Last week TorrentFreak reported that the Canadian Pirate Party had established its own BitTorrent tracker. The Pirates hope to show that BitTorrent is not a threat, but a great tool for artists to promote their work. Record label Thorny Bleeder agrees and is now offering free music via the tracker.
An ISP in the UK is set to introduce a voluntary customer Internet censorship scheme. Charles Dunstone, chief executive of Carphone Warehouse/TalkTalk said the company would introduce parental controls for subscribers which would include a feature to ban BitTorrent sites.
A UK music industry group claims that it has given an ISP evidence that thousands of its customers are pirating music but it has done nothing to stop them. Since February the BPI has harvested the IP addresses of 100,000 BT Broadband customers but is now labeling the ISP’s lack of action against them as “shameful.”
Controversial blogger Tucker Max has been telling the Internet about his drunken sexual encounters for many years. His antics will hit the big screen tomorrow in the movie release of his book I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell. If you’ve never heard of Tucker, now’s your chance. He says he doesn’t care if non-US citizens pirate the movie.
Despite seemingly insurmountable problems experienced with its proposed purchase of The Pirate Bay, Global Gaming Factory continues to surprise. Today it has announced that it will call a meeting for the election of new board members. Those suggested are music industry veterans and include a BPI council member.
The war against file-sharing has found a new figure-head. After she wrote an interesting post on MySpace, singer Lilly Allen’s words have been relayed around the world – she has even started a new blog where many artists are supporting her. But what if the new face of anti-piracy was just as bad as those she criticizes?
Dan Brown’s latest novel The Lost Symbol sold a million copies in the first day, and this success has carried over to various file-sharing sites. Both the unabridged audiobook and the ebook versions have already been downloaded tens of thousands of times through BitTorrent.
After Australia’s Senator Stephen Conroy’s plans to filter the Internet earned him the title of Internet Villain of the Year, today there is more chin-scratching over the plans. Speaking yesterday, the Senator Conroy said there has never been any suggestion that the government could or would block P2P traffic.
Bram Cohen, the inventor of the BitTorrent protocol that revolutionized file-sharing, is working on BitTorrent-based live streaming. With his efforts he aims to develop a piece of code that is superior to all the other P2P-based streaming solutions on the market today.
In the past weeks the Pirate Bay has been ripped, copied and rebuilt by avid file-sharers, guaranteeing that the site’s legacy will be preserved no matter what. The people behind the Kiosk of Piracy take this trend to a whole new level as they have created an offline copy of the site which is open to the public.
Trackers are the Achilles’ heel of BitTorrent. Tens of thousands of downloads will slow down or stop working entirely when some of the bigger trackers go offline. Trackhub is a new service that addresses this problem by distributing downloaders to a working tracker in case the main tracker fails.
