Back then BitTorrent was a relatively unknown technology that, for the first time in history, allowed users to share large videos with groups of people all over the world.

One of the torrents that gained quite a bit of traction in the early days is an ASCII version of The Matrix. This piece of fan art is a re-coded version of the original movie in green text on a black background, resulting in a rather unique viewing experience.

Thanks to BitTorrent, the creator of The Matrix ASCII was able to share his work with thousands of people. Exactly 10 years ago today on December 20, 2003, the torrent for this release was created.

A few weeks later the torrent file was first shared online, along with an ASCII DVD cover and insert. In the months and years that followed thousands of copies of the film were downloaded worldwide, and even today it is still being shared by a dozen people every day.

To the best of our knowledge, this means that The Matrix ASCII is the oldest torrent that’s still being actively shared.

Perhaps worried that Hollywood wouldn’t appreciate the effort, the DVD file comes with a small disclaimer.

“This work is a parody. As such I do not believe that this DVD has any possibility of competing with the original in any market. It is not for sale,” the disclaimer reads.

Prospective downloaders have very little to worry about though, as Warner Bros. is not known to go after this type of fan-art that’s created for non-commercial use.

The people who’ve downloaded a copy of The Matrix thus far responded mostly positively after watching the ASCII movie. That is, those who knew what to expect.

“This is absolutely INCREDIBLE!!! EASILY one of the coolest things I’ve EVER seen! Where’d you get the notion to do something like this!?!?!?!” one person noted in a comment highlighted on The Matrix ASCII website.

Others, who assumed that they had downloaded a copy of the original Matrix movie, were less happy with the ASCII version.

“Dude, tell me what to do with this Matrix ASCII, cause the picture is all green n stuff, can’t even see what’s going on. And, its in 4 VOB files, but why?” was the response of an unhappy downloader.

All in all it’s safe to say that The Matrix ASCII has become a fine piece of Internet history. The tale of its survival in itself has now become a reason for people to download it as a collectors’ item.

The question is, however, will it survive another decade?

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

Next week marks the start of a trial in which a jury will be asked to decide how much in damages Hotfile must pay the movie studios. The trial is limited in scope, however, as the movie studios already won summary judgment on the issues of DMCA defense and vicarious liability.

With only a few days to go both parties have now reached agreement on the number of copyrighted works that will be part of the trial. Initially the movie studios wanted to include 3,808 movies and TV-shows, but this has now been reduced to 3,448.

“Defendants acknowledge and concede that Plaintiffs’ copyrights in all 3,448 of the Remaining Works in Suit were directly infringed by users of the Hotfile system, for which Defendants are vicariously liable, and for which Plaintiffs are entitled to recover statutory damages,” the joint stipulation reads.

The full list of pirated files includes work from all MPAA members except Sony Pictures. Among the pirated files are several episodes of popular TV-shows including Glee, Heroes, Lost, Prison Break, Friends and Fringe, as well as the movies The Karate Kid, The Bourne Identity, Bambi and The Matrix.

For each of these titles the jury or court can award a fine between $750 and $150,000. This means that Hotfile could face damages as high as half a billion dollars, $517,200,000 to be precise.

The stipulation further clarifies that Hotfile has waived all affirmative defenses against its liability for direct copyright infringement. The file-hosting service does, however, reserve the right to argue that its users were “space shifting” files that are not included in the suit, which could be seen as fair use.

“Defendants reserve their right to argue that files on the Hotfile system [other than the 3,448 files in suit] may have been ‘space shifted’ by Hotfile users. Plaintiffs reserve their right to argue the contrary, including that ‘space shifting’ is neither a relevant nor legally viable theory of fair use with respect to any copyrighted files on the Hotfile system,” the stipulation reads.

Aside from determining how much Hotfile owes the major movie studios, the jury will also have to decide on Warner Bros’ potential DMCA abuse.

Hotfile previously counter-sued Warner and alleged that after granting access to its systems the studio wrongfully took down hundreds of files including games demos and Open Source software without holding the copyrights to them. Hotfile seeks compensation for these false takedowns and the damage they have done to the company.

To the disappointment of the movie studios, the trial will be fought out without mentioning words such as piracy, theft and stealing. As reported before the weekend, the MPAA and its witnesses are banned from using such pejorative terms during the proceedings.

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

NZBMatrix was a very popular site in the newsgroup community and for many was the go-to place for NZB files linking to the latest content. In December 2012 the site was forced to close due to increased pressure from Hollywood studios who were sending more takedown notices than the site could handle.

Over the past year several sites have popped up to try to bridge the gap but while of decent quality, most are inherently prone to the same sort of attacks. If a site’s servers can be located then there is always a risk of litigation (or the threat of it at least) later down the line.

However, this week TorrentFreak has been speaking with Tyrion, the administrator of a fairly new Newznab-based site, who hopes to avoid some of the external pitfalls of running a Usenet indexer.

As its name suggests NNPbeta is in beta and at the time of writing is close to backfilling 340 groups to a total of 6,077,496 releases. But unlike other indexers the site is being built on an unusually secure footing right from the start.

“When I look back on the last few years of file sharing, I see the various organizations such as RIAA, MPAA, FACT, and Prenda getting ever-more aggressive in their hunting down of file sharers and search indexers,” Tyrion explains.

“For the file sharers and users of the services, the environment is getting to be one of Guerilla Warfare. They have taken away our ability to use centralized services and instead made us use small-force tactics in order to get our content.”

NNPbeta has no conventional web presence and cannot be found using Google. The site itself can be accessed via http://nnpbetabzsneptym.onion, but this link only works for users of Tor. The site is situated in what has become known as the Deep Web.

Tyrion naturally won’t say where his servers are other than they could be anywhere in the world. All users need to know is that by jumping onto Tor they are able to find the site as easily as they could a regular webpage but with much better security.

“Tor, I believe, is part of our evolution. By using Tor as the base of operations, we have reduced the risk of our users being discovered as well as the risk of the site being discovered, therefore providing a more reliable, long-term solution for indexing,” Tyrion says.

“We don’t know who our users are (unless they chose to provide a valid email) and they don’t know who we are. We hold the user’s privacy above all else and feel that this is the only way to accomplish our goal of providing a service that is stable, reliable, and resistant to external pressure.”

In describing what Tor does for the site (which he acknowledges isn’t entirely bulletproof), Tyrion uses a nightclub security analogy.

“We like to think of Tor as that bouncer at the front of the club that only lets people into our club that we want to let in. Yes, he can be overpowered if someone sets their mind to getting into the club regardless of the design of the system but we have a really good bouncer and the bad guys need significant manpower in order to beat him down,” said.

Tyrion believes there is a balance to be considered. Given the right manpower and resources it would be possible to bring down the site, but at some point the mounting costs versus the potential gains stop making financial sense.

Another thing for NNPbeta to consider is DMCA notices, not served on the site itself, but on external Usenet providers. One of the things pointed out by NZBMatrix in its goodbye message is that anti-piracy groups are becoming so fast at taking down infringing content from Usenet itself, Usenet indexers are being rendered much less useful. Tyrion believes that can be mitigated by acting quickly.

“From the time something is released on Usenet, [NNPbeta] users will have (at absolute maximum) about 30 minutes until we are able to identify that release until we are done with backfill. Once we are done, users can depend on knowing about a release in two minutes which provides that much more opportunity to grab files before something happens to them,” Tyrion concludes.

NNPbeta also plans on not succumbing to the payment processing issues suffered by other sites such as Newzbin2. Tyrion insists there will be no ads or affiliate links on the site, ever. As expected, the site will accept donations into a Bitcoin account.

Whether NNPbeta will grow to become a site as successful as NZBMatrix remains to be seen but they have significant hurdles to overcome. Not being indexed by search engines and sitting quietly in the Deep Web may be good for security, but it’s also likely to prove a hindrance to people who are just passing by.

Nevertheless, the emergence of sites hidden by Tor and other cloaking systems such as those employed by The Pirate Bay are an interesting development in the file-sharing space and a trend only like to increase in the months and years to come.

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

The movie industry-funded group identifies sites it would like to close, works to identity their admins, and turns up at their homes in order to add weight to their shutdown demands. On the whole, it has to be said, their tactics are effective.

FACT has done a lot of work against Usenet sites in recent times, most recently forcing the shutdown of NZBsRus. Barely a week later and another site has received personalized threats.

NzbX is a public Usenet search engine that has automatically indexed around five million releases. It’s been in existence since December 2012 following the NZBMatrix shutdown and since then has registered 130,000 members and serviced many more. Yesterday lunchtime its admin, Lemon – a 26-year-old recovering from a recent heart attack – had an unexpected visitor.

“I was in bed, recovering, I’m sleeping a lot – my partner is also recovering from surgery that limits her movement,” Lemon told TorrentFreak.

“I heard a buzz at the door. I ignored it twice, thinking if it was important they’d be louder. I heard something go through my letterbox and I stumbled downstairs to find an envelope without a stamp – which I thought was odd. Upon opening the envelope I found a letter from FACT.”

“About 20 minutes later I called the number, and the FACT guy stated he was waiting outside still. He showed up, without the officer from Trading Standards this time. At this point, he pulled out an A4 portrait photo of myself (that I can only find on my highly private Facebook) and asked if that was me. My response was something along the lines of ‘That is God damn creepy’,” Lemon explains.

As usual, FACT were quick to point out their successful prosecution against SurfTheChannel (STC) admin Anton Vickerman hoping that Lemon would see the similarities. He didn’t.

“I [told FACT that] I do not run anything like STC. I do not run a video streaming site. I make available XML descriptor files (.NZB) which describe content posted on newsgroups. We act upon DMCA requests and we do not curate content, I do not actively go out of my way to upload the latest episode of Who Gives a Fuck,” Lemon said.

The FACT officer thought otherwise and indicated that the sites were the same.

“What, so SurfTheChannel was a Usenet indexer?” Lemon questioned.

After some back and forth on the potential for criminal prosecution over profits made by nzbX (Lemon admits making only losses on the site), FACT’s target says he got bored. He informed the investigator that he was in the process of handing the site over to someone else in Europe but he’d be happy to transfer FACT’s paperwork to them. FACT indicated if those new owners happened to be in Sweden, the group had “good relationships” there.

Lemon says that he later spoke with the site’s potential new operators who considered the situation and decided they wanted out. They handed the domain back, but Lemon says he won’t be signing it over to FACT as requested. However, NzbX will be changing dramatically.

“I’ve decided to do the following. Shut down the index, modify the code base – open source it, and make it available as a one-click installer so people can run their own local indexers. I’ll also enable the ecosystem mode so comments, ratings, etc would be shared amongst all installations (if enabled), as well as NZB file sync through the cloud,” Lemon explains.

“The nzbX index itself will be shut down within the next 24 hours. I would like to point out that it is not closing down due to external pressure – but due to my health problems, and the fact that I have a new plan which seems like a far smarter alternative.”

So, another UK-based NZB site bites the dust. The question now is how many people will step up to replace it, with or without Lemon’s code.

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

Thus far, these lawsuits have almost exclusively focused on BitTorrent users, but new legal action by several major book publishers suggests that Usenet uploaders are also being eyed.

Cengage Learning, John Wiley and Sons, Elsevier and McGraw-Hill recently obtained subpoenas from the U.S. District Court of Columbia, requiring Usenet providers to hand over the personal details of two very active uploaders.

The publishers state that they caught the uploaders “Hockwards” and “Rockhound” sharing hundreds of books. The pair are allegedly connected to Usenet services provided by Usenetserver and XS News, and both companies are now being held responsible for the infringing uploads.

“This information is being provided to you as the Usenet provider responsible for providing Rockhound with the accounts through which the infringement is occurring,” the publishers write in one of their letters.

“Based on the information at our disposal, we have good faith belief that the material uploaded to Usenet by Rockhound is infringing the book publishers’ copyrights. Over the past four months alone, Rockhound has uploaded hundreds of infringing books.”

The book publishers are asking the Usenet providers to hand over all information they have on the two uploaders, including billing records, phone numbers and addresses. In addition, the publishers list hundreds of infringing books that they want the providers to remove from their servers.

TorrentFreak talked to a representative of the book publishers who informed us that they have to protect their rights online, to guarantee that high quality books will continue to be published in the future. Targeting Usenet providers and their users is part of this strategy.

“The publishers are actively monitoring and enforcing their rights on the internet, including on Usenet. Any individual or company that uploads large quantities of digital copies of the publishers’ books for others to download without authorization is a potential target for enforcement,” the representative told us.

“Those individuals and companies are violating the law, no matter where they live and no matter why they are doing it,” the publishers add.

Whether the information obtained through the subpoenas will help the book publishers to identify both users has yet to be seen. It is not uncommon for uploaders to take measures to obfuscate their identities by using prepaid credit cards, VPN services and false contact information.

That said, the action against these Usenet uploaders is significant and in line with developments over the past year. Gradually, we’ve seen anti-piracy efforts begin to include Usenet providers and related services.

Copyright holders, for example, have rapidly increased the number of DMCA takedown notices they send to indexing and hosting services, leading to the shutdown of NZBMatrix. In addition, payment providers such as PayPal are banning Usenet related sites over piracy concerns, causing sites such as Newzbin2 to fold.

Although very rare at the moment, these recent legal actions by book publishers show that Usenet users aren’t immune to legal troubles either.

Update: This article has been updated to make clear that one of the users was a Usenetserver customer. Highwinds is not providing Usenet services.

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

When NZBmatrix shut down over piracy concerns in December, hundreds of thousands of Usenet junkies were looking for an alternative indexer.

A large number eventually ended up at Usenet-Crawler.com, which offered a decent alternative.

Unfortunately for them, the fun didn’t last. Protecting the rights of various entertainment industry companies, the Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN contacted the site’s hosting company, asking it to pull the site offline.

In an email the group explains that the site “is offering a choice of popular titles in the area of films, and music that are made available without the required prior permission of the rights owners.”

Since the site owner hasn’t responded, BREIN wants the host to shut it down instead. This request was successful as Usenet-Crawler is no longer working.

This practice is not uncommon for BREIN, who have shuttered thousands of (mostly smaller) file-sharing sites through similar threats over the years.

Below is the email Usenet-Crawler’s host received, which is currently published on the site’s home-page.

—

Dear Sir, Madam,

Pieter Haringsma
Legal Affairs
Stichting BREIN

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

Looking ahead we wanted to discover the oldest active torrent to have survived all of these troubles.

After digging around for a while we found that the honor goes to a pirated copy of the documentary “Revolution OS.” The torrent in question was uploaded March 31, 2004.

At the time there were only a few hundred torrent files stored on The Pirate Bay, compared to more than 2 million today. Over the years just 15 people left a comment on the torrent and at the time of writing it has 27 seeders.

There is some irony in the fact that a “pirated” copy of a movie about Linux, GNU and the free software movement is the longest seeded torrent. Richard Stallman, one of the key figures in the documentary, will be proud.

Revolution OS director J.T.S. Moore has mixed feelings about the achievement.

“It’s definitely a problem, but I guess there’s some satisfaction in knowing that REVOLUTION OS still has appeal for some people twelve years later,” Moore told TorrentFreak.

But is Revolution OS also the oldest active torrent overall?

No, that honor goes to another non-mainstream product. 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 seeders. The torrent file in question was created in December 2003 when The Pirate Bay was only a few months old and when Facebook and YouTube didn’t yet exist. Thus far, this torrent has survived a mind-boggling 3,333 days.

Since we’re talking about records we should also mention the largest and smallest torrents on The Pirate Bay. The largest active torrent is an archive of the late Geocities.com, that was shut down by Yahoo in 2010. The 641.32 GB torrent is currently battling for its survival with just one seeder.

The smallest torrent, just over 3 kb, points to an Adobe Photoshop “crack”. In this case the torrent file itself takes up more disk space than the download itself. With more than 1,000 seeders this one is expected to be around for a while.

Next year the Revolution OS torrent is set to turn 10 years old, and we have a feeling that it will still be around to celebrate its birthday.

Update: The information on the oldest “active” torrent was provided to us by The Pirate Bay, with the criteria that it should have at least one seeder and one leecher. A commenter (vetyu) rightfully points out that there is a torrent that’s a few days older with 1 seeder and no leechers.

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

For those researching the piracy phenomenon these databases prove particularly useful, but for the countless thousands viewing these sites looking to download the videos themselves, there is nothing but disappointment. Strict rules ban the posting of links and on some sites even mentioning where something can be obtained is forbidden.

But a few years ago and alongside the rise of regular blogging with software such as WordPress, people began posting news on their own blogs detailing which releases had become available. Growing in confidence they later added a crucial element that release news sites had previously omitted – links to the content itself.

Founded in 2006, RLSlog.net was one of the pioneers of the ‘release blog’ format. At its inception the site didn’t post any download links but over the years that position changed to the point where it was reported by the RIAA to the U.S. Trade Representative as a “notorious market”.

But while it was the recording labels making the most noise in 2011 (and a year earlier when the site was taken offline following a complaint from Universal), it was a 2012 action initiated by the Hollywood studios that would end up having the biggest impact on how RLSlog operates.

In December last year, Usenet indexing site NZBMatrix was shut down following an aggressive complaint from the Wiggin LLC lawfirm. Quickly following up on this success the studios instructed Wiggin to go after RLSlog.

“Wiggin represent most movie studios. They asked us to remove all movie and TV shows represented by these companies,” RLSLOG’s admin informed TorrentFreak.

Rather than the takedown of specific “infringing” pages, Wiggin asked RLSlog to take down more than 90% of their content. In advance of a full agreement with the lawfirm RLSlog agreed to close the comments section of its site on movie and TV show releases to stop users posting links.

But that didn’t go far enough for the studios and yesterday RLSlog was forced into much more aggressive action.

“We would like to announce that starting from now, RLSLOG will no longer post any kind of download links or links to filesharing sites on all TV Shows and Movies,” site admin Martin announced. “This decision was done to comply with [the] requests of a legal company representing major Hollywood film studios and companies.”

RLSlog goes on to underline the fact that the site never hosted any content itself but of course neither does The Pirate Bay, and Hollywood still want that site shut down.

“Our site is strictly informative and never stored any files on its servers – we just linked to 3rd party websites which were actually offering the files,” Martin explains.

But there is a final twist to the tale.

Although RLSlog is doing as asked, the site will continue to provide news on which TV shows and movies appear online in pirate form. That is reporting and there is nothing illegal about that. However, what RLSlog is adding to fresh news posts is links to custom searches on Google utilizing the unique filenames that go along with pirated releases. These generate dozens of results, any of which allow users to download content just as they did before.

If the studios want those links removed they’re going to have to keep sending takedowns to Google. That’s individual takedowns too. Better put on a pot of coffee, this could take some time.

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

Eventually both bills were defeated.

Then there was the Megaupload raid and the indictment against the “Mega Conspiracy” which dominated the news the entire year and disrupted the file-hosting business.

There were also winners in 2012, such as the ACTA protesters, Rojadirecta and thousands of alleged BitTorrent users who had their cases dismissed.

And there were those who “lost” or received bad news, such as Gottfrid Svartholm, the Ninjavideo team, the IMAGiNE release group, Demonoid, BTjunkie, NZBMatrix and others.

The Pirate Bay made dozens of headlines as well, some good and some bad. The infamous BitTorrent site ditched torrents and moved to the cloud to escape getting raided, and enjoyed a huge increase in traffic despite increased censorship worldwide.

At TorrentFreak we carefully select the stories we write, and all these articles are important to us. But, to make some kind of an objective ranking of the top stories we compiled a list of the Top 12 most-read and the most-commented upon news articles.

Of course we would love to hear which stories and events were most important to our readers so feel free to join the discussion.

And a Happy New Year to all of you all! We really appreciate your ongoing support and encouragement.

—

Here are the most read news articles, each with hundreds of thousands of page views.

1. Police Raid 9-Year-Old Pirate Bay Girl, Confiscate Winnie The Pooh Laptop

2. Download a Copy of The Pirate Bay, It’s Only 90 MB

3. Pirate Bay Moves to The Cloud, Becomes Raid-Proof

4. Demonoid Busted As A Gift To The United States Government

5. Tribler Makes BitTorrent Impossible to Shut Down

6. Demonoid Is Back, BitTorrent Tracker is Now Online

7. Pirate Bay Enjoys 12 Million Traffic Boost, Shares Unblocking Tips

8. MegaUpload Shut Down by the Feds, Founder Arrested

9. The Avengers: Why Pirates Failed To Prevent A Box Office Record

10. The Pirate Bay Moves to .SE Domain To Prevent Domain Seizure

11. Leaked: Police Plan to Raid The Pirate Bay

12. BitTorrent Pirates Go Nuts After TV Release Groups Dump Xvid

Here are the most commented articles, each with their respective comment count.

1. MegaUpload Shut Down by the Feds, Founder Arrested (1202)

2. Demonoid Busted As A Gift To The United States Government (1087)

3. Cyberlocker Ecosystem Shocked As Big Players Take Drastic Action (842)

4. BitTorrent Pirates Go Nuts After TV Release Groups Dump Xvid (816)

5. Police Raid 9-Year-Old Pirate Bay Girl, Confiscate Winnie The Pooh Laptop (692)

6. BitTorrent Giant BTjunkie Shuts Down For Good (662)

7. Book Publishers ‘Shut Down’ Library.nu and iFile-it (662)

8. Filesonic Kills File-Sharing Service After MegaUpload Arrests (625)

9. Demonoid Is Back, BitTorrent Tracker is Now Online (609)

10. Pirate Bay Moves to The Cloud, Becomes Raid-Proof (601)

11. Pirate Bay Under DDoS Attack From Unknown Enemy (594)

12. ISPs To Begin Punishing BitTorrent Pirates This Summer (576)

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

The site provides information on new content availability in the popular “release blog” format and covers all the main categories including movies, music, TV shows, games, eBooks and software.

Like all large file-sharing related domains RLSLOG has had its share of legal threats. It has been taken offline temporarily in the past due to complaints from outfits such as the Web Sheriff and record label Universal, and was reported to the USTR by the RIAA.

RLSLOG has always recovered, but this month the site has something apparently much bigger on its mind. According to the site’s operator, RLSLOG has received a threat of legal action from the same law firm that has just taken down NZBMatrix on behalf of the major Hollywood studios.

“I can tell you the company is called Wiggin LLC, the same that forced NZBmatrix to shutdown,” RLSLOG’s admin informs TorrentFreak. “Wiggin represent most movie studios. They asked us to remove all movie and TV shows represented by these companies.”

RLSLOG told us that the studios estimated that around 94% of all content listed by the site is material to which they own the copyright, an amount RLSLOG contests.

Although NZBMatrix have provided a few details on the threats made to them, largely they have remained quiet. However, it does appear that the threats they received are similar in nature to those now being received by RLSLOG.

“RLSLOG has always cooperated with DMCA requests, it’s just the fact we haven’t received so many of them in the past, lets say 10 or 15 per month, because we do not host the content, we just inform about it and post some links,” says the site’s admin.

“But Wiggin didn’t want us to remove particular posts/pages like its common with other DMCA requests but rather the whole thing. We are still in the process of negotiating.”

While discussions continue, RLSLOG have already taken the first step towards satisfying the studios.

Say, for example, RLSLOG announced that movie X or TV show Y was made available online today, they would post up an article including a link or two of their own to where they could be found. However, underneath the news article would be a section where site users could make their own comments, which in recent times mainly consisted of people posting dozens of links to the content on different file-hosting sites.

The site’s operator says he has taken the decision to remove these comments sections on every movie and TV show post to eliminate links to 3rd party sites hosting the content.

For now, the changes only affect the movie and TV show sections, but it is possible that the changes could spread to other parts or indeed all of the site, depending on how things pan out in the future.

“We started like that, not posting any download links, and it is possible we’ll return to this model,” the site’s admin concludes.

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