After more than 6 years online, the site’s operators say they were forced to shut down due to the threat of legal action.

“Unfortunately we have to terminate our tracker services due to a ‘copyright infringements’ lawsuit,” the site said in an announcement.

“There isn’t much we can do but comply to their terms.”

No specifics of the threat were offered but assurances were given that there will be no ‘comeback’ from the FilePorn admin or moderation team.

The news comes hot on the heels of the closure of Cheggit earlier this month.

Source: FilePorn Adult Torrent Site Joins Cheggit, Shuts Down

This change is expected to go into effect before the end of the month. From then on, Pirate Bay users can only download files through magnet links.

The Pirate Bay team told TorrentFreak that one of the advantages of the transition to a “magnet site” is that it requires relatively little bandwidth to host a proxy site. This is needed, because The Pirate Bay is currently blocked in several countries, and more are bound to follow in the months to come.

Without torrents, the Pirate Bay also becomes extremely portable which makes it possible for people to download a personal backup. As we said before, such a copy would easily fit on a thumb drive. Pirate Bay user “allisfine” was intrigued by this idea and decided to find out how small a copy of the torrents site would be.

“I did a complete snapshot of ALL the Pirate Bay torrents, in case somebody wants to close it or something similarly crazy,” he told TorrentFreak.

Using this script, “allisfine” managed to copy the title, id, file size, seeds, leechers and magnet links of 1,643,194 torrents. Comments were not copied to keep the files as small as possible, and the end result is a full copy of all magnet links (magnet) on The Pirate Bay in a 90 megabytes file, 164 megabytes unzipped.

There is some confusion as to whether the 1,643,194 torrents are indeed a full copy of the site, as The Pirate Bay itself lists 4,199,832 torrents in the footer link on its site. However, the latter stats apply to the number of torrents that are available on several public trackers, The Pirate Bay itself only hosts a fraction of those.

With the release of the copy everyone can now download a personal backup of The Pirate Bay in a few minutes. Although searching the copy isn’t as convenient as using The Pirate Bay itself, there is little doubt that someone else will soon come up with another script that solves this problem.

Recent history has shown that when a site is threatened with shutdown, or censored, the Internet is very quick to come up with a workaround. And with thousands of backups of The Pirate Bay floating around, it will be very hard at this point to get rid of the famous torrent site.

What’s perhaps even more striking is that the greatest arch rival of a billion dollar entertainment industry is nothing more than 164 megabytes of text. Something to think about.

Update: Here’s a copy of 17 million torrents from Bitsnoop.com, pretty much the same format but nicely categorized. It’s only 535 MB.

Source: Download a Copy of The Pirate Bay, It’s Only 90 MB

In recent weeks, however, worry about the future has increased drastically among the owners of some of the largest torrent sites. Yesterday, BTjunkie closed its doors for good, and TorrentFreak has learned that at least two other sites in the top 10 have toyed with the same idea.

“There have been talks of shutting our site down, even before BTjunkie did it,” one admin told TorrentFreak on condition of anonymity.

The aggressive actions against MegaUpload – site founder Kim Dotcom was raided by an anti-terrorist squad last month – are frequently mentioned as cause for concern. So much so that several people involved with one of the largest torrent sites on the Internet have already dropped out.

“A couple guys on the staff decided not to be involved anymore with the site after the MegaUpload incident,” the admin told us.

The fact that a German citizen can be arrested in New Zealand upon request from the US authorities signaled that regardless of local laws, people connected to file-sharing sites have become a global target.

“It’s turning into a witch hunt. It is worrying,” said the admin.

The thoughts of this admin are shared by one of the owners of another major torrent site, who told TorrentFreak in private that shutting down has crossed his mind on several occasions.

Things have become more and more complicated in recent weeks. Even those who are as cooperative as possible with copyright holders, by swiftly responding to DMCA takedown requests for example, can’t be entirely sure that they won’t become the next target.

On the other side, however, there are also those who continue undeterred, such as isoHunt.com owner Gary Fung, who is battling in court with the music and movie industries.

“After 6 years of 2 civil lawsuits with MPAA and CRIA, we are still here. None of these events is really new to us. From Lokitorrent to Suprnova, we’ve seen sites we index come and go. And as long as the Free Internet exists, sharing will endure. As will isoHunt,” he says.

Ironically enough, isoHunt’s ongoing legal battle might be what keeps Fung relatively safe. If the authorities planned to launch a criminal investigation against a torrent site it would be strange to pick one that is already involved in a civil lawsuit with a copyright holder.

Besides not being worried about the future, isoHunt’s owner is going on the offensive and is urging the entertainment industries to embrace technology, instead if fighting it.

“Perhaps more than ever, I wish the content industries will wake up to the fact you can’t fight technological progress, that battles maybe won, the war is already lost. Unless Content really starts working with technology to accelerate spread of culture, as the Internet has naturalized it. And make more money than ever in the process,” Fung says.

“Because so-called piracy enabled by the Internet and media consumption is not a zero-sum game, a download does not equal a lost sale, and what pirates really want is not necessarily free as in beer, but free as in speech and convenience.”

isoHunt’s determination to continue operating is shared by Extratorrent‘s admin Sam, whose site became the 5th largest torrent site after BTjunkie folded.

“What happened with MegaUpload is not at all good for the torrent world, but I would say it is impossible to stop the unstoppable. After all, if one site is shut down, a hundred new sites will open,” Sam told TorrentFreak, adding, “We have no plans to shut down,we will continue running as usual.”

Another site that’s not going anywhere is The Pirate Bay, the largest torrent site of all. Although its founders are now very close to serving jail time, the site itself will remain online. In the coming weeks The Pirate Bay will replace .torrent files with magnet links, which makes the site more portable and resilient.

The above shows that the end of BitTorrent is not near, but it’s hard to ignore the changing climate. People who previously saw no problems with running a torrent site are now reconsidering their position. The exact fallout, and whether there will be any newcomers to fill the gaping hole BTjunkie left, will become apparent in the coming months.

Source: Is BitTorrent Done? Major Torrent Sites Consider Shutting Down

The site was never involved in any legal action, and to keep it this way the site’s operators decided to shut the site down for good today. The following message was posted on the BTjunkie homepage a few minutes ago:

“This is the end of the line my friends. The decision does not come easy, but we’ve decided to voluntarily shut down. We’ve been fighting for years for your right to communicate, but it’s time to move on. It’s been an experience of a lifetime, we wish you all the best!”

Talking to TorrentFreak, BTjunkie’s founder said that the legal actions against other file-sharing sites such as MegaUpload and The Pirate Bay played an important role in making the difficult decision. Witnessing all the trouble colleagues got into was cause for a lot of worry and stress, and those will now belong to the past.

That said, BTjunkie’s owner still thinks there might be a future for other BitTorrent sites.

“I really do hope so, the war is far from over for sure,” he told TorrentFreak.

While BTjunkie was never targeted directly by copyright holders, the site was reported to the US Trade Representative (USTR) November last year. Both the RIAA and MPAA listed the torrent index as a ‘rogue’ site that facilitated mass copyright infringement.

BTjunkie is also one of the search terms censored by Google because it’s piracy related, alongside The Pirate Bay, RapidShare, uTorrent and others.

As a result of the decision to shut down BTjunkie, one of the top 5 torrent sites with dozens of millions of users a month is no more. Judging from previous shutdowns like that of TorrentSpy and Mininova, users will quickly find a new home at one of the many alternatives.

Nonetheless, it’s the end of an era.

Source: BitTorrent Giant BTjunkie Shuts Down For Good

Today the largest torrent site on the Internet rolled out a new promotion platform for filmmakers, musicians, writers and all other artists alike. To help them reach an audience of tens of millions of people, The Pirate Bay is offering the artists a prime advertising spot on the site’s homepage, replacing the iconic logo.

True to The Pirate Bay spirit, the Promo Bay campaigns are free of charge.

“As you might have seen we sometimes replace our front page logo with others. Sometimes we link to important political issues like internet censorship and sometimes it’s to some cool indie musicians we like. We would now like to improve this feature,” The Pirate Bay announces.

Artists who want to participate have to offer something free in return, so a link to the iTunes store wont work, but apart from that pretty much anything goes. The promos can be targeted to a maximum of 3 countries, but if an artist manages to impress the Pirate Bay team, they may choose to promote it worldwide.

The Pirate Bay is no stranger to helping out artists. The site has been one of the key partners of the indie movie distribution platform VODO, and they’ve also run several promotional campaigns for content creators on their own.

On the other hand, many artists are already releasing their work voluntarily on The Pirate Bay, and not just basement bands either. To promote their new single, Radiohead turned to The Pirate Bay in 2009, and Nine Inch Nails have made pretty much all their music available on the torrent site.

Best selling author Paulo Coelho is another dedicated fan of The Pirate Bay, sharing his books on there every time his publisher looks away. “I am openly supporting their site,” Coelho told TorrentFreak when the site’s founders were defending themselves in a Swedish court.

There is little doubt that the new promotion platform will be welcomed by artist all across the globe. Perhaps there will even be a few established names that sign up who want to take advantage of this free advertising opportunity. To those who are about to try we have one piece of advice; please make sure your website can handle the load – with 1.8 billion page views a month a worldwide promotion can be quite a hit.

Source: The Pirate Bay Launches Promo Platform For Artists

The Pirate Bay argued that BitTorrent trackers have been made redundant by technologies such as DHT and PEX. In addition, The Pirate Bay team said that they might move away from torrents entirely and switch to offering magnet links instead.

“We’re talking to the other torrent admins on doing magnet links and DHT and PEX for all sites. Moving away from torrents and trackers totally – like pick a date and all agree ‘from this date, we’ll not support torrents anymore’,” a Pirate Bay insider told TorrentFreak at the time.

Now, two years later, that date is coming soon.

Today, The Pirate Bay made the first step towards this new future by making magnets the default download links instead of torrents. TorrentFreak was further informed that in “a month or so” the largest torrent site on the Internet will stop serving torrent files indefinitely.

The announcement is bound to lead to confusion and uncertainty among many torrent users, but in reality very little will change for the average Pirate Bay visitor. Users will still be able to download files, but these will now be started through a magnet link instead of a .torrent file.

The Pirate Bay team told TorrentFreak that one of the advantages of the transition to a “magnet site” is that it requires relatively little bandwidth to host a proxy. This is topical, since this week courts in both Finland and the Netherlands ordered local Internet providers to block the torrent site.

Perhaps even better, without the torrent files everyone can soon host a full copy of The Pirate Bay on a USB thumb drive, which may come in handy in the future.

Unlike the site’s users, existing torrent sites that scrape .torrent files from The Pirate Bay will have to make some drastic changes. If they want to continue serving .torrent files they will have to fetch them from DHT. Also, hotlinks to .torrent files will stop working and will soon redirect to The Pirate Bay’s detail page for the files in question.

One of the potential downsides of using magnets is that it could take a bit longer for downloads to start, especially if there are relatively few people sharing a file. This is because the .torrent file has to be fetched from other users instead of being downloaded directly from the site. More background on these and other technicalities can be found here.

The good news is that all mainstream BitTorrent clients support magnet links. This wasn’t the case back in 2009, but when The Pirate Bay hinted that in the future they could become a magnet-only site, all developers quickly made their clients fully compatible.

There’s no doubt that a torrent-less Pirate Bay will certainly mark the end of an era. At the moment it’s hard to predict what the impact of The Pirate Bay’s decision will be on the BitTorrent community. But torrents, however, will never disappear completely.

Source: The Pirate Bay Will Stop Serving Torrents

The most notable absentee this year is TorrentReactor, one of the oldest torrent sites on the Internet. The Russian-based site hasbeen featured in the top 10 since 2006, but missed the cut in 2012. Last year’s best newcomer LimeTorrents took an even bigger hit in traffic and has dropped off the list as well.

Below we have compiled a list of the 10 most-visited torrent sites at the start of the new year. Only public and English language sites are included. The list is based on traffic rank reports from Compete and Alexa. In addition, we include last year’s ranking for each of the 10 sites.

1. The Pirate Bay

The Pirate Bay is probably the best known BitTorrent brand on the Internet. The site was founded in 2003 and is still expanding, despite the various legal troubles and blockades that were designed to hurt the site in recent years. The Pirate Bay currently has close to 2 billion page views a month.

2. Torrentz

Torrentz has been the leading BitTorrent meta-search engine for years. Unlike the other sites featured in the list Torrentz does not host any torrent files, it merely redirects visitors to other places on the web.

3. KickassTorrents

Founded in 2009, KickassTorrents is one of the youngest sites in the list, and this year it moved up to the top 3. Responding to the increasing worries about domain seizures, the site moved from its kickasstorrents.com domain to kat.ph a few months ago. The site continues to innovate and release new features every other week.

4. IsoHunt

In 2010 isoHunt became the first search engine forced to implement a keyword filter provided by the MPAA. Despite this setback, isoHunt continues to be listed among the top torrent sites. In 2012, isoHunt hopes to get rid of the filter through the Appeals Court.

5. BTjunkie

BTjunkie had to deal with a setback a few months ago when the site was blocked in Italy following a court order. In response to the block, the site’s owners launched an ad-free proxy site for Italians only. Just as last year, BTjunkie settles in fifth place.

6. ExtraTorrent

ExtraTorrent is one of those robust torrent indexes that doesn’t make the news very often. Compared to last year the site has moved up a spot and is now the 6th most popular torrent venue.

7. Demonoid

The semi-private tracker continues to attract a massive audience, also on the new .me domain name. Behind the scenes the site’s owners are working on a new and improved look.

8. EZTV

Unlike the other sites in the top 10, TV-torrent distribution group EZTV is a niche site specializing in TV content only. Despite its fair share of downtime this year, EZTV has managed to get a spot in the top 10 for the first time in its six year existence.

9. Bitsnoop

BitSnoop is another newcomer that gained a large audience this year. This didn’t go unnoticed by the RIAA, who filed a complaint at the U.S. District Court of Columbia and obtained a subpoena to reveal the identity of BitSnoop’s owner a few months ago.

10. 1337x

1337x is also new to the top 10, and focuses more on the community aspect than some competitors. The site’s owners say they started 1337x to “fill an apparent void where it seemed there was a lack of quality conscience ad free torrent sites with public trackers.” Its 10th place this year proves that they’re getting the success formula right.

Disclaimer: Yes, we know that Alexa isn’t perfect and that Compete has plenty of flaws, but combined both do a pretty good job at comparing sites that operate in a similar niche.

Source: Top 10 Most Popular Torrent Sites of 2012

The levels of work and expertise required to run a large torrent site shouldn’t be underestimated of course, but there are also hundreds of hobbyists out there who have the desire to set up a small torrent site of their own. WP-Trader is aimed at the latter, and it has a wide range of features that support the needs of every self-aspiring torrent site admin.

WP-Trader developer Andrew Walker told TorrentFreak that he saw the need for an ultra-simple torrent script through his half-decade long involvement in the forums of the popular Torrent Trader script.

“All of the torrent tracker source codes out there are unique or good in their own ways, but I saw a lack in one click install and setup for torrent sites since only a couple of sources offer that function. On a daily basis I saw people coming into the forums having problems with install and setup of their sites,” Walker told TorrentFreak.

“I do have a strong belief that if you do not know how to install or mod your own torrent site then you should not be running a torrent site but something like WP-Trader can benefit artists who have little to no knowledge about how to set up a site,” Walker adds.

So the idea for WP-Trader was born, and little over a month ago the first version was released via the WordPress plugin repository. Since then, Walker and his co-developer Lee Howarth have added new updates every week, and they’re dedicated to improving it further during the coming months.

“At the moment the plugin is still in beta and does lack a lot of features but new things are being added weekly. The plugin was built around Torrent Trader V2.07 and some things you see in Torrent Trader will stay, we were are trying to use a lot of the built-in functions of WordPress,” Walker adds.

The current release already comes with a wide range of options and a fully functioning tracker. Users can choose to make all uploads public and allow external trackers for example, but it’s also possible to run a completely private tracker with ratio requirements and wait times for lower user classes.

In addition, WP-Trader comes with several widgets, to show off the latest uploads and most active torrents for example. The full list of features is too long to list here, but you can get a glimpse of the options below.

While WP-Trader already has all the features a basic torrent site needs, there is still a lot of work to be done. Aside from ironing out the bugs and implementing new features such as support for anonymous uploads, the developers will also work on a more seamless integration with WordPress.

“We plan on fully integrating it as closely as possible with WordPress because WordPress has plenty of features or plugins to handle certain things which we feel that should not be added to the plugin,” Walker says.

The WP-Trader team hopes that a lot of people will take the plugin for a spin, and provide feedback where needed. WP-Trader is available for download in the official WordPress repository, which also hosts a FAQ section and some pointers on how to get a torrent site up and running in no time.

Source: Turn Any WordPress Site Into A BitTorrent Tracker

A coalition of the willing, headed up by the BPI and including the major Hollywood studios, approached BT, the UK’s leading ISP, with a demand – block The Pirate Bay voluntarily or consent to a court order.

The self-styled “world’s most resilient torrent site” is no stranger to censorship. It is already blocked by ISPs in Ireland, Italy, Turkey, Denmark and Belgium but the quest to put it completely out of business continues.

“The Pirate Bay is no more than a huge scam on the global creative sector. It defrauds musicians and other creators of their wages, and it destroys UK jobs,” said Geoff Taylor, BPI Chief Executive.

“Unlike legal music download sites, it exposes consumers to the risk of viruses, theft of personal information and inappropriate content. We would not tolerate Counterfeits ‘R’ Us on the High Street – if we want economic growth, we cannot accept illegal rip-off sites on the internet either. We hope that BT will do the right thing and block The Pirate Bay.”

But at this stage PaidContent is reporting that BT will not simply roll over and comply with the demand for The Pirate Bay to be blocked voluntarily.

“BT cannot block web sites willy nilly,” said the BT source.

Voluntary action aside, BT has reportedly been given the chance to consent to a court order. If the ISP refuses it seems likely that the parties will end up in court for a mirrored re-run of the arguments in the Newzbin2 case. If there are no surprises the High Court could order a blockade of The Pirate Bay in the first half of 2012.

After a lengthy legal process the censoring of Newzbin2 finally kicked in earlier this week, but users of the site are reportedly bypassing the block by various means including the use of Newzbin2′s very own anti-blocking software.

A feature to unblock The Pirate Bay in the event that it too became blocked was already added to the client several weeks ago.

Speaking with TorrentFreak, a Pirate Bay insider laughed off the efforts to slow down the site and said that every time there are attempts at censorship the resulting publicity only gives them a boost.

“Thanks yet again for the free advertising,” they conclude.

Source: BPI and MPA Demand UK Pirate Bay Blockade

With the legendary BitTorrent indexer Suprnova riding high but with no significant file-sharing network in Sweden at the time, Piratbyrån decided to fill that gap. For TPB founders TiAMO, Anakata and Brokep, the relatively new BitTorrent protocol would be the weapon of choice.

“We and Piratbyrån wanted more Swedish and Scandinavian content. So we started a big library, and that is The Pirate Bay,” recalls Brokep, aka Peter Sunde.

By the end of 2004, a year after the site launched, the tracker was already tracking a million peers and over 60,000 torrent files. What followed in the years to come was both dramatic growth and turmoil on a grand scale, as The Pirate Bay became a media distribution monster, loved by its users but despised by the mainstream entertainment industries.

Over the years The Pirate Bay was hosted in several countries and its founders subjected to both civil and criminal lawsuits and prosecutions. Despite seemingly overwhelming odds, the site refused to give in.

“We shall defend our Internets, whatever the cost may be,” is the site’s latest mantra. On past performances of sheer defiance, few will doubt them.

So here we are, in 2011, exactly 8 years on from the site’s creation. Well, perhaps not exactly 8 years. The Pirate Bay commemorated its 5th birthday in November 2008 amid a haze of uncertainty over when the precise celebrations should take place. But for the site’s millions of followers, a month or two here or there will be of little concern.

“So it has become our 8th birthday! Time flies huh?” the site’s new owners, whoever they are and wherever they may be, declared today.

“We’ve said it before and we”ll say it again. This would not have happened without you! Outside of the bay a lot of stuff has happened during these 8 years. A lot of good and some bad.

“We admins are positive dudes and dudettes who like to think that the world is moving forward and not backwards. That’s partly what the site is about. Spreading culture around the globe so that maybe people will understand each other a bit more,” they add.

Traditionally that ‘spreading of culture’ – the exchange of digital files online – would have taken place among fairly niche, need-to-know file-sharing circles. One of The Pirate Bay’s biggest legacies will be that it cast aside those elitist chains, successfully penetrated the mainstream media and psyche, and achieved spreading of culture on a biblical scale.

And it’s not over yet.

“Heading in to our 9th year we are preparing some huge news. We can’t really tell yet but it will be huuuuuge!” the site’s operators promise.

The Pirate Bay has given the file-sharing world much, and quite possibly its Concorde-moment. By definition there’s both happiness and sadness there – the bittersweet taste of an era that has provided so much but may never be repeated. But better to have lived and loved, than to have lived and never loved at all.

Happy Birthday Pirate Bay, we’ll stick around for next year’s celebrations. We know you will.

Source: Happy Birthday Pirate Bay, You’ve Just Turned 8 Years Old Today

There are countless complaints about the catch 22 situation of needing money to continue, but no job yet to provide it. One of the unavoidable major expenses faced by most students is compulsory spending on textbooks.

“According to a study (pdf) conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, textbook prices have increased FOUR TIMES the rate of inflation of other finished goods for the period of 1990-2009,” the admin of LibraryPirate.me [LP] told TorrentFreak this morning.

LibraryPirate was founded a little over a year ago with a site mission of providing college students with an alternative to continuously rising textbook prices.

“Our mission is simple and specific,” LP’s admin explains. “To revolutionize the digital e-textbook industry and change it permanently.”

LibraryPirate’s founder believes that real-world business rules don’t apply when it comes to textbook pricing and he bemoans the often unnecessary annual updates that render last year’s textbook obsolete, just as this year’s version – with its 6% annual price uplift – becomes the dictated ‘choice’.

“The Government Accountability Office reports that the average student spends about $1000 on textbooks each year, or 26 percent of their yearly tuition [source, pdf]. Publishers defend their actions claiming increased expenses in updating this supplementary material are only being passed along to the student,” he explains.

“While there is a need to keep information current, most of what is taught in big introductory courses simply isn’t going to change that much from year to year, or even from decade to decade. For example, Calculus was invented 300 years ago however new editions of textbooks are released like clockwork.”

In common with the music and movie industries, a relatively small group of textbook publishers have a monopoly on the market. Even congressional intervention is said to have failed in dislodging their grip.

“New Textbook legislation was introduced by the Higher Education Opportunity Act (H.R. 4137), which passed 380-49 in the House and 83-8 in the Senate on July 31. The bill was signed by President Obama on August 14 and went into effect July 1, 2010,” LP’s admin explains.

“The bill aims at making textbook publishers more up front with students about textbook pricing and also forces them to sell some additional course materials separately. While this is a start, it is clear now that these measures have done nothing to prevent the continued rise in inflation of textbooks and new digital course material.”

Furthermore, as is becoming increasingly common in the video games market, publishers are taking steps to discourage student use of the pre-owned books market. LP’s admin says they are achieving this by offering discounts up to 20% on their eBook products to encourage uptake, but then disqualifying the purchaser from selling the product by implementing DRM.

But LP’s admin, who says that he experienced the street-level effects of the monopoly during his time as a student, intends to undermine it through what he describes as the open access movement.

“Open source textbooks alone will, without a doubt, turn the textbook industry on its head by taking away the power from the major publishing companies,” he explains.

“Those with access to e-textbook resources — students, librarians, scientists and professors have the responsibility to share this knowledge openly with the rest of the world. Unfortunately, the majority of universities do not utilize open source textbooks today. Professors continue to require students to buy hundreds of dollars in textbooks and ‘kiss the ring’ of textbook publishers.”

This open source dream is not yet reality, which automatically leaves students in the hands of the textbook monopoly. However, LP’s admin says he intends to meet demand by making ALL textbooks open for everyone to use and distribute.

“To strike back against the textbook monopolists we must hit them where it will hurt the most – not in the testicles, but in the pocketbook,” he says. “Tell all your friends not to buy books from the campus bookstore when they can get them for free online. ”

While there are currently around one thousand textbooks indexed on LibraryPirate.me, the site’s founder hopes that through collaborative effort that collection will grow.

“Grab every textbook you can get your hands on and scan it so that everyone in the world can have a chance at education,” he says. “Professors, students, and avid readers alike, it is our responsibility to do everything we can to make education available to all who seek it, and this policy flies directly in the face of the textbook publishers that are using you to line their pockets.”

While many users of torrent and other file-sharing sites will simply be looking for casual digital entertainment to fill their free time, the careers of those searching for textbooks could hang in the balance depending on whether they find their target material or not.

But of course, just as poor students want to save money on their way to a career, textbook publishers need to make money in order to survive too. Is there a moral difference between downloading a song or movie and downloading a career-enabling educational textbook, even if it is provided at unfair prices through an anti-competitive monopoly?

“While many may view the open source movement as blatant ‘piracy’, I believe they are overlooking the obvious moral imperative at play here,” TorrentFreak was told. “Personally, this notion became very clear to me after attending college and has remained the driving motivation behind the LibraryPirate project.”

“It’s no secret that college students today are simply victims of a broken educational system. Until real steps are taken to ensure textbook material is made more affordable and accessible to students, I only see one path to moral high ground.

“So, in the historical tradition of civil disobedience, the time has come for students to declare their opposition to this private theft of education,” LP’s admin concludes.

Source: Free Textbooks For Students Will Break Greedy Monopoly

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

The latest in a growing line of lawsuits against service providers worldwide, the legal action demands that Elisa, one of Finland’s largest ISPs, should block all subscriber access to The Pirate Bay.

Elisa, however, aren’t going to give in so easily.

Despite CIAPC (better known locally as TTVK) and IFPI’s claims that blocking The Pirate Bay is the only practical solution to slow down piracy, Elisa have lodged a reply at the District Court which rejects the demands of the music groups.

While Elisa indicate that they have no fundamental objection to assisting with the fight against unlawful file-sharing, Elisa Senior Vice President Panu Lehti says the lawsuit’s demands are unacceptable.

“The fact that the requirement [to block TPB] applies to only one Internet service provider is unreasonable,” says Lehti.

Singling out one ISP for legal action is the usual modus operandi for the entertainment industries, especially in website blocking cases. CIAPC and IFPI selected Elisa because they have proportionally more subscribers using The Pirate Bay than any other ISP.

Lehti says the basic censorship strategy is flawed and successfully blocking The Pirate Bay would prove technically “very difficult or even impossible.”

The industry groups counter by saying they have been left with no other choices after the criminal conviction of the Pirate Bay admins following their November 2010 appeal failed to close down the site. Instead, the number of Finns using the site only increased.

According to the industry groups The Pirate Bay is the preferred online location for Finns to access illicit music. This makes it one of the most popular sites in the country, and one which has broken into the top 30 most-visited sites.

“The development of a legitimate online market in Finland will not be successful if illegal services such as the Pirate Bay can continue to operate,” says producer representative Lauri Rechardt.

Others believe the reverse is true, i.e build the legal services and “they shall come.”

This week, Johan Lagerlöf the CEO and Co-Founder of X5 Music Group in Sweden, has been speaking about the success enjoyed by Spotify, the ‘pirate-killing’ service that has just launched in the US.

“Spotify has had the biggest impact on the Scandinavian music market since the launch of the CD,” Lagerlöf told Hypebot in a Q&A.

“Spotify is currently the biggest single revenue source for the music industry and is estimated to be over 3 times bigger than iTunes in Scandinavia. Despite that, digital downloads grew 17% in Sweden last year compared to 3% in the US.”

“Piracy for music has almost stopped.”

Source: ISP Refuses To Block The Pirate Bay

To most current users the following may not be a surprise, but for those aware of the site’s history know that without a few essential keystrokes five years ago, The Pirate Bay may have not been here today.

May 31, 2006, less than three years after The Pirate Bay was founded, 65 Swedish police officers entered a datacenter in Stockholm. The officers were tasked with shutting down the largest threat to the entertainment industry at the time – The Pirate Bay’s servers.

While the policemen were carrying out their jobs, Pirate Bay founders Gottfrid and Fredrik learned that something was seriously wrong. In the months before the raid they were already being watched by private investigators day and night, but this time something was about to happen to their trackers.

Fredrik recalls the day vividly: “I got a phone call like 10am in the morning, it was Anakata [Gottfrid].” He told Fredrik that there were police officers at their office, and asked him to get down to the co-location facility and get rid of the ‘incriminating evidence’, although none of it, whatever it was, was related to The Pirate Bay.

As Fredrik was leaving, he suddenly realized that the problems might be linked to their tracker, so he initiated a full backup of the site. At the co-location facility there were dozens of policemen, some in civilian clothing. Fredrik asked them: “Who are you? What are you doing here?” To which they responded: “Who are YOU? What are you doing here?” After questions back and forth, Fredrik eventually told them his name, and a police officer said, “Oh, we’ve been looking for you.”

Although these events may seem almost comedic, Fredrik’s decision to start a backup of the site is probably the most pivotal moment in the site’s history. Because of this backup Fredrik and the rest of the Pirate Bay team were able to resurrect the site within three days. If there hadn’t been a recent backup, things may have turned out quite differently.

Technicalities aside, the determination to get the site back online as soon as possible set the defiant tone for the years that followed. Backups were spread over different countries to guarantee that the site would survive any attack, and although the site has gone down for 24 hours or more since the raid, this was usually caused by technical problems combined with laziness or wild parties. If they were shut down because of legal troubles, it usually took just a few hours to set up shop elsewhere.

Now back to 2006, when the Swedish police confiscated 180 servers, most of which had nothing to do with The Pirate Bay. After all the equipment was taken, Peter, Fredrik and Gottfrid were escorted to the police station. During the subsequent questioning, the Pirate Bay trio gave up very little information. Gottfrid quickly confessed to his crime – of killing the Swedish prime minister when he was 2 years old – but that was all they got.

After the raid it became clear that the US had threatened to put Sweden on the WTO’s black list if they refused to deal with the Pirate Bay problem. Even the MPAA was involved, with John Malcolm, Executive Vice President of the MPAA, writing a letter to Sweden’s State Secretary in which he stated: “It is certainly not in Sweden’s best interests to earn a reputation among other nations and trading partners as a place where utter lawlessness with respect to intellectual property rights is tolerated.”

The raid eventually resulted in a lengthy investigation out of which the police generated 4000 pages of evidence against the people involved. The evidence was used by the prosecution during the Pirate Bay trial of 2009 and the appeal of 2010 where four people who were previously involved with the site were sentenced to jail time and significant fines.

The case is currently waiting to be appealed once again, this time at the Supreme Court. The site, meanwhile, is still up and running and it is larger than ever before. Right before the raid the site welcomed its one millionth registered user, today they have well over 5 million. It wouldn’t be far fetched to say that all the legal struggles have actually increased the site’s user base, instead of shutting it down altogether.

In 2008 The Pirate Bay team declared May 31st to be celebrated as a very special occasion for pirates.

“Let today be the pirates independence day!” they announced at the time. “Today we celebrate the victories we’ve had and the victories that will come. Today we celebrate that we’re united in our efforts. Keep on seeding!”

And in 2011 they continue to make a case for file-sharing and for an open Internet. A few weeks ago they commented on the recent Internet censorship proposals in Europe and elsewhere, urging the public to defend their rights. It’s no longer a battle to keep The Pirate Bay online, they claim, but one in defense of the Internet.

Nevertheless, with a failed raid and several legal decisions against it, the site has grown to become the number one censorship target for a rapidly developing list of countries around the world. Draconian attempts to silence the site are looming on an ever-nearing horizon.

“The battle of Internets is about to begin,” The Pirate Bay team said.

Source: The Pirate Bay: Five Years After The Raid

If it’s up to a group of Finnish Music Industry representatives, Finland will be the next country to join this growing list. Yesterday, the Copyright Information and Anti-Piracy Centre (CIAPC) and the local IFPI branch announced that they have filed a lawsuit at the District Court in Helsinki.

The legal action targets Elisa, one of the largest ISPs in Finland, and demands that the Internet provider stops allowing its subscribers to access The Pirate Bay. The BitTorrent site is hugely popular in Finland where it’s listed as the 31st most-visited website according to traffic reports.

According to the music industry there’s no other viable option to stop the mass-scale copyright infringement other than to censor The Pirate Bay.

“We’ve waited and hoped that the Pirate Bay’s admins would cease the service in November 2010, after the criminal conviction at the Swedish Appeal Court,” said music producer representative Lauri Rechardt in a comment. “That did not happen, on the contrary, the number of Finnish users increased instead.”

“The development of a legitimate online market in Finland will not be successful if illegal services such as the Pirate Bay can continue to operate,” Rechardt added.

The President of the Finnish Musicians’ Union Ahti Vänttinen further stressed the need for effective legislative tools to crack down on ‘rogue’ websites.

“It is somewhat tragicomic that, although the illegal activities of Pirate Bay’s founders have been sentenced to imprisonment, the site is still operational in Finland,” Vänttinen said. “Unless this is addressed in Finnish legislation, credibility is at stake. Or is the Internet outside the law?”

Thus far several lawsuits throughout Europe have resulted in a Pirate Bay blockade, but not all.

A Dutch court ruled last year that two of the largest ISPs in the Netherlands don’t have block customer access to The Pirate Bay. According to the court, there was no evidence that the majority of the ISPs’ users are infringing copyright through The Pirate Bay, so a block would not be justified.

But the tide is changing to the benefit of the entertainments industries, and increasingly lawmakers are warming up to broader censorship tools. In Europe there are talks to adopt a China-like firewall to block websites deemed ‘inappropriate,’ and in the US blocking ‘illicit’ websites will be simplified if the PROTECT IP Act is passed.

Although The Pirate Bay team has weathered worse storms, they are worried about said proposals and told its users earlier this month that “The Battle of Internets is About to Begin.”

Source: Music Industry Sues ISP to Censor The Pirate Bay

Aside from the main criminal trial, they also obtained a wide variety of interim injunctions through the courts.

In 2009, a Stockholm district court injunction ordered founders Fredrik Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm Warg to cease assisting in The Pirate Bay’s operations or face fines of 500,000 kronor ($78,000). Former Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde was later presented with a similar injunction.

Neij and Svartholm Warg were prohibited from assisting in the operation of The Pirate Bay website, and any website that hosts torrents available through The Pirate Bay, and The Pirate Bay tracker.

However, an interesting situation arose in the fall of 2009 when The Pirate Bay decided to remove their in-house tracker. As the setup of the site had changed the Appeal Court ruled that the interim injunction against the site’s founders was no longer valid. The Pirate Bay no longer consisted of all three elements, the Court ruled.

The movie studios and record labels were not pleased with this outcome and filed for a new interim injunction against Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde in June 2010 and against the other founders, Neij and Swartholm Warg, in October last year.

The injunction against Sunde was made final in October last year after a decision by the Court of Appeal, and the injunction against Neij was made final in February this year. Swartholm Warg was unfindable. The new injunctions in force no longer prohibit the site’s founders from operating all three elements of the site, but any.

Last week the companies dropped the enforcement action under the old injunction to replace it with one that applies to the broader injunction. If this order is violated, Neij faces a fine of 500,000 kronor.

Whether or not the update was needed has to be questioned. The founders of The Pirate Bay have stated many times that they handed over the operation of the site and all its aspects to the Seychelles-based company Reservella.

During the past several years the entertainment companies initiated several civil cases in addition to the criminal trial, and by doing so managed to obtain several injunctions. Two of these prevented the site’s former ISPs Portlane and Black Internet to serve the site as a customer.

In the months that followed anti-piracy outfit IFPI threatened several ISPs around the world against daring to host The Pirate Bay, quoting the injunctions above. Needless to say, the paperwork was one of the most powerful tools they have to chase down The Pirate Bay and make the lives of those who operate it as difficult as possible. Eventually this forced The Pirate Bay to seek shelter with the local Pirate Party.

With the new and more broad injunction and the injunction against Portlane, the movie studios and record labels now have even more ammunition to go after companies who dare to provide services to The Pirate Bay. This means that the new mountain complex where the servers are currently located is probably on the top of their hit list.

Source: Hollywood Beefs Up Injunction Against Pirate Bay Founders

In the months that followed it became apparent that more power was needed to keep the site running. In 2004 the tracker was separated from the rest, running on the Pentium laptop pictured above, and the database was also moved to a separate machine.

The above was the start of a continuous process of necessary hardware upgrades in order to keep serving the ever growing number of users.

The Pirate Bay team is currently working on the largest hardware upgrade in the site’s history. Ten 2x 5620 Xeon machines have been ordered, eight with 12GB RAM and two with 24GB RAM. In total, The Pirate Bay will be using 17 machines.

The servers just arrived in a mountain cave near Malmö in southern Sweden where the new datacenter is located. The exact location will not be revealed, a lesson The Pirate Bay team learned from the raid back in 2006.

The existing servers have been relocated from Stockholm where they were hosted for the past years. Previously, The Pirate Bay was hosted in Goteborg as well, which means that the site now completes its tour of Sweden’s three largest cities.

In the coming days the Pirate Bay team will put new hardware online, presumably without any significant downtime. In fact, the hardware upgrade will ensure more redundancy for the site, meaning that future downtime will be reduced to a minimum.

As can be seen below, since 2003 the 1.3GHz 32-bit Celeron processor has been upped to 279GHz worth of 64-bit Xeons, and the 256MB RAM turned into an impressive 204GB RAM. And this is after The Pirate Bay stopped operating a tracker.

Makes you wonder where it will be 5 years from now.

Search

search1: 2x E5620 CPU, 19200 MHZ, 12GB RAM, 2x500GB Raid1, Debian 6
search2: 2x E5620 CPU, 19200 MHZ, 12GB RAM, 2x500GB Raid1, Debian 6
search3: 2x E5620 CPU, 19200 MHZ, 12GB RAM, 2x500GB Raid1, Debian 6

Web

www1: 2x E5620 CPU, 19200 MHZ, 12GB RAM, 2x500GB Raid1, Debian 6
www2: 2x E5620 CPU, 19200 MHZ, 12GB RAM, 2x500GB Raid1, Debian 6
www3: 2x E5620 CPU, 19200 MHZ, 12GB RAM, 2x160GB Raid1, Debian 6
www4: 2x E5620 CPU, 19200 MHZ, 12GB RAM, 2x500GB Raid1, Debian 6
www5: 2x E5620 CPU, 19200 MHZ, 12GB RAM, 2x500GB Raid1, Debian 6

Torrents

varnish-torrents1:P4-3.3GHz CPU, 3300 MHZ, 4GB RAM, 1x 80 SSD X25-M, Debian 6
varnish-torrents2:P4-3.3GHz CPU, 3300 MHZ, 4GB RAM, 1x 80 SSD X25-M, Debian 6

Database

db1: 2x E5620 CPU, 19200 MHZ, 24GB RAM, 2x500GB Raid1, 2×32 GB SSD X25-E Raid0, Debian 6
db2: 2x E5620 CPU, 19200 MHZ, 24GB RAM, 2x500GB Raid1, 2×32 GB SSD X25-E Raid0, Debian 6

Misc.

VM1: 2x E5620 CPU, 19200 MHZ, 12GB RAM, 1x500GB, vmware ESXi 4.1
VM2: 2x E5620 CPU, 19200 MHZ, 12GB RAM, 1x500GB, vmware ESXi 4.1
VM3: 2x E5620 CPU, 19200 MHZ, 12GB RAM, 1x500GB, vmware ESXi 4.1

vmware-storage: 2x E5620 CPU, 19200 MHZ, 12GB RAM, 4x500GB Raid6, Debian 6
vcenter: P4-3.3GHz CPU, 3300 MHZ, 4GB RAM, 2x 80GB Raid1, Win64

Source: The Pirate Bay Ships New Servers to Mountain Complex

The injunction is the result of isoHunt’s protracted court battle with the MPAA that started back in 2006. The Court ordered the owner of isoHunt to start censoring the site’s search engine based on a list of thousands of keywords provided by the MPAA, or cease its operations entirely in the U.S.

With the injunction, isoHunt saw no other option than to implement the filter, which they did. However, at the same time isoHunt owner Gary Fung filed an appeal at the Court of Appeals. Through the appeal, isoHunt hopes to reverse the permanent injunction and obtain a jury trial instead of a summary judgment.

In previous months both isoHunt and the MPAA filed their opinions on the case to the Court, and in February even the search giant Google added its testimony in the case.

Yesterday, the parties appeared before the thee-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to motivate their stance on the case. isoHunt was represented by long-standing legal counsel Ira Rothken, and the MPAA by their attorney Paul Smith.

In its quest for a jury trial, isoHunt’s attorney argued that there is no evidence that his client and his websites induced specific acts of copyright infringement.

“isoHunt is a search engine. It does not host any copyrighted content, it only links to BitTorrent files. Any copyright infringement that could ever occur, would occur off-site, and leave isoHunt behind.”

“In this case a motion for summary judgement should never have been granted. The District Court made errors, both in terms of the inducement as well as the DMCA. It also issued an overly broad injunction,” Rothken said.

After having introduced some of the arguments, Rothken was interrupted by one of the judges who, in a display of modest curiosity, wanted to confirm that isoHunt was in fact a website.

“As I understand [stops and laughs]. I won’t pretend to understand, I didn’t know what a BitTorrent was until this case. The Internet progresses faster, I just got my iPad 9 months ago and it’s already obsolete,” the judge said.

“So with that caveat, my understanding is that at least with regard to your client, he had a site. He has a site right?” he adds, which isoHunt’s attorney then confirmed. The judge then went on to describe the isoHunt system and asked what element is missing to show a causal relationship between isoHunt and potential copyright inducements.

During the rest of his speaking time isoHunt’s attorney explained how there is no direct evidence that isoHunt’s actions actively induced copyright infringements. Furthermore, he explained that Gary Fung and his websites are protected under the DMCA.

After 20 minutes MPAA attorney Paul Smith took the stand. He argued that “the record makes amply clear that the District Court had every reason to grant the summary judgement to the plaintiffs in this case on their claim of intentional inducement of infringement.”

“I think it’s important to understand here that the claim is a Grokster claim; intentional inducement by the creation of this entire set of websites that facilitated infringement of the plaintiffs copyrighted works on a massive scale.”

“The evidence that it was intentionally designed to do that is extremely compelling and indeed is undisputed. We heard a lot about the need for a trial this morning but there wasn’t a single material fact identified that was disputed in this record,” Smith added.

MPAA’s attorney then went on to explain why the plaintiffs believe the District Court was right, and why isoHunt does not deserve protection under the DMCA. During one of the interruptions, a judge made a call-back to Google, mentioning that the search giant was very worried about MPAA’s take on the law, as described by Smith.

When MPAA’s attorney was done the panel gave isoHunt’s lawyer a brief moment to reply and balance things out before the court adjourned.

Despite the earlier signs that not all judges may be that BitTorrent-savvy, the core issues of inducement and liability have become very clear during the hearing. The important question for isoHunt (and Google and other web-services) in the coming months is whose version of the truth is more compelling to the judges. In this, the judges will be assisted by several technical analyses of legal experts.

Commenting to TorrentFreak, isoHunt founder Gary Fung previously said that a trial by “jury of one’s peers” would be fitting in more way than one. Whether the judges will agree with him will become apparent in the near future.

Source: MPAA Has Nothing On Us, isoHunt Tells Court

Last week’s actions are similar to an earlier Italian block of The Pirate Bay that was first ordered in 2008. After an appeal process of nearly two years, The Pirate Bay was eventually blocked both completely and permanently last year.

TorrentFreak spoke to the owner of BTjunkie who told us that he does not intent to appeal the court order. However, that doesn’t mean that Italian users wont be able to access the site anymore. As it turns out, with just one simple step Italians can have full access to BTjunkie again, as well as every other censored website.

Italian visitors whose ISPs have not yet implemented the block now see the following message.

“Attention Italians: BTjunkie will soon be blocked following an Italian judicial complaint. You can continue to access the site through proxyitalia.com/btjunkie.org”

Indeed, all BTjunkie users have to do to gain access to their favorite torrent site is update their bookmarks to use the proxy site. And this is not limited to BTjunkie either. The proxyitalia.com site works for The Pirate Bay as well, or any other site that may be blocked in the future.

BTjunkie’s action shows how futile web censorship is. Aside from updating one’s bookmarks to use the proxy URL, there are plenty of other ways to bypass the block. A particularly popular solution is signing up with a VPN service, which assigns users a foreign IP-address, lifting all local restrictions.

And the above is no secret to Italians.

As of today, hundreds of thousands of Italian BitTorrent users use The Pirate Bay website despite a nationwide censorship order. And even those who stop using The Pirate Bay can still choose from dozens of other large indexes to score their daily BitTorrent fix. Apparently, censorship is not the best solution for decreasing piracy.

Needless to say, the authorities are not too fond of the proxy sites that allows Italians to bypass their court orders. A proxy site that was setup in response to the Pirate Bay blockade was quickly pulled offline by the authorities last year, but ultimately they’re fighting a losing battle.

To add to this, shutting down proxyitalia.com will not be so easy as it’s a general purpose proxy. Unlike the Pirate Bay proxy site it can be used with all URLs, so if the authorities block the proxy site they might as well block the thousands of other proxy sites that exist on the Internet too.

As John Gilmore famously said: “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”

Perhaps, then, the only way to succeed is to shut the Internet down altogether.

Source: BTjunkie Starts Proxy to Bypass Italian Blockade

The downtime caused widespread concern, particularly among those fearful that The World’s Most Resilient BitTorrent Site might have finally succumbed to endless entertainment industry pressures. Adding to the worries, simultaneously the Pirate Party’s websites also disappeared, which resulted in the stalling of online pirate activities in more ways than one.

“All the Pirate Party Internet services are currently down,” said Party leader Anna Troberg on the situation. “Due to a sudden situation that has arisen, I have, in consultation with the party’s IT manager decided to immediately move our servers to a new location.”

The Pirate Party had been hosted with Bahnhof, a privacy conscious ISP in Sweden. It appears that it was Bahnhof themselves who alerted the Party to a problem with their server utilization.

“Bahnhof drew to my attention earlier today that a small part of the party’s IT resources were being used for commercial purposes,” Troberg explained.

“I and the rest of the party leadership are extremely concerned about the incident because it is hitting the Pirate Party and the young pirate activities.”

Although yet to be officially confirmed, the problem appears to relate to allocation of Party network resources. As a strictly non-profit organization, the Pirate Party receives preferential rates for its hosting from Bahnhof. However, it’s understood that the Pirate Party-linked ‘Pirate ISP’ – which was launched last year – had been allocated resources which should have been for the exclusive use of the Party.

“Pirate Party IT resources will be used to deliver the party’s message and to support our internal systems. They should under no circumstances be used for commercial purposes in the manner that occurred,” Troberg said. “Such use is contrary to what the Pirate Party stands for. Neither the Board or the party leadership has sanctioned any ‘loans’ of the Pirate Party IT resources.”

A thorough investigation is said to have been launched with the aim of discovering how the problem occurred and how to prevent a repeat in the future.

Source: Pirate Bay Back Up, Pirate Party Shut Themselves Down Over Server ‘Abuse’

In the three years that followed, What.cd grew beyond all expectations, outgrowing OiNK and establishing itself as the greatest music-sharing torrent site the world has ever known. With Christmas 2010 just around the corner, What.cd reached a somewhat spectacular milestone – the uploading of the site’s one millionth torrent.

While this achievement is the product of the site’s hard-working members, these masses still need to be directed through leadership and a well-designed and run site. At What.cd these essential qualities have been provided from day one by site co-founder and coder extraordinaire, WhatMan. But to the huge disappointment of all who know him, WhatMan’s reign is now over.

“I’ve always been willing to give all of my free time to this site, but as of several months ago, free time has become a luxury of the past. The less time I spend here, the less qualified I am to decide the future of the site and lead it in that direction,” WhatMan explains.

“In these past few months, these duties have been impeccably overtaken by the current management, and I feel entirely comfortable leaving the site in their more than capable hands. It is thus, with great regret, that I have chosen to resign from my long-standing post as sysop of this site.”

WhatMan, who has always conducted himself with grace, went on to give credit to all those staff, past and present, who have helped to make What.cd what it is today. And, like all great leaders, he acknowledged the work of the masses, who contributed hugely to the site’s ecosystem by ripping, uploading and simple downloading.

“I’d love to write more, but this has been hard enough already. If nothing else, I guess, I’d like to be remembered as the badass who coded Ocelot,” WhatMan added.

While the existence of What.cd is a memorable achievement in itself, the creation of the Ocelot tracker software utilized by the site is a milestone which will live on for many years to come. Indeed, Ocelot is one of the most efficient pieces of software of its type available today and the badass who created it will long be remembered, that’s guaranteed.

What.cd remains in safe hands and will continue on seamlessly. Like all good site operators, WhatMan has clearly ensured that everything is running smoothly before announcing his departure.

“It’s been a hell of a ride, What,” he concludes. “I know you’ll do fine without me.”

Source: What.CD Founder Quits World’s Largest Music Torrent Site

Although Google did not dispute isoHunt’s liability, it is clearly concerned that some of the reasoning in the District Court verdict went too far, and wants to see it scrapped in the appeal.

As the case moves along Google continues to play a central role. In the reply brief filed by isoHunt, a study brought to the table shows that the majority of the files that can be found through its search engine are also available via Google.

“Neither Google nor Plaintiffs mention the 95% overlap between torrents available through Defendants’ systems and torrents available through Google and/or Yahoo!,” isoHunt’s legal team writes (pdf) to the Court of Appeals.

With this data isoHunt claims that what they do, Google does too, and perhaps even better. To a certain degree this is a valid point. Aside from indexing and caching hundreds of millions of pages with directs links to torrent files, Google also has a filetype command which allows users to search only for .torrent files.

In its quest for a jury trial, isoHunt suggests that they, but not Google, are hunted down and scapegoated by the movie studios. To put it in even stronger terms, isoHunt is indirectly telling the court that Google may be the largest torrent search engine on the Internet.

“Defendants might argue to the jury that it is unfair to hold Defendants liable if Google, unbothered by Plaintiffs, provides torrents to ten or twenty times the number of users that visit Defendants,” the reply brief reads.

It adds, “Defendants might argue that Defendants are being scapegoated. Defendants might argue that holding Defendants liable while ignoring Google would not curtail infringement.”

The reply further responds to several of the arguments made by the movie studios and eventually asks the Court of Appeals to reverse the permanent injunction and summary judgment. Instead, isoHunt favors a jury trial which it deems to be more appropriate considering the nature of the case.

“Defendants submit that upholding the right to jury trial is the best way to deal with rapidly-changing technology. Judicial rulings influence practical decisions for many years but cannot track changes in Internet technology.”

Commenting to TorrentFreak, isoHunt founder Gary Fung said that a trial by “jury of one’s peers” would be be fitting in more way than one.

Source: Google’s the Largest Torrent Search Engine, isoHunt Tells Court

In short, all search engines search through a database of .torrent files, either uploaded by users of their own site, or pulled from other places on the web. These torrent files are stored online and if a person creates a new torrent file he or she has to upload it somewhere for it to be picked up by torrent search engines.

BTDigg does things differently. Instead of relying on .torrent files this search engine uses BitTorrent’s DHT to discover new files.

DHT enables so-called “trackerless torrents”, a feature supported by all major BitTorrent clients. DHT’s function is to find peers who are downloading the same files, but without communicating with a central BitTorrent tracker. This is useful in the event that a central tracker goes down.

DHT is enabled by default in clients such as uTorrent and Vuze and millions of people are already using it without knowing. Unlike conventional torrent search engines, BTDigg’s servers are now using information from BitTorrent’s DHT network to find and index torrents.

Although we can’t really say that this is better or more efficient than the traditional search engine approach, it’s certainly a fresh perspective.

Another benefit is that people can theoretically share something without using a tracker, and without having to upload it to a torrent site. If DHT is enabled the file will be eventually picked up by BTDigg. In theory, this is another step towards a truly decentralized BitTorrent ecosystem.

This was also one of the main reasons why BTDigg was launched, the site’s founder told us. “We think that the Internet’s moving towards to decentralized and distributed systems and would like to contribute to it by creating BTDigg,” he said.

Contrary to the progressive concept, the design of BTDigg is rather retro. All users get to see is a search box, and the search results are presented in a l33t user interface. The search results show users detailed information on the various files, including the title, file size and a download link.

“We use information about the count of peers and the time of the last access to present users with the most relevant results,” the site’s founder further explained.

The downloads on BTDigg go through magnet links instead of the more traditional torrents. Since BTDigg uses the DHT network to find files there are no torrents involved at all, even though the files all come from other BitTorrent users.

BTDigg’s founder told TorrentFreak that they will keep improving the site in the weeks to come, and we were ensured that a redesign is also in the planning. It will be interesting to see where this goes, and for traditional search engines DHT might be another interesting (but resource consuming) source of content.

Source: BTDigg, The First ‘Trackerless’ Torrent Search Engine

Alexey, the owner of TorrentReactor.net, informed TorrentFreak that his company has won its domain dispute against TorrentReactor.com. The complaint was filed at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) on October 26 of last year, with Alex stating that the .com domain is abusing the brand TorrentReactor has built over the years.

New York resident Craig Pratka, the (former) owner of TorrentReactor.com, was not operating a website under the name TorrentReactor but had simply forwarded the domain to the affiliate site allcontentaccess.com. In his complaint, Alex argued that the sole intent of the .com domain was to mislead users of the .net domain.

According to WIPO, Alex stated that Pratka was “intentionally attempting to attract Internet users to his web site for commercial gain, since the web site associated with the disputed domain name is redirected and urges visitors to pay money in order to access its database.”

The WIPO arbitration commission reviewed the case and finally concluded that the domain was indeed registered in bad faith. Alex told TorrentFreak that the domain was transferred to his company yesterday, and that the case is now officially closed.

This successful dispute follows a failed one against the previous owner of the .com domain, Jinsu Kim, who offered to sell it to TorrentReactor.net for $150,000 a few years ago. Alex declined and offered $30,000 instead, to which Kim replied with a new price tag: “The price is $50k and not negotiable.”

In 2008 Alex tried to go for the cheaper option and filed a WIPO dispute. This request was denied because at the time he had not yet registered the TorrentReactor trademark.

In the years that followed the .com domain was sold to Craig Pratka, who owns several torrent site typo domains, and is currently in the process of registering the Pirate Bay trademark. How much Pratka paid for the .com domain is unknown, but based on the previous quotes it can’t have been cheap.

Thankfully there are trademark and copyright laws to stop such abusive behavior.

Source: TorrentReactor.net Wins Trademark Infringing .Com Domain

The idea is simple yet innovative, a combination that’s often the key to success. Unlike most torrent search engines, Torrent Butler is focused on browsing and discovering films in an elegant and visually attractive layout, augmented with loads of useful information. Unfortunately for the movie industry, the site is not limited to ‘authorized’ film copies either.

Fascinated by the project that officially launched this week, TorrentFreak got in touch with the brains behind the site to find out what inspired him to develop it. Perhaps shockingly, it turns out he’s a big movie buff who pays for his enjoyment. “I really love movies and watch quite a lot of them. The past few years I’ve actually been renting movies through iTunes,” Torrent Butler’s founder told TorrentFreak.

Being a movie fan nowadays is not easy though, especially outside of the US where most new films are simply unavailable online.

“The problem with iTunes is that for a big movie lover and consumer like me, the number of (decent) movies that are released, is rather limited. I mean most of the ‘new’ releases on iTunes are just old, back-catalog movies, with higher-quality, recent releases popping up only every once in a while, especially in HD,” Torrent Butler’s founder explained.

“So at some point you’ve just seen them all, or all the good ones for that matter. Most of the movies are also only available in the US store, and as I don’t live there and don’t have a US credit card, I have to jump through a lot of hoops to pay iTunes, which is a another major PITA,” he added.

This troublesome experience eventually led Torrent Butler’s founder to switch to torrents instead, simply because the legal alternatives we’re unable to cater to his needs. However, this introduced another problem. Most torrent indexes and meta-search engines are not very well suited for ‘discovering’ movies.

“With torrents the search experience is pretty bad. When you know what movie you’re looking for, it’s fairly easy, but when you want to find out what movies are available it’s just a lot of work. You’re basically spitting through long textual listings, with a lot of repetition and no visual cues whatsoever. The lists are not very inspiring, and when you want to have a look at the trailer you have to do another manual search for it”

“So we fixed that problem and built Torrent Butler,” the site’s founder added.

Torrent Butler’s development took several months and this week it was officially released to the public. The aim of the site is, in part, to show the movie industry what a convenient and attractive movie store should look like.

“I often think why no-one else has built this before, because it’s such a simple and obvious solution,” the site’s founder said. “So I think it’s pretty big, until the studios finally figure out that they should just create something like this themselves. I really don’t mind paying 5 or 6 bucks for a rental, as long as they offer lots of good and fresh content.”

The torrents listed on Torrent Butler are all hosted externally, mostly on The Pirate Bay. New movies are added to the search index on a regular basis and by default they are listed based on popularity. However, the site also offers users the option to browse through the latest added torrents, or high definition releases only. If a high definition download is not yet available users have the option to be notified by email when it is.

In the future Torrent Butler may expand its index and add TV-torrents as well. The site’s founder told us that he is open to feature suggestions from the public. Overall we’re quite impressed with the site’s presentation. If only the movie industry could come up with something like this for the global public.

Source: Torrent Butler, Serving Movie Torrents With Class

Rumors continued to persist in connection with their sudden vows of chastity, with the AVN porn industry website reporting that the owners of both Empornium and PureTNA had been seen the week before at one of their trade shows in Las Vegas.

Regardless of the specific ins-and-outs, the effect of site refugees fleeing to other trackers was immediate. The pressure was perhaps felt most deeply at rival porn tracker Cheggit.

“After this latest fiasco, any stat you can think of (web, torrent or tracker) at least doubled over the span of about 4 days,” Cheggit admin Chip told TorrentFreak.

“After some help from our host and some reconfiguring, we’ve got things in order with our servers running the site pretty smoothly. There is still the odd error that will cause a slow down, but that’s to be expected considering the unplanned and hurried fashion in which the server reconfig came about.”

As Cheggit’s ranks become increasingly swollen with new and eager members, the mass debate now centers on where else porn aficionados can spend some me-time.

With the help of ex-PureTNA and Empornium users we’ve compiled a list of alternatives / replacements which can be found below. Both public and private sites are included, but only those that are currently accepting new sign ups. Those that aren’t immediately welcoming to complete strangers are excluded.

* If you’re looking to download torrents anonymously and avoid the prying eyes of third parties we strongly recommend BTGuard.

Then the rest of our stimulus package, in no particular order….

Links removed upon Google’s request.

Source: NSFW: Top PureTNA and Empornium Alternatives

However, despite their sabre-rattling the country’s biggest BitTorrent sites, ArenaBG and Zamunda, have remained up. Threats by pirate-hunter-in-chief Yavor Kolev, who in July 2010 vowed to take them down, came to nothing.

Then in the early hours of Saturday morning, all hell broke loose. At 1am Zamunda went down, quickly followed by ArenaBG. A posting on the latter’s separate forum spelled doom.

“Once again the virtual society of free sharing of information is under threat,” began the announcement on ArenaBG on the back of the chaotic situation at both sites.

“The initiator of this work is a secret group called ‘Council for the Protection of Intellectual Property’. Formally, this organization seems like an inter-ministerial body, but its meetings are invited and attended mostly by representatives of the so-called ‘Rightholders’,” noted the lengthy posting. It concluded by confirming the site’s defiant intentions of bouncing back against any further attacks on its domain name or servers.

Little wonder then that this dramatic version of events was quickly reported by several news outlets in Bulgaria, some with the apparent confirmation that the government had hacked or DDoS’d the sites in question and taken them offline.

However, TorrentFreak has discovered that there may be a more simple explanation for the downtime at both sites.

According to a source close to Zamunda, late Friday night the site suffered what is being described as “a technical malfunction of a crucial piece of equipment”. The extended downtime that followed was due to the failure happening during the night.

“The problem has been taken care of and measures have been taken in order to improve [future] response to emergency situations of any sort that can lead to temporary server unavailability,” our source added.

So while this clears up the situation at Zamunda, how does one explain the problems at ArenaBG? As boring and simple as it sounds, it seems that when Zamunda went down Bulgarians needed an immediate replacement site so thousands of them flooded to the next logical choice – ArenaBG. The site simply couldn’t cope and went down under the load.

While there are reports today that Yavor Kolev of the Computer Crime Department has denied any involvement in the downtime, he also took the opportunity to warn the sites that since they continue to “break the law” they can expect attention in the future.

The panic in Bulgaria this weekend certainly shows that the country’s BitTorrent community exists on a knife edge. Only time will tell if their position becomes more or less secure in 2011 but if Kolev is to be believed, it might be the latter. The signs are, however, that neither site intends to go quietly.

Source: BitTorrent Sites Hacked By Secret Government Unit? Not So Fast..

In common with most torrent indexers and search engines, TorLock is committed to ensure that DMCA takedown requests from copyright holders are handled properly, but there’s one outfit for which this is not enough.

TorLock advertises itself as the “no fakes torrent site” and claims that it is nearly impossible to find a fake file among the 140,738 torrents that the site currently hosts. To illustrate the confidence the site owner has in TorLock’s “VeriPLUS” system, he has an open offer to pay $1 for every fake torrent users are able to find.

“Simply take the url of the fake torrent and paste it into the message box, remember to give a valid email where we can get in contact with you to discuss the torrent in question and arrange payment,” says a statement on the site. TorLock’s owner Jack told TorrentFreak that this offer still stands. “I’m sure that we are one of the biggest verified sources in the torrent world right now,” he said.

The offer is an interesting gesture, and it’s good to see efforts being taken by site owners to prevent spam and fakes from flooding indexers. However, the $1 per fake torrent offer is not liked by everyone, the Indian anti-piracy outfit Aiplex in particular. Yes, the same Aiplex that admitted to DDoSing torrent sites, to conspiring with the Government and signing contracts worth thousands of dollars to protect Bollywood films.

Aiplex claims the offer is highly illegal, which it pointed out in an email to the TorLock owner.

As always, the correspondance from Aiplex is not the most outstanding literary work, and even plain incomprehensible here and there, but the core message is clear. As can be read below, Aiplex believes that offering users money for their fake torrent reports is highly illegal. The reason they give is an odd one though, to say the least (note: verbatim quote).

We have seen u advertise in ur site that you give $1 for fake. We trust this is highly illegal and we will fight to protect our clients rights. You cannot pay people for other’s material, you do not own the rights. We have already ban ur site. Now we will come after u and the people who host ur illegal website… The Indian Govt wont take this and will suport us in the battle against ur and other sites. Other people dont pay users for helping piracy. U will get in trouble for this… u do not understand who u are dealing with. We demand u remove the offer and also adhere to the many requests we have sent u to delete illegal files… We will not ask again…

Aiplex seems to argue that TorLock’s owner can’t pay users for reporting fake files, because he doesn’t own the rights to these fake torrents. This makes no sense, right? If we follow this logic it would be illegal for TorLock’s owner to take down torrent files following a DMCA complaint as well.

We’ve read this and the rest of the email Aiplex sent a few times now but we have really no idea what it means. The only thing that’s clear to us is that TorLock’s owner Jack appears to be in serious trouble and Aiplex and the Indian Government have allegedly set the wheels in motion for a site-ban.

Too bad, TorLock seemed to be a promising site.

Source: Paying Users To Report Fake Torrents is Illegal, Anti-Piracy Outfit Claims

For the last few days the huge BitTorrent porn trackers Empornium and PureTNA have been dark, with both sites routing to 127.0.0.1. Understandably, users of the sites have been pretty concerned since these pair of giants, which are connected by the same management, have massive memberships and are long-standing mainstays of the community.

To give an idea of size, PureTNA had in excess of 1,329,500 members, Empornium a similar number. At last count PureTNA’s database sat at nearly 67,000 torrents servicing around 630,000 peers. Empornium listed more than 82,000 torrents and 660,000 peers. That’s a hell of a lot of filth and depravity, just how their members liked it.

But for their users, speaking of the sites in the permanent past tense is the sad reality today. The management of both Empornium and PureTNA have confirmed to TorrentFreak that they are “offline permanently”. Requests for elaboration were declined, but a comment obtained from Breeze, the manager of both sites, said simply: “Such is bittorrent life.”

So considering that both sites had continued to grow, both in terms of torrents and membership, why suddenly close down?

The main unconfirmed rumor to have gained traction is that due to a lack of investment in code development, both sites have been vulnerable to malicious attacks. This resulted in one or both of the sites being hacked in recent days. Rather than pump money into the sites to prevent this happening again, their hard drives were wiped by the sites’ owners to protect user privacy, or so the story goes.

The other rumor, which is circulating on the fringes of the adult entertainment industry, is that the sites buckled under legal pressure, or at least the threat of it. As can be seen from a list retrievable via Google cache which was updated only last week, dozens of porn sites and studios have issued some kind of legal “do not upload” orders to the sites.

While there may be some triumphant gloating from elements of the porn industry, these lists could merely be an indication that both sites were trying to stay within the law by abiding by the desires of copyright holders who preferred for their material not to be shared on the sites. In any event, with the demise of both sites, that point is moot.

Interestingly, although PureTNA is still listed by Google, a similar search for Empornium draws a a complete blank. As far as the world’s leading search engine is concerned, Empornium doesn’t exist. In the future, those looking for nostalgia will have to settle for the Empornium song from Futuristic Sex Robotz which lives on with YouTube.

Whatever the reason – hackings, legal pressure, a combination of the two or just plain old lack of interest in continuing – the sites are not coming back so for BitTorrent porn consumers this certainly marks the end of an era.

Whether Cheggit can cope with the Empornium/PureTNA refugees will remain to be seen. Their servers, in common with the actors in the videos they index, are likely to be puffing and panting for some time.

Source: Empornium and PureTNA Permanently Shut Down

Today, five years later, EZTV has become one of the largest torrent sites on the Internet. With 30 million visitors a month the site is still expanding, and feature-wise the site’s owners also have plans to grow.

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

However, while working on the new features EZTV’s founder realized that the site’s design could also use an overhaul. In recent months a lot of money has been invested on the hardware side, but the design has remained the same. But with some help from the public this may soon change.

“So I have started work on the EZTV codebase, getting ready to implement a whole bunch of new features we hope you will all love, and I thought it was about time to come up with a new visual style to the website,” Novaking writes in an announcement.

“Now this is where it becomes interesting, I’m terrible at graphics/design so I think this could be the best time to see what you loyal fans might be able to do in regards to taking this site to the next level of TV content,” he adds.

True to the sharing nature, the new EZTV design will be crowdsourced. People who want to help out are encouraged to submit their designs, which should be simple and support mobile devices, Google TV and tablets such as the iPad.

TorrentFreak of course asked Novaking to reveal a bit more about the upcoming features that he’s working on, but aside from the ezRSS integration he was reluctant to share his plans. EZTV users will have to be patient and wait for the new features until they are ready to be rolled out.

Source: EZTV Crowdsources New Design, New Features Coming

Below we have compiled a list of the 10 most-visited torrent sites at the start of the new year. Only public and English language sites are included. The list is based on traffic rank reports from Compete and Alexa. In addition, we include last year’s ranking for each of the 10 sites.

To download torrents anonymously we highly recommend BTGuard

Do you know a good public torrent site that’s not listed here? Feel free to plug it in a comment.

Update: 2012′s best torrent sites.

1. The Pirate Bay

The Pirate Bay is probably the best known BitTorrent brand on the Internet. The site was founded in 2003 and is still expanding, despite the immense legal witch hunt launched by the entertainment industries several years ago.

2. Torrentz

Torrentz has been the leading BitTorrent meta-search engine for years. A few weeks ago the site traded in its .COM domain and switched to .EU, but this didn’t affect the site’s traffic.

3. IsoHunt

Last year was a tough one for isoHunt, as it became the first search engine that had to implement a keyword filter provided by the MPAA. Despite this setback, isoHunt is still the third largest torrent site in terms of traffic. In 2011, isoHunt hopes to get rid of the filter through the Appeals Court.

4. KickassTorrents

KickassTorrents was the fastest growing newcomer of last year, and managed to continue this upward trend throughout 2010. The site released many new features and continues to innovate, still without a single banner ad on the site.

5. BTjunkie

BTjunkie had a pretty quiet year, which is usually good news for a site that operates in the BitTorrent niche. The only setback was the removal of the site’s front page from Google due to a DMCA complaint. As last year, BTjunkie settles in fifth place.

6. Demonoid.me

The impossible happened. Demonoid finished 2010 with only a minimal amount of downtime, compared to weeks or months in previous years. A few weeks ago the site announced that it would move from the familiar .COM to a .ME domain in response to the news about US domain seizures.

7. ExtraTorrent.com

ExtraTorrent is one of those robust torrent indexes that don’t make the news very often. In 2010 it continued to expand and the site gained two spots compared to last year.

8. TorrentDownloads.net

TorrentDownloads is in the same league as ExtraTorrent, a no nonsense torrent index that provides torrents to millions of users each month.

9. TorrentReactor

TorrentReactor fooled most of the tech press last year when it announced that it had bought a Russian town, one of the better PR stunts seen in 2010. On the flipside TorrentReactor seems to have lost some traffic due to a Google penalty, dropping the site to 9th place this year.

10. LimeTorrents.com

LimeTorrents is the best newcomer of 2010 in terms of traffic, which promises a lot for the new year. The site went live half a year ago and already made it into the top 10 in this short period. It’s also a bit ironic as ‘Limewire’ got shutdown a few months ago.

Honorable Mention EZTV

If there’s one site that deserves an honorable mention it’s EZTV. The leading TV-torrent release group almost made it into the top 10 on its own, but due the seasonal traffic spikes it just fell short. It has to be noted though that unlike other sites in the above list EZTV’s traffic doesn’t rely heavily on search engines such as Google or BitTorrent meta-search engines. EZTV currently has 30 million visitors a month and continues to expand.

Disclaimer: Yes, we know that Alexa isn’t perfect and that Compete has plenty of flaws, but combined both do a pretty good job at comparing sites that operate in a similar niche.

Source: Top 10 Most Popular Torrent Sites of 2011

While the majority of these outfits do their job with a relative low profile, there are a few oddballs that continue to make the news due to their unconventional tactics. In the past we’ve covered the mysterious ways of the Web-Sheriff, and more recently the Indian based company AiPlex Software has been making a name for itself.

Last September Girish Kumar, managing director of AiPlex Software, admitted that his company DDoSed torrent sites that were not complying with their DMCA takedown requests. “We flood the website with requests, which results in database error, causing denial of service as each server has a fixed bandwidth capacity,” he said at the time.

This revelation was not appreciated by everyone, and led to the start of Anonymous’ Operation Payback which took down the AiPlex website for days on end. A costly attack for the Indian multi-purpose firm that also specializes in medical transcription and search engine optimization.

Despite this setback AiPlex is not backing down, on the contrary. Although the DDoS attacks seem to have stopped the outfit has continued to harass torrent site owners, often incorrectly. Now Bitsnoop has alerted us to an interesting email conversation he had with AiPlex’s managing director.

A few days ago Bitsnoop’s owner received a takedown request for the following torrent, which linked to a copy of the Indian blockbuster Tees Maar Khan. The torrent site owner quickly took the linked page offline and thought the case was settled, but he was wrong. Yesterday, AiPlex’s general manager Girish Kumar sent a reminder for the file that was already removed.

For Bitsnoop’s owner these type of incorrect reminders are an annoyance, and he replied to AiPlex that similar unverified requests will be ignored in the future. Girish Kumar obviously failed to see the mistake he made, but quickly replied with an oddly worded, brand new and unprecedented threat.

HI,

In that case we may have pull the cat out of the bag & ban u completely…Anyways, if u don’t confirm to adhere to our Infringement notification requests, we will be forced send ur website details to the Indian Govt. to further ban ur site across pan India. In fact we have done this to several sites & u are given the last chance to comply the request…

Awaiting for ur earnest reply,
Best,

Girish Kumar N
Managing Director
Aiplex Software Pvt. Ltd.

Really?

It is hard to take any of the above response seriously and indeed Bitsnoop’s owner wisely ignored it. Needless to say, through these unusual threats AiPlex is not making themselves popular among site owners. TorrentFreak contacted Girish Kumar to hear more about their close ties and influence within the Indian authorities, but we have yet to receive a reply.

Of course this is just one side of the daily DMCA troubles torrent site owners face, there are also many agents that are more pleasant to work with, and these usually get more done. When the takedown notices are complete and properly formatted most torrent site owners will cooperate and take the infringing links offline quickly.

AiPlex has obviously chosen to go down another route, which makes it harder for them to succeed. But, this doesn’t matter much for them of course, they’ll simply ask the Indian Government to ban Bitsnoop and The Pirate Bay, making piracy a thing of the past.

And putting themselves out of the anti-piracy business in the process.

Source: Anti-Piracy Outfit Threatens Pan-Indian Torrent Site Ban

With their domain names no longer under their control rendering most existing search engine links unusable, most of the sites all but disappeared. Some, however, refused to give in and moved immediately to new domain names.

One of those is the BitTorrent meta-search engine Torrent-Finder, which relocated to a .info domain it already owned. Just after the seizures, TorrentFreak asked site owner Waleed Gadelkareem how the action had affected his traffic. The response was clear – the domain seizure had set the site’s traffic back massively.

Like many other torrent sites Google was the main traffic source of Torrent-Finder, so even with the .info domain ready traffic initially plunged up to 90%. Google was simply sending the traffic to the seized .com domain, not the new one.

But for this determined Egyptian, patience, hard work and a little help from Google was to set the site back on track to recovery. At the same time, Waleed shows how futile the U.S. seizures are for sites that are determined to continue their operations.

“Google webmaster tools are very important for any website’s SEO and I had already registered torrent-finder.com on my cpanel and confirmed ownership,” Waleed explained.

This registration meant that using the “Change of Address” option on the panel could be done immediately.

“Then I had to direct all linkbacks to the new .info domain by contacting webmasters or changing it by myself if I could. You can see the result on Google analytics of search engine traffic,” says Waleed. (see below)

“Slowly Torrent Finder is getting back most of the indexed pages that we used to have on Google, and of course the targeted keywords,” adds Waleed.

Despite the encouraging signs of recovery with the .info domain (thanks to Google), Waleed is also continuing with his legal action to reclaim his .com domain with the help of lawyer David Snead.

Waleed hopes that the mistakes that were made will serve him well in his case.

Source: Google Helps Seized BitTorrent Site to Regain Lost Traffic

Sadly for GGF, none of the headlines in the last year have turned out to be good ones for the company. It has been followed by almost constant controversy.

Now, for the second time in just over a year, GGF faces bankruptcy. In common with last year’s close escape when a former employee requested court action against the company for unpaid debts, history is repeating itself.

A pair of companies, Kennicott AB and Hercora Trading Technology, say they are collectively owed 1.5 million kronor ($220,000). The amounts, 906,200 kronor and 567,600 kronor respectively, were loaned to GGF in August 2008 but the companies are yet to be repaid.

In an application to the district court the companies demand that GGF “is immediately placed in bankruptcy.”

According to a report, owner Hans Pandeya already has liabilities of more than 400,000 kronor ($58,800) registered with the bailiff and today Global Gaming Factory has recorded liabilities of 450,000 kronor ($66,200). The company has filed no financial reports for 2009.

In filings, Pandeya places much of the blame for the current position on the failure to acquire The Pirate Bay last year.

In 2009, GGF was kicked off Swedish stock market Aktietorget following several serious violations which solicited comments that the company had a casual approach to disclosure requirements which misled the market.

But despite all the setbacks and serious lack of finances, Hans Pandeya continues to pursue his dream of owning a torrent site.

In August this year he approached Demonoid with a buyout offer, which was rejected.

Then in September, Winnipeg-based law firm Thompson Dorfman Sweatman LLP put in offers to acquire several of the largest BitTorrent sites on behalf of an unnamed client. All roads pointed back to Pandeya. These offers were also rejected.

TorrentFreak has learned that just two weeks ago Pandeya made an offer to one of the most prominent torrent sites. No prizes for guessing what the response was.

Source: Failed Pirate Bay Buyout Blamed for Global Gaming Factory Going Bust, Again

For the majority of westerners, December is a consumer-orientated orgy of greed, over-eating and over-spending, all accompanied by countless hours of overtime at work in order to pay for these annual excesses.

But presuming funding is in place, and that you can tolerate the violent free-for-all that has become the much loved hallmark of Christmas shopping, there’s still the problem of what to buy your loved ones. Luckily, help is at hand.

This year, forget expensive perfume and designer clothing, and throw high-end electronics and fine champagne to one side. Online gifts are the new cool, so what could be a more warm and romantic gesture in 2010 than handing your significant other the root passwords to a fully functioning, high-flying torrent site?

While you’d need many millions to buy The Pirate Bay, Sweden’s biggest torrent site, it is currently possible to acquire the next best thing. An auction currently taking place on Flippa could enable one lucky individual to obtain Sweden’s second biggest torrent site.

While it has a reserve price of $44,000, the indexing site Tankafetast can be bought immediately for just $100,000. For this amount the lucky Christmas present recipient could enjoy 4.5 million visitors and a claimed 39 million page views per month.

The site is on the up too, shown here at #9 in Google Sweden’s list of searches that increased the most in popularity during 2010.

“The site is not a tracker, but an index of torrents that are on different trackers,” the site’s current owner explains. “So, the site hosts no torrents or any copyrighted content, in other words.”

The owner says that while he’s had some good times on the site, he’s off to pastures new. Apparently the site is making around $1,700 per month gross and has contracts in place with ‘discreet advertisers’ which can be passed on to the new owner.

If the site went for its reserve of $44,000 it’s clear that it would take quite a while for the new owner to get his money back based on the current position. For most people even $44k is a lot of money and would represent a pretty extravagant Christmas gift – you could even get a Nissan 370z Nismo Edition sports car for that, with enough change for a romantic holiday in the sun.

But of course, cars have running costs, so the bills don’t end with the initial outlay. The same, however, is also true of torrent sites. Tankafetast costs at least £350 per month in bandwidth and this figure does not include any of the unpredictable legal fees that can be incurred at torrent sites indexing Hollywood movies, even if they are all subtitled in Swedish.

Nevertheless, if you’re interested in acquiring the site you’ll need to hurry since there are only 18 days left to make an offer. Interest is currently riding high with zero bids.

Just like buying a dog or cat as a ‘surprise’ present, this Christmas when you have absolutely no idea that the recipient is prepared to commit to their new friend for the next few years, buying someone a torrent site might also be ill-advised.

Actually, no. Buying someone a torrent site for Christmas is not just ill-advised but the worst idea ever. Forget I even mentioned it. Stick to gift cards. Or socks.

Source: Sweden’s #2 Torrent Site Up For Sale, The Perfect Xmas Gift

The torrent indexer was told by the court to remove all infringing torrent files from its index. This was technically unfeasible according to the Mininova team, who were left with no other choice than to remove all torrent files uploaded by regular users and restrict new uploads to verified accounts.

This move resulted in the deletion of more than a million torrents, many of which were not infringing any copyrights at all. As expected, the consequences of this decision for Mininova’s traffic, as well as the number of searches and downloads on the site, were disastrous.

Today, a year later, we take a look at the unprecedented impact the decision had on the website. Right before going ‘legal’, Mininova was believed to be the leading torrent site in terms of traffic, with a massive 5 million visits a day. Today, the site has a few hundred thousand visitors at most.

The decrease in daily downloads is even more pronounced, dropping from more than 10 million a day to just 250,752 yesterday. Similarly, the daily search volume has decreased from 10 million to 694,345 a day. These numbers are of course still higher than hundreds of other torrent sites. But Mininova is no longer part of the top 10 most visited torrent sites, a list it led for two years in a row.

Content wise things have changed quite bit too. Previously, thousands of new torrents were uploaded by users daily, but in recent weeks the average number of newly submitted torrents is stuck at 35 a day. In total, Mininova now indexes just shy of 15,000 torrents, while most other torrent sites have several million active torrents, many of which ironically originated from Mininova.

An interesting conclusion that we can draw from the stats above is that the average number of downloads per torrent has actually increased now the site only features authorized content. 17 downloads per torrent today compared to about 10 last year.

On the other side, the searches compared to downloads also show that many people don’t seem to find what they are looking for on the site. A year ago the daily searches and downloads were both at 10 million, but today the searches are nearly three times as high as the downloads.

Although the unavoidable decision to limit new torrents to authorized publishers has had quite an impact on the site and its users, Mininova as a company still exists. Whatever their plans are for the future, the site’s founders are still owed credit for having inspired dozens of torrent sites that emerged in the last years.

Source: Mininova Dwarfed A Year After Going ‘Legal’

It went public in October last year and quickly gained a steady user base in the months that followed. Unfortunately, the site suddenly disappeared in February due to several crucial mistakes.

“Our host has screwed up hard drive replacement in RAID array,” the BitSnoop team informed TorrentFreak. “They’ve replaced the wrong drive two times in a row, which caused all data to be destroyed. We did not have full backup at that moment, so it was partly our fault.”

BitSnoop eventually returned in May this year and not without leaving an impression. The torrent indexer started from zero and is without a doubt the fastest growing torrent site of the year. Not only in traffic, but also in the library of indexed torrents that keeps on expanding.

This week the site reached a new milestone when the 10 millionth torrent was added to the index.

At the time of writing BitSnoop has 10,211,341 indexed torrents, of which 3,703,060 are currently active. These numbers make the site one of the largest torrent databases that we know of, nearing the range of established sites such as Torrentz and isoHunt, and beating KickassTorrents and The Pirate Bay by a a few million torrents.

Some additional mind-boggling statistics:

In terms of visitors the site has been doing well too. It’s currently on its way to entering the top 10 most visited torrent sites on the Internet with well over a million page views a day. Needless to say, servicing these numbers requires quite a lot of hardware. The BitSnoop team was kind enough to give us a sneak peak behind the scenes and find out what’s powering the BitTorrent indexer.

BitSnoop’s data crunching box and indexer backend both run on Dual 4-core Xeons 2.33 GHz, with 32 GB RAM and SAS disks in RAID10. The search query server is a 4-core Xeon 2.6 GHz, with 16 GB RAM and SATA in RAID1. The web frontends are VPSes, and some small VPSes for utility and infrastructure purposes. All the current hardware is rented but BitSnoop’s plans to buy their own servers in the near future.

The BitSnoop team further assured TorrentFreak that they will do all they can to keep the site running smoothly. The main focus for future improvements will be on usability. Currently they are working on several new features including a ‘TV show finder’, improved detection of fake files, some social features and tag based browsing and searches.

And most importantly, more torrents will be indexed, with 15 million being the next big milestone.

In relatively little time BitSnoop has become an established name in the public BitTorrent community. The site offers one of the best API’s that’s currently in use by several other torrent sites, and they also collaborate with academic researchers who wish to learn more about the BitTorrent ecosystem.

It definitely looks like BitSnoop is here to stay, and despite a difficult start of the year with months of downtime, it deserves to be crowned the fastest growing BitTorrent site of 2010. They hereby follow in the footsteps of KickassTorrents, who ‘won’ this unofficial (but honorary) title last year.

Source: BitSnoop Breaks 10 Million Indexed Torrents

Having been shut down briefly in 2008, the site is no stranger to negativity about some of its work. However, unlike most sites, it recently received a welcome boost from a content owner who for once didn’t have smoke coming out of his ears and a team of lawyers behind him.

“We were recently approached by one of the owners of Voleurz, a company that produces fantastic winter sports movies, with a proposition,” ExtremeBits staffer CB told TorrentFreak.

Noting that he’d already spotted two of their earlier productions on the site’s tracker, Voleurz co-owner Bruce Giovando told ExtremeBits that his company had a brand new video just about to come out. But rather than warning the site about leaking it early, Voleurz took a completely different approach.

“I’d love it if we could drop our new video titled ‘Look on the Bright Side’ here a little early to support this awesome community,” Bruce told ExtremeBits.

“Awesome” isn’t usually a word used by content creators to describe torrent sites so TorrentFreak caught up with Bruce to find out what is so special about a Voleurz / ExtremeBits tie-up.

“To give you some background info on approach I’ll need to explain a little bit about our company. It’s called Voleurz and was originally started in University when filmmaker Darren Rayner and I got together,” he explained.

“Voleurz is actually, for all intents and purposes, a clothing company, but we like to describe it as a lifestyle brand because that’s what we really see ourselves as selling. Since day one we’ve been producing videos and sharing our crazy experiences with the action-sports community. Every year we’d produce a video that encompasses all the sports we were doing – skateboarding, skiing and snowboarding.”

Between 2005 and 2007 Voluerz relied on DVD sales, but the numbers weren’t adding up. The company was barely breaking even on their production costs and due to small distribution numbers it was hard to pitch to potential sponsors. So the company chose a different path.

“We made the decision to forgo selling the DVD and instead give movies away online for free,” said Bruce.

“At the time this was still a relatively new idea, right around the same time Radiohead released their album online for free. This approach was unique to the action-sports industry and because of this we raised a few eyebrows, and received substantially more press than we would have otherwise. It was considered a little controversial at the time.”

For then on, when Voleurz pitched projects to potential sponsors (which include household names such as Coors Light) they used download stats from ExtremeBits and also The Pirate Bay in order to illustrate the promotional benefits of torrents. Bruce said that due to the specialist and relatively untapped nature of the ExtremeBits userbase, that site was of particular interest.

During a count last week, ExtremeBits had 13,372 active users. One of those members is Bruce who has been quietly using the site since 2007 and actually witnessed some of Voleurz’s earlier movies get released there.

“It was pretty awesome to see our first two free films put up on Extreme Bits without any interaction of my own,” he said. “The users found and uploaded the video themselves – this was gratifying for us, it really justified all the hard work that went into making the video.”

ExtremeBits are very proud that Voleurz views them so positively and told TorrentFreak that they hope this is a taste of things to come.

“Our hope is that this approach from Voleurz will open the eyes of other creators to the possibilities of free exposure of their sponsors,” CB told us. “It would be fantastic to see more cooperation between creators and fans who mostly get their material via P2P.”

Those interested in reading more about Voleurz and their products can do so here while anyone who’d like to join ExtremeBits (and sample some free Voleurz videos) can signup here. Hurry though – registrations are only open at the weekends.

Source: Lifestyle Company Tries Rad New Approach To Extreme BitTorrent

With this action, isoHunt hoped to prevent a judicial order which would require the site to implement a mandatory filter and remove torrents based on a list of ‘banned words’. However, despite these changes the US District Court of California still issued a permanent injunction against isoHunt in May.

Although the lite version didn’t change the decision of the District Court, it did impact isoHunt’s traffic volume of visitors from the United States.

As with most changes, many of the US users expressed unhappiness and complained from the get go. In the months that followed it turned out that the complaints were not those of a tiny minority simply resisting change. Since April, isoHunt has lost most of its US visitors due to the new look and this is one of the main reasons why the popular torrent search engine has now reverted to its original interface.

“We lost over half of our US traffic,” isoHunt owner Gary Fung told TorrentFreak, adding that he’s now experimenting with a look that most users are happy with, while abiding with the court order. The key issue here is that the isoHunt website should not induce copyright infringement any more than other search engines such as Google. This was the main point of the lite interface: that the isoHunt search engine can be made to look and work exactly the same way as general web search engines, such as Google or Yahoo.

To most US visitors the isoHunt homepage now has a familiar look again, but there are some differences with the site the rest of the world sees. The ‘top searches’ that used to be listed on the site are gone for example, because one could potentially see this as inducement.

isoHunt appealed the permanent injunction of the District Court this summer and is now awaiting the appeal at the Ninth Circuit Appeal Court. Both the MPAA and isoHunt have filed their motions in their legal battle that will soon enter its fifth year. With this appeal, isoHunt hopes that the mandatory keyword filter will be dropped.

“I find it absurd that we are required to keyword filter which ironically all search engines in countries like China are required to do due to political censorship, but isoHunt would be the only search engine serving traffic to US users required to do similar filtering..,” Fung wrote to the Ninth Circuit Appeal Court.

Instead, a filter based on ‘infringing’ hashes is more appropriate according to the isoHunt founder. A similar system is already in use for a partnership the site has with the US Attorney General to ban child porn.

The Ninth Circuit Appeal Court has now to decide whether the permanent injunction will stay in place or not. This decision will be a crucial one to the future of isoHunt and possibly other BitTorrent sites.

Source: isoHunt Revives Full Search After U.S. Traffic Tanks

Torrents.net, Vertor.com, Yourbittorrent.com, Torrentfunk.com, Torrenthound.com, Torrentreactor.net, Torrentzap.com, Torrentmatrix.com and Fulldls.com are just 9 sites that are affected by the attack, but it is likely that there are dozens more. The number of visitors for the above mentioned sites ranges from tens of thousands to more than a million a day.

According to Reality Check Network the attack took place early Saturday morning. An intruder managed to corrupt the Master Boot Records of several servers the company said, but backups are in place and are expected to be installed as soon as possible.

“We are writing this letter to inform you that a very targeted malicious attack took place on our network this morning at 6AM EST. As a result, most of our server operating systems have been corrupted resulting in the current downtime,” the company wrote to the affected customers a few hours ago.

“We have access to all backups and have already figured out a strategy for bringing your servers back up, and have all hands on deck working to restore service,” Reality Check Network President Moisey Uretsky added.

Initially it was unclear who had carried out the attack. Since Reality Check Network hosts quite a few high profile torrent sites, some site owners suspected that it might have been an anti-piracy action, but this was just a hunch.

During the last hours Reality Check Network has frequently updated its customers, and according to one of the latest emails the attack is being blamed on a disgruntled ex-employee.

“It was the result of an ex-employee who was with us for three years as a result he had intimate knowledge of our systems which is why the effects are so large,” Uretsky wrote.

Regular visitors of the affected torrent sites will probably have to seek refuge at alternative sites as it may take a few more hours before the sites reappear.

Update: In unrelated news, The Pirate Bay is down also.

Source: Major Torrent Sites Go Down After Attack on Hosting Provider

At its height the site had more than 70,000 members, with over 20,000 peers trading files at any given point in time.

The site managed to fly under the radar for a long time, but as it expanded the press and book publishers started to take notice. This unwanted attention led to numerous takedown requests and legal threats were also directed at the owner of the site, who saw no other option than to turn the final page in October 2008.

After it closed, students were left with no other option than to buy their books or to find other sources where they could share them. Oddly enough, the gap left by TextBookTorrents was never filled in the two years since its demise, despite the fact that eBooks have become mainstream and eReaders more affordable. This absence didn’t go unnoticed to a duo of college students, who launched the site Torrent My Books a few days ago.

“We were disheartened when we heard that TextbookTorrents was shutting down way back when, and since we did not see any sites coming up to replace it, we decided to take it upon ourselves to do something,” one of the founders explained to TorrentFreak.

The purpose of TorrentMyBooks is to be a place where people can share books freely, not just textbooks, although that is the main focus. The main difference with the late TextBookTorrents is that the site doesn’t have a tracker. It just provides an index of book related torrents where users can add to and download from.

The appearance and feature set of the site is similar to many other sites. Visitors can browse through the different sections, and the homepage of the site shows the more recent titles added to the various categories. TorrentMyBooks currently lists just over hundred torrents, but the founders hope there will be thousands of titles available soon.

“The motivation for creating the site is based on a personal experience of mine in college,” half of the duo told TorrentFreak. “One semester I needed to take an Art History class and it required the students to buy a textbook which cost roughly $150 USD. Fast forward to the end of the semester, I go to the school book store to sell back the book. I am told flat out that it is out of date and they cannot buy the book.”

“I was appalled that an art HISTORY book goes out of date. How does a book about the history of art change so much that you need a new edition? The only reason I can think of is that publishers have a monopoly and are able to force students to buy a new edition,” TorrentMyBook’s co-founder says.

It is pretty clear where the motivation of the site’s founders come from, but then there’s always the follow up question that deals with the morality of the operation. Here, the site’s co-founder – annex textbook vigilante – pictures himself on the right side of the argument as well.

“The morality of torrenting books is not clearly defined. You can’t really put a price on sharing knowledge such as books. That’s why most libraries are free. I also do not mind paying for books but publishers like to take advantage of students which does not seem right to me. Also, as a student, I do notice that people are looking for a cheaper alternative to books.”

Then there’s one hurdle left, the legality of the operation. Considering the history of TextBookTorrents and the piracy paranoia among book publishers as of late, the founders of TorrentMyBooks can expect plenty of DMCA notices, or worse. This is something they considered before starting the site, but nonetheless they will carry out their ambitions.

“One must be worried about the legal implications. However, we are going to be diligent in creating the number one source for books,” we were told.

Source: College Starts With a Fresh Textbook Torrent Site

This suggests that the ecosystem is more stable and conservative than most think it is. Up to a certain degree this is true, but it’s not entirely invincible. Four out of the five websites have been dragged to court and two of them have suffered serious damage.

TorrentSpy was closed by its owner in 2008 after it lost a court case where it was ordered to hand over details of US-based users to the MPAA. Last year, Mininova decided to delete over a million torrents and restrict new uploads to pre-approved publishers following a court decision where it was ordered to filter content. Two other sites, The Pirate Bay and isoHunt, are still battling in court but continue to operate as of today.

Although only 5 sites have dominated the BitTorrent landscape in the last years, there is still room for new sites to move up. Founded in 2009, the relative newcomer KickassTorrents has already gained a spot in the top 5. If it continues to grow at the same pace as it has in the last few months, it might end up in the top 3 at the end of this year.

Below we’ve listed the top three BitTorrent sites of each year since we started following them. The rankings are based on the number of daily visitors each site had at the end of each year. The Pirate Bay is the only site that appears in all rankings. The 2010 list is reported as of today, and might change before the year is over.

2005

1. TorrentSpy
2. The Pirate Bay
3. Mininova

2006

1. TorrentSpy
2. Mininova
3. The Pirate Bay

2007

1. Mininova
2. isoHunt
3. The Pirate Bay

2008

1. The Pirate Bay
2. Mininova
3. isoHunt

2009

1. The Pirate Bay
2. Torrentz.com
3. isoHunt

2010?

1. The Pirate Bay
2. Torrentz.com
3. isoHunt

Source: The Most Popular Torrent Sites Of The Last Five Years

Even though the site was only founded last year, it has quickly gown out to be one of the leading BitTorrent sites with millions of visits every month. Hosted in the Ukraine, the site has been free from trouble in its relatively short life, until now that is.

Starting two days ago, regular visitors of the torrent site noticed that KickassTorrents was unreachable. Although the site has been down for a few hours in the past due to maintenance, worries started to grow as time went on.

In an attempt to find out what was going on, TorrentFreak contacted the site’s founder, who informed us that the Ukrainian authorities were the reason for the prolonged downtime.

“Kickasstorrents.com main web server was shut down by the hosting provider after it was contacted by local authorities. We don’t have many details right now but it seems that there was no direct threat or order to shut down the site, just ‘concerns’ about the site’s activities,” the site’s founder told us.

“One way or another I’m afraid we must say goodbye to Ukraine and move the servers to other countries,” he added. TorrentFreak was further informed that the site should return in a few days once the site has moved the operation to a new location.

KickassTorrents was hosted by Mhost in the Ukraine, who voluntarily shut down the site after the local Government voiced its concerns about the site. The exact nature of the concerns are not known by the founder of KickassTorrents, but he told us that leaving the Ukraine is in the best interest of all parties involved.

Thus far many torrent sites have operated peacefully in the Ukraine, but the current events might indicate that times are changing, and not for the better. There is no official statement from the authorities but we assume that the concerns are copyright related.

We will post an update if more information becomes available.

Update: And they’re back…

Source: KickassTorrents Taken Down After Copyright Concerns

Take.fm is a torrent indexer, meaning that the site does not operate its own tracker. Those browsing through the site will immediately notice that it’s unlike any other indexer. The site is developed by the owner of Coda.fm, a music site that launched last year. Similar to Coda.fm, the looks and unique features of Take.fm set the site apart from most of the competition, this time focusing on the movie niche.

TorrentFreak got in touch with the owner of both sites to find out more about his newest project.

“As I did before with Coda.fm, I wanted to create a new kind of movie torrents site, open for everyone and one that offered a user experience comparable to the best e-commerce websites,” Take.fm’s owner told TorrentFreak. “We don’t have to get used to a third-rate user experience just for dealing with torrents. I tried to build a website that I – and hopefully all the torrents community – would enjoy using.”

Visitors to the site will indeed notice that the site looks more like a movie store or rental site than the average torrent index. The movies are presented nicely and users can browse through different genres and list movies based on popularity and the date they were added. Although the site has just launched, there are already over a 1000 titles listed, all verified by the site’s members.

“The website went online only a few hours ago, so the movies available now are the ones that a few invited users uploaded during a closed beta period. We have now approx. 1400 movies and 1900 torrents. As happened with Coda.fm, we expect to build a great user base, with many contributors that could help us to greatly increase our catalog.”

Although the browsing experience is neat, the features we described earlier can be found on most other torrent indexers as well. What really sets Take.fm apart from other sites is the presentation and features of the movie torrent pages. Here users can find all the info they need on a movie torrent, including a description, IMDB rating, a review and details specific to the release such as the quality, release group and audio and video specs.

To top it off, users also get a list of recommended titles for the movies they browse. This is similar to the recommendation engines that e-commerce sites such as Amazon have, and with enough contributors this could help users to quickly find related content of interest.

Although all of this sounds great, the movie industry wont be cheering the site on. They would argue that it assists in copyright infringements, which are against the law in most countries. Especially since all the files on the site are manually verified, anti-piracy groups might be inclined to take swift action to shut the site down. The Take.fm owner is aware of this risk, but is not planning to back down.

“Yes, we expect a lot of legal actions against us, the kind that we already endured with Coda.fm, but with more pressure. However, they couldn’t stop us before, and they won’t succeed now either. I really believe in what we do, and we will do anything it takes to stay online, as long as we have users that enjoy our service.”

People unconcerned or unaffected by the legal issues are being encouraged by the site’s owner to help out and join the team. “We just launched and we need collaborators that could help us to increase our catalog and build a community. I would like to use this opportunity to invite users that liked our vision to collaborate, uploading movie torrents and applying for moderators,” he said.

All in all we have to say that Take.fm is truly an amazing site, much like its sister site Coda.fm. A site that immediately captures one’s imagination. We have little doubt that this one will be around for a while, if it manages to stay out of legal trouble that is.

Source: Take.fm Pushes Movie Torrents To The Next Level

The village, founded in 1958 by a religious group connected to the Russian Orthodox Church, was reportedly bought for 4.5 million rubles ($148,000 or 115,000 euros). TorrentReactor said that the money would be used to re-equip the local school, repair roads and purchase agricultural equipment. Not least the money would bring the village into the Internet age through the introduction of broadband, a wonderful prospect for a place said to have only three computers and a single dial up connection.

But those who know TorrentReactor will also be familiar with their sense of humor and earlier pranks. This news concerning the village was quite rightly taken with a grain of salt – or two.

After being reported in dozens of Russian news outlets, the claim was investigated by a correspondent at local news outlet Media FM in Tomsk who managed to speak with Tatyana Tolkachev from the Asinovski district where Gar is located.

As it turns out, TorrentReactor’s assessment that the village had 214 residents was a little off the mark – it actually has 380. Equally the claim that there are only 3 computers in the area was an underestimate, there are more, and many have Internet access.

Furthermore, the notion that the villagers make a living from selling home-grown vegetables in a nearby town possibly painted an overly rustic image of a place which actually has its own fire department, a club, a few shops, a post office and a school which houses 50 students.

And, according to administrator Marina Platov, the revelation that her village has been sold and renamed is a surprise to her, but nevertheless, not an unwelcome one.

Should an offer be received, Platov said the villagers would not be against it. The roads in and around Gar are very poorly maintained and that 4.5 million rubles would be very helpful, she explained.

The TorrentReactor crew, who now feel obligated to help the town out in some shape or form, informed us that renaming the town is not a viable option. “We can’t rename the village, it’s a long story,” founder Alex told TorrentFreak this morning in response.

Indeed, according to another report, renaming villages isn’t easy. Although a choice can be made by the villagers, the final decision lies with the President of Russia.

So, now that the poor and needy villagers of Gar have become excited at the prospect of some significant investment from a torrent site, what are the TorrentReactor people going to do to stop them becoming disappointed?

“We can do other things,” promises Alex.

To find out what exactly, we have to wait until tomorrow.

Source: Despite Confusion, Village Still Wants Torrent Site Investment

The anti-piracy group won the case and Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm and Peter Sunde were ordered to block Dutch users, a decision they decided to appeal.

In the verdict of the initial appeal, the Court ruled that The Pirate Bay had to remove a list of torrents linking to copyrighted works and make their website inaccessible to Dutch visitors. This ruling was confirmed yesterday in a full trial by the Amsterdam Court.

The judge ruled that The Pirate Bay itself is not necessarily guilty of copyright infringement. However, according to the Court, the site’s operators assist in copyright infringement by allowing and encouraging its users to share torrents.

Previously, the defendants had argued that they were not the owners of the site, but a Seychelles-based company named Reservella. The Court rejected this defense as the defendants could not name the current owners or provide any documents proving that the site was sold. It concluded that the three defendants are responsible for the site.

In an appeal of one of the earlier cases against BREIN the defendants hired a lawyer to represent them, but in the full trial the defendants did not show up or defend themselves.

The Amsterdam Court ruled that Fredrik, Gottfrid and Peter will now have to pay penalties of 50,000 euros per day if they don’t comply. However, based on their previous inaction and the claims that they are no longer responsible for The Pirate Bay, it is unlikely that Dutch users will be cut off.

The worrying thing for other BitTorrent site owners is that BREIN might use this case as a precedent in an attempt to get other big torrent sites offline. If that’s the case, the effects of the current judgement might be more severe that they appear at the moment.

In the meantime, BREIN has been anticipating and making the best of The Pirate Bay’s lack of response by starting a lawsuit against Dutch ISP Ziggo, demanding it blocks user access to The Pirate Bay website.

Source: Court Bans The Pirate Bay From The Netherlands

“PirateDate will allow singles to share and assist their social connections in finding potential dates, while getting recommendations and referrals from their friends,” explains the article. “Pirate Date is utilizing Meezoog’s technology to provide users with ‘social proximity’ measurements, that allow people to efficiently filter their cyber connections.”

TechCrunch went on to question why people would want to join this new dating service, once the type of Pirate Bay user is taken into consideration. The torrent site, they argue (probably correctly) is more oriented towards men than women, a sentiment shared by some Digg commenters.

“Registered users: 12,000,000 dudes. 6 women,” notes one. But not all feel this situation is a problem. “lol that’s a better male to female ratio than most dating websites,” adds another.

Another user couldn’t resist taking the apparent file-sharing connection to the next level. “Wow, 50 guys hammering the same girl. I mean, it works for BitTorrent, right?”

But joking aside, are The Pirate Bay crew really diversifying into new markets? Well, not exactly, but they are prepared to benefit from them so they can support their site.

It’s taken a little while, but in 2010 The Pirate Bay brand is one of the most recognizable on the Internet. Many millions of people use the site on a daily basis and hardly a week goes by without it appearing in the news, and not just geeky news either. The Pirate Bay’s brand went global and mainstream a long time ago.

What advertisers and marketeers need are a good way to generate interest and for those who don’t mind being associated with the self-styled baddest site on the planet, The Pirate Bay can generate that in truckloads.

For their part, what The Pirate Bay needs is a steady stream of income to keep the site running. In the main they are achieving that with advertising but it appears they are prepared to consider creative partnerships if those deals make sense.

So, although it may seem that The Pirate Bay crew are launching an online dating site, in reality they’re not. What is actually happening is another company is launching a dating site which uses the branding and marketing power of The Pirate Bay in order to penetrate the market.

Just as PirateShops and PirateChat are linked from the site’s massively-visited homepage, in due time PirateDate will be too (outside of Scandinavia), alongside another familiar product – iPredator. Even though it doesn’t use the site’s branding, this VPN service draws a huge amount of publicity purely because of its connection to, and promotion by, The Pirate Bay.

So while the site clearly has a great use as a file-sharing location, it also has considerable strength with certain advertisers and marketeers. Other companies have also picked up on The Pirate Bay’s popularity and successfully boosted their own profiles – who can possibly forget Hans Pandeya and Global Gaming Factory?

As The Pirate Bay generates value in its brand and the awareness it creates, it also becomes a problem when the inevitable chancers come along. In late 2009, Swedish company Sandryds Handel took the opportunity to hijack The Pirate Bay’s logo with the aim of using it to sell USB drives.

Will the future see The Pirate Bay enforcing protection on its trademarks and other rights, or will anyone be allowed to come in and do as they please with its image? Do the site’s owners even care as long as they’re making enough to keep the site going? Time will tell.

Source: Marketeers Use Pirate Bay Brand To Generate Business

The case went on in the years that followed and two months ago the US District Court of California proposed a permanent injunction that would require isoHunt to maintain a list of banned keywords and remove torrents that match items found on it. This injunction has now become final, meaning that the site has to start filtering or close down in the US.

IsoHunt owner Gary Fung earlier told TorrentFreak that he has no faith in a filtering mechanism either. He said that such a measure “raises serious issues on the balance between freedom of speech, fair use and copyright protectionism,” as it would also filter out many torrent files that are in the public domain, or distributed with the consent of copyright holders.

Last month isoHunt chose to redirect all United States visitors to a Lite version of its website in a final attempt to prevent the search engine from having to close, but this was not enough according to the Court.

The verdict does not necessarily mean that isoHunt will be unavailable in other parts of the world. Gary Fung earlier told TorrentFreak that the ultimate measure would be to block access to visitors from the United States, which would also be sufficient to comply with the Court’s demands.

IsoHunt is not the first torrent site that has been put out of business in the United States by the MPAA. In the summer of 2007 a federal judge ruled that TorrentSpy had to monitor its users in order to create detailed logs of their activities and these were to be handed over to the MPAA.

In a response to this decision, TorrentSpy decided to block access to all US visitors instead which led to a huge drop in traffic. In 2008 TorrentSpy, once the largest torrent site on the Internet, closed its doors for good after it was ordered to pay a 110 million dollar fine.

Fung has to comply with the temporary injunction withing a day. The permanent injunction also holds for isoHunt’s sister sites TorrentBox, Podtropolis and Ed2k-it.

Source: IsoHunt Forced to Shut Down in the US

That meant that for several hours The Pirate Bay, for the first time in many months, was taken offline. An insider at the site told TorrentFreak that people shouldn’t worry, and that the site would soon return.

By start of play this morning that promise had been kept. In most corners of the globe, the world’s most resilient BitTorrent tracker was living up to its name by coming back online with a new and as yet unnamed host.

Now the identity of the site’s ISP has been revealed, and it is a somewhat of a surprising revelation.

“Today, on 18 May, the Swedish Pirate Party took over the delivery of bandwidth to The Pirate Bay,” says the Party’s Rick Falkvinge in a statement.

“We got tired of Hollywood’s cat and mouse game with the Pirate Bay so we decided to offer the site bandwidth,” he adds. “It is time to take the bull by the horns and stand up for what we believe is a legitimate activity.”

The Pirate Party say they will provide bandwidth to the site’s homepage and search engine.

“The Pirate Bay is a search engine, and as such it is not responsible for the results,” notes Falkvinge.

The Party adds the attempts at censoring The Pirate Bay “is an attempt to silence one of today’s most important opinion makers in matters of civil liberties and rights on the web,” adding that it is “nothing less than political censorship, and something that any democratic-minded person must reject.”

With a general election coming up in Sweden, the Pirate Party’s move is also an attempt to reiterate what the Pirate Party stands for.

“It feels great to get an opportunity like this to demonstrate that we put our money were our mouth is,” Falkvinge told TorrentFreak. “We’re not your run-of-the-mill politician who commissions reports and spends 8 hours a day avoiding blame. We’re people committing our own resources and time to the values we believe in.”

“The only thing we have in common with today’s politicians is that you can vote for us, and I hope this demonstrates how we are prepared to take responsibility for civil liberties and the future of the net in a very direct way,” he added.

Meanwhile, a Pirate Bay insider remains vague about the exact location(s) of the Pirate Bay servers, and ensured TorrentFreak that nothing is as it seems. The important thing though, is that the site is fully functional again.

Source: The Pirate Party Becomes The Pirate Bay’s New Host

The injunction, which was granted without an oral hearing, stated that CB3ROB and Managing Director Sven Olaf Kamphuis were now prohibited from connecting The Pirate Bay website and its servers to the Internet.

yesterday Kamphuis officially confirmed receiving the injunction and has decided to stop routing The Pirate Bay’s traffic until his lawyers have carefully read and reviewed the legal documents. This decision has resulted in downtime for the world’s largest BitTorrent site.

A Pirate Bay insider told TorrentFreak that they are not planning to wait for a decision from the Cyberbunker team, and that they’ve already set the backup process in motion which will bring the site back online. The Pirate Bay’s servers are untouched and getting the site up and running only requires the routing (IP-tunnel) to go through another provider.

It may take several hours before this process has been completed and before all ISPs see the new AS-path. TorrentFreak was assured, however, that things will return to normal as soon as possible, probably within hours.

Ever since The Pirate Bay’s servers were raided back in 2006, the operators of the site have taken extreme measures to ensure that there are proper backup mechanisms in place and that the locations of the servers are well concealed. Where the servers are actually located remains a mystery.

Update: The site is still offline after a few hours. The Pirate Bay teams is working hard on getting it back up but there’s no ETA.

Update: The site is back (tpb blog) for most people now. The Pirate Party is the new host.

Source: The Pirate Bay Goes Down Following Legal Pressure