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Latest Posts

• eMule: A Decade of File-Sharing Innovations

  On May 13th, 2002 a new filesharing client called eMule entered into our world of sharing. Ten years later we’d like to take this anniversary as an opportunity to look back at some major technical achievements of filesharing applications since then and what might come in the years ahead. With further innovation, even the mighty BitTorrent can be improved to become impossible to shut down.

• Dan Bull & Pirate Bay Attack the Music Charts With “Sharing Is Caring”

  This week, with support from a Promo Bay campaign on The Pirate Bay, UK rap artist Dan Bull is aiming to send a message to the mainstream entertainment industry. With the release of a brand new track called “Sharing is Caring”, Dan will attempt to break into the UK and international singles charts without the backing of a label and show that with the help of a free Internet and BitTorrent, there is another way.

• The History of File-Sharing

  Last century filesharing was a fringe hobby, only for geeks who were lucky enough to own a computer that could dial into the World Wide Web. How different is that today, where filesharing has become daily routine for hundreds of millions of people worldwide. In just a few years swapping files has become mainstream. Time to take a step back and see how it all came about.

• The Moral Battle Between Pirates and Copyright Lobbyists

  In a recent interview, Harvard Professor Yochai Benkler raises some serious concerns surrounding the MegaUpload bust. One question raised by the professor, which may not have been entertained by many prior to the wide public opposition to SOPA, is of whether the lobbyist companies currently reaping the benefits of increasingly harsher copyright enforcement confer a [...]

• American Chamber of Commerce Threatens Estonia’s Open Internet

  This is a guest post from Otto de Voogd, digital freedom fighter, a member of the non-profit Estonian Internet Community and a volunteer Mozilla contributor. Thousands of sites, led by Reddit and Wikipedia, staged a successful blackout against SOPA and PIPA last week. But, it would be a mistake to think that the threat against [...]

• Hurt Locker Makers Subpoena ISPs for Non-Defendants

  This is a guest post by BitTorrent defense lawyer Blair Chintella. More news on the case here. — I have been practicing in the area of copyright infringement and specializing in bittorrent cases essentially since they started in the District of Columbia.  I wanted to write this short anecdote to raise awareness to an important [...]

• The Case for Piracy

  The excellent article below comes from ABC Australia and is written by Nick Ross. Well worth the read. When it comes to copyright theft and piracy, many people assume there’s just one side – the side of truth, justice and copyright owners. Beyond that there are parasitical thieves. When most governments come to legislate on [...]

• Are Pirates Freetards?

  The following is a guest column by Michael Neumann, philosophy teacher at a Canadian university. The Register’s Andrew Orlowski habitually calls illegal downloaders of music ‘freetards’. But if you’re going to label people tards of any sort, you ought to be able to think straight. Not so Orlowski, whose snarky asides conceal either inconsistencies or [...]

• How to Unblock The Pirate Bay

  Update: This post is for the Belgium blockade only, where IP-addresses are not blocked. This doesn’t work in the UK, Netherlands etcetera. There, people have to use VPNs or proxy sites. Update: TPB shared some unblocking tips here. Today, two of Belgium’s biggest operators, Telenet and Belgacom, got a court order to block the website ThePirateBay.org, and about [...]

NewsBits

The latest news from around the web, not covered on the frontpage

• TorrentFreak Censored by Orange’s Child Protection Filter

  The Internet is a scary place for kids, but luckily there’s censorship. In the UK mobile...

• “How We Stopped SOPA”

  After the historic protests in January SOPA and PIPA were ‘shelved’. In a keynote speech at...

• Supreme Court Refuses $675,000 File-Sharing Case

  The case of the RIAA vs. Joel Tenenbaum – aka the case that will not die...

• MPAA: Piracy is NOT Theft After All

  For decades the entertainment industry used the word “theft” to refer to piracy. Most famous is...

• Idiotic Copyright Comparisons in Canadian Parliament

  Politicians are always going the extra mile for their supporters, and nothing spells that out more...

MostDiscussed

Below are TorrentFreak's most discussed articles of the past month. Join the discussion if you like.

• Pirate Bay Under DDoS Attack From Unknown Enemy

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• Microsoft Funded Startup Aims to Kill BitTorrent Traffic

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• Who’s Pirating Game of Thrones, And Why?

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• The Pirate Bay Suffers (Local) Downtime

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• The Avengers: Why Pirates Failed To Prevent A Box Office Record

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PopularArticles

A selection of some TorrentFreak's classics dug up from our archives.

• Top 10 Most Popular Torrent Sites of 2012

  Continuing a long-standing New Year's tradition, we present an up-to-date list of the world's most visited...

• Which VPN Providers Really Take Anonymity Seriously?

  Last month it became apparent that not all VPN providers live up to their marketing after...

• What’s The Best VPN / Proxy for BitTorrent?

  Privacy is important on the Internet, and BitTorrent users are certainly not excluded. Already, hundreds of...

• BTGuard Review: How Does it Work?

  With the entertainment industries lobbying for increased powers to spy on BitTorrent users, many downloaders are...

• Optimize Your BitTorrent Download Speed

  BitTorrent can be fun, as long as you get decent speeds. Not satisfied with your current...