For more than a decade the mode of operation employed by these companies has followed a similar pattern. Pick the most famous or popular file-sharing client of the day, use flashy websites and confusing domain names to attract users who can’t tell an imposter from the real thing, lull them in with the suggestion of free downloads, and then extract money from them.

These outfits have picked on just about every file-sharing brand out there with impunity, but now one of them is being held to account.

In a lawsuit filed this week, BitTorrent Inc. is claiming damages from a German-based company for trademark infringement, unfair competition and cybersquatting.

According to the San-Francisco based owner of uTorrent, BitTorrent Marketing GMBH is
making money from users who start out looking for BitTorrent Inc.’s products but then get “misdirected” to dozens of domains bearing similar names, all operated by BitTorrent Marketing.

Listed in the lawsuit are a sample 54 domains such as Bit-Torent.com, Bit-Torrent.com and Bitorrent.net, plus many other misspellings of the official BitTorrent brand.

Once users have visited one of these domains they wrongly presume to be operated by BitTorrent Inc., they are led down a misleading path promising media downloads.

“U.S. users who select the links on Defendant’s BitTorrent website are redirected to websites enabling them to sign up for a variety of services associated with accessing and viewing media and online content, including, among others, ultimate-downloadcenter.com and itv-dish-pro.com,” the lawsuit reads.

However, those who are eventually convinced to part with their money end up disappointed.

“Users who sign up and pay to obtain the services offered through Defendant’s BitTorrent website do not in fact receive those services. For example, after paying over $50 to sign up for ultimate-downloadcenter.com, U.S. users are redirected to third-party websites of other digital media providers, like Netflix.com and Hulu.com, and invited to sign up for membership with those services as well,” the lawsuit continues.

“Accordingly, Plaintiff is informed and believes, and based thereon alleges, that Defendant is intentionally using Plaintiff’s BitTorrent trademark to deceive U.S consumers into signing up for memberships and other ‘services’ that do not afford those users any tangible benefit, with knowledge that such conduct is a result of confusion as to whether those websites are associated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Plaintiff.”

It appears that Bram Cohen, the inventor of BitTorrent, became aware of the people behind BitTorrent Marketing around 9 years ago. In 2003 Cohen was contacted by an individual requesting permission to register the BitTorrent.de domain name. He refused, but the company (at the time known by a different name) went ahead and started registering BitTorrent-like domains anyway, as well as the German and European trademarks for BitTorrent.

After targeting other world-famous file-sharing brands such as Azureus, Vuze, Kazaa and Morpheus, in early 2012 BitTorrent Marketing started using the BitTorrent trademark in the US through the website BitTorrent.net.

“This filing is part of a series of actions that we’ve taken since 2010 to prevent this company from using the BitTorrent brand to trick users into using a service that is not the genuine article our company provides,” a BitTorrent Inc. spokesperson told TorrentFreak.

In conclusion, BitTorrent Inc. is asking for BitTorrent Marketing to be barred from using the BitTorrent mark “or any mark confusingly similar.” They also request damages for trademark related offenses committed by their German namesake including $100,000 for each infringing domain name.

Source: BitTorrent Inc Takes Legal Action Against Download Scammers

Among other things, the new version aims to make downloads even faster for users with high bandwidth connections.

But there was something else quite unique about the release. Those who took a peek at the ‘about’ section saw the name of a new mysterious company. BitTorrent Inc. wasn’t listed there, but Gyre Inc.

So had uTorrent been quietly sold?

TorrentFreak contacted BitTorrent Inc. to find out more, and we were told that Gyre Inc. was listed there because of a “coding error.” The company didn’t want to confirm or deny the existence of a rebranding exercise, but did say that they “regularly test new brand and product names internally.”

This vagueness encouraged us to research the “Gyre” brand and to speculate about BitTorrent’s future.

Let’s start with some details on Gyre Inc. first. The company was registered in January of this year and lists BitTorrent Inc. CEO Eric Klinker as the service agent. The company address is identical to that of BitTorrent’s San Francisco offices.

One of the signs that points in the direction of a rebranding effort is the fact that BitTorrent Inc. copied all their BitTorrent trademarks for the term Gyre. These three Gyre trademarks cover devices, software and licensing and are identical to the existing BitTorrent trademarks.

And that’s not all.

There is also some evidence to suggest that Gyre is more than just a front for a new product. The company name already appears in the “Terms of Use” for the “Share” app released by BitTorrent Inc. a few months ago. In these same terms there’s also a reference to “SoShare”, another term trademarked by BitTorrent recently.

BitTorrent developers are also referencing Gyre in their code. In the new plugin.btapp.js for example we see several mentions. This is part of a yet-to-be-released product where web browsers can talk to uTorrent/BitTorrent via a plugin.

And what about the unusual fact that “Gyrecorp” is selling uTorrent stickers and shirts?

But perhaps the strongest support for a possible rebranding is that BitTorrent didn’t deny this when we specifically asked about it. We were informed that uTorrent and BitTorrent will continue to be released under BitTorrent Inc. But it wasn’t specified for how long.

BitTorrent Inc. wouldn’t be the first of its kind to change names. Several years ago Azureus changed its name to Vuze. This rebranding also covered the name of the BitTorrent client, but there is no indication that the uTorrent brand will disappear.

The ultimate question is of course why BitTorrent Inc. needs a new brand name to begin with. Could it be the pirate stigma? Are investors pushing for something new? Is there a sale on the horizon?

All speculation for now, but something is up for sure.

Source: BitTorrent Set To Rebrand Itself As Gyre?

The copyright holders who start these cases generally provide nothing more than an IP-address as evidence. They then ask the courts to grant a subpoena, allowing them to ask Internet providers for the personal details of the alleged offenders.

The problem, however, is that the person listed as the account holder is often not the person who downloaded the infringing material. Or put differently; an IP-address is not a person.

Previous judges who handled BitTorrent cases have made observations along these lines, but none have been as detailed as New York Magistrate Judge Gary Brown was in a recent order.

In his recommendation order the Judge labels mass-BitTorrent lawsuits a “waste of judicial resources.” For a variety of reasons he recommends other judges to reject similar cases in the future.

One of the arguments discussed in detail is the copyright holders’ claim that IP-addresses can identify the alleged infringers. According to Judge Brown this claim is very weak.

“The assumption that the person who pays for Internet access at a given location is the same individual who allegedly downloaded a single sexually explicit film is tenuous, and one that has grown more so over time,” he writes.

“An IP address provides only the location at which one of any number of computer devices may be deployed, much like a telephone number can be used for any number of telephones.”

“Thus, it is no more likely that the subscriber to an IP address carried out a particular computer function – here the purported illegal downloading of a single pornographic film – than to say an individual who pays the telephone bill made a specific telephone call.”

The Judge continues by arguing that having an IP-address as evidence is even weaker than a telephone number, as the majority of US homes have a wireless network nowadays. This means that many people, including complete strangers if one has an open network, can use the same IP-address simultaneously.

“While a decade ago, home wireless networks were nearly non-existent, 61% of US homes now have wireless access. As a result, a single IP address usually supports multiple computer devices – which unlike traditional telephones can be operated simultaneously by different individuals,” Judge Brown writes.

“Different family members, or even visitors, could have performed the alleged downloads. Unless the wireless router has been appropriately secured (and in some cases, even if it has been secured), neighbors or passersby could access the Internet using the IP address assigned to a particular subscriber and download the plaintiff’s film.”

Judge Brown explains that the widespread use of wireless networks makes a significant difference in cases against file-sharers. He refers to an old RIAA case of nearly a decade ago where the alleged infringer was located at a University, on a wired connection offering hundreds to tracks in a shared folder. The Judge points out that nowadays it is much harder to pinpoint specific infringers.

Brown also cites various other judges who’ve made comments on the IP-address issue. In SBO Pictures, Inc. v. Does 1-3036 for example, the court noted:

“By defining Doe Defendants as ISP subscribers who were assigned certain IP addresses, instead of the actual Internet users who allegedly engaged in infringing activity, Plaintiff’s sought-after discovery has the potential to draw numerous innocent internet users into the litigation, placing a burden upon them that weighs against allowing the discovery as designed.”

Judge Brown concludes that in these and other mass-BitTorrent lawsuits it is simply unknown whether the person linked to the IP-address has anything to do with the alleged copyright infringements.

“Although the complaints state that IP addresses are assigned to ‘devices’ and thus by discovering the individual associated with that IP address will reveal ‘defendants’ true identity,’ this is unlikely to be the case,” he concludes.

In other words, the copyright holders in these cases have wrongfully accused dozens, hundreds, and sometimes thousands of people.

Aside from effectively shutting down all mass-BitTorrent lawsuits in the Eastern District of New York, the order is a great reference for other judges dealing with similar cases. Suing BitTorrent users is fine, especially one at a time, but with proper evidence and not by abusing and misleading the courts.

Source: Judge: An IP-Address Doesn’t Identify a Person (or BitTorrent Pirate)

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: The History of File-Sharing

Despite massive competition from cyberlockers, BitTorrent continues to expand year after year, and not just by a little. Today, BitTorrent Inc. announced that their two flagship clients increased their user base by 50 percent, to more than 150 million active users a month.

Most growth can be attributed to uTorrent, which more than quadrupled its number of monthly users in the last three years. The ‘tiny’ BitTorrent client went from 28 million monthly users in December 2008 to 132 million last month.

“This marks an amazing milestone for our company and we want to thank our loyal users and partners for their support. Our protocol and software clients have become some of the most pervasive pieces of technology in Internet history,” says BitTorrent Inc. CEO Eric Klinker.

“We look forward to another exciting year of growth and we continue expanding our product lines to meet the needs of consumers creating and consuming high-quality personal media files on a broad range of consumer electronics devices,” he adds.

The last comment ties in to a slew of other announcements released by BitTorrent today. The company is currently showcasing several “BitTorrent Certified” devices at CES, the world’s largest consumer electronics tradeshow in Las Vegas. Through these partnerships BitTorrent hopes to add an extra revenue stream, and widen its user base beyond the traditional computer.

Aside from showing off BitTorrent-enabled routers, TVs and network storage devices, BitTorrent will also launch the world’s first certified set-top box developed by the Slovakian company Antik. The set-top-box allows users to search, download and play torrent files directly on their TV.

The advantage of the BitTorrent Certified ecosystem is that it simplifies the downloading process for less tech-savvy people. Right now, many people drop out after installing a BitTorrent client because they find it too complicated to download and play content.

Whether these devices will be a success is yet to be seen, but there is certainly a large enough user base to tap into.

Based on the 150 million active monthly users BitTorrent Inc. reports for their clients, the total number of monthly BitTorrent users can be estimated at more than a quarter billion. And despite these already dazzling numbers, there is still plenty of room for growth.

Source: uTorrent & BitTorrent Surge to 150 Million Monthly Users

Another downside is that public torrent sites don’t support private uploads. All the torrent files users add are available for the entire world to see. This public visibility has its benefits, but sometimes a simple “drop and share” service is a better solution. It gets really interesting when that’s combined with a URL shortener so the torrent can be shared easily on social networks and in blog comments.

Tors.in does all the above.

Although the concept is hardly rocket science and while the site makes creative use of existing code, the service is unique and quite handy. For the creator of Tors.in the idea emerged when he couldn’t find a simple site to dump and share torrents.

“I was making torrent mirrors of important YouTube videos related to SOPA. I wanted to share these on Reddit but I noticed that there was no place to just dump a torrent and call it a day,” Tors.in creator Woodrow Freeman told TorrentFreak.

While looking for a simple torrent hosting service Freeman eventually found Torrage.org, a storage solution that’s also used by many of the larger torrent sites. However, the problem with Torrage is that the URLs are rather long as they are based on the torrent’s hash.

“To fix this problem I decided to create a simple service that allows users to upload files to Torrage, and add a URL shortener to make the links easier to share,” Freeman explains. A few hours later Tors.in was born, and without promoting it in public Freeman already noticed that people started using it.

The process that goes on in the background is pretty straightforward. When someone uploads a torrent through Tors.in the site sends it to Torrage, giving the uploader a short URL in return. In addition, users can also create custom URLs such as tors.in/snowblind to make the link a bit more descriptive than a random string of letters and numbers.

Dump and share, that’s all there is to it.

Source: Tors.in: Dump Your Torrents and Get a Fancy URL to Share

In the years that followed the Internet traffic distribution underwent a metamorphosis, as video streaming took off with the launch of YouTube and later Netflix. However, all this time BitTorrent remained a significant player and new data confirms that this is still the case.

Sandvine, the company that’s best known for manufacturing the hardware that slowed down BitTorrent users on Comcast, has released their latest Internet traffic report. The report highlights several emerging trends in Internet traffic consumption in North America.

Netflix is by far the most bandwidth-consuming source of traffic. On an average day, 23.3% of all North American traffic comes from or goes to Netflix. BitTorrent is a good second with 16.5% of the traffic pie, meaning that Netflix and BitTorrent together account for almost 40% of all traffic.

The main difference between BitTorrent and Netflix traffic is that the former is more spread out over the day, as BitTorrent users continue downloading overnight.

The graph below shows the usage of various types of traffic during peak hours, where BitTorrent takes up nearly half of all upstream bandwidth. Netflix is the absolute king in terms of downstream traffic here, accounting for nearly one third of all traffic during peak hours.

The data further shows that BitTorrent is the last major P2P network standing. After LimeWire was shut down exactly one year ago, major traffic to and from the Gnutella network vanished completely. Last year it was responsible for 11% of upstream traffic and 2% of downstream traffic during peak hours. In October 2011 it is no longer present among the top 10 traffic sources.

Interestingly enough, none of the popular file-hosting services generates enough traffic to make it into the top 10 in North America. However, the report shows that this is quite the opposite in Brazil, where a massive 9.45% of all traffic during peak hours goes through Megaupload, and another 1.97% through its sister site Megavideo.

Both Megavideo and Megaupload are also listed in the top 10 in Africa with 2.33% and 3.11% respectively. Other regional differences that stand out include Google Video being twice as popular than YouTube in Eastern Europe. In Brazil on the other hand, YouTube is generating nearly a quarter of all Internet traffic during peak hours.

While keeping in mind that Sandvine might benefit from overestimating the percentage of P2P traffic because they sell traffic shaping applications, the above shows that BitTorrent is still a major player on the internet in terms of the traffic it generates. But the question is for how long.

The rise of Netflix in North America – despite negative results earlier this week – shows that there is plenty of interest in paid entertainment. Combined with the traffic stats above it is fair to assume that many more people pay for movies than those who download. For Hollywood this leads to the disappointing conclusion that even if all movie pirating BitTorrent users got a Netflix account, the effect on the movie industry’s revenues would only be ‘marginal’.

Source: BitTorrent and Netflix Dominate America’s Internet Traffic

And there are the dozens of spin-offs, using the familiar “all white background” format. One of the companies that made an ad inspired by the Get a Mac campaign is BitTorrent Inc., and interestingly enough they targeted an Apple product.

The BitTorrent vs. iTunes ads, which were never officially released to the public, emphasize how people can get higher quality content on BitTorrent at much faster speeds. They were created in 2007, before the iTunes store offered the high-definition downloads that were already commonplace on BitTorrent.

To find out more about the origin of the campaign TorrentFreak got in touch with Alvir Navin, who wrote the scripts together with Nic Birondo. Alvir, brother of BitTorrent Inc. co-founder Ashwin Navin, was working as director of content services at BitTorrent at the time.

“Back in 2007, a lot of users were complaining that iTunes downloads weren’t that fast, especially during the holiday season when the iTunes servers were taxed by the popularity of the service. So we played on the ‘Mac vs PC’ ad campaign to highlight the difference between centralized and decentralized content delivery,” Alvir told us.

“This was really just a fun project for me and a few friends that allowed us to pay homage to a few of our favorite film genres, drive home a relevant point about new methods of content delivery, and throw in a few digs about closed ecosystems,” he added.

For reasons unknown the ad campaign was never released. We recently stumbled onto it at the portfolio page of director Lucas Abel but other than that the campaign had never received any exposure.

In total three clips were produced titled “Crowd Beatdown”, “Zombies vs. Ninjas” and “Director’s Chair”. All follow the same format as the ads from the original Get a Mac campaign. The full credits listing all the people who helped create the videos are available at Lucas Abel’s website.

Source: BitTorrent Crushes iTunes in Apple Inspired Ads

However, a new report just published (pdf) by Northwestern University and Telefónica Research shows that for larger ISPs there’s an upside to BitTorrent as well. In fact, these companies make a substantial amount of money from BitTorrent traffic.

The goal of the research was to understand the network impact of BitTorrent, both in terms of traffic and the costs involved. To answer this question the researchers conducted a 2-year study where they tracked the downloads of 500,000 people for 169 different countries. The end result is an interesting trend report which, among other things, shows how BitTorrent traffic has developed over time.

For instance, the research found that the average download volume per user per hour increased by 25 percent between November 2009 (110 MB/hour) and November 2010 (139 MB/hour). The number of unique users on the other hand dropped by 10 percent, possibly because people finish their downloads faster. In total the absolute volume of BitTorrent traffic increased by more than 12 percent from 2009 to 2010.

Aside from these general BitTorrent trends, the researchers also looked at the directions BitTorrent traffic are taking. Surprisingly, they find that BitTorrent traffic stays very local. A third of all traffic (32%) does not leave the country of origin and an additional 41 percent only travels to one other country. The researchers further find that the majority stays in local lower tier networks.

The above has some very interesting implications for the costs of BitTorrent traffic for various ISPs.

The researchers translated their findings into the actual costs and revenues of Internet providers and found that contrary to what the public would expect, large Tier 2 ISPs actually make money off BitTorrent traffic. This means that companies such as Comcast, Virgin Media and France Telecom profit directly from heavy downloaders.

“Using inferred business relationships between ISPs, we showed that most BitTorrent traffic flows over cost-free paths and that it generates substantial revenue potential for many higher tier ISPs,” the researchers write.

But not all Internet providers make money off BitTorrent; those in the lower tiers where most traffic is flowing through have less local (and free) traffic and often have to pick up the bill.

“Unlike with tier 2, provider traffic is larger than customer traffic for tier 3, indicating that these ISPs on average are paying for rather than profiting from transit charges due to BitTorrent traffic,” state the researchers.

The report shows that BitTorrent traffic has very a different impact depending on the place an ISP has in the network. Higher tier companies mostly profit from BitTorrent downloads, while lower tier companies are charged for the downloading habits of their consumers. According to the researchers the Internet providers should be aware of the impact BitTorrent has on them, as it may greatly impact their business decisions.

The fact that ‘local’ BitTorrent traffic is preferable is not a new idea. Attempts to keep P2P transfers within the local network as much as possible are not new, and some ISPs have secretly tested the concept in the wild by seeding their own BitTorrent downloads.

As a closing remark we have to note that the study only looked at bandwidth, and not the various other costs BitTorrent traffic has on a network by making millions of connections every day. The takeaway message, however, is that in terms of revenue there are quite a few very large companies that profit directly from heavy BitTorrent users. That’s a conclusion we haven’t heard before.

Source: Large ISPs Profit From BitTorrent Traffic, Study Finds

Tribler’s BitTorrent client has been in development for more than 5 years and continues to deliver experimental improvements and innovative ideas. Last year Tribler became the first truly decentralized BitTorrent client that doesn’t rely on central trackers, or even BitTorrent search engines. But the researchers have more in store.

The latest innovation from the Tribler team is promising something all BitTorrent users are interested in – faster downloads. The researchers came up with what they call a Superior Seeding Standard, a set of rules that reward users who put the most effort into sharing. The new standard is an alternative to the current tit-for-tat algorithm and is inspired by the ratio-enforcement policies often seen at private BitTorrent trackers.

The researchers have carefully analyzed the effectiveness of private BitTorrent trackers and found that users achieve great speeds, but that the ratio requirements also discriminate against users who don’t have high-bandwidth connections.

The Tribler team proposes a new standard which rewards BitTorrent users independent of their connection limitations. Instead of looking at the share ratio alone, it uses the ‘seeding effort’ to reward BitTorrent users by giving them priority in the swarm and thus faster downloads. Again, all of the above works without a central server.

The Tribler team ran several experiments with their new Superior Seeding Standard and found that the download speeds for people who share fairly are greatly improved compared to current transfer speeds on public trackers. The initial results suggest that it is more fair to people who are good BitTorrent citizens than the classic tit-for-tat algorithm.

“One of the problems with tit-for-tat is that it provides no motivation for seeding the terabytes of long-tail content that’s out there on BitTorrent,” Tribler leader Dr. Pouwelse told TorrentFreak. “We believe that people should be rewarded with priority downloads when they are seeding these more obscure files, especially the stuff which only gets a few downloads a month.”

“The ‘seeding rewards’ concept has been in the making for several years. It always required a central server, but we finally made it work in a truly decentralized manner with robustness against cheating. We implemented a first version of this proposed ‘Superior Seeding Standard’ in the latest Tribler release, and we expect that it will be tweaked and optimized quite a bit in the years to come,” Dr. Pouwelse added. “

The full technical specifications and several performance tests are detailed by these scientists in the paper titled “Fast Download but Eternal Seeding: The Reward and Punishment of Sharing Ratio Enforcement,” which will be presented at the P2P 2011 conference later this year.

As is true for many of Tribler’s innovations, getting it adopted by other BitTorrent clients will prove to be a tricky endeavor. Those who install Tribler will nonetheless notice that the concept of an entirely decentralized and fast BitTorrent network is already reality. The next and final step is to make it anonymous, that would certainly justify the millions of euros in tax money that has gone into the Tribler project in the last few years.

Source: Researchers Improve BitTorrent Download Speeds

It was the first time a working copy of the BitTorrent code had been made available to the public, but the initial response wasn’t exactly overwhelming.

“What’s BitTorrent, Bram?” was the one reply he received on the board.

Despite this underwhelming response, BitTorrent was born. In the weeks and months that followed more people started to become aware of its potential. The music-sharing community Etree was one of the first paces where its full capacity was tested in the wild.

“Early tests used losslessly compressed audio files from Etree, a fan community where people could upload self-recorded concert footage by artists who allowed recordings. That kickstarted it all. Also, Slashdot gave us some early coverage that definitely attracted the attention of engineer influencers,” Bram told TorrentFreak.

It turned out to be the start of something big, something really big. Fast forward a decade and BitTorrent is part of the daily routines of millions of people. Hundreds of petabytes of data are transferred over BitTorrent every day and this number continues to rise.

A question Bram probably heard a few times over the years is why he came up with BitTorrent in the first place. In hindsight this may seem to be a stupid question, but the idea behind BitTorrent wasn’t so obvious in the early 2000s.

“Fundamentally, I was trying to figure out how people on the Internet could utilize all the unused upstream bandwidth to make it faster to send huge files,” Bram told TorrentFreak.

“The technology has been a success in that it works the way I had envisioned and lots of people use it. However, there are many use cases where BitTorrent could potentially be applied, and as file sizes explode, the protocol is increasingly relevant,” he adds.

Today, BitTorrent does indeed utilize much of the consumer upstream traffic that would otherwise lie unused. In fact, recent estimates show that BitTorrent accounts for more than half of all upstream traffic on the Internet in many locations, including the United States.

However, as Bram emphasizes there is also a lot of untapped potential in BitTorrent. Only recently Twitter and Facebook discovered that BitTorrent was a life saver for them, and today its helping these tech giants distribute files across their servers faster and more efficiently than any other alternative. And the opportunities don’t end there.

Aside from everything that went right, the original BitTorrent code was also improved on many times in the last decade.

“There were two changes that had a significant impact,” Bram told us. “With the first in-the-wild testing in 2001, there was no Web integration or real UI. You had to do everything manually, which was awful. The Web UI in 2002 made it easy for anyone to use.”

“The second improvement was uTP, finalized last year. Overnight, BitTorrent became good Internet citizens, simply by voluntarily de-prioritizing our protocol traffic when a network is over-congested. We don’t cause network congestion today.”

But not only on the code side was significant progress made. In 2004 Bram Cohen co-founded the BitTorrent Inc. company to turn his increasingly popular file-sharing protocol into a business. Although the company is doing well today thanks to acquiring the popular BitTorrent client uTorrent in 2006, looking back Bram things he might do things differently if he could start over now.

“If I had to do it all over again, I’d have kept the company more focused on core technologies from day one. We have a lot of smart people who have a lot of great ideas, and on occasion have become distracted. Today, I’m very focused on live streaming.”

Looking ahead, streaming is one of the new territories where BitTorrent may play a more important role in the coming years. It can save publishers tens of thousands of dollars in distribution costs and allows everyone to stream content to large audiences.

“BitTorrent may be able to play a role in creating experiences for stuff to start playing as soon as you hit a Web page, for example. Streaming is also going to play a role, outside of Live streaming, the new protocol I’m building.”

“Also, until bandwidth becomes virtually free, BitTorrent adds value to the ultimate goal of moving large files. People are now not only consuming huge files, but creating and sharing them as well. Cell phone videos, hi-res pics come to mind. Who wants to create quality content and then destroy the quality just so someone else can see it?”

Today, demand for BitTorrent is greater than ever before. Despite the numerous streaming websites and direct-download portals that were launched over the years, BitTorrent continues to expand its user base. An entire generation grew up with BitTorrent and many people can’t imagine an Internet without it, ever.

We want to congratulate Bram for his groundbreaking invention that has had a tremendous impact on the Internet in the last decade, and we eagerly look forward to the next 10 years.

Source: BitTorrent Turns 10: Happy Birthday!

Today, however, VODO sees arguably its highest impact release to date – ‘A Lonely Place For Dying‘. With Hollywood veteran James Cromwell as Executive Producer, a talented first-time Director, and a crew of professional filmmakers and actors it has all the ingredients for a quality product.

The real impact, however, comes from the distribution model selected for the movie.

Rather than accepting offers from traditional Hollywood insiders who sought to acquire rights to the movie, the makers felt more comfortable in keeping the rights and funding through the BitTorrent community instead. They therefore chose a serialized release on VODO, for free, in the hope that they can secure enough donations to fund a theatrical release themselves.

With the donations from BitTorrent users the filmmakers will complete a theatrical mix of the motion picture, create a digital cinema package, and get everything else ready to position the film in U.S. movie theaters. This order is the complete reverse of the regular Hollywood path, and it wouldn’t be going too far to describe it as a breakthrough.

“It’s no exaggeration to say A Lonely Place for Dying is a milestone for VODO and for original content distributed through BitTorrent. We hope the community will help us prove this can work!” Director Justin Eugene Evans told TorrentFreak in a comment.

“While some of our movie theaters are nervous about this decision we believe that the torrenting audience isn’t necessarily the same as the theatrical audience,” Evans added.

“We’re really excited about this release and the model the producers are following,” VODO Founder Jamie King told TorrentFreak.

“This is a suspenseful, intense movie that we know our audience are going to love. It’s important to show how the popularity we can build for movies online can convert into paying cinemagoers down the road. This could be a turning point for indie filmmakers –– plus it’s awesome to be premiering a film with real stars!”

A collection of high-profile P2P partners including The Pirate Bay, isoHunt, uTorrent and FrostWire are faithfully backing the VODO project, guaranteeing hundreds of thousands of downloads a week. Quite a privilege for an independent production.

At a time when many independent films are failing to find a route to audiences, either through traditional cinema release, DVD distribution or online monoliths like iTunes and Netflix, VODO’s free-to-share strategy might just be proving itself as a way for independent filmmakers to empower themselves. All that remains now is a positive reception for the film from the public.

The first part of Lonely Place For Dying is available for download now.

Source: Hollywood Star ‘Reverses’ Movie Distribution Model With BitTorrent

However, according to a lawsuit filed at a U.S. District Court this week, BitTorrent is also an infringement in its own right.

Tranz-Send Broadcasting Network filed a complaint at the court this week where it alleges that BitTorrent is infringing on a patent originally filed in April 1999. The company claims to have suffered significant losses and wants to be compensated for the ongoing patent infringement.

“By making, operating, using and/or selling [uTorrent and BitTorrent Mainline] and or other software, BitTorrent has infringed and continues to infringe, contribute to the infringement, or induce the infringement of at least claim 1 of the ’944 patent,” the complaint reads.

The patent in question is titled “Media file distribution with adaptive transmission protocols” and was granted in November 2007. It describes a file-sharing system consisting of a file database, a transfer client and a distribution server.

“A server/client media file distribution system is provided in which the server system is adapted to receive transmission requests from clients, status information from a network, and protocol information from each client,” company writes in the patent abstract.

“The server, based upon this information, adaptively transmits a given media file stored therein to one or more clients using the optimal transmission speed and/or network protocol based on the network status information and protocol information,” the abstract adds.

The above is certainly not how most people would describe BitTorrent, but its is up to the District Court Judge to assess the validity of the patent infringement claim. Aside from BitTorrent Inc., Tranz-Send Broadcasting Network have also sued Kontiki Inc. on similar grounds.

Kontiki offers a media content delivery technology that is hybrid of central servers and P2P transfers. Unlike BitTorrent Inc, Kontiki’s user base mostly consists of businesses who can use the software to stream and distribute video. According to the complaint, this software also infringes on the aforementioned patent.

Although it’s not easy for an outsider to assess whether the case holds water or whether it’s classic patent trolling, the fall-out could spread far and wide.

Together, the two BitTorrent clients mentioned in the lawsuit have a user-base of more than 100 million users worldwide. If BitTorrent Inc. is suddenly required to pay royalties for each and every download, this will drastically impact the company’s operations. Not to mention the spill-over effect it may have on other BitTorrent software companies.

BitTorrent Inc. was asked for a comment on the lawsuit, but TorrentFreak was told that the company currently has nothing to add.

Source: uTorrent / BitTorrent Sued For Patent Infringement

One of these defendants was the Calgary, Canada-based Alan Phillips. The adult entertainment studio Corbin Fisher filed suit against Phillips, who they claim had illicitly shared two of their movies (“Turner F***s Austin” and “Keagan” ) on the BitTorrent tracker Gaytorrents.ru.

While most BitTorrent sites treat the private information of their users confidentially, the Gaytorrents.ru operator kindly provided the copyright holder with information that could identify the defendant.

This compliance by GayTorrents.ru allows Corbin Fisher to directly target defendants, instead of having to ask the court for a subpoena.

In the initial complaint Corbin Fisher alleged that Phillips willingly infringed on its copyright, and the studio’s lawyer Marc Randazza asked U.S. District Court judge John Houston to award $50,000 in damages per movie, totaling 100,000. Although Phillips complained to the court in an attempt to get the case dismissed, he did not defend himself.

Due to Phillips absence, Judge Houston was left with no choice but to order a default judgement as requested by the plaintiff.

In his ruling Judge Houston rejects the studio’s claim that the infringement was willful, just because Phillips was savvy enough to use BitTorrent. This reduced the maximum damages from $150,000 to $30,000 per movie.

Judge Houston did, however, rule that Phillips was guilty of copyright infringement.

“The record, as presented does not support a finding of willfulness based solely on plaintiff’s speculative argument that BitTorrent requires technical knowledge such that a person using the application necessarily used it in order to defraud plaintiff.”

“Thus, this Court finds that the increase in statutory damages suggested by plaintiff is not appropriately assessed here. In this Court’s view, statutory damages of $30,000 per infringed work, for a total of $60,000 plus attorneys’ fees is reasonable.”

In total Alan Phillips was ordered to pay $63,867, which makes it one of the largest fines ever handed out to a P2P user in the U.S. Certainly the highest we know of where a foreign copyright infringer was targeted.

“As a Canadian citizen, I do not recognize the applicability of US copyright law or the jurisdiction of a US District Court over me in this matter,” Phillips informed TorrentFreak in a statement. “For that reason I refused to formally participate in this civil action against me in a foreign court under foreign law.”

“Again, I am not a resident of, and have no economic assets in, the USA. So it is difficult to see how this judgment will affect me as written. To have this judgment enforced against me in Canada would require further judicial proceedings in my country, which I would, of course, be free to contest,” Phillips added.

The plaintiff’s defendant had something different to say.

“There are too many canadians who are under the mistaken impression that Canada does not respect copyrights,” lawyer Marc Randazza told TorrentFreak in a comment.

“Canada is a signatory to international copyright treaties, and thus Canadians need to learn that the border does not insulate them from illegal activity,”

“My client is delighted with the verdict,” he added.

Update: The people at Gaytorrent.ru (without an S) deny any involvement in this issue. More info here.

Source: Canadian BitTorrent User Fined $60,000 By U.S. Court

The overall conclusion we can draw from the data is that in Europe and North America BitTorrent traffic continues to grow spectacularly, something that may in part be attributed to the shutdown of LimeWire. The Gnutella network (used by LimeWire) on the other hand has all but disappeared.

The bandwidth usage patterns during peak hours in North America reveal that a massive 52% of all upstream traffic can be attributed to BitTorrent at these times. This is up from 34% in 2010, and since it’s a relative comparison, the absolute traffic consumed by BitTorrent has risen even more.

The BitTorrent percentage of downstream traffic in North America lies at 10% of all Internet traffic during the busiest time of the day, up from 8% last year. Netflix is the absolute king in terms of downstream traffic here, accounting of nearly 30% of all traffic during peak hours.

Traffic generated by the Gnutella protocol (used by Frostwire etc.) in North America has nearly vanished after the LimeWire shutdown. Last year it was responsible for 11% of upstream traffic and 2% of downstream traffic during peak hours. In 2011 it is no longer among the top 10 downstream applications, while the upstream traffic is stuck at little over 2%.

In common with North America, BitTorrent also remains the most used file-sharing protocol in Europe. In fact, the surge in peak hour traffic compared to 2010 is even more pronounced here.

Bandwidth usage patterns during peak hours show that nearly 60% of the upstream traffic in Europe can be attributed to BitTorrent during these times. This has doubled compared to last year when it accounted for ‘only’ 30% of the upstream traffic.

Similarly, downstream traffic during peak hours went up as well, rising from 8% last year to over 21% in March. With upstream and downstream traffic combined, BitTorrent tops the list of most used ‘applications’ leaving HTTP (including cyberlockers) in second place with 18%.

Whether there’s a direct link between the LimeWire shutdown and the increase in BitTorrent usage has yet to be seen. This may explain the fall of Gnutella coinciding with the rise of BitTorrent in the North America. However, in Europe Gnutella was already virtually nonexistent last year, and here BitTorrent traffic has risen even more sharply.

While keeping in mind that Sandvine might benefit from overestimating the percentage of P2P traffic because they sell traffic shaping applications, the above data shows that BitTorrent is still going strong in North America and Europe. The relative share of BitTorrent traffic increased on both regions, and since the overall Internet traffic has grown as well, the absolute increase is even greater.

Source: BitTorrent Traffic Surges After LimeWire Shutdown

The BitTorrent mainline beta version, codenamed Chrysalis, debuted its new design in March. With a different, less complicated look, it was built to appeal to BitTorrent novices who otherwise might stop using the software.

Yesterday, the BitTorrent mainline client added another major feature that is supposed to appeal to a broad audience – personal content channels. In the latest beta users are now able to create channels where they can share content with a selected group of friends.

The new feature basically creates a small social network inside the BitTorrent client where people can share files no matter what the size is, something that’s not possible with existing social networks.

“Until recently, most of your personal files were small enough to email or post to social networks. Now, it’s really easy to shoot HD video with your smartphone or snap high-res photos from a digital SLR. What happens to these giant files? They sit orphaned on your computer, or over-edited to make them small enough to share,” BitTorrent’s CEO Eric Klinker explains.

“BitTorrent removes the size barrier and makes it simple for you to openly share your creations,” Klinker adds.

According to BitTorrent protocol inventor Bram Cohen, the new addition is a perfect match for the client. “BitTorrent’s distributed technology was built to accelerate the transfer of large files,” he says.

“Personal content channels are an ideal use case given the asymmetric nature of bandwidth and the costs of file hosting. The more friends you add to a channel, the faster your files will download. This is an emerging market and we’re excited to see the technology solve modern Internet challenges,” Cohen adds.

Although it will be hard to convince the hardcore BitTorrent users to adopt it, we can see the purpose of the personal content channels from a novice perspective. Setting up a channel only takes a few clicks and is pretty much dummy-proof, so in that regard the developers have done a great job.

That said, the announcement also came with the suggestion that these channels will not be completely free in the future, and that might be less appealing to most users. BitTorrent Inc. told TorrentFreak that they’re not sure what the cost will be, if there will be any at all, but that they’re keeping it open as an option.

The same is true for bringing these personal content channels to uTorrent. Right now they are only implemented in the BitTorrent mainline client, but this may change in the future.

“We’ll see how the channels work for the BitTorrent community and if it’s popular and makes sense, we’ll take a look at the idea. In that case, it would be implemented in a way that considers the needs and priorities of the uTorrent community,” TorrentFreak was told.

The last ‘cost’ we feel we have to highlight is privacy. Large files shared in ‘private’ personal content channels are in theory not easy to discover by others, but since they use DHT, there are some specialized search engines that may pick them up.

In other words, don’t share anything the rest of the Internet isn’t supposed to see. Once it’s posted on BitTorrent, there is no central place to take it down either, if other people are still seeding the file. Bottom line is, be cautious while sharing.

It’ll be interesting to see how the personal content channels will be picked up by the public and what changes will come along with them. If anything, BitTorrent Inc. can’t be blamed for not trying to innovate, which is gutsy in the generally change resistant BitTorrent community. Time will tell whether they’re right in doing so or not.

The latest BitTorrent beta is available here, and more info on how to get started can be found at the BitTorrent blog.

Source: BitTorrent Inc. Goes Social, But At What Cost?

But every now and then, however, a movie comes along that both shocks and surprises, and director Jason Eisener’s Hobo with a Shotgun does just that, in more ways than one.

The movie began its life as a fake trailer played along with the Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino hit Grindhouse. It ended up winning the South by Southwest Grindhouse trailers contest, which is not bad for a flick featuring the killing of anyone from armed robbers and corrupt cops to a sickeningly abusive Santa Claus.

It later developed into a full-length movie and since its official VOD release on April 1st and ‘unofficial’ Internet release a couple of days ago, it’s been riding high on a BitTorrent wave. Having entered the Top 100 movies on The Pirate Bay, at the time of writing it has skyrocketed to an amazing No.13, right up there with the smash mainstream Hollywood hits listed at the start of this post.

In the last 24 hours its popularity on IMDb has increased significantly, almost certainly due to people reviewing the unofficial copy. There’s absolutely no doubt that people love it. But the news of the leak initially came as a disappointment to director Jason Eisener.

“Today it hurt to hear that people are illegally downloading Hobo With a Shotgun. I saw one torrent seeding over 7600 downloads,” he wrote. “I knew this day would come, I wish I could stop/prevent it from happening, but I can’t. I didn’t think it would shank me up this much.”

Despite realizing there was nothing he could do about it, Eisener headed over to The Pirate Bay. Perhaps he could do something after all?

“Please don’t steal my movie. I never stole anything from you guys. The writer and the producers and myself, put our pay checks back into this film, so we could make it happen,” Eisener posted on the site. “If your gonna steal it, at least come to my home and try to steal it from here.”

From a dude that fantasizes about grisly shotgun murders and gallons of spraying claret? Not likely. But while the comment solicited a few angry comments, it was interesting to see how the tone changed when Eisener became a little more pragmatic.

“If you like it I hope you guys at least support it on DVD or Blu/Ray,” he wrote. “I gave my pay check back to production so the film could be made. It’s hard for indy movies to make back their budget.”

Eisener went on to explain that with a lack of a big advertising budget, the movie would not make lots of money.

“This film is very far away from being a Hollywood film, it was made with Canadian money in Nova Scotia. Its not making millions, it doesn’t have a marketing machine big enough to do so. Its now on VOD in the states, and will soon be released in the UK and Europe,” he explained.

But posters on The Pirate Bay and other torrent sites are quietly confident that being a BitTorrent hit will give this blood-spattered exploitation movie the boost it needs. Eisener is hopeful.

“If our film doesn’t make its money back, it would be hard to make another film and pay everyone. We all have to pay rent and heat. I’m new to this, I appreciate people wanting to see my film. I just hope you guys spread the word about the dvd/blu ray or when it comes out in theatres.

“I appreciate the supportive comments. If you dig the movie, please support it. I see a lot more people downloading the film today. I’m glad there is demand for the movie and people want to see it. I appreciate those of you who are spreading the word.

“Some may feel I’m missing the point on this subject. I hope you guys prove me wrong, we have mouths we still have to feed, so I hope you’re right. Take care,” he concludes.

Compare this with the recent trainwreck approach favored by others who file-sharers aren’t even interested in and the difference is staggering. Who’s gong to make the most money? It’s a no brainer.

You can read a review of Hobo With A Shotgun here. It sounds like a riot.

Source: Pirate Bay Users Blown Away By Hobo With A Shotgun

At the same time the above labels intensify their crusade against BitTorrent, several smaller and independent labels are trying to find ways to benefit from the technology. Adamant Records is a good example of the latter. Instead of fearing technology, they are embracing BitTorrent and even explaining how it works to visitors to their site.

Next to the ‘download on iTunes’ links to their albums, Adamant Records is prominently featuring a BitTorrent tutorial on their homepage. Why you might ask? Well, unlike the major labels Adamant Records seems to believe that they may eventually benefit from giving away music on BitTorrent.

The video is related to an interesting announcement that came in a few minutes ago. One of Adamant Records’ top bands “Sick of Sarah” has partnered with BitTorrent Inc. and is now offering their new album “2205″ through an app in uTorrent and the Mainline client.

“Releasing an album on BitTorrent is an incredible opportunity. We wanted to reach our fans on the Internet, and our fans use BitTorrent,” says Jamie Holm, Sick of Sarah’s bassist in a response to the partnership.

“Imagine exposure to the same number of people as a Super Bowl ad. While album sales will remain a critical element of success, we also believe BitTorrent will help us drive new fans to live concerts and purchase our merchandise.“

Indeed, BitTorrent Inc’s uTorrent and BitTorrent mainline clients have more than 100 million monthly users combined. By releasing the album to such a large audience the band hopes that they will pick up many new fans, who will boost the band’s income in the long run.

“Our industry is changing fast, and it’s time for bands to experiment with new types of Internet distribution and discover the future of fan engagement. We’re excited to work with BitTorrent to learn what works,” Jamie Holm says.

BitTorrent’s CEO Eric Klinker applauds the band for sharing their music with uTorrent and Mainline users, which is expected to benefit all the parties involved.

“Sick of Sarah’s progressive thinking and modern approach to making their music available to online audiences is inspiring. The band’s efforts align with our vision of an open ecosystem. Rather than act as a middleman between creators and consumers, our engineers are building technologies to connect the two communities directly,” Klinker said.

Sick of Sarah’s album Sick 2205 is available in the App studio of uTorrent and BitTorrent mainline and can be downloaded for free. The BitTorrent App Studio was launched by BitTorrent last August and features content from selected content providers including Spotlight Artists such as Sick of Sarah.

Source: Record Label Teaches Music Fans BitTorrent

Well, not quite.

An officially anonymous BitTorrent user (who TheNextWeb believe may be called Ben Metcalfe) has set out to prove that the websites in question can not only be saved for posterity, but also at a super cheap price.

“As time goes on, the on-going cost of storing this website data decreases – to the extent that it is practically nothing by today’s costs,” he explains.

“The purpose of this project is to show how the entire 172 public facing websites that are earmarked for deletion have been copied, archived, distributed and republished online – independently – for the price of a cup of Starbucks coffee (around $3.99).”

The anonymous user says that he embarked on his mission to save the websites at almost zero cost to “expose the ‘cost savings’ of this proposed exercise as nothing more than a charade to appease the detractors to a strong BBC and to curry favour with the current government.”

Of course, since this is TorrentFreak, it will be no surprise to any of our readers that when people want to copy, archive and distribute digital data with a tiny financial outlay, there is no better mechanism online than BitTorrent. This task is no exception.

Once the individual discovered that the BBC would be deleting the 172 websites, he began spidering them and ripping their content to a VPS server, purchased for the bargain price of $3.99. This seedbox is hosting the content which is all neatly wrapped up in a torrent for anyone to download and share.

“Contained within this torrent is a gzip tarball of each site, archived individually, allowing you to download just the site(s) you are interested in,” explains the site ripper.

He adds that he would like to see people continue to seed the torrent so that the sites can continue to exist after the BBC finally scraps them, adding that people may even be able reconstruct and host all or some of the sites.

This is not the first time a whole bundle of sites have been saved with BitTorrent distribution. Last year a huge torrent weighing in at more than 641 GB hit the net which linked to the entire archive of Geocities sites which were eventually shut down by Yahoo.

Source: BitTorrent User and $4 Seedbox Saves 172 BBC Websites From Extinction

Every day millions of people are downloading files via BitTorrent, and in some instances more than 100,000 people are sharing the same file at the same time. These large ‘swarms’ of peers are great for sharing, but they also pose a threat as became apparent at the Chaos Communications Congress (CCC) recently.

In a talk titled “Lying To The Neighbours” it was shown that the DHT technology which powers “trackerless torrents” can be abused to let BitTorrent downloaders effectively DDoS a webserver of choice. DHT’s normal function is to find peers who are downloading the same files, but without communicating with a central BitTorrent tracker. This ensures that downloads can continue even when the central tracker goes offline.

According to the presenter who goes by the name ‘Astro’, Kademlia based DHT can be exploited by a malicious peer to carry out a DDoS attack. If there are enough peers downloading the same file, this could easily take down medium to large websites. The worrying part is that the downloaders who are participating in the DDoS will not be aware of what’s going on.

“The core problem are the random NodeIDs. The address hashing and verification scheme works for scenarios like the old Internet, but becomes almost useless in the big address space of IPv6,” Astro told TorrentFreak in a comment. As a result, any BitTorrent swarm can be abused to target specific websites and potentially take them down.

This and other DHT vulnerabilities are not entirely new concepts for BitTorrent developers. They have been discussed in various places already, but no agreement on how they should be dealt with has yet been reached.

Over the last months DDoS attacks have been in the news regularly, mostly carried out under the flag of Anonymous’ Operation Payback. Initially anti-piracy targets such as the MPAA and RIAA were taken offline, and last month the focus switched to organizations that acted against Wikileaks, including Mastercard and Paypal.

While these attacks required hundreds of people to actively participate and fire up their LOIC application at the same time, the BitTorrent DDoS could take down the same sites from a single computer, using BitTorrent downloads as a ‘botnet’. But, where there’s a problem there’s a solution, and Astro has some pointers for BitTorrent developers.

“Not connecting to privileged ports (< 1024) where most critical services reside," is one ad-hoc solution, but Astro says that since it's a design error, the protocol has to be redefined eventually.

The idea of using BitTorrent as a DDoS tool is not entirely new. In fact, researchers have previously shown that adding a webserver’s IP address as a BitTorrent tracker could result in a similar DDoS. The downside of this method is, however, that it requires a torrent file to become popular, while the DHT method can simply exploit existing torrents that are already being downloaded by thousands of people.

It will be interesting to see if BitTorrent developers are going to act upon the DHT vulnerability in the coming months and come up with a solution to prevent this kind of abuse.

Source: BotTorrent? Using BitTorrent as a DDoS Tool

To document the ongoing evolution of BitTorrent and the files people share, today we present a snapshot of the BitTorrent landscape at the end of 2010. We believe that this is the most elaborate and detailed classification of the files currently available on BitTorrent.

The data is gathered with help from BitSnoop and comes from thousands of BitTorrent trackers. It includes (nearly) all torrents that can be downloaded from public torrent sites today, including those that were not active at the time our snapshot was taken.

We start off with an overview of the number of torrents and the associated file-sizes, separated into five broad categories. Later, we will take a close look at some of the sub categories such as TV, movies, books and different types of gaming platforms.

Below are the same categories again, but now with the number of peers who have downloaded the complete file and continue to share it (seeders), and the peers who are currently downloading the files (leechers).

The data above shows us that the number of public torrents exceeds at least 10 million and that close to 30 million peers were sharing a torrent at the time this snapshot was taken.

We also find that video content is by far the most popular category on BitTorrent. The ‘video’ category contains more than half of all torrents available, and two thirds of all active BitTorrent users are downloading or sharing video content.

In terms of available files, ‘games’ is the smallest category with just 340,416 torrents, but in terms of active BitTorrent users ‘software’ is at the bottom with 4 percent. In total, all available files on BitTorrent add up to a massive 12,037.9 TB.

Let’s drill down a bit more, and take a look at the different subcategories. It has to be noted that not all torrents are categorized into a subcategory, and these files will be ignored below.

Movies vs. TV

Movies are by far the largest ‘video’ subcategory with 2,012,432 torrents, followed by TV which lists 1,011,607 torrent files. In terms of downloaders this difference is even more pronounced. Movies have 7,173,330 seeders and 2,851,119 leechers, while TV has 2,626,238 seeders and 1,230,625 leechers. The other video subcategories such as anime, adult and music videos are far behind.

Gaming platforms

PC games are shared the most on BitTorrent, with a total of 113,624 available torrent files. PSP games are in second place with 31,742 torrents, followed by Wii (25,770), Playstation (24,240), XBox (24,108), NDS (18,714), Mobile (2,495) and Mac games (1,936).

Books

One of the categories that has been growing quickly in the last year is ‘books’. We currently count 399,267 available ebook torrents (including magazines), with 662,228 seeders and 172,811 leechers. Ebooks are followed by audio books, with 81,841 torrent files and comics with 15,774 available torrents.

It will be interesting to see how these trends develop over time. We will update this overview in a few months to see what trends are emerging and to find out more about what’s happening in other subcategories.

Source: A Snapshot of the Public BitTorrent Landscape

One could argue that Google has been one of the greatest contributers to the success of BitTorrent. Unlike other filesharing applications such as Frostwire, Ares and eMule, the .torrent download links are listed on billions of search engine friendly pages on the Internet.

We dare to argue that if BitTorrent didn’t rely on web-based indexing sites, it would be nowhere as popular as it is today. Today, thousands of new people continue to be introduced to it by Google alone. Features such as Google Suggest and Google Instant play a key role in this discovery process.

Just take a look at the two screenshots of Google searches for Wall Street Money Never Sleeps and Resident Evil Afterlife, and see what Google suggests as a search phrase after one enters the movie titles into the search box.

The search suggestions are based on the search habits in one’s geographical locations, so they may not be the same for everyone. However, the ‘torrent’ suggestion usually makes it into the top 5.

Due to BitTorrent’s popularity, a movie title followed by the word ‘torrent’ is often the first suggestion, before words such as trailer, review and soundtrack. This isn’t a decision made by the Google staffers, but a reflection of the fact that more people search for ‘torrent’ in combination with a movie title (or music and software tiles) than these other words.

Earlier this year Google rolled out a new feature that may boost the conversion of new people to BitTorrent to even more. With Google Instant users directly see the results of the search phrases they type. This means that for a lot of movies merely entering the title and a space will give then a list of download links on torrent sites.

When we do a search for Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World for example (with Google Instant enabled), we immediately get a list of download links on various BitTorrent sites when we enter a space. It’s needless to say that this may pique the interest of people who have never heard of BitTorrent.

Of course, Google is not to blame for any of this. They have their automated algorithms and because BitTorrent is used by millions of people, ‘torrent’ related search phrases often rise to the top of suggested searches. In a way, the same can be said for torrent search engines – should the operators really be blamed for how a subgroup of their visitors use their sites?

Source: What’s That Torrent Thing Google Keeps Suggesting?

The overall conclusion we draw from the data is that BitTorrent, and P2P traffic in general, is still dominant in all geographical regions. In North America, Latin America and Asia-Pacific, P2P traffic is responsible for the vast majority of all upstream traffic. The percentage of downstream traffic is significantly lower, thanks to the streaming video sites that have gained popularity in the last years.

Despite the global nature of P2P there are some striking differences in the preferred applications and protocols that are used. We’ll discuss the various trends and statistics below, starting with North America.

P2P in North America

BitTorrent remains the most used file-sharing protocol in North America, and the total amount of P2P traffic is still very significant. Sandvine’s research reveals that on an average day, 53.3% of all upstream traffic can be attributed to P2P applications. P2P is less dominant on the downstream side. It is currently at 13.2%, following real time entertainment (45.7%) and web browsing (24.3%).

The bandwidth usage patterns during peak hours are slightly different, but still a massive 34.31% of all upstream traffic can be attributed to BitTorrent at these times. The BitTorrent percentage of downstream traffic lies at 8.39% during the busiest time of the day.

What’s further noteworthy is that the Gnutella protocol (used by Limewire, Frostwire etc.) is still fairly large in North America. It currently lies at 11.18% of upstream traffic and 2.12% of downstream traffic during peak hours. In most other parts of the world Gnutella has vanished completely.

The normalized aggregate of all traffic (up/down) during peak hours puts P2P traffic at 19.2% during the first months of 2010. Interestingly, this is up from 15.1% in 2009, which shows that P2P traffic is growing strongly, not only in absolute numbers but also as a share of total Internet traffic in North America.

Overall, it can be concluded that P2P traffic is still on the rise in North America, with BitTorrent being the dominant protocol.

P2P in Europe

In common with North America, BitTorrent also remains the most used file-sharing protocol in Europe. The report doesn’t give any exact stats, but roughly 40% of all upstream traffic and 10% of all downstream traffic can be attributed to P2P applications on an average day.

Bandwidth usage patterns during peak hours show that of 29.97% of the upstream traffic can be attributed to BitTorrent during these times, versus 8.29% of downstream traffic. PPLive, the popular peer-to-peer streaming video network, also has a significant share with 11.76% of all upstream traffic and 4.41% of downstream traffic during peak hours.

Strangely enough, Sandvine categorizes PPLive as real-time entertainment rather than P2P file-sharing.

In Europe, the normalized aggregate of all traffic (up/down) during peak hours puts P2P traffic at 11.0% during the first months of 2010. This is down from 22% in 2009, which indicates that P2P has lost half its share of the total Internet traffic there.

The relative downward trend of P2P traffic during peak hours does not have to mean that the absolute traffic has gone down as well. What is clear, however, is that relative to other traffic sources P2P has decreased in Europe, while it has increased in all other regions.

P2P in Latin America

Latin America is the only region where BitTorrent is not the preferred protocol to share files. Even though BitTorrent has a pretty decent market share there also, Ares is the most used file-sharing protocol. Overall, P2P traffic is huge in Latin America.

On an average day, 73.3% of all upstream traffic can be attributed to P2P applications. P2P is less dominant on the downstream side. It is currently at 23.1%, following real time entertainment (35.2%) and web browsing (28.3%).

The bandwidth usage patterns during peak hours of the day show that 11.91% of all upstream traffic can be attributed to BitTorrent at these times. This is dwarfed by the 54.74% Ares is credited for. The BitTorrent percentage of downstream traffic lies at 6.80% during the busiest time of the day, compared to 12.98% for Ares.

What is further noteworthy is that eDonkey is still fairly large in Latin America. It currently lies at 6.29% of upstream traffic and 1.82% of downstream traffic during peak hours. In most other parts of the world eDonkey has vanished completely.

The normalized aggregate of all traffic (up/down) at peak hours puts P2P traffic at 36.7% during the first months of 2010. Interestingly, this is up from 31.9% in 2009, which shows that P2P traffic is growing strongly, not only in absolute numbers but also as a share of total Internet traffic in Latin America.

We can conclude without a doubt that Latin America is the winner when it comes to the share P2P has of overall Internet traffic.

P2P in Asia-Pacific

BitTorrent is the most used file-sharing protocol in Asia-Pacific, where P2P has a traditionally high market share. The report doesn’t give any exact stats for this region, but roughly 60% of all upstream traffic and 25% of all downstream traffic on an average day can be attributed to P2P applications.

The bandwidth usage patterns during the peak hours show that 37.63% of the upstream traffic can be attributed to BitTorrent, versus 16.91% of downstream traffic.

PPLive and PPStream, two popular peer-to-peer streaming video networks, also have significant shares with 18.83% and 11.06% of all upstream traffic respectively, and 7.90% and 7.14% of downstream traffic during peak hours.

In Asia-Pacific, the normalized aggregate of all traffic (up/down) puts P2P traffic during peak hours at 25.7% in the first months of 2010. This is up from 8.4% in 2009, which indicates that P2P is still increasing its share of total Internet traffic there.

As can be seen from the table below, at the busiest time of the day BitTorrent has the largest market share of Internet traffic in Asia-Pacific compared the other regions.

In conclusion, we can say that Sandvine reveals some intriguing statistics, with the overall conclusion that BitTorrent and P2P in general are still going strong. Although there are regional differences, BitTorrent is responsible for a significant share of total Internet traffic in all regions. That said, we have to keep in mind that Sandvine might benefit from overestimating the percentage of P2P traffic because they sell the traffic shaping applications.

Source: BitTorrent Still Dominates Global Internet Traffic

Although the App itself is not quite revolutionary, the fact that Apple allowed a BitTorrent-based app into their iPhone store is. Previously, all BitTorrent related submissions were rejected because BitTorrent is often used to “infringe copyrights”, according to Apple.

By carefully avoiding the dirty word “torrent” or anything that could hint at unlawful use of the app, developer Derek Kepner passed Apple’s stringent approval regime. The big question was whether Apple had changed their ‘policy’ or if the approval was an oversight at the company. It turns out that the latter was the case.

Kepner informed TorrentFreak that he got a call from Apple a few hours ago, announcing that IS Drive would be booted from the App store. The Apple employee cited section 22.4 of the App Store Review Guidelines: “Apps that enable illegal file sharing will be rejected.”

“I mentioned to the person that called me that my app doesn’t do anything that can’t be done in Safari. It sounded like he wasn’t going to change his mind though,” Kepner told TorrentFreak.

“I’m very disappointed by Apple’s decision. A lot of people think BitTorrent is just for piracy, but it’s not. I wanted to help change that misconception with this app. Unfortunately, Apple doesn’t seem to be interested,” he added.

Despite the setback, the developer is not giving up so easily. He’s currently drafting a letter to Apple where he is going to explain in detail how his App does nothing different than a web browser, and that it’s not a pirate App. Below, Kepner shared a few sentences from his writing to Apple.

I’d just like to reiterate that my app does *not* present the user with any pirated materials. Nor will it *ever*. I feel very strongly about that. If that’s why you’re rejecting my app, you’re mistaken.

It presents the user with a field to paste a link. So do all of the third party web browsers on the store, all the FTP clients, etc. If you take my app down, I demand that you take those apps down too.

Kepner is totally right of course. IS Drive is not enabling illegal file-sharing any more than a regular web-browser. However, somehow we doubt that Apple will be easily convinced, to them BitTorrent is synonym for piracy.

“I feel like I’m fighting for the BitTorrent community here. Wish me luck,” Kepner concluded.

Finally, although IS Drive was the first App that was linked to a web-based torrent download service, there were already Apps that allow BitTorrent downloads via the Synology Disk Station such as SynoLoad and SynoDS.

Expect these to be removed in the coming days. Right Apple?

It is just this kind of inflexibility which encourages Apple users to jailbreak their machines and head over to Cydia, which they are doing in their hundreds of thousands.

Source: Apple Boots BitTorrent App From iPhone Store

Despite a direct ‘threat’ from piracy, including many BitTorrent sites, Netflix’s revenue has been growing steadily year after year. In 2006 the company acquired a net income of $49.1 million, which more than doubled to $116 million by 2009. And this growth is not slowing down either. During the second quarter of this year Netflix booked a record-breaking income of $43.5 million.

Although business has been going well for the movie rental company, there will always be customers who decide to cancel their accounts. In common with all self respecting companies, Netflix want to find out why people cancel, and this is the reason why they present leaving customers with an interesting survey.

In the survey, Netflix asks for the reasons why the customer has chosen to leave, the likelihood that he or she will return and what their primary sources for TV-shows and movies will be in the future.

“What will be your primary source for movies and TV episodes after canceling Netflix?” the question reads.

Although this question in itself is nothing out of the ordinary, one of the response options is. Apparently Netflix sees BitTorrent sites as direct competition, and it fears that this may cause some customers to leave.

“Peer-to-peer / bit torrent sites such as Torrentz.com, Demonoid.com, Tvlinks.com, ThePirateBay.org, etc,” is one of the answers that customers can check (see below).

If chosen, the option does not trigger any follow-up questions related to BitTorrent, so the information they gather is not very elaborate. It would be interesting, however, to see how canceling subscribers answer the question above. How many would pick the peer-to-peer option? Perhaps more importantly, how is this information going to change Netflix’s business strategy?

Thanks Dylan.

Source: Netflix Polls BitTorrent Habits of Leaving Customers

Unfortunately, the results of these type of studies are pushed by anti-piracy outfits and taken for granted by outsiders, even by respected news outlets on the Internet such as Ars Technica and ZDNet. In this case their reporters were completely taken in by the report.

Just a few minutes into reading the study we were shaking our heads here at the TorrentFreak headquarters. Mistake after mistake is made in the report and conclusions are drawn based on painfully inaccurate data and methodologies. We’ll lay out the most critical errors below, which represent just the tip of the iceberg.

The study aims to answer four questions. We will state each question and indicate what’s wrong with the answers.

1. How many files are shared using BitTorrent and what are the categories of shared files?

ICSL claims that there are slightly more than a million torrent files to be found online, according to data obtained from 17 BitTorrent trackers this spring. They further come up with an overview of categories where applications account for 2.3% of all torrents, while movies and TV-shows are good for more than 70%.

Both conclusions are horribly wrong.

We’re not sure how the researchers came up with the one million torrents because the OpenBitTorrent tracker, which is included in their sample, reports it has 2,5 million torrents alone. In addition, sites such as isoHunt index over 5 million unique torrents. Needless to say, ICSL’s data collection methods are far from accurate.

An even bigger flaw is found in the categorization process. The categories are not based on the entire set of torrents, but only on the most-seeded ones, which heavily skews the data. Books and applications generally have a lower seed count than movie and TV-shows which means that they are underrepresented in the category overview.

2. At a given point in time, how much sharing of files is actually occurring using BitTorrent?

“For the trackers that we scraped, we recorded a minimum of 117,420,061 current seeds. This value is calculated by determining the highest available seeder count for each torrent from any tracker that was scraped,” the researchers answer in their report.

Again this is figure is bogus, but this time it’s wrong on the other end of the scale. As will become clear later in our analysis, the researchers have made a critical mistake by including various trackers that report false seed counts. We had to chuckle when we saw 2-year-old torrents with more than a million seeders in their report. The real seed count at any given time lies between 10 and 20 million.

3. For each shared file, how many times has it been shared in total?

Here’s where the researchers make total fools out of themselves. In their answer to the question they refer to a table of the top 10 most seeded torrents. As noted before, the most seeded file was uploaded nearly two years ago (The Incredible Hulk) and has a massive 1,112,628 seeders. The torrent in 10th place is not doing bad either with 277,043 seeds. All false data.

We’re not sure where these numbers originate from but the best seeded torrent at the moment only has 13,739 seeders, that’s 1% of what the study reports. Also, the fact that the release is nearly two years old should have sounded some alarm bells. It appears that the researchers have pulled data from a bogus tracker, and it wouldn’t be a big surprise if all the torrents in their top 10 are actually fake.

4. Overall, what is the number and percentage of shared files which are infringing, both by number of files and total downloads?

Here the researchers conclude that 97.9% of all files on BitTorrent are copyright infringing, and only 0.3% confirmed ‘legal’. Based on our previous conclusions it is hard to believe that these figures are even remotely accurate, and they aren’t. There are too many flaws in the methodology to list here, but for one this statistic is grossly inaccurate because it’s based on the most popular files, of which many are fake.

The researchers should have at least tried to determine the percentage of infringing files on their whole (inaccurate) dataset instead of the most seeded ones (of which many are fake). We’re not trying to argue that the majority of the torrents are legit, but the selection of torrents and sources is extremely biased towards discovering copyright infringing torrents.

To back this up, we only have to take a look at isoHunt. According to isoHunt their site indexes 5,451,959 unique torrent files, and 85,457 of these come from Jamendo, a site that publishes only Creative Commons licensed music. So that’s already 1.5% torrents that can be shared legally, without mentioning any Linux distros.

Bottom line is that this ‘Academic’ paper is one of the most inaccurate reports we’ve seen thus far, and the mainstream tech media either didn’t spend long reading the report or simply didn’t have the specialist knowledge to read the results and come to their own conclusions. Even worse, the Australian anti-piracy outfit AFACT will probably use this ‘credible’ report in court to convince the court that the local ISP iiNet responsible for the copyright infringements of its customers.

Let’s hope that Ars and others will update their reports accordingly.

Update: They did..!

We’ve contacted Paul Watters, one of the researchers, for a comment but haven’t heard back from him yet.

Update: Watters replied to me, stating that he stands by his findings. He ignored all questions and offered to send a copy of a statistics manual instead. Since I taught statistics and research methods to PhD students myself, I kindly declined his offer.

Source: Tech News Sites Tout Misleading BitTorrent Piracy Study

This download trend has not gone unnoticed by the local police either, who recently arrested an unemployed man for sharing 165 TV-shows on BitTorrent.

The 31-year old Shuichiro Tanaka was arrested by Tokyo Police’s Cyber Crime unit and was charged with recording and uploading 3 TV-shows in early June. According to reports, Tanaka also shared 165 more TV-shows between February and July this year.

The videos the man shared on BitTorrent were mainly Japanese variety shows such as “Waratte Iitomo” and “Genius! Shimura Zoo.” According to the police, this is the first time that someone was arrested for copyright infringement on BitTorrent in Japan.

Tanaka has confessed to the charges and stated that he used BitTorrent to avoid running into viruses and the police.

“I did it for people who missed the TV-shows. Because there is a potential for viruses on Winny and others, I used BitTorrent, which I heard police weren’t investigating,” Tanaka told the police while pleading guilty.

Unlike on BitTorrent, viruses are both prevalent and quite aggressive on the Winny network. One virus that surfaced three years ago was specifically targeted at file-sharers and threatened to report them to the police, or kill them if they continued sharing.

Although this is the first arrest of a BitTorrent user, it is certainly not the first file-sharing related case. Last year, a 33-year old Japanese man was arrested for uploading the movie ‘Wanted’ to the Winny network before its Japanese theatrical release. He was later sentenced to two years in prison.

Source: Japanese BitTorrent User Avoids Virus, But Not the Police

Yesterday, U.S. District Court Judge Louis Stanton granted Google’s motion for summary judgment, ruling that Google is protected by the DMCA’s safe harbor provision. Effectively, this means that YouTube doesn’t have to remove any clips unless they are asked to do so by copyright holders.

“If a service provider knows of specific instances of infringement, the provider must promptly remove the infringing material. If not, the burden is on the owner to identify the infringement. General knowledge that infringement is ‘ubiquitous’ does not impose a duty on the service provider to monitor or search its service for infringements,” Judge Stanton wrote.

In a response, Google claimed the judgment to be a victory for all the people who ‘share’ on the Internet. “This is an important victory not just for us, but also for the billions of people around the world who use the web to communicate and share experiences with each other,” the company wrote on its blog.

This judgment is obviously a huge win for YouTube and other video hosting services, but it also sets an important precedent for BitTorrent sites. Google’s YouTube shows striking similarities to torrent sites as it allows users to submit content. The only difference is that YouTube actually hosts the uploaded files, whereas torrent sites only link to content indirectly through .torrent files.

The Pirate Bay aside, nearly all torrent sites work closely together with copyright holders to ensure that their rights are respected. Like YouTube, IsoHunt and others have strict notice and takedown policies and swiftly remove .torrent files pointing to infringing material when they are notified by copyright holders.

Despite the similarities, BitTorrent sites haven’t been very successful in court thus far. Using the same arguments as Google did in its case against Viacom, Mininova and isoHunt have both argued in court that they were protected by a DMCA(-like) safe harbor, but both eventually lost their case.

The good news is that both isoHunt and Mininova have still options to appeal, and with yesterday’s landmark victory in hand their chances of winning may have increased.

If anything, BitTorrent sites should be seen as less infringing than video hosting sites because they only link to copyright infringing content indirectly through .torrent files. If Judge Stanton’s decision is translated to BitTorrent sites, it means that under safe harbor protection sites like isoHunt and Mininova would operate legally and wouldn’t have to use filtering mechanisms to prevent users from uploading ‘infringing’ torrents.

Viacom, meanwhile, isn’t done with Google and Youtube just yet. “We believe that this ruling by the lower court is fundamentally flawed and contrary to the language of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the intent of Congress, and the views of the Supreme Court,” the company said in a statement.

Source: Google Scores a Big Victory for BitTorrent Sites

“It’s not a secret that the blockade in the Middle East prevents vital resources like water, food and medicines going to the needy people in Palestine. But it is perhaps not as general known that normal people who are traveling out of the area are denied a visa,” the festival organizers write in a blog post commenting on the issue. Luckily, with BitTorrent the filmmaker can still follow the festival.

The Norwegian film festival has close ties to the people of Gaza. The festival’s organizers have previously invited its young filmmakers and after the 2008/2009 siege they continued to collaborate on film workshops over the Internet. This year, due to the political situation, they’re going to take it up a notch by offering a BitTorrent-powered live stream to people all over the world, including Gaza.

The BitTorrent stream that the festival will use is facilitated by The Far North Living Lab which has experience with the technology. Last year the lab kicked off with a spectacular experiment in which they used BitTorrent to stream a 2K resolution film onto the big screen, and a few months later they hosted the first BitTorrent-powered live streamed concert.

The Far North Living Lab start their live stream from the festival tonight during the opening. In order to get the stream to Gaza and other parts of the Internet they’ve set up a BitTorrent-powered live stream (approx 1.1mbit h264, full PAL resolution) that will be transmitting from Norway’s oldest still-used cinema. Similar to the previous projects, the lab’s researchers are using the P2P-Next codebase.

“This is an important opportunity to reach our goal for an international awareness of Youth Cinema,” festival director Hermann Greuel told TorrentFreak.

An important aspect is that through the stream young filmmakers in Gaza can follow the festival. “The current stream will not be possible on a central place or event in Gaza due to special permissions from the Gaza government, but the stream is available in Gaza,” he added.

It’s good to see that there are filmmakers and enthusiasts who put BitTorrent to creative use, rather than simply accusing the technology of facilitating copyright infringement.

Readers who want to check out the stream can do so from 6 PM CET.

Source: BitTorrent Live Stream Brings Film Festival to Gaza

Today, the UK Treasury decided to publish several data sets detailing how the tax money of UK citizens was spent in the last two years. Thanks to the Internet it is easier for the Government to be transparent about such issues, and thanks to BitTorrent the public can help with distributing the files.

“For too long the previous Government acted as if the public had no right to know where their hard earned taxes were spent. Today we have lifted that veil of secrecy by releasing detailed spending figures dating back to 2008,” Danny Alexander, Chief Secretary to the Treasury commented.

Although the four torrent files that have been posted don’t link to huge files (between 32 and 78 MB uncompressed), it is good to see that the Government isn’t shying away from using BitTorrent. If anything, this move will boost BitTorrent’s image. This is much needed since all the press about lawsuits have made BitTorrent synonymous with piracy for the majority of the mainstream public.

The torrent files have been posted today on data.gov.uk and the public is welcome to share them on The Pirate Bay or other high profile torrent sites. As a tracker, Amazon’s S3 service has been added, which most likely means that there will be always some high speed seeds available for the files.

By using BitTorrent to share information with the public, the UK government is in good company. NASA too uses BitTorrent for their ‘Visible Earth’ project, a massive library of high resolution images of the earth. In addition, several Universities use BitTorrent powered systems to update their computers.

Perhaps it’s time for Hollywood to look into BitTorrent as well, it sure sounds like a great technology to share films on the Internet.

Source: UK Government Uses BitTorrent to Share Public Spending Data

Less known is the fact that the people who are adding content – the initial seeders – can also be exposed quite easily. With this info copyright holders could potentially track down the big uploaders that are responsible for providing the content which goes on to be distributed among millions of people, and take action against them.

TorrentFreak spoke with Arnaud Legout, one of the researchers who examined how easy it is to spy on BitTorrent users. “Our goal is to make the privacy issues associated with BitTorrent usage public,” he said. “BitTorrent is truly one of the most beautiful, elegant, and efficient protocols ever designed. However, it has never been designed with privacy in mind.”

Legout and his colleagues found that spying on BitTorrent users is relatively easy and cheap. “We showed that anybody can monitor tens of millions of BitTorrent users in real time from a single machine and with a xDSL connection,” he told us.

The researchers also found that pinpointing the IP-addesses that make files available (initial seeds) is relatively easy to do. “We were able to identify 70% of the initial seeds for all the contents uploaded to The Pirate Bay in one month,” Legout told us, adding that they could have achieved a much higher percentage if they further refined their techniques.

The researchers were able to find the initial uploaders by quickly jumping on new torrents that were added on The Pirate Bay. This allowed them to grab the IP-addresses of the ‘content providers’.

Another interesting detail that the research revealed is that the majority of all the uploaded content originates from a small group of users. The Pirate Bay has millions of users, but only 100 IP-addresses are responsible for seeding 30% of the material uploaded to The Pirate Bay. The top 1000 IP-addresses are the ‘content providers’ of 60% of the torrents.

Taken together, this means that anti-piracy outfits could quite easily track down the biggest providers of copyrighted material, instead of just going after regular sharers.

Although most of these top providers do not use their home connection but high bandwidth seedboxes instead, shutting these down through legal action might hinder the distribution of copyrighted material.

Source: Research Exposes Risks for BitTorrent Seeders

BitTorrent’s leading role can be partly attributed to its technical superiority, but there are other, perhaps even more defining factors that have propelled BitTorrent’s popularity. One could argue that Google has been one of the greatest contributers to its success.

Unlike competing filesharing applications, BitTorrent has a dominant presence in search engine results. A site like isoHunt for example, has 13,500,000 million indexed pages on Google and The Pirate Bay has 3,760,000. All public torrent sites combined, there are probably over a billion torrent pages indexed by Google alone.

It is needless to say that this overwhelming web presence has created a huge advantage for BitTorrent compared to P2P applications such as Limewire, that mostly rely on searches within the application. Over the years, millions of people have been introduced to BitTorrent through search engines like Google.

We’re now at a point where torrent sites top the search results for nearly search phrases related to downloading movies and music. For example, a Google search for “Shutter Island download” returns 6 torrent sites in the top 10 results and no legal authorized download options. The same is true for nearly all similar searches.

While Google and other search engines have helped BitTorrent popularity to a great extent, this could not have been possible without the people who developed the torrent indexes in the first place. That is where another key aspect of BitTorrent’s popularity, which also ties into the web-based nature, plays an essential role. Money.

BitTorrent sites can generate some serious revenue, enough to sustain the site and make a decent living. In general, ad rates per impression are very low, but thanks to the huge amounts of traffic it quickly adds up. This money aspect has made it possible for sites to thrive, and has also lured many gold diggers into starting a torrent site over the years.

Initially, most torrent sites were operated by students or hobbyists with a passion for filesharing and coding. Most of the larger sites today started out that way, but in the years that followed they were joined by groups of people that are mainly interested in the cash, not so much in offering a good service to their users.

Despite this darker side, the possibility to monetize torrent sites has been essential to the success and the survival of BitTorrent. Without a return on investment, nobody would spend tens of thousands of dollars each month to keep a large site or tracker online.

All in all it is fair to say that BitTorrent is as popular as it is right now simply because it’s web-based and findable through search engines. Although we don’t have any numbers to back it up, it would not be an outrageous claim to say that most of the people who use BitTorrent today were introduced to it through a Google search.

Source: Why Google Made BitTorrent a Success

The nifty BitTorrent swarm visualization uses processing.js to represent how a BitTorrent swarm works. In particular it may help novices get a grasp on how BitTorrent functions and why it’s capable of sending a gigabyte of data to millions of people in only a few minutes.

As most tech-savvy users know, BitTorrent starts with chopping a file into small pieces. The person who starts sharing the file sends those small pieces to available peers in the swarm. The BitTorrent protocol makes sure that the seed sends pieces to everyone, so they can immediately exchange these pieces with each other.

What follows is a sharing fest of bits and bytes. Your BitTorrent client tries to find the rarest piece that’s available among the peers in the swarm to avoid getting stuck at 99% and sharing relies on fair trading principles (tit-for-tat).

In general BitTorrent transfers go faster if the number of seeders in the entire swarm is higher. This means that a torrent with 20 seeders and 50 leechers should result in a better download speed compared to a torrent with 50 seeders and 250 leechers.

The BitTorrent simulation is a simplified visualizations of this process. It works in all up-to-date browsers except Internet Explorer. Seeds can be added to the swarm with the “s” key and peers with the “p” key. The “r” key allows you to delete seeds or peers from the swarm at random.

In 2006 we wrote about an earlier version of this “BitTorrent simulator,” but because the original is no longer online and since many more people use BitTorrent nowadays, the update is appreciated.

Source: How and Why BitTorrent Works, a Visualization

Last November The Pirate Bay shut down its own trackers, arguing that they have been made redundant by DHT and PEX. At the same time, The Pirate Bay team said that they might move away from torrents entirely and switch to offering Magnet links instead.

These are all interesting developments, but to really decentralize BitTorrent one has to take it up a notch. The way most torrent sites are setup makes them vulnerable to legal action from copyright holders, so the real solution might be to move away from web-based torrent indexes.

A rather primitive way to do this is to share torrents over another file-sharing network, and this is exactly what the Gnutella/BitTorrent client Frostwire has now made possible. Without any public announcement and stuffed away in the changelog of FrostWire’s upcoming release we find the following lines:

- New Feature: Gnutella Torrent Search. FrostWire now can search for .torrent metadata files in the Gnutella network.
- Upgraded feature: Optionally FrostWire will copy all .torrent meta files to a shared torrent folder.

Technically speaking these are just minor adjustments to the file-sharing application, but the implications could trigger a revolution in how torrents are shared in the future.

When FrostWire users start downloading a torrent with FrostWire, the client will keep and share the .torrent file on Gnutella. The idea is that as time goes by and more users download more torrents, even if torrent websites are shutdown, all the torrents will live on the P2P network forever.

To make it easier to find torrents on Gnutella, FrostWire also added a specialized “Torrent Search Mode”. As more users install this and later versions – and keep downloading more torrents – the richer these search results will be.

Now FrostWire only needs to offer support for trackerless torrents and they will have completely decentralized the BitTorrent operation with just a few simple adjustments.

Although we believe that FrostWire’s approach is interesting, it will also introduce one major problem. It is relatively easy to make a P2P-powered torrent index, but keeping it clean and malware-free will prove to be very difficult.

Most people might not even be aware of it, but one of the benefits of most torrent sites is that they remove thousands of torrents linking to spam and fake files every day. This will be much harder to do in a P2P-based environment, but not entirely impossible.

Over the last five years the Tribler BitTorrent client has been working on a decentralized torrent index that would make BitTorrent sites obsolete. Unlike simply sharing the torrent files among users, the upcoming release of the Tribler client has built in several spam control and moderation options that allow users to keep the network clean. In addition, newly created torrents can be shared with peers, instead of uploading it to a central server.

We don’t know if FrostWire has plans to implement similar moderation options, but they are absolutely required for a fully decentralized BitTorrent environment.

It will be interesting to see if the idea of a P2P powered and searchable BitTorrent index takes off. For now there are still plenty of good and reliable torrent sites out there, but with continued pressure from the entertainment industry they are not to be taken for granted.

Disclaimer: FrostWire is a TorrentFreak sponsor.

Source: BitTorrent’s Future? Decentralized Search and Hosting

The uncontested winner on BitTorrent this year is Star Trek, with well over 10 million downloads, many more than The Dark Knight got last year. The download statistics clearly show that BitTorrent use is still on the up, even though the relative increase is not as pronounced as in previous years.

As we look over the rest of the top 10, we see that there are quite a few differences between popularity at the box office and on BitTorrent. Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs and 2012 are ranked 2nd and 4th based on their worldwide grosses but didn’t make it into the top 10 list of most swapped movies.

On the contrary, RocknRolla is the third most pirated movie on BitTorrent this year, but with a minuscule worldwide revenue of $25 million it was ranked just 168th at the box office in 2008 when the movie came out. Part of the success of RocknRolla is that it was released by the infamous uploader aXXo whose releases are always guaranteed to have at least a few million downloads.

The data for this list is collected by TorrentFreak from several sources, including reports from all the large BitTorrent trackers. All release formats, including cammed versions are counted. Afterward, the data is carefully checked and possible inaccuracies are systematically corrected.

Source: Top 10 Most Pirated Movies of 2009

Now, at the end of the decade where BitTorrent has become a synonym for file-sharing, hundreds of millions of people have high speed broadband connections at their homes. Downloading a popular movie or TV-series often takes less than an hour nowadays, but for the demanding web users of today this delay can still prove quite annoying.

Spoiled by the many streaming video sites that have surged in popularity since YouTube’s launch in 2005, many people simply want to start watching instantly. To satiate this demand the popular BitTorrent client uTorrent has now added streaming support to the latest uTorrent beta release, which allows users to play video files while they are downloading.

“Our hope is to transform getting media using uTorrent from a ‘load-wait-watch-tomorrow’ to more of a ‘point-click-watch’ experience,” Simon Morris, BitTorrent’s VP of Product Management said in a comment.

Although several other BitTorrent clients have already implemented similar streaming capabilities, uTorrent will finally make BitTorrent streaming possible for the majority of BitTorrent users.

In our tests the new feature worked flawlessly on well-seeded torrents. Users simply have to click on the play button next to the download, and after a few seconds or minutes it will turn green, ready to be streamed.

By default the latest uTorrent release is configured to use the DivX web player to stream video. This works well for most files but for us it caused problems with some video formats. Changing it to VLC or any other media player is relatively easy though, by nominating a different streaming player in uTorrent’s preferences.

Aside from streaming regular downloads, uTorrent’s parent company BitTorrent Inc. is also working on BitTorrent-powered live streams. BitTorrent inventor Bram Cohen himself aims to develop a piece of code that is superior to all the other P2P-based streaming solutions on the market today.

“I think there’s a very large market for live [streaming] in general, and to date no-one has proven that a p2p solution can meet the real-world requirements for being an acceptable live solution. I intend on changing that,” Bram told TorrentFreak earlier this year.

For now, uTorrent users will have to settle for on-demand streaming. Those who do not intend to use the feature can be assured that the streaming implementation used by uTorrent is designed on the principles of tit-for tat sharing, meaning that it does not slow down regular downloads.

Source: uTorrent Adds Video Streaming Support

It therefore came as a big surprise to hear that Ethan Applen, director of technology and business strategy at Warner Bros., stated at NewTeeVee’s Video Rights Roundtable that P2P technology doesn’t deserve to be blamed for the fact that some people use it to download copyright infringing content.

“In terms of our own view, we think P2P gets vilified. It’s just a technology. CNN used it for Inauguration coverage. It can be used for piracy, but as a technology, I think it has a lot of advantages to it,” Applen said, adding that “P2P works really well at delivering an entire season or the entire run of a show.”

Applen’s comments are at odds with the legal strategies of the Hollywood studio, where its lawyers continue to blame the providers of technology for the activities of their users. If Warner Bros. indeed believes that P2P technology is not the villain, then they should inform their lawyers or withdraw from the court cases they are currently involved in.

Applen appeared together with Bram Cohen in the roundtable session, where worryingly some of the attendees admitted hating the BitTorrent inventor for creating his famous file transfer protocol. Aside from praising P2P for its speedy delivery of TV-shows, Applen also mentioned that it is a good marketing tool.

This is no surprise as a Warner Bros. executive previously admitted to leaking a pilot of Pushing Daisies on BitTorrent in order to “help the cause”.

Bram Cohen himself also gave several example of how ‘unauthorized sharing’ via BitTorrent may have helped content creators. He mentioned that the leak of an unfinished copy of X-Men Origins: Wolverine might have boosted interest in the film, and he noted that BitTorrent may have also helped the anime business to grow.

Despite all the positive comments on the use of BitTorrent and P2P in general by this Warner Bros. executive, we can’t help wondering why they are still pouring millions into ridiculous anti-P2P lawsuits that haven’t decreased piracy a single bit.

Source: Warner Bros. Thinks P2P Gets Unfairly Vilified

In this short time span it was downloaded by more than 400,000 people on BitTorrent alone, earning it a spot in TorrentFreak’s chart of top 10 most pirated movies this week.

For most Hollywood bosses this is usually a trigger to start complaining about lost revenue, but the makers of Ink are welcoming their new pirate audience.

In an email to the followers of their newsletter, Jamin and Kiowa Winans say that they have “embraced the piracy” and are “just happy Ink is getting unprecedented exposure.” Thanks to the pirated copy their movie jumped to 16th place on IMDb’s movie meter, and according to the makers this increased popularity also boosted DVD and Blu-ray sales.

Who needs a hefty marketing budget to promote a movie (and merchandise) when they have BitTorrent? Sent out a few hours ago, here’s the mailing in full plus a follow up response from Kiowa.

Dear Fans and Friends,

Over the weekend something pretty extraordinary happened. Ink got ripped off. Someone bit torrented the movie (we knew this would happen) and they posted it on every pirate site out there. What we didn’t expect was that within 24 hours Ink would blow up. Ink became the number 1 most downloaded movie on several sites having been downloaded somewhere between 150,000 to 200,000 times as far as we can tell. Knowing there’s absolutely nothing we can do about it, we’ve embraced the piracy and are just happy Ink is getting unprecedented exposure.

As a result, Ink is now ranked #16 on IMDb’s movie meter and is currently one of the top 20 most popular movies in the world.

This all started as a result of the completely underground buzz that you’ve each helped us create. We’ve had no distributor, no real advertising and yet the word of mouth that you’ve generated has made the film blow up as soon as it became available worldwide. So many of you came to see the movie multiple times, bringing friends and family and many of you have bought the DVD and Blu-ray from us. All of this built up and built up and suddenly it exploded.

We don’t know exactly where this will all lead, but the exposure is unquestionably a positive thing.

Ink hits Netflix, Blockbuster, iTunes and many more tomorrow! Remember to get your signed copies, t-shirts and posters at the Ink Store.

Thank you so much for the constant love and support.

Jamin and Kiowa
Double Edge Films

And the follow up response we got from Kiowa, in reply to this article.

Dear Ernesto,

To say we are shocked by all this news and are digesting it rapidly is an understatement. We made this film in Denver, CO on a budget of $250,000 and have fought to bring it to 15 cities ourselves over the past ten months. Hollywood has claimed that they don’t know how to market the film or that it doesn’t have an audience, and what BitTorrent has done in the last four days is prove, unequivocally, that Hollywood is wrong.

So is this the best thing that could happen to our little film? Absolutely! There is no way this many people would know about the film otherwise, or that our IMDb MovieMeter would have shot up an astounding 81,000% from a few days of activity over the torrent sites. What Hollywood would calculate as lost dollars, we calculate as fans earned. Due to many suggestions from downloaders over the past few days we have established a Donate button on our Store page for people to contribute what they can. Thank you for posting that info.

We’re not looking to get rich, but would like to pay back our investors and the enormous amount of personal debt we’ve gone into making the film. We’re also not looking to make Hollywood films (Jamin has had several opportunities) and plan on continuing the march of making fiercely independent films. In order to do that we have to count on the power of the people, eyeballs all over the world and torrenters to throw our film a few bucks apiece. It’s the indie film model of the future and we appreciate each and every person who takes the time to watch our film. It appears we’re all rebels here… so let’s wave that flag proud.

Again, we are really floored that all of this is happening and that you’ve opened up the conversation!

All the best,

Kiowa K. Winans

Source: Indie Movie Explodes on BitTorrent, Makers Bless Piracy

What’s most interesting about the site is that its users can also browse torrents based on an actor or director, a feature that other torrent sites lack. With just a single click users can list all the films where Patrick Swayze made an appearance, or all the films directed by Quentin Tarantino.

“The actors and directors can be added by the users when they upload a torrent file,” Files24 founder Oleg told TorrentFreak. “Also if we recognize the movie, we automatically check and fill in any missing data,” he added.

Although the site also lists music and games, thus far these advanced searches only work for movies. TV-shows are oddly enough listed in the movies section but Oleg told TorrentFreak that a TV and software section will be added in the near future.

The navigational structure and design of the site is not the only thing that’s unique to Files24 though. According to one of the site’s founders, Files24 also has a dedicated tracker that is optimized to facilitate the highest download speeds.

“We track which country users come from and the tracker then gives priority to peers from their own country. As a result users can download at much higher speeds,” Files24′s Oleg told TorrentFreak.

One of the downsides of the site is that users are only permitted to upload torrents with a Files24 tracker, so this may severely limit the number of torrents that will be added to the site. On the other hand this is also one of the upsides, since this will stop a great deal of spam and fake files from being uploaded.

Files24 went live yesterday and currently lists some 40,000 torrents. It is clear that the site is still work in progress but the new features the site has to offer will be welcomed by many BitTorrent users. Of course they will also be frowned upon by Hollywood. Nothing new there.

Source: BitTorrent Meets IMDb on Files24

BitTorrent: Attacked by Copyright Holders, Crushed by Courts, but Needed for Innovation.

The Pirate Bay and other P2P sites continually find themselves on the defensive. Copyright holders repeatedly threaten and sue them. Courts zealously document their contribution to copyright infringement. But copyright holders and courts ignore P2P’s vital role in fostering innovation. I would like to change that.

In my book, Innovation for the 21st Century: Harnessing the Power of Intellectual Property and Antitrust Law, I examine (1) why copyright holders continually seek to quash new technologies, (2) why courts fail to appreciate P2P, and (3) why we should lament these developments.

First, I trace the long history of copyright holders reacting with alarm to new technologies that threaten their business models. John Philip Sousa bemoaned the introduction of the player piano, which would lead to “a marked deterioration in American music.” Jack Valenti warned that the market for copyrighted movies would be “decimated, shrunken [and] collapsed” by the VCR. And the recording industry, lamenting a decline in CD sales, has sued numerous P2P services.

In fearing the potential of the new business models, copyright holders offer a classic example of market leaders that fail to appreciate disruptive innovation. A decade ago, the recording industry responded to Napster, which was striving to be “the online distribution channel for the record labels,” not by striking a deal that would have seamlessly transported the industry into the digital era, but by suing it. While the record labels may have won the battle in shutting down Napster, they began to lose the war, as former users migrated to other P2P networks.

Nor are copyright holders the only ones that fail to appreciate the new technologies. Courts also do. Why? Because of an innovation asymmetry. Courts downplay the future benefits of new technologies and overemphasize copyright owners’ present losses. Copyright owners offer evidence of losses from infringement on a silver platter.

In contrast, non-infringing uses are less tangible. It is difficult to put a dollar figure on the benefits of enhanced communication and interaction. And when a new technology is introduced, no one knows all of the beneficial uses to which it will eventually be put. I offer numerous examples of this (including, just to pick two, the telephone, which Alexander Graham Bell thought would be used to broadcast the daily news, and the phonograph, which Thomas Edison thought would “record the wishes of old men on their death beds”). This asymmetry, combined with costly litigation (which ensnares small technology makers in a web of complex tests and unaffordable lawsuits) explains why courts do not sufficiently appreciate P2P.

This lack of appreciation threatens innovation. As this site’s readers are well aware, BitTorrent and other P2P protocols offer revolutionary forms of interaction and distribution. By breaking up large files into many small pieces, BitTorrent speeds up transfer, allowing the distribution of numerous works, such as home movies, independent films, TV shows, video games, educational videos, computer software, and high-resolution images. Just a few of many examples discussed on this site that have utilized BitTorrent include (1) computer manufacturer Asus, which offers fast, cheap software updates, (2) the airing of a high-definition movie in Norway, and (3) FrostWire’s offering of a service that promotes music of new artists.

Courts’ failure to appreciate P2P and BitTorrent threatens to stifle the development of new business models that attempt to free participants from the shackles of traditional distribution methods. Independent artists would find it much more difficult to break away from mainstream record labels if they lacked an inexpensive method of rapidly and widely distributing their work. Independent filmmakers would no longer be able to reach the masses, instead having to rely on boutique movie theaters or direct DVD mailings.

And of course, we can only see the tip of the P2P innovation iceberg. To pick two of countless examples, in my book I explore potential P2P benefits in providing alternatives to the Google search engine and cloud computing.

In short, the trend—as typified by developments such as the Pirate Bay decision, Malaysia’s order to shut down the tracker LeechersLair, exorbitant statutory damage awards, and various “three strikes” legislative proposals—is to clamp down ever harder on any technology that could contribute in any way to copyright infringement. But in squeezing technologies in this infringement vise, courts and copyright holders threaten to suffocate P2P innovation.

Michael’s book ‘Innovation for the 21st Century: Harnessing the Power of Intellectual Property and Antitrust Law’ is available on Amazon.

Source: BitTorrent: Under Attack but Needed for Innovation

With a net profit of close to a billion US dollars in 2008 Asus is one of the big players in the computer business. They are also no stranger to BitTorrent, as they’ve been making BitTorrent supported hardware for years, including the first BitTorrent router.

Recently the company decided to embrace BitTorrent even further, and use it to boost the download speeds on the tens of thousands of downloads they offer on their website. It is currently enabled on all larger downloads listed on the official website.

“In order to speed up software download process, ASUSTek is now implementing BitTorrent DNA technology. Through this technology, the software you need can be delivered to you with less time,” Asus informs their customers.

Consumers looking for drivers or software will now see a P2P download link next to the regular http downloads. When the P2P link is clicked Asus explains the process to first time users, after which they will be asked to download the BitTorrent DNA client.

Asus is offering BitTorrent boosted downloads

DNA stands for BitTorrent Delivery Network and is developed by BitTorrent, Inc. The software runs in the background on your computer and uses BitTorrent to speed up regular downloads, which means that customers will share the files they’ve downloaded with people who are downloading the same content.

Of course we would rather see regular .torrent links instead of the closed DNA software, and that is also the main disadvantage to Asus’s implementation. In the past BitTorrent’s DNA has been causing problems for some people and although these issues have reportedly been resolved, it still leaves a bad taste with some people.

Nevertheless, it is good to see that billion dollar companies are interested in, and willing to take advantage of BitTorrent. In the end it comes down to a classical win-win situation for both parties. Consumers get faster downloads and Asus a reduction in bandwidth costs.

Source: Asus Uses BitTorrent to Boost Software Downloads

We have to admit that the usefulness of the service escaped us when we first discovered the project. So, we contacted Michael Nutt, one of the people running the project to find out what it’s all about.

“It is an attempt to make torrents more resilient,” Michael told TorrentFreak. “The difference is that you no longer need an indexing site to host your torrent file. Many forums will allow uploading images but not other types of files.”

Hiding a torrent file inside an image is easy enough. Just select a torrent file stored on your local hard drive and Hid.im will take care the rest. The only limit to the service is that the size of the torrent file cannot exceed 250KB.

Once the torrent is converted you can easily share it via image hosting services or social networking sites that don’t allow the uploading of .torrent files.

People on the receiving end can decode the images and get the original .torrent file through a Firefox extension or bookmarklet. The code is entirely open source and Michael Nutt told us that they are hoping for people to contribute to it by creating additional decoders supported by other browsers.

The idea of converting torrents into images is not entirely new. Stegtorrent is an application that has been around for a few years already and does something similar. However, unlike Stegtorrent Hid.im is web-based and doesn’t require users to install any software.

Although we’re not really sure how useful Hid.im is for the average BitTorrent user, it does come in handy for those places where torrents are prohibited.

Source: Hid.im Converts Torrents into PNG Images

Many BitTorrent users are looking for the holy grail that will boost their download speeds to the maximum, and tweaking your client can indeed help a bit. However, selecting the right torrents is far more important, and those are not necessarily the torrents with the most peers. Bram Cohen, the inventor of the BitTorrent protocol addresses this common misconception in a recent blog post.

“Cohen designed BitTorrent to be able to download files from many different sources [...] the more popular a file is, the faster a user will be able to download it, since many people will be downloading it at the same time, and these people will also be uploading the data to other users,” writes Cohen while quoting an erroneous article.

This is indeed an explanation we often hear – the more people who download a file the better – but unfortunately it’s not very accurate. Or to put it in Cohen’s words, this description of BitTorrent is “somewhere between grossly misleading and wrong.”

Cohen goes on to explain why: “There’s a classic fallacy because if one person stands up during a concert they get a better view, then if everybody stood up during a concert they’d all get a better view. This is of course is not true – they wind up slightly worse off by all standing, because they all compete with each other for a view.”

So how do you get the most out of BitTorrent then? Or to put it differently, what torrents perform the best and generally give you the fastest download times? We’ll try to explain it as simply as possible leaving math out as much as possible.

The fastest torrents will be those where downloaders (leechers) can tap into the most upload capacity. If you have a swarm (seeders and leechers) with a hundred people in total it will be faster when there are relatively more seeders. Why? Very simply it’s because seeders don’t download while their upload capacity is available for the leechers.

Many people understand these basics. A torrent with 30 seeders and 70 leechers (30% seeders) will go faster than one with 10 seeders and 90 leechers (10% seeders). However, it get confusing when you compare swarms of different sizes.

For example, a torrent with 30 seeders and 70 leechers (30% seeders) will generally be faster than one with 500 seeders and 2500 leechers (20% seeders). Why? Simply because the swarm has a smaller percentage of seeders. When picking the right torrents to download, the percentage of seeders that a swarm consists of is the most important thing to look at.

A higher percentage of seeders means that the average upload capacity available to the leechers will be higher. The fact that leechers also upload themselves is irrelevant because all peers have more download capacity than upload capacity. The seeders make the difference.

This is one of the reasons why private trackers generally have such great download speeds. Since users are required to seed as much as possible, they have torrents with 100 seeders and only two or three leechers.

So what can we learn from this? If you’re looking for fast torrents pick those with the best seeder/leecher ratio or the highest percentage of seeders. Or when you don’t have a choice, don’t complain about slow speeds when there are only a few seeders in a large swarm. Perhaps even more importantly, remember to seed as much as possible if you don’t need your upload speed for something else.

Source: How to Pick The Fastest Torrents

“Total visits by Australians to BitTorrent websites including Mininova, The Pirate Bay, isoHunt, TorrentReactor and Torrentz grew from 785,000 in April last year to 1,049,000 in April this year, Nielsen says. This is a year-on-year increase of 33.6 percent,” The Age wrote a few days ago.

This may sound like a lot of traffic, but since Nielsen reports the number of visits and not the unique visitors we expected it to be much higher. Luckily, Mininova was kind enough to give us some insight into their statistics so we could check how accurate Nielsen’s estimates are. The results are quite a shock.

When we look at the statistics of Mininova alone, we see that the site had 6,268,969 Aussie visits in April and a massive 33,162,846 Aussie page views. Compared to the same month in 2008 (4,144,556 visits), this is an increase of more than 50 percent.

So, the Australian visitors to Mininova alone are already 600% higher than Nielsen’s estimates of the total traffic to Mininova, The Pirate Bay, isoHunt, TorrentReactor and Torrentz. Unfortunately we don’t have any details on the methodology or sample Nielsen used, but it’s certainly not very representative.

Perhaps even more worrying, The Age attributes the surge in traffic to the economic downturn, without providing any evidence for a causal relationship between the two events. Over the past 5 years most BitTorrent sites have seen huge traffic increases every year, also when the economy was in an upswing.

Even more so, the money generated by (legal and illegal) use of BitTorrent and other file-sharing networks is greater than the combined revenue of the various entertainment industry bodies who try to stop piracy. One could argue that without piracy the whole economy would collapse.

The downloading itself is not so much about cost saving. In Australia, BitTorrent is especially popular among those who want to catch up with US television shows that appear months or years later on TV down under. Money is not so much of an issue for them, they simply want to see the latest Lost or Heroes episodes.

Source: Nielsen Hugely Underestimates BitTorrent Traffic

We’ve restricted the results to a few of the most used clients plus ‘seedbox’ for the hardcore torrenters. If you’re not using one of these, please let us know what your preferred BitTorrent client is in the comments.

Source: What is the Best BitTorrent Client?

This February, the company went on to Google powered torrent search to the uTorrent website to make a few extra bucks, and they’re still looking for additional sources of revenue. This is where Ask.com comes in with their browser toolbar that is used to monetize other P2P clients as well.

Simon Morris, Vice President of product management at BitTorrent Inc. said that the toolbar will be included in new downloads of uTorrent 1.8.2. He assured people that it would be optional though, and that the executable will not have any size increase beyond the download option page. Also, we were told that those doing an upgrade will not be prompted about the bar.

Of course, this new ‘feature’ will fuel speculation by some that it carries on with the ‘MPAA spying’ which some have accused BitTorrent of doing since it bought the uTorrent client, and leads a small groups of people to continue using old versions. To date, we’ve yet to observe any ‘callhomes’ or similar that match any of those accusations.

Simon addressed these concerns telling TorrentFreak: “We are NOT on a path to do anything evil with the user community to make a quick profit. I know you only have our word on this, but it’s not hard to see that we have no chance of achieving our objectives if we alienate the very people on who the popularity of our software depends.”

While browser toolbars have sometimes gained a reputation as being a malware vector, this is usually due to 3rd party advertising. The toolbars generally make money though the search traffic that is generated by its users, and that is also the reason why most torrents sites – The Pirate Bay and Mininova included – now offer their own toolbars.

What BitTorrent inc. is aiming for is simply an extra influx of cash. What it is not looking to do is annoy their users, a point Simon is firm on. “To be very clear – uTorrent is very popular free BitTorrent software – the only thing we hope to change here is to make it even more popular. We hope the community will continue to support us in our efforts,” he told TorrentFreak.

If clients are to continue to develop, then with a growing shortage of venture capital there needs to be other ways to generate income. If the addition of one simple installer option about a browser toolbar means that uTP can be funded to completion (obsoleting many traditional throttling methods) is that really such a bad thing?

Source: uTorrent Is Going to Make Money With a Toolbar

To solve these issues, some ISPs have started to slow down all BitTorrent traffic, Comcast-style. Others choose to limit BitTorrent speeds at certain times of the day, and there are other examples where customers simply cannot download files with a .torrent extension at all.

Luckily there are options available which can help manage BitTorrent traffic and please customers, all at the same time. The Israeli ISP Bezeq International has taken this more consumer-friendly route. This ISP actually makes BitTorrent downloads faster by caching popular torrent downloads on their own network. By doing so the load on the network decreases and since there are less connections to peers outside the network Bezeq is also saving on costly bandwidth.

It works as follows. When a Bezeq International customer downloads a .torrent file the ISP will intercept it and add (!) a new tracker to it. The additional tracker is only accessible for Bezeq International customers and it connects to a high speed web-seed hosted on Bezeq International’s network. As a result the files will be downloaded much faster. A Bezeq customer told us that almost all ‘popular’ torrents he downloaded connect to local seeds.

Interestingly, the tracker Bezeq International uses is hosted by an ISP in The Netherlands, while the actual seeds (caches) are on the ISPs network. The provider confirmed to TorrentFreak that the ISP is indeed listed as a client, but they were not aware of its torrent caching practices or that they were hosting a BitTorrent tracker.

On the surface this seems to be a win-win situation for both the ISP and its customers. Bezeq saves on resources and expensive bandwidth while the customer enjoys higher download speeds. There are of course privacy concerns, since the .torrent files are intercepted and edited without permission, but the biggest opposition to such a system will most likely come from the entertainment industry.

Various anti-piracy lobby groups, including the MPAA and RIAA are already pushing for more cooperation from ISPs in tracking down copyright infringers. The relationship between the entities is an uneasy one already, and that’s before an ISP decided it would become a BitTorrent seeder. Although Bezeq International does not control which files are cached on their servers, the likes of the MPAA and RIAA will likely see it as aiding in copyright infringement.

Caching BitTorrent traffic and attempts to keep it within the local network as much as possible are not new, but aside from occasional tests these technologies are never implemented by ISPs. Bezeq International did not respond to our inquiries so we can’t confirm that they have implemented it for all their customers. For those who are lucky enough, enjoy the ride.

More discussion in Israeli.

Source: ISP Speeds Up Customers’ BitTorrent Downloads

Researchers from the Tribler P2P team at the Technical University of Delft, Netherlands, took an in depth look at the ‘ratio economy’ at various private BitTorrent trackers. Interestingly, they found some striking similarities between this virtual economy and some of the recent events in the global financial system.

In the paper, the researchers looked into the BitTorrent share ratios of members of a private TV-torrent tracker. They found that the current ratio system is heavily skewed towards a small group of people with a lot of upload capacity, often armed with seedboxes. These greedy ‘rich peers’ take away a disproportional of the available upload ‘credit’ so that new peers, or poorer ones have trouble keeping their ratio above the required figure.

In addition, several variations of swarm populations were simulated to see what their effect is on the users’ share ratios. Overall, the researchers found evidence of a credit crunch in the current ratio tracking schemes currently employed by most private BitTorrent trackers. Even when everyone has similar bandwidth limits this credit shortage still occurs.

“We discovered a strange phenomenon in existing private BitTorrent communities,” Dr. Johan Pouwelse told TorrentFreak. “Lack of credit is hampering performance. We have been able to reproduce this effect in a simulator to further understand it. It has many similarities with the credit crunch where the greasing oil of the world economy is drying out.”

“Lack of credit makes for bankrupt states and poorly functioning BitTorrent communities,” Pouwelse added. While it is unlikely that the trackers will collapse from it, the paper indeed shows that the current emphasis on share ratios is not fair to all members of the community.

Previously, Bram Cohen, the inventor of the BitTorrent protocol has spoken out against share ratios. “A better approach would be to not count it against people when they download from heavily overseeded torrents. Or to just not use total upload/download ratios at all, or if you do only make them advisory and not a source of banning,” he said at the time.

There are indeed hundreds of alternatives to the current ratio calculation, and most of them will indeed guarantee a healthier sharing environment (less favorable towards ‘rich peers’). In the paper, the researchers show that a ‘seeding bonus’ where peers get more credits for their uploads may help and others have suggested to use the total seeding time instead of the upload/download ratio.

While the paper presents some interesting findings, it doesn’t say much about download speeds on private trackers, which tend to be much higher than on public trackers. The parallels with our collapsing financial system are interesting, and with the only difference that a ‘bailout’ or ‘bonus’ would actually help the poor peers on private BitTorrent trackers, we can’t be too sure if that’s also going to work in the real world.

Source: Private BitTorrent Trackers Face Credit Crunch

Since all of the mp3s are available for download on the festival’s site, it only takes one person to get a torrent up and running. Last year it was Greg Hewgill who took the time and effort to put all the MP3s into one big torrent, and for the 2009 edition Ben Stolt did the same.

Since there’s over 6 GB of DRM-free music, using torrents makes it much easier than laboriously downloading every MP3 separately. In addition, using BitTorrent instead of the server based system saves SXSW money in bandwidth costs. The good news is that, for once, the RIAA isn’t watching over your shoulder when downloading music.

There are three torrents for the 23rd SXSW edition which contain a record breaking 1267 MP3s of both upcoming, as well as established artists who will appear at this year’s festival. Needless to say there should be something to suit everyone’s tastes, and all in all it’s a great way to expand your horizons and discover new and upcoming artists, all for free.

This year’s SXSW music festival takes place from March 18-22 in Austin Texas. All the tracks released for the previous editions are also still available for those people who want to fill up their iPod without having to invest thousands of dollars.

Source: SXSW 2009 on BitTorrent: 6 GB of Free Music

The data for our weekly download chart is collected by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. Currently both DVDrips, DVD Screeners, BDrips and R5 rips are counted.

RSS feed for the weekly DVDrip chart.

Source: Top 10 Most Pirated Movies on BitTorrent