The advanced search capabilities and outstanding usability makes it without a doubt one of the best YouTube jukeboxes around. One of the true gems is the Billboard “timetravel” feature, allowing users to pull up the Billboard chart for any week since 1964 and listen to the tracks that were leading the charts then.

Tubeify is an idea from Tomas Isdal, a University of Washington PhD student who TorrentFreak readers may remember from BitTorrent related research projects such as OneSwarm and the DMCA printer study. However, Tubeify is not a research project, but one that aims to turn YouTube into a decent music player.

“I came up with the idea roughly a year ago when YouTube signed an agreement with Time Warner, which meant that they now have license agreements with the “Big 4″ labels,” Tomas Isdal told TorrentFreak. “At the same time I noticed that I increasingly used YouTube for music listening, but that the YouTube interface really wasn’t what I wanted.”

Isdal told us that, among other things, he was annoyed by several issues on YouTube including the fact that videos stop when you search for another song, that many duplicate clips appear in the search results, and that the playlist has poor functionality. The upside, however, is that YouTube has a huge archive of music with many (un)licensed tracks.

So, Isdal took up the challenge to come up with a better YouTube player, with help from Billboard and Last.fm.

“In Tubeify I tried to make it feel more like a traditional desktop music player, think iTunes or Spotify, but still web-based so you can use it anywhere. Then I fixed the annoying parts of YouTube and added stuff that I always wanted in a music player,” he said. The result is a pretty useful mashup of Last.fm, Billboard and YouTube.

Tubeify’s searching is handled by the Last.fm api, and unlike on YouTube the current track will continue to play while searching. Search results are treated as “lazy playlists” which can be “pinned” to the sidebar for easy access later. Adding songs to playlists and the play queue is also pretty easy with full drag and drop support.

Another feature that beats most existing services is that it allows users to share playlists with friends. Playlist links can be shared anywhere – just paste the link on Twitter, Facebook or in an email and your friends will have instant access to it.

Another great feature of Tubeify are the top charts that are included, and the ability to pull up charts from previous years, all the way back to 1964. This functionality is powered by Billboard’s API and allows users check out, and play, what was topping the charts decades ago.

Although Tubeify is obviously not the best music listening experience there is, it is one of the only music video Jukeboxes that lets you search for and play millions of tracks instantly. If anything, it beats using the traditional YouTube interface.

Tubeify was kind enough to exclusively share an unlimited amount of invites for TorrentFreak users, that will be handed out for as long as the server holds up. You can get your invite here (should arrive in a few minutes), no strings attached. No user account or password is needed either, but Tubeify does require a Facebook or Google account, to allow users to login securely.

Source: Tubeify: A ‘Historic’ Mashup of Last.fm, Billboard and YouTube

The name Sifonr originates from the word ‘siphon’ which is a U-shaped tube – a YouTube. The service uses the latest P2P capabilities of Adobe’s Flash and is the first site to really show off what it can do for real-time communication and file-sharing. It is not going to be any competition for torrent sites, but the innovative use of P2P technology makes it definitely worth a mention on TorrentFreak.

Aside from video and text chatting, Sifonr allows users to share files in real-time. To top it off the Flash-based Sifons can be embedded just as easily as a YouTube video, so people can post them to Facebook or their blogs (styleable widgets are available) to provide a direct communication channel or discussion platform.

TorrentFreak spoke to Floze, the founder of the site, who sees Sifonr as a potential next generation communication tool.

“Sifonr is about sharing your thoughts and ideas, kinda like on YouTube, only in a more direct and more involved way. It’s not supposed to be another spin-off of some video or live-chat portal, I rather see it as a new way of communication.”

“For me it means the simple and logical ‘next step’ of today’s web-interaction, even if it turns out to be ‘only’ an interesting social experiment in the end,” Floze says. “The borders between author and reader, artist and beholder, broadcaster and consumer have diminished ever since I can remember. Now with Sifonr you are always both at the same time. Just passively enjoy it, or be an active part of it.”

In theory, thousands of people can join and share files in a single Sifon, but this of course will make the video streaming part pretty much unusable. Since the service has no real competitors it will be interesting to see how the public decides to use it. One feature that works well with multiple people is the file-sharing part. Floze told TorrentFreak that adding file-sharing support seemed only logical since the video and audio streaming is P2P based as well.

“File-sharing in a Sifon works pretty much like in any file sharing software – you load (seed) the file, it gets chopped into chunks of data, others get notified of its presence, and the downloaded pieces are immediately shared between peers and put back together when completed. Once a file is loaded into a Sifon, it is available as long as one healthy seeder.”

“The major limitation Adobe put on sharing is that, for security reasons, all shared data needs to be loaded into the system memory instead of being read and written from disc. The ‘official’ limit is supposed to be at 100MB per shared file, but I see no reason why more shouldn’t work if the RAM is sufficient. There shouldn’t be anything keeping you from sharing larger files, at least for stuff up to around 1GB,” Floze explained.

Any type of file can be shared in a Sifon, but FLV (flash video) files that are encoded with the latest magic h.264 and AC3 get a special treatment. These files are played directly and instantly in the Sifon as soon as sufficient data is buffered. Instant MP3 playing is another feature that is currently on the roadmap and will be implemented in the near future.

“I only created a piece of software that I thought was kind of missing, and that I’d use myself because I think it is fun. I hope that people use it to do something productive and enjoyable, though unfortunately I have seen many wanking dicks too [which receive an instant ban from sifonr.com] from people who think it’s all another Chatroulette clone. I hope it’s more than that,” Floze told TorrentFreak.

People who’re interested in trying Sifonr can start their own Sifon in just a few clicks (language can be set to English). The service works as advertised but people should keep in mind that it’s still in startup mode, and caution is advised while browsing Sifons as there’s no 24/7 flesh patrol yet. Adobe Flash Player 10.1 is a requirement as the P2P technology wasn’t implemented in earlier versions.

Source: Sifonr: File-Sharing and P2P Video Chat Made Easy

Wikipedia (and indeed the whole Wikimedia Foundation) just announced that it has started to use BitTorrent to stream its videos. The foundation is using Swarmplayer from P2P-Next to try and cut down on bandwidth costs.

The Wikimedia Foundation is concerned about bandwidth costs, as video becomes more prevalent on their various project sites (like News, and Quotes and the more famous Wikipedia project). In an announcement this week the foundation stated: “Eventually bandwidth costs could saturate the foundation budget or leave less resources for other projects and programs. For this reason it is important to start exploring and experimenting with future content distribution platforms and partnerships.”

The system set up by Wikipedia uses a combination of webseeds and BitTorrent peers to spread the load. High priority pieces (like the start of the video) are pulled via more traditional HTTP sources, while later in the video where the data is of a lower priority it comes via the BitTorrent protocol. The process is described by P2Pnext in the following diagram;

Source - P2P Next

“I think it’s important as a technology and something that needs exploring,” Michael Dale, Kaltura Open Media Developer and Wikimedia admin told TorrentFreak. The 6000-or-so videos on the Wikimedia servers are all set to use the technology, as will any new ones that are added.

Currently, Swarmplayer is only available as a plugin for Firefox (3.x, it doesn’t work well with the version 4 betas). An Internet Explorer plug-in will be available within the next day or two and a Chrome plugin is planned as well, we are assured. Not so good news for the Opera and Safari users though, as there is no plugin currently planned for them. However, people are free to create their own as the code is open source. “We’re just counting on one hardcore Opera user to port it to Opera,” Dr Pouwelse of P2P-Next told TorrentFreak.

“This is another step in strengthening Web TV,” Pouwelse continued. “The long-term goal is to offer more choice, provide higher quality and increased reliability compared to traditional TV technology.”

Source: Wikipedia Adds BitTorrent Powered Video Streaming

Early February Twitter attributed a phishing attack to an unnamed torrent site script, blaming a torrent site developer for intentionally installing backdoors into his code. The backdoor was then allegedly used to steal passwords and hijack Twitter accounts.

A few weeks later Twitter itself called in the help of BitTorrent to optimize the site’s backend. With BitTorrent, Twitter is planning to distribute files faster and more efficiently, saving time and precious resources and improving the scalability of its operation.

It is great to see that Twitter recognizes the value of BitTorrent since many BitTorrent sites also appreciate and use Twitter’s service to communicate with followers. Last week, however, two torrent sites were suspended by Twitter without prior notice.

YourBitTorrent and TorrentSurf both ‘lost’ their accounts and followers. The reason cited by Twitter was ‘abuse’ but no further details were given. The owner of yourBitTorrent told TorrentFreak that he contacted Twitter over a week ago to find out more, but he hasn’t heard back from them yet.

Although it’s easy to jump to the conclusion that the sites have been suspended for copyright related issues, another plausible explanation is that the mass tweets of links to torrent files were seen as a violation of Twitter’s terms of service.

“If your updates consist mainly of links, and not personal updates,” say Twitter, your account could be suspended for spamming. Since both sites were doing just this, this mass posting might have triggered the suspension. If this is indeed the case, other accounts including nearly all popular news feeds are at risk as well.

It seems unlikely that simply being torrent-related makes an account a target for suspension. The account of @EZTV which also lists thousands of torrents, and the highly resourceful @isoHunt and @TorrentFreak are still up and running.

Source: Twitter Suspends Accounts of Torrent Sites

BitTorrent’s leading role can be partly attributed to its technical superiority, but there are other, perhaps even more defining factors that have propelled BitTorrent’s popularity. One could argue that Google has been one of the greatest contributers to its success.

Unlike competing filesharing applications, BitTorrent has a dominant presence in search engine results. A site like isoHunt for example, has 13,500,000 million indexed pages on Google and The Pirate Bay has 3,760,000. All public torrent sites combined, there are probably over a billion torrent pages indexed by Google alone.

It is needless to say that this overwhelming web presence has created a huge advantage for BitTorrent compared to P2P applications such as Limewire, that mostly rely on searches within the application. Over the years, millions of people have been introduced to BitTorrent through search engines like Google.

We’re now at a point where torrent sites top the search results for nearly search phrases related to downloading movies and music. For example, a Google search for “Shutter Island download” returns 6 torrent sites in the top 10 results and no legal authorized download options. The same is true for nearly all similar searches.

While Google and other search engines have helped BitTorrent popularity to a great extent, this could not have been possible without the people who developed the torrent indexes in the first place. That is where another key aspect of BitTorrent’s popularity, which also ties into the web-based nature, plays an essential role. Money.

BitTorrent sites can generate some serious revenue, enough to sustain the site and make a decent living. In general, ad rates per impression are very low, but thanks to the huge amounts of traffic it quickly adds up. This money aspect has made it possible for sites to thrive, and has also lured many gold diggers into starting a torrent site over the years.

Initially, most torrent sites were operated by students or hobbyists with a passion for filesharing and coding. Most of the larger sites today started out that way, but in the years that followed they were joined by groups of people that are mainly interested in the cash, not so much in offering a good service to their users.

Despite this darker side, the possibility to monetize torrent sites has been essential to the success and the survival of BitTorrent. Without a return on investment, nobody would spend tens of thousands of dollars each month to keep a large site or tracker online.

All in all it is fair to say that BitTorrent is as popular as it is right now simply because it’s web-based and findable through search engines. Although we don’t have any numbers to back it up, it would not be an outrageous claim to say that most of the people who use BitTorrent today were introduced to it through a Google search.

Source: Why Google Made BitTorrent a Success

Musicians and movie makers can share their work with the rest of the world with very little investment, something that was impossible little over a decade ago. Similarly, weblogs are able to provide news and information much faster than old media at relatively low costs.

The Internet has brought us a tool to share and consume content, but up until now there has been no really easy way for the consuming side to reward content producers. Flattr, a new venture started by The Pirate Bay’s former spokesman Peter Sunde, opts to change this.

Flattr has been in development since 2007 and finally opened up in Beta this week. It is best described as a mashup between social content discovery sites such as Digg, Reddit and Stumbleupon, and an online payment service like Paypal.

“It’s a new revenue stream for people who share their content! It’s a combination of a donation system and a quality list of interesting content online,” said Peter Sunde describing the service to TorrentFreak.

Users who join the site can use it to discover interesting articles, great music and useful software, like on the aforementioned social discovery sites. If they see something they like they can give it a thumbs up, which is nothing new either.

The innovative part is that users of Flattr set a monthly budget they are willing to donate each month to the content they like. This can be as low as $2, or whatever the user is willing to share. At the end of the month the money is shared between the creators of the content they liked, who are all Flattr users as well.

In other words, Flattr allows consumers to flatter content producers for a flat-rate fee, and offers a revenue stream to those who create and share content.

The idea behind Flattr is innovative, but for the service to be a success the user base has to be significant. If Sunde and friends succeed in that they have an ideal solution to pay off the people who share their work for free.

Those who want to give Flattr a try can sign up for a Beta invite.

Source: Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde Starts Money Sharing Site

File-sharers on the other hand haven’t been sitting still either, as many have chosen to negate these initiatives by going anonymous.

Users of BitTorrent and other file-sharing networks have increasingly turned to solutions that hide their identities from the outside world, rendering these new anti-piracy initiatives useless. The IPREDator service from the founders of The Pirate Bay opened up to the public this week, and is undoubtedly the most talked about newcomer in this business.

With a beta launch coinciding with the introduction of the controversial IPRED law in Sweden, the service promised to offer users an anonymous connection to the Internet. IPRED gave the copyright holders increased power to track down pirates, and with the launch of IPREDator the creators neutralized this new ‘threat’.

Much like many other comparable VPN services, Ipredator allows users to connect to the Internet while hiding their own IP-address. The interest in services like this is booming. In Sweden alone, an estimated 500,000 Internet subscribers are already hiding their identities online, and that number is expected to rapidly grow in the new year.

Ipredator is currently using the same platform as several other VPN franchises including Relakks, which means it’s not really anything we haven’t seen before. The servers are maintained and provided by Pirate Bay affiliates though, which may be more trustworthy to the average BitTorrent user than a random VPN provider.

That aside, we were told by former Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde that contrary to what the legal page states, no logs of any kind are kept by Ipredator. The text that is in there is a left over from the standard template they got from the provider of the VPN platform.

And, according to Sunde, there will soon be even more advantages and added security to Ipredator.

While Ipredator owes its name to the IPRED legislation, the team behind it is also working to crush the Swedish wiretapping law (FRA) that was introduced earlier. Sunde explained in a recent writeup how they are planning to not only encrypt the connection between individual users and the VPN, but also the entire stream of outgoing data from the VPN until it has passed Sweden’s borders.

This will make it practically impossible for the Government to decrypt the data and find out what’s being sent. “The only thing they can do is to make it illegal to encrypt,” Sunde told TorrentFreak.

“People don’t understand why I want to encrypt the traffic, since they’re already hidden when they connect to our system. But they must understand that the same traffic can be found unencrypted, traveling across borders again,” Sunde told TorrentFreak. “Also, using a VPN outside of Sweden is bad for Swedes, since it will raise a suspicion flag at FRA,” he added.

Although these wiretap-busting plans haven’t been implemented yet, Ipredator does already offer a secure VPN connection. The service guarantees that anti-piracy outfits or even your ISP will be unable to record or spy on your BitTorrent downloads. Ipredator has just opened its doors to the public for those who did make the beta and are interested in giving it a try.

Source: Pirate Bay’s Ipredator VPN Opens To The Public

Early in 2008, the project was revived by Radical Software and one year later, Wyzo 3 is alive and kicking. The most recent Wyzo release is based on the latest Firefox 3 core, but with it comes with a brand new “chrome like” theme and a wide range of proprietary extensions.

The new version of FireTorrent has been completely rewritten and provides integrated support for torrent downloads. Downloading torrents with Wyzo is as simple as grabbing any other file and the speeds are comparable to most standalone BitTorrent clients. FireTorrent is also available as a Firefox extension and currently has 25,000 active daily users.

Another new extension that comes with the browser, FireDownload, provides multi-threaded acceleration to all regular http downloads. FireTray, a minimize to tray feature, allows all downloads to continue while the browser sits in the tray.

Wyzo also includes some other popular extensions such as Cooliris to enhance the users’ browsing experience. A full list of features can be found at the Wyzo site.

The latest version of the ‘BitTorrent browser’ is a great improvement and shows Radical Software mean business with Wyzo. TorrentFreak was told that here are other proprietary extensions in the development pipeline and Wyzo hopes to gain users by offering a rich media browsing experience.

Disclaimer: Wyzo is one of our sponsors. It’s always good to declare such things or you end up accused of being biased ;-)

Source: Wyzo 3, The BitTorrent Web Browser

Sure, we could make fun of these people. Or we could help them with an easy way to download torrents without having to know about the pros and cons of enabling DHT in uTorrent. Littleshoot decided to try the latter approach with a new BitTorrent browser plug-in that is being unveiled today.

Littleshoot’s BitTorrent plug-in has been in the making for quite some time now. The company behind it was founded by the former Limewire developer Adam Fisk who initially set out to develop an application for sharing data within a circle of friends. Littleshoot eventually changed directions towards general purpose, browser-based P2P and finally launched last November, albeit without BitTorrent integration.

The plug-in’s first iteration looked a little like a solution that didn’t really know which problem it wanted to solve. Littleshoot offered Gnutella downloads through your browser as well as the capability of publishing data on a separate P2P network that is based on the open source SIP protocol. Both were great in theory, but people hardly shared any data via Littleshoot, and when it comes to media sharing Gnutella isn’t exactly the first choice anymore either.

Enter BitTorrent. Fisk teamed up with Julian Cain for this release, who previously developed the Mac torrent client BitRocket as well as Kazaa’s never-released OS X client and who has also been involved in a bunch of other P2P projects over the years. Their ambitious goal is to transform Littleshoot into something like the Flash player of the BitTorrent world. Install it once, then forget about it, and it will work with any content, on any site.

I’ve had a chance to test multiple builds of the client over the last couple of weeks, and I must say Littleshoot has come a long way towards achieving this goal. Install the client, visit any torrent site, click on a torrent download link – and Littleshoot starts do download the files in question right within your browser on a Web 2.0-ish download page. The client even automatically starts a Flash-based audio player if you download an MP3 file, and files can be easily forwarded through Twitter, Facebook and other social networks.

It also offers a search page that makes it possible to simultaneously search isoHunt, Youtube, Flickr, Yahoo Video and the Littleshoot P2P network, or any subset of these services. This search page may not be that useful to advanced users that prefer sites other than Isohunt, but again, it’s a great feature for beginners.

Littleshoot doesn’t come with any configurable options at this time. All data is saved in a default download directory, and the client seeds files indefinitely. However, Fisk told me that future versions of Littleshoot will offer the option to shut down the client after a certain ratio is reached. The current download page already offers details about your ratio as well as your up-and download rates. Speaking of future changes: Littleshoot is still clearly in beta stage. The Windows version seemed especially rocky in earlier builds that I got to test, but most things seem to be working when it comes to the final version that has been made available today.

So what’s the final verdict? Littleshoot may still have some room for improvement, but it’s definitely promising. Not only because this is the first BitTorrent client your mom will be able to use, but also because the Littleshoot team definitely has its eyes set on bigger goals.

One of the plans for future releases is an SDK that will make it possible for website owners to offload the distribution of any file to Littleshoot. Just drop a few lines of Javascript in your blog, and your MP3 file will be available as a P2P download. Says Fisk: “If a site relies on P2P services, they’ll display an “install plugin” window, just like the user sees when they don’t have Flash on sites that require it.” Kinda makes you wonder how long it will take for a torrent site to integrate something like this for all of its files.

The new version of Littleshoot is currently available on this beta page and will launch on the Littleshoot home page later today.

—

Guest author Janko Roettgers is a Los Angeles-based journalist. He is also the editor of P2P Blog.

Source: Littleshoot Adds BitTorrent Capabilities to Any Browser

ALIS reached private agreements with the admins of ‘xvoom’ and ‘MYakuza’, under which the sites would be closed and compensation paid.

“The feeling is very difficult. A website that I have put 2.5 years of work into was closed”, said the owner of ‘mYakuza’, who didn’t hire a legal team. “Links to illegal films were never available on the website but I preferred not to destroy my life and decided to shut it down completely. They have more lawyers and money. We came out lucky.”

Effi Teva, the admin of ‘Donkey’ wasn’t included in the settlement and legal procedures against him have begun.

Last Wednesday, the district court in Haifa, Israel, ordered the permanent closure of the movie and TV subtitling sites donkey.co.il and sratim.co.il.

The court decided that the sites infringed copyrights by offering links to unauthorized subtitles and Judge Gideon Ginat ruled that the defendant, Effi Teva, should pay compensation of 160,000 shekels to ALIS and various filmmakers, which includes the lawyers’ fee of 60,000 shekels.

Effi Teva didn’t give any testimony. The previous hearing in the case took place in 2007, but Teva didn’t show up then either, instead asking the plaintiff’s lawyer to request an extension.

Judge Ginat says that Teva requested postponements numerous times. “I want to make it clear”, said the judge, “that I said in the last meeting to those present that I won’t be able to keep postponing the dates of the hearing.”

Judge Ginat criticized the behavior of the defendant and his lawyer and said, “It goes without saying that the defendant and his proxy cannot dictate the hearing date in a last minute phone call.”

Lawyer Sarah Prazanti, who represents movie anti-piracy outfit ALIS said that the judge refused to accept the request to postponed the hearing, and gave the verdict. Effi Teva did not comment on the matter.

In France this week, Warner has been taking action of its own against subtitling sites. It says that such sites “make intellectual property available to the public without authorization,” such as foreign translations of Warner productions. “This,” says Warner in threats to various subtitling sites, “will affect your liability and exposes you to possible civil lawsuits.”

One site under threat is ‘Frigorifix’, which appears to be taking the threat seriously. “Never, until now have we had threats from rights holders that are as real and immediate as the ones we received yesterday.”

“Our names and addresses are listed with our registrar and web host,” said a representative of the site, “and we can not afford to undergo a judicial process.”

It is believed that members of the site will continue to translate, but no subtitles will be available from the site itself.

Earlier this month we reported on the problems faced by Brazilian sub-site Legendas.tv after anti-piracy action, but it quickly bounced back.

Thanks go to Q-subs translator ‘Godfather’

Source: Anti-Piracy Action Closes Yet More Fansub Sites

Earlier this month a code of practice was drafted by the copyright holders and ISPs which should outline the manner in which the new Section 92 ’3 Strikes’ regime should be handled by the ISPs. However, the parties involved couldn’t agree on the content of the code and Prime Minister John Key has just announced that the law has been delayed until a workable solution can be found. If the parties involved can’t reach an agreement, the law might be changed, he noted.

Most of the opposition is worried about the “Guilty Upon Accusation’ part of the law, and rightly so. Regular readers know how shoddy anti-piracy groups are at accurate take-down notices, either they’re for stuff that you can share, never had, or are incapable of having.

Last week, many people blacked out their profile images on social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook, and today several bloggers announced a blackout of their entire website. The protest is being spearheaded by Creative Freedom, which was formed two months ago in response to this law – and not without success.

The protest caught the eye of many, including some celebrities. Stephen Fry, author of 7 novels, and a prolific screenwriter, actor, and presenter, is supporting the cause. “My picture is blacked out for good reason,” he twittered last week. The Quite Interesting Fry, ranked second most popular by twitterholic, was one of the first to black out his profile picture.

For now the protests have resulted in a delay of the law, perhaps not directly, but we are pretty certain that it would have been in effect already without all the opposition.

Source: Kiwis Delay Draconian File-Sharing Law

The ViO converter reduces AVI, MPEG, MP4, WMV and others videos to 20% of its original size without any reduction in image quality, and claims to do it faster than any other converter. The tool is completely free and comes with pre-configured settings for the most wisely used mobile devices, including the iPod, iPhone and BlackBerry.

The converter can be downloaded for free, but strangely enough a .torrent is not available. The ViO website is currently accessible at a subdomain of The Pirate Bay, complete with a nifty marketing pitch claiming that “ViO proprietary compression delivers better video quality, higher resolution and smaller file sizes, than anything else on the market today.”

When ViO is installed there is an optional toolbar that can be installed with it. The application itself is easy to use, and does indeed a good (and fast) job at converting different video files we’ve tried. If this takes off, it might even reduce the number of pirated downloads of some of the commercial alternatives.

Update: Some readers noted that ViO violates the GPL for at least 2 projects (1 and 2), The Pirate Bay will put the source online to resolve this issue.

Source: The Pirate Bay Launches Free Mobile Video Converter

FireTorrent can be especially useful for people who only use BitTorrent sporadically, those new to BitTorrent, or users who don’t need the advanced features most standalone clients offer. The add-on uses the popular libtorrent library and fully integrates into the native download manager of Firefox.

Since it’s an alpha release, there are no options or preferences to configure yet. The official release, however, will include adjustable download and upload limits and several other basic configurable settings. Completed downloads will currently be stored in the desktop folder, this can be changed in the beta release that will come out in a few weeks.

Firefox 3.0 or greater is required to get the add-on to work properly. At the moment, the upload speed is capped at 15kB/s. This is for the alpha release only, but since BitTorrent is based on ‘tit-for-tat’ sharing, it doesn’t really help to get the downloads up to full speed. That aside, the add-on works just fine, and download speeds on most connections are comparable to clients such as uTorrent and Vuze.

FireTorrent is also included with Wyzo, the BitTorrent browser (one of our sponsors) which is based on Firefox. A new alpha of Wyzo is also being tested at the moment, and will be released in the first week of January. FireTorrent is invite only at the moment, but there is an easy way to get around that, for those who want to give it a try.

Source: FireTorrent Brings BitTorrent to Firefox

Rather than limited action against one site, the picture emerging today shows a concerted attempt by the police to take down many other Bulgarian trackers, both those hosted in their home country and others hosted elsewhere. A special police unit usually dedicated to fighting organized crime recently starting working to identify the administrators of the sites. Once identified, the police set about making contact with them, and each was invited to a meeting.

At the meeting the administrators were ordered to shut down the sites. There were no explanations as to why they should, or which laws were being put into effect, but the order was clear – shut down the sites or the police will come and take the servers. Below is a rundown of sites that are currently affected, but we can’t confirm yet that all of these administrators were actually at the meetings.

ArenaBG, at one stage thought to be one of the larger European trackers, currently displays the message, “Dear user, We were forced to close our website.” The site was hosted at LeaseWeb in The Netherlands. However, the site has an alternative URL at 0.arenabg.com and appears to be setting up a new open tracker, which can be found at free.arenabg.com.

With 120,000 users, P2PBG is a pretty significant site. Although still visible, the site has been ordered by the police to cease tracking torrents. P2PBG is hosted in Bulgaria.

The MastersTB tracker has disappeared. AvatarBG, another Bulgarian tracker is currently down, but links on the homepage show a forum and alternative domain available elsewhere.

A site which intends to close altogether is Torrent-BG. There is no longer a torrent section on the site and the site owner says he will even give away the domain to a worthwhile new owner. Another site set to disappear is WordBG, and the administrators of Zarta.org have announced that the site will no longer have a BitTorrent tracker, and that it will go in a new direction. All sites were hosted in Bulgaria.

Currently, Bulgaria’s largest BitTorrent tracker Zamunda.net is fully operational. It has around 500,000 members with a tracker serving up to a peak of 1.8 million peers.

If any reader has additional information on this developing story, please contact us in confidence.

Source: Police Threats Close Many BitTorrent Sites

That’s where many lawyers, such as Davenport Lyons can make a tidy profit. As has happened in some of the cases they are involved with, many will admit wrongdoing, and even pay ‘damages’ where no actions (wrong or otherwise) have occurred. It has led to a general feeling that a claim of copyright infringement by a large powerful company will get the actions they desire, irrespective of facts, through fear of litigation. This was the situation last week, when Toyota ordered wallpaper site Desktop Nexus to remove all images featuring Toyota vehicles, even those with copyright belonging to others.

However, sometimes a company can be pressured into accepting mistakes, and this is the case here. With a large amount of negative publicity (a selection of which can be found on DesktopNexus’ blog) Toyota today contacted TorrentFreak and DesktopNexus, expressing their apologies for the incident.

From: Scott DeYager
Date: Wed, Nov 19, 2008 at 12:52 AM
Subject: Desktopnexus Toyota Wallpapers
To: tips@torrentfreak.com

Dear Torrentfreak.com,

The recent request Toyota made to have certain photos of Toyota vehicles removed from the public wallpaper site, DesktopNexus, was the result of an internal miscommunication.

To protect the legal rights and agreements we have with the photographers we hire, we ask that the photographs not be used for direct consumer advertising, sales brochures and the like.

If people wish to post their own photos of one of their own vehicles, that’s their right. In fact, we’re pleased that people would want to show their Toyota vehicles to the world. So have at it. Consider the wallpapers on DesktopNexus to be fair game for personal use.

Please let your readers know that we offer a sincere apology to the DesktopNexus site and its users for any inconvenience or disruption this miscommunication may have caused.

Thanks for your understanding,

Scott DeYager
Toyota Motor Sales, U.S.A., Inc.
Corporate Communications

DesktopNexus told TorrentFreak that they will be releasing a statement on this shortly.

Source: Toyota Admits Wrongdoing in Wallpaper Case

This ‘Way’ is probably not communicated to its lawyers in great detail, which is why Desktopnexus, a site that provides desktop backgrounds, has been contacted by them. In perhaps one of the most wildly arrogant demands in DMCA history, Toyota’s lawyers are demanding the withdrawal of all wallpapers that feature a Toyota, Scion, or Lexus. The site’s owner, Harry Maugans contacted Toyota to clarify. He was told that all images featuring Toyota vehicles should be removed, even images with copyright belonging to others.

Speaking to TorrentFreak, Maugans said: “Their lawyer, Garrett Biggs, told us that if we wanted them to specifically identify their images, we would have to pay for them to do so”. Maugans also said he was afraid it would come to a lawsuit, fearing the attrition effect that is so common now in copyright disputes. Toyota, with cash assets of over $23Billion can surely afford to spin out the legal costs in an attempt to bankrupt the site – the same strategy that is often used to ‘encourage‘ a settlement in RIAA cases.

Yet, Toyota has also been cagey. These demands have not been sent in the form of a DMCA notice. While sending such a notice would require the takedown, it also requires that the person sending the notice legally certify that they are legal representatives for the copyright holders at issue. Making a false statement is ‘punishable under penalty of perjury‘, which is not taken lightly in US courts.

That copyright holders should be properly identified is also not lost on Mr. Maugans. “What if Toyota comes back and says “yes, we own the copyright to all of those [Toyota images on site]“. How can we know if they’re lying to get us to take them all down? How can we prove they do in fact own the copyrights on those wallpapers? Some are very hard to believe, such as this which looks more like Fan Art than a professionally designed marketing photo. Or this one which they’re claiming they own, but it has a “Created by:” line at the bottom by someone who doesn’t seem to have any connection to the actual Toyota company.”

The ‘huh what?’ value of Toyota’s position has been noticed by others as well. On the FreeCulture News site, one comment questions the action saying “What are they trying to accomplish by attacking free advertising?” Indeed, this is what it comes down to. Instead of embracing free advertising and word of mouth, Toyota seems desperate to control and micromanage every aspect of it’s publicity.

At the end of the day, the best question is that asked by Mr Maugans, “Has DMCA abuse really gotten this bad?”

At the time of press, Toyota Inc. did not respond to requests for comment.

Thanks to Conley at FCnews for the tip

Source: Toyota Claims Ownership of Fan Wallpapers

This blend of ‘education’ backed up by legal action has caused controversy for FAST. The outfit is known to track down people who use company Internet connections to share files. FAST then approaches the company with what many consider to be veiled threats of being raided, audited and/or prosecuted. If the company capitulates, FAST introduces the customer to the ‘commercial arm’ of their ‘non-profit’ outfit which goes about aggressively selling software and licenses to ensure the target company ‘complies’. FAST’s approach is not popular, with a lawyer claiming that FAST actually undermines work to protect copyrights. Many companies that have sought legal advice after being contacted by FAST have been advised by their lawyers not to speak with them.

However, FAST is not limiting itself to putting pressure on businesses, it wants to go after individuals too. FAST (or The Federation as it likes to be known), has just responded to the Department for Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform’s (BERR) ‘Consultation on Legislative Options To Address Illicit Peer-to-peer File Sharing‘, which was launched in July 2008. In a nutshell, this consultation was designed to find a way for ISPs and rights holders to reach agreement on what to do about illicit file-sharing, via “3 strikes” or another mechanism.

Of course, this hasn’t been plain sailing for them, since ISPs don’t really want to start harassing their customers at the behest of copyright lobbyists. FAST CEO John Lovelock clearly believes that a voluntary agreement is unlikely: “A voluntary approach would be the easiest solution but experience has shown that such an approach may well not work, as it is dependent on a full consensus being achieved; to date this has not been successful, despite ongoing dialogue between rights holders and ISPs.”

The fact that ISPs don’t want to go after their own customers isn’t lost on Lovelock, who says that government regulation is ‘inevitable’, since this will “take the decision out of the hands of the ISPs themselves.” He also says that he feels that ISPs should not be able to ‘opt-out’ of any scheme, since this would “undermine the entire arrangement”.

Lovelock is calling for “political will” to force ISPs to take action against illicit file-sharing, whilst conveniently skipping over the legal difficulties this would cause. ISPs are not responsible for the actions of their users and time and time again they have refused to become ‘Internet Police’, and quite rightly so. In the meantime, trying to force ISPs to do things against their will, or taking steps to ensure that they are side-stepped in the decision making process, isn’t going to be appreciated.

More worrying is how organizations like FAST feel that somehow they should be able to shortcut, bypass or change the law to suit their needs. “One argument,” said Lovelock, “is that personal data relating to a given IP-address may be given to the rights holder on request, without a court order being needed, which is arguably gold plating.”

Sure, let’s just scrap due process and the Data Protection Act. They just complicate things.

Source: Anti-Piracy Group Hints at Disclosure “On Demand”

With VIPeers this might change, since it is one of the few sites that makes it really easy to share files over BitTorrent. The service eliminates the need to create a .torrent file, add trackers, and seed the file – stuff people often find cumbersome. All you need to do is use the web based uploader, point to the file you want to share on your computer, and VIPeers takes care of the rest.

The whole process works very intuitively, and even people who have never heard of trackers, seeds or peers will be able use it without running into trouble. When the file has been uploaded to VIPeers, it will show a list of sharing options, including a direct link to the .torrent file. You can send this link to the people you want to share the file with, or upload the torrent file to any other BitTorrent site if you don’t mind making it public.

In addition, VIPeers offers “widgets” for blogs, forums and other websites to make it even more easy to share files. The other option is to include a link to the download page, which also has a direct download link, and a link to download it via Podmailing.

VIPeers’ Louis Choquel told TorrentFreak that he has seen the highest speed with BitTorrent downloads, especially when more people are downloading the file. Another advantage of using BitTorrent is that the torrent can live on indefinitely. “The duration of hosting is limited to a maximum of 3 months. But after that, we continue tracking the torrent so that the swarm can live on and enable people to continue downloading it, even though it’s not on our server anymore,” Choquel said.

Overall I would say that VIPeers has succeeded in making BitTorrent more accessible as a publishing tool, and a 5 GB limit is much more than most of the competition offers. Also, not having to seed a file can be very convenient. The only downside to the service is that you’ll have to sign up in order to upload files. VIPeers is currently invite only, but TorrentFreak readers can sign up with the invite code TORRENTFREAK888.

Source: VIPeers Intoduces Free BitTorrent Hosting

Without a doubt, it is the most successful “checked content” project based on the English Wikipedia, used by hundreds of schools in first and third world countries. The project was originally aimed at schools in developing countries, but because of the high quality articles – all based around the UK curriculum with an absence of adult content – it is often used on intranets in first world schools too.

To save on resources, Wikipedia for schools is only available online via BitTorrent, which practically reduces the charity’s distribution costs to zero. SOS Children CEO Andrew Cates, who is a Wikipedia administrator himself, said that they have no other choice than to use BitTorrent, since the 2.9 GB download would crush their server.

“BitTorrent was a bit disappointing in that it got us the only substantial criticisms we received online,” Cates said in an interview with Wikinews. “A lot of people find it too much effort to use. However for the period we offered a straight http: download we had huge problems with spiders eating vast bandwidth.”

“As per last year therefore our main two channels will be free download by BitTorrent and mailing the DVDs free all over the world. At a pinch we will (as before) put straight copies up for individuals who cannot get it any other way, and we have some copies on memory sticks for on distributors,” Cates added.

The .torrent file is available for download on the SOS Children’s Villages website. For those who don’t want to install a BitTorrent client, the DVD can also be downloaded from any web browser with BitLet.

A final word of advice from SOS Children’s Villages: “It helps our charity if you keep µTorrent running after your download is finished.”

Source: Wikipedia DVD Released on BitTorrent

One of the prime examples is best-selling author Paulo Coelho, who said he sold thousands of extra books because he pirated his own books. “Sharing is part of the human condition. A person who does not share is not only selfish, but bitter and alone,” Coelho told TorrentFreak in a follow up interview, explaining why he decided to share his books for free.

Responses to unauthorized filesharing vary. Those that have embraced it have seen dividends. Others fight it and throw tantrums, or use it as an excuse. A prime example of the last category has emerged, in the form of author Stephanie Meyer. Meyer, best known for her recent hits based around vampires, caters to the ‘young adult’ market re-popularized by the Harry Potter books.

In what seems like an echo of what happened to Potter author Rowling, Meyer’s latest book, Midnight Sun, has leaked online. Not the entire book, but a major part of the first draft, comprising the first 12 chapters. Meyer says the source is known to her. In a statement on her website, she says

“I have a good idea of how the leak happened as there were very few copies of Midnight Sun that left my possession and each was unique. Due to little changes I made to the manuscript at different times, I can tell when each left my possession and to whom it was given. The manuscript that was illegally distributed on the Internet was given to trusted individuals for a good purpose. I have no comment beyond that as I believe that there was no malicious intent with the initial distribution.”

Instead of rolling with it, working on reader feedback, and moving on and forward, Meyer is ‘throwing in the towel’ on the book for now, putting it “on hold indefinitely”. However, as was reminiscent of the buckcherry debacle, it smells of contrived events. A June update to her site said that she was working on it, partly due to fan pressure.

A leak that makes her so frustrated to want to write the book in the opposite way from intended, shouldn’t at the same time leave her ambivalent to the person and actions that caused it. It certainly shouldn’t leave her attacking her fans with statements such as:

“Just because someone buys a book or movie or song, or gets a download off the Internet, doesn’t mean that they own the right to reproduce and distribute it. Unfortunately, with the Internet, it is easy for people to obtain and share items that do not legally belong to them. No matter how this is done, it is still dishonest. This has been a very upsetting experience for me, but I hope it will at least leave my fans with a better understanding of copyright and the importance of artistic control.”

Yet again, P2P is blamed for ‘ruining’ something, and this will no doubt be added to the big list of ‘reasons filesharing should be dealt with more harshly’ that the governments of the world get hit around the head with (paid/lobbied/bribed).

Source: Furious Author Cancels Pirated Book

There is no need to register, everyone can search for, and play as many tracks as they like. There is even a queue feature in place for those who want to play more than one song. Registration is free, and offers several benefits, as it enables users to create playlists, add favorites, download tracks, and includes all of the other features Grooveshark offers. This is when it gets even more interesting.

TinySong is linked to Grooveshark, which is best defined as an online version of iTunes, including a store where you can buy songs and a social network where you can connect with other users. Grooveshark allows users to import their music library, which they can then access from any computer with an Internet connection. Users also have unlimited access to streaming music they don’t have in their own library – for free.

Perhaps one of the more interesting features of Grooveshark, for TorrentFreak at least, is that it is a P2P based service. Users who upload their local music library to the site will make it available to all other users. Users are rewarded for every song they share and receive “song credits”, which they can use to buy new tracks. The end result is one of the largest P2P music libraries around with millions of tracks in the collection.

There is also a commercial aspect to the site of course, as Grooveshark offers paid downloads. The downloads are available in different formats, high quality and DRM-free. Individual songs cost 99cents, and can be downloaded to a local computer once purchased. “FLAC, OGG, MP3, anything that’s available online will eventually be in our catalog,” Grooveshark’s Josh Bonnain told TorrentFreak. “We’re currently the only music company, or media company for that matter, that could easily one day offer a selection of over 50 million files.”

Grooveshark has potential, as it’s basically iTunes “in the cloud”, powered by P2P and with a social network on top of that (yes, a lot of buzzwords). All you need is an Internet connection, and you’re hooked up to one of the largest music libraries in the world. Josh told us that there are no deals with any of the major record labels yet, but they are working on it. They do pay royalties though.

“Due to the fact that all content which enters Grooveshark is monetized and made legal to purchase, we will in actuality be able to collect most every song in the world in due time,” Josh told us. “Many members like this, as they don’t need to store music locally, and can listen to all of the live, rare, unreleased, lossless and so forth content which there was no access to before.”

In sum I would say that TinySong is one of the easiest ways to share single tracks with your friends. The Grooveshark service is promising as well, and a great way to access your music library (and more) if you’re not at home. The paid downloads are still too expensive though, even though they offer high quality and DRM-free songs. Getting the labels behind it will be a challenging endeavor, as we already spotted some prerelease tracks (and the Beatles), that made their way from BitTorrent to Grooveshark.

TinySong Search (gotta love BuckCherry)

Source: Find and Share Music with TinySong

Some ISPs have refused to block the site in the past but in any event, most attempts only seem to provide free advertising for the site and subsequent increases in traffic.

Unfortunately for the people at the IFPI – the driving force behind the block – the results so far aren’t what they’d hoped for. Rather like the increases in traffic experienced at HTTPShare when they tried to block that, this week has seen traffic from Italy to The Pirate Bay increase too.

Brokep from The Pirate Bay has announced that while the tracker has never been “particularly big in Italy”, the recent attempted block actually seems to have done them a favor.

“Since the block we’ve increased traffic from Italy,” he says. “We gained 10 places on Alexa in Italy, and our own stats show a 5% increase in traffic from Italy (which has been quite stable before),” which is understandable considering the masses of worldwide press coverage this week, a fact not lost on brokep:

“It’s quite interesting and my guess (with background about what happened in Denmark) is that the site will gain even more attention over the coming weeks in the media and also get a lot of new visitors.”

It seems unthinkable that there could be any other result. The music and movies industries might hate The Pirate Bay with a passion but millions upon millions of regular people love them. It’s difficult to keep that level enthusiasm down.

Source: The Pirate Bay Sees Boost in Italian Traffic Following ‘Block’

The report states that the deal was agreed by six of the UK’s most prominent Internet Service Providers following intense government pressure. It’s estimated that these as-yet unnamed ISPs will send out hundreds of thousands of letters to suspected uploaders of music. The ISPs – thought to include Virgin Media who already did an early deal – are BT, Orange, Tiscali, Carphone Warehouse (AOL, TalkTalk) and BSkyB.

Demands from the music industry to disconnect uploaders from the Internet have not been met by the ISPs nor insisted upon by the government as Culture Secretary Andy Burnham had already stepped back from a government implemented ’3 strikes and you’re out’ policy. One ISP, Virgin Media, already indicated that there was “absolutely no possibility” of them disconnecting alleged pirates from the Internet.

However, it’s being reported that other measures may be taken against alleged file-sharers, including traffic management techniques being deployed to punish persistent offenders. As we reported earlier, this element is likely to be negotiated by the UK telecoms regulator, Ofcom.

The Times is reporting that other steps may be taken by the government such as the introduction of an annual £30 ‘download tax’. Peter Jenner, a music industry player who has been supporting such a plan said that the tax could bring in enough turnover to support the music industry: “If you get enough people paying a small enough amount of money you can turn around the wheels of the music industry” he said. Although UK citizens are used to this type of charge with the current TV licensing system, this type of tax seems unlikely to succeed in the current environment.

A Memorandum of Understanding drawn up by the Department for Business, Enterprise & Regulatory Reform (BERR) and signed by all six ISPs states that not only must the ISPs commit to a “significant reduction” in music file-sharing in the UK but they must also help develop legal music services too. One can see how this might be attractive to certain ISPs, such as BSkyB who just days ago signed a deal with Universal to set up an online music service “to rival iTunes”.

All this will be backed up by an educational campaign to ensure that every customer knows that it is illegal to upload copyright music.

More on this breaking news as we get it during the day.

Update: Geoff Taylor, chief executive of the BPI says reports of a levy are incorrect: “A levy is not an issue under discussion. It has not been discussed between us and government and as far as we are aware it is not on the table.”

Source: ISPs To Send “Hundreds of Thousands” of File-Sharing Warnings

One of the new weapons in this conflict, is called ‘Deep Packet Inspection‘ (DPI). An innocuous sounding name for a technology that basically means ‘Internet monitoring’. Deep packet inspection is a technology that some companies are salivating over, including advertisers and entertainment lobby groups like the MPAA. With it, their dreams can come true, some of them anyway.

There are various uses for deep packet inspection, such as its use by intelligence agencies (It’s a wiretap for the Internet) to intercept email and other web traffic, like in Sweden. However, there are two more sinister usages being rolled out that are not so good for the everyday Internet user.

With the ability to see the contents of data packets, it’s no surprise that it’s a prime candidate for traffic shaping and throttling. With ISP’s increasingly overselling their capacity, they are starting to spend money not on infrastructure, but on DPI equipment, to throttle BitTorrent traffic for example. Until recently, the processing power required to inspect data packets has made this prohibitive, as it required massive computers, and significantly slowed down network traffic. Now, though, companies like Procera Networks are selling systems capable of DPI on 40Gbps of traffic, per system. Think Sandvine, without the telltale RST packets.

The MPAA loves the idea of DPI as well. It, like other groups, figure, that if people can see the contents of packets, that it can tell if those packets contain copyrighted data. Of course, they’re oblivious to the idea that their material can be used in a non-infringing way, and staunchly against fair use (and don’t forget, Fair Use Day is only a week or two away). If this becomes a popular view, though, we may see multi-part rar files in torrents growing in popularity again.

The other, arguably more sinister usage of DPI, is the growing interest by advertising companies to use deep packet inspection to observe what Internet users are doing. Watching your browsing activity, you can gain all kinds of insights into the user behind the keyboard. Similar to spyware, but on your line not your system, it’s not a good thing, and impossible to remove. Worse, it may be able to tell who is behind the keyboard at the time, by identifying trends in connection behavior. In the case of a p2p lawsuit, these DPI-based advertising companies may end up being called to testify who their systems believe to be behind the keyboard at the time of the allegations.

With British Telecom in the UK having experimented with DPI based advertising , without telling the subscribers about it , and with Charter in the US looking into trialling it (or as has just been announced – discouraged from it) it is a pressing concern. Fortunately, some people are not exhibiting the apathy mentioned above, and are doing something about it. Alex Hanff (you might remember his tangle with the MPAA) has been studiously working against the likes of Phorm, and indeed, we linked to his dissertation on it last time. He is holding a protest outside British Telecom’s AGM next month, to protest this rape of user’s privacy for commercial gain.

While the protest might be mainly against advertising based systems, it’s a worry for all net users, and needs to be dealt with by something other than apathy. At least one torrent site admin has told me he will be there and I may be there, but the more that attend, the better. So, users of the world, it’s time to start acting for what you believe in, and stop just moaning about it.

Source: Deep Packet Inspection and Your Privacy Online

Suspects were taken to their local police station for questioning and required to provide DNA samples and fingerprints. Sources close to those arrested confirm that most accusations relate to the uploading of a single album by each suspect but despite the fact that uploading music is not a crime in the UK if done for no profit, somehow this civil issue had been transformed into allegations of serious crime, with police paying close attention to donations the suspects made to the site, presumably in an effort to find some financial motive.

Rather than the organized crime ring, they were told to expect, the police ended up questioning six regular people, terrified and mortified at being in trouble with the police for the first time in their lives. Eventually all six were released, and bailed to report back to police on July 1st. Alan Ellis himself is due to report on the same date, after his bail was extended not just once, but three times already.

Sources close to case have informed TorrentFreak that those arrested will report to the police next Tuesday and told that their bail will be extended. They will be ordered to reappear before police on Monday 28th July. No reason will be given for the delay in either releasing or charging those accused, but it is likely to increase speculation that the evidence in the case isn’t anywhere near as strong or as damning as the police were led to expect.

Source: Arrested OiNK Uploaders’ Bail to be Extended

The government previously set a deadline of April 2009 for the parties to reach an agreement but according to sources, pressure is intensifying to deal with the issue sooner. A “top-level executive” gave an indication of the level of pressure stating: “The British government just put a gun to our head.”

According to what DMN describe as “top-level” and other “executive” sources, the music industry and major ISPs including BT, Carphone Warehouse, Tiscali and Virgin Media are now involved in “serious negotiations” over how to deal with what they perceive to be a serious threat to their business model.

Andy Burnham, Culture Secretary and Labour Member of Parliament is said to be playing a prominent role after tough comments earlier in the year: “Let me make it absolutely clear: this is a change of tone from the government,” Burnham told the FT. “It’s definitely serious legislative intent.”

At the London Calling event last week – billed as ‘the UK’s premier international music business event’ – sources confirmed meetings between the music industry and ISPs. It’s believed that ISPs are being negotiated with individually, rather than as a group. “All of the ISPs are at the table meeting with the rights holders, but it’s not a roundtable,” said a source.

Current CEO of British Music Rights and former pop star Feargal Sharkey said he was optimistic at the discussions between the music industry and ISPs: “At this moment, I am completely optimistic. Three months ago these guys wouldn’t even get into the same room.”

It’s unclear what could happen if the music industry and ISPs fail to reach an agreement, as Culture Secretary Andy Burnham has already stepped back from a government implemented ’3 strikes and you’re out’ policy.

For their part, ISPs are only too aware of the profit they make from file-sharers. If the latest reports are to be believed, around 6 million Brits use their internet connection for file-sharing. Alienating them could be a huge strategic error.

Source: Government “Holds a Gun to the Head” of ISPs Over P2P

When we reported about the 3 billionth download back in November, Erik from Mininova told TorrentFreak: “We hope to reach the 4 billion mark in 4 or 5 months from now”. He didn’t have to wait that long, as it only took 78 days before they got there. The TV-show category remains the most popular, approximately half of all downloads from Mininova are torrents relating to TV-episodes.

The popularity of Mininova became apparent a few weeks ago when the site was offline for nearly a day because of hardware issues. The millions of visitors had to go elsewhere to feed their BitTorrent habit, and as a result, other sites like Torrentz.com and SumoTorrent saw a huge traffic increase, and almost went down under the strain.

The Mininova team will continue to optimize the site in order to handle the continuous traffic increase. On top of this, they are also adding new services and features such as a content distribution platform for independent publishers, a music streaming feature, and more recently, video streaming.

From the looks of it, Mininova’s growth will not be halted anytime soon, unless there is outside intervention. Last week, the Dutch anti-piracy organization BREIN announced that it will take legal action against the site, not to take it down, but to force it to filter copyrighted content. Erik from Mininova said in a response they “will proceed to court with full confidence,” and they will continue to serve torrents.

Mininova downloads since 2005.

Source: Mininova, 5 Billion Downloads and Counting

Previously, we have reported on other WebUI tools, such as uTorrent widgets, a mobile version of uTorrent, and even an iPhone compatible WebUI. The Facebook application for uTorrent is another example of how the WebUI can be used to integrate uTorrent into other applications.

The uFacebook home page lists all the torrents that are loaded in uTorrent, including statistics such as the current upload and download speed of each file. Once the application is installed, you can remotely start, stop, delete, add, and even search torrents, no matter where you are. That is, if your PC is turned on with uTorrent running.

uFacebook is developed and maintained by the same people who run the BitTorrent meta-search engine Morrent. In addition to this app, the Morrent team has also developed a uTorrent WebUI for the iPhone, and a gadget for the Windows sidebar.

If you want to give it a try, make sure you have enabled the WebUI. To do so, go to Options ,> Preferences ,> Advanced ,> WebUI, and enter you details there. Detailed instructions on how to install the Facebook application, and how to configure the WebUI can be found here.

While you’re at it, feel free to join the TorrentFreak page on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter.

Source: Manage Your BitTorrent Downloads on Facebook

Nevertheless, two of the largest opposition parties in Danish parliament think it is a good idea , despite the ineffectiveness of the block , to streamline the process, making it quicker and easier to do. A proposal (Danish) before the government seems to create a tribunal to handle these cases.

Whereas in the past cases have involved a rights holder suing an ISP and forcing a block through the courts, this proposal creates a tribunal to do it instead. This tribunal will apparently consist of members appointed by government ministers, who will then rule on blocks with no judicial oversight. Any sites blocked would have to go through the courts to appeal and the site would remain blocked unless and until successful.

If that was not bad enough, there is also talk of a secretariat that would handle ‘simple’ cases, so the appointed tribunal would not even have to hear the majority of cases. Cases would be put to the tribunal by copyright holders that feel they have had their rights infringed by the target site. As with the court cases, though, it’s extremely unlikely that the accused site will be invited or even made aware of any such proceedings, and allowed to state their case.

“This is a wet dream for organizations like IFPI,” is the view of Ole Husgaard, chairman of the Danish Pirate Party. “This isn’t even a law proposal, so there is not all the work usually done in our parliament when passing laws; this can be passed in a month or two. If it is, I would guess that we will have at least 2000 sites on the blocking list within 12 months – without a single court case having been decided, if any get started at all.”

He’s not alone in his pessimism. “It’s blatant censorship of course.” is the opinion of The Pirate Bay’s brokep. “It’s not in the interest of the citizens, so I hope the government understands that if they go against the people like that, they should be replaced. It is also not a huge step before they start censoring other stuff – let’s say political parties that have thoughts about changing the current government.”

As analysis of the Pirate Bay block has found it contrary to EU laws, it’s curious as to the motivation behind this proposal. The only rational one would be bribery , either legal or not , and so the question we are forced to ask is, are Danish politicians cheaper to buy than those in New York?

Source: Danish Copyright Censorship Proposal Revealed

“We decided to move to the desert of Sinai in Egypt since we feel that we’ll be safe there.” Connectivity in Egypt should be uncongested, with only about 1 in 13 of the population regular net users, despite modern infrastructure investments by Telecom Egypt. Meanwhile, the sun should do wonders to counter the typical pasty-faced stereotype of the typical computer addict.

In other news, there’s egg on the face of ABC, as a pre-air episode of the popular TV-show “Lost” hit the net. Apparently, the episode is from a DVD screener, and proves, yet again, that the problems come from members of the industry, who are often claimed to be the victims.

There is more breaking news today, as the popular OiNK replacement Waffles.fm now accepts new members. For months thousands of users have waited to get an account at the popular private BitTorrent tracker, and today this may become reality.

Unfortunately, things have not been so rosy for all BitTorrent sites. BT-chat, a popular torrent site has closed it’s torrent operations, to concentrate on its Bluetooth based IM client.

BT-Chat owner NBtX told TorrentFreak ” Server costs we’re starting to get too much, and the ads were making everyone mad. We have since then decided to stop providing torrents, and focus solely on the Bluetooth instant messaging program.”

However, the worst news comes for users of the private BitTorrent tracker BitHQ. Like EliteTorrents before them, they have been raided and shut down by US Federal Officers. No comment from any party involved has been forthcoming so far.

What a day….

Source: The Pirate Bay Moves to Egyptian Desert Island

In response to the news, Pirate Bay co-founder Brokep told TorrentFreak: “It’s dangerous to trust a company like Yahoo! when they filter the searches. It’s a new China, but this time Yahoo is the dictator. Yahoo should let the governments decide, not themselves. It’s dangerous when companies take the law into their own hands.”

It seems like The Pirate Bay is the only BitTorrent site that is filtered at the moment. Searches for Mininova and Isohunt are still working fine, Yahoo! even suggests you should try “mininova torrents”, “mininova downloads” and “mininova today downloads”, and more related searches.

It is not clear why Yahoo decided to filter The Pirate Bay, but seems unlikely that they did it because the site is often associated with copyright infringement. Perhaps Yahoo’s index is just screwed up? If we dig a little deeper, it turns out that not all Pirate Bay’s pages are gone.

Interestingly, Yahoo! was found guilty of infringing copyright themselves two months ago. During December last year, Yahoo China’s music search was confirmed illegal in a Beijing court ruling which stated that under new copyright laws it facilitates mass copyright infringement.

Update: February 21, Yahoo links to The Pirate Bay again…

Source: Yahoo! Filters Pirate Bay From Search Results

Torrentflux-b4rt started out as an attempt to integrate all the existing torrentflux hacks that users have made over the years. As they explain on their website: “torrentflux-b4rt was an attempt to sidestep the complicated mess of adding hacks and modifications to the base torrentflux system in a random way, as well as allowing users more choice in which BitTorrent clients they used with torrentflux.”

The software currently includes 4 different BitTorrent clients, Azureus, Transmission, BitTorrent mainline and BitTornado, which can be configured separately for every .torrent you download. In addition it can handle .nzb files to download easily from Usenet, and uses wGet to download files over HTTP/FTP.

Torrentflux-b4rt is pretty much a fully-featured filesharing portal, it comes with a built in file-manager that can extract rar-archives, and a great web-player (VLC) that allows you to stream media files to your local computer. The software is easy to install and configure through any web browser. It is an ideal solution if you want to manage your downloads on a computer other than your desktop machine.

The software runs on any Unix like OS. It has a command line version for advanced users, so you can set cron jobs to watch folders for new torrent files, automatically download .torrent files from RSS feeds, and much more.

Below is a screenshot of the index page, more info and screenshots can be found at TorrentFlux b4rt’s homepage.

Click to enlarge

Source: Download from BitTorrent and Usenet with Your Web Server

Currently, WeStream supports OGG and MP3 encoded audio files, but more file types will be included in the near future.

There are a few important conditions to achieve an optimal streaming experience. Most importantly, there should be enough seeds and peers to guarantee a decent download speed. Besides this, the playback time will depend on the filesize of the tracks – the higher the bitrate, the more bandwidth is needed.

Below is an example of WeStream for a torrent from Mininova’s featured torrents section. By clicking on this link you can load it in your web browser.

From a technical viewpoint, WeStream prioritizes the bits at the beginning of each song, otherwise it will be impossible to stream anything before the entire track is downloaded. However, like most other BitTorrent clients, it also gives a high priority to rare pieces in order to guarantee an optimal swarm speed.

The applet seeds the torrents as long as you keep the browser window open. Daniele, the developer of both BitLet and the new WeStream feature told TorrentFreak: “It would have been easy to design the streaming client to be extremely selfish, and make it care only for its needs. Ideally, we tried to avoid it: Westream should behave as most torrent clients, with a slightly different piece choosing strategy.”

WeStream is a great tool for people who want to listen to some of the tracks before they download anything, or for people who want to let their friends listen to an album without having to send all the files over first. Above all, it is a great looking innovation from the BitLet team that shows how much is possible with BitTorrent. We might just see this implemented in some of the popular BitTorrent sites soon.

Source: WeStream: Streaming Music From A Torrent File

This list of BitTorrent sites is not extensive, but it covers the three most popular torrent sites. A search for the recently released second part of Steal This Film returns quite a few results which are presented in a clean way. By default the results are ordered by popularity (seeds/peers), but they can be further sorted by date, size, and search engine.

If you can’t find what you were looking for you have the option to check for related and popular searches in the sidebar. At the moment the site has no ads and is pretty fast, but that might change in the future. Overall, for people who like meta search engines, I think that YouTorrent is worth a visit.

More useful BitTorrent sites can be found in our roundup of the 10 most popular BitTorrent sites of 2007. Do you know any other BitTorrent sites with some innovative features that we haven’t covered yet here at TorrentFreak? Let us know and leave a comment.

Source: YouTorrent: Great New BitTorrent Search Engine

The project, so named according to one of the developers because “It’s sleek, fast, and generally awesome” (and ironically, commonly targeted by predators) aims to be a new tracker script that would make even high volume sites run smoothly. Currently, what.cd, like most others, is based around the ageing TBsource, a site template with a large number of holes, and little documentation.

Whilst some might think that it would be easier, and perhaps quicker, to update and close the holes in the existing code, the development team had other opinions. “You’d think so, but in the end, it would take 10 times the manpower, and much more time than it would take to rewrite it. The TBSource code is scary – there are no comments, things on one page can be implemented differently from those on another page.”

The overall aim is to produce a torrent site that will be faster for end users, easier to use for site administration, able to use optional modules, and allow a lot more users on the same amount of hardware as a TBsource system. As one developer explained “The ‘catch up’ feature on the forums, as found in TBsource, runs 2 queries per post. As we have it, that is over 80000 queries each time a user loads the page. Our sourcecode has this down to 2 queries”.

They are not alone in these attempts, back in late June the popular UK TV site UKNova also moved away from TBsource, also moving to a system based around XBTT. However, there are currently no plans for UKNova to make their system public as yet. Project Gazelle aims for a closed beta within the next 6 weeks, and will be implemented on what.cd when it is stable enough to do so. Eventually it will be released to the public, under either a GPLv3 or AGPL license. However, warned one of the development team, “some of our tools, such as cheater evasion, will not be included in the public version of the source, for obvious reasons.”

Source: What.cd To Launch New BitTorrent Tracker Script

To give an impression how big they are, Mininova has well over 3,000,000 visits and 16,500,000 pageviews a day, and this number is still growing. Last month they already broke the 3 billion .torrent download barrier and we will probably see the 4 billionth download pretty soon.

Niek, one of the founders of Mininova, told TorrentFreak that the increase in traffic is facilitated by the new hardware they recently installed. “The faster the site is, the more visitors we get,” he said “However, more visitors make the site slower again, so we have to keep optimizing the site and hardware all the time.”

There is also a downside to this positive news of course. Mininova’s continuing growth is, in part, due to the downtime at Demonoid and the issues TorrentSpy and Isohunt currently have with the MPAA.

Note: Alexa’s data gathering is not perfect. The exact figures may be not be completely accurate, but it is a great tool (especially the traffic rank) to compare sites within the same niche and to get a global impression of traffic shifts over time.

Source: Mininova Enters List of 50 Most Popular Sites on the Internet

OinkPlus displays a list of similar artists, a link to other torrents from that artist on the BitTorrent site you’re on, the artist/band’s bio, a Last.fm player, and, if available, a MySpace player. The script also displays links to the artist’s presence on Wikipedia, Amazon, Hype Machine, Pandora, and so on.

The extra data loads beneath the regular content on the .torrent download pages and integrates very well into the style of each of the compatible sites. Personally I find the script very useful to preview tracks from artists and to discover new music. Below is an example of what it looks like on The Pirate Bay.

Indieana told TorrentFreak that in future versions it will be possible to disable certain features or block the use of OinkPlus on certain sites.

Music discovery is an essential part of private torrent sites. Although OinkPlus was originally developed exclusively for OiNK, after the site was taken down by the BPI and the IFPI, its author decided to go all-out and support not only the most popular private torrent sites, but some of the most popular public ones too.

Source: OinkPlus Adds Music Discovery to BitTorrent Sites

This proposal has come under fire however, by Pirate Parties all around the world. The Chairman of the Austrian Pirate Party, Florian Hufsky, stated “it’s a tyrannical attempt to curtail useful knowledge from the general public on par with policies of China, Saudi Arabia and North Korea. Thus, whilst ineffective as a measure, it is a strong deviation from the principles of the open society.”

With the various Pirate Parties aiming for the European Parliament in 2009, there is not a voice that can easily be discounted, and with the incumbents making these gargantuan faux-pas, it may seem that they are in with a shot of success

Source: Pirates say ‘Narrgh’ to EU Terrorism Censorship

The BitLet team promised upgrades were on the way, and after a few short months, the BitLet ‘Upload’ section is now complete. With this addition, BitLet users can not only download torrents but also create them too, all done online within a regular browser. Entering the ‘Upload’ page, the user is asked to enter a tracker of their choice. Bitlet conveniently provides the option to select the urls of four popular open trackers for some seriously easy torrent creation.

Once created, the automation of the torrent creation process doesn’t stop. BitLet Upload gives the option to send the .torrent file immediately to Mininova, which is great for advertising the content the user is about to make available. Automatically sending to other sites will be possible in the future.

This is an important new addition to the online BitLet experience. Offering convenience to those who prefer to use a browser or simply have no choice, BitLet Upload brings BitTorrent distribution another step closer to the complete novice.

Source: BitLet Evolves: Create and Upload Torrents Online

I’ve tried it with a couple of torrents and it seems to be working quite well, just enter the url of the .torrent file and you’re good to go. The download speeds are decent and doesn’t require any configuration, so it’s pretty much idiot-proof.

BitLet also has a very useful code generator so you can offer BitTorrent downloads on your blog or website so that people can easily download, even when they don’t have a BitTorrent client installed. If people click on the link a popup window will appear, and the download starts immediately. Here’s an example download link:

Steal This Film!

If everything works like it should you’ll get a popup window similar to the screenshot below, it currently shows the download speed, percentage completed, and even a status led that signals potential problems (green is good). BitLet uses the Sun Java platform, if you encounter any problems, try installing the latest Java Virtual Machine plugin from Sun.

Personally I think that BitLet is a great way to make BitTorrent available to the occasional downloader who is not familiar with it at all. It could also be very helpful if you want to download a torrent on a PC that doesn’t have a BitTorrent client installed, like work or school for some people. It’s not a replacement for the regular BitTorrent client, but it sure is a great addition.

Source: BitLet: A Cute Web-Based BitTorrent Client

Presumably, the mUI will work like the existing WebUI, with the exception that it’ll be a lot more light-weight, which it has to be in order to support mobile browsers. The mUI will allow you to monitor and control the torrents running on your desktop PC from your mobile phone, wherever you are. You can expect us to do a detailed review of its features and usability when it’s live.

For now, it looks like the mobile UI will only support the Windows version of uTorrent, as the Mac version isn’t out yet and doesn’t even have basic WebUI support it.

The uTorrent mUI has not been developed by BitTorrent Inc and isn’t official. The developer, mofle, is just a fan and user of uTorrent. See his forum post and the continuing discussion for more info.

Official site: utorrentmui.com

Source: uTorrent Mobile UI Goes Live Tomorrow

The videos are placed in different categories such as Accidents, Animals, Cartoons and Commercials to make it more easy to discover videos you like. The downside to keeping the site clean is that all videos need to be approved by the Snotr staff before they appear on the site.

Niek stresses that it is not their goal to create the next YouTube killer, “if you’re looking for a place to dump your videos, stick to those sites. But in case you have some spare time to spend, try Snotr ” he adds.

Snotr had some really great features that other video services lack such as a slidebar for real-time video resizing, a clean interface and the possibility to upload high quality content. On the other hand, Snotr does not (yet) have an embed feature to share the videos on your website or blog (update, they have now).

Check out Snotr.

Source: Mininova Launches SFW Video Site

The technical specifications of the device certainly make it possible. It has more than enough cpu power for it, assuming a nice, tightly coded client was written. The built in WiFi (802.11b/g) and use of the EDGE 2.75G wireless network data transfer system allows a fairly widespread availability of reception.

According to one of the developers of the ‘iPhone-binutil‘ project, going by the name ‘geohot’, the only obstacle stopping it from making an application like “iTorrent” happening is their current lack of coding ability for the iPhone. The file system is open, and media players already exist, if for nothing else than playing media from iTunes.

On of the downsides it that, for many, the 3.4Gb free on a brand new phone (or 7.4Gb, if you went for the bigger one) may not be enough to hold much data, but it all depends on what you torrent. Bigger problems are that the battery will last only in the region of 6-8 hours at best (according to Apple’s figures) which isn’t the greatest. Additionally, many users have reported the wifi connections being on the slow side as far as data transfers go. Using EDGE is a lot slower, about 30k/sec max.

Of course, the benefits are that you can carry it around with you, and you have the wide range of content available, with the benefits of torrent file’s typical pricing (free). Of course, time will tell. Meanwhile, the lack of MMS on the iPhone has been a small thorn in the side of many owners. However, there is help at hand in the form of a workaround. More details here

Source: “iTorrent”: A BitTorrent Client for your iPhone?

In the meantime, we thought we could take a look at some other Russian music sites, offering cheap music to the masses.

Winner: MP3Fiesta

MP3 Fiesta hold nearly 67,000 albums from nearly 17,000 artists. Prices are around the $0.10 mark for single tracks with full albums coming in at roughly $1.00. Tracks are available from 192kbps and they take major credit cards and PayPal.

LegalSounds

Another allofmp3 replacement, LegalSounds.com prices are $0.09 per song, full album downloads average $1 each. Music carried includes the US Top 100 Albums/Singles, European Top 100 Albums and UK Top 50. Tracks are available between 192kbps and 320kbps and they take major credit cards.

JustMusic

Just Music carry around 160,000 albums from 44,000 different artists. Prices vary according to the amount of credit you apply to your account and range between $0.11 and $0.15 per track. Tracks are available at 192kbps and they take major credit cards and PayPal.

GoMusic

GoMusic claim to carry over 35,000 tracks. Prices are $0.19 per track and around $2 per full album. Tracks are available in various bitrates and they take major credit cards.

MP3 Skyline

MP3 Skyline appears to be offering a huge amount of music. The site claims a staggering 2.2 million tracks available from over 128,000 artists. Prices are around the $0.35 mark for single tracks and encoded at 192kbps. Major credit cards and PayPal are accepted, along with other payment options. They also have a free download of the day, currently ‘Seeing Red’ by Killing Joke.

MP3Sale

MP3 Sale boasts a cataolgue of over 90,000 albums from 23,556 artists. Prices are $0.15 for a single track with full albums around the $1.50 mark. Tracks are encoded at 192kbps and the site takes all major credit cards, PayPal and a wide range of other payment options.

iSound

iSound currently offer nearly 60,000 albums from 14,000 artists. Prices start at $0.11 per track up to a maximum of $0.15, depending on the amount fo credit deposited in your account. Tracks are encoded at a minimum of 192kbps. Major credit cards and PayPal are accepted.

Enjoy the music!

Source: Top Cheap Russian AllofMP3 Alternatives

In comparison, two years ago, 65% of all the data sent over the Internet was P2P related. However, that soon changed after the big boom of video streaming services. Unfortunately there is no data on the total growth of Internet traffic, but it is likely that P2P traffic is still growing, only not relative to HTTP traffic.

A breakdown of the HTTP traffic reveals that audio and video streaming represents 41% of the HTTP traffic, half of that is caused by YouTube. Text and images from web pages are still using a bit more bandwidth (46%), but this wont be for long.

Interestingly, newsgroups only account for 9% of the total traffic, but are treated as a separate category in Ellacoya’s report. However, most of the data shared on newsgroups can be categorized as peer-to-peer traffic, in this case both HTTP and P2P will be responsible for 46%. Gaming, Voip and non HTTP video streaming fill up the gaps with 2%, 1% and 3% respectively.

The total volume of bandwidth that people consume will probably continue to grow in the years to come. New streaming services, and Internet based TV project such as Joost will require massive amounts of bandwidth. Also, BitTorrent is still gaining popularity, earlier this week we reported that Mininova is still growing at a rapid pace, they served 1 billion downloads in less than 6 months.

Let’s hope the pipes won’t clutter.

Source: HTTP Traffic Overtakes P2P, Courtesy of YouTube

Up until now, we weren’t completely sure if this was going to be the YouTube killer that TPB fans everywhere have been talking about. But a statement published today on The Pirate Bay Blog outright confirms it:

“YES – we’re going to do a video streaming site. It’s true. It’s in the works being done right now and as usual we put a bit of Pirate Bay mentality behind every project we do.”

And it’s exactly that “Pirate Bay mentality” that, in our opinion, is going to make this site a winner. Think YouTube without Google constantly pulling down copyrighted videos.

Some clever TorrentFreak readers and TPB fans managed to locate the URL of the upcoming YouTube competitor. It is: thevideobay.org. All you can see on the site is a plain page with two lines of text:

only open for beta- and dev-testers.
some is live, most is not. we will open for public when done.

Stay tuned!

Source: The Pirate Bay to Launch YouTube Competitor

But the gadget is not limited to listing information, you can also:

- drag & drop to add new torrents
- start, stop pause torrents
- set priority for individual files

It’s based on the “Azureus stats” gadget for Windows Vista, but has some extra features. The WebUI works on 32-bit as well as the 64-bit Vista, and it has a auto update function.

The sidebar gadget will only work if you run the uTorrent webUI. The WebUI makes it easy to access uTorrent from an external computer, and it opens up a world of possibilities for uTorrent users to create fancy widgets, scripts, and other add-ons.

To enable the webui go to Options –> Preferences –> Advanced –> WebUI, and enter you details there. There is also FireFox extension available for the WebUI.

The latest Beta of the Vista sidebar gadget for uTorrent can be downloaded over here. You can track the latest updates, or post your questions and suggestions in the thread over at the uTorrent forums.

Source: uTorrent’s Vista Sidebar Gadget

I’ve tried the latest stable version (0.1.2) which was released last month, and it works great. Simple, lightweight, and it doesn’t need a database. The WAP support is great and allows you to start and stop torrents with your mobile phone. w3btorrent currently has less features than its competitor TorrentFlux, but it does everything I want a BitTorrent client to do.

You can also install w3btorrent on a web hosting account to download and seed torrents. That is, if your webhosting company allows it.

A few months ago a customer of the popular hosting company Dreamhost tried to run the EFF’s Broadcast Machine on his Dreamhost account. However, Dreamhost said that BitTorrent was strictly forbidden, both as a client and as a tracker. Very strange because it is a great way to share podcasts and other large audio video files, and it even saves Dreamhost and its customers some bandwidth.

Some of the features of w3btorrent include:

Source: w3btorrent: A BitTorrent Client for your Web Server

I can’t really tell how accurate the stats for the swarm are. It looks like Poland, the country where p2pmonitor.com originates, is overrepresented. Apart from this, it is fun to see where all the bits and pieces come from, and it makes you realize how global a BitTorrent swarm actually is.

It would even be better if you were able to hook it up to your own BitTorrent client, so you can pay leechers a visit if their share ratio is not what it’s supposed to be. Perhaps an idea for a future release of this tool?

Try for yourself.

Source: Tracking a BitTorrent Swarm in Google Earth

The MPAA has removed Forest Blog from their site. The Director of Application Development replied with the following e-mail:

The material has been removed from our Web server.

• No Web links were ever provided to the blog.
• The blog was never assigned a domain name.
• The blog was never advertised to the public in any way.
• The material on the server was a proof of concept awaiting approval to move into production.
• The blog was only ever used for testing purposes.
• Should we have decided to make the move to production, then we would have paid the 25 Pounds that would have authorized us to run a version of the blog without the logos and links.

Sounds innocent, doesn’t it? And it might even be considered an honest mistake, if the MPAA wasn’t on a rampage, suing everybody in sight for copyright violations. The question that arose last time was, how can an organisation that’s only goal is to rid the world of piracy go ahead and illegally use someone else’s copyrighted work? Would someone who downloads a movie from one of the MPAA’s studios be able to get away by saying they were only “testing” the movie, and that they put it up on the Internet, but provided no links to it? Ever heard of Google? Patrick Robin, too, makes a similar comparison:

Whilst that all sounds fair enough but I doubt I’d get away with pirating a few movies providing I didn’t advertise it and only used them for testing purposes. hmmm!

Source: MPAA: We Were Only Testing Forest Blog