After an earlier decision failed to reach its objective, this week a Brazilian court made an unprecedented ruling against file-sharing clients. Following legal action by anti-piracy groups against a website offering a file-sharing client for download, the court decided that software which allows users to share music via P2P is illegal.
Just as the payment deadline for the Pirate Bay deal is set to expire, its intended buyer Global Gaming Factory (GGF) faces yet another setback. Former director and board member Johan Sellstrom is owed hundreds of thousands of dollars by the company and has now requested bankruptcy for his former employer.
Dan Brown’s latest novel The Lost Symbol sold a million copies in the first day, and this success has carried over to various file-sharing sites. Both the unabridged audiobook and the ebook versions have already been downloaded tens of thousands of times through BitTorrent.
After Australia’s Senator Stephen Conroy’s plans to filter the Internet earned him the title of Internet Villain of the Year, today there is more chin-scratching over the plans. Speaking yesterday, the Senator Conroy said there has never been any suggestion that the government could or would block P2P traffic.
Bram Cohen, the inventor of the BitTorrent protocol that revolutionized file-sharing, is working on BitTorrent-based live streaming. With his efforts he aims to develop a piece of code that is superior to all the other P2P-based streaming solutions on the market today.
Last month, the bandwidth supplier to The Pirate Bay was ordered by a court to disconnect it from the Internet. Within hours the site had relocated and was back online with a new host – who immediately received similar entertainment industry threats. Maybe Open Internet, a new fighting fund, can help?
China’s Anti-Pornography and Anti-Illegal Publications Office has booked a huge victory by preventing the country’s youth from accessing more than 4 million copies of pirated teaching materials. According to the vice director of the office, such materials “harm the healthy development of the country’s youth.”
Below are TorrentFreak's most discussed articles of the past month. Join the discussion if you like.
Left Quote“The Pirate Bay has been one of the most important movements in Sweden for freedom of speech, working against corruption and censorship.
Peter Sunde Left Quote
A selection of some TorrentFreak's classics dug up from our archives.
Continuing a long-standing New Year's tradition, we present an up-to-date list of the world's most visited...
Last month it became apparent that not all VPN providers live up to their marketing after...
Privacy is important on the Internet, and BitTorrent users are certainly not excluded. Already, hundreds of...
With the entertainment industries lobbying for increased powers to spy on BitTorrent users, many downloaders are...
BitTorrent can be fun, as long as you get decent speeds. Not satisfied with your current...