TorrentFreak

A new report published by Northwestern University and Telefónica Research discovered some BitTorrent trends worth sharing. During a 2-year period the researchers monitored an unprecedented sample of 500,000 people in 169 countries. Aside from showing that BitTorrent users download more and more data, the report also finds that large ISPs including Comcast are actually making money off BitTorrent traffic.

Researchers from the Tribler project at Delft University of Technology are proposing a new set of rules that should significantly improve the download speeds of many BitTorrent users. The new “Superior Seeding Standard” implemented in the latest release of the Tribler BitTorrent client is inspired by the ratio-enforcement policies at private tracker communities, but doesn’t discriminate against people with low bandwidth connections.

When Bram Cohen first revealed BitTorrent on a public message board on July 2nd 2001, he never imagined it would quickly become one of the main generators of Internet traffic. Now, exactly a decade later, BitTorrent is used by hundreds of million of people worldwide. To celebrate BitTorrent’s 10th anniversary, Bram Cohen joins us to look back at the past and ahead to the future.

The BitTorrent-powered VODO network has released what is arguably its highest-quality film to date. ‘A Lonely Place For Dying’, with Hollywood star James Cromwell as Executive Producer, prefers the BitTorrent community over Hollywood’s own funding mechanisms and debuts online before making its way to various movie theaters. A new distribution model is born.

BitTorrent Inc., the makers of uTorrent and the BitTorrent Mainline client, have been sued for infringement of a file-sharing related patent. According to the complaint, the BitTorrent clients infringe on the rights of San Francisco-based company Tranz-Send Broadcasting Network. The company demands compensation and if the court agrees, this case could have a disastrous impact on the BitTorrent landscape.

A new dimension was just added to the ongoing stream of BitTorrent lawsuits in the U.S. A Canadian BitTorrent user has been ordered to pay $60,000 by a U.S. District Court judge. The Calgary resident, who did not defend himself, was ordered to pay the damages for sharing two films on an adult-oriented BitTorrent tracker.

A new Internet traffic trends report released by the Canadian broadband management company Sandvine reveals that BitTorrent traffic is on the rise globally. More than half of all upstream traffic during peak hours in North America and Europe now comes from BitTorrent. The report further signals that the shutdown of LimeWire killed traffic generated by the Gnutella P2P network.