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.

By design the BitTorrent protocol shares the location of any user in the swarm. After all, without knowing where to send the data nothing can be shared to begin with.

Despite this fairly common knowledge, even some experienced BitTorrent users can be shocked to learn that someone has been monitoring their activities, let alone that their sharing activity is being made public for the rest of the world to see.

Like it or not, this is exactly what the newly launched torrent search engine BTindex is doing.

Unlike most popular torrent sites BTindex adds new content by crawling BitTorrent’s DHT network. This is already quite unique as most other sites get their content from user uploads or other sites. However, the most controversial part without doubt is that the IP-addresses of BitTorrent users are being shared as well.

People who download a file from The Pirate Bay or any other torrent site expose their IP-addresses via the DHT network. BTindex records this information alongside the torrent metadata. The number of peers are displayed in the search results and for each file a selection of IP-addresses is made available to the public.

The image below shows a selection of peers who shared a pirated copy of the movie “Transcendence,” this week’s most downloaded film.

Perhaps even more worrying to some, the site also gives an overview of all recorded downloads per IP-address. While the database is not exhaustive there is plenty of dirt to be found on heavy BitTorrent users who have DHT enabled in their clients.

Below is an example of the files that were shared via the IP-address of a popular VPN provider.

Since all data is collected through the DHT network people can avoid being tracked by disabling this feature in their BitTorrent clients. Unfortunately, that only gives a false sense of security as there are plenty of other monitoring firms who track people by gathering IP-addresses directly from the trackers.

The idea to index and expose IP-addresses of public BitTorrent users is not entirely new. In 2011 YouHaveDownloaded did something similar. This site generated considerable interest but was shut down a few months after its launch.

If anything, these sites should act as a wake up call to people who regularly share files via BitTorrent without countermeasures. Depending on the type of files being shared, a mention on BTindex is probably the least of their worries.

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.

As promised, we’re now back with part two of our interview in which we discover how some of the business’s pitfalls can affect profitability.

Affiliate schemes and the Megaupload effect

To begin we went straight in with a big question – how many views can John get on a top movie and what does that mean to him financially?

“I’ve had a few video files get over 100,000 hits but that is by far the exception. Most of the files I add don’t even get 1,000 hits because there is so much competition. That’s why I have to do so many! Financially…well I get between $1 and $2 per 1,000 views so I’ll let you do the math,” he explains.

As detailed in our previous article, revenue is generated when John drives traffic to file-hosting sites. We asked which ones are the best and how much money they pay out but John didn’t want to reveal too much. The takedown of Megaupload is apparently still ringing in everyone’s ears.

“Many of the file hosts now have ‘private’ affiliate programs. When Megavideo got taken down, many of them panicked and publicly removed their affiliate programs. That being said, their payouts are based on where the viewer comes from. This is purely based on what advertisers are willing to pay for. A viewer in the US is more valuable than one in say China or India,” he says.

File-hosting sites and DMCA takedowns

But of course, while John may upload many thousands of files, it doesn’t necessarily follow that those videos remain accessible. Once copyright holders find out where they are they issue takedown notices to the operators of the file-hosting sites who, if they want to stay on the right side of the law, have to disable access to the infringing material. So how often does that happen?

“It all depends on the file host and the TV show/movie. Some file hosts immediately remove a file when they receive the DMCA notice. Some take the legal limit to remove it and some I work with ignore the takedown notice completely,” John explains.

“My experience is that the pay television channels like HBO, Showtime and Starz are the most active when it comes to sending notices and based on their outmoded business model they have to be. My personal belief is that the rest of them only do it occasionally because they need to show their advertisers and/or investors that they are doing something, but secretly they love the exposure and increased fan base.”

Interestingly, John says that when he uploads copies of The Big Bang Theory, the number one U.S. primetime sitcom, two things happen. One – it becomes one of his best earners, and two – the episodes never get taken down.

“Maybe Chuck Lorre thought it through and figured the exposure was worth it,” John says.

But while episodes of The Big Bang Theory might remain intact, others most certainly do not. John says that at least once a day he replaces all of the links that have been taken down via DMCA notices. This, he says, takes around an hour and while it’s an annoyance “it is just part of the business.”

Repeat infringer policies are essential – or are they?

As revealed by the Megaupload case, copyright holders are absolutely insistent that in order to remain within the law, file-hosting sites must have a repeat infringer policy. So has John, an uploader of tens of thousands of movies and TV shows, seen any signs of such a thing in play at the file-hosting sites he uses? Does he ever get warned that if he uploads copyrighted movies again his account will be closed?

“Never. All I receive is an email or other type of notification on their websites letting me know when a link has been deleted. I simply re-upload it since it is already on my seedbox and re-add it to the streaming sites. Then I notify the streaming site that the other link is bad,” he says.

“It literally takes me about 2 minutes or so to replace a link. All of the file hosts and streaming websites cover their ass by putting in their Terms of Service that they do not allow any copyrighted material. As long as they remove the file when they receive a DMCA notification, then they are legal.”

Profit gets hit from an unexpected corner

While some file-hosts are clearly turning a blind eye to the activities of people like John which is a plus for him, they can also become part of the problem. Apparently some affiliate programs don’t live up to the hype meaning that John is sometimes left out of pocket.

“I had amassed over 20,000 video files with one site and had them all added to multiple sites. They would collectively regularly receive 50,000 to 100,000 views a day. Then overnight they all disappeared and I still have no idea why…ouch. Megavideo also owed me $1,000 for a year before they got shut down,” he says.

John says his worst experience came courtesy of the operator of several very well-known file-hosting sites which are all part of the same network.

“You are able to upload to one of his file hosts and then copy it to the others. This makes it easy to add a lot of links fast. So I did what I do and added 1000s of files to all of his sites and then added them to multiple streaming websites. Never got paid a dime. Received a few emails promising to pay but nothing….grrrrr. Anyways, just part of the business I am in. How does the saying go ‘No honor amongst thieves’?”

Finally, we asked John for his general thoughts on copyright and the state of the entertainment industry. He didn’t hold back.

Broken business models

“The business model used by the television, movie, music, and soon to be book publishing industries is on life support. It is kept alive by corrupt politicians such as Lamar Hunt (Rep-R-TX) and Patrick Leahy (Sen-D-VT) who are in the pocket of the MPAA and RIAA,” John says.

“The majority of the connected population on the planet has decided that they often prefer their musical and video content to come from the Internet. But these industries still can’t get it together after more than 15 years of widespread Internet usage.

“NBC/Universal spends millions each year fighting piracy. Start a fucking affiliate program and I’ll link for you! I realize it is not quite that simple, but if they don’t adapt and soon, they will go the way of the dinosaurs. The people have spoken – is anyone over there listening? I am and other linkers are. Torrent and streaming sites are too,” he concludes.

It seems very unlikely that anyone at the studios will listen to the advice of people like John so in the meantime they will continue to exploit the weaknesses in the current business model. Whether he’s still making a decent living this time next year remains to be seen, but rest assured that Hollywood and their friends in government will do everything in their power to disrupt him.

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.

But a third site, celebrating its tenth anniversary today, is old-timer TorrentReactor. At the start of the year it was the ninth most-popular torrent site on the Internet but with isoHunt’s closure and the disappearance of H33T, it’s position is likely to improve at the start of 2014.

The site has experienced many ups and downs over the last decade but is one of the few still in an upbeat mood and having fun. In 2010 the site claimed it had bought a Russian village and the story went viral, something the team never expected for an elaborate joke.

Rejecting the idea of a repeat performance, TorrentReactor have come up with something else to celebrate their birthday – a browser game called Game of Torrents. The game is still under development but is set to go live next month with plenty of new features. When it does a few lucky torrent users can also pick up some cash prizes.

“It took us some time to develop some basic mechanics and graphics. We developed tons of ideas along the way and it turned out game development is even greater fun than we expected,” TorrentReactor told TorrentFreak.

“The current gameplay is trivial. A player needs to click the big ‘Upload torrent’ button and buy automatic uploading units that can do the job for him/her. So the start is pretty easy,” TR explain.

“The goal of the game at this time is to get all the achievements. This sounds easier than it is. Not only there are trillions of torrents that need to be uploaded but there are some negative events that should be avoided. For example, your virtual computer may break down or your virtual ISP will block your torrenting activity. Just like in real life. These events should be monitored and dealt with during the game. Later we plan to add many interesting upgrades that will make the game even more unpredictable.”

TorrentReactor are also promising a future multiplayer upgrade but in the meantime will launch the game in single player competition form in a few days time. It’s not Call of Duty or Grand Theft Auto, but it’s surprisingly addictive when you get going and the promise of hard cash is something neither of those titles offer.

“We’ll start the competition on the 1st of November and it will last two weeks. Players that have the greatest amounts of torrents uploaded by that time will win real money. The first three cash prizes will be $300, $200, and $100 respectively. Seven runner-up players will get smaller rewards. There will be a top-players list where anyone can see who the leaders are,” the site’s admin concludes.

In the meantime TorrentReactor are making available an early beta version of the game so that people can get used to the kind of thing that will be on offer in a couple of weeks time. We haven’t played the game for long but aside from a sore finger we can confirm virtual raids on hosting providers, ISP power failures and random copyright infringement issues.

Players who would like to have some features implemented (we’d like to see seedbox and VPN boosts please) are welcome to mention them in the comments section below.

An early beta of Game of Torrents can be played here.

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.

While all of these mechanisms still exist today, there has been a tightening of restrictions.

Pressure is being applied to advertisers like never before and outfits such as PayPal are clamping down on payment processing for file-sharing sites. Unless they successfully pass through PayPal’s pre-approval system, facilities can be withdrawn in an instant.

File-hosting sites have suffered a great deal from this new regime too, and the signs are that private torrent sites – who rely heavily on donations – are also feeling the pain. Both are generally unwelcome to do business with PayPal and the signs are that companies such as Mastercard and Visa are also hardening their stances too.

However, as these forces come into play, sites are looking to augment their income by other means and as we’ve seen recently the crypto-currency BitCoin is appearing more regularly on file-sharing sites and services.

More and more VPN and seedbox companies are accepting BitCoin payments and last week The Pirate Bay added their BitCoin link to the site’s main page.

The site has never accepted donations from its users but the decision to add this anonymous chip-in option has turned out well. In just seven days the site has received a total of 174 Bitcoin donation transactions with a value today of around $2,000, a decent amount that could stretch out to more than $100,000 over the next 12 months.

While BitCoin (BTC) is definitely the number one player in the crypto-currency market, there are other options, some of which claim technical improvements over BTC making them more usable on a day to day basis. The Pirate Bay has just added donation support for one such currency – LiteCoin.

LiteCoin is a peer-to-peer currency based on the BitCoin protocol and is the number two player in the market. One LTC is currently worth just over $3.70, a far cry from a single BTC’s value of around $140 at the time of writing.

Nevertheless, according to its creators LiteCoin (LTC) boasts a couple of advantages. Unlike BitCoin, LiteCoin can still be mined on consumer hardware, and where BitCoin transaction times can sit between ten minutes and an hour, LTC takes a couple of minutes.

At the time of writing The Pirate Bay had received 50.6 LTC so getting rich by this mechanism will take a considerable time yet. Still, it’s money they would’ve never had and when added to the BitCoins already coming in it helps to pay the bills.

The question now is that considering the building pressure from authorities and payment processing companies, how long will it take for currencies such as BitCoin and LiteCoin to become a viable means of keeping file-sharing sites alive. Adaption and evolution in response to aggressive market forces isn’t only something that entertainment industry companies have to think about.

Know a torrent or file-sharing related site that accepts BitCoin, LiteCoin or similar currency? Please let us know.

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