This change is expected to go into effect before the end of the month. From then on, Pirate Bay users can only download files through magnet links.

The Pirate Bay team told TorrentFreak that one of the advantages of the transition to a “magnet site” is that it requires relatively little bandwidth to host a proxy site. This is needed, because The Pirate Bay is currently blocked in several countries, and more are bound to follow in the months to come.

Without torrents, the Pirate Bay also becomes extremely portable which makes it possible for people to download a personal backup. As we said before, such a copy would easily fit on a thumb drive. Pirate Bay user “allisfine” was intrigued by this idea and decided to find out how small a copy of the torrents site would be.

“I did a complete snapshot of ALL the Pirate Bay torrents, in case somebody wants to close it or something similarly crazy,” he told TorrentFreak.

Using this script, “allisfine” managed to copy the title, id, file size, seeds, leechers and magnet links of 1,643,194 torrents. Comments were not copied to keep the files as small as possible, and the end result is a full copy of all magnet links (magnet) on The Pirate Bay in a 90 megabytes file, 164 megabytes unzipped.

There is some confusion as to whether the 1,643,194 torrents are indeed a full copy of the site, as The Pirate Bay itself lists 4,199,832 torrents in the footer link on its site. However, the latter stats apply to the number of torrents that are available on several public trackers, The Pirate Bay itself only hosts a fraction of those.

With the release of the copy everyone can now download a personal backup of The Pirate Bay in a few minutes. Although searching the copy isn’t as convenient as using The Pirate Bay itself, there is little doubt that someone else will soon come up with another script that solves this problem.

Recent history has shown that when a site is threatened with shutdown, or censored, the Internet is very quick to come up with a workaround. And with thousands of backups of The Pirate Bay floating around, it will be very hard at this point to get rid of the famous torrent site.

What’s perhaps even more striking is that the greatest arch rival of a billion dollar entertainment industry is nothing more than 164 megabytes of text. Something to think about.

Update: Here’s a copy of 17 million torrents from Bitsnoop.com, pretty much the same format but nicely categorized. It’s only 535 MB.

Source: Download a Copy of The Pirate Bay, It’s Only 90 MB

Today, however, Tribler is more relevant than ever before.

Developed by a team of researchers at Delft University of Technology, the main goal is to come up with a robust implementation of BitTorrent that doesn’t rely on central servers. Instead, Tribler is designed to keep BitTorrent alive, even when all torrent search engines, indexes and trackers are pulled offline.

“Our key scientific quest is facilitating unbounded information sharing,” Tribler leader Dr. Pouwelse tells TorrentFreak.

“We simply don’t like unreliable servers. With Tribler we have achieved zero-seconds downtime over the past six years, all because we don’t rely on shaky foundations such as DNS, web servers or search portals.”

So how does it work?

Like many other BitTorrent clients, Tribler has a search box at the top of the application. However, the search results that appear when users type in a keyword don’t come from a central index. Instead, they come directly from other peers.

Downloading a torrent is also totally decentralized. When a user clicks on one of the search results, the meta-data is pulled in from another peer and the download starts immediately. Tribler is based on the standard BitTorrent protocol and uses regular BitTorrent trackers to communicate with other peers. But, it can also continue downloading when a central tracker goes down.

The same is true for spam control. Where most torrent sites have a team of moderators to delete viruses, malware and fake files, Tribler uses crowd-sourcing to keep the network clean. Content is verified by user generated “channels”, which can be “liked” by others. When more people like a channel, the associated torrents get a boost in the search results.

The latest addition to Tribler is a Wikipedia-style editing system dubbed “Open2Edit,” where users have the option to edit names and descriptions of torrents in public channels. All without a central server, totally decentralized.

According to Dr. Pouwelse, Tribler is fully capable of resisting any pressure from outside, and it will still work when all torrent sites and trackers are gone. It simply can’t be shutdown, blocked or censored, whatever laws politicians may come up with.

“The only way to take it down is to take The Internet down.” Pouwelse told us.

One thing that could theoretically cause issues, is the capability for starting users to find new peers. To be on the safe side the Tribler team is still looking for people who want to act as so called bootstraptribler peers. These users will act as superpeers, who distribute lists of active downloaders.

“Together with software bugs and a code cleanup, that is now our last known weakness,” says Pouwelse.

While the Tribler client only has a few thousand users at the moment, for avid file-sharers it must be a relief to know that it’s out there. No matter what crazy laws may pass in the future, people will always be able to share.

Those who want to give it a spin are welcome download Tribler here. It’s completely Open Source and with a version for Windows, Mac and Linux.

Source: Tribler Makes BitTorrent Impossible to Shut Down

In recent weeks, however, worry about the future has increased drastically among the owners of some of the largest torrent sites. Yesterday, BTjunkie closed its doors for good, and TorrentFreak has learned that at least two other sites in the top 10 have toyed with the same idea.

“There have been talks of shutting our site down, even before BTjunkie did it,” one admin told TorrentFreak on condition of anonymity.

The aggressive actions against MegaUpload – site founder Kim Dotcom was raided by an anti-terrorist squad last month – are frequently mentioned as cause for concern. So much so that several people involved with one of the largest torrent sites on the Internet have already dropped out.

“A couple guys on the staff decided not to be involved anymore with the site after the MegaUpload incident,” the admin told us.

The fact that a German citizen can be arrested in New Zealand upon request from the US authorities signaled that regardless of local laws, people connected to file-sharing sites have become a global target.

“It’s turning into a witch hunt. It is worrying,” said the admin.

The thoughts of this admin are shared by one of the owners of another major torrent site, who told TorrentFreak in private that shutting down has crossed his mind on several occasions.

Things have become more and more complicated in recent weeks. Even those who are as cooperative as possible with copyright holders, by swiftly responding to DMCA takedown requests for example, can’t be entirely sure that they won’t become the next target.

On the other side, however, there are also those who continue undeterred, such as isoHunt.com owner Gary Fung, who is battling in court with the music and movie industries.

“After 6 years of 2 civil lawsuits with MPAA and CRIA, we are still here. None of these events is really new to us. From Lokitorrent to Suprnova, we’ve seen sites we index come and go. And as long as the Free Internet exists, sharing will endure. As will isoHunt,” he says.

Ironically enough, isoHunt’s ongoing legal battle might be what keeps Fung relatively safe. If the authorities planned to launch a criminal investigation against a torrent site it would be strange to pick one that is already involved in a civil lawsuit with a copyright holder.

Besides not being worried about the future, isoHunt’s owner is going on the offensive and is urging the entertainment industries to embrace technology, instead if fighting it.

“Perhaps more than ever, I wish the content industries will wake up to the fact you can’t fight technological progress, that battles maybe won, the war is already lost. Unless Content really starts working with technology to accelerate spread of culture, as the Internet has naturalized it. And make more money than ever in the process,” Fung says.

“Because so-called piracy enabled by the Internet and media consumption is not a zero-sum game, a download does not equal a lost sale, and what pirates really want is not necessarily free as in beer, but free as in speech and convenience.”

isoHunt’s determination to continue operating is shared by Extratorrent‘s admin Sam, whose site became the 5th largest torrent site after BTjunkie folded.

“What happened with MegaUpload is not at all good for the torrent world, but I would say it is impossible to stop the unstoppable. After all, if one site is shut down, a hundred new sites will open,” Sam told TorrentFreak, adding, “We have no plans to shut down,we will continue running as usual.”

Another site that’s not going anywhere is The Pirate Bay, the largest torrent site of all. Although its founders are now very close to serving jail time, the site itself will remain online. In the coming weeks The Pirate Bay will replace .torrent files with magnet links, which makes the site more portable and resilient.

The above shows that the end of BitTorrent is not near, but it’s hard to ignore the changing climate. People who previously saw no problems with running a torrent site are now reconsidering their position. The exact fallout, and whether there will be any newcomers to fill the gaping hole BTjunkie left, will become apparent in the coming months.

Source: Is BitTorrent Done? Major Torrent Sites Consider Shutting Down

The data for our weekly download chart is collected by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are BD/DVDrips unless stated otherwise.

RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.

Source: Top 10 Most Pirated Movies on BitTorrent

The site was never involved in any legal action, and to keep it this way the site’s operators decided to shut the site down for good today. The following message was posted on the BTjunkie homepage a few minutes ago:

“This is the end of the line my friends. The decision does not come easy, but we’ve decided to voluntarily shut down. We’ve been fighting for years for your right to communicate, but it’s time to move on. It’s been an experience of a lifetime, we wish you all the best!”

Talking to TorrentFreak, BTjunkie’s founder said that the legal actions against other file-sharing sites such as MegaUpload and The Pirate Bay played an important role in making the difficult decision. Witnessing all the trouble colleagues got into was cause for a lot of worry and stress, and those will now belong to the past.

That said, BTjunkie’s owner still thinks there might be a future for other BitTorrent sites.

“I really do hope so, the war is far from over for sure,” he told TorrentFreak.

While BTjunkie was never targeted directly by copyright holders, the site was reported to the US Trade Representative (USTR) November last year. Both the RIAA and MPAA listed the torrent index as a ‘rogue’ site that facilitated mass copyright infringement.

BTjunkie is also one of the search terms censored by Google because it’s piracy related, alongside The Pirate Bay, RapidShare, uTorrent and others.

As a result of the decision to shut down BTjunkie, one of the top 5 torrent sites with dozens of millions of users a month is no more. Judging from previous shutdowns like that of TorrentSpy and Mininova, users will quickly find a new home at one of the many alternatives.

Nonetheless, it’s the end of an era.

Source: BitTorrent Giant BTjunkie Shuts Down For Good

As one of the older torrent sites around, The Pirate Bay has been at the forefront of this copy revolution. But according to the people behind the torrent site, copying bits is just the beginning. The next step is to download stuff you can hold in your hands.

“We believe that the next step in copying will be made from digital form into physical form. It will be physical objects. Or as we decided to call them: Physibles,” said The Pirate Bay last month when they announced a new 3D printing section of their site.

To give people something to work with, a 3D model of The Pirate Bay ship designed by Todd Blatt was one of the first items put up for download. Since then several people have printed it out and have now become the proud owner of a cute 3D printed ship.

The copy above belongs to Canadian Charles Randall. After he read the announcement on TorrentFreak he downloaded the torrent and went straight to Shapeways.com to print a copy for personal use.

“I was entertained by telling shapeways.com that I owned the copyright on the design though, something they force you to accept in order to have the model printed. But I guess, in a way, we all do,” Randall told TorrentFreak. “I debated just putting it up for sale on the site, but despite the Pirate Bay sensibilities, I didn’t want to entangle myself in any weird controversy for trying to sell it.”

Unlike regular downloads on BitTorrent, 3D objects come with a hefty price tag. Using the cheapest materials available, 3D pirates have to invest roughly $100 to get their new toy made.

“The raw price was about $80 for the material, $6.50 for the shipping, and then I had to pay $15 in Canadian duties,” Randall said

What this process has in common with copying bytes, is that it can be quite addictive.

“As for doing more 3D printing, I am tempted to learn Blender in order to start making interesting little things,” Randall told us. “The build quality is super detailed and fairly solid. You can see the patterns from where it was printed, but if I were to build small model pieces it would probably be easy enough to sand them down.”

“The whole thing is an amazing process and just knowing it’s possible has opened the floodgates of my imagination.”

The above response of one of the first 3D ‘pirates’ is just what The Pirate Bay were looking for when they launched their new category. Since the announcement the 3D printing category has grown to 26 torrents, ranging from a 3D printable MPAA Boss Chris Dodd to a Teddy Bear.

These are the first steps in discovering a new future that will one day allow people to print a perfect set of sneakers and spare car parts for a few dollars. The auto industry should be very worried.

Source: First Downloaded and 3D Printed Pirate Bay Ship Arrives

Leading up to the Super Bowl this weekend, a total of 307 domain names were seized, 16 of which provided access to online streams of popular sporting events.

Commenting on the actions, ICE Director John Morton was quick to declare victory, but perhaps this came a little too soon. Firstrow, one of the largest sites which had several of its domains taken over by the US government, is not planning to give up the ‘battle’ anytime soon.

Quickly after its firstrow.tv, firstrowsports.tv, firstrowsports.net and firstrowsports.com domains were seized, the service was operating as normal under a new domain – Firstrowsports.eu. Talking to TorrentFreak, one of the owners said that the US has stepped out of line by simply taking away their property.

“The US has prided itself on their ‘innocent before proven guilty’ mantra, yet is clearly hypocritical when it comes to this,” the Firstrow co-owner told us. “Numerous times the US has seized domains, before the defendants have been proven guilty in a court of law.”

“What is the point of trying to approve SOPA and PIPA if they do the same without these laws,” he questioned, referring to the pending US bills that would make it even easier to seize allegedly infringing domains.

The response of Firstrow stands in sharp contrast with that of ICE Director John Morton yesterday.

“In sports, players must abide by rules of the game, and in life, individuals must follow the laws of the land. Our message is simple: abiding by intellectual property rights laws is not optional; it’s the law,” Morton said.

This comment forms the base of the dispute. What is the law of the land? The people who operate Firstrow don’t live in the US, and neither are their servers located there. In fact, Firstrow says that their site is perfectly legal where they are based, so they will continue business as usual.

“Since we don’t live in a third-world country here, the courts decide if something is illegal not the entertainment industry lobbies. We will continue until a court decides that the site is illegal, but for now we’ve seen three court decisions on this matter that say it is not.”

Firstrow’s co-owner is referring to the court cases in Spain, where sites that merely link to copyrighted works have been declared legal. Rojadirecta, a site very similar to Firstrow, won in Spanish courts twice.

In the US, however, things work differently. Two operators of streaming sites have already been arrested and await criminal trials. And if the domains are linked to foreigners, the US believes it has the authority to take them over if they are deemed to infringe copyrights.

This stance has raised eyebrows among foreign governments. A few months ago the European Parliament adopted a resolution which criticized US domain name seizures. According to the resolution these measures need to be countered as they endanger “the integrity of the global internet and freedom of communication.”

Yesterday’s actions show that the US authorities are not impressed by the international critique, just as Firstrow refuses to change course after yet another domain seizure. Firstrow says ICE is wasting its time and continues to provide access to sports fans all across the world, who are otherwise unable to see their beloved games.

“ICE must have a lot of spare time if they can waste it on these domain seizures,” Firstrow’s co-owner says. “They should invest time in the real important stuff , instead of chasing people who have no other option than to watch a sports game for free.”

Source: Seized Sports Streaming Site Makes a Blazing Comeback

At the time there was no official announcement from the authorities, but ICE has now confirmed that this, their 10th round of domain seizures, is being branded ‘Operation Fake Sweep.’

In total the authorities took down a record breaking 307 domain names. The majority, 291, sold counterfeit NFL merchandise and the remaining sites allegedly linked to copyrighted streams.

The full list of seized streaming domains is firstrow.tv, xonesports.tv, firstrowsports.tv, firstrowsports.net, firstrowsports.com, hq-streams.tv, robplay.tv, soccertvlive.net, sports95.net, sports95.com, sports95.org, sportswwe.net, sportswwe.tv, sportswwe.com, youwwe.net and youwwe.com.

In addition to the seizures, police also arrested 28-year old Yonjo Quiroa of Comstock Park, Michigan. According to the press release Quiroa is the owner of nine of the sixteen sites, which he operated from his home.

Responding to the arrest and domain seizures, ICE Director John Morton declared victory.

“While most people are focusing on whether the Patriots or Giants will win on Sunday, we at ICE have our sights on a different type of victory: defeating the international counterfeiting rings that illegally profit off of this event, the NFL, its players and sports fans,” Morton said.

“In sports, players must abide by rules of the game, and in life, individuals must follow the laws of the land. Our message is simple: abiding by intellectual property rights laws is not optional; it’s the law.”

NFL’s Vice President of Legal Affairs Anastasia Danias welcomed the support of the authorities.

“We are grateful for Homeland Security Investigations’ tireless efforts in combating intellectual property theft and are pleased to be working along with them and the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department on this important issue,” he said.

The controversial seizures which started early 2010 have now resulted in the takeover of 669 domain names. The majority of the sites in question offered counterfeit goods and three dozen were linked to copyright infringements. One domain name has been returned because it was seized by mistake.

Source: Feds Arrest Streaming Site Operator for Copyright Infringement

Thus far, neither the Department of Justice nor Homeland Security’s ICE unit have officially commented on the seizures, but it can’t be a coincidence that sports streaming sites are being targeted a few days before the Super Bowl is due to be aired.

The targets of today’s seizure round include Firstrowsports.tv, Firstrowsports.com, Firstrowsports.net and Soccertvlive.net, but more may be added in the coming hours (see update below). The former apparently remains operational via Firstrowsports.eu.

For the first time, seized domains also include the .TV extension as Firstrowsports.tv is now displaying the familiar seizure banner. The .TV domain belongs to islands of Tuvalu, but is operated by the US-based company Verisign.

Last year there was a similar round of domain seizures during the lead up to the largest American sports broadcast. At the time the feds seized a dozen domains including Firstrow.net and Atdhe.net.

Both sites continued to operate under different domain names, several of which have been taken down today.

The seizures in 2011 also targeted domains linked to the website Rojadirecta, owned by the Spanish company Puerto 80. Despite being declared legal by two courts in Spain, the US authorities ruled that Rojadirecta was a criminal operation. The company has been fighting in US courts to get the decision overturned, but so far without luck.

Another target during the seizures last year was ChannelSurfing.net, which was operated by the Texan Brian McCarthy. The 32-year-old McCarthy was later taken into custody on suspicion of criminal copyright infringement, and he is currently awaiting his trial.

The extent of the fallout of the new “Super Bowl Crackdown” will become apparent in the coming days. It will, however, once again fuel the censorship debate which exploded last month with the SOPA/PIPA protests and the MegaUpload shutdown.

Update: ICE statement and arrest.

Source: Feds Seize Sports Streaming Domains in New Super Bowl Crackdown

This means that the prison sentences and fines against the defendants are now final. The Pirate Bay website itself, however, wasn’t part of the trial and will remain operational as normal. That is, unless the US Government chooses to intervene.

In 2010 it was reported that both The Pirate Bay and MegaUpload barely escaped a domain seizure. Although it wasn’t entirely clear at the time, one of the assumptions was that in the case of The Pirate Bay the pending trial against several people involved with the site acted as a roadblock.

Today this last barrier was removed. And with MegaUpload also out of the way, the largest torrent site on the Internet is now a prime target for a domain seizure.

The people running The Pirate Bay are aware of this risk and quickly redirected the site to a Swedish .se domain, outside the reach of US authorities. A Pirate Bay insider confirmed this morning that this was done “just in case ICE has been waiting for the court case to be over.”

Along with the domain change The Pirate Bay team delivered a defiant message.

“2012 is the year of the storm. The Pirate Bay will reach an age of 9 years. Experiencing raids, espionage and death threats, we’re still here. We’ve been through hell and back and it has made us tougher than ever,” they begin.

“Our 3 friends and blood brothers have been sentenced to prison. This might sound worse than it is. Since no one of them no longer lives in Sweden, they won’t go to jail. They are as free today as they were yesterday,” they note, adding:

“In this year of the storm, the winners will build windmills and the losers will raise shelters. So flex your muscles, fellow pirates, and give power to us all! Build more sites! More nets! More protocols! Scream louder than ever and take it to the next level!”

Although it’s clear that The Pirate Bay lost a battle today, the above statements signal that the war is far from over.

Source: The Pirate Bay Moves to .SE Domain To Prevent Domain Seizure

Although Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundström all had their prison sentences decreased from the levels ordered at their original 2009 trial, they were ordered to pay increased damages amounting to millions of dollars to the entertainment company plaintiffs.

Hoping to overturn the ruling, the three filed for a hearing of their case at the Supreme Court. Today this request was denied, meaning that the sentences as determined by the Court of Appeal are now final.

Peter Sunde, also known as Brokep, now awaits 8 months in prison. Fredrik Neij, also known as TiAMO, faces 10 months. Businessman Carl Lundström has the lightest sentence of 4 months. All will have to pay their share of a combined 46 million kronor ($6.8 million) in damages.

A fourth defendant, Pirate Bay co-founder Gottfrid Svartholm, was absent from the appeal hearings due to medical circumstances. Having also failed to appear at a subsequent hearing, it was announced last year that the District Court ruling of 2009 against him of 1 year in prison and a share of the damages would be made permanent.

“The verdict is absurd,” said Carl Lundström’s lawyer Per E Samuelsson. “I am disappointed that the court is so uninterested in dissecting and analyzing the legal twists and turns of one of the world’s most high-profile legal cases of all time.”

One of the defendants informs TorrentFreak that they will now appeal at the European Court of Justice. But this, however, won’t prevent the sentences from being executed in Sweden.

Today’s news doesn’t necessarily means that the defendants will have to go to prison. It is common in the Swedish justice system to deduct 12 months from any prison sentence on cases over 5 years old. Since the case in question meets that criteria the Pirate Bay defendants would qualify, but the decision lies with the court.

Even if denied, the Pirate Bay founders still have a few months of freedom before they are required to serve their prison sentences. Also, both Peter Sunde and Fredrik Neij no longer live in Sweden, which may complicate things.

Peter Sunde is disappointed by the Supreme Court decision, which didn’t come as a huge surprise to him.

“Sweden speaks well about caring about the Internets. They spend a lot of money and time on helping activists all around the world. But who are these people that they’re so proud of helping? TPB has been one of the most important movements in Sweden for freedom of speech, working against corruption and censorship,” he says.

“All of the people involved in TPB at some time have been involved in everything from famous leaks projects to aiding people in the arab spring. We’ve fought corruption all over the world. We’ve promoted equal opportunities to poor nations around the globe. We’ve crushed the monopoly on information. Our close ones, many who have helped building TPB, have been mentioned as possible winners of the nobel peace prize.”

“I’m not bragging – I’m saying this to make sure that people understand who’s doing the right thing here. I haven’t seen the entertainment industry help anyone but themselves.”

Despite the fact that sentences are now final, The Pirate Bay website remains online as it was not part of the legal proceedings. However, a few hours after the Supreme Court decision was made public, The Pirate Bay website started redirecting to a .se domain, fearing a possible seizure from the US authorities.

Source: Pirate Bay Founders’ Prison Sentences Final, Supreme Court Appeal Rejected

Founded in 2009, the file-hosting site allowed users to share files up to 50 gigabytes. Unlike similar services, Ex.ua was completely free to use. The site made money from advertisements and didn’t offer a paid subscription.

Because the site was widely used to share copyrighted files, several international companies including Microsoft, Graphisoft and Adobe filed complaints against the service. After a six month criminal investigation, this resulted in the shutdown of Ex.ua today.

A spokesperson for the authorities confirmed that the service was targeted and said that 200 servers were taken, holding a massive 6,000 terabytes of data.

In addition, sixteen employees were taken in for questioning. At the time of writing it is unclear how many arrests have been made, if any. The authorities did confirm that the site was run by a Latvian citizen.

While Ex.ua has some similarities to MegaUpload and other file-hosting sites, it was also crucially different in several aspects. Ex.ua allowed users to search for files and browse categories such as “MP3″ and “Video,” which is quite uncommon for a cyberlocker.

In 2010, the RIAA reported Ex.ua to the Office of the US Trade Representative, branding it a “pirate haven.” Among other things the RIAA highlighted that users of the site could not only upload, but also search for files on the site.

“This is the largest service in Ukraine and the vast majority of the Internet users in Ukraine use the site to download music and film content. None of the content made available on the site has been authorised by the copyright owners and the site operators are unresponsive to takedown notices as a result there are thousands of music titles available on the site,” the music group wrote at the time.

If found guilty, the operators of the site face up to five years in prison.

Breaking story.

Source: Authorities Shut Down Ukraine’s Largest File-Sharing Site Ex.ua

As of today, the case is still ongoing.

In 2009, a jury found Tenenbaum guilty of “willful infringement” and awarded damages mounting to $675,000. A year later this amount was reduced by 90% when Judge Nancy Gertner ruled that the penalty was excessive and unconstitutional. In 2011 this decision that was reversed after a new hearing at the Court of Appeals.

In yet another appeal, Tenenbaum’s legal team, headed by Harvard law professor Charles Nesson, is asking the court to reduce the $22,500 fine per song to the minimum statutory damages of $750 per song. This request is made on due process grounds.

As expected, the RIAA doesn’t agree with the request and presented its arguments to the court last Friday. But they were not alone – on the same day the Department of Justice also filed a brief with the court, backing the RIAA’s vision on the case.

In a 26-page filing the Department of Justice makes the argument that previous cases, as cited by Tenenbaum’s legal team, do not apply in this instance. It concludes that the due process grounds are not relevant yet and that the damages therefore shouldn’t be reduced before the case continues.

The due process question should only be answered when the court decides that the jury’s award of $22,500 per song is not excessive, according to the Departement of Justice.

“The only circumstance in which the Court can reach Defendant’s due process challenge at this time is if the Court first determines the jury’s statutory damages award is not excessive under the common law remittitur standard. The United States, therefore, does not believe it is necessary at this juncture to address the merits of Defendant’s constitutional claim,” the DoJ writes.

Although this is not the first time the Justice Department has become involved in an RIAA civil case, it remains unclear why they chose to intervene this time. What we do know is that the authorities are very up-to-date with the legal proceedings, as five former RIAA lawyers are now employed by the Department of Justice.

Whether these connections between the Justice Department and the RIAA have increased the likelihood of the authorities getting involved is hard to say. However, it is clear that Tenenbaum and his legal team are up against some serious resistance, and that the US authorities don’t want the student to get off that easily..

To be continued, indefinitely.

Source: Justice Department Backs RIAA Against Pirating Student

From work-related data to personal photos, the raid disabled access to hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of files that are clearly not infringing. A recent announcement by the US Attorney now suggests that these files may soon be lost forever.

“We received a letter very late Friday from the US Attorney that declared there could be an imminent destruction of Megaupload consumer data files on this coming Thursday,” MegaUpload lawyer Ira Rothken told TorrentFreak.

Rothken explains that MegaUpload is determined to protect the interests of its users, but that its hands are tied without help from the authorities. The looming data loss is linked to unpaid bills at Cogent Communications and Carpathia Hosting where MegaUpload leased some of its servers.

“We of course would like to think the United States and Megaupload would both be united in trying to avoid such a consumer protection calamity whereby innocent consumers could permanently lose access to everything from word processing files to family photos and many other things that could never practically be considered infringing,” the lawyer told TorrentFreak.

“Megaupload’s assets were frozen by the United States. Mega needs funds unfrozen to pay for bandwidth, hosting, and systems administration in order to allow consumers to get access to their data stored in the Mega cloud and to back up the same for safekeeping.”

MegaUpload has contacted the US Attorney’s office with a request to unfreeze assets including money and domains so users can get access to their personal data. If this doesn’t happen, the consequences for many MegaUpload users and the future of other cloud hosting services will be disastrous.

“If the United States fails at helping protect and restore Megaupload consumer data in an expedient fashion, it will have a chilling effect on cloud computing in the United States and worldwide. It is one thing to bring a claim for copyright infringement it is another thing to take down an entire cloud storage service in Megaupload that has substantial non infringing uses as a matter of law,” Rothken told us.

Meanwhile, MegaUpload users are also taking action themselves. Last week Pirate parties worldwide began making a list of all the people affected by the raids, and they are planning to file a complaint against authorities in the US. The EFF has also taken an interest in the issue, and is sharing data with the international Pirate parties.

For now, however, the more urgent matter is to ensure that the data doesn’t get destroyed.

Update: The data is safe for two more weeks, at least.

Update: Carpathia Hosting sent us the following statement.

“In reference to the letter filed by the U.S. Department of Justice with the Eastern District of Virginia on Jan. 27, 2012, Carpathia Hosting does not have, and has never had, access to the content on MegaUpload servers and has no mechanism for returning any content residing on such servers to MegaUpload’s customers. The reference to the Feb. 2, 2012 date in the Department of Justice letter for the deletion of content is not based on any information provided by Carpathia to the U.S. Government. We would recommend that anyone who believes that they have content on MegaUpload servers contact MegaUpload. Please do not contact Carpathia Hosting.”

Source: MegaUpload User Data Soon to be Destroyed

The data for our weekly download chart is collected by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are BD/DVDrips unless stated otherwise.

RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.

Source: Top 10 Most Pirated Movies on BitTorrent

The ruling was the first to bring broad censorship to the Netherlands and in a response XS4ALL said they were “bitterly disappointed”, noting that fundamental rights had been traded for “commercial interests.”

For BREIN, the Dutch anti-piracy group that started the court case, the verdict wasn’t quite enough. The Hollywood-backed group wasted no time issuing requests for other ISPs to block access to The Pirate Bay as well. Or else.

After internal discussions two large ISPs – KPN and T-Mobile – are now on record stating they will not honor BREIN’s request. This means that millions of Internet users in the Netherlands will still be able to access The Pirate Bay without having to go through proxies.

Speaking out against censorship, both Internet providers state they will only block The Pirate Bay following a court order and that innovation is a better way to deal with the problem of piracy.

“KPN sees the blocking of websites as a drastic measure for which a court order is required,” KPN said in a statement, adding that innovation is needed to curb piracy.

“KPN doesn’t believe a blockade is the right solution. What is needed are robust, attractive business models that are easy to use and offer a fair deal to both producers and consumers of content.”

T-Mobile also said that it will only respond to court orders, while it emphasized the value of an open Internet.

“T-Mobile strongly supports an open Internet and is fundamentally against shutting off access to websites. Dutch law is very clear when it comes to blocking access to the Internet. T-Mobile will only respond to a court ruling, not to demands from a private party such as BREIN.”

If BREIN follows up on threats that were made earlier, both ISPs can expect to be sued by the anti-piracy outfit in the near future. Ziggo and XS4ALL, meanwhile, are expected to enforce the blockade this coming Wednesday, February 1st.

Whether the blockade will have much of an effect is yet to be seen. Judging from what happened in other countries when the site was blocked, users will quickly find ways to route around the blockade to regain access to the world’s largest torrent site.

Source: Dutch ISPs Refuse To Block The Pirate Bay

If the copyright industry had their way, Google and other search engines would no longer link to sites such as The Pirate Bay and isoHunt. In a detailed proposal handed out during a meeting with Google, Yahoo and Bing, various copyright holders made their demands clear.

The document, which describes a government-overlooked “Voluntary Code of Practice” for search engines, was not intended for public consumption but the Open Rights Group obtained it through a Freedom of Information (FOI) request.

In short, the rightsholders want the search engines to make substantial changes so that pirated content becomes harder to find, or is de-listed entirely. In addition, they want to boost the rankings of licensed content. Below are the three new measures they propose.

• Assign lower rankings to sites that repeatedly make available unlicensed content in breach of copyright
• Prioritize websites that obtain certification as a licensed site under a recognised scheme
• Stop indexing websites that are subject to court orders while establishing suitable procedures to de-index substantially infringing sites

In the document rightsholders explain that they find it inexcusable that some websites – Pirate Bay and Isohunt in particular – are still indexed by all major search engines even though courts have ruled they facilitate copyright infringement.

Not surprisingly, there is no mention of the collateral damage that such a broad filter would bring with it – many artists and other legitimate individuals are known to use these websites to share their works.

The document further details how many of the top search results for music, movies and books currently link to pirated copies. In order to stop this, the rightsholders propose that Google and other search engines systematically assign a lower ranking to possibly infringing pages.

“We propose that in order to further protect consumers and to encourage responsible behaviour among websites, the extent of illegal content on a website should become a factor influencing the ranking of that website in search results returned to consumers,” they write.

This should be doable according to the rightsholders, as Google already influences its search results based on various other criteria, such as the lower rankings that are assigned to so-called content farms.

“Given that Google already de-ranks and de-lists sites that do not meet its own ‘quality guidelines’ or otherwise violate its policies, we do not believe that search engines would face significant legal exposure if they were to de-rank or de-list sites using an objective measure, based on their actions in response to legal DMCA complaints, in pursuit of the legitimate objective of preventing their service being used to facilitate copyright infringement,” they write.

Conversely, it’s argued that search engines should also boost the ranking of legitimate sites for certain ‘relevant’ searches. A list of relevant terms to match to these relevant searches should be provided by pro-copyright groups. In the proposal, the rightsholders give the following example in the case of music files.

“We would propose that prioritisation be enabled for searches that contain any of the following key search terms: “mp3″, “flac”, “wma”, “aac”, “torrent”, “download”, “rip”, “stream” or “listen”, “free”, when combined with an artist name, song or album title contained on a list to be regularly updated and provided to a search engine by a recognised and properly mandated agency representing rights holders for a particular sector, such as BPI.”

Aside from these new proposals, the document also calls on the search engines to improve the censorship measures already in place, such as Google’s keyword filter for their “instant” and “autocomplete” services.

Although the proposal from the rightsholders is not a direct threat as it is a long way from being accepted, it clearly shows that rightsholders see censorship as the way forward. The search engines on the other hand were not impressed and are expected to supply a proposal of their own in a future meeting. Again behind closed doors.

Source: Copyright Industry Calls For Broad Search Engine Censorship

Last week the feds shut down the popular site accusing its founder and six others of money-laundering and several copyright related crimes. The site’s former users, meanwhile, are left without their files and forced to find a new place to share.

The big question is, where do these millions of people go now?

The RIAA hopes that the people who used MegaUpload to share copyrighted music are turning to iTunes, but this is not the case for everyone. A look at the traffic of some of the MegaUpload alternatives shows that millions have simply migrated to other file-hosting sites.

The graph below shows a sharp increase in traffic for four popular MegaUpload ‘replacements’ since last week. Based on data from various traffic measurement sites, Depositfiles, Uploaded.to, Hotfile and Rapidshare welcomed hundreds of thousands of extra visitors.

The example above is just the tip of the iceberg, as there are many other sites that experienced a surge in traffic including Filepost, Hulkshare, Netload.in, Uploading, zShare.net and many others. Whether the newcomers will remain on board has yet to be seen, but it is clear that millions of former MegaUpload users are migrating to other sites.

As the cyberlocker landscape stands now, 4shared.com remains by far the largest site on the Internet. With an estimated 2.5 billion page views, 4Shared is more than twice the size of MegaUpload before it was shut down.

Needless to say, 4Shared is deeply concerned about the recent developments, but the company also told TorrentFreak that they have nothing to worry about themselves.

“This case has a great negative impact on file storage services and the Internet overall,” a spokesman said, adding that “4shared has some of the most strict house rules among all other file storage services and there’s no need for any changes.”

With many sites still in a state of shock, it might take a few weeks to see what the precise effect of the MegaUpload shutdown is. One thing is for sure though, many of MegaUpload’s former users haven’t given up downloading and sharing just yet.

Source: MegaUpload Alternatives See Surge in Traffic After Shutdown

Alongside the millions who protest against these increasing censorship initiatives, there’s also a group of people who come up with ways to route around it. One of these projects is the RePress plugin for WordPress.

The plugin is developed by the hosting company Greenhost and allows everyone with a WordPress blog to start a proxy for sites that are censored elsewhere in the world. As an example, Greenhost have setup a Pirate Bay and Wikileaks proxy.

“By adding this plug-in to your WordPress website it will start functioning as a proxy and uncensor any blocked website you’d like,” Greenhost explains. “The only thing you’ll need is a WordPress website and the ability to install new plug-ins. After that you can maintain a list of websites you’d like to keep open freely available on the web.”

One of the main motivations for the plugin’s developers was to provide people in the Netherlands full access to The Pirate Bay when the recent court order is enforced. However, if SOPA or PIPA pass there might also be a need for people in the US to have a tool like this.

“We hope people outside Holland use the plug-in to uncensor piratebay.org, as it is in danger of being blocked in our country after a court-ruling. In the Netherlands we could then uncensor websites for people in oppressive regimes like Iran, Syria or the US after SOPA is passed.”

“[SOPA and PIPA] are said to defend the interests of the Entertainment industry, but will mainly cause grave and undeniable damage to the Open and Free web and all of its users: from the end-consumer to the cutting edge developers and inventors. Our aim is to make this impossible,” the Greenhost team notes.

Although the plugin can’t prevent domain names from being seized, it is indeed a good solution to bypass all of the common blocking measures that are used today.

The RePress initiative is applauded by several politicians, including European Parliament member Marietje Schaake. “This is a fantastic opportunity for human rights activists and a solution for people who face technological censorship and repression,” she told Webwereld.

To those eager to start their own proxy of blocked websites, RePress can be downloaded in the WordPress repository.

Source: WordPress Plugin Unblocks Censored Sites, Including The Pirate Bay

Today we can add a VP at one of the major RIAA labels to this list, which is quite unique and yet another game changer.

Speaking for himself, EMI’s VP of Urban Promotions Craig Davis said that the two pending anti-piracy bills are not the way to move forward.

“Personally, I feel that the method they’re using is incorrect. All it will do is cause headaches and issues for everyone,” Davis noted.

While the EMI VP opposes PIPA and SOPA, he does admit that piracy is a problem. However, Davis thinks that the problem can be better solved from within the music industry itself. In other words, the key to solving piracy isn’t legislation, but innovation.

“I do believe that a person should be compensated for their work. I feel that piracy is a big issue, and things like Spotify will assist in combating this problem,” he said.

Reiterating this point, the EMI VP refers to comments that were recently made by Gabe Newell. The Valve co-founder said that piracy is a service issue – once you give people what they want it will mostly disappear.

“Gabe Newell is correct, it’s a service issue not an issue of money. Sales have gone up from sales concerts and merchandise, it’s obvious that our fans still love music. We’re just not giving them their music in an easier way,” Davis noted.

Adding to the above, Davis also commented negatively on DRM in a separate question that he was asked on Reddit.

“Personally I’m not happy with the way DRM is right now. We need to re-evaluate technology to find a better way to give you music,” he wrote.

Davis’ take on the piracy problem stands in clear contrast with the policy of the RIAA, who tend to prefer the repressive approach over innovation. Defining piracy as a service issue, however, is in line with the things we, and many others with us, have been saying for years.

People are happy to pay as long as they get what they want.

This is also illustrated by the fact that people are willing to pay hundreds of millions of dollars for premium access to file-hosting sites, often to download content that’s not available at all legally, or only in inferior quality. In recent years the music industry has caught up quite a bit by removing DRM and launching services like Spotify. But the movie industry is lagging behind, especially outside the US.

Implementing harsh anti-piracy laws and disconnecting file-sharers from the Internet doesn’t change the mismatch between what the public wants and what the industry offers. Improving availability, quality and other service issues can probably make a much bigger impact.

It’s good to see that some people in the industry are well aware of this, but we doubt that the RIAA would make itself obsolete by agreeing.

Source: EMI Boss Opposes SOPA, Says Piracy is a Service Issue

Even today, when more music is being sold than ever before, the RIAA, IFPI and other music groups still lobby hard for draconian measures to curb piracy. Whether it’s SOPA, PIPA or similar legislation as currently being presented in Finland and Ireland, the music industry begs governments to help them out.

One of the countries where these lobbying efforts have paid off is France, where Internet users are now monitored by the state and disconnected if they are caught pirating three times. The big question is whether this law, which costs 11 million euros a year, has any effect at all.

Yes, says the music industry, backing up their claim with a non-peer reviewed academic study. Last week some of the results were already teased to the press, and yesterday they were presented to the public, coinciding with the publication of this year’s Digital Music Report published by IFPI.

We decided to take a look at the two reports, and the only reasonable conclusion we can make is that France’s three-strikes anti-piracy law is not having ANY affect at all. Let’s start off with how IFPI summarizes the results in their report.

“The analysis found that French iTunes sales saw a significant uplift at exactly the period when awareness of Hadopi was at its highest, in Spring 2009, when the law was being debated in the National Assembly.”

This is bogus. The researchers don’t conclude this at all. There is no uplift in sales reported. What the researchers found is that in France, compared to five other European countries, more music was sold through iTunes. Looking at the graph below (from the report), it’s clear that the “uplift” in France before Hadopi was introduced (March 2009) is actually much sharper than the two years after.

Another quote from the IFPI report:

“This effect was maintained throughout the period studied. French iTunes sales were 22.5 per cent higher for singles and 25 per cent higher for digital albums than they would have been, on average, in the absence of Hadopi.”

This is interesting, and indeed pretty much what the researchers conclude. However, as long-time followers of Hadopi and other anti-piracy laws, this conclusion doesn’t feel right. The huge increase in sales reported by the researchers is based on the alleged impact Hadopi had in the year and a half before it went into effect, not after

The following footnote from the researchers is also quite revealing.

“We also estimated the model for the 6 months before and after September 2010, as this was the first month that HADOPI began sending out first notices. In this case, the resulting coefficient was close to zero and statistically insignificant.”

Indeed, when the three-strikes warnings were actually sent out, there was no effect on iTunes sales compared to the control countries. This is unusual, because you would expect that the hundreds of thousands of warnings that went out would have had more of an impact than the ‘news’ that this could happen in the future.

In addition, if we look at the search trends for Hadopi and The Pirate Bay we don’t see a drop in interest for the latter, suggesting that the interest for pirated goods remained stable.

The researchers, however, are convinced that their findings are the result of the “potential implementation” of Hadopi. We find this strange. Could there be an alternative explanation? Let’s have a guess.

At the same time Hadopi was introduced (early 2009) there was a lot of buzz around Spotify in several of the countries that were used as a control group in this study. Could it be that Spotify resulted in relatively less iTunes sales in countries like UK and Spain than in France? This could potentially explain all of the findings reported in the study. And that’s probably just one of the many alternative explanations.

Whatever the case, concluding that expensive privacy-invading legislation such as the French Hadopi is boosting sales is going way too far.

Source: Anti-Piracy Warnings Have No Effect on iTunes Sales

Quickly after the raids and arrests, top attorney Robert Bennett announced that he would lead the defense for MegaUpload. The New York lawyer has defended many prominent clients in the past but is best known for defending President Bill Clinton during the Lewinsky scandal.

MegaUpload worked with Bennett before the indictment, which means that he is already familiar with the file-hosting site, but now that his work for MegaUpload is more public, other clients of his law firm are apparently taking offense.

A Reuters report cites a source who says that Bennett was ordered to withdraw from the case due to a conflict of interest with another client. Although the name of the client is not mentioned, the most logical conclusion is that one or more entertainment industry companies pulled some strings to get Bennett off the case.

On Friday, Bennett was still determined to bring the case to a good end for MegaUpload. “We intend to vigorously defend against these charges,” he said at the time, but due to “outside” pressure Kim Dotcom and the others will now have to look for another lawyer to represent them. One without conflicting clients nonetheless, a rarity at the top law firms in the US.

One of MegaUpload’s other lawyers, Ira Rothken, said that the file-hoster has not yet found a replacement for Bennett. “Who is or isn’t on the criminal defense team is still being decided,” Rothken said.

Meanwhile, some interesting developments have taken place in MegaUpload’s court case against Universal Music Group (UMG), who had allegedly deleted the Mega Song from YouTube without permission. While that court battle is still ongoing, MegaUpload has now decided to voluntarily dismiss the music group from the list of defendants.

The case against the 100 Doe defendants, which may include other UMG branches, remains intact. Previously, UMG claimed that Megaupload sued the wrong UMG, stating that UMG Recordings is the correct entity since they are the ones dealing with YouTube and other video hosting services.

In the coming weeks, however, the major battle will be the one between the US and the MegaUpload defendants. Considering the people involved and what’s at stake, it promises to be a landmark case in file-sharing history.

Source: MegaUpload Loses Top Lawyer After ‘Outside’ Pressure

The data for our weekly download chart is collected by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are BD/DVDrips unless stated otherwise.

RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.

Source: Top 10 Most Pirated Movies on BitTorrent

First, MPAA CEO Chris Dodd described the blackouts of Wikipedia, Reddit and others as corporate PR stunts which manipulated and exploited the sites’ users.

“Some technology business interests are resorting to stunts that punish their users or turn them into their corporate pawns,” Dodd said.

Then, a few days later when many lawmakers had already dropped their support for the anti-piracy bills, the MPAA’s comments turned even more grim. Talking to Fox News, the MPAA’s boss threatened to stop contributing to politicians who don’t back legislation designed to protect Hollywood.

“Those who count on quote ‘Hollywood’ for support need to understand that this industry is watching very carefully who’s going to stand up for them when their job is at stake. Don’t ask me to write a check for you when you think your job is at risk and then don’t pay any attention to me when my job is at stake,” Dodd said.

Although it’s no secret that the movie industry has a powerful lobby in Washington, explicitly admitting that bribery is one of the tactics the MPAA uses to have their way wasn’t well received by the public. A few hours ago a White house petition was started to investigate Chris Dodd and the MPAA for alleged bribery.

“This is an open admission of bribery and a threat designed to provoke a specific policy goal. This is a brazen flouting of the ‘above the law’ status people of Dodd’s position and wealth enjoy,” the petition reads.

“We demand justice. Investigate this blatant bribery and indict every person, especially government officials and lawmakers, who is involved.”

In just a few hours the petition amassed more than 5,000 votes and this number is increasing rapidly. As a former Senator, Chris Dodd has many friends in Washington so it’s unclear whether the petition will accomplish anything, but if the numbers grow big enough the White House won’t be able to ignore it either.

The MPAA’s response to the PIPA and SOPA opposition this week is a sign that they might be losing control in Washington. At the very least, they are starting to lose their patience and become frustrated, which may not help their cause at this point.

Source: White House Petitioned to Investigate MPAA Bribery

“Mega has nothing to fear. Our business is legitimate and protected by the DMCA and similar laws around the world. We work with the best lawyers and play by the rules.

“We take our legal obligations seriously. Mega’s war chest is full and we have strong supporters backing us,” Dotcom said.

But behind the scenes powerful forces were at work, plotting the forceful demise of MegaUpload, one of the world’s biggest websites.

An indictment unsealed today by the Department of Justice claims that MegaUpload has caused the entertainment industries more than $500 million in lost revenue and generated $175 million “in criminal proceeds.”

Two corporations – Megaupload Limited and Vestor Limited – were indicted by a grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia on January 5th, 2012, and charged with “engaging in a racketeering conspiracy, conspiring to commit copyright infringement, conspiring to commit money laundering and two substantive counts of criminal copyright infringement.”

Today, the authorities executed in excess of 20 search warrants in the United States and eight other countries.

Data centers in the Netherlands, Canada and Washington housing MegaUpload’s equipment were raided. In an apparent reference to the latter location, a source has just informed TorrentFreak that the FBI are currently detaining everyone at the ISP Cogent Communications’ headquarters in Washington DC, in connection with a Mega-related search warrant.

In addition to MegaUpload founder Kim Dotcom who was arrested today in New Zealand, another six alleged members of the Mega “conspiracy” were charged in the indictment:

- Finn Batato, 38, Mega’s chief marketing officer and a citizen and resident of Germany
- Julius Bencko, 35, Mega’s graphic designer from Slovakia
- Sven Echternach, 39,Mega’s German head of business development;
- Mathias Ortmann, 40, the German CTO, co-founder and director of Mega
- Andrus Nomm, 32, programmer and head of the development from Estonia
- Bram van der Kolk, 29, a Dutch citizen who oversaw programming and network issues.

Dotcom, Batato, Ortmann and van der Kolk were arrested today in Auckland, New Zealand, by authorities there. Bencko, Echternach and Nomm are still at large.

The authorities seized approximately $50 million in assets, which appears to include Kim Dotcom’s treasured collection of several dozen cars, as detailed below.

A total of 18 Mega-related domains were also seized by authorities including Megastuff.co, Megaworld.com, Megaclicks.co, Megastuff.info, Megaclicks.org, Megaworld.mobi, Megastuff.org, Megaclick.us, Mageclick.com, HDmegaporn.com, Megavkdeo.com, Megaupload.com, Megaupload.org, Megarotic.com, Megaclick.com, Megavideo.com, Megavideoclips.com and Megaporn.com.

According to the Department of Justice, the individuals named in the indictment face a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison on the charge of conspiracy to commit racketeering, five years in prison on the charge of conspiracy to commit copyright infringement, 20 years in prison on the charge of conspiracy to commit money laundering and five years in prison on each of the substantive charges of criminal copyright infringement.

The legal action against Mega will set a precedent for similar cloud-hosting services. The MegaUpload site itself had no search function to discover content directly, but according to the indictment this was done to “conceal the scope of its infringement.” Would the same be true for services such as Dropbox?

Breaking story, more to come.

Related:

- Anonymous retaliates
- What happens to Megaupload’s Grammy Winning CEO
- MegaUpload Back? Don’t Be Fooled by Scammers
- I Want my Personal Files Back!!
- MegaUpload Hires Former Bill Clinton Lawyer

Source: MegaUpload Shut Down by the Feds, Founder Arrested

By 3pm Washington time millions of people had already voiced their concerns. Google just reported that more than 4 million people signed the petition on their site, and the EFF says that 250,000 people sent messages to Congress through their site. These are just two examples of the many initiatives currently being organized.

The big question is, of course, whether this wave of protest is having any effect. The answer is an unequivocal YES.

Not only have Senators’ websites been knocked offline due to the massive flow of traffic, but quite a few initial backers of the bills are having second thoughts.

Below is a list of PIPA and SOPA co-sponsors who have now dropped their support for the pending legislation. They are joined by more than a dozen lawmakers who didn’t sponsor the bills, but have now stated on the record that they are not planning to vote in favor. Some even decided to black out their own site.

Senator Marco Rubio was one of the first to de-list as a PIPA co-sponsor today, stating:

“Earlier this year, this bill passed the Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously and without controversy. Since then, we’ve heard legitimate concerns about the impact the bill could have on access to the Internet and about a potentially unreasonable expansion of the federal government’s power to impact the Internet. Congress should listen and avoid rushing through a bill that could have many unintended consequences. “

“Therefore, I have decided to withdraw my support for the Protect IP Act. Furthermore, I encourage Senator Reid to abandon his plan to rush the bill to the floor. Instead, we should take more time to address the concerns raised by all sides, and come up with new legislation that addresses Internet piracy while protecting free and open access to the Internet.”

Initial PIPA backer Senator Roy Blunt drops out saying:

“While I believed the bill still needed much work, I cosponsored the Senate version of the Protect IP Act because I support the original intent of this bill – to protect against the piracy of lawful content. Upon passage of this bill through committee, Senate Judiciary Republicans strongly stated that there were substantive issues in this legislation that had to be addressed before it moved forward. I agree with that sentiment. ”

“The right to free speech is one of the most basic foundations that makes our nation great, and I strongly oppose sanctioning Americans’ right to free speech in any medium – including over the internet. I continue to believe that we can come to a solution that will cut off the revenue sources for foreign websites dedicated to counterfeiting and piracy that steal American jobs, hurt the economy, and harm consumers. But the Protect IP Act is flawed as it stands today, and I cannot support it moving forward.”

Senator Mark Kirk also decided that it is a good idea to withdraw his support. He said:

“Freedom of speech is an inalienable right granted to each and every American, and the Internet has become the primary tool with which we utilize this right. The Internet empowers Americans to learn, create, innovate, and express their views. While we should protect American intellectual property, consumer safety and human rights, we should do so in a manner that specifically targets criminal activity. This extreme measure stifles First Amendment rights and Internet innovation. I stand with those who stand for freedom and oppose PROTECT IP, S.968, in its current form.”

Senator Orrin Hatch followed, and is no longer a co-sponsor of PIPA either. He said:

“After listening to the concerns on both sides of the debate over the PROTECT IP Act, it is simply not ready for prime time and both sides must continue working together to find a better path forward”

“Rushing something with such potential for far-reaching consequences is something I cannot support and that’s why I will not only vote against moving the bill forward next week but also remove my cosponsorship of the bill. Given the legitimate vocal concerns, it is imperative that we take a step back to allow everyone to come together and find a reasonable solution.”

Senator John Boozman is no longer backing PIPA, he stated:

“I will have my name removed as a co-sponsor of the bill and plan to vote against it if Majority Leader Reid brings it to the floor in its current form.”

“The PROTECT IP Act seeks to address an issue that is of vital importance to the future of intellectual property rights in the modern era. However, the concerns regarding the unintended consequences of this particular bill are legitimate. Therefore, we should not rush to pass this bill, rather we should be working to find another solution so that the epidemic of online piracy is addressed in a manner that ensures innovation and free speech is protected. I have confidence that we can do this, but not as the PROTECT IP Act stands today”

SOPA also lost two of its co-sponsors. Politico reports that Representatives Ben Quayle and Lee Terry have quietly withdrawn their support for the House bill.

The various protests are still ongoing and it wouldn’t be a surprise if the list above is already outdated by the end of the day.

Although these first signs are positive, it doesn’t necessarily mean that PIPA or SOPA are now off the table. There are still many sponsors and supporters left. Both bills are still on their way to be passed in Congress, but with a little less support than before.

Source: SOPA / PIPA Co-Sponsors Drop Like Flies As Millions Protest

Could this pattern be broken today?

Judging by the scope of today’s protests it’s now or never. In the coming hours hundreds of millions of Internet users will be confronted with blacked out pages and similar “strikes” in opposition to the PIPA and SOPA bills, and if enough people take action the people in Washington may just listen.

The first signs are positive, but there’s still a long way to go. Here’s how YOU (corporate pawns) can help:

- Tell Congress you oppose PIPA/SOPA.

- Not in the US? Email the State Department.

- Call your Senator.

- Leave your computer and visit a Senator.

- Discuss, share and inform others about the bills.

For those who are wondering, TorrentFreak is not going dark. Our purpose has always been to inform the public, whether it’s the latest news or a call to action like this article. We believe we can contribute and achieve more by keeping the site online than to black out completely. That said, we are alerting all visitors to take action through the excellent censorship script put together by FAT LAB.

To save an impression of today for future generations, we’ve listed below a few of the many protest pages being run today. Did we miss a good one? Paste a link in the comment section and attach a screenshot!

Google

Google has blocked its logo to protest PIPA/SOPA and added a link to a resource page where people can take action.

Demonoid

Demonoid, one of the largest BitTorrent communities, is going dark completely, with a nice spotlight effect.

Firefox

Firefox users will be welcomed with a dark themed default home page today, alerting people about the looming PIPA/SOPA threats.

Reddit

The online community Reddit will point the public to a resource site where they can take action.

Wikipedia

Wikipedia will be completely inaccessible for 24 hours, except the pages about censorship, PIPA and SOPA, of course.

WordPress

WordPress is joining the protest as well, and has decided to censor itself today.

Minecraft

Minecraft is protesting as well, but in red with the tagline “PIPA & SOPA, How About NOPA.”

Source: Historic: The Internet Protests Anti-Piracy Bills

But on the horizon looms threats of a different kind, the PIPA and SOPA bills.

While SOPA has been put on hold temporarily, the PIPA bill is going full steam ahead. If it passes, The Pirate Bay and other torrent sites may be the first to be targeted. Depending on the final text of the bills, these sites may be blocked by ISPs, censored by search engines, and in some cases they may even lose their domain names.

These developments cause some concern among the people running The Pirate Bay, but interestingly enough they don’t fear for themselves.

“Of course we’re worried. Not so much for The Pirate Bay, as there are many workarounds, but for democratic reasons,” a Pirate Bay insider told TorrentFreak.

Indeed, recent history has shown that no matter what technical measures are put in use to block The Pirate Bay, the site and its users find ways around it. Whether it’s a backup domain, alternative DNS-servers or proxy sites, PIPA and SOPA can be easily circumvented. In addition, the site’s advertising partners don’t fall within reach of the US Government.

Anticipating future censorship, The Pirate Bay yesterday released a modified version of the CGIPROXY software so anyone with access to a webserver can easily start their own Pirate Bay proxy. And since The Pirate Bay plans to ditch .torrent files completely, the resources that have to be invested are minimal.

For opponents of the PIPA and SOPA bills, The Pirate Bay’s stance is yet even more ammunition to get the pending legislation thrown out completely. When even the biggest target isn’t worried at all, why put the future of the Internet at risk?

The Pirate Bay itself is amazed by the unprecedented power the entertainment industry has in Washington.

“It’s crazy what politicians will do in the name of copyright! They are either totally paid off, stupid or copyright holders. Or all of them – that’s not as uncommon as you might think. The worst part is that it’s so obvious that pretty much everyone in and outside the US, including major corporations, are against this bill,” the Pirate Bay insider said.

“The minority will now decide to get to control the majority, for reasons that only help the minority and not society as a whole. It’s disgusting. If the law was discussed in Iran or China, we might understand it – and criticize it just as much. But this… come on!”

The Pirate Bay urges the International community to take a clear stand in the issue, preventing the US from taking control of the Internet. The European Parliament set the first step in this direction recently, by condemning domain name seizures, but there is still a long way to go according to The Pirate Bay.

“It’s obvious that the US has too much influence on the internet and the world’s politics. SOPA/PIPA is one of many newer laws that is passed in the US but really is in effect outside of their borders. The UN and other bodies should actually fight back and say that this is not OK, ” the insider said.

“The internet is a global infrastructure and can’t be run in one single country. Besides fighting SOPA, we must also take away the possibility for a single country to rule over the global infrastructure.”

For now, however, the battle is far from over. SOPA can be revived any minute and PIPA is still very much alive and up for vote in Congress next week. As a protest, many websites large and small will go on strike tomorrow, but not The Pirate Bay, for the torrent site it’s business as usual.

Source: The Pirate Bay: PIPA/SOPA Won’t Stop Us!

Today the largest torrent site on the Internet rolled out a new promotion platform for filmmakers, musicians, writers and all other artists alike. To help them reach an audience of tens of millions of people, The Pirate Bay is offering the artists a prime advertising spot on the site’s homepage, replacing the iconic logo.

True to The Pirate Bay spirit, the Promo Bay campaigns are free of charge.

“As you might have seen we sometimes replace our front page logo with others. Sometimes we link to important political issues like internet censorship and sometimes it’s to some cool indie musicians we like. We would now like to improve this feature,” The Pirate Bay announces.

Artists who want to participate have to offer something free in return, so a link to the iTunes store wont work, but apart from that pretty much anything goes. The promos can be targeted to a maximum of 3 countries, but if an artist manages to impress the Pirate Bay team, they may choose to promote it worldwide.

The Pirate Bay is no stranger to helping out artists. The site has been one of the key partners of the indie movie distribution platform VODO, and they’ve also run several promotional campaigns for content creators on their own.

On the other hand, many artists are already releasing their work voluntarily on The Pirate Bay, and not just basement bands either. To promote their new single, Radiohead turned to The Pirate Bay in 2009, and Nine Inch Nails have made pretty much all their music available on the torrent site.

Best selling author Paulo Coelho is another dedicated fan of The Pirate Bay, sharing his books on there every time his publisher looks away. “I am openly supporting their site,” Coelho told TorrentFreak when the site’s founders were defending themselves in a Swedish court.

There is little doubt that the new promotion platform will be welcomed by artist all across the globe. Perhaps there will even be a few established names that sign up who want to take advantage of this free advertising opportunity. To those who are about to try we have one piece of advice; please make sure your website can handle the load – with 1.8 billion page views a month a worldwide promotion can be quite a hit.

Source: The Pirate Bay Launches Promo Platform For Artists

The data for our weekly download chart is collected by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are BD/DVDrips unless stated otherwise.

RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.

Source: Top 10 Most Pirated Movies on BitTorrent

While many of the largest websites on the Internet have vowed to blackout their sites this coming Wednesday, the people responsible for drafting the bills have started to make concessions. Just yesterday, SOPA author Lamar Smith said DNS blocking would be removed from the bill until further notice while the bill is put on hold.

In part, the ever-increasing pressure from the public and anti-SOPA lobbyists can be credited for this change in tone, but a statement released by the White House today might have also played a role.

Responding to two petitions signed by over 50,000 people each, the Obama administration recited much of the criticism voiced by SOPA/PIPA opponents.

“Any effort to combat online piracy must guard against the risk of online censorship of lawful activity and must not inhibit innovation by our dynamic businesses large and small. Across the globe, the openness of the Internet is increasingly central to innovation in business, government, and society and it must be protected.”

“To minimize this risk, new legislation must be narrowly targeted only at sites beyond the reach of current U.S. law, cover activity clearly prohibited under existing U.S. laws, and be effectively tailored, with strong due process and focused on criminal activity,” the Administration writes.

While this is encouraging for those who oppose the pending anti-piracy bills, the language used in the statement remains very vague. The lawmakers backing SOPA and PIPA have heard these comments many times already, and usually counter them by saying that the “openness” of the Internet is not at risk should these bills pass, and that due process is guaranteed.

It all remains a matter of interpretation.

The only strong position the Obama Administration takes is against DNS blocking. Here, the White House sides with many of the tech experts, and against the MPAA, by concluding that tampering with DNS poses a threat to the Internet.

“We must avoid creating new cybersecurity risks or disrupting the underlying architecture of the Internet. Proposed laws must not tamper with the technical architecture of the Internet through manipulation of the Domain Name System (DNS), a foundation of Internet security.”

“Our analysis of the DNS filtering provisions in some proposed legislation suggests that they pose a real risk to cybersecurity and yet leave contraband goods and services accessible online. We must avoid legislation that drives users to dangerous, unreliable DNS servers and puts next-generation security policies, such as the deployment of DNSSEC, at risk,” they write.

The above statement may also explain why many of the lawmakers previously in favor of DNS-blocking have suddenly started to back pedal. They probably got a heads up and changed their tone before the White House statement was released.

By itself, however, this change of position might be an indication that it’s not a good idea to rush through legislation that can have devastating effects on the Internet. If DNS-blocking turns out to not be such a good idea after all, there might be plenty of other things that need to be reconsidered as well.

For the SOPA/PIPA opposition the White House statement is encouraging, but nothing more than that. It’s a small win and a motivation to continue the protests, but in the end the White House is also very clear when it states that “new legal tools to combat online piracy” have to be implemented.

And so the battle continues.

Update: Rupert Murdoch is not happy.

Source: White House Speaks Out Against SOPA/PIPA, Sort Of…

Despite this lack of action, the RIAA sees BitTorrent sites as the main source of music piracy. In their most recent submission to the US Trade Representative (USTR) last November, they claimed BitTorrent “is responsible for approximately 50% of the industry’s global P2P piracy problem.”

One of the sites reported to the USTR is TorrentHound, and this week the RIAA put the wheels in motion to find out who is operating the torrent site. The music group obtained a subpoena from the U.S. District Court of Columbia and has ordered Namecheap’s WhoisGuard service to hand over all identifying information they have on the owner of the domain.

“We believe your service is hosting the above-referenced domain name on its network. This website associated with this domain name offers direct links to files containing sound recordings for other users to download by such artists as Lady Gaga, Michael Jackson, Coldplay, Madonna and Kanye West,” the RIAA writes in a letter to Whoisguard.com.

“As stated in the attached subpoena, you are required to disclose to the RIAA information sufficient to identify the infringer. This would include the individual’s IP-address and e-mail address,” the RIAA adds.

Interestingly, the identification request is not for the actual torrent site TorrentHound.com, which is registered through Katz, but for TorrentHound.net. The latter domain redirected to the .com site in the past, but it currently points to an entirely different site.

Despite the non-infringing nature of TorrentHound.net, WhoisGuard is expected to hand over the domain owner’s details.

In their Service Agreement they specifically mention that all personal information will be revealed when it’s “necessary to comply with any applicable laws, government rules or requirements, subpoenas, court orders or requests of law enforcement.”

The question remains, however, what the RIAA is planning to do with the information. Are they preparing to strike on torrent sites in the US? Last summer the music group also requested the personal information of the domain owners of three other torrent sites – LimeTorrents, BitSnoop and Monova – but thus far no notable action has been taken against the owners.

TorrentFreak contacted the RIAA for a comment, but we have yet to receive a response.

Source: RIAA Orders WhoisGuard to Identify Torrent Site Owner

Hana Beshara, known online as Phara, was the first of the site’s founders to be sentenced. She has to spend 22 months in prison followed by 2 years of probation and 500 hours of community service.

After her sentencing Beshara was released to allow her to spend a few weeks in the outside world until a bed became available at a local prison. This is common procedure if a person is unlikely to flee and doesn’t pose a danger to the safety of any other person or the community.

Initially the authorities didn’t protest this decision, but a few hours after the verdict they changed their position. As it turns out, the Attorney’s Office was keeping an eye on NinjaVideo’s Facebook page where Beshara was blowing off stream and interacting with other members of the Ninja community.

“I never snitched, I never left Ninjavideo, and I will always be proud of this incredible world we built, this community that touched millions. I hold my head high. Always. Ride or die, no? THIS SHIT IS NINJA,” was the first of more than two dozen updates to which the authorities took offense.

Aside from joking about her time in jail – picking up a degree, earning pennies making license plates – Beshara encouraged people to spread the word about her sentencing. The NinjaVideo founder further solicited for photo shoots in men’s magazines, and made plans to create a documentary.

The authorities were not amused by the outspoken convict, and immediately requested the court to detain her as soon as possible.

“Between Friday afternoon and this morning, Beshara posted more than 25 additional Facebook messages, which variously criticized the government, celebrated NinjaVideo.net’s copyright infringement, and sought to assemble a public relations team to engage media and documentary filmmakers to help her ‘fight back’ and ‘change [ ] history . . . again.’.”

“Beshara also posted several entries on what remains of the NinjaVideo.net forum boards, now hosted at www.ninjavideoforum.net, one of which belittled the sentence imposed by the Court and mocked the named victim of her crimes,” they write.

According to the authorities, the Facebook updates written by the NinjaVideo founder pose a danger to the community.

“Beshara’s post-sentencing actions demonstrate a clear lack of remorse over her illegal conduct and a disregard of the harm her actions have caused, and pose a danger to the community,” they write.

The question is what the authorities see as a threat. We assume that a comment like “IMA RUN MY FUCKIN CELL BLOCK. :),” isn’t taken too seriously. Even if it is, the comment wouldn’t be a threat to the community, and certainly not a reason to rush her to jail.

Another option is that the authorities simply don’t want Beshara to speak up in public and be critical or even sarcastic about her sentencing. Her motivation to get into the spotlight and have her say, may be one of the main reasons why the authorities wanted to speed up the detainment.

Despite opposition from Beshara’s lawyer, today the court sided with the prosecution and ruled that the NinjaVideo founder should be locked up effective immediately, taking away the few weeks she had left. Beshara was sent off to the Alexandria detention center where she will serve her sentence… and run a cell block.

Source: US Authorities Silence NinjaVideo Founder, Rush Her to Prison

The Pirate Bay argued that BitTorrent trackers have been made redundant by technologies such as DHT and PEX. In addition, The Pirate Bay team said that they might move away from torrents entirely and switch to offering magnet links instead.

“We’re talking to the other torrent admins on doing magnet links and DHT and PEX for all sites. Moving away from torrents and trackers totally – like pick a date and all agree ‘from this date, we’ll not support torrents anymore’,” a Pirate Bay insider told TorrentFreak at the time.

Now, two years later, that date is coming soon.

Today, The Pirate Bay made the first step towards this new future by making magnets the default download links instead of torrents. TorrentFreak was further informed that in “a month or so” the largest torrent site on the Internet will stop serving torrent files indefinitely.

The announcement is bound to lead to confusion and uncertainty among many torrent users, but in reality very little will change for the average Pirate Bay visitor. Users will still be able to download files, but these will now be started through a magnet link instead of a .torrent file.

The Pirate Bay team told TorrentFreak that one of the advantages of the transition to a “magnet site” is that it requires relatively little bandwidth to host a proxy. This is topical, since this week courts in both Finland and the Netherlands ordered local Internet providers to block the torrent site.

Perhaps even better, without the torrent files everyone can soon host a full copy of The Pirate Bay on a USB thumb drive, which may come in handy in the future.

Unlike the site’s users, existing torrent sites that scrape .torrent files from The Pirate Bay will have to make some drastic changes. If they want to continue serving .torrent files they will have to fetch them from DHT. Also, hotlinks to .torrent files will stop working and will soon redirect to The Pirate Bay’s detail page for the files in question.

One of the potential downsides of using magnets is that it could take a bit longer for downloads to start, especially if there are relatively few people sharing a file. This is because the .torrent file has to be fetched from other users instead of being downloaded directly from the site. More background on these and other technicalities can be found here.

The good news is that all mainstream BitTorrent clients support magnet links. This wasn’t the case back in 2009, but when The Pirate Bay hinted that in the future they could become a magnet-only site, all developers quickly made their clients fully compatible.

There’s no doubt that a torrent-less Pirate Bay will certainly mark the end of an era. At the moment it’s hard to predict what the impact of The Pirate Bay’s decision will be on the BitTorrent community. But torrents, however, will never disappear completely.

Source: The Pirate Bay Will Stop Serving Torrents

Tens of thousands of musicians, from those just starting out to those already established, use BitTorrent to give away their music for free.

One of the BitTorrent clients that helps these artists to get noticed is FrostWire. In 2008, the client introduced its FrostClick service through which it promotes independent artists, and not without success.

With help from FrostWire, independent musicians reach a bigger audience than many of the artists signed by major labels. In the last year alone, 2.4 million people downloaded the albums promoted by FrostWire, and according to the artists who were featured, it pays off.

“FrostWire jumpstarted my music career by giving away my album for free to over 130,000 people,” says female rapper Kellee Maize in a comment. “Paying for that type of exposure would have cost me over $50,000 on other outlets such as taking out Facebook ads or Google Adsense.”

“Because of FrostWire I’ve accumulated over 100,000 Facebook and Twitter followers. During my FrostWire campaign, my website has received over 100,000 page views,” she adds.

Some of the critics of ‘free’ music say that it doesn’t convert to any sales at all, but Maize disagrees. The rapper says that thanks to releasing her music under a Creative Commons license through FrostWire, she’s now earning some decent money.

“I’ve been able to sell more albums on iTunes with this exposure and earn a sustainable income off of MP3 sales even though my music is part of Creative Commons,” says Maize.

She’s not alone either. Other artists that were promoted by FrostWire also praise the promotional success it gave them.

“We were truly delighted by the number of downloads we received after our EP was featured on FrostWire. It’s the most effective way we’ve found so far of getting the music out there,” says John from Azoora Feat. Graciellita.

This view is shared by Ryan Egan from The Ugly Club. “I never anticipated the kind of feedback we’ve received from music fans all over the world and it was a great decision to leave our record in the hands of the great people at FrostClick,” Egan says.

To celebrate 2.4 million downloads in 2011, FrostWire has released a compilation album as they also did in 2009. The A Side of the new album features 18 artists who’ve been promoted in the FrostWire client, and Side B is a hand-picked selection of 12 of the best artists who were featured on the FrostClick website.

All all the tracks are completely free to download and share. We’ve embedded Side A of FrostWire Creative Commons Mixtape below, and Side B is available here. For those who want more, here’s another 2.5 gigabyte compilation of some of the best Creative Commons music of 2011.

Enjoy.

Source: Musicians Praise BitTorrent and Creative Commons

A few days ago Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff wrote an article in the Salt Lake City Tribune. In the column the Attorney General stresses how important it is for Congress to pass the SOPA and PIPA bills. The MPAA is delighted with the support and praised it in a blog post yesterday.

“Shurtleff effectively hammers the point that Google, Yahoo and others have spent millions trying to distort – that states which allow rogue websites to operate unfettered will experience massive revenue reduction and job loss,” the MPAA writes.

The Attorney General’s statements do indeed bolster what the MPAA and other pro-copyright groups have said all along. By itself this is not unusual, but when we examined the article in more detail we began to notice that many of the sentences that are passed off as Shurtleff’s work actually look very familiar.

Could it be that the column was partly written by the MPAA?

We say yes. To back up this claim we will highlight a few sentences from the Attorney General’s article, and compare them with those previously delivered by the MPAA and affiliated pro-copyright groups.

The first sentence that caught our attention is: “It will take a strong, sustained effort to stop Internet thieves and profiteers.”

Strong words, but also familiar ones. In fact, former MPAA President Bob Pisano uttered exactly the same words in 2010 when he congratulated the Senate Judiciary Committee with unanimously approving the COICA bill, the predecessor to SOPA and PIPA.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg really. Here’s another example.

“Congress can make a significant contribution to that effort with legislation to strengthen law enforcement tools. In the interests of American citizens and businesses, it is time for Congress to enact rogue sites legislation.”

The sentence above is copied from a pro-COICA column (bottom paragraph) written by Mike McCurry, co-chairman of the pro-copyright outfit Arts+Labs. At the time, McCurry’s piece was praised by pro-copyright lobby groups and in his writing McCurry also uses the previously mentioned sentence from the MPAA’s former president.

But there’s more. The column from McCurry, which is often quoted by the MPAA and affiliated groups such as FightOnlineTheft, displays more similarities with the article published by Attorney General Mark Shurtleff.

For example: “[Rogue sites legislation] cut off foreign pirates and counterfeiters from the U.S. market and deprives them of what they want most — our money. By disrupting the business models of these online criminals, this legislation would make it less profitable and more difficult for those who wish to engage in blatant intellectual property theft.”

Now compare that to this quote from McCurry’s MPAA-inspired column which is nearly identical, far beyond what can be called a coincidence.

The Attorney General was also directly inspired by the Coalition Against Counterfeiting and Piracy, a Chamber of Commerce outfit that belongs to the same pro-copyright clique.

Compare: “[rogue sites] represent the worst of the worst infringers on the Internet, are a threat to our economic security and they have no place in a legitimate online market.”

..to this quote (PDF) “[rogue sites] represent the worst of the worst on the Internet, and have no place in a legitimate online market.” And the list goes on.

Although we can’t say with certainty that Attorney General Mark Shurtleff was fed by the MPAA directly, it is obvious that the article wasn’t written by him. It’s a collection of ripped off sentences that can be directly traced back to the MPAA and affiliated groups.

This is quite a concern coming from someone who is supposed to be objective, especially considering that this Attorney General will have the exclusive power to grant requests for domain seizures and DNS blockades if SOPA or PIPA passes. The way we see it now, this Attorney General is clearly in the pockets of the pro-copyright lobby.

Holmes Wilson of the citizen rights group Fight for The Future agrees with this assessment.

“This is a reminder that SOPA/PIPA—the language, the money behind it, and the arguments used to justify it— are coming straight from the same place: the copyright industry,” he told TorrentFreak. “It’s possible that they’re turning up the heat in Utah in response to the meetings Utah residents have scheduled with Utah Senator Mike Lee.”

Unfortunately this isn’t an isolated incident. A lot of seemingly independent groups that recently supported PIPA and SOPA use the exact same language that appears to be fed to them by a single source.

Just Google the sentence “Criminals have turned to the Internet, abusing its virtually unlimited distribution opportunities,” and you’ll see that it was used in pro- SOPA/PIPA letters by the National Governors Association, Public Safety and First Responder Groups and others. Letters that were coincidentally all highlighted on the MPAA blog.

The more we dig, the more we find…

Source: ‘Rogue’ Attorney General Spreads MPAA-Fed SOPA Propaganda

Despite massive competition from cyberlockers, BitTorrent continues to expand year after year, and not just by a little. Today, BitTorrent Inc. announced that their two flagship clients increased their user base by 50 percent, to more than 150 million active users a month.

Most growth can be attributed to uTorrent, which more than quadrupled its number of monthly users in the last three years. The ‘tiny’ BitTorrent client went from 28 million monthly users in December 2008 to 132 million last month.

“This marks an amazing milestone for our company and we want to thank our loyal users and partners for their support. Our protocol and software clients have become some of the most pervasive pieces of technology in Internet history,” says BitTorrent Inc. CEO Eric Klinker.

“We look forward to another exciting year of growth and we continue expanding our product lines to meet the needs of consumers creating and consuming high-quality personal media files on a broad range of consumer electronics devices,” he adds.

The last comment ties in to a slew of other announcements released by BitTorrent today. The company is currently showcasing several “BitTorrent Certified” devices at CES, the world’s largest consumer electronics tradeshow in Las Vegas. Through these partnerships BitTorrent hopes to add an extra revenue stream, and widen its user base beyond the traditional computer.

Aside from showing off BitTorrent-enabled routers, TVs and network storage devices, BitTorrent will also launch the world’s first certified set-top box developed by the Slovakian company Antik. The set-top-box allows users to search, download and play torrent files directly on their TV.

The advantage of the BitTorrent Certified ecosystem is that it simplifies the downloading process for less tech-savvy people. Right now, many people drop out after installing a BitTorrent client because they find it too complicated to download and play content.

Whether these devices will be a success is yet to be seen, but there is certainly a large enough user base to tap into.

Based on the 150 million active monthly users BitTorrent Inc. reports for their clients, the total number of monthly BitTorrent users can be estimated at more than a quarter billion. And despite these already dazzling numbers, there is still plenty of room for growth.

Source: uTorrent & BitTorrent Surge to 150 Million Monthly Users

The data for our weekly download chart is collected by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are BD/DVDrips unless stated otherwise.

RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.

Source: Top 10 Most Pirated Movies on BitTorrent

The most notable absentee this year is TorrentReactor, one of the oldest torrent sites on the Internet. The Russian-based site hasbeen featured in the top 10 since 2006, but missed the cut in 2012. Last year’s best newcomer LimeTorrents took an even bigger hit in traffic and has dropped off the list as well.

Below we have compiled a list of the 10 most-visited torrent sites at the start of the new year. Only public and English language sites are included. The list is based on traffic rank reports from Compete and Alexa. In addition, we include last year’s ranking for each of the 10 sites.

1. The Pirate Bay

The Pirate Bay is probably the best known BitTorrent brand on the Internet. The site was founded in 2003 and is still expanding, despite the various legal troubles and blockades that were designed to hurt the site in recent years. The Pirate Bay currently has close to 2 billion page views a month.

2. Torrentz

Torrentz has been the leading BitTorrent meta-search engine for years. Unlike the other sites featured in the list Torrentz does not host any torrent files, it merely redirects visitors to other places on the web.

3. KickassTorrents

Founded in 2009, KickassTorrents is one of the youngest sites in the list, and this year it moved up to the top 3. Responding to the increasing worries about domain seizures, the site moved from its kickasstorrents.com domain to kat.ph a few months ago. The site continues to innovate and release new features every other week.

4. IsoHunt

In 2010 isoHunt became the first search engine forced to implement a keyword filter provided by the MPAA. Despite this setback, isoHunt continues to be listed among the top torrent sites. In 2012, isoHunt hopes to get rid of the filter through the Appeals Court.

5. BTjunkie

BTjunkie had to deal with a setback a few months ago when the site was blocked in Italy following a court order. In response to the block, the site’s owners launched an ad-free proxy site for Italians only. Just as last year, BTjunkie settles in fifth place.

6. ExtraTorrent

ExtraTorrent is one of those robust torrent indexes that doesn’t make the news very often. Compared to last year the site has moved up a spot and is now the 6th most popular torrent venue.

7. Demonoid

The semi-private tracker continues to attract a massive audience, also on the new .me domain name. Behind the scenes the site’s owners are working on a new and improved look.

8. EZTV

Unlike the other sites in the top 10, TV-torrent distribution group EZTV is a niche site specializing in TV content only. Despite its fair share of downtime this year, EZTV has managed to get a spot in the top 10 for the first time in its six year existence.

9. Bitsnoop

BitSnoop is another newcomer that gained a large audience this year. This didn’t go unnoticed by the RIAA, who filed a complaint at the U.S. District Court of Columbia and obtained a subpoena to reveal the identity of BitSnoop’s owner a few months ago.

10. 1337x

1337x is also new to the top 10, and focuses more on the community aspect than some competitors. The site’s owners say they started 1337x to “fill an apparent void where it seemed there was a lack of quality conscience ad free torrent sites with public trackers.” Its 10th place this year proves that they’re getting the success formula right.

Disclaimer: Yes, we know that Alexa isn’t perfect and that Compete has plenty of flaws, but combined both do a pretty good job at comparing sites that operate in a similar niche.

Source: Top 10 Most Popular Torrent Sites of 2012

It all started in 2007 when a jury hit Thomas with a $222,000 verdict when she was found guilty of sharing 24 songs using the file-sharing client Kazaa. In 2008 Thomas appealed this verdict and a mistrial was declared, with the judge ruling that the fines were “disproportionate to the damages suffered.”

The case went up for re-trial before a new jury in 2009 where Thomas lost and was ordered to pay $1.92 million in fines. She then filed for a re-trial and in November 2010 a jury again found her guilty and awarded a total sum of $1.5 million .

Last year the case moved in another direction. Describing the massive damages as “monstrous and shocking” U.S. District Judge Michael Davis significantly reduced the earlier fine. Instead of $1.5 million, the judge ruled that $2,250 per song, for a total award of $54,000, is the maximum consistent with due process.

“The Court concludes that an award of $1.5 million for stealing and distributing 24 songs for personal use is appalling. Such an award is so severe and oppressive as to be wholly disproportioned to the offense and obviously unreasonable,” Judge Davis wrote.

The RIAA was disappointed by the verdict of the federal court, and is now hoping to reinstate the initial $222,000 damages award through an appeal. This week the music lobby group filed a brief in which they claim that this amount is not “monstrous and shocking,” and neither was the $1.5 million fine.

“Neither the first jury’s $9,250-per-work award nor the third jury’s $62,500-per-work award is more substantial than the Constitution allows,” the RIAA concludes.

The RIAA further criticizes Judge Davis’ ruling that any fine higher than $2,250 per infringed song requires some proof of actual damages. In other words, the RIAA would have to show that there is “some” relation with actual damages suffered by the copyright holder. According to the RIAA, neither the copyright act nor the due process clause requires this.

“Neither its legal analysis nor its factual analysis supports the court’s holding that the relationship between actual and statutory damages renders any award greater than $2,250 per work unconstitutional,” writes the RIAA.

The RIAA is not alone in their assessment, as they are now joined by the MPAA who this week filed an amicus brief in the case.

“That ruling improperly would require copyright owners who elect statutory damages to present proof of actual damages. Requiring such proof would significantly alter well-established ground rules for copyright litigation, add substantial practical burdens and unreasonably increase the costs of pursuing such litigation,” the MPAA writes.

In addition, the RIAA argues that Judge Davis made a mistake by ruling that “making a work available” is not part of the distribution right protected by the Copyright Act.

“The District Court erred in rejecting the first jury’s verdict on the mistaken ground that the Copyright Act does not protect the copyright holder’s long-established exclusive right to control the terms on which a work is ‘made available’ to the public,” the RIAA writes.

Again, the MPAA sides with the RIAA in its writing to the court.

“That right is, in fact, an international copyright norm. The right has particular importance in a digital age where unauthorized third parties routinely make available valuable copyrighted works for instantaneous dissemination to millions of Internet users around the globe,” they write.

It is now up to the court to decide if the arguments provided by the billion dollar entertainment companies hold any ground.

To be continued, indefinitely.

Source: MPAA Joins RIAA in “Monstrous” Jammie Thomas Appeal

Dubbed “Share,” the new application is targeted at people who want to share large files with a private group of people, as opposed to uploading them via a public BitTorrent site for all the world to see. With the tagline “No more storage limits. No more fees” it also takes a stab at the increasingly popular cyberlockers.

Although the software uses BitTorrent under the hood, people are not required to create torrent files. Instead, they can select files on their computer, pick a person or group to share them with, and the application takes care of the rest.

According to BitTorrent’s chief strategist Shahi Ghanem the new application fits perfectly into a world where media files grow larger and larger by the day.

“With today’s consumer cameras/video recorders producing stunning quality, traditional media sharing requires concessions. With Share, you don’t have to crop photos, reduce resolutions or cut video length to easily share something with your friends, family and colleagues. It’s much faster than traditional ‘cloud’ solutions and easy for anyone,” says Ghanem.

Those with a keen eye for detail may see similarities between “Share” and the “Project Chrysalis” client that was released last year. The new application is an improvement over the Chrysalis client, directly based on input from users.

“After evaluating the user response and feedback, we realized we had the right goal, but users identified challenges with the implementation. Ultimately, we took what we learned and started again from scratch. Share was born,” Ghanem explains.

The Share project is currently in an early Alpha phase, but once it has matured the application will be integrated into the existing uTorrent and BitTorrent Mainline clients. Although some might find this useful, there is also a group of uTorrent users who would prefer to keep a lighter client.

In recent years uTorrent has been augmented with quite a few extra bells and whistles, features that some traditional BitTorrent users are not interested in. To address these concerns, we asked whether BitTorrent Inc. would consider releasing a more basic version of the popular client as well.

“We might consider it in the future – it’s definitely not out of the realm of possibility,” we were told. “Right now, even with the new features, the client is still very small and efficient on resources. We also review features very frequently, and if they aren’t being used, we are always open to removing them.”

A uTorrent “light” may indeed not be a bad idea to please the angry mob. Those who are less resistant to change are of course invited to give Share a spin.

Source: BitTorrent Releases New “Share” Application

Philosophy student Isak Gerson is such a religious file-sharer, and in an attempt to protect his unique belief system he founded The Missionary Church of Kopimism in 2010. In the hope that they could help prevent persecution for their beliefs, the Church then filed a request to be officially accepted by the authorities.

After two failed attempts, where the Church was asked to formalize its way of praying or meditation, the authorities finally recognized the organization as an official religion. The Church’s founder is ecstatic about this news, and hopes that it will motivate more people to come forward as ‘Kopimists’.

“I think that more people will have the courage to step out as Kopimists. Maybe not in the public, but at least to their close ones,” Isak tells TorrentFreak. “There’s still a legal stigma around copying for many. A lot of people still worry about going to jail when copying and remixing. I hope in the name of Kopimi that this will change.”

Although the formal status of the Church doesn’t mean that copyright infringement is now permitted, the Church’s founder hopes that their beliefs will be considered in future lawmaking.

During the last half year the Missionary Church of Kopimism tripled its members from 1,000 to 3,000 and it’s expected that the recent news will cause another surge in followers. Official member or not, Gerson encourages everyone with an Internet connection to keep on sharing.

“We confessional Kopimists have not only depended on each other in this struggle, but on everyone who is copying information. To everyone with an internet connection: Keep copying. Maintain hardline Kopimi,” Gerson concludes.

Prospective followers who embrace the same calling are of course welcome to join the movement, free of charge.

Source: File-Sharing Recognized as Official Religion in Sweden

Needless to say, a site of this size can’t possible avoid some of its users occasionally uploading copyrighted files. In common with most websites that deal with user uploaded content, 4Shared allows rightsholders to send takedown notices to remove copyrighted files that are posted without permission, but for some this is not enough.

Modulo Security Solutions has filed a lawsuit at a federal court in New Jersey in an attempt to reveal the identities of the person or persons who uploaded confidential documents to 4Shared. The security company told the court that it plans to take civil action against the alleged uploader(s) for copyright infringement related offenses, but that it can only do so if 4Shared hands over their personal details.

In the complaint Modulo states that while 4Shared took swift action to remove the infringing files from their website, it refused to give up any information on their users without a court order. This claim is backed up by a copy of an email 4Shared sent Modulo early December.

Interestingly, the lawsuit was filed “ex parte,” meaning that 4Shared will not be notified about the legal proceedings. Modulo says it chose to do so because it fears that the cyberlocker may destroy the information when they become aware of the suit.

“Petitioner submits this petition on an ex parte basis because the information that it seeks from Respondent is highly susceptible to deletion or otherwise may be destroyed, either intentionally or inadvertently,” the complaint reads.

Modulo further cites several paragraphs from the 4Shared site which indicate that the data they are after may be destroyed if the case is delayed significantly. Among other things, the 4Shared’s terms of service state that free accounts will be deleted 180 days after they were last accessed.

The cyberlocker also notes that it reserves the right to “disable or remove the accounts of users who infringe the intellectual property rights of others or may expose 4shared to civil or criminal liability.”

While the nature of the case is different from traditional media piracy, its outcome will be watched closely by copyright holders currently suing BitTorrent users. After all, if 4Shared is ordered to hand over customer information including names and IP-addresses, there is no reason why others shouldn’t try the same tactic.

In their complaint Modulo is only asking 4Shared to identify the uploader(s) of the files, not those who have downloaded them. This would make it harder to sue large groups of people as is currently the case with BitTorrent lawsuits, but it’s not unthinkable that other companies will cast a wider net.

At this point it’s unclear what type of information and logs 4Shared has of up- and downloaders, and perhaps more importantly, for how long this data is stored. TorrentFreak contacted 4Shared with a request to comment on their logging policy, and we will add a response as soon as it comes in.

Update: 4Shared comment

“We take our Privacy Policy very seriously and protect the rights of legal copyright owners, as well as personal data of our users. Here’s a snippet, concerning the protection of the users information:

“… We will make no public release of any personal information that is collected through our proprietary file sharing tool. All client-specific information gathered through 4shared will be the property of the user.”

Personal information that is collected includes users IP, the exact time and date of the login and upload process. The reason for disclosure of such data can occur only if a crime took place and after appropriate decision of the court. We don’t provide our users info if someone just say so without a legal reason for that.”

Source: 4Shared Sued To Reveal Identify of Infringing Users

One of the most prominent sites that has rallied against the bills is the largest online community Reddit. The site’s users have organized various successful protests, which led domain registrar GoDaddy to drop its support for the bill. But the site itself also actively encouraged its users to speak out against SOPA and PIPA on several occasions.

For the site’s staff, taking a political stand is very much a matter of self-preservation. Reddit’s general manager Erik Martin recently said that the bill would “almost certainly mean the end” of the popular site.

Strong words, but First Amendment lawyer and Internet policy expert Marvin Ammori tells TorrentFreak that it’s certainly not far-fetched. While some SOPA and PIPA supporters say that Reddit is safe because the bills only target foreign sites, Ammori disagrees.

The former law professor says that thousands of US businesses, large and small, may be hit by the bills if they pass Congress. Ammori explains his views in a recent article where he lists three scenarios under which American websites could be targeted.

“Reddit is most likely to be illegal under the second category as anti-circumvention,” Ammori tells us. This means that should The Pirate Bay be declared illegal under the new laws, any US-based site or service that talks about gaining access to the site via the various loopholes, breaks the law as well.

“Any tool that helps anyone circumvent the bills’ remedies are illegal. Since the bills’ remedies include domain-name breaking and removal from search engines, any American sites that permit you to search for, or find, The Pirate Bay’s new domain name is potentially liable for circumvention,” Ammori reasons.

“I think if the community posts an article and votes for an article that helps people get to a targeted site, perhaps by listing the target site’s IP-address or new domain name, then Reddit itself might be ‘a product or service designed or marketed for the circumvention or bypassing of measures’. The copyright industry might argue that Reddit’s products (links) are designed or marketed by Reddit or by users ‘in concert with’ Reddit.”

Reading the above it’s clear that the current language of the bills could indeed have far-reaching consequences. Not just for Reddit, but for every site or service that relies on user-based input. Perhaps even for TorrentFreak, should we report on how people are making tools that can circumvent SOPA and PIPA.

And what about VPN providers? Or TOR? The list of potential targets goes on and on.

Supporters of the bill have pointed out that these fears are not justified, and they promise that the bills will only be used to take out the bad apples. But if that’s really the case, wouldn’t it be a good idea to draft the law in a way that makes it absolutely clear that only rogue sites are at risk? Just a thought.

Source: How SOPA Can Kill Reddit and Many Other US Sites

The levels of work and expertise required to run a large torrent site shouldn’t be underestimated of course, but there are also hundreds of hobbyists out there who have the desire to set up a small torrent site of their own. WP-Trader is aimed at the latter, and it has a wide range of features that support the needs of every self-aspiring torrent site admin.

WP-Trader developer Andrew Walker told TorrentFreak that he saw the need for an ultra-simple torrent script through his half-decade long involvement in the forums of the popular Torrent Trader script.

“All of the torrent tracker source codes out there are unique or good in their own ways, but I saw a lack in one click install and setup for torrent sites since only a couple of sources offer that function. On a daily basis I saw people coming into the forums having problems with install and setup of their sites,” Walker told TorrentFreak.

“I do have a strong belief that if you do not know how to install or mod your own torrent site then you should not be running a torrent site but something like WP-Trader can benefit artists who have little to no knowledge about how to set up a site,” Walker adds.

So the idea for WP-Trader was born, and little over a month ago the first version was released via the WordPress plugin repository. Since then, Walker and his co-developer Lee Howarth have added new updates every week, and they’re dedicated to improving it further during the coming months.

“At the moment the plugin is still in beta and does lack a lot of features but new things are being added weekly. The plugin was built around Torrent Trader V2.07 and some things you see in Torrent Trader will stay, we were are trying to use a lot of the built-in functions of WordPress,” Walker adds.

The current release already comes with a wide range of options and a fully functioning tracker. Users can choose to make all uploads public and allow external trackers for example, but it’s also possible to run a completely private tracker with ratio requirements and wait times for lower user classes.

In addition, WP-Trader comes with several widgets, to show off the latest uploads and most active torrents for example. The full list of features is too long to list here, but you can get a glimpse of the options below.

While WP-Trader already has all the features a basic torrent site needs, there is still a lot of work to be done. Aside from ironing out the bugs and implementing new features such as support for anonymous uploads, the developers will also work on a more seamless integration with WordPress.

“We plan on fully integrating it as closely as possible with WordPress because WordPress has plenty of features or plugins to handle certain things which we feel that should not be added to the plugin,” Walker says.

The WP-Trader team hopes that a lot of people will take the plugin for a spin, and provide feedback where needed. WP-Trader is available for download in the official WordPress repository, which also hosts a FAQ section and some pointers on how to get a torrent site up and running in no time.

Source: Turn Any WordPress Site Into A BitTorrent Tracker

The data for our weekly download chart is collected by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are BD/DVDrips unless stated otherwise.

RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.

Source: Top 10 Most Pirated Movies on BitTorrent

Below is a selection of some of the most remarkable topics covered here on TorrentFreak in the latter part of 2011. Part 1 (covering the first 6 months of the year) can be found here.

Feel free to add your assessment of the last year in the comments section below.

July

BitTorrent had its 10th birthday at the start of July, and inventor Bram Cohen was kind enough to share his thoughts on the past decade with us.

In the same month the MPAA, RIAA and all major ISPs in the US announced a deal to curb piracy with a six-strikes warning system. Under the agreement the ISPs agreed to send “copyright alerts” to subscribers whose Internet connections are used for copyright infringement. Repeated offenders will not be disconnected from the Internet, but could be slowed down instead.

Around the same time, the French authorities provided some details on the scope of their three-strikes law, Hadopi. During the first 9 months of operation, a total of 18 Million file-sharers were tracked. This mass discovery process resulted in 470,000 first warning emails, which equals a little over 50,000 per month. The number of people who received a second warning is currently stuck at 20,000 and only 10 Internet subscribers received a third warning.

Yet another ruling (final this time) confirmed that ‘pirate’ sites operate lawfully in Spain. In India things started working differently, with copyright holders obtaining the power to order ISPs to block sites deemed to be infringing.

Following a hearing in London’s High Court, leading UK ISP BT was forced to block subscriber access to Usenet indexing site Newzbin2. After an attempt to stop the blockade the order went into effect in November. The blocking decision was the first of its kind in the UK on copyright grounds and increased the pressure on other ISPs to follow suit, which Sky did later in the year.

Oh, and sadly enough file-sharers were denied official religion status in Sweden.

August

The mass-BitTorrent lawsuits in the US continued at a rapid pace and by August 200,000 people had been sued for allegedly sharing copyrighted material online.

The UK communications regulator OFCOM published a report which came to the conclusion that blocking ‘pirate’ websites would not be effective. Ironically enough the document wasn’t redacted properly, revealing a comprehensive guide on how to bypass all possible blocking attempts.

The US domain name seizures resulted in another arrest. US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) apprehended a 19-year-old man who allegedly ran HQ-Streams.com and HQ-Streams.net, domains that were previously seized by ICE in February.

Two of the original Pirate Bay founders launched a one-click file-hosting service called Bayfiles. The new service is dedicated to respecting copyrights while offering its users a great platform to store and share files.

Meanwhile, anti-piracy lawyers sue a dead person and a blind man.

September

Early September five people connected to the video streaming and download site NinjaVideo were indicted by a grand jury on copyright infringement and conspiracy charges. NinjaVideo was one of the sites first targeted by Operation in Our Sites mid-2010. The authorities hold the defendants responsible for providing access to unauthorized movies and TV-shows between 2008 and 2010, which allegedly earned the site more than $500,000. In the same month the site’s founder Hana Beshara and co-defendant Matthew Smith plead guilty, and two others followed in October.

Throughout 2011, the Florida-based file-hosting service Hotfile has battled in court with five major movie studios. In September, Hotfile turned the tables on Warner Bros., suing the movie studio for fraud and abuse. Hotfile accused the movie studio of systematically abusing its anti-piracy tool by taking down hundreds of titles they don’t hold the copyrights to, including open source software. Among other things, Hotfile is looking for damages to compensate the company for the losses they suffered.

After blocking The Pirate Bay and BTjunkie, Italian lawmakers proposed several new measures that will put Internet users at risk of losing their connection after one alleged infringement. These copyright complaints can be sent by anyone, not just the copyright holder in question.

The German Pirate Party scored an unprecedented win in the elections for the Berlin state parliament. The Pirates got 9 percent of the vote, which translated into 15 parliament seats. A few weeks later the party polled double digits across the country. With 10 percent of the total vote, the Pirates would become the third largest party in the country if federal elections were held.

Oh, and girls are not into the Pirate Bay at all, but those who are fancy porn just as much as men.

October

In Belgium the Antwerp Court of Appeal ordered Belgian ISPs Belgacom and Telenet to initiate DNS blockades of 11 domains connected to The Pirate Bay. A few days after the verdict The Pirate Bay registered depiraatbaai.be, a new domain not covered by the court order. By the end of the month this domain was already on its way into the top 100 most-visited domains in Belgium.

The Stockholm District Court sentence against Pirate Bay founder Gottfrid Svartholm was finalized after he failed to appear at the Court of Appeal. Svartholm, also known as Anakata online, did not appear at the appeal trial last year because he was hospitalized in Cambodia. He later went missing. The Court of Appeal decided to finalize the initial verdict of one year jail time and a fine of $1.1 million. The other defendants await a decision on their request for a Supreme Court appeal.

A report showed that the majority of users on The Pirate Bay value their anonymity online, but how anonymous can they really be if VPN-providers don’t value the privacy of their customers?

On October 26, Representative Lamar Smith introduced the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which is the House version of the Senate’s PROTECT IP (PIPA) bill. This marked the start of a months-long Internet battle that was still ongoing at the end of the year.

Aside from making streaming of copyrighted content a felony, the pending bill aims to make it easier to put sites that facilitate copyright infringement out of business. Should SOPA become law, authorities and copyright holders will have a broad range of tools to censor sites they deem to be facilitating copyright infringement. Aside from domain seizures, they can demand that search engines remove ‘rogue sites’ from their results, order ISPs to block these domains, and cut off their payments providers.

Meanwhile, Justin Bieber face the prospect of jail for pirating.

November

The SOPA soap continued. Mid-November leading civil liberties and tech policy organizations called for an Internet-wide day of protest against censorship. Every hour more than 23,000 emails were sent to Congress via the American Censorship campaign and Tumblr users alone made 3.6 calls per second.

US authorities carried out the largest round of domain name seizures yet as part of their continued crackdown on counterfeit and piracy-related websites. Right before “Cyber Monday” more than 130 domain names were taken over by the feds to protect the commercial interests of US companies. The new round came exactly a year after 82 domains, including Torrent-Finder, were taken over in 2010.

Across the pond, the European Parliament adopted a resolution which criticized domain name seizures of “infringing” websites by US authorities. According to the resolution these measures need to be countered as they endanger “the integrity of the global internet and freedom of communication.” With this stance the European Parliament joins an ever-growing list of SOPA opponents.

Universal Music filed a lawsuit against the popular music streaming service Grooveshark. The music label claimed that bosses and other workers at Grooveshark personally uploaded many thousands of infringing tracks to the service, and could demand hundreds of millions of dollars in damages. Grooveshark denied the claims and is determined to fight back.

At the end of November, Rick Falkvinge, founder of the first Pirate Party in Sweden and TorrentFreak columnist, earned a spot in Foreign Policy’s prestigious list of Top 100 Global Thinkers.

December

More than a year after Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) seized the domain of music blog Dajaz1, they finally gave it back. It turned out that the seizure was a mistake.

SOPA continued to dominate the news all over the Internet. Wikipedia aired a plan to censor itself to protest the pending bill, and the General Manager of the largest online community Reddit said that the bill would “almost certainly mean the end” of the popular site. Reddit’s users also played a key role in convincing domain registrar GoDaddy to drop their support for SOPA.

A new service called YouHaveDownloaded exposed what people behind an IP-address are downloading on BitTorrent. Using this data, we were able to show that unauthorized downloads occur even in the most unexpected of places, from the palace of the French President, via the Church of God, to the RIAA and the US House of Representatives. Ironically, the RIAA blames another company for pirating though their IP-addresses.

Early December, cyberlocker service Megaupload pulled off one of the biggest file-sharing marketing coups in recent memory. Their Mega Song, a production by Printz Board and Kim Dotcom, featured some of the biggest names in pop and show business including P Diddy, Will.i.am, Alicia Keys, Kanye West, Snoop Dogg, Chris Brown, The Game, Mary J Blige , Kim Kardashian, and even boxer Floyd Mayweather.

Within hours, Universal had vented their fury by having the Mega Song removed from YouTube, even though they had no legal right to do so. Megaupload and its founder Kim Dotcom responded by filing a lawsuit against Universal. The label responded with a “so what?” attitude but Megaupload made it clear that Universal won’t get away so easily – questions must be answered.

Finally, downloading copyrighted content for personal use will stay legal in Switzerland and The Netherlands.

—

That’s it for 2011, we’ll be back next year.

Source: 2011: Striking Pirates and Stopping SOPA

Take a deep breath…

January

After pressure from the entertainment industries, Google started to censor piracy-related keywords from its instant and autocomplete services. Keywords such as ‘torrent,’ ‘BitTorrent’ and ‘RapidShare’ were excluded from the start, and later in the year Google added a wide range of new terms including ‘The Pirate Bay.’

Despite these efforts the RIAA remained dissatisfied, patronizing the search engine with a could-do-much-better “Report Card” in December.

The mass-BitTorrent lawsuits that entered the US during 2010 reached a new milestone in 2011 with the 100,000th person being sued for alleged copyright infringement. In January alone several prominent lawsuits were added. Anime distributor Funimation announced a lawsuit against 1337 alleged BitTorrent downloaders, and the rights holders of “The Expendables” and Paris Hilton sex tape did the same.

One alleged BitTorrent user paid a mysterious settlement of $250,000.

There was also positive news from the UK, when so-called Speculative Invoicing schemes there came to an end, at least for a few months. ACS:Law, the law firm that had terrorized untold thousands of alleged file-sharers in the UK, quit the anti-piracy business and went into bankruptcy a while later. ACS:Law’s Andrew Crossley was honored with the title of “Internet Villain” of the year and will now face the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal in early 2012.

Two lawyers who were responsible for introducing Speculative Invoicing to the UK were fined and banned from practicing for 3 months. David Gore and former partner Brian Miller of the law firm Davenport Lyons were each told to pay a £20,000 fine and interim costs of £150,000 for their professional misconduct.

Meanwhile, RapidShare and Megaupload fought back against entertainment industry propaganda.

February

Early February, the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) seized several domains belonging to major sports streaming sites. One of the websites was Rojadirecta, an unusual target because two courts in Spain previously ruled that the site operates legally. Rojadirecta appealed the seizure but thus far without result.

In response to domain seizures many people voiced concern that they may be unconstitutional. US Senator Ron Wyden feared that the seizures could stifle free speech, and this indeed turned out to be the case as the US government shut down 84,000 websites by mistake late February.

In Australia, the Federal Court dismissed the movie industry’s appeal against a 2010 ruling which found that Internet service provider iiNet is not responsible for copyright infringements carried out by its file-sharing customers. This decision was appealed once more and is now with the High Court.

Oh, and despite rampant piracy Hollywood box office grosses worldwide surpassed the magic $30 billion mark for the first time in history.

March

Following the February seizure of several domains belonging to major sports streaming sites, the feds arrested the operator of Channelsurfing.net in March. The 32-year-old Texan Bryan McCarthy was taken into custody on suspicion of criminal copyright infringement. In November, McCarthy was indicted on several copyright related charges. Awaiting his trial, the psychologically-troubled operator pleaded not guilty on all counts.

In the same month President Obama’s “IP Czar” Victoria Espinel laid the foundations for PIPA and SOPA, calling on Congress to make changes in order to make it easier to clamp down on copyright infringement. Among the recommendations were calls to turn streaming into a felony alongside authority to wiretap in copyright cases. Music industry expert, book author and Grammy winner Moses Avalon welcomed the plans, which he declared would signal the end of TorrentFreak.

In the ongoing mass BitTorrent lawsuits, U.S. District Court Judge Beryl Howell laid down a landmark verdict that would make it easy for copyright holders – the makers of The Hurt Locker in particular – to send cash demands to people they suspect of copyright infringement. The fact that Howell previously worked as an RIAA lobbyist and as the Managing Director of a pirate-chasing outfit led to suggestions of a conflict of interest.

Meanwhile in Belarus, a pirated copy of The Hurt Locker aired on national TV.

April

In April, worries about the US domain seizures prompted another major torrent site to move to a new domain as a precaution. KickassTorrents, one of the most visited torrent sites on the Internet, replaced its .com domain name with the Philippine extension .ph.

At the same time a group called MAFIAAFire coded a browser plugin to make these type of domain transitions go more smoothly by automatically redirecting users to these new homes. The release went viral and in the following months more than 200,000 people installed the add-on. ICE wasn’t happy with this and asked Mozilla to pull the add-on from their site. However, Mozilla denied the request, arguing that this type of censorship may threaten the open Internet.

An Italian court ordered all ISPs to block subscriber access to BTjunkie, leaving hundreds of thousands of Italians with the task of finding a new torrent site. At least, that was the plan. Just hours after the news was made public, a brand new and ad-free proxy site was launched. The site allowed Italians to browse an uncensored web and access BTjunkie, as well as another popular blocked site, The Pirate Bay.

May

In May, US lawmakers introduced the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA), a bill that delivers a wide range of censorship tools authorities and copyright holders can use to quash websites they claim are facilitating copyright infringement. It is basically a revamped and worsened version of the controversial COICA proposal which had to be resubmitted after its enaction failed last year. Two weeks after its introduction, the Senate’s Judicial Committee unanimously approved the bill and it now awaits the senate vote.

In the same week as PIPA was introduced, three U.S. Senators presented the Commercial Felony Streaming Act, a bill that would make streaming unauthorized music, movies and TV-shows a felony. The bill is said to address a gap in current legislation where streaming is not considered a criminal offense.

The popular video streaming site “Fast Pass TV” was shut down following the arrest of one of the site’s alleged operators. The site itself didn’t host any copyrighted content but indexed videos hosted on third-party sites.

In the US the controversial mass-BitTorrent lawsuits continued. Early May the makers of the Expendables set a record when they sued 23,322 people at once, but this record was broken a few weeks later when The Hurt Locker lawsuit was updated to include 24,583 alleged BitTorrent users. Both cases were dismissed a few months later.

In another mass-BitTorrent lawsuit – VPR Internationale v. Does 1-1017- Judge Harold Baker denied a Canadian adult film company permission to subpoena ISPs for the personal information connected to the IP-addresses of their subscribers. The reason? IP-addresses are not people, and especially in ‘adult entertainment’ cases this could obstruct a ‘fair’ legal process.

US authorities resumed “Operation In Our Sites” and seized several domain names associated with copyright infringement or counterfeit related crimes. Among the new targets were two sites that linked to copyrighted films hosted on third-party streaming sites such as megavideo.com and veoh.com.

Oh, and in the midst of all the censorship talk The Pirate Bay moved their severs to a secret mountain complex after Comcast offered help to fix a network issue.

June

A report from the UN’s Human Rights Council labeled Internet access a human right, arguing that laws which allow for the disconnection of Internet users are disproportionate and should be repealed.

Richard O’Dwyer, the 23-year-old UK-based administrator of a TV show and movie links site was arrested by police. Following his detention in the UK’s largest prison, the admin continued fighting his extradition to the U.S.

On June 11th 2011, Europe witnessed one of the largest piracy-related busts in history. The popular movie streaming portal Kino.to was shut down and a dozen people connected to the site were arrested.

As collateral damage, several file-hosting services connected to Kino.to also went down. Several people went on trial for their part in the site’s operation and the main admin was sentenced to three years in prison. Interestingly, a report published after the raids revealed that Kino.to’s users were actually the movie industry’s best customers.

—

Part 2 covering the second half of 2011 can be found here.

Source: 2011: Piracy Wars and Internet Censorship

Although tens of thousands of people downloaded a copy, the real boom came when the full version was released in March, resulting in nearly 4 million downloads by the end of the year.

This ‘success’ landed Crysis 2 the title of most pirated game of 2011 on the PC platform, beating Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and Battlefield 3 with 3,650,000 and 3,510,000 downloads respectively. Interestingly enough, the interest among pirates in the Xbox 360 version of Crysis 2 was relatively low and the game didn’t make it into the top 5 there.

On the Xbox 360 the title of most pirated game goes to Gears of War 3. This game was released in September and amassed a total of 890,000 downloads. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and Battlefield 3 also came in second and third on the Xbox 360.

On the Wii platform ‘Mario’ titles traditionally come out on top, and this year is no exception. Super Mario Galaxy 2, released in 2010, becomes the most pirated Wii game for the second year in a row. With 1,180,000 downloads it comes just in front of Mario Sports Mix, which was pirated 1,090,000 times since February.

As can be seen from the three lists below, PC games are by far the most downloaded titles, with on average more than three times the number of downloads compared to Xbox 360 and Wii releases. Overall, the number of downloads of the top titles in each category is slightly lower than last year. The platforms that are not mentioned, such as the PS3, get considerably less downloads and are excluded for that reason.

The data for these estimated download numbers is collected by TorrentFreak from several sources, including reports from all public BitTorrent trackers.

Source: The Most Pirated Games of 2011

Last month, the American Assembly, a non-partisan public policy forum affiliated with Columbia University, released a paper titled “Copyright Infringement and Enforcement in the US” which came to the same conclusion. To define the local piracy culture researchers conducted 2,303 telephone interviews, and they found that roughly half of all adults can be branded a pirate.

Sharing files among friends and family is the most common form of copyright infringement, and just over 13 percent of all respondents admitted to using file-sharing software such as BitTorrent to download content. File-sharing seems to be most popular among the younger demographic as can be seen in the graph below.

A section of the report that particularly piqued our interest concerns the use of tools to hide ones IP-address online. The original report shows that about 5 percent of the general population use these tools, but we expected this figure to be significantly higher among file-sharers.

The American Assembly was kind enough to share additional data with us which confirmed this suspicion. Among the people who use file-sharing software, little over 15 percent use tools to hide their IP-address online. In other words, one in 7 file-sharers in the US is anonymous.

Further analysis reveals that in particular younger adults hide their IP-addresses. A quarter of all file-sharers between the ages of 18 and 24 say they share files anonymously, while less than 5 percent of file-sharers older than 44 years hide their IP-address.

TorrentFreak talked to several VPN and proxy providers who all say they have witnessed substantial growth throughout the past year. The leading BitTorrent VPN and proxy service BTGuard even doubled its customer-base during the past 12 months.

“BTGuard has been consistently growing since we started. Compared to 2010, we increased by around 200% in 2011. The growth has really picked up lately which I contribute to SOPA and other censorship efforts,” BTGuard’s founder says.

“We grew 25% this month. If SOPA or something similar actually passes, the flood of Internet users seeking asylum from oppression would be staggering to say the least. Hopefully that doesn’t happen, the Internet is far more important to us then business.”

This uptick is not limited to the US either. All around the world BitTorrent users have become more aware of their privacy, as a survey among Pirate Bay users recently confirmed.

Although the data obtained through the American Assembly survey says nothing about people’s motivations to download anonymously, it is indeed safe to assume that the increased talk about anti-piracy laws, copyright alerts and file-sharing lawsuits are high up the list.

In the US alone over 250,000 BitTorrent users have been sued for alleged copyright infringements because their IP-address was captured by anti-piracy outfits. And in the coming year millions of sharers are expected to receive warnings through their Internet providers as part of a deal the major ISPs struck with copyright holders to educate and punish BitTorrent users.

A promising outlook for providers of VPN and proxy services, but whether these measures will have a significant effect on the prevalence of piracy remains to be seen.

Source: 15 Percent of US File-Sharers Hide Their IP-Address, More to Folllow