On the day that The Pirate Bay announced that they will be sold to a commercial company for $7.8 million, Tomas Wennström secured an audio interview with TPB spokesman Peter Sunde. The interview is of great interest but raises even more questions as shockwaves continue through the P2P community.
While the MPAA sees BitTorrent as enemy number one, many filmmakers dream of getting their work into the top 100 download list on The Pirate Bay. Filmmaker Tommy Pallotta is one of them. His previous film was already immensely popular on BitTorrent, and he hopes to repeat this success with his latest work.
In July a group of enthusiasts will start uploading as many video mixtapes as they can to The Pirate Bay. A couple of the most controversial, shocking, hilarious, absurdly weird and in parts, downright sickening examples come from the Retard-O-Tron series. TorrentFreak caught up with the creator to find out what mixtapes are, where they’re from and where they’re going.
The European elections are only two weeks away, and Pirate Party candidates vie for seats in different countries. We speak with some of them, starting with Andreas Popp, lead candidate for the German Piraten Partei.
The entertainment industry managed to convince the French government to draft a law that will make it possible to disconnect people from the Internet, if they receive more than two copyright infringement warnings. Sadly, most of the politicians who plan to sign the law into action have no clue what they’re dealing with.
It’s been two weeks since the Pirate Bay trial came to an end - at least for now. While the judge reviews the arguments presented by both sides, TorrentFreak caught up with Peter Sunde to look forward to the decision and review the tumultuous events of the past weeks.
Fanedits are fan-created versions of officially available movies. Fans spend huge amounts of time with sophisticated software to add, cut or alter scenes to improve the original or simply create different versions of a movie. Fanedit.org is the largest such community in the world and the MPAA has, in the words of the admin, just ‘castrated’ the site.
In October 2007, while most tech media attention was focused on the OiNK raid, another large site got police attention. TV-Links, which linked to videos on YouTube-like sites was raided and shutdown, with the admin arrested. A year later, we catch up with the ex-admin of TV-Links for the entire story.
Ashwin Navin, former president and co-founder of BitTorrent Inc. has left the company after four years. Thus far, the company hasn’t been a great success, but the BitTorrent protocol is more alive than ever. Now he can talk more freely, we ask Ashwin about his view on the future of BitTorrent, piracy and online media.
From relative obscurity, Textbook Torrents, the world’s largest BitTorrent index of textbooks, found itself in the world spotlight during July 2008 and was forced to close down by its host. The site returned weeks later, growing massively in the process, but now, just a couple of months on, the site has closed for good.
TorrentFreak recently ran a story about a movie director’s unique approach to piracy. Now, Darren Bousman, director of Saw II, III and IV, talks to us about his decision to target BitTorrent, the fallout and his dreams, as 10 years of effort comes to fruition with his latest movie, Repo! The Genetic Opera.
