TorrentFreak

Every year, tens of thousands of people are scammed into paying for free file-sharing software. Over the years this has evolved into a multi-million dollar business damaging legitimate American companies such as BitTorrent, FrostWire and Vuze. So why is ICE not seizing the domain names of these known scammers? Or viewing it from another angle, perhaps SOPA might come in handy after all…

While the major record labels see BitTorrent as a threat, thousands of independent musicians believe it’s one of the best ways to gain an audience. The FrostWire BitTorrent client has been promoting independent artists for years, with great success. To celebrate a massive 2.4 million downloads in 2011, FrostWire just released a compilation album featuring free Creative Commons-licensed tracks from 30 artists.

Without any explanation Google has suspended the FrostWire file-sharing application from the Android market. The timing of the removal is both remarkable and unfortunate. Google’s decision follows the news that FrostWire had settled its dispute with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) over privacy concerns.

The popular file-sharing application FrostWire has settled its dispute with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The FTC accused FrostWire of disregarding the privacy of its users, by not making it clear enough that their files are publicly shared when downloads are finished. By turning FrostWire into a BitTorrent-only client the company was able to swiftly settle the charges and avoid a lengthy court battle.

BitTorrent’s future might look grim to some, as torrent sites increasingly draw the short straw in legal cases brought on by copyright holders. But even if all torrent sites on the net were shut down tomorrow, the sharing wont stop. People could simply switch to P2P-powered torrent search engines.

A common criticism leveled at most p2p clients is that they just ‘help people steal’, but they are actually a great tool to help promote undiscovered artists. This is exactly what FrostWire is trying to accomplish with their new FrostClick service. The results from their first featured artist are very promising.

This year, several companies launched advertising programs targeted at the millions of users of Limewire and other Gnutella or eD2k based filesharing applications. The boundary between advertisement and plain old spam is completely disappearing, especially with the recently launched service ‘PeerMatrix’.