The good news is that both publications now want to include a greater range of BitTorrent and other file-sharing related terms and phrases in their next publications. It was an honor when they approached TorrentFreak for our input and we’ve been working hard to ensure that the most important items are included.

If you think we’ve missed any out, please feel free to add your definitions in the comments and we’ll be delighted to add the best to this article and send them off to Oxford and Merriam-Webster in due course.

The shortlist

Bitatone – The act of buying a product previously downloaded due to wishing to support the artists involved.

BitTorrent Babysitting – The art of carefully monitoring a rare torrent’s seeds and leechers (versus percentage left and time to completion) to ensure its long-term welfare.

Bittorrent Bukkake – Having a ratio of seeders far in excess of leechers. Having an embarrassment of seeds.

Darknet - A network that will never, ever be busted by the **AA’s, largely because its obscurity lends itself to having no users and no content.

DHT Desperation – The feeling of concern used to describe grabbing a torrent currently displayed as having no seeds and no leechers and knowing there is just one chance left.

Digital Discount – A special price reduction system available to Internet users when procuring virtual goods file-sharing networks.

DVD Screener – A really good copy of a movie sent out with the studio’s name printed across the middle of the screen so that BitTorrent users get advance warning of which company will be monitoring the torrent they just finished.

Enrarged – The unprecedented anger experienced when having spent hours downloading a torrent, the unrar’ing process inexplicably asks for a password.

Free Anonymous Proxy – A special site which can be used to hide your IP address and private data transmissions from all the evil people on the Internet, except the completely anonymous and undoubtedly completely trustworthy person running the proxy.

Hash Collision – A statistically interesting occurance on which subjects of torrent lawsuits sometimes rely in order to prove they downloaded the latest Ubuntu distro and not MILF Mommageddon 5.

Open Wireless Router – A security-related network device essential to successfully defending oneself in a file-sharing copyright case.

P2P or Not P2P – The question of whether ’tis nobler in the mind to download the media you desire, or buy it because it belongs to a niche genre that lives off the small money it makes.

Peerstipation – The phenomenon experienced when using a ‘security’ IP filtering software and list combo that has so many IP addresses on it collected over several years it becomes completely blocked and nothing can pass.

Peersimisstic – The emotion felt when trying to finish a 4.7gig DVD and there’s no seeders and just 9 peers stuck at 99%.

PEX Panic – (see DHT Desperation)

Pi-curious – A BitTorrent pirate who sometimes fancies having a go on eDonkey to see what it’s like.

Piratnoia – The creeping feeling of unease suffered by some security conscious file-sharers the closer they get to 100% of a download. Escalates exponentially when seeding.

Quentin Torrentino – A BitTorrent releaser at the top of his game.

Ratio – A statistical comparison which indicates whether a BitTorrent user is 1337 or utter scum (7331). Can be used to claim victory in the elite pissing contests frequently held on private trackers.

Ratio Credit – A fiscal recompense-related statistical adjustment made to a private tracker user’s account which results in the impression that the user always seeds 7:1 but actually doesn’t know the meaning of the word.

Restorrection – The physically exciting bodily response to bringing a previously dead torrent back to life by pasting in a list of 250 public trackers.

Restroom Countdown – A courtesy service offered by most cyberlockers whereby they promise not to begin your download for X number of minutes allowing you to rush off and get back before the action begins. At 20kb/s.

Seedbox – A server designed to pump so much bandwidth into a private tracker swarm it makes it impossible for regular users to seed, resulting in them making an entirely voluntary donation to avoid being kicked out for having a bad ratio.

SeedTease – Repeatedly taking a hot torrent to 99% then backing out leaving the leechers frustrated.

Swedish Netflix – The Pirate Bay

Swarm – An egalitarian collection of Gentlemen and Ladies whose purpose is to share the world’s cultural anthologies.

The Pirate Pay – What the Pirate Bay would’ve become if Hans Pandeya had his way in 2009.

Torrendous – A word to describe a torrent site with more ads and popups than torrents.

Torrentard – The impossible-to-please commenters on sites like The Pirate Bay who despite getting the latest stuff for free, always find something to complain about.

Torrenteer - Anyone in the Top 10 Releasers or Seeders list on a private tracker. (See also MPAA Magnet)

Torrential – Maxing out your download speed. (I got 30mb/s…It was fricken torrential ! )

Torrent Relief – An annual charitable initiative which helps smaller and more needy trackers avoid having to shut down through lack of funds. Every. Single. Christmas.

Torrent Shopping – The art of walking around bricks and mortar stores looking for things to download when you get home.

TorrentWhore – Someone who will download torrents from anyone who offers them, without considering who they are, where they’ve been, and without using any kind of protection.

Torrorists – An MPAA-coined term to describe a huge group of people using up all the bandwidth on the Internet through indiscriminate BitTorrent use, thereby undermining national security.

Tracker Invite – The key to a highly delicate enforced-rarity economy whose scarcity is directly linked to the both the perceived exclusivity of the issuing private site and the amount Eastern Europeans can get for them on eBay.

Usenet Binaries – A place to download completeley free content, conditional only on paying monthly subscriptions to a newsgroup provider and often a Usenet indexing site too.

Vapidshare - An uninteresting file-hosting service that offers nothing new.

As mentioned above, please add your definitions to the comments below and we’ll pass your suggestions to Merriam and Oxford. Probably.

Source: BitTorrent Terms & Phrases Set For Inclusion in Famous Dictionaries

TakedownPiracy isn’t a “let’s sue file-sharers” company, it concentrates on taking content offline with DMCA notices. It is run by a guy called Nate Glass and make no mistake, he is one funny dude who just loves to stir up a hornets nest.

Once we even offered him a chance to come and say something entertaining to the TorrentFreak readers but he didn’t answer our email, leaving us no option but to fight back the tears and try to move on. Sadly, Nate’s deliberately controversial blog has been strangely quiet for a month, but yesterday a new post burst forth and as usual, provided some food for thought.

Nate argues that while some lawyers are protesting against the pending PROTECT IP and E-PARASITES legislation on grounds that they are unfair and unbalanced, what they really want is for online piracy to continue. Of course they do – they are getting rich from representing both copyright holders and their targets, the file-sharers.

Which got me thinking.

Just for a moment, let’s entertain the notion that several things these bills intend to achieve actually work as planned. Let’s presume that all the prominent torrent and other file-sharing sites either have their domains seized or their DNSs blocked, and no Internet service provider in the United States carries their traffic anymore.

Visitors to these sites from the United States would cease to exist, just like that. Not only would there be no visitors from the US, but no advertisers and no friendly payment processors either. To these sites the United States may as well be dead because the country would be completely useless to them.

At this point, one can’t help worrying about Nate.

With the United States having taken off the metaphorical gloves and hitting file-sharing portals with the doomsday scenario they’d been promising all these years, what do we think is going to happen when Nate sends them his list of infringing URLs? Are these sites that are already being heavily punished simply going to comply and take them down?

Even with takedown requests being given the bird, Nate’s business model could well take a bit of a battering domestically. After the hugely successful forthcoming United States DNS, ISP and domain blocks take hold, presumably 312 million fewer people will have almost no access to pirated music and movies.

This means that even when Nate does manage to find a site that still respects DMCA takedowns after it has been blocked, censored and had its US payments cut off, each deleted URL will prevent exponentially less amounts of piracy than they do today. So, taking the entertainment industries’ notion that illegal downloads represent lost sales, these links aren’t going to be worth very much anymore.

But if Nate’s plight isn’t tearing you apart, please spare a minute of your thoughts for the copyright trolls behind the United States Copyright Group and their clones. With no US Internet subscribers having access to pirated media via BitTorrent anymore, where are the settlements going to come from?

Let’s face it, for once the MPAA and IFPI are absolutely right.

Just like the lawyers pointed out by Nate earlier, there are way too many entities around today making suitcases full of money from online piracy.

So let’s thank God for PROTECT IP and E-PARASITES – the perfect mechanisms for cutting off their finances and shutting them down for good.

Source: The Death Of Anti-Piracy Companies And Copyright Trolls

Making it even harder is the reality that laws tend to lag about a decade behind technology. It took 10 years for the legality of the video cassette to be decided, and even now new laws are being written to deal with P2P, a decade after BitTorrent was first debuted.

While these two technologies have caused problems for copyright owners, by disrupting the status-quo around distribution, the incredibly fast growth in both computing power and storage could soon lead to a fundamental shake-up in copyright.

As it stands in US law (and remember, US law rules throughout the world,  even if it’s legal, or you’ve not been there in decades) the creator of a picture is the copyright holder. Even if you drop the resolution, or reduce the number of colours to simpler shades, it is still considered by many to be under the original copyright.

So, what if you could create every possible picture? What if you took a fairly low resolution (say 500×500) and a reasonably low colour mix (say 256 colours) and tried to create every single image? What then would be the state of copyright? It’s the visual equivalent of the infinite monkey theorem.

If you could do it, then the project would own all the copyrights, to every image not already copyrighted. Furthermore, since it’s an independent creation with no outside reference to draw upon, works and images similar to those already copyrighted are not infringing.

There is that word though – ‘if‘. 500×500 with 256 colours might seem like a small, grainy picture now, but it’s a massive field of data. 250,000 pixels, each with 256 possible shades comes to 9.802 *10⁶⁰²⁰⁵⁹ and that’s a large number; 9 with six hundred thousand zeros after it!

“You would pretty much need a quantum computer and massive storage space for this to become even slightly feasible,” says Stephen Brooks, head of the Muon1 DPAD project based at the RAL near Oxford.

The problem is clear. At present the distributed.net RC5-72 brute force effort has been going on for 8½ years, and is only 1.7% done.

“Creating an image is faster than cracking an RC5 key but not that much, and there’s still space issues,” says Brooks. “You could easily fill 1Gb per hour, per user.”

However, while it’s not feasible now, 20 years down the line it may well be possible. Already some strong progress has been made towards quantum computing and with technological progress as rapid as ever in this field, it’s a question of sooner, rather than later.

In a very real sense, technology might kill copyright in our lifetime.

Source: Could Quantum Computing Kill Copyright?

Rather than hang lowly bloggers by the neck until dead for sharing the latest pre-release warblings from Beyonce or GaGa, the company prefers the gentle touch and the art of persuasion, often delivered with a sharpness of wit rarely seen in swashbuckling circles.

With most of the company’s targets the approach seems to work quite well. Unless you’re The Pirate Bay or RLSLOG that is, then you just ignore them.

Nevertheless, while anti-piracy companies such as MediaDefender have in their time been both loathed and despised, head sheriff and company founder John Giacobbi is secretly loved by all of his enemies.

His friendly tone, multitude of media appearances and comedic manner never fail to impress pirates. One only has to look at the company’s immaculately edited Wikipedia page (and the almost completely positive tone throughout) to realize this is a very well-loved and respected outfit.

It will come as no surprise, then, that others should want to emulate the Sheriff.

“A digital Cold War has manifested itself as Web Sheriff, www.websheriff.com, the world’s leading anti-piracy protection agency, fires the first shots in an international legal battle against an alleged Russian imposter,” said the Sheriff yesterday.

“The rogue website, operating under the WebSheriff.ru banner, has not only copied Web Sheriff’s trademark, but also poses to offer similar services.”

A quick surf over to the page in question reveals a shiny robotic cyber-sheriff, touting services which do indeed seem similar to that of the carbon-based humanoid Sheriff we all know and love. Name aside, we saw no other graphical or trademark similarities apart from a star they used in the middle of a sheriffs badge back in February 2008.

If it came to an age-related revolver shootout, Web Sheriff UK would be quicker on the draw. Giacobbi founded that company in 2000, Web Sheriff Russia came along 2 years later. Why it’s taken 9 years to spot these Moscow-based pirate-hunters is anyone’s guess.

In keeping with his usual style, we presume that Giacobbi initially sent over a cheerful email to his Russian counterparts in the hope that their dispute could be settled amicably and at minimal cost. If he did, however, it didn’t work.

“These Russian imposters have picked the wrong company to try and rip-off. They’ll be cracking rocks in Siberia by the time we’ve finished with them,” he declared yesterday with menacing tone and a glint in his eye.

Without a hint of drama Giacobbi adds that he’s hired lawyers in both the US and USSR Russia to launch an “intercontinental legal attack” on his .RU namesakes.

“Even though we have become established as the world’s Web Sheriff, ironically we’re now fighting the same battle as we fight on behalf of our clients – who said the Cold War was over?!”

In the meantime, users requiring the services of the UK-based pirate pin-up should Google “Web Sheriff”. Those looking for services thousands of miles away in Russia, in Russian, against Russian file-sharing sites, should search for this term instead.

“This town ain’t big enough for the both of us,” Giacobbi concludes.

Time will tell what XMediaDigital, the company behind the Russian WebSheriff, has to say about that.

Here at TorrentFreak we love the Web Sheriff but we can’t help but notice that a golden opportunity for getting some free exposure was missed here.

Note for next publicity stunt press release: Don’t release it on a Friday/Saturday. Most of the tech press have the weekend off, getting coverage during the week is much easier.

Fortunately TorrentFreak never rests, especially if there’s an intercontinental anti-piracy bloodbath looming.

Source: International Crisis Looms As Russians Pirate The Web Sheriff

Inevitably though, quality is sometimes a little lacking. A copy iPhone might look all good on the surface (until you use the OS), and a copied TAG watch might tell the correct time (twice a day at least), but sometimes buyers get a product that exceeds all expectations.

Over in Russia a computer engineer located near the Chinese border had quite a surprise when a customer brought a 500GB hard drive in for repair.

According to the casing it was a very nice Samsung product, but somehow it had ceased functioning. Indeed, it hadn’t functioned properly since the beginning.

The drive itself reported its full capacity and initially seemed to behave correctly when files were transferred to it. The owner had apparently copied a 1.5GB movie to the drive, but somehow only the last few minutes of the movie were being stored.

Time to open up the case and have a little look inside.

What you’re looking at there is a couple of large metal nuts (presumably for some authentic ‘weighting’) which are together caressing a 128Mb flash drive.

But here’s the clever bit. The drive cleverly sucks data in from the host computer until it’s full and then starts dumping data until all it’s left with is the last part of the file. All other files on the drive stay intact and the file size of the now incomplete file is reported correctly.

File-sharers are apparently buying these drives in good faith and are getting ripped off and left with nowhere to put their stuff. If we can find out the name of the domain selling these devices we’ll send it over to ICE so they can have it seized….

Source: Arrr!! Pirate Hard Drive Offers Infinite Capacity

Francis and his colleagues at the RIAA are deeply critical of the continuing rise of music piracy, something which has been getting progressively easier with new technology.

“Ten years ago piracy wasn’t a big problem,” explains Stephen Neary of IFPI. But now that people are starting to get equipment capable of recording music at home, he worries, the difficulties are escalating.

“We call it the rape of our tape,” says Neary.

A spokesman for Capitol Records supports the RIAA and agrees that with the advent of cheaper and better equipment, things are getting worse in the United States. The evidence can be seen in the grim picture below.

“This is something I have seen and known about and lived with for 20 years. It has to be stopped,” said rising country music star Johnny Cash. “I’m concerned with the moral issue here. Record piracy is no better than counterfeiting $100 bills….or rustling cattle.”

Cash’s paymasters in the country music industry agree that the solution definitely lies in the toughing up of legislation. Following a period of lax legislation, recently Tennessee became the first state where the piracy of music became a felony and now there are nearly eight others.

Penalties are getting harsher too and now range from $100 to $5,000 but according to the industry, that’s not enough. Indeed, Cash has been publicly supporting a bill by two congressmen that would impose fines of $50,000 and jail terms of up to 3 years for music piracy. But not everyone is happy with the approach.

“These proposed fines are absolutely crippling and a totally over the top reaction,” said a spokesman for TapeFreak, a small newspaper that reports on music piracy issues.

“In 30 to 40 years people will look back on these fines and wonder why there wasn’t more public outrage. If people don’t speak out now who knows where we will end up.”

But it seems that harsher fines in one area simply causes a relocation of the problem. According to Joe Smith, President of Warner Bros, when certain states adopt tougher penalties, pirates simply move to another.

“State laws would be OK if all 50 states had laws, but they don’t,” says Smith. “I remember one case about two years ago when Tennessee passed a strict law and a big pirate there just moved to Selma, Al., where he was welcomed by the Chamber of Commerce for bringing a new industry into town.”

TapeFreak’s spokesman says that legislation isn’t the answer and that pirates will always find a way to continue – particularly if they get access to new technology.

“I know it sounds unlikely but what if in the future pirates find a way to duplicate music at negligible costs, maybe by making tapes spin round more quickly? The problem could escalate overnight and who knows what might come along next,” he said.

But the problem isn’t only making the copies. TapeFreak says there’s a real possibility that the postal service will get their act together in the next few years and become really efficient with their deliveries. Once tapes can be shipped around in double quick time – perhaps even further afield outside the US – the problem might not remain localized. It could even become a worldwide issue.

“What is the music industry going to do then – open every package and envelope and look inside? I don’t think so. It would take too much time and besides, people would go crazy,” he added.

Stephen Neary of IFPI maintains that the solution to these possible but unlikely future events lies in legislation. To this end his organization is waging a worldwide campaign to persuade governments to introduce and enforce tougher copyright laws. He held up Hong Kong as a shining example of what could be done and told the Sarasota Herald Tribune that “you’d be very lucky” to find pirated music there.

While tackling large scale pirates is one thing, going after individuals is something else altogether. A spokesman from Capitol Records is pessimistic.

“You’re never likely to stop the little guy,” he explained. “Just like they never stopped people making bootleg liquor in their bathtubs.”

However, if teenagers in bedrooms were the only threat, executives at Capitol, Columbia, RCA and other record companies would breathe a sigh of relief. They have bigger fish to catch and are making significant progress in doing so.

As this article was going to press, it became apparent that the United States government had incredible news for the music industry following their intense lobbying efforts. According to yesterday’s article in the New York Times – dated 7th December 1978 – more than 300 FBI agents have seized $100 million worth of modern sound-recording equipment.

Officials said the raids “wiped out 50 percent” of the illicit recording industry in the United States, which is obviously very encouraging news. Considering the industry’s moves to have harsh legislation put in place in all 50 states, it must follow that getting rid of the remaining 50% is just a raid or two away.

Couple this with a replication of IFPI’s Hong Kong successes in other countries around the world and music piracy will almost certainly become a thing of the past, probably in a matter of a few years.

Of course, there’s always the possibility that some new newfangled device will come along to stir things up, but rest assured, the music industry are no fools. They won’t be fighting this war in another 30 years.

The law will see to that.

Comments from TapeFreak aside (forgive us a little artistic license), every person, every event and every quote referred to in this article is entirely genuine. The story was compiled from real news reports from real newspapers during the 1970′s, as indexed by Google’s wonderful archive service. Just a few of this article’s sources can be found here, here, here, here and here.

Source: No Fools: 300 Feds Wipe Out 50% Of US Music Piracy Overnight

I also know that the Bieber has a new movie out. It’s called Never Say Never, it’s shot in glorious 3D and is apparently “half-concert, half-biographical film”. The critics, according to various reports, think that it’s pretty good, even though the New York Times said that “…at 105 minutes it’s exhausting.” Let’s face it, more than an hour and half of any teenager can wear one out, and not always in a good way either.

But it’s not all positive news I’m afraid. This week, Never Say Never had its VIP Premiere and according to reports, the event was scarred by a rampage of federal criminality.

Untold numbers of teenagers, who lined up for God-knows-how-long and paid $30 a shot for the privilege, weren’t happy with simply seeing the floppy-haired one in all His (3D) Glory. Oh no. Teenagers always want more, don’t they?

No doubt relying on the utterly poor excuse of wanting to have some memories of their day, some reportedly pointed their camera-phones and recorded the screen, blatantly driving a cart and horses through the Artist’s Rights and Theft Prevention Act of 2005 in the process. Believe me, that’s some serious shit.

You can get locked up for 3 years for camming in the US. Do it twice and you’re looking at a 6 stretch. And quite right too. Let kids get away with it now and next thing you know they’ll be camming for the Scene and 2017′s Never Say Never, Ever, Ever Again Part 6 will be all over The Pirate Bay, just when Bieber needs the money most.

“Since most of the audience consisted of teenage girls with their parents, I am left to wonder what parent lets their child commit a crime? Even scarier, what kind of parent lets them do it in public?” says a concerned writer on Examiner.

“Also I wonder how can Justin’s fans call themselves true fans by stealing from the star? Sure, they are probably not going to present their illegal footage in a theater, and collect money, but it is still considered stealing just the same,” the report continues adding: “Aren’t parent’s who sit by and allowed their teens to commit this act just as guilty?”

Absolutely. That sounds like contributory infringement right there. But you know what? Despite looking high and low, there appears to have been no arrests. Not one. Considering how much money was spent by the MPAA lobbying for anti-camming laws, I have to say this is somewhat of a disappointment.

Where are the airport-style bag searches and pat downs on the way into the theater? Where were the infra-red goggles and anti-cam technologies? Why weren’t these criminals detained for a couple of days?

“I’m wearing tattoos of Justin Bieber, a T-shirt of Justin Bieber, and a necklace,” eight-year-old Audrey Danis said in one theater. “Sometimes I wonder if I’m a bigger fan than her. We listen to Justin Bieber all the time. She has a Justin Bieber room,” said her mother.

Fans? Thieves more like. And what did the Universal Cineplex in Orlando do about this. Nothing. No scandals, no pissing off the public, no arrests. Common sense being applied by the movie industry? I certainly hope not, we’ve got stories about injustices to write.

Source: Justin Bieber Movie Pirates Deserve At Least 3 Years In Jail

The process works as follows. The copyright holders hire companies such as BayTSP and MediaSentry to track down people who share certain titles on BitTorrent and other file-sharing networks. These companies then join the swarm and request files from others. When someone shares a piece of the file with them, they log the IP-address, look up the ISP and send out an infringement notice automatically.

Most of the notices are sent out to the larger ISPs who are then asked to forward them to the customers in question, but search giant Google has also been receiving quite a few. A search on ChillingEffects – a site that collects some of the DMCA notices that are sent to Google – reveals that more than 100 of these automated warnings were sent to Google in the past several months.

Since Google also offers Wi-Fi hotspots in some cities, most of the infringers are not actually sharing material directly from Google headquarters. However, in some cases these warnings do appear to be aimed at Google employees. This is an awkward situation for a company that is trying to help out the entertainment industry, and has even revealed a censorship policy towards certain BitTorrent-related terms.

But there is more. If we believe some of the notices sent to Google, the company is at risk of losing its connection to the Internet.

“Copyright infringement also violates your ISP’s terms of service and could lead to limitation or suspension of your Internet service. You should take immediate action to prevent your Internet account from being used for illegal activities,” the movie companies write in various letters.

The above text is of course intended for average consumers, but in this case it appears to be directed at Google. Not that we (or Google) have to worry about it much. Although the copyright holders use strong language, these kind of notices are nothing more than a warning, and they never lead to legal action.

At the bottom of each notice there is generally some info about the alleged infringer, in the following format.

Infringing Work: The Green Hornet
First Found: 2 Feb 2011 16:57:21 EST (GMT -0500)
Last Found: 2 Feb 2011 16:57:21 EST (GMT -0500)
IP Address: 216.239.XXX.XXX
IP Port: 14077
Protocol: BitTorrent
Torrent InfoHash: 42708AA384CF93EC6B67E6CEFB6E27B32362F689
Containing file(s): The Green Hornet TS(iPod.Zune.PSP).torrent (442,480,008 bytes)

Of the 100 latest infringement notices received by Google for sharing copyright works, most of them are associated with IP-addresses used by Wi-Fi customers while a few point to Google’s headquarters. Even though they are posted on ChillingEffects (some redacted, some with full IPs) it is impossible to tell whether the company has forwarded them to employees, if these are traceable at all.

The movie companies, however, do have some advice for Google.

“An MPAA website, www.respectcopyrights.org, offers step-by-step instructions to ensure that your Internet account is not being used to violate the copyright laws. Also, the site can point you to an array of legal choices for enjoying movies and TV shows online. You can also learn there how theft of motion pictures and TV shows damages our economy and costs thousands of Americans their jobs,” they write.

The most recent notices received by Google were sent on behalf of Paramount Pictures and Columbia Pictures for the illicit sharing of The Fighter and The Green Hornet respectively. In total, Google has published 20+ of these warning letters in the last 30 days.

Source: MPAA Snags Google Downloading Torrents, Threatens to Disconnect

In recent days, however, rumors started to grow that The Music Bay domain might be put to use after all. It is currently setup to serve ads for The Pirate Bay website, but this spring it could be hosting a special surprise for the music industry.

The currently active subdomain fear.themusicbay.org is currently displaying a “comming soon” [sic] title so TorrentFreak caught up with a Pirate Bay insider to learn more about the plans for the site. Although the Pirate Bay crew is reluctant to release any specific details, their intentions are obvious.

“The music industry can’t even imagine what we’re planning to roll out in the coming months. For years they’ve complained bitterly about piracy, but if they ever had a reason to be scared it is now,” TorrentFreak was told. “It will be a special surprise for IFPI’s 78th birthday, and we’re thinking of organizing a huge festival in Rome where IFPI was founded.”

IFPI is of course the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, one of the most active anti-piracy outfits and a long-time adversary of The Pirate Bay. Formed under Italy’s fascist government of Benito Mussolini in 1933, IFPI will turn 78 in April of 2011.

TorrentFreak did ask for more details about “The Music Bay”, but the above is all we are able to reveal at this stage. What’s clear from the conversation we had, however, is that the major record labels are in for a big surprise. More details are expected to follow in the near future.

Without any hard evidence all the above can of course be interpreted in a million ways. We simply don’t know what the announced project will be, who will run it and what it will do. For all we know the entire project is nothing more that a domain name, registered and used just for the purpose to put fear into the already quite paranoid music industry.

Source: The Music Bay: Pirate Bay Crew Instill More Fear Into The Music Industry

For the majority of westerners, December is a consumer-orientated orgy of greed, over-eating and over-spending, all accompanied by countless hours of overtime at work in order to pay for these annual excesses.

But presuming funding is in place, and that you can tolerate the violent free-for-all that has become the much loved hallmark of Christmas shopping, there’s still the problem of what to buy your loved ones. Luckily, help is at hand.

This year, forget expensive perfume and designer clothing, and throw high-end electronics and fine champagne to one side. Online gifts are the new cool, so what could be a more warm and romantic gesture in 2010 than handing your significant other the root passwords to a fully functioning, high-flying torrent site?

While you’d need many millions to buy The Pirate Bay, Sweden’s biggest torrent site, it is currently possible to acquire the next best thing. An auction currently taking place on Flippa could enable one lucky individual to obtain Sweden’s second biggest torrent site.

While it has a reserve price of $44,000, the indexing site Tankafetast can be bought immediately for just $100,000. For this amount the lucky Christmas present recipient could enjoy 4.5 million visitors and a claimed 39 million page views per month.

The site is on the up too, shown here at #9 in Google Sweden’s list of searches that increased the most in popularity during 2010.

“The site is not a tracker, but an index of torrents that are on different trackers,” the site’s current owner explains. “So, the site hosts no torrents or any copyrighted content, in other words.”

The owner says that while he’s had some good times on the site, he’s off to pastures new. Apparently the site is making around $1,700 per month gross and has contracts in place with ‘discreet advertisers’ which can be passed on to the new owner.

If the site went for its reserve of $44,000 it’s clear that it would take quite a while for the new owner to get his money back based on the current position. For most people even $44k is a lot of money and would represent a pretty extravagant Christmas gift – you could even get a Nissan 370z Nismo Edition sports car for that, with enough change for a romantic holiday in the sun.

But of course, cars have running costs, so the bills don’t end with the initial outlay. The same, however, is also true of torrent sites. Tankafetast costs at least £350 per month in bandwidth and this figure does not include any of the unpredictable legal fees that can be incurred at torrent sites indexing Hollywood movies, even if they are all subtitled in Swedish.

Nevertheless, if you’re interested in acquiring the site you’ll need to hurry since there are only 18 days left to make an offer. Interest is currently riding high with zero bids.

Just like buying a dog or cat as a ‘surprise’ present, this Christmas when you have absolutely no idea that the recipient is prepared to commit to their new friend for the next few years, buying someone a torrent site might also be ill-advised.

Actually, no. Buying someone a torrent site for Christmas is not just ill-advised but the worst idea ever. Forget I even mentioned it. Stick to gift cards. Or socks.

Source: Sweden’s #2 Torrent Site Up For Sale, The Perfect Xmas Gift

Since late 2008, Hitler has ranted over Windows Vista, his banning from Xbox Live, the iPod Touch, iPhone and iPad, and even the decline of Second Life. However, things got very interesting earlier this year when copyright owner Constantin Films started issuing DMCA takedown requests to YouTube in an attempt to remove the parodies from the Internet.

Predictably it didn’t take long for Hitler to rant about that too, albeit from the relative safety of video-hosting site, Vimeo.

Despite the efforts of Constantin, this celluloid reenactment of Hitler’s final days endured that particular copyright storm with its parody defense, so it’s perhaps fitting that it should reappear to depict the events of a more recent copyright tragedy.

Unless you’ve been holidaying on Mars, you will be aware that anti-piracy lawyers ACS:Law had their internal emails spilled all over the web recently. The news travelled quickly around the globe, and even Hitler himself seems to have heard about the event.

Believe us, he is not happy. Not happy at all.

Source: ACS:Law’s Anti-Piracy Downfall Sends Hitler Crazy

In episode 7, which aired last week, events were focused on the visually impaired Auggie Anderson. While in bed with beautiful TV reporter Liza Hearn (Emmanuelle Vaugier), Auggie notices the phones are down. Not only that, but all TV, cable, Internet, cellular and satellite communications too.

Concerned at the shutdown and eager to get back into the field, Auggie puts his theory to his bosses – that a hacker was responsible and he is the man to go in and sort things out.

To his surprise, Auggie was given the mission but at the briefing (6 minutes into the episode) he had quite a surprise. The hacker turns out to be his elegant Russian ex-girlfriend Natasha Petrovna (Liane Balaban), who Auggie had dumped several years earlier.

As with many shows of this type, Covert Affairs blurs reality with real-life events, people and organizations such as the CIA. In this respect, Petrovna’s background proves to be of particular interest.

Born and raised in St. Petersburg, Russia, Auggie’s old flame has a graduate degree in computer security but according to the CIA is now a member of a particularly sinister group – the Swedish Piracy Bureau Piratbyrån – the founding group behind The Pirate Bay.

“A card carrying anarchist,” remarks an agent in the briefing.

Concerned that there’s rarely smoke without fire, TorrentFreak contacted Piratbyrån founder Marcin de Kaminski for comment.

“What I can say is that we do have strong and positive connections with Russian groups and individuals,” Kaminski explained. “We have experienced really good cooperation at more than one time.”

“It is of course always bad for our credibility when information appears to leak. At the same time we know that the MPAA has been making stuff up for years, so we are not surprised.”

So has Piratbyran ever been involved in hacking, or would it consider employing mysterious hackers?

“If we use secret agents like this Natasha? It is impossible for me to say anything specific about our whereabouts and strategies, but let me make this clear: there is still lots of dirty stuff that has to be taken care of,” warned Kaminski.

But wasn’t Piratbyrån disbanded recently?

“Piratbyrån is in fact not currently an operational entity, that is correct. But at the same time we are working on other partially related projects. You will hear from us again,” Kaminski concludes.

The next episode of the show, Fool In The Rain, airs September 7th. Who knows what other secrets will be revealed….

Source: Hollywood Links Pirate Bay Founding Group To Cyber Attack

A few months ago Dmitry Chestnykh, the founder of Coding Robots and copyright holder of Mémoires, discovered that his program – like many others – was being shared via The Pirate Bay. Out of curiosity he decided to download the torrent to find out how it was cracked, and he didn’t like what he saw.

In a passionate “Notice of Ridiculous Activity” (reproduced in part below, errors intact) the company’s founder decided to notify The Pirate Bay crew about his findings, shocked as he was at the crappy work of the person who cracked his application.

“Not only it requires installing APE plugin, and generating keyfiles using some scary tool, it contains a fucking *WINDOWS* program to verify the validity of this release. The ‘How-to’ section in the description is just incomprehensible, and won’t be understood by anyone other than the writer of the description,” Chestnykh writes.

“Clearly, the ‘cracker’ Minamoto did a lazy job and don’t know how to crack software. It’s a fucking SINGLE BOOLEAN SWITCH that validates the license, it doesn’t require any Application Enhancer tricks or whatever.”

“I demand that you don’t remove this torrent, so that people can laugh at Minimoto and CORE skills. However, I also demand the better crack be made, so that it doesn’t cripple the use experience of my beautiful program,” Chestnykh added, putting pressure on the Pirate Bay crew.

For the Pirate Bay crew it must have been refreshing to receive a request to keep a torrent, especially when it’s written in a mildly entertaining form reminiscent of the replies sent by the site to copyright holders in the past.

Ironically, however, the torrent has been removed from The Pirate Bay for reasons unknown.

Below is the notice in full, as found on Reddit.

Source: Pirate Bay Receives Notice To Keep a Torrent

The main reasons people have for downloading TV is to catch up with missed episodes, or to watch episodes that are not yet available in their country. While this used to be a relatively geeky habit half a decade ago, today even computer illiterates know how to download a TV-show.

People who make their living in the TV business are not excluded from this group either. Earlier this week, on MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann, the Canadian comedy group ‘The Kids In The Hall’ admitted to pirating their own shows via BitTorrent on multiple occasions.

Their reason? They had trouble getting their own episodes over the border legally.

In the Czech Republic a slightly more embarrassing example of BitTorrent use among TV-insiders was uncovered recently. TV Prima, one of the local television stations, was discovered to be hosting two episodes of Fringe on their servers, accessible via a public FTP.

Apparently one of the employees missed two episodes that aired on competing station Nova Cinema. Since TV Nova will only start offering shows via the web starting this fall, there was no other option than to turn to BitTorrent.

Unfortunately the on-demand offering from TV Prima didn’t last long. Shortly after the ‘mistake’ was revealed by a local website the open FTP was closed.

Source: TV Station Hosts Pirated Copy Of Fringe

One torrent site that has been floating under the radar, relatively speaking, is now pushing back at these outfits with a rather unusual action. The Russian-based team of operators behind Vertor.com has sent special packages to six of the leading anti-piracy groups through which they hope to send a clear message.

The packages, containing the local brand of Vizit Overture aroma flavored condoms, are accompanied with a note that doesn’t allow for much speculation. “We wish your parents had used it,” the message reads, venting the frustration of the Vertor team and many of the site’s users.

The people behind Vertor informed TorrentFreak that their action is a joke, but one with a clear message. “I’m sure that every one of us would want to say something like this to these bloodsuckers, but not everyone has the opportunity to be heard,” an anonymous source from the Vertor team said.

The condom shipments were sent out yesterday are expected to arrive within a day at the anti-piracy offices. They are believed to be free of anthrax and other kinds of hazardous materials.

From Russia with love…

The UPS tracking numbers for the packages and scans of the shipping documents have also been posted on the Vertor blog.

Source: Torrent Site Ships Condoms To Anti-Piracy Offices

PRS recently demanded an £80 annual fee from a corner shop to allow it to keep its radio, but a cunning plan was hatched by one of the employees that enabled it to avoid the charges.

Sandra Burt, a 56-year-old grandmother shop assistant at A & T Food Store in Clackmannan, turned off the radio and began to personally serenade her customers instead. Ha! Take that PRS!

But it wasn’t to be. The PRS got in touch and said that Mrs Burt’s singing constituted a live performance and was subject to a “four figure” annual fee. The PRS said that Mrs Burt was “getting up to mischief” to avoid paying the fine.

Nevertheless, Mrs Burt was told her activities are illegal and she had to pay.

“She could be fined for not having a live performance licence,” said a PRS spokesman at the time, “and if the fine isn’t paid, then she could potentially be taken to court.”

But now the PRS is having to eat its words, along with a large helping of humble pie and a nice groveling apology dessert. They have suddenly realized, strangely, that everything has just been one big mistake all along and have taken all the threats back. How nice.

But in reality, although she tried Mrs Burt simply couldn’t comply and has been compulsively infringing copyright all along.

“I couldn’t stop myself singing,” she told the BBC.

“They would need to put a plaster over my mouth to get me to stop, I can’t help it,” she said.

“We’re very sorry we made a big mistake,” said a note attached to a big bunch of flowers from the PRS to Mrs Burt. “We hear you have a lovely singing voice and we wish you good luck.”

I guess that makes it all ok then. How ridiculous.

Source: Copyright Threats Against Compulsive Singer Withdrawn

Lily has managed to capture the imaginations of both sides – people are talking about this issue and that is always a good thing.

Debate, discussion and hopefully understanding will bring this file-sharing ‘war’ to an end one day but in the meantime let’s not forget what this is ultimately all about – the music. We all love it and that’s why you’ll love this too;

“After Lily’s hectic week I’ve made a pro-filesharing song and video calling her up on a few of the claims she’s made,” UK musician Dan Bull explains to TorrentFreak.

“I’ve also tried to outline some of the main moral arguments for filesharing in the lyrics. Hope you enjoy, and hope the readers do too.”

The song is brilliant in my opinion, and, ironically I suppose, i’d like to give Dan some money for his work, he deserves it. Let’s hope this song gets to Internet #1 this weekend and he reaps the benefit. Now if I can just get the chorus out of my head…..

…or if you prefer, download the MP3 here.

Dan’s MySpace page can be found here and his album ‘Safe’ is available from FreshNut but can also be downloaded digitally from iTunes, Amazon and Napster.

You can grab it free of charge here or using Mininova.

Source: A Brilliant Open Letter Song On Piracy To Lily Allen

Litago milk features a cow on the packaging so not wanting to break with tradition, Tine invited the public to enter their own cow designs. Once all entries were received voting began – the winning cow will become the new Litago logo – no bull.

Here are the finalists, they are very amoosing.

According to reports, the cow in first place right now – the Opera Browser Cow – could have been put there by supporters or even (gasp) employees of the Norwegian browser company. An udderly scandalous allegation, especially when the steaks are this high.

But take a closer look at the design in second place right now. That’s right, just as expected, it’s a Pirate Bay-inspired cow. With green arrows on it.

“What we are really talking about here is Litago with a Pirate bay logo, submitted by a someone who loves to drink milk and loves to download torrents,” say IT-Avisen, “but perhaps has less love for Tøndel and intellectual property law.”

But of course, Tine has a few safeguards to ensure that no Pirate Bay logo gets anywhere near their bottles and packaging. The final decision will be made by a panel of farmers judges – selected by Tine.

Moo.

Source: Pirate Bay Cow Gatecrashes Milk Competition

The artist’s anti-piracy plan with a message is so simple, it’s brilliant. Infringe on Pirate Bay’s copyrights by using TPB artwork, logos and graphics to make their own T-shirts carrying anti-Pirate Bay messages. These are to be sold through a website, which looks remarkably like the Pirate Bay homepage, since all the graphics and layout are naturally copied from there. I’m sure TiAMO, brokep and Anakata are incandescent with rage right now.

Surprisingly, this pretty hypocritical operation has a spokesman, well-known Ireland-based music industry publicist Stephen Anderson.

“There’s a human cost to Pirate Bay’s activities,” said Anderson in a recent interview. “Jobs are being lost, mortgages defaulted on, kids pulled out of school – the consequences are widespread. We’re calling on the entire creative industry – whether it be media, retail, record companies, studios, distributors, publishers or artists themselves – to unleash the bats by embedding one of our logos on their MySpace, Bebo, Facebook or website pages. We want to bring people at every level of the industry on board right up to your U2s and Metallica, and expose Pirate Bay for what they are – common thieves.”

In the next part of the interview, things got a little confusing. Rather than just a single “artist” being behind this genius plan as the earlier poster suggested, Anderson speaks of a much bigger operation. So who is behind it?

“An international coalition of executives and bands who want the concept to be floated and discussed before revealing themselves,” says Anderson. Very wise indeed, since the whole thing is a joke, funny in parts, tragic in others. On the one hand the whole thing looks like the efforts of one man in a bedroom trying to cash in on T Shirt money, but according to their publicist it’s the seeds of some international movement. Who knows who deep this goes?

Anyway, clicking almost any link on the homepage (i’ll come back to this later) returns this page;

Here T-shirts are sold, virtually identical to the ones available from TPB, except – and here’s the genius idea – they are all dramatically cheaper. According to the artist’s friend, he’s “virtually giving them away” just to spite Pirate Bay. Anderson probably has a deeper, more worrying explanation.

But sadly the plan falls apart on several levels. First of all, the Pirate Bay don’t give a damn if someone infringes on their copyrights. In fact Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde told TorrentFreak that he has sent an email to the people who run the site, pointing them to some high-quality logos they can use for their shirts.

Second, all these T-shirts carry an anti-Pirate Bay message, hardly something your average geek is likely to wear or buy and to be honest, I can’t see many artists wearing them either. Thirdly, not only are these poorly ‘designed’ but the messages on them turn out to be unintentionally hilarious too.

I mentioned earlier that not all links on the homepage go to the anti-Pirate Bay T-shirt buying page. Ironically, since the entire aim of the site is to deprive Pirate Bay of billions in T-shirt money (or raise worldwide awareness of how bad The Pirate Bay is, depending on who you believe), it hardly seems fitting that the link that says “TPB T-shirts” on the fake site doesn’t in fact point to their T-Shirt sales pages, but actually to the official Pirate Bay T-shirt page on Bytelove.com. So in this context and to finish up, let’s have a look at a couple of the anti-TPB shirts.

Unleash The Bats can be found here. Hurry up before its hacked into oblivion.

Source: Anti-Pirate Bay Site In Pirate T-Shirt Failure

Just recently Pontén received a letter from the Swedish tax authority (Skatteverket) informing him that his request for a change in his personal details had been accepted, which came as quite a surprise since he had made no such request.

From May 29th 2009, said the letter, 43 year-old Henrik Pontén would have his name changed and become known as Pirate Pontén, undoubtedly to the high amusement of millions of file-sharers.

“The pirate movement have previously tried threats and when that doesn’t work, they do this,” Pontén told Aftonbladet.

Labeling the name change as a “silly” act, Pontén remains determined to press on and get his original name back. “This only makes me more convinced that I’m right,” he said. “The pirate movement often speaks about the importance of personal integrity, but the name change violates my integrity.”

Pontén and others like him around the world are continuing to discover that most people in opposition to their plans have access to a keyboard and the Internet and that is all they need to do their tiny part in annoying those that set out to annoy them. One person alone can cause enough damage, multiply this by thousands or millions and the whole situation can become entirely unmanageable.

Pirate Bay users will tell you that they have grown used to Pontén and his activities against them. Equally Pontén says he has grown used to piracy advocates harassing him in return.

“The way I see it, there is a campaign against anyone who disagrees with the piracy movement,” notes Pontén. “They are trying to restrict our freedom of speech. Previously they have tried threats, now they are trying other methods,” he added.

Pontén told Aftonbladet that the Pirate Party should distance themselves from this type of threat and harassment, although why they should be required to do so is not clear. There is absolutely no suggestion that the Pirate Party was involved in changing Pontén’s name but nevertheless, vice chairman Christian Engström felt compelled to comment;

“To poke fun at the opposition is perfectly ok, but this kind of conduct is just bad form. We distance ourselves from threats and trouble-making. It does not benefit the party,” he said.

Interestingly, no identity check is carried out in Sweden for name change applications, the person concerned just receives a letter to inform the change has been carried out.

Ingegerd Widell, head of the registry at Skatteverket, said that Pirate Pontén will get his original name back in due course.

Source: Pirate Bay Nemesis Has Name Changed By Pranksters

Last year we reported that the RIAA’s website had suffered an XSS attack and just a couple of days ago we revealed how the MPAA site was vulnerable to an XSS attack too, one which left it embarrassingly displaying torrents from The Pirate Bay.

Now it is the RIAA’s turn (again) to suffer the same fate. Vektor, who also discovered the MPAA site exploit, told TorrentFreak that he had managed to find a security hole in RIAA.com too. He demonstrated this by using an iframe – an HTML element which makes it possible to embed an HTML document inside another HTML document – TorrentFreak for example.

As with the MPAA site exploit, Vektor explains that his work on the RIAA site is a proof of concept and should be taken as a joke.

We’re sure the RIAA and MPAA coders will be laughing heartily as they try to plug these holes.

Source: RIAA Site Features TorrentFreak’s Latest News

About a year ago the RIAA website suffered from a similar vulnerability and was wiped clean. The RIAA fixed the problem within a few hours and eventually all the ‘lost’ content was restored, but not before thousands of people had fun with it.

The XSS vulnerability on the MPAA website was found on the about page where visitors can submit their favorite movie. In the screenshot below it says “thank you for taking the time to share your favorite movie,” which is the actual text that people get to see when they fill out the form. The Pirate Bay logo and the links to the latest movie torrents are obviously not supposed to be there.

It is “a proof of concept that demonstrates an XSS attack on mpaa.org website,” writes Vektor who covered the details in a blog post, adding that it should be taken as a joke. No lies there, as it made us smile indeed.

Source: MPAA Website, Now With Torrents

According to the recently updated RIPE database entry, the Pirate Bay is now listed as a customer of Danowsky & Partner law firm (who represented IFPI), Maqs Law Firm (representing the MPAA) and the Swedish anti-piracy bureau. All three were involved in the recent trial, which led some to believe that they somehow gained control over the site. This is nonsense of course.

So why is this info in there, some might wonder. One explanation might be that during the Pirate Bay trial the prosecution used (incorrect) data from the RIPE database claiming that this was the absolute truth. The Pirate Bay team probably put the lawyers’ info in there themselves to show that this is not the case. Indeed, there is no doubt that they will have a hard time selling this ‘truth’ to the public now, with their own names being featured in the recent entry.

One of the other advantages of the new RIPE WHOIS is that the Pirate Bay team doesn’t have to deal with any of the takedown requests anymore, as it states that all abuse email should be directed to the earlier mentioned law firms. Aye, that will teach those landlubbers.

Update: The Pirate Bay is down at the moment due to technical problems, they will be back soon.

Source: Pirate Bay IP Addresses Assigned to Prosecution Lawyers

But there are other more subtle ways for the company to benefit from copyright infringement. Who remembers our article from 2008, when we showed an aXXo release being used to sell Macs in a John Lewis store? Well, now it looks like another retailer had the same idea – why spend money on real DVDs when you can just download them?

On a visit to the Rivas H2Ocio shopping mall in Madrid, Miguel Ángel Moro walked into a Saturn store. There, in the Apple section, he saw demo machines – and they were all running pirate movies.

Miguel told TorrentFreak, “This is not the first time I’ve seen this stuff in MediaMarkt/Saturn, a big consumer electronics store in Europe. They sell from computers to washing machines, including DVD and Blu-ray discs.”

Displaying their own DVDs is illegal without clearance, so they might as well grab a copy off BitTorrent and safe a few bucks – right? Sharing copyrighted files is legal in Spain, but not for commercial use which is clearly the case here.

Below is a photograph taken by Miguel of a ‘Cars’ Blu-ray movie rip running on VLC Media Player, on a Macbook, in the store.

Source: Electronics Retailer Pirates Movies to Sell Macbooks

In the meantime, according to a report, one of the servers originally confiscated by the police in the 2006 Pirate Bay raid is set to become a museum piece.

Sweden’s National Museum of Science and Technology has announced it has bought the server for 2,000 kronor ($243). It will be displayed in a section of the museum dedicated to machines and inventions that have changed people’s lives.

In other Pirate Bay news, film director and producer Simon Klose previously announced he was making a documentary about the site entitled “TPB-AFK”. The movie, which is being made by Klose from a fly-on-the-wall perspective, is scheduled to be finished in five years. When it’s released, Klose hopes that it will be heavily pirated but of course, pirates don’t operate on other people’s release schedules.

Impatient at having to wait years for a release, someone sneaked a CAM into an early screening and released the footage onto the Internet. The damning footage, which shows the crew working out how much money they have earned from the site, is available below.

More Pirate Bay updates as we get them…

Source: Pirate Bay Server Becomes Museum Exhibit, TPB Cam Leaked

The girl in question couldn’t connect to her home WiFi network from her bedroom, so she borrowed her mother’s 3G modem to download some Lost episodes, among other things. What she didn’t know was that this would result in a $40,000 (30,000 Euro) bill at the end of the year ($300 per episode).

Her mother, Blanca Rosa Alcántara, a city councilor for the People’s Party in Spain, protested: “I thought that it had unlimited downloading data rates.” In an official statement, representatives of the People’s Party at Getafe City Hall said that the party regrets “the improper use of the party’s Internet and phone lines by children”.

“I was absolutely unaware that such usage [using the 3G modem for downloading TV shows] could result in such excessive costs. I have a flat rate plan at my home and something like this has never happened before,” Alcántara added.

The councilor claims that she should have been warned against excessive use of the modem by the City Hall economic department, saying that this huge bill could have been prevented. Nevertheless, she promised to pay the entire bill including interest and hopes that the accident wont turn into a political issue.

This is not the first time that someone’s downloading habits have caused a financial crisis. In 2007 a factory worker from the UK was billed $54,000 for hooking up his mobile phone to to his laptop, and downloading 20 or 30 TV-shows. For some, file-sharing can prove to be an expensive hobby.

Source: City Hall Billed $40,000 for Downloading ‘Lost’ Episodes

He was heavily attacked by industry lawyers Danowsky, Pontén and Wadsted who did everything they could to discredit and slander his reputation. When Wallis was asked whether he wanted to be reimbursed for travel expenses etc, he light-heartedly suggested sending some flowers to his wife.

His statement was picked up by the large audience listening in to the live audio from the trial and flowers soon began arriving at the Wallis’ house.

Roger’s wife, Görel Wallis, wasn’t surprised by her husband’s whim in court:

“We have been married for 38 years. He proposed half an hour after we met and I said maybe. After a day, he had convinced me”, she said.

At a local flower store in Stockholm they had received 100 orders by 20.30 last night. Owner Kristian Skald said that two nearby stores had received an equal amount of orders.

“Last delivery was 33 bouquets Thursday night. There will be more to come on Friday,” the owner of the flower shop commented.

Today, Friday, the couple celebrates their wedding day anniversary and on Saturday it’s Görel’s birthday. Roger Wallis feels she is worth all the flowers she gets.

“She was very worried before the trial. They questioned my competence and that made her very sad. She hadn’t slept for two days,” Roger said.

A web page has been set up that collects what has been given so far, complete with an ever-growing stack of CDs that show how many sales the music-industry has lost by slandering the Professor.

Thus far, in an amazing show of generosity from a section of society labeled by the music industry as ‘thieves’, more than 4100 Euros worth of flowers, chocolate and gifts have been sent to the couple.

The Wallis’ soon ran out of vases for the flowers but Görel knows that sharing is caring and will distribute the flowers to all residents in their apartment building.

“We will make sure it will be beautiful here.”

Source: Pirate Bay Witness’ Wife Overwhelmed With Flowers

“My friend Monique Wadsted, who represents the movie and gaming industry in the trial against The Pirate Bay, needs comments from creators and authors on these issues. She is currently preparing her closing arguments and would like to end it with a message from Swedish authors. It can’t be long – only 30 seconds – so we’re talking one-liners here.”

“Since I know that we the authors are affected by file-sharing, I think this is an excellent chance to take a stand. […] I’ll try to write something and would like to encourage members to do the same. […] Furthermore, Monique would love to see us coming to the court in person. As things look now, the whole situation is dominated by the pirates,” Carina added.

Now, perhaps this is nothing unusual. As the digital society has progressed, not all authors have recognized the marketing opportunities of file-sharing. What is interesting, however, is that Carina Rydberg’s real stance on file-sharing differs dramatically from her Facebook post. Swedish blogger projO published postings from Carina Rydberg from earlier discussions in the same Facebook group, where she confessed that she was a registered user at The Pirate Bay. So why is she a member there?

“Because I want to watch movies that can neither be rented anymore nor bought on the Internet. I want to read books that are out of print and will cost you 750 British pounds on eBay. For that reason, I want The Pirate Bay to stay. At the moment, I’m trying to download John Schlesinger’s ‘The Day of the Locust’; it takes time and it’s not even certain I’ll get a copy that is watchable – but at the same time I have no idea how to get the damn flick any another way…”

Further on in the same discussion thread, she doesn’t spare her praise:

“The Pirate Bay is an invaluable source for content that publishers, record labels and movie studios for some reason can’t or won’t offer. If someone on The Pirate Bay chose to download the book I wrote in 1989 I would have no objection to that. That novel is practically impossible to get hold of and as an author I want to be read.”

As panic over her hypocrisy increased, Carina Rydberg quickly edited the posts on Facebook to cover her tracks. However, she made a comment to a torrent on The Pirate Bay in November where she repeated a similar statement, that she encouraged the making available of her out-of-print novels.

In recent posts to the authors’ Facebook group, several enraged members have demanded that the person who leaked this information from the group be expelled. However, the founder of the group stated that there are no rules about the contents having to be kept private, and that leaks like this are something you must take into account when posting to a Facebook group.

He added: “I think Carina’s post was somewhat offensive since it presupposes that all authors agree on what is obviously a subjective opinion.”

Meanwhile, Carina Rydberg has come out all guns blazing in running errands for her friend Monique. Despite her earlier support for The Pirate Bay she has forwarded the request to The Swedish Writer’s Union. “They absolutely don’t want to support the pirates,” she wrote in a another Facebook post.

At the time of writing, it is unclear whether the authors were to be paid for their work, or if Monique Wadsted expected to get user generated content for free. One thing is sure though, an anti-Pirate Bay quote from Carina and friends wont be worth much in court now.

Source: Pirate Bay Prosecution Hires Hypocrite Pirate Author for PR

On Thursday, Gottfrid Svartholm explained this to the Court, which resulted in an interesting exchange of information. It started with Per E Samuelsson, the lawyer of one of the other defendants (Lundström), who questioned Gottfrid:

—

Samuelsson: Do you have any idea of how many of the works that the charges relate to, that have been uploaded by ordinary users that have bought a DVD or a CD and then made it available at The Pirate Bay?

Anakata: Yes, exactly.

—

Peter Danowsky, one of the prosecution’s lawyers representing the music industry, was apparently intrigued by these mystical figures who specialize in copyright infringement. He later followed up on this issue and asked Anakata some additional questions.

—

Danowsky: You have identified that there are certain piracy groups that have released the works in these cases…

Anakata: They like to keep their releases within a selective group of people.

—

It seems unthinkable that the IFPI could believe that ‘The Scene’ would hire The Pirate Bay to spread releases, but presumably this is just more of those “Epic LOLs” from the TPB trial that Peter spoke of earlier. It’s doubtful we’ve heard the last of them.

Source: Anakata Explains in Court How ‘The Scene’ Works

Last year, the band were working on their yet-to-be-released studio album “Tonight”. Like many other albums, however, a copy of “Tonight” leaked out before the official release date, and it is now widely available online. Given the previous pro-piracy stance of the band, which got them on the front page of Digg, you wouldn’t expect that they would make a big deal out of it.

The contrary is true. The band, together with the record label, have instructed the one and only Web-Sheriff – who also works for Prince, Michael Jackson and Village People – to take on the sites that posted the album, or links to it. One of the sites that received a takedown notice recently is Scene Releases. Web-Sheriff wrote in an email to the site:

On behalf of Domino Records and Franz Ferdinand, we would kindly ask you not to post copies of ‘Tonight’ on your site. We do appreciate that you are fans of / are promoting Franz Ferdinand, but the label and artist would greatly appreciate your co-operation in removing your links to the pirate files in question.

Web-Sheriff, who sent similar emails to dozens of other sites, is known for his politeness – if you cooperate, that is. Normally, this takedown request would hardly be newsworthy, but this one is special. Only a few months ago, Franz Ferdinand openly encouraged its fans to pirate one of their new tracks, advocating downloading using LimeWire. They even confessed to being pirates themselves, by admitting copying CDs for use on their iPods – currently illegal in the UK. So, understandably, the partnership with Web-Sheriff comes as quite a surprise.

Faolan, one of the editors of Scene Releases, was as baffled as we are, and decided to ask the sheriff for an explanation. Instead of explaining why Franz Ferdinand performed this 180, Web-Sheriff replied with a list of threats, claiming that Scene Releases could be held liable for putting links up to the unreleased album. He replied:

Joking aside, you are currently acting as a de facto digital distributor of this (unreleased) album and, if you do not remove / de-activate the links that you have published, our clients shall be obliged to take legal action both to stop what you are doing and to seek compensation for the (extensive) commercial losses directly arising from your illegal activities.

Furthermore, the sheriff stressed that the email should not be shared with third parties, a tactic also employed by UK lawyers Davenport Lyons, in an attempt to stifle discussion. Faolan told TorrentFreak that the reply from the sheriff inspired him to keep the conversation going. He believes that he didn’t break any laws by merely linking to files that are hosted on other sites. In fact, the links that Scene Releases posted at the bottom of their article were already dead (removed by the associated hosting sites) by the time Web Sheriff sent his reply.

Scene Releases was not the only release blog that was contacted by Web-Sheriff, the conversation that he had with RLSLOG is just as entertaining. After RLSLOG pointed out to Web-Sheriff that he misspelled the domain name, he didn’t back off, and sent the following demands:

You must also arrange for the following apology to be published on the relevant page of the site for a period of seven (7) days : “RSLOG wishes to apologies to Franz Ferdinand, Domino Records and Web Sheriff for the disruption caused to their sales, marketing and promotion plans by our publishing of pirate file details relating to the unreleased album “Tonight”.

Yes, you’re reading it correctly, the Web -Sheriff is asking RLSLOG (or RSLOG) to make an apology, and he repeated his spelling mistake. The admin ignored all his requests, and replied with the following email:

Thanks for good laugh, i will probably publish this whole conversation somewhere, it’s too good to remain unknown! Once again, learn to type instead of drinking brandy in saloon.

Yours, Old Shaterhand

The question remains – does Franz Ferdinand know about the involvement of Web Sheriff and his threatening tone towards the site admins, or is it all orchestrated by the record label? We hope that it’s the latter, but thus far the band hasn’t responded to our inquiries. Franz Ferdinand’s new album Tonight will be available in stores on January 26th.

Source: Franz Ferdinand Sends Web-Sheriff After Pirates

The RIAA recently announced that it would stop its massive legal campaigns and limit the court visits to a minimum. No surprise there. Lawsuits are expensive and the RIAA lost more of those than they had hoped, so they turned their attention to lawmakers, local governments and ISPs instead.

The new plan is to get legislation implemented that will allow the entertainment industry to spy on the filesharing behaviors of individual Internet subscribers, and order their disconnection when they are suspected of repeated copyright infringements. Ideally they would like to make “downloading” a criminal offense of course, and this is exactly what the Pirates Prison Project is anticipating.

According to Dimitri Johnson, CEO of Pirate Prisons Project (PPP), billions of Internet users around the world will have to be thrown in jail if the anti-piracy lobbyists have their way. “Everyone is guilty by default: since nobody will want to do without Internet access, no matter what, everyone will end up going to jail. All of our kids, parents, friends and peers. Off to jail we go,” he writes.

“This trend has led PPP to foresee a gigantic business opportunity,” Dimitri adds, while introducing his plans to build thousands of prisons where these Internet pirates can be locked up. Investors can buy shares in these yet to be built prisons, and pirates have the opportunity to book a comfortable cell in advance. PPP currently offers three options:

1. Buy Shares

You can invest in the new prisons due to be built, which is a solid investment according to the PPP. 150 shares currently trade at $10,000, but people with a smaller budget can get 2 shares for just $200.

2. Denounce Someone

If you happen to know someone who pirates music, software or movies on the Internet, you can first report them, and then send them over to the PPP website to book their cell early on. There are several options to choose from, and early birds get the best picks.

3. Book a Cell Yourself

Last but not least, you can book a cell yourself, and make sure that you’ll have a comfortable time in prison once you’re locked up. If your budget allows it, you can book the “jail premium” package: the largest cell available, complete with broadband Internet.

TorrentFreak contacted one of the project leaders, who told us that he hopes to get the RIAA and MPAA on board as one of the main investors in the project. He’s right, it’s their future…

Source: Pirate Prisons Project Launches, Book Your Cell Now!

But what if you want to move a precious cargo around in a Hollywood fantasy world? What if you needed a method of getting something from A to B, using a person who is as content agnostic as BitTorrent? Well, you could try to hire Jason Statham’s character in The Transporter movies. Now in his third outing, Frank Martin is a driver/courier who specializes in getting things from A to B while asking few questions. Some of his guidelines would please many BitTorrent fans, especially the “no names” and “don’t look in the envelope” rules, but sadly, not everything is sunny in torrent world.

In his latest movie, Transporter 3, Frank has to work with a human cargo – the rather attractive daughter of a Ukranian minister, previously kidnapped by the bad guys – and take her from France to Odessa. But this is TorrentFreak, so at this point you weren’t expecting a movie review, but something about BitTorrent.

A few minutes after the hour mark, the true evil of the bad guys becomes apparent. At the order of the chief baddie, an operative is told to “hack into a military satellite”, which he achieves in just a few seconds and, as is compulsory when anyone in Hollywood hacks a computer or cracks a code, the camera swings to a computer screen as rows and rows of complicated-looking text rolls by, dramatizing the process.

It seems that an old Mac version of the BitTorrent Mainline client, developed by BitTorrent Inc., is used to hack the satellite. Unfortunately, or perhaps part of the process – it crashed immediately.

Concerned at this nefarious use of our favorite technology, we contacted the person responsible for this piece of technology, to find out what on earth is going on. In response to the report, Andrew Lowenstern, the developer of the old client noted: “Clearly, the technical consultants for Transporter 3 have good taste in obsolete BT clients. You can see they created that crash report themselves since it says the exception type is a breakpoint.”

It’s disappointing that a movie as realistic as Transporter 3 has been let down by a lack of technical accuracy, especially when the storyline and acting were of the highest calibre, and the stunts so believable ;)

Nevertheless, great fun!

Source: BitTorrent Crash Linked to Military Satellite Hack

Of course, a country with plenty of ‘pirates’ has to have its own anti-piracy organization, and Lithuania is no different. The local anti-piracy outfit goes by the name ANVA, an acronym for ‘Antipiracines Veiklos Asociacija’. Their main targets are the local BitTorrent sites, which they have announced they will sue for millions in damages.

To use the word ‘Lithuania’ in a Lithuanian organization’s name requires government approval. Recently, ANVA changed its name to LANVA, after they succeeded in getting this authorization. This seal of approval may give the organization more credibility, but there is a small problem. They forgot to register the domain lanva.lt when they changed their name. Before, they were using anva.lt, but while they did make a new logo with the L included, registering a new domain didn’t come to mind.

Usually, mistakes like this can be easily overcome by paying a certain amount of money to the person who was smart enough to register the domain, but not this time. Kestas Ermanas, the owner of one of the largest BitTorrent sites in Lithuania, registered the domain as soon as he found out about the name change, and he is not planning to hand it over to his arch rival.

The domain Kestas bought currently displays the following message: “This is how it works. Whatever you sink, we build back up. Whomever you sue, ten new pirates are recruited. Wherever you go, we are already ahead of you. You are the past and the forgotten, we are the Internet and the future.”

LANVA has scheduled an emergency meeting next Thursday to discuss what they can do to get the lanva.lt domain in their possession. The chances that they will get the domain through a dispute are very slim though. There have been several cases in Lithuania where large companies sued owners of domain names, and they lost every single time.

This is not the first time that an anti-piracy organization has had a domain dispute with a BitTorrent site. October last year The Pirate Bay got hold of the domain name of IFPI, under which they wanted to launch the “International Federation of Pirate Interests.” The case was later lost by The Pirate Bay, but the fact that they acquired it in the first place is yet another example of the tech illiteracy of these organizations.

Source: BitTorrent Site Pwns Anti-Piracy Outfit

The movie, the third in the Futurama series and due for release in a few days time, has already leaked to BitTorrent. This is nothing new, but hidden away in the DVD extras is a parody of the infamous movie industry anti-piracy ad, which was previously parodied by the IT Crowd.

Entitled ‘Downloading Often Is Terrible’ or D.O. I.T for short, the animated advert follows the familiar “You wouldn’t steal…” structure, but with more unusual content. Whatever the ad suggests that Bender wouldn’t steal or do, is followed up by Bender doing just that, starting with “You wouldn’t steal a spaceship”, which of course, Bender would, along with lots of other amusing things.

Although Bender is stealing physical objects in his 2D animated world, lots of people disagree with the use of the word ‘steal’ to describe the act of copyright infringement. Australian lawyer Brendan Scott certainly doesn’t believe it. When someone downloads movies or music illegally, they make a copy, he argues. The original is still there, and legally speaking nothing is stolen. Scott concludes: “To use the infringement-as-stealing meme demonstrates something of a lack of respect for language and consequently a lack of respect for the people to whom you are speaking.”

But maybe Bender himself provides the truth. The copyright lobbies often paint the fight against piracy as a “matter of life and death” so it seems fitting to utilize the phrase to illustrate the chasm between stealing and copying. Having watched the clip and noted the final stolen item produced from Bender’s chest, I immediately thought about where that came from, the state of the gentleman in question, and where I could find him for a chat.

Because if anyone in the world knows the difference between copying and stealing, it’s got to be him. Or Lucy Liu’s milliner. Enjoy the clip.

If you go back 3 months on YouTube, it appears that even this parody got leaked ahead of time. Cammed too, you couldn’t make it up.

Source: Futurama’s Anti-Piracy Message, Just Do It

Titan Media advertise themselves as ‘the premier creator of all-male erotica’ (aka ‘gay porn’), and they are known to go after sites and individuals who they say are illegally using their content. Gilbert Gonzales, who regularly posted infringing files on his weblog, was one of the key players according to the company,

In April, Gonzales was served with a $1.275 million default judgment for uploading 17 films to file hosting sites, but that didn’t stop him. He continued to share the work of Titan Media and its parent company Io Group Inc., and often accompanied his uploads with the message: ‘I will never stop sharing what I have with others.’

According to a report from AVN, the court was not amused by Gonzales’ repeated and defiant offenses. Judge Marilyn Hall Patel wrote in a second order for injunctive relief that, if he continues to share infringing material, “the court shall issue a warrant for the arrest of Gilbert Michael Gonzales.”

Since the regular anti-piracy outfits (MediaDefender excluded) don’t want to be associated with companies such as Titan Media, with the CEO of BayTSP saying: “We don’t want to be known in the porn space,” they had to go after the pirates themselves. With some success it seems, as the company managed to track down the remaining 21 “John Doe’s” that were listed in last year’s complaint.

Most of the 21 others have already decided to settle for a substantial, but undisclosed amount. Among these men were architects, restaurant owners and several married men, according to Io Group vice president Keith Webb, as if that should be some sort of surprise.

Source: Judge Spanks Insatiable Gay Porn Pirate

To some this might not seem like a worthy event for TorrentFreak to cover, after all, films come out every week. However, this film markets itself as “…the first time ever that a major feature-length film is debuting as a free download on the Internet – legally.” – a title that could arguably fall to Steal This Film. Yet, its the interaction between the legal and technical aspects that are the biggest story here.

First and foremost, the film’s website states that downloads are available in the US and Canada only. It states this not just once, but twice AND uses an IP lookup system to check. If you fail the IP check, you are told that the lawyers have said the film can only be offered to people in those countries.

It’s such a ‘shame’ then, that they have used BitTorrent. Worse, they’ve used a set of public trackers (including The Pirate Bay), and allowed the use of both Peer Exchange and DHT. Clearly, all it needs is for someone to offer the .torrent to other people, and they can download the film, as the torrent protocol has no methods for limiting by geographical location. Indeed, as you can see on this screenshot, there are plenty of people on the torrent from outside North America.

Is this deliberate, or accidental? Moore is known for his disregard of rules (and laws) in making films (such as his Cuba trip for Sicko), and this could be the latest example. Alternatively, it could be a lack of understanding on the part of those that are providing the technical backend.

However, with a budget of $2 million for distribution, Brave New Films could have done better, and have set up their own tracker, enforcing a US and Canada only download. Not that this would have helped much. It’s the Internet, and once it’s downloaded, it can be retorrented. In that they might be foresighted enough to try and keep the downloads together, strengthening the swarm.

Source: Slacker Uprising’s Torrent Available Worldwide, by Accident

Proving that if media can be seen, heard or touched it can be copied, songs from U2′s forthcoming album have been leaked online. Four tracks from the album, provisionally entitled ‘No Line On The Horizon’, have appeared on the Internet. The mechanism of the release is pretty comical – Bono blasted the tracks from a stereo in his villa in the South of France so loudly, that a passer-by recognized his voice and recorded them.

Four songs have been put online including the title track, the first single from the album ‘Sexy Boots’, ‘Moment of Surrender’ and ‘For Your Love’.

There’s no doubt that these cam-quality recordings will be particularly poor, but a large section of the file-sharing U2 fans won’t care about that. They have something that they’re not supposed to have and Mr McGuiness has had a bit of egg rubbed in his face – which probably holds more value to file-sharers than a pre-release FLAC rip of the entire album….

…which will appear online too of course, probably before the scheduled November release date.

Source: U2 Tracks Leak After Bono Plays Stereo Too Loudly

The Pirate Bay now joins the hype, as the renamed their site into “The Pirate Bat“, and put up a new logo that links to a search for “The Dark Knight”.

A week ago the police arrested a man who tried to record the movie with a camcorder. However, they couldn’t stop all cammers, and it didn’t take long before a leak got onto various BitTorrent sites. Rlslog reported last week that a copy of “The Dark Knight”, was published by a release group called “TradingStandards”. As usual, reports say that the quality of the leak is pretty poor. There has since been a Telesync of the movie released, which means if nothing else, the sound will be better.

This is not the first time that The Pirate Bay has rebranded its site to piss off content owners. When Apple’s OSX x86 leaked. in July 2005, they renamed the site to the Pear Bay, and linked to the leaked torrent. Back in July 2005 The Pirate Bay put up a logo inspired on Grand Theft Auto for the release of their new website, the Grand Theft Bay. Apart from being creative with their logo’s TPB is known for their hilarious responses to copyright owners who request takedowns.

Source: The Pirate Bay Promotes “The Dark Knight” Leak

Leaks of pre-release material onto the Internet are pretty normal events these days. Even the mainstream media are happy to cover the big leaks, usually while portraying file-sharers as the son of the devil. In the past many file-sharing news sites have covered such leaks of movies and music as a matter of course, but as they become more prevalent, less people report on them.

Normally the approaches of the mainstream (and the bands, artist and labels) and that of the file-sharing community are pretty much opposite. On the one hand piracy is killing everything it touches. On the other hand, the file-sharing hand, it’s something totally different – free promotion and all-important publicity for the artists.

Our regular readers will know that the relatively unknown Indiana Gregg did rather well from her recent experiences with piracy, thanks largely to The Pirate Bay, TorrentFreak and dozens of other sites. And she’s not on her own, many other artists have benefited from piracy.

Some of these people are openly happy with their ‘piracy’ successes, others complain like crazy. Interestingly (and this is an opinion piece so feel free to disagree) we now appear to have a third type of piracy complainer – the complain-like-crazy-but-secretly-love-it type.

Enter ‘BuckCherry‘. I haven’t been (un)fortunate enough to hear anything from them but according to Wikipedia they are a hard/alternative rock band. They claim to be pretty mad that a track entitled “Too Drunk…” from their latest album “Black Butterfly” has started cropping up on BitTorrent sites, way in advance of its September 15th release date. This is what the band has to say:

“Too Drunk…,” a featured track from “BLACK BUTTERFLY,” recently appeared online at a number of BitTorrent sites. Buckcherry has released an official statement regarding the song’s unscheduled arrival, declaring, “Honestly, we hate it when this s*** happens, because we want our FANS to have any new songs first.”

There is an old saying, “Least said, soonest mended“, but clearly BuckCherry have never heard of this saying or the concept, since they didn’t just comment casually on the leak, but shouted it from the rooftops in a fully-blown Atlantic Records press release. They mention the leak in the opening paragraph:

Buckcherry Reveals “BLACK BUTTERFLY”; Platinum-Certified Hard Rockers Announce New Album as “Too Drunk…” Appears Online;

…and then go on to mention the actual network (BitTorrent) in the second paragraph detailed above, which is not a particularly smart move if you’re trying to dissuade file-sharers from the inevitable free download. Adding further fuel to the already smoldering pile of suspicion is the fact that it’s possible for fans who preorder to get the “Too Drunk…” track for free.

I may be completely wrong in coming to the conclusion that BuckCherry has (cleverly?) manipulated 30 million world-wide file sharers into sampling their work through their faux displeasure in this press release. I may be wrong that Indiana Gregg is quietly enjoying all the extra publicity afforded to her by piracy.

But of course, the BitTorrent community wouldn’t fall for such a cynical publicity attempt and the file-sharing press wouldn’t fall for it either, we’re not that stupid.

Hmmmm….

Source: Does BuckCherry Think The BitTorrent Community is Stupid?

The situation revolves around that oddest of characters, Direct2Drive (D2D) – an online games store, owned by IGN, selling games over the Internet as protected downloads. Game code is modified to prevent the standard retail DRM from inhibiting game play (as there is no actual disc to check for) with Trymedia activation utilized instead. More importantly, since the code around the DRM has been modified and changed to a different system, regular patches from the game developers can’t be used. Instead, patches must be reworked by D2D to accommodate these changes. These changes are not always quick, a point D2D does try and defuse in its FAQ.

Thus we come to Rainbow Six: Vegas2 (R6V2) which, since its release in March, has had three patches released for it. The third, 1.03 provides a lot of changes, including new play modes, so legitimate purchasers of the game were eager to try it. The problem is, those that bought it via D2D can’t use it. This is the problem inherent in DRM. Those that buy the product are the ones affected, not those the DRM is designed to defeat.

After lots of complaining and attempts to fix things themselves, one Ubisoft employee found a solution. A zip file was uploaded to the help/support site, named “R6Vegas2_fix.zip”.

If D2D users patched to 1.02, then replaced the EXE with this one, they could then update to the new patch. However, someone ran a hex edit and it appears the fix was not Ubisoft code but actually a ‘no-cd’ crack released by the Scene group RELOADED, as shown here.

Since then, the zip file containing the fix has been pulled from the Ubisoft support site, so we’re unable to verify. The game’s community is as baffled by this as everyone else. Since the claimed origin of the fix, 10 days ago, there has been no word on it officially from Ubisoft, beyond a ‘Community Manager’ who states

We’re looking into this further as this was not the UK Support team that posted this, however if it is an executable that does not need the disc I doubt it has come from an external source. There’d be very little point doing so when we already own the original unprotected executable.

As soon as we find out more about this we’ll let you know.
_________________
Ubi.Vigil
Community Manager
Ubisoft UK

Although it is not unknown for a Scene release to be used to ‘fix’ a retail product, it’s certainly rare to have that fact promoted. That the ‘no-cd’ patch works, might have some relation to how brutal the Scene is when it comes to the quality of their work, especially in games. Whilst this is a validation that the Scene isn’t as bad as the lobby groups would have you believe (they fixed the game, and did it for free) you can bet that Ubisoft won’t be smiling at E3, and that they, and Direct2Drive, will continue to use DRM to annoy and inconvenience paying customers.

Source: Ubisoft Steals ‘No-CD Crack’ to Fix Rainbox 6: Vegas 2

IFPI proudly announced their new campaign a few weeks ago, writing: “The campaign comes as millions of people take advantage of the explosion of new ways of accessing music digitally, but still lack clarity on safety and legal issues, on finding legitimate sites, on the basics of copyright and on how to unpick the jargon of digital music.”

IFPI has always been concerned with the safety of children, and on pro-music.org they maintain a list of download stores that are ‘safe’ to use. I was of course curious about these legal stores, and since i’m from the Netherlands, I decided to give the Dutch legal stores a try. This turned out to be an interesting experiment.

To my surprise, the first 4 sites on the list were all gone, some had quit, and others redirected to websites that didn’t sell any music. Even worse, commodore.nl -the first site on the list- served ads for a scam site that sells filesharing software.

I finally got something that looked like a music store when I got to the fifth link, dance-tunes. However, when I searched for the latest Radiohead album, nothing came up. The site only has a few mp3s, and nothing of my choice.

The journey continued, and with sixth site, download.nl, I finally found some good music. Interestingly however, the songs I found were not for sale. Instead, I was advised to download LimeWire, Shareaza and Kazaa Lite. This may indeed sound a little confusing, but the IFPI apparently wants kids to use filesharing software after all.

So, to sum up my legal music experiment. I tried the first 6 sites advised by IFPI, 4 didn’t sell any music, the fifth only listed a few songs, and the sixth website I tried advised me to install LimeWire or Kazaa. It gets even worse further down the list where the kids end up at sites that sell hardcore adult movies.

Viviane Reding, EU Commissioner for Information Society and Media said about the new campaign: “The new guide is a very good example of an initiative that offers simple, practical advice to parents and teachers to keep young people safe and legal while enjoying music on the Internet.

I guess she didn’t try it herself.

Screenshot of a music “store” promoted by IFPI

Source: IFPI Advises Kids to Use LimeWire and Kazaa

After our original article we caught up with the director, Joe Russo, a film student at Arizona State University. Joe was selected to intern on the movie ‘The Kingdom’ and has worked with Fox Sports Network and Applebox pictures. He is also an accredited film critic and is Editor-in-Chief at MoviePulse.net – and he’d like the support of TorrentFreak readers.

TF: How did you come up with the Movie Screening Security Guards concept?

Joe Russo: The history of this project is actually a funny story. I had just finished production on a short film, which I have been editing simultaneously, called Santa’s Last Stop. It’s my thesis project, and I hadn’t really planned on doing another short film until it was complete. My Director of Photography, Andy Hendrix, really wanted to do another short film for our Business Ethics class. The only criterion for the project was that it had to be “related to an ethical problem in the film industry”.

Well we started mulling over ideas and then it hit me. I was at a press screening for a film called Definitely Maybe. We were in an older theater up in North Scottsdale and for some strange reason the exit was lit and the security guards were clearly visible. I noticed that they were fooling around a bit with their night vision goggles so I turned to see what had their attention , the group of blondes seated behind me. I said to myself, man this would be a funny bit for a short film. So I brought the idea up to my classmates, they dug it and we went for it.

TF: Why did you choose a ‘Mockumentary’ format?

Joe Russo: First things first, I hate documentaries. This was an opportunity to not only spoof what I consider to be a silly form of piracy prevention, but the documentary genre itself. I know that our lead actor Dean Veglia really got a kick out of viewers questioning if Movie Screening Security Guards was real. He felt that meant we had done our jobs right.

TF: How did you generate ideas for the film?

Joe Russo: Essentially we came up with little scenarios, based loosely off things I had witnessed at press screenings, and our incredibly talented writer, Jen Winterbotham, fleshed out the characters and story. Usually screenplays for Mockumentaries are structured like a narrative, but I really wanted to shoot the film like a documentary. We tried to keep things very loose, and the script was written as a series of vignettes. We then edited them together, trying to find the funniest combination in post-production, to create the final product.

TF: What was the hardest part about getting the film made?

Joe Russo: Everything on Movie Screening Security Guards came together quite smoothly; the hardest part was actually locking down a location. It wasn’t until the week of the show that we were able to get a confirmation from Harkins Cinemas, a fairly large chain in the South West, that we would be able to use one of their locations. I had to go all the way up the food chain to get permission too, somehow finding myself in communication with the owner of the company who loved the idea.

Two days before the shoot we were informed that we were good to go, once they had our million dollar liability insurance policy. If we were working with a production company, typically that wouldn’t be a problem, but because we were an independent student film and completed the movie for under two hundred bucks, there was no way for us to raise enough money in time.

As I was typing the email to cancel the shoot, I got a message from the head of Chandler Cinemas. If you live in Arizona I highly recommend you check them out. They put on really cool 35mm screenings of grindhouse flicks, seventies exploitation pics and weekly midnight showings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Anyway, we were able to shoot there for less money and in turn got more space and time, but man did it come down to the wire.

TF: So how can the TorrentFreak readers help?

Joe Russo: We loved the article and the big response from your post about the film and we were hoping maybe you could help us out once more. “Movie Screening Security Guards” was just accepted into an online short film competition where we have the chance to not only make another short film for ten thousand dollars, but could win up to a hundred thousand dollars and a meeting with studio executives! If you could help us out by pointing your readers to the film at the below link we would really appreciate it! All they need to do is click, register, watch and vote!

TF: Well, you gave us all a few laughs, so sure, why not! Click here to vote for The Movie Screening Security Guards.

Source: Vote for the Movie Screening Security Guards

“Lately we received more complaints from anti-piracy organizations on behalf of major companies, because some of our members post our torrents on your indexer. I take the freedom of you ask whether it is possible to remove all torrents related to my tracker, and not to accept new ones in the future.”

The administrator had already asked the members of his tracker not to post their torrents elsewhere, but this didn’t work out, as he writes: “We already put announcements on the tracker, but our +120,000 are not very co-operative.”

Most BitTorrent sites owners are more than familiar with handling takedown requests, however, these usually come from copyright holders or anti-piracy organizations, not fellow site admins.

Other than that, it is of course impossible to prevent torrents from being shared, since it is the whole purpose of filesharing. The only option to prevent people from spreading ELiTE-TEAM torrents is to take down the tracker.

ELiTE-TEAM, on the other hand, is simply trying to stay out the firing range of anti-piracy organization by showing that they are willing to cooperate with content owners. They even posted the takedown requests and removal logs on their disclaimer page. However, I doubt that sending takedown request to torrent indexers is the optimal solution.

Source: BitTorrent Tracker Sends Takedown Request to Torrent Indexers

“We decided to move to the desert of Sinai in Egypt since we feel that we’ll be safe there.” Connectivity in Egypt should be uncongested, with only about 1 in 13 of the population regular net users, despite modern infrastructure investments by Telecom Egypt. Meanwhile, the sun should do wonders to counter the typical pasty-faced stereotype of the typical computer addict.

In other news, there’s egg on the face of ABC, as a pre-air episode of the popular TV-show “Lost” hit the net. Apparently, the episode is from a DVD screener, and proves, yet again, that the problems come from members of the industry, who are often claimed to be the victims.

There is more breaking news today, as the popular OiNK replacement Waffles.fm now accepts new members. For months thousands of users have waited to get an account at the popular private BitTorrent tracker, and today this may become reality.

Unfortunately, things have not been so rosy for all BitTorrent sites. BT-chat, a popular torrent site has closed it’s torrent operations, to concentrate on its Bluetooth based IM client.

BT-Chat owner NBtX told TorrentFreak ” Server costs we’re starting to get too much, and the ads were making everyone mad. We have since then decided to stop providing torrents, and focus solely on the Bluetooth instant messaging program.”

However, the worst news comes for users of the private BitTorrent tracker BitHQ. Like EliteTorrents before them, they have been raided and shut down by US Federal Officers. No comment from any party involved has been forthcoming so far.

What a day….

Source: The Pirate Bay Moves to Egyptian Desert Island

Worst Search Software: TorrentSeek .NET v1.0

They Say: “It will search within entire Internet for Torrent links and display them after vereifying [sic] the target link existence / URL clean-up…much faster than other extraction software.” — TorrentSeek Team.

We Say: You’ll find torrents with TorrentSeek, all right. Just not the ones you want. You’ve a better chance at finding what you seek by loading up the mininova page, closing your eyes and just clicking wildly. If there’s an award for ugliest BitTorrent software, this one wins in a landslide. These guys don’t know torrents from tortillas.

The Truth: With over 4,000 recent downloads from softpedia.com… well, that’s 4,000 less people to compete with for those private BitTorrent sites, we reckon. In a “search” for ‘There Will Be Blood’, results included Finger Eleven, King of the Hill and DJ Tiesto.

Runner-up: Movie Torrent v1.6.0 (adware-filled).

Worst Toolbar – Torrent Search Bar v4.5

Thank goodness for Torrent toolbars – without them, how would anyone find torrents? You’ll find more than torrents with this one – it should have been called the “Torrent/Weather/Google Search Bar”.

They Say: “Links to the best private torrents communities. We will always get you the best secret torrent sites.” — torrent-search-bar.com.

We Say: Ooh, secret torrent sites – sounds exciting! TSB includes some not-so-secretive Google ads, weather bars and other shameless advertising stuffed onto your browser.

The Truth: The torrent search page doesn’t work and showed zero search results. Isn’t that supposed to be the marquee feature of the Torrent Search Bar? Without that, all it really is, is a browser bookmark of outdated torrent sites and advertising. Brought to you by the same group that gave us eXeem (the pay-to-use BitTorrent service).

Runner-up: P2P Torrent Toolbar.

Worst BitTorrent Client – TorrenTopia

They Say: “Finally you will be able to search again. Powerful queue system: choose all you want to download and let it work by itself” — torrenTopia.com.

We Say: At last, someone’s come out with a BitTorrent client that does the work by itself!

The Truth: TorrenTopia had an innovative & creative idea – and came up with a BitTorrent client with an integrated .torrent search engine! The major flaw? – the search doesn’t work! We tried a search for ‘mp3′ on The PirateBay and it came back with no results. Worse still, the BitTorrent side of it contains all the features of a bowl of jello. Now if only the search worked, we might be able to overlook its other shortcomings.

Runners-up: Artemis v2.5.7 (Azureus rip-off with removed features), Hermes P2P BT (adware), and other malware supported BitTorrent clients such as Torrent101, BitRoll, TorrentQ and GetTorrent..

Honorable Mention – PKTorrents

We Say: PKTorrents incorporates a nasty Trojan within the release, free of charge. Not only must you worry about malware in the torrents; they put it right in the software.

They Say: “The ‘So Called – TROJAN’ reported in PKTv0.1(beta) Was NOT! I Repeat NOT put in there on purpose to attempt to hack or screw anyone over.” — PKT website rebuttal.

Well, that about does it for this list. Stayed tuned for more, and stay safe!

Source: Ridiculously Useless Bittorrent Software

In the time it took you to read the introduction to this post, movie pirates have cost the MPAA $12.7m in lost revenue, several thousand people in the movie industry have lost their jobs, and civilization (as we know it) is under threat.

Faced with this nightmare scenario, drastic action is called for, as any delay could exacerbate the already horrendous losses listed above. It’s time to stop movie piracy in its tracks – right now – by letting loose the “Movie Screening Security Guards”, armed with the bluntest instruments known to man – and night vision goggles.

MSSG is a four-man security team, here to serve and protect the integrity of the Hollywood movie industry. They say they’re here to hunt down strange people – the type that download stuff from the Internet and anyone carrying large bags “like a suicide bomber” into a movie theater.

Their training allows them to see things normal people can’t, so when they’re confronted with what appears to be a kid with a cellphone, they do the right thing – and immediately destroy it, rightly terrifying the child.

“The world needs morals and integrity,” says the MSSG boss, “and when someone’s going around recording films that cost millions of dollars to make, and showing them to all their little snot-nosed friends while they’re picking their noses, well that’s just wrong. When you take morals and integrity away from a human being, I ask you: What then? What do you have left then?

Enjoy the documentary.

Source: Movie Screening Security Guards Take On The Pirates

Not surprisingly, “the confessions” of the Pirate Bay three didn’t help the police much. Earlier this week, the Swedish prosecutor HÃ¥kan Roswall charged four individuals involved with The Pirate Bay for “assisting copyright infringement”. Actually, this is a surprisingly mild accusation if you consider that he called the Pirate Bay “terrorists” only a few months ago. The response of Brokep’s lawyer sums it up quite nicely: “My client will plead not guilty, but i’m not sure if what he’s being charged with, is a crime at all,” he said.

Below you can read some of the transcripts of the interrogations of Brokep, Anakata and TiAMO, translated from a Swedish article published by IDG.se. (thanks Jens and Billy)

Brokep

I: Interrogator
B: Brokep (Peter Sunde)

I: You are under suspicion of assisting copyright infringement between 2005-07-01 – 2006-05-31 by running and maintaining The Pirate Bay, and thereby assisting in other peoples’ copyright infringement. Another accusation is conspiracy to commit copyright infringement during the same period of time. This has been done through The Pirate Bay where a large amount of so called torrents of copyrighted files or content are made available. It’s customary to ask the person being interrogated if he admits or denies committing a crime?

B: I deny.

I: You deny.

B: Definitely!

I: Yes. And this thing with The Pirate Bay. I don’t know your position on anything about what you have been accused of, but I say you are one of the people who run this site, The Pirate Bay. What do you say about that?

B: I have no comment.

I: Why not?

B: I don’t want to make a statement about it.

I: What do you want to make a statement about?

B: I’ll probably not make statements about very much.

I: Okay. Then what are we doing here?

B: Well it was you who wanted to (not recognizable, laugh) interrogate me.

I: Yes, because you have the opportunity to explain you ideological position.

B: But I think…

I: ..the purpose of The Pirate Bay etc.

B: Oh, well I don’t think my ideology has anything to do with an interrogation. My ideology and my views on things are… Well it’s my political opinion and I can keep that to myself.

I: I’m not asking about your political opinion, I’m asking about your stance on….

B: But I think copyright is a political issue. So if you ask me about my opinion on a copyright policy issue, I will answer that I don’t wish to make a statement on my policy and my political views.

[...]

Anakata

I: Interrogator
A: Anakata (Gottfrid Svartholm)

I: Well! What do you know about this site, The Pirate Bay?

A: Well it is a site.

I: Yes…what is it?

A: Yes bits and trackers and related services.

I: What is your part in this site?

A: No comment!

I: No. Anakata – Who is that?

A: No comment!

I: No. Do you know how long this has been going on, The Pirate Bay?

A: Like a couple of years!

I: Were you involved in starting it?

A: No comment?

I: No, I will ask a lot of questions!

A: Okay, you will have to annoy me then!

I: Do you have any idea how many users per day The Pirate Bay gets?

A: No comment!

I: Do you have any idea who maintains the homepage?

A: No comment!

I: How can one translate the word tracker? (Note: same in Swedish)

A: It is not possible to translate.

[...]

I: Okay! Is there anything else that you want to say, that we might find valuable to know?

A: No! Yes… there… you can tell Roswall that he is a damn clown, he can … can stop abusing the judicial system!!!

I: You have said this before!

A: Yes. It is the third or fourth time i have said it!

I: Okay!

A: I said it in the media earlier!

I: Well! Then I will end the interrogation at 12.25.

[...]

In a later interrogation Anakata was questioned about an interview with IDG.

I: Okay. During last year, or maybe it was this year, there was an interview in the Hot chair at IDG where you talked openly about The Pirate Bay’s operation. Have you got any comments on..(interrupted)

A: No! No comment.

I: Is it correct that you where in this..(interrupted)

A: No comment!

I: …interview. Okay.

I: We have been talking about this nickname Anakata, and we still claim that is you.

A: No comment!

I: You don’t want to comment on that either. Okay, then lets move on and make this effective instead!
[...]

TiAMO

I: Interrogator
T: TiAMO (Fredrik Neij)

I: This has been a police investigation for a long time. The prosecutor’s case is one of copyright infringement, assisting in copyright infringement and conspiracy to commit copyright infringement. What is your position on this?

T: That he is wrong. That if we are guilty, then Google is guilty too.

I: You mean you can compare Google to The Pirate Bay?

T: Almost.

I: What the difference between them?

T: Well… One difference is that you can upload torrents on The Pirate Bay, but it’s really the same thing because if you have a site with copyrighted material, you can add the link to be indexed on Google. It’s the same level as both sites are handling user-generated material. We don’t have any views on what the content is, we just provide a search engine.

I: But these torrents.. Uhm.. I don’t know what it is in plural (ED: The word “torrent” sounds weird in plural in Swedish)

T: Files of meta data..

I: Yes, I know but what… torrents. If we talk about torrents as more than one, they actually end up on The Pirate Bay’s servers. That’s different to Google?

T: But in the same way it’s… we have a torrent file that is a reference to the material. Someone who only uses a meta link and doesn’t host the file but the file is still available on the filesharing network. Should that be less illegal or more legal? Just because you store the binary data for the hash file locally on a server?

I: But that’s more than Google provides. They only provide a link in that case. While a user or a specific computer in another network provides with the actual… meta data. That has nothing to do with…

T: But then you had to decide whether meta data in itself is illegal or not.

I: But surely it’s not!

T: No.

I: I don’t believe so either, but the summary I mentioned, assisting to commit a crime, that is supplying or owning certain things that can be used for a crime. In this case, it’s providing a tracker, providing a collection of torrent files, you have… It’s about a search engine and so on. That’s more than Google does?

T: Yes

I: And furthermore there was a change of legislation July 1 2005, which means the copyright law has been made tougher than before. I don’t know if you are familiar with the mp3 trial that many refer to in this context, that it is not permitted to link to copyrighted material?

T: Yes.

I: That sentence may be obsolete now, it’s not relevant anymore since the legislation has changed. That’s the foundation of the crime we investigate today. So this thing with Google, it isn’t quite the same thing.

T: I still don’t believe the way we have interpreted it, and we have consulted law people on this. They say that torrent files are not illegal and providing them is not illegal. Since we haven’t actively encouraged the users to upload copyrighted movies and not (not recognizable). We haven’t said anything. We have created an empty site where the only condition was that you cannot upload something where content doesn’t match the description, or if it blatantly is criminal in Sweden.

I: But at the same time, you ridicule Microsoft etcetera on another page of The Pirate Bay?

T: That’s because they try to apply US laws to Sweden.

I: Yes, but what they are really doing is making you aware that there is copyright infringing content on the site.

T: Yes.

I: It comes as no surprise to you that such content is available there?

T: No..

I: So you are not unaware that there is copyright infringing content, but still you chose to remain passive and not remove it?

T: There are links to copyrighted content!

I: Yes exactly, there are links to copyrighted content!

T: Yes.

I: And you are aware of this?

T: We have always had the policy not to interfere with the content on the site.

I: Ok.

T: Since the site was created by Piratbyrån, who stand for free speech and freedom to share without some bully trying to interfere, the policy (not recognizable)

I: That’s what we have left here (not recognizable). You say yourself that PiratbyrÃ¥n is not a part of it anymore and that the ideological thing has faded during later years?

T: Yes, but I believe Gottfrid for example is ideologically in line with Piratbyrån. Peter as well.

I: And you aren’t?

T: I agree with much of what they say, but it’s not like I would go out on a cold rainy autumn day and protest with a sign against something (not recognizable)

[...]

Source: The Pirate Bay Interrogations

Qtrax should’ve gone live today and it hasn’t, effectively ruining our chances of riding along with the Qtrax launch-day media hype, becoming QtraxFreak and converting the entire BitTorrent collective from one free service to another. Damn. Plan B.

My understanding of Qtrax, limited as it is – and, to be fair, I don’t think many of the news stories about it today are based on any sort of live test – is that it’s essentially a DRM-infested Gnutella client which converts everything you download to Windows Media DRM format – making it a sort of Dr. Frankenstein’s LimeWire, but in a bad way.

Now, please tell me if I’m wrong, as I obviously haven’t tested the service, but aren’t the files you download just like all the the others on the Gnutella network? You know the sort – they call them ‘Scene releases’ and ‘home rips’, identical to the ones you can see on LimeWire. I mean, Qtrax aren’t guaranteeing a ‘pure’ copy are they? If they are, all well and good but I can’t see it myself, something doesn’t sit right.

From their ‘legal’ page:

LTDnetwork Inc is not responsible for any content such as audio, video, text or any other file owned by users of the Qtrax/Qtraxmax software.

Is Qtrax really offering to dress up pirate MP3s from Gnutella and give them to Qtrax users, paid for by advertisers? Maybe they’ve got some sort of ‘walled-garden’ inside the Gnutella network, accessible only by Qtrax users with non-pirate copies?

..

Sorry, I just drifted off then. Got a bit carried away dreaming of getting a 64K KaZaA-quality, advertizing-supported mono rip of Michael Jackson’s ‘Beat It’, labeled up as an audiobook entitled ‘How to End Piracy Overnight’ and listening to it with sparkling Windows Media DRM. All authorized by the RIAA. Oh boy.

Ok, ok, ok, I’m being negative. I like BitTorrent and yes, that makes me biased but I have strange feelings about Qtrax and they aren’t good. Warner Music, one of the supposed partners of Qtrax said in a statement that it “has not authorized the use of our content on Qtrax’s recently announced service.”

Also, Universal Music Group and EMI Group both confirmed that they have no licensing deals with Qtrax. It’s probably not that significant that a Sony spokesman said: “Sony BMG can confirm it has not signed a deal with Qtrax for the ad-supported service”. I know, just because they say they don’t have a deal, doesn’t make it so. After all, the music companies always lie, don’t they?

I concede, I might be completely wrong about Qtrax. They probably didn’t launch today because of some minor last minute cosmetic issue with the skin on the client, and as everyone is in a meeting in Peru today, they can’t inform the masses by way of a news update on their website. Or maybe they’re adding that last minute code that somehow enables anti-piracy organizations to differentiate between Qtrax and LimeWire users on the Gnutella network.

And maybe the Big Four are probably just being coy until Qtrax really launches tomorrow by which time someone will have taken www.qtraxfreak.com. Damn.

Source: How to Convert Millions of BitTorrent Users to Qtrax

“So I was in my local John Lewis store a week or so back, and I was checking out their new little Apple mac area, which had lots of Macs on display, with some desks setup and other accessories. They also had some wall mounted iMacs. Imagine my surprise when getting closer to one of them to see ‘Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest’ – ripped by Axxo playing.”

Using a ripped DVD is bit odd because this is certainly not the best promotional material. Regular DVDs or free HD-content looks much better on an iMac monitor.

One thing is clear though, aXXo’s presence has now moved beyond the Internet, and for him it must be flattering to see that commercial outlets appreciate his work. Perhaps this might motivate him to return?

The last official aXXo torrent was uploaded November 11, after that it has been awfully quiet. There were rumors that he got caught, others said he had an accident. However, the official statement is that he decided to take a break.

John Lewis was not available for comment, the MPAA probably wont appreciate it that much, but they have our support.

Update: John Lewis replied to Hexus with an official statement: “Thank you for bringing this matter to our attention. We have fully investigated the incident and the shop has removed and destroyed the clip. We have also taken the necessary steps to ensure that the replication and publication of pirate material in any form does not take place in our shops. This incident is not reflective of our policy and we take very seriously the copyright laws and would not intentionally break any of these rules or regulations.”

Source: aXXo’s Pirated Movies Used to Promote the iMac

Happy New Year!

The quotes…

The MPAA after they were caught infringing the copyright of Patrick Robin’s blogging software “Forest Blog”:

“The blog was only ever used for testing purposes.”

BitTorrent Inc. co-founder Ashwin Navin on iTunes DRM:

“iTunes DRM Inspires People to Pirate Content.”

The Pirate Bay’s Gottfrid Svartholm about his favorite anti-piracy organization:

“The MPAA can most accurately be described as rabid, obsessed lunatics.”

Mediadefender CEO Randy Saaf when we found out about Miivi:

“This is really fucked.”

Mark Cuban to Bram Cohen, in a rant about the new BitTorrent movie store:

“But where are they ? Not just the customers Bram. The content? I searched for Prison Break. Lots of torrents. None of them Legal. Is this what Fox had in mind when they signed up with you?”

President Basescu (Romanian President) on copyright infringement:

“Piracy helped the young generation discover computers. It helped Romanians improve their creative capacity in the IT industry, which has become famous around the world … Ten years ago, it was an investment in Romania’s friendship with Microsoft and with Bill Gates.”

Shaw, Canadian ISP gives advise on how to configure BitTorrent:

“Set the KB/s LAN max upload speed [0:unlimited] value to 1.”

MPAA’s Dean Garfield about Pirate Party politicians:

“There’s nothing about what the Pirate Bay does or what the Pirate Party does that is legitimate.”

P2P virus to its victims:

“Ah, I see you are using P2P again……if you don’t stop within 0.5 seconds, i’m going to kill you!”

Scener about Feds that try to stop the Scene:

“No matter how hard the Feds try to stop the scene there are always people smarter than them out there. What they should be doing is leaving us to it and catching pedophiles, rapists and psychopathic killers rather than wasting resources on a few geeks.”

The Pirate Bay about the Caribbean pirate Jack Sparrow:

“Hollywood is trying to ridicule us pirates by portraying us as crazy but sympathetic adventurers. Not far from the truth, but in the 21st century real pirates are riding other torrents than that of the ocean”

BitTorrent admin about Leaseweb:

“It looks like we’re not going to be very safe anymore on Leaseweb, we are putting backups in place on another location, just in case.”

Demonoid explains why they were offline for almost a week, and moved from The Netherlands to Canada:

“We had a system problem which will force us to restore everything from backup. The disks are pretty much empty right now and until we are able to upload the backup and set up everything up, we have to close down.”

IsoHunt’s Gary to Brokep from The Pirate Bay:

“You are either illiterate and don’t check the frontpage of sites you are pointing fingers at, or you are a communist. Or both. What makes you think you have rights to content you didn’t produce? People’s rights vs. copyright holders’ rights? Please. I will laugh at you when you are marked a terrorist and US armies hunt you down. Not that I like the whole anti-terrorist thing from the US but I digress.”

Marnie stern about her BitTorrent addiction:

“Since I’ve been here I have downloaded…I mean I feel I’m going to jail, well, I discovered the torrent, but I feel I’ve downloaded, I would say, honestly 40 or 50 movies, which I hear isn’t that bad, you know, for jail. But I mean, because I’ve pretty much been staying in the studio and a little bit with Zach [Hill], I have all of this time to just sit….”

MPA to “Christmas” movie Pirates:

“We can say this to all the pirates out there: you’d better watch out, you’d better not try”

Pirate Bay admin Brokep on US politics:

“The US government is losing popularity every day in Europe, and people don’t want to see us give in to them.”

NiN’s Trent Reznor about OiNK after it was raided:

“I’ll admit I had an account there and frequented it quite often. At the end of the day, what made OiNK a great place was that it was like the world’s greatest record store. Pretty much anything you could ever imagine, it was there, and it was there in the format you wanted.”

TorrentSpy’s Justing Bunnel on the power of the entertainment industry:

“Unfortunately many companies use their power and influence to halt and punish innovations they cannot think of ways to make money with. The monopolies tried to stop the VHS, DVD, and MP3 player, but thankfully failed when they took it to Court. Now Imagine for a second all the amazing products they did manage to squash…”

Dave Peters, frontman of “Throwdown” on supporting musicians:

“If you wanna really support a band, “steal” their album….help bury the label….and buy a tshirt when you show up at their show and sing every word.”

“A former music buyer writes to the CRIA:

“The music industry itself needs to recognize that they are to blame for sagging record sales. For years, they have been marketing recycled crap, and people are getting tired of it.”

Comcast to its customers:

“Comcast does not block access to any applications, including BitTorrent.”

(but we do slow it down)

Researchers on the effect of filesharing on CD sales:

“We estimate that the effect of one additional P2P download per month is to increase music purchasing by 0.44 CDs per year.”

Noël St-Hilaire, head of copyright theft investigations of the Canadian police on piracy:

“Piracy for personal use is no longer targeted. It is too easy to copy these days and we do not know how to stop it,” he added.

TorrentFreak council in an open letter to the Dutch anti-piracy organization BREIN:

“Your “news release” is peppered with inaccurate information, calculated to mislead and intimidate the millions of legitimate users of the many peer-to-peer filesharing services that are in common use throughout the world.”

50 Cent on filesharing:

“What is important for the music industry to understand is that this really doesn’t hurt the artists.”

Eric Wilkinson, the producer of the independent film “The Man from Earth”, wrote an email to RLSlog in which he thanks them for the free promotion they gave him:

“In the future, I will not complain about file sharing. When I make my next picture, I just may upload the movie on the net myself!”

Source: TorrentFreak’s Most Memorable Quotes of 2007