After an earlier decision failed to reach its objective, this week a Brazilian court made an unprecedented ruling against file-sharing clients. Following legal action by anti-piracy groups against a website offering a file-sharing client for download, the court decided that software which allows users to share music via P2P is illegal.
A politician being touted as Britain’s next Prime Minister has been persuaded to take action to criminalize 7 million citizens following intensive industry lobbying over file-sharing. Business Secretary Lord Mandelson is in favor of introducing tough laws including Internet restrictions and fines of up to £50,000 ($83,000).
A new version of the P2P plug-in Littleshoot makes it possible to download torrents right from within your browser. The software runs on Macs and Windows PCs and works with IE, Firefox, Chrome and Safari. It even offers Gnutella and Youtube integration as an added bonus.
The UK Government, through the BERR, commissioned a public consultation last year into illicit file-sharing, and how to deal with it. The responses should have been published in December, but due to a holdup concerning a freedom of information request, it was delayed until today. Despite this, some will still be kept confidential.
This year, several established bands have decided to give away their music for free, while giving fans the option to donate whatever they seem fit. For Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails it was a great success since they made more money from the donation model than they would have otherwise. However, it seems that this doesn’t hold for less established artists.
Sandvine, best known for manufacturing the hardware that slowed down BitTorrent users on Comcast, has released an Internet traffic trends report today. The report shows that, on average, P2P traffic is responsible for more than half of the upstream traffic, but mostly the report seems an attempt to sell their traffic shaping products.
It’s been a bad week for the RIAA. First their headline campaign victory over Jammie Thomas was thrown out, and then the government said it ’strongly opposes’ a bill lobbied for by the entertainment industries.
TinySong is an easy to use website where users can search for music and share tracks with friends via a direct link. The website is linked to Grooveshark, a P2P powered music service, that allows users to manage and store their entire music library “in the cloud”.
Researchers from several Universities are currently working on a search technology that could make BitTorrent sites obsolete. While the idea of a completely decentralized filesharing network is not new, there are some downsides that are often overlooked.
The top 10 most downloaded DVDrips on BitTorrent, “Street Kings” tops the chart this week.
New data on the ever changing P2P landscape shows that the number of uTorrent users worldwide has more than doubled compared to last year. The BitTorrent client is most popular in Europe – with an install rate of 11.6% – and least popular in the United States, where 5.1% of the PCs have uTorrent installed.
