One of Canipre’s partners is Voltage Pictures, the company that launched a huge campaign in the United States targeting thousands of alleged sharers of the movie The Hurt Locker. Voltage’s settlement project has now spread to Canada and the first unlucky targets are customers of the ISP TekSavvy.

Voltage Pictures are claiming that around 2,000 TekSavvy users have been monitored sharing around two dozen of their titles including Tucker & Dale vs Evil. They asked the ISP to hand over their personal details so they can be approached for settlement, TekSavvy refused and the whole thing went to court in Toronto Monday.

However, while TekSavvy have gone out of their way to keep their customers informed (leading observers to believe that they would end up fighting Voltage Pictures to defend their customers’ privacy) yesterday’s proceedings weren’t to go that way at all.

TekSavvy CEO Marc Gaudrault said that after spending a considerable amount of time the company had come to a decision that it would not to oppose the motion for discovery filed by Voltage.

“Everybody should know though that we have looked into all angles to determine what our position should be in this situation and after spending a significant amount of time and soliciting a considerable amount of advice from numerous respected sources, we found that we simply could not comment on the merits of the case,” Gaudrault explained.

The TekSavvy CEO says the company’s primary responsibility is to ensure that customers being targeted by Voltage Pictures get “adequate notice” but added that the best way for people not to become involved in the case “is to simply not engage in such [illegal file-sharing] activities.”

After learning there would be no fight, there was a backlash among some users which prompted a response from Gaudrault.

“If there was more I could do to protect your privacy, I would do it. I just don’t have a hook,” he said. “Whatever behavior our customers engage in is not for us to scrutinize. If we wade into that, we are essentially going against Net Neutrality principles that we fought for.”

Gaudrault said that new Canadian copyright laws had tied his hands. He said that the Copyright Modernization Act shelters ISPs from liability from infringement based on the fact that they are mere intermediaries and nothing more. Getting further involved in the merits of the case could jeopardize that.

“The law is the law. I can’t defend against the law. The laws are there to defend against bad things. If we defend against laws, that makes us bad. We don’t do that. We’ve never done that,” he said.

But already the ISP’s decision is coming under scrutiny.

Writing on the Excess Copyright blog, lawyer Howard Knopf says that despite the ISP’s openness, questions will arise as to why TekSavvy isn’t opposing the motion as ISPs Shaw and Telus did (with success) in a music industry lawsuit dating back to 2004.

“In this regard, it is interesting to compare Voltage’s material with the BMG et al material filed in 2004 that was rejected by the Federal Court and Federal Court of Appeal at that time as inadequate in a very comparable situation, as a result of which we now have clear and binding appellate case law,” Knopf wrote.

One success that did come out of the hearing is that the judge apparently took notice of a letter filed by the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic which requested a delay in the court hearing Voltage’s motion for discovery.

CIPPIC argued that there had been insufficient time from the filing of the motion to yesterday’s hearing date for defendants to “learn of the motion, retain, be advised by and instruct legal counsel,” and insufficient time for “CIPPIC to prepare and file an application to intervene in the motion.”

Despite opposition from Voltage the hearing was adjourned until January 14, 2013. In the meantime TekSavvy could potentially change its mind on the decision not to oppose the motion but given Marc Gaudrault’s decisiveness since the weekend, that seems unlikely. Should that remain the case, any opposition will have to come from CIPPIC and the defendants.

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

The interactive data set published yesterday spans a two-year period and this initial release covers the period between April 2008 and May 2010. It includes BitTorrent throttling percentages of ISPs in dozens of countries, divided into three-month periods. Below we discuss a few trends and notable findings.

United States

The BitTorrent throttling practices of Comcast, exposed by Robb Topolski and TorrentFreak in 2007, were in part what led to the Measurement Lab research. After an FCC investigation Comcast was ordered to stop slowing down BitTorrent on a large-scale, and the data shows that the company has kept its word.

Early 2008 Comcast limited nearly half (49%) of all BitTorrent traffic but this was reduced to 3 percent by the first quarter of last year. Cox, another heavy throttler, went from 51 percent to 3 percent in the same time period. The data further shows that in 2010, Clearwire was the only U.S. Internet provider that limited more than 10 percent of all BitTorrent traffic, 17 percent to be precise.

Worst: Clearwire (17%)

Best: Comcast and others (3%)

Canada

In Canada, all large ISPs have admitted to slowing down BitTorrent traffic, and some do so to a great extent. Since the start of the measurements Rogers has continuously throttled more than three-quarter of all BitTorrent traffic, and there are no signs that this will stop.

During the first quarter of 2010 the two other large Canadian ISPs, Bell and Shaw, were throttling 16 and 14 percent respectively. Videotron on the other hand has never slowed down more than 7 percent, and only 3 percent during the last measurement year.

Worst: Rogers (78%)

Best: Videotron (3%)

Great Britain

In Great Britain, TalkTalk used to limit a third of all BitTorrent traffic, but this was reduced significantly by the end of 2009. They now only slow down BitTorrent during peak hours which resulted in a 12 percent throttling rate early 2010. Tiscali and BT Group are exposed as the most heavy throttlers while Virgin Media, O2 and BSkyB have had relatively low percentages throughout the measurement period.

Worst: Tiscali and BT Group (27%)

Best: BSkyB (5%)

Other

A quick look at some other countries shows that in Australia none of the large ISPs were throttling BitTorrent traffic heavily in 2010, and the same can be said for Sweden and France. In The Netherlands UPC used to throttle heavily, but this was no longer the case early 2010.

In Germany, Kabel Deutschland seems to be the poorest choice for BitTorrent users (36%), and in Poland UPC has to be avoided as they limit 87 percent of all BitTorrent traffic.

Those who are interested in seeing how their own ISP performs can take a look at the full dataset at deeppacket.info. The researchers promise to release more recent data in the future, and it will be interesting to see how the various throttling habits of ISPs develop.

For those who have a choice, which us unfortunately not always the case, the data can definitely help to make an informed decision when signing up at a new Internet Provider.

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

At the end of May 2011 a leaked copy of Deus Ex: Human Revolution turned up online. As downloaders quickly discovered, it wasn’t the full game and was marked up on torrent sites as a ‘beta’ version. Nevertheless, a good time was being had by all.

However, what file-sharers didn’t know was that they were quietly being overlooked by a young anti-piracy outfit who had a most unorthodox plan up their collective sleeves. Founder of Vigilant Defender, James Grimshaw, who describes himself as “an illegal downloader” with connections to “the Scene”, told TorrentFreak that this particular leak of Deus Ex: HR gave his company the opportunity they’d been waiting for.

First, Vigilant obtained a copy of the leak and a crack that was made available from a Chinese file-sharing site known as ALI213. Using a combination of the pair and the addition of their own code, the company then re-uploaded their version of the release to various torrent sites, all mocked up to look like official releases from well-known piracy groups such as Skidrow and Reloaded. The modified beta was then distributed via rented seedboxes.

James told TorrentFreak that after the first couple of levels, gamers found themselves dumped out and directed to a website containing a questionnaire. It asked why people illegally download, which torrent and DDL sites they use, how much data they download per month, what content people download (with a focus on PC games) and what, if any, anonymity services they use.

A whole section of the questionnaire was dedicated to DRM systems such as SecuROM, Steam, and solutions from EA and Ubisoft. Vigilant also asked respondents if they were planning on buying the game when it came out officially and how much they would pay for it – the average (including nearly 24% of respondents who indicated they had already pre-ordered at the full price) was $28.00.

The whole point of the experiment, James says, was to get pirates to download a free trial of a game and then go on to buy the full product through a yet-to-be-created distribution system. He apologized for having to do that by tricking pirates into a ‘fake’ download and went out of his way to say that he wishes to embrace file-sharers, not treat them as enemies.

“Our intention was not to upset illegal downloaders, and we did hold back on the amount of images we created, uploaded, and to what sites we were on,” James told TorrentFreak.

“We love downloaders just as much as we love PC Games, but there has to come a time when you realize that the balance is no longer there, we just want to restore balance. Hopefully that will be enough to bring publishers back, to take more risks on the PC instead of shying away.”

Now, if an anti-piracy company admitting to seeding warez isn’t strange enough, consider this. James told TorrentFreak that while he has been speaking with games companies, none of them wanted to go first with an experiment. This means that Vigilant Defender were seeding leaked copies of Deus Ex: Human Revolution without the permission of developer Eidos Montreal or publisher Square Enix.

So, TorrentFreak asked, how do you think they’ll react when they find out?

“We believe that Square Enix and Eidos might be hurt, Eidos not so much,” James told us.

“But you have to remember that Square Enix is a business first and has a Japanese business culture. Thats how we will be approaching them, after they get over the hurt; we hope to make them understand that our experiment would not have affected their business. Until we owned up, no one knew what was happening!”

“But we do know that Square Enix, if approached correctly, could understand that illegal downloading is worse, and that in a different way we were trying to help.”

James says that the company was looking for a compromise between illegal downloaders and publishers, but red-tape was getting in the way.

“Sadly we were stuck in the water until a publisher gave us permission, while they liked the idea; they were leaving us hanging without an answer! We saw that if we didn’t take this chance, we might miss it altogether,” he explained.

“I think publishers are so upset with piracy of their media, that they believe nothing will ever work. But if you approach illegal downloaders, forgetting all transgressions, and tempting them as potential customer, it just might stand a good chance. We’d like to believe if you treat people as humans, they will do the right thing.”

When anti-piracy companies (and I’m not even sure that’s a good way to describe Vigilant Defender) try to do something innovative or daring to solve the piracy issue, that should be commended. However, the raw story behind this experiment was so complex we had to ask question after question and conduct hours of our own research. Even following that, some things still nag.

According to Vigilant Defender, between 22nd August and 12th September over 1 million people downloaded the ‘trial’ version of Deus Ex:HR resulting in 900,000 hits on the company’s questionnaire. However, TorrentFreak looked for live torrents relating to this release which might suggest this level of activity, but we were unsuccessful.

James says this is probably because the torrents have all been deleted having been discovered to be ‘fake’, but a million downloads is a hell of a lot and they must’ve stayed live for some time to achieve that. Furthermore, we expected to find comments on torrent sites at least mentioning the questionnaire, but we drew a blank there too. That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, but we thought we should point that out. [See foot of article for update]

Furthermore, despite Vigilant Defender stating clearly that Eidos were not involved in their experiment, as reported on June 1st the games company clearly knew about the leak of the ‘beta’. Not only that, Eidos Community Manager Kyle Stallock was actually encouraging users to provide comments and feedback on it.

And we won’t even go into the several strangely coincidental emails we received from readers who wanted to know if there was any truth in the rumor that Skidrow had an agreement with Eidos not to crack Deus Ex: HR as soon as it came out. We laughed at the time, but quite unusually it did take Skidrow more than a month after the game’s release to deliver an official crack.

All in all this is a strange story from start to finish and what will come from it we just don’t know. If it was Vigilant Defender’s goal to attract the attention of games publishers, they have probably achieved that.

However, their overall goal, of monetizing the file-sharing space for PC games, is somewhat of a Holy Grail. If they can do that the whole world will listen, but at first view the model seems easily replicated. Any games developer can put a trial product out and then offer links to the full thing at a cheaper price. If they were prepared to do that, one might argue they would’ve done it already.

Update: Since publication Vigilant Defender have pointed TorrentFreak to some of the torrents they uploaded. Some have user comments which indicate that they were indeed directed to fill in a survey after the game ‘timed-out’.

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

Napster’s Sean Parker had a key role in the Facebook film The Social Network, but his story and that of Napster’s founder Shawn Fanning will now be told in a brand new documentary.

“The rise and fall of Napster and the birth of peer-to-peer file-sharing technology created by Shawn Fanning when he was a college student, changed music to movies, and made possible everything from Julian Assange, WikiLeaks to the iPod and Facebook,” Winter told Deadline.

“It became an expression of youth revolt, and contributed to a complete shift in how information, media and governments work. And it is a fascinating human story, where this 18-year-old kid invents a peer-to-peer file-sharing system, and brings it to the world six months later.”

Winter further said that Parker, Fanning, musicians and label executives will participate in the documentary.

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

A new one by Toronto-based filmmakers Shawn Goldberg and Avi Zarum takes the intellectual property ‘idea’ to a whole new level.

Sleep well folks – and watch out for thieves…..

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

At one point during the summer of 2007 a massive 8 new episodes were released with a PREAIR tag in just one week, including hit series such as Dexter, Weeds and Chuck.

In recent years, however, PREAIR releases have become a rarity. Before the start of the fall season of 2010, the only notable PREAIR leak was a Weeds episode.

Despite this declining trend, there are still a few notable releases that are worth mentioning, such as the premiere episode of The Walking Dead that surfaced online yesterday. The new series is written and produced by three-time Academy Award-nominee Frank Darabont, known for films such as The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile.

The Walking Dead is based on the similarly named comic book and tells the story of a group of survivors after a zombie apocalypse.

The series will officially premiere in the US on the AMC network on October 31, but already thousands of people have downloaded the file online. According to most of the ‘amateur’ reviews we’ve read the quality isn’t all that great, but good enough to watch. Content wise there were few complaints.

AMC hasn’t officially responded to the leaks thus far, but we doubt that they will be bothered too much by the free publicity. It is often suggested that some of these leaks might even be intentional, that broadcasters use them to hype the show just before the season starts. Although this is often impossible to confirm, it would not be the first time that this has happened.

In 2007, a Warner Bros executive admitted that he helped to leak the pilot of ‘Pushing Daisies’. The exec wanted to make sure the show “got out there,” and said his goal was to “help the cause.” He didn’t upload it himself though, but used his neighbor’s kid to do it instead.

The leak of The Walking Dead premiere, whether intentional or not, is guaranteed to boost the show’s momentum through word of mouth promotion. If anything it will help the show, rather than hurt it.

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

Championed by Baron Mandelson after an entirely coincidental holiday meeting with Dreamworks co-founder David Geffin, the Bill has now taken another step in its rush to become law before the end of Parliament, despite all the protests and criticisms.

The Bill, which the UK Pirate Party say “will shape the future of technological and artistic progress” was not important to most MPs. Through the 5 hours of debates, only around 20 MPs were present, including just one from the Liberal Democrat party  - Don Foster (Lib-Dem, Bath) – who had pledged not to vote for the Bill.

Debate was mostly back and forth over the contentious issue of disconnections, but industry figures and unverified estimates were again quoted as fact. Many (including Labour MPs) were outraged at the Government for having left it so late to try and rush through a Bill as complex and controversial as this. It did, however, get passed at this second reading and will be taken to a third tomorrow.

The low turnout didn’t stop the invective, however, or the silly comments, lies, inaccuracies and other miscellaneous statements, all of which were picked up on Twitter (over 16,000 tweets under the #DEB and #DEBill tags), and analyzed a great deal more thoroughly than by these MPs that had apparently read the Bill. Some of the most memorable points include:

• “The creative industries have grown at twice the rate of the economy as a whole over the past 10 years, and they should do so again over the next 10″. Ben Bradshaw MP
• [on Clause 43 - Orphan works] “Let me provide an example of where this is already going wrong. An image of none other than the great Lord Mandelson himself is apparently being used to market a Russian vodka, with the caption, “When only the best is good enough”. If ever we needed proof that captions to pirated images can be misleading, surely that is it.” Jeremy Hunt MP
• “The Government could have brought this Bill before Parliament ages ago, because these issues have been in the public domain for years. The Gowers review of intellectual property is so old it is practically out of copyright.” Jeremy Hunt MP
• “I cannot see how the Bill takes on India or China; I simply cannot see a single provision that does so. They are not going to settle for 2 megabytes; they are going to settle for 100 — and much, much more.” Derek Wyatt MP
• “Listen, if we want the smartest, most creative industry, we have to tackle intellectual property and copyright together. They cannot just be shunted in as a couple of paragraphs; they are so fundamental to the reason why people write music, sing or create whatever they do.” Derek Wyatt MP

And most amusingly:

• “People are not talking about co-operating and sharing their own thoughts and content, but are stealing someone else’s content and sharing that. There is an Armageddon, which has partially arrived in Sweden, where the Pirate Party, whose leader is in jail, won seats in the European Parliament on the basis that everybody’s work—including MP4’s—should be free.” Michael Connarty MP. Rick Falkvinge was quick to point out that he remains a free man.”Despite rumors to the contrary, it is still not illegal in Sweden to hold political opinions that would bring the country into the digital age,” he told TorrentFreak. “Such a  society would be atrocious and far out of line from all Human Rights Conventions. One might also wonder what other facts proponents of the Digital Economy Bill have gotten entirely wrong.”

The Bill passed despite extensive opposition from many MPs present, who had concerns over specific amendments and the breakneck pace the Bill is being forced through with virtually no debate. The sensible suggestion that it be left for the next Government to reintroduce was derided as it is “needed now”, despite the fact that those industries have not only survived, put prospered without the Bill for the last 10 years.

Meanwhile, the MPs were not so much concerned with the public outcry, as the sartorial comments on Twitter. The Bill now gets a total of two hours for Committee, Reports and its third reading later today, after which it will be (probably) passed.

The first two hours of debate can be watched on the BBC website and the transcripts are here. The third reading of the DEB is scheduled for tonight and if the bill passes it will head over to the Lords where it will be signed into law.

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

So how would Mashboxx work? According to Rosso the application would work like many other P2P clients of the day. Users would be able to search for, upload and download tracks but also buy WMA-encoded and fingerprinted music tracks for around $1 each, all while employing Shawn Fanning’s SnoCap technology. Those tracks, it was claimed, could then be legally distributed to other users on the network, utilizing the buyer’s upload bandwidth.

But it wasn’t to be. Three years later the Mashboxx site is in the same condition as it was in 2006 when the last press release went up announcing that EMI had “agreed to make its entire catalog of digital recordings available to Mashboxx, a legal peer-to-peer (P2P) service currently in development.” Another casualty of P2P that never even got off the ground, Mashboxx was rumored to have died due to lack of investment.

But now in 2009, Wayne Rosso is back in what appears to be somewhat similar circumstances. Like almost everyone, when the news broke that GGF would buy The Pirate Bay and turn it into a legitimate service, Rosso says he was pessimistic. “Those poor bastards have no idea what they’re in for,” he recalls.

But then, two days after the announcement, Rosso’s phone rang. On the other end was none other than GGF CEO Hans Pandeya. At first Rosso says he couldn’t grasp what Hans is trying to accomplish but now he does and describes the plans as “pretty ingenious”. It’s fairly well-known by now that Pandeya plans to harness New Pirate Bay users’ bandwidth and computing resources in order to subsidize their media consumption costs.

“Long story short, I am now working with Hans to facilitate the model and helping to make the Pirate Bay site legit,” says Rosso. “So Jaws is back. And I’m sure a lot of people won’t be so thrilled about that!”

So now, in a replay of events in 2004/2006, Rosso is meeting with content providers and “big players” in the international music scene in order to make New TPB’s future a little more certain. And here’s the thing – according to Rosso every one of them has been supportive. He even goes as far as to say they are “excited” at the proposition.

“They see that it could really work. I left a label meeting Tuesday unlike any I have ever had. They were fantastic!” says Rosso.

An enthusiastic Rosso says he is working with people he describes as “real partners” who will not tie up him and GGF “in Gordian knots that would drive all the users away.”

It remains to be seen if the current users will subscribe to even testing the New Pirate Bay, but Rosso is characteristically enthusiastic and optimistic, to levels not seen since, well, 2004.

Praising the attitude of his music industry partners, Rosso concludes: “It was truly incredible and exciting and when the time is right I will go out of my way to give these guys the credit that they deserve, because, together, we’re going where no mortals have ever traveled.”

Time will tell if the result is sci-fi, or just sigh.

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

The Canadian Radio, Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) is currently looking into the traffic management practices of Canadian ISPs, which came to a head as a result of a dispute between CAIP, and its wholesale provider, Bell. The core objectives of the investigation are to examine the Internet traffic management practices being used, and check that they are in accordance with the Telecommunications Act.

The CRTC is looking at the effects of filtering on both regular customers and wholesalers, and the results of the first round of questions are just in. Even though some of the responses are filed in confidence (summarized by Chris Parsons), there is enough information to conclude that all major ISPs slow down customers, with most specifically targeting peer-to-peer traffic.

In their response to the CRTC investigation, Bell, Cogeco, Rogers and Eastlink all admit to slow down P2P traffic, arguing that it negatively affects network performance. Shaw, one of the other big players, admitted that customers are slowed down, but most of its responses were filed in confidence and P2P was not specifically mentioned.

Bell was more open about its practices, and admits using deep packet inspection (DPI) to throttle its individual customers and wholesalers. On Bell Wireline, P2P traffic is slowed down between 4.30 PM and 2 AM. To cope with the increasing bandwidth demands of its customers, they further plan to disconnect heavy users and introduce metered plans where customers pay for the bandwidth they use.

Cogeco started to throttle P2P users back in 2001, when they were only using a tiny fraction of what they do now. However, it was seen as necessary because of the increasing load these users put on the network. Like other ISPs, Cogeco considered other options such as metered plans, but these would not solve the network ‘abuse’ by P2P users. Furthermore, the ongoing battle with P2P users who strive to evade their management solutions led the ISP to use deep packet inspection (DPI) as well.

Rogers claims it has to throttle P2P users to prevent their network from becoming “the world’s buffet,” as they like to call it. Not only does this affect their network, their bandwidth bills also increased due to the growing popularity of BitTorrent and other filesharing networks. Similar to Bell and Cogeco, Rogers is also known to use DPI. Upstream P2P traffic is slowed down across their entire network, regardless of congestion,

Shaw filed most of its answers in confidence, but provided a rather paradoxical statement which clearly shows that they slow down upstream traffic. “The traffic management technologies have reduced the rate of upstream consumption to a more manageable rate,” they write, claiming that this allows their customers to reach their full contract speeds. Similar to the other ISPs Shaw is predicting that bandwidth usage will grow, and that traffic shaping is essential to manage their network.

In summary, we can conclude that there is no such thing as net neutrality in Canada. All of the larger ISPs slow down their customers, with most of them specifically targeting P2P traffic through deep packet inspection. Because of this, P2P users can’t enjoy the speeds they were promised, and several legitimate businesses whose income depends on delivering content through BitTorrent or other filesharing networks are unable to compete with those who don’t. It’s now up to the CRTC to draw the right conclusions.

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

Happy New Year!

The quotes…

The MPAA after they were caught infringing the copyright of Patrick Robin’s blogging software “Forest Blog”:

“The blog was only ever used for testing purposes.”

BitTorrent Inc. co-founder Ashwin Navin on iTunes DRM:

“iTunes DRM Inspires People to Pirate Content.”

The Pirate Bay’s Gottfrid Svartholm about his favorite anti-piracy organization:

“The MPAA can most accurately be described as rabid, obsessed lunatics.”

Mediadefender CEO Randy Saaf when we found out about Miivi:

“This is really fucked.”

Mark Cuban to Bram Cohen, in a rant about the new BitTorrent movie store:

“But where are they ? Not just the customers Bram. The content? I searched for Prison Break. Lots of torrents. None of them Legal. Is this what Fox had in mind when they signed up with you?”

President Basescu (Romanian President) on copyright infringement:

“Piracy helped the young generation discover computers. It helped Romanians improve their creative capacity in the IT industry, which has become famous around the world … Ten years ago, it was an investment in Romania’s friendship with Microsoft and with Bill Gates.”

Shaw, Canadian ISP gives advise on how to configure BitTorrent:

“Set the KB/s LAN max upload speed [0:unlimited] value to 1.”

MPAA’s Dean Garfield about Pirate Party politicians:

“There’s nothing about what the Pirate Bay does or what the Pirate Party does that is legitimate.”

P2P virus to its victims:

“Ah, I see you are using P2P again……if you don’t stop within 0.5 seconds, i’m going to kill you!”

Scener about Feds that try to stop the Scene:

“No matter how hard the Feds try to stop the scene there are always people smarter than them out there. What they should be doing is leaving us to it and catching pedophiles, rapists and psychopathic killers rather than wasting resources on a few geeks.”

The Pirate Bay about the Caribbean pirate Jack Sparrow:

“Hollywood is trying to ridicule us pirates by portraying us as crazy but sympathetic adventurers. Not far from the truth, but in the 21st century real pirates are riding other torrents than that of the ocean”

BitTorrent admin about Leaseweb:

“It looks like we’re not going to be very safe anymore on Leaseweb, we are putting backups in place on another location, just in case.”

Demonoid explains why they were offline for almost a week, and moved from The Netherlands to Canada:

“We had a system problem which will force us to restore everything from backup. The disks are pretty much empty right now and until we are able to upload the backup and set up everything up, we have to close down.”

IsoHunt’s Gary to Brokep from The Pirate Bay:

“You are either illiterate and don’t check the frontpage of sites you are pointing fingers at, or you are a communist. Or both. What makes you think you have rights to content you didn’t produce? People’s rights vs. copyright holders’ rights? Please. I will laugh at you when you are marked a terrorist and US armies hunt you down. Not that I like the whole anti-terrorist thing from the US but I digress.”

Marnie stern about her BitTorrent addiction:

“Since I’ve been here I have downloaded…I mean I feel I’m going to jail, well, I discovered the torrent, but I feel I’ve downloaded, I would say, honestly 40 or 50 movies, which I hear isn’t that bad, you know, for jail. But I mean, because I’ve pretty much been staying in the studio and a little bit with Zach [Hill], I have all of this time to just sit….”

MPA to “Christmas” movie Pirates:

“We can say this to all the pirates out there: you’d better watch out, you’d better not try”

Pirate Bay admin Brokep on US politics:

“The US government is losing popularity every day in Europe, and people don’t want to see us give in to them.”

NiN’s Trent Reznor about OiNK after it was raided:

“I’ll admit I had an account there and frequented it quite often. At the end of the day, what made OiNK a great place was that it was like the world’s greatest record store. Pretty much anything you could ever imagine, it was there, and it was there in the format you wanted.”

TorrentSpy’s Justing Bunnel on the power of the entertainment industry:

“Unfortunately many companies use their power and influence to halt and punish innovations they cannot think of ways to make money with. The monopolies tried to stop the VHS, DVD, and MP3 player, but thankfully failed when they took it to Court. Now Imagine for a second all the amazing products they did manage to squash…”

Dave Peters, frontman of “Throwdown” on supporting musicians:

“If you wanna really support a band, “steal” their album….help bury the label….and buy a tshirt when you show up at their show and sing every word.”

“A former music buyer writes to the CRIA:

“The music industry itself needs to recognize that they are to blame for sagging record sales. For years, they have been marketing recycled crap, and people are getting tired of it.”

Comcast to its customers:

“Comcast does not block access to any applications, including BitTorrent.”

(but we do slow it down)

Researchers on the effect of filesharing on CD sales:

“We estimate that the effect of one additional P2P download per month is to increase music purchasing by 0.44 CDs per year.”

Noël St-Hilaire, head of copyright theft investigations of the Canadian police on piracy:

“Piracy for personal use is no longer targeted. It is too easy to copy these days and we do not know how to stop it,” he added.

TorrentFreak council in an open letter to the Dutch anti-piracy organization BREIN:

“Your “news release” is peppered with inaccurate information, calculated to mislead and intimidate the millions of legitimate users of the many peer-to-peer filesharing services that are in common use throughout the world.”

50 Cent on filesharing:

“What is important for the music industry to understand is that this really doesn’t hurt the artists.”

Eric Wilkinson, the producer of the independent film “The Man from Earth”, wrote an email to RLSlog in which he thanks them for the free promotion they gave him:

“In the future, I will not complain about file sharing. When I make my next picture, I just may upload the movie on the net myself!”

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