After the show a reporter asked her what she thinks of piracy, and people who download her songs off the Internet. Her response baffled the reporter, as she simply told him: “I think it’s great…” There was an awkward silence for a few seconds, the reporter probably expected to hear something else from her. “Great?,” he said.

“Yeah, I love it. I think it’s brilliant and I’ll tell you why,” Stone continued. “Music should be shared. [...] The only part about music that I dislike is the business that is attached to it. Now, if music is free, then there is no business, there is just music. So, I like it, I think that we should share.”

“It’s ok, if one person buys it, it’s totally cool, burn it up, share it with your friends, I don’t care. I don’t care how you hear it as long as you hear it. As long as you come to my show, and have a great time listening to the live show it’s totally cool. I don’t mind. I’m happy that they hear it.”

Stone went on to say that most artists have probably been “brainwashed” by the record labels, when they discourage their fans from downloading music. Of course, Stone is not the only artist who actually wants people to share their work. Last year rapper 50 Cent made some positive remarks about filesharing, and Nine Inch Nails takes it even further, as they upload their music onto BitTorrent sites themselves.

These artists are spot on, in fact, several studies have shown that artists actually benefit from filesharing. The more music people share, the more CDs they buy and the more concerts they visit.

Source: Joss Stone: Piracy is Brilliant, Music Should be Shared

John Wang, CEO of IAdea Corporation and developer of the new chip said in a response, “This new service architecture is infinitely scalable, delivers faster as more users join, and can be built at a fraction of the cost of a traditional server farm. We see this trend emerging as ‘Web 3.0′ where each consumer becomes part of a universal content storage and delivery system. Our new chip plays part in the new paradigm by making BitTorrent available efficiently and economically. You should not be surprised if you find your next car or cellphone enabled with our technology.”

The processors will be available to hardware manufacturers within a couple of months to embed in existing products such as wireless routers, NAS, mobile phones and DVD players. Last October, BitTorrent Inc announced deals with Asustek Computers, Planex Communication and QNAP Systems to build BitTorrent compatible routers and other devices.

Source: BitTorrent Optimized Microprocessor Announced

As of December 15, 2006…

Source: Mosts Popular DVDrips on BitTorrent (wk50)

We do not link to actual torrent files for obvious reasons. The data is collected by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only.

As of December 8, 2006…

Source: The Mosts Popular DVDrips on BitTorrent

The data is collected by TorrentFreak, and are for informational and educational reference only.

Source: BitTorrent DVDrip Top 10

Wrong, when I loaded the torrent file in uTorrent, I noticed that the videoclip was over 1GB! Wait a minute, 1GB for a 5 minute videoclip? That’s over 3MB per second! I know that BitTorrent recently expanded their server park, but this is just a waste of bandwidth. V2 Records probably never heard of “compression” because they offer a whole collection of oversized videoclips.

Source: Oversized Video Clips at BitTorrent.com

The data is collected by Big Champagne, the numbers of seeds and peers is the average swarm size of the torrents during the last week. Check out Infofilter for daily updated BitTorrent Charts statistics.

thanks to p2pnet

Source: BitTorrent Movie Download Chart (wk46)

The data is collected by Big Champagne, the numbers of seeds and peers is the average swarm size of the torrents during the last week. Check out Peermind for more free p2p filesharing (non BT) statistics.

thanks to p2pnet

Source: BitTorrent Movie Download Chart (wk38)

The data is collected by Big Champagne, the numbers of seeds and peers is the average swarm size of the torrents during the last week. Check out Peermind for more free p2p filesharing (non BT) statistics.

thanks to p2pnet

Source: BitTorrent Movie Download Chart (wk37)

The data is collected by Big Champagne, the numbers of seeds and peers is the average swarm size of the torrents during the last week. Check out Peermind for more free p2p filesharing (non BT) statistics.

thanks to p2pnet

Source: BitTorrent Movie Download Chart (wk36)

The data is collected by Big Champagne, the numbers of seeds and peers is the average swarm size of the torrents during the last week. Check out Peermind for more free p2p filesharing (non BT) statistics.

thanks to p2pnet

Source: BitTorrent Movie Download Chart (wk35)

They’d rather sue them. But enormous and continuing opposition from the music monopolies notwithstanding, the indies and p2p networks survive, meaning music lovers have for years been able to satisfy their unyielding passion and thirst for music, entertainment, and information.

Now Froggie Would A Wooing Go takes on a new meaning. Something called SpiralFrog is lurching in with Big Four Organized Music cartel founder-member Vivendi Universal to offer (you guessed it) a, “secure environment where music lovers can satisfy their unyielding passion and thirst for music, entertainment, and information”.

“Secure” means users won’t be terrorized and/or sued by the RIAA or any of the dozens of other Big Four ‘trade’ organizations such as the IFPI, BPI, CIRA, ARIA, and so on and etc

The Frog will force users to sit through brain-dead advertisements before they can download, and the songs will polluted with Microsoft WMA DRM (Digital Restriction Management) so they won’t play on Apple iPods which isn’t, of course, anything new.

Naturally, sharing will be strictly forbidden. Froggers will also have to allow alien anti-p2p software into their computers to stop them from making copies of tunes they download, share them or burn them.

They’ll also have to re-qualify by checking in at the Frog’s site every month. If they don’t, access will be cut off.

Significantly, former RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) and IFPI (International Federation of Phonographic Industry) boss Jay Berman is at the top of the Frog directors list. He’s the ‘Berman’ in Berman Rosen Global Strategies with protege Hilary Rosen, another ex-RIAA boss, as the Rosen.

And to further digress, “Jay Berman was also on the board of Loudeye, owner of Overpeer the spoofing company that planted spoofed recordings on the web to the annoyance of music consumers and the amusement of unauthorised sites who increased their value as traffic increased to cope,” a p2pnet reader commented, also pointing out, “Unfortunately cheating music consumers with fake recordings wasn’t a long term business propostion with Overpeer recently closed down.”

Anyway, “Offering young consumers an easy-to-use alternative to pirated music sites will be compelling,” states Frog ceo Robin Kent. The target audience is people between aged 13 to 34, “an advertiser’s dream,” as he states it.

Older users can, presumably, go fish.

Warner Music, EMI and Sony BMG, the other three members of the Big Four cartel, will be watching keenly.

Will significant numbers of the hundreds of millions of people who currently steer well clear of the paltry, over-priced corporate offerings, preferring the p2p networks and indie sites, now switch to the Frog site?

Not a hope.

Interestingly, Kazaa is expected to introduce a free-with-advertising service, “when it reintroduces itself as a licensed, legitimate distribution business,” says The New York Times.

Sharman Networks recently achieved its ambition of years by ‘settling’ with the cartels and as p2pnet said, “the deal with the Big Four also means Kazaa will be resuscitated“.

SpiralFrog hops into North America in December, and into the UK close to the start of 2007.

p2pnet

Source: SpiralFrog to offer “free” downloads

The data is collected by Big Champagne, the numbers of seeds and peers is the average swarm size of the torrents during the last week. Check out Peermind for more free p2p filesharing (non BT) statistics.

thanks to p2pnet

Source: BitTorrent Movie Download Chart (wk31)

What do they offer?

Master flash files and bitmaps of every piece of art used in this season of Odd Job Jack. Every character, prop, and background from every episode plus tutorials and other support material. All free to hack, use, remix under a share-friendly license.

And why?

We love animation and we just know you do too. We’re proud of Odd Job Jack and we’ve put lots of work into our show. Our art deserves to live beyond broadcast and who better to give a free gift to than the entire planet?

The torrents are tracked by legaltorrents.com, and can be found a the freejack site. This is a great initiative, let’s hope more will follow.

Source: Odd Job Jack For Free

You can use your web browser to read detailed information about each program on the CD: what the program does, its key features, useful related websites, view a screenshot, find links to the program’s website and to download/install the program from the TTCS OSSWIN CD.

The CD (burnable ISO) includes a broad range of applications in the following categories: desktop, educational, games, graphics, internet, server, sound and video, and utilities.

Great stuff, read more about the CD, and check out some screenshots on the TTCS homepage. The torrent can be found on the download page.

Source: Torrent: Free and Open Source Software CD

The data is collected by Big Champagne, the numbers of seeds and peers is the average swarm size of the torrents during the last week. Check out Peermind for more free p2p filesharing (non BT) statistics.

thanks to p2pnet

Source: BitTorrent Movie Download Chart (wk30)

Guba recently signed a deal with Warner Bros. to spread DRM loaded movies and TV-shows online.

According to the press release “GUBA is filtering movies and TV shows using a proprietary technology, codenamed “Johnny.” Johnny analyzes video in digitized form and generates a unique fingerprint for each video. Once Johnny has scanned a video, that video is blocked from illegal file trading or distribution on GUBA’s site”.

The MPAA responded:

“Providing consumers legitimate ways to get movie and television programming online is essential to our industry,” said Chairman and CEO of MPAA, Dan Glickman. Collaborating with GUBA has given us an opportunity to test new technology that will help ensure consumers can freely share videos without being exposed to illegal programming, which could lead to copyright infringement.”

Source: MPAA & Guba to use Johnny

In the documentary “done the impossible” the fans tell their part of this success story. They explain why and how they managed to get their Firefly heroes on the white screen in the popular movie Serenity.

The makers of the documentary offer a free, Creative Commons licensed .torrent download of their film. They state:

In our opinion, the modern state of copyright is counter productive to creativity and free culture. It puts unnatural restraints on “fair use”, hinders the creative process and has fundamentally destroyed an entire industry before it was even born.

Personally I’m impressed with the quality of this documentary, I highly recommend this one if you are interested in the story behind Firefly and Serenity.

You can view the trailer over here or download (.torrent) Done the impossible

Source: Done The Impossible .Torrent

According to an article in Variety Apple CEO Steve Jobs wants the movies to be $9.99, but the Studio’s are giving him a hard time:

Studios have resisted Jobs’ initial insistence that feature films be priced at the easy-to-remember $9.99. After all, library titles are typically sold to Wal-Mart and Best Buy significantly cheaper than new releases. Studios now are trying to convince Apple to sell similar content at multiple price points, something the company has never done.

the article continues:

Also complicating the deals: The studios are working out terms with a host of other distributors, including Amazon, Movielink and BitTorrent, in part to make sure that one company does not dominate. It seems that none of the studios wants to be first in making a deal with Apple. Disney would be the logical leader, but even they are cautious, fearing it will look like in-house synergy rather than a business decision.

And the rumors go on, there are “insiders” suggesting that the movie store wil be “BitTorrent powered, and that people can earn credits if they share bandwidth. This could go through the torrent client that will be included in OS X 10.5 “Leopard”.

Last month it was announced that BitTorrent users could save for free goodies from the Itunes store, if they help to distribute software updates.

Source: Apple’s Movie Download Store

Michael Geist went through the complete study report and concluded:

In summary, CRIA’s own research now concludes that P2P downloading constitutes less than one-third of the music on downloaders’ computers, that P2P users frequently try music on P2P services before they buy, that the largest P2P downloader demographic is also the largest music buying demographic, and that reduced purchasing has little to do with the availability of music on P2P services. I’ve argued many of these same things, but now you don’t have to take my word for it; you can take it from the record labels themselves.

Pollera, the company that conducted the story called Michael Geist’s interpretation “misleading, incorrect, and inconsistent” and wrote a 11page! response.

Michal Geist, who’s the Canada Research Chair of Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa posted a great rebuttal to Pollera’s response. Here’s a snippet:

Pollara misleadingly recharacterizes some its own questions. For example, it points at page six to a question on whether the person had ever acquired a CD with songs downloaded from a file sharing service such as Kazaa. This is then inaccurately presented as “Ever Purchased or Received a CD That Contained Illegally Downloaded Tracks”. One might say that Pollara should stick to polling for its paying clients like CRIA rather than offering up its opinion on the legality of P2P in Canada.

Read More

Source: Filesharing does not hurt the record industry