This is where Popcorn Time excelled when it debuted earlier this year. While it was the same old torrent content underneath, the presentation was streets ahead of anything seen before. With appetites whetted, enthused BitTorrent fans have been waiting for the next big thing ever since.

Recently news circulated of a new service which in several headlines yesterday was heralded as the new Popcorn Time. Joker.org is a web-based video service with super-clean presentation. It’s premise is straightforward – paste in a magnet link or upload a torrent file from your computer then sit back and enjoy the show.

Not only does Joker work, it does so with elegance. The interface is uncluttered and intuitive and the in-browser window can be expanded to full screen. Joker also provides options for automatically downloading subtitles or uploading your own, plus options for skipping around the video at will.

While these features are enough to please many visitors to the site, the big questions relate to what is going on under the hood.

Popcorn Time, if we’re forced to conduct a comparison, pulls its content from BitTorrent swarms in a way that any torrent client does. This means that the user’s IP address is visible both to the tracker and all related peers. So, has Joker successfully incorporated a torrent client into a web browser to enable live video streaming?

Last evening TF put that question to the people behind Joker who said they would answer “soon”. Hours later though and we’re still waiting so we’ll venture that the short answer is “no”.

Decentralized or centralized? That is the question..

The most obvious clues become evident when comparing the performance of popular and less popular torrents after they’ve been added to the Joker interface. The best seeded torrents not only tend to start immediately but also allow the user to quickly skip to later or earlier parts of the video. This suggests that the video content has been cached already and isn’t being pulled live and direct from peers in a torrent swarm.

Secondly, torrents with less seeds do not start instantly. We selected a relatively poorly seeded torrent of TPB AFK and had to wait for the Joker progress bar to wind its way to 100% before we could view the video. That took several minutes but then played super-smoothly, another indication that content is probably being cached.

To be absolutely sure we’d already hooked up Wireshark to our test PC in advance of initiating the TPB AFK download. If we were pulling content from a swarm we might expect to see the IP addresses of our fellow peers sending us data. However, in their place were recurring IP addresses from blocks operated by the same UK ISP hosting the Joker website.

Conclusion

Joker is a nice website that does what it promises extremely well and to be fair to its creators they weren’t the ones making the Popcorn Time analogies. However, as a free service Joker faces a dilemma.

By caching video itself the site is bound by the usual bandwidth costs associated with functionally similar sites such as YouTube. While Joker provides greater flexibility (users can order it to fetch whichever content they like) it still has to pump video directly to users after grabbing it from torrent swarms. This costs money and at some point someone is going to have to pay.

In contrast, other than running the software download portal and operating the APIs, Popcorn Time has no direct video-related bandwidth costs since the user’s connection is being utilized for transfers. The downside is that users’ IP addresses are visible to the outside world, a problem Joker users do not have.

Finally and to address the excited headlines, comparing Joker to Popcorn Time is premature. The site carries no colorful and easy to access indexes of movies which definitely makes it a lot less attractive to newcomers. That being said, this lack of content curation enhances Joker’s legal footing.

Overall, demand is reportedly high. The developers told TF last evening that they were “overloaded” and were working hard to fix issues. Currently the service appears stable. Only time will tell how that situation develops.

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

TorrentFreak obtained a copy of the MPAA’s latest submission. The Hollywood group targets a wide variety of websites which they claim are promoting the illegal distribution of movies and TV-shows, with declining incomes and lost jobs in the movie industry as a result.

These sites and services not only threaten the movie industry, but according to the MPAA they also put consumers at risk through identity theft and by spreading malware.

“It is important to note that websites that traffic in infringing movies, television shows, and other copyrighted content do not harm only the rights holder. Malicious software or malware, which puts Internet users at risk of identity theft, fraud, and other ills, is increasingly becoming a source of revenue for pirate sites,” MPAA writes.

Below is an overview of the “notorious markets” the MPAA reported to the Government. The sites are listed in separate categories and each have a suspected location, as defined by the movie industry group.

Torrent Sites

BitTorrent remains the most popular P2P software as the global piracy icon, MPAA notes. The Pirate Bay poses one of the largest threats here. Based on data from Comscore, the MPAA says that TPB has about 40 million unique visitors per month, which appears to be a very low estimate.

“Thepiratebay.se (TPB) claims to be the largest BitTorrent website on the Internet with a global Alexa rank of 91, and a local rank of 72 in the U.S. Available in 35 languages, this website serves a wide audience with upwards of 43.5 million peers,” MPAA writes.

“TPB had 40,551,220 unique visitors in August 2014 according to comScore World Wide data. Traffic arrives on this website through multiple changing ccTLD domains and over 90 proxy websites that assist TPB to circumvent site blocking actions.”

For the first time the MPAA also lists YIFY/YTS in its overview of notorious markets. The MPAA describes YTS as one of the most popular release groups, and notes that these are used by the Popcorn Time streaming application.

“[Yts.re] facilitates the downloading of free copies of popular movies, and currently lists more than 5,000 high-quality movie torrents available to download for free,” MPAA writes.

“Additionally, the content on Yts.re supports desktop torrent streaming application ‘Popcorn Time’ which has an install base of 1.4 million devices and more than 100,000 active users in the United States alone.”

The full list of reported torrent sites is as follows:

- Kickass.to (Several locations)
- Thepiratebay.se (Sweden)
- Torrentz.eu (Germany/Luxembourg)
- Rutracker.org (Russia)
- Yts.re (Several locations)
-Extratorrent.cc (Ukraine)
-Xunlei.com (China)

The mention of Xunlei.com is interesting as the Chinese company signed an anti-piracy deal with the MPA earlier this year. However, according to the MPAA piracy is still rampant, and there is no evidence that Xunlei has fulfilled its obligations.

Direct Download and Streaming Cyberlockers

The second category of pirate sites reported by the MPAA are cyberlockers. The movie industry group points out that these sites generate million of dollars in revenue, citing the recently released report from Netnames.

Interestingly, the MPAA doesn’t include 4shared and Mega, the two services who discredited the report in question. As in previous submissions VKontakte, Russia’s equivalent of Facebook, is also listed as a notorious market.

- VK.com (Russia)
- Uploaded.net (Netherlands)
- Rapidgator.net (Russia)
- Firedrive.com (New Zealand)
- Nowvideo.sx and the “Movshare Group” (Panama/Switzerland/Netherlands)
- Netload.in (Germany)

Linking Websites

The largest category in terms of reported sites represents linking websites. These sites don’t host the infringing material, but only link to it. The full list of linking sites is as follows.

- Free-tv-video-online.me (Canada)
- Movie4k.to (Romania)
- Primewire.ag (Estonia)
- Watchseries.lt (Switzerland)
- Putlocker.is (Switzerland)
- Solarmovie.is (Latvia)
- Megafilmeshd.net (Brazil)
- Filmesonlinegratis.net (Brazil)
- Watch32.com (Germany)
- Yyets.com (China)
- Cuevana.tv (Argentina)
- Viooz.ac (Estonia)
- Degraçaemaisgostoso.org (Brazil)
- Telona.org (Brazil)

The inclusion of Cuevana.tv is noteworthy as the website stopped offering direct links to infringing content earlier this year. Instead, it now direct people to its custom “Popcorn Time” equivalent “Storm.”

Finally, the MPAA lists one Usenet provider, the German based Usenext.com. This service was included because, unlike other providers, it allegedly heavily markets itself to P2P users.

Later this year the US Trade Representative will use the submissions of the MPAA and other parties to make up its final list of piracy havens. The U.S. Government will then alert the countries where these sites are operating from, hoping that local authorities take action.

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

The country is currently grappling with its piracy issues and while there’s hardly a consensus of opinion right now, most of the region’s rightsholders feel that suing the general public isn’t the way to go. It’s painful for everyone involved and doesn’t solve the problem.

That said, US-based Dallas Buyers Club LLC are not of the same opinion. They care about money and to that end they’re now attempting to obtain the identities of iiNet users for the purpose of extracting cash settlements from them.

Yesterday additional information on the case became available. An Optus spokeswoman told SMH that it had been contacted by Dallas Buyers Club about handing over subscriber data but its legal representatives had backed off when it was denied. The movie outfit didn’t even try with Telstra – but why?

So-called copyright trolls like the easiest possible fight and through iiNet they know their adversaries just that little bit better. According to Anny Slater of Slaters Intellectual Property Lawyers, documents revealed in the ISP’s earlier fight with Village Roadshow show that Telstra could well be a more difficult target for discovery.

The business model employed by plaintiffs such as Dallas Buyer’s Club LLC (DBCLLC) requires a minimum of ‘difficult’ since difficulties increase costs and decrease profits. To that end, part of the job of keeping things straightforward will fall to DBCLLC’s lawfirm, Sydney-based Marque Lawyers.

Unfortunately for DBCLLC, Marque Lawyers have already shot themselves in the foot when it comes to convincing DBCLLC’s “pirate” targets to “pay up or else.”

In 2012, Marque published a paper titled “It wasn’t me, it was my flatmate! – a defense to copyright infringement?” which detailed the company’s stance on file-sharing accusations. The publication provided a short summary of cases in the US where porn companies were aiming to find out the identities of people who had downloaded their films, just as Dallas Buyers Club – Marque’s clients – are doing now.

“To find out the actual identities of the users, the [porn companies] asked the Court to force the ISPs to reveal the names and addresses of each of the subscribers to which the IP addresses related. The users went on the attack and won,” Marque explained.

And here’s the line all potential targets of Dallas Buyers Club and Marque Lawyers should be aware of – from the lawfirm’s own collective mouth.

“The judge, rightly in our view, agreed with the users that just because an IP address is in one person’s name, it does not mean that that person was the one who illegally downloaded the porn.

As the judge said, an IP address does not necessarily identify a person and so you can’t be sure that the person who pays for a service has necessarily infringed copyright.

This decision makes a lot of sense to us. If it holds up, copyright
owners will need to be a whole lot more savvy about how they identify and pursue copyright infringers and, perhaps, we’ve seen the end of the mass ‘John Doe’ litigation.”

So there you have it. Marque Lawyers do not have faith in the IP address-based evidence used in mass file-sharing litigation. In fact, they predict that weaknesses in IP address evidence might even signal the end of mass lawsuits.

Sadly they weren’t right in their latter prediction, as their partnership with Dallas Buyers Club reveals. Still, their stance that the evidence is weak remains and will probably come back to bite them.

The document is available for download from Marque’s own server. Any bill payers wrongly accused of piracy by the company in the future may like to refer the lawfirm to its own literature as part of their response.

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

Pirate Bay users also have a great interest in anonymity. A survey among the site’s users previously revealed that nearly 70% already had a VPN or proxy or were interested in signing up with one.

For this last group The Pirate Bay has an interesting promotion running. For the past few days the site has replaced its iconic logo with an ad for FrootVPN, a new startup that offers free VPN accounts.

The promo has has been seen by millions of people, many of whom very interested in the costless offer.

Since VPNs are certainly not free to run, many people are wondering if there’s a catch behind this rather generous offer. Previously TPB advertised an adware ridden client so this suspicion is understandable.

TorrentFreak contact the Pirate Bay team for more information, and they informed us that the FrootVPN promotion is not a paid ad. It’s merely a friendly plug for a startup run by some guys they know.

While that’s assuring, it doesn’t explain how they can offer their service for free. We contacted the FrootVPN operators to find out more, and they told us that they started the free VPN to counter the commercialization of the VPN business.

“The whole idea behind FrootVPN was to provide a free simple VPN service without any bandwidth limitations. Of course the maintenance isn’t free but we had some resources over from our other projects from which we were able to launch FrootVPN.”

“We are a bunch of guys who support freedom of speech and don’t like the idea that VPN providers charge so much money for just a simple proxy, especially since the bandwidth costs nowadays is so cheap,” FrootVPN tells us.

While a free VPN sounded like a good idea, the VPN service has become a victim of its own success. They gained 100,000 users in less than a week and admit that it’s not sustainable to keep the service free forever.

“The word has spread rapidly and we thank all our promoters including TPB for supporting us. We got 100,000 users within a week, which we never expected. However, this does indicate that we will be forced to charge something for the service in order to maintain it,” FrootVPN says.

FrootVPN’s VPN servers are currently hosted at Portlane, who have been very helpful in accommodating the growth. During the weeks to come they hope to increase their capacity and FrootVPN has already bought several new servers to keep the quality of the service on par.

“We have 20x servers running currently with 2x10Gbps total capacity. We have now additionally bought 40x more servers and 4x10Gbps bandwidth from Portlane which will be ready within a week or two. We hope that after this upgrade the quality of our service will be much better,” they say.

While they may have to charge a few dollars in the future, one of the main motivations of the FrootVPN team remains in line with The Pirate Bay’s original philosophy. That is, to provide tools that help to bypass censorship and promote freedom of speech.

“FrootVPN supports freedom of speech and want the Internetz to be an uncensored place,” they say.

Although free VPNs are often not the fastest, especially not when they are growing with tens of thousands of users per day, FrootVPN says it will try to keep up. In any case, “free” is an offer that’s hard to refuse for those who are on a tight budget.

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

The follow-up debacle involving ACS:Law was widely documented, with owner Andrew Crossley being forced to close down his business after being suspended by the Solicitors’ Regulatory Authority for misconduct. After misleading the courts, bankruptcy was just the icing on the cake.

None of this was a deterrent to porn outfit GoldenEye International. They embarked on a similar scheme, sending letters to alleged file-sharers and demanding hundreds of pounds in settlements to make supposed lawsuits go away. However, GoldenEye learned from its predecessors by proceeding with caution and staying largely under the radar. But quite predictably and despite legal bluster and empty threats, the company took not a single case to court.

So today, quite possibly due to the tendency of the public to pay up rather than become linked with embarrassing porn movie titles, the porn trolls are back once again in the UK.

TorrentFreak has learned that last year four porn producers teamed up in an effort to force ISP Virgin Media to hand over the names and addresses of more than 1,500 subscribers said to have downloaded and shared adult content without permission.

The companies, none of which appear to be based in the UK, teamed up with Wagner & Co, the London lawfirm also working with GoldenEye. They are Mircom International Content Management & Consulting Ltd, Sunlust Pictures, Combat Zone Corporation and Pink Bonnet, Consultores de Imagem LDA.

Mircom International Content Management & Consulting Ltd are active in Europe, particularly when it comes to demanding cash settlements from alleged file-sharers in Germany. Sunlust Pictures is an adult movie company founded in 2009 by former porn actress Sunny Leone, who – entirely unsurprisingly – has featured in copyright trolling cases in the United States. Combat Zone Corporation is an adult movie company based in California. They’re no strangers to the cash settlement model either.

TorrentFreak contacted Mark Wagner at Wagner & Co to find out what his clients hope to achieve in the UK, but unfortunately our emails went unanswered. The company doesn’t appear to have a working website and its address relates to a house in residential area.

Fortunately, Virgin Media were rather more accommodating. In the past the ISP has been criticized for not doing more to protect its subscribers’ personal details but it turns out the battle with Wagner & Co has been going on for some time.

“We have contested the validity of Wagner & Co’s claims (ongoing for 12 months), asking the Judge to thoroughly review the application and the supporting evidence. We have challenged the reliability of the software used to obtain evidence of infringement (FileWatchBT) and the accuracy of the data collected,” spokesperson Emma Hutchinson told TF.

But despite Virgin Media’s efforts the High Court took the decision to side with Wagner & Co and order the ISP to hand over the details of its subscribers. While the situation is pretty grim, things could have been worse.

“The original request was for double the number of addresses than we have been forced to disclose, now fewer than 800,” Virgin explain.

“We advise any of our customers who receive a speculative letter from Wagner & Co, who also represented Golden Eye International in action against O2 customers last year, to seek independent advice from organizations such as Citizens Advice,” the ISP concludes.

Restrictions placed on GoldenEye in previous procedures indicate that initial letters sent to Virgin customers by Wagner & Co and its clients will not be as aggressive as the ones sent out by ACS:Law and will not contain a precise settlement amount. However, it is guaranteed that cash will be requested at some point.

Upon receipt of these “speculative invoices” there will be those who panic and pay up, and that’s their prerogative. But it’s highly likely that those who admit nothing and stand firm will pay what they’ve always paid in UK cases – absolutely nothing.

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

The sessions this week, on October 7 and 10, were used for summing up by the prosecution and defense. Danish language publication DR.dk, which has provided good coverage of the whole trial, reports that deputy prosecutor Anders Riisager used an analogy to describe their position on Gottfrid.

Prosecution: Hands in the cookie jar

“If there is a cookie jar on the table with the lid removed, and your son is sitting on the sofa with cookie crumbs on his mouth, it is only reasonable to assume that it is he who has had his paws in the cookie jar,” he said.

“This, even though he claims it is four of his friends who have put the cookies into his mouth. And especially when the son will not reveal who his friends are, or how it happened.”

Riisager was referring to the evidence presented by the prosecution that Gottfrid and his co-defendant were the people behind hacker attacks on IT company CSC which began in 2012.

The Swede insists that while the attack may have been carried out from his computer, the computer itself was used remotely by other individuals, any of whom could have carried out the attacks. Leads and names provided by Gottfrid apparently led the investigation nowhere useful.

Remote access unlikely

That third-parties accessed Gottfrid’s computer without his knowledge is a notion rejected by the prosecution. Noting that the Pirate Bay founder is a computer genius, senior prosecutor Maria Cingari said that maintaining secret access to his machine over extended periods would not have been possible.

“It is not likely that others have used [Gottfrid's] computer to hack CSC without him discovering something. At the same time the hack occurred over such a long time that remote control is unlikely,” she said.

And, Cingari noted, it was no coincidence that chatlogs found on Gottfrid’s computer related to so-called “zero-day” vulnerabilities and the type of computer systems used by CSC.

Dane and Swede working together

In respect of Gottfrid’s co-defendant, the prosecution said that the 21-year-old Dane knew that when he was speaking online with a user known as My Evil Twin (allegedly Gottfrid), the plan was a hacker attack on CSC.

Supporting their allegations of collusion, the prosecution noted that the Dane had been living in Cambodia when the attacks on CSC began and while a hacker attack against Logica, a crime for which Gottfrid was previously sentenced, was also underway. The Dane spent time in a café situated directly under Gottfrid’s apartment, the prosecution said.

Why not hand over the encryption keys?

When police raided the Dane they obtained a laptop, the contents of which still remain a secret due to the presence of heavy encryption. The police found a hollowed-out chess piece containing the computer’s SDcard key, but that didn’t help them gain access. Despite several requests, the 21-year-old has refused to provide keys to unlock the data on the Qubes OS device, arguing there is nothing on there of significance. According to the prosecution, this is a sign of guilt.

“It is very striking that one chooses to sit in prison for a year and more, instead of just helping the police with access to the laptop so they can see that it contains nothing,” senior prosecutor Maria Cingari said.

Cingari also pointed the finger at the Dane for focusing Gottfrid’s attention on CSC.

“You can see that [the Dane] has very much helped [Gottfrid] with obtaining access to CSC’s mainframe. It is not even clear that he would have set his sights on CSC, if it had not been for [the Dane],” she said.

Defense: No objectivity

On Friday, defense lawyer Luise Høj began her closing arguments with fierce criticism of a Danish prosecution that uncritically accepted evidence provided by Swedish police and failed to conduct an objective inquiry.

“They took a plane to Stockholm and were given some material. It was placed in a bag and they took the plane back home. From there they went to CSC and asked them to look for clues. This shows a lack of an independent approach to the evidence,” she said.

Furthermore, the mere fact that CSC had been investigating itself under direction of the police was also problematic.

“The victim should not investigate itself. CSC is at risk of being fired as the state’s IT provider,” Høj noted.

Technical doubt

Computer technicians presented by both sides, including famous security expert Jacob Appelbaum, failed to agree on whether remote access had been a possibility, but this in itself should sway the court to acquit, Høj said.

“It must be really difficult for the court to decide whether the computer was controlled remotely or not, when even engineers disagree on what has happened,” she noted.

Why not take time to investigate properly?

Høj also took aim at the police who she said had failed to properly investigate the people Gottfrid had previously indicated might be responsible for the hacker attacks.

“My client has in good faith attempted to come up with some suggestions as to how his computer was remotely controlled. Of course he did not provide a complete explanation of how it happened, as he did not know what had happened and he has not had the opportunity to examine his computer,” she said.

Additionally, clues that could’ve led somewhere were overlooked, the defense lawyer argued. For instance, an IP address found in CSC’s logs was traced back to a famous Swedish hacker known as ‘MG’.

“The investigation was not objective. I do not understand why it’s not possible to investigate clues that don’t take much effort to be investigated,” Høj said. “The willingness to investigate clues that do not speak in favor of the police case has been minimal.”

A decision in the case is expected at the end of the month. If found guilty, Gottfrid faces up to four years in jail.

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

Established as Group NBT in 1995, the company was renamed NetNames in 2013 and shortly after grabbed dozens of headlines after publishing a major study into online piracy.

Commissioned by NBC Universal and titled ‘Sizing the Piracy Universe‘, the study mapped piracy volumes and prevalence around the world. NetNames’ found that piracy is both “tenacious and persistent”, with a penchant for consuming increasing amounts of Internet bandwidth every year.

The report was overseen by Dr David Price, then Director of Piracy and Counterfeit Analysis at NetNames. Price also presided over the publication last month of NetNames’ latest piracy study which focused on the role played by credit card companies in the cyberlocker space.

Published exactly a year after the NBC study, ‘Behind The Cyberlocker Door: A Report How Shadowy Cyberlockers Use Credit Card Companies to Make Millions‘ was commissioned by the Digital Citizens Alliance (DCA), ostensibly to protect consumers. DCA doesn’t openly reveal its sources of funding but the report has all the hallmarks of an entertainment industry-focused study.

Previously, Price was the chief of Piracy Intelligence at Envisional and the head of a study claiming to be the first to accurately estimate the amount of infringing traffic on the Internet.

Now it appears that Price’s work has received the ultimate compliment from one of the most powerful entertainment industry organizations on the planet.

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, or IFPI as it’s more often called, is the umbrella anti-piracy organization for the world’s leading recording labels. As of now, IFPI – probably in their UK office since that’s where Price is based – has a new employee.

According to an amendment tucked away on his Linkedin profile, Price – who has a doctorate in Criminology from the University of Cambridge – is now working for the IFPI as their Head of Anti-Piracy Research and Analysis.

In recent years Price has maintained a clear anti-piracy stance, which will obviously suit IFPI. He has participated in discussions calling for government action against piracy and regularly uses content-industry friendly terms such as “stealing” to describe unauthorized copying.

TorrentFreak contacted NetNames’ PR company for a comment on Price’s departure but at the time of publication we were yet to receive a response.

IFPI London, where the organization’s anti-piracy operations are based, also did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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

In some countries, coding is now the most common profession. All growth sectors are heavily technology-dependent, which always means that the net is at underpinning all of it. All celebrated entrepreneurs have built super-scaling businesses enabled by the net. We also shop for food online, we date online, we build things together online.

It stands clear that the net is by far the most critical piece of infrastructure existing today. Not only does it build all future jobs, growth, economy, and entrepreneurship; we also exercise all our civil liberties, civic duties, and spend a lot of our social activities on this infrastructure. It’s more important than any other piece of infrastructure in society. We can do without the phone network, without cable TV, even without paved roads when we have the net.

So why are we letting this infrastructure get regulated by a cartoon industry?

This is not just figurative: we quite literally are. The Walt Disney Corporation has been instrumental in lobbying for limiting the utility of the net, taking leadership within the copyright industry at large. It’s no random chance that the latest copyright monopoly extension in the United States was called “The Mickey Mouse Copyright Extension Act”.

The notion that the copyright industry’s distribution monopoly is somehow more important to society than the super-infrastructure we call the Internet is not just laughable; it’s absurd and bizarre. And yet, the latter is being limited to appease and safeguard the former, instead of the other way around.

Of course, it’s easy to speak of the copyright industry as a cartoon industry in the figurative sense, too. It’s hard to find an industry that’s exaggerating its own importance more while failing at its core business more at the same time.

Policymakers have completely failed in realizing what the growth engine in society is today, and are letting a completely irrelevant industry negate it from the sidelines. This is not just baffling but limits growth, jobs, and future entrepreneurship.

The industries inhibited by the copyright monopoly are contributing more to the economy by almost a factor of twelve-to-one compared to the copyright industry. In other words, for every job lost in the copyright industry, twelve more are created. (Even formal studies agree that more than one job in technology is created for every job lost in the copyright industry.)

For a tangible example of this, observe how Linux- and Unix-based computers now have a market share of over 50% both on the client and server sides. In other words, over half of our service offerings and the consumption of them – across all categories – are now dependent on technology which was written in defiance of the copyright monopoly, and which states outright that the copyright monopoly is a problem at best and absurd at worst.

It’s more than time we saw the cartoon industry for the cartoon industry they are, and kick them out of making policy for critical infrastructure.

Quite regardless of whether they like being kicked out or not, and especially regardless of what they think of the policies we need for the Internet instead of the ones they want.

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

The new experiment is part of BitTorrent Inc’s bundles project, which allows artists to easily share their work with fans. While many artists tested the waters before Yorke, he is the first to ask for money directly from consumers.

“If it works well it could be an effective way of handing some control of Internet commerce back to people who are creating the work. Enabling those people who make either music, video or any other kind of digital content to sell it themselves. Bypassing the self elected gate-keepers,” commented Thom Yorke on his decision to join.

Fast forward a few days and the album release has turned out to be a great success. At the time of writing the number of downloads surpassed 500,000, and at the current rate this will have doubled before the end of the week.

These numbers are for both the free sample and the full album, which are both being counted by BitTorrent. Thom Yorke doesn’t want the sales figures to become public but judging from the number of people sharing the torrent this lies well above one hundred thousand.

“When the Bundle is downloaded using one of our clients, it pings back with a torrent added event which is how these are being counted. Thom Yorke has asked that sales figures remain undisclosed, which is his discretion,” BitTorrent spokesman Christian Averill told TorrentFreak.

Now that BitTorrent Inc. has become a paid music service, a whole new world opens up. Will there soon be a BitTorrent release at the top of the charts for example? We asked BitTorrent whether they are considering becoming an RIAA-certified seller, and the company’s answer was an unequivocal yes.

“Our vision is absolutely that Bundles will count toward all the usual industry accolades and charts. Again, it will be up to the publisher of the specific Bundle. But the numbers certainly merit the recognition,” Averill says.

If that happens, BitTorrent sales will be eligible for RIAA’s gold and platinum awards as well as other charts.

While some music industry insiders may need some time to adjust to the idea of BitTorrent (Inc) as an authorized music service, the RIAA itself doesn’t see any reason why the company can’t apply.

“Music sales … on digital music services that are authorized by and reported to the record labels, whether paid for by the consumer through a subscription or free to the consumer through ad-supported services, are accepted for RIAA certifications,” RIAA’s Liz Kennedy tells TorrentFreak.

Becoming RIAA-certified doesn’t happen overnight though. BitTorrent would first have to request the certification and a full audit is then required to receive an Authorized service stamp and a possible listing on whymusicmatters.com.

“Whymusicmatters.com, a joint initiative of the RIAA and Music Biz, lists the leading authorized music services in the United States,” Kennedy explains.

For BitTorrent this would be a great achievement. The company has had to withstand a fair amount of criticism from copyright holders in recent years, and recognition as an authorized music service will surely silence some of it.

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

Countering, advocates such as Swedish Pirate Party founder Rick Falkvinge frequently argue that copyright monopolies stifle creativity and hinder innovation.

But what would happen if rather than providing an incentive to create, the existence of copyright meant that no-one would ever need to create anything original online ever again? And if they did, they could be sued for it?

That’s the staggering notion being put forward by Qentis Corporation. The outfit, which claims a base in Russia, says that its business model is to use massive computing power to generate digital intellectual property on a never-seen-before scale and transfer the rights to its partners.

“Our clients are private high net-worth individuals (HNWI), investment funds and corporations that act as pure investors,” Qentis explains.

What Qentis are proposing is the bulk algorithmic creation of content – music, text, images etc – on such a large scale that in a few years its clients will own the rights to just about anything people might care to create and upload.

“Qentis aims to produce all possible combinations of text (and later on images and sound) and to copyright them,” Qentis’ Michael Marcovici told TorrentFreak.

“Concerning text we try this in chunks of 400 word articles in English, German and Spanish. That would mean that we will hold the copyright to any text produced from now on and that it becomes impossible for anyone to circumvent Qentis when writing a text.”

In terms of graphics, Qentis promotional material states that a subsidiary has already generated 3.23% of “all possible images” in the 1000×800 pixel format.

“We are now generating images at a much faster pace and expect to complete 10 percent of all possible images by the end of 2015. At current projections, we will by 2020 generate every possible image in the 1000×800 pixel resolution,” the company claims.

Of course, ‘creating’ this ‘content’ has a purpose. According to Qentis it effectively seeks to become the biggest copyright troll on the planet. The company says it will identify copyright infringements and help investors to pursue infringers. And, astonishingly, it claims it will free companies from having to rely on people to come up with creative content.

“It is only a matter of time before Qentis becomes the universal single source for all web content, freeing corporations from their expensive dependence on writers, musicians and artists,” says Qentis co-founder Howard Lafarge.

TF spoke with Rick Falkvinge about Qentis’ stated aims and needless to say he’s completely unimpressed.

“Interesting, and complete bullshit,” Rick said.

“They claim to have generated all possible texts in English that are up to 400 words in length, and therefore, any text below that length ‘infringes’. However, having the copyright monopoly on a text is solidly dependent on having had artistic skill gone into generating it. Merely mechanically generating all combinations does not, repeat NOT, reward a copyright monopoly.”

Having spent way more time on the Qentis website than we probably should, (and arriving at the conclusion that they’re either crazy, evil geniuses or masters of parody) we’re still left with an interesting concept.

The fact remains that there are plenty of huge, heavily pro-copyright corporations on the planet today who would happily embark on a Qentis-style operation of copyrighting all content before a human can create it, if indeed such a thing was possible. Rest assured, at that point the ‘artists’ would be a forgotten and inconvenient part of their business models.

“The mere concept that somebody thinks of generating all possible texts and then thinks they can sue humanity for coming up with one of these combinations through actual artistic talent shows how completely screwed up copyright monopoly law is,” Rick concludes.

Since Qentis claims to have come up with the lyrics to Lady Gaga’s ‘Applause’ before she did, TF pressed Qentis to give us more examples where their creations have successfully predicted the future. The company couldn’t immediately give us any, but said there were “many more” to be found.

We also asked about the mathematical implications of coming up with every available combination of text in a 400 word article, given there are one million words in the English language alone. How many generated articles would be a ‘miss’ in trying to come up with one ‘hit’?

“About the mathematics, this is mainly about working with n-grams, we don’t work iteratively with misses because that would produce as you mention a LOT of misses, probably only 1 out of few million would be readable,” the company’s Michael Marcovici told us.

“We do not include entities in the text as it does not matter and we concentrate on the structure of the text. Using known or predicted combinations is more economical, the main challenge is storage and not so much generating text.”

For those interested in reading just how bad things could get on the copyright front, given the chance, the fully comprehensive and quite incredible Qentis website can be found here. We’re not sure what their endgame is, but we wouldn’t be surprised if they have a secret underground base.

Everyone is invited to comment below, scholars of copyright and mathematics in particular.

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