Having failed to encourage massive punishment against the administrator of eDonkey link site ‘ShareConnector’ in a criminal trial, anti-piracy outfit BREIN has once more resorted to traditional bully tactics - by turning up on his doorstep and threatening him, face to face.
A recent analysis of the latest P2P trends wordwide shows that BitTorrent is still the most popular filesharing protocol. BitTorrent traffic is still on the rise and responsible for 50-75% of all P2P traffic and roughly 40% of all Internet traffic.
It’s normal these days for anti-piracy companies to target P2P protocols and applications such as BitTorrent, LimeWire and eDonkey. Targeting the newsgroups or Usenet is fairly unusual but add that to the fact that one particular company isn’t going after pirates but the original content purchaser, this approach seems relatively unique.
In March we reported on an anti-piracy outfit and its legal partners taking action against UK file-sharers, having already done so against thousands in Germany. Now, thousands of Italian file-sharers have been issued with demands totaling over one million euros. The cost of sharing a single song in Italy? A cool 300 Euros.
The popular filesharing application LimeWire released Debian packages for Ubuntu. The latest LimeWire release is tested on Ubuntu Edgy and Kubuntu Edgy/Feisty, and both the free and pro versions are available for download.
Limewire is installed on nearly 20% of all Windows PCs and little over 15% of the PCs has a BitTorrent client on it. This is concluded in the digital media desktop report from Digital Music News.
In November 2004 several respectable sources were reporting that BitTorrent was responsible for 35% of all internet traffic. This impressive statistic inspired pirates, frightened ISP’s, and motivated the MPAA and other anti-piracy organizations to take down BitTorrent trackers.
On February 21 the MPAA claimed a “major victory” in their war against piracy. The Belgian police managed to shut down Razorback2’s servers. Razorback2 was considered to be the heart of the Edonkey2000 network, with over a million users.
The Spanish police made 15 p2p related arrests today, and closed down several BitTorrent, eMule and Edonkey sites. The victims are accused of facilitating “copyright infringement”. Today’s arrests are the result of a large scale investigation by several Spanish “copyright protection” organizations that started in October 2005.
