TorrentFreak

The Swedish Film Institute (SFI) is in the middle of a crisis after an anti-piracy company revealed that it had tracked several leaked movies on The Pirate Bay back to its servers. Desperate to deflect the accusations, today the SFI made a long statement. It turned out to be a perfect illustration that allegations of piracy based on an IP address and nothing else, simply must be backed up by something more solid.

The U.S. Copyright Group has sued more than 100,000 alleged BitTorrent users since last year. But, a recent filing in a U.S. class action lawsuit filed against the group shows that these cases may be built on shoddy evidence. It cites a German court ruling where the company responsible for providing the evidence could not prove that defendants actually shared any files. In addition there was evidence of a pirate honeypot.

A new report published by Northwestern University and Telefónica Research discovered some BitTorrent trends worth sharing. During a 2-year period the researchers monitored an unprecedented sample of 500,000 people in 169 countries. Aside from showing that BitTorrent users download more and more data, the report also finds that large ISPs including Comcast are actually making money off BitTorrent traffic.

A high-quality copy of the Steven Spielberg movie ‘Super 8′ has turned up online and is spreading like wildfire. While it is hardly unusual for preview copy DVD screeners to become available in this way, it is unusual for them to carry watermarks which appear to identify the source of the leak. Come Monday morning, Howard Stern might have some questions to answer.

A new study by researchers from Copenhagen Business School and the University of Waterloo explores the magnitude of game piracy on public BitTorrent trackers. The researchers tracked 173 new game releases over a three-month period and found that these were downloaded by 12.7 million unique peers. They further show that the number of downloads on BitTorrent can be predicted by the scores of game reviewers.

Previously confidential documents detailing Universal Music’s meetings with the former UK government over the Digital Economy Act are revealing a whole lot more than the pair intended. Blacked-out sections now uncovered show that Universal believed that ISPs could spy on their users and hand over information to rightsholders in order for them to sue.

Was the Digital Economy Act always going to be implemented? The latest revelations in the Act’s complex two year history shows that it was always going to happen, and that public consultation on the matter was just a sham.