Legal and DRM-free Movie Torrents from Sweden
Written by Ernesto on April 04, 2008For most people, Sweden and BitTorrent equals The Pirate Bay. There is more though, Headweb, a new online movie store now offers over 500 authorized and DRM-free movies, which can be downloaded via BitTorrent. True to the BitTorrent philosophy, sharing is rewarded.
At the moment Swedish customers will have to use the official Headweb download manager in order to download files, but support for regular BitTorrent clients might be added later.
The downloaded movies can be played with any media player, and are free of DRM. On top of that, the download manager comes with a built in DVD-burner so you can burn the movies onto a disk and play them with any standalone DVD-player.
One of the interesting things about the service is that it rewards people who share their purchases. That is, people get credits for sharing the downloaded files with other Headweb users.
Peter Alvarsson of Headweb told TorrentFreak: “We believe it’s fair to pay for our users’ time and resources and we give credits back to those that upload to other users. The ratio is 1 credit per 10mb which makes it possible to get a free movie after some 50 GB upload.
“We’ve seen that some users are really good at predicting “hot” movies and earn a lot of credits by keeping their clients running after the download has finished,” Peter added. A win-win situation really, the sharing mechanism saves Headweb bandwidth and server resources, and the users get free downloads.
All movies offered by Headweb are DRM-free, which is great, and quite unique for a movie download service. Not surprisingly, they had a hard time convincing the movie studios to offer their content without access restrictions.
“It has taken us nearly 2 years to convince movie studios that DRM-free downloads are the future,” says Peter “We’re not there yet with everyone but we are getting closer. More studios now start to realize that DRM isn’t consumer friendly and that it has to go.”
Several surveys have shown that a lot of people are willing to pay to download movies as long a there is enough content available, and if the files are high quality and thus DRM-free.
Headweb’s users seem to confirm these findings. “We’ve received lot of feedback from people telling us that they would switch to support legal services completely, if only the services had the same selection,” Peter told TorrentFreak.
In the near future, Headweb will be working on more new features, groundbreaking innovations and more content. em toThey are confident that this will enable them to compete with The Pirate Bay.
Previously: ISP Will Protect File-Sharers From Music Industry Disconnection Threat
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59 Responses
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[quote comment="331242"]so if average joe leaves his computer on seeding for a month he gets a free movie that he could’ve downloaded from tpb anyway. how innovative.[/quote]
plus its available just a bit faster :P
liars !
having to use proprietary download manager isnt “drm free” per se…..
u lying sweedish weasels ;
btw,is the download manager an open source ??
As far as i know, the movies on Headweb are watermarked with the buyers personal information.
If you for an example make a legal copy of a movie from Headweb, and send it to a friend over MSN(that’s legal fair use in Sweden, and many other countries), and that copy later find it’s way out onto the filesharing networks, the original buyer could be sued for millions in civil court, where demands for evidence are smaller then in criminal court, and the defendant with the most money and experienced usually wins.
Personally i would never purchase anything watermarked.
My CD’s aren’t watermarked, my DVD’s aren’t watermarked, and when i buy files over Internet, there is no reason why my personal information should be watermarked into the files.
The concept of watermarking files in this manor is intimidation, to scare buyers from making legal copies, and using their legal fair use rights.
The worst thing that could happen if you buy a DRM-infected file, is that it does’nt work. 1 dollar lost.
What’s the worst thing that could happen if you buy a watermarked file, it turnes up on the filesharing networks, and the MAFIAA-organisations can connect a persons identity to a file, has already been proved by the RIAA over and over again..
I don’t trust the entertainment industry enough to let my personal information be watermarked into files, do you?
If the entertainment industry trust’s you, why do they watermark the products you buy from them in the first place?
[quote comment="331636"]As far as i know, the movies on Headweb are watermarked with the buyers personal information.
If you for an example make a legal copy of a movie from Headweb, and send it to a friend over MSN(that’s legal fair use in Sweden, and many other countries), and that copy later find it’s way out onto the filesharing networks, the original buyer could be sued for millions in civil court, where demands for evidence are smaller then in criminal court, and the defendant with the most money and experienced usually wins.[/quote]
Trust who you give it to, then.
And if you’re seeding this ‘watermarked’ copy, then it can’t be watermarked as the watermark can’t carry onto the next person, since you’d be getting the person’s info with it who seeded it to you.
Simply, your logic doesn’t work with this system.
I, for one, think this is progress. The industry is realizing that it needs to move forward and by doing this, it’s a step in the right direction.
It takes many steps to walk a mile and even a foot of progress is better than turning around.
Also - fix the ‘posting too fast’ system to read ‘your comment is too long’.
[quote comment="331665"]Trust who you give it to, then.[/quote]
Why should i police my friends?
[quote comment="331665"]And if you’re seeding this ‘watermarked’ copy, then it can’t be watermarked as the watermark can’t carry onto the next person, since you’d be getting the person’s info with it who seeded it to you.
Simply, your logic doesn’t work with this system.[/quote]
The watermark is added by the Headweb Download Manager. The files doesn’t receive their watermark until they are completely downloaded. The part of the file that is seeded between Headweb-users doesn’t include the watermarking.
On the “about us” section it claims to support Windows, Mac and Linux, but the Linux support is “coming”.
Watermarked?!? I knew this was too good to be true. Sorry mates but I find watermarks even worse than DRM. Keep yout shit.
this is fantastic!!
living in sweden, the 50gig rule is not really that steep. most homes have at least 2mb connections, while 8mb and 24mb are not that uncommon.
after checking some of the movie sizes, they are about a dvd, so 4gigs on average for a DL. you’d only be seeding 12 copies or so before you get a free movie, not a bad deal. we all seed already anyway.
only negative is that you can’t use uTORRENT which blows. if they changed that, even i would be on board!!
but good on them for being the first (or close to it)!!
I wanted to try this, but I’ll have wait until they no longer use watermarking.
[quote comment="331855"]I wanted to try this, but I’ll have wait until they no longer use watermarking.[/quote]
as soon as they found a way to stegnograph the info invisibly into the movie,
It says that “some” movies can be watermarked. because some movie studios requires it (can we guess who?). I dont see the problem with it though if I get my movies without other protection mechanisms.
Mike: aren’t watermarks based on steganography?
I would pay, same its not for the UK aswell ): .
PB down? (Holland)
Let’s see. $16 a movie which I can download for free, plus I can get a free one if I upload 50 Gb which on my bandwidth limits would take about 4 1/2 years. Hmm that’s a tough choice ..
Well, I think we can agree that this is not going to be a breakthrough for the movie industry, but they are stating to get the point, and that is very important. This should have been done 7-10 years ago…but nooo, greed is why it didn´t! Hope this gets some kind of success, so they can see that the costumer are in control! Otherwise we´ll keep DL as we have done for a decade :-)
/Pantonamia
[quote comment="331894"]It says that “some” movies can be watermarked. because some movie studios requires it (can we guess who?).[/quote]The only honest solution is to not sell their product. Leave it to TPB and other pirate trackers to fill those demands. Otherwise, legacy requirements such as these watermarks will continue to pollute our lives. Deny it now while there is a revolution.
Cracking their client to not apply WM after the file is downloaded would add another good source of new DVDRIP. Then just to create .torrent and seed.
Thank you Sweden.
Good source anyway.
The way the fiber net is expanding here in Sweden atm 50gb will be nothing to ‘average joe’ in a couple of years. Myself, i seed around 30-35gb/night
This is simply the future of bit torrent
When you do it like pirate bay let me know or like hte cbc did let me know
you gain cheap distribution and tracking stats.
That is to expensive,lets say FOX offered online the first episo from 24 one day before it show on tv, and charge $1.00. Do you know how many millions of click will be in 1 hour? that is money and power out there. But the industry don’t want to use. I think lots of people would like to pay for a nice movie, at a nice price and get something back if you seed as well.
Sounds like the idea of actually USING the internet to it’s full extend finally spreads through the industry… now let’s look how long it takes for a music service like this one to appear, and giving away free music for every 5 - 10 songs you share, or so…
Why is my comment which i made HOURS ago “under moderation”? It only contained some positive comments FFS.
[quote comment="331330"]KserX: “I can buy DVD movies from shop at that prices…”
But you can’t seed those DVDs and then get more DVDs for free. That’s what these guys let you do.[/quote]
Yeah, a free movie for 50gb of your upload bandwidth.
Oh, joy.
@24- Exactly. You don’t deal with the devil no matter how attractive the offer.
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