In November 2011, Universal Music, the world’s largest recording label, sued the music streaming service in a copyright infringement lawsuit claiming hundreds of millions of dollars in damages. In December, Sony and Warner joined the action and in January this year EMI sued over a contractual dispute.

Just last month a group of entertainment companies in Denmark obtained a court order forcing an ISP to block Grooveshark at the DNS level, a punishment previously inflicted on The Pirate Bay after prolonged legal argument.

So when the recording labels claim that Grooveshark has cost them hundreds of millions of dollars and when headlines refer to the music streaming service in the same breath as The Pirate Bay, are those statements and associations fair?

According to a source close to Grooveshark who spoke to TorrentFreak under condition of anonymity, the differences are not only palpable but the accusations made by some in the recording industry are just plain false.

Our source insists that Grooveshark has aggressively pursued licenses across the globe, gone directly to artists and has built (and continues to build) systems to help rights holders manage their content and receive revenue shares. But sometimes Grooveshark’s ideals run counter to the labels’ preferred route to the market.

“Grooveshark wants to keep the platform Open. That is to say, even after all the deals are inked, the company wants artists to be able to share without having to go through a label. That’s Grooveshark’s definition of open,” TorrentFreak was told.

Another perceived area of conflict is that Grooveshark want to keep their platform and musical offering unlimited.

“That doesn’t mean that users don’t have to pay and it certainly doesn’t mean that record labels don’t get paid, but users might pay with their attention or their interaction, or (and I know this is controversial) with their data,” our source explained.

Grooveshark’s 35 million users are a rich source of information which the company believes could be of immense value to the record labels. A comment from a company exec quoted in the Universal lawsuit suggested that in some instances that value could cover the costs of music licensing. In some instances and in a practical sense, information may be the only currency users have to trade for music.

“If a 13-year old kid can’t get access to music because she or he doesn’t have a credit card and Grooveshark can earn enough money to pay a record label off of a few survey questions then that should be net positive for the label, the artist, the user and Grooveshark,” our source noted. “The alternative is piracy.”

Of course, stopping piracy is something the labels are striving for every day, but they also want to do business on their terms and maintain control over their product. Grooveshark, it seems, may be being perceived as problematic in that area.

“As far as I can tell, it’s not that labels don’t want money. It’s that they don’t want Grooveshark’s type of money. They see that model as a slippery slope,” our source explains.

“The last thing they want is for artists to be able to make a living in a way that undercuts the 1-to-1 value of recording to dollar. It’s seen as an attack on their power base, which is not what Grooveshark set out to do.”

TorrentFreak has learned that Grooveshark’s creators initially believed that the labels would not only embrace the company’s technology, but seeing value in new artist revenue streams would also be the first to invest. That seems unlikely now.

But the company still firmly believes that long-term viability coupled with equity and revenue sharing can bring in more money than traditional streaming models for the labels. However, for reasons best known to Universal, Warner and Sony, the litigation route has been selected instead and Grooveshark will now have to fight its corner in a civil lawsuit, presumably protected by the DMCA.

“The DMCA Safe Harbors are not a loophole,” our source insists.

“They are necessary for the progress of society and are meant for situations EXACTLY like Grooveshark’s. It’s not something to use for protection or to hide behind. It’s meant to allow the development of technologies that are potentially revolutionary. That doesn’t mean that if you operate within them, you shouldn’t be expected to reward content creators for their work and that’s not what we want them to mean.”

But because of the position Grooveshark finds itself in, the company has been left with a dilemma.

“When record labels use threat of criminal prosecution as a negotiating tactic you are left with two choices; Continue working to improve the user experience, build tools for those rights holders that do want to participate and do your best to walk the straight and narrow of the law. Or stop innovating in an industry that is desperate for innovation.”

“Which is the principled position?”

Source: Grooveshark Fights To Keep Music Open and Unlimited

While the immense capabilities of the Internet has made sending and receiving data child’s play, there are others who find the transfer of bits and bytes across much shorter distances just as fascinating.

In 2009 we reported on the Kiosk of Piracy, an offline copy of The Pirate Bay accessible via local WiFi. Although a neat little project, the Kiosk was in one specific location in Germany, meaning anyone out of range would not be able to access it. But now a cool little tool means that anyone, anywhere, can offer a similar file-sharing service for just a few dollars.

Inspired by the local transmitting power of traditional pirate radio, NYU art professor David Darts created the PirateBox, a WiFi hotspot and server providing easy and anonymous access to the files held within.

In a previous incarnation (see below) the PirateBox – which utilized a full-size wireless router and a USB stick for storage – was housed in a fairly cumbersome metal lunchbox.

The huge price cut has been made possible by using new hardware, specifically the TP-LINK TL-MR3020 3G Wireless N Router, available from Newegg at just $39.99. Once obtained, all people have to do is follow the PirateBox installation instructions here, insert a USB stick full of files and power on. As can be seen below, it looks rather good.

Although great for anyone to share files within its range, considering the pressure currently being applied to university students by record labels and their anti-piracy partners, the chances of music-stuffed PirateBoxes popping up on campuses all around the world increases every day.

And considering that The Pirate Bay can now fit on the smallest of USB sticks, every PirateBox could also contain a copy of the world’s most famous torrent site.

Source: PirateBox Takes File-Sharing Off The Radar and Offline, For Next To Nothing

From SOPA to Megaupload, there is a growing uncertainly about the future of sharing.

While many BitTorrent sites and cyberlockers continue to operate as usual, there is a growing group of users who are expanding their horizons to see what other means of sharing are available if the worst case scenario becomes reality.

Anonymous, decentralized and uncensored are the key and most sought-after features. For some this means signing up with a VPN to make their BitTorrent sharing more private, but new clients are also generating interest.

Earlier this month we wrote about Tribler, a decentralized (not anonymous) BitTorrent client that makes torrent sites obsolete. We’ve covered Tribler for more than half a decade, but it was only after our most recent post that it really took off with more than a hundred thousand downloads in a few days.

But there are more file-sharing tools that are specifically built to withstand outside attacks. Some even add anonymity into the mix. RetroShare is such a private and uncensored file-sharing client, and the developers have also noticed a significant boom in users recently.

The RetroShare network allows people to create a private and encrypted file-sharing network. Users add friends by exchanging PGP certificates with people they trust. All the communication is encrypted using OpenSSL and files that are downloaded from strangers always go through a trusted friend.

In other words, it’s a true Darknet and virtually impossible to monitor by outsiders.

RetroShare founder DrBob told us that while the software has been around since 2006, all of a sudden there’s been a surge in downloads. “The interest in RetroShare has massively shot up over the last two months,” he said.

“In January our downloads tripled when interest in SOPA was at its peak. It more than doubled again in February, when cyberlockers disabled sharing or shut down entirely. At the moment we are getting 10 times more downloads than in December 2011.”

RetroShare’s founder believes that there is an increased need for security, privacy and freedom among file-sharers, features that are at the core of his application.

“RetroShare is about creating a private space on the Internet. A social collaboration network where you can share anything you want. A space that is free from the prying eyes of governments, corporations and advertisers. This is vitally important as our freedom on the Internet is under increasing threat,” DrBob told TorrentFreak.

“RetroShare is free from censorship: like Facebook banning ‘obscene’ breast-feeding photographs. A network that allows you to use any pseudonym, without insisting on knowing your real name. A network where you will not face the threat of jail, or being banned from entry into a country for an innocent tweet.”

It’s impossible to accurately predict what file-sharing will look like 5 years from now. But, a safe assumption is that anonymity will play a more central role than it ever has.

Recent crackdowns have made operators of central file-sharing sites and services more cautious of copyright infringement. Some even went as far as shutting down voluntarily, like BTjunkie.

In the long run this might drive more casual downloaders to legitimate alternatives, if these are available. Those who keep on sharing could move to smaller communities, darknets, and anonymous connections.

Source: Anonymous, Decentralized and Uncensored File-Sharing is Booming

The aim of the copyright holders is never to take any of the cases to trial, but to get alleged infringers to pay a substantial cash settlement to make legal action go away. Some equal this scheme to extortion, but the copyright holders say they are merely protecting their work.

One of the first film studios to recognize the potential of these schemes was Nu Image. Last year they had the questionable honor of filing the largest P2P lawsuit in history by targeting 23,322 alleged downloaders of ‘The Expendables’.

While that case was dismissed a few months later, Nu Image isn’t leaving BitTorrent users alone.

Late last week the studio filed a brand new mass-BitTorrent lawsuit at the US District Court of Maryland for another well-known movie. The suit targets 2,165 alleged sharers of ‘Conan The Barbarian,’ a film that was downloaded on BitTorrent by millions of people in recent months.

The accused individuals had their IP-addresses exposed while downloading the film, and were ‘busted’ somewhere between December 1st 2011 and February 1st of this year as can be seen from the full list of “Doe defendants” below.

Other than the new film title, the paperwork is pretty much identical to previous lawsuits that were filed by the US Copyright Group (USCG). However, a closer look reveals that the lawyers did learn from ‘mistakes’ made in previous cases.

One of the most significant changes is that all defendants appear to reside in the right district, Maryland in this particular case. Previously judges have dismissed tens of thousands of defendants because they lived in other districts. This was also the main reason why Nu Image’s ‘The Expendables’ case died prematurely.

The judge in that case advised Nu Image to use one of the many IP-location databases to find out who they can go after in court, and the movie studio has done so for their most recent filing.

Another smart move from the movie studio is to include only IP-addresses allocated to Internet providers that were previously cooperative, such as Comcast and Sprint. Noticeably absent is Time Warner, who successfully fought the mass-production of IP-addresses in a related case.

While the above give Nu Image a better chance of reaching their desired goal, BitTorrent users aren’t sitting still either.

The mass-lawsuits and the upcoming copyright alert system motivated many BitTorrent users to routinely hide their IP-addresses through proxy and VPN services. But nevertheless, the scheme is profitable enough for studios like Nu Image to continue. Even if only half of the defendants pay up the total settlement earnings will be in the millions.

And so the cat and mouse game continues.

Source: ‘Conan The Barbarian’ Chases 2,165 BitTorrent Downloaders in Court

An international operation shut down the movie streaming portal Kino.to and police made more than a dozen arrests. As collateral damage, several file-hosting services connected to Kino.to also went down.

A few days ago Skyload.net, another cyberlocker with connections to Kino.to, was raided and shut down while the site’s alleged operator Maik P. was arrested. According to the authorities the 28-year-old operator was personally responsible for uploading more than 10,000 films .

The German anti-piracy outfit GVU reports that after Kino.to was shut down Skyload continued its operation by linking unauthorized streams and downloads to alternative movie portals such as kinoX.to.

Together with the operator of Skyload, the police also arrested Marcel E., the 25-year-old owner of the site’s hosting provider. Aside from providing hosting services to the cyberlocker, the Internet provider is also alleged to have hosted servers to release groups and movie streaming portals.

How tight the connections were between the hosting provider and the file-sharing services is unclear from the information currently being made public. It is quite unusual for a hosting provider to get arrested for alleged crimes that were committed through clients.

Both men have been charged with copyright-related offenses and face up to several years in prison if they’re found guilty. Several other people connected to the Kino.to ring have already gone on trial for their part in the site’s operation and the main admin was recently sentenced to three years in prison.

Together with the Megaupload shutdown, the actions against sites affiliated with Kino.to have drastically changed the cyberlocker business. In particular, rewards programs for uploaders became a liability and have been dropped by dozens of sites.

Source: Police Raid File-Hosting Site, Arrest Operator and ISP

This change hasn’t gone unnoticed by the RIAA, as Vice President Mitch Glazier just published a scathing reply. Describing The Pirate Bay as one of the worst offenders, the RIAA boss argues that the industry needs better tools to topple such ‘rogue’ websites.

“Talk about Exhibit A for addressing rogue websites in a meaningful manner,” he writes.

“A blatantly illegal file-sharing site, proud that it’s an online bazaar of every conceivable U.S. copyrighted work, found criminally responsible by its own country’s legal system and who has been ordered by courts in at least seven European countries to be blocked by ISPs, has publicly acknowledged changing its domain name to escape U.S. laws.”

“It is motivated by its brazen philosophy of thumbing its nose at the basic rights of America’s creators. It is, in a phrase, one of the worst of the worst.”

The RIAA boss then seizes the opportunity to call on lawmakers to pull sites like The Pirate Bay offline before it does more damage to the entertainment industries.

“It is one of the most clear and obvious examples of why meaningful tools are needed to target foreign rogue sites that steal American jobs. Responsible leaders in the tech community should come to the table with constructive ideas and work with us and others to address this blatant theft before more damage is done to our economy and the creative community.”

Although the punchline above is expected from the music industry group, the response does raise an interesting point. Apparently the RIAA also realizes that domain seizures are completely useless as websites can simply switch to foreign domains. If that is the case, then why risk breaking the Internet by baking it into law?

The Pirate Bay, meanwhile, is seriously offended by Glazier’s writing. They decided to respond with a rebuttal, describing the RIAA as a delusional outfit that has to be stopped.

Source: RIAA: The Pirate Bay is The Worst of The Worst

However, a new study reveals that movie industry itself has the key to decreasing piracy, without passing any news laws.

In a paper titled ‘Reel Piracy: The Effect of Online Film Piracy on International Box Office Sales’ researchers from the University of Minnesota and Wellesley College examine the link between BitTorrent piracy and box office returns. As hypothesized, they find that international movie piracy losses are directly linked to the delay between US and foreign premieres.

In other words, the longer it takes before a movie is released internationally, the more box office revenues are impacted through piracy.

“We find that longer release windows are associated with decreased box office returns, even after controlling for film and country fixed effects. This relationship is much stronger in contexts where piracy is more prevalent: after BitTorrent’s adoption and in heavily pirated genres,” they write.

“Our findings indicate that, as a lower bound, international box office returns in our sample were at least 7% lower than they would have been in the absence of pre-release piracy.”

Aside from their conclusion that a lack of availability is fueling piracy, the researchers report a perhaps even more interesting result. Contrary to what the MPAA and other lobby groups claim, the study doesn’t find a negative effect of BitTorrent piracy on US box office revenues.

“We do not see evidence of elevated sales displacement in US box office revenue following the adoption of BitTorrent, and we suggest that delayed legal availability of the content abroad may drive the losses to piracy,” the researchers write.

The above means that movie pirates in the US wouldn’t have bought a ticket at the box office if file-sharing was nonexistent. Only international box office sales see a piracy related decline in revenue, which is attributed to long release windows, something the industry itself can address.

Yet, the movie industry lobbyists keep hammering on about eliminating pirate sites, while ignoring the fact that the industry itself can make important steps to decrease international piracy as well. Governments around the world are not blind to this double standard, as both the Netherlands and Switzerland chose to keep unauthorized movie downloading legal until the industry improves the availability of legitimate content.

Of course the study is far from perfect as there are many more factors that influence box office returns. However, the findings clearly suggest that the movie industry itself can take the biggest step towards eliminating piracy “losses,” not lawmakers.

Source: BitTorrent Piracy Doesn’t Affect US Box Office Returns, Study Finds

But if you told him back then that you could deliver that letter before he could saddle his horse, he would suspect that either witchcraft or alcohol were at play.

In the 20th and 21st centuries we became more open to the notion that amazing things can be achieved without magic, but occasionally we still fall short in our predictions for the future.

Downloading digital media is so last decade now, even your grandmother can do it, but just a handful of years ago “You wouldn’t download a car” gained traction, a lighthearted meme that took the notion of Internet file-sharing to an intentionally ridiculous level. Several years later, however, it’s not looking quite so outrageous.

Soon, the interest in digital files will take a new direction, not because they transform into music, movies or books, but because they will possess the ‘genetic’ code for physical objects.

“We believe that the next step in copying will be made from digital form into physical form. It will be physical objects. Or as we decided to call them: Physibles,” says The Pirate Bay as they announce a new 3D printing section of their site.

“Data objects are able (and feasible) to become physical. We believe that things like three dimensional printers, scanners and such are just the first step. We believe that in the nearby future you will print your spare parts for your vehicles. You will download your sneakers within 20 years,” they add.

Although free sneakers in two decades sounds intriguing, creating physical objects from digital files is a reality now, as pointed out by 3D printing site Shapeways.

“Being able to download product files is not new, Shapeways has had downloadable models for years, as has Thingiverse and Google Warehouse, but let’s see how this affects the 3D printing IP debate,” the company says on its blog in response to the TPB announcement.

That’s right. The ever-looming copyright bogeyman, just waiting to throw his spanner in the 3D printer works.

In the future, however, instead of Hollywood taking action against 3D object pirates (although Paramount did actually do that in 2011), they could well be outnumbered by just about every major product manufacturer in the world – possibly even some 3D printer manufacturers themselves, since they can already print themselves.

But as pointed out by The Pirate Bay, there are huge potential benefits to be had.

“No more shipping huge amount of products around the world. No more shipping the broken products back. No more child labor. We’ll be able to print food for hungry people. We’ll be able to share not only a recipe, but the full meal. We’ll be able to actually copy that floppy, if we needed one,” they conclude.

So, when the writers at TorrentFreak are (more) old and gray, the children of today’s readers might be browsing The Pirate Bay III wondering which car to download. Or, as the coincidentally relevant (slightly NSFW) SOPA protest song embedded below suggests, even a boat. Or a cow.

Copyright wars? You ain’t seen nothing, baby.

Source: The Pirate Bay Wants You To Really Download A Car

Their so-called “three strikes” or “graduated response” scheme would see Internet account holders receive an official warning should their IP addresses be linked to uploads of infringing material on file-sharing networks such as BitTorrent.

Hadopi, the agency tasked with administering the system, started sending out the initial warnings in October 2010 and has periodically provided stats on how many first, second and third strike notices have been issued.

Using the latest available data, PC Inpact‘s Marc Rees has created some graphs showing the progression of the scheme since the delivery of those first warnings some 15 to 16 months ago.

The first chart above shows that as of November 2011, 736,000 “first strike” emails had been delivered to Internet subscribers. Hadopi president Marie-Françoise Marais previously reported that September had seen the agency send out its 650,000th notice.

Chart two shows the number of “second strike” notices sent to Internet subscribers. Rather than via email, these are delivered to individuals by traditional recorded delivery mail. The latest data shows that 62,000 of these notices were delivered to November 2011, up from just under 20,600 delivered by July 2011 and 44,000 by September 2011.

The third graphic shows the number of Internet account holders being held responsible for a total of three online copyright infringements. As of November 2011, 165 subscribers were on their third and final strike, up from 60 citizens two months earlier in September.

But the big question, however, is whether the warnings are causing the French to swap a file-sharing habit for one which involves spending money with official outlets. Next week the big labels will support a study which claims that is indeed happening.

According to Numerama, next Monday the IFPI will publish a study which will apparently show that during the last 18 months the Hadopi environment has led to a 22.5% increase in purchases from iTunes and an extra 13.8 million euros for the French market. We’ll certainly be taking a closer look at these figures when they become available.

In September 2011 it was revealed that Hadopi asked the French Ministry of Culture for 12 million euros to finance its operations in 2012. It was granted 11 million euros.

Source: 165 French File-Sharers Now On 3rd Strike, “iTunes Up 22.5%”

Whilst at University in 2008, AMP’s phone was either lost or stolen. Shortly after the images it contained appeared on an unnamed file-hosting service and these were linked by someone to her Facebook account. Although Facebook removed them, it was clear that the situation was developing – into blackmail.

AMP was contacted personally on Facebook and her fathers business public relations team were “threatened and blackmailed” over the existence of images. Then, the genie was let out of the bottle.

During November 2008, the images were uploaded “to a Swedish website that hosts files known as ‘BitTorrent’ files,” court papers reveal. Although not mentioned by name, the revelation that AMP legal’s team couldn’t get the site to respond to DMCA takedowns points the finger towards The Pirate Bay.

Making matters worse, AMP’s real name had been added to the BitTorrent filenames, meaning that the torrents were the first results if anyone typed in her name on the leading search engines. So this extraordinary battle was on – could it really be possible to take this content down?

For the purposes of the action, it was presumed that people most interested in downloading the photos would, in common with AMP, reside in the UK. Therefore, if a court could be convinced to issue an order declaring that the distribution of the material is illegal, then any seeder could be served and ordered to cease his or her activity. If every seeder could be attacked this way, then the torrent would simply die.

While it might be expected that the claimant claimed copyright in ‘the work’ and attempted to take it down that way, instead she sought an injunction “to preserve the right to respect for her private and family life” under the Human Rights Act 1998.

The High Court noted that although under the Human Rights Act citizens have “the right to receive and impart information without interference”, the rights of BitTorrent users to “download the digital photographic images using the BitTorrent protocol and to disseminate them by seeding them” had to be balanced against the privacy rights of the claimant.

AMP was ultimately successful in obtaining an injunction in respect of her privacy and under the Protection from Harassment Act 1997, with the Court deciding that anyone seeding the image files on BitTorrent within its jurisdiction would be committing an offense.

“There is therefore a good arguable case that the conduct of disseminating the digital photographic images amounts to harassment of the Claimant under the Protection from Harassment Act 1997 and that this is a case where it is appropriate to grant an injunction,” the Hon. Mr Justice Ramsey wrote in his decision.

As far as we are aware, this is the first case of its type where BitTorrent users are expressly forbidden by a court injunction from sharing specific material. But the big question remains – has it been successful?

AMP’s name is secret, the filenames are secret, and the court reinforces the confidentiality of both sets of information by expressly including them in the court order – revealing them would also be an offense. Since we don’t know either we can’t search for them, but it’s likely that the torrents still exist. Whether they have any seeders is key, but any within the jurisdiction of the court should beware.

According to Andrew Murray, Professor of Law at the London School of Economics, AMP’s lawyer will track down seeders in England and Wales (and anywhere in the EU thanks to a European Arrest Warrant) via their ISPs using CPR 31.17, not a Norwich Pharmacol order which is usually the preferred method in such cases.

Reading this case it is clear that AMP and/or her father and family were prepared to spend a large sum of money pursuing this action. Exactly how much is unclear but from the files appearing on, presumably, The Pirate Bay, it has taken 3 years to reach the point where seeding them is covered by an injunction.

Effective? We have no way of saying. But 10/10 for persistence and ingenuity.

Source: BitTorrent Seeders Harrass Blackmail Victim, High Court Rules

Philosophy student Isak Gerson is such a religious file-sharer, and in an attempt to protect his unique belief system he founded The Missionary Church of Kopimism in 2010. In the hope that they could help prevent persecution for their beliefs, the Church then filed a request to be officially accepted by the authorities.

After two failed attempts, where the Church was asked to formalize its way of praying or meditation, the authorities finally recognized the organization as an official religion. The Church’s founder is ecstatic about this news, and hopes that it will motivate more people to come forward as ‘Kopimists’.

“I think that more people will have the courage to step out as Kopimists. Maybe not in the public, but at least to their close ones,” Isak tells TorrentFreak. “There’s still a legal stigma around copying for many. A lot of people still worry about going to jail when copying and remixing. I hope in the name of Kopimi that this will change.”

Although the formal status of the Church doesn’t mean that copyright infringement is now permitted, the Church’s founder hopes that their beliefs will be considered in future lawmaking.

During the last half year the Missionary Church of Kopimism tripled its members from 1,000 to 3,000 and it’s expected that the recent news will cause another surge in followers. Official member or not, Gerson encourages everyone with an Internet connection to keep on sharing.

“We confessional Kopimists have not only depended on each other in this struggle, but on everyone who is copying information. To everyone with an internet connection: Keep copying. Maintain hardline Kopimi,” Gerson concludes.

Prospective followers who embrace the same calling are of course welcome to join the movement, free of charge.

Source: File-Sharing Recognized as Official Religion in Sweden

Using the tools at YouHaveDownloaded, Perrier found six illegal downloads including a cam copy of the movie Tower Heist, a telesync copy of Arthur Christmas, and music from The Beach Boys.

But while six downloads are easily ignored, bigger things were around the corner for the French government. The country’s Ministry of Culture has quite an online presence and are allocated more than 65,000 IP addresses. Perrier and friends scanned them all and found 250 government IP addresses that were used to share the latest movies, music, video games and even adult titles during the last two months.

Instead of keeping their collective heads down, the government has now issued a press release refuting the allegations.

“The Management Information Systems Department ensures strict use of computers in its fleet,” the Ministry of Culture said in a statement quoted by Numerama.

“The configuration of the network prevents connections to peer-to-peer networks, which excludes any possibility of using such networks for illegal downloading,” the Ministry added, while offering assurances that “internal audits” are now underway.

The statements here appear somewhat conflicting. On the one hand illegal downloads are apparently impossible, but on the other the Ministry has seen fit to commission an audit. They don’t sound confident, that’s for sure.

Interestingly, thanks to YouHaveDownloaded the debate on the accuracy and usefulness of IP addresses evidence has been stimulated. Unsurprisingly, though, the French government doesn’t dismiss the usefulness of IP address evidence completely. When they’re the ones collecting it, it can be relied on. When others harvest it, the data loses its value.

“The processes used by the site youhavedownloaded.com can in no way be compared with the methodology employed by TMG,” says the Ministry. Trident Media Guard is the company that collects evidence for France’s 3-strikes ‘HADOPI’ law. In common with all similar companies, their systems are secret and not open for scrutiny.

“The findings of this process can not therefore call into question the process established by the HADOPI, particularly in regard to the reliability of the findings derived from an IP address. As a result, all of these allegations appear unfounded,” the Ministry concludes.

One of the main problems with IP address-based evidence is what happens when someone is wrongfully accused. There is no simple way of refuting the claims and it’s down to the defendant to prove their innocence.

It’s all well and good for the Ministry of Culture to say “it’s impossible to share files from our IP addresses” but will that standard of rebuttal be acceptable coming from the man in the street faced with an accusation from HADOPI? Hardly.

So, if the Ministry of Culture is completely innocent let’s see them held to their own standards. Let them show their citizens how proving a negative, that something didn’t happen, is done. They’re not going to find that easy, even with their limitless resources.

Update: Canada’s parliament also has piracy issues.

Source: Zut Alors! French Government Deny BitTorrent Piracy Allegations

Below is a selection of some of the most remarkable topics covered here on TorrentFreak in the latter part of 2011. Part 1 (covering the first 6 months of the year) can be found here.

Feel free to add your assessment of the last year in the comments section below.

July

BitTorrent had its 10th birthday at the start of July, and inventor Bram Cohen was kind enough to share his thoughts on the past decade with us.

In the same month the MPAA, RIAA and all major ISPs in the US announced a deal to curb piracy with a six-strikes warning system. Under the agreement the ISPs agreed to send “copyright alerts” to subscribers whose Internet connections are used for copyright infringement. Repeated offenders will not be disconnected from the Internet, but could be slowed down instead.

Around the same time, the French authorities provided some details on the scope of their three-strikes law, Hadopi. During the first 9 months of operation, a total of 18 Million file-sharers were tracked. This mass discovery process resulted in 470,000 first warning emails, which equals a little over 50,000 per month. The number of people who received a second warning is currently stuck at 20,000 and only 10 Internet subscribers received a third warning.

Yet another ruling (final this time) confirmed that ‘pirate’ sites operate lawfully in Spain. In India things started working differently, with copyright holders obtaining the power to order ISPs to block sites deemed to be infringing.

Following a hearing in London’s High Court, leading UK ISP BT was forced to block subscriber access to Usenet indexing site Newzbin2. After an attempt to stop the blockade the order went into effect in November. The blocking decision was the first of its kind in the UK on copyright grounds and increased the pressure on other ISPs to follow suit, which Sky did later in the year.

Oh, and sadly enough file-sharers were denied official religion status in Sweden.

August

The mass-BitTorrent lawsuits in the US continued at a rapid pace and by August 200,000 people had been sued for allegedly sharing copyrighted material online.

The UK communications regulator OFCOM published a report which came to the conclusion that blocking ‘pirate’ websites would not be effective. Ironically enough the document wasn’t redacted properly, revealing a comprehensive guide on how to bypass all possible blocking attempts.

The US domain name seizures resulted in another arrest. US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) apprehended a 19-year-old man who allegedly ran HQ-Streams.com and HQ-Streams.net, domains that were previously seized by ICE in February.

Two of the original Pirate Bay founders launched a one-click file-hosting service called Bayfiles. The new service is dedicated to respecting copyrights while offering its users a great platform to store and share files.

Meanwhile, anti-piracy lawyers sue a dead person and a blind man.

September

Early September five people connected to the video streaming and download site NinjaVideo were indicted by a grand jury on copyright infringement and conspiracy charges. NinjaVideo was one of the sites first targeted by Operation in Our Sites mid-2010. The authorities hold the defendants responsible for providing access to unauthorized movies and TV-shows between 2008 and 2010, which allegedly earned the site more than $500,000. In the same month the site’s founder Hana Beshara and co-defendant Matthew Smith plead guilty, and two others followed in October.

Throughout 2011, the Florida-based file-hosting service Hotfile has battled in court with five major movie studios. In September, Hotfile turned the tables on Warner Bros., suing the movie studio for fraud and abuse. Hotfile accused the movie studio of systematically abusing its anti-piracy tool by taking down hundreds of titles they don’t hold the copyrights to, including open source software. Among other things, Hotfile is looking for damages to compensate the company for the losses they suffered.

After blocking The Pirate Bay and BTjunkie, Italian lawmakers proposed several new measures that will put Internet users at risk of losing their connection after one alleged infringement. These copyright complaints can be sent by anyone, not just the copyright holder in question.

The German Pirate Party scored an unprecedented win in the elections for the Berlin state parliament. The Pirates got 9 percent of the vote, which translated into 15 parliament seats. A few weeks later the party polled double digits across the country. With 10 percent of the total vote, the Pirates would become the third largest party in the country if federal elections were held.

Oh, and girls are not into the Pirate Bay at all, but those who are fancy porn just as much as men.

October

In Belgium the Antwerp Court of Appeal ordered Belgian ISPs Belgacom and Telenet to initiate DNS blockades of 11 domains connected to The Pirate Bay. A few days after the verdict The Pirate Bay registered depiraatbaai.be, a new domain not covered by the court order. By the end of the month this domain was already on its way into the top 100 most-visited domains in Belgium.

The Stockholm District Court sentence against Pirate Bay founder Gottfrid Svartholm was finalized after he failed to appear at the Court of Appeal. Svartholm, also known as Anakata online, did not appear at the appeal trial last year because he was hospitalized in Cambodia. He later went missing. The Court of Appeal decided to finalize the initial verdict of one year jail time and a fine of $1.1 million. The other defendants await a decision on their request for a Supreme Court appeal.

A report showed that the majority of users on The Pirate Bay value their anonymity online, but how anonymous can they really be if VPN-providers don’t value the privacy of their customers?

On October 26, Representative Lamar Smith introduced the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which is the House version of the Senate’s PROTECT IP (PIPA) bill. This marked the start of a months-long Internet battle that was still ongoing at the end of the year.

Aside from making streaming of copyrighted content a felony, the pending bill aims to make it easier to put sites that facilitate copyright infringement out of business. Should SOPA become law, authorities and copyright holders will have a broad range of tools to censor sites they deem to be facilitating copyright infringement. Aside from domain seizures, they can demand that search engines remove ‘rogue sites’ from their results, order ISPs to block these domains, and cut off their payments providers.

Meanwhile, Justin Bieber face the prospect of jail for pirating.

November

The SOPA soap continued. Mid-November leading civil liberties and tech policy organizations called for an Internet-wide day of protest against censorship. Every hour more than 23,000 emails were sent to Congress via the American Censorship campaign and Tumblr users alone made 3.6 calls per second.

US authorities carried out the largest round of domain name seizures yet as part of their continued crackdown on counterfeit and piracy-related websites. Right before “Cyber Monday” more than 130 domain names were taken over by the feds to protect the commercial interests of US companies. The new round came exactly a year after 82 domains, including Torrent-Finder, were taken over in 2010.

Across the pond, the European Parliament adopted a resolution which criticized domain name seizures of “infringing” websites by US authorities. According to the resolution these measures need to be countered as they endanger “the integrity of the global internet and freedom of communication.” With this stance the European Parliament joins an ever-growing list of SOPA opponents.

Universal Music filed a lawsuit against the popular music streaming service Grooveshark. The music label claimed that bosses and other workers at Grooveshark personally uploaded many thousands of infringing tracks to the service, and could demand hundreds of millions of dollars in damages. Grooveshark denied the claims and is determined to fight back.

At the end of November, Rick Falkvinge, founder of the first Pirate Party in Sweden and TorrentFreak columnist, earned a spot in Foreign Policy’s prestigious list of Top 100 Global Thinkers.

December

More than a year after Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) seized the domain of music blog Dajaz1, they finally gave it back. It turned out that the seizure was a mistake.

SOPA continued to dominate the news all over the Internet. Wikipedia aired a plan to censor itself to protest the pending bill, and the General Manager of the largest online community Reddit said that the bill would “almost certainly mean the end” of the popular site. Reddit’s users also played a key role in convincing domain registrar GoDaddy to drop their support for SOPA.

A new service called YouHaveDownloaded exposed what people behind an IP-address are downloading on BitTorrent. Using this data, we were able to show that unauthorized downloads occur even in the most unexpected of places, from the palace of the French President, via the Church of God, to the RIAA and the US House of Representatives. Ironically, the RIAA blames another company for pirating though their IP-addresses.

Early December, cyberlocker service Megaupload pulled off one of the biggest file-sharing marketing coups in recent memory. Their Mega Song, a production by Printz Board and Kim Dotcom, featured some of the biggest names in pop and show business including P Diddy, Will.i.am, Alicia Keys, Kanye West, Snoop Dogg, Chris Brown, The Game, Mary J Blige , Kim Kardashian, and even boxer Floyd Mayweather.

Within hours, Universal had vented their fury by having the Mega Song removed from YouTube, even though they had no legal right to do so. Megaupload and its founder Kim Dotcom responded by filing a lawsuit against Universal. The label responded with a “so what?” attitude but Megaupload made it clear that Universal won’t get away so easily – questions must be answered.

Finally, downloading copyrighted content for personal use will stay legal in Switzerland and The Netherlands.

—

That’s it for 2011, we’ll be back next year.

Source: 2011: Striking Pirates and Stopping SOPA

Although tens of thousands of people downloaded a copy, the real boom came when the full version was released in March, resulting in nearly 4 million downloads by the end of the year.

This ‘success’ landed Crysis 2 the title of most pirated game of 2011 on the PC platform, beating Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and Battlefield 3 with 3,650,000 and 3,510,000 downloads respectively. Interestingly enough, the interest among pirates in the Xbox 360 version of Crysis 2 was relatively low and the game didn’t make it into the top 5 there.

On the Xbox 360 the title of most pirated game goes to Gears of War 3. This game was released in September and amassed a total of 890,000 downloads. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and Battlefield 3 also came in second and third on the Xbox 360.

On the Wii platform ‘Mario’ titles traditionally come out on top, and this year is no exception. Super Mario Galaxy 2, released in 2010, becomes the most pirated Wii game for the second year in a row. With 1,180,000 downloads it comes just in front of Mario Sports Mix, which was pirated 1,090,000 times since February.

As can be seen from the three lists below, PC games are by far the most downloaded titles, with on average more than three times the number of downloads compared to Xbox 360 and Wii releases. Overall, the number of downloads of the top titles in each category is slightly lower than last year. The platforms that are not mentioned, such as the PS3, get considerably less downloads and are excluded for that reason.

The data for these estimated download numbers is collected by TorrentFreak from several sources, including reports from all public BitTorrent trackers.

Source: The Most Pirated Games of 2011

Last month, the American Assembly, a non-partisan public policy forum affiliated with Columbia University, released a paper titled “Copyright Infringement and Enforcement in the US” which came to the same conclusion. To define the local piracy culture researchers conducted 2,303 telephone interviews, and they found that roughly half of all adults can be branded a pirate.

Sharing files among friends and family is the most common form of copyright infringement, and just over 13 percent of all respondents admitted to using file-sharing software such as BitTorrent to download content. File-sharing seems to be most popular among the younger demographic as can be seen in the graph below.

A section of the report that particularly piqued our interest concerns the use of tools to hide ones IP-address online. The original report shows that about 5 percent of the general population use these tools, but we expected this figure to be significantly higher among file-sharers.

The American Assembly was kind enough to share additional data with us which confirmed this suspicion. Among the people who use file-sharing software, little over 15 percent use tools to hide their IP-address online. In other words, one in 7 file-sharers in the US is anonymous.

Further analysis reveals that in particular younger adults hide their IP-addresses. A quarter of all file-sharers between the ages of 18 and 24 say they share files anonymously, while less than 5 percent of file-sharers older than 44 years hide their IP-address.

TorrentFreak talked to several VPN and proxy providers who all say they have witnessed substantial growth throughout the past year. The leading BitTorrent VPN and proxy service BTGuard even doubled its customer-base during the past 12 months.

“BTGuard has been consistently growing since we started. Compared to 2010, we increased by around 200% in 2011. The growth has really picked up lately which I contribute to SOPA and other censorship efforts,” BTGuard’s founder says.

“We grew 25% this month. If SOPA or something similar actually passes, the flood of Internet users seeking asylum from oppression would be staggering to say the least. Hopefully that doesn’t happen, the Internet is far more important to us then business.”

This uptick is not limited to the US either. All around the world BitTorrent users have become more aware of their privacy, as a survey among Pirate Bay users recently confirmed.

Although the data obtained through the American Assembly survey says nothing about people’s motivations to download anonymously, it is indeed safe to assume that the increased talk about anti-piracy laws, copyright alerts and file-sharing lawsuits are high up the list.

In the US alone over 250,000 BitTorrent users have been sued for alleged copyright infringements because their IP-address was captured by anti-piracy outfits. And in the coming year millions of sharers are expected to receive warnings through their Internet providers as part of a deal the major ISPs struck with copyright holders to educate and punish BitTorrent users.

A promising outlook for providers of VPN and proxy services, but whether these measures will have a significant effect on the prevalence of piracy remains to be seen.

Source: 15 Percent of US File-Sharers Hide Their IP-Address, More to Folllow

Another downside is that public torrent sites don’t support private uploads. All the torrent files users add are available for the entire world to see. This public visibility has its benefits, but sometimes a simple “drop and share” service is a better solution. It gets really interesting when that’s combined with a URL shortener so the torrent can be shared easily on social networks and in blog comments.

Tors.in does all the above.

Although the concept is hardly rocket science and while the site makes creative use of existing code, the service is unique and quite handy. For the creator of Tors.in the idea emerged when he couldn’t find a simple site to dump and share torrents.

“I was making torrent mirrors of important YouTube videos related to SOPA. I wanted to share these on Reddit but I noticed that there was no place to just dump a torrent and call it a day,” Tors.in creator Woodrow Freeman told TorrentFreak.

While looking for a simple torrent hosting service Freeman eventually found Torrage.org, a storage solution that’s also used by many of the larger torrent sites. However, the problem with Torrage is that the URLs are rather long as they are based on the torrent’s hash.

“To fix this problem I decided to create a simple service that allows users to upload files to Torrage, and add a URL shortener to make the links easier to share,” Freeman explains. A few hours later Tors.in was born, and without promoting it in public Freeman already noticed that people started using it.

The process that goes on in the background is pretty straightforward. When someone uploads a torrent through Tors.in the site sends it to Torrage, giving the uploader a short URL in return. In addition, users can also create custom URLs such as tors.in/snowblind to make the link a bit more descriptive than a random string of letters and numbers.

Dump and share, that’s all there is to it.

Source: Tors.in: Dump Your Torrents and Get a Fancy URL to Share

These lists give insight into recent trends, and in 2011 Rebecca Black, Google Plus and Ryan Dunn were the fastest rising searches on Google.

But what about BitTorrent? With billions of searches every year it’s worth taking a look at the most-entered keywords on the dominant file-sharing network.

Unfortunately there is no central database of searches available, but Kat.ph, one of the top 5 torrent sites in terms of visitors, was kind enough to share the most popular search terms of 2011 with us. This list is based on millions of searches and gives an indication of what people were looking for on BitTorrent during the last 12 months.

Interestingly, the most searched for terms are not targeted at specific content, but used to discover files instead. “Ita,” “French” and “2011″ make up the top three and are used to find media in Italian, French and from 2011 respectively. The same is true for “DVDrip” and “720p” which are also listed in the top 10.

The first search term related to a specific title is “Thor” in 9th place, a title that also ended up in the most pirated movies list of this year. Movie related searches are clearly the most popular among users of the site as we also find “Harry Potter,” “Kung Fu Panda 2,” “Green Lantern” and “Transformers 3″ in the top 20.

Traditionally, TV-shows are also much sought after on BitTorrent as well, and that’s no different this year. “Glee” is the most popular TV-related search phrase in 13th place, followed by “True Blood,” “Game of Thrones,” “How I Met You Mother,” “Supernatural,” “House,” “Dexter” and “Breaking Bad” further down the list.

Besides movies and TV-shows the list is completed with a few unavoidable adult related searches, and the relatively rare software and game related keywords such as “PSP” (11) and “Windows 7″ (23). Music isn’t all that popular on public BitTorrent indexes, as we find the first and only artist related search is “Adele” in 44th place.

Below is the full list of the 50 most-entered search phrases on Kat.ph. This list will be different on other public BitTorrent sites, but we assume that the top searches will be popular on other indexes as well.

1. ita
2. french
3. 2011
4. ita dvd
5. xxx
6. dvdrip
7. italian
8. kickasstor
9. thor
10. 720p
11. psp
12. harry potter
13. glee
14. kung fu panda 2
15. green lantern
16. 1080p
17. wwe
18. movies
19. porn
20. transformers 3
21. cars 2
22. captain america
23. windows 7
34. true blood
25. fast and furious 5
26. hindi
27. sex
28. game of thrones
29. telugu
30. tamil
31. rango
32. super 8
33. playboy
34. x art
35. how i met your mother
36. pirates of the caribbean
37. x men
38. transformers
39. mac
40. rio
41. supernatural
42. kickassto
43. source code
44. adele
45. house
46. sucker punch
47. final destination 5
48. dexter
49. nero
50. breaking bad


Source: BitTorrent Zeitgeist: What People Searched For in 2011

These days Moore is better known as Skrillex, and since taking his current form in 2008 he’s been going from strength to strength. Last year he released his debut EP, My Name is Skrillex, as a free download and he hasn’t looked back.

He’s currently nominated for no less than six Grammys including Best New Artist, Best Dance Recording and Best Dance/Electronica Album. Everyone seems to love Skrill’ and today his fans will love him even more.

After delivering his much anticipated new album Bangarang this week, Skrillex reached out to fans both rich and poor, and trashed the mainstream recording industry mantra that “file-sharing is evil”.

“Happy holidays just like I promised,” said Skrillex on his Facebook page. “Just like I always say, go pirate it if you don’t have the money, I just want you to have it.”

“You can buy it here, either way i’ll love you,” he concludes.

Quite how long Skrillex will be able to deliver this crowd-pleasing attitude is unclear. He’s signed to Big Beat Records, an Atlantic Records subsidiary which in turn is owned by Warner Music. Hopefully, though, Skrillex will be left alone to do his thing, and here’s why he should be.

Modern electronic music, and by that I mean material from the last 25 years, has drawn its lifeblood from piracy. Sampling, cut-and-paste, mixtape and more recently file-sharing cultures have ensured that artists like Skrillex can hit the mainstream, gain a huge fanbase, get Grammy nominated and yet still give stuff away for free. And make money.

But perhaps more importantly in these turbulent times, this kind of approach gains the respect of fans, regardless of how deep their pockets are today. And tomorrow, one way or another, they will spend. If they actually enjoy doing that, the rest is easy.

Source: Skrillex: Happy Holidays! Pirate My Music, I’ll Still Love You

Presently, the Dutch see downloading movies and music for personal use as “fair use” and not punishable by law. However, the current government is trying to find a solution to the ever-increasing piracy problem and has proposed a new bill to make it unlawful.

The topic has resulted in a heated political debate over the past several months, and yesterday opponents of the bill won the first battle as the Dutch parliament adopted a motion to keep downloading movies and music for personal use legal.

One of the main concerns of the parliament is that a download ban would go against the free and open Internet, as it restrict the free flow of information. The motion further states that enforcing such a ban via monitoring would invade the privacy of Internet users.

In addition, the parliament is worried that should downloading become unlawful, copyright holders will go after individual downloaders in court. This might result in a similar situation currently seen in countries like the United States and Germany, where hundreds of thousands of Internet subscribers are being sued by copyright trolls out to make a quick buck.

Instead of a download ban, the parliament suggests that the entertainment industry should focus more on offering authorized alternatives. At the moment, it is practically impossible to download high quality copies of recent movies and TV-shows via legal channels in the Netherlands.

The stance of the Dutch parliament is in line with an authoritative report commissioned by the government in 2009. In the report it was estimated that file-sharing has an overall positive effect on the Dutch economy. While it was recognized that the entertainment industry suffers some losses, these don’t outweigh the positive effects of file-sharing.

This report also motivated the Swiss government to keep downloading of music and movies totally legal a few weeks ago.

While the adopted motion is a win for the parties who want to keep downloading for personal use legal, State Secretary for Security and Justice Fred Teeven has already announced that he plans to bring the plan back in an altered form. Whether that will be able to address the current concerns of parliament is yet to be seen.

Source: Dutch Parliament: Downloading Movies and Music Will Stay Legal

The total number of downloads for Fast Five pales in comparison to last year’s victor Avatar which was downloaded more than 16 million times. This downward trend is also visible throughout the rest of the top 10, where the average number of downloads is lower than in 2010.

In part this drop might be explained by the increase in legal alternatives, although upcoming alternative piracy sources (such as cyberlockers and steaming sites) may have also had an effect. However, since the total number of active BitTorrent users isn’t shrinking, the downloads may simply be spread out over more titles in 2011.

As is the case every year, our top 10 lists have a few notable absentees in 2011. These include the top grossing Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides and Transformers: Dark of the Moon. On the other hand, 127 Hours and Sucker Punch were both hugely popular among the downloading public, while their box office grosses were relatively modest.

The data for this list is collected by TorrentFreak from several sources, including reports from thousands of BitTorrent trackers. All release formats, including cammed versions are counted. Afterwards, the data is carefully checked and corrected if needed.

Source: Top 10 Most Pirated Movies of 2011

Despite the fact that Dexter and runner-up Game of Thrones have more downloads than television viewers in the US, the overall number of TV-show downloads is leveling off.

The percentage of TV-show downloaders, from the US in particular, has steadily declined in recent years. This is in part thanks to alternative viewing options such as Hulu and Netflix. In other regions, such as Australia and Europe, the demand for US TV-shows remains strong.

Outside the US fans sometimes have to wait endlessly before their favorite show airs on TV in their own country. Many of them are simply not that patient or willing to torture themselves, and turn to BitTorrent in desperation.

The above suggests that availability is one of the key solutions to decreased TV piracy, and this was confirmed earlier this year. When Fox decided to delay the airing of new episodes on Hulu in August, many former Hulu users turned to BitTorrent where the number of US downloads more than doubled.

In common with many branches of the entertainment industry, the challenge for TV companies is to come up with a business model that allows users to consume what they want at any given time, without losing revenue in the process. When that puzzle is solved worldwide the number of unauthorized downloads will be pretty much insignificant.

Below we have compiled a list of the most downloaded TV-shows (single episode) of 2011, together with the viewer average for TV in the US. The data for the top 10 is collected by TorrentFreak from several sources, including reports from all public BitTorrent trackers.

Source: Top 10 Most Pirated TV-Shows of 2011

However, according to independant filmmaker Mark Diestler, it’s not that black and white. Last week his film “The Inner Room” ended up online, and as is so often the case thousands of people started to share the movie on BitTorrent.

Within 24 hours 5,000 people had already grabbed a copy without paying. For some filmmakers this is a nightmare scenario, but Diestler clearly disagrees as he sees all these BitTorrent downloads as a good way to gain exposure for the film that took blood, sweat and tears to make.

“I would much rather have 500,000 downloads than 5,000, although our distributor may feel differently. The worst thing that can happen to a small film, any film for that matter, is to fall into obscurity. 500,000 people could download it and hate it, but in my mind that is better than then not seeing or hearing about it all,” Diestler tells TorrentFreak.

“In the end not everyone is going to hate it, some will like it and you would hope that a lot of people would enjoy it – and even more importantly talk about it. That buzz would hopefully translate to additional sales of the film. People buy the DVD to see the bonus features or just to help support the filmmakers of a film that they really enjoyed.”

The filmmaker explains that unlike the big Hollywood productions, most of the independent films that get made have a negligible advertising budget. For these films, BitTorrent ‘piracy’ serves as promotion. Diestler has witnessed the power of BitTorrent first hand when a friend’s film blew up thanks to piracy two years ago.

“When you are a small film with zero money for advertising, BitTorrent can get your film out there and get people talking about it – that is all advertising really does anyway. It’s certainly an interesting question. Being friends with Jamin and Kiowa Winans – the filmmakers behind the film ‘Ink’ – I am very close to this topic,” he says.

When the “The Inner Room” was released the people behind the movie even toyed with the idea of pirating the film themselves to gain exposure. But eventually they decided to leave that up to the pros.

“I remember the topic coming up with a few people involved in the film a couple of months before the release of our film on DVD if we should consider ‘leaking’ the film to bit torrent. My first response was even I wanted to, I wouldn’t know how. Even more importantly, do it properly. I would have to hire someone to do it! How lame is that?”

“In the end, we figured it would show up on BitTorrent regardless, so no need to post it ourselves. It took a couple of months, but sure enough, it finally showed up. Now we just have to hope to gains steam and people watch the film, enjoy it, and talk about it,” Diestler concludes.

Thus far The Inner Room has done “great” on BitTorrent resulting in the much anticipated buzz. Just a few days after it was pirated the movie saw a huge bump on IMDb’s movie meter where it’s currently ranked 250. And although the exposure is nowhere near that of “Ink,” the makers are content with the publicity BitTorrent pirates have given them thus far.

Update: Mark Diestler asked us to include the following statement.

First off, we have decided to add high quality legal downloads on our website. For the first time anywhere, the film can be downloaded in HD. $9.99 for the HD download, $7.99 for the SD. These are not region specific, so anyone from around the world should be able to download the film. Additionally, there is a donate button for those that would like to support our efforts.

I also feel it should be made clear that:

#1 – I do not own the North American digital rights to the film, with the exception of selling downloads off my website.
#2 – I’m not condoning “piracy” – I am simply proposing that bitTorrent can give added exposure for a micro-budget film such as ours. Even if 10k people download it, that’s about 9,900 more people than would have normally seen/heard about it. So we miss out on 100 potential “sales/rentals”? Even then, those are only potential sales, who knows how many actual sales… 5? I think the exposure of 10k views is probably far more valuable. But maybe I’m completely wrong?
#3 – for those that do bitTorrent the film, if they hate it, they can be happy they didn’t spend any money on the film. While others who enjoyed it may like to help out the filmmakers by making a donation or downloading a copy off our website or buying a dvd or simply talking about the film

Thanks for the support, Mark Diestler, Producer

Source: Filmmaker: BitTorrent Pirates Help Us Get More Exposure

The first demos of the game were well received by the gaming community and as a result many PC gamers asked Ubisoft to release a PC version as well. This is not going to happen anytime soon though.

PC gamers shouldn’t “bitch” about it, ‘I Am Alive’ creative director Stanislas Mettra said in a recent interview. In his commentary Mettra insinuates that many of the people who are asking for a PC release are in fact going to end up pirating the game.

“We’ve heard loud and clear that PC gamers are bitching about there being no version for them,” Mettra told incgamers.

“But are these people just making noise just because there’s no version or because it’s a game they actually want to play? Would they buy it if we made it?”

The creative director argues that it might not be worth the effort porting the game to PC because of widespread piracy.

“It’s hard because there’s so much piracy and so few people are paying for PC games that we have to precisely weigh it up against the cost of making it. Perhaps it will only take 12 guys three months to port the game to PC, it’s not a massive cost but it’s still a cost. If only 50,000 people buy the game then it’s not worth it,” he said.

Indeed, it’s undeniable that game piracy is an issue for developers, but the question has to be asked to what extent piracy has been a factor in the non-release of a PC version.

Talking to Digital Spy Mettra reveals that not all the blame can be put on pirates.

“This is basically the second version, especially designed for XBLA and PSN in mind, knowing that we had to design something really unique, really different type of game experience, but we knew we had to push some levels that aren’t compatible with mass market gaming experiences,” Mettra said.

In other words, for this version a PC port wasn’t ever the plan, and it’s doubtful that pirates are solely to blame for that. It is of course good to use as an excuse, especially for a game that was originally announced in 2006, has suffered several setbacks since (including development by two different studios) and one that underwent a “total re-engineering” only last year.

The piracy blame-game is an interesting choice too, particularly coming from Ubisoft. The company was previously exposed using pirated music and cracks to support their games.

Luckily, not all people in the gaming industry blame piracy for all their troubles and misfortunes. Valve co-founder and managing director Gabe Newell, whose Portal 2 sold more copies on PC than on any other format, has a refreshing take on how to approach the issue of piracy. According to him, game publishers should compete with it.

“One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue,” he said recently. “The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates.”

For now, however, Ubisoft is taking the “no service” approach to ‘I Am Alive’ and actually killing PC piracy dead in its tracks, but sadly in the most cynical way possible.

Instant update: There goes Ghost Recon: Future Soldier too

Source: Ubisoft Blames Piracy for Non-Release of PC Game

The Health Status of Net Neutrality – The Operators’ Impact on Internet Traffic is their new report which looks at how suppliers of fixed and mobile Internet services in Sweden, traditionally some of the fastest in the world, regulate the flow of traffic in their networks.

The plan was to discover if throttling activities exist among operators, and if so to assess how feasable it is to accurately measure it, and then decide whether it was worth continuing with and expanding upon the project.

Tests were conducted by .SE on the services of a dozen ISPs and measurements were taken for three different types of traffic – standard web browsing, file-sharing and video (such as YouTube).

“What is evident from the measurement results is that some mobile operators systematically downgrade user traffic such as the file-sharing protocol BitTorrent,” says Jörgen Eriksson.

Eriksson, who had responsibility for conducting the tests, says at least one ISP blocked all incoming connections to torrent clients.

The report notes that interfering with BitTorrent is a bad idea, since much open software distribution relies on it. Furthermore, messing with P2P protocols in general is problematic since other services such as Skype, Spotify and Voddler use them.

“If an operator attempts to limit these protocols and the operator’s customers know that their Internet connection does not give them full access to this type of service the operator will lose customers,” says the report.

In Sweden, service providers are free to restrict traffic providing they comply with certain conditions, but the report criticizes ISPs for their lack of transparency.

“The most interesting conclusion is that it is very difficult, if at all possible, to find information among operators about what they block or prioritize,” says Eriksson.

“We know that mobile market players see it as an advantage to NOT be compared with others. There is thus a risk that even if the technical information is presented, it will be useless for those who do not have a deep understanding of how the Internet is built.”

For now and until .SE’s next and more comprehensive report, the tested ISPs will retain their anonymity giving them time to reconsider their strategy, which given wider considerations might not be a bad idea.

Restricting end-users’ access to peer-to-peer based services could have a knock-on effect to the wider Internet. Peer-to-peer protocols help to distribute traffic online, an improvement upon older and more bandwidth intensive models.

“If peer-to-peer protocols are blocked so the trend will go toward developing protocols according to the traditional server-client model, or data will be hidden in other traffic where it is difficult to discern,” the report adds.

“It will probably not be as effective and lead to an increase in traffic – rather than the decrease as ISPs seek when they block peer-to-peer protocols,” the report concludes.

Full report here (Swedish, pdf)

Source: Net Neutrality: Mobile Broadband Suppliers Discriminate Against BitTorrent

April’s 2009 “guilty” verdict for the site’s founders was quickly followed in June by an announcement from internet café and gaming center company Global Gaming Factory X that it was in the process of acquiring The Pirate Bay for $7.8m.

But amid all the commotion and confusion, Swedish-based Englishman and alcoholic beverage entrepreneur Colin Scragg saw a golden opportunity – to own the very identity of “The Pirate Bay”.

“No one had protected the trademark,” Scragg told the press. All the publicity and the perfect match between the name “The Pirate Bay” and introducing a new rum to Sweden was too great a chance to miss, he added.

As can been seen above, Scragg was pictured in the Swedish media holding bottles of rum adorned with the familiar Pirate Bay logo but an official objection to his acquisition put the process on hold. The challenge came not from the famous site, but from the company behind the Captain Morgan brand in Scotland. Their “Parrot Bay’ product is confusingly close to “Pirate Bay” they argued.

Two years later that battle is all over with Scragg winning the trademark and the right to put ‘The Pirate Bay’ not only on rum and other spirits, but also on beer.

“We think it’s kind of sad that we will now have to pirate our own Pirate Bay beer, but it just shows that the world of immaterial rights is fucked up,” a TPB insider told TorrentFreak.

“At least we have some TPB beer glasses that you can buy in our shop though – to drink the pirated beer in!”

Interestingly, while at the time of the trademark acquisition Scragg was chief of drinks company LO Smith, he didn’t register it in their name. He told the press that he needed to act quickly so he registered it personally.

Now, following a pretty big dispute over finances at the company and the subsequent involvement of the police at his behest, Scragg appears to have parted ways with LO Smith, meaning that the trademark “The Pirate Bay” is presumably now in private hands.

What Scragg intends to do with it now remains a mystery……

Source: The Pirate Bay Trademark Handed To Alcohol Entrepreneur

The above is just one of the many examples which show that there are many positive sides to the act of ‘copying’. Despite these nuances, piracy is often referred to as theft. This is a problem according to Stefan Larsson, lawyer and socio-legal researcher at Lund University in Sweden.

Larsson addresses the issue in his thesis “Metaphors and Norms – Understanding Copyright Law in a Digital Society,” for which he just received his doctorate. Talking to TorrentFreak, he explains why copyright infringement isn’t theft, and how this problematic metaphor keeps the gap between public norms and the law intact.

“The theft-metaphor is problematic in the sense that a key element of stealing is that the one stolen from loses the object, which is not the case in file sharing since it is copied. There is no loss when something is copied, or the loss is radically different from losing something like your bike,” Larsson explains.

One of the obvious problems is that it suggests that every “stolen copy” is a lost sale.

“Following this conception, some iPods could be valued at millions of dollars and a file sharing service could aid in copyright infringements representing more value than the Gross Domestic Product of entire countries,” Larsson says.

And indeed, if we look at the court case against The Pirate Bay in Sweden, the renumeration model of the entertainment industry would mistakenly put the “value” of the site at billions of dollars.

“I think that one important aspect lies in that the legal regulation is built on fundamentally different conceptions of reality,” Larsson told TorrentFreak.

The researcher explains that the public perception of the law, or social norms, is out of line with what the law actually says. In part this is because the “theft” metaphor is built into law, while there is no such thing as theft where piracy is concerned.

“In other words, this means that legal concepts can become metaphorical if their meaning expands into new areas, and the fixed conceptions that once ensured their legitimacy may seem unjust in the eyes of a reality that has moved on. This supports the gap between legal and social norms regarding parts of copyright today.”

This gap between the law and what people see, feel and experience in real life is a problem, one that lawmakers are now trying to address with even more draconian laws based on the same nonsense metaphors.

But are tougher laws the best solution? Will these change people’s norms? Larsson is not convinced.

“There are naturally many examples of when tougher laws change behavior, and there are also even examples of when tougher laws have made a substantial contribution in changing social norms. However, there are a few possible drawbacks when law turns repressive.”

He explains that these laws “would need to make everyone think differently about reality,” something that’s easier said than done. Another problem according to Larsson is that may people will simply find ways to hide what they do, such as using VPN services or proxies when downloading via BitTorrent.

Larsson doesn’t think that the current trends of stronger copyright laws and more surveillance of Internet users is the right path to take. These measures often violate the rights of the masses to benefit the interests of a few, which can never be a good solution.

Instead of changing people’s norms and twisting reality, perhaps society might be better off when copyright law adapts to the digital age?

Source: Piracy is NOT Theft: Problems of a Nonsense Metaphor

In the years that followed the Internet traffic distribution underwent a metamorphosis, as video streaming took off with the launch of YouTube and later Netflix. However, all this time BitTorrent remained a significant player and new data confirms that this is still the case.

Sandvine, the company that’s best known for manufacturing the hardware that slowed down BitTorrent users on Comcast, has released their latest Internet traffic report. The report highlights several emerging trends in Internet traffic consumption in North America.

Netflix is by far the most bandwidth-consuming source of traffic. On an average day, 23.3% of all North American traffic comes from or goes to Netflix. BitTorrent is a good second with 16.5% of the traffic pie, meaning that Netflix and BitTorrent together account for almost 40% of all traffic.

The main difference between BitTorrent and Netflix traffic is that the former is more spread out over the day, as BitTorrent users continue downloading overnight.

The graph below shows the usage of various types of traffic during peak hours, where BitTorrent takes up nearly half of all upstream bandwidth. Netflix is the absolute king in terms of downstream traffic here, accounting for nearly one third of all traffic during peak hours.

The data further shows that BitTorrent is the last major P2P network standing. After LimeWire was shut down exactly one year ago, major traffic to and from the Gnutella network vanished completely. Last year it was responsible for 11% of upstream traffic and 2% of downstream traffic during peak hours. In October 2011 it is no longer present among the top 10 traffic sources.

Interestingly enough, none of the popular file-hosting services generates enough traffic to make it into the top 10 in North America. However, the report shows that this is quite the opposite in Brazil, where a massive 9.45% of all traffic during peak hours goes through Megaupload, and another 1.97% through its sister site Megavideo.

Both Megavideo and Megaupload are also listed in the top 10 in Africa with 2.33% and 3.11% respectively. Other regional differences that stand out include Google Video being twice as popular than YouTube in Eastern Europe. In Brazil on the other hand, YouTube is generating nearly a quarter of all Internet traffic during peak hours.

While keeping in mind that Sandvine might benefit from overestimating the percentage of P2P traffic because they sell traffic shaping applications, the above shows that BitTorrent is still a major player on the internet in terms of the traffic it generates. But the question is for how long.

The rise of Netflix in North America – despite negative results earlier this week – shows that there is plenty of interest in paid entertainment. Combined with the traffic stats above it is fair to assume that many more people pay for movies than those who download. For Hollywood this leads to the disappointing conclusion that even if all movie pirating BitTorrent users got a Netflix account, the effect on the movie industry’s revenues would only be ‘marginal’.

Source: BitTorrent and Netflix Dominate America’s Internet Traffic

The Cybernorms group researches how the Internet creates new social norms in society, and to what extent these norms are or should be reflected in relevant legislation. Ultimately, the researchers hope the collated knowledge and insights will help legislators draft more sensible laws.

In just a few days 75,000 people responded and TorrentFreak was given the opportunity to share some results on the topic of anonymity. The respondents were asked whether they use services to make their BitTorrent downloads anonymous, or whether they were interested in using such services.

The results of the survey reveal that nearly 70 percent of The Pirate Bay users utilize a VPN or proxy, or are interested in doing so in the future. Of this group 4.8 percent already use a paid service, while 13 percent use a free solution. Another 51.5 percent do not use an anonymizer service, but are interested in doing so in the future.

Only 18.4 percent of the respondents said they were not interested in appearing anonymous online, and the remaining 12.4 percent weren’t familiar with terms like VPN, or were undecided about their usefulness.

Looking at some of the regional differences a few interesting patterns appear.

Pirate Bay users from North America and Africa are most anonymous, 22.6 and 21.2 percent respectively. Within North America there are some striking differences as well. Only 14.7 percent of the Canadians use BitTorrent anonymously, versus 24.7 percent in Central U.S.

Within Europe there’s a great variation between the use of free and paid anonymizer services. In Russia free services (11.2%) are favored over paid services (1.9%), but in Northern Europe Pirate Bay users are more likely to use a paid (8.2%) than a free (7.7%) service.

The largest group that say they do not care about anonymity online can be found in Central and South America, with 27.8 percent. This group is the smallest in the U.S. and Oceania with 14.7 and 15.6 percent respectively.

Finally, we see that the more often people upload files themselves, the more likely they are to do so anonymously. Nearly a third of the Pirate Bay users who upload files nearly every day use an anonymizer service, versus 14 percent of the people who never upload files at all.

Overall, the results of the survey show that the vast majority of The Pirate Bay users do value anonymity, but that many of these users are currently not downloading and sharing anonymously. However, this could change at any time.

“We interpret this as a type of readiness by quite a lot of people in the file-sharing community to become more anonymous. This could happen when the risk of getting caught would increase or perceived as a more significant threat,”Stefan Larsson, co-founder and researcher at the Cybernorms research group told TorrentFreak.

There is definitely a large number of potential clients out there for proxy and VPN services, and with the increase of lawsuits and three-strikes policies this group may become even larger.

Source: The Pirate Bay Users Long for Anonymity

There are dozens of VPN providers, many of which carry marketing on their web pages which suggests that the anonymity of their subscribers is a top priority. But is it really? Do their privacy policies stand up to scrutiny? We decided to find out.

Over the past two weeks TorrentFreak contacted some of the leading, most-advertised, and most talked about VPN providers in the file-sharing and anonymity space. Rather than trying to decipher what their often-confusing marketing lingo really means, we asked them two direct questions instead:

1. Do you keep ANY logs which would allow you or a 3rd party to match an IP address and a time stamp to a user of your service? If so, exactly what information do you hold?

2. Under what jurisdictions does your company operate and under what exact circumstances will you share the information you hold with a 3rd party?

This article does not attempt to consider the actual quality of service offered by any listed provider, nor does it consider whether any service is good value for money. All we are interested in is this: Do they live up to claims that they provide a 100% anonymous service? So here we go, VPN providers in the file-sharing space first.

P2P Supporting VPN providers

BTguard

Response to Q1: “It’s technically unfeasible for us to maintain log files with the amount of connections we route,” BTguard explain. “We estimate the capacity needed to store log files would be 4TB per day.”

Response to Q2: “The jurisdiction is Canada. Since we do not have log files, we have no information to share. We do not communicate with any third parties. The only event we would even communicate with a third party is if we received a court order. We would then be forced to notify them we have no information. This has not happened yet.”

BTguard website (with discounts)

Private Internet Access

Response to Q1: “We absolutely do not maintain any VPN logs of any kind. We utilize shared IP addresses rather than dynamic or static IPs, so it is not possible to match a user to an external IP. These are some of the many solutions we have implemented to enable the strongest levels of anonymity amongst VPN services. Further, we would like to encourage our users to use an anonymous e-mail and pay with Bitcoins to ensure even higher levels of anonymity should it be required. Our core verticals are privacy, quality of service, and prompt customer support.”

Response to Q2: “Our company currently operates out of the United States with gigabit gateways in the US, Canada, UK, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. We chose the US, since it is one of the only countries without a mandatory data retention law. We will not share any information with third parties without a valid court order. With that said, it is impossible to match a user to any activity on our system since we utilize shared IPs and maintain absolutely no logs.”

Private Internet Access website

TorrentPrivacy

Response to Q1: “We have connection logs, but we don’t store IP addresses there. These logs are kept for 7 days. Though it’s impossible to determine who exactly have used the service.”

Response to Q2: “We have servers in Netherlands, Sweden and USA while our company is based on Seychelles. We do not disclose any information to 3rd parties and this can be done only in case of a certain lawsuit filed against our company.”

TorrentPrivacy website

TorGuard

Response to Q1: “Our sever connection logs are purged on a daily basis since we don’t maintain hard drive’s big enough to store all this data. TorGuard’s torrent proxy and VPN connection logs do not associate an IP with each request as there are hundreds of users sharing the same connection at any given time. Since there are no logs kept or IP’s recorded, it is not possible to identify exactly who has used the connection.”

Response to Q2: “Our parent company is based in Panema, with secure servers in Netherlands, Romania, Ukraine and Panema. We do not share any of our user’s information with third parties, period. Only in the event of an official court order would we be forced to communicate with a third party. This scenario has never occurred, but if it were to, we would be forced to explain in more technical terms how we don’t maintain usage logs.”

TorGuard website

ItsHidden

Response to Q1: “No logs, they are not kept. Even system logs that do not directly link to users are rotated on an hourly basis.”

Response to Q2: “The company has recently been sold and falls under the Jurisdiction of the Seychelles. As such there is no requirement [to log] within that jurisdiction.”

ItsHidden website

Ipredator

Response to Q1: “We don’t store the IP at all actually. It’s in temporary use for the session you have when you’re connected but that’s it. We’ve had very few issues with not having logs, but not keeping them makes it safer even for us since we can’t accidentally give out information about anyone.”

Response to Q2: “We fall – mostly – under Swedish jurisdiction when it comes to the service. When it comes to organisational stuff (who keeps the data, who owns the service, who owns the server, who owns the network etc etc) it’s very mixed, intentionally. This is to make it hard and/or impossible to legally bully us around if that would be the case.”

“We can’t be easily shut down, and we can’t be pressured by courts to implement stuff we would oppose. For end-users this is not affecting them in a negative way at all, only the opposite.”

Ipredator website

Faceless

Response to Q1: “We do not log any IP addresses and no information about what data is accessed by our users, so we have no information that could be interesting to third-parties.”

Response to Q2: “We have servers in The Netherlands and our company is based in Cyprus. If authorities would contact us we would have to tell them that we have no connection logs or IP-addresses saved on our systems.”

Faceless website

General VPN providers

IPVanish

Response to Q1: We in no way record or store any user’s activity while connected to IPVanish. The only information we collect from a VPN session is: Timestamp (date and server time) of the connection to us, duration of the connection, IP address used for the connection and bytes transferred. Logs are also regularly cycled. Additionally, IPVanish users are given dynamic and SHARED IP addresses on the same servers—making it impossible for us to single out anyone for anything.

Response to Q2: ” We operate out of the US and, like all companies and citizens, must comply with local law. As detailed earlier, we have generic connection logs, but that information is not sufficient for identifying individual users. We take privacy and reliable extremely seriously and will also never share, rent or lease any information to any 3rd party.”

IPVanish website

AirVPN

Response to Q1: The company carries no identifying logs.

Response to Q2: “Jurisdiction is in the EU, under most circumstances Italy (country of the company and home of the person legally responsible for data protection), but applicable law may be one of the EU Member States where the servers of the network are physically located (no servers are in Italy),” AirVPN told us.

“We don’t share any information with anyone.”

AirVPN website

PRQ

Response to Q1: “We do not log anything, not even temporary logs. We do not have any “personal information”, since we only require a working e-mail address to sign up. Many customers use anonymous e-mail services like hushmail and the like. Even if a customer gives us their information, we do not use it.”

Response to Q2: “We fall under Swedish jurisdiction, no circumstances will be accepted to share information, since we do not have any information to share.”

PRQ website

VPNReactor

Response to Q1: “Only for 5 days to stop abuse[..]. After 5 days we have absolutely no way to match any IP address or time stamp to any users. Privacy and Security is further enhanced for individual users because their VPN connections are basically lost in the crowd.”

“Our free VPN users share a block of IPs when they connect to the internet via VPNReactor. So at any given time hundreds/thousands of our VPN users that have active connections could all be sharing a single IP address. None of our VPN users are assigned individual public IPs.”

Response to Q2: “We strive to be upfront and transparent with our logging policies for the benefit of our VPN users.” Logs seen by TorrentFreak seemed to confirm no identifiable information being stored.

“We are a U.S. based company and are bound by U.S. based court orders,” VPNReactor continued. “However, if a U.S. based subpoena comes in requesting info for activity that occurred more then 5 days prior, we have absolutely nothing to provide as our logs would have expired off. Request for connection details outside a U.S. based court order will be fully ignored.”

VPNReactor website

BlackVPN

Response to Q1: “We do not keep any logs about our users internet activities including which sites they access or what data they transfer. We also run log cleaners on our systems which removes the IPs from logs before they are written to disk,” the company told TorrentFreak.

“For tax and legal reasons we do store some billing information (name, email, country), but it is stored with a third-party and separate from the rest of BlackVPN.”

BlackVPN say they hold a username and email address of their subscribers and the times of connection and disconnection to their services along with bandwidth consumption. Logging is carried out as follows:

“On our Privacy Servers, NL & LT we don’t log anything that can identify the user, but on our US & UK server where we don’t allow sharing copyrighted materials we do log the internal RFC1918 IP that is assigned to the user at a specific time,” BlackVPN explain.

“So to clarify, we don’t log the real external IP of the user, just our RFC1918 internal one, this we have to do to comply with local laws and to be able to handle DMCAs.”

Update: in their FAQ BlackVPN now writes:

“Although we do not monitor the traffic, incoming or outgoing connections of our users we may assign users to a unique IP address and log which user was assigned which IP address at a given time. If we receive a copyright violation notice from the appropriate copyright holder then we will forward the violation to the offending user and may terminate their account. We therefore ask our users not to distribute or transmit material which violates the copyright laws in either your country or the country in which our Service is hosted.”

Response to Q2: “We operate under the jurisdiction of the Netherlands and we will fiercely protect the privacy and rights of our users and we will not disclose any information on our users to anyone, unless forced to by law enforcement personnel that have produced the proper legal compliance documents or a court order. (In which case we don’t really have a choice).”

BlackVPN website

PrivatVPN

Response to Q1: “We don’t keep ANY logs that allow us or a 3rd party to match an IP address and a time stamp to a user our service. The only thing we log are e-mails and usernames but it’s not possible to bind a activity on the Internet to a user.”

Please note: PrivatVPN also offer use of a US server for watching services like Hulu. IP logs are kept when users use this service.

Response to Q2: “Since we do not log any IP addresses [we have] nothing to disclose. Circumstances doesn’t matter in this case, we have no information regarding our customers’ IP addresses.”

PrivatVPN website

Privacy.io

Response to Q1: “No logs whatsoever are kept. We therefore simply are not able to hand data out. We believe that if you are not required to have logs, then you shouldn’t. It can only cause issues as seen with the many data leaks in recent years. Should legislation change in the juristictions we operate in, then we’ll move. And if that’s not possible, then we’ll shut the service down. No compromises.”

Response to Q2: “We span several jurisdictions to make our service less prone for legal attacks. Servers are currently located in Sweden. We do not share data because we don’t have it. We built this system because we believe only when communicating anonymously, you can really freely express yourself. As soon as you make a compromise, you are going down a slippery slope to surveilance. People will ask for more and more data retention as seen around the world in many countries recently. We do it because we believe in this, and not for the money.”

Privacy.io website

Mullvad

Response to Q1: “No. And we don’t see why anyone would. It would be dishonest towards our customers and mean *more* potential legal trouble.”

Response to Q2: “Swedish jurisdiction. We don’t know of any way in which the Swedish state in practice could make us behave badly towards our clients and that has never happened. Another sign we take privacy seriously is that we accept payments in Bitcoin and cash in the mail.”

Mullvad website

Cryptocloud

Response to Q1: “We log nothing at all.”

Response to Q2: “We don’t log anything on the customer usage side so there are no dots to connect period, we completely separate the payment information,” they told us.

“Realistically unless you operate out of one of the ‘Axis of Evil Countries” Law Enforcement will find a way to put the screws to you,” Cryptocloud add.

“I have read the nonsense that being in Europe will protect you from US Law Enforcement, worked well for HMA didn’t it? Furthermore I am pretty sure the Swiss Banking veil was penetrated and historically that is more defend-able than individual privacy. The way to solve this is just not to log, period.”

Cryptocloud website

VPN providers who log, sometimes a lot

VyprVPN

VyprVPN is the VPN service connected to and offered by the Giganews Usenet service, although it can be used completely standalone. In common with many other providers we contacted, VyprVPN acknowledged receipt of our questions but then failed to respond. We’ve included them here since they have such a high-profile.

The company policy says that logging data “is maintained for use with billing, troubleshooting, service offering evaluation, [Terms of Service] issues, [Acceptable Use Policy] issues, and for handling crimes performed over the service. We maintain this level of information on a per-session basis for at least 90 days.”

On Usenet forum NZBMatrix several users have reported having their VyprVPN service terminated after the company processed “a backlog” of DMCA notices which pushed them over the “two-strikes-and-out” acceptable use policy.

So, does VyprVPN log? You bet.

SwissVPN

We included SwissVPN in our survey because they are well known, relatively cheap and have been used by those on a tight budget. To their credit, they were also the fastest company to respond. They are one of the few companies that do not make anonymity claims.

Response to Q1: “SwissVPN is being operated based on Swiss Telecommunications and Personal Data Protection Law. Session IP’s (not visited content, websites, mail, etc.) are being logged for 6 months,” the company told us.

Response to Q2: The company responds to requests from 3rd parties under Swiss criminal law (pdf).

SwissVPN website

StrongVPN

This company did not directly answer our questions but pointed us to their logkeeping policy instead.

StrongVPN do log and are able to match an external IP address to their subscribers. We have included them here since they were the most outwardly aggressive provider in our survey when it came to dealing with infringement.

“StrongVPN does not restrict P2P usage, but please note sharing of Copyrighted materials is forbidden, please do not do this or we will have to take action against your account,” they told us, later adding in a separate mail: “StrongVPN Notice: You may NOT distribute copyright-protected material through our network. We may cancel your account if that happens.”

StrongVPN website

Disappointing: VPN providers who simply failed to respond

In addition to the above, TorrentFreak also approached a number of other fairly well known VPN providers. It’s not clear if our questions were simply too tricky to answer in a positive light or whether there was some other reason, but disappointingly none of them responded to our emails, despite in some cases having acknowledged receipt of our questions.

They include Blacklogic.com, PureVPN.com, VPNTunnel.se [Update: VPNTunnel.se have now responded, see here], Bolehvpn.net [Update: Boleh responded after publication - they carry no logs] and Ivacy.com.

Should the above now feel able to respond directly to our questions, or if there are any other VPN providers reading who would like to be included in a future update, please contact us now with direct responses to the questions above. Apologies to the providers who contacted us at the last minute but were too late to be included in the report – we had to stop somewhere.

Final thoughts

When signing up to a VPN provider it really is evident that their their logging and privacy policies should be read slowly. And then read again, even more slowly than at first. Many are not as straightforward as they first appear (some even seem to be deliberately misleading) and that is the very reason why we asked our own questions instead.

In contrast to the the pessimism generated by yesterday’s report, as we can see from the list above, when it comes to offering real privacy there are plenty of services out there.

Source: Which VPN Providers Really Take Anonymity Seriously?

But his plan failed in the biggest way imaginable. HideMyAss (HMA) keep logs and as a UK company when given a court order to cough up information, they do so. After matching timestamps to IP addresses, in the blink of an eye Luzlsec member ‘Recursion’ became 23-year-old Cody Kretsinger from Phoenix. The FBI had their man.

While the outrage from the public has been well reported – many pro-privacy activists accused HideMyAss of becoming SellMyAss – what has not yet been documented is how elements of the VPN industry have reacted to the news.

VPN Council is probably best described as a trade organization for some, but not all, VPN providers. A document obtained by TorrentFreak which was penned by their Chief Information Officer and sent on September 25th, shows they are very concerned by recent events.

“There has been a lot of controversy, especially on Twitter that the actions taken by HMA were the wrong ones to take. I disagree with their consensus and I believe its time to implement tougher security reviews on new clients signing up for any VPN service,” the memo begins.

“Earlier this year several companies in our industry had discussed ideas about a shared fraud database between VPN providers. I believe in light of this incident that a renewed call for this would be a good idea and I’d like to re-open discussions on this because if we all sit back and do nothing and continue on with normal business like nothing happened, these same folks will go around popping off more VPN companies and causing more havoc than we’ve ever seen before,” the memo continues.

“I’m in favor of strengthening our respective industry and protecting it as well. We all share the same responsibility of protecting our legitimate clients and the industry as a whole and I’d be in favor of listening to you folks and seeing what additional ideas you guys have in this endeavor.”

In the days that followed, discussions between the VPN providers went ahead and reached consensus on the foundations of an “anti-fraud database” that would be shared among them.

In a second document titled ‘PROTECTING VPN INDUSTRY: FRAUD DB’ and dated September 28th, the problem of high profile hackers such as those from Lulzsec using VPN services is framed as a “direct threat to business survival.”

The document goes on to suggest a framework for the creation of a centralized fraud database which will enable VPN providers to “assess the quality of orders” for their services.

Items suggested for inclusion in the database (along with the supplied descriptions as provided in the memo) are listed as follows:

Fraud Data (hashed): This is a hashed piece of information that can be used to flag an order as fraud. This information could be: IPs, emails, user names (any other data susceptible of indicating fraud can be added).

Fraud Type: Identifier of the fraud type. We need to agree on fraud types list.

Hits: Number of hits (submissions from different VPN providers) this data has had. This will give more latitude to providers to decide to act on a given database result.

Submitter id: Identification of the VPN provider that has submitted the record.

An API will be created to interact with the database and integrate into payment processing systems.

Action points for the future are noted as decisions on database structure, hashing to be employed, parameters on what activities should be considered fraud and a decision on which VPN providers can access the database and who can update it. It is suggested that a single VPN provider should have responsibility for the entire list and others should have to pay their share of its maintenance costs.

What is clear from the above is that the included VPN providers will begin sharing information they hold on their customers with each other (albeit in hashed form), ostensibly to combat fraud. However, the alleged activities of the Lulzsec member in question aren’t easily described as fraud, and it is far from clear how a database of this nature would have prevented, for example, Sony being hacked.

TorrentFreak contacted the VPN Council and enquired on the depth of their definition of ‘fraud’ since confusingly hacking seems to come under that banner and indeed sparked the apparent need for this database. For instance, would copyright infringement come under that heading too?

“Copyright infringement is not factored into our plans,” VPN Council CIO Jared Twler told us. “This is more about financial payment fraud and network abusers/hackers. This is more to the tune of preventing federal disasters happening on VPN provider networks.”

But of course, when copyright infringement is considered serious enough by the US government it can become a big criminal issue, recent ICE and FBI activity against sites and certain file-sharers and release groups show that.

Clearly the activities of malicious hackers cannot be condoned by the VPN providers and combating fraud is a requirement in many online businesses. But what we see here and in the Lulzsec/HideMyAss fiasco is a clash of ideals that could prove catastrophic.

Most VPN providers sell their services on the notion that by using them the subscriber becomes anonymous. It became crystal clear in September that, given the right pressure, what certain VPN providers are really interested in is upholding the law and thereby saving their own asses from ending up in court. Why this should come as a surprise to anyone is a mystery.

What does come as a surprise is how many VPN providers are allowing themselves to get into this conflict of interests in the first instance. In the HideMyAss case the company clearly held enough information for a 3rd party to match a HMA external IP address and a timestamp to a HMA user account and subsequently a real-life identity.

So, for the purposes of illustration, let’s dismiss the notion that the service was used to attack Sony. Let’s pretend it was a dissident, or a government whistleblower, or some other equally vulnerable individual relying on the service to provide anonymity, as advertised. Let’s be absolutely clear – thanks to the myriad of logs kept by HMA, when someone really needs to count on the service, there is no anonymity that a court order can’t destroy.

Many VPN companies argue that they don’t log the sites visited but some logs are necessary to make sure that ‘criminals’ can’t abuse their services. But logs don’t discriminate. Quite simply, criminal or not, if a VPN provider logs the external IP addresses they hand out to a user along with a timestamp, subscribers are not anonymous.

But while all VPN providers have a duty to uphold the law and be accountable to the government in the country where they are based, not all of them are required by law to carry logs – so they don’t. But who are they?

If you’re a VPN provider and take privacy seriously, contact us immediately to be included in tomorrow’s VPN anonymity report. We’ll ask you two very simple but crucial questions.

Source: VPN Providers Mull ‘Fraudster’ Database In Wake of Lulzec Fiasco

Last month and before the court-ordered ISP level block of Usenet indexing site Newzbin2 even came into effect, the site launched a home-grown tool to defeat it. TeamRDogs – the group behind the site – released Newzbin Client 1.0.0.127, the first public piece of software designed to circumvent ISP BT’s Cleanfeed censorship system, the tool the MPA hopes can neutralize Newzbin2 in the UK.

Within days Newzbin2 told TorrentFreak that they would extend their support to other sites affected by DNS and IP address blocks. Today they announce their first partner.

“We have updated the Newzbin2 Client with a special link to The Pirate Bay, in response to the blockage in Belgium,” TeamRDogs’ programmer Mr Violet told TorrentFreak.

The ‘blockage in Belgium’ is a reference to the news yesterday that two ISPs, Belgacom and Telenet, were ordered by a court to implement DNS blocks against The Pirate Bay.

Tests by TorrentFreak confirm that the Newzbin2 tool will indeed circumvent a DNS blockade of The Pirate Bay. Those looking for other ways to unblock the site can find information here.

“We at Newzbin2 are HUGE fans of The Pirate Bay badboyz: we’d like them even if they beat up our mothers. The fact that they, like us, suffer pointlessly at the hands of the Copyright Dinosaurs disposes us to assist them in any way we can,” Newzbin2′s Mr White told TorrentFreak.

“They certainly don’t need us and this is as more of a solidarity gesture than a Mink lined lifeboat with minibar. We have no ties to TPB but us Swedes gotta stick together.”

Mr White says the team have also been keeping an eye on BREIN’s work over in the Netherlands.

“The block [in Belgium] is astonishing to us and we also wonder whether BREIN have been smoking too much dope in Dutch coffeeshops. What with the recent ‘ban’ on Usenet in the Netherlands we can only assume the European rights agencies occupy a building exposed to high levels of stupid rays,” he adds.

As website blocking becomes more aggressive it is likely that more tools such as the one offered by Newzbin2 will appear and become ever more sophisticated. Rather than having hard-coded parameters they will be updated automatically via plugins, online updates and user input as they become more savvy.

For file-sharers, unblocking sites will become just another part of the game, a game they’ve been playing virtually unhindered for more than a decade, despite millions of dollars being spent to stop them.

“TPB won’t be silenced: we won’t be silenced,” Mr White concludes. “We serve a valuable role in disseminating culture. And free stuff. We are here to stay, deal with it. ‘Barman! a jug of Pina Colada for the Pirate Bay guys.’

Article has been updated with comments from Mr White

Source: Newzbin2 Team Up With The Pirate Bay To Defeat Site Blocking

As soon as the new service went live TalkTalk subscribers were noticing some strange behavior. During the day they were able to play games just fine, but after 6 in the evening, they were all of a sudden unable to connect. Then, after midnight the connection problems suddenly disappeared and games were loading just fine.

Initially some thought it could be that OnLive couldn’t keep up with the demand, but when the same pattern repeated during the following days it became apparent that something was seriously wrong. This was confirmed by OnLive’s support desk, who observed that the users with problems were facing excessive packet loss on their connections.

So what’s going on here?

Based on the systematic problems between 6 PM and 12 AM, it appears that TalkTalk’s P2P throttling application is also cutting off OnLive. TalkTalk are very open about their traffic management practices, and they do indeed limit P2P traffic during the exact times OnLive users are facing problems.

OnLive uses UDP connections to transfer game data, and it seems that TalkTalk’s traffic shaping equipment mistakes this for P2P traffic.

TorrentFreak reached out to TalkTalk to find out more about the issue, as users in the ISP’s support forums were unable to find out more. Yesterday we got a response and TalkTalk acknowledged the problem, but a fix is yet to be found.

“This has been raised with our network team and we are currently investigating,” a TalkTalk spokesperson informed us. Meanwhile, TalkTalk subscribers are growing impatient as they feel that they are being ignored.

“I basically feel that my money spent on OnLive is being wasted. Working from 8:00 till 16.30 I have no use for this service as I would have wait until midnight to have access. Which is unrealistic, people need to have a good sleep, right?” OnLive user and TalkTalk subscriber Dawid told TorrentFreak.

And somehow we feel that OnLive is not very happy with the issue either, as they may lose customers who think that the cloud gaming platform is simply offering a bad service. A few users of other ISPs have been reporting issues as well, but only at TalkTalk are they still persisting more than a week after OnLive launched.

While we understand that problems can always occur, the above clearly illustrates the dangers of traffic shaping. There’s always going to be collateral damage. In the case of OnLive it is significant enough to be noticed and (hopefully) fixed, but what happens if a smaller company is affected? Hopefully TalkTalk will come forward with an official apology and more details on their UDP throttling, so this debacle can be prevented in the future.

Update (October 3, 2011): TalkTalk gave the following comment to TorrentFreak

“Unfortunately the recently launched OnLive gaming service was incorrectly identified as a peer-to-peer application. We’ve changed this and are currently testing with customers. We apologise for the inconvenience this has caused.”

Source: TalkTalk’s P2P Throttling Kills OnLive Games

Having the option to stream millions of tracks supported by an occasional ad, or free of ads for a small monthly fee, Spotify appeared to be serious competitor to music piracy. Data just released by the Swedish Music industry appears to support this theory.

Through quarterly surveys researchers have polled the music consumption habits of thousands of Swedes between the age of 15 and 74, and in their most recent report they find that music piracy continues to drop.

Since 2009 the numbers of people who download music illegally has decreased by more than 25 percent, and over the last year alone it dropped by 9 percent. The data further suggests that this downward trend is caused by the availability of improved legal services such as Spotify.

When Spotify opened up to the public early 2009, it took only three months before the number of Spotify users had outgrown the number of music pirates. In the months after that the number of downloaders continued to decline while Spotify expanded its user base.

playing in Spotify..

Streaming services such as Spotify are now the most popular way to consume music. More than 40 percent of the participants in the survey now use a music streaming service, compared to less than 10 percent who say they download music legally.

About 23 percent continue to pirate music, but this number is dwindling.

“The long-term trend is a sharp increase in legal streaming while we see a reduction in illegal file sharing and downloading,” Music Sweden’s CEO Elizabet Widlund said commenting on the results.

“When 800,000 Swedes are willing to pay for streaming music, there is clearly a market for more legal players in the digital music market. We encourage diversity of music services as it will provide better conditions for both those who create music and those who listen to it,” she added.

Looking at the motivations for people to switch to legal services, participants in the survey cited “the range of music that’s released” as the primary reason (40%). Other explanations were the absolute increase in available music (30%), and the fact that legal services have become cheaper (24%) and simpler (24%).

Although the above is certainly good news for the music industry, it has to be noted that the ‘change’ to legal services is ‘fragile.’ The survey shows a slight change in the ongoing trend during the second quarter of 2011, exactly when Spotify announced that its free service would have some new limitations.

Although this change motivated some (15%) to sign up with a paid Spotify account, the majority (31%) said they would leave Spotify to turn to other streaming services, like YouTube, or file-sharing sites.

There is no doubt that, unlike music industry bosses have claimed in the past, there are indeed ways to compete with free. However, time is needed to find the right balance between giving music fans what they want, and secure a healthy revenue stream.

Source: Music Piracy Continues to Decline Thanks to Spotify

The beginning of the new TV-season is generally speaking the busiest time for EZTV, as over a million people flock to the site every day to catch up with their favorite shows. So when they found that their preferred TV-torrent index wasn’t loading, some people started to worry.

Luckily for them, there is not much to be concerned about.

EZTV’s NovaKing informed TorrentFreak that the downtime is due to hardware issues. They are currently working on replacing old servers with new ones, and when this is done the site will come back. This could take a few more hours up to a few days, depending on how much time the volunteers can free up.

“We recently got new servers to help with the increase in visitors we are getting to the site. With the new setup EZTV and sister sites like ezRSS will be more stable,” NovaKing said.

In recent months EZTV has seen quite an increase in usage, and since the old servers couldn’t keep up this often resulted in downtime. And aside from better up-time, there’s more for EZTV’s users to look forward to.

“The new version of the site is almost complete as well which we hope most people will like and find more useful,” NovaKing told us.

One of the new features currently in development is the integration of ezRSS (which is also down) with EZTV’s “my shows” feature. This means that users can setup an RSS feed for their favorite shows on the EZTV website, and use this feed to automatically download new shows.

The upcoming iteration of the site will also have a revamped forum, improved usability, more detailed show information and an updated TV news system. When these new features will be rolled out is unknown at this point.

Unlike other torrent sites, EZTV is completely advertising free and run entirely by volunteers. All the people working on the site also have real jobs to attend so site maintenance and upgrades sometimes take longer than with other sites. Still, that doesn’t mean that EZTV isn’t publishing content elsewhere.

Update October 5, 2011

EZTV has not made the switch yet and is still facing issues every now and then. The site is down at the moment but the techies are working on bringing it back.

Source: EZTV Goes Down In Preparation For Big Return

Last Wednesday, TeamRDogs – the group behind the site – released Newzbin Client 1.0.0.127, their first software release designed to circumvent BT’s Cleanfeed online censorship system. Our tests revealed that encryption is one of the main tools being used to circumvent the system.

Following the release, TorrentFreak caught up with Mr White from TeamRDogs, a character far more colorful than his monochromatic name might suggest. He told us that being forced to create this software was not only a waste of their time, but a sad testament to the state of the open Internet dream.

“Having to write a client program like this is an admission that the open web is in the process of failing. The ability of vested interests to choke the Internet with a vinculum woven from malevolent law and technology is very depressing,” Mr White told us.

“TeamRDogs would rather spend its time in titty bars drinking whisky and snorting lines than hacking the MAFIAA’s Client of Doom (hmmm, CoD – we may call it that), but they’ve made it necessary.”

The Newzbin2 anti-blocking software, which was updated with a new release just before the weekend followed by a brand new OSX version this week, is said to include ‘Agility Technology’. But what does that mean?

“This is simply a mechanism that will allow the application and its configuration to be modified to adapt to the new web censorship techniques that we can envisage arising,” Mr White explains. “The App can also ‘Phone Home’ for a friendly message if Newzbin2′s Intarwebs is cut off.”

While Newzbin2 could indeed become the first victim of the pro-copyright web-blocking movement in the West, if the lobbyists get their way it certainly won’t be the last. But by picking on a site like Newzbin2, which has already shown it is prepared to fight technology with technology (a route to failure in itself), the prospect of successful future web blocks has already been reduced.

Mr White told TorrentFreak that rather than keep their toys to themselves, in the spirit of sharing Newzbin2 could adjust their code to assist other victims of web-blocking.

“We could adapt it to help out other websites so if, for example, the MAFIAA start to go after NZBMatrix [another Usenet indexing site] or torrent sites we’d be happy to help them out.”

However, it’s not all plain sailing. We’ve already had pessimists point out that since TeamRDogs obtained the original Newzbin database by unconventional means, their software should be viewed with caution. But that notion is dismissed by Mr White.

“Some people will worry that [the client] will have adware/malware etc: given the heuristic examination that it will inevitably be subject to that would be dumb on a Sony scale,” says Mr White referencing the Sony CD rootkit fiasco. “It’s clean, we swear this on Ron Jeremy’s manhood.”

Mr White says that in addition to the new client, TeamRDogs also recommends tools offered by 3rd parties.

“Despite the App we reckon that MAFIAAFire will also be a good bet for most for now but we believe in having options,” he concludes. “And doubles all round.”

Source: Newzbin2 Offers Anti-Blocking Tech To BitTorrent Sites, Releases OS X Version

The 18-year-old, who is reportedly an opponent of New Zealand’s just-introduced “3 Strikes” Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Act 2011, allegedly took his anti-legislation demonstration too far, by announcing that websites were going to be hacked and that government buildings had been rigged with explosives.

The man from South Auckland was subsequently tracked down by local police with the assistance of the National Cyber Crime Centre and the Electronic Crime Laboratory.

He was charged with making Threats of Harm to People or Property under the Crimes Act 1961, an offense carrying a maximum sentence of 7 years in prison.

“Such threats are taken very seriously by Police and this investigation demonstrates Police has the expertise and resources to trace those who make such threats on the internet,” said Acting Detective Inspector Pete Jones.

Under the new anti-filesharing legislation, those who are discovered uploading copyright material are first sent two warnings via their ISP. On receipt of a third, copyright holders can take Internet account holders to the Copyright Tribunal where they will face fines of up to $15,000 and disconnection.

Unfortunately the evidence gathered by rights holders is only accurate enough to identify an ISP account from where an infringement took place, and is unable to identify actual infringers. The New Zealand government dealt with this eventuality by making account holders responsible for infringements even if they didn’t carry them out.

This has annoyed a wide cross-section of New Zealand society and generated a number of both peaceful and law-abiding protests. Inevitably though, in highly-charged situations and with a backdrop of the ‘Anonymous’-style direct action cyber-protests of recent months, some people will overstep the mark.

The facts of the case will be heard tomorrow when the 18-year-old appears in court, but considering the charges it seems clear the authorities believe that he had no intention of carrying out any threats.

On this basis it will be interesting to see how the man is dealt with. A man who made a 6 minute-long call to police in August claiming that an airplane passenger was carrying a bomb was said to be only facing a bill for the call and a charge of wasting police time.

An interesting footnote is that since the anti-filesharing legislation was introduced earlier this month, not a single warning has been sent out to Internet subscribers, reportedly because rightsholders haven’t paid up the required $25 per notice admin fee.

Source: File-Sharing Protest Bomb Threat Video Lands Teenager in Court

The Cybernorms group researches how the Internet creates new social norms in society, and to what extent these norms are or should be reflected in relevant legislation. Ultimately, the researchers hope the collated knowledge and insights will help legislators to draft more sensible laws.

The Pirate Bay supported survey was a great success and in just a few days 75,000 people responded. Although the final results wont be made public before November, the researchers are already teasing some key figures.

Unsurprisingly perhaps, the researchers find that only 5 percent of the respondents are female. Although it could just mean that girls/women are less likely to fill in surveys on their file-sharing habits, the result certainly suggests that BitTorrent is still very much a boys/men thing.

If we look at some other data sources, such as Google’s site profiles, females are indeed underrepresented. Although the percentages are higher than in the survey, most popular torrent sites get approximately 20 percent female visitors. BTJunkie is the most appealing to girls with 26 percent.

Going back to the survey results, the researchers report that the majority of the respondents are young men between the ages of 18 and 24. Within this group the download habits don’t vary much between cultures. Whether they come from India, Africa, the United States or Europe, when it comes to file-sharing they are very much alike.

Perhaps more surprisingly, there’s no difference between men and women when it comes to the content they download. Both men and women download the same amount of porn, and the same is true for sports. The only gender difference comes from games, which 60 percent of men download compared to 25 percent of the women.

Content-wise, movies are by far the most sought after. More than 80 percent of all respondents say they’ve downloaded movies. This is more than twice as much as the people who’re interested in music.

According to the researchers it wont be easy to stop people from sharing files. Aside from seeking more ways to download torrents anonymously, the respondents are also increasingly seeking alternative sharing options, such as swapping USB-sticks and sharing files directly with friends via mobile phones.

In the coming weeks the researchers will delve deeper into the data and the full results are expected to be released in November. Aside from the lack of girls, some interesting patterns should emerge from the file-sharers’ brains.

Source: Girls Are Not Into The Pirate Bay, Or BitTorrent

In the hope of correcting this and other misconceptions surrounding their operations, RapidShare then took the unprecedented step of hiring the lobbying firm Dutko Worldwide, who also work for Google.

Initially, little was known about the priorities of RapidShare in Washington, but the most recent lobbying report filed by Dutko reveals that the PROTECT IP Act is high up the list. For good reason, because if the bill becomes law RapidShare could be one of the first to be put out of business, in the United States at least.

Under the PROTECT IP Act, authorities (and copyright holders) will have a broad range of tools to censor sites they deem to be facilitating copyright infringement, starting with domain seizures.

In case a domain is not registered or controlled by a U.S. company, authorities can order search engines to remove the website from their search results and order ISPs to block the website.

Although the above measures are already quite far-reaching, the bill also allows for private copyright holders to use some of the same tools as the Government. Without due process, copyright holders can obtain a court order to prevent payment providers and ad-networks from doing business with sites that allegedly facilitate copyright infringement.

One of the many problems of such a law is who gets to decide what the definition of a “rogue website” is. In common with other file-sharing platforms, RapidShare is often labeled as seriously problematic, despite the fact that they’ve been found to operate legally by a U.S. federal court. This could lead to a situation where hundreds of legitimate businesses are virtually shut down because the entertainment industry sees them as a threat.

To make lawmakers aware of these threats and to improve their image in Washington, RapidShare has already spent $260,000 in lobbying efforts during the first half of 2011.

The PROTECT IP Act, currently placed on hold by Senator Ron Wyden, is crucial in this regard as the RIAA and MPAA have already labeled RapidShare as a rogue website. This means that when the bill is signed into law the file-hoster could be one of the first companies to be targeted.

Whether RapidShare’s lobbying efforts in Washington will pay off is yet to be seen. It is no secret that entertainment industry groups are lobbying extensively in favor of the PROTECT IP Act, with much bigger budgets. That said, it’s certainly better than standing idly by.

In the coming months RapidShare is expected to continue their lobbying efforts at the White House Office, the Senate and the House of Representatives. Not only against the PROTECT IP Act, but to improve the image of their company and protect their rights and those of other file-hosting services.

Source: RapidShare Lobbies Lawmakers Against PROTECT IP Act

Having met resistance on home soil, the makers of The Hurt Locker are now sending out letters to Canadian Internet users saying they have been caught sharing the Oscar-winning movie. Settle now for a few thousand dollars, the letters say, or face an expensive legal battle in court.

While opponents of these settlement schemes label them as a ‘scam’, they largely operate within the law. After all, they’re being run by lawyers. However, where there’s money to be made there’s always the chance of an illegal scam riding on the same wave, as Canadians are just finding out.

According to an official public fraud warning from West Vancouver Police Department, Canadian seniors have been targeted recently in a fake pay-up-or-else style ‘file-sharing’ settlement scheme.

The letters, which claim to be from Artisan International License, Compliance and Investigations, state that the recipient has been caught downloading porn movies. In common with their ‘legal’ counterparts, the scammers offer to make the whole sorry episode go away for a few thousand dollars. If they don’t settle, further legal action is threatened.

“I opened an interesting letter today from ‘Artisan International’. The letter accused me of downloading several pornographic movies via “Bittorrent / P2P,” says a letter recipient who identifies himself as Sandworm.

“The letter demands 3000$ by September 24th. I won’t go into my professional background, but let’s just say I know the law and am no idiot when it comes to internet technology. In fact I regularly publish articles covering filesharing technology,” he continues.

“They are messing with the wrong person. I took the letter straight to the local police. It turns out they have already received hundreds of complaints about these letters already. That is hundreds of complaints in my neighborhood. Their advice: ‘rip it up’.”

The movies listed in the fake settlement letters include Paris Porno (1976), Retired Porn Stars (2010), Real Big Boobs 2, Volume 2 (2006), White-Hot Nurses (2002), Reality Pron Series 1 (1995), Les Affames sont tombles sure la tete (1994) and Rammin’ the Rear Gate 2001 (2001).

Targeting the elderly with any scam is a despicable act, made even worse by the potentially embarrassing payload employed in this case.

“If you or anyone you know has been a recipient of this letter or has personal knowledge of who may be responsible for sending these letters, please contact the West Vancouver Police at 604-925-7300 quoting file number 11-11341 or if you wish to remain anonymous, please call Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-8477 ,” the police conclude.

Scams of this nature aren’t new. Criminals in Germany tried the same thing last year.

Source: Canadian Police Issue File-Sharing Scam Letters Fraud Warning