TorrentFreak

BitTorrent Inc., the company behind the BitTorrent protocol and the world famous uTorrent client, has taken legal action against a company attempting to trade on the company’s brand. In a lawsuit against a German-based company calling itself BitTorrent Marketing GMBH, US-based BitTorrent Inc. is claiming damages for trademark infringement, unfair competition and cybersquatting.

When the latest alpha version of uTorrent was released earlier this week several users spotted something unusual in the ‘about’ window. For years the uTorrent client belonged to BitTorrent Inc., but all of a sudden ownership was being credited to an unknown company named Gyre Inc. The uTorrent team was quick to fix this ‘coding mistake,’ but they couldn’t wipe out a trail of evidence suggesting that BitTorrent might rebrand itself in the near future.

A landmark ruling in one of the many mass-BitTorrent lawsuits in the US has delivered a severe blow to a thus far lucrative business. Among other things, New York Judge Gary Brown explains in great detail why an IP-address is not sufficient evidence to identify copyright infringers. According to the Judge this lack of specific evidence means that many alleged BitTorrent pirates have been wrongfully accused by copyright holders.

Last century filesharing was a fringe hobby, only for geeks who were lucky enough to own a computer that could dial into the World Wide Web. How different is that today, where filesharing has become daily routine for hundreds of millions of people worldwide. In just a few years swapping files has become mainstream. Time to take a step back and see how it all came about.

uTorrent parent company BitTorrent Inc. just announced that the BitTorrent Mainline client and uTorrent have hit the milestone of 150 million monthly users. Together both clients increased their user base by more than 50 percent compared to last year, and the end of this surge is not yet in sight.

BitTorrent is a great way to share large files with friends, family or even complete strangers, but it’s not always as convenient as it should be. Even though BitTorrent is more than a decade old there’s no site where users can simply dump torrents and get a fancy URL in return, so they can share with others. Until now that is, because the newly launched Tors.in just filled that gap.

New data published by the Canadian broadband management company Sandvine reveals that on the average day Netflix and BitTorrent are responsible for 40 percent of all Internet traffic in North America. During peak hours Netflix accounts for a third of all download traffic, while BitTorrent is credited for nearly half of all upload traffic during the busiest time of the day.