Distributor Lionsgate was quick to react. Just days after the leak the entertainment company sued several file-sharing sites, which eventually resulted in the closure of file-hosting site Hulkfile. But more action was yet to come.

Doubling up on their efforts, Lionsgate also targeted hosting providers, domain registrars and seedboxes while at the same time sending thousands of DMCA takedown notices to have content and links to content removed.

However, a big question remained unanswered. Would the makers of The Expendables 3 start tracking down alleged file-sharers to force them into cash settlements as happened with previous iterations of the movie? It’s taken a few weeks but confirmation is now in.

Millennium Films, the production company behind The Expendables 3, is now shaking down individual Internet users they believe to have downloaded and shared the leaked movie without permission. What do they want? Hard cash, of course.

Interestingly, and at least for now, the company isn’t going through the courts filing subpoenas against ISPs to obtain downloaders’ personal details. In a switch of tactics the company is sending DMCA takedown notices to ISPs via CEG TEK International and requesting that the notices are forwarded to the customers in question instead. In addition to the usual cease and desist terminology, Millennium tag on cash settlements demands too.

As can be seen in the image above, the production company is giving notice recipients until October 5, 2014 to come up with the money – or else.

“If within the prescribed time period described above you fail to (i) respond or settle, or (ii) provide by email to support@cegtek.com written evidence of your having consent or permission from Millennium Films to use the Work in connection with Peer-to-Peer networks (note that fraudulent submissions may give rise to additional liabilities), the above matter may be referred to attorneys representing the Work’s owner for legal action,” the settlement offer reads.

Of course, whether people fill in CEG TEK’s settlement form or write to them with their personal details, the end result will be the same. The company will now have the person’s identity, something they didn’t previously have since at this stage ISPs have only forwarded the notices.

While the notices are real (CEG TEK have confirmed the action) little is known about how much money Millenium/CEG TEK are demanding to make a supposed lawsuit go away. However, TorrentFreak has learned that CEG TEK are simultaneously sending out settlement demands to alleged downloaders of The Expendables 2. A copy of the settlement page demand – $300 – is shown below.

While some people will no doubt be worrying about how to deal with these demands and whether Millenium will follow through on its implied threat to sue, at least some of these notices will be falling on deaf ears. LiquidVPN, an anonymity company listed in our 2014 report, received one such notice but as a no-log provider, could not forward it to its customer.

Compare that to the despair of a user posting on KickassTorrents who got caught after relying on IP address blocking software (typos etc corrected).

“I woke up to this alongside four other notices from my ISP. I stopped downloading six days ago, but I’m receiving old notices about movies that were downloaded a month ago and I basically can’t do nothing about it since its old. I use PeerBlock and it’s a bunch of bullshit. What should I do with this October 5 deadline on a settlement? Please help!” he wrote.

Finally, and as Lionsgate, Millennium Films and CEG TEK shake down sites, hosting services, domain registrars, seedbox providers and now end users, the big mystery surrounding the most important questions remain unanswered.

Who – at Lionsgate, Millennium or one of its partners – had full access to a clean DVD copy of the movie? Who then put that copy in a position of being placed online? The FBI, who can crack the most complex of terrorist crimes, are reportedly involved and must’ve asked these questions. Yet the culprit still hasn’t been found……

Could it be that studios become less cooperative when blame falls too close to home?

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

Aside from dragging six file-sharing sites to court, Lionsgate sent out hundreds of thousands of takedown notices to websites that linked to pirated copies of the leaked movie.

As a result all traces of the movie were completely wiped from many file-sharing sites. However, the movie studio still isn’t satisfied and is now going after individual downloaders as well.

Lionsgate has started sending takedown notices targeting people sharing the movie via BitTorrent. The notices are being sent to various ISPs who are urged to forward them to the customers whose accounts were monitored sharing the movie.

Interestingly, this also includes those who use remote servers known as BitTorrent seedboxes. While many believe that seedboxes keep them safe from the prying eyes of piracy monitoring firms, this is not always the case. Yesterday, a customer of the Canadian seedbox provider Whatbox received the following notice.

Via an email Whatbox urged the customer to delete the file in question, or face account suspension.

“A copyright complaint has been received for content existing on your account. To prevent account suspension, please delete the affected content within the next 24 hours,” the notice reads.

TorrentFreak contacted Whatbox, who explained that this takedown procedure is standard policy. As an Internet access provider it properly processes all incoming requests form copyright holders.

“When we receive a notice we check for the infohash and email the appropriate customer asking them to remove the file(s). Nothing is passed along to the copyright enforcement group except to confirm that the content was found and subsequently removed,” Anthony Ryan of Whatbox says.

“If a customer causes a large number of copyright complaints, we reserve the right terminate their service with a prorated refund and 24 hours of complimentary service to backup all their non-infringing files,” Ryan adds.

The above notice confirms that Lionsgate’s takedown efforts are now targeting individual downloaders, through their ISPs. The action appears limited to warning letters and at least for now there are no signs that Lionsgate will drag file-sharers to court.

Nu Image, another studio involved in the production of The Expendables 3, hasn’t taken any legal action either. However, they are more familiar with the topic than Lionsgate, as they sued a record breaking 23,322 U.S. Internet users for downloading a copy of the first Expendables film.

To be continued?

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

The trackers provide a useful function for the public, but are also used by copyright holders to track down pirates. This includes the companies that are used for the various “strikes” initiatives around the world, and various copyright trolls.

To make these increasing snooping efforts more difficult, the tracker operators have decided to take a drastic measure. The three top trackers have all implemented a ban list which includes the IP-address ranges of many of the larger hosting providers, which are frequently used by anti-piracy firms.

The operator of one of the trackers informed TorrentFreak that the measure will help to keep anti-piracy monitoring firms at bay. At least, those who use services of large hosting firms such as Leaseweb.

However, there is also a downside to the measures. Since many VPN services, proxies and seedboxes also use these hosting providers, they are banned as well. The tracker operators are aware of these consequences, but note that there are ways to circumvent the ban.

Also, affected services and users can still connect to DHT and PEX, which essentially makes the trackers obsolete. By using DHT, BitTorrent users are creating their own peer-to-peer trackers. The tracker operator we spoke to recommends enabling DHT whenever possible.

“Trackers are really not needed anymore for torrents to work. All BitTorrent users should switch to DHT primarily,” he says.

One of the collateral damage victims of the ban is torrent download service Put.io. They have quickly enabled DHT and PEX to ensure that torrents can still be downloaded, and will take measures to ensure that the trackers can be used through a separate server in the future.

“Right now turning on DHT and PEX brought some relief, but this limits our speed in finding peers and in general, our options. We will try our best to first get off those lists and then find a way to route the announce traffic over another server so this doesn’t happen again,” Put.io’s Hasan Yalcinkaya informed us.

Of course, anti-piracy outfits could take similar steps to bypass the ban. However, several are believed to rely solely on trackers for the time being. How effective the IP-address blacklist will be in the long run has yet to be seen.

The measure is not the silver bullet that will stop all anti-piracy outfits, but it’s certainly not making it any easier monitor file-sharers. So for once, they will be the ones who have to circumvent a blockade.

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

While downloading and/or sharing copyrighted material is against the law in many countries, there are plenty of tools around to help people’s TV-torrenting habits. The new Chrome extension ‘SeriesGuide’ falls into this category.

SeriesGuide keeps track of people’s favorite TV-shows, which are then displayed in a calendar format, so users know when to tune in. In addition, it offers Pirate Bay download links for each episode, ranked by the number of seeders and leechers.

TF caught up with SeriesGuide’s developer who goes by the nickname SchizoDuckie. The developer says he coded the extension to fix a recurring problem he faced.

“I’m developing this mostly because it’s a solution to a problem I have myself. I’m following loads of series that air at separate intervals and you keep having to take the same steps manually: Figure out when something has aired, wait for a download to appear, go to The Pirate Bay, search for a torrent, sort it by most seeds, weed out the crap, and download.”

While he has a Netflix account, SchizoDuckie says most TV-shows take weeks or months to become available in Europe where he’s located.

“We don’t even have the final half of Breaking Bad yet. So then you resort back to piracy,” he says, adding that many other people are probably facing a similar problem.

Right now SeriesGuide is in beta stage, but SchizoDuckie says that many more features will be added in the near future. This will include automatic notifications when new episodes are released, automatic downloads, plus support for seedboxes and remote downloading.

SeriesGuide is free of charge and available in the Chrome Store. It currently comes in two flavors; one that opens the extension in the same tab, and one that launches it in a separate tab.

There’s very little doubt that the TV-companies wont be amused by SeriesGuide. However, SchizoDuckie believes that the extension is perfectly legal and there’s no lawsuit on the horizon.

“I’m not really worried. First off, I’m in Europe, I don’t have to worry about gazillions of dollars of lawyer fees if I cough in the wrong direction. Secondly, I’m not distributing anything illegal, I’m merely connecting pieces of data that are freely available on the web and presenting them in another interface,” he says.

“This is exactly what Google and The Pirate Bay does too, and this is exactly what a human does if he operates this same procedure manually. If there’s a law against that somehow, then I don’t want to live on this planet anymore.”

That said, Google is known to boot torrent related extensions from the Chrome Store over “piracy concerns“, so there is a chance that SeriesGuide will not be available there forever. According to SchizoDuckie, this isn’t really a major problem.

“If somehow the whole thing does get taken down, then the source code is still out there, since it’s an open source project. The genie is out of the bottle,” he concludes.

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

First there are the no-signup required types that give free access to all of their features with no commitment required by the end user. Next there are the free to access sites that also offer additional features if the user is prepared to sign up with an email address. Finally we have private torrent sites that have all of their features behind a subscription wall.

Gaining access to this latter category can vary from a fairly simple process to an almost impossible one. Some private sites let new members sign up via an ordinary page with no additional restrictions but many operate an invite-only regime and are very strict about who should obtain them.

The first hurdle, trading and cash

Herein lies the problem. If a user wants access to BestTrackerInTheWorld.com he needs to have an online buddy already on the site with invites to spare – if he doesn’t then he can’t get in. However, there are ways for people to obtain invites without having any ‘real’ friends at all.

Firstly, there are sites around where people in possession of invites to site X are able to trade them with people who have invites to site Y. By sharing in this fashion a user with access to a couple of sites’ invites can find himself with double or triple the amount, if he plays the game cautiously.

This activity is strictly against the rules of many private trackers but that doesn’t stop those wishing to trade. Many traders build up vast collections of invites which are not only valuable in terms of the access they provide, but in a real monetary way too. And when there’s cash on the table, getting access to that all-important first invite isn’t hard at all.

There are plenty of places online where people can buy an invitation to a low-end private tracker for just a few bucks. Furthermore, those with deep pockets should have no problems gaining access to even the most exclusive private trackers, providing the price is right.

Trading scum

At this point many admins, moderators, staffers and users of private torrent sites will be screaming at the screen. Trading and selling invites is almost always completely banned on invite-only sites and those who participate in either activity are often viewed as the lowest of the low.

“These scum put our security in jeopardy,” a moderator of one site told TorrentFreak.

“Any anti-piracy company can buy an invite and put the whole site at risk. We don’t want traders on the tracker and them being there undermines our work.”

However, trackers do allow members who have proved themselves in some way to give out a few invitations of their own. They are supposed to do this carefully, to people they already trust and only to those who will contribute positively to the site. But how can site operators be sure that’s going to happen?

“Well if they screw up and invite a trader/seller/cheater whatever, they’re gonna get their account banned aren’t they?” a staffer on another site told us.

But just as an anti-piracy company might threaten a file-sharer with prosecution for his transgressions (and be completely ignored of course), invite sellers and traders don’t follow tracker rules either.

Getting organized – trading and selling invites on the web

One site that aims to drive a bus through the invite wall is TorrentInvites.org (TI). This site and its users give away and sell/trade invites (plus other items such as seedboxes) and its operator is only too aware that his work is unappreciated by many private trackers.

“I know that trackers are calling us scumbags or whatever, because they want users to invite only REAL friends on their sites. But come on… we’re in 2013. The power of the net is HUGE and our virtual friends are (unfortunately in my opinion) in many cases more than our real friends,” he told TorrentFreak.

“I find it funny that these guys who are breaking federal copyright laws are calling us scumbags, because we are breaking their (shitty in my opinion) anti-trading and anti-selling invites rules.”

We asked the operator of one private tracker for his opinion of TI and while he didn’t use the word ‘scumbag’ he did get to the point in a four letter word that you rarely hear even in the movies. He also threatened to nuke anyone even slightly associated with the site. However, the admin of TI doesn’t see his operation as the natural enemy of torrent sites.

Let’s be friends

“We are just giving the chance to many thousands of users to join some good private trackers. To users who are not lucky enough to have real friends to invite them. To users who can prove in the near future that they really deserved this chance,” TI explains.

While the trackers’ stance is understandable, to his credit TI does put forward what appear to be some logical arguments in support of his operation being of use to trackers.

“A guy who is willing to pay for an invite is probably the kind of user who is going to donate to a tracker as well. I think it makes sense!” he says.

“Another interesting example. Let’s suppose that an HDBits.org account costs $200. A guy doesn’t really need his account and he is selling it to another user. Isn’t it obvious that the new owner needs it more and will make better use of the account than the previous user?

“What trackers want are good users. Why the hell will they ban this account if they find out
that there was a deal involved? If [the trackers] would let each user to do whatever he likes with his account, after a while they would have the best possible user base.”

Countering, the retired sysop of another tracker told us that anyone buying invites for large amounts of cash should always be viewed with suspicion as anti-piracy outfits tend to have deep pockets. That may well be, but aren’t they also just as capable of infiltrating communities, making online ‘friends’ and obtaining invites for free?

“I’m sure it happens but we wanted to try to reduce the odds,” he said. “I don’t know if it worked or not, all I can say is that it seemed effective at the time. What I hated most was seeing some kid punting our invites all over the place and making good money when we were struggling to pay our server bills.”

Trackers sell invites too

While the sysop above clearly wasn’t prepared to step over the line and sell his own invites, there are quite a few sites who are currently doing that.

Visitors to some of the larger private trackers will be aware that while the sites are advertised as full, room can apparently be made for those prepared to donate in return for an invite. However, while not always advertised as blatantly as this, other sites are indeed involved in selling their own invites.

One trader who asked to remain anonymous told TorrentFreak that over the past year he has obtained an official supply of invites from almost a dozen private trackers which he sells and sends back a cut.

“Some they are wanting me to sell invites only to the best users but others they do not care about it,” he explains. “I give them money and they give me invites, beyond that does not concern me.”

Selling, trading or giving away – can security ever be assured?

TI notes that just because an invite channel is official – whether that is via the site itself or some other sanctioned source – it doesn’t necessarily follow that the quality of new members will be high.

“Just keep in mind that MANY (bad) users are getting invites in a ‘legit’ way, through tracker’s forums or official recruitment threads [on sites such as Reddit etc] and they are selling/trading these invites,” he concludes.

The issue of invites is controversial and unlikely to disappear soon. Trackers obviously have an interest in having some sort of control over who gets them when their security is at stake. On the other hand, however, trackers themselves are giving invites to people that they do not personally know yet are asking their members not to follow suit.

In the meantime sites like TI ignore all the rules in order to give the community what they believe it really wants. Who is right? You decide…

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

Giants such as PrimeWire.ag and Movie4K.to host links to all of the latest movies to view within a browser, but where does that content come from and how does it get there? What motivates people to contribute?

To find out, TorrentFreak has been speaking to an individual with a wealth of experience in this field. To protect his identity we’ll have to be vague about where he operates, but suffice to say he’s one of the most prolific uploaders and linkers online today with a hundreds of thousands of links spread and 30,000 movies and TV shows uploaded. So how did it all start for John?

“When I was a child, the hottest TV show was Happy Days. Well, it came on Tuesday nights at eight and if I wasn’t around ready to watch, I missed it. That’s right; you used to have to be in front of your television at a specific day and time to watch your favorite TV shows. There was no such thing as VCRs or DVRs and even good ol’ Blockbuster was a decade away from opening its first store,” John recalls.

The seeds of need had been planted and many, many years later John found file-sharing sites to be the perfect solution to that original problem. But then streaming sites came along with their ultimate convenience, changing things forever.

“I had just moved to Puerto Vallarta [Mexico] and went to a network’s website to watch a TV Show I had missed and I was blocked because I was outside the US. Grrrrr. Then a friend told me about [Richard O'Dwyer's former site] TVShack and a whole new world opened up to me. The site itself was ugly and clunky but it provided the market with what it needed and me with 100’s of hours of entertainment,” John explains.

While the site was clearly fulfilling unmet demand, not even TVShack had all the answers. This caused John to start contributing to the piracy ecosystem himself.

“One day, there was a movie I wanted to watch and there were no links to it. So I did a Google search and found one and added it to TVShack. Yay me! I was part of the community.”

That event triggered some thoughts. It’s a time-intensive task adding links, so why were some people spending so much time adding huge quantities of links to sites every night? John did some research and then it hit him in the head “like a brick.”

It was all about the money.

“In order to make money, you have to ‘own’ the links. The links come from file hosts. A file host is someone like YouTube or the now defunct MegaVideo. Of course there are hundreds of others out there and many of them have public, and often times private, affiliate programs,” John says.

The basic mechanism is that users upload hot content to file-hosting sites. The more people who visit that site to view the content the more advertising revenue the file-hoster makes. The file-hoster’s affiliate scheme then kicks in and part of the ad revenue generated gets sent to the uploader of the content. John says the payout to him is around $1 to $2 per 1,000 views of a movie or TV show.

Of course, putting content on a file-hoster is one thing, driving traffic to that content in order to generate the clicks – and the revenue – is another. This is where streaming link sites come in. By uploading hot movies and TV shows to file-hosters and then submitting their links to streaming indexes, more people find the content.

“Just post your links on one of the popular streaming websites like PrimeWire.ag, Movie4k.to or even up-and-comers such as TheShowDepot.com, and collect your money. Sounds easy doesn’t it?”

While John sounds very organized and streamlined now, things weren’t always that way. The main efficiencies have come in the way that movies and TV shows are obtained and made available on hosters and linking sites. Early on John would only be able to upload around ten TV shows per day and hard drive restrictions were becoming an obstacle to making more money.

“I made a few bucks, but I knew if I could do more and faster and add to more websites, I could make a nice living. Then I discovered seedboxes and a new way to download massive amounts of TV shows and movies. I even found software that automatically uploads the video files to the file hosts.”

With things hotting up with a part-automated system, John was soon adding more than a thousand links a day to several streaming websites. He now has 30,000 different movies and TV shows stored online, across 12 different file-hosting sites, each carrying between 10,000 and 30,000 items from John’s collection.

“Amongst the different streaming websites I have added over 200,000 links. And yes, I am making a nice living at it,” John concludes.

To some readers the idea of making money from unauthorized content will be something that’s unacceptable, yet it’s a difficult reality to escape online. While the vast majority of file-sharers and stream viewers will have no financial interest in the content being viewed, there will always be a small minority who seek to monetize it.

When reward becomes possible, motivations often increase and with that a proliferation of content online. It’s impossible to detect the motivations of the person who uploaded the content currently being viewed so the big question is whether the majority of consumers care. To be blunt – probably not.

Next time: How do copyright takedowns affect profits?

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

The company has pioneered mass-BitTorrent lawsuits in the United States and is estimated to have made a lot of money doing so.

This week another Voltage movie landed in court, with a series of lawsuits filed under the flag of “Killer Joe Nevada LLC” for the black comedy crime movie Killer Joe.

The film in question grossed disappointing box office earnings, but these fresh lawsuits offer new revenue potential.

On the surface the suits don’t seem to bring much new to the table. The complaints, filed at the Delaware District Court, are pretty standard and describe how a handful of defendants are responsible for distributing the movie all across the world without permission.

“Thus, a Defendant’s distribution of even one unlawful copy of a motion picture can result in the nearly instantaneous worldwide distribution of that single copy to a limitless number of people. The Plaintiff now seeks redress for this rampant infringement of its exclusive rights,” the complaints read.

The purpose of the lawsuits is to reveal the identities of the file-sharers who are only known by their IP-addresses, so they can be encouraged to settle. To accomplish this the movie studio asked the court to grant a subpoena so they can order associated ISPs to give up their customers’ details.

Usually the list of ISPs is limited to residential Internet providers, but in the Killer Joe suits we see also see several IPs that belong to hosting provider Leaseweb. These IPs could run a seedbox for example, but a few of them trace back to privacy boasting VPN service SpotFlux.

The question rising now is how private these seedboxes or SpotFlux users really are. VPNs and seedboxes are often advertised as anonymous ways to download, but when the hosting company or VPN provider keeps logs that can link an IP to a user there is not much privacy left.

TorrentFreak asked both Leaseweb and SpotFlux what kind of information they will be able to share when the subpoena comes in, but we have yet to receive a response. In its privacy policy Spotflux explains that it will comply with court orders, but that the company keeps logs to a minimum.

Why the movie company is targeting VPN and other Leaseweb IP-addresses is a mystery. Conspiratorial thinkers may suggest that they want to crush people’s privacy, but the more likely explanation is that they didn’t bother to examine who owns the IPs.

After all, the true purpose of these lawsuits is to get the personal details of infringers with the least possible effort.

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

However, while many users simply can’t be bothered to read the rules, some site staff don’t stop to think what it’s like to be a user. A couple of dozen basic rules are easy enough to follow, but make them too complex and members just switch off, rules get broken, and no one is happy as a result.

Last Monday CHDBits, a private tracker specializing in HD content, introduced a set of rules for those members who use seedboxes on the site. These server-based tools paid for by members pump bandwidth into torrent swarms, making transfers quicker for everyone on the site.

Far from seeing this as a good thing, CHDBits felt the need to regulate their use with the most bizarre and complex rules the torrent world has ever seen. They include users having to send the site proof that they paid for the seedbox, along with a “legal agreement of usage as well as any other certificate / proof of rental from the original service provider.”

In order to fully appreciate the complexity of the rules a copy can be found here. Please have a read through now and we’ll meet you back here for the next paragraph in 20 mins.

Back already? Excellent!

Perplexed that we may have somehow overlooked the need for such a complex set of rules, TorrentFreak spoke with DroidX from Underleech.org, a company that provides VPNs and seedboxes to BitTorrent users.

“Sometimes things seem like great ideas at the time, similar to when you code your website with a barking dog on every page refresh when you’re drunk at 6am. The difference between the aforementioned and CHDBits’ new seedbox policy is the policy wasn’t taken down when they sobered up unlike your barking dog surely was,” Droidx begins.

“At first glance the policy sounds normal enough: prevent hit and runs and cheating by enforcing a set of rules. Sounds like a perfectly valid reason with good intentions, unfortunately everyone but CHDBits’ has heard the story about how the road to hell is paved. Simply put, these new rules are ridiculous.”

Droidx says that the ruleset basically treats seedbox users like cheaters (people who manipulate their stats to make it appear they have uploaded more than they have) when in reality they tend to be the users that go out of their way to help a tracker.

Rule 1A states that any seedbox used on the site must have a dedicated IP address for that user’s exclusive use. This, Droidx explains, is problematic.

“Maybe CHDBits’s haven’t heard but IPV4 addresses have basically run out, all remaining blocks are owned and users are forced to rent them from their provider or buy them at high prices. This is the main reason just about every seedbox provider in the business uses a shared IP. There is no good reason to buy a dedicated IP for every user on a box and end up charging more for the seedbox plan.

“Worse, I believe the reason for this is that CHDBits’ tracker software isn’t compiled to handle multiple users seeding on the same IP and rather than invest time in fixing the issue and recompiling the tracker, they are taking the easier way out and just banning shared IPs,” he explains.

As mentioned earlier, CHDBits also want their users to send over proof that they paid for the seedbox. That anonymity users hoped for when they signed up for the seedbox in the first place? Forget it.

Other rules basically dictate the terms that a user must agree with their seedbox provider in order for it to be accepted on the site.

“Requiring a minimum rental period of not less than a calendar month rules out the one week and two week plans some users strapped for cash use to get a quick boost. What is the harm in that? The user is paying their own hard earned money to do the right thing and help their account,” says Droidx.

Furthermore, if a user purchased their seedbox in a promotion, received a discount, or even won it in a competition, unbelievably that seedbox is banned from the site.

Of course, no draconian set of rules is complete without the punishments for non-compliance which in CHDBits’ case include being barred from downloading torrents for up to four weeks or being banned completely. Perhaps unsurprisingly given the madness so far, these punishments can kick in for the most minor of infractions, such as using a seedbox for its intended use.

“No mass downloading/ uploading torrents?? HUH? REALLY? Did they not get the damn memo of what seedboxes are used for!?!?!……. MASS SEEDING! That is the whole damn point for the majority of the users. They spend their cash to seed as much as they can to get their money’s worth,” Droidx notes.

But perhaps the best one (and you may have to read this twice) is that users’ seedbox use may not “Disturb the other users download/upload experience.”

“I can see it now,” says Droidx. “CHDBits’ !!! My torrents from your site are downloading TOO FAST! It’s using up all my connection and I can’t stream YouPorn! BAN the asshole with the seedbox who is causing this disturbing situation!”

As highlighted at the start of this article, rules are put in place to make a site a better place, but if they don’t achieve that then one has to question why they are there at all. Furthermore, rules that treat contributing members in this fashion are simply ridiculous and should never have been put in place.

“At the end of the day, with all these rules and regulations, I fear most users will say ‘Why bother with all this bullshit? Easier to download a cheat client.’ I for one, hope CHDBits’ rethinks this assinine policy,” Droidx concludes.

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

As a result, more and more solutions are coming to market that aim to give freedom back to file-sharers while increasing performance and anonymity.

With their own unique skill sets the popularity of seedboxes and VPNs has grown tremendously in recent years, but for those with slightly different needs there are alternatives. Today we take a look at a new service which aims to offer performance, security and convenience, backed up by the anonymity of BitCoin.

BitFetch is a remote BitTorrent downloading service operating entirely within any browser with no torrent client needed. Since it also has its own search engine there is no need to visit a torrent site either, meaning that blocked sites are a thing of the past.

“I created BitFetch as an alternative to BitcoinTorrentz, since its owner went MIA since October and the site was down most of the time,” the owner of BitFetch told TorrentFreak.

The BitFetch interface is clean with a single box requesting one of three types of input.

The first option is simply to enter a search term. We chose TPB AFK and were greeted with 13 short pages of results, conveniently ordered by number of seeds.

Users who already have a magnet link in their clipboard can simply paste it into BitFetch. Equally, those who have a torrent file on their computer can upload it using the same tools.

When ‘fetch’ is clicked BitFetch joins the torrent swarm in question and grabs the files requested by the user and stores them on its own servers. Since users of BitFetch never enter the BitTorrent swarm, privacy is never comprised. This part of the process was so quick on the 974MB file we chose that we had no time to take a screenshot.

Once the files are stored by BitFetch it’s simply a case of transferring them to the host PC. Clicking download brings up a box which allows the user to have all files compressed into a convenient single ZIP file download. Alternatively any of the files from the original torrent can be selected to avoid downloading files that aren’t needed.

We opted to ZIP which took a few seconds and after choosing a hard drive location the subsequent download was on its way. The beauty here is that downloads take place over HTTPs which unlike BitTorrent is not regularly throttled by ISPs and is encrypted by default.

Just like any decent seedbox or VPN service, BitFetch costs money to use. Don’t let that put you off though. All TorrentFreak readers can test the service out for free – we’ll tell you how to access that in a moment. Second, BitFetch wants its users to stay as anonymous as possible and to this end only accepts payment in BitCoins.

“I always thought it was a great idea to take advantage of the instant nature, non-existent fees and pseudoanonymity of Bitcoin for services like this, especially in this day and age where governments and ISPs are the puppets of copyright groups,” BitFetch explains.

“I think that in the coming years BitCoin is going to become absolutely huge. People are slowly waking up to the fact that fiat currencies are a joke and Bitcoin actually puts the power back into their hands.”

Since we’re on the subject of privacy it makes sense to outline what information BitFetch stores on its users. The information is limited to an account token, total bytes downloaded, total BitCoin deposited and last date using the service. Torrent hashes are tied to account tokens only while transfers take place and are deleted once complete. No IP addresses, browser headers, BitCoin sending addresses or other data is saved.

TorrentFreak readers can test the BitFetch service completely free of charge by following this link. It’s limited to 2GB per person for the 24 hours following the publication of this article with no limits on the number of torrents fetched.

After this period users will have to top up with BitCoins. It’s a pay-as-you-go system which means that no credits are wasted at the end of a month as is the case with subscription packages.

Update: For those who are concerned about BitTorrent etiquette, BitFetch’s owner clarifies that all files are properly seeded. “Bitfetch tries to keep a ratio above 1. In fact, in the last 2 months the average ratio has been 1.62 (total BT bytes out / total BT bytes in),” he writes.

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

Sure, many of the bigger public sites (Pirate Bay, Torrentz, KickAss, isoHunt, ExtraTorrent etc) continue to do well, but 2012 was awash with stories of web blockades, site shutdowns, arrests, copyright trolls and, perhaps most importantly, developing financial restrictions that limit sites’ abilities to operate.

Last year hundreds of sites lost their ability to do business with PayPal and other payment processors and this year it looks like that trend will continue.

Just yesterday we published an article on research from Boston’s Northeastern University that recommended going after sites’ opportunities to process payments through PayPal or credit card processors.

And just a few hours later we published another which explained the plight of some private trackers that are being subjected to PayPal demands for invites so the company can snoop around the site to decide whether to carry on doing business with it.

A site mentioned in the article, the 37,000 member TorrentBytes (TBy), is facing closure after its options for processing donations ran out. Founded in late 2004, TorrentBytes has its next server bill due at the end of January but thanks to a PayPal withdrawal has no way to collect money from users to pay it. Not even Bitcoins will work according to an admin.

“Bitcoin is not an option. We can pay next to nothing with it and there seems to be no ‘certain’ way to convert it to something we can use,” he says.

Additionally, a suggestion on how to bypass PayPal’s verification system by using a third party site is also rejected by the TorrentBytes admin.

“Using another site/community/forum/whatever as a ghost site to funnel funds to this one is also a no-go. If you people can find the link from this page, so can PayPal,” he explains.

So how do you fund a file-sharing site if donations are wiped out? Well there is advertising, but apparently that is also a problem when applied to the largely tech-savvy private site community.

“Advertisements would work if 99% of the userbase did not run Adblock. And even then the funds that come from somewhere would have to get passed through. And they are something that has been on the no-no list for this site since before day 1,” the TBy admin concludes.

Of course, advertising is being cracked down on too.

As reported earlier this month, the University of Southern California has just published its first Advertising Transparency Report in which it criticized the use of ads on ‘pirate’ sites. The report received widespread coverage and seems to be having an effect. According to Digital Music News, several advertisers including Levis are ordering their ads to be removed from file-sharing related sites.

However, at least for the immediate future and despite the rhetoric, public sites will still be able to finance their operations from advertising and affiliate programs. There are apparently enough companies prepared to place ads on the big sites at the moment but the drawback is that they don’t want to pay good rates to put them there, at least not when compared to those placed on a ‘normal’ website.

The future for some private communities is not so rosy. Despite being able to run on a $200 per month server many have taken on many extra costs, not least seedboxes and other servers to ensure that their sites are competitive in the torrent racing scene. Many are also investing in VPN tunnels to ensure their true locations aren’t discovered. These costs are continually adding up, just as sites’ abilities to receive funds are being throttled.

But it’s not all bad news, far from it.

There are still hundreds of sites to choose from and more content than ever before, but things will probably have to change if things get worse. Just like any other entity going through financial issues, belts will have to be tightened, compromises will have to be made. Do sites really need ten seedboxes and an expensive pay account on some scene topsite to exist?

The beauty of P2P and BitTorrent is that it’s a distributed system. Indeed, as far as sites are concerned bandwidth between users (and of course content) are both available for free and running in basic mode requires only a few dollars a month on top to pay for a server. Trading in the big gas guzzler for a something a little more frugal should be a survival option.

Of course, in many cases this could potentially mean file-sharing backing up in sophistication to 2004, to what may as well be the stone age to many of today’s younger enthusiasts. That said, ask anyone who was around at the time if it was so bad. Yes, at times Suprnova required 30 refreshes until a page actually loaded and yes, initial seeders uploaded at a snail’s pace, but the scene was buzzing and people were having fun. And if it’s not about having fun anymore, something has gone wrong along the way.

Maybe a fresh start and a resurgence of some old fashioned non-monetary gain values is what is needed. The money can’t be targeted if there isn’t any.

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