One of the key ways it’s changing this perception is by partnering with well-known artists such as De La Soul, Moby and Madonna, and showing that BitTorrent is an ideal tool to connect artists with fans.

To provide some examples of what it can do, BitTorrent Inc. has made a distribution and advertising deck with success stories. Thus far more than 10,000 artists have used BitTorrent’s bundles, generating over 100 million downloads which convert into real sales.

Aside from listing its successes the company also reports some intriguing statistics on the consumer behavior of its community.

On slide 12 BitTorrent Inc. notes that its community is 33% more likely to buy albums online, makes 34% more DVD purchases, watches 34% more movies in theater and is twice as likely to have a paid music subscription.

Because BitTorrent Inc provides no source for the data provided in this last slide we contacted the company last week to find out more. Unfortunately, we haven’t received a response thus far.

However, while writing this article we found that the numbers reported in the pitch deck trace back to one of our own articles. The data reported by BitTorrent Inc. comes from music industry group IFPI and details the buying habits of music pirates. BitTorrent Inc subsequently used these piracy statistics to sell its “community” to potential partners.

This is interesting for a variety of reasons. First, IFPI’s research doesn’t mention BitTorrent users, but file-sharing music pirates in general. Furthermore, since when does BitTorrent see “music pirates” as its community? Perhaps that’s the reason why the source for the data isn’t provided in the pitch deck (IFPI was mentioned as source in an earlier pitch deck).

That said, BitTorrent Inc is right to point out that file-sharers tend to be more engaged fans than the average person. Even the RIAA was willing to admit that.

It’s good to see that more and more artists, including many big names, are beginning to recognize this potential too. Even U2, whose former manager is one of the most vocal anti-piracy crusaders, has now decided to give away its latest album for free hoping that it will increase sales of older work. Without piracy, that would have never happened.

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

One of the biggest backlashes in recent history happened two years ago when BitTorrent Inc. announced its plan to make uTorrent ad-supported. This announcement led to a small user revolt.

The people complaining were mostly annoyed that there was be no option to disable the ads. Luckily for them, BitTorrent Inc. listened to the feedback and quickly decided that users would indeed get a chance to opt-out.

At the time BitTorrent Inc. CEO Eric Klinker said that the backlash made it clear that users should be given the choice.

“We’ve long contemplated an opt-out mechanism for the new offers and advertisements we will be experimenting with. Given all that’s been said here, we’ve decided to release the initial version with an opt-out mechanism, and we will provide them with ways to do so,” said BitTorrent CEO Eric Klinker.

From that moment uTorrent’s ads became optional, but turned on by default. Still, the company managed to generate billions of ad impressions per month. Five billion to be precise, according to information released last year.

The optional advertisements were a situation most users could live with, but right before the weekend uTorrent pushed through an unexpected and unannounced change. The latest stable release version 3.4.2, no longer gives users the opportunity to opt out from the banner ad in the lower left corner.

As can be seen below, the option “show plus information” has been removed from the context menu. In addition the advanced setting “gui.show_plus_upsell,” which had the same functionality, has disappeared as well.

At this point it’s unclear why BitTorrent Inc. removed the opt-out. The change is not documented in the release notes, but several users were quick to pick it up and began asking questions.

The uTorrent development team hasn’t responded to the comments yet. Some users are nonetheless quick to draw their conclusions, much like two years ago.

“Just like the coming of the video killing the radio star, ads will kill uTorrent’s popularity,” one user comments in the forums.

While there is no longer an option to hide the uTorrent Plus house ad, people can prevent other ads from showing up there by going into the advanced settings. Setting offers.left_rail_offer_enabled to false should restrict the ads to the uTorrent Plus upsell.

There is no denying that the advertisements, in addition to the toolbars and other software that’s bundled with uTorrent, generate the majority of the revenue for BitTorrent Inc. Perhaps this latest change is an attempt to increase the revenue coming from the banner ads, which eventually goes to paying the company’s bills.

Whether this will be a wise decision in the long run remains to be seen.

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

In order to facilitate subsequent data-sharing between the U.S. and EU, the U.S. Department of Commerce worked with the European Commission to develop the U.S. – EU Safe Harbor Framework. By signing up to the program, U.S. organizations can send a clear signal to others in the EU that the standards mandated by the EU’s Directive on Data Protection are being met.

For U.S. organizations, signing up has several benefits. All 28 member states of the European Union accept the standard, being a signatory is a sign of commitment to privacy, approval to exchange data with the EU will be automatically granted, and legal issues raised in relation to data sharing can be heard in the United States.

After meeting the standards required by framework, organizations must self-certify every year with the Department of Commerce and state in their privacy policy statements that they adhere to the Safe Harbor Privacy Principles. Herein lies the problem.

By allowing their self-certifications to lapse, BitTorrent Inc. and another eleven companies including ISP Level 3 Communications, encrypted email company DataMotion and a trio of NFL teams, fell short of the framework’s requirements (full company list).

“Enforcement of the U.S.-EU Safe Harbor Framework is a Commission priority. These twelve cases help ensure the integrity of the Safe Harbor Framework and send the signal to companies that they cannot falsely claim participation in the program,” said FTC Chairwoman Edith Ramirez in a statement.

As can be seen by BitTorrent Inc.’s Safe Harbor entry, the company’s self-certification expired in January 2008 and still lists Ashwin Navin as the company’s president. Navin vacated that role in November 2008.

While there is no suggestion that BitTorrent Inc. or any of the other organizations involved compromised customer privacy in any way, failure to self-certify and then falsely claiming to participate in the U.S. – EU treaty is unacceptable to the U.S, particularly in light of the recent NSA scandal. With that in mind all 12 organizations have agreed to settle with the FTC by entering into “consent agreements” – BitTorrent Inc.’s can be read here (pdf).

Considering BitTorrent Inc.’s recent publicity drive on the privacy front, the charges by the FTC will come as a disappointment to the company, particularly since their error appears to have stemmed from an administrative oversight rather than actual carelessness with data.

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

BitTorrent Inc., the company behind the immensely popular file-sharing client uTorrent, has just released an overview detailing the successes of its “bundles” program alongside a list of the most-downloaded legal content.

The company regularly teams up with artists to release free content. One of the top stars last year was Moby, who shared several tracks from his 11th studio album ‘Innocents’ for free via the popular file-sharing platform.

According to BitTorrent Inc., this bundle with free tracks was the most-shared torrent of 2013, with a staggering 8.9 million downloads. Not a big surprise, as more than 85,000 people are still actively sharing the tracks at the time of writing.

The second most-shared bundle is the Epic Meal Time video bundle with 8.6 million downloads, followed by Kaskade’s tracks with 4.1 million downloads.

The secret behind BitTorrent’s bundle program is that the torrents are included with every download of the uTorrent and BitTorrent mainline applications. Since these clients are installed by dozens of millions of people, the numbers add up quickly.

“164,383 BitTorrent Bundles are downloaded around the world, every day. These projects have been downloaded 60 million times, by fans in over 170 countries around the world,” BitTorrent Inc. notes.

Bragging rights aside, the downloads also bring value to the artists in question. They are able to reach millions of new fans which may eventually boosts concert visits and sales.

Moby, for example, managed to add 419,000 people to his email list via the bundle. In addition, 130,000 people clicked through to the iTunes store while 68,000 new remixes of his tracks were created.

That can be considered quite a success.

The top 20 most-downloaded bundles are listed below. More stats and background information on the program is available in the 2013 BitTorrent report.

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

The company, known for the popular file-sharing applications uTorrent and BitTorrent, put up shocking billboards in three major metropolitan areas.

One of the slogans displayed the spooky message “Your Data Should Belong To The NSA.” After a few days this billboard was updated, striking The NSA while adding You.

In a blog post BitTorrent’s marketing president Matt Mason later explained that the company wanted to wake the public up, alerting them to the fact that they have the power to do something about the gross rights violations that were all over the news lately.

“We’ve chosen to accept surveillance culture: the right of security agencies to violate the Fourth Amendment; to see and store data as they see fit. But these things are just that. They’re choices. And these choices belong to us,” Mason wrote.

According to Mason privacy is one of the core values of BitTorrent and a means to get away from nasty government surveillance.

“We’re a company founded on a few simple core values. Uphold user privacy, and user control,” he writes, adding that “BitTorrent is a secure, distributed response to the challenge of data surveillance.”

While these words are music to the ears of many Internet users, they certainly don’t apply to all BitTorrent products.

In fact, regular BitTorrent transfers through uTorrent or other clients lack any form of privacy. People who share files in public, including BitTorrent’s artist bundles, display their IP-addresses to the rest of the world and are tracked by dozens of monitoring outfits.

This was also picked up by David Lowery, a well-known musician and respected anti-piracy advocate in the music industry. Lowery was quick to highlight the privacy aspect in an article on the Trichordist where he slammed BitTorrent for not understanding their own technology.

“It seems to me that BitTorrent is suggesting that by using their product you are somehow safe from snooping by the NSA. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Nope you aren’t even safe from a so-called luddite musician,” Lowery writes.

Backing up his argument, Lowery goes on to list the IP-addresses of a few dozens downloaders who were sharing his work via BitTorrent, many using the software provided by the San Francisco company.

“Apparently BitTorrent doesn’t even understand how it’s own product works. Luddites,” Lowery notes.

BitTorrent does know its own technology of course, but we have to agree that the company’s messaging is confusing to say the least. Yes, BitTorrent released a great Sync application earlier this year, which allows people to run a private and secure backup service. But the general public associates BitTorrent with something entirely different – public downloads.

The billboard campaign and media commentary the company put out this week made no mention of this distinction. This is unfortunate, and perhaps a bit misleading. Not least because more than a quarter million torrent users have been sued in the U.S. alone because it’s so easy to monitor downloaders.

It becomes even more painful when we bring in the fact that BitTorrent refused to accept advertisements from a company that wanted to offer BitTorrent users a bit more privacy.

Earlier this year the company refused to run ads for TorGuard, because the VPN-service was considered to be “high risk”. The VPN service would only be welcome when it changed its name, logo, and removed all references to “BitTorrent,” “torrent” and uTorrent from its website.

For a business that claims to have privacy as one of its core values, this is a rather odd stance. But perhaps the privacy principle is only applied selectively, whenever it fits the company’s business interests.

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

The company’s tools can of course be put to illegal uses, but so can those of a thousand other companies in thousands of cities worldwide. The company has been relentless in its quest to get this message to the masses, but it’s also taking another approach to boosting its image with its tech-savvy customer base.

Anyone who monitors the company’s Twitter feed will see that it regularly retweets items that relate to privacy and freedom, such as the recent NSA whistle-blower scandal for example.

Like many technology companies BitTorrent Inc. has an interest in keeping the Internet both free and open so the news today that the San Francisco-based company is behind a controversial advertising campaign doesn’t come as too much of a shock.

Last week billboards appeared in three major cities – New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles – each with a statement designed to be offensive to anyone who values freedom, privacy and a right to choose.

“These statements represent an assault on freedom. They also, for the most part, represent attitudes Internet culture has accepted. Chips we’ve traded for convenience. Part of the allegiance we’ve sworn to the web’s big platforms and server farms. That’s what you get for going online,” BitTorrent Inc. says of the campaign’s messages.

The company goes on to bemoan general society’s apparent eagerness to accept data centralization and along with it the distribution of personal information to powerful companies and governments who choose to exploit it.

“We’ve chosen to accept surveillance culture: the right of security agencies to violate the Fourth Amendment; to see and store data as they see fit,” the company says.

Interestingly, BitTorrent Inc. also takes a shot at entertainment companies who put content behind paywalls and suggests that all-you-can-eat outlets like Spotify, for example, fail to adequately compensate the artists.

“We’ve chosen to accept walled gardens of creativity: a lifetime of work (our life’s work) locked into digital stores that take 30% of the revenue and streaming services that pay pennies in royalties,” BitTorrent says.

Of course, the campaign isn’t simply a me-too retaliation at the revelations of the past few months and years. BitTorrent Inc. has a business model and several products that really do put the power back in the hands of the individual, from its BitTorrent Bundles through to its DIY decentralized Dropbox alternative, BitTorrent Sync and its “NSA-proof” messenger app.

With these tools and last week’s billboard campaign the San Francisco-based company hopes to capture the imaginations of Internet users who have become weary of entrusting their data to big companies and artists who want to leave the industry machine behind and take their futures into their own hands, as the updated billboards suggest.

“This is the generation that will decide whether the Internet is a tool for control, or a platform for innovation and freedom. We have an incredible opportunity. We can shape the next one and one hundred years of human connection. A free, open Internet is a force for change, creativity; the backbone of a society where citizens are stakeholders, not data sets.

“BitTorrent is built to preserve that Internet,” the company concludes.

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

Internet privacy suddenly became a mainstream topic and all the negative news has increased the demand for encrypted and secure communications.

Responding to this, several developers quickly jumped in with new tools to prevent the public from having their conversations spied on or their data breached. Pirate Bay founder Peter Sunde announced a new encrypted messaging service for example, and Kim Dotcom’s Mega has similar plans.

Today BitTorrent Inc. announced a new project that will also increase people’s security. The San Francisco-based company just launched BitTorrent Chat, a secure messenger app that allows people to communicate without storing the conversations on any central servers.

The new tool is based on BitTorrent technology and is offered free of charge to help people regain complete control over their own data.

“This year alone, more than 6 million people have been impacted by data breaches. The right to own your own conversations online: it’s not a given. It should be,” the company says.

“So over at Labs, we’re working on something that could solve for conversation security. BitTorrent Chat applies distributed technology to the idea of IM. Our goal is to ensure that your messages stay yours: private, secure, and free.”

While BitTorrent Chat doesn’t store any conversations on a third-party server, it does need a central location to get the conversation going. To speak in BitTorrent terms, people have to connect to a tracker to know where the message should be sent.

TorrentFreak asked for further details on what central servers are involved in bootstrapping the conversations and what encryption the new tool uses, but the company could not immediately provide further details on these issues.

The new messenger app is not the only ‘breach safe’ tool the company is currently working on. Earlier this year BitTorrent launched its Sync application which provides a secure alternative to centralized cloud backup solutions such as Dropbox and Google drive.

Those who want to give BitTorrent’s Chat application a try can head over to BitTorrent Labs to sign up for the private Alpha.

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

Considering the size of this massive userbase, one doesn’t need a lot of imagination to come up with several disaster scenarios that might unfold should a malicious third-party gain access to all these clients. But that is exactly what could’ve happened earlier this year if it wasn’t for “MentaL”, an admin at RaGEZONE.

This Spring, MentaL was looking for a hosting provider for a friend when he stumbled upon the Jenkins panel of BitTorrent Inc. This turned out to be the gateway to a treasure trove of highly confidential information that could have destroyed the company if it had landed in the wrong hands.

“They forgot to set a user/pass to the admin panel, that had access to github from a master account. Github accounts had usernames and passwords that were linked to everything,” MentaL told TorrentFreak.

BitTorrent’s Jenkins panel

Luckily for BitTorrent Inc, MentaL wasn’t out to do harm. He contacted the company in May to report his findings and was duly thanked and promised a reward in return. BitTorrent Inc. quickly secured the Jenkins panel but to MentaL’s surprise no reward was forthcoming.

MentaL says that when he contacted BitTorrent Inc he was treated rudely and was eventually offered a $500 reward for which he should send an invoice. MentaL was insulted by this “low” offer and instead of taking it he decided to share his findings with the rest of the world. While he never copied any of the files available through the panel, he did take screenshots which show how severe the “leak” was.

Through the open Jenkins panel anyone had access to the heart of the company, including financial details, user accounts and the source code to pretty much all released and unreleased software including uTorrent.

“Anyone who had the access I had would be able to steal the source code of all BitTorrent products and more,” MentaL told TorrentFreak.

“Truth be told, I had access to so much content that I was really unaware of what most of it would and could do! But one extreme scenario that I could have done hypothetically if I was some idiot would be to tweak the actual live build and push an update that could include a virus that would destroy all user content who installed the update,” he adds.

uTorrent source code (more)

So, in theory, a malicious person could have updated millions of live torrent clients with viruses, or worse. In addition, it would be possible to reveal stacks of confidential documents including financial information and detailed job offerings.

“In regards to the financial documents, I only checked several and it included payments and balances to and from the company. Other documents I saw were job offers with introductory salaries that reached over $150,000 starting wage,” MentaL told us.

“It was quite extreme and shocking.”

Below is a screenshot of a letter that was sent to the Brazil consulate in Los Angeles. As MentaL has no intention of doing the company any permanent harm, the details of the letter have been redacted.

Letter to the consulate

In another screenshot several source files of BitTorrent’s software and databases are visible. In addition, MentaL tells us that he had access to username and passwords for SQL databases. Needless to say, there are plenty of possibilities to exploit this kind of data for nefarious purposes.

BitTorrent data

The above clearly shows that BitTorrent Inc has narrowly escaped a massive disaster. Perhaps they could have been a bit more appreciative of the way MentaL reported the problems, as that would have saved the company from having the rather embarrassing mistake out in the open.

“I felt I wanted to share and express my annoyance regarding the matter. They make millions a year in ad revenue alone and I never released, tweaked, sent fake builds or nothing out to any user and I feel insulted,” MentaL concludes.

TorrentFreak contacted BitTorrent Inc for a comment on the potential disaster and we will add their response when it comes in. It could be that they are still busy counting their blessings.

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

Not surprisingly, providers of such services are eager to advertise their products to this ‘niche’ group. Many VPN providers are buying ads through Google and other ad-networks, but there is a more direct method.

Last year BitTorrent Inc. added advertisements to its uTorrent and BitTorrent clients, which cater to over 150 million monthly users. The owner of VPN and proxy provider TorGuard therefore made inquiries to the San-Francisco based company to learn more about advertising opportunities, but he was in for a surprise.

In a phone conversation the Vice President of advertising at BitTorrent Inc. told TorGuard that his brand was not a good match since it’s categorized as “high risk.” According to BitTorrent, TorGuard is seen as a service that promotes the use of torrents, which is apparently not allowed.

To find out what is wrong with his service, TorGuard agreed to an extensive review by BitTorrent Inc’s legal team and late last week the final verdict came in. The VPN provider is welcome to advertise with BitTorrent, but not before all torrent related references are removed.

To be accepted, TorGuard has to remove the “tor” from its brand name and website URL, because this directly relates to torrents. In addition, all images even remotely relating to BitTorrent or torrents in general have to go. And it doesn’t stop there.

“Any text content containing the words ‘BitTorrent’,’utorrent’ or ‘torrent’ would also need to be removed. This would of course include landing pages, knowledge base articles, forum/blog posts, and more,” TorGuard’s Ben Van Pelt tells TorrentFreak.

The long list of demands is a bit much for TorGuard’s owner, who is baffled by the entire ordeal.

“Needless to say, we won’t be censoring any of these concerns and will continue to pursue other advertisement initiatives,” Van Pelt says.

“We’ve worked with some of the biggest names in marketing like Google, Cnet and Bing, but never expected censorship requests of this extent from the likes of BitTorrent. It really is wildly ironic,” TorGuard’s owner adds.

The question that remains is why BitTorrent doesn’t want to work with BitTorrent-friendly VPN and proxy services. After all, both the uTorrent and BitTorrent clients have built-in support for proxy connections. And like BitTorrent, VPNs and proxies are nothing more than a technology.

Before the weekend TorrentFreak asked BitTorrent Inc. for a comment on their rules and regulations regarding VPN advertisements, but we have yet to receive a response.

The irony of the situation is amplified by BitTorrent Inc’s ongoing attempts to distance itself from everything piracy related. Deals with content partners are hard to get when people associate your company with illegal downloading, and time and time again the company has been forced to explain that there are plenty of legitimate uses for BitTorrent.

However, BitTorrent now appears to be doing the same to TorGuard.

TorGuard’s owner tells TorrentFreak that he understands that BitTorrent is protecting its brand, but he disagrees with the way the company is going about it. He was willing to make a few changes here and there, but completely banning all references to torrents, suggesting these are somehow evil, is simply not an option.

“To me, the name ‘TorGuard’ first represents anonymity, overcoming censorship and encryption, before it has anything to do with BitTorrent,” Van Pelt concludes.

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

After BitTorrent Inc. bought the software in 2006 it evolved heavily. What began as a minimalist and no-nonsense client targeted at a BitTorrent-savvy crowd, is now an application that does far more than downloading alone.

As always, some love the changes and added features while others complain bitterly after every bug fix. However, the announcement that uTorrent will become ad-supported is expected to meet wider resistance among a certain crowd.

The change was quietly made public in a forum post yesterday where it is framed as “a fresh approach to creating a no-nonsense and free torrenting experience.”

After nearly seven years this is the first time that advertisers will be able to reach millions of uTorrent users directly from within the client itself.

Until now nearly all revenue came from the toolbar which users can install optionally when uTorrent is first downloaded. However, BitTorrent Inc. sees the need to experiment with other revenue sources with “sponsored torrents” being added for all users in an upcoming release.

“You are all very familiar with how we have paid the bills so far. These new changes mark our next step towards finding that difficult balance between keeping our lights on and providing a positive user experience,” they explain.

The sponsored torrents will appear in a highly visible spot on top of the list of downloads and will be used to promote content from advertisers. They can’t be “turned off,” but users have the option to click away individual ads.

“This new build will display a featured torrent at the top of your torrent list. This featured torrent space will be used to offer a variety of different types of content. We are working towards bringing you offers that are relevant to you.”

“This means films, games, music, software…basically anything that you will find interesting. We may not get it right on the first try but we will continue to improve our efforts based on your feedback,” BitTorrent Inc. adds.

The company explains that aside from ads the sponsored torrents will also be used to inform users about important updates and to promote artists.

BitTorrent previously informed TorrentFreak that people in different geographical locations will see different content. This means that uTorrent will use your IP-address to lookup where you are. Other than that, the company says that users’ privacy is guaranteed.

For BitTorrent Inc. the main motivation to add sponsored torrents is to generate extra revenue. The company added dozens of employees to its payroll in recent years, and these all have to be compensated.

However, a person close to the company told TorrentFreak that even without the uTorrent ads the company is doing very well. Current annual revenue is estimated at somewhere between $15 and $20 million and the company is backed by millions in venture capital.

With “sponsored torrents” BitTorrent Inc could possibly bring in millions of added revenue and grow even further.

The uTorrent team closed their announcement with a request for feedback, and we would like to do the same. What do you think of uTorrent’s move to add sponsored torrents? Does it put you off or is it no problem in exchange for a free client and service? Let us know in the comment section below.

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