To our surprise, we found out that even IP-addresses registered to the RIAA were showing unauthorized downloads of movies, TV-shows and software.

This curiosity was quickly picked up by other news outlets to whom the RIAA gave a rather interesting explanation. Apparently these file-sharing transactions weren’t carried out by RIAA staffers, but by a third party who’s using the RIAA IP-addresses to share and distribute files online.

“Those partial IP addresses are similar to block addresses assigned to RIAA. However, those addresses are used by a third party vendor to serve up our public Web site,” a spokesperson told CNET, adding, “As I said earlier, they are not used by RIAA staff to access the Internet.”

This is all a bit confusing. First of all, the addresses are not similar, they are simply assigned to the RIAA. Everyone can look that up here, or here.

Secondly, while we are prepared to believe that RIAA staff didn’t download these files, we are left wondering what mysterious third party did. Also, is it even allowed by the official registry to register a range of IP-addresses to your private organization, and then allow others to use these IPs?

Also, just as a bit of friendly advice, it’s generally not a good idea to let others use your organization’s addresses to browse the internet. This time it’s “just” copyrighted material up for debate, but who knows what else they may be sharing online.

Considering the RIAA’s past of suing tens of thousands of file-sharers for copyright infringement, the excuse is perhaps even more embarrassing than taking full responsibility. When some of the 20,000 plus people who were sued by the RIAA over the years used the “someone else did it” excuse this was shrugged off by the music group’s lawyers. Can these people have their money back now? We doubt it.

Elsewhere, Henrik Chulu from the Free Culture blog discovered that someone at the infamous Johan Schlüter law firm downloaded the Danish movie ‘Dirch’. But Maria Fredenslund from anti-piracy group RettighedsAliancen had their excuse ready.

“We’re working for right holders, who obviously have given us permission to collect their material online as part of an investigative work,” she told Comon.dk in response.

Notably, Sarkozy is staying quiet and not attempting to justify any infringements carried out in his name. Perhaps a case of least said, soonest mended…

Source: RIAA: Someone Else Is Pirating Through Our IP-Addresses

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 treaty eventually passed a few months later, but due to the slow bureaucratic process it would take another two years before this seat could be filled. All this time Amelia Andersdotter had to wait patiently to enter parliament and represent the people who voted her in.

However, now that all member states have signed off on it, Andersdotter and 17 other new members are expected to take their seats next month.

Representing one of the youngest parties in Europe, the second Pirate MEP is about to set a fitting record. When elected Andersdotter was only 21, but the now 24-year-old will still be the youngest member to hold a seat in the current parliament.

“Not having to answer more questions about when I will finally get to fill my seat is what I’m looking forward to most,” Andersdotter tells TorrentFreak. “It feels really good that the when-question is over.”

Andersdotter is a supporter of a united Europe, and hopes that the Pirate Party can help to shape policy in which culture, creativity and innovation will flourish.

“I kind of buy into this idea that the European Union is a good thing, and that closer connections between European nations both political and social are advantageous not only on the level of the prices of groceries, but perhaps even more, culturally.”

“It’s nice to be able to say democratisation of EU governance is moving forward, that individual member states aren’t stalling that democratisation for their own nationalist purposes any more,” Andersdotter tells us.

The unitedness is also one of the downsides. As her delayed appointment illustrates, it can be very hard sometimes to actually get things done in Europe.

“What I’m not looking forward to as much is perhaps the fear that I will realise most of EU governance is actually a battle between various national interests, rather than one interest in having a good, strong European Union. But it’s difficult of course. ”

“The EU is a big place, and one reason people feel closest to ‘their’ member state is because they know most things about it. I remember the first time I was in Belgium a few years ago and the prime minister resigned and I thought ‘oh no!’ but another Belgian just said to me ‘again?’ with a deep sigh.”

For the remainder of her term as MEP, which end in 2014, Andersdotter will focus on issues like competition in the telecommunication area.

“European approaches to competition law need to be changed, at least a bit. Better sector adaptation, for instance. The lack of real control over vertical integration creates the situation where telcos (or media enterprises) own everything from the backbone cables to the music streaming service – that’s not good. One would at least expect some obligation to keep the different tiers apart,” Andersdotter says.

“Currently this type of bundling is, more worryingly, encouraged rather than regulated and it creates a very unfair balance between the infrastructure owners (in this case) and users. Competition law just now deals mostly with horizontal integration, which would be say, if one company owns all of the cable in northern Belgium (Telenet).”

Andersdotter points out that the telecommunications sector has some good sector specific laws already, the net neutrality law in the Netherlands being a prime example. The problem is, however, to get all member stats to adopt these regulations.

“Maybe European Parliament or the European institutions need better tools to make sure member states follow their community obligations,” Andersdotter notes.

Aside from defending the public from unfair competition, the future Member of Parliament will also tackle the various rights issues that are so dear to the Pirate Party.

“I’m also very interested in industrial rights, like, patent rights or design rights, trademarks. There’s an abundance of kind of side-initiatives, data exclusivity in the pharmaceutical industry being a good example, that also reinforce the ‘non-material’ economic position of companies in a way that is not always good for society,” she says.

“One issue that I know the EU deals with a lot in all areas, and that we don’t really think much about at all in terms of industrial property, is certification – what is a certification worth, how are they generated (produced) and traded, by whom? Between whom?”

Andersdotter further hopes that the Pirate Party presence in the European Parliament will be followed by strong representation in national parliaments.

“It’s important for the PP to be represented everywhere, I guess. One of my hopes for the future is that the PP will be represented in all the national parliaments of member states so that we can hold member states kind of accountable more for what happens in the EU.”

“I find it antagonizing that member states and their politicians try to avoid responsibility for their own failures by blaming the EU, but mostly how successful they are in doing so,” Andersdotter tells us.

“When national parliaments have been saying that they can’t do anything about ACTA, activists and media just kind of happily accept. What national parliaments could do, and should do, is obviously tell their national governments not to sign the agreements. That is and would be within their power,” she adds.

Thus far none of the Pirate parties has managed to score a seat in the national parliament through elections, but the recent outcome of the German State elections shows that the possibilities are there. Political change is slow, but things are moving in the right direction for the Pirate Party.

In the European Parliament the seat of Amelia Andersdotter will double the representation of the Pirate Party in Europe’s highest political arena, something the 5-years-young party can be proud of.

Source: Pirate To Join European Parliament As Youngest Member

Although the lax security in Hungary had been exploited for some time, the problem seemed to come to a head when a copy of Hangover Part II turned up online just after its premiere.

The copy of most interest to the international audience came from release group EP1C, who had spliced the video from the Hungarian language release with English language audio. The all-important video source had been supplied by release group CiNEDUB. According to the Hungarian government, that group are now in all kinds of trouble.

The National Tax and Customs Administration (NAV) say that in response to US pressure, its financial investigators and police have shut down “the largest pirate server center” in the country, which reportedly played a major role in the CiNEDUB group.

Dramatic video footage showed more than a dozen heavily armored and masked police and customs agents, some of them armed, smash down doors, make arrests and seize equipment. At one point the camera shows a shotgun on the floor of what appears to be a residential address. In another shot the camera homes in on a mirror, razor blade and what appears to be cocaine. Piles of money only add to the ‘Tony Montana’ effect.

The authorities say they seized 10 servers, 3 of which had a combined capacity of 70TB. They contained 5000 movies, 4000 songs , 6000 games and 500 pieces of software.

The government reports that access to the illegal material was being sold by a 9-man team using premium SMS payment systems and bank transfers. Two men are said to be under arrest and the rest are said to be “still at large.”

TorrentFreak spoke with SCT of ASVA, the leading local P2P blog, and asked if CiNEDUB stand accused of running the entire operation, a part of it, or whether they simply provided movies which were later exploited by the server operators. That remains unclear.

The government, however, are laying the blame firmly at CiNEDUB’s feet for attracting the ire of Hollywood.

“Most of this team were responsible for the great American filmmakers blacklisting Hungary,” NAV said in a statement.

Source: Dramatic Footage Shows Raid on Pirates Blamed For Hollywood Movie Boycott

“Our mission is simple and specific,” he told TorrentFreak. “To revolutionize the digital e-textbook industry and change it permanently.”

Now the site is stepping up its assault against “textbook monopolists” by offering a brand new service to not only reduce the costs of digital textbook rentals, but to turn that temporary access to an educational necessity into permanent ownership.

The initiative the site is running is called “Hire-a-Pirate” and the publishers aren’t going to like it one bit. Many students, on the other hand, won’t share their view. This is how it works.

First, the student lets LibraryPirate know the title of the book they’re looking for. Then, site staff locate the product on eTextbook rental services and advise the student of the current rental price. An example shown to us was a book costing $200, but with a time-limited digital rental copy also available at $118.50.

Participating students are then asked to purchase a gift certificate from the official seller for the full amount ($118.50 in our example) and send the gift code to LibraryPirate. Site staff then rent the book on the student’s behalf.

“After a little bit of this and a little of that, we strip the DRM from the PDF and contact the user letting them know the book is ready via torrent,” says LP’s admin. “The student can now carry the textbook with them anywhere for as long as they want, allowing the PDF to be easily read on any device.”

The idea is that not only does a rental copy get turned into the unrestricted real thing, but students can choose to split the cost of obtaining a book between friends – 10 friends contributing means just $11.85 each. For future students, however, the cost of obtaining the same book reduces to zero.

“Every textbook purchased through the Hire-a-Pirate program will be added to the LibraryPirate torrent database. If you do not have time to scan books, this is an excellent way to help the cause and save money at the same time,” adds LP.

However, for those who have hard copies already, the time to take a few photographs and a desire to share, LibraryPirate have just released a new tool to make eBook creation a lot more simple.

LPBR is a piece of software created by LP member RiddleRiot which turns any digital camera into “a lean mean textbook scanning machine.”

After placing the book on a black background and photographing its pages, a couple of clicks later and an eBook comes out the other end.

“LPBR will crop, sharpen and re-size the entire folder of camera scan images into one easily readable PDF book,” says TP’s admin. “It’s so easy to scan a textbook now, even a college student can do it. During our testing, we were able to scan and convert one 500 page book in under 2 hours.”

Of course, with both the Rent-a-Pirate service and the LPBR software, what we’re looking at here is copyright infringement, but LP’s admin insists that since students are being abused by a broken education system that leaves them no other option than to spend ridiculous sums of money on textbooks, there is only “one path to moral high ground.”

The “private theft of education” must be combated, he concludes, and that can only come about by striking the monopolies where it counts – in their pocketbooks.

So, is ripping DRM from textbooks and sharing them for the purposes of gaining an education more morally acceptable than doing the same with movies, music and games? Or is it just an elaborate excuse to frame copyright infringement in a righteous manner?

What comes first, the rights of the publishers or the need for a fairer system towards educational enlightenment?

It’s an interesting point for debate, and one we encourage in the comment section below.

Source: Pirate Service Makes Textbook Rentals Last Forever

Based on the trailers alone the game got raging reviews from prominent game sites. ” It looks amazing,” Kotaku wrote, and Destructoid labeled it a “terrific premise.”

In the months that followed the developers raised $26,068 from supporters through a Kickstarter project, and mid-August the game was finally released to the public. Unfortunately, as with all games, it didn’t take long before a pirated version ended up online.

However, the pirated version of No Time To Explain that was uploaded to The Pirate Bay is rather special. Unlike the regular game it has a clear pirate theme, with all the main characters wearing pirate hats. The game was literally ‘pirated’.

To confirm the suspicion that the pirate themed game was actually released by the makers themselves, we got in touch with developer Alex Nichiporchik. He confirmed that they are indeed responsible for the release. Alex came up with the idea of making a special release for sites like The Pirate Bay a while ago, and his partner Tom Brien’s suggested adding the pirate theme.

“We thought it’d be funny to leak a pirate version ourselves which is literally all about pirates and pirate hats,” Alex told TorrentFreak. “I mean, some people are going to torrent it either way, we might as well make something funny out of it.”

“With indie game development, the whole motto is to constantly update the game for free to the userbase. For pirated versions this makes things really confusing with version tracking, so we were more comfortable with making a joke out of it and so that people who appreciate it could buy the game and thus help us do more dumb stuff,” Alex said.

The idea to release a pirated copy themselves comes from the realization that it’s impossible to prevent unauthorized downloads anyway. In fact, it is often argued that for smaller indie releases the promotional value of a ‘free’ release may actually lead to more people buying the game.

“You can’t really stop piracy, all you can do is make it work for you and/or provide something that people actually want to pay for. For us this is humor, we like making people laugh,” Alex told us.

Thus far the idea appears to work out as planned. The response from the public is overwhelmingly positive, and perhaps even more importantly, the pirated copy hasn’t hurt sales a tiny bit. If anything, tinyBuild has sold more games because they uploaded the game to The Pirate Bay.

“We saw very positive WTF REALLY feedback from users, and saw reactions that people bought it simply because they liked the joke. So we don’t see it hurting sales in any way,” Alex said.

Indeed, in some cases piracy is actually a good thing. The above is yet another example of what happens when piracy becomes promotion, something that’s certainly not unique to this particular case ^{(1, 2, 3, 4, 5 etc)}.

Those who haven’t played the game yet, you’re encouraged to pirate it on The Pirate Bay. Those who like it are of course welcome to buy the regular release as well, which reportedly is less buggy than the pirate-themed version.

Source: Indie Game Devs Post Pirated Game on The Pirate Bay

But in a bizarre turn of events, the Institute appears to have achieved their mission to promote Swedish films by a most unusual and controversial route.

Following an audit of IP addresses sharing movies online, investigators from anti-piracy company DoubleTrace discovered that IP addresses in the BitTorrent swarms of several local movies belonged to none other than the Swedish Film Institute (SFI).

Needless to say, the movies leaked from SFI ended up on The Pirate Bay.

In response to the revelations, last Wednesday SFI managing director Bengt Toll held a staff crisis meeting where he warned employees not to talk publicly on the issue without consulting him.

However, when Swedish news outlet Aftonbladet contacted Toll this Monday to find out if the allegations of movie leaks from SFI were true, he replied: “No, No.”

Yesterday, Toll – who is now reportedly in sensitive discussions with film producers, lawyers and IT experts – gave a different impression on the developing scandal.

“I can in good conscience say, we have logged all of our computers,” he said. “We have looked through our firewall, we have looked through everything. But there is nothing.”

“Here we work in the film industry against illegal downloading and the institution we rely on most heavily is the Film Institute. If it turns out that the leaks come from here it is extremely serious,” the SFI chief added.

Toll says he has informed the Ministry of Culture and engaged an independent company to audit the organization’s security. In the meantime, representatives from the film industry are understandably unhappy.

“I will request consultations with [SFI] about what the hell this is all about,” said former Economy Minister and President of Film Producers, Bjorn Rosengren. “I want the cards on the table, now.”

The investigation into the leaks, which is already underway, is said to be focusing on two SFI employees.

Source: Pirate Bay Movie Leaks Traced Back To Swedish Film Institute

During the hostilities, Cotter – who would become more commonly known as Jack – served in the balloon section of the Royal Flying Corps, but he later returned to film. Between 1919 and 1920 he worked briefly for Topical Budget, a silent British newsreel that ran from 1911 to 1931. It would be this company’s rights Cotter would breach in his role as one of the world’s first ‘camming’ pirates.

Sometime between 1920 and 1922, Cotter joined film and newsreel company British Pathé but it would be in the following year that he hit the big-time as a notorious pirate. With London’s Wembley Stadium completed, it would play host to the 1923 F.A. Cup Final, the most prestigious event in English soccer. The opposing teams would be Bolton Wanderers and London’s own West Ham United.

But for British Pathé, who hoped to film the match, there was a serious problem. Rival Topical Budget – Cotter’s former employer – had paid £1,000 to secure exclusive rights to the event. Cotter was undeterred. Fans of West Ham United call their team ‘The Hammers’ and this mental image gave Cotter a cunning plan.

Just as the maVen’s of today may hide their cameras in anything from a drinks cup to a modified wheelchair, as can be seen from the images below Cotter hid his camera in a giant hammer he’d fashioned from wood. He successfully recorded much of the event in true camming style, with plenty of heads and other obstacles in the way.

In his piracy efforts, Cotter wasn’t on his own. Intent on getting some aerial shots of the match Pathé hired a plane. Unfortunately that eventuality had been anticipated by Topical Budget who had painted their company name in giant letters across the top of the roof of Wembley Stadium, perhaps providing the first ever anti-piracy ‘watermark’ in the process.

However, according to a 1933 book by news photographer Bernard Grant, in an attempt to thwart the Pathé pirates even more sophisticated anti-piracy measures were put in place during the previous year’s F.A. Cup Final.

“I saw the battle from the top floor of a high building overlooking the ground, from where I had hoped to obtain some photographs with a long-focus camera, but as I was sharing the position with the well-known film man, Frank Bassill, on this occasion a ‘pirate’ [for Pathé], I was handicapped by the efforts of the defenders [Topical Budget],” Grant wrote.

Amazingly, in addition to sending up an air balloon to block the view, around the ground Topical Budget had deployed multiple heliographs, mirrored devices usually used to reflect sunlight in order to send morse code over great distances. In this case they provided blinding light to ruin filming. But it still wouldn’t be enough to deter the swathy pirates of Pathé.

“At the sound of the referee’s whistle starting the match there came a terrific noise of hammering and crashing at a point away to our left, and we saw the corrugated-iron roof of a building alongside the ground fly off in all directions,” wrote Grant.

“A moment later there appeared, rising through the aperture, two heads which I recognised through my glasses as those of Tommy Scales and Leslie Wyand, pioneers in the production of movie news reels. Steadily they rose higher and higher, turning their handles as they came, as the telescopic tower ladder upon which they stood was wound up by friends in the room below,” Grant continued.

“This happening brought into action the defenders’ [rightsholder Topical Budget's] large mobile ‘stand by’ force, members of which, armed with double-poled banners and flags, dashed off to meet the attack.”

While the pirates were ultimately successful, money was rarely made directly from obtaining footage in this way. The prestige of having the events in future news reels was the important thing to Topical Budget and Pathé.

However, despite the ‘immoral’ act of violating someone’s exclusive rights, there is a very interesting cultural footnote to these acts of piracy.

According to Bioscopic, a site dedicated to early and silent cinema, Topical Budget’s footage of the 1922 Cup Final was completely lost. Without Pathé’s pirate footage, the entire event would have been lost forever.

Furthermore, in order to cut the cost of buying exclusive rights to the 1924 F.A. Cup Final, Topical Budget and Pathé decided to put in a joint bid to film the match together.

“It was turned down,” Bioscopic explain. “Consequently no film exists of the F.A. Cup Final of 1924.”

Come back pirates, all is forgiven.

Source: The Failed Battle To Stop The World’s First Camcorder Pirates

Pirate Party Canada’s Travis McCrea, who holds both an American and a Canadian passport, definitely falls into the latter category.

As part of the “war for digital sovereignty,” as McCrea describes it, he has launched Tormovies, a site dedicated to providing movie torrents. A look at the site’s front page reveals that all the latest Hollywood blockbusters are showcased.

This is a bold move considering the current political climate, especially since the site is hosted in the United States. However, that’s exactly the plan according to the Pirate Party candidate.

“TorMovies.org is hosted in the United States (for now) as a stance that they can try to extradite my friends and shut down free speech but new sites, new technologies, and new people will always be right around the corner,” McCrea told TorrentFreak.

Despite its current hosting arrangement, Tormovies is unlikely to stay in the United States for long. Instead it will be hosted in a redundant setup with many servers scattered around the world as backups.

“Just because the United States hates sharing culture, doesn’t mean that we are going to back down,” McCrea explained.

“I have full intentions on not backing down and making it clear that my site is not a tool for piracy, it is a tool for discovering movies and sharing culture. It spiders the web like Google does and sometimes it finds torrent files, but the heart of our site is to showcase the art of movies.”

The plan of the Canadian Pirate Party candidate is very similar to that of his Czech counterparts who launched two movie download portals last month. Using the slogan “linking is not a crime,” the Czech Pirate Party said their initiative was a declaration of war against the local anti-piracy lobby.

How long Tormovies will last remains to be seen. There will undoubtedly be a response from various copyright holders, and it wouldn’t be the first time that a Canadian torrent site has been dragged to court. McCrea, however, believes the project is one of the many battles that has to be fought to secure people’s right to share digital information, copyrighted or not.

“We are in a war for digital sovereignty and we are patriots of this digital revolution,” he says.

Source: Canadian Politician Starts Movie Torrent Site

On July 28th, the admin of XtremeSpeeds had his house raided by the authorities.

He says he was questioned under suspicion of being part of IMAGiNE, one of the leading P2P release groups.

Although the allegation is denied, the admin notes that “I did rent a server to a guy who rented it out,” which seems to suggest that he now has suspicions about who might have been using the equipment in question.

“I’ve tempory [sic] closed the site till after the investigation. I’m expecting a court case in coming months,” he concludes.

A meeting with a lawyer is planned for August 1st and up until recently a PayPal link to donate money to a legal fund was displayed on the site. That has now been removed.

At this stage it is unclear where the admin is based, although the site took donations in British pounds.

Readers may have noticed that TorrentFreak does not regularly report on the world of private trackers. While some might thank us for keeping their communities low-key, our motivations are often quite different.

Aside from a limited interest in these communities in the wider world, the fact is that some private sites simply love to fight. In fact, if some of these disputes were in the flesh, people would be seriously injured. Sorting out who threw the first virtual punch and why is extremely difficult making even close to accurate reporting impossible.

However, what we can say with relative certainty is that P2P group IMAGiNE (who also have their own private tracker) had enemies, enemies like rival release group EP1C whose recent threats included revealing the personal identities of IMAGiNE members.

Equally, IMAGiNE made multiple allegations about EP1C having connections to the FBI. What the allegations all have in common is they have proven impossible to investigate through sources without a vested interest.

That said, a fairly lengthy notice posted on the FTP server of EP1C last month ended with the words “Get ready for a War”, hardly a sign that things had been patched up between the groups.

Whether or not this dispute between IMAGiNE and EP1C is directly or indirectly connected to the arrest of the XtremeSpeeds admin is yet another question which will disappear into the private tracker black hole of muddled information and rumor. The nature of these communities means that we may never know the truth.

Source: XtremeSpeeds BitTorrent Admin Busted

Merrill, who was Chief Information Officer and Vice President of Engineering at Google, left the search giant in 2008 after being poached by EMI, a key member label of the RIAA.

At EMI he took up the impressive position of Chief Operating Officer of New Music and President of Digital Business, despite admitting this week that he knew the music industry was “collapsing”.

“The RIAA said it isn’t that we are making bad music, but the ‘dirty file sharing guys’ are the problem,” he said during his speech as quoted by ComputerWorld.

“Going to sue customers for file sharing is like trying to sell soap by throwing dirt on your customers.”

But those “dirty file-sharing guys” had an even dirtier secret. During his stint at EMI, Merrill profiled the behavior of LimeWire users and discovered something rather interesting. Those same file-sharing “thieves” were also iTunes’ biggest spenders.

“That’s not theft, that’s try-before-you-buy marketing and we weren’t even paying for it… so it makes sense to sue them,” Merrill said, while undoubtedly rolling his eyes.

That same “try-before-you-buy” discovery was echoed in another study we reported on last week which found that users of pirate sites, including the recently-busted Kino.to, buy more DVDs, visit the cinema more often and on average spend more at the box office than their ‘honest’ counterparts.

Merrill’s words yesterday are not the only pragmatic file-sharing related comments he’s made in recent years. Almost immediately after his 2008 EMI appointment, he made comments which didn’t necessarily tow the company line.

“For example, there’s a set of data that shows that file sharing is actually good for artists. Not bad for artists. So maybe we shouldn’t be stopping it all the time. I don’t know,” Merrill said.

“Obviously, there is piracy that is quite destructive but again I think the data shows that in some cases file sharing might be okay. What we need to do is understand when is it good, when it is not good…Suing fans doesn’t feel like a winning strategy,” he concluded.

Less than a year later, Merrill was forced out by EMI.

Source: Former Google CIO: LimeWire Pirates Were iTunes’ Best Customers

Ninja Tune, the label founded by DJs Matt Black and Jonathan More (better known as Coldcut), say that after sending watermarked promo CDs to Germany-based Backspin magazine earlier this month, two albums leaked online.

“It was with considerable disappointment that we learnt in the last week that two records we have been working on have been leaked, despite the use of watermarked CDs,” the label said this week.

“Toddla T’s Watch Me Dance (Ninja Tune) and another upcoming release were both leaked from copies sent to the journalist Benjamin Jager at the offices of Backspin magazine in Germany.”

While Ninja have refrained from naming the second title, TorrentFreak has learned that it is Thundercat’s The Golden Age Of Apocalypse.

Ninja reacted to the leaks by rushing out Toddla T’s album alongside claims that it may not be possible “to make any kind of financial return from commercial release.” Backspin, they add, won’t be getting any more promos “until the situation is resolved.”

That point could be some way off – Backspin are far from happy.

“Since its founding days BACKSPIN Magazine has been renowned for its professional and trustworthy relationship with artists, labels and partners. Therefore, we distance ourselves from allegations made against the magazine and its staff,” the accused Benjamin Jager announced.

Backspin say they are reserving the right to take legal measures to mitigate what they describe as damage to their reputation, but the row hasn’t ended there. Both Ninja Tune and Backspin are arguing over the timelines of when the magazine received the promos and when they appeared on the Internet.

“The first leaks appeared on the net days before we received the CDs in the mail,” Backspin insist. “Further leaks appeared one week after the incident was reported.”

According to Ninja the promos were sent from their German publicist on July 1st and the magazine acknowledged receipt “several days ago” which even by conservative measurement is a period of at least two weeks.

“The first audio leak of the Toddla T album occurred on the 5th July, the second album [Thundercat's The Golden Age Of Apocalypse] leaked on 14th July,” claim Ninja Tune.

Using Scene databases, TorrentFreak discovered that both albums were released by Scene release group hbZ, known online as homeboyZ.

However, while Thundercat’s album was indeed leaked on 14th July (at 01:32) it appears that Toddla T’s wasn’t leaked by hbZ until 6th July (at 13:14), a day later than claimed by Ninja.

But according to Ninja Tune, Backspin believe the leaks go back even further.

“Backspin also claim that there was a prior leak of both albums but the link they refer to is a fake, and leads only to a series of online data collection adverts and surveys,” say Ninja, refuting the claim.

So could there be any truth in Backspin’s claim? Quite frankly, it’s extremely difficult to tell. While so-called Scene releases, such as these from homeboyZ, are very well documented, leaks from other sources are much more difficult to pinpoint, unless one is looking for them ‘live’.

However, there is an interesting element to many of homeboyZ’s releases. The vast majority of them are ‘nuked’, which in layman’s terms means that the piracy scene found something wrong with them and disallowed the release. For every ‘nuke’ a reason is given, and for homeboyZ a recurring theme runs through many of their releases, including the two from Ninja.

“No.proof.provided” or similar phasing means that a group has made a release without showing, even in rough terms, where the source material came from. In the case of music, scene rules for MP3s 19.1 and 19.2 state the following:

19. Scans/Photos
1. All releases from physical sources must always include proof.

2. Proof means a good quality scan or photo of the physical medium together with the cover or a booklet page so the proof can be identified as the release in question. If the medium or cover/booklet contain anything that may expose your identity, then that part of the image can be blurred or blackened. Additional scans may be added but these DO NOT count as sufficient proof!

Of course, promos tend not to have the full artwork. Ninja refers to the CDs going out with “paper PR sheets accompanying them inside the cardboard sleeves”.

But there are other reasons for not having proof of source, reasons that could add credibility to Backspin’s claims.

Scene groups often stand accused of “stealing” releases from “lesser” groups on P2P networks, private BitTorrent trackers for example. Scene groups sometimes try to hide that they got the material from a public file-sharing source but then they suffer the “No.proof.provided” nuke, just as homeboyZ have.

So, for Backspin’s claims of earlier leaks to have credibility, homeboyZ must have “stolen” the releases from non-Scene sources. That said, TorrentFreak has looked for releases of both albums which pre-date the Scene releases and we can’t find them. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that they don’t exist – the Internet is a very big place.

While Ninja appear to be certain that Backspin are responsible for the leak, making accusations like these in public are very rare, and very risky.

A Scene source told TorrentFreak that they have many ways of gaining access to promo material, including paying off delivery drivers to take copies of CDs and even persuading office cleaners to do the same.

In this instance the presence of a watermark is a bit like a residential IP address. You know where you sent the CD, and you know which household an IP is assigned to. But what happened behind those doors to create the infringement is anyone’s guess. Wifi hacked? CD quietly copied?

Perhaps we’ll never know. Ninja Tunes, it seems, don’t really care.

Source: Music Piracy Row Escalates Between Label and Magazine

The pair, collectively Team Meat, say that their PC and Xbox 360 title was hugely pirated.

“We don’t fucking care,” they told the DarkZero podcast. (1hr 9mins in)

“If there are, let’s say, 200,000 copies of SMB that are getting passed around for free, that’s 200,000 people who are playing the game.

“If they like this game there’s a really high probability of their friends coming around and seeing it or them posting about it on their blogs. And it’s not cool to go round and say I really like this game that I stole, so they’re not going to say that.

“So it’s going to come around to sales.”

Read More

(Super MeatBoy on Steam)

Source: Super Meat Boy Devs Don’t Care About Piracy

The developers have said all along that they had no intention of spending that money on advanced DRM and would rather use it to improve the game. Piracy is inevitable, they believe, and it’s pointless trying to fight it. But sometimes a line has to be drawn, even by the most pirate-tolerant devs.

After a build of Project Zomboid was leaked to 4chan by someone from the game’s tester group, it seems that this month a modified version started doing the rounds on torrent sites. The version included an additional ‘Update’ button which downloaded the latest build, not from BitTorrent, but from the developer’s servers.

“We’ve always turned a blind eye to pirate copies, even on occasion recommending people who had problems with the legit version try a pirate version until the issues are resolved. We realise the potential viral benefits of pirate copies, and while obviously we’d prefer people to purchase our issue is not with those,” the developers say.

“However, these ‘auto updating’ versions of the game could screw us completely. We have a cloud based distribution model, where the files are copied all over the world and are served to players on request, which means we are charged money for people downloading the game,” they continue.

So, to mitigate the threat of excessive bandwidth consumption and rising costs, over the weekend the game was switched off for a day. A dramatic move maybe, but according to the developers it was one they were forced into but it could actually have been avoided – if only pirates had used BitTorrent instead.

“Whether piracy actually amounts to lost sales we’re not going to get into,” say the devs.

“The possibility that it raises awareness and promotes the game cannot be ignored, but the difference is offline versions on torrents, which we’ve been largely unconcerned about, do not cost us real money, only potential money, and even then we can’t really guess at what the net effect is.

“Likewise people who download the game through our website only download it when there is a new version, so once every week or so. These new pirate copies have an ‘update now’ button which will download the game every time it’s clicked, potentially every time the game is run by everyone using it.”

After Indie Stone took the game offline, they responded by releasing a free public tech demo, distributed using BitTorrent of course.

Despite the problems, the devs have asked fans of the game not to be “down” on piracy, and have highlighted reasons why people might have gone down that route, such as having no access to PayPal.

“We have no ill feeling toward those pirating the game or those distributing the pirated copies of the game. We’re mainly glad that people feel it’s worthy of pirating,” they conclude.

The situation has been spotted by Notch of Minecraft fame who chimed in on Twitter a couple of hours ago to add his opinion.

“Everybody stop pirating this game, please,” he wrote. “It’s very cool.”

Source: Zombie Game Taken Offline Because Pirates Didn’t Use BitTorrent

The reason for the raid is unclear at this point, but the Pirate Party believes that it’s unrelated to the party’s activities. The board of the Pirate Party has promised full transparency to assist with the investigation.

“At the moment, the Board does not expect delinquency on behalf of the Pirate Party. The investigation is not directed against the party or any of its subsidiaries, they are only involved as the server’s operators. The results are awaited with curiosity,” the Party said in a statement.

The information which the authorities provided to the Pirate Party suggests that the police were targeting a public service on a virtual server. The service has not been named, but there are concerns that the action to take the party’s entire server network down was disproportionate.

The timing of the raid is also unfortunate, as it happens just two days before the Bremen elections.

“The disconnection of all servers is a massive intrusion into the communications infrastructure of the sixth largest party in Germany. Considering the state elections taking place in Bremen in two days, this caused severe political damage, which the Board condemns decisively,” the Party continued.

“In relation to the ongoing investigations, it will have to be verified whether the issued search warrant was actually appropriate, especially whether the principle of proportionality was followed. After all, this action has led to a large-scale breakdown of the technical infrastructure of Pirate Party Germany.”

Although we can only speculate at this point, a plausible target of the raid could be the Piratepad service. Piratepad allows people to collaboratively draft documents, and unconfirmed rumors suggest that it was used to plan a DDoS attack against a French company.

Thus far, however, no official information has been provided about the nature of the French investigation. We will update this post accordingly as more information comes in.

Update: The Pirate Part released some additional information.

The servers were raided this morning 9:15 am following a warrant ordered by the Darmstadt prosecutor.

The investigation is not directed at the Pirate Party, but at unknown users of the Piratepad service who published an SSH Key which was allegedly used to attack a server of the French energy group EDF.

The Pirate Party stresses that the damage to their organization is enormous. Two days before the election their entire communication system was wiped out, and although the main page was brought back up, most services are still interrupted.

The Pirate Party further distances itself from the attacks on the websites of the German police, which started after the raid.

Source: Pirate Party Servers Raided by German Police

The situation gets even more complicated when one realizes that ‘pirates’ are often legitimate customers too. As previously highlighted, music pirates are the ones who spend the most money on legitimate music. In a way, speaking out against pirates is speaking out against one’s biggest fans.

So how does a content creator approach such a multi-layered species when he or she spots one in the wild?

If we look at Chris Baker, app developer and owner of the The Fucking Word of the Day website, confrontational politeness might turn out to be a good choice. Yesterday, Chris spotted a potential pirate on the xSellize forums, who posted the following request:

“Can someone please crack The F-ing Word of the Day app. Please.”

Although many content creators would have cringed upon reading the message, perhaps tempted to shout the pirate down, Chris opted for a more peaceful reply to the poster “HiDefinition”.

“Hello! I’m the creator of the *** Word of the Day website and more particularly the F-ing Word of the Day App. First of all, this is a huge compliment! As a person who pirates content, I’ve always placed the moment people are pirating MY goods as the exact time of my arrival, as it were.”

Chris Baker goes on to explain that, although he has a decent job in New York, he’s by no means rich. The app and website are his pet projects and he works on them during his free time in the hope that the public might learn something. Then he continues with giving the prospective pirate his virtual blessing.

“What’s my point in all this? Go ahead and pirate the app. It cost me 1500 bucks to have programmed. It’s not even a month’s rent for me. But if you think the site is cool, and you want to pay for one eighth of a Stella Artois for me, hook me up with 99 cents. The rapture will be here soon, I could use the drink.”

The above might not have been the response HiDefinition had been hoping for, but it did make an impact. Suddenly, the prospect of getting a pirated App without paying didn’t seem as appealing as it did before.

HiDefinition replied:

“Wow, I wasn’t expecting the developer to comment. Sorry, about that. You know I was only looking to get the IPA for free only because I have no credit, credit cards, or any kind of banking services. However, your attitude has seal[ed] the deal for me. It might end up costing me a couple extra dollars in nominal fees to figure out how to pay for it but I’d be glad to contribute towards that Stella fund raiser you’ve got going on.

“Besides, I really appreciate your response and I fully support your work. I hope no one actually cracks your app [and] for sake of respect, consider my request revoked. Thanks again Chris and have a good one bro!”

It appears that with his polite reply, Chris eliminated at least one potential pirate. But that wasn’t the end of the matter. Instead of eagerly waiting for HiDefinition’s 99 cents, Chris offered to buy the App for him, asking for a positive rating in return.

Chris then concluded:

“I hope this comment thread goes down as one of the more unexpected things that happens to you online. I like the unexpected. And I like making people happy, even when something stupid like learning vocabulary is involved.”

The thread is memorable for sure, and shows that the blazing guns strategy might not always be the best one, especially not for indie content creators. This doesn’t necessarily mean that ‘pirates’ should be cuddled, but it might be a good idea to try a more balanced response every now and then.

TorrentFreak got in touch with Chris, who shared his remarkable encounter on Reddit, and he told us that he expected people to pirate his app and that it’s not a problem.

“I knew people would try to pirate my app and I’d rather have people trying to pirate my app than not pirate it. If no one is trying to pirate you, you’re irrelevant,” Chris said.

In fact, Chris admits that he too has pirated software since he was eight or nine. Whether it is the moral thing to do is not up to the developers he believes, it’s something every ‘pirate’ has to decide for him or herself.

“The morality of pirating an app will be a topic that gets debated forever,” Chris told us. “If a starving kid steals a loaf of bread to feed himself, is that wrong? If a starving designer pirates a copy of a 700 dollar version of Photoshop, is that wrong?”

“A creative storyteller could produce narratives that make you see both sides to each story,” he concludes.

Source: App Developer Fights Pirate With Politeness

“There’s a Rock Band called One Soul Thrust. They have a debut album, which I like (bought it off iTunes). However the first I heard of the band was when there were complaints that the band had gone Platinum – because of illegal Torrent downloads!” Borean explained.

Indeed, according to a press release from the band’s manager, Cameron Tilbury, the situation is very serious.

“The Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA) states that, to achieve Platinum status, an album must achieve sales of 100,000 copies/downloads of an album. Sales…that’s the key. A random polling of several torrent site’s downloads—ILLEGAL downloads—has shown that 1ST, the debut cd by ONE SOUL THRUST has been downloaded over 100,000 times,” he wrote.

Now, 100,000 downloads is a lot, especially for a band like One Soul Thrust who have just 176 Twitter followers and a single short, non-musical video on their YouTube channel which at the time of writing has 79 views. Incidentally, the video is quite nice, since they have actually taken the time out to thank a radio station for playing one of their songs. However, the band are less pleased that people are apparently sampling their music using newer methods, i.e BitTorrent.

“We paid to create that album totally out of our own pockets. People think of illegal downloading not hurting anyone, but we’re real people too- with real mortgages, real family to feed and real bills to pay,” said lead-vocalist Salem Jones. “By downloading our album from pirate sites, people have stolen from us, our families, everyone involved in the production of our album, and their families.”

At this point, since we couldn’t find any torrents on any site (Borean tried everywhere too), we have to admit we were beginning to wonder if this 100K download claim was some kind of publicity stunt. Furthermore, since Wayne Borean and Tilbury were starting to publicly tear each other apart (and getting pretty personal at times) it seemed sensible to get to the bottom of this, particularly since the band’s manager claimed that the all-powerful CRIA is supporting the band’s stance.

Our initial discussions didn’t go particularly well. Despite explaining that we are a news site and what we were trying to find out, Cameron Tilbury initially refused to speak us. Instead he responded with a post on his site:

“We have been accused of lying and we have been abused for our position. We have also had requests for our evidence from torrent sites which actually support illegal downloading–and even more offensively, publish charts of the top illegally downloaded music, movies, etc [That's us, TorrentFreak, apparently]. We will not comply with people who’s only agenda is to support piracy. We feel that there is no way to win an argument with those people.”

Despite this hostility we pressed on, determined to get to the bottom of the story so we can report, since that’s what we do. In the end Tilbury provided the ‘evidence’ of the illegal downloading via some screenshots, one of which is shown below.

As many readers will now be aware, there is a huge problem. These results are completely fake and are generated from user input to draw traffic to site advertisers. You can type anything in the search boxes on some of these torrent sites (these apparently came from LimeTorrents) and anyone can appear to be pirated into oblivion, as the screenshot below shows.

We wrote back to Tilbury and explained our findings. We also asked him to comment on how he feels now that he realizes that people aren’t downloading the band’s music at all. He hasn’t responded to that question which is a real shame, because personally I think this is the most important part of the whole story.

I’m absolutely confident that there was no attempt to mislead with the band’s ‘piracy problem’ press release and that the band and their manager sincerely believed that 100K people had downloaded their album without paying for it. However, it would be intriguing to know what happened, when emotions of supposedly being ripped off by 100,000 pirates were replaced by other, perhaps more confused feelings.

In response to the initial crisis, lead-vocalist Salem Jones had said that while the piracy was unacceptable, the band were “flattered that people could love our music that much.” Does it now follow that band aren’t flattered? Dare I venture that they’re now quietly disappointed? Would it be better for 100K new fans to have sampled their music after all, rather than continuing with the relative obscurity they currently enjoy?

I’m going to end this piece with an unusual request because, to be brutally honest, I feel sorry for this band. All good musicians want to be heard and One Soul Thrust have just ‘lost’ 100K fans overnight. From what i’ve seen they seem really nice guys (and girl) and are completely innocent in all of this and although their music isn’t my scene, it sounds fairly decent to me.

At the time of writing they only have 176 Twitter followers, 324 on Facebook and their solitary video on YouTube has 79 views.

Please give the CRIA and the Balanced Copyright For Canada Facebook page something interesting to talk about by adding, following, Tweeting and re-Tweeting the band right now. Get creative and feel free to post any links where you mention them on other sites (Reddit etc) in the comments. A ten-fold increase in a day or two shouldn’t be too hard.

Update: Well, it seems whoever operates the band’s Twitter account, be it them or their manager, have responded to our calls to support One Soul Thrust around the Internet with the following message:

To say this is a huge disappointment after our efforts is an understatement. Really sad about this. Not all publicity is good publicity you know. Ask Jacqueline Howett.

Source: CRIA Watches Massive Music Piracy Crisis Devastate Unknown Band

But while virtually all other game developers would be complaining about a near 70% of their market being eaten away by parasites who could not care less about the gaming industry or the fate of those who work so hard for their entertainment, Minecraft creator Markus “Notch” Persson sees the situation rather more optimistically.

Speaking during the closing session yesterday at the Independent Games Summit, Notch dismissed the notion that piracy is the same as stealing, or ‘looting’ as incoming MPAA chief Chris Dodd framed it this week.

“Piracy is not theft,” he said to those gathered in San Francisco. “If you steal a car, the original is lost. If you copy a game, there are simply more of them in the world.”

With this kind of reasoning one could be forgiven for thinking that Notch has pirate sympathies but since he’s a self-confessed member of the Pirate Party, that stance comes as no surprise.

“There is no such thing as a ‘lost sale’,” he added with a philosophy so Pirate-aligned it could be happily transcribed directly into any of their press releases. “Is a bad review a lost sale? What about a missed ship date?”

Notch was expected to talk about piracy for 5 minutes at GDC but in the event only managed about 3 minutes, describing the experience as “the scariest thing in a long time.” But while he may have only utilized 60% of his available time, he appears to have packed in value and left people wanting more, which coincidentally is his game developers philosophy too.

“If you just make your game and keep adding to it, the people who copyright infringed would buy it the next week,” he told those in attendance.

While anti-piracy zealots would insist that Minecraft has a 70% piracy or “lost sale” rate, Notch steadfastly sees his cup as rather more full than the raw percentages of his sales data may suggest, particularly by those viewing them from the perspective of an outdated business model. Indeed, despite this ‘pro-piracy’ stance, Minecraft’s position continues to improve.

Back in September last year the game had 658,429 registered players, that’s an increase of 4,222,328 in less than 5 months.

Currently 1,469,513 (30.1%) people have handed over money – in September that was 155,521 (23.62%) so its clear things are headed in the right direction. In the 24 hour period we examined in 2010, 4,910 people had bought Minecraft. Yesterday 10,381 did so.

“Piracy will win in the long run. It has to,” said Notch last year. “The alternative is too scary.”

If making truckloads of money is scary to Notch, he must be terrified right now.

Source: Piracy is Theft? Ridiculous. Lost Sales? They Don’t Exist, Says Minecraft Creator

“A scammer could use this information to build a profile of a person and then target them with convincing phishing messages—perhaps referring to specific purchases on another website,” writes TechnologyReview in response to the study.

But while this research is certainly relevant to Internet users in general, it is also of great interest to those who may be sharing files online without the copyright holder’s permission.

TorrentFreak learned last year, perhaps unsurprisingly, that anti-piracy companies are increasingly using profiling techniques to identify and track the habits of the more prolific file-sharers, in particular initial uploaders.

However, while it’s unclear to what use this gathered data is being put, we can confirm 100% that users targeted in so-called Speculative Invoicing (we caught you sharing files, pay us money to go away) campaigns are being tracked through their general Internet use and comments they have made used as leverage against them.

In several cases last year, Internet users caught up in ACS:Law’s pay-up-or-else sweep asked for advice on how to respond to the law firm using online forums. The usernames they used were not unique. In fact they corresponded perfectly with ones they used on other forums where they had been less careful about disguising who they were.

In at least one case a user even discussed downloading the material he was accused of, albeit some months earlier. In another there was general talk about file-sharing, hardly proof of infringement, but it doesn’t help a case longer term.

Another person, who contacted TorrentFreak with his plight, had previously emailed ACS:Law using the same email address. We Googled that and found a site where the person mentioned his website, which led to a WHOIS which, coupled with his forename posted freely on the forum, conveniently supplied his surname and address.

From that information we were able to discover not that he had infringed, but had just come into some money – valuable information to a law firm looking to screw someone for hard cash.

In another recent case which ended particularly badly for one confirmed file-sharer, armed with nothing but an email address and a forum post we were able to follow a trail which led into highly personal aspects of the individual’s life. Our deep suspicions, without compromising this person’s privacy further, is that this same trail was cynically exploited by copyright holders to extract a very sizeable settlement.

Today, while writing this post, we spent just an hour on a private torrent tracker researching the site’s top 20 uploaders. In 13 cases we were able to find the users on other sites, including YouTube, Last.fm, eBay and any number of non-filesharing related forums. In 4 cases we were able to quickly identify real names. Given more time the exposure would almost certainly prove greater.

As the INRIA researchers note, people using unique and easily identifiable usernames are more vulnerable to cross-site profiling. Others with common usernames are far more difficult to track down and in our quick tests we have to agree.

Try Googling your regular usernames and email addresses….

Food for thought.

Source: Some File-Sharers Leave Trails To Their Front Door

“Crytek has been alerted that an early incomplete, unfinished build of Crysis 2 has appeared on Torrent sites. Crytek and EA are deeply disappointed by the news,” the post begins.

Indeed, a beta of the PC version of the game has been doing the rounds on torrent sites since Friday and although clearly unfinished and requiring varying levels of hoop-jumping to keep it running, it’s getting a pretty good reception from those who have downloaded and played it.

The fact that it has leaked, however, has caused gaming blogs to go into overdriven condemnation of the anticipated rampant piracy of this much awaited game. In particular, Destructoid editor Jim Sterling has gone postal with a passionate four-letter-word-littered tirade aimed squarely at pirates.

While some of Jim’s points are debatable, he makes some good points and is clearly absolutely passionate about games. As a former 8bit coder and gamer of more than three decades myself I can respect that. People love games. They appreciate the work that goes into them.

While it’s rare to hear people complain about movies or music leaking onto the Internet in file-sharing circles (in fact such situations are largely relished), games are a bit different. This leak of Crysis 2 appears to show that there’s something, even in piracy circles – I’m not sure what – that elevates the connection people have with games and their creators over the connection people have with those behind movies for example.

As both EA and Crytek plead with people to wait for the March 22 release date for Crysis 2 they appear to be supported, not just by those who never pirate, but also those who do.

Despite the beta being widely available, TorrentFreak stats show (completed) downloads of just 10,000 on public BitTorrent trackers. And that’s not because this title isn’t popular with gamers. Indeed, given the current mood, it’s not unthinkable that these low download numbers may well be a result of it being quite the opposite.

While some people are clearly happy to get an advance copy, it’s eye opening to see people on torrent sites encouraging others NOT to download it. Sure, there is the usual crowd throwing a middle finger up to the publishers while delighting in their juicy booty, but so many others are pleading with people to support Crytek by putting their hands in their pockets next month instead.

That said, there are others who aren’t heeding the advice but are treating this download as a demo to be deleted in due course, having grown tired of waiting for an official one to be released. Perhaps there’s a lesson to be learned there.

High profile game leaks don’t have to result in the doomsday scenario feared by their creators – unless they’re terrible games of course. Rewind back to October 2003 and a beta of Half-Life 2 was also leaking onto the Internet, a full 6 months before its release date, putting this 49 day advance copy of Crysis 2 in the shade. HL2 went on to do staggeringly well, selling 12 million copies to date.

Personally, as upcoming games in this genre go, I had my eyes mainly on Epic’s Bulletstorm but having seen the various videos on YouTube recorded by people playing this leaked beta, all of a sudden March can’t come soon enough. Crysis 2 looks absolutely gorgeous and while I don’t feel much warmth towards EA, I’m happy to support Crytek.

But why, when the game is sitting right there for free?

Do gamers really have more empathy with studios than their movie-going peers? Why are great games so special? What’s your take on this leak and how it should be handled? Are these download stats low because people are doing ‘the right thing’ or is fiddling about with betas just too much hassle? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Source: Crysis 2 Leak Fails To Result in Massive Download Fest

As President he met with all the major world leaders but Gül also likes to keep in touch with the public, for which he started to use Twitter a while ago. Gül, who has a verified account on Twitter, occasionally tweets his thoughts about national and international politics, and also shares more personal stuff from time to time.

One tweet in particular caught the attention of many of his 185,000+ followers yesterday. Before wishing everyone a good weekend, Gül mentioned how he enjoyed watching “The King’s Speech” at home with his wife the other day.

“Watched The King’s Speech at home with my wife the other day. Really a very beautiful movie,’ he tweeted.

The Turkish President is not the only one who enjoyed the film of course. With twelve Oscar nominations it is considered to be one of the best movies of 2010 by many people.

However, the tweet nevertheless resulted in a small uproar among his followers. The big question is how he could have possibly watched the film at home, without breaking copyright law.

The King’s Speech is not available on DVD anywhere in the world, and the film has not even premiered in Turkish movie theaters yet. There is, however, a good copy of the film available on BitTorrent, Usenet and various other file-sharing platforms (and on the streets).

This led many of his Twitter followers to conclude that their President is in fact a movie pirate. How else would it be possible for him to watch the movie at his home in Turkey?

In a response to the tweet many people asked Gül where he downloaded the movie, and whether he prefers Usenet or BitTorrent. Thus far, the President has not replied to the inquiries, but if he does we will add the response here.

Perhaps Gül can do something about the Turkish Pirate Bay block now? I assume many of his followers would also like to grab a copy of The King’s Speech following this shining presidential endorsement.

Update: Without going into detail Gül said in a response “an illegal film would not be given to me.” Perhaps his staff managed to get a super-exclusive deal to show a private screening to the President? We’d love to hear more about it.

Source: Is The President of Turkey a Movie Pirate?

I also know that the Bieber has a new movie out. It’s called Never Say Never, it’s shot in glorious 3D and is apparently “half-concert, half-biographical film”. The critics, according to various reports, think that it’s pretty good, even though the New York Times said that “…at 105 minutes it’s exhausting.” Let’s face it, more than an hour and half of any teenager can wear one out, and not always in a good way either.

But it’s not all positive news I’m afraid. This week, Never Say Never had its VIP Premiere and according to reports, the event was scarred by a rampage of federal criminality.

Untold numbers of teenagers, who lined up for God-knows-how-long and paid $30 a shot for the privilege, weren’t happy with simply seeing the floppy-haired one in all His (3D) Glory. Oh no. Teenagers always want more, don’t they?

No doubt relying on the utterly poor excuse of wanting to have some memories of their day, some reportedly pointed their camera-phones and recorded the screen, blatantly driving a cart and horses through the Artist’s Rights and Theft Prevention Act of 2005 in the process. Believe me, that’s some serious shit.

You can get locked up for 3 years for camming in the US. Do it twice and you’re looking at a 6 stretch. And quite right too. Let kids get away with it now and next thing you know they’ll be camming for the Scene and 2017′s Never Say Never, Ever, Ever Again Part 6 will be all over The Pirate Bay, just when Bieber needs the money most.

“Since most of the audience consisted of teenage girls with their parents, I am left to wonder what parent lets their child commit a crime? Even scarier, what kind of parent lets them do it in public?” says a concerned writer on Examiner.

“Also I wonder how can Justin’s fans call themselves true fans by stealing from the star? Sure, they are probably not going to present their illegal footage in a theater, and collect money, but it is still considered stealing just the same,” the report continues adding: “Aren’t parent’s who sit by and allowed their teens to commit this act just as guilty?”

Absolutely. That sounds like contributory infringement right there. But you know what? Despite looking high and low, there appears to have been no arrests. Not one. Considering how much money was spent by the MPAA lobbying for anti-camming laws, I have to say this is somewhat of a disappointment.

Where are the airport-style bag searches and pat downs on the way into the theater? Where were the infra-red goggles and anti-cam technologies? Why weren’t these criminals detained for a couple of days?

“I’m wearing tattoos of Justin Bieber, a T-shirt of Justin Bieber, and a necklace,” eight-year-old Audrey Danis said in one theater. “Sometimes I wonder if I’m a bigger fan than her. We listen to Justin Bieber all the time. She has a Justin Bieber room,” said her mother.

Fans? Thieves more like. And what did the Universal Cineplex in Orlando do about this. Nothing. No scandals, no pissing off the public, no arrests. Common sense being applied by the movie industry? I certainly hope not, we’ve got stories about injustices to write.

Source: Justin Bieber Movie Pirates Deserve At Least 3 Years In Jail

Initially Gaiman got annoyed by people who put his stuff online for free, but later he realized that it’s actually the best promotion an author can get.

“People were discovering me through being pirated, and then they would go out to buy the real book,” he notes.

Gaiman did some experimenting and started to realize that his sales jumped 300% in some cases when the publisher made a book avialable for free.

“I started to realize, that actually, you’re not losing sales by having stuff out there,” he says.

Source: Neil Gaiman Loves Piracy: “It’s Advertising”

Piracy is a signal that consumer needs are out of line with the offerings of the entertainment industries. We’ve said this many times before and will probably do so again in the future.

Of course there will always be people who will download movies or music just because they can, but aside from that there are millions of people who turn to BitTorrent and other file-sharing services for different reasons. The lack of availability due to release windowing is an often heard argument, and technical restrictions and DRM are frequently mentioned as well.

The big question is, what would stop most of these people from pirating their media instead of paying for it?

An intriguing manifesto that was published yesterday claims to have the answer, at least for some people. Started by Jordi Boggiano and Pierre Spring, the “Don’t Make Me Steal” manifesto lays down a set of criteria that they would like to see implemented, before they stop pirating movies.

Among other things they want movie rentals to not exceed 1/3 of the cinema price and purchases not to be more expensive than a movie ticket. Everything should be ad-free and without copyright infringement warnings. Every movie ever produced should be available instantly in all languages and countries, without DRM and sortable by IMDB rating.

In less than a day more than 2000 people have signed the manifesto.

What a brilliant idea!! or …?

We’re the first to admit that the movie industry can do a much better job satisfying consumers needs than they do now. However, this manifesto poses even more rules and restrictions on the movie industry than they do on consumers now. Tit-for tat or ignorant pretentiousness?

While it would be amazing (and unbelievable) if something like this was adopted by the entertainment industries, as pointed out a few days ago here on TorrentFreak, this type of ‘extremism’ is generally not very fruitful. Especially when it’s as commercially unrealistic as that presented in the above mentioned manifesto.

Sure, nearly everyone on the Internet hates the MPAA, but let’s not forget the progress that has been made during the last decade. In the early 2000s it was impossible to watch films online and the Internet was still a collection of text and funny gifs back then.

Today, millions of people stream movies and TV-shows online. Netflix is responsible for 20% of all the consumer bandwidth consumption in the US, and through services like Hulu it’s relatively easy to watch TV-shows online. Increasingly, release windows are being eliminated to make content available at the same time worldwide, and so on.

Now, we’re not saying that things are perfect the way they are now, far from that. Especially outside the US there is still a lot of work to be done, but one can’t expect that this will happen overnight. The Internet has abruptly changed consumer demand, and it takes time for the entertainment industries to adapt to this.

People are free to make demands and of course in a way they do that by continuing to download, but it might be a good idea to keep demands realistic and without pretensions. That said, if the entertainment industries want to stop being coerced by pirates, then they too have to abandon their coercive practices.

But overall, if you look at all the changes that have occurred in the last 10 years, one can imagine that the digital media consumption landscape will look entirely different by 2020. Let’s hope the change will be for the better, and that the few pirates that are left are simply hardcore, rather than the average consumer.

Source: I’ll Stop Pirating Movies On The Pirate Bay If…

The statistics for all 2011 nominees, excluding the documentary and foreign films categories, show that 20 of the 29 films are now available on BitTorrent in DVD quality. More than half of the films have leaked as a screener and 7 of those are estimated to be leaked by Academy members.

Despite the widespread availability of these high-profile movie titles, the overall trend is that fewer high quality copies leak every year. In common with last year, the number of screener copies that surfaced online has been reduced – 38% of the all the nominated films, down from the record low of 41% this time last year.

If retail DVDs are thrown into the mix we find that 66% of the films are now available in high quality format, down from 79% around the same time last year. Interesting statistics, which are obviously welcomed by the MPAA and other Hollywood players.

Another statistic that stands out is the average time between the theatrical release in the US and the leak of the film online. This average wait time (including CAM releases) has gone up to 37 days this year, the longest wait since Baio started tracking these statistics in 2003.

It has to be noted though, that the 37 days average is a skewed picture and most leaks come out much quicker. The median leak time is only 17 days, but the average waiting time is pushed up by three movie titles for which the pirating audience had to wait for more than 100 days.

Finally, we want to draw attention to some statistics which showing that availability and box office success don’t always lead to high piracy rates.

Toy Story 3, the most successful film at the box office last year, was available in a high quality copy on BitTorrent just a day after its premiere. All the ingredients for an unprecedented number of illegal downloads were there, but somehow it didn’t even make it into the list of 2010′s most downloaded movies.

Also, this year, Rabbit Hole was only one film for which the first screener leak came out before the theatrical release last December. Despite this unfortunate timing, the film has been downloaded by only a few thousand people in the past several weeks, trailing dozens of other films in terms of popularity.

Despite the lack of a high correlation between early availability, box office revenues and piracy, the movie industry continues to worry about piracy and the losses it may generate. Given that overall movie piracy is still on the rise, we expect that both measures against torrent sites and screener leaks will be intensified throughout 2011.

Source: 2011 Oscars: Pirates Have to Wait Longer for Fewer Leaks

In recent days, however, rumors started to grow that The Music Bay domain might be put to use after all. It is currently setup to serve ads for The Pirate Bay website, but this spring it could be hosting a special surprise for the music industry.

The currently active subdomain fear.themusicbay.org is currently displaying a “comming soon” [sic] title so TorrentFreak caught up with a Pirate Bay insider to learn more about the plans for the site. Although the Pirate Bay crew is reluctant to release any specific details, their intentions are obvious.

“The music industry can’t even imagine what we’re planning to roll out in the coming months. For years they’ve complained bitterly about piracy, but if they ever had a reason to be scared it is now,” TorrentFreak was told. “It will be a special surprise for IFPI’s 78th birthday, and we’re thinking of organizing a huge festival in Rome where IFPI was founded.”

IFPI is of course the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, one of the most active anti-piracy outfits and a long-time adversary of The Pirate Bay. Formed under Italy’s fascist government of Benito Mussolini in 1933, IFPI will turn 78 in April of 2011.

TorrentFreak did ask for more details about “The Music Bay”, but the above is all we are able to reveal at this stage. What’s clear from the conversation we had, however, is that the major record labels are in for a big surprise. More details are expected to follow in the near future.

Without any hard evidence all the above can of course be interpreted in a million ways. We simply don’t know what the announced project will be, who will run it and what it will do. For all we know the entire project is nothing more that a domain name, registered and used just for the purpose to put fear into the already quite paranoid music industry.

Source: The Music Bay: Pirate Bay Crew Instill More Fear Into The Music Industry

With help from the excellent designer Ryan we are now ready to present our new look. It’s totally different from our previous theme, but hopefully recognizable enough for regular readers to feel at home.

In the process we implemented a few changes that will eventually liven up things a bit here. Below are two of the most significant.

1. We now support comment replies.

2. We have a “news bits” section where we will post links to things we’re not covering ourselves. You might even find some of our random musings here, so keep checking back.

We hope that the news bits section will be a useful collection of links, and a good place to discuss topics that are not featured in full TorrentFreak articles. The news bits are excluded from our main RSS feed but you can subscribe to these links through this feed.

We always welcome tips from readers and if you’re a real BitTorrent/P2P/copyright news addict who can contribute on a regular basis, feel free to get in touch with us.

Also, we realize that there might be a few bugs here and there, so please let us know if you spot one, preferably in a descriptive email.

Update: Here’s some stuff we’ll address in the coming days, aside from a few small bugs we will fix soon.

* Next / previous article links will return
* Header will be a bit smaller
* RSS feed should exclude news bits

Source: TorrentFreak Looks Different Today…

The site had connections to a variety of scene groups and allegedly sold access to several well-known private BitTorrent trackers. Although the unplugging will be seen as an inconvenience and might delay some releases, none of the persons connected to the site appear to be facing legal action.

BREIN generally informs hosting providers of its suspicion that ‘illegal activity’ is taking place on their infrastructure and without the authorities getting involved the hosting provider then decides whether or not to take action. According to this scenario it is not impossible that Swan could reappear in a different location, as we’ve seen happening dozens of times after BREIN pulled torrent sites offline. But Scene groups and networks are complex creatures and take more time to reconstruct.

However, BREIN’s head Tim Kuik stated in a comment that his outfit is now in possession of the Swan servers. This is interesting to say the least, because BREIN has no authority to seize any equipment on its own, and the hosting provider can’t just hand over private customer data without a warrant.

In a comment Swan’s hosting provider Worldstream avoided these peculiarities and simply stated that they were happy to cooperate with BREIN.

“We can not accept such activities in our network,” the WorldStream owners explained. “BREIN is known as a reliable partner and provided very clear evidence to demonstrate that unauthorized files were made available on the servers. For us it was therefore quickly decided to cooperate in this action.”

The owner of Swan, who operates under the nickname MrTB, has also responded with a response to the events. With the exclamation “F*** me i’m famous!” MrTB claims that the ‘bust’ is the result of the actions of a rogue member. In addition he claims that BREIN misrepresented the facts since Swan only operated 8 servers holding 175 terabytes of data.

“I’m waiting for BREIN to offer me a job. I’ll be a one man wrecking crew: TaH, TDA, KoP, AUS, TEL, DC, FUK, TITS, PANDORA, NOT, GUK, 100SE plus the other 30 sites I was on,” he added.

“Peace out, and fuck you all!”

The last statement seems to indicate that Swan is not planning to make a return any time soon. This makes the BREIN action, albeit trivial, very effective. BREIN’s head Tim Kuik was asked for a comment regarding the ‘seizure’ of the servers but has yet to respond.

Update: Tim Kuik told TorrentFreak the following in response to the seizure of the servers.

“BREIN exerts the rights and civil enforcement remedies of copyright holders. That includes seizure of servers used for infringements. These can be claimed as property of the right holders. If the owner wants them back, he needs to identify himself, which of course means that he can be held liable as well, if we don’t locate him first. We have ample evidence of the unlawful activities carried out with the servers in question. This evidence convinced the hosting provider to cooperate. Conducting unlawful activities also is in contravention of hosting providers’ terms of use.”

Source: Anti-Piracy Outfit Unplugs Warez Topsite ‘Swan’

In a torrent discussion at Demonoid.me, the largest semi private BitTorrent community, a commenter with the nickname “TANP1′ claims to have a special relationship with the show. Unlike the regular downloaders, he is actually involved in the production of Bob’s Burgers, or so he claims.

“Nice to hear that people liked the show, I’m an animator on it so it’s nice to hear something positive from all the negative I’ve been hearing about! I’m going to keep seeding to support my show,” TANP1 wrote a few hours after the torrent was published on Demonoid.

Of course, anyone can claim to be an animator of the show, but as we will point out later in this article this one turns out to be legit. This is where it gets interesting.

Other commenters on Demonoid seem to be genuinely surprised and honored that one of the animators approves of their actions, since makers of such big productions are generally negative towards ‘unauthorized’ downloads. In a follow up comment TANP1 adds some more insider insights to the ‘sharing’ crowd.

“There are 13 eps for the show coming out, they’ve been well received by the everyone at the studio so far so we’re hoping everything will turn out and it’ll gain more of an audience as it goes,” he says.

The commenter went on to further state that if you view to end credits his name is listed there.

With that last comment TANP1 did give away more than he might have wanted to do. It is of course great that someone from the production team of a popular show approves of torrenting, and we welcome such an open stance. But, at the same time we got very curious about the identity of the torrenting animator, if only to verify the legitimacy of his claims.

Since it’s hard to hide something on the internet nowadays, it only took a few Google searches to find out that the nickname and the birthday of the commenter are linked to an animator featured first in the credits list of the episode. So, the story seems to check out and we applaud TANP1 for making Bob’s Burgers available – in more ways than one.

Update: We’ve been in contact with the animator and agreed to alter some of the info mentioned in the above article to address his concerns.

Source: Bob’s Burgers Animator Helps Seeding The Show’s Torrent

We’re not going to argue about the exact impact of piracy in this article, but we do want to balance out the music industry’s propaganda a little bit. By doing so we hope to show that the music industry isn’t doing so badly as they claim. In fact, year after year more music is being sold.

What’s changing is the type of music consumers buy, and this change is driving revenue down. The question, however, is whether piracy has anything to do with this change. We doubt it, and we’re going to show why.

Let’s start off with some key figures published by the BPI last week regarding UK music sales. Unlike some news outlets claimed, these are not revenue figures but actually the number of units sold, counting both digital and physical albums and singles.

In 2010 the BPI reports that there were 281.7 million units sold, which is an all-time record. Never in the history of recorded music have so many pieces of music been sold, but you wont hear the music industry shouting about that. In fact, the music industry is selling more music year after year and today’s figure is up 27% compared to the 221.6 million copies sold in 2006.

But, instead of praising the increasing consumer demand for music, the industry cuts up the numbers and prefers to focus on the evil enemy called piracy. By doing so they spin their message in a way that makes it appear that piracy is cannibalizing music sales. But is it?

In their press release the BPI points out that album sales overall were down by 7%. Although digital album sales were up 30.6%, physical CDs were down by 12.4%. If we believe the music industry, this drop in sales of physical CDs can be solely attributed to piracy. This is an interesting conclusion, because one would expect that piracy would mostly have an effect on digital sales.

We have a different theory.

Could it be that album sales have been declining over recent years because people now have the ability to buy single tracks? If someone likes three tracks from an album he or she no longer has to buy the full album, something that was unimaginable 10 years ago.

This theory would also fit the sales patterns of the last few years, where album sales are down year after year while the number of individual tracks sold is increasing rapidly. In 2010 the UK music industry sold 161.8 million singles (digital and physical) compared to 66.9 million in 2006. Where does piracy fit in here?

Could it possibly be that piracy is only affecting album sales and not single sales? Would that make sense?

Or could it be that the consumption habits of the average music consumer have changed in the last decade? You never hear the music industry talk about the digital music revolution where an entire generation of people have never even owned a CD. To these people the album concept doesn’t mean as much as it does to older generations.

I’d hate to break the news to all the suits in the music business but the CD is dying, and the album is dying with it. Sure, the true music enthusiast will appreciate the art that a well orchestrated album is, but the masses are increasingly spending their money on singles. The album has lost much of it’s appeal and function to the iPod generation.

And that’s the problem.

The digital revolution in music and the consumer shift from albums to singles described above is hurting the industry’s revenue. Despite the fact that more music is being sold, revenue is shrinking because consumers prefer singles over full albums. And if someone buys 6 single tracks instead of a full album, this means usually that less money is coming in.

This change is mostly being felt by the managers and employees at record labels, and not as much by artists. Since album and single sales are just a small fraction of the artists’ yearly income, and with attendances of live performances being up, the artists are doing great.

We’re not here to argue that piracy has no effect on sales at all, positive or negative, but we do want to point out that the music industry might be chasing a ghost while they ignore the big elephant in the room. The music industry isn’t dying, it’s evolving.

Source: More Music Sold Than Ever Before, Despite Piracy

BitTorrent site Mininova also got a questionable mention in Google’s Zeitgeit list as one of the fastest falling searches in 2010, which follows the collapse of the site earlier this year. In 2006 things were going much better for the site as Mininova was one of the most searched for terms on Google.

Following this Zeitgeist trend we thought it might be a good idea to make a similar list for searches on BitTorrent indexes. Since BitTorrent searches are scattered across hundreds of sites it is impossible to get a full picture of what people search for on BitTorrent, but luckily one of the largest indexers agreed to cooperate.

KickassTorrents, one of the top 10 torrent sites in terms of visitors, was kind enough to share the most popular search terms of 2010 with us. With a few hundred million searches a year this data should give a clear indication of what people were looking for on BitTorrent in the last 12 months.

At the top of the list we find “Inception“, the movie that also appeared in our most pirated movies chart of the year. In addition, four other titles made it into the top 10; “Iron Man 2″, “Avatar”, “Despicable Me”, and “Clash of the Titans”. Movie related searches are clearly the most popular among users of the site.

Aside from movie titles we find “2010” in third place and “dvdrip” in seventh, two keywords that are also used to find movie related content. Another interesting keyword is “French” which shows that France’s anti-piracy law that went into effect earlier this year isn’t chasing many people away from BitTorrent. The top 10 is completed by the inevitable adult searches “xxx” and “porn“.

The first TV related search is “Dexter” which appears further down the list in 15th place. “Windows 7” is the first software related search keyword in 20th place, and for the first music related entry we have to go all the way down to “Eminem” which is listed as number 47.

A rather surprising entry in the top 100 is “axxo” in 17th place, since the last torrent file by the popular DVDripper was uploaded in March 2009. Axxo has been among the most popular search keywords on BitTorrent for years and it seems that old habits are hard to break.

Below is the full list of the 100 most entered search phrases on KickassTorrents. This list will be different on other BitTorrent sites, but we have to assume that the top searches will be popular on other indexes as well.

1. inception
2. iron man 2
3. 2010
4. xxx
5. french
6. avatar
7. dvdrip
8. despicable me
9. porn
10. clash of the titans
11. toy story 3
12. glee
13. salt
14. twilight eclipse
15. dexter
16. the sorcerer's apprentice
17. axxo
18. robin hood
19. prince of persia
20. windows 7
21. get him to the greek
22. predators 2010
23. the last airbender
24. shutter island
25. knight and day
26. the expendables
27. takers
28. dinner for schmucks
29. unstoppable
30. the book of eli
31. grown ups
32. true blood
33. alice in wonderland
34. movies
35. shrek forever after
36. supernatural
37. hindi
38. house
39. devil
40. step up 3d
41. megamind
42. harry potter and the deathly hallows
43. skyline
44. green zone
45. naughty america
46. iron man 2
47. eminem
48. predators
49. lost
50. the town
51. date night
52. the wolfman
53. smallville
54. the last song
55. torrents
56. how to train your dragon
57. fringe
58. dear john
59. toy story 3
60. red
61. the social network
62. weeds
63. noir
64. telugu
65. pc games
66. vampire diaries
67. the town
68. 2012
69. twilight
70. cop out
71. tamil
72. sex and the city 2
73. harry potter and the deathly hallows part 1
74. remember me
75. the walking dead
76. eclipse
77. due date
78. book of eli
79. fxg
80. true blood
81. avatar the last airbender
82. grown ups
83. ironman 2
84. entourage
85. sherlock holmes
86. how i met your mother
87. sex
88. microsoft office 2010
89. spartacus
90. the pacific
91. karate kid
92. the other guys
93. call of duty black ops
94. despicable me
95. chuck
96. ita
97. resident evil
98. wii
99.. due date
100. hot tub time machine

Source: BitTorrent Zeitgeist: What People Searched For in 2010

Hackulous are most well known for two products. The first is Apptrakr, a web-based index of cracked apps which has between 10 and 11 million unique users per month. The second, Installous, is a piece of software resident on 8 to 9 million jailbroken Apple devices which allows the installation of software found via Apptrakr and elsewhere.

Hackulous admin Dissident has just announced a number of new developments and innovations. The first related pair are upgrades to ‘Clutch’, a piece of software which allows the cracking of iOS software, and its GUI called Crackulous. The second is ‘Overdrive’, a piece of code which stops applications becoming self aware.

Apptrakr is also receiving various upgrades but an update included in the new Installous 4 package is of particular interest.

While Apptrakr has an absolutely huge database of cracked apps, by no means does it index all apps currently available. However, as millions of Installous users are also buyers of apps from the App Store, most titles will already be installed on their collective devices. But how can they be shared with the world?

In the past, owners of App Store apps would have to crack the software using something like Clutch then patch, test, upload and submit it to Apptrakr in order to grow its database and enable others to download. Not surprisingly the learning curve dissuaded all but a tiny minority from even trying.

Described by Dissident as a kind of ‘reverse BitTorrent’, Mobile Hunt is a clever way of utilizing an existing network of millions of peers to provide a solution to the app supply bottleneck.

“Essentially what will happen is when you’re using Installous you’ll get a little pop up that says ‘Hey, you have an application that Apptrakr doesn’t. We will add the application to a queue in the background (if you say yes) and it will start uploading tiny pieces of it, kind of like a torrent, up to the cloud’,” Dissident explains.

So, unlike BitTorrent, where one starts with a single file that multiplies the more people jump on the torrent, with Mobile Hunt the start point is perhaps hundreds or thousands of copies of the same piece of software, and little tiny pieces of each upload from each person’s device to the cloud in order to make one final copy, which will then become available from Apptrakr. From there it will be available for millions to download.

The other announcement from Hackulous is also very significant. On January 6th, Apple will release the Mac App Store and before it’s even released, Hackulous have cracked its security.

By removing DRM from products available from the Mac App Store with a new product called ‘Kickback’, Hackulous will be able to offer the same kind of free download service for Mac as they do for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that they will do so immediately.

“We don’t want to release kickback as soon as the [Mac App] Store gets released. I have a few reasons for that,” Dissident explains.

As mentioned earlier, Hackulous and its suite of services exists to provide a try-before-you-buy trial service and this was only needed when Apple allowed “tons of crap” software on the App Store.

“Most of the applications that go on the Mac App Store [in the first instance] will be decent, they’ll be pretty good. Apple isn’t going to put crap on the App Store as soon as it gets released. It’ll probably take months for the App Store to actually have a bunch of crappy applications and when we feel that it has a lot of crap in it, we’ll probably release Kickback,” says Dissident.

“So we’re not going to release Kickback until well after the store’s been established, well after developers have gotten their applications up. We don’t want to devalue applications and frustrate developers.”

So how long will it take for the Mac App Store to become polluted enough for Kickback to be released? Maybe February…..

Source: Pirate Apple App Store Innovates With ‘Reverse BitTorrent’

“I felt sick to my stomach all morning,” was how What.CD co-founder ‘WhatMan’ described his reaction on hearing the news. “We plan to grow into a large tracker – probably not as large as OiNK, and not as open, but eventually I would like to support at least a hundred thousand users,” he added.

And so it happened. What.CD was founded and thousands of OiNK refugees soon started to populate the site with tens of thousands of torrents. In the three years that followed, What.CD outgrew its predecessor by a wide margin, which went beyond the expectations of the site’s founders.

“The original plan for What.CD was to be a worthy replacement for OiNK,” WhatMan told TorrentFreak today. “When I was on OiNK, I thought it was perfect – I figured that the community, content, and quality were unbeatable. What.CD was originally a place for OiNK refugees to hide out, and I dreamed of the site one day hosting as much content as OiNK did.”

This dream came true, and today What.CD celebrated the 1 millionth uploaded torrent, a mind boggling number especially for a private BitTorrent tracker. However, the uniqueness of this collection doesn’t just exist in impressive numbers, but in the variety and completeness of the catalogue.

“Nowadays, What.CD tracks over four times as much content as OiNK did at its peak. I’m fairly certain that it’s the largest collection of free music on the internet, and the community helps to keep the content plentiful, of high quality, and exquisitely organized,” WhatMan told us, adding: “If you’re looking for a specific master of an album in a specific format, I would be very surprised if you can’t find it extremely easily on What.CD.”

The site’s userbase is quite different from that of the average BitTorrent tracker, the co-founder told us. What.CD users are audiophiles and music lovers, with musical tastes that are quite distinct from the most downloaded tracks on the majority of BitTorrent sites.

“The What.CD community isn’t a bunch of stereotypical casual pirates who download top 40 songs to put on their ipods. What.CD is comprised mainly of music fanatics – those who really care about their music and its quality – ie. those who think of music not as entertainment, but as art.”

“There aren’t many places for these people to go – legitimate download stores don’t offer our level of quality, and CDs are prohibitively expensive for most audiophiles to build a satisfyingly large collection. So they end up here, and form the backbone of our community.”

In the last three years, What.CD has not only built a million torrent music collection, but the team has also created their own tracker frontend and recently launched its own tracker software. Looking back, WhatMan is proud of what he and his team have accomplished.

“It gives me great pleasure to see other trackers running on our code. By releasing the Gazelle frontend and the Ocelot tracker, our goal was to make it easier for admins to run large sites and for users to download content. When I see the number of successful Gazelle sites, I know that we’ve at least partially succeeded.”

Like any other popular tracker, public or private, What.CD also runs into legal issues with copyright holders. The site has had to relocate to new hosting services due to music industry complaints, and more recently the IFPI has been trying to deprive the site of its income by cutting off the tracker’s donation processing services.

“We do occasionally have legal issues. Our main problem lately has been with donation processing services – every time we get a new method of accepting donations, the IFPI is very fast to send threatening emails to the service and cut off our revenue stream. It’s very difficult to find a payment processing service which will offer us the privacy and protection we need.”

The What.CD team understands that is is impossible for the site is to fly under the radar, which it never did. However, they are confident that these issues can be dealt with and that they can focus on improving the functionality of the site to keep the community and site thriving.

“Needless to say, we plan on continuing to survive – we’ve worked too long and too hard to lose the site now. I’d also like the site to expand to contain music from non-English speaking cultures, and become a haven for audiophiles from all corners of the globe,” WhatMan told TorrentFreak.

What.CD, it seems, is here to stay.

Source: What.CD BitTorrent Tracker Breaks A Million Torrents

Following a lengthy investigation by anti-piracy group Antipiratbyrån, during the last 48 hours Swedish police acted on their evidence and moved in on at least one ‘topsite’.

The site, which supposedly carried between 200 and 250 terabytes of media, was known as ‘Devil’. During the raids police seized a dozen servers and other computers and detained one person.

The individual, who is believed to have been handed over to Antipiratbyrån for questioning, is accused of being the operator of ‘Devil’. He is blamed for the distribution of “tens of thousands” of mainly Hollywood movies.

In what appeared to be a security response to news of the bust, other topsites started going down in Sweden and at least one other major European country.

Elements of two other topsites with links to ‘Devil’ known as Secu and Tomte (250 terabytes combined) have also been affected but so as not to compromise our sources, we will refrain from going into further detail as to why at this stage.

Suffice to say that some fairly important movie release groups (particularly Swedish ones) were connected to the sites and their activities will have been disrupted, at least temporarily.

Within the Scene the recriminations have begun, with fingers pointed at individuals and groups who are suspected of having caused the security lapse which led to the busts. Not unexpectedly, the accusations appear to be focused on Scene members who are also connected with P2P sharing groups, a frowned upon activity but one that is nevertheless widespread.

Source: Police Raid ‘Devil’ Warez Piracy Topsite

To document the ongoing evolution of BitTorrent and the files people share, today we present a snapshot of the BitTorrent landscape at the end of 2010. We believe that this is the most elaborate and detailed classification of the files currently available on BitTorrent.

The data is gathered with help from BitSnoop and comes from thousands of BitTorrent trackers. It includes (nearly) all torrents that can be downloaded from public torrent sites today, including those that were not active at the time our snapshot was taken.

We start off with an overview of the number of torrents and the associated file-sizes, separated into five broad categories. Later, we will take a close look at some of the sub categories such as TV, movies, books and different types of gaming platforms.

Below are the same categories again, but now with the number of peers who have downloaded the complete file and continue to share it (seeders), and the peers who are currently downloading the files (leechers).

The data above shows us that the number of public torrents exceeds at least 10 million and that close to 30 million peers were sharing a torrent at the time this snapshot was taken.

We also find that video content is by far the most popular category on BitTorrent. The ‘video’ category contains more than half of all torrents available, and two thirds of all active BitTorrent users are downloading or sharing video content.

In terms of available files, ‘games’ is the smallest category with just 340,416 torrents, but in terms of active BitTorrent users ‘software’ is at the bottom with 4 percent. In total, all available files on BitTorrent add up to a massive 12,037.9 TB.

Let’s drill down a bit more, and take a look at the different subcategories. It has to be noted that not all torrents are categorized into a subcategory, and these files will be ignored below.

Movies vs. TV

Movies are by far the largest ‘video’ subcategory with 2,012,432 torrents, followed by TV which lists 1,011,607 torrent files. In terms of downloaders this difference is even more pronounced. Movies have 7,173,330 seeders and 2,851,119 leechers, while TV has 2,626,238 seeders and 1,230,625 leechers. The other video subcategories such as anime, adult and music videos are far behind.

Gaming platforms

PC games are shared the most on BitTorrent, with a total of 113,624 available torrent files. PSP games are in second place with 31,742 torrents, followed by Wii (25,770), Playstation (24,240), XBox (24,108), NDS (18,714), Mobile (2,495) and Mac games (1,936).

Books

One of the categories that has been growing quickly in the last year is ‘books’. We currently count 399,267 available ebook torrents (including magazines), with 662,228 seeders and 172,811 leechers. Ebooks are followed by audio books, with 81,841 torrent files and comics with 15,774 available torrents.

It will be interesting to see how these trends develop over time. We will update this overview in a few months to see what trends are emerging and to find out more about what’s happening in other subcategories.

Source: A Snapshot of the Public BitTorrent Landscape

“Books are priced too high,” said Berntsen when justifying his work. “One of the reasons why the pirate world is so big, is that publishers take crazy prices for something that isn’t even in physical form.”

To counter his viewpoint, DN also interviewed Anne B. Ragde, an award-winning author. Unsurprisingly, Ragde isn’t a huge fan of eBook sharing. In order to thwart piracy, she refused to allow her latest novel to be released as an audiobook since the format is popular with file-sharers and also denied the publication of Russian and Chinese versions.

“Piracy scares the hell out of me. I do not know what to say. I lose sleep at night over it,” said Ragde. “I have figured out that I’ve lost half a million kroner ($72,500) on piracy of my books, maybe more.”

Like many who oppose file-sharing and other forms of copying, Ragde goes on to equate copying with theft and shares her sympathies with those in the music industry.

“I can not stand the thought of someone stealing something. I look at Norwegian musicians who have to do live concerts. We have nothing to live on other than the physical product,” she said.

In response to a question about her habits when it comes to buying or otherwise acquiring copied or counterfeit items, Ragde’s anti-piracy halo slipped more than a little.

“Pirated handbags? Yes, I do buy them,” she said. “I feel that the genuine Prada bags have such an inflated price.”

Ragde then reportedly went on to list many other items she’s bought legitimately but was kindly assisted with a further confession by her son, Jo. If her halo had slipped with the bag admission, it was now set to strangle her.

“You have a pirated MP3 collection,” Jo added, helpfully. “We copied the first 1500 songs from one place and 300 from another.”

“Yes,” admitted Ragde. “There were a lot of things on the iPod.”

Olav Torvund, a professor at the Center for Law at the University of Oslo slammed Ragde as having a set of double standards.

“You’d think that a writer whose income is completely dependent on her rights being respected, would also respect the rights of others,” Torvund said.

“When Anne B Ragde exposed her double standards and made a fool out of herself in Dagens Næringsliv as she did, she has only one thing left to do: Buy the 1800 music tracks that she downloaded to her iPod, so that musicians and composers get their rightful royalty.”

“Burn the counterfeit bags. And come with an apology to all those whose rights she has violated.”

In a follow up to the revelations published in the interview, Ragde tried to defend herself by saying the quotes had been taken out of context. She also went on to blame the music piracy on her son while insisting she’s always been against illicit file-sharing.

“The stuff on my ipod is not representative of my relationship with the music industry and the products they produce. I pay for my music,” she insisted.

Ragde says that the ipod is in storage somewhere in her cottage so when she goes there to celebrate Christmas she will pull it out and delete all the music.

And as a reward for his ‘help’ with the interview, little Jo’s presents will probably be hand delivered by Ebeneezer Scrooge this year.

Source: Author Slams eBook Piracy, Son Outs Her As a Music Pirate

Apparently someone who had acquired a copy of Black Ops had offered one of the copies to an Internet user known as ‘Ungodly Leaker’, someone who was also allegedly involved in the earlier leak of Halo:Reach. In order to raise funds to buy the game (the seller wanted around $450 for it), Ungodly Leaker started gathering donations on an Internet forum, which for the purposes of this article shall remain nameless.

Funds gathered, and it was time to get hold of the game. The seller wasn’t within driving distance of the small group involved with the purchase, so someone who they barely knew but had gained some trust with was given half of the donated funds as an advance and given the task of physically collecting the disc.

But there was a problem. Someone who appeared to be Treyarch’s Josh Olin was watching the whole deal going down. Sources with access to privileged information told TorrentFreak that after IP address checks, it was confirmed to be really him.

Olin went on to warn a handful of members of the forum about not leaking the game – somehow he had managed to find out their personal telephone numbers. It was agreed with Olin that the copy of the game would be collected by Treyarch and taken back into safe care.

Although Treyarch were successful this time, other sources for Black Ops were on the loose.

“A week or so later I start to get some real good leads, some of my usual contacts/sources were notifying me that they would be getting the game within the next few days and would sell it to me for a decent price,” a key figure in the eventual leak of the Xbox 360 version of Black Ops told TorrentFreak.

“Obviously I kept pretty quiet about it, it’s always the best thing to do with something like this. You never know what could happen.”

By October 30th, T.P as he is known, had two separate people who said they were willing to supply the game. But the 30th was a Saturday which meant that the game would delivered by 2nd November at the earliest – not nearly quick enough for someone used to the efficiency of digital transfers.

Unexpectedly, however, another source appeared – one that had not only got the game but had already and conveniently ripped it to an ISO. Confirmed as legitimate, the deal was on. For $50.

True to his word the supplier uploaded the game to a file-hoster (which must remain nameless) in around 70 parts, some of which had unique passwords. The next job was to get Black Ops spread to a worldwide audience and for this T.P received assistance from a member of the Scene. Through highly encrypted connections, uploads were made to a very large private BitTorrent tracker and various Usenet servers.

“When the ISO was being uploaded/spread around I was receiving a lot of abuse and death threats from forums, on IRC and on MSN,” T.P told TorrentFreak. “Makes me sick how people expect something for nothing, and when there is a slight hiccup they think they have the right to complain about it.”

In the end the release got out there but, in true pirate style, T.P’s leak was quickly pirated by someone else wanting to take the credit for his work. As can be seen on this article on Releaselog, the release of the version Call of Duty Black Ops READNFO XBOX360-FW was ‘nuked’ (disallowed) by the warez Scene for being from a “stolen source”.

“This release is just a P2P repacked rip (Release: Call.of.Duty.Black.Ops.XBOX360-T.P),” explained Rlslog adding, “..available 1 hours before on some trackers.”

Of course, being first is everything when releasing and T.P is very happy with the results here.

“Being the first to leak a big title is great motivation as many will remember you for months/years in the future and recognise your work,” he told us.

“I enjoy seeing my work all over the internet, people saying thanks etc. It’s nice to see people who appreciate the time spent to release something.”

Indeed, a huge number of people will be saying “thanks” for T.P’s efforts. As of last week, the Xbox 360 version of Black Ops had been downloaded more than half a million times and will certainly end up in TorrentFreak’s Top 10 most downloaded games of 2010.

Source: “I Leaked Black Ops” – Confessions of an Xbox 360 Pirate

Today, CNET reports that the RIAA is claiming in court papers that due to the existence of LimeWire Pirate Edition, somehow the official LimeWire company is in breach of the injunction handed down by a federal judge.

“Defendants have demonstrated in no uncertain terms that they either will not or cannot do what the injunction commands,” CNET quotes the RIAA as saying.

But how could LimeWire be responsible for the actions of those behind LimeWire Pirate Edition? Simple. The RIAA is claiming that the site which carried links to the software was created by someone “either formerly or presently a Lime Wire employee.”

To this end, the RIAA has asked for LimeWire’s assistance to find out the identity of “Meta Pirate”, the individual fronting the LimeWire Pirate Edition operation. Following this pressure, LimeWire took action against the Pirate Edition’s website – and had it shut down.

Unsurprisingly, Meta Pirate is not happy and has told TorrentFreak that the RIAA is exploiting the release of LimeWire Pirate Edition to gain leverage in its case against Lime Wire.

“This is nothing more than cheap and dishonest opportunism,” he told us.

“The monkeys who created LimeWire Pirate Edition are not associated in any way with Lime Wire LLC. Because of the RIAA’s underhanded tactics, Lime Wire has used a court order from the U.S. Southern District Court of New York to shut down our website.”

Meta Pirate is well aware that it’s impossible to contest the court order while remaining anonymous so the site will stay down for now. Nevertheless, the software remains available from The Pirate Bay and other websites.

“LimeWire is and always has been open source software, licensed under the GNU GPL,” he concludes. “We created a derivative work from the published source code, as any user of LimeWire has the right to do. We encourage other curious monkeys to do the same.”

Source: LimeWire Pirate Edition Site Nuked By “Cheap and Dishonest” RIAA Action

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: Behind The Scenes at Anonymous’ Operation Payback

One could argue that Google has been one of the greatest contributers to the success of BitTorrent. Unlike other filesharing applications such as Frostwire, Ares and eMule, the .torrent download links are listed on billions of search engine friendly pages on the Internet.

We dare to argue that if BitTorrent didn’t rely on web-based indexing sites, it would be nowhere as popular as it is today. Today, thousands of new people continue to be introduced to it by Google alone. Features such as Google Suggest and Google Instant play a key role in this discovery process.

Just take a look at the two screenshots of Google searches for Wall Street Money Never Sleeps and Resident Evil Afterlife, and see what Google suggests as a search phrase after one enters the movie titles into the search box.

The search suggestions are based on the search habits in one’s geographical locations, so they may not be the same for everyone. However, the ‘torrent’ suggestion usually makes it into the top 5.

Due to BitTorrent’s popularity, a movie title followed by the word ‘torrent’ is often the first suggestion, before words such as trailer, review and soundtrack. This isn’t a decision made by the Google staffers, but a reflection of the fact that more people search for ‘torrent’ in combination with a movie title (or music and software tiles) than these other words.

Earlier this year Google rolled out a new feature that may boost the conversion of new people to BitTorrent to even more. With Google Instant users directly see the results of the search phrases they type. This means that for a lot of movies merely entering the title and a space will give then a list of download links on torrent sites.

When we do a search for Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World for example (with Google Instant enabled), we immediately get a list of download links on various BitTorrent sites when we enter a space. It’s needless to say that this may pique the interest of people who have never heard of BitTorrent.

Of course, Google is not to blame for any of this. They have their automated algorithms and because BitTorrent is used by millions of people, ‘torrent’ related search phrases often rise to the top of suggested searches. In a way, the same can be said for torrent search engines – should the operators really be blamed for how a subgroup of their visitors use their sites?

Source: What’s That Torrent Thing Google Keeps Suggesting?

Although we would love to, it would be impossible to mention everyone who has contributed to TorrentFreak. Over the years we’ve had several guest writers and received tens of thousands of tips from readers – they have all contributed to the site in some way or another.

Writing for TorrentFreak has been a a great endeavor thus far, most of all thanks to you, our readers. We’re here to stay, and hope the next five years will be as much fun as the first.

Thanks!

Update: Thanks for all the wonderful comments. It may sound silly but it does mean a lot.

pic credit

Source: Happy Birthday To Us, TorrentFreak Turns 5

The Largest Torrent

When we refer to the largest torrent we mean the single .torrent file that downloads the most data, not the size of the .torrent file itself. There are several huge torrent files active at the moment, but the record goes to a torrent with a 746.70 GB collection of all 2010 World Cup soccer matches (~ 6GB per half). This torrent was released 4 months ago and is still active with a handful of downloaders (update, this one is even bigger).

Another sizeable torrent that was released just a few days ago is the archive of the late Geocities.com that was shut down by Yahoo last year. The 641.32 GB torrent has received a fair bit of attention from tech journalists and is well seeded at the moment.

Downloading these torrents nowadays is a lot easier and cheaper than a few years ago. In 2001 when BitTorrent first went public the cheapest hard drive cost $238.00, and that was for just 40 GB. At the time, downloading a file of this size would have required a $4522 investment. Even in 2005 you would still had to invest $500 to get this much storage cheaply (5×160 GB).

The first commercial 1TB hard drive, one that could store the entire 746.70 GB, wasn’t released until 2007. Times sure have changed a lot.

The Oldest Torrent

The torrent file that has been around for the longest time according to our knowledge is The Matrix ASCII. We already crowned this one the oldest torrent back in 2005, and as of today it is still active with a few downloaders and only one seeder.

The torrent file in question was created in December 2003 when sites like isoHunt, The Pirate Bay and Torrentz.com were only a few months old and when Facebook and YouTube didn’t yet exist. Thus far, this torrent has survived a mind boggling 2500 days.

The Largest Swarm

We know that BitTorrent is used by millions of people, but which torrent was shared by the most people at once? According to our records this honor goes to the first episode of Heroes season 3, which appeared on BitTorrent September 23, 2008.

On the first day the torrent ‘Heroes.S03E01.HDTV.XviD-0TV’ had a swarm (seeders + leechers) of 144,663 peers, a record that hasn’t been broken since. Today, most than two years later the episode has been downloaded more than 7 million times and at the time of writing it is still active.

The Most Files

The next record is the one for the most files in a single torrent. This is a tricky one, because we know that there are torrents which link to millions of files, but none of these are indexed by regular torrent sites. With this many files, the size of the torrent alone can go over 10 MB and most torrent indexes have a restriction on the filesize of a torrent file.

The torrent with the most files that we’ve seen on public indexers is a copy of Magic Workstation that was uploaded 8 months ago. The download is only 4.01 GB in total but has 35,256 files in total.

The Most Data Transferred

The final record we will discuss is the torrent that has resulted in the transfer of the most data. This record goes to a release of Blizzard’s StarCraft 2 which came out three months ago. The most popular torrent file for this 7.19 GB game has been downloaded 2.3 million times, totalling a massive 15.77 Petabytes.

Interestingly, the legit copies of the game sold by Blizzard may have transferred even more data. All download copies of StarCraft 2 have been distributed through Blizzard’s very own BitTorrent downloader. Unfortunately Blizzard’s tracker doesn’t provide any stats so we don’t know if the official beats the illegitimate counterpart traffic wise.

—

Are there any torrents or records that we missed? Feel free to discuss these in the comments.

Source: 5 Torrent Files That Broke Mind Boggling Records

Maybe in some ideal, utopian world that doesn’t obey the normal laws of society and human nature that might be possible, but this is 2010 and the days of staying completely under the radar are long gone.

One only has to look around the most prominent half dozen torrent invite communities. There is always someone spilling the beans on even the most supposedly low-profile of locations – often with the full knowledge of the ‘secret’ site’s staff. The facts of life on the web are simple – if you’re on there, have a URL and you invite people to your torrent site, word spreads as easily as the files being shared on it. Hollywood and IFPI can’t stop that free flow of information – and neither can site owners.

Although there are plenty of smaller communities with a few hundred members, a large proportion of the more visible private sites – despite what some of their users may think – could not survive without a level of publicity since members are kicked out all the time. These sites, one way or another, nurture their image and desirability using things such as the apparent exclusivity of their community, the size and quality of their swarms (which by necessity require a decent number of contributors) and their efficiency at getting the best material first.

In recent times, the ability to get the latest releases first after they have pre’d (been released onto the net) has become one of the major bragging rights site staff and members use to demonstrate that their community is ‘better’ than that of their competitors.

So, in common with members of the Warez Scene who also have their own races to see who can be numero uno, many torrent sites are involved in competition too. Their rivalry is tested in something called a TRACE (Torrent Race). Thanks to a website that has been running for a few months now, the results of these races can be discovered without using IRC channels, making them even more public than they used to be.

When one first visits pre.corrupt-net.org and enters a title into the search box, it functions as any other preDB (Pre-Database) might, displaying a list of releases and a time and date of when they first hit the Internet. Since the movie ‘Inception’ topped this week’s Top 10 Most Pirated Movies chart, we’ll use that as an example below.

With the release format (DVDR/XVID) on the left, the penultimate far right column reveals the time when the release first hit the Internet. However, by clicking the green ‘TRACE’ buttons next to them, the list of which private torrent sites got them first can be viewed.

Using Inception.NTSC.MULTi.DVDR-THENiGHTMARE as an example, we get the following results:

What we can see here is that a site with the acronym of TL offered this particular release 6 minutes and 57 seconds after it first appeared on the Internet and was quickly followed by sites AL, HS, TBy, IPT and TB.

Many staff and members use acronyms when referring to their sites (ahem) in public, often for speed but also so that outsiders don’t know what they are talking about. But as a security measure it’s absolutely hopeless since anyone Googling ‘tracker acronyms’ can easily find out the full name and URL of the site in question.

When site admins give highly public interviews, as was the case with the owner of ‘TL’, the whole thing is made even easier. Many private sites say they want obscurity and many of their members believe that, but obscure sites don’t have tens of thousands of members and they certainly don’t race.

Rewind back more than a decade and a half ago and finding the latest warez releases on the Internet was a fairly difficult task to say the least, and if you had a reliable and safe source you were not only lucky but in the minority. Back then even the notion of a private tracker where one could sign up (let’s admit it, fairly easily) and get almost anything would be almost unthinkable.

These days everything is mainstream and as much as even the most 1337 inhabitants of private trackers would like to have people believe, nothing is off limits to someone determined to get in since everyone knows these sites exist. Of course, that’s by design, because if people don’t know they exist there would be no way to replenish their userbases.

And what’s one of the best ways to attract quality users to boost those constantly diminishing userbases other than relying on existing users to invite them? By having the top releases, first – and proving it with consistent TRACE results.

Source: Which Torrent Sites Get Releases The Fastest (and why it’s not a secret)

Every day, millions of people download the latest blockbusters through file-sharing applications, and the majority of those come from so-called Scene groups. Despite the major impact the Scene has on modern day society, very little is known about the people who are part of it. After today, we might know a tiny bit more.

TorrentFreak had the chance to ask a few questions to a former member of a well-known Scene group. Our source (let’s call him SC) is a self-proclaimed expert at busting the watermaking techniques of the MPAA, and between 2003 and 2009 he was a member and supplier of a group responsible for hundreds of pirated movie releases online.

We got in contact with the former Scene member through Reddit, where he has been answering many questions about his ‘profession’ this week. As always, the true identity of SC will remain a mystery, but judging from the answers that were given and the knowledge the person has we can be fairly certain that he is indeed who he claims to be.

In his introduction, SC says that during his time in the Scene six close associates got arrested, 2 served prison time, 2 became informants and one killed himself. The latter case refers to Geremi Adam aka maVen, one of the best known movie pirates who died of a morphine overdose after he was released from prison.

Below, you can read the Q and A session we had with SC, which tells us a bit more about the Scene and the motivations and connections of the people in it. Those who want to ask something of their own, or who want to read more questions that were answered by SC, can do so on Reddit.

TF: Can you tell us a little bit about how you got into the movie piracy world?

SC: I got into movie piracy after being an avid downloader. I distinctly remember in fact, getting a hold of my first movie over a 4 day leech on a 56k line. It was wicked. I loved it, and quickly realized there was some sort of underground in control of all of this. It piqued my interest, and I was determined to get to the top of it. Seemed a little far fetched at the time, and I cant really fathom still how far it snowballed, but its pretty cool none-the-less.”

TF: You mentioned your connection to maVen, can you say anything about other groups you’ve worked with?

SC: I dont think it’s fair on my part to say to be honest. It would be foolish and unnecessary – but lets just say I worked with most during my time. Any that dealt with theater rips/prints at least. I mentioned maVen because the police would have a hard time getting information from a dead individual.

TF: What was the main motivation for you to join the movie piracy Scene? What about the others?

SC: Pride and ego was my main motivation. Most sceners are male, between 18-30, generally white and well educated. Most are middle/upper middle class, students and young professionals.. Pride and Ego fuels almost 90% of their motivations. You are able to achieve a level of status online that you probably could never in the real world; you are respected and feared, and the mystique of it all helps. Sounds foolish now; but at the time it didnt seem so.

TF: Over the years, have you noticed any significant changes in how groups and suppliers operate?

SC: Massive significant changes. At some point maybe 10 years ago, I knew of major groups who had public IRC channels! at a time all of this required some technical wizardy, and you had to be fairly knowledgeable in order to do it. As time went on, with the advances of technology, this changed, bringing it to a much wider audience base, and also with newer distro methods (Torrents, etc). Laws have changed pretty dramatically worldwide also.

TF: Did the increased monitoring and safety measures in theaters change anything? A delay in release time for CAMs perhaps?

SC: I would say the changing technologies and the learning curve are more to do with any delays. Some releases can take far more time then others.

TF: Could you tell a bit more about the process that’s involved from the theater to a pre-ready release?

SC: A cammer will go to a theater and retrieve a print. Ideally, he is wanting to see the whole frame of the film – cropping can be done afterwards. Ideally he is sitting centered, mid level/back level, with an unobstructed view. Another very important factor is the camera doesnt move – ideally sitting stationary 100% of the release.

The next process is removing the watermarks. Ideally this is done by several individuals looking over the print, tagging the dots, and checking with each other. After a few good guys look it over you can be pretty sure you got most of them.

Once the final release is encoded, the watermarks are removed, the audio is done, its packed/checked and spread to affiliates. Some short time later, its pre’d, and released upon the world.

TF: What kind of precautionary measures did you take so you never got caught?

SC: Secrets to not getting caught… those might possibly get me caught! Lets just say, seeing the bigger picture, watching your tongue and understanding the way people are connected helps dramatically.

TF: You say that you were both a supplier to, and a member of, a group. Is this common?

SC: Yes. Very Common. Since its quite possible you will never meet members, you are all colluding to commit crimes together. A great way to ‘keep it in the family’ is to essentially make the guy next to you just as guilty. In this case I’ve seen members take on many many roles, it also helps with the breakdown of the group and the overall structure. I would say its common among the top echelon.

TF: Have you seen any changes in the Scene in recent years?

SC: The scene has changed dramatically since I first entered it. There was a time saying the wrong thing would immediately make you lose your access and become an outcast; if you were not contributing, you were a nobody. this mentality has changed dramatically; its not so hush hush, or technically proficient as it has been in past years. The ease of it all has also made it a more risky hobby.

TF: Are there any commercial interests linked to groups that you’ve been connected to or heard from?

SC: Yes. Absolutely. Money and those accusations have gone on for years. I can attest with certainty that I know groups that have sold – but to sit here and spout their names endangers them and is just slander. Its unecessary for me to publically shame them all. Except maVen. He’s no longer here; and his motivation was money almost 100% of the time.

TF: What do you think the future holds for movie release groups?

SC: Nothing good. Cam/telesync/high quality theater rips are dead pretty much. Retail DVD video is impossible to track; that shit will be here forever.

Last year, SC decided to leave the Scene he had been part of for such a long time. We did of course ask him why he made this decision, but SC told us that it was “the eternal question.”

SC continued his life outside the Scene and doesn’t contact his former group members and associates anymore, although they are not out of sight completely.

“I can find them and they can find me,” SC said. “But I think everyone prefers a bit of an arm’s length approach at some point.”

Source: Former Movie Piracy Scene Member Speaks Out

Looking at the music industry, some publishers are fearing the worst, but the million dollar question is whether or not these fears are justified. How big of a threat is eBook piracy for the book industry? Or is it an opportunity instead?

This week comic book writer Steve Lieber has shared his experiences with book piracy, proving that it also has its benefits. Lieber noticed that scanned copies of his graphic novel Underground were posted on 4Chan, but instead of putting his sales to a halt, they skyrocketed.

Lieber shared his findings in a blog entry, complete with fancy graphics which show that the 4Chan piracy resulted in a flood of new customers.

The picture above shows how Lieber’s site traffic surged after the pirated scans were posted, and how 4Chan brings in more traffic than BoingBoing. But Lieber also said that the spike in sales was even more impressive.

“The sales spike, I think, would be a lot sharper, actually, but we don’t have any way to track that as precisely… After the Boing Boing article ran, I sat down to do the free sketches for our Etsy buyers, and got them all done while eating a sandwich. After this, I’ll be sketching for DAYS.”

It would of course be naive to claim that this example proves that piracy is not going to affect the book industry in a negative way, or that it will boost sales for everyone. However, it does show that ‘being noticed’ can do wonders in individual cases, even if it’s through piracy.

And that’s not the only benefit. The availability of unauthorized copies doesn’t only help writers who have yet to gain an audience. Well established authors have also noticed that piracy can do wonders for sales figures.

Bestselling author Paulo Coelho has previously shown that giving away free digital copies of books can actually boost sales to quite an extent. He claimed that this ‘piracy’ has led to millions of additional sales over the years.

Coelho, who is an avid BitTorrent user himself and a passionate supporter of The Pirate Bay, has encouraged many of his fellow authors to share their work. “A person who does not share is not only selfish, but bitter and alone,” Coelho told TorrentFreak.

Even more so, according to the anecdotes above an author who doesn’t share might actually miss out on some additional revenue.

Source: Piracy Can Boost Book Sales Tremendously

The Pirate Parties International is the umbrella organization for Pirate Parties worldwide, which are active in nearly 50 countries at the moment. On their mailing list, interesting ideas, links and documents are shared, and a few days ago the idea for an extraterrestrial file-sharing site was born.

Although it is no secret that Sci-Fi fans are well represented in the pirate community, the idea is taken somewhat seriously, both by PPI members and outsiders. Forbes already took notice of the plans and in the PPI members are carefully weighing the pros and cons of their options.

So what are these Pirates up to?

The idea is to get away from current ‘restricted’ hosting facilities where the law of the land applies. Initially, a balloon was opted for as the ideal vessel, but others quickly suggested that an actual satellite would be a more durable solution. To fund the project, crowd-sourcing platforms like Kickstarter were mentioned.

As the discussion moved on the more down-to-earth members mentioned that it might be a good idea to start at sea. This would be a nice fit with the Pirate theme and also slightly more affordable. A remote-controlled sail-boat could easily carry the hosting platform and be shipped outside of territorial waters.

Although there is no consensus yet, boat, balloon then satellite seems to be a logical order of approach.

But will this work?

We would be the last to temper the hopes and dreams of any Pirate, but there are some hurdles to overcome. Money issues aside, it’s not going to be easy to launch a website in space without being bound to the laws of a country or company down below. After all, one needs connectivity, a domain name and an IP-address.

It would be a real shame to have a torrent site up and running in space, but have it disconnected because the bandwidth provider receives a take-down notice. Not to mention the logistics that will be involved with replacing a failing harddisk.

To use a famous Sci-Fi quote: “Anything is possible, but the odds are astronomically against it.”

So what’s next?

Encouraged by the recognition from Forbes and the enthusiasm from PPI members, the discussion on what the ideal plan would be continues. And as The Pirate Bay has proven with their Buy Sealand project, raising thousands of dollars is a piece of cake. Time will tell if it’s going to be a homemade balloon, a pirate ship, a satellite, or nothing.

TorrentFreak readers with suggestions are encouraged to post a comment. The previous discussions can be read on the online mailing list, and everyone can join the conversation by signing up.

We contacted the PPI with some questions and a request for comment, but haven’t heard back from them at the time of publishing.

Source: Pirate Parties Plan to Shoot Torrent Site Into Orbit

From our analysis we discovered that the impact of the operation was significant as it hit some of the most important sites in the European piracy Scene.

One would never expect a case as complex as this to be over in such a short time so now, more than a month on, it’s no surprise that the investigation is continuing. However, while it hardly comes as a shock to hear that server administrators and datacenter operatives have been questioned in connection with the case, an eyebrow or two will certainly be raised at the questioning of someone being described as a “top politician”.

After tracing an IP address to a physical location, on September 7th (the day of the raids) police went to a property in Eskilstuna in Sweden. At that address lived a still unnamed 32 year-old politician. After seizing seven computers, four hard drives, various USB drives and memory cards, the man was taken for interrogation.

“I told them that I am not a part of these file-sharing networks and they believed me,” the man told news portal Ekuriren.

Frederick Ingblad from the Prosecution Office in Stockholm later confirmed that after around a week the man, who is said to be a leading representative of his party, was no longer a suspect. The politician confirmed this but added that he did not know if the claims against him could return at a later date.

So how did this politician come under suspicion?

“I will not go into details of the investigation,” said Inglblad. “But to be a suspect, intent is required. The fact that people know what they’re doing,” he added.

But despite the prosecutor making it clear that the man is no longer a suspect, it does seem that the authorities are continuing with the investigation in connection with the politician’s equipment.

Following a request from the Stockholm Prosecution Office, yesterday a district court ruled that two of the politician’s computers could be sent over to the hub of the investigation in Belgium for further analysis.

Source: Politician Tied Up In Warez Scene Piracy Investigation

In the years that followed the aXXo brand went on to achieve cult status. For many it became synonymous with quality, dominating the searches on all public torrent sites. As a result, aXXo has grabbed the attention of scammers, the mainstream press and even documentary makers.

For reasons unknown, aXXo stopped uploading torrent files to the usual places in March 2009, leaving millions of desperate followers behind. One of the people who appreciated aXXo’s contributions is Alexander Støver, a Norwegian musician who produces electro under the name Binärpilot.

In a newly released album, Binärpilot has dedicated the first track to mourn aXXo’s absence with the following lyrics:

Where have you gone?
You had become such a good friend
Don’t take too long
To come back home
Come back home

All things end
But we can’t pretend that it doesn’t hurt
Anonymous space
Lacks grace
And it would rather see you burn

In true aXXo spirit, the track and the entire album can be downloaded for free of course. This is the business model Binärpilot has embraced since he started making music. Instead of asking people to pay for his music, he makes money through donations, bookings and merchandise.

Aside from publicly showing his appreciation for a DVD-ripper like aXXo, Alexander has been very vocal about how piracy is affecting the music industry.

“I’ll sum it up for you,” he wrote in a blog post on the topic. “It’s not hurting the artists, it’s hurting the industry behind the artists. And that is, in my opinion, the beauty of it; Contrary to what they want you to believe, piracy is (if anything) saving music, because it’s bringing a corrupt and exploitative machine down to its knees.”

As an artist, Alexander personally has very little to worry about illegal downloads, since he’s not charging for his music in the first place. Instead of complaining about the lack of income from music sales, he attributes most of his success to the people who are sharing his work for free.

“I’ve never charged a dime for any of my music, but thanks to the internet I’m making a fair amount of money through donations and ad revenue. Money I never would have seen if it wasn’t for so-called pirates downloading and uploading my music,” Alexander says.

“And most important of all, this is money I can spend with a clear conscience, knowing I never sacrificed my artistic integrity to fit some sort of corporate formula. Now, I’m not making a living with my music, and with the status quo I don’t think I ever will, but that’s not because of pirates, and it never will be. In fact, I salute them.”

Binärpilot’s latest album Nordland, including the track aXXo, can be downloaded for free on his official website. If you like it, please consider chipping in a few bucks so he can buy some bread.

Source: Musician Mourns aXXo’s Absence, Defends Piracy

The site, which specializes in Asian content, was reported and confirmed to be a target for an Indian anti-piracy company with an unconventional approach to enforcement.

AiPlex Software had admitted to carrying out DDoS attacks for movie companies against ICTorrent (something it later denied) but the suspicion in the community was that its activities were wider. Word quickly spread that it had also attacked The Pirate Bay and this resulted in the first wave of attacks in Operation Payback, the DDoS attacks carried out by 4chan and their supporters against anti-piracy operations.

While AiPlex Software went down in dramatic fashion, ICTorrent remained cheerfully up. According to an admin at the site, all is quiet at the moment. He told us that he’s had no DDoS attacks from AiPlex Software for 2 weeks.

It’s perhaps no coincidence that on and off, AiPlex has been under 4chan-inspired DDoS attacks itself for a similar period.

“Its just nice to see that there are anti-anti-pirates out there who are ready to fight companies who don’t seem to live by the law,” an ICTorrent admin told TorrentFreak. “I am glad to see that AiPlex got a taste of their own medicine and I would like to support 4chan in any way possible.”

Moving on to more light-hearted events, today ICT celebrates its second birthday and on this occasion has shared some interesting screenshots with TorrentFreak.

When ICTorrent releases a PDVD (a DVD encoded from an Asian Silver or Telesync source) of a Bollywood movie, they add their own clearly visible watermark to the release which is viewable throughout the movie in the top right hand corner of the screen. The watermark consists on an I and a C (from ICTorrent) which stands for Intellect Clever.

However, ‘clever’ might not be a term that could be associated with the producers of an Indian TV movie awards show. Since 2008, when ICTorrent was born, the national TV show has been running with clips of nominated movies culled from an interesting source – ICTorrent PDVDs.

The distinctive ‘i’ (for reference see the logo above) can be seen in the screenshots below from an earlier show, just below and to the right of the ‘Sony’ logo (ouch!).

Another logo which has appeared regularly on the awards show is that of Cinema Max, another outfit that places watermarks on pirate DVDs. Example below, watermark bottom right of ‘screen’ section.

After using ICTorrent sourced movie clips in 2008, 2009 and 2010, it will remain to be seen if 2011 shows the same pattern. However, if AiPlex Software renew their DDoS attacks against the site, the awards show might have a problem getting their fix this time round.

To this end, ICTorrent has issued a direct warning to AiPlex not to go back to their old ways.

“After the attacks from 9/10 to 9/11 if we receive an another DDoS attack from you we will make sure all the documents sent to us by AiPlex are made public to every single Indian Director and Producer so they know what kind of ridiculous emails you send & the kind of people you have in your company,” the site warns.

TorrentFreak has seen some of these documents and they make uncomfortable reading. Let’s see what happens next. To DDoS or not? That is the question.

Source: Torrent Site Thanks 4chan For DDoSing Anti-Piracy Outfit

To top it off, Dawkins is the person who coined the term “meme”, which has started to lead a life of its own on the Internet.

An outspoken atheist and prominent critic of creationism, Dawkins has made several documentaries where he shows that the world would be a better place without religion. His most recent documentary Faith School Menace explored the detrimental effect faith schools have on children.

The documentary, presented by Dawkins, aired on Channel 4′s television channel More4 last month in the UK. The reviews of the film were mixed and as always highly correlated with the beliefs of the viewers. However, most of Dawkins’ regular followers were impressed. That is, the ones who got a chance to see it.

The majority of Dawkins fans are not located in the UK, and this caused the usual problems. Due to copyright restrictions only people in the UK could see the show, but luckily for people abroad Professor Dawkins had the ultimate solution.

“Is there any way to watch this from Australia? I’d really like to see it,” one commenter wrote on Dawkins official website, followed by another saying, “I´d like to see it, too. Is there any way how to watch it from Czech Republic?”

Dawkins, a man of answers rather than questions, had an easy solution.

“Do you mean that none of these work in your countries?” the Professor commented under his official account, while linking to several YouTube links and a torrent file on The Pirate Bay.

Ironically, one of the YouTube links has been taken down after a copyright complaint from Channel 4 (before it was set to private). The torrent file on The Pirate Bay, however, is still very much alive.

It appears that Professor Dawkins thinks that the world would be a better place without copyright restrictions, in this particular knowledge-spreading instance at least. Perhaps that’s a good topic for a future documentary?

TorrentFreak contacted Prof. Dawkins two weeks ago to find out more about his defiant position, but thus far we haven’t had a response.

Source: Prof. Richard Dawkins Advocates the Use of BitTorrent