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.
Over the last year, UK residents accused of sharing games like Dream Pinball have been threatened by lawyers Davenport Lyons. Stuck in a trap of not having enough money to defend themselves, many choose to pay compensation demands – guilty or not – fearful of a much bigger punishment if things go bad. Now a UK IP lawyer says he will defend as many people as he can – for free.
The team behind the Shareaza client have recently had a tough time, having been the victim of a music industry conspiracy to steal their brand name and destroy goodwill. Undeterred they are fighting back and today proudly announce the development of a brand new filesharing client with BitTorrent support – Project Panthera.
Half of the people who use BitTorrent do so to download TV-shows. Some episodes of popular shows such as ‘Heroes’ and ‘Lost’ get up to 10 million downloads. We had a chat with Jesse Alexander, the co-producer of both ‘Heroes’ and ‘Lost’, and asked him what his thoughts are on BitTorrent, piracy and the future of TV.
For every blank CDr bought, a few cents “pirate tax” are added to compensate artists for loss of revenue when people share their albums. However, not every artist agrees that sharing is wrong so as a statement, the Swedish artist Mr.Suitcase has used his “pirate tax” income to make a pirate album.
There are many devices available today that are technically able to run BitTorrent, but the manufacturers choose to limit the usability of their devices. TorrentFreak chats to the developer of TorrentRelay, a service that allows you to download torrents on the PS3, iPhone and many other web-enabled devices.
When Nine Inch Nails decided to give away their latest album for free, the news soon spread all over the Internet. However, NiN was not the first, nor will they be the last. Tens and thousands of artists share their music on Demonoid, The Pirate Bay, Mininova and other BitTorrent sites. We got in touch with one of them to find out why.
