As such, these events aren’t particularly big news but every now and again one comes along to make people sit up and listen. Several hours ago, July 24, 2014, marked one such notable leaking event.

Featuring every action hero known to man, from Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Wesley Snipes, Jason Statham and Jet Li, to UFC stars Randy Couture and Ronda Rousey, Expendables 3 was always going to be a hit. However, the plan was to have it become a hit on the big screen before breaking into the home market.

That is not going to happen. Around twelve hours ago, a near perfect copy of The Expendables 3 appeared online and it’s already a smash hit with home audiences.

Figures gathered by TorrentFreak reveal that more than 100,000 200,000 (update) people have downloaded the presumed ‘DVD screener’ copy using BitTorrent alone, and at one point in excess of 65,000 users were engaged in transfers on a single torrent.

These stats push the leak well ahead of the initial pre-release popularity of the infamous X-Men Origins: Wolverine leak back in 2009 and once the news begins to spread today, things are only going to get worse.

Needless to say, the folks at distributor Lionsgate are going to be absolutely furious. While ‘cams’ are an annoyance, most movie-goers won’t want to destroy the movie experience by watching them. High-quality copies like this one are a different matter altogether and the soaring download numbers are a testament to that.

So who is behind the leak? At this stage it’s impossible to point the finger at the person who obtained the DVD copy. However, we can take a look at who brought the copy to the wider public Internet.

When leaks come from a so-called ‘Scene’ source it’s possible to track the copy at least as far back as the group that placed it online but with so-called P2P releases, as is the case with Expendables 3, that’s not quite so easy. However, the initial and most popular public copy appears to be attributable to an entity known as Drarbg. (see update below)

Drarbg has accounts on several major torrent sites, including The Pirate Bay, and is one of the most prolific BitTorrent releasers online today. Many presume that this is a single person, but Drarbg has previously indicated that it’s a group of individuals working together as a team. Drarbg, as the name suggests, has affiliations with RARBG, a popular public torrent site.

It seems likely that this high-profile, high-quality leak will become a talking point in the hours, weeks and months to come and will probably be seized upon as a prime example of why piracy crackdowns are needed. However, there is also another angle to be aware of.

Nu Image, the production company behind all three Expendables titles, sued previous downloaders of its titles. Will history repeat itself? Time will tell….

Update: Downloads climbing well over 200K copies now…

Update 2: While the Drarbg torrent gained the most traction initially, it appears another torrent was uploaded by another releaser around 20 mins before.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The outlays associated with the Olympics need to be clawed back in every possible way and one of the options is the selling of TV rights. In 2012, NBC paid the International Olympic Committee around $1 billion for broadcasting rights and as a result wanted to protect their investment.

Next year it’s expected that Russia will spend a record $50 billion to put on the Sochi winter games. Local broadcasting deals have already been sewn up by the IOC, with Channel One, RTR, NTV and RIA Novosti securing the key rights and other broadcasters having to settle for putting out a maximum of just six minutes of footage per day.

Needless to say, the Internet isn’t going to care about the IOC’s rules, much less abide by them. There will be hundreds of unauthorized streams and downloadable torrents of the games, from the opening ceremony through to the closing moments – and everything available for capture in between.

The IOC is familiar with the problem. In 2008 the body went as far as writing to the Swedish government to do something about Olympic events on The Pirate Bay. By 2012 illegal live streams caused the biggest problems and this time round in Russia the IOC wants to take an even more aggressive approach.

According to a letter obtained by Russian publication Gazeta, the IOC has written to Russian authorities and Olympic-related bodies demanding an extraordinary effort to rid the Internet of unauthorized Olympic content in record time.

The IOC is calling on the organizing committee for the games to create a “rapid response team” with the authority to remove unauthorized streams, links and other content from the Internet “in a few minutes or hours”, not days as is the current norm.

The adoption of a new anti-piracy law earlier in the year is an inadequate mechanism to protect the Olympics, the IOC said, as responses to copyright holder complaints take too long to process. Instead, they have a better idea.

The IOC appears to be suggesting the creation of a ‘blacklist’ of sites where Olympic events and streams are likely to appear without permission. Once on the list the IOC wants the sites to create tools that will “automatically and immediately carry out the removal of unauthorized content.”

Details are unclear, but the IOC also seems to be seeking government-administered punishment for sites that fail to efficiently remove infringing content.

When asked about the IOC’s demands the Ministry of Communications said they had not received a letter and refused to comment on “rumors”. The Olympic Organizing Committee simply refused to comment.

Communications watchdog Roscomnadzor, who would need to be involved in any initiative of this type, said they had not seen the letter but were willing to look at the proposals.

“If at the highest political and legislative level decisions are taken and Roscomnadzor receives the necessary powers, we will study this,” a spokesperson said.

By law, Roscomnadzor currently has the power to block access to any site or service that fails to remove reported copyrighted content or links within 72 hours. To meet the requirements of the IOC, legal adjustments will almost certainly be required.

Speaking with TorrentFreak, TV-focused torrent site EZTV said that they will be distributing torrents of the Olympics as they have done in the past. In their view the games should be an inspiration to everyone, not simply viewed as a money-making exercise.

“The Olympics is about people from all over the world coming together to show their skills and sportsmanship. And the IOC is purely interested in making as much money from broadcasting as possible,” the site told us.

“We think differently, we believe everyone should be able to see these events freely and inspire future sport heroes!”

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

TorrentFreak has seen an advance screening of the film and we can say that it’s not a hero story, not at all. It is a unique documentary about three totally different individuals with personalities that often clashed. They had their own motives for becoming involved in The Pirate Bay, and defended them till the bitter end.

Gottfrid Svartholm, the youngest of the three, made the news last year when he was deported from Cambodia to Sweden, where he’s currently serving his prison sentence for his involvement in The Pirate Bay.

In the film Gottfrid comes across as a witty person who likes to challenge the status quo. Known online as Anakata, he can be credited for many of the bold responses to copyright holders that are still published in Pirate Bay’s legal threats section.

Gottfrid also founded Internet company PRQ which provided hosting to many controversial sites including Wikileaks. In TPB AFK this connection is brought up as well, with Daniel Domscheit-Berg saying that Julian Assange has a lot of respect for the Pirate Bay founder.

The former Wikileaks spokesman recalls that he and Julian Assange made a quite an unusual trip to Sweden to hand over the hosting fees in 2008. The Wikileaks duo were surprised by Gottfrid apparent paranoia, and Domscheit-Berg remembers it as one of the weirdest experiences he ever had.

“He came to the hotel. And had someone waiting outside in a car. They had some kind of agreement that Gottfrid would always be near a window. So he stood there in the lobby and behaved really strange. Every half a minute he turned around to see if the guy in the car was still there,” Domscheit-Berg explains.

Gottfrid declined an offer to hang out for a drink, simply accepted the money and which he took off quickly.

However, Gottfrid’s dealings with Wikileaks didn’t stop at providing hosting services. Together with other people connected to The Pirate Bay he helped out the whistle-blower site on several fronts. Most publicly he assisted in the publication of the “Collateral Murder” video, which some regard as Wikileak’s big break.

At the end of the Wikileaks video the Pirate Bay founder is listed as part of the “decryption and transmission team” and credited for “networking.” While the exact nature of his contribution remains unknown, it is no secret that Gottfrid is an encryption specialist and that the leaked footage had to be decrypted before it was of any use.

A Pirate Bay insider informs TorrentFreak that several Pirate Bay “associates” did work for Wikileaks.

“Let’s say we were really good friends once upon a time. The original idea of Wikileaks is really close to that of The Pirate Bay, as you know.”

Our source further confirms that Gottfrid was connected to other Wikileaks endeavors, albeit minimally, and that it is “not improbable” that his contributions were related to crypto activities.

“Anakata has always been involved ‘lightly’ in all projects. Just as with The Pirate Bay, he didn’t really do a lot, because he had so many other things to do. He can’t focus on one thing,” we were told.

Unlike others connected to Wikileaks the Pirate Bay founder appears to get most satisfaction from displaying his skills, rather than displaying himself. With a constant drive to solve new puzzles and break down barriers, the establishment is a natural enemy.

More on Gottfrid Svartholm, the Wikileaks connection and the events surrounding the Pirate Bay trials will be made public on Friday when TPB AFK is released on the Internet.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

In the U.S. the MPAA was the outfit that tipped the authorities off on many of the ‘rogue’ sites that had their domain names seized in the last year. Similarly, in the U.K. the MPAA-funded group FACT carried out most of the investigative work in cases against the operators of the BitTorrent community FileSoup and the streaming site TV-Links.

Today we talk to Gavin “Tex” Warren, a private investigator who worked for the Hollywood backed group AFACT in Australia. While he mostly worked on offline piracy, his inside view allows us to learn more about how the anti-piracy agenda is sold to the outside world.

Warren became a private investigator in 2000, and prior to that he served as a detective in the Australian Federal Police for twelve years. From 2003 until 2008 he worked as an investigator, undercover operative handler and then lead investigator for AFACT. When AFACT moved their priorities from offline piracy to ISPs, they eventually let Warren go.

The Big Score

“Initially AFACT was called the Australasian Film and Video Security Office and was run out of Sydney by Mr Steve Howes,” Warren says, explaining how it all started for him in 2003. “The lead investigator here in Melbourne was another former AFP officer, Greg Hooper.”

“I had an undercover operative who worked for me (name withheld) that I shall refer to as “Short Round”. We were contracted to make purchases of DVDs and back then, VHS tapes of copyright infringing movies. In our first operation which lasted about six months, we had infiltrated a manufacturing “laboratory” and the dodgy sales team at the local trash and treasure market.”

Warren’s team then made so-called ‘trap purchases’ and all the evidence they gathered was then presented to the Victoria Police. The operation resulted in the execution of three simultaneous search warrants, netting about fifteen thousand exhibits, $30,000 cash and a dozen computer towers. It was a great success that was quickly communicated to the media.

“The press were informed and all was tied up in a neat bundle. Column inches were filled, sound bites were created and everyone was happy, except the pirates,” Warren recalls.

“This success ensured that Short Round and I had ongoing work. The AFVSO was subsumed by AFACT soon thereafter. Steve Howes was replaced by Neil Gane, a former British Hong Kong Police Inspector who had been working in Malaysia with the MPAA against piracy.”

Boosting Statistics

“At this time, Short Round and I were trotted out to meet Neil and to show him our equipment and discuss tactics. Mr Gane gave the impression of being very committed to stopping the evil scourge of piracy and was far more media savvy than his predecessor.”

“He was adamant that we needed to boost our statistics to make the media sit up and take notice and that the large numbers would make it easier to get the local Police interested. This was especially difficult to do as local police had no jurisdiction over copyright infringing product and the AFP were desperately short on manpower. We were encouraged to find links to drugs and stolen goods wherever possible.”

“We discussed the formula for extrapolating the potential street value earnings of ‘laboratories’ and we were instructed to count all blank discs in our seizure figures as they were potential product. Mr Gane also explained that the increased loss approximation figures were derived from all forms of impacts on decreasing cinema patronage right through to the farmer who grows the corn for popping.”

Gane understood that the media was an essential tool towards AFACT’s goal of getting tougher copyright legislation in place. And for this purpose, it was a good idea to bend the truth a bit. The results of this recalculation are quite amazing.

“2002 impact estimates were $100 million to today’s figure of $1.36 billion in nine years…. That’s a lot of extrapolating,” Warren says.

Courting the Police

Aside from influencing lawmakers with creative statistics, Warren and his colleagues also had to court the police on a regular basis. AFACT worked with both local law enforcement and the attorney general’s office where they delivered evidence and information to, based on their own investigations.

“Funded solely by MPAA, AFACT lobbies hard for changes to Australian law and enhance the sexiness of their case by making vague references to links to terrorism. Sometimes not so vague. I was instructed to tell police officers that the profit margins were greater than dealing heroin. It was bizarre. A twisted logic that AFACT spewed out with monotonous regularity,” Warren says.

One of the examples Warren gives is that they assumed that all burners and DVD replicators would run 24/7, making these operations appear very lucrative.

“Each burner cranking out ten discs an hour, multiplied by ten dollars per disc is potentially a hundred dollars an hour, multiplied by number of burners by hours in a year gives a yearly potential…. Very pumped up statistics.”

When the local police were convinced about the to need to follow-up on the case, Warren delivered them all the evidence they would need on a silver platter.

“In my time at AFACT we developed relationships with various police officers (detectives) and would work our cases up to a stage where we could present them with enough information, intelligence and evidence that most of the work was done. This is called a ‘walk up start’.”

“Police on the other hand would sometimes find large quantities of copyright infringing material whilst executing warrants, eg: drug warrant executions would invariably turn up some dodgy DVDs and I would get a call to come and identify the product and prepare a brief of evidence for prosecution.”

“It was a matter of educating the police officers what to look for. In this vein, I would regularly deliver half day seminars to police on their training days. It was a good system and had the effect of increasing their prosecutions and my investigations statistics. Collaboration had such a dark overtone. Cooperation is my preferred term,” Warren says.

Like many other private investigators Warren is a former police detective. And although the statistics may have been pumped a little, Warren was always careful to act within the boundaries of the law when it comes to his investigative work.

“The PI license is relatively difficult to obtain and easy to lose, therefore we tend to shy away from any activity that would jeopardize our livelihood. The key to efficient and effective investigations is to know all aspects of the various legislations that cover things such as Surveillance Devices, hidden cameras etc. At no time did I authorize or condone the breaking of any laws or rules.”

“Undercover operations, to be used in evidence, need to be squeaky clean. The last thing any investigator needs is to have evidence thrown out of court because of the breach of legislation, or compromise by way of entrapment,” Warren told TorrentFreak.

Bye Bye PI

At the end of 2007 Warren had a meeting with Neil Gane, who just returned to AFACT after serving as the Australasian Operations Manager for the MPAA for a brief while. Gane told Warren that AFACT would be focusing more on ISPs and online piracy instead of the street work Warren did.

Warren was still welcome to submit a tender for piecemeal work at an hourly rate, instead of daily. However, he later learned that his partner and former friend, Short Round, had undercut him, and was working on an as-needed basis for AFACT.

This ended Warren’s ‘career’ in the anti-piracy business. In the years that followed he continued to monitor what AFACT was up to, and he still can’t help but crack a smile when he reads about the disastrous piracy statistics AFACT tells the media about. And so do we.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

There is a blind trust in authority here that is alarming. The ever-increasing desire to know what we talk about and to whom is cause for more than concern, and that desire is displayed openly by corporations and politicians alike. To make matters worse, it is not just a matter of eavesdropping: corporations and politicians openly want – and get – the right to silence us.

The copyright industry is demanding the right to kill switches of our very communications. If we talk about matters disruptive enough, disruptive according to authorities or to the copyright industry, the line goes silent. Just twenty years ago, this would have been an absolutely horrifying prospect; today, it is reality. Don’t believe me? Try talking about a link to The Pirate Bay on MSN or on Facebook and watch as silence comes through. The copyright industry is fighting for this to become more pervasive. So are some politicians with agendas of their own.

While the copyright industry and repressive Big Brother politicians may not share the same ultimate motives, they are still pushing for exactly the same changes to society and control over our communications.

At the same time, citizens’ physical movements are tracked to street level by the minute and the history recorded.

How would you revolt with all this in place, when all you said just fell silent before reaching the ears of others, and the regime could remotely monitor who met whom and where, when they could kill all your equipment with the push of a button?

The West hardly has any high moral ground from where to criticize China or the regimes that are falling in the Arab world.

And yet, in all this darkness, there is a counter-reaction that is growing stronger by the day.

Activists are working through the night in defeating the surveillance and monitoring to ensure free speech by developing new tools in a cat-and-mouse game. These are the heroes of our generation. By ensuring free speech and free press, they are ensuring unmonitored, unblockable communications. Therefore, they are also defeating the copyright monopoly at its core, perhaps merely as a by-product.

Free and open software is at the core of the counter-reaction to Big Brother. It is open to scrutiny for any and all kill switches and wiretapping, and it can spread like wildfire when necessary. Moreover, it renounces the copyright monopoly to the point where popular development methods are actively fighting the monopoly, again making the connection between copyright enforcement and repression. Free operating systems and communications software are at the heart of all our future freedom of speech, as well as for the freedom of speech for regimetopplers right this day.

The software that is being built by these hero activists is a guarantee for our civil liberties. Software like Tor and FreeNet and I2P, like TextSecure and RedPhone. That criminals can evade wiretapping is a cheap price to pay for our rights: tomorrow, we might be considered the criminals for subversion. These are tools used by the people revolting against corrupt regimes today. We should learn something from that.

At the same time and by necessity, this free software makes the copyright monopoly unenforceable, as it creates the untappable, anonymous communication needed to guarantee our civil liberties. Mike Masnick of Techdirt recently noted that “piracy and freedom look remarkably similar”.

Perhaps Freenet’s policy expresses it the most clearly:

“You cannot guarantee free speech and enforce the copyright monopoly. Therefore, any technology designed to guarantee freedom of speech must also prevent enforcement of the copyright monopoly.”

The fights for basic freedoms of speech and for defeat of the copyright monopoly are one and the same.

Therefore, the revolutions will happen using tools that are not just in lack of the copyright monopoly, but actively defeat it. The revolution will not be properly licensed.

– — –

Rick Falkvinge is a regular columnist on TorrentFreak, sharing his thoughts every other Friday. He is the founder of the Swedish Pirate Party, a whisky aficionado, and a low-altitude motorcycle pilot. His blog at http://falkvinge.net focuses on information policy.

Follow Rick Falkvinge on Twitter as @Falkvinge and on Facebook as /rickfalkvinge.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Lost and Heroes, two shows that were also leading the list in 2009, have achieved slightly fewer downloads when compared to last year. Despite this slight dip, the most downloaded episode of Heroes is still exceeding the average viewership on US television. The same is true for Dexter which moved up to third place this year.

The massive piracy of TV-shows is mostly a reflection of the unavailability of these shows in countries outside the U.S., and a signal that TV viewing habits are changing. There is a huge interest in on-demand TV and there are millions of viewers that can potentially bring in millions of dollars in revenue.

The percentage of TV-downloaders from the U.S. has steadily declined over the last years, in part thanks to alternative viewing options such as Hulu. In other regions, such as Australia and Europe, the demand for U.S. TV-shows remains at pretty much the same level as last year.

Outside the U.S. fans sometimes have to wait for weeks or even months before the show airs on TV in their own country. Many of them are simply not that patient or willing to torture themselves, and turn to BitTorrent in desperation.

Below we have compiled a list of the most downloaded TV-shows, together with the viewer average for TV in the U.S. based on data from Nielsen. The data for the top 10 is collected by TorrentFreak from several sources, including reports from all public BitTorrent trackers. All the data is carefully checked and possible inaccuracies are systematically corrected.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The Largest Torrent

When we refer to the largest torrent we mean the single .torrent file that downloads the most data, not the size of the .torrent file itself. There are several huge torrent files active at the moment, but the record goes to a torrent with a 746.70 GB collection of all 2010 World Cup soccer matches (~ 6GB per half). This torrent was released 4 months ago and is still active with a handful of downloaders (update, this one is even bigger).

Another sizeable torrent that was released just a few days ago is the archive of the late Geocities.com that was shut down by Yahoo last year. The 641.32 GB torrent has received a fair bit of attention from tech journalists and is well seeded at the moment.

Downloading these torrents nowadays is a lot easier and cheaper than a few years ago. In 2001 when BitTorrent first went public the cheapest hard drive cost $238.00, and that was for just 40 GB. At the time, downloading a file of this size would have required a $4522 investment. Even in 2005 you would still had to invest $500 to get this much storage cheaply (5×160 GB).

The first commercial 1TB hard drive, one that could store the entire 746.70 GB, wasn’t released until 2007. Times sure have changed a lot.

The Oldest Torrent

The torrent file that has been around for the longest time according to our knowledge is The Matrix ASCII. We already crowned this one the oldest torrent back in 2005, and as of today it is still active with a few downloaders and only one seeder.

The torrent file in question was created in December 2003 when sites like isoHunt, The Pirate Bay and Torrentz.com were only a few months old and when Facebook and YouTube didn’t yet exist. Thus far, this torrent has survived a mind boggling 2500 days.

The Largest Swarm

We know that BitTorrent is used by millions of people, but which torrent was shared by the most people at once? According to our records this honor goes to the first episode of Heroes season 3, which appeared on BitTorrent September 23, 2008.

On the first day the torrent ‘Heroes.S03E01.HDTV.XviD-0TV’ had a swarm (seeders + leechers) of 144,663 peers, a record that hasn’t been broken since. Today, most than two years later the episode has been downloaded more than 7 million times and at the time of writing it is still active.

The Most Files

The next record is the one for the most files in a single torrent. This is a tricky one, because we know that there are torrents which link to millions of files, but none of these are indexed by regular torrent sites. With this many files, the size of the torrent alone can go over 10 MB and most torrent indexes have a restriction on the filesize of a torrent file.

The torrent with the most files that we’ve seen on public indexers is a copy of Magic Workstation that was uploaded 8 months ago. The download is only 4.01 GB in total but has 35,256 files in total.

The Most Data Transferred

The final record we will discuss is the torrent that has resulted in the transfer of the most data. This record goes to a release of Blizzard’s StarCraft 2 which came out three months ago. The most popular torrent file for this 7.19 GB game has been downloaded 2.3 million times, totalling a massive 15.77 Petabytes.

Interestingly, the legit copies of the game sold by Blizzard may have transferred even more data. All download copies of StarCraft 2 have been distributed through Blizzard’s very own BitTorrent downloader. Unfortunately Blizzard’s tracker doesn’t provide any stats so we don’t know if the official beats the illegitimate counterpart traffic wise.

—

Are there any torrents or records that we missed? Feel free to discuss these in the comments.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Most TV-show downloads come from overseas where the episodes haven’t aired yet, let alone that it can be streamed online. The only option left for these unfortunate souls is to use BitTorrent, or wait.

However, it seems that people don’t want to wait for months when they know that their favorite TV-show is out there, just a few clicks away. Indeed, at an increasing rate people have started to use BitTorrent to get their TV fix.

Traffic to the leading TV-torrent distribution site EZTV is up over 50% compared to last year. The site had more than 15 million visits in September compared to 9.2 a year earlier.

TV-torrents are particularly popular in Australia where most US TV-shows air with a delay of months or even years. EZTV is among the 300 most visited websites Down Under, and Mininova, The Pirate Bay and isoHunt are all in the top 100.

Stopping TV piracy is not that hard though. TV distribution companies should get rid of the long delays and offer streams to people outside of the US. If they can pull that off there is no doubt that the number of ‘pirated’ downloads will plunge.

Below is the list of most downloaded TV-shows on BitTorrent last week. Heroes is leading the chart with well over a million downloads in just one week.

The data for the most recent TV episodes are collected by TorrentFreak from a representative sample of BitTorrent sites and is for informational and educational reference only.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The debut post on the blog includes a criticism of 50 Cent, who just a couple of weeks ago had the temerity to suggest that piracy and file-sharing are all part of marketing music.

However, aside from the critique of Fiddy, the rest of the blog post – put there by Lilly herself – is someone else’s work. Arrr mateys, Long John Allen lifted the entire post from another site – Techdirt.com – effectively pirating the work of the one and only Mike Masnick.

“I think it’s wonderful that Lilly Allen found so much value in our Techdirt post that she decided to copy — or should I say ‘pirate’? — the entire post,” Mike told TorrentFreak on hearing the shocking news.

“The fact that she is trying to claim that such copying is bad, while doing it herself suggests something of a double standard, unfortunately. Also, for someone so concerned about the impact of ‘piracy’ I’m quite surprised that she neither credited nor linked to our post. Apparently, what she says and how she acts are somewhat different. Still, Lilly, glad we could help you make a point… even if it wasn’t the one you thought you were making,” Mike added.

Mike holds no grudges of course, neither is he pressing for Lilly to be disconnected from the Internet. He says he is more than happy for Lilly to carry on using his work, but wonders if he can now post Lilly’s music on his site without giving her any credit.

Lilly, here is our take on the whole situation. In isolation we don’t think your copyright infringement is a big deal at all and neither does Mike, but in the arena of this debate it’s still quite important. Infringing copyright these days is so easy to do, most people manage it every day in one way or another, and you are clearly no different. You probably didn’t mean any harm or even given it a second thought, but it takes only a few clicks to be labeled a pirate these days I’m afraid.

The next thing you know you’ve got God-knows-who accusing you in public of being an evil copyright infringer and telling you the sky’s falling in. Oh, you’re on your first strike now by the way. A couple more and it’ll be off to Ofcom for disconnection for you young lady. Or rather, no, you won’t, since it’s only music rightholders who will be ‘protected’ under this legislation you want so badly.

But measured by your colleague James Blunt’s standards, just because file-sharing copy/pasting is “easy to do, and has become accepted by many,” that doesn’t make it OK to rip off someone else’s work. Many thousands of people will read and enjoy Mike’s work on your blog and he won’t get paid a penny. He’s probably sleeping in cardboard box right now.

But let’s not get things out of proportion. Pop over for a chat Lilly, and we’ll try to broker a private music-for-article copyright trade-off with Mike – before he decides to buy Peter Mandelson lunch instead.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The data for the most recent TV episodes listed below are collected by TorrentFreak from a representative sample of BitTorrent sites and is for informational and educational reference only. The data for the second list is based on the total number of downloads (not only recent episodes) of all shows in the past week is provided by ShowInsider.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.