Having never seen anything like it before, James (as we shall call him for now) became hooked, and quickly began to display a trait inherent in many addicted file-sharers.

“I simply couldn’t get enough,” he told TorrentFreak. “It was more fun downloading and sharing the stuff with all my friends then actually using it or playing the actual games.”

Having become inspired by these simple beginnings, James began chatting with other like-minded people on warez sites and ICQ, going on to share warez via PUBS, FTP-enabled servers conveniently left open by companies with more bandwidth than security sense.

Sharing files wasn’t a simple process back then and James took exception when Napster began dumbing down the process.

“We hated it, simply despised it because it made a mockery of the hard work we put in to obtain all these different warez,” he recalls.

But despite these early bad feelings towards Napster, the future would eventually see James become a facilitator of even easier ways of downloading. Not for just his friends, but for more than a hundred thousand people.

After working his way up to become one of the top members on the GraveyardFXP warez board, James says he became a moderator of DelusionalFXP. It was there, on their IRC channel, that he would meet people whose new project would suck him in and change his life forever. At some point along the line, ‘James’ became better known to his peers as StonyVision, and he was invited to join a new project being set up by, among others, a fellow pirate known as Sk0t.

Under Sk0t’s leadership, a torrent site called Elite Torrents was taking shape and preparing itself for an eventual membership of some 130,000 active users. It would also become the only US-based BitTorrent tracker ever to be busted by the FBI and ICE.

After he’d installed BitComet and began sharing content in February 2004, staff on Elite noticed something very appealing about StonyVision – his impressive upload capability. StonyVision told us he’d “followed instructions” on how to use two instead of the regular one modem his cable connection usually allowed, which gave him business-standard upload speeds. When you’re delivering content on BitTorrent, upload bandwidth is king, and Elite wanted some of Stony’s.

But as file-sharers are often heard to complain, you can never have enough bandwidth, so Stony acquired a 100mbit server at The Planet in Texas and began seeding his files from there. Once around 150 of Elite’s users had grabbed his latest release he’d begin releasing his next torrent, usually the very latest movies. His performance eventually meant that he became a member of staff, later going on to organize other Elite Torrents uploaders.

Of course, StonyVision needed content to share and he wasted no time in getting it directly from source – The Scene. He’d gained access to this elite network through his contacts at DelusionalFXP and ended up adding his own server to something called T.O.P. or “Tower of Power” – 53 dedicated 100mbit servers acting as a single giant RAID FTP piracy site. But still Stony needed more.

“At that point I was on four or five top sites, and my main interest was always movies. I loved movies and still do,” Stony explained. “Since my server was tied up I ended up renting two more, one to race with and another for seeding content on Elite Torrents.”

In common with his more old-school peers, Stony saw himself as something of a Robin Hood, “taking from the rich and giving to Average Joe”, and reveled in the positive feedback left by up to 130,000 Elite Torrents users.

But the environment in the United States had become increasingly unfriendly towards The Scene. The FBI and DoJ’s Operation Fastlink was underway and there was a growing fear that torrent sites would be targeted next. Stony sensed the tension and stepped down from the site’s staff around April 2005. He was 19-years-old – and too late.

Elite Torrents and its operators were already being watched and no amount of IP-address obfuscation would prove effective in hiding Stony or his fellow staffers on the site.

“Truth be told I did hide my IP and was the hardest one to find but [the FBI] used the Patriot Act and came up with an asinine amount of money lost to these companies and the movie industry and labeled me as a possible domestic terrorist who was conspiring to commit copyright infringement,” Stony explains.

“I woke up to banging on the door over and over, the dogs started barking. I got up thinking who’s the asshole banging on my door at 6am? Next thing I know there’s 10+ FBI agents in my house. I started laughing at first – I thought it was a joke – until the reality sunk in.”

It was 25th May 2005 and Operation D-Elite, which was to claim several admins and staff members at Elite Torrents, was underway.

“That was the day of days, I was in total and utter dismay and couldn’t even wrap my head around what had happened. I had no clue what was happening to the others. I lawyered up immediately which in itself is a funny story. I opened up the Yellow Pages, looked under ‘lawyer’ and there it was – an ad with a firm that had dealt with computer crime.

“I think I need a lawyer,” Stony told the gentleman on the other end who inquired “Why?”

“Well, the FBI had just raided my house along with a group they called ICE,” Stony responded.

A few awkward seconds of silence was followed by: “How fast can you get here?”

What came next was mountains of litigation and Stony being told to expect the worst – 5 years in prison. The pressure proved too much and Stony went off the rails, turning to alcohol.

In December 2006 he would learn his fate for the uploading of 53 movies, 6 pieces of software and 10 video games. The government demanded a prison sentence in order to deter others from infringement. To Stony’s huge relief, they didn’t get their way.

“Luckily for me I had the most liberal federal judge there was at the time. I was given a fine of $3,500, 6 months house arrest, community service and 3 years probation in which I was not allowed to touch a computer. I had somehow escaped doing time and the U.S attorney was furious.”

But despite avoiding prison, Stony says that he’s still paid a price.

“It’s been the bane of my existence and yet made me who I am. I continued on a self destructive path for quite some time doing crazy things, still working out, getting in bar fights. Truth be told I’ve been to hell and back, stared the devil in the face with its trillions of dollars of influence (RIAA, MPAA) and laughed and walked away.”

Stony says that confessing to a double felony on job applications hinders him, but the support of a new woman in his life has helped tremendously. So how are things today?

“I of course no longer pirate anything anymore as I’m sure I’m still on numerous watch lists. Its simply fun to look every now and again,” says Stony.

“My story isn’t one of inspiration but one of caution. It could happen to anyone out there. I know people are thinking ‘nah, not me’, but that’s what I thought too and now here we are.”

Stony told us that he recently got back online again with his own computer and was inspired by the huge anti-SOPA and PIPA campaigns.

“Thanks to everyone who spoke out on Internet blackout day. It really did give me goosebumps to see people finally stand up and be heard,” he concludes.

Sk0t’s story and those of his fellow operators and uploaders can be found here and here.

Source: Busted By The FBI: The Life Of An Elite Teen BitTorrent Uploader

The Big Music (RIAA) labels make their fortunes by promoting and marketing artists who usually only pocket a few percent of album sales. Their control over the distribution channels has given them a great deal of power, but the Internet is taking this monopoly away bit by bit. Today, independent artists and labels can easily reach millions of customers, something unimaginable only a decade ago.

That said, the advancement of the Internet has also brought in new threats. Apple. for example, is taking a big chunk of the revenue music generates online and their growing power is frustrating artists more and more. Musicians are forced to cut up songs because Apple deems them too long, and track listings are shuffled by mistake without an option for the artist to restore his art.

One of the first musicians who revolted publicly against Apple was Benn Jordan aka The Flashbulb, who found his album on iTunes in early 2008 without being aware or paid for it. In a counter move Jordan decided to share all his music on BitTorrent for free, which turned out to be one of the best business decisions he has made in his career.

On Christmas eve, where sharing is on the minds of millions of people, we sit down with Benn to talk about what has happened in the past three years. How did he fare financially? Has his opinion towards Apple or the RIAA labels changed? Where does he think the music industry is heading?

TF: You first published your music for free on BitTorrent nearly three years ago. Could you take us back to that moment and explain why you took this decision?

Jordan: I just figured that if someone was going to upload my new album to these sites, it may as well be me. I can make sure the rip is a good one and I can personalize it with a message. It wasn’t marketing or anything political at first either. Trent Reznor and some other big names released stuff in a similar fashion a few months later and the same crowd applauded, but I felt like it was more about marketing.

TF: How has this decision changed your stance toward “piracy”?

Jordan: It oddly put me in a hot seat for a bit and for a limited time, made me an pseudo expert in a field of study that doesn’t really exist yet. Again, this was all undeserved and weird. Music piracy is still a huge issue and people want answers, but they’re not sure who to ask.

I’m grateful now because it made me think, generally, file trading is just a peephole to a much larger picture. Copyright, in its current state, holds information at ransom for monetary value. While in music it can stifle culture and art, with literature and education it can be nothing more than a weapon of class warfare.

TF: How are you doing financially compared to three years ago? Have you benefited from giving away your music?

Jordan: In this particular case, yes. It expanded the amount of people who pirate my music, therefore it has expanded those who bought CDs, donated to me, or came out to shows. Another interesting thing is that it wound up in some licensing company’s hands that I’ve never worked with before, and got me additional placement in TV/film/etc, which is a good portion of my income.

TF: What are your thoughts on the big labels. Are they good or bad for the majority of artists?

Jordan: I have to be honest. Big labels that aren’t being innovative are little more than delusional laughing stocks at this point. Their numbers get worse and worse, and they push the artists to do dumber and dumber stunts to try and stay on top of things.

The shows and festivals they book are sponsored by 8 different alcoholic beverages and 10 different energy drinks, and they just punish their customers while validating their own demise. I’m not worried about them and neither should you. Its a dozen senior citizens trying to stop a stampede of fresh culture. Good luck boys.

TF: And what about Apple?

Jordan: Apple, love or hate their products, is fucking scary. On one hand, hats off. They’re business and marketing geniuses. On the other hand, they might single handedly be the worst thing that has happened to entertainment media in the last 3 years. The major record industry collapsing should also mean that artists are more free to do what they want.

For example, iTunes completely screwed up the track listing of my last album Arboreal. Their network is so influential that over half of the people who have bought the CD from my label now have botched track titles on their mp3 players. Apple doesn’t have ANY accessible artist support to deal with things like this.

They reject my cover art if I don’t have my name and the title in bold. If I want to sell a 30 minute long track (Louisiana Mourning, for example), they require me to split it up into a bunch of separate tracks. Their distribution system is so unorganized that artists have to pay business like Tunecore upwards of $40 per album (and annual fees) to do Apple’s job for them.

Again, its genius on the business side. But they’ve wedged themselves in so well that now, if I don’t have an album on iTunes (under their insane rules and lack of support), a large portion of my listeners simply won’t know how to put my music on their iPods/iPhones.

I know I sound preachy, but think about it, how is that any better than what existed 15 years ago? I still maintain that I’d rather have my stuff “illegally” downloaded than have to go down that path.

TF: What advise do you have for artists who consider giving away their music?

Jordan: That being a “consideration” is always funny to me. You either release it knowing it will be distributed for free or you keep it locked up on your hard drive. If the last decade has taught us anything, it is that no amount of bitching, threatening, lobbying, suing, or file protecting is going to stop information from being spread to those who want it.

The way I look at it is, if hundreds of thousands of people are downloading my album, I’m contributing to culture and my music will likely outlive me. Money is pretty insignificant in the face of immortality.

TF: What changes in the industry would you like to see in the coming years?

Jordan: It makes me nervous because I feel like we’re at a really big crossroad. We’re facing three big issues at the same time that are eventually going to be connected: Net-neutrality, free speech, and piracy/copyright laws. We need to make a bigger deal about it because we don’t want information to be controlled by an entity that only exists for its investors.

We don’t want a situation where if Amazon refuses to carry a book, nobody will be able to read it. Or if iTunes refuses to carry an unabridged album, nobody will be able to hear it. Most importantly, we don’t want poor people to continue being less educated than wealthy people because of the illusion created that information has a monetary value. News, history, media, and culture is made by everyone, and it is intolerable to me that we allow the messengers to hold it from us at such a high price, whether monetarily or contextually .

Now’s the time to get involved.

Source: Music Is Better Off On BitTorrent, Than With Apple or Big Music

And so it happened. For the distribution and promotion the pair teamed up with the VODO BitTorrent distribution platform, and the first $6,000 that was needed to shoot the pilot was collected from supporters through the Kickstarter website.

Mid-June the first episode of Pioneer One was eventually released to the public through VODO. With support from all the big players in the P2P-scene, the BitTorrent-only TV-series quickly gained a huge audience.

Hundreds of thousands of people had downloaded the show, and many decided to donate money to fund future episodes. An additional $20,000 was raised in just the first two weeks and the counter topped the $30,000 mark early September – enough money to shoot more episodes of the first season.

“Once our heads stopped spinning after the pilot, we sat down in July to figure out our game plan. If we were going to produce more episodes, we knew we had to do more than one at a time to make it cost effective and timely,” Pioneer One writer Josh Bernhard told TorrentFreak.

“So a lot of preparations had to be made. Initially we didn’t think we’d be able to move forward with the money we had, but the cast and crew were all eager to do more based on the success of the pilot. So based on their generosity, we called in the rest of the favors we had and were able to start shooting in October,” he added.

Three new episodes were eventually shot in October, and the first one was released on VODO just a few minutes ago. Like the pilot, this second episode can be downloaded for free. In the coming weeks the Pioneer One team plans to release episodes 3 and 4, and gather enough funds to complete the remaining episodes.

Although the delay between the first and second episode is not something the general TV-audience is used to, it is one of the inevitable downsides of a peer-funded production. According to the current schedule it looks like the first season will be completed within a year, something the production team and all those who supported the endeavor can be proud of.

The first season has 7 episodes in total, but after that the show is far from done.

“From the beginning we knew this was a multi-season story with an arc that would play out over time. The first season is limited enough in scope that we felt we’d be able to pull it off with the resources that we had, but moving forward, it gets bigger,” Bernhard told TorrentFreak.

“How exactly those future seasons will happen, and what form they will take, is not set in stone. Ideally, we’d love to keep producing the show the way we have been: on our own, releasing through BitTorrent. But right now we’re focusing on getting the first season done, because I think that’ll prove what we set out to do, and all together it will stand on its own as a unit,” he commented.

The series was ‘invented’ for BitTorrent, and the team wants to keep it that way for now. However, there has been plenty of recognition from other filmmakers and traditional TV people. The peer-funded episode won an award for ‘Best Drama Pilot’ at the New York Television Festival, which was quite a morale booster for the makers and an indication that they are on the right track.

“We had some great meetings, but we felt very strongly that we had an obligation to our audience that supported the pilot to continue releasing episodes on BitTorrent. That was the stated goal, and that’s what we want to deliver,” Bernhard said.

Eventually, the Pioneer One team would of course be happy to see their work on traditional TV as well, which serves a wider audience than the traditional BitTorrent public. In the end, a collision between traditional TV and content funded and distributed on the Internet might benefit both sides.

For now, however, Pioneer One still relies on the BitTorrent community. Today, the release of the second episode will again be promoted by many P2P partners. Among other initiatives it will be bundled with all the new installs of BitTorrent Inc.’s uTorrent client. Through these promotions the Pioneer one team hopes to gather enough donations to finish the first season.

“We have no funding beyond user donations, but we’re hoping if we can repeat the success of the pilot and beyond, we may attract more support through some kind of sponsorship model. But for now user donations are absolutely crucial. At the moment, we’re depending entirely on the support of our audience to fund episodes 5 and 6.”

It will be interesting to see how the second episode will be picked up by the public. Josh Bernhard has high hopes, but realizes that the success of the pilot won’t be easily matched.

“I hope people will get a better sense of the kind of show we’re trying to make. Personally, I think this next episode is a step above the pilot. We’re all really proud of it. And, hopefully, people will get excited enough to support us and spread the word. I’d love if we outdid the success of the pilot, but we’re taking nothing for granted.”

Pioneer One, episode 1 and 2 can be downloaded through VODO, fully powered by BitTorrent.

Source: Pioneer One, The BitTorrent Exclusive TV-Series Continues

Initially DDoS assaults were started against the MPAA, RIAA and anti-piracy company AiPlex Software because these outfits had targeted The Pirate Bay. Those DDoS attacks were later replicated against many other targets that have spoken out against piracy or for copyright, resulting in widespread media coverage.

Even law enforcement agencies showed interest in the operation recently. Last week CNET reported that an FBI probe is underway, and TorrentFreak personally knows of at least one court case against a person that was associated with the operation.

Besides covering the results of the DDoS attacks and website hacks, very little is known about the people who are part of the operation. Who are they? What do they want, and what are their future plans? In this article we hope to solve a few pieces of the puzzle.

After numerous talks with people who are actively involved in Operation Payback, we learned that there are huge differences between the personal beliefs of members.

We can safely conclude that this Anonymous group doesn’t have a broad shared set of ideals. Instead, it is bound together by anger, frustration and the desire to be heard. Their actions are a direct response to the anti-piracy efforts of pro-copyright groups.

Aside from shared frustration, the people affiliated with the operation have something else in common. They are nearly all self-described geeks, avid file-sharers and many also have programming skills.

When Operation Payback started most players were not looking to participate in the copyright debate in a constructive way, they simply wanted to pay back the outfits that dared to target something they loved: file-sharing.

Many of the first participants who set the DDoS actions in motion either came from or were recruited on the message board 4Chan. But as the operation developed the 4Chan connection slowly disappeared. What’s left today are around a dozen members who are actively involved in planning the operation’s future, and several dozen more who help to execute the DDoS attacks.

An Anonymous spokesperson, from whose hand most of the manifestos originated, described the structure of the different groups to us.

“The core group is the #command channel on IRC. This core group does nothing more than being some sort of intermediary between the people in that IRC channel and the actual attack. Another group of people on IRC (the main channel called #operationpayback) are just there to fire on targets.”

Occasionally new people are invited to join the command to coordinate a specific attack, but a small group of people remains. The command group is also the place where new targets are picked, where future plans are discussed, and where manifestos are drafted. This self-appointed group makes most of the decisions, but often acts upon suggestions from bypassers in the main IRC channel.

Now let’s rewind a little and go back to the first attacks that started off the operation in September.

The operation’s command was ‘pleasantly’ surprised by the overwhelming media coverage and attention, but wondered where to go from there. They became the center of attention but really had no plan going forward. Eventually they decided to continue down the road that brought them there in the first place – more DDoS attacks.

What started as a retaliation against groups that wanted to take out The Pirate Bay slowly transformed into an attack against anyone involved in anti-piracy efforts. From trade groups, to lawyers, to dissenting artists. Since not all members were actively following the copyright debate, command often acted on suggestions from the public in the main IRC channel.

What followed was an avalanche of DDoS attacks that were picked up by several media outlets. This motivated the group to continue their strategy. Anonymous’ spokesperson admitted to TorrentFreak that the media attention was indeed part of what fuelled the operation to go forward. But not without some strategic mistakes.

As the operation continued more trivial targets were introduced and the group started to lose sympathy from parts of the public. While targeting the company that admittedly DDoSed The Pirate Bay could be seen as payback by some, trying to take out Government bodies such as the United States Copyright Office and UK’s Intellectual Property Office made less sense. In part, these targets were chosen by anarchistic influences in the operation.

“I fight with anonops because I believe that the current political system failed, and that a system based on anarchy is the only viable system,” one member told TorrentFreak. “I encouraged them to go after political targets just because I like Anarchy.”

The Anonymous spokesperson admitted to TorrentFreak that mistakes were made, and command also realized that something had to change. The targets were running out and the attacks weren’t gaining as much attention as they did in the beginning. It was a great way to gather attention, but not sustainable. In fact, even from within the operation not everyone was convinced that DDoS attacks were the best ‘solution’.

“I personally don’t like the concept of violence and attacking, but violence itself does raise attention,” Anonymous’ spokesperson told TorrentFreak.

“Attacking sites is one side of the story, but this operation would finally have to serve a purpose, otherwise it wouldn’t exist. We all agree that the way things [abuse of copyright] are currently done, is not the right way.”

Last week command decided to slow the DDoS attacks down and choose another strategy, mainly to regain the focus of attention. It was decided that they would make a list of demands for governments worldwide. In a move opposed to the desires of the anarchic influences, command decided to get involved in the political discussion.

Copyright/patent laws have to change, they argued, and from the bat they were willing to negotiate. They called for scrapping censorship, anti-piracy lawsuits and limiting copyright and patent terms, but not getting rid of copyright entirely. Interestingly, there is also no word in the demands about legalizing file-sharing.

To some this new and more gentle position taken by Anonymous came as a complete surprise. We asked the spokesman of the group about this confusing message and he said that there are actually several political parties that already adopt a similar position, like the Pirate parties and the Greens in Europe.

However, according to the spokesman (who wrote the latest manifesto with other members in Piratepad) they consciously chose this set of demands. “Some of us have the vision of actually getting rid of copyright/patents entirely, but we are at least trying to stay slightly realistic.”

“What we are now trying to do, is to straighten out ideals, and trying to make them both heard and accepted. Nobody would listen to us if we said piracy should be legal, but when we ask for copyright lifespan to be reduced to ‘fair’ lengths, that would sound a lot more reasonable,” the spokesman told TorrentFreak.

The demands have been published on the Operation Payback site for nearly a week, but thus far the media coverage hasn’t been as great as when they launched their first DDoS. Some have wondered whether this is the right path to continue in the first place, as it may get in the way of groups and political parties that have fought for similar ‘ideals’ for years already.

The spokesman disagreed and said that Operation Payback has “momentum” now.

So here we are nearly two months after Anonymous started Operation Payback. The initial anger and frustration seems to have been replaced by a more friendly form of activism for the time being. The group wanted to have their voice heard and they succeeded in that. However, being listened to by politicians and entertainment industry bosses might take more than that.

Source: Behind The Scenes at Anonymous’ Operation Payback

At the event Cohen sat down for an interview to talk about the new App platform, and how the company came to be where it is now. Some of the failures such as the video store and BitTorrent’s CDN were briefly touched on, and according to Cohen these failures made them realize that the true power of the company lies with the millions of users of their software.

Together, the Mainline client and flagship uTorrent have a massive 80 million monthly active users, and more recently the company shifted most of its resources to the development of the clients instead of selling services and goods to the public.

This also meant that the company’s main source of income is now coming from the Ask toolbar that comes with their BitTorrent client. A rather old-fashioned and not entirely sexy revenue stream, but it pays the bills for the few dozen people at the company.

Finally, Bram Cohen talked about the direction the company is heading in the future, in particular his pet project – BitTorrent live streaming. His implementation, which will be released in a few months, should crush the competing streaming services currently out there in terms of latency and cost efficiency. It will be the ideal platform from which to stream sports events, news events, and webinars according to Cohen, and will allow individuals to stream content to millions of people without having to spend tens of thousands of dollars on bandwidth.

Check out the full interview below.

Source: BitTorrent Inventor Bram Cohen On BitTorrent’s Future

The first group of artists is now joined by UK rock legend Liam Gallagher who, in his characteristic thoughtful commenting style, discussed some of the pros and cons of file-sharing. Illegal downloaders don’t bother him, he told Shortlist in an interview, adding that he is annoyed by big artists who complain about piracy.

“Downloading’s the same as what I used to do – I used to tape the charts of the songs I liked [off the radio]. I don’t mind it,” Gallagher said about his past as a copyright infringer.

“I hate all these big, silly rock stars who moan – at least they’re fuckin’ downloading your music, you cunt, and paying attention, know what I mean? You should fuckin’ appreciate that – what are you moaning about? You’ve got fuckin’ five big houses, so shut up,” he added.

Although it could have been framed more delicately, Liam does have a point. It is far from obvious that music piracy is actually hurting sales. If it doesn’t, piracy is only broadening the fanbase of an artists at no cost, and that can never be a bad thing.

Then again, a comment like Liam’s is easy to make for someone who has already sold more than 50 million albums during his career.

Liam’s brother Noel, who is the former lead guitarist of Oasis, has made similar comments in the past. Although Noel admitted to be a complete computer illiterate, he went on record stating that he doesn’t mind people passing along his work for free online.

“If people are willing to have faceless CDs like that in their collection, good for them. It would be absolutely ludicrous for a rock-star to demand that people pay money for albums because the kids haven’t got that much money to pay for an album, so if they can find it for free, go ahead!”

It’s needless to say that many Oasis fans have taken this advice from the Gallagher brothers to heart. The most popular download on BitTorrent at the moment is the band’s discography, which is still getting thousands of new downloads every week.

Aye Lars!

Source: Liam Gallagher Hates Rock Stars Moaning about Piracy

Just over a month has passed since the first stable public release of the software and PeerBlock has now managed to clock up more than 100,000 downloads. To mark this milestone, TorrentFreak caught up with Mark from the project for the lowdown.

Mark told us that the creation of PeerBlock was inspired by him upgrading his PC from 32 to 64 bit in order to utilize 6gb of RAM. Everything worked fine – until he tried to get PeerGuardian (another IP blocker) to work.

Having hacked away and jumped through hoops to get around driver-signing it would still only work half the time and often crashed without warning. As a software engineer who has worked in the commercial sector for more than 13 years, Mark – who admits to being “an arrogant bastard who truly believes he can do just about anything better than just about anybody,” decided he could find a solution. It was “put up or shut up time,” he told TorrentFreak.

Noticing that the PeerGuardian code was open-source but hadn’t been touched for a couple of years, Mark contacted another developer who had the same thing in mind, but having heard nothing back, he went at it alone.

“I started setting up a Sourceforge.net project for it so we could get free source-control, but they took too long to set it up for me so I instead created a project over at Google Code where it was ready within minutes,” he told us.

Having heard from a few people who were interested in helping out with the development side – “night_stalker_z” who’d earlier started trying to hack the PG2 code into shape, “DarC” / “DisCoStu” who wanted to help out with fixing up the installer, XhmikosR who rewrote the installer, and some testers, things moved forward.

After facing troubles due to the lack of a “signed driver” for 64-bit versions of Vista (which resulted in Mark having to set up a registered company before they were allowed to buy a $230 code-signing certificate), a couple of blogs wrote articles on PeerBlock which attracted some much-needed publicity to the project. This resulted in 10,000 downloads in just one weekend.

“We’re still getting donations from people and we now have enough to pay for next year’s annual code-signing certificate, and we’re saving up to be able to rent our own VPS with full root access etc, upon which we’ll be able to build a ‘real’ online-update system, a custom web-app to tie our forums/issue-tracker/website all together, and some other neat things,” Mark explains.

The first stable release of PeerBlock came out on September 27th, and as of November 5th had clocked up an impressive 100,000 downloads. The site now receives up to 7,000 visitors each day.

Aside from fixing one or two bugs, the team has lots of new features planned for PeerBlock. Anyone that has tried to surf the web with a blocklist in place will know how painful that can be, so PeerBlock will have some new features which allow the “whitelisting” of certain apps, such as a browser, the creation of a proxy server to let users configure PeerBlock to listen on certain ports, possibly an integral “AdMuncher” style ad-blocking feature on a per URL basis (as opposed to just an IP-address), and an encrypted chat feature.

TorrentFreak asked Mark why users should choose PeerBlock over the competition.

“Well, first off we need to ask ‘Who IS the competition?’ The only ones I’m really aware of are: Protowall by the folks over at Bluetack which is closed-source and I don’t believe was ever updated for Vista, and Outpost Firewall, which is closed-source and basically just a hack add-on to a more professional firewall product,” he responded, while noting that uTorrent’s built-in IP-filtering feature only handles one manually-updated list.

“We protect your entire machine, and give you the option to try out any P2P app you want – this freedom of choice is a very important thing, I think. And since it does everything automatically, including list-updates, it’s one less thing to think about,” he added.

Another important question relates to the blocklists that have to be used in conjunction with PeerBlock in order for it to block anything.

He told TorrentFreak that he’s a big fan of iblocklist, who serve up a staggering 10TB of blocklists every month for free. The site doesn’t create the lists, but does offer those from Bluetack, including the Level1 list (renamed to ‘P2P’ in PG2/PeerBlock, which contains both Gov and Anti-P2P IP-addresses) and others.

Mark admits that even in a best case scenario, the available blocklists aren’t 100% effective. That said, there have been studies which show that using blocklists along with software such as PeerBlock can help speed up downloads, but no-one knows how many of the potential “bad IPs” are covered by currently available blocklists.

P2P aside, Mark says there has been feedback to suggest that PeerBlock discovered a Conficker infection on a user’s machine that their anti-virus programs missed, and can also stop ads appearing in browsers that lack in-built blocking.

One other exciting thing for the future of PeerBlock is porting it to the Mac. Mark says they’re saving all the donations for additional development and this is the most-requested request right now.

Users of PeerBlock are encouraged to give as much feedback as possible to Mark’s team, via their forums, IRC (#peerblock on freenode.net) or email.

PeerBlock can be downloaded here.

Source: PeerBlock File-Sharing Safety Tool Clocks 100,000 Downloads

One major site that has showed an acute aversion to saying just about anything to outsiders is Demonoid. This semi-private site has nevertheless made the news dozens of times, most recently due to its recent downtime, as reported here on TorrentFreak.

“We are experiencing power outages that have caused some ram and hard drive issues. We might have to shut down everything to fix and prevent further damage,” said Demonoid in a statement six weeks ago, warning that downtime could run to “…days maybe, until we can change the power circuit.”

However, TorrentFreak has received possibly conflicting information from Demonoid’s host, Colocall in Ukraine, who said in a statement: “There were no problems with power supply at the location where Demonoid servers are hosted.”

While information about Demonoid is always scarce, information coming out of Colocall is a rarity too, since the company has previously refused to speak with journalists about their most infamous customer. That’s why it was of great interest when Ukrainian blogger Pavel Golubovskiy contacted TorrentFreak to say he had netted an interview with Colocall. Here is a translation of the questions related to Demonoid;

Why did you choose to host Demonoid?

The customer came to us and ordered a particular service. For us it wasn’t a political decision, Demonoid is an ordinary client for us.

What exactly do you host, the inferno.demonoid.com tracker?

They brought their servers, which are now located in our data center. We don’t know what information is stored there – we do not have access to this information. These servers are supported remotely by Demonoid technical staff.

Is there a way to contact the Demonoid admins?

They will not answer you. Many people want to contact them – journalists, fans, police, local authorities from different countries. But the Demonoid admins have a very selective approach to e-mail correspondence. When the police wanted to contact them, I specifically warned the admins that they had to respond to this request.

So the police already inquired about Demonoid?

Well, our local authorities are interested in Demonoid all the time. Rightholders associations are constantly trying to put pressure on us, including pressure with the help of Ukrainian authorities. We redirect them to the admins, but do not interfere or try to negotiate.

Are they putting any serious pressure on you?

It sounds strange, but Ukraine is still a jural state. Therefore IFPI’s personal opinion is just that, their personal opinion, despite the fact that the budgets of the IFPI participants are comparable to the budget of the Ukraine.

Aren’t you afraid that there can be a similar situation with Demonoid’s servers as there was with Infostore.org site? [famous Ukrainian file-sharing site, its servers were confiscated by police about a year ago]

As a hosting-provider we take such risks into account. This can happen not only with Demonoid, but with any client. We do not control what information is stored on servers, anybody can buy our hosting service.

Anti-pirates and the media-lobby are now trying to shift all the responsibility for file-sharing onto Internet providers, so that providers will have to monitor user activities. Will this affect hosting providers too?

We have such laws in draft in our parliament periodically. But the Ukrainian law “On communication” is clear about this: providers are not responsible for what their customers do. And the fact that rights holders want to change that is their personal opinion, they are not legislative bodies. Let them buy a parliament member and lobby for such law, then we will observe this law. But until then they are nobody to us, and we are nobody for them too.

About a month ago Demonoid reported technical problems. Due to those problems all data for the last several months has vanished. In an attempt to recover from these problems the site went offline. Do you know what happened?

Some time ago several of their hard-drives crashed. But that was several months ago and we don’t know what was the reason of recent problems.

According to their admins, the man who can restore the tracker is not available. Are they speaking about some Colocall programmer?

No, all the technical support of servers is performed remotely. They aren’t speaking about one of our specialists.

Torrentfreak wrote about the president of Lithuanian antipirates, who demanded the closure of access to Demonoid. He said that it is very hard to even make contact with you. Have you spoken with him?

Yes, someone called us. We just could not speak with him: from the start of the conversation he immediately began to threaten us, he was absolutely non-constructive. We sent him to the court and have said that if he brings the court’s decision, we will be happy to execute it, because we observe all Ukrainian laws. Until then we are not going to speak with him.

Access to Demonoid is blocked for several countries including Ukraine. Is this your initiative or the tracker’s decision?

It is the tracker’s policy, not our initiative. I think this is due to DDoS-attacks.

Are there any DDoS-attacks aiming at Demonoid?

Yes, there are many large and serious DDoS-attacks. But they are always the problem of every hosting provider. We have learned how to neutralize them, so such attacks have almost no effect on Demonoid’s operations. And, incidentally, Demonoid isn’t the only site to be attacked: during the last election we hosted the server of the central election commission committee, it was constantly under DDoS-attacks.

Source: Demonoid: An Interview With Their Ukranian Host

In September 2006, Scott pleaded guilty to two charges – ‘conspiracy to commit copyright infringement’ and ‘criminal copyright infringement’. For his ‘crime’, Scott was sentenced to 5 months in jail and 5 months home confinement but his release didn’t mean his life was back to normal.

After his release in 2007, Scott was fitted with a monitoring ankle bracelet which restricted his freedom, but the government hadn’t finished limiting his life. Scott had to have special software installed on his computer to monitor his online activities, but since it was Windows only, he had to give up his beloved Ubuntu.

In the months that followed, Scott publicly shared details via his blog of his struggle to come to terms with his severe treatment for uploading a single movie, which at times made pretty upsetting reading. Thankfully his nightmare is now coming to an end.

It has been around 3 weeks since Scott was taken off the US government’s monitor list, which means that he is no longer on probation. Scott says things have been pretty good since and he can now do things we all take for granted – like being able to use Ubuntu instead of Windows.

TorrentFreak caught up with Scott who said he was happy to send a message to his friends and readers here to mark his official freedom.

“I have officially been off probation since July 12th. What a great feeling to finally be free from the clutches of evil (or the federal government). It was actually a really easy time on probation. It was 2 years, dealing once a month with my probation officer… who was really a great person,” he told us.

For those of us who remember the exact time and date of the EliteTorrents raid, it seems like only yesterday, but so much has happened since and as Scott puts it, his freedom has been a long time coming.

“I haven’t had a clear head since May 25th, 2005. Over 4 years of what I would call the worst period of my life is over,” he recalls.

But in the end the release from the nightmare comes from Scott himself and he is certainly trying to make the best of things now.

“I have been focusing a lot of time on my family. We bought a house in November, while I was still on home confinement. I am working at a local college, dealing with ERP implementations, specifically Oracle, and I am still actively participating in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, and MMA,” he told TorrentFreak.

As if these things won’t keep Scott busy enough, he’s looking forward to a brighter future and a very special occasion.

“I will be hopefully starting back to school for my MBA in the spring. And I am getting married in May 2010. Aside from the economy, I couldn’t ask for anything more.”

Scott told us that he felt his story is probably no longer worthy of news, so he will take this opportunity to move back into the shadows to get on with his new lease of life.

“This will be the last time most of you hear from me – although there is sk0t.com. The good majority of you have been really supportive… so thank you all for caring, and for
those of you who didn’t care… thanks also.”

I’m sure that the readers will join us in wishing Scott all the best for the future and every happiness in his forthcoming marriage. Good luck Scott.

Source: EliteTorrents Admin Finally Free After Dark Four Years

Founded in 2003, isoHunt is one of the oldest BitTorrent sites that remains around today. The site has millions of pageviews a day and searches through more than 2 million torrent files, which totals an impressive 1729 terabytes of data.

Gary Fung, the founder of the site, is in charge of daily operations from his hometown Vancouver in Canada. Below is a picture of Gary sitting behind his 2008 Mac Pro hooked up to a Dell 30″ LCD monitor (3008WFP).

What’s really keeping the site up and running is not his Mac though, rather the 14 servers located in Ontario, Canada. Below is a picture of the server rack currently in use. Gary told us that he is working on adding another cluster in Europe soon.

isoHunt is currently using four dual quadcore Opteron 2352′s for the web servers. The site’s database runs on three additional servers, two Opteron and one Intel Nehalem based. Four old dual core AMD nodes are used for various background processing, one Intel, dualcore Xeon is used by the search backend and two more for load balancing.

Below you’ll find another picture isoHunt’s server rack, all wired up. We thank Gary for sharing this with us, and we will continue our behind the scenes series this weekend with a brand new workspace of another torrent site admin.

Source: BitTorrent Behind the Scenes: isoHunt

From then on The Pirate Bay quickly became the largest BitTorrent tracker on the entire Internet, responsible for the communication between millions of BitTorrent users at any given time of the day. Up until today they have continued to do so in a rather unorganized fashion, but that is all about to change.

This Monday the relatively unknown Global Gaming Factory (GGF) announced that it will acquire The Pirate Bay for $7.8 million. Provided that the shareholders agree and that GGF manages to raise the necessary funding to complete the sale, The Pirate Bay will be in new hands. Undoubtedly, this announcement resulted in a tidal wave of media coverage.

It’s been nearly a week since the sale to GGF was announced so TorrentFreak took the opportunity to catch up with departing Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde to look back at the last few turbulent days and to find out what the future holds for him.

TF: Were you surprised by the negative responses to the sale?

Peter: Not really surprised, but overwhelmed anyhow. The pressure of this thing has been enormous, and not a lot of people think it’s fair for us to take a break from things. I can appreciate that a lot of people put their support and hopes in us and we’re really happy that we’ve made an impact that allows people to do that. At the same time, we’re only human and can’t keep up with everything. The Pirate Bay needs to change or it will die by itself.

TF: Hundreds of media outlets have covered the news, but it is not entirely clear what is actually being sold to GGF. Can you enlighten us?

Peter: GGF is buying the domain names for thepiratebay (under all the tlds they exist). They also get a copy of the code and the database. The database includes no logs (there’s never been any logs) and there’s no personal details stored anywhere.

TF: GGF’s future plans for the site are still very vague, but they announced that “illegal downloading” will he halted once they own the site. What’s your opinion on this?

Peter: Well, that depends on how you look at it. GGF aren’t stupid, they know that if they only allowed pre-scanned content the site is worthless. Illegal downloading? Well, torrents aren’t illegal, it could potentially lead to copyright being broken though. But don’t underestimate them. They have had a hard time in the media, which they’re not used to being in. It’s all new for them – all of a sudden BBC, CNN, all local media in Sweden and so on just hammer them with questions. It’s probably hard to answer in the beginning. But they’re not as stupid as they’ve been portrayed.

TF: How do you think The Pirate Bay will look like a year from now?

Peter: No idea really. A guess would be an updated logo, new skin for the site, some changes in features but still the same basic concept.

TF: Will you or any of the other Pirate Bay co-founders be involved in the Pirate Bay site once it’s sold?

Peter: As it looks right now, no.

TF: Will the old Pirate Bay team still be working on (new) BitTorrent related projects?

Peter: We’re working hard on other things right now, especially with The Video Bay and some of our personal projects.

TF: The money generated by the sale will go to an unnamed foundation. Can you tell us a little bit about the foundation that receives the money? Are they working on any interesting projects?

Peter: The foundation is interested in more political means than technical. Having money will make it work quite hard, but there’s nothing to present yet. A lot of projects are in the pipe-line though.

TF: What does the BitTorrent community need the most to continue being the mainstream P2P protocol?

Peter: More trackers, less centralized systems and more people standing up for the community.

—–

For the founders of the site the sale is certainly the end of an era and they deserve credit for all the work they’ve done thus far. We will watch closely to what happens with The Pirate Bay in the future but BitTorrent is here to stay with or without it.

Source: The Pirate Bay’s Founders Sail On

Tomas Wennström of What’s Next managed to secure a recorded audio interview with The Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde. In it Peter says why the site was sold, talks a little about the future for the site and touches on the huge disappointment being expressed by the site’s fans. It’s a very interesting interview, although in common with everything else going on today, it raises even more questions.

Some key points from the interview:

GGF approached The Pirate Bay with a deal several weeks ago. TPB considered GGF to be the correct company to bring the project “to the next level” since they didn’t feel capable of doing it themselves. Peter said he feels that GGF share the same values as TPB.

Peter said that TPB have been approached by companies before to sell out, but they didn’t understand the value of TPB. He said the value of the site is to be found in the userbase and nothing else. He added that if a company is interested in buying that userbase they have to keep up spirits or they will find themselves owning something that rapidly decreases in value.

Tomas Wennström said that he found it crazy that TPB would become a listed company. Peter responded that they think the concept is “super funny” and that’s one of the main reasons they are doing this.

Peter said in the past they’ve had to hide the financial details of the site and who is doing what “for legal reasons” but says that in the future there will have to be more transparency about how the operation is run, adding that people now not only have the chance to share files, but also buy shares in the site.

Peter explained that he and the original owners of TPB disposed of the site in 2006. He refused to name who took the site but referred to a single owner in one of his responses, using the word “he”.

Peter noted that the site hadn’t yet been sold to GGF and the company will have to find funding inside 4 weeks. He said he doesn’t know who the financial backers are, but if GGF cannot find the money then everything goes back to exactly the way it was before.

Peter said that the perfect situation would be if the users of the site set up something to buy The Pirate Bay. Certainly, with all the previous fund raising for buying islands etc this might have been a possibility but this has never even been put forward as an option. The idea seems optimistic considering the backlash among the users.

Currently the site is down after suffering a minor DDoS attack, and TPB’s TiAMO told TorrentFreak that the site’s load balancer had crashed .

Peter says running Pirate Bay has resulted in ‘bad pay’, i.e minus SEK 30 million in fines – incidentally an identical amount to the cash payment part of the deal with GGF.

Tomas Wennström put a scenario to Peter – what if GGF screws up and makes all that is good about The Pirate Bay go away – which seemed like a veiled reference to the availability of the usual TPB content.

“I’m agnostic about it, I think it could be true, could be faulty, but whatever happens at least something happens, which is the big thing here. I’d rather see The Pirate Bay die in a chance of becoming better, than just dying.”

For the time being The Pirate Bay crew will assist the new owners in operating the site. In addition a new tracker will be launched as well as a new torrent hosting service.

The interview can be downloaded here.

Source: Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde Discusses the Site’s Future

In film circles, Pallotta is known for his outstanding animation work that defines most of his work thus far. His last film, A Scanner Darkly starred Keanu Reeves and was a smash hit on BitTorrent. With more than a million downloads, the movie earned a place in our list of Top 10 most downloaded movies four weeks in a row.

Pallotta’s latest work is something totally different though. It’s a follow up documentary to film legend Martin Scorsese’s cult-classic American Boy that was shot more than thirty years ago. In American Boy Scorsese documented the life of his friend Steven Prince, who was also the inspiration for one of the best known scene’s in Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. With American Prince Pallotta continues the saga.

Since Scorsese’s original documentary is a rarity nowadays, Pallotta had to ‘pirate’ much of his material on BitTorrent sites and YouTube. In return, Pallotta is giving the film away for free on BitTorrent. This of course caught our attention and we decided to catch up with the director to lear a little more about his motivation to embrace BitTorrent.

TF: First off, A Scanner Darkly – which you produced – became quite successful on BitTorrent and was downloaded by hundreds of thousands of people. Were you aware of that at the time? What do you think of people who use BitTorrent to download the film?

Tommy: Really, A Scanner Darkly was successful on BitTorrent? GREAT! I wish it was more so, I have to admit, I get jealous when I look at the top 100 downloads on the trackers and I don’t see my movies. In fact, part of the reason I am releasing American Prince on BitTorrent is for the hope that it breaks the top 100. I live in Amsterdam now, so the only way I can keep up with some of my favorite shows, events, and films is to download. I think it is great, especially for filmmakers of niche movies. My movies tend to get limited releases and are more of the cult film status, so the initial release is often overlooked or simply the movie is unavailable in many areas. For me as a filmmaker it is most important that the work I make get seen. I feel for many people and places, downloading is the only way they will get to see my movies. Waking Life is a movie that I produced that is a pretty interesting example of that. It seems more popular today that when it came out in 2001. I think BitTorrent and steaming sites like YouTube are completely responsible for that phenomena. Since I use BitTorrent, I wanted to give back to the community, that was part of the motivation is releasing American Prince via BitTorrent.

TF: The MPAA has often argued that the movie industry loses billions of dollars through piracy. Others think that it has close to no impact. What’s your position in the ongoing ‘piracy debate’?

Tommy: Well, everyone has a different opinion. It is pretty simple to me: The exact same thing that happened to the music industry will happen to the film industry. I suspect the film industry knows that and is trying to hold off the inevitable as long as they can. My guess is that they will try to make as much money as long as they can until they have to change or someone comes in and organizes and unifies the industry in the way Apple did for music. But even that is tricky because obviously Apple benefited more than the music industry. So they should be looking at alternative revenue streams, I find it hard to believe that many DVDs will be sold a few years from now. I would rather embrace new technologies and distribution methods, I feel this gives me greater and more immediate access to an audience.

TF: For American Prince you’ve used material from BitTorrent and YouTube, which is great. Did you license all these clips, or are they pirated copies?

Tommy: Yes we used material from BitTorrent and YouTube for American Prince and no, we did not license them. I did receive the Master copy of American Boy from Steven Prince himself, but we found a copy via BitTorrent that was better than that copy, so we used that! Plus, there is some confusion as to who actually owns the rights to American Boy. Part of the motivation of this film was to get a proper release for Scorsese’s American Boy. I felt this film would help uncover who has the rights and hopefully get it in front of a larger audience.

TF: Why did you decide to release American Prince for free on BitTorrent and what do you expect from it?

Tommy: Scorsese’s American Boy has been and is still generally unavailable for over 30 years, yet so many filmmakers have been influenced by it. The way we saw it is through multi-generational VHS tapes. Now with BitTorrent, there is a whole new audience and generation ready to be influenced by that film and I hope mine. Steven Prince is a gold mine of future cinema scenes and I hope a whole new generation of filmmakers will understand how he has influenced American Cinema. My biggest expectation is that the most people possible will watch my film! Also, I would really like to encourage people to talk about the film, with each other as well as on the Internet. It would make me happy to see Wikipedia entries and IMDB boards as well as Internet sites. I would love for people to get together and have screenings of it with their friends, or for universities to suggest to their class for the students to watch it. I look at American Prince as the film school I never had, what I always imagined film school to be.

TF: Do you think that the Internet and file-sharing technology will play an important role in shaping the future of film distribution?

Tommy: I absolutely believe how we watch and share movies will shape the future of film distribution. I believe it will have such a profound influence that it will even change how movies are made. I think it is a win-win for the filmmakers and the viewers. Filmmakers will have a more direct reach with audience and viewers have more to choose from. I wanted to release this film in support of file sharing and to prove to myself and others that it can have a profoundly positive effect.

TF: Amen.

Source: Scanner Darkly Producer Puts Latest Movie on BitTorrent

A video mixtape is a collection of bootleg clips from movies, tv shows, home grown videos or just about any other source. These tapes grew in popularity along with the advent of home VHS and Betamax videos – the masses now had the equipment to make their own shows and compilations. Of course, nowadays while they are still called ‘mixtapes’, they are more likely to exist in digital form on the Internet or on DVD.

Mixtapes are also known for the strange and unusual material they can contain. From weird B-movies to sporting accidents and dramatic news footage, through to unintelligible TV shows and rare pilots from countries far and wide, they contain all types of mind boggling clips that most people never knew existed. The heavy doses of porn and various stomach-churning activities and curiosities turn some of these tapes into controversial items, even on the underground.

Anyone Googling “Video mixtape” will be immediately exposed to links and references to the Retard-O-Tron (ROT (NSFW)) mixtapes – possibly the most controversial and popular mixtapes around. Already banned in the US, Canada and Ireland, we caught up with ZXQL3000, the creator of the ROT mixtapes, to find out why the hell he does it.

“Before the Internet was available in every household, many people around the world used to trade music with each other by taping stuff from their collections onto audio cassettes, and sending them to each other by snail mail,” ZXQL told TorrentFreak.

“These things were called mixtapes, and were a great source for discovering music. Getting new and unknown songs from all kinds of obscure sources was only part of the fun — MAKING your own mixtape was even better.”

Projects like ROT are the natural progression from purely audio based output to video, with the emphasis on fun. “They’re made for lazy Saturday nights after (or before!) going out, for having a drink and having a no-brainer laugh with your buddies,” says ZXQL.

As Internet availability became widespread, mixtapes traded by standard mail pretty much died out, taking the mixtape phenomenon with it. “And then P2P came along,” said ZXQL, “and like it did for commercial music and movies, it changed the rules — if you wanted it to or not.”

This new found ability for individuals to take control of their own distribution coupled with the availability of cheap and even free audio and video editing packages, gave mixtapes a new lease of life. But P2P wasn’t just used for the distribution of completed projects, it was to became a prime source of raw material.

“P2P offers you a nearly unlimited library of digital media: there’s no song obscure enough for you not to find it,” says ZXQL enthusiastically. “Even better: there is SO much stuff out there that still needs to be discovered, the chase is as much fun as the catch. Mixtapes help you show what’s out there.”

Finding the source material can be entertaining in itself, ZXQL explained. “There’s so much about today’s availability of media that makes this so much fun: hunting for that perfect clip to end your sequence, exploring new music by just typing in keywords and seeing what comes up.”

“Say you start your mixtape with one single video clip of Bill Gates getting a pie thrown in his face, but it needs some music in the background. So you start looking for a song that fits the clip. Maybe you just type in “pie” in Emule or Limewire, or Google for lyrics that contain the phrase “in your face”. Maybe that song makes for an excellent link to the next clip. You’ll be amazed with where your search can take you.”

Having laughed, cried, been bemused, shocked and sickened all within the space of a few minutes at Retard-O-Tron 2 – I can see what ZXQL meant by “be amazed” at the kind of footage available. While a lot of the footage is suitable for everyone (and some of the B-movies and obscure footage is amazing), overall it is definitely one for the over 18′s. Actually, better make that 25, with a very broad mind too.

To be honest I would have preferred fewer sex scenes, as I think I would’ve watched more of it. We understand ROT1 is more of an easy ride. “ROT3 is in the making, and it will feature less porn,” ZXQL reassured me. “Or at least easier to view with a group of people, so it won’t be as explicit. ROT2 kinda went overboard with the porn, I think so myself,” he added.

Of course, porn aside, many of these mixtapes can hardly be considered legal. Who knows how many instances of copyright infringement there are in each one – dozens would seem conservative – but since the mixtape scene is still fairly focused and most of the source material so obscure, the creators seem to be largely left alone.

For those wanting ROT1 or ROT2 on DVD, one is available from the site, but there are other ways to watch. ROT1 was already ripped and released by a group specializing in releasing cult and b-movies called PiMPRiPPaZ. ROT2 was ripped by a similar group called ViDEOCULT who ZXQL says did a much better job and delivered a high quality, scene-standard compliant rip. He’s happy for people to grab these rips of course, adding;

“In the end, I just want the ultimate thing I can create. Not held back by copyright, censorship, good taste, a commercial drive or other barriers. I wanted a DVD for when my buddies and I chill on the couch with a beer and a bong. I love making my mixtapes, and I love watching them. It’s a hobby, it’s underground and it might even be considered art – but it isn’t about money.”

Just in case you didn’t get the message – the ROT mixtapes are NOT for kids or anyone easily offended. Absolutely, categorically NSFW – you have been warned. And don’t forget, July is unofficial video mixtape month on The Pirate Bay – who knows what it will turn up.

Source: Prepare Yourself For Video Mixtape Month on The Pirate Bay

TorrentFreak spoke with their lead candidate, Bavarian party chairman Andreas Popp, to discuss his views on the upcoming election.

What do you see as being the most important issue in the election?

Currently the most important issue in EU (but also national) politics are the civil rights. This includes the fight against the censorship of the Internet as well as against the transformation of our western societies into police states. IT, especially the Internet, plays a very important role in these topics. The politicians who are in power right now fear the Internet and are doing everything to get control over it, just like the content industry does. What makes these topics so important is the immediate danger we are facing. If we do not fight for our civil liberties now, we might just find ourselves in a new form of dictatorship.

What is your opinion of Commissioner McCreevy’s attempts to extend copyright terms in the EU?

This extension really was some kind of a joke. They said they wanted to enhance the financial situation of retired musicians. This is already strange, since while other people have to save money for their retirement, musicians get their pension for free by copyright. But then all the experts stated that musicians will not benefit from this extension, because they normally sell all their rights in buy-out-contracts. So only music labels benefit from the law. They passed it anyways.

What about copyright in general?

I think it would take too long to explain what needs to be changed here, but you can read about it on the program (english) page of our campaign site.

How many members does the German Pirate Party have right now, and has there been any boost from the Pirate Bay trial, as the Swedish party has seen?

Nationally, we just had our 1000th member. Yes, we have had a great boost during the last few weeks, but I cannot tell you if it is because of the Pirate Bay trial or because of the new censorship law.

Are you seeing the ‘older generations’ supporting the party in significant numbers, or is it mainly 18-30 year-olds?

Of course the generation of the “Digital Natives” are the main supporting group for the Pirate Party. But there are also a lot of people who are already out of their thirties and are supporting our activities. Even if you look at our list of candidates there are only three people who have not passed thirty yet. So I would say yes, there is a significant number of ‘older’ people supporting the pirates. I think the only difference is the medium we use to communicate. You can get in touch with the younger ones mostly through the net. The older ones are more likely to come and talk to you when you are standing on the street.

What is the method of election in Germany for the European Parliament?

It is basically the same as in our national elections. Each party nominates a list of candidates for the election and the citizens can put their cross next to one of the party. Germany has 99 seats in the EU parliament. These seats are divided proportionally among all parties with more than 5% of the total votes.

5% would be roughly how many votes?

There are about 60 million voters, but Germans are not really interested in EU elections so only about 50% of them are going to vote. So that might be round about 1.5 million votes to break the 5%-line. 50% is rather low compared to national or local elections, but the turnout is falling. People here get kind of annoyed with politics. The 60 million figure is about 10 years old, but there is a small difference to the national elections because citizens of other EU countries can register for voting in the EU elections in Germany too. It is a fair number to base things on though.

Some say you have little chance of making that 5% barrier, so why should people vote for you?

One of the most important chances in the EU elections is to get enough votes (0.5%) to qualify for public party funding. That is one of the things I like to tell all the people out there who do not want to vote for us, because they think we cannot make the 5% threshold. Even if we do not, qualifying for public funding would be a big step. One of the parties who gets public funding and is about the same size as we are, got around 80,000 Euro (about $108,000) last year – that would mean more than tripling our funds – and making it it possible to hire people for the administrative tasks, giving us more time for politics.

How much of an issue is funding in German elections?

It is a big issue. As a small party we do not get any public funding yet, so we have to get along with the money we get from our membership fees and donations. All of us are working unsalaried right now. Considering the organizational stuff that has to be done, we are limited in activity. If people want to make a donation, they can do so either to the national party, or directly to their state party. And if they cannot afford to donate money, voluntary helpers to do local work are always a big help.

The European elections take place in early June. The Germany party has a campaign website, www.piratenpartei.net

Source: German Pirate Party Sets Course For European Parliament

In order to clamp down on piracy the French have proposed a new law that requires Internet service providers to cut off Internet access for persistent offenders. Under the new law ISPs have to warn alleged copyright infringers, and if they they ignore these warnings their Internet access is terminated for up to a year.

The public has actively opposed the law, claiming it restricts their freedom and privacy, while deeming the measure to be ineffective. In a recent poll 90% of the people spoke out against the legislation. Despite this protest, the law is backed by a majority in the French parliament and is expected to be adopted quite easily in the beginning of April.

However, do the politicians that will vote on the law have any clue what they are dealing with? Are they aware that the evidence gathering against alleged infringers is far from accurate, and that it’s not unusual for the wrong person to be accused? Or do they even know what BitTorrent is?

In order to test their knowledge on the subject, a reporter from Hebdo Cinéma questioned some of the politicians. They were asked what they thought was a bigger threat – BitTorrent or P2P. The results were quite revealing, and almost none of them could come up with the right answer.

Most politicians have simply no idea what they are talking about, with Herve Mariton commenting “It is beyond my skills, I admit.” Arnaud Montebourg used his trip to Washington as an excuse for not answering the complex question. “Give me a minute, because I am not aware of the details of the last amendments,” he added.

Patrick Ollier on the other hand, didn’t even understand what was said and asked the reporter to repeat the question in French. Maxime Gremetz’ response wasn’t any better, “I don’t know, I am not a technician,” he told the journalist. Interestingly, Georges Tron said that P2P was more of a threat than BitTorrent, although his explanation for it was utterly vague.

Claude Bartolone was the only one who made sense really. “From a technological point of view, I think the consequences would be the same,” he said, adding “From a consumer point of view it’s always more pleasant to listen to whatever you want whenever you want.”

The lack of knowledge demonstrated by these lawmakers signals a major problem. They are clueless about file-sharing technology and how it works, and oblivious to the potential negative consequences of the new law. Their main advisers are fed dubious and one-sided information from the entertainment industry, while the people on the streets seem to be ignored. Sad but true.

Source: Lawmakers Clueless About BitTorrent and P2P

Now that things have settled down a little, we took the opportunity to ask one of the defendants some questions of our own. We spoke with Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde about the trial and the future of the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker.

TF: Before the trial started, you said that it was going to be a theater – Hollywood style. Looking back at recent weeks, did your predictions come true?

Peter: Yeah, some days it was a really weird show outside! A lot of stuff happened in secret too, and those events will probably come out in the documentary. It’s been great theater!

TF: Are you satisfied with how the trial played out? Do you still predict an EPIC WIN?

Peter: Right now, yes. I’m very happy about it and I still predict an EPIC WIN for sure. But you never know. We expect a win but we’re prepared for the worst case scenario, so that we don’t get too beaten up if that happens.

TF: During the trial, the prosecution was heavily criticized for their lack of knowledge about BitTorrent, and how people use it to transfer files. Would you agree with this?

Peter: Yeah. We actually presented our own video ‘how-to’ to the court during the final day, to make sure the jurors got the right knowledge on how it works. The prosecution has tried to show BitTorrent as something bad and suspicious and we wanted to show that it’s legitimate and has a broader use than just STEALING FILES FROM THE POOR COPYRIGHT LOBBY…

TF: A lot of people are worried about the future of The Pirate Bay. However, the trial seems to be against four individuals, not against the site/tracker. Worst case scenario: Is there a possibility that people will have to do without TPB in the future?

Peter: If TPB is not used in the future, it is because there’s a new technology available that makes TPB obsolete.

TF: Do you think there’s a future for BitTorrent as it is now, or do you expect that file-sharing will change in the future?

Peter: I think it will evolve of course, but BitTorrent is on the right path to stay relevant for a while. The problem with a decentralized tracking system is that there’s no way (right now) to keep spammers and IP-stealers away from the network, which one can do on TPB for instance. Media Defender was a good example of that, TPB could find their IPs and lock them away rapidly without having to tell the users to update files.

Good solutions like that might appear in the future for end users, but it’s still a long way off. BitTorrent as a technology will be used for the actual sharing, or at least the basic concept of BitTorrent.

TF: There has been a lot of trial coverage online, both by traditional press and bloggers. What are some of the positive and negative surprises?

Peter:There were no real surprises. The media coverage of TPB has been somewhat the same over the past years. There are no secrets surrounding TPB that could come out and harm us, which keeps it easy to maintain a good relationship with the media. I’m just happy that people take part in the discussion about the Internet’s future, which has been promoted to debate by this spectrial.

TF: We’ve heard rumors that Anakata traveled to Cambodia after the trial. Is he meeting King Kong there or is there another explanation?

Peter: I’m not sure if he’s in Cambodia – he travels a bit for a customer that he’s working with. But, I think he’s in Asia at least. And yeah, he’s probably drinking cider with King Kong one of these days.

TF: Finally, do you have any good advice for the judge while he’s reviewing the case?

Peter: Don’t trust the prosecution – they don’t know what they’re doing.

—

The verdict is due on April 17. Links to our previous Pirate Bay trial coverage can be found below.

Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5, Day 7, Day 8, Day 9, Day 10, Day 11, Summary.

Source: Pirate Bay Interview: EPIC WIN Prediction

In existence since 2006, Fanedit.org is the world’s biggest fanedit site and the people there clearly have a passion for what they do. Visited by around 2000 people every day, members of the site have created dozens of new versions of existing movies such as sci-fi greats Alien, The Matrix, Terminator and Star Trek, and regular movies like Titanic, Harry Potter and Pulp Fiction. However, things started to turn sour for the site recently. TorrentFreak caught up with the admin of Fanedit.org, boon23, for the lowdown.

TF: Please introduce yourself to the readers

boon23: I am boon23, faneditor and administrator of the biggest fanedits website in the world. I’m a preschool teacher from Europe and as faneditor I post under the name CBB (created by boon) and have so far created 29 fanedits, which is quite a lot. It is my hobby, my art, the thing I really love to do and will continue to do.

TF: Tell us a little about fanediting.

boon23: It’s actually a bit like creating a mix music CD or deleting tracks from a music album, but even more like remixing music to your own liking. Creating fanedits is a desire as old as movies themselves. People love to make things more their own or enjoy a variation on the original.

TF: How long have people been sharing fanedits online?

boon23: The online sharing of fanedits started 2004 with the fanedit: The Phantom Edit, a fanedit by Mike Nichols based on The Phantom Menace (SW Episode 1). It was shared millions of times, because people had such a big desire for a grown up version of that movie. The latest incredibly successful fanedit is Adywan’s Star Wars Revisited, which corrected every little flaw from the 2004 release of A New Hope. New special effects, sharper image, better and corrected coloring, new and improved scenes, new music, additional and corrected sound effects. It was created by one guy in 2 years, in which he did nothing else but work on this project.

Fanediting is strictly non commercial (on fanedit.org). We expect everyone interested in a fanedit to buy and own the original movie, have links for that on every page and ban and report everyone that tries to sell a fanedit. With this we are trying to keep it as legal as possible.

TF: The MPAA don’t like what happens on the site. When did you first hear that they had the site in the cross-hairs?

boon23: Three days ago I heard for the first time from them through my webhost, who was contacted by them. They filed a DMCA complaint and wanted two pages containing loads of Rapidshare download links removed. They did not get into detail, or say which fanedits were concerned. Both pages contained links to five or more fanedited movies.

TF: What exactly is their complaint?

boon23: Their problem is that people are sharing movies for free and they do not earn money from that, even if those movies are not the original versions. They see a copyright infringement in this, despite our warnings and disclaimers for legality. The MPAA demands are not clear yet.

TF: Not all studios have a huge problem with the site – tell us about Lucasfilm.

boon23: Lucasfilm tolerated and accepted fan films. A year ago we were contacted by their anti-piracy department regarding one fanedit they wanted to be removed, but they clearly stated that they had looked through the entire website and did not find anything offensive – and fanedit.org has about 80!!! Star Wars fanedits!

TF: You had a BitTorrent tracker on Fanedit.org, could you tell us more about that?

boon23: We used TorrentTrader but linked from it to external torrents only. No torrent was ever transferred by our own tracker. On the tracker we had about 400 torrent links to fanedits.

TF: Is this the first threatened legal action against the site?

boon23: Fanedit.org started in 2006 and we have not had any kind of legal problem before (except for the small and rather positive incident with Lucasfilm). The page was never private and open for all search engines.

TF: What steps are you taking in the face of these MPAA threats?

boon23: Dreamhost has informed us of the consequences – being shut down, lawsuit filing etc, so that is why we are taking down all the download links from Fanedit.org and the according forum now, which is an incredible amount of work. We deactivated our tracker yesterday and cannot bring it up again on this webhost.

TF: Thanks for taking the time to speak with us, and good luck in the future.

Boon23 told us that he feels this MPAA action is a serious blow against an artform that is not harming the industry and was certainly never based on anything commercial, and he is saddened that this previously-tolerated ‘gray area’ (such as with Lucasfilm) has now come to an end.

Time will tell what the future is for Fanedit.org and fanedits in general. In the meantime, it seems clear that a US-based host is causing difficulties for the site, which may have to relocate in order to survive. Any offers of hosting will be gratefully received.

Source: MPAA ‘Castrates’ World’s Biggest FanEdit Movie Site

Nevertheless, following an investigation by UK Trading Standards, the Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT) and the police, the admin was arrested. At the time, FACT claimed that he was detained due to “offenses relating to the facilitation of copyright infringement on the Internet.” Except there was a problem.

There is no criminal offense of ‘facilitation of copyright infringement’ under English law. There would have been at least a civil offense if TV-Links had hosted the videos themselves, but they did not. Sites like YouTube and Dailymotion did, but the police or anti-piracy groups didn’t go after these giants. Indeed, the police themselves seemed to disagree with FACT’s reasoning for the raid, saying that the admin had been arrested for “supplying property with a registered trade mark without permission.”

…which raised another problem. The Trade Marks Act 1994 (specifically section 92) was designed to deal with physical, real-world counterfeit goods. Supplying links, if anything, could only be considered a service – definitely not a sale of physical goods. Getting a conviction on these grounds would be tricky, if not impossible. Considering the problems highlighted above, it’s no surprise that the TV-Links case has disappeared from the news radar.

TorrentFreak tracked down the now ex-admin of the site, 26 year-old Dave Rock, for the lowdown on this important case which seems to ask two questions: Can someone be held responsible when 3rd parties merely link to copyright works that are hosted by someone else, and furthermore, does this constitute a criminal offense under an act designed to protect physical goods?

It all starts on the morning of 18th October, just five days before the police raided OiNK. Dave had some unwanted visitors. At 06:20, two police officers, three FACT members, and around five Trading Standards officials descended on Dave’s home. Fortunately for him, in his case the media wasn’t tipped off, so there were no photographers and reporters outside his house. Alan Ellis of OiNK was not so lucky.

“The police and Trading Standards officers were always polite and professional, I wasn’t man handled like you see with the over acting police on the TV,” Dave told us. “I was arrested as soon as I opened the door, not cuffed and was allowed to grab a few bits, like my wallet and phone. They seized my laptop, my old PC and annoyingly, my girlfriends PC too, along with random CDs and four or five old hard drives, ranging between 8GB to 15gb.”

When we asked Dave what was on the search warrant, he said: “They ticked Video Recording Act 1984 – Section 16A and Trade Marks Act 1994 – Section 93. But, thinking about some of the questions during the interview I got the impression they were looking for DVD copying kit or they hoped to find this type of thing. FACT’s website always boasts about DVD pirate busts.”

The police officers then took Dave to the station where he was questioned. Not by the police, but by people from Trading Standards and FACT, a well known private anti-piracy company-come-lobby group. Quite why a private company is allowed to directly question someone in a criminal case that they may wish to prosecute privately is another question, and one that many people will find unpalatable.

It seemed that both outfits were disappointed, they must have expected more than just hyperlinks. In common with thousands of forums around the world, Dave didn’t know any of the TV-Links staff personally, and obviously didn’t know anything about the users. Almost 75% of the site’s visitors came from China, 10% from the US and next popular was the UK, at just 3.8%. Hardly a threat to Great Britain Ltd, but of course the implication was that Dave was making money. The reality was that he was receiving around $2 to $5 per day in donations from random site users, which he used to cover the server costs.

After six hours, Dave was released – without being charged and with no restrictions. Now, well over a year later, not much has changed. For the last 6 months or so, Dave has had no contact with the police and no contact through his lawyer with FACT or (Gloucester) Trading Standards. In fact, GTS has no further involvement in the case and has deferred to FACT, just in case they want to make a private prosecution. But, everything has gone very quiet.

TorrentFreak asked Dave if it had ever been raised that he was arrested under laws ill-placed to deal with the situation. He told us, “When it comes to law there isn’t really any point arguing after the point, you need to concentrate on identifying [in this case] how FACT will interpret the current law and, if/when this ends up in court, how they will use it to their advantage.”

Until then, it just seems like a waiting game. “I guess you could call it being in limbo, but recently I haven’t given it much thought, I’m just getting on with my life,” Dave told us. “The only thing that’s a little annoying is that FACT still have all the gear seized by GTS, apparently they’ve been given it for “forensic analysis”. Do I hear you cry ‘breach of Data Protection Act‘, for passing private data to a private company? Again this is something we are still looking into.”

So how on earth did TV-Links end up on the radar in the first place? Why was such significance put on the site and why did the response include a raid with so many people in attendance from the police, government trading standards and Hollywood-funded private company FACT?

“One thing I’d like to mention, Gloucester Trading Standards were always polite and professional,” said Dave. “In my eyes they were led up the garden path by FACT. My personal opinion is that Gloucester Trading Standards were lead to believe I was copying and selling DVDs. But, when they entered my home they only found crappy old PC gear, Laptop and no DVDs, and lost all interest – if they were ever interested in the first place.”

Despite the lack of interest and indeed grounds for a conviction, it doesn’t change the fact that TV-Links is gone as a result of the above actions. Why did it even find a place in people’s lives in the first instance? Dave believes it’s down to sheer lack of choice. “TV-Links and other linking sites are only around because the big media companies haven’t supplied the viewing public with any viable alternatives, at least until recently in the UK. The BBC iPlayer is very good, but it’s a shame it’s only 7 days of TV.”

So, with the authorities backing away, what are the chances of TV-Links making a comeback? “Running the site did take up all of my free time, it was good fun running it but I’m happy I now have my evenings and weekends free,” Dave told us. He has no intention of bringing the site back, particularly since a TV-Links.co.uk replacement site popped up many months ago at TV-Links.ws.

Finally, when sites are busted, many people are interested in exactly how the owners were tracked down by the authorities. With TV-Links, the techniques weren’t mysterious at all. They didn’t need to be. The reason why it was so easy is the very reason Dave felt free to run the site in the first place:

“To be honest I didn’t really attempt to hide my ID, as under UK Law linking to another site isn’t illegal, so I didn’t see the need.”

Source: The Inside Story of the TV-Links Bust

Ashwin Navin leaving BitTorrent Inc.

His position as president of BitTorrent never held Navin back much. With quotes such as “iTunes DRM Inspires People to Pirate Content,” he was very clear about his attitude towards digital rights management for example. Still, he often found himself in an awkward position, where he had to please the average BitTorrent user, but also the big Hollywood studios.

Now Navin has quit his job at BitTorrent Inc, we decided to do an exit interview, hoping he can speak a little more freely. “My BitTorrent tenure certainly didn’t feel like four years,” was the first thing Navin told TorrentFreak. “But time flies when working among good people, world-changing ideas, and great fun! What attracted me to BitTorrent in the first place, and what is still inspiring to this day, is its ability to provide people true digital freedom.”

Indeed, the BitTorrent protocol provides freedom, but that is also why the entertainment industry is hesitant to adopt it. They don’t want freedom for consumers, but they do want to maintain their cash flow. Nevertheless, one way or another, BitTorrent provides the entertainment industry with a whole new set of tools, something with which Navin seems to agree.

“For its direct and indirect benefits, I believe BitTorrent sits among the handful of important technology breakthroughs such as the printing press, broadcasting, and the Internet itself. Why? Today’s publishing technology – like blogs, BitTorrent, and video sharing sites for example – quite directly forge a level playing field for creativity,” Navin said.

“Indirectly, these tools force large media companies to realize that there is no longer scarcity or a stranglehold on distribution that locks people out of self-expression. Anyone can speak to the world in any format, without filters. Freedom of Speech has never been so available to the masses. How these large corporations respond to this fundamental realization will benefit many many millions of people–creators and consumers alike.”

Navin hits the nail on the head here. BitTorrent is a great technology with a lot of potential. The thing the entertainment industry has to do, is find a way to leverage it. Listening to consumers instead of trying to shut them up would be a good place to start. The Internet has put the consumer in control, and it’s time for the copyright holders to realize this. Or as Navin puts it:

“The free flow of information and entertainment over the Internet doesn’t diminish the relevance of high value, professional entertainment at all. It does force the publishers to be more quality conscious (make fewer flops, and more hits). And the great cardinal sin in this era would be to withhold your content in exclusive deals or to be too precious with your creation. Now’s the time to be more promiscuous with your distribution strategy than before: be everywhere at once, wherever there are eyeballs you can count.”

“In the previous era, there was a lot of forgiveness when 3 or 4 companies owned every road to the consumer. Publishers could produce a crap movie or TV show and get away with it. But when there are millions of ways to get to the user, or in other words, millions of “channels” to choose from, the best entertainment presented in the most frictionless format always wins.”

So, Navin argues that piracy leads to less crap. The entertainment business now has to make stuff people actually want to listen to or watch. Unfortunately for them, it is getting harder and harder to influence and direct consumers to see things the way they want to. Information is more free than ever before and consumers have a choice now, and that will not go away. It’s up to Hollywood to take the next step, and compete with piracy.

Source: Piracy Leads to Less Crap says BitTorrent Co-founder

On July 1st 2008, Jeff Young, a writer with The Chronicle of Higher Education, wrote an article entitled Textbook Piracy Grows Online, Prompting a Counterattack From Publishers. The article focused on TextBook Torrents and it quickly gained traction after being picked up by Slashdot and subsequently, many other mainstream publications. In this explosion of publicity the site’s membership grew rapidly, but almost inevitably, the anti-piracy hawks began to circle.

Within days, Textbook Torrents’ host and domain registrar received takedown requests. At the time, Geekman, the admin of the tracker told TorrentFreak: “We received a DMCA notice from Pearson Education a week or so prior, which we complied with, but it was a group of publishers that contacted our host.” On July 5th Dreamhost suspended Geekman’s account and refused to speak with him and it took a week to even transfer the domain. It took a month for the site to return.

“I want to see the textbook industry change such that we are no longer needed,” Geekman told TorrentFreak when we asked him in early August about his motivation to bring back the site.

Now, just 2 months later, visitors to the TextBook Torrents site this week were faced with the grim reality that the site has gone. “TextBook Torrents won’t be coming back,” Geekman told TorrentFreak. “I’ve been at it for two years and it has been an awesome two years, but i’m ready to step back and hopefully allow somebody else to rise up in our place.”

Geekman told us that he felt that when it became clear to the copyright owners that simple threats to the site and its host wouldn’t be sufficient to close down the tracker, he himself became the next logical target: “We got word from several credible sources that there was a lawsuit in the works against myself personally,” he explained.

Of course, when anyone invests a huge amount of work into a project, there will be some pain to endure when it comes to an end, and Geekman is no different. “It does hurt. Textbook Torrents was my baby and one of my proudest projects, both personally and certainly as Geekman. At the same time, running the site had become very demanding. Since the attention last summer the site nearly doubled in size in 4 months from 60,000 to over 100,000 members. In all honesty, it was all I could do to keep up with media interview requests.”

Geekman told us that he was sorry to have to shut down the site without notice, but in the absence of others immediately stepping up to take over the running of the site, he had no alternative. He also said that he was disappointed that nobody stepped in with a replacement site when TextBook Torrents was down for 3 weeks in August, but hopes that someone will do so now.

When asked if book publishers have learned anything from the whole affair, Geekman said he doubted that: “Intellectual property corporations are notorious for missing the point. Like I’ve said before, we were out to make a statement, to give out as much free stuff as possible, and I think we’ve made that statement – perhaps not as loudly as we could have given another few months and a little more perseverance – but certainly people have heard, and are talking. Piracy will never be sustainable for the textbook industry, but perhaps this is the first step towards a more sustainable model in the future.”

When a torrent site goes offline, especially when it’s quite a quick shutdown, it’s inevitable that users get nervous that somehow they could be implicated if the site’s logs fall into the wrong hands. However, ex-users of the site have absolutely nothing to fear in this respect: “Textbook Torrents files, including logs and backups, have been permanently removed from all servers where they were stored,” notes Geekman, “We no longer have any data on the site or its users.”

All donations made to the site have been secured for the possibility of mounting a legal defense, should the need arise. However, once it’s established that Geekman is in the clear, whatever money is left over will be donated to a textbook or education-related non-profit organization. For his part, Geekman says he will ceremonially take the last $12 for himself, to cover the only thing he ever paid for on the site – the domain registration.

“I’m an activist, I’ll freely admit it but I believe activism is about a lot more than parading around holding a sign,” Geekman told TorrentFreak. “There are far more effective ways to get peoples’ attention.”

There can be no denying that TextBook Torrents did just that.

Source: TextBook Torrents Turns The Final Page and Closes Down

The report caused quite a stir, with dedicated Repo! fans, known as the ‘Repo Army’, angry at BitTorrent users for “stealing” their soundtrack (more about why this is so important to them later) and BitTorrent users angry at the Repo! fans for trying to mess up their torrent sites with fakes.

Director Darren Bousman has since told his fans to leave BitTorrent alone, and there even some torrent users having friendly chats on the Repo! forums now. To see things from ‘the other side’, we caught up with Darren to find out exactly why this soundtrack is so important to the Repo! fans.

TF: Please introduce yourself to the TorrentFreak readers.

dlb: Most of you know me from the SAW films. But long before SAW I was directing this little stage play called Repo! The Genetic Opera. It was the first thing I ever read that spoke to me. I have been fighting to get it made [as a movie] ever since. It’s been a long long road – and only now, after the success of three SAW films am I able to get Repo! off the ground.

TF: What makes it so different to your previous work?

dlb: Repo! to me was about doing something completely different. I had directed three sequels. I am proud of the SAW films, but I wanted to do something unique. Repo! is that. A lot of people will hate Repo!, a lot will love it. I will admit it’s polarizing. But I wouldn’t have it any other way. Repo! is so different than SAW in every single aspect. I hope people give it a chance, and don’t prejudge it because of certain cast members they may dislike, or on the mere fact people ‘sing’ in it.

TF: You’ve gone on record saying that you feel very protective of the movie, as if watching over a child’s first day at school, and that’s understandable. The actual movie comes out on November 7th, however, you asked the fans to concentrate on ‘protecting’ the soundtrack instead. Could you explain why this soundtrack is so crucial to you, your fans and the upcoming movie?

dlb: I am not some muti-millionaire – and sales of this album will affect me personally. I have been begging and pleading to get this movie made since 2001. I have fought, burned bridges, sacrificed relationships, and even ended relationships all based on Repo! Why? Because I believe in the project so much. I put all my resources into making this movie. However through the entire course of making it I was told IT WOULDN’T work, that there wasn’t an audience for this. I have been met with constant opposition. At one point there was talk of not even releasing a soundtrack. I fought, screamed and fought some more to get this small release we have – on Amazon, iTunes and other downloadable sites. This was a way to gauge the interest in the film. I did this to show all the nay-sayers LOOK at our numbers. Look at the reactions.

TF: You told Alternative Film Guide that Repo! was so weird, out of the box, and avant garde that people didn’t know what to make of it. It sounds like getting people outside the mainstream familiar with the movie might be a challenge. How would you feel if thousands downloaded this soundtrack for free via BitTorrent but a proportion of those loved it and turned up at the theater as a paying customer?

dlb: I wish it worked like this but for this film it doesn’t. That’s why I had the reaction I did when I heard it was being downloaded for free. The release of Repo! is only in 6 theaters. SIX THEATERS. Even if I sold out EVERY single show – in every single city – for the entire run, it still wouldn’t make the money it needs to make. Sales of the soundtrack are the only way to prove if this film registered with fans. Our hope was – the sales would be so good on the soundtrack – we would get more theaters. More screens, more showing. Repo! will not be in the majority of cities, or countries. Its only in three cities. THREE CITIES. This album was our way of showing those in charge there is an audience for this.

TF: Could you tell us about your hugely dedicated fans, the ‘Repo! Army’ ?

dlb: These are the greatest fans I have ever come across – the most loyal people I think I will ever meet. These people weren’t hired by me. They found Repo! A good portion of the Repo! Army has seen the movie through various festivals. And the movie spoke to them. Since I don’t have the support of most movies – I turn to them to help spread the word. I never realized how passionate they were until recently when they turned out in droves to Austin Texas to see a screening of Repo! They are as passionate about Repo! as your users are about file sharing.

TF: Of course, BitTorrent fans can spread the word for you too. An interesting group have been vocal in emails to TorrentFreak – the Repo! fans who are also BitTorrent users. Are you surprised that some of your fans in the ‘Repo Army’ are buying your material with a passion, yet appear to be using BitTorrent too?

dlb: No, not at all. I am sure tons of people use these sites. The sad fact with Repo! is that every person who purchases the album for $9.99 is making a big statement. And these statements are going to be be the difference between Repo! playing in six theaters, or seven. To the mass population this will seem trivial – but for us, who have very little support or marketing. One paid download is huge.

TF: Thanks for speaking with us Darren, and we wish you well with the movie.

The brief storm that blew up between the opposing groups has largely died down now, after being dampened by Darren’s request to his fans to stop actions against torrents. After much correspondence with Darren it seems clear to us that he never really intended to hurt BitTorrent, but acted passionately in his role as the ‘protective father’ of the movie, not as some greedy corporate fat cat.

Darren told TorrentFreak that he was sorry that his actions offended some BitTorrent users, adding “Just understand, we are not the studio system. We are not the major corporation. We are a group of people who have been fighting to get something made only to see it released in just 6 theaters.”

It’s not hard to see why this movie and its soundtrack has raised such passions, when years of planning, investment and dreams rest on the success of such a small release window. However, in the absence of a huge marketing investment by Lions Gate, the movie will live or die by word of mouth and magnitude of Internet ‘buzz’.

Big named movies and albums gain less from the publicity offered by piracy than smaller productions desperate for exposure, so at least on the surface, Repo! seems an ideal candidate to benefit. It will be interesting to see how much success this movie gets, and if the piracy situation mirrors that. Hopefully, if the Repo! soundtrack does get downloaded a lot – and loved – those six theaters will be full and extended to more, which can’t fail to boost January’s DVD release.

Of course, when you rely on companies like Lions Gate to get even 6 theaters, admitting that piracy might help isn’t going to go down too well.

Source: “Saw” Director Explains Why He Was Worried By BitTorrent

According to reports, any minute now lawyers Davenport Lyons will send out up to 25,000 further ‘pay up or get sued’ letters, demanding around £300 in compensation on the back of their so-called ‘landmark ruling’. Unfortunately, those accused of infringement have had limited choices up to now. Pay around £200-£250 for a few minutes with a lawyer and maybe get him to send a solitary letter, or go it alone, maybe with limited help from the UK’s Citizens Advice service. Either way, it’s pretty much guaranteed to cost more than £300, in time and/or money.

Until now.

Michael Coyle is a Solicitor Advocate, which means he is entitled to represent clients in the High Court and has frequently done so. He is also a Director at his company Lawdit Solicitors and leads the company’s Commercial and Intellectual Property legal section. He’s says he’d like to help those file-sharers wrongly accused, so we caught up with him to find out more.

TF: Please introduce yourself Michael, and tell us about your company. What do you specialize in?

MC: Lawdit Solicitors was formed on 3 September 2001 by me, Michael Coyle. Almost seven years later we are a busy commercial law firm with close connections in Marbella and Rome. Lawdit’s team consists of five Solicitors and support staff. While Lawdit is a commercial law firm a large part of its client base is concerned with intellectual property and copyright of course.

TF: What inspired you to start the firm?

MC: I wanted a law firm which was fair and would not price anyone out of securing at the very least a right of response when either the client’s intellectual property has been infringed or they are defending a claim for intellectual property infringement.

TF: Please tell us a little about Lawdit’s track record, relevant to this matter.

MC: Over the years I have advised clients in many aspects of copyright infringement from both perspectives, i.e the rights holder and the copier. In relation to P2P there is a paucity of legal case law largely due to lack of funds and the lack of defences. We have advised a retired gentleman and a 14 year old child, both threatened with lawsuits and both issues seem to have gone away.

TF: Why do you think they have gone away?

MC: It may be because the rights holder does not wish to take the case further as they now know legal representation is in place or they do not want the publicity. We will never know. Litigation can often be described as a game of poker. You have to always show a willingness to commence a legal action even if this is not your intention. At the same time you always need to show you will defend. At the time its usual for a ‘without prejudice’ exchange of correspondence to be maintained.

TF: Let us know what first got you interested in these Davenport Lyons cases.

MC: I have some clients who watch with interest all these developments and either they let me know or we are generally very good at keeping in touch with copyright laws

TF: What is your opinion of the ‘settle up now or we sue’ letters?

MC: It can make sense to ‘settle up now’ if you have no defence to the claim and are almost certainly going to lose. It’s back to the poker game analogy. Will they sue? etc. It seems they will commence legal action as the recent case shows, however I would need to know more about each case. If there is no defence and you are sure that a claim will follow then perhaps a penalty is worth paying. If they have no defence and it is a case of ‘its not me guv’ then perhaps not. If you have a valid defence then you should fight it.

TF: What is your opinion on how these ‘default judgment’ cases have been selected and prosecuted and the blanket media coverage of a ‘landmark case’ ?

MC: The individual would have ample opportunity to deal with numerous letters from the Lawyers. Equally once a claim has been issued the defendant has over a month in many instances to provide a defence. So the individual really ought to deal with it as the ostrich approach is not helpful. Lawyers will generally want to shout about their success and I am no different. A default Judgement is still a win although a fairly one sided win!

TF: So what exactly are you and Lawdit offering?

MC: I think it’s important that individuals do have a voice in this matter. There will be some defendants who are infringing copyright with their use of the P2P software. But at the same time there will be others who may not be. I am willing to offer Lawdit Solicitors services as the law firm to represent these individuals. I will do so for free. Obviously we are a small firm and there may be limitations to this offer. That is 5 offers for help will not be a problem. 5000 may pose me a problem, but yes, we’re willing to be on the end of an email for sure.

TF: How would you like people to contact you, bearing in mind that at the moment there are a few hundred people receiving demands and this may increase to tens of thousands shortly, or so they say…..

MC: Email is best. I am often in court but the Blackberry is on and happy to help as much as I can email is michael.coyle[at]lawdit.co.uk.

TF: Thank you for your time.

Readers contacting Michael are strongly advised to be very clear and concise in their initial correspondence. A lot of people will be interested in this offer and Michael and his team are a limited resource. Make their job as easy as you possibly can, so they can help more effectively.

Update: Already Michael is reaching capacity. If any other law firms wish to step up to get involved, please contact us here.

Source: Alleged UK Pirates Offered Free Legal Representation

After turning two other filesharing applications, Bearshare and iMesh, into pay services, a company called Discordia Ltd turned their attention to Shareaza. The company, which seems to be related to the recording industry hijacked the Shareaza domain and moved to seize the valuable Shareaza trademark as their own. Discordia even had the nerve to set their lawyers on the open source team. A summary of the entire scandalous story so far can be obtained here.

Back in May the Shareaza team announced “We’re fighting back!” and today we bring good news in the battle to neutralize the nefarious intentions of Discordia – the release of a brand new client. We interview Wout and Alex of Shareaza about their new baby: Project Panthera.

TF: The Shareaza client has enjoyed considerable success over the years. What inspired you to taper off the effort on the old software and embark on this huge effort of creating a whole new client?

Wout: Due to recent events beyond our scope of expertise, we were required to rethink our strategy surrounding Shareaza. Because we can count on the support of a massive userbase, we decided to create a new client, with some of the features requested most for Shareaza, but which we were never able to introduce.

TF: Shareaza is a very well known name in the P2P community – it’s been downloaded way in excess of 43 million times. What were the factors that led to the decision to create a fresh brand? (Project Panthera)

Wout: Well once again some people demonstrated how low a person is able to go. We learned that a company owned by Imesh (Discordia) filed for a trademark on the Shareaza brand name. Even though they have no ties to the program or the Shareaza brand. So in essence they are just doing it to benefit from the Shareaza name. This was also a factor in naming the application. We didn’t want them to benefit from our developers hard work yet again.

Alex: We basically got mugged by a gang armed with lawyers. This meant we had to reconsider our whole approach to managing Shareaza’s development to ensure the long term survival of the project. We can see a real danger that this may happen to other popular free software projects too.

Something interesting we’ve discovered: did you know that the United States Patent and Trademark Office aren’t connected to the Internet? When Discordia Ltd. filed for the trademark on our name, we wrote to the USPTO and pointed out that we’ve been using the Shareaza name for years. They said they can’t investigate sources external to their own database. We said “Couldn’t you just spend 30 seconds Googling the name of the application?” They said their procedures don’t allow them to do that. This rubbish is actually the basis of intellectual property law in the U.S. and many other western nations. Is it any wonder people are going out and creating their own licenses like the GPL and the various flavors of Creative Commons out of sheer bloody frustration with the IP laws?

According to Alex, “F**king heaps!” of time and effort have gone into the development of Panthera, “a massive job” which has been underway since April 2008, and in part personally financed by members of the team. As Panthera is (of course) an open source project and does not include any adware or bundled software, Wout told us that the team are counting on donations to help them make this software the best of its kind.

TF: What are the key features of ‘Panthera’ and why is this release superior to the ‘old’ software? Why should people switch?

Wout: Panthera has every feature Shareaza has and much more. Panthera includes decent BitTorrent support (libtorrent), skin support, proper Gnutella1 support, no use of the registry and a completely revamped media player. There is no denying it – we looked at Shareaza a lot when coding this app, and whenever we found some code that was interesting, we asked ourselves: “How can we make it better?”

TF: Panthera is a multi-network client, including BitTorrent. Tell us a bit more about the implementation and the support for other networks.

Wout: Panthera supports Gnutella1, Gnutella2, BitTorrent and ED2K (not in beta but it will be in final release). The BitTorrent in the beta release will be the default QT (more about this later) BitTorrent sample client. This is for testing purposes only. Once we have enough test data, we will replace this with Libtorrent from Rasterbar.

Alex: Shareaza has a long history with BitTorrent – we were the first client to experiment with decentralized torrents for example – but since the BitTorrent scene has just exploded, our home grown implementation has fallen behind the times which is why we’ve decided to implement the libtorrent library. One other reason is that as we’re free and open source, we figured it was about time we started taking advantage of our right to use other people’s free and open source code where its better than ours. Why reinvent the wheel when there is a perfectly good solution just sitting there waiting for people to use it under the same copyleft conditions we believe in?

TF: Panthera is multi-network, and multi-platform too. Tell us more about this.

Wout: Multi platform means more users, means more files, means more and faster downloads. No other P2P program allows to connect to virtually all the most popular networks on every operating system.

Alex: Linux especially is starting to become a viable alternative to Windows and many of our developers and supporters are either dual booting or have switched to Linux environments completely. The next logical step is native multi-platform support. As Wout says, broader coverage = win.

Clearly a project of such ambition can consume considerable resources. Wout and Alex agree that they will take all the help they can get, noting that they “absolutely need testers and feedback” and welcome anyone who is prepared to code, test or donate. In particular they would be very grateful for offers of help from developers – the program is based on the QT framework and is coded entirely in C++, and anyone with experience of Rasterbar’s Libtorrent.

It is possible that Discordia might just be successful in stealing the Shareaza brand name but the team remains upbeat and is full of enthusiasm for Panthera.

“It’s given us a chance to re-write a fantastic P2P app and make it even better,” says Alex, “which is a perfect example of the file-sharing Hydra in action.”

Panthera Project will be officially available on August 25th but in the meantime, temporary test builds are available here.

Anyone offering project support should contact the team on contribute@pantheraproject.com.

Those able to donate, should do so via donations@pantheraproject.com

Don’t forget, the real Shareaza project is located at http://sourceforge.net/projects/shareaza/

Source: Shareaza Team Fights Back With Project Panthera

One could argue that their availability on BitTorrent actually helped ‘Lost’ and ‘Heroes’ to build a stronger fanbase. With torrents, no-one has to miss an episode anymore which keeps the fans more engaged. So called “pirates” advertise the shows to their friends, or write about it on their blogs. Accordingly, when we asked Jesse Alexander whether he thinks that BitTorrent might have helped to reach a broader audience, he answered with a clear cut “Yes”.

Not that Jesse wants everybody to get the shows off BitTorrent, but he said that it certainly signals that there is a market for on-demand and interactive TV. “People watching shows such as Lost and Heroes on BitTorrent is the present world reality,” Jesse told TorrentFreak. TV networks have to recognize this, give their viewers more ways to interact with the shows, and find ways to generate revenue from every member of the global audience.”

“It’s the same for music artists. The reality is, people share music. Artist now make money by driving people to concerts, through community websites, and by offering exclusive events. TV networks are focusing too much on one exclusive product, instead of building a community. This is a mistake I think.”

The success of Heroes on BitTorrent didn’t pass by the cast of the show unnoticed either. “The cast and the people behind the scenes have all been talking about it,” Jesse said. As an example he mentioned last year’s promotional tour in France, where the actors were recognized by hundreds of fans, even though the show had not even premiered on TV yet.

Alexander has hit the nail on the head. This is in fact one of the main reasons why shows like ‘Heroes’ are so popular on filesharing networks. It can take up to six months after the US premiere before these shows are aired in Europe, Australia and other parts of the world. Jesse agreed that this is indeed one of the major causes of piracy. “This gap is something that is certainly going to change in the future,” he added.

Jesse went on to say that in the near future, thanks to the Internet, the viewers of TV-shows will see more interactive components and alternate realities they can participate in. The future of TV will be more international, with real interaction, and shows will be more and more integrated into the core part of an online community.

When we asked Jesse if he has ever downloaded TV-shows off BitTorrent, he told us: “I can’t confirm or deny, but I’m familiar with all kind of new technologies.” I guess we all know what he’s trying to say.

It is no surprise that Jesse is more positive towards new technologies than some others in the entertainment industry. Last week we reported on the upcoming “Pirate TV” show that he is working on, together with Matt Mason, the author of ‘The Pirate’s Dilemma’.

“Matt’s book needs to get a broader audience,” said Jesse. “We want to discuss the negative and the positive side of piracy, and place things in a broader historical context. We want to start a real conversation about the future of intellectual property.”

We’re happy to join the debate, what about you?

Source: ‘Heroes’ Producer Recognizes Benefits of BitTorrent

It all began last year when, having released his album “Guidelines For An Emerging Century”, Mr.Suitcase received a payment from Stim, the Swedish Performing Rights Society. Included in it was a refund from the tax that is put on all recordable media in Sweden. Whenever CDRs, mp3-players or similar items are sold, an extra fee of 0,04 crowns/megabyte is added and later paid back to the artists.

“First, I got a bit put off by receiving the money because to me, that kind of arbitrary hand-out of alms is a ridiculous system,” Mr.Suitcase said. “Then I thought, why not see it as an opportunity and earmark the money for something creative. And since the money came from piracy, I had to use it for more piracy, right?”

With the money, Mr.Suitcase bought old used effect boxes and began experimenting. Without knowing where it would take him, he started sending fragments and loops from other people’s songs through the effects.

“I’ve always been fascinated by cut-and-paste aesthetics. I grew up with artists like The Future Sound of London and Saint Etienne who layered samples and combined the bits and pieces to create something brand new, something that became more than just the sum of the elements.”

He says the project “got completely out of control” when friends started to drop by the studio to record new instruments and vocals over the samples. In the end, he had an album’s worth of new songs, although they all were rooted in someone else’s work.

“As the project grew, I lost count of how many original songs that were used in it. Nearly a hundred, I’d guess. It’s very diverse, from Prince to The Rice Twins, from Ashanti to Zongamin. In the end, I realized it wasn’t a mixtape or mash-up but it wasn’t an album either. I decided the tracks were all frauds, called it a wrap and posted it on The Pirate Bay.”

Mr.Suitcase thinks artists should be more relaxed about non-commercial use of their work. Since the world went digital, he feels the availability is a natural consequence that should be embraced rather than hopelessly opposed.

“The way Internet works, there’s no reason to argue for or against file sharing. We can just conclude here and now that file sharing ‘is’. For me, I’m very attached to the idea that the top-down structure of producers and consumers has turned into a blur, and that anything created isn’t only there to be experienced but can also be a building-block for new creations. It’s fantastic! I was absolutely thrilled when techno producer The Field used one of my recordings for his brilliant track ‘Istedgade’.”

“To me, ‘Frauds’ is a statement. There’s so much negativity in the debate. ‘File sharing means artists can’t…’, ‘File sharing means nobody will ever…’ I think it’s the opposite, I think the beautiful aspect of the digital era is that anything recorded can be remixed, tweaked and modified.”

Mr.Suitcase’s album “Frauds” can be downloaded via BitTorrent at mrsuitcase.se.

Source: Pirate Tax Funds Pirate Album

TorrentFreak spoke with Kevin Kowalewski of TorrentRelay, which is designed to bring BitTorrent functionality to platforms that don’t support a native torrent client, such as the PlayStation 3, Wii or iPhone.

As we had an iPhone to hand, we decided to give this system a go, choosing the easy mininova option (detailed below) and downloading a single .jpg image from a wallpaper pack. In just a few seconds the image appeared in Safari as promised, but due to limitations in the current version of Safari, it wasn’t directly possible to save the image. I know there is an addon somewhere that already provides this functionality, if only I could find it…but the file transfer component worked fine.

Here is a video showing the process on PS3. We follow up with an interview with Kevin below:

TF: Please introduce yourself and tell us a little about your background.

KK: My name is Kevin Kowalewski and i’m a student at Seneca College’s Computer Systems Technology program. I’ve always been interested in computers, Perl, PHP, Python etc and wanted to make a project over the summer.

TF: Could you give tell us a bit more about history about the project?

KK: A lot of work needed to be done in reverse engineering the BitTorrent protocol – my original plans were to have it completely “stream” the download from peers into a browser. Over time the project evolved, from this simple goal to download pieces in order and to get them to the browser, to the user friendly and stable code base you see today.

Mostly written in Perl, the TorrentRelay site aims to provide any user with the ability to download torrents. Any browser that supports Javascript will do great and any other browser will still work! Desktop browsers get the most enjoyment by unchecking the ‘Load only when complete’ check box but leaving Ajax support on.

TF: What technical challenges have you faced?

KK: There were many hurdles to overcome while on this project, Perl’s handling of memory for one, interfacing with the core downloader, managing all these users requests in a timely manner and allowing it to seed as well.

TF: So how does the system work exactly?

KK: The system itself is really straightforward. Simply visit the TorrentRelay site and there you’ll be presented with three ways to get your torrent:

1.) The most common way is “Browse and select”, which allows you to choose a torrent from your local file system.

2.)The URL method which allows you to simply copy the URL of where the torrent is online.

3.)The third option, my personal favorite, is by Mininova ID. Just jot down the short 7 digit code found on Mininova torrents, and hit ‘Get ID’. You can easily find the corresponding Mininova ID from the download link, just hover over it and you’ll see it in the bottom of your browser.

Next you’ll be presented with a list of the files within the torrent.

Leaving the “Load only when complete” checkbox ensures your browser won’t timeout when downloading. The server will temporarily buffer the entire contents of the file prior to sending it to you. On desktop browsers, unchecking this produces amazing results. As the torrent downloads the data is sent to your ‘Save as’ dialog, improving overall download time to you.

Leaving the “Ajax” checkbox lets you see updates in real-time. Most browsers (including the PS3) support Ajax, so leaving it checked it recommended. On smaller browsers (like the Nokia N95), un-checking this is a good idea. The constant Ajax requests are too much for its browser to handle. You’ll get the same updates, just in a list style.

Just click on the file you want, opening it in a new tab (or window) is recommended. Here you’ll see your torrents progress.

As it downloads you’ll get regular updates. If you unchecked the ‘Load only when complete’ box, you’ll get a save as shortly after it starts to download. Otherwise you’ll get the ‘Save-as’ when its complete.

TF: What are your plans for future development?

KK: Hardware-wise, plans for the future include getting a new server! The demand has been great and we’re in the process of getting a new dual Xeon, if anyone could donate it would be great, since I’m but a poor engineering student.

From a software perspective we’re planning on allowing users to run and view their torrent progress side-by-side, in a nice list format. Also, they’d be able to come back later and use the same previously downloaded data again. This way they can setup their torrents, close their browser and can come back at a later time to get them!

TF: Thanks for taking the time to talk with us and good luck with the rest of the project!

Source: Download Torrents on PS3, iPhone and Web-Enabled Devices

Being a dedicated user of Demonoid, Xihilisk is used to sharing his (and probably others) music. His previous 10 albums are all available for free on BitTorrent. However, he decided to release his latest album “EPTwo Special Edition”, exclusively on the popular BitTorrent tracker Demonoid.

This move seems to be counterintuitive, since an exclusive release on Demonoid will limit the audience. On the other hand, the album wont be exclusive for a long time. In fact, it’s the nature of p2p and BitTorrent that such releases soon spread to other sites.

We got in touch with Xihilisk to find out what motivates artists like himself to share their music on BitTorrent.

TF: Why did you decide to exclusively release your new album on Demonoid?

Xihilisk: I’ve been with Demonoid for a few years, and its always been the first place I go to look for something. I’ve been a member of quite a few other private trackers, and still am, but Demonoid has lots of obscure stuff I haven’t found anywhere else.

In terms of it suitability for this release, it has a large user base, and a decent community that seem genuinely interested in listening to music they’ve never heard of.

TF: What are the benefits of sharing your music on BitTorrent for artist like yourself?

I’ve always given away my music for free. I used to burn off a load of CDRs and hand them out to random people and leave them lying around places, then came myspace, and then the explosion of BitTorrent use. It seemed like the next logical step.

I was using torrents for a long time before I realized that if people can share major artists via the medium, then why can’t I share my own music. Of course, I knew that quite a few people were already doing this, but its still the most exciting and effective way for me to get my music to people who never would have found it otherwise.

TF: What do you think of the RIAA, and the big music labels, for going after their own customers?

Xihilisk: Fuck the RIAA. It sickens me when I hear about somebody getting fined a tonne of cash for downloading a couple of songs off LimeWire (and sharing them probably without even knowing they were). I understand that copyright infringement exists, but destroying someone’s life just for getting a few songs off the internet is disgraceful.

What I find most ironic is that you can share thousands of death metal albums online and you’ll almost certainly never find trouble, but share one Lionel Richie track and they’ll nail you to a wall.

TF: Do you think the music industry will change in let’s say the next 5 years? How do you want it to be?

Xihilisk: 5 years? What music industry? Hopefully, there will only be music.

The Internet is rapidly leveling the playing field for all musicians. I’d like to see it where all money hungry labels go out of business, and a true DIY ethic takes over. You want to get your band noticed? Make really good music and the internet will do the rest. You want to make money? Play a load of gigs or forget it.

Trying to get signed these days is a lost cause. Yes iTunes is doing well, and who knows what tricks the record companies have up their sleeves to stop people getting music illegally, but the fact is that now you’re very lucky if you can make a living from being an artist.

I’m more than happy with that fact that many thousands of people have downloaded my albums legally, for free. And maybe even listen to them!

TF: Thanks, we wish you all the best.

For those who want to check it out, the album can be downloaded at Demonoid. Xihilisk describes his as experimental indie/electronica, with a hint of chiptune, post rock, metal and several other genres.

On a sidenote, it appears that Demonoid has been inaccessible to Dutch users for a few days. The block happened after the site did some server maintenance, there is no official explanation yet, but we will post an unpdate as soon as we have more info.

Source: Artist Releases Album Exclusively on Demonoid

The sole purpose of the covert-operation was of course to gather information from SMÁÍS on the ongoing investigation on TVB (Icelanders only) and Torrent.is, two Icelandic BitTorrent trackers. “Me and an administrator at TVB were pondering one morning about what Smáis actually got on us, and I had this idea to contact Snæbjörn and set up a meeting,” Unnar explained.

To gain the confidence of Snæbjörn and the other investigators, 15 in total, Unnar led them to believe that the TVB staff was threatening him. “I was called in for another meeting and I told him that I had been assaulted because somebody knew I was going to witness against TVB, I made my friend give me some bruises.” Undy told TorrentFreak.

The investigators fell for it, and believed that they finally had an insider on their side, so they started to share confidential information. The cover story had worked, and this Friday Unnar was called in for a meeting where they showed 1000 pages of evidence against TVB. In addition they told Unnar that they were plotting a criminal case against the tracker, not a civil case as the one against Istorrent.

“I was shown screenshots of admin profiles on TVB, which showed information only available to administrators. I asked how they got this information and if somebody else was snitching, but they replied ‘you can do everything on the internet’,” Unnar said. The most likely scenario is that SMÁÍS used an exploit or some other hack, to gain access to the tracker.

At that point they still thought Unnar was going to testify against the people behind TVB, so they showed him all the info they had gathered on the tracker, and which users they would go after, if it would come to that. “They gave me the usernames of two persons who where responsible for 90% of the Icelandic material on TVB,” Unnar said. “After the meeting I gave this information to those users, so they could take evasive action.”

“The most interesting part about this is that I said at the beginning of the meeting: “No offense, I can help you convict some administrators, but the website isn’t going down just for that,” to which Snæbjörn replied “It doesn’t matter if we win or lose, we will still bankrupt you.” This shows that they are simply using their money to force the trackers to go offline.

All in all Unnar thinks that he has gathered enough information to have a significant advantage in court. This Friday he publicly shared his covert-ops experiences with other users at TVB, but up until now, he hasn’t heard anything from SMÁÍS.

Source: BitTorrent Tracker Insider Infiltrates Anti-Piracy Lobby

His urge to share received quite a lot of attention after Coelho started a weblog with the name Pirate Coelho a few months ago. His motivation? He wanted people to have the opportunity to ‘try’ his books for free, but he knew some of his publishers wouldn’t agree right away. So, he took matters into his own hands and put his own books onto BitTorrent, FTP sites and Rapidshare.

“There was a strong reaction when I mentioned the site at Digital Life Design, back in January 2008,” Coelho explains. “The blog was out there for a while, but it seems that nobody from the publishing world was paying attention to it. When I spoke about it, all eyes were aimed at the site. From that moment on, based on actual numbers, the publishers not only accepted it, but helped me.”

“Harper Collins, for example, decided to offer a new book of mine every month, for free reading.” This, together with the pirated copies worked out really well, and the book sales went up. “If you go to the New York Times Bestseller list, you’ll see that the Alchemist jumped to the #6, and the Witch of Portobello is in the extended list.”

BitTorrent is one of the filesharing networks Coelho uses to share his books. “I am using it now, while doing this interview,” he says, and he encourages other authors to follow his lead. “The ultimate goal of a writer is to be read. Money comes later.” This is of course easy to say for an author who has already sold millions of copies, but Coelho goes even further, and argues that ‘sharing’ books will actually help upcoming authors to sell more books. It is a win-win situation.

“I do think that when a reader has the possibility to read some chapters, he or she can always decide to buy the book later,” Coelho says, indicating that it is not a lost sale. On the other hand, the Internet makes it easier for new authors to publish content, and get people to read their work. “Nowadays, people are being encouraged to write, and start blogs, the book industry already found a few new talents on Internet,” Coelho says.

When we asked Paulo about the difference between book piracy and the unauthorized copying of music and movies, he told us that it is difficult to compare, since it is easier to consume movies and music digitally. Most people still prefer to read a real book however, pirated ebooks are more often used to preview. This can always change in the future, but for now Coelho is not impressed by the ebook reading devices that are out there, and many of his readers seem to agree.

“A (real) book is easy to carry, easy to read anywhere. Reading a book on a monitor on the other hand is very tiresome, and it would be even more expensive to print (considering cartridge prices) than to buy a paperback,” he says. What the movie and music industry can learn from Coelho, however, is that availability is of the essence, and restrictions will only lead to reactance.

Coelho fully adopted all the possibilities the Internet offers, as he uses his weblog, Myspace, FaceBook, Flickr and even Twitter to interact with his readers. “I want to share everything I write, from my books to my blogs.”

He recently started a new experiment, as he encouraged his readers to make a movie based on one of his books. When “The Witch of Portobello” was released, Hollywood came rushing in with movie deals, but Coelho told his agent: “it is time to start a new adventure!”

Source: Best-Selling Author Turns Piracy into Profit

A little like a private tracker, you either have to be invited to an Alliance network – or help the hydra and make your own. It’s very easy to setup and scale your own decentralized network with BitTorrent-like ‘swarming’ capabilities using Alliance, and as the software just reached V1.0 we thought it would be a good time to catch up with the creator for the lowdown.

TF: Tell us about the birth of AllianceP2P and why you decided to conceive it.

Maciek: I remember writing the first lines of code for Alliance back in 2005. It was cold and dark outside. In Sweden, where I live, it tends to be dark and cold during the end of the year. So I’m guessing it was around November 2005.

I was discussing the different p2p networks out there with a work colleague. There was nothing really good that guaranteed high security, was easy to use and had high download speeds (all truly secure p2p networks I know are really slow, to the point where they’re useless). We talked about many, many different solutions to the problem – I remember talking about DHTs and network coding.

Finally I got totally hooked on the idea of a network where you connect to people that you trust. You’d use encrypted connections and only connect to friends , this way safety would be guaranteed. You’d be able to connect to friends of your friends , if you knew you trust them. This way the network would grow. I’d use a BitTorrent-like download mechanism and direct connections (no tunneling). This way I could guarantee high download speeds. I’d make sure it was user friendly and easy to use. This way networks would grow fast.

Now, almost three years later, I’ve just released version 1.0! I’m really happy with this because I feel I have implemented my entire vision. I have a full time job so I coded Alliance during my spare time. At times it was pretty intense… Other times I didn’t code on Alliance for months.

TF: Who else is involved in the project?

Maciek: This being an open source project I’ve had help from others along the way:pontusm, mrund and deathfired on sourceforce.net to mention a few.

TF: What size is the AllianceP2P userbase and who are they?

Maciek: Since Alliance is free and open source there is no real target market. I simply developed a piece of software that I knew I’d love to use. And since it’s decentralized I don’t keep track on any user statistics (a part from the automatic error reports I get). I just released version 1.0. Before 1.0 the alpha/beta versions where downloaded over 50,000 times.

TF: How does the software work?

Maciek: Alliance is written in Java and runs on Windows, Mac OS and Linux. It has file-swarming capabilities like BitTorrent. Unlike BitTorrent it has an extensive built-in search, is completely decentralized and designed to be secure. Alliance is actually a friend-2-friend network. Within each network of friends is a community where users can download files from each other, chat and post new files in the chat.

TF: What are the most important aspects of Alliance?

As you only connect to people you know and all connections are encrypted, Alliance is very secure. Since there is no central server or single point of failure, the network gets strength by decentralization.

Alliance has great scalability , it has been tested to work with share sizes where each client shares one terabyte of data in approximately 50,000 files and it is very easy to use. Additionally, Alliance is, and will always remain, free and open source.

Alliance uses tiger hashes to identify files. All files that a user shares are automatically hashed and indexed in the background. This way Alliance can automatically identify a file that several users have and download from all those users simultaneously.

TF: Tell us about this latest version 1.0. Why should people install it?

Maciek: I actually took two weeks off of my normal job in order to complete version 1.0. I knew that I would not be able to finish it otherwise. I had over 3000 detailed automatic error reports sent to me during the last year. I sorted all error reports in order of “popularity” and started fixing them. One after another. It was a dirty job but someone had to do it =). Alliance 1.0 is the first stable release of a new kind of p2p software. A network that is fast AND secure.

TF: Thanks for speaking with us.

So, if you’d like to quickly create a secure, decentralized filesharing network with BitTorrent-like swarming, and a DirectConnect-style community to compliment your communications and sharing arsenal, Alliance could be your solution. Even when your favorite tracker goes down, Alliance will still be there, with all the peers intact. You can get it here.

Source: Run Your Own Encrypted Decentralized Filesharing Network

The tagline for MVGroup is “An Education in P2P”, so TorrentFreak caught up with the tracker admin Merrin for a quick history lesson. Turns out that some anti-piracy company got it wrong – again. Who needs an education now?

TF: Please give us a little background on MVGroup before we find out why you were shutdown.

Merrin: MVGroup started with one aim in mind, an aim to fill a gap that I noticed 5 or 6 years ago on the Internet. A lack of availability of good quality educational material. We are here to give those that can’t get it, access to all the knowledge they need. A sort of video wiki of documentaries I suppose. Starting on ed2k we branched into torrents as they became popular and now I suspect that thanks to the wonderful staff and members over the years, we are getting close to being the biggest – and we hope best – free, no ratio, documentary site on the web.

TF: No ratios is great! How does this operate? Do you have seeding issues?

Merrin: We have torrents that are over 4 years old still going due to an adoption scheme where members choose a series and the seed upon request, the rest is on trust.

TF: Lots of fans have been emailing and starting forum threads, all worried about your sudden disappearance. What happened?

Merrin: Ok, the simple fact is that the whole thing is a cockup – by both a movie studio and our host/datacenter. The studio said (I suspect a bot trawling torrent dumpsites) that we were tracking a movie called “The Eye” – we obviously don’t carry that kind of thing. Never have done.

TF: So why the confusion?

Merrin: What we did have however was a documentary series also called The Eye.

TF: If it was case of mistaken identity, why is the site still down?

Merrin: The sudden shutdown is down to our host, who panicked, so basically we were taken down for the wrong reasons. Not very fair, but the host got paranoid, so we have had to move anyway. We have now found a new host and have more powerful server, for the same outlay financially.

TF: MVGroup has a good reputation and is known for being careful and considered with the material indexed by the tracker, with no mainstream movies, music or any type of warez. Do you get any takedown requests?

Merrin: As the modern MVGroup of 4+ years operation, we haven’t had more than one mildly upset email, and in fact have had a producer and writer of a series we torrented actually linking to us from his homepage.

TF: Do you have a message for the worried fans, currently hanging out in TorrentFreak’s inbox waiting for news?

Merrin: The main thing here is that we will be back, we have all our data, and nothing has been lost, the donations are safe, we’re safe and we’ll hopefully be up again in a day or two. We’re doing basic installs on the new server as we speak.

TF: Thanks for talking to us today, we’ll be over to MVGroup for our next lesson in a day or two.

For those interested in checking the site out, signups will be open with no invite needed.

Source: Anti-Piracy Blunder Shuts Down BitTorrent Tracker

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

The downloaded movies can be played with any media player, and are free of DRM. On top of that, the download manager comes with a built in DVD-burner so you can burn the movies onto a disk and play them with any standalone DVD-player.

One of the interesting things about the service is that it rewards people who share their purchases. That is, people get credits for sharing the downloaded files with other Headweb users.

Peter Alvarsson of Headweb told TorrentFreak: “We believe it’s fair to pay for our users’ time and resources and we give credits back to those that upload to other users. The ratio is 1 credit per 10mb which makes it possible to get a free movie after some 50 GB upload.

“We’ve seen that some users are really good at predicting “hot” movies and earn a lot of credits by keeping their clients running after the download has finished,” Peter added. A win-win situation really, the sharing mechanism saves Headweb bandwidth and server resources, and the users get free downloads.

All movies offered by Headweb are DRM-free, which is great, and quite unique for a movie download service. Not surprisingly, they had a hard time convincing the movie studios to offer their content without access restrictions.

“It has taken us nearly 2 years to convince movie studios that DRM-free downloads are the future,” says Peter “We’re not there yet with everyone but we are getting closer. More studios now start to realize that DRM isn’t consumer friendly and that it has to go.”

Several surveys have shown that a lot of people are willing to pay to download movies as long a there is enough content available, and if the files are high quality and thus DRM-free.

Headweb’s users seem to confirm these findings. “We’ve received lot of feedback from people telling us that they would switch to support legal services completely, if only the services had the same selection,” Peter told TorrentFreak.

In the near future, Headweb will be working on more new features, groundbreaking innovations and more content. em toThey are confident that this will enable them to compete with The Pirate Bay.

Source: Legal and DRM-free Movie Torrents from Sweden

For years now, many ISPs have sought to limit P2P traffic as they try to reduce bandwidth consumption due to their lack of preparation for the online video and music sharing boom. When it was first revealed that Comcast had been using hacker techniques to limit the effectiveness of BitTorrent traffic, there was quite an uproar and this even led to a FCC hearing.

Of course, it’s not just Comcast messing with transfers, there are many other ISPs around the world using a wide range of techniques to limit P2P traffic. As file-sharers become more aware that ISPs aren’t necessarily giving their subscribers what they hoped they’d already paid for (unlimited traffic etc), slow speeds or erratic transfers often raise suspicions of meddling.

However, ISPs aren’t forthcoming about these activities so asking them often gets people nowhere. Now, thanks to some new software, file-sharers can find out for themselves. TorrentFreak caught up with P2PForum.it and the Gemini Project for the low-down.

TF: What was the inspiration for Gemini Project? Who chose this project name and why?

[_SHIN_]: Well… as to the first part of the question, we can’t but think of a negative inspiration. We’re referring to the much-trumpeted slogan “Internet without limits” dominating the ads for almost all the ISPs. What makes it negative is the fact that the slogan is all about false promises masking a real inability of the providers to recognize the natural evolution of the transmissions over the Internet. Inability that becomes unsustainable when it comes to adjust the physical structures to the ever-developing nature of Internet communications. We all know there’s a general discrimination against peer-to-peer.

The aim of our project is to help the users lamenting over filters and slow downs to find evidence of ISP manipulations.

As to the name, «Gemini» stands for the synchronized activity of the two systems (Gemini A and Gemini B), where the first knows exactly what to expect from the latter, and vice versa.

TF: When did work on the Gemini Project begin? Who is involved and how much time has been spent?

[_SHIN_]: Neither the core application nor the method which that is based upon are original creations by p2pforum.it: we’ve just limited ourselves to put some points of the EFF detailed guide into practice, always keeping in mind that in order to check ISP filters, there needs to be a traceable communications between two hosts, with a given ISP in between.

In about a month, some members of p2pforum.it staff had discussed and technically developed the project. The point we’ve worked on most has been the creation of a system that would be simple for newbies to use while preserving those requirements pointed out by the EFF as necessary in order to get valid, non-altered results.

The test ambiance requires a definite setup that’s overtly invasive, as it involves installing softwares of packet inspection and analysis, disabling NAT and firewall, modifying the configuration for Ethernet cards, and so on.

We thought the best solution was to use a Live operating system in two versions, with the needed software and analysis tools already installed on it, so that users would not have to intervene too much in the process.

TF: Would you tell us a little about the technical aspects of the project, such as the software/systems used and why they were chosen?

[_SHIN_]: The operating system we used as a base is Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon 7.10, on which we’ve pre-installed and configured the following elements: Wireshark, a BitTorrent client/tracker, a ZIP file containing mp3 to be transferred from A to B, pcapdiff. We’ve chosen BitTorrent protocol because it is, as far as we know, one of the most filtered, together with the eMule network.

TF: How does the system work?

[_SHIN_]: Each Gemini user launch his/her version of the system (A or B) and type the other user’s IP address. When the two systems locate one another’s presence, clocks are synchronized (via time server) and network-card setups are performed, and the requirements for a valid test (NAT and firewall disabled) are checked. If all the requirements are met, Gemini_A creates the .torrent file out of the ZIP, generating the tracker and the seed.

Gemini_B starts the download. Transmission is recorded on both hosts using Wireshark. After a predetermined period (the default is 4 minutes), Gemini_A sends Gemini_B the Wireshark log, so that Gemini_B can perform a traffic comparison through pcapdiff, producing a final report.

TF: How can the users interpret the data they get from these tests?

[_SHIN_]: The final report is a text file that’s easy enough for an ordinary user to interpret. We’d say it’s self-explanatory. The report shows:
- the overall number of sent/received packets
- the number of forged packets
- the number of dropped packets.

The number of dropped packets should be relatively low, while the number of forged packets should approach zero. Whoever performs the test and needs help to interpret the results, is invited to open a thread in the forum dedicated to Gemini Project – we’ll help them to understand if his/her ISP is really jamming peer-to-peer traffic.

TF: Thanks for taking the time to speak with us. Do you have anything to add?

[_SHIN_]: There are other things (i.e extensions to the python pcapdiff script, new methods of analysis, etc.) we’re planning to develop and include into coming versions of the project. But improvements and add-ons will depend on community interest and Gemini circulation.

Further information and operating details are available on the forum.

The Gemini ISOs can be downloaded from P2PForum.it

Gemini A and Gemini B

Source: BitTorrent Throttling: Interview With Gemini Project

Part 1

In the first part of the interview Fredrik (TiAMO) and Peter (Brokep) talk about the goal that they have for the Pirate Bay, which basically comes down to uncensored sharing. Of course, they are also asked about the millions they make from the site. Peter says that he’s not making any money from it, his income mainly comes from the speeches and seminars he gives. Fredrik adds that it is hard to monetize a BitTorrent tracker, because the legal gray zone makes the ad prices drop.

The pirate bay does plan to launch a few side-projects that will eventually make them some money, such as the videobay and playble, a site where artists can put up their music for free, which will be monetized by advertisers.

Part 2

In the second part of the interview Fredrik advises the movie and music industry to start their own torrent site, and put The Pirate Bay out of business. Peter briefly comments on the upcoming trial, which is a good pr-stunt for The Bay in his opinion.

The interviewer then asks: “We think the design of your website sucks, don’t you know any designers.” Peter responds by saying that the designers he knows are very hard to work with. Fredrik says he rather focuses on securep2p, the new faster and anonymous p2p protocol based on BitTorrent he’s currently working on.

Peter goes on by saying that Denmark the new North-Korea, when the recent block by the Danish ISP comes up.

Part 3

In the third and last part the upcoming trial against the Pirate Bay comes up again. Peter says that he is pretty confident: ” We’re not going to lose the case.”

They further discuss copyright, why mashups are often more interesting than the mainstream media, and how more and more people are consumers and producers

Source: Pirate Bay to Hollywood: Open your Own Torrent Site

Haifa District Court Judge, Gideo Ginat: “I order the respondents, that is Israeli internet service providers, to systematically block access to the illicit site, HttpShare, so that surfers cannot enter this site and utilize it in in order to impede upon the claimants’ copyrights.”

In response, the site owners state: “According to Dutch law, sites providing external links allowing surfers to download movie, music, games and program are perfectly legal. Sites cannot store these illicit files on their internet servers, and that is precisely what we do not do. The site merely provides links to file sharing sites that host BitTorrent files or http downloads.”

This fact doesn’t seem to have influenced the judge when he ordered the blocking of the site.

Unfortunately for the IFPI, this block has achieved nothing other than boosting the popularity of the site – dozens of news outlets wrote about the block and the result so far is that visitors are now up to 70,000 a day. HTTPShare even had to get new hardware to cope with the demand – “Big Thanks to IFPI Advertising” says a note on the site.

TorrentFreak caught up with admin ‘Andre’ to hear more:

TF: Please tell us a little about the history leading directly to the creation of HTTPShare.

HTTP: Before HTTPSHARE there was a warez site back in 2003 called ELICOMP.CO.IL. The site’s owner was Eli Amar. Eli had to join the army and could not continue running the site, however he met me and I agreed to fund the site and keep it running. The site indexed HTTP links on all sorts of servers, then we grew in size and developed a crawler which job was to track fast speed .torrent files. The crawler was added to the the site which made it even more popular. We created the VIP zone in which users get fast and direct links (min. 500KB/s) to cover the servers and the programmers cost.

TF: When did your legal problems with the IFPI begin?

HTTP: About 9 months ago, Eli got a package with IFPI prosecution documents, including a court order to shut down the site. Eli didn’t know what to do so he mailed the files to me and I canceled the domain and opened a new one – HTTPSHARE.COM. Then 150K of emails were sent to previous members telling them about the new site and it wasn’t long before search engines like Google and Yahoo picked us up.

TF: Obviously changing the domain name and owner didn’t persuade the IFPI to leave you alone, so what happened next?

HTTP: The IFPI kept sending sending emails demanding us to shutdown the site. I never did so because the site is legal, we do not upload illegal stuff to our server [do not host any infringing media], and what we are doing is not against the law of the country in which we are hosted [Netherlands].

TF: How did the ISP block come about?

HTTP: After the IFPI understood that they are dealing with a new owner they asked the Israeli court to order the ISPs to block the “www.httpshare.com” domain. We all know that the legal system in Israel is corrupted and driven by money and power of the share holders. How can you accept such a ruling from a judge whose son was suspended from his job as a lawyer because of counterfeiting documents and money blackmail?

TF: Why do you think you became an IFPI target?

HTTP: We were a target of the IFPI and similar organizations even at the time of Elicomp. I think we were targeted because of the huge amount of bandwidth my site used while providing Direct external links. At that time the ISPs blocked us, but were then forced to unblock as a result of complaints from their subscribers.

TF: What actions have you taken to try to counter the block?

HTTP: For now we changed the IP of the server and released a program (browser) for the members that uses a server with 10 IP ranges so that it will be a lot more difficult to block it. Since we introduced the browser, the number of visitors has doubled. Also, thanks to the huge amount of publicity we got from the IFPI and sites like yours, we have added an English language forum to the site and translated the names of the forums to make the site easy to use.

TF: Thanks for taking the time to speak with us.

Suing individual users doesn’t work, bullying site owners doesn’t appear to be effective and ISP bans simply create more traffic and popularity for the target site. All this on top of reduced funding for chasing copyright infringers. So where next for the IFPI?

Source: ‘IFPI Advertising’ Boosts Visitors To Blocked File-Sharing Site

Contrary to the Pirate Bay guys, however, the people behind Mininova prefer to lay low, and don’t speak out in public very often. We had the chance to do a short Q&A with Niek, one of the co-founders and the CEO of Mininova (yes, it’s a company).

TorrentFreak: Recently you have started to focus more on legal content, that is .torrent files uploaded by approved publishers. What are your plans with the Mininova publisher platform for the future, and will this affect the other .torrent files hosted on Mininova?

Niek: We focus on extending and improving our Content Distribution service. Publishers will see more distribution options (e.g. extensive statistics) in the near future, and users will be able to find featured content easier. Our plan is to offer the most sophisticated and scalable distribution service of the future. Functionality of “regular” torrent files will of course be kept as it is now.

TorrentFreak: The Mininova CD launched in December 2007, how many publishers are releasing their content on Mininova now?

Niek: Over 330 premium publishers are now actively using Mininova to share their content. We receive functionality requests from time to time, but overall they’re very pleased with the CD service.

TorrentFreak: Like any other BitTorrent site, Mininova has to deal with a huge number to DMCA takedown requests from copyright holders. How is your relationship with the people who want you to remove .torrent files from your index?

Niek: I would say that in general the relationship with copyright owners is very good. Our copyright policy is being used by many companies and organizations when necessary. Some copyright owners are so satisfied with our service that they send stuff like collectors editions of their products :)

TorrentFreak: Mininova never had it’s own tracker. Why is this? Don’t you think you have a responsibility to help out the BitTorrent community here, especially now there are only a few reliable BitTorrent trackers out there?

Niek: We discussed this matter from the start. We do run a tracker, but only for Content Distribution purposes. Running an open tracker is not a trivial task, it requires major technical and financial backing. Thus, running such a tracker is currently not an option for us.

TorrentFreak: Mininova is a registered company in the Netherlands. Has 2007 been a good year for the company profit wise?

Niek: I would say this was a pretty nice year. We just bought a Palm Tree island in Dubai (we chose the bottom right leaf, for those who’re interested). I also received my second Bugatti Veyron last week (bonus for the increased Q4 numbers). Oh, and don’t forget to watch MTV Cribs next month to see all this stuff. /sarcasm

TorrentFreak: About the future, where do you see Mininova in 10 years from now? do you think people will still download .torrent files by then?

Niek: Predicting the future is probably one of the most dangerous things to do (remember Bill gates and his 640K?). One thing is for sure: P2P won’t go away anytime soon. We will probably share more files than ever in 10 years, either using an improved version of BitTorrent or a different P2P protocol. We hope that Mininova will stay on top of developments.

TorrentFreak: Thanks for taking the time to talk to TorrentFreak, even though you skipped some questions ;) Is there anything you like to add?

Niek: Thanks to all our users! Especially the 4 billion downloads wouldn’t never been possibly without your support and the great help of our moderating team. TorrentFreak, thank you for your time.

Source: Mininova: Serving Billions of Torrents and Buying Bugattis

When asked about the purpose of the memo in 2006, party spokesperson Peter Eriksson said: “Our aim is to make laws in line with the new technologies. The other option is to pretend that you can go on like you always have, although it’s practically impossible. Reality has changed.”

One of the driving forces behind the recent “I Wouldn’t Steal” campaign from the European Green parties was the Swedish politician Carl Schlyter, and his initiative seems to have spurred others in the party to join the debate. Earlier this week, an editorial was published in two local Swedish newspapers. It was titled “Filesharing is not theft” and was written by Akko Karlsson, member of the Swedish Green Party’s executive board.

In the editorial, Akko argued that filesharing can’t be compared to theft, as theft is when someone takes away the possibility for another person to use something, whereas filesharing only creates a new copy without erasing the original.

“For me, this is a generation issue,” said Akko Karlsson when TorrentFreak asked her why she decided to write the editorial. “You should always endorse the new technologies’ possibilities.”

In her editorial, Akko criticizes the entertainment industry’s failing to enter the information age with working business models:

“You could argue that filesharing hinders some people from earning as much money as they would have if filesharing was not possible. But now it is possible, the technology is there, and then the industry needs to find new ways of handling it. They’ve had the chance to work on new ways for 10 years but haven’t come up with much else than silly trailers that say filesharing is theft. [...] When new technology emerges, it’s not necessarily it that must be adapted to the old ways. Sometimes, the industry itself must adapt.”

Akko further told TorrentFreak that she’s convinced that filesharing, copyright and integrity will be important issues for Green Party in the 2009 elections for the European Parliament and the 2010 elections in Sweden.

“Because there is also the democratic aspect of this,” she says, “There are so many people under repressive regimes for whom filesharing and the Internet is the link to the rest of the world that inspires, gives hope and makes it endurable to fight for human rights and democracy. The state’s control system is expanding. We used to heavily criticize the intrusions of privacy and control systems in place behind the Iron Curtain, but now we are building this ourselves.”

In Swedish old media, there’s currently a heated argument against filesharing, with novelists like Liza Marklund and Jan Guillou using every inch of their weekly columns in Swedish newspapers to lobby for tougher measures. With the trial against The Pirate Bay coming up, the debate has sunk even deeper in the trenches. In this climate, for politicians to step up to the plate with sound arguments why filesharing should be legalized seems like a bold move.

But Akko Karlsson is not alone.

On January 31, an editorial was published in Gothenburg’s daily newspaper. It was written by Green Party’s Lage Rahm, member of Parliament, party spokesperson on IT issues and substitute member on The Committee on Industry and Trade. On the subject of the ongoing case against The Pirate Bay, he called for reason when it comes to impose tougher measures on filesharing:

“Not only is the struggle [to end illegal filesharing] doomed to fail, it also creates a risk that filesharing on the Internet becomes anonymized and encrypted. An increased availability of untraceable networks will make it harder to fight organized crime.”

As an example, Lage Rahm put forward the bust of a pedophile ring with more than 700 suspects in 33 countries last year. This was done by tracking chatrooms, downloaded photos and e-mail.

“Most people realize that the police and copyright interest groups are fighting against windmills. [...] Convicting sentences against The Pirate Bay would have merely marginal effects on the scope of illegal filesharing. More severe is that the hunt will lead to an increased interest for absolute anonymity among Sweden’s approximately 1 million filesharers. Their activity will move to untraceable darknets.”

He focused on the dangers of Internet communities going underground and concluded:

“New technologies mean we as legislators are faced with an entirely new reality. Tougher measures against filesharing means risking the police’s possibilities of fighting child pornography and organized crime. It is worrying that the Minister of Justice doesn’t seem to realize this. For The Green Party, this is one of the main arguments of legalizing non-commercial downloading. [...] The Minister of Justice should leave to the industry to clear up the mess they have made for themselves. Judicial resources should be diverted to fight severe online criminality instead of hunting filesharing sixteen-year-olds.”

So, what does this all mean for the European filesharer? Well, one thing is sure, political parties that actually have power are taking a pro-filesharing stance. A sign that things are moving forward, slowly, but in the right direction.

Source: The Pirate Bay and Filesharers Backed by Swedish Politicians

Born out of the VPNTunnel Project, the TorrentFreedom ‘manifesto’ is an interesting document, particularly if you’ve ever worried about being tracked, traffic shaped, blocked or censored on the Internet. With a suitably clandestine feel, the manifesto states:

“Today, there is a nexus of Schumpeterian creative destruction to be found at the asymptotic fringe of intellectual property law and networking technology. Everyone says there is an ‘arms race’ between the unwashed filesharing masses and the forces of Big Brother – we like to think of ourselves as the suitcase nuke for the little guys.”

TorrentFreak got in touch with ‘Faust’ of TorrentFreedom to find out what on earth they’re talking about.

TF: Tell us about this ‘creative destruction’ and what inspired you to create TorrentFreedom.

Faust: It’s all but trite to point out nowadays that we’ve undergone a revolution in how human knowledge is created, stored, and shared. And, much as Schumpeter himself had predicted, the creativity unleashed has more than made up for the detritus of old forms of information transmission that now scatter the landscape like broken, forgotten toys. This is as it should be. The backlash from the praxis of stasis threatens to drown the organic reinvigoration that innovation technology has always brought forth – there would be no 95 theses without Gutenburg, remember.

So our inspiration comes from a deeper, historical appreciation for the transformative role of new technologies in human social organization. Nobody knows where creativity, academia, and knowledge creation will evolve as our tools allow for more and deeper interconnection between physically disparate peoples – but we do know that hampering that process isn’t part of making a better world for all beings. We’d like to see people keep sharing, keep learning, keep exploring. . . and they can’t do that if there’s roadblocks and threats of censorship every step of the way. Make it easy and make it work, that’s our approach – then the creative destruction can continue apace.

TF: There are number of evils you appear to tackle head on with this service, such as traffic shaping, packet raping, blocking, censorship etc. I expect lots of Comcast customers will be interested as you specifically mention the ‘Sandvining’ technique they employ. How does your system work and how will it benefit each type of problem?

Faust: Metaphorically, the system is quite simple: think of the difference between sending postcards in the postal mail, versus sending sealed envelopes. A postcard can easily be read by anyone along the way, and if they don’t like what it says (or who it is addressed to), they could just throw it out – oops! A sealed letter isn’t vulnerable like that – the contents aren’t readable whilst in transit. Even more than that, our system protects the address (sender and receiver) on the envelope as well – so nobody can block the message just because they don’t like where it’s headed (or where it’s come from).

At a deeper level, our server farm is based in the Netherlands. Everything passes in and out of these machines, and all IP addresses are associated with them. The activities of our customers – once their sessions decrypt and leave our server farm – are fully and unambiguously decoupled from their RL info (including local/physical IP address). Big Brother isn’t going to show up at their doorstep with a fishing-expedition summons or subpoena. We took it a step further, however – we’ve broken the link between RL info and public IP for our customers inside our systems as well – once an account is set up, it is methodologically impossible for anyone to back-connect a given external TF IP address to a customers’ specific account, ever.

TF: You’re called TorrentFreedom so it’s fairly clear which crowd you’re aiming your product act. What sort of dedicated optimizations can BitTorrent users look forward to when using your service?

Faust: We’ve tested the service extensively with just about every BT client out there. They all work seamlessly. We also don’t penalize our customers for running lots of network traffic over TorrentFreedom – there are no monthly caps, and no drama if someone uses a lot of gigs with us. That’s cool – it’s why we built the system!

OpenVPN, in its rawest form, will work with BT traffic – but getting it to do so consistently and smoothly is nontrivial. We’ve done all that work, so our customers don’t need to become experts in subnet addressing, MTU window sizing, and the 100 other little tweaks one needs to do to really make BT over a VPN sing. We also hand out real, public IP addresses – so no port forwarding garbage, just fast connectivity.

TF: Please give us a brief rundown on how your system works.

Faust: On a technical level, it’s an implementation of the TLS-based OpenVPN project’s codebase (which itself implements various OpenSSL crypto algorithms). Starting from there, we’ve created a Java-based client that handles all the encryption and coordinates OpenVPN’s handshake tasks, to ensure that every packet coming and going from our customers’ PCs is tightly encrypted (including DNS queries, unlike pptp). The really cool stuff comes in the firewall-busting tricks that our client has up its sleeve – there’s very few local network configurations that we can’t tunnel through. . . with no customer tweaking of the software needed. We’ve also implemented a rather clever port 443 wrapper so that, unlike many VPN instantiations, the TorrentFreedom service can’t be blocked unless the entire HTTPS capacity is also shut down – unlikely.

We’ve built most everything with open code, and we’re pushing further in that direction (with perhaps full distribution of the source for our client extensions in the works). “Just trust us” crypto isn’t worth anything – if it’s not open, it’s not reliable. We run 2048 keylength RSA algorithms so, to the local ISP or anyone else “listening in” to our customers’ packets, the data all looks like a stream of secure web traffic, back and forth. This is true for ALL IP traffic coming off a machine, all protocols and all applications. So there’s no need to tweak individual applications to get them to “work” with TorrentFreedom – just set up the client, connect, and everything is encrypted all the time.

TF: There are other well known VPN services that say they are strong on anonymity and hide your IP address, yet all of them will give up your personal details at some point. How is TorrentFreedom going to live up to the claim in the manifesto that BitTorrent users using your service will be “just about as traceable as dusty footprints in a windswept street. You can’t subpoena what doesn’t exist” ?

Faust: Ok this is where the rubber really meets the road. An “anonymizing” service that keeps detailed records of their customers’ activities is just a problem waiting to happen. There’s no point in hiding an IP address only to keep records that connect that IP address to the one that’s used to cover for it! And, reality is that there is no place in the world that isn’t subject to some form of legal jurisdiction – just saying “we won’t turn over records” is silly. When the authorities show up – with court orders or guns – and people start talking about jail time and contempt, those records are going to get coughed up, period. Despite our respect for the company overall, Hushmail’s admission that it provides “secure” email information to certain government authorities demonstrates all too well that even a good team will fold if the pressure gets too high – and if they have information to provide in the first place!

We built the system from day one so that there’s no correlation between an IP+timestamp and a username – this means we can’t hand over logs of “who was on what IP at what time”, and therefore the user can’t be tracked back from their online activity. Our payment system is fully abstracted from the operational environment – billing events are passed to the VPN engine via temporary “tokens” that are one-way-factors – there’s no link between the VPN account and the details of the billing transaction, ever.

We keep a little bit of data on file to make sure we can monitor the performance of the system overall, but we don’t have “server logs” like everyone else does. They don’t exist. So, we can be forced to turn over those logs – but they don’t link back to anything. Not to mention all of our operational VMs run in fully-encrypted partitions, etc. Someone seizing any of our servers has nothing but an expensive doorjam for their troubles. Even someone with full access to every machine we have cannot link people to their past network traffic through TorrentFreedom. It’s structural anonymity, at the most fundamental level.

Now, there’s lots of other VPN services out there and some of them are sorta ok. Most, let’s be honest, are based on pptp – it’s really insecure with several known weaknesses. Plus, it’s closed-source/proprietary, so who knows if it has backdoors or not? The reason people use it is because it’s easy to set up – Windows machines come with it pre-installed. Well, we did the hard work of getting a real VPN implementation (OpenVPN) to work just as easily as pptp – but without the security problems.

Some of the stuff we did is a little complex, behind the scenes, but the end result is a service that’s really easy to set up and use. We’ve got clients for Windows, Macs, and Linux. We don’t limit bandwidth, and we’ve got some very fast servers backing it all up. It’s all done right.

TF: Any final thoughts?

Faust: Using TorrentFreedom for online security is like bringing a machine-gun to a knife fight. . . it might not be ‘fair,’ but the outcome isn’t going to be in question either.

TF: lol ;)

Update: the free invites are gone.

Alternatives: (not free)

Relakks
Smarhide
VPNtunnel

Source: TorrentFreedom Offers 100% Anonymous and Unrestricted BitTorrent

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

TorrentFreak spoke to the admin of a BitTorrent tracker to find out how he stays safe, not sorry.

Introduction

“I’m fairly paranoid and I find that’s a good start point” he told us. “I’m probably overly cautious, but if that’s what it takes for me to sleep right, that’s cool. I’m nothing special and not a huge target but I don’t leave much to chance, even though I don’t have much to worry about compared to the really big boys. I don’t claim to be an expert on security, I’m self taught only, but I’m happy to share my precautions with you (and happy to hear from others on where I need to improve!). I know of admins who run their trackers from their parents residential ISP account with little extra care at all, so any protection is better than nothing!”

Below, our admin gives a breakdown of some of the measures he takes to stay safe. Although an experienced security aware user might spot some holes in this series of measures, it’s interesting to see the lengths to which people will go to protect themselves when seemingly, others take few precautions. This article is entirely consistent with the admin’s message, but at his insistence, it has been re-written by TorrentFreak:

Identity is Everything , If you never tell anyone, no-one will ever know

If the authorities/MPAA/RIAA don’t know who I am or where I live, they can’t threaten me. When I’m working on the site I use either an encrypted connection via an Internet connection available in these premises (my name isn’t on the bill, adding another layer of confusion), or a secure VPN over a local open wireless network. For me, hiding my activities from any ISP accounts even remotely linked to me is important, as I don’t want any ISP to be able corroborate anything specific about what I do. If approached by a 3rd party for information (with a request like “can you confirm that such-and-such connected here at XX:XX time”, for example), they know little or nothing about what I’m doing, throwing any gathered evidence into doubt.

I think the recent OiNK bust was quite a wake up call. I for one was laboring under the misconception that copyright issues are mainly civil and I really only thought through evading civil actions. Once the police get involved, they can find out pretty much anything about you from anyone. Thanks to what we learned about the OiNK bust, my improved security measures should save me from the police too, in the small chance they are interested in a relatively small fish like me.

Registering a Domain

The WHOIS for the site’s main domain is protected, for that added layer of annoyance, although even this isn’t foolproof. Our main domain name isn’t owned by anyone who has anything to do with the site, so it’s pointless threatening that person, even if they find out who it is. It might not stop them making threats so just in case the domain owner complies, other domain names point to our server too and every user is aware of these. None of the domains are owned by me.

Paying for Stuff Online

When we need to pay for something we use disposable credit cards, and the same via PayPal. We also have a few other PayPal accounts scattered around which we run unverified, then dump when PayPal start asking questions. ‘We’ is a term I (we!) get into the habit of using often, it’s less focused than ‘I’.

Using Email

Use a few varied accounts and try not to ‘cross contaminate’ them by doing *any* personal stuff on them at all , site business *ONLY*! If your email address typed into Google returns results other than to do with the site, you are taking risks. Ideally a search would produce nothing at all. In addition, I always hide my IP when I pick up or send email.

Security When Using Other Sites

They’re not, but I act as if all file-sharing forums are insecure. I work on the basis that someone on the staff could be a security risk so I make a policy of never discussing site business on other sites, unless I’m asking general questions. I’d certainly never say “I’m the admin of etc-torrents, hi!” on an open forum and wherever possible I use other aliases.

Find a good host you can trust who doesn’t ask for much verification of identity

Our site has had a few hosts since it began a few short years ago. The first was a friend of a friend of a friend who accepted us with no formal contract or ‘paperwork’, paid from any old PayPal account. For a while we just got users to donate directly to the host which meant I didn’t need to get involved at all. The second and third hosts were people who had established (anonymous) reseller accounts with big ISPs. As long as they got their money, they didn’t ask any awkward questions like: ‘What’s your name and address and credit card number?’ I communicate with any host using disposable email addresses (or something like Hushmail) combined with some sort of anonymizing system previously mentioned. I guess even more precautions could be taken, but time is time and we all have to do some productive work in the end!

Server Location

I would never choose a host in my own country and I’d never put a server in a country where my worst anti-piracy enemy is located, the legal wheels turn too easily. But if the wheels do turn really easily and your host hands over your personal details, you will have been clever enough to make sure that they never had the correct information in the first place. Pay your host on time and be a good customer, you need him onside.

Online Identity

Ok, so I may be a proud super admin (j/k!) but I’m not too keen to spread my nick around carelessly or needlessly. I try to resist the ego trip, even though it can be fun using your ‘power’ to get stuff you wouldn’t normally have access to! Remember, even online nicknames can be a source of identification over time. In my opinion, any admin who features himself on Facebook or MySpace in a way that could be linked back to his torrent activities, really needs a psychiatric evaluation. But I know of a couple who do and so far, they’ve survived. Maybe I’m crazy, and they’re all sane. It’s possible!

Security on the Site, Choosing and Dealing with Staff

Any logging on the server or control panel info excludes staff members details, so a rogue moderator with a grudge can’t get any useful information, should someone try to make it worth their while to provide it. No-one on the site knows anything really useful about me, even within my own team. None of us have ever met in real-life, but I make it my business to learn as much about them as possible, just in case. The very closest people to me on the site know my first name, I guess that’s ok?

Wrong!

I never let anyone know anything important about me, no matter how small. Small clues can easily add up to answers when put together like a jigsaw. Let people think they know your real name if you like, it’s functional and no-one really gets hurt. For the survival of the site I believe it’s acceptable for me to lie about my country of origin, my age, marital status and even my sex, but beware, pretending to be a girl will get you LOTS of attention! Look after the small things and everything else looks after itself.

It’s also a good move to encourage my staff to be security conscious too but I don’t force my regime onto them. I find that when choosing staff it’s best to never let people with inflated egos get close to you – they tend to have big mouths too. They generate tension and trouble and YOU will become a target with their boasting and trigger happy attitude. I like quiet, considered staff because i’m paranoid!.. but this style doesn’t suit everyone.

Try making other forum accounts and act like a normal user on them. You’d be surprised at what people will tell you about your own site that you didn’t already know when they think they aren’t talking to anyone important.

Site Donations

Anonymous PayPal accounts (or in a 3rd party’s name) are completely desirable. Although I suggest a level of transparency in showing users how much money in donations are received, making these records public provides a level of evidence of financial income to the site and you just know that this would be used against you at some point, should the shit hit the fan. If you know and trust your host, why not let users donate directly to him?

Don’t Break the Law!

Running a tracker is a gray area in most country’s laws but I try to stick to some basic guidelines to not show blatant disregard for things that are surely illegal in most places. Under no circumstances would I seed any copyright works on my own tracker. I saw an admin recently who had uploaded 4tb of warez and was showing off his stats for all to see. Why take the risk?

If you get a DMCA type takedown request, take the torrent down! The Pirate Bay guys are going crazy at me now I guess (they’re entitled to hold their own style of course!) but I see no point in doing anything unnecessary to annoy copyright holders, especially us small guys who don’t have many resources.

Do unto others as you’d have done to you!

Try and make good contacts at other torrent sites as they can be a valuable source of information. Try to stay out of conflict with others and be known as a problem solver, not a problem maker. A good reputation is a must to maintain admin karma ;) No-one wants online enemies, especially in huge numbers! People with a grudge and keyboard can really fuck you up. Don’t badmouth people to others unnecessarily , you have no idea who they know, who they might tell and what it could lead to.

A few basic tips to hopefully keep the right side of the law

1. If you can’t be identified, they can’t do anything against you personally.
2. Always respond to proper takedown requests. Be courteous, don’t make enemies.
3. Never seed anything yourself and don’t operate a seedbox. If others operate them on your tracker, that’s up to them.
4. Don’t run any kind of pay-to-download service unless you like police attention.
5. See 1

Final Thoughts About Being Anonymous

Being as anonymous as I can is a must for me and it helps me feel safe. It’s probably already past a healthy stage and it does have drawbacks. A few of my staff I love, I really do, they’re great guys but I can never let them know my true identity, which is sad for me because maybe we could become more to each other than just text on a screen. If I thought even one person knew who I was, my confidence in security would fall dramatically.

Being anonymous can be a quite lonely experience as you struggle to keep the very things that make you an individual, private, while constantly having to view people that probably don’t deserve it, with suspicion. But in the end you gotta keep the torrents going, so it’s all good.

Source: How a BitTorrent Tracker Owner Hides from the MPAA/RIAA

An established, but outraged musician has decided to shun conventional distribution methods by following other recent initiatives (such as Radiohead’s ‘In Rainbows’ promotion) by making his latest album available for free download. It’s available on BitTorrent on sites like The Pirate Bay, with so-called ‘OiNK replacement’ site, What.cd, providing the album on ‘free leech’ to encourage more downloads.

TorrentFreak caught up with Benn Jordan who told us he’s not just disillusioned, he’s ‘outraged’ that iTunes is selling his work without permission and seemingly keeping all the money.

TF: Please tell us a little bit about yourself and your musical journey.

Benn: I’m Benn and I’m 29 years old. I started playing classical guitar when I was about 5, and since then, all I’ve wanted to do with my life was make music. Now 20-some odd years later, I feel lucky to tell you that I make music for a living. I’ve been releasing albums for about 14 years on various indy labels, and in the last 5 years I’ve also been composing for television, film, and ads. Music has allowed me to travel the world, meet thousands of wonderful people, and express myself through my work. It seems impossible to me that I’m on this planet for any other reason than writing music.

My label, on the other hand, doesn’t have a complex or radical plan. Our goal is to simply compensate our artists as much as possible, and that includes utilizing the “digital revolution” to our advantage, instead of punishing our artists by punishing their fans.

TF: Tell us a little about your dealings with labels and ‘the industry’ and why you became disillusioned.

Benn: Luckily, my record contracts were always negotiated well. Once things started moving with small labels I was approached by some larger ones, but there was always some seedy stipulation that prevented me from ever signing.

Still, with a 50/50 contract, I’d be selling 2,000 albums and would get $250 for it somehow. Many people that i’d meet at my shows would say that they bought my music on iTunes, yet I’ve never signed any sort of agreement allowing iTunes to host my music, and I’ve certainly never seen a dime of money for my albums hosted there.
So I started investigating the numbers from the label, which led me to some shocking revelations about how little the artist and label was getting in comparison to the retailers. When I got around to asking about iTunes, the owner of Sublight Records pleaded with me to “leave it be”. Everyone else made an extraordinary effort to ignore my calls and emails.

When I finally got a hold of the digital distributor (I must note that “digital distributor” is the most pathetic job title I’ve ever heard), I was told that once the files are in the iTunes system, it literally couldn’t be removed or taken down for a year. So, either Apple has created a self-aware doomsday machine that cannot be stopped or reasoned with, or everyone involved is just enjoying the gravy train of ripping off artists like myself and using Apple’s backbone of attorneys as an intimidation factor.

Even after having a lawyer working for me on this matter, this is the one and only response we’ve EVER been able to get from Apple:

Dear Benn,
I understand that you are writing to the iTunes Store because you are upset about finding your own album “The Flashlight” and some of your other album as well on the iTunes Store, and that you feel that you are owned
royalties for this music that his being purchased. I am sorry that you have to found this upsetting. My name is Wendy, and I would be happy to link you to right people to talk to about this issue

So, who’s the pirate I should go after? A kid who downloads my album because it isn’t available in non-DRM format and costs $30 on Amazon? Or a huge multi-billion dollar corporation that has been selling thousands of dollars worth of my music and not even acknowledging it?

I’m not disillusioned, I’m outraged, and anyone who ever spent a dime on buying music through these distribution methods should be outraged too. Here we are pleading with people to not steal music, and then we hand them dog shit when they go out of their way to buy it.

TF: You were a member of OiNK. Could you tell us a bit about your time there and how you used the site?

Benn: OiNK was an amazing network. As an avid-collector of ultra-rare old jazz records, I’ll tell you right now that it was the most complete and diverse library of music the world has ever seen. I filled some requests by uploading some of my rarer albums there. Eventually I started being harassed by someone on the network who was sending screen grabs of my seed lists to record labels. Upon complaining, a moderator simply removed my ability to communicate with anyone on the network or post comments on torrents. I can understand the paranoia and strictness.

I guess I just sort of laughed it off and stopped using it. When Oink went down, the only thing that surprised me was that the servers weren’t hidden in some weird country.

TF: Could you tell us more about the support you’re getting from one of the so-called ‘OiNK replacement’ sites, ‘What.cd’ ?

Benn: It was really a fresh breath of air for What.cd to promote the idea of artists having involvement with their own torrents. Not only does it benefit the artist to no end, but I can’t imagine that any court in the world would be able to pin someone on copyright infringement for a torrent the copyright holder created.

TF: Aside from uploading your own albums, at times you took an anti-piracy stance at OiNK, why the big change of heart?

Benn: I don’t think my stance has changed all that much. It’d be a great PR move to say that I’m pro-piracy, but I’d be lying. I keep seeing these internet news stories saying things like “The Flashbulb Promotes Piracy”. It is totally out of control. How could I be promoting piracy if I’m uploading my own material with a “buy it if you like it” message in the torrent?

What I’m promoting is the artist’s freedom to choose what can and can’t be done with his/her music, and more importantly, the listener’s freedom to do what he/she wants with their own computer, MP3 player, or internet connection.

After a journey through miles and miles of bullshit in this industry, you learn one thing: If you want something done right, you’ve got to do it yourself. Whether you’re downloading my music to check it out, to accompany the CD, or even pirating it…I want you to have a version/rip of it that I’ve listened to and approved of.

TF: You say you’re not pro-piracy yet you downloaded stuff from OiNK and also What.cd. One position seems to conflict the other. How do you explain this?

Benn: In my case I think that visible list of downloads strengthens my point. Most of those downloads are actually albums I already own (much easier to download than to record an entire vinyl album), albums I previewed but didn’t like, or albums I simply cannot find available in a suitable DRM-free format (including CD). Some of the software, like the TomTom DVD on my list, is actually impossible to technically “pirate” because you can’t buy a US TomTom GPS unit without the software. The thing is, when a tracker gets busted, the companies count these towards their losses.

So, my new album currently has 6381 downloads at the time of this interview on what.cd alone. Using that deceitful equation, my losses are over $100,000. If I wanted to, I could subtract those losses from my profit and completely get out of paying any income taxes. It makes sense from an evil, corporate, criminal-minded standpoint, right?

Beyond that, iTunes and other services simply are not acceptable to me. No company will have any control over a product that I legally own after I buy it, period.

Oink was the biggest music library in the world. People didn’t use it because they were criminals, people used it because it was literally better than any service you could pay for. It was the stubborn behavior of the record labels, artists, and government that wouldn’t allow that music library to have a cash register at the front door.

The thing RIAA is scared of is that their billion dollar backbone can no longer shelter people from exploring music themselves. Their business plan had evolved into telling the world what they will want to listen to and buy, and now they’ll have to actually compete with talented artists again. As the people regain control of the market, music will be judged by it’s content again and will be subjected to it’s own Darwinism. It is a very interesting time for the music industry…and since my entire life is devoted to making music, bring it on. I hope that this situation with my new record proves to other labels and artists that giving people exactly what they want is the smartest way to conduct any business.

TF: How do you feel about people being heavily punished for sharing music?

Benn: Obviously, the last thing I would want is anyone to be fined or imprisoned for listening to my music. Another feature of uploading my own torrent is that it creates a little legal nesting area on a network otherwise deemed illegal by most governments and RIAA. When someone else uploads a torrent of my music, it is without my approval…on the other end of things, and more importantly, when someone raids an admin’s apartment…no police officer is asking me if I want to press charges.

TF: What happens when people donate?

Benn: If you decide that you like the album, you’ll have the option of donating directly to the artist. If you decide that you’d like a CD, you’ll be able to order it directly from my label. I’ve even hired my mother to run our shipping department since she’s the most obsessive-compulsive-perfectionist office worker that I’ve ever laid eyes on.

Finally, every detail of my album’s content, release, and business is done exactly the way I want it to be done. I hope other artists realize how liberating and profitable it is compared to the distribution system we’ve all become so accustomed to.

TF: Radiohead did really quite well after they offered ‘In Rainbows’ online for free. You’re a few days into this experiment – how is it going for you?

Benn: My donations have a way to go before they match the numbers from CD pre-orders, but I’m still crossing my fingers. In a week or so I plan to release a detailed statistical report. For some reason I really like making pie charts.

TF: I’ve listened to the album – Soundtrack To A Vacant Life – and I really enjoyed it. Could you tell us some more about it?

Benn: It was 2 years in the making, and is conceptually me attempting to write the soundtrack to my own life. Of course this means that it is much more cinematic than electronic, and the songs all connect chronologically. Those who have heard my previous albums can expect this one to be a lot more melodic, tame, and instrumental. Suggested listening is with a decent pair of headphones from start to finish.

TF: I have some, I’ll try that later. Thanks for your time.

Benn Jordan’s blog can be found here.

Source: Pirated by iTunes, Artist Turns to BitTorrent

“We will continue our efforts to bring down Scientology, but we need the help and support of another Freedom fighting community, the pirates.” one of Anonymous’ members told TorrentFreak, and the group gave us the opportunity to ask a couple of more questions.

TorrentFreak: Can you briefly describe what “Project Chanology” is?

Anonymous: Project Chanology is the project to bring down Scientology. Nothing more, nothing less. Why that name? Well, we’re working from IRC ‘Channels’ against ‘Scientology’. Mix those words together and add the project in front, and you have it.

TorrentFreak: How did Anonymous start? and how many people take part in it?

Anonymous: Anonymous is an old group of friends. I don’t exactly know the date, but it has been raised by some friends who wanted to test out their hacking skills. Since then, they created Anonymous, and let it be open for anyone who wants to join. That made it into a new kind of hackers-group. It consists of two spheres. The outer sphere is for new people. They mostly are low-skilled and are “scriptkiddies”. Since they have a very good contact with the inner sphere (we’re all friends fast and easily), anyone is allowed to join the inner sphere of high-level hackers. This is a loose representation since it doesn’t fit always. But, this made it for sure into a group of scriptkiddies with the right tools and high-level hackers with the right skills.

TorrentFreak: What is your main motivation to ban Scientology from the Internet?

Anonymous: Scientology is a malicious organization. Here’s a YouTube clip that proves more. Also, they’re frequently taking off content from the Internet. Like a clip in which Cruise promotes Scientology too much, criticizing health science, etc… it would have brought Scientology in a bad situation. So they took it off all sites with an army of lawyers. This is censoring. This is bad. This is against Net Neutrality. This is taking away our freedom and our right to fight for that freedom.

TorrentFreak: Don’t you think your actions violate the freedom of speech?

Anonymous: It does violate the freedom of speech. Of course, we know that. But there should be a refinement. Anonymous fights for freedom of speech in a way they have always used, but a little bit rougher however. For a greater sake.

TorrentFreak: Do you see any parallels between your fight against Scientology and the conflicts between pirates and the entertainment industry?

Anonymous: Yes. Most of us are pirates too. We have no big money to start lawsuits. But the enemy, the MAFIAA and Scientology are both big companies. They misguide the law, they change the law. Scientology members have infiltrated in many governments. Just like the MAFIAA.

TorrentFreak: What is your ultimate goal for “Operation Chanology”?

Anonymous: Our ultimate goal is to let Scientology say in public that they are misleading many people. And that they are destroying the futures of many people.

TorrentFreak: How do you plan to accomplish this goal, apart from the DDoS attacks?

Anonymous: We have IRL raids in planning stage, we have real life protests and demonstrations coming up. We are infiltrating their networks with zip bombs. We are sentencing them.

TorrentFreak: You told us that you wanted the pirates to help you to free the Internet, how can people help?

Anonymous: People can help Anonymous by joining the IRC, get one of the DDoS tools and start firing the DoS. IRC is at irc.partyvan.org. Channels are #Target , #Lazer and #Xenu. There are also many local channels. They can also help us by joining protests, by telling other people about this, by telling their media, etc… The force of humanity will save many lives.

…

Update: As many already argued, it turns out that the person interviewed here is an Anonymous member from the “outer sphere”, who is not as informed as he appeared to be. Sorry.

“I know that I’m not as informed as the inner sphere. However, I had a source which I thought was from there, providing me many answers. He faked his status.
But we do not have one spokesperson. We do not have a leader.
We unite as one, divided by none.
Together, we will bring them down in their glory.
We are Anonymous.
We are Legion.
We do not forgive.
We do not forget.
Expect us.”

Source: Scientology Hackers Ask Pirates To Join Their War

John August, the director of hit movie ‘The Nines’ said he wouldn’t hold it against BitTorrent users who downloaded his movie. So what exactly does he mean by this? TorrentFreak caught up with John who shared some more of his thoughts on piracy with us.

He’s not exactly pleased that his movie is available for unauthorized download, but he’s remaining realistic. “I’m not bouncy with joy over my movie getting torrented,” he told us, “but I think it’s a stretch to equate unlawful downloading with traditional theft.”

Many people in the copyright debate agree that personal use is much different to physical theft, with many drawing the moral line where personal use ends and commercial piracy starts. John seems to do the same: “I get pissed off when I see blackmarket DVDs sold on the sidewalks, because those are literally discs we’re not selling. It’s an organized crime. But an individual watching a movie he’s downloaded for free isn’t on the same scale for me.”

So how does John view the usefulness of BitTorrent for marketing purposes? He told us: “The pro-torrent argument, particularly for indie films which get limited distribution (like The Nines), is that a torrent allows a lot of people to see the movie who otherwise couldn’t. And yes, a filmmaker wants his work seen.”

Of course, monetizing content is something that film makers have to consider, as John explains: “[the filmaker] wants to be paid for his efforts. No matter where you work – an office, a factory, a retail store – you do your job with the expectation of getting paid. If your employer decided he didn’t want to pay you, you’d be upset. If the employer said, ‘Well, the customers decided to take the products without paying for them,’ you’d rightly tell him to get off his fat ass and hire a security guard.”

Many discussions about the ‘solutions’ to piracy touch heavily on the need for more reasonable, appropriate laws and greater ease of access to legal content. John seems to be of a similar view: “There are lots of things that can and should be free – or at least freer. Copyright needs to be re-thunk, particularly in terms of corporations and their endless time limits. And legitimate, convenient alternatives need to be available, so that’s it’s not any more difficult to find and download a movie legally.”

Finally, John told us about an interesting idea he’s hoping budding film makers will pick up on: “One of the things I hope to do with The Nines – sometime after the writers’ strike, when I can call Sony again – is to release a low-res version of all the source material for The Nines, so budding filmmakers can try their hand at cutting (and re-cutting) a real feature.”

John finishes up with a thought about the motivation behind someone downloading his movie: “I’m watching this first wave of torrents carefully, hoping the people who are downloading The Nines are doing it because they love movies, and not because they want to screw over some mythical ‘The Man’”

Maybe we should let Tom Corelis over at DailyTech put your mind at ease John? Here he is, writing about Ernesto’s recent article charting the success of an independent, free to download movie:

Meanwhile, TorrentFreak attributes Steal This Film II’s success to the creators’ wise avoidance of psychological reactance, which states that people are inclined to respond in a manner opposite of the rules when it inhibits behavioral freedom

You know it makes sense.

Source: Director of ‘The Nines’ Talks to TorrentFreak About Piracy

It now seems that there’s some good news for Deimos as The Pirate Bay is offering their help. In fact, they claim to have two servers lined up for Demonoid already. Pirate Bay’s Brokep made this public in a recent interview on the Subdemon techcast where he said: “We tried to contact the guys behind Demonoid and we’ve set up a tracker for them but they haven’t responded. But, we have two servers running for them if they want to set it up.” Brokep also says that he hasn’t heard back from Deimos yet, but it sure is a great gesture.

If Demonoid decides to take them up on their offer they will not be alone. In 2007 quite a lot of torrent sites moved to Sweden, and to PRQ in particular. Sweden is considered to be a safe haven for BitTorrent sites, and PRQ is popular because it is owned by TiAMO and Anakata, two of the founders of The Pirate Bay. Ironically, however, The Pirate Bay is not hosted in Sweden or at PRQ, which is probably a wise decision.

In the remainder of the interview Brokep and the interviewers discuss some of the recent news surrounding The Pirate Bay, such as the huge pile of paperwork they received last month, the new protocol they have been developing, and the explosive growth of their tracker. It is definitely worth listening to, and I’m looking forward to the next episodes of this podcast, and to more news surrounding Demonoid.

You can download the podcast, including the interview here, or stream (might be buggy) the torrent and listen to it right away, with Bitlet.

Source: The Pirate Bay: Demonoid is Welcome in Sweden

Interview

TF: Thanks for taking the time to talk with us. Please introduce yourself.

CS: My name is Christian Solmecke and I work as a lawyer in Germany at the Cologne Chambers of Lawyers Wilde & Beuger. There I work in the field of Internet law/New Media. Presently we are defending about 500 file-sharers against the German music industry.

Obtaining identities behind IP addresses

TF: We have written many times here on TorrentFreak about the P2P tracking company Logistep and how they track down alleged file-sharers. They are collecting data about internet users all over Europe yet their activities are not welcome in Italy or France. Their methods of getting user data from ISPs seem to questionably legal from a European standpoint (according to Juliane Kokott, Advocate General to the European Court of Justice) – why are they allowed to continue with these actions?

CS: First of all it has to be stated that the statements by Juliane Kokott at the European Court of Justice were construed in various ways. As far as I understood Ms. Kokott, the storage and the disclosure of data is not to be made impossible in general. The disclosure, however, is to be subject to control by the state.

TF: Are there ways for media companies to get data from ISPs about who an IP address belongs to in civil cases?

CS: At present, civil law does not provide a claim for disclosure of identities behind IP addresses for the rights owners (media companies) from the ISPs. For this reason the rights owners choose to gain disclosure via criminal procedures. Based on the data provided by Logistep and other P2P tracking enterprises, an offence is reported. The public prosecution service is obliged to investigate because a copyright infringement is a criminal offence in Germany. Here the legal situations differs from e.g. the Spanish system in which copyright infringements can only ever be committed within a commercial context. As the statements by Juliane Kokott relate to a legal action initiated by the Spanish music industry, they are not necessary fully transferable to all European legal systems.

The big question is if a German counsel for prosecution can, within criminal law proceedings, get information from the ISPs about who a certain IP address was assigned to at a certain time. Many legal practitioners argue that a court order is required before the data in question may be disclosed. In practice, however, the ISPs react directly to the requests by the counsels of prosecution and disclose the addresses without one. Most of the criminal proceedings are discontinued as the counsels for the prosecution regard these cases as petty offences. The music industry lawyers then authorise access to the records and thus obtain the address of the person behind the IP address. After this the civil law proceedings begin.

The future of disclosure/discovery

TF: This situation whereby the court’s time is wasted on these so-called criminal cases – just to get names behind IP addresses – is a terrible waste of public funds. Does this method have a future?

CS: In the future, obtaining disclosure via criminal proceedings is to be stopped. A civil law is planned for obtaining identities behind IP addresses. The rights owners (e.g. the music industry) are to be allowed to make an immediate request from the ISPs as to who a certain IP address belongs to. This rule is to serve the realization of the EU enforcement guidelines.

The big question here is if the rights owners (movie/recording industries) shall have such a claim for disclosure without prior obtaining a court order (which, of course, would entail expenses). Some German parties have different opinions. If I have correctly understood Juliane Kokott, a judicial caveat is an essential requisite so that our German copyright may remain consistent with the corresponding European guidelines.

European Data Retention

TF: On the 10th November 2007 the German Federal Parliament adopted the new EU data retention directive which essentially requires that ISPs spy on their customers and gather data about what they do on the internet. Who can access this information?

CS: Since the beginning of January 2008, the ISPs ARE required to store data about their customers for 6 months. This amendment was brought about by the EU data retention directive. The purpose of data storage, however, is the disclosure of data to the enforcement agencies in criminal cases. This storage rule is designed exclusively for the prevention of terrorism and the prosecution of organized criminals. The German federal Attorney General, Brigitte Zypries has stated that the data isn’t supposed to be disclosed to private parties such as the music industry.

TF: So can this data stored for use in future criminal cases be used in a civil case?

CS: As of today this question remain unsolved. If I have understood Ms. Kokott correctly, such disclosure would not be consistent with European law.

Challenging the accuracy of P2P tracking systems

TF: Logistep use a system called ‘The File-Sharing Monitor‘ which is a fairly secret piece of software based on the Shareaza P2P client. They use this to gather ‘evidence’ against alleged file-sharers yet this system is unlicensed and unaudited for accuracy by any official body or government. Cameras used by the police to detect speeding motorists need to be examined and calibrated carefully so why is the ‘evidence’ collected by this system allowed to be used when Logistep don’t allow it to be examined?

CS: In an exemplary legal proceeding at the Amtsgericht (Munipical Court) Frankfurt, we are currently having an expert clarify if the evidence logged by Logistep is accurate enough to be used as evidence in court. According to our opinion, various possibilities of manipulation exist in the whole chain of evidence.

Privacy

TF: Do P2P tracking companies breach privacy laws?

CS: Up to now, no German court , as far as is known , has ever dealt with the question if collecting data by Logistep infringes upon data privacy law. Of course one could argue that the respective user consciously discloses the data by connecting to the internet. This controversial question is certain to be discussed in future.

Production line threats, risky Germany

TF: Logistep and their legal partners have threatened many thousands of people all around Europe, including the UK. We haven’t heard of any cases going to court. Have you heard of any cases actually going to court in any country in Europe and if so, what was the outcome?

CS : We estimate about 200,000 file-sharers have received threatening letters in 2007, in Germany alone. There a hundreds of filesharers in Germany who are being subjected to claims in courts. Most of this is carried out by the music industry but here the tracking was conducted by Pro Media GmbH and not by Logistep.

Mostly the music industry won these court cases. However, I have knowledge of one case where two numbers were inverted and the wrong owner of an IP address was identified.

Is an IP address alone enough evidence to identify a particular individual?

TF: TorrentFreak is in contact with many people who have received threatening letters in the UK and in many of these cases we’ve seen proof that the bill payer is not the one who committed any offense. Surely this threatening of innocent people is causing a problem?

CS: Frequently the truly infringing parties are not subjected to the claims, but the owner of the IP address instead. In most cases, children were the infringing parties and their parents were subjected to the claims. The parents then are then held liable as it’s felt they contributed to the copyright infringement. In this matter, too, diverging German court decisions exist. Some courts say that parents can only be held liable if they fail to instruct their children sufficiently or secondly, secure the computer in such a way as to render file-sharing impossible.

TF: Requiring that the parents block the use of all file-sharing software is a little too far don’t you think?

CS: According to our opinion, a complete blocking of file-sharing software cannot be accepted. File-sharing software in itself is not illegal. Solely the copyright infringement committed with it is illegal. However, the courts bring forward the argument that file-sharing software should be blocked because mainly copyright infringements are being committed with it.

TF: Accusing the bill payer regardless of if they did anything or not is a very blunt instrument. Are they really responsible for what others do on their connection? Are parents responsible for their children’s actions on the internet?

CS: There are some indications of a move towards a system which limits the liability of the bill payer. For example, some courts deem that simply instructing a child not to download is sufficient. A recent decision of the court in Frankfurt stated that adult family members don’t even have to be instructed or controlled by the bill payer unless they are suspected of committing any file-sharing activity. Another court said that a company could not be held liable if an employee used the company internet connection to commit copyright infringement.

Calculating compensation for rights holders

TF: The bottom line is always money, we know that. What sort of financial punishments are people being subjected to?

CS: The lawyers’ fees are calculated according to the amount of compensation. In standing jurisdiction, German courts presently assume compensation of 10,000 euros per song. German filesharers provide an average of 300 songs to upload. This would mean compensation of 3 million euros per case. Typically, based on these figures, fees for a single warning letter amount to 16,000 euros.

The threatening/warning letters amount to “just” 3,000 euros to 10,000 euros, but they point out that theoretically they are entitled to demand much more. Unfortunately many German courts concede to the music industry. Presently the District Court (Landgericht) has decided that in a case of uploading 50 music tracks, compensation amount of 500,000 euros may be assumed. In my opinion, this is a dramatic situation.

TF: It is indeed. Thanks for your time. Do you have anything to add?

CS: We publish fresh daily news (in German language) concerning filesharing cases on our internet site www.wb-law.de.

Source: TorrentFreak Interviews a Lawyer Defending 500 File-Sharers

Steal This Film 1 already was a huge success with nearly 3 million downloads, and we think this will be no different for part 2. The film, again produced by The League of Noble Peers, features some people from the BitTorrent community such as Erik from mininova and Peter (aka Brokep) from The Pirate Bay. Dan Glickman from the MPAA also makes a short appearance stating that they will never be able to stop piracy, but I guess we already knew that.

Jamie King of the League Of Noble Peers was answering chat requests today, so we caught up with him to ask a couple of questions:

TF: You must be excited about releasing the film finally. What’s been the delay?

JK: To be honest, the film simply took a lot longer than we’d imagined to make — it’s a big step forward from STF I for us. And then we got sidetracked with The Oil Of The 21st Century, a conference some of us were involved in organising in Berlin this year. It was great and we got to preview the film there for some friends, but we’re sorry to everyone who was waiting. We’re sure no one has been that upset!

TF: Are you working with anyone to promote the film this time?

JK: Of course we’ll be working with The Pirate Bay again to do a bit of promotion, as we’ve really discussed the project a lot with those guys. We’ve also got to know the people at Mininova who’ll be seeding the torrent and promoting it a bit. I was also really pleased to hear that BitTorrent themselves will be featuring the film since we met them during a screening of STF II in Amsterdam. We’re really up for working with anyone who’d like to feature STEAL THIS FILM so get in touch!

TF: Is there a streaming version anywhere?

JK: We discussed this a lot. There will be a streaming version (and of course we can’t and wouldn’t want to prevent anyone transcoding it and uploading it whereever they like) but right now, it’s about BitTorrent. With The Pirate Bay and Mininova seeding it, there shouldn’t be any problem with the download speeds.

TF: Are you asking for donations?

JK: Yes, but not for this film :D We have a new project in development — based around our ‘Oil Of The 21st Century’ idea — and we’re headed out to Asia in the new year to start investigating. We’re asking anyone who wants to help us with this project to donate $5 or more (or whatever they can afford really) to donate@stealthisfilm.com. Oh! And we’re giving away a secret giftpack to anyone who donates $15 or more.

TF: Any final words?

JK: Only that we’re really pleased to be releasing STF II after more than a year and we’re looking forward to all the argument we hope it will generate. And we’d like to say a massive thanks to everyone who supported us so far. You rock.

—

You can download Steal This Film 2 over here.

Source: Steal This Film 2 Goes Live

Back in July, we took a look at a beta version of the xbtit tracker package, which aimed to make owning and running a BitTorrent tracker a much easier, simplified experience. Created by BtiTeam, xbtit enables potential site administrators to quickly and easily set up their own BitTorrent tracker, something that was only previously accomplished by people with some coding skills. TorrentFreak decided to get to know a little more about this tracker and the people behind it.

xbtit Development Leader, Lupin

I have been in the BitTorrent scene since 2003 when I used TorrentTrader. In September 2004 the BtiTracker story began when Sqrtboy took the TorrentTrader development and transformed it. Many hacks became “premium” which meant paying for them. The other popular system was Tbdev (ex TorrentBits) which did not have a great look and lacked many features. I decided to give the opportunity to all tracker owners to have a good, complete, and easy system with which to manage their torrents. For 3 years I put many hours in the development while other developers came and went.

xbtit Project Leader, Locutius

LokiTorrent and Suprnova going down at the end of 2004 was shocking, there were big sites collapsing almost monthly. It was uncertain if filesharing was gonna survive, the sites I was frequenting were dead men walking. They knew it too. The USA would be clean of trackers within 6 months. That is the background in which I decided to open my own tracker. I found Lupin at btiteam.org was releasing an easy code base to install and manage with a feature set to rival the more complex systems.

TF: So what exactly is xbtit? Can you give us a little history?

Lupin: Early in 2006 we decided to create a new system which can handle many peers based on xbtt (by Olaf van der Spek). We wanted a great look and features that no other tracker system had. We really put in a lot of work, in this case we got the help of some very generous developers in our team.

Locutius: You already know how difficult it is to set up and run a tracker. You have to be a linux guru, fluent in PHP, a db admin, a security expert, and all that before you start to performance tune your httpd and iptables. I wanted an easy to set up and run system the size of LokiTorrent. Then I had an idea. What if everyone could have an easy system the size of Loki?

TF: Where does the name/acronym xbtit originate?

Locutius: The name for the project comes from the bringing together of xbtt and btit. The merger of the strongest backend with the strongest frontend, to make xbtit.

TF: So what would you say are xbtit’s main features? What does it offer which other trackers don’t?

Locutius: There is a design focus by Lupin and the dev team to make the system smart and capable. The template system allows single click installation of hacks, modifications, and styles. There are two tracker systems, the PHP tracker for platforms without access to system root, and xbtt capable of running millions of peers at very low overhead. There are two forum systems, an internal forum and Simple Machines Forum (SMF). There is an install script and an upgrade script from previous version. Lupin has included a phpmailer script so you can run your tracker from a Windows desktop at home!

TF: In the past your team has talked of how easy it is to install, setup and operate xbtit. How does xbtit compare to other trackers?

Lupin: I don’t like to compare myself with other work, but the users will, and with no doubt will choose xbtit because:

- easiest to manage (almost all tasks can be done via web admin interface)
- easy to hack, one click and you’re ready to go with hacks and new features
- modules system which will allow to extend the power and the features
- xbtt support, usually only done by hacking to allow the use of xbtt as backend, in our work it’s already done, so also no problem to upgrade an hacked version
- SMF support, if you like a “real forum” then no problem, you can use SMF
- internal forum with subforum support, the internal forum has been rewritten from scratch and is optimized

TF: Your site offers different ‘flavors’ of xbtit. What do these ‘flavors’ mean to the end user?

Locutius:The home of the code is btiteam.org, an open source support and development forum. The open source flavor is free.

Then we have the professionally supported flavors, xbtit PREMIUM and xbtit PRO. The difference is PRO includes VPS hosting for the code with the new tracker admin receiving the password to a fully installed site on his own private server. It doesn’t get easier to own a tracker than that.

www.xbtit.com is the showcase for the xbtit live demo and the home to the xbtit private members forum where it all happens. Buying xbtit PREMIUM or PRO gives you 10 support tickets and access to the private members forum where you can exchange the tickets for btiteam hacks, modifications, and styles (everything is nominally priced, hacks cost no more than 2 or 3 euros). Members of xbtit can also request private hacks and coding for their site. Eventually, all the hacks and styles on xbtit.com will be released into the open source community on btiteam.org.

The difference between btiteam.org and xbtit.com is the same difference as between Fedora and REDHAT. xbtit at biteam.org is like Fedora, it is exciting, it is free. xbtit at xbtit.com is like REDHAT, it is supported and you have privileged access to the dev team and first hit on the hacks. xbtit.com funds the free open source support and development at btiteam.org.

TF: You are also offering hosting with xbtit and this could have copyright implications. What’s your view on this?

Locutius: BitTorrent is strongly associated with filesharing and there is an issue there with the improper application of the technology by copyright pirates. But there are greater more important economic uses for the technology. Our enemies are Luddites but technology has never been criminalized and there is no issue with hosting torrent trackers if the owners keep 3 simple rules: adhere to the DMCA, only supply your own content, do not profit from another’s copyright.

Some of the content traversing the BitTorrent networks may come with a legacy copyright issue but that is to be expected when the global media industry is operating a monopoly.

TF: Perhaps as a backlash to this monopolistic control, Indie content is starting to explode on the internet. You see your team as having a part in this?

Locutius: Significantly, our technology is making it easier for independent publishing and distribution of privately created digital content, movies and music and software. By removing the traditional barriers to tracker ownership our technology can land in the creative hands of artists in a form they can adopt. I want to see a swarm of private trackers seeding creativity the world over.

TF: Thanks, and good luck in achieving that.

Source: Put a Head on the BitTorrent Hydra with xbtit

TorrentFreak – What topics are you focusing in on your campaign?

Christof Leng – With national data retention starting on January 1st, this is certainly a major topic not only for us, but for the opposition in general. Beyond that, the privacy infringements by government agencies are something to be discussed. Another big topic for young people are the new tuition fees, which lead to a drop in student numbers. We believe strongly in the knowledge society and stopping the concept of free education will hurt Germany’s future.

TorrentFreak – So more on the privacy than culture/copyright angles?

Christof Leng – Unfortunately, copyright is something that is not decided in Hesse or even in Germany, but mostly on the European level. Thus is plays a lesser role in this election. But we try to raise awareness and get support for the next European election in 2009.

TorrentFreak – How many people have you put up as candidates?

Christof Leng – Ok, I guess I should explain a little bit about the German election system first. We have (party) lists and direct candidates, and we don’t run for direct seats, only a party list. A direct win would be utopian, as it’s majority vote. Because we’re sane and realistic, we focus on the list, which in our case has seven pirates on it.

TorrentFreak – And the minimum requirement on the party list is 5%?

Christof Leng – To get into the regional parliament of Hesse, yes, but to my best knowledge, no new party ever achieved this on this first election in an existing federal state.

TorrentFreak – Are you, however, hopeful?

Christof Leng – There are other things to aim at. If you get 1% at a regional election, you get public funding.

TorrentFreak – Is that an attainable goal?

Christof Leng – As we are a brand new party it’s really hard to predict. The Hessian division of the party was founded in February with only a few pirates. Less than a year later we already have a efficient organization and were able to collect those 1000 signatures. And the growth has not slowed down by any means. It might be not as mind-blowing as in Sweden, but we are really happy with the development. Now we want to show that we are in fact serious party and can do campaigns and participate in elections. Furthermore, while we are already well-known in the interested public, we are still mostly unknown to the general public. Everything we currently do helps us to get more and more attention.

TorrentFreak – How has your party been viewed by the mainstream media?

Christof Leng – I have no real overview of that, sorry. I’m aware that a lot of newspaper articles have mentioned us as an example of the smaller parties in the upcoming election (I guess it’s because of the catchy name), but we have been ignored mostly so far. But the election campaigns just started to heat up, there’s not much news about the election in general. We have been covered by media interested in youth, Internet/computer, and/or civil rights. We are regularly covered by Heise Online, the most important German computer/Internet news site. A lot of journalists support us, because they feel the pressure of surveillance hits them hard and hits them first. Freedom of press is endangered and they are aware of it. There have been several scandals of government agencies investigating journalists and infringing privacy laws while doing that. You also read more about the US election 11 months away in *German* press than about the Hessian one 2 months away…

TorrentFreak – It must drive you mad.

Christof Leng – On the contrary. The heat of the election in Sweden really did hurt the Swedish pirates. If it is close and it seems important, many people are afraid of trying something new. We are new, we still need to build up our reputation. That’s much easier now than in an election where people will go for the safe bet anyway. We’d not be able to compete with the major parties mainstream media coverage. With them not being covered by the media either it’s not that much of an uphill battle, but it is still uphill, of course. It’s an optimal setting for us in Germany right now (as a party, not as a citizen). The two biggest parties form a national coalition. That boosts smaller parties naturally. Imagine the US president being a republican and the vice president a democrat…

TorrentFreak – Clearly you don’t have the financial support that the major parties have, how has that altered your strategies from the traditional methods used in a political campaign?

Christof Leng – We claim that we are experts of knowledge society, online cooperation, and sharing. That is also our strong point in the campaign. We use the Internet a lot, not only to reach voters, but to coordinate our campaign. Also, most of the population in Hesse is concentrated in the Rhein-Main area (Frankfurt is the biggest city). This makes it easy for us to reach a good part of the voters. Especially the voters that are interested in our topics (students, IT workers, journalists), and they use the internet.

TorrentFreak – with about 38Million of Germany’s roughly 82M citizens as net users, that’s clearly a core demographic.

Christof Leng – Exactly .

TorrentFreak – Is there much negative campaigning in Germany?

Christof Leng – yes, but only bashing the big parties. We are mostly ignored as a party. But… they start adopting our positions. the SPD tries to look like a civil rights party in comparison with the CDU, even though they work together on data retention in the national government. the Green party made a big fuss on their last convention about how bad data retention is. The Left party tout the topic too. Point is, none of the parties takes the topic seriously.

TorrentFreak – Why is that?

Christof Leng – the SPD and Green Party prepared much of what is going on now back when they were in government. The SPD and Left party form a coalition in Berlin and just issued new laws for public surveillance. each of the established parties plays the white knight for civil rights only as long as they are in opposition. they are brainwashed as soon as they are in government. That’s why we need the Pirate Party.

Jan Huwald, Political secretary of the Piratenpartei Deutschland was similarly upbeat about the election. “Most motivating in the upcoming election campaign is it’s constant relation to grassroot political movement. Beside the visible activity the word is spreading about the pirates. Citizens are aware of our new party much more than traditional media’s coverage might suggest. In fact while collecting signatures many people actively searched for our signing stand to help out”

The question still remains, however, if the Hesse party will do any better than Rick Falkvinge, and the Swedes did in 2006.

Source: Hessians Hope to Weave Election Magic