In 2001, I sold 10,000 hard copies. And everyone was puzzled. We came from zero, from 1000, to 10,000. And then the next year we were over 100,000. [...]

I thought that this is fantastic. You give to the reader the possibility of reading your books and choosing whether to buy it or not. [...]

So, I went to BitTorrent and I got all my pirate editions… And I created a site called The Pirate Coelho.

He’s convinced — and rightly so — that letting people download free copies of his books helps sales. For him the problem is getting around copyright laws that require him to get the permission of his translators if he wants to share copies of his books in other languages.

So is Coelho just seeding torrents of his books? That’s just the beginning. He took it one step further and, as quoted above, set up a WordPress blog, Pirate Coelho, where he posts links to free copies of his books on filesharing networks, FTP sites, and so on. He says it had a direct impact on sales:

Believe it or not, the sales of the book increased a lot thanks to the Pirate Coelho site…

In his speech he talks about how the Internet is changing language and books, and how online “piracy” and BitTorrent have helped him not only be more widely read, but also sell more books! It’s a must watch.

Via P2P-Blog

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

Brokep, one of the site’s admins, released the widget in a post on the Pirate Bay blog. He also mentioned the opening up of the site in the near future, with the release of a public API. This will make it easy for developers to use data from the pirate bay in widgets like this, or other applications.

For those who haven’t seen it yet, BBC’s technology lifestyle program Click had an item on The Pirate Bay and interviewed Brokep (Peter) and TiAMO (Fredrik) in their natural habitat.

They once again stick it to the movie and music cartels, with Brokep commenting on the morality of downloading copyrighted content: “I don’t care, that’s the big thing, I don’t care. If I want it, I take it, ’cause I can. It might be moral to some people but I think it’s up to me to decide.” You can watch the full show over here.

Download The Pirate Bay Top 10 Dashboard widget (92kb ZIP)

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

OinkPlus displays a list of similar artists, a link to other torrents from that artist on the BitTorrent site you’re on, the artist/band’s bio, a Last.fm player, and, if available, a MySpace player. The script also displays links to the artist’s presence on Wikipedia, Amazon, Hype Machine, Pandora, and so on.

The extra data loads beneath the regular content on the .torrent download pages and integrates very well into the style of each of the compatible sites. Personally I find the script very useful to preview tracks from artists and to discover new music. Below is an example of what it looks like on The Pirate Bay.

Indieana told TorrentFreak that in future versions it will be possible to disable certain features or block the use of OinkPlus on certain sites.

Music discovery is an essential part of private torrent sites. Although OinkPlus was originally developed exclusively for OiNK, after the site was taken down by the BPI and the IFPI, its author decided to go all-out and support not only the most popular private torrent sites, but some of the most popular public ones too.

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

If it’s any consolation, The Pirate Bay is not alone in being blocked. In March, YouTube was banned for hosting videos that insulted the founder of modern Turkey. To the relief of many Turks, the ban only lasted two days, as Google promptly pulled down the videos. And last month, WordPress.com was blocked because some of its users were charged with defamation of a Turkish author.

The first we heard of the Pirate Bay block was two days ago, when Cenk, a long-time reader of TorrentFreak from Turkey, e-mailed in to let us know that The Pirate Bay was no longer accessible in his country. Cenk states that since last Monday, government has shut down all access to thepiratebay.org. However, the press has said nothing on the matter. “I did not hear about thepiratebay.org getting sued or anything and even there was no news on the newspaper or anywhere,” he wrote.

We asked the TPB guys if they knew anything about this. According to them, it has been blocked “for over a year.” They’re “not sure if it’s the whole country or just the major ISPs,” but “there was some court ruling over it.” That court ruling, we’ve discovered, has ordered Türk Telekom, Turkey’s largest ISP, to block The Pirate Bay, though why exactly is still unknown to both the site’s admins and users of the site in Turkey.

There is a comical irony to this all, given that Turkey is the home of some of the most famous real life pirates history has seen, those of the Barbary coast. One can only guess that they have yet to set sail in the intertubes.

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

In a recent interview for the Seattle Post, I speculated that it seemed likely that TV executives and writers were purposefully leaking their yet-to-air shows to BitTorrent to build up hype and an audience. It looks like I wasn’t too far off.

An anonymous Warner Brothers Television executive has admitted he helped leak the pilot of “Pushing Daisies“, an upcoming TV show. His reason? He wanted to make sure the show “got out there,” and wanted to “help the cause.” The executive didn’t upload it himself; he got his neighbour’s kid to do it. And the kid was delighted to, because it pushed up his ratio on some private network.

You might think, as I did, that someone made this story up. Turns out, the executive used his work e-mail ID (yep, @warnerbros.com or whatever) when he contacted Rick Ellis of AllyourTV.com. When asked about what made him leak the pilot, he replied:

I just thought it was a good idea. Even though [...] I don’t have any direct stake in the show, it’s a really great project. It’s tough to describe, though, and while it makes great sense once you’ve seen it, it’s one of those shows that will only work if people do tune in at least once.

Which, by the way, is one of the reasons that ABC and Warners are promoting the show in all sorts of venues. The pilot has been screened at everything from auditions for ABC reality shows to Comic-Con. We all believe in the show. And if I can do something that might in some small way help…I can live with that.

One last thing…some of this is also about building pressure with the network. I don’t think anyone here involved with “Traveler” was exactly thrilled with the treatment ABC gave the show. But it didn’t really have any champions inside either company. And I suppose all of us are hoping that this show gets the support it deserves.

Further evidence of TV studios embracing BitTorrent can be found in an interview with Jenji Kohan, the creator of ‘Weeds‘. The third season of Weeds was leaked around a month before it was to be aired on TV. Although another week is left before season three is broadcast to the world, hundreds of thousands of people from around the globe have already downloaded and watched episodes of it. And what does Kohan think of this? She’s glad her show’s gaining a larger audience: “Revenue aside, I don’t expect to get rich on Weeds,” she told Advertising Age jubilantly. “I’m excited it’s out there. Showtime is great, but it does have a limited audience.”

‘Weeds’ and ‘Pushing Daises’ aren’t the most popular of shows. The first has a relatively small following and the latter has yet to gain one. But both are mainstream, television shows, not podcasts. Kevin Rose being ‘cool’ with fans torrenting Diggnation a week before it’s released to non-subscribers and a primetime TV show’s creator doing the same are two vastly different notions, with the second having a significantly greater impact on traditional broadcast TV.

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

David Watanabe, the developer, has now released Xtorrent 1.1 (beta). Here’s what’s new:

Interface changes
Xtorrent has gotten what the developer calls a “newly refreshed user interface”. New, sleeker-looking toolbar buttons that resemble those in the Leopard Finder, including a number of other interface tweaks have been added.

Selective Downloading
What was one of the most requested features, followed by encryption, is the ability to pick and choose which files you want to download from inside a torrent. Xtorrent finally lets you do this. Up until recently, Azureus was the only Mac BitTorrent client that could do this. Transmission added the feature a few weeks ago.

File Prioritisation
You can now tell Xtorrent which files in a torrent you want to give more priority to and have downloaded first. This was another oft-requested feature, according to Watanabe.

Xtorrent is quickly becoming the uTorrent of the Macintosh. Not uTorrent Mac, which we gave you a preview of, but the Mac equiavalent of uTorrent Windows. It’s light, has many important features and has a pretty UI. The only difference is that Xtorrent is shareware and uTorrent is not. But it’s widely known that the Mac community is a lot more open to shareware than most Windows users.

Unfortunately, Xtorrent still has its drawbacks. Its intrusive shareware policy is still very much there, rearing its ugly head at people without licenses. And some popular private trackers explicitly ban Xtorrent from connecting to torrents and downloading them. OiNK, possibly the most exclusive private BitTorrent site, whose invites are highly sought after, and till they banned the practise, were auctioned off on eBay for ridiculous amounts of dough, has banned Xtorrent. Here’s the message OiNK users who try to download with Xtorrent get:

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

You might be of the opinion that it serves those nasty Harry Potter-reading pirates right. But this doesn’t have anything to with “piracy”. Fans of the book are so upset that Len’s done this, they’re posting death threats on his site. Here’s one:

Go f*** yourself

Len, if you don’t like this world and what we do, then go slit your fucking wrists rather than spoiling a perfectly good film and shocking little kids.

P.S. I work as a butcher.

Drastic, for sure. But it shows you how much people love J.K. Rowling’s books and how far they’re willing to go in order to ensure they aren’t “spoiled” before they read the book. Possibly fearing such a backlash after the leak, Rowling posted a message on her website, requesting fans not to spoil the book for others. She didn’t seem to care that people were downloading it illegally, though.

I’d like to ask everyone who calls themselves a Potter fan to help preserve the secrecy of the plot for all those who are looking forward to reading the book at the same time on publication day.

Here’s a clip from the “Evan Almighty” DVDrip with the spoilers in it. Blind dragons and book 7 spoilers ahead. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.