TorrentFreak

The administrator of a growing private BitTorrent tracker is reporting that he has been raided by the authorities. The admin of XtremeSpeeds says that he was questioned on suspicion of being involved with leading P2P release group IMAGiNE. While the investigation is underway, XtremeSpeeds will remain offline.

Delivering his keynote address at this week’s annual CA Expo in Sydney, former Google CIO Douglas C Merrill added to the growing belief that punishing and demonizing file-sharers is a bad idea. Merrill, who after his Google stint joined EMI records, revealed that his profiling research at the label found that LimeWire pirates were iTunes’ biggest customers.

A London-based music label and a German music magazine are having an escalating high-profile row over two leaked albums. Ninja Tunes have publicly accused Backspin magazine of leaking promos sent to them earlier this month, accusations the magazine aggressively denies. So who leaked what and when? TorrentFreak takes a look.

Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes, the team behind indie platform game Super Meat Boy, are taking a particularly pragmatic approach to game piracy. 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 [...]

A popular indie zombie-style RPG game has been taken offline due to an unofficial feature made available in a cracked copy. The developers of the game say that they usually turn a blind eye to piracy since it could have benefits for their project, but when pirates keep using their servers to get updates instead of using BitTorrent, they had to make a stand.

This morning German police confiscated the servers of the Pirate Party, currently the sixth largest political party in Germany. Details of the raid are still scarce, but initial information indicates that the raid was targeted at a service running on the Party’s servers. The timing is unfortunate with the Pirate Party participating in the upcoming election in Bremen this Sunday.

Most major music and movie industry outfits go out guns blazing against those who dare to copy their content. They often label these people, who also make up a great portion of their legitimate customers, as thieves and criminals. App developer and owner of the website Word of the Day decided to take another route, and crushed a potential pirate with politeness instead.