domain that Dotcom believes will enjoy great protection. “Prime Minister John Key can have as many dinners with Hollywood executives and copyright lobbyists as he likes,” he informs TorrentFreak. “The simple fact is that the NZ government, which has been acting like a subsidiary of the US government, is not above the law.”
After three and a half months of downtime Demonoid’s tracker is now back online. The unexpected revival of the tracker is the first sign of life in weeks and suggests that the Demonoid team is working to bring the full site back online. While the index and forum remain offline, the many thousands of torrents tracked by Demonoid have been brought back to life.
The top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent, ‘Total Recall’ tops the chart this week, followed by ‘The Watch’. ‘Ted’ completes the top three.
Several popular private BitTorrent trackers have suffered downtime today due to DDoS attacks. The attacks appear to originate from an individual who had aspirations of joining the music tracker What.cd, but carried over to other sites including BroadcastTheNet, PassThePopcorn and HDBits. Three of the six targeted sites are still offline and the disgruntled user is showing no signs of stopping the attacks.
This week uTorrent 3.2.2 was released to the public and one of the release highlights are the new advertisements present in the client. BitTorrent Inc. hopes that these ads will bring in extra revenue so the company can continue to invest in the future of distributed technology. When the advertising initiative was first announced no opt-out was offered, but thanks to user feedback there now is an advanced feature to disable the ads.
Every other Friday there is a court hearing in Sweden to discuss the continued detainment of Gottfrid Svartholm. A request to detain the Pirate Bay co-founder for an additional two weeks was granted yesterday but not without more drama being added to the proceedings. Gottfrid was arrested under suspicion of being involved in a second hacking case along with accusations of four instances of serious fraud and four attempted frauds. Further details of the alleged crimes are being kept secret.
Usenet is a lesser known file-sharing system that its fans have tried to keep under the radar for years. However, the genie has been out of the bottle for a long time and with an increasingly tech-savvy userbase Usenet has managed to attract millions of paying customers. Although still nowhere as big as BitTorrent, there are now increasing signs that copyright holders large and small are targeting their takedown resources on Usenet.
The collaboration between The Pirate Bay and the Cybernorms research group at Sweden’s Lund University has resulted in their first academic publication. The researchers surveyed 75,000 people from all over the world and found that close to 70 percent of all Pirate Bay users are interested in hiding their IP-addresses, or hiding it already. According to the researchers the high interest in anonymizing services among file-sharers is a direct response to anti-piracy initiatives.
Swiss-based file-hosting service RapidShare is about to take a drastic step in its ongoing efforts to drive away pirates. Starting later this month free users of the service will be limited to sharing just 1 gigabyte a day while paid users will be allowed to transfer up to 30 gigabytes to the public. RapidShare CEO Alexandra Zwingli says that the new measures will prevent abuse by persistent copyright infringers.
After being convicted for his role in operating The Pirate Bay, former site spokesman Peter Sunde is required to serve a jail sentence, but rather than giving in he’s fighting to the bitter end. His battle, however, has just received another setback. Despite Sunde calling for a retrial on evidential issues and allegations of bias, Sweden’s Supreme Court has announced the rejection of his application. All hopes now lie with the EU Court and the European Court of Human Rights.
New data published by the Canadian broadband management company Sandvine reveals that BitTorrent traffic increased by 40% in North America over the past half-year. During peak hours BitTorrent is credited for more than a third of all upload traffic, while Netflix accounts for 28 percent of all downstream traffic during the same period.
A Gabon government minister has said that his country will not be used as a base for committing copyright infringement and has announced that his country will seize the new Me.Ga domain. But while Dotcom blames the United States and entertainment company Vivendi, a group of hackers say they have taken over the domain. Speaking with TorrentFreak the group say that they are the true pirates and that Dotcom is a megalomaniac. “He himself is an industry, only here to pollute,” they say.
The much-discussed U.S. six strikes anti-piracy scheme should consider targeting private BitTorrent trackers according to a report by Stroz Friedberg. The suggestion is published in the evidence review which was made public after bias accusations arose two weeks ago. In addition to eyeing private trackers the report also recommends a more secure way to send incriminating data to Internet providers.
After mounting pressure from international rightsholders, in August Google finally caved in and said it would start making ‘pirate’ sites more difficult for its users to find. But three months on and despite removing millions of links to allegedly infringing content every week, the content industries still aren’t happy. In the face of Google’s apparent inability to hide online piracy from its users, the search engine faces the specter of legislation forcing it to do so.
While the major record labels and movie studios do what they can to shutter The Pirate Bay, thousands of lesser known artists are eager to become featured on the site’s homepage. Since the start of the “Promo Bay” initiative in January, 10,000 independent artists have signed up to be promoted by the world’s largest torrent site. Those who were lucky enough to be featured have enjoyed a healthy career boost and in some cases earned thousands of dollars from file-sharing fans..
According to reports this morning, Twitter has withheld the first Tweet from one of its users on copyright grounds. Normally, disputed Tweets will simply disappear if there is a complaint, but one belonging to F-Secure’s Chief Research Officer Mikko Hypponen has now been replaced with a copyright notice. While Twitter has indeed introduced a welcome policy change that will lead to more transparency, the first ever “withheld” Twitter comment was faked by a rather mischievous F-Secure employee.
The top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent, ‘Total Recall’ tops the chart this week, followed by ‘The Watch’. ‘Brave’ completes the top three.
Whenever pirates demand the right to send anything to anybody without being tracked, we are somehow accused of wanting things for free. That’s not true. What we demand is simpler: we demand the laws to apply equally online and offline; we demand our children inherit the civil liberties that our parents fought, bled and often died to give to us. It’s an entirely reasonable demand.
Four individuals behind a so-called “scene topsite” used by the popular release groups MEDiEVAL and DoNE have been sentenced for copyright infringement offenses. Three of the men, described as IT professionals working for Internet service providers, hid their servers within the infrastructure of an Internet service provider. Despite managing to delete evidence after a tip-off, they received suspended prison sentences of between four and six months. A fourth man was fined for aiding and abetting.
After being tipped off by the MPAA the feds arrested four members of the prominent BitTorrent release group IMAGiNE in 2011. All plead guilty earlier this year and yesterday the first two were sentenced to 23 and 30 month prison terms for their role in the capturing, ripping and distribution of copyrighted films. In addition, the members were ordered to jointly pay $449,514 to the MPAA.
CIAPC, the anti-piracy group that has successfully forced ISPs in Finland to block The Pirate Bay, has threatened to sue the ISPs themselves over alleged TV show piracy. Local ISPs such as Elisa and TeliaSonera offer cloud services where their customers can store TV shows for later viewing over the Internet. CIAPC says the services fall outside the scope of private copying “fair use” and therefore require a license to operate legally. The ISPs are ignoring demands to shut down the services and now face legal action.
Megaupload has responded to U.S. Government claims that the company tried to “extort” the Department of Justice by offering it a deal. A “perverse conception” according to Megaupload’s legal team, and to prove this point the attorneys published the agreement that was proposed to the authorities. In the email Megaupload offered to drop the service requirement dispute in exchange for access to the company’s assets.
A federal court in Illinois has handed down the largest ever damages award in a BitTorrent case. In a default judgment defendant Kywan Fisher from Hampton, Virginia is ordered to pay $1,500,000 to adult entertainment company Flava Works for sharing 10 of their movies on BitTorrent. The huge total was reached through penalties of $150,000 per movie, the maximum possible statutory damages under U.S. copyright law. It’s expected that the verdict will be used to motivate other BitTorrent defendants to settle their cases.
With the election around the corner, polls tied, and a slow news week in the US, it’s time to ask the question that’s on everyone’s mind: could Mitt Romney win with some strategic repositioning on copyright policy? Could the answer be to embrace pirate Romney? Let’s explore.
Kim Dotcom has continued to supply more details on his new Megaupload project which is set launch early next year. Today he reveals that the new service will operate on the Gabon-based domain name ME.GA. In addition, Dotcom warns other cloud storage sites that it’s not safe to host their services in the United States, or use .com and .net domains.
By seizing the servers of Megaupload, the U.S. Government also confiscated the personal belongings of many innocent users. One entrepreneur has asked the court to return his data but this request is meeting resistance from the authorities. The U.S. Government points out that the Megaupload user in question may not technically be the owner of his uploaded files. In addition they accuse him of hosting pirated copies of popular music.
The evidence review for the controversial “six strikes” anti-piracy warning scheme will be reexamined, it has now been confirmed. Last week the news broke that the“impartial and independent” technology expert that was initially hired had previously lobbied on behalf of the RIAA. With a second review by an independent company the Center for Copyright Information hopes to restore the public’s faith in the BitTorrent monitoring scheme.
A backlash among Reddit users has seen BitTorrent Inc. criticized over the way revenue-generating addons were presented in parallel with uTorrent client downloads. The company informs TorrentFreak that it always considers feedback, aims to provide a good customer experience, and will introduce changes soon. But whatever they are, is it really possible to please all of the people all of the time, especially ones whose requirements are “no-strings free” at all times?
Earlier this year the U.S. authorities arrested Yonjo Quiroa of Comstock Park on suspicion of operating several websites that linked to unauthorized sports streams. Following his arrest, Quiroa was detained for more than nine months, and he has now been sentenced to time already served plus deportation to his home country. In addition the site admin has to pay restitution to five major sports leagues, totaling $13,000.
An ISP in Finland has failed in its quest to have a court-ordered blockade of The Pirate Bay challenged in the highest court in the land. At the behest of a local anti-piracy group ISP Elisa was ordered to block the torrent site, but it complained from the start, describing the censorship strategy as “flawed”. Now the Supreme Court has announced it will not be hearing the case, so the blockades will stand and more will surely follow.
File-hosting service RapidShare has lifted its download restrictions for free users. The slowdowns were implemented in the aftermath of the Megaupload shutdown and were supposed to drive pirates away from their service. However, according to Rapidshare CEO Alexandra Zwingli, they have been traded for more efficient counter measures.
The top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent, ‘The Campaign’ tops the chart this week, followed by ‘Fire with Fire’. ‘The Amazing Spider-Man’ completes the top three.
To reduce online piracy, Google has implemented several changes to its search engine in recent years. Among other things, Google has blacklisted dozens of piracy related terms from appearing in its autocomplete and instant services. Megaupload is one of these search terms, and nine months after the last infringement took place the name of Kim Dotcom’s file-hosting service is still being censored. This begs the question, what other terms are needlessly censored by Google’s blacklist?
The main way for people to begin downloading content from BitTorrent is to visit one of the Internet’s many hundreds of torrent sites. There they can download either .torrent files or, in the case of The Pirate Bay, magnet links. This week it became possible to go on a YouTube-like “related video” journey through BitTorrent’s Distributed Hash Table to find similar content to that being already downloaded, all without visiting a torrent site.
A month before the controversial “six strikes” anti-piracy plan goes live in the U.S., the responsible Center of Copyright Information (CCI) is dealing with a small crisis. As it turns out the RIAA failed to mention to its partners that the “impartial and independent” technology expert they retained previously lobbied for the music industry group. In a response to the controversy, CCI is now considering whether it should hire another expert to evaluate the anti-piracy monitoring technology.
January this year the U.S. Government destroyed Megaupload, but founder Kim Dotcom is a not done with the file-hosting business yet and is preparing a comeback with something bigger and better. Over the past months a group of coders have been working hard on the new “Mega” venture and Dotcom announced today that the raid-proof service will launch exactly one year after Megaupload was shut down.
It’s not uncommon for content producers to go crazy when they discover their work is being made available via The Pirate Bay. But while the big movie and music studios think the answer is to legislate and then sue everyone into submission, there is another way. Games developer Jonatan Söderström aka Catcus went into the comments section of The Pirate Bay and started giving free customer support to pirates. Has this Swede gone mad or does it just make better sense in the long run?
The U.S. Government has just submitted its objections to Megaupload’s motion to temporarily dismiss the criminal indictment against the company. Megaupload’s lawyers had argued that a dismissal would allow the cyberlocker to rehabilitate itself, but the U.S. believes this can’t happen as Dotcom has sworn that the old Megaupload won’t return. According to Kim Dotcom the DoJ’s opposition is “full of frustration.” “Their bluff case is falling apart,” he says.
The recent decision not to extradite hacker Gary McKinnon to the United States was considered by some as a sign of hope for the predicament of former TVShack admin Richard O’Dwyer. But while there is still a High Court appeal around the corner, things still don’t look good. Speaking with TorrentFreak, Richard’s mother says her son’s extradition is now “almost certain” which is forcing her to plan for a worst case scenario in which he is sent across the Atlantic with little notice. Can you help?
Hollywood-backed anti-piracy outfit BREIN has won a landmark case against XS Networks, the former hosting provider of torrent site SumoTorrent. The Court of The Hague ruled that the provider is responsible for damages copyright holders suffered through the torrent site’s activities. The Dutch verdict has far-reaching implications for the liability of hosting providers for the conduct of their clients.
While “three strikes” or graduated response-style schemes continue to spread, it is the mainstream music and movie industries that are the main beneficiaries of any supposed benefits. To date, makers of other digital products have been left to fend for themselves but if developments in France carry through, that will no longer be the case. According to the country’s Hadopi anti-piracy agency, in 2013 individuals sharing video games online could also be subjected to warnings and punishment.
Starting today, The Pirate Bay is no longer accessible for customers of the Irish Internet provider UPC. Subscribers who try to access the BitTorrent site get a notice informing them that it has been blocked following a court order in a case brought by Ireland’s equivalent of the RIAA. The block has come as a total surprise, as the court proceedings in question appear to have been progressing under the radar. Surprisingly, UPC – who have opposed blockades in the past – have announced nothing.
By seizing the servers of Megaupload, the U.S. Government also confiscated the personal belongings of many innocent users of the file-hosting service. One entrepreneur has asked the court to return his data and to assist this demand his lawyers are asking to unseal the search warrants. “Gaining access to the materials that served as a basis for the government’s seizure of his property can assist Mr. Goodwin and other innocent Megaupload users in determining whether the seizure was unreasonable,” Goodwin’s attorneys argue.
Following its successful application to have The Pirate Bay blocked by several leading ISPs in the UK, the recording industry is back again with new demands. The BPI has reportedly asked Internet service providers such as BT, Virgin and TalkTalk to block leading torrent sites Kickass Torrents, H33t and Fenopy. The ISPs have refused to do so voluntarily but will all do so should a court order a blockade. That will happen, it’s just a question of when – the BPI has Christmas in mind.
On the first day of October, police in Sweden raided so-called “bulletproof hoster” PRQ. The action took dozens of file-sharing sites offline, but it was later announced that the main target was Tankafetast, Sweden’s second favorite torrent site. A few days later Antipiratbyran confirmed the site’s demise but now, just three weeks later, Tankafetast is back, taunting the anti-piracy group not only with a return online and the launch of a clothing range, but by renting cinemas in celebration.
Next month the file-sharing habits of millions of BitTorrent users in the United States will be monitored as part of an agreement between the MPAA, RIAA, and all the major ISPs. To guarantee the accuracy of the evidence that will be used for the accusations the parties agreed to hire an impartial and independent technology expert. However, their commitment to this promise is now in doubt as the hired experts have turned out to be a former RIAA lobbying group.
The top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent, ‘The Amazing Spider-Man’ tops the chart this week, followed by ‘Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter’. ‘The Campaign’ completes the top three.
After its move to the cloud earlier this week The Pirate Bay became more portable and raid-proof than ever before. The entire website and six months of database and code backups have a storage footprint of just 500 gigabytes. At the same time, The Pirate Bay claims to be the greenest site in the list of 100 most visited websites on the Internet. In its new setup the site uses just 2.5 kilowatts to serve mllions of users a day, which is equivalent to the consumption of a regular vacuum cleaner.
In late August Pirate Bay founder Gottfrid Svartholm was arrested in Cambodia. After being held by authorities there he was swiftly deported to Sweden. Once in his homeland he was hit with charges connected to an alleged hacking offense but since then the news trail has gone largely cold. Speaking with Gottfrid’s mother Kristina, TorrentFreak has learned that her son is being kept in solitary confinement, locked up for 23 hours a day. But he is allowed to read and hopefully, very soon, that will include your letters.
This week Netflix launched its popular on demand video streaming service in Finland, but not without controversy. To cater to the local audience, on some of its programming the company displayed “unauthorized” fansubs. Unlike regular subtitles, fansubs are created without permission from content owners and often used alongside pirated content. Netflix apologized for the use of the unauthorized subtitles and has promised to take them offline.
RIANZ, New Zealand’s answer to the RIAA, have withdrawn their case against an individual they said should have been punished under the country’s “3 strikes” anti-filesharing regime. The decision follows a procedure beset by problems, including delivery of erroneous infringement notices and a claim for financial punishments that was not only unsupported by the law, but appears to have been reached via guesswork on the part of rightsholders.
A comprehensive report published by the Dutch Institution for Information Law and CentERdata reveals that compared to the rest of the population, file-sharers are more likely to pay for movies, books, games, concerts and box office tickets. The report further reveals that blocking websites such as The Pirate Bay does very little to deter consumers from sharing copyrighted files online.
While Megaupload’s demise has been well publicized, the burning question remains. How will its imminent replacement fend off attacks from aggressive copyright holders and authorities? Today we have the answer. Kim Dotcom and business partner Mathias Ortmann say they have a plan that will not only make “Mega” raid proof, but will also give it an iron-clad defense against copyright infringement claims.
Following the conviction of 18 individuals who engaged in a bloody Stockholm drug war, Sweden’s Court of Appeal has ruled that due to a lay judge’s membership of a police board that previously discussed the case, he should be considered biased and the case should be sent for re-trial. Former Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde sees clear parallels with the TPB trials and intends to file for a fresh investigation into the earlier bias accusations against three judges with the aim of getting a re-trial.
The Pirate Bay has made an important change to its infrastructure. The world’s most famous BitTorrent site has switched its entire operation to the cloud. From now on The Pirate Bay will serve its users from several cloud hosting providers scattered around the world. The move will cut costs, ensure better uptime, and make the site virtually invulnerable to police raids — all while keeping user data secure.
By now it’s common knowledge that nearly all content on the Internet can easily be removed or censored by filing a single DMCA notice. For some reason, however, this doesn’t seem to apply to most mainstream music stores. When The Flashbulb, aka Benn Jordan, found out that another artist was selling a “copy” of his music, he learned that it is pretty much impossible to get it removed. According to Jordan the mainstream music industry only cares about profits, not the actual artists.
If a copyright holder has a problem with content hosted on a website they are perfectly entitled to issue a copyright takedown request. Publisher Pearson did just that, after a 279-word list from one of its works dating back to 1974 appeared on an education blog. But rather than speak to the blog owner, Pearson DMCA’d its hosting provider instead. The end result was that hosting provider ServerBeach not only took down that blog, but around 1,450,000 other blogs too.
One of the most comprehensive studies into media sharing and consumption habits in the United States and Germany reveals that file-sharers buy 30% more music than their non-sharing counterparts. The result confirms that file-sharers are actually the music industry’s best customers. In addition, the research reveals that contrary to popular belief, offline “copying” is far more prevalent than online music piracy.
While games usually leak online early, in the case of the long-awaited Halo 4 the time between online debut and official launch is pretty large at just about three weeks. Of course, it’s inevitable that games will be pirated but what some people should understand is that games companies’ are within their rights to do something about it. Microsoft have, and for some pirating idiots their punishment is well-deserved.
The top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent, ‘Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter’ tops the chart this week, followed by ‘Stolen’. ‘Safety Not Guaranteed’ completes the top three.
While BitTorrent Inc.’s hugely successful uTorrent client grabs most of the headlines, there is another mainstream client that every BitTorrent user should be aware of. Vuze, previously known as Azureus, is a ridiculously powerful torrent client with more features than you ever knew you needed. Today we hand over to the guys at Vuze for a handful of power tips to transform straightforward downloads and improve productivity.
Despite numerous efforts by the government and entertainment industries, many college students still use BitTorrent to gain access to the latest movies, music and games. While most universities have strict anti-piracy policies in place, there are always groups of students who continue undeterred. Today we look at the top universities in the United States ranked by BitTorrent usage.
A set of leaked internal AT&T training documents obtained by TorrentFreak reveal that the Internet provider will start sending out anti-piracy warning notices to its subscribers on November 28. Customers whose accounts are repeatedly flagged for alleged copyright infringements will have their access to frequently visited websites blocked, until they complete an online copyright course. It’s expected that most other participating ISPs will start their versions of the anti-piracy plan on the same date.
DRM systems in the digital media world are nothing new and are utilized extensively in the music, movie and video games industries. Now, after applying four years ago, a company has this week obtained a patent for a DRM system that aims to stop future owners of 3D printers from printing whatever they like. The dream of downloading a new pair of sneakers or even a car might already be in jeopardy, before it’s even begun.
After historic Internet protests in January the SOPA anti-piracy bill was defeated. However, this week several reports have pointed to a rather unfortunate SOPA comeback. Not in Congress, but as a nasty cryptovirus that locks up people’s computers and accuses them of distributing copyright infringing files. Infected users can get their data back after a payment of $200 – at least, that’s what the virus makers promise.
Earlier this week District Court Judge Liam O’Grady denied Megaupload’s request to drop the company from the indictment. The judge, however, noted that the cyberlocker could ask for a temporary dismissal until it is decided whether the U.S. Government can serve Megaupload. This ruling surprised Kim Dotcom and his legal team, who quickly filed a new motion pointing out that they already made this request during a hearing in July.
Just how easy is it to silence your critics on the Internet by using the DMCA? Apparently, very easy indeed. Yesterday, a writer who reports on religion and current affairs had his entire website taken offline after he allegedly breached the copyright of the operator of a Facebook page. His crime? Reproducing a 16-word Facebook posting made by his copyright adversary that accused an anti-racist, anti-fascist organization of being worse than pedophiles.
According to a tweet by F-Secure’s Chief Security Officer, Pirate Bay co-founder Fredrik Neij and former site spokesman Peter Sunde have reportedly been “stopped” in Bangkok. They were apparently on their way to give a talk at this year’s Hack in the Box Security Conference in Malaysia but never arrived. TorrentFreak has spoken with the duo and has discovered the reasons behind their no-show. Sunde says it’s “messy”.
Fairfax’s head of video Ricky Sutton has admitted that his company’s acquisition strategy is in large part based on what content is popular on BitTorrent. Not only is Fairfax using BitTorrent as a market research tool, the company also admits to advertising their content offerings directly on BitTorrent sites, in an attempt to convert pirates into paying customers.
Megaupload’s request to dismiss the criminal proceedings against it on the grounds that the U.S. Government failed to serve the company, has been denied. District Court Judge Liam O’Grady believes that the authorities could still satisfy the federal rule if they can prove that Megaupload is an alter ego of Kim Dotcom. At the same time, however, the court leaves the door open for Megaupload’s legal team to file for a motion to dismiss the indictment until the government finds a way to issue the summons.
Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom believes that he was spied on by New Zealand’s GCSB because this allowed the U.S. Government to have real-time access to all of his communications. New Zealand and the United States have an agreement to share all intelligence gathered by the secretive Echelon, and Dotcom says this is the primary reason GCSB was utilized for the secret surveillance.
New Zealand rightsholders have come under fire for failing to fully utilize the so-called “three strikes” mechanism after they sent out less than 3,000 notices to alleged pirates in a year. However, it’s now been revealed that eight individuals are now just one step away from the most serious punishments available, just six shy of the French total after they sent out a massive 1.1 million warnings.
A landmark order by a Pennsylvania District Court judge may become the turning point for the many mass-BitTorrent lawsuits that are sweeping through the United States. For the first time in these cases a copyright holder has been ordered to go to trial, instead of settling with the alleged file-sharers for a few thousand dollars. This will be the first time that BitTorrent-related evidence will be tested in a U.S. court.
As the Swedish file-sharing scene recovered from the raids on the PRQ webhost last week, police were already queuing up their next target. After the takedown of Tankafetast on Monday, it now transpires that another site was raided on Thursday. Antipiratbyran informs TorrentFreak that five key sites have shut down during the last week and that further action against other sites should be expected.
The top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent, ‘Stolen’ tops the chart this week, followed by ‘Ice Age: Continental Drift’. ‘That’s My Boy’ completes the top three.
One of the most persistent myths about the copyright monopoly has been that it’s needed to make money. This assertion turns out to be false for a very large number of observed cases, but the plural of anecdote is never statistics. So let’s look at some sound statistical evidence for policymaking on this issue.
Over the last year Microsoft asked Google to censor nearly 5 million webpages because they allegedly link to copyright infringing content. While these automated requests are often legitimate, mistakes happen more often than one might expect. In a recent DMCA notice Microsoft asked Google to censor BBC, CNN, HuffPo, TechCrunch, Wikipedia and many more sites. In another request the software giant seeks the removal of a URL on Spotify.com.
Three months ago one man declared war on the cyberlocker market and set himself a mission to disrupt and meddle with the businesses of what he describes as the industry’s “bad players”. Now, 90 days on and with a team of people stepping in time, TorrentFreak takes a look at what has been achieved. Without doubt the annoyance factor is off the scale and at first view the damage looks significant, but will sites simply give up – or use the opportunity to adapt?
Pirate Bay co-founder Fredrik Neij has won his appeal against the Embassy of Sweden in Bangkok after it revoked his passport earlier this year. The authorities could not give a proper reason for the revocation to the Appeals Court, meaning that Neij is now free to travel from Laos where he currently resides.
The U.S. Department of Justice is ramping up its battle against online piracy. Yesterday another $2.4 million was dedicated to the ever-increasing threat, and Attorney General Eric Holder seized the opportunity to gloat about some recent anti-piracy successes. Besides claiming the Megaupload takedown as a clear victory, Holder also noted that the DoJ has trained, educated and met with thousands of foreign judges, prosecutors, investigators, and policymakers on piracy issues.
When the Megaupload file-hosting service was raided and shut down in January this year, it wasn’t just the company and its operators that were punished. Thousands of Megaupload users lost access to their legitimate data and for nearly 10 months have been in a state of limbo. Now, following pressure from one wronged user and his supporters at the EFF, it seems progress is being made . He will get his day in court, a judge has ruled.
New information suggests that Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom may have been spied on for weeks longer than the authorities have admitted. Last October Dotcom noticed an unusual lag in the 100 megabit fiber connection he had installed for optimal Modern Warfare 3 gameplay. At the time technicians couldn’t find a source for the connection problems, but Dotcom is now convinced that GCSB, the Kiwi equivalent of the CIA, was already spying on him.
With millions of users every day The Pirate Bay is an ideal site to reach tech savvy people all around the world. The power of this online platform is used by many advertisers to target customers, and not just those looking for a Russian bride either. Currently a secretly-funded conservative-leaning organization, listed by the New York Times as “getting the most bang” for its advertising bucks in 2010, is running an anti-Obama campaign on the world’s most resilient torrent site.
Two targets of a police raid on PRQ this week have been revealed. Authorities still aren’t talking, but the boss of the hosting company says one of the seized servers belongs to Sweden’s former number two torrent site Tankafetast. The second domain of interest is Appbucket, which appears to be the same site targeted by the FBI during the summer. Meanwhile, the Swedish Pirate Party is basking in a huge spike in member signups as a direct result of the raids.
After nearly 48 hours of downtime and a replaced Power Distribution Unit, The Pirate Bay is back in business. The last two days have been one of the longest downtime episodes since the site was raided in 2006, and its effects have been felt elsewhere on the Internet.
The RIAA has obtained subpoenas from the U.S. District Court of Columbia ordering WHOIS privacy services to hand over the IP and email addresses and all other identifying information related to the operators of three file-sharing sites. The websites in question are targeted at Dutch and Spanish language audiences, suggesting that the RIAA is assisting foreign anti-piracy groups in local investigations.
While it has been fairly common in recent times for users of other file-sharing systems to be pursued by the Swedish authorities, BitTorrent sharers have been almost completely avoided due to evidential difficulties. But this week sees a change and what could become a turning point, with the prosecution of a music industry worker who leaked an unreleased Beyonce album onto The Pirate Bay.
Police have raided the Swedish hosting company PRQ today, possibly looking for servers connected to copyright infringement. PRQ was founded by Pirate Bay co-founders Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij and is known to host or route many file-sharing sites. The target of the raid has not been confirmed by the authorities, but The Pirate Bay team informs TorrentFreak that they are no longer using PRQ’s services.
The top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent, ‘Ice Age: Continental Drift’ tops the chart this week, followed by ‘That’s My Boy’. ‘Prometheus’ completes the top three.
A few hours ago Japan introduced new anti-piracy legislation designed to clamp down on illegal file-sharing. The regime is one of the most draconian in the world. In most countries users are only targeted when they upload copyright-infringing material to other Internet users, but the new law’s wording means that simply downloading unauthorized material could result in a jail sentence.
Gottfrid Svartholm will be kept in detention for at least two more weeks on suspicion of hacking into a Swedish IT company connected to the country’s tax authorities. According to Prosecutor Henry Olin the extended detention is needed “to prevent him from having contact with other people.” The Pirate Bay co-founder is not allowed to have visitors and is even being denied access to newspapers and television.
When it comes to BitTorrent clients, uTorrent is the most popular one around. Tips and tricks are always welcome and today we have a selection straight from the guys at BitTorrent Inc., including an exclusive peek at a new money saving feature set to appear in uTorrent Android.
Like many other websites on the Internet The Pirate Bay makes its money from ads. Due to its reputation the torrent site generally has to settle for lower grade banners, but the Canadian Government recently broke this trend. This week ads from the Canadian Department of Finance’s Economic Action Plan appeared on The Pirate Bay. Unfortunately for the infamous torrent site, the feds pulled the banner campaign as soon as they were alerted to it.
Soon, five large U.S. Internet providers will begin to warn and punish alleged copyright infringers as part of the “six strikes” anti-piracy scheme. While details are still scarce, TorrentFreak is informed that MarkMonitor will be responsible for tracking down alleged infringers, and that an independent expert review of the evidence gathering technology has been completed. ISPs have also been making progress and several are now ready to start sending out warnings, although none of them wants to go first.
Five men have been sentenced for their role in releasing pre-release copies of Hollywood movies onto so-called Internet ‘top sites’. A court handed out suspended sentences of between three and six months to individuals from two Internet release teams said to be responsible for causing Disney, Warner Bros. and Universal millions of dollars in damages. Together they will have to pay damages totaling more than 1.1 million euros.
Hoping to curb the ever-increasing piracy figures in Portugal, local anti-piracy outfit ACAPOR reported the IP-addresses of 2,000 alleged file-sharers to the Attorney General last year. This week the Portuguese prosecutor came back with a ruling and decided not to go after the individuals connected to the IP-addresses. According to the prosecutor it is not against the law to share copyrighted works for personal use, and an IP-address is not enough evidence to identify a person.
New Zealand Prime Minister John Key has apologized to Kim Dotcom after a report from the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security found that the government illegally monitored the Megaupload founder. The Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) carried out surveillance on Dotcom, but did not check out his residency status, instead relying on incorrect information supplied by the police.
Kim Dotcom is determined to put the major music labels out of business with Megabox. At the same time he promises to give artists full control over their own work and a healthy revenue stream. Today Dotcom released a video on the making of Megabox which unveils some of the service’s features. The video also shows “The Black Keys,” “Rusko,” “Two Fingers” and “Will.i.am” as exclusive artists.
Court documents have revealed how information supplied by New Zealand’s Organised and Financial Crime Agency led to Kim Dotcom and his associates being illegally monitored by GCSB, the Kiwi spy agency comparable to the United States’ CIA. Today a High Court judge expressed concern at the situation, with Dotcom’ legal team calling for an independent inquiry into the fiasco. Meanwhile, pressure continues to mount on Prime Minister John Key as it’s revealed the government issued an information suppression order.
Mediacom, one of the larger Internet providers in the United States, has not joined the controversial six-strikes anti-piracy scheme set to start later this year. But that doesn’t mean Mediacom customers can pirate without consequences, on the contrary. The Internet provider rigorously terminates the Internet access of subscribers who receive two DMCA notifications and after a third notice customers are permanently disconnected and banned for life.
As part of a case between several computer media companies and the organization responsible for copying levies, the Dutch Supreme Court is set to seek the advice of the European Court of Justice concerning the right to make private copies. Currently it is considered acceptable for Dutch citizens to download copyrighted material for personal use, even if that content comes from an illicit source such as file-sharing networks. A ruling in the wrong direction could change all of that.
The Pirate Party movement reached a new milestone yesterday with the world’s first elected Pirate Mayor being voted into office in the Swiss town of Eichberg. With an overwhelming 63 percent of the total vote, Alex Arnold defeated two candidates from the political establishment. The 31-year old software programmer is eager to steer the small Swiss town towards a prosperous future.
The top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent, ‘Resident Evil: Retribution’ tops the chart this week, followed by ‘Men in Black 3′. ‘Prometheus’ completes the top three.
New Zealand Prime Minister John Key announced today that he has ordered an inquiry by the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security into the conduct of government spies leading up to the arrests of Kim Dotcom and his co-defendants. The GCSB is the Kiwi equivalent of the CIA and is forbidden by law to conduct surveillance on New Zealand citizens or permanent residents in the country. Nevertheless, the bureau helped the U.S. by spying on Kim Dotcom, Bram van der Kolk, and their families.
January this year the U.S. Government destroyed Megaupload, but founder Kim Dotcom is a not done with the file-hosting business yet and is preparing to come back with a vengeance. The coding work for the new Megaupload is nearly finished, the servers have been ordered, and investors are lining up. A return of the file-hosting site appears to be looming.
When the first Pirate Party was founded, it was with the realization that activism alone had come to the end of the road. Everybody was discussing net liberty issues and how they were being restricted by the copyright industry – everybody except the politicians. We needed to take the fight to these politicians. But how?
Earlier this week, file-sharing related news was dominated by a set of stats compiled by Musicmetric. The company said that in the first six months of 2012 it monitored 405 million music releases downloaded using BitTorrent. But while huge piracy levels are regularly touted by recording labels, completely legal BitTorrent downloads are growing at an impressive rate. In the first half of the year at least 124 million licensed and legal downloads were enabled by BitTorrent Inc.
Downloading files via BitTorrent is about as public as file-sharing gets, and it’s safe to say that most popular BitTorrent swarms are being monitored one way or the other. To protect the privacy of its users BitTorrent Inc. therefore decided to randomize the peer-id uTorrent users display to other peers and the tracker. While the new feature makes it more difficult to track the download habits of individual users, IP-addresses still remain public and trackable.
The Congressional International Anti-Piracy Caucus has just released its 2012 International Piracy Watch List. In addition to countries such as China, Russia and Ukraine, this year Italy and Switzerland make fresh appearances in the list. Both countries are accused of not doing enough to combat online infringement with the latter allegedly proving itself as a “magnet for rogue sites.”
The dispute between file-hosting service Hotfile and Warner Bros, where the latter is accused of taking down content they don’t hold the copyrights to, is heating up. The court has accepted a brief filed by the EFF who argue that the automated takedown requests of the movie company represent a threat to free speech. Warner Bros quickly replied and disputes that computers are more accurate than humans, arguing that broad automated takedown systems are not incompatible with the DMCA law.
It is looking increasingly unlikely that the world’s largest entertainment companies will be able to recover any significant amount of money from the individuals convicted in the Pirate Bay trial. After a movie studio moved last month to have Pirate Bay co-founder Fredrik Neij made bankrupt, former Pirate Bay financier and multi-millionaire businessman Carl Lundström has filed for bankruptcy under his own steam. The focus of the studios now falls on former site spokesman Peter Sunde.
Millions of BitTorrent users are unknowingly DDoSing websites because ‘publishers’ of popular torrents mistakenly add website URLs as trackers. The DDoSes drag websites down and their operators have very few options to mitigate these ‘attacks’. But, thanks to a new BitTorrent protocol enhancement this is about to change. This week Vuze becomes the first client to add support for DDoS protection alongside calls from one of the “victims” for other developers to follow suit.
In an unprecedented data breach, tens of thousands of usernames and passwords from large private BitTorrent tracker RevTT have been leaked onto the Internet. The attackers, who call themselves Afghanistan Hackers, leaked the user/pass combinations via The Pirate Bay. The initial response from RevTT was to censor all discussion of the data breach, even as hundreds – possibly thousands – of accounts were being used without their owners’ permission.
Julia Schramm, a prominent board member of the German Pirate Party, had success in scoring a lucrative book deal and finally had her work published this week. Nothing out of the ordinary there, if it wasn’t for the fact that Schramm and her publisher are now clamping down on book pirates. Dropbox removed a copy of Schramm’s book after it received a DMCA take-down request today and another copy hosted on the Pirate Party’s own site also vanished into thin air.
This week a court has been hearing how a group of movie and TV show pirates ran a so-called ‘Scene’ topsite. The individuals, mainly employees of ISPs in Finland, allegedly hid their operation inside their company’s networks and rerouted monitoring software so that the existence of the server wouldn’t be uncovered.
In the coming months U.S. Internet providers will begin to warn and punish alleged copyright infringers. The “six strikes” plan is the result of a deal between the MPAA, RIAA and several large ISPs. While the parties involved have described the scheme as fair and balanced, University of Idaho Law Professor Annemarie Bridy has her concerns. In a new report she points out that the copyright alert system lacks transparency, favors copyright holders, and that procedural fairness is hard to find.
A new report reveals that when it comes to worldwide unauthorized BitTorrent downloads, users in the United States are the most prolific, followed by those in the UK, Italy and Canada. When zooming in on the UK, citizens from Manchester download the most per head, with those from the capital beaten into a lowly 20th place. Interestingly the world’s most downloaded artist is very happy with his record, as is the UK’s number one, who’s filling venues despite 80% of his fans paying nothing for his music.
The top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent, ‘Men in Black 3′ tops the chart this week, followed by ‘Prometheus’. ‘Snow White and the Huntsman’ completes the top three.
Gottfrid Svartholm has been officially detained under suspicion of hacking into a Swedish IT company connected to the country’s tax authorities. Agreeing with the prosecutor’s request the Nacka District Court said Friday that the Pirate Bay co-founder should be detained for another two weeks to enable a thorough investigation to take place. Gottfrid denies all charges.
Vytas Simanavicius, president of Lithuanian anti-piracy outfit LANVA, is suspected of drug trading or unlawful possession of illegal narcotic substances in high quantities. Details on the investigation were made public by the police this week with local news sources identifying the LANVA boss as the suspect. Simanavicius, who earlier partnered with Microsoft to sue a prominent BitTorrent tracker, faces up to eight years in prison.
The Pirate Bay turns nine years old today, a truly remarkable achievement considering the history of the site. What started out in 2003 as a fun project of a small group of friends turned into one of the largest websites on the Internet. The site has become a global icon; hated by Hollywood and other entertainment industries, but loved by millions of file-sharers.
With the so-called “six strikes” scheme just around the corner in the United States, one could be forgiven for thinking that the major recording labels are satisfied with their anti-piracy progress. But one major management company appears to want to extract just that little bit more from alleged file-sharers. In emails being sent out to subscribers via their ISPs, account holders are being asked for settlements, not for many thousands of dollars, but just $20 cash.
A few days ago Demonoid showed the first signs of life in weeks when the domain’s nameservers were updated. Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean that the site is preparing to make a comeback. The site’s tech admin informs TorrentFreak that the Demonoid crew is “not looking into putting the site back up at the moment.” However, the troubled BitTorrent site is not giving up entirely just yet.
Months after the Megaupload raids and arrests the fate of the site’s user data is still unclear. The final negotiation round between the involved parties just went bust with Megaupload’s defense team holding the US Attorneys Office responsible. “They favor the Hollywood Oligopoly over innocent consumers who lost access to their data,” Megaupload lawyer Ira Rothken told TorrentFreak.
It’s been a long time coming but today the controversial French ‘Hadopi’ anti-piracy law has claimed its first scalp. After his account was connected to a series of previous infringements, a 40 year-old man was summoned to court today. Despite a third-party admitting that the music piracy in question was carried out by them and not the accused, the court still decided to fine the account holder.
A crucial ruling in one of the ongoing BitTorrent lawsuits in the United States has delivered a clear win for open Wi-Fi operators. Among other things, California Judge Phyllis Hamilton ruled that Internet subscribers are not required to secure their wireless networks to prevent outsiders from pirating movies. In other words, people can’t be held liable for the alleged infringements of other people on their network.
This week millions of Brits sat down to watch the start of a new series of Dragons’ Den on the BBC. As usual, a handful of budding entrepreneurs put their businesses before five captains of industry in the hope of securing investment for their company. One such business, SendMyBag, was slated by the Dragons as “easily copied”, but now in an interesting twist the delivery service is having entire pages from a competitor’s website removed from Google due to a copyright dispute over a single image.
The most recent step in the never-ending Thomas-Rasset music piracy case occurred today with the US Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit ruling in favor of the RIAA. In its ruling the court decided that the outcome of the first trial in 2007 was indeed correct, and that Thomas-Rasset owes $222,000 to the major music labels.
For a minute we got excited. Apple approved two BitTorrent Apps in recent weeks, suggesting that the company had lifted its ban on file-sharing applications. But today came the inevitable disappointment. Apple just informed one of the developers that it made a mistake during the approval process, and the company is about to pull his BitTorrent app from the App Store.
After being deported from Cambodia yesterday Pirate Bay co-founder Gottfrid Svatholm is now back on Swedish soil. The big question now concerns the motivations of the authorities in having him brought back to Sweden. It now seems almost certain that they want Gottfrid for more than just the Pirate Bay case. TorrentFreak is informed that upon his arrival the 27-year-old was immediately charged by police in connection with another alleged crime.
Google has quietly expanded its list of censored search phrases with the addition of The Pirate Bay’s domain names. The blacklist prevents popular keywords from appearing in Google’s Instant and Autocomplete search services, while the pages themselves remain indexed. Although Google understands that there is no silver bullet to stop online copyright infringement, the search giant is convinced that the steps they’ve taken could help to decrease piracy.
The top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent, ‘Men in Black 3′ tops the chart this week, followed by ‘Snow White and the Huntsman’. ’6 Bullets’ completes the top three.
It’s almost two weeks since Gottfrid Svartholm was arrested in Cambodia but despite dozens of news headlines and stories published around the world, not one has been able to explain exactly what is happening to him and what his ultimate fate might be. A Flattr programmer and close friend of Gottfrid’s from Cambodia tried to find out by visiting the country’s counter terrorist department and holding face to face meetings with Swedish ambassador Anne Höglund. Here is his story.
Every week copyright holders send out millions of takedown notices to websites all across the Internet. While the majority of these claims are legitimate, a healthy percentage are not. These “errors” can cause serious harm to the public, but the senders are never held responsible for their mistakes. Perhaps it’s time to punish repeat senders of bogus takedown notices?
The MPAA and file-hosting service Hotfile are ramping up their battle in court. In a new filing the movie studios back up their request to shut Hotfile down, describing the company as the most blatant inducer of copyright infringement ever to appear before a court in an online piracy case. In response the file-hosting service accuses the MPAA of foul play and points out that it’s merely a service provider.
After being detained nine days ago there are now signs that Pirate Bay founder Gottfrid Svartholm will be returning to the place he once called home. Since there are no direct flights from Cambodia to Sweden he will first make a stopover in Bangkok, Thailand. In the meantime. Svartholm’s mother has been speaking for the first time about her son’s plight, criticizing Swedish authorities for withholding information and failing to look after her son’s interests.
Almost nine months on from the raids that took down Megaupload and bizarrely some of the world’s biggest record labels still think that the site is hosting infringing content. In a clear sign that anti-piracy companies aren’t bothering to carry out even the most rudimentary checks before they send DMCA notices, Google is receiving daily takedown demands not only for Megaupload, but also Demonoid, BTjunkie, and other dead file-sharing services.
Ever since the inception of the App Store, Apple has notoriously banned all apps related to BitTorrent. However, those who conduct a search for BitTorrent in the App Store today will be surprised to see that Apple returns two search results. One app allows users to control the mufti-platform BitTorrent client Transmission and the other one does the same for uTorrent. This begs the question, did Apple lift its BitTorrent ban?
The arrest of Pirate Bay co-founder Gottfrid Svartholm last week resulted in much speculation about the motives and forces driving the action. In most scenarios it was assumed that Svartholm was arrested for his role in The Pirate Bay, but this turns out to be untrue. Sources confirmed to TorrentFreak that Svartholm is being held at the interior ministry’s counter terrorism department in connection with the alleged hacking of a Swedish IT company and the subsequent leak of thousands of tax numbers.
According to statistics released yesterday, rightsholders identified a total of 3 million IP addresses in the past two years and France’s Hadopi anti-piracy agency deemed just over a third worthy of receiving a ‘first strike’ warning. Less than 10% of these account holders went on to receive a second warning and just 0.34% of those went on to the third strike phase. In what is being framed as a victory by Hadopi, just 0.0012% of those who received a first strike have been referred to the courts.
BitTorrent Inc. released a native uTorrent client for Android smartphones and tablet computers today. This is the first official BitTorrent client released by the uTorrent team that works on mobile devices, a relatively underserved market of BitTorrent users. The new release allows users to search for torrents online, download files directly to any Android device, and supports RSS feeds.
Ever since the arrest last week of Pirate Bay co-founder Gottfrid Svartholm, there has been the usual speculation of who in the United States or Sweden ‘paid off’ Cambodia to make the move. Of course, with no supporting evidence claims that such a deal exists can be brushed off as pure fantasy. But today, in another one of those unusual political coincidences, Cambodian officials announced the “strengthening of bilateral ties” with Sweden – along with a $59 million aid package sweetener.
A considerable decrease in instances of alleged illegal file-sharing after a 3 strikes regime was implemented in New Zealand has resulted in the government refusing to change the prices righthsolders pay to send warnings. Due to rightsholders’ reluctance to send many at this price, ISPs are being denied the benefits of economies of scale associated with processing large amounts of notices. As a result they are out of pocket and in one instance spending four times more than the amount they recover.
Anti-piracy groups are monitoring millions of BitTorrent users every year. Whether their end-game is to warn, threaten or sue, all public BitTorrent trackers are populated with companies that harvest IP-addresses. A new paper published on these monitoring activities describes the variety of techniques being employed, and shows that P2P-blocklists offer little protection.
Following his arrest last week, it has now been confirmed that Gottfrid Svartholm will be deported from Cambodia. Following a meeting this morning with Swedish authorities, Cambodia’s deputy police commissioner said a decision was taken to kick the Pirate Bay co-founder out of the country. “Wherever he goes, we don’t know,” he said.
Next week the Dutch will elect their national parliament for the coming four years, and for the second time the local Pirate Party is on the ballot. According to most polls the Pirates have a decent chance of securing at least one seat, a milestone for the movement as it would be the first democratically chosen Pirate in a national parliament. One of the main goals of the Pirates is to fight increased censorship and the growing influence of the copyright lobby.
With the destruction of The Pirate Bay seemingly an impossible mission for the time being, seeing that the site’s former operators serve their sentences appears to be the next best thing for the authorities. Following the unlikely news last week that site co-founder Gottfrid Svartholm had been arrested in Cambodia, a country rarely associated with its interest in intellectual property issues, it will perhaps be of interest that President Obama’s trade ambassador was in Cambodia on that very day.
The top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent, ‘Snow White and the Huntsman’ tops the chart this week, followed by ‘Dark Shadows’. ‘Men in Black 3′ completes the top three.
Following the arrest of Gottfrid Svartholm this week it has now been confirmed that Cambodian police acted on a request from the Swedish government. Since there is no extradition treaty between the two countries Cambodian authorities say they are now considering their options on how to deal with the situation. Today TorrentFreak spoke with someone who was processed through the Cambodian deportation system to see what could lie in store for the Pirate Bay co-founder.
After being tipped off by the MPAA the feds arrested four members of the prominent BitTorrent release group IMAGiNE earlier this year, all of which have now plead guilty. Jeramiah Perkins of Portsmouth was the last to admit to copyright infringement charges this week. Along with his co-defendants from the now-defunct piracy release group, Perkins faces up to 5 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
Pirate Bay founder Gottfrid Svartholm has been arrested in the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh. Svartholm, known online by his nickname Anakata, was sentenced to one year in jail for his involvement in The Pirate Bay but has been missing for some time. Svartholm was wanted internationally but exact details as to why he was arrested have not yet been made public.
One of the world’s leading Pirate Bay proxy sites has been battling a crippling DDoS attack this week. Since Wednesday, the reverse proxy service operated by the UK Pirate Party has been under assault, rendering the service inaccessible to many of its users. The site they aim to facilitate access to – The Pirate Bay itself – has also been under attack. Both sites are fighting back and are determined to come out on top.
Academic researchers have published information on the individuals and groups who upload torrent files to The Pirate Bay. The data reveals that most torrent files are first seeded from U.S. connections, with Comcast and Road Runner being the top Internet providers. The researchers also reveal the top 100 uploaders to The Pirate Bay along with their alleged whereabouts.
A major cyberlocker described by the MPAA / RIAA-affiliated International Intellectual Property Alliance as an “infringing distribution hub” appears to be in serious trouble. Filesonic, previously listed among the top 10 largest file-sharing sites in the world, was badly affected by the Megaupload shutdown and lost huge amounts of traffic in 2012. During the last 48 hours it simply ceased to function.
Following the news that the seized domains of streaming sports site Rojadirecta will be returned after the U.S. government backed away from a court battle, the fortunes of another streaming site admin could hardly be more different. Since his arrest in February and the seizure of nine of his domains, Yonjo Quiroa has been detained without bail. This month he pleaded guilty and will probably receive between 6 and 12 months in custody. After that he will be kicked out of the country.
The hugely popular sports streaming and download site Rojadirecta has won its battle with the U.S. More than one and a half years after the feds took the domain names of the Spanish company the authorities have now dropped their lawsuit, meaning that the domains will soon be returned. Later today Rojadirecta will become available again on its .com domain, marking yet another shameful episode in the overbroad U.S. war on online copyright infringement.
Two prominent anti-piracy companies that are expected to participate in the U.S. six-strikes anti-piracy scheme are already monitoring thousands of torrent files. Statistics obtained by TorrentFreak show that BayTSP and Peer Media have been increasing their activities in recent months. The BitTorrent activity of these two companies is three times greater than that generated by all customers of a smaller ISP such as Sonic.net
Kim Dotcom has yet another reason to celebrate this morning. The High Court in New Zealand has freed up $4.83 million from a government bond seized from the Internet entrepreneur when he was arrested back in January. The cash will go towards Dotcom’s New Zealand legal expenses to date and contribute to his future fighting fund. The Megaupload founder will also be able to sell some of the vehicles from his luxury car collection.
Interesting news coming out of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) shows that maybe BitTorrent pirates have a point when it comes to not waiting for TV shows. In an attempt to dissuade Aussie punters from torrenting the show, ABC has announced it will offer this weekend’s new Doctor Who episode on its iview service as soon as it finishes airing in the UK.
Maxxo is a relatively young cloud hosting and synchronization service and one that’s not afraid to launch a disruptive feature. Starting this week the company officially adds support for BitTorrent downloads, allowing users to download torrent files quickly and anonymously. When BitTorrent downloads are completed the files automatically sync to all connected devices.
Several weeks ago Kim Dotcom informed the world that Megaupload would be back, bigger and better than ever. Today, in a series of announcements he’s provided more intriguing details about the new service. “We are building a massive global network,” Dotcom revealed, while adding that hosters will all be able to connect to the network to add servers and bandwidth – providing they’re not in the United States that is. “I am going to turn this world upside down,” Dotcom warned.
One third of all torrents uploaded to The Pirate Bay point to malware or scams, researchers report. While Pirate Bay moderators are usually quick to remove suspect torrents they can’t prevent millions of people from downloading these fake files. To counter this threat the researchers have published TorrentGuard, a tool that allows users to identify fake torrents. The Pirate Bay and several large public trackers are eager to collaborate with the researchers to optimize and implement the new technology.
The MPAA-funded anti-piracy group behind the prosecution of UK streaming links site SurfTheChannel has claimed another prominent victim. UKNova, which has been in existence for almost a decade, has a strict ‘ethical’ policy which forbids users from uploading any material which is available to buy, but that didn’t stop the Federation Against Copyright Theft targeting the site. UKNova will now disable their torrent trackers, depriving thousands of expats access to the TV shows from home they know and love.
The top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent, ‘The Avengers’ tops the chart this week, followed by ‘The Dictator’. ‘The Cold Light Of Day’ completes the top three.
I was on a debate panel in Edinburgh, UK this week; a panel about the copyright monopoly conflict. I have had this feeling in my gut for some time, but it became clear on this panel: we’re going to be debating the same topics with the same arguments for another 40 years.
Today it’s been one month since Demonoid was driven offline by a massive DDoS attack. In the weeks that followed things went from bad to worse and the site’s Ukrainian hosting provider eventually pulled the plug on the site following a request from Mexican authorities. Despite the legal trouble, many of the site’s former users are refusing to give up hope that Demonoid will live up to its reputation as the comeback kid.
Despite the ever increasing threat of online piracy, Hollywood is allocating less money to their flagship anti-piracy outfit. Tax records reveal that in a period of three years the major movie studios cut their payments to the MPAA in half. As a direct result the budget of the movie industry group reached a new low of $49.6 million, causing wage and legal fee payouts to plummet.
From today, file-sharers in Norway can download pretty much whatever they like without facing any consequences. Pirates were effectively given the green light after the only law firm in the country permitted to monitor file-sharing networks lost its license and were denied a new one.
The massive wave of DMCA takedowns sent by rightsholders to Google in recent months is growing at an astonishing rate. During the past month the number of takedown requests received by the search giant doubled to almost 1.5 million URLs per week. To put that into perspective, exactly one year ago weekly URL takedowns numbered just 131,577 per week, an increase of 1,137%.
Movie company Yellow Bird has asked the Stockholm District Court to declare Pirate Bay founder Fredrik Neij bankrupt. Neij, who currently lives in Asia, owes the movie studio nearly $1 million in damages for his role in operating the BitTorrent site. Yellow Bird hopes to recoup some of this money through the bankruptcy, but Neij informs TorrentFreak that there’s not much to take.
Kim Dotcom makes no secret of the fact that he holds U.S. President Barack Obama personally responsible for the destruction of Megaupload. The outspoken Internet phenom is determined to uncover the political scandal behind Megaupload’s demise and wants Obama to be voted out of office. But what would Dotcom do if he was the most powerful man in the world? Let’s find out.
“Hollywood is keeping piracy alive by failing to make content available legally.” It’s an often heard argument, but one that’s not “borne out by the facts” according to the MPAA. However, the “facts” presented in a rebuttal by the movie industry group are twisted and show utter contempt for those trying to do the right thing.
A German law firm will hit a new low next week, even for companies engaged in the file-sharing settlement letter business. The company says that from September 1st it will begin publishing the details of individuals it claims have infringed their clients’ copyrights by sharing hardcore pornography online. To make matters worse, they’re threatening to target churches, police stations and Arabs first. Neither the Pirate Party nor Anonymous are happy and now the latter are threatening action of their own.
After torrent sites and streaming portals, U.S. authorities have now taken down three websites offering pirated Android apps. The FBI operation, which also involved police from France and the Netherlands, is the first to incorporate domain name seizure of sites offering mobile apps. It is unclear at this point whether any of the website operators were arrested during today’s actions.
The CEO of games giant Ubisoft has revealed an interesting parallel in the company’s business models. Speaking at Gamescom this week, Yves Guillemot said that around 95% of players of the company’s boxed PC games are pirates. Equally, of all players of the company’s free-to-play games who can voluntarily part with cash to obtain a better experience, 95% choose not to pay a dime. Nevertheless, the latter model can be a great opportunity to beat piracy.
Due to court imposed blockades millions of Pirate Bay users rely on proxy websites to access their favorite BitTorrent site. Approximately 5% of all Pirate Bay users now visit the site through a proxy address, and thanks to “The Pirate Patch” app they can now do so using the familiar thepiratebay.se and .org domains.
The chief executive of one of Australia’s biggest media companies has come out all guns blazing in an attack on Internet piracy and those who carry it out. Speaking at the Australian International Movie Convention, News Limited CEO Kim Williams described movie downloading as “scumbag theft” carried out by “copyright bandits” and called for new legislation to protect the entertainment industries. “The scale of this theft makes the London riots of last year look like children stealing [candy] from a shop,” he said.
The battle between the owners of the currently offline Oron cyberlocker and adult movie studio Liberty Media continues, despite a judge ordering a $550,000 settlement. Lawyers for Oron have asked the court to unfreeze the company’s assets so it can take the case to appeal, but Liberty Media has objected, noting that the cyberlocker still hasn’t given a full accounting for its worldwide assets. Furthermore, the studio’s lawyers accuse Oron of laundering money through Hong Kong and converting almost $3m into gold bullion.
File-hosting service RapidShare admits that the file-hosting business has its challenges, but says that linking sites are the real problem. The company advised the U.S. Government last week that law enforcement should crack down on these websites, instead of writing new legislation that may stifle innovation. To address these piracy concerns, RapidShare’s Chief Legal Officer Daniel Raimer is meeting with technology leaders and law enforcement at the Technology Policy Institute forum in Aspen today.
The top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent, ‘The Avengers’ tops the chart this week, followed by ‘The Hunger Games’. ‘The Dictator’ completes the top three.
For tens of millions of BitTorrent users, uTorrent is the immediate client of choice. However, a recent decision by its creators to include adware in the client prompted some users to question their loyalty to the product. After numerous reader requests for an overview of other BitTorrent clients, here is a rundown of ten possible alternatives.
After several turbulent weeks with DDoS attacks, the shutdown of its servers and a criminal investigation into the site’s owners, trouble continues for the Demonoid BitTorrent tracker. After the site’s domain names were put up for sale last week, domain market place Sedo has now delisted them citing “legal issues.” As time progresses the hope of a comeback for what was once one of the largest BitTorrent communities continues to fade.
Police in Sweden are warning Internet users not to send money to criminals trying to extort money from alleged file-sharers. The sophisticated scam began when unsuspecting cell phone users browsed an infected website which somehow extracted information from their devices. This was followed up by a mailed allegation of copyright infringement and a cash demand for between 90 and 195 euros to be paid into a foreign bank account. Swedish Antipiratbyran say the scheme is nothing to do with them.
The latest RIAA tax filing shows that the revenue generated by the anti-piracy group has reached a new low. In just two years the membership dues from music labels have been cut in half and have now sunk to below $30 million a year. While the group has 72 employees, payouts to the top two executives including CEO Cary Sherman amount to more than $3 million, some 25% of the total wage bill.
One of the founders of The Pirate Bay is this month engaged in yet another battle. Fredrik Neij currently lives in Laos, Asia, and he and his wife are expecting their third child very soon. However, they need to cross the border to Thailand to give birth which is proving problematic – the Embassy of Sweden in Bangkok has revoked Neij’s passport.
Today we are beginning to see the first signs of Google’s announced punishment of “pirate” websites. The changes are resulting in lower search rankings for many file-sharing sites, but that doesn’t seem to bother The Pirate Bay. They are, however, disappointed that Google is giving in to the demands of the entertainment industries. The owner of fellow BitTorrent site isoHunt has gone a step further with a call for protest against antitrust bullying and censorship.
The bid to have Kim Dotcom extradited to the United States suffered a significant setback today. US authorities had insisted there was no need for them to reveal the evidence they hold against the Megaupload founder. But today a New Zealand judge upheld an earlier decision and ordered the US to reveal the evidence they are relying on to have Dotcom and his associates shipped to the United States, including details of covert operations and confidential discussions with rights holders.
BitTorrent Inc, the parent company of uTorrent, is backpedaling on its decision to force advertisements on users of the popular file-sharing client. While the upcoming uTorrent release will still include “sponsored torrents”, users will have the option to turn these off if they don’t wish to see them. In a statement the company stresses that they will continue to experiment with new revenue models to support the development and innovation of file-sharing software.
The Hollywood-backed Federation Against Copyright Theft was the driving force behind the four-year jail sentence handed down to former SurfTheChannel owner Anton Vickerman yesterday. The organization conducts its own investigations and then hands its findings to police and other authorities, but just how much can they discover about targets such as Vickerman? Internal FACT documents obtained by TorrentFreak show the anti-piracy group go to scary lengths to delve deep into people’s private lives.
In a submission to the U.S. Copyright Tzar the MPAA and RIAA characterized Kim Dotcom and his colleagues as manipulative, “wealthy and arrogant.” According to the MegaUpload founder this language is a sign of weakness. “There is no need to sway public opinion because everyone can see how the MPAA and RIAA are corrupting the system by infiltrating their own people into key government positions,” he says.
The owner of TV streaming links site SurfTheChannel was sentenced to four years jail-time at Newcastle Crown Court today. Anton Vickerman was previously found guilty of conspiracy to defraud for “facilitating” copyright infringement . The landmark case follows a sting operation by the MPAA, who partnered with the UK Federation Against Copyright Theft to obtain evidence against the site operator.
After holding out on a Hollywood request to block a file-sharing site, Virgin Media has finally been forced to comply. The UK ISP said it would only block the Newzbin2 Usenet indexing site if ordered to do so by a court. Now, more than a year after the High Court told ISP BT to initiate a blockade against the movie industry target, Virgin Media has been ordered to do the same.
Late 2011 a site appeared claiming to have tracked the sharing habits of more than 51 million BitTorrent users. The site, YouHaveDownloaded, went down a storm in the months that followed but is sadly no longer functional. However, what that Russian site did in the winter is now being matched by a Polish site this summer. So what did “you” download during the past few months? ScanEye believes it knows.
The MPAA and RIAA have submitted their policy recommendations to Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator Victoria Espinel. In a joint submission the groups explain that despite the broad availability of legal content, online piracy is still rampant. The groups say that services including The Pirate Bay, Rapidgator, Turbobit, DepositFiles and PutLocker are piracy havens, and they urge the U.S. Government to help them quash these sites.
The top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent, ‘The Hunger Games’ tops the chart this week, followed by ‘The Dictator’. ‘Battleship’ completes the top three.
When making laws, there are nominally quality criteria that need to be met for each new law. Are these quality criteria really fulfilled for the copyright monopoly?
While it’s undoubtedly been a turbulent couple of weeks for Demonoid, its loyal users still had hope that one day the site might return. However, today the chances of that happening appear to have been cut from an optimistic 50/50 to much, much less. All key Demonoid domains are now up for sale to the highest bidder, signaling what could be the start of the end of an era
With well over 125 million active users a month uTorrent is by far the most used BitTorrent client. Because of its success the software is also the main source of revenue for San Francisco based parent company BitTorrent Inc. It is estimated that the company currently generates between $15 and $20 million in annual revenue but this figure is expected to rise after it was quietly announced that uTorrent will become ad-supported.
Two individuals who worked with former TVShack admin Richard O’Dwyer on his now-defunct streaming links site helped ICE Homeland Security Investigations to identify him. The dealings of the unnamed individuals, one who did technical work on the site and the other who acted as a moderator, are listed in U.S. court documents obtained by TorrentFreak.
Google announced today that it will lower the search engine rankings of websites that receive a high number of DMCA takedown requests, independent of whether the linked content is lawful or not. The algorithm change is the result of extensive lobbying efforts by Hollywood and the major music labels, and could severely degrade the rankings of websites such as The Pirate Bay, FilesTube, and even YouTube.
This week’s hearing into the January raid against Kim Dotcom’s New Zealand mansion has turned up interesting new evidence today. Under questioning from a defense lawyer, a senior police officer has admitted that top New Zealand officers and members of the FBI watched the raid live via video link. Only adding to the intrigue is the revelation that a secret government unit were present at the pre-raid meeting.
The much-discussed U.S. six strikes anti-piracy scheme has been delayed until later this year. The main question on people’s minds is why. Is it because of the SOPA and PIPA revolts? Are the Internet providers having second thoughts? Not according to Advisory Board member Gigi Sohn, who points out that finding the right “language” for the warnings is one of the delaying factors.
After a few days of no comment, the actors behind the raid and closure of Demonoid have stepped forward. The IFPI and Interpol say they worked together with the Attorney General of Mexico and Ukrainian police to shutter the popular file-sharing service. In addition to equipment seized in Ukraine, they have now confirmed “a number of arrests” and seizures of assets in Mexico.
New data published by the Google-backed Measurement Lab gives a unique insight into the BitTorrent throttling practices of ISPs all over the world. In the U.S. and Australia most large ISPs limit less than 10 percent of BitTorrent transfers. In the UK and Canada on the other hand, some providers interfere with up to three-quarters of all BitTorrent traffic.
The raid on Demonoid’s servers and the reports that a criminal investigation has been started against the site is causing some panic among the site’s users. Was the user data encrypted? Can the authorities see what people have downloaded? Without official comment from Demonoid’s admin these questions are hard to answer, but a massive legal operation aimed at the site’s users seems highly unlikely.
For more than six months there have been claims and counterclaims about what happened in January when New Zealand police raided the mansion of Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom. Now video of the event has been released to the public and it includes helicopters, armed officers, dog units and multiple police vehicles – Hollywood style.
A U.S District Court has ordered the Oron cyberlocker to settle its copyright infringement dispute with adult studio Liberty Media. The file-hosting site claimed that settlement negotiations had never been finalized but yesterday the court decided otherwise. Oron will now have to pay Liberty Media at least $550,000 with additional attorney’s fees to be decided at a later date. In the meantime, Oron’s service remains down.
The Internet Archive has just enriched the BitTorrent ecosystem with well over a million torrent files, and that’s just the start of “universal access to all knowledge.” The torrents link to almost a petabyte of data and all files are being seeded by the Archive’s servers. Founder Brewster Kahle told TorrentFreak that turning BitTorrent into a distributed preservation system for the Internet is the next step.
Following the news yesterday that Demonoid had been shut down by Ukrainian police, today brings further woes for the site. According to a source at the site’s former webhost, the owners of Demonoid are now the subject of a criminal investigation and prosecution in Mexico after one of the site’s admins was arrested there last year.
Earlier today Kim Dotcom told a New Zealand court how police assaulted him during the raid on his Coatesville mansion in January this year. The Megaupload founder said after hearing a commotion downstairs he fled to a safe room and waited to be found but was eventually assaulted by the police. “And then they were all over me,” he said. “I had a punch to the face, boots kicking me down to the floor.”
The nightmare week for Demonoid has just reached a huge crescendo, with news coming out of Ukraine that following a massive DDoS attack the site has now been busted by local authorities. Those looking for a U.S. connection to the raid won’t be disappointed – a source in the country’s Interior Ministry says that the action was scheduled to coincide with Deputy Prime Minister Valery Khoroshkovsky’s trip to the United States.
Following on from an MPAA memo that leaked yesterday, TorrentFreak has obtained an even more revealing document which shows that the movie group is experiencing problems finding “allies” to support the extradition of UK student Richard O’Dwyer. According to the “communication plan” the MPAA is recruiting “third party surrogates” to write op-eds and blog posts which back their position.
The top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent, ‘Battleship’ tops the chart this week, followed by ‘The Hunger Games’. ‘American Reunion’ completes the top three.
A leaked “memo” from the MPAA shows how movie industry insiders are being briefed to respond in media interviews on the extradition case of TV-Shack admin Richard O’Dwyer. In the talking points the MPAA describes the UK student as a deliberate criminal while mocking his wardrobe. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, who launched a petition to stop the extradition, is called out as “presumptuous” by the movie industry group.
During recent years, many sites and individuals connected to the alleged streaming of copyrighted movies have found themselves at the mercy of the United States and UK governments. According to the makers of a hard-hitting short film, Richard O’Dwyer, Kim Dotcom, and the admins of NinjaVideo and SurfTheChannel are all victims of the same phenomenon. Are our voted representatives really Political Prostitutes?
In the coming months U.S. Internet providers will begin to warn and punish alleged copyright infringers. The “six strikes” plan is the result of a deal between the MPAA, RIAA and several large ISPs. However, only a small minority of U.S. ISPs are participating and many were never even asked to join. Talking to TorrentFreak, the CEO of Sonic.net argues that it’s not the task of ISPs to police the Internet, and that the entertainment industry should work on improving their business models.
A statement by French Culture Minister Aurelie Filipetti spells bad and possibly fatal news for the country’s “three strikes” anti-piracy scheme. The Minister said that not only is the cost of running Hadopi too great to justify, but the agency has failed to deliver when it comes to developing the availability of legal content. As the final insult, Filipetti said that Internet disconnections are a disproportionate way to deal with infringement.
Hollywood-backed anti-piracy outfit BREIN is going after a former hosting provider of SumoTorrent and demanding compensation for the damages caused by the torrent site. Hosting provider XS Networks previously refused to take the site offline or reveal the identity of the owners unless it was presented with a court order. XS Networks’ lawyer Steven Kroesbergen accuses BREIN of deliberately destroying the company to intimidate other hosting providers.
It’s been nearly a week since Demonoid went down following a huge DDoS attack and still there is no sign that the site will return. If anything, the situation has worsened somewhat. The site’s main domain is now redirecting straight to an ad network serving up malware to unsuspecting visitors.
Porn companies attempting to track down alleged file-sharers with the aim of extracting cash settlements have managed to incur the wrath of judges in both New York and Columbia. In separate ongoing cases, adult studio plaintiffs ordered Comcast and Cablevision to provide them with the identities of alleged BitTorrent users against instructions issued by the court, which in one case were put in place specifically to protect defendants’ rights.
Finnish band Älymystö are furious at local anti-piracy groups after their action forced The Pirate Bay to become blocked by several of the country’s largest Internet providers. The band, which has been around for more than a decade, views BitTorrent sites as a valuable form of promotion. To counter the blockades, Älymystö are now showing their fans how easy it is to circumvent the censorship attempt.
Due to court imposed blockades hundreds of thousands of Pirate Bay users rely on proxy websites to access their favorite BitTorrent site. However, starting three days ago several of the most popular proxies turned evil, only allowing users to download torrents if they agreed to install crapware. The Pirate Bay team is not happy with this move and has threatened to retaliate.
The U.S. Government has accused Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom of conspiracy to defraud , and now two tech giants appear to be having trouble trusting Dotcom as well. Despite faxing over official government-issued ID, he still can’t get Twitter to believe he’s the real deal. Furthermore, Facebook won’t accept ‘Dotcom’ as a valid surname for a personal account. So, inspired by Reddit, we have something that will hopefully do the trick, at least with Twitter.
FileSonic and Oron, two prominent file-hosting services, have been dragged to court by adult entertainment company Flava Works. In a complaint filed at a federal court in Illinois, the cyberlockers are joined by 26 John Doe defendants who stand accused of sharing copyrighted material. These files were also allegedly shared on several other cyberlockers including FileServe, Hotfile and RapidShare.
Hacker Tavis Ormandy has discovered a serious vulnerability in a well-known PC game DRM system. The Google engineer said that after buying a game from Ubisoft he became aware that its “Uplay” browser plug-in might prove problematic. In the early hours of this morning Ormandy confirmed that the add-on allows remote and “wide access” to machines running the DRM, potentially giving malicious attackers free reign to wreak havoc.
The top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent, ‘American Reunion’ tops the chart this week, followed by ‘The Dark Knight Rises’. ‘The Raven’ completes the top three.
Two weeks ago OpenBitTorrent and PublicBitTorrent, the two largest BitTorrent trackers on the Internet, went on strike. The trackers protested BitTorrent Inc.’s unresponsiveness to a protocol improvement proposed by Pirate Bay co-founder Fredrik Neij. Soon after the news broke the BitTorrent developer team sprung into action to address the issue, and as a result the tracker operators have confirmed to TorrentFreak that they will restart their services within a week.
Following the inadvertent leak of several IFPI and RIAA reports this week and our subsequent articles, today we wind up with perhaps the most ironic of the series. It covers a presentation by the IFPI’s head of anti-piracy operations to industry insiders on how to prevent leaks. It explains how individuals gain access to pre-release music, how to set up honey-traps to ensnare them, and also hints at why the UK’s Serious Organized Crime Agency targeted the RnBXclusive blog earlier this year.
Earlier this year the sentences against the Pirate Bay defendants were made final. Aside from prison sentences, they will have to pay damages to the entertainment industries, including €550,000 to several major music labels. The court awarded the damages to compensate artists and rightsholders for their losses. However, it now turns out that artists won’t see a penny of the money, as the labels have allocated it to IFPI to fund new anti-piracy campaigns.
Contrary to the endless lobbying and subsequent defending of the now-dead SOPA and PIPA frameworks, a leaked report shows that earlier this year the RIAA’s Deputy General Counsel admitted that the legislation was “not likely to have been effective tool” for dealing with music piracy. All efforts are now being put behind the “six strikes” plan – but could disconnections for repeat infringers still be on the agenda?
A severe DDoS attack has brought down one of the most famous BitTorrent trackers. Demonoid has been inaccessible to its millions of users for more than a day and is expected to remain offline for quite some time. The tech admin of the troubled BitTorrent tracker told TorrentFreak that the issues at hand are not easy to fix, and suggests that aside from the DDoS there might have been an attack from another angle.
A leaked presentation from the RIAA shows that online file-sharing isn’t the biggest source of illegal music acquisition in the U.S. The confidential data reveals that 65% of all music files are “unpaid” but the vast majority of these are obtained through offline swapping. The report further shows that cyberlockers such as Megaupload are only a marginal source of pirated music.
Grammy award-winning artist Swizz Beatz has publicly defended his role with Megaupload. The U.S. authorities hinted recently they might involve Beatz more in the case, but the rapper/producer seems unfazed. “I’m a fan of music, i’m a fan of people who work hard and I would never be a part of anything that’s taking from artists when I fight so hard to give so much to the artist,” he said in a new interview. “You know what I was doing, I was giving artists 90% of the shit.”
This coming Friday the Opening Ceremony of the 2012 Olympics will be streamed for free in more than one hundred countries, but not in the United States. In the U.S., Olympic live streams will only be available to those who have a paid cable subscription, which excludes millions of people. This restricted access is a hotbed for piracy, but NBC and the IOC are fully prepared to act against Olympic pirates to protect their commercial interests.
A confidential internal report of the music industry outfit IFPI has been inadvertently made available online by the group itself. Penned by their Head of Internet Anti-piracy Operations, the report details the global strategy for the major recording labels of IFPI. Issues covered include everything from torrent sites to cyberlockers, what behavior IFPI expects of Internet service providers, the effectiveness of site blocking, and how pirates are accessing unreleased music from industry sources.
BitTorrent Inc., the parent company of the popular BitTorrent client uTorrent, starts a new series of experiments today in which it will help artists monetize the BitTorrent ecosystem. The company has partnered with the legendary DJ Shadow who agreed to give away exclusive content to BitTorrent users. The free content bundle includes software from advertisers, allowing the artist and BitTorrent to generate revenue from users who opt to install it.
After initially attempting to target around 9,000 individuals, Golden Eye International acting on behalf of pornographic film producer Ben Dover are about to start dumping cash demands on the doorsteps of 2,845 alleged file-sharers in the UK. TorrentFreak has obtained a copy of the letter due to be sent out and it amounts to little more than a demand for cash wrapped up in an ACS:Law-style fishing exercise.
One of the many alleged BitTorrent users to fall victim to copyright trolls in recent years has launched an impressive counterattack against a plaintiff who accused him of downloading an adult movie. Jeff Fantalis of Louisville wants millions of dollars in damages for defamation, emotional distress and invasion of privacy, plus a prominent retraction in a local newspaper. Fantalis further asks the court to rule that porn can’t be copyrighted as it is not a “useful art.”
According to a submission made to the New Zealand government by the major studios, the mere threat of sending out an infringement warning halved movie piracy in less than a month. After years of battling for “3 strikes” the studios haven’t sent out a single warning, but nevertheless insist that to reduce piracy further they’ll have to send out thousands. The recording labels want to do the same at a greatly reduced cost, but the ISPs want to charge four times more than they do now.
The top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent, ‘Wild Bill’ tops the chart this week, followed by ‘American Reunion. ‘The Raven’ completes the top three.
Well, here’s a story we’ve heard before in a flavor we haven’t. The Swedish Young Pirates association had a tent at a local municipal festival, and were handing out free waffles as an attraction. They were targeted with eviction from the festival, not because they weren’t allowed to make food or give things away (they were), but because the traditional festival waffle makers couldn’t get paid anymore.
Last month Google issued warnings to the owners of websites and software which allow users to copy YouTube videos. Now, the developer of RipTunes has discovered that this anti-copying policy has now been carried over to many of the large downloading portals including Download.com and Softpedia. Shockingly, however, Brothersoft is still willing to host the software, but only when the developer pays up.
In probably the most outrageous protest yet against piracy, an author has ripped off her clothes in front of a government palace. Brazilian writer Vanessa de Oliveira shocked the citizens of Lima, Peru, with nearly everything she has. “I’m doing this for my book so it is not pirated anymore anywhere in the world,” the redhead said, adding that her latest publication is based on her experiences bedding nearly 5,000 men.
Several UK Internet providers expanded their blockade of The Pirate Bay this week. Sky Broadband, Virgin Media and TalkTalk are now blocking user access to several IP-addresses the BitTorrent site added in recent weeks. Whether this will have any effect is doubtful. This weekend The Pirate Bay is getting ready to add a new address and meanwhile the hundreds of proxy sites remain accessible.
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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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