In 2005 the FBI shuttered EliteTorrents, a popular ‘private’ BitTorrent community that came to a sticky end after making available a pre-release ‘workprint’ copy of Star Wars Episode III. By 2010 the agency was focusing its resources on Operation in Our Sites, an initiative which closed down several domains including the notorious NinjaVideo. Then two years ago the FBI played a key role in the closure of Kim Dotcom’s Megaupload.

While few would doubt the gravity of the cases highlighted above, it may come as a surprise that in addition to commercial scale infringement, the FBI also views unauthorized personal copying as a serious offense. While it may not actively pursue individual pirates, it doesn’t want them in-house.

Monday this week Sacramento State‘s Career Center welcomed the FBI for a visit concerning recruitment of students for its paid internship program. One of the topics discussed were historical actions that could exclude applicants from the program.

In addition to drug use, criminal activity and even defaulting on a student loan, students were informed that if they had illegally downloaded content in the past, that could rule them out of a position at the FBI. It appears that to the agency, downloading is tantamount to stealing.

While some students might be tempted to tell a white lie or two about their piracy experiences during their initial interviews, that appears to be a dangerous course of action. All responses are recorded and sent to a polygraph technician and if the student fails the lie detector test they are excluded from the FBI forever, even if they tried to cover up the smallest thing.

But what if applicants have a bit of personal piracy to hide, but choose to tell the truth? Information is limited, but a 2012 posting on 911JobForums by a rejected applicant reveals that while honesty might be the best policy, it can be enough to rule someone out of a job.

“My reason for posting this is to help give fair warning to those who don’t think pirating copyrighted information from the internet will trip them up later on. While I sometimes ask myself what might have been, I can honestly say I gave it my best shot,” the poster explains.

“I had downloaded songs while at college 10 years prior (300+) and a few recently (<20). I had an illegal copy of Windows XP in my possession and 10 years ago had watched fewer than 8 pirated full-length movies which I had downloaded then promptly deleted. I had copied a Redbox DVD to my iPod I wasn't able to watch before returning but then promptly deleted the movie after watching once."

According to the student-run newspaper The State Hornet, the FBI are interested in the amount of illegal content applicants have downloaded, so it’s possible that people downloading very small amounts might be shown leniency.

Those interested in how the polygraph procedure itself works can find details of the equivalent CIA test here. Interestingly the writer has a tip for former pirate students.

“[The CIA] were concerned mostly about crime, drugs, and misuse of technology systems. Downloading music, though it is illegal, does not disqualify you. Most people especially college students did this, just pretend you didn’t know that it was illegal,” he notes.

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

The Frostwire client, which can be used in the same way as uTorrent or Vuze for example, now includes a torrent creation feature which supports Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dogecoin and PayPal donations.

Once a torrent is created and loaded into FrostWire, downloaders are given a new set of icons indicating which crypto-currency donation options are programmed into the release.

Clicking any of these takes the downloader to a custom donation page, meaning that there is a direct connection between a torrent and a monetization option, something that has been absent from torrents since their creation well over a decade ago.

Although software and a music single were used as a demo for the tipping system, no band had taken the plunge and used it for one of their albums. A month later and hip hop band Ain’t No Love have made history, becoming the first ever band to offer a full album for free on BitTorrent, using an integrated Bitcoin tipping mechanism.

“Using Bitcoin has definitely widened our reach to people who don’t necessarily listen to our type of music, but like that we get down with Bitcoin, and started listening to our music, which is a cool thing in itself,” says lead singer Saidah Conrad.

Having worked hard on a Bitcoin implementation, FrostWire say they are pleased to welcome the band on board.

“Ain’t No Love’s Tears of Joy comes to FrostWire during a very special time – as a first ever .torrent album to support crypto-currency donations such as Bitcoin, Litecoin, and Dogecoin (as well as the more traditional PayPal),” the company said.

“So if you love the band just as much as we do, be sure to check them out on Facebook, share the video, spread the news on Twitter or simply show some support by giving a little tip, whatever you can, any way you can.”

The other neat thing is that all donations go directly to the band as there is no middleman, and FrostWire is promising to keep it that way forever.

The torrent for Ain’t No Love’s Tears of Joy can be downloaded here.

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

The possibilities are intriguing, from artists being able to seed their own content to the public and getting paid directly by fans, to curators of already free content being rewarded for their distribution efforts.

In file-sharing circles there has been a traditional reliance upon PayPal transactions to show appreciation, but with the rise of alternative cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, new avenues have opened up. Many sites, The Pirate Bay included, accept donations in Bitcoin and Litecoin, and some artists have adopted the currencies for fans who want to chip-in.

Despite these developments there remains a disconnect between downloading content and a subsequent donation, meaning that split-second urges to hand over cash in appreciation often have time to cool. That, however, is about to change.

Following their teaser in December 2013, a brand new build of FrostWire’s BitTorrent client (Windows, Mac, Linux) now includes torrent creation supporting not only Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dogecoin and PayPal donations, but also the selection of appropriate Creative Commons licenses for delivered content.

We’ll bring you comment from the FrostWire team in just a moment, but first let’s look at the simple process from the creator’s perspective.

After loading up FrostWire one simply goes about creating a .torrent file in the usual way, by selecting the tracking options and pointing it to the relevant content on the host computer. If the torrent creator would then like to give fans the option to donate, two extra screens appear.

The first allows the user to select an appropriate Creative Commons license under which to spread the content.

The next screen configures payment/tips/donation options, whether Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dogecoin, PayPal, or a mix-and-match between all four.

Obviously the creator/distributor will now need to seed, at least until plenty of other people download and start sharing the content.

For the downloader it’s simply a case of installing the correct version of FrostWire (this is a must at the moment until other clients implement the feature) and clicking on a donation-enabled .torrent file.

FrostWire have made a couple available for testing, one of which is a track by FriCtrl labeled Bitcoin_Revolution. Downloading that reveals a box next to the torrent title labeled “Tips/Donations”, with Bitcoin’s logo highlighted. Hovering over reveals the text shown below.

Once an option is clicked, FrostWire launches a payment process which opens a web page containing the target wallet’s cryptocurrency address in QR, hyperlink, and text form.

Of course, there will be those who immediately see possibilities for monetizing piracy. But, speaking with TorrentFreak, FrostWire’s Angel Leon says their objectives actually run counter to that.

“We believe piracy is best fought by giving consumers the options of getting legal content, and we want to build solutions that use this technology to empower content creators no matter how big or small they are. We want them to try BitTorrent as an alternative, an additional channel. We think it will be easier to convince more and more artists to join us with the new possibilities,” Leon told TF.

“Putting it bluntly, Bitcoin and BitTorrent integration give us the tools to create the P2P equivalents of iTunes and Netflix, which are centralized venues which work great for big content but not so much for the little guys who have to jump through many hoops to get in.” 

Leon says that the end result could be a decentralized media store “owned by nobody and available to all,” one which allows consumers to deal directly with content creators “without the corporate interests, censorship issues and draconian rules that make it hard for the little guy to publish his work.”

The possibilities don’t always have to be commercial either.

“Just imagine a BitTorrent bundle powered by this technology in which Bono from U2 shares free songs or a free video documentary to raise awareness and collect Bitcoin donations for the (Red) foundation to further the fight against HIV worldwide,” the FrostWire team teases.

Further information, including the experimental builds and info on how to activate .torrent-enabled donations, can be found here.

^{Photo: Steve Garfield}

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

Back in June the software became embroiled in court proceedings over a specific feature present in an unofficial beta of JDownloader2 which enabled the downloading of RTMPE video streams on top of existing RTMP. It wasn’t created by AppWork themselves but was a contribution from an open source developer who had worked on the project before.

Since the plug-in handled encrypted streams the Hamburg Regional Court decided that this represented a circumvention of an “effective technological measure” under Section 95a of Germany’s Copyright Act. As a result the Court issued a preliminary injunction against JDownloader2 and threatened its makers, Appwork, with a 250,000 euro fine for “production, distribution and possession” of an ‘illegal’ piece of software.

Appwork found out about the functionality of the plug-in months before the court case and had already disabled it, but the judgment had the potential to have a chilling effect on open source development.

“Are developers really liable if another developer in the community commits code that might be protected somewhere in a software patent? How are Open Source communities supposed to check? What if a program that is included in another Open Source program makes an update that adds illegal functionality?” the company told TorrentFreak at the time.

To find out, Appwork filed an appeal and this week the project received the decision of the court. It was bad news not only for the company but also the open source community in general.

“In the eyes of the judges, our company ‘made the open source contributions our own’ mostly by having a copyright sign in the info dialogue,” Appworks’ Alex informs TorrentFreak.

“Therefore we are liable and must actively screen every code contribution and/or have protective mechanisms in place against someone committing something that might be illegal.”

Alex says that the decision is “worrisome” for the open source community and has the potential to deter people from getting involved in such projects when they discover they must take responsibility for the work of others.

“It doesn’t matter if the project owner did not do anything (i.e. write any line of code) or even if the project owner knows about anything illegal being committed,” Alex says.

“In our case, even when we didn’t even know about the functionality, which was part of an open source binary one of our open source developers used (rtmpdump), we were held liable anyway. Not from the moment on that we got notified about it, but even before,” he explains.

“This means that if any company or individual wants to use an open (or closed) source binary (commercial or not), they are liable for it if it contains any illegal functions. This practically means they are obligated to check every single line of code, which is almost impossible for smaller projects.”

Appwork are looking into the details of the judgment and are currently considering their options for appeal.

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

The actual situation is nowhere near as bad as some would like to make out, but every now and again something happens to remind us that it is very possible for something nasty to slip through the net.

On February 12, 2013 a new warez group appeared calling themselves MeGaHeRTZ. Their first release was BurnAware Professional v6.0 plus a patch to remove the software’s protection. Over the months that followed the group released a lot of noteworthy products such as SmartFTP, DVDFab, FlashFXP, Incredimail, Traktor and hundreds more, each with the obligatory ‘freebie’ patch.

Tomorrow the group will have been operating for a full nine months and during that time their releases have spread to every corner of the Internet. However, far from merely wanting to do downloaders a favor, MeGaHeRTZ have been playing a little dirty.

Over the weekend a notice spread around the warez scene which detailed how one individual became alarmed by unusual firewall activity after he had installed, ironically, a MeGaHeRTZ release of Malwarebytes Anti-Malware Pro.

The problem reportedly came from patch that MeGaHeRTZ supplied with the release which attempted to send out traffic on port 25, a port commonly used to send email. The same individual who found the strange activity then ran the patch through a debugger and to his alarm found that it was harvesting information from the host machine.

The data being gathered from infected machines includes the username, computer name/drive serial obtained from the Windows API, and the host machine’s IP address. This information is then packaged up and sent off to any of three predetermined email addresses, all of which have account names containing some variation of the MeGaHeRTZ group name.

Further tests were carried out on several other MeGaHeRTZ releases and they were all found to carry similar mechanisms for pulling data from host machines and funneling it back to the release group.

Quite what MeGaHeRTZ intend to do with the data is unclear but it appears that as an active release group they are now finished, at least under their current identity. On Saturday the warez scene took action to ‘nuke’ every MeGaHeRTZ release, which means they won’t be allowed to release anymore.

Revealing malware in scene releases is a very unusual occurrence and malicious content is usually added at a later stage by third parties. Still, the damage has now been done. MeGaHeRTZ releases are now all over the Internet and there is nothing that anyone can do to get them back. Avoidance is the only solution now.

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

Studios including Ubisoft have even stated that some games might not be released on the format due to its vulnerability.

There are, however, clear signs that developers are finding ways around the problem. One particularly cute approach was taken in 2011 by game developers Alex Nichiporchik and Tom Brien. The baby of their new company tinyBuild was ‘No Time To Explain, a title that was funded through a Kickstarter campaign.

Like all games it ended up on The Pirate Bay but this one came with a twist. The characters in the game were donned in pirate attire.

“We thought it’d be funny to leak a pirate version ourselves which is literally all about pirates and pirate hats,” Alex told TorrentFreak at the time. “I mean, some people are going to torrent it either way, we might as well make something funny out of it.”

And, as Nichiporchik now explains to PCGamesN, it worked out really well. tinyBuild received dozens of emails from Pirate Bay users who found the game on torrents but went on to buy it afterwards.

“The press coverage spiked our sales,” he said. “Don’t buy into developers blaming piracy for lost sales, it’s just silly.”

So, with tinyBuild’s new game SpeedRunners, the company intends to give pirates what they want – a version of the game for free.

“I’ve seen it multiple times when people pirate some sort of software, fall in love with it, and then due to constant updates reminders end up buying it, just for the convenience. Basically, when developers provide a good service, people see the value in spending money,” Nichiporchik says.

The game will allow users to play the single player for free and then if they like it they get to choose whether to pay to take the game online. This try-before-you-buy approach is often put forward as a reason for piracy and surprisingly Nichiporchik not only agrees, but also participates in it himself.

“I am pirating Battlefield 4 right now,” he told PCGamesN.

“It’s a 23gb download. I want to see if it runs fine on my Bootcamp installation of Windows 8, as in if it’s playable. If it runs fine, I’ll happily install Origin and buy BF4 for the multiplayer.”

There’s no indication that there will be a special ‘pirate’ version of SpeedRunners this time around, but it’s nonetheless interesting to see how a reality that few can do much about is able to be better framed and redirected towards a net positive. In a sea of negativity surrounding piracy, that’s something fans can get behind.

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

In some cases people had to wait up to a year to view their favorite show after the U.S. release, which is unacceptable for most die-hard fans.

Responding to this criticism the TV industry has systematically improved traditional release windows. The recent premiere of The Walking Dead’s fourth season is a prime example of how the industry is adapting to the signals pirates have been sending for years.

To remove one of the incentives for people to grab an unauthorized copy of the show, Fox International Channels premiered the show in 125 countries a day after it first aired on US television.

“We want to prevent the spoilers for sure, we also want to make sure [international viewers] get the best version of the show — not some pirated version,” Liz Dolan, Fox International Channel’s chief marketing officer told The Wrap.

Unfortunately for Fox, however, pirated versions are available in better quality than most legal streaming options. Also, the download numbers have not declined, quite the opposite.

Data gathered by TorrentFreak shows that 16 hours after the first episode appeared online more than half a million people had grabbed a copy through one of many torrent sites. This is more than last year’s season premiere, despite the legal viewing options.

Interestingly, most downloaders come from the U.S. where there is no release lag at all.

Based on a sample of more than 30,000 people who shared the show via a BitTorrent client, we see that the United States is in the lead with 15.5 percent of the total. This means that even though people can stream the episode for free, many still preferred to download it through a torrent site.

In the U.K and Australia there was a slight delay but even legal availability couldn’t prevent people from pirating the season opening. With 11.7 and 10.1 percent these countries are second and third respectively. The Philippines and Canada complete the top five with 8.8 and 6.8 percent of the total.

Fox has to be applauded for making the show available quickly in so many territories, something that was unthinkable half a decade ago. It’s safe to say that the download numbers would have been much higher without these efforts, although at the moment piracy is far from defeated.

In part this might be because some prefer the unauthorized download option simply out of habit. This is especially true for U.S. file-sharers. As we reported earlier this year, many people who pay for a Netflix subscription downloaded Netflix’s exclusive Arrested Development release, preferring the download experience over online streaming.

There is also another group, one that simply doesn’t want to pay for a subscription, which is required in Australia for example. It’s also possible that they are just unhappy with the viewing options currently on offer. In many countries viewers still have to tune in at a fixed time slot while many prefer to program their own viewing schedule.

The challenge for the entertainment industry is to take away these leftover incentives, and make sure that the legal options become the default. For some people it may be too late to be converted, but for most there’s still hope.

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

One of the most popular is JDownloader, a Java-based tool that works on Windows, Linux and Mac. Among other features it can download videos, pull files from countless file-hosting sites and finish things off by automatically extracting them.

This week JDownloader found itself at the center of a controversy when news broke that the Hamburg Regional Court had banned the software. That statement turned out to be a little overbroad and was soon corrected, however the problem was still fairly serious.

The Regional Court had ruled against a feature present in an earlier beta (not official) version of JDownloader 2 which enabled the downloading of copyrighted and protected RTMPE streams. The Court decided that this represented a circumvention of an “effective technological measure” under Section 95a of Germany’s Copyright Act.

As a result the Court issued a preliminary injunction against JDownloader2 and threatened its makers, Appwork, with a 250,000 euro fine for “production, distribution and possession” of the Open Source Software.

“JDownloader can no longer be offered with a very specific feature – downloading videos that are ‘protected’ with RTMPE. This feature found its way into a beta of JDownloader 2 through our Open Source community. We removed that feature as soon as we got notified about it months ago,” Appworks’ Alex told TorrentFreak.

As outlined by Alex, the feature to download RTMPE streams wasn’t created by AppWork, tt was a third party tool that in its newest version also made the download of RTMPE streams possible on top of being able to download regular RTMP. This update of the third party tool was added to JDownloader 2 by an open source developer.

“In our new update system, we update every client very frequently. Once an update is committed by one of our longtime Open Source developers it can potentially reach millions of users within minutes. This continuous deployment is an important feature of JDownloader2 and of course necessary to be able to repair broken plugins and features as soon as possible, instead of only getting updates from time to time.”

But despite Appwork itself not creating the feature, the Court is now holding the company responsible, a situation which Alex believes is comparable to any Internet site being held responsible for the actions of its users.

“For us, as Open Source developers, news like this paints a very dark picture of how content owners and lawyers can destroy what has become so important to so many of us: Open Source Software – which is included in almost any electronic device,” Alex explains.

“Is it really OK that Open Source software companies like us are held liable for allegedly illegal updates the community publishes? YouTube is not. Forums are not. So why are software companies liable under German law?” he questions.

Alex says that this legal environment, in which creators can be held liable for the actions of others, will only discourage developers from getting involved in Open Source projects.

“Are developers really liable if another developer in the community commits code that might be protected somewhere in a software patent? How are Open Source communities supposed to check? What if a program that is included in another Open Source program makes an update that adds illegal functionality?” Alex asks.

“We definitely think that Open Source developers shouldn’t have to worry about this, because frankly, they can’t possibly check thousands of lines of code for every software and update they include. We are very worried about this and hope that other developers and users of free software are as concerned as we are,” he concludes.

Alex says that Appwork’s CEO is currently fighting the company’s corner and any assistance from the Open Source community would be gratefully received. The next hearing in the JDownloader case is scheduled for September.

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

TorrentFreak was lucky enough to be one of the early-birds and here we report our findings. Before going over to the obligatory screenshot tour we’ll take a look at the site’s most anticipated feature, encryption.

As promised, Mega encrypts all uploaded files by default. This works as promised and means that no one except the uploader of a file can see what it contains, unless he or she shares the private key with someone else.

With this tool Dotcom hopes to bring encryption into the mainstream.

“Our easy to use one-click privacy feature will turn encryption into a mass product. We believe within five years half of all Internet traffic will be encrypted with solutions born from our new API,” Dotcom told us previously.

So we’ll put a check mark behind security, assuming that people come up with decent passwords of course.

However, since Mega has branded itself “The Privacy Company” we couldn’t help but examine the site’s privacy policy, to see what personal information is stored and for how long. As it turns out the company keeps quite detailed records of its users, including IP-addresses.

We keep the following personal information:
- When a user signs up for particular services on our website they may need to give us the details required in our registration form and keep that information up to date;
- Communication logs, traffic data, site usage and other information related to us supplying the services (including for serving of advertising material on our site);
- Any personal information included in data uploaded to our system including but not limited to registration information.

We keep records of IP addresses used to access our services.

While this may not be a huge issue for the mainstream, privacy buffs usually prefer more anonymity. Currently dissidents and whistleblowers are not shielded from being exposed by Mega, if the authorities come knocking.

Mega won’t hand personal information out to random strangers of course, but they will cooperate with law enforcement and comply with subpoenas as they should. In their privacy policy they state the following:

If we think it is necessary or we have to by law in any jurisdiction then we are entitled to give your information to the authorities.

We reserve the right to assist any law enforcement agency with investigations, including and limited to by way of disclosure of information to them or their agents. We also reserve the right to comply with any legal processes, including but not limited to subpoenas, search warrents (sic) and court orders.

Another strange line we stumbled upon relates to the creditworthiness of Mega users. According to Mega’s terms this type of information can be shared with any person (see update at the bottom of the article).

We can use any information we have about you as a customer relating to your creditworthiness and give that information to any other person for credit assessment and debt collection purposes.

This anonymity aspect is somewhat of a missed opportunity.

Moving on to the rest of the site we see that Mega offers a great and easy to use interface combined with a decent feature set, including shared folders between contacts. It’s what you would expect from a cloud hosting service.

Aside from some browser incompatibilities the uploading, downloading and sharing of files works seamlessly.

The 50GB storage limit on a free account is definitely a plus. Premium accounts start at $9.99 per month for which users get 500GB of storage and 2TB for data transfers.

There are still many features and tools in the pipeline which will be released in the coming weeks and months. The development roadmap lists mobile access, sync tools for all major platforms, and a mount for Windows.

Finally we’d have to mention that Mega is nothing like the old Megaupload. It’s an entirely different animal, but definitely one worth keeping an eye on.

Update: Mega opened up to the public, hit 250,000 users in a few hours and is mostly offline now.

Update: The creditworthiness mention has been deleted from the TOS. It was most likely a copy/paste gone wrong.

On Sunday Dotcom and his colleagues will officially launch the site during a Mega press event, after which it will open up to the public.

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

Two decades ago 3.5″ disks were the most sought after medium to distribute files. At the time, their massive 1.4 MB file size was more than enough to distribute files. But things got really interesting when people started to swap files on the Internet.

In just 2 score years, filesharing has evolved into an amazingly efficient process which has enhanced lives everywhere. It has brought great exposure to underexposed types of media and democratized distribution, making it possible for individuals to share files with the rest of the world at virtually no cost.

Let’s briefly examine how filesharing has become what it is today in a non-exhaustive overview.

BBS: The Early Days (70s-90s)

The BBS, or Bulletin Board System, has been largely attributed with the beginning of contemporary digital filesharing. Beginning with the Hayes Smartmodem, Bulletin Board Systems became automatic enough that Sysops (or administrators) were able to own and operate these mediums from their own homes as both a hobby and, later, as a business. Typically, the BBS was almost like an intranet in which users would dial-in with their modems to read/send messages, access news, and most importantly for us, share files.

Shareware became incredibly popular through the distribution provided by Bulletin Board Systems. From Wolfenstein to Commander Keen, users were able to learn about a BBS by word of mouth and, in its pinnacle, through printed magazines focusing on BBS’s. Many well-known software packages, including PKZIP, were made popular through the BBS. Many users today still use PKZIP’s .zip algorithm when compressing and decompressing archives.

There are still many traditional Bulletin Board Systems in operation today.

Usenet: Beginnings of Decentralization (Late 70s-Present)

Usenet or Newsgroups were similar to Bulletin Board Systems. However, they operated using UUCP and were able to transcend beyond the centralization of a BBS. Essentially, Usenet servers were able to receive files and re-distribute them amongst other Usenet servers effectively creating multiple copies of messages and files across hundreds upon thousands of servers. Usenet was the medium for discussions which gave birth to several projects, including the World Wide Web, Linux, and Mosaic, amongst other amazing projects.

While Usenet has been in existence since the late 70s, major filesharing did not typically occur until much later. In 1993, Eugene Roshal created RAR which allowed users to split files into multipart archives. Given the decentralized copy-nature of Usenet, this helped distribute files much faster and more efficiently, as corruption in file transfers no longer required files to be re-uploaded in their entirety.

Although many may disagree, Usenet is still very much in use today. However, it is used mostly for filesharing rather than for its original purpose of messaging, which has been mostly replaced by contemporary web forums and IRC.

FTP and FXP: Topsites and the ISO Scene (90s-Present)

Soon after, the underground filesharing scene gave birth to an intricate private network of FTP sites known as Topsites. These networks were based on invite only systems and adopted many of the features of Usenet.

Generally, release groups would upload new media to their release servers and create various kinds of announcements thereof (generally, IRC bot based). Then, couriers who had access to the release servers, as well as other servers, would transport or “race” new releases from one server to another, typically with the use of FXP. By doing so, they would earn credits (typically 1:3 ratio) for uploading files as long as the file was considered to be appropriate and unique (not a dupe — hence the racing).

Through this culture and rewards system, files eventually would make their way to topsites all over the world in this decentralized nature. Much like Usenet, split-file or RAR archives were utilized in order to further enhance the racing culture.

Of course, due to the private and closed nature of this distribution network, it was difficult for many users to gain access to these topsites. Topsites are very much still in existence today.

IRC (90s-Present)

IRC has been around for a long time and has played quite a role in society, both in filesharing as well as politics. Many IRC clients feature a DCC (direct client to client) protocol which allows users to do exactly as the name implies.

Through DCC, and later with advancements and bots known as XDCC servers, filesharing took yet another turn. Distribution groups who were able to get their hands on releases were able to serve files to the masses using these XDCC servers, which were typically hosted anywhere from powerful machines, brute forced Windows NT computers, personal computers, and university computer labs.

XDCC is still quite popular and a quick search through Netsplit.de shows many active channels across many active IRC networks still utilizing XDCC for distribution. Additionally, IRC is still widely used for its original purpose of chat as well as a bootstrap mechanism for filesharing mediums which sprouted later.

Hotline (90s)

For a brief period Hotline was a very popular medium for sharing files. At first, Hotline was very mainstream with many mega corporations participating in the Hotline network. However, it quickly faded away due to many complications, including but not limited to the encrypting of source files on Hotline computers which essentially crippled the company.

Napster (Late 90s)

Napster arguably brought MP3 and filesharing to the masses. There are very few netizens who haven’t used or heard of Napster. The software operated as a peer to peer filesharing network strictly used for music. Napster’s database, however, was centrally located, which eventually helped lead to its shutdown and subsequent demise. However, not before it helped to spread the idea of filesharing, in its entirety, to the masses.

Gnutella, eDonkey2000 and Kazaa (Early 2000)

The centralized nature of Napster gave way to a single point of failure – or single point of shutdown. As such, many gifted developers researched methods to avoid such complications. Gnutella, eDonkey2000, and Kazaa were different implementations which all did quite well in their heyday. While their protocols were all different, they were each very similar in that there was no central server. However, each protocol ended up “failing” as they were rooted in commercial (and corporate) interest – which ended up becoming an attack point.

Gnutella, originally created by the Nullsoft people, was once the most used network thanks to LimeWire. The LimeWire client was sued by the RIAA and shutdown in 2010, which turned Gnutella into a ghost network. The original eDonkey2000 from Jed McCaleb was toppled as well, but clones have kept the eDonkey network alive. The Kazaa team later created Skype, which is a widely used VoIP/IM platform.

DC++ and i2hub

DC++ and i2hub were popular methods of sharing files in closed-networks. Both were highly used within the university and college scene where students would share hub/server addresses with each other in order to share files at very high speeds within the local college networks. The advantages provided within these was that outside agencies and other various third parties could not access the content found within these networks.

However, the RIAA found a way into i2hub and was able to shut it down. DC++ is still in active development today, but is not as common or widespread as it once was.

BitTorrent (2001)

Bram Cohen created BitTorrent, which almost anyone with an Internet connection today has used, knowingly or not. BitTorrent essentially took on all of the greatest properties of its predecessors and packed them all into one, easy to use file sharing platform.

Taking on the concepts of breaking files into multiple chunks (Usenet, Topsites) as well as the decentralized peer-to-peer distribution mechanism (Napster, Gnutella, eDonkey2000, Kazaa), BitTorrent has catapulted into a mainstream filesharing mechanism which is fast, efficient, and difficult to stop.

Early versions of BitTorrent required centralized trackers to operate, but have later become able to utilize trackerless “torrents.”

Increasingly BitTorrent users have grown concerned with their privacy. Indexes such as YouHaveDownloaded.com have been able to maintain logs of every file downloaded by IP, which has raised significant awareness to whether it is safe to download files through BitTorrent. In addition, many ISPs have been known to cap speeds when detecting BitTorrent downloads.

As a result of these privacy concerns millions of BitTorrent users have signed up with Anonymous VPN services to mask their IP-addresses when downloading files

Filelockers and Forums (2000 to Present)

In recent years Megaupload, Rapidshare, Hotfile and other file lockers became quite popular. These file lockers provided the simplest means of filesharing when compared to all of their predecessors. Files are simply uploaded to the file locker, and a URL is provided to the file which is download through HTTP/HTTPS.

Generally, the URLs are shared through forums. Due to the affiliate compensations some cyberlockers offer to file uploaders on a per-file based download count, many files are distributed in split-file or RAR archives much like in the days of topsites and Usenet. This is mainly due to for-profit reasons as opposed to cultural or technical reasons as seen in the scene (topsites) or on Usenet respectively.

However, governments as well as special interest groups including the RIAA and MPAA have targeted file lockers leading to widely publicized lawsuits, including the arrest and destruction of Megaupload and Kim Dotcom.

Final Thoughts

Filesharing has come a long way, and with it, many industries have been born.

While it provides challenges to many of the big media conglomerates, it undoubtedly enriched the lives of many independent creators. Distribution is no longer something for the happy few, which shows as tens of thousands of artists share their work for free online every year.

Filesharing as a technology is good. Let’s make sure it stays around so that we may continue to share our thoughts, ideas, and art in order to better ourselves, our communities, and our earth. Anyone who is against that must obviously dream of world destruction, or at the least, wish for human progress to stop.

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