But lately, all that rhetoric about cord cutting has been sounding awfully familiar, and I started to wonder: Where had I heard that before? And then it hit me: Cord cutting is the new file-sharing.

Of course, I don’t mean to say that all cord cutters are pirates. Sure, a subset of them are definitely getting their TV show fix from BitTorrent sites and cyberlockers after ditching cable, especially in countries where no legal alternatives exist. But in the U.S., many people instead turn to Hulu, Netflix and even free over-the-air TV once they cut the cable cord.

Still, cord cutting and file-sharing have a lot in common. On the surface, both are about paying less for movies and TV shows. But take a closer look, and you’ll realize that money is only part of the equation. What really unites cord cutters and file-sharers is that they want to take their media consumption into their own hands.

Cord cutters don’t just want to watch what’s on TV at any given time anymore, and they don’t want to spend hundreds of dollars a year on channels they don’t need, or don’t agree with. Instead, they want to have access to the media they want, when they want it, on the devices of their choice.

The same is true for file-sharing. Sure, one of the reasons that people download torrents is that they’re free. But more often than not, free is the only price point that TV shows or movies are available at to begin with. It can take months before U.S. TV shows become available in Europe or elsewhere, and broadcasters in countries like Germany still think that their audience would rather listen to horrible dubbing as opposed to the English original. In many cases, the only way to get that new TV show episode everyone is talking about on Twitter and Facebook is BitTorrent.

Finally, both file-sharing and cord cutting are driving innovation, often against established industries that would rather keep things the way they are. If it wasn’t for file-sharing, Spotify & Co. wouldn’t exist. And if it wasn’t for people looking for alternatives to traditional cable, Netflix would still just be a DVD rental service.

But this potential for disruption doesn’t bode well with everyone. Movie studios and record companies have been waging a legal war against file-sharing ever since the days of Napster. These days, they’ve found another target: Cord cutting innovators like the New York-based startup Aereo that makes broadcast TV streams available over the web.

Chances are, broadcasters and Hollywood studios will win at least some of these battles, and cable companies will use their market power to keep their online competition in check. But just as file-sharers have done before them, cord cutters will prove their smarts and show us that some things just can’t be stopped.

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Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Sure, we could make fun of these people. Or we could help them with an easy way to download torrents without having to know about the pros and cons of enabling DHT in uTorrent. Littleshoot decided to try the latter approach with a new BitTorrent browser plug-in that is being unveiled today.

Littleshoot’s BitTorrent plug-in has been in the making for quite some time now. The company behind it was founded by the former Limewire developer Adam Fisk who initially set out to develop an application for sharing data within a circle of friends. Littleshoot eventually changed directions towards general purpose, browser-based P2P and finally launched last November, albeit without BitTorrent integration.

The plug-in’s first iteration looked a little like a solution that didn’t really know which problem it wanted to solve. Littleshoot offered Gnutella downloads through your browser as well as the capability of publishing data on a separate P2P network that is based on the open source SIP protocol. Both were great in theory, but people hardly shared any data via Littleshoot, and when it comes to media sharing Gnutella isn’t exactly the first choice anymore either.

Enter BitTorrent. Fisk teamed up with Julian Cain for this release, who previously developed the Mac torrent client BitRocket as well as Kazaa’s never-released OS X client and who has also been involved in a bunch of other P2P projects over the years. Their ambitious goal is to transform Littleshoot into something like the Flash player of the BitTorrent world. Install it once, then forget about it, and it will work with any content, on any site.

I’ve had a chance to test multiple builds of the client over the last couple of weeks, and I must say Littleshoot has come a long way towards achieving this goal. Install the client, visit any torrent site, click on a torrent download link – and Littleshoot starts do download the files in question right within your browser on a Web 2.0-ish download page. The client even automatically starts a Flash-based audio player if you download an MP3 file, and files can be easily forwarded through Twitter, Facebook and other social networks.

It also offers a search page that makes it possible to simultaneously search isoHunt, Youtube, Flickr, Yahoo Video and the Littleshoot P2P network, or any subset of these services. This search page may not be that useful to advanced users that prefer sites other than Isohunt, but again, it’s a great feature for beginners.

Littleshoot doesn’t come with any configurable options at this time. All data is saved in a default download directory, and the client seeds files indefinitely. However, Fisk told me that future versions of Littleshoot will offer the option to shut down the client after a certain ratio is reached. The current download page already offers details about your ratio as well as your up-and download rates. Speaking of future changes: Littleshoot is still clearly in beta stage. The Windows version seemed especially rocky in earlier builds that I got to test, but most things seem to be working when it comes to the final version that has been made available today.

So what’s the final verdict? Littleshoot may still have some room for improvement, but it’s definitely promising. Not only because this is the first BitTorrent client your mom will be able to use, but also because the Littleshoot team definitely has its eyes set on bigger goals.

One of the plans for future releases is an SDK that will make it possible for website owners to offload the distribution of any file to Littleshoot. Just drop a few lines of Javascript in your blog, and your MP3 file will be available as a P2P download. Says Fisk: “If a site relies on P2P services, they’ll display an “install plugin” window, just like the user sees when they don’t have Flash on sites that require it.” Kinda makes you wonder how long it will take for a torrent site to integrate something like this for all of its files.

The new version of Littleshoot is currently available on this beta page and will launch on the Littleshoot home page later today.

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Guest author Janko Roettgers is a Los Angeles-based journalist. He is also the editor of P2P Blog.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

File-sharing will continue to grow.

Okay, this is a no-brainer. Torrent sites like the Pirate Bay have been showing huge growth rates every single year, and there is no reason to assume that 2009 will be any different. Except maybe for the fact that the global economic crisis will continue to force consumers to spend less. And what’s an easy way to save some dough? Exactly, free music, movies and TV shows. File sharing is going to get a big recession bump in 2009.

One of the biggest torrent sites will close down.

Just don’t ask me which one. Rights holders will continue to put pressure on site admins and their hosting providers in 2009, just as they did in 2008, and at least one well-known name will fold under this pressure. For a few days it will look like the file sharing world is going to end, but then it will be business as usual again.

The RIAA’s new three-strikes policy will fail.

The music industry announced just two weeks ago that it will stop its mass lawsuit campaign and instead cooperate with ISPs to punish file sharers. The Wall Street Journal reported at the time about “agreements in principle” with an unspecified number of unnamed ISPs that “may cut off” net access for repeat offenders. Or not, one should add. ISPs don’t like to lose customers over a few traded songs, which is why a similar deal in the UK still doesn’t include any enforcement measures half a year after it was struck. The same will happen in the US. In fact, some smaller ISPs might even get a boost by promising that they won’t disconnect customers over P2P.

P4P will actually work.

The somewhat controversial technology that aims to mitigate the effect of P2P transfers on ISPs’ networks has proven to work pretty well in field tests, but those were limited to a single video file provided by personal file sharing start-up Pando. 2009 will bring us some first mass-scale implementations, and I suspect that some of you will start to use P4P-assisted file transfers without even noticing, which is how good infrastructure technology should work.

We will all become socialists.

The uproar was huge when Warner Music first expressed support for a flat fee for legal P2P music sharing in the spring of 2008. Techcrunch called the idea extortion, others warned of socialism, big government and an unfair music tax. Then the global financial markets hit rock bottom, countries like the US started to nationalize banks left and right, and people warmed up to the fact that government intervention and taxation aren’t always bad things. This will continue in 09.

We’ll see billions of tax payer’s money spent on infrastructure projects and governments taking stakes in major industries. In a way, we will all become socialists, if only to wait out the end of the crisis. And in the process, we will warm up to the idea of collective licensing. Now, it’s unclear whether the record labels will actually come through and start first blanket licensing trials by the end of the year, but I predict that consumers will be ready for it. Because really, who will object to five bucks a month in light of billions spend on bailouts?

Janko Roettgers is a Los Angeles-based journalist. He is also the editor of P2P Blog.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.