TorrentFreak

The Pirate Bay has just launched a new survey in collaboration with the Cybernorms research group at Sweden’s Lund University. As part of a sociology study they hope to find out more about the motivations people have to share files, with the ultimate goal of influencing and shaping more sensible laws regarding copyright issues and the Internet in general.

Just two weeks ago, Hobo With a Shotgun was a relatively unknown Grindhouse-style movie but within a matter of days was riding high on BitTorrent networks and even broke into The Pirate Bay’s Top 10. Now it’s blasted into the iMDb’s weekly chart at No.9 – that’s up from No.252 in just a week.

During March, Sumerian Records boss Ash Avildsen made the news on a couple of piracy-related occasions. First, he orchestrated a hoax to trick BitTorrent users into downloading a fake band promo, then later got serious with a YouTube broadside against music piracy. As Sumerian gets ready to launch their own music store, TorrentFreak has discovered that they have Long John Silver’s skeleton in the closet.

When anti-piracy outfits and Big Media speak out against file-sharing they often claim to be standing up for the interests of the artists. However, a new survey among nearly 4,000 artists has revealed that nearly a quarter are pirating the works of fellow artists. Contrary to popular belief among higher level execs in the entertainment industry, the younger generation of artists believe that file-sharing helps them to gain an audience.

ICE director John Morton has confirmed that the seizure of domain names that are alleged to be promoting copyright infringement will continue in the coming years. In a statement before the U.S. House of Representatives, Morton said that “Operation In Our Sites” will continue through and beyond 2011. In addition and contrary to popular belief, Morton claimed that the seizures “respect free speech” and “provide due process.”

The recent developments around domain name seizures by the U.S. authorities has prompted another major torrent site to move to a new domain as a precaution. KickassTorrents, one of the most visited torrent sites on the Internet, has announced it will soon replace its .com domain name with the Philippine extension .ph.

The Pirate Bay achieved a new milestone today. Just a few minutes ago the 5 millionth user created an account at the most-visited BitTorrent site on the Internet. Despite efforts from the entertainment industries that have tried to shut the site down for half a decade, The Pirate Bay keeps expanding. Let’s see how they got there.