TorrentFreak

Following Mininova and The Pirate Bay, isoHunt is now the third BitTorrent site to enter the list of top 100 most visited websites on the Internet. Together the three sites generate more than a billion pageviews a month and they continue to grow.

A new paper from the University of Washington department of Computer Science and Engineering, has investigated a problem with current DMCA notices and the methods used in dealing with them. It puts further pressure on anti-p2p groups like BayTSP to validate their claims.

A month after the tragic death of it’s founder, Merrin, MVGroup is one step closer to his aim of ‘educating the world via p2p’. Today, EZTV partners MVGroup in sharing documentaries via bittorrent.

Today, one of Mininova’s users will will have the honor to download the 5 billionth torrent, an impressive figure for a site that has only been around for little over three years. If Mininova continues to grow at this rate, we might see the 10 billionth download before the year ends.

Last month, TorrentFreak had the pleasure of interviewing Merrin, the founder of the 150,000 member MVGroup tracker. It is with great sadness that we bring the news that after a long struggle against increasing health problems, Merrin has passed away, aged just 31.

The MPA(A) has announced that it is demanding $15.4 million from the Pirate Bay in the upcoming court case, to cover the damages they suffered from 4 movies and 13 TV-episodes that were made available via the popular BitTorrent tracker.

The legality of BitTorrent sites has always been highly debated. As of today, no court has ever ruled that a website offering .torrent links is legal or not. This might change soon, as isoHunt and the MPAA once again clash in court.

Over six months have passed since the popular private BitTorrent tracker OiNK was raided in a joint effort by Dutch and British law enforcement. Today, the bail date for OiNK admin Alan Ellis has been extended for the third time, now until the 1st of July.

The BitTorrent popularity explosion is still underway, with some torrent sites now amongst the most visited sites, anywhere on the web. One of those, Mininova, now gets well over half a billion page views a month and is now 100% bigger than it was this time last year. And the site is still growing.

The popular BitTorrent site mininova has been down for a few hours due to hardware issues. It is expected that the downtime will continue for several hours, which puts other BitTorrent sites under pressure.

Authors are becoming less concerned with piracy, and having pirated copies of their books listed on BitTorrent sites such as The Pirate Bay is even considered to be an honor to some. Particularly for book authors, piracy seems to be a useful promotional tool, rather than a threat.