No Starch Press and Wired’s news editor Leander Kahney have released free copies of “The Cult of Mac” and “The Cult of iPod” on the Pirate Bay. Publishing music, movies and books on BitTorrent seems to be becoming a trend, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
The acceptability of P2P took another big step forward over the weekend, as accounts claiming to be ‘the official profile for NIN’ appeared on a number of torrent sites, including The Pirate Bay and the private trackers What.cd and Waffles.fm. NIN has now confirmed that these accounts indeed belong to the band.
The South by Southwest (SXSW) music festival is one of the biggest and most popular in the United States. For the fourth year in a row, SXSW has released a DRM-less collection of songs that - thanks to Greg Hewgill - can now be downloaded for free via BitTorrent.
These last few years P2Pers have got used to TV entertainment ‘our way’: unfucked, de-loused, delivered efficiently in economical, good-looking codecs. Because we rarely turn it on, it’s been easy to forget just how cynical, unsatisfying and downright venal television, as a distribution medium, has become.
As previously shown, BitTorrent can be a boon to the independent film-maker. Usually a lack of money restricts the distribution of a film, but occasionally the content works against it. As well as the promotion of new, aspiring talent, torrents can be used to spread films which may be politically discouraged from more usual methods.
The Pirate Bay has released a widget that puts a list of the top 10 torrents from any (or all) of the categories on the popular BitTorrent site on your Mac Dashboard. In addition they announce the upcoming release of a public API for their website.
A greasemonkey script that was supposed to enhance music discovery for OiNK users has now expanded to include other BitTorrent sites and is available for download.
Jamendo.com offers over 4000 free music albums, all published under a Creative Commons license. The albums are available in MP3 and Ogg Vorbis format, free of DRM of course.
Do you ever wonder where all the seeds and peers on your torrent come from, and what their houses look like? P2p-monitor.com developed a great tool to visualize a real life BitTorrent swarm in Google Earth.
